tushanshu_logs | For you are made of nebulas and novas and night sky...

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For you are made of nebulas and novas and night sky...

Characters: Pepper Potts, Yami no Bakura, Raine Sage, Jackie Ma, Gene Khan, Tony Stark and open!
Date: Throughout November
Location: Around Keeliai
Situation: Pepper gains the ability to do magic on her own, she's turning 18... it's a crazy month
Warnings/Rating: Probably mention of death; others as needed

A. Jade Dojo | November 1 | Bakura

After the reappearance of Bakura's ghosts, Pepper offered to be something of an ally for them. As she promised, she hasn't kept asking about it, although it's been extremely difficult. As something of an alternative, she'd visited the pyramid outside the city a few times and drawn out the hieroglyphs. She thought about using the suit to translate them, or to borrow one of Solomon's books, but thought better of it. Pepper is only going to learn those names if or when Bakura tells her. She made a promise, and she's going to keep it. Despite them being remnants of people, mostly full of rage according to Raine, she's grown a little fond of them. She comes to the dojo looking forward to seeing them as well as him now.

B. Fire Sector | November 6 | Jackie

Jackie is a sort of odd and interesting person. He's different than most of the people Pepper knows in Keeliai, but he's fun to hang out with. Plus, hanging out with him is a great reason to visit the Fire sector, which is a super cool place. He's also one of the only people she's talked to about the letter she got and that's earned him extra brownie points.

C. House Iron Dragon | November 15, morning | Gene and Tony

Pepper can do magic. She can do magic. On her own. This is awesome and terrifying at the same time. After taking enough time to calm down about it, she needs to tell Gene and Tony. This is awesome! She's as antsy as she's ever been, buzzing with excitement when she bursts into the house.

"Gene? Tony? Are you guys home?" Pepper calls, loudly.

D. Healing Guild | November 15, later afternoon | Raine

It had occurred to Pepper that, while giving Raine a heads up that she was stopping by would have been the polite thing, her shared excitement about this new development will probably overcome any upset at barging in. She's practically bouncing through the halls on her way to Raine's office.

"Raaaaaaaaine," she sings, sliding to a stop in front of the healer's door, the gauntlet on hidden behind her back.

E. Central and Sky Sectors | Late November | Open to all

Back home, it's nearing Thanksgiving. The air is getting colder, and sometimes the feeling of homesickness is intense. Pepper didn't think she'd be spending Thanksgiving away from her dad for many, many years to come. She's doing her best to hide it by preparing for Thanksgiving at home. That means decorations and finding the best substitutes for things like garlic mashed potatoes and perfect roast turkey. She can often be seen in the markets, poring over the different offerings and trying not to buy all the scarves in Keeliai.

(OOC: If you want a starter, PM me or hit me up on plurk)

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It's fortunate that Pepper has a mind for details. She's practiced at collecting information about and from people and compiling them. The skill has been particularly useful with the bits and pieces of Bakura's history that he's started to share.

The cool air is nice after sparring; a hint of a breeze but not so cold as to need more than a light jacket. She looks up a little too quickly when he mentions what is clearly an Egyptian name.

"Is there something important about being seventeen in Egypt?" Pepper asks, noting the choice of the present tense and using it as well. Maybe that was when people came of age.

Edited (timelines they are a thing) 2015-11-15 05:59 (UTC)

"Not unless you're in the process of getting married," Bakura answered dryly, of which he was fairly sure Pepper was not. "She was. Well, that was the plan, but she had been kind of stubborn about it, I think. I remember Khephra being annoyed by it."

Pepper makes a noise that sounds something like 'nghl' at the prospect of being married at 17.

"So, Khephra is either an annoyed parent with a rebellious daughter, or an annoyed guy who Nakhanatit wasn't marrying," she reasons. She could probably come up with a few others, but those seem the most obvious and most likely. "Good for her, being stubborn," she says, giggling a little.

"Don't make such a sour face at the thought, that was a completely normal age to have been married by, particularly for girls. And you were closer with the first," he added. "Khephra was the village's elder, so it was his responsibility to oversee anything like a marriage. The one trying to marry Nakhanatit was Hor-Khaut."

Bakura pauses here, ostensibly to brush a few stray leaves from the wooden deck, but in reality he's testing himself minutely. There's a peculiar tightness in his chest, as there normally is when he thinks about the lives he knows about, the ones he was part of in a small way by proxy. The conflicted trickle of feedback from the ghosts, collective and distorted by their overbearance of negative emotions.

It hurts, a little, to speak about them like this. But it's an acceptable kind of hurt.

"Yeah, but not for girls from Manhattan." At least 17 was better than 12 or 13. "She can get married whenever she likes, I'm a little busy fighting supervillains most afternoons."

Pepper turns the names over in her head a few times, memorizing them, memorizing the relationships between the people they represent. If only tumultuous marriage arrangements had been the worst of Khul Elna's problems.

She notices his silence, and doesn't disturb it. Instead, Pepper reaches out across the space between them and just barely rests her fingertips on his forearm, and only for a moment, as if to say 'That's enough for now' if he doesn't want to continue. Each name meant a person, a life, and the loss of that life. Three people meant three times that memory of loss, although he must be thinking of all of them whenever he does bring them up. How can he not? She promised she wouldn't press, and she won't.

"No, I suppose not," Bakura answered. It actually wasn't uncommon for girls to start being married off at 13 or 14, although he conceded it was probably better that didn't happen anymore. He looked over at her when she touched his arm, understanding what went unspoken. It took him another moment before he seemed to rouse himself, and gave her a weary smile before resuming speaking.

"You'd have liked Khephra," he said finally. "Near everyone did, and he was the smartest person I knew. He was an estate overseer for most of his life, somewhere in the Ma-hedj Nome, until the landowners fell out of favour with the local heri-tep a'a--"

Bakura paused, running the word through his mind to find an adequate comparison. "Nomarch? A governor. Anyway, that happened a lot, if you angered the wrong people or just didn't slip them enough bribes, whatever. The land got turned over to someone else who was probably kissing up to the governor, and everyone who lived there before was out of a job."

He exhaled with a shake of his head. "Khephra could have gone-- anywhere, really. Any estate would have been lucky to have him, with his skills and his experience. But he came back to Kul Elna... he wanted to bring those skills back, teach them to the younger ones. You have to understand, very few people were literate in the village. Not just in reading and writing, but in a lot of things. It just wasn't necessary for the kind of life that was lived there. Khephra came back because he wanted to try and change that."

It was interesting, Pepper notes, that they really only learned about the structure of ancient societies. Details were reserved largely for the more 'attractive' subjects, like the construction of the pyramids or the mythology. The day to day life of the lower classes was hardly ever held the spotlight.

That decision had been a mistake on the part of whomever had made it, she decides, as she listens to Bakura speak.

"He sounds like a great guy," Pepper agrees. "He wanted a better life for all of you. And he cared more about that than himself." A quality which Bakura seemed to have picked up, at least in regards to his ghosts. "It must have been hard, when everyone else was always doing the ladder-climbing thing. Khephra. Hm."

She likes the name, and who he apparently was. He'll probably come up in more of the stories Bakura tells her, as the elder.

"What'd he look like?"

"He did," Bakura nodded, and there was a note of undisguised fondness in the agreement. "It would have been nice to see what he could have done, if there'd been more time. My--" he hesitates a moment, as if reconsidering what he was about to say, but reluctantly continued.

"My mother never spoke of whoever my father was, so I... think I thought of Khephra, in much the same way."

He leaned back, thinking some more. "He was quite tall, although in his age he'd begun to stoop a little. He walked with a cane, and his hands were... he had trouble some days, writing. Especially in the mornings."

"Sounds like arthritis," Pepper considers.

She's familiar with that reluctance about talking of one's parents, or at least of one parent in particular. And she decides to share a piece of her past she usually keeps well locked away.

"My dad doesn't talk about my mom," she starts, exhaling slowly. "I remember she had red hair, like mine. But her eyes were more of a blue-green; I got Dad's eyes. She got sick when I was little. I don't know if he doesn't say anything because he's worried about upsetting me, or if it's too upsetting for him. Probably both." She smiles at him, but it's tinged with sadness. "It's nice that you had someone to be a father for you, even if you didn't really realize it back then. Was he the one who taught you how to write?"

"Most likely," he agreed about the arthritis. "I remember he took coriander and cumin in a hot tea in the mornings, and when we could steal some, we made a paste from crushed frankincense, and rubbed it on his hands."

He's quiet as she describes her mother, trying to picture the woman in his mind. Taking Pepper's features, changing them based on her words, trying to build a mental image of the woman. "Perhaps both," he agrees. "Still, one day you should ask."

Bakura nodded, running his hands absently over one of the Ring's spires. "He did," he confirmed. "He was teaching the three of us: myself, Senef, Tjepa."

"I will." She says it like a promise, but one she probably won't remember making. Still, it's an important enough subject that, Keeliai or not, Pepper needs to raise with her dad eventually.

"Stealing even as kids, huh? You three must have been a serious handful," she comments, lightness returning to her tone. Pepper tries to imagine Bakura as a child, and she giggles at the mental image of him. "Did you like writing? Hieroglyphs seem more like art than an alphabet."

It wouldn't have been an idle pastime - being able to write could open all sorts of doors for them - but it could be enjoyable even as an occupation.

"We were," he agreed wryly. "We weren't the only children, but we three were the only ones of that age. But we weren't the only ones who stole, Kul Elna was called the Thieves Village for a reason. There was reason for it, yes, but it wasn't a wholly unearned moniker."

He would elaborate, if she was interested, but leave it if she wanted to know more about the people.

"To be honest, I disliked it quite a bit," he admitted. "I didn't appreciate what he was trying to do for us. I couldn't imagine the kind of life he wanted us to be able to lead until much later."

"That seems like an odd occupation for a whole village," Pepper remarks. Obviously not everyone stole all the time, but there was enough to garner the name, apparently. "But if it earned that name, it didn't start out that way, right?"

Growing up in the Thieves Village certainly explained how Bakura ended up a thief, as well. He'd inherited the family business, so to speak.

"You must have been pretty young." Raine had said he was a child when the massacre happened, after all. "Kids usually don't appreciate their parents until they're older," she adds with a smile, "That's what I've heard, anyway."

"No," he shook his head. "Once, it was the home of tomb-builders, architects and workers. That's why Kul Elna was where it was, as the foot of the cliffs. Many small settlements on the western side of the river started out that way."

He pulled a breath in and then it out slowly at her observation. "You're not wrong. I was five when it happened."

"Oh. Wow. Did they run out of space to build more tombs around there and just... let the village fend for itself or something?" Not something they covered in history class, that was for sure.

Pepper inhales sharply - five? Bakura really had spent all his life fighting, hadn't he? His age at the time only serves to make the whole situation resolutely more foul.

"God, I could barely tie my shoes at five years old. How did you survive on your own?" She looks aghast. "Er. Sorry, you don't have to answer that if you don't want to."

She's been trying to be more careful about asking questions when the ghosts come up, but that one just kind of popped out.

"Not out of space, just out of power," Bakura replied. "This would have been quite far back, you understand. Old Kingdom, perhaps. Certainly no trace of the village's initial workforce remained there for its original purpose. While a pharaoh was in power, the royal city would have sent supplies as part of its tithes, but once the dynasty moved on... well, so did the support. And yes, those who lived there would have been left to fend for themselves. Kul Elna wasn't unique in that regard, but it was out of the way enough that it attracted bad sorts. Even so, it was still a village... families lived there. It wasn't just a hundred cutthroats sitting around and plotting robbery, much as certain others would have liked to believe."

His mouth quirked upward at her outburst, not quite a smile and too wry to be a smirk.

"Well, for the first two years, I was with a trader's caravan. They found me out in the desert, after that night, and decided I was worth keeping on as mirhat for a while."

"I suppose the reputation could have been useful sometimes but... You know, they never teach us this kind of stuff in school, and it seems a lot more important than knowing the difference between Ramses I and II or which god did what." Villages like Kul Elna might not have determined the ebb and flow of history on their own, but they mattered more than most history classes gave them credit for.

"Mirhat?" Some kind of slave or servant perhaps. She studies him for a moment, as if debating something with herself, and then says: "You're kind of amazing; do you know that?"

In both good and bad ways. His ability to survive was remarkable, and no matter how much evil he may have perpetrated in his millennia-long quest to restore his family, he gave all of himself for that cause. That meant something, and was worth recognizing.

"Mm, a sort of drudge slave," he elaborated, the factual way he said it; not even resentful, but as casual a recollection as the rest of the history he relayed. "Not one assigned to any specific task or area of expertise."

But he paused in his story to look at her in surprise at her declaration. "Much as my ego appreciates the elevation, biahbenat, getting picked up by a caravan is hardly worth such admiration."

Bakura was certain that wasn't what she'd meant, but for all his posturing -- one didn't go around proclaiming to be the King of Thieves without a healthy self-confidence, after all -- he'd never really considered himself remarkable on a personal level.

Pepper rolls her eyes with mild amusement.

"You know that's not what I meant. Maybe getting picked up by a caravan isn't impressive, but surviving everything you went through at that age, and then spending your entire life - literally giving everything you had, your ka, your soul - for your family? That's amazing. And sure, you did some stuff that most people would consider seriously bad-," She's one of them, "-along the way, but even that's amazing in a sort of 'what the heck, holy crap' kind of way. Not a lot of people would even consider doing what you've done, much less actually act on it. This is not approval for getting yourself killed, by the way," she adds pointedly. "But I can be annoyed with your lack of self-preservation for your own sake and still admire what you did at the same time."

He offered her a smile, but it was sad and weary. "Admirable would have had them at rest millennia ago, but I do appreciate the sentiment. I never thought of it that way, nor frankly cared what anyone else thought of it. The goal was all that mattered."

Pepper fixes him in a narrow, concerned gaze.

"What about what they think?" she asks quietly, referring to the ghosts. "Have you ever considered, even for just a second, that maybe, possibly, they might have wanted you to live no matter what? I mean, even if it was just selfish, if you survived and lived your whole life then at least they had someone to remember them and keep their names alive, rather than taking mega giant risks where you might lose that opportunity for forever."

She sighs, looking out into the yard although she can't see the ghosts.

"They might be ghosts now, but they're your family, and maybe the way they are now means that they would want you to risk literally everything. If there were more of themselves left, more than just rage and hate and anger... did you ever ask yourself what they might have thought about risking your soul? You're their hope, even if they can't feel that anymore."

It's all said evenly. She's honestly just curious if the thought occurred to him, and if he had ever entertained living a different kind of life.

"But they're not more of themselves, are they?" he snaps, harsher than he'd intended, but with enough anger behind it not to rein the spike of temper back. The soft nostalgia is gone; returned is the simmering resolve and cold fury that had defined him for so long.

"What use would daydreaming of what might have happened done for me? Or do you, as well as Wreath, think that I've done them more harm than good by trying to save them?"

It's a side of Bakura she's hardly seen before, and it's a little shocking; Pepper flinches, barely, trying to hide it. His reaction is not unexpected, but it does sting. More so because he has reason for such anger, rather than feeling that the words were undeserved. She makes a conscious and careful choice not to snap back, taking a deep breath before speaking again.

"No, I don't think that," she replies honestly, still watching the empty air. "I have no idea if what you've done was better or worse, and even if I did have an opinion, my opinion doesn't really matter. They're your family." Pepper turns back to face him again. "You did what you did. I just wanted to know if you ever thought you had another choice."

"I didn't waste my time with it," Bakura replies coldly, pressing his hands against the wooden slats and getting to his feet and picking up the short staff he used to spar against her. "And neither should you. I didn't watch them die so I could turn around and live carefree and at ease."

The intimation is there, a warning in the tone, that it's not for debate. He turns and heads back into the dojo.

Crap.

Pepper closes her eyes as Bakura gets up and leaves. That had not ended well, but... his reaction and his response are telling in and of themselves. If Bakura had ever thought he had other options, he had dismissed them anyway. The choice he made in either situation was enormous, incredible, and terrible all at the same time. She might not agree with the actions he took because of that choice, but the choice itself is a different matter.

Choosing to live, though, didn't mean he was choosing to forget, or choosing not to fight. Perhaps when faced with something so horrific, something as awful as what he'd been through, those subtleties couldn't exist.

She sits quietly on the veranda for a while, listening to the sounds around her. Pepper drinks in the noise and tries to soothe the storm of sadness and confusion occupying her mind. Outwardly, though, she's calm save the tension in the corner of her eyes and mouth. It's a choice to be calm, one that she's learned from Skul.

Eventually, Pepper gets up and goes to return the staff to it's place in the dojo. She debates the merits of trying to speak with him, and instead goes to her bag and pulls out a piece of paper. She writes a short note and leaves it folded over the staff where he can see it whenever he does his usual weapons maintenance, then departs. The note reads:

Thank you for answering my question, and for not sparing me your anger. See you in a few days.

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For you are made of nebulas and novas and night sky...

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