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Christine was thirteen when her father began coughing up blood. She wrapped her mother’s red scarf around his neck and helped him drink warm broth to warm him. He had known he was dying long before she had accepted it, though.
Doctors called it consumption. For people of their social status, there was nothing to do but sit and wait while the disease wasted his body away to nothing over years. Her father would say that at least, his death wouldn’t be sudden like her mother’s was. There was time to say goodbye, reach closure.
For Christine, there was never enough time to say goodbye.
Even when he wasted away to the point he could no longer play his violin. It felt so horribly selfish to still want him there at that point, when he only seemed half-alive, but Christine couldn’t bring herself to pray for a quick death for him, either.
She was eighteen when he breathed his last, still promising to send her an angel from heaven to bring her music back. Had it not been for the kind Valeriuses, he would have been laid to rest in an unmarked pauper’s grave. Instead, she had a headstone to visit each year and try to say goodbye again.
When she thought Erik dead, she couldn’t grieve. Not with Raoul excitedly making plans to put their past behind them and starting their newly married life. It seemed almost obscene, to cry into her pillow at night, wishing for the man who had almost killed her fiancé.
She had no grave to say goodbye to. From what she could gather, her former teacher lay in a criminal’s grave, unmarked and unavailable to the public. A part of her knew that, in a sense, that was a kindness; there was no way for someone to dig up his body and put him on display after death.
Still, she clung to the thought of that one night they shared on the roof of the Palais Garnier. Even though he had left, maybe that one night he had gotten to experience a semblance of happiness for once in his life before the end.
But oh God, how she had betrayed the man she was to marry now.
The fact that her cycle was a week late by the time of her wedding didn’t help much, either.
By the time the Raoul she had known as a child was dead, killed by a poisonous concoction of alcohol, gambling, and anger, she had no more tears left to cry. A part of her knew she must deserve this, this must be God’s punishment for her choices. Even though she had thought they were the right ones at the time.
A part of her was glad that God’s wrath must be directed towards her. She didn’t know what she would have done had it been directed towards Erik’s son instead.