Like Father, Like Son | Phantom of the Opera

xxx. Be Strong, My Warrior

AUGUST 1921

ERIK

It was a beautiful day, perfect for a picnic, I realized, as I made my way over to Lara and Gustave's house. My son was out at one of the construction sites for a new building we had just finished designing, so Lara was alone and naturally, we decided to have lunch together. Gustave kept hinting that he didn't want her to be alone at the moment because she had been acting out of the ordinary as of late and I didn't like the worried look on his face when he asked, so I decided to double down and brought some of her favourite foods for lunch.

When I finally got there, I knocked and nobody answered. I checked my watch just to make sure I was on time and quickly started to get concerned when I knocked again and still received no answer. I then started thinking that she might have been upstairs and hadn't heard me knock, so I decided to go through the back gate to let her know I was there. The latch on the gate was simple enough and within moments, I was making my way to the back door and I was about to go in when I heard the sound of someone crying. I turned to find Lara kneeling in the gazebo in the middle of the yard with her face in her hands, so I put my basket down and practically ran over to her.

"What happened?" I asked urgently as I knelt next to her, quickly noticing that her hands were dirty with topsoil.

"What's wrong with me?!" she cried out.

I couldn't help but be terribly confused. "What could you possibly mean? Nothing is wrong with you, Lara."

"It happened again. I lost a baby again." She spoke so softly I almost didn't understand her, but the words, when I processed them, hit like a freight train and I didn't know how to react, so I simply hugged her close to my chest.

When I finally collected my thoughts, the only thing I could think of asking was, "Does he know?"

She didn't respond with words; she simply shook her head no, which made me sigh despite myself. "You shouldn't be going through this alone, Lara."

"But how can I tell him?!" she demanded, lifting her head from my chest in order to look me in the eyes. A piece of my heart broke when I saw her eyes; they were red and puffy from all the crying, but there was something more. There had always been such a stubborn resilience in her, but that seemed to be gone, and it hurt more than anything I could have imagined. "Why should I keep getting his hopes up that I will finally give him a child only to disappoint him a month later when I lose it?! I'm a failure of a wife; I am defective. He doesn't need more reason to believe that. If I tell him, he would leave me, and honestly, I wouldn't blame him. Look at these rose bushes. I plant one for each miscarriage. For every child that I couldn't keep. He'll never know, but I can never forget."

"You are not a failure, my girl; you are strong. Not many people can hold the weight of what you've been through. You are a warrior in every sense of the word; I've never seen more resilience in my life. Gustave loves you more than anything in the world, and he wouldn't want you to do this alone." As I spoke, I was wiping the tears away with my handkerchief along with some of the dirt that had transferred from her hands to her face. As I did, I looked at the four rose bushes lined up in front of us and felt a sense of numbness wash over me; the poor girl was being put through the wringer for no reason whatsoever.

"Believe me, it would take the entirety of both the British and French armies to get him to leave you, and even then, there is still an incredibly low probability of success for them," I continued. "You are worthy of this happiness, and once it has arrived, you will feel more joy than you have ever known. You just have to hold on, my girl. I speak to you as a father myself; while I never got to hold my son just after his birth, being able to see him grow up and hold him close when he needed me is the most beautiful thing I've ever experienced. You must hold on so you can experience that and so much more. It will be worth the wait; I waited for ten years, and I'm so glad I did."