Summer of 1870 - Paris, France

Erik shuffled through the stack of leather folios and sheafs of his handwritten music. For the fifth time that evening he sighed as he organized and reorganized his meager trunk of possessions. It hardly mattered if his work was in alphabetical or chronological order. No one but him would likely ever see it. Who would care? No one… not even him. The works that he'd left behind in Paris had been transcribed from memory in the months that had passed. It was easy enough work. He knew them all by heart as if they'd been carved upon his very soul.

His memory was perfect once he'd managed to lift his head up out of a bottle and set the morphine syringe aside. Those were dark times indeed and Erik was content, in a way, to leave that all behind him now and start fresh. The morphine and liquor had burned through his gut and veins and carved him out, leaving nothing but an empty shell behind. Afterwards, he'd put his pen to paper and transcribed every single aria and every single duet he'd ever dreamed. He'd felt some great need to record their story (his and Christine's) as if to prove that it had been real once upon a time. She'd loved him once. He knew it was true. But now he just felt hollow, and spent, and empty in her absence. Like a shadow that has faded into the darkness after the sun has set. His heart had been cut out of his chest that night. She'd taken it with her and left him behind to slowly wither away and die in her absence.

Food had turned to ashes on his tongue and nothing brought him pleasure. Alcohol numbed him for a short time, until he'd heaved his guts out into some back alleyway and added to the filth that lined those stinking gutters. The warm thigh of a prostitute wrapped around him in a shadowed alley brought his body relief for a short time but left him feeling even more depraved, hollow, and empty afterwards. It was no comfort to him.

Once the moment was gone and his body was spent he felt like the monster that she must have thought him. Why else had she left him? Why else had she not understood that he'd done all of those terrible things for her? For them? So that they could have been together?

He'd have given her the world and made her his queen if she'd only let him remain by her side. He would have followed her anywhere and been delirious for it so long as he was by her side. Not that it mattered anymore. She was gone and happily married and he was puking his guts out in filthy gutters after he'd fucked a whore to try to forget her.

But it was impossible. She'd wormed her way into every corner of his mind and now he simply couldn't pry her loose. Every time he closed his eyes he saw her there. The curve of her cheek, the color of her hair, and most of all the way that her limpid eyes had stared up at him with fear and unshed tears had glimmered in her eyelashes like dewdrops.

He'd done it all for her, but in the end she hadn't wanted him. Erik rubbed the back of his neck forcefully and closed his eyes and sighed for the sixth time that night.

Once the notes had flowed from his mind to paper he could barely stand to look at them, let alone play them, again. He would never play their music again. The music of the night was over. Erik closed the leather folio and tied it tightly with a blood red ribbon. He added it carelessly to the other contents of the trunk.

An entire lifetime had been reduced to one large steamer trunk and one leather suitcase. His clothing, his masks, his music. Did any of it really matter without her? The notes fell flat. The clothes never seemed to fit right. The masks chaffed. It was as if all of the color had been drained from the world in her absence.

She'd left him, her ring tucked neatly into his cold and trembling hand, as he'd wept on the lakeside shore while he watched her leave with her young beau. She'd rowed away from him with her perfect, beautiful lover at her side. She'd only briefly glanced back once before she had turned away from him for the final time. What had been the point of that one last, long look? She'd still left him, all while knowing that she'd taken his music with her too. She was his soul. She was his music. Did she know that she was leaving him to this living Hell? Would she have cared?

Even now he barely understood how he'd managed the escape from the angry mob at the time.

Erik barely remembered the weeks of dodging gendarmes afterward the great fire. The hiding and skulking about in shadows. The Daroga had found him, as the Daroga always found him, and spirited him away to some dark hole. Madame Giry had brought him what little she could scavenge from his ruined home. They'd moved from hovel to hovel, from town to town, until the fervor died down. And then, one day, the mismatched pair of men discovered that they'd been entirely forgotten about. There were no more suspicious glances their way. Gendarmes went back about their normal business. The season changed and France turned its attention to some new exciting scandal. Life continued in Paris.

In the weeks and months that followed the ever dauntless Persian had pried the empty liquor bottles from Erik's limp grip and then forced hot, salty broth down his throat when the morphine left him as compliant and weak as a newborn babe.

His heart had failed to stop even though Erik had wished on innumerable occasions that it would. But his body, it seemed, was determined to live. Anything, including death, must surely have been better than this miserable non-existence. Yet his heart continued to beats its staccato rhythm in his chest. Erik felt nothing now. He wondered vaguely if he would ever feel again, or if he'd live the rest of his miserable years in this strange, gray unfeeling state of mind. There was no more anger or sadness or rage left within him. Just this bizarre, unnatural lack of caring. He should be enraged that he, the Living Corpse, the feared sorcerer assassin of Mazandaran, the opera ghost, the Angel of Music, had been reduced to this state. Instead he felt absolutely nothing.

The Daroga shuffled up to him and peered into the steamer trunk before them. "Are your preparations finished, my old friend?"

Erik let the heavy lid of the trunk fall closed and nodded mutely. France… Italy… what did it matter? His Hell followed him wherever he went. And he felt nothing now.