All the Rules Rearranged, Chapter 3

Raoul, naturally, doesn't have the faintest idea why Meg Giry would want to kidnap his son -- and of course he isn't the rescuer that Meg is hoping to see...

---

Chapter 3: Diary of a Madman

Gustave. Raoul would not let himself think of anything else. He kept the boy’s face before his mind’s eye with a fierce, willed concentration, as if that small fair head could blot out the rest.

Gustave’s face — lost. frightened — haunted him round every corner, with every glimpse of a child through the crowd and every furtive shape that whisked away down dark alleys at his approach with what might have been a struggling burden in tow. Gustave...

The persistent small shadow trailed in memory at his heels, demanding acknowledgment — attention, affection — again and again with the same uncomprehending hope, until Raoul’s teeth had been set on edge by the knowledge of it. The child had wanted the old days back. He’d made himself a living reproach to the father he’d lost, and it had been one more reminder that Raoul neither wanted or needed to tell him what he had become.

( Read more... )

Across a hundred lifetimes

http://dorkshadows.tumblr.com/post/86306038171/
( Raoul chasing Christine across space and time, even if it takes ten, twenty-five, a hundred lifetimes. )

The images I recognise are amazingly apt to the captions ("is that really you?" for the very un-Leroux-like Christine of the animated version, "all the lifetimes in which one of us doesn't exist" for Philippe/Christine from the Yeston/Kopit Phantom and Raoul/Lucille from "Monstre à Paris"), and I suspect that if one could identify them all there would be an additional layer of meaning! I can't help wondering which is the lifetime "in which you kill me"...