(Barely) Controlled Chaos #6

(Barely) Controlled Chaos #6

Follows on directly from part 5

Warnings for this part: none

November 1991, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

He was on his way back to his dorm when he heard it.  It was dark, cold and raining, and Tony was clad in a pair of jeans that were more hole than denim and a too-thin t-shirt that bore the evidence of his late night working in the robotics lab.  He was frankly surprised that he could hear anything over the sound of his own teeth chattering, but he was sure he had.  He paused his stride and listened carefully.  Yes, there it was again; a high-pitched, almost inaudible yip.

Tony turned in the direction he thought the sound was coming from; there was an alley to his right that seemed to be the source.  It wasn’t wide enough to be a walkthrough for the general populous – it was a three-foot-wide gap between two university buildings rather than an actual pathway – but Tony had used it before to get from one class to another when he was running late and could actually be bothered to go.  He squinted down it, but it was too dark to see if there was anybody there or not.

“Hello?” he called, just in case.  The only reply was another, slightly louder yip.  Tony narrowed his eyes, debating the wisdom of checking it out.  Well, it wasn’t like he could get any wetter, and this was a very elaborate set-up for one of his dorm-mates’ let’s-mess-with-the-kid pranks; usually they just tripped him up and stole his stuff.  Decided, he shuffled closer to the alley and peered down it, calling out again.

The yip this time came from below him.  He looked down, and saw a huge pair of brown eyes looking up at him from a sodden, skinny Pokémon.  Tony knelt slowly so as not to startle the creature and gently reached toward it.

“Hey there, are you ok?” he asked soothingly, ignoring the shirt sticking to his back.  The animal shivered violently and sneezed, crawling closer until its nose touched Tony’s knee.  He rested his hand on its back, hoping it wasn’t about to turn around and bite him.  It shivered under his palm, cold and soaked to the skin, but didn’t move otherwise.  Tony could feel its ribs bumping against his fingertips.  He sighed and pulled his shirt off, shivering as the night air made intimate acquaintance with his bare skin, and carefully tucked it around the Pokémon, picking it up and tucking the material under its paws.

“It’s alright, let’s get you dry, shall we?” he said to it, pulling it into his body and hoping that any warmth left in him might transfer to the creature.  He finished his jog back to his dorm, doing his best not to jostle the Pokémon, and for once didn’t run into any of his jackass dorm-mates.  He put the Pokémon down on his bed, ignoring the damp patch that spread over his sheets, and found a dry towel in the bottom of his closet.  Gently, he unwrapped the animal and dried it off, telling it what he was doing so it didn’t startle.  After it was no longer dripping, Tony ran the towel over his own hair and chest before throwing it onto the floor.  The Pokémon sneezed again and climbed onto his lap, huddling against his stomach in a little ball.  He petted it carefully, making soothing sounds until it stopped shivering.

It blinked up at him with huge brown eyes, and Tony realised what it was.  “Lillipup,” he said aloud, and the little dog yipped at him and wagged its skinny tail a few times.  Tony smiled down at it.

“You’ll be alright now; it’s safe here.  I’ll go find some food and you can sleep here, if you want?”

It yipped again and rolled off his knees, so Tony got up and traipsed into the communal kitchen.  He didn’t keep food in there, but the others did, and unless he wanted to try to feed day-old pizza to the ill puppy, he needed to raid the fridge.  He pulled it open and found a plate with the remains of somebody’s chicken dinner on it.  He grinned and stole a handful of the meat before slipping back to his room.

The Lillipup ate from his hand happily, and all the chicken was gone in seconds.  The dog still looked starved, but at least it was dry and warm now.  Tony spared a minute to change out of his sodden jeans into something more comfortable to sleep in, then pulled off the wet top bed sheet and slid under the remaining layers.  He patted the pillow beside his head gently, and the Pokémon wobbled its way up, curling up beside him.  He arranged the sheets so that the creature was at least partly covered, hoping that he’d done enough for it.  He wasn’t sure what else he could do; it needed food and sleep, but he wasn’t a physician and couldn’t tell more than that.

Not that it really mattered, because the dog would be gone in the morning.  Pokémon never stayed with Tony for too long, so there was no point getting too attached to this little one now.  He leaned over and cracked the window open just enough so the Lillipup could crawl through when it woke, then curled up and closed his eyes.

When he woke, Lillipup was curled up against his chest, awake and looking at Tony.  It yipped when it saw his eyes were open and stood up, licking him on the nose.  Tony blinked at it.  “You’re still here…”

The dog rolled its eyes at him and yipped again, wobbling down the bed so that he could sit up.  He did so, staring.  It wagged its tail and licked his hand, eyes never leaving Tony’s face.  Slowly, a smile spread across his face.

“You’re still here.”  It was a statement this time.  The dog wagged its tail faster.  With a grin, Tony got out of bed and dressed, then stole some more chicken for Lillipup.  At the first chance he got, he’d take it to a nurse, but until then he let himself pat it and reassure himself that it was really there.

It had chosen to stay with him.  Today was officially the best goddamned day of his life.

I wish my cats were this cool

(Barely) Controlled Chaos #12

Again with the delay... Work sucks.

Follows on from last part.

Warnings for this part: Randomness, if that counts, but nothing else particularly.

April 1996, Clifftop House, Malibu

Malibu was awesome.  There was no other word for it.

The sun was shining, there was a private beach literally on his doorstep, and Tony had the pleasure of witnessing Ditto turn itself into a clump of seaweed the first time it ventured into the ocean and got startled by a passing fish.  He had to grab the Pokémon before it floated off and got lost, but the chagrin on its pink blobby face when it transformed back was enough to have Tony almost doubled over laughing.  The Pokémon had maintained a respectful distance between itself and the sea ever since, and Tony had taken to threatening it with dried seaweed when it took its jokes a step too far, which led to the blob adopting a haughty pose that was frankly hilarious.  Herdier put up with this with little more than an eye-roll, letting the raucous duo have their fun.

Unlike Ditto, Herdier loved the sea, and Tony had taken to joining his dog for a swim every day for half an hour or so in the morning.  The water was freezing cold, but it woke him up, especially if he hadn’t been to sleep the night before and was in need of more stimulation than caffeine alone could provide.  That happened more often than either of his Pokémon was happy with, and when Ditto started giving Tony disapproving looks, he knew he was pushing it too far; the blob spent most of its time enabling his insomnia.

It was part of his deal with Obie.  Tony could have his free reign and live on the other side of the country, but he had to pull his weight with the company – specifically, with R&D, since that was the only department he’d shown any real enthusiasm towards in all of Obie’s prodding about Stark Industries.  Tony heard ‘go live in Malibu’ and fled before his mentor could change his mind.

He had spent three days moving his parents crap out of the house – there were a few sets of clothing and one framed picture of his mother and father on their wedding day, which he had put carefully out of the way in the bedroom he’d nominated his so that Ditto wouldn’t break it in one of his fits of exuberance.  He spent the rest of the month redecorating; he knocked down three walls, turning the upstairs into three huge rooms and opening the ground floor up to let all of that glorious California sun into every nook the window-wall could illuminate.  Which, by the time he was finished with it, was most of the floor.  He made sure not to get rid of anything structurally important – he was an engineer, and by no estimation an idiot – and then he turned his attention to the basement.  His father had made it into a garage, but as much as Tony loved cars, he had no plans to keep it that way.  Well, maybe some of it.  The far wall, perhaps, by the ramp that connected the basement to the outside world.  Yeah, that could be the garage.  The rest of the space Tony transformed into an engineer’s heaven.

There were computers – of his own design, a prototype that was not viable for mass production, but that served him quite well – several steel tables with every tool he could conceive of ever needing spread out over them, a large open area for tinkering with bigger projects, a forge; hell, he’d even included a small, secluded firing range for testing the designs he came up with, soundproofed in respect to Herdier’s dislike for guns.  He hadn’t used it yet – he was busy learning his new home and was yet to produce the new-and-improved prototypes Obie had asked him to throw together to show off to the R&D guys (there were still 6 days before the deadline he’d been presented with, he had plenty of time).  He had, however, christened the workshop by producing another ‘bot.

In this new home, with so much space and so few people filling it, Dummy was at a loss; the bot wasn’t used to so much quiet and had started to glitch, trying to make jobs where there were none.  Tony figured that some company would be good for him (Dummy was totally a him, no matter what faces Obie pulled when Tony said so), so had spent the last week building another robot arm.  He kept the design similar, tweaking the claw slightly to compensate for the ticklish joint that Tony didn’t have the heart to fix in Dummy, and altering the AI to incorporate the things he’d learned since his first foray into AI technology.  It was half-improvement on the old design, and half-prototype for making Dummy more stable – he needed to fix the loop the bot got into when faced with a dilemma he didn’t know how to solve, and making an upgrade was a good way to figure it out.

The arm was finished and the AI installed two days later.  Tony was exhausted; he’d been up three nights in a row getting it done, but the bot’s first whirr as it came to life and Dummy’s response – which Tony could only think of as a Happy Dance – was worth it.  Ditto also loved the bot, mostly because it became clear two minutes after uploading the code that Tony had miscalculated his adjustments to the claw.  The bot wasn’t ticklish, so it had worked in that respect, but no matter how he adjusted the wiring, he could not get the robot to grip anything properly.  Dummy didn’t care, and Herdier reacted with a flinch the first time a wrench hit the floor, but ignored it from then on.  Ditto, however, delighted in giving it things to hold, just to see how long it took before it dropped them.  Tony wondered briefly whether he could put the Pokémon off by draping the new bot with seaweed, then gave up and named it Butterfingers.

They were all a little dysfunctional; why should the newest addition to the family be any different?

(Barely) Controlled Chaos # 16

Follows on directly from last part, read that first.

Warnings: mentions of military and weapons, unrealistic contract-negotiation

September 1997, Stark Industries Main office, New York

Tony grinned.  Rhodey rolled his eyes.

“I didn’t go to Outer Mongolia anyway.”

“Why not?”

Rhodey sighed and sat down at a table in the window, cradling his coffee in his hands.  Tony joined him, still grinning.  He’d missed Rhodey while he was off travelling the world, even though the older man had called every few days, and Tony had a pile of postcards and small gifts from every country his friend had visited in a box in the penthouse apartment he’d bought upon his return to New York.  He refused to live at the mansion, though he had made three more trips to the old house to deposit more degree certificates on the dresser.  Most of his stuff was still in Malibu, as he was mid-way through the process of relocating the R&D department to California, possibly along with a few other departments, and it would only be responsible of him to be near his employees, wouldn’t it?

Tony finished his coffee and looked up just in time for another to land at his elbow.  RoRo smiled as she swept up his used mug and returned to the counter, talking to Jeanie over it and giving the men their privacy.  Tony grinned at them.  He loved this place.

“So, now that you’re back where you belong, what are you doing?” he asked, turning back to Rhodey.  The older man smiled and shrugged one shoulder.

“That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.  Some of the things I saw abroad...  I’ve signed on.”

Tony blinked at the sudden change in conversation and wondered if Rhodey meant what he thought he meant.

“Signed on?  Like, the army?  What kind of places did you go to?  I don’t remember any war zones on the list.”

“Tony…”

“Have you thought about this, Rhodey?  Properly?  You have a Masters from MIT; you can do so much other stuff.  Hell, you could probably do my job.”

“I don’t want your job.  I wouldn’t mind your PA though.”

That was a weak joke, but the look on Rhodey’s face told Tony all he needed to know.  His friend had been planning this for a while, and the decision was already made.  This was an FYI, not an opinion-seeking mission.

“My Pepper, get your own,” he joked back, getting a smile in return.  Rhodey could read Tony just as well as Tony could read him; he knew this was the closest to an endorsement he was going to get.  Tony may make weapons, but that was his father’s business, not his.  Now though, now it became his business.  Now it was personal.

He pulled his cell from his pocket and dialled Pepper, who answered very politely until she realised it was him.

“Mr Stark.  No, I will not extend the deadline; you have a meeting with two of the Board in forty minutes and I’m not cancelling it again.”

“That’s not why I’m calling Pep, though you do realise that now you’ve reminded me, I’m going to dawdle on purpose.  I hate Board meetings.”

“I’m aware.  Herdier is here though; I could just send him in your place.  He’d probably talk more sense.”

“Do that,” Tony agreed, smiling slightly at the expression he could imagine her wearing right then.  He forged ahead with his original point before she could come up with another, more effective threat, and ignored the odd look on Rhodey’s face as he eavesdropped.  “I need you to re-draft the military contracts.”

There was silence on both ends of the line for several seconds, then Rhodey narrowed his eyes and Tony could sense Pepper doing the same thing.

“Tony…” Rhodey said, at the same time Pepper said “Mr Stark…”.  Their voices carried the exact same tone of ‘what the hell are you doing’.  He cut across them both before they could say more than his name.

“I need a new sub-clause, or however you want to draft it.  James Rhodes will be present at any and all liasons between the military and Stark Industries, and they are to deal with me personally.  Get Legal on it, whatever, just make it happen.  And schedule a meeting with somebody for sometime in the next month; I want to go over the latest deal we made with them.  There are a few additions I want to make.”

Pepper was a little thrown by this efficient Tony (he could do it when he wanted to; he was a Stark, after all, and he’d spent the last few years learning from Obie, whether he wanted to or not), but knew better than to argue with it, merely replying in the affirmative and confirming that he would be back in the next quarter of an hour.  Tony hung up with his gaze firmly on Rhodey, who was staring at him like he’d never seen him before.

“Tony, what are you doing?  You can’t just change the contracts…”

“I can and I am.  You’re going into this, fine.  I can’t change your mind, and I won’t insult you by trying.  But I can give you the best fucking chance of coming home in one piece.  You looked after me all through MIT, Rhodey; it’s my turn.  What was it you said to me once?‘When friends do stupid shit, you help them out.’  You’re coming home, Rhodey.  I’m not letting you not come home

THIS is amazing

Best thing I’ve ever seen.

omfg funniest thing i have watched in a long time,love it

everytime i see this - REBLOGGED LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER.

OMG THE DRAG QUEENS LAWL

THE END O.M.G LOL

SPREAD THIS LIKE HERPES CHILDREN.