The Choices of Raoul de Chagny (Phantom/Love never Dies fanfic)

Friend and Father

...in which Gustave gets a bath...

Chapter 5. Friend and Father

It was really quite unseasonably hot. Christine fanned herself surreptitiously with the folded sheet of the ship's daily Gazette (a Toureg uprising in Mauretania; arrival of Crown Prince Wilhelm in Bremen; an unclaimed pearl bracelet to be found at the purser's office) and exchanged a smile with Mrs Cunningham, the little Englishwoman who was likewise leaning over the rail of the aft promenade beside her. Below them on the liner's stern decks, a boisterous game of quoits was going on, with much laughter among the younger contestants as an occasional larger swell sent a throw flying off-target; the Persephone had become a little more lively over the last few days, heaving through the long mid-Atlantic rollers, and Christine had been admiring the dexterity with which the attendants brought round trays of afternoon tea, handling china and silverware with as much ease as if the deck planking had not been slanting steadily from side to side beneath them.

Down below, young Selina Cunningham was taking her throw amid much solicitous advice from not one but two jostling youths a couple of years older; she made the cast with a schoolgirl squeak of triumph and turned to wave up at her mother, who was watching her with a smile. Still very much a nursery-party, Christine deduced with amusement, as another squeal announced the arrival of her own offspring along the upper deck at high speed.

She held out her arms, laughing, to catch Gustave as he flung himself around the corner towards her, and swept him round and up against the rail in a swirl of skirts, hugging the compact small body tight against her. Gustave grinned back, cheeks flushed and pink beneath the flying fair hair, and used the fall of one sleeve to wipe his forehead before she could prevent him. "Sorry, Mother, I can't stop — it's a chase—"

And he was off again like lightning, vanishing back up the far side of the ship with the inexhaustible energy of the very young.

Raoul, appearing light-footed in pursuit an instant later, was every bit as flushed in the face as her son, his hair damp and clinging; but he returned her an equally cheerful grin, mopping perspiration from his eyes with a pocket-handkerchief. "No tea, thanks—" as she held out an unused cup — "I've got a child eagerly waiting to be caught up with—"

"Do try to make sure he doesn't fall in," Christine said without thinking — in some part of every mother's heart, it seemed, her son was still a helpless infant — and received a look of oblivious masculine unconcern in return.

"As if any of us would dare, after one scolding from old Mathilde. Why, the time I fell in the lake..."

But the nostalgic tone trailed off, and after a moment he sighed, unexpectedly. "I wish she could be here now — Mathilde."

It was not the sun and the sea that she thought he had in mind.

"So do I." She slipped her hand briefly into his. "So do I. We owe her so much."

A son, a husband... It was Mathilde's calm sense and refusal to pass judgement that had held Raoul together in those last few months, when her own attempts to reach him had only lacerated them both; and it was the shared de Chagny nursery experience — twenty years apart — that had formed the first tentative bridge between her husband and the stranger's child whom as his own son he'd always resented.

But Raoul had set himself, a little awkwardly, to make overtures: Gustave, blossoming in the unaccustomed attention like sun after rain, had launched into enthusiastic anecdote. Twenty minutes later she had come back to find her son with one hand tucked confidingly into Raoul's own, listening enthralled to a hesitant account of evading Mathilde's vigilance in order to slip into the stables at night. And twenty minutes after that, Gustave had evidently succeeded in insinuating himself into the crook of Raoul's arm, a position which — judging by the blissful satisfaction of his expression — he had long been envious to attain: the two fair heads were bent close together over the workings of his grandfather's prized repeater, which had been one of the young Vicomte's most hallowed boyhood possessions. Christine still remembered the awed air with which the small Raoul had first displayed to her the intricate mechanisms of the watch, that summer at Perros; she had barely dared do more than stroke the burnished case with one finger. She could only imagine the joy with which her mechanically-minded son must have discovered the potential of such an object.