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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Sansa laughs a little when he says she was singing but it's exhausted and not as good a laugh as it could be. She turns in her chair so she can use her back and Tony's body as a shield while she shifts the baby off her breast and adjusts the front of her dress.

"Do you want to hold him for a little while? Just...stay right next to me while you do. It'll be easier for me to eat."

Eating is just protein gel and tea but she has to keep putting food in her body for James more than for herself. She won't be able to nurse him if she's not eating enough.

"I just don't want him out of my sight at all."

Tony gladly hummed his acceptance, happy to hold James under any circumstances and willing to keep finding things to feed Sansa since it seemed to do the trick. "Where do you think I'm going to go?" he grumbled, giving Sansa a pout for somehow not noticing that they were trapped in a rat cage while he was bouncing off of the walls, but quickly lit up a smile for James as he accepted the baby instead of welcoming him into Tony's anxiety. "Is that why you're not showering?"

"I can't bring him with me," Sansa says quietly. "And it wouldn't be proper for Bucky to stand in the room while I did so. He's with someone. It'd be different if it were my husband or someone whom I was with that way but I wouldn't do that to Steve. It's not proper."

Sansa shrugs a bit. "Though he wouldn't be interested in my body anyway. I have to eventually, I know. I just dread it because I don't know what will happen if I do. If it weren't for my fear for James, I would be quite fine. Grief is a part of life and I know he isn't going home to die. He does great things - necessary things. He's important."

The hangups were not so alien to him now, but Tony did still bite his lip to keep from chuckling at the explanation Sansa chose to give him, brow raised to ask if she really didn't see how weird that was for her to say-- making her need to wash her hair some kind of threat to Steve's homestead. Both of those two were sharing showers with the rest of the men in this bunker, it really wasn't them Sansa had to have any concerns about in this situation, they could handle it.

It stopped being quite as funny when Sansa tried to explain her fears, making Tony shake his head, because she didn't have to justify any compulsion right now, especially not one he could already track. Except maybe the compulsion to rationalize Tyrion's disappearance like she was; not that Tony didn't understand why she would find comfort in knowing he was just back home, but he was pretty sure if he found a wife and married her here, being separated like that wouldn't feel any better than death. It was lonely enough here. "You don't have to be fine, sweetheart," he offered, knowing he wouldn't take it himself but smiling his support nonetheless. "You can look a damn mess as long as you need to. Here--" Carefully taking the baby in one arm against his chest, he dragged a hand through his hair that was already too long anyway to pull it out of place until he had to try to blow a strand from his eye as he cradled James again. "Now it's fashionable."

Sansa smiles a little in spite of herself when Tony ruffles up his hair. It looks better on him than she expects it does on her but she appreciates his efforts all the same. Now that James is safely tucked in Tony's arms, she cups her hands around her cup of tea to warm them.

"Perhaps I don't have to be fine but I need to be fine for James. He needs his mother and if I'm distraught and unable to care for him - it's unacceptable. If I were home, I'd have less time to get myself together. I'd have to mourn, put it aside, and remarry within two or three moons. I'm grateful that I at least get the luxury of time and choice here."

James looks comfortable for the moment so when Sansa finishes her tea, she doesn't reach for him. He's quiet and looks so, so handsome just now. Her son is so beautiful.

"He seems to go right to sleep with you men. Bucky, Tommy, you. You must teach me the secret."

At some point, what was expected of Sansa where she came from had to stop being and ugly surprise, but for this one Tony was still wrinkling his nose and muttering, "Jesus," because that was a real ordeal to put a woman through when she was supposed to have dedicated her whole life to the husband she just lost. It must not have been that difficult if most of them were assholes, but there was still some comfort in a familiar asshole. James was a much more pleasant topic, and Tony gladly offered his wisdom, "Not for nothing, but I have to lay down after a good drink, too. Tommy's been helping?" If even that kid could slow down for long enough to get the baby to sleep, Sansa should have known she had plenty of hands on deck to let her be just the littlest bit distraught.

"He doesn't mind holding him. I think he even likes it," Sansa says, surprised at herself. "And Tommy isn't someone I associate with liking things very easily. Half the time, I don't think he likes me. He does tolerate me because I'm Wanda's friend and very persistent."

She sips at her tea, glad for the moment of just plain conversation and not dwelling on her misery.

"Any time Bucky holds him, he falls straight asleep."

"Tommy's just like that," Tony muttered, not feeling entirely confident about that assessment but even if Tommy's behaviour with Tony was his norm, he couldn't imagine Sansa had given Tommy any personal reason to be so abrasive. "What's not to like? Please. He wouldn't stick around unless he wanted to," he insisted.

He didn't have a good reason for James' general relaxation with his babysitters, except that maybe he was listening; he was used to Sansa's rhythms and voice, he had more to process with anyone else. Tony peered down at the little face, trying to interpret some reason from it, but didn't come away with any further proof of this theory, just a smile at the baby's pout. "This Bucky is not the one he is named after," he had to clarify, not quite a question, because she had mentioned him enough times already for Tony not to be sure. "You're just some kind of Bucky magnet."

"I suppose I am. You could also say there are simply a lot of Buckys," Sansa says, shrugging a little. She pulls at her hair a bit, combing her fingers through it so she can try and coax it into a braid so it doesn't look quite so haphazard and unbecoming. If she looks bad, she needs to look better. Porcelain. Ivory. Steel. She needs to be steel again.

"I don't think of them as the same person. You wouldn't either, if you knew my soldier. My James didn't trust anyone but me and even that, I think, was limited. I kept his secrets and I still keep them - even though Steve asked me to tell him. I won't. They're not mine to share. If I'm told something in confidence and trust, I won't break it unless I think people will be hurt by that secret being kept."

It's easier to talk about this, a loss she had a while back, than a loss keenly felt.

"I gave him my name and my sigil. It's not something lightly done in Westeros. He said his name had been taken. I gave him Stark to use. He didn't think he deserved it, or anything, but I did. There are things about me that if you knew them, you would think of me as tainted or spoiled. You'd pity me for them. James never did. Sometimes we forgot how much we were worth so one of us had to remind the other. He wasn't my blood kin but he was mine and I was his. I loved him. I'll always love him. It's hard to see his face on Bucky but it's not him. His eyes are bright and merry, his smile is quick. He's as different from James as my brothers Robb and Jon are different. There's things that my soldier knows that my husband never even knew. I hope that I was as good a friend to him as he was to me."

Of course they weren't really the same person-- Tony was learning that lesson regularly, interacting with people with names and faces he should know down to the wiring, but felt more like Skrulls than friends, and even that effect came in shades. He had run into these faces so quickly on his arrival that it hadn't occurred to him that this wasn't necessarily something anyone from the alien planets in Temba was experiencing. Sansa didn't have a Billy or a Steve here, she only had Tyrion, and as far as either of them had indicated he was her Tyrion. Did that mean something?

Tony's smile was distracted but soft at Sansa's strict confidence, an admirable policy that he wouldn't soon forget. That she could follow it with so many stumbles into self-deprecation drew Tony out of his puzzle solving, watching Sansa carefully like he could see where that habit was coming from as she spoke. "You still are," was the only one Tony could confidently combat-- she was still keeping his secrets, that made her a good friend, easy job. "If you had told me when I was a kid that Bucky Barnes would be a Stark one day, I would have lost my mind," he grinned. "That's a very different person again-- That's so weird, right? The Steve I know is similar, but Bucky...He died in the war they were fighting for me, he didn't get to come back. And when I was growing up, looking at pictures of him, I always saw myself in that mask, standing next to Cap and being a hero."

"Stark is the best name to have. Ser James Stark exists somewhere, I'm sure, in some version of Westeros that I've never seen. There's infinite possibilities, I think, and if there can be so many versions of one person then there must be that many worlds for them to have come from."

Sansa drums her fingers on the table a bit, trying to expend a little nervous energy. Being trapped in these caves was agony and she just wanted to go home.

"I do find it interesting that Stark is the name of a Great House both in your world and mine. There's so few of us left back home. My eldest brother and youngest brother were both killed. My bastard brother was raised with us as a Stark bastard but it turns out he was actually my cousin - my aunt married the crown prince in secret. He's not a Stark at all, he's a Targaryen. He's still a Stark to me, though, and still my brother. My sister Arya has restless feet and a sharp knife. My brother Bran is broken in body but his mind is able to travel back and forth through time the same way you and I could walk around this room. When you compare me to Jon the Targaryen Prince or Arya the Faceless Assassin or Bran the Broken - I'm not nearly so interesting. It's like you saying that Steve is completely average."

It's a ridiculous thought, that, and she's thought it ridiculous since he first suggested it to her.

"But I'm sure there's men who sing of me. Sansa Stark - thrice betrothed, twice married, once widowed. Queen in the North. Queen of Winter. No matter where we are, we're still together. When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives. He's the Winter Soldier. He was the lone wolf but he's not anymore. His life was hard. I hope he's sitting in Winterfell right now eating my lemoncakes and drinking my ale until I get back."

This wasn't really about the James Sansa knew, and Tony already was floundering trying to be emotionally capable of that conversation, as abstract as it was to him; he wasn't in any way prepared to be the emotional champion for Sansa's pain as she clutched at the tenuous tether, at the breaking point with her husband's departure, to a home she was so conflicted about and clearly was missing right now without her anchor. Tony watched her break down her household and tried his best not to look panicked for it, because this was the conversation he was trying to stay safely on the fringes of since Tyrion's disappearance.

"You know you're not alone," he said, and tilted his head with the question, asking if she realized how much of that she was projecting. To fill that jagged hole before it became a structural issue, he continued, "How can you be in this place? I can't piss in private, and I'm not even allowed to have my own messed up dreams, I've got to be in somebody else's and still dealing with their personal space in mine. I've never wanted to be alone more in my life."

"One can be alone in a room of people," Sansa says softly. "Trust me. I've done it more than once in my life. I spent time as a hostage, remember? I could be in a room of courtiers and be utterly without a friend or sympathetic ear."

She takes in a breath and lets it out. "But those days are over. I am the Queen who Stood, the lady who never kneels. I can be singular and alone in a room full of people by choice and not circumstance. I know how to be alone because I've fought my battles alone for my entire life."

That didn't work. It wasn't supposed to remind Sansa of how good she was at being alone without her husband, and Tony didn't want to encourage that misery by commiserating with the experience of being alone in a crowd. That wasn't part of him that he would share as readily as Sansa did, anyway; he was the life of the party, of course, and always happy to be there, and he was trying his best to still be that for Sansa but he was really failing her so far.

"That's over, too," he pointed out, giving James a pointed pat. "You're stuck with a partner in crime for the next eighteen years at least, he's going to stick it out, I'd put money on it." And she didn't get to choose to be alone when he was around, but Tony reserved that point to a cautious glare as he licked his lip between his teeth.

"I am blessed to have him with me for the next part of my life," Sansa agrees. "And so I won't ever be alone again. I kind of like that, honestly. It's quite a bit safer here than in Westeros and I don't fear for his life or anything. I think I'll just have time to enjoy him being small."

Sansa's smile softens as she looks at James tucked into Tony's arms. "I think I might cry if he gets any bigger."

"You know, I think if you squeeze them enough they stop growing. Like a bonsai tree," Tony suggested wisely, eyes squinted in a knowing frown and nodding sagely. "Or," he offered, "you keep handing him to bigger and bigger guys, you won't even notice the difference. Let Steve hold him, he'll be a month old until you're thirty." He tried to give a flex without jostling James too much, but even without the baby in his arms it wouldn't have had nearly the effect he was going for, trying to emulate Cap.

"Very true. Steve makes everyone look small," Sansa says, laughing at the image. "I'm the tallest woman I've ever met and he makes me feel small. I've never felt small."

She's always thought herself a bit of a giant, truly, and while she's blessed with the height and long limbs of House Stark, it looks better on a man than a woman.

"Really?" Tony asked with a surprised grin. "I mean, I'm glad you haven't felt small-- Maybe I've got a flawed data pool, the women around me are usually..." Tony rolled his eyes and tipped his head back with a smile, his own religious experience to thank whatever forces brought people like Jen Walters and Carol Danvers into his sphere, and he knew he lived in exceptional circumstances. So did Sansa, he realized; if the place she came from was winter all of the time, her people were probably naturally small, like people that lived near the arctic circle. "Even my assistant, she's about your height, but I know she's really frustrated with me when she wears these heels," he continued, freeing one hand from under James to demonstrate a generous few inch height and flashed that appreciative grin again even as he continued, "to remind me who's really running the company."

"Ah, no. There's even men shorter than I am but...there's one woman taller than me. She's my sworn sword, Brienne. She's taller than some men and broader too. She wanted to be a knight but no knight would knight her because she was a woman. She eventually became one, though, and now she guards my brother in the south."

Sansa taps her lips, thinking for a moment. "The only man taller than I am that I've known was a fearsome one called The Hound. His face was scarred and he wore a hound shaped helm into the field. He wasn't a nice man but he was a good man, under it. He kept me safe when I was around him. My horrible second husband was shorter than I was and all my brothers were. My sister is much shorter, probably only to the height of my shoulder. Of course, if you wanted to kill people without being seen I imagine being small would help."

"So, you might have nothing to worry about," Tony concluded, which was about the time James decided he was getting tired of all of Tony's gesturing and gave a whine of irritation, making Tony lay a hand along his front to hush, "Hey, I'm talking about you, pipe down. He's going to turn out to be a little guy anyway, if all of his uncles are. Do you think he might be like Tyrion? That's genetic, isn't it? How soon could you tell?"

"He's not. I'd already know," Sansa says. "Dwarves have larger heads and smaller limbs," she explains. "At least that's what Tyrion told me. His parents and siblings were of average size so I imagine that it doesn't run strongly in his family, necessarily."

Some families do have quite a bit of it, she imagines, but from what she knows of House Lannister, it doesn't.

"But he'll likely be shorter than I am. I think my brother Bran might have been taller than me, if he'd not had his back broken."

That could have been a more dangerous question than it turned out to be, and the clench in Tony's gut when he realized he was playing with fire eased considerably when Sansa easily spoke about her husband without another immediate thread of being alone. How Sansa handled her grief must have been complex, and her brother's broken back was only a reminder of that for Tony-- they hadn't had a conversation yet where he wasn't discovering some tragedy laced through Sansa's life. He didn't have to push her at all to find out where her pain was, it was everywhere.

"Here," he instructed, shifting for her to take her baby back as he started to wiggle more, not about to be the one holding the fussy baby if he could help it, then rolling to his feet as he pulled her hair out of the way for her to pull out the braid she had been trying to lay over the back of her chair. "How'd the big gal get to be a knight?" he asked as he fingercombed the strands back away from her face.

"Another knight, the Kingslayer - he knighted her. He died in the battle for King's Landing not long after but it only takes a knight to make a knight so it stands. The first woman knight in all of history, I think. Of course, I'm the first Queen in the North."

She gratefully accepts James back while she talks, holding him close to her and rocking him back and forth. He's a little fussy but she doesn't mind it. She hardly ever minds it.

"Women are just as important as men. I don't know why having a cock between your legs makes a person more important."

So, Tony was going to have to find a knight-- and he knew a few of those, but it hadn't worked out for him so far. Not even helping them slay a dragon. Distracted by his knighting fantasies, Tony let out a startled laugh, not expecting Sansa to phrase her frustration quite like that at all.

"Not more important, no. Just smarter, and more capable and reasonable. If you had one, you'd understand," he said, giving up on Sansa's hair to slide back a cautious step with a smirk and avoid any incoming damage he might have inspired her to lay on is very important organ.

Sansa arches her brow. "Funny, I could kick you between your legs and have you howling for half an hour. Besides, giving birth is more painful than anything you men have to endure. I wouldn't dare say I am less reasonable and capable than a man. I'm a queen."

It's playful, but only just. "So it's best to remember one's place when talking to the Queen in the North. I yield to no one any longer. No man will ever have rights to my bed again unless I permit him so. And that is the only thing you have that I don't."

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