Shilo/Shallot
a songfic for one of my favorite characters (sh-sh-sh-SHILO...i get really amused picturing her as a Gangsta, don't you?) to the lyrics of the song "Shallot" by the glorious Emilie Autumn. I do not own anything, which is rather unfair, as i am owned in equal parts by Repo! and Ms. Autumn.
I will warn you that the following story is scenes and memories, not necessarily a sequential story. what i picture for the pieces the opera left out.
She's locked up with a spinning wheel
She was thirteen years old, today. She stared at her doubtful expression in the mirror, her image given back in the perfect way that glass and metal never could by the tiny pixels. She fiddled with the softwear, a gift from her father. Her reflection's eyes widened in delight as long blonde hair surrounded her pale oval of a face. She ripped off her wig, and the golden tresses fluttered into a more natural position. She could make them grow longer, shorter, red, brown, violet. The hair-My hair, she thought with wonder-could curl or hang straight with the command of her fingers. She forgot the processed air that whistled over her neck. Eager to see what else this beautiful device could do, she stripped out of her thin dress and stood bare before the Magic Mirror. But not for long; a blush, then a dark tan, then a slightly less dark tan covered her thin limbs. Her figure rounded here and there. Her face-she didn't bother changing her features. But she added a bit more red, until her cheeks glowed with sun. She leaned closer, and saw that the program had tinted the ends of her eyelashes blonde. Bleached with sunlight. She smiled, and smiled wider when her sunkissed skin stretched in perfect time. Magic.
And then, out of habit, she turned and looked toward the window. The curtains were drawn, and the window barred-not long after she threw the tantrum that would let her open the window by herself-and in that glass was a reflection that she had forgotton about. A bone-pale girl with insect-like limbs, a flat torso, and a bare, blank oval of a face. There was no face, no pink cheeks, no eyes that sparkled. Bare. Dead.
She couldn't bear to see the lovely creature in the mirror again. The one who danced in perfect green fields till her legs were no longer thin and sickly, until her skin was tawny and rose and her own long, sunbleached hair fell in ringlets. She threw herself onto her bed, hiding from both illusion and reality. She took a safety pin out of one of her socks and pressed the needle into her palm until her dead-white skin produced a tiny drop of color.
She reached under her pillow and stared at the cloudy, puckered surface of her mother's antique mirror. She smeared her bloody palm across her cheeks, and smiled again, waiting to again see the princess in the Mirror. She saw instead a face with smeared eye-makeup and gory streaks across her cheekbones. An insect in a cage.
She can't recall what it was like to feel
It was the same technology that was used before surgeries, as the scalpel-virgin lay down on the table, doubts beginning to spin in the moments before the Glow hit and buzzed its way through her veins. The doctors would flick on a wall-screen, and the tiny micro-cameras would reflect the patient in all her imperfection. Then, as the Z began to slip into her brain, the white-coated magicians waved their wands, and the image transformed.
There was the dazed patient in the hospital bed, but beautiful. Imperfections gone, new eyes, new breasts, a lovely new face. And as the feeling in her fingers and hands and arms was replaced by a lovely golden heat, the magicians murmered "How beautiful you will be. How lovely you will be." Go to sleep, bitch. You'll be under soon. We'll cut you apart and stitch you together, inject a bit more Blue so you won't feel the cracks in your porcelain skin. It didn't matter that hours after she awoke the meds would fade, and then the beast would be there, hungry for more. And no matter how perfect her skin, she would want to claw her way out of it to get rid of the hunger.
Days later her pretty face would be covered in bruises, her thighs aching, her arms bleeding where she had clawed herself in her sleep. But the faces of the men who had given her these burns would be fading to unimportance, because the last and the cruelest had given her a shot of magic dust, of enchanted wine that slid straight into her veins, its perfect taste on the tip of her tongue. The new and improved Shilo would fall to the ground, a lovely colored jewel with grime on her white little dress and the filth of a rotten world under her skin. She wouldn't feel the pain as her cheek scraped the filthy concrete. She would fall asleep with a smile on her face. Happy Eighteenth, Shi.
She says "This room's gonna be my grave
And there's no one who can save me"