Disclaimer: I only own the plot and my OCs. Anything you recognize as not mine belongs to Marvel Studios, Disney, Warner Bros. Entertainment, and/or their otherwise respective owners.
Author's Notes: And we are back for chapter 3! Hooray!
Before you go off and read, a few things: I wanted to mention that one of the plot points that comes up in this chapter was inspired by another fic which is tbh one of my favorites of all time, There's a Fire Burning In My Bones by BisexualLightning on AO3. I've handled this and will continue to handle it very differently than they did, especially with the difference in characters, the backstory of Anahita, and (edited) info from a certain Marvel project (if you're up to date, it's going to become abundantly clear what's going on at the end of the chapter lmao), but I just wanted to mention that because I do believe in giving credit where credit is due.
Additionally, I need to set up some additional warnings for this chapter. If you're concerned about the stuff I haven't tagged on AO3, ***read this***: there is dubious consent in this chapter because of the entire situation overall, though Tony is coherent. If you would like to skip the section that *really* gets into it versus broad strokes, I've not only broken it off but also bolded the sentence where it begins like the first sentence of the chapter and the sentence after it ends. I hope this is enough – if it's not, let me know and I'll do more to make it skippable on AO3, although I don't know how much more I can do on FFN, unfortunately. I really hate FFN's style format sometimes, ugh. -_-
Chapter title comes from the song Le chant de l'eau by Ariana Vafadari. Didn't ever think I'd vibe with opera this hard, but she's a really good singer. :)
Anyways, as always, I hope you enjoy. Until the next chapter (next week!),
~TGWSI/Selene Borealis
~the black and gold 'verse~
~black and gold~
~chapter 3: le chant de l'eau~
"You're – you're joking," Tony said.
"For you, I wish that I was," Anahita replied. "But I am not. I am Aredvi Sura Anahita. By the years of your Earth, I am over six thousand years old. My people age differently than you do. I will tell you more of this later, if you wish. But for now, Dr. Stark, I need you to make a choice."
The brain fog was becoming even more overwhelming now. He gasped, trying to keep himself together. "What – what choice?"
"Your heat is not going to stop as long as you are around me," she explained. She gestured to the cuffs on her hands. "These cuffs, they suppress most of my powers, but not all. I need you to..." She abruptly trailed off, her eyes crinkling around the edges. "No, never mind. I cannot ask this of you now."
He was about to ask her what she meant by that.
But before he could, the brain fog finished what it always did, and he stopped thinking at all.
When he clawed his way out from the gauze, he was laying on his cot. The slick was absolutely gushing out of him, soiling the thin fabric beneath him as well as his pants and underwear. With a groan, he curled in on himself into a fetal position.
"Dr. Stark."
He was still wearing his glasses in spite of that being rather dangerous when he was in heat due to all of the tossing and turning, so he could see Anahita standing on the other side of the room, her back pressed firmly up against the wall.
Right. He was in the cave in Afghanistan with her, and not at home with Bruce and their kids like he so desperately wanted to be. "Wha' – wha' are you doing over – ?" he started to ask.
Then, all at once, it came back to him. The events that had led up to him losing coherency.
He sat up with a whine and moved back, but there was nowhere to go because of the wall, which his head smacked against with a crack! "You did this to me," he breathed.
She nodded. "I did. And like I said, I'm sorry."
His eyes darted towards the door. "Have they – ?"
"They have not come in yet, no. We still have another several hours before they come with the evening meal."
So he had some time yet before they potentially figured out he was in heat and decided to have their way with him. He pressed a hand to his forehead, rubbing it. "You said...you're the goddess of fertility. Can't you make my heat stop?"
"I could, if I was not wearing these cuffs. They were devised by the leader of the true Ten Rings. He kept me captive for centuries, until the previous leader of this organization took me from him as well as his organization's name. He thought that he could make me do the things he wanted for him. But as I also said, these cuffs suppress most of my powers, and they are made with a metal that is more powerful than anything that can be found on this Earth. I cannot break them or take them off, and neither could he if he wanted to."
"So, that's just it?" Tony seethed, recalling her earlier words. "I'm going to be in heat in perpetuity as long as I'm around you?"
"Yes. There is another way that I could end your heat, but..." She faltered again.
He closed his eyes. "Let me guess, it h – has to do with that 'choice' you spoke of earlier."
It seemed she'd had a change of heart in the past several hours. "I was wrong to even begin to proposition that to you. I'm sorry I did that, Dr. Stark."
"What's the choice?" he asked.
Silence.
Anger welled up inside him, as hot and thick as the fever from his heat. "What's the choice?" he roared, opening his eyes again to glare at her.
Anahita didn't look at him as she spoke, keeping her eyes on the ground for all of the goddess that she claimed to be. "The power to grant fertility is the overall power I have that has not been suppressed by the cuffs. It is why omegas and beta women go into heat around me, and...why I can make deltas present. That was what the leader of the Ten Rings kept me for, to make sure that he could produce the amount of children that he did, becoming the most prolific progenitor of your species. I can sense that you were sterilized, and that you had injuries to your reproductive system before that that would make another pregnancy dangerous for you. But I think, as a result of my power, I could fix that. And then..."
Oh, now he knew exactly why she'd said she shouldn't have even given him the choice.
Nausea rolled in his stomach. Tony breathed in through his nose to try and abate it. In, out. In, out.
He didn't want to make this choice. The only person he had ever been with was Bruce, and his alpha was the only person he had ever wanted to be with.
But if he didn't make this choice, he would be in heat for who knew how long, and so he would be unable to finish working on his plans. That meant he wouldn't be able to get home. Goodbye to getting back to his husband and kids, then.
But he was going to get back to them, whatever it took. Even this.
"Do it," he said. His voice was barely beyond a whisper.
Anahita heard him anyways, perhaps proving that everything she had said was true. "Dr. Stark..."
"Please!" he bit out, wrapping his arms around his torso. "Please, just do it! All I want to do is go back to my family! I'm willing to do whatever it takes! Just don't...don't let them rape me."
Her expression once again became impossible to read. "Alright," she said.
As horrible as it sounded, he appreciated the fact she didn't ask him if he was sure.
She came over from the other side of the room slowly, as if she was walking towards a wild animal. She stopped when she was just in front of him. As gently as she could, she pried his arms away from his torso and pulled up his jacket, revealing his stomach and the vertical scar from his three C-sections. "This is going to feel strange," she told him softly. "It won't hurt, but it will not feel like anything else you've felt before."
Wordlessly, he nodded.
She placed her hands on his stomach. He knew the instant that it started, gasping and smacking his head against the cave wall again as he tipped it back, his eyes fluttering. It was indeed unlike anything he'd ever felt before.
It didn't take her long, at the most a few minutes. When she was done, he looked down, and nearly balked at what he saw. The scar from the incisions was still there, but it was much fainter, looking like it had been years since he'd had his last C-section and not ten months.
"I didn't think you would want me to get rid of it entirely," she murmured.
Slowly, he shook his head. "No."
He wanted the scar to remain. It was a reminder of all that he had gone through for Peter, Bea, Edward, and Gemma. All that he still had to go through for them and the rest of their family.
She was the one to lean down and forwards. She hesitated before she got too close, probably expecting him to make some sort of protest. But he didn't.
Even though the tears were streaming down his face, he didn't.
For what it was worth, Anahita was a gentle lover.
She pressed her lips to his softly, keeping the kiss chaste and short. She didn't touch him, clasping the edge of the cot in her hands and keeping them firmly there.
When they broke it off, Tony unzipped his jacket and took it off, the blue light of the miniature arc reactor shining between them. He felt himself flush from the roots of his hair all the way down to his chest, just like he had all those years ago when he and Bruce had had sex for the first time on their honeymoon.
Bruce. He hoped his alpha could forgive him for this. He hoped that he would understand. Tony figured that he would, because he knew his husband inside and out, but still...
He brushed his fingers up against his bottoms next. But before he could even begin to take them off, Anahita stepped back. She did not take off the tunic of her salwar, and for that he was thankful, because it still hid her from view as she took off her pants. He knew what theta biology was supposed to look like, but he really had no interests in seeing it right now.
Unfortunately, he was put on wide display as he took off his pants and underwear. He wrapped an arm around his breasts when he was done, embarrassed, not daring to look her in the eye.
She took her time preparing him, using all of her fingers and her thumb, completely unlike the sex that he and Bruce had, but he couldn't bring himself to care, even with him being in heat. The only thing that he said, the only thing that either of them said, was after she had already entered him and was going at a slow pace: "Faster...please."
Like alphas, thetas had knots even though they possessed what was technically called a peniform and not a penis. He hissed as it locked them together. He himself wasn't hard from their act, in spite of him being in heat, and she didn't try to get him off. He was thankful for that, too.
When they were done, she cuddled with him on the cot until her knot went down. The gauze started to return then – and that was a miracle in of itself, that it for some reason hadn't come back until now. Tony was still crying as it did, his shoulders shaking in Anahita's hold.
"It's okay, Dr. Stark," she said after she'd pulled out of him, putting his blanket over his huddled form. "You can sleep now."
But Tony knew that things weren't going to be okay for a long, long time.
His heat lasted for four and a half days.
Tony and Anahita worked on his plans when he was coherent and free from the gauze, because they didn't really have a choice otherwise (and wasn't that the mantra for the situation that they were in?). Then, when he told her that the gauze was starting to come back, they had sex with her not touching him more than necessary or unless he asked (which he didn't very often), and afterwards he rested until he became coherent again. It was all very mechanical.
Rinse. Wash. Repeat.
When they were working together and during their sex, Anahita spoke about herself and her past. Why, he didn't know, except for what his heat ending would mean, but what she talked about was a nice distraction from how horrible their already horrible situation had become, and so he listened with an attentive ear:
"My people...my brothers, nephew, and I...we are not from your world. Earth. We came from a planet in a solar system in the Perseus arm of the galaxy." This pleased him for more reasons than she knew. He and Bruce had always been agnostic, neither believing nor disbelieving in a higher power. And though that meant his worldview hadn't been outright changed at the reveal that she was a goddess, he nevertheless felt better that she was technically an alien, despite the existence of other intelligent, humanoid life out there being mind-boggling to think about, and that the child they conceived would be half of said other intelligent, humanoid life. But, anyways, "Our people learned how to traverse the stars long before my family and I did. We were not the first ones to leave our world.
"Actually, we were traveling to visit another star-traveling civilization when our ship malfunctioned and we crashed here. Miraculously, we all survived. Our ship was too damaged to send out a distress call, so we had to mine the local environment for resources. That is how we came across humanity for the first time. We didn't realize how unlike our two species were...you appeared to have the same male and female genders that we did. It wasn't until we began to figure out the language of the ancient Iranians – because our universal translators had broken in the crash – that we learned of the secondary genders, the designations, and by then it was too late.
"We became sick with the same disease that afflicted your ancestors seventy thousand years ago. But none of us died from the fever that overtook us as our bodies changed. Instead, the virus activated something in our DNA, giving us our powers. We each had different abilities than the others.
"But these powers came with a heavy cost. With us being so heavily affected by the virus, changed genetically and physically, we knew that we could never go home. We had to stop rebuilding our ship. Almost all of us were in agreement over this. But one of us, whom the ancient Iranians called Angra Mainyu, did not. He wanted to go home, even if it meant inflicting this virus on the rest of our people. He did not see the harm in it; he thought that the powers we had been given were a good thing, and that those who might be killed unlike us were worth the sacrifice. He refused to listen to us when we tried to reason with him. And so, the day came when we all had to fight him. We killed him, and not a day has gone by that I do not wish he had come to see our reason in the end so we did not have to do that.
"Because of our abilities, our long lives, and our decision to help the local humans as best as we could, we became deities to them. Our pilot became Ahura Mazda, the King of the Gods and the God of the Sky and Wisdom, among other things. His son, Atar, became the God of Fire. Mithra became the God of Light, Justice, Oaths, and Truth. They are the only ones that I am biologically related to, but I view all the rest as my brothers due to the millennia we have spent together, just like you view your Rhodey and Pepper as your siblings. Hvar Ksata became the God of the Sun. Rashnu became the God of the Dead, Verethragna the God of War, Tishtrya the God of Agriculture and Rainfall, Haoma the God of Harvest, Health, Strength, and Vitality, Vayu the God of the Wind, and Zorvan the God of Time.
"Of course, eventually, the religions of the humans changed. All of us except Ahura Mazda became spirits to them when Zoroaster proclaimed that he was the one true god and we were only aspects of him. Then, when Zoroastrianism fell out of favor, we became the Djinn, and this is the name that I think I have preferred the most out of all we have been called, though it does not just include us. There are many more types of beings out there who have been described as djinn."
"What happened to the rest of the...Djinn?" Tony asked. Between his heat and hearing the word for the first time, he struggled to pronounce it correctly. He waved a hand. "I mean, you...you said you've been held captive for centuries. Why haven't they come to rescue you?"
She smiled sadly. "Many times, I have pondered that question myself, Dr. Stark. I believe that they are still out there, and that whatever it is they are doing, they will find and rescue me eventually."
He wasn't sure if he believed that, but he didn't call her out on her bullshit.
She got into more detail than just that, telling him stories about the past several thousand years. Some of them made him laugh, some of them added on to the tears that he had already shed. She'd been right before: she did know many things, even about the child that they conceived, though she said she only knew this because of the genetic simulations that she and the other Djinn had run. None of them had actually had a child with a human before.
"They'll grow up at the same rate as the rest of your children, don't worry," she told him after a round of sex, running a hand through his greasy hair. "She will have a longer lifespan after that, but not as long as mine."
"That...doesn't bother you?" he questioned her.
She chuckled. "I have lived over a dozen natural lifespans of the people that I originally came from, and so have the rest of the Djinn. We believe it is another thing that the virus gave us. On our home world, all the people that we knew are long dead and gone."
He couldn't help but think, as the gauze came over him for the umpteenth time, how lonely that and her entire story sounded. Even with eleven people, he couldn't imagine being away from the Earth for thousands of years, and knowing that all the people who he loved would die in less than a fraction of that time while his aging had slowed down to the point of being nonexistent.
When he woke up on the morning of the fifth day since his heat had started, he knew that it had ended. His slick production had stopped, leaving his thighs to be sticky. The cramps, nausea, and brain fog were all gone.
He was now pregnant with Anahita's child. Though honestly, between her being a goddess of fertility and his hyper-fertility, it probably should have happened sooner. Whatever.
"Anahita," he said, shaking her shoulder to wake her up. "Anahita."
She slowly opened her eyes. "Mm...Dr. Stark, what...?"
"My heat ended," he informed her. "It took."
She was wide awake at that, looking as if she had been told something she hadn't expected to come true. "Oh," she said, before clearing her throat. "I'm glad."
Although they'd slept on the same cot in order to get him through his heat, they slept on their separate ones after that. They didn't talk about the child of hers that was now in his womb, either. The talk of genetics was enough for him; truthfully, for the first time since Lili, he wasn't sure if he wanted to keep the fetus at all. But he only thought about that at night when he couldn't sleep, going back to staring at the ceiling of the cave, along with what Bruce's reaction to him being pregnant with a half-alien child would actually be when he got back home.
Again, I'm so sorry.
For the most part, it was back to work.
They almost got found out.
Six days after his heat was over, the metal door opened without warning and a bunch of alpha and beta men came streaming in. Luckily, he and Anahita weren't in the midst of working on his plans, they were doing a bit of pretend for the camera, the results of what they were actually doing safely hidden away, and so they weren't caught. Yet.
One of the men, an alpha, was new, clearly the actual leader of the group instead of the man that Tony had dealt with up until now, and he looked almost familiar. He had familiar features. When he noticed Tony looking at him even before he spoke, the omega and Anahita having their hands on their heads just as they always did when the men came into the room, he smirked. "You think you recognize me, but you don't know from where, don't you?" he questioned snidely. "Don't you?"
Tony kept his mouth shut. He'd come too far now just to risk it all and lose.
"My daughter spoke highly of you when she came back home from America," the alpha man continued. "She confirmed that you were a highly intelligent man from the time that she spent with you. And my daughter is very smart, I knew this even before she landed an internship at the one and only Stark Industries."
Tony's face blanched.
Coldness seeped into his bones.
No...
"That's right," Zadran confirmed viciously. "My daughter is Farzana. This plan has been in place for longer than you could imagine. But, enough about that. Relax." He motioned for Tony and Anahita to drop their hands from their heads. Tony did so numbly, and he was still numb as Zadran walked forwards until he was standing right in front of him, staring down at the soft blue light emanating from through his jacket. The miniaturized arc reactor. "The bow and arrow was once the pinnacle of weapons technology. It allowed the great Genghis Khan to rule from the Pacific to the Ukraine – an empire twice the size of Alexander the Great's and four times the size of the Roman Empire. But today, whoever holds the latest Stark weapons rules these lands. Stark weapons were what the killers of my wife and son had. And soon, I will have the greatest one of them all." Then, he switched to Urdu: "Why have you failed me?"
Tony knew that, if Farzana was really his daughter, then Zadran would already know that he knew Urdu. So he responded accordingly in the same language: "I have not failed you. It's just taking longer than I first expected. But I do have a question for you: why are you so hellbent on using my weapons when you have a goddess at your disposal? You know that's what she is, right?"
Zadran snorted. "A goddess of fertility, you mean? She has no powers besides those with those cuffs on. What use do I have for a fertility goddess?" He eyed her with contempt. "I was just about to kill her when your injury happened. She is nothing more than a mouth to feed. And someone for you to have sex with, apparently. Yes, Stark, I saw," here, he smirked at the expression on Tony's face, "did you have fun when you spread your legs for her in heat, just like the omega whore you are?"
Anahita cut in then. "We are working diligently," she said, stepping forwards.
Zadran glared at her. "On your knees!" he ordered her.
She did not immediately move, which led to the men forcing her to the ground. The alpha motioned for one of the men to step forwards. He was holding a strange, glowing blue rock with a pair of tongs. It looked almost like a piece of coal, but according to how the color of temperature worked, it had to be much, much hotter. The beta man held it up to her mouth.
"You think I'm a fool?" Zadran spat at her. "I'll get the truth."
"We're both working," Anahita said.
"Open your mouth." When she didn't, another man grabbed her jaw and forced it open. "You think I'm a fool? What's going on? Tell me the truth!"
"He's building your Jericho!"
"You lie!"
"He's building your Jericho!"
No, no, no...
Truth be told, Tony had his own anger to deal with towards Anahita. He knew she wasn't to blame for being unable to control her powers as a result of the cuffs, but it wasn't fair that he had had to deal with the results of that in the way that he had.
But she was also the themither of the fetus currently in his womb, whether he aborted it when he got out of here or not. He'd forged a camaraderie with her, too, from their time spent together in this cave. He didn't want her to die.
"What do you want? A delivery date?" he snapped in English, stepping forwards himself. Zadran turned to look at him; the omega pointed at Anahita. "You might want to kill her, but I need her. She's a good assistant."
"You only want her to live because she put a baby in your belly," Zadran scoffed. As Tony flinched, "Yes, Stark, I know how her powers work. That's the only reason why your heat would have ended around her. She claimed you before my men would've been tempted to do the same; they were under strict orders not to touch the merchandise."
"Merchandise." Tony almost broke out into hives just at the usage of the word to describe him.
"Are any of your men good at welding? Smithery?" Tony demanded. "Because unless they are very good at it, unless they are skilled, I need her."
Zadran raised a hand. The men surrounding Anahita, including the man with the bluish-coal, stepped away. She fell to the ground. "You have one more day to build my missile," he informed Tony. "Then I kill you both, regardless of its completion. There are other ways to get what I want."
The men left the room. Tony scrambled over to Anahita. While she was a goddess, he still looped an arm through hers, helping her up. "What were they threatening you with?"
"A piece of the metal that my cuffs are made out of. It has an extraordinarily high melting point, and is one of the few things that has been able to harm the Djinn after we became infected with the virus. It is called adamant by the Olympians, another race of beings that ancient humans mistook for gods," she explained. She panted, shaking her head. "That is not the first time that I have been threatened with it. You would think that I..."
"Hey, people react to different traumas differently, right?" Tony attempted to comfort her. "Right?"
After a moment, she nodded.
Anahita's eyes fell upon her cot, since it was within her line of sight. But she wasn't looking at the cot itself, rather something...beneath it. A chest he had never noticed before. "I have something to give you," she said.
Tony frowned. "What?"
Anahita walked over to her cot. She pulled out the chest from under it and opened it up, taking something out from inside it. When she turned around, he saw that it was a...bangle, for lack of a better word. It was gold, but with some purplish detailing on it, again looking like a substance he had never seen before, although vibranium came close, the little he'd seen of it. Maybe it was vibranium, his initial suspicions aside.
"This is mine. I was wearing it when we crash-landed on Earth thousands of years ago." She held it out to him. "It comes from my home-world. I want you to have it."
"No, I can't. It's yours," he refused. "And I'm not even sure if I – "
" – Will keep our child when you get out of here or abort it? I know," she returned, an eyebrow raised. "Still, if there's even the slightest possibility that you will, I want you to have this so that you will be able to give it to them some day."
His knees felt weak. "Won't you be able to give it to them yourself? You're getting out of here just as much as I am." That had been the plan. That had always been the plan, even before they'd shared his heat together.
"Yes," she acknowledged. "But I am sure you will want to raise our child in Gotham along with all of your other children and your husband, yes? I will not stop you there. Do not be mistaken, I will be present in their life," she assured him, "but though I have traveled this world in the millennia I have lived on its surface, Iran, or Persia, in all of its borders, from Anatolia to Pakistan, has always been my home. I would like to live in it, and track down my brothers and nephew once and for all so we can be reunited after all these centuries and so that they can help me finally be rid of these cuffs once and for all."
The thought of her reuniting with her own family persuaded him some, albeit it also made him think, if he brought this child into existence, they would have more family than he could even imagine...
"And they won't be troubled by the...existence of a half-Djinn, half-human child?"
"Not at all," Anahita replied. "I know that I have told you none of us have had children with humans before, and that is true. But if anything, they will be most pleased to have another one of us out there in the world."
Reluctantly, Tony took the bangle from her hands; its metal was cool. She instructed him how to open it and put it on, which he did. The bangle was a little large on him even with her being an inch or so shorter than him (actually, it looked like it wouldn't even fit her wrist), but even as he thought that, the hidden mechanics of it whirred as it tightened itself to fit perfectly around his wrist. At the same time, the purple detailing on it began to glow; the light was faint, much fainter than the light coming from his arc reactor, but still discernible.
He gasped.
Anahita chuckled. "If we needed any further confirmation that you are with my child, it would be that. The bangle only activates and glows when it senses the DNA of my species."
Once again, there were so many questions he wanted to ask her.
But he didn't.
He swallowed instead. "Thank you, Anahita."
"No, thank you, Dr. Stark, truly." Her eyes shone in the dim light. "You are the first human I have met in centuries to treat me with the kindness that you have, although it would be understandable for you to think that I did not deserve it due to what I have put you through. I think that is one of the beauties of you humans: even in the worst of circumstances, your kind continues to show compassion without hesitation whatsoever."
He didn't get the chance to respond to this, as she turned away, heading back towards her cot. "Now, I believe we should both get some rest," she spoke. "If Raza means to keep his word, we will have a very busy day tomorrow indeed."
Word Count: 5,150
Next Chapter Title: hell's bells
