Disclaimer: I don't own Phantom of the Opera. Sad, idn't it?
Chapter One: The End of Childhood
The gendarmes hadn't wanted the mask after dusting it for fingerprints and showing it to the detective Rouletabille, after all. M. Firmin was on the verge of throwing it down onto the boards of the Opera stage to shatter, but Meg stopped him.
"Mademoiselle Giry, why-?"
"We have to dance on this floor, m'sieur," she explained deftly. "Porcelain shards are very dangerous, no matter how small, when you're en pointe." It was true, Meg realized, even if it was not her real reason for keeping the mask. "Please."
"Ah. Well, get the thing out of my sight!" The manager relinquished the hated object and Meg hastily concealed it in her bag, wrapping it in an old pair of tights. "As I was saying, Monsieur Moncharmin and myself wish to thank you all for your cooperation with the investigation."
"In recognition of the terrible events of the season, this year's bonuses are to be sizably increased," Andre added, "and a most generous gift of the Vicomte de Chagny will enable us to completely remirror the dancing salon."
Applause, cheers and whistles echoed through the empty auditorium from the stage. The petite rats' bonus was never very large and an increase meant likely little more than an extra pair of shoes, but the old, tarnished mirrors were so universally hated that the dancers sprung up, joined hands and began enthusiastically circling the managers with pas de chats and cheers.
The old mirrors were vintage of the initial construction, and fourteen years' work on the Opera House, plus some six-odd more years the building had been functional meant that the silvered glasses were approximately as accurate in reflection as the waters of the Seine. The silver had tarnished, rendering the view dim and yellowy-brown, and the sheer age of the glass and the hangings had caused warps in the two centermost mirrors. It was like trying to dance before carnival house mirrors that had been painted with yellow varnish. Meg could even hear her mother pounding her tempo staff appreciatively. The handsome young sceneshifter, newly promoted to follow in his late uncle Buquet's footsteps, Claude Angiers, called out a question.
"When shall they be installed?"
"Later this afternoon!" Andre was in his element as the kind employer, not that the leaping, scantily clad dancers presently circling him didn't improve his mood somewhat. Angiers grinned.
"I'll get my tools!"
Meg knew that a great many of the other petites rats thought Angiers –or Arjay, as she was allowed to call him- quite handsome. True, he did have wonderfully soft brown hair and lovely blue eyes that lit up whenever he smiled, but Meg preferred him as an older brother. He was kind enough to teach her the occasional bit of stagecraft after rehearsals, such as how to fix hinges, how to fix the gas lights of the stage when they needed new globes, and even how to run the complicated fly system. Growing up in his old uncle's shadow, Arjay had learned every imaginable trick, even some that people like Firmin and Andre considered distasteful. Just as dancers and soubrettes were associated with courtesans and grisettes, stagehands were considered by some to be only slightly better than criminals. True, Arjay could pick a lock, forge a signature or swipe a wallet better than most convicts, but he had a good reason for knowing how to do each. The time Carlotta had locked herself in her dressing room had demonstrated the use of picking, and the forgery was exceptionally useful for accepting deliveries when M. Firmin was not there to sign for them himself. As for pickpocketing, when a cast member had forgotten a necessary prop they needed for a scene, put-pocketing was more the apt name for it. More than once Arjay had pinned flowers to costumes without even Madame Giry noticing, which further endeared him to the petites rats. If Madame Giry caught them unprepared or slacking in any way, their fate was not pleasant.
This fact eventually ceased the revelry over the new mirrors in favor of rehearsal proper. The salon at the back of the stage was opened, so that the old mirrors might be unbolted, and the dancers gracefully went over the latest combinations. Little Jammes had new shoes she was breaking in, which meant that she was ever so slightly unsteady, but in the spirit of sisterhood the other petites rats gave her a wider berth. Everyone had had new shoes before, and the combination thrill and terror of breaking them in was as familiar and sympathetic an event as having to dance with cramps. Meg tried to concentrate on her turnout as she practiced the grand arabesque that precluded the double chainne turn on the sixth eight-count. Her turnout was her only true Achilles heel, as her mother never failed to remind her seven or eight times a day. ("From the hip! We are not laying an egg on the stage!") So hard she was concentrating, Meg barely noticed Monsieur Edgar in the corner with his sketchpad again, or La Carlotta complaining about her costume.
The double chainne was never an easy turn, but to Meg it felt like flying, gliding above the boards like a whirling top. She inadvertently made it a triple, landing in perfect third position with a sigh of contentment. Jacquie noticed first.
"Madame! Meg has her triple!"
"Your triple!" Jammes cried, happy for her friend. "Brava!"
"Let us see," Madame commanded, her stern voice not quite hiding a faint half-smile of pride. Tensely, Meg took fourth position, bent to an arabesque, and spun. The world whirled for a moment, and then she landed in an only slightly wobbly third. Her fellow rats burst into applause. "Good work," Madame observed calmly, stepping back to her usual place. Monsieur Edgar gave her a congratulatory grin before waving slightly at Meg. "Back to the combination, now."
"May I try for my double, Madame?" Jammes asked. "Meg has been helping me."
"You may."
What happened then was as synchronized as the ballet, but diabolically. Jammes spun off from arabesque just as Carlotta stormed across the stage, swearing in Italian about her costume. The new shoes slid wildly on the smooth floor and the two collided. Carlotta responded to this by shoving poor Jammes, who fell backwards, directly into the old mirror Arjay and the other stagehands were removing.
Meg felt a sharp pain as she lunged to catch Jammes, but gave it little thought as she helped her friend up. There was blood on the floor, but it wasn't until Jammes let out a piercing scream that she realized some of it was her own. Jammes had seen her face.
She also realized she was only seeing the left half of the stage. Meg turned, and, in the wonderful new mirror, beheld her injury for a moment before the other dancers swept in and surrounded her. Her cheeks, her lip, and her forehead were all unscathed. It was just her eye. Her mother shrieked and Meg knew no more.
"Mademoiselle?" Meg awoke in a vast white room that smelled of rubbing alcohol. A white-habited sister from a nursing order stood over the bed with a tray in her hands. "Mademoiselle Marguerite Giry?"
"Wh- where am I?"
"St. Anne's Hospital, on the Rue de les Martyrs. You have been asleep for quite awhile, little one." The nun set down the tray and felt Meg's wrist for her pulse. "My name is Sister Solange. Would you care for some soup?"
Meg blinked –or tried to, and felt the gauze and cotton covering her right eye. The distress must have been evident on her face, for Sister Solange clasped her hand in her own.
"Do not fear, little one. It is a small wound, for all the distress of it."
"Will I…will my eye…?"
"Dear one, you must be brave."
That was all Meg could bear to hear.
Madame Giry had been forced decades ago to forsake her career as a prima ballerina due to a heart condition acquired during a difficult pregnancy with Meg, whereupon she had become the ballet mistress of the Opera Populaire. Every year the doctor urged her to rest more, take life easier, but she was too devoted to the dance and to the support of her only child. The affair of the Phantom had further weakened her, though noone realized how much until it was too late. It was perhaps fortunate she didn't survive to see the true results of Meg's disfiguring accident.
Her petites rats, past and present, some grown to matronage with daughters of their own, some at the peak of their career, some retired from ballet, some changed over to tutors and some, like Meg and Jammes, left suddenly without their beloved teacher -all returned to Paris for the funeral of their dear Madame. Her own corps de ballet seemed leery of her since the accident, but former pupils of her mother's lavished sympathy upon her. Meg couldn't cry, somehow, until she saw a familiar figure appear, on the arm of an equally familiar nobleman.
"Christine!"
"Meg!" The great soprano and the ballerina ran to each other and embraced. "Oh, Meg, I'm so sorry about your Màma…and your eye! We heard about the accident on our way from Montreuil. Will you be able to…?"
"It's doubtful," Meg confessed. She still had white gauze over it instead of the fearsome patch the sisters had already been showing her. "How have you been?"
"We're to be married in June," Christine explained, holding Raoul's hand. "You will be my bridesmaid?" Meg frowned gently and Raoul smiled comfortingly.
"It would take a lot more than a bandaged eye for us to not have our favorite dancer there. Please say you will, Meg."
It was strange, how the Vicomte de Chagny suddenly called her by name. Meg wondered for a moment why before realizing that she must have been Christine's best friend at the Opera. When the madness truly began and Carlotta turned everyone against the young soprano, Meg remembered how she had not joined in the gossip and jibes. It had not even begun to occur to her that her friendship would be so valued, nor that her mother's simple counsel of 'sorority among the dancers, come what may' was as wise as it now proved itself.
"I will," she promised, finally allowing the tears to come.
A/N: Reviews are greatly appreciated, even flames. To be continued.