Chapter Nineteen: Meta and Potatoes

The headache had eased, and in its place, Lonny was developing habits that annoyed Erik exceedingly; that is, in addition to the habits she'd already had which had irritated him to no end. The two combined threatened to drive him to distraction, and it was to the oblivious phangirl's advantage that Erik had left his Punjab lasso behind long ago.

Now, she'd started following him around narrating everything he did. This wouldn't have bothered him quite so badly if it weren't for the fact that her spoken prose was biliously purple. She seemed to attach some arcane significance to everything he did, rendering his trip to the restroom deep and Freudian.

He decided to stay in there longer than was absolutely necessary, and only emerged when he heard her mutter something about his subconscious desire to return to the womb.

He whipped the door open.

"What was that?"

She was sitting on the hallway floor, back against the wall; she grinned up at him sheepishly. "I thought about being a psychologist," she said.

"Apropos of little." He tightened his grip on the doorknob.

"Well, mental health just didn't take."

Erik snorted. "A lucky break for the rest of humanity, then."

"Oh, probably," she agreed cheerfully, and pushed herself to her feet, holding on to the wall for support. "Anyway. He stood in the doorway, oozing deadly charm as though it were pus from a full-body wound."

"That's disgusting," snapped Erik.

"Absolutely outraged, contempt caused him to vibrate as though he ran on batteries."

"That's worse. Why do you continue to plague me, girl? Are not your cryptic remarks bad enough? Why are you following me around adding dialogue tags and terrible analogies to everything I say and do? Rest assured, I am aware of your limited writing skills. There is no need to prove anything to me."

"He orated, drawing himself up regally," said Lonny. She winced briefly at the look he gave her, and realized that as discretion is the better part of valor, so explanation is the better part of not-being-throttled. "It's just that I've been thinking."

"A rare enough occurrence, I imagine. Shall I order a commemorative plaque?"

"Oh, go plaque yourself," said Lonny, pleasantly enough. "Listen to me for a minute. It's just like I said. Your story's not over yet, right? You're still here, right?"

She had said that, Erik realized, though he was loathe to agree with her. Things were so much easier when he could view her as a mere dispensary of pills. As soon as he was required to actually remember everything that spouted out of her mouth—

"Possibly," he admitted.

Her eyes sharpened. "Possibly what?"

"Possibly all of that. Your point?"

She dropped her arms down by her sides. "You can be so rude, you know that?"

"You're hardly a paragon of polite upbringing yourself, young woman. Get on with it."

"Is it the post-migraine malaise? It happens to my mom, too. Do you need to take another nap? I can wait."

"Lonny," Erik forced out through gritted teeth, as patiently as possible, "would you just tell me what you're going on about without constantly being sidetracked? I am doing you the great honor of assuming there's something important beneath all your blathering. Please." A breath, so quiet as to be nearly inaudible. "Please do not disappoint me."

"Let's go sit back down," she said. "I don't want to just stand here outside the bathroom all afternoon."

Fuming, he followed her back to the dining room, where she settled into her chair again. Rather than her usual smile— the obnoxiously cheerful smile of a chronic ignoramus, he thought— her face was settled in serious lines. He was a bit disturbed to discover that, on the whole, he preferred the smile. Serious did not suit Lonny at all; her chin was too round for it to turn out well, and it threw her off-kilter.

She folded her hands in front of her.

"Everyone keeps going back," she said. "If I know my phanfic— and let me tell you, I know my phanfic— no one tells the story as it really is. I mean, they either tell the same old, same old— you know, masked musical genius, falls in love, soppy Vicomte, chandelier, blah blah. Everyone knows it backwards and forwards. Even if it's technically AU, it still follows the pattern. So it's either that, or it's some sequel that may or may not involve Christine coming to her senses and escaping an abusive Raoul to return to you and live in wedded, damp bliss beneath the Opera House to the end of your unnaturally-long lives." She frowned slightly. "Though, not as unnaturally long as it naturally turns out to be, which is— odd, to say the least."

"I have found this to be the case," Erik agreed. "Let's take it as read."

"Okay. Well. It's not like no one knows that you got brought into real life. I mean, I didn't know it, I guess— but my mom did. Which practically counts as me knowing. It maybe wasn't reported on in all the most reputable news sources, but I'm almost certain it showed up in the Enquirer."

She jumped when Erik growled.

"They offered me ten thousand dollars for an exclusive photo," he said. She raised her eyebrows.

"Ten thousand? Jeez. I'd be all over that."

"Without my mask."

"Oh." She paused, thoughtfully. "Well, I'd probably still be all over that, but hey. I am not you. You are not me. We are not each other." An impatient gesture startled her out of redundancies; she carried on. "So some people know that you're still around. It's a fact. Yet. Not one story I've seen has speculated on your life now; no one writes about what you're doing. Isn't that weird?"

"No," said Erik, and spread his hands on the table. "No, it is not weird. I'm real. I've been brought, as you say, to real life. Who writes stories about people in real life without express permission?"

Lonny snorted. "Oh, please. Don't tell me I have to introduce you to RPF."

"I cannot stand any more acronyms. Please don't."

"Let's just say that doesn't really stop people, okay? Seriously, draw a line for fangirls, and in ten minutes it'll just be a memory. Won't even show in the rearview. That's not my point. My point is, no one tells stories about you now. They're all concerned with the past. We need to put that behind us. Not to make a Lion King reference, or anything."

She waited for a quizzical glance from Erik, but received only an impassive stare.

"Don't tell me you actually watch Disney movies."

"Alright," said Erik. "I won't."

Lonny eyed him skeptically for a moment, then shook her head and resolved to move on. Clearly, that way lay only madness. She was close enough to it with Erik sitting all phantomy across from her. She didn't need to sign her own order of commitment by imagining him sprawled on a couch singing along with Timon and Pumbaa.

Or Scar. Oh my god. He would sound so natural singing along with Scar.

The next thing she knew, Erik was leaning over her, a strange variety of concern lighting his yellow eyes.

"Are you alright?"

"Whurr," said Lonny. "My— tongue feels really weird."

"You leapt up and started running in circles laughing like a maniac," Erik told her. "Then you ate six pickles, which may account for your tongue."

She appeared to have passed out atop the kitchen table, as well. She sat up and looked around her with a deep sigh.

"Madness," she said. "I knew it."

"Should I even ask?"

"Oh, probably not." She scrambled down, using his unwilling arm for assistance, and plopped into her seat once more. "Where was I? Oh yes. Writing. Writing things that are actually happening. Erik, we need to write about your present, not your past. Only by writing about your present can we move on to the future. Wow. That was deep. Wasn't that deep?" She got nothing from him. She settled for repeating herself. "I think that was deep. That was like Karate Kid deep."

Erik heaved a sigh.

"And somehow in this turmoil of nonsensical thought you've reached the conclusion that narrating my every action will somehow lead Christine into the land of reality?"

She blinked at him. "Did I say that?"

"In so many words, yes. While you were incapacitated. You also said it in limerick, which makes me wonder why I never thought to rhyme reality with causality and hilarity. Oh, yes, now I know. Because it makes absolutely no sense."

Lonny slapped her palm on the table, then winced.

"Right on," she said. "Write on, even. We've got a story to tell, Erik, and it's going to be all the harder because we won't be able to make bits of it up. We're going to write about your life in the here and now. We're going to speculate on the future. We're going to bring Christine to the land of the living, which rhymes with hand of the giving, curiously enough. No matter. Let's rock."

She got the impression that behind the mask there was a deeply furrowed brow.

"I thought we were going to write."

"I'll lead the way," Lonny sang, leaping to her feet and suiting action to word. He followed her down the steps warily, only wincing slightly when she was unable to escape the call of tradition and warbled, "Down once moooooooore to the dungeon of my blaaaaack de-spaaaaaaair—"

She shut up, at least momentarily, once she was seated again before the computer, fingers poised over the keys, eyes fixed on him. Erik subsided onto her bed, and put his hands on his knees.

He cleared his throat.

"Do you think we'll get many reviews?"

"Shhh," she said. "I'm thinking. How does one start the true, true story of the Phantom of the Opera in modern times? How does one encompass the scope of such epic epicness?"

"Hopefully with a better turn of phrase than epic epicness."

"Shhh," she said again, and turned to the screen.

Her finger moved, and having writ, there on the screen was the sentence:

The impossible happened.

She half-turned her head to look at him for a reaction, but Erik's glowing eyes were fixed on the words; his fingers hovered in the air momentarily before settling thoughtfully on his lips.

At length, he spoke.

"How deliciously meta," he said.

Lonny beamed at him. "I have never felt more proud in my life," she said. "You said meta."