Note: You may notice that this is once again chapter 9, even though this story was on chapter 11 earlier last week. I have gone through and consolidated some chapters in an attempt to fix what felt like a 'drag' in the action. Previous stories of mine have had longer chapters anyway, so this is just more in line with those, now. No content was lost, and very few was changed (the start of chapters may have been slightly altered by a few words to feel more like a chapter start).
This chapter is a definite shift towards everything being more 'near the surface;' feelings, powers, worries, etc. The title doesn't display properly here on FFN, but it is Morse Code for the word 'sunlight.'
Chapter Nine: ... ..- -. .-.. .. -. ... -
Emory looks over at Tony in utter disbelief. "You think I shut off the fire somehow? Come on."
Tony gestures to the fire. "Do you have another explanation?"
She frowns. "What if something weird happened with the chimney? Why does it have to be me?"
"My welding torch stopped working yesterday when you walked past."
"You're sure?" Emory whispers, stunned. She takes a step toward Tony and trips on the cord for the aforementioned welding torch, spilling the few sips she had left in her cup.
He gets up and comes over, taking the cup and hanging it back on its hook. When he comes back, she has to try really hard not to stare. The wife-beater with the glowing circle in his chest look is really working for him.
"How're you feeling? You don't look as tired as you've been," he says, leaning over to look in her eyes.
"I feel like I'm full of energy this morning," Emory says, including the way her body is so aware of him.
"Perfect. Let's test this, then."
Tony turns in place, looking around the room. He snaps his fingers and jogs over to the shelf of supplies he'd asked for to make the Jericho missile. Tony grabs the bowl of dark brown sand, pressing the smaller bowl into the sand and setting it aside. Leaning over, he snags a crumpled up piece of the thin white paper he'd drawn the suit schematics on, putting it inside and putting the whole thing on the floor.
"Set it on fire," Tony orders with a nod to the bowl, crossing his arms and rocking back on his heels.
"Stop distracting me with those arms and maybe I will," Emory mutters, deliberately turning her back on him, ostensibly to focus.
"Woah, woah, woah, hang on," Tony says, coming up behind her. He's warm and she just wants to sink back into him, especially when he rests his cheek beside the top of her head and she can feel the prickles of his beard. Something about that intimacy makes Emory want to spin around and kiss him with all the feelings she's been trying to repress, before they explode out of her in all directions. "I'm just trying to do my job, here. This is work attire," he says.
Emory feels a surge of affection for him, and says, "I may have to have a word with management."
Tony's voice is deep and naughty in his response. "Put me on a performance improvement plan first."
"Your performance isn't at issue," Emory groans, shivering just a bit at the way his tone hits her in exactly the right places. Then, Tony's next, insolent words break her resolve.
"Is it the compensation package?"
Emory spins around and rests a hand on each bicep, sighing in delighted frustration. "You!"
Tony's expression is profoundly smug as he dips his head down to kiss her. The second they make contact, the mood changes to something akin to desperation. She arches up, but it isn't enough for either of them. Tony's hands are rough on her hips, her ass, and finally he drags her up, pulling her legs to bracket him as his hungry kisses demand her full attention.
"Too long," he mutters, tracing her jawline with kisses. It makes her heart ache to hear the sincerity in his voice, so much so that she can feel the dam break inside her.
"It's always too long," Emory admits, using both of her hands to direct his lips back to hers. He lets out a deep, satisfied groan when she boldly seeks out his tongue with hers.
A spray of sand interrupts them abruptly. Tony's immediate instinct seems to be to turn so her body is shielded by his, and his head is turned toward the threat even as he helps her down.
"Yinsen?" she whispers, though the idea that the interpreter would toss sand at them for kissing seems completely out of character.
"Praying," Tony responds, nodding toward the man's cot.
Emory peeks around behind him to see that the brown sand is scattered, too far and too finely for them to have knocked the bowl over. The crumpled paper is nowhere to be seen.
"So, how?"
"If we need to test whether kissing affects your newfound powers, I volunteer as tribute." His expression is excited, though, rather than teasing. "This almost looks like it was hit by a vortex." He walks over to the farthest reaches of where the sand landed. "Look, see? Go stand near that one."
She follows where he's pointing and sees what he's saying. The pattern of sand on the floor is as if it's been spun out of the bowl, with the most sand spilled around the bowl itself, decreasing in amount until it's a few grains at the farthest arc.
"What if it isn't fire at all?" Tony asks. "What if the fire flickered because you affected its oxygen supply? Same for the torch?"
Emory stands there looking at the evidence in front of her eyes and wraps her arms around herself. "I don't know what to think!" she says, overwhelmed.
"Have you discovered something?" Yinsen says, coming over as he buttons his waistcoat.
"She's totally an airbender," Tony says, gesturing to her.
"Did you need to discover this by creating a mess?"
The two men start bickering in friendly tones, but Emory is caught up in worry. What if she only manifested her powers when she was thinking about Tony? What if she couldn't master them? What if the process of learning how to use them ended up hurting Tony or Yinsen? What if the terrorists found out and forced her to use them against good people?
She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.
"Freaking out?"
Emory opens her eyes to see Tony standing there wearing a t-shirt on top of the tank top from earlier. She nods.
"Use it," he says, bluntly. "Prudence is probably warranted, and we both know I don't have an abundance of that. I mean… I'm going to have flamethrowers. On both arms." He grins.
"Did little boy Tony Stark really love flamethrowers? That's the second time you've brought it up," Emory laughs.
"I wanted to be able to keep people away from me if I wanted to," Tony says, sliding his hands into his pockets. "Watched some movies when I was a kid and always wanted to have one." He tips his head to the side, gestures with it to the sand on the floor. "You could probably do that, with wind, if you practiced, figured it out."
"What, like push people away?" She looks down at the floor, concentrates on the sand, trying to push the farthest grains up against the wall so it can mix with the concrete and other sand residue that's already there. Nothing happens.
"Maybe don't try to do something specific, just do something?" Tony suggests, his tone encouraging, confident. "And, I mean, if it helps-" he says, pulling his hand out of his pocket and holding it out for her to take.
A jolt of pure joy hits her chest. Emory looks at the hand he's holding out, then up at his face, at his brown eyes framed by the little creases at the corners that show his own happiness in the offer of his hand.
Fuck, I am absolutely gone over this man. I love him, Emory realizes in that moment.
Tony's standing a foot or so away, but as she looks at him, her heart is so full, and when she takes in her next breath and lets it out, she feels a surge of energy shimmy through her body and break free. She watches as Tony's hair is blown around, sees his eyes go wide as he stumbles toward her as if driven forward.
"Okay," he says in a shaky, impressed voice. "I felt that. Did you do it on purpose?"
"What did you feel?" she asks, feeling a blush rise in her cheeks when she realizes it could be a multipurpose question.
"Definite cyclic movement. Do it again." His gaze is intense, excited. It fuels her own excitement.
Emory thinks about how she wants him to come over to her and kiss her again. She knows relying on that as a power motivator is dangerous, but tells herself that it's just a conduit to recognize how the powers feel when she brings them to bear.
Sure enough, she feels like the surface of her skin is electrified or maybe more accurately, sheathed in a molecule-thick film that she can control as she lets it slide off of her and into the air between herself and Tony. As Emory adjusts to the slight but noticeable sensation, she sends a thought along with it, that she wants Tony to be closer to her.
Almost as soon as she thinks this, there's a torque to the layer that is still sliding away from her, and though she can't see it, she can sense its angle. Not only that, she can guess when Tony might feel it, so that when he does react, the confidence boost Emory gets is palpable.
-and then Tony surges toward her. He looks surprised before the expression shifts to superior smugness, which she can see is mostly an act, but not completely. He's taking confidence from the fact that some of the first uses of her powers are to physically command him. If Emory's honest, so is she. That's the last thought she manages before their bodies collide, his arms coming around her to spin her just a slight bit to dissipate the energy she'd entangled him with.
"You could have asked me to come over," he chastises, before nipping a little kiss onto her lips.
"It's subconscious, or, at least, the first one was, anyw-" Emory closes her lips, burying her head (softly, she expects that his ARC reactor is still sensitive) in his chest as she realizes she's just said exactly what she was thinking.
Tony's hand comes up and strokes her hair. "It's my magnetism. I mean at this point, with the ARC reactor? Gotta be completely out of control," he teases.
"But you really felt that, right? I saw it move your hair," she asks in wonderment.
"You really sent a twist of wind to pull me over here, yes. Gentle around my head, more forceful around my ankles." Tony squeezes the arm he has resting lightly on her back before stepping back. Then he heads back over to his shelf of supplies to pick up a few sheets of paper. "I have an idea."
Emory ends up sweeping up the sand with a very old broom and dustpan set, looking over when she gets a chance to see what Tony's doing. He ties two shoelaces together, then strings some flat sheets of paper onto them, sliding them up until they're equal distances from each other. After he crumples each one, Emory realizes he's creating a sort of wind-sock/weathervane sort of apparatus.
She appreciates the chance to watch Tony move one of the heavier stacks of missile carapaces so that they overhang the shelf they're being stored on. His muscles bulge, and he makes a bit of a grimace with the strain. To her embarrassment, Tony notices her noticing.
"You should stay up a little later at night. I work out right before bed," he says, jumping his eyebrows at her, his eyes glittering with a bit of a challenge. "You might want to join me, Aang, if it turns out there's a physical component to your airbending. Please don't shave your head, though. That hair is gorgeous, even when it's dirty."
He turns away from her before he can see her reaction, which is to sink onto her cot and (ensuring he really isn't looking her way) fanning herself.
8888888888
Tony bites the inside of his lip to stop himself from saying anything else. He's been het up and horny all morning, from the moment he woke up. Emory's been uncharacteristically right up against him, in one way or another, for almost as long. If it hadn't been for the sand and their discovery of the ramping up of her injection-prompted abilities, he thinks they may have ended up taking things a lot further than they have so far. Her frank visual appraisal of him (he's seen a hunger in her eyes that he absolutely wants to assuage) is feeding his ego, but it's not just that. Tony thinks that it was more than Rory's need for Emory's loyalty that had caused the other woman to exploit her so much. Emory's face is expressive, perhaps even more than she realizes. She likes him. He can tell.
Tony's never really cared so much about that. Probably because he wasn't looking to make a connection that would last very much longer than a night together at his lavish home in Malibu. He could probably count on one hand, with spare fingers, the number of those women he'd be able to tolerate being trapped in this place with. With Emory, what he can count on one hand (with spare fingers) is the amount of times he's been so frustrated with her that he wished she was anywhere but nearby.
He finishes with the thing he's setting up for her: a solid weight of metal on the shelf with part of it sticking out for the paper and shoelace contraption to hang from.
"Okay," he tells her, looking over to see her sitting on the cot watching him. "Step one, figure out how to make this spin the way you want? We can add weights later on. Idea is to visualize what you're doing, without so many… distractions." Tony likes the way Emory's lips twist in a bit of an amused expression as she walks over, on hearing those last words.
His heart definitely does some acrobatics when she doesn't stop walking, but rather slots herself up against his side and kisses his chest, giving him a squeeze with the arm she'd thrown around him.
"Thanks. I know you have a lot to do. I appreciate you taking the time."
"Oh, it's self defense," he lies, squeezing her back, his hand coming to rest on her wrist. His thumb just happens to rest against the place he can feel her pulse, and impulsively, Tony adds, "I meant it though. Come get me if you want me."
Her pulse practically doubles. Tony looks down to see Emory do a cute little shrug before she looks up at him, and he likes all the signs her body's sending him. It doesn't occur to him that he's sending any of his own until they make eye contact, and her eyebrows lift a little, and her cheeks darken with a blush. He's reckless, today, and as a result, Tony throws himself headlong into whatever's going on right now.
"What?" he asks in a low, interested tone.
Her grey eyes are bright and affectionate, right there in the open where he can see it. Again, there's a feeling in his chest that's both lightness and weight, a sense of freedom but also a binding connection, all at the same time. The way the two opposing forces interact feels exactly like the most cliched descriptions of falling in love he's ever heard: butterflies fluttering in his stomach. It's ridiculous and kind of terrifying.
Emory shrugs, a shy, nervous action. "I want you," she says, and he can see the truth of it painted across all of her actions. Because he's already looking fully into her eyes, he sees a shadow of fear there. Because he's a besotted daredevil today, he assuages it.
"I was really hoping you'd say that."
Her eyes widen and her arm around him tightens. She bites her lip, and Tony bends his knees so he can band his arm around her ass to lift her up to him.
The shoelace and paper contraption starts spinning. It flies so high that the end hits his shoulder, and the two of them start laughing and flee that immediate area.
"Do not tell me that you developed powers whose only use at the moment is to cockblock me," Tony says, his hands flat on the table, head down, laughing and frustrated at the same time.
"I really hate to say it but that kind of looks like what's happening!" she says, hopping up onto the table beside him. They look at each other, and beside her, a metal cup that Yinsen hadn't put away the evening before starts sliding.
"Here's what's going to happen," Tony says, turning away from her with difficulty, walking away from her a little ways so he can start pacing without being captured by her magnetic pull. "The thing I set up is in their video camera's dead zone. Your job is to go over there and figure out how it feels to make it move. Spend all day. Let me know if you need to re-up," he adds, head down, shooting a glance over at her. She's cross-legged on the table, her teeth sunk into that full lower lip of hers, a look of deep amused regret on her face. "I'll get as much done here as I can, and at the end of the day, we'll do some research, examine the difference between what you did without me, to with."
Emory lets out a breath and leans her head back. When she straightens back up, she's wearing a huge grin on her face. "I could live with that." She hops off the table and looks at him impishly. "For science."
"Oh, of course," he says, feigning seriousness.
"See you later," she tells him, her smile crooked and, in a way that shouldn't affect him so damned much, confident. As soon as she turns her back on him, Tony shakes his head, rubbing a palm against the spot right under his ARC reactor that has started to ache a bit.
8888888888
Tony spends the next few hours working on the intricate wiring that feeds the various weapons to his chest power source. He's always found that sexual frustration is a very powerful magnifier for his focus- a fact that he was delighted to discover while at MIT, and which he has exploited for years. In his mind, he's blasting his favorite music, and every so often he looks over at where Emory's standing in various poses. More often than not, their contraption is in motion, and around when Yinsen starts preparing their food, Tony sees that she's started tying socks to it.
He wants to call her over, but Yinsen rests a hand on Tony's arm and gestures for him to come over to the fire.
"I have a concern about the two of you."
"Oh?"
"You recall the positive reaction that our captors had to the idea of a child? What reaction do you think they will have when they realize they don't need a child for leverage over you when they have Emory? You need to be more careful around each other."
The other man scrapes the cooking spoon through the middle of the pot multiple times, then shoots Tony a wry look. Because of the nature of the stew mixture and the shape of the pot, it does not stay separated, no matter how vociferously Yinsen cuts through it.
"Like my children, when they resist their responsibilities, and work together to hide it from their parents," he tells Tony. "You'll need to simulate animosity between you, hmm?"
"I hear you," Tony says.
"Hear it, do it."
Yinsen's demeanor is, as always, uncomfortably jovial in moments like these. It's almost a trigger to tell Tony that the subject is important to the man.
"Yes, sir," he finally says.
"Uh oh, what did I miss?" Emory asks from behind him.
He wants to say something flippant, but they had had a moment, that morning, and Tony doesn't want to crush it. Yinsen catches his eye and raises his eyebrows. This was the tough part, he realizes. Not understanding the need in the first place.
"Our resident experimental scientist is worried that you might like being manhandled by me too much. Thinks it'll give the terrorists leverage, if they get the wrong- or right -idea," he says as he makes his way over to the shelf with their bowls and silverware. Tony doesn't look at her or Yinsen, keenly aware that by saying 'the right idea' he is revealing something he'd only really alluded to before.
"So antagonism theater? I can do that. Go get your own cup,' Emory says, pouring the water from the second cup into hers and hanging it back up before coming back from the barrel. He narrows his eyes at her and turns as if he's going to do just that. Instead, though, Tony comes up behind her. His plan is to take her cup.
"So, there hasn't actually been manhandling. I assume that's the problem?" he hears Emory ask Yinsen in a quiet voice. "I could pretend that I don't want him to touch me, if that would help?
"Let the record show, I heard that, and I like that it would be pretence," Tony says, using her subsequent surprise to steal her water cup. He makes a show of drinking it.
Just as she turns to glare at him, the door opens abruptly, and Emory takes the opportunity to shove him away from her, right as their communication leader, the bearded terrorist walks in through the door.
Tony deliberately stumbles, and then marches back to Emory, buries his hand in the hair at the nape of her neck, and pulls her to stand up. "Good one," he growls in her ear.
The bearded terrorist claps his hands and lets out a shout, but when Tony pushes Emory behind him and puts his hands up, he sees the man is smiling. After an exchange with Yinsen, the interpreter explains.
"He says that he likes to watch a strong man getting his woman to submit. You should know he used that exact phrase, 'his woman,'" Yinsen says, keeping his tone carefully neutral.
Behind Tony, Emory rests her forehead on his back, and he wonders if this is acquiescence or frustration on her part. After another quick conversation between Yinsen and the terrorist, Yinsen speaks again.
"The clothes came for you, Emory. They were not suitable. He wants to know if you have sewing skills."
A huff of laughter against Tony's back tells him the answer, but when Emory speaks, she's more diplomatic. "My mother was one of the least domestic people I've ever known. She didn't even teach me how to cook, I had to teach myself! No, the answer is no. Sorry."
"He says he will give you the clothing and see if you can salvage them yourself," Yinsen relays.
Tony makes eye contact with the terrorist and sees the man lean over to peek at Emory where she's hiding behind Tony. The expression on his face is one of challenge, and Tony meets it, gives a casual shrug, hoping to convey 'Women, what can you do?' as best he can. The grin of camaraderie he gets in return tells Tony he's succeeded, but the victory tastes bitter. He doesn't want to have anything in common with this man, whose instincts are to exploit a kidnapped young woman or kill her if she is no longer useful.
Tony hopes the flamethrowers work. He knows who he wants to use them on.
8888888888
The clothes are hilarious. They're dropped off a half hour after their initial visit, and Emory actually wonders if the guy waited till their typical dinner hour (the smell of their food often wafts into their prison cave) so fewer people could see them being delivered.
It appears that the terrorists got taken in by some sort of costuming or fancy dress website from a scammer in a country that doesn't respect patents. There are two outfits, and one is a cherry red dress with many poor quality beads and ribbons hot-glued onto the bodice, cuffs, and hem, with a matching pair of baggy pants in the same thick, shiny fabric. It's for a woman taller than Tony, Emory thinks, but the biggest issue with it is that it seems to have been designed based on a picture of an actual dress. The proportions are all wrong.
Yinsen tells her that it resembles the fancier traditional Afghani garb enough that it could be a distant cousin, design-wise, but nothing about the red dress looks wearable even if Emory was another six inches taller.
Its extra fabric is interesting, though.
"Tony?" she asks, as she hangs the dress up on the jutting missile he'd set up the testing device for her 'airbending,' as he'd called it earlier that day.
"Mmm?" he asks, his focus on his soldering iron. She waits, assuming he is engrossed in his task, and after a few minutes he finally looks up. "Yes?"
"Do you think I could put some of the thinner metal between a few layers of this stuff? For makeshift armor?"
His surprised, interested expression tells her it's not as stupid an idea as she'd worried it might have been. Tony comes over, picks up the skirt with his first few fingers and rubs them together.
"It's a good idea in theory, but this isn't strong enough to hold the thickness you'd need to stay alive. Might prevent a lower-energy ricochet, though." He runs a hand across the beaded front. "This is genuinely hideous. I'm offended on your behalf."
"I thought you liked red?" she teases.
Tony turns to head back to his workstation, but reaches out as he passes her to trace a finger across the hair on her shoulder, down along her bra strap. "Depends on the red," he says.
"Yeah, I bet," she laughs.
"See you in an hour?"
Above and beyond his earlier suggestion to test out the differences between how she feels when trying to manipulate airflow when she's by herself, and when she's with Tony, during lunch, he'd reiterated his suggestion that she start working out with him.
Emory looks over to where Yinsen is tending to the fire. She's not sure he'd encourage the two of them to spend amiable time together. "Assignment or assignation?" she whispers over to Tony.
"Yes."
"My eyes have rolled out and will keep rolling until they hit the sea."
"But what would you look at my arms with?" he asks, grinning.
Emory wants to kiss that grin right off his face, but that would just encourage him. Instead, she focuses on the area above his head, leaning into the feeling of wanting him just a little, and tries to send what she hopes is a small whirlwind of air down far enough to ruffle his hair.
It's a little stronger than she'd anticipated; Tony's hair whips around, his shirt billows out, and the metal cup beside his (all thankfully too heavy to be budged) armor parts slides across the table.
"Good progress. I bet you could undress someone with that if it went up instead of down," Tony observes, his lips twisted into a smirk.
"You seriously have a one track mind!" she protests. As Emory walks away from him, shaking her head, Tony calls out after her.
"Thank you!"
Even without having touched him, Emory can feel that the strange over-skin of power potential waiting to be used is stronger than it had been when she hadn't interacted with Tony for over an hour. Taking a deep breath, she examines her feelings. They're a mix of exasperation and affection, with a swathe of desire. All three feel like they're capable of generating a certain amount of… attunement, for lack of a better term, Emory decides. She grabs her notebook and starts to write a few things down.
Lust and love are both very powerful generators. The latter probably had varying degrees, such that affection was effective, but not as strong as full-blown, acknowledged love. That meant that actual anger (as opposed to frustration or exasperation) was probably also one of the stronger ones.
Emory laughs to herself. It would serve the smug man right if she offered to try out anger over lust, later.
The bottom line? It was going to be important to figure out how to manipulate her powers without any percentage of influence by Tony Stark. Not only was that just a naturally good idea, it was also realistic.
After all, he wouldn't always be a part of her life, if they escaped from this place.
That thought generates a wave of unhappiness. Because it is the right thing to do, Emory directs it at the sheath of power resting against her skin, prickling, waiting to be unleashed.
After seeing the results, she notes them in her journal, putting 'Sadness/disappointment' next to love, lust, and anger.
4/25/21: So I've been struggling with this story. I decided that part of the reason for the low engagement by readers is that the chapter count left people feeling like the story's plot should be moving along faster than it was- but this story's chapters were much shorter than my usual (3500 average vs. 6000 average), and I decided that this was part of the problem.
It was drastic, and lost me a few reviews for the later chapters (and any reviews prior to 4/25/21 will be a bit off on content, based on the chapters they're left under), but I am hoping that this will rehabilitate the story. Ultimately, those readers who were around as this was being written will be a bit inconvenienced/confused, and I apologize for that, but the story itself should be the better for it.
If that doesn't fix readership, then I get it, some stories just don't resonate with people. I may put the story on hold and write chapters for it interspersed with other projects, if that happens. It's tough to push to do something that doesn't feel like it's hitting its audience the right way, you know? In any case, I'm sorry for the inconvenience. My struggles with this story were getting so rough this week that I considered deleting it entirely. I hope this is better. (note: moved this note to the most recent chapter after changing the story, so people who didn't see the changes would see it. I won't continue to move it, just wanted to explain)