Repo!: We Need to Talk
Summary: Shilo's never had 'The Talk'. Graverobber finds himself in the unwilling role of father-figure. This can't end well
A/N: Influenced by a Harry Potter fic I read where Sirius has to give Harry 'The Talk', except it includes lube and vibrators, leaving both rather shell-shocked. Also, I was watching 'A Knight's Tale' while writing, so several Britishisms may have slipped in. I think my lovely beta Forestwater caught them all, if not too bad. Shilo's half British anyway.
Disclaimer: Repo! and the characters aren't mine.
Warnings: Contains swearing and a vague description of the menstrual cycle and sex on TV. Vague description of sex as well - very vague - and mentions of porn.
"You alright, Kid?" Graverobber looked down at his surprisingly silent companion. Shilo had been quiet all evening, and was now only picking at her food. He was quite sure it wasn't anything he'd done - or at least, anything she'd managed to find out about.
"I'm fine," she murmured. She didn't look fine to the older man, and he saw no reason not to say so.
"Oh really? 'Cause you look like shit. Paler than usual. And why do you keep rubbing your stomach?"
"I just…" Shilo looked hesitant, then shrugged. "I don't know. My stomach's kind of unsettled. Maybe I'm coming down with something."
Graverobber gave her one of his half-lidded looks, the one which meant he knew she wasn't telling the whole truth. But the girl wasn't picking at her gloves or fiddling with her brooch, her usual tells, so he shrugged back, mimicking her.
"Okay then. You head up to bed, I'll take care of the dishes."
"Take care of them?" Shilo looked sceptical. "You're just going to throw them in the bin again, aren't you?"
"Probably," he smirked. Shilo just rolled her eyes and got up, leaving the kitchen without looking back. Graverobber gathered the plates and smiled. He wasn't going to throw them in the bin. Not when there was a perfectly good open window to throw them out of. He was used to buying new crockery every few weeks given his method of cleaning up - in fact, he had a Zydrate for plates barter system set up with several of the local shopkeepers. The pan he threw into the sink for Shilo to deal with later. That was the extent of his domestication.
Gathering his things, Graverobber was about to hit the graveyards when he heard a scream from upstairs. Cursing under his breath, he ran up the stairs, long legs taking three to a stride. He burst into the bathroom, where Shilo was standing with her back to the wall, staring at the toilet. Seeing nothing apparently wrong, he grabbed her by the arms and shook her slightly.
"What's wrong?" Graverobber shouted, "Why were you screaming, you idiot?"
"I… I…" Shilo's eyes were wide with shock, still staring at a point behind her unofficial guardian. He glared for a moment, then turned to see for himself. There didn't seem to be anything out of place, except for Shilo's panties on the floor. Wait a second…
Graverobber stepped forward and saw blood on the white underwear. The water in the bowl was also stained red. He blinked. This was what made the kid scream? Graverobber had seen Shilo covered blood from neck to feet, and it hadn't turned her into a gibbering wreck. Granted, there had been other things to worry about then.
"You got your period. That's what frightened you?"
"Huh?" Shilo half whispered. "What's a… period?" Graverobber turned back to look at her, thinking she was joking, but she looked terrified. He wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but decided to play along.
"Uh, you know… period? 'That time of the month'? You…" it dawned on him. "You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?" At a shake of Shilo's head, Graverobber covered his face with his hands.
He knew that she'd been filling out in the four months since she'd stopped taking her medication. She now had decent curves, and had grown several inches. He'd assumed that the girl had gone through puberty years before, but he had to concede that it was possible her medications had delayed her maturation. Though surely she knows something about this… right?
"Kid, did your father ever talk to you about growing up? The facts of life?" Shilo shook her head, and Graverobber gulped. "What about where babies come from?" Another head shake. "Oh, fuck."
Shilo's eyes filled with tears, and Graverobber sighed.
"Oh, don't be like that Kid. You didn't do anything wrong." He thought for a moment, then sank to a crouch, leaning against the bath. "Get down here and we'll talk."
Shilo sat beside him, looking up with her dark, puppy-dog eyes. Graverobber looked at the ceiling and tried to recall the 'facts of life' as they'd been explained to him. He had a rough idea of how the female body worked, due to his multitude of lovers in the past. He wasn't entirely sure how to put his practical knowledge into words for the girl to understand though. It was one of the many reasons he'd always sworn he'd never have children.
"This should really be coming from another woman, you know. But I guess you'll just have to deal with what I tell you. For starters, you're bleeding from you crotch because of your cycle. Roughly every four weeks you'll get bitch, have mood swings, stomach aches and you'll bleed. Something to do with your body getting ready to have a kid, but I really hope you don't decide to have one just yet."
"Every four weeks? I have to go through this every month?" Shilo's eyes, which he had thought couldn't possibly get any bigger, suddenly widened in horror.
"Roughly that, yeah." Graverobber nodded, wishing that she didn't have to look at him like he was slaughtering a puppy in front of her. Which, in a strangely metaphorical way, he was. "To stop the blood ruining all your knickers, you can either put a pad in 'em, or shove a tampon… where the blood comes out. Find a woman to explain the finer details of those, 'cause there's no way in hell I'm touching them."
"O… okay…" Shilo looked a little nonplussed.
"It's probably gonna hurt like a bitch, too. We'll get you painkillers for the worst days, but you're not touching my Zydrate, you hear me?" Graverobber brushed over that as quickly as he could, hoping that Shilo wouldn't latch on to the pain idea. He'd seen some right terrors in his time, the pain making the girls do strange things. One girl had even tried to kill him. Several times, in fact. On the whole it had been most invigorating.
"Now, as far as the other stuff… oh fuck." Graverobber ran a hand through his hair, trying to figure out how to go about this. "Well, do you have any idea how babies are made?"
Shilo looked about as uncomfortable as Graverobber felt, which made him feel a little better.
"Well… I've seen pregnant women on the telly. I know that the baby's inside their stomach. But whenever I asked Dad…" she trailed off, looking sad. He guessed that the Repo man hadn't been very forthcoming when it came to these things. After all, he'd wanted to keep his little girl forever.
Sicko.
"So you don't know about screwing. I mean, sex," he quickly corrected himself. But Shilo looked surprised.
"Oh, I know about sex. Again, I've seen it on the telly." Graverobber thought that Shilo must be watching different channels to him. All he ever saw when he turned the damn thing on was an ad for Geneco, or a lion disembowelling a zebra. While entertaining, it wasn't exactly sex education.
"You've seen people having sex then?" Kid's turning into a little voyeur. Kinky.
"Well, sort of. Naked people rubbing against each other and kissing, anyway. It looked kind of messy and uncomfortable, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves."
"Y'know," Graverobber mused, "you just described my first time perfectly."
"Huh?" Shilo looked confused again, and Graverobber cleared his throat.
"Nothing. Anyway, there's slightly more to it than that." He was trying to think of a way to explain the finer details of sex to the kid, looking at him with so much trust. This was made fairly difficult, however, by the fact that the only thing running through his head was ohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuck.
After a moment of silence, Shilo started to get fidgety, and Graverobber sighed.
"How about we go downstairs. The tiles are getting cold." Shilo nodded and stood up far more gracefully than Graverobber could manage. He scratched the back of his neck as he followed her out of the bathroom. And this'll give me slightly more time to work out how I'm meant to explain sex to a 17-year-old.
-UC-
Shilo sat waiting on the couch as Graverobber made his way into the room, his shoulders slouched and his feet dragging. She looked like an eager student, which made him feel a little more secure. Obviously, the kid trusted him enough to take his word for all this weird new information. And maybe, just maybe, if he thought about this as an academic exercise, he wouldn't get so nervous.
Rather than join Shilo on the couch, Graverobber chose a rather uncomfortable armchair out of her reach. He knew that he had a reputation for screwing anything in a skirt (or out of one, for preference) and he was sure that he'd bedded girls younger than his companion. He'd even been the first for several of them. Somehow, though, he couldn't do that to Shilo. The thought of Shilo actually having sex with anyone made him feel sick to his stomach.
Deciding not to dwell on why he couldn't see Shilo as a sexual being, Graverobber turned back to the problem at hand.
"So…" he started, then cleared his throat. Damn, this is hard... Okay, poor choice of words there. "I guess I should explain how sex really works then." Shilo nodded enthusiastically, and Graverobber stifled a groan. She wasn't going to let him off easy this time. Then again, she usually seemed to enjoy making his life 'more interesting'. By which she usually meant 'difficult'.
"Basically, you… insert tab A into slot B." Biting his tongue, Graverobber almost laughed at the puzzled expression directed at him. "Okay, a little more elaboration. Have you ever seen a man naked before?" And please don't say you've seen your father naked, I don't think I could handle that right now.
"Not completely," Shilo said. "Not even on the telly. There's always blankets or pillows or something in front of their hips. I've seen naked chests though." This seemed to remind her of something. "Graverobber? Why do women have breasts but men don't?"
Happy to be granted a brief reprieve, Graverobber followed the train of thought.
"That's because ti - breasts, while very nice to look at, actually serve a practical purpose. When a baby is born, it drinks milk. A woman makes milk in her breasts. The baby sucks on the nipples to feed. Men don't make milk, so they don't need breasts." Graverobber was quite pleased with that explanation, and Shilo seemed to accept it.
"Okay. I have another question about babies too." Graverobber tensed again. "Is the baby really in a woman's stomach when she's pregnant? 'Cause that doesn't really make sense."
"Well, technically it's not in their stomachs," Graverobber replied after thinking a moment. "Woman have something called a uterus inside them, near the stomach but not connected to it. The baby grows inside that, which is why pregnant women look fat."
"Oh. That makes more sense." Shilo thought for a moment. "Not a lot more, but some." Just as Graverobber started to relax again, Shilo piped up with another question. "So how does the baby get inside the pregnant woman in the first place?"
"That's… that's where the naked man comes into it," Graverobber paused, then cursed his choice of words. "I mean, a man and woman need to have sex to create a baby. Y'see, women have eggs inside them." At the horrified expression on Shilo's face, he rushed to reassure her. "Not like a chicken egg or anything. Tiny. Smaller than your littlest toenail. And men have… sperm… inside their… testicles." It took all of Graverobber's strength to finish that sentence. He just couldn't believe that these words were coming out of his own mouth. Surely someone was playing some sort of joke on him? But surely not even Shilo could fake the incredulous look she was giving him.
"Eggs and sperm? That's what makes a baby? But how do you put them together?" Graverobber swallowed the lump in his throat.
"Well, it's all to do with the area the telly covers up. A man has a co - penis. Yes. A penis and testicles. The testicles store the… the sperm. And the penis is… inserted into the woman for the transfer." He could no longer meet Shilo's eyes and covered his face with his hands. Why hadn't he just told her to find a book to explain this?
"Inserted? How?" Curiosity seemed to have won out over horror. Graverobber, however, refused to remove his hands from his face and look at the kid. As a result, his next few sentences were rather muffled, but also very rushed.
"Through the… vagina. The penis is inserted into the vagina. After some… rubbing, I guess" - he'd never really thought about how all this worked, and he was starting to realize that if he didn't wrap this up soon, he might never want to have sex again - "the sperm is released. It goes into the uterus and if the egg's there as well the woman might get pregnant."
After a moment of silence, Graverobber dared to look at his young friend. She was chewing on a lock of hair from the wig she still wore, looking thoughtful. What seemed like an eternity passed before her eyes focused again on Graverobber, and she smiled.
"Okay, I guess I have a vague idea of how it works. But, I'm gonna go to the library tomorrow, see if they have a book that has a little more detail." Relief washed over Graverobber, and he couldn't keep it from showing on his face.
"Oh, thank you, kid. I gotta… I gotta get going." He leapt to his feet and all but ran to the kitchen to retrieve his gear. "I'll be back before morning. Probably. Bye!" He shouted over his shoulder as he retreated through the familiar tunnel, to the friendly graveyard where people didn't ask awkward questions about sex and puberty.
Shilo waited a few minutes to make sure he wasn't coming back, then let herself out the front door. A car was waiting a few houses down - one that Graverobber would have recognised, had he come this way. But he always used the tunnels when feeling threatened, and Shilo had made sure he'd use them tonight.
Climbing into the car, Shilo smiled thoughtfully at her companion.
"I see now why you didn't want to explain it. But why did you insist I ask Graverobber about it? I feel kind of sorry for him now."
Her companion laughed, a rare occurrence. Making Graverobber's life miserable was one of the few hobbies she had - and Shilo had been a most unexpected yet useful ally. The girl enjoyed teasing the older man, and was so naïve that it was easy to manipulate her into really embarrassing him.
"For my own amusement, of course. Why else?" She inspected her nails thoughtfully. "I guess we should leave him alone for a few days, let him get his bearings again before implementing stage two."
"What's stage two?" Shilo looked puzzled. "What could possibly squick him out any more than he already is?"
"Simple, my dear." The older woman pulled a magazine from her bag. "Get him to explain this." Shilo took the magazine and laughed again. It was gay porn.
"Amber, you're a bitch... and I think I love you a little bit."
"Naturally."