Spoilers of course... read at your own risk. :)
It was 8am. Time for work. An alarm clock rang somewhere and was silenced with a lazy tap of a finger.
Yomiel shuffled out into the bathroom sleepily in his pyjamas. Like clockwork, his hands scooped up the tube of toothpaste, squeezed some of the minty blue substance on his toothbrush. He stuck the combination in his mouth and looked up at the mirror with lidded eyes.
His eyes widened and he dropped everything.
This time it was Sissel. A half rotted corpse of Sissel, once his cat, staring back at him quietly, left eye and fur leaking blood and fluid from the shotgun wound Yomiel gave him. His other eye was milky white, glazed and dead, yet somehow it could still follow the blonde man.
"No... No, I didn't mean to." The man said, struggling to keep himself together, feeling gunshot wound bore into his mind, his mistake pounding itself into his eyes.
He knew Sissel didn't hold it against him. He knew it!
Yet... why...
Why is he looking at him this way?
"You know why." It spoke, fangs bared permanently under missing flesh.
It walked out of the mirror, dropping little pieces of its flesh as it came out until nothing but a yellowed skeleton was left. In the middle of its shattered ribcage, a blue crystalline stone as big as its skull shone with unearthly light.
Yomiel's eyes settled on it like a moth to flame. Temsik.
"YOU GAVE YOUR FUCKING CURSE TO ME!" The skeleton snarled, growing bigger. Immediately, flesh started to form back over the cat in nauseating detail. Withered organs, putrifying muscle slithered over the bones and tightened -there's no other way of saying this - juicily around it, obscuring the meteorite until Yomiel couldn't see it anymore.
"I... I didn't..." Yomiel breathed half-heartedly as he backpedalled and hit the bathroom wall. The putrid scent finally hit his returned senses like a wave of nothing he'd ever smelled, and he gagged.
"You saw it hit me." The monster advanced on him. "You KNEW."
It was right. He knew. Yomiel had known the same thing happened to Sissel when he saw the kitten limp in Lynne's arms.
"YET YOU SAID NOTHING!"
"There was nothing I could do!" Yomiel yelled and tore his eyes away, lunging for the bathroom door. He had enough of this. "What good would it have done?"
"Lies... Stop running from your own mistakes, Yomiel." The cat's voice hissed as the man burst out of the bathroom and into the darkness.
Somewhere in the apartments overlooking Temsik Park, Yomiel woke with a start in his own bed.
What the hell.
'Yomiel?" a concerned voice asked.
Yomiel flinched as his wife Sissel touched his arm sleepily in the dark.
"W-What's wrong?" Her fingers found their way up to his forehead, but he reached up and held her hand tight in his clammy ones instead. Somehow her warmer temperature spiked through his storming emotions and helped to calm him down.
'I'm not sick," he muttered. "It's nothing... it's just something stupid."
How could he tell her that a monster cat just tried to terrorise him in his sleep?
Or that a young woman with red-hair shot him in the back the night before in his dream, her bullet which hurt like a fricking meteorite... also a purple haired woman with an antique gun... and the first was a Pomeranian which barked at him happily until a thread of blood ran down his clean white and brown fur from his bullet wound in the head. The little dog had then yelped and keeled.
Yomiel shook his head.
It was hard to think of that little dog as terrifying. That little brave warrior was too friendly for his own good. But it managed to unnerve Yomiel when something picked the dog's corpse up and used it like a magic marker, making it hobble around pathetically and leave a thin scribble of blood around that somehow formed the words "We wiLL GeT YOu."
It was like a ghost using Ghost Tricks. It reminded Yomiel horribly of himself using Sissel's corpse to run away.
Yomiel laughed at horror movies in real life, but he wasn't amused at this one showing so intimately in his own head.
It wasn't funny that he was the victim.
It wasn't funny when the horror actually involved people he knew he had killed or threatened.
It wasn't funny when they threw the fact that he killed innocents in his little angsty temper tantrum in his face.
It wasn't funny at all.
Even his best friend the cat had something to say about it, digging up all his guilt again with a little blue meteorite.
Yes, Yomiel had known Sissel was dead. That's why he mentioned that the little cat's life was going to be greatly changed. But it was too late when he realised and spoke up... his own life was already saved, they can't go back in time again.
He had tried his best under those circumstances.
No, you didn't. His subconscious whispered. You saw the meteorite's new trajectory and you knew where Sissel was. You were close enough to control him via Jowd.
Why didn't you do anything?
"...it's those weird dreams again, isn't it." Sissel breathed a sigh at her husband's stubborness after what felt like a long silence, bringing him back to the present. She turned over and tried to hug him with an arm.
"...Maybe they're trying to tell you something," she murmured.
Yeah... they're telling me I let my only friend who stuck with me for ten years die yet again.
Yomiel sighed and got out of bed, shaking his wife off gently. One thing's clear, he's not going to get any more sleep for now.
Notes: After I wrote this, I realised this whole thing can be summarised in one sentence: Yomiel got hit by a Tonberry's "Everyone's Grudge".
Hence the title.
This really just started out as "I just wanted to write something scary involving bathroom mirrors and the characters coming out of it." *laugh* So no, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Yomiel's never going to be normal again. Things like murder and getting killed don't just disappear from people's psyches... Ghost Trick is quite scary when you think about it in real life terms.