revivalproject | Ghostriders In the Sky [Catch-All Event Log]

It wasn't even fifteen minutes before those same previously quick-retreating footsteps became louder on a return route. If Tony had been bothering to track him in the cameras, he would have seen that Donnie hadn't stayed terribly long once he did get back to his room, almost immediately rushing back out.

He skidded past the doorway to the forge, scrambling back to throw himself bodily through it, his goggles askew, a hand gripping tightly the staff section he'd reclaimed from the workbench.

"I found it!" he blurted, looking even more like some deranged scientist as he pulled his goggles down and once again looked towards the bench.

Whether or not Tony was tracking did not diminish his surprise when Donnie went thundering by, then burst back in, leaving Tony frozen and waiting for the aftershocks to diminish before he risked glancing around again, looking for what about that presentation he was supposed to understand. He was kneeling on the floor by then, gathering the parts that had been shoved from the table, so maybe it was a problem of perspective again. "Yes," he eventually had to agree, "Last time you came in here. It was right there."

Donnie waved off the response as he came closer to inspect the space, pointing at a spot before he set the staff piece there. He lifted it again, frowning to himself.

"An energy reading. It's roughly the size of this segment. I found one back in my room where this had been, different position, same amount of energy. Whoever moved it was doing some very precise targeting, but that would mean knowing what they were aiming for and where it was. And be just as precise in where they'd set it, because there's no...excess trail indicating any other movement. It's just...gone from one spot and here the next."

He brought up his holoscreen off of his bracer computer, tapping through things before he sent over screencaps of the readings from his goggles to give Tony visuals of what they'd picked up. There were a couple of the segment itself and its readings, and then images of the silhouette of the staff segment glowing in indication of the readings, from presumably the place in his room aside from the worktable. The number levels between the images didn't seem to differ too much between them, the latter only slightly lower. They however matched the levels with the corresponding staff segment images.

"It's deteriorating, that's the only reason the levels are different, but given the numbers matched up between what I read from my room and the staff then, and the staff and this spot now, they are all very consistent, so this happened instantaneously. Who all's twiddling their thumbs around here and has that kind of control?"

It was an honest question, since Tony seemed to know a lot about the people around and the abilities they had. He'd already named several, so it had to be one of them maybe...? But that still left reasons unanswered.

While Donnie produced his findings, Tony carefully gathered himself up with a dainty pat for any lingering debris on his clothes, and took a cautious step closer then halted with a restrained lean to eye Donnie's data with his hands planted on his hips. He was a little surprised again, not expecting Donnie to have anything to ask of him after the presentation, and his focus darted between Donnie's face and the images as he rapidly searched for a more satisfying answer than the suggestions that he had produced before. "Billy," he decided to narrow the focus. Jon likely could, too, but Tony had already said probably too much about what he was capable of, and Billy was very cavalier about his powers. "He wiggles his fingers and can make things appear, disappear, wear a hat." The problem was, "I don't know why he would, though. I mean, he wouldn't." That was supposed to sound confident, but it came out a little sideways, and one of Tony's hands escaped to flip in the air, hedging. "He's the one that convinced me to come with you in the first place, he wouldn't be messing--The Agrii did it, too. Or, their systems. Popped you right into that pod."

The suggestion seemed to be taken into serious reconsideration. "Well he did threaten to teleport people over to him for a chat or something last time so maybe this is him being bored," Donnie shrugged.

"Anyway, Venidelosia said that the it isn't possible to use the matter transfer system aboard the ship itself, otherwise she said she would've done so to protect Ny Ak from being hurt, and it's a huge energy drain that involves rerouting unnecessary energy from the rest of the ship whenever it's even employed on our behalf, down on Agra Ten."

Maybe Billy did need a little attention, but that would have to wait because Tony had to suck his teeth then vocalize for Donnie, "So, you trust anything she says over seeing something teleport on the ship that teleports things. Okay." As long as they were clear on that, Tony had to come up with an alternative that Donnie was more likely to explore, so he suggested with increasing helplessness, "Maybe if you got to know him, a chat wouldn't seem so threatening. He's very nice, no matter what anyone's been telling you. The stuff with the bugs, that wasn't his fault."

"Externally, not internally! Whatever brings us in must be on a different system," Donnie muttered, brow furrowing as he hadn't really thought about that angle and put the whole pod incident out of his mind until right then. He taps at his bracer, making notes, another thing to look into once they got back to the Agrii ship. His task list was never going to end.

"Uh, you're the only one that's been telling me things about him and even suggested it could potentially be him and now you're saying it's not so which is it?" he asked, looking at Tony flatly with the exasperation as only a teenager could muster.

"I'm saying he's not threatening," Tony interrupted before Donnie had even finished his derisive question, and by then Tony was ready to abandon the argument and dismissed, "Fine, I'll talk to him. You just--" He cast an impatient hand over the forge and the mess he had made, like he could grasp it and push it aside, then said, "I'll get this out later, go have some breakfast or something."

Donnie tossed his hands, frustrated, before letting them drop. He pocketed his staff piece again, frowning as he looked around.

"Why?" It came out sharper than he'd meant to, but it was frustrating to him that it seemed they'd somehow circled back to this again.

"It's a communal resource, if you need to use it then I'm not the project police." He looked at Tony as though he could find whatever answers he was seeking, written somewhere on him.

"...I thought we got past this sort of thing." That they were cool with things again, hashed it all out during he zombie apocalypse. Or maybe that was just a moment of bonding driven by everything else. He hated that he had to wonder if that needed to be reassessed.

What Donnie might read was all frustrated and tense, Tony's gaze averted and darting for the door again, watching for whoever did enforce those boundaries to come in. He tried to temper it with a lean against the worktable with one hand, looking more like a listing fort than a casual lounge. Maybe continuously having to vocalize his crimes was integral to whatever this process was, so he wouldn't be allowed to ignore them. "If you need to use it," he countered carefully, "then I can't be here. You shouldn't be penalized because I can't control myself. It's not supposed to be your problem."

"Who ever said there was a problem??"

Did he?

"This is like a bad rerun and it was never fun to go through the first time around. I never kicked you out of the forge when I first arrived, actually it was the other way around-" Probably not helping- "So I don't know why you feel like you have to vacate the area whenever I so much as breathe in your space. Anyway, that has to be a pain to move around, and I know I hate having to resituate my stuff when I'm working on things, so I doubt it's a party for you."

Donnie hugged his arms close as he looked at the floor.

"...if you don't like me, then...just say so. So I won't be a bother anymore."

It wasn't a party. Every day was so frustrating and lonely, and Tony shouldn't have been so eager to have Billy assure him that he didn't have to stay behind. That should have been his first sign to slow him down before he came crashing into hurting Donnie within ten minutes again. Tony hung his head with eyes closed as he tried to carefully pick his way through all of his impulses, say something less him so it wasn't just shrapnel that he spewed, and said slowly, "You did not do anything. I am sorry I have made you feel like you were being disruptive. I should be more thoughtful with my language as well as my space and actions."

"....that's not a disagreement," Donnie said, slumping a bit. It sounded...strange, like Tony was reading off a teleprompter.

"I miss when we'd do things together. I thought you enjoyed it too. It was cool to finally have some sort of father-figure who actually understood and took interest in the same things. But I guess that was all just me."

He rubbed at his arm, glancing away before he decided to turn back towards the door.

Of course it still wasn't good enough. No amount of pressing his knuckle into his eye helped Tony think of how he could have been any clearer, either. A drink also wouldn't help. It wouldn't.

"I'm not trying to do this," he finally said with resignation. "I'm not, but every time you're here, it's like I can't help myself, I say something or I do something and I can't even account for it, I don't even know where it comes from, that's the worst part--I've been alone for months, telling myself I'm doing the work, I'm fixing it, and I still don't even know what it is, this broken part of me that keeps hurting people. It's not just you. Everyone else, though, they can see it. They keep their distance. I don't know why they're not telling you."

He stopped at the edge of the doorway.

When had it all started getting strange between them? Donnie knew the answer, things seemed so much more tense and awkward ever since the pod incident. Maybe it was because he'd been on the other end of it that he had no say in what was happening, but he'd listened to it so many times and the only thing he found that bothered him was that Tony had gotten hurt just because he'd been trying to get Donnie out.

"Maybe nothing's really broken. Maybe trying to fix it a problem that wasn't really there is what broke things."

That was a sweet sentiment that Tony had to give Donnie a pained smile for trying. It didn't last long. This blind spot that Donnie was maintaining just kept exposing him to being hurt again. "I've been dodging the consequences of my own actions for my whole life," Tony said. "I put on a shiny metal suit and told everyone I was a hero like that could bring a thousand people back to life. I can't keep doing that. You have people here that care about you enough to make sure I don't get to lie to you like that."

So far as Donnie could figure, it seemed the best analysis of the situation. Things had seemed- had been fine. And there had been ups and downs, but things always smoothed out after, so he had no idea why it hadn't just bounced back like before.

"So helping me when we were stuck in that weird reverse dimension was a lie? Or making me rocket boots so I could get around when the world was burning up? Helping me build a battle shell to protect me? You weren't even going to let me go back out into the zombie hordes. I know I'm bad about reading people, I'm not like Leo, but if me thinking you cared was all actually a lie then I don't know what to believe anymore."

He held his breath, trying to will away that annoying prickly dampness in his eyes.

"But then, maybe I want to believe that lie."

"This is me trying to care for you," Tony replied, caged hand tapping over his heart, trying to pull out the parts of it that functioned. "That I can't even express that, that you hear something different that makes you feel like you're a bother or that I'm disappointed, that's my problem. As soon as someone else was there to see how I treated you, you know--You got yourself out of that awful place. You made the shell. You're extraordinary, sweetheart, and you shouldn't be letting me take any of that credit."

"Is it? Because I think it's me. I think I've been the problem all along. I did something stupid and you tried to fix that, and that...that messed everything up. And I am so sorry that you had to go through that."

Donnie swiped the back of his sleeve across his eyes, dragging in a breath that was just as quickly expelled in a sigh.

"I didn't do any of that without you, so stop selling yourself short. Because you are a hero. It sounds really lame to say, but it's no lamer than my brother wanting to be called our champion."

The argument didn't really fit together, but while Donnie made it, Tony had to politely find somewhere else to look until Donnie could hide the dampness in his eyes, his own mouth set in a tight smile against an apology he didn't deserve and the vivid feeling of panic in his chest when he lurched out of his own stasis. Donnie, of course, wasn't equipped to see those missing pieces, where he wasn't the common denominator. It was Tony that couldn't hold a conversation without someone seeing that he must have been some kind of predator, selfish and stupid, and it wasn't everyone else that was wrong. He wasn't willing to take that risk, at least, with these kids' safety.

"He is your champion," Tony had to agree with Leo, finding some softness at the edges of his expression, and didn't see how either designation was lame. "He doesn't make you feel that way, does he? That you're the problem. I'm, genuinely--I can't figure it out, what it is that I do that convinces you that you should feel these awful ways about yourself. It is so hard for me to imagine that anyone else could treat you that way, that they don't act like you hung the moon."

"...he is," Donnie admitted, the faintest of smiles stubbornly tugging at the end of his lips. He shook his head. Leo had never looked at him as the problem, but Donnie had sure felt it was his responsibility for his brother shrinking in upon himself, distrustful of everyone and doubting his own ability because he couldn't keep Donnie from getting hurt.

"Stop trying to avoid me. Every time you try to excuse yourself, even if you're believing you're giving me space, it's... It's not what I want. It's like I have the plague or something. And then I get paranoid when we talk, and maybe it's just my misinterpretations and your not saying things straight."

He made a face. "Maybe we're just both. Really, really bad at this."

There was no way Donnie didn't hear it that time, how he still couldn't respond to Tony without putting himself down. Tony tipped his head, a pleading gesture with a sigh, not sure how many more personality defects he could handle inspiring. What Donnie wanted was as healthy as Tony wanting a drink.

"You're asking me to put you in danger," he reiterated. "The solution that I have right now is not getting involved. And, okay, maybe it's selfish, maybe I'm just trying to avoid the oncoming train that I can see, the next time it's really bad, and Wesker, or the Soldier, or Tae has to take me down. I don't know. My wires are crossed, that much is clear."

It didn't seem to him like he was putting himself down when he was describing something akin to symptoms. It was cause and effect, and it really did start to seem to him that maybe it was a double-ended problem of lacking comprehension.

He couldn't help for the exasperated sigh and roll of his eyes as Tony pushed. "When have we not been in danger? You are not responsible for any of the threats I've gone through. None of our previous encounters have ever been life-threatening, and as mentioned before, you even helped me get through some of those."

"I know I'm not the engineer of all of the world's evils!" Only most of them. That was still a different conversation, a willful ignorance of the same impulse that had Donnie telling himself it was his own fault he felt terrible about himself whenever he talked to Tony. "I, personally, with my hands, would have killed you if your brother and Wesker didn't intervene. To this day, I don't believe I would do anything different if we were standing in that room again, and I'm sorry for that, I don't know what is wrong with me. People have their kids taken away for less."

"I would've done the same thing!"

For a split-second Donnie looked like he regretted yelling back, but he doubled down on it.

"So maybe we'd both accidentally kill someone and feel terrible about it, but in the moment, you were doing what you thought would work, you were trying to open the pod! Cutting the energy would in theory work, but unfortunately nothing of the tech and information for anything make sense because some stupid entities figured it was better separating knowledge and understanding of things that otherwise have informational overlaps but for whatever reason it doesn't translate that way when we rewrite our brain with their preprogrammed information!

"So I can't be mad at you for doing what you thought would work, because you were doing what you thought you could. And maybe things would have turned out terribly if Leo and Wesker didn't do anything, maybe I wouldn't be here yelling at you. But I am, and things worked out one way or another. You keep talking about something that's already happened, that you wouldn't do anything different. I get that. But if it happened again in the future, would you still do it, knowing what you do now? You're focused on the wrong thing. Stop beating yourself up over something that almost happened. Wesker already did that for you."

Ghostriders In the Sky [Catch-All Event Log]

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whoops, it appears my backslash got eaten

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