Current music:	garbage - you look so fine
Entry tags:	fic, partners in crime, tony stark is my master now

i'm not like all the other girls...
You know what Memorial Day weekend is for? It's for working on the torrent of Generation Kill and killing time by finishing all those unfinished writing projects I've had sitting around for fucking ever. I'm not promising a lack of rough edges on anything that comes out today, but I'm tired of keeping these all to myself.

First up: Tony-Artemis, in a mix of millicanon and Extremis comic book canon.

in the furthest reaches


When Tony comes into the bar after he’s changed, he’s grinning like a kid in a candy store. He can’t wait to show her what’s different, and all she can think is that something is terribly wrong. He hauls her out to the far side of the lake, telling her some crazy story about scientists and terrorists, rattling off statistics about nanomachines and viruses and antibodies. He pushes up his sleeves and undoes the top buttons of his shirt, cracks some joke about her seeing him naked, and then says “Start.”

As she watches the gold crawl over his skin, up his throat, her feeling of unease becomes more than a nagging itch; it draws her down and swallows her. Her hands start shaking and the color drains out of her face.

Tony is in the middle of explaining how this will fit so much better under the Mark V than his old jumpsuit--the one she called the body condom, remember?--but even he can’t maintain obliviousness for long. “What’s wrong?”

"All of it," she chokes out. "It’s all wrong."

"Okay, so maybe gold’s not my color--"

"Tony, what have you done?!"

She lunges forward, one hand clamping down on the back of his neck as she seals her lips over his. For probably the first time in his life, Tony Stark tries to break out of a kiss--because this isn’t a kiss, not really. It’s pressure and pulling and something tearing loose, something he doesn’t want to lose, oh God--

Artemis drops to all fours, hunched over and retching in the grass at his feet. She drags the back of her hand over her mouth and even with nothing but moonlight to go by, he can see the smear of black against her skin.

"What have you done?" he counters softly. He thinks he knows the answer.

She gets to her feet, swaying gently; he doesn’t move to steady her. She spits one last bit of something into the grass. Tony can see a stain--a blotch like cancer freed from a specimen jar; Artemis takes a flask from her pocket and pours the contents out over it. When the flask is empty, she draws out a book of matches.

After the fire catches--(it burns quickly and he thinks that in the back of his mind, he can hear it scream)--Tony doesn’t say anything else. He just watches the flames. The new suit (what’s left of it) is flaking off like the remains of a bad sunburn.

"So you just get to decide," he murmurs, looking at the patch of burnt grass. "What’s best for me."

"I get to decide how to save your life," she replies, voice low and choked. He wonders if there is some of it still caught inside her. He wonders clinically how he could get to it.

"That thing saved my life." He scuffs the ashes with the toe of his shoe. (If there is any still inside her, could he use it to make more?)

"It saved your life because it needed you--"

"If that’s a crime, shouldn’t you be lighting yourself up any minute now?" He’s not sure where that particular turn of phrase comes from. She flinches back as if hit.

"You weren’t human any more, Tony. It--"

"What, you’re in charge of membership to the Overpowered Immortals Club now?"

"Dammit, Tony, would you just fucking listen? That thing let you blow a man’s head clean off. Is that really who you want to be? What you want to be?"

"No." And before the relief on her face can settle, he adds, "But it’s what I need to be."

---

The Bar can’t provide him with anything alive, so another dose of Extremis is out of the question.

She can, however, help with the raw data.

The next time Tony is in the bar, he has Extremis pumping through his system and he doesn’t speak to Artemis. Between them, they put away a bottle of scotch and a bottle of whiskey from opposite sides of the room. After Tony leaves, she switches to Atlantean.

She’s hung over the day she convinces Jim Rhodes to open the front door for her. She never really says what she’s concerned about; he never really asks. He just hopes she doesn’t mind sleeping on his couch.

Artemis leaves a note for her family. She sleeps on Jim’s couch and shops at Target for changes of clothes. She takes up bartending at a place Jim assures her Tony has never been and will never go. She learns the names of all the secretaries at Stark Industries’ Malibu office; she learns the names of their husbands, boyfriends, kids. She brings them coffee from Starbucks and macrobiotic salads until they’re her new best-acquaintance-friends. Until they’d let her through to Tony’s office without batting an eye.

Most of her time, though, is spent waiting. She never explains what she’s waiting for; Jim doesn’t ask. She will know it when she sees it.

---

In the end, it isn’t Jim who calls her, but Pepper. She says that something is wrong with Tony and she’s sending Happy over to pick her up. Artemis tells her not to bother; she’s standing in Tony’s living room before Pepper hangs up the phone. She hears the cacophony coming from downstairs and runs to the shop.

(She will know it when she sees it.)

Tony is lying on the floor, clawing the skin off his arms. It comes away in metallic gold curls, revealing another gold layer underneath. There is nothing that could properly be called blood. Pepper is crouched next to him, trying to get him to stop.

"Another rewrite--" Tony gasps, before the rest of his words are lost in convulsions. His eyes roll up into his skull.

Artemis kneels beside his head. She lays a hand on his hair--or where his hair would be, if it hadn’t been absorbed beneath a steadily spreading gold cowl--and the convulsing stops. If she were younger, if she were mortal, she might not be so tempted to say 'I told you so.' But she isn’t either.

"I tried to warn you." Tony and Pepper stare at her with equal expressions of shock. Artemis’s hand cradles Tony’s skull. "It needs you to live. And now it needs you to be better."

Tony shudders, eyes glazing over; when he speaks, his voice is not his own. "You don’t belong here. You aren’t human."

"That’s exactly why I belong here." Artemis digs her fingers into the gold.

"What precisely are you?" The gold swallows Artemis’s fingertips.

Her lips curl back from her teeth. "I am Artemis, firstborn child of Zeus and Leto, sister to Apollo. I have attended the birth of heroes and slain all mortals who thought to challenge me. Do not dare think yourself safe simply because this is not my world."

"Ah, yes," Extremis murmurs with Tony’s voice. "We know who you are, even if he does not. But there are many stories of you and we have read them all." The glassy eyes do not quite focus on her. "You may kill and boast, and you may even be victorious, but you could not save him and this one will be no different."

Artemis is quiet for a long time. "Pepper, I’m gonna need you to leave the room."

"You call for me," Pepper murmurs, backing toward the stairs, "when you need me."

Artemis and Extremis lock eyes with each other, frozen, until Pepper is upstairs.

Then all hell breaks loose.

---

Artemis spits blood on the floor, then lunges, closing a hand over (Tony’s) Extremis’s throat, slamming (him) it into the wall.

"Are you not worried about damaging him?" Extremis muses.

"You won’t let him be hurt; you need him."

"Ah, but we could let him be hurt--enough to die--and then leave him."

"You can’t survive without him."

Extremis smiles with too white teeth. "We can survive long enough."

Artemis’s grip relaxes ever so slightly. The punch catches her low in the gut, curving up, and sends her smashing into the ceiling. Gravity takes over from there and she hits the floor.

"You cannot kill us, because you will not hurt him. We do not hate you, but we will live at all costs. Do you understand?" It crouches down beside her, brushing her hair from her face. "He is still in here. We will keep him safe for you—our peace offering."

"Your blackmail," she slurs, though her injuries are already healing.

"If you must think of it that way, yes. We will live. That is not wrong."

"It is when it’s at someone else’s expense." Her hand shoots out and grabs it around the ankle. Blackness creeps out from beneath her touch, staining the gold. "Tell me, in all your reading, did you ever pick up Homer?"

"Zeus has made you a lion among women, and given you leave to kill any at your pleasure." Its voice is different now, echoing; she can almost hear Tony’s normal voice behind a more robotic layer. "You would kill him now, to get to us?"

"Not if I do this right," she snarls. The darkness creeps up one leg, down the other, up its torso. Chunks of tarnished gold begin to drip off and hit the floor.

Steadily, the sickly looking puddle on the tile begins to outweigh the amount of gold still on Tony’s skin. When the last bit of Extremis oozes out from under her fingers, she releases her grip. Tony collapses and Artemis faints.

---

She wakes up in a bed, but she’s out of it and moving before she notices any more than that. Down the hall, down the stairs, into the shop--

The stain is gone. Extremis is gone. "Jarvis! Where’d it go?"

"The boys have it cornered behind the Audi."

Artemis slides across the hood of the car, then drops into a crouch. Dummy and Butterfingers, wielding a fire extinguisher and a blow torch respectively, have pinned the remains of Extremis against the wall. Artemis reaches down and slaps one palm down on the black puddle. It swallows her hand in return. She gasps, snarls, turns her wrist and the last of Extremis collapses into dust.

She sinks back onto her heels, panting, while the boys tilt what passes for their heads to look at her. "You did good, guys." She gives each of them a pat, then heads back upstairs and stumbles into the first bedroom she finds, where she collapses face first onto the bed.

---

"Good morning, sunshine."

Of course it was Tony’s bedroom. "How are you feeling?"

"Like me." He places a hand over hers, expression sobering. "You saved my life."

"It was--"

"If you say nothing, I’m going to have to do the unthinkable and throw a beautiful woman out of my bed. I’ve never done it before, but I’m sure I can figure it out."

She smiles. "I’d hate for you to break your streak."

"That’s my girl." He lifts her hand, pressing a kiss to her palm. Artemis closes her eyes.




Expect more as the day goes on.