A/N: Written for an anonymous Tumblr prompt which read "Erik likes to simply watch Christine go about her daily life, seeing her practice and smile and laugh. He feels young again."

They would be wrong to think that the opera ghost's lurking is always sinister. Granted, a great deal of the time it is and Erik will forever be the first to admit that, such pride does he take in the fact. Sometimes, though he is simply there, watching, breathing in the upper world that does not want him when the quiet of his empty parlour gets too much and his fingers refuse to tap the correct keys.

The first time he came above like this was the day after he first sang to Christine Daaé. Oh, he'd been up a few times before, of course, for no discernible reason. But that first time, as he thinks of it, was different. His thoughts were so possessed by her, with her voice and her eyes and her soft, slow smile that his feet simply guided him up the stairs and it was not until he found himself in the rafters, looking down on her rehearsing with the rest of the chorus that he realised quite where he was.

He smiled to himself beneath the mask, a secret smile that he was hardly aware of, as he watched her with those other girls who were not half of her worth, and it was as if he were thirty years younger, the stiffness of his knees fading as he simply watched. In a moment he was transformed from the fearsome opera ghost to a twenty year old boy, his heart filled with the sweetest ache.

He's watched her many times of course, since. Wherever she may be in the course of a day at the Opéra he has often been, too. It is his favourite pastime, though she is so very much more than a pastime. Sometimes, he thinks she might be the only reason he has left for living.

His eyes have followed the movements of her fingers in the hours she spends brushing her golden hair, lips softly singing to herself. He's watched how she lies back in her chair and often withdraws a book from her vanity, has learned how she genuinely favours plainer dresses, and he half-suspects she would be rather good at chess, though he has never ascertained an answer to that question and someday plans to raise the question in one of their lessons.

She makes him feel so very young again, with these new feelings in his chest and below his navel, and he cannot say that he understands them but supposes that they must be love. Is this sweet ache the very thing the poets have written about? It must be.

And he longs to touch that hair, to hold that soft body close. It is a yearning that he never truly felt when he was young but this must be what the young men do feel. Such thoughts are wrong of him, he knows. He is so very much older than her, even if she makes him feel young, and she needs someone who can be real to her when he can be only a voice. Still. It does not detract from how young she makes him feel simply by going about the ordinary matters of her day, and he sometimes thinks that, where Christine Daaé is concerned, everything must be learned afresh.

But if he can watch her, and feel like this, then the learning cannot be so very difficult