Chapter 5: Storm Surge Need
The regulator was a cold, silent ghost in his veins.
Tony stared at the diagnostic readout on his sunglasses, the holographic display painting amber lines across Damon’s sleeping form. They were back in the air, encased in the shuddering metal womb of the Quinjet. Outside, a storm raged, turning the world into a primal chaos of black clouds and lashing rain. The jet bucked and yawed, but Tony’s world had narrowed to the data stream.
The neuro-regulator had been administered twelve hours ago. Its job was to dampen the receptor activity, to build a firewall in his brain. The graphs showed a steady, flatlined suppression of the craving’s peak signals. A success, on paper.
On paper was fucking useless.
The need wasn’t gone. It was muted, turned from a screaming siren to a sub-audible hum. But it was a hum that resonated in the hollow of his bones, a phantom itch in the center of his being. He could look at Damon—curled on a bench, face slack with exhausted sleep—and not want to claw his own skin off. Progress. But he could still smell him, a dark, musky undertone beneath the jet’s recycled air. It called to a part of Tony that lived below thought, below reason.
He felt…hollowed out. Sanitized. Like a beautiful, complex equation reduced to its dullest integer.
“Still analyzing your own head?” Natasha’s voice was quiet from the cockpit doorway. She held two mugs of something steaming. “It’s been a day. You should sleep.”
“Sleep is data-deficient,” Tony muttered, flicking the display away. He took the proffered mug. Coffee. Bitter and perfect. “Banner’s miracle cure leaves…residual noise.”
“Noise.”
“Static. In the system.” He nodded toward Damon. “He’s quiet.”
“He’s exhausted. His metabolic readings are still normalizing from the suppressant field failure. From the… event.” She didn’t flinch from the word. “Your system got the full dose of the agent again during that. The regulator is working harder because of it.”
Tony drank the coffee, letting the heat scald a path down his throat. “It’s not a cure. It’s a gag.”
“It’s time.” She leaned against the bulkhead. “Cho thinks repeated doses, combined with behavioral aversion therapy, could—”
“Behavioral aversion?” Tony snorted. “You mean electrocute me every time I get a hard-on for our guest? Hard pass.”
“It’s a option.”
“It’s medieval. The problem’s in here.” He tapped his temple. “I don’t need to be trained like a dog. I need the wiring ripped out.”
A violent shudder rocked the jet. Coffee sloshed over the rim of Tony’s mug, burning his hand. The interior lights flickered, plunging them into strobbing darkness before stabilizing.
“Turbulence is getting worse,” Natasha said, her eyes glancing at the cockpit.
“That’s not turbulence.” Tony was already on his feet, his senses sharpening. The pitch of the engines had changed, a straining whine undercutting the roar. He strode to a viewport, wiping away the condensation. Beyond the sheeting rain, in a brief clearing of cloud, he saw them—three sleek, dark shapes riding the storm, gaining fast. “We have company.”
Hydra.
Natasha was moving before he finished the sentence, bolting for the cockpit. “Steve, we’ve got tails. Three bogies, converging from the eastern quadrant.”
Steve’s voice crackled over the comms, calm and steely. “Evasive pattern Delta. Tony, get to the secondary console. See if you can jam their targeting.”
Tony moved, but his path took him past Damon’s bench. The man was awake now, eyes open and clear, fixed on Tony. The sleep was gone, replaced by a predatory alertness. The shared adrenaline cut through the regulator’s muffling effect like a razor. Tony’s breath hitched.
“They’re here for me,” Damon said, his voice rough.
“They’re here because we’re a slow-moving target in a shitty mood storm,” Tony snapped, but he knew Damon was right. He tore his gaze away, heading for the auxiliary controls. “Just stay put.”
The Quinjet dove sharply, throwing Tony against the straps of his seat. He pulled up a tactical display. The three bogies were spreading out, trying to herd them. Their signals were scrambled, advanced. Hydra had learned from past encounters.
“Jamming isn’t working,” Tony called out, his fingers flying over the interface. “They’re using a phased-frequency hop. It’s… it’s one of my older algorithms. Bastards pirated it.”
Another impact rocked the jet, this one louder, metallic. A proximity alarm began to blare.
“They’re firing!” Steve shouted. “Brace!”
The world tilted violently. Tony was thrown from the seat, crashing into the wall of the cargo hold. Damon was there, somehow on his feet, grabbing Tony by the arm before his head could connect with a supply crate. The grip was iron, burning through the sleeve of his shirt.
“Armor,” Damon growled. “Where is it?”
“Locker. Aft section.” Tony gasped, pain lancing through his shoulder. The jet leveled out briefly, then shuddered into another steep climb. The lights died completely this time, emergency strips along the floor casting everything in a bloody crimson. The main engines whined, then cut out, replaced by the strained howl of auxiliary power.
They were gliding, a wounded bird in a hurricane.
“Power’s gone,” Natasha’s voice was tight over the comms. “Primary and secondary. We’re on batteries. We’re losing altitude.”
Steve’s voice: “Prepare for a rough landing. We’re going down.”
The floor fell away as the jet nosedived. Tony’s stomach lurched. Damon hauled him up, shoving him toward the rear of the hold. “The armor. Now.”
They staggered together, a four-legged beast in the lurching darkness. Tony hit the release on the armor locker. The Mark LI assembly unit gleamed dully in the red gloom, a silent promise of strength.
Another impact, closer this time. The fuselage screamed. A seam split near the ceiling, and wind-driven rain spewed into the hold, icy and brutal.
“It won’t engage without the main power coupling!” Tony yelled over the gale. “The suit needs a jolt to bootstrap the arc reactor initiation sequence!”
Damon looked from the suit to the tear in the fuselage, to Tony’s desperate face. The jet was shaking itself apart. “What kind of jolt?”
“A concentrated energy surge! More than the batteries can—”
Understanding flashed in Damon’s eyes. A dark, terrible understanding. He grabbed Tony by the shoulders, shoving him back against the open locker, next to the rigid form of the suit. “The bond,” Damon shouted, his mouth inches from Tony’s ear. “The chemical reaction. When we… the spike in bio-electricity is off the charts. Banner showed me the graphs.”
Tony stared at him. The regulator in his veins seemed to shrink back, horrified at the suggestion. “No.”
“Yes.” Damon’s hands were on his waist, tearing at his belt buckle. “It’s a fucking circuit. You need a surge. I’m the capacitor.”
“It’s insane!”
“We’re about to be scrap metal in a forest! Do it!”
The Quinjet groaned, the sound of tearing metal everywhere. The floor tilted to a thirty-degree angle. They were falling, fast.
The animal part of Tony’s brain, the part Hydra had rewired, took over. The regulator’s firewall shattered.
He stopped fighting. He grabbed Damon’s face and kissed him, a frantic, tooth-breaking clash. It was nothing like before. There was no aching need, only a savage, practical urgency. He fumbled with the fastenings of Damon’s pants, his own, his fingers numb with cold and fear.
Damon spun him around, bending him over the open edge of the armor locker. The cold metal bit into Tony’s stomach. The wind and rain screamed through the ruptured hull. There was no time for anything, no spit, no gentleness.
“Do it,” Tony snarled, bracing himself.
Damon pushed his pants down and thrust inside him with one brutal, tearing motion.
Tony screamed into the roaring darkness, the pain a bright, sharp shock. But beneath it, as Damon began to move with a ruthless, driving rhythm, the chemistry ignited. It was a wildfire in his nerves. His spine arched. His hands scrabbled against the locker’s interior. Damon’s hips slammed into him, each impact driving him harder against the metal edge. The agony of the stretch, the punishing pace, the sheer outrage of the act fused with the illicit, hormonal cascade flooding his system.
The sensor nodes in the suit, designed to interface with his bio-signatures, began to glow a faint, pulsating blue.
“Faster,” Tony gasped, the word ripped from him.
Damon obeyed, his grip on Tony’s hips vise-like, his own breath a ragged growl in Tony’s ear. The wet slap of skin, the creak of the metal locker, the howl of the storm—it all became one deafening rhythm. Tony felt the building overload in his own cells, a gathering storm of neural static. He was the conductor. Damon was the raw, live wire.
The suit’s arc reactor flickered, then began to spin up with a low, gathering whine.
Damon’s pace became frantic, desperate. He was chasing it, chasing the surge. He drove into Tony with a final, brutal series of thrusts, his body rigid. “Now, Tony… take it… take all of it!”
He came with a shattered groan, his release hot and deep. At the exact moment of that chemical and physical precipice, Tony’s own climax tore through him, a seizure of raw, electric sensation.
The sensor nodes on the suit blazed to life.
A cascading hum of power filled the locker. Sections of the armor snapped free, swarming through the air. Plates clamped around Tony’s thighs, his torso, his arms. The helmet formed over his head, the HUD springing to life with a flood of data—altitude, trajectory, structural integrity of the jet.
Power. One hundred percent.
“Targeting the bogies,” JARVIS’s calm voice announced in his ear.
Tony, still draped over the locker, with Damon shuddering and spent behind him, raised a gauntleted hand. The repulsor charged with a rising, searing whine. He targeted the nearest Hydra craft through the torn fuselage.
“Get clear,” he gritted out to Damon.
He fired. The blast was blinding in the dark hold. It sheared through the Hydra ship’s wing, sending it spiraling into the black.
Damon pulled out, staggering back. Tony straightened up, the armor fully encasing him, the world now filtered through his tactical display. He turned. Damon stood amid the wreckage, pants around his thighs, rain and sweat glistening on his skin, his face a mask of stark exhaustion and grim triumph.
The Quinjet was screaming toward the tree line.
“Sir, you have approximately eighteen seconds before impact,” JARVIS stated.
“Get to the crash chairs. Strap in,” Tony ordered, his voice metallic through the helmet.
He didn’t wait to see if Damon obeyed. He turned, blasted the remaining section of the fuselage open with his other repulsor, and shot out into the lashing storm. The two remaining Hydra ships banked to face him. Lightning arced across the sky, illuminating the world in frozen, monochrome snapshots.
Tony Stark soared into the chaos, the taste of blood and come on his lips, the phantom ache of the act a live wire in his gut, the armor humming around him like a second skin forged in the violent proof of his own corruption.