Hi, everyone! Mayflower here, taking my first stab at a Repo! fanfiction. (Get it? Stab? Ah, I'm not funny.) Anyway, I wrote this little piece a while back after a spree of watching the movie a million times to show it to a bunch of my friends, 'cause it's awesome like that. So let's throw it up, shall we? :) Enjoy!
DISCLAIMER!
Repo! The Genetic Opera, including all related characters (c) Darren Lynn Bousman and Terrance Zdunich
You could never trust a monster, and there's more beneath his mask! Did you know he killed your mother? Accidents don't end in murder! And that's not his greatest fib! He's poisoned all your medicine! He deceived the only one that mattered - it's not your fault, Shilo, he's to blame! Deny your father now for the world to see!
And now, here she was, staring down at the shiny silver weapon in her hands. "Kill him, and I leave you GeneCo."
Shilo Wallace was many things - entomologist and closet rock-and-roller topped the list. But murderer? Could she really pull the trigger? Kill the only family she's ever known? ...Even though she never really knew him at all?
"Witness it, people! All I have to do is sign the paper! All she has to do is pull the trigger!"
Shilo could barely register Rotti's words, barely understand the fame and wealth contained in that single piece of paper. She couldn't hear Luigi and Pavi clamor for forgiveness from their dying father.
All she could do was look at the gun and listen to her dad's strained apology. "I poisoned you. I'm worse than Rotti! I imprisoned you...I couldn't lose you! What have I done? Oh, forgive me, Shilo. I drugged your blood! Oh, God, what have I done to you?"
Suddenly, every moment of anger and betrayal was blazing through Shilo's memory. He had killed her mother. He had imprisoned her for seventeen years, poisoning her so she could never leave. He was a repo-man, slaughtering hundreds of people for not paying their debts. He killed Blind Mag, he knew all of this was going to happen tonight!
"Please, Shilo...remember my mistakes, remember you can change. Remember that I love you! I'm sorry that I failed you...Remember that it's up to you to shape your life into one that's worthy of remembering."
Shilo shivered, feeling the cold metal against her fingers as she flexed them around the gun. "It's been so many years...seventeen years, resenting the years of my heredity. I've mistaken this for destiny...but the truth is, my legacy isn't up to my genes. The imprint is deep in me, but it'll always be up to me."
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Free at last.
Rotti smiled, putting a warm arm around his heir before pulling out a pen and signing the will. "That's my girl."
xxxxx
Bzzzt! "Miss Wallace, the reporters are ready for you. Good luck at your conference."
Shilo pressed the call button on her intercom, just so the receptionist would recognize she got the message. It was the annual Genetic Opera again; her tenth since she took over GeneCo, to be precise. Now at the wise age of twenty-seven, Shilo was a woman of the world.
Before going downstairs to meet the press, she paused to check herself at the mirror by the elevator. With her father's poison out of her system for good, Shilo had hair for the first time in her life. It had grown out into a curly brunette bob, only furthering the resemblance between herself and the late Marni. Her dark eyes still popped on a porcelain face, which now had painted lips to complete the look. She kept her slim figure - even through middle-age and motherhood, her curves didn't develop well, so she maintained the girlish look she had when she inherited the corporation so long ago.
Despite all of the wicked rumors from Vanity and Vein, she hadn't gone through any selective surgery. There was a time and a place for plastic, and the world didn't need one more zydrate addict on the streets.
After taking a moment to fix her dress and adjust her necklace (which she never took off, even to this day), Shilo stepped into her elevator and rocketed down to the ground floor. Sanitarium Square was lit up, just as it was every year at the Renaissance. It always brought back memories of her first Genetic Opera - meeting Blind Mag, taking in all of the spectacle and performances...
Her memories of the night tended to end there. The Genetic Opera was a night of fun, or at least she made it that way. Once a cheap trick on Rotti Largo's part to attract opera-goers and sell some cheap surgery before the show, the Genetic Opera became a celebration of GeneCo's advancements and a showcase of talent via the street-performers at the Renaissance.
The best part of the night was the change she put into the place for her first Genetic Opera: the creation of the Blind Mag Foundation. Established in the name and honor of the world's most beloved songbird, the foundation was a charity that helped people finance their organ transplants. (The medical ones, anyway; Shilo had a surprising opposition to the selective surgeries that made GeneCo the giant it is today.) The fears of going into default began to fade from view as the Blind Mag Foundation helped the sickly become well. And it was all funded on this night; all of the proceeds from the Opera and the Renaissance went straight to the Foundation.
Giving the most pleasant smile and wave her tired face could manage, Shilo greeted the crowds of reporters that gathered outside of the opera house. Like Rotti Largo before her, Shilo maintained the tradition of the GeneCo press conference before the show. Granted, the reign of Shilo Wallace wasn't nearly so filthy with scandal that it required a conference, but she enjoyed any opportunity to come out and face her public.
Shilo was never sure how to confront the compliments that she carried herself just like Rotti. He had passed from illness mere hours after that fateful opera so many years ago, so she barely got to know the man who so desperately wished to be her father. In the eyes of many, he was a savior and a saint: he saved the world from epidemic, and passed his empire onto a young girl who had never seen the light of the outside world, all because she belonged to his old lover. In the eyes of others, he was the devil, repossessing life as he saw fit and only awarding his gifts to the people who paid for it in blood.
Their similarities ended with their charm in front of a camera. Rotti was a dashing man, full of charisma and life, always ready against the most vicious of questions and scandals, facing the world with a smile. Shilo was a gentle woman. She wasn't so charismatic, but her charm came from innocence and softness. She didn't need to be well-spoken to handle scandal - she simply avoided the scandal.
Still, nobody dared to cross her. Under the soft smiles and quiet words, everybody knew Shilo Wallace had shot her father to reach this position. Rotti had a defense prepared for the situation, so she won the trial on counts of severe parental abuse on her father's part, but even though she was cleared for the crime, it still sat in peoples' minds.
The conference was filled with the usual questions. (Unlike her predecessor, Shilo rarely had announcements to make. She much preferred Q-and-A sessions to speaking on her own.) She spoke very excitedly of the Opera, being a lover of music, and re-encouraged everybody to enjoy the night and make plenty of contributions to the Blind Mag Foundation. She bit her lip when magazines like FACE and Vanity and Vein started their usual storm of questions about the newest revolutions in selective surgery. Occasionally, she had things to announce, like when last year brought about the perfected procedure to Replace Your Face (which failed miserably after Amber's fiasco at the '57 Opera, when the initiative first appeared on the market) and the year before that spawned the SeX-Ray surgery that offered designer bones that were thirty times more durable than usual; usually, though, she avoided talk of selective surgery and let her PR team deal with advertising those.
Then there were a few more-interesting shouts from the crowds. "Miss Wallace, any word on how the Largo triplets are doing?"
Shilo sighed. Even after ten years, the Largos still gave her hell over the GeneCo inheritance. She had given them a chance, even after Rotti warned her to kick them all to the streets. She wanted to get to know her brothers, she wanted to help her addicted sister. She gave them every opportunity in the world to succeed, to join her at the top, to avenge their father and prove their worth.
"Amber is still being retained at the GeneCo Zydrate Support Building; she's still struggling with the addiction, but wants me to thank everybody for their prayers and support." (The last part was a lie, but it sounded nice.) "The GeneCo defense team is working on a way to free Luigi from his sentence, and we hope to have him home very soon." (Actually, Shilo was purposely slowing down the workload to keep Luigi in jail for as long as possible. You can only knife so many people before it gets ridiculous.) "Pavi is still on his retreat, but he writes frequently; he can't wait to come home and tell you all about all of the wonderful things he's learned." (Yeah, study retreat, everybody bought THAT excuse. Pavi was on a stripper spree across the south of Thailand, and nearly everybody knew it. The bigger question was how many faces he was going to come home with.)
Hey, Shilo tried. Some people are just impossible to change.
"Miss Wallace! Speaking of children..." Everybody got a laugh at the segue. Even Shilo cracked a smile. "How are your kids doing?"
Nothing could light up the typically-stern Wallace like the mention of her twins. Marni Magdalene and Nathan Rotti, age 6, were the loves of Shilo's life. She gave her children everything in the world, making sure they explored as much as possible - she spent seventeen years in her bedroom, and now she was going to make sure her children did just the opposite. "Marni and Nathan couldn't be better. Except for the fact that Nate just lost his front teeth, so it's a bit hard to eat apples right now." The reporters laughed - they always ate up cute stories about the Wallace-Largo twins. "They're at a friend's house for right now, but I'll be going to pick them up right after this conference. You'll see them at the opera tonight."
"Any word on who the father is yet?" another of the reporters asked with a smirk.
Shilo just laughed. The mystery of her twins' conception was one she was going to drag out as long as possible. She had never even been SEEN with a man, much less married and fooled around with one, and yet she was still spotted with her pregnancy belly six years ago. It was less of a scandal and more of a glamorous guessing-game, really. Some people theorized it was an experimental GeneCo surgery that could engineer sperm for single women wanting children. Others tried to sell the idea that she had been raped by the power-hungry Largo brothers, but that rumor fizzled quickly. Yet another idea suggested that she was having an illicit affair with a graverobber, or that she had been trading sex for street-zydrate. The fact that both children had the same dark hair, haunting eyes, and porcelain skin as their mother didn't help anything.
For whatever reason, it was a mystery. Shilo was a mother to two beautiful children, and she did a wonderful job of it. That was the story, and Shilo wanted to keep it that way. "Nope, not yet. Maybe next year," she teased. "Next question?"
"Miss Wallace? There's whispers in the grapevine that GeneCo is working on a new formula for zydrate. Any comments on what you're aiming for with this redesign?"
Shilo gently put a palm to her face. "I knew I was forgetting something." She had never mastered the art of preparing announcements, and the reporters were more-than-used to having to remind her to break news. She was quite upset with herself over this one, though. The zydrate reforms was something she had been pushing for years, and only recently got her team to make progress. Her run-ins with Amber and the graverobber in '57 were more than enough to spoil her views of zydrate. People paid to get their drugs from the dead? And then got addicted? How horrible!
"Yes, I can very proudly announce our new plans for what we're currently calling ZydrateX. Seeing the current problems with zydrate addiction and graverobbing, our team is working on a redesigned formula that will hopefully combat those problems, as well as lower the cost of surgeries. Because this zydrate will be less expensive to produce, it will be more accessible, encouraging people to obtain it through a safe and legal vendor. We're also trying to remove the ingredients known to trigger addiction and replace them with safer, more-natural alternatives that will be healthier and easier to use over time. Our hope is that we can close down the support network once ZX hits the market and use those extra funds to put back into the Blind Mag Foundation."
"Isn't ZydrateX going to mean bad business for the graverobber who fathered your children?"
"Alright, next question!"
After a few more rounds of questions and laughs, Shilo looked at the clock and ended the conference, once again encouraging people to purchase tickets to the Genetic Opera and help fund the Foundation. With just as much grace as when she entered, Shilo exited the platform, disappearing into the crowds.
Another successful conference. Another successful opera. Another successful year for the new and improved GeneCo. Yes, lots of things have changed under Shilo's watchful eye...
People have nearly forgotten that organ repossession is still legal.
Hope you guys enjoyed! Thanks for reading!
§ Tucker's Mayflower, signing off! §