tampered | Log; Completed

"That's understandable. Even the strongest person I know struggles sometimes. I'm glad you got yourself put together again, though. Has it been very long?"

Coming from some people, the words might have bordered on platitudes, but Tosh was serious. She'd seen people have to face terrible things, and barely keep themselves sane. Sometimes she wasn't sure they'd actually managed.

She did feel as though a personal glimpse like that deserved one in return, though, and after a moment she said softly, "I spent some time in prison."

He gave her a somewhat wistful smile. "It's my own fault. Normal people build up support systems of friends and family. Between all the time I spend tinkering on something and the fact that I don't like to involve other people in my problems or let them get close it's my own fault."

Tony looked down at Tosh, able to tell by the change in her tone that it was something very personal to her. "Computer hacking?"

Oh yes, Tosh knew pretty well about that. Until Torchwood came along, she was in pretty much the same boat.

At his question, she shook her head, smiling wryly. "Crimes against national security. As in, stealing secret government files, using them to build a dangerous alien device, and then handing the device over to terrorists."

Which yes, sounded now like possibly the stupidest idea ever, but at the time...well, she really hadn't been thinking very clearly.

Tony was very impressed. Toshiko was proving to be more and more unlike what he had expected the more he got to know her. Even the stealing of national secrets was really a plus.

"I'm sure that you had a very good reason to do it," he told her as he spun her around and then pulled her close, a bit closer than she was before he spun her. "Or at least what seemed like a good idea. Is that why... I eventually had to let you out of the room when I locked you in?"

Pausing for a moment, Tony decided that she might not want to answer that so he should give her another line of conversation to follow.

"I was in prison for a short time myself."

The dance steps did a good job of distracting Tosh from dwelling on the memories of why she'd been imprisoned, or what the experience had been like. Tony deserved at least some kind of answer, however, and so when he paused, she looked up and nodded at him without speaking, and slid her from his should to rest behind his neck.

Then she smiled a bit, grateful once again for his deft handling of the conversation. "What did you do?"

Tony gave a soft hum as her hand moved from his shoulder to behind his neck. She had a very nice touch, he should have expected as much though with how deft it would have to be to work on the sort of things that she did.

"I was accused of murder. And rightfully so. It turns out the someone had implanted a sort of techno-organic receiver in my brain that allowed them to send my body commands, which caused me to kill several terrorists."

The hum made Tosh smile again, and maybe blush just a little. Her smile didn't even quite fade away when Tony explained the reason behind his arrest.

"Not rightfully so, then. If someone else was sending the commands, then your body was just being used as a weapon. You can't hold a weapon accountable for how a person uses it."

"I needed to be locked up to keep me from killing anyone else," Tony explained, enjoying the closeness of her body. She also smelled very nice.

"But unfortunately that didn't hold me. But I managed to stop the guy before he hurt anyone else," Tony continued.

Pausing a moment he looked at her.

"Tosh, I'm going to ask you something I haven't actually asked someone in a long time... may I kiss you?"

"Well, I suppose that does make sense, then," Tosh agreed thoughtfully, thinking that she ought to feel much less comfortable than she did in the arms of a man who'd just admitted to multiple murders. But she'd never claimed to have the shiniest morals around, you couldn't when the kind of work Torchwood did, really. "And I think it's good that you stopped him yourself. Gives it a sort of balance you wouldn't have had if someone else had done it and you'd just been let go."

The question caught her by surprised, and she blinked up at Tony for a moment, before replying. "Yes...I think I'd like it if you did."

"I'm glad, because I'd really like to," he said before leaning in to kiss her softly. It wasn't deep or full of passion but it was definitely not chaste at all.

And it was good, or at least Tony thought it was. He thought Tosh might be wrong in just what was her second most impressive ability.

Well, Tosh certainly was forming an opinion on what Tony's second most impressive ability might be. It was a nice kiss indeed, and better for not being too intense for the moment.

She smiled, both hands light clasped behind his neck. "I wouldn't object," she said softly, "if you did that again sometime."

He continued to move with the music, both hands moving to the small of her back now. For all her talk of being shy she was definitely more than adept at social situations.

"That's good to know," he told her with a wink. "I'll probably take you up on that sometime."

Tosh did tend to underrate her ability in the social arena, although she found it infinitely easier when in the company of someone who made her feel as comfortable as Tony did.

"So what drew you into engineering?" A topic which Tosh felt was perfectly well suited to following a kiss on the dance floor.

Tony had to admire a woman that could juggle being kissed and then transition right into talking about engineering. He didn't know if he found her kissing or her tech talk more attractive.

"Since as early as I can I've been building things," he confessed. "My dad's company did weapons contracts for the government and I think I even scared him a little bit with what I could do. Engineering was just the degree I could get that wouldn't interrupt my fascination with inventing things."

It shouldn't have been at all surprising that Tony had Tosh hanging on his every word the minute he starting describing his interest with invention, at least not for anyone who'd spent more than five minutes talking to her.

"What's your favorite thing you've invented?" she asked, plainly curious to know he answer.

The Iron Man suit was definitely his favorite invention but he couldn't come out and say that just yet. It's not like he hadn't had a lot of other impressive inventions.

"The SHIELD helicarrier," he said. "It wasn't solely my invention but a lot of the things I've made are in it. Other than that, nannites are probably the favorite thing I've made."

The helicarrier sounded like an interesting invention, although it didn't sound like the personal sort of thing that a person usually chose as a favorite. The nannites were a little closer to that, but Tosh wondered if maybe she wasn't getting the whole truth.

Well, she wasn't exactly in a position to blame people for having secrets.

"Tell me about the nannites?"

It was possible that at this point, she'd completely forgotten about dinner, and was in fact perfectly content to dance and engage in tech talk for the rest of the night.

"At the most basic level, they're microscopic, programmable machines," he said, moving easily around the dance floor as he began to talk. This sort of thing was what he excelled at, especially when he had an appreciative audience that could understand what he was talking about.

"But the really amazing thing about them is how much programming I can get them to do. Since each one is capable of only carrying a small portion of programming they're almost useless on their own for even the most simple functions. What I did those is created nannites that function as a group. Each one carries a tiny bit of the OS with a command linking it to other nannites, almost like DNA. Alone they don't do a whole lot but since they're so small you can have enough of them to execute incredibly complex commands and even have a certain basic level of intelligence."

Oh, he most definitely had an appreciative audience. Tosh listened intently, imagining a dozen uses for something like what Tony described by the time he'd finished his explanation.

"Did you invent them with a specific purpose in mind, or was it just the idea of the nannites themselves that got you started?"

"I had several purposes in mind," he told her, able to see that she was genuinely interested. "Sometimes it's hard to tell if I invent something as a solution to a problem or just make something and find things that it can solve. It's sort of a... thing a few people in my world have. We're called futurists."

Tosh cocked her head at him, puzzling out what it sounded like Tony was telling her. "You mean, that you might see the need for a solution before the problem's actually presented itself, and base your invention off of that...prescience, I suppose?"

For someone who dealt with time as part of her job, it was an intriguing idea. She wondered if she ought to suggest that Tony get in contact with Jack sometime.

Edited 2008-05-20 04:35 (UTC)

He pursed his lips in thought. That was actually a really good description of it, probably the best he's heard from someone who isn't one.

"It is like that. Futurists can see the needs of the world years in advance," he explained as he looked down at her. "For someone like myself that means inventions. Some of the technology in my world is years ahead of it's time because of people like myself or Reed Richards. An example would be the phone. Bell might have invented the first phone but a futurist would have seen the implications for cell phones that play music, videos, movies and have calendars and the like in them. Even if they wouldn't know what satellites were they could infer something that would allow phones to connect wirelessly over great distances. If they're capable enough, they could make all those things. It also works on a bigger, social scale too."

"So you might have an idea for something you want to create, and maybe you're not even quite sure why you want to include some details, except that you know it's going to be of use when you're finished," Tosh mused. Really, it was fascinating. She wasn't an inventor herself, the things she made were for very specific purposes, but she was rarely happier than when she sat down to take something apart and discover how and why it worked. She imagined she'd have a field day with some of Tony's inventions.

"That's amazing. Explains what you meant about the nannites, too. Are you planning to set yourself up a workshop while you're here?"

"Something like that, although I always know what things are for," he said with a nod. Toshiko seemed to really get the idea, which was rare. She was a very incredible woman indeed.

"Sometimes it's a long process, like discovering satellites for the cell phone. And then you need to discover rocket propulsion in order to get them up there. With the nannites though I first thought of how they could help build things on a very small scale. Eventually I'd like to get them to the point where they could say... go into a body and remove all the cancerous cells in it."

God, it was nice to actually think about technology like that being really used for something. Tosh looked thoughtful for a moment, caught up in the idea of all those alien artifacts, stored away out of reach, serving some purpose in the world beyond just the defense of their little secret battleground.

"Wish we had someone doing things like that back home." She laughed softly and looked up at Tony. "You'd love to see our archives, I bet. We haven't figure out what half the things we've got locked away even do, yet."

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