Chapter 6: Pheromone Withdrawal: The Relapse
The world returned in shards of pain and noise.
Tony gasped, choking on acrid smoke. His helmet was gone, ripped away. Rain peppered his face, cold and sharp. Something heavy pressed down on his legs. He tried to move and fire lanced through his left side, a white-hot brand just below his ribs.
The armor. It was in pieces around him. The chest plate lay a foot away, a smoldering hole punched through its center where a Hydra plasma round had found its mark. The reactive interior weave had saved his life, dispersing the worst of the energy, but the concussive force had shattered the housing and sent him careening into the trees. The rest of the suit was scattered across the forest floor like metallic seed pods.
He heard groaning metal, the hiss of ruptured conduits. The Quinjet was a broken silhouette against the storm-gray sky, its belly torn open on the trunks of shattered pines.
Hands grabbed him, hauling him backwards over mud and torn roots. He cried out, the movement tearing at the wound in his side.
“Shut up and move,” Damon grunted, his voice strained.
Tony was dragged behind the relative cover of a moss-crusted log, thick as a barrel. The world swam. He looked down at his side. His flight suit was charred and melted, the edges blackened. Beneath, the skin was an angry, blistering red, deep bruising already flowering around a central point of terrible pressure. A broken rib, maybe two. Internal bleeding was a distinct, ugly possibility.
Damon loomed over him, his face streaked with soot and a thin line of blood from a cut on his temple. His eyes were ferocious, scanning the smoky treeline. “They’ll be coming. On foot. To confirm the kill.”
“The others…” Tony managed, his throat raw.
“The pilot and the woman got clear. I saw a chute. They’re not here.” Damon’s attention snapped back to Tony. His hands, streaked with dirt and Tony’s blood, went to the sealed seam of the flight suit. With a brutal wrench, he tore it open from collar to navel.
The cold air hit Tony’s burned skin, and he hissed. “What are you—”
Damon’s hands were on his waist, pulling the ruined material down his hips. His touch wasn’t gentle. It was clinical, assessing. His gaze flicked from the wound to Tony’s face. “Plasma burn. Concussive trauma. You’re leaking inside.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Tony gritted out, trying to push Damon’s hands away. His own hands trembled.
Damon caught one of his wrists, holding it with immovable force. He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a low, guttural rasp. “I can smell it on you. The chemical shift. The bond… it wants to fix this. It wants to fix you.”
Tony’s breath hitched. He could feel it too—a fizzing, frantic activity under his skin, a phantom warmth gathering low in his belly, disconnected from the searing pain in his side. It was the remnants of the compound, reacting to his injury, to his stress, to Damon’s proximity. A biological distress beacon.
“The regulator’s gone,” Tony whispered, the truth dawning with horror. “Burned out with the suit’s systems.”
“Yeah.” Damon’s other hand slid down Tony’s bare stomach, past the waistband of his briefs. He didn’t pause. He gripped Tony’s softening cock, giving it a rough, purposeful stroke. “Your body knows what it needs. It’s screaming for it.” He leaned in, his lips almost touching Tony’s ear. “I can fucking smell how wet you are already.”
The vulgarity, the raw claim in the words, sent a jolt through Tony that had nothing to do with pain. A flush of shameful heat followed it. Damon was right. Despite the terror, the agony, the cold mud beneath him—his body was responding. A traitorous, slick warmth was gathering between his legs.
“No,” Tony breathed, but it was a weak protest, lost in the rasp of his own aching lungs.
Damon pulled Tony’s briefs down to his thighs, exposing him fully to the damp, leaf-littered ground and the grey sky. He didn’t bother undressing fully. He just unfastened his own pants, shoved them down, and knelt between Tony’s splayed legs. His cock was already hard, thick and urgent.
“One more dose,” Damon growled, his eyes locked on Tony’s. They were the blue of a deep, violent sea. “The chemicals… they’ll spike. Supercharge your healing. You’ll clot faster. Inflammation will drop. It’s the only thing that’ll get you on your feet before Hydra finds this clearing.”
He wasn’t asking. He was stating a brutal fact. Survival, packaged in grotesque, addictive necessity.
Tony let his head fall back against the wet log. He stared up at the twisted branches, the indifferent rain. He gave a single, sharp nod.
Damon moved. He didn’t try to prepare him. There was no time for that, no place for tenderness in the mud and the smoke. He spat into his palm, slicked himself roughly, and positioned the head of his cock against Tony’s entrance.
The first push was a tearing, burning stretch. Tony arched off the ground, a strangled sound ripped from his throat. It was too dry, too fast. Damon shoved forward anyway, burying himself to the hilt in one relentless, conquering thrust.
“Fuck!” Tony screamed, his fingers clawing into the mud.
Damon held there, buried inside him, his body trembling with the effort of restraint. His face was a mask of grim concentration. “Breathe. Let it in.”
Tony panted, tears of pain and humiliation mixing with the rain on his face. The fullness was an agony, a violation that went beyond the physical. It was the violation of his own autonomy, his genius, his self. Reduced to this: a broken vessel being fucked in the dirt for a biochemical fix.
Then Damon began to move.
It was a hard, punishing rhythm, each thrust jolting Tony’s wounded body. The pain in his side flared bright and hot with every slam of Damon’s hips. But underneath it, the promised chemistry ignited. It was like pouring rocket fuel on a dying fire. A wave of endorphins and strange, synthetic neurotransmitters flooded his system, a counterfeit euphoria that wrapped around the pain and twisted it into something else.
A choked moan escaped Tony’s lips. His own cock, ignored between them, twitched and filled, aching with a perverse need that bloomed from the very violation itself.
Damon saw it. A feral grin touched his lips. He shifted his angle, driving deeper. “There it is. Your body knows. It’s hungry for it. Take it.”
He fucked into Tony with a brutal efficiency, his hands digging into Tony’s hips, holding him steady for the assault. The sounds were obscene in the quiet aftermath of the crash: the wet slap of skin, Damon’s guttural grunts, Tony’s ragged, involuntary whimpers. The cold mud seeped into Tony’s hair, his bare back. The smell of ozone, burnt metal, and sex filled the air.
Tony’s mind fractured. One part was cataloguing the damage: the probable internal injuries, the compromised armor systems scattered in the brush, the approaching enemy. Another part was drowning in sensation—the unbearable stretch, the devastating friction, the chemical burn spreading through his veins like a truth serum made of lust and degradation.
“Gonna come,” Damon warned, his rhythm stuttering, growing frantic. “Gonna fill you up. Pump this cure right into you.”
The words were the final trigger. Tony’s orgasm crashed over him without a hand ever touching his cock. It was ripped from him, a convulsive, whole-body seizure that made his vision whiten at the edges. He spilled over his own stomach, his back bowing off the ground as a raw, broken cry was torn from his throat.
Damon followed with a deep, shuddering groan, slamming home one last time and holding there. Tony felt the hot, insistent pulse deep inside him, the transfer complete.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing and the patter of rain on leaves.
Damon pulled out, leaving Tony feeling emptied and strangely cold. He stood, fastening his pants, his eyes already scanning the perimeter again. The act was over. The transaction was complete.
Tony lay there, utterly spent. But as the blinding pleasure-pain receded, he became aware of a new feeling. The white-hot brand in his side had dulled to a deep, manageable throb. The tightness in his chest had eased. When he tentatively drew a breath, it came easier, deeper.
The healing had begun. Fast. Unnaturally fast.
He pushed himself up on one elbow, his movements less agonizing than before. He looked at the mess on his stomach, the mud streaking his skin, the angry but already stabilizing wound on his side.
Damon tossed a torn piece of flight suit material at him. “Clean yourself up. We have about ninety seconds before company arrives.” He was listening to something Tony couldn’t hear yet. A rustle in the distant undergrowth. The faint crunch of a boot on a branch.
Tony wiped himself off with numb fingers, his mind a warzone of shame, disgust, and a terrifying, burgeoning gratitude. He had survived. Because of this. Because of him.
He met Damon’s eyes. The man looked back, his expression unreadable. There was no triumph there, no pity. Only a sharp, focused readiness.
“Can you stand?” Damon asked, his voice low.
Tony nodded, pushing himself to his feet. His legs held. The pain was a distant echo. He felt unnaturally clear, his senses heightened. He could smell the pine, the wet earth, the coppery scent of his own blood, and beneath it, Damon’s sweat and sex.
From the direction of the crashed Quinjet, a voice called out, sharp and foreign in the dripping silence.
“Search the wreckage. Find the body.”
Hydra was here.