Perhaps it was her own fault for destroying his courage so entirely - Cinnabar, after all, had been wary of treating him thus. The Ascendant General still thought she knew him better than that, even now, after his temper had earned him the upper hand. All it was going to take was a little motivation, a little more prompting, as it always had with him. There were few things in the world that ever seemed to motivate Kamboja Vaiphei quite like his love for and loyalty to the people he cared about. After all, she had spent years testing that theory with such great success.
Unfortunately for Kam, she had been given a very long, drawn out period of solitude on her planet while she recuperated from the fist that had been driven through her middle and now that she was back to her sleuthing ways, she knew just the buttons to press. What was it that Knight had said? She had made an impression? - well, she meant to make another.
The bright amber eyes stared up at the apartment window she had seen Kamboja lurking in on several occasions, with the man that had been at his side before those Knights showed up to throw off her trail. It wasn’t in the dreadhead’s nature to have people he depended on, or who would depend on him, these days. From what she had seen, his favorite comfort lay in the bottom of a bottle - or between the legs of a woman. Typical human weaknesses.
It took little more than a bit of concentration for her to reappear on the other side of the window, finding herself in the dark, empty room. For a moment she was silent as she listened for the sound of stirring around her but there was nothing that said another soul was inside - a pity, as the message would have been much clearer had the man been home to suffer for Kam’s complacency.
Her brittle fingers curled around the industrial sized bottle of lighter fluid she had brought with her, squeezing the first jet of liquid across the bookshelf so conveniently placed, like a torch waiting to be lit. She walked a slow and deliberate pace through the apartment, trailing the lighter fluid along at her side, across picture frames and fabric, until she came face to face with one of the many works of charcoal pinned up to the concrete walls. It seemed a shame, almost.
She turned away from them and headed up the stairs to the bedroom, where she emptied the last of her lighter fluid onto the unoccupied bed. Though it was filled with every sort of flammable object she could want, the apartment itself seemed fairly defensible against fire, with the hard brick and concrete composing nearly every surface. It would simply have to be enough, to destroy everything that the man had. She tossed the bottle carelessly onto the floor and flicked open the cheap zippo she had procured for the occasion. She threw it on top of the sheets and watched as a bright, blue flame rippled to life, then settled down to burn away the fabric beneath the top layer of fluid.
It would take a moment to catch, but a moment was all she needed. With her tools of destruction left behind to finish the job, she slipped down to the display of artwork on the first floor. There would be no way of knowing they’d been taken, in the end, when it was all said and done - this room would be just as hollow and scorched as the others, consumed by the flame of her revenge. It would be proof enough, for the silly boy who still thought he could ignore her demands.
Just as she was about to slip away into the night, to deliver the news of the misfortune to the dreadhead and to emphasize that she was not one to make idle threats, she realized there was a single soul in the apartment - a feline, drawn out of its slumber by the heat and the distant crackle of flames. For a single moment, she thought about leaving it behind, when her mind jumped immediately to thoughts of Hiro - sweet, loving, Hiro. A soft sigh escaped her cracked lips, for whose benefit she couldn't say, and she stooped to gather the cat in her arms.
"Alright then," she murmured, "let's take a trip, little friend."
((Words: 792))
Strickenized
