It starts innocently enough. It always does.
--
He's sixteen, just barely, and he's still stumbling, trying to find his footing, contemplating what it means to carve out a niche in this world. For the moment, that niche seems to involve women. As many women as he can dream up, for now. He's only recently learned to sweep his hair up with foul-smelling goop, to mould it into some sort of decoupage that girls seem to like. He hasn't the faintest idea why they do, but he catches stolen glances, and he likes it. The Technicolor eyes outlined in black are the best motivation he knows.
Surgery is the logical next step. After he's looked at photo books thicker than his own body, he points to what it is he wants. This muscle structure, those forearms, even the hardy organs that must beat inside the model's chest.
He doesn't remember a thing after that, only waking up the next morning with blinding light flashing through the window as cars drive by. He rubs his eyes and spies Amber seated next to his bed, her hands folded demurely in her lap. Her locks hang loosely around her face, framing it in gold. She looks like Luigi imagines the angels in stories might look, all gauzy lighting and bright blue eyes.
"You okay?" she asks, her voice barely a squeak. She's twelve, but still sounds like she could be eight.
He coughs deeply, hopes it sounds less like a sick child and more like a hardened man. "Yeah, yeah," he grunts. "Fine. S'nothing."
Amber smiles and Luigi smiles too. He's always liked the way they seemed like mirror images of one another.
"Can I see?" she inquires. She's sounding braver now, more like the little girl who asks their father about surgery procedures instead of fairy tales at bedtime.
He obligingly lifts up his shirt, and finds himself a bit shell-shocked at the set of dark stitches that run along his midriff like train tracks. They're thicker than he imagined. He doesn't see the flawlessness in flesh he'd hoped for, just a jagged line of black chicken scratch.
Amber breathes deeply beside him, leans forward to get a closer look. Her hair brushes against his chest. It's soft, softer than it looks, like the expensive fabrics of his newly-tailored clothes. A tentative hand reaches out to press against his chest, and he feels his spine stiffen from the radiating coldness of his sister's fingers. She's so chilly, he imagines she might leave an ice print of her palm across his skin as though she were only making snow angels in flesh.
She glances up and smiles again at him. "You're going to get all the girls with this body, aren't you?" she says, her voice rapt with childish wonderment. Her hair tickles his skin as she talks, and he has to bite his lip.
"Y-yes," he tells her shakily. "Surgery makes me perfect. And I'm going to get girls who are perfect too."
He doesn't really believe the words; they're just a mantra he'll repeat to himself over and over before sleeping. But he wants to trust them, hopes they'll come true.
As he lowers his shirt slowly, he hears Amber sighing softly. He can imagine all the stupid girlish things she's thinking, and he says it again, more strongly this time, "They're going to be perfect too."
--
He's seventeen when it happens again.
The bottle blonde beneath him writhes and moans mechanically, every movement and sound planned in advance and perfected after watching numerous flickers in the dark. Her hands move instinctively up past her head, held there in some mock-ballerina pose that Luigi finds intolerable. He thinks that he can't even remember her name, and for a split second, he finds this scene all so pitiful and repugnant, he can imagine bile rising in his throat. But she's breathing and she's rutting against him and if he squints, she looks almost pretty instead of garish.
He pushes into her again, feels flesh manicured with a knife, and groans once, a sound of both relief and disappointment. She stops moving the moment he does, lies back against his bed like a wooden marionette with dead strings.
"I didn't know just how nice you Largo boys are," she purrs. Her lips twist into a smirk, a triumphant battle face. They're bloated with collagen.
He groans as he lifts himself off the woman and flops down onto the mattress. "Shut the fuck up," he murmurs half-heartedly. He closes his eyes and breathes deep. In his mind's eye, he sees a real girl lying next to him, untainted and natural. He grasps blindly at the nightstand for a tissue and imagines that the real girl's the one breathing beside him.
"What the fuck?"
He hears the shrill voice of the starfucker next to him, and he opens his eyes again. She sits up quickly, her breasts bobbing frenetically and unnaturally as she does. "Who the fuck is that?" she asks angrily, an accusatory finger pointed toward the door.
Luigi pulls himself onto his elbows. He has to rub his eyes with a hand before he can make out Amber's lanky shape in the doorway. She's munching on a cracker, holding it tightly with one little fist, while the other hand is pulled behind her. Luigi thinks that she's leaning against the frame with all the grace of a loner in an old film. She's Elvis Presley, she's Matt Dillon, she's James Dean. She flashes him a saccharine smile.
He sighs. "My little sister. Give her a fucking break."
The woman seems to fly out of the bed and grabs her torn dress with lightening speed. "You wanted her to watch, didn't you? You sick shit," she spits.
Luigi watches the woman as she bends over to fetch her shoes. Her ass is tan and flat as a pancake. He listens to her suck her lips into her mouth. "You're gonna be reading about this in the papers for the next week," she offers to no one in particular.
She wriggles into her heels and heads toward the door, her naked backside still decidedly facing Luigi in the bed. Amber smiles brightly at her as she passes, greeting her with a quick, "Scalpel slut," as she leaves the room in a huff.
Once the girl's gone, Amber starts to giggle. She holds a hand to her mouth, but it doesn't hide the sick sound. "Did you see her tits?"
And then Amber's bounding across the floor before he can reply, she's leaping onto the mattress, looping her arm with his, and then leaning back against the pillows. Her face and body are effortlessly cool and charming, golden hair spread across the sheets like a fan spread open.
"Is that the perfection you had in mind, brother?" she chirps. He thinks she must intend malice, but her face is devoid of it. He searches her features for it, but finds only two shining eyes, a clown-like grin, and innocuous freckles on the bridge of her nose.
"She's just a slut," he mutters.
Amber nods, as though she's reached the age where she understands what it means to fuck someone you detest for unnamable reasons, as though she's got a clue what just bleach blonde locks, baby blues, and a pert body will do to him.
"I'm having my first surgery next week," she announces. He can hear the pride in her voice, the need for him to be impressed.
"Yeah?"
She nods again and smiles even wider. "My eyes. I want green ones."
He can feel his fingers moving of their own accord, reaching out to touch Amber's face as soon as the words are out of her mouth. "I thought you wanted Mag's," he replies. He touches his thumb to her round little chin, his index finger pressing against her cheek. Her skin is so pale, so white and elegant, like a porcelain doll.
"Oh, I changed my mind last month," Amber replies flippantly. "She's old news anyway. Blind old bitch."
He chuckles a bit at the line, his lips moving in a way that's not so much a smirk as it is a wince. He watches Amber's gaze, watches it waver from his own face, sinking down to the bare scrapes and scars on his chest. Her eyes flicker past the organ between his legs, the only one he's never thought to replace, to the calves with their smattering of dark hair and all the way down to his bare toes.
"Green eyes," he repeats, pulling her face close to his, locking her in with his conspiratorial glance.
"Yeah, green," she whispers, licking salt off her lips. "They're gonna be perfect."
--
The first time he kills a man, the first time he takes a life, it's all about a girl and sex and power and her, and it all just feels so clichéd, he's disgusted.
He's twenty, home and safe and sound after having been dismissed from college by the only dean in the world not intimidated by the five letters that make up his last name.
The halls, dimly lit by flickering bulbs, seem even darker then before, even danker, and it's easy for him to imagine filthy things hiding in the corners. He stalks down every floor of their manor, paces every deep corridor, rubs his dirty heels on every Oriental rug. He thinks that school wasn't for him, not before and not now, that there's little point in him attending classes about economics and sociology when he's only going to grow up to do all the same things his father does, make all the same mistakes.
After hours of walking through the wings, he finds himself in the only hallway decorated with pink Wright wallpaper. His steps seem to echo as he walks, bouncing off the walls and reverberating all the way down to the basement of the house as he inches closer to her door. It takes an eternity to reach out and grab the door handle. He watches his fingers stretch and bend around the knob as though it's all in slow-motion, the movement of joints and the flash of rings on his digits.
All her lights are on, which he finds so characteristic of a little sister who spends more time preening than any other hobby, and before his mind can register anything else, he spies two moving forms on her mattress. He sees the arc of a man's ass, the tight muscles in the man's back and legs as he thrusts between a pair of skinny white legs. The man's not exceptionally large- he's average, really, if Luigi were to think about it- but he looks as if he could snap the small teenage girl below him like a twig.
For a moment, there's nothing. No sensation or emotion, just a blank slate of his face, and then it's as though the glass has shattered, and it's every feeling he's ever felt falling to the floor. It's a sense of duty, as though his sister's honor is something rare to be guarded, and it's betrayal because he thought she wouldn't do something like this, wouldn't fuck anybody ever, and it's lust, in the wildest and most depraved sense of the word, and then it's anger, anger at its core because some no-good schmuck is moving in Amber and making sick noises and it's absolutely blinding.
It all happens so fast as Luigi runs forward, yanks the man off Amber by his shoulders, and then begins to pummel the surprised figure who's probably twice his sister's age. The man doesn't even have time to scream, Luigi's fists are against him so quickly. The only one who shrieks is Amber, flinging herself up from the bed and crying at her brother to stop. She doesn't try to force him though, just stands there with her hands clenched at her sides.
Luigi's eyes flick around the floor for something else to hit the man with when his hands begin to tire, and he comes up short. It hasn't occurred to him that sixteen year old girls don't tend to leave weapons lying about. The only thing he can see is a ceramic unicorn half-hidden under the bed skirt, and he grasps for it without thinking, aims it at the man's chest, and thrusts it down into flesh. The skin yields easier than he would have imagined, almost accepting the assault of the statuette like it were all only destiny.
He brings it down over and over again. It's his single purpose now, to drive this hand-plucked stake into the heart of the fucker until there are hot red ribbons all over his arms.
The man sputters and flops a bit, his body grooving like a caught fish, and then he stops. His eyes begin to look past Luigi, as though he's staring at the light fixture above him instead. Luigi keeps pounding him though, wants to make the flesh feel more and more like wet clay against his hands.
"He's fucking dead!" Amber screeches in his ear. She's bending down to him, her hair whipping against his neck and shoulders. Her voice calls him back, yanks him out of that universe where all he can feel is his fingers wrapped around a poorly-made child's decoration and the blood and tissue beneath him.
He lets go of the weapon, lets it stick with a squish in the chest of the man, and he stumbles to his feet slowly, punch-drunk and woozy. He looks to his right, sees Amber standing beside him with her arms crossed over her chest. He thinks that if he hadn't just pulled the life out of a man, if she wasn't the girl she is in this moment, he would feel something in his head emanating from her lithe naked body. Instead, he's just left feeling like every fluid has been drained from his veins and organs.
"Who was he?" he manages, his voice low and brash.
Amber's mouth falls open, gapes at him like the answer to his inquiry should be obvious. "My dealer," she snarls. Her tone is thick with venom he never thought she would possess. "This is fucking great. Who's gonna get my shit now?"
It takes him a moment to register her words. They sound garbled to his ears, scratched and muffled like a dusty record. He runs a hand through his hair. "What are you taking?"
She throws her arms in the air and sighs. "Oh right, make it a big fucking joke," she says, her lips pursed and her eyes slits in her head. "She tells the whole world to use zydrate responsibly and then gets shot up by grimy men with dreadlocks in back alleys."
He can't find the words to express the disappointment and disgust in the pit of his stomach, so he settles for the ragged, ruthless tone he uses on the genterns who fuck up all too much.
"They're obviously not grimy enough, or you wouldn't be screwing the guy who gets you black market Z," he tells her. He wants his lines to resound like sonic poison, wants them to weave into her brain, but instead of crying or shouting like he'd hoped, she simply glares at him.
"I was screwing him because I didn't have any cash," she says plainly. "And I wanted somebody to try my new parts out." She's turning away from him slowly, moving for her clothes, when he takes her by the arm, digs his fingers into her cool skin.
His free hand stretches out in slow motion again, and slaps her, hard, across the face. He doesn't so much feel his palm against her cheek as hear it. It sounds like a crack in the ice, like lightening in the early evening.
He can almost see tears welling up in her eyes, see the sting stretching down through her skin and bones to her bright and shiny new heart. She crumples up like a piece of paper, falls against the bed, wraps an arm protectively around her body, and holds a hand to her cheek. She's a wounded deer now; she shifted in a split second, and he knows she can shift back.
"I'm calling Dad. He's gonna take care of your little mess," she says quietly, simmering. "And don't you ever fucking touch me again."
He feels all those vile emotions rising in his chest again, scattering black ash across his lungs, and he spews the words he's not sure are a threat or a promise. "I'll touch you whenever the fuck I want."
Amber's green eyes flash and catch his gaze. "You don't have the balls."
And he thinks, I'll fucking show you.
--
Times passes, and there are more men pounded to a pulp or sliced, and more dirty men scrubbed clean by Amber's fingernails in her bed.
And there is always the sensation that he can reach out and touch her with his fingertips, that all he need do is stretch a bit farther, take a step closer, eke out the insurmountable physical distance between the two of them.
She teases and flirts sometimes, starts doing it a few months after their father has hired bodyguards to drag that first body from her floor. She likes to pinch his cheeks, likes to recite his name as some sort of incantation, whisper filthy things in his ear when Rotti isn't looking. Luigi watches her face when she does all these things, sees that same sense of triumph in her eyes that he's seen on the faces of so many whores and groupies and genterns. That sense of luck that flickers behind the pupils when they know they've conquered one of the most powerful men on earth in the only way they know possible.
And he watches her face, clenches his fists, sputters thinly-veiled threats around Pavi and his father, tries is best to keep cool and keep his fingers from leaping out at her. He's not sure if he would strangle or fuck her if he ever makes contact with her skin, and he's not sure he cares. There is always the wanting, the need to be certain, though.
He's twenty-seven when he finds her passed out in front of his door one morning, catches her limbs sprawled out in dark nylon, all akimbo against the clean carpet. Her head rests against the wall, spreading hair into her face and obscuring her eyelids. The flimsy black negligee she calls a dress rests against her skin, makes her look smaller and paler than she really is. He hears her murmur something unintelligible when he opens the door, mumbling about this or that hit, this or that body part that's going to be sculpted, or at least he imagines so.
"Scalpel slut," he mutters as he leans down close to her face. She smiles with the abandon only slumbering junkies and children possess.
It's clear in his mind that he should really just leave her here, leave her lying in her own filth, leave her to rot, but he's the first person to admit that his mind and his actions never entirely correlate for the best. He finds himself bending down to her level instead of merely walking over the threshold and down the hall. His hands sweep under her lean legs and the small of her back, and he lifts her up, finds her lighter than expected. He can't remember the last time he saw her eat anything, though he's lost count of the times he's caught her high in the past month.
She groans a bit when she's in his arms, leans against his chest and grabs for his shirt. She tugs on the fabric lightly, mumbles again, and then her arm goes slack, falls to her lap.
Once he's holding her, he can't think of what exactly he should be doing with a dopey, sleepy sister. He could take her down to her bedroom, of course, deposit her there and let her think she's managed to stumble home successfully. That would be the brotherly and chivalrous thing to do.
He's a shitty brother and a poor imitation of a knight though, and so it all suddenly makes sense that he should take her into his room, leave her lying there, convince her that she's done the sort of thing Pavi teases them about several times a week. Let her think she's actually done the unthinkable; be the torturer for once and not just the tortured.
He brings her inside, his feet practically gliding over the floor, and unceremoniously drops her in the middle of his mattress. She sinks into it, crinkles against his silk sheets, and makes a swooning sort of sound. Her hair, dark and choppy and tangled, shines like the feathers of a crow, all oil and the kind of black that looks less like a color the more he stares at it and more like gasoline.
He leans an arm against one of the posts of the bed, smirking and sucking his cheeks in. He watches her shift against the bed, watches her tug at her own clothes as she dozes. The top, the dark one she was wearing the last time they were photographed in public, falls open against her skin, exposing flesh to the hungry cold air.
There should be uncomfortable shifting now and looking away, but there isn't. There is only his back stiffening again and his gaze frozen on her, on the skin that's miraculously free of cuts and scars. There's only its whiteness, snow waiting for a footprint, and two breasts with nipples that always rise to attention regardless of the situation. He's almost surprised at the shape of them, surprised that they're smaller than he would have guessed- certainly smaller than he's used to- and surprised at the dark tan tint of her scientifically-manipulated nipples.
There are no translatable messages relaying in his brain as he sits down on the bed, nothing that could be easily deciphered as he reaches his fingers tentatively out, and certainly nothing that could explain the sensation he feels when they're pressed against her skin. There is only the tracing of signs and letters over breasts that feel more real than he thinks they are obligated to feel, only the warmth and stiffness between his legs.
She smiles at his touch, and he pulls back for a moment when she does, thinking that this is all some game and he's the unwitting pawn. Her eyelids don't flutter though, and there is still that dreamy glaze over her face, and so his fingers reach back again, stretch to touch things soft and hard and cool to the touch.
His thumb moves over her right nipple, memorizes its tiny shape, and his fingers trespass over the white flesh around it.
Her lips open for a moment, and he hears the sound of them pulling apart, chapped. "Uh uh," she mutters, her tone that of an over-exerted five year old. "Not now, Graverobber. I'm tired."
And then, with those words, it's a game all over again, even if she's not aware she's playing, and she still remains the victor.
He pulls away almost immediately, his hand retracting like he's just touched a pot on the stove. He leaves her alone then, lets her wake later, lets her feel confused, but he doesn't say a word. She's already said enough for both of them.
--
The game ends when their father dies, or so he thinks.
Now the only one making crude remarks is their brother. Even when the three of them are squabbling and screeching at lawyers about the legality of documents mentioning Shilo's name, Pavi manages to sneak in another joke about Spartan helmets or make another disgusting hand gesture.
Their fate is all reliant upon investors, really, what they think after getting wind of all the tabloids in wake of Rotti's death. More than a couple papers pick up the story of a dealer Luigi killed, one even writes a charming editorial about the deed as an expression of brotherly love. Granted, the piece is only written after Luigi's quite literally placed the editor's balls in a vice, but it is published nonetheless.
It soon becomes clear that Amber's public persona is, miraculously, the best of the three of them. She's never worn a dead woman's face in public or been accused of murder, and most of the papers shy away from her addiction. The overwhelming number of public service announcements she films contribute to her popularity, as do the charity concerts at the opera. She sings with the sorrow of a broken angel, they say, whatever the fuck that means.
The night before the official announcement of her effective coronation, he finds her in their father's office, draped over the couch in that dreadful white and black dress that makes her look like an ostrich. She's quiet, reserved for a moment before she hears him enter the room.
He catches her glancing up at him over the sofa, sees her dark eyes against pale skin, empty little orbs.
"Come to congratulate me, brother?" she asks. He can almost see her baring her fangs in his direction.
For a moment, he thinks he might let the defeat sink into his voice, let himself sound like one of those pathetic losers who know they've risked all and lost. He catches himself though, strides over to the couch, and announces haughtily, "Yes, sister. Congratulations on having the fake tits all the investors want to stare at during meetings."
He pushes her legs out of the way and sits down, glances over at the empty desk in front of him, thinks it's never looked so imposing. Amber brings a bare foot up to his chin and kicks lightly at it, tickling his skin.
"No one likes my fake tits more than you," she tells him half-heartedly. "You're always looking at them like they were…Mount Olympus or something."
He finds himself smirking, glances over at her. Her profile is elegant and regal, the product of more surgeries than he thinks even she can count, all in pursuit of perfection. She doesn't look like a junkie whore. She's the queen now, and she wears it well.
"No," he tells her, his voice unexpectedly soft. His fingers are encroaching on her legs without even his realization of it, sliding over the surprising sleekness of their skin. "I like your real tits."
She looks back to him, squinting as though she's staring into a fluorescent light. "My tits haven't been real since I was fifteen," she says matter-of-factly.
"They're real enough," he replies.
He listens to her chuckle, a husky sound he almost doesn't recognize. "You'd think anything of mine was real enough. Don't think I don't know about all those boys you killed for my face."
"It fucking fell off during the opera. It's a piece of history," he tells her, the tone tighter now. "That makes it real." His fingers stride over her knee, tiptoeing about the round there.
He can feel her gaze on him, can tell she's staring at him so intently, trying to look through him like she's got a pair of bionic eyes. "That kneecap you're playing with? Definitely not real," she says, stifling one of her feigned yawns.
His hand slips past her knee, to the soft flesh of her thigh. It's warmer there. She doesn't feel so much like a human iceberg when his fingers are pressed against the yielding skin.
"And those thighs," she announces. "They've been radically constructed by a team of German scientists to be cellulite free until I die."
"Is there any part of you, dear sister, that is real?" he asks. He doesn't mean for it to sound as mocking as it does, but that's how all of his words come tumbling out of his mouth, tinged with sarcasm and violence.
She goes still in his hands and quiet for a moment. He can hear only the sounds of life outside and his own breathing.
"Why don't you find out for yourself?" she asks at last. It's a challenge, an invitation, and, in seven little words, all either of them need to hear.
He's not sure what he expected to happen. He didn't expect that they would fall into one another's arms, embracing and kissing while the music swells, for certain, but neither did he expect that his fingers would walk down her legs so silently, that he would hear the intake of her breath with each centimeter. He watches her face as his hands move over her thighs, sees the curve of her lips, the way they pull back from her teeth slightly. She doesn't meet his gaze, just watches his hands as they stretch the longest distance he has ever known.
The skirt of her dress makes a sashaying sound as she pulls it back and lets him see what he's been missing and craving for longer than he can remember. His fingers sweep down under the curve of her ass, cradle its roundness in his palms as his thumbs reach up to touch her soft skin. She shivers against him, but he can't bring himself to watch her face anymore.
Instead, he presses against her, runs his fingers over the damp skin, and feels strange currents shifting in his blood. He moves an index finger to the lips the color of bubblegum between her legs, slips his finger inside her cunt, and finds the small, wet assurance of falsity and perfection and reality. He feels lost and full, a balloon that's drifted off and up into the sky, and, as he listens to her soft sighs, he thinks she does too.
As her hips buck against his hand, the new game begins.