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

4. My Only Love

I can't do this. I can't go through this pain a second time. I barely survived the first.

I hadn't noticed when my tears mixed with the blood that oozed from where my nails sank into the palms of my hands. The odd mixture slid down my arms and stained the white ivory keys.

"Mm, writer's block, huh?"

I whipped around to face Loki's nauseating voice and pointed a bloodied nail at him, "You shut your mouth or I will sew your lips together like Odin had done before."

Loki cackled, ignoring my threat entirely, "You are unbelievably irritable. Are you on your period?"

In a movement faster than Loki could predict, I stood from my place on the piano bench and shoved him against a wall, holding him there with my forearm to his throat, "Be glad that I am not on my period or else I would have killed you the minute I saw your rotting face on the roof." With a shove I released the wretch, refraining from spitting at his feet, "The only reason you're alive now is because no one else can take me back to 2015." I returned to my piano, my place of serenity.

A knock on the door called both of our attention. A woman's voice, Anita's, came from the other side, "Is everything alright, Alouette? I heard a noise."

Clearing my throat, I raised my voice slightly to make it sound more pleasant, "Everything's alright, Anita. I just...dropped something."

There was a pause, and then she replied, her voice unsure, "Alright. If you say so."

I waited for her footsteps to fade into the downstairs area before I glared at Loki and faced the piano.

Loki paced behind me, his dull green eyes studying me closely, his index finger tapping his grotesque lips, completely unfazed by my attack. To assist myself in ignoring him I muttered out loud to myself, "Was it a B?" I played the note and cringed at the sourness of it. "A?" the right note floated through the air, calming me, "It started on an A." I bent over the keys to write it in.

Loki stopped beside me, his eyes burning into my skull.

Taking a deep breath to calm myself I looked sideways at him and snapped, "What?"

Narrowing his eyes, he pointed at me with the finger that had been at his lips, "Sexual frustration. That's the only explanation I can come up with."

Forcing my voice to remain level, I finished writing in the A and the notes that followed it, "Can't you think of anything else other than intercourse?"

He smiled, a look of triumph on his face, "Sexual frustration. I knew it."

Annoyed, I let out a quick, heavy breath, "My irritability couldn't possibly be because you have trapped me in a time where all my most avoided memories took place, hm?" I arched a brow at him, my blue eyes wishing they could melt him into nothingness with their fiery gaze of hatred.

"Be honest with me, Alouette," he placed his right foot on the bench and rested his forearms on his knee, "after your first time - with me - exactly how many other times have you experienced...that?"

Without glancing at it I pushed his foot off of the bench and went back to trying to remember the aria I had written, ignoring his question. I played the first string of notes, scratching out one and replacing it with another.