(Subverting gender since the world was born)

[scarred_grin]

[OOMs: Night One, in which Loki plays bingo and Weyland decides to stay for a while (which is a euphemistic way of saying the story's nothing but sex and drugs), followed immediately by Loki's School for Wayward Girls, lesson one: gender and strength (no warnings there, much to Skaði's disappointment), and immediately following that: action is go]

But Pyrrha doesn't know about any of that, and she's the shape in which Loki comes down to the bar tonight. She's more subdued than usual, but you wouldn't know it to look at her--between her ridiculous boots and the crimped-and-teased-and-AquaNetted big-goth-hair she's got going on, she hits just over seven feet tall today, and that's not counting the feathers she's got stuck in her hair (that admittedly look a bit like a bird lost a fight with her hair, but she's okay with that). She's also got her usual tiny shorts, a faded Love & Rockets shirt (band not comic) and a small backpack she'd made to look like a cartoonish cute stuffed zombie doll (the zipper's in its neck).

Anyway, she does her drunken-marionette-runway-stomp up to the bar, to order herself a cherry coke slushie (with an umbrella) and a chicken sandwich with fries. She's very hungry for some reason.

Botherable.

[open until forever but slows are <3]

Comments

[scarred_grin]

"How scary somebody is has nothing to do with what they could do to you," she says. "I've had the worst luck with guys who try really hard to make themselves seem harmless. But I mean, you're bigger and stronger than I am, and you're trained, so if you were going to try something..."

She shrugs.

"But I don't think you would."

[ostro_goth]

"Indeed, I would not," Teja says.

So the lie about the demon was not a trap? Or all that she proved was his not listening well enough?

"You cannot truly tell about any, but there are ways and means to gain experience of people -- and I would think you have much of that."

And some of it darker and stranger than it needs to be.

[scarred_grin]

"You can never really know about anybody. Look at me, for instance--there's a lot you don't know about me. I mean, maybe I'm a horrible person. Maybe I deserved every scar I have. You don't know."

She shakes her head.

"There's something you need to know, 'cause I need to know--if it's a problem, I don't want to get any more attached."

[ostro_goth]

Teja nods.

"Yes," he says. "Tell me."

[scarred_grin]

"I was trying to tell you before, but I got kinda distracted," she says. "I do that sometimes. The third thing I wasn't entirely honest about the other day--my name's not really Pyrrha."

A brief, nervous pause.

"I mean, it's sort of my name, it was my present for my fifteenth birthday--brand new name, Miss Pyrrha Pandora. But it's not the name my parents gave me, and it's not the name on my official paperwork, if I even have official paperwork, which I might not. My folks weren't really big on government involvement."

[ostro_goth]

"Indeed," Teja says, "I had assumed as much. You have remade yourself from the strictures of your youth: - a new name would be part of that! Pyrrha is not a name that religious parents would give their daughter; it is a boding name, as a 'Pyrrhic victory' is one that wins you a battle and loses you a war. Also, Pandora: - the one who gives everything, from whose box came a myriad of dire things, and one that was deemed good, but still not a thing I am overly fond of. Hope."

Pause.

"Whatever your name was before" -- and she can tell him if she wishes to, but he will not ask and make her -- "it is Pyrrha now."

And Loki, secretly, hiding behind and inside, but Teja will not speak of those things to her.

[scarred_grin]

"Yeah, my parents gave us all really boring names," she says. "First name from the Bible, Spanish middle name. Nothing really exciting about it, though when I left home I was one of thirteen so they had to start getting into the more obscure names. I can't imagine what they're up to now, probably picking from the lists of genealogy or something. I was only the seventh, though, so mine wasn't too bad."

She pushes her left sleeve up to show a tattoo that doesn't quite hide some burn scars. "It was Daniel."

[ostro_goth]

And that is when Teja fully realises how truly perfect Pyrrha is for an avatar of Loki's -- not just an afterthought and helper to the dazzling Serafina.

"You truly and fully remade yourself," he says, his eyes quiet and gentle.

[scarred_grin]

"...well, it wasn't just me," she says quietly. "I had help. I had the people who took me in when I was on the street, gave me my new name--and my demon, he, uh... rearranged the downstairs furniture for me. But everybody's had other people help make them who they are."

[ostro_goth]

"Yes, they do," Teja says. He won't comment on the 'downstairs furniture' thing, but it seems that Pyrrha has profited from Loki as much as he from her.

"For me, it was an old warrior named Hildebrand, who had been a friend of my father's, who found me again where the priests had taken me after the violent death of my parents, and picked me up time and again at the difficult points in my life, knowing that I would have a purpose in the end, for which all must be borne."

Pause.

"Maybe some that live in the sun can go through life oblivious, never doubting who they are and what they are here for, but the dark ones from the shadows, as we are, cannot."

[scarred_grin]

"Maybe they just haven't been tested yet," she says. "Maybe some people never are. I don't trust people who haven't been, though. It's not their fault, and it's not like I want people to suffer, but if somebody hasn't been through a dark time of one kind or another, we're just not going to understand each other. But you--I think we're still on the same wavelength. At least I hope so."

[ostro_goth]

"We have both seen much darkness," Teja says, "known much pain, faced the world and ourselves and been remade."

He, more literally, returning from death three times now. Or four, if one counts the recent Ragnarök.

[scarred_grin]

"Like snakes shedding their skin," she says. "You get reborn, and you have to decide what to give up, what to leave behind, so you'll have room to keep growing. Or maybe being in a cocoon is a better metaphor--for me, there's always been a gap between the end of one part of my life and the beginning of the next, where I just sorta drift. I've done it twice now."

[ostro_goth]

Teja nods. "Coming out of the darkest moments, being alive if nothing else: - and then, to be imbued with new purpose and impetus, however strange that may seem to one."

[scarred_grin]

"It's amazing sometimes what you find you don't need anymore," she says. "You go along clinging to something, and then all of a sudden, you realize you don't know why. And you let it go, and nothing bad happens."

[ostro_goth]

"It is amazing what all we may do without, if we but dare," Teja agrees. "And questions that which 'everybody knows', or 'everybody wants'."

[scarred_grin]

"The first time, I left my family behind, and the way they'd raised me, and shame. I could be myself, and there was nothing wrong with that, and if people don't like that, it's their problem, not mine. The second time, though, after Damian died, it was a lot harder. I don't think I'd have pulled out of that at all if it weren't for my demon."

[ostro_goth]

"Not everybody can have those," Teja says, "or at least, many people in most worlds only have Socratic demons, not literal ones."

[scarred_grin]

"But they usually have somebody," she says. "Maybe not a demon, but friends or family or somebody they can lean on for a while. I didn't have anybody--it was literally a choice between killing myself or sticking around to see how the creepy fuck in the other room was gonna kill me, but I wasn't getting out of there alive."

She looks down at her arms.

"Maybe that's how people end up with demons. You get desperate enough, and there they are."

[ostro_goth]

"Desperate enough either die outright," Teja agrees, "or die trying, if needed, so you will accept any help and make yourself anything needed at that moment."

[scarred_grin]

"What I learned the last time," she says, "is I'm a lot stronger than I think I am. And maybe I don't need a demon, or anybody else either, maybe I can be okay on my own. I can do this. But it's nicer having people."

A pause.

"Do you know--can you get magazines at the bar? Like, specific issues of old magazines."

[ostro_goth]

Huh.

"I would ask her," Teja says. "But indeed, it is better to have people; and all find some here, as you have found me."

[scarred_grin]

"You've been too nice to me," she says with a small smile. "You're stuck with me now. And you know I got your back, if you ever need help in one of the very specific areas I'm qualified to help in, or any other time if you don't mind the fact that I don't know what I'm doing."

[ostro_goth]

"I would rather have you at my back at something new," Teja says, "than another that has made a study of that situation: - for I know you have been tried with darkness."

And are Loki.

[scarred_grin]

"And I'm good at improvised weaponry," she says. "Even if I don't fight to win, I just fight to get away. But I doubt you need any help with fighting."