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Tony was sitting alone in his penthouse when it all began. Well… not began, but restarted. The day started quite fine, nothing indicated that everything would go downhill so fast.He lay on his leather couch with a glass of golden whiskey in his hand when he felt it. The little prickling under his skin, as if a swarm of ants were walking through his veins, tickling and biting him all the way down. Tony’s eyes twitched when he understood what that meant. He knew the feeling all too well.Shit.The cold radiating from the ice in the whiskey made moist residue to appear on the glass, and Tony counted all the droplets that appeared and rolled down.
One. Two. Three.
It didn’t actually take his mind off of what he wanted so strongly to ignore, to roll under the carpet and never feel again. But it was some kind of distraction.
Four. Five. Six.
Tony took another gulp of the amber liquid, his knuckles white from the force with which he was grabbing the glass.The feeling was there, that cruel, horrible feeling.
The feeling that he waited for every day with anxiety and fear.His heart twisted and sunk with nerves, the whiskey almost spilling as he shook, his breaths coming in slow sharp pants as he tried to control himself, but nothing worked.It hurt.
He was angry, because he knew. He knew that it wouldn’t go away.It was like thirst or hunger. When you haven’t drank or eaten for a long time, your body will begin to send you subtle messages to remind you that it can’t survive without nutrition, and that pain radiating from your body won’t go away until you satisfy its needs.The difference was that it wasn’t Tony’s body but rather his mind.And no matter what he did, no matter what he tried, that itch, that ache he feels all over won’t go away until he takes a life.It won’t go away until Tony coats his hands with blood, chokes the life out of someone with his bare hands while watching them squirm and thrash under himself.Tony wanted his fingertips to dig into someone’s neck, to look into the person’s eyes and see the horror swirling in them while he slowly squeezed the life out of their body.Even thinking about seeing the light fading out of somebody’s eyes by his hand sent pulses of rush through his spine that made him shiver violently.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
He knew that once the thought occurred it will just keep getting stronger. Day by day it would get more possessive, more corrupting. It would control every inch of him, his body, his mind and soul until he can’t control himself. It would change him into something that would make most people sick to their stomach, but he just can’t help it. He can’t help falling in love with the feeling of absolute glee and bliss when someone’s pulse slows down and stops under his fingertips, over and over again.Tony absolutely loves the euphoria and energy the action of taking someone’s life brings him.It’s like sex, just better.He remembered his first kill like he remembered the moment he lost his virginity. Tony was just 18 then, his parents recently deceased and his life a mess of drugs, alcohol and parties. That’s when he felt the prickling under his skin for the first time. Tony didn’t pay it much thought, thinking that it was just his body’s way of telling him that he needed to find a pretty face and take it to bed.Oh, how wrong he was.Her name was Claire, she was a fellow student at MIT. She wasn’t a bad person, her grades were pretty high, her face and body more than decent and she didn’t have a bad reputation of sleeping with everyone she saw. Tony had laid an eye from the moment he saw her first. Her casual beauty, her jeans and t-shirts, her Bambi eyes and golden hair, the way her smile grows and the way she moves from one side of the room to the other like an experienced deer made him want her in every way. After years of looking at her from distance Tony finally approached her that night. Claire knew what he was offering the moment she saw him and took Tony’s hand, leading him into her dorm. They closed the door and shut all curtains.Tony was trying to be gentle with her clothing and not to rip it off of her, but it was proving to be very hard with his newfound aggression. His hands were used to mending metal rather than undoing tiny clasps. And then… Harder…
Faster…
Deeper…Until they were both lying exhausted and drenched with sweat, panting deeply because of their recent… activities.It was at that moment that Tony understood something was wrong. The girl beside him may have been fully satisfied from what he did to her, but he… … the feeling hadn’t gone away.Tony looked at Claire for what felt like the first time, he looked at her like he never looked at a human being before. There was something special about this woman.Tony grabbed her by the waist and pulled her up close against his chest. His hand gently glided through her hair, a sigh escaping his lips.It seemed that he was suddenly aware of the warm naked body he was holding in his arms. That not only stirred him, but took over his thinking. The rest of his world became an unimportant blur that was banished into the far corners of his mind. The only thing that mattered was the olive skin of his first love under his fingertips, soft and gracious like the finest of silk.One part of him wanted to date her, to fuck her again and never let go, but another part of him, something he didn’t know existed, told him that her head would look quite pretty on a stick.Tony didn’t notice how time passed. A minute, ten, twenty. He didn’t notice how Claire went to sleep in his arms, or how his thoughts stopped. It seemed like his body became the human embodiment of TV static.Tony moved his head closer to her hair and inhaled giddily, the smell of sweat and strawberries feeling his lungs, sending jolts of electricity all the way down his body. Goosebumps covered him. He licked his lips.It's the anticipation of being together in a way that's more than words, in a way that's so completely tangible. Something more intimate than what they just did.The next thing he knows is that he’s over her and his hand is sliding slowly to her neck, cold fingers brushing over Claire’s trachea and grasping it so gently that she doesn’t even stir. He could back down, he could just go to sleep and forget that this ever happened, but he already was acting on pure instinct, all rationality gone and away.And so he squeezed.Her eyes opened abruptly and her body jumped upward, not understanding what was happening. Tony fell on her hard with his knee, pushing her down into the mattress, his hands not once leaving her neck… pressing, closing. The absolute panic on the blonde’s face was priceless, it made his heart beat accelerate, but it had nothing to do with fear. Tony’s blood rang in his ears, making him squeeze harder and dig his nails into the tender flesh underneath, drawing out blood.Just one simple action made Tony feel on top of the world, his teeth biting into his lip so viciously he split it. In that moment he was only alive in the present, all thoughts of past and future melted away. Tony reoriented her face so that he could hold her gaze, to steal and swallow the intense panic and horror swirling under the mirrors to a human’s soul. He wanted to see the moment life leaves her eyelids and savior the moment.The gurgling and choking sounds she was making were music to his ears. He felt like he just discovered heroin.Claire was wriggling her fingers at his face, a desperate but useless action. Tony just put more weight into his knee and pushed all the leftover air from her lungs. Her eyes widened further if it was possible, mouth opening and closing, trying to gulp in air, save herself.It was all futile.“Shh. Shh.” He quietly uttered “It’s gonna be over soon”He retracted one of his hands, making sure that the other remained firmly in place, and put a finger on her lip. Her face began to turn into a sickening color as her sight started to close in on her.With a few last flutters of eyelashes her body stopped resisting. Tony waited for another minute, just to be sure, and retracted his other hand, lowering himself and biting her lip gently, leaving a bloody imprint.“I’m sorry” The apology was said so gently that it felt like Tony was talking to a living, breathing person, not a corpse with blooming angry red lines on its neck. He finally understood.It wasn’t lust (or, more correctly, not in the form we’re familiar with) it was an urge.It grew to such extreme proportions that Tony just couldn’t stop himself from whatever he just did.All the pressure, all the stress and hatred left his body as soon as the job was finished. It just Vanished, dissipated. And yes, he felt satisfied, but he wasn’t happy by the fact that he just killed a person. Or maybe he was bothered by it because it was someone that he liked?He should test that theory…
…the next time.Claire lived alone in her dorm, so it wasn’t hard to get rid of the body. He couldn’t just leave it there or throw it somewhere else, because he had just had sex with the girl. DNA and all that Jazz. Claire Westcott went missing that day.The body was never found.Over the years Tony killed many more. Women and men, with his hands or with a gun, after sex or he just felt the urge to.It became his addiction, his drug. Something that he couldn’t just give up and be done with. Because whenever you try to get rid of a drug, the cravings follow. And resisting it was absolute hell. His whole body burned, ached with the desire to take a life. He never won.He found people, he killed those people.He had to satisfy himself in order not to hurt the ones he truly cared about, like he did to Claire.It stopped for a while after Afghanistan… well… until this point he assumed. He thought that it was because he saw his fair share of violence and didn’t need more in his life, but, so it seems, that it was just muted by his job as Iron Man.
Ten
Well then…Time to find a new target, eh?