Repo! Fic: At the Surgical Theatre (R: gore, language)
Sorry there hasn't been a new KueiFeng Avatar fic for awhile, folks. I'm working on finishing a ton of them now, and one should be up very soon.
Until then, I have something the Repo! The Genetic Opera fans might like. Here! Have some Pavi and Luigi.
Summary: Fourteen-year-old Luigi Largo and nine-year-old Pavi spend an interesting evening together in San Francisco.
Rating: R for gore, language. This is not an incest fic.
Beta'd by: weyrdchic! Thank you, my lovely dear!
“What are you doing?”
Luigi Largo nearly fell from the windowsill. Swearing mightily, he slammed his hand against the wall to catch himself and threw his entire weight forward in a most undignified way. Clearly, the person ten feet below agreed; the annoying little shit was laughing like it was his birthday.
The annoying little shit was none other than Pavi, Luigi’s irritating nine-year-old brother. The elder Largo boy turned as slowly as he could, pressing his back firmly against the pane.
“None of your damned business,” he snarled.
Pavi clicked his tongue in a way that made him sound like a disapproving adult twice his age, even as he cradled one of Amber’s dolls to his chest in a way that made him seem like a much younger child. “You’re sneaking out.” Giggling again, he turned his head to the left and parted his heavily roughed lips. “Dad’s gonna kill you.”
Luigi’s fingers arched against the glass as he fought the temptation to leap down and throttle the boy. “No. But I’m going to fucking kill you if you tell him, you little dicklicking shit.”
“You’re swearing!” Pavi insisted. And then, lowering his voice to a malicious little whisper: “Pavi’s telling!”
“Yeah? Too bad for you, Dad’s not here right now. The old fart bastard had another dicking stockholder meeting.”
“Pavi’ll tell when he gets home!” Pavi insisted, rubbing his nose. It was covered in one of those fake, latex noses you could get at high-end toy stores that still looked like crap. Especially because it was a girl’s nose.
Sighing, Luigi hefted himself down from the window. His sneakers squeaked as they hit the polished hardwood floor, and Pavi flinched as his brother grabbed him roughly by the shoulder.
“You tell the old man one word about this, bitch, and I’ll tell him all about how you keep fucking swiping Amber’s Pretty Parts Polly dolls.”
Pavi blanched and guiltily hid the toy behind his back. “Amber’s a baby, she’s too little for dolls! She keeps trying to suck on Pretty Polly’s glitter spleens!”
Luigi sniffed distastefully. “Yeah, right. You’re a fucking little faggot, Pavi!”
“Am not!” Pavi bleated. Then, screwing up his face he asked, “What’s a faggot?”
Luigi pushed him away in disgust. “So fucking help me, Pavi, I will fucking shove those glitter spleens up your frigging nostrils if you don’t fucking turn around and go back to fucking bed right now.”
Pavi folded his arms across his chest and shook his head. “No. You’re going out, and Pavi wants to come, too. Or he’ll scream and wake up everyone else in the house, including the babysitter!”
“Yeah, well, Pavi’s going to put his little pansy ass right back into bed or -”
And screwing up his face, Pavi made good on his threat.
Swearing again, Luigi slammed his hand over his brother’s mouth and weighed his options. He could always beat the shit out of Pavi, but that would piss off their father and he’d catch hell. Murder was also an option (one he really liked, in fact), but it was messy, and he didn’t want to stain his ascot. Sighing, Luigi realized he really didn’t have a choice.
“OK, fine. You can come. But if you fuck this up for me, Pavi -” Luigi clenched his hand into a fist and roughly touched the knuckles to his brother’s nose. When he pulled his hand away, it was smeared with Pavi’s garish lipstick.
“I know, I know. You’ll fucking strangle Pavi with his own intestines,” the boy recited. “Pavi will be good, Luigi. He just wants to spend some time with his bello brother.”
Luigi rolled his eyes and snapped the switchblade he always carried in his belt. “Fine. Get your fucking coat, and take off that stupid fake nose. You look like a retard. And for fuck’s sake, stop with that Italian shit and talking about yourself like you’re someone else, you fucking freak.”
Goddamn it, why did this fucking shit always happen to him?
***
On pain of strangulation, Luigi had told Pavi to keep his mouth shut while they climbed down the manor’s side, sneaked through the bushes, and scaled the wrought iron gates that separated the Largo household from the carnage of the streets beyond. Knowing better than to really anger his brother, Pavi kept his mouth shut until the two boys had lost themselves in the crowds that prowled San Francisco even at midnight.
“So where are we going?” he asked at last.
Luigi tugged Pavi forward as the younger boy stumbled on a crack in the sidewalk. Fucking hell, Pavi was a clumsy little fucker. “Surgical theater,” he said.
He heard Pavi gasp over the clamor of night clubs, partiers, and scalpel sluts searching out their next Zydrate fix. “No way! You’re lying to Pavi! That isn’t real. Dad said so.”
“Yeah, well, Dad’s good at lying,” Luigi huffed. “You’re so stupid, Pavi. Repo men do this shit all the time to supplement the shit pay Dad gives them.”
Only Pavi wasn’t listening, or holding onto his hand anymore.
“Pavi?” Luigi turned around quickly, feeling his engineered heart prickle. If his stupid little brother got lost, he’d never hear the end of it. And with untouched children’s organs going for thousands of dollars on the black market …
“Pavi?!”
But he needn’t have worried. The boy was standing stock-still in front of a window display, ridiculously red mouth agape and his manicured nails clutching at his pilfered doll as he stared at a window display in a toy shop.
“Look, Luigi! It’s the new Sweet Surgery Sally doll!” Pavi shoved his nose against the glass and enumerated each detail with one purple fingernail. “She’s got her own gurney, and five different organ packs, and she comes with her own genterns!” He sighed wistfully, his breath fogging the glass in a wide, white line. “Ahhhh! Pavi hopes he gets her for his birthday! Her face is so pretty.” He touched his own cheek wistfully. “Pavi wishes he could just snap it on over his face, like Surgery Sally can!” The boy rubbed at his nose and sighed wistfully. “Pavi wishes his nose looked just like hers!”
Really, Pavi was just fucking creepy sometimes. Luigi scowled down at his brother as he stood behind him. “Pavi is not going to get that for his birthday, because Dad’s fucking tired of you being a sissy freak,” he scolded. “Now c’mon. You’re gonna make us late.” And Pavi shrieked like a kitten as Luigi picked him up and threw him over his shoulder.
“Ieeee! Put Pavi down! Put him down! Pavi can walk!”
“And I’m going to put Pavi in the nearest GeneCo dump truck with all the bodies if he doesn’t shut the fucking fuck up and stop trying to kick me in the chest!” Luigi snapped.
“Pavi will be good.” And he was; the younger Largo boy didn’t say a single word as Luigi carried him down the street, over a few of San Francisco’s omnipresent paved hills and to the Surgical Theatre - a stadium where they used to hold football games before the worldwide outbreak of N.O.S. The lines at the betting stands were outrageously long, as they typically were on Saturday nights, and even though Pavi was small for his age, Luigi’s arms and shoulders were beginning to hurt. He did not relish the idea of waiting half an hour or more holding Pavi like a sack of potatoes.
“If I put you down, you promise not to run away, or cry like a little bitch?”
Pavi was silent until Luigi shook him a few times. Then sullenly, he said, “Uh-huh.”
Grunting, Luigi shrugged his brother back down onto his feet. Then straightening his ascot, he stood on his tip-toes to get a better look at the neon boards. “Woah. Fucking sweet! They’ve got two former wrestlers up tonight!”
“Huh?”
It wasn’t that Luigi felt like explaining, just that he new Pavi: the kid would not fucking stop asking questions unless you answered him. “You remember when Dad told us about how people used to bet on horse races, dog races, shit like that? This is sort of like that, except there are people instead of horses.”
“Why people, fratello?”
“When people that can’t pay their organ payments, they get their guts repossessed. The repo men do their work here when they need more money, and we bet on how long they’ll last without their heart or lungs or whatever-five seconds, half a minute, that kind of thing. Whoever gets the closest wins a shit-ton of money.” He stood on his toes again and scanned the neon boards.
“So, who are you going to bet on?”
***
“The 30-year-old wrestler,” Luigi said half an hour later, slapping a bundle of 100 dollar bills down on the counter as Pavi idly twined a lock of thick, black hair around his middle finger. “What are the odds on the ballerina?”
The bookie scratched his nose and consulted the monitor at his side. “She’s 20, healthy … five to one she lasts a minute without her pancreas.”
Luigi frowned. “Not enough of a challenge. Who’s a hundred to one?”
“The geezer,” the bookie said immediately. “But he ain’t gonna last more than five seconds without those guts, son. It’s a shit bet.”
“Yeah, well, save it for someone that gives a shit,” Luigi snapped, slapping down another packet of bills. “Fifteen grand on the geezer. One fucking minute.”
The bookie shrugged. “Hey, you’re the boss. No skin off my ass if you wanna flush your dough.”
Ignoring him, Luigi grabbed Pavi’s hand. “Come on. I wanna get some popcorn and hotdogs before they start.”
Finding good seats at the Surgical Theatre was easy even on a Saturday night if you knew just how to threaten people twice your age and twice your size - and Luigi did. The two brothers barely had enough time to settle and unwrap their hotdogs before the Surgical Theatre began.
Pavi liked the dancing genterns, of course. As the tall, graceful women twirled and strutted and ground their hips against each other, he clapped enthusiastically.
“Bella! Bellisima!” He shouted until Luigi elbowed him in the side. He pouted throughout the presentation of colors, and the singing of the national anthem-though Luigi couldn’t exactly blame him for that. Nobody knew the words and the few who did didn’t know the key. Finally, the boring formal shit stopped and the real action began. Luigi grinned as two sexy genterns, clad in nothing but bikini tops, thongs, and see-through miniskirts, wheeled out an ancient, white-haired man gagged and bound to a surgical chair by strong synth-leather straps. A third gentern followed, pushing some kind of monitor that, Luigi knew from experience, was hooked up to the geezer’s brain waves. According to theatre rules, the victim wasn’t officially dead until they flat lined. He guessed it was as good a system as any.
“Fuck yeah!” Luigi crowed. “Pavi, our guy’s first up!”
“Yeah …” Pavi agreed uneasily. He nibbled at his hot dog and clutched his doll tightly.
The genterns pushed the chair to the center of the field. It was covered in pale white concrete and contained a number of steel organ carts filled with scalpels, catheters, and a number of other surgical implements Luigi couldn’t identify and didn’t care to. They glinted coldly beneath the white-hot lights and cast long, sharp shadows. Briefly, Luigi wondered what the stadium had looked like long before GeneCo and Neural Over-stimulation Syndrome, when it had been home to football games, and concerts, or whatever gay shit people did back in 1995, or 1895, or whatever. Shrugging the thought away, he stuffed a handful of popcorn into his mouth and waited for the repo man to arrive.
The crowd didn’t have to wait for long - just long enough to get even more impatient and rowdy. Luigi cheered and pumped his fist in the air along with everyone else as the tall, burly man in black, vinyl scrubs and a matching mask strode out from some opening hidden by the seats. The applause were deafening; everyone, in fact, seemed to be having a good time except Pavi, who was hugging his doll and observing the repo man with eyes that seemed a little too wide and glassy to be interested. Luigi shrugged it off; Pavi was just weird like that.
Out on the concrete, the masked repo man approached one of the carts and calmly selected a large, serrated scalpel - perfect, Luigi knew from previous evenings at the Theatre, for carving into an abdomen. He then paced before the shivering old man, holding the instrument aloft and waving to the audience, who cheered, clapped and stamped their feet. Now this was an anthem Luigi liked much better! He joined the crowd in a chorus of “Slice and Dice ‘Em,” including the requisite hand motions, which he typically thought were low class and just fucking embarrassing.
Pavi was still staring straight ahead like someone having a seizure.
“Come on, princess, get with the fucking program,” Luigi growled, thwapping him upside the head. But instead of whining and rubbing his skull, Pavi just shuddered and kept watching. What the hell was his problem?
Luigi found out when the repo man turned and plunged his scalpel into the writhing geezer’s skinny, pale gut. At the first jet of blood, Pavi jumped as if bitten. His doll fell from his hands, spilling out her glittery heart, lungs, stomach, spleen and lower intestine as she hit the bleachers’ metal floor. Her plastic face also snapped off and rolled down the aisle, but Pavi didn’t notice. He was shaking all over, and pressing his hands against his mouth. Even through the cheering and the stomping, Luigi could hear him.
“No … I don’t like this. I don’t like this. Stop it … please stop it …”
But of course, the crowd only got rowdier, and the repo man’s cuts only got deeper as the old man writhed and whimpered and paled and paled. When he pulled the flap of skin and muscle down like a drawbridge, Pavi let out a single, shrill cry that Luigi swore the entire stadium (and probably people as far away as LA) heard.
“Pavi? Pavi!” Luigi hissed as he shook his brother by the shoulder. “Dammit, you’re fucking embarrassing me!”
Pavi, however, just covered his head with his hands and continued to wail; and someone was tapping Luigi’s back roughly.
“Hey kid.” It was some ugly guy sitting behind him, popcorn sticking in his beard and wearing sunglasses that hadn’t been in style since when Rotti Largo was a teen, probably -totally low-class and totally Silicone Valley, where they were all fucking stupid trailer trash assholes. “Hey kid,” he said again. “You mind shutting your boyfriend the fuck up? Some of us are trying to enjoy a fucking evening of legitimate Theatre.”
Luigi didn’t know what he was saying until the words themselves came tumbling out, and every single one of them surprised him. “You shut the fuck up, dickwad! He’s just scared.”
“Awww, wittle babie wet himself?” The man cooed, leaning in just close enough for Luigi to smell his breath: cheep booze, cigars and popcorn. Great. “Go on, cry,” he yelled at the cowering little boy. “Cry, you big fucking baby! Can’t even go to the Theatre without crying, you fucking little shitstain. Christ, why don’t they ID you motherfuckers at the door, anyway?”
Pavi just kept wailing as the man ranted. On the concrete below, the repo man was pulling out the geezer’s small intestines. Luigi couldn’t have cared less. His legs were shaking, his brow wet with sweat, and his fingers twitching closer and closer to the knife sheath on his belt. It wasn’t that the guy was saying anything he disagreed with, per se. After all, Pavi was a sniveling little shitstain who had no more business coming to the Surgical Theatre than Amber did shoving Pretty Parts Polly’s sparkle uterus into her nose, or whatever. But goddamnit, Pavi was his sniveling little shitstain of a brother! And Luigi would be damned if anyone else would steal his right to call Pavi just that!
“You shut the fuck up,” he growled.
The man just laughed before tossing his popcorn aside. Later, Luigi would remember how everything moved too fast, and not like it did in old movies at all. The valley guy was big, but he was fucking quick. Before Luigi’s reflexes registered that he was even moving, he closed one meaty hand up in a fist and aimed a punch right for Pavi’s face.
Luigi didn’t even have time to catch him as Pavi fell backwards, his head banging down on the concrete with a sound like getting sick. Luigi’s mouth opened, but he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t cry out or move as Pavi’s thin arms and legs splayed out, his eyes half-lidded, his nose slick with red and tilted at an angle it shouldn’t have.
The guy was talking again, saying some stupid shit to nobody about how they should have a night at the Theatre where you won prizes for punching little lipstick-wearing queers in the face. Luigi ignored him as he knelt at his brother’s side and felt for a pulse. Pavi’s heart was beating strong, and his chest was rising with breath; he was alive, but unconscious.
But Luigi’s relief was short-lived, and just as quickly replaced by rage he could only describe as blinding. When he turned around, the man was laughing again.
“Too easy,” valley guy snorted. “Too easy.”
And in one fluid motion, Luigi was in his face, his hands on the guy’s dirty leather jacket. This just seemed to make him laugh even harder.
“Ooooh, whatcha gonna do, big man? Gonna kick my ass? Do me like Repo out there is doin’ that old fuck?”
With a smile that felt to him like burning, Luigi unsheathed his switchblade and casually watched the reflection of the valley guy’s face falter and pale along its edge.
“Oh, man. You really did just fucking walk right into that.” And Luigi let out a sharp bark of a laugh before plunging the blade straight into his stomach.
It was over all too quickly; a few thrusts through soft, yielding tissue and muscle, some warm jets of blood, and then the guy was toppling over into Luigi’s row. His sunglasses skittered to a stop right beside the fallen Pretty Parts Polly as he convulsed, gurgled, and stopped moving.
Luigi wiped his arm across his forehead as he prodded his toe against the corpse’s side. On every side of him, the crowd was going nuts - not in shock or outrage, but in uninhibited joy. A few people clapped as Luigi kicked the man in the side, and a few even patted him on the back.
“Nice job, kid,” one woman said as she pushed a fifty dollar bill into his hand. “The fights in the audience are why me and my boyfriend come here.”
Luigi mumbled a half-interested agreement before he leaned down and spit in the dead guy’s dirty brown hair.
“Nobody,” he yelled, “nobody gets to harass my brother but me. You got that, dickfucker? Nobody but me!”
In the pit below, the old man slumped backwards in his wheelchair and the machine flat lined at exactly sixty seconds.
***
Pavi was still out cold when Luigi picked him up after wiping his hands on the guy’s jacket. He began to stir and groan painfully as Luigi stopped at the bookie’s stall to collect his winnings. His best attempt at a murderous glare silenced the guy’s feeble comments on Luigi’s “incredible” success; thankfully for everyone, he seemed smart enough not to ask questions about the groaning, bloody boy in Luigi’s arms.
As he carried his half-conscious brother back to the Largo manor, Luigi berated himself for his stupidity. What the hell was he thinking, giving into Pavi’s stupid-ass demands to come to something as child-unfriendly as the Surgical Theatre? Worse, what the hell would Dad say when he got home to find his younger son cowering in bed with a broken nose and what was probably a concussion and a need for therapy for the rest of his life?
He was a fucking, goddamned idiot, that was for sure.
Pavi was still groggy when Luigi reached the mansion’s gates. Not wanting to risk hurting him even more by dragging him up over the wall, Luigi sighed and rang the bell until the butler let them in. Luigi finally interrupted his attempts at an excuse with a well-placed death threat that had the man swearing he wouldn’t tell Master Largo, no sir, Young Master, never in a thousand years. Luigi guessed the blood stains on his ascot or the smell of death on his hands had been all the convincing their butler required.
After he had carried Pavi upstairs and placed him on his own bed, it was then a matter of calling in a few surGENs who could work fast and keep their mouths shut. Of course, that meant paying them more of his winnings than Luigi wanted, but he took it as his punishment for fucking up.
Still, things could be worse, he told himself as he waited outside Pavi’s room after changing his ascot. In addition to replacing the broken cartilage, he’d told the surGENs to re-sculpt his brother’s nose so it looked thinner, more feminine. If the old man asked, Luigi figured he’d just call it an early birthday present.
Pavi would probably appreciate it if their father yelled at someone else for a few days.
When the surGENs had finished and collected their money, Luigi ignored their orders to give Pavi plenty of rest. He found Pavi snuggled up in the purple sparkly comforter (stolen again from Amber), looking groggy, but nonetheless wide awake. As Luigi pulled a chair over to his bedside, Pavi tried to sit up. His un-bandaged nose was slender, aquiline, and turned up just a bit at the tip. It didn’t look too bad, Luigi reasoned. For a girl, anyway.
“Hey,” he said softly. “Hey, Pavi.”
The boy rubbed his eyes and blinked. “Brother? What happened? Who were those men in Pavi’s room?”
Luigi quickly weighed his options and decided against lying. “We were at the Theatre and you freaked out like a little bitch,” he said plainly.
“But … my nose?”
“Yeah, some jackass decided to get rough with you. I took care of it.” Well, decided against it for the most part, anyway. Pavi would probably just start blubbering again if he knew his brother had killed the sack of shit. Deciding it was time for a subject change, Luigi reached into his pocket and pulled out another of Amber’s fashion dolls - Face Lift Francis or Cunt Restoration Celeste, fuck if he could remember all those gay names. “Hey, I brought you this.”
But to his surprise, Pavi batted the toy away. “Amber can keep her.”
“I thought you said she was too little for dolls.”
Pavi shook his head. “Real surgery’s not like that,” he said flatly. “There’s blood and guts and people screaming, and nothing sparkles.” He shuddered. “Surgery’s scary. Bodies are scary. The surGENs in Pavi’s room were scary.” His voice sounded almost tearful. “Why did you let them in, brother?”
“OK, I get it. Forget the damn doll.” Luigi held his hands up in frustration. “Jesus, Pavi. Listen, alright? What you saw tonight …” he sighed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let you come. But not everyone that does surgery is like the repo men. Your nose got broken, and the surGENs were fixing it.”
“They cut up my face!”
“Yeah, but … they did it to make it better, right? To make the bones in it straight again, and to make it look prettier. They don’t fuck you up like repo men do. If you’ve got a fucked up nose, or just want to fix how you look, they do it.” Spotting a hand mirror on Pavi’s nightstand, he passed it into the boy’s hands. “Go on. Take a look.”
Pavi shook his head. “I’m scared.”
“I said fucking look at yourself,” Luigi snapped. For God’s sake. It sucked that the kid had had a shitty night, but this was just getting ridiculous.
Swearing at a slightly raised volume, however, typically seemed to do the trick with Pavi. Sniveling just a little, Pavi peeked into the mirror, one eye closed as if to shore himself up against some further scene of carnage. Luigi merely looked on patiently, his hands resting in his lap as Pavi winced, looked away from the glass, looked back, then cracked open his right eye for a full-on stare. His mouth puckered like it did whenever Pavi was thinking hard, and then opened into a little O.
“Ooooh,” Pavi whispered. “Oh. It’s beautiful. Magnifico!” He trailed his thumb down its contours, across its blade-like point. Just as suddenly, he put the mirror aside. “Luigi, why are there repo men? If SurGENs do good work, why are there people that do bad things like in the … like tonight?”
Luigi had heard the story several times from his father: all about the outbreak of N.O.S. in 2012, GeneCo coming to the rescue, and the nexus of global capital health and individual help. Of course, the explanation had been much simpler then. “You can’t have healthy people if a business isn’t healthy,” Rotti had explained, when Luigi was roughly Pavi’s age and sitting on his father’s knee to ask the same questions. “And if you just try to be nice and let people keep their organs when people can’t pay, you will put yourself out of business. Before you were born, Luigi, before everybody got sick, people all over the world thought that we should all be nice and give everybody free health care, even it meant that we didn’t have enough money to do research and notice when new diseases and problems started happening. That’s why so many people died of N.O.S. Nobody had a health care system that was strong enough to help because of all this charity. Yes, taking back people’s organs is not a nice thing to do, but you don’t survive by being nice, my boy. For every few people who die when we have to take back a heart or a spleen, think about all the people who we save by staying in business. The world isn’t a nice place, Luigi, and nobody survives by being nice. Remember that.”
Luigi had. He’d told the story to himself for years, until he knew it by rote, until his father’s voice transformed from a whisper to a roar that drowned out all of his own opinions, all of his doubts. Now, it could have been Rotti himself speaking with his tongue and lungs as he related the story to Pavi, who listened wide-eyed, his fingers never straying far from his new nose.
Pavi was silent for a few minutes after Luigi had finished; if not for those big, open eyes, Luigi would have thought he’d fallen asleep out of boredom from all the big words, just as he had the first few times.
“But that man,” Pavi said then, in a voice so quiet it startled his brother. “That man in the chair. He looked so scared. Just like Pavi felt.”
Luigi tried his best to ignore the hard, sharp feeling in his stomach that felt like a peach pit. He didn’t like thinking, not like this. It had edges, and it cut. Besides, he wanted to go out again, maybe this time for a drink to calm his nerves. “It’s late,” he said, patting Pavi’s hair. “No more question tonight. Time for bed.”
Pavi grabbed his arm with such speed and fierceness it was all his brother could do to splutter out, “Shitfuck!”
“Don’t go. Please don’t go, fratello. Pavi will have nightmares. He’ll see repo men in the shadows.”
“Then keep the fucking lights on,” Luigi grumbled, trying to shake his arm out of that grip.
Pavi just clung tighter. “Please, Luigi! Don’t go back to the Theatre tonight. Stay with Pavi. Tell him a better story.”
Tug as Luigi might, it soon became apparent that he would have to either saw off his arm or drag Pavi out again if he wanted to leave. Feeling a bit too tired to do either, and not wanting to wreck Pavi’s new nose by punching him, he sighed.
“Fine. One story, then we’re sleeping. You want the one about the little faggot duckies?”
“Pavi hates that one. It’s stupid.”
“Well Pavi is getting that one because Pavi is being a whiney little bitch.” And Luigi proceeded to tell him the story about the mother duck and her baby ducks. Pavi was right; it was stupid and boring and sleep-inducing.
It was the only story Luigi could remember his mother telling him.
***
“Once upon a time, a really long time ago, back before everywhere was a fucking dump, and everyone got surgery all the time, and there were actual animals that lived outside fucking zoos, there was a mommy duck, and her three baby ducks.” Of course, when his mother had told it, there was just one. But that had changed when Pavi came along. If she’d lived long enough, Luigi figured she would have changed the number again to make it three.
“Go on,” Pavi prompted. “Was there a Pavi duck, fratello?”
“No, stupid. There was no fucking Pavi duck! Who the fuck would name a duck Pavi? Do you want this story or not?”
“Sorry, Luigi.”
“So there was this mommy duck and three baby ducks, and they all lived on a farm. In a - in a lake.” Pond, lake, Luigi could never remember what you called big bodies of water that weren’t the sea, there being so few of them anymore that you could even go near. “So one day, the mommy duck and the baby ducks all went out - fucking swimming, I guess. Or paddling on the water. Whatever ducks do. And the mommy duck turned around and saw that one of the baby ducks was missing.” Luigi laughed. “Hey. Hey Pavi! The missing duck’s the Pavi duck, because it’s retarded like you.”
“Ha-ha.”
“So the mommy duck looked everywhere; under the rocks, on the lake bottom, in the plants growing around the lake, but she couldn’t find the Pavi duck. ‘Duck children, we can’t swim today,’ she said. ‘We have to go find the Pavi duck before it gets its nose punched in or something.”
“Tell it right, Luigi.”
Luigi was trying. But they weren’t ducks, and there was no mommy duck. Unless you could count the stupid sluts Rotti brought home as moms, which they weren’t. They only cared about money, or free surgery, or the sex, which fuck if Luigi could get why. One of them was even a fucking pedophile who tried to come onto Pavi when he was five.
Rotti was still pissed because Luigi wouldn’t say where he’d dumped the body.
“I can’t,” Luigi said after awhile. “It’s not that I don’t want to. I just can’t, Pavi. Stories are just stories. Life’s more complicated than that. Sometimes you’re the momma duck and you don’t - Pavi?”
But Pavi wasn’t paying attention. As Luigi had predicted, the story was so boring and insipid that it had put him to sleep-clinging, unfortunately, just tightly enough now to Luigi’s arm that the older Largo wasn’t in danger of losing circulation, but couldn’t disengage himself without waking his brother up.
Cursing his rotten fucking luck, Luigi sighed and stretched out on the purple blanket with his brother, snapping his fingers along the way to dim the lights.
Really. The fucking things he did for the kid. Still, Luigi was glad that Pavi wasn’t awake when he pressed his lips against his little brother’s forehead.
The fucking things he did.
Until then, I have something the Repo! The Genetic Opera fans might like. Here! Have some Pavi and Luigi.
Summary: Fourteen-year-old Luigi Largo and nine-year-old Pavi spend an interesting evening together in San Francisco.
Rating: R for gore, language. This is not an incest fic.
Beta'd by: weyrdchic! Thank you, my lovely dear!
“What are you doing?”
Luigi Largo nearly fell from the windowsill. Swearing mightily, he slammed his hand against the wall to catch himself and threw his entire weight forward in a most undignified way. Clearly, the person ten feet below agreed; the annoying little shit was laughing like it was his birthday.
The annoying little shit was none other than Pavi, Luigi’s irritating nine-year-old brother. The elder Largo boy turned as slowly as he could, pressing his back firmly against the pane.
“None of your damned business,” he snarled.
Pavi clicked his tongue in a way that made him sound like a disapproving adult twice his age, even as he cradled one of Amber’s dolls to his chest in a way that made him seem like a much younger child. “You’re sneaking out.” Giggling again, he turned his head to the left and parted his heavily roughed lips. “Dad’s gonna kill you.”
Luigi’s fingers arched against the glass as he fought the temptation to leap down and throttle the boy. “No. But I’m going to fucking kill you if you tell him, you little dicklicking shit.”
“You’re swearing!” Pavi insisted. And then, lowering his voice to a malicious little whisper: “Pavi’s telling!”
“Yeah? Too bad for you, Dad’s not here right now. The old fart bastard had another dicking stockholder meeting.”
“Pavi’ll tell when he gets home!” Pavi insisted, rubbing his nose. It was covered in one of those fake, latex noses you could get at high-end toy stores that still looked like crap. Especially because it was a girl’s nose.
Sighing, Luigi hefted himself down from the window. His sneakers squeaked as they hit the polished hardwood floor, and Pavi flinched as his brother grabbed him roughly by the shoulder.
“You tell the old man one word about this, bitch, and I’ll tell him all about how you keep fucking swiping Amber’s Pretty Parts Polly dolls.”
Pavi blanched and guiltily hid the toy behind his back. “Amber’s a baby, she’s too little for dolls! She keeps trying to suck on Pretty Polly’s glitter spleens!”
Luigi sniffed distastefully. “Yeah, right. You’re a fucking little faggot, Pavi!”
“Am not!” Pavi bleated. Then, screwing up his face he asked, “What’s a faggot?”
Luigi pushed him away in disgust. “So fucking help me, Pavi, I will fucking shove those glitter spleens up your frigging nostrils if you don’t fucking turn around and go back to fucking bed right now.”
Pavi folded his arms across his chest and shook his head. “No. You’re going out, and Pavi wants to come, too. Or he’ll scream and wake up everyone else in the house, including the babysitter!”
“Yeah, well, Pavi’s going to put his little pansy ass right back into bed or -”
And screwing up his face, Pavi made good on his threat.
Swearing again, Luigi slammed his hand over his brother’s mouth and weighed his options. He could always beat the shit out of Pavi, but that would piss off their father and he’d catch hell. Murder was also an option (one he really liked, in fact), but it was messy, and he didn’t want to stain his ascot. Sighing, Luigi realized he really didn’t have a choice.
“OK, fine. You can come. But if you fuck this up for me, Pavi -” Luigi clenched his hand into a fist and roughly touched the knuckles to his brother’s nose. When he pulled his hand away, it was smeared with Pavi’s garish lipstick.
“I know, I know. You’ll fucking strangle Pavi with his own intestines,” the boy recited. “Pavi will be good, Luigi. He just wants to spend some time with his bello brother.”
Luigi rolled his eyes and snapped the switchblade he always carried in his belt. “Fine. Get your fucking coat, and take off that stupid fake nose. You look like a retard. And for fuck’s sake, stop with that Italian shit and talking about yourself like you’re someone else, you fucking freak.”
Goddamn it, why did this fucking shit always happen to him?
***
On pain of strangulation, Luigi had told Pavi to keep his mouth shut while they climbed down the manor’s side, sneaked through the bushes, and scaled the wrought iron gates that separated the Largo household from the carnage of the streets beyond. Knowing better than to really anger his brother, Pavi kept his mouth shut until the two boys had lost themselves in the crowds that prowled San Francisco even at midnight.
“So where are we going?” he asked at last.
Luigi tugged Pavi forward as the younger boy stumbled on a crack in the sidewalk. Fucking hell, Pavi was a clumsy little fucker. “Surgical theater,” he said.
He heard Pavi gasp over the clamor of night clubs, partiers, and scalpel sluts searching out their next Zydrate fix. “No way! You’re lying to Pavi! That isn’t real. Dad said so.”
“Yeah, well, Dad’s good at lying,” Luigi huffed. “You’re so stupid, Pavi. Repo men do this shit all the time to supplement the shit pay Dad gives them.”
Only Pavi wasn’t listening, or holding onto his hand anymore.
“Pavi?” Luigi turned around quickly, feeling his engineered heart prickle. If his stupid little brother got lost, he’d never hear the end of it. And with untouched children’s organs going for thousands of dollars on the black market …
“Pavi?!”
But he needn’t have worried. The boy was standing stock-still in front of a window display, ridiculously red mouth agape and his manicured nails clutching at his pilfered doll as he stared at a window display in a toy shop.
“Look, Luigi! It’s the new Sweet Surgery Sally doll!” Pavi shoved his nose against the glass and enumerated each detail with one purple fingernail. “She’s got her own gurney, and five different organ packs, and she comes with her own genterns!” He sighed wistfully, his breath fogging the glass in a wide, white line. “Ahhhh! Pavi hopes he gets her for his birthday! Her face is so pretty.” He touched his own cheek wistfully. “Pavi wishes he could just snap it on over his face, like Surgery Sally can!” The boy rubbed at his nose and sighed wistfully. “Pavi wishes his nose looked just like hers!”
Really, Pavi was just fucking creepy sometimes. Luigi scowled down at his brother as he stood behind him. “Pavi is not going to get that for his birthday, because Dad’s fucking tired of you being a sissy freak,” he scolded. “Now c’mon. You’re gonna make us late.” And Pavi shrieked like a kitten as Luigi picked him up and threw him over his shoulder.
“Ieeee! Put Pavi down! Put him down! Pavi can walk!”
“And I’m going to put Pavi in the nearest GeneCo dump truck with all the bodies if he doesn’t shut the fucking fuck up and stop trying to kick me in the chest!” Luigi snapped.
“Pavi will be good.” And he was; the younger Largo boy didn’t say a single word as Luigi carried him down the street, over a few of San Francisco’s omnipresent paved hills and to the Surgical Theatre - a stadium where they used to hold football games before the worldwide outbreak of N.O.S. The lines at the betting stands were outrageously long, as they typically were on Saturday nights, and even though Pavi was small for his age, Luigi’s arms and shoulders were beginning to hurt. He did not relish the idea of waiting half an hour or more holding Pavi like a sack of potatoes.
“If I put you down, you promise not to run away, or cry like a little bitch?”
Pavi was silent until Luigi shook him a few times. Then sullenly, he said, “Uh-huh.”
Grunting, Luigi shrugged his brother back down onto his feet. Then straightening his ascot, he stood on his tip-toes to get a better look at the neon boards. “Woah. Fucking sweet! They’ve got two former wrestlers up tonight!”
“Huh?”
It wasn’t that Luigi felt like explaining, just that he new Pavi: the kid would not fucking stop asking questions unless you answered him. “You remember when Dad told us about how people used to bet on horse races, dog races, shit like that? This is sort of like that, except there are people instead of horses.”
“Why people, fratello?”
“When people that can’t pay their organ payments, they get their guts repossessed. The repo men do their work here when they need more money, and we bet on how long they’ll last without their heart or lungs or whatever-five seconds, half a minute, that kind of thing. Whoever gets the closest wins a shit-ton of money.” He stood on his toes again and scanned the neon boards.
“So, who are you going to bet on?”
***
“The 30-year-old wrestler,” Luigi said half an hour later, slapping a bundle of 100 dollar bills down on the counter as Pavi idly twined a lock of thick, black hair around his middle finger. “What are the odds on the ballerina?”
The bookie scratched his nose and consulted the monitor at his side. “She’s 20, healthy … five to one she lasts a minute without her pancreas.”
Luigi frowned. “Not enough of a challenge. Who’s a hundred to one?”
“The geezer,” the bookie said immediately. “But he ain’t gonna last more than five seconds without those guts, son. It’s a shit bet.”
“Yeah, well, save it for someone that gives a shit,” Luigi snapped, slapping down another packet of bills. “Fifteen grand on the geezer. One fucking minute.”
The bookie shrugged. “Hey, you’re the boss. No skin off my ass if you wanna flush your dough.”
Ignoring him, Luigi grabbed Pavi’s hand. “Come on. I wanna get some popcorn and hotdogs before they start.”
Finding good seats at the Surgical Theatre was easy even on a Saturday night if you knew just how to threaten people twice your age and twice your size - and Luigi did. The two brothers barely had enough time to settle and unwrap their hotdogs before the Surgical Theatre began.
Pavi liked the dancing genterns, of course. As the tall, graceful women twirled and strutted and ground their hips against each other, he clapped enthusiastically.
“Bella! Bellisima!” He shouted until Luigi elbowed him in the side. He pouted throughout the presentation of colors, and the singing of the national anthem-though Luigi couldn’t exactly blame him for that. Nobody knew the words and the few who did didn’t know the key. Finally, the boring formal shit stopped and the real action began. Luigi grinned as two sexy genterns, clad in nothing but bikini tops, thongs, and see-through miniskirts, wheeled out an ancient, white-haired man gagged and bound to a surgical chair by strong synth-leather straps. A third gentern followed, pushing some kind of monitor that, Luigi knew from experience, was hooked up to the geezer’s brain waves. According to theatre rules, the victim wasn’t officially dead until they flat lined. He guessed it was as good a system as any.
“Fuck yeah!” Luigi crowed. “Pavi, our guy’s first up!”
“Yeah …” Pavi agreed uneasily. He nibbled at his hot dog and clutched his doll tightly.
The genterns pushed the chair to the center of the field. It was covered in pale white concrete and contained a number of steel organ carts filled with scalpels, catheters, and a number of other surgical implements Luigi couldn’t identify and didn’t care to. They glinted coldly beneath the white-hot lights and cast long, sharp shadows. Briefly, Luigi wondered what the stadium had looked like long before GeneCo and Neural Over-stimulation Syndrome, when it had been home to football games, and concerts, or whatever gay shit people did back in 1995, or 1895, or whatever. Shrugging the thought away, he stuffed a handful of popcorn into his mouth and waited for the repo man to arrive.
The crowd didn’t have to wait for long - just long enough to get even more impatient and rowdy. Luigi cheered and pumped his fist in the air along with everyone else as the tall, burly man in black, vinyl scrubs and a matching mask strode out from some opening hidden by the seats. The applause were deafening; everyone, in fact, seemed to be having a good time except Pavi, who was hugging his doll and observing the repo man with eyes that seemed a little too wide and glassy to be interested. Luigi shrugged it off; Pavi was just weird like that.
Out on the concrete, the masked repo man approached one of the carts and calmly selected a large, serrated scalpel - perfect, Luigi knew from previous evenings at the Theatre, for carving into an abdomen. He then paced before the shivering old man, holding the instrument aloft and waving to the audience, who cheered, clapped and stamped their feet. Now this was an anthem Luigi liked much better! He joined the crowd in a chorus of “Slice and Dice ‘Em,” including the requisite hand motions, which he typically thought were low class and just fucking embarrassing.
Pavi was still staring straight ahead like someone having a seizure.
“Come on, princess, get with the fucking program,” Luigi growled, thwapping him upside the head. But instead of whining and rubbing his skull, Pavi just shuddered and kept watching. What the hell was his problem?
Luigi found out when the repo man turned and plunged his scalpel into the writhing geezer’s skinny, pale gut. At the first jet of blood, Pavi jumped as if bitten. His doll fell from his hands, spilling out her glittery heart, lungs, stomach, spleen and lower intestine as she hit the bleachers’ metal floor. Her plastic face also snapped off and rolled down the aisle, but Pavi didn’t notice. He was shaking all over, and pressing his hands against his mouth. Even through the cheering and the stomping, Luigi could hear him.
“No … I don’t like this. I don’t like this. Stop it … please stop it …”
But of course, the crowd only got rowdier, and the repo man’s cuts only got deeper as the old man writhed and whimpered and paled and paled. When he pulled the flap of skin and muscle down like a drawbridge, Pavi let out a single, shrill cry that Luigi swore the entire stadium (and probably people as far away as LA) heard.
“Pavi? Pavi!” Luigi hissed as he shook his brother by the shoulder. “Dammit, you’re fucking embarrassing me!”
Pavi, however, just covered his head with his hands and continued to wail; and someone was tapping Luigi’s back roughly.
“Hey kid.” It was some ugly guy sitting behind him, popcorn sticking in his beard and wearing sunglasses that hadn’t been in style since when Rotti Largo was a teen, probably -totally low-class and totally Silicone Valley, where they were all fucking stupid trailer trash assholes. “Hey kid,” he said again. “You mind shutting your boyfriend the fuck up? Some of us are trying to enjoy a fucking evening of legitimate Theatre.”
Luigi didn’t know what he was saying until the words themselves came tumbling out, and every single one of them surprised him. “You shut the fuck up, dickwad! He’s just scared.”
“Awww, wittle babie wet himself?” The man cooed, leaning in just close enough for Luigi to smell his breath: cheep booze, cigars and popcorn. Great. “Go on, cry,” he yelled at the cowering little boy. “Cry, you big fucking baby! Can’t even go to the Theatre without crying, you fucking little shitstain. Christ, why don’t they ID you motherfuckers at the door, anyway?”
Pavi just kept wailing as the man ranted. On the concrete below, the repo man was pulling out the geezer’s small intestines. Luigi couldn’t have cared less. His legs were shaking, his brow wet with sweat, and his fingers twitching closer and closer to the knife sheath on his belt. It wasn’t that the guy was saying anything he disagreed with, per se. After all, Pavi was a sniveling little shitstain who had no more business coming to the Surgical Theatre than Amber did shoving Pretty Parts Polly’s sparkle uterus into her nose, or whatever. But goddamnit, Pavi was his sniveling little shitstain of a brother! And Luigi would be damned if anyone else would steal his right to call Pavi just that!
“You shut the fuck up,” he growled.
The man just laughed before tossing his popcorn aside. Later, Luigi would remember how everything moved too fast, and not like it did in old movies at all. The valley guy was big, but he was fucking quick. Before Luigi’s reflexes registered that he was even moving, he closed one meaty hand up in a fist and aimed a punch right for Pavi’s face.
Luigi didn’t even have time to catch him as Pavi fell backwards, his head banging down on the concrete with a sound like getting sick. Luigi’s mouth opened, but he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t cry out or move as Pavi’s thin arms and legs splayed out, his eyes half-lidded, his nose slick with red and tilted at an angle it shouldn’t have.
The guy was talking again, saying some stupid shit to nobody about how they should have a night at the Theatre where you won prizes for punching little lipstick-wearing queers in the face. Luigi ignored him as he knelt at his brother’s side and felt for a pulse. Pavi’s heart was beating strong, and his chest was rising with breath; he was alive, but unconscious.
But Luigi’s relief was short-lived, and just as quickly replaced by rage he could only describe as blinding. When he turned around, the man was laughing again.
“Too easy,” valley guy snorted. “Too easy.”
And in one fluid motion, Luigi was in his face, his hands on the guy’s dirty leather jacket. This just seemed to make him laugh even harder.
“Ooooh, whatcha gonna do, big man? Gonna kick my ass? Do me like Repo out there is doin’ that old fuck?”
With a smile that felt to him like burning, Luigi unsheathed his switchblade and casually watched the reflection of the valley guy’s face falter and pale along its edge.
“Oh, man. You really did just fucking walk right into that.” And Luigi let out a sharp bark of a laugh before plunging the blade straight into his stomach.
It was over all too quickly; a few thrusts through soft, yielding tissue and muscle, some warm jets of blood, and then the guy was toppling over into Luigi’s row. His sunglasses skittered to a stop right beside the fallen Pretty Parts Polly as he convulsed, gurgled, and stopped moving.
Luigi wiped his arm across his forehead as he prodded his toe against the corpse’s side. On every side of him, the crowd was going nuts - not in shock or outrage, but in uninhibited joy. A few people clapped as Luigi kicked the man in the side, and a few even patted him on the back.
“Nice job, kid,” one woman said as she pushed a fifty dollar bill into his hand. “The fights in the audience are why me and my boyfriend come here.”
Luigi mumbled a half-interested agreement before he leaned down and spit in the dead guy’s dirty brown hair.
“Nobody,” he yelled, “nobody gets to harass my brother but me. You got that, dickfucker? Nobody but me!”
In the pit below, the old man slumped backwards in his wheelchair and the machine flat lined at exactly sixty seconds.
***
Pavi was still out cold when Luigi picked him up after wiping his hands on the guy’s jacket. He began to stir and groan painfully as Luigi stopped at the bookie’s stall to collect his winnings. His best attempt at a murderous glare silenced the guy’s feeble comments on Luigi’s “incredible” success; thankfully for everyone, he seemed smart enough not to ask questions about the groaning, bloody boy in Luigi’s arms.
As he carried his half-conscious brother back to the Largo manor, Luigi berated himself for his stupidity. What the hell was he thinking, giving into Pavi’s stupid-ass demands to come to something as child-unfriendly as the Surgical Theatre? Worse, what the hell would Dad say when he got home to find his younger son cowering in bed with a broken nose and what was probably a concussion and a need for therapy for the rest of his life?
He was a fucking, goddamned idiot, that was for sure.
Pavi was still groggy when Luigi reached the mansion’s gates. Not wanting to risk hurting him even more by dragging him up over the wall, Luigi sighed and rang the bell until the butler let them in. Luigi finally interrupted his attempts at an excuse with a well-placed death threat that had the man swearing he wouldn’t tell Master Largo, no sir, Young Master, never in a thousand years. Luigi guessed the blood stains on his ascot or the smell of death on his hands had been all the convincing their butler required.
After he had carried Pavi upstairs and placed him on his own bed, it was then a matter of calling in a few surGENs who could work fast and keep their mouths shut. Of course, that meant paying them more of his winnings than Luigi wanted, but he took it as his punishment for fucking up.
Still, things could be worse, he told himself as he waited outside Pavi’s room after changing his ascot. In addition to replacing the broken cartilage, he’d told the surGENs to re-sculpt his brother’s nose so it looked thinner, more feminine. If the old man asked, Luigi figured he’d just call it an early birthday present.
Pavi would probably appreciate it if their father yelled at someone else for a few days.
When the surGENs had finished and collected their money, Luigi ignored their orders to give Pavi plenty of rest. He found Pavi snuggled up in the purple sparkly comforter (stolen again from Amber), looking groggy, but nonetheless wide awake. As Luigi pulled a chair over to his bedside, Pavi tried to sit up. His un-bandaged nose was slender, aquiline, and turned up just a bit at the tip. It didn’t look too bad, Luigi reasoned. For a girl, anyway.
“Hey,” he said softly. “Hey, Pavi.”
The boy rubbed his eyes and blinked. “Brother? What happened? Who were those men in Pavi’s room?”
Luigi quickly weighed his options and decided against lying. “We were at the Theatre and you freaked out like a little bitch,” he said plainly.
“But … my nose?”
“Yeah, some jackass decided to get rough with you. I took care of it.” Well, decided against it for the most part, anyway. Pavi would probably just start blubbering again if he knew his brother had killed the sack of shit. Deciding it was time for a subject change, Luigi reached into his pocket and pulled out another of Amber’s fashion dolls - Face Lift Francis or Cunt Restoration Celeste, fuck if he could remember all those gay names. “Hey, I brought you this.”
But to his surprise, Pavi batted the toy away. “Amber can keep her.”
“I thought you said she was too little for dolls.”
Pavi shook his head. “Real surgery’s not like that,” he said flatly. “There’s blood and guts and people screaming, and nothing sparkles.” He shuddered. “Surgery’s scary. Bodies are scary. The surGENs in Pavi’s room were scary.” His voice sounded almost tearful. “Why did you let them in, brother?”
“OK, I get it. Forget the damn doll.” Luigi held his hands up in frustration. “Jesus, Pavi. Listen, alright? What you saw tonight …” he sighed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let you come. But not everyone that does surgery is like the repo men. Your nose got broken, and the surGENs were fixing it.”
“They cut up my face!”
“Yeah, but … they did it to make it better, right? To make the bones in it straight again, and to make it look prettier. They don’t fuck you up like repo men do. If you’ve got a fucked up nose, or just want to fix how you look, they do it.” Spotting a hand mirror on Pavi’s nightstand, he passed it into the boy’s hands. “Go on. Take a look.”
Pavi shook his head. “I’m scared.”
“I said fucking look at yourself,” Luigi snapped. For God’s sake. It sucked that the kid had had a shitty night, but this was just getting ridiculous.
Swearing at a slightly raised volume, however, typically seemed to do the trick with Pavi. Sniveling just a little, Pavi peeked into the mirror, one eye closed as if to shore himself up against some further scene of carnage. Luigi merely looked on patiently, his hands resting in his lap as Pavi winced, looked away from the glass, looked back, then cracked open his right eye for a full-on stare. His mouth puckered like it did whenever Pavi was thinking hard, and then opened into a little O.
“Ooooh,” Pavi whispered. “Oh. It’s beautiful. Magnifico!” He trailed his thumb down its contours, across its blade-like point. Just as suddenly, he put the mirror aside. “Luigi, why are there repo men? If SurGENs do good work, why are there people that do bad things like in the … like tonight?”
Luigi had heard the story several times from his father: all about the outbreak of N.O.S. in 2012, GeneCo coming to the rescue, and the nexus of global capital health and individual help. Of course, the explanation had been much simpler then. “You can’t have healthy people if a business isn’t healthy,” Rotti had explained, when Luigi was roughly Pavi’s age and sitting on his father’s knee to ask the same questions. “And if you just try to be nice and let people keep their organs when people can’t pay, you will put yourself out of business. Before you were born, Luigi, before everybody got sick, people all over the world thought that we should all be nice and give everybody free health care, even it meant that we didn’t have enough money to do research and notice when new diseases and problems started happening. That’s why so many people died of N.O.S. Nobody had a health care system that was strong enough to help because of all this charity. Yes, taking back people’s organs is not a nice thing to do, but you don’t survive by being nice, my boy. For every few people who die when we have to take back a heart or a spleen, think about all the people who we save by staying in business. The world isn’t a nice place, Luigi, and nobody survives by being nice. Remember that.”
Luigi had. He’d told the story to himself for years, until he knew it by rote, until his father’s voice transformed from a whisper to a roar that drowned out all of his own opinions, all of his doubts. Now, it could have been Rotti himself speaking with his tongue and lungs as he related the story to Pavi, who listened wide-eyed, his fingers never straying far from his new nose.
Pavi was silent for a few minutes after Luigi had finished; if not for those big, open eyes, Luigi would have thought he’d fallen asleep out of boredom from all the big words, just as he had the first few times.
“But that man,” Pavi said then, in a voice so quiet it startled his brother. “That man in the chair. He looked so scared. Just like Pavi felt.”
Luigi tried his best to ignore the hard, sharp feeling in his stomach that felt like a peach pit. He didn’t like thinking, not like this. It had edges, and it cut. Besides, he wanted to go out again, maybe this time for a drink to calm his nerves. “It’s late,” he said, patting Pavi’s hair. “No more question tonight. Time for bed.”
Pavi grabbed his arm with such speed and fierceness it was all his brother could do to splutter out, “Shitfuck!”
“Don’t go. Please don’t go, fratello. Pavi will have nightmares. He’ll see repo men in the shadows.”
“Then keep the fucking lights on,” Luigi grumbled, trying to shake his arm out of that grip.
Pavi just clung tighter. “Please, Luigi! Don’t go back to the Theatre tonight. Stay with Pavi. Tell him a better story.”
Tug as Luigi might, it soon became apparent that he would have to either saw off his arm or drag Pavi out again if he wanted to leave. Feeling a bit too tired to do either, and not wanting to wreck Pavi’s new nose by punching him, he sighed.
“Fine. One story, then we’re sleeping. You want the one about the little faggot duckies?”
“Pavi hates that one. It’s stupid.”
“Well Pavi is getting that one because Pavi is being a whiney little bitch.” And Luigi proceeded to tell him the story about the mother duck and her baby ducks. Pavi was right; it was stupid and boring and sleep-inducing.
It was the only story Luigi could remember his mother telling him.
***
“Once upon a time, a really long time ago, back before everywhere was a fucking dump, and everyone got surgery all the time, and there were actual animals that lived outside fucking zoos, there was a mommy duck, and her three baby ducks.” Of course, when his mother had told it, there was just one. But that had changed when Pavi came along. If she’d lived long enough, Luigi figured she would have changed the number again to make it three.
“Go on,” Pavi prompted. “Was there a Pavi duck, fratello?”
“No, stupid. There was no fucking Pavi duck! Who the fuck would name a duck Pavi? Do you want this story or not?”
“Sorry, Luigi.”
“So there was this mommy duck and three baby ducks, and they all lived on a farm. In a - in a lake.” Pond, lake, Luigi could never remember what you called big bodies of water that weren’t the sea, there being so few of them anymore that you could even go near. “So one day, the mommy duck and the baby ducks all went out - fucking swimming, I guess. Or paddling on the water. Whatever ducks do. And the mommy duck turned around and saw that one of the baby ducks was missing.” Luigi laughed. “Hey. Hey Pavi! The missing duck’s the Pavi duck, because it’s retarded like you.”
“Ha-ha.”
“So the mommy duck looked everywhere; under the rocks, on the lake bottom, in the plants growing around the lake, but she couldn’t find the Pavi duck. ‘Duck children, we can’t swim today,’ she said. ‘We have to go find the Pavi duck before it gets its nose punched in or something.”
“Tell it right, Luigi.”
Luigi was trying. But they weren’t ducks, and there was no mommy duck. Unless you could count the stupid sluts Rotti brought home as moms, which they weren’t. They only cared about money, or free surgery, or the sex, which fuck if Luigi could get why. One of them was even a fucking pedophile who tried to come onto Pavi when he was five.
Rotti was still pissed because Luigi wouldn’t say where he’d dumped the body.
“I can’t,” Luigi said after awhile. “It’s not that I don’t want to. I just can’t, Pavi. Stories are just stories. Life’s more complicated than that. Sometimes you’re the momma duck and you don’t - Pavi?”
But Pavi wasn’t paying attention. As Luigi had predicted, the story was so boring and insipid that it had put him to sleep-clinging, unfortunately, just tightly enough now to Luigi’s arm that the older Largo wasn’t in danger of losing circulation, but couldn’t disengage himself without waking his brother up.
Cursing his rotten fucking luck, Luigi sighed and stretched out on the purple blanket with his brother, snapping his fingers along the way to dim the lights.
Really. The fucking things he did for the kid. Still, Luigi was glad that Pavi wasn’t awake when he pressed his lips against his little brother’s forehead.
The fucking things he did.