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You are Tomie.
You, and you, and you, and you, and you are Tomie. All of the fragments of your mind scattered across the globe, creating duplicates that, god, must number in the thousands by now.
But there is only ever one of you. Spread thin, sure, sentience stretched taught across multitudes of bodies and minds and floating around in the air, but they are all you.
You have never been a good person. At this point, you wouldn’t be sure what a good person is anymore- but hey, that can happen after eternity of being a magnet for the worst humanity has to offer. But back to you- your favorite subject. Beauty has always been your strongest suit, acting following close behind. You use your natural charms to take hold of others, bending them to your will and marking another down on the mental tally. It fills you with a mad kind of glee, to be so desired even after turning into this monster. Even if you feel nothing for them in return, the thrill of the conquest is addictive.
Other people never understood; men are evil. Always have been, always will be, and so even when you were whole you treated them with disdain. The only thing they were good for was to boost your ego, and if it took some fluttering eyelashes and an extra sway of the hips to cement their infatuation then so be it. After all, isn’t it truly the highest honor to be loved even by something so heinous?
(Even if it means being labeled a whore. Even if it means dodging shards of glass that explode from another bottle hurled at the wall, slurred words and cries of monster following you as you flee.)
The other girls didn’t understand, save one. They all treated you with equal scorn and jealousy, avoiding you in the halls and spitting curses behind your back, except… Reiko.
She held your heart in her hands after letting you be slaughtered and threw it away. She swore secrecy after watching you be cut apart while still alive. You hate Reiko. You despise her. You feel no regret for the fact that the first thing you did after coming back in that tide pool was eat her alive, mad with fear and the animal instinct to live. The hatred is what keeps you going, when you become too many and your mind is spread too thin to focus on anything else.
But when some distant part of you comes back, returning a piece of your mind back to the place it goes in-between the deaths and deaths and deaths and deaths - you remember.
Reiko, holding you close after another night of punishment. Reiko, lending you her makeup to cover up the bruises that couldn’t be hidden by your school uniform. Reiko, sobbing even louder than you after you begged her not to tell, please, mother is all you have left and so what if she drinks, anyone would after living with a monster like you, and it hurts so much to watch your only friend swear her silence because she’s so good and you can never be that good, not even if you tried-
And that piece of you splits back off, and you are left with only a bitter, burning hatred for the girl who left you to die.
One of your more.. intellectual conquests once called you a succubus, right before cracking your sternum open with a tire iron. It was such an odd name that it stuck with you even in the in between, and so in the next iteration that you were complete enough to remember you searched it on a library computer.
The definition made you laugh, not the high, bell like laugh that drew men to you like moths to a bonfire, nor the mocking one you used to destroy their self esteem- a real laugh. A snort, if you were going to be completely specific. The same one that Reiko had lovingly teased you about in grade school, that you blushed about whenever you got caught. The memory, so horrible in its clarity, makes your stomach sour, and you push away from the dingy cubicle to find a man who would split you into so many pieces that you wouldn’t have the wherewithal to remember it anymore.
Men have called you every name in the book at this point. Demon, witch, temptress, devil woman.. and those are only the more ah, child-friendly ones. But never succubus.
Sex has never been your end goal, truly. At this point the feeling of a knife ramming into your gut is more pleasurable than- ugh- a man grunting and heaving on top of you for a few minutes before he finally finished. It was bait, something to keep them around for longer when you felt the urge to stick around. Even a pig will eventually learn that he can never reach the carrot if you dangle it in front of him for long enough. The true pleasure, while you were still singular, was the challenge of it all. To see how horrible you could be to a man and still have him love you. Mr Tagaki was… an outlier of sorts. He claimed to understand everything about your life, to get what you felt towards other people. You suppose that maybe he was the only one you truly felt something for, in the end. Nowadays, men are only good for the ego boost.
You may be evil too, sure, but you have never consciously wanted a man to split you into pieces. The feeling of fragmentation is less than pleasant, and in truth regeneration is exhausting. You suppose that something in you just brings out the bad in others, makes them lose control in their lust. You have never once caused a man to kill you, not outright.You have never done something worthy of mutilation. They were obviously all that way before you came along, you just brought it to the surface. You did the people around them a favor.
(At least, that’s what you tell yourself. The idea that you are so demented that it turns innocent men into murderers.. well. It’s disquieting.)
In the times when you are more whole than not, you always end up reminiscing about your past. The times before you were many and you were just the one Tomie living with your drunkard of a mother and just barely scraping through with the support of-
No.
You never used to be so.. shallow. Rude, sure. cutthroat and two-faced and a bitch to the end, but you like to think you had some emotional depth before being split. If you had the solidity to feel embarrassment anymore it would surely fill you to the brim after remembering the vanity of your many selves. All they wanted- all you wanted was pretty dresses and attention. Sparkling jewels, silken clothing, the adoration of everyone around you. It’s not like you aren’t greedy, who wouldn’t want the finer things in life, especially when they had eternity to experience it?
A small part of you - ha - wonders if it’s because you never got to experience these things when you were whole. A disability check and a part-time job can only net you so much cash after all, especially when your drunkard of a mother spent the majority of it on booze. You also wonder what she would’ve thought of the yous that got turned into sake, way back when. It had sold like hot cakes, exclusively to men of course, women wouldn’t touch it, and even as the ground up fragmented parts of you got consumed they were basking in the attention.
God, that had been a difficult few… years? Months? Decades, maybe? A long time in your collected memory at least. So many little atoms of yourself went into the brew, all sprouting into their own bodies (or some into others, the unfortunate bastards) after a while. The amount of brain power that could be rationed into all of them was minuscule at most, and you were secretly glad when the vats of gore got incinerated. Even you can’t stand being that fractured. The respite of dying was worth the burning pain.
Death, to you, is not an abstract like it is for so many others. The end of everything. The start of the afterlife. Death is simply… a reset. A moment to catch your metaphorical breath as you coalesce and the you that died fills the you that still lived, before the pieces would regenerate and be split off again. The idea of an afterlife is absolutely baffling to you.
Maybe, you think, only the good parts of people’s souls go to heaven. Or the afterlife, or whatever. Maybe the nicer parts of Tomie went into the light, while the stubborn, bitter, poisonous parts- you - stuck around for too long. Maybe the good Tomie is sitting up there with Reiko, finally able to be happy openly without a facade. Able to express affection through hugs and smiles instead of biting comments. Able to stand being around others for longer than it took to feel powerful. The parts of Tomie that Reiko could probably like. The ones that didn’t tear her flesh from her bones in a desperate bid for survival.
Yeah. That would be nice. You hope… you hope Reiko is happy. That she doesn’t hold it against you after all this time. That eventually you and you and you and you might be able to join the good parts of Tomie in the afterlife and be whole again. That you will stop being the horrible, fragmented versions of yourself that terrorize the world, forever tasked with ridding it of men. You are so, so very tired of men.
But for now, you have work to do.
And the world has more demons where that came from.