All the Rules Rearranged, Chapter 3

[igenlode]

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...

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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.

Did they think — Gustave and Christine — in their tight little world of let’s-pretend-Papa’s-himself-again, that he didn’t know what his folly had done to their lives, or see how strained his wife’s smile had become as she promised all three of them that things would be different tomorrow... and tomorrow, and tomorrow? Had she thought he would neither understand nor care as the boy’s burgeoning talents drew him further and further away from the harsh realities of debt and drunkenness into the safe, sequestered refuge of his mother’s realm, where all passions flowed into music and no voice was ever raised?

He was losing his son. He’d known that: resented Christine and Gustave for it, and hated most of all the vileness he saw in himself where he’d once carried courage and trust.

He’d thought there could be nothing worse than to watch all that you cared for fall apart, and know that the fault was yours.

But that was before he’d seen Christine stand consenting within the arm of that creature and understood at last the depths of his own blindness. He’d blamed himself for the fractures in their marriage that had set deep unhappiness in her eyes. In the worst of his nightmares he’d never dreamed it could be the fact of that marriage itself at the foundation of her hurt.

They’d been happy. Had that all been a lie, then?— like the trembling bride beneath the veil, and the son she’d watched over with an intensity born of fear; fear and... longing?

She’d wanted that monster as the father of her child. To persuade herself of such a thing, she must have wanted it to be true, Raoul told himself. That other had been there between them all along like a ghost in her body and in her mind, singing songs in her head, seaming her with his own corruption—

No. Not Christine. It could not be Christine there in the torment of his mind’s eye, eager and unresisting in the moonless dark...

He’d fought to keep her out of the shadow all those long years ago. Fought and failed, and somehow all the same in the abasement of that failure he had set her free. She had been so afraid, and he’d promised her the sunlight he had no power to bring... but surely it could not, could not have been her own free will to sink back into the terrors of that clutching hold?

He would have fought for her again tonight to the last breath of the last humiliation, if she had asked it of him. He’d believed — with a painful dawning sweetness of hope — that there could be a chance for them after all, and found an answering courage in himself to face the worst in her defence. Perhaps that tentative road back to happiness had been no more than illusion, but he’d caught at it with both hands and been ready to fling himself into battle at her side.

As if she’d needed him. As if she’d ever needed him or wanted him... The old hopeless resistance rose up in him against that thought, crying out; but he’d seen them together, seen her yielding in that masked embrace, seen her stand silent without protest as the monster she’d chosen laid claim to their son...

He would have spent the last drop of his blood to set her free, once, if only he could hold up his head again in her eyes. But it seemed he’d failed her from the start, and the only freedom or happiness left to give was release from the travesty of their marriage.

The Phantom had meant to kill. The world had blurred away almost without a struggle beneath that hard pressure where the great blood-vessels beat... and it would have been simpler, after all. In that first moment of understanding — when ten years of their lives had been torn asunder along with everything he thought he knew — the shelter of such an oblivion had been an almost welcome offer.

But then he knew himself for a coward already. Raoul’s hands tightened, nails biting into his palms. He’d spent years escaping from their problems into drink and blurring the edges of his shame at his family’s expense. No wonder he’d yielded so easily to the chance of an end... but it was a craven choice that had lost its savour.

Let Christine have her release, then, if it was all he could give her: but not that way. Not with Gustave out here, lost and alone, a victim of old jealousies and heartbreaks and obsessions the child could neither guess at nor understand.

Gustave... needed him. It was a hard little knot of knowledge somewhere beneath his ribs, an unaccustomed ache of reproach that held a warmth of its own. If he could do nothing else — save nothing else from the wreck of all they’d dreamed — he could do this. If he couldn’t find in himself for Gustave the laughter, the songs and the teasing that once they’d shared, still he could do this one last thing when it mattered: find his son and bring him back safely out of the dark.

~o~

If the so-called ‘Mr. Y’ had claimed to hold Gustave captive, he’d lied. That had been clear enough from the first moment of Raoul’s search; the steadying contempt of it kept him now from panic. The man was no demon, no puppet-master of the supernatural pulling all the strings. He was a cheap carnival trickster — no, a rich carnival trickster: the correction was a bitter one — and he could resort to threats as empty as those of any other man.

As empty as Raoul’s own bravado. I’m not afraid of him, Miss Giry— the memory of it still had him glancing back behind his shoulder, curse himself as he might, with the glimpse of a white-painted Pierrot through the crowd enough to bring a reflexive lurch to his throat. Any half-formed craving to lose himself again in Dutch courage died, abruptly.

Meg Giry... Where was she, anyway? And with all that she’d hinted— just how much had she known?

The boy was with her, somewhere out together in this seaside madhouse; from everything he’d heard, Raoul was sure of it. What he didn’t understand was why... or whose side she was on.

No-one else had laid a hand on the son of Christine Daaé. Gustave had wandered freely backstage with the thoughtless curiosity of a little Rajah — made a thorough nuisance of himself, no doubt, though they were hardly likely to tell the Vicomte that to his face — and then Miss Giry had met him with a spate of ‘Frenchy-talk’, and the two of them had left the theatre together. And not one of those who’d seen it could tell Raoul anything of what she’d said, save for Gustave’s name and the single word ‘Maman’...

“Pardon me, sir—” He caught at a towering sleeve as the crowd around him pressed towards the row of booths ahead and a fresh wave surged against them from the pier beyond. “Have you seen—”

And just how did one address a uniformed clown on stilts, anyhow? But the creature wore the white cuffs of a gendarme directing traffic, and he stood here at the junction of the ways with an air of casual surveillance; he must have seen something, even if he had not remarked it at the time. Raoul cleared his throat, trying to force it beyond the hoarse croak that was the legacy of the Phantom’s grip, and tugged again urgently at the clown’s sleeve.

“Pardon me, sir, but have you seen a woman with a little boy? Fair, dressed in grey, with a face”—the English he wanted escaped him, and he cast around desperately—“unhappy... afraid? The child perhaps ten years, and small? Miss Giry: the Ooh-la-la Girl?”

The painted face peered down at him for a moment from beneath its peaked cap, not unkindly; then pointed to the right.

“Yeah, I know her. They went that way... I guess she wanted to get some sea air, maybe clear her head. She was looking kind of rough.” He shrugged it off, leaning down. “You a friend of hers? Paris, France?”

It was easiest to nod. “My wife...”

But the simple words hurt, more than he had expected, and he turned aside with a muttered half-truth about making haste.

A moment later, as possibilities hit him, he broke into an actual run. Bodies jostled against him and cursed, complacent sweating faces bleached into stark shadow by the flaring lights on the booths behind, and Raoul set his teeth and thrust through on the all-too-familiar path. He’d found his way down to perdition blindly, last night— this morning. His own private Hell... but she’d been a regular there, seeking her own road to oblivion. Seeking the cold, faceless waters of the bay to close over her and wipe away the past.

Suicide Hall, they called it. The pier beyond was dark, with a single row of distant lanterns like marsh-fire glimmering out over the water; but the lamps in the bar cast their intimate dim glow, and glasses on the shelf rang together as they were reached down.

He wanted a drink again, suddenly, painfully. Saw recognition in the bar-tender’s eyes, and the man half-turning for the bottle with a shrug. They knew him here, after last time. He wouldn’t even have to ask...

It was complete insanity, and he knew it. Raoul bit back the self-destructive impulse with a groan, sending a swift look across every corner of the place. She wasn’t in here... of course not; she’d had Gustave with her. Why— why, when she’d been so distraught?

And why, in heaven’s name, had Gustave gone with Meg Giry in the first place? The boy had no sense: trusting, confiding... why, he’d disobeyed everything he’d been told about the reporters, and bestowed upon every five-cent rubbernecker in New York the touching revelation that he still couldn’t swim.

The pit of Raoul’s stomach dropped away abruptly.

Gustave... couldn’t swim. And the Giry girl — she’d taken him out on the pier, of course. Out over the waves with God knew what on her mind, and that wild look in her eyes the stage hands had all spoken of—

The air bit cold after the momentary fug in the bar. But he could see her now, a wavering shape in that distant dusk with a smaller shape clinging; pulling back...

“Gustave!” But his voice gave out and the wind was against him; Raoul muttered a helpless oath and began to run again, the boards of the pier hollow under his feet. “Miss Giry...”

The woman had whirled at the sound of his approach, eyes huge and dark in the pallid light, and the boy cried out as her hold tightened. “Papa!”

“You.” Meg Giry’s hands gripped white on Gustave’s collar. “So now you run his errands, Vicomte... You and your wife. Have you sold your soul yet for his sake — as I did?”

Her mouth was distorted with hatred or grief, and the words that made no sense held a wild edge. She was close, far too close, to the spray-slicked timbers at the rim of the void behind her, and Gustave was pinned there closer still.

Raoul reached out without thinking to pull her away; froze as she recoiled, her bootheel slipping in a sickening jolt that sent the boy out over the sucking waves, to scrabble back with a choked-off sob. The expression in her eyes was one the Vicomte had seen all too often before— staring back bloodshot from his own mirror, above the mockery of a meticulously knotted cravat.

She must have seen that recognition in his face. Her lip twisted in a jeering half-sob of her own. “This is no place for you. I told you that. I warned you to take her away, her and the child. I told you what would happen if you let her sing—”

Raoul caught at those words like a thread of understanding amid surrounding madness. If only he could get through to her somehow.

“Miss Giry— Miss Giry, she did not sing! I swear that to you—”

“Then why are you still here? Why isn’t he here? Where is he — if not with her? Don’t look like that... he is, isn’t he? I can see it in your face... Then why else doesn’t he come?”

She was weeping now — ugly, raw and unconcealed — and her hair had begun to slip down across one shoulder, long unpinned tendrils that made her look far younger than the jaded showgirl of Phantasma’s stage.

“I gave everything for him — everything, do you understand? All those men, all those greedy hands: permits, concessions, bribes... Do you think it was easy for us here, at first? Do you think they made him welcome — a foreigner and a penniless freak? But a pretty girl from naughty Paris... Who do you think called the favours — raised the loans? I offered up everything I had for him, and let them take it: I opened my arms to them in their laps, and my legs to them in their beds.

“Oh, don’t pretend to be shocked, Vicomte... they were men like you. Men of position, men of rank, married men — where did you think girls like me come from? Did you think we were there of our own accord?”

For him? Raoul bit back disgust and disbelief; took a breath. “And he— he let you do that? For him?”

And the slow burning of outrage rising within him was not only for Christine.

“He never knew — he never noticed — he never cared...” She seemed to crumple inwards in anguish, but her head came up in fierce warning before he could approach. “Don’t move... I’d do it all again, d’you hear me? I’d break myself in two for him, if only he knew I was there. But he never once saw what was in front of him all the time. I danced for him; I sang, I brought in the crowds. They paid to see me and they came back and they cheered... all except him. It pays the bills, but it’s not Art in his eyes, and so it’s worth nothing. I’m worth nothing. It was her, her, always her... and now he has her. You and I, we might as well not exist — you know that, don’t you? — for we’ve both been replaced!”

It bit home like a whiplash, and Raoul winced and bent his head. “Miss Giry... give me the boy. Please. Whatever you’ve suffered, whatever you think of me or his mother, Gustave is innocent in all this. How can you hope—”

“Not another step!” He’d reached for Gustave’s arm on instinct as the boy struggled in her grasp; stopped aghast at the sight of the gun wavering in her hand.

“This shot isn’t for you — don’t make me use it...”

Comments

[butterflydrming.livejournal.com]

Evil cliffhanger!