Disclaimer: Moulin Rouge! doesn't belong to me.

Dedicated to the lovely Petal La-Belle-En-Cuisse.


Sometimes, she used red as an excuse as to why she brought that girl into her room every night. She blamed red for the way she made her carve words into her thighs, wrap thorns around her wrists. She blamed red for the aching she felt every morning, how she found herself wrapped in cotton sheets saturated in blood.

She blamed red for all the dejected thoughts that entered her mind. She really didn't mind the pain.

Ebony eye-let lace swirled about her scarred thighs, her black corset smothering her sun-kissed skin. Cuts and bruises adjourned her face and neck like jewels did Arabia, or the inked words and magenta roses did Tattoo. Birthmarks, Harold called them. "Every whore here receives one, after a time." And most brought the pain Spanish wanted so, with every needle that pierced her lovely little heart.

"Cleopatra's needle, in fact." She'd tell Gypsy on some nights. The girl would appear to believe her, for silver pins, in all probability, must prick Spanish's means of compassion. It would explain why she had none.

On some evenings, Spanish would hold out a length of silk to Gypsy, and tell her to wring it around her neck. "A tight knot, my love." It was those nights she hated most. There was no kiss, no veil of stars to blind their eyes. Only the burning fire, endless fire, that swallowed them up.

Gypsy took the wooden chair near her vanity and slid it close to Spanish. She then held taut the end of the silk wrapped around Spanish's neck, almost beckoning her to come as though she were a dog; her sick, vicious dog. But it was Gypsy who was chained, eternally shackled to this woman as though she was the only one who could bring her throbbing muscles, twisted veins.

Gypsy hung the silk over a pipe by the ceiling and secured it with a slight tug. Spanish smiled. "Wonderful, my beauty." And this was the beast, placing kisses on dear beauty's body as they stood on the wobbly chair, something less dramatic than a very last kiss. Poetry was meant for rhymesters, quite obviously; not whores.

Gypsy stepped away from Spanish, for the divine beast already swayed forward. Her bare toes gripped the edge of the wood, splinters' flaws in her skin. "Awful, really. What a casualty." Spanish said in her finest impersonation of Harold. "Yes, what a loss it'll be." Tones of black and white. Not red.

"Catch."