duplicity — inbox

[vestments]

Comments

[vestments]

Not especially.
Questions have never been my forte.

[redhourglass]

you don’t stay alive in this business as long as i have without asking a few

[vestments]

( ha. )

Maybe that's why I've been killed so many times.

[redhourglass]

maybe not every time

probably 40% of them

[vestments]

Mm.

( give him a second to work it out. )

Depends how you break it down.

( not asking questions is what got him into the bullshit with khonshu, after all, and that's lead to a solid every one of his deaths except the first. )

[redhourglass]

you realize most of us only get one, right?

[vestments]

Most people don't agree to be the avatar of an Egyptian god.
The price to pay, and all that.

[redhourglass]

i think it has more to do with the lack of opportunity
if offered immortality, i think most would take it regardless of cost

[vestments]

It's not immortality.
I age, I'll die eventually.

[redhourglass]

and so what? in the interim you just get a ‘get out of death free’ card?

[vestments]

Presuming a degree of 'do as I ask'.

[redhourglass]

so it’s coercion then

what would happen if you decided not to do what he says ever again?

[vestments]

It's a debt. Regardless of anything else, I made a choice.
I know men who'd have made the better choice irrespective of how few details they'd been given.

Now? He's imprisoned on Asgard, so not a lot.
Otherwise? I imagine he'd move on to the next guy. I've never asked what happened to the previous Moon Knight.

[redhourglass]

some debts people ought to know better than to collect on

( clint had never even attempted to try for all that she owed him. never would, probably. maybe her death had been the final payment; her life for his. )

so it’s like black widow, then
a title, not a person

[vestments]

He's a god, not a person.

I suppose.
Like I said, I haven't asked many questions.

[redhourglass]

want me to tell him myself?

( bluffing .. sort of? who knows how the afterlife works, etc etc. )

how did you end up with this debt, anyway?

1/2

[vestments]

( a pause. )

No-one else can see him, let alone talk to him.

But he'd find the attempt cute.

[vestments]

I had a disagreement with my employer.
He stabbed me.
Took my pilot.
Left me to die.

I found myself in front of his temple in Selima and presented with two options: die or live.
I chose to live, and here we are.

I'm aware of the irony.

[redhourglass]

doesn’t sound like a fair deal to me
you were under duress

[vestments]

Maybe.
But duress is when faith is tested.
You don't need to pretend I'm blameless.

My father would've never made the same deal.

[redhourglass]

never said you were blameless
but you and i both know that’s a no-win situation
not like the gods play fair

( she’s got firsthand experience with that - if ‘gods’ are even what thor and loki are. 🤷 )

your father wasn’t in the situation you were in

[vestments]

Whose definition of fair, Natasha? Ours? We're human.
It's hardly the same thing.

My father was a pacifist.
He never would have been.
When he died, he was ( who knows, actually, because they hadn't talked in years, and then marc (steven, both of them—) had ignored his phone call. ) everything I wasn't.

[redhourglass]

not many people who can aspire to true pacifism
most of us have some sense that sometimes the end justifies the means

( or it doesn’t. she’d been raised to be a weapon, nothing else. )

why is he your measuring stick?

[vestments]

He was better than that.

He was the best man I've ever known.

[redhourglass]

( hmm. even the best in her experience have some flaws. but what does she know about fathers? about family? )

were you close?