Who: Sam (And the Phantom door) What: Narrative: Freaking out → Welding Where: Passages When: Todayish Warnings/Rating: Language. It's Sam.
Sam had been crashing at work since the morning after. Oh, she’d left a note, after crawling off the couch while Neil still slept - Work. Might be gone for awhile. Welding the door shut. P.S. That didn’t fucking mean anything. And, yeah, so it was a lie. And that was the problem. Sam had a husband across the country, a lover across town, and a long trail of bodies and sex that led way North and, until now, she had never given a shit about any of it.
Now she did, and that crap just was not going to work for her. No way.
She wasn’t going to do feelings. She was too tough for that and, whatever, it’s not like Neil had made any declarations about anything. Friends messed around all the time, and they’d both been drunk. Right? Right. And, if worse came to worse, she could always blame Christine. Christine, who’d been annoyingly fucking quiet since Paris. Oh, she was there; Sam could sense her. But the Victorian virgin hadn’t said a word, and Sam didn’t want her getting any ideas. Neil wasn’t Erik, and no one was going back to Paris, and that was final.
They could all go fucking crazy for all she cared just then.
So, she’d been crashing on Tristan’s couch, working around the clock on the exoskeleton, getting lost for hours in the detailed work of fingers and toes. Whenever she had a free minute, she found scrap metal, and she worked on the door. She’d set up her MIG in the hallway of Passages, and it took two full days to piece together enough metal to cover the fucking thing. Luckily, it kept changing while she worked, the door, as if it was taunting her - The Paris house, the Chagny Estate, the Opera House door, and even the side door that led down to the sewers. She ignored every fucking one, and she used the opportunity to weld enough metal to go around the largest version of the door that wanted to get them all killed. Oh, yeah, she’d personified the fucking door by this point. Whatever.
And then, she drilled the plate into the supports around the gateway to the Opera Ghost. Oh, she could still hear it changing, still hear the music and smell the scents of wax and candles and Paris, but the metal was securely bolted into the supports around the frame, and then it was welded there. No screws, nothing, and only another blowtorch would be able to uncover it.
The Phantom door was, effectively, gone - the only thing left behind was a smooth, sleek, thick slab of metal, one that blocked the door entirely.
She stepped back, and she examined her handiwork and she knew, she just knew. Despite what Aiden said, this was a bad fucking idea. Neil was probably right, and if she wasn’t so freaked about his existence in general, she probably would have reconsidered. But no, Neil was dangerous even without the door, and it’s not like she could fucking stop thinking about him anyway.
Christine would just have to deal. They would all have to deal.
She didn’t even let them know, though she pulled out her journal to tell them - Hey! Welded the door shut! Party at Aiden’s! - But no, she just tucked the fucking journal away and picked up her MIG. She had an exoskeleton to work on. Yeah, whatever, sure.