fe_male | memeboxing

[ That's - surprisingly actually probably a better way to handle it than she would. By whatever point that she was that mad she'd probably just keep pushing the issue (as she's doing now - actually she'd just keep pushing the issue no matter what), regardless of how mad it would make them both. And maybe that's dumb (it's totally dumb) but she's never been good at backing down from confrontations.

It's bought her a lot of grief over the years, actually. She still hasn't learned the lesson.

She's done so many interrogations, Tony, you don't even know, she can absolutely control her face that well. It requires her closing it off completely so that there's nothing on it at all, but she can keep any reaction off it. And her shields are - actually they're quite good these days, and that's because of him and what he's given her. So she listens, and absorbs, and thinks over the implications of that for a long moment before she nods slowly, meets that moment of eye contact steadily and without any shift in expression. ] How old were you the first time?

[ He squints up his eyes and his face and lets his hands - they haven't been crossed since he started working again, but still - fall and rest on the edge of the table. He leans on it, which pushes his shoulders up a bit but relieves some of the tension in his lower back even while it emphasizes what's above that. Somewhere in there he also let his head fall forward, chin on his chest, while he took a deep breath in and out. It doesn't seem like he was prepared at all for her to keep asking clarifying questions, but in reality, it's what he half-expected. This is just venting, and not even at her. She's seen him vent like this before, and it's all physical, it's frustration, when something goes the way he thought it would and the way he thought it would go was frustrating, because he couldn't figure out why it wouldn't go the way he wanted instead.

He feels like he sort of at least understands why this conversation is going the way it is, and he's pleased that she's kept to her word about not letting him feel any of her own feelings about the subject. He's got enough of his own, and while he is now very curious, he's not going to ask her to share them. Not now that he's said so clearly he doesn't want them. Not when he's already got enough. Not when he knows that if she did for whatever reason relent and let him in, that he would simply become all that anger he didn't want her to have on his behalf instead. This is okay, this is good. This is just information she was already going to be able to find anyway. He supposes it's better to come from him and be the truth rather than be read elsewhere and then leave her to try and confirm it herself, through whatever means she found.

So he takes the breath in and then he lets it back out, and with it goes a sizable percentage of the ten square tons of pressure previously visible in his spinal column. Still isn't an immediate answer, but he is remarkably calm and detached in tone when he replies again. ] Three. Boarding school started just a month or so after I turned eight.

[ She has seen him vent like this before, watched him use the physicality of movement or tension to make it easier to express what he's feeling, get it out a little. That she can handle easily, knows that it means he is in fact handling it. A lack of anything that looks like processing would be likely to worry her more, really.

So she waits now, patiently, staying as calm and blank as she was, not letting him see anything of what she's feeling. It's harder than she anticipated, because what he's giving her is almost surprisingly difficult to handle. She knows how angry she gets when people try to hurt him, but this is old news. It shouldn't be this frustrating to learn, shouldn't make her blood run hot and part of her brain start to try to figure out ways to make people realize that they are never, ever allowed to try to hurt Tony Stark ever again. She should be able to handle this with more equanimity. Goodness knows she expects him to handle her past with calm the few times it does come up, is always surprised when he reacts with anything like anger. So why can't she just handle it the way she wants him to?

He's calm right now, at least, and she's faking it remarkably well. That will have to do for the moment. ] Okay. [ She knows she needs a more verbal answer than that, but it's taking her a moment to put words together that won't come out with all the heavy anger she feels. ] Thank you for telling me.

[ She hesitates for a moment, but then she lifts a hand and rests it on his shoulder for a little bit, squeezes and lets go. ] Sorry.

[ You know, surprisingly, he's totally with her on two fronts there: he knows how angry she gets when people hurt him, at least to a degree, and he's of the mind that no one's allowed to do that to him again. It's just weird, how he doesn't really enjoy it that much. At least in this particular respect.

It also puts a weird light on how he enjoys being controlled but hey that's not something she needs to make any particular connections to right now, right? He wouldn't be able to explain it any better than he's already not been able to when she asked about it before, anyway.

But he appreciates her making good on her promise, doesn't offer up any more information voluntarily - although if she wants it, this is pretty much the time to ask. If she wants more later it's really just up in the air as to whether he reacts the same way he did this time, if he's already okay with the idea, or if he handles it even more poorly. He waits instead for her next reaction, because while he asked for her not to react a particular way, it doesn't mean she can't react at all.

She can't really... react like that though, and he stops moving for a moment, because he can't tell why she's sorry. If she's apologizing for asking in the first place, he feels like he made that clear as to how he felt about that from the get-go. If she's apologizing for what happened, he's putting it on the same level as getting angry about it. If it's anything else, he just can't tell. There isn't any more physical shifting at the moment - he's just sort of frozen in place. ] Why.

[ Her getting mad on his behalf tends to have good results for him, so she doesn't know why he finds it so irritating. (No, she does, it's the same reasons she finds it hard to handle, but still.)

She's not sure yet if she wants more information, if there's more she wants to pull out of him, because she's having that moment of realization of having pushed her way into something he didn't really want her to push her way into. How much further is she willing to take it becomes the question, and how much she's willing to risk him being any angrier.

That's really hampering of her emotions, there, she's putting a fair amount of effort into making sure that he can't see them on her face or feel them in any respect from her, shields thorough and secure and everything locked down. She's allowed to say she's sorry. ] You shouldn't have had to deal with that. [ He should have been protected better, looked after, somebody making a little more certain that he was safe. ] I'm sorry you did.

[ He doesn't want to talk about this, at all, ever, but he feels like perhaps he might be able to just get this all done with now that they're in it. But maybe that's her call to make. He isn't sure.

So he shrugs, suddenly, and his posture is open and carefree. ] It happened. I'm over it. Could tell you stories, but. Nah. Not interesting enough. [ He suddenly remembers the apple, takes a bite out of it. ] It's in the past tense, so there's no need to be tense over the past.

[ Okay? ]

Okay? Now, do you wanna see this thing I made or do you want to ask more questions. Headsup - such questions will be answered in a location of my choosing.

[ She started the conversation, but technically he's the one with the most stake in it. The most meaning attached to it, at least, and the most likely to get hurt from it. She's not sure what that says about which of them has the most right to demand more from this, because she's the one who needs answers and he's the one who likely wants them to not happen. ]

Easy to say. [ Not nearly as easy to do, as she can say from her own personal experience with the past and the way it tends to keep coming back and pushing its claws straight into the spine of the present.

It would paralyze you, if you let it. ] What kind of location would that be? [ Because that's a question that she thinks needs answered before she asks any more questions. That phrasing made her - suspicious, or possibly just suddenly interested in what he considers suitable locale for answering questions about the past. ]

[ He mostly just shrugs what's more or less an agreement to that first statement. Some things are. Some aren't. Parts of things can be while the whole thing as a whole is very difficult. Who knows.

That question though: that makes him grin a little bit. He considers just saying 'You're just gonna have to follow me.', but chooses against it. He has no idea what mood she's in - hah, because her mind is locked down and away from him, but he knows what's going to be the least begrudged method of getting him to talk. ]

Bedroom.

[ That's the idea. Oddly. What was it you said so long ago? 'Bless your libido, Tony'. He's thought of a way for her to get what he wants and for him to give it to her without all this discomfort. Well, without most of it. Good enough. ]

[ Who knows is probably a really good response to the idea of the past and reactions to it in general, really. There's no way to look at it consistently because how you're viewing it is through the prism of your everyday experience and that changes moment to moment, is entirely mutable and subject to present experiences.

That grin makes her think she got her first guess at what he meant right, and what he follows it up with is easy enough to acquiesce to, even if her first response is to move closer, angle so that she's pushing him back against the table just with her body, not quite touching yet, making sure that she's not letting her body press against his at all yet. ]

That could work. [ But she's still blocking the path, stubborn and entirely in his way. Daring him to make a move, any move. ] If you're sure you'll answer the questions.

[ And some days it's easier to talk about other days than others, just because of reasons.

That's a decent sign of reciprocation, at least. He's pretty sure it is. It seems like it ought to be, anyway. He leans back instinctively with the loss of personal space, because he's making light of things now in the attempt to make even lighter of them, but they've still broached a very personal issue very recently. It's potentially easier than it should be to imitate indignation as to whether or not he'll make good on his end of the unspoken bargain here. All he does right now is straighten his posture a little bit, coming back to where he was before she crowded him in, which leaves him both slightly against the table and slightly brushing against her. ] If you're sure you can make me want to.

[ The past is another country, and a complicated one at that.

There's no outward reaction at first to him pushing back, just her watching him steadily and neutrally for a long time before she brings her hands up, brushing them very deliberately across the front and outsides of his thighs until they rest flat against his stomach for a long moment.

And then she takes her hands away and two decisive steps back, looks him up and down slowly and nods, face still giving nothing away. ] Bedroom, then.

[ Her turn is almost military in its precision, and she might not look like she's deliberately moving fast but her stride eats up space quickly as she walks out of the workshop back towards the stairs. ]

[ Aww, and here Tony forgot his passport. Oh well, guess that's that.

He waits, because for the both of them, eventually, there will be a reaction - it's just a matter of the length of time for which you're willing to wait one out. Usually (always), she wins this particular tactic hands down. He hasn't got the patience. But occasionally, on the rare moment here and there where she wants and he knows it, he can just tell, he does enjoy having the upper hand, even fleetingly, enough to overcome whatever it is that generally has him with a max wait time of about twenty-two seconds before he's giving in to whatever it is that she wants. (Because more often than not, he wants it too; he's just pretending he doesn't so she'll 'force' it on him.) He doesn't wait long.

She moves first, turning with such precision he momentarily thinks perhaps she was able to actually cut the air with the geometry of it. She looks like Rhodey, for a second, and he appreciates the hearkening, but he wants Max right now, so it's Max right now. Max, with the way her hips sway even if she's not trying to - a little bit of something to keep his eyes on as she leads them to the bedroom, because it's either that or consider the offer (ultimatum?) he just made, and he'd really rather not do that right now. He made it solely because he knows it's logistically something that ought to be shared in full now that it's been shared at all, but at the same time he knows he won't be able to actually talk about it. Not to any degree that conveys the meaning necessarily to understand his own actions about them.

So this way. Physical payment for personal truths. It might seem self-serving, or it might just seem fucked up, but it's the best he has to offer, and it's not like he isn't aware she's going to get something out of it as well. The question now becomes, what is she going to do to get him to answer? How far is she willing to go? He's willing to let her do almost whatever she feels like, in a moment of severe and exuberant recklessness, but mostly because he wants to see how far she'll actually go. Will she just restrain and tease? Hit? Restrain and interrogate? (Which might result in the safeword fairly early, because it's not hard to flash back to those flash backs, and then she'll be having to convince him he's not drowning, shh, it's okay.) 'Whatever you wants to do', though, that's how he's left it. ]

Do you actually have a plan? [ Goading, goading. Tony is incapable of letting something good potentially just be good without consideration. ] Or are you gonna make it up as you go along?

[ It's a tactic she has a great deal more practice in than he does. Not just in the immediate sense, in that it's one that she employs a lot more frequently than he does, but in the past. She learned patience over and over again, like it was the one thing life desperately wanted her to understand. Stake outs, hiding in the dark, pacing in a cell - she knows how to wait for what she wants, as long as it takes. And with him - with him she always wants it, anything and everything he'll give her. His attention, his body at her command, his eyes trained on her and nothing else, his patience.

Every shiver and sigh and shift beneath her. She wants it all, and she knows fully how capable she is of getting it, now. If there's a smile at the edges of her mouth it's the smile of someone winning, sharp and sure.

She thinks some people would probably disapprove of this particular manner of getting information you want out of someone, but Tony offered and this is - this is how they work. On the edges of more acceptable methods of transfer. They're neither of them healthy people, but at least they've found ways to merge that into something that works for both of them. And the goading, well. She was expecting that. Tony can't let something lie, is incapable of staying silent. ]

You didn't give me much warning. [ Which isn't either an answer or reproof, her tone deceptively mild even if she won't face him, keeps moving away even once she's in the bedroom. ] I try to stay prepared, though.

I never give you much warning. There's always either no warning or you pre-planned the whole thing.

[ Not that he minds, and there's no bitterness in the words. Just fact. It's another facet of the way they operate, and he enjoys it. He likes that neither one of them feels the need to conform to normalcy strongly enough to actually do more than compare how abnormal what they're doing is to the standard and then shrug and keep on going. It's nice, having someone else who is as outside the boundaries as he is, or occasionally doesn't even realize they are outside those boundaries (like he does). ]

Prepared how?

[ She makes a small noise of agreement, tips her head a little to one side and then turns to face him, hands folded behind her back. He does have a fair point there, really. They don't tend to go for the inbetweens.

But his question gets him nothing more than a slight shake of her head. She doesn't feel like answering questions if she doesn't have to, and right now she doesn't. Right now he's the one who has to answer questions, and that's all she intends to go through with. ]

Boy Scouts missed out when they didn't let me join. Take a few steps forward and kneel.

[ Well that ended fast. He's just going to casually get a little more tense, deliberating for a few moments even though it's not really like there's a whole lot of choice. Do it or don't - that's the choice.

And it's not that he doesn't want to, and he's well aware that this is something he actually offered, but that doesn't ultimately remove the knee-jerk discomfort stemming from the subject in the first place, or the fact that he's constantly attempting to avoid answering questions about himself. Well, some kinds of questions about himself. He's answered the same twenty-five questions for various magazines more times than he thinks even he can count.

So it's really more a few moments where he forces himself into switching mindsets. Stalling really didn't even - she didn't even sort of let that happen, and he was using it as a go-between, because they really don't, they never do anything in the middle, and between all or nothing in this particular instance he had been coming down rather more heavily on the latter.

Three or four, that counts as a few, right? Three and a half, ish steps, anyway - the last one gets caught up in going to his knees, because once committed, he doesn't feel like putting that sort of thing off. ]

Boy scouts are dicks anyway. You didn't miss out.

[ She doesn't intend to go directly back to the asking questions, in part because she feels he needs a little bit of time to adjust and in part because there's something else she'd like to address first, but she doesn't see any need to tell him this just yet. He can do what she says without knowing what's happening next. That's part of the point, after all, isn't it?

She circles as he moves forward, until by the time he's on his knees she's to his side and almost behind him, and then a moment later she's almost directly behind him, crouching down so that she can start to pull his shirt up and off. ]

Good to know. You walked away from me. [ It's still very even, everything about her motions and voice and expression right now methodical and deliberate. He walked away from her after she told him not to, and she wants to address that before she starts asking him questions again. ] I didn't appreciate it.

[ It's part of the point and goes against precisely half his instincts while simultaneously calming the other half down. He has a difficult time feeling comfortable in just about any given situation.

He doesn't try to follow her movements, stays more or less looking ahead where she was, because the point of walking around or behind someone is so that they can't see you, and he can project the likely response to that fairly easily. It's a quick glance down and to the side - not moving his head very much, just sticking to within the frame of vision he already has - when she comes up behind him though. That one is difficult to ignore. But he doesn't resist her pulling the shirt, shifts a little to help it slide off when it's necessary. It's helpful in regards to ignoring what she's actually saying, because yeah he did that and yeah he didn't really think she'd be happy about it but it was just something he needed to do at the time. He's not sorry for it, even if she's making it clear that it's being filed with other mistakes he's made in the past. Just means that he straightens a little bit, tilts his head just enough without thinking about it in that way that stubborn people do when they're exercising their right to be - usually - wrong about something, but with emphasis. ]

You pushed. I didn't appreciate it.

[ With diametrically opposing instincts like that, he would. But then in a situation like this, not feeling entirely comfortable with it makes sense. It's part of how things go. It's discomfort that at least you asked for.

That's a good choice on his part, because at this moment in time she wouldn't be very pleased with him going against even things that are unspoken. It's not time for that right now. She tosses the shirt aside, slides her fingers up the curve of his spine and presses her lips to his shoulder, nips at it before pulling away and standing back up, continuing to talk as she moves around the room. ]

I could tell. You still don't walk away when I tell you not to. [ Sharper, wielding words like a whip for just a moment, and then she falls back into evener cadence. ] I'm going to blindfold you now.

[ It's cool - even he can tell that it's not time for that right now. There might be a time, later, but as it is he's pretty sure he's going to need to save up whatever leniency he can earn for questions he's not going to want to answer too much.

That probably earns her pretty much the reaction she was looking for. He was already fairly straight-backed, but there's a tension borne of energy that breaks out across his skin and shoulders at the touch. He manages to stay still even for the nip, but by the time she's saying the blindfold comment, he's looking straight forward again. There's a flicker up to look at her for just a second, then back across to some random part of the room. ] Okay. Sure.

[ He should definitely work on saving up that leniency, because she's not in the mood to grant much at all. What little there is should be saved for when he actually really wants it.

That is pretty much the reaction she was looking for, the frisson of energy and the visible reactions to what's really very little. Start slow, work your way up. It's a good policy, she generally finds. But for right now she's just watching him for that moment before she retrieves the blindfold, moves back behind him, standing closer this time so that her legs are almost touching his bare back but not quite. ] Same safeword? [ They may have a deal here, but he still has to have an available out. No matter what. ]

[ Precisely. Prioritizing. He's prioritizing.

And staying very still while she's away from him. If he moves - well he'll move more than he probably will have meant to and that's also bad. There's a lot of ways for all of this to go wrong, he thinks. He's probably over-thinking it anyway. So he'll just sort of nod a little bit and voice an assent. ] S'fine. Great. [ And maybe lean back towards her a little bit. Contact, man. ]

[ There are always a pretty significant amount of ways for things to go bad, with them. That's what happens when you put two significantly damaged people in a situation as delicate as one like this can be. That they've managed to do quite well so far is, she thinks, a strong indication that they've actually got quite a good handle on this.

Still, the potential to fuck it up is always there. She rewards his stillness with a hand against his cheek for a tiny space but pulls it away again a moment later so that she can slip the blindfold on, adjust it even as she steps backwards just enough to ensure that his lean doesn't get him contact. She didn't offer it, so he can't have it yet. But she does lean down as she finishes making sure the knot is secure, lips just brushing against his ear when she speaks. ] If you're so over it, why do you need all this to talk about it?

[ Blindfolding he doesn't really have any sort of direct negative things with. It's a thing that happens, but it's not a thing that could happen. It's just... A thing.

Right now it's a nice thing. It makes him slightly more antsy - he's irritated when she moves away from him, but it stays relegated down to a slight huff of air, and honestly it could just be from the whole experience today. There's not a whole lot else to be said for that though - he's still trying not to react too much, and she's not putting a whole lot into things yet. It's hard to control his skin though - the muscles were okay, he's got some input there, at least.

There's still another moment before he actually decides he's going to answer though. ] I'm pretty sure that just means I'm lying.

[ She knows he doesn't, but it still took a long time for her to be willing to do it to him at all simply because of her own negative associations with it. But right now she wants to limit outside input to him, wants to keep him without distractions and without any focus but her.

She's selfish. Always has been, when it comes to him. There's a soft hum at his answer, her fingers threading into the hair at the nape of his neck and tugging sharply backwards to tilt his head up. ] I don't like being lied to. [ There's almost no sound associated with her movement as she circles back around to the front and crouches down, but her free hand slides down his arm to his elbow, fingers pressing momentarily against a cluster of nerves. It's carefully calculated, pain for only a moment, almost more as a test than anything else. ]

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ily sleep well

ty i hope you did as well

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i stopped to read old threads before answering this and surfaced a long time later

it's okay i've been rereading old threads off and on for like four days

some of them are like 400+ comments they eat time

several of them are like 400+ comments

last time i checked i had like 4.5k comments from you in my inbox

oh my /god/

YEAH MAN

idk if i should feel proud or worried or

like 1/3 of your comments from tony's account are to me i just feel proud

that's only slightly horrifying

8D 8D 8D

uh huh thank you that doesn't look crazy

i am a deeply reassuring and totally believable and sane person