After

by angelicdamnation

The events which follow the Masquerade Ball and the experience of an oft-forgotten character when confronted with the true music of the night. "I will play you Mozart, if you like, which will only make you weep; but my Don Juan, Christine, burns; and yet he is not struck by fire from Heaven..." One-shot. Lloyd Webber, Leroux, and a dash of Kay.

After

Author's Note:

Despite the fact that I have been working on the first chapter of a different fanfic for more than a year, now, I managed to write this oneshot in a single evening. Go figure. The premise was inspired by a fanfiction that I began writing back in 2013 but ultimately abandoned before I could write the scene on which this is based. Also, in retrospect, it might have been better to split this into two chapters, but I've never been one to listen to reason. ^^

This is written in a combination of the Leroux and Andrew Lloyd Webber musical universes, probably with dashes of Kay somewhere. Absolutely no 2004. Keep your eye out for Easter Eggs, by the way. They come from all kinds of places. I'll mention my favourite at the end. Happy reading!

-ad

oOoOo

"Your chains are still mine, you will sing for me!"
Sparks filled the air for the briefest of moments, and in a mighty whirl of crimson, the Phantom had disappeared, the echo of his fury still reverberating against the walls of the foyer like the voice of God.
For a moment that could have held an eternity, everything was still, until the Opera House hissed out the breath it had held and panic set in.
All around, masks were removed, discarded, trampled as a garish crowd of patrons and personnel bedecked in now-irrelevant finery blindly surged for the doors in search of escape. The sounds of hundreds of shoes and screams did nothing to muffle the memory of that voice which promised hell. No stranger to them was the sight nor sound of thousands of tonnes of crystal and brass plummeting downward, nor the sonorous snap of a man's neck as he, too, plummeted downward. No stranger to them was the Phantom of the Opera.
Indiscriminate of privilege and status, the attendees of the Bal Masqué fled as one into the dark of the Place de l'Opéra, calling for carriages, hailing brougham cabs, or simply dropping to the ground, too petrified to move further. The icy winter wind made no difference to them.
Within the Foyer, however, a small group of people remained, among them the managers of the Opéra, Mme. Giry and her daughter, Meg, M. Reyer, the Vicomte de Changny, and his fiancée, Christine Daaé, who had not moved an inch but to bring her hand up to cover her mouth as she stared frozenly at the spot where the Phantom had stood minutes before. This group did not include Carlotta Giudicelli, whom had seemingly fainted away on the Grand Staircase, nor her husband, Piangi, who was fanning her with his hand and studiously ignoring everyone else.
All other eyes were trained on Christine. The Vicomte stepped closer to her and put a hand on her shoulder.
Upon contact, she jerked violently away from him, giving a strange look toward the mirrors which lined a portion of the foyer.
"No, Raoul. Please."
To her right, Madame Giry gave an unexpected, strangled sob and without even a word to Meg, turned on her heel and rushed up the staircase in the direction of her office.
Raoul's eyes followed her. He whispered briefly to Meg, then set off in pursuit of Madame Giry, rounding the corner of the landing with a glance back at Christine.
Meg took a deep breath and stepped away from the banister. In a voice of very out-of-place calm, she called to the managers, who looked up from where they had begun muttering to each other feverishly.
"Monsieurs? Might one of you assist me in escorting Chri-... Mademoiselle Daaé back to her apartment? I'm afraid I don't have enough money for a cab."
Firmin mopped his brow with an unsteady hand and gave a pleading look to André, who sighed.
"Of course," he said shakily, then turned back to Firmin, who was gazing at him worriedly, all too aware of the commotion outside. "Do try to calm them, Richard. It wouldn't do for us to lose half of our patronage in one night twice..."
Firmin gave a tense nod and forced his legs to move in the direction of the door, fishing around the pocket of his coat for spectacles or a flask, whichever presented itself first.
André adopted a tight smile and joined Meg next to Christine, whose eyes had gone dull and whose body language was that of someone who wished very much to disappear. Her breath hitched, however, upon seeing what André held in his arms whilst he assured Meg that he would cover the cost of a carriage.
Following Christine's eyes, André became aware that he still held the finished score of his opera under his arm, which the Phantom had cast down to him, nearly knocking him over with the weight of it. Its leather-bound cover was the precise color of freshly spilt blood, bound with a black satin ribbon, tied in an absurdly perfect bow. The gold lettering on the front was simplistic, but glinted darkly in the glimmer of the many hooded gaslights.
Christine began to breathe very shallowly and urgently pushed past Meg to rush out the doors of the Opéra onto the cobblestones, where the sound of retching was only partially muted by the rest of the voices angrily speaking with Firmin.
Meg followed her out while André rushed over to where Monsieur Reyer had sunk against the marble of the banister during the commotion, staring fixedly ahead and seeming himself to be stone.
"Gabriel...please deal with this," André said to Reyer, dropping formalities and gingerly placing the score at his feet. "Mademoiselle Daaé requires a physician, it would seem. We will discuss...that tomorrow." He gestured toward the score. Then, without valediction, he hastened into the chill night air, broken by discourse and the sounds of wooden wheels and hooves.
Monsieur Reyer hesitated only briefly before getting to his feet. He felt years older than he had at the beginning of the Bal Masqué. He stooped to pick up the score, turned, and slowly began to climb up the marble stairs, staggering slightly under the sheer weight of the score. He wasn't much of a young man by any means, but was in relatively decent health. Still, his spectacles slipped to the end of his nose with perspiration by the time he reached the top of the stairs.
Seven-hundred pages of music, at the very least, he thought, trying to distract his mind from all that had happened in the last five minutes, which by his standards may as well have been a lifetime.

He had been conducting his chamber orchestra in the opening bars of the Danse Macabre, the twelve chimes coinciding with the midnight tolling of the New Year church bells throughout Paris, when gasps from all around the foyer interrupted the beginning of the solo violin tritones. All of the gas lamps sputtered and dimmed as if caught in an invisible wind. The violin itself hissed to silence as Reyer dropped his arms to turn around.
Standing at the top of the Grand Staircase was a hellish figure, cloaked in crimson from head to toe in the garb of a Spanish Cavalier, toweringly tall. Atop the figure's neck was a spectacular death's head, a white skull which leered from beneath the plumage of its feathered headpiece. One arm gripped a bound manuscript, while the other came from beneath the cloak, hand outstretched toward Christine, who stood at the base of the steps, motionless, the only person in the room not facing the nightmarish masquerader. The figure curled his long, pale fingers, beckoning to her, and like a marionette, she turned to face him.
He began to walk down the steps deliberately, every step louder than a gunshot in the silence, the bated breath of the Foyer. He spoke with a voice like darkness itself, powerful and pointed, descending the staircase like the Commendatore of Don Giovanni. Reyer could only see a hint of his lips behind the hinged jaw of his mask, but could see nothing of his eyes. There were no eyes.
He knew the voice, however. Its laughter had accompanied his nightmares of the chandelier crushing him. Yes, everyone in the room knew the voice...and everyone in the room was very aware that the voice knew them...

Shuddering off the memory, Reyer jolted himself out of his reverie. He had stopped at the top of the staircase, looking down at the smooth marble which bore no physical mark of the Phantom, but retained the chill of his presence all the same. Reyer continued to walk toward the unlit administrative wing of the Opéra, leaving behind the foyer, leaving behind the commotion which still persisted outside, and leaving behind Piangi and Carlotta, who had finally conceded to open her eyes with a huff after realizing no one was paying attention to her.
She slapped away Piangi's offer of assistance and clambered to her feet with fresh bruises to her lower back and ego. With a huff, she exited the building, muttering in Italian, Piangi trailing tiredly behind.

oOoOo

Monsieur Reyer's office felt uncharacteristically stuffy when he entered it, locking the door behind him, the beast of a score tucked beneath his arm. Fumbling for a match in his desk drawer, he lit one of the gas lamps above his desk, the flash of light illuminating the mounds of paperwork which covered the surface of his workspace. Notices, opera resumés, letters, heaps of sheet music with notes and corrections written in the margins, etc. were all crushed flat when he heaved the score onto the desk, nearly upending an inkwell upon impact.
Reyer sank down into his desk chair casting off his dress coat and unbuttoning his collar to seek relief from the heat. With a tired sigh, he opened a lower cabinet in the desk and pulled from it a decanter of brandy and a glass.
How he missed the days of the old management! In the past, the only cause he had for opening the decanter was when meeting with a potential new member of the company or orchestra, or ironically, greeting the new management. Since then, however, it had been fully emptied twice, once when Carlotta threatened to quit prior to the opening of Il Muto and Reyer found himself at his wit's end trying to persuade Piangi to persuade Carlotta to persuade her pride to permit her to return, and then again on the night the chandelier crashed. After helping to carry some of the wounded patrons and opera personnel from the wreckage, speaking with the gendarmes, and picking bits of crystal from his hair and mustache, Reyer had returned to his office to calm his nerves with a bit of brandy, which had turned into what was left in the decanter.
Tonight would be a similar night.
The Opéra was furnished with an office for the musical director, which was jointly connected to a sizeable rehearsal hall and a modest suite of personal rooms, respectively. Reyer resided in his own apartment in Paris, but since his late wife's death of a fever some years previously, he had taken to staying at the opera house on occasion.
Pulling himself from his thoughts, Reyer poured himself a slug and began to work off the obscene black bow from the front of the score.
Upon casting away the ribbon and opening the sheaf of pages, he discovered a title page written in red ink, with spidery, but not illegible, penmanship. Beneath the title was no name, merely the initials "O.G.". Following this was the orchestration page, mercifully written in black ink. It called for an expanded pit orchestra, beyond what Reyer typically staffed, with additional doubling in the woodwinds and a third trombone, among other additions. After this was a table of contents, and then the dramatis personae, which was accompanied by an unbound sheet of paper detailing a pre-made cast list, with Christine Daaé set as the leading lady opposite Piangi. Her name alone was written in the same crimson ink as the title page.
With a heavy sigh, Reyer turned to the first page of the libretto and glanced at the overture. His tired eyes quickly widened, then creased into a frown.
"Chromaticism from the initial downbeat?" He muttered, surprised.
With a quick sip of the brandy, he adjusted his spectacles, and began to examine the page more closely. From the very beginning of the piece, it was unconventional. Unnatural, even. It used a motivic whole-tone scale in many places, and was filled with atonal phrases.
Reyer was an accomplished pianist in his own right, and was no stranger to the more modern compositional trends, but still, he could not hear it in his head. It was too out of the ordinary.
With more curiosity than frustration, he rose from his desk chair, and tucked the heavy score under his arm once more. In the pocket of his waistcoat, he placed the small box of matches from his desk drawer. In his free hand, he took the decanter of brandy, disregarding the glass, and with that, he went into the dark rehearsal hall, depositing both the score and the decanter atop the piano.
As the rehearsal hall was just slightly too wide for a single gaslight to illuminate the music stand on the half grand piano, Reyer made a second trip back to his office for a small candelabra, which he lit and set atop the instrument, a short distance away from the brandy.
The hall was lined on one side with mirrors, and on the other, windows. The quarter-burnt taper candles flickered when one of the windows was flung open to allow in the frigid night air, but remained lit.
All was quiet when Monsieur Reyer sat down at the piano and raised the lid. Candlelight danced in the mirror and on the walls. Brisk, light wind fluttered the pages of the score.
Sleep could wait, thought Reyer. Unbeknownst to him, behind the mirror parallel to where Reyer sat, Erik was thinking the exact same thing as he sat back and crossed his legs, a black cloak over his thin shoulders. A rare, small, genuine smile played over the exposed side of his face.
Reyer's fingers trembled slightly as he drew a deep breath, gazing intently at the scribblings which made up the rehearsal piano scoring. Even the night breeze seemed to intone the faint word, "play".
He struck the first chord.

oOoOo

Sometime after seven o'clock the following morning, there was a knock on the door of the joint office of the management.
Firmin and André had already been in the Opéra for well over an hour, having met with a few patrons already, maintaining empty conversation in between. When they had arrived, respectively, nothing out of the ordinary remained to harken to the previous night, apart from a small cluster of beggars and urchins whom Firmin had encountered while walking along the Pavillion des Abonnés. They had fallen asleep against the east façade of the Opéra, all with upturned faces. In no mood for contention, Firmin had let them be, and merely stepped around them on the way to the main entrance.
Now, as they sat tiredly in their office, not enough coffee in in the city to soften their exhaustion, André muttered a half-hearted "Entrez-vous...", and the door swung open. They gaped at what lay beyond, immediately awakened.
In the doorway stood Monsieur Reyer. He was utterly disheveled. Collar open, sleeves rolled up, sweat stains beneath his waistcoat, which was unbuttoned. His spectacles drooped at the end of his nose and his greying hair was mussed, his face unshaven. He stepped over the threshold with a hint of unsteadiness, but his eyes were clear, though swollen, steely, and rimmed with red.
In one hand, he had a messy stack of parchment covered with untidily scrawled handwriting. He held this gingerly with his handkerchief. In the other hand, he held the crimson bound score. This, he dropped on Firmin's desk where the thud it made sent almighty ripples through the coffee cups of both managers. The leather cover was dotted with crackly splashes of dried white candle wax, and in some places, the crimson shone as if wet. Its pages were ever so slightly dog-eared.
As Reyer sat down, clearly having done without rest and smelling faintly of candle smoke and alcohol, André and Firmin poured out hurried questions about him, about the score, and about whatever they were supposed to do next.
After a long while and with deliberate pause, Reyer closed his eyes, inhaled, and cleared his throat. The managers went silent.
In an extremely hoarse voice, he said,
"It is terrible."
They blinked, stunned.
"It is absolutely, unequivocally awful," he said, and when Firmin began to scoff, he continued, cutting him off. "...and it is a masterpiece."
For a third time that morning, the managers were speechless.
"It is music with such fire, such... unimaginable hate and lust and violence... and yet utterly indescribable tenderness. I have never heard anything like it."
Reyer's voice remained hoarse but grew in intensity.
"It is music that...that should never have been made. Music that was never meant to be pulled from the air. It is... too much for the ears of men."
He was speaking more to himself than anyone now, and as he raised a hand to wipe a stray tear from his eye, the managers noticed that the pads of every single one of his fingers were rubbed raw and a few were gently bleeding. This was further evidenced by the fresh blood on the handkerchief he brought up to mop his brow as he continued.
"But he wants it performed, and as you can guess, he wants her, Mademoiselle Daaé, to perform it. And as I think we all know, gentlemen, there is no arguing with him, not anymore. Whoever...whatever he is, the Opera Ghost is a genius, and in more ways than one." Reyer drew a long sigh. "According to the note I discovered on my desk this morning, which I imagine I did not receive alone, we have exactly two months. He wants it performed at the beginning of March. Today, the clock begins to tick."

André cleared his throat. "We shall need to inquire at Crawford & Michél to have this etched and copied. We will need separate versions of the libretto and orchestral scores and..." He trailed off.
Firmin gave a dreadful sigh. "I suppose can see to that. It appears that we need a leading lady, however. If you do not mind paying her a visit? I understand she has not fully recovered from last night."
André murmured in affirmation.
"Then, gentlemen," said Reyer, standing. "I shall take my leave. If rehearsals are to begin within the week, I would like to sleep while the opportunity remains."
In spite of themselves, both managers chuckled.
"I have reviewed the score twice in full and have made notes over anything that I had ideas about or see fit for review. Feel free to examine them."
And with that, and a nod to the management, Monsieur Reyer left the office, collected his overcoat from his desk chair, and made his way from the Opéra.
Once outside, Reyer blinked in the light of the rising sun. The rehearsal hall had been brilliantly lit by the sunrise, but the shutters of the manager's office were drawn against their migraines and his eyes had to readjust.
Preferring to walk to his apartment to clear his head, rather than hail a brougham, he rounded the corner to the east side of the Opéra. There, a few metres in front of him, was a small congregation of homeless children and adults, dressed in rags, just beginning to stir. Many of them appeared to have fallen asleep looking up at the windows of the Opéra, the highest of which were glistening in the pale pink light of the new day, save for one which hung slightly ajar and refracted the light towards the Place de l'Opéra.
As he passed through them and beyond them, one of the urchins, a boy who occasionally assisted in the stables of the Opéra for a few sous, recognized Reyer. He stood up and called out to him.
"Please, Monsieur! Wait! Please! ...What is it called?"
All of the little group had perked up to look at him as he stopped.

He knew then that they had listened. They must have wept with him, burned with him, mere hours previously. Yet they did not even know what they had heard, though his own perception of music, cultivated over a lifetime, had changed in the course of just few hours.

Feeling the weight of everything that had been and everything that would be, like the score itself was pressing against his lungs, keeping him from standing straight and drawing a breath that was not anything but the dark music, he turned back to look at them, and said three words.
"Don Juan Triumphant".
And he walked on.

oOoOo

A/N

Free Easter Egg:

The violin tritone which follows the twelve pulses of the first three measures of the Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens is representative of Satan. In classical music, tritones were considered to be the Devil in music. Erik quite literally makes an entrance to the music of hell, and interrupts it. It's not quite as cool as BAAAH-BAHDAHDAHDAHDAAAAAAA but you get the point.

Please review and tell me what you think!