Teach Me to Live: Ch3

And -- rather sooner than usual since I have been working on this while tinkering around with Chapter 2 -- here is the conclusion of my 'final' Love Never Dies story, with the not-so-big reveal in it. I'm pleased to see from reviews on fanfiction.net that Raoul's secret has apparently been preserved there through chapters 1 and 2, despite both my test readers finding it patently obvious: hope it justifies the wait!

But poor Raoul... At least he and the Phantom are 'even' now (in the ugly convention of counting characters as trophies of possession), and he is loved and needed. But there is no way that a story set at this point in canon can be anything other than almost unmitigated tragedy.

(Groscek, who was originally a one-line invention to fill the top bunk in Raoul's cabin, rather got away with me in this chapter and started developing a personality of his own. I was quite pleased with that at the time, but now I worry that it does rather unbalance the chapter: it's a gratuitous extra scene that is basically filler since it has no implications in the plot arc...)

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( Ch 3: To Hold Me and to Hide Me )

( Not a humour fic after all )