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cookies n' hugs

Lee

Loving You All The Time

Erik

The cemetery was cold under the night. Cold and silent, a vast world of unspoken presence. It pressed in all around him, the dark sky flickering with pinpricks of light, the bare and unmoving trees holding up their branches in supplication to the unwavering stars.

The air was still, as still as though he stood in the center of the world's axis. The storm's eye. The clean, sharp scent of snowfall imbued the air, a silvery scent, a calming one. It brushed his skin as he walked through the gravestones. The flowers were darkly lit, like the last embers of a dying fire.

He reached the grave he was looking for.

Marie Destler

Beloved

And discovered that there was already someone there. A pale-haired someone who knelt in the snow, frail body intent, breath puffing out in unsteady clouds. He felt a vague familiarity prick the air.

She looked up at him and Erik felt a shock reverberate in him. "Janet King?"

The moon made bright streaks on her face where the tear tracks shone. Her eyes were wide and colorless in the moonlight, almost a reflection of its light. There was an odd look in them a nostalgia, a heart-deep aching weariness. And something that lingered just underneath the surface, a plea. He felt suddenly uneasy, there was something in the back of his mind, a thought that he couldn't quite touch. "Did you know her?"

She laughed. It was a short sound, the merest breath. But there was a bitterness to it, an incredulity. Something that bordered the fine line between hysteria and madness.

"I was there that last night you visited her." There was a fevered intensity around her, a magnetizing desperation in her eyes. She ignored the light snowfall, unflinching as a snowflake touched her face with a cold kiss before melting and beading, small and shining as it slid down her cheek.

The eyes of a child looked up at him.

Erik felt the breath drive out of him. Her eyes were intent upon his face, pleading. For a moment, his mind went completely blank.

Than his thoughts were all tumbling over one another, like ripples of a downpour upon a lake. Fast and fleeting, overlapping in wild discord, gone so quickly it was almost impossible to comprehend them.

"You-" he managed. His lungs felt constricted, his mind was on fire. "You were the girl." Impossible. Impossible. His mind repeated in a mechanical litany.

He knew differently.

Tears started anew at the corners of her eyes. A corner of her mouth lifts, the gesture more a grimace than anything else. She seemed blind to all else. "I still am that girl." She breathed in deeply, let it out in a rush of white that diffused in the cold night. Her voice lowered, as though she sat in a confessional. Intimate, almost afraid. "You saved me that night."

He shook his head. Strange electricity ran through his veins, making it difficult to think clearly. But not difficult to remember. "No- no I didn't. I let him get to her- you- again. I didn't stop him the second time." He was reliving that dark day again, feeling the frail young girl against him, her eyes drawing him in with their bleak imploration. As though he would drown in the eyes nearly mindless with fear.

She rose. She was still painfully thin, as she had been that day. Still so fragile, as though the world would break her like a child snapped the stem of a flower encased in ice. She shook her head slowly in negation. She stared straight into him, still the clear-eyed child. "No, Erik. But you gave me hope." The endless, almost translucent eyes looked into the core of him. "Since that night, I thought of you whenever the pain was too much. You were the angel who carried me through the years. I lived for you. I lived to meet you once again."

She reached out and touched his unmasked cheek, he was numb to the sensation, the sedative of memories running through his veins. Her fingers trembled, her hand dropped back to her side. "I lived to meet you not as a child, but as a woman." Her eyes were almost hypnotic in their fervored intensity. Her lips parted, her breath shuddered. A tear gathered, fell.

"I've loved you ever since that night. Like I've loved nothing and no one else." Her voice was soft, wistful. A broken smile passed over her face. "You're the only thing I've ever been able to love, Erik. Do you know what it means to me, to be able love something?" The winter-grey eyes were wide and shimmering, clear and liquid. "It's so beautiful to know that I can love. So beautiful- and so painful." her voice faded and fell. Her eyes dropped, closed. Points of light sparkled on the still lashes.

It was all crashing in on him too quickly. He was struggling to keep his head above the water in this strange dark ocean of memories. With the storms of her confession whipping the waters like a tempest. "Painful?" he asked, striving to bring this strange conversation to a point he could comprehend.

Her eyes flew up to his, pupils dilated until the blackness seemed to conquer her eyes and cheeks flushed. "Painful, Erik! How do you think it feels- to see you in the arms of another woman?" Her voice broke. "To see love in your eyes when you look at her? How do you think it feels to lose the only person who's ever cared about you to another!" The girl of so many years ago looked out at him from barren, despairing eyes.

A rush of something like empathy went through him. "Why didn't you tell me? At the theatre, when I first came?"

Her eyes were glazed, almost blinded, by pain. "I wanted to. More than anything. But- Erik, I was so afraid!" she cried. "So afraid you'd see what I'd become- so afraid you would judge me like everyone else has. So afraid you'd changed..." her voice dropped into nothingness. She shook, her entire body shivering like a wind-blown sapling.

He looked into the maelstrom of her eyes. Something urged him that this was a moment of change. Pity swept him for the girl who, like him, had dwelt so long in darkness. A compassion for another soul that had taught itself to be lonely. "I won't judge you." You didn't judge me, when you saw my face that night.

She wrapped her arms around her trembling body. "No." she shot back, hopelessness imbuing her words with dark shadows. "But you'll never love me either, will you? Oh God, Erik, my angel... my guardian angel..." Her words shuddered than evanesced. The night pressed in around them.

Pity stirred in him, for the child he had once comforted. But I can't anymore. I can't be what you want of me, Janet. He looked away. "I'm sorry, Janet." He felt his heart drop at the youthful fragility she exuded now. He could hear her as he once had. Please, please. Help me- please! I need you.

I need you.

She gave a faint, bitter laugh. Her face was, for once, stripped bare of all its guards. All the anger and worldliness which served as her mask. He saw what lay beneath- and in its way, it was as pitiable and terrifying as what lay beneath his own. It was the look of a person who had lost all faith. Alone in the darkness and the silence.

So alone.

"Do you remember that night- when I saw your face?" she asked with a terrible nostalgia. Her face shone palely in the moonlight, eyes bright.

He flinched, brought out of his musings. "Yes." He remembered all too clearly how she had clung to him still. Her deus ex machina. Her guardian angel.

Her eyes were suddenly fierce, focused, falcon-like. "I loved you still. You were the only thing of beauty in my life, with or without a mask." She fumbled at her collar, slipped off the silver chain on her neck. Cradling it in her palms like a bird, she opened her hands. In her hands she cupped one of the shattered pieces of that mask that hung, pendant-like, from the chain. The edges were worn, smooth and gleaming dully.

His blood seemed to stop in his veins. A kind of guilt swamped him. God, I never realized what that night would do to her. Would it have been better if he had never answered her child's scream that night? Would it have been better if he had not brought her to this point- the obsession and blind conviction that had done nothing but shatter her in the end?

Her hands shook, she replaced the necklace. The rounded piece of the mask spun, gleaming in the moonlight before she caught it and tucked it once more against her skin. She looked up at him, and in her eyes was the same longing and irrevocable trust. "I loved you, Erik." Something in her seemed to shatter and release at the words, she was suddenly against him, clutching his collar as she had that night. "I love you!"

He started, stepping back. Fought to keep his head clear of the shock that pulsed through him at the wild, desperate eyes. The childlike grey that beseeched him, begged him. Oh, God. What did I do that night?

Her eyes were despairing on his. "Can't you see it, Erik? We were meant to meet again after that night. You and I have been bound since that night. How can you tell another woman that you love her?"

Janet

Her breath came harshly, burning coldly into her lungs. She stared at him, wide-eyed, as something passed fleetingly through his eyes. Inside, she felt a fracturing, a spreading cracking like ice that would all too soon shatter and explode into fire and blood.

"Janet," he began calmly, in the voice that had soothed her that night. She closed her eyes painfully. God, Erik. Why can't you see?

I have to make you see. I can't- I can't lose you. Not you.

Her eyes flew open, she wanted to drown in the sky-colored eyes that were so turbulent, so glowing on hers. She tasted a bittersweetness, swallowed hard. "How can you do this?" To her shame, she felt tears slide coldly down her skin.

He did not reach to wipe them away as he had all those years ago.

His eyes were blazing, compassionate, pitying. She felt her nails dig into her palms. Goddammit, I don't want your pity, Erik. I want so much more than that. Don't you understand?

"One doesn't choose who they love, Janet." he began softly, firmly, in the seraphic voice that she longed to wrap herself in. She winced. "I never chose to love Christine. But I do. I love her, Janet. Whatever that night is to us, I love her still."

A choked sound scraped its way up her throat. She couldn't breathe.

He sighed, eyes softening, empathetic. He reached into his pocket, snowy linen coming away in his hand. His hand came to cup her face, she trembled at the warm hand against her jawline. Oh, God. Erik.

She closed her eyes as the cloth glided across her face, taking the tears into itself. She felt a heat ripple through her at the touch, something that shivered her to her core. A brightness and an electricity that raced through her like wildfire, throwing off glowing sparks into the night that drifted up to the heavens. The sensation was so familiar, so painfully familiar.

She didn't ever want it to end. She could have stood there endlessly, under the night sky, for all eternity, if only she could share it with him. She wished it would never end.

But it did.

She opened her eyes again, pleading with the steady blue ones above her. "Somewhere out in the world, Janet, there are other arms to hold you." His voice flowed over her, into her, as no other did, sparking a painful longing. "Someone who can love you as I cannot. I can't offer you anymore than an illusion, Janet. And you deserve more than that."

She laughed disbelievingly, blood racing through her, mind in turmoil, spirit in agony. "I don't want anyone else, Erik. Can't you see? I'll never want anyone but you." Her voice came out strained and faint and she cursed it.

His eyes were fantastically, impossibly bright on hers. "It's only a dream you love, Janet."

"A dream that has kept me alive when I wanted nothing more than death!" She wanted to scream, to rage at him. How could he do this to her? How could her angel leave her after she had found him again- before she could share what she felt with him?

How could the angel who had saved her- murder her like this?

"Erik- why!" She felt the girl of her youth staring out of her eyes, hopeless and beseeching. "Why...?"

But he did not comfort her. Not this time. He stepped back, blue eyes speaking a lament. "I don't know, Janet. I don't know."

She fell to her knees as he faded into the snowlit darkness. She did not even feel the tears as they fell.

Angel...

Erik

Behind him he heard a voice raised in song. It had not the unearthly beauty of his Christine, but there was a despair in it that shivered him at his core. He heard all of the sufferings of humanity cry out in the notes that echoed through the silent night. In the cold, impersonal world of white snow and stone, he heard something beating with a heart that bled with all the miasma and memories of earthly tragedy.

It was utterly human, a voice of agony, a broken heart that had been given voice.

It was the sound of something dying. High and clear, pursuing him to the parking lot, where the world still seemed empty.

It was still in his mind when he stepped over the threshold of his apartment.

I'm so sorry, Janet. If I had known what I would have done to you that day... I never meant to hurt you.

I never meant for this to happen. I'm so sorry, Janet.

Please- find peace, Janet. May you find a better angel.

He shed his coat. Christine still slept peacefully, a smile touching and warming her face. In the moonlight, it was as though some divine being slept in the silent room, radiant and shining under the mystical light in the darkness. He watched the rise and fall of her calm breathing, brushed a stray curl back from her face. She turned toward the touch, he smiled faintly. I couldn't love anyone but her. I'll never love anyone else. She is my angel.

"I love you, Christine." he whispered.

Her fingers reached out and, in sleep, wrapped around his.