Authoress' Notes: This was my entry for the pfn humour contest. It took fourth place!
Please note that this is in no way my usual canon and is intended all for fun, so don't be alarmed at anything that transpires in this story. It's just something I'd always secretly wanted to see, and when nobody wrote it for the Morbidity Contest (yeah originally this was a Morbidity Contest entry) The Scorpion talked me into writing it. ;)
Also please note that this story is 100 percent movieverse, because it's just funnier that way.
Doe Eyes
Christine Persephone
Christine had never put much hope in Raoul's master plan to catch the Phantom of the Opera, particularly since it involved constructing a baited trap with herself as the bait, but everybody else – particularly the diva Carlotta, her faithful Piangi, and the managers, MM Firmin and André, seemed to think it was just grand. Flawless, even. Reluctantly, she had let herself be bullied into taking part in it. And then she had cried.
"Christine, dearest," soothed Raoul, when he found her after she had taken sanctuary in the Opera's little chapel, "Please don't think that I don't care about your wellbeing, but everybody's counting on you to stand onstage in the line of fire of fifty trained marksmen so that we can catch the Phantom. I promise there's only a minor risk that you'll get shot." (Only he said it in rhyme. I have paraphrased it for storytelling purposes.)
Christine looked up at him, her big brown doe eyes shining with tears, and then sighed and resigned herself to the master plan in store for her as Raoul folded her into his arms.
After he left Christine knelt again before the candle she had lit for her dead father. "I'm sorry, Daddy," she whispered, (and this was not in rhyme because it is of my own addition by way of artistic license) "I did so just wish to please you by becoming the great singer you always wanted me to be . . . but everything's gotten so complicated now. Everyone expects so much of me and I don't think that I can do it."
Unseen, the Phantom of the Opera watched the tears shining on her cheeks in the soft candle-light, and clenched his gloved hands with rage.
They had made Christine cry for the last time.
Twenty minutes before the opening performance of Don Juan Triumphant was a chaos of props, costumes, and people. Raoul de Chagny took his place in Box Five to oversee the proceedings. The fifty trained marksmen waited in the orchestra pit, the wings, and the other boxes surrounding the stage, loading their rifles. The audience flounced in in their high-society grandeur and took their places beneath the auditorium's glittering monstrosity of a crystal chandelier. M. Reyer tuned the orchestra. In her dressing-room Carlotta strutted to and fro, testing her voice and the last-minute adjustments to her costume, trailed by her insufferable little lapdogs. In the ballet dressing-room, twelve or so ballerinas whispered in a gaggle as they warmed up. Christine, white and resolute, sat by herself beside the basket of red roses she was to carry onstage as Aminta, not yet in costume. Meg Giry, the prima ballerina and her best friend, took her hand reassuringly.
Five stories below in his underground lair, the Phantom of the Opera waited.
Raoul was the first to go, of course. He was so focused on the preparations below that he did not hear the door to Box Five open and did not register the barely perceptible rustle of the cloak behind him. He did not even notice that his sword had been taken from him until he heard the thin, swift whistling as it sheared through the air bare moments before it sheared through his neck, parting it neatly from his shoulders. His head fell to the floor with a gentle bump in the true manner of a French aristocrat, his handsome boyish features permanently set in a look of alarm.
A single red rose with a black satin ribbon tied to its stem was laid delicately beside Raoul's headless body. "You really ought to have known better."
While Carlotta was practising the few lines allotted her in her dressing-room, one of her pet poodles began to whine. Irritably she scolded it in Italian, but then the other began to whimper as well. And then the white one snapped at her skirts.
"Little wretch!" shouted Carlotta in alarm, kicking it. The poodle bounced off the dressing screen with a yelp, and then began barking so hard the little pink bows on its perfectly trimmed ears flounced. The black one joined it, and their frenzied barking rose to a piercing pitch, drowning out the diva's cries of consternation. She removed a shoe to throw at them, but in doing so accidentally tripped over the low chair before her dressing-table and fell.
The poodles were on her in an instant and tore her to pieces.
"Cara? My love? What is going on?" Piangi asked, (only he said it in Italian. As with Raoul, I am writing in subtitles for the Italian-impaired) as he opened the door to find his darling diva being snacked on by her lapdogs. Whether he was about to cry out in horror or joy the world will never know, for the next instant the mirror slid open and a well-thrown axe imbedded itself in his skull, putting him out of his misery forever.
A pair of gloved hands pocketed the tiny silver dog whistle and retrieved the axe, replacing them with two red roses.
Ten minutes to the performance the managers' office was a scene of confusion, dismay, and overblown décor. None of this, however, was due to the current epidemic of rather creatively gory deaths we have seen cropping up all over the Opera Populaire, but rather to the performance about to commence. (Except the overblown décor. That was an unrelated phenomenon, but one as indigenous to the rest of the Opera as the sudden string of murders. So in an extraneous sort of way, these two trends are connected.)
"Fifty trained marksmen in the house!" exclaimed Firmin, or perhaps it was André. (I must confess that I can never quite tell.) "The patrons are as jittery as newborn ponies. It's a wonder we have an audience at all!"
"Keep your hair on," replied André, or perhaps it was Firmin, "It's better than having fifty untrained marksmen in the house. And nothing draws the public like a scandal."
"Ha," snorted perhaps-Firmin, "You can say that again. This is the first opera I've ever had to issue a Parental Guidance Suggested rating on. I really wonder if the little Daaé girl is up to the challenge."
"Oh, she is," said a voice from the doorway. Both managers turned.
"You!"
Any further surprise they might have exhibited was truncated abruptly by the pair of identical bullets that fired at the same time from the pair of identical revolvers, lodging simultaneously in a pair of foreheads that were sadly not identical and rather throwing off the congruity of the scene. They were followed by a pair of identical red roses with identical black ribbons, however, so the overall artistic effect was soon corrected. Black velvet brushed sibilantly over the lifeless features of the managers nobody was ever really able to tell apart, and now nobody would ever really have to, as the cloaked figure stepped between them into the smaller office adjoining, the one that belonged to Mme Giry, the ballet mistress.
"Oh, this. This is much better."
The five remaining minutes to the performance were eclipsed in a splendid cacophony of violence, expedited significantly by the highly anachronistic machine gun that had been found in Mme Giry's office. One round took out all twelve ballerinas in rapid succession, followed by a slight pause as another clip was procured from beneath the pile of beribboned red roses.
"Seal my fate tonight," rang the hauntingly melodious voice from the rafters, (musical accompaniment seemed only fitting on such an operatic occasion) as it opened fire on the orchestra pit.
"I hate to have to cut the fun short
But the joke's wearing thin,
Let the audience in,
La . . . bother I forgot my libretto."
In the ensuing confusion the fifty trained marksmen retaliated with a barrage of their own, but unfortunately in their failure to pinpoint the exact location of the singer, they were facing in fifty different directions. By a truly remarkable freak coincidence, the fifty bullets fired by fifty marksmen managed to hit fifty other marksmen and they all fell down dead together.
And then a chandelier fell on the audience. You know, just for dramatic effect.
The maniacal laughter emitting from the rafters (into which the singing had lapsed to cover up for the omission of forgotten lyrics) broke off to allow for the remark, "I always thought that chandelier had it in for somebody."
The Phantom was alone in his lair preparing for the night's premiere of his opera when he heard the portcullis rise. He looked over to see Christine entering, followed by her friend Meg, who was lugging along the basket of red roses Christine was meant to carry onstage as Aminta in Don Juan. Neither of them were in costume, however, or apparently at all prepared for the performance.
The bow in Christine's hair was undone, but her perfect mahogany curls were scarcely out of place. Her flawless porcelain cheeks were flushed and her bosom heaved from some great exertion, and a murderous light gleamed in her doe eyes. She carried a machine gun easily over one white shoulder and her skirts and her blouse were spattered vividly crimson with blood.
The Phantom leaped up as though his hair was on fire. "Christine! What on earth . . .?"
Christine removed her gloves and tugged at the ribbon fastening her cloak at her neck so that it slid to the floor with a rustle of black velvet. She held out her hand to Meg, who rummaged helpfully among the roses and came up with a bundled object that the Phantom, so transfixed by the luminous stare of those doe eyes, did not recognise as a thin snare of catgut until it was around his neck.
He tried to bellow in shock and rage, but with the Punjab Lasso around his neck he could not manage much more than a startled gurgle. Christine braced her little feet against the floor and pulled. He tried frantically to free himself from the tightening noose, but years under Madame Giry's stern training in the ballet corps had made her strong, and she did not let go until he lay in a heap at her feet, the unmasked half of his face slowly turning blue.
"I love you, Angel," said Christine, "You taught me everything I know."