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: Okay, here is chapter 2! A day early because I'm traveling tomorrow. Along with it I bring news: I am now up to chapter 7 of this story, and man, I grossly underestimated how long this story was going to be. I'm thinking it's going to be at least 18 chapters now, possibly more. But because I'm up to chapter 7, y'all will be getting weekly updates until you're caught up with me! Exciting news, isn't it?

But on this chapter specifically, two things. One, I've fan-casted the character you're meeting in this chapter as Shohreh Aghdashloo. If you haven't seen her act before, I highly suggest you watch some clips from The Expanse of her, because she has a very distinctive voice and distinctive mannerisms that might help you picture this character better. (Also, speaking of fan-casting, if you haven't seen the wiki updates, I've fan-casted Brenton Thwaites as Dick and Jenna Coleman as Zatanna. Also exciting stuff!) Two, the title for this chapter comes from the song Tale of Innocence by Ariana Vafadari.

Anyways, that's all I have. As always, I hope you enjoy. Until next chapter,

~TGWSI/Selene Borealis

~the black and gold 'verse~

~black and gold~

~chapter 2: tale of innocence~

Tony's conscious flickered in and out of existence, and when he was conscious, what he was seeing and feeling didn't make sense.

The first time he woke up, and he knew it was the first time he woke up and not just the first time that he remembered it, he was in a dark room. He was aware that somebody was performing open-chest surgery on him, though the brightness of the room wasn't conducive for that. They also were performing the surgery without providing any pain medication for him, using some sort of constraints to keep him from fighting them off. His screams echoed loudly in the room.

"I know, Dr. Stark," a voice said when he stopped screaming at one point because the pain was too much to bear to even do that, the accent lilting. "I know. But I need you to hang in there at least a little bit longer..."

The second time that he woke up, and this time he wasn't sure if it was the actual one or the only one that he remembered since the first time, he was sitting in a room that was much brighter than the previous one had been, being propped up in a chair as several men stood around him. He was barely aware of the fact that he was being recorded, as one of the men pulled his head back by his hair and another man recited something in a language that he recognized as Urdu, but didn't have the comprehension abilities to understand. He realized that he was wearing his glasses, which he sluggishly thought was a good thing because he wouldn't be able to see without them, although his right lens was cracked.

There were multiple more times after that that he came to, though each and every single time was back in that dark room. The owner of the lilting voice was there each time, just beyond his peripheral. They spoke to him each time, in English, but again, his cognitive abilities had been shot to hell. It didn't help that he passed out pretty much as soon as he was able to pull himself from the dregs of unconsciousness each time.

Finally, the last time that he was able to wake up, he knew before he even opened his eyes that it would be for an extended period of time. His eyes shot open, and he grimaced upon realizing that there was a tube shoved up his nose and down his esophagus. He pulled it out as gently as he could, before he caught sight of a glass of water on the table next to his bed. He reached for it, but wasn't able to grab it. There were a bunch of wires stopping him.

...Why were there electrical wires all over his body, and not the kind that you would find in a hospital?

Tony looked down. It took him a second to fully register what he was seeing.

The wires were going into the hole in his chest. There was a hole in his chest. It'd been covered by bandages, but his addled mind had decided to rip all of those off so he could see where the wires had led to. And now he knew.

What the f – ? he began to think, too drugged up to say the thought out loud.

"I know. Shocking, isn't it?"

His head snapped up. The owner of the voice was standing three or four feet from his bed. She was a theta woman in her mid-fifties or so with Indo-Iranian features, her long black hair pulled into an elaborate bun. Her voice was not just lilting, but rasping in quality, reminding his fucked-up mind almost of a snake. She was wearing a black-and-blue salwar with golden embroidery, though it looked like it had seen far better days. A pair of weird handcuffs were around her wrists: they weren't connected, so she could move her hands about freely, though it looked like they were clearly for punishment, and they didn't look like they were made of any metal he had ever seen before. Not even vibranium.

"W'o are – w'o are you?" he slurred. "'Nd wha' the hell did you do to me?"

"I saved your life," she answered. "You were right next to a bomb when it exploded. I removed all the shrapnel that I could, but there's a lot left, and it's headed into your atrial septum." She pulled out a small bottle from an apparent pocket in her salwar, holding it up to the light, because they were once again in the dark room – except, no, it wasn't a dark room. It was a cave. "This is my souvenir. You can take a look." She tossed it to him. Somehow, he caught it, and stared at what was inside. It was shrapnel, teeny-tiny pieces of it. "I've seen many wounds like that. People who sustain them are called the walking dead because it takes about a week for the barbs to reach the vital organs."

He pointed at the giant hole in his chest. "Wha' is this, then?"

"That is an electromagnet, hooked up to a car battery, and it's keeping the shrapnel from entering your heart," she responded.

Tony suddenly realized that there was a camera in the cave-room, and with the bandages ripped off from his chest and the jacket he was wearing open, leaving his breasts exposed to view. Flushing, he quickly zipped up his jacket as best as he could.

"Hmm?" the theta woman hummed at the action. Then, she saw what he was looking at. "That's right. Smile. You're on camera. It's only video, though, no audio."

The most important question after all the other ones he had asked popped into his brain: "Where are we?"

Unfortunately, this wasn't a question that she was able to answer for him right away. Loud voices came from the other side of the large metal door that served as the only entrance and exit of the room.

"Come on, stand up," the theta woman instructed. "Stand up! Just do as I do. Put your hands up."

He got up from his makeshift bed – actually a metal table – and did as told. Alpha and beta men swarmed into the room, causing his mouth to nearly drop open. "My guns!" he exclaimed. "How did they get my guns?" And my bomb?

"Do you understand me? Do as I do!" the theta woman repeated.

One of the men stepped forwards and started to speak in Arabic. She served as his translator: "He says, 'Welcome, Tony Stark, the most famous mass-murderer in the history of America.' He is honored to have you here. He wants you to build a missile – the Jericho missile that you demonstrated." The man handed over a picture of the Jericho missile to her, which she showed Tony. "This one."

Tony didn't hesitate. He stared the apparent leader of the group straight in the eye. "I refuse."

For this, he was led out of the cave-room to a different one. He barely had time to register the contents of the room before he was brought down to his knees and his head was shoved into a vat of water. Just before he could drown, they brought his head up long enough for him to get in a couple of breaths, before his head was shoved back down again.

He was being waterboarded.

He lost count of how many times they did this before he passed out. All he knew was, as everything from his mind to his nose to his lungs burned, all he could think about was his family. Bruce. Dick. Jason. Lili. Harley. Peter. Bea. Edward. Gemma. Rhodey. Pepper. Riri. Rebecca. Alfred. Happy. Selina. Felix. He didn't know how much time had passed since the Humvee, though he knew it had to be a while. They had to know that he was missing by now.

He had to push through for them. He was their husband, their omither, their brother, their uncle, their son, their friend. He didn't have another choice. He refused to let his children grow up without their omither.

He was still in the waterboarding room when he came back to. Once the men realized that he was conscious, they did the process all over again. And again. And again. And again.

When they seemed to think that he'd had enough, they put a bag over his head and escorted him out of the cave system entirely. The light of the outdoors blinded him, even through the black bag. The bag was taken off of him, revealing a lot of men and tents, and an even larger amount of his guns. The theta woman was standing next to the alpha man who had spoken before.

"He wants to know what you think," she translated for him.

Tony was too tired and his brain was too oxygen-deprived for him to think much of anything. But, that being said, "I think you have a lot of my weapons."

The theta woman translated for the both of them. "He says they have everything you need to build the Jericho missile. He wants you to make the list of materials. He says for you to start working immediately, and when you're done, he will set you free."

Even in his current state, he knew the truth. As much as his brain was trying to rebel because of what he'd thought during the waterboarding, his new reality was beginning to sink in. "No, he won't." He shook the alpha man's hand anyways, mildly impressed that he'd even offered it out to him in the first place. A lot of alphas even back in America wouldn't have done that.

The theta woman smiled grimly. "No, he won't."

After they were led back to the cave-room they were being housed in, which also was apparently meant to be his workshop for the missile as the alpha and beta men brought in the supplies as well, the theta woman decided to introduce herself.

"My name is Anahita, to answer your earlier question," she said as she started to get a fire going, which he figured was to bring some warmth back into the room, because night was coming and it was quickly becoming absolutely freezingwithout something producing heat.

Tony wrinkled his nose. "Just Anahita?"

"I've been called Anahita Khan before," she replied. It wasn't an answer to his question, but wisely, he decided to drop it for now.

Once she got the fire going, they huddled around it. She made sure to keep four feet between them – and he didn't know why he was noticing that. Perhaps because she'd made sure to keep that amount of distance between them even when they'd been taken back here?

"I'm sure they're looking for you, Dr. Stark," she murmured as he watched the flames. "But they will never find you in these mountains. Look what you saw; that is your legacy to most of the world, Dr. Stark. You're life's greatest work, in the hands of those murderers. Is that how you want to go out? Is this the last act of defiance of the great Tony Stark? Or are you going to do something about it?"

"My weapons aren't my life's greatest work. That title belongs to my kids, but okay," Tony snorted. He ran a hand over his face. "I'm not sure what you're asking me to do. Is that supposed to be some sort of rousing speech? I'm not going to build these guys that missile. They're going to kill me and you either way. And if they don't, I'll probably be dead in a week."

If he didn't know any better, he would've sworn her eyes were twinkling in the firelight. "Well, then. This is a very important week for you, isn't it?"

They went to bed after being provided food by their captors, the "beds" being cots on different sides of the room. Tony laid there on the uncomfortable thing, looking up at the ceiling of the cave, watching the firelight flicker shadows on it like Plato's allegory of the cave. The thought made his mouth taste even bitter than it ever had before, because he realized now he had been one of the people chained to the wall of the cave all this time and not one of the people above in thinking that the wrong people wouldn't get ahold of his weapons, because that wasn't a reflection of the real world. It had only been his hopes and dreams.

Logically, he knew that he couldn't give up, no matter how the odds were stacked against him. Though it seemed impossible for him to get out of here, because even if he built that missile (he wouldn't), his captors would kill him anyways, he needed to figure out a way to get back home. His family was relying on him.

But how could he get out of here and pretend to build the missile at the same time? That would be the only way he could survive long enough to escape.

The answer came to him hours after Anahita had already fallen asleep, judging by the quieting of her breathing. Not one of his finer moments. He didn't get much sleep that night once it came to him, too busy gazing up at the ceiling of the cave and mapping out the full extent of his plan inside his mind.

In the morning, before their captors came to give them their morning meal (they were only provided two a day, according to Anahita), he told her what his plan was. Perhaps it was a stupid move to do, as he was half-expecting her to grin triumphantly and walk out of the room without a problem in the world, or to wait until their captors gave them food to inform them what was going on, but she didn't betray his trust. Besides, even if she had, she was stuck in here with him, so it wasn't like she wouldn't have noticed what he was doing anyways.

The edges of her mouth lifted when he finished telling her what he was going to do, what he wanted her to help him with. "Now, that sounds more like the Tony Stark I was told about," she said. "Let's do it."

After breakfast, as she set about melting sixteen grams of the palladium they'd been given, through his missile that had been among the mess of materials supplied, and he got to work on the rest for the first stage of his plan, she told him more about their captors. "They are your loyal customers. They call themselves the Ten Rings, but that is a name they have stolen from a much powerful, more omnipotent organization."

"And you know this, how?" he asked.

"I know many things, Dr. Stark," was all she said in reply.

When they finished the device a couple of days later, the miniaturized arc reactor, Anahita helped him put it into the hole in his chest, where it fit perfectly. "It's like the power of the sun in the palms of our hands," she mused.

"Yeah," he panted, rubbing at his chest. He knew that the arc reactor was doing (part of) the job that it was supposed to, it still felt weird. He wasn't supposed to feel something touch that part of his body that wasn't his body, and on that latter part he wasn't supposed to be aware of feeling it. "Three gigajoules per second."

"It could power your heart for 50 lifetimes." That wasn't the first time she had said that.

"Yeah. Or something big for fifteen minutes." That wasn't the first time he had said that, either.

Anahita told him after they'd built the arc reactor that, by her estimates, since she admitted it was hard to keep track of time when you had no daylight or clocks and thus no sense of time, he had been held captive by the not-Ten Rings for just over three weeks.

Tony thought about it numbly. Three weeks. That meant his alpha's thirty-sixth birthday had already passed by now. Selina's son Felix's twelfth birthday was going to happen in just over two weeks. Another three weeks after that, it would be Dick's eighteenth birthday. Was he going to make it home in time for his adoptive son's milestone birthday? What about Edward and Gemma's first birthday on May 9th? His own twenty-eight birthday?

He didn't have much optimism on any of those accounts. Yes, he would get home, but he doubted with the way things were going with what he was planning that it was going to happen within three months unless they really rushed things. And he was way past the "hoping for the best, preparing for the worst" mentality. He hoped that Dick would be able to forgive him, and Edward and Gemma once they were old enough.

During the evenings, after long, hard, and grueling days of work, he and Anahita either huddled around that fire until one of them was ready to call it a night, or they played an ancient Persian board game she taught him called nard, and she said it specifically was the ancient version and not the modern one. It was a lot like backgammon – or more accurately, backgammon was a lot like it.

"Good roll, good roll," Anahita said one night.

He looked at her over his glasses, even though that made her form blurry. She still kept on maintaining a three-to-four foot distance or more from him. "You still haven't told me where you're from."

He didn't know anything about her at all, actually. Nothing except for her name. But they needed some way to pass the time outside of board games.

Anahita smiled faintly. "Oh, I am from a place that is far from here."

"Got a family?" Tony asked.

"I don't have a mate or children of my own, that was never in the cards for me. But I do have ten brothers and a single nephew," she replied, smiling at the first part, like it was some sort of inside joke.

He whistled. "That's a lot of brothers – although, I guess I'm not one to talk. I do have eight children."

"Yes, so I've heard. Tell me about them," she requested.

That was one thing that wasn't hard for him to do. "The oldest are Dick and Jason; they're eighteen and thirteen. They're adopted," he explained when she raised an eyebrow. He knew how it sounded, him having an eighteen-year-old son when he wasn't even twenty-eight yet himself. Although, it did surprise him a little that he had to explain. Yes, he didn't expect a common person all the way in Afghanistan to know every little detail about his life, he wasn't that famous, no matter what other people thought, but it did make him stop and wonder just how long she had been held by this terrorist organization – and once again, what was up with those handcuffs on her wrists.

But, he was getting too far away from himself. "Dick is an omega, like me, but he's much braver than I am, with a better heart. He gives me and his father, my husband, worry over it all the time, but he's at an age and experience where I can mostly trust him to know what he's doing in those aspects, even if he still needs guidance in other ones. Jason hasn't presented yet; we didn't adopt him or Dick under the best of circumstances, but his was the worse of the two." FuckHYDRA. Fuck everything that they stood for. He just wanted to mention that now. "He got into a lot of fights when he was younger because of it, though he's mostly aged out of those now. He's a lover of literature. You give him a book in any of the languages that he knows, he'll read it and talk to you extensively about it once he's finished, but never before.

"Next are Lili and Harley; they're ten and just over eight and a half. They, like most of my kids, were surprise babies. Lili was pretty much conceived on our honeymoon and Harley while I was still nursing her. She's a little ringleader and he is very stubborn. Out of all of my kids, the ones I'm most sure about in how they're going to present is him and my next one. I'm confident that he's going to be an alpha and Peter's going to be an omega." He'd never admitted to that before, not even to Bruce, but here in the cave tucked away in the mountains of Afghanistan, it was something he knew would never get back to them.

"Peter and Bea are next, six and four. I almost died giving birth to Peter. He's the sweetest, most gentle soul that I've ever met. He's also the child with the most health issues in our family, at least partially because of him being born premature. He needs glasses like me, has asthma, and developed a deadly peanut allergy despite us introducing it to him at an early age to prevent that. It sucked, because it used to be one of his favorite foods." That had been a nightmare for the ages, to say the least. "Bea is a cutie pie. She gets jealous easily sometimes, but she's always willing to share her toys and can't wait to go to school like her older siblings, Peter included now that he's in kindergarten.

"Last are the twins, Edward and Gemma. They'll be turning one in May. They're my babies. All of them are really, but those two are the actual ones." His smile slipped. "I told myself before I left that none of them would grow up while I was gone. But Edward and Gemma have probably started talking by now, because they were on the cusp of it before I left, and now I'm not there."

Tears sprung to his eyes at the thought. What kind of omither was he, that he had chosen to go to what some would argue was one of the most deadliest countries on the earth, regardless of him potentially being able to have foreseen the circumstances with his precognition or not, and left his now nine-month-olds at home? Not a good one, that was what it sounded like.

Hurriedly, he wiped at his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket.

Anahita decided to give him a bit of a reprieve. "What about your husband?" she inquired. "What is he like?"

He laughed through his tears. "Bruce? He's the best husband ever, and one of the best alphas ever, too. He basically bought me from my sire. Howard wanted to sell me off to the highest bidder as soon as I presented as an omega; I'm sure you understand." She nodded. "Bruce didn't really have any interest in having a relationship with me, though. Not at first. He was mostly trying to save me from the other alphas who would've taken Howard up on his offer; he worked out the betrothal contract so that a lot of it was in my favor. But we eventually fell in love. I wouldn't have had eight children with him otherwise. But he always made sure that it was my choice to have them, that he wasn't pressuring me or anything else, that it was my body, my choice. We don't keep secrets from each other. He's the love of my life, my husband, my alpha."

There was a pause before she spoke again.

"It sounds like you have the most valuable thing in the world, Dr. Stark: a family. With a family, you have everything."

"Oh believe me, I know it," he replied cheekily. "I've only told you about my husband and my kids; you don't even knowabout everybody else."

She became eager. "Tell me about them, too."

So he did. He told her about Alfred, Rhodey, Pepper, and Riri, Happy, Rebecca, Selina, and Felix. He didn't mention anything about Batman or the rest of the vigilante group or HYDRA, but she was enthralled by everything that he said. By the time that he was finished, it was as if she was mesmerized.

"You know, you're unlike any human I've ever met, Dr. Stark," she spoke upon him concluding his not-so-little monologue of sorts.

Tony almost froze at that, because this wasn't the first time he had heard those words. He had heard them before what seemed like a lifetime ago, back in the initial months after he had given birth to Peter. He hadn't remembered it until now; it seemed for all that his precognitive abilities gave him, they could only do so much good if he didn't remember all the feelings he experienced or those voices that he heard.

And there were so many questions he wanted to ask her now in response to that statement, now that he was in this moment, living it.

But he kept to his script, reciting his line:

"You mean 'man,' right?"

She startled, like he had just called her out on a lie. That only piqued his curiosity even more. "...Yes," she said at last. "I apologize."

Their game of nard forgotten, they mutually decided to call it a night not long after that and went to bed, so that they could wake up and do it all over again the next day.

It started with a pain in his lower back.

According to Anahita's estimates, it had been over two months since he'd been captured by the not-Ten Rings, so he'd unavoidably missed Dick's birthday. His plan was coming along well. Though their captors had that camera, they hadn't figured out what was going on yet.

Due to the extent of his injuries from the bomb explosion and the lack of proper nutrition in their meals, Tony was in pain a lot, all over his body, as he recovered, and there was no pain medication in their room to help make it more bearable. All he could do was grit his teeth and push through it, because he didn't have a choice otherwise. He was going to get home, whatever it took.

But this pain was different. Unlike the aches and sharp-shooting spasms that the injuries had left him with, the pain in his lower back was like cramps. Like the rest of his pains, he tried not to think about it too much, because there wasn't anything that could be done about it. Anahita did watch him with an inscrutable expression when he had to pause in the midst of what he was doing, multiple times, to place a hand on his lower back and take in a few breaths, but she said nothing.

But then, within twenty-four hours of the cramps coming on, they weren't his only symptoms anymore. When he tried eating breakfast the following morning, he was only able to eat a little bit of it before he felt like he was going to throw everything that he'd eaten back up, and there was a haze settling over his mind, regardless of how he tried to resist it. A very familiar haze.

Brain fog.

His teeth chattered from the horrific realization that dawned upon him, or maybe that was just the fever. Whatever the reason, he clutched his head in his hands, feeling a swirl of emotions that was so overpowering it almost threatened to take him down under and away like a riptide out to sea.

"Dr. Stark," Anahita said gently, prodding.

Tony didn't know what she was trying to do. Ask him what was wrong? If that was the case, couldn't she already smellhim? Or was she just trying to comfort him? He didn't know.

All he knew was one thing:

"I'm going into heat," he whispered, his throat tightening as tears came to his eyes once again.

It shouldn't have been possible. The estrus cycle, regardless of whether or not one breastfed their child after giving birth, in humans was very predictable. After getting pregnant and giving birth, the body would not go into heat again until after eighteen months, roughly give or take. Sometimes it was sooner, sometimes it was later. It had been sooner for him after Harley at seventeen months. But that was only a month's difference, not just a little less than eight.

It should not have been possible. His heat shouldn't have started already.

But it was. The cramps had been a sign of him going into pre-heat, and he'd ignored them. It wasn't like anything could be done about the heat by then, anyways. Not even the heat suppressants he'd come up with would've been able to stop it if he had access to them, and if his captors were unwilling to even give him pain medication –

He gagged, almost actually throwing up the little food he'd eaten, at the thought. Oh, God. He was being held captive by alpha and beta men in a part of the world where omegas had little rights and were seen mostly as baby-makers and fuck toys. Yes, he was sure that not everyone in Afghanistan saw them that way, but he doubted that his captors were of that mindset. They'd pretty much ignored his omega status up until now because of their desire for him to build the missile for them, but the second that they realized he was in heat, he was sure those bets were all going to be off. And he wouldn't even be coherent for most of it.

He was going to be raped. The torture they'd already done wasn't going to be enough. He was going to be raped, and maybe even unwittingly killed as they raped him. But even if they didn't kill him yet, his plans were going to be set back. Most likely now, his plans were going to be found out, and this would be the end of Tony Stark. He was never going to get to go home, never going to get to spend another heat with his alpha, never going to see him or their children again.

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, so sorry, so sorry...

"I know, Dr. Stark," Anahita soothed as he became a sobbing mess. He heard her come to stand in front of him, coming the closest to him for the first time since she had performed surgery on him and put the electromagnet in his chest. "I am sorry. I had hoped that this wouldn't happen, even though I knew that it would. It's what happens to omegas and beta women who are exposed to my abilities for long periods of time when I am wearing these cuffs."

...Wait.

What?

He sniffled, lifting his head from his hands, actively fighting the brain fog from finishing its taking over of his mind. "Wha'...wha' do you mean?"

She was smiling at him, but her smile was nothing except bittersweet. "It's my fault you're going into heat," she said. "I'm sorry, Dr. Stark, but I haven't been exactly truthful to you about who I am. My name is Aredvi Sura Anahita, and I was once called by the ancient Iranians their goddess of fertility, health, water, wisdom, and war."

Word Count: 5,261

Next Chapter Title: le chant de l'eau