The spurned engagement ring sailed through the darkness like a falling star, but it had one last trick to play. It rang out when it hit the deck, and continued in a skid into a dark and unswept corner of the backstage – wobbling, and ultimately tipping through the opening in the floorboards that hid the technical director's brainchild: the secret mechanism that paid out cable to Act One's chandelier.
The ring would only be discovered later, after the fact, when an investigation was mounted into what went wrong. But the moment Charlotte cast it from her, it no longer occupied space in Eric's thoughts. It became the hollow gesture of another man's love: meaningless, more artificial than any prop. Ryan might, in that moment, still claim Charlotte as his fiancée, but Lotte belonged to no one but him.
The thought of finally possessing his friend possessed him in turn. No, Eric had to remind himself forcefully. He could not think of it as ownership – but he was sliding into character already, the Phantom's thoughts overlaying his own, and he was lost before he could regain sense or bearing. It was too heady a rush to resist: the intoxicating feeling that Charlotte Dawson was finally his. They had come so far from their first shows together – from being castmates to costars and leads – from familiar silhouettes backstage, to friends, to the shivering, uneasy twilight of more than friends, forbidden from one another, living out a love story in the moments of someone else's.
When he assumed his place behind the mirror, the crew and ensemble members milling about backstage gave him a wide berth. They knew better than to approach him once the curtains rose. The actor called "Eric" was generally beyond recall unless there was an emergency, and tonight, the energy igniting the air around him was especially kinetic. In Charlotte's performance, too, everyone saw a different Christine: more headstrong from the start, a striking member of the corps de ballet rather than a hidden gem to be uplifted unaware of its facets. A young woman who knew her own mind, who could not be twisted without her consent in the tangling.
When she met him at the mirror, it was the Phantom gazing out at her from a spectral countenance. Eric's performance attuned to her own like they were two tines of the same fork resonating a tone: she came to him already wholly his, and the Phantom's choreography of hesitation and retreat evaporated the instant he took her by the hand. The heat between them made any alternative interpretation impossible. They made the music of the night, and as Eric's eyes drifted out over the crowd, they homed in on a familiar face caught in the blazing splashback from the lights. Ryan gazed up at the pair of them, as rapt as anyone else in the audience – only his face betrayed all he felt watching his fiancée melt in the arms of another. In a flash of insight Eric saw confusion, comprehension, grief... and a bewildered indignation, hardening into something more, the longer the two opponents locked eyes. Ryan must have thought Eric too stunned by the lights to notice at first, but the other man could not now misunderstand the challenge as anything but deliberate.
So it wasn't so easily ended. The ring was gone, but its blushing imprint on Charlotte's finger remained. Though those fingers were clasped in his, though he steered them up the length of her body and over the rippling bodice of her negligee, Ryan thought this a temporary snag in his own story. The two men had only ever gotten along because of Charlotte, forcing civility and tolerance the few times they had been in a room together (Ryan's "tolerance" had always driven Eric insane). Even Charlotte had noticed the tension after a while and taken to spending time with them apart.
But Eric had seen the look in Charlotte's eyes when she cast the ring from her. He believed her when she said she had made her final choice. They had been aware of each other's feelings for a while now – it had just taken one of them acknowledging it, saying it.
On her way to the Il Muto quick change, Eric caught Charlotte's elbow and drew her briefly into the shadows. Enfolded by luxuriant curtains and drops, he only had time to smooth a damp curl back from her eyes and breathe: "Dressing room," an invitation for where he would be come intermission. He had dropped out of character now. His eyes shone, and his smile was giddy, almost boyish, as another stroke of his fingers made way for his lips to steal a kiss from hers – but then the wardrobe assistant was pulling her away, and Eric had departed for the next wing. Leather creaked with the triumphant clench of a fist, and there was no hiding his exhilaration from the stagehands, who attributed it to the offer he had received earlier in the day. But all thoughts of departing the show were far from his mind.
The scene moved forward, driving them toward the crescendo, the crash, the intermission – driving him toward the embrace of Charlotte's arms – but then things seemed to stall abruptly. Eric was backstage after the death of Buquet, preparing to take over the God Mic. He watched as Charlotte curtsied a second time. Something was wrong. He forgot his cue as he whirled to the person closest to him. "Stop the chandelier!"
"They can't!" The stage manager was panicking, seeing what Eric saw. There were multiple crew members heaving on the cables to no avail. Charlotte was trapped onstage with the show's colossal set piece hurtling toward her.
"Eric!"
His name was a ringing endorsement to forget everything else. Eric turned, jaw tight, and saw Charlotte's hopeless expression. Before she reached for him he was already running. He heard terrified voices calling him, screams and ensemble turning away; a pair of hands tried to drag him back into the wing, but he was free of them and flying for Charlotte, his dark cape billowing behind him like wings.
He thought nothing of the danger, except that she was in its path. He thought nothing. He fell upon her and swept his cape over them both as the world shattered around them.
More than the chandelier – their very reality – seemed to twist and fragment. Jewels hung in the air around them. Ten thousand real candle flames joined with electrical currents arcing through wires to create a fire unlike anything ever seen or felt by those in the audience. And Eric felt it. He felt the fire catch the corner of his cape and ignite the entire right half of his body, racing like wildfire up his back. The excruciating trajectory of it seemed too perfect, too impossible, to be believed.
And so was the pain. Now the angel with black wings was shedding feathers of flame. His mask caught fire, and when he freed a hand to reach for it, to wrench it off him, he screamed; it was sealed to his face, to his flesh, and he felt his skin boil beneath it. The pain was beyond endurance. He cast what remained of his sanity out for anything else to focus it, and felt Charlotte's fragile body beneath his own. Protected. Safe.
Peace washed over him as the fire laid its claim. He was half-ifrit, a hellish pairing of human and monster; his suffering pushed past the threshold of his endurance, and he grew numb as the fire consuming him ate away what was left to burn. They were entangled in the ruin of the chandelier, Charlotte splayed beneath him, he braced above her as if he expected the roof to fall next, or the sky. As if his ruined back alone would keep it at bay. Voices swam into focus around them. Strange voices. Voices that didn't seem to be speaking English, until all at once they snapped into comprehensive focus and resolved into words he understood.
"The chandelier! It fell!"
"On a chorus girl!"
"Who is it?"
"Mademoiselle Daaé! Is she dead? I cannot bear to look!"
"Who is responsible?"
"You know who is responsible."
Disoriented, mishearing, and still partially smoking, Eric shifted, displacing broken glass. His body was a torturous prison and it was nearly all he knew, but Charlotte was alive. She gazed up at him, and Eric felt something unidentifiable, yet vast, had changed in her. Something in her expression? And her costume...
"Are you all right?" His voice was cobweb-thin. His lips cracked and it hurt to speak the merest words. What was happening? Why hadn't the S.M. called a hold? Why was the audience onstage with them?
The lights flickered and died. Terrified voices screamed in chorus. There were hands vying for Charlotte, pushing them apart and recoiling from his smoking back.
"What is it?"
"There is someone else here!"
Eric staggered to his feet. Charlotte was being pulled away from him. He didn't want to be torn from her for a moment. Was she getting medical attention? Something instinctive in him, the wounded animal that didn't know friend nor sense, overpowered his need to go after her. Get out, it said. Escape. They will hunt you.
Who would hunt him? Why was he still thinking with another man's brain – a man who didn't exist?
But he could not reason beyond the sirens blaring in his head. A blueprint filled his awareness, a map, and he staggered back a half-step, then another, clutching his mask and face. He found the trap door, and by a mechanism he barely understood, tripped it. The stage caved beneath him and spat his ruined body into subterranean darkness.
I'm dead. I'm going mad, he thought. But at what point in the evening had he started to go mad? Was it before or after Charlotte had confessed her love for him?
And if he was dead, then why was he still in such mind-bending agony?
His hand on the slick wall to guide him, Eric limped, following the tug of another man's memory. "Charlotte," he whispered. "I'll find you. Whatever's left of me."
Time felt like it stood still as the chandelier fell.
This wasn’t supposed to be happening. She should’ve been on her way to Eric’s dressing room right now, running through the halls with her skirts in her hands before throwing her arms around him as they came together. His arms around her felt like home, like there was nowhere else on earth that she was supposed to be. His lips were supposed to be on hers, in between long-awaited declarations of love. They had known deep down for so long, and it turned out that they had wasted so much time. Because supposed to’s and should’s didn’t matter in the cruel light of reality, nor the lights of the chandelier that was racing towards her.
Her heart was breaking further with every inch that the chandelier fell, knowing the future she had longed for with Eric was becoming more and more unlikely, that any time with him at all was coming to an end. There would be no more prank kidnappings from the stage door, no more walks in Central Park, no more trips to tiny off the beaten path cafes where they wouldn’t be recognized, no more sitting on the same side of a booth at a diner after a show and discussing how well it had gone, no more sneaking around backstage, no more clandestine dressing room meetings, no more silly rehearsal shenanigans, no more anything.
There was no future for them. They wouldn’t get to be together, she’d never get to kiss him again, never get to tell him she loved him, no planning what to do about their future - would he have taken her home after this performance? Would they have made love that night, physically cementing the fact that they were meant for each other and each other, alone after having done so emotionally earlier backstage? Would he have worshipped her body, mind, and soul as she wished to do to him?
Why did it take the threat of losing him to make her realize that he was all she had ever wanted? And now she was about to lose him forever, the chandelier would see to that. The despair was soul-crushing. Charlotte wasn’t ready for their story to be over before it ever truly began, she wasn’t ready to let him go. She wasn’t ready to die, not when there was supposed to be so much life ahead for them. She wanted to be with him, to marry him, to go on adventures together, to travel the world as they performed, maybe eventually settle down back in New York City and have a family one day.
Maybe this was her punishment for falling so head over heels completely and utterly in love with another man when she was with someone else, even if that relationship was unfulfilling and left her wanting in every kind of way. Ryan was complacent. Assumed she would always be there because ever since they had met she had been. He had worn her down into dating him, into staying with him, into agreeing to marry him. Had she ever really loved him? Charlotte couldn’t say for sure, at least definitely not the way that she loved Eric.
People always said that when you’re about to die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but she could see the whole life she would’ve shared with Eric ahead of them, not the few years she had shared with Ryan or the life before with her parents. Eric was all she wanted, Eric and anything and everything he was willing to share with her. But it wasn’t meant to be. They wouldn’t get to have that life, wouldn’t get to grow old together. It wasn’t fair.
Charlotte’s overwhelming despair turned to fear as she saw Eric turn to face her, face set grim. She knew he was going to be running to her before he even took the first step, and she was relieved when the stagehands momentarily managed to grab him. There was no reason for him to die with her - the performance was supposed to be The Phantom of The Opera not Romeo and Juliet. Yet he broke free of them, thinking not of himself and the danger he was putting himself into, Eric merely rushed to her side as he always did whenever she had a problem.
He threw himself over her, preparing to take the brute force of the chandelier on his back. She didn’t waste time when they had precious few seconds left together, saying, “I love you,” over and over in between kisses before the chandelier hit.
It was then that something unexpected happened.
They didn’t immediately die. Somehow, impossibly, Eric was able to withstand the weight of the chandelier, neither of them were crushed, nor impaled by the massive and complicated structure. For half a second, Charlotte thought that maybe they would make it out of this okay, before the candles set fire to his cloak, rushing up the right side of his body and sealing the mask to his face.
His agonized screams of pain were like knives to her heart, and there was nothing she could do about it, no way to ease his pain.
This was her fault. He was in this pain because of her.
If they somehow survived, she would do everything she could to help him heal. She would put her whole life on hold to care for him, just as he risked his to protect her now. Once they were freed from underneath the chandelier, she would stay by his side indefinitely. She would demand to ride in the ambulance, get a cot to stay in the hospital room he would be assigned after surgery to debride the wounds and apply skin grafts. What he looked like didn’t matter to her, if anything, the scars would be further proof of his love for her, and she would love him even more for it.
She was so focused on planning how to help him that she barely noticed the world around them turn into fractal spirals for a moment. Charlotte thought it was merely a trick of the light, the steel, electricity and fire making the world around them seem strange and unknowable as their lives came to a standstill in the aftermath of the crash. She could hear voices, speaking but not in English, for a moment before it clicked into place and she understood - clearly she wasn’t completely uninjured, a concussion would make perfect sense for both strange occurrences. But that was nothing compared to the devastation Eric’s body was suffering through on her behalf.
“I’m okay,” Charlotte replied when he asked if she was alright, “thanks to you.” She was about to say more, to ask him why on earth he would be so recklessly selfless, why he had thrown himself into harm’s way when the chances were that they should’ve died (but apparently, once again, reality didn’t care for should’s, and this time she was overwhelmingly grateful that they were both still breathing), when people began lifting the chandelier to free them. When arms grabbed her to pull her away from Eric, with no one moving to help him and staring at him in fear, she struggled against them.
“Let me go - call an ambulance! He’s hurt!” The panic in her mind that his burns needed tended to overriding everything else, including a small voice telling her that she needed to let Eric go, that these people would only hurt him further.
The people on the stage crowded around her, fussing over her, checking to see if she had any injuries, and she wasn’t able to see as Eric disappeared through the trap door on the stage floor.
“Mademoiselle Daaé are you alright?”
Daaé?
Her name was Dawson. Miss Charlotte Dawson, not Mademoiselle Daaé. She must’ve hit her head harder than she thought to be hearing things this off.
“I’m fine, but -”
“No! Even if you are uninjured, you must rest after such an ordeal! I will not hear otherwise. Off to your dressing room with you.” A familiar older, stern woman who looked like she wouldn’t take no for an answer interrupted. “Buquet! Escort her, make sure she lies down to rest while I send for the doctor.”
“Yes, Madame Giry,” came Buquet’s response, tucking her arm into his and practically dragging her away.
No one would listen to her pleas of help for Eric after Madame Giry had spoken. Where did he go? He needed help! She was terrified in this place where familiar faces had different names, different personalities. Was it the concussion? Was she even conscious? Was this some deluded form of a coma, or was she dead and in hell? Only time would tell.
Charlotte was deposited by Buquet on the chaise longue in her dressing room, and the door was closed and locked behind her, so she couldn’t leave. She tried the door anyways, her lower lip trembling in equal fear and indignation.
What had happened when the chandelier fell?
Eric forged ahead, committed to a tunnel within a tunnel, his vision expanding and contracting like a panicked pupil; several times he blacked out from the pain, only to come to and continue stumbling on, grasping at the walls like a wounded creature and smearing sooty handprints in his wake. There was nowhere to spiral but down, deeper into the bowels of the nightmare.
Even though Charlotte was behind.
He didn't know what drove him forward. Nothing should have been capable of driving him from her anymore, and moments ago, he might have thought that with certainty. But it was as if he was impelled by some strange choreography outside himself to descend deeper into the pit. The coolness of the air, the stagnant taste of — water? — in its promise felt, if not good, then at least better than what he was presently experiencing. More than once his hand sought the mask, but even exerting the slightest pressure caused him enough pain to recoil. A nagging suspicion told Eric that it was grafted to his face, but the thought alone seemed capable of driving him to madness, so he pushed it from his brain. Always it crawled back, like the same spider unwilling to be chased fully into hiding.
He came out into a cavern and stopped abruptly at the shores of an underground lake, frozen, an intrepid explorer surveying unimagined terrain. On the opposite shore a forest of candelabras glowed with flickering, effulgent light. (Who had lit them?) Rich red curtains and tapestries flowed along every surface, creating the illusion of a lush, open chamber, and disguising the grim reality of the dank dripping rock that entombed the observer. Antiques real or replicated, stolen from the properties department or created by ingenious hands, glittered in every corner; stacks of pages more ink than paper spilled from surfaces. All of it set dressing, he wanted to think, but knew better.
A momentary peace settled over him — a balm that wasn't enough to banish the pain of his burns, but familiarity in an environment that should have been unfamiliar. It felt like a homecoming, standing there on a shoreline that lapped at his shoes, the water's tide seemingly ungoverned by the pull of the moon.
But nothing here was out of reach of a pull, least of all him. Eric went to the abandoned gondola awaiting him like a sleepwalker, too numb to think to do otherwise. Perhaps the answers he needed lay on the other side.
A brief boat ride and he was among wonders. Here on dry land among the sheets of music and schematics of inventions, there were ground plans. Eric cleared away candle nubs (how long had they been burning there, unattended?) and spread one out on a drafting table. Winding passageways and forgotten servants' tunnels would have put Daedelus to shame, but as Eric's eyes scanned them, he found he understood them as well as their cartographer seemed to. His mask hovered above the drawing like a crescent moon looming over the opera house. He had no idea what time of day it was, but supposed it was night. It was perpetual night down here where he had found himself.
"How do you know which time might be the last?" A strange melody filtered past his lips unbidden. "What I would give just to see you again. I'd walk to the depths of a world down below, and demand to get back what some circumstance stole..."
His gaze traveled upward. Charlotte was there. He had to find his way back to her.
Eric had always found the show's set palatial. Where other theaters had continued to slash their budgets at the expense of the scenic department (even Broadway), their production had maintained as much of the original mounting's integrity as funds would allow. Now, navigating the underground tunnels and traps of the real Palais Garnier, he realized just how inadequate their reproduction had been. But if the set hadn't prepared him to find his way, there was something else — another's familiarity, the echoes of another consciousness — that assumed the wheel now. All he had to think was dressing room, and a well of knowledge separate from his own lived experience was available to him to pull from.
There was another pull, too. One he had always felt. The one that called him to Charlotte. It sang in him, preternatural, and he followed, navigating back through the network of tunnels ever upward.
He found her in a wilderness of flowers. That might have provided some clue to their timeline. Eric hovered behind the mirror glass, as if watching through a vertical reflecting pool. The dressing room on the other side was dark — those who had pulled her from him had left the wilting figure only a solitary candle to light the others by, but she had yet to do so. When she finally turned, and saw him, no more than the ghostly outline of a mask, his breath caught. They froze, looking at one another as they had a hundred times throughout the run of their show.
But where the Phantom would have remained remote, insubstantial, and ever out of reach of the woman he loved, Eric pushed the glass aside; it swiveled outward, and he came into the room like a shadow poured from the underworld.
"Charlotte."
He pulled her into his arms, cape whispering. She was warm against him, and solid, and her smoky brown curls tumbled around them. She smelled like a rose, like the garden of bouquets in her room, with an undercurrent of singed fabric. She felt like a dream, but in the dreams he had of her in the past she had always slipped through his arms, his fingers, at various points in the encounter.
This Charlotte was solid, and real. Even though logic told him none of it should be.
Picking bobby pins out of her hair from the updo she had as Christine, Charlotte placed them on the vanity, her curls tumbling free down her back. Pulling one open, she walked to the door, trying to pick the lock.
…A few minutes later, all she had to show for her efforts were a still locked door and a handful of ruined hairpins.
She was stuck, locked in her….no, in Christine's dressing room. The anxiety started to swirl inside her mind once again. Charlotte had no idea where Eric had disappeared to, no idea if he was alright, if he was alive even, and no idea what was going on. It felt like the walls were closing in on her, the panic bubbling up in her chest like a caged animal, crying.
Normally, whenever her mind started to spiral she would call Eric, and he would always know just the thing to calm her down. Except she didn’t have her phone, and she didn’t know where he was. She was all alone, locked in a room that she didn’t know, but also somehow she did? She knew which drawer to pull open to find a spare nightgown, knew there was a robe waiting for her behind the changing panel, knew the brush for her hair was hidden on the left side of the vanity hidden behind some of the vases of flowers. Her breath caught when she saw the one rose with a black ribbon, lying casually on her vanity. Sitting down on the stool, she picked up the rose, playing with the bow’s tassels, twirling them around her fingers as a sense of pride that wasn’t entirely hers bubbled up inside.
He’s pleased with us.
Of course he was. Eric was always proud of her, - he never let her down. Even earlier, when she thought she was about to die, he didn’t think twice. She called out for him, and he was there. He had proven yet again that he would do anything to make her smile, make her laugh, make her dreams come true, or, make sure she was safe.
"If I had a box just for wishes and dreams that had never come true, the box would be empty except for the memory of how they were answered by you." The words and melody came unbidden, as she reflected back on their time together.
Standing, she pulled the nightgown from the drawer and went to change behind the modesty panel, taking off the costume she had been wearing. Tugging the gown over her head, Charlotte wrapped herself in the robe for warmth, and then proceeded to wrap her arms around herself for comfort. What if Eric was badly hurt from taking the brunt of the chandelier on his back? What if he was somewhere all alone, dying? What if she never saw him again?
“So if only I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I’d like to do is to save every day ‘til eternity passes away – just to spend them with you. And I’d save every day like a treasure, and then, again and again I'd spend them with you.”
Sitting back down at the vanity, she held the rose in her hands, cradling it softly as if it were the most precious thing on the planet. It might be the last gift from her Angel, and as much as it was hard not to drown in despair at the situation, she also had to hold steadfast onto the hope that she would see him again – that this wouldn’t be the end for them, the end of their story before it ever really, truly began.
“I’ve looked around enough to know, you’re the one I want to go through time with…” her voice shook as she sang the last notes, the emotion thick as tears slipped out from her eyes. What would she do if she lost him? What would she do if she could never look into his beautiful blue eyes, or see the silly crooked smile that was almost exclusively only ever for her? What would she do if she could never hold his hand again, or be wrapped up tight in the safety of his embrace? How could she survive losing the great love of her life?
It was just as that awful thought crossed her mind that she glanced up from the rose, and saw the outline of the Phantom’s mask in the mirror across the room. It was a familiar sight, but this time the breath caught in her throat wasn’t choreography – it was genuine shock, relief and joy all tumbled together. The mirror slid open as she stood and ran across the small distance to throw her arms around him, to rest her head against his chest. The sound of his heartbeat soothed an ache deep in her soul, and brought a fresh set of tears to her eyes.
“I didn’t know if you had…” she couldn’t bring herself to say the word died out loud. “Are you all right? I was so scared.” One of her hands rose to cup his uncovered cheek, as she lifted her head to look up at him in awe of the fact that he selflessly threw himself in harms way to protect her, in awe of the fact that he was still alive. “You saved me,” she whispered. She wanted to tell him how grateful she was, how much she loved him, but held her tongue upon keenly remembering that he hadn’t yet said it back. Instead, she said, “we have to get you to a doctor, but they locked the door so I can’t get out.”
