A/N:

Are there still people in this fandom in 2018? Man, most of the POTO stories out there are over a decade old …

Anyway, this story is set immediately after Love Never Dies and is mostly based on ALW canon - which means Christine does die, but she is still very much present in memory.

Drop me a line so I know you're reading!

The current situation was thus:

Gustave de Chagny, sole heir of the Comte de Chagny, had locked himself in the master bedroom in the penthouse suite of that freak show of a hotel called the Aerie.

The owner and creator of this whole dreadful town, Mister Y, also known as the Opera Ghost, also known as the Angel of Music, also known as Erik, was crying.

It was almost comical. Raoul himself didn't quite know whether to cry or to laugh. He might lean towards the latter, which made him ponder whether he'd lost whatever shred of sanity he had not managed to drown in a bottle over the last decade sometime during the course of today, the day of Christine's funeral.

Christine's funeral.

He had cried then, earlier in the morning, when the coffin was lowered and the grave filled in painfully slowly. He'd sobbed loudly, messily like a heartbroken fool, clutching the small hand of, at least in the moment, the Northern Hemisphere's most stoic 10-year-old. Gustave stood straight with barely a muscle moving, his posture perfectly mirrored by his biological father just a few meters away. The Ghost - no, Erik. The Ghost asked Gustave to call him by his given name from now on; he probably would've preferred if Raoul simply didn't address him at all. Erik hadn't shed a tear during the funeral, black mask stark against his unnaturally pale skin in the late August sun. It was uncanny - how seamlessly they copied each other. Raoul was incredulous at his blindness - how had he not seen it before?

Had he mentioned the weather was perfect this morning? It wasn't fair. It was unthinkable that the sky wouldn't weep when his Little Lotte was returned to the ground; that they were greeted by one of the last perfect summer days instead.

It had rained three days ago on the dock, when the love of his life was taken away forever by one stray bullet. Thunder began to cackle as soon as they'd sent Gustave indoors with Madame Giry, and they were all drenched and chilled to the bone as they stood waiting for the doctor - what good was a doctor then? - shaking in shock and grief. The wind had howled. The usually gentle waves of the seaside resort had crashed upon the dock, as if to swallow them whole, and Raoul had the heart to let them. And one look at the Phantom told Raoul that he also wished the waves to put an end to his misery. There was something to be said about the moment you looked into your archenemy's eyes and saw the exact same pain that was tearing yourself inside out … in that moment. Perhaps something shifted; Raoul wasn't sure. But perhaps "archenemy" was no longer the right word … Raoul was certain of why Erik hadn't chosen to lose himself to the waves that night - the same reason why Raoul hadn't: that angelic little boy who was so good and pure that neither of them could possibly deserve him. Gustave.

Gustave hadn't been angelic in the last three days. He no longer ran around the fairgrounds with the clowns, no longer hummed all sorts of little tunes that came from his head, no longer said anything at all unless directly talked to. He hadn't acted out, but his eyes were haunted and old. Raoul was aware that it could be argued that he himself had been acting worse - even without the numbing filter of alcohol, the hours and minutes and seconds passed by in a blur. He signed papers, mailed correspondence, made statements, yet none of it felt more than halfway real. When Erik insisted the Cometesse de Chagny be buried at a beautiful, secluded spot beside the sea, Raoul hadn't even put up a fight.

The final arrangement was for the Comte and his heir to board a ship this very evening. Yet as soon as their automobile came to a stop at the entrance of Phantasma, the so-far pensive boy bolted like a startled horse. Raoul, with all the dignity he could muster, took off after his son, weaving among tents and roller coasters and through shortcuts he had no idea existed. They eventually entered the threshold to the foreboding tower on the other side of the grounds - straight out of a Gothic - at which point Gustave promptly disappeared.

" … expect to find him in my rooms … taken a back way." Said the Ghost from the partial darkness, startling the life out of Raoul with perverse satisfaction. His winded breathing and uncontrollable coughing greatly hindered the effect. "Come." Raoul was ordered eventually, and for this once he followed.

More trapdoors and hidden passages later, they indeed found Gustave in the lavish rooms on the top floor. The boy had his arms crossed petulantly by the windows, glaring murder at the orange-tinged expanse below.

"I don't want to leave, Papa."

"Gustave, be reasonable …"

"I don't want to leave!" His son's childish cries rose to a wail. Gustave was always mild-mannered, but it seemed there was no reasoning with him today. "I don't want to go on a ship - I hate ships!"

"Nonsense, Gustave, you don't hate ships. You want to be in the Navy one day, remember? And I will be there with you -"

"I can't swim, Papa! And you weren't there!" Raoul was momentarily stunned: he couldn't possibly mean - "You weren't there and you didn't save me! Where were you?"

There was nothing Raoul could possibly say to that. Beside him, the Ghost took a cautious step towards the boy, and Gustave's blinding fury was trained on him instead.

"And you - you didn't protect her! You were there but you let her die!" The Ghost flinched violently, as if he was physically struck.

Knowing he'd crossed too many lines to count yet stubbornly unwilling to yield, Gustave slipped into the adjoining bedroom. "I hate you! I hate you both!" The door was slammed and a bolt was slid shut. Trust the Opera Ghost to have a deadbolt on the door to his bedroom on a private floor. All of a sudden, there was no sound on either side of the door.

Raoul turned slowly, thinking of saying something, anything, to cut through this oppressive silence. He might've even attempted levity, maybe a good-natured remark on explosive temper as a hereditary trait. That would probably have been going too far, but really, what could he say? Decades of training as a young aristocrat had not prepared him for this. Even Aunt Marie's most contentious dinner parties came nowhere near.

In the end, he didn't get the chance to say anything. The mastermind behind Phantasma let out a broken cry at the the full-size portrait on the wall opposing the windows, whose likeliness was undoubtedly Christine's - Christ, that man kept a portrait of her, in his living room, all these years - and sank to his knees. He wiped at his face uselessly, then tore off the midnight black mask with silent fury, pulling the wig with it. He didn't seem to care that Raoul would see in that moment; didn't seem to remember that the Comte was still there at all, gaping like a fish near the grand windows. Folding in on himself, the Ghost wept, ugly sobs eventually taken over by angry coughs.

And that was how the Comte de Chagny found himself standing in a murderer's apartment, his son locked in the next room and his long-time archrival crying on the floor. The situation was equal measures comical and despairing, but Raoul was so far out of his depth that it was no longer amusing to him. Focus on the tangible, Raoul, he imagined his brother saying. The tangible … right. Science?

The Ghost had been hacking his lungs out every time Raoul had had the misfortune to run into him since the dock. It could be the cold, or the shock, or the grief, or the fact that they both looked like they hadn't slept at all in the last three days. Raoul himself felt fine. He was a drunkard, but a barely-thirty-year-old drunkard. Yet for perhaps the first time in all these years, Raoul truly saw the Phantom of the Opera as a man. Not a monster, faceless, ageless, existing somewhere not quite here between the damned and the sublime. Just a man: heartsick, lonely, his slim shoulders shaking and breaths coming in awful gasps, lost and frail.

Raoul felt something warm and heavy in his chest then, and he wondered if that was how Christine felt towards the Ghost all along - and it was just his luck to finally begin to understand now that she was forever gone. It wasn't simple pity, not really, however pitiful a sight the man made now. It was easy to pity a dog on the street, but to feel the pain of a fellow man, to share it - that was something much more complex.

Raoul cleared his throat and took a chance. "... Erik."

The Ghost started at his name, reaching for the mask out of instinct, then stilled his hand in the air. He slowly got back on his feet, half-turned towards the window, the dying rays of the sun lighting up his bare face in all its terrible glory.

"You will not -" He said, voice raspy from the coughing but no less deadly. "Not again - I won't let you."

"What are you -"

"Well played, monsieur. Quite ingenious, I must say, for someone like you." The Ghost drawled. "Two tickets under different names for the RMS Saxonia, departing this evening at 9 o'clock - did you think I wouldn't notice?" Raoul kept his features schooled, but Erik paid him little mind. "It matters not - you will not take him away from me."

"He is my son, and I'm taking him home." Raoul heard his voice rising despite his best efforts.

"Your son?" The mocking query cut like a blade through his chest.

"He is still my son!" He snapped, incredulous. The gall of that man - "He is my child, my heir, and every day in the last ten years, I've raised him as such!"

"And what a father you must've made! Gambling away your heir's inheritance and drowning your sorrows in drinks -"

"And I was a father to him while you were busy putting on shows with half nude girls! What right do you have to talk to me about morals? And, monsieur, did you forget your little escapades at the Opera Populaire?" Raoul dimly registered he was perhaps passing a point of no return. He almost raised his hand to his neck to rub at some imaginary pain, but caught himself. He was not afraid. He was not. The Phantom was nothing but a man. "Be reasonable, Erik - I am taking Gustave home to his governess and his little friends. He'd never asked for more. But this, this is a fairground - it's no place for a young man of Gustave's stature to grow up, running among clowns and, and freaks!" Nothing but a man that flinched at the last word. Raoul could almost regret saying it, Madame Giry's haunting tale from more than a decade ago teasing at his ear.

"For all my life, I dared not think I could love." The Ghost said, oddly earnest. As if it mattered to him at all what Raoul thought of him. "But then, against all odds, there was Christine, and now Gustave." He was looking directly at Raoul now, mismatched eyes blazing with a familiar need. "I do love him. My past is -" The uncovered half of his face winced at this. "My past is irrelevant. But I've been to places, seen wonders, made them - wonders you could never dream of. And I've sworn that from now on, every day for the rest of my existence, I will work to give Gustave a better life. I will give him my music, my everything - this island, the world if he asks for it -" And the most disconcerting thing was that Raoul had little doubt that Erik was completely sincere, that he really would … "What are you good for, my dear Comte de Chagny?"

For one time too many on this wretched day, Raoul simply had no answer to a question he was being asked. It was the same old argument again, wasn't it? The one in the lair under the Opera that many years ago. Raoul would offer nothing but a name, a home, a good and easy life, whereas the Phantom - the Phantom would lay his heart bare with a passion so intense it hurt, a genius tainted with darkness, a misadventure out of a life. Once again, Raoul watched as someone he loved must choose to go with the Comte de Chagny or to stay with the Opera Ghost. But Raoul wished nothing less than to impose that choice on his son - it wasn't fair. That choice had broken something inside of Christine once. She'd tried to hide it, but in those quieter moments, Raoul had always known… And Gustave was so young.

The Ghost did not seem to expect an answer. He sank down heavily onto a chaise nearby, lowering his head towards shaking hands. Muted coughs began to tear through his thin frame again.

"You're unwell." Raoul said eventually, his voice soft. "I should go fetch a doctor."

"You should leave and never return." The Ghost replied, echoing his own words from years ago, but this time he just sounded spent.

"That would quite defeat the purpose of fetching a doctor." He tossed over his shoulder with utmost casualness on his way to the door. "Will you keep an eye out for Gustave?"

[To be continued]

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