Author's Note: I told my friend I wouldn't get into Repo! fanfiction because the story was good enough on it's own. I broke that promise. C:
This isn't even my headcanon - in my head, Shilo doesn't inherit anything and has no money and teams up with Graverobber and eventually they wind up working for a changed version of GeneCo. C: But hey, there's this too.
Warnings: Um, swearing. And a hinted Graverobber/Shilo relationship, but it's mostly friendship.
I can hardly believe I'm posting this. But, any mistakes or constructive criticism, tell me. I can't get better if I don't know what I'm doing wrong.
Shilo Wallace is completely alone when she returns to her home.
It's cold now, she notes. Before, the only place that felt like someone actually lived there was her bedroom. They never had guests, but now Shilo could guess that they'd think their house – now her house – was a house and not a home. The entire place was haunted by Marni, Marni's presence and Nathan's obsession with her.
Shilo didn't believe in ghosts. But still, it was haunted.
She guessed she was still in shock, and that was why she hadn't broken down in sobs yet. She opened the gate and locked it behind her and continued up the short path to her house, her home, her prison, her cage. She was free, but she was returning.
Dad left it to me, she thinks as she locks the door behind her. It's mine now.
She wonders what else she's been left and then decides that she does not care. She wants to curl up and sleep. She wants her dad to come down the stairs and ask why she's not in bed. She wants to be comforted and held. But her father's dead. Her father's been poisoning her. She can still feel the pain in her stomach and head, clawing and tearing as she fought through it. She shudders. She needs to be an adult now. There is no Nathan, no father to hug her and make sure she's alright, no overly-feely grave robber to show up and explain things.
Shilo Wallace leans against the locked door and sinks to the floor.
When Amber, Luigi and Pavi show up at her doorstep the next day, pounding on the door (what happened to the gate?) Shilo is still on the floor right in front of the door, where she fell asleep last night. She wipes at her face, realizing that she must've cried herself to sleep last night. She never even changed – she's still in her mother's old dress, covered in dry blood that's going to take some scrubbing to get off.
As she opens the door, some part of her tells her she should be worried – wouldn't these three be resentful of her, the girl who their father liked more despite no blood relation? But Amber Sweet doesn't look like she wants Shilo dead. Luigi looks angry, his knife in his hand, and Shilo is reminded of when he slashed at her father. Amber Sweet wrinkles her nose at the teenager's appearance, but she grins by the time Shilo meets her eyes.
"Shilo Wallace. I'm Amber Sweet." She holds out her hand.
"I know." How could she not? Amber Sweet was everywhere. She was the trendsetter, the leader of the Zydrate Support Group (which was really ironic, now that Shilo thought about it) and now the owner of GeneCo. It would be impossible for anyone to not know who she is. Shilo shook her hand.
Amber Sweet looks disgusted for a second but she hides it quickly. "Blind Mag was your Godmother, and in her will she left you everything she could."
"Except her face…" Pavi drawled, holding the mirror up and smiling at himself. Shilo blanches and suddenly wants to get out of there now. No, she wants them to get out of here. She wants to curl up in a ball and cry. She doesn't want to deal with this.
"And her eyes," Luigi adds, laughing a little.
"Everything she could." Amber repeats, harsher, with a glance at her brother. Pavi lowers the mirror but giggles and Luigi's knife is still in plain view. Shilo wonders if she could get away with slamming the door. Probably not.
"I wanted to present you everything in person." The words are laced with contempt, an unseen threat lying under them. Amber Sweet snaps her fingers and out of nowhere a man in a suit appears to hand her a bunch of paperwork. She smiles and he vanishes again, gone as quick as he appeared. The owner of GeneCo hands the papers to Shilo, who feels dirty and out of place even though this is her house and the Largo siblings are the ones invading.
"Would you like to… come in?" Shilo realizes that it was not polite to stand at the door with the world's most powerful family on her porch without inviting them in.
Pavi leers at her and goes to take a step, but Amber's arm shoots out to stop him and smiles sweetly. But the sweet smile is dripping in poison and Shilo clutches the papers to her chest. "No thank you." The smile doesn't quite reach her eyes, Shilo thinks. Maybe it's the surgery. Amber's face had fallen off at the opera last night – was it really only last night? – and she's already had surgery again. "You've inherited three million dollars." Amber Sweet tells her. "That should be more than enough."
The owner of GeneCo turns on her heel and walks back down the path. Luigi turns to follow her, and Pavi remains for a moment longer, grinning and leering and making her feel uncomfortable until Amber Sweet shouts for him and he dashes off. There they go. The Largo Siblings.
Shilo stands there for long after they left, long after she shut the door and locked it again. She glances at the papers. At the bottom is a poster on keeping organ repossession legal – a harsh reminder of the power they have, and Shilo gets the message.
Stay away from GeneCo.
Shilo Wallace scrubs and scrubs until her skin is raw and until she can't think. She's a millionaire now. She owns an apartment – Blind Mag's apartment. She owns this house now, too, and all that is in it. The water is nearly scalding. It leaves her skin red and burning, but Shilo doesn't care.
She stands there after she scrubbed the blood off and considers burning her dress. She decided that she needs to move out. She needs a different house, one not so haunted by her dead parents.
But then you can't visit the tomb.
Shilo shuts the water off and puts her wig back on. She gets dressed and decides that visiting her mother had always been a getaway, a comfort, like a stuffed animal.
"I'm seventeen." Shilo says to her reflection as she puts her wig on. She smiles at herself, but it's forced. She's an adult now. She doesn't need such a comfort.
"I'm going to be a singer," she says. "or an entomologist. Or an entomologist who also sings. Named Bug. Or Insect." She considers this. "No, Bug is better."
When she smiles this time, it's more genuine.
Her new house is a small one. One-bedroom, one-bathroom, with a kitchen connected to the dining room and a small living room. She can't bring herself to sell her old home, but she does sell Mag's apartment after going through it and keeping the little things that Mag might've shared with her if she'd grown up with Mag there.
She wonders sometimes, how different her life would've been if Mag had been there. Maybe her dad would've been more lenient. Maybe she would've gotten to go outside more often. Maybe he wouldn't have poisoned her.
The thought is still bitter in her throat whenever she thinks about it. He was sorry, in the end, but he'd still done it.
Shilo decides to go for a walk before she begins to unpack. It won't clear her head, but nothing will. She will never clear her head of some of those images.
Shilo Wallace does her best to not mope around.
Graverobber helps with that – he doesn't appreciate moping or walking around, covered in self-pity. "Pity's for the weak," He says, watching her as she pours herself some cereal. She can't cook to save her life.
He started to show up again a month after she moved into her new house. He has a bad habit of explaining some things far too much – "That fucking Amber gave up on street Zydrate. But she owns GeneCo now, she has her own collection back home…" – and a bad habit of pocketing her things and messing with her. He's yet to take anything important. He hasn't touched any of Mag's or Nathan's things lying around – the few there are.
Shilo still mopes. It's hard not to – her father betrayed her and then died and her idol and godmother who she'd only known for hours died. Organ repossessions were common still – she'd be walking down the street to get Chinese food with Graverobber and find someone in an alley, their liver or lungs cut out of their chest, a blank stare looking up at the sky.
The flashbacks and nightmares didn't help, either. The images in her mind stung when she remembered them when she was completely awake; reliving them in her dreams was horrible, the true essence of the word 'nightmare'.
Graverobber doesn't exactly understand. He was completely bewildered the first time she burst out crying when he was around – like he'd never seen tears before. And when she'd stuttered out that she missed her father and mother, he seemed only more confused, even as he hugged her and tried to get her to stop crying.
"Have you ever cared about anyone?" Shilo snaps at him, a small part of her wondering when she wound up on his lap. She tries to suck in a breath, but her throat feels closed and Graverobber is close, too close. He bumps their foreheads together and for a wild second she thinks he's going to kiss her.
"Once." He grins that same smug smile of his. "But she died."
Shilo does this – not on purpose, of course – three more times, one more month of wallowing in self-pity, before Graverobber gets sick of it. She's hardly done a thing and she knows it – she knows her way around this neighborhood now, and she knows how to avoid the Genecops. She knows she wants to be Bug, the famous singer who will go down in history as soon as she discovers some way to fight against GeneCo, but she has no idea how she'll get there and she hasn't tried to think of a way.
"Life isn't going to just stop because someone else's did." He tells her, angry. He's sick of this, of her moping and self-pity. In some part of her head, Shilo wonders if he ever really did love someone, or if everyone he loved left or died. It's a sad thought. She feels tears pooling in her eyes, but he keeps going. "What happened to being someone worth remembering? A depressed teenager doing nothing with her life is not going to be remembered fondly. Things die. Cats die. Dogs die. Parents die. Children die. Everything dies."
She slaps him and refuses to talk to him for a week after that, but eventually she admits that he's right. He doesn't even smirk when she apologizes to him, even though that damned smug grin hardly ever leaves his face for long. He just kind of looks at her, and then he smiles, and it's not a smug smile or a sarcastic one, it's a genuine one, but it's gone so quickly Shilo wonders if she imagined it.
Sometimes she wonders if she's imagined it all.
Shilo Wallace gets her first gig as Bug a day after her eighteenth birthday. Oddly enough, her first Zydrate-gathering expedition was a day before her eighteenth birthday. She messed up the first few times she tried to extract the Zydrate – drawing in liquefied brain instead of the bright blue painkiller – but she got the hang of it eventually, with a little coaxing from Graverobber.
Nervousness has ever vein in her body – a body that's never once had surgery, a body completely her own – on end on the day of her gig. It's a small one, but it still scares her. It's ridiculous, she thinks, that she's more nervous about going on stage than she is when she's in the graveyards where she could be executed on sight.
A Zydrate addict tells her she'll do fine and that she'd see her if she had the money, a compliment that is diminished when the addict looks upset that she'll still have to pay for the drug.
Graverobber assures her that she'll do fine – she has a pretty face and a wonderful voice, after all, and then he makes the addict pay and pick-pockets her wallet somehow at the same time, earning them more money and an angry addict later on.
"Kid, you're gonna do fine."
She believes him.
"I can't do this."
"You can do this." Graverobber sounds annoyed. Shilo knows he's sick of repeating this, but at the same time he knows she needs to hear it. If she hears it often enough, she'll believe it. He does little things like this – where he's an asshole with the addicts and a devious bastard everywhere else – but he still does nice things for her now and then. He messes with her, he steals her stuff (including underwear, and she's taken to locking that drawer) and he teases her and makes fun of her, but he cares.
"You can do this." He says it again. "I'll be backstage." He blows her a kiss and winks before he vanishes around the corner, not even bothering to disguise himself. She rolls her eyes. He never bothers to hide what his… occupation is. The smell of death always hangs on him. She's used to it by now – she smells like it sometimes, too.
Shilo likes the idea of him liking her. At first, she expected him to just stop showing up one day, leaving her alone in her new house without any idea of how the world worked, but he didn't. He stayed, he taught her how to extract Zydrate ("if you're ever short on cash…"), he tries to make sure she knows that she can do this, she can go on stage and sing and be remembered.
Shilo wants the other people to know that they aren't alone. She wants them to know that GeneCo can be good, but GeneCo can be evil. Amber Sweet has changed it – there's more time for payments and now, if they turn themselves in, they will have the organ removed with surgery instead of by a repo-man – it still leads to death, but it has less pain and gives some of them some more time – but that's about it. Luigi still gets away with his random murders and Pavi stays free from jail with his face-stealing.
But Shilo's more or less happy. Maybe that's what matters, Shilo thinks. Being happy.
Shilo loves being Bug.
On the stage, it's so easy to slip into being someone else, something else. She can sing and wail as much as she wants – people get rich off of complaining about their lives or trying to be meaningful like this. Shilo loves that she's not really anyone on stage. She's her, but she's not, and who's watching, and who cares?
But she's always nervous. Her nerves don't wear off until she hits that first note perfectly, like she always does. Shilo takes a deep breath, and then the music starts and it's time to step on stage. She glides out there, the lights blinding. She grabs her microphone and grins at the crowd she can't see.
Shilo Wallace hits that note and the nervousness vanishes like smoke, like blood gone down the drain, and she sings her song, she tries to change the world, to be someone worth remembering.