Havoc and Retribution

Nadir

In the aftermath of the battle with the Norns, Jay is dying inside of herself.

It is literal and visceral and emotional.

Gone is the girl she was, the woman she became. In its place is this shell of being, so, so, so, very tired to her soul. She may have decided to fall, decided to let the old parts of her die, but she does not know what she is now.

There are metaphors about how dead things in soil help plants grow. She wants to believe that she is like that. A sparkly quote on a pretty background posted for millions of people to see. Hope from death. New birth from the remnants of a deceased soul.

But Jay knows that she is only a fragment now.

Somehow, she ended up in this story of titanic goddesses and cosmic beings so much bigger than one lost little girl from Earth. Not much about her life before Warren Biochemical is left in her memories but she does remember knowing, even as a child, that she was small compared to the universe. How can a person believe they matter so much in a universe that is so big? She knows that she never thought of herself as special as a child. She may not know much about her childhood, but she does remember that.

Even when she was being experimented on by Tyr and Bradlich, Jay never saw herself as something important. It was blind bad luck that brought her to them and to that operating table. Her mother was a drug addict, her father a starry-eyed dreamer. What was she then? Too young to know, she didn't ever think about it any more until ...

... until she decided to escape Warren Biochemical.

Something about that musing has Jay alert inside her own head. Why did she choose to escape Warren Biochemical all those months ago? Once she did escape, she was suddenly thrust into a world where she mattered, where she learned to care about a whole set of new people and found out who she really was. But... why did she escape in the first place? If she was so self-depreciating about her own worth, then what propelled her out of that lab, out into the night, with only her wits to guide her?

Intrigued despite her bleak outlook on her own future, Jaycee Strong follows that thread of a thought.

Why? Why? Why?

It echoes through her head, a steady drumbeat. She moves through her own mind, color and light and sound blurring as she travels back. The beat of the question in her head feels like the beginning of a rhythm her soul knows but she cannot place. Rainbow light bleeds at the edges of the vision of her internal eye. She sees the last months, her days on Vanaheim, a passionate kiss in a prison, stitches in the night, a dagger to the heart on the Bifrost, meeting the trickster on Asgard, the Helicarrier fight, waking up in the Avengers Tower.

As the moments pass, she hears the strains of a French horn or cello or some other instrument she cannot name swirling in a tenor around her. She moves backwards not in a linear path, but in something that she slowly realizes is a dance. Each moment is a measure of musical time, each scene a phrase between breaths. Each day becomes a movement, each set of memories an entire piece of music. She can feel the notes on her skin, tiny vibrations of sound that resonate in her blood.

She remembers the Dance of Sigyn. She remembers how dance has always been her release from everything. Even when she used it to control her telekinesis in the past, she moved from within, not by looking at her surroundings, but by feeling her connection to her surroundings.

The drumbeat is steady as her heart in her chest. It propels her onwards, limbs now moving through space by intuition instead of force. She is not swimming against a current in her own head as she does when she fights Hel. This time she is a band of light rippling in the water, moving with the eddies. The swirl of rainbow light caressing her feet feels like the most solid surface she has ever danced on. Her eyes are open and clear and instead of trying to control the dance, she lets go.