Disclaimer: I was in grade school when the idea of Repo! was in the works.

Title: A Helmet Is a Mask Is a...
Genre: Drama / Horror
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Pre-Opera. The Repo Man delighted at the feel of engineered tissue between his fingertips while Nathan buried himself in suffering once again.

A/N: Snippet title reference to Gertrude Stein's "A Rose is a rose is a rose."


The ink that looked like blood looked like blood that looked like ink.

The Repo Man, Rotti Largo's best, worked his work on an unfortunate man whose bakery business had finally plunged into debt and had now been unable to pay off his very necessary liver transplant. With acute precision and reckless butchery, the night surgeon sliced and slashed the debt-ridden man's stomach that opened to his medicinal eyes like a treasure chest opening before the greedy. Organs coated in blood felt delicate to the touch, and the Repo Man was to be careful not to damage the small intestine on his way to the liver.

The victim's nose was slightly askew, no doubt punched into that position by the overzealous shark lender he saw as he waited for the baker's moment of weakness. The poor soul's wide eyes, forever frozen with fear, looked to once have been of Asian descent.

The Repo Man laughed.

Thus ends Mr. Kaito Truman, age 35, weight 214 lbs, height 5'6".

Somewhere, Nathan Wallace blanched at yet another face that he would never forget. This by-gone Truman, along with Rose Stalin, Mathew Parker, Ade Nesmith…

It was so tragic, all of it, the screaming faces, the pleas for help, that he could do nothing—but laugh. Somewhere inside the maniacal laughter of the street physician, Nathan stared mutely at the blood that poured out around the victim's now-useful organs, and marveled at how it looked more like ink than blood. The ink that he had signed his name onto Rotti's agreement that trapped him, bound and gagged him, into this Repo life.

Or was it that the ink looked like blood?

Thinking of that again, are we? a bloodlusting, husky voice echoed lowly before laughing again.

The Repo Man delighted at the feel of engineered tissue between his fingertips while Nathan buried himself in suffering once again. The night surgeon never understood why the man tried so hard to be miserable, and his dark, low voice slithered out, asking himself, And how many more are we to kill?

The Death Doctor laughed merrily at his own question, knowing that both of them existed only for Shilo, that both of them would do anything for her, and that both of them lived to keep each other sane.

Nathan sighed at the question and indeed thought of his little girl. His precious little girl. His everything that he would never allow to leave his side.

Never.

"As many as it takes."

Nathan Wallace blinked and found himself in front of a corpse, his Cyrobag filled with the necessary organs, and his repo identity tucked back into the dark edges of his mind until it would be needed again. It was getting easier and easier as the years went by, without Marni, without letting his little caged bird free—so easy that it hurt to even exist.

The legal assassin slowly stood up, one hand holding his kit, the other the bagged organ, and walked away from the body he would never forget, trying not to think of the two newly-orphaned daughters who would wake up to find their father dead on their kitchen floor.

He tried so hard not to think of Shilo, of a contract signed in blood, and of screams and pleas that meant nothing—even his own.