In The Wings

Finale

-10 YEARS LATER-

Christine brushed off the keys of the piano. It was a useless action, as the keys were always being tapped so much that there was never any chance for them to develop any dust. But Christine was brushing it off because it was an instrument of music, and anything relating to music had become of the utmost importance to her.

Some people liked to think that it was the only thing keeping her fully sane - she'd been struggling with her emotions and controlling herself for the past decade. Without the music, she probably would've ended up in constant therapy with tons of pills to take each week. Simply, she was just inches away from going insane.

Everyone had assumed that Christine's mental inbalance had come from the stress and trauma of having to deal with the Phantom. She had been kidnapped by him, forced to do his will, threatened by him and shocked by his scarred face. Christine had lived in a period of unending fear for a while in her life, just waiting for when the Phantom would pounce again and either take her away or hurt someone. She had always been convinced that he would kill, and then he did.

But the real reason for Christine being slightly crazy was the fact that Eric had killed himself. She had never shaken the feeling that it was her fault. In the end, she knew that it was her fault even though it wasn't what she had done. He had killed himself because she was leaving him and he could never have her.

No one seemed to understand this fact, and therefore Christine had realized no one was going to listen to her about it. She'd rather be slightly crazy and slightly feared rather than be hated by others for what she said even if it were the truth. There was only so much she could say about a boy she'd known to be an angel, then a demon, then a human.

Christine diverted her mind back to the piano she was still lovingly caressing as if it were a living animal. She liked to think of that way, because she considered music to be infinitely more than bunch of black dots and sticks sitting on a page. But she wasn't quite prepared to start playing anything yet - no, she needed a cue to get her going.

Christine smiled as Paul led Charlotte into the room. He held her hand as she slowly walked on by, coming to the piano. Charlotte was their Little Lotte, and they called her that all of the time. Her hair wasn't exactly blonde, but it was lighter than Christine's and therefore she was close enough to the Lotte of the stories.

Paul and Christine's child was only three years old and yet she was absorbing the music from all around her and falling in love with it. She liked to hum along whenever her parents played music for her, and she'd soon end up the lyrics and singing along. Lotte had already become their little songbird, and there was something extremely pleasing about that to Christine.

But of course, Christine wasn't very interested in the lighter kind of music that she associated with her family. Paul and Charlotte seemed to be associated with daylight and bright noons in her mind, all sorts of simple yet deeply happy things. Therefore, that was precisely how she imagined them to be when it came to all sorts of music.

Christine craved for so much more than that manner of music, or of anything.

All she really wanted was the darkly seductive and enchanting tones from the music of the night she'd experienced with the Phantom himself. The notes always played at the very back of her mind, tantalizingly soft as if she could just barely reach out and grab them. But, however, she'd never been quite able to pull it together once again.

Christine had been struggling the entire decade to try and recapture the music of the night again. Sometimes she would become obsessed with it and get furious if anyone tried to take her away from her work. She was struggling to get it back, and whenever her focus became consumed by the music of the night she would be dangerous.