revivalproject

Entry tags:

Wilt

WHO: Tony, Donatello, Lestat. Let me know if you want one for ✨you✨
WHERE: The agricultural building and the beach
WHAT: Checking up after a couple of different traumatic events.
WHEN: July
WARNINGS: Lestat, there will be blood. Might be following up on any relevant Calibrations traumas with Donnie.

a. greenhouse [for Donnie]
It was even hotter inside the glass building. There was a dark cloud on the horizon that Tony looked to with longing, willing to weather whatever nuclear-level storm this planet could fabricate for them for a little rain to cool down the shimmering street, only to decide once inside that humidity was actually exponentially worse. DATA was entirely unconcerned, tapping away on his spindly legs down the aisle and brushing through the lush greenery that practically burst out of every bed on either side of them. The robot didn't have to struggle through a thick breath of dense air. He wasn't waiting for Tony to keep up, either, and rounded a corner into the thicket while Tony tugged at his cuffs to push them impatiently up his already damp arms, where there wasn't even a breeze anymore to cool them.

"Hey," Tony complained, but was already alone and released all of that pressure in a sigh with a droop of his shoulders instead of the argument he had puffed up with for being abandoned. He didn't want to spend any longer in here than he needed to, and definitely not wandering around lost, so he had to muster the willpower to jog after DATA before he had entirely disappeared. He was the one that knew where Donnie was.

Tony hadn't properly warned the kid about what that tunnel really was, and even a month spent scavenging berries was preferable to being stuck in that nightmare. He might have been a little thin and bruised, but at least Tony had gotten a tan. In his time since being violently deposited back at the fountain, a few anxious days prodding around the tunnel did mean a lot of time for Tony to have designed a new suit that may have had something to do with the boots swinging from his hand. Tony might not have deserved forgiveness, but Donnie did deserve a little freedom.

b. waterfront [for Lestat]
The arguments in favour of becoming nocturnal were mounting. Not that Tony was getting much sleep at any time of day, but he could see the benefits of being completely unconscious through the height of the relentless sun and only coming out of wherever Lestat was storing himself in the relative cool of the night. The raucous birdcall wasn't as pervasive, either, leaving the beach clear and attuned to the meditative lap of the water that slipped away from the sand silently. Not that Tony was very good at meditating, either. Or waiting. He filled that gap with his own voice then, sometimes mumbled, sometimes snatches of song, up toward the stars as his hands worked just as busily at nothing just over his stomach, fingers tapping at the air as though he sat at a keyboard rather than sprawled on his back in the sand where he could dig his toes into the cooler layers below. When the noise he made wasn't quite enough to drown out his own doubts, it would get quieter still, fading out into occasional mutters if he wasn't biting his lip, until an idea was distracting enough that he wasn't consumed with the crushing weight of its ultimate worthlessness. They were all stored on the servers back in the library, anyway, blueprints and equations or more ephemeral sketches for Tony to sort through when he returned to the workshop, maybe find something that Jon could make an approving noise at.

While he worked, his head was pillowed on his silk jacket, shoes abandoned beside him, one of them holding down the corner of the blanket where a basket and small box waited. In the stillness between each wave, while the water seemed to hold its breath, he could still sometimes smell the sticky sweetness from the picnic, reminding him every time to check his messages in the back of his mind as though he could miss a notification. Two more minutes, if Lestat didn't show, Tony would leave, and no one had to know he had been tricked into wasting his time out here. He could have been wasting his time at home.

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Every point of access to the outside was considered, it sounded like. Or happened to be distorted, if it wasn't the doors that were truly being tampered with, but the room itself shifting. How important was the difference? More immediately, Tony was following that gesture toward the shed, literally, moving before Donnie was finished explaining, muttering, "Hey, look at that."

He had to drop the boots by the door to run inquisitive hands over the shell, then turn back to Donnie with a lopsided grin to say, "You're a marvel, sweetheart. I'd get you a contract tomorrow." The smile faded at the sight of the crystals, making Tony cock his head with concern, back to the looming problem. Distantly, a hand flapping to dismiss any concerns, he said of the skates, "Basically the same thing."

"Needs a paint job too," Donnie felt he had to note, but Tony's praise sure did the job of perking him up. He smiled brightly, looking almost ready to hug the guy but he reins himself in, that'd be weird, maybe.

The boots are considered again, brow quirked. Wheels? Blades? He had to backtrack a bit. "Wait, wait. They're for me?"

"They were..." Tony started, their energy swapping as Donnie brightened and Tony struggled against brooding on what the crystals meant. Their powers didn't work in that tunnel, either, disconnecting them from something, like a battery...He cleared his throat, squinting to try to focus, because he was in the middle of saying something. "If you got this thing to fly, though, you might have made me obsolete. Tell me you were working out those kinks down there, I'm sure everyone else loved it."

The shift wasn't lost on Donnie. He blinked before shaking his head.

"It wasn't like I had room to give it a proper test run. I just worked in my room. But the bulk of it was all done in your forge and with your help."

He sighed, the earlier energy boost quickly petering off without someone reflecting it. "Not sure how much good it'll do in this weather, even with a better battery pack. My shell will cook under the metal in this heat."

"So, you don't know yet if it can fly?," Tony tried to parse, slightly disappointed that Donnie didn't have chaotic development stories. That would have livened the place up and given Tony at least once person to tease about it. Maybe that wasn't worth the inevitable head injuries. More disappointing, the shell wasn't properly designed if it wasn't going to be protecting Donnie from the elements, though for that Tony twirled a finger in the air and said, "We'll have to work on that, this is MK 1--or..A-1. Make sure the toys work, we get the power source sorted--Reeve can probably help. Have you asked him about the crystals?"

"It can fly! I was able to touch the ceiling. But like I said, the batteries I had on hand weren't optimal for much more. I probably wouldn't have gotten from the tunnel to the forge, let alone stay in the air any higher than a few feet." He'd finished it, yes, but there were a lot of things he couldn't properly do, like field-testing.

Tony's suggestions made him relax again, nodding before he paused, face scrunching up thoughtfully. "I...think? Ugh, it's even weirder to say I dreamt that I did because it's technically true."

That was a weird enough thing to say that Tony took a moment to parse it and be sure what kind of dream Donnie meant, then snapped a nod with another apologetic gesture scratched up the back of his neck, keeping his focus on the shell. "Those aren't particularly productive conversations, in my experience," he allowed. So maybe a topic worth revisiting, now that all parties had their eyes open. "Not for that level of problem solving, anyway. Very productive if you're looking for blackmail material. That kind of thing could convince a guy to make a power source for you."

"Well...maybe not, but it seemed better than accidentally getting hit with someone's memories." Some had definitely been better than others but on the whole it was still pretty unsettling. Donnie hugged his arms around himself for a moment. He really didn't need to know what other people's lives were like from so intimate a perspective.

"But if someone else makes it then you don't know how it's done yourself," he frowned. Not to mention it was virtually unheard of for him to have anyone make something for him. Usually it was the other way around.

Donnie made it sound like he was looking for reasons not to use the blackmail material he didn't get, leaving Tony watching him narrowly, not sure if it was some kind of cover or Donnie really managed to be thrown into one of those dreams and not see someone's most rusted inner workings, and on top of that happened to have a moral compass strong enough that he wouldn't even take the hypothetical advantage. Annoying.

"Sure you would. You take one look at it, you figure it out. You figured out how to make this thing by taking toasters apart, didn't you?" Tony argued, patting the battle shell again. Maybe that was a misguided assumption and Donnie had neglected to tell Tony about his stint at Xavier's where Forge could teach him engineering by blasting it into his head.

There didn't really seem much to blackmail on when it came to Reeve. If he had a talking cat doll wandering around somewhere then there really wasn't much else to take advantage of there. Donnie didn't even want to think about Billy's headspace.

It wasn't particularly that Donnie wasn't one to take advantage where he could, but of what he could remember, there wasn't anything he'd want to make use of and nothing he could particularly think of that he'd want from anyone of them.

Talking toasters and reverse engineering was much easier.

"Okay, point," Donnie admitted. "...but I doubt you'd be happy if I took apart your armor."

"I'd use you for kindling," Tony readily agreed. There were lines that just weren't crossed, like dismantling a man's armor. Only the worst people did that. "But I'm not the one you're blackmailing. Unless that's what you're doing right now. Am I being blackmailed?" If it was his choice, he'd also pick himself over literally anyone else to design and build something, but he'd proven too stupid to understand the energy this planet could apparently support so he didn't think that was really an option. Besides, it wasn't his head that Donnie had been digging around in. His secrets should have been safe from leverage.

"I haven't decided on who's worth blackmailing yet," Donnie said, shrugging, not that he sounded very enthusiastic about it. Going through people's experiences involuntarily was already exhausting enough the first time around without wanting to recall them. He slumped a bit.

"Can...we not talk about stuff that happened in there?" They hadn't been released for all that long in comparison to how long they'd been trapped- it was far too soon to be recollecting the whole experience.

Tony had to work on his subtlety. He still tried to play it off with an innocent lift of his eyebrows like he had no idea that was what they were talking about, even if it was with clear reluctance that he finally said, "Yeah," then didn't have any followup prepared to change the topic. "Okay," wasn't it, either, and he tapped restlessly on the battle shell, chewing his lip apologetically for how Donnie must have been feeling, before Tony started pushing him. "So..." There were a thousand things to work on, one of them had to come to mind to keep Donnie distracted, but Tony's gaze darted fruitlessly until they landed on the boots he had brought. Then he was abruptly pointing with too much enthusiasm, glad for the direction; "Those can break the sound barrier."

Tony was an exhausting force to deal with in and of itself, but Donnie still preferred the company, even if he felt like he was dragging his heels through the conversation.

He took a moment to keep up with the other, blinking before he looked back at the boots. Hopefully they were fine getting wet. He reached over to pick them up for closer inspection so he could try working out the how's from the broken information he'd been provided.

"How..?" he started to ask as he turned them over to inspect the soles. Between skating and broken sound barriers, he couldn't help but feel a bit eager to see just what these babies could do.

Nothing could have made Tony light up more. Except maybe telling him he was an incomparably beautiful genius. His eyes flashed with what was almost a warning over a wide smile, and he raised a pointed finger, clearly prepared to give a thorough breakdown of the mechanics that started with, "It's very simple." Those boots were heavy, though, with circular nodes along the soles that glowed faintly while inert, and slightly articulated toe joints for Donnie's distinct, lizardy feet. "You see those rockets?" Tony prompted, pointing to a seam on the heel that must have been hiding some explosive power behind the right manipulation. "I made them for a jet engine." Tony's instructive hand dropped. Thorough.

Some people might be horrified at the prospect of giving a fourteen-year-old a pair of rocket-boots.

As the fourteen-year-old in question, Donnie was absolutely ecstatic. Even for the lack of a proper explanation, he studied the areas of interest as Tony pointed them out, the suggestion of a grin eventually stretching out into a full-blown, undeniable look of glee.

"Seriously?! Ohmygosh that's awesome!" Because it was totally safe having jet engine boosters strapped to your feet. But he clearly meant it as he hugged the boots to his chest like a kid having just found the thing they'd been hoping for on Christmas day. Sure, it wasn't uranium, but he'd never gotten anything like this before.

Whatever sullen mood he'd worn earlier was quickly slung off in favor of this new rush of excitement- only put briefly on pause as he hesitated in trying those boots on for size as he looked up at the 'rain'. Were these waterproof? more importantly, he didn't want to stick damp turtle feet in his new toys.

They worked in practice even better than they did in theory, generally Tony's preferred method of experiencing the world, but there were a lot of things about Donnie that he didn't understand yet. He couldn't help the grin in return as the kid beamed, nodding to encourage that enthusiasm into something explosive, then followed his gaze up at the shimmer of water, stepping back out of the shed curiously to try to calculate what was so much more magnetic about it.

"We can set up a humidifier in the forge, if that's...I didn't really think about it, you know, listen, I'm not theorizing on just how much turtle you are, it makes sense, that's on me," he concluded, hand to his heart to accept that he might be capable of entirely missing Donnie slowly dying while they worked.

Donnie paused from considering this new, slightly annoying predicament to follow Tony's movement. He blinked, scratching the back of his bandanna'd head then.

"Mostly turtle- soft-shell variety. I uh, started out as a regular turtle before someone figured they could try making an invincible army by mutating animals with human DNA." He made a slight face, but he still couldn't be upset about it. Gross designs or not, if it hadn't happened, he wouldn't be here.

"I didn't really think about it either. It's usually not this hot and dry, back home. I mean, I live in the sewers under Manhattan, summer's are usually more humid and there's water..."

This was the opposite of all of the assumptions that Tony had been making, at it took him a moment to recalculate, leaving him looking entirely stalled out as he continued to stare up at the water with just a furrowing of his brow. To him, Donnie had been a very straightforward boy-to-transformative-mutation situation. The other way around hadn't even occurred to him.

"You're actually a turtle," he eventually accepted. Then, accusatory, "I thought you were a mutant." They had clearly been going about this all wrong, too focused on their armors than baseline bodily needs--Donnie hadn't even thought to build those into his armor. Maybe being transformed from turtle-to-boy did something damaging to his basic self-preservation. How Tony managed to express that concern was, "Are you supposed to be eating lettuce or something?"

The kid opened his mouth and then closed it as he reconsidered what he'd been about to say. No, he supposed he hadn't really gone over any specifics, but it wasn't like many asked, and it was surprising really, just how many people were so accepting of giant humanoid turtles around here.

"I am a mutant, just not in terms of like...I guess Billy," Donnie said, hugging his arms around his new boots as he tried very hard not to let his thoughts go back to that place he'd seen in their dreams. He didn't realize he was squeezing his eyes shut so tightly then.

Tony's follow-up question was a curveball that helped him break away from the memory of that torture room and its cruel implements, a surprised and somewhat indignant laugh blurting from his lips.

"I can eat people food!" he huffed. "Pizza is my preference."

It was very hard to assess where exactly that tension was coming from, and as far as Tony could tell maybe bringing up the genetic-capital-M-Mutants was maybe something of a sore spot. There were other kids here closer to Donnie's age anyway, right? Dustin might even appreciate the battle shell. Okay, probably not, maybe that was why Donnie was always going off to the beach on his own.

Tony's narrow study of the kid left his laugh in lingering silence until Tony abruptly offered, "Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Too much pizza and my farts can clear a city block. Banned on date nights, stick to sushi." Maybe Jon knew something about softshell turtles and could let Tony know what to look out for.

The awkward silence made Donnie clam up again. The advice just made him roll his eyes.

"Well, not like I've had much opportunity for pizza here anyway, so that's no big worry. Not sure I'm a fan of liquid diets though, although some of the pastes they provided in that hole weren't too bad..." That observation was less than enthusiastic.

"Man I miss pizza..." And his family. He missed home.

This had to be a test, making Tony grimace and consider the falling water again, distant and tense himself now as he tried his best not to obviously follow up on what Donnie was eating or doing in that hole, or follow the impulse to point out Tommy's potential pizza technology. He didn't have to say it was Tommy's. "There might be a, uh, pizza oven. At the diner," he ventured. "There were plans, anyway. They might still be there, could inspire some innovation. In the cheese and pepperoni department. Never know."

It seemed like a bit of extra work whenever he went into a conversation with Tony, some weird dance that went in vague circles around whatever he was trying to say. Donnie wasn't much in the mood for deciphering things, he had just enough focus to latch onto whatever came up at the moment.

He blinked, pulling himself back to the present. If there had been pizza he would've certainly have known by now. Dimly he remembered something possibly mentioned somewhere, but he'd thrown himself headlong into other things and hadn't paid attention at the time.

Plans for a pizza oven were much different than an actual pizza oven, and even having an oven didn't guarantee pizza. ...where did pepperoni even come from? He rolled Tony's words into a more cohesive ball he could make sense of before dropping his shoulders in a sigh.

"Figures, needa work for my food. I'll put it on the list," he muttered, rubbing a palm against his tired eyes. It wasn't exactly a complaint, but right now he wasn't in the mood to tinker and going outside to do anything was less and less appealing.

That was the unique experience that this special getaway offered, and it was a very holistic one that Tony alternated between resigning himself to and wallowing in dismay about. Now, it was resignation that tinged his tight smile and clap on Donnie's shoulder before he was moving away, already pulling his sunglasses back on before he had left the influence of the spattering water. "Come one, what are you doing, don't you have a job to do?" he grumbled at DATA as he passed, sparking the little robot into hurried action that had it tripping over its own feet to go scrambling out into the greenery.

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thepurpleone - 2023-07-20 02:55 (UTC) - Expand

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