Chapter Text
Lúcio gets the first email early on in his career. It's not particularly notable at the time: enough of his shows have been recorded by fans and posted online for him to have some international fans, and he can still have contact info publicly available because Vishkar is barely a note in the news. It's a pretty standard fan letter, but Lúcio is still blown away by every letter he gets. Her Portuguese is passable enough. He sends back a warm thank you, making sure to stick to simple language so whatever translator she's using won't butcher it.
~~~
The next email is much later, when the extent of the Vishkar nightmare is just starting to become apparent in the favela. Lúcio's personal site is less open, no longer has shots of his face, though that won't stop anyone who digs from finding the old ones. He responded to her last email, though, so of course she still has the address.
It comes after the first time that he really says what he thinks before a show. "You know why tonight's special?" he'd said. "Because Vishkar doesn't want you to be here. They want you working, or they want you sleeping so you'll do better work. No fun allowed. But where's Vishkar's dogs now? We're all here tonight, and they're not. And you better believe we're going to party. They don't like it? They can step right off."
The government rips the video off of youtube within hours, but by then it's been copied and shared.
"Greetings from a fan in Mexico," the email starts. "I wrote a long time ago, because I liked your music. I didn't know then that we have a lot in common. We don't hear much here about what's happening in the favelas, but I think I can guess. What you said before your show was a little right ¿you know what I mean? ¿Do they tell you in Brazil about what's happening in Mexico?
"Solidaridad, my friend."
It's at once heartening and disheartening, knowing that there are people outside his home who are sharing the same struggles and sending him, and his family by extension, their support. He's not surprised that a quick dig online doesn't get him much of anything similar in Mexico.
Lúcio responds: "Solidarity, my friend. Our news says nothing about Mexico having these problems. It doesn't say anything about Brazil having these problems, either. But despite the silence of the people in charge, people are still finding out and talking about it. They can press mute on the unrest, but they can't make it go away."
~~~
His next concert ends in a raid, and Lúcio barely makes it away. He debates whether to go home or not, and ultimately decides that if Vishkar hunts him down he's going to face them on his own turf instead of hiding like an animal.
When Lúcio gets home, there's a new message waiting for him.
"How very inspirational. I can tell you're trying to speak more simply, and it still comes through. I think you may have a skill ;)
"The people who run the world are never going to care for people like us unless it's to crush us. I have some personal experience with that ¿you understand? But I'm still here, and I'm not going anywhere.
"You can call me Shadow."
Today won't be the day that Lúcio's arrested, but he doesn't know that. It's just a nice moment of much needed emotional support. He chuckles at the name, not so much because it's funny as that he needs anything to break the tension thrumming up and down his spine. Maybe he can channel this specific sort of adrenaline into the baseline of his next track, if he's not rotting in a Vishkar holding cell somewhere no one will ever find him.
The name is a little dramatic and on the nose, but that's charming.
"I understand pretty well right now. I'm waiting to see if today's the day they come for me. I don't want to go anywhere either."
He pauses here, thinking, and then figures to hell with it and writes the thoughts down to share with at least one other person.
"I think I'd rather keep my name. If I'm still here tomorrow, then I want to keep being here. It's not enough that I still live. Lúcio needs to live. I'm not judging your situation. I don't know what was happening that made you become Shadow. But I'm not going to hide."
Lúcio doesn't know what else he can say. He sends the email.
A response comes almost immediately this time: "I saw. The video was taken off the air very fast, but I'm good at finding things.
"Our situations are a little different. I couldn't do what you're doing. It wasn't a choice. But I'm glad that Lúcio still exists. I like his music ;)"
~~~
Lúcio is true to his word: he doesn't disappear. His next track is inspired by that feeling when he'd been sitting in his tiny room, waiting for the company enforcers to kick the door down, deciding that the fear wasn't going to silence him. If he has a gift, it's not his words like Shadow said: it's his music. He pours the strength of that conviction into his music, samples some sirens and some shouts to set the scene, and brings in a solid beat that starts too quiet to hear under the subsonic hum but crescendos into the racing of his heart by the end.
When he plays it at his next show, the energy in the room is palpable.
Shadow tells him it's his best song yet.
~~~
He doesn't add lyrics to his tracks very often, priding himself on his ability to put the message in the melody, but sometimes he needs to convey something a little more complicated. Lúcio samples his own voice when need be, but he likes collecting the voices of people around the favela, weaving the message out of the voices of the people, each clipped together in pieces too short for vocal recognition to use.
Cleaned versions of his songs go up online, too, for free. He doesn't want people limited by money or the grainy quality of a cell phone video.
Shadow sends him a link to an American news station running a human interest piece about this Brazilian artist that the youth are listening to. Lúcio's picked up some pretty functional English just from international media, but he turns on captioning to make sure he gets all of it. He frowns at the video the whole way through. He doesn't know what to do with the idea that he has fans who can't understand a word he's saying. They don't know what he's talking about. But they mention that they get emotional, that they feel like it's a fight song. One guy says it "makes me want to go out and tell the big guys to go fuck themselves." Maybe that guy knows a little Portuguese.
There's enough of them who clearly don't get it at all, referring to his music as catchy dance songs, to keep him grounded. But there's also enough of them who get it, not wholly, not completely, but get at least some little part of his message through the music that he gets a little teary-eyed.
When he emails Shadow back, he tells her his next step: "We need to make some more noise."
~~~
He does, eventually, get arrested. Technically. A raid breaks up his concert again, declaring it an unauthorized rally, against curfew, and an undeniable act of sedition.
There are a lot more guests, supposed rebels, than enforcers. Lúcio holds his head high as they're walking him to the car, hands cuffed, helmet lost, and face bruised. It's going to suck to be a martyr, but he made his peace with it a long time ago and there's no way he can overpower these guys. May as well face his unknown future with furious dignity.
The crowd tips the car over before the enforcers get him within five meters of it. Now that it's less like 1-on-12 and more like 100-on-12, the Vishkar suits start to get worried and Lúcio starts to looks for a chance. Their grips loosen as they try to decide whether to go for their weapons or not, and Lúcio executes an Aú sem Mão to make his mother proud and makes a break into the crowd.
~~~
According to the news, thirty people are severely injured in the ensuing riot. Vishkar makes a public statement explaining the dangers of being involved in illegal gatherings, the drugs and drink passed around, how people get overstimulated and act out to their own detriment. Whispers in the favela say that all the injuries came from the Vishkar guys blasting their way through the crowd. They say that once Lúcio was out of their grip, the rest of the so-called-rioters were just trying to get out of the area, shouting at the enforcers to leave because they're not wanted here.
This is unacceptable. Lúcio learns the two versions of the story while sitting in the back of his cousin's mechanic shop as they try to remove the hard-light cuffs without taking a hand in the process. It's hard enough to get decent prosthetics in the development; trying to get one that's not a Vishkar product will be functionally impossible, and the idea of getting one from Vishkar themselves is laughable.
Vishkar's minions have top-of-the-line technology. Lúcio's friends and family, his people, make that technology all day long but own nothing that can even compare. Lúcio looks at the circuit boards in the disassembled cuffs and starts to think.
~~~
Stealing Vishkar's technology is legitimately easier than any other option, but it's also poetic.
~~~
He keeps his head down after the break-in. Vishkar's goons are all over the place, trying to find him without letting on about the reason for their increased interest. His apartment is lost to him, but the rebellion is gaining traction and he's not the only leader anymore. There's six of them getting quietly smuggled between safe-houses, keeping in contact through jail-broken communicators as they organize their people.
Lúcio lets the others deal with the logistics for awhile. Cracking Vishkar's tech takes all of his effort.
Back when he first realized that the message was starting to be heard, Lúcio and a few of his friends set up a secondary contact point for his fans to reach him, shielded with every trick they could come up with between the four of them. It would've been safer to have no inbox at all, but Lúcio had insisted that he had to be able to answer questions from fans who wanted to know more. Now, the international news mentions the riot, and he's suddenly got a lot of questions. He feels bad that most of them are answered with the same copied paragraph, but he's too busy to do more.
Shadow, unprompted, emails him to let him know that she tried to crack into his server and "it actually gave me some trouble" so Vishkar probably won't get into it any time soon as long as they keep changing things up. It's not the first time that Lúcio's wondered what Shadow did to get herself in so much trouble that she erased her identity, but it's the first time he's felt like he might have a hint.
He still keeps the incriminating stuff out of his emails.
~~~
The day he declares the sonic amplifier complete, the other rebellion leaders cheer. The foreign media calls them his "lieutenants," but he feels uncomfortable with that term no matter how willing they are to follow his lead.
This is going to change the game entirely. Vishkar won't be able to hurt the people of the favela anymore.
~~~
Shadow's next communication comes three days after Vishkar officially announces that they're going to abandon the Brazilian developments. The partying has finally begun to die down, but for awhile there was dancing in the streets and Lúcio could hear his own music filtering up from all directions when he returned to his long-abandoned hovel. It's definitely been squatted in and half his things were stolen, thanks to the goons breaking the lock when they came for him. He's glad the pay-what-you-want system on his music has been bringing in money from overseas. It'll replace what's missing. He'll probably even be able to move somewhere a little nicer to work in.
"Very nicely done, my friend. I heard some gringo refer to you as a terrorist, so clearly you're doing something right.
"But I have a question for you, Lúcio. ¿Did you really steal and repurpose Vishkar tech? ¿And you didn't tell me? I thought we were friends :( "
He hopes the frowny face means she's not too serious.
"I know you said my mail was safe, but I still don't think I'm going to incriminate myself in text ;)" he sends back.
She sends him an application. It's no commercial thing. He thinks that she may have programmed her own communication app. It has a little skull icon.
The call goes through, and the woman who appears on his screen is striking. She looks about his age, maybe a little older, with unnatural purple eyes and sharp features. He's not sure what he imagined Shadow would look like, but now that he sees her it seems fitting. She's very pink for a shadow.
"Hello, my friend," she greets. She has a nice smile and a lovely voice. "You're looking good for a rebel leader." It's funny how he can tell which words are the same in both Spanish and Portuguese; Shadow speaks more slowly during some parts of her sentences while others flow smoothly off her tongue.
"It's a pleasure to meet one of my oldest fans," Lúcio replies, smiling back.
"Qué encantador," Shadow says. Charming. "Really, though, did you steal Vishkar's technology? I'm dying to know." She leans towards the screen like they're sharing a secret over a table instead of over 7,000 kilometers.
Lúcio picks up the screen and turns it to show her the sonic amplifier. "You tell me," he says. When he turns the screen around, Shadow's smile looks impressed.
~~~
They start chatting more often. As long as they keep the time difference in mind, it works. There's whole stretches of time where Shadow is out of contact; Lúcio's in the public eye on the world stage and can't be easily made to disappear anymore, but Shadow still has to go to ground regularly. The communication app is encrypted six ways from Sunday and Lúcio's head spins when she shares just a little bit of it with him.
They make the best of it when she's available, though. Sometimes that means watching video game streams together. Sometimes that means comparing notes on how to run an armed insurrection.
Lúcio looks up Guillermo Portero after she tells him about the man, and his whole public image is almost too good to be true. Shadow is more than willing to tell him about the seedy underbelly.
"LumériCo is more subtle than Vishkar was," Shadow tells him. "There are no curfews or obvious tyranny like that. But you look around and there are more and more poor people every day. You follow the money and you find that all of it keeps going up to Portero and his closest friends, and none of it comes back down. The citizens suffer, and there is nothing to take a video of. I'm trying to get something concrete."
Lúcio thinks of what she's told him she can do. "There's nothing in his emails?" he asks.
"I haven't been able to get into them yet," she says, making a face like she's personally offended by the server's failure to give up its secrets. "The work I do to pay the bills keeps dragging me away from this. If I could work on it twenty-four seven maybe it wouldn't take so long, but of course I can't. And you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get good help over here." Shadow rolls her eyes dramatically. Lúcio laughs, but he can understand her frustration.
~~~
Shadow's Portuguese starts getting much smoother. When Lúcio suggests that maybe he should start trying to get better at Spanish in return, she grins and doesn't speak Portuguese again for the next three months.
~~~
Despite the safety of the spotlight, Lúcio is still encouraged to get out of Brazil for awhile. That idea quickly forms into the seeds of the Synaesthesia world tour. He's been working prolifically on his music since the rebellion ended, and he's gotten more than a few inquiries, casually from fans and more professionally from producers, about whether he'll do live shows outside of Brazil.
"I thought it bothered you that they don't understand," Shadow says.
"It did, yeah," Lúcio answers, "but I realized that they don't have to understand the music. The music just has to bring them together where they can hear the message. I've gotten so many messages from around the world saying that my interviews spoke to them because they were also poor and working themselves to death. There's systems all over the place that are hurting people and making their lives worse. Maybe I can do something about it, like I did in Rio."
"You want to take the revolution worldwide?" asks Shadow.
"Something like that," says Lúcio.
"The powers that be aren't going to like that one bit," she says. It sounds like the very idea is cheering her up.
"They don't have to," Lúcio declares.
"I'll buy you some time, then. They won't be looking at you when the revolution hits Dorado," Shadow tells him proudly.
"You got something?" Lúcio asks with some surprise.
"I got some help," she says. "I'm making progress."
"Look at us," says Lúcio, waving a hand between himself and her face on the screen. "We're gonna do great."
~~~
They start practicing English too. Apparently Shadow already has to speak English with her coworkers, but Lúcio wants to make sure he's got it down before the tour. Not many people speak Portuguese. More people speak Spanish. English is everywhere .
Shadow laughs herself sick when she first hears Lúcio talk. "You sound like an American hip-hop artist! How did that happen?"
"How do you think?" he asks in return. "I learned from listening to a lot of American hip-hop artists."
~~~
Lúcio is packing and double checking all of his gear for the first of several moves between other people's offices as the final preparations for the tour begin. Shadow is on the screen hanging out and asking questions about the tech. He's told her a lot about it already, since she's one of the few people who can really appreciate the effort that went into jail-breaking it, but so much of it is new that they've got plenty to talk about.
Shadow has to cut him off when an alert pings at her end. He waits patiently, watching her reading through something on her screen. The excitement blooming over her face is a sight to behold.
"Good news?" Lúcio asks when she finally looks back up.
"The best news," Shadow answers. "My help finally came through."
It takes Lúcio a moment to process that, and then he smiles. "Did they come through a little, or a lot?"
Shadow's smile isn't very nice at all, spreading sharp across her face. The cat that got the canary. "She who has the information, has the power," Shadow says in Spanish, "and I have the power to bring LumériCo to its knees."