Phantom of the Opera Overture: For Mysty's Contest

by Peppermint in Serenity with River Tam

A/N: I guess it's mystery...

Overture

The overture boomed in everyone’s ears, and I could have sworn the audience jumped an inch off the auditorium seats, which nearly made me lose my grim façade and would have ruined the first two minutes and forty-seven seconds of the show.

            We were floating down the aisles, like ghostly whispers in haunted woods, spirits in a long-forgotten opera house. I felt my nerves to my very fingertips and tried to keep my hands from shaking, tried to control my fumbling feet in my ivory-colored ballet flats. The white dress swished quietly around me, sounding like ethereal footsteps in an empty graveyard.

            The loud, dramatic music only added to the mingled sense of creeping fear and anticipative wonder as we slinked through the audience, towards the stage, as smoke billowed over the edge and cascaded out in a great waterfall of silver-grey mystery. It was a special night indeed, I thought, as I looked at the fallen chandelier only rows away from me…

            The Phantom moved stealthily forward in his billowing black cape, commanding the entire room’s attention from the aisle directly parallel me. He held a single, long-stemmed red rose in his black-gloved hands, and the mask covered his face with an unassuming grace that no one could exactly describe.

            He moved sleekly and beautifully, like a great black panther ready to strike. His eyes surveyed the room with a mysterious calm that sent chills down my spine, and he seemed to be casting a spell over everyone as he disappeared into the cloud of smoke.

            The entire cast seemed to have paused to watch the Phantom, but now we continued our path, weaving and wending with each other, vanishing into the smoke and appearing once more, like an elegant dance with the very elements of which we knew so well. We were ready for this.

            Raoul broke the ballet by turning to glance at me once before ascending the steps to the stage, and I winked to reassure him. He nodded ever so slightly and continued on his way as I rotated ever so slowly once, twice, then set a foot onto the first step.

            A guard extended his hand to me, and I took it carefully, so as not to upset the pocket watch in his hand. I stepped lightly upwards, then again, climbing delicately up the staircase and onto the beautiful, expansive stage. The curtains were drawn tight, and my dress skirted by the very edge as I swept by it towards center stage, towards where the Phantom’s dark outline was visible in the mist.

            I let the guard’s hand slip from mine and glided to the Phantom, standing merely inches from his warm body in the darkness. My heart raced as the overture’s tune bled into my heart and left a permanent imprint, turning me into my character, sending me back over a hundred years to a dusty old opera house in which lived a man just skirting past the edge of insanity.

            An Angel of Music.

            The Phantom looked down at me and I could just make out the smallest of a quirky grin on his face, but it disappeared into a look of such utter longing I shivered again as the smoke enveloped us in its secrecy, turning us into a dangerous mystery never to be unraveled. I closed my eyes and took a shaky breath in the silvery tendrils as I felt his hand take mine.

            With a last, banging note, the overture ended, the curtains opened, and the show began.