Hi there!

It's been awhile since I last wrote anything...I've been working on multiple fics at once, because I'm ADD like that. Lately I've been working on my two Hobbit fics I've got going simultaneously, which is always fun.

And in case any of you are wondering, yes, Comfort and Care is still in the works. I just have to think of an ending that will do it justice.

This little brainchild was thought up, like many of my brainchildren, in the early hours of morning after much wine and chocolate because I'm classy like that (Not really. It was I-got-my-paycheck-day.)

Oh, and this story is very meta. Gaston Leroux is a main character. Where the hell do I get these ideas?

So in order to keep with the timeline in which the book was originally published (1911? Correct me if I'm wrong), the events have been bumped up about a decade. And so begins a lovely mishmash of ALW musical/Leroux-verse with the possibility for some elements of Kay later on.

Oh, goody.

1906

On the day Christine de Chagny's obituary appeared in the newspaper, my mother screamed. The news had come as quite a shock. She had not heard from her old friend in decades, ever since they were in the corps de ballet together at the Paris Opera. Christine de Chagny was known as Christine Daae then, the orphaned daughter of a famed violinist. She had a brief span as the Prima Donna before disappearing from the public eye forever. She married the Comte de Chagny and that was the last that my mother, Meg, ever heard of her. She remained at the Opera until she met my father, and then after he died, being years out of practice, she gave up dancing altogether and purchased a ladies' clothing shop. When I came of age, I went there to work with her—she a milliner and I a seamstress. She loved to regale me with stories about her days at the Opera, the fanciful scenery, the opulence, the feeling of being part of society-though she really wasn't.

But more often than not she told me about Christine, her dearest friend. They were the closest in age of all the ballet rats, and as Grandmere had taken Christine on as a second daughter, they spent a great deal of time together. But suddenly, she'd told me, when Christine was nearly seventeen years old, she became enamored with the Comte Raoul de Chagny—a childhood friend—and went away with him and got married. There had been no communication between her and my mother since. Of course, the de Chagny family would consider it an impropriety for a member of their family to be corresponding with a lowly ballerina. And now, decades later, as a lowly shopkeeper, my mother could not even attend the funeral.

"Ninette!" my mother's frail voice resounded through the house with more force than I'd heard in years. "Ninette!"

Thinking I'd find her collapsed on the floor, I raced from the kitchen where I'd been peeling vegetables for dinner to find her sitting rigidly still in her chair, one hand upon her cane, the other with a lace-edged handkerchief pressed to her mouth. A newspaper lay in her lap, its loose pages sliding to the floor. She looked up at me, and slowly she moved her hand from her cane and removed her spectacles, dabbing at her eyes with the handkerchief.

"Christine has died." she said flatly. The gravity in her voice shook me to the core.

"Oh, Mother, I'm sorry." I said, gathering up the sheets of newspaper and putting them aside. "Is there any chance…"

"No, no. You know as well as I that I would not be welcome at the funeral. Besides, how would I get there? The de Chagny estate is all the way in Lannion, and I'm in no condition to travel."

She had recently had trouble with breathing, and the doctors had told her to stay still as much as possible, a near impossible feat for her. Though she was growing old, she had never lost the energy she had possessed in younger years.

"And it would bring back memories…not all good ones." she added quietly, after a minute of silence.

"What memories?" I asked, before I could stop myself. I should not agitate her and make her restless. She had enough troubles.

But with that one sentence uttered, she replaced her spectacles and looked me squarely in the eye with not a trace of the tears that had been there moments ago. "Ninette, what I am about to tell you, you must swear to keep a secret. I've kept it secret long enough, but I feel as though if I hold my tongue any longer, I'll burst."

"All right."

"First of all, I am not saying this to slander Christine's name. But what I am going to tell you is that Raoul was not the only man in her life. There was, for a time, a mysterious voice that Christine claimed to be the voice of the Angel of Music. It spoke to her, and her alone. We all thought her mad, until we put two and two together and determined that her Angel was also the Opera Ghost, an entity which frightened patrons and performers of the Opera alike. But this entity was not an angel or a ghost…he was a living, breathing man, and his name was Erik."

"Why didn't you ever tell me this?" I wondered incredulously. She had gone over the aspects of her days at the Opera in the most meticulous of detail, but she had never once mentioned any Opera Ghost…or anyone named Erik, for that matter.

"You must understand," she said, leaning forward, never breaking her piercing gaze. "This is not a story to tell a child."

"I'm hardly a child anymore, Mother."

"I know…I just…I could never really bring myself to tell you. It haunts me to this day. Erik played the role of a spirit quite well, but not all of his tricks were harmless. People died by his hand. But he was brilliant. Under his ever-watchful eye, the Opera flourished. He had impeccable taste in the arts, and the managers trusted his judgment entirely. He saw details that no one else did. He was even given a salary. But all this he did unseen. He communicated with the managers only by note, and few ever saw him."

"Why?"

"He was purported to be hideously ugly. One of the few who claimed to see him was a stagehand by the name of Joseph Buquet. He loved to frighten the ballet rats with stories, but this was his grandest. Girls fainted from the mere description."

"Well, go on. Now I'm curious." I said slyly, sinking down in a chair opposite her.

"He is mostly bald, the only hair on his head seems to be behind his ears. And he has no face…merely a skull with perhaps a hint of a face. His skin is ashen and thin, stretched over his bones like parchment. His eyes—sockets hidden beneath a massive brow, and only visible in the dark, where they glow yellow. And his nose—he has none. There is only a hole where a nose should be. A lipless mouth reveals crooked teeth. Overall, he is tall and lanky—skeletal, and his clothes hang off his emaciated form." She recited, as though from memory. The whole time she had been staring off into the distance, as if he were standing behind me.

I must admit, I was a bit taken aback by this vivid description. It must have showed, because in the next moment my mother had straightened a little and fixed me again with that steely gaze.

"I never saw him, of course, so I have no idea whether or not this is true. I asked Mother about it once, and she said it was fairly accurate. She was the one who rescued him from a traveling fair. What she described to me of his condition was awful…afterwards, I did not pester anyone for stories of the Ghost."

"Why would you feel sorry for him?" I asked, a bit insensitively, I knew.

"The poor man…he was brilliant. A genius, really. You could see it in the production value—as I mentioned he served as something of a consultant. And if he could do that much, just think…he could have done so much more. But whatever genius he had was confined to the walls of his home somewhere deep beneath the opera house, where no one would ever see it. He could have been great…if only he'd been born with a normal face I have no doubt he'd have been one of the greatest minds of the age. He'd have had the entire world in the palm of his hand if he wanted. But he didn't. Can you guess what he did want?"

It was hardly a guess at this point. "Christine?"

"Exactly. He tricked her into thinking that he was the Angel of Music, sent by her departed father. And poor, naïve Christine believed him. I have no doubt he was well-intentioned, but the man had no morals. He didn't consider her thoughts at all, or that she might love someone else. In his mind, she must love him, and only him. And she did, but it was not passionate love. She loved him as a mentor. Over and over again he tried to get her to love him, securing higher and higher positions for her until she was the Prima Donna. But it was all for naught. She loved Raoul, and that was that. Erik was heartbroken."

"Why are you telling me this?"

Mother gave a heavy sigh as she stood up, leaning on her ebony cane for support. "Don't you see? It was Erik who drove Christine and me apart. If he hadn't scared her, I've no doubt she would still have come to Paris now and then. But I suppose, because of him, she didn't want anything to do with her prior life. And to think, we were like sisters." She glanced at me, and I could see once again that tears clouded her eyes.

She said no more, and it was the last we talked of it for quite a while.

That night, I wrote down all that Mother had told me in a little book I kept in my nightstand drawer. It was meant to be a diary, but I had never been good at keeping them. And besides, this was far more interesting.

So, yeah, chapter 1 was kind of a boring, synopsis-y thing. The plot should be gotten to by the end of chapter 2.

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