Say You'll Share With Me | Phantom Oneshots

POTOber Day 4 - Down Once More

day 4 - taken hostage/the torture chamber/escape 

Kay's final lair, Nadir's point of view, but with a far more tragic end. sorry for the angst, especially with Kerik, who I adore and just want to make happy, but i really can't seem to get away from it 😂

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Nadir slammed his fist against the mirrored wall of the torture chamber that he and the Vicomte had unwittingly fallen into on their way to confront the Phantom himself and rescue Mademoiselle Daaé. He had tried to stay out of the conflict with Erik and the young woman as long as he could, expressing his disapproval and thoughts on the subject but doing nothing more, but when his friend—could he even still call him that?—had brought the chandelier crashing down, glass and sparks raining down on the audience, and kidnapped the young soprano, he knew he could sit idle no longer. The Vicomte by his side and a pistol in hand, he had ventured down towards the Phantom's lair, but he was kicking himself now; he had come with a hand held up to the level of his eyes, prepared for an attack from the Punjab lasso, but he hadn't been watching where he was walking until he and the Vicomte had fallen fast and landed in what he quickly recognized as the torture chamber Erik had designed all those years ago.

The tone of Erik's voice when he had spoken through the mirrors had sent a chill down Nadir's spine, which didn't happen very often anymore. He had never heard him sound so cold, so calculated and...evil. Though he never wanted to associate the man who, really, had been his only friends for decades with such a word, he could think of no other adjective hearing the threats he had made, the way he had mocked the Vicomte and implied that Nadir would use his pistol to end the young man's life without forcing him to endure the tortures the Phantom had concocted.

Those very same tortures were already beginning; he could feel the temperature starting to rise in the mirrored room, and his stress levels rose with them as he began to consider just how dire their situation was. Nadir remembered the executions in the torture chamber back in Persia; watching the victims with weaker constitutions take their own lives with the rope hanging on the branch of that metal tree in the centre of the room while the stronger ones hallucinated and collapsed from the heat. He never would have thought that he might succumb to the same fate.

He glanced over at the young aristocrat, finding the chamber already taking its toll; he had shucked his tailcoat and torn open the neck of his shirt, and the pounding on the wall that he was doing had already weakened. Erik's assumption may have been right; that boy might not long at all.

Gritting his teeth as he peeled off his own coat, Nadir refused to give up and went back to pounding on the wall. "Erik, stop this!" he yelled, not even knowing if his voice could be heard or if the Phantom would care to listen to him. "Erik, this is ridiculous, enough!"

He could still hear voices from outside the chamber even as he wailed away on one of the mirrors; one was undoubtedly Erik's, but the softer one that he couldn't really hear must have been Christine Daaé. He had never met the girl, so he could only assume, but either way, he knew that she didn't deserve to be trapped in a life with Erik. Perhaps if his friend had gone about things in a different way, they could have been happy, but not like this. He knew that Erik knew that too, deep down.

So that was the side of the Phantom that he decided to plead with.

"Erik, you know you can't do this!" he exclaimed, pressing his hands and his forearms against the glass that was steadily heating up with the warmth in the room. "You can't trap this girl in your world, it's not fit for her! I know you love her and I know that if that love means anything to you, you'll stop this and let her go! Let her be happy, Erik, the Vicomte will give her that! I don't even know the boy that well and I know it's true, and I think you do too. I know that that's what you want for her; happiness, not to just be a silent wife on your arm to sit there and look pretty. That is never what you wanted! You wanted a woman you can be happy with and this isn't how you're going to make that happen!"

No response came.

Nadir growled and slammed his pistol against the mirror, wishing it had cracked, before he walked along the edge of the room, taking in slow breaths so the hot air wouldn't choke him out with the sheer temperature of it. "You promised me no more killing! What did I do to earn being betrayed in this fashion?" he demanded as he tucked his gun into his waistband so he could unbutton and roll up his sleeves. "I did everything for you! I didn't have to rescue you all those years ago, but I did! I could have let the shah have you and put your head on display somewhere for everyone to see and jeer at, but no, I set you free at the cost of everything I had! You were my friend and I didn't let you die, but you would turn around and kill me yourself after all I've done! You would break the promise you made to me by making me the person you kill?! Do you not see how twisted that is?

"I didn't have to call you my friend, but I did! You were the only friend I had most of my life, how do we find ourselves here now?!" Nadir paused in his furious rant as a thought crossed his mind. His mouth was dry as if he had just swallowed a mouthful of sand; he would have thought that he had already sweat out any water in his body, but he was proved wrong when he felt tears fill his eyes.

"I...I let you near my son," he added, his voice cracking as he grit his teeth and slammed his fist against the mirrored wall just before his knees buckled beneath him and he slumped down to the ground. "I trusted you with Reza, believed that you would never hurt either of us! I...I never should have."

He always should have known better, he realized as the world went dark. To think that any man who willingly named himself 'the Phantom' could care enough about him, a disposable asset, had only been foolish on his part. He should never have gotten his hopes up that Erik really could be a good man.

The night that he died at his own friend's hands was proof enough.