Author's Note: I dont know where this came from. I don't know if this makes sense. I just wrote it. That's all.
Summary: Christian needs to learn that he can't just expect someone to try and make it better for him.
Broken Souls Can't Fix Each Other
You expect, you want me to help you, to make it go away, but I sit here in this chair watching you, not knowing what to say, even though it's all happened to me before.
Yes, it's happened to me before Christian, though you're inclined not to believe it, if you even heard me say it. This has all happened to me before, a long time ago when the Moulin was brand new, before the halls were clogged with smoke and disease, when the first generation of dancers entered the Red Mill and took their places on the dance floor – ready to gave themselves to men whose names they never learned.
Her name was Giselle, and she was beautiful. She would've been the star.
Giselle, the thought of her still causes prickles in the red seams of my heart and little droplets of blood cry out. She had a voice like running water, fresh and pure from the enchanted mountains. Eyes deep mahogany like the brand new dance floor of the Mill, polished and sincere, so far untouched. I could never paint her eyes properly.
She used to like to watch the Doctor explode things and set off fireworks, she found the colours of the sparks in the air amazing, and I in turn found the reflection of them in her eyes equally amazing.
We'd hide away together. She always seemed to be at peace with me, free.
I loved her so much, it made my chest ache and she always used to tell me that she loved me right back – but I never found out if she really meant it. She would always sit with me in the Mill whenever she got the chance to slip out of the dance. She and I would hide away in a booth, I would draw with charcoaled fingers and she would find amusement in observing all the people in the Mill, sniggering at the other girls who messed up the dance or failed to attract a customer. She would point out the men who had wives and those that didn't, the men who were really still just boys – or young enough to be mistaken for boys.
Sometimes she would have to rush out into the dance number again, as though she'd never been gone, tease a few fellows here and there (she was the best before Satine) and belt out a tune, but she'd always come back to sit with me. When the night grew old we would sit, her head resting sleepily on my shoulder, hand linked in mine – it seemed so innocent and out of place inside the infamous Mill.
In the end she would always have to go, leaving me with a kiss that was both meaningless and full of promise and I would watch her tall figure disappear into the throng of people in the Mill, always wondering which man was following her that night.
She thought she was invincible, she thought she was safe, my beautiful, silly Giselle.
It was only a matter of time - for the girls of the Rouge – before they slept with the wrong man, and if they didn't they were lucky. The Mill was the perfect place for the violent, the drunk, the evil and the villains to prey on the young pretty things of the underworld. Places like the Rouge – however enchanting, however unrestricted – are never safe, are never without a dark, threatening layer of horror beneath all the colour and the fantasy and the makeup. And so it had its fair share of murders – girls who didn't turn up for dance practice found wrapped in red stained sheets, cold as ice, split open from neck to navel, red and blue hand prints around necks with faces frozen in fear. Their screams for help gone unheard, their struggles mistaken for something else, and Giselle had seen it all, like all the other girls, the bodies being carried from the Mill, the stagehands mopping the blood from the walls and floor. But it was one of those things you never believed would happen to you until it did – and when it did, it was too late.
Giselle was cocky and Giselle was confident and Giselle was never, ever afraid. Deep down, I know, she thought that she was too nice and too beautiful a creature to kill – though she never would admit to it, and perhaps it was just a façade she used to never let herself slip or feel the fear that was always subtly present in the world she lived in.
It took only a mysterious, dark eyed rich man with a hidden furious blood lust to break through that façade, and then, nothing mattered. I was the one that found her, the day after when I went to visit – I could always visit, a painter like me could just make up an excuse about painting a poster of the can can line. When she was absent from the dancehall, it never ever occurred to me that the worse had happened – you just don't think of things like that. Instead I climbed the steps to her room, picturing her sitting at her mirror fixing her makeup, a smile spreading over her lovely face when I entered.
The steps I climbed were a countdown to the moment my heart would collapse within me
I must've screamed, although I don't remember doing so, but people started galloping up the stairs. I must've walked over to her, but my legs felt so frozen I don't know how I could've. I must've fallen down next to her, but I can't remember the impact of hitting the ground, smelling the blood up close.
I took her hand, and in that moment when the cold clamminess of her skin touched my own the whole of my insides fell away, hollowing me out, everything I am – was – gone in an instant. I cupped her face, I kissed her cheeks, I snapped into tears when I saw her eyes – frozen, dead, petrified. Those beautiful, beautiful eyes of my darling Giselle staring into nothing so terrified.
The tears were streams down my face, never letting up but intensifying, blurring my vision, falling like rain onto the parted courtesan - washing the blood away. Sobs cackled from my throat and rattled my lungs, my body flailed as though it didn't know what to do, whether to hold her, shake her awake or run away.
As they pulled me away, I knew I had nothing. My heart was tiny pieces in my chest, my paints seemed dull and colourless, my Giselle had been murdered.
See, I'm just like you
I drank too much, Christian. That's why I can't remember much; I drank Absinthe because I thought I could find her. And sometimes I did. I still yearn for love with all of my being – maybe because I never really knew if Giselle loved me – really actually loved me.
I see you in your corner, dirty and miserable, grieving over Satine, but I have nothing to say. I could tell you I understand, that I've been through it. I could say I know exactly how it feels – a pain so awful you don't know whether you're crying because of the hurt or the loss. I could tell you not to cry, not to think about it, but I am no better equipped to help you when I am still so broken myself. I can't pick up the shreds of your heart and press them back together, like you somehow expect me to.
That's why I sit here, silent, hoping maybe you'll find comfort in presence, not words
A broken soul cannot fix another's, Christian, that's just how it is