Coming back (drabbles)

[igenlode]

Finished uploading the full drabble-fic. It really needs a better summary, since this one isn't going to draw in anyone save those who read all new uploaded POTO stories (probably most of the surviving readers in that fandom, I suspect; posting levels seem to gave gone down in the last couple of years) or those who are prepared to read anything with my name on it...

Part of the problem was that the opening chapter was designed to be deliberately ambiguous (which creates naming problems further on!) and therefore when uploading the initial section I didn't want to give too much away. But you have to give people some reason to read.

---

Coming back

A life in vignettes.

She grew up in a little town in Sweden a long way from the sea, and there was never any thought in her mind that she might leave. And for all her love of music, how could she guess that it would weave through every sorrow and joy in the long years to come?

Yet it would take her far from the steep wooden houses and streets of her birth, through the great cities of Europe and even out to Brittany's desolate shores. And in the end, memories and love would bring her back to the simpler music of home.

~o~

The Peterssen girls had a piano, and sometimes in the summer evenings the sound of Elsa's playing would flow out from the parlour and slip down the street in a beckoning dance.

A quick glance for her father's permission, and she would catch up her shawl and fly out of the door to join the other girls in singing the ballads they loved. Three young voices lifted, twining, in melody, while parents beneath both roofs wiped away a brief nostalgic tear and Elsa's little brother kicked his heels on the front step... and, passing by, a student stood stock-still, enchanted.

~o~

He was a shy young musician from the big city, and he courted her at a distance, with shared glances and a rush of hot blood beneath curly sideburns when their eyes met. The letters he wrote spoke a language of tenderness in which she was unversed, and which set her heart to trembling... and when he played for her, his fingers on the keys spoke all that he dared not breathe aloud.

The sun shone overhead on the day that she married Oskar Valerius, but even that sky was not so blue nor yet so bright as her eyes.

~o~

And so she left sleepy little Torkelby as Oskar's bride, to share his life and the fine career that awaited him. Fortune smiled upon them, and hard work won him recognition, and the time came when he was a Professor and a well-off man. They were happy together, and she was rich in his love and all that he could give; side by side in the symphony-hall or the opera house, the wife grown plump and comfortable and the husband dignified and portly with age, they had but one lasting regret. In all those years there had been no child.

~o~

The whim that took Oskar to Ljimby Fair came perhaps direct from the angels above.

The country fiddler he heard there was a player of the first rank, an unworldly man reduced to penury by a world that scorned his art. The child who sang to her father's fiddle held promise of her own, and the Professor carried them both off willy-nilly with him to Gothenburg, vowing to see to her education as in the training of a great artiste.

But the motherless girl found her way straight into Madame Valerius' heart, and the last regrets were gone for good.

~o~

They'd always travelled. But that was the year the Professor took up a post in Paris, and they all went to live in France.

Little Christine soon learned to chatter away as fast in French as in Swedish and began to blossom forth, but her father never truly reconciled himself to the change, and seemed to wither even as she grew.

He was not the only one who was homesick. But one could not tell Oskar that the soft, sad notes of the Swedish violin beneath the fiddler's fingers made the smoke-stained skies of Paris seem more alien than ever.

~o~

Brittany was better. They took a summer cottage on the coast at Perros-Guirec, and she could breathe again. Christine's father sighed over the sea as if it were Uppsala once more, but her own home was far inland and the waves could not conjure it back.

Still, when he begged to take Christine to play at the village fairs as in the old days, she could not say no.

And from one such wandering the little girl came back fast friends with a playmate her own age. She had been too serious; it brought solace to see her childlike again.

~o~

The end of summer was the end of happiness. Back in Paris, Oskar took on more work than ever. One night he came home in the rain and caught a chill that settled on his chest, and all her frantic nursing was to no avail.

When the earth went down to seal his grave in Père-Lachaise, it bound her to the land that had claimed the man she loved, and took with it the last of her spring-time. She had grown old, and knew herself frail.

After Christine's father followed, three years later, they had only one another for comfort.

~o~

Christine studied at the Conservatoire, under the best teachers in France, just as the old Professor would have wished. She brought home a prize that filled her foster-mother with pride. Presently she began to play minor roles at the Paris Opera, and Madame Valerius was sure the good angels must have her under their wing.

It was no surprise when Christine broke the news that a heavenly messenger had indeed spoken to her in person, nor when his guidance gained the young singer a great public triumph. If an Angel of Music were to visit anyone, it would be Christine.

~o~

The fine young gentleman who sent in his card one day proved to be Christine's childhood playmate, all grown up: the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny, no less. Despite his moustache and his well-cut coat, he still had the fresh face of youth and all his rash innocence of old, and Madame Valerius regarded him with great fondness.

He had come to court Christine, of course. Poor boy, how could he have known that an Angel forbade it? The girl he sought was vowed to a higher service than mere marriage, and borne up by an ecstasy out of his reach.

~o~

Only it seemed there was no Angel after all. She did not understand it. She was so confused these days, and there were so many things she could no longer comprehend.

Christine shouted at her for the first time. Called her a deluded, credulous old woman, and ran off to sob herself into exhaustion.

Later, they wept in one another's arms and begged forgiveness. But Christine gave no explanation as to what had happened, or where she had been and with whom, if there was no guardian angel. And her face had lost its serenity and grown drawn with fear.

~o~

It was all so terribly muddled. Raoul de Chagny came to her with Christine one night, and insisted they must all three flee the city, and she never did grasp why. She was swept up as if in a whirlwind and carried along with the two of them over land and sea on a journey that seemed to have no end.

In a world of uncertainty, she clung to love. She did love Christine so very much, and so did monsieur Raoul, it was plain to see. If Christine was where she wished to be, that was all that mattered.

~o~

Raoul tucked the shawl about her more closely on the tossing deck of the packet-boat, clearly concerned, and she beamed back at him in reassurance. She'd always had a strong stomach. It was poor Christine who looked green.

They were crossing from Lübeck, and it warmed her heart to hear Swedish again among the other travellers. Often now she drifted away into reminiscences of her own girlhood and romance, but it was Raoul who prompted her for the way to Torkelby. Of course things would have changed, but she knew there could be no better refuge to shelter them all.

~o~

The house they found for her was well-swept and scented with pine, and through her bedroom window she could see the clear Scandinavian skies. She rarely rose from bed these days, and sometimes the world seemed a waking dream... but the church bells rang out their familiar melodies atop the hill, and she slept, and woke to find Christine hand in hand with Raoul at the bedside.

She smiled up at the two young faces, remembering Oskar, and a happiness that no longer hurt. She had left his mortal resting-place behind, but that love was with her here and always.

---

---

Due to time constraints (I only started this about three days before the deadline!) I ended up uploading the drabbles in four chunks, which certainly produced some interesting traffic stats. With hindsight I suspect it would have been better to upload each fresh set as a single chapter -- especially as they have no identifying titles -- since fanfiction.net doesn't allow the reader to jump to the last unread chapter but only to the latest. And again, the reason why I didn't was that I wanted that first chapter to stand on its own with no 'giveaways' that it wasn't Christine...

The first three chapters got almost 100% 'clickthrough' and quite a higher number of readers, with everyone who read the opening page continuing to the next chapters. The next batch were uploaded less than 24 hours after the first, which meant that the site didn't mark the story as updated -- which meant that only those people who were 'following' me as an author had any idea that new material had been uploaded at all. They got about three page views each (which gives an indication of how many of those 'followers' are still active on the site and/or interested in POTO fic and/or all that interested in the story -- to be frank, my enthusiasm would start to wane if a story kept pelting me with new chapters at a rate of knots!)

I then carefully waited until the story showed as having last been updated over 24 hours earlier (luckily for my deadline, it turns out that the anti-spam cutoff is 24 hours after the first upload, not after the most recent batch!) before uploading as far as chapter 10 and Raoul's appearance. That produced a larger bulge of views at the end, but left the centre chapters still virtually unread, with a few dedicated readers working their way backwards.

Thanks to the US/UK time difference being in my favour, I got the final chapters uploaded about 25 hours later, two hours after October 31^st had started in this part of the world but before it had happened over there! Those then received a fresh trickle of views, which translated into an overlap on the preceding chapters -- but it was still very noticeable that people arrived directly on the final page and worked backwards to find out where they'd left off, which of course is really not the optimum way to present a story to your readers :-(

Oh well. Everyone who reads it from now on will at least get the chapters in their proper order.

---

I think I've got the timing problem with Plot Point Fifteen more or less sorted out by having Christine dealing with the wounded man (since Stefan is now actually injured by the Punjab cord, instead of its being a near miss) while Raoul has his initial talk with Erik. She can hear what is going on but Erik, having collapsed after the expenditure of strength in that final reflex attack, isn't aware of her presence. If Erik ends up dangling over the edge of the bed, that provides a motive for Raoul to take hold of his legs at some point...

Still worried about this scene. I need to get on to the dialogue, I need to do it well, and it has to be plausible. I'm not all that happy with the 'travelling' chapters (unsurprisingly), but I can get away with a slight sag there if there's a blistering finale.