Authoress note: I am going to end this trial tonight, for once and forever. Thanks to those who read and stuck up with me. I learned my lesson, Never post a "Phantom of the Opera" fanfiction without the phantom, gets you no readers. Every girl and woman just wants Eric and pitiful few seem to care about any other characters (least of all Raoul, in whose case I can understand perfectly well). Anyway, this is my last chapter. REVIEW!
This was it, the last, the final decision. One or two words that meant nothing to them and my whole existance to me. But the seconds of silence were the worst, I had never been able to remain calm and patiently waiting for long.
"Not guilty" What? I must have misheard! But, no. They had actually said it, I could not believe my ears.
After all I knew I was not guilty, but they had not and still they had made the right decision. The judge frowned and I sillily smiled at him. My accusant glared daggers at me and hastily left the builting, possibly to hide his scraped off goldpaint under his bed.
The three women I had spent my last weeks with, came rushing in. "I knew you would make it out" Meg told me off and gave me an overenthusiastic, bone-crushing hug.
"Only because of me helping" La Carlotta stated "I gotten him out!" "Of course, thank you very much" I was just so happy, I would have told her anything. And it seemed to make her glad too, so why not.
The one action I did not expect however, was for Madame Giry, no, Magdalene, to advance onto me with a deadly serious expression on her face and then to suddenly kiss me. I mean really kiss me.
Obviously her daughter suffered from shock too, because she decidedly did not know whether to faint or to laugh, but ended up smiling.
I remembered when Firmin had asked me with which of all the women at the opera, I could imagine to spend my life with, not the night, or a couple of weeks, but really, like the rest of my days. Of course we both where unexcusably drunk and level-headed at that time and not capable of thinking straight any longer.
No need for excuses. I said "Madame Giry" and Richard looked at me quite strangely and slurred "Why?" which I could only answer with a "No idea. Just is so." I still had no idea. But it still was that way.
For that moment I believed that everything could be okay in the end. Of course there was no such thing as a "happily ever after", only a "if they are not dead, then they still live".
But I imagined our tries at rebuilding the opera populaire, reopening, again enduring La Carlotta as the star of each evening, marrying Magdalene, becoming a step-father to Meg and so an and so forth. And those prospects were not the worst in my eyes.
I would always remember Richard Firmin, the opera would be reopened in his name and I would make sure that the world that was to come would remember him the way I did, as a clever and intelligent businessman, but more important, as a true and loyal friend.