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 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.

For a moment, it had felt as though everything was moving in slow motion. There was a very large dinosaur, explosions and somehow, out of the damned blue, Tony. Pepper really doesn't know how he manages to heroically swoop in at the last moment with such regularity, but seeing as how it continues to keep her from being dead, just now she's going to withhold any complaints.

It all startles her so much that she falls on her ass in the mud with a little yelp of surprise, mouth agape for the ten or so seconds it requires for her better sense to kick in again. Cooper isn't far, crumpled and motionless at the base of a tree, and she scrambles over, hands trembling as she rolls him over and presses fingers to the pulse point in his neck.

The immediate danger to Pepper seemed handled, replaced with immediate danger to Tony.

That was fine. He preferred that.

The dinosaur, having decided on Tony as the thing to attack, lunged for him. Tony propelled himself out of the way, hopping with one repulsor aimed at the ground. Activating the collar seemed pointless at this point, wasn't likely to set the dinosaur running.

Instead, he brought both hands up, paused long enough for the dinosaur to lift one leg as it turned, and fired, both repulsors blazing with a loud whine as they discharged. The leg he'd fired on was slammed sideways, skidding in the mud.

It went down, but it started getting up again immediately.

"Everyone back up," Tony said, not backing up.

Rachel had been just standing there, struck dumb until the robot had bellowed at them. She jumps about a foot and runs back to Pepper. "What the hell?" she hisses, making sure Cooper is actually breathing before turning back to the insanity. "What the fuck is that?"

"Tony, be careful!" Pepper yells, heart in her throat. It is absolutely ridiculous that an instinctual and entirely idiotic part of her actually wants her to jump up and run out there, as if she can help subdue the lizard by giving it a stern talking to.

"It's my-" she breathlessly begins to answer Rachel as they pull Cooper and the baby further away from the action, but then realizes she doesn't know how to answer that. Her what? "It's Iron Man," she pragmatically settles on in lieu of engaging herself in a semantic argument over Tony's current status in her life. "He's fine," she hastily adds, reminding herself more than informing Rachel. "He'll be fine."

How smart is a dinosaur? You had to expect at least what you'd get from a large animal.

Tony hadn't studied a lot of large animals. He wasn't an animal guy. Would it know when to run?

The dinosaur lumbered to its feet, roaring, massive head swinging until it fixed on Tony. Apparently it didn't, then; time for a more pointed lesson.

This time, he didn't launch himself out of the way. He let it come, let it prepare to bring the massive teeth crushing against the suit, and then just as Jarvis began to advise that maybe he'd like to get out of the way-

He let loose with the repulsors, hands and chest both, right down its mouth. It felt that, and made a noise less roar and more yelp, swinging away.

They studied each other, and then Tony took a couple of steps back. The dinosaur seemed to consider following; he saw it shift its weight. "Jarvis, fire up that collar."

It reconsidered. "Stay," said Tony (although it seemed more inclined to leave, now), as he turned to see if everyone was all right.

Wait, he's what? "What the hell is Iron Man?" she wonders outloud, keeping her death grip on the kid, shoving the disgusting stuffed thing and blanket back into his hands as one hand settles on Cooper's chest. If the kid croaks on her watch she must admit, she's going to feel bad about it.

This is so jacked up it's not even funny.

Rickon continued to cry, although having Wolf and Blanket again helped very much with what he thought about the situation. His crying was less more of a panicked shriek and more of the cry of a wet, hungry, tired little boy who missed his mother.

Rachel was apparently not a comic book nerd, big surprise there. "Tony Stark!" she clarifies, throwing up frustrated hands still shaking with adrenaline. "Tony Stark is in the suit." The suit that is accelerating his death. Pepper doesn't know whether to scream or sob.

Quickly on her feet, she crosses the distance to Tony and tries to rally her typical composure despite knowing that she has to look worse than he's ever seen her, barefoot and bruised and dirty. "The boy is knocked out but he's alive, and the baby is, um-" she begins, her voice skipping away from her as she lifts a shaking hand to push her hair from her eyes. "If you can carry them both and just point us in the right direction, Rachel and I can walk back."

"Walk- Absolutely not," Tony said, opening the visor so he could take a look at her without the HUD getting in the way. "I'm not losing track of you again. I'll take the... baby?"

He turned, took in the, yes, the baby, okay, that was bad. "I'll take the baby and the kid back, then I'll come back for you."

Rachel just watches, back and forth like she's at a damn ping pong match. This is the craziest thing that has ever happened to her. Which would seem obvious, but there was this whole thing with some coke, a clown, and blowup pool once. But yeah. She's pretty sure the guy inside the robot just said he was going to fly off with the baby and she's not 100% sure about that.

"Wait, just hang on. What the hell. You fly around in that and rescue people and...fight dinosaurs?" she finishes weakly.

Now that the robot was closer, Rickon's crying was reduced to a dribbly sniffle, for his curiosity had overcome his fear of the frightening things that had just happened. "Wobot," he said, between hiccups and sniffles.

"No," Pepper insists, then cuts a look over to Rachel. "Yes, he does, but this is the last time." Turning back to Tony, she considers what tack to use that won't be immediately dismissed. He's got that look, the stubborn, purposely oblivious one.

"I'm fine. We're fine," she tries, motioning to Rachel and herself. "We can walk, it isn't that far. We just need to know which way to go." She levels him with an unflinching gaze. "I appreciate you saving the day, but I mean it, Tony. Don't come back. Go home and get out of that suit."

"Yup- Yes, I do, it's sort of... my thing-" Tony said to Rachel, at the same time Pepper was saying the same. Well, except the part where it was the opposite of what he was saying.

"It's what I do," he said, firmer this time, turning back to Pepper. "Let me do it, please? Pepper? I will tie you up if I have to." He swung around to Rachel again. "If I tie her up, will you keep an eye on her until I get back?"

He wasn't actually planning on it. Well. Not really. Maybe a little.

"I'm pretty sure I'm more afraid of her than I am of you," she says, waving her free arm around in frustration. "Look, robot guy. Thanks for mauling the dinosaur but Pepper's in charge because the rest of us are kind of useless so just take the kid back to it's mom, come get the comatose teenager and we'll be fine. Probably." Rachel would actually like to be flown home but she seriously doesn't want Pepper pissed at her.

Edited 2010-07-28 01:45 (UTC)

Rickon did not understand very much of what the grownups were talking about, but there was one bit that he could not possibly have missed. "Mum?" he asked, a little hopeful for the first time since they ate the bananas. He very much missed his mother and wanted to go back to her and Uncle Edmund and his baby sister.

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