A/N: Written for an anonymous Tumblr prompt which read "This might be somewhat depressing, but I'd really love to read a fic about the fact that Erik is so much older than Christine usually. How would they handle it in the future when he's getting a lot older and she's still at most middle-aged?"

It is the first time in months that he has been able to spend all day at his organ without having to lie down for a little while. The pneumonia he battled in the spring almost killed him, and for three weeks he lay abed hardly knowing who or where he was. Christine sat at his side endlessly, nursing him and talking to him and singing to soothe him from his delirium, his fingers cradled between her own. Hers was the voice that pulled him from his nightmares, her lips the ones that graced his fevered brow and even when he did not know who or where he was he knew her. He always knew her, his angel.

She has always been so good to him, better than he has ever deserved.

It was the effect of the weeks away from his music that made it unbearable to play his music for a time. The ever-increasing stiffness in his fingers meant that he was simply unable to play even when he was sufficiently recovered. Eventually, after much careful massaging and moving of said fingers by Christine enough freedom was restored to the joints to permit him to play his piano, and what a wonderful relief it was, as if a knot in his chest had been loosened. To have been away from music for so long…And yet, it is not enough to be able to play, when he cannot play as he once did.

His violin comes easier, but the music will never feel the same. Even his voice is not what it was, rougher now after his illness, with only the vestiges of its old beauty remaining. His throat will always carry that roughness, his lungs will be that bit weaker and Christine says it does not matter, not to her, but it does, it does.

The realisation is a crushing one, a block of travertine dropped on his chest and knocking the wind out of his lungs. For what feels like hours and is probably only a handful of heartbeats he cannot breathe. His lungs simply refuse to take in air. Christine sees the pain cross his face and her heart leaps into her throat, before she takes him into her arms and rocks him gently, backwards and forwards, murmuring softly to him.

He retires to his bed after, and refuses to leave it for three days, keeping his fingers limber by half-heartedly plucking the strings of his violin. Christine tells the opera managers that she is ill and cannot possibly rehearse, then fetches the Daroga to counsel her husband.

Her husband. Fifteen years of marriage, and she still loves him the same, even if he has changed so very much. What she will do after...After, she dreads to think.

There were no children. Not that she did not want them, because she did. It just, through some flaw in him or her, never happened for them, and she knows that Erik secretly thinks it to have been for the best. It would kill him to father a child similarly disfigured as himself. Still. There is that part of Christine's heart that craves to hold a baby close, to have those so tiny fingers wrap around one of her own. Someone for Erik to live on inside of and yet…Yet if it came down to it, she would not trade Erik for any other man, not even one with whom she might have a child. Erik she would not give up for the world.

He does not have long left, she knows. A handful of years at most, especially with the toll the pneumonia took on him. He was slowing down already, his hips and knees troubling him. They do not know exactly how old he is, though they estimate around sixty-five. In some ways he is tremendously fortunate to have lived as long as he has. There is no denying, however, that he has become frail. The clothing that was once tailored just so has become loose on his thin frame, though he still manages to stand tall and proud. She half-fears that one strong wind will kill him, and so when he is at his magnificent grand piano she insists that he have a blanket draped about his shoulders. He protests, of course, but he cannot bear to upset her, even now. Especially now.

She is all too keenly aware of the fact that their time is growing short, and if she could she would resign the opera to spend his last years in quiet seclusion with him, tending to him and loving him, existing in the same space. But he will not permit it, and on this one thing alone he stands firm. She cannot let the gift of her voice go to waste for his sake. She is still young and so very, very beautiful, her eyes still as blue as the summer sky and her hair fine spun-gold. She deserves to live in the sun, in the world. He will not see her locked up beside him.

(And he is wholly confident that when his time does come, she will be there holding him close and singing to him, whispering her love. She will still have her music afterwards, and perhaps, perhaps that will be a comfort to her.)

It has become something of a challenge for him, he will confess, to make it all of the way up to Box Five unassisted. It comforts him to know that the Daroga has become similarly decrepit, and so as they attempt the stairs they goad each other on, climbing with the help of their canes and, once or twice (though the Daroga is all too willing to fill in such lapses in Erik's memory, smirking as he does so) the arm of the Vicomte de Chagny, who remains devilishly handsome and has fathered a family of blond cherubs with his wife.

No longer is Erik able to carry Christine back to the waiting brougham that will take them to their apartment beside the Daroga's. Now they simply walk arm in arm when he is well enough to attend the opera, and she promises him that he still looks as regal as ever.

He knows her words are somewhat biased and not-quite-true, but he loves them nonetheless.

And on the days that he is too tired to journey to the theatre and watch her perform, he stays home and plays chess with the Daroga, and retires to bed, waking from his doze when she returns and slips in beside him, kissing his forehead, and his cheek and his lips. It is only when they are safely wrapped in each other's arms that sleep can overtake them properly.

When he retires to bed at last after that first whole day at his piano, he takes her in his arms, and silently vows that before he departs this earth, he will compose a triad of pieces in her honour. It is the one last gift that he has left to give to her.

Fifteen years of marriage, and he has never realised that when it comes to him, she desires no gift but himself. And she is not surprised that he has never realised this, though she silently vows that she will kiss him harder, and hold him tighter, and make certain that every day he knows how very much she loves him. And she always will.