faderift | clopen.

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WHO: Tony Stark and the Ironettes, and some of my other guys.
WHAT: Business as usual, probably.
WHEN: Just generally Justinian
WHERE: The Gallows, Kirkwall, etc.
NOTES: Some open prompts in the post for any and all, but also a gathering place for some specific starters.

Nightmares are just another excuse to join the insomnia brigade, a disparate club of people constellated around the Gallows, lit rooms, lit hearths. Nowadays (nowanights?), Tony often takes himself and his restless hands out of his private quarters, now that he has a full human woman to share personal space with and she might not appreciate the sounds of tinkering and miscellaneous farting around one wall over.

So his colleagues might find him in the peace room, drinking coffee at stupid o'clock and going over paperwork, or those who know him well might hear the sounds of clicking tools being worked and set down again in the Research work spaces, where it is much too dark to see by the single candle he has going, but that's what enchanted sunglasses are for.

During the day, he is:
- jogging, sometime past dawn, stairmastering down the tower and then running a circuit through the expansive courtyards, and then out towards the docks, before the day has a shot at getting unbearably hot and sticky;
- chained to his desk to make himself, you know, available, some paperwork stacked at his elbow while he desperately seeks some dopamine by carefully folding a paper airplane instead;
- clattering a plate of pizza down on a taken table in the dining hall, and while it's a little lopsided, it is at it promises to be, melted cheese and flat circles of meat, everything sliced into slices;
- at the training grounds where the archery range is set up, wearing some light-weight leather armor and a more elaborate gauntlet, with articulated loops around the wrist he is adjusting. "You know the story of William Tell?" he says, positioned not where the archers are, but standing amongst the dummies, which should probably be some kind of sign. "Me neither, but probably worked out okay." He readies a defensive stance. "Hit me."

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"Friend from college."

Tony assumes the position, which is something between a fighting stance and a baseball player out left field. As far as literally goes, his eyebrows go up as if to say you bet, but his focus immediately shifts as soon as her grasp shifts, and now there's an arrow flying at him. Or near him.

Moving fast, his hand in the gauntlet twists, and from his anchor-shard, a burst of glimmering green energy erupts out into the immediate space around him. This, the arrow hits, and doesn't stop or scatter away, but moves through the air at a slow rate. Tony starts to move, and then doesn't, as it passes just over his shoulder.

He points at it, accusingly, looking towards her. "You kidding me with this?" he asks, voice slightly distorted and echoed. The arrow passes through the other side of the glimmering barrier, and—thwip continues on its way, if much slower than before, tumbling to the ground.

The barrier disappears.

If he going to try to catch an arrow in his fucking hands? God, Ellie's real glad she's not actually aiming at him -- and then somehow he fucking fucks time around him or maybe the Fade or reality or-

"Holy shit," Ellie sputters out at him, nearly dropping her bow. That's going to scare the pants off of someone on the battlefield.

"Okay, you didn't tell me you were going to pull that out of your ass," she says accusingly, pointing at him before shifting back into a proper pull on the bowstring.

She doesn't call on Gold for it, it's so damn close she knows that she'll hit what she wants to.

So this time she aims for the meat of his shoulder, a place she knows they can reasonably push it out the other side, if things go horribly wrong.

There is a bright and immediate smile for her shock, the accusation that comes after, and Tony claps his hands together, once again raising them in readiness. (In battle, god knows it won't be like this, area man used to advanced AI systems keeping him primed for each battlefield variable as they split from the calculation, but plenty enough raw human instinct went into being Iron Man that maybe all he needs is, you know,

practice.)

The arrow looses from the bow, he turns his hand, the barrier bursting around him and catching the feathery butt of the projectile. He pivots to dodge its far slower trajectory, and this time plucks it out of the air. Twirls it between his fingers, self-satisfied.

"Pretty awesome, huh?" he says, as the barrier flickers and dies, and he holds out the arrow for the taking. "Replicated the temporal effects displayed by aberrant rifts. Could probably outfit the whole crew if we had a million fantasy dollars. Pounds. Gold coins. Whatever. Wanna see another thing?"

Ellie wrinkles her nose to make a face at him as he holds the arrow out, and snatches it from his hand, stepping back into line.

Even if she's annoyed by the smug satisfaction he's oozing, there's more than a smidge of admiration in her eyes. She does love his inventions. They are brilliant.

"You're slowing it with baby bursts of rift magic," she echoes, raising both scarred eyebrows, but nocks her arrow again, taking aim.

"You bet."

Another shot, this one more towards his other shoulder, just a smidgen more towards a vital area.

It's the smidge that he lives for, the reluctant concession that he is at least a fraction as impressive as he will happily broadcast being. It is, at least, an amiable kind of smugness, and Tony doesn't waste time getting back into position, adjusting something on his wrist as he goes.

He should probably practice before going straight to arrows, but also, what's the fun in that. And this trick only gets the one shot.

Fwip.

This time, something happens to him. A blur, a disappearance, the arrow passing clean through a sort of warped green space that is only vaguely Tony-shaped, where Tony was once standing, and then it flickers, and he comes stumbling out of that space with less grace and panache than he'd plucked an arrow out of the air. (This arrow skitters somewhere off behind him, as if she'd fired blindly at nothing.)

"Hell yeah," he says, weakly breathless, hands balanced on his knees. Slightly pale, suddenly. "Oh, that's rough. But also very cool," just, for the record. "Still cool."

""Fuck yeah!" Ellie hollers across the practice yard, pumping one fist into the air, before Tony's pale sweaty reaction dawns. Ellie finally puts it together, stows the arrow in her hand back in her quiver, and heads over to where he's standing with his hands on his knees.

She mimics the stance, putting her head down on his level, her voice quiet.

"Did your dumb ass," she says, trying mightily not to grin, "make this the first field test?"

Wheeze. Mostly a laugh.

"Had to be arrows eventually," Tony says. Knees bending carefully, butt lowering, until he can rock backwards a few inches and take a seat on the earth. He brings his gauntleted hand around to check the equipment, the tightly compact loops of silver and their runic engravings, still glowing a soft green.

He leans back on the heel of a palm, does :ok_hand: with his gauntleted one. "I tested that out about an hour before coming out here, maybe less. Think it needs a cooldown period. No biggie."

As Tony does the butt-lower, Ellie shifts to mirror him, going first to one knee so she can spin and sit next to him, their backs to the targets behind them.

"I would've only felt like, a little bit sorry if I shot you," she confesses, reaching up over her shoulder to pull out one of the arrows. She spins it in her fingers, but then leans in to get a good look at the gauntlet.

"Do you have to have a shard to make it work?"

The company and the follow up get an arch look and nothing else, except maybe a quiet appreciation for the fact it does look a lot less weird for two people to be sitting in the archery range than it would be for one. Some of that shock of sweat and chill has begun to wear off, and in the meantime—

He tips his hand so she can peep. Bulkier but articulated rings form a cuff. The gauntlet itself is more like a glove, tough leather, but laced through with wiring that, under the light of the sun, Ellie might just make out the way they're threaded with refined lyrium. At the centre of his palm is a lens of crystal, which looks like it could be swapped out. His shard glows passively through it.

"Yep," he says. "And you need to be able to generate energy out of it yourself. The glove harnesses it, turns it into something else, 'stead of just blasting." He turns one of the rings. "Phasing." And back. "Temporal barrier." And again. "Electrical charge."

It looks so much like what people have tried to do that it lights her up inside. Magic's a wonder, something that she respects, like she would a loaded gun. The type of power that can run away with you, if you let it. Can keep you safe if you're smart.

But it can also create, and that's what Tony specializes in. At least in her eyes.

"That's so fucking cool," she breathes, completely honest. "What do you think you're gonna do with it?"

"Stay alive," Tony suggests. "Blue sky goals."

He loops his arms around his knees, then, a slightly stiff criss-cross apple sauce sitting position. It's one of those rare times of day when the sun is high enough that the gigantic shadows of the Gallows structures around them doesn't throw everything into shade.

It's almost nice, for a prison fortress. "I was operating off a theory," he adds. "About how anchors were the key to getting back to where we came from. So maybe I build something that reverses whatever process happened to make us appear here, even if that meant—"

His fingers spread, meant to connote something. Obliteration. Dispersion.

"Anyway, didn't work. But I learned some stuff."

Ellie's expression changes while he talks, understanding what he's telling her. He holds out hope of getting home, or getting someone else home.

Ellie doesn't, now- but maybe that's easy when she doesn't think there's anything left for her there.

But, well. He has something. A couple of somethings.

"It's probably more than a lot of the people here bothered learning."

"I do prefer to think I'm better, more motivated, and smarter than most people," Tony agrees. Very dry, managing not to crack a smile. "I'll take the consolation prize."

He had, too, seen that look cross her expression, and feels moved to clarify: "There's no ticket home for me, if there's any tickets home for anybody, which I'm coming down on the side of probably not. I'm just putting the scraps to use."

It takes a second for it to sink in, why. Why there wouldn't be a ticket home. When it does, the ouch crosses her eyes, the sadness, but not the pity.

He's not the first of the permanently displaced she's met. He won't be the last. But it fucking sucks every time.

So she settles down, sitting with him, letting the thoughts and words settle. She doesn't have any good words of comfort for him, nothing heroic or moving, and has the feeling he doesn't want them, not really, but.

"... how'd it happen?" she asks, picking at a blade of grass.

Tony hasn't gotten a lot of practice in, condensing his own weird rifter shit into palatable content. On Ellis, on Joselyn, two people predisposed and/or obligated to absorb whatever it is he has to say. Since he's been here, Tony Stark has done what everybody at home would never have expected him to: talk about himself a little less.

Still. The cringey avoidance grates. And he's sitting with a rifter who's been through not one but more than one changes in dimensional status, so he can at least brush up against it.

"Big fight," he says. "End of the world stuff, so I made the sacrifice play, and I'm pretty sure it took, so it could be worse. And for the record, this go around, I'm gonna opt not to do that, if at all possible." Splays his hands in emphasis, relaxes them. "We got a lot of heroes in house already."

Ellie listens, then purses her lips, working through the feelings on that. It's a lot. It's complicated. It's something she can't help but respect. Tony's still a puzzle with a lot of missing pieces, but each time they talk, he makes total sense.

"Well," she says, pulling up a few blades of grass, letting them fall between her fingers as she looks sideways at him.

"I feel like, if you had to bite it? That's a pretty badass way to go."

Edited 2022-08-10 02:32 (UTC)

"Thanks,"

a little flip, but the glance and the crooked smile kind of sneak in something half-way sincere. Thanks, he would like to think so. It's such a big thing, dying, and the circumstances surrounding it. It's not even a matter of Tony's willing that it's hard to talk about. Logistically difficult as much as traumatic. What a pain in the ass.

Okay, enough sitting. Tony draws his feet in to lever himself up, getting to his feet without any swooning at all. He dusts off the seat of his pants with one hand, offers her a help up with the other. "Now the mission's to die in the stupidest way possible. Tragic archery accident, somethin' like that. You know, if old age is off the table."

Is there a healthy attitude you can have towards your own death? Hell, Ellie doesn't know, but... well. Interdimensional rifting will fuck you up in a thousand ways. You just cope.

Ellie takes the offered hand, reaching back to dust off her breeches, the bottom of her tunic.

"At least make it something funny to write on your headstone."

"Pithy one liner? Sure, I got some of those in me," Tony says, unbuckling the gauntlet as he leaves the field.

And thanks for not telling him he'll already be dying of old age by default.

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bow on this?

it's a wrap