A/N: It's MINE! ALL MINE!!...

Except for the characters and the general plotlines stolen from Gaston Leroux and all that. Heh.

Chapter VII- Perdition

I kept her at my house for a fortnight. In the duration of her time there, I gave her several somber threats to ensure that she would return to me. Though I do not believe that that was what brought her back to me that night of the Masqued Ball....

I led her calmly to the above world that night, despite the horrible sense of loss that made my heart feel like frozen lead.

"You will dress as the black domino," I told her finally, as we reached the passage to the world above. "That is how they will expect you to be dressed. You will be required to meet me a few hours after the masked ball.... I may even arrive myself, if I sense there is something terribly the matter...." The girl, understandably, looked frightened at this remark- of course, I would attend the ball either way. I had fashioned myself a costume based upon Edgar Allan Poe's "Red Death- I have always liked the man's works, despite his being one of those horrendously pompous Americans whom I have generally found distasteful, besides this particular authour.

Tears beginning to fall from my eyes, I stopped the girl once more before she made her exit.

"Christine... promise your Angel that you will come back... please..." I pleaded pitifully, grasping her hand as if it were the only thing keeping me alive. With a small, mortified nod, the girl slipped her tiny hand from my rather weak grasp. As her delicate, mouse-like footsteps faded away, I again returned to the house by the lake, determined to have my darling child come back to me.

My costume for the Masqued Ball was, admittedly, quite magnificent. A very commanding French officer's uniform decked out in a bright, blood-like scarlet colour, a long cape, and an ostentatious hat that rather made me appear inhumanly tall. If I was to be Monsieur le Cadavre Vivant, this time spreading death rather than merely portraying it as a freak show oddity, I had to properly cut the figure. Despite the fact that this was a masquerade, however, I chose not to wear a mask. No one who saw me would suspect that it was my real face, other than the girl, at least, and I did not exactly expect to meet with her. I would, however, be keeping a silent vigil over her boy for most- if not, all- of my time there.

Perhaps it was merely the thought of losing my dear child that brought me to the surface that horrid night... while I do find myself often engrossed in the hatred of her fatuous young courtier, I believe that I was at my most pathetic at that point in the incident, concerning her... If she'd gone back on her promise, it would have been the very end.

Of course... only a few steps into the Masquerade that night, I spotted them.... The white and the black domino, staring up the staircase at me vacantly, as the rest of the crowd was, for what I assume was the sudden shock of seeing such a tall and grotesquely-clad figure. I immediately started to the opposite direction as it happened- apparently enraging Monsieur de Chagny, for all around that night, there were whispers of the 'eccentric young man searching for the Red Death'- and took refuge in that place I took to pray... Apollo and his golden lyre raised in glory to the heavens, now brought sadly to a dim purpose by the darkest of his students.

Even now, it seems a ridiculous proposition... I had not 'believed' in any sort of divine being since I was a diluted young boy, living in a world of sugared fancy constructed entirely by my over-active imagination. While I have changed little over the years, in the fact that I have the habit of believing dreams once they've become tasteful enough to me, at least, I thought I was beyond this sort of petty pandering to a non-existent spectre created out of man's obsessive vanity.

Yet I found myself upon the roof anyway that lamentable night, standing among the strings of the magnificent statue, quite literally at the brink. As it always does, being so very pessimistic about my life as I am, the thought crossed my mind to merely let go.... Nothing could be changed by my purpose there. My love would still be abhorred by me, and thoroughly in love with another, far better man, right beneath my feet, who, while not the most bright of fellows... would undoubtedly give her everything I had always wished to give her. Comfort. Protection. Everlasting love.... Things that my age and manner before her in the past would not allow.

I wasn't bound much longer for this Earth- even I, ever the imaginative old monster, could not deny that, with the seizures and Masons' Lung finally beginning to take a grinding toll. And to force my dear child into what she thought was love, then dying months, even weeks later, was an even more terrible prospect. I never wished for her to be alone, or,- though it was likely impossible,- regret for our time together.

Still, I remained at my place, despite all of the doubts that I threw at myself by the moment, hearkening back to my time as a righteous young Catholic child, kneeling on the back of the true 'Angel of Music' and proclaiming my pitiful prayers before the soulless, empty onyx sky filled with a conglomerate of fancifully named stars above Paris. I did not ask for forgiveness... rather, I only asked for what I wished for, and what my dreams told me was possible, if I only wished hard enough. If I had any feeling of Heaven and Hell left within me, I knew that I was absolutely condemned. There was no point begging for the impossible to happen.

Though, as I reiterate once more, the prospect of my dear love finding love in me was just as unlikely. But if I thought of it, and fancied the thought enough... it had to be true. Such is the manner of madmen....

I asked only for the thoughts of my love, and for her to come back to me... as well as her protection, and clarity in the choice she would be bound to make, caught between the love she wished for and the one that fear of damnation forbid her turn away from.

Sadly,- or, more likely, with all of the fortune of an enlightened demon,- I was interrupted from my imagination as the door to the rooftop swung open... and my golden-haired angel and her veritable bastard of a fiancé emerged, in black and white, the angel and demon... reversed satirically in the perverse manner of that wretched fools' masquerade.

They whispered to each other.... But voices grew quickly louder within the silence and assumed loneliness of the night, and, soon enough, Christine, in all of her childs' treachery, spoke of my name and my horror loudly enough for me to echo her, practically out of dying disbelief rather than to frighten she and her handsome young man. The two hardly understood what it was, I marveled. What was most perturbing about the sickeningly loving vignette unfolding before me was the terrible, admitted deceitfulness of my love- that she had lived an utter, bloody lie for all of the time we spent together, that made me turn away from her pale face glowing in the night as if she were the one disfigured by birth and by a twisted spirit. Lied when she said she would come back to me, when she burned my masks, lied when she looked into my face without a cry of fearful despair....

I could have openly wept when her boy questioned about love. At how very readily my dear child denied any feelings for me... but horror. "Oh, horror, horror, horror!" She cried out into the night, unable to even contain her cut-glass voice at the memory of me.... If she shall live to be a hundred and still remember my lamentable face, then when I am so old, I shall still recall the very pitch and conviction for which those words cast me away into nothing.

If it was the archangel's lies that made me sad, their promise to be gone was the blow that brought me into assured madness. An insult, it seemed, that she pledged to give me a swan's heart-rending prothamalion before leaving to my solitary Hell without so much as an open 'farewell.'

The children kissed, then. Taking their masks off, the first flush of a lover's embrace met my daughter's sweet face even in the dark. She smiled, as I'd always fancied she would for me, and took her gloves off to entwine her pale little fingers in the thick hair of her boy, as if to bring truth to the fact that her promise was real, this time, that she was really free of all the deceit of night....

And, as the most wretchedly perfect symbol as one could ever suppose in the moment, the pain gold wedding-ring I'd given her, and bid her never to lose for fear of torment, slipped carelessly off her tiny finger and rolled innocently and silently away, across the roof until it fell, as I wished, to the watery street below. She had cast off the chains of my pitiful love that constantly drove a dagger into its own heart for what she really wished for, and deserved.... The assurance of things that I could never procure for her, even with all the wealth and love in the world.

Even though I'd made some, minute effort to remain undetected... I think it quite understandable that a cry came belting from by throat as the pair pulled away from one another. Christine had made a small fuss over her ring being gone, but... she no longer cared enough for the fact to make any difference. What is one minute sin absolved when one has committed the great and deadly seven?

They immediately took flight, and I, with no particular goal but to exact some maniacal plot for revenge, through the soaring rafters of the roof until they finally came back to their door, where I could already hear that meddling old Persian instructing the children how best to flee from my eyes.

I chased them no longer... rather, I crawled down the gilded facade of the gargantuan House of Music to the street; as if a dark reflection of what had just happened, the telling sky had already begun to weep sordid tears of heavy black rain. The ring glinted its warm gold against the tracked walkways, a beacon in the street invisible to all but myself... the enlightened and the damned.

Placing the thing in my hand, I cried out my childish misery all the way back to my home, truly a young boy who had been spoiled without getting a thing he wanted.... The very reason why the horrid plans already flew through my mind, as to how to steal back my child from the clutches of my own monster.

A/N: How long has it been, exactly? A year since I last posted a chapter?

Well, anyway, it's been a really long time. As for reviewing goodies... hmm.... Well, reviewing will get you a GerryErik with BookErik's voice. All the advantages of hotness plus the voice a commanding character deserves. -Swoon-

If not, you get regular GerryErik. Mwahahahaha, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.... (NOT "ECK CETERA!!")

Kindly review, even if you didn't like it. I loves meh feedback. =3