AN: It is with a heavy heart that I admit to falling totally out of love with Romancing Captain Rogers. I have neither the time nor the energy to complete it. Part of me doesn't want to because it doesn't feel like "mine". So sorry for the people who treasure it! I'll be deleting it on Friday, April 5thto give those who may want to save or download it time to do so.
I'm tired of feeling blocked and downtrodden by it. It's time to get back to other things I've had waiting on me. Mainly – Tony Stark.
Please note that I've only seen Iron Man 2 once, and therefore will be relying very little on that movie. I'm just using that setting because this story doesn't really fit the Avengers platform.
WARNING: The upcoming story, Iron and Alabaster, WILL HAVE MATURE THEMES. It's both on Tony's part and the OC, Ellowyn's.
Themes you can expect include:
Sexual puns and situations
Coarse language
Drinking
Smoking
Suicidal thoughts
Death
Scarring villainous scheme/psychological damage
Things that probably won't happen but could:
Torture
Not edited due to battery life. Will be updating Avengers .VS. Aunt Flow and We Need to Quit Meeting like This sometime this weekend (depends on duration of company)
Iron and Alabaster
- Character Expansion/Drabble/Dark Teaser –
Tony hesitated at the door to a shockingly tiny apartment. He and Ellowyn hadn't spoken for days. Not since he let her go as his biography writer. Stark honestly dropped her with the best of intentions – Ellowyn was the silent type who, despite the iron exterior she flaunted, remained internally fragile. The media would eat her alive if they knew half of the thoughts rolling around in his head when she sliced through his advances with her dry, axe-like tongue.
He forced space between them to spare her. To spare himself.
Stark was a dying man. He'd rather not spend his last days – weeks? Months? – living in some bittersweet lover's illusion.
And yet…here he was.
Ellowyn had become more than his biography writer. She couldn't fill the gap Pepper left behind. She'd carved her own silhouette into his arc reactor. Tony was beginning to think the damn device literally beamed her willowy frame about the office or the lab.
It was a lie.
He was simply seeing her everywhere because he wanted to see her. Now he was ready to admit that.
Dying had a way of changing him. The great Tony Stark was begrudgingly acknowledging the gaping weakness in his unmovable iron personality. He was human. He was dying.
He was lonely.
Pepper had left him for the better. Partly because he thrust the position upon her, knowing the declining state of his health, and partly because his beloved secretary couldn't stomach standing by him during the suffering. Tony didn't want that kind of grief for her. Karma always had unfinished business with the wild Tony Stark; his act of mercy bit him in the ass. Pepper was no longer suffering, but he was.
Maybe more than Pepper, who had a functional heart and no complications, could.
Ellowyn Harding had somehow tricked him into thinking he still had a heart. She made it canter, flop, and float. And she'd broken it. He'd hammered the nail into it, but she did nothing to impede or pull it out. Tony wouldn't blame her for that, and couldn't, but still felt hurt at her unwillingness to oppose him and banter with him.
Her lip quivered slightly. She wore a bug-eyed look of shock. Then she quietly, quickly, and furiously snatched up her things. The silence made it especially easy for him to feel the deterioration of his own body.
She'd numbed the pain and sustained him. Tony needed her like medicine. He needed to feel human and functional again. Pepper would explode into tears or an irreversible fury if he turned back to the bottle or the pills, so that wasn't an option.
Ellowyn was the only alternative, and dammit he would have her!
Tony knocked.
There was no answer.
Stark jimmied the door open with a credit card. A chain lock prevented him from opening the door full-swing and storming in. Unable to insert his arm completely or at the right angle necessary to undo the nuisance, Tony relied on the card again. Swatting at the fake, gold chain stirred it from its nest. He turned on heel after entering, silently shutting the door and locking it.
It's strange not to hear JARVIS, he thought. Ellowyn's little apartment was startlingly unguarded. Tony was disturbed by the realization. She was a beautiful woman…bad things happened to beautiful women in shitty houses. "That's Life" by Frank Sinatra acted as an auditory map.
Stark found himself at the mouth of Ellowyn's bathroom. She was immersed in a layer of bubbles, long peach legs hooked lazily over the edge of a claw-foot tub. Her left-hand fingers were curled near her temple. Ellowyn's head was tipped back against the painted wall, finishing the bow-like angle that almost showed her left nipple.
Black-heeled feet kicked in time with the song she slurred. A champagne bottle tapped lightly against the floor.
"Ellie?"
She cracked one gray eye open. Her lips turned up in a drunken sneer – that he deserved – that held an undertone of sweetness.
Like it or not, the alcohol couldn't wash away what they felt. What she knew they had. What was only beginning, and what would probably never ripen or blossom because of his impending death.
"'f it 'sn't th' great Tony Stark! Wha' c'n I do for you?"
Tony swallowed, evaluating the scene. He'd pick his words carefully with a sober Ellowyn, and definitely needed to do so with a drunk one. The man wasn't prepared to see her hitting the bottle so hard. Ellowyn, herself, said she hadn't touched the sauce since college. Several tried-and-true tactics from his personal playbook hadn't even been enough to sway her.
To see her drinking now, of her own volition, saddened him.
He was physically dying. She didn't need to join him.
"Put down the bottle, Ellie."
"No thanks." she shook her head. "I'm th' boss of me now, an' I wanna drink! An' I'm gonna." stated the woman like an inebriated child.
"Why?"
"Old habits die hard." Ellowyn informed, sealing her lips crookedly to the bottle.
"That's impossible. You haven't drank in almost a decade."
"I'm not talkin' about drinkin', you condescendin' ass."
Barb expected. Not totally effective due to her drunkenness, but it still landed. It still hurt.
"What are you talking about, then?"
"The bond of twins." Ellowyn raised her bottle. "I'm followin' Elita! She died, you know."
"I remember." Tony frowned. He'd spent the day tracking her down. It wasn't like Ellowyn to take a vacation or personal day, though she'd earned it. At the time Tony simply couldn't tolerate the thought of her trying to bail on his good-natured picking. His insistency to hear her curse, to see her flush at his boyish ways and then spit at him, was too great.
She was sitting on a slat of cold, hard concrete when he found her. Her back was to the engraved stone. Ellowyn was surrounded by tissues, venting. It was the first time he knew she felt anything other than hatred for him. His hired writer was crying her eyes out over the unfairness of "a hero's light fading unjustly".
"Don't do this." Tony Stark didn't beg. He negotiated. He demanded. He warned.
She would not leave him alone. He would not die a lonely man.
"Why? Want one more fuck before your battery dies?" Ellie inquired with a smirk.
"No!" Tony's fingers curled into fists at his side. "I don't want to watch you throw your life away when I'm involuntarily losing mine!"
"I'm not throwing away my life." argued Ellowyn, "I'm escaping Hell. Everything about my life sucks."
"Oh yeah?" Stark crossed his arms angrily over his chest. "Do you have palladium in your chest? Is it slowly poisoning you? Because I don't think you do!"
"I was dropped from the biggest project of my life, I'm thirty-one and single, my ex-employer is toying with me, and you are dying." Ellowyn took a sip of the champagne. She relaxed against the wall. "I think that one hurts the most…" she murmured.
"R-Really?"
"Yep." nodded Ellowyn. "You get me, Tony Stark. And I don't really understand how…you annoy the hell out of me but…there's so many pieces to you. Pieces that are already arranged into someone I'd want to date. And I can't…"
"You could. I'm not dead yet!" Tony smirked, finding purchase on the closed toilet. He turned off the radio.
"Elita always lucked out in the romance department." reflected Ellowyn, bouncing her heels against the tub. "I always got the scraps. If I date you now, in your state, I'll be getting more scraps. I don't want scraps anymore, Tony. Even if they'd be delectable, sassy scraps."
"I'm not scraps if I'm giving you everything I have, and I am. I'm a dying man, Ellowyn. I am all I have. You've won my brain, and we both know you influence my penis so…why not accept me?"
"Where's the heart? Where's the love. That sounds like lust, Tony."
"You can have both."
"But I want love. Lust is good, but never as fulfilling."
"I still have a heart to give, Ellowyn. It's just going through some weird shit right now. I mean…more than normal. I'm dealing with palladium poisoning and your cat-and-mouse game."
Ellowyn rolled over slightly, sitting up. Her right arm hugged the tub rim. She hunched slightly to keep her sudsy form partially submerged. Tony watched the suds slide subtly down her body, his eyes bouncing from bursting bubble to bursting bubble.
The blonde never recalled Tony Stark being a victim of someone else's cat-and-mouse game. Usually that was the description pinned to him. One that had been worn and thrown by countless women. "You really do love me…don't you?"
"Would I be standing here if I didn't?" Tony question rhetorically. "A man like me doesn't have time to waste. Literally."
"What are you going to do with the rest of it?"
"Try my hardest to prove I love you. And maybe have sex with you because I don't want to go out doing something old or business-y."
Ellowyn laughed. Yep…Tony Stark was still alive and kicking. "Strike out. It's a worthy quest before your final hour." she toasted him.
"Don't mind if I do." Tony got up, moving to take the champagne bottle. Ellowyn's surprise was delayed by her mild inebriation. "Now you can drain the tub yourself, or I'll go spelunking for the plug. I readily volunteer." he teased throatily.
Ellowyn responded by kicking off one heel and pulling it with her toes. She swung the thick stopper teasingly on its chain.
"Good progress, good progress." Tony gave an approving nod. He scrounged for a towel in the cabinet beneath the sink. "You sober enough to stand up?"
"Let's pretend that didn't happen, that you're a ridiculously suave gentleman, and you've opted to carry me to my bedroom." offered Ellowyn dryly.
"You're sober enough." deduced Tony, scooping her up.
"You're romantic enough not to kill my mood." quipped Ellowyn.
Tony gave a sarcastic hum as he dropped delicately her on the single-person bed. The size was going to make the following events very interesting. Ellowyn's toes curled, foot rising out of her remaining heel as Tony began to massage her through the towel. His lips captured hers, mustache and goatee tickling her moist, soft skin.
Stark pulled the towel from her body.
His suit quickly joined it on the floor.
Ellowyn wouldn't deny Tony. Not when she'd wondered what it would be like to date an intellectual (an intellectual that wasn't Hammer, anyways). Tony – sarcastic, secretly considerate, hovering-to-check-on-her-while-disguising-his-conc ern-with-flirting Tony – was the modern and unashamed model of her dream guy. He embodied most of the qualities, anyways. There were parts of him that weren't ideal, but she didn't care.
They both had baggage. They both had insecurities. They both had needs.
Tony's quiet, unwavering presence was comforting. It reinforced her weaknesses. Ellowyn didn't feel so consumed or confused and stressed with Tony around. Maybe she was relating him too much to the connotations of Iron Man, but maybe not.
He felt the figurative steel barricading him from the public, from others, rapidly softening. Her feminine heat was scorching and encompassing. It was melting his defenses. Tony didn't like admitting his weaknesses – his poison-based unraveling – to himself, much less others.
But…he was dying. The great Iron Man was human. And he was a lonely human.
She made him forget all of that. Ellowyn made him feel lithe and full of youth like his pre-Iron Man self. It was gratifying. In a way, it forged his iron will, his sense of invincibility, all over again. Hours later, when their bodies were conjoined and cooling from rambunctious love-making, Tony found himself staring up at the ceiling.
Ellowyn traced patterns on his chest, listening to the beat of his heart. "What's on that bucket list of yours now, Stark?" she propped her chin up beneath his clavicle.
"Finish pouring through my dad's stuff to find a cure. I think I've got something." Stark scratched at his goatee.
"YOU'RE GOING TO LIVE?!" Ellowyn shot up.
"Pretty sure." Tony remained nonchalant. She assumed he didn't want to say anything until he knew for sure. Tony Stark didn't endorse anything he hadn't thoroughly tested or worked on, himself.
That was wonderful. Things were beginning to pile up. Having Tony around would help her feel safe. It would help her feel stronger.
Iron curled around alabaster, strengthening it for the trials to come.
Alabaster snuggled against iron, malleable and embracing to show that life needn't be all stiffness and loneliness.