A/N: This story has been gathering dust for a long, long time (something like three years), both in my brain and on my hard drive. I'm glad to finally let it see the light.

As to whom you should have in your mind's eye when reading this story, Erik is entirely Michael Crawford, with a dash of Leroux in his personality. Christine and Raoul are both composites—Christine (in my own mind) is a blend of several different stage Christines, mixed with a healthy dose of my own imagination, and Raoul is mostly Leroux, with a smidgeon of Steve Barton (the original London Raoul) thrown in.

A time of bleakness had begun.

Sunny days were darkened by the gloom, and boredom was nefariously chipping away at her mind and soul.

Sometimes she caught herself staring at her hands. Pink finger, pink nail, white tip. Pink-pink-white.

It needs more white, she thought, and the idea was like a hiccup, a brief sigh. She had shocked herself with that weird, awful thought, but there was more.

She imagined lightly running fingertips across white skin, so white that it hardly seemed possible that there could be blood, feeling the bumps and curves. She imagined a mouth—His mouth—open, his eyes closed.

I could have Him in my power…

Her eyes snapped open, appalled at her own perversity.

Deep brown met intense and puzzled baby-blue—he was staring, her beloved—and she nearly closed her lids again from sheer shame, the utter nothingness of lies.

I lie to you every day, Raoul, because even I cannot entirely confront or embrace the awful, treacherous truth.

"Come, dear," he whispered, her rescuer. "Tell me what the matter is." Vaguely, she felt the soft, feather-light kiss upon her burning cheek, sending shivers up her spine, and guilty hatred in her heart. I am a traitor to myself and to you. And you are blind.

She looked at him, and both wanted and did not want him. She could not have him. Never in the way they'd wished…not now, at any rate. There was his family, to begin with…and now always Him hanging between them, like a burial-shroud.

In her mind, she rehearsed the things she wanted to say, planned them out like puzzle pieces on a slab of cherry-wood, soft pine blocks against a burgundy red. The pine, however, turned black in her imagination, black with fire, with burning. The charred pieces remained on the unscathed cherry, in her mind. They were broken testaments to a shattered dream.

Raoul.

You and I are very different…

Raoul.

I must talk to you about…

Raoul.

I cannot go through with…

Raoul.

I can't escape.

She squeezed her eyes shut, bursts of light erupting, one two three, pyrotechnics like the ones upon the Bal Masque night—Fly into the air, bright ones, and flee before you burst into a flowered flame…

He won me after all.

"Christine…" Raoul whispered, and the breath inside her ear sent more of the same guilty shivers, which whispered in their turn of lies lies lies, and in their structure held her greatest secret.

Don't you see?
His sturdy hand lay upon her feminine fingers, leading her symbolically to hearth and home—but instead, she wanted the long-fingered hand that was oddly beautiful as it pounded upon the organ keys, taut and stretched in teaching lesson after lesson, waving in the air with elegance in front of a horrid skull with feathers…

The Mort Rouge, Raoul. He is stalking abroad, still, in my mind.

"We'll be…"

Can't you guess? Don't you know?

The boy-turned-man's hands were sailor-hands…calloused in places, but smooth in most.

Still clinging to your sisters' apron strings…you always were a child, Raoul. No. I was. SUCH a child! I thought I would be with you for ever. But then I saved you from your fate, and we fled, and I have been miserable ever since.

"…so happy…"

"…won't we…"

His voice seemed oddly disjointed, broken. Words sounded in her ears and faded out again, like waves against the jagged shore.

"…always…"

"…free…"

"…last…"

"…beaten…"

"…and my God, Christine…"

Raoul, don't you understand?

She could not say it aloud. She smiled, altogether beatifically, hating herself for this ongoing farce. She took his strong hand in hers, his sailor-hand, and kissed the tips of his fingers.

A tear threatened to spill from beneath her lids. She closed her eyes, turned her head away, pretending to be fascinated by the lilies on the end table.

"Do you not feel happy?" he asked, his finger sliding down the smooth jawbone below her ear. Her flesh was the color of cream, she'd been told…smooth and perfect, blemishless, though it made her blush to think of it. Had He said it? She could not remember.

Did…did He think her skin was creamy and perfect?

Silly, silly, stupid goose. Stupid girl, idiotic woman, child…what am I, exactly? Child? Woman? Girl? Devil? Angel?

But now the forbidden word had crossed her brain, and it was in complete revolt. She blanched, and snatched her hand away.

"I don't feel well."

Raoul stared. "What on earth has put you in such a fright?" he gasped. "You haven't…" And he looked out the window, as if fully expecting to see the personified apparition of her self-imposed Forbidden Word to appear at any moment. As if He were what she had seen out the window. As if that were what had put her in a fright.

But it was, wasn't it, after a fashion? She'd seen him in her mind, at any rate.

"Raoul, I…" She grasped at straws for words. "I'm so frightened…I need…time…away. To think…about…things."

His face stiffened, softened, tightened around the eyes. She knew he was crushed. She could not come out with it, out with the real truth.

I love you, dear, but I can't—I cannot love you the way you need to be loved. You are no true companion for me—not in that way. You never will be.

She could not say it. That would rip his heart out. And yet…had she not only just ripped out the heart of another only a few nights past? Without mercy, or quarter?

She remembered all too well giving back His ring. She had meant it kindly—something to remember her by, as well as a plea to forget—but the full portent of that action had struck her the very next morning as if by a killing blow.

She must say it.

"I…"

Raoul waited, his fingers laced so that they seemed to draw the blood from their veins.

Now they're white, but only now. A yellow-white, the white of death…the white of…

She shuddered.

Not quite.

His leg was bent sideways upon one knee, his entire body nearly sliding off the elegant divan. Tension rang true, and it never lied.

"I need to…" Her hands wrung painfully, fingers twisted even more than his now-bloodless phalanges. "I need time, Raoul. Time to think…"

"But you…promised…" he began, and cut himself off.

Raoul was too much of the gentleman to protest against her now, though if he thought she were in danger he would protest enough.

"Time to act. Time to be ready…" How empty the words sounded, how hollow. How utterly devoid of promise. And who was that in the mirror opposite? Who was that elegantly clad female figure, who so recently had been dressed in dripping wet rags of a wedding dress?

HIS wedding dress.

The thought gave her a shiver, an awful, creeping shiver, but something so despicably delicious in the horror of it all made her want to scream aloud with rage.

It was then she saw her chance.

She was the convict, the bird flying through the open window. She was the inmate about to be freed.

"Raoul, look at me. Look at me in the mirror."

He looked, against his will. "I see my bride."

"You see a peasant decked in trappings."

"'A jay in borrowed plumes?'" quoth he, raising an eyebrow.

Christine sighed. "You know Jane Eyre."

"You've read it, then?" he asked.

"Oh, Raoul," she sighed. "So little you know about me. So many things you never thought to ask."

"It's that, then," he said. "It's time to get to know you, time to get to know me."

"No, Raoul," she said. "Time to get to know ourselves."

There was a pregnant pause, a slight but ever-so-perceptible stitch in the fabric of the day, and then a sigh. "So it has come to this," he whispered. "You do not wish to marry me, do you, Christine?"

She blanched. "I…"

Could she make the plunge?

Could she say a heartfelt No…or Yes? Which must it be?

"That," she said softly, "is why I must have time. To think it over. You see, Raoul…"

He sighed again. "All of Paris watches," he whispers. "All judgmental eyes. Do you not want to get away from it all, to go to the coast and plunder it like pirates, or live in the jungles like natives?"

She laughed out loud…she could not help it. Such delightful things he said, oftimes—

Bittersweetness turned the laugh into a hiccup. He patted her back instinctively. She coughed a bit from the over-firmness of the pat. He didn't know his own strength, her Sailor Lad.

"Give…" she coughed again. "…me time."

His hand was still in midair, paused in indecision as he thought, muscles not transferring the signal to pull it back from its over-zealous mission of curing her of the hiccups.

It dropped. Decision made.

Her eyes would not leave the blond downy-fur on his upper lip, the fine tracing hairs that caressed the indent, the tender soft-scratchiness.

They nuzzled against her ear, his lips brushing chastely but hotly across her cheek, the mind-whisper coming, so soft, so understanding, Oh, I love you, Raoul, how could I not, as such a dear devoted friend? But nothing more…

Quoth the raven, she almost said aloud, on a strange and wicked impulse, but caught herself in time.

"Time I'll give you," he whispered. "Always. Infinite. If only you are happy."

This time a tear did drip down her cheek, and her mind finished what it had begun.

…Nevermore.

A/N: This prologue and a good deal of the first chapter were written, as I said, quite a while back, so the writing style (in the prologue, mainly—not so much in the first chapter) at first varied drastically—and even still differs quite a bit—from the one I have now. I made a lot of revisions to this before posting it, to make it a bit more consistent with the following chapters, and especially to make it less distractingly florid. Christine came off as more than a little crazy in the original prologue, and while I was going to go along those lines, it ended up just not working. I subsequently wrote her as being far more in possession of her faculties—even though she still seems just a little out of it at first.

I say this mainly because I posted the original prologue on a website or two, a few years ago, when I was testing the waters for the story, and if anyone who happened across it then happens across this now and wonders at the changes, this is why.