BLACK WIDOW'S EYES

"Frightening the Horses"

(Author's Note. This is a bit of a spinoff of an X-Men movie/comic hybrid called \ "Frightening the Horses". You don't need to read it to make sense of this story, though. if yo read this short intro. To square things between X-Men movieverse, Iron Man movieverse and Comicverse, as of 1985, Tony is 20, and in graduate school at Columbia University when he becomes friends with Jean Grey, 17, a chain-smoking, black-leather jacketed radical mutant rights activist and party girl in a Ramones tee shirt he meets when she crashes his private birthday party at CBGB's. She's a rebellious 17-year old genius who's looking to cheat on her saintly boyfriend, Scott Summers, with the X-Institute's infamous new combat instructor, Wolverine. He's holding out, for now, but Tony won't. Fast forward ten years. Dr. Jean Grey, sober and respectable, saved by the love of two good men, has recently married Scott Summers, which has sent Logan on an extended sabbatical for unknown reasons that just about anybody could figure out. Tony Stark , with whom she remains good friends, went cold turkey in a cave during the Persian Gulf War, from which he emerged, in 1991, as Iron Man. Two stints at rehab later. Tony's kicked the coke habit he used to freely admit to but still entertains the taste for speedballs he didn't, and considers himself a superbly functioning alcoholic. He's now officially too old to be Tony Stark, troubled, but handsome and dashing boy genius, and he's pretty sure he doesn't want to be Tony Stark, pathetic old skirt-chasing boozer who used to be somebody. He's 50% Iron Man, Knight in Slightly Tarnished armor, swashbuckling hero, and 50% Tony Stark, high-living, hard-charging playboy, and mad scientist plutocrat. Ten years after that? He may very soon be nothing but an inert mass of palladium suffused veiny flesh. Ouch. Verily, this IS the winter of Tony's discontent."

Chapter One: Love Me Two Times

I: Tony.

Los Angeles, California. 2010

"You don't suppose it's just the drugs and the booze doing this, do you? Because I can lay off the drugs, anytime i want. I'm strictly a recreational user."

"What drugs?"

"Nothing serious. A little weed. Dexies for when I need to stay up for about a week or so. They're totally prescription, I get them from my doctor. Adderall is, like 75 percent dexedrine. And if I don't have ADHD, who does? Also Valium, you know, on occasion. When I've had too many dexies. Also prescription. And its' not as if I take them every day. And I think I've only done, like, three speedeballs in the past eight months, so, it's not a problem. I have to get Pepper to call my doctor. Find out if chlorophyll interacts with my other medications."

"You need to go back to rehab."

"For two speedballs in the last year? Look I went to rehab six, nine, eleven times or something between 1987 and 1994 and I just decided, fuck this. Rehab just makes me get pissed off and want to do more drugs. Drugs i haven't even tried yet. Honestly, I don't think I have this huge substance abuse problem that everyone thinks I do. i mean, alright, I admit it, i did have a really serious coke problem for about a decade, but I haven't touched the stuff since 1994. I mean, I grew up in the Village and, Vegas and LA in the seventies. I think I smoked my first joint when I was seven, or something. I know I had my first drink when I was seven. Maybe I smoked my first joint when I was nine. Or was that the year I lost my virginity? My point is, that certain substances have been a part of my life since I was still wearing Keds and overalls. My father and mother were both alcoholics, the old man as addicted to everything he could chew, shoot, snort or swallow, and the only person I know who's been to rehab as many times as I have was my stepfather, and compared to Mom and Dad, he might as well have been a narc. And I never had a serious drinking problem. Not compared with that coke habit, anyway. I mean, I'm a functional alcoholic. I don't drink when I'm working, I never get wasted at lunchtime. That last time at rehab was ridiculous. I did one tiny little speedball. One. I mean, it was my birthday, right? Right."

Tony pulled his gaze away from the infamously bright lights of LA, the Naked City, spread out beneath Stark Tower West, swiveled his chair around, ran his hand through his hair, straightened his tie and took a sip of his drink.

Across his massive desk, Natasha Romanova looked impassive.

"You died." She replied.

"No I didn't. Not technically."

"And it was my birthday. Not yours."

"So it was. Your 18th birthday. God, I was so in love with you. That's probably why I did it. I was so terrified. There I was, thirty years old, and in love for the first time with a 17 year old girl. So, do you think it's the drugs?" Tony asked.

"No. It's the palladium."

Tony began to scratch, with renewed vigor.

"Shit! My chest itches. It's not enough I'm slowly dying of heavy metal poisoning, it has to be itchy."

Tony reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a pill case made of platinum.

He popped a Valium and washed it down with a slug of really top notch Scotch, which was so good the taste of it wasn't ruined by a hint of chlorophyll.

Then he picked up his phone.

"Pepper? It's me. I want you to call that gentleman in Toronto about getting me some ludes...you don't have to shout...look if you don't call him, I'll fly to Canada, I'll fly to South Africa if I have to and get them, myself...No, I am not going back to rehab. I'm under a lot of stress about this thing in Monte Carlo and Valium isn't going to cut it. It's not my fault they quit making Quaaludes in this country. I have a prescription, sort of...I have to go. I have work to do, Potts...very funny. I'm hanging up, now."

Tony leapt to his feet, undid his tie and took off his jacket.

"Not to mention I haven't had sex in, I'm not sure, at least two months, because I can't expect any woman not to run, screaming, from this lovely labyrinth of poisoned veins radiating out of my chest. WE'll Jean wouldn't. But, I don't want Jean to know. It's getting lower, too. The itchy, veiny, purple thing. I cringe to think of just how far south this plague will spread. I definitely need some ludes."

"You can put your shirt back on, Tony. I don't feel nothing for you, anymore."

"Really? In that case, I'm taking my pants off, too."

"If you do that, I will shoot you."

Tony just laughed.

"If you don't feel anything for me, anymore, why did you take this assignment, Sasha?"

"Don't call me that! I needed a job, okay?"

"You have a job. You work for S.H.I.E.L.D. You're Nick Fury's Bratva hatchet man. So, do you work under him nights, too?"

"Don't try to bait me. I don't want you to kill yourself, okay?"

"Why not?"

"Because, whether I like it or no, I owe you. I want to pay my debt and be done with it What about you? Why did you hire me? I know you recognized me."

"I recognized you five years ago when Nick Fury introduced me to Natasha Romanova, his latest wunderkind. I kept my mouth shut then, didn't I? And why shouldn't I hire you? I always knwe you'd come back to me. I wasn't about to turn you away when you did."

"I don't come back to you! This is my job. I'm only surprised Pepper didn't know me."

"To someone who doesn't know you all that well, Sasha, you look very different. And ten years is a long time. But, considering that I have licked almost every square inch of your body, you couldn't fool me."

He finally got a blush out of her.

That was a good sign.

"There is some hope. Also good reason for you to make another trip to the MORC and dry up. Unless you keep on the way you are, drinking like fish, popping pills, the poison will not kill you. Your father will be a hundred and one, this year. And he doesn't look a day over thirty-five. But with the poison and your drinking and you and your occasional speedball? You won't last two months. "

"My stepfather."

"Oh no. Like you say about me, Tony. I know you too well. He's your father."

The Black Widow got up, smoothed out the skirt of her suit, put on her jacket and spun, crisply on her heel.

"Now I make first move. Out of door. Good night, Mr. Stark."

Tony waited until she got to the door of his office.

"I still love you, Sasha. Shouldn't that at least entitle me to a fast blowjob? It's not as if it would be the first time. And I'm goddamn horny and so completely unfulfilled by all this compulsive masturbation. I'm sure, it would only take me about two minutes to come. Five minutes, tops."

Natasha paused but she didn't turn around.

"What if I promised not to come in your mouth? What if I pay you, extra, this week? Double overtime."

That did the trick.

She spun around on her high heels and stalked back to where Tony was leaning against his desk.

He finished his drink.

"Fuck you! Go to hell, you bastard!" Natasha shouted.

"Triple?" Tony asked

She moved to deliver a rabbit punch to his temple, and Tony blocked the blow.

"Alright, we can renegotiate. You don't have to touch me. You don't even have to look at me. Just let me go down on you, and I'll jack off. You can sit in my chair. I'll be under the desk the whole time, and I'll buy you car. Whatever car you want. A Bentley. A Rolls. A 1938 V-8 Ford driven by Clyde Barrow. Anything."

The whole point was, Natasha was now close enough to Tony that he could kiss her.

She pushed him away, slapped him the face and said some very nasty things to him in Russian, then she walked out the door.

Tony poured himself another drink, and drank about half of it.

He smoothed out his hair, flicked a piece of lint off the arc reactor, ran his tongue across his teeth to make sure there was nothing stuck on them, took off his rings and his wristwatch, adjusted his package and then began to count backwards.

"Ten…nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…"

The Black Widow burst back into his office.

She locked the door and used a device in her iPhone to turn off the security cameras.

Even the secret ones.

She didn't have her jacket on, anymore, and she no longer appeared to be composed.

Sash kicked off her shoes, and in the same motion as she approached Tony, drew a snub-nosed but still terribly lethal .357 hand cannon out of a holster in her bra, cocked the hammer and jammed the barrel against Tony's head.

"If you tell a single living soul about this, ever, so long as you live, I will kill you. Slowly. I will shoot you five times, in most painful places possible, and let you bleed almost to death before I sit on your chest and strangle the life out of you with my bare hands, you son of a bitch!"

"Who am I going to tell?"

Tony kissed her again, and Natasha dropped the gun on the floor, and kissed him back.

As he unrolled her thigh-highs, Tony thought of three little words.

In like Flynn.

He almost laughed, but he didn't.

After all, he only had a few months, maybe even only a few weeks to live.

This may be the last time.