What Sweet Seduction
Chapter 1: Evenstar
Meg Giry walked the grubby streets that made up Paris slums. Her life had gone into a downward spiral since the infamous disaster at the Opera Populaire that had left her homeless, jobless, and motherless in one fell swoop. The first two wouldn't have been so bad if she'd only had her maman with her now. She hadn't been killed in the fire; no, she'd been trampled by panicky crowds racing to escape the inferno. Meg had been told all this about a week later, and the story was relayed to her by the priest who had buried her. The news had made her sick then and it made her sick even now, a year later.
"Why is my life so wretched?" she wondered. "I've always said my rosary, gone to Mass, confessed my sins, and tried to be a good girl, yet my life has always been worse than all the other petit rats in the corps de ballet. It's just unfair!" She sat down on the steps of someone's house; she didn't care whose it was. As she sat there, she got more and more depressed, thinking about all she had lost. Even her best friend, Christine Daae, had left her and was spending an extended honeymoon in the French Alps with her new husband, the Viscount D'Chagny. This was the straw that broke the camel's back, and Meg just broke down and cried. On the spur of the moment, she started to run. She didn't care where she was going; she just wanted to get to a place where she would be safe.
As she ran toward a massive shell of a building, she felt the rain start to pour. She continued to run, however, not realizing that it was too slippery for anyone to jog, let alone run. Suddenly, she lost her balance and fell, in the process hitting her head. As everything went black, she felt a man pick her up and carry heroff to God-knows-where. She fell into a comatose sleep feeling a vague feeling of terror.