((yea uhh warning: this drabble contains depictions gore and murder. Like, the first-degree kind. Premeditated shit. With blood))
If there was anything her multitude of experiences had taught her, it was patience. There wasn’t a force on this Earth that could best her, given enough time, and willingness to wait.
She’d done this a thousand times.
Opportunities would always come. She just had to watch. Listen. Pull a string or two. Watch, listen. Wait. Eventually, he came home one night. Tired, exhausted. Ready to collapse in his living room. The family next door out on a trip, the other house vacant on account of a disastrous termite infestation. He was recently divorced; wife staying with her parents in Texas, closer to their daughter while she attended college.
Most importantly, he was alone. Just as she planned.
She was waiting for him. In the living room, lounging on his favorite armchair (She’d always had a flair for the dramatics). She gave him a smile as he entered. He saw her, eyes widening in alarm. He was awake now.
She stood.
He flinched away from her. Understandable. Many would fear a stranger in their home, no matter how small or smiling they were. Especially if they smiled, unsettingly cheerfully. Or when a plastic trash bag lay spread out across the floor, cut open to cover more space.
There was something on her. A darkness that seemed to make the night darker. “You know why I’m here,” she told him, advancing over the bags towards him.
He didn’t have anywhere to run. It was a small room. He begged, pleaded. “I have a family,” he said. “Please, don’t kill me.”
“They left you,” she told him. “You know as well as I do. It was unpleasant, I know,” she consoles. “I had no other choice.” He whimpered as she stood in front of him. She had to look up to see into his eyes; full of fear.
“I take no pleasure in this,” she confesses, “But you should not have investigated us.”
Her hand at her side, and a bit of her forearm, begin to change. She’s used to this transformation. The shifts and cracks of her bones and muscles don’t faze her anymore. There’s barely reaction out of her as her hand grows, her fingers elongate gruesomely.
His breath catches in his throat, and then blows out as she runs him through with her hand--her claws, jagged bones sharp as pikes buried in his guts. She’s deceptively strong, lifting him an inch or two off the ground from the force of her blow alone. Gravity pulls him back down onto her claws, driving them up and deeper, digging up indiscriminately through his organs. His blood and gore flowed out of him, drenching her sleeve in warm, red blood.
She turned and threw him back onto the trash bags. He smashed into the ground, blood and guts spilling out of the hand-sized hole in his stomach. Dying, dreadfully. She pressed the tip of her finger to the bottom of his head, behind his chin, and she pushed up. He stopped writhing.
She stood, surveying the scene. There was still work to be done.
Her fingerprints were on the couch. She shouldn’t have sat in it. She’d have to wipe them off the armrests. Clean him up, get his prints back on them.
His blood found its way onto the carpet. A few specks on the walls. A little spatter on the ceiling. She’d have to clean it up.
She might have shed a hair or two onto the chair. His was curly and blonde. Hers was straight and black. She’d have to find them, pick them up with tweezers.
There were a multitude of tasks she had to accomplish. She would check everything off the list, slowly, methodically. Patiently.
She just needed a little time.