Come What May

A.N. Thanks for the reviews!

Disclaimer: I don't own Moulin Rouge

Cassandra and Toulouse talked for quite awhile longer. Cassandra was relieved to finally be getting the answers she had searched for, and that she was getting them without being sneaky or having to read French.

"So let me get this straight. Everything that happened in this play happened to my parents?" Cassandra asked.

Toulouse nodded. "More or less. There were a few details changed. After all, we had to keep the Duke…"

"The Duke?" Cassandra remembered hearing about a Duke before, in the stories.

"Oh, yes. He was a very evil man. Very evil. But he had money, and that's all that Harold seemed to care about at the time. He gave us all quite a scare at the performance of this play. Ran down the aisle with a gun, you know. But luckily Harold came to his senses and knocked him out."

"That's right." Cassandra thought to herself. "The Duke was a bad man."

"Is that why my parents came here? To get away from the Duke?" she asked.

"Well, that was one of the reasons. Your mother's health had something to do with it too. It was just time for them to move on. There were just too many bad memories in Paris."

"Isn't that where they met and fell in love? How are those things bad memories?"

"Oh, not those things of course. But Paris is also where your mother sold herself to men, and where she was…"

"Whoa, wait a minute. What did you say?"

Toulouse suddenly realized that perhaps he said too much. "Well, I mean, your mother….everyone has to survive somehow. This is how the girls at the Moulin Rouge survived."

Cassandra wasn't sure if she really wanted to know any more, but she kept asking anyway. "So…how long did she do…that?"

"Actually, she was just a little bit older than you when she started. Harold didn't normally like to start them so young, but we didn't want to leave her out on the streets."

"So…is that what a courtesan is? A girl who sells herself?"

"Yes, although courtesans receive much more than money. Your mother lived in the lap of luxury in Paris, you know."

"The lap of luxury." Cassandra thought to herself. She didn't want to hear any more about her mother's past. She didn't want to know. There was no excuse for what her mother had done. Sure, Toulouse had said that she did it to survive. But he had also said that she lived in the lap of luxury. There was a big difference between surviving and having luxury. There were most likely many more things that her mother could have been doing to survive, or even to do moderately well, that wouldn't have been so, well, wrong. But instead she had to have the lap of luxury.

"So she stopped doing that when she met my father?" Cassandra was eager to change the conversation to someone else.

"Oh, yes. Once she fell in love with him, she wanted no one else." Toulouse paused for a moment, sensing that he might have just caused some anger in Cassandra. "You know, I don't think she ever really wanted to do it in the first place. Harold was just the first one who found her, and she didn't exactly have other options waiting for her."

While his reasons were highly plausible, Cassandra saw them as mere excuses. Her mother had simply taken the easy way out, and Cassandra didn't see how she could look at her mother the same way again.

Toulouse sensed that he had caused enough damage, and left the room. After a few moments, Cassandra returned to her position at the top of the stairs. She looked down into the living room, and heard her parents laughing with the guests about the good times they had shared together back in Paris. Normally, she would have listened intently to these conversations, but tonight she tuned out the words and simply watched.

As far as she was concerned, everything they were saying was a lie.

A.N. Ok, so this chapter was slightly shorter, but at least it's up. Please review!