hela dark'ness dementia raven way

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.