I know where you sleep
by Sora G. Silverwind
Summary: Being dead isn't going to stop Tomoe from taking her revenge on the man audacious enough to hurt her husband and the one he loves. Faux-sequel to Enough to Go By.
Rating: PG-13 for unsettling imagery.
Author's notes: Based on an anonmeme prompt asking for ghost!Tomoe's reaction to the events in the later part of the second half. I decided to keep this short, because Tomoe's ghost abilities in this particular storyverse give her potential access to/influence on a lot of plotty stuff, and I don't want to write something in that regard that's just going to be immediately jossed by canon. Besides, I'm pretty sure what we all want to see is the unleashing of Trollmoe on an unsuspecting Maverick, mwahaha.
Disclaimer: Blah blah blah.
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You can lie to the papers
You can hide from the press
You can fake it on stage
Crawl from your cage
Search and destroy
Kill and depend on it
I know your tainted flesh
I know your filthy soul
I know each trick you played
Whore you laid
Dream you stole
I know the bed in the room
In the wall in the house
Where you got what you wanted
And then ruined it all
I know the secrets that you keep
I know where you sleep!
-Emilie Autumn, "I know where you sleep"
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As Tomoe sat down on the only chair she hadn't sabotaged in the luxury condominium, she reflected on how astonishingly, curiously refreshing her virginal experience with rage had been.
It wasn't like annoyance or anger, both of which she was intimately familiar with as a result of having known Kotetsu for most of her life. Annoyance was a buzzing fly you barely missed swatting every time, an itch that returned the more you scratched it. Anger was full of thundering storm clouds raining grief and pain on one's heart. It was difficult to think straight through annoyance and anger.
But rage? Rage was clear and diamond-edged. Rage lit the way to revelation in its pure, exquisite brilliance.
Contrary to how she'd usually heard it described, Tomoe hadn't been blinded by the emotion. In fact, she'd found it only honed her rational faculties to a fine point. It gave her a sense of purpose like she'd never felt before. She knew what she had to do, what she wanted to do, and how she wanted to do it. And in stalking her target in preparation for striking at his darkened heart, she'd been distracted from the despair and helplessness that had choked her upon learning that Kotetsu had been wrongly accused of murder and stripped of his life's work; that Bunny had been torn away from one of the few people who truly cared about him at present, his mind now warped to hate that very person; and that HeroTV was, at its core, a criminal sham feeding upon itself in a neverending story of corruption. All of it burned her up...but she felt no fear at this alien fire that consumed her and then birthed her anew.
Rage was safe. Rage was refuge. Rage was power.
Tomoe's plan was not so simple or easy as killing the target of her vengeance. That wouldn't have been satisfying at all, considering the scope of his sins. Besides, even in her righteous fury, and even knowing how much she could get away with as a ghost, she still had basic morals.
Unlike a certain Albert Maverick.
Next to her, the elderly man stirred slowly in his bed as the morning sun bore down upon him. He sat up, blinking, and raised a hand to rub at his eyes.
Which was when he noticed the silent chants of accusation inscribed all over his hands and arms.
'I know what you did to Barnaby'
Tomoe was blasted with minty confusion upon this discovery. But it was less like refreshing spearmint and more akin to the tear-inducing sting of mouthwash. Maverick wasn't just confused — he was outright panicked, and Tomoe reveled in it with a serene smile.
Grabbing his glasses, Maverick looked around him, taking in the disaster zone of his bedroom. One of his dressers was tipped over, with clothes spilling onto the carpet soaked with the contents of every bottle of expensive cologne he owned. The suits that could be seen through the open doors of his closet were stained crimson and saffron. Pictures had been torn from the walls and carelessly tossed aside, replaced with a landscape of threats rolling across the embossed paisley patterns.
'PAIN'
'You'll pay for what you did'
'RAGE'
'You can't hide anymore'
'JUSTICE'
'There's nowhere to run'
'DIE'
Maverick swore and stumbled out of bed, almost tangling himself in the sheets. But as he made a beeline for the door, his reflection in a full-length mirror stopped him cold.
His hair, once weathered white with age, now bloomed muddily in algae-like blues and greens: the result of powdered Jell-o from the pantry and hair gel from the bathroom. More worrying than the impromptu dye job, however, was the judgment scrawled on his forehead in red permanent marker.
'MURDERER'
Maverick touched the word with a shaky hand, as though it would burn him. Eyes wide, he gulped and scurried out of the bedroom...
Only to slip on the dishwashing detergent Tomoe had dumped out onto the hardwood floor of the hallway outside.
WHUMP!
More chaos awaited him once he got back to his feet and headed to the living room. The couches and chairs looked like they'd been used as scratching posts for a pack of hellcats, the cushions shredded and bleeding stuffing everywhere. The taunts from his bedroom echoed here, carved directly into the wall instead of being merely written in ink. His precious collection of rare butterflies and other insects? Destroyed, with their glass cases shattered and the bugs themselves crushed into dust. The coffee table was overturned, but a Bible lay open against one of its legs, a piece of paper tucked into the middle of the book of Isaiah. Maverick stepped over the fallen plasma TV to get at the note, plucking it out to read its message.
'Thy nakedness shall be uncovered, yea, thy shame shall be seen: I will take vengeance, and I will not meet thee as a man'
Tomoe watched as Maverick backed away in shock and accidentally stepped barefoot on the remains of an expensive crystal figurine she'd smashed against the floor. She found herself strangely apathetic to the sight, though she remembered having gone through a similarly harrowing experience herself. It was not one of her more pleasant memories from her life, and it was partially why she hadn't physically hurt his body while possessing it to execute her revenge. But if Maverick happened to hurt himself, well, that wasn't her problem. And it was the least of what he deserved for what he did to Kotetsu, to Bunny, to the million and one victims that Tomoe didn't know about but whose existence she was sure of, given how long he had kept up his machinations.
Maverick limped bloodily to the kitchen, which had exploded into a culinary warzone, with food — both fresh and rotting — blanketing as many square inches as possible. Egg yolks dripped down the window panes and curtains; raw meat was piled into bloody heaps on the counter, baptized in red wine. The floor was a sea of condiments: ketchup, mustard, salad dressing, hot sauce, vinegar, and more. Every single piece of breakable kitchenware had been broken, the remnants littered everywhere. Whatever wasn't breakable — mostly the utensils — had been stabbed into the expensive Brazilian rosewood table. Maverick was forced to keep his distance from it, repelled by the mess on the marble tile, but the words etched into the tabletop could not be denied: second verse, same as the first, but all the more unsettling for its repetition.
His mobile phone rang then, and Maverick flinched violently at the sound, ramming his forearm into a corner of the counter. Cursing, he shuffled back to his bedroom to answer the call, with Tomoe following. As he picked the phone up and flipped it open, she leaned in close, determined to hear both side of the conversation.
"Maverick speaking," he intoned, regaining some of his usual authoritative poise.
"Ah, yes, hello, Albert." It was an older female with a slight Italian accent, sounding very displeased. "This is Jenna Florentino of Aphrodite Apparel. Care to explain why you left a rather pornographic message in my voice mail last night?"
His face paled. "What?"
"Don't play dumb with me. It was clearly your voice, calling from your number, and you sounded perfectly lucid so don't try to blame this on any sort of alcohol overdosing. If it will jog your memory, your disgusting tirade included the description of various sexual acts involving the severed genitals of a duck, boiled cat feces, and at least two lava lamps. Oh, and somehow you managed to work my mother and my daughter into that mess, you shameless boor."
"But I didn't...I was asleep...I couldn't p-possibly have..."
"Really, I expected better from a distinguished businessman like yourself. Well, you can be sure that Aphrodite Apparel will not be throwing its support behind Apollon Media and HeroTV, and I will be warning my other business associates to stay far away from you. I'd bid you a good day, but I don't like to lie." Click.
For a few moments, Maverick didn't move. Then reluctantly...he lowered his arm and clicked through to a record of recent outgoing calls.
Alexander Lloyds.
Agnes Joubert.
The CEOs of Poseidon Line, Odysseus Communication, Titan Industry, and Kronos Foods.
And that was just on the first screen of calls dating to last night or earlier this morning.
The phone plummeted from Maverick's hand, landing with a pitifully quiet thump on the carpet. Maverick himself soon followed, collapsing to his knees with a dazed expression on his face. His shoulders slumped, and he dropped his head into his hands.
And behind him, Tomoe laughed and laughed, her voice as cold and terrible as the depths of Judecca, and she vowed that her next visit would be a hundred times worse.
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Not pictured: Tomoe's internet hijinks, in which she...
1) Took brain-bleach worthy pictures of herself as Maverick on the computer's webcam and posted them on as many sites as she could think of
2) Maxed out Maverick's credit cards to order a metric ton of random stuff from websites, ranging from the innocuous (a hundred Sock Monkeys!) to the WTF (ten crates of various animal penis dildos!)
3) Found Maverick's e-mail list of the MIBs on his payroll and spammed them with Kotetsu MeepCat, Trollfaces, and Goatse (old-school!)
If you're wondering why Tomoe didn't have Maverick call the police while she was possessing his body, well...girls just want to have (vindictive) fun, dammit! I'm sure she'll eventually stop tormenting him and have him turn himself in soon enough, if her antics don't cause him to do it of his own volition first.
Review if you will, flame if you must!
-Sora G. Silverwind
I know the sickening thoughts that slither around your head