Solo: What Am I?

[howl_typhoon]

Who: Tai Feng, and special guest star Tai Feng's Memories.
When: Week 34, Friday, Evening.
Where: Uncle Carl's apartment in Underwood.
Before/After: After Artemis swaps with Tai Feng and makes her acutely aware that being a gross tomboy is her own fault and Tai Feng and Gunnar talk about origins.
Warnings: I am pretty sure it's pretty toothless but there's a lot of almosts. Some cursing. Introspective teenaged body poking, including some consideration of Things That Happen To Your Body When You're A Teenaged Girl like menstruation and breasts growing in. There is nothing terribly sexy here but the meat of it is Tai Feng thinking about her body. Also, a tiny sliver of retrospective violence, and the woes of tongue piercings.

In which Doom performs an extended meditation on Tai Feng's self-image and lets you all watch.



Tai Feng hung by fingertips down from the ledge of the apartment above. Her room was one of three windows in the apartment she shared with uncle. She snaked a foot out and grabbed a foothold with her toe - built herself, improvised from some old wood to give her something to open the window with from outside when her uncle occasionally closed it during her longer absences.

With a grit of her teeth and a "Hnng" she yanked the leg up, the energy shifting up her body and straining her arms. She had at least that much arm strength, though, even if the window was old and sticky and she had to dig her fingers into the grooves in the paint she'd been leaving after years of this. Then, legs curled back up, and she shoved her feet against the wall to curl back up and over the ledge. Nobody would see her, her Rogue powers made sure of that. These people were too weak to see through even the basic Rogue misdirection magic. She collected the bright red dress off the balcony, folded it up neatly around one arm, and slung herself back down by the other, hanging by one hand. A quick release, and she dropped past her own window. Her fingers sang painfully with the weight of catching her own body mass on her one hand. She kicked off the wall, again flipping neatly around her hand and spinning through the window and into her room. She checked the clock immediately. It'd be about one and a half, two hours before her Uncle would show up. Plenty of time to get her head sorted out.

It was the same barren room as ever. She didn't have the money to pursue 'real' hobbies, and had never managed to scrounge or steal enough to get her hands on more expensive gear. On one side of the window she had her bed, which was the rattiest, tiniest mattress Uncle could find and a bare frame. On the other side, a nightstand that was supposed to go next to the bed, but Tai Feng had repurposed it as her drop-off ground for using the window. It had a lamp old enough that Tai Feng was always a little impressed it didn't catch fire when she turned it on. Another wall had a desk, though really more of a table, where she did work on the handful of occasions she decided doing her schoolwork was actually worth her time. At the moment it was mostly the home of a set of small hand weights she'd 'acquired' from someone a few floors up with the poor sense to leave them unattended on his balcony. The hooligan life needed muscle, and Tai Feng could at least dedicate herself to that much. Other than that the only sign of habitation was her tablet, sitting in a dime-store case off to one side of the desk; it was a bottom-tier model, slow to wake up and positively glacial at processing anything more taxing than the system clock. That and the streaming app her uncle had subscribed her to were enough to kill a few evenings, at least.

Her clothes all lived in a dresser in the middle of the inner wall. She set the dress down on her bed, for now, then hooked a foot around her chair's leg and dragged it out enough to plop down over its back. She puffed an unhappy breath out through her lips, eyeballing the dress like it had recently kicked her nonexistent dog. Sigh. She shrugged out of her hoodie, swinging it around to dangle the light jacket off her chair's back, and stood.

She quickly stripped to her plain underwear, reaching for the dress. She didn't actually own much but utilitarian gray and white support underwear; pretty underwear was a bewildering concept. She understood 'pretty' better than Gunnar did, maybe, but even she couldn't wrap her head around that. Maybe it was just something you understood when you were already pretty. Maybe that was why she could never follow what Lisa Callaway sneered at her before PE every day.

Well, that was a lie. She could follow dwarf, squinty, muscles, and beast. Tai Feng was built all wrong, for Callaway's pretty little world. She was pitifully short even by middle school girl standards. Her build was strong and athletic, and she'd done zero to try and soften the toned muscles that all her climbing and street fighting had left her with.

Tai Feng didn't know what pretty even was, if it was supposed to be something she could do. Her mother died less than a month after her second period. Growing up was a nightmare she'd had to figure out for herself. Her uncle was useless for this, too busy with his own life and exhausted by his own work to even make the effort. Rachel Bellevue calling her "sasquatch" and laughing like a hyena was the first time anyone ever told Tai Feng girls were supposed to shave anything. Wasn't that just guys? She thought it was just a thing that pretty girls didn't have hair, and Tai Fengs did.

That was the first time she got suspended for hitting another girl, instead of fighting the boys. Tai Feng had punched Lisa in her precious overinflated white girl chest in the locker room and sent her sprawling, and then crying. Ahhh, good memories. ...her uncle had yelled for weeks, but it was a good memory. They made her write the least sincere apology in the world, which was fun in its own way. She'd still refused to start shaving though; at that point it was a matter of principle. Another thing Artemis had found wanting. She supposed the dress would've looked a lot worse without the neat legs. And then she wouldn't be in this mess!!

She held up the dress to her shoulders, looking at herself in the mirror on the back of her door. She swung it over and away from her body a few times. Well. ....the legs did look pretty good, actually, she thought, twisting her ankle against the floor to get a few angles on it. She emitted a low, unhappy noise. Admitting it even silently caused an ugly twist in her gut. Like losing something important, denying something she'd needed.

Speaking of things she needed, she pulled the dress away and frowned at the reflection of her bra. It was getting tight. She'd grown again, she thought dismally. She more or less hadn't gotten any new since she'd come to America. Money was too tight, clothes too expensive. But if that kept up, she'd have to think about it again...easy breathing and full support were vital, for someone like Tai Feng. Besides, it turned out being a hooligan didn't pay very well, and a whole new set of underwear would destroy her laughable savings. Plus she had to save up to get SOMETHING enchanted, apparently, if she wanted to stay alive. Which she did, for all that Heaven seemed determined to hold her face in the mud for her entire life.

Well, she got back at gods and men when she could. She'd flaunted the school's rules everywhere she could, really, and they let her because she was a troubled teen who barely even spoke the language. The ear piercings were fun and eye-catching, but her big ultimate gambit was her tongue ring, of which she was immensely fond. She'd had DJ from two blocks down forge her uncle's signature, then she just clammed up. This wasn't long after she'd floored Callaway, so nobody really wanted to talk to her. She got her favorite purple hoodie from a Salvation Army outlet at about the same time. She could vanish, in that hoodie; nobody wanted to say a word to her and as long as the hood was up, she could let them know the feeling was mutual.

Which made it a perfect time to spend almost two months with her tongue swollen from getting a barbell stuck in it. Even her uncle was too mad at her to try to talk, and she'd already trained him to accept her regular disappearing act. It was a masterstroke. Nobody outside the gang had found out until the swelling had gone down and she was on her real barbells. She stuck her tongue out and held the dress up at the same time, the purple acrylic ball and gray steel bar a sharp contrast, particularly with the bright red dress. She giggled at it; it was a weird combination, pretty and thug at the same time.

....maybe she'd get a red barbell to go with the dress. A little touch of her own. She wondered if Artemis had figured out why she had a hole in her tongue. She'd left the barbell out that day. Common forgetfulness, but probably a stroke of luck; a total novice with a full-weight tongue ring in probably would've cracked her teeth.

She sighed, finally, tossing the dress lamely back on the bed and plopping her butt down on her chair, spinning it around lazily. "What the hell am I doing?" she asked herself; at home she could stick to her native Cantonese without the aggravation of an entire room immediately asking what she'd said.

A slow pfffooooo of breath as the chair spun to a stop, and then she kicked off to her feet. The table did have another resident, right now; the beauty care products Artemis had left in her bag after the swap. She flipped them up, picking up eyeshadow, lipstick, blush, looking them over. "I don't know what to do with any of these," she muttered, but set them down with more care than she thought they deserved. "Bastard. Just has to be the prettiest little flower at the ball, doesn't he? Worse than Karen Sanchez. Fucker. I should paint his windows."

Sigh. She ran her hand through her hair, stubby fingernails scratching at her scalp. Long nails...that was 'pretty' too, wasn't it? That was even weirder than 'nice' underwear. She grumbled, thoughtfully spreading her digits, and then shaking her head ruefully. "Who comes up with this shit?" she asked the world, and padded over to reach past Artemis' taunt-gift to where she kept her bathroom supplies. She checked the clock on the table. One hour until Uncle would get home. Maybe half, depended a little. More than enough time to shower and scram, either way.

She slipped out the door, closing it behind her.

A few seconds later, the floral shampoo sample Artemis had left her rolled off the table, neglected.