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Grease-stained [Iron Man, Tony/Pepper, PG-13]
As if my obsession with this movie couldn't be more obvious. HA. I couldn't resist the angst, though, because I am, well, me.
Title: Grease-stained
Word Count: 4600
Fandom/pairing: Iron Man, Tony/Pepper
Summary: This is what being Iron Man is.
Author Notes: Movieverse. Betaed by the wondeful![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nomelon. Writing this has convinced of what a scary place Tony's head must be. To which I say: AWESOME. :D
Grease-stained
The papers call him genius, billionaire, playboy and, lately, Iron Man. Tony is all of those things, no doubt. He is also slightly unbalanced, childish and selfish, but those are things even he has a problem in admitting to himself.
----
Sometimes, he thinks he relates better to machines than people. Pepper teases him about it all the time, phrases it just like that and he laughs every time, but it hits too close to home for him to actually find it amusing.
Thing is, building is what he’s always been best at. He’s not a particularly good CEO, or a particularly good human being for that matter, and he’s never tried to deny it, but machines, machines he gets; the way a circuit connects with another one, the way wiring twines around steel.
He builds robots because they’re easier to understand than people. There’s something constant and unchangeable about them that is comforting to Tony. He’s never been fond of change – following in his father’s steps, keeping his father’s associate close, holding onto his friendship with Rhodey when they’ve gone in such different directions, boycotting Pepper’s attempts to leave him; it all attests to it.
Robots don’t die. Robots don’t betray you, scorn you with their indifference or drive you crazy with their clicking heels and soothing voice.
He created Jarvis so he would have someone to talk to that would understand everything he said. It has since developed a personality of its own, and is only a few steps away from becoming sentient, but sometimes, Tony wonders if he’s really not just talking to himself all the time.
----
When Pepper picks up her phone, she sounds half asleep.
“What do you want now, Tony?” she asks, still too groggy to care about formalities, and he can almost picture her, hair all over the place and her eyes still closed. Then one of the steel beams of the building he inadvertently collapsed on top of him slides down another inch, building up pressure, and he comes back to reality. There are cracks on the helmet, and fissures growing longer on the chest plate.
“You wound me, Potts, you sound far from pleased to hear me.”
“It’s four am, Tony.”
“I knew that, thank you.” So much pressure on his chest is making it hard to breathe. “I—I might not come back. So, you know, good luck and goodnight, or something like that. I left you a considerable amount of shares in the company, so don’t let those assholes from the board take them from you. Not that I think they could, mind, you have more guts in a single freckle than those idiots have in their entire bodies, and--” He cuts himself off with a groan of pain when another wall collapses somewhere above him and pushes the debris down on him. When Pepper calls his name this time, she sounds fully awake.
“Do me a favor and talk to Jarvis every once in a while. He’ll get lonely. Rhodey too, but at least he has his planes and little military minions to play with.”
“Tony, where are you? Tony? Answer me, for heaven’s sake,” Pepper is all but yelling into his ear.
“Okay. I think that’s all. Gotta go now,” he says, and disconnects the call. He briefly thinks how he forgot to mention a closed-casket funeral would be the better option, considering. Oh well. At least he doesn’t have to worry about the bad guy anymore – he can see the parts of him that remain if he turns his head a little to the left. Not an ideal solution, but it’ll do.
When Pepper and several other SHIELD agents dig him out of the wreckage an hour later, the first thing Pepper does when she manages to get his helmet off is slap him. Hard.
“You don’t get to do this, saying goodbye like that,” she says, furious in that tight-lipped way of hers, and he can’t say sorry because he isn’t, because he’ll do it again. Instead, he lets her help him up, doesn’t complain about his broken ribs until she’s stopped shaking.
He stares at her on the way to the hospital, hair everywhere and dressed in sweatpants and a t-shirt, not doubt the first thing she found, and she looks almost as he’d imagined. She’s still mad enough that she leaves as soon as she drops him in the hospital, but she’s there the next morning, handing him coffee and looking as poised as ever.
“You get decaf today, Mr. Stark, doctor’s instruction,” she says.
“Thank you, Miss Potts,” he says, and then it’s all business and markedly not talking about all the bits and pieces the armor ended up as, and the two bones he broke and how he would’ve died of asphyxiation if he’d been found half an hour later.
----
“Whoa, slow there, Jarvis. I think you’re enjoying this a bit too much.”
“I can’t imagine whatever gave you that idea, sir. Now, if you could stay still.”
“Look, I get it. I look rather dashing all strung up, completely defenseless, but do try and control yourself.”
“I shall keep it in mind, sir.”
“This is taking far too long. This thing is supposed to come off. I know, I designed it.”
“It wouldn’t take that long if you could stop moving, sir. And if you could stay silent as well. That would help.”
“And now I’m being chastised by my own AI. While stuck inside a metal suit. Such is the glamorous life of Tony Stark.”
“May I remind you, sir, that if you had listened to my instructions and hadn’t tried to lift that much weight at once, the suit wouldn’t be half destroyed?”
“Instructions, just like rules, are meant to be ignored. It worked, didn’t it? Anyway I-- holy shit-- Jarvis, you sly thing, you’ll have to buy me dinner first, I’m not that kind of girl.”
“…”
“Aw, come on, now you’re not talking to me? Really?”
----
If he is talking to himself, well, he never claimed to not being a narcissist.
----
He takes to dragging Pepper out of stuffy charity parties to go get a cheeseburger, looking out of place in his tux and her ball gown. He throws fries at her until she gets mad enough to throw some back. They don’t talk shop at those moments, just argue about everything and nothing at all, Pepper’s heels thrown haphazardly between them under the table.
It’s only after the third time it happens that Rhodey asks about it.
“What are you playing at, Tony?” he says, and Tony doesn’t quite know what to tell him because he’s not so sure himself.
Pepper stares at him sometimes, when she thinks he’s not looking, as if she's trying to figure him out. He knows because he’s looking back, catches her while he’s trying to steal a look himself.
He’s wanted Pepper for years, in that abstract way of his to want people, things, knowledge. He’s liked her for even longer. These days, he thinks he wants more, and it scares the fuck out of him.
----
In the months prior to his time in Afghanistan, Tony lived through two freak accidents that seem too strange to really be accidents.
It’s not until later, after the suit and the giant hole in his company’s roof and the death of his father figure, that he realizes that maybe that wasn’t the first time Obadiah tried to kill him.
The thought makes him feel faintly sick.
----
He’s always liked drinking a bit too much, and after the whole business with Obadiah, well, it only gets worse. He’s only semi-conscious about it, of the way Rhodey stops taking him out for drinks and starts showing up in his place with pizza instead, of the way his decade old scotch bottles start disappearing and how both Pepper and Jarvis claim they know nothing about it. Pepper, incidentally, is the better liar.
“I’m a big boy, damn it,” he says as he comes home with a new bottle, and Pepper pointedly says nothing but leaves him passed out at his working table instead of dragging him up to his bed as usual and then refuses to tell him where the painkillers are the next morning in retaliation.
“You’re a big boy, you figure it out,” she says, and clicks her heels extra loudly all day long.
He vaguely comments on how passive-aggressiveness is never an attractive trait before heading back to bed.
He drinks when he makes a breakthrough in the armor’s technology, drinks when the board tries to gain control of his company again, when he thinks of Obadiah praising him on the first remote control missile he built when he was seven; drinks when Iron Man can’t save someone from a flood or an earthquake or a nutcase with a gun.
He drinks and everything fades for a while, so he keeps on doing it.
----
Once, a maid drops Tony’s graduation picture by accident(Tony gangly and clean shaven and a bit pimply, just seventeen and holding a degree and his parents standing on either side of him, smiling at the camera, his mother’s warm smile and his father’s quiet approval visible on his face), and the glass cracks a bit. She’s fired the same day.
He’s surrounded himself by mementos of his dead parents – an old tie, a book his mother used to love, the engineering plans of his father’s that Tony practically learned to read from. He wears his father’s cufflinks, buys the paintings his mother liked and lives by his father’s ideology, always has.
Pepper thinks it’s a little morbid. He knows because he overheard her telling Obadiah, a long time ago. He disagrees. He finds it comfortable, well-worn. He sees her point, though.
He’s spent half of his life trying to live up to the expectations of ghosts.
Ever since Afghanistan he’s been working on reshaping his moral code, adapting it to the man he is now instead of the boy he was when his parents died. It’s both terrifying and liberating.
----
“Not even a strip club? Come on. You love strip clubs.”
“Don’t have the time, sorry.”
“Just one bar? Come on, you’re scaring me.”
“Nope.”
Rhodey has been trying to get Tony out of the house for an hour. Pepper tried for two before giving up and going home, which probably was when she called Rhodey. They gang up on him far too much, those two. He’s never complained (that much) because it’s good to know that someone cares, that someone’s there.
Tony goes on welding, even if his eyes sting a bit already. He takes the goggles off for a moment to rub at them, and grimaces when he realizes he’s only spreading grease along his nose. He’s been sitting in the same position for two hours, wearing the same clothes for eight and been in the workshop for the past twelve. He’s not really tired, though, engineering gives off a high of its own, creating something out of wiring and steel and his own brain synapses. It’s a bit intoxicating, always has been for him.
Rhodey sighs, head down. “Tony, you can’t wear yourself out like this, it’s not good for you.”
“And I suppose going to strip clubs is?”
“Just listen to yourself, man, a few months ago you would’ve been stuffing dollar bills into g-strings already,” Rhodey says, sounding half fond and half exasperated at the memory. He downs most of Tony’s drink, abandoned on the workbench, before Tony steals it back and pours himself some more.
“Yeah, well, a lot can change in a couple of months. Getting kidnapped, for example.” Rhodey mirrors his movements and rubs at his own nose. Tony watches him, then sighs himself. “We’ll just go another day, or, I don’t know, hang out somewhere, your call,” he adds, more for Rhodey’s peace of mind than his own.
Rhodey shakes his head, says, “What are you even working on, anyway?”
“Oh, this. It’s a water filter – I was over in Botswana the other day, and part of the reason the children mortality is so high is that they have to end up drinking whatever water’s available, not matter how polluted or infected it might be. When I’m done with this baby, it’s supposed to be the smallest and cheapest possible for widespread use for entire families. This is just a prototype, though.”
He had met Botswana’s ambassador earlier in the week. She asked whether he really thought he was doing something for the good of humanity. Tony answered yes, no thinking. She laughed. There were pictures from her, from her country, sitting on his inbox the next morning.
Rhodey just stares at him for a long time, saying nothing. “It’s like I don’t know you anymore,” he says, a bit awed and a bit overwhelmed but mostly surprised.
It stings, a bit, knowing how people think he is, but Tony sips his drink and looks straight ahead. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” he says, and believes it.
----
Four months after he first dons the suit, he sleeps with Pepper.
He knows what the first thing she says in the morning is because he’s there, because he’s still lying on the bed next to her, wide awake, because this is something, whatever it might be. And then he knows it’s all gone to hell because what she says is, Oh, fuck, and he has never heard her swear before in all the time he’s known her.
He says, God, I was so drunk, loudly, to give her a chance to escape, and he’s somewhat disappointed when she takes it, when she says, No more than I was, and gets dressed and leaves without looking him in the eye.
So everything gets fucked up, only not really, because she still waves her clipboard menacingly at him, and still patches him up every time he goes out as Iron Man and comes back as a bloodied Tony Stark, and still manages to make Jarvis do whatever she wants him to whether Tony likes it or not. Only, she now leaves at eight pm sharp, whether her work is done or not, just says, “Would that be all, Mr. Stark?” and walks away before he can even answer.
And he gets it, he does, because she’s slept with her boss and isn’t that just the biggest fucking cliché of all time?
They don’t flirt anymore, though. Or rather, Tony doesn’t flirt and Pepper doesn’t make scathing comments after every attempt. Tony finds himself missing it more than the actual sex; it’s always been such a big part of who they are together.
So Pepper goes on telling him which tie he should wear for his next appointment and Tony goes on charming the playmate of the month but going to bed alone, as he’s been doing since Afghanistan, and they both just go on pretending nothing particularly important happened between them.
----
He remembers, though. Remembers the party he’d hosted and her blue dress and how they’d danced in the living room after everyone else had left, Tony singing loudly for lack of actual music and Pepper laughing at him. He remembers dragging that dress off her shoulders.
He knows she remembers too, because sometimes she’ll stare for too long and then blush, red going down her neck, disappearing below her neckline, and then he wants her so much he has to leave the room and put something together or pull something apart just to forget for a moment.
----
“Do you want a suit too?”
Pepper blinks, pauses in fiddling with her blackberry. “I—what?”
“Rhodey wants one. He’s been nagging me to build one for him for ages. Do you want one too?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Oh. Well, you’d be quite the dashing superhero, I have to say. All the bad guys would swoon at your feet.”
“Tony, what is this about?”
He shrugs. “Making conversation? We haven’t talked in ages.”
She tenses, bites her lip for a moment.
“You know, you haven’t shown me what it is you’ve been building down there for the last, oh, century,” she says, and he grins before dragging her to his workshop and naming every single piece and repair he’s added to the armor. So many years of working with him have made her curious about machines, at least a little bit, and she nods a lot and prods some more.
They have pizza, later, and he just laughs when she realizes she hasn’t gotten any work done all afternoon long and panics.
“Stop worrying, Potts, I’ll have Jarvis re-schedule everything.”
“If Jarvis can do everything, then what, pray tell, do you need an assistant for?” she says, eyebrows raised, no real bite in it because they both know he’d be useless without her.
“Well, Jarvis doesn’t look half as good in a skirt, for starters,” he says, and when she smiles and shakes her head it feels like they’ve finally gotten back to normal.
----
Things get easier after that. He starts flirting again and it carries a new meaning behind it, a certain intent. He knows it and she knows it and she starts giving as good as she gets, making him as uncomfortable as he makes her. It makes it interesting, keeps it playful, and when Tony is facing scorn from the press and pressure from the government to quit his little vigilante tirade and battling super villains in Halloween costumes, he needs as much playful as he can get.
----
Flying is Tony’s new drug.
Better than driving, better than fucking, better than power. Over the years he’s tried most of what’s on the market – call it curiosity, scientific interest or pure hedonism, whatever the reason, but he’s never felt such a high as the one he gets when he’s literally up in the sky.
There’s something claustrophobic in first getting inside the armor, complete blindness and skin encased by metal, but then it’s on and off the ground and it’s barely there anymore, just him and open skyline and clouds that get the suit wet and his racing heart and his laughter echoing inside the helmet.
Pepper says he’s really just a big boy who never quite grew up, a billionaire Peter Pan. He leers and tells her he’s quite grown up, thank you very much, that he could show her anytime.
“Believe me, Mr. Stark, it’s not that great a view,” she says with a blush climbing up her neck, and he laughs until he cries because she’s never been as blunt as then, never alluded to that night so nonchalantly.
Rhodey once asks him what the clouds feel like between his fingers. Tony teases him for weeks, but he remembers the look of pure wonder on his face, the one that says that he thought clouds were made of cotton candy as a child, and sometimes, Tony envies that, envies that innocence, because even at age four he knew that clouds were just a large mass of frozen crystals floating in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth.
He’s been trying to make up for the childhood he didn’t have all his life.
----
This is what being Iron Man is.
Being Iron Man is getting up from bed at three am in a Tuesday, not being able to sleep out of sheer excitement, and going out to prove that new balance system on the armor only to end up catching an amateur thief trying to get into an old lady’s apartment. He sticks around in the police station long enough to take his picture dangling an annoyed looking thief a feet off the ground. While doing a peace sign.
That is PR genius, no matter what Pepper says.
There’s a board meeting on Wednesday, in which he’s considered insane and unfit to manage the company for the twelfth time. Before things had gone down, Tony hadn’t been to a meeting in years. He’d trusted Obadiah enough to fill that part for him. Pepper hands him a couple of painkillers on the ride back home, without being asked, and he considers giving her another raise.
He sets himself on fire on Thursday on an experiment gone wrong. Rhodey and Pepper take turns in both chiding him and being worried. Tony develops a newfound appreciation for Dummy. He considers giving it a personality for all of three point two seconds before he realizes it’d probably be the most annoying robot in history.
On Friday he gives five interviews – four of them involving questions such as how exactly is he entitled to be above the law and could he explain again how was it that building a lethal piece of armor doesn’t make him and his new views on military weaponry a hypocrite. The fifth one involves questions such as what exactly he wears under the suit and whether he would like to pose naked for a centerfold.
He’s so relieved he says yes right away, and then Pepper has to clean up his mess once again. He says sorry and she says he doesn’t mean it and he grins and she struts around in those heels of hers and when he puts his fingers on the soft skin inside her elbow as he sits next to her she doesn’t pull away. He goes on grinning.
Saturday is being too late to save a man from being murdered. He goes over the scenario over and over, trying to figure out what he did wrong, what he could’ve done better, and every single time Joshua Bartlett, 24, is still on the ground with a bullet between his eyes, his brain matter speckled all over the counter of a local convenience store.
Sunday is spent drinking. It is also Pepper’s day off, which says rather a lot.
On Monday he helps with the search and rescue efforts for an earthquake in Ecuador. When he gets back home, half ripping the suit off, Pepper is in the workshop watching footage of him flying children to safety and not looking them in the eye because no, their mother isn't going to wake up. She turns around to stare at him with such a grave look on her face that he can’t help but return it. Jarvis, TV off, he says, and the room is left in darkness.
Pepper takes him by the wrist and helps him finish getting the armor off, then drags him to the shower and sits outside the bathroom in silence, waiting. He sits next to her when he comes out, and then they stay like that for a while, not talking, not even touching, just being.
“I’m proud of you, you know, even if I don’t want to endorse all this,” she says later, not quite looking at him.
“Well, sometimes I’m not,” he says.
He drinks himself to sleep thinking of all those families watching their destroyed homes, of all those people holding the hands of dead loved ones with tears in their eyes.
On Tuesday, the cycle starts again.
----
Once, Pepper is kidnapped as a way to get to Iron Man.
When Tony finally gets there, she’s already convinced the guy to turn himself in.
“I am not ever letting you quit,” he says, impressed, and she smiles and says she didn’t expect anything else.
----
He remembers kissing her, both of them tasting like too many martinis, and he remembers not kissing her during a party, close enough to breathe her in but not feeling like good enough of a man for her.
He wants to be that man.
----
It’s winter and it’s dark when she trips and ends up with a hand against Tony’s chest to balance herself. When he looks down, he can see her fingers glow blue against the arc reactor, and when he looks up he finds she’s staring at it as well.
They’re standing close, Pepper’s blackberry digging into his hip because not even almost falling to the ground would make the woman let go of it. It hurts a bit in a good way, just a remainder of being able to feel, and she’s breathing fast and trying to conceal it and it only makes him step closer.
“Tell me you don’t think about it,” he says for the second time in so many months.
“It’d be horrible,” she says, still staring at the arc reactor, fingers feeling the metal, curious.
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do,” she says before she looks up, before she puts an arm around his neck and kisses him, fast and messy and everything she’s not, and then she’s pulling away, flushed but still poised, still with her chin up.
“Would that be all, Mr. Stark?” she asks while she straightens imaginary wrinkles in her skirt.
“Nowhere near it, Miss Potts,” Tony says with a grin, and Pepper grins back before leaving him alone in the dark living room, his chest the only light in the room.
----
She’s right, of course. He’d either get bored or end up living for it and she’d get tired or end up suffocated and it would. It would be so bad.
That doesn’t stop him from wanting it, though.
Doesn’t stop him from kissing her again in his workshop, sudden and breathless and her with clipboard in hand and shifting from foot to foot because she won’t admit her new shoes are hurting her; doesn’t stop her from kissing back for a moment before pushing him away with the clipboard when he tries to hitch one of her legs up to his hips.
He leaves grease smears on her arms and on her inner left thigh. He thinks they suit her.
----
The next time he almost dies, she’s the one that has to remove glass fragments from his chest and shoulders because he still won’t allow a doctor near him unless he truly is a step away from death. Which he isn’t right now. Really.
“You’re an idiot. You know that, right? The being an idiot part,” Pepper says as she squints at the tiny sliver of glass she’s holding between a pair of tweezers.
He’s drinking to numb the pain, even when he knows he has much more effective painkillers somewhere in the house. These days, everything is a good excuse for drinking.
“That’s not a nice thing to call your boss, Miss Potts.”
“Yes, well, sometimes you need to hear it. And Rhodey isn’t here to do it, so.”
She starts extracting another fragment, and he downs the scotch in one gulp, eyes closed and eyebrows together. He’s bleeding from dozens of small cuts, just a few drops of blood that run down his chest and join the other red stains. The overall effect is rather chilling.
“Well, I hope you stick to this idiot.” Tony’s pretty sure he’s never sounded as pathetic as now. He blames the pain. And the alcohol.
Pepper pauses for a moment, lifts her head. He avoids her gaze. “I think I might,” she says, and he leers and says something inappropriate because it feels like one of those moments, those crucial ones that could change everything, and he’s never been good at those. She just threatens to leave him there with glass still embedded in his skin, though, and then he knows she’s probably as scared as he is.
They fall asleep like that, him still sitting in a stainless steel high chair and her sitting by his side, tweezers thrown on the workbench beside them and head resting on his knee.
It’s the second time he’s seen her wake up, and this time, she only says "God, my back hurts."
It sounds like a beginning.
Title: Grease-stained
Word Count: 4600
Fandom/pairing: Iron Man, Tony/Pepper
Summary: This is what being Iron Man is.
Author Notes: Movieverse. Betaed by the wondeful
nomelon. Writing this has convinced of what a scary place Tony's head must be. To which I say: AWESOME. :DGrease-stained
The papers call him genius, billionaire, playboy and, lately, Iron Man. Tony is all of those things, no doubt. He is also slightly unbalanced, childish and selfish, but those are things even he has a problem in admitting to himself.
----
Sometimes, he thinks he relates better to machines than people. Pepper teases him about it all the time, phrases it just like that and he laughs every time, but it hits too close to home for him to actually find it amusing.
Thing is, building is what he’s always been best at. He’s not a particularly good CEO, or a particularly good human being for that matter, and he’s never tried to deny it, but machines, machines he gets; the way a circuit connects with another one, the way wiring twines around steel.
He builds robots because they’re easier to understand than people. There’s something constant and unchangeable about them that is comforting to Tony. He’s never been fond of change – following in his father’s steps, keeping his father’s associate close, holding onto his friendship with Rhodey when they’ve gone in such different directions, boycotting Pepper’s attempts to leave him; it all attests to it.
Robots don’t die. Robots don’t betray you, scorn you with their indifference or drive you crazy with their clicking heels and soothing voice.
He created Jarvis so he would have someone to talk to that would understand everything he said. It has since developed a personality of its own, and is only a few steps away from becoming sentient, but sometimes, Tony wonders if he’s really not just talking to himself all the time.
----
When Pepper picks up her phone, she sounds half asleep.
“What do you want now, Tony?” she asks, still too groggy to care about formalities, and he can almost picture her, hair all over the place and her eyes still closed. Then one of the steel beams of the building he inadvertently collapsed on top of him slides down another inch, building up pressure, and he comes back to reality. There are cracks on the helmet, and fissures growing longer on the chest plate.
“You wound me, Potts, you sound far from pleased to hear me.”
“It’s four am, Tony.”
“I knew that, thank you.” So much pressure on his chest is making it hard to breathe. “I—I might not come back. So, you know, good luck and goodnight, or something like that. I left you a considerable amount of shares in the company, so don’t let those assholes from the board take them from you. Not that I think they could, mind, you have more guts in a single freckle than those idiots have in their entire bodies, and--” He cuts himself off with a groan of pain when another wall collapses somewhere above him and pushes the debris down on him. When Pepper calls his name this time, she sounds fully awake.
“Do me a favor and talk to Jarvis every once in a while. He’ll get lonely. Rhodey too, but at least he has his planes and little military minions to play with.”
“Tony, where are you? Tony? Answer me, for heaven’s sake,” Pepper is all but yelling into his ear.
“Okay. I think that’s all. Gotta go now,” he says, and disconnects the call. He briefly thinks how he forgot to mention a closed-casket funeral would be the better option, considering. Oh well. At least he doesn’t have to worry about the bad guy anymore – he can see the parts of him that remain if he turns his head a little to the left. Not an ideal solution, but it’ll do.
When Pepper and several other SHIELD agents dig him out of the wreckage an hour later, the first thing Pepper does when she manages to get his helmet off is slap him. Hard.
“You don’t get to do this, saying goodbye like that,” she says, furious in that tight-lipped way of hers, and he can’t say sorry because he isn’t, because he’ll do it again. Instead, he lets her help him up, doesn’t complain about his broken ribs until she’s stopped shaking.
He stares at her on the way to the hospital, hair everywhere and dressed in sweatpants and a t-shirt, not doubt the first thing she found, and she looks almost as he’d imagined. She’s still mad enough that she leaves as soon as she drops him in the hospital, but she’s there the next morning, handing him coffee and looking as poised as ever.
“You get decaf today, Mr. Stark, doctor’s instruction,” she says.
“Thank you, Miss Potts,” he says, and then it’s all business and markedly not talking about all the bits and pieces the armor ended up as, and the two bones he broke and how he would’ve died of asphyxiation if he’d been found half an hour later.
----
“Whoa, slow there, Jarvis. I think you’re enjoying this a bit too much.”
“I can’t imagine whatever gave you that idea, sir. Now, if you could stay still.”
“Look, I get it. I look rather dashing all strung up, completely defenseless, but do try and control yourself.”
“I shall keep it in mind, sir.”
“This is taking far too long. This thing is supposed to come off. I know, I designed it.”
“It wouldn’t take that long if you could stop moving, sir. And if you could stay silent as well. That would help.”
“And now I’m being chastised by my own AI. While stuck inside a metal suit. Such is the glamorous life of Tony Stark.”
“May I remind you, sir, that if you had listened to my instructions and hadn’t tried to lift that much weight at once, the suit wouldn’t be half destroyed?”
“Instructions, just like rules, are meant to be ignored. It worked, didn’t it? Anyway I-- holy shit-- Jarvis, you sly thing, you’ll have to buy me dinner first, I’m not that kind of girl.”
“…”
“Aw, come on, now you’re not talking to me? Really?”
----
If he is talking to himself, well, he never claimed to not being a narcissist.
----
He takes to dragging Pepper out of stuffy charity parties to go get a cheeseburger, looking out of place in his tux and her ball gown. He throws fries at her until she gets mad enough to throw some back. They don’t talk shop at those moments, just argue about everything and nothing at all, Pepper’s heels thrown haphazardly between them under the table.
It’s only after the third time it happens that Rhodey asks about it.
“What are you playing at, Tony?” he says, and Tony doesn’t quite know what to tell him because he’s not so sure himself.
Pepper stares at him sometimes, when she thinks he’s not looking, as if she's trying to figure him out. He knows because he’s looking back, catches her while he’s trying to steal a look himself.
He’s wanted Pepper for years, in that abstract way of his to want people, things, knowledge. He’s liked her for even longer. These days, he thinks he wants more, and it scares the fuck out of him.
----
In the months prior to his time in Afghanistan, Tony lived through two freak accidents that seem too strange to really be accidents.
It’s not until later, after the suit and the giant hole in his company’s roof and the death of his father figure, that he realizes that maybe that wasn’t the first time Obadiah tried to kill him.
The thought makes him feel faintly sick.
----
He’s always liked drinking a bit too much, and after the whole business with Obadiah, well, it only gets worse. He’s only semi-conscious about it, of the way Rhodey stops taking him out for drinks and starts showing up in his place with pizza instead, of the way his decade old scotch bottles start disappearing and how both Pepper and Jarvis claim they know nothing about it. Pepper, incidentally, is the better liar.
“I’m a big boy, damn it,” he says as he comes home with a new bottle, and Pepper pointedly says nothing but leaves him passed out at his working table instead of dragging him up to his bed as usual and then refuses to tell him where the painkillers are the next morning in retaliation.
“You’re a big boy, you figure it out,” she says, and clicks her heels extra loudly all day long.
He vaguely comments on how passive-aggressiveness is never an attractive trait before heading back to bed.
He drinks when he makes a breakthrough in the armor’s technology, drinks when the board tries to gain control of his company again, when he thinks of Obadiah praising him on the first remote control missile he built when he was seven; drinks when Iron Man can’t save someone from a flood or an earthquake or a nutcase with a gun.
He drinks and everything fades for a while, so he keeps on doing it.
----
Once, a maid drops Tony’s graduation picture by accident(Tony gangly and clean shaven and a bit pimply, just seventeen and holding a degree and his parents standing on either side of him, smiling at the camera, his mother’s warm smile and his father’s quiet approval visible on his face), and the glass cracks a bit. She’s fired the same day.
He’s surrounded himself by mementos of his dead parents – an old tie, a book his mother used to love, the engineering plans of his father’s that Tony practically learned to read from. He wears his father’s cufflinks, buys the paintings his mother liked and lives by his father’s ideology, always has.
Pepper thinks it’s a little morbid. He knows because he overheard her telling Obadiah, a long time ago. He disagrees. He finds it comfortable, well-worn. He sees her point, though.
He’s spent half of his life trying to live up to the expectations of ghosts.
Ever since Afghanistan he’s been working on reshaping his moral code, adapting it to the man he is now instead of the boy he was when his parents died. It’s both terrifying and liberating.
----
“Not even a strip club? Come on. You love strip clubs.”
“Don’t have the time, sorry.”
“Just one bar? Come on, you’re scaring me.”
“Nope.”
Rhodey has been trying to get Tony out of the house for an hour. Pepper tried for two before giving up and going home, which probably was when she called Rhodey. They gang up on him far too much, those two. He’s never complained (that much) because it’s good to know that someone cares, that someone’s there.
Tony goes on welding, even if his eyes sting a bit already. He takes the goggles off for a moment to rub at them, and grimaces when he realizes he’s only spreading grease along his nose. He’s been sitting in the same position for two hours, wearing the same clothes for eight and been in the workshop for the past twelve. He’s not really tired, though, engineering gives off a high of its own, creating something out of wiring and steel and his own brain synapses. It’s a bit intoxicating, always has been for him.
Rhodey sighs, head down. “Tony, you can’t wear yourself out like this, it’s not good for you.”
“And I suppose going to strip clubs is?”
“Just listen to yourself, man, a few months ago you would’ve been stuffing dollar bills into g-strings already,” Rhodey says, sounding half fond and half exasperated at the memory. He downs most of Tony’s drink, abandoned on the workbench, before Tony steals it back and pours himself some more.
“Yeah, well, a lot can change in a couple of months. Getting kidnapped, for example.” Rhodey mirrors his movements and rubs at his own nose. Tony watches him, then sighs himself. “We’ll just go another day, or, I don’t know, hang out somewhere, your call,” he adds, more for Rhodey’s peace of mind than his own.
Rhodey shakes his head, says, “What are you even working on, anyway?”
“Oh, this. It’s a water filter – I was over in Botswana the other day, and part of the reason the children mortality is so high is that they have to end up drinking whatever water’s available, not matter how polluted or infected it might be. When I’m done with this baby, it’s supposed to be the smallest and cheapest possible for widespread use for entire families. This is just a prototype, though.”
He had met Botswana’s ambassador earlier in the week. She asked whether he really thought he was doing something for the good of humanity. Tony answered yes, no thinking. She laughed. There were pictures from her, from her country, sitting on his inbox the next morning.
Rhodey just stares at him for a long time, saying nothing. “It’s like I don’t know you anymore,” he says, a bit awed and a bit overwhelmed but mostly surprised.
It stings, a bit, knowing how people think he is, but Tony sips his drink and looks straight ahead. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” he says, and believes it.
----
Four months after he first dons the suit, he sleeps with Pepper.
He knows what the first thing she says in the morning is because he’s there, because he’s still lying on the bed next to her, wide awake, because this is something, whatever it might be. And then he knows it’s all gone to hell because what she says is, Oh, fuck, and he has never heard her swear before in all the time he’s known her.
He says, God, I was so drunk, loudly, to give her a chance to escape, and he’s somewhat disappointed when she takes it, when she says, No more than I was, and gets dressed and leaves without looking him in the eye.
So everything gets fucked up, only not really, because she still waves her clipboard menacingly at him, and still patches him up every time he goes out as Iron Man and comes back as a bloodied Tony Stark, and still manages to make Jarvis do whatever she wants him to whether Tony likes it or not. Only, she now leaves at eight pm sharp, whether her work is done or not, just says, “Would that be all, Mr. Stark?” and walks away before he can even answer.
And he gets it, he does, because she’s slept with her boss and isn’t that just the biggest fucking cliché of all time?
They don’t flirt anymore, though. Or rather, Tony doesn’t flirt and Pepper doesn’t make scathing comments after every attempt. Tony finds himself missing it more than the actual sex; it’s always been such a big part of who they are together.
So Pepper goes on telling him which tie he should wear for his next appointment and Tony goes on charming the playmate of the month but going to bed alone, as he’s been doing since Afghanistan, and they both just go on pretending nothing particularly important happened between them.
----
He remembers, though. Remembers the party he’d hosted and her blue dress and how they’d danced in the living room after everyone else had left, Tony singing loudly for lack of actual music and Pepper laughing at him. He remembers dragging that dress off her shoulders.
He knows she remembers too, because sometimes she’ll stare for too long and then blush, red going down her neck, disappearing below her neckline, and then he wants her so much he has to leave the room and put something together or pull something apart just to forget for a moment.
----
“Do you want a suit too?”
Pepper blinks, pauses in fiddling with her blackberry. “I—what?”
“Rhodey wants one. He’s been nagging me to build one for him for ages. Do you want one too?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Oh. Well, you’d be quite the dashing superhero, I have to say. All the bad guys would swoon at your feet.”
“Tony, what is this about?”
He shrugs. “Making conversation? We haven’t talked in ages.”
She tenses, bites her lip for a moment.
“You know, you haven’t shown me what it is you’ve been building down there for the last, oh, century,” she says, and he grins before dragging her to his workshop and naming every single piece and repair he’s added to the armor. So many years of working with him have made her curious about machines, at least a little bit, and she nods a lot and prods some more.
They have pizza, later, and he just laughs when she realizes she hasn’t gotten any work done all afternoon long and panics.
“Stop worrying, Potts, I’ll have Jarvis re-schedule everything.”
“If Jarvis can do everything, then what, pray tell, do you need an assistant for?” she says, eyebrows raised, no real bite in it because they both know he’d be useless without her.
“Well, Jarvis doesn’t look half as good in a skirt, for starters,” he says, and when she smiles and shakes her head it feels like they’ve finally gotten back to normal.
----
Things get easier after that. He starts flirting again and it carries a new meaning behind it, a certain intent. He knows it and she knows it and she starts giving as good as she gets, making him as uncomfortable as he makes her. It makes it interesting, keeps it playful, and when Tony is facing scorn from the press and pressure from the government to quit his little vigilante tirade and battling super villains in Halloween costumes, he needs as much playful as he can get.
----
Flying is Tony’s new drug.
Better than driving, better than fucking, better than power. Over the years he’s tried most of what’s on the market – call it curiosity, scientific interest or pure hedonism, whatever the reason, but he’s never felt such a high as the one he gets when he’s literally up in the sky.
There’s something claustrophobic in first getting inside the armor, complete blindness and skin encased by metal, but then it’s on and off the ground and it’s barely there anymore, just him and open skyline and clouds that get the suit wet and his racing heart and his laughter echoing inside the helmet.
Pepper says he’s really just a big boy who never quite grew up, a billionaire Peter Pan. He leers and tells her he’s quite grown up, thank you very much, that he could show her anytime.
“Believe me, Mr. Stark, it’s not that great a view,” she says with a blush climbing up her neck, and he laughs until he cries because she’s never been as blunt as then, never alluded to that night so nonchalantly.
Rhodey once asks him what the clouds feel like between his fingers. Tony teases him for weeks, but he remembers the look of pure wonder on his face, the one that says that he thought clouds were made of cotton candy as a child, and sometimes, Tony envies that, envies that innocence, because even at age four he knew that clouds were just a large mass of frozen crystals floating in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth.
He’s been trying to make up for the childhood he didn’t have all his life.
----
This is what being Iron Man is.
Being Iron Man is getting up from bed at three am in a Tuesday, not being able to sleep out of sheer excitement, and going out to prove that new balance system on the armor only to end up catching an amateur thief trying to get into an old lady’s apartment. He sticks around in the police station long enough to take his picture dangling an annoyed looking thief a feet off the ground. While doing a peace sign.
That is PR genius, no matter what Pepper says.
There’s a board meeting on Wednesday, in which he’s considered insane and unfit to manage the company for the twelfth time. Before things had gone down, Tony hadn’t been to a meeting in years. He’d trusted Obadiah enough to fill that part for him. Pepper hands him a couple of painkillers on the ride back home, without being asked, and he considers giving her another raise.
He sets himself on fire on Thursday on an experiment gone wrong. Rhodey and Pepper take turns in both chiding him and being worried. Tony develops a newfound appreciation for Dummy. He considers giving it a personality for all of three point two seconds before he realizes it’d probably be the most annoying robot in history.
On Friday he gives five interviews – four of them involving questions such as how exactly is he entitled to be above the law and could he explain again how was it that building a lethal piece of armor doesn’t make him and his new views on military weaponry a hypocrite. The fifth one involves questions such as what exactly he wears under the suit and whether he would like to pose naked for a centerfold.
He’s so relieved he says yes right away, and then Pepper has to clean up his mess once again. He says sorry and she says he doesn’t mean it and he grins and she struts around in those heels of hers and when he puts his fingers on the soft skin inside her elbow as he sits next to her she doesn’t pull away. He goes on grinning.
Saturday is being too late to save a man from being murdered. He goes over the scenario over and over, trying to figure out what he did wrong, what he could’ve done better, and every single time Joshua Bartlett, 24, is still on the ground with a bullet between his eyes, his brain matter speckled all over the counter of a local convenience store.
Sunday is spent drinking. It is also Pepper’s day off, which says rather a lot.
On Monday he helps with the search and rescue efforts for an earthquake in Ecuador. When he gets back home, half ripping the suit off, Pepper is in the workshop watching footage of him flying children to safety and not looking them in the eye because no, their mother isn't going to wake up. She turns around to stare at him with such a grave look on her face that he can’t help but return it. Jarvis, TV off, he says, and the room is left in darkness.
Pepper takes him by the wrist and helps him finish getting the armor off, then drags him to the shower and sits outside the bathroom in silence, waiting. He sits next to her when he comes out, and then they stay like that for a while, not talking, not even touching, just being.
“I’m proud of you, you know, even if I don’t want to endorse all this,” she says later, not quite looking at him.
“Well, sometimes I’m not,” he says.
He drinks himself to sleep thinking of all those families watching their destroyed homes, of all those people holding the hands of dead loved ones with tears in their eyes.
On Tuesday, the cycle starts again.
----
Once, Pepper is kidnapped as a way to get to Iron Man.
When Tony finally gets there, she’s already convinced the guy to turn himself in.
“I am not ever letting you quit,” he says, impressed, and she smiles and says she didn’t expect anything else.
----
He remembers kissing her, both of them tasting like too many martinis, and he remembers not kissing her during a party, close enough to breathe her in but not feeling like good enough of a man for her.
He wants to be that man.
----
It’s winter and it’s dark when she trips and ends up with a hand against Tony’s chest to balance herself. When he looks down, he can see her fingers glow blue against the arc reactor, and when he looks up he finds she’s staring at it as well.
They’re standing close, Pepper’s blackberry digging into his hip because not even almost falling to the ground would make the woman let go of it. It hurts a bit in a good way, just a remainder of being able to feel, and she’s breathing fast and trying to conceal it and it only makes him step closer.
“Tell me you don’t think about it,” he says for the second time in so many months.
“It’d be horrible,” she says, still staring at the arc reactor, fingers feeling the metal, curious.
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do,” she says before she looks up, before she puts an arm around his neck and kisses him, fast and messy and everything she’s not, and then she’s pulling away, flushed but still poised, still with her chin up.
“Would that be all, Mr. Stark?” she asks while she straightens imaginary wrinkles in her skirt.
“Nowhere near it, Miss Potts,” Tony says with a grin, and Pepper grins back before leaving him alone in the dark living room, his chest the only light in the room.
----
She’s right, of course. He’d either get bored or end up living for it and she’d get tired or end up suffocated and it would. It would be so bad.
That doesn’t stop him from wanting it, though.
Doesn’t stop him from kissing her again in his workshop, sudden and breathless and her with clipboard in hand and shifting from foot to foot because she won’t admit her new shoes are hurting her; doesn’t stop her from kissing back for a moment before pushing him away with the clipboard when he tries to hitch one of her legs up to his hips.
He leaves grease smears on her arms and on her inner left thigh. He thinks they suit her.
----
The next time he almost dies, she’s the one that has to remove glass fragments from his chest and shoulders because he still won’t allow a doctor near him unless he truly is a step away from death. Which he isn’t right now. Really.
“You’re an idiot. You know that, right? The being an idiot part,” Pepper says as she squints at the tiny sliver of glass she’s holding between a pair of tweezers.
He’s drinking to numb the pain, even when he knows he has much more effective painkillers somewhere in the house. These days, everything is a good excuse for drinking.
“That’s not a nice thing to call your boss, Miss Potts.”
“Yes, well, sometimes you need to hear it. And Rhodey isn’t here to do it, so.”
She starts extracting another fragment, and he downs the scotch in one gulp, eyes closed and eyebrows together. He’s bleeding from dozens of small cuts, just a few drops of blood that run down his chest and join the other red stains. The overall effect is rather chilling.
“Well, I hope you stick to this idiot.” Tony’s pretty sure he’s never sounded as pathetic as now. He blames the pain. And the alcohol.
Pepper pauses for a moment, lifts her head. He avoids her gaze. “I think I might,” she says, and he leers and says something inappropriate because it feels like one of those moments, those crucial ones that could change everything, and he’s never been good at those. She just threatens to leave him there with glass still embedded in his skin, though, and then he knows she’s probably as scared as he is.
They fall asleep like that, him still sitting in a stainless steel high chair and her sitting by his side, tweezers thrown on the workbench beside them and head resting on his knee.
It’s the second time he’s seen her wake up, and this time, she only says "God, my back hurts."
It sounds like a beginning.