Major Tags: Abuse (Mental), Bodily Fluids (Blood), Mention of Death (Character), Graphic Depictions of Violence(Violence to Specific Body Parts (Mouth)), Sexual Content
Word Count: 1521
Additional Tags: Psychological Horror, Heavily Implied Unsafe Sex

You come home and your furniture is rearranged. It's just your living room, but its still unsettling. You disarm your security system and put your bag down before walking into your front living room. It's furnished like the rest of your small mansion, with blues and whites. The couch was selected for comfort as well as its neat style, and you've set it off with a couple portrait paintings just to bring some peach into the room. However, where the couch used to be the armchair is now, and the couch had been placed where the bookshelves were. Despite bieng moved, the room is impeccable. It may even have been an improvement?

As you make dinner and start winding down for the day, you also ponder if you should bother notifying the police. Has someone broken into your apartment? or did you just forget the arrangement? Slowly you start realizing the increasing occurances of you having forgotten where you put things: spoons, car keys, holiday decorations. Perhaps you rearranged things in your sleep and just forgot? You had been under a lot of stress lately. Crockercorp, you found out, was a front all along for a big agro-business company. Stocks had plummeted recently as your agro-business had been responsible for a first-world famine, and as a woman CEO, you were under constant fire. Especially since your grandmother had passed away and promoted you from vice to actual CEO in such a short time. That's why you had your security system installed. Speaking forgetting, shouldn't there be footage?

After dinner, you find yourself at the security computer in the basement, looking through video files. There's nothing. You sigh, but you also notice something. There's a blonde hair on your keyboard. It certainly isn't yours, nor does it belong to the gentleman who installed your computer.

It's time to call in a favor.

"Oh yeah, I can run the DNA test," Ms. Harley smiles at you, "I'm surprised to see you over here so late."

"Well I also wanted to see how you've been faring," you cover, "With all the stress at work, I haven't had time to see old friends."

"Well it'll take my lab assistant a few hours to run the test, do you want to sit down for a movie? I have a nice comedy."

Sit down you do, enjoying the mild cuddling you get from Jade, and the movie is quite funny. All the while, your brain rests on the happy idea that what you have on your hands is a burgalar and not a severe memory problem. After the movie, you get a name: Rose Lalonde, known anarchist. Charged repeatedly but never convicted. You thank Jade and drive home to find a note on your kitchen counter, handwritten in elegant pink.

"Jane. I'm almost glad you've figured out my gambit so far, but now the rules have changed. You know I can enter and exit your house as I please. You know I can access your security system. You know I have changed things about. Now ask yourself: Are you sure all the changes have been innocuous?"

You look up and your mind goes to your pills and cooking oils. There are several places where a subtle poison or even cyanide could hide discreetly for months, and now you cannot trust a single item in your own home.

The note continues, "I understand that you are predominantly a figurehead, that you are simply carrying out the position fo which you had been groomed your entire life. However, this also places you in the position of receiving the end result of my own work, which is to inform the powers that be that a corporation may not cause famine and be permitted to live."

You sleep in a hotel. You buy a flask and keep water in it. People think you are starting to keep a flask of vodka sue to stress. You realize that if the public sees you acting differently, you may as well be dead, because you will be on the street, and Rose is not the onlyprson who wants you dead. So you sleep in your house and wait. You make sure the clock is ticking for your intruder as well, set private investigators on her trail. Several times the find things she intended for them to find. Small, one line notes with snark and wit and playfulness to them.

Your company begins to have enough prifit to start making amends, and you do. Fodd is given to those affected by the famine. You pay burial costs beyond what the courts demanded. Your trustees complain, and you explain that to do anything else would cause the start of a slow permanent decline. The image of Crocker corp is cleaned up slowly, but Rose does not let up. Your furniture keeps being rearranged.

One day, you find out the investigators missed her only by a hair, and you come into her latest den to find another note, and the scent of her perfume.

"My dearest Jane, I'm afraid our campaign of bitter passive-aggressive shenanigans shall have to be on hold for just a month or so. I have a paying job I must attend to, as even anarchists must pay for good from time to time."

You write a note, placing it in an envelope labeled "Rose" on your kitchen counter. You wait.

Two months later, the note has been opened but not taken. There went your tracking device plan. You set your bag down and go take a shower. As you rinse the shampoo from your hair, you hear a noise and jump. On the other side of the frosted glass is a body, short, blonde, and not thin. You crack out a "Rose?"

The door to your shower opens and she replies, a voice soft and commanding, "Yes. Please, Jane, do get out of the shower so we can talk."

Hypnotized, frightened, wondering where you left your peashooter, you turn off the water and climb out, drying off. Rose watches you the whole time, and the two of you wind up on your bed in silence.

"I've decided not to kill you," Rose opens, "My last job felt like going back to work after a vacation, and it helped me realize that I don't want this task of mine to be over."

"What the FUCK are you even talking about? Do you realize how much hell I've been through in the past six months trying not to die? Trying to get you turned into the authorities?" You don't even care that you're swearing, or that you've dropped your gosh-golly-gee affectation. "You had damn well better have a plan, or I am throwing you in the slammer myself!"

You take in the form next to you. Where you had expected tall, thin, and deadly, you've found a short, curvy woman with bright eyes and an H.P. Lovecraft tshirt. There is a nerd sitting next to you on the bed, and she might be a world class assassin. You realize you have been fighting the urge to slap her. Why have you been fighting the urge to slap her?

"Oh yes," her voice shifted from commanding to vitriolic, "Worrying about dying for 6 months is so comparable to starving to death and watching people you love get sick and die all around. Heaven forbid you should have to worry if your food is safe, my dear. sweet. helpless. Jane."

You slap her. All hell breaks loose. This is no catfight. You have been taking self defense courses with your private police for hire, and it has been paying off. There are are holds, escapes, punches, bloodied lips and bruised ribs, all as you roll about the floor. However, experience wins out in the end and Rose has you pinned, her mouth dripping blood onto your face, looking colder and more distant that you thought possible.

"You killed my mother," she hisses.

"I killed my grandmother, too," you retort, now crying, "Why do you think she passed away when she did? Old age? No, I'm a Benedict Arnold, dyed in the wool, and I couldn't have lived with myself if I hadn't done something to stop the famine. This company is going to go down, and I'm going to make sure it goes bankrupt from paying for that horrible crime."

Rose Lalonde did not see this coming. She kisses you. You did not see that coming. Adrenaline from fighting easily turns into lust, and you relish in having the ability to touch someone who requires secrecy in this moment as much as you, who may very well agree with the actions which have caused you so much guilt in the last year. Clothes don't even come off, but hands are darting underneath towels and shirts, into pants and perhaps over pubic bones.

You'll delete the security footage of this in the morning.