Title: The Little Sparrow
Rating: PG-13 to be safe
Archive: Sure, just lemme know where you're putting it so I can bang in there awhile.
Summary: Satine's early life and how Zilder convinced her that she was worth only what men will pay for her.
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He spotted her on the street, she couldn't have been more then nine or ten but already at the full figure of a glorious woman. Even through the dirt the crimson silkiness of her hair was shown. Fine pale skin was marred by the dirt that always seemed to cling to the impoverished children of the sin-plagued village in the middle of the city. An exotic oddity, this woman-child and her hips held even his trained glance. But he was no pedophile. Other vices certainly, but never that. Attention shifted to the smaller boy who clung to the dirty hand, shivering with the filth and cold. The boy was ill and starving, even from the distance he could see that.
The snow fell down around them, causing the Gothic Tower to seem almost like something in a fairy story with it's windows aglow with that pale caressing candlelight and the green ivy cast over the window. Even though the M'sieur was hiding from the Sortie' it seemed that he couldn't resist the illusion that he felt he deserved. Drunken laughed rang out like a chorus from the tower, almost as if in a mockery of the church bells ringing somewhere up the street.
The children shifted into view, and he was able to examine them more closely now. He knew the boy now, and he knew that the pale faced angel was his sister. Trick babies, that's what they where. The children of a whore who where doomed for the muck that passed as a life in the Underworld. He sighed softly, not willing to give them another thought. After all he had his own brood to think of at the Moulin Rouge and that was enough when times where hard.
But still his eyes were drawn to the skinny children who snaked through the crowds of patrons coming to call as the light of respectability faded away. The girls fingers moved quickly through the crowd, filling her pockets with small baubles and money. The retort he longed to shout dried against his tongue and Henry wondered if he was going soft. A shake of head was given as he decided it was his Christmas spirt nothing more.
He followed them past the stage door to the club, past the crowd of men who were jeering with each other like school boys. A special show had been promised for this night. "The Lady Queen Marie" was going to be giving kisses under the mistletoe, for any person who could come up with a mere pound. After all what was a mere pound to the men who used such things to wipe their moustaches after ten franc bottles of wine.
As he headed into even the darker sections of the streets, where even the street lighters didn't venture, a shiver of something undefinable shifted through his heart. Could it be guilt? No, never, not for him. Henry Zilder didn't have a guilty bone in his body. But for some reason he walked quicker, closing the gap that had grown wider with his thoughts.
Finally they entered the filthiest hovel on the block, they entered. A handkerchief was taken from his pocket and pressed to his nose in an effort to stop the stench from slipping in. All it could give him was a flash of Marie, a mockery in a place such as this. He coughed again, stomach rolling from what was viewed. There were rats crawling over a small child who sat in decapitated cradle. This place was a nightmare of poverty.
One foot ached to move forward and remove the children from this horror when a small group of well dressed shifty eyed men moved forward from their fancy carriage. Suddenly, a scream broke out as he saw the little girl being pulled forward. The toothless crone must have been pretty in some long ago dream, but now she was a mockery of a mother as she dragged the girl by her mane of scarlet silk.
The little girl whimpered as she was shoved before the waiting men, eyes moving over her as if she was a racehorse or a slave. Henry's heart almost stopped as the realization hit him. She was selling the little girl. Righteous anger welled up in his chest as he could hear the leering voices mingling with the cries of the child in a gruesome symphony. A flash of gold was seen and the man known through out the seeder ends of Paris as M'sieur's right hand man grabbed the girl and threw her into the waiting carriage.
A step was taken towards the grimy path in the snow before another set of screams caught
his ears. The little boy was screaming his lungs out, tears sliding down his dirty face. "Moineau