by She's a Star
Disclaimer:
Moulin Rouge belongs to Baz Luhrmann. The Lovely Bones, which this is based off of, was written by Alice Sebold. The title was taken from the song My Last Breath by Evanescence.Author's Note:
I started this quite awhile ago, but abandoned it, and then I came across it again this morning and kept on writing. I shouldn't be getting into another chapter fic, but this one doesn't have much of a plot, so hopefully it won't be too much trouble. This is very inspired by The Lovely Bones (amazing book); so basically, this story is from Satine's point of view after her death, looking back on the Moulin Rouge. It will jump around in time quite a bit; hopefully I won't confuse you too horribly. :-)I.
When I was four years old, my mother died. Being a child, of course I couldn't understand why she got so still, why she looked more beautiful than she ever had before, and yet I feared her. I had never feared my mother before, and it was unsettling.
My father's best friend was an absinthe bottle, the Green Fairy his paramour, and the only tragic realization that struck him with my mother's demise was that he had no idea how to care for a child. Unlike my mother, I had always been afraid of him, perhaps because he never smiled and always looked so clumsy and cold.
For two years, we lived amongst one another without ever truly being together. We would shoot bewildered glances back and forth with the same blue-green eyes, endlessly wondering why we'd been cursed to suffer a presence we couldn't even begin to understand. Finally, when I was six, he grew tired of me, decided that he couldn't bother with his own daughter any longer. He gathered together my shabby assortment of dresses and tiny rag doll that I'd christened Gwendolen (after my mother), wrapped my tiny hand in his own foreign, calloused fingers, and led me outside the only place I'd ever known and into the Underworld.
He knew Harold Zidler well - probably because he spent so much time at the man's beloved bordello - and I can only remember staring up at the smiling man with the rosy cheeks and jovial chuckle and instantly loving him. He was not at all like my father; not cold and unfeeling - instead, he smiled when he met me and bent down to shake my hand. His hand was warm, not like my father's, and it made me like him more.
He asked me my name, even though my father had introduced me moments before, and I told him distractedly, with a sort of childish awe in my voice.
"Satine," he'd repeated, smiling. "That's a beautiful name. The name of a star."
I giggled a little then, only because the sentence sounded so big and intriguing and important. The name of a star.
My father left, a storm brewing in his eyes so like mine.
I never saw him again.
I quickly forgot my father, though clung to my mother's memory and wondered vaguely if she would ever return to me.
There were other little girls there, two of them, and we became instant friends. Nini (you couldn't call her Antonia; she hated that name) was best for sneaking food from the kitchen and having make-believe adventures as we invented fantasies of pirates and kidnapped princesses and swashbuckling heroes. Katie and I had tea parties with our dolls and stuffed animals, dressing extravagantly in the too-big costumes that Elizabeth, the seamstress, allowed us to borrow sometimes. We dreamed of being perfect society ladies; of attending balls and stringing along countless suitors and being taking turns being bridesmaids when each of us got married.
The day after I died, Katie found the chipped porcelain tea set that we'd played with so adoringly and ran her fingers over the pieces with tears in her eyes. I wished she wouldn't cry, but she'd always been sensitive.
Nini hadn't cried. We'd grown apart, she and I, though it was hard to distinguish when. We'd always bickered a little bit, but even after I'd become the infamous star of the Moulin Rouge, she hadn't hated me. Not really. Not until the morning in December.
It was a year before Christian had come, and I'd gone up to her room to see if she was going to get up for rehearsals - she had a habit of consuming just a bit too much absinthe (usually due to the fact that she challenged a few of the rakes that haunted the bar to drinking contests...and won) and then sleeping until past noon. I found her unconscious, badly beaten, her face bloodied and disfigured. It turned out that one of her customers - a man that I was meant to service, but then ended up changing plans the last minute - had done this to her.
She never forgave me, after that.
She was always a skeptic, cynical, to the point where Katie and I would snap at her sometimes in pure disbelief, wondering how anyone could possess so little faith and still find the will to live.
"It's the truth," she'd always retort defensively. "Sooner ya give up on silly dreams, the better."
It was strange, really, that she was the one that had the most notorious romance of us all: ever since the Argentinean had come here, a few years before I met Christian (everything, it seems, is divided in my life: before and after I met Christian. I suppose that's what love does to you), he'd been quite smitten with her, but in a way that wasn't at all like a classic love story. He would go around flirting with the other girls constantly, wooing them with richly murmured 'yo quiero's and 'mi amor's, always checking to see that Nini scowled as she watched.
She always did.
They bickered a lot, getting into ridiculous arguments that ended in slammed doors, shouted 'fuck off!'s from Nini and frustrated yells from the Argentinean that were often accompanied by, "That woman is impossible!"
But everyone knew that they cared for each other, and it was something a bit reassuring to all of us: even Harry didn't have the heart to lecture her, because he knew that Nini would do something awful if accused of breaking the only rule and falling in love.
A few days after Opening Night, Nini couldn't find her cigarettes, and she lost it, throwing things and yelling out obscenities that could probably be heard across the continent.
She always reacted to things strangely.
No one dared go near her but the Argentinean, who murmured something in that dark velvet voice of his and rather tentatively kissed her hair. That night, they danced one last time, raw footsteps echoing throughout the empty Moulin Rouge.
There was something so utterly tragic in that.
Outside, in the desolate courtyard, Christian stood, listening, as snowflakes swirled around him and his breath appeared in tiny mists, drifting from chapped lips.
Why does my heart cry . . .
We both watched the scene, quietly, and somehow I felt as though we were together again.
I think he did as well, because he smiled a bit, a sad, wizened sort of smile that looked so out of place next to those naive eyes.
"You know," I'd said once, offhandedly, as we watched the sunrise dance, a majestic myriad of colors, "Forever scared me until I met you."