Inner Demons

Luigi didn't regret. He never regretted anything in his life. Out of all the underhanded and evil things he had done, none of them mattered… except for the one thing.

He had been nine when he had done it, and Pavi had been four. Pavi had no memory of the incident, but Luigi's memory was vivid.

"Luigi, when's my mommy coming home?" Pavi whimpered one day while they were wandering around Gene Co with their bodyguards at their side.

"Your mommy is never coming home, stupid, she's dead."

"But… I don't… what's dead?"

"Dead is when they're good and gone forever."

"What happened to her?"

"I don't know, maybe she killed herself, or someone killed her…"

"Don't you miss mommy?"

"No. She wasn't my mommy, I killed my mommy."

"How did you kill your mommy?"

Luigi felt an overwhelming rage when Pavi asked that question. His mother had died in childbirth, and his father could barely stand to spend time with him because of it. He had heard his father say multiple times that Luigi's life took his mother's away, and Luigi hated the thought of that. He had never had a mother, had never been held the way Pavi had as a child. He was angry because of something he wasn't even sure if he missed or not.

"Pavi, stop asking these stupid questions!" a cart had been going by as he was screaming at his little brother, and he pulled the first container of liquid he could grab off of it. Before the guards could stop him, or the doctors could say anything about it, he had pulled the top off and tossed the contents into his brother's face.

The contents had been hydrochloric acid.

Pavi landed on the floor screaming and clawing at his face; Luigi fell backwards and cried.

Pavi had knowledge of the happenings of that day, but he whether he held it against Luigi or not was a different story. Luigi felt that Pavi should hate him, and most of the time, it appeared that he did. But although Pavi taunted him about getting laid more often that Luigi did, he could still carry semi-normal conversation with him.

Before Pavi had been obsessed with collecting new faces, he had ivory comedy and tragedy masks that he used to wear. For the first month after the incident, everyday, Pavi would choose to wear the tragedy mask.

For some reason, although Luigi knew it wasn't Pavi's real face, he couldn't stand the thought of him wearing the tragedy mask. When Pavi was taking a nap one day, he snuck into the room and threw the tragedy mask out of the window. It broke on the sidewalk below, shattering into a million pieces.

He was about to leave, when he caught sight of Pavi's face. It hurt him to sleep with the masks on, and he had to use a strangely-shaped pillow to keep his head from rolling side-to-side. Luigi walked up to him and stared deeply at the craters in his face, the parts of his face where the skin had sloughed off his face.

"I'm sorry, little brother…" Luigi cried for a moment, stroking Pavi's hair back behind his head. It was the first time Luigi recognized Pavi as one of his relatives, and Pavi whimpered in his sleep, as if in pain.

"Yeah, I didn't think you could forgive me," Luigi let out a little laugh.

Luigi never claimed to be sane; but to keep what little sanity he had left, his mind seemed to divide the masked Pavi and the un-masked Pavi into two different people. If he considered the masked Pavi to be the pervert, the competitor for his father's inheritance, then his feelings of regret wouldn't get in the way of doing what he needed to do.

But when he saw Pavi, without a mask on, he felt like a nine-year-old boy again, crying because he hadn't meant to hurt his little brother because of his misplaced rage.

The masked Pavi wasn't his brother; just a sick, twisted individual who needed to be pushed out of the way.

After the incident, Pavi and Luigi didn't speak with each other much. They didn't even fight, at least, not until Luigi grasped the importance of the Largo fortune. Then the fights were very one-sided, and Pavi didn't care for them until he was much older.

This was the state of their relationship until Pavi was twenty-one, and Luigi was twenty-six. By that time, Pavi had slept with, raped, or stolen the faces of countless women, and Luigi had murdered just as many. They weren't children anymore, and seemed to have lost all semblance of humanity.

It had been an accident, Luigi's walking in on Pavi in the middle of him changing his face. Genterns were preparing Pavi's new face, and Pavi was dressing as they did it.

"Brother, what-uh are you doing here?" he turned to face Luigi. He had his pants halfway on, and only a thin white t-shirt that served as an undershirt to cover his torso.

"Get the fuck out," Luigi commanded, yelling at the Genterns. They all exchanged worried looks, and glanced back at Pavi. "I said get the fuck out!" Luigi yelled again, flipping a knife out of his sleeve and slicing through the nearest Gentern's arm.

The Genterns scrambled for the door, including the new blond one sporting an arm wound.

"What-uh the fuck, brother?" Pavi spread out his arm in exasperation.

Luigi slammed the door shut and stormed up to his brother. They glared at each other, holding their gazes and clenching their jaws, not saying a word.

And then, suddenly, Luigi fell to his knees. He pressed his face against his brother's leg, somehow already bawling at the sight of his disfigured brother.

"Pavi… I'm so fucking sorry… I didn't mean to, not… Not really… I…" he buried his face so that he'd be inaudible.

"Luigi?"

Luigi looked up, and for the first time in his life, Pavi saw Luigi express an emotion other than unadulterated rage. His face had tears pouring down it, and snot was running from his nose.

"Please, Pavi… Have me make it up to you… I can't… I can't live on like this, I'll never get over this shit… As your brother, you have to…"

"We're-uh only half-brothers. We're-uh only in each other's way, Luigi. At least, that's-uh what you and Amber have-uh always said."

"Amber's just a whiny bitch, Pavi, and you know I'm fucked up. Please, Pavi, punish me."

Something strange flickered behind Pavi's eyes—pity. How was he supposed to punish Luigi? He was a lover, not a fighter. His greatest fight move was spraying perfume into someone else's eyes, and that only worked long enough for Pavi to back away quickly. In fact, the only thing that had ever interested him was sex.

"In what-uh way do you mean to be punished, mi fratello?" Pavi leaned forward, staring Luigi in the face.

"I… Any way is good, just a punishment," Luigi's voice faltered at first, because it was at that moment he was starting to understand what Pavi had in mind.

Pavi turned away and walked over to his vanity dresser. He pulled one of his faces off of a mannequin's head, and pulled small hooks from a container.

"You and-uh Amber don't know, what is-uh like for a small child to have to put-uh hooks into his face to hold down masks," Pavi said, working quickly to sterilize the hooks and prepare the mask.

"I guess not…" Luigi muttered.

"Shh, my brother, this is-uh for me, is it not?" he turned his head to give his brother a look over his shoulder. "This is-uh something I've always want to do…"

He finished sterilizing the hooks in alcohol, and brought them, along with a mask, on a metal tray just as the Genterns usually did for him. "Hold-uh still, fratello, you will not-uh be able to do this yourself…"

"How many do I need?"

"Six, three on-uh each side."

He pulled a hook from the tray and put it to his temple. At the end of the hooked end was a clamp, and the holes in the masks were for each of the six clamps.

He took the hook, and slid it under his brother's skin. Pavi looked down, to see that though his brother didn't cry out in pain, he had clenched his fists.

"The second must be-uh deeper than the first, fratello," Pavi whispered in his brother's ear. He took the second hook, and slid it deep down into the flesh of his brother's cheek. Pavi looked down again, to see how his brother was fairing. He was holding his own, and he wasn't moving.

"The third, on-uh each side, is the most difficult to do, you know, because-uh of the jawbone." He pinched the skin up and slid the hook into the skin slowly. Luigi's jaw clenched, and when that one was done, he let out a small gasp.

"Still-uh three more, brother," he whispered.

Luigi took them, just as he had taken the three others, without complaint. Actually clamping the mask to his face with the strange hook-clamps wasn't painful at all, unless Pavi had to pull on the clamps to situate them right.

When he was finished, the girl's face fit perfectly onto Luigi's masculine one, and Pavi couldn't help but think he looked better that way. Pavi leaned down, and stroked his brother's masked cheek.

"Now, touch my skin," Pavi turned his cheek towards his brother. "In-uh the same way."

Luigi's hand reached for his brother's marred face, but he faltered just as he was about to touch his skin. Pavi grabbed his hand and forced his hand to his face. "Like-uh this, brother," he said forcefully.

Luigi's hand trailed up and down his brother's face, feeling the roughness of his face and the ridges that surrounded the small craters in his face. The skin itself was coarse, and it felt like his entire face was covered in calluses.

Luigi began crying again, but not loudly. Tears slid down his cheek under the mask as he stroked his brother's face.

"You and-uh Amber never notice when I am upset," Pavi began, looking away. "Whenever I am upset, it disappears under the mask. When you are upset, you kill. When Amber is upset, she whines or yells."

Pavi stood up, and pulled his brother to his feet by pulling on his arm.

"You know…" the masked Luigi looked down. "I actually… do care about you and Amber. It's just you two are in my way."

"I love you, too, brother." Pavi smiled lightly, and before Luigi could move away, he quickly kissed his brother's forehead. "And-uh thank you for today. You-uh may want to have a Gentern take that mask off for you."

Pavi looked in one of the other drawers of his vanity table, and pulled out a stringed, ivory comedy mask. He pulled it on over his face, and then turned to face his brother.

"And my-uh brother, I forgive you!" he smiled a real smile, and for once, Luigi bothered to look past the mask.