tushanshu_logs | rough winds do shake the darling buds of may

Entry tags:

rough winds do shake the darling buds of may | open, with starters

Characters: ~~Eyebrow Squad~~ Gene, Jackie, Deon, and you!
Date: Throughout May
Location: Keeliai and the rest of the shell
Situation: General May drama and doings for Eyebrow Squad.
Warnings/Rating: None initially, but subject to change.

A. [Gene] Midnight Hotel | May 2 | closed to Tony

Gene hadn't taken the disappearance of the new influx of Foreigners well. But he'd taken it better than he'd expected; he'd always known, in his heart, that Bianca being back had been too good to be true. And Amelia hadn't returned, either. He'd been seized with a rather unusual and rather unfortunate sensation of missing all his friends who'd come and gone from Keeliai.

And it occurs to him that Tony might be feeling even worse. Howard had been swept away too. Gene hadn't been particularly heartbroken to see him gone - he still isn't too sure where he stands with the man - but he knows Tony's devastated by it. So he's tried to be as supportive as possible. He doesn't like seeing Tony upset.

B. [Gene] Sky Sector | early-mid May | open

Gene's been going around the Sky Sector and helping finalize some of the construction, making himself known among the kedan in the area, checking out the stalls in the artisan area. Sometimes he's putting the finishing touches on the little house he'd built for himself and Tony, and if he's not actively using tools - or secretly using the orange ring to manipulate matter, honing his control of it - he's probably open to talking.

C. [Jackie] Teahouse in the Water Sector | early-mid May | open

When he's not doing Snake stuff, Jackie's become quite fond of hanging out in a little teahouse in the Water Sector. Most of the time he has his Snake badge off, not wanting to intimidate any of the kedan, and just enjoying a quiet cup of tea. Tea had never really been his...well...his cup of tea, back home, but here he was starting to enjoy it.

D. [Deon] Metal Sector | early-mid May | open

Deon, meanwhile, is scouting out any technology he can find, buying up scrap wherever he can find it and writing out code by hand in a cheap notebook. Even if he can't test it, it's at least a decent exercise.

He's been dissuaded from dismantling a console - but he really wants to know how they work. Not worth pissing off the kedan, though; he's heard they don't take well to that.

But it looks like he knows what he's doing, or at least what he's after, either sitting on a bench and going over his handwritten code, the end of a pen in his mouth, or haggling with some kedan over some busted piece of looted Foreigner tech.

E. [Deon] Fire Sector | May 16 | closed to Shay

Deon's tired, and in need of a drink. He doesn't normally drink, but he's interested in seeing more of the kedan culture, and he figures that's worth the price of a beer or the local equivalent. Thus he sits at the bar, drinking an oddly sweet concoction that still has a mildly alcoholic fire to it, occasionally writing in his notebook as more ideas occur to him.

F. [Gene] House Iron Dragon | May 8 | closed to Tony

Tony's been acting weird the past day or so - more cagey than usual. Something's up, but Gene hasn't deduced what yet.

"You okay?" he asks, setting a mug of tea down in front of Tony, some concern in his voice. Still mopey over Howard, perhaps? The grief happens in waves, he knows that well.

G. [Deon] Stark Industries | late April | closed to NPCs

The staff at Stark Industries has been busy of late, but not too busy to finally see Deon for a job interview. He hasn't had one since college, so he's a little apprehensive, and visibly fidgeting.

H. [Deon] Wood Sector | mid-May | closed to China and Shay

Deon should really know better than to cut through gang territory by now. As it is, he's been cornered by some kedan from a smaller gang who are pushing him around and demanding his juulan. For someone so tall, he's a bit shit at defending himself or being at all imposing.

I. [Gene] Sky Sector / Earth Sector | early May 9 | closed to Skul

Once Gene manages to get his heart down from pounding like hell in his head, he grabs his radio and makes a call to Skul, like he'd promised Tony.

"Skul? I know it's late, but I need your help."

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"An artificial gravity well?" Gene asks, half to himself, his mind racing. That sure didn't sound normal, even for Keeliai.

He wants to put Tony at his ease, though - or as much as he can. "I'll talk to Skul," he says, quietly, putting a hand on Tony's shoulder. "We'll find who took your bracelet and get it back." And make them pay. But the mention of Skul as a stabilizing influence might help ease some of Tony's worries about Gene getting a little too intense.

The mention of Skul does put Tony a lot more at ease: he relaxes visibly. Gene is definitely freaking out, but he's not Mandarining out and getting that look in his eyes that says 'I'm going to disintegrate anyone and everyone who stands in my way.' That had been what Tony had been most afraid of. He doesn't want Gene hurting anyone else.

"Yeah. I don't know if it was magic or tech. They had this orb that seemed to make them immune to it. It broke when they were running off and they left it behind. I saved the pieces. They're in a box over there, in my bag."

No, Tony, he's not totally Mandarining out and destroying everything in his path. Because he wants to prove he can be better than that.

He'll still probably rough up the muggers, though. Just a little. There's that dark streak in him still, the rough and violent past ready to rear its head again.

"I'll get the pieces, they might have a clue or something." He kisses Tony on the cheek. "And I'll get your gem back for you. I promise." He's still angry, still practically shaking with how livid he is that Tony had been attacked. But he's trying to hide it. He knows Tony doesn't like when he indulges his dark side, or even comes close to it.

"I should go with you," Tony protests weakly. If Gene is going to go haring off right now, Tony wants to go too.

Only some of it is the fact that he's worried what Gene will do - the rest of it is that he's too stubborn for his own good.

"I might recognize them if I see them. And it'll go faster with more of us." It absolutely will not, because Tony feels like shit and he's only going to keep feeling worse, so either Skul or Gene will be stuck babysitting him. But fat chance Tony's ever going to admit that.

"Like hell," Gene says, and runs a hand through Tony's hair - half to calm Tony, half to calm himself. "You're a wreck, you could barely even stand. Just tell me what happened, from the beginning. I'll tell Skul and we'll find the people who took your gem."

He sighs. "It'll be better if you just...stay here. And recover your strength." He's loath to leave Tony alone - what if the muggers come back and finish the job? - but he knows the Midnight Hotel is the safest place Tony could possibly be.

Tony makes a frustrated, petulant noise and drops his head onto his folded arms on the table. "I'm fine," he mutters, unconvincingly. "Just a little dizzy." He doesn't try to stand up again, though.

"There were four of them, like I said. At least one - the leader, I think - was a woman, but I'm not sure about the others. She had this tattoo on her tattoo on her wrist, sort of a lighting bolt drawn in a spiral. They knew what they were doing. It was almost like they'd... trained for it. Like they were targeting me specifically. That's all I've got." He shrugs. "The gravity well took a few minutes to wear off. I went right after them, but I haven't found any signs of them yet."

"Yeah, sure," Gene says, sounding utterly convinced, but shuts up to take some mental notes when Tony describes the situation.

"A lightning bolt in a spiral...?" Interesting. He'd have to see if Skul had heard anything about such a symbol. "Why would they specifically be after you, though?" Why do most supervillains target Tony Stark? he asks himself with no small amount of sarcasm. The Stark fortune did no good for anyone here, back in their world as it was. "You wouldn't have found them. If they'd been targeting you specifically, they'd probably know enough about you to know how you operate and hide accordingly, even if a few minutes hadn't been enough time for the trail to go cold."

Are you questioning his bad-guy-hunting skills, Gene? "Hmph." Now he's sulking. "I guess. I don't know why they went for me, but they wouldn't need to use a gravity well unless they knew they'd be mugging somebody who could fight them off." If any foreigner would have done, why not skip the SEAL Team Six routine and just wait for an easy target?

Perish the thought. He's just trying to get to the bottom of this.

"I'll find out why this happened," he says, "we'll get your gem back, and everything'll be okay." He might be trying to convince himself more than Tony with that last bit.

"I know." He trusts Gene to figure it out, even if he doesn't completely trust that he'll like his methods. And he's not really worried about his gem, yet. It is true that everyone else's had turned up - whoever's taking them doesn't actually want the foreigners dead.

"Just... don't go too hard on anyone, okay? We already know some of the muggers were being blackmailed. They may not have had a choice."

Not that Tony would be above roughing them up a bit, just to get even, but he's still a little afraid Gene will take things too far.

Gene's silent for a moment.

"There's always a choice, when it comes to hurting someone," he says, and there's something a little sad in his voice, like he's thinking about himself. "And if this was blackmail, then I'll...I'll follow it up the chain. Whoever's doing this needs to be stopped."

Tony is way too tired to be ruminating on complex ethical dilemmas, Gene. Just don't kill anybody and he won't complain.

"Okay," Tony says at length, sounding a little resigned. He still doesn't like being left behind while other people go out and do the hard work for him, but he doesn't think there's anything he can say that will stop Gene.

"Are you going right now?" Another downside to this turn of events: he'd been looking forward to snuggling with Gene tonight, as small compensation for his really, really shitty day. But it looks like he's going to be sleeping alone.

"The sooner I get started, the sooner I can get your gem back," he says, but then hesitates a little. He's scared, still, and he doesn't want to run off and leave Tony all alone just yet.

"But I can wait if you can," he says after a moment. "Besides, I'm going to need a little sleep before starting out." Sleep will help him control himself and rein in his more toxic impulses. He hopes.

"Yeah, good idea," Tony says, as if he's not himself a gold medalist in the Skipping Sleep Olympics. But he is relieved to have Gene here for a while longer. "A little sleep is sounding really good right now."

Of course, going to bed requires getting to bed, which requires moving. Uuuuugh.

He tries standing again, more carefully this time, using the table to support himself. The world is still a little... wiggly, but he doesn't fall. And now— to bed! You might want to be spotter, here, Gene.

"Take it easy," Gene says, hovering by Tony's side, ready to catch him if he should fall.

What the hell - he gently takes Tony's arm anyway, both to provide support and to reassure himself that Tony's still alive, if not exactly okay, and to quell some of the terrifying rage that burns deep in his heart. This way, he can keep an eye on Tony, so to speak, and be bright and ready to go in the morning.

And maybe by the time he wakes up, things won't seem quite so terrifying. They're going to find Tony's gem. They have to. Because the thought of losing Tony now, once they'd finally come to an understanding, come to love one another - makes Gene a little bit crazy.

Tony accepts the help without further grumping, letting Gene lead him to bed. He collapses onto the mattress with a groan. After a few moments of relishing being horizontal, he squirms into a comfortable position and pulls the covers up.

"I thought I was done being sick after I got Extremis," he grouses jokingly. "This is so lame."

How can Tony even joke at a time like this? Gene just rolls his eyes and kisses Tony on the forehead. "Now you have to be normal for a little while. Such a tragedy." He's joking, too, if only to let Tony know that he can relax. Gene's still incandescently angry, but it's sitting in his stomach like a hot coal now, not threatening to burn through him from the inside out.

"Being normal: also lame," Tony declares. But he smiles, glad to know that Gene isn't so lost in his rage that he can't make a joke.

Now that he's in bed, Tony's already starting to nod off. The headache is still ferocious, but the fatigue is worse, so he's not going to have any trouble falling asleep.

Gene nods in agreement, trying to let sleep take him as well. Tony's already beginning to doze in his arms, and he can feel his own heart beating, hear it pounding too loud in his ears.

I'll get it back for you, Tony. I swear.

"I swear," he murmurs, closing his eyes, hoping to get some rest before beginning his search.

When Tony wakes up, Gene is gone.

He'd kind of expected him to be, so he's not too alarmed. A little bummed, maybe. He's gotten used to waking up next to Gene, and waking up alone is... well, lonely.

He doesn't feel any worse than he had last night. Given the progressive nature of soulgemitis, that probably means his lack of a soul gem has already made up for all the sleepdeprivationitis he'd slept off. Well, at least he doesn't feel worse?

---

He starts to feel worse pretty quickly.

It starts with a slight fever, which makes the room uncomfortably, though not intolerably, warm. Restlessness slowly transmutes into nagging body aches, and by afternoon he's started to have fever chills. He putters around and tries to make himself some dinner, but he gives up about halfway through the meal when the dizziness and nausea make it too hard to eat.

Gene calls him periodically on the radio, and Tony always reassures him that he's fine (as fine as he can be, anyway, coming up on two days without his soul gem). Eventually, Gene promises to stop bugging him for the night, and tells him to get some sleep. Tony's exhausted again and he thinks his eyes are starting to play tricks on him, so he willingly obeys - or tries to.

His sleep is plagued by nightmares. Some old standbys make an appearance, along with some new but predictable scenes. But as the night goes on, they get weirder, disturbingly surreal, like his brain is taking the highlights of the standard fare and throwing them in a blender with the worst acid trip imaginable. The nightmares and the worsening aches and chills keep waking him up, until he's not sure anymore what he's dreaming and what he's hallucinating.

When he finally wakes up enough to call Gene again, he doesn't do a very good job of hiding how awful he feels, and Gene doesn't do a very good job of hiding how frantic he's getting. Tony stares at the clock on the nightstand and wonders if Extremis will give him a few extra hours.

He tries to eat something again but doesn't manage very much. He's not hungry anyway. By lunchtime he doesn't have the energy to try again: he's too weak to do much of anything except lie in bed and answer Gene's radio calls.

Those calls are starting to sound less like check-ins and more like a deathwatch, which is both annoying and depressing. He's reminded of his stay in the hospital again, when the doctors weren't sure if he would make it.

At first, annoying and depressing is all it is. But as the afternoon bleeds away into evening, he's finally forced to admit: he's scared.

It's the eleventh hour, and Gene is scared.

But he's retrieved the gem, and gotten approximately zero information about who's behind the thefts, and he'd be angry about it except he's too frightened to be angry. His chief concern right now is getting the gem back to Tony.

He'd teleported away from Skul almost the second they'd found the gem, and he's been holding it tightly in his hand. And as he holds it, it's zapping him, it's hurting him like it never has before, because he failed, he failed, he'd promised to be there for Tony and he'd failed, and as he runs into the Hotel and up the stairs his heart is pounding in his ears and he's clutching the gem even more tightly the more it hurts.

The door bursts open. "Tony? Tony?!" He's practically frantic.

Please let it not be too late...

Tony thinks he hears the door slam open and Gene calling his name - then again, he's been hearing Gene calling his name a lot in the past couple hours, and and only some of those were radio calls. He's having a hard time keeping a grip on what's real and what's hallucinations, at this point.

But just in case it is real, he groans weakly. He can't manage anything more than that, but at least Gene will know he's not dead yet.

...He isn't, is he? Would he even know it if he was? If their 'souls' really do stick around and get re-corporealized... maybe he's stuck in some kind of horrible dream limbo, waiting for somebody to figure out how to put him back in his body. That's an awful thought. If this is what limbo feels like, he thinks he'd rather be dead for real.

Edited 2015-06-19 02:44 (UTC)

Gene rushes to the bed when he hears the groan, finding Tony sprawled out in a mess of covers. It looks like a blanket bomb went off, and Tony looks like hell. He tries to push down the panic and move, his hand still clenching the soul gem tightly, painfully, his arm half-numb from the shocking. He forces his numbed hand to release the bracelet; he's not the one it's meant for, and it's hurting him because he's not good enough, because he failed.

"Please be okay, please," he says, slipping the bracelet onto Tony's wrist.

Gene grabs Tony's hand and slides something onto his wrist; Tony figures that probably means he's real.

"Gene?" he mumbles, blinking groggily. The light still hurts when he opens his eyes, but he can already feel his head beginning to clear. He looks down at his wrist and sees his bracelet, pretty beat up, but intact. "You found it." He sighs in relief and summons up a smile for Gene. "You're the best."

He shifts in his tangle of blankets until he can prop himself up on one elbow, and runs a shaky hand through his hair. "Wow, that works fast." Like, intravenous-morphine-fast. His headache and the weird hot-cold feeling of a high fever are subsiding, and he doesn't feel dizzy anymore. He still aches all over, but that's starting to taper off too.

Edited 2015-06-19 06:10 (UTC)

When Tony opens his eyes and smiles at him, Gene sags in relief (and exhaustion), finally letting himself relax for the first time in days. What Tony says barely registers to him, but he's alive, he's looking like he's going to be okay, and that's all that matters.

"I'm sorry, I tried to find it faster, but we kept running into these dead ends, and..."

His hand still hurts where the gem had been shocking him, and he flexes his fingers, trying to bring some life back into them. "I'm sorry," he says, hanging his head, half-collapsed on the bed.

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