fe_male | memeboxing

[ He's not quite as used to people watching him yet. Still likes it, but he's not as good at shrugging it off as he will be later. But mostly he narrows his eyes. ] What do you mean? Why do I live here? We've never lived in Malibu. How do we help each other? You don't look like you work in a house.

[ She can look away again after a long moment, back at the paused video, try to sort out answers to his questions. It's not that she minds that he has them, because of course he's going to have questions, she would too. It's kind of a bizarre new situation to get thrown into. But she doesn't know how to answer all of them. Particularly the one about helping, because they've never done definitions of what they are. It's just - help. Unquantified and there and a saving grace sometimes. ] I don't know why you live here, it's just - your house, you've lived here as long as I've known you. You know how Guides and Sentinels work?

[ It's cool. People take time to answer stuff. People who aren't him, anyway, and he's already learning both sides of the time differential. Doesn't mean he's good with handling it though, and now that the earlier immediate entertainment is done, he pulls up a game Tony had on his computers that he's already found. ] How long have you known me? [ Although that gets a look. ] Of course I do.

[ Well, now she knows he came by his attention span honestly. Although, child. That's a really weird switch to have to make in terms of thinking about him. ] I - quite a while now. Over six months? I can't remember when I moved in. [ And okay, so that will make the explanation a little easier, even if she's still going to have to cut corners and try to keep it simple so that she can keep out any mention of trauma he's not going to know about for years. ] We help each other like Guides and Sentinels help each other, but without a bond.

[ Six months. That's a while. But without a bond, he already has help like that from time to time, it's just never the same person twice, and never for six months, beyond that. And because of that, he doesn't totally get what Sentinels can offer Guides in return. ] What's in it for you? Free house?

[ She glances down at him at that, a little startled because that's a surprisingly cynical approach for someone so young and maybe she should have expected that, given what she knows of his general history with empaths, but it's still strange to run across and a little sobering. It's important to make a point of only bringing in empaths for young Sentinels in arrangements that don't make it an obligation for them to work with the Sentinel, so that it becomes at least a somewhat natural thing rather than forced. A long pause as she sorts out how to phrase it. ] No. He grounds me as much as I ground him. We work well together.

[ He waits for the response uncharacteristically patiently. It's something he's curious about, so he doesn't mind waiting for an answer that seems to be accurate or otherwise hard to find somewhere else. ] I don't know how to do that.

It takes a long time to learn. [ Immediate, calm and sure. This bit she knows. She and Tony are better at it now, but they're not perfect either. It's a skill that takes a lot of learning to do right even with a bond. ] Most people don't figure it out until adulthood.

[ That's a flash of irritation, then a mask of vague annoyance. He's learning. ] I hate things like that. That take a long time.

[ A sympathetic glance down. ] Yeah, everyone does. Patience isn't much fun to learn. [ Reaching out to bring up one of Tony's projects, glancing it over. Mostly for something to distract herself, buy time to figure out what she's supposed to do now. Call SHIELD? She doesn't really like them. How would Tony wind up a kid? ] I don't know how to get you back home.

[ He watches what she's doing, thinking about things but oddly still in the process. ] Into the right time, you mean. [ More considering. ] Maybe I can just stay here anyway.

[ She's flicking through it, which she doesn't actually normally do with Tony's things, but double checking his math in columns is soothing and blowing up the model to watch the simulation even more so. ] I'm no expert in time, but I think that would cause linear causality problems.

[ It's okay, he likes watching it too. It is soothing, in a weird way. He's not up to that level in math, but he can still see the basics in the way things go together, and if nothing else, this technology doesn't exist in the timeframe he's from. ] Yeah, I've seen tv shows about that. Just hoping.

What do we do here?

Why don't you want to go back? [ Soft and unsure, because he doesn't really talk about his childhood, but she's never gotten the impression it was good. And she'll just keep going over his things, staying casual. ]

You invent things and go be a superhero when you're needed and help run the R&D division of your company.

[ He's just started leaning back in the chair he found, now he's spinning it a little bit, still looking at the schematics she's flicking through when he's facing the right way. He's only sliding around fairly slowly as it is. ] Just don't. [ And wow, he's about as forthcoming as a child as he is as an adult, although it's probably easier to coax a little more information out of child-him, given how he mostly spoke into his lap while still moving the chair. It's not quite evasion. More like temporary avoidance. If she feels like following it, of course.

That causes pause again though. ] I run the R&D section? At.... forty? Where's my dad? Where's Obie? Are they helping me run it?

[ Well that's really not subtle at all there, though she wouldn't have particularly expected subtlety from him at any age. She hopes it's not bad that she feels curious now, because she does, but at the same time - okay wow those questions are going to be hard to answer, maybe she can dodge them. ]

More stuff to do here, or? [ And a short pause. ] You ran the whole company for a while, but you got bored of it. [ She'll just. Leave it at that version of events yes. That'll work, right. ]

Yeah. Cooler stuff. Less school. I don't know.

[ Okay, that sounds enough like him, he thinks. He considers it fairly heavily for a little while, but accepts it afterwards, starts spinning again. ] I guess they're back in New York still. It looks like a lot of work - I really just like building things.

You don't like school?

[ She lets out a half breath of relief at that, her physical reactions as always muted around him but never quite eliminated. ] Well, you do a lot of that. And really well, of course.

Goes too fast. I don't see why I have to do it at all when it just means that I'm here for a little while and there for a little while and everybody's new all the time and the older they get the more they... I dunno. They don't like it, for some reason. I can't wait until I'm done with school.

[ He perks back up a little bit, because right now most of what he makes is for school or secretly with pieces his dad didn't need and didn't notice were missing. ] I build whatever I want here, don't I? This is my house.

Skipping grades? How close are you to being done with school?

[ She notes that perking up, and it brings a little bit of the smile back to her face. His enthusiasm about building stuff remaining a constant is nice. ] You do, and you can. It's all yours.

I'm moving to the fifth halfway through the year, officially, but they all blend together. [ And that's proud, because this is the most tangible reason he's special, aside from, you know, all the obvious stuff. ]

Yeah see, just more reason to stay here. Are we building something? What are we building? Do we work together?

Yeah, not a lot changes between the first several years. But most kids don't get that. [ She knew you had to have been a genius early, but fifth grade already, wow. ]

Mostly we both work on our own things, though we've been working together on my car some. I think your latest project was working on boosting your stabilizer output again when it's under stress, but you may have already moved on.

[ He'll finish his sophomore year and start his junior year in high school when he's twelve, Max. What do you think of that? ] Most kids don't go to special private boarding schools either. That probably helps.

Hmm. [ He glances back over at his own screens again, the one bottom left of Iron Man flying around and being awesome in general, and then his gaze shifts to some of the other screens, as he stops spinning entirely and pulls up some of the other recent projects, looking them over. He's smart, and he intuitively understands machines and electronics and stuff, but he knows he doesn't know any of this, and thinks that maybe future him would be angry if he messed around with any of it. Maybe he'll start his own project. Or something that was still labelled under the 'future stuff' heading; stuff that his older self hadn't started working on yet. He couldn't mess any of that up, right? Just sort of, jot down some ideas and save them in a supplemental file. Maybe they'd help. ] What's wrong with your car?

[ That that is going to suck for him. Probably a lot, given what she remembers of high school. ] Boarding school, huh? [ He's so young though, why is he in boarding school already? She doesn't like it at all, that's not something she approves of. ] Do you like it?

[ Instinctively not seriously defensive. ] There's nothing wrong with my car, she just needs a few upgrades. Get her more up to speed.

Yeah. It's not bad. Homework's easy, but not like, shoot-me-now-boring-easy like it was before; the shop is easy to sneak into, and it's an old building so there's lots of secret hiding-spots. And my teachers talk to me a lot, which is kind of fun. A few of them don't mind when I interrupt, although most of the others get me in trouble for it. [ /shrug. He doesn't get asked that often. More just: 'When are you graduating from this one?' ]

Upgrades like what? Something's wrong if it's not starting at up-to-speed.

8D

i'm impressed

i can be your ASCII art master, baby

you say the sweetest things to me darling

i try

and you succeed very well

thank you very much

alwaaaays

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject