I wanted to write a dominant!Christine fic, but I ended up with this instead. Wrote most of the filth in this while hugging a stuffed froggie. There's something really wrong about that. This little scribble picks up just after Erik pops the question. In Kay, of course.

Disclaimer: late for work. Can't be bothered. Don't own.

lady is a tramp

"I won't beg!" he said with sudden coldness, "not even for your love. I have asked you to marry me, but I don't want your answer now. I would like you to come back tomorrow evening, after the performance, and tell me what you have decided. Will you promise to do that, Christine... will you promise to come back and tell me... even if your answer is no?"

Erik, Susan Kay's Phantom

I knelt on the floor and was grateful for its solid reassurance. The world seemed to tip and spin around me, the elegant furnishings of his chamber seeming to slip and slide. Perhaps this is the effect morphine has on Erik, but I couldn't fathom why anyone would want to feel this inertia, as though the world itself had entered a new and violent spin. I was aware of the silence, stretching, stretching out far longer than acceptable for me to remain speechless. Erik's presence was a tower of stone, a fortress whole and entire and utterly impenetrable. His face behind the mask would no doubt be as emotionless as the mask itself.

So this was the endgame. Had that been the goal all along? He was the most purposeful of men, every physical movement so icily controlled that it was all too easy to believe he could even control the world around him too. All of Erik's passion, his wrath, his fire and his zeal, and this was what it could be distilled down to. Phrases like 'six months' and 'true marriage' and 'young widow'. Erik demanded everything of me, but he would give me only a fraction of himself, the tiniest speck of the great and wondrous heart that beat in his skeletal chest. And that was the truth of it. Erik would have possessed me utterly had I given him but half an indication, but God forbid I try to do the same. God forbid the playing field ever be levelled to the point we could meet as equals. He was the man and I was the woman, and regardless of any other hold he had over me, he saw that as enough to govern our relationship. I don't want your answer now, Christine. How dare he deny me the right to speak, to decide the terms of my own fate?

And that outrage was enough to return me my voice.

"That's it, then?" I asked, finally raising my eyes to his, when I felt I could manage speech without screaming. "That's all you want. All you want of me."

His eyes glittered behind the mask. There was passion there, oh yes. It was a matter of coaxing it out. I was done with silence and with long unspoken glances, his unfathomable answers and his cryptic words. The attribute I appreciated most in Raoul was his frankness, his blatant regard for me, yes, but more than that his honesty. The sensations of confusion and turmoil that accompanied Erik's presence - I never suffered such feelings around Raoul. But then, Raoul did not make me feel so wildly free, a creature of liquid light and gossamer wings. Erik had taught me to want more than what the rest of the world promised, exposed me to a fairytale kingdom of wonders. But he persisted in approaching me as a child, a babe barely out of the cradle incapable of caring for herself one moment and then fervently as a woman the next. Last night, when we sang Aida, and now, proposing marriage. He cannot have one or the other. He must choose.

"What else is there?" he inquires sharply. "No, do enlighten me, my dear, as I seem to be lacking in expertise in matters of the heart. What more could there possibly be?"

Oh, what more could there be, other than demands and limitations and obedience? Between us, there was a vast gulf of unsaid words, unspoken sensations. Would we linger here in this half state forever?

"You want to marry me," I pursued doggedly, a mongrel worrying at a bone. "Why?"

He chuckled grimly. "I know you're not this dim, Christine. You must know by now." Suspicions are not the same as knowing something for the hard, incontrovertible fact that it is. I shook my head, and I could imagine his eyebrow arching tartly behind the mask. When did I learn him so well?

"Ah," he breathed, an unimaginable quality of sarcasm present in that one syllable. "So we return to our former point, then, my child. You would have me beg." The condescension in his voice fell upon me like a plague of festering dead things, his glorious voice subdued beneath its weight. It hurt my very mind to listen to it, shafts of pain straight into my skull through the tender openings of my ears. It gave me strength.

"Why would you bother begging for my love? You've never even asked for it," I dared to say, raising my eyes to him. "You call me your child, you treat me like a babe, and then you turn around completely like last night with Aida." He stiffened defensively at once. "And now wanting to marry me! I don't - I can't even - " Confusion left me incoherent, unable to articulate the seething torrent of emotion rushing through me. Erik looked more than a little disturbed by my less than customary display of deeper emotion.

"What are you driving at?" he asked warily.

"I don't know!" I burst out. "How am I supposed to know with you! You've told everything about you but not once of your feelings for me! You send me away because I'm a - a distraction but propose marriage when I come back! Erik, I don't know what you want from me!"

I didn't know my voice could be so loud or fill up so much space. Erik, I knew, could shout and make the very furniture quake, but perhaps some transference of power has passed from me to him in my days here, for the room seems to echo with my words.

"What I want from you?" he echoes, in a dreadful hollow voice. "What... what I want?" He looks less than he usually is, his tall frame shrunken inwards around himself.

"Yes," I whisper, unwilling to raise my voice again, to unleash the power that had before consumed the air of the room. "Do you..." God, I feel like a prize idiot. "Do you love me?"

His head snapped up at that, golden eyes white hot. And the sound he made was a laugh, the creak of ancient floorboards and the whine of overused machinery, but still a laugh.

"Are you honestly in such ignorance of my feelings for you?" he asked bitterly. "I couldn't believe it possible. Christine, I love you, I adore you, and I would make you my bride because the thought of existing a day without you is more than I can bear." It was as though a weight lifted from his shoulders; his spine straightened and his eyes were level with mine. We were open with one another for the first time and it was positively dizzying.

I rose to my feet unsteadily, wishing he'd put a hand out and assist me in rising. He didn't, of course.

"Well, then," I whispered, almost more to myself than to Erik. "That... that changes things." I walked towards him, wavering a little, my knees unsteady from too long kneeling. Behind the mask his lamplight eyes were guarded, as though he was trapped with a wild animal and unable to escape. That was me. I had that effect on him. How had I never noticed before.

"How does it change things, Christine?" he asked, and when we were a scant two paces apart I stopped, and his relief was palpable.

"I thought you just wanted to possess me," I explained slowly, sorting it out in my head even as I articulated the words. "To own me. But you love me." Raising my eyes to his was hard, hard to force them up his slim hips and chest and shoulders, to push up even further over the white expanse of mask to meet him dead on. "You love me," I repeated wonderingly. That he cared for me, wanted me was inexplicable and strange - and I would not question it. Not now.

"Yes," he sighed. "Oh, Christine. Yes."

This was fitting, after Erik and my dramatic history together, that there would be shouting and tears and confusion and misunderstandings. That we would almost miss one another, like ships in the night, rather than meet in the middle to resolve our difficulties. Entirely too stubborn, the both of us, but it was no time for stubbornness now. I was ready to make my decision.

"Yes," I said decisively, and he looked at me like I'd reordered the heavens. "Yes, then, Erik. I'll marry you."

And so we were married. Do you need to know the details? It was a small wedding, attended only by the half-awake priest and two altar boys as witnesses. When it came time to kiss the bride, Erik threw an ungodly number of francs in the general direction of the altar and fled, gripping my hand with an unholy fervency. And I guessed that was that.

We returned to the house below the Opera, and somehow its orderly, familiar nature was striking. It was as though now the dynamic between Erik and I had shifted so dramatically, so should our home. Surely I should have returned to discover the furniture on the ceiling, a maze to wander through. But no. These were the thoughts of a fool, the ramblings of a child, and I was a child no longer. I was married, to my husband, and tonight was my wedding night.

It was something of a comfort to think that really, he knew less about such matters than I did. That he would... how had he put it? 'Accept any conditions that I cared to name?' I could bolt the door tonight, lock him from my heart and my bed, and get quietly between my cold sheets and listen to the silence as he no doubt climbed into his box.

No. Absolutely not. My husband was not going to sleep in a box ever again, not if I had my way about it.

So there we stood in the drawing room, staring at one another. It was late, far too late for music or conversation or any pretensions beyond what was truly going to occur. My husband was going to take me to bed. Now I just had to convince him of it.

"Christine," he finally said, and I raised my eyes to his attentively. "You have made me... the happiest man alive, tonight. The happiest. I can ask no more of you." I frowned. This might be harder than I had first thought. "Now, I think it is best you retire to your bed - "

"I'm going to take a bath," I interrupted. "I think you should take one too. It's... soothing." I eyed Erik discreetly; he looked like his heart was playing up again.

"I don't... have a bath," he muttered. "In my chambers."

"Use mine, then," I replied in exasperation, and his eyes widened. "I mean, after I'm finished, of course."

Oh, hell. We were the most inept couple ever.

"This is hardly proper," he spluttered.

"We're married, Erik," I reminded him, and went to take my bath.

I didn't know if he would do as I asked, but sure enough there he was, standing in his evening dress with a towel and a pile of black silk clutched in his arms. I exited in my nightgown and felt his eyes shred me up and down, dissembling every detail and storing it in his marvellous memory. For a moment our eyes were locked and it seemed he would never look away, but he took one step, and then two, and when the door closed behind him I dropped to my knees before it and listened.

The run of the water, the sigh he made when he got in, the faint splashing sounds. I was listening to my husband take a bath and it was oh so domestic, so blissfully normal. And it fascinated me. It was an eerie kind of vulnerability, a strange sort of affection. Erik was naked in there. If he had left the door unlocked I could walk in and see him laid bare, see every hidden secret and every disguised emotion in front of me. I could see him.

But, no. That was a betrayal he might never forgive. And so I waited.

The water drained, and I heard the soft rubbing motions of the towel over his skin, could imagine him hanging it over the railing to dry. I got up from the floor - it would hardly do for him to find me listening to him bathe - and into my bed, wishing I could feel a little more afraid than I felt.

Erik emerged in black silk Oriental pyjamas, masked, the light behind him giving him a sort of halo. And it was like being with him every other time, when he was buttoned up and swathed and protected by layers of clothes. But - oh, but. His feet were bare. Big feet, man feet, and utterly normal feet.

"Come on, Erik," I said, and hoped my smile was more inviting than my insipid words. Good lord, girl, you are as dull as a spoon. And yet here I was, with my husband, here at this desolation point.

He slipped into the bed, cold, what little hair he had damp from the bath. The scent of death subdued beneath my blueberry soap and vanilla shampoo. Thank God.

The light from the bathroom was gone, and I blew out the last candle, and commanded him to take of his mask.

"You are my husband," I said, and for all the times I'd told myself that, it meant more to say it out loud, to him. I heard the rustling of cloth, his hands at the ties, and then the gentle thud onto the floor.

"Wife," was all he murmured in response, and I should feel disgrace and dismay, but for the way he trembled.

And so we lay in the dark, as the silence built, and for all his quietness I might have thought he was asleep but for the irregularity of his breathing. "Tell me a secret," I whispered spontaneously when I could bear the quiet no longer, and felt his shoulders tense.

"A secret?" he echoed, as though I'd asked for a camel that could fit through the eye of a needle or something else equally ridiculous.

"Yes, a secret. What... what's your favourite colour?" I asked, and felt him relax as he chuckled.

"Black," he muttered, as though it really was a secret. I giggled.

"Black doesn't count," I countered childishly, and I could just make out Erik dipping his head in grave acknowledgement.

"Then blue," he said softly, hand coming up to graze my cheek just below my eye. Those same cheeks flooded with head. Marrying Erik would have been so much easier had he not been such a genuinely sweet man underneath the madness, and a quick recklessness overtook me.

"Can you... you can see in the dark, Erik?" I asked, but I knew full well the answer.

"Yes, Christine," was the sober reply.

"Good," I replied, and slithered out from under the sheets to lie atop the quilt. Nothing separated me from the cool air and from his eyes but my nightgown - and then, that too was gone. I felt his eyes on me like a brand, the cold puckering my nipples into hard points. I felt wild and wanton and completely untamed, even in this domestic normality of lying nude beside my husband. Except he wasn't just any old husband, he was Erik, and this was the first time between us. The very first.

His eyes were gold in the darkness, and they burned. "Touch me," I crooned, hardly recognising my own voice. "Trust me, Erik."

I took his hands and placed them on my body, but the moment I moved my own away, they dropped like a stone. Erik stared up at me, helpless confusion lighting his eyes, and I imagined his cheeks to be a rather fetching shade of crimson.

"I don't know what to do, Christine," he stammered, and it would be hard to bear except oh, this was unmapped territory. Erik was like new snow, untouched and unsullied by hands and skin other than mine. It was entrancing. My hands would go where no others had roamed before, I would feel parts of Erik that had lain dormant for too long. These were uncharted waters and here be monsters, except the monster was lying looking up at me with too-wide eyes and he was no kind of monster at all.

Just a man.

It gave me the courage to rip back the covers and settle astride him, centre to centre, feeling the hardness of him against me. He was clothed and I was not, and somehow the contrast made me feel impossibly wanton, madly free. And it was only that confidence that gave me the strength to start on the buttons of his shirt. He was inflexible, hands snapping like steel vices around my wrists as I reached the third button.

"Christine, don't - " The sheer wretchedness in his voice wound its way around my chest and squeezed, tight. Poor, poor Erik.

"I can't see you, Erik," I whispered, and unbelievably, he relaxed. "You're safe here." I kept up this mindless stream of prattle, talking to him even as I stripped off the shirt, his body lifting so I could cast it aside. The revelation of his bony chest and deceptively brittle limbs would have been enough to derail me, but I moved my hands to his trousers almost against my own will. I wanted to touch his skin, I wanted it like oxygen, but more than that I needed that feeling again of the blood rushing through my veins, the heat animating me in a way I'd never dreamed of.

And when we were skin to skin in the dark, the crescendo of that massive sensation filled me like a bubble of warmth expanding to fit into every dark crevice of my body. I was with Erik. We were together.

He was mine.

He was also terrified.

He lay like a corpse under me, the stubborn hardness of him brushing me but his hands by his sides. the golden lights of his eyes skittering everywhere but my body. I said his name like a prayer and he looked at me, at my face, at my eyes. "What is it?" I asked, leaning down until we were pressed completely together, and he let out a groan of pure frustration.

"Forgive me, my dear. I'm trying to convince myself you're not a hallucination," he replied, and I wanted to both laugh and weep. Poor, dear Erik.

"I am no hallucination," I replied, and the shift of his eyes meant he was turning his head on the pillow, turning away. I wanted so badly to convince him.

"Let me love you. Let me take care of you," I murmured. I could feel him swallow convulsively.

"No one... no one has ever... ever wanted to - " I stopped him with a finger to the lips. I didn't need to hear it.

"I want to," I affirmed, and lowered my lips to his.

He kissed like a starving man, like a boy unschooled in sensuality, like a maestro left too long at his music and only just rediscovering the universe. We kissed until my head spun and I could only imagine his was the same - perhaps more, considering his striking lack of a nose. I kissed that hole, those misshapen lips, the parchment skin and the throbbing veins before sliding my lips down that fascinating throat - sometimes the only part of him to be seen - to collarbones frighteningly prominent, shoulders sticking through his skin. I counted every rib with my lips, lapped at every tiny protruding bone, and licked down his navel, mentally vowing to fatten him up.

My eyes were adjusting to the dark, but there was no way I was going to tell him that. He had a tiny diamond shaped birthmark on his right hip, just to the left of where the skin stretched taut over the bone. I blew on it, just to see what would happen, and his toes curled.

"Christine - oh, darling, my love, Christine - " Erik was sparing with praise at the best of times - fair, but not gushing. But I touched my tongue to his belly button, ultimate proof he was born like any other man, and he said things I'd never imagined I might hear him say. His skin was paper-fine and soft beneath my lips, the faint bite of salt from sweat on my tongue. But oh, the taste of him. I lived in an opera house, I had seen my fair share of dirty, unwashed men. But Erik was clean, the conflicting scents of my own bath products and the faint aroma of damp and ink and dust. Technically, I suppose, it could be described as the scent of death, dry dust, the scent of things long since passed. But more than that it was the scent of Erik, of his tidy little home, of mornings spent at music and afternoons of conversation and evenings of stories. And this... this unfamiliar being-time with my husband, this lying in the dark, feeling the coolness of his skin.

It heated under my hands.

Erik appeared to have lost the ability to articulate words. The broken murmur of ohs and ahs and sheer, speechless moans were enough to unhinge me a little. Erik, man of more words than any other I'd ever known, was wordless under the onslaught of my kisses and my sighs and my affection. He fell apart beneath my hands and I held him together. Was this what marriage was supposed to be about? It felt like it. Erik had shown me so much, reflecting his love for me in a thousand little ways, and now I was showing him. We were equal.

But all I was doing was touching, running my fingertips and my lips over the unfamiliar plains and dunes of his body. I suppose for a man as unused to touch as Erik, even the lightest of caresses could feel like heaven. But that want was surging in me again. He might be satisfied with just this, but I wanted more.

"Christine, please," he begged, and that was enough to lower my head, to take him in my mouth, to feel him twitch against my tongue and his hands hesitantly snake into my hair. Everything I had ever been heard about intimacy was telling me this was wrong, that this was not the way love was supposed to occur between a man and a woman. But I had kissed Erik all over, felt the rhythm of his pulse in his throat and the lift and fall of breath in his chest. Every line, every bony ridge, every scar - and God knows he had enough of those. This was just one more kiss, one more way of showing Erik how I loved him. Better women have gone to hell for less, and I didn't care. God had no place in this room.

"Christine, going to - " Erik arched and my mouth flooded, salty and bitter and awful but worth it for the noises he made. I swallowed. What else was there to do? He hadn't left me much choice, but I wasn't angry with him, not when he stroked my hair as he came down from whatever cloud of bliss he'd been floating on.

"Oh, I am sorry," he apologised, voice languid and body relaxed, looking distinctly non-apologetic. I couldn't help but laugh.

"You don't look sorry," I replied, crawling up to kiss him. His eyes were wide and briefly I wondered if he could taste himself on me. Judging from the enthusiasm of that kiss, though, if he could he certainly didn't mind.

"No, I am," he said, this time sounding genuinely remorseful when we broke for air. "That was... not how I wanted to end it."

I arched an eyebrow. "So you didn't enjoy it then?" I pretended to turn away, insulted and was not surprised when he followed, impossibly fast, impossibly uninhibited, long lean body against mine.

"Oh, I didn't say that," he purred, and I pushed my hips back against him, longing for sensation. He chuckled. "Minx," he growled in my ear, something stirring against my backside. Two could play at his game. I shoved back, reclaiming my former position on top of him, finding his erection with my hand. He groaned. It was though he had not climaxed at all - but, I recalled, I was with a man who had endured a lifetime of celibacy. I would probably find myself in this situation often.

I really should have been more disturbed by it than I was.

With care, I lowered myself onto him, and braced myself for the pain that did not come. Maybe it should hurt. Maybe I am so far gone in sin I should be shrieking in agony but I am not. All I felt was warmth, Erik's warmth, even as his hands were cool on my hips to guide me, one hand sneaking down to - oh. Oh.

Someone's been doing his research.

Erik was touching me - my husband was touching me, those fingers that were so elegant on the piano at work between my legs. The sight was humbling and glorious and it felt like there were arias in my head, in my heart, a melody of my own making.

"Christine," he gasped, and for all I've never particularly felt one way or another about my name, I could become too accustomed to hearing him say it, in that voice. "Eyes clenched wide shut, Oh, Christine, I'm - "

"Look at me," I said without being entirely aware of it, hands braced on the wall of muscle that was his chest. "Erik, look at me," I repeated, and when his amber irises reappeared it was enough to send me shivering.

"Y-yes?"

"You're mine, now," I said, staring deep into his eyes, feeling him unravel beneath me, the rhythm between us becoming frantic and irregular. "Say it. Say that you're mine."

"Yours, Christine," he groaned, and something clicked into place inside of me, as though I'd found a groove to slot into. "Only yours."

And when he bucked up into me for the last time, throat straining, cords of muscle rippling under his skin - the power in me leaped from my centre all the way to my fingertips, leaving humming in its wake.

Oh, I loved him.

I collapsed on top of him, breathless, feeling his chest rise and fall rapidly and for a moment fearing for his less than reliable heart. But no, he was grinning in the darkness, a schoolboy enthralled with his first taste of ecstasy.

"What are you smirking about?" I asked when I could speak without gasping, and had he a nose, I was sure he'd be wrinkling it.

"Making love to my wife," he replied, looking entirely too pleased with himself. I tapped him tartly on the arm.

"Excuse me, sir, but I think I was the one doing the 'making love'," I said sharply, but it dissolved when I began to laugh. "Erik, I love you." It was not what I intended to say - I was going to tease him a little more - but it was the right thing to say. His eyes misted over a little and he wrapped a skeletal arm around me to draw me closer.

"I love you, Christine."

This will be no ordinary marriage. Erik would possess me, own me, mould me into a further expression of his great genius. There was no doubt about it.

But in the bedroom, I was in charge.