Chapter 58: Dead Insects
By the time they were back in Combanee, Henry & Grant had subdued a woman who had a similar mask in her apartment, and had tied her to a chair with her Revenant removed when Matoi & the others arrived there. Grant told Matoi that they weren't sure which Gorgon sister it was, and with sleep's infliction, Matoi had little energy to properly interrogate her.
She ripped the tape off of the woman's mouth and asked her which sister she was.
The woman shook her head. "N-Not telling you shit."
Matoi simply closed her eyes, stood up, rubbed the bridge of her nose, then took a deep breath and sighed it out. Wedding's armor formed and she put her right hand on her shoulder, catching a missile about as big as her finger. "I really am not in the mood for this. I'll make myself clear, and you will speak after."
As she put her hand on the woman's cheek, her thumb peeled her mouth open, shoved the missile between it; that her victim made no attempt at resistance pissed her off even more. Matoi backhanded the insolent fuck in the throat, and as she started to choke, Henry grabbed Matoi's shoulder from behind and said: "Wait, stop, wh-"
"-take your fucking hand off of me."
Henry did so. "What the hell are you doing? I thought we were interrogating her, not fucking torturing her!"
Matoi turned and heard the woman swallow. "I have zero desire to argue about this with you."
"Well, I do, I'm not going to just stand here and let you treat her like some -- some fucking insect you can just grind up and torture! She's still a woman, you can't just act like you're some serial killer and not a student!" He looked around and saw no support. "I thought everyone here knew that, but apparently, I'm the only one with a fucking conscience!"
Matoi turned back to the woman. "Henry, continue and I'll put you in this chair next."
Henry looked around, saw the others' silence, then muttered something under his breath as he stomped out of the room and to the hall.
"Kusotare." muttered Matoi and Serena giggled. "Grant, go deal with Henry while he has his tantrum. Mia and Serena, search the apartment while I question her."
Slightly discomforted, Grant stepped outside. She continued to torture the woman over the next twenty minutes, but gained no new information besides a confirmation that this woman was Stheno. She considering disposing Stheno by dumping her out the window and detonating her mid-fall, but the cleanup was not worth civilian effort, so she simply detonated her here, splattering the gore & bits of brain that had been her against the walls.
Mia came out from the bathroom she'd been searching. "Did you find out anything?"
"No."
Serena's voice came from the bedroom. "Did you already kill her?"
"Did you want to see?" shouted Matoi back and Serena came out holding a laptop, nodding. She smirked. "Next time. Have you found anything?"
"Yeah, her laptop."
Mia came out of the bathroom, and the three sat on the couch as Serena went through her laptop. They searched through any social media sites to see if she had saved any accounts or passwords, any history, or even text files of email addresses & phone numbers -- but found nothing. A few of her folders were filled with PDFs for the Gorgons' flyers, lesbian literature, and various other downloads.
Matoi recognized one of the folder's names. "…Citrus?"
"What is it?" said Mia as Serena clicked it.
"Um, it's a yuri manga." said Serena.
Matoi nodded, and gestured for Serena to continue over to the saved photos. A sense of unease came over Matoi as they went through the pictures, for while they had known before Stheno was the other woman's girlfriend, speech cannot capture the emotions vision has evolved over millions of years to instinctually receive, or the smile a partner glances towards you during a great spring afternoon. Matoi wondered: Had the woman Mia fought simply been like herself, only pointed in a different direction? Was there more depth to this woman she almost habitually despised, and who Mia & Serena had described as dim & naive?
But this train of thought derailed as she realized she did not really care for the answers, for while the unknown details of a shallow person may entice a viewer or reader, full knowledge often reveals their mundanity, and why they would taste the rot of forgottenness Matoi was attempting to avoid through presidency. Yet this all had happened once before with Matoi, at finding a cockroach's body in her shower with no knowledge the provenance, then soon forgetting it, and the dullness of corpses both living and dead.
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