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[ingeniar]

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USERNAME: STARK

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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?

[rehandle]

[ He's struggling - and then he isn't. Tony's hands on his hands, voice in his ear. Stephen watches for a moment as those hands take over, stupid with the unlikelihood of it, his own hovering uncertainly just above them. Then the lightest brush of knuckles and his abdomen leaps, prompts a snatched gasp, his gaze jumping up to check if he'd seen—

And finds Tony looking right at him. The breath he'd only half taken follows itself through, drops deep, lungs full. Trapped in his gaze, the rest of him frozen, and when he lets that held breath go it stumbles out in stages then a rush. The cadence of his breathing can't recover after that, not while Tony's hands continue to work and neither of them look away, deep brown laying him out, pinning him in place, fragile as any other specimen.

But that's not all of it. Close, coddled, the balled tight mess of the rest of him unclenches, tension building where it's dangerous and unspooling everywhere else. It leaves enough space between feelings for him to notice their threads. Tightness around Tony's eyes, the false fact of a smile that earns a visceral call to action. In a frantic bid to fill that space with something he can control Stephen lifts a hand, a cradle for Tony's neck so he can trace his thumb along the fresh cut across his throat, keeping cautious distance from its edge. He understands now. The crisp threat of panic was a laser caught between mirrors. ]

I'm sorry. I didn't—

[ Think. Couldn't think, not of anything but what they'd done, the crown of Tony's head and the bite of his knife. His other hand now, thumb to a cheekbone, palm warm over his cheek, blood and apology smudged onto skin. Pulse racing, breath shallow, all out of other ways to pull himself back from the brink of something he can't take back - ]

Tony.

[ Warning, question, plea. For him to see what's happening, tell him no; see what's happening, tell him yes. He tilts closer, magnetised, lashes low and foreheads close. Fingertips curl into short hair, and his toes push right up against a line he shouldn't cross. ]

[ingeniar]

[ There's a lot between them worth apologising for. A handful of dust on Titan balanced out with some impromptu field surgery that should never have been allowed to happen. Cosmic purpose and human mistakes, five years of retreat from the battlefield; they both owe each other. The sorry that trips over and falls from Stephen's lips doesn't seem to be about any of that, though -- something larger, maybe. Undefined.

Tony tilts his head helplessly into the touch, wanting the tenderness that he's been missing for a couple months now, the recent glut of contact from the villagers overshooting the mark and landing somewhere else, somewhere unsatisfactory. This is different, coming from Stephen. Not an anonymous hand, but someone who knows what it means to lean into it with him, who has seen him in his worst and most desperate moments and still wants to --

He makes a noise that's not quite a word, murmured agreement, approval, permission. Tips forward until his brow meets Stephen's, until he can feel soft warm breath against his cheek, against his mouth.

His hand, caught between them, slips down and sideways beneath the fabric of his trousers, palm sliding over bare skin and across Stephen's hip. His body is warm and solid and masculine, both familiar and, well -- strange. Tony can feel his heartbeat thudding in his veins as they both skid towards a defining moment. He tries not to think about Pepper. He can't help it, he can't stop thinking. It's complicated and it's very simple. ]

Yeah. Yeah.

[ Soft, a little breathless. He reverses course with his hand, decisively, back across, letting Stephen's pants drop down to the floor -- glancing, briefly, over certain anatomy he knows he wants to return to -- tilting down a little bit until his fingertips graze across that new cut up the inside of Stephen's thigh. Commentary, as if they need it, personal pronouns getting lost in the everything of it all: ]

Did this to you. [ And he's not sorry. ]

[rehandle]

[ A touch, the skim of a hand, a shudder. His pants drop and leave him bare while Tony stands there clothed, and there's no hiding the shock of a sigh elicited by his travelling hand when they're this close, when all it would take now is the slightest lift of his chin -

Did this to you.

Hips jolt. Pressing his cut into the hand that made it, pressing the rest of him against wrist, forearm, briefly trapping him there. Did this to you. That didn't sound like remorse, regret. It sounded more like reinforcement. Reminder. Like the active staking of a claim. ]

Yeah.

[ Yeah. Acknowledgement, approval, surrender. In some ways, he did it long before he ever held the knife.

Everything is so loud now that he can barely hear either of their guilt. Tony is a gravity, proximity stinging at him, his touch like it's charged with every intimacy Stephen's never received. It's (better) worse than if this were anyone else, has to be - in the heartbeat cacophony of the moment he cannot know if that's because of the mark drawn, the claim made, or just because this is Tony Stark.

One thing he does know is that Tony marked him, fair and square. And he owes him too much to deny him what they both want.

A calling shift of the hand at his face, the press of a thumb to his jaw to align them. One last bated breath. Then Stephen surrenders what little ground they have left, nudges first his nose to Tony's nose, then his mouth to Tony's lips, and waits there for leave to sink into a kiss. ]

[ingeniar]

[ Weird, to want it from both sides. The ceremony had been all about one bond and marked belongs to the marker and some other stuff -- Tony hadn't caught all of it, too distracted by the whole nakedness thing -- but it doesn't feel like that. It feels like more, almost too much. He doesn't know where the guilt is coming from, except that it's there. Doesn't know which one of them wants to give in, except that he does. They all do. Right now, he contains multitudes, and they all want to kiss Stephen Strange.

He makes a small soft noise in his throat as their lips meet, somewhere between amusement and surrender. The hand between Stephen's legs moves a little higher, fingertips dragging across the wound, curving around the heat and weight of him. Not quite holding on, not yet, but feeling him fill out into his palm.

The kiss doesn't taste like much more than the air outside, faint traces of copper and salt. Tony leans into it, lets his lips part, crowds a little closer into Stephen. His free hand skids up over Stephen's hip, up his side, ribs, shoulder, until he can sink his fingers into the soft hair at the nape of his neck. ]

[rehandle]

[ There. There. Tony yields to him, moves his hands over him, and it's magic. Stephen goes taut with it, primed, curving in, and soft sound spills like a spell between met lips.

The hand at Tony's neck drops to slide down his chest, splay over his shirt where a machine had once kept the man alive. He feels his heart thud through muscle and bone and the intrusion of metal, and Stephen mourns for one strange moment his own missing scaffolding - another point of similarity, a matching invasion he'd never considered before. But these hands, these new hands, were a gift. What they'd been through to make them is another lock clicked shut, condemned to never be nothing to one another, too many keys thrown too far out of reach.

Good, he thinks. Good, as he cants his hips to rock shallowly into Tony's hand, needing nothing from him, needing everything from him, testing waters and making welcome, parting their mouths for just a second to gasp down breath as even that simple sensation crests higher than it should. Then Stephen opens into the kiss, claims the space Tony's given him to deepen it— slow, no matter the fervour building in him. Taking time to map out ground he was never destined to tread, the two of them fated to die together or die alone, no hope of both living on in the same world once their paths had crossed.

How's this, fate? Stephen's hand slips lower, making room to press in chest to chest as his fingers tug at fabric, find the hem of Tony's shirt and bully up underneath, gratified to spread his hand over the span of his ribs, slide it down his back, tuck fingertips into the waistband of his pants and dig into the muscle there. Encouraging him inward, fixing him close. ]

[ingeniar]

[ It's been death for a long time. Death on the hot wind across Titan, death in the cold coils on the ship, death on the news when he got back home, everywhere at first and then fading as the world kept turning. They made documentaries and then they made movies about it. They mourned, collectively and apart, on the anniversary every year. They call it the Blip and the Snap to make it easier to say, but everyone knew what it really meant when someone was gone but not forgotten, when doors were left open that will never be closed.

Tony can't help thinking about it, maybe because Stephen can't help thinking about it. The warm hands on his body shouldn't exist for too many reasons. It's impossible. The odds are too long to quantify. But then again, he's seen plenty of impossible things over the last couple of decades -- what's a ghost compared to a god?

He grunts a little, a low pleased noise, increasingly distracted from his wandering thoughts by the desire to be doing three different things at the same time and the discovery that he has to choose between them. He splits the difference by letting go of Stephen's hair long enough to hitch up his shirt, trying to be encouraging and work his way out of his clothes without actually stopping anything else.

The kiss is getting into more tongue and teeth. Daringly, refusing to think any further than the space between their bodies, Tony nips at Stephen's lower lip while he circles his hand more meaningfully around his cock. He pulls back a tiny bit from his mouth -- not going anywhere, just making room to talk. ]

Haven't.. done this before. [ He's not vulnerable about it, not unenthusiastic, just making things clear. ] Don't.. don't judge me on my first try.

[rehandle]

[ Oh, fuck. Answer comes in a cut-off groan, first towering up over everything else and connecting with that hand closing around Stephen in earnest until his fingers have to bite into Tony's hip just to give it all somewhere to go. Breath gusts between them, starved of sound, but he's shaking his head while he wrangles his lungs. Judge him? He can't. If he did, he'd have to judge himself for how little it's going to matter, given that - ]

It's yours now. [ Strung up on the thought of being the first man to make it into Tony's hand, nevermind the sheer spiralling improbability of the chance to be his first anything, he only registers what he says when it tumbles out of him as fact. That and the shallow judder of his hips has him pressing his brow to Tony's again. Trying to disappear into him and dare him to say anything in the same small act. ] Don't - let it go to your head.

[ But it's words for the sake of words, a nod to the old order. Stephen hopes it goes to Tony's head - it's already gone to his. Too late to hide now, too late to pedal back and not remotely wanting to, Stephen leans into the helpless swell of pride, possession, belonging. There's not a lot of room between them now but he makes what space he needs, wrist butting up against wrist as he cups his palm over the shape of Tony through fabric and fastenings, squeezes ungracefully to make his point and muffle his frustration at needing to demand instead of just do. ] Let me in.

[ingeniar]

[ It's absolutely going to go to Tony's head in every single way, both literal and figurative, leaving him feeling a little dizzy with it all. He breathes a giddy laugh across Stephen's cheek, nosing over his skin, getting more relaxed now that they've crossed the proverbial line. This is what he enjoys -- the opportunity to learn something new, make new discoveries -- even when it means also making an almost conscious effort not to think about anything beyond the boundaries of this small room, this moment. But he can do that. The bond between them is barely hours old; it's unfurling in his blood, sending out roots.

Another laugh turns into a sigh as Stephen reaches for him in response. He cants his hips forward a little, pressing briefly into that bruised palm. ]

Okay, well I -- I gotta let go to do that, so.

[ Warning given, he does just that, though he stays close, almost nose to nose while he puts his hands to better use undoing his belt and his fly, trusting that Stephen can at least bully the rest of it aside, then makes a little more necessary room as he pulls his shirt off over his head.

The space gives him more room, a moment or two to let it settle in, what they're doing. He finds that the guilt and regret he might have expected isn't there, or is at least dialled almost all the way down, lost in the background noise. Instead, there's a growing fondness for the rumpled, slightly wild-eyed and mostly naked man looking back at him.

He steps back in again, raising both hands to touch Stephen's face. ]

Hey. [ Just in case he needs something to focus on. ] Hey, this is weird, right? [ Not that it's going to stop him cutting off the opportunity to get an answer by leaning in to kiss Stephen again, both hands still on him, fingertips strafed into the grey wings at his temples. Nevertheless: ] Sorry, I just had to say that.

[rehandle]

[ Better. Better, laughter and language bringing all this back down to earth. Tony is himself, no matter the madness that grips them both now, and Stephen huffs a breath of answering laughter over incoming lips as he's kissed again. If he was going to stop this he should have done it before it started - he didn't, and he won't, and before Tony tips back to get the space to speak again Stephen resolves not to think about it any more. ]

It's weird, [ he concedes, words swollen with a glut of feeling honed over too many million encounters with the same borrowed time.

It's weird when his palm presses soft over Tony's stomach, angling his fingers down to line himself up as he sinks them low, wrist pushing at fabric, making way for contact with hot skin. It's weird when he tips in to mouth a barely-there kiss against the corner of Tony's lips, tender, lingering. And it's weird when a hand that had struggled so much with precision has no trouble finding a comfortable hold on him, working him slowly to get a feel for his shape, thumb sweeping curiously over the head. ]

Fortunately, that's kind of my wheelhouse.

[ So Tony can blame it on him later if he needs to. Place the weight on the shoulders of a wizard who knew better and still decided it was fine and let what will be, be. What else is there? All they have in this moment is each other. There's nothing left in the way. ]

[ingeniar]

Hence the name.

[ They're going slow for now, teasing it out. It's probably better that way, though Tony can sense that it won't last too long, tasting a well-honed edge of impatience. He lets go of a slightly shaky breath across Stephen's mouth when his thumb finds a sensitive place, leaning into him, brows pressed together.

For all of his observations, the longer they stay like this, the less weird it feels. It's comfortable, almost familiar, though Tony couldn't say why. Like they've known each other for years, like they've done this before.

Tony rocks his hips a little, pushing his cock into Stephen's hand. He strokes his fingertips through the wizard's hair, keeps him bracketed, like he can make sure he's safe as long as he doesn't go anywhere, as long as they stay right here like this. Another shaky breath, shallower this time, as Stephen's hand keeps moving on him. A soft laugh, a groan in the back of his throat. As always, he's unable to stay quiet for long. ]

Mm. Feels good.