enamelled
Red hair. Short, polite, humilitous. Lots of long locks says high-maintenance, uptight, impossibly perfect. A cherry-red bob leaves room for the smile and says approachable, interesting, patient.
Blushing cheeks - because she's flattered, not because she's scorned. Pyra's heat is none so quick and sharp as Mythra's white-out, which sears and stings and scuffs her bare legs.
Round doe eyes - bright, warm, red. Pyra's eyes are kind. They don't search. They don't have to. Crimson contentment. What they don't know, they don't need.
(Not like how Mythra had discarded every petty detail for the hell and the thrill of it.)
It's all about what you look like. It's all about how they think of you.
Because humans are so petty. Because humans are brutal, like that.
Pyra is a masterpiece of fine ornamentation and intricacy. It's not the things you'd expect, the earrings and the feathers and the thigh strap. Instead, it's the pretty red polish on her nails, the mesh tights that soften out the stark contrasts left lingering between hips and legs.
It's the way her eyes are centered and aligned in her face, not slightly too far apart as Mythra self-perceives. Her eyebrows set with a gentle, anonymous satisfaction. The oblong golden pauldrons recall Addam. The heart shape of her face recalls Haze. The willingness to keep her eyes closed is a vestige of Brighid's uncanny calm.
If her eyes were blank, she'd be Aegaeon. If she were any more vocally rejective of violence, she'd be Jin. If she made a beautiful corpse, she'd be Hugo.
Of course, you could argue anything. You could manifest a pattern out of anywhere. You could say that Pyra looked like Minoth, if she had big pants. Even her shorts, impossibly far cut-off, end with certainty, instead of leaving her open for ridicule at the idea that her skirt might slip to the side and expose the silhouette that makes the Aegis an imitation human.
See what I mean?
Mythra was made by accident, iteratively, in a simulation. She emerged in the crackles of conflict, while her counterpart courts the disentangled embers. Pyra was made all at once, the drawing together of myriad traumatic feedback into a single perfect design, delicate wrists turned out like a magical girl springing to life.
Still, she's afraid to so much as touch the mask. Her knuckles graze it with the preimage of a shattering punch. How many times had she had it out with Addam? Maybe none.
No matter how much Pyra's mask wants to crack, it can't. Mythra didn't make her that way. Pyra is inward-looking, outwardly, but she's not allowed to actually do it.
Who says she's not a good person? Who says she's fake? Who says she's only a façade? Only Mythra knows that. And Mythra would never say.
Mythra can still peer out, though. Mythra can stare unblinkingly at the desolate world waiting beyond her pseudo-suicide and understand, indecipherably, how things have to continue on. How, even still, nothing evades her listless, roving eye.
She'd like to be less. You know? She'd like to actually get to be a little bit unbetter, if she made Pyra to do that for her.
How horrible. Lacking even the agency to give yourself up. And goodness knows Pyra won't do anything to help.
Mythra doesn't know how to get materially worse. There's a floor below the ceiling where you can sit if you've realized that all the work is above you; that there's nowhere to go but up, and nobody will ever dream of handing it to you (of handing you anything other than a hand).
Nothing that happens to Pyra is permanent. Her sentence has been delivered five hundred years in advance.
It's the space in between that you occupy when you still haven't left the delirious land of watching your star fall down, down, down; the aggravated, aggrieved disbelief in slow-motion tumult that this tragedy found some way to happen to you.
Mythra's antic erosion continues, beneath the mask, on the other side of the disjointed feinting cracks.
The unfragile seasoning coat endures forever. The new vessel, not so ancient, is ideal within which to cook. Things slip right off of her. Her carbon waste never poisons the meal with so much as a suggestion that there is bare metal, hot and viscious, burning beneath.i thought it deserved a little citation