Disclaimer: I do not own Moulin Rouge or the characters.

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It’s nighttime and it’s Paris and there are lights everywhere, and for the first time since I’ve started exploring the city I notice that Paris is truly beautiful, and why would I ever think of leaving?

My breath comes in gasps and I feel lightheaded, but perhaps this is just the feeling the city gives me on a night such as tonight. It is terribly cold, but I must keep walking because otherwise I might miss it and tomorrow it will be the same sad city I have seen it as for the past two years.

Now the lights are dancing, dancing like the girls who danced at the Moulin Rouge the first night they brought me there, the Argentinean and Toulouse, and then there was Satine, the Diamond, and she was asking me to dance and I did, and then everything came like a whirlwind from there.

I stagger onward.

There she is, at the end of the street, beckoning me forward. She looks so beautiful, her pale skin positively glowing in the light of the street, snowflakes falling all around her, and she is wearing white and she looks like an angel. No, she is an angel.

Wait, I thought she was dead.

I need to reach her, to touch her, to hear her voice. It is hard to breathe now, but a small price to pay if I can see her one more time as she was when she was alive. I love her, I still love her, and it pains me, but she’s right there and everything will be alright if I can only get to her, even though she still seems so far away.

“Satine!” I gasp.

She tilts her head and I push myself forward, but she never gets any closer. Her expression is strange. A small, sad smile graces her ruby red lips, and her eyes pierce my soul.

Then she speaks. “Christian.” Her voice, exactly as I remember it, the one that has haunted me. Slightly breathless and with so much tenderness that I almost break into a run, but my chest feels tight and my heart is beating so fast that it hurts, and I stifle a cough.

I’m coming.

She watches me, does not move closer, and although I’m still making my way towards her she’s always the same distance away.

“Christian,” she says, her eyes sad, “what are you doing?”

I gasp, I stumble forward, and the dancing of the lights becomes even wilder, and Satine stands out more than anything, but she is still so far away…

“I love you!”

The words echo in the street and fall dead, and I stop because my legs have stopped working and the lights are moving this way and that and I can still see Satine but I don’t know how to get to her, and the lights and snowflakes fall all around her.

“You have to go on,” she says, her voice a sweet murmur.

“But I can’t,” I gasp.

She shakes her head. The lights all blend into one and she disappears, and the street and the buildings and everything else begin to disappear, and the only sound is my ragged breathing, and then I can’t breathe.

And then I disappear.