A/N- Yes, I'm aware that Antoinette spilled her guts to Raoul, but I do have logic behind this so hear me out. Or... better yet, hear me out at the bottom of the chapter, so I'm not spoiling anything!

After a few months, the attacks on Clothilda tapered off, and Adéle seems to have been content to share her limelight with the other girl. But all that changed when Monsieur Benoit retired, and a new director took charge of the Opera Populaire's ballet...

After a long embrace, Antoinette inclined her head toward the door, indicating that they should exit the room in order to be able to speak above a whisper. The Giry women stepped out into the corridor, and Meg drew the door just to behind them. Then she turned, reluctantly, to face what she was sure was to be a disapproving glare. Instead, however, she found a look of puzzlement around her mother's eyes that she couldn't recall ever seeing there before.

"What is he doing here?" Antoinette asked gently.

Meg glanced briefly at the door behind which Erik lay sleeping. "I brought him here," she said. "I thought... It's the only place I was sure he'd be safe."

Her mother looked at her for a long moment, giving her that steely stare belonging wholly to the ballet directrice. It was a look that Meg was all too familiar with from her childhood, when Antoinette knew she had done something wrong, and wanted her to confess it herself. Antoinette Giry made no accusations; she drew confessions from guilty parties with her icy eyes.

Meg scuffed the toe of her boot uncomfortably against the stone floor and began speaking, words tumbling over each other in her haste to make her mother understand. "I went to try and save Christine, you see, but she had already gone. He let her go, and I found him instead. His heart is broken, and I couldn't just leave him down there in the dark, all alone, no matter what he's done. You should have seen him, Maman! He was just laying there on the floor... he might have died if I hadn't come along! It was the right thing to do, Maman-!"

All at once, Meg found herself tucked in her mother's arms once more. Antoinette stroked the back of her head affectionately. "Oh my brave girl," she said softly. "I always knew you had a kind heart, but I didn't realize just how kind until today." She too cast a glance at the door. "He has a way of making it very difficult to abandon him to his distress, doesn't he?" she mused.

Stepping back from Antoinette's embrace, Meg looked up at her inquisitively. "Erik said the two of you knew each other..." she said leadingly.

Antoinette didn't elaborate, too distracted by something else entirely to answer her daughter's implied question. "He told you his name?" she asked, astonished.

"I asked, he answered," Meg said.

"He really must be distraught," Antoinette murmured wonderingly.

Meg pursed her lips in frustration. "Maman, how do you know him?" she demanded.

The older woman sighed, looking down at her hands. "It is a long story, ma cherie, and not a pleasant one. It might be better if he told you that; I am sure there are things he would rather be left unspoken. Suffice it to say that I met him when we were children. He was in most terrible circumstances, and I brought him to the opera house and hid him here. He has lived here ever since."

Meg nodded slowly. "I always thought you knew more than you were saying," she said. "Why didn't you ever tell me any of this?"

"Because you were always such a curious child," Antoinette said, "And I knew if I told you even part of the story, you would realize I wasn't telling you everything and want to know the rest. As I have said... I don't think it is my story to tell. And if I refused, I knew you would go looking for the rest wherever you could find it. You were bright enough, I thought, to find your way down to the catacombs given enough time to look, and I didn't want that. I didn't want you around him, especially as a child. Erik..." She sighed, shaking her head. "He has a good heart. But he has always been a little... wild. Perhaps given the events of the past few days, you can understand my concern."

"I do understand, Maman, but... well, he's so terribly lonely. Even I can see that, and I haven't known him a day! If the two of you are friends, why is he still so alone?"

Antoinette sighed again, and took her daughter's hands between her own. "We haven't spoken in many years," she confessed. "We... we argued. The night I told him I was engaged to your father, we fought bitterly. Things were said... and then I let the opera house, and too many years had passed for any apologies by the time I returned. The silence had settled into place between us, and I didn't know how to approach him any more. He had fully become the Opera Ghost while I was gone. He had been playing little tricks on the manager for years, but after I left to marry your father, he took it a step further. You know how he has been. He would let me see him, sometimes, which was more than he gave to anyone else, but I never had the courage to speak to him again."

Meg understood then: her mother blamed herself for what had happened. She thought that if she had just tried a little harder, reached out to Erik before Christine Daaé ensnared his heart and mind, all this disaster could have been prevented. She squeezed the hands still holding her own. "It isn't your fault, Maman," she reassured her. "His actions are his own. Loneliness is an explanation, not an excuse."

She smiled sadly and glanced again at the door. Her mother was right about one thing, though: Erik did have a good heart. Meg didn't think a person could love someone that much, enough to set them free, and not have a good heart. She only hoped it could recover from this.

"What do we do?" she asked. "He can't stay here... someone's bound to notice."

Antoinette pursed her lips, thinking. "They'll be on the lookout for him, which will make smuggling him out of the city nearly impossible. But perhaps we can hide him in the city. Goodness knows he has enough money to afford it."

Meg smirked in amusement, thinking of the outrage of Monsieurs Andre and Firmin at the outrageous salary O.G. had demanded each month, and Monsieur LeFevre before them, and Monsieur Gravois before him... Given that practically everything Erik owned was "borrowed" from the opera house, Meg supposed that he couldn't have spent much of that. Yes, Erik was a very wealthy man indeed. It would, she guessed, make the job of secreting him away much easier.

In his dream, Christine was wearing the wedding dress he had saved and cherished for her... no, she was wearing the robe she had worn that first night he had brought her down to his sanctuary... no, that still wasn't right, she was wearing her costume as Aminta, red rose perched tantalizingly in her luxurious curls... She held out a hand to him, beckoning him on with a shy smile that quickly turned coy, and he was powerless to stay away. He chased after her, across the stage and down through the red-velvet aisles of the theatre, which suddenly seemed much longer than they really were. Her dark eyes enthralled him as she glanced back over her shoulder, always just one step ahead no matter how quickly he ran. His fingertips brushed the ends of her hair, elation filling him at the thrill of capture, but she slipped away again, and suddenly she was leading him a light-footed chase down the marble steps and across the foyer, right out the doors of the opera house...

...where a jeering crowd of thousands stood waiting, and Christine stood there, draped in a scarlet cloak, laughing as she held his mask high for all to see. "Devil's child!" she cackled, whipping the mask away when he tried to reach for it. "See? Here he is, the devil's child!" And the crowd echoed back, "Devil's child! Devil's child! Devil's child! Devil's child! Devil's child! Devil's ch-"

He lurched upright with a strangled yell, clutching at his disgusting face as taunts and jeers and cries of "Devil's child!" echoed in his waking ears. Where was he? Even with his hands covering his face, he knew he was in unfamiliar surroundings. Where was he? Hands touched his shoulder, and he jerked away, yelling incoherently at the attackers he couldn't see through his protective fingers, but then there was a voice, a gentle voice that broke through his panic.

"Shh, Erik! Erik! It's alright, you're safe. It's only me! It's just Meg."

Meg. The little ballerina, Christine's sweet, silent shadow... He peered through his fingers and saw her face quite near to him, filled not with disgust and horror, but concern. It was his undoing, and for the second time in just a few hours, Erik fell apart. Tears poured down his face and he tried unsuccessfully to bite back a sob. He heard her let out her breath in a little "oh" of surprise, and suddenly her arms were around him, giving him unlooked-for comfort once again.

She held him gently, and he felt her fingers running through his hair. Slowly the paralyzing terror leeched away, leaving him limp and with grief twisting in his gut, and he cried quietly into Meg's warm shoulder, too far gone to care anymore about dignity.

Antoinette watched the scene unfold quietly from the doorway. When Erik had bolted upright, her first instinct had been to go to him, but Meg had beaten her to it, shaking him out of his nightmare and comforting him in the aftermath. She watched, amazed, as Meg opened her arms unquestioningly to the terrified man before her, offering comfort and affection freely. Even more surprising was the way Erik simply melted into her embrace; she remembered how he shrank away from her when they were children, and marveled that he accepted Meg's touch so readily.

When had her daughter grown up? When had she grown from the kind but timid girl who was always following everyone else into this woman who was brave enough to descend into a tortured man's dark world of nightmares for the sake of her friend and empathetic enough to turn right around and give comfort to the stranger who had destroyed her home and her livelihood only hours before? It seemed to Antoinette that she had blinked and suddenly her daughter was a grown woman. She was sure Meg had not been this person even yesterday. Maybe it was Erik's effect- goodness knows he had made her grow up quickly- or perhaps Meg had just never had her strength tested before tonight. Either way, Antoinette had never dreamed that she could raise such a girl.

Looking at the pair sitting on the bed made her uneasy. She had never known Erik to show such weakness to anyone before, and the fact that it was her daughter who finally coaxed him out of his shell like this... it made her nervous. Erik could be beautiful, but the chaos in his head could just as easily turn that beauty into destruction at the flip of a coin, and her instincts screamed at her to take her daughter and fly away from him. Somehow, though, watching the two of them in this moment, Antoinette knew that Meg wouldn't leave him. Not now. It was too late to separate them, and the thought terrified her.

Resisting the urge to interrupt the moment, she stepped back out of the room and pushed the door quietly closed behind her. She would see to her girls, especially the little ones who would most need looking after in the wake of the disaster, and perhaps by the time she returned, Erik would have calmed enough that her presence wouldn't be a cause for any later embarrassment. She doubted he wanted their twenty-year silence to end while he was crying on her daughter's shoulder.

A/N- First off, Antoinette was really freaked at that point. Erik had gone off his meds and she didn't know what to do. Second off, Raoul is trustworthy. For all his foppishness, he's a decent guy, and Antoinette knew that. Thirdly, she was torn between her loyalty to her protégé and her loyalty to a friend she hadn't spoken to in years, who was menacing said protégé and realistically could have killed her. She had to chose between protecting Christine and protecting Erik and in the end she decided that giving Raoul information that might save Christine's life outweighed Erik's privacy. The situation with not telling Meg is entirely different.