sixthiterationlogs | sorry mario

Entry tags:

sorry mario

WHO: Tony Stark
WHERE: The Fountain, Blacksmithy.
WHEN: 25 Sept.
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: Tony Stark.
STATUS: Open, ongoing. Like I'll ever remember to edit this once it's not.

ᴛʜᴇ ғᴏᴜɴᴛᴀɪɴ

He squints.

Both at the sunlight and the fact that the world seems to have rearranged itself somehow in the last little while since he most recently took survey of his surroundings, and he's not entirely sure to which direction things have swung but he knows he doesn't like it.

Level one, assessment. He's sitting up on the bottom of a probably-concrete pit outside, and he can hear wildlife. No, wait, not a pit, a fountain, unless one makes the argument that a fountain without any water is technically a pit anyway. "Somebody changed my clothes, sure, why not, that's not weird at all. That hasn't happened since like. Ninety four." Investigating the backpack tells him very little aside from the fact that someone around here apparently lacks forethought and that he's retroactively pretty happy this fountain is empty aside from one increasingly irritated engineer.

"Alright, I don't know what kind of game this is, but it's pretty crappy! Like, terrible. Duke Nukem wouldn't even touch this with a wavebird, and now I'm just talking to myself in a hole. Fantastic. I have red pants, a peacoat, and nothing to get out of here with."

Shouting into the void seems like potentially a Bad Idea, so instead he's gonna poke around and see if he can finagle something out of the pipework maybe. Probably with running commentary to himself.

ʙʟᴀᴄᴋsᴍɪᴛʜʏ

Well this is familiar. His hand releases the strap of his backpack over his shoulder and trails over the edge of a shelf. Tony hasn't seen much of wherever the hell this little place is - nothing even really indicates whatever country he's supposed to be in now - but he can't really say it looks that appealing. If there's a blacksmith, then this might be a little bit more rustic than he's comfortable with. Either that or he's found the last bastion of hipsters. That might at least explain the overalls.

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Well that makes sense at least. It's also encouraging, because it means this isn't a map of a whole bunch of empty buildings with arbitrary uses assigned to them. "Are the residences furnished too? Like, to the same degree across the board? Are any of the indigenous people still here?"

There's not a whole lot to a map if you're not actively using it and he feels like he has enough of an idea of things - he's gonna be heading over to that blacksmith shop later - so he doesn't protest when she begins putting it away. He's sort of at a loss for how to handle himself posture-wise - he hasn't spoken to her in years and it's amazing how seeing her like this, seeing her young and the closest to when he was young in decades, manages to take aspects of him straight back. It's confusing, and he doesn't know how to feel about it, and by virtue of both aspects he doesn't like it, but he does, because it's her. And because Tony Stark has never been any great determiner of what is and is not good for him.

"I think that came up a couple times, yeah," Tony replies, smiling a little bit. She's the one who actually told him about it, years and lightyears from now. Also it establishes not a pattern, but at least a trend - Stark men forge friendships by forcing people to stay close and seeing if they can't push them away regardless. Both of Tony's best friends were - and still are, to varying degrees - paid to work with him. He hasn't forgotten.

There's so much to adjust to, and he still wants to know things but he also doesn't, because he doesn't need more contrast than he already has and also because there's a time and a place, and right next to an empty fountain creates too many metaphors. He has no idea what they are, but he's sure they're somewhere. Back to the whole keeping-dad-out-of-jail-for-treason thing: "Thanks for that, by the way."

Peggy raises a brow at the thanks, wondering how much she's told Tony about the case in the future (or whether it was even her). "Howard Stark was the only person in the world, for a time, that believed in me for who I was," she says. "And if I had lost him, I would have simply been someone that the men I worked with could use to fill voids and archetypes in their lives." Even the ones she admired and respected had done that and even Jarvis had, to a degree.

"I know he was using me for his own gains, but it also meant he had such faith in me," Peggy says quietly. "And besides that, it allowed me to protect Steve, even after I failed to save him. Or rescue him, as it turns out."

She keeps her head down, inhaling sharply and choosing to focus on the other topic. "The homes are furnished, yes. My first home, before the earthquake demolished it, had everything you could want. Where I'm staying now does, as well," she happy to confirm. "And while that might make you suspect a population that existed before us, we've yet to meet a soul."

Well that doesn't hit a poignant nerve or anything. His father didn't do exactly the same thing with him or anything at all, although Tony supposes at least the man was consistent in more ways than he was aware of. He doesn't have the distraction of looking at the map to work with anymore, but he can disguise glancing to the side for a second as just general looking around, right? She's not looking at him either. "Yeah, he operated like that." Not the sort of thing he might normally say, but. Circumstances.

Although part of that statement merits a little following up, so he shifts gears and continues on with, "Rescue him after?" Tony feels like somebody would have told him about that.

As for her other response, Tony allows himself some dramatism and lets his head loll back on his shoulders for a moment with the force of his eye roll. "Of course you haven't, because that would probably entail getting some answers and who wants those?" He sighs, looking over again but this time for a reason, towards the rest of the village. "Guess I oughta find a bungalow to call home."

Peggy licks her lips in order to bide time in order to find the proper words to talk about this. Perhaps it's that, but it's also a little bit of her taking the moment to breathe in deeply and push back a wave of grief. "For two years," she begins carefully, "I thought that Steve was dead and I had to move on. I had given up on him, you see. Howard looked and didn't find anything and I told your father that he had to let go of Steve."

The lump in her throat is only growing larger, despite her best efforts to push it down. "And then I arrive here, only to be told that Steve Rogers is well and alive in the future," she says. "Which means I gave up on Steve and I don't think he ever would have done that to me. It means I gave up on rescuing him and he was alive out there." She blinks rapidly and turns her head to the side as she wills the tears in her eyes gone. "I should have pushed Howard to keep looking. He certainly had the money and the resources."

She says nothing to his settling into a home. He ought to, yes, but on that avenue, she can offer no advice. Even she has simply fallen into inertia in her own living situation, but it seems adequate enough that she hasn't thought to leave it despite the occasional awkwardness of living with Barnes.

Oh. Sometimes Tony regrets his insatiable need to ask questions. He didn't mean to poke a sore subject and make her cry.

"We didn't find Steve until 2012. Dad, he - he went back to looking for him later anyway, he just sort of took a break for a little while I guess." Tony's gonna get hives, why is this happening. "And SHIELD recovered him so the transitive property sort of means you both won the world's longest game of hide-and-seek anyway."

There's more about how people move on and they need to, or how mourning happens in different ways, and it's weird that he's comforting her like this when it used to be the other way around, but he's not really sure how to get into that just yet. There's so much happening right now that he's getting bogged down in the processing.

She's not sure whether to be pleased or angry with Howard for going back when she had talked him off a ledge in order to get him to stop the first time. She'll settle for pleased, if only because it likely helped to lead the way to actually finding Steve. And while SHIELD might have recovered him, it's too many years too late. She had spent all her time grieving and moving on, when she could have been productive.

"I'm selfish," she admits. "I wanted him to come to the Stork Club. I went," she admits, "foolishly, I went." Still, in a way, Steve is gone for her. Even here, being here, she's not sure what to make of it.

Clearing her throat, she sheds her sadness like a snake's skin sloughing off. "Would you like me to show you the houses before I go home?"

Tony's actually heard this story from her, but in a rare moment of insight he's figuring it would be the better option to maybe decline from saying so. Anyway it's less of a story right now and more an admission, and sometimes you just let those live where they lie, in the moments between making the decisions that cause them. Besides, he doesn't want to bring up years of resentment for Captain America right now, or scoot back into how Howard Stark was as a father.

Anyway, she abruptly shifts her posture and appears to move on from the topic, which - thank god - means Tony can as well. "Uh, sure, yeah why not, if you don't have anything else to do." If there's a bit of a tone in his voice it's less questioning and more on the edge of hopeful. The longer they speak, the more he realizes he's missed her.

"Sadly, my time here is occupied with mealtimes, explorations, attempts at learning new skills, and keeping in whatever shape I can manage," Peggy says. "Which leaves a great deal of free time for whatever might pop up," she says, managing a warm smile for Tony. "I'd be happy to show you around."

It's both for a friend of hers, but also for Tony himself. After all, where he comes from, she's a sort of support for him and she thinks it's only right that she offers that now. Besides, he seems a good boy (and what a strange thing to think, given how much older than her that he is).

"What a ball," Tony says, relatively deadpan but smiling a little back reflexively in the wake of her own. He turns to look around at nearest parts of the village - he's done it a couple times sure, but that was mostly a conversational tool for avoidance - and. Well. Maybe it'll look more encouraging up close. Hopefully. Dear god, please let it look more encouraging up close.

He never really has been one to let silence dominate a conversation, so once they start walking, he starts multi-tasking. "So, question. I've got red - clearly - and there's a fire symbol on my backpack. Do you have like, a water symbol? Do we get together to create Captain Planet?"

Peggy gapes at him and feels like she's not as confused as she ought to be for all the madness Tony seems keen on sputtering off to her. She glances down at her navy blue scrubs and then to his red ones, thinking that perhaps there's some meaning behind it, but she's allowing that mystery to run in the back of her mind. "Perhaps it's just someone's favourite colour," she says. "Or the last colour you were wearing on a Tuesday seven months ago."

"What on earth is a Captain Planet?" she demands, when it continues to poke at her and annoy her terribly.

It will inevitably probably become added to the list he's already working on putting together for things that he wants answers for, but for now it's at the forefront just because it's right there. "I do wear a lot of red," he agrees.

She just sounds so irritated, he can't help but laugh a little bit. "By product of sustainability movement targeting kids. Also produced one of the most catchy theme songs of pretty much any cartoon ever, I can actually hear it playing in my head now."

She blinks once, then twice, then a third time just to see if she can somehow process the information that he's giving her. She's used to crass media being awful and twisting things for entertainment value, but she's not entirely sure that she understands why on earth they would need such a thing to promote sustainability.

And yet...

Tony might not be Howard, but in some ways, a Stark is a Stark. "Sing it," she insists.

"Wait, what? I'm not gonna sing it," is his knee-jerk reaction, because wow out of all the things he was expecting her to react with, that was definitely not one of them. Hilariously far from it. He's not entirely sure why, considering he did just say it was catchy and he could hear it, but. Still.

That's interesting, enough. Peggy hadn't really counted on him to actually sing anything, but it says something that in this state, he doesn't. It means that there are limits to how much Tony intends to do to win over her favour and it gives her a baseline to begin working with. "I'll have to leave it to my imagination, then," she says.

Soon, they're arriving at some of the homes, down the block from where Peggy is staying. "Apart from the aesthetics on the outside, they're fairly similar," she says. "Beds, linens, curtains. Unless you've the ill luck of picking a home that's been ransacked for materials."

He's not actually sure why he said no, but. He doesn't know. Tony concedes a few seconds after she says she'll leave it to her imagination, because that's not necessarily disappointment, but. Who is he to deprive someone of the Captain Planet theme song?

"Maybe later."

Anyway, they're closer now, so he's kind of sad that it does, in fact, not really look that much more encouraging. "I'm sure you'd tell me if I did that, right?" he says, somewhat playfully. "So, totally furnished - stocked? Nobody lives in any of these? Aside from fountaineers."

"I haven't done any pilfering," Peggy says, a touch offended that she would invade someone else's home to find something for herself despite the fact that she has absolutely done that for other supplies. Perhaps it's a touch hypocritical, but she keeps mum about that. "But you're right about the population. The only people who are currently living here are those that came out of the fountain, but the signs are absolutely there to indicate that there were people here before."

"For one, the very moment that I arrived, there wasn't a soul but us, and yet, someone set off an air raid siren as warning before a windstorm hit." She's yet to be able to explain that and it irritates her more than she thinks it should.

Tony sounds slightly confused when he first responds with, "I never said you did," but the tone doesn't quite make it to questioning. He hadn't assumed when she said that materials had been taken from certain houses that she'd been burgling people. Not like she couldn't if she wanted to. Or did a lot of for Uncle Sam.

Anyway. Whatever.

He mulls that little nugget over for a few moments before finally responding. "Where's the siren?"

"I don't know," she bites out the words, the frustration evident in the way it forces the words out a touch aggressively, but it's the biggest problem right now. She absolutely doesn't know who set it off, how they knew to set it off, or where it came from. "It's just one more mystery this place has decided to throw our way and I'm no closer to solving it, despite going nearly mad trying to figure it out."

God, it's like. There's so many layers of nostalgia and guilt and giddiness happening right now. Tony's no stranger to feeling many different, often contradictory things at once, and neither is he unfamiliar with feeling them strongly. It's really more the being able to identify and appreciate them all and not be overwhelmed by it. Why is he not overwhelmed? Why does this feel... Comfortable? He's just arrived god-knows-where, god-knows-when, he's a generation older than his aunt, and the edge of frustration in her voice is so recognizable he almost wants to scream. Or at least point at her and then loudly shout, "Look!" No one has ever argued that Tony Stark makes sense more often than he doesn't.

Anyway. That is weird, the siren. Not knowing, how it went off, why it went off. "How far out have you guys managed to explore? I mean, we can't be completely isolated." There's a moment, then he amends. "Okay we could be, but evidence strongly indicates to the contrary. Unless we're either extremely lucky with a very well hidden, abandoned, and malfunctioning security system, or the alarm goes off on a regular, albeit very long interval."

In many cases, Tony is irritated about the interruption to the mystery he was working on back home. In most, however, at the moment, this one is a welcome distraction. This one at least literally can't be his fault. Probably.

"Every time I try and push the boundaries of this place, something shifts. It's like an endless horizon," she says, thinking of the multiple maps that she's had to throw out because a one hour expedition turned into six hours of her walking and walking, only to find that the horizon before her kept expanding. "The more and more I'm here, the more I start to think this must be some sort of experiment."

"Or, rather, that we've got captors," she says darkly.

Oh, fantastic. "So I've landed in a mysterious, malleable, maybe malevolent, unmappable location of some sort. That's great. What do you guys call it, Bermuda?"

An experiment does... Actually not sound inaccurate. No interfering except to change the independent variables, introducing new catalysts and quietly observing, having a confined and controlled environment - they just have to figure out some sort of common theme among whatever random shit happens to them. As for the other idea, he shrugs a little bit. "Captors tend to be pretty direct and immediate with the whole 'telling you what they want' thing," he starts, before continuing. "Unless we're leverage against someone else, but that doesn't really jive well. Kidnapping doesn't really look this much like Skyrim; I'm liking the experiment idea a bit more."

Peggy isn't sure how they haven't named the place they're in. It's typical human tendency to want to put a name to things, so she does find it a bit strange that they've been here for some time and have yet to give it any sort of designation. "No one's actually named it," she says, but it's quickly followed by a sharp look. "Which isn't to say that any terrible name is going to do." If they are part of some larger experiment, she has to wonder what on earth the purpose and point is.

All she knows is that she doesn't like being pushed around and told what to do. It makes her bristle and bark, hating the way it makes her feel trapped. "You keep saying things I absolutely don't understand," she reminds him wearily. "I'm an old woman, remember?" she dryly jokes.

"It's not terrible, it's perfect - quasi vacation, way more trouble than it's worth, people appear and disappear at will - I'm calling the fountain the Bermuda Triangle and I doubt you're gonna stop me. Also seriously, how have none of you named it? People name everything."

Tony's also curious as to what could possibly be the point, but unfortunately all that sort of information gathering means observation over time. Which means... time, and waiting. Something he's neither all that fond of, nor historically very good at.

He glances at her when she jokes, a bit amused because that's better than any other potential way to handle all these things he's learning. "Yeah, that's probably not gonna stop either, but I guess I can try." Anyway, he's glad she didn't question whether his awareness of how kidnappings usually go was theoretical or otherwise. He continues on, "If it is an experiment, commonalities would hopefully be visible after a while. Patterns, testing us on the same skills in different ways. We'll just have to keep watch."

"Not when you're not intending to stay past the week." Only that one week had turned to two, then three, and then more and more to the point that Peggy is fairly sure she's missed her window for naming this place and she's going to simply have to put up with whatever it is that people come up with.

She leads him down another path of homes, some of them affected by the quake, including hers (which had collapsed in half). "People keep arriving in a fountain," she points out. "Not to mention the predominant habit of something terrible happening, only for something beneficial to swoop in on its heels."

"I've seen people name a mocha frappuccino they knew wasn't going to exist in half an hour," he deadpans. "You'd be surprised."

Tony's somewhat distracted by the damaged houses, because that's something to file away for later, and he wants to see what's in the walls. What better opportunity than walls that are already cut away for easy viewing? So his response comes slightly delayed while he's investigating a little bit. "I assume that means something bad just happened," he says, turning back around and brushing his hands off. "Since I'm here now."

8D

sorry mario

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'he seems a good boy' leave me here

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lord i wish he was current bc he'd suggest 'the upside down' for the name

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