Blue Remembered Hills (ch8)

[igenlode]

I'm seriously running out of time on posting this one before I disappear, but I can manage to give it a few hours here before the mandatory pre-FFnet reread..

I'd forgotten just how much E/C I'd put into this story in the hopes of attracting the 'mainstream audience' -- at this point, we're practically in classic "Christine is Erik's prisoner and is learning to love and pity him" territory. What with that and "In Regret Always", I seem to have been paying a lot more attention to Christine's relationship with the Phantom recently than I have for a long time!

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Chapter 8: The Land of Lost Content

The third time Cris woke from the nightmare, it was dawn, and light was flooding across her face.

She curled up shivering, attempting to stifle the whimpers. Every time it was the same. She woke... only to exchange the dreamed horror for one that was real. She was trapped here, trapped in a tomb— with a monster who loved her.

Last night she had been an automaton, trying to parley with a kidnapper treading the tightrope between cringing abasement and howling vengeance. Her Angel... how could her Angel treat her so? How could her tutor’s measured, gentle words have come from those same lips — a hysterical sound escaped her at the thought: oh no, not lips — from that same mouth that had grovelled and raved in wild fantasies? She had pictured him as a wise leader of men, a high priest of knowledge; how could he have become that degraded creature hiding away in darkness, who spoke of ‘Erik’ as a being outside himself and whose jealous fury was that of an unschooled child?

How could he believe that imprisoning her here would make her love him?

A sob escaped her at the thought of months — years — at the mercy of a man she no longer believed sane, however much she might pity him, and she pressed her face closer into the sheets, trying to choke off the sound. He might come, if he heard her. That face might lean over her as she lay, dripping tears down its ruined cheeks, even as it had done last night.

He had carried her tenderly, so tenderly, to this bed, weeping for the bruises on her throat. Half-choked and entirely terrified, she had been unable to move. He had taught her once to act for herself, to think in her work and to use initiative, and she had thought in her folly that she could rid him of the shame and the shrinking that led him to hide torment behind the white mask of the Ghost. Despite everything, she owed him so much. She’d thought that one shared act of courage could make things equal between them. She had been terribly, hideously wrong; and she had thought that he would kill her for what she had done.

Instead, he had let her fall, and wept. And then he had laid her here and cleaned the torn flesh from beneath her nails, one by one, though the clawed wounds they had made still stood ragged upon his face— that dreadful dead waxen face. It had followed her into sleep and ravaged her dreams until she woke again and again in terror.

She could see it now.

Flesh that had melted and run down, flesh that was thickened and twisted and carved away entirely. The grinning skull-mouth amid the ruin, and the eyes that wept and burned. The eyes of a monster. The eyes of the Newparis Ghost.

Cris rolled over with a moan and sat bolt upright, letting the daylight pour over her. The cold sanity of day... she clung to it, filling her gaze with reality in that early light as if to drive away the visions that lurked behind closed lids.

Beyond the viewport the sky was green and dusty behind the mountain-tops. Long wisps of shadow still trailed from the shoulders of each peak to gather in dark eddies below, fed by streams that trailed from each crevice and chimney, but ebbing minute by minute as brightness gathered above despite the coming storm. She was looking out over the lip of a vast valley that spread out to join the familiar plain. Above her there would be more towering peaks, gaining colour now in the morning light; the foothills of the Servin Range.

It was a view she knew as surely as the ruddy, glistening sands that stretched out around the dockyards, or the miniature crags and pinnacles of rock that had formed the mountains of her childhood imaginings. It had been painted for her in words of aching beauty by an Angel who had sat here and looked out, even as she looked out now, to see glories gather around that triple peak and storms burst in all their majesty upon the ramparts below. A crippled Angel whose soul reached out for all the beauties of the world around with passionate, overwhelming adoration...

Just as his genius had devised and installed these computer banks that formed walls around her little chamber, with their grey casing and vents and the coded lights that he had taught her to read. Great bundles of cables hung amid the shadowed rafters beyond the draped tent in which she sat, bundles that were dusty now and grimed with years; how long had he been here, shut away? How long had that brilliant mind turned inward upon itself?

And yet within the great austere hall that he had shown her — a room of screens and keys and static humming power in which even the mask of the Ghost was an interloper of humanity amongst the kingdom of the machines — he had made this nest of soft draperies and warm colours for her, with a care he had never once spared for himself. This long cord by her hand, if she sought to pull it, would let fall another curtain to hide away the light without her ever leaving her bed or stirring more than a finger from her sleep. Laid out on a dainty little table she could see a fresh set of clothes and everything she might need, all of exquisite make and taste and finer than anything she had ever been issued with at home. He could have shrouded that tall form of his in sweeping coats, sleeveless robes that gave majesty to his height or formal trousers and tunic whose cut bestowed elegance in place of grotesquerie on long limbs and whipcord strength; instead he chose to wrap himself in tight bodysuits whose grip, she thought now, must support further unseen scars. But for her— for her, he had taken pains that no lover could have equalled...

Taken pains to gild the cage, Cris thought sadly, torn between pity and horror. In spite of who he was — what he had done — she could not hate him. The thought of that face close to hers was unbearable; the thought of that rage, held back by such inhuman effort, made her sick with dread. But the thought of his love — his devouring, encroaching worship — was the spectre that haunted her both sleeping and waking.

She pitied him, as she had pitied him most truly last night. Still she knew she would lie, deceive, and break any promise she must to get out of here, never to return; you do not go back to a tomb, or to a corpse who loves you.

And yet — because he loved her, and because she did pity him — when she had dressed, and brushed her hair out from its loosened plaits, she let it lie free in a cloud of flaxen silk around her instead of rebinding and coiling it in its comforting grip about her head. The fine strands crackled a little as she brushed them, taking on a life of their own.

Veiled to the waist yet feeling painfully exposed, Cris tossed the pale mass back to hang in sheets across her shoulders, parting its sheen. Then she slipped through the draperies that shielded her, in search of the face she dreaded. She would lay her dreams to rest and gaze upon it steadily in morning light... and she would win her freedom by any means she might.

She took the route he’d showed her, up to the central console. Despite the early hour she could see his gaunt figure perched there already, brooding over the banked screens. She had the most powerful network on the planet within her reach here in this room... if only he would show her how to use it. He loved to teach; surely that had not changed? There must be some way to get a message through— some common ground they could find together if she herself were not to go insane...

She could see only the back of his head as he bent over his task, and was shamefully glad of it. She had thought it the head of a skull, last night, but a little sparse hair lay lank upon his scalp — no wonder he set such store by hers; the thought came as a pang — and from behind he looked merely old, and weary.

Believing himself alone, or else absorbed in his work, he had discarded both mask and gloves. The hands that moved swiftly across keys and controls had a painful fascination of their own; they were dead-white and skeletal, crabbed into ugliness for all their dexterity, and she thought it must have cost him months or years of suffering to learn to use them again with such skill.

“Erik...” Her throat hurt more than she’d thought, and it came out as a croak. He stiffened and swung not towards the sound of her voice but away, scrabbling for the mask.

“Erik, no— let me see you. I won’t scream, I promise.” She came hastily towards him as it seemed for a moment he would flee, steeling herself to reach out and catch hold of the twisted white fingers. She almost flinched. The hand that jerked beneath hers was cold as ice and bone-thin; it was like grasping onto a skeleton.

But she kept a steady grip and drew the dead thing towards her, guiding it into the clinging curtain of her hair. She shut her eyes as Erik made a small sound of wonder, his fingers beginning to move of their own accord, and tried to pretend it was only her father’s touch stroking gently, marvelling, running through the fine weight of it.

No— no. Daddy had tugged and teased; he would never have touched her like that.

Rall, then, hesitant and adoring... no, that was worse still. Cris swallowed down the ache in her throat and the longing that was a sudden fierce pain, and endured.

She had to be strong. She had to confront the worst alone.

When she opened her eyes, his face was still averted. But he was too close now to hide; she could see thickened flesh above his ear, the line of a cheek that... that wasn’t.

“Erik, I don’t want you to hide away. I want to— get used to you. Your genius, your moods, your... face. I don’t want to picture nightmares that are worse than the truth.”

“The truth— really? Of Erik?” There was bitterness in that, and he turned, swift as a blow. The full impact of that glaring mask of flesh struck her, and she gasped; but she managed to hold his gaze, forcing herself to see him steadily, objectively.

It was just as bad as she had remembered, with waxen-distorted shapes that strained and creased as he moved. The mouth leered, drawn up into a constant snarl. The nose was a mere cavity amid scars that had devoured all semblance of humanity.

But— in the light of day, it was human. It was hideously misshapen, but still a living thing; and it was no longer deformed by last night’s terrible rage.

She could do this, Cris told herself, offering up a hesitant smile. He would not weep. She hoped desperately that he would not weep. She could not bear the tears that came from the sockets of those dreadful eyes.

“Won’t you show me what you’re doing?” she said gently, pulling free from his touch and laying a hand on his arm. Her hair slipped forward around both of them as she came to lean over Erik’s shoulder, and she bit her lip and let it lie there, feeling herself as miserably duplicitous as Supreme Commander Servalan.

“So how do these boards work? This is an analyser, isn’t it— and this one a sequence tracer? Wait, no... it’s not...” A little frown of impatience, ending in appeal. “Won’t you teach me— Erik?”

It was the relationship both of them knew; with that deep patient voice at her elbow and her eyes on the controls, she felt him steadier, more sane. She had not been the only one, last night, then, frightened almost out of her mind by that unaccustomed torrent of passion...

“There’s an incoming message here— lots of them.” She hesitated, risking a sidelong glance. “Shouldn’t you—”

“I know what they say... and I have no time to spare for Dar Ogar.” The voice, however cold, held the living tones of Angel Six; but the mind that spoke was that of the Ghost, and Cris felt her mouth grow dry once more.