405A/N-For some time I've been meaning to set up a section on my FFN account for the smaller pieces I've written for Phantom. These are completely unrelated to each other, just quick impressions, responses to writing prompts on Tumblr, requests from friends, short ideas that will probably never become full-length stories. They've been interesting to write, and I thought someone else might enjoy them, too. Please let me know what you think!
~Riene
Demons
2017
The mattress shifts as at last he lies down beside her, thin and weary. Christine rolls over into his embrace and he whispers into her hair I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Sleepily she wraps her arms around him, pulling him into her warmth and softness. She smells the cognac on his breath, another attempt to numb the voices in his head.
At one point it was morphine, she remembers, but as he aged the drug only made the hallucinations worse, a nightmare miasma of memories and pain and death.
Three days now he has been unable to sleep, pursued by the demons in his mind, laughing, jeering voices, the echoes of old injuries. Stiffly he has sat at the piano and played until swaying with weariness, only to force himself up again as his eyelids close in exhaustion. She has watched him play the violin until the fingerboard grows slick with blood, begging the music to drown out the sounds only he can hear.
She does not ask what eldritch horror he sees. The torment and anguish on his face is enough. She urges him to eat, but he can only pace, walking the corridors of the house, the streets of Paris, the underground labyrinth of catacombs and passageways of the city, trying desperately to flee from the memories that pursue him. Once he would seek out men to fight, that the adrenaline might flush away the torment, or with better luck he would not survive.
It is agony to watch, and she feels so young, so helpless in the face of such pain.
Her hands run down his body, caressing the flayed skin of his back, skimming over the sharp outline of his hip, holding the horror that is his face in her soft hands. "I love you," she whispers, and feels his body respond, a heat and hardness against her thigh.
He enters her roughly but she wraps arms and legs around him, holding him tightly and gentling his approach. "Slowly, my love," she murmurs against his throat, her lips working their way up to his jaw, kissing and hands caressing in the darkness. Her fingers brush back his thinning hair and smooth the ravaged side of his face, kissing the thin lips that gasp words of need, or desire, of love that only her ears will ever hear. She is here, her warmth and love enveloping him, reassuring him that this is reality. She shudders around him, crying out in her pleasure, and feels the shiver start in his spine. She holds him tightly as he presses hard against her with an inarticulate cry, shaking with the force of his release.
"Christine, you are my angel, my salvation, my life," he whispers brokenly.
Ruined face buried in her hair, he sleeps at last. He is safe, he is loved, and she will not let demons take him tonight.