Francis, begins

[heirtotheshield]

The fight in Ultra City isn't over, not yet. Ultron is gone, for now, thanks to Torrun, but there's still that worry in the back of his mind, that Ultron will be back, and they still won't be ready for him.

Tonight, he's taken a fire away from the others. Pym and Azari are off doing something that looks like a complicated game of tag. Torrun is praying to her father again. Or actually talking to him, for all James knows. Tony is working on Vision's body that they'd fetched from the Arctic.

He just needs a moment to get this all straightened out in his head. Thor is real. Clint Barton had been real. That meant....

A soft voice, singing in Russian, the smell of sweat and metal, the feel of the shield under his tiny hands. All that could have been real too.

He pokes his fire a bit, eating the rations that Tony had found for them. He's not sure what he's brooding about tonight, but this is far more than just not wanting to listen to Tony. This is his wanting to know where they go from here.

He hears the scrape of a shoe and has a moment to brace himself before Francis joins him at the fire. He doesn't say anything, just uses his stick to poke the flames again.

Comments

man sorry this took so long sob

[knucklesdirty]

Francis flirts with Torunn- of course he does, who could help themselves? But, there's a draw toward James too. So when he'd noticed that he was off by himself, he gives him a little bit to hopefully work through his thoughts, and then he wanders over, hands stuffed in his pockets as his eyes rest on the redhead. He can be sort of frustrating, but in the end, he's kind of glad he met him and his friends. Even with the Scavengers, there had always been something a little lonely ever since his father died.

"Hey," he says, moving over to take a seat near James by the warm flicker of the fire. "You're being awful quiet tonight."

His tone makes it only a little bit of a complaint. Not that he'd admit to being concerned, exactly, but-- they'd actually managed to pull it off. Torunn had ended it. He's pretty sure it's the sort of thing that his dad would have somehow materialized chocolates or something else extravagant for, like he did on Francis' birthdays. He'd never quite worked out how he'd managed it, so they were stuck with rations.

Now there's just the City. Getting back, and then dealing with the thousands of robots that Ultron had left behind. Hoping that this was really somehow they end of it. That they could push them back, pick up the pieces and try to make something out of it. Reclaim the City until it was a place people could live again. See if there were other survivors; find out what happened to the rest of the world.

And that was sort of an overwhelming thought, honestly. The world had been like this for as long as Francis could remember, the idea that maybe it was over now? The After was... hard, in it's own way. So he didn't blame James for being a little out of sorts about it. But he wasn't gonna leave him on his own over here, either.

Now I apologize.

[heirtotheshield]

James is drawing in the dirt. Buildings, and robots. Things that he wasn't used to, to be frank. There was Tony and Jacosta, but that had been it. Then, Mr. Vision had appeared. Now, Ultron is gone. The cracked shield leaning against his knee had belonged to his father. He remembers it, whole, without the damage, resting on a wall. He remembers trying to touch it, but then being scooped up by this blond man, who'd tickled him.

"Mr. Vision said, that most of Asia was conquered." He thinks, anyway. "That means there are still people." He doesn't look up from his random drawings in the sand. "If we can get word to them, we might have a shot..." He trails off, sticking his stick back in the fire, to char the end again.

"Taking out Ultra City... New York," he corrects himself, "that could signal to them that there's a chance. Maybe Pym can help Tony reprogram the robots?" He's not so sure on that point.

He's been more talking to himself than to Hawkeye. (He'll respect him not wanting to be called Francis.) "Sorry. A lot on my mind." He admits. He goes to scrub out his drawings with one booted foor.