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No one ever notices the scars -- at first anyway. They're fine and pale, scattered along the hollow of his collarbones and the top edge of his scapula. They seem almost insignificant next to the webbing of keloid scars across his chest from the shrapnel -- and the headlight he's got in his chest, he'll admit, has a tendency to steal focus.
Look closely enough, however, and at just the right angle one could imagine that they're the faded remains of bite marks. Bonding marks maybe.
They're not, he'd deny wryly but never emphatically, unless anyone should think that this omega protest too much. He'll take drink of his scotch (but never too long) and change the subject of conversation.
Sometimes people will press -- the idea that an unprotected enemy omega could escape... unmolested... in captivity is admittedly hard to believe. Depending on his audience, depending on what he thinks he can gain from it, depending on how many drinks he's had, he'll hint that the Ten Rings tried -- TRIED -- to make him their bottom bitch-omega. Lowest of the low in the pack. That Tony's own pride and resilience -- as an American -- is the only thing that prevented such a catastrophe -- leaving him with a few more scars but his honor intact. He never goes into details, never confirms how far, exactly, the Ten Rings went to try and make him theirs, and lets the listener draw their own conclusions.
Omegas already get so much shit for even looking at the front lines, he won't allow himself to be used as some parable that attempts to explain why it's too dangerous for omegas to be allowed to fight for their country -- like omegas haven't been doing so since the dawn of time, without acknowledgement or proper compensation.
The smell is a bit easier to explain -- He was held prisoner by terrorists for 3 months at the behest of a close member of his primary pack. It's no wonder that he'd have trouble trusting -- that it's his underlying fear of (yet another) betrayal at the hands of those closest to him is what warps his scent and makes him seem unavailable.
The truth, of course, is much more monstrous than they could ever imagine.
There are days when he notices looks from the other Avengers -- the ones they think he doesn't notice -- and he knows their unspoken desire to have him round out their newly fledged pack. Those are the days he wonders which would repulse them more; the idea that Ten Rings managed to complete the bond and that he's tethered to them for all eternity-- or that in spite of the bond he killed them all, painted sand dunes with their blood and kerosene, and then set the whole them ablaze.
On good days, he thinks they'd be horrified by the murder of "bond mates", even if they were the ones who forced the bond in the first place. It's the plot to a grindhouse movie. Killing bond mates -- it's just not something that's done in real life, especially by the omega. An alpha driven mad, maybe, but never the omega. The bond between them, no matter how corrupted, should have prevented that. That somehow the newfound empathy between him and his captors should have -- fuck, he's not sure, convinced them of the error of their ways and help him escape? Had his soul utterly consumed by men who didn't bother to give him their names while he was living (and he refuses the dignity of names in death), left a broken spirit to crawl at their feet?
On bad days, he remembers Raza's sneer, the feeling of spit sliding across his cheek, as Raza explained that he was too dirty -- too whorish, too unworthy -- for Raza to sully himself with -- before "gifting" him to the lowest ranked members of the Rings pack as a reward for their "bravery" during the convoy attack. How Raza had encouraged them to bite -- to bind -- to break him. How Raza had egged them on, had laughed at his tears and told his rapists he could take more, that Raza had seen the videos. That he didn't fight the bond as hard as he could have -- that another omega, a better omega, a smarter, wouldn't have end up bound to eight strangers in a cave.
Before Afghanistan he would've sworn that he didn't buy into any of the bullshit about how omegas are more fragile than alphas and betas, or how they're more sensitive emotionally. He'd have laughed. He told himself to suck it up and move on. He thought he was beyond it -- but it wasn't true. Now the line between biological reality and Hollywood bullshit and political propaganda is so blurred that even all this time (years) later he's still trying to sort it out.
Most days are good days, fortunately. Most days he can accept that despite a millenia of romantic fairy tales, bonding really is just a biological imperative to ensure paternity of offspring. That society is to blame for making it into something more -- something that it's not. That when he thinks he can feel them watching him from beyond the grave that it's really just his PTSD talking. That what he did wasn't some obscene act -- just his mind overruling outdated biological imperatives.
He never questions whether it was the right thing to do -- it absolutely was. He doesn't regret -- although he thinks that maybe he should, just a little, if only about being 'forced' to take a life (lives), even if he was justified. That's something normal people do, he's pretty sure.
Sometimes, though, the only way he can sleep is to convince himself that bonds really do stretch beyond the grave, just like in those romance books his mother used to sigh over. That their spirits really do watch over him and seethe -- and the thought is paradoxically soothing. If they're haunting him, it means they're still dead. That he killed them.
Like he said, better to let them come to their own conclusions.