Author's Note: Back by popular demand, it's another "missing scene" from the movie! This one is set after Satine lies to Christian and makes him believe that she doesn't love him and is staying with the Duke, but before Christian is thrown out of the Moulin Rouge.

Broken Hymns

By Trisana McGraw

Icy raindrops splattered on his body, but he was already numb. He stared, disbelieving, up at the nightclub where he had learned, lived, and lost love all at once as the rain poured over him, each drop stinging his broken heart as if the drops were acid rather than water.

Satine's final statement to him had devastated Christian at the very center of his being. Each word she flung at him was like the stinging slap of a whip and made him curl tighter and tighter into himself, trying to hide from the new and terrible situation. His heart, which had lived only for the promise of love and had thrived when he and Satine had experienced their short-lived bliss, couldn't comprehend that Satine would stop loving him.

That was why he stood here outside her window in the downpour, clinging to his one simple plan for winning her back.

He was a writer; he used pen and paper to express his heart and soul. Satine had fallen for him through his words, his songs — and that was the only way to bring her back.

He swallowed past a dry and scratchy throat and began to sing, gathering all his strength so that his voice soared like a bird in flight. "I've heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord. But you don't really care for music, do you," he called out, remembering her cold, closed face — truly like a glittering, but impersonal, diamond. She'd resisted him at first, but he had eventually won her over to his side with promises of a real life and a man who would treat her like no other ever had. "Well it goes like this: the fourth, the fifth, the minor fell, the major lift. The baffled king composing hallelujah.

"Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah," he continued to sing, hoping, praying that the winds would carry his voice up to Satine's room and into her ears and her heart, showing her the truth that had existed for so long even before he had found her face in which to put his faith and love.

For the millionth time, Satine clamped her lips shut so as not to betray the feelings that lingered inside her and struggled to claw themselves out of her chest. The devastation on Christian's face as she had told him that she didn't love him — quite the contrary, she ached over and over to let him know — had cut her more deeply than her wracking cough, and she wished, a thousand times a day, that she could have found another, better way out of their situation, a way that they could both be together.

But her life didn't allow that or any kind of happiness or content. Christian's words flowed through her window and wrapped around her body, bringing the smallest comforting warmth. She hugged her arms around her thin body, shivering from a cold that came not from the rain outside but from the pain within. Shutting her eyes, she tried to bring the memories of their brief but beautiful time together as some sort of cover.

"Well, your faith was strong but you needed proof," she whispered back to him, remembering his young, earnest, so handsome face in stark, painful clarity. "You saw her bathing on the roof. Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you." Oh, how innocent and pure their love had been in the beginning; even she, as hardened as she was against the pain life could and had thrown at her, was so terribly naïve. They had shared laughter and kisses, warm embraces and stories of their separate pasts and intertwining future.

And then she had sabotaged it. Well, not her, exactly, but her life, her reputation as the Sparkling Diamond, which was more her than the name Satine. She was a courtesan, and she had broken the number one rule: Never fall in love. The punishments for such a grievous infraction in the Moulin Rouge were terrible.

"She tied you to the kitchen chair. She broke your throne, she cut your hair." The Duke had stopped at nothing to make her his own, and if she hadn't known Christian she would have gone along with the whole thing. But sharing love with him had shown her that there was something better than the half-hearted life she used to lead. So, together they had resolved to fight the darkness that clung to her as they took their slow but sure flight out of the underworld.

"And from your lips she drew a hallelujah. Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah." His genius words — their song, which he had written for the two of them — were sweet and untarnished.

It was this unwavering hope of his that both filled her with joy and made her heart ache even more. Why couldn't he understand that things could never be the same and try to save himself before the darkness devoured him too? "Baby, I've been here before," she explained. "I know this room, I've walked this floor. I used to live alone before I knew you. And I've seen your flag on the marble arch. Love is not a victory march. It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah. Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah." The once happy words, a sign of happy times gone past too soon, were now sullied with the heartbreak she had had to cause.

She hadn't answered his song, as she had so many times before, and Christian felt some of his confidence deflate. They had used to be so open and free with one another, but lies and deception now cloaked their words and actions, and he didn't know what was real anymore. "There was a time when you let me know what's real and going on below," he complained, "but now you never show it to me, do you."

He'd thought, when they would sing each other to sleep and make love the following morning as the birds sang outside his garret, that their love was real. And perhaps it had been. But now those happy times were merely memories, ghostly fragments being tossed about and eventually blown away by the wind. But he wanted her to remember, so he raised his voice louder, aware that the winds had picked up in noise as well. "And remember when I moved in you; the holy dove was moving too; and every breath we drew was hallelujah.

The sweet "Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah" echoed in Satine's ears, and her body began to shake as tears rolled down her ivory cheeks. Even now, after all she had done to him, his love was enduring.

"Maybe there's a God above," they sang, their voices in perfect tandem though neither would ever know it, "and all I ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you."

Hearing the commotion, several burly men rushed outside, splashing noisily through puddles. Even as they grabbed his arms and roughly hauled him away from the Moulin Rouge, he continued to scream, "And it's not a cry you can hear at night.

One man punched him in the face, hard enough to send him reeling to the ground. "It's not somebody who's seen the light," he whispered hoarsely, choking on water mixed with his own shaky breaths.

"It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah." Satine's resolve broke, and there was only one thought in her mind: She had to let him know that she still loved him, that their bond was as strong as ever. She rushed to the window, but he was nowhere to be seen. She searched the steely gray sky and the muddy ground as the rain whipped past, but she could not locate the figure that had been serenading her moments before. Utterly crushed, she slammed her window shut and leaned heavily against the wall, to weak to stand on her own. Her head sagged forward, and loud, screeching sobs were wrenched from her throat. She had missed her last chance, and all that was left was her bleak future as a courtesan, her heart and body owned by someone she could never love because she was already dedicated to another.

"Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah." Now, rather than buoy him up with hope, the words seemed to drag him deeper and deeper into dark depression. Satine didn't love him. If she had, she would have returned his sentiment by now.

He had always believed that love was supposed to endure all hardships. But here their "neverending" love was lost, swept away as if it had been nothing more than a paper sailboat on a raging sea. Disappointment and grief combined to make a bitter taste that weighed heavily on his tongue and threatened to choke him. Every other nerve in his body ached like a fiery pain, centering in his heart, shattered like glass.

He didn't have the energy to lift his head from the ground, and as the rain mingled with the tears on his cheeks, his final words, hoarse and weak, seemed to be swallowed up by the ground. "Hallelujah . . . hallelujah . . . hallelujah . . . hallelujah. . . ."