Disclaimer: As before, Final Fantasy VII and the concepts it contains are copyright Square. Rebeka and Travyn, of course, belong to me.
Golden strands of hair separated as the brush moved through their mass, and fall to rest on her shoulders like the trailing ends of a thin, silken veil.
Reluctantly, Charlotte put the brush down and opened her eyes, regarding the image in the mirror quietly. The corner of her mouth lifted, and her reflection's did the same, returning an encouraging smile to the girl reaching for the pot of crimson lippaint.
She doubted that her mother would be back before dawn, affording her another chance to experiment with the cosmetics and cheap jewelry that had been strewn across Rebeka's dressing table for as long as she could remember. After the woman's second marriage - to the dark-haired man that had given Charlotte her first real toy - had fallen apart due to her infidelities, she had taken her daughter and returned to the slums of Sector Six - albeit to a somewhat larger, cleaner flat than the two had previously inhabited. While Travyn had refused to reward the woman for her actions, he had begun filtering a small amount of gil to Charlotte. It hadn't taken Rebeka long to figure out how to divert it to her accounts, as the girl was underage - and it had taken Charlotte less to contrive a way to leech a portion back to her possession. If her mother had even noticed the "theft", she had never let on...what she retained was more than enough to keep herself comfortable. If Charlotte had decided to go to Travyn and reveal the situation, that would have been cut off completely - something Rebeka didn't care to chance.
Charlotte wasn't hurting from the loss, either; or not as much as she could have been. The years spent in Travyn's home had accustomed her to a level of luxury she herself was unwilling to give up. The man had paid for her to attend one of the more affluent schools in Midgar, and the skills picked up through the various courses far surpassed those of most of the residents in the Sector slums, who never had an opportunity for formal education. She had both, and it paid off. Ofttimes rather highly.
Toasters had long ago left the list of appliances that found their way into her hands for redesign. The girl knew the tunnels and train routes like the back of her hand, and it was a simple matter to divert the power flow on the older control panels to be put to use elsewhere - and if toasters ever came into it, it was merely because someone had borrowed the crossed wires for the purpose of cooking. Occasionally, she could put spare parts to use in place of those that found their way into her hands with more difficulty; but on the whole, it was easier to buy the pieces on the underground market with either Travyn's funds or those she earned for her services, or to scrounge them from the scrap piles as Rebeka had once done with furniture.
The latter was becoming almost a daily task. As the older panels wore down - or were discovered after being re-routed - they were replaced by the more unfamiliar design of the systems used by the Shin-Ra Corporation; a level of technology that demanded compatible parts. It was rare to find Shin-Ra components in the scrap bins, and what few she did find were inevitably broken, useless until she mastered the intricate processes required to repair them. Often, as soon as she did, they were replaced by even newer designs, and the process would begin anew.
As Mako energy replaced electricity as the power source of choice in Midgar, the slums seemed to degrade further; driven even deeper into poverty and despair as its residents were conscripted and killed at the hands of Shin-Ra lackeys. Charlotte had been able to elude them thus far - a streak of luck she attributed to her gender, if not youth. Of the inhabitants of Sector Six that she had seen leave for the top plate - either of their own will, or taken by Shin-Ra - the majority had been male. One of those had, at fourteen, been a year younger than her. She had more to worry about from her neighbours, all things considered. As long as she could tinker with the electronics in the walls, she was useful. It was after that use dwindled to nothing that she would have to concern herself with her safety. The slums were an unpleasant place for a young girl to dwell in, and less so if she was at all attractive.
Charlotte liked to think she was attractive.
Painted now with a vibrant shade of red, her lips curled into a sly, calculating smile as she examined her makeover in the warped mirror. In her opinion, the results weren't bad - quite the opposite, in fact, as she had known they would be. From her shoulders, she lifted the golden mane for the final touch; twisting the strands into a hasty bun and securing them at the nape of her neck.
A dangerous place for a pretty girl, and one she intended to be out of soon enough. Pushing her chair away from the dressing table, she rose to reclaim her garments.
And not a moment too soon, apparently. Barely had she zipped the back of her dress than the door chimed, and she darted into the front room to release the lock. Grinning, she lifted her gaze to meet that of the dark-eyed man at the door. "Hey!"
"Evening, Charlotte," Travyn replied with a wink, and drew the girl into an easy embrace. "Mm. You're looking more like your mother all the time, I swear."
"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?" she countered, laughing, and slid her arms around his waist.
"You tell me, darling." He squeezed her gently and began extracting himself.
She allowed him to move away, closing the door once he entered fully and turning to face him again. "If it's going to lose me my gil, a bad one." That same, sly smirk twisted her mouth. "You want something to drink? Mom's not going to be back for a while, but I'm pretty sure she's still got her stash beneath the bed."
"I wouldn't expect any less," he replied dryly as he took a seat on the sofa. "I'm fine. Come, sit." He smiled, patting the cushion beside himself.
Charlotte grimaced. "Neither would I," she muttered. Hands lifted to smooth nervously at the fabric of her gown as she settled beside him, and she was quiet for a long moment before she finally sought his eyes with her own again. "You gonna take me up top, Trav...?"
He quirked a brow; that old, familiar gesture. "Why do you ask?"
The corner of her mouth twitched. It was a few seconds before she was able to formulate an answer properly, and she shrugged lightly in the meantime. "I haven't seen you for years; not face-to-face like this. We've barely spoken." That, perhaps, had been the most unpleasant result of Rebeka's misstep for Charlotte, moreso even than their subsequent return to the slums. The man had been more of a parent to her than her own mother, and leaving his home had been painful. She'd woken up in tears for months after the divorce was finalized. "Then you call out of the blue and ask if you can drop by when Mom's not home...it's the only reason I could come up with. All my instructors always said I was one of their best students...thought maybe they had a place for me."
Travyn's dark eyes sparkled with amusement as he listened to Charlotte's explanation; only to blink once as the final words spilled from her tongue. "Who?"
"Shin-Ra." Her own sapphire-hued eyes, darker in the dim light of the flat, turned coy, and she looked away to regard the man from their corners rather than meet his gaze full-on. "You didn't think I was going to figure that out sooner or later, Trav? You live up top, you've got money to spare, and you look every bit the suit." She grinned wryly.
It was Travyn's turn to mirror the chilly smirk, then, and he shook his head. "My dear, you are too bright. Far more than a slumdweller has any right to be."
"You see? And whose fault is that?"
"Not mine," he retorted, heading off the girl's laying of the blame before she could begin placing it. "All I did was make it so that you could develop those talents. There's no doubt in my mind that you would have done so even if you'd been left here."
"Well, there you have it then," Charlotte informed him, shifting so that her gaze rested fully on him once more. "All that's left is for you to tell me what you want me to do now!"
Travyn laughed, draping his arm around her shoulders. "If I wasn't looking at you, I'd think you'd never left the plate. You certainly sound as if you'd been employed there for years. Ready for orders, eh, Char?"
"Indeed, Sir." She gave a wink of one sapphire eye.
"Go get your things, then," he told her, briefly tightening his hand on the top of her arm. "We can be out of here and to the plate before Rebeka gets back."
Instantly, she slid from the sofa, pausing in the hall only long enough to call back, "You know she's been stealing most of the gil you've given me, right?" Ha. Take that, bitch.
"I know," he responded calmly. "That stopped as of six o'clock this evening."
The breath caught in Charlotte's throat as the weight of that announcement sank in, and she hurried into her room. Rebeka was going to be decidedly unhappy the first time she tried to withdraw her funds to feed her vices, and if she was in the flat when the woman got back, she'd be the one it got taken out on. Especially if Rebeka suspected it was she who had told Travyn...and who else would she suspect? For all she knew, her mother was on her way back already.
It was, perhaps, the first time in her life she was grateful for not having much. It meant that there was less she'd have to pack, and the less time she spent doing that, the less chance there would be of running into Rebeka. Indeed, upon taking stock of her belongings, she realized that there was only one item she actually had to pack. Everything else could be replaced when they got to the plate. Her fingers closed around the doll, lifting it from her pillow, and she dashed back down the hall.
An instant before she reached the front room, she skidded to a stop; the toy tumbling from her hands as they rose involuntarily to cover her ears. Gunfire. She'd heard it before, but never quite so close... Trembling, the girl knelt to retrieve the fallen doll and crawled to the corner.
It had taken a moment for the ringing left in the wake of the shot to fade away, and with the double shock of the realization that it had been fired in the flat, she hadn't been able to pick up on the voices from the frontroom until she was already in the doorway, the doll clutched to her chest as if she were no more than a frightened toddler.
"It's the bastards like you on the plate that are keeping us from having any chance at a real life!"
Charlotte recognized the man speaking. She'd done a wiring job for him once, before his son had run off to join SOLDIER. Months had passed before there had been any word of the boy, and that had come in the form of a twisted, broken body left in one of the trash heaps. She wondered, idly, how long he had crouched in the shadows at the train stops, waiting for a chance like this. He would have had to, to have followed Travyn to the flat. Unless...
Unless there was someone else running wires in the 6? Someone as good, or better, than her?
But what reason would there have been to bug Rebeka's flat? As far as she was aware, all anyone know was that she had married and left the Sector for a few years. Midgar was a big place...she could have gone anywhere in the city. Why would they have suspected the plate, or that she would still have been in contact with its inhabitants, let alone her daughter?
"You're mistaken," Travyn muttered. The man leaned heavily on the arm of the sofa, coughing, and turned away to spit out a mouthful of blood. "I merely came to visit my stepdaughter, and see how she was getting on. I haven't seen the sky in years."
Neither had Charlotte, though it was only then that she realized how much she missed it.
"Nice try," his assailant snapped, bringing the gun up to level on the man once more. "We saw you come down from the 8-stop. Don't think we haven't been waiting for someone like you to come for the rest of ours. Be damned if you're gonna take anyone else like you did Nicólai."
She could see his finger move on the trigger; the tendons contracting in his wrist. Even had she been able to raise her voice in protest, it would have been lost in the burst of gunfire that followed.
"Trav..." Scream or whisper; it mattered not by that point.. The man stumbled back with the impact of the rounds and collapsed against the wall, leaving a wide smear of sanguine to mark his slide down.
She did scream then, sapphire eyes widening as she glanced down to catch sight of the blood splattered on the floor on walls...that bright, vibrant red like that paint on her lips. Her hands closed more tightly around the doll's waist, and she retreated a few steps into the hall.
The gunman's gaze lifted from Travyn's body as the girl sought escape, and he followed her, forcing her further into the flat until her back was pressed against the wall at the end of the passageway. "He do anything to you, kid?"
His question fell on deaf ears, however. Charlotte merely stared at him in horror, lower lip quivering. "You...you killed him!"
"He would have done the same to me." He shrugged. "Ain't like you never seen someone die before."
"No...no, he wouldn't! I know him!" she protested, shaking her head with enough vigor that the pins came loose from a section of her coiffure.
"And he'd've made you Shin-Ra's little bitch, too," he added, leaning in to leer at the girl more closely. "Would you like that? Good a wirer as you? Been wasted on the plate."
"Get away from me!" Painted lips drew back as she screeched. Not willing to wait to see if he complied on his own, she shoved both fists into his gut with as much strength as she could summon. The look as his face as he fought to regain his balance gave a certain sick pleasure to Charlotte. He hadn't been expecting her to strike him, she was sure.
In the moment it took him to steady himself, she ducked into Rebeka's room and kicked the door shut behind her. The knob always stuck, and it would take him a moment to either unjam it or knock the portal down if he wanted to pursue her yet - more time than she needed to wriggle her hand beneath the mattress and grasp the gun the woman kept there.
Idiot. Idiot. She might have clued him in, Char; as soon as she was denied access to the gil, she might have realized what had happened. Her fingers closed around the cold muzzle of the weapon, and she tugged it free, nearly dropping it in her haste to position it correctly in her hand.
It was waiting to greet the gunman when he crashed through the door, face contorted with anger. "You are a little bitch, aren't you? Becky was right. An ungrateful little plate bitch!"
Confirmation. She didn't bother replying to the man. She wasn't sure she would have been able to if she had wanted. Let the gun do the talking, babe... Her lips curled as she increased the pressure on the trigger, taking on an expression far colder than the one she'd demonstrated earlier in the evening - as far away as that seemed, now.
The first shot was off; missing its target entirely and sinking into the sheetmetal partition between the bedroom and the hall. Charlotte flinched as the recoil of the weapon jarred her arm to the shoulder. In the second it took her to shake it, his gun was up and aimed.
It was then that she realized she didn't care. One way or another, she would get out of the slums - if not by going to the plate, dying wasn't that bad of a second choice.
He pulled the trigger -
- and nothing happened.
Charlotte burst into laughter as she realized in the same instant as he that he had wasted all his rounds on Travyn; a high-pitched, hysterical sort of cackle that was far less collected than she normally preferred to present herself as. He wouldn't have expected her to fight back, no. To feign innocence to save her own life, perhaps; as frightened as she was of Rebeka.
Don't ever underestimate me. I'm the best wirer in Sector 6, and I'm far more of a bitch because of what I've been through here than Shin-Ra could ever make me into.
Her fist closed.
His eyes widened.
And his head exploded in a sickeningly satisfying shower of bone chips and brain matter, splattering the girl with the same droplets of scarlet fluid that decorated the rest of the flat.
Ignoring the gore around her, Charlotte turned to snatch a pillow from Rebeka's bed and strip it of its case. She discarded the latter, turning again to the woman's dressing table and sweeping its contents into the makeshift pack. Let her rot without her toys, without her pretty boy paramours...she wouldn't be needing them for long anyway.
What did you ever do for me, Mother? You taught me how to bat my eyes and act vacuous. What will I teach you in return?
Don't piss off a wirer. Especially if she knows every nook and cranny in your flat.
Pity that knowledge won't get you anywhere in life.
As she left, she turned out the lights.