Homework
After Tony's swift exit, he'd waffled a bit about what to do. Rhodey would never ever EVER let him forget that outburst, but he trusted that the entire neighborhood wouldn't find out about it. And honestly, Pepper had seemed too grossed out to ever want to think about it again. So he was in the clear, and he could put the whole thing behind him.
At least for the rest of the night.
After a moment of standing in the middle of his room, he finally decided that he wanted to write. Getting some thoughts down on paper was supposed to have its rewards, wasn't it?
He grabbed a pencil and paper and shut his mind off as his pencil began moving. Rhodey found him at his desk in his room not five minutes later, still wearing that goofy grin. "Writing a love letter?" he asked.
Tony rolled his eyes. He'd expected that, and he was going to ignore it. "Being a genius, my ideas are naturally more important and interesting that other people's, such as yourself."
Rhodey's smile disappeared, just as Tony had predicted. "Gee, thanks."
Tony shrugged. "Anytime. I figure the world would benefit from a record of my mental activities."
"How philanthropic of you."
"Yeah, well, the world isn't going to get it cheap."
"What are you even writing?"
Tony held up the paper with a thoughtful expression. "I couldn't really think of anything, so I'm drawing some Martians attacking the world in general."
Rhodey snatched the paper and began reading the captions at the top of the four pictures he'd drawn. In one square was a drawing of the earth with a flying saucer headed in that direction.
"The aliens came from a far and distant world, in a large yellow ship that blinked as it twirled. It rounded the moon, and entered our sky. We knew they had come, but we didn't know why."
The next picture showed the saucer hovering several hundred feet above ground, with a large straw-like tube sticking in the ocean.
"Bright the next morning, with noisy commotion, the ship slowly moved out over the ocean. It lowered a tube and drained the whole sea, for transport back to their home galaxy."
Next was a picture of mass panic. People in the streets running and screaming and apparently choking. Above, the tube was sticking in a cloud.
"The tube then sucked up the clouds and the air, causing no small amount of earthling despair. With nothing to breathe, we started to die. 'Help us! Please stop!' was the public outcry."
Lastly, Tony had drawn a close-up of the spaceship, and a loudspeaker was sticking out of the top.
"A hatch opened up and the aliens said, 'We're sorry to learn that you soon will be dead, but though you may find this slightly macabre, we prefer you're extinction to the loss of our jobs'."
Rhodey shook his head with a smirk as he handed the paper back to Tony. "I'm lost for words. You have a one of a kind imagination, Tony."
"Is it too far-fetched?" Tony asked.
"Not enough, really," was the answer. Rhodey tilted his head to the side as he further observed Tony's drawings. "Is that the back of yesterday's math homework?"
Tony shrugged. "Oh, I'm not going to do my math homework anymore." He turned over the page and motioned to the equations that'd hardly been looked at. "Look at all these unsolved problems. Here's a number in mortal combat with another. One of them is going to get subtracted, but why? How? What will be left of him? If I answered these, it would kill the suspense. It would resolve the conflict and turn intriguing possibilities into boring ol' facts."
Rhodey hummed thoughtfully. "I guess I never really thought about the literary qualities of math."
"That's what you have me for," Tony said as he turned the paper over to continue drawing in details. "Personally, I prefer to saver the mystery."
