The raw feelings having faded, this little meetup feels almost inappropriate. They don't really know each other, after all. And the insistence his other self had had that they not burn any bridges was more than a bit uncharacteristic of him. At first, he feels almost as if he's going along with this for that man's sake more than anyone else's, which is surreal to say the least.
But Misty's good company, really. Bright and pleasant, and she really does seem to enjoy the film. He wonders if she'd have felt the same way if she knew his true history, but...for now she doesn't.
When she asks about his new warden, he's very glad she doesn't know more about him.
"I don't know about 'exciting'. I'm not sure I know what to expect. He mostly keeps suggesting we'll 'figure it out'. Which doesn't exactly instill me with confidence in his abilities." He shrugs. "What exactly did you and your inmate do to get him to graduate?"
"He's not exactly what I'd call a very structured type," she remarks, not unfondly. Beej seems a poor candidate for projections, hard-number progress. Hardly seems surprising or unfair to develop some nerves about it.
Her arms cross at the question, eyes rising contemplatively to the ceiling. So tempting to try and boil things down to formulas, every time the topic comes up. Waste of time. Bottomless rabbit hole.
"We talked a lot. About important things, before and after we were paired. I tried to take at least one meal with him a day, little visits, stuff like that. Thought out loud at each other, had...not really arguments, not really debates. We didn't dance around things. Things seemed weird in his file, I noticed a pattern, I'd ask and he'd answer and we'd peck at it awhile. Kept him comfortable, tried to make things painless."
Her chin drops into her hand, she searches for anything more obvious than that. "I was lucky, of course. He didn't run from the process, never fought me. As himself, anyway."
Only one murder attempt seems a small price to pay, brilliantly behaved and kind as he was otherwise.
"For the record? You seem smart enough to not have to wait around on pairings."
Loki's mouth quirks up wryly. "I'm not sure what smart has to do with it. If I was smart I'd find a way to do this without anyone ever getting a file on me."
But he's not seeing a way around that, unfortunately. So far, of all the people he's met on the Barge, Betelgeuse does seem the least likely to judge him for his past, although there are certainly parts he finds it difficult to believe anyone would be able to read without flinching. He's disturbed by it himself, after all. But it is likely Betelgeuse's lack of horror and disgust that would make him a poor candidate for actually getting Loki to graduate.
Which he's still not certain is even possible regardless of how skilled his warden might be.
"I have a...pattern of orchestrating self-fulfilling prophecies. Unintentionally, of course. I don't know if it would be apparent in a file," he says, choosing his words carefully, "but in hindsight I see it happen again and again."
"It didn't take much to convince him to pair up with me, and I simply took advantage of the opportunity." He shakes his head, the exhaustion on his face only slightly exaggerated from the reality. "I might be smart enough to seek out a pairing because it is the only way out of here. But whether I'm smart enough to actually change..."
He may have simply landed on the warden who is the least likely to encourage actual change. What a wonderful excuse for when he inevitably fails?
"What happens to inmates who don't change for the 'better'?" He stops short of tracing quotation marks in the air but his skepticism of an objective 'better' is fairly obvious.
"They linger, and get worse, and eventually disappear. No word, no notes, just gone entirely along with their cabin one day." Her tone is solemn. She's lost people. It doesn't wait and there are no sure signs; she has to be vigilant and blunt. "Back to being dead."
A moment is allowed for it to sink in. Then, though only slightly, she smiles. This is something she feels she'll be explaining for years.
"You misunderstand. Smart has nothing to do with graduating-- if it were a puzzle, none of the smart ones would be here. It's emotional intelligence, self awareness, literally being dropped into something new to shock your system. I think what people don't get is you don't need to wait on an official pairing at all. Any pairing, actually."
Graduating is graduating. Pairing status only matters to a warden needing the deal.
Emotional intelligence. Loki avoids making a face at that. It sounds so frivolous. What good would his 'self awareness' do the universe? Certainly not enough to warrant dragging him here from the brink of death. There must be something else to it all.
He just wishes the ticket out of here was something less...unpleasant.
"The thing is, I feel rather aware already. I know all the terrible things I've done. I'm fully conscious of what a monster I am." He shakes his head, a soft mirthless laugh leaving him. "I'm hundreds of years old. You'd think I'd have figured that sort of thing out by now."
He tries not to think about how many things have changed in the past decade. How much he's changed. How he might not have ended up here had he died before Thor's coronation. He might have even gone to Valhalla. The changes he's gone through have all been for the worse, surely.
He hesitates before he goes on, eyes darting away as he realizes he's essentially minimizing her role. "I'm sure my warden will try their very best. Betelgeuse seems rather determined, though I don't know that he's...fully developed his own self awareness." His lips quirk up at that before falling again. "I would, of course, prefer to be alive. It just seems unlikely I will ever meet the parameters."
And if none of it is possible, he knows his own tendencies. One good deed doesn't undo all the bad. He'll rot here until he goes back to rot on an abandoned ship drifting through space.
Skeptical as she is of some, generally she can trust that the Admiral selects only those who can be redeemed. It's just a matter of frustrating trial and error once they make it aboard.
"It's not just awareness, either. It's someone helping you want to fix things, or the boat forcing you if the former's never going to happen on its own. Some kind of outside element is necessary, and that's what the boat's shoving people around for, and that's why wardens are such a...wildly mixed bag. Beej might not be the best fit for you overall - doesn't mean there's not something useful you could glean there, someplace."
The sooner one starts taking in any lesson not nailed down, the sooner they're freed. Supervised or no, she figures. The Barge is just too damn varied to keep anyone stagnant who isn't choosing to be.
"If you're so aware you're a monster, what put you there in the first place? Why not work against some of it?"
Loki nearly winces at calling him Beej, but he sees her point. People do change, of course they do. But he's not sure how you can ensure it's for the better.
He drums his fingers on the arm of his chair for a moment, stalling his response. It doesn't change what his first thought is, however. She sounds just like Thor. You could be more.
When he looks up again, he gives a wry smirk. "Not to start a nature vs nurture argument, but. If one is born a monster, there's only so much one can do, I think. Particularly when you don't even find out that that's the case until far too late to divert your course."
He pauses, and when he speaks again, there's some arrogance to his tone, though it's mostly there to hide the bitterness. "Considering where I started, I think I've actually done quite well for myself already. Genetics set me up to be a savage. It could be worse."
Born a monster. Her eyes don't narrow, but they do light up some. Seems meaty.
"I'd think if someone can resist a lot of nature, no reason to not believe they could beat all of it if they had the right kind of environment to try it out, support them." Just as importantly, "Would it be overstepping to ask for a little elaboration? Don't know that genes could do that to most."
There's some hypocrisy here, but it's drops in the bucket. Worth carrying for the question's sake.
Normally, Loki would bristle at someone asking about his heritage. He's worlds better about it now than he was, of course-- writing and watching plays about it all had certainly put it into some perspective. But deep down it's still a struggle.
But after what happened on the train, he doesn't exactly feel like he has any right to feel any more violated than she probably does.
"I was adopted as an infant. My adoptive father found me abandoned, left for dead, and took me in." He gestures at himself vaguely. "I'm a runt, you see. My race is known as frost giants. The Jotnar."
As he moves on to the real issue, his expression grows darker. "They never told me. He cast a spell on me, disguised me as an Aesir-- as I look to you now. And I was raised on stories of the cruelty and evil of the frost giants. I was taught how my adoptive father put them in their place when they attempted to invade Earth and slaughter innocent people."
Loki notices the tension in his shoulders and forces himself to relax, to lighten his tone as he continues. "Of course, I found out more recently that all of that was much more complicated than I was told. The Aesir were hardly innocent. But that doesn't mean the parts of me that will always be Jotnar are pure."
And the instant he discovered his true parentage, the damage he did... It was like he had unlocked the wicked violence at the heart of him.
Adopted. Her mind returns to the train, that final conversation of real significance. Returns to one of her earliest meaningful exchanges on the barge, the theory that there's physics to these things. As in one life, so in another. This is a split instant; she's listening attentively, nodding where appropriate. Not so much as a peep until he's well and done stating his piece.
There's no mistaking the tension as he goes on, but, optimist that she is, the conscious control over it is also noted. She thinks briefly of her own youth and roughly sidelines it.
"They could both be muddled," she suggests mildly. "If one could be less than heroic, the other isn't necessarily without some kind of worth." Not that she could claim any personal experience.
And the train, the father, the brother. She continues, "Were you happy? Before you knew?"
Loki's eyebrows raise. He hadn't expected such a blunt question. But it's insightful.
Had he been?
"More happy than I was before, certainly." His eyes go distant as he pictures that time. "But I also thought I was smarter than everyone around me and tried to indirectly persuade them into doing what I wanted." Also known as manipulating them. "So I couldn't have been that happy."
"Something to hold onto, then." Not the unhappiness, but-- "Even if that part of you is entirely rotten, which I'm not sure I'd believe, it couldn't be the root of every problem. One moving cog."
It would certainly be simpler if he could point to one single cause for all his failures. But it wouldn't make overcoming them any easier. Being evil at his core doesn't exactly solve itself.
At her question, he shrugs. "Leave me alone, largely. But I also sabotaged my brother's coronation because I doubted he was ready. Which he immediately proved to be true, I might add." He scowls a little, eyes darting away as he remembers. "It didn't work out. I discovered my nature in the course of it. Went a bit mad over it. Sort of ended sabotaging myself, in hindsight."
That was usually what happened, actually.
"Even when I'm right, I'm wrong. Seems a bit like the deck is stacked against me, don't you agree?"
Hardly sounds sweet, but she's not without sympathy. After considering it a moment she pats his shoulder - twice, light, and her hands return to her lap. Companionable.
"I'm sorry things turn out like that. You're sounding pretty self-aware, at least. If you can keep ahold of that long enough to resist jumping into the same traps you could probably cover a lot of ground. Still feeling a bit mad about things, or-?"
There are factors ultimately working in favor of recovery and composure, but on the whole she does seem receptively wired for them. Hard to let even an echo of a friendship die.
And he seems like the sort to need it. At his question, she shrugs. Honest. Not flippant, but decidedly casual.
"I wouldn't call it a pressing concern, but it's good to know what you think, and what to expect when the ship pushes too hard. People blow up a lot and things turn up alright, but it's probably good to check and know whether or not to expect it."
Loki's not surprised that people would blow up given his first flood and breach. They were both bound to rile people up, and most of these people seem to be bad at coping with boredom, let alone having their buttons pushed. He's surprised she's concluded things turn out okay more often than not.
"I wish I could say I know what is likely to 'set me off', but given what I've seen so far I really don't know what to expect. Not to mention the fact that this place seems capable of taking my ability to control myself away." At least, that's what the flood that happened just before he arrived sounded like, from what he's been told.
He sighs, sitting up straight again. "In any case, I'm not an idiot. If I'm trapped here, it would be foolish to intentionally do damage." And he's starting to like some people here, though he'd likely do plenty of damage just by admitting that.
"Foolish things don't always feel foolish in the heat of the moment," she counters with a wry smile. Everyone simply having bouts of foolishness would be too easy an explanation for such a variety of complex people. "Right buttons pushed at once, anybody's gonna do some stupid stuff. Those are the things it's better to not hold against somebody too much."
Within reason. Of course.
"Probably good to have hit that point already though. Things run smoother for you."
As she speaks, Loki realizes that he actually would like to know what his buttons are. He has an idea of some of them, but even he has been surprised at things that have upset him in the past. Perhaps he'll never know precisely why those things are an issue, but he'd at least know to avoid them if possible. It's something to work on with a warden, perhaps, if only to keep him from being expelled from the ship entirely.
"Thank you for your counsel, Miss Misty. I might just do well here after all."
Not graduation well, necessarily. But not as poorly as he might've thought.
It's reassurance enough. If he can stay on board, eventually the right stimuli will work out a lot of the rest. Something of a weight lifted, she bows her head.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
But Misty's good company, really. Bright and pleasant, and she really does seem to enjoy the film. He wonders if she'd have felt the same way if she knew his true history, but...for now she doesn't.
When she asks about his new warden, he's very glad she doesn't know more about him.
"I don't know about 'exciting'. I'm not sure I know what to expect. He mostly keeps suggesting we'll 'figure it out'. Which doesn't exactly instill me with confidence in his abilities." He shrugs. "What exactly did you and your inmate do to get him to graduate?"
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Her arms cross at the question, eyes rising contemplatively to the ceiling. So tempting to try and boil things down to formulas, every time the topic comes up. Waste of time. Bottomless rabbit hole.
"We talked a lot. About important things, before and after we were paired. I tried to take at least one meal with him a day, little visits, stuff like that. Thought out loud at each other, had...not really arguments, not really debates. We didn't dance around things. Things seemed weird in his file, I noticed a pattern, I'd ask and he'd answer and we'd peck at it awhile. Kept him comfortable, tried to make things painless."
Her chin drops into her hand, she searches for anything more obvious than that. "I was lucky, of course. He didn't run from the process, never fought me. As himself, anyway."
Only one murder attempt seems a small price to pay, brilliantly behaved and kind as he was otherwise.
"For the record? You seem smart enough to not have to wait around on pairings."
no subject
But he's not seeing a way around that, unfortunately. So far, of all the people he's met on the Barge, Betelgeuse does seem the least likely to judge him for his past, although there are certainly parts he finds it difficult to believe anyone would be able to read without flinching. He's disturbed by it himself, after all. But it is likely Betelgeuse's lack of horror and disgust that would make him a poor candidate for actually getting Loki to graduate.
Which he's still not certain is even possible regardless of how skilled his warden might be.
"I have a...pattern of orchestrating self-fulfilling prophecies. Unintentionally, of course. I don't know if it would be apparent in a file," he says, choosing his words carefully, "but in hindsight I see it happen again and again."
"It didn't take much to convince him to pair up with me, and I simply took advantage of the opportunity." He shakes his head, the exhaustion on his face only slightly exaggerated from the reality. "I might be smart enough to seek out a pairing because it is the only way out of here. But whether I'm smart enough to actually change..."
He may have simply landed on the warden who is the least likely to encourage actual change. What a wonderful excuse for when he inevitably fails?
"What happens to inmates who don't change for the 'better'?" He stops short of tracing quotation marks in the air but his skepticism of an objective 'better' is fairly obvious.
no subject
A moment is allowed for it to sink in. Then, though only slightly, she smiles. This is something she feels she'll be explaining for years.
"You misunderstand. Smart has nothing to do with graduating-- if it were a puzzle, none of the smart ones would be here. It's emotional intelligence, self awareness, literally being dropped into something new to shock your system. I think what people don't get is you don't need to wait on an official pairing at all. Any pairing, actually."
Graduating is graduating. Pairing status only matters to a warden needing the deal.
no subject
He just wishes the ticket out of here was something less...unpleasant.
"The thing is, I feel rather aware already. I know all the terrible things I've done. I'm fully conscious of what a monster I am." He shakes his head, a soft mirthless laugh leaving him. "I'm hundreds of years old. You'd think I'd have figured that sort of thing out by now."
He tries not to think about how many things have changed in the past decade. How much he's changed. How he might not have ended up here had he died before Thor's coronation. He might have even gone to Valhalla. The changes he's gone through have all been for the worse, surely.
He hesitates before he goes on, eyes darting away as he realizes he's essentially minimizing her role. "I'm sure my warden will try their very best. Betelgeuse seems rather determined, though I don't know that he's...fully developed his own self awareness." His lips quirk up at that before falling again. "I would, of course, prefer to be alive. It just seems unlikely I will ever meet the parameters."
And if none of it is possible, he knows his own tendencies. One good deed doesn't undo all the bad. He'll rot here until he goes back to rot on an abandoned ship drifting through space.
no subject
Skeptical as she is of some, generally she can trust that the Admiral selects only those who can be redeemed. It's just a matter of frustrating trial and error once they make it aboard.
"It's not just awareness, either. It's someone helping you want to fix things, or the boat forcing you if the former's never going to happen on its own. Some kind of outside element is necessary, and that's what the boat's shoving people around for, and that's why wardens are such a...wildly mixed bag. Beej might not be the best fit for you overall - doesn't mean there's not something useful you could glean there, someplace."
The sooner one starts taking in any lesson not nailed down, the sooner they're freed. Supervised or no, she figures. The Barge is just too damn varied to keep anyone stagnant who isn't choosing to be.
"If you're so aware you're a monster, what put you there in the first place? Why not work against some of it?"
no subject
He drums his fingers on the arm of his chair for a moment, stalling his response. It doesn't change what his first thought is, however. She sounds just like Thor. You could be more.
When he looks up again, he gives a wry smirk. "Not to start a nature vs nurture argument, but. If one is born a monster, there's only so much one can do, I think. Particularly when you don't even find out that that's the case until far too late to divert your course."
He pauses, and when he speaks again, there's some arrogance to his tone, though it's mostly there to hide the bitterness. "Considering where I started, I think I've actually done quite well for myself already. Genetics set me up to be a savage. It could be worse."
no subject
"I'd think if someone can resist a lot of nature, no reason to not believe they could beat all of it if they had the right kind of environment to try it out, support them." Just as importantly, "Would it be overstepping to ask for a little elaboration? Don't know that genes could do that to most."
There's some hypocrisy here, but it's drops in the bucket. Worth carrying for the question's sake.
no subject
But after what happened on the train, he doesn't exactly feel like he has any right to feel any more violated than she probably does.
"I was adopted as an infant. My adoptive father found me abandoned, left for dead, and took me in." He gestures at himself vaguely. "I'm a runt, you see. My race is known as frost giants. The Jotnar."
As he moves on to the real issue, his expression grows darker. "They never told me. He cast a spell on me, disguised me as an Aesir-- as I look to you now. And I was raised on stories of the cruelty and evil of the frost giants. I was taught how my adoptive father put them in their place when they attempted to invade Earth and slaughter innocent people."
Loki notices the tension in his shoulders and forces himself to relax, to lighten his tone as he continues. "Of course, I found out more recently that all of that was much more complicated than I was told. The Aesir were hardly innocent. But that doesn't mean the parts of me that will always be Jotnar are pure."
And the instant he discovered his true parentage, the damage he did... It was like he had unlocked the wicked violence at the heart of him.
no subject
There's no mistaking the tension as he goes on, but, optimist that she is, the conscious control over it is also noted. She thinks briefly of her own youth and roughly sidelines it.
"They could both be muddled," she suggests mildly. "If one could be less than heroic, the other isn't necessarily without some kind of worth." Not that she could claim any personal experience.
And the train, the father, the brother. She continues, "Were you happy? Before you knew?"
no subject
Had he been?
"More happy than I was before, certainly." His eyes go distant as he pictures that time. "But I also thought I was smarter than everyone around me and tried to indirectly persuade them into doing what I wanted." Also known as manipulating them. "So I couldn't have been that happy."
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A beat.
"What did you want people to do?"
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At her question, he shrugs. "Leave me alone, largely. But I also sabotaged my brother's coronation because I doubted he was ready. Which he immediately proved to be true, I might add." He scowls a little, eyes darting away as he remembers. "It didn't work out. I discovered my nature in the course of it. Went a bit mad over it. Sort of ended sabotaging myself, in hindsight."
That was usually what happened, actually.
"Even when I'm right, I'm wrong. Seems a bit like the deck is stacked against me, don't you agree?"
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"I'm sorry things turn out like that. You're sounding pretty self-aware, at least. If you can keep ahold of that long enough to resist jumping into the same traps you could probably cover a lot of ground. Still feeling a bit mad about things, or-?"
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But her question earns something of a smirk. "Less than before, I suppose. Larger concerns arose. And I had a few years to 'recover', you could say."
He leans his head onto one hand, elbow resting on the arm of the chair. "Do you worry I'm unstable?"
no subject
And he seems like the sort to need it. At his question, she shrugs. Honest. Not flippant, but decidedly casual.
"I wouldn't call it a pressing concern, but it's good to know what you think, and what to expect when the ship pushes too hard. People blow up a lot and things turn up alright, but it's probably good to check and know whether or not to expect it."
no subject
"I wish I could say I know what is likely to 'set me off', but given what I've seen so far I really don't know what to expect. Not to mention the fact that this place seems capable of taking my ability to control myself away." At least, that's what the flood that happened just before he arrived sounded like, from what he's been told.
He sighs, sitting up straight again. "In any case, I'm not an idiot. If I'm trapped here, it would be foolish to intentionally do damage." And he's starting to like some people here, though he'd likely do plenty of damage just by admitting that.
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Within reason. Of course.
"Probably good to have hit that point already though. Things run smoother for you."
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"Thank you for your counsel, Miss Misty. I might just do well here after all."
Not graduation well, necessarily. But not as poorly as he might've thought.
no subject
"Fingers crossed for you."