Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
The Opera House
No.
The word still rang on Meg's ears, echoing off that empty living room as the masked man who had spoken it turned his back on her. In her mind, Meg had replayed the conversation leading up to that moment a thousand times. She had gone over hundreds of iterations, of small changes, of anything really that might have changed the outcome. She had gone over what were, in the end, little more than maybes.
Maybe if she had reached out as he left and stopped him.
Maybe if she had insisted just a little bit more.
Maybe if she had sang. Maybe if she had he would have listened.
In the end, however, no matter how Meg went at it, not matter what scenario she managed to conjure up in her mind, it always felt like it didn't matter, that her question would always have led to the same word, to no, to the man who had spoken it turning his back on her and leaving. Even now, as she went around the Opera's auditorium, picking up fragments of broken, burned wood and dumping them in the bucket she carried, the answer felt like a condemnation. An end. And the truth was that she hadn't insisted, she hadn't sang, she hadn't stood her ground. Instead, she had taken the cape he had offered her and gone down the perfectly varnished wooden stairs outside the front door. Down one floor she had gone, then another, until she moved down an atrium flanked by mirrors and found herself stepping into Boulevard Haussman, the large avenue leading directly to the back of the Opera.
So, bucket in hand, picking up what looked like the lower half of a chair's leg lying right over this nasty burn on the rug covering the floor, here Meg was again. Back home. Back at the auditorium. Back to being surrounded by ballerinas and stagehands and the Opera's maintenance staff — which might as well be everyone today, Meg surely wasn't the only one tossing debris into a bucket. She was far from being the only one doing something so far removed from her usual job while dressed in whatever clothes had survived the fire that the scene down at the audience side of the auditorium, looked exactly like the stage curtain was about to be pulled up for an opera to start.
A strange opera that would be though. Half the ballet dancers on their costumes from Don Juan. A few stuck on the colorful ones from Il Muto. There was even someone walking around in Hannibal's armor. As for Meg, as much as she would rather have kept the trousers and shirt from last night, those were drying on a clothesline on the backyard, so here she stood in a white silk skirt and leotard picking up burned wood while the bearer of Hannibal's armor went by with one of the surviving chairs.
It was kind of ridiculous.
It was so ridiculous in fact that a good-humored gleam had taken over Meg's eyes. She was leaning to her right now, turning with a smile. Both that and what she was about to say, however, faded the moment she looked to where Christine would have been, to where only an empty space remained.
Meg shook her head, picked up her half-filled bucket and moved a few steps forward, towards a group of scattered debris that were still on the floor.
Right.
Christine had left.
How Meg had forgotten that, she did not know. Also, if her friend was ever to come back here, she wouldn't be found with a bucket and picking up some lady's lost shoe — like Meg had just done — she would be up there in the boxes, watching the plays, looking down at that stage she had commanded with her voice and someone else's dream.
His dream.
Music.
It was Meg's dream too.
No.
Meg brought both her hands up, slapping them against her own cheeks the very moment that word in a raspy male's voice again erupted inside her head. This time, however, she wouldn't have time to follow that up with another of her make-believe scenarios. She wouldn't even have time to chastise herself for going at it yet again, when it was more than enough already! The truth was that she hardly could when Sorelli had just let out a horrified shriek and sent Meg's attention flying away from the mortal remains of the shoe she had picked up and to the group to her left.
"Your face!"
And so to Sorelli. Beautiful, raven haired Sorelli who was still downing her black dress from Don Juan, who had been busy cleaning one of the surviving and previously disassembled audience chairs with a wet cloth, who was now barreling down on Meg like heaven's fury itself.
As for Meg, if looking down at her hands and the soot clinging to them had given her quite the image of what had just happened to her face, that wet cloth Sorelli was brandishing, dirty as it was, made it very clear what would happen to it if Meg hadn't just grabbed the chair off the Hannibal-dressed stagehand and put it straight between the two of them.
"Don't you dare!" Meg exclaimed.
"Come on, Meg!" Sorelli despaired, trying to go around the chair Meg kept putting in her away, the cloth dripping soot filled water all over the burnt carpet. "If I don't clean that, it will never come off!"
"Now, I really want you to use that thing on me!"
A chuckle broke from somewhere among the large group Sorelli had stepped away from, then outright laughter consumed it as Sorelli managed to bypass the chair by throwing herself into it and Meg bopped the tip of her nose in self-defense.
Well, supposed getting sot on her own face and on Sorelli's nose was a small sacrifice for the laughter now echoing up the auditorium. The truth was, there was little to laugh about. The Opera's infamous ghost had his house back at Boulevard Haussman smelling of varnish and paint, smelling new and about as unlived as it looked. The Opera House, on the other hand, had always been an amalgamation of scents — of candle wax and expensive perfumes and tobacco. But that was the thing. The Opera had been like that. Now all that was left was the acrid smell of burned wood. Worse than the smell, however, was seeing what the building had been reduced to.
Right this moment, having completely evaded Sorelli and left her vigorously scrubbing the tip of her nose with that cloth — something that was going as well as Meg had feared — Meg stood in the center of the pit, looking around the stalls, and at the voluptuous golden statues framing the boxes.
For what was usually the quietest part of the Opera, this place looked particularly crowded today. It also looked relatively well, despite the piles of broken chairs pushed against the walls. Or, at least, that was the case until one looked up to the broken dome or the stage. The worst of the damage, however, laid beyond the latter, on the vast aisle that just yesterday had been flanked by wood structures rising in two and three floors up the walls. There had been clothes hanging from between them, props left to dry, workshops. Now? Now, what little was left was blackened and burned. The exterior walls, the stone ones, might look as sturdy as ever, but everything that was made of wood was either broken or missing. And as for the structures that looked intact, they seemed to be dangerous enough for a group of stagehands to be hacking away at them. In fact, just now a group of them was clearing the closest one to the stage, attaching ropes to it and sending everyone away.
"Pull!"
The structure not so much fell down as it came apart, crashing on itself when the ropes ripped right through the blackened wood and sent the stagehands fleeing for cover.
As for Meg, Sorelli, and mostly everyone working on the stalls, their attention might not so much be at the disaster zone and that wave of dust bursting into the auditorium, but on this man that had just rushed from the atrium and banged on the door at his side with strength enough for everyone to turn.
"The managers!"
The managers.
Meg's eyes went round. A quick glanced being traded with Sorelli and they both rushed forth, joining the group abandoning the chairs they were trying to fix in favor of one of the many doors leading to the atrium. In a pair of seconds, dancers, stagehands and staff, half of them in costume, had pilled up at that very door, looking into the atrium, waiting for the group outside to make its way in.
It took only a pair of minutes for M. Richard Firmin and M. Gil Andre, with Giselle firmly attached to his left arm, to be passing by the fixed chairs that filled one side of the atrium. Their conversation sounded like it had been going on for a while. Or if it didn't, the first thing Meg could make sense of certainly made it feel like it.
"Inform everyone we want them back here in—in a week!" M. Firmin was announcing. "We have to start rehearsals!"
"Rehearsals?!"
That squeak had came from the third member of the group, a thin, elderly man that Meg knew and easily recognized. M. Reyer. His words had just sent Firmin charging up the marble stairs, as full of energy as ever.
"Yes! And it should be possible for us to put on a show now that we don't have a madman roaming around."
"He escaped," Reyer tried to remind him. He managed little but to have his groan trampled by Andre.
"Exactly!" he screeched. "And we were lucky he didn't engage in more senseless killing after straggling Piangi, the poor man, behind the stage!"
Struggling to keep pace with Firmin, his voice showing exactly that, Andre finally manage to intercept him on the top of the stairs.
"The chandelier, Richard! Think of the chandelier!" he implored. "That thing could have fallen right on top of the audience—!"
"It didn't, my friend," Firmin cut through while giving a polite bow to the cleaning lady he had just trusted his cane and hat to. It was a gesture that somehow resulted in Sorelli bumping shoulders with Meg.
"Sophia is rather absent," she noted. "Put off by them losing money would be my guess."
Meg frowned. Sophia sure was absent. Before she could address that bit of gossip, however, the small crowd listening in on the managers was falling back, giving them passage inside the auditorium. What laid inside — the broken chairs, the destroyed chandelier, the broken dome, the tapestry on the floor filled with holes from falling candles — made Andre stop almost immediately and look around. He was shaking his head the next moment.
"Who would want to come here after almost getting killed?!" he pointed out. "Look at the Opera, Firmin!"
Firmin was not the only one who turned to look around at Andre's gesture, from the cleaning lady still hanging onto his hat and cane, to the ballerinas and male dancers around Meg, everyone did. Everyone, however, didn't proceed to look around for support the way Firmin did.
"Well, we need ideas."
Meg dropped her eyes. Fortunately, she didn't need to worry about being called in — or worse, being confused for her mother. Sorelli was quick to come to Firmin's aid.
"We still have the costumes from Il Muto," she pointed out.
"There!" Firmin said, triumphant. "M. Reyer can surely fetch the scores—"
From were Meg stood, Gil Andre seemed to be about to burst a vein out of stress alone.
"Il Muto?" he stuttered, Giselle caressing his arm to calm him down, having absolutely no soothing effect whatsoever. "We had a dead man thrown from the rafters the last time it showed! And even if we hadn't, we have no Miss Daae! No Carlota! No Piangi! Unless, sopranos and tenors start raining from the sky—!"
Meg brought her gaze up from the soot covered floor, the mass of piled-up chairs that had been pushed against the walls coming back in view as her attention returned to the managers. Her lips parted.
"I—"
Nothing made it passed her lips after that word. There was nothing for her to say when she took a step forward and stopped as invisible as ever, there was nothing for her to do other than shake her head at herself. No. This wouldn't do. She wasn't Christine. She wasn't about to marvel anyone if she sang. Still, she could listen. And listen she did.
"We will do auditions!" Firmin was now announcing. And if anything that caused Meg's heart to leap. "Surely, we can find someone. And if we don't, we do a ballet! We still have our Prima Ballerina."
His hand had just pointed towards Sorelli, who, rapidly covering her still soot covered nose, bowed. As for Andre—
"And where does she practice? Where does anyone practice?!" he practically screeched. "We have no stage!"
He was not wrong. The stage was to Meg's back and had fallen into itself, burned wood and ash spread over the place where it had been and where the chandelier still remained, scorched and black and leaning over the edge.
Somehow, however, Firmin managed to give all of that a nod.
"We fix the stage," he said.
"With what money?! We would need investors! And the Vicomte is gone!"
For the first time, the gravity of the situation André kept trying to call Firmin's attention to seemed to be staring him down. Still, it took only a moment, for Firmin to be back on his game.
"We can't stand around doing nothing," he said and he pointed towards the same door they had entered from. "We will do it outside, on the front stairs, if needed be! We are hardly the first theater to suffer a fire!"
There was some nodding now, M. Reyer among it and this time there was no way dropping her eyes would hide Meg from his polite query or the managers attention.
"Does the Mademoiselle know where Madame Giry is?" Reyer asked, hopeful.
Immediately, Meg's eyebrows arched, raising higher and higher before her expression settled for reserved politeness.
"No, Monsieur," she said and, with M. Reyer's despaired groan taking the managers attention back to their conversation, she looked to the side. Sorelli was still there. She took the question to her.
"Maman isn't here?"
A shrug was her answer. It made Meg shake Sorelli's arm.
"Is she here?" she insisted and this time Sorelli answered.
"Last time, I saw her she was with the Vicomte."
Meg's hands closed over the tutu she was wearing. A moment later, and taking advantage of the moment Sorelli's attention went back to the managers, she was looking up.
There was no shadow on the balcony running around the destroyed dome. There was no phantom on what was left of the rafters over the stage either. He wasn't here. Not that she had any idea if he would pay any mind to her if he was, if he would even care to look down. But that wasn't what mattered right now. Slipping back through the crowd, leaving them to the manager's ongoing argument, Meg made her way out of the auditorium, she navigated corridor after corridor until she found herself in front of the door to the main dressing room and pulled the door open.
The room had been torn apart. Jars laid broken on the floor. Small tables had been toppled, their legs broken to make the very same torches that had used the curtains for fuel. The wallpaper had been ripped, the mirror that commanded the entire room tossed aside, what remained was the stone wall that had been behind all of that and right in the middle of it, as glaring as an open wound, that same corridor she had found behind the mirror months ago, the same one the mob had burst through last night, the very same one she entered right now.
"Maman?"
The call multiplied as it rushed in front of her, ricocheting off the walls until the voice that spoke sounded nothing like hers. Footsteps leading her over the squared stones that made the floor, Meg swallowed, attention moving to the damp walls and arched ceiling. She knew where this corridor lead to was she to go forward. A never ending spiral stairway. The cistern under the Opera. Those tunnels.
Her fingers closed over the torch at her side, hugging the sculpted hand where they rested.
"Maman?"
Again her own voice was Meg's only answer. Her voice and the echoing dripping in the distance. She didn't think she had made it much further than where her mother had stopped her last time, before her body refused to continue. Meg looked right in front, down the tunnel, attention jumping from each of the unlit torches, the absolute darkness under the Opera still far too present in her mind.
She had to find her mother, but no way she was going down there alone.
Author's Note: Next chapter we are back to Meg and Erik and it will be here tomorrow, or sooner if I can manage :)
See you all there!