A/N: This story has been beautifully translated into english by Igenlode Wordsmith from my french version Le Quai. I recommend you to go on her profile and read her enthralling stories. Take a look at The Choices of Raoul de Chagny and Teach me to live. It's beautiful.
Manhattan, 1909.
The February wind whipped his cheeks, pitilessly. His lips were dry, cracked and bleeding. The damp cold crept eagerly in through his worn-out garments like the caress of despair. The night was full of shadows and even the moon had gone. He shivered and took another step onto the pier.
He hated this country. He hated this city, teeming with vermin. He hated the language, so barbarous, hard and shorn of all nuance and poetry. So many people — so much noise, day and night! Never a moment's respite. How he craved silence!
Day after day he thrust forward through the stinking crowd whom he had come more and more to resemble and who took no notice of the phantom that he had become. He thrust resolutely through these lost souls, always with the same purpose. Always, and forever. His hair and his long filthy beard, no longer fair but now almost grey, repelled the passers-by; they looked down to avoid the piercing, accusing blue eyes that shone out with a vengeful light from his dirty face covered with scars.
He heard people whisper, sometimes: how young he seemed! How handsome and charming he must have been! But he didn't care. Oh God, he did not care. He felt a century old; he felt like the remnant of some formerly gilded and resplendent aristocracy that had been dumped on the pier. How he hated this city and its inhabitants.
And yet he had remained here. Despite all that he had lost.
Why had she insisted on making the voyage here? Oh, why?
To make reparation. Reparation, for a night that had been stolen from him and for a lineage of which she had deprived him.
To redeem his debts — debts he could have paid off overnight, in just one more night at Monte Carlo. A single night that would have brought in as much as all the money Coney Island could give them.
But she had insisted. Because she loved him, she said. And to give pleasure to the child. Poppycock — all that was pure poppycock.
But he had forgiven her. How could he have done otherwise?
He took another step out onto the pier. The black waters of the Hudson lapped tirelessly against the pier supports like a stubborn lover seeking admission. He smiled, despite the painful cracks in his lips.
He caressed the rose he held in his hand: a rose stolen from a shop on the corner of Essex Street. A rose he had pressed against his heart. A rose which would in any case have wilted in the mid-February cold.
Oh, how she had loved roses. She would tell him that constantly, those eyes of hers imploring with love and with dreams, especially as February approached. Especially when the whole world pretended to be in love, seeking to escape their solitude in mid-February. Even though she had her son — the son she adored. Even though she no longer loved him and their marriage was all but worthless. Even though she knew that Monte Carlo awaited her husband: all that was needed to make him a rich man and to restore them to the life they had once known.
He had stayed in this putrid city of New York. He had stayed for love of her.
He had stayed to watch over the son who was not his, even though he had promised the Monster he would return to France. For four years he had endured degradation, thirst, nightmares of withdrawal, homelessness, cold, lice — and hope. His sole hope, that the Other had lied and that Gustave was truly his son.
But Gustave, head filled now with the thankless turmoils of adolescence and of music, had forgotten him. The son on whom he had pinned all his hope was day by day becoming a stranger.
He had followed him, tirelessly, waiting; waiting for some sign that the woman he had loved had not really betrayed him.
But the sign never came.
And then he saw her. On the corner of Delancey and Essex Street, where he glimpsed her exquisite image amidst the muddy snow of Manhattan while lovers embraced frenetically, mechanically, in order to appease a saint who had been dead for centuries, she smiled at him. There, through the crowd, she had summoned him. Like an angel.
Oh, that divine smile! At last a warmth spread over him that he had thought forgotten. He had followed her and her long silky dark curls through a city that no longer paid him any heed. She halted on the pier and turned to him, opening her arms to him with the unconditional love that he so desperately sought.
Death.
Raoul de Chagny let fall the petals of the rose into the black water that surrounded him, and took one more step towards the one who awaited.