Chapter Text
He had left the mask behind. She remembered it clearly now, sitting in the Seconda Donna’s dressing room, which had been empty for months. Since the silently triumphant Christine had left the opera house, with a wave and a shining new diamond, no one had dared enter the reputedly haunted room… Save Meg. People claimed to have heard sobs in the night – she had heard nothing. Still, the abandoned room proved a pristine silent chamber, undisturbed – Perfect for a young woman lost in thought.
As the rest of the Opera Popular’s mob charged off to search for the murderer – unsuccessfully, of course – little Meg (“petite Giry,” as they called her) had wandered off to explore the lovely chamber of shattered glass and scattered sheet music. She found only the hard, smooth white mask, still warm from the living flesh of the wearer. Turning it over reverently in her small hands, she knew with certainty that her suspicions, all that her mother had been hiding from her for all these years, had finally been confirmed. But the so-called Opera Ghost was long gone now, likely vanished into the underground as the primitive and slow-moving Parisian fire brigade battled the flames above.
But of course the opera house still stood. Privately, Meg wondered if a building that had held so many souls, that had watched silently as so many laughed, cried, and danced their way across life’s stage, could ever be destroyed. It held the life and livelihood of hundreds in its walls. Though construction and repairs prevented performances for the time being, the Opera Popular was very much its old self, but for one significant difference – the Opera Ghost remained silent.
Meg and Christine had been childhood friends, growing up together as sisters, sharing a corner in the ballet dormitories. Mme. Giry favored them as her daughters and allowed them more freedom than most. But while Christine had been favored by the Phantom and taken down into the mysterious belly of the Opera House, Meg had never been allowed to go. Indeed, she’d never been allowed to explore beyond the well-lit rooms she had grown up in; even when she stumbled upon something new, her mother was quick to pull her back.
And when Christine rose to the rank of Seconda Donna – Prima Donna in La Carlotta’s absence – Meg remained a chorus girl of no importance, left to serve the girl she had played with as a child.
In truth she wanted to resent it, but the young woman held too much affection for the dreamy Christine. The dark-eyed Northern girl had always been more susceptible to ghost stories, legends, superstitions; always religious to the point of fanaticism (focused on her father’s dying promise). Therefore, she had been a more suited recipient for the guise of Angel of Music. But while Christine had – at first – idolized the Phantom and become his protégé, Meg thought that she could perhaps have been merely his friend.