fe_male | memeboxing

[ She doesn't actually do a great deal of digging as to Tony's past. It's kind of a silent bargain between them, or maybe she's imagining that part but she knows he doesn't look into her past and fair's fair, right?

Nobody needs to spend all their time burdened by the past, and that includes the people around them knowing about it. Sometimes it's better to just leave it buried there.

But sometimes you find things out completely on accident, and when someone made a casual joking reference to Tony's long and storied history with kidnapping, well. She'd gotten a little curious. She knew about Afghanistan, but they'd made it sound a lot bigger than that, which dovetailed in with comments he'd dropped himself over time. It was somewhere in the middle of SHIELD's file on his childhood that she gets frustrated and pushes her chair clear so that she's in his line of sight. ] Exactly how many times have people tried to kidnap you?

[ He's just working, chatting with his bots as he and they by proxy shape whatever groundbreaking thing it is that he's working on now. Suits, maybe, maybe environmental, sometimes he just calls up the Oracle network so that he can get a good feel for what's happening out there in the world, what's out there that he's not supposed to even be aware of. (And he gets that. He gets keeping the majority of civilian America save and unworried, but dammit, he's not a part of civilian America.

So he's in a decent mood - didn't find anything new from SHIELD, didn't dig up anything interesting with his little bugs, Jarvis is being snippy with him but that's just because he's gone for a while without sleep again and after about fifty hours awake the AI starts to shift rapidly into mother hen mode.

He comes upstairs for some form of sustenance when Jarvis actually locks down everything in the lab just shy of turning off the three bots, because not even Jay-man has the heart to do that. Tony grouses, and complains, but goes upstairs for food anyway.

He does not, however, make it all the way back down when she asks him the question, and he pauses, apple in mouth and sandwich and water bottle in hand. He takes the bite out of the apple, free hand coming up to hold it while he chews, looking at her. ] Old news. You wanna see what I'm working on?

[ If she was keeping track of how long it's been since he slept this particular round she might have put off the question till later, but as it is she hasn't been and the question gets asked anyways. It's just - she's mad, a little bit. Not at him.

Maybe a little at him for treating it so flippantly over time, but on the other hand that makes sense. She can understand wanting something to be less important than it is and treating it as such in the hope it will be, but it's still - she doesn't like this.

She's not entirely sure what she feels, which is probably part of why she's mad. ] I wasn't asking for fun. I want to know. [ And yeah, she wants to see what he's working on, but that can wait a little bit. She can see that later. ]

[ He would be even less inclined to actually share anything of importance with you were he less sleep deprived anyway though so this is probably working in your favour.

But for the moment, he finishes the apple in his mouth, takes his time about it, and then swallows it before replying to her again, because she's getting into shit he buried a long long time ago, and he's neither sure of whether he wants her to be privy to such information, nor if he's feeling up to going down that particular road himself. So he watches her, as he finishes with the food in his mouth.

And he chooses to give her an answer, albeit a vague one, not at all like what she's actually asking for. He shrugs, starts to move back downstairs, where he's safe from stupid delvings like this. ] Handful.

[ No it's clearly not working in her favor enough here.

She's just waiting as he finishes, arms folded as she leans back in her chair, clearly settled in for the long haul and with no intention of leaving this alone, like a dog with a bone that's sitting so that nobody can take the bone away.

If he thinks he can get her to drop this, he's badly mistaken. Especially since she's not even sure where she's going specifically with it, just that she needs to know. ] That's not an answer. [ Flat and very unimpressed as she lifts her chin. ] Don't walk away from me, Tony. [ Because she sees that first movement towards the stairs and she doesn't like it. He's not getting out of this just by leaving. ]

[ He stops, dead still as she finishes her second sentence. Not looking at her, not moving towards the stairs, a relatively guarded yet still someone blank expression on his face. He doesn't know who or what clued her in to this whole... Line of questioning, but he is totally going to sic the IRS after them when this is over. He thought the pair of them had already had this conversation.

Or maybe he was simply wishing they had, or that she had silently understood the sort of life one leads when ones father is wealthy, intelligent, and knows how to build almost anything for other people. It never actually worked - ransoms were paid to save face, but only after a 'hunt to find the child' to be sure that they couldn't just retrieve him on their own. Howard's own. Tony had spent days away from home at times, and eventually he'd learned to escape on his own. The kidnappers wouldn't admit to this, never, and the first time it happened, Howard was genuinely pleased to see his son trot through the door.

It had the unintended consequence of meaning that Howard from then on out assumed Tony could take care of himself, and all but antagonized whoever else dared to kidnap the progeny of Howard Stark.

Either way, he's frozen by the stairs, looking down them, because that's where he wants to go. He would really like to go downstairs right now and get away from this. He definitely doesn't want to look at her face right now and give her something numerical. He's barely tolerating just standing still, but he doesn't know what else to do. ]

Why? Where did this come from?

[ They totally haven't had this conversation yet. It hasn't happened. It's come up obliquely and then they both immediately slid off of it because it wasn't important at that moment. She couldn't tell you why it is important now, but it is.

That one, the one where he'd gotten away on his own - she'd hit just past that report when she'd seen him and stopped reading to just go ahead and ask him. He'd been a child, and she'd thought she'd understood at least well enough how difficult his childhood had been but this was something else entirely.

Maybe it's because she feels so helpless to do anything about it that she's mad. Maybe that's it. ]

Something someone said pinged off things you've said. You know how trains of thought go. [ But that's really not important, just a delaying tactic. She doesn't want delaying, she wants an answer. Seeing him give her a number, maybe that will give her a better grasp of the scope of things. ] Still not an answer.

[ He narrows his eyes a little bit at that. 'Something someone said pinged off things you've said.' He wonders who's been talking and about what. Logically, it should just be people discussing Afghanistan, in which case the thing he said was that gave her pause to consider that it had happened more than once.

He rather feverishly hopes it's somehow the other way around, but in his experience life doesn't work like that.

Asking her about what the other person said or whatever it was that he himself said isn't really likely to get him anywhere, so he just ignores both potential lines of thought and moves on to something else. Specifically, how many times has he been kidnapped. ]

Clarify 'kidnapped'?

[ It was mostly things he'd said, because she tends to file those away much more carefully than things anyone else said, and without those things she wouldn't have given other people's words much more of a thought. She doesn't tend to. She doesn't like people, so she doesn't listen to them much.

Seriously, world's biggest delaying game. Tony, this is not a thing she's going to fall for. She's too used to him and his method of conversation by now, and besides that she's stubborn as hell and once she actually gets bent on needing an answer she doesn't let herself be side tracked very easily.

So if he wants a definition, she'll give one. ] People holding you against your will with coercion in an attempt to get something out of you or others.

[ Damn it's hard to get any wiggle room in that definition. The set to his jaw tightens for a few seconds, as he considers. And remembers a few things he'd have preferred to not have to think about again. But he comes up with some numbers - it's not that difficult, really. The experiences tend to stand out quite brashly in comparison to what took place around them.

And he's looking at her and trying to figure out why she suddenly needs this sort of information, because he can't really figure out why she wants it now, why she didn't want it before, and it's actually longer he spends standing there trying to figure that part out than it took him to mentally tally all the times he's been or attempted to have been kidnapped and decide whether or not to tell her.

He doesn't want to tell her, but maybe she needs to know. Maybe she's been kidnapped too - he knows she has - and she needs the anchor. That's what he's choosing to believe, because if she's asking because she's retroactively worried about him, well, that reason wouldn't have gotten her a straight answer.

So he shrugs, makes to start moving downstairs anyway as soon as he starts talking, so that she's forced to follow him to his own space if she wants to follow up on it. ] Different rates at different times. Slowed down when I went to boarding school. Then again when I was an adolescent. [ And by now he probably is downstairs, so if she stayed in place and doesn't hear this part, it's totally her own fault. ] Picked back up a little bit with the Avengers, but not too much. [ Back to work, yo. ]

[ The point of her definition, he managed to land straight on it. Good work. She meets his look solidly, face neutral enough despite everything. Her poker face has always been good (should be after all the practice she's put into it) and right now she feels like employing it if for no other reason than she thinks letting him see that she's conflicted about this whole affair is a bad idea.

If he asked her why she needs the information, she wouldn't be able to tell him. Mostly because it's not really the information itself she needs so much as the look on his face and the shape of his body when he answers. The exact numbers she could get if she just kept reading through files.

And then he starts walking away anyways and that does it. That's the straw that turns her rather complicated emotional state just to anger and frustration, because those are easier than anything else she's feeling right now and he's walking away after she'd told him not to. She doesn't like people doing things she's told them not to. With him she particularly doesn't like it for a long list of complicated reasons.

So she does get up, and she does follow him downstairs, but she's completely silent about it until he's apparently finished talking and is turning to his work. She's still moving at that point, directly into his personal space without any regard for it as she slides between him and the workbench, angles her body to push him back. ] I'm not hearing any numbers. [ Her voice is very detached and calm, but her face is settling into something hooded and displeased. ]

[ Well gee, sorry, but she's not the only one being irritated by this sudden conversation. He's not even a little bit sure why she's suddenly latched on to this idea, but he's pretty sure whoever put her on the trail of it is going to be on the wrong end of some very creative cyberbullying.

To a degree, going downstairs was three things: a clear sign that he was finished with the topic and unwilling to divulge more information; that she was interrupting him in the middle of something else; and he simply felt less exposed and caught off-guard in his workshop than he did standing dumbly halfway in the top of the staircase. If it's truly a topic she wants to explore, she'll put the effort into it.

Although, that sort of effort is just irritating. He takes a quick step backwards because wow serious invasion of his personal bubble there, not cool, and now he's just openly scowling at her, coming to a stop a good two or three steps back - it wasn't a retreat, it wasn't, he just needs the space - and crossing his arms defensively. The way his holds his shoulders, his arms rest a little higher than they would have otherwise, relatively unnoticeable save for the fact that it effectively shields the light from the reactor behind them. It would look slightly more impressive if he weren't still holding a half-eaten apple in one hand, though. ]

I'm sure it's in whatever file you were looking at already. That is why you came to ask, right? [ And no, that wasn't sarcastically feigned ignorance at all. ] It's happened at least twice since we've known each other. Extrapolate for yourself. Or keep reading, I don't really care, since it doesn't matter. It happens. [ And he's shrugging, brushing it off and just turning to another screen, since she won't let him get near his desk. ] Half the reason there's such a big tae-kwon-do hoo-hah after school movement.

[ He's the one who wanted her to put effort into it - he's just going to have to deal if he finds her effort irritating, because she finds him walking away equally irritating. There's a balance and that doesn't fit into it.

She doesn't miss where his arms rest, how he's holding himself, because his body language is something she's very carefully attuned to even if body language in general wasn't something she's always paying close attention to. She's not touching his mind because there are rules and agreements, but she steps forward again anyways. ]

I asked because I wanted you to tell me. [ She's just going to skip the file comment, mostly because it's completely accurate. ] Your reluctance to tell me is just telling me that I was right to want you to.

If you wanted a straight answer I'd have thought you'd know by now to have just kept reading.

[ It's not always a correct answer, but it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to get one out of Tony himself. The words are a little more biting, a little more bitter than he actually intends to direct towards her specifically, which matches the way he's mostly facing something else again. She's right, with her logic, and he's annoyed because the logic in talking is always either that you have nothing to hide and shouldn't have a problem with just spilling your guts, or that you're tight-lipped and taciturn because there's some deep dark secret waiting to be spilled instead. It's uncomfortable and messy either way, and he hasn't always seen what's so great about sharing things with other people. More often than not it just means it gets shared with everyone else, and more often than that, there's not much you can do about it anyway. At least not volunteering the information yourself gives you an indignant leg to stand on later.

Anyway. This isn't about whatever trust issues he might have. (Because he totally has them.) This is apparently about all the ones that have to do with those issues instead. He's not trying to be angry at her, because he gets curious too, and this is exactly the kind of thing he would have forced with her (except where, no, he is perfectly okay with reading everything he can first and then just confronting them with the information rather than trying to get it from them via confrontation). He's not trying to be angry, she's just making it difficult not to be. ]

You're just going to - get angry. Er. Angrier. And not at me, which I can handle. [ She's going to get the answer from him, he already knows that. He gets too irritated too fast to not wind up just giving it to her to make the situation stop. It doesn't mean he's going to just give in though, and right now he's in a weird state of paying a lot of attention to her without actively paying a lot of attention to her. ] You're gonna get mad for me, and I don't want it. So I'm pissing you off now and just asking you to read it - preferably on the other side of the house. Or maybe when I'm not here. [ Or he'll just finally look at her. This tag is long enough now where I feel like that's an okay thing to do again. ] I'll give you a brief, but - I don't want to feel it. Either or.

Maybe I just wanted your answer.

[ She's not fond of biting and bitter directed at her, but she can put up with it short term if it gets her what she wants in the end, can push back until he gets it through his head that he's not going to succeed in sending her away, that she's not going anywhere. Her persistence is a lesson you'd think he'd have already learned, but then there's his persistence to contend with as well.

They're complicated people. It makes for a complicated relationship and understanding of how things work between them. Nothing's ever allowed to just be easy, really, is it.

And the leg to stand on is at least part of the point of asking him instead of just continuing to read the file. It's a much more legitimate way to get information, and it means he won't be surprised later when she knows it. Mostly though she just wants him to tell her, and all these delaying tactics are only serving to irritate her. Which is his point, she knows, but they're not irritating her nearly enough to make her leave. ] I don't leave when I'm mad. [ Seriously, this whole constantly facing away thing is annoying, though. When he does finally turn to face her she's watching him carefully, narrowed eyes and every tactic she's learned over the years that makes her take up space, demand attention. ] I have enough control to keep you from feeling anything that I might feel.

Are you done finding objections yet?

[ No, you don't leave when you're mad, but he does. Tony leaves, when he's so angry he feels like he's about to crack into shards and fall apart on the floor, when he knows that the things he is starting to want to say are going to be immediately to his own detriment in several fashions, because they're petty and childish and ill-thought-out. He leaves when he feels like he's about to do something even he - with his slim awareness of this - feels like he'll regret later. It's a tactic, and it looks like more of one than it is, because it's not so much self-defense or preservation as it is the need, and recognizing the need, to not Completely Fuck Up these particular relationships. Some of them are special, sacred, like this one, and if leaving and pissing her off is how he knows to prevent burning this bridge down too, then he's only got the one option available to him, doesn't he?

He sighs a little, because he knew that was going to be the answer regardless. It's not that he doesn't believe her, that she can keep her reaction to herself - he almost completely believes her, but they're so close, and she's not going to be able to control her shields and her walls and her face and her mouth like that, perhaps. He's not sure, but he wants to believe her. ] The brief, then. [ Looking at her but up through his eyelashes, because he's tilted his face down and is looking up at her in that gesture for imperative attention. ] Brief. Three, then boarding school. Twice there. Twice in high school. Maybe three at MIT. After that, at least one or three attempts a year until about twenty-five. Died down. Only one attempt between twenty-five and Afghanistan. Two or three with the Avengers, because there's now a sixth reason for doing it. [ He stops working entirely, but he's long since stopped looking at her. He's looking down, a little, off towards the side she's standing on but not near her, just zoned out on something he found safe to look at. ] Three ransoms, three rescues, two just let me go again. Lots of people tried, but I'm not an idiot. Talked one of them into taking me back to my hotel. Paid me for the trouble. Works out a little better when the don't put a gag in, obviously. Got away from several. By myself. [ He looks her right in the eye for a moment, to see if she's making good on her promise to keep herself to herself and also just to see what her reaction then therefore is. Just as abruptly, he's full of life, going back to what he was doing. ]

Them's the brief.

[ 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.

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sleep well

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ily sleep well