Obvious influences I feel. This is her favorite book. I get the feeling I have read something similar, but I think it is just deja vu from the book. Lol. Maybe I dreamt that I wrote this before? Who knows. No need to state that I don't own Repo! The Genetic Opera or Lolita. Many, many lines taken directly from the book.

Rose in Bloom

.

.

.

.

It began with a painting.

Not a huge affair; they simple act of choosing which small, thin brush for which to paint with, however, was the first step towards his downfall.

It wasn't the way her tiny, child fingers skimmed over their shared bathroom sink, though; it was the color she chose that truly caught his eye as she touched her chosen brush to her toes.

She chose red; the color of heated kisses, whispered promises, and dark corners. She chose the color of her blood.

She was dressed to the nines in a stiff, white cotton dress that was quickly becoming limp in the heat of the middle of the summer. Even for the city, it hadn't been this hot in quite a few years. Still, she seemed to not notice as she hummed (he hated it when she hummed) and painted her toes.

He watched her, staring, chest tight and stomach coiled with something that was both unfamiliar and unwanted. A teasing wind that stank of corpses grabbed at Carmella's tangled mop of hair that she had piled on top of her head. It was held - barely - by a single, silver clip that looked as though at any second it was going to give. But still, her hair stayed up there, exposing a long line of creamy child flesh for his molesting eyes.

Luigi had never felt very much affection towards either his little brother or his little sister. Both Carmella and Pavi were, to him, nothing more than late comers, but competitors none the less. None the matter; the company would be his.

It was because of this attitude he had towards his younger kin that when he had began to feel the first, tender unfurling of affection towards little Carmella that it startled him; he was unused to the prospect of loving anyone but himself.

It wasn't very long after that he began to place what the emotion really was. And while it certainly wasn't love, it wasn't very far off.

He knew it was wrong.

He didn't care.

She was only fourteen, and him, nearly twice her age, and he told himself for that reason, if no other, his feet should stay right were they had planted themselves in the doorway of their conjoined bathroom, if not turn around completely.

Then she turned to him, and smiled.

"Oh brother!" Her voice held a charming lilt to it, an innocence that he wasn't sure he had ever experienced, and it only made him want to corrupt her even more. "Aren't they lovely?"She wiggled ten piggy toes at him, and he decided in that moment that he would have her.

Consequences be damned.

He would have her.

.

.

.

.

.

She was in the tea room again, the day after the first event occurred, red nail polish traded for two knitting needles as she tried desperately to learn the trade from one of the genterns that their father had ordered to babysit her. She was failing miserably, the bright and expensive looking yarn tangled and knotted, but he knew that it wouldn't matter to Rotti; he was so proud of his darling little Carmella; she was destined for greatness beyond the GenCo business. Luigi, for one, was happy because as long as she was failing at knitting, she wouldn't be trying to take his throne.

He tried to ignore the tension that coiled in his belly once again when she lifted her eyes from her held threads and greeted him.

“Brother? Was there something you needed?” The politeness was familiar as well, if not a little short and abrupt. She was becoming quickly annoyed with the task set before her, and she was in no mood to deal with her older, much more callous brothers. He focused on that: the familiar, the known, the tried and true. Her anger was something that he could handle. Her affections, her smiles, her tiny girl-touches, however, were something he was unsure of how to proceed with. More so now that he had decided that he wasn't going to try to ignore his growing passion for the child.

"Nothing."

She pouted petulantly. “Get on, then. I am busy.” She began anew with the needles, and untucked her legs, displaying bare feet and the startling red flash of painted nails. She mistook his intake of breath as annoyance and apologized hastily. She had seen firsthand what happened when Luigi became annoyed with a woman, and she rather liked her flesh pink and delicate, rather than black and blue. She had no reason to believe that her being his younger sister would give her any slack.

Luigi in a temper was something nearly impossible to stop; the best anyone could hope to do was curb his anger with deference.

"I'm sorry, brother, it is just that I ...can't... get this right." She growled as she clapped the needles together, and threw them across the room.

They landed with a dull clatter against the floor in front of the unlit fireplace, and Carmella crossed her arms over her flat chest. "I hate knitting. I don't think I ever shall again."

The misery in her tone was not lost on him, but he said nothing. Comforting little girls was not his strong suit. It was better to focus on her voice and words, on the cold, still needles that lay like dead things on the floor, than to regard the carpeted floor and how it bent to each rise and fall of her feet as she rocked on the back two legs of her chair.

"You'll get it... eventually." Luigi finally said after a spell. "But you have got to work at it. Nothing good was ever earned by giving up. You can't have everything handed to you, Carmella. You have to work sometimes too." He watched her red toes as they flexed, rocking her chair back dangerously on two legs. "Stop that! You'll fall and break your neck!"

She paused and turned to face him, a hesitant smile trapped on her lips. “But then Daddy can just buy me a new neck. A better one. Mine's all pudgy and wierd.”

“I assure you, Carmella, that your neck is not pudgy in the slightest.” He walked over to her and flicked her chin up sharply enough to draw a gasp from her. "It's actually kinda cute." He kissed it then, and she flushed and was silent. He took a step back, pleased that the girl hadn't screamed like a frightened woman, nor had she smiled, like an uneducated child. Her cheeks were colored darkly, and he decided to just let that stew for a while.

She shuffled her bare feet, the hesitancy from earlier once more painting her features into awkwardness and uncertainty. “Brother?”

“Yes, Carmella?”

She looked as though she was starting to say something, once, twice, before she changed her mind. "I will work harder." She made a gesture to the genturns, who quickly retrieved her knitting needles for her.

Luigi didn't smile.

He didn't smile just so.

.

.

.

.

.

It was dinner again, and through the walls of the Largo home hummed the faint bass of a Pavi's party that little Carmella, alone save for her oldest brother, had not been allowed to attend. Pavi was throwing it, and when she had asked for permission to go, her father had put his foot down, saying that she was far to young. Pavi winked at her, promising that he would let her attend one of his many wild parties as soon as she was a little bit older. Two years wasn't that long, he told her, and when he said it, it almost seemed true. Chilled cucumber soup was on the menu tonight, its sickly green killing all chance for Luigi's appetite that evening. Or so he told himself.

Because, of course, it was the soup and not the way that Carmella was going on and on about Pavi's party and the cruelty of their father that had pinched his stomach in to a tight bundle of knots.

"He wouldn't even let me go with a gentern!" She wailed, banging a fist against the table. "Can you believe that? What good are the silly spoiled prisses if not to do what I want!" Her bottom lip stuck out in obvious displeasure and he wondered, briefly, what it tasted like.

“Are you certain that father isn't just worried about you?” The words cut their way into Carmella’s unceasing chatter like a razor across open flesh. And much like the blood that would flow from such a fatal wound, Carmella responded in kind.

“I'm not a kid anymore, you know,” she snapped back forcefully with a jab of her spoon in the air. Her eyes pierced him, calculating in the dimmed light. “Why have you been haning around me so much lately anyways, Luigi? I thought you hated the idea of having a kid sister. Just one more competitor, am I wrong?" Her eyes dared him to contridict her, and they both knew that she had him trapped in a corner. Then her eyes tilted, and she smiled cruelly. "Or maybe it is just that you have a thing for me."

Mentally he reared back from the insinuation, feeling too much truth in the idea and instinctively loathing himself for it. Outwardly, he showed no reaction. “Yeah, that's what it is, A-cup.” His tone was cruel, but he hid the truth cleverly in plain sight. Still, he stood from the table.

"Where are you going?" Carmella's voice followed him as he left the dining room.

"Not. Hungry." He responded, not bothering to look back over his shoulder at the infuriating girl, a little frightened that he might do something stupid. Like throttle her. Or fuck her where she stood.

Unbidden the very thing he hadn’t thought of appeared before his eyes. Her arms bare once more, the flesh of her stomach as pale and untouched by sunlight as the skin the filled her feet and lined her cheeks. Her wide mouth, open and expectant; and that hair without neatness or order swept down over her eyes and across her breasts. In a blink the picture formed and in another, it vanished.

.

.

.

.

.

He had retired back to his room, but couldn't sleep. He could feel the bass of the music beneath his feet on the well-worn carpet, and frowned. He, too, had been invited to Pavi's little 'party,' if one could call that fuck-fest anything but an orgy. He had no idea why father took his brother even remotely seriously. Probably because half the genterns would work for nothing if they got to fuck Pavi a few times a week. Silly whores. Didn't they know it meant nothing to him? His eyes reached for the clock that stood on a shelf near the doorway: seven o’clock it read and the chime soon sounded. Four hours left then, until the party was scheduled to end; or at least the music. He could wait. Or so he thought.

A woman stumbled, drunkenly and half dressed in to his room, looking around in a blinking stupor. She smiled lazily, and then frowned. "Sorry." She apologized without mirth, and stumbled down the hallway, leaving his bedroom door wide open. He sighed, but made no move to close it.

There was contracts to be drawn up, warrants to be issued, lawsuits to be dealt with. He went to his desk, ignoring the way the carpet pulsed beneath his feet in time with the music, and began to work on them.

He had given up on trying to concentrate on actually working. He had a large flat screen in his bedroom, nearly eighty inches in size, but he could count the times that he had clicked it on on one hand. Still, there was little novelty for him though to sit and watch a horror film depicting disguised murderers stalking and stabbing defenseless girls, and irritatingly, the few channels seemed to all be in agreement on their content. He flicked through another set of shows before finally clicking it off.

He attempted to throw cards in to an old hat in front of his couch in the bedroom, trying to make them in. He had made two so far, but was having little luck with the rest. It wasn't long before it annoyed him to the point of irrationality (although, probably, it might have had something to do with the blaring music from right underneath him) so he soon quit that as well.

The cards were discarded, television rejected, and letters finished. The dulled bass from beneath seemed to actually be rising in volume, resounding in the back of his head as a beating, a pounding mallet of rhythm and hated expectancy. Without distraction to keep his thoughts on other things, pictures of all that could be occurring in that cacophony of teenage ritual played on through his mental landscape. The heady throb of mindless beat, steady and pulsing, pitching upward and then crashing in a deafening roar.

The vision appeared once more, coupled with motion and blazing technicolor. Endless pale skin, pliable and bruisable, unstained and untouched but for that stretch of red. The red was a stain, a stain that could spread until her skin was no longer the white of thick walls and unvisited grounds, but a brilliant crimson. On her cheeks, her throat, spilling from her mouth-

Soft footsteps could be heard just outside of his door, too quite to be someone just walking past. They were the footsteps of someone who didn't want to be caught. The music, blessedly, stopped, and his eyes caught the clock: eleven o-eight.

He waited until her footfalls reached his door before flying up at her, grabbing one of her naked arms and feeling that his fingers would leave their imprint on the pale flesh.

“And just what were you doing out at this time of night, Carmella? Your bedtime was an hour ago.”

She stared up at him, hair loose and unkempt in a perfection of disarray his imagination couldn’t have ever dreamed up. Her lips parted, lips painted a blazing, stinging red. It was too much like the vision.

“Nothing. I wasn't doing anything.” Her words were slurred, her eyes glazed, and her breath smelled of alcohol. "I... umm... glass of milk."

"Why didn't you ask a gentern?"

She frowned dumbly. Her thinking was obviously impaired. "They were all at the party."

He scowled at her. "Were you at the party too?"

She smiled lazily. "Y-e-a-h." She stumbled in to his arms, weighing practically nothing at all. At least, nothing compared to the weights that he lifted every morning as a part of his workout regime. He needed to train his body so that he wouldn't need to have anything replaced.

"And what in the world will father say when he sees that his perfect little Largo princess attended Pavi's orgy?"

Her eyes grew, alarm stretching the brown irises into a distortion of fear and discomfort. He felt his hand tightening over her arm, memorizing the soft feel of the skin against his hard palm, memorizing the innate weakness of the limb within his grasp. The strength he felt was overpowering. He could do anything to her, and she would succumb. Their kinship was no defense; her age was no defense. In this moment, this second of time caught in a dimly lit hallway, there was but one truth: she was his.

“Please don't tell him, Luigi.”

He lowered his face to her neck, breathed in the downy musk of her scent, and recoiled. The tang that was hers alone, a warm undertone of the soaps she used and the sheets she slept in- putrefied by the stench of another. It was all over her, the stale odor of another’s unwashed body, sweat-mired and teaming with hormones. It coated her.

Another male.

She cried out and wrenched free her arm. Three tiny indentations of blood seeped out from that bare skin, the stains mirrored on the tips of fingers. The blood gave him no shame; no, the shame came from the intense want that it proffered.

“Don’t you dare touch me!”

His hand, unsolicited, had risen to grasp at her again, his fingers craving the delicate feel of her between their own hard pads of skin. He glowered down at her, daring her to finish that thought with a suggestion he knew as true, but she could never prove.

“You have no right.” She massaged the bruised flesh with her free hand. The other held her thinly strapped shoes. Unbidden, his eyes found those ten marks of red, exposed entirely to his viewing.

“I am not playing the part of scolding gentern, Carmella.” He hissed her name like a curse and she recoiled. "You should have known better. YOU were better than that. And no look at you. You are just becoming a filthy whore; just like the rest of them."

He watched as her ire slipped away and shame drenched her cheeks in a heavy rouge. She wilted before him, and he witnessed as the child- pretensions: foolish pretentious posturing!- bowed her head, contrition remaking her in entirety.

“I apologize, Brother, for having been so thoughtless. You’re right, of course. I shouldn’t have gone to his party, and when I had seen what kind of party it really was, I should have just left.”

She still rubbed her arm, and in the dimness of the hall, he saw the slight stain of the blood on her fingertips. He could feel her nearness now, having now felt her skin with his own. It was memorized, that brief touch, and his mind caught on the details of it.

“Are you going to tell mother?”

“No.”

“I see.”

And silence once more, yet she did not leave. She stayed before him, waiting, and for a brief second, he thought she knew. To have stayed with him in the darkness of the hallway, alone, utterly, completely alone, and knowing the strength his hands alone held. Oh yes, alone, alone- she was with him. Alone. His reasons, and hers; he knew them to be opposites. For he could see it now, in her calmer eyes, in the tired weaving of her hand at the base of her neck. She stayed because she trusted, and he knew that she knew naught. Hellish, damning, insufferable ignorance-

“Keep in mind your situation, Carmella, in the future, and behave appropriately.” Luigi's tone was softer than he had expected it to be, and it seemed to surprise him just as much as it did her. "In no time at all, you will be the Largo Princess once again."

She bowed her head and her dangling shoes knocked gently against her thigh. She was dressed in white, a white slip of a dress that hung loosely across her hips and rested sheer on her shoulders. It was the dress a child wears when attending Easter dinner, and he disliked her for it. Disliked her and yet his fingers remembered the supple fullness of her skin on his own, and the dress could be no other. Its wrongness made it right in the dimness of his vision.

“Good night, Brother. I’m sorry again for having woken you up.”

She left, and he watched, his hands grasping nothingness of air and remembering. Remembering and creating.

.

.

.

.

.

The square garden was unremarkable, a brief piece of mendacity that held nothing of originality or difference from its many predecessors. Really it was a wonder that his father even bothered to maintain it; they certainly had nicer gardens in the surrounding areas. But it made Carmella happy, as she sat in her high tower window, so Rotti kept it exactly the way it was: plain. Ordinary. Not at all something that they were used to. It was in it's plainness, he supposed, that it was remarkable. Still, it didn't suit his tastes one bit.

The girl, for that was all that she was, was stretched out, legs bared to the sun and to his eyes, next to the single, simple koi pond. The Mammoth koi swam nearer to Carmella, occasionally daring to nip at one of her toes as the massive fish begged for food. The chaise lounge that cushioned her muttered rubbery obscenities with each of her movements, the largest of which entailed the turning of a page. Her eyes were guarded, hidden beneath the black ovals of a pair of sunglasses. She was dressed as youthfully as ever, and undeniably, his stomach coiled at the plaid of her shirt and the brevity of her denim shorts. She flicked a toe in the water, and the giant fish fled, swimming for deeper waters.

She acted as if he were not to notice, and there in was the madness of it. She taunted, and he felt the taunt, the cruel mockery of his gender with each slight movement of her leg against the chair, of her sock less feet dipping in to the cool dark waters. She read unobtrusively, oblivious, and the heat only darkened further. It swarmed upward and ground into his mind like a dying man’s last words. Could not, would not be forgotten. Could not, would not become slightened memory. She was paved in his mind in solid concrete, and he was damned if he did not wish to touch the brittle stone and sand it to gloss.

His window was closable. There were shutters he could draw and blacken out the yard’s viewing. He could leave the room for the front study, but that was on the first floor and far too close for his liking. To have something within reach made it all the more graspable. To be separated by distance gave solace. He could claim his clemency from his windowed room, and gaze down with the same foddering emotion that the bound all have.

Was he mad? It was probable. He was a man, first and foremost. Magnanimous man of malevolent mein. Neolithic nescience of neptunian nocturnes. Opulent orator of odious oddments. Palaving ponderer of portentous pantomime. Quixotic quagmire of quaking qualms. And she, the girl, turned yet another page.

He had stolen the bottle a week earlier. He found it on their shared bathroom counter (really, he was going to have a talk with their father about installing her room bathroom; they certainly could afford it), by a wooden hand brush and lotion smelling of vanilla. He took it and drained it without regret down the sink. He scrubbed the bottle free of any of its former contents, and now took interest in watching as the color faded from her toes. Nearly half gone, and by the end of summer, surely then it would have vanished and so would his thoughts. Time, in its grace giving brevity, would reach the end of this stage, and he’d be freed from the reflexive heat that pooled, that coiled, that gathered and stirred and festered- festering, stirring, gathering, coiling, pooling heat that kept him enslaved.

Oh but he was a mockery of his self. To have been unhinged by the simplicity of disconnection: a startlement of color on the naked toes of a child he near reared for fourteen years. Was there to be some sign of his depravity from youth? Had he glimpsed in that oedipal training of all male youths, his mother with such color on her skin? Had he tucked that first introduction to sex and lust in his ignorant mind, leaving it to be birthed in this sunshine present? Had he done the things a man does when a boy to bring him to such an end?

What did he know of her then? Surely that which he knew could overcome this abhorrence of self and soul. She was quick to recite. Quick to beg praise. Quick to plead recognition. Quick, ever so quick. She had biased scruples. Save the whales, but be sure to have the best make up on the market, regardless of it's orgins. She clung to any signs of commodore. She-

But it mattered little. The less he knew, the less detail to her as a person, the less he could find to...to further propagate his abnormality. Still though, to the window he crept, carefully kept hidden from the gazes below. He stole sight through the parted white gauze and watched, mesmerized as her hand rose to remove those glasses from her eyes. He watched as she lifted her hair from the smooth line of her neck and her lips parted to call some insignificant to a gentern that lingered nearby, guarding her furiously. Her feet steadied on the grass, and she stood. Step, step, step. Mark finished page. Open door. And now-

“Brother?”

He leaned out his window slowly, masking his features and putting a firm grasp on the window sill, anchoring him from further movement. She had almost gone; almost hidden her teasing bits of flesh in the large, empty house, where he could no doubt avoid her. But she had stopped, turned her head up at the door, and discovered him peeping out his window. He had humiliated himself enough; she would get nothing from him.

Nothing.

“Yes, Carmella.”

She twisted her hair, the unmanageable mess, in the palm of her hand, holding it up off her throat. Her eyes, still dazzled by the sunlight of the yard stirred brown unfocused irises as she stared at him, as thought expecting to see something in them that she hadn't seen before. Her lips turned in disappointment, and his chest throbbed. Damnable girl.“Never mind."

No one else could ever have her, his little princess;but even if she was his, he vowed in that moment that she would receive nothing from him.

He would not break; not for her, and not for anyone.

And if his knees shook a bit at the vow, she would never know.