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grimalkinmessor · 5 years

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Refract

(Okay, so, a friend of mine pointed out--after I pestered her for days--that she can't read things on Ao3. So I'm reposting this here so she has no excuse to deny me feedback anymore 😜 Love you, Hev!!!)

Starker - Superior Iron Man/The Spider

It was an oversight on his part.

A grevious oversight.

An oversight that was costing him time, money, and popularity. Unacceptable. Time was annoying, money was dispensable, but someone had publicly defaced his name. On his own damn building.

Unacceptable.

Tony stared up at Stark Tower with a scowl that could melt titanium. Several jittery, frightened PR agents and employees fluttered around him, not daring to get too close. At least they weren't that stupid.

"Who did this," Tony seethed. No one answered him for a beat, and his fury skyrocketed. "Who did this? I want a fucking name!" He roared as he whirled on the fidgety interns, who scattered like bowling pins in the face of his rage.

"W-We don't know, sir," A random employee in a lab coat stuttered. "The c-cameras were s-sc-scrambled, sir; they didn't catch the perpetrator. But the criminal did leave behind this." She shakily extended a black slip of cardstock, and Tony snatched it from her.

He flipped the flimsy strip of paper over to reveal a bright red spider printed in the center of the black. His lip curled up into a sneer. "A spider? Is this supposed to be a calling card?"

The woman swallowed. "With all due respect, sir," She pointed a trembling finger up at the message splattered across the stainless steel and glass of Stark Tower in drying blood, a body staked beneath it. Tony unwittingly followed her gaze. "I think that's enough of a calling card."

He's Gone

STARK

Ravin' Mad!

Tony snarled, "I'll find this bastard. And when I do, they're going to wish they'd never been born."

•🕸️•

Rumors of a mercenary called the Spider littered the darknet like candy wrappers. Attestments to his prowess, curses to his name, shaky accounts of his insanity. It was enough for Tony to put together a profile, but not enough to get an actual name.

The Spider had popped up in the merc community about six months ago, by the looks of it, and began to carve his name into the world with numerous bodies in various stages of dismemberment. Statements said that he hung around a regular haunt for mercenaries all the way in New York, but no one had ever seen his face, nor heard of a name beyond the one used as a title.

"What the hell was a merc from New York doing in San Francisco? Besides fucking up my building," Tony growled as he ripped ruthlessly through firewalls and code locks in search of more to go on.

When further digging yielded nothing, Tony nearly flipped the table over in a fit of anger. Instead, he dug his fingers deep into the lacquer his desk and drew in a deep breath. Tapping the bracelet on his wrist, Tony stood and rolled his shoulders. "JARVIS, clear my schedule for the next week. I'm going to New York."

"Shall I reschedule your meetings for next week, sir?"

"No. I wasn't going to go to them anyway. Send Pepper and her complaints to voicemail," Tony drawled as the symbiotic metal slunk up over his chest and secured itself into something solid.

"Of course, sir."

Then Tony was off to stomp on a pest.

•🕸️•

Tony Stark walking into Sister Margaret's was like a lion strolling into a herd of sheep. The entire bar immediately went silent, tension and fear thick and cloying on the back of his tongue. Tony strode across the room with easy confidence until he reached the bar itself. The crowd of unwashed murderers parted for him like the Red Sea for Moses.

Shaggy, dirty blond hair hung over thick coke bottle glasses to tangle in an even dirtier goatee. Bloodshot eyes of an unidentifiable color glanced lazily up at him. An almost imperceptible flash of tension twitched through the bartender's body, before it slumped back into a nonchalant slouch. "Can I help you, Wall Street?"

"Weasel, is it?" Tony drawled, the picture of relaxation. "I'm looking for a friend of yours."

"Friendship is for toddlers and Bronys," Weasel sneered. "Whoever you're looking for, they aren't here. Now run along back to your supermodel orgies and Extremis campaigns. Unless you have a fetish that makes you make want to rub elbows with us peasants, that is."

"Oh, but I would just love to get up close and personal with a certain arachnid of yours. Because he's already rubbed me all kinds of the wrong fucking way." Tony lashed out a hand caught Weasel by the collar of his hoodie. Almost every patron in the bar pulled a gun on him, and a few even shot. Tony glanced back dispassionately with half-lidded eyes as the bullets ricocheted off his force field and sought their way back into their owners' skulls. Six people dropped to the floor of the bar, dead. Tony sniffed and turned back to Weasel, whose calm facade had abruptly abandoned him. "You have three days to get the Spider to come to me in San Francisco, or I burn you and your establishment to the ground, understand?" He said darkly.

Weasel had gone pale, faintly green, and he looked half a second away from puking as he nodded rapidly. Tony released him and wiped his hand off of his pants with a grimace.

"Good. Three days, and then I come after you with war on my heels. Don't disappoint me."

Tony left the bar behind him and straightened out his three-piece suit with a huff. He flicked his wrist and the surveillance device he'd implanted in Weasel's phone flared to life. Sure enough, not five minutes after he'd walked out of the bar, the Bluetooth in his ear flared to life.

"Wes! What's the occasion? You calling to congratulate me? I've gotten several thank you notes in the mail these past few days—I'm famous!" A voice considerably younger than Tony expected chirped.

"You are an absolute fucking idiot that's going to get me killed," Weasel snarled back. "Do you know who just walked into my bar?"

"Kesha!"

"Tony Stark, you fucking crazy bitch," Weasel hissed. "Your little stunt on your last mark brought Zeus himself down on my ass. Now you have to get your ass down here and fix it before I strangle you."

The voice's jovial tone dipped into something black and sharp. "Careful, Jackie. You wouldn't want two demons on your ass, now would you?"

A falter, then Weasel seemed to shake it off and said, "Just get down here before I throw away all of your Gushers."

"Not my fruit snacks! You monster!"

Tony's nose scrunched up in reproach. This was the man who'd defaced his building? Well, from the sound of it, the 'man' was a boy who wasn't really all there. Not that the knowledge softened Tony's ire in the slightest.

His bracelet pinged with a location. Tony grinned, shark-like, and let his armor slough over him once more. From there, it wasn't hard to launch up and over the few streets to where the signal was originating from. Sure enough, a brief scan of the alley displayed a man with all his organs neatly arranged outside his body on the dirty concrete. A small figure was crawling along the wall of one of the buildings, away from the scene. It was a full body suit made of black spandex, which left little to the imagination. The same blood red spider symbol that had been printed on the card marred both the back and the chest of the suit. The Spider.

Bingo.

Tony dove down towards the alley and fired off a repulsor blast just in front of the figure. Recoiling back from the blast, two slim lenses of red snapped over to glare at him. Tony slid to a smooth stop just before the Spider and hummed as the merc tipped his head at him. "Hi there, Muffet. I don't think we've formally met."

The lenses flickered at him as the Spider leaned back to lounge easily on the wall. "Nope, can't say we have. But what is formality, really? It's an outrageous concept when you think about it. After all," Here, the Spider leaned forward and his mask stretched like he was smiling beneath it. "If formal was wearing a codfish on your head, would you wear it?"

The casual reference to Alice in Wonderland reignited Tony's fury at the message left on his tower. It was obviously meant as a dig. He raised his hand to fire off another repulsor blast right at the Spider's face, but instead of looking scared, the brat just draped an arm dramatically over his face like a fainting maiden.

"Oh my, mister, please don't shoot me," He bemoaned in a theatrical southern bell impression. He fanned his mask with his other hand, only held up by his feet as he swooned. "I don't think I could take you teasing me so."

Before Tony could disperse the cloud of confusion the Spider's rambling had incited, the brat flipped off the wall and onto Tony's shoulders. One hand keeping his balance, the other reached between the shoulder slats and wrenched out a handful of wires. The suit guttered.

"Oops! Hope you didn't need those," the Spider sang as he backflipped off Tony and onto the nearest roof. The suit quickly made up for the lost tech, but it was enough of a stall for the Spider to vanish, "It hasn't been a pleasure, Stark! Buh-bye!" Called over his shoulder.

•🕸️•

Tony was infuriated.

He was known as the unbeatable, the untouchable, the one not to be outwitted. He was Tony fucking Stark.

And yet in his first altercation with what had to be a middle level threat, he hadn't been able to get a word in edgewise, much less actually make a move. It tore at his pride until he became obsessed, tearing through archives and sending scans through voice recognition for something—something that would give him leverage.

Which he shouldn't have even fucking needed in the first place.

But no, there was nothing. Nothing but the memory of a glittery voice laughing in his ear, the stretch of black spandex over distinctive muscle that made Tony take more bedpartners than normal, growling angry obscenities into the sheets as he took everything out on his conquests—both his rage, and his lust. It left them bruised and limping away from him after, a spooked look in their eyes. It just made Tony angrier.

Three days ticked by with nothing. Then, just when Tony was fully ready to go blast Sister Margaret's into next week, about to take off towards New York, an encrypted email pinged into his inbox. It was an address.

'Do not tell him I gave this to you. If you can't kill him, then I don't want him coming after me. Frankly, I'm more scared of him than I am of you. I just don't want you nuking my bar.

—W'

Tony bared his teeth in a savage grin, triumph blooming hot in his chest. The slight niggle of indignance in the back of his mind—the brat was hardly more intimidating than him—went ignored. Address loaded into his suit, he shot off towards Queens.

•🕸️•

The side of the building exploded beneath the force of the blast Tony directed at it. He flew forward and could have laughed in delight when the sound of a familiar voice cursing reached his ears. The dust began to clear as Tony ventured confidently into the rubble. A rough bout of coughing drew Tony's eye towards the far wall, which had collapsed on top of a waifish figure that was struggling to pull themselves up.

Wild brown eyes snapped up to glare at him, plush lips twisted into a snarl that bared actual fangs. "You bastard," That same shimmering voice rasped, scraped raw with pain. "You destroyed my lab!"

"You hung a dead guy from my tower," Tony replied as he made his way forward, head tipped to the side curiously.

"Oh don't tell me you're mad that I killed one of your chairmen." Doe eyes rolled as the kid shook out the dust from his curls. He had freckles. Tony drew his tongue across his bottom lip, intent. "I doubt you have actual emotions as it is. You didn't even know he worked for you, I bet," He said daringly as he twisted to try and push the wall off of him.

"You smeared viscera all over my name. Literally," Tony growled as he stalked even closer.

"If it makes you feel any better, it wasn't actually about you," the Spider drawled as he began to heft the wall up with the barest of strains. A mutant.

It decidedly did not.

Tony raised an arm and fired off a slip of liquid metal. It landed on the piece of wall the Spider was levering and quickly forced it back down. He wheezed as the full force of Stark tech crushed back into his chest. Tony stopped to look over the pinned bug, brow raised. He leaned down to better take in the amber shine of narrowed eyes, the sprinkle of freckles across a button nose, the endearing tangle of coffee curls draped over dark spider-leg lashes. He took in the sharpness of those bared fangs, then admired the petal pink softness of those lips. Tony wondered if he defanged the little pest, if they would grow back. More relevantly, how quickly would they grow back, and if he could fit his cock between those lips in the recovery time.

He leaned down even further. "Did you really think that you could get away with defaming me?"

A wide, broken glass grin cut up at him. "What're you gonna do, big man? You gonna toss me off a building? Threaten my loved ones? I don't have any!"

Just then, JARVIS chimed in his ear, "Facial recognition scan complete, sir. The Spider's true identity is one Peter Benjamin Parker."

"Peter Parker, huh?" Tony mused with a grin. The feral amusement slid off the Spider's face, and he went pale. "Let's call your bluff, Spidey. Any extended family, J?"

"All deceased, sir. But records display what appears to be a close friend of Parker's: Harry Osborn."

Tony smirked, "Is that so?"

He expected Parker to blanch further, maybe even make a bid for his friend's life, but to his surprise, Parker just tossed his head back and laughed, long and loud and unhinged. He gasped for air in between cackles, and Tony flicked his fingers in annoyance. The metal pressed the wall down harder, and Parker wheezed out a last delirious giggle. "You think I give a single shit about that piece of literal fucking human garbage? You're grasping at straws, Red Queen!"

Tony wasn't deterred. "I'd say something witty involving 'off with your head', but I've come to the realization that I don't actually want you dead," He mused as he propped his boot on the wall as well, just because he was feeling vindictive.

Parker raised an eyebrow, both wary and intrigued. It probably wasn't very often that people declared that they didn't want to kill him. He searched Tony's face with eyes that had lost their earlier giddy sheen. In their place were two hard shards of topaz, much more intelligent than the madness he'd observed before. "Then how do you want me, Executioner?"

"At my feet," Tony hissed as he fired a second slip of metal right at the kid's face. It was a sedative, one that worked instantly and wore off only when the tech was removed.

Parker was out like a light.

•🕸️•

However tempted he was to tie Parker to his bed, Tony wasn't an idiot. The casual strength the brat had displayed would hardly be the only mutation Parker had up his sleeve, and Tony didn't want his house trashed. So he tossed Parker into the cell he'd created to house the Hulk, then left to give himself a congratulatory glass of Scotch, leaving JARVIS with orders to notify him when Parker woke.

Tony poured himself three fingers of Scotch, feeling like he'd caught a wild panther. He had wrangled a wild animal into a cage, a collar ready to be fastened around its neck, but the challenge of taming the beast looming overhead left a tingle of thrill in his chest.

He wanted to break Parker, to weigh down his limbs until he could lift nothing heavier than a butterfly, to cut up his sharp tongue beyond repair, to pry out his fangs and carve away the stores of venom likely resting in his jaw until he was nothing more than a pretty bauble for Tony to admire.

(There was a small part of him—very, very small—that lamented that Peter would become disgustingly boring should he lose those things. That suggested that he cap the fangs instead of removing them, just to let Peter try to bite him, try to end him, and watch that sweet face blossom in rage when nothing came of it. Wanted to hear him curse and watch metal twist beneath those delicately small hands as he railed against Tony, oh so powerful and yet oh so his. Fashion a sign that read 'Beware of Spider' because a pet he wanted but a beast he'd gained. See those amber eyes burn up at him because that helpless rage was a thing of beauty. The part of him that acknowledged that part of Peter's appeal was that he was a beast, a monster, and Tony wanted to make him kneel.)

(Not that he would ever admit it.)

"Sir, Mr. Parker is awake." JARVIS intoned, a bit ruffled if Tony was reading that tone correctly.

"Awake and lively, I assume." Tony tossed back the rest of his drink and wiped the corners of his mouth with his fingers as he made his way back down to the cell.

JARVIS didn't answer, but he didn't need to. Tony came in sight of the cell just as he heard a loud bang echo down the hall. Peter had apparently thrown himself at the wall. They held up, of course. The brat may have super strength but he was no Hulk.

He stilled when Tony came closer, poised to leap again at the walls, fangs bared. Though the window into the room was mirrored, Peter's head snapped to the side and focused with startling accuracy on Tony. Slowly, he straightened out of his crouch and turned towards the mirror. His head tipped, puppy-like.

"Do you think you can hold me?" Came the soft inquiry with an innocent blink of those doe eyes.

"Yes, actually." Tony didn't bother with the microphone. The kid's senses were enhanced—he could probably pick out Tony's heartbeat through the four foot reinforced concrete. "I'm doing it right now."

"You're letting your technology do the holding for you," Peter spat back. "Because you know you aren't man enough to grapple with me face to face."

Tony's lips twitched. "Does goading usually get you what you want?"

Instead of getting angry, or denying the blatant manipulation tactic, Peter smirked at him, amused. "Yes, actually. Wes can't stand it."

The gleeful note to his voice made something in Tony's chest flicker. He drew his tongue along his bottom lip in thought, wondering. "So what are you, Peter Parker?"

He, of course, meant the mutations. He had never seen a mutant that could do what the Spider could do. He could stick to walls, he could spin actual webs, he could lift things easily ten times his own weight, not to mention his bite was most likely lethal. Almost all mutations manifested in a latent gene of some sort, one that had to be put under stress to become active. The gene was not all-encompassing. It gave one gift, and no matter how powerful, it was still only one. Peter had at least five.

But Peter didn't take it that way. He beamed at Tony through the glass and began to him to himself, swaying in place to a silent rhythm. "I am what happens when an angel falls from the sky. I am what happens when goodness realizes that good and evil do not truly exist. I am that one that dared to ask why a God sits on his throne, and lead a third of his children down into the chasm with me." He drew his arms sensually up his sides, cupped his throat, and ended with his hands tangled in his messy curls. He grinned at Tony, eyes half-lidded, taunting. "Do you think yourself a God, Stark?"

The conversation he'd had with Murdock rang in his ears like the high of a church bell. A damning, indisputable truth.

"No use thinking when I know," Tony drawled, heart thudding calmly in his chest. But Peter seemed to hear the flutter of his excitement anyway, known what he was thinking, because his grin widened.

"Mayhaps this was supposed to be the ultimate battle!" Peter tossed his arms high. He began to twirl across the room, light on his toes, humming erratically. "God versus Man! Or, well, it would have been, had poor Daredevil been up to the task. But alas, he fell to the temptation of sacrificial miracles—the taste of the rainbow! Let's call him Skittles from now on, yeah? But if Man won't kill God,"

Peter slung to a stop in front of the glass, a small palm smacked up against the glass, and it cracked. The Spider grinned, predatory.

"Then the Devil will do it."

Adrenaline flooded Tony's veins, made his teeth buzz in expectation—an urge to bite. "Are you forgetting Revelations?"

"Hardly," Peter trilled, ecstatic. "I don't need to win to ruin you, baby. I can the devastation to your reform! Besides, I like you much better than the other one. A Martyr. Please." His eyes rolled as his fingers scraped along the hairline fissures in the glass which had, until that moment, been bulletproof. "But you're not him. You're not Jesus—you're Judas. Ready to sell out the world for a few slips of paper that ultimately will amount to nothing. You are...pure greed," He breathed, enraptured even as his eyes darkened.

"And you think you can stop me? You're a child," Tony sneered, but it was a front for the surge of angry hunger that had roared to life in his chest. He ached with the need to press his fingers around that pale, flawless column of flesh and stain his mark upon it. Take that odd, rapturous insanity and breathe it into his lungs. Brand it back into Peter's skin with his mouth. Mine.

"I saw the way you looked at me, Stark. I can feel it right now," Peter sighed pleasantly as he continued to stroke his fingers down the glass. "The temptation that will allow me to strangle your empire from the inside out. Press my knives to your skin and snip it from the roots." He crooned.

"Oh please, baby," Tony purred. "We both know you don't actually give a shit about me taking over the world. You profit off other people's anger. You can't have the moral high ground. Your hands are covered in blood."

Peter slammed his hand into the glass again, hard, and the glass splintered. It pierced his skin, drew blood to paint its way down his wrist. He started humming again, louder. "Hmmm, you can't fix your broken promise, our ties have come undone; your lies fool no one. You can't offer your poison to me, in your kingdom of filth," He sang, high and eerie. He grinned, fangs bared. He leaned his head against the glass, pupils blown, and looked up at Tony through his lashes as he murmured, "You're just afraid to get your hands dirty."

"Oh but I don't need to," Tony breathed, giddy. "Not when I have you to do it for me." Without further ado, Tony spun on heel and began to stalk away, back turned on Peter's sudden snarl.

•🕸️•

When Tony pulled himself from beneath the rubble of his building three days later, the Spider's farewell still sparkling in his ears, he couldn't help but laugh.

"Forgot to tell you, I hid some bombs around here when I left Louie up there on your sign. My bad. Payback's a bitch, baby. But really, you could use some redecoration—far too much white. Red's more my color, for future reference, though I'm going to assume you knew that." The recording had mused, suit reaquired as black, clawed fingers toyed with the leather strip of red around his throat. He'd blown a kiss at the screen, the brat, and then the explosion behind him had cut out the feed.

Laughter rang from Tony's chest, light and toxic, and he turned his dusty face to the sky and grinned. A predator, a chase—a hunt.

"I'm going to fucking kill him."

#now feed me critism heaven #starker #superior iron man #the spider #superior starker #evil spiderman #my writing #refract

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