He has always known that he is surrounded by ghosts. Such things are obvious, though never spoken of. Even as a child he knew, always somehow knew, not to breathe a word of what he's heard. Aunt Ariane would worry and think he was dreaming and the ghosts would still be there. No. It was best to remain silent.

Besides, the ghosts were not hurting anybody. If anything they were his friends, albeit the friends he could never see or speak to.

From the time Guillaume can first remember – even while his mother still lived – he could catch their snatches in the half-moments before sleep came. Soft murmurings that he was never afraid of, words breathed like prayers into the darkness.

"…Christine's boy…"

"…sleep well, my son…"

"…vowed to keep you safe…"

The faintest touch – press of lips to his forehead and fingers lightly trailed down his cheek, a blessing, right before his mother would take him in her arms and sing soft lullabies in another language – Swedish, he knows now – and they made him feel so warm, the world so soft wrapped up in her voice. The ghosts would silence, listening too and sometimes he would hear a whimper as if someone were crying and sometimes a voice, a low man's voice would join hers in a soothing caress though they would be alone in his room, and sometimes the softest strains of a violin would drift through the air around them. His mother's cheeks would be damp as she kissed him goodnight and he wondered, always wondered, if she could hear it too.

(There is one broken half-memory of a night when he was very small and the snow was falling outside to muffle the world that was always too loud. His mother tucked him up safe beneath the mound of blankets and sang a lilting lullaby that made cosy sleep tug at his eyelids but he held tight and kept awake for his night kiss. As her voice trailed off he heard the faintest, murmured, "Oh, Christine" breathed as if the speaker were sitting on the bed beside them. His mother's eyes snapped open, wide and shining and he thinks he heard her whisper "Erik?" but in the next moment his eyes slipped closed and she kissed his forehead and he thinks now perhaps he dreamt it. (He knows he didn't.))

He was seven when she died – old enough to remember her, young enough that those memories are worn and faded. She wore rose-scented perfume, and favoured blue dresses, and her hair was a tumbling mass of spun golden curls. Her eyes were always sad and sometimes as grey as the overcast sky and sometimes the deepest blue but their precise shade is beyond his grasp. (His own eyes are blue – sky blue – and Aunt Ariane says that they are the same as his father's, as his uncle's. His father drowned before he was born, dived into the Seine to rescue a child that fell in and he was an excellent swimmer but the current was too strong – so all the newspapers say. And his uncle, nobody speaks of what happened to his uncle. (It was something of a scandal at the time, he knows, and tries not to think of it.))

It was a carriage accident, one Sunday coming home from Mass. He fractured his ribs and broke his ankle (it still stiffens in the wintertime with ghost-pain) and has a scar on the side of his forehead hidden by his hair and he remembers nothing of that day except for the sun shining gold on the river. He woke in his own bed, a day later, his head fuzzy and his aunt sitting beside him and the ghosts crying but he could not hear them over what sounded like his mother singing but she was not there and he could not find her and he thinks that he asked for her but remembers not what was said.

(It was whispered that a man in a Navy uniform pulled him from the wreckage, but the man could not be found afterwards.)

Tears sting his eyes and he brushes them away, swallowing hard against the lump in his throat. It's been fourteen years, fourteen years- He needs to be composed tonight, needs to…keep control of himself. It is too important to let slip by in a fit of emotion.

His aunt frowned that the Comte de Chagny might want to play at the Palais Garnier, but he had come into his majority then and the lure of the place was always too strong. Besides, the arrangements had been made long before he told her, and he is more than ready.

(If he were true to his blood he would join the Navy, do his duty. But the sailor's life was never one for him. There have been enough drownings in the family.)

He began tinkering at the piano when he was four. His grandfather was a violinist, he knows, but that instrument never held the appeal for him that the piano did and his singing voice leaves much to be desired. But the piano…The first time he brushed his fingers over the keys he felt it, could not help but press the smooth ivory and his mother had to balance herself on the doorframe when she found him sitting at it tapping the keys. She engaged a tutor for him but after she died-

After she died there were no more piano tutors. There were mathematics and Latin and English and Italian and even literature, but no music. His aunt frowned on it – all of his aunts did – and there were mutterings that "music has wounded the family enough" and piano playing was a nice parlour trick that he was already suitably accomplished for. He could play it if he wished, but there would be no more tutors.

His aunts did not realise that he had his own tutor, one that he could feel standing behind him, who offered little encouragement and grumbled over posture. He could feel the light fingers resting on top of his own though he could not see them and once there was a soft hiss in his ear, almost a threat that "Christine's boy will play properly."

That voice always called him Christine's boy, never Comte or Vicomte or even de Chagny the way some of the other boys did with their lips curled that his mother was an Opera singer and his father a usurper to the title. Only and ever to that voice, Christine's boy, as if the very term were sacred.

The voice could not hurt him, but its inherent authority made him a better player, one that could play at the Palais Garnier.

(He could outplay all of those other pianists, the voice said once with a rare note of pride. Like your mother could outsing every other soprano.)

This was his mother's dressing room, he knows. He suspects that that is why he was given it. There was a scandal that he heard snatches of whispers of, hurried murmurs into ears and meaningful glances. The Opera Ghost. The Phantom. Well. There may have been a scandal but he is plenty used to ghosts.

You will excel tonight and Paris will fall at your feet.

He was thirteen and home for Christmas when his aunt first permitted him to attend a gala. The de Chagnys have always been patrons – his uncle, his father, his mother, himself technically too – and it would not look right if that changed after his mother's death, and so it was necessary that the patronage not only be kept up but that the newest Comte attend also.

Another boy of his age might have been fascinated by the ballet girls, but Guillaume could not help but remember that that was the stage she performed on and this is where they reunited.

As he climbed the stairs on that first visit, he felt rather older than thirteen, with his blond curls slicked back and his black dress suit. He fancied that he could see the swirl of a blue evening gown into Box Five, hear the tinkling of his mother's rare laugh.

Box Five was very definitely empty when he pulled the curtain back, heart pounding, but the scent of her rose perfume drifted to his nose, the fragrance the same even after all of that time and not a rose in sight.

(Perhaps, he concluded shortly after, it is not the house or any building haunted by these ghosts, but him.)

Guillaume takes a breath to steady that ghost-pounding in his chest. She would be proud to see him now, and his father, his father-

He is certain that it was his father who squeezed his hand as he sat staring at his compositions before the blazing fire last night, and he hopes that that means that he is proud, too.

How often did his mother look into this mirror, and ready herself to go onstage? How often did she sit at that vanity and think of his father? Did he send her roses, bouquets of blood-red roses? Did he favour white roses? Is that why she always wore rose perfume? Did she sit there and tie her hair back with blue ribbons and sing to herself in Swedish and never think that more than two decades later her son would stand in this very room and wonder about her?

They said that she had a mysterious tutor who polished her voice so that when she stepped on stage in La Carlotta's place the city swooned. Nobody who searched for him ever did find him, and she never told but that she had been visited by the angel of music. And it strikes him as very nearly funny that his own tutor is not one that could be found, either, though he doubts if he is (was?) an angel.

(His pocket watch has the name 'Erik' engraved on the outside of the case. Not Raoul, not Philippe, not even Andreas or François like either of his grandfathers, but Erik and he has no idea who Erik is though he found the watch in his mother's old desk when he was ten so Erik must be someone who mattered.)

He brushes his fingers over that unknown mysterious name and eases the case open. There is a sketch inside of his parents on their wedding day that he drew when he was seventeen. He used a photograph to guide him, a framed one that sits on his desk in his study at home and with each line he carefully placed he felt the gentle brush of fingers over the back of his hand, as if to tell him how much pressure to put on the lead, then he traced it in ink to last.

His jaw is his father's, his nose his mother's, and they were both blonde too but his eyes – his eyes he found in a small portrait of his grandfather Andreas, and the curve of his ear is in every painting, every photograph of François and here he stands in this old half-abandoned dressing room and if he tries he can smell her perfume and for the barest moment he thought he could see a figure in a black dress suit with a death's head inside the mirror, but how could there be anyone inside the mirror?

Even the Opera Ghost is surely long dead now. Everybody else is, yet why does the skin on the back of his neck insist on crawling as he stands here as if there are eyes upon him?

"It is nerves," he says firmly, as if by speaking the words out loud he will believe them. "Merely nerves."

He traces the sketch, and snaps the watch case closed, pocketing it. He cannot, he must not let these questions plague him tonight. It is crucial that he be calm and firmly in the present, and he must take his position on the stage in fifteen minutes' time. It is a long walk up.

If he had brandy he would drink a snifter of it to calm his nerves.

If he had a rose he would link it through his lapel.

If he had a blue ribbon he would stow it safely in his jacket pocket.

He has never drunk brandy in his life. The smell of roses makes him nauseous. And when he searched he could find no blue ribbons of hers only black ones and he has one of them tucked into his pocket and besides, no blue ribbon would do unless it had been hers.

He clenches his hands into fists until his knuckles whiten, then stretches his fingers, flexing each one individually. It is essential that they be limber tonight of all nights. Straightening his cuffs and collar, he smooths one hand over his hair and nods resolutely at himself in the mirror, suppressing the wave of disappointment that there is truly nobody inside of it to nod back.

In another world, his mother would squeeze his fingers and kiss his cheek. In another world, his father would clap his shoulder and smile. In another world, they would join his uncle in a private box. In another world, his tutor would nod sagely. In another world, he would not be solely Christine's boy but Raoul's too.

But there is only this world. And he is only Guillaume, Comte de Chagny since before birth and an orphan. And if he tries hard enough, lets his eyes slip out of focus, he can see the ghosts hiding in every shadow, ready to take his hand and lead him forward.