The Art of Manipulation || Phantom of the Opera & Loki the God of Mischief ||

4. My Only Love

A/N: I meant to post this way sooner but...work got in the way. So, to make up for it, here's a little Phantom Broadway doing "All I Want For Christmas Is You" to make up for it xD. Jeremy Hays is precious by the way.

Chapter Four || My Only Love

"Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,You may forever tarry." ~ To The Virgins, To Make Much Of Time by Robert Herrick

~*~

Loki's proposition - or as he called it: his game - ran through my mind for the rest of the day.

"Think of it as a second chance, Alouette." He had said, his voice dripping with invisible slime. "I am giving you a second chance to win the heart of your mortal crush. If you win that love," he paused, for dramatic effect no doubt, "you may stay here and live happily ever after. Until he dies of course. He will die, you do know that."

All I did was sit on the floor, holding myself tightly, afraid that, if I didn't hold myself, I would fall apart into minuscule pieces and blow away with the wind.

Loki continued, not truly caring for an answer to his last rhetorical question, "But if you don't win his useless heart, if he instead falls for Christine once again, you come home with me. You forget about him, you forget about your life here, and you give your heart...to me."

"No." I had said.

I had no chance at winning Loki's twisted game even if I did participate in it. Christine was everything to Erik, even before he realized that, before he fell in love with her and her voice. Christine was his redemption, his second chance. She was that firm foot that brought Erik's compass full circle. She was everything Erik strived to be: pure, sweet, innocent, unadulterated. Qualities that were forcibly taken from him long before any of us had heard of the Opera Ghost. Love works that way, does it not? We all love what we want to be. We fall in love with those people who have the qualities we are so desperate to have.

Erik couldn't love me. Perhaps I had a chance before, but not now. Not now that Time has robbed me of most of my purity and innocence. That's what Time does to our souls; it feeds off of them, sucks them dry with trials and experience that are mislabeled "Life". Time takes away the things we love most. Time took Erik from me, long ago. And yet, here he is now, alive once again. He is alive and I am dead, internally dead. No, he couldn't love me now. Not when I know that the love between Erik and Christine was destiny - is destiny.

I stumbled into my office on numb legs and sat down heavily on my piano bench. Trembling hands laid out the pages of empty sheet music, my left hand burning where Erik had touched me just moments ago.

That touch. That touch in Box Five that I had thought about over and over again, analyzing it, reliving it. It's funny how quickly such sacred memories can become your worst nightmares.

"If you want your little drummer boy to have his precious happy ending, you cannot leave. Not yet."

My shaky fingers dropped the pencil onto the floor when I attempted to pick it up. Forcing my fingers to firmly grasp it, I poised it over the blank page, the awaiting treble and bass clefs blurring from the tears building up in my bloodshot eyes.

"I believe you know why."

The pencil left a jagged mark on the pure page as it slipped from my hand and clattered onto the floor again. The instrument before me made an atrocious noise as my elbows sank into the keys, my face hiding itself in my clenched hands.