Disclaimer: Characters are property of Marvel. Phantom of the Opera themes belong to LeRoux.

Author's Note: This fic has been up on my deviantArt account for the past couple of weeks, but I decided to finally put it up here, so more people can see it and because dA isn't kind to visitors. If you want to read ahead, though, I urge you to go through the 'homepage' link in my Bio. There are currently three chapters up, with a fourth due any time. This fic was spawned from a dream I had the night I saw the Phantom of the Opera movie, then watched Spider-Man 2 and reread "Falling Feels Like Flying" all in one night. I mentioned the dream in my journal, and was persuaded to actually write it. So, here you are. Enjoy.

Musique de la Nuit

One – Scars

The brick was cool under his fingertips, a hint of what was to come in the winter if he didn't find the money to repair the shattered window or pay for heat. Otto Octavius took another step, continuing his exploration. He'd thought he'd known this place like the back of his hand, but his knees were now black-and-blue from every collision with every piece of furniture in the apartment. The actuators had offered to assist him, but he needed to do this without them. He needed to prove to himself that, although the sight had been burned from his eyes, he could still function as a normal human being.

As if normalcy could ever be an option for him. Society had viewed a man who was a victim of a tragic accident as a criminal; how would they see him now? What would the papers make of his scarred features, his unseeing eyes? The label they'd given him of 'monster' had become far more appropriate.

The dying sun of his fusion reactor had heated the water around him, bringing it to a boil. Skin had bubbled, burst, melted… He should have died. He would have, except the actuators had dragged his ruined body out of the river, their will to survive greater than his own death wish. He didn't know how they'd kept him alive; all he knew was that, two months after his accident, he'd awoken into eternal darkness, his flesh a mass of scar tissue and his voice a rasping growl. He didn't know how they'd kept his wounds clean, how they'd kept him fed, how they'd managed to prevent his muscles from atrophying during the prolonged bed rest. All he knew was that he was alive. If this wretched existence could even be called 'life.'

The actuators couldn't understand why their father wasn't pleased they had saved him. They knew certain systems no longer functioned, and offered their own as replacement. He was learning to see through their cameras, though depth perception was skewed, and if he did it more than half an hour at a time, he developed a pounding headache. They had helped him relearn to walk on legs as unsteady as a newborn fawn's, and offered their own delicate internal pincers to perform tasks his fingers were too damaged to handle. To them, the damage to his soft, external shell was an inconvenience, not something to die for. They didn't understand humans and the way they judged a man based on looks. Even Otto couldn't bear to look at himself through the actuators' 'eyes.'

It was why, as soon as he was well enough to move about, he went home – if one could call it that. Since he was officially 'dead,' Otto, under a false name, had had to use the last of his bank heist money to buy the building he'd owned for several years. OsCorp, which had seized the property after the first fusion disaster, had been happy to get rid of the property, as if it would wash their hands clean of the incident. After, of course, all notes and lab equipment that could prove useful had been confiscated, of course.

That Rosie's family had come and taken her possessions was perhaps a blessing. When he'd come to find that there was nothing left to show she'd once lived there, he'd been livid, at first. And then… relieved. Perhaps he wouldn't have been able to see her clothing in the closet, or her books on the shelf, but knowing they were there, touching what she had once touched, would have sparked painful memories. It was hard enough to sleep on the bed that had been theirs; he'd taken to sleeping on the battered couch. Those restless, dream-haunted nights on the couch had made him wonder if he'd done the right thing, returning. It was said you could never go home again. Otto had never seen the truth of this statement so clearly as he did now. This place where he'd spent the best years of his life had become a cold, empty shell without Rosie's presence. It would be better, perhaps, for him to start this new life, his third life, far from this place where memories haunted his every waking hour.

But memory was all he had left, now that hope was gone. Even if he somehow managed to get the actuators removed, what could he do afterwards? He couldn't even show himself in public – any traveling he did was limited to the night, where shadows hid his ruined visage. No one would hire a blind, hideous genius who had once succumbed to madness. So here he would remain, with his pain and his memories to keep him company.

Otto pulled his hand from the wall, taking the first tentative step into the open space that had been his laboratory. He knew that the twisted wreck of the first fusion reactor's containment system was still in the middle, like some abstract sculpture, and he needed to memorize how many steps away it was from the wall. Counting silently, hand extended in front of him, Otto crossed the distant to the warped crescent. The metal was studded with shrapnel that had been fused with it when the miniature sun had imploded, just as it had fused the actuators to his spine.

The actuators curved in lazy arcs around him, whispering that perhaps they should continue the Work they had begun in this very spot. Perhaps it would be Otto's means of winning acceptance from the society that had shunned him.

Rebuild. As if that would solve everything. He didn't blame the actuators for suggesting it; it was what they had been programmed for, and completing this objective was all they understood. Otto ignored the persuasive voices that had led him astray before. Rebuild, and repeat my mistakes? Rebuild, and fail again? Anger flooded his mind, and without quite knowing what he was doing, he smashed his fists against the metal crescent, wanting to rend to pieces the machine that had destroyed his life. The actuators made startled squawking noises as Otto continued to strike the metal until his knuckles bled. A scream built in his throat, escaping as a howl of anguish. "Damn you, damn you, damn you!" he shouted. The upper actuators seized his wrists before he could hit the machine again, and the lower two pulled him away.

His madness temporarily abated, Otto fell to his knees, weeping. The actuators writhed in confusion at the strength of Otto's emotions. One of them brushed against his cheek, but he roughly pushed it away. Leave me alone, he thought numbly. The actuators obeyed; he could feel their motion cutting the air around him, but they'd withdrawn from his mind. Good, he thought bitterly. He needed to get used to being alone, because it was how he was damned to spend the rest of his miserable life.

XXX

The city spread out beneath her, a breathtaking vista of gleaming metal and glass, reflecting the sun's rays a hundred times over and making the city seem to glow. Rosie loved to watch the sun rise from this height; it was as if she was the first to be touched by its warmth, before its rays finally penetrated the streets far below. And this high up, the ever-present roar of the motors and the voices of millions of people that was the city's heartbeat was diminished, becoming only a muffled buzz at the edge of hearing that she could block out by humming a bit of song.

Rosie closed her eyes, letting the chilly morning breeze wash over her and ruffle her honey-brown hair like a lover's caress. If she concentrated hard enough, she could fool herself into thinking that he was there with her, that it was his hand affectionately playing with her long tresses, as he had so often. The shift of cloth around her body could be his gentle caresses, a delicate touch that belied the strength of his hands. The gust of wind prickling the nape of her neck could be his breath as he pulled her in closer, savoring contact with her as if it were the most addictive of drugs. If she let herself, she could get lost in the memory and forget the hell the past three months of her life had been. She could pretend the painful surgeries that left her throat and chest a mass of scars had never happened, nor the long hours of therapy as she tried to cope with this new, hollow life.

But if she let herself dwell on it for too long, depression would overcome her. And then there would be pills to take, and the therapist to talk to… Better not to think of Otto at all, as cruel as that seemed. She knew he wouldn't want her to destroy herself over his death, and she tried to honor that by going on with life, even when the anguish was so overwhelming that she longed to throw herself over the edge of the railing and fall to the pavement below. It was for that reason that her niece had spent every morning up her with her, at first, though her brother seemed to feel that Rosie had advanced beyond the point where suicide was a possibility. As if it would be possible to get over her husband's death!

At least it proved that he cared. If she'd had to go through the loss of her husband, the other half of her soul, on her own, Rosie would have killed herself as soon as the nurses in the hospital turned their backs on her. Michael had stayed by her side, however, showering her with love, struggling to prove to her that there were people here who needed her. She sometimes wondered if he had done her a favor… or inflicted upon her the cruelest of tortures by making her feel too guilty to die.

Rosie opened her eyes, blinking away the tears that threatened. No, best not to think at all about how happy she'd once been. She turned her back on the view, crossing the rooftop garden to the patio chair, settling down with the book she'd brought out. She was revisiting the classics, with half a mind to return to school to teaching it, as she had a decade before. Perhaps it would ease the pain of her loss. She refused, however, to even consider reading poetry. The raw emotions it evoked would bring on another bout of depression.

She'd been reading for about an hour when a shadow fell over her. Rosie looked up, smiling wanly at her brother's serious face. "You missed breakfast," he told her.

"I'm sorry; I didn't realize how late it was." Words came easier now than they had before, when her throat had been healing from the gashes the glass had left in her flesh. It had been a miracle that nothing vital had been hit by the shards of glass that had torn her open. There'd been so much blood… and she had, apparently, been clinically dead when the paramedics loaded her into the ambulance. The paramedics had been stunned when she'd suddenly regained consciousness during the ride, and what had been a slow funeral procession to the city morgue became a mad dash to the Midtown Hospital.

She closed the book and got to her feet, knowing Michael wouldn't leave her be until he was certain she'd eaten. She followed him obediently through the elegant patio doors and into the penthouse apartment that housed Michael, his wife, their youngest child, and now Rosie. Rosie remembered her early visits to her brother's spacious home; she had felt out of place, and Otto had been downright uncomfortable at this display of wealth. He'd always compared himself to the proverbial bull in the china shop, and spent entire visits worrying he'd knock over some expensive vase resting on an unstable pedestal – never mind that Michael wasn't stupid enough to display anything that expensive in such a way in a home with children, even if they were no longer young enough to cause serious damage.

Her thoughts were taking a dangerous path again, so Rosie firmly quashed them. She lived here, now, with her family. She didn't need to feel like a guest. Michael guided her to the dining room, and directed the maid to bring Rosie what food had been saved for her.

Normally, he would leave as soon as he'd made certain she was eating, but today, Michael took a seat next to her. "I'm going to be going on a business trip to California next week," he told her without preamble. Michael had always been direct with her… except in one matter. "I'm planning to bring Lucy with me," he continued. "I wanted to bring you, too, because a change of scenery would probably do you some good, but it's not going to be a pleasure trip, and you'd be stuck in a hotel with my business associates and their families. I'm afraid you wouldn't enjoy being stuck with people you don't know." He smiled apologetically. "Will you be all right?" You won't kill yourself if I leave, will you? he didn't ask.

He was right; being trapped with people she didn't know, people who would wonder why she was in her brother's care, people who would stare at the hideous scars on her throat and ask uncomfortable questions… It would be more than her healing psyche could bear. "I'll be all right," she told him. "You're not taking Eve, are you?"

Now her brother smiled ruefully. Evelyn, his sixteen-year-old daughter, was at that point in her life where she'd come to the conclusion that her parents weren't as smart as they'd pretended to be, and fought them at every turn. Conversations between parent and daughter often descended into screaming matches and led to Eve storming off to her room. She was at the point where she'd do anything to defy her parents.

In short, she was the perfect person to help Rosie with a certain little project…

"Think you can handle her?" Michael asked, looking as if he'd just asked his sister to do something unpleasant. "She'll spend most of her time at work or in her room, of course, but with you as the only authority figure, she might try to take advantage of you."

"Don't worry, Michael." It wouldn't be as bad as her brother feared; Eve might lash out at her parents, but in the time she'd spent watching her convalescing aunt, they'd grown close. It was easier to bond with someone who wasn't an authority figure. It was also a bitter reminder of the children she'd been unable to have… Otto had tried to give her everything she could ever want; that he couldn't give her the one thing she wanted the most had almost broken him. "Eve and I get on fine."

The housekeeper put a plate of scrambled eggs before Rosie, and Michael got to his feet. "Then I'm off," he said. "I'll see you at dinner."

Rosie watched him go, her face thoughtful. A whole week… It would give her the chance to find out the one thing that Michael and the rest of his family wouldn't talk about, the subject that was forbidden in his household. She had to know the truth about her husband's death.

To Be Continued…