#fallout .

"It's Doctor, actually." There's a game he likes to play, generally when he's in hostile territory (and yes, he very much considers the Institute very hostile territory, invitation to be here or not), that on the surface very rarely seems to play in his favor, but it's a goldmine for the one thing he prizes above all things: Information. Enough plots on the graph, give him just enough of a curve to let him form his predictive models, and he suddenly has a plan, where the outcome is very often predetermined. It's not a fun game, and there's usually a little more punching involved (usually to his face, and hasn't ruled that out completely yet), but it's one that's come in clutch more times than he has fingers and toes to count on.

It's like this: He pushes a button, gently - this is him asking about accountability. He gets a response back - the whole works, his last named used like a bludgeon, a reiteration on why he's here, a little bit of carrot and stick, a little bit of broad-brushing. And these things - all of them - they tell him things. How he's walking a fine line between righteous outrage and heavy-handed condemnation, teetering there carefully while he has the absolute best chance he thinks he ever will to have a look at the workings of the Institute up close and personal, with his own eyes. How he's giving what he assumes is expected pushback - this one's got a lot pride, and probably not a lot of patience for a motormouth smart guy with an attitude. If he's lucky, there's a little guilt mixed in, willingly tying himself to what is, essentially, an AIM or a Sinister Six or a Weapon X for the post-apocalyptic world.

He used to punch guys like these before breakfast, and here he is, walking into the lion's den under the guise of cooperation. What a fucking time to be alive.

"I have seven doctorates. Which I earned from the fine institution your little egghead think tank is sitting under. It's Dr. Stark." Which is a title he's never actually insisted on, except in jest. Mostly because literally no one in a life long ago would have used it, anyway. Once everyone you know is a doctor of something, it kind of loses its shine. But here...Here it has a point. He is, if anything, possibly the most qualified person in this entire underground little world. He doesn't think that to toot his own horn, he is, literally, a mind that comes along once a century, if not longer. It's not arrogance to admit your strengths.

Time to reel it back in. "I'm not here to argue with you, I'm genuinely asking. Is it? You want me to talk like the animals, and I can do that, sure. But I promise you- I promise you..." He picks up his own pace, lengthens his own stride, to cut in front of Nate and hold up both hands as a concession. "You're playing on one field, and they're playing on another, and those don't even share a game board, much less rules."

He gets the idea he gets to decide what's useful, what's not, he pisses off the wrong nerd...See, this is how things like MODOK happen. And while there is plenty of weird out there on the surface that makes MODOK look like a cute little kitten, something worse than the Institute - or worse, a disgruntled gaggle of scientists taking their balls to play in a new backyard - is probably in the top three things the wasteland actually doesn't need.

so once upon a time, logan (@wolverinetm) brought tony a wanted poster he found in diamond city that had a drawing on it of a big, scary monster that the poster claimed was skirting the edges of what passes for civilization in the boston commonwealth, and especially around the glowing sea. and what logan said to him about it has kind of stuck with him: imagine it green.

now, look, he knows it's probably just an exceptionally cranky super mutant wandering around out there, and he's tempered his expectations, but the more he hears about this big, green, and angry individual sticking to uninhabited places like the world's ugliest, hairless bigfoot, he's pretty convinced it might be bruce. or the hulk. one of the hulks. he's not sure who would be in the driver's seat for that, but if anyone's going to survive all out nuclear war to live in the shittiest, loneliest place he can find, it's definitely bruce banner.

“You know, never in my wildest apocalyptic nightmares did I see Fenway Park becoming a shanty town.”  Mostly because he's assumed - perhaps erroneously - that no one, not even people born this long after civilization has effectively ended, would ever think anything connected to the Red Sox is worth saving.  Logistically, sure, it makes sense - it's walled, protected.  But how do you ever feel clean again or come back from the shame?

He pushes one of the bowls of noodles across to Nate, along with (what he's sure is a very flat, very disappointing) Nuka Cherry (they're out of the regular and with Takahashi's broken voice module it's made communication a little, you know, difficult).  “I knew things were bad, but imagine having to say you live where the Sox cemented themselves as baseball's biggest disappointment.”

"That's cute." He actually means that, for the record, even if he thinks Nate thinks he's...You know. Soft. That's fair, a lot of people have made that mistake in the past, and he's sure they'll continue to do so in the future, it's- It's whatever. He wasn't, however. Soft, that is. Captain America had the uncanny knack for bringing out the hidden talents in someone, when he decided to train them, and Tony had learned a long time ago not to bristle every time this happens, especially when someone just generally doesn't know any better. There's no patronization in his tone, or in his expression, because there's a small part of him that usually gets drowned out by the self-critical circular punching down his brain likes to do kind of hopes people make a fuss over him being all too obviously human because they worry.

They don't, actually, not generally, he knows that, too, but it's a nice little story to weave himself. Keeps his temper from flaring up at the insinuation the suit does all the heavy lifting.

"You do understand, right." He drops the bag Nate's tossed to him, and pulls open the one at his feet, which has something a little more important than a few rounds of ammo inside. "I have twenty years of combat experience. Not...Not fluffing myself here, it's just...It is what it is. I've been taking punches and bullets for exactly that long. Ranged and close quarters."

And still has a lot of the scars to prove it - at least the ones that have come after extremis, and most recently the 10mm that he'd gotten dug out of his shoulder after a fun little run in with some raiders out near that bastion of naturalistic thought - Walden Pond. Protip: Those guys in Diamond City are dicks, and he's not entirely convinced they're not actually trying to kill their patients. Next time he's going to just do it his damn self, the way he had before the world had ever known his identity.

Probably in a dirty gas station bathroom, just like the old days.

"Point is-" He starts shifting things from his own bag to the second one he's been tossed, all red and gold, though faded and chipped and deceptively cloth-like, the sound of it rubbing together like the dry rasp of snake scales. "I've been doing this for a long time - if I had a couple of brain cells to rub together I'd retire. But since I don't-"

It was probably an indication of how fucked his perspective had actually become, really, that when the idea of a Halloween party had gotten floated, his first thought had been well there's plenty of places to still grab a costume. At some point he'd have to square with that, but it would not be this day. Instead, he'd kept that fun little tidbit of moral fuckery to himself, coming to what he considered the genius conclusion that all self examination that would require realigning himself like a moral chiropractic appointment would have to wait until...At least after Thanksgiving, minimum.

But, his discomfort at how the wasteland might have shifted his compass aside, he wasn't wrong. The bombs having dropped less than two weeks before Halloween, leaving the world in a...Weird, perpetual aesthetic autumn that would never end, and meant that the pop up shop Halloween market had been in full swing, and, if a person were lucky, they'd find one not completely picked over by scavvers or raiders and score something decent to wear to a shindig like this one. Hell, he'd even managed to dredge up enough decorations that the space within the Castle chosen for the party was actually halfway decently gussied up, black cats and grinning skulls plastering the walls around a creepily cheery Happy Halloween! banner, all having seen better days, for sure, all a little faded and tattered around the edges, but if he blurred his eyes a little the damage became nearly invisible. Someone had even carved a few misshapen pumpkins into jack o' lanterns, situating them at the entrance of the party and on each table.

It was nice, was his point. Nice in the sense that things were calm enough, were doing well enough, to allow for a little r and r. To have the surplus to have that little bit of nostalgia for a world never to be seen again.

He'd wrestled with the idea of dressing up, for himself: Iron Man would have been the easy choice, obviously, but he also wasn't something Tony wanted to reduce to a Halloween costume, not now. There'd been the other relative gimmies he'd run across: Silver Shroud. Mistress of Mysteries. The Machinist. None of those had felt right, either, given they had been half inspired by the Avengers.

So here he was. In the most (amazingly preserved) luridly bright red devil costume known to man, that he'd stumbled over in a little boarded up shop tucked away in an alley in the Back Bay, figuring why the hell not, right? He did have the facial hair. When Steve had wandered over in the straight-from-Nuka World get up he'd managed to get his hands on from somewhere, hat and all, and it took a near herculean amount of effort to keep his face straight at the tip of his hat.

"You took your sweet time moseying around the corral before you decided to actually get over here." He lost the battle against the way the corners of his mouth wanted to turn upward and glanced around a moment, in the blinking overhead light of the Christmas string lights he'd shown up with earlier today last minute to add to the ambience. "We should have tried for matching costumes, we're gonna look like an interpretive dance version of The Devil Went Down To Georgia."