st_arkintern | (no subject)

Peter approaches and sits down next to Tony. "It was fun," he says, smiling lightly. "Scary, but fun."

If Peter had the will to smile about something from the future, life couldn’t be all bad. He raised a hand, dropping it on Peters’s shoulder to give it a hearty squeeze. “I chose the structure. You choose the colors. Deal?”

"Deal," Peter says. "I already know what color I want, though."

Red, obviously.

"When it's done, are you gonna show me how to drive it?"

"When we're done, it's gonna be yours." Tony patted Peter's back, pushing up off the logs. "So, yes."

Peter's head swivels to face Tony and looks at him, unblinking.

"Really?"

Tony paused, realizing his mouth had gotten ahead of him. After a moment he simply shrugged, carrying on. “Yeah. Pretend to be surprised later.”

Embarrassed, Peter tries to suppress the smile that's quickly growing on his face, but instead he finds himself smiling harder. He looks down, rubs the side of his nose, and looks down, hoping his delight isn't too obvious.

"Well, we should probably get started."

In a few moments, armor was encasing Tony’s chest and arms and he was tossing a chunk of lumber the size of the Hulk’s forearm Peter’s way. “What types of wood you worked?”

"Plywood, cedar, and cypress," he says. "Basically whatever we had in shop class. I kinda spent a lot of time doing non-shop activities in shop classes, though."

Mostly stuff like trying to figure out what was going on with the glowy thingie. And building his web-shooters.

"We're spoiled for pine here." Tony nodded at the piece he tossed Peter--the reddish-brown heartwood of a Ponderosa Pine, bearing swirling grain. "Decent softwood. Doesn't split like hardwood, workable. Can easily fashion into more veneer."

It all did raise some interesting questions--did the natural resources replenish like the inn's resources? Those questions would get answered soon enough. Hitting some kind of ore vein somewhere would be priceless. 'Literally. Neverending mining would destabilize more than a few economies. Thank god for pocket dimensions.' "Hey, random thought but wanna do a geochemical analysis of the soil with me sometime, Pete?"

This idea was too precious not to follow up on.

Peter looks up from the piece of pine in his hands.

"Yeah," Peter says, nodding. "Sure, I'd love to." Sure, the nature of their relationship had changed a lot since Tony's arrival, but there was still a part of Peter who still was as eager to be around Tony as he was after his first mission with him in Berlin.

"The faster we strike a vein, the fast we explode this place with the full throttle of our collective genius." Tony's dark eyes were alight with possibility, his shoulder mounts popping up to carve the pine into thin sheets via laserwork. California wasn't starved for natural resources, and even just enough bauxite ore could open up a world of possibilities for building. All of Tony's manufacturing had come from scavenging, but he was only content with that for so long (which was not at all.)

Peter feels like he's two steps behind Tony, but it doesn't bother him as much as it might have when he felt a constant urge to impress him; as their relationship settled into something more comfortable, it seemed less important to him that he convince Tony that he was somehow worthy.

Besides, he's pretty sure now that most people feel like they're two steps behind Tony.

"What do you mean?"

"Catapulting this joint into the Industrial Age." Though he hadn't consciously willed it, his armor was now coating his hands once more, his fingers twitching anxiously as they caught strips of veneer. "The only part we can't manufacture out of wood is the engine. And the tires." Tony waved off any concerns with making either before Peter could even think it.

"California's a leader in mining. Gold, gypsum, iron, aluminum, oil--you know it's the sole producer of boron, to boot. You know what that means? Fuel, pyrex, neutron detecting." Tony was beginning to ramble, and quickly, out of pure excitement. He almost added nuclear reactor regulating, but he was getting far ahead of himself. That lab was close enough to taste.

"Yeah," Peter agrees. He assumed that they'd find those things the next time a portal opened... provided a portal did open and there were useful things there. It'd been over a half-year since the last time it opened. May? Or was it June?

"Have you ever mined before?" That wasn't exactly something they taught at Midtown.

"Sure haven't." Tony processed another few kilos of lumber, a third arm emerging from his back to catch and gather veneer as his hands laid it out on the table he'd dragged out.

Peter watches Tony carefully, committing everything to memory. If he's going to be of use, he should probably start paying attention.

"I bet there's probably books on it in the library." Maybe, anyway. "I brought a lot of books back from this other world we went to." The library had definitely grown since his first days at the inn.

"I go down, you spot up top." Before long, strips of veneer had been piled into a pyramid twice the length of Tony's body atop the table. He stepped back, clapping his hands to dust them off.

"Yeah, sure," Peter says, nodding. He moves into position, trying his best to follow his instructions to a T.

"My dad and I didn't do anything like this," he says. "He wasn't really into making things. Just cooking."

Tony motioned for Peter to make his move--the tower of stripped wood would have to be webbed up and stored in the shed Tony constructed near their workstation. "The best skill in dorm life. He who cooks reigns king."

Webbing is something familiar -- and it's something that Peter knows he can do. Peter starts moving and webbing the woods into more easily carriable stacks. Sure, he could probably carry a lot of it at once (strength was, after all, one of his superpowers), but it was also super awkward to carry because of its length.

"Yeah, we used to do it together sometimes," he says. "Uncle Ben and I made a pinewood derby car once. I used to help with his models too."

"For your troop?" Recalling that Peter was a scout at some point, anyway. As the table got cleared, Tony pulled a rolled sheet of graph paper, 34"x 44", and laid it out on the surface.

Edited 2019-01-27 22:02 (UTC)

"Yeah," he says, continuing to wrap and bundle things up. "I stopped before I got to Webelos, though."

"What'd you do in those, anyway? How many badges on that cute little vest?" Civilian life was largely a mystery to Tony and his military-industrial background.

"Went camping, earned badges," Peter explains, still working. "Uncle Ben was my assistant den master until I left."

A beat, and then: "You weren't in cub scouts?"