One Love, One Lifetime [a Phantom of the Opera Phanfiction]

4: Somehow Here Again

I awaken lying in a soft bed with a familiar surrounding, adorned with pinks, lace, and frills galore. Sunlight streams through sheer white curtains that adorn the windows, glazing the room in warmth. This room seems like one well acquainted with my memory, although I can't pinpoint exactly why.
Reaching up to rub my eyes, I'm shocked to find my hands half the size that I remember them being when I fell asleep on the chapel floor. I blink, looking around the room more carefully, and slowly realize that I am in my childhood bedroom. How is this possible? This house was abandoned when we left. How is it still standing, and more importantly- how did I get here?
    I hear a hacking cough and am immediately hit with a wave of grief and rememberance by more memories. Father.
    "Father!" I shout, running instinctively out of my room and down the hall to where my father's bedroom is, the way I'd done so many times in my younger years when we inhabited this house in his declining state.
    "Christine," he croaks, extending a shaky hand toward me as an even shakier smile creeps across his deteriorated, crinkled face. "Christine, I love you."
    "Daddy?" I ask, tears threatening to spill as I lower myself into the wooden chair beside his bed. The words he just said... I've heard them before. I know it. A bell rings in the back of my mind when suddenly, the realization hits me like the newly invented modern train. I am living a memory. This has all happened before. And so that means that if that is, in fact, true, my father will slip away any minute now right through my grasp like sand and travel to the land of the dead. I grab onto his cold hand, clutching it tightly to my chest.
    "Christine, my dear," his sympathetic yet dull eyes glisten with his final tears. He looks as though he's lived a thousand lifetimes. His voice sounds as worn as an old petticoat feels barely embracing tight legs. "You possess a rare potential. You have a gift in your voice, and I want you to hone that gift and use it for all it's worth... That's why, my dear, when I die," he tells me and hacks into his hand that's not enclosed in mine, "I will ensure that God himself sends you an angel, an angel of music, who will guide you in my absence and help you blossom the way I wish I could." He takes in a shaky breath, closing his eyes for a moment as if to gather the strength and will to finish his monologue. "But my child, I will watch you from heaven, and you will never be alone... I will never leave you, even when my body is gone. My soul is always-" He places his hand that's not clutched in mine above my heart- "in here. As long as you believe."
    "Daddy, you can't go!" I plead with him, finally letting myself cry. "You can't leave me alone." I take my hand on my heart from his weak grasp and brush away a tear with the heel of my palm.
    "You are not alone, my child. Never. You have your angel... your guide and guardian. You are going to grow old and have a life filled with happiness and success. And I have sent for an old friend of mine who will take you to a place where you will flourish. She will arrive in roughly two days' time. Hold on til then for me, can you do that, my dear?" He lets out a halfhearted chuckle that sounds like his lungs are covered in dust and trying to shake the thick coating off.
    "Daddy, I will never let go." I lay my head on his chest, wetting his old crisping shirt, stale with sickness, with my fresh tears. "But I can't live without you."
    He rests a hand on my head. "Yes, you can. You can do incredible things, all on your own..." His voice trails off, fading towards the end of the sentence, and we lie like this, my head on his chest and his breathing faltering, until he heaves one last breath. And then he is gone.
    I don't realize it for a moment, that I've just felt my father die, even though I've lived all this before.
"Daddy? Daddy, wake up!" I sit up and shake his shoulders as if that will bring him back from death. "No," I whisper after a moment of my new grim reality sinking in. "You can't be gone."
    I sit kissing his cold hand for a few minutes, silently sobbing while praying I'll lend some life back into him with my simple touch. "COME BACK!" I yell at his lifeless body. "Please, come back, Papa, I need you," I beg to him, shaking his new corpse but find myself met with only the same haunting solitude that has now been forced upon me. Only the howling wind outside responds by throwing leaves at the thick windowpanes, signaling a brewing storm. "We still have places to see." My voice cracks, threatening to give up in the midst of my grief as I struggle to even whisper the words, "We still have music to make."