wildlyconflicted | [Dinoplot

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[Dinoplot - Day 2]

Without a doubt, the last 24 hours have been the most miserable of Pepper's life. To think, she'd believed that time she had been trapped in an elevator with Tony, a Vegas showgirl and a chihuahua had been bad. Right now, she'd give anything to be back in that metal box with Amber and Mr. Winky.

The dinosaur that had initiated their group into this mess had eventually gone away, although the four of them had remained treed for at least another hour before daring to climb down. Determining which way to walk had been an impossibility, the sun all but completely obscured by thick, ugly cloud cover as the rain continued. It seemed hours they'd trudged along at a snail's pace, trying to keep the baby quiet and jumping at every errant twig snap, and Pepper can't say for sure they weren't just walking in circles.

The night they spent in another tree, and Pepper had assigned rotating watch duty, although the only one of them who got any real sleep at all was the toddler. They've been hiking through mud and rain since this morning, Cooper, Rachel and herself taking turns carrying the little one. Pepper's beginning to think this may be Hell.

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The word banana was a familiar one, and Rickon's temper improved somewhat at the idea he might have one soon. "Nana, nana, nana, nana," he said in a babyish singsong voice.

"Banana sounds good, huh?" asks Cooper, managing a half smile as he looks down at the baby, damp and miserable as he is. He bounces Rickon a little bit and gives Rachel an amused look.

"I mean, all that time on a pole's got to be good for something, right?"
He almost feels like himself.

Ignoring Cooper's crass commentary, Pepper motions Rachel over. "I can give you a boost up," she explains, and pushes both hands through her hair to slick it back from her face. At this point, she feels like she'll never be truly dry again, and can only imagine how awful she looks, skirt ripped up the seam from tree climbing, somehow still covered in mud despite the constant rain.

"Take your time and be careful," she gently reminds Rachel, and then laces her fingers together to form a step.

Rachel gives Pepper a nod of thanks, trying to keep the pissy muttering to a minimum as she kicks off her boots. Now she has to do it, since the kid thinks he's getting fed and all.

"Man," she sighs, putting stepping into the hold and hoisting herself up. "This is going to be epic chaffing."

"Nana," Rickon sang, bouncing up and down in the man's arms. As young as Rickon was, he was old enough to understand where the bananas come from, and now that the lady in the see-quins was going to climb the tree, it seemed he might get to eat one soon.

"Nana," repeats Cooper, in a sing-song sort of voice, head tipped back to watch as Rachel climbs. There's some stupid masculine part of him that feels like he ought to be the one doing th climbing or, at least, the boosting, but Cooper is also smart enough to know that, right then, he's the one who ought to be holding the baby.

"It's going to be alright, right?" he asks Pepper, finally. Another thing he's smart enough to hav noticed: there's only one person who's actually in charge here.

Right then, Cooper feels every inch as young as he really is.

For one brief, wavering moment, Pepper hesitates, staring through the rain at bedraggled boy and baby, but she might as well simply be pondering how best to phrase her reply given how completely she keeps her doubt tamped down and hidden away. "Of course," she finally replies, firm enough to leave little room for argument. "If it weren't for the rain, we would have been back yesterday. We just have to do the best we can and eventually we'll pick the right direction."

Tipping her head back, she calls up into the tree. "Doing okay there, Rachel?"

No, Rachel is not okay in the sense that her inner thighs are all chaffed and not even in a fun way and apparently it's possible to get tree burn on your boobs. She manages a tight, "Fine," however as she's pretty sure that's not what Pepper meant.

Just a few more inches and there. Her hand starts tugging and who the hell would have thought that skill would come in handy as she sends a bundle (a bunch?) of bananas crashing down.

Rickon clapped his hands with glee, nearly dropping Wolf and Blanket, but not quite; he had managed, in the way that small boys do, to wedge his treasures between his arm and his body close to the man holding him, so even wet and soggy they did not fall. "Nana!" he shouted happily. Normally Rickon did not like to eat his fruits and vegetables and shouted no when Mother made him eat them, but he was hungry enough that if someone had given him a whole plate of vegetables he would have eaten them up without complaint.

He's got a soggy soft-toy shoved in against his ribs, and a squirming kid all but tumbling out of his arms, but Cooper holds on grimly as he moves, squatting down and starting to separate fruit from the bunch with his free hand. He's going to fucking useful here somehow.

Jenny would be proud.

"Shit," he says, realising that he doesn't quite have enough hands for this. "Can you peel one for him, Pepper? Please."

"Put him down," Pepper advises, moving to reach up the trunk of the tree to help Rachel avoid breaking her neck on the way down its skinny length. "It's not as if he can get any wetter- Rachel, just take it slow, you're almost there."

Rachel's still muttering at the tree, a few obscenities slipping out as she scrapes up her legs. She feels a hand steadying her legs before finally dropping down to the wet ground. "Thanks," she huffs, breath heaving a little as she struggles back into her boots. "God, let's just...there's a little more canopy over there. Let's just stop and eat for a second?"

"Eat," Rickon agreed, wriggling to be put down. It would not make him any more wet, and he was tired of being carried. "Eat nanas."

Cooper puts Rickon down smoothly and bends to pick up a banana for him, peeling it and offering it before he bends down to retrieve a few more.

"C'mon, buddy," he says, free hand grazing the top of the little boy's head. "Come sit down over here and eat it."

Half-ripe and coated with rainwater, this is the best banana Pepper has eaten in her entire life. She sinks down onto one of the less muddy patches and closes her eyes as she chews, having not realized how famished she was until she got a little something to eat. It's amazing how much the human body can endure when it has to, she thinks, and not for the first time she thinks of Tony, out there alone in the desert. This situation is far from pleasant, but it could be so much worse.

"Thank you, Rachel," she remembers to say as she reaches for her second banana, and almost immediately wishes she'd knocked on wood when she'd considered things being worse—There's a head, small and vaguely birdlike, peering out from the bushes beside them. It might seem innocuous were it not for the rows of sharp teeth.

"Cooper," she says as calmly as she can manage, gone utterly still. "Pick up the baby."

The banana goes down fast, but even Rachel's too tired to come up with a good pun about that. She'd been seated with her head leaning against the tree when Pepper's tone cut through the fog of sleepiness. Her eyes pop open to see a tiny little head and register a chattering noise. It takes everything she has not to freak out and make a sudden movement. "Give the kid to me," she says in a low voice. "Cooper's going to be better at fighting it off, needs both hands."

Rickon was tired of being carried, and he wanted to walk and run and play just like all boys his age liked to do. So with the first chance he got, he squirmed away and toddled off, his treasures clutched in one hand and his half-eaten banana in the other. He liked this very much, as the soggy wet ground made fun splatsplat noises beneath his chubby bare feet.

Halfway through a banana, for a moment, Cooper just stares. This shit? Is so far from fair it's untrue. Under his hand there's a branch and he closes his fingers around it without even thinking.

"Rachel," he says, voice tight. "You need to go get him. Please. Right now."

Spying the movement, Pepper's eyes dart to the branch, Cooper's face and then back to the dinosaur as it takes a few plucky little steps from the foliage. For a moment, she thinks they might actually come out this unharmed fairly easily—It's a big branch, and if Cooper can hit it in the head, it might at least knock it out. Nothing about this experience can be that simple, though, and Pepper's breath catches as a second and then third curious snout peek out from behind their new friend.

"Cooper," she slowly begins, pushing herself carefully to her feet. "Run."

She doesn't waste a moment, hopping to her feet and running after the kid. She's trusting Pepper and Cooper to keep a dinosaur from latching onto the back of her damn head and that is some serious fucking trust right there.

Of course, that goes to shit when all of the sudden the kid drops from view seconds before the muddy, sloppy ground gives way and they're both tumbling down a shallow ravine.

"Fuck," she pants, scrambling through mud and rocks to scoop him up. He's just lying there and her breath catches in her chest until she pushes his hair back and he starts squirming and fussing. There's a cut on his head but she's got tiny, dinosaur shaped problems to deal with.

Cooper watches Rachel and Rickon all but fucking disappear and there's three of the little fuckers now, and Cooper is sick of running. He pushes to his feet, and the branch has got a decent heft to it. He swings it experimentally and very deliberately, he puts himself between them and Pepper.

The first one darts closer, and Cooper swings, hitting it solidly in the head. It hits a tree and stays still and Cooper's actually grinning when he lines up for the next one and...

And holy shit. He barely has time to react to the much bigger fucking dinosaur which is suddenly right there. He swings, but the branch gets ripped out of his hand and one of the little guys bites him high on his thigh and then his feet are off the floor. The back of his head hits a tree and that's pretty much the last thing that Cooper's aware of, after that.

To think, Pepper had actually been stupid enough to assume they'd get out of this place alive.

A dinosaur has just pushed through the brush, so much bigger than the one from yesterday, multi-colored and seemingly designed to be utterly terrifying. As a general rule, Pepper isn't much of a screamer, but when it sweeps its head down like it's going to make a snack out of Cooper, she's scarcely aware the she's screeching like a maniac, some primal instinct pushing up and out of her throat.

Whether Cooper is lucky or not she can't say, the bigger dinosaur having knocked him aside as it grabbed one of the smaller ones in its (horrifyingly massive) jaws, crunching it down in perhaps ten seconds flat before turning its attention on her.

Tony had not had the best day or so, although there were probably some people happy to point out they'd had it worse.

Pepper had vanished, right in front of him. He had, in the immediate moment, been prepared to tear the island apart. Literally, if he had to, and he'd been in the early stages of assessing the possibility of building something that could put a hole in reality out of what he had on the island when he'd gone out and found out about the other disappearances, and what that could mean.

From there, there was only one course of action conceivable.

From up in the sky, dinosaur territory wasn't so big. But it was dense, and filled with movement, and even with Jarvis excluding anything bigger than a human, he'd dipped below the treeline several times only to spook some average-sized herbivores.

When he got Pepper back to the house, he was fitting her with some kind of tracking chip.

In the meantime, all he could do was search, and hope that he got to her before-

"I can detect screaming." Jarvis, in his ear.

Tony snapped an impatient, "Which way?" and as soon as it came up on the display, accelerated, staying above the treeline for maximum effect until he could hear it, too.

He'd made the Redirects for this, to be able to set off a dinosaur's collar whenever he needed.

When he saw the thing menacing Pepper, he didn't even consider it. He opened up the repulsors to full and cannoned into the dinosaur's neck at full throttle. It was heavy, heavy enough that he didn't take it off its feet, just swung it around, vioently twisting by the neck before tumbling off, cushioning his landing with one repulsor thrown backwards.

The other one he kept raised, pausing just fractionally to see which way the dinosaur reacted.

Rachel had been flipping out pretty spectacularly. Sure, Pepper and the baby had been holding their own in that department but she was really making a run for second place.

Then a robot dropped from space and punched the dinosaur. Her mouth hangs open as she barely holds onto the kid, watching the only thing more insane than a dinosaur.

A robot fighting a dinosaur.

Rickon did not know what was happening all round him. There was mud everywhere, and his head hurt very much, and the monster was making an awful sound and something--Rickon did not know what it was, really, but it looked a great deal like a robot from one of the picture books Papa Jack had given him--was fighting the monster. It was just too much for such a small boy, so Rickon yelled, "Wobot!" and continued to cry.

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