Waiting in the Wings (Love Never Dies fanfic)

Euphoria

Chapter 1: Euphoria

“Go and find Gustave — tell the stage manager not to disturb me. I need some time...”

The Vicomte de Chagny closed the door of his wife’s dressing-room behind him with the strangest sensation that he was floating on air. The shakiness of reaction was setting in — he was trembling like an adolescent, and his stomach felt as if he had just jumped a hedge only to find a ditch beyond — but between the memory of promises given and kisses returned he could scarcely feel his feet touch the ground. And I’ll do it, Christine, I swear: every word of it. We’ll get away from here, begin again as it should have been...

He had not known until this morning how much he had feared to lose her. How little his own nursed grievances, his self-justification, were worth, when that yawning possibility opened before him like a gulf. From the height of the moment’s euphoria, he could almost spare a scrap of pity for that other — for him, whose delusions and scheming had led only to this clear bright salvation for Raoul’s own life...

To his unaccustomed eye, the activity backstage here at Phantasma seemed oddly disorganised compared to the regimented rush of the great opera houses, with their ranks of serried hemp on the walls as ordered as the teams of stage-hands amid the apparent chaos. In this world, catwalks sprawled instead of backdrops suspended above, and great trunk cables fed a maze of conduits and electrical trickery all around; he was familiar enough with the demands of a quick-change between acts to recognise the undercurrent of urgency that ran through the handful of shirt-sleeved workers moving as if at random to reconfigure the stage, but it was beyond him to identify any hierarchy among them. In Paris or Vienna, he could have carried out his errand within moments. Here, after staring round like a fool for what felt like an eternity, he was reduced to calling out.

“Stage manager!” He moderated his tone with a conscious grip on his temper as the nearest stage-hands turned to stare at him with identical egalitarian American hostility, and addressed the closest. “Excuse me, but can you direct me to the stage manager?”

The man shifted a wad of tobacco — or gum — to the other side of his cheek and chewed briefly before obliging with an answer, in a brogue so thick that it momentarily puzzled Raoul’s ear. “Pieczinski — stage left.”

He masticated again, observing the Vicomte with slow-moving malice, and Raoul took considerable satisfaction in confounding his evident expectations by striding off without hesitation in the direction specified.

The big Pole bending over down in the prompt corner straightened at his approach, and Raoul gave him the courtesy of a nod. “Madame de — my wife, Miss Daaé — is not to be disturbed, if you please. She needs a little privacy just now.”

Pieczinski tugged absently at an earlobe that was already grimed with dust. “Sure thing — we already got that from the boss.” He grinned, very white in the dust-smeared jaw. “You’re the Vee-compte, right? The husband? He says you’re looking for the kid...”

“He says?” Raoul’s rosy mood, already tarnished, abruptly ebbed further. That damnable eavesdropping manipulator — he’d been listening to every word in Christine’s dressing-room. Of course he had. Peeping on at every embrace... well, much pleasure might he have had of that! Raoul’s jaw tightened. It was all he was getting... from either of them.

“Sure... the kid — the boy?” Pieczinski pointed, obligingly, to a small figure engrossed in the flies above them.

Go and find Gustave — I need some time...

She hadn’t said — she hadn’t actually said, in so many words, that she was coming with him, a small, remorselessly literal part of his mind had begun to point out, even as he went through the motions of thanking Pieczinski... crossing the stage... approaching his son... She hadn’t said it, though he’d begged it of her: if you love me, as I love you.