ic; salt inbox

[ingeniar]

WELCOME TO THE SALTBURNT NETWORK

USERNAME: STARK

text ❖ audio ❖ video

note: this inbox is a choose not to warn experience and may contain nsfw threads

Comments

call, @strange

[rehandle]

[ By the time he accepts his situation he's past the point of being able to text, voice-assisted or not. No warmth left in the pads of his dominant hand's fingers, no living tissue to control the screen. There's just enough to work with to put in the only call he can think to make.

Tony picks up, and Stephen's speaking over him immediately, brusque and brief. ]

I need you.

[ingeniar]

[ There's no question over whether he's going to take the call, though he only gets out a few syllables of if the Cloak has been flapping its threads, that was a totally legal chess move before Stephen interrupts and pulls him up short.

Three small words and the tension in Stephen's voice, that's all it takes. He's already up and moving, grabbing the closest thing he has to a weapon right now (a screwdriver) off his temporary workbench. ]

Say no more. Where and when?

text ❖ @shadowheart

[nightsung]

Where are you?

[ingeniar]

Technically? On a couch. At least I think it's supposed to be a couch.

the night of the marking,

[rehandle]

[ It's been a long night. His choices have ranged from rushed to reasoned, instinct to intent, and it's only as they make their way back from the marking that reality starts to set in. Each step aches like a bruise, nothing to do with the blood on his skin, but it's hard to notice with Tony Stark a deafening presence at his side and his thigh smarting under fabric and friction. Each time drying blood catches and pulls at the edges of the wound, all he can think about is the surreal sinking of the man at his side to his knees. Warm hands, cold metal. Excruciating nakedness.

They make it back to the house without incident. By the time they lock the door behind them, Stephen feels like a trapped and tender nerve.

A moment spent in the kitchen - water poured and offered, shared - gives way to the walk upstairs to bed. Their bed. As strange as it was to share it that first night, clutching Tony's hand in the dark, that tension pales compared to this. Nothing is different. Everything has changed. He slips a few feet ahead once they reach the top of the stairs, stealing into the bedroom first, feeling every step of the walk to his usual side stretching out between them as he goes. Tugging his shirt off in a bid to follow routine, he doesn't notice when the collar tears. It's not until he drops his hands to the fastening of his pants that things finally start to go sideways.

His fingers, still a little bloody, catch and fumble - lose their grip. He pauses, blinks. Grabs up his discarded shirt to wipe his hands and tries again. Fails again. A third time. Dexterity, long-lost newfound friend, abandons him in an instant.

A breath shudders out of him. Frustrated, unsteady, Stephen stands there at the bedside, plucking fruitlessly at a knot he can't get a hold of, disbelief his final stubborn stop before coming undone. ]

[ingeniar]

[ It all gets a little Wicker Man a little too quickly. In hindsight, Tony isn't totally surprised. He's heard stories, back at the house, in the campsite, on the walk through the woods. Rumors about people being turned into cake (or cake into people, he's not sure about that one) and werewolves and zombies and all kinds of weirdness. So maybe the sleepy village that houses a creepy blood-worshipping cult is just part of things.

He could have done without the nudity. He'd gone along with it, partially because it didn't seem like they had much choice and he didn't like the odds of going up against torches and sharpened pitchforks with a whole lot of nothing. And then it had --

It's not like he'd planned to hurt Stephen. It had all happened kind of fast. One minute they're all standing there staring at each other, freezing their various parts off, and then the next there had been a knife in his hand, other hands guiding him onwards, the choice presented -- gizzard or breast meat or thigh, Christ, it's so fucked up, it's so fucked up -- so he'd gone with the least problematic, though it hadn't been until he'd gone down to one knee on the cold cobblestones that he'd really put together what it meant. He still has a lingering ghost warmth of Stephen's thigh on his hand, blood smeared across his palm where he'd tried to make it better, fighting the rising panic that wanted to build in his chest. Doing a decent job of it, too, even when Lanfear had approached out of the darkness, beautiful and terrible, and slipped her fingers into his hair to tug his head back. And after that --

The cut on his throat stings. He splashes a little water on it from the kitchen faucet, rubbing his hands clean with the icy cold water until they feel numb. The panic is still there, threatening, somewhere behind his artificial sternum. But it's become just a note in a symphony of emotions, arriving and leaving without warning and oddly disconnected. On the walk up the stairs behind Stephen he finds out he's crying -- or someone is crying, or wants to cry -- and rubs his eyes with the heel of his palm. It feels weird. It all feels too weird.

Ahead of him, Stephen disappears into the bedroom. Tony doesn't hurry, arriving in the doorway to see him standing behind the bed, back to him. His bare back is a Michaelangelo study of musculature in the faint blueish light and the shadows. Tony watches the flex and shift, the shuddering breath.

Yeah, he thinks as he crosses the room, turning on the oil lamp to give them a little light, warm and golden. He rubs a shaking hand across his mouth. Yeah, me too..

Tony watches another attempt, the perfect hands they remade together turned into fumbling and useless tools, and then he can't stand it any longer. ]

Hey. Hey, buddy. Hey, okay.

[ Slipping back into a role he's picked up before not so long ago, is getting kind of good at. Carefully, avoiding the recent cuts, he takes Stephen's hands, guides them away from the fastening of his trousers. Replaces them with his own hands. His knuckles brush against the soft hair of Stephen's belly as he looks into his eyes. It kickstarts something adolescent and electric in his own body -- not for the first time; in fact, it's been getting kind of hard to ignore.

He's a bundle of nerves. They're a bundle of nerves. Raw, exposed, flying by the seat of the pants they can't get undone. It reminds Tony of his first flight in the Mark II; guiltily, he's almost enjoying it.

Too close to the surface, shut off from the ability to lie, he can't stop himself voicing that thought in the quiet intimacy of their room, trying on a smile that doesn't reach his eyes as he undoes the buttons of Stephen's fly: ]

Boy, it's good to be alive, isn't it?

@strange, backdated to post-bond but still early-ish in the flock experience

[rehandle]

Hey. You at the smithy?

[ingeniar]

Where else? Little old lady needs some horseshoes. Don't think she even has a horse. Didn't know I knew how to make horseshoes.

text @shadowheart

[nightsung]

In all your visions of the future or otherwise—

Do you ever see us leaving this place?

[ingeniar]

Kind of a weird question.

Yes. No. We're going to stay here. We're going to walk out. We're going to burn it down and most of us are going to die but we're going to get out. Half of us get out. Some of us get out, but they don't come back. We're going to do it wrong and collapse the whole thing like an egg breaking. You're going to go home and I'm going to stay here. You're going to forget me. We're going to be here together forever. We're already dead. I'm already dead.

text @shadowheart

[nightsung]

Why won’t you let me use your errand boy as a footstool?

[ingeniar]

Get your own errand boy, I found this one.

You can have the other nerd. Adrian.

text @shadowheart

[nightsung]

Have you slept at all tonight?

[ Asks the girl texting him at 3 in the morning from an otherwise empty bed. ]

[ingeniar]

I don't think what I did counts as sleep so no. Why are you awake?

@sgr

[altercates]

[ hoo boy. ]

Apparently there needs to be a buddy system.

[ingeniar]

Dibs on the wizard.

I think we're supposed to be playing detective.

backdated to post-j'accuse

[rehandle]

[ The walk to the house is almost as potent as the night of the marks, and for all the wrong reasons. Stephen is almost silent, a grave air to the set of his face and any answers kept short. Shadowheart isn't with them. He can't blame her after the way he's been this week. The only real surprise is that he's not making this walk alone.

They make it back. It's a building they've lived in for a little over a month now and the only home they've ever shared, and maybe it's this thought or maybe it's the sight of Tony's back as he goes to replicate that first bonded night's routine of water before bed, but the overworked tendon of Stephen's resolve snaps.

He reaches out, lost child in the dark, catches fingers into coarse wool to keep him from straying too far. Not knowing what to do with him once he's caught him but not wanting to leave him to pull away or turn to watch him crumple, Stephen closes the gap, brow dropped against his hair and reaching around to take a fresh handful of the knit at Tony's front, unsteady breath spilling down over his nape. ]

[ingeniar]

[ It's been a shitty day in a string of shitty days. Tony grew tired of the game shortly after it started and hasn't warmed back up to it since. He avoids it as much as he can, retreating to the smithy or the cottage with his phone, uncharacteristically, ignored. The smell of death on the wind makes him feel panicky and useless; he spends his nights drafting suits of armour he can't make, using up precious sheets of paper reworking the designs over and over.

He has to turn up to the voting, though. If it wasn't a town rule, something in him makes him want to go. He's pretty sure it's not natural, but that doesn't mean he can ignore it. He sits near the back, unhappy and fidgeting, eyes fixed on Stephen and Shadowheart in turn, occasionally tracking the faces of his colleagues, people he's known for years -- or thought he knew, at least. It feels like watching some horrific play, with actors pretending to be his friends and companions.

On the walk back, he's as silent and unhappy as Stephen, though his failures seem much less personal. It's easy to slip back into that routine, making the place as secure as they can for the night, working their way around a little house that's on its way to becoming familiar.

He's running the faucet and about to turn and ask if Stephen wants some tea before they try and fake sleep for a few hours when the man himself interrupts. The arm that roughly grips him feels strong and desperate, a man reaching for a life raft in the middle of the ocean. Tony shuts off the tap, reaches up to rub his palm over Stephen's knuckles instead. Bows his head, letting himself become the curve around which Stephen can find purchase. ]

Hey. [ Reassuring, or trying to be. ] Hey, come on.

[ He threads his fingers through Stephen's and tugs his hand up a bit to fit it more firmly over his own heart. ]

Could be worse.

@strange

[rehandle]

[ He's thinking of asking nicely, when he first thinks to ask at all. Asking for a lesson, to sit down and be taught how to lure shapes out of wood, an hour of peace to cover over the rot of what he's really doing.

But the only thing that can really make this worse is a lie. ]

Will you show me your whittling tools?

I'd like a tour of the smithy after, if you have time.

[ He doesn't apologise. If all this is as much nothing to worry about as every second thought he has demands of him it must be, then there's nothing to apologise for. Simple process of elimination. He thinks Tony will understand. ]

[ingeniar]

You going to frisk me, doc?

text ❖ @shadowheart

[nightsung]

I suspect I know the answer to this question, but: have you ever made custom toys?

[ingeniar]

Yeah, I think I need to know what you're imagining if you already know the answer.

@strange, vaguely whenever shadowheart mentioned this to him -

[rehandle]

Shadowheart suggested it'd be an idea to make me up a room key
In case we get another power outage

[ Badumtsh but that's also the sound his heart is making as it crashes around in his ribcage ]

[ingeniar]

You want a key?

@strange, after/during Bucky outreach

[rehandle]

Hey
Where are you?

[ He could find out in a second, be there in that same amount of time. But this is a moment for caution, and so he asks. ]

[ingeniar]

The garage. Jonty's letting me play with the Jag. I think I might need to put out.

text ❖ @shadowheart

[nightsung]

I'm not sure we can top the gift you two gave me, with Stephen's birthday on the horizon. But I do suppose we should try.

I have something personal I'd like to give him, but--should we do something together?

[ingeniar]

[ Immediately on board. ]

How long do we have?

@strange

[rehandle]

Going to be able to keep yourself entertained while we're both at work this weekend?

[ingeniar]

I was assuming I would keep myself entertained by watching you work. Possibly on a pole. I can give you some tips if you want, I've conducted some very rigorous studies in this area.

@strange, backdated to like an hour after his network post went off

[rehandle]

Sorry about Bob

[ Wasn't on his to-do list to play catalyst to a breakup, but what can you do. ]

[ingeniar]

You owe me a new intern.

@goodsir

[mygoodsir]

Mr. Stark,

I hope this is not inappropriate, but I wished to ask how you are faring now that we are back at the mansion.

- Harry

[ingeniar]

Hey doc. You want a scale of 1 - 10? Hopefully you don't need any samples.

text @stacy (misfire)

[internship]

Do you think guys put even half the amount of effort into sexts that we do? I spent like 40 minutes picking out which pleated skirt would look best with those panties. They definitely don’t have an equivalent struggle.

[ingeniar]

Going to go out on a limb here and vote for the shortest one.

🎁 delivery

[nightsung]

[ Elegantly wrapped in rich purple paper and tied with a dark velvet bow, Tony will find several boxes containing:

- a pair of Givenchy sunglasses
- a red & gold Versace robe
- an app-controlled panty vibrator with the note: For when you get bored of your laptop at the Slip.
- one gift voucher for permission to call Shadowheart’s breasts “boobies”. ]

Merry Christmas, Tony.

Love,
Shadowheart 🖤

@strange

[rehandle]

Hey.

[ Don't mind him waiting until he's not home to venture this one. Stupid to still be shy about anything, but somehow they've still never, just the two of them - ]

Let me take you out somewhere next week.

[ingeniar]

You're asking me on a date?

[ As if he's going to let him get away with it so easily. ]

@shadowheart

[nightsung]

[ Tentative, after a gentle creak of a door in their conversation the other night: ]

Do you ever think about having more children, some day?

[ As if some day is guaranteed, when Shadowheart knows it isn’t. But she still wants to ask. ]

[ingeniar]

[ Hard question to get out of nowhere, but Shadowheart is direct like that. It's one of the many things Tony likes about her. ]

Sure. I was an only child, look how I turned out. Might be a good idea to try to mitigate that.

@shadowheart

[nightsung]

If you fuck one more maid in our bed, I’m going to let Saber come all over your silk pillowcase.

[ingeniar]

First of all, they're not all maids. Second of all, where exactly am I supposed to screw them? You get pissy if we use the chaise.

@dean

[cholesterol]

You're invited to Dean Winchester's funeral. Refreshments and a small catering spread will be provided afterward. Prepared remarks and stories are encouraged.

@shadowheart

[nightsung]

I don’t suppose you’re in the market for another maid?

[ingeniar]

You want to replace Kovacs?

@shadowheart

[nightsung]

We were awful to each other this month, weren’t we?

I don’t like being awful to you.