I do not own Anastasia or the characters. Just the plot of this story!

Night was beginning to spreading her mauve, gentle veil above the restless City of Lights and still the young woman was wandering around the capital's endless streets. She just could not stay in one place, something was prodding her on walking, perhaps a divine power, or some kind of magic. A thought which she found absolutely absurd but she would not stop thinking it was the only reasonable explanation. But as the afternoon gave its place to the evening, so did her strength to yield.

Supporting herself on a bridge's ceilings, she waited for a sign, a clue to know what she was to do.

But a ghastly voice reached her ears, alarming all of her five senses. She stood in the middle of the bridge and looked around almost desperately and saw she had been left alone. How was that possible? She remembered lots of people passing her by, chattering and laughing merrily. Where everybody had gone? But as she distracted her suspenseful mind, the voice shook her out of her thoughts as it turned into a disgusting laughter of victory.

"Princess Anastasia."

She gasped and turned around expecting to come face to face with the owner of the voice. But still there was no one to be seen. She was starting to get anxious. She was all alone in Paris and she was weak in the middle of an empty bridge.

"Let me give you a tour, Your Highness." Her tired, ocean blue eyes never ceased scanning the area for the man. But not finding him was both disappointing him and alarming.

"To your right, you can see the Eiffel Tour, the city's most famous building." She glanced at said building with her brows knitted. What was happening? Who was that man and what was his point? "To your left, the city's most precious church, Notre Dame." He continued, upsetting her even more with this attitude. "And this very bridge we're standing on, the Alexander III bridge, is named after your grandpa upon which he met… his… death."

She gasped in horror at his last whispered word and this time, when she looked over her shoulder in quest of the man, her eyes met with a cloaked, skinny man with long, dark beard and a reliquary hanging loosely from around his wrist. His face was shadowed by his hood therefore it was unrecognizable but there was an aura about him menacing, familiar. Had she met him before?

"Your Imperial Highness. I hope you enjoyed my little tour, found it... amusing." He hissed in a hostile whisper, the promise of vile laughter lingering on.

Gazing upon the man, a picture of a memory hit her hard like a rock. "That face." She was writing a letter. A man was holding a dagger behind her back. She tried to fight back but then everything… blacked out.

"Oh, yes, Princess. We have met before. Remember?" the man almost yelled as his hood fell off. But she had no time to take a glimpse at his face for a dark green wave of magic surrounded her, twirled her so wildly she lost orientation for a moment. But with that wave of magic, a wave of brand new memories overtook her. She could remember everything now.

At the ball, she had runaway so to avoid Dimitri. She met with a man who pretended he wanted to help her. Instead he surprised her by pressing a knife at her throat and forcing her to find her way to her grandmother's study, where she was forced to write a letter of goodbye. The letter did not mention where he would be taking her or that a man was threatening her at all. She remembered coding a message in her letters and after folding the paper, attacking the man but failing as he knocked her out of consciousness for obviously two days or even more. And he had eventually led her to Paris while she was unconscious. Only God knows how he had achieved that.

But there was more to the story. Those days before, that wasn't their first meeting. A couple of days ago, she had acknowledged him as a man of her deepest nightmares, a dark figure who haunted her memories. She had recognized him as the man who had cursed and murdered her family, as… "Rasputin!"

"And I was starting to fret you had forgotten me!" the man jeered her before his face suddenly darkened threateningly and he slowly approached her, pointing at her an accusing wrinkled, rotten –much to Anya's surprise and even amusement- finger. "Yes, it is Rasputin! Destroyed by your despicable family!"

"What are you talking about? The only despicable one I can remember is you! You destroyed my family! Not the other way around!" anger and determination gradually raising in her, boiling in her veins as she faced the reason of her orphanhood, of her lost years and memories, of hers and her grandmother's pain, of her family's murder.

At her courageous words, the man laughed in mocking deviousness as he slightly raised his reliquary from which a glowing, green light was coming. "Well, Princess, what goes around comes around… and round…and round…!" with circling waves of his free hand, he released the same green mist and the girl was suddenly surrounded by little flying monsters that were tearing her dress apart and were making her dizzy.

"Stop, stop!" She started walking backwards in an attempt to get away from them but that only happened when her back collided with the bridge's stony ceilings. "I'm not afraid of you!" she yelled bravely, meaning every word and was about to defend herself and her family's honour when he started walking towards her laughing victoriously.

"I can fix that! Care for a little swim, under the ice?" he questioned rhetorically before lifting the source of his magical powers and with another frightfully bright glow of his reliquary, a large part of the bridge, the part she was standing on, started giving away and soon she found herself hanging for dear life from the ceilings of the bridge's part that was hanging loosely over the magically iced water of the river, and was about to give away.

She started struggling her way upwards, to salvation, but the vibrating movements of the paved street were making it hard. But she had to keep fighting. She could not let that horrible man win the war, for that's what it was; a war. She heard him laughing his usual victorious, evil laugh and that was only pushing her to her rescue. But she would not make it. He was waiting for her and was about to finish her off with just a wave of that damned thing he was holding. "Say your prayers, Anastasia! No one can save you now!"

"Wanna bet?" she jerked her head upwards at the sound of an awfully familiar only to see Rasputin losing his balance and falling on all fours because of the force a man had put in his fist.

Dimitri.

All right, just because I've been in Paris does not mean that I know where everything is. So you have to forgive me if the Eiffel Tour is not opposite to Notre Dame or whatever. But the bridge on which the fight between Rasputin and Anya&Dimitri takes place in the film, is really named Alexander III after the real Anastasia's grandfather. Well, I do not think he died on it but I just wanted to be dramatic XD

Sorry for this really short chapter but hopefully in the next chapter the battle will be won and over with :D

Care for a little review? (: