Phantom of the Opera 1. Prologue

**Ever seen the show Hole in the Paper Sky? It's a lovely movie with a wonderful score by Kerry Muzzey. Go on iTunes and spend the $2-3 it asks for, you'll never regret it. I got the idea for this fic from there and even though it's only a slight connection-as in so miniscule that you might not even see it-I thought I should mention it. SUCH A GREAT MOVIE! Anyway, I don't know exactly what kind of angle I'm going to take with this. I really want to make a full, blown out epic story, I just don't know how much time I'll be able to put into it. So, we'll see where this goes, no?**

Prologue

The water came in a torrent. Every particle flitted across my skin in fierce speed as if hurriedly desiring to die upon the ground. Thunder shook the ground like some angry organist in the sky hitting chord after hideous chord. I wanted to tell him that the E flat should be an E natural, but I doubt he would have listened anyway. Yes, even the thunder had notation when perceived by the right mind.

It was a hard rain today. She said the hard rains were the best, that they washed away any blackness on the heart. I had rebutted, "But I have no heart." I remember that she laughed, the lovely sound making the very heart I claimed not to have skip a beat.

"Believe me, stay in the rain long enough and you will have one, Erik," had been her reply.

My flesh absorbed the moisture and the sensation of touch ravenously. The corners of my mouth pulled into an expression that wasn't quite a smile, but not necessarily a negative expression either. The uplifted corners allowed some of the water in and it was sweet on my tongue. My hands lifted to the sky, palms upward as if accepting a gift with gratitude. Or about to wrench the gift from the heavens if I had to. I needed it, what she had promised me I would receive. I needed it now.

I remained in this position for a long time, listening to the music in my head accompanying the percussionistic patter of heavy rain on the ground. This would be a concerto by tomorrow morning. The wild wind would become a fluttering flute solo and the swaying leaves the accompaniment. I waited as long as I thought I could stand. My hands were shaking in anticipation at this point. My knees were even unsteady, quaking in the cold and wind.

But it would come, she had promised it would come.

Eventually, the rain departed, fading as a solitary note to neinte. I waited, my breathing harsh and low. But the feeling never came. The overwhelming warmth remained nonexistent. I was shaking quite furiously now, but be it from the cold or the disappointment or the anger, I didn't know. I lowered my head from the blackened sky and bent to retrieve my mask where I had thrown it in my haste to get the blasted thing off. Clothes soaked and emotions washed away with the pour, I left the forest.

She had promised me a heart.

_Where was it?_


	2. She Wouldn't Quit Looking At Me

**I nearly screwed the tone I set for this story yesterday. I almost threw it out the window with ahorrible first chapter. Good thing I caught myself before I clicked the "save" button. So, you can thank me later for sparing you that awful crap I wrote. It's been taken care of-as in locked in a deep, dark cellar where it can never see the light of day again.**

**So today, after class, I was waiting in the music section of the library for my duet practice time to roll around. I did some good old circle of fifths work, trying to clean up my scales (I'm a music major, don't you know?) Of course, I fell asleep-every time I grab one of those private desks in the library, I end up face in my hands, drooling on my iPod.**

**But when I woke up after 30 minutes, I felt rejuvenated. I finished my circle of fifths work, checked my email, pulled out a sheet of paper, and started writing this:**

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She Wouldn't Quit Looking At Me

I finished the test with a final sweep of my pencil, dubbing the messily compiled pages complete. With my bag thrown over one shoulder, my inconspicuously black ball cap pulled as low as possible, and my shirt collar uncomfortably high, I walked to the teacher's desk and deposited the test there.

The man didn't look up at me, focusing a little too hard on his task of marking essays. I stood there for a few moments to see if he would actually make eye contact with me. He circled one misspelled word on an essay and continued to loop around it in red ink multiple times until I turned my back and left.

I hurried from the room, leaving a massive lecture hall full of students still creasing their foreheads over the first page. It's no wonder the whole world was going to the pits, these people were incompetent.

Once I had Hanz Zimmer playing his latest work from Inception on my iPod, I headed towards the library, occasionally tilting my head when people walked by. I didn't need the stares anymore than the overweight girl I passed in the food court needed that extra maple and sprinkle-covered donut she was purchasing.

Once at the library, I took the stairs up to the fourth floor where the music section was, telling myself it was for the exercise rather than an excuse to avoid being crammed in an elevator with twelve other people. How these undergraduates did it sometimes, I didn't know…nor did I care to find out.

Students sat scrunched over books in theory and difficult scores as I entered, some of them like I with headphones projecting another world into their brains. I found a table that hadn't been claimed by the multitude and sat at it, silently wishing that I could be doing this Teacher's Assistant work in Professor Nadir's office. At least he didn't gape at me every time I entered the room.

…

First, my leg started to shake. Then, I began a nervous tick of brushing the front of my cap-as close as I could get to my mask without bringing attention to it. If the girl across the room was staring at me, that had to be the reason, right? It's not like she couldn't take her eyes off of me because I was dancing in the nude. Eventually, I just gave up and returned the favor to the girl who had been openly staring at me for the past ten minutes.

When I confronted her visually, she blushed a deep red and leapt into whatever notes she had spread in front of her, bending over so a silk curtain of brown curls covered her cheeks. She peered through her hair a few seconds later but went right back to her work when she saw I was still watching. She sat very still then.

Balking for a few seconds, I noticed that her papers had musical notation on them. A theory student perhaps? Most likely some snotty, half-witted singer who thought herself the next Joan Sutherland. I bet she couldn't hit a high B flat without cracking.

Obviously, people staring at me were often at the receiving end of some antagonistic mental abuse.

I went back to my TA's job of jotting notes on Professor Nadir's next test for architectural design. He had miss-worded this question…

By the time the hair on my neck started standing up, I knew she was at it again. If we hadn't been in the library, I would have tosses a rude remark at her and seriously considered snapping her neck.

Eventually my leg launch its twitching again, so I just got up and walked it out, rounded a few shelves of scores, picked up a random one to occupy myself later, and headed back to my seat.

And there she was.

Sitting at my once-empty table right across from the chair over which my jacket was draped.

She didn't look up at me once as I sat down even though I blatantly stared at her for about five minutes. She was indeed doing music theory work-looked like a Professor Swicket assignment. Yes, she was definitely a Sutherland wannabe.

I thought about moving, but all the other tables were occupied. If only Nadir hadn't been playing that awful reggae CD he had recently bought, I could have done this in his office. Instead, here I was escaping the brain-damaging sounds of Bob Marley only to come face-to-face with something that made it impossible to focus.

But I resolved to ignore the girl and her wide, blue eyes and to get done with this test as soon as I could. But Nadir always made so many mistakes!

Of course, not long into my hard-pressed search for possible revisions, the strange girl started looking at me again. Oh for the love of-

I tapped my fingers impatiently on the table like an insane jazz drum improvisation. There was no way I could get this done before tomorrow's exam at this rate.

I snapped my head up, glaring beneath the ball cap.

"_What do you want_?" I mouthed furiously.

She watched for a handful of seconds before giving me a questioning look.

"_What...do…you…want_?" I tried mouthing again.

Same response. I swear she was edging into a smile.

"What do you want?" I hissed, trying not to raise more attention to myself in the crowded library.

The girl shook her head in confusion.

Having had enough, I tore a piece of paper out of Nadir's test and scribbled on the back: _What the - do you want?_

I'm pretty sure the explicit term I used can be correctly assumed. I tossed the sheet of paper at her and watched her reaction of a barely concealed coy smile. The little-

_I'm Christine Daa__é_, she wrote back. I noticed she had scratched out the curse word I had written. She tried to hand the paper back to me but I wouldn't take it.

"_So_?", I mouthed.

She shrugged and once again attempted to give the paper back but I refused to take it. With a sigh (what did _she_ have to sigh about? I was the frustrated one here!) she wrote something else. _That's a nice piece, the Arnold concerto. The third mvmt is fun _

I glanced down at the score I had sitting to the side, the one I had gotten when I went to stretch my twitching leg. It was a clarinet concerto by Malcolm Arnold. But what did she care? She was staring at me long before I even got up and fetched it.

_Do you play clarinet_, she wrote.

I glared at the paper. What was she trying to do? Play a stupid little get-to-know-the-weird-guy game? Well, I wasn't going to play along. I grabbed my bag, Nadir's test, Arnold's concerto, and left. Any reggae Nadir was blaring would be heavenly voices compared to this nuisance.

If she followed me, I swear…

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**Trust me, it's much better than what I had written before. _That_ was just awful. But this is okay. Sort of.**


	3. I'm Feeling Like a Jerk Today

**Hey, peoples! I live! I was really busy this summer (working, playing around with my man) so obviously I didn't do a whole lot of writing. I actually wrote this chapter months ago and never uploaded it. But I'm bored, so I have decided to just put it up here and see which direction it goes. I'm a month into fall semester already, so I don't see myself adding more chapters anytime soon.**

**Unless I get some awesome reviews, that is. Like maybe 3. How about that? 3 reviews=a new chapter by next week.**

**You'll all be scrambling to make sure that happens, right?**

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I'm Feeling Like a Jerk Today

I went home that evening, raging on my motorcycle as the wind whipped painfully about me. Through my full face helmet, I could see the sky begin to darken and hissed when I felt raindrops pelt my black coat. Of all the times to rain, the sky selected the night I was explicitly frustrated to pour.

There would be no composing with that awful ruckus.

I ignored the swift drop in temperature and continued, weaving in and out of the lanes of traffic. Strangely, my drifting mind traveled upon a road of thought which brought me to _Christine Daa__é._ I knew why the strange girl had taken that twisted interest in me-or at least I was comfortable in my speculation. It was, after all, the only answer that made sense when paralleled with humanity. The stupid girl was curious about my mask.

Her big, blue eyes had been practically begging to find out what was underneath it. I shivered as I remembered that stare, that penetrating look that said, "I don't know what you're hiding, but I will find out." The rest of her face could have been portrayed in an expression of utmost confusion but those eyes knew exactly what was going on.

My hand jerked on the gas a little too much and the bike jolted forward. A car honked behind me as I swerved to regain control. I righted the vehicle, heart pounding a bit, and dismissed thoughts of the foolish girl from my brain. Columbia University was big enough. She would fade into the 25,000 student population by tomorrow morning, I reassured myself, not feeling as confident because I could still see those eyes in the back of my head.

I pulled onto Greenwich Street and sighed angrily when the rain began to pour mercilessly down. God was being eloquently horrendous to me today, I decided. I parked my motorcycle in the garage and dragged my drenched body to an elevator in my building, The Archive.

A few of my fellow patrons gave me an odd look for continuing to wear my helmet inside, but after finding an empty elevator I took it off and shook my head around. _She was still inside my head. _Sparkling blue eyes, laughter that made my stomach clench in fury, thick brown hair that would do well to be set on fire…

I got exited the elevator on the top floor and retreated quickly into my apartment. I had paid well for a room on the tenth floor, needing as much quiet as I possibly could, but tonight the blasted rain would override every dollar spent for such luxury.

_Rain_, I mused, _a sign of redemption. Nothing more than hellish noise and wetness._

I should have been banging out the fugue portion of my newest composition so that I could be prepared to turn it in on Friday, but with my current frustration I doubted anything useful would become of that assignment. Instead, I sat down at the piano and shook it with my emotional storm-wild enough to match the one outside. From my mental repertoire I pulled out a succession of melodic minor scales and played them every way I could imagine, variation after variation of constantly altering themes.

It was a nice _long_ night.

I don't know what drove me to do it. I mused that perhaps the .001 percent of my soul akin to kindness decided to splurge and use up its year supply of will power to make me. Yes, it could have been that. Or more likely, I was acting in spite of the predisposition being used against me. _Little bitty masked boy will be too scared to do it; insignificant social outcast is too beaten in his ways to do something of that nature._

That had to be what she was thinking when Christine Daae slipped a sheet of her theory homework in with the Arnold concerto. The theory homework I was going to return.

A part of me wanted to know how she did it without me knowing. I mean really, I was on my guard twenty-four seven. My personal bubble extended out ten feet in every direction and I knew all workings within that space. So how had she gotten that close without my knowing?

I must have been distracted by visions of dousing her in gasoline at the time.

I sneered to myself. The girl wouldn't know what hit her when I showed up in the middle of Swicket's class brandishing her assignment like a flaming sword. Swicket wouldn't mind of course. The professor practically worshiped me after hearing my application composition. The man still emailed me questions about the chord progressions.

I might even make her come to the front of the class and explain every single incorrect answer that I had found on the paper. Swicket would find the display charming; he had a malicious bone in his body when it came to shaming students less intelligent than he-good thing I was obviously excluded from that category.

These hissing thoughts gained control of my mind for the entire morning and it didn't help my mood that the rain was still pouring when I departed on my motorcycle. Along with it, there was a torrent of angry music in my head and I had yet been able to release it. I was cold, wet, angry, and quite ready to strangle the first person to show even the slightest sign of cheek to me by the time I reached campus.

Nadir called me before I could reach the fine arts building and destroy Ms. Daaé's fragile world.

"Did you finish correcting the test?" He asked, sounding a tad bit frustrated.

"It took me hours."

"There were that many mistakes?"

"You have proven yet again how easy it is for a person to become a college professor." I smiled to myself. It was such good fun to pick on him.

"Thank you, Erik. That means so much coming from you." Right about now he was rubbing his forehead and feeling the newly developed wrinkles there. He took to doing that as soon as I had pointed them out last semester. "Why don't I quit and you can just have my position?"

"Because I hate students," I growled as I walked up the stairs to the fourth floor of the fine arts center. Swicket's room was down the E wing. A scrawny boy descending the same staircase-who had the looks of freshman year about him-flinched at my tone and proceeded in hurried fashion. I think I heard him stumble down the last five steps.

"_You_ are a student, Erik," Nadir argued, "And have been for how many years? Which doctorate are you working on again?"

"I forget," my eyes rolled, "Not that it matters to you. I'll drop the _corrected_ test off in an hour."

I snapped the cell phone shut and admired Swicket's door. The same phrase had been painted onto the wood for years and every now and then someone would create a small uproar about it before they realized it was pointless. Swicket had been on this campus for as long as anyone could remember and the day administration got rid of him because of a single sentence on his door was the day the entire place went up in flames.

"Music: more important to God than sports."

It was, of course, an allusion to the increasing amount of money in the budget allotted to the athletic department while the pianos in the practice rooms downstairs hadn't been professionally tuned in two years. On a good day every now and then, I would venture down and do it myself, but good days come so very rarely for me.

I chuckled to myself before turning the knob. Today certainly wasn't going to be a good day for Christine Daaé either.


End file.

Phantom of the Opera, Angst, Romance