Disclaimer: The characters, the opera house, and the reason everyone is standing in the courtyard as the latter burns, are not mine.

Author's Note: This, my first POTO fic, is set just after the conclusion to the movie version. The relationship between Madame Giry and Meg intrigued me, and so I wanted to play with it a little. The result is what follows. I hope you enjoy and reviews, especially constructive criticism, are always welcome! Thank you.

Après La Fin

by Imagination Obsessed

Antoinette Giry, like many others, did not sleep the night the Opera Populaire burned. Dawn found her standing erect, motionless amidst her dancers, many of whom had succumbed to the sandman despite the stresses of the endless night. With a curiously vacant, or perhaps simply numb, expression on her face, she watched the chaos around her as workers rushed about with water, wood, tools. Surely they couldn't be rebuilding already? She could still see tendrils of inky smoke rising to stain the pale morning sky . . .

Beside her, her daughter was staring into the ruins with her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped tightly around them. Her head was tilted to the side, resting her cheek against her knee, and her eyes were heavy and underlined with bruise-blue curves. "Maman," she said softly, not taking her eyes from the opera house. "What do you think happened to Christine?"

Antoinette heard the fragility in her daughter's voice and craved, like any mother, to soothe it away. But what could she say? What words of comfort could she offer when she knew no better than anyone in that courtyard what had unfolded in the caverns below? Just as ignorant as everyone else, just as anxious as her daughter, Antoinette could do nothing but reach down and pat Meg on the head. "I don't know," she said quietly, guilty for not inventing some pacifying fiction, even though she knew that Meg was too old and too bright to be lied to successfully.

Meg's shoulders heaved with a sigh. "I hope her and Raoul . . ." she trailed off, but it wasn't imperative that she complete the thought. Antoinette understood well both the wish and the fear that voicing it would somehow make the opposite come true.

Meg rested her chin on her knee and Antoinette's heart loosed a warm vibration of sympathy for the little girl, her little girl, who had lost so much in her short life. First a father, now a best friend and, possibly, a home.

As these thoughts passed through her mind, they brought up faces from the past, faces she knew were better left untouched until she had greater control over her emotions. However, once the barrage began, it wouldn't stop. Christine, Erik, the Viscount, her late husband, her own Maman and Papa, her sister . . . The faces continued appearing, a litany of everyone she had ever lost, and soon she felt her sympathy melting into self-pity. Then hardening into rage, at herself, at Christine and Erik, at the Viscount, at her late husband, at the cruel forces of nature, forces of heaven and hell, which seemed particularly fanatical about destroying everything either Giry gave her heart to. Tension trembled in her arms and stiffened in her back, as Antoinette blinked back angry, helpless tears and attempted to swallow the rock in her throat. Non, non, she couldn't lose control now. She had to reign in her anger before it forced her into an action her rational self would balk at or, even worse, gave way to the paralyzing grief she could feel ready to consume her.

"I went down," Meg blurted, distracting Antoinette from her inner war. She hadn't exactly heard what her daughter had confessed, but she knew, whether through a mother's instinct or pure observation, that her self-control was about to be tried again. "I - after you took Raoul, I tried to hold people back -" Antoinette felt a flush of pride, but it faded as Meg continued "- but the mob . . . I couldn't . . . They were so strong, so determined, Maman, and I was so curious and worried myself. If Christine was still down there, I . . . I wanted to help her . . ."

No! The caverns, they were practically a dungeon, and rich with Erik's wild traps. Nightmare scenarios rushed Antoinette's consciousness, and she felt the staccato against her ribcage, felt the churnings of her gut at the images of what could have happened down there. Exploring a madman's sanctuary with an angry mob, while the theater above burned and crumbled! Antoinette fumbled for her cross, said a silent pray of thanks and apologies to whatever saint had been watching over her foolish child.

She took a deep breath, but it did not calm her. "Marguerite Anne Giry," she hissed, bending over so that her face hovered only a few inches above her daughter's. "I have forbidden you from ever setting foot down there, and for good reason! There are traps hidden around every corner - even I no longer . . ." She closed her eyes, took another deep breath, stomped down the urge to lecture until another time. "You should not have done that!"

"But Maman, I wasn't alone-"

Antoinette shook her head in disbelief. "No, no, you were with a mob of angry fools! Do you think that they could have protected you from a trapdoor, Meg? Do you think that they would have even noticed if something happened to you?" Exhaling deeply and quickly, Antoinette suddenly stood up straight, turned her eyes from her daughter's cowed face, and bit back her anger. Now was not the time for a lecture, nor for a punishment, and if she didn't stop herself her anger would only grow and smooth the way for all of her other emotions to surface. She clenched her abdominals, stiffened her neck, and stared at the singed front of the opera house with narrowed, tempestuous eyes.

"Maman -"

"No, Meg. We'll continue this later." Her lips compressed into a narrow line, Antoinette looked back down at her daughter. "Not another word."

Meg's head fell back to her knee and her eyes returned to the action around them, which was picking up as daylight brought more helpers from the surrounding workshops and more gawkers from the surrounding homes. Those dancers who were awake were talking in quiet voices, likely gossiping over the mother-daughter exchange they'd just witnessed.

Antoinette let the silence between her daughter and herself stretch while she tempered her anger and calmed her nerves. The thought of little Meg anywhere near the monster Erik had become made her shudder, but Antoinette was surprised to feel her rage melting quickly into understanding, for would she have behaved any differently were she in Meg's skin? Would she have been able to abandon her dearest friend?

Coldness, quick and sharp, ran through her like blood. That's exactly what she had done, when she gave up Erik's secret, when she led the young Viscount down the staircase. She had abandoned the boy she had once protected, once loved and nurtured, once mothered.

Mais non, she knew that was not entirely true. For she had not abandoned him, though she often thought everything might have been better if she had. In honesty, he had abandoned her. As he grew and needed her less, as he dove deeper into obsession and cultivated his persona, he pushed Antoinette away. By the time she'd married and left the Opera Populaire to raise a family, Erik was on his own, cloistered in his caverns and succumbing to his madness. And after the passing of her husband, when she returned to teach, Erik was no longer the boy she had rescued, no longer the tortured, pitiable creature she had loved as a girl. No, by the time she returned he had become the Phantom of the Opera, feared and revered for his mystery and his apparent omniscience.

"Meg," Antoinette said, her anger at her daughter vanquished for the time being and her recent thoughts piquing her curiosity. "What did you see?"

Meg looked up quickly, her forehead creased, her eyes questioning. Glancing back at her eavesdropping comrades, she pushed herself to her feet and, keeping her eyes fixed on Antoinette's face, spoke softly: "It was eerie, Maman. There was a cavern, half-flooded . . ." As she described wheat she had encountered in the sanctum of the Opera Ghost, Antoinette closed her eyes, comparing the sketch her daughter was giving her to her own memories of that same room from years before, back when it did not bear such obvious stains of madness.

"Madame Giry! Excuse us, Madame!"

Antoinette's eyes flicked open and Meg aborted her description mid-sentence, just as she began to speak of broken mirrors. The managers were hurrying towards her, which she found vaguely amusing since there was very little need to be rushing about when the opera house had already burned.

"Madame," Andre spoke, while Firmin nodded in greeting, first to Antoinette and then to Meg, who curtsied politely but did not retreat from her mother's side.

"Messieurs," Antoinette greeted them both, sliding her eyes from one face to the other and taking a shard of pleasure in the way they seemed to squirm under her gaze. Andre glanced at Meg, obviously expecting her to withdraw, but she did not seem inclined to do so on her own and her mother foresaw no need for privacy. Apparently, and correctly, figuring it unwise to give direction to any of Antoinette's dancers, and especially to her daughter, Andre looked purposefully at his partner, who took his cue surprisingly quickly and began to speak.

"The fire's out, or nearly so, and it didn't spread much beyond the theater itself. All the residences and whatnot are smoky, but still intact and habitable." Likely wishing he was still in the "scrap metal" business, Firmin spared a glare over his shoulder at the smoldering opera house. "Unfortunately, it'll be quite some time before we're able to reopen."

"I figured as much, Monsieur," Antoinette stated, her eyebrows raised expectantly. Surely they had not come over just to tell her what she could obviously deduce.

"Right, well," Andre began, "there's also the matter of Miss Daae . . ." He let the sentence hang open, obviously hoping Antoinette would finish it for him. However, all it took from her was a pointedly irritated sigh and he picked up where he had left off. "You don't happen to know anything about that, do you, Madame?"

Antoinette knew that, as managers, they deserved to know the history of the man who had ruined their investment, but the idea of recounting that tale again so soon enervated her completely. "Monsieur, I know nothing," she claimed, watching them exchange a disbelieving look, but before they could question her further, as they were obviously bracing themselves to do, she turned to her dancers and gestured for them to rise, which they did with a graceful obedience marred only slightly by fatigue and anxiety. She looked back at Andre and his comrade. "If you say the dormitories are sound, Messieurs, I think it best my dancers returned to their rooms. It has been a long night for us all."

Their mouths opened vacantly, then closed again and they seemed to resign themselves to the fact that they would get no information from Antoinette at present. "Yes, right. Of course, Madame."

"Straight to your dormitories, then," she commanded her pupils, then, settling her eyes on Andre: "If there is nothing else, I would like to accompany my students."

To their credit, both men accepted defeat well, for they bowed away, leaving mother and daughter standing side by side in front of the wreckage of the Opera Populaire. For a long moment, they simply looked at it, absorbing it into their minds and souls like the visage of a departing loved one.

"Come along," Antoinette said finally, taking off at a rapid pace toward the entrance which would lead them quickest to the residences. Meg scampered to catch up, and then fell into step beside her mother.

"Maman, what's going to happen now? I mean, without the stage, or Christine, or the patron?" Her voice held the brittle edge of a frightened child's, and Antoinette could neither suppress nor deny the sudden waves of maternal devotion and tenderness it elicited from her breast.

"Now we pick up the pieces," she said, taking her daughters hand, "and we rebuild."

For what choice did they have? It was the responsibility of the survivors, the duty entrusted to those who remained when the sun set, when the curtain fell. The Girys, and all those around them, had been charged with the task of re-construction, not only of the Opera Populaire, but of their lives.