A/N: Another slightly angsty one shot. Written in two halves, several days apart, so the end product is very different from what I thought it would be when I started it.

Down Once

He had taken her down for the first time, his hands wrapped around her wrist tightly, ten long fingers, turning slightly to reassures himself that the rest of her came along, followed after. She did her best, nodded encouragement. She was half frightened out of her wits, but she knew in her heart that he would do her no harm.

Words slipped from his lips, and drifted back to her, a prayer.

"Oh heavenly father, thou art so good to thy children, so benevolent; when thy angel comes, Father, receive her at thy door."

The words unnerved her, but she could only go on, allow him to lead her further down into the damp catacombs, farther and farther away from the light on the surface. As he had led her into the wall cavity that opened up into her dressing room, she has cast one last glance behind her at the serene room: everything as normal. No one would even be able to tell that she had gone, until she didn't show up for rehearsals.

And there were rehearsals the next day. She would be fine; he would not risk keeping her for very long.

His fingers were cold, clamped around her wrist, the pressure tight. In the dark she could barely make out the slim bulk of his body, moving ahead of hers with a catlike surety to his tread. He knew this labyrinth; he knew this place; it was his normal environment, and his home.

She did not think to wonder at this.

Looking at him, it seemed only natural.

This tall and dark man, this skeletal hulk, this strange angel, and the mask on his face, concealing: where else would he go?

For a while, it all made sense.

He took her to his home, the lair beyond the lake, and he showed her where she would sleep. Even at this she did not begin to panic; what was one night, at any rate? It did not cross her mind that he meant to keep her.

It did not cross her mind that she should be seriously in fear.

She was preoccupied with concentrating on the way he moved, graceful, economical in his movements, so careful; and yet so quick at the same time, as though when he moved the world rearranged itself to be just where he needed it to. She watched him. Her eyes stared so hard that it gave her a slight headache; staring at this man who baffled her with everything he did.

Why me?

How long had it been; several weeks at least, since he had first begun to teach her. She did not understand; her father had always said she had a pretty voice, yes, but worthy of this man's notice? Surely not! Undoubtedly he was a genius; he sang to her during their lessons and she wanted to die to hear him. There was beauty in his bones. The mask was not a deterrent to the wonder of his voice.

She could only hear the voice, and the hearing was all and everything. The sight of him meant nothing as long as she heard the voice—

But he could not keep singing all the time.

She slept hard that night, and had strange and unsettling dreams. He drifted through them, ghostlike presence a wraith caught in the wind, eyes the only solid and unchangeable thing, surrounded in darkness. Everything she didn't know, everything she wished to know, all that she had never been told, those secrets in his eyes. She couldn't reach; he slipped away from her as the day awoke, and she arose with body hollow and unfulfilled to find him sleeping.

The wooden box at the corner of the room; set on a raised dias, she could only see into it by standing on her tiptoes and peering over the edge. There he was, that concealed face and that long, frail body. The barest breath of air— he sighed in his sleep.

The memory of his voice was enough to bring a flush to her cheeks, and she dared to step closer and look at him over the edge of the box. This man— was there a face behind that mask? There were those eyes to be sure, there was no hiding the eyes— but was there a nose, eyebrows, high cheekbones, lips—

She shivered in the cool morning. It was damp there in the lair, the walls resounded with distant echoes, and she was alone with an angel.

She stood and closed her eyes determinedly, reaching out for the fragments of her dream.

Here he was, in front of her.

Here he was, and his body was his voice, his voice his perfection, his mask his face.

Here he was, and all the love she'd longed for as a child and a teenager was visible in his eyes.

She would take off the mask, and he would be everything, all and nothing all at once, her darkest dreams and the highest pinnacle of reality, for her to hold and her to discover and her to conquer.

The slightest touch, and that in her mind, and the shiver turned to a shudder, her bones shaking as her heart beat fast in her breast. What the voice could do—

His eyes snapped open and the first thing he saw—

She stood, eyes closed in unearthly bliss, dreaming of his touch.

He returned her to the surface later that day. It was too complicated a beginning.