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person4Title: An Alternative To Love (part two)
Fandom: Repo! The Genetic Opera
Pairing:Luigi/Shilo (eventually)
Rating: R (for language)
Words: 18,688
Requested by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scifiroots here
Notes: For June fic-a-day. Draws from the official Myspaces and twitter on top of the movie, but the one thing you probably need to know from them is that if you're looking at Pavi's dialog and going "Shouldn't that be signora?" not with Pavi it shouldn't.
He'd planned on never going up to her anywhere in the city where there were plenty of people around who weren't half-braindead from glow. It was too likely that someone might pay close enough attention to recognize him under his hat and start spreading stupid fucking rumors that he liked slumming it. But she'd left her usual alley while he was on his way to her, and like hell was he just going to sit around waiting for her to come back. Luigi Largo didn't wait for anyone.
He found her in an entertainment store in the closest shopping district, a weird little owner-run mess of a place that had sections for everything from reel-to-reel tapes to the latest holorecordings. She was pouring over the selection of CDs, already holding a couple in her hand.
"You're wasting cash on music when you're living on a trashheap?" he said when he reached her side. Luigi was beginning to think that his dad's disease must have done something to screw up his brain during his last few days, if this was what his almost-chosen heir thought of as a good spending choice.
Apparently, for the moment at least, she settled on 'yes, we're friends' as the answer to the question she'd asked the last time she saw him, because she greeted him with a smile. "I don't have anything better to spend it on."
He raised his eyebrows, bemusement the only way he could think of to react to that statement. "You haven't thought for a second about saving up for, say, an apartment?"
"I can't do that," she admitted, ducking her head. "I don't really keep that much of the money I make; I let Graverobber have most of it."
"What, he's some sort of fucking drug pimp to you?"
She giggled, pressing her hand to her mouth like that could hide it. "'Drug pimp'? You'd call it that?" she asked, then shook her head. "No, he's not my 'drug pimp'. He never even asked me to give him anything, though he's not the type of person who's going to turn money down when it's offered. I just don't have any debt to pay off, and he does, okay? I can't sit back and not help him out with something like that."
From the way she said it, Luigi could tell that she meant the type of debt that ended in bleeding to death on the street with missing guts five percent of the time. It was interesting information to have; might just come in handy if he ever needed to hunt down dirt on the freak.
But it probably wasn't a subject that he wanted to dig any deeper into for the time being, in case she'd reveal anything else she was doing that was idiotic.
"You're getting CDs?" he said by way of changing the subject. "What, are you seventy-fucking-years-old?"
"Blame my dad for that, he liked antiques. I mean, the TV I grew up with was only this big," she said, indicting a tiny box in the air with her hands. Luigi didn't even know they made them that small. "So I can only get music that plays on this ancient Walkman thing I took out of the house with me."
"The Runaways and The Bangles," he said, reading the names of the bands she'd already grabbed music for over her shoulder. Then he grabbed her chin and tilted her head upward so he could get a good look at her.
"What are you doing?" she asked, making a face at him.
"Looking for signs that one of our surGENs deaged you," he said, smirking at her. "Those fucking bands were old when my dad was born; doesn't really go against the 'secretly seventy' theory."
She glowered at him. Apparently insulting her musical interests struck a nerve. "They're not old, they're classic. And you've obviously never listened to them if you're insulting them; Joan Jett alone is so awesome that she's uninsultable."
"I hear enough screaming women already," he told her, ignoring the way it didn't make her glare at him any less, and looked over the shelves of CDs. It only took him a minute to find what he was looking for and toss it onto her pile. "Here, try some decent music. I'll even fucking treat you."
She looked down at what he'd handed her, and her glare was broken by a small laugh. "Frank Sinatra? And you're calling my music old?" She tapped the fedora he was wearing in the picture on the cover with her finger then looked at Luigi, a smile growing across her face, "I thought the hat was a disguise, not a tribute to fashions from a hundred years ago."
"Sinatra is fucking timeless," he informed her, then adjusted his own fedora to a rakish angle, "and so is the fucking hat."
"The hat is pretty okay," she said. After a second she stuck her hand out at him, "Okay, how about this? I'll listen to your music, if you listen to mine."
He examined her hand like it might be crawling with unspeakable germs--which it probably was--before clasping it in a firm handshake. "Deal. But only so you learn some fucking class."
"And you can learn to rock out," she said cheerfully, not rising to the insult again. "I think this is enough for today."
The atmosphere between them was surprisingly light, so he should have realized that something would happen to break it. It wasn't either of them that caused it this time, but her eyes skirting away from him to something over his shoulder that made her face fall like she'd never been smiling at all. He turned to search out what she was looking at, and quickly spotted the display selling recordings of The Opera, complete with a flickering standee of her yanked out of the quickly-becoming-iconic image of her standing in the doorway covered in blood.
"Can't you all do something about that?" she asked, ripping her eyes away from the display and back to him. "You guys can't be any happier about people gawking at your dad dying than I am with them watching mine."
"It's obvious you aren't kidding about having know damned clue how people work," he said, waving off the idea out of hand. "The second we try banning the damned thing, every fucking asshole in the world will be scrambling for an illegal copy, even the ones who try to claim they're too fucking classy to watch something like that when it's freely available. Acting like we don't give a shit is the fastest way to make them get sick of it."
She ducked down a side aisle instead of continuing to the checkout counter, finding a bench she could collapse onto and then burying her face in her hands. "I guess you're the one who'd know. And maybe it's easier for you; your dad would be proud of you guys, for completely proving him wrong about how well you could run the company. My dad wanted me to the change the world, and I'm dealing drugs on the street." she mumbled through them. Then her entire body shuddered once. "Mostly I just really hate that complete strangers who weren't even there know more about that night than I do."
"You can't remember?" he asked, gingerly settling himself onto the crappy little bench beside her. Well, that explained a thing or two. He'd thought that winning her over had been a little easier than expected, even if she hadn't noticed him stabbing her old man.
"Not much," she admitted. "It all blurs together, except for the big moments; finding out about the drugs, your dad trying to make me shoot mine, my dad dying. It probably would be easier if I hadn't had that last big attack there, but ones big enough to make me collapse always left my brain..." she freed one hand long enough to wave it absently in the air around her head, illustrating her loopiness. "It's stupid, but the thing I remember best through the whole night is that stupid audience, how they all just stared at us without even trying to help. Even if they'd decided that they wanted to side with your dad, at least that would be doing something! I remember that there was this woman right in front of me who was crying even harder than I was after daddy got shot, and I kept thinking, 'If you're that upset, get up here and help him, you stupid bitch,' but she just kept staring at us with everyone else like we were just some sideshow." She tilted her head to the side so she could look at him, her brow furrowed deeply enough to make his jokes about her age suddenly seem more plausible. "How can you and your family stand people acting like that around you all the time?"
"All right, listen up, because this is the best fucking lesson you're ever going to get about how the fuck people work," he said, drawing himself up straight. "Ninety-percent of the people in the world are nothing but fucking sheep. They might be more obvious about it with us because they know we're the biggest fucking thing the world has ever seen and there's no damned point in even pretending that they could be on the same level as us, but we could be peasants ourselves and they'd just be a little subtler about acting the same fucking way because deep down inside all they want to do is flock around and stare at anyone who has an actual fucking personality."
"...That sounded really egotistical, Luigi," she said, her lips twitching, almost forming a new smile before they settled back down again. "And not really right. I mean, I don't want to stand around staring at you all the time."
"Ten percent don't." He glance back towards the display of recordings, considering. She probably wasn't in the best mood to talk about anything that had happened there, but he really needed to get her mind thinking about it soon, and he'd probably never have a better excuse to bring it up. "Hell, you almost became a member of their GeneCo sideshow yourself, if you don't remember. Ever think about what you would have done if that happened?"
"It wouldn't have," she said flatly. "There's nothing he could have done that would have convinced me to kill my father."
"Hypothetically," Luigi said with a frown. "Don't be so fucking prosaic."
"You mean, if he'd just handed it over without any murder?" She leaned backwards, bracing herself on the back of the bench with her arms, and looked thoughtful, then laughed quietly. "I guess I'd have just made you vice-president and then stood out of the way being a figurehead, which would have kind of gone against the whole point of giving it to me. But it's not like I know anything about running a company, Pavi's too creepy to want in charge, and I already knew Amber was a drug addict back then, so you'd have been the only choice."
"So you'd only have fucking picked me because you thought the other two are more awful. Thanks."
She flashed him a quick smile, "It's not like I knew you, back then. I guess I probably never really would have, if things had gone differently that night. I mean, half the reason I thought that maybe you'd be okay to talk to after that first time was because you lost the same thing I did that night."
Luigi privately thought that he'd lost a hell of a lot more than she did. He had lost his rightful inheritance along with his dad, but she'd gained her health and freedom when she lost her's; it was pretty damned obvious who got the better deal out of the night. It didn't even matter that she'd ended up on the streets, seeing as it was her own choice not to live comfortably on what her father had left her.
But he just kept quiet about all that, ignoring her cheesy little 'Maybe we aren't so different after all' aside in favor of getting back to the point. It was good to know that she was fine just being a figurehead, but he still wanted to know going in if there were any ideas she had for what she'd do if she was in charge. If she actually had any that were half-decent, tossing one into action every so often would be an easy way of keeping her complacent. "Every fucking person who's ever dreamed of swiping one of our spots is rolling their eyes at you right now. You seriously don't have anything you'd want to do if you'd gotten the company?"
She sighed, and rubbed her forehead. "I wish you could get rid of the Repo Men. I mean, I understand why they exist--I read everything I could find about them after that night, and I saw all the facts and figures about how hard it was for your dad to make people keep up their payments when they were just happy to still be alive no matter what he did to punish them--but it's still horrible. I guess I'd have wanted to figure out if there was some way to restructure the way they work, if they couldn't be gotten rid of all together? Like, no repossessing from children, period; it's not like it's their choice not to pay, or to get surgery to begin with. And maybe have different payment levels, so people who actually need new organs don't need to pay as much as people who just want an orange spleen for fun? Oh! And I'd donate funds towards any scientists who are still trying to find a real cure to the plague. It's stupid that everyone just stopped caring because they know replacements are available."
As he watched her prattling on about surprisingly level-headed ideas, Luigi had to wonder if spending her life in a bedroom had left her with no real damned clue how much wealth and power his family commanded. He'd expected to get a list of ways she'd want to spend their cash out of her, not actual fucking business ideas.
• • •
He left her alone for a few weeks after that, allowing time for the idea of 'What would I have done with GeneCo' to keep brewing in her mind, and went to work really setting his plan into action in the meantime.
It wasn't enough for people to just look the other way for her in honor of Rotti, they had to want her. They had to be gathering around water coolers when no Largo was around talking about how Rotti must be rolling in his grave over the daughter who refused to even keep his name taking over the company while the kid he'd wanted in the position was nowhere to be found. He wanted the peasants muttering on the street corners about how much better they thought things would be with her in charge; how she was one of them, not someone who'd grown up with a silver spoon in her mouth. He wanted everyone in upper management positions in GeneCo daydreaming about what a tractable pawn a sheltered teenager would make, while they were stuck instead with the most stubborn bitch the world had ever known.
He wanted the whole fucking world whispering Shilo Wallace's name in dark corners when they thought nobody who wasn't on their side was around to hear their treason.
But that took work, made only slightly easier by the fact that Amber's zydrate addiction was getting worse than ever as the stresses of being in charge of the biggest company in the world piled up.
He'd spent an entire night getting the staff of a subversive newspaper that they thought was so far underground that GeneCo had no idea it existed drunk out of their minds. He kept his face carefully hidden the entire time and let them think that they were important enough to be approached by their very own shadowy informer as he kept the conversation constantly circling back to GeneCo's 'true' heir, and wouldn't things be better with her around?
It was the fifth time he'd spent a night like that in the past month, though the company was different every time. He had radio programs preaching her name, websites full of visitors that flocked to other forums to spread the word, he was even thinking of rounding up some street corner prophets and training them to scream her name in the middle of their garbled nonsense.
Nobody had commented on any of the other nights he'd taken off, but this morning was different. As soon as he entered the dining room, still wearing his clothes from the night before, Amber was screeching at him in her most ear-splitting tone, "Where the fuck were you last night?"
"Where ever the fuck I wanted to be, sister" he said, having a servant dish him up a plateful of waffles.
"You can't just leave without saying anything! Do you have any idea what a fucking mess last night was? It's not like Pavi's any help!"
"Ohh," Pavi groaned sadly, then perked up. "Ah, the Pavi thinks he knows where Luigi was last night, little sister!"
"He was at a bar, I can smell it from here," Amber snarled. "And don't think I'm going to forget about it the next time you bitch at me about addictions."
"Si, that too. But Pavi knows why he's been disappearing so often lately." Pavi leaned towards her like he was offering up some grand secret and stage-whispered, "Luigi has found a singora to pass his time with."
"Shut the fuck up, Pavi!"
"Ha!" Amber burst out, more of an exclamation than an actual laugh. "One who isn't already in a body bag?"
"Startling, yes? But the Pavi found many people who saw her leaving safely with Luigi the night Pavi saw her, with no wounds at all!" He dropped his voice further, looking slyly at Luigi even though he was still acting like he was directing his words at Amber. "They were all so surprised to be able to say that she and our brother seemed to be talking happily on the way out."
"'Happily'?" Amber and Luigi said at the same time, then shared a disgusted look with the other.
"Luigi's never happy," Amber continued with a sneer before Luigi could go on.
Not that he'd been planning on saying anything more. He'd just been surprised enough to wonder whether it was him or the people Pavi had asked who had read her wrong that night, when he'd thought she was just anxious to finally leave.
"Happy for Luigi, perhaps they meant," Pavi deferred. "But, for certain, Luigi has not been here so often since that night, and the Pavi does not think it's because he was taking care of company business."
The Pavi obviously didn't know shit, but it wasn't like Luigi could say that without being questioned about what he meant.
Strangely enough, Amber seemed drained of her previous anger. "God, I guess I should just be happy that someone else in this family is learning how to get along with someone without killing them by the third time they see them. Why don't you try using those lessons to go a day without killing an employee sometime?"
• • •
It was raining the next time he found her. She was shivering under a store canopy looking like a wet rat, or maybe like the cheapest fucking prostitute the world had ever known.
"You seriously won't even go home long enough to get a fucking raincoat?" he asked when she looked up at him.
"I don't own a raincoat," she replied, her teeth chattering hard enough to garble the words. "I wasn't allowed outside, remember?"
He stared at her, still dressing in her tiny little skirts and light little tops even though winter was getting close, and wondered how the hell she hadn't gotten sick yet. "This is fucking idiotic," he finally said, and dragged off his coat to toss it over her.
He turned to walk back to his car, expecting her to follow but still faintly pleased when he heard her footsteps right behind him. She was getting well-trained.
"Take us to my tailor, now," he told his driver once he was at the car, giving her a look to tell her to get in at the same time.
"I know how much you like rubbing in the whole I sleep in trash thing," she said as she settled down, "but I'm not going to ruin your coat just by wearing it. You don't need to get a new one now."
"First of all, the lining of that coat is silk, and you're soaking wet, so yes you fucking are going to ruin it by wearing it," he was quick to point out. It was an expensive coat, so she'd better realize that she was going to be responsible for its water stains. "And we're not going for the fucking coat; you're getting some decent clothes."
"Decent?" she repeated, then her eyes narrowed. "Hey! My dad picked out all of my clothes for me!"
Luigi really hadn't needed to know that Nathan Wallace had had even more issues than he'd already known about, if he'd been picking out dresses for his daughter short enough for her to flash the world every time she bent over. "You want to freeze to death in the middle of December because you don't own a single fucking outfit made out of more than a yard of fabric?"
"Well... no," she admitted, but frowned. "I don't have enough money to buy tailor-made clothes," she said, and, when he snorted, added, "I'm not letting you buy me any either."
"As if I'd waste the money on clothing that was just going into the garbage," he said. "I know you've got issues with touching your dad's money, but you don't fucking have to. The company still has access to his accounts; I can get the money out of them and you can tell yourself that you still haven't let your pretty little hands touch a single red cent of it."
She closed her eyes tightly, looking disgusted with the very idea, but slowly she said, "He really was a doctor before he became a Repo Man, right? So, I guess he probably saved up enough from that job to pay for some clothes."
Luigi just rolled his eyes. Whatever helped her sleep at night; it wasn't like the clothing she was wearing had been paid for out of some other money.
The tailor was closed when he reached it, but it didn't matter. He banged on the door until the man came out, and instantly his demeanor switched from annoyed to sycophantic when he saw who it was. "Mr. Largo!" he exclaimed, unlocking his door as quickly as he could and getting out of the way. "Come in, come in! What do you need?"
Luigi gestured at Shilo. "Measure her for a winter wardrobe. Whatever you think she needs to not freeze her tits off."
The tailor froze for a moment, looking at her, then laughed, "Oh, you're making a joke! Mr. Largo, sir, you know that I only make menswear."
"Then I guess it's time to find out if an old dog really can learn new tricks!" Luigi said in a tone of faux-joviality, his eyes sharp. "Damn, you've always done such a good job that I'll hate to have to replace you if it turns out you can't do what I want."
The tailor had been around him often enough to recognize the threat, and went pale. But he made one last effort to avoid the job; "Perhaps, Mr. Largo, you might consider taking her to Miss. Sweet's clothier instead?"
Luigi's eyes narrowed. "No, she's not going to where that bitch gets her outfits. I brought her here because I knew you could make something with some fucking class, not because I want her looking like a skanky fucking slut! Do you understand?"
He felt a hand on his elbow and snapped around to glare down at Shilo, who no longer even flinched away at the look. "This really isn't worth getting so angry about, Luigi," she said calmly, and somehow some of the anger really did start draining back out of him. "I'd be happy just with sweaters off the rack from somewhere."
"Oh no, Miss, please, don't do that," the tailor said, reaching out to gently tug her away from Luigi and push her towards his measuring station. He was actually fucking frightened for her, Luigi realized from the look on his face. As if, after all the bullshit Luigi'd put up with from and because of her over the months without ever so much as smacking her on the wrist, he'd suddenly snap and off her over something as fucking benign as her distracting him when he was pissed at someone else. Of course, the bastard didn't say as much, instead coming up with the excuse that, "Even the most clumsily made outfit that I could create would be better than anything you would find mass-produced."
"She's a fucking street urchin, so don't bother wasting any decent fabrics on her," Luigi chipped in as the tailor began to take Shilo's measurements.
"Are you ever going to get tired of coming up with new ways to insult me about that?" she asked, glaring at him in the mirror that was positioned in front of her.
"Listen to me one of the times I tell you to suck it up and find a fucking apartment and I won't need to keep it up," he shot back. He eyed the small selection of premade clothing available at the front of the store, and grabbed a black shirt that looked his size. "I'll be taking this too," he said, flashing it at the tailor. "The hell I'm going to keep walking around in a shirt that's soaked enough to be see-through. When you're done with her, see if you can find something in the kids sizes she could wear out of here too."
He ripped off his old shirt, and heard a gasp. When he looked up, Shilo was still looking at him in the mirror, but now her eyes were focused on his chest and the scars snaking across it. "If you want to ogle me, I can take off the ascot so you have a better view," he said, raising an eyebrow at her.
"Vain," she said, more absently than as a sarcastic rejoinder. "What the hell happened to you. That doesn't look like a surgical scar." She tapped her own collarbone to indicate exactly which one she meant.
"Lucky bastard with a knife," he said, touching that one, and then a few more. His hand settled across the one slashed across the area above his liver, "Too fucking much booze," then moved up to trace the two well-faded ones beneath his ribcage, "Lungs. Any more questions?"
She tilted her head to the side. "What, did you used to smoke too?"
"No, I didn't fucking smoke! I was ten."
"But aren't you old enough that that would be... before designer..." She blinked, then her eyes widened with realization but she didn't say anything, just kept silently staring at him as she waited for him to confirm or deny her suspicions.
"That's right, you're looking straight at GeneCo's first fucking patient," he said with a smirk. "Not that you'll find that on any records, since Pop still had a year worth of hoops to jump through before he could open up the company and start curing the masses."
She looked sad at the information, but he didn't know why. For all that Pavi liked to taunt him about his false first-generation lungs, he was fucking proud of the place that gave him in history. The whole goddamned world dominating company was built up from his shitty organs, and even if there hadn't been any other good reason on Earth for why he should have been the one to inherit it, that should have been enough on its own.
• • •
It was luck that he was watching her when it happened, fucking unpredictable luck that could have had him off doing a million other things and never realizing that she was in trouble until she showed up in the morgue.
She should have fucking known better than to try to take care of new faces in her little junkie alley on her own, or should have at least realized that the three men were obviously a lot more clear-headed then harmless, brainless, Z-zombies. She sure as hell shouldn't have let them convince her to go down a more private branch of the alley to take care of business.
Stupid fucking people-ignorant shut-in, half a year she goes distrusting everyone in the world but the graverobber and Luigi himself and the one time it was actually necessary she went and let down her guard.
And what the hell were the odds that she'd be attacked right after she'd finally stopped dressing like she'd spread her legs for anything that asked?
He wished that it had been something he'd planned. That he'd paid some lowlifes to rough her up so he could play hero and weasel a little more of that trust out of her. The thought that she might have been hurt of killed under uncontrolled circumstances is fucking enraging to him, the fury burning more fiercely in him than it had in months.
He threw open the door to his car and leapt out the moment he recognized that one of the men standing behind the one she was talking to was slipping a knife out of his sleeve, a movement Luigi could have recognized anywhere after the million times he'd performed it himself. Even as he did so the ringleader suddenly lunged at her, but she'd become so quick at dodging at a moment's notice over the months that he wasn't nearly fast enough to grab him. If she'd just had the sense to run back out into the crowded main alley it would have been fine, she would have been able to spot Luigi immediately and get the hell behind him, but in another stunning display of idiocy she headed in the opposite direction. He sure as hell hoped that she was thinking she'd be able to hide in the darkness there, and wasn't just mindlessly fleeing in the direction she found herself facing after the first dodge.
They chased her, Luigi chased them, and it was like some sort of fucking race except that he knew he'd be losing a lot more than a gold medal and a pat on the back if he came in too far behind.
He reached them all at a dead end, and was glad to see that she was at least fighting them tooth and claw though she was too damned scrawny to hold out unarmed against three grown men for long. "Come on, kid, just let us have all the zydrate and a little fun and we'll let you go perfectly fine," the leader was trying to say to her, the lies obvious in his voice. They were the last words he'd ever have a chance to say, Luigi purposely stabbing through his larynx with his sharpest knife before going after the carotid arteries. The blood started to pulse out immediately but Luigi didn't stop to watch him fall, knowing it would only take seconds.
Shilo saw him, but when she opened her mouth to call out to him he gave her a curt shake of his head that kept her quiet. He wasn't giving up a single of the few seconds that he had the element of surprise on his side. They were what let him get close enough to drive his knife into the back of the next bastard. He bellowed in pain and lashed around to see who was there, which only made things worse for him as Luigi kept the blade of the knife buried deep within him. A few more stabs were all it took.
He'd thought that the last one might be a little more difficult, actually knowing that he was there and all, but he was as pathetically easy as the others. He wasn't shit with his knife, but no one was as good as Luigi. He didn't stand a chance.
Every last one of them was down, their blood everywhere, but Luigi was still as angry as he'd ever been before in his life. He wanted to kill more, to slash, and stab, or even just pick a trash can off the ground and bludgeon any person he could find until he could finally be calm.
But there was only one other person there, and when he looked at her he almost dropped his knife from shock when he realized that the killing rage refused to settle on her. It spread out around him in every direction, looking for something he could focus it on, but when it reached her it just slid right past. That had never happened before, ever. There'd been people he wasn't allowed to kill, the list basically made up entirely of his family members and Mag, but that didn't mean he'd never wanted to. When he was in a blind rage like this the most he'd ever been able to do was grab the first unlucky bastard who walked by and redirect it towards them, leaving him unsatisfied at not getting his chosen target even if it cooled his head down.
Shilo was a person that he didn't want to see dead? It was a strange new thought, but one that seemed to ring true when he poked at it.
Not that he had much time to do that, since a second later she was flinging herself at him. "Thank you, Luigi," she said, her entire body shaking against his. "Thank you."
"What the fuck did you think you were doing?" he shouted at her. Just because he didn't want to kill her, didn't mean that he wasn't pissed the hell off in other ways. "Where the fuck is that fucking graverobber of yours, and why the hell would you follow those bastards down here without him?"
"I thought it would be okay."
"Because following strange men down dark alleys is really something people walk away from all the fucking time."
"I thought it would be okay," she repeated, her face twisting. "He... the leader, he kind of reminded me of you. So I didn't think he'd do anything."
Good fucking grief. Out of every damned way in the world his plan could have blown up in his face, it went and did so in a way that would have made anyone else laugh in her face if they heard it. She thought that she'd be safe because he'd reminded her of Luigi Largo; it was like the set up to some bad fucking joke. And what could he even say to that? 'Don't trust me, you idiot,' when that would not only screw up all the work he'd put into her, but when he'd just realized that maybe she possibly could, at least as far as not hurting her was concerned? If it wasn't just a one-time aberration.
"And you didn't even have a fucking weapon in case you were wrong," he just said tiredly, then slid his hand into his coat to produce another knife. "Here, take it. Don't make that fucking mistake again."
It was his own first knife, first and favorite and never far from his side even though he'd long since taken to only using more flashy looking ones. It had been a gift from one of his dad's old girlfriends, back in the time before Marni, one who'd wanted to make a good impression on Rotti Largo's oldest child and figured that all boys liked weapons. He couldn't have remembered her name if he'd tried, but he'd never forget the knife. It was just an old trench knife, simple and to the point without even one of the interesting designs that some of them could boast, but the first time he'd ever slid it into a person it had been the most perfect feeling that he'd ever experienced. Over time its wooden handle had been worn by his grip and the flat of its blade had lost some of its shine, but he still kept it as sharp and well cared for as it had been the day he'd gotten it.
But she didn't seem to realize what a great gift it was. "I don't even know how to use a knife," she said. "I mean, aside from the sharp part being what you hurt people with."
He grabbed her hand and forced the handle into it. "I'll start to teach you how to use the fucking thing the next time I'm out here. Until then, I think you can get by with 'sharp part hurts' as long as you don't do something that stupid again." He finally stopped to look her up and down, making sure she was all in one piece. "Those bastards didn't get you anywhere?"
"No. Well, not really." She twisted her arm around so he could see where her sleeve had been sliced open, but, though the cut had reached her skin, it hadn't gone deep enough to leave more than a faint graze on her. "I guess it's lucky you got me these new clothes when you did."
"Great," he said. "Come with me. You're not sleeping in a dumpster with an open wound, no matter how shallow it is."
"I could just buy some bandages," she argued.
He didn't know how the hell he'd gotten saddled with the only girl in the world who'd try to argue in favor of letting her stay on the street. But he wasn't even going to waste energy on it. "No. Now move your fucking feet."
He kept a first aid kit in his car for those times when he felt like having an actual knife fight instead of just a stabbing spree, and he pulled it out after ordering his driver to take them to the closest half-decent hotel he could think of. She took off her jacket and rolled up her sleeve peaceably enough when asked and let him poke at it. After spending most of her life 'sick' she was probably used to that sort of treatment.
It was a tiny bit deeper at the end then it was the rest of the way across, cutting in enough to produce a tiny trickle of blood, but it wasn't enough to worry about. By the time he had it cleaned and bandaged they were already pulling into a hotel that a quick glance told him didn't fit his standards of decent, but the driver was a fucking peasant and probably had a better idea than he did of what she'd consider okay.
Pretending for a second that she hadn't chosen to become a person who'd consider just having a bed to be a luxury.
It only took him a minute to get her their best available room; he didn't let the person at the front desk get a good look at his face, but she could see the stack of cash he tossed down in front of her just fine. He'd honestly planned on just seeing Shilo safely to the door and then leaving her there, maybe after lending her some money to order in some takeout if she needed it. He'd even told his driver to leave the car running because he'd be straight back.
Then she grabbed his sleeve before he could walk away. "Luigi..." she started then trailed off, staring first at her hand where it was still clutching the fabric of his coat, then searchingly at his face. Finally she quietly finished. "...Thank you. For tonight. For everything." And then she leaned up to kiss him.
It was chaste for all of five seconds, all her and her utter lack of knowledge about what she doing, then he groaned and pushed her backwards into the room, kicking the door closed behind them.
He'd never had much fucking use for virgins. The only thing they had going for them was that he could be absolutely positive that Pavi had never once gotten near their cunts, and that wasn't a benefit that could put them over an experienced woman whose Pavi-related background he'd completely checked out. But she learned quickly, with nothing more than imitation and a nudge here and there to guide her, and before long he was starting to think that he'd never been so turned on so quickly in his life as he pressed her back towards the bed.
He hooked his fingers into the row of buttons holding her shirt closed, ready to rip it open as he had so many of his own in the past, but forced himself to pause there and look at her. "If you're going to remember that you freak out about sex and want to stop, you sure as hell better do it now."
She smiled, and laughed, and pulled him back down to her. "No," she whispered just before their mouths met again.
• • •
The bed was awful, hard and lumpy and covered by sheets scratchier than any he'd ever so much as touched before, but it was hard to care that much about it when she was flopped against his chest, relaxed and sated.
He drummed his fingers lightly on her back, wanting to go to sleep but realizing that this was probably the best mental state he'd ever have her in to press her onwards towards the place he wanted her to end up. "Did you know," he asked, trying to make it sound like the absent meandering conversation of someone on the edge of sleep, which wasn't too difficult since it wasn't far from the truth, "how many people want you in charge of the company? Seems like every time I go into a room people are trying to shut up before I can hear them talking about how we should have gone with what Pops wanted even if he never signed that will."
She hummed quietly, then murmured, "Did they miss how I wouldn't go along with his requirements for it?"
His stopped his tapping, and smoothed his hand down her spine. "Doesn't matter to them. You could storm up to the front doors tomorrow, and they'd run Amber straight out for you."
"I wonder how quick it would be before they were disappointed by me?" She turned her face into his shoulder and whispered something that sounded like, "'Go and change the world for me'? Ha..."
It didn't really matter if the idea wasn't appealing to her just then. It was fine. He'd sowed the seeds in her mind, and that was what mattered.
He didn't need to rush them to grow.
Fandom: Repo! The Genetic Opera
Pairing:Luigi/Shilo (eventually)
Rating: R (for language)
Words: 18,688
Requested by
scifiroots hereNotes: For June fic-a-day. Draws from the official Myspaces and twitter on top of the movie, but the one thing you probably need to know from them is that if you're looking at Pavi's dialog and going "Shouldn't that be signora?" not with Pavi it shouldn't.
He'd planned on never going up to her anywhere in the city where there were plenty of people around who weren't half-braindead from glow. It was too likely that someone might pay close enough attention to recognize him under his hat and start spreading stupid fucking rumors that he liked slumming it. But she'd left her usual alley while he was on his way to her, and like hell was he just going to sit around waiting for her to come back. Luigi Largo didn't wait for anyone.
He found her in an entertainment store in the closest shopping district, a weird little owner-run mess of a place that had sections for everything from reel-to-reel tapes to the latest holorecordings. She was pouring over the selection of CDs, already holding a couple in her hand.
"You're wasting cash on music when you're living on a trashheap?" he said when he reached her side. Luigi was beginning to think that his dad's disease must have done something to screw up his brain during his last few days, if this was what his almost-chosen heir thought of as a good spending choice.
Apparently, for the moment at least, she settled on 'yes, we're friends' as the answer to the question she'd asked the last time she saw him, because she greeted him with a smile. "I don't have anything better to spend it on."
He raised his eyebrows, bemusement the only way he could think of to react to that statement. "You haven't thought for a second about saving up for, say, an apartment?"
"I can't do that," she admitted, ducking her head. "I don't really keep that much of the money I make; I let Graverobber have most of it."
"What, he's some sort of fucking drug pimp to you?"
She giggled, pressing her hand to her mouth like that could hide it. "'Drug pimp'? You'd call it that?" she asked, then shook her head. "No, he's not my 'drug pimp'. He never even asked me to give him anything, though he's not the type of person who's going to turn money down when it's offered. I just don't have any debt to pay off, and he does, okay? I can't sit back and not help him out with something like that."
From the way she said it, Luigi could tell that she meant the type of debt that ended in bleeding to death on the street with missing guts five percent of the time. It was interesting information to have; might just come in handy if he ever needed to hunt down dirt on the freak.
But it probably wasn't a subject that he wanted to dig any deeper into for the time being, in case she'd reveal anything else she was doing that was idiotic.
"You're getting CDs?" he said by way of changing the subject. "What, are you seventy-fucking-years-old?"
"Blame my dad for that, he liked antiques. I mean, the TV I grew up with was only this big," she said, indicting a tiny box in the air with her hands. Luigi didn't even know they made them that small. "So I can only get music that plays on this ancient Walkman thing I took out of the house with me."
"The Runaways and The Bangles," he said, reading the names of the bands she'd already grabbed music for over her shoulder. Then he grabbed her chin and tilted her head upward so he could get a good look at her.
"What are you doing?" she asked, making a face at him.
"Looking for signs that one of our surGENs deaged you," he said, smirking at her. "Those fucking bands were old when my dad was born; doesn't really go against the 'secretly seventy' theory."
She glowered at him. Apparently insulting her musical interests struck a nerve. "They're not old, they're classic. And you've obviously never listened to them if you're insulting them; Joan Jett alone is so awesome that she's uninsultable."
"I hear enough screaming women already," he told her, ignoring the way it didn't make her glare at him any less, and looked over the shelves of CDs. It only took him a minute to find what he was looking for and toss it onto her pile. "Here, try some decent music. I'll even fucking treat you."
She looked down at what he'd handed her, and her glare was broken by a small laugh. "Frank Sinatra? And you're calling my music old?" She tapped the fedora he was wearing in the picture on the cover with her finger then looked at Luigi, a smile growing across her face, "I thought the hat was a disguise, not a tribute to fashions from a hundred years ago."
"Sinatra is fucking timeless," he informed her, then adjusted his own fedora to a rakish angle, "and so is the fucking hat."
"The hat is pretty okay," she said. After a second she stuck her hand out at him, "Okay, how about this? I'll listen to your music, if you listen to mine."
He examined her hand like it might be crawling with unspeakable germs--which it probably was--before clasping it in a firm handshake. "Deal. But only so you learn some fucking class."
"And you can learn to rock out," she said cheerfully, not rising to the insult again. "I think this is enough for today."
The atmosphere between them was surprisingly light, so he should have realized that something would happen to break it. It wasn't either of them that caused it this time, but her eyes skirting away from him to something over his shoulder that made her face fall like she'd never been smiling at all. He turned to search out what she was looking at, and quickly spotted the display selling recordings of The Opera, complete with a flickering standee of her yanked out of the quickly-becoming-iconic image of her standing in the doorway covered in blood.
"Can't you all do something about that?" she asked, ripping her eyes away from the display and back to him. "You guys can't be any happier about people gawking at your dad dying than I am with them watching mine."
"It's obvious you aren't kidding about having know damned clue how people work," he said, waving off the idea out of hand. "The second we try banning the damned thing, every fucking asshole in the world will be scrambling for an illegal copy, even the ones who try to claim they're too fucking classy to watch something like that when it's freely available. Acting like we don't give a shit is the fastest way to make them get sick of it."
She ducked down a side aisle instead of continuing to the checkout counter, finding a bench she could collapse onto and then burying her face in her hands. "I guess you're the one who'd know. And maybe it's easier for you; your dad would be proud of you guys, for completely proving him wrong about how well you could run the company. My dad wanted me to the change the world, and I'm dealing drugs on the street." she mumbled through them. Then her entire body shuddered once. "Mostly I just really hate that complete strangers who weren't even there know more about that night than I do."
"You can't remember?" he asked, gingerly settling himself onto the crappy little bench beside her. Well, that explained a thing or two. He'd thought that winning her over had been a little easier than expected, even if she hadn't noticed him stabbing her old man.
"Not much," she admitted. "It all blurs together, except for the big moments; finding out about the drugs, your dad trying to make me shoot mine, my dad dying. It probably would be easier if I hadn't had that last big attack there, but ones big enough to make me collapse always left my brain..." she freed one hand long enough to wave it absently in the air around her head, illustrating her loopiness. "It's stupid, but the thing I remember best through the whole night is that stupid audience, how they all just stared at us without even trying to help. Even if they'd decided that they wanted to side with your dad, at least that would be doing something! I remember that there was this woman right in front of me who was crying even harder than I was after daddy got shot, and I kept thinking, 'If you're that upset, get up here and help him, you stupid bitch,' but she just kept staring at us with everyone else like we were just some sideshow." She tilted her head to the side so she could look at him, her brow furrowed deeply enough to make his jokes about her age suddenly seem more plausible. "How can you and your family stand people acting like that around you all the time?"
"All right, listen up, because this is the best fucking lesson you're ever going to get about how the fuck people work," he said, drawing himself up straight. "Ninety-percent of the people in the world are nothing but fucking sheep. They might be more obvious about it with us because they know we're the biggest fucking thing the world has ever seen and there's no damned point in even pretending that they could be on the same level as us, but we could be peasants ourselves and they'd just be a little subtler about acting the same fucking way because deep down inside all they want to do is flock around and stare at anyone who has an actual fucking personality."
"...That sounded really egotistical, Luigi," she said, her lips twitching, almost forming a new smile before they settled back down again. "And not really right. I mean, I don't want to stand around staring at you all the time."
"Ten percent don't." He glance back towards the display of recordings, considering. She probably wasn't in the best mood to talk about anything that had happened there, but he really needed to get her mind thinking about it soon, and he'd probably never have a better excuse to bring it up. "Hell, you almost became a member of their GeneCo sideshow yourself, if you don't remember. Ever think about what you would have done if that happened?"
"It wouldn't have," she said flatly. "There's nothing he could have done that would have convinced me to kill my father."
"Hypothetically," Luigi said with a frown. "Don't be so fucking prosaic."
"You mean, if he'd just handed it over without any murder?" She leaned backwards, bracing herself on the back of the bench with her arms, and looked thoughtful, then laughed quietly. "I guess I'd have just made you vice-president and then stood out of the way being a figurehead, which would have kind of gone against the whole point of giving it to me. But it's not like I know anything about running a company, Pavi's too creepy to want in charge, and I already knew Amber was a drug addict back then, so you'd have been the only choice."
"So you'd only have fucking picked me because you thought the other two are more awful. Thanks."
She flashed him a quick smile, "It's not like I knew you, back then. I guess I probably never really would have, if things had gone differently that night. I mean, half the reason I thought that maybe you'd be okay to talk to after that first time was because you lost the same thing I did that night."
Luigi privately thought that he'd lost a hell of a lot more than she did. He had lost his rightful inheritance along with his dad, but she'd gained her health and freedom when she lost her's; it was pretty damned obvious who got the better deal out of the night. It didn't even matter that she'd ended up on the streets, seeing as it was her own choice not to live comfortably on what her father had left her.
But he just kept quiet about all that, ignoring her cheesy little 'Maybe we aren't so different after all' aside in favor of getting back to the point. It was good to know that she was fine just being a figurehead, but he still wanted to know going in if there were any ideas she had for what she'd do if she was in charge. If she actually had any that were half-decent, tossing one into action every so often would be an easy way of keeping her complacent. "Every fucking person who's ever dreamed of swiping one of our spots is rolling their eyes at you right now. You seriously don't have anything you'd want to do if you'd gotten the company?"
She sighed, and rubbed her forehead. "I wish you could get rid of the Repo Men. I mean, I understand why they exist--I read everything I could find about them after that night, and I saw all the facts and figures about how hard it was for your dad to make people keep up their payments when they were just happy to still be alive no matter what he did to punish them--but it's still horrible. I guess I'd have wanted to figure out if there was some way to restructure the way they work, if they couldn't be gotten rid of all together? Like, no repossessing from children, period; it's not like it's their choice not to pay, or to get surgery to begin with. And maybe have different payment levels, so people who actually need new organs don't need to pay as much as people who just want an orange spleen for fun? Oh! And I'd donate funds towards any scientists who are still trying to find a real cure to the plague. It's stupid that everyone just stopped caring because they know replacements are available."
As he watched her prattling on about surprisingly level-headed ideas, Luigi had to wonder if spending her life in a bedroom had left her with no real damned clue how much wealth and power his family commanded. He'd expected to get a list of ways she'd want to spend their cash out of her, not actual fucking business ideas.
He left her alone for a few weeks after that, allowing time for the idea of 'What would I have done with GeneCo' to keep brewing in her mind, and went to work really setting his plan into action in the meantime.
It wasn't enough for people to just look the other way for her in honor of Rotti, they had to want her. They had to be gathering around water coolers when no Largo was around talking about how Rotti must be rolling in his grave over the daughter who refused to even keep his name taking over the company while the kid he'd wanted in the position was nowhere to be found. He wanted the peasants muttering on the street corners about how much better they thought things would be with her in charge; how she was one of them, not someone who'd grown up with a silver spoon in her mouth. He wanted everyone in upper management positions in GeneCo daydreaming about what a tractable pawn a sheltered teenager would make, while they were stuck instead with the most stubborn bitch the world had ever known.
He wanted the whole fucking world whispering Shilo Wallace's name in dark corners when they thought nobody who wasn't on their side was around to hear their treason.
But that took work, made only slightly easier by the fact that Amber's zydrate addiction was getting worse than ever as the stresses of being in charge of the biggest company in the world piled up.
He'd spent an entire night getting the staff of a subversive newspaper that they thought was so far underground that GeneCo had no idea it existed drunk out of their minds. He kept his face carefully hidden the entire time and let them think that they were important enough to be approached by their very own shadowy informer as he kept the conversation constantly circling back to GeneCo's 'true' heir, and wouldn't things be better with her around?
It was the fifth time he'd spent a night like that in the past month, though the company was different every time. He had radio programs preaching her name, websites full of visitors that flocked to other forums to spread the word, he was even thinking of rounding up some street corner prophets and training them to scream her name in the middle of their garbled nonsense.
Nobody had commented on any of the other nights he'd taken off, but this morning was different. As soon as he entered the dining room, still wearing his clothes from the night before, Amber was screeching at him in her most ear-splitting tone, "Where the fuck were you last night?"
"Where ever the fuck I wanted to be, sister" he said, having a servant dish him up a plateful of waffles.
"You can't just leave without saying anything! Do you have any idea what a fucking mess last night was? It's not like Pavi's any help!"
"Ohh," Pavi groaned sadly, then perked up. "Ah, the Pavi thinks he knows where Luigi was last night, little sister!"
"He was at a bar, I can smell it from here," Amber snarled. "And don't think I'm going to forget about it the next time you bitch at me about addictions."
"Si, that too. But Pavi knows why he's been disappearing so often lately." Pavi leaned towards her like he was offering up some grand secret and stage-whispered, "Luigi has found a singora to pass his time with."
"Shut the fuck up, Pavi!"
"Ha!" Amber burst out, more of an exclamation than an actual laugh. "One who isn't already in a body bag?"
"Startling, yes? But the Pavi found many people who saw her leaving safely with Luigi the night Pavi saw her, with no wounds at all!" He dropped his voice further, looking slyly at Luigi even though he was still acting like he was directing his words at Amber. "They were all so surprised to be able to say that she and our brother seemed to be talking happily on the way out."
"'Happily'?" Amber and Luigi said at the same time, then shared a disgusted look with the other.
"Luigi's never happy," Amber continued with a sneer before Luigi could go on.
Not that he'd been planning on saying anything more. He'd just been surprised enough to wonder whether it was him or the people Pavi had asked who had read her wrong that night, when he'd thought she was just anxious to finally leave.
"Happy for Luigi, perhaps they meant," Pavi deferred. "But, for certain, Luigi has not been here so often since that night, and the Pavi does not think it's because he was taking care of company business."
The Pavi obviously didn't know shit, but it wasn't like Luigi could say that without being questioned about what he meant.
Strangely enough, Amber seemed drained of her previous anger. "God, I guess I should just be happy that someone else in this family is learning how to get along with someone without killing them by the third time they see them. Why don't you try using those lessons to go a day without killing an employee sometime?"
It was raining the next time he found her. She was shivering under a store canopy looking like a wet rat, or maybe like the cheapest fucking prostitute the world had ever known.
"You seriously won't even go home long enough to get a fucking raincoat?" he asked when she looked up at him.
"I don't own a raincoat," she replied, her teeth chattering hard enough to garble the words. "I wasn't allowed outside, remember?"
He stared at her, still dressing in her tiny little skirts and light little tops even though winter was getting close, and wondered how the hell she hadn't gotten sick yet. "This is fucking idiotic," he finally said, and dragged off his coat to toss it over her.
He turned to walk back to his car, expecting her to follow but still faintly pleased when he heard her footsteps right behind him. She was getting well-trained.
"Take us to my tailor, now," he told his driver once he was at the car, giving her a look to tell her to get in at the same time.
"I know how much you like rubbing in the whole I sleep in trash thing," she said as she settled down, "but I'm not going to ruin your coat just by wearing it. You don't need to get a new one now."
"First of all, the lining of that coat is silk, and you're soaking wet, so yes you fucking are going to ruin it by wearing it," he was quick to point out. It was an expensive coat, so she'd better realize that she was going to be responsible for its water stains. "And we're not going for the fucking coat; you're getting some decent clothes."
"Decent?" she repeated, then her eyes narrowed. "Hey! My dad picked out all of my clothes for me!"
Luigi really hadn't needed to know that Nathan Wallace had had even more issues than he'd already known about, if he'd been picking out dresses for his daughter short enough for her to flash the world every time she bent over. "You want to freeze to death in the middle of December because you don't own a single fucking outfit made out of more than a yard of fabric?"
"Well... no," she admitted, but frowned. "I don't have enough money to buy tailor-made clothes," she said, and, when he snorted, added, "I'm not letting you buy me any either."
"As if I'd waste the money on clothing that was just going into the garbage," he said. "I know you've got issues with touching your dad's money, but you don't fucking have to. The company still has access to his accounts; I can get the money out of them and you can tell yourself that you still haven't let your pretty little hands touch a single red cent of it."
She closed her eyes tightly, looking disgusted with the very idea, but slowly she said, "He really was a doctor before he became a Repo Man, right? So, I guess he probably saved up enough from that job to pay for some clothes."
Luigi just rolled his eyes. Whatever helped her sleep at night; it wasn't like the clothing she was wearing had been paid for out of some other money.
The tailor was closed when he reached it, but it didn't matter. He banged on the door until the man came out, and instantly his demeanor switched from annoyed to sycophantic when he saw who it was. "Mr. Largo!" he exclaimed, unlocking his door as quickly as he could and getting out of the way. "Come in, come in! What do you need?"
Luigi gestured at Shilo. "Measure her for a winter wardrobe. Whatever you think she needs to not freeze her tits off."
The tailor froze for a moment, looking at her, then laughed, "Oh, you're making a joke! Mr. Largo, sir, you know that I only make menswear."
"Then I guess it's time to find out if an old dog really can learn new tricks!" Luigi said in a tone of faux-joviality, his eyes sharp. "Damn, you've always done such a good job that I'll hate to have to replace you if it turns out you can't do what I want."
The tailor had been around him often enough to recognize the threat, and went pale. But he made one last effort to avoid the job; "Perhaps, Mr. Largo, you might consider taking her to Miss. Sweet's clothier instead?"
Luigi's eyes narrowed. "No, she's not going to where that bitch gets her outfits. I brought her here because I knew you could make something with some fucking class, not because I want her looking like a skanky fucking slut! Do you understand?"
He felt a hand on his elbow and snapped around to glare down at Shilo, who no longer even flinched away at the look. "This really isn't worth getting so angry about, Luigi," she said calmly, and somehow some of the anger really did start draining back out of him. "I'd be happy just with sweaters off the rack from somewhere."
"Oh no, Miss, please, don't do that," the tailor said, reaching out to gently tug her away from Luigi and push her towards his measuring station. He was actually fucking frightened for her, Luigi realized from the look on his face. As if, after all the bullshit Luigi'd put up with from and because of her over the months without ever so much as smacking her on the wrist, he'd suddenly snap and off her over something as fucking benign as her distracting him when he was pissed at someone else. Of course, the bastard didn't say as much, instead coming up with the excuse that, "Even the most clumsily made outfit that I could create would be better than anything you would find mass-produced."
"She's a fucking street urchin, so don't bother wasting any decent fabrics on her," Luigi chipped in as the tailor began to take Shilo's measurements.
"Are you ever going to get tired of coming up with new ways to insult me about that?" she asked, glaring at him in the mirror that was positioned in front of her.
"Listen to me one of the times I tell you to suck it up and find a fucking apartment and I won't need to keep it up," he shot back. He eyed the small selection of premade clothing available at the front of the store, and grabbed a black shirt that looked his size. "I'll be taking this too," he said, flashing it at the tailor. "The hell I'm going to keep walking around in a shirt that's soaked enough to be see-through. When you're done with her, see if you can find something in the kids sizes she could wear out of here too."
He ripped off his old shirt, and heard a gasp. When he looked up, Shilo was still looking at him in the mirror, but now her eyes were focused on his chest and the scars snaking across it. "If you want to ogle me, I can take off the ascot so you have a better view," he said, raising an eyebrow at her.
"Vain," she said, more absently than as a sarcastic rejoinder. "What the hell happened to you. That doesn't look like a surgical scar." She tapped her own collarbone to indicate exactly which one she meant.
"Lucky bastard with a knife," he said, touching that one, and then a few more. His hand settled across the one slashed across the area above his liver, "Too fucking much booze," then moved up to trace the two well-faded ones beneath his ribcage, "Lungs. Any more questions?"
She tilted her head to the side. "What, did you used to smoke too?"
"No, I didn't fucking smoke! I was ten."
"But aren't you old enough that that would be... before designer..." She blinked, then her eyes widened with realization but she didn't say anything, just kept silently staring at him as she waited for him to confirm or deny her suspicions.
"That's right, you're looking straight at GeneCo's first fucking patient," he said with a smirk. "Not that you'll find that on any records, since Pop still had a year worth of hoops to jump through before he could open up the company and start curing the masses."
She looked sad at the information, but he didn't know why. For all that Pavi liked to taunt him about his false first-generation lungs, he was fucking proud of the place that gave him in history. The whole goddamned world dominating company was built up from his shitty organs, and even if there hadn't been any other good reason on Earth for why he should have been the one to inherit it, that should have been enough on its own.
It was luck that he was watching her when it happened, fucking unpredictable luck that could have had him off doing a million other things and never realizing that she was in trouble until she showed up in the morgue.
She should have fucking known better than to try to take care of new faces in her little junkie alley on her own, or should have at least realized that the three men were obviously a lot more clear-headed then harmless, brainless, Z-zombies. She sure as hell shouldn't have let them convince her to go down a more private branch of the alley to take care of business.
Stupid fucking people-ignorant shut-in, half a year she goes distrusting everyone in the world but the graverobber and Luigi himself and the one time it was actually necessary she went and let down her guard.
And what the hell were the odds that she'd be attacked right after she'd finally stopped dressing like she'd spread her legs for anything that asked?
He wished that it had been something he'd planned. That he'd paid some lowlifes to rough her up so he could play hero and weasel a little more of that trust out of her. The thought that she might have been hurt of killed under uncontrolled circumstances is fucking enraging to him, the fury burning more fiercely in him than it had in months.
He threw open the door to his car and leapt out the moment he recognized that one of the men standing behind the one she was talking to was slipping a knife out of his sleeve, a movement Luigi could have recognized anywhere after the million times he'd performed it himself. Even as he did so the ringleader suddenly lunged at her, but she'd become so quick at dodging at a moment's notice over the months that he wasn't nearly fast enough to grab him. If she'd just had the sense to run back out into the crowded main alley it would have been fine, she would have been able to spot Luigi immediately and get the hell behind him, but in another stunning display of idiocy she headed in the opposite direction. He sure as hell hoped that she was thinking she'd be able to hide in the darkness there, and wasn't just mindlessly fleeing in the direction she found herself facing after the first dodge.
They chased her, Luigi chased them, and it was like some sort of fucking race except that he knew he'd be losing a lot more than a gold medal and a pat on the back if he came in too far behind.
He reached them all at a dead end, and was glad to see that she was at least fighting them tooth and claw though she was too damned scrawny to hold out unarmed against three grown men for long. "Come on, kid, just let us have all the zydrate and a little fun and we'll let you go perfectly fine," the leader was trying to say to her, the lies obvious in his voice. They were the last words he'd ever have a chance to say, Luigi purposely stabbing through his larynx with his sharpest knife before going after the carotid arteries. The blood started to pulse out immediately but Luigi didn't stop to watch him fall, knowing it would only take seconds.
Shilo saw him, but when she opened her mouth to call out to him he gave her a curt shake of his head that kept her quiet. He wasn't giving up a single of the few seconds that he had the element of surprise on his side. They were what let him get close enough to drive his knife into the back of the next bastard. He bellowed in pain and lashed around to see who was there, which only made things worse for him as Luigi kept the blade of the knife buried deep within him. A few more stabs were all it took.
He'd thought that the last one might be a little more difficult, actually knowing that he was there and all, but he was as pathetically easy as the others. He wasn't shit with his knife, but no one was as good as Luigi. He didn't stand a chance.
Every last one of them was down, their blood everywhere, but Luigi was still as angry as he'd ever been before in his life. He wanted to kill more, to slash, and stab, or even just pick a trash can off the ground and bludgeon any person he could find until he could finally be calm.
But there was only one other person there, and when he looked at her he almost dropped his knife from shock when he realized that the killing rage refused to settle on her. It spread out around him in every direction, looking for something he could focus it on, but when it reached her it just slid right past. That had never happened before, ever. There'd been people he wasn't allowed to kill, the list basically made up entirely of his family members and Mag, but that didn't mean he'd never wanted to. When he was in a blind rage like this the most he'd ever been able to do was grab the first unlucky bastard who walked by and redirect it towards them, leaving him unsatisfied at not getting his chosen target even if it cooled his head down.
Shilo was a person that he didn't want to see dead? It was a strange new thought, but one that seemed to ring true when he poked at it.
Not that he had much time to do that, since a second later she was flinging herself at him. "Thank you, Luigi," she said, her entire body shaking against his. "Thank you."
"What the fuck did you think you were doing?" he shouted at her. Just because he didn't want to kill her, didn't mean that he wasn't pissed the hell off in other ways. "Where the fuck is that fucking graverobber of yours, and why the hell would you follow those bastards down here without him?"
"I thought it would be okay."
"Because following strange men down dark alleys is really something people walk away from all the fucking time."
"I thought it would be okay," she repeated, her face twisting. "He... the leader, he kind of reminded me of you. So I didn't think he'd do anything."
Good fucking grief. Out of every damned way in the world his plan could have blown up in his face, it went and did so in a way that would have made anyone else laugh in her face if they heard it. She thought that she'd be safe because he'd reminded her of Luigi Largo; it was like the set up to some bad fucking joke. And what could he even say to that? 'Don't trust me, you idiot,' when that would not only screw up all the work he'd put into her, but when he'd just realized that maybe she possibly could, at least as far as not hurting her was concerned? If it wasn't just a one-time aberration.
"And you didn't even have a fucking weapon in case you were wrong," he just said tiredly, then slid his hand into his coat to produce another knife. "Here, take it. Don't make that fucking mistake again."
It was his own first knife, first and favorite and never far from his side even though he'd long since taken to only using more flashy looking ones. It had been a gift from one of his dad's old girlfriends, back in the time before Marni, one who'd wanted to make a good impression on Rotti Largo's oldest child and figured that all boys liked weapons. He couldn't have remembered her name if he'd tried, but he'd never forget the knife. It was just an old trench knife, simple and to the point without even one of the interesting designs that some of them could boast, but the first time he'd ever slid it into a person it had been the most perfect feeling that he'd ever experienced. Over time its wooden handle had been worn by his grip and the flat of its blade had lost some of its shine, but he still kept it as sharp and well cared for as it had been the day he'd gotten it.
But she didn't seem to realize what a great gift it was. "I don't even know how to use a knife," she said. "I mean, aside from the sharp part being what you hurt people with."
He grabbed her hand and forced the handle into it. "I'll start to teach you how to use the fucking thing the next time I'm out here. Until then, I think you can get by with 'sharp part hurts' as long as you don't do something that stupid again." He finally stopped to look her up and down, making sure she was all in one piece. "Those bastards didn't get you anywhere?"
"No. Well, not really." She twisted her arm around so he could see where her sleeve had been sliced open, but, though the cut had reached her skin, it hadn't gone deep enough to leave more than a faint graze on her. "I guess it's lucky you got me these new clothes when you did."
"Great," he said. "Come with me. You're not sleeping in a dumpster with an open wound, no matter how shallow it is."
"I could just buy some bandages," she argued.
He didn't know how the hell he'd gotten saddled with the only girl in the world who'd try to argue in favor of letting her stay on the street. But he wasn't even going to waste energy on it. "No. Now move your fucking feet."
He kept a first aid kit in his car for those times when he felt like having an actual knife fight instead of just a stabbing spree, and he pulled it out after ordering his driver to take them to the closest half-decent hotel he could think of. She took off her jacket and rolled up her sleeve peaceably enough when asked and let him poke at it. After spending most of her life 'sick' she was probably used to that sort of treatment.
It was a tiny bit deeper at the end then it was the rest of the way across, cutting in enough to produce a tiny trickle of blood, but it wasn't enough to worry about. By the time he had it cleaned and bandaged they were already pulling into a hotel that a quick glance told him didn't fit his standards of decent, but the driver was a fucking peasant and probably had a better idea than he did of what she'd consider okay.
Pretending for a second that she hadn't chosen to become a person who'd consider just having a bed to be a luxury.
It only took him a minute to get her their best available room; he didn't let the person at the front desk get a good look at his face, but she could see the stack of cash he tossed down in front of her just fine. He'd honestly planned on just seeing Shilo safely to the door and then leaving her there, maybe after lending her some money to order in some takeout if she needed it. He'd even told his driver to leave the car running because he'd be straight back.
Then she grabbed his sleeve before he could walk away. "Luigi..." she started then trailed off, staring first at her hand where it was still clutching the fabric of his coat, then searchingly at his face. Finally she quietly finished. "...Thank you. For tonight. For everything." And then she leaned up to kiss him.
It was chaste for all of five seconds, all her and her utter lack of knowledge about what she doing, then he groaned and pushed her backwards into the room, kicking the door closed behind them.
He'd never had much fucking use for virgins. The only thing they had going for them was that he could be absolutely positive that Pavi had never once gotten near their cunts, and that wasn't a benefit that could put them over an experienced woman whose Pavi-related background he'd completely checked out. But she learned quickly, with nothing more than imitation and a nudge here and there to guide her, and before long he was starting to think that he'd never been so turned on so quickly in his life as he pressed her back towards the bed.
He hooked his fingers into the row of buttons holding her shirt closed, ready to rip it open as he had so many of his own in the past, but forced himself to pause there and look at her. "If you're going to remember that you freak out about sex and want to stop, you sure as hell better do it now."
She smiled, and laughed, and pulled him back down to her. "No," she whispered just before their mouths met again.
The bed was awful, hard and lumpy and covered by sheets scratchier than any he'd ever so much as touched before, but it was hard to care that much about it when she was flopped against his chest, relaxed and sated.
He drummed his fingers lightly on her back, wanting to go to sleep but realizing that this was probably the best mental state he'd ever have her in to press her onwards towards the place he wanted her to end up. "Did you know," he asked, trying to make it sound like the absent meandering conversation of someone on the edge of sleep, which wasn't too difficult since it wasn't far from the truth, "how many people want you in charge of the company? Seems like every time I go into a room people are trying to shut up before I can hear them talking about how we should have gone with what Pops wanted even if he never signed that will."
She hummed quietly, then murmured, "Did they miss how I wouldn't go along with his requirements for it?"
His stopped his tapping, and smoothed his hand down her spine. "Doesn't matter to them. You could storm up to the front doors tomorrow, and they'd run Amber straight out for you."
"I wonder how quick it would be before they were disappointed by me?" She turned her face into his shoulder and whispered something that sounded like, "'Go and change the world for me'? Ha..."
It didn't really matter if the idea wasn't appealing to her just then. It was fine. He'd sowed the seeds in her mind, and that was what mattered.
He didn't need to rush them to grow.