revivalproject | Calibrations Waiting Room Mingle

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Calibrations Waiting Room Mingle

WHO: ALL HE ROWS
WHERE: The Secret Tunnel, which has become the Calibrations Waiting Room (or was it always...?)
WHAT: Mingle log for literally anything you'd like to take place in the waiting room between sleep cycles during the event
WHEN: June 3 - July 10
WARNINGS: Please mark individual threads with warnings

For those that have heeded Ga Re's warning, the door within the secret tunnel - which looks suspiciously like the hatch to one of your shuttles - is wide open, waiting for you. You walk through... and the door behind you disappears. You’re now standing in a cavernous, cold, white waiting room. There are hallways leading off the main corridor with names above each. One of them has your name and will draw you toward it, inevitably.

And on the wall, in pink, running letters is written this single greeting:

‘Welcome to Calibrations’.

The secret tunnel has become a large waiting room with chairs, tables, and the same food dispensers available in the shuttles. There are also communal bathrooms - one for each gender - with several toilet stalls and shower stalls in each, including basic shampoo and soap dispensers, like you might find in a hotel. The water isn’t hot, so hopefully you don’t mind lukewarm showers. Somehow, at least, it never goes cold.

Branching off the main waiting room room are the labeled hallways. At the end of each short hallway is a door, with the same character’s name written on them. Anyone can enter any room, regardless of the name written on it. Everyone has their own room, though of course people can share. Each room has a simple bed (approximately queen-sized) and a set of drawers.

You can opt to spend time in your room or in the larger, common waiting room. (And if you do, you can thread it out here!) But every 16 hours, you'll feel a compulsion: You need to sleep. Right now. You find yourself going into your room (or someone else's, if you really want). But you’re drawn to the bed. You can’t help but lie down. And then, you fall asleep.

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That backfired. With a frown, Tony pressed both his hands back into the bed, dropping his ear toward his shoulder to lean away as Reeve drew back, and muttered, "Sorry," for reminding Reeve about what he had left back home again. Shifting his tension, Tony freed a hand to pat sympathetically up Reeve's back then squeeze his close shoulder, not sure what about this situation didn't remind him of a hollowed out city. Being trapped underground by some sadistic aliens, maybe. "You could be thinking of this as a vacation," he offered with a knowing smile, sure that Reeve had a poor understanding of the word and he would have been working at his sketches while laid up with in a sunhat with a pina colada, never mind in a clinical storm cellar. "Maybe...work on something you love," Tony suggested, plucking up one of the pencils that had fallen from the bundle he carried in to indicate the other sketchbook.

It wasn’t Midgar. It wasn’t even the rest of everything. It was that touch, so familiar. So wonderful. It wasn’t being reminded of the place he lost but something else entirely.

“This is practice. I have no issues with the work here, Tony. It will be nice. And I don’t mind working on Mini either. I just...”

Honesty. That was something Tony deserved, wasn’t it?

“I would be happy to tell you of Midgar and anything you want. I just ask you not use me as a pillow. The last thing I desire is Jon wandering in here to ask me something and thinking I was attempting to seduce you.”

Tony had mouthed 'nice' with a skeptical smirk, definitely not the way he saw the indentured servitude, but it was gone quickly, along with Tony's hand, the moment Reeve asked him to back off. Complete backfire. Bracing his hands safely behind him again where they couldn't get anywhere they weren't welcome, Tony sucked his lip between his teeth then muttered, "Wouldn't want that." Not sure what to do with himself now, not sure what he was doing here at all if they weren't getting along as well as Tony felt they had been and wondering how badly he had misread Reeve in such a short amount of time, Tony searched the room for his place in it only to realize he hadn't been invited in the first place. With a glance to the sketchbook he had brought back, he easily produced a hard smile and accepted, "Right," of course he had done his job, anything for the work, and rolled up to his feet, not about to overstay his welcome anymore. "Let me know if you run into any more roadblocks," he said.

“I will,” Reeve agrees, reaching out and scooping Mini into his arms as if the doll could protect him.

Only then does he look at his friend, but without expression. A very guarded look.

“I need to apologize for my behavior at the hospital that day. If I had known that you and Jon were... dancing around each other, I would have behaved differently. Both of you are good men who deserved better than my even unknowing meddling.”

Because from what he’d heard from Jon, the two men had been... well, Reeve hates to realize that he had made it awkward for everyone else.

That wasn't helping, and left Tony desperate for something to occupy his hands, one crawling up his chest to clutch over his heart and the other tucking purposefully into his pocket to pick at the loose threads there. This was the ludicrous interpretation that Tony could not follow the logic of: that Reeve was apologizing for Tony's fucking around on a relationship that Reeve himself could best define as 'dancing around', and every element of that sent a unique shock of self-resentment up Tony's spine, making him coil defensively against Reeve in case he had any more news about how Tony had been manipulating all of them. Somehow worse: that Reeve was letting him know how much he regretted getting involved at all.

"No apologies necessary. You're right, I should..." Tony didn't even know where to start with how he should have been behaving, knowing full well he was entirely capable of making the conscious decision not to hopefully cultivate either of their attention, not to respond when they invited him closer and not to take a drink when he was the one who had brought it to his lips. He spread his hand flat over his chest with a pat, suggesting he should maybe keep them to himself, that would have been a start, to think a little more clearly about what they were doing here. "Focus," he eventually landed on with a smile. Reeve was having no trouble getting the work done, and at best Tony had been distracting him from it. He had been on this ruined planet for months now. What did he have to show for it?

Geez, Reeve's making this a world more awkward, isn't he? Of course he is.

"I still want to be your friend, Tony. I just need a little bit more time to get over you so I can act like a mature man and not a love-struck idiot. Can you give me that? Just a little time to get my head on straight so I can smile and be supportive and friendly and comforting without just wanting to be petulant and possessive of someone I have no right to?"

Yep, tall order, he knows. But they're smart men and this place needs smart men like them if they ever want to get home. So just, well, give him a chance to get smart again.

That was Reeve acting like a love-struck idiot? He was worse than Steve; at least his idiocy came out in bursts of misplaced anger and melancholy that the women he was barely paying attention to had to tell him off for before shoving him back into the Mansion for Tony to deal with. Reeve was so closed off that Tony heard himself saying, "How was I supposed to know?" even as he processed that Reeve's doting kindness was his idiocy, and Tony's heart could have collapsed. He didn't want to give Reeve that. His fist had slowly curled again and Tony swayed where he was, at a loss, Reeve's instructions to keep his distance very clear but unsure how else to express himself. "I'd...give you anything," he eventually managed, gaze to the floor then darting back to the sketchbook, not exactly regretting laying out his heart in it but not sure what else he had to give after that. What Reeve was asking of him, of course. Chancing it with his shoulder to Reeve, facing more toward the door than to whatever further rejection Reeve might have for him testing the boundary, he asked, "Do you really want that?"

"How were you... Tony, are you so unused to someone being enamored with you, to someone being affectionate with you, that you couldn't see it?"

And if so, he pitied felt bad, because Tony deserved that love in his life. After a moment he released Mini, and the feline just shook its head because it didn't understand people.

"What I want is already spoken for, isn't it?"

The only possible answer Tony could give for his ignorance was a small, apologetic shrug, unable to articulate in any way that could make sense to someone who didn't even know who he was what it was like to spend most of his life sealed behind the armor, desperately hating the isolation that came with it at times and eagerly retreating into it at others, leaving him enchanted at every touch that didn't mean nearly the same to anyone who gave it. He had no idea what that looked like, every time he was sure he saw it he was left abandoned to a cold morning in an empty bed with another engagement ring to shove into the back of a drawer.

He didn't have a better answer for Reeve's next question, but his shoulders dropped with a sigh as he rolled his head back and he admitted, "I don't know," then tried another smile. How Jon felt about him was Tony's secret to jealously guard, not something he wanted Reeve to be so close to knowing, but he didn't know if that made him committed to anything. It would be gone soon enough. "I've had the incredible fortune for so many years to be surrounded by the most magnificent people..." The smile was gone and Tony dropped his head forward again, unable to explain that either. This affection he had earned from either of these men was false from the start; Tony hadn't shared a fraction of himself yet, and didn't think he was any closer to doing so, even if it meant he could better explain how he knew he would be falling in love all over again in the morning. "You're beautiful. I wish I had more time," he finally said, managing to meet Reeve's eye.

Reeve gets to his feet and moves to Tony, For a moment he hesitates before reaching out to stroke the man's face.

"If you are always longing for more time, than you find yourself passed by. You become a stone sunk down into the river of time, and you deserve more than that. We'll figure out how to get you home, Tony, back to your real time. Until then... make this your vacation, from yourself. Don't be afraid to feel. I expect you'll find people all around who would delight in making that time worth it."

Oh Tony, how can you do this to yourself? How could Reeve do this to himself?

"If nothing else, learn a lesson from me. If all you see is the project and how it helps the people, you're part of the problem. You have to live for more than the world, no matter what that work is."

How was Tony supposed to handle that? It was as though this whole thing was a set up to make him as miserable as possible in that touch and the strange poetry Reeve kept on being able to pull out of the air. Both of his hands clenched around fistfuls of fabric where they were as though that could keep them from disobeying Reeve's request under this duress, only to easily escape to ghost along Reeve's jaw and curl into his hair to pull him closer. That only made it harder to breathe, but at least Tony could try to say all of the things he couldn't from so far away, thumbs stroking down through Reeve's beard and fingers spreading restlessly down the back of his neck. "Sorry," he at least acknowledged, "I know, but..." He had so much more to tell Reeve. He settled for letting his hands smooth down across Reeve's shoulders to wrap him into a hug around his neck, and mumbled, "You asshole. I have too much to learn from you."

It was a strange position to be in, so drawn to the man and yet knowing he shouldn't be. But that didn't keep Reeve's arms from settling around Tony's waist, to hold him for just a moment. He's a fool to do this. Going to get himself hurt, and other people besides and yet... And yet he still holds Tony, and lets the man talk.

"What I know is both dearly won, and given to me by people who have seen great pain. But if I can give it to you a touch easier, then it's worth it. Perhaps for no other reason than you make the time I am stuck here more pleasant."

The proximity and Reeve's welcome of it was such a relief that Tony smiled this time at Reeve's constantly charming diction, feeling less abandoned and more at a familiar arm's length, as it were. He could work with that, why hadn't Reeve just said that? In Tony's language, not his ridiculous words. If he could still love Tony from a distance, Tony would accept it hungrily. As long as they were speaking Tony's language, he shifted back enough to touch his thumb to Reeve's chin, tilting it up into a kiss to his cheek where Tony offered, "If you change your mind, leave your door open." Which was to say, I adore you, and won't stop adoring you, it's there if you ever want it. He would try not to be another lesson for Reeve to suffer.

He's already another lesson. Perhaps a final one. A suggestion that he just stop trying.

"My door is always open to my friends, Tony. To talk. To share stories."

But not to be the other man. Not to hurt someone like that. The cruelty was needless, pointless. He leans up just enough to kiss Tony's forehead.

"But I can't be a tool to hurt someone else, intentional or otherwise."

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Calibrations Waiting Room Mingle

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