Hi everybody! More Phantom fanfiction, aren't we all excited? This popped in my head while reading Phantom of the Opera and so I jotted it down. I know it's not very long, but I hope you enjoy it.

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There is a little girl sitting in a room with her father. The girl is perhaps about three years old and her father wears a white porcelain mask. She's playing and he's writing music, both of them amicably silent.

The little girl looks up and grins when her mother enters the room with tea. Mother places the tray on a side table, kisses Father's exposed cheek, squeezes her daughter's arm, and leaves. Nothing is said. This family rarely talks.

While her papa pours tea the little girl asks a question. "Papa, can you tell me how mama was before?" The man's eyebrows pull together in confusion, although the child does not realize what affect her question has had.

"Before what Angelique?" She put down her doll, one that looked like her much to her pleasure, and climbed into her father's lap.

"She wasn't like this forever, was she?" And then she simply blinks.

Erik knew his daughter noticed details and was insightful, paid attention, but this floored him. He hadn't thought she would notice her mother's state. He sighed, put the tea cup down, let his daughter snuggle into his side, and began the story.

"When your mother began singing here, I was enraptured. She was twenty and had just graduated from the conservatory for music. I was thirty-five. Even though she'd had lots of lessons she lacked soul. Does that make sense?" Angelique had grown up in an opera house and listened to plenty of singers. She nodded fervently.

"I therefore began giving her lessons in her dressing room. She vastly improved and after several pulled strings became primma donna." The little girl burst into a smile. Her father frowned distantly.

"But then she fell in love with someone else. The Viscount of Chagny was a patron here and they'd known each other as children. I was madly in love with her though, and did everything I could to keep them apart. I brought her down here once and...convinced her to be my wife. I wanted her, needed her, and kept her to myself—at least until you came along." He paused and tickled her, sending peals of laughter echoing through the dungeons.

"She wasn't happy though. Music used to make her ecstatic, but after being down here too long, she wilted. Once a rose is planted in earth and knows sunshine, it cannot get used to darkness. Your mother lives here, goes about her duties as caretaker and wife, but she does not achieve her full potential. I caged the songbird in the hopes to keeps its melodies for myself, and succeeded only in silencing it."

The little girl pondered this story for a moment. "Then why don't I wilt Papa? Am I not a rose?" He smiled in the way fathers smile at their daughters and shook his head.

"My angel, you are a lily. You were planted and are growing in shade, but one day you will bloom and be the most radiant of all." She grinned, kissed her father's face, and scampered away. The lovechild of joy and sorrow, the happy offspring who didn't understand her mother's depression and father's haunting. She knew she was loved, happy, and wanted nothing more than to stay in the basement of the opera house for forever. And so she would.