Enjoy!

The car ride home was stilted and uncomfortable. Ming-Ming deliberately made it more so by flaring up in a tantrum when her father asked for her opinion ("Oh! Now you care! Bit late!"), and spending the rest of the time silently toying with her phone.

She had a plan. It revolved entirely around the fact that Toni, abnormal as he so very was, had no idea of how mobile phones worked beyond using them to call and some vague knowledge of texting. He didn't know what else they could do.

It wasn't an expensive phone. No internet, no Bluetooth, no touchscreen, not even a camera.

It would do perfectly.

She didn't know why she'd never thought of this before – except, no, she did know. Somehow the abuse had just become a part of life, something to put up with and fight past the effects of, and it had taken Kai and all his burning anger and outrage to remind her that, no, this really wasn't normal, wasn't nice, and needed to stop.

She had, in some twisted, disgusting way, been proud of herself at times. Proud of her expert makeup application to cover the many times Toni'd forgotten where to stop, proud of her supple movement that hid the limp and staggers of pain, and the carefully modulated sugary voice that covered the quivers and shakes and sobs.

That wasn't her. She wasn't this adorable bubble-headed baby everyone knew. She hadn't been so for years, but still! Beyblading had loosened the chains by which she bound herself, reminded her what it was to do and say things without it passing a careful brain-to-mouth filter first, but still she had done nothing. Just returned to France and carried on as usual, snuggled up in the bonds of what she had always known no matter how distasteful. Hidden behind her disguise because the unknown was scary.

No more. No fucking more.

They reached home, and she fled to her room, ignoring her parents' calls. She needed to practise.

Toni was furious. Well, in total he was embarrassed, terrified, panicked, frustrated and disbelieving, but that all added up to the same thing. How dare she tell Kai? How dare Kai tell his father? His father! The repercussions of this didn't bear imagining.

He wanted to go upstairs and teach the disrespectful little kid a lesson she wouldn't forget in a hurry, but he had seen her dark, brooding look in the car home. That look invariably preceded some form of defiance; last time she had lashed out at him with Venus. He'd needed six stitches in his abdomen, psycho cow.

Calm as you like, he had come home, knocked her out, taken her to a seedy little motel room on the outskirts of nowhere. When she'd woken up, he had systematically, skilfully caused her as much pain as possible without knocking her out again. Just as revenge. And then, to remind her that nobody would ever believe her because he was clever enough to find an excuse for everything, he had taken her straight to hospital, claiming she had been a victim of a vicious mugging attack. All the newspapers seized the story happily and ran with it.

So he had to be careful. She was obviously plotting something, and he couldn't risk another lesson like that one. Not just yet. His father didn't believe Kai's allegation, of course not, but he was wary. It had made him put less faith in Toni's own allegation. Toni cursed himself for not hiding his dislike of his sister more thoroughly over the years.

Just a couple of hours. That was all. A couple of hours of placating his parents by acting entirely normally (unlike Miss Broody-Bitchy, skulking in her room) and then they would hopefully be appeased enough to go out on their usual Wednesday dinner-dance, and then. He wouldn't do too much. Merely give her a taste of what she could expect once Papa had given Kai the expected ultimatum of 'leave the country or I'll have you arrested.'

And then.

"À quoi tu penses, Antoine?" his father asked, jolting him back into reality. They were sat in the drawing room. His father was reading a newspaper (except he hadn't turned a page since Toni had last looked) and Toni was sitting on the floor, leaning against the arm of the armchair opposite his father. Toni analysed his father's face expression and decided to go for almost the truth.

"Thinking how much I'd like to punch Kai for such a barefaced lie. He's just trying to distract attention from himself!"

His father nodded slowly and returned his eyes to the newsprint. He turned the page at last. Toni breathed a sigh of relief.

Four hours later, Toni waved his parents goodbye from the doorway. It had worked, the gullible, blind and deaf pair that they were! However, he was very aware that although his mother seemed clueless as ever, his father was regarding him with more suspicion than he felt the situation required. Obviously he wasn't too worried or he wouldn't have left them alone together, but it still had a feel of the 'I'm giving you one chance to prove yourself' rhetoric.

The sensible thing to do would be to do nothing, but he just couldn't. Her flouting of their unspoken rules had just been too blatant, too dangerous. She had to be at least warned of the lesson awaiting her.

So he climbed the stairs loudly and slowly, grinning to himself. Went into her room without knocking. She uncurled herself like a snake and faced him with red-rimmed, spiteful eyes.

"Put that stupid phone down," he snapped. With a huff, eyes never leaving him, she pressed a button and held it down (he knew that was how the phone turned off), then tossed it onto the dressing table beside her bed. It skidded to the edge and for a second he thought it would fall off. That would have been amusing.

"Satisfied?" she hissed. He felt the grin stretch his lips even wider.

"What do you think, sis?" He made a move towards her, and immediately she rocked back onto the bed, legs raised defensively. Definitely wasn't supposed to be funny, but he laughed. "Do you know, that's the exact position a cat will take upon confrontation with a hierarchical superior?"

"Probably because it works," she said defiantly. He carried on laughing.

"Oh, you think? Just a second." He darted forwards. Her flailing feet caught him smartly across the head and chest but he barrelled through, then grabbed her thighs and squeezed until she was forced to lie still. "Animals avoid pain at any cost. Humans understand that sometimes a little pain is necessary to achieve your goals." She regarded him speechlessly with those huge eyes that the whole world loved. "You're not scared enough," he mused. "A little tweak in the right place can only be productive."

Quick as a flash, he grabbed her side, just below her ribs, and squeezed. She shrieked and tried to buck him off. He dug his fingers in further momentarily then released her and stood up. She tried to return to her defensive position, but relented with a wince and ended up rolled onto her other side in a comma shape. He looked at her eyes. Saw pain, and that was a good enough substitute for fear for the time being.

"You almost fucked everything up," he said in a very low and soft voice. "So we'll wait a while for the fuss to die down and Papa to stop looking at me askance, and then you'll pay."

There we go! Pure fear glittered in those hated eyes, if only for a second. He drove it deeper.

"It'll be like last time, remember that? I won't care about leaving marks, I won't even care about leaving you functional." He realised he was beginning to pant and took a deep, slow breath. Didn't work. "I'll beat you until you can't move, I'll break every one of your fingers, I'll make you scream until your vocal cords deform. Can't sing, can't dance, can't hold a beyblade, can barely talk. Ugly and malformed and useless. We'll see how well your career lasts after that, slag!" He subsided, panting heavily. She spat at him. Literally. The spit landed near his foot.

"I won't stay silent!" she shouted. "Not anymore! No matter what you do!"

"Oh, that so?" he snarled. "What about if I ram Venus up ..." He trailed off delicately. It needed no further elaboration. She went white. He seized on the successful theme. "What if I hack off your nipples and mutilate your genitals further, until Kai wouldn't touch you with a barge pole and even if by some miracle he would, it would cause you nothing short of agony? What if I did that?"

Her face was an interesting white-green colour. He was feeling a little sick himself; he hadn't meant to say any of that. He hadn't even considered it. It was her fault, she hadn't been scared enough! They stared at each other in ringing silence for endless seconds, until he turned on his heel and stormed from the room. Let her ponder on that.

Kai was feeling fine, relative to how he had felt yesterday at any rate, and as a result was bored, restless and anxious by the time that Ming-Ming's father entered the hospital room at half past one in the afternoon.

"I trust you are much recovered?" he asked. Kai was surprised and encouraged. That didn't sound like he was about to be arrested and imprisoned.

"Yeah, all the stupid tests came back clear."

"Good, good." The man wandered aimlessly around the room, hands linked behind his back. Tension stretched Kai's self-control to breaking point. "I'm inclined, upon reflection, to accept that my son's claims are unfounded and based upon the jealousy I know he feels for his sister. Ming-Ming told me that last night he said some very nasty things to her about the two of you." He sighed heavily. "I don't mind the age gap. Nor do I mind the speed which you two appear to have fallen for each other; I did a similar thing with their mother."

I don't care, Kai was thinking frantically, just what else did Toni do to her? It can't have been that bad, he reasoned, or it would have been mentioned.

"However, what I do mind very much about are your accusations of abuse. I see no grounds for these claims and, – "

"Are you blind?" Kai couldn't help it. How could someone be this dense? The man's countenance hardened immediately.

"No, Kai, I am not. I would appreciate it if you – "

The door swung open and clattered against the wall. Ming-Ming stood in the doorway. Despite the situation, she took Kai's breath away. She was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and loose green shorts. She held her phone tightly in her hand. Again, she was stripped down to her bare self, dark eyes burning out of a pointed, unmade-up face, all angles and curves and positively fizzing with some barely suppressed emotion.

No bruises, none that he could see, at least, but her eyes were red-rimmed and something was wrong in the way that she stood.

"Kai's telling the truth, Papa," she stated. Her father looked bewildered.

"What? Mimi - "

"He's telling the truth," she said again. "And I have proof." She held the phone out into front of her like a grisly war trophy. Silence. Her father swallowed. His face was very pale.

"Well, then, mon ange, I suppose you'd better ..." He gestured vaguely in her direction.

"He didn't know my phone could record sound," she said shakily, and a pressed a button. Toni's voice spooled out into the little room.

When it came, her static-laden scream made both men flinch. Kai jumped to his feet and looked at her urgently. She smiled wonkily and waved her hand in dismissal. Then as Toni's disembodied voice recited how he would beat her break her, and make her scream, he realised that he was pacing backwards and forwards, hands clenched in tight fists. A quick glance over at her father showed that dark anger was starting to replace disbelief in his stricken expression.

""I won't stay silent! Not anymore! No matter what you do!" With a purr from the phone, Ming-Ming ended the recording.

"What did he do?" Kai demanded.

"Nothing," Ming-Ming replied quickly, her eyes fixed on her father, who didn't seem able to look at her.

"You screamed," he ventured at last, his voice a quivering husk compared to earlier. "Why?"

"Oh, that. This." She rolled one side of her top up to rest just under the breasts. The skin was faintly mottled red and purple. "And earlier, here," she rolled up her shorts to reveal bruises on her thighs.

Kai could understand both sides here. He could understand why her father had just gasped, because it was actual physical evidence that confirmed he had been impossibly blind, but he could also understand Ming-Ming's relatively cavalier attitude. It wasn't as bad as the bruise he had seen on her stomach, and nowhere close to the threats Toni had been making in the recording.

Still, "If he didn't do anything after that, then what did he say?"

Ming-Ming gave him a strangely irritated look. "He made some threats. That was all. Didn't so much as touch me."

Was it his imagination, or had her face momentarily paled?

"What did he say?" he demanded.

"I won't tell you." She stared him down calmly. He was bemused. 'Won't?'

"Why not?"

"Because it would do nobody any good." She stuffed her phone back into her pocket. "I'll show the police, and they can do what they want with it."

"The police?" her father repeated uncertainly. She whirled on him, eyes suddenly flashing with that mix of emotions.

"Oui, Papa, la police!"

"What did he say, Min?" Kai wasn't giving up that easily. He needed to know!

Ming-Ming walked over to him, and to his surprise and faint amusement, grabbed him by the ears. She had to stand on tiptoe to do so.

"In the future, when all this has blown over and Toni's safely in jail where you can't get to him, then I might tell you," she said. Her hands moved to either side of his jaw. "But I might not. He's not worth it." She turned to her father, who was looking at her with tears in his eyes.

"Mimi, I'm so sorry," he mumbled.

"It's ok, Papa," she said.

It was a lie. Kai didn't need to be as good a people-reader as he was to know that; since he was that good, he knew that it was a lie that the broken man in front of him desperately needed to hear and one that must have been very, very hard for Ming-Ming to tell so sweetly. She hadn't moved to hug her father though, just stood there, straight-backed and radiant.

And then she turned back to Kai, grabbed his face again and stood on tiptoe again. She shoved her lips against his. The kiss wasn't nice in the conventional sense of the word; it was open-mouthed and wet and hot and her teeth scraped against his tongue, and normally he would have needed a healthy dose of blood to the lower regions to find it appealing, but he let it last for as long as she needed it to. When she pulled away, tears were trickling down her cheeks. Her eyes were swelling and her face was beginning to blotch. Snot glistened in her nostrils.

She was fucking beautiful.

"Thank you," she whispered. "I'll call in a bit, ok?" Away she went, trailing her father behind her, this beautiful golden teenage girl who had finally stood up for herself.

She turned up at his hotel room a week later, unannounced.

"Surprise," she grinned. There was a hint of uncertainty in her voice. Kai opened his arms and she moved into them and hugged him tightly. "Hope you don't mind me dropping in," she said as she let go. "Home is so shit right now."

He raised an inquiring eyebrow. She flicked her hair and sighed.

"Toni's being held in prison pending court – they can't let him out on bail because even though I've got a restraining order, I don't think that'll stop him." She jumped on his bed and bounced for a second before continuing. "Parents don't know what to say to me. Sorry doesn't cover it – and it gets annoying to hear after a while."

He grunted for want of something constructive to say. He noticed with embarrassment that while she was making herself comfortable on his bed, he was still standing by the closed door like an idiot. He shifted away a few steps, feeling suddenly awkward.

She patted the bed next to her, a glint in her eye. He hesitated even so. It seemed utterly wrong still. Her smile disappeared. She put both hands on her hips. "Kai! I don't give a fuck about age, fame, emotional trauma or whatever else is making you stand there like an idiot!"

He grinned sheepishly and she smiled back. "I don't mean sex," she continued frankly (Kai jumped and tried to pretend that he hadn't even begun to consider anything vaguely like that). "I ..." She shook her head briefly, and Kai knew it was connected to Toni.

"I'll kill him, you know," he said as if to himself. "One day." She scowled.

"And what exactly would that solve? Making you feel like you've done something?" She scoffed. He felt himself go red. She laughed as if at a sudden thought and opened her arms. "So come and do something, anger man."

So he did. He sat down next to her and they had an awkward moment trying to work out torso angles as their mouths met, but then they somehow ended up toppling over backwards anyway, so that was fine. Her hands were pressed to the back of his neck, and he had one hand holding her hair and one running up and down her spine. He put his hand underneath her blue T-shirt. Her skin was soft and hot under his fingers, just as her lips were against his. She gasped and shivered against him, and he stopped, afraid he'd touched a bruise. She bit his lip in response and put both her hands underneath his shirt, up the front of it, and touched his nipple gently. Now he gasped.

He wasn't very experienced with girls, really. He'd done it twice before, to be truthful, and both of those times he'd been drunk and it had been Spencer's idea. Hadn't exactly lasted long.

She giggled as he told her this, and put a feathery kiss on his nose.

"It doesn't matter," she assured him. She was right, of course, especially when she removed her T-short completely. Then experience didn't matter at all, because no matter what he did with the soft, squashy items that she insisted on laughingly calling "mammaries", she made sexy moans and arced her body forwards into his. She put one hand down the back of his boxers and made a comment about there not being enough to grip. She meant his bottom, of course, but the mistake started her laughing, and he smirked, even as he faked outrage and put both hands on her denimed bottom to drag her that precious fragment closer.

But the killer to the mood was, paradoxically, ten minutes later when Ming-Ming pressed her hand flat against the bulge in his trousers while caressing his nipple with the other hand and hungrily slopping kisses onto his face. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he came in his boxers. The humiliation. So he immediately went crimson and apologised gruffly, and as soon as she realised what had happened she howled with laughter until tears spurted from her eyes.

"Not laughing at that," she spluttered at last. "Stop sulking!"

"I'm not sulking," he grumbled.

"Yes, you are." She cuddled up to him. "Stop it."

He sighed. It was hard to resist. Orgasm-euphoria made it difficult to continue anyway. She started to giggle again, and this time he could join in, until he too was nearly crying with laughter about nothing at all.

"Never seen you properly laugh before," Ming-Ming observed, poking his newly-dubbed 'baby chest-hairs'.

"Yeah, well," he muttered, then left it at that. Put his head on hers and held her tight, and if the two of them shed a tear or two during the time they stayed silently like that, just to sum up the past month, then oh well. No one else could see.

À quoi tu penses

Oui, Papa, la police! - Yes, Dad, the police!

THE END.

All opinions welcome. Thank you to anyone who is reading this,

xIlbx