revivalproject

Entry tags:

Loom

WHO: Tony and open
WHERE: The Temba greenhouse
WHAT: Taking care of the greenhouse
WHEN: End of February
WARNINGS: That's up to you

It was early enough that Tony's breath still came in a faint puff even inside the greenhouse. He didn't think much of it at first, of course it was cold, and inside was still an effective haven from the frost that had reddened his ears as he crossed the square. Not so much from the dark, which seemed to cling to the ground, pressing in from the density of eerily still plants with the deep blue of the sun not quite breaking the horizon yet wilting against them. Tony could feel his heart in his chest, trying to hear the scuttling legs he knew were in that darkness, squinting to try to find some source of light. There had to be lights in here. It was almost enough to send him back out, try again later, but his stomach grumbled and the street just outside the window was washed with that tepid grey already. It wasn't that dark. Bugs probably slept.

By the time he had made his way along the perimeter, closest to the windows and the too slowly climbing sun, he had a paltry few berries in the (evidently overconfident) bucket that he had brought along with him. They weren't going to be enough to feed him, let alone bring back to the kitchen like Tommy would have. Tony was going to have to venture deeper in, and, god forbid, investigate some of the plants closer to the ground and the crawling things within. How was he supposed to tell when a potato was ripe? Did potatoes ripen? It was while he was crouched down by a bed of completely mysterious tubers that he became so viscerally aware of the barrel that he was staring down, that he was going to have to figure this out if he really thought he was capable of staying here alone, and just how much he took from the extraordinary people who had been doing the work while he made their lives more difficult. He risked pulling a glove off with his teeth to test the tenderness of a hanging leaf, dainty pinky out in case he felt an antenna or fuzzy body hiding on the underside, and found only wilted crepe, dry and cold. Around his glove, his breath still fogged. From there, still knelt down, his eyes finally flicked up, searching along the windows, not for the light outside but the glass. The cold and the constant wet of the winter had not been kind to the most robust of the buildings. This one featured a hasty patch job.

Another breath, this time a sigh that swirled around Tony's head and dissipated into the darkness. There was more for him to do here than collect a few berries.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Interstellar deals? Astral planes? Negative Zone?

"Really?" she asks, and she looks almost anxious. "I just... would be happy to not have to risk bible thumpers being ready to thump me."

Tony should have seen the backfire coming. Instead of a smile, he got Robin worked up, and he gave himself a short, impatient nod for having to learn that lesson the thousandth time. "You get that a lot?" he asked, a little incredulous. Sure, he had plenty of religious protestors standing outside his door for his heretical lifestyle, but his sins were very public, and there were plenty of groups who took umbrage with them. Robin seemed more like she made an effort not to be seen.

"I don't tell people," she admits. "Because they would do that. Not my parents. Hippies and free love and all of that."

But the other stuff? Come on, she lives in a small town in Indiana in the 80s. It would be dangerous.

While Tony was certain he wouldn't want to have been raised by hippies, this did make him squint inquisitively, feeling like he missed an important function. "So, your parents are supportive, and you don't tell anyone anything so they haven't done anything horrible, but you're still afraid," he summarized, as far as he understood it. "What else don't you let yourself do?"

"I don't know if they are supportive," Robin groans. She can't tell them. What if they disown her? She needs to be safe and able to take care of herself before she even considers telling them. "I never told anyone by choice but Steve. And Billy I guess."

And soon she'll say it to Cal.

By then, Tony had leaned back on his hands, watching Robin curiously and trying to work out her baffling machinery more than his opening defensive tension. Someone must have programmed this anxiety into her, and her answer about her parents was a little ambiguous. After a contemplative beat, Tony admitted, "My dad had me figured out before I did." He shrugged one careless shoulder, but his focus rolled away again, wandering like there could be something interesting on the ceiling as he continued, "Said he sent me to boarding school to toughen me up, he wouldn't be having such a sissy in his house, Stark men were made of iron. All of those parts of me that he hated so much, that weakness, that failure to be the man he expected me to be, it feels all bound up together, and I still don't want other people to see it. I put on a suit of armor, and I try to be more like him. I don't know if I've told anyone--I don't really let myself think of the words for it." Other people had enough names for him, and didn't often pause to ask personal questions before the bedroom door shut. It was easy enough to avoid.

"You dad sounds like he'd fit in back in Hawkins," Robin says with a sigh.

But she thinks she gets it. The wanting to be what others want, but not being able to change for them.

"I used to think if I got away from home it would be easier. I could find a place I would be accepted. But... I can't just leave, you know? Not when it's not safe."

'Getting away from home' hadn't really been an option for Tony. He was still in that same childhood home where his dad had taught him how to think about himself until it was knocked down from under him. "You're still in high school, aren't you?," he asked first. "Your job is math tests and getting drunk and fooling around, and if you're not doing it, nobody will. It's important, just as important as keeping the world together at the seams. I promise. But..." He knew more than enough kids her age and younger who had a hard time extracting themselves from that unreasonable responsibility, so he knew better than to hope she internalized the point immediately. He continued, "You build with what you have. You have a home, you don't have to run away from it--you fill it with the people and the ideals that are important to you. You make it into the place where you're accepted. You won't have any more tools somewhere else than you do right here."

"Oh wow, so not getting drunk. Or fooling around, thanks."

But what she has is a family she hadn't expected to gain, and what felt like a duty to help save the world. And so much trauma.

"I think you might not be right about that. Like... seriously? There is a lot I could get elsewhere. People other than Steve who know who I really am for one thing."

"Yeah, okay," Tony muttered as he hunched forward over his fire again, taking the chance to warm his fingers with his elbows tucked in tightly to his sides. No answer seemed reasonable when Tony was sure he was just about to learn of yet another entry on the endless list of things that Robin would not do. Maybe she thought she'd stop being that tiny person when she got far enough away, another universe between her and that home she thought was stifling her. Temba, extraordinarily, still had too many familiar faces. "So, who are you?," Tony prompted.

Robin works on wrapping the tuber she got up enough to put it by the fire safely. Meanwhile Little Bear moves closer to Tony to put his head against Tony's leg.

"I don't know," she admits after a bit, her voice a bit lost. "College is supposed to be about figuring that out, right? But I'm so scared to leave home. What if they need me? But do I just want to define myself by the horrors of my home? It's so hard to figure it all out for me."

The tangle of the way things were 'supposed to be' at odds with who he really was was a familiar one, though it made Tony purse his lips with an impatient sigh, watching Robin for any sign that she recognized how much she was in her own way. Despite the next impending rejection, he had to suggest, "You figure out who you are in college because you're surrounded by new people and confronted with ideas that never penetrated your gated community in your dad's house. You don't meet some gal there who can look into your eyes and tell you. You're forced to talk to someone that you disagree with long enough that you realize what's important to you." He raised his eyebrows, inviting her to disagree again, and maybe figure out that who she was had to be, at the very least, not this guy she thought was an idiot.

"Exactly!" Robin says, nodding at Tony like she gets it. Because she has heard that.

"I want that experience. I want to go to classes and debate topics and have someone convince me to change my mind. I want new people and new ideas that never make it into Hawkins. I want to be challenged."

She sighs and tilts her head back to stair up at the distant glass roof.

"Hawkins is so small, so isolated, so dangerous. Multiple ways even. I've never felt really challenged there. I pass my classes easily. I've been teaching myself multiple languages by audio tape and dictionaries. I've read so much of the town library. I don't feel like I can GROW there."

She did not get it. Tony glanced up to follow her gaze, wondering if she saw Hawkins up there, and what it would actually take if changing the stars wasn't enough. "Sounds like you're stuck there," he finally relented.

No, she didn't. She thought she did, but nope.

"I don't want to be stuck there. But I also want to go home to finish the year and help my friends. And then I can go somewhere else. Somewhere I can feel safe to, you know, meet me for real."

There were about thirty arguments on the tip of Tony's tongue, about home, about a new problem always around the corner, about college and security and identity and ultimately about how none of those arguments were really going to go anywhere with Robin because she was already very sure about who she was, so he let them all simmer in the crackle of the fire and thump of his hand on Little Bear's back. After a beat, he asked instead, "And then what?" That was the really important question, after all.

That's really the question. She sighs.

"I don't know. I wish I did. But I don't."

And she's pretty sure no one expects that of her at this age.

Her melancholy must have been funny, because Tony chuckled while he let his head loll onto his shoulder, his smile slanted with his tongue between his teeth. "Your parents aren't here," he said after massaging between Little Bear's watchful eyes, keeping his own focus there as he continued, "All those people from town who aren't at your speed, the kids in class who don't know how to talk to you. It's just you. You could tell me you're a Kree princess and I wouldn't know the difference."

See, here's where she'd ask what a Kree was, but she was focusing on his words. ANd her eyes were widening. Maybe she couldn't get the education or the practice with girls but...

She really could, couldn't she? Really try and figure herself out here?

"You're really smart, aren't you?"

It wasn't clear yet if Robin did actually understand him, or had just found her own path to whatever enlightenment was making her stare like that. The question still made Tony give another breathy laugh, then grimace with a shrug. "Some people have said that. Usually with some modifiers," he replied.

Who knows which it is. Robin sure doesn't. But she'd crediting it to Tony. Perhaps that counts for something.

"Like 'amazingly'?"

Because clearly he's earned it.

Tony still wasn't sure how to take that, not seeing any sign to doubt its earnestness, and mostly feeling guilty that he had managed to mislead Robin if so. That couldn't stop him from lifting his chin with a nagging smile that he had to school into something more flirtatious to answer, "You must bring it out in me." Before his head could get any bigger, he had to toss it with some impatience, abruptly redirecting, "How's the harvest coming? Come on." He gave the dog an apologetic pat so he could slide away and onto his knees over the garden bed again, searching expectantly for another potato to pull.

"Ew, please don't flirt with me," Robin cringes. Before finally saying it out loud. "I don't like, you know, guys."

There. Now he knows. It's not even that he's old. It's that he's all male and all of that. One day she was going to be quite the butch and everything about her was going to scream who she was. But today was not that day.

"The harvest will probably go well," she says with a sigh, before finally pulling out one tuber. Got to wash it off next.

"Thanks for the help."

With a snort, Tony said, "Yeah, I figured that part out," which did not at all acknowledge her questionably polite request. In fact, it was that kind of security that made some people exceeding fun to flirt with, people who could never be interested, or who were otherwise committed and Tony generally expected to not take such an exchange seriously, until it backfired and he had to politely turn them down before Hank set ants on him. So instead, he promised, "Eddie's gone, sweetheart, sorry, I'm running out of options, you're going to have to put up with it. That's the sort of thing you can't leave to Steve, he probably doesn't even like to be called 'daddy'." He mostly seemed focused on digging up another potato, so his sidelong glance Robin's way was brief, eyebrows raised in challenge.

Robin snorts.

"If you heard about how many kids Steve wants then you would realize he would probably love to be called Daddy."

And she doesn't even mean just out of bed. He's probably got one of those kink things about it.

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