A/N This is a rewrite of a previously published story. It will include new scenes and hopefully fewer grammatical errors. Please read and review! If you read Shadows of the Past you will enjoy meeting Erik, Sophia and Citrine all over again. If you haven't yet met them please sit back and tell me what you think. I liked the characters far too much to let their story just sit, so here they are again restarting their journey. I will repost as I re-edit, which will be around once a week so that it doesn't immediately effect my other stories. :-)

Paladin

Late Winter, 1870

Days after the opera fire.

"This is beyond repair," Madame Giry said, her voice a low, rumbling thunder of anger and resentment. "You do know that, do you not?"

Erik made no reply. He stood and watched her stand with her back to him, grateful that she had allowed him to see her again. He deserved her ridicule. In the seventy-two hours that had passed since the chandelier fell he had waited for reprimands.

Everything about Madame's posture screamed anger to him: the straightened back, the hands on hips. He considered himself fortunate that she had led him to her sister's apartment in the northern part of Paris and not straight to the authorities searching for him.

"After all I did for you, all the years I hid you. Is this how you show gratitude?" She sighed and turned to face him for the first time, a wild gleam in her eyes. "Well, Erik? What do you have to say for yourself?"

The look in her eyes told him that no matter what he said it would not be enough. He had outworn his welcome, had destroyed the only bond he had with another person. Already he had spent two days wearing the same clothes, sleeping for spurts beneath the opera house and stealing into the night when he head voices echoing through the empty stone corridors. Soon, he would not be able to return.

"I would beg for your forgiveness," he murmured at last. "And ask that you have faith in me still…if you ever had faith in me to begin with, Madame."

Her face softened enough to show that she pitied him. She walked toward him, then thought against it and walked away, folding her arms as she turned.

"I thought I could save you," she whispered.

Erik stared at his feet. Ever since he had seen Christine leave with Raoul he had been haunted by shame. He had wanted to love Christine. He had embraced the idea of being her angel, a living, breathing Angel of Music. Somehow it had all spiraled away, slipping through his fingers like sand, each grain of hope escaping him. He had fled the old opera house with nothing but a deep feeling of emptiness and rejection, the same feelings he had carried since birth. Nothing would ever release him from his loneliness.

Little thoughts tripped through his mind: the two-way mirror, the ruined chandelier, the terrible accident with Joseph Buquet. He remembered with acute awareness every detail of exactly how the light fell, how the water rippled when he watched Christine leave in the boat, and her hands around her beloved, handsome Vicomte.

He had cried until he made himself sick. How had the angel become the devil? How had his good intention slipped so far into vile, murderous acts? This was not what he wanted.

"Erik? God in Heaven, are you even listening to me?" she asked. She stomped toward him, hand raised as though to strike him. When he didn't flinch, she lowered her hand and touched the right side of his face, the terrible side of his face still hidden beneath the mask.

Erik knew he still needed her help and it had come as a surprise that she had offered, especially after all that had recently transpired.

"You are more than this," she said gently.

"Not any more," he replied. He still could not look her in the eye. Since the first time he heard Christine sing Erik had known Madame Giry greatly disapproved of his affection for the girl. She looked at him sharply on the rare occasion they encountered each other. Always she stared, her eyes accusing, flooded with pain, but she said nothing. She knew better than to upset him, knew his temper, knew how quickly he could turn from placid to a torrent storm. His actions and harsh words drove her away and kept her at a distance.

Erik sighed and shook his head. Madame was all he had left in the world. When he looked at her again he realized she was all he had ever had.

"Not after what I did, what I wanted to do."

She drew him nearer, which startled him. Closeness was foreign and frightening. The warmth and comfort allowed others had always been denied to him, and his first reaction was to push away from human contact. She seemed to sense his apprehension and sighed.

"What a terrible thing to have your life weighed by this," she whispered as she turned his face toward hers. She held her hand against his chest, feeling the hammer pounds of a nervous heartbeat. "If I could scrape away all those years, I would search for a glimmer of happiness and give it to you."

"Why?" was all he could ask. "Why would you do such a foolish thing?

"Because even you deserve to be happy," she said. "So much talent, so much knowledge and it's being wasted."

He shivered at her words but embraced her as she did him, the bond of an orphaned son finding motherly acceptance.

"I will never be able to thank you for all you did for me."

Madam Giry shook her head. "There is no reason to thank me, mon cher." She showed him a folded piece of paper. "But now you must do me one favor. Go to this address and never return here, is that understood?"

Pain flickered into his pale eyes. She was sending him away. Was she frightened of him? Did she hate him? He took a step back but she caught him by the arm, keeping him from bolting out the door and into the night-darkened streets of northern Paris.

"Listen to me a moment. I have made arrangements for you. Your funds have been transferred but I will continue to manage them on your behalf. You will live quite comfortably, I expect."

His eyes flickered up. He would never live comfortably. Not as long as he was alone.

"With the twenty thousand francs you garnered each month I have purchased property."

"Property?"

"Months ago. When," she hesitated, searching for the right words, he knew. "When I expected there may be misfortune."

"How did you purchase property?"

"You barely went through a third of your 'earnings' from the Populaire. You've been here what? Twenty years? That's quite a substantial income, which has matured beyond what you would imagine. Personally, I think you could have demanded five thousand."

"Twenty thousand they respected. Five they would have laughed at."

Madame grunted at the absurdity of his words. "You have done well for yourself in your deception. Well enough to live the rest of your life with everything you should need."

"Everything?" he muttered in misery.

The door to her flat opened and the cold of winter greeted him. "It is time for you to live as a man, not an apparition."