I'm alive! Tragically my other work remains on hiatus due to realities of grad school, but this has been sitting in my drafts for literal months and tonight I spontaneously decided to finish and post it. It's barely edited because I'm too impatient for that right now and I really can't guarantee an acceptable level of coherence but here it is: the 1920s séance AU that no one asked for.

August 1920

The house is old to her, the memories even older.

Several years, now, since she has last seen it, the sofas and end tables and mirrors and ornamental statues covered in sheets, wallpaper peeling at the edges, daylight slanting in through tall grime-lined windows. It is a beautiful house in the neo-Gothic style, on a tree-lined street on the edge of Manhattan, though the trees are sparser these days and Manhattan has grown wider and consumed it.

The front door opens onto an ovular hall, curving staircase tucked along the far wall, and as she moves farther inside, her shoes leave dainty smudges in the dust coating the worn floorboards.

She supposes there is no caretaker, has not been since her father's death all that time ago.

There, in that room off to the side, is where she had learned to play piano, her father patient beside her on the bench as she plodded through her scales. There, too, is where she had curled up in her favourite armchair by the fireplace and watched and listened, for hours, as he spun music and stories out of thin air with only a hollow construction of wood and catgut string.

Something about the house, about its outdated architecture or the perpetual darkness of it, dark even when she had lived in it, or the odd noises it makes as it pitches and groans and settles in its foundations, has always made her feel as though it is a living organism with its own web of history and memory, ancient secrets she might never discover. She has loved it all the more for it.

The door slams behind her, and she flinches as the sound echoes.

"We shouldn't be here," she whispers. "Who did you say owns this place now?"

He limps up beside her, and adjusts the crutch under his arm. "I didn't say," he replies, blithe and too loud for this house full of ghosts. "As it happens, due to a series of fortuitous circumstances, the house is mine."

"What?"

"Christine," he says, more soberly now, and he grasps her elbow and swivels her to face him. "I can't get down on one knee for you—if I did, I'd never get back up again." He gestures to the stump of his leg, as though she has not known of it for the past two years.

Her throat has tightened, and she readjusts her hat and says, "Raoul, what are you doing?"

He laughs. "Will you let me finish?"

"Yes. Of course, yes. I'm sorry."

"Christine," he says again, in that fond way of his, with the eyes crinkling and the tone wistful, and she has to put her hand over his, still on her arm, to steady herself. "Marry me."

The woman wears a cloche over fire-red hair arranged in sleek finger waves. The fur stole draped around her shoulders envelops her torso, and below that, a fringed hem dangles teasingly above slim stockinged legs.

She presents herself as Carlotta Giudicelli, medium. This is Ubaldo Piangi, her assistant. Where might they set up their equipment?

The night is neither dark nor stormy but rather typical for October in New York, dying leaves crisping on tree branches, a chill wind animating the air. Raoul's idea of a party, to hold a séance on a dark autumn night.

They have never had many friends between the two of them, fewer now that the war has carved a hole into the world, and even Raoul's brother Philippe died, at Amiens, only a month before the armistice. The house is populated by strangers tonight, relatives of Raoul's and his military friends, and now, it seems, a medium is to be added to the fray.

"We don't need an engagement party," she said when he first brought it up. She was sitting at her bureau, uncoiling her braid, watching through the mirror as he turned the bed down. "Meg is out of the country still, and I have no family left…"

"Engaged couples have parties," he replied firmly. "And if they are the only two to attend that party, then so be it."

She had left the whole affair to him and put it out of her mind, had been more interested in tuning the piano and restoring the library and hiring a staff than in planning a party for two, but then a week ago he had mentioned something about a caterer and perhaps live music, and now there are guests in silks and velvets and a woman and a man looking for a place to set down a rather heavy-looking carpet bag.

Mutely she points to a table in the piano room, and the medium and her assistant cross the hall into the parlour and from the bag they pull a variety of candelabra, candles tall and squat, and matchbooks.

"Ah, I see our entertainment has arrived," Raoul says, coming up beside her. There is a glass of something in his hand, almost empty, and he lists somewhat dangerously to the side.

"Did you arrange this?" she asks. Her fingers flex empty at her sides, and she wishes for a glass of her own. A whole bottle, even.

"I did," he says, with a proud look. "Thought I'd surprise you."

"Consider me surprised."

He drains his glass. "I'm no spiritualist, but it's just some harmless fun. They'll bang the table around, produce some kind of apparition. God knows I'm paying them enough for a good show." He gives her a sloppy grin. "Who knows what nefarious spirits lurk beyond the veil, just out of sight?"

She goes off in search of something strong, and he calls the guests to gather round, and a few fingers of whisky later she sits across from Carlotta Giudicelli, who has removed herself of the hat and stole and replaced them with a length of diaphanous material that she has settled over her shoulders and head.

The assistant strikes a match and lights the candle nearest him, and takes that candle and uses it to light the others. The lamps have been turned down, and this corner of the room is a little oasis of flickering candleflame within the deep dark of the house.

The assistant resumes his seat and turns his heavy, theatrical gaze on the assembled guests, and the medium waits until the silence in the room is complete before she takes a breath and opens red-painted lips.

"Good evening," she says. "I am Carlotta Giudicelli, and I will be facilitating tonight's excursion into the paranormal. If you would all join hands, please, so that I may harness our collective psychic energy."

Christine takes the shaking hand of an older woman, a great aunt, perhaps, and Raoul shifts beside her and grasps her fingers, smoothing his thumb over her engagement ring. She does not want to see the pleased jut of his chin, and she watches the medium instead, as she closes her eyes and grows still. The hush broadens and stretches until even the slightest rustle of silk sounds off like a gunshot.

The hair at the nape of her neck stirs, making her shiver, and she leans closer to Raoul and hisses, "Stop doing that."

"I'm not doing anything."

"I sense a presence in this room," the medium breathes suddenly, tremulous. "Yes, there is a visitor here, a visitor, with a message…"

Someone whimpers, and Raoul nudges her shoulder.

"Has anyone in this circle lost a loved one?" the medium asks. "A… father, perhaps?" A pause, and then she continues: "An older man, tall, and thin. Dark hair, curly, and a hat, a wide-brimmed hat—and a tweed suit, holding a violin."

It is quiet again, and the woman's eyes rove furiously beneath her closed lids.

The light from the candles blazes a moment, and settles.

"Ahh, come closer, Spirit," the woman moans. "Please—what is your message?" And then her lids open and her eyes are rolling, the whites of them stark against the surrounding blackness, and her voice deepens unnaturally as she says, "Let me rest."

A woman screams and tugs away from the circle, and yet the spell is not broken: the air has thickened or tightened, Christine can't be sure of the sensation, only that breathing is different now. Half of the candles extinguish as one.

"Do not be afraid!" the medium cries, in her own voice. "No harm will come to you!"

A discordant chord sounds suddenly through the room, amplifying the panic around the table; even Christine feels a flicker of uncertainty—no one is near the piano. Could the assistant have somehow engineered this, capitalizing on the confusion? But no, he is unmoved, both hands clasped and head bowed reverently.

"Spirit," Carlotta moans, her expression almost obscene, "please, what ails you?"

Again, that silky baritone issues incongruously from her throat: "Leave me be!"

Raoul, beside her, gasps and oohs condescendingly as a chill wind sweeps the room and the gas lamps flare to life. She slips her hand from his and watches the medium, pale and glistening with sweat, stand shakily and proclaim the spirit too troubled for proper contact.

Applause follows, and the assistant bustles around the room offering Carlotta's card, and Christine quietly excuses herself. She is reading in bed when Raoul steps in an hour later.

"You left our engagement party," he says.

"You had too much to drink," she replies, turning the page.

"Yes, alright, I did. I'm sorry." He drops the crutch and falls onto the bed, watching her as she reads until he grows bored and says, "Undress me, Christine."

"You're perfectly capable," she says, and leaves him to drunkenly struggle with his cravat.

She thinks simply to wander, and before long she finds herself at the foot of the attic stairs. They are draughty, and she ought to go back for her dressing gown, but she is here already; besides, Raoul will be insufferable after her walking out on him.

The door to the attic sticks, and she shoulders it open and spills inside, wishing she had thought to bring a lantern to light the way; it is the darkest room in the house, darker even than the parlour downstairs tonight, although there is some faint light from the little window, casting the room in a pale blue light reminiscent of being underwater.

A strange feeling creeps up her back, and it is perhaps that she has come to the attic not to escape Raoul's whisky-soaked breath—not entirely—but because ever since the party something inside her chest has been tugging her toward the uppermost room of the house, the room clogged with dust and mildew and long-disremembered artifacts. She has hardly stepped past the doorway of it in the months since her return—these trunks and crates and rolled-up carpets and other varia are relics of previous owners who had lived and died before she had ever come to the place as a child—but now some nebulous feeling beckons her closer.

The door swings shut behind her, a wave of dust rising in its wake, and when she pries her eyes open again there is something there: an irregular flickering and glint of gold by the window. She crosses the room, picks her way around the splayed contents of a trunk with a broken latch, and comes to a small stretch of clear floorboard.

The glinting from over here, she sees now, is from the play of pale moonlight over a dust-dulled mirror, ornately carved and trimmed with gold leaf. At least a foot taller than her, and half-obscured by a white sheet.

The surface of the mirror, blackened and obscured in spots from age and mold, offers a strangely distorted reflection of her face, white and pinched and stark in contrast even to the bright sweep of her unbound hair. She has never known of its existence, had lived ten years here and never found it—her father had barred the attic door and she had found every other hole and nook and hiding spot to be found and had made her home in them instead—and somehow, just by beholding it, she is certain it has gone untouched in the intervening years, and likely for some time before.

There is an urging in her fingertips to divest the mirror of its veil, and so she does, the sheet sliding to the floor in a whispering tumble of fabric, raising another cloud of dust. She steps back to avoid the worst of it, and it is odd, how between blinks the dust swirls in such a way that it resembles the frame of a man, just barely, in the mirror behind her before resettling…

Odd, but what is stranger is the feeling of a presence in the room that had not been there before the mirror, the feeling that someone stands just out of sight, and it is something of a malignant feeling, prickly and weighty, and then—it eases suddenly when a voice rises out of the darkness.

"Let me rest."

The rich baritone of a man, but cold and disused and jagged, and she is reminded of the medium's entreaty from hours ago.

"Raoul, if this is your idea of a trick—"

The sheet rustles on the floor, and something brings her eyes back to the mirror—

The mirror—

She is not alone in it, has been joined impossibly by a figure, tall and graceful, which seems to stand behind her but which cannot exist, for she is alone before the mirror. She is; there is no one behind her, and she looks over her shoulder to make sure before she is drawn back to her reflection, and the strange not-man behind it.

No one, nothing, save for the old detritus of lives past.

"Raoul," she tries again, louder, "I swear, if this is you—"

The figure in the mirror speaks: "I am not your Raoul, girl."

It speaks, and there is movement in it, but the face—or the area where the face ought to be—is obscured by dirt and shadow and by what looks like a hat with a wide brim.

A hat with a wide brim… something sparks in her memory, and the smallest step forward brings her close enough to the mirror to touch and she looks hard at the apparition: just as Carlotta had described, tall and thin and wearing a wide-brimmed hat and, she sees, holding a violin.

"That's not tweed," she says of his suit, without thinking.

"No," the thing says, sounding offended. It does not elaborate.

"And you have a violin."

"Yes..."

She blows out a breath, and it seems to sweep across him in a gentle ripple. "Do you only respond in one-word answers?"

It takes some time to reply. "No."

Surreal, to be conversing with a mirror-creature, and perhaps a place in her mind has processed the utter absurdity of it and convinced the rest of her that it is only a dream, for that would explain her steady-beating heart and clear head.

"Do you—have a name?" she asks, for it seems the thing to do.

"A name," he echoes. "Somewhere, yes. I must have, once."

She offers him hers, and he grows quiet for a time. She watches him in the mirror, an almost imperceptible sway to him.

"What is the year?" he asks, when he speaks again.

"Nineteen-twenty."

"Ah," he says. "Ah, then I have been dead for quite some time, then."

"Dead," she says. She is speaking to a dead man in a mirror, wearing only her nightgown.

Abruptly, it—he—seems to recall her question.

"Erik," he says. "My name was Erik."

So he was a violinist, then, and those are all his belongings in the attic.

It seems foolish to deny it any longer, and so when she rises for breakfast alone the next morning, Raoul still deeply asleep, she sits at the dining table and says to the cutlery, "There is a ghost in the attic."

She supposes that while she has never been particularly superstitious, some part of her—the part that longs for solitude and must-smelling books and seeks to find out a house's secrets, to get lost in the rafters—the part of her that hungers for music, now more than ever for how it can bring her father back to her—has by necessity contained a previously untested capacity for accepting such realities as ghosts in one's attic with minimal fuss.

Despite this, she is left with a number of questions: is he visible only in mirrors? Why? Can he sleep? Does he come out only at night? Did he die here, in this house? Can he move about the world freely? Her father's modest library, she knows, does not hold the answers she seeks, mostly contains scores and librettos and orchestration guides and Swedish fairy stories; and she is not entirely certain there is any written record anywhere that could be useful to her. It seems, then, that she will be making a second midnight sojourn to the attic.

She spends the morning sorting her father's old musical scores, but when she comes to the libretto for Verdi's La traviata, slightly coffee-stained and smelling of the musty interior of her father's old wardrobe, she abandons the sorting and goes to the gramophone instead.

La traviata, the fallen woman, a painful and bitter story of bad love and longing. She remembers her father taking her to a production, once, and though it was certainly not the only opera she had heard live, it had moved her differently than the others had.

Before the close of the first act, Violetta sings an aria about a man, a suitor who has loved her from afar, and wonders if he might be the one for her. It is halting and tentative and yearning, and the orchestra produces a sound like two lovers engaged in a cautious waltz, until suddenly the melody unfolds and Violetta sings her heart into words.

There is a 1910 recording somewhere in this room, and she searches a few minutes before finding it. The rest of the morning is for Lucrezia Bori singing Violetta, and the music, familiar, comes back to her and flowers again in her chest.

She waits until she hears Raoul's breathing slow and deepen, and then she climbs out of bed, slips on her dressing gown, and returns to the attic. It is unchanged from yesterday, as it should be—there is no reason for her to expect its appearance to have altered, except for that persistent feeling that she has been changed, and it seems peculiar that there is no physical reflection of it.

Yesterday she woke not knowing the things she does now, but now that she knows, now that her world has shifted irrevocably on its axis, it is hard to imagine she was ever ignorant. Her child-self would have been delighted.

Around the mounds of junk, around the pile of tchotchkes and the broken trunk. Like last night, she has not brought anything to light the way; it doesn't seem right somehow.

"Hello?" she says, into the mirror. The space behind her stays empty. "Are you there?"

After a time, she realizes she is flexing her fingers, bunching the fabric of her dressing gown between them, and she stops and holds herself still.

Stale air, sinuous as it winds around her arms, and she thinks that if she calls again, he might be coaxed into answering.

What possesses her to sing, she does not know, other than the fact that her head has been full of music all day as it has not been in too long. And he, a musician. The urge rises up and squeezes her sides, and she sings.

"E strano!" Softly, so as not to wake Raoul downstairs. "E strano! In core scolpiti ho quegli accenti!"

She means to go on, as long as it takes to draw him out, but as soon as she takes a breath his voice fills the silence: "You are over-enunciating."

Her head snaps up, and there he is, peering over her shoulder.

"Excuse me?"

"You are over-enunciating," he repeats. "Italian is meant to glide over the tongue."

"You—do you know it?"

"The language, or the aria? Yes to both."

"Oh," she says, and casts around for something to do now that he has appeared.

She does not have to think long. "Da capo," he commands, face and tone inscrutable.

"What—no, I didn't come here to sing—"

"If that were true, you wouldn't have sung," he replies smoothly, and then his reflection wavers: he has tilted his chin up. "You possess a fine instrument, Christine, and I made a life out of music, after all."

She hadn't known what exactly she was looking for, returning to the attic, but music lessons from a ghost?

She knows what her father would have said, had she come to him with such a dilemma as a child. It is enough.

Dawn suffuses the bedroom in an ethereal, bone-white glow when she finally slips back between the sheets.

It has been perhaps a month, the weather gradually worsening, the far reaches of the house nigh inhospitable due to the pervading cold. She stands in the library, fire roaring, the mirror from her bedroom propped against a lamp on the desk, and she and Erik are discussing opera again.

"I never liked Verdi, not the way the rest of the world did," he is saying, "although I did attend some of his operas. Overwrought, but with occasional incisive glimpses into the human condition. Ah, to hear his work performed by Christina Nilsson—"

A Swedish-born singer, a soprano, who had never consented to her voice being recorded but whose voice Christine feels she knows like the back of her hand, all those times her father described it to her.

"A fine voice," he says. "Very fine. Where is she now, do you know?"

In truth, she has not been following her career so closely in the years after her father's death. "Sweden, I think. But tell me more about Verdi."

"Enough about Verdi," he says, dismissive. "What is Mahler doing these days?"

"Mahler? He's dead. Almost ten years."

"Dead?" No small amount of shock colours his voice.

"He conducted the Philharmonic after my father passed, and died not long after."

He is silent for some time, and she waits for him to speak again, combing restlessly through the Puccini and the Offenbach.

"I saw him in Hamburg, you know," he finally says, a shade mournful. "Eighteen-ninety-one. He conducted a great deal of Wagner that season."

"I don't care much for Wagner," she says, turning to face him, and he looks at her with some quiet intensity and replies, "No, I know you don't," and then there is a tense minute in which she can't tear her eyes from his.

After that, she brings out the Stravinsky and laughs as he gleefully whips through the pages.

Early evening already, and the sun has melted down behind the rooftops and she has turned up the old gas lamps in the parlour. She stands at the gramophone.

"You'll like this," she tells him over her shoulder. "The Concord Sonata. I have the score somewhere, too—it's marvellous—most of it is written without barlines and there is no key signature."

"Impossible," he says, but there is a smile in his voice.

"Maybe in eighteen-ninety," she laughs. "The rules are different now. This composer even wrote a direction into the score for the pianist to use a length of wood, almost fifteen inches long, to form a chord."

His answering chuckle is a tendril of cool air snaking around the shell of her ear.

She loads the disc, and sits and listens and watches him in the mirror, rapt. She can't see his face, never can, with the mask and the hat, and she wonders at his expression.

He makes no sound at all during the first movement, but he relaxes into the second, and he sighs his appreciation and even laughs, once, incredulous, at the cluster chord she mentioned.

"My God, Christine," he says—breathless—

"Is that the Ives again, darling?" Raoul, in the front hall. She didn't hear the door. "God, I hate that ugly noise."

She looks to the mirror in alarm—Erik is gone—and she turns back to the gramophone and removes the record. The air is heavy with the sudden absence of music.

Raoul's hand low on her waist, and his mouth on her hair. "Don't turn it off on my account," he says. "I know how much you like it."

"Never mind," she says, with a bare smile. "Why don't you go wash up? I'll be along."

He leaves her with a lingering kiss and a pit of unease low in her belly, and when he has turned the corner she rushes to the mirror and says, "Erik?"

There is no reply, and though she stares determined for some time, he does not reappear.

Some days they exhaust the music.

She does not think it possible, to tire of music, but after hours of recordings and poring over scores and singing, it is as though she and he become rubbed raw by it, oversensitive and aching from it, and they set it aside and settle elsewhere.

She does not think of Raoul, will be guilty about it after, but how can she think of him when he is so seldom there to share this with her? How can she think of him when her thoughts are occupied by Erik?

Erik, who discourses on romantics and impressionism and on the glitter and freneticism of the capitals of fin de siècle Europe. She sits in her armchair and listens, knees tucked up under her, and in times like that, more and more frequent, she thinks back to long nights in the same chair, captivated by her father's music. Things, she thinks, like people and houses and the warmth of music, never do change much—but no, that isn't quite right, for the shape of the world certainly has changed since those nostalgic days.

Perhaps it is simply that she has not changed much, not for grief nor for war nor for growing up, and neither has this house, which has never quite belonged to her but nonetheless represents some extension of her heart.

Erik's house, and then her father's before it was lost and now Raoul's, and really it is as though it has been Erik's house the whole time, now that she knows him, as though each pitch and groan of the house are his, as though each hole and nook and hiding spot are part of him, like the crease of his elbow or the hollow of his throat.

Parts of him that she has never properly seen, that she wants to, every time she looks for him in a mirror and finds him there. And she thinks with a start, Oh, so that's what this is.

"What is the matter?" he asks, breaking from a ponderous sketch of the architecture of the Staatsoper.

Did he see something change in her face? In her posture? She can't remember how she was sitting before, can't contain anything now except for a new looping refrain, it's you, it's you, it's you, so loud he must be able to hear it with the bruising crush of her heart. It sits heavy in her mouth, too, and she swallows before speaking lest she let it escape. It's you. It's you.

"Nothing," she says. "Please, go on."

Raoul takes her out dancing. It is all a good time, and she rather enjoyed dancing, once, and the music is diverting, but lately she is hungry only for armchairs and the crackle of the gramophone before a record starts, long discussions and an equal reciprocity between two people, both of them the teacher and the student at once.

He takes her dancing, and she does laugh and drink and hold him to her, curls her hand and her body around his when the band slows, and closes her eyes so that they won't lie to him.

She listens closely to the music, and he lets her take his weight and guide them. He had been a very good dancer before, had danced, in a way, like she sings: to lose himself, and to purely express his heart. Something she has always admired about him.

Her eyes stay closed.

Boozy as they spill inside the house, and stumble up the stairs, and when he drops onto the bed and winks at her and asks her to undress him, fingers clumsy with drink crawling up her thigh, she does. She is just barely drunk, and she does. He takes her, back propped against the headboard and her on his lap, her dress tossed aside as an afterthought. Her head leans back when he sucks at her breast, and in the midst of hazy almost-pleasure she catches sight of herself in the mirror at her bureau.

A flood of ice douses the flame low in her belly, and she is lucky that Raoul is close to finishing, his movements jerky and his breathing staccato, because she feels frozen. Erik, could he have been in the mirror, could he have seen—?

After, Raoul seeks out her mouth for a kiss, and she turns her head and his lips meet her cheek. Numb, she climbs from his lap and he slumps over almost immediately, eyes fluttering shut, and she cleans up and puts on her nightgown and housecoat, the layers like armour.

And she climbs the attic stairs.

Her heart beats heavy in her ears, and she probably ought not to be doing this, ought not to think in the first place about Erik—watching—ought to have stayed with Raoul, her fiancé, and tucked herself into bed beside him.

"Erik?" she says, into the dark of the attic.

There is no reply, but this is not unusual, and she draws closer to the mirror, which tonight looks even more ominous and glinting than it did the night she had first discovered it.

"Erik," she says again, "are you there?"

He is in the air, suddenly, a furious wind beating at her, tangling loose hair about her face and stinging her eyes. He is there, then, and he is angry.

"Erik, I—"

"Come to gloat?"

"I—what?" she says weakly. "Erik, please—"

"Of course, you did not imagine I would transgress, would violate your privacy so," he hisses. "Dear Christine, sweet Christine, did you truly think so highly of me? That I could resist—"

"Erik, no—"

"I am a monster!" he roars, and she fears the windows might smash but abruptly he quiets, the wind seeping from the air, little twisters of dust settling back onto the floor. "And cursed twice over, covetous of what I can never possess."

She is speechless, and unsurprised to find her face marked by tears.

"Do you truly love him, Christine?"

"I—you have no right to ask me that—"

And he doesn't, he doesn't, although she is this close to telling him anyway, telling him no, she does not love him, how could she love a man without music in his heart?

But it is not that simple, and they are engaged, and he has loved her since childhood, and he bought this house for her, and he loves her. He does.

"I may have no right," he snarls, "but I am a selfish demon, Christine, and that has not changed in death. Say it—say you love him and I'll stop—"

There is something on her tongue, some word or phrase, and it begs to be released, and it tastes like an admission. A little sob escapes instead, and—

"I can hardly bear for him to touch me now," she cries, "because when he does I can think only of you!"

For the first time, he seems completely still.

"You—want me to touch you, Christine?"

His voice, his voice, jagged and disbelieving.

Hesitant now, she nods.

A chill gust of air, and the candle blows out. She breathes, and that is the only sound until his voice in her ear: "Show me."

The room dark as it is, she can imagine she is alone, or even that he is here with her, truly, solid and living and thrumming beneath her fingers. She feels a fire kindle deep within her belly, and then shame roots itself into her heart: Raoul could not coax this fire to life, but a wisp, a dream of a man could?

He waits, and finally she gathers her courage and reaches up to unpin her hair, and it falls thickly down her back. She runs her fingers through the knots, and his sigh stirs the curls at the nape of her neck.

"Beautiful hair," he whispers, cold against the skin of her throat. "Would you have me run my fingers through it?"

She nods again, swallowing hard.

"And… where else?"

She swallows, and traces her fingers over eyelids and temples and cheekbones and jawline, the only sound in the room that of his heavy breathing. No, she realizes, it is her producing that desperate sound.

The tips of her fingers, grazing over her mouth, her lips parting slightly under them.

The drapes flutter. "You want me to touch you there?"

"I want your mouth there," she whispers, a confession.

The sudden breeze sends a shiver dancing down her spine.

"To touch your lips with mine…" He pauses, and his voice when he speaks again has roughened. "You would kiss a ghost, Christine?"

"A hundred times," she replies, and emboldened, trails the pads of her fingers down the length of her neck.

Head tossed back, hair tumbling, she draws along the ridges of her collarbone, raw lace of her nightgown rough and thrilling on bare skin. She is bathed in moonlight and his windy breath streams over her, twisting through the curls of her hair and sending the hem of her gown fluttering and catching around her calves.

"Ah, Christine…"

The air, alive with his voice, at once whispered and resounding, and a small sound of need escapes her and she flattens her palms and draws them down over the swells and peaks of her breasts.

"There?" he chokes.

Her hands fall away. "Is that wrong?" she says, face hot.

"Right or wrong, it does not matter." Impatient. "But you would let me—there?"

"Yes," she says. "Yes."

The air stills and now it is into her ear that he speaks, not for the rest of the room, intimate and smooth and her toes curl and she catches her breath and makes that sound, again, sharp and needful.

"Show me how to touch you," he breathes.

And she does.

A beam of moonlight slants in through the half-covered window, and she imagines she can see him illuminated by it, the impossibly tall frame of him glinting around the edges and tantalizingly out of focus. Her hand rises and in the mirror he meets it with his, and she draws them both to her breast.

One button, then two, and then the bodice of the nightgown falls around her waist. She shivers with the cold, and in the mirror he circles her and holds himself against her back, and invisible fingers trace her arms and curl around hers.

She breathes for the both of them, and finds the contour of his face, a silvery smudge along her shoulder, and she thinks of him kissing her there. It is not enough, not near enough, to have only her hands and the faintest whisper of him at her back.

Afraid that even sighing too loudly might cause him to vanish, she keeps herself still and allows him to guide her, to explore the flesh, soft and straining, that she has so willingly bared to him in the dark.

She forces herself to watch as the last case is loaded into the car, as Raoul turns back and his gaze finds her, eyes wet and resigned and understanding.

"We're good for each other," he had said, disbelief lining his features. "Haven't we always been?"

"Yes," she had said, "yes, always—but not in this way."

He had not fought, after that. She almost wishes he would have; then perhaps she might not feel as though she is getting away with something.

So he goes, and the house truly is emptier without him, less vibrant, but more breathable. She avoids the attic for some time, because returning would mean she has made up her mind, and she avoids reflective surfaces as best she can, such that after a week has passed she has resigned herself to hair resembling a rat's nest.

She buys new sheets for the bed, though, and after her week of isolation it seems as much of a decision as anything else, and her self-inflicted punishment comes to an abrupt end.

She has an insane thing to do, and because her father left her little but an overdeveloped sense of the dramatic, she waits until night has fallen to do it. The piano will not be moved, so she sets up at the other end of the parlour, heaving and dragging mirrors of assorted shapes and sizes from all over the house, leaning them against bookshelves and end tables so that they form a rough circle with her in the center.

He has not yet appeared, and she understands, she does, keeping herself apart from him for so long, but if he chooses tonight to be moody and reclusive…

"Christine?"

His voice is different, and the first word that comes to her is tethered.

Her eyes find the shape of him in the mirror and it takes her a moment to notice, because he's so damnably tall—and really the first thing she registers is the colours of his eyes, heterochromic but equally piercing—but suddenly he is not hovering and rippling so much as he is standing and breathing, and she was right, the suit is not tweed but a fine-looking silk, and oh, he's taken one and two steps forward, lissome and intent.

"What have you done?"

He is not yet close enough for her to make out his face, his hat tilted so that what lies underneath remains shrouded in shadow. The room itself is shadowy, the gas lamps turned low, and the gilded frames of all her mirrors glint and reflect in his eyes. Those she can see clearly, and they feel like home.

His shoulders rise and fall with his breathing.

"Did you really think I wouldn't figure it out?" she says.

"How—what—"

She is enjoying this speechless Erik, but what she really wants is to feel him beneath her hands, touch his skin and prove to herself endlessly that he is real and warm and preciously, deliriously alive.

"The mirrors," she says, "I wondered if I might—well, capture you between them, if I had enough of them, and there's a full moon tonight and in the stories those are often portentous, and—did I do something wrong?"

He doesn't answer, but raises a shaking hand into the space between them, retracting it just moments before it can make contact with her cheek.

"You do not know what you've done," he says lowly, the hand curling into a fist, "what you've brought into your home."

"Yes, I do," she says.

A chuckle tumbles from his lips, but it fills her with ice. "The face," he says, "is monstrous, beyond the scope of your stories. If you had known—if you had seen—it is a curse, Christine, and mine to bear alone."

She has made her decision, and anyway, she has always lived her life with one foot in a story. Maidens and monsters; what does it matter how they look, when they share a soul?

Time slows and freezes when she closes the distance between them and reaches up and knocks the hat from his head. Time shudders and speeds up as she looks at him and fills her memory with the dips and ridges and twists, and he is still with horror but his eyes—

It's you. It's you. I would recognize you anywhere.

"Come here," she says, "and touch me."

Title lifted from Itgara'a (The Band's Visit).