cor a apparatus
the avengers (2012). tony stark x natasha romanoff. the heart of the machine. ~800 words | r
for the porn battle

they rip his heart, she puts it back in. It’s as simple as that.

it’s not of course (there’s always more to the iceberg than just the tip that spears out of the dark water, hell to ships and hell to men; there’s politics and a terrorist’s too white smile and the blue-hue glow of his heart and the sparks and the wheeze as he reaches into his chest and pulls it out, oil dripping down his gripping fingers like dark sticky blood)

Tony Stark thinks he’s dead, then, dominoed back to the beginning—he was never supposed to leave that cave alive, and maybe he never did.

Natasha Romanoff seems to have a differing opinion, and she jams his heart right back into his chest—merciless and strong, and her hair bleeds a thick red down her shoulders, and Tony thinks there some sort of irony here because she bleeds everyday but when they take out his heart, all he has in him is black.

He wakes up in a hospital. There’s Pepper and Happy, and worries and fears to alleviate (“come on, Pepper<,” he says with bravado he hates to admit rings false; it’s too much like when he had been dying and trying to keep it together, trying to leave it so the few people he cared about weren’t left swallowing ash, “it takes a bit then a high-powered rocket to my chest to decommission me.”)

All the while, Special Agent Romanoff stands just outside the door, one leather-clad leg and both arms crossed, red hair tangled down her back. The edges are singed, and she’ll have to cut it soon—and short.

But not yet.

“I’m bored,” Tony says. The plastic bracelet around his wrist scraps the hairs on his arm and he hates it—hates hospitals. Hospitals are where the sick go to die.

Natasha, perched gracefully on the edge of a chair she’s scooted by his bed, merely lifts an eyebrow.

“Natasha,” there’s a whine this time.

“You’re the one who sent Pepper away,” she points out.

Pepper who had never left his bedside, who had gripped his hand like a lifeline, looked at him like he hung the stars or something equally pathetically romantic that they would never really ever own up to feeling. Pepper who had— “She wouldn’t stop crying. I did it for my own sanity.”

“She loves you,” Natasha says simply and Tony almost snaps—what do you know about love—but some measure of self preservation stops him. Brush with death will do that.

“She’s crazy. Certifiable,” he says. Then, quickly, “You never cry, Agent Romanoff. Why?”

“In Russia, they beat it out of me.”

Tony frowns. “That’s terrible. You’re supposed to be keeping an invalid company, and you’re going to regale him with depressing tales of Soviet Russia? Go, on. Tell me something happy.”

“I could say,” a heavy Russian accent flavors her words, like it’s a switch she can turn on and off, “in my country, tears freeze on our cheeks and so we do no cry—we drink vodka.”

“My God,” Tony says. “Your sense of humor is appalling, Agent Romanoff.”

“I never claimed to be a comedian. That’s Clint’s job.”

The silence stretches out, and then quietly, Tony says, “You saved my life. You sort of put my heart back in. So. Thank you.”

She stands, and he hears the leather encasing her thighs brush together, and then she climbs into the bed with him, and Tony does what he does best. He stops thinking. His hands play at the slick leather on her hips, the zipper pulls down her middle—oh, Tony thinks, those are mine hands—and sex isn’t something new or especially unique to him, but he feels off his game with Agent Natalia Alianovna Romanova (she thinks he didn’t bother looking up her full history; or she pretends).

The heart, he thinks.

“Well. This is odd. Shouldn’t I be the one saying thank you?” He hisses out a breath as she lifts his hospital gown and there yes, her small warm hand around his rapidly hardening cock.

“If we’re going to do this,” she points out, “you’re going to have to be quiet.”

“Quiet. Yes.” He smiles. “Like a mouse.”

They shimmy her out of her leather, and Tony’s fingers trace a familiar path to warm, wet woman and she lays her forearm across the pillow above his head, and leans in and kisses him. Not a real kiss, mind. Because Natasha Romanoff kisses like an assault, like he’s a tree she’s going to cut down, a castle she’s going to siege.

“Just this once,” she says, pulling away sharply. They both watch as she eases herself down on top of him.

“Just this once,” he repeats, and rolls up into her. Just this once. It’s what he’s good at, after all.

[fic: ouat]

trysts — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:16:08 GMT

trysts — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:46:33 GMT

and alas, for I cannot swim

game of thrones/song of ice and fire. au. robb/jeyne/theon. spoilers. how sad, alas, it is to see my people shrunk so small, so small. ~11000 | pg13
part one

In ruck and quibble of courtfolk
The giant hulked, I tell you, on her scene
With hands like derricks,
Looks fierce and black as rooks;
Why, all the windows broke when he stalked in.
-The Queen’s Complaint, Sylvia Plath

In the end, Robb gives Sansa Joffrey’s head. Presents it to her, the blood drip-splattering against the stone floor. She touches the matted hair, finger catching in the knots, as if she needs to test the solidness of it, the realness. Joffrey’s is not the only head to be cleaved from his shoulders—his is the last, in fact, Robb had made him watch as he took Queen Cersei’s and Lord Tywin’s and Ser Jaime’s and Lord Tyrion’s; the man who passes the sentence, he had said to the crowd that had gathered, must be the one to swing the sword and down he had brought Ice, over and over again until the Sept of Baelor ran red—but they are insignificant to her. She cares only for the head of her betrothed.

Robb asks her what she wants. Sansa requests Winterfell, home. He sends her there with Eddard Stark’s bones for the crypt and Joffrey’s head for Winterfell’s walls. The North does not forget, he tells his sister, and she repeats it like a prayer.

Lady Catelyn ransoms Arya from the Hound, who is given his gold but not his life. He had eaten under her father’s roof and was treated with every courtesy, but the Brothers Without Banners soon fall upon him, he does not leave the Riverlands alive—he asks for gold and it was given, Lady Catelyn writes to her son, he never once asked for life. Perhaps he had not wanted it.

The executions go on for days. Varys and Grand Maestar Pycelle, Spymaster Qyburn and countless gold cloaks. He promises a similar to fate to Lord Baelish, disappeared into the night.
Winter had come, at last, to King’s Landing and what a chill it was, Ice cutting through flesh as it were the softest bread.

It was Barristan who said to Robb, “And the Iron Throne, Your Grace? What of it?”

Robb sends his sister north, but he stays. Dacey Mormont takes up the White Cloak left unworn in the wake of Jaime Lannister’s demise. He names a reluctant Brynden Tully his Hand. Not long after, in the cover of darkness, Balon Greyjoy dies—his son takes the Seastone Chair as his own, and bends his knee to the King in the North, who traveled south.

And Robb Stark’s queen, the girl who had once been Jeyne Westerling, cannot help but tremble beneath the crown they place on top her head.

In the beginning, they walk among the gardens. King’s Landing is alien and unsettling to them both, and they take comfort in that. Robb Stark is a northman, bred with ice wedged in his teeth. Jeyne is a Southron child, but she is familiar with cold waves and jagged rocks clinging to the edges of her castle. In King’s Landing they both stomp like untrained bulls.

“I can see why he didn’t take it.” Robb pauses, and at last acknowledges that his queen does not know him, cannot read his thoughts or sense the feelings he buries beneath the snow of his determination. “My father. He was the first—to reach the Iron Throne, but he gave it to King Robert. He went back north. Starks don’t belong in the south. We melt.”

Jeyne has been married to the Young Wolf for a year, but it feels as if she beds a stranger. He keeps so much from her, locked away in places she is not allowed to touch. She knows what his court must think of her already—once they damned her for his fall, now they find her undeserving of her crown, a greedy woman who’d surrendered her castle and her virtue for the seduction of a king—and wonders what he thinks.

She dares not ask. Instead, she makes small murmur of acquaintance and says, “I’m sorry, my lord.” Because Jeyne is courteous, because Jeyne is polite, because Jeyne was taught her manners and remembered them well.

Once, she had lived by the shore and had thought herself the future wife of a hedge knight of some small fame—bad blood, Ser Kevan Lannister had written once, doubtful blood. She’s a pretty girl, my lady, but prettiness fades and the blood remains.

Robb looks at her as if to say something more, and she thinks she must feel the brush of his fingertips against her knuckles—

“It’s no matter, my lady. Come, I’ve business to attend.”

—accidently, of course.

It’s not long before the full story comes out—Jeyne, covered in barely more than her shift, with the blood of her maidenhead drying on her thighs, kneeling down onto the cold sept with Robb Stark, the boy who would be king.

“It won’t matter,” her mother says, “once you give him a trueborn heir.” Her lips twist. “When he grows tall and strong, they won’t think twice about the blood, will they? Here now. Drink up, love.”

Jeyne notices the different taste of the potion, less bitter than before, less of an aftertaste on her tongue. She says nothing—perhaps all food will have different tastes, different textures, now that she eats them in King’s Landing?

She drinks it heartily, as she always has. It is a Frey girl who should wear the queen’s crown, and she cannot forget. She is neither beautiful nor clever nor graceful. She must instead rely on the one talent specific to her sex—she must give her husband sons.

Jeyne nearly dies on the childbed. Good hips are not enough to cancel slenderness it seems, and she slips in and out of fevers for nigh four days.

She awakes to find Robb sitting beside her, the weight of him leaving deep depressions in the bed. Jeyne only has the smallest of strength, and she uses it to touch him lightly at his elbow.

“You nearly died giving me my son, my queen,” he says, his voice like the sharp points of shattered glass, like the rocks that had spiraled out beside her castle. “But I am told you will recover.”

He leaves her then, and Jeyne feasts upon the bitter remains of rejection, of failure. Her hand curls into a fist upon the warmth from where he sat. She wishes she could say that the smell of him lingers on in her furs, days after he has left, but the sad truth of it is that it leaves within minutes, swept away from her by a drafty breeze.

The king does not visit her chambers again.

Jeyne has not the vivaciousness that Cersei Lannister had possessed. Her beauty is mild, her ways cautious and unsure. She must lead her court the only way she knows how—a learned amiability and inherent kindness.

Margaery Tyrell becomes an uncertain ally. Lord Mace was quick to bend the knee to the King in the North when he’d claimed the Iron Throne as his by right of conquest, and Lord Renly’s young widow is a breath of fresh air in a stifled room—smiling and laughing with an accomplished ease that makes Jeyne feel clumsy and oafish before her.

(“we must do something about her,” Jeyne says later. Robb makes it a habit to walk her through the gardens, though it is often uncomfortable and disquiet, pregnant with a thick aura of restlessness between them.

“Her?” Robb asks.

“Lady Margaery,” she explains. “There are whispers of a match between her and Quentyn Martell.” The Martells have little love for the harsh, weathered northmen, she has learned. Their acceptance of Robb Stark as King is begrudging, carried with an undercurrent of bitterness—Robb would not bend on his decision to break the betrothal of Myrcella Baratheon and Trystan Martell, and Stannis Baratheon still seethed in the waters of Blackwater Bay, held back by Ironborn longships. Tommen and Myrcella Baratheon assured the Stormlands and the Westerlands.

He says, “I will think on it.”

Jeyne thinks this is a moment to feel proud, this a moment to feel like a queen. Instead, Robb looks at her with a mixture of distaste and disapproval—he has commented he has no stomach for the game of thrones that is enjoyed here, and she is swallowed up by a sudden shame.)

When Theon Greyjoy comes to collect his bride, Jeyne finds it a wonder the whole keep doesn’t shake with his steps.

(she loves Robb. Here, that is important to know. She loves, specifically, Robb—he’d taken a wound when he’d conquered her castle, and colossal male arrogance had allowed it to fester.

In a fever, he’d kissed her and she’d resisted. The day before he’d taken his host to march she gave herself over to him, fully and completely. She’d never thought he’d marry her, she only thought to have something for herself—something that could be hers and hers alone—and he’d been such a young boy, really, breaking beneath the weight of his crown even then. She’d wanted to give him something too.

She’d woken to the early morning air on her skin, and a king staring at the waves crashing against the rocks below her window. She would have left him to his thoughts; only it was her room and her dress was torn, ands she did not know where else to go.

We will marry, Jeyne, he’d said and his tone had brokered no arguments. He took her before the sept, done up in his furs, looking uneasy kneeling there. He’d be more at home in the godswood, where he pledged himself to her and she repeated the words in a strangely fuzzy tongue. It felt like a half-dream still, even with a crown and a child that was his.

And a wiser woman would have said no, would have taken the subtly offered hand of her brother and fled. But she remembered the feel of Robb’s mouth, trailing fire down her skin, and the way he had fit inside her, marking her as his own, how he had called her name in a steady flow, begging her for something she hadn’t fully understood.)

Robb is different with Theon. Jeyne keeps her head down, but it is impossible to take no note of it. He spends less time with the Small Council, more with this childhood friend. They drill the soldiers together, playing with swords as Jeyne imagines they must have on the snowy grounds of Winterfell.

She watches from above, a world apart.

The sound of his laughter rings like hollow bells in her ears, the glance of his smile as he turns the corner drives deep wedges into her ribs. Has he laughed, in the whole of her presence? Has she ever known his smile to come easy and careless, if it came at all?

Robb had not spoke of Theon often, before he had come, but he’d always been Theon, never Lord Greyjoy; never anything but Theon. It is not enough for Jeyne to pull apart the complexities of Eddard Stark’s former ward, but it is telling.

There is a feast the first night of his arrival—Robb states he has no taste for tourneys and so it is forgone, despite Margaery’s protest—and Theon sits at the place of honor, his elbow brushing against Jeyne’s.

He wears his grin like armor, arrogance built up like a wall. If there’s a leer in his gaze when he takes in the queen in her fine gown—silk and lace and velvet, fabrics that have never touched her skin before, that she had shivered underneath and felt naked—it’s in a clinical sort of way.

“And Jon? You’ve been to see Jon?” Robb demands.

Jon, Jeyne remembers, the natural born brother on the Wall. There is talk, of going on north of the Wall. Ravens have arrived, requesting aid. Robb sent what men he could spare, but their resources are limited.

“Settling into commandership, from what I could tell.” Theon shakes his head and releases a laugh. “Bloody bastard, should have known he’d not content himself with rangering when he could have the whole damned thing.”

Margaery coughs at Jeyne’s side, a small dark glance toward the man who would be her husband.

“I’ve wanted to go there myself,” Robb explains, saying things he has never spoken of to Jeyne before. “But things are complicated here—we’ve so much to settle yet.”

“Robb Stark, King of the Iron Throne. There’s a title I’d never pick for you.” Theon’s grin is sharp and fast, like a knife cutting across the bottom of his face. “Shall I call you Your Grace? Proffer you my arm?”

“Do as you will,” Robb says, and his laughing is booming—almost like the Greatjon’s and Jeyne wonders if he was like that, before? “I’ll remind you why words don’t leave the bruises swords do in the courtyard on the morrow.”

“Ha! I’d have to let you win, wouldn’t I? Like to have my hands cut off for leaving a single mark on His Grace.” Theon looks over at her, suddenly, and winks. “Still, kinghood has its perks, doesn’t it?”

Robb laughs again, the sound ricocheting from the rafters. “If there is, I’ve yet to find it,” he says with callous shrug.

Theon bends toward Robb, and Jeyne occupies herself with the mummer, pretending she cannot hear. “I wouldn’t have thought you to allow your cock to take the lead—still she’s fairer than any Lord Frey would have had. Unless he’d planned on giving you Lady Roslin, then you would have been better served keeping your laces tied.”

The king keeps his eyes on his guest, but she has the strange sensation of his gaze upon the curve of her shoulder.

“Theon—” he begins.

Jeyne stands suddenly. “Forgive me, I must go—check on Ned.”

Margaery lifts her eyes, and Jeyne thinks she sees a small flicker of sympathy there but she is already stepping down from the high table, allowing the press of the guests to swallow her up. She drowns in the safety of the anonymity.

“You don’t have to stay with me,” Jeyne tells Margaery as she bounces Ned along her hip. There are endless lines of septas to care for the little prince, but Jeyne takes a pride in touching his smooth head, her fingers moving through the soft downy black hair—I made this, this is mine. At the very least, this is mine. “I’m sure you have far better things to occupy yourself with.”

Margaery shrugs, barely glancing up from her needlework. “Your Grace, I know what it’s like to be bereft of family. I was quite lost when my father and grandmother departed, and I still had Loras to care for me.”

Jeyne closes her eyes against that new, shocking punch of pain. Her father had returned to the Crag shortly after seeing her with a crown, and then her mother with great reluctance. Raynald had gone, at last, as well—he was heir to the Crag, and had a duty and duty was something she could understand well.

Eleyna would come, in a few years, when she had flowered—but would it be the same? When Jeyne had seen her last, they had been girls with dismal prospects and bleak futures. Eleyna would come into womanhood as the sister to the queen. That had to change a girl. She would be given all the things Jeyne had never had—a septa, fine gowns, dancing lessons and signing lessons—but she would be deprived of all the things Jeyne had known—long nights on the beach, the sound of waves crashing bleakly on the coves, the sweat smell of salt water.

Would they know each other when they met again, or would they be no more than the strangers that often passed through the keep?

Margaery makes a small humming sound at the back of her throat. “It’s hard, isn’t it?” she asks and then, when Jeyne stares at her with mounting confusion, adds, “Marriage. When it matters. Marriage can be very easy, Your Grace, when there is little investment in it. But it’s abysmally difficult when it matters.”

Jeyne blinks, surprised at the sudden moisture that gathers at the corner of her eyes.

Those dark eyes, so greatly admired by the court, seem to travel to a place out of time’s reach, she grows younger before Jeyne’s eyes. “My marriage to Lord Renly was very easy.” When she looks up at Jeyne, her eyes are startlingly unguarded. “My brother and my husband knew each other well—it was hard for them. If it is any help, I don’t think… marriages are not supposed to be easy. Otherwise, the thrill of it passes and we forget why it was so profound to begin with.”

All Jeyne wants to do is weep. Lay her head onto this rose’s soft lap and weep, for reasons she doesn’t fully understand. I love him too much to bear, and I am nothing but a queen he took because to do otherwise would be a strain on his honor—that is not hard, that is impossible.

But she thinks that queens should not weep, or if they must then in private. Queens must keep their own counsel, and their grief must always be there own—they are a world apart from others, they are nearly unreal, casement designed to vessel their people’s secrets.

“My lady,” Jeyne says quietly, “forgive me, but I must take my leave.”

“Of course,” the rose says and slides into an elegant, well-versed curtsey as her queen gathers her son up and stands.

Jeyne is not certain but she thinks there might be approval there, hidden the corners of the smile that flirts across the Golden Rose’s mouth.

Grey Wind keeps pace with her as she carries Ned down the hall. He’s fussy, as he often is this time of day, a combination of learned hunger pangs and encroaching tiredness. She and Grey Wind have come to an accord, of sorts. Jeyne doesn’t think she will ever truly feel comfort in the presence of the massive wolf—the memory of the blood on his muzzle, the blood of knights she had known and loved, will always be a bit raw, like a wound that never heals properly—but she at last understands why Lady Catelyn took relief in knowing they were so near her sons.

Grey Wind would tear the throat of any who wished her son harm, and there is something vicious and fulfilling in knowing that.

She meets Robb and Theon on her walk, both smelling of sweat and activity. Robb’s hair is wind-torn, tussles of wild curl that riot around his face. She’d only seen him like this a handful of time—the most vivid memory of it was when he had turned from the window of her bedchambers and told her they would marry and she had gone with a meek, yes my lord.

“Ah, and is this the little princeling?” Theon demands, and steps in closer. Grey Wind settles on his hind legs, looking bored—and Jeyne battles down a ridiculous trace of betrayal. “Well, let’s have a look at him.”

Robb says nothing, and Jeyne surrenders the babe to her lord’s milk brother—fingers left to grasp empty air and a strange sense of dejection.

“Not a single tuff of red hair,” Theon observes. “There’s a boon. Red hair never looks half-so-charming as it does on a woman.”

Robb comes up, and strokes one finger down the babe’s cheek. Ned reacts to his father’s touch and quiets, little hand curling around the intruding finger. He makes a noise, half-hiccup, half-cry.

“He’ll look like his mother,” Robb says, but doesn’t look at Jeyne. He adds, “His grip is strong.”

Theon barks out a laugh that jostles Ned. “Worried he was going to turn into one of those soft, southern lads? Too much Stark blood in him for that.”

Jeyne feels a disquiet prowl restlessly beneath her skin, like a caged animal. She wants to snatch her son back—mine. But she feels foolish and selfish for the thought, and twists her fingers in the soft, silky fabric of her gown while Theon makes faces at her babe.

She thinks she feels the pressure of Robb’s blue gaze on the top of her head, but she focuses only on the slight point of her slippered feet that stick out from beneath the hem of her dress.

“Where were you headed?” Robb asks.

“I was to put Ned down, and then take a turn through the gardens,” Jeyne says.

Robb frowns, suddenly, a vicious hard slash that darkens his face. He was smiling, only moments again, but she turns his face dark. “It’s too cold out,” he says, the sound of his tone final. “You’ll catch a chill.”

Theon says, “We’re tough, callous northmen, Your Grace. Winter lives in our bones. But you’re a sweet, southron lass, summer and sun. Winter’s no place for you.”

And she wants to scream, is that so wrong? To be sweet and soft and summer? Does he not want me because of that? Would he care for me more, if there was winter in my veins? If I could remember snow?

Instead, she curtsies. “As my lord wishes.” Theon returns Ned to her, and Jeyne chafes under that too, that she couldn’t have made him return her son to her if he hadn’t wished too (and maybe, just maybe, she worries that Robb would have stood by and done nothing).

She brushes pass Robb, careful not to let a single inch of the fabric of their clothing touch. It hurts too much.

(here is something Jeyne does not know:

Kindness turns hearts quicker than beauty. For all Cersei Lannister had been unearthly pretty, she had lost favor quickly, and Jeyne gathers it as easy as a child picking at daisies. There is something to be said of a slow, soft smile and dark eyes in a pale face that move with a shy kindness.

And she is a Southron child, they cannot forget—she is the opposite of her husband in every way. Warm where he is cold, shy where he is bold, soft where he is loud. King Robb has no patience for little matters, his focus is always the full scope of the matter. That is how wars are won. It is Jeyne who picks up each minute detail and stows them away in her pockets, remembers them where others forget. Yes, there is something to be said of kindness.

The smallfolk whisper, as the smallfolk do. They see Robb Stark as a foreign invader, a conqueror who took them roughly, who took them unwillingly. Once, he took Jeyne Westerling’s castle as well—once he took her castle and her virtue and made her his queen to save her the shame. And yet, this only hardens their hearts to him.

They say Queen Jeyne is a soft, sweet spring trapped in the warms of an indifferent, bitter winter. He will wring her dry, they say, until is she a shriveled up fruit—ripeness leeched and sweetness shattered.

“She nearly died begetting him an heir,” one says.

“Any more will like kill her,” another says, and his voice is a well of great grief, and of great certainty. “Southron ladies are not meant to bear the seed of the north, trying and cumbersome it is—spring never survives the winter.”

Jeyne does not hear this. Robb does. His fingers ball into fists. But the anger is impotent; he cannot battle himself.)

Theon’s interest in Margaery is largely passing. He makes overt gestures of greeting her each day but that is the general extend of their contact.

Margaery does not seem to mind. “After you have called Lord Renly yours, all husbands are interchangeable, no?” she teases Lady Lynesse, recently married, who sighs with the wistful heart of romantic youth.

Jeyne thinks of Margaery and Renly Baratheon—my brother and my husband knew each other well; it was hard for them—and she sighs, but for a different reason. Margaery looks over at her and smiles, a private sort of smile that says, we two. We share the secrets of the world.

part two