fic: "Assembly, Care, & Feeding of a Queen's Court" by Tielan - Chapter 7
TITLE: Assembly, Care, & Feeding of a Queen's Court - Part 7: Branded By Her Hand
SUMMARY: Sometimes, in the deep of winter and the dark of the night, Tony remembered what it felt like to be shattered.
CHARACTERS: Tony, Maria
DETAILS: Master Post
Chapter 7: Branded By Her Hand
Sometimes, in the deep of winter, Tony's chest ached, right at the edges of his Jewel.
He'd wake in the middle of the night and be unable to fall asleep again. After the first time Pepper kicked him out, Tony took the hint and stayed out of her bed entirely. It was better that way, anyway; he couldn't hurt her if he kept his distance.
Sometimes he felt the flesh around his Jewel burn, scalding off his bones layer by peeling, bloody layer. When that happened, he locked himself in his workroom and made spells, wrote down ideas, researched complicated intersections of Jewelled power, and forced himself to keep doing things - anything.
If he didn't, he'd find himself back in the cold again, curled up against the stone and shivering, while Yinsen's fingers held his wrists and the calm, rusty voice of the other male drew him back towards the edge of sanity, away from the spellwebs that entangled his mind.
Sometimes, in the deep of winter and the dark of the night, Tony remembered what it felt like to be shattered.
Lately, it had been getting worse. Harder to keep things together, to stay focused. The world was sliding away from him, and he could feel himself slipping towards the Twisted Kingdom. The only times he felt whole were in the rut and on the killing edge.
Like now.
He stood on a killing field as a hundred Hydra stormed towards him in an unending wave, their weapons out, their eyes empty and blank.
Tony tore through them with practised ease; pushing his power out in expanding waves of Jewelled strength. He'd discovered this method of destruction while trying to escape his prison, and it had served him and the resistance very well.
Heads popped and bodies collapsed as he burst their 'Jewels', and he dragged thin blades of power through their corpses and shoved the remains out of his way.
Keep coming, you mindless dicks. I can do this all day.
*Rhodey!* He swept out on a psychic thread, reaching instinctively for the familiar mind. *Hydra on the way!*
*Logan already brought us the news. Can you get back to the camp? We're gonna need all we've got for this.*
Tony grimaced as he lashed out with another wave of power, taking out another swathe of Hydra. And yet they still came. Where were they coming from? And why had they chosen now to attack? And - Mother Night - they had that chit in the camp... *Tell me you got rid of the Queen.*
*They were too close. We couldn't risk her.*
*Sure we could. Just send her and her escort away...*
*Tony. She's not just any Queen, she was trained in the Phoenix Court.* He heard the hesitation in Rhodey's voice and sensed what was coming just before Rhodey hit him with it. *And I'm hers.*
What? Another set of Hydra minds shattered beneath Tony's blast of power. *You're not hers.*
*Yes, I am.*
*No, you're not. You've just been without a Queen so long that you think she's your Queen. What you've got is a perfectly normal reaction-*
*We're not discussing this now, Tony. You need to get your ass back here. I've warned the nearby towns including Stark Manor-*
Pepper. *But you couldn't let go of your cock long enough to send the little Queen home?*
*That's enough.* The cold anger in Rhodey's voice said he'd crossed a line, but Tony was a Warlord Prince - he didn't back down or apologise. *Get back here and help or play it solo, it's your call, Tony. Meantime, I've got a camp and a Queen to defend and that's what I'm going to do.*
Tony snarled as the other male cut the psychic connection between them. He swept his power through the remaining Hydra minds in the area like an arm sweeping crystal glasses off a table and onto the floor.
A Queen for Rhodey. That was just rich. A bitch with her greedy little hands wrapped around his best friend's heart - or his balls. Someone to order them all about to her whim. Backed by Fury, of course, because that was all Fury cared about anymore - power and a pretty face to give his dominance legitimacy.
Tony stalked through the bloody mist that hung in the air, feeling the damaged edges of his shattered self grating against each other - the way his bones had ground together as her Warlords held him down...
No.
He dragged on his Jewels to bolster the fractured pieces of his inner self, and leaped for the Red Wind before the next wave of Hydra could reach him. Don't think about it. You're not whole - but you survived.
Yinsen hadn't.
Don't waste it. Don't waste your life, Stark.
But death was all he was good for anymore. Death and destruction and revenge and retribution, meted out by a Red-Jewelled Warlord Prince who walked too close to the Twisted Kingdom for anyone's safety or comfort, let alone his own.
Death, and hurting people who deserved better than him.
There are no parties, there are no social events, there are no speeches. There is nothing but the next fight.
And Pepper had looked at him with lightless eyes and only asked, So that will that be all, Prince?
He'd expected to find her resignation on his desk the next morning but she'd been brisk and civil and brittle as ice. And Tony ached as he went about tidying up the last loose ends of the estate before he headed back out to the camp, but he hadn't tried to make things better between them.
What was the point?
He hadn't mentioned it to Rhodey either. Every time he tried it stuck in his throat. Even earlier, when he'd issued the Winsol invitation - something Pepper had been at him to do since the last time he'd been back at the Manor - he hadn't been able to say the words. It was as though something in him knew that saying them out loud might damage him beyond healing.
Tony chose not to arrive at the camp's landing web, but dropped off the Red Wind before he reached the camp, sight-shielded as well as body-shielded, landing lightly behind a rocky outcropping uphill from the camp.
From this vantage point, he could see the Hydra spread out across the plains below, attacking the camp with their short, clear-coloured bursts of power. They covered the ground as far as Tony could see. Hundreds of them pulsed sharp psychic blows into the shield that was enclosing the camp - not one great shield but many smaller, overlapping ones.
Even as he watched a section of shield blinked out of existence, the Yellow shield vanishing to reveal a Rose shield behind it. There was no breach, no break - just the settling of the shield edges up against the abutting shields. An excellent piece of work by males who'd trained with each other for such a situation when they would have to hold shields up for extended periods of time.
Tony started down towards the encampment and paused.
Down below him, unnoticed by camp and Hydra alike, someone was making their way up the hill beneath Summer-sky shields.
A witch.
A Queen.
Rhodey's Queen. Outside the shields that were supposed to keep her safe. Escaping? Or running away?
Tony wasn't sure where the anger came from - the flooding heat beneath his breastbone where his Jewel rested - but he wasn't prepared for it, or the way his body seemed to move without his conscious control to intercept her.
"What do you think you're doing out here?"
She hadn't felt him approach - no surprise since he was Red-shielded - and at his words she stumbled, her ankle twisting on an uneven hollow in the long grass. It was instinct that had Tony catching her arm, not courtesy, but her weight swung them both around. Unbalanced, Tony nearly fell on top of her in the grass, only just stopping himself from crushing her with his weight as his hand scraped against the rocky soil.
He stared down into her eyes, vaguely aware that she smelled of leather and smoke, something spicy and almost intoxicating, and the scent seemed to be coming from the place where her right shoulder met her neck...
A knife pressed lightly into his throat. He caught his breath, his mouth hovering over her skin. An inch more and he'd taste that intoxicating flavour - and have a inch-deep hole in his throat.
"You'd be Prince Stark, then."
"And you'd be Fury's Queen." Tony lifted his head, but the knife continued to press into his throat until he rolled off her, his gut curling with something terrifyingly like desire. Mother Night. No wonder Rhodey had lost his brains over the chit. "Do you mind?"
"Not at all." She sat up with the knife still in her hand, eyeing him warily, her shields up. "What are you doing out here?"
"I could ask the same of you. And, in fact, I already have. You're supposed to be inside those shields. In fact-" *Rhodey!*
*Tony, now is not the time!*
A hand caught at his arm as he reached out to tell the other male that their Queen was outside the shields. "Don't tell Lord Rhodes."
"Don't tell Lord Rhodes what?" Tony demanded. She was out here without an escort, without protection, with a fucking Hydra army attacking down in the valley, and she'd decided that now was a good time to go for a walk up the hill? "In case you haven't noticed, there are several thousand Hydra down there-"
"And I need one of them."
He stared at her, not sure he'd clearly heard what she just said. "You want a Hydra?"
The look she gave him suddenly made him realise just how young she was. Mother Night. Not even old enough to have had her Virgin Night yet. "I need one. Just one."
"Do I even want to know why?"
"I need to get behind his psychic barriers."
"No. That's been tried."
"But not by a female. Not by a Queen."
"And you know that how?"
"Because not one of you cocks has let a Queen anywhere near a Hydra for the last twenty-five years!"
Sudden temper strained inside Tony; he struggled to keep it leashed. "Of course we haven't - because they kill the Queens."
"And has anyone asked why?"
"Because they're the Queens! That's all the reason they need."
"Spoken like a Blood male."
"That is what I am."
"And the Hydra aren't?" She stared at him, her expression one of helpless annoyance - a very similar expression to one he'd seen on Pepper's face countless times; a witch trying to make a Blood male understand something he simply wasn't capable of comprehending except at the most abstract of levels.
Pepper had enough experience with Tony to know not to bother explaining. This little Queen hadn't - yet.
"The Hydra aren't Blood as we understand them, Stark. They wear Jewels but colourless ones. They can use some Craft and have a marginal reserve of power. They have some psychic connection to each other, but their minds burn to ash at the first psychic touch of a male, leaving them empty husks. And they're pretty much all the same - made to the same template - pale skin, dark hair, blue eyes."
"And they kill the Queens."
"But why?"
The woman was unbelievable. "Because they're Queens!"
"Because they're a threat."
"That's what I said."
She shook her head, wisps of hair drifting around her face, come loose from her plait. "The Red Skull is a Blood male; his instincts are exactly the same as the ones that drive you."
"I'm going to point out that I haven't killed you." Although he was thinking about wringing her neck.
"Yet." Clear grey eyes fixed on him, steady and arresting. "Would you let me kill you, Prince?"
"N-" The lie died on his lips beneath the look she gave him.
Darkness help him, the chit wasn't just Rhodey's Queen.
Tony looked away, feeling his jaw tighten, remembering what it felt like to be shattered. Remembering what it felt like to have a Queen's hand hard upon him, in his hair, on his cock; to want and hate and fear and loathe...
She slapped him, hard enough to sting. Temper flared and he snarled at her. And she didn't cringe or flinch the way most people did; instead she snarled back.
"I am not her, Prince, and if you're going to be anywhere near me in future, you'd better remember that!"
He stared, still riding the edge of his temper, but feeling the tingle of her handprint on his face like a brand. "You slapped me."
"You needed it." Mother Night but she was a cool one. "Whatever was done to you, Stark, you're still a Warlord Prince of the Blood who wears a dark Jewel. Nothing in the realms can or will change that. What's the first law?"
"To protect." It came out without thinking, the purest core instinct that informed everything else he'd ever done.
The first law of a Blood male is to protect, Tony. The second is to cherish. It's only the third that's obedience.
The noise of the battlefield rose up below them, the hushing grunts of the Hydra, the shouts of the Blood males trying to defend and protect not only the camp but this Queen - who'd taken herself out of their protection because she was trying to do something more.
"You can't help it," she was saying. "Maybe the Red Skull can't either - but his response is to destroy what he fears can control him."
"And you think that by getting your hands on a Hydra... No."
"I think that by getting my hands on a Hydra, I can find out more about them than any male has found out in the last twenty-five years."
"No." Tony's better judgement was telling him all the ways this was bad. But his instincts were telling him to side with his Queen - she had a certain, crazy logic- "Absolutely not."
"Prince."
"The first law isn't obedience."
"Did I give you a command?"
"You're about to."
She looked at him, solemn as a Priestess presiding over a ceremony. No tantrums, no tears, no tirades. Just one word: "Please."
Mother Night. If he didn't do this, she'd only work out another way. She was definitely that kind of a witch. But if he was going to let her do this, he was going to push every advantage he was allowed. It went against Tony's grain to give in meekly.
"You will tell me exactly what you plan to do, and how you plan to do it. You will tell me what the dangers are and whether you have plans to deal with it. And if I approve of your plan, I will consider getting you a Hydra for Winsol."
He didn't mean to be flippant, it just came out that way.
She probably didn't mean to grin in a way that curled warm hands around his gut - and his balls - it just came out that way.
"Do I get a pony, too?"
Tony glared at her. "Don't push your luck."
--
Chapter 8: Pushing Back
SUMMARY: Sometimes, in the deep of winter and the dark of the night, Tony remembered what it felt like to be shattered.
CHARACTERS: Tony, Maria
DETAILS: Master Post
Chapter 7: Branded By Her Hand
Sometimes, in the deep of winter, Tony's chest ached, right at the edges of his Jewel.
He'd wake in the middle of the night and be unable to fall asleep again. After the first time Pepper kicked him out, Tony took the hint and stayed out of her bed entirely. It was better that way, anyway; he couldn't hurt her if he kept his distance.
Sometimes he felt the flesh around his Jewel burn, scalding off his bones layer by peeling, bloody layer. When that happened, he locked himself in his workroom and made spells, wrote down ideas, researched complicated intersections of Jewelled power, and forced himself to keep doing things - anything.
If he didn't, he'd find himself back in the cold again, curled up against the stone and shivering, while Yinsen's fingers held his wrists and the calm, rusty voice of the other male drew him back towards the edge of sanity, away from the spellwebs that entangled his mind.
Sometimes, in the deep of winter and the dark of the night, Tony remembered what it felt like to be shattered.
Lately, it had been getting worse. Harder to keep things together, to stay focused. The world was sliding away from him, and he could feel himself slipping towards the Twisted Kingdom. The only times he felt whole were in the rut and on the killing edge.
Like now.
He stood on a killing field as a hundred Hydra stormed towards him in an unending wave, their weapons out, their eyes empty and blank.
Tony tore through them with practised ease; pushing his power out in expanding waves of Jewelled strength. He'd discovered this method of destruction while trying to escape his prison, and it had served him and the resistance very well.
Heads popped and bodies collapsed as he burst their 'Jewels', and he dragged thin blades of power through their corpses and shoved the remains out of his way.
Keep coming, you mindless dicks. I can do this all day.
*Rhodey!* He swept out on a psychic thread, reaching instinctively for the familiar mind. *Hydra on the way!*
*Logan already brought us the news. Can you get back to the camp? We're gonna need all we've got for this.*
Tony grimaced as he lashed out with another wave of power, taking out another swathe of Hydra. And yet they still came. Where were they coming from? And why had they chosen now to attack? And - Mother Night - they had that chit in the camp... *Tell me you got rid of the Queen.*
*They were too close. We couldn't risk her.*
*Sure we could. Just send her and her escort away...*
*Tony. She's not just any Queen, she was trained in the Phoenix Court.* He heard the hesitation in Rhodey's voice and sensed what was coming just before Rhodey hit him with it. *And I'm hers.*
What? Another set of Hydra minds shattered beneath Tony's blast of power. *You're not hers.*
*Yes, I am.*
*No, you're not. You've just been without a Queen so long that you think she's your Queen. What you've got is a perfectly normal reaction-*
*We're not discussing this now, Tony. You need to get your ass back here. I've warned the nearby towns including Stark Manor-*
Pepper. *But you couldn't let go of your cock long enough to send the little Queen home?*
*That's enough.* The cold anger in Rhodey's voice said he'd crossed a line, but Tony was a Warlord Prince - he didn't back down or apologise. *Get back here and help or play it solo, it's your call, Tony. Meantime, I've got a camp and a Queen to defend and that's what I'm going to do.*
Tony snarled as the other male cut the psychic connection between them. He swept his power through the remaining Hydra minds in the area like an arm sweeping crystal glasses off a table and onto the floor.
A Queen for Rhodey. That was just rich. A bitch with her greedy little hands wrapped around his best friend's heart - or his balls. Someone to order them all about to her whim. Backed by Fury, of course, because that was all Fury cared about anymore - power and a pretty face to give his dominance legitimacy.
Tony stalked through the bloody mist that hung in the air, feeling the damaged edges of his shattered self grating against each other - the way his bones had ground together as her Warlords held him down...
No.
He dragged on his Jewels to bolster the fractured pieces of his inner self, and leaped for the Red Wind before the next wave of Hydra could reach him. Don't think about it. You're not whole - but you survived.
Yinsen hadn't.
Don't waste it. Don't waste your life, Stark.
But death was all he was good for anymore. Death and destruction and revenge and retribution, meted out by a Red-Jewelled Warlord Prince who walked too close to the Twisted Kingdom for anyone's safety or comfort, let alone his own.
Death, and hurting people who deserved better than him.
There are no parties, there are no social events, there are no speeches. There is nothing but the next fight.
And Pepper had looked at him with lightless eyes and only asked, So that will that be all, Prince?
He'd expected to find her resignation on his desk the next morning but she'd been brisk and civil and brittle as ice. And Tony ached as he went about tidying up the last loose ends of the estate before he headed back out to the camp, but he hadn't tried to make things better between them.
What was the point?
He hadn't mentioned it to Rhodey either. Every time he tried it stuck in his throat. Even earlier, when he'd issued the Winsol invitation - something Pepper had been at him to do since the last time he'd been back at the Manor - he hadn't been able to say the words. It was as though something in him knew that saying them out loud might damage him beyond healing.
Tony chose not to arrive at the camp's landing web, but dropped off the Red Wind before he reached the camp, sight-shielded as well as body-shielded, landing lightly behind a rocky outcropping uphill from the camp.
From this vantage point, he could see the Hydra spread out across the plains below, attacking the camp with their short, clear-coloured bursts of power. They covered the ground as far as Tony could see. Hundreds of them pulsed sharp psychic blows into the shield that was enclosing the camp - not one great shield but many smaller, overlapping ones.
Even as he watched a section of shield blinked out of existence, the Yellow shield vanishing to reveal a Rose shield behind it. There was no breach, no break - just the settling of the shield edges up against the abutting shields. An excellent piece of work by males who'd trained with each other for such a situation when they would have to hold shields up for extended periods of time.
Tony started down towards the encampment and paused.
Down below him, unnoticed by camp and Hydra alike, someone was making their way up the hill beneath Summer-sky shields.
A witch.
A Queen.
Rhodey's Queen. Outside the shields that were supposed to keep her safe. Escaping? Or running away?
Tony wasn't sure where the anger came from - the flooding heat beneath his breastbone where his Jewel rested - but he wasn't prepared for it, or the way his body seemed to move without his conscious control to intercept her.
"What do you think you're doing out here?"
She hadn't felt him approach - no surprise since he was Red-shielded - and at his words she stumbled, her ankle twisting on an uneven hollow in the long grass. It was instinct that had Tony catching her arm, not courtesy, but her weight swung them both around. Unbalanced, Tony nearly fell on top of her in the grass, only just stopping himself from crushing her with his weight as his hand scraped against the rocky soil.
He stared down into her eyes, vaguely aware that she smelled of leather and smoke, something spicy and almost intoxicating, and the scent seemed to be coming from the place where her right shoulder met her neck...
A knife pressed lightly into his throat. He caught his breath, his mouth hovering over her skin. An inch more and he'd taste that intoxicating flavour - and have a inch-deep hole in his throat.
"You'd be Prince Stark, then."
"And you'd be Fury's Queen." Tony lifted his head, but the knife continued to press into his throat until he rolled off her, his gut curling with something terrifyingly like desire. Mother Night. No wonder Rhodey had lost his brains over the chit. "Do you mind?"
"Not at all." She sat up with the knife still in her hand, eyeing him warily, her shields up. "What are you doing out here?"
"I could ask the same of you. And, in fact, I already have. You're supposed to be inside those shields. In fact-" *Rhodey!*
*Tony, now is not the time!*
A hand caught at his arm as he reached out to tell the other male that their Queen was outside the shields. "Don't tell Lord Rhodes."
"Don't tell Lord Rhodes what?" Tony demanded. She was out here without an escort, without protection, with a fucking Hydra army attacking down in the valley, and she'd decided that now was a good time to go for a walk up the hill? "In case you haven't noticed, there are several thousand Hydra down there-"
"And I need one of them."
He stared at her, not sure he'd clearly heard what she just said. "You want a Hydra?"
The look she gave him suddenly made him realise just how young she was. Mother Night. Not even old enough to have had her Virgin Night yet. "I need one. Just one."
"Do I even want to know why?"
"I need to get behind his psychic barriers."
"No. That's been tried."
"But not by a female. Not by a Queen."
"And you know that how?"
"Because not one of you cocks has let a Queen anywhere near a Hydra for the last twenty-five years!"
Sudden temper strained inside Tony; he struggled to keep it leashed. "Of course we haven't - because they kill the Queens."
"And has anyone asked why?"
"Because they're the Queens! That's all the reason they need."
"Spoken like a Blood male."
"That is what I am."
"And the Hydra aren't?" She stared at him, her expression one of helpless annoyance - a very similar expression to one he'd seen on Pepper's face countless times; a witch trying to make a Blood male understand something he simply wasn't capable of comprehending except at the most abstract of levels.
Pepper had enough experience with Tony to know not to bother explaining. This little Queen hadn't - yet.
"The Hydra aren't Blood as we understand them, Stark. They wear Jewels but colourless ones. They can use some Craft and have a marginal reserve of power. They have some psychic connection to each other, but their minds burn to ash at the first psychic touch of a male, leaving them empty husks. And they're pretty much all the same - made to the same template - pale skin, dark hair, blue eyes."
"And they kill the Queens."
"But why?"
The woman was unbelievable. "Because they're Queens!"
"Because they're a threat."
"That's what I said."
She shook her head, wisps of hair drifting around her face, come loose from her plait. "The Red Skull is a Blood male; his instincts are exactly the same as the ones that drive you."
"I'm going to point out that I haven't killed you." Although he was thinking about wringing her neck.
"Yet." Clear grey eyes fixed on him, steady and arresting. "Would you let me kill you, Prince?"
"N-" The lie died on his lips beneath the look she gave him.
Darkness help him, the chit wasn't just Rhodey's Queen.
Tony looked away, feeling his jaw tighten, remembering what it felt like to be shattered. Remembering what it felt like to have a Queen's hand hard upon him, in his hair, on his cock; to want and hate and fear and loathe...
She slapped him, hard enough to sting. Temper flared and he snarled at her. And she didn't cringe or flinch the way most people did; instead she snarled back.
"I am not her, Prince, and if you're going to be anywhere near me in future, you'd better remember that!"
He stared, still riding the edge of his temper, but feeling the tingle of her handprint on his face like a brand. "You slapped me."
"You needed it." Mother Night but she was a cool one. "Whatever was done to you, Stark, you're still a Warlord Prince of the Blood who wears a dark Jewel. Nothing in the realms can or will change that. What's the first law?"
"To protect." It came out without thinking, the purest core instinct that informed everything else he'd ever done.
The first law of a Blood male is to protect, Tony. The second is to cherish. It's only the third that's obedience.
The noise of the battlefield rose up below them, the hushing grunts of the Hydra, the shouts of the Blood males trying to defend and protect not only the camp but this Queen - who'd taken herself out of their protection because she was trying to do something more.
"You can't help it," she was saying. "Maybe the Red Skull can't either - but his response is to destroy what he fears can control him."
"And you think that by getting your hands on a Hydra... No."
"I think that by getting my hands on a Hydra, I can find out more about them than any male has found out in the last twenty-five years."
"No." Tony's better judgement was telling him all the ways this was bad. But his instincts were telling him to side with his Queen - she had a certain, crazy logic- "Absolutely not."
"Prince."
"The first law isn't obedience."
"Did I give you a command?"
"You're about to."
She looked at him, solemn as a Priestess presiding over a ceremony. No tantrums, no tears, no tirades. Just one word: "Please."
Mother Night. If he didn't do this, she'd only work out another way. She was definitely that kind of a witch. But if he was going to let her do this, he was going to push every advantage he was allowed. It went against Tony's grain to give in meekly.
"You will tell me exactly what you plan to do, and how you plan to do it. You will tell me what the dangers are and whether you have plans to deal with it. And if I approve of your plan, I will consider getting you a Hydra for Winsol."
He didn't mean to be flippant, it just came out that way.
She probably didn't mean to grin in a way that curled warm hands around his gut - and his balls - it just came out that way.
"Do I get a pony, too?"
Tony glared at her. "Don't push your luck."
--
Chapter 8: Pushing Back