revivalproject | [Video]

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[Cal's leaning against a wall nearly overtaken by clinging vines. He sighs a little before giving a headshake and a sad smile directed off-screen.]

Guess not, buddy.

[He looks back at the screen, rolling back his shoulders as he takes a deep breath, trying to summon a more convincing smile.]

Well, things sure got a lot more...greener around the city. Didn't think we were gone that long, but alien planets, right?

Been easing back into things and I'm sure everyone else has been doing the same, but if anyone needs anything repaired or might want to have a look at salvage parts I've got, just let me know so I can be at the workshop.

Also, if you need some doors or paths cleared, I can probably help with that too.

Guess that's it.

[The Jedi shrugs, offering a nod before he clicks off.]

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While Tony's gaze was unfocused, letting the vibration through the ship numb him into a kind of meditation, if your brain feeling full of bees could be meditation, the movement that eventually did catch his attention as Cal slipped into the room had him huffing a deep breath and pushing purposefully away from the wall. He had the performance readied, glancing around with an idle smirk, before he had fully formed, "I was hoping there'd be...," leaving him cradling his arms to illustrate the concept he didn't yet have words for. "You know--that Lark or Tommy might have left around the place, that they use--" He took another breath, dropping the mime with a shrug, because what they used to gather their flowers hadn't actually been much of a concern that Tony didn't think he'd be able to solve on the spot.

Hands on his hips instead, he diverted to greet, "Prince Charming, on an important mission, the most important, some might say. Have you been getting taller? You look taller." Diverted to a lot, really, which Tony tried to make very casual by deciding to look like he didn't actually care about any of it.

Deciphering what Tony meant was something of a challenge, head cocked as he tried to picture what it was that Tony tried to shape with his arms. Cal wasn't sure whether to prompt him for more of a clue when it seemed he'd given up on trying to explain it.

Both brows lifted as Tony switched subjects, the Jedi studying Tony as he leaned against the wall, arms folded across his chest. "Or maybe you're shrinking," he suggested, going along with the diversion for that much at least as he offered a shrug. "You doing all right?" It seemed that people always beat him to the question, but not many people liked to answer it when it was turned back at them.

Both the suggestion that he was shrinking and the question had Tony wrinkling his nose, rolling his shoulders back to as subtly as possible correct his posture, which wasn't subtle at all but did at least earn him a few centimetres. Maybe. "Always," he had at the ready, flicking a hand to dismiss the question from the cargo bay. "Just, you know--" With his hand still suspended in the air, indicating vaguely toward the door, since the flower-gathering-vessel thing didn't seem to stick, he crafted, "Those two together, I feel like I'm going to catch the frown lines, it's like a feedback loop." No wonder they were friends. They were friends, right? What work Tony had put into his posture was gone as his shoulders dropped to direct that question toward Cal, though he didn't actually give it voice. Instead, he said, "They always come back a little--weirder."

That could mean a lot of things that he could only guess at, twirling fingers by his ear and hoping Echo and Jon at least had figured out how to talk about it together. Mostly, Tony meant that they had come back, and he raised his eyebrows with a different question for Cal, knit with some hope that this was reassuring.

Cal ducked his head in a brief chuckle at that, although he doubted that was exactly why Tony was...well, not exactly hiding, here. That wasn't the point though, that much he could sense as Tony continued his meandering reasoning. Never direct, always hinted at, nudged along in hopes that you'd come up with the rest and meet him at the point he intended all along.

"Life continues," he said, nodding a little as he rested his head against the cool metal behind him. "At least they remember." Could maybe still remember. He had a vague memory of speaking with Jon about something similar, while they dreamed, a sort of déjà vu kind of feeling. Cal closes his eyes, letting his head fall forward a little before he opened them again with a sigh. "...I don't think I'll ever get used to it, when people go back." And when they don't return...

Alright, maybe that was the opposite of reassuring, and bringing Echo and Jon along was the wrong tactic. Life continues had a much less sentimental tone than Tony expected from the kid who saw ghosts. The future, then; progress, not hanging on.

"We don't really deal with it..." Tony acknowledged, scratching at his beard and considering the shadows in the corners where they kept having to push aside how they felt about these constant upheavals. "Not that I'm the biggest fan of a funeral, but what we're doing now, I can't say that there's ever closure, there's--" Well, there was the lingering hope that it wasn't ever actually final, Tony indicated toward the door again. It only took the briefest consideration of what kind of ritual they might do instead for Tony to realize, "Do you do that, funerals?"

Equating things to a funeral made Cal grimace, but he supposed he'd started them on that sort of a mood. He breathed out a laugh as he ran a hand over his face.

"That's... not really what I'd thought about but...I can see what you're getting at. And yeah, we had funerals." He shook his head. "I guess that's the thing we have to focus on, right? Hope for the best, and just...just remember the time we had while we were all here, while we can."

Tony mirrored the grimace in apology, and weighed his hand side to side, admitting that it might not have been the perfect analogy. "Retirement party," he suggested, though it didn't feel like it could really be walked back now, and retirement didn't exactly have the same finality. Clint was always retiring from the Avengers. The only time he didn't come back was when he died. "Graduation?" Now Tony was looking a little desperate for Cal to save him with how he had been framing it.

Retirements and graduations were a bit more foreign than funerals, the former two ideas more understood from the time he'd been an intern at a newspaper company in a made-up world. Cal gave Tony a pained smile as he wasn't really sure how to rescue him from the hole he'd been digging himself into.

He looked to try and offer something, raising an upturned hand as though he could grasp a word from out of the air, but apparently he wasn't having any luck of finding anything. His mouth opened then dropped a sigh as he shook his head again, letting his hand fall.

"I think we're kind of drifting," he finally said with a weak chuckle. "Maybe the first one was closer after all."

Ritualizing it probably wasn't the solution if they were both struggling to frame it so much, and Tony gave a noncommittal nod, waving his hand again with the other hooked around the back of his neck. "Life continues," he decided to agree. "And, hey, listen, you've got your gal, you've got to have plans, that's what you still have control over," he enthused, only to lose energy as he spoke because it did sound a lot like the kind of thing that hurt Lauri-Ell so much. "If you're into that kind of thing," he tried to temper.

"I don't know... Heh, it's kind of sad to think about. I haven't really made much plans past surviving before I got off Bracca, and now... I guess I've just been playing things by ear," Cal admitted, shaking his head with a brief, rueful smile. "Planning around here seems...trickier to do too." Never knew when the world would warp or the sky would fall, or you'd be shipped off planet among other things.

He looked at Tony. "Do you have plans?"

That was hard to argue with, when the next thing Tony knew he could be waking up in some new torture device when he didn't remember falling asleep, so he twisted his mouth to the side with a small nod to accept this very immediate lifestyle choice. Not that he'd know what to do with it, his next step always seemed to be thinking too much about what might happen ten years from now if the exact right sequence of events could be influenced, but he could appreciate it.

"More than I should," he admitted, because most of those obsessive plans never came to fruition after he impulsively threw the whole chess board off of a building instead of nudging a pawn. "None of them...useful," he continued, gaze sliding away and shoulders dropping again awkwardly. Even at his most focused and restrained, none of his planning had gotten them out of that bunker, and he had to quickly craft his smile again before he went unfocused here and added brightly, "But! We've got a whole plan right now, I've got A through Omega to make sure we get results. We're getting flowers, they're going to blow Merrin's mind, she won't even make you fight a bear."

Tony's anticipation for potential problems wasn't forgotten, but it was proving difficult to prepare for a situation when someone seemed to always be ahead of you. Not that Cal thought they should just give up, but maybe they just had to tackle it differently.

The corner of his mouth twitched in a faint smirk at the admission, his nodding one in understanding. Cal stepped closer so he could give Tony a light bump, shoulder to shoulder. "Well then, I'm counting on you," he said as Tony laid out the general flow of this particular plan. Bears or no bears.

As misguided and sarcastic as the sentiment was, Tony still took it with some gratitude, lightening his practiced smile as he swayed with the bump, then swung his arm around Cal's shoulders to draw him close like they were conspiring as he led the kid back toward the living quarters. "What's with the glowing thing? Not that I don't appreciate the dramatics, naturally, but she could have had a normal favourite colour. A gothy one, sure, we could probably find a black flower--glowing's a specific ask..." And how Cal worked it out might help Tony figure out why he kept messing up handing flowers to Jon, who he smiled at tightly as they came conspiring into the galley.

The gesture eased more of a smile on his face, and Cal was willing to ride this current. Maybe they were deluding themselves, distancing from something inevitable until it would rouse its ugly head again, but Cal didn't think that dwelling in it was going to help for much either.

"I dunno," he shrugged, his smile turning shy as he thought out his reasons. "I just thought...well, it's kind of how she is. The world she's from, it's...dark, and I'll be honest, it's just not a nice place to wander. Things that want to eat you, the scenery's kind of disturbing in some places. But things still thrive there. There's plants- the pilot I travel with, he'd asked me to pick up seeds when I could find them wherever we'd go- and some of the ones in Dathomir are kind of creepy..." He shook his head. Kind of wandering there.

"Anyway...I guess it's kind of cheesy, now that I have to explain it, but Merrin's like...a light that managed to thrive despite the darkness, and everything that she's had to go through."

Tony followed along with the image easily enough, pouting thoughtfully with his head cocked and thinking what Cal was describing didn't sound all that alien, and did sound like he was trying to skirt around the question. Which made sense when he finally spit it out, and for a moment Tony gave him a sidelong look with a dangerous smirk, like they were about to find out together just how humiliated Cal could be about this dorky pronouncement.

Instead, Tony's arm grew heavier around his shoulders as he sloped closer to press the other hand to Cal's chest with an appreciative pat, and he asked, "Have you told her that?" If that was what the flowers were for, then they were really going to have to get this right.

Tony might change his mind if he actually ever saw Dathomir for himself. Cal was trying to be polite by not going into too much detail, and no one needed to know about the sacks of dead Nightsisters strung up in what passed for trees. ...they had strange burial practices.

Cal seemed to tense a little at that particular look from Tony, as though bracing himself for whatever rejoinder was loading up. He blinked as instead he got a pat and...encouragement? The corner of his lips twitched in a brief smile. "Not in those exact words," he admitted.

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