hela dark'ness dementia raven way

[conquestforged]

yes... we’re gonnae try it one more time... catch hela here. https://gutsymmetry.tumblr.com/

[conquestforged]

me following you down the street talking to you through a megaphone: hela is partially colorblind. are you listening? it’s because she’s part-jotunn. there are just whole ass colors you don’t need to perceive on jotunheim. but she can perceive ultraviolet light

[conquestforged]

you can like this for a starter, it’ll just be pretty much unformatted since im mobile

[conquestforged]

“Hela, can you hear me?” Let Trish care!!

A black-glass blade jumps to her hand. She catches herself in the act of striking at Trish and lurches back again, staggering, dropping the dagger, not unmaking it, and it hits the floor with a clatter.

“Don’t—don’t—“ she’s barely getting the words out from behind her clenched teeth, lips curled back in a grimace. If Trish comes closer, worse, touches her, she’ll strike her, and it won’t be the little love-games they’ve played before, it could kill her, she could kill Trish, she almost did just now—

She sits back down hard on the uncushioned couch where she sleeps, pressing herself against the wall, grounding herself, controlling herself.

It’s a long while of breathing in through her nose, and out through her mouth, trying to gather herself back into herself. Her hands have dimpled the metal where she clutches the frame of her bed.

“Next time...” Her jaw hurts, where she’s clenched it so tight, grinding her teeth. “Next time... Don’t wake me.”

[conquestforged]

i also talked about this a bit before but

odin taught hela that to be the “goddess of death,” as she always was and will be, meant that her purpose was to CAUSE death. this was convenient to him because it let him use her to indiscriminately kill, it slotted in nicely with what he perceived to be her inherent lack of regard for the value of life (really it was just that she was a child at the time, one who thought that if you killed something you could just “get it back,” because she didn’t understand that other people didn’t have access to death/the souls of the dead), and it interlocked with his idea of her as having “killed” her mother, because from the beginning hela was “killing” people so that was her purpose, right?

a major, MAJOR key to hela’s psychological dissatisfaction, an ESSENTIAL component of why she, as she is, will never be happy, is because this fundamental idea--that as goddess of death she must cause death--is not true. it simply isnt. she wasn’t born to kill. she wasn’t made for destroying people. that’s not what it means to be the keeper of the souls of the dead. what she’s supposed to do is guard, protect, and provide for the souls of the dead. she’s supposed to take care of them. she has a whole REALM she could be ruling for that purpose, that she was BORN to, and shes not there and shes not doing it because she was taught from childhood that the purpose of her existence is negative, to rampantly destroy.

the issue is that this is currently a key component of her sense of self. so she doesn’t question it. it has a kind of logic from the outside, too, such that she wouldn’t think “wait a second.” and even though there’s a lot of psychological turmoil under the surface i think hela is way too comfortable right now with how she is--it’s logical, it’s easy, she always knows what to do--that she’s not going to try to pick it apart. it’s hard to do that and question your base assumptions about yourself.

[conquestforged]

on the subject of odin’s treatment of hela, i also just think it’s important that jötunn lives are established as essentially meaningless to the aesir and they’re considered basically savages, colonial subjects who essentially have to be like, terrorized/coerced into submission. like that’s the context of his siring hela and choosing to raise her to be his executioner, to use her as a weapon to subjugate the realms, and it’s why--did i say this already--it was never intended for her to take the throne after him, that wasnt the point. she wasn’t a part of his dynastic plan. i don’t mean that he never loved her or that she was just a puppet who wasnt responsible for her actions, but this is the approach odin took to raising her--that she was always half-animal to him on some level--not to mention some of the stuff i talked about way back when, how he was disturbed by her association with death but also used it to his advantage, because he saw that he could groom her into something useful.

[conquestforged]

so odin sired hela on a jötunn while he was in disguise as a jötunn himself and essentially scouting and exploring jotunheim. i don’t think he ever expected to actually get a kid out of it considering the biological differences between the aesir and jötnar and probably carrying a half-aesir baby did not have good implications for the mother’s health. hela’s mother did not survive giving birth to her and odin used magic to perform a kind of messy inexact c-section to retrieve the baby from her mother’s corpse, which is to say that hela was from her mother’s womb untimely ripp’d, and the impression that she’d “killed” her mother had a massive influence on how her father treated her.

[bextaylors]

AVENGERS: ENDGAME SENTENCE STARTERS.   feel free to change pronouns   /   change the sentence(s) to your liking.  for multi-muses,  specify who you’re sending the meme(s) to  /  who you’re sending the meme(s) from.

‘  __ told me to come save you.  ’ ‘  __,  can you hear me?  ’ ‘  and i needed you.  as in past tense.  ’ ‘  are you here about the cable?  ’ ‘  aren’t you drunk enough already?  ’ ‘  as long as there are those who remember what was,  there will always be those who cannot accept what can be.  ’ ‘  be careful.  ’ ‘  can you see?  ’ ‘  careful with that thing.  ’ ‘  define lunch or be disintegrated.  ’ ‘  don’t care.  couldn’t care less.  goodbye.  ’ ‘  don’t do anything stupid until i get back.  ’ ‘  don’t give me hope.  ’ ‘  don’t say that name.  ’ ‘  don’t you get all decent on me now.  ’ ‘  everybody wants a happy ending, right?  but it doesn’t always roll that way.  ’ ‘  everything’s gonna be alright.  ’ ‘  feel free to log on to the wifi.  no password,  obviously.  ’ ‘  first of all,  that’s horrible.  ’ ‘  get it together!  ’ ‘  get your hands off me.  ’ ‘  good luck on your mission.  ’ ‘  good luck on your project.  ’ ‘  good luck.  ’ ‘  great to see you,  angry girl.  ’ ‘  have we ever met that guy?  ’ ‘  hey,  look at me.  ’ ‘  hey.  we won, __.  ’ ‘  how far along is she?  ’ ‘  how’s it feel?  ’ ‘  i can do this all day.  ’ ‘  i can do this.  ’ ‘  i can’t do this.  i can’t do this.  ’ ‘  i didn’t ask for your help.  ’ ‘  i don’t even know who you are.  ’ ‘  i don’t judge people on their worst mistakes.  ’ ‘  i don’t know how you’re gonna get it through all that.  ’ ‘  i don’t know why everyone believes that,  but that isn’t true.  ’ ‘  i feel like i’m losing it.  ’ ‘  i figured it out,  by the way.  ’ ‘  i get it.  you’re in a rough spot.  ’ ‘  i got this.  okay,  i don’t got this.  ’ ‘  i have a vaguely exact idea.  ’ ‘  i know i said no more surprises,  but..  ’ ‘  i know that guy might scare you.  ’ ‘  i know you think i’m wallowing down here in my own self pity,  waiting to be rescued,  but i’m fine.  ’ ‘  i literally pieced it together as i went along.  ’ ‘  i lost the only family i ever had.  ’ ‘  i love you three thousand.  ’ ‘  i love you tons.  ’ ‘  i really need to talk to you.  ’ ‘  i saw this coming a few years back.  ’ ‘  i see this as an absolute win.  ’ ‘  i shouldn’t be here.  ’ ‘  i shouldn’t have come.  ’ ‘  i swear i will make you proud.  ’ ‘  i think we could bring them back.  ’ ‘  i wasn’t always like this.  ’ ‘  i wish there was a way that i could let __ know that we won.  ’ ‘  i’d be careful going that way.  ’ ‘  i’d offer to cook you dinner,  but you seem pretty miserable already.  ’ ‘  i’ll give you anything.  ’ ‘  i’m gonna get you all the cheeseburgers you want.  ’ ‘  i’m not ready for this.  ’ ‘  i’m not supposed to be like everyone else,  am i?  ’ ‘  i’m still worthy.  ’ ‘  i’m telling you,  you’re in no condition.  ’ ‘  i’m trying to save your life,  you idiot.  ’ ‘  i’ve got a job to do.  ’ ‘  i’ve got beer,  tequila,  all sorts of things.  ’ ‘  i’ve really missed you.  ’ ‘  idiot, no. a failure?  absolutely.  ’ ‘  if i tell you what happens..  it won’t happen.  ’ ‘  if you’re about to tell me to look on the bright side..  i’m about to hit you in the head with a peanut butter sandwich.  ’ ‘  in the future,  what happens to you and me?  ’ ‘  is he asleep?  ’ ‘  is that axe body spray?  ’ ‘  is that everyone?  ’ ‘  it was supposed to be me.  ’ ‘  it’s a mess back here.  ’ ‘  it’s always you.  ’ ‘  it’s dead.  i have to hot - wire it.  ’ ‘  it’s like a little puppy,  all happy and everything. ’ ‘  killing all these people isn’t going to bring your family back.  ’ ‘  let me do something good.  ’ ‘  let me go.  it’s okay.  ’ ‘  let’s start over, shall we?  ’ ‘  look out for each other.  ’ ‘  may i ask you where you’re going?  ’ ‘  maybe he’s making this shit up.  ’ ‘  no amount of money ever bought a second of time.  ’ ‘  no messing around.  ’ ‘  no, no.  i’m pretty sure he’s dead.  ’ ‘  not that it’s a competition,  but she loves me three thousand.  ’ ‘  okay. you win.  ’ ‘  perhaps i treated you too harshly.  ’ ‘  please know that when i drift off,  i will think about you.  ’ ‘  see you in a minute.  ’ ‘  see you on the other side.  ’ ‘  shut the front door.  ’ ‘  so,  back to the future is a bunch of bullshit?  ’ ‘  so,  did something go wrong or did something go right?  ’ ‘  so,  the how works. now we gotta figure out the when and the where.  ’ ‘  so,  where are you at with names?  ’ ‘  something died in here.  ’ ‘  sorry,  buddy,  we got a problem.  ’ ‘  tell me a story.  ’ ‘  tell my family i love ‘em.  ’ ‘  that suit did nothing for your ass.  ’ ‘  that wasn’t supposed to happen,  was it?  ’ ‘  the door is this way,  pal.  ’ ‘  the future hasn’t been kind to you,  has it?  ’ ‘  the greater good has rarely outweighed my own self interest.  ’ ‘  the kid’s not even here yet,  and there’s nothing i wouldn’t do for them.  ’ ‘  then i guess we both know who it’s gotta be.  ’ ‘  there might be a chance we could fix everything.  ’ ‘  there shall be no knifing one another.  ’ ‘  there’s an idiot in the landing zone.  ’ ‘  they look like bad guys.  ’ ‘  this is the part where spikes come out.  ’ ‘  this was our shot.  we shot it. it’s shot.  ’ ‘  trying to get you to stop has been one of the few failures of my life.  ’ ‘  turns out resentment is corrosive,  and i hate it.  ’ ‘  we are getting the whole team,  yeah?  ’ ‘  we can all stand around posting up a storm later.  ’ ‘  we don’t actually say that name in here.  ’ ‘  we need you,  pal.  ’ ‘  we won. you did it, __.  you did it.  ’ ‘  we work with what we got,  right?  ’ ‘  we’re gonna be okay.  ’ ‘  what am i looking at?  ’ ‘  what are you doing here?  ’ ‘  what are you doing up,  little miss?  ’ ‘  what are you doing?  ’ ‘  what did you say?  ’ ‘  what do you want me to do with this damn thing?  ’ ‘  what do you want?  ’ ‘  what i want you can’t give me.  ’ ‘  what you seek lies in front of you.  ’ ‘  what’s up, regular sized man?  ’ ‘  when your kid was born,  were you nervous?  ’ ‘  where are my headphones?  ’ ‘  where did you get this?  ’ ‘  who puts mayo on a hotdog?  ’ ‘  who’s the fancy broad?  ’ ‘  why are you doing this?  ’ ‘  why the long face?  ’ ‘  why would i be scared of that guy?  ’ ‘  you can change.  ’ ‘  you can do this.  ’ ‘  you can rest now.  ’ ‘  you can’t say things like that.  ’ ‘  you disgust me.  ’ ‘  you don’t have to do this.  ’ ‘  you don’t want to do this.  ’ ‘  you go and be the man you’re meant to be.  ’ ‘  you got a big date tonight?  ’ ‘  you got something for me?  ’ ‘  you guys watch each other’s six.  ’ ‘  you hungry?  ’ ‘  you know, we usually work as a team here.  ’ ‘  you look like melted ice cream.  ’ ‘  you missed the first time.  then you got ‘em both the second time.  ’ ‘  you must lose that which you love.  ’ ‘  you new here?  ’ ‘  you okay?  ’ ‘  you promise to bring that back in one piece,  right?  ’ ‘  you promise you won’t die?  ’ ‘  you see where you’re going?  ’ ‘  you shouldn’t be here.  ’ ‘  you shouldn’t have come.  ’ ‘  you think you’re the only one that lost people?  ’ ‘  you took everything from me.  ’ ‘  you wanna get some air?  ’ ‘  you were kidding,  right?  ’ ‘  you’re a pain my ass,  you know that?  ’ ‘  you’re betraying us?  ’ ‘  you’re done hurting people.  ’ ‘  you’re no idiot.  ’ ‘  you’re not the __ i know at all,  are you?  ’ ‘  you’re only a genius on earth,  pal.  ’ ‘  you’re small,  but you’re talking loud.  ’ ‘  you’re weak.  ’

[bitofthisandthat-deactivated202]

rasec-wizzlbang:

nonchalante:

Admit you were wrong. Apologize. Understand that you’re fallible. You make mistakes. You hurt people. Apologize. That’s growth; understanding you did something wrong and working towards making things right.

NEVER

[itsnotpatsy]

can’t believe ebony dark’ness dementia raven way was hannah montana’s girlfriend.

[conquestforged]

[conquestforged]

itsnotpatsy‌.

“no.”

she can tell you’re being truthful because right now your ability to lie like the expert you are (addict, your brain keeps reminding you, addict, addict, addict) has shut down almost completely. you’d need a bunch of higher functions to be able to pull off a fabrication of any kind, and you don’t have it right now. at the fuck all. you shake your head like a delayed reaction. you unconsciously roll a ball of stuffing in your palm for how it feels. you should be embarrassed, you feel. maybe.

“i didn’t know this was you,” you say it taking in the place, your eyes trying to see everything in a slow, lazy sprawl around. you catalogue the chairs and the water cooler, carpet, her, and how there’s no piercings, no tattoos, and looking at her in that weird business getup makes you think you’re looking at a flamingo wearing an Armani. you don’t know her, and then you know her so well all at once.

she hated mother. always. ever since you were both young. hated her the way you should’ve until you finally found some scrap of preservation that said she was hurting you, over and over and over. you remember envying her that honesty— wishing you could look and act and be whoever you wanted. so you stuck by it, and you were absolutely in love with the freedom of it.

your laugh is hollow and tired, “i know. i just had a medical procedure done. i think maybe I need a nap.” that’s it? that’s all? a lot more but it’s all you can say. “not right now. awhile ago.” you shouldn’t even be saying this. but who’s even aware of words right now? “—i hope she hasn’t given you any trouble.” what? dorothy?

fuck.

        “Was it a frontal lobotomy, by any chance?” There, that wasn’t nice, not at all, and Hela feels more like herself, but she also feels a queasy kind of lurch at striking out at Trish when she’s in this state. Maybe it’ll bring her back out, bring her into the real world, no more wandering in the fog... Or maybe she’s high, and nothing will?

        It’s an ugly thought. She wants to be mean like she’s always mean, but going down that low feels so bitter, feels so bad. But Trish is so far away it’s as though she’s on another planet and Hela wants to yank her back down, out of space, out of orbit, onto this Earth again, to have her present and solid. She can’t stand the way people go to pieces over death, can’t stand having all these shards of Trish on the ground in front of her, not being able to put her back together.

        “There’s an office back here.” She wasn’t going to touch Trish, this is supposed to be all business and she’s not supposed to care--but she takes her elbow, consciously softening the contact. She is so aware of being gentle, of trying to be gentle, that her whole body is rigid as they stand, stiff as a board. “This way.” Out of the front room where people might come in, away from the front door and windows, with cameras behind.

        This is Hela’s office--she insisted on one. Everything split down the middle, fifty-fifty, with her partner, and each of them with their own office. She has a low couch against one wall. “Here,” she says, and she wants to be a bitch again, but she can’t; instead she ekes out, begrudgingly, “You can take that nap.”

[conquestforged]

probably also the exposure to drugs and alcohol from earliest childhood on is why hela, as an adult, is so Pure Clean Living, Work Out, Only Cookinge The Finest Freshest Foods For Herself. she takes care of herself to an insane micromanaging degree because she’s seen the flip side and she can’t think about taking even one tiny step toward that.

[conquestforged]

so i basically redid hela’s human history while i was brainstorming coming back to this blog and it’s As Such

her dad was a hippie who was like a Smonk Weed Every Day No War No Prisons Man!! leftist guy but not in like the, actual politics and praxis kind of way, more in the “it’s the 60s and i want to fuck any woman i wanna fuck and also none of them have access to birth control so :)~” and anyway that’s how he ended up with 3 kids by 3 different moms--hela, thor, and loki. yes, those are their names. like i said, their dad is a metaphysical free love hippie nutcase.

hela is older than her brothers by at least 8 years and spent her early life basically being jounced back and forth between her dad and her mom until her dad took her full-time so that he could, uh, i guess neglect her full time :X and then parentify her full time when thor and loki were born :X so basically hela grew up in this incredibly, INCREDIBLY unstable environment full of neglect, mistreatment, and uhhhhhh drugs, and was taking care of her two younger brothers from childhood.

as a teenager hela Got Out--i’m not sure exactly how yet. but the result was that she had to leave her brothers behind. it was a basically shitty horrible impossible decision, coming right at the time when thor and loki’s brains were big enough to be horribly imprinted by the trauma of her leaving, and it’s the decision she’s regretted basically for the rest of her Entire Life. she saved herself but sees herself as doing it at their expense.

100% of hela’s hostility toward intimacy and attachment is about not putting herself in a position to leave or be left ever again. if she rejects people out of hand, no hard decisions ever have to get made. that isn’t to say she’s never had relationships or friendships, but that she tends to get spiky and hard when people get too close, and she’s burned a LOT of bridges that way.

i don’t think she speaks to either brother as an adult and i think she is TERRIFIED of ever reaching out to either of them, because surprise! she actually really loved them! and if they rejected her for what she did it would just destroy her. so she never wants to ever make that a possibility.

[conquestforged]

itsnotpatsy‌.

she’s seen you duck out before. you used to do it when you were young. when you were little it was so you could hide from mother. when you were a teenager it was so someone could hurt you and you could slip away so you didn’t feel it. now you’re not even here of your own will. you’re not self protecting. there’s just no radio signal being picked up. you’re alone in this void.

and then…! a voice touches your ears, and you look wordlessly over at her. she’s seen you like this— pale and tired how she’ll be able to see. the rest of the world buys your bullshit easily. you pretend to be made up and perfect and it’s simple to pass it by, brush it off. you don’t shake your head, but you feel the cobwebs in it.

“sorry,” you say, and you look down at the chair you’ve basically torn open. you didn’t mean to, and a wave of some foreign feeling crashes against you— pats, look what you did! you went and made a mess— i’m so sorry. goddamn it, pats! you can hear it from somewhere in the back, echoing. high and shrill and pissed. you’re not six anymore, and you didn’t accidentally knock over the bodega man’s tip jar because you panicked. you’re much older, and mother is dead.

“hi,” it’s your next statement, soft. like you’re waking up. you wish you had just about anything to take the edge off this moment. your teeth hurt so badly you focus on the pain instead of being right here, “hi.”

you’re so detached that you try to remember where you’re sitting, what chair you’re in, what the world is like around you. what sounds exist. scents. your stomach stings.

you want to wake up but you’re trapped under the ice.

your eyebrows drop, then, basically float down, and then you hear yourself talk again like you’re not necessarily using your own windpipe but some puppet’s, “i missed you. it’s good to see you.”

        “Huh” is the noise Hela makes, almost a laugh. "It’s not good to see you. You look like shit.”

        They have water, for the guests. Clients. Whatever you want to call them. She goes and gets her a cup and after a moment of hovering--wanting to stay upright, keep this indifferent, businesslike, but fuck it, this isn’t business, she’s not indifferent, she’s pissed off that she’s not indifferent. Trish looks like she’s dragged herself, arm’s length by arm’s length, out of the hell to get here, left the consciousness from behind her eyes in the pit, now this is just a Patsy-doll sitting here, pretending like it’s good to see Hela, like any part of this isn’t fucked.

        She sits down next to her. There’s foam from the arms of the chair; Trish has clawed right through the upholstery. Addicts sometimes claw right through the skin of their own arms, this has got to be better. Hela can always buy a new chair.

        “Did you know I worked here?” She has to ask. Her name isn’t on the sign outside; she’s practically a silent partner, except that she’s the one who handles all the formaldehyde. “I’m the one who’s working on Dorothy.” Not “your mother.” When they were younger, she used to say it in a nasty, cynical drawl: Fuck Dorothy. When Trish didn’t know she was allowed to hate her mother, Hela hated her for her.

[conquestforged]

so,

hela’s brain is kind of Always On and there is virtually no situation where she is not taking in and remembering the following information:

the faces and names of people introduced to her or who might come in handy at a later date

so like if she goes to the doctor on midgard and checks in with the receptionist even if she isn’t formally introduced to the receptionist she will read his name tag and remember his face, and ditto for the tech that walks past her down the hall as she’s going into the exam room because she can hear that she’s carrying a ring of keys that might come in handy, etc

the locations of exits and the general floor plan of a place as she has experienced it--so she is virtually always able to find her way back to the front door of a building, and can guess at/visualize parts of buildings she hasn’t seen yet but can make estimations about

generally where she is in relation to her last known landmark, e.g. if you blindfolded her and put her in the back of a car after taking her out of a gov’t building, she would count the amount of time it takes to get to the next location and make a guess at how far away she is/how she can get back, and pay attention to the turns the car makes, the sounds she hears from outside, etc.

she doesn’t actually hold onto all of this information forever or she’d never be able to like. think. if she’s unlikely to return somewhere she definitely lets some of this info go and doesn’t revisit it. what she wants to remember for a long time will either hold on naturally due to emotional attachment, or has to be consciously reinscribed onto her memory w/ mnemonic devices.

the amount of processing she can do at a time definitely has to do with the fact that she’s ummmmmm an alien, with a very different capacity for comprehension and processing than even a top-tier human being. she is also always Switched On in this way because she was trained to be, as a soldier and as odin’s executioner, and also, on some level, as a constant low-level PTSD hypervigilance thing.

if she DIDN’T do all this, if she found that she lacked any of this information, she would be incredibly freaked out because it means that the tactical part of her brain, which is the part of her brain she primarily thinks with, was Off somehow. it would be genuinely scary, as though she’d suddenly lost an entire sense.

[notbadforafailedvessel]

─ Sheila Mosconi (Why Women Kill).

[itsnotpatsy]

@conquestforged​

“hm?” hm. you say it, halting, and your nails keep scratching the arms of the chair you’re sitting in. your eyes blink– hard, and then harder– and you don’t think everything makes any sense. mostly, it’s just fog. there’s this thick, dense, soupy layer over the world. it’s more like a film, maybe. you blink again. your mouth aches, and your eyes feel so dry. they feel scratched with sandpaper. you’re stuck dead ahead with your purse in your lap, thousand yard stare into the wall.

should you tell jess? oh. yeah. absolutely, you should. but you can’t bear to. you can’t stop thinking about the fact that in that back back backroom is–

you’re not going to think about it.

truthfully, you don’t remember why you’re in this parlor, or this waiting room. you don’t have any clue why you came here. it smells like something stale and constant, thick in your mouth like when you’ve just woken up. you look over next to where you are at the table. the arms of the chair? little, faint scratches, your nails constantly biting deeper and deeper.

you’re talking to no one in here. hm? is for no one, considering it’s just you. outside the cameras are waiting and you know that. somewhere. there’s no respect to be had, especially not for you.

(your subconscious says that you should replace this chair immediately, or figure out some lie about how this happened. something less mortifying than an unconscious nervous tick. you think about how humiliating it is, with your hard, glittery, dry eyes.)

you turn your hand over and look at your wrist. your watch beats above faint, dark, spotty bruises. you can only look for a second before the hand ticking blasts in your head like a sledgehammer and you have to focus somewhere else.

time must stand still or something here.

[conquestforged]

        “Trish.”

        Hela’s jaw is clenched, teeth grinding, grinding inside her tense mouth. Her dentist has told her they’d be perfect, perfect teeth if she wasn’t wearing her molars flat. She would have told him concisely what she thought of his opinions if he hadn’t had her mouth wedged open, tools jabbing her gums, at the time. She hates that feeling, being prone, wide open; she hates being on her back; she hates having anything at all exposed, much less her sensitive insides. She hates standing here, admitting that for all the years that have passed, Trish Walker matters to her, and that once Trish’s bitch of a mother showed up on her embalming table, Hela knew she’d be the one cut open. Exposed. The corpse can’t feel it but the living can.

        She’s been trying to get her attention and what patience she has is wearing out. Trish is in a fog, not looking up at the doorway where Hela stands, pretending to be aloof.

        “Trish.” She comes closer. She sees herself reaching out, snapping her fingers irritably in Trish’s face, or shaking her, or grabbing her--all horrible ideas for a person she knows is probably at the bottom of some mental oubliette right now, but they tempt her anyway, tempt her because they’re easy, aggressive, can break this moment, let her pretend she doesn’t care. She does none of it, just stands with her hands at her sides, wearing her neat black workwear and feeling not entirely like herself--no jewelry, no spikes, tattoos covered, and all her piercings out.

        “Trish. Look at me.” She’s stiff. She’s been in this foyer a thousand times before; it’s comfortable, easy, it’s home. Or should be. Right now she feels like the walls are moving in on her, inch by inch; she feels like she’s about to be crushed. “It’s Hela.”