Fic: Till Death Do Us Part (1/1)
Title: Till Death Do Us Part
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Tony/Pepper
Word Count: 4,706
Summary: She is married to her work. Movieverse. For the pepperony100 Prompt #9 - Gold.
Prompt Table: Here
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author’s Notes: This is essentially the product of me playing around a little more with the structural devices in 'This Is How It Works,' along with juxtapositions of tense. It's more a character study than anything else… seems like I haven’t quite gotten those out of my system yet, though I am working sporadically on something a little more dialogue-driven. Regardless, this turned out much happier and fluffier and more outside of my comfort zone than I normally attempt - apologies if it doesn’t actually work. Warning for really, really long paragraphs - part of that structure experimentation I mentioned.
Till Death Do Us Part
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It starts the very moment she from graduates college; she’d still been in her thigh-length black gown, though her cap had been lost somewhere in the visitors’ bleachers, the hem damp from the precipitation still clinging to the air after the late spring showers that had fallen the evening prior, her conservative black pumps steeped in the mud of the football field-turned reflection pool upon which they’d unwittingly held commencement on that particular overcast morning. She’d stumbled a bit on her right foot, the large, divot-like chunk of dirt that was attached like a growth to the spike of her heel throwing her off balance, and she tried to look natural as she toed it off with a cross of her ankles. Trying desperately to avoiding further drenching the seam-line of her nylons, she could only manage to roll her eyes when she heard her mother rambling on about how now - with her education secured and her future bright before her - she could find a good man to settle down with, to take care of her. She very nearly popped her brother over the head with the stiff degree-folder clutched under her arm when he snickered in solidarity with their mother, nearly tackled her father in a hug as he murmured in quiet retaliation that “his baby’d probably end up taking care of her man, not the other way around,” but ended up doing neither; instead, she stumbled on shaky feet to towards the parking lot, stepping awkwardly to avoid sinking into the deeper puddles, and pulling self-consciously on the uncomfortable bobby pins that were pinching at her up-do.
Her first job out of school, to her everlasting shame, lands her in food service. She’d worked at an Olive Garden for a year before she found anything more permanent, more suited to her skill level. She had required the financial support of her family to manage both making her loan payments and affording her rent, and she walked to and from work because she couldn’t afford the insurance on her deathtrap of a ’76 Chevy Caprice. And while it killed her every time a male patron stared too long at the backs of her knees where the edge of her skirt flirted with her skin, while it mocked her pride ever day she stalked the two-and-a-half miles from the shithole she called an apartment in her monochromatic uniform with the plastic of her nametag reflecting in the afternoon sun; while she wanted to crawl into a hole and die every time she went to grab her mail, only to find the crack-addict from 3F passed out in front of her keyhole, it wasn’t all a waste. She learned more in those twelve months than she ever had in the endless stream of courses she’d endured, learned more about life and people and the world and the fact that not everything was fair than she’d bargained for - more than she’d wanted to know, really. She learned how to escort a drunken man from the bar to the door without getting groped more than once and still avoiding the stream of vomit that sometimes came along for the ride; she learned how to walk in stilettos while missing the cracks in the pavement, and how to unstick the heel should it get lodged in a cement hole without causing a scene. She learned how to balance a budget and a checkbook between the trays on both arms without falling flat on her face, getting audited, or spilling a plate of stuffed rigatoni down her front; she learned how to care for herself as well as other people, when her neighbor needed a babysitter, or when the man from 3F needed a hand up the stairs. Perhaps most importantly, however, she learned how to dodge her mother’s interference in her love life - how to duck the questions and insinuations that she shouldn’t be living alone, how to turn down the countless attempts at set ups that were bound for failure before they even began; how to pour water from a pitcher with a simple lie of a ring on her left hand to divert the suspicious glances and the lecherous stares, to fool the world, and perhaps herself in the process, by making it seem as if she wasn’t alone.
She finally gets a position as a secretary, and for once, she doesn’t complain, because she makes $12 an hour base, gets to wear color again, and can finally pay her parents back for the groceries and the rent payments and the little things here and there, like the new refrigerator and the replacement lighting fixtures and the plumber she’d required when her sink had veritably exploded. She learns things in passing about laws and statutes and court proceedings, and she absorbs it, breathes it like oxygen because it’s stimulating and she’s been without anything aside from petty gossip and late night television for so long that it seems like a lifetime. She wears a mint green pantsuit that somehow manages to look very striking with her hair when the office staff first asks her to join them for drinks on a Friday night; she’s wearing the pale peach skirt with the pinstriped oxford blouse when she finally says yes. She sips a dirty martini with a single olive and she laughs at all the right intervals and she almost says yes when Carl from the corner office asks her if she wants to go somewhere less ostentatious for something stronger, but yawns dramatically in decline, her skin still flushed from the invitation as she changes her outfit in the privacy of her room some hours later. She answers a coy “maybe” when her mother, in their next phone conversation, asks if there’s a “special someone,” but deftly ignores any further advances that come from the corner office over the following sequence of weeks with a smile hid smartly behind a stack of folders.
In less than six months, Pepper Potts is moving up in the world, and all thanks to a fortuitously missed elevator and an inconveniently closed restroom. She’d bumped into Mr. Wentworth while climbing the stairs to the ladies’ room on the tenth floor of her building, thanks to a leaky pipe in the one on the third level, when he opened the door directly into her nose as she turned to make the final stretch towards her destination. An obligatory ice pack led to a lunch, which led to a dinner and a job proposal with his brokerage firm that she wanted more than anything to pass up, if only because Pepper wasn’t a fool, and she knew this type of man from the bars at the Olive Garden, from the glint in his eye and the quirk at the end of his smile; and if there was one thing Virginia Potts would simply not stand for, it was objectification by a man. She grudgingly accepts the position as his personal assistant only because it’s a step on the ladder, the first rung in what she likes to think of as her personal ten-year-plan; she would start small, working her way up slowly but surely, first a nicer flat, then a nicer car, then a nicer wardrobe, and then some even nicer shoes and by the time she was sliding into her mid-thirties, she would finally be successful. The plan is flawless, and she sticks to it with worrisome fortitude, editing it only when she goes home for the holidays with the half-hearted addition of a husband to soothe her mother’s concerns, all the while making plans to return the shirts her parents have purchased for her as gifts and exchange them for something a little less revealing below the throat.
Incidentally, a job with Stark Industries is not in Pepper’s ten-year plan, but when the opening is mentioned to her by the matronly security guard at her office building with the curly black hair plastered to her scalp and the comical ruby lips, it sticks in her mind, and she considers it not once, or twice, but a whole three times before she faxes over her credentials. She starts small, and when she gets to her tiny, crowded desk without a view, she wonders if the extensive interview process and the invasive background checks required to so much as step foot in Stark Industries’ front lobby were really worthwhile. When she meets her monotone supervisor and almost gags at the permeating odor of stale coffee that follows him around like a shadow, she begins to miss the predatory eyes of her old boss, because at least those she could ignore. She learns quickly that she’s nothing more than a paper pusher, and that paper pushers are meant to keep their mouths shut and their eyes open and to gather around the water cooler and twitter like scared mice when the backs of their superiors are turned. She learns quickly that she’s stumbled by mistake and fallen down a step or two in her notorious plan for her future, but after two years of doing the same tedious office work and traitorously learning to really enjoy the bloated salary that came as a given to every Stark employee, from the CEO to the custodial staff, she and her slowly-swooping necklines were beginning to wonder if mediocre wasn’t tolerable after all.
With her ten-year plan already shot to hell, she figures it’s only fitting that the mathematical skills she’d honed in her youth would come back to bite her in the ass. She doesn’t get a say in the promotion, and thinks that maybe that’s just the first red flag. She spends her first week as Tony Stark’s PA trying her damnedest to convince the disconcertingly realistic voice that runs his household that she’s authorized to enter the premises, to ignore Mr. Stark’s laughter when he watches her fight with the highly-advanced computer system that protects his home, and to generally avoid staring at the finely shaped buttocks of her employer as he saunters away with a smirk. She pretends not to notice when he comes down without a shirt on, when his hair is still glistening with water droplets from a quick shower, when his lips purse and a stray lo mein noodle peaks out from between them as he shovels his dinner into his mouth with the chopsticks he found at the bottom of the takeout bag; she imagines away the funny dab of filling that somehow manages to dot his cheek from the crab rangoon he’s chewing, and when she turns to the Blackberry in her hand she tells herself that’s she’s flushing because she has no idea how any human being could possibly fix the hellish mess that is Tony Stark’s schedule, and decidedly not because she’s imagining what his mouth could do if not full of noodles and deep-fried dumpling.
The first time he brings home a leggy brunette on her watch, it’s well into her second week there, and given his reputation, she’s surprised at the fact that it didn’t happen sooner. Still, the day had been about to end on a high note - she’d managed to go without getting lost in the mansion for the very first time, and Jarvis had finally warmed up to her presence, bidding her a fond farewell and a safe journey home as she packed up her laptop and prepared to find her boss and wish him a good evening before she left. When she eventually finds him on his knees between the spread legs of his flavor of the week, said female’s miniskirt hiked up near her ribs, she gasps with a squeak and slams the door. She doesn’t know if it bothers her that he doesn’t follow after her to explain, or apologize, but she does know that it frustrates her as she drives to work the next morning that she didn’t have to even think about returning after such an incident; that already, this job was ingrained into her being as routine, as a given. She notices a replenishment of fruit on his table, in the bowl that she’d been eating out of regularly and depleting considerably over the past few days, and she wonders if that’s Tony’s way of saying he’s sorry. In time, just as she learns that Tony Stark doesn’t change his flavors weekly, but more often does so hourly, she comes to see that for Tony, a few mangos and a pear constitute the most sweeping apology she’s ever likely to receive.
It’s within the first year that she starts staying whole nights on site at the Stark Estate, as she likes to call it, and when she tells her nagging, irritable mother that she has no need of romantic male interests on account of being dutifully married to her work, she speaks only the truth. Her mother, consequently, takes to cursing “that bastard Stark man” as the worst kind of things the English language has words for, and using any excuse she can find to call her daughter and attempt to lure her away from that playboy, who was not only ruining her professional reputation but also her prospects as a woman. During one such exchange, Tony had found his way up from his workshop in search of the ever-present box of day-old pizza that graced his countertop, and had asked her as she hung up to repeat the part about marriage. She had, without a thought, and he’d chewed on the crust for a moment before pausing and nearly spitting out the remains with the sardonic sort of laugh that brought heat to Pepper’s cheeks and made her look down in shame. She knows that he took it wrong, that he was just being his ironic, insensitive self, but it hurt, and that’s what makes her angry. It’s the first time she leaves before all of her work is done, and the first time she realizes that in reality, Tony Stark is her entire world.
She falls ill the second Christmas she spends in his employ, a little twenty-four hour flu of no consequence, really, but he has the chauffeur drive her home early on the 24th because, in Tony’s own oh-so-considerate terms, she “looks like shit,” and he “hates assistant hunting, and would rather she didn’t kill herself on the freeway.” She hadn’t fought him, but she had protested when Happy, who she still called Mr. Hogan, tried to help her up the stairs to her apartment (which had voice-recognition security systems and guards on duty 24/7 and mail delivery to each individual unit and was completely drug-addict free, thank you kindly). She resigned herself to letting him mix her up some Alka-Seltzer before she shooed him away, wishing him a Merry Christmas and flipping on the television, never even registering that ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ was playing before she was out cold against the supportive arm of her loveseat. He bought her the Audi that year, the very next day, and while she liked to think it was a planned gift of simple gratitude, she knew it was likely because she’d left her car when Happy had taken her home, and Tony had finally seen his opportunity to rid them both of that thorn in his side - he couldn’t stand the Civic she drove; while a sight better than her previous Caprice, it certainly wasn’t quite in the league for Stark approval. When her mother led the way in from the driveway they next morning, complete with an armful of Tupperware that smelled overwhelmingly of turkey, they’d both spotted the sleek, silver vehicle at the very same time. While her mother wondered loudly about a secret admirer, Pepper herself couldn’t help but wonder how he’d managed to arrange its delivery on such short notice, and couldn’t help but wish he’d been there to give it to her himself.
She perfects herself as the flawless, the only cog that fits Mr. Stark’s well oiled machine with the aid of time and her own sharp mind, and she manages to reclaim some of her dignity as well, making herself a presence, a viable force; and she’s almost shocked when her efforts don’t simply go unnoticed. The women start to pick up her name, by some perverse system, some strange word of mouth. When Tony insists that she accompany him to this event or that social gathering, when they stalk through lines of spas and dug-out hot tubs and her shoes become discolored in the chlorine mist of a decorative waterfall at this engagement or that soiree, she’s surprised at the looks, at the attention she seems to receive. She politely declines every offer of a dance at benefits, and graciously turns down every man who tries to buy her a drink, but she keeps track of them all in her head. She ultimately finds it very disappointing that people she’s never met before seem to know how she likes her martini, when even after all this time, Tony still thinks she drinks a Tequila Sunrise.
It’s three years later when she falls ill near the holidays once more, though this time it is something nastier, and this time she never makes it back home before passing out on the couch. Instead, she spends an entire week drifting in and out of consciousness in Tony Stark’s bedroom, in Tony Stark’s bed, with Tony Stark’s cold hand on her forehead every few hours. She never asks him if he’d stayed with her, if he’d been worried; but she does realize that it’s Christmas, and he has been home, and he has no one. When she starts feeling better, he helps her to the bathroom, to the one with the Jacuzzi that looks more like a mid-sized pool, and he leaves her under Jarvis’s watchful eye; by the time she returns to clean sheets and a can of Diet Sprite on the nightstand with a bright-pink bendy straw laced through the pop-tab, she’s decided never to leave him alone on Christmas again. Her mother protests when she misses their family gathering, and Pepper won’t tell her that she’s been ill. Instead, she says that she spent Christmas with someone important to her, and leaves it at that - because it’s not a lie and it’s enough of the truth to mollify her mother’s impertinence, and quiet her embarrassing warnings that Pepper’s biological clock is ticking.
When he disappears, she doesn’t say a word. When they tell her that his chances of survival are negligible, her heart twists a bit. When the days start to turn into weeks, she beings to lose hope. She cleans and schedules and fields the press like a pro, and it’s only after they start to lose interest that she begins to despair, because that means he’s really gone, and he’s not coming back, and it’s then that she falls to the floor in the hallway, dropping the expensive linens she’d just retrieved from the dry cleaners and was about to make up his bed with, and she cries, for the first time since that terrible, terrible day that she was born, when she hadn’t even managed to properly bid him goodbye. She cries every night, and she doesn’t step foot in her own apartment once, laying instead on the wrinkled pillowcase that had never made it back onto Tony’s down pillow and wishing she’d had the presence of mind to keep it away from the cleaners, so that she could still smell his after shave on it. Her mother, over the months of his absence, had prudently neglected to mention her lack of a significant other, for which Pepper would be eternally grateful. When Jarvis one day expresses tentative concern for Pepper’s mental state, it only makes things worse, and when he finally does come back, against all hope and sense and every need she’s ever known to turn cold in her veins, she doesn’t mind that he notices how her eyes matched her hair, but even in her joy at his return, she’ll be damned if in the face of that smirk she admits to being a wreck over him. She’s just grateful that he’s too enraptured by his cheeseburgers to notice the few stray tears that leak from the corners of her eyes as they drive, just at watching him; so alive, and sitting right next to her.
She understands that he thinks - that he needs to think - that he’s not the same Tony that she’s always known; but really, she’s convinced he’s more that Tony now that he ever was. The suit scares her, because it’s hard and angry and filled with such power without any real emotion, and because he’s so different when he’s in it. The number of nights that find her situated upon the settee, watching the newly-replaced baby grand across from her as if it held the answers to the universe are too many to mention; the times when she nearly hyperventilates with the sheer magnitude of reality as it compresses her lungs and strangles her heart are too numerous to count, and sometimes she only just manages to slip out of the house as he trudges up the stairs after one of his so-called “missions,” bruised and exhausted, before he can know that she was ever there. It’s on one of those nights when she realizes that he’s more than just her boss, realizes it in such stunning clarity that it nearly knocks the wind out of her. He really is all that she has, and it doesn’t bother her so much as it astounds her, and she drives home shaking, feeling so nauseous and overwhelmed that she pulls over on a side street and spends the rest of the hours left until morning propped against the driver’s side window, breathing harsh and deep and hoping that she has enough gas to run the air-conditioning until sunrise. He comments on the dark circles under her eyes the next day, and when she dozes off while answering his e-mail, she wakes up later to find her laptop safely folded closed on the half wall nearby, and a blanket tucked thoughtfully around her elbows. She’s glad, just then, that Jarvis doesn’t have arms, because it makes her feel warm knowing who it was that paid her such careful mind.
Her resignation, she suspects, is what forced both of their hands, in the end. He wasn’t supposed to find it, not yet, but he does, typed and signed by her briefcase before she can file it away. The first words out of his mouth are to ask if it’s because he keeps asking for her help with the arc reactor, and the hurt in his eyes makes her melt a bit as she tries to explain that she isn’t quitting, that she doesn’t want to leave - so many things that make no sense and really never did, things she can’t verbalize or describe properly, and as a result she can’t convince him that she doesn’t mean what’s in that letter because even she doesn’t know why she wrote it anymore. She’s exposed in black and white, the only things that have ever been solid and dependable in her life, and it’s heartbreaking because she wants more, needs more, and it kills her every time he silently refuses to give it to her. She runs, for the first time in her life, and her pulse jumps when he catches her with a firm grip around the wrist, pulling her against him and watching her with fiery eyes, breathing hard against her until the warmth of his breath becomes the warmth of his mouth and everything else, everything before that instant melts away. She can feel his heart pounding in his lips, and she holds tight to him, suddenly dizzy as he deepens the kiss, as he slips his arms around her shoulders and forces her closer, and she finds that his chest is hard as it heaves against her breasts, and that his hand his searing against the back of her neck. Things don’t go any further that night, except for the fact that she stays, and nothing is different at first, except for the fact that her chest gets a weird fluttery feeling whenever she looks at him, the kind that she thought was only real in films and trashy romance novels, and he looks breathless every time she walks into the room. And it’s little things, baby steps, when things do begin to change - he kisses her on the cheek when she goes home, and she starts to go home less and less, so he kisses her goodnight instead. He keeps his appointments more often than not, and she flat out stops calling him ‘Mr. Stark.’ When they order dinner, Tony lets Pepper pick where from, and when she playfully steals a pepper out of his curry one night, he only grins and takes one of her onions in reply. He buys her a present, of his own accord, for her next birthday - a shockingly tasteful evening gown in deep amethyst with a high, shimmering neckline and a low, draping back that rivals that of the infamous blue number from so long ago, and she’s flattered that it’s a size too small, but knows better than to mention it. They share private smiles and secret looks and he never goes to a party without her on his arm. It takes Pepper a while to notice that there’s no one else, anymore; that she’s the only one. It’s a beautiful feeling, when she realizes it, and after it settles into a general contentment as she starts waking up in his bed, and surges back into joy when he starts waking up next to her, she knows; she just knows, and it’s everything she ever dreamed.
These days, Sunday afternoons often find her in the kitchen, and this particular Sunday is no different. She chops a stalk of celery on the cutting board in front of her, careful not to nick her fingers in the process. The sterile metallic lighting above the island is dimly illuminating her pale skin, making the freckles more pronounced, shimmering off the gleaming gold of the simple band wrapped around her left ring finger (he’d wanted platinum, or a symbolic use of gold-titanium alloy, but she’d insisted on something simple and traditional, and he’d eventually given in). Her mother never asks about her love life anymore - she claims she doesn’t want to know, and sometimes, Pepper can’t blame her. Sometimes it’s hard - too hard; sometimes it’s frightening and dangerous and sometimes she wonders if every day there aren’t more wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, or if the strands of silvery grey at her temples aren’t just tricks of the light, and more than anything she wonders if all of that isn’t his fault, in the end; but she knows she that she wouldn’t have it any other way. She knows, in the quiet moments when he’s safely confined in his workshop drawing up plans for some new project or another to submit to the board and she’s upstairs actually cooking them a homemade meal, when she can hear his music wafting up the stairs and on the echoes all she can hear is the soft whisper of his voice on the fateful day when Anthony Edward Stark took Virginia Margaret Potts to be his lawful wedded wife, when she smiles at the glittering promise of a diamond nestled under her wedding ring and considers the prospect of life without him; she knows that if she were given the opportunity go back and relive the past, she wouldn’t change a single thing. And she knows, suddenly, when he sneaks up behind her and wraps lean, naked arms around her waist, pulling her close enough to feel the hitch between his breaths, close enough to make her forget about the conference call she has yet to set up for the next morning, that this is what she’d been working towards since the very beginning, what she’d always known she wanted.
She is married to her work, and in a way, she always has been.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Tony/Pepper
Word Count: 4,706
Summary: She is married to her work. Movieverse. For the pepperony100 Prompt #9 - Gold.
Prompt Table: Here
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author’s Notes: This is essentially the product of me playing around a little more with the structural devices in 'This Is How It Works,' along with juxtapositions of tense. It's more a character study than anything else… seems like I haven’t quite gotten those out of my system yet, though I am working sporadically on something a little more dialogue-driven. Regardless, this turned out much happier and fluffier and more outside of my comfort zone than I normally attempt - apologies if it doesn’t actually work. Warning for really, really long paragraphs - part of that structure experimentation I mentioned.
Till Death Do Us Part
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It starts the very moment she from graduates college; she’d still been in her thigh-length black gown, though her cap had been lost somewhere in the visitors’ bleachers, the hem damp from the precipitation still clinging to the air after the late spring showers that had fallen the evening prior, her conservative black pumps steeped in the mud of the football field-turned reflection pool upon which they’d unwittingly held commencement on that particular overcast morning. She’d stumbled a bit on her right foot, the large, divot-like chunk of dirt that was attached like a growth to the spike of her heel throwing her off balance, and she tried to look natural as she toed it off with a cross of her ankles. Trying desperately to avoiding further drenching the seam-line of her nylons, she could only manage to roll her eyes when she heard her mother rambling on about how now - with her education secured and her future bright before her - she could find a good man to settle down with, to take care of her. She very nearly popped her brother over the head with the stiff degree-folder clutched under her arm when he snickered in solidarity with their mother, nearly tackled her father in a hug as he murmured in quiet retaliation that “his baby’d probably end up taking care of her man, not the other way around,” but ended up doing neither; instead, she stumbled on shaky feet to towards the parking lot, stepping awkwardly to avoid sinking into the deeper puddles, and pulling self-consciously on the uncomfortable bobby pins that were pinching at her up-do.
Her first job out of school, to her everlasting shame, lands her in food service. She’d worked at an Olive Garden for a year before she found anything more permanent, more suited to her skill level. She had required the financial support of her family to manage both making her loan payments and affording her rent, and she walked to and from work because she couldn’t afford the insurance on her deathtrap of a ’76 Chevy Caprice. And while it killed her every time a male patron stared too long at the backs of her knees where the edge of her skirt flirted with her skin, while it mocked her pride ever day she stalked the two-and-a-half miles from the shithole she called an apartment in her monochromatic uniform with the plastic of her nametag reflecting in the afternoon sun; while she wanted to crawl into a hole and die every time she went to grab her mail, only to find the crack-addict from 3F passed out in front of her keyhole, it wasn’t all a waste. She learned more in those twelve months than she ever had in the endless stream of courses she’d endured, learned more about life and people and the world and the fact that not everything was fair than she’d bargained for - more than she’d wanted to know, really. She learned how to escort a drunken man from the bar to the door without getting groped more than once and still avoiding the stream of vomit that sometimes came along for the ride; she learned how to walk in stilettos while missing the cracks in the pavement, and how to unstick the heel should it get lodged in a cement hole without causing a scene. She learned how to balance a budget and a checkbook between the trays on both arms without falling flat on her face, getting audited, or spilling a plate of stuffed rigatoni down her front; she learned how to care for herself as well as other people, when her neighbor needed a babysitter, or when the man from 3F needed a hand up the stairs. Perhaps most importantly, however, she learned how to dodge her mother’s interference in her love life - how to duck the questions and insinuations that she shouldn’t be living alone, how to turn down the countless attempts at set ups that were bound for failure before they even began; how to pour water from a pitcher with a simple lie of a ring on her left hand to divert the suspicious glances and the lecherous stares, to fool the world, and perhaps herself in the process, by making it seem as if she wasn’t alone.
She finally gets a position as a secretary, and for once, she doesn’t complain, because she makes $12 an hour base, gets to wear color again, and can finally pay her parents back for the groceries and the rent payments and the little things here and there, like the new refrigerator and the replacement lighting fixtures and the plumber she’d required when her sink had veritably exploded. She learns things in passing about laws and statutes and court proceedings, and she absorbs it, breathes it like oxygen because it’s stimulating and she’s been without anything aside from petty gossip and late night television for so long that it seems like a lifetime. She wears a mint green pantsuit that somehow manages to look very striking with her hair when the office staff first asks her to join them for drinks on a Friday night; she’s wearing the pale peach skirt with the pinstriped oxford blouse when she finally says yes. She sips a dirty martini with a single olive and she laughs at all the right intervals and she almost says yes when Carl from the corner office asks her if she wants to go somewhere less ostentatious for something stronger, but yawns dramatically in decline, her skin still flushed from the invitation as she changes her outfit in the privacy of her room some hours later. She answers a coy “maybe” when her mother, in their next phone conversation, asks if there’s a “special someone,” but deftly ignores any further advances that come from the corner office over the following sequence of weeks with a smile hid smartly behind a stack of folders.
In less than six months, Pepper Potts is moving up in the world, and all thanks to a fortuitously missed elevator and an inconveniently closed restroom. She’d bumped into Mr. Wentworth while climbing the stairs to the ladies’ room on the tenth floor of her building, thanks to a leaky pipe in the one on the third level, when he opened the door directly into her nose as she turned to make the final stretch towards her destination. An obligatory ice pack led to a lunch, which led to a dinner and a job proposal with his brokerage firm that she wanted more than anything to pass up, if only because Pepper wasn’t a fool, and she knew this type of man from the bars at the Olive Garden, from the glint in his eye and the quirk at the end of his smile; and if there was one thing Virginia Potts would simply not stand for, it was objectification by a man. She grudgingly accepts the position as his personal assistant only because it’s a step on the ladder, the first rung in what she likes to think of as her personal ten-year-plan; she would start small, working her way up slowly but surely, first a nicer flat, then a nicer car, then a nicer wardrobe, and then some even nicer shoes and by the time she was sliding into her mid-thirties, she would finally be successful. The plan is flawless, and she sticks to it with worrisome fortitude, editing it only when she goes home for the holidays with the half-hearted addition of a husband to soothe her mother’s concerns, all the while making plans to return the shirts her parents have purchased for her as gifts and exchange them for something a little less revealing below the throat.
Incidentally, a job with Stark Industries is not in Pepper’s ten-year plan, but when the opening is mentioned to her by the matronly security guard at her office building with the curly black hair plastered to her scalp and the comical ruby lips, it sticks in her mind, and she considers it not once, or twice, but a whole three times before she faxes over her credentials. She starts small, and when she gets to her tiny, crowded desk without a view, she wonders if the extensive interview process and the invasive background checks required to so much as step foot in Stark Industries’ front lobby were really worthwhile. When she meets her monotone supervisor and almost gags at the permeating odor of stale coffee that follows him around like a shadow, she begins to miss the predatory eyes of her old boss, because at least those she could ignore. She learns quickly that she’s nothing more than a paper pusher, and that paper pushers are meant to keep their mouths shut and their eyes open and to gather around the water cooler and twitter like scared mice when the backs of their superiors are turned. She learns quickly that she’s stumbled by mistake and fallen down a step or two in her notorious plan for her future, but after two years of doing the same tedious office work and traitorously learning to really enjoy the bloated salary that came as a given to every Stark employee, from the CEO to the custodial staff, she and her slowly-swooping necklines were beginning to wonder if mediocre wasn’t tolerable after all.
With her ten-year plan already shot to hell, she figures it’s only fitting that the mathematical skills she’d honed in her youth would come back to bite her in the ass. She doesn’t get a say in the promotion, and thinks that maybe that’s just the first red flag. She spends her first week as Tony Stark’s PA trying her damnedest to convince the disconcertingly realistic voice that runs his household that she’s authorized to enter the premises, to ignore Mr. Stark’s laughter when he watches her fight with the highly-advanced computer system that protects his home, and to generally avoid staring at the finely shaped buttocks of her employer as he saunters away with a smirk. She pretends not to notice when he comes down without a shirt on, when his hair is still glistening with water droplets from a quick shower, when his lips purse and a stray lo mein noodle peaks out from between them as he shovels his dinner into his mouth with the chopsticks he found at the bottom of the takeout bag; she imagines away the funny dab of filling that somehow manages to dot his cheek from the crab rangoon he’s chewing, and when she turns to the Blackberry in her hand she tells herself that’s she’s flushing because she has no idea how any human being could possibly fix the hellish mess that is Tony Stark’s schedule, and decidedly not because she’s imagining what his mouth could do if not full of noodles and deep-fried dumpling.
The first time he brings home a leggy brunette on her watch, it’s well into her second week there, and given his reputation, she’s surprised at the fact that it didn’t happen sooner. Still, the day had been about to end on a high note - she’d managed to go without getting lost in the mansion for the very first time, and Jarvis had finally warmed up to her presence, bidding her a fond farewell and a safe journey home as she packed up her laptop and prepared to find her boss and wish him a good evening before she left. When she eventually finds him on his knees between the spread legs of his flavor of the week, said female’s miniskirt hiked up near her ribs, she gasps with a squeak and slams the door. She doesn’t know if it bothers her that he doesn’t follow after her to explain, or apologize, but she does know that it frustrates her as she drives to work the next morning that she didn’t have to even think about returning after such an incident; that already, this job was ingrained into her being as routine, as a given. She notices a replenishment of fruit on his table, in the bowl that she’d been eating out of regularly and depleting considerably over the past few days, and she wonders if that’s Tony’s way of saying he’s sorry. In time, just as she learns that Tony Stark doesn’t change his flavors weekly, but more often does so hourly, she comes to see that for Tony, a few mangos and a pear constitute the most sweeping apology she’s ever likely to receive.
It’s within the first year that she starts staying whole nights on site at the Stark Estate, as she likes to call it, and when she tells her nagging, irritable mother that she has no need of romantic male interests on account of being dutifully married to her work, she speaks only the truth. Her mother, consequently, takes to cursing “that bastard Stark man” as the worst kind of things the English language has words for, and using any excuse she can find to call her daughter and attempt to lure her away from that playboy, who was not only ruining her professional reputation but also her prospects as a woman. During one such exchange, Tony had found his way up from his workshop in search of the ever-present box of day-old pizza that graced his countertop, and had asked her as she hung up to repeat the part about marriage. She had, without a thought, and he’d chewed on the crust for a moment before pausing and nearly spitting out the remains with the sardonic sort of laugh that brought heat to Pepper’s cheeks and made her look down in shame. She knows that he took it wrong, that he was just being his ironic, insensitive self, but it hurt, and that’s what makes her angry. It’s the first time she leaves before all of her work is done, and the first time she realizes that in reality, Tony Stark is her entire world.
She falls ill the second Christmas she spends in his employ, a little twenty-four hour flu of no consequence, really, but he has the chauffeur drive her home early on the 24th because, in Tony’s own oh-so-considerate terms, she “looks like shit,” and he “hates assistant hunting, and would rather she didn’t kill herself on the freeway.” She hadn’t fought him, but she had protested when Happy, who she still called Mr. Hogan, tried to help her up the stairs to her apartment (which had voice-recognition security systems and guards on duty 24/7 and mail delivery to each individual unit and was completely drug-addict free, thank you kindly). She resigned herself to letting him mix her up some Alka-Seltzer before she shooed him away, wishing him a Merry Christmas and flipping on the television, never even registering that ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ was playing before she was out cold against the supportive arm of her loveseat. He bought her the Audi that year, the very next day, and while she liked to think it was a planned gift of simple gratitude, she knew it was likely because she’d left her car when Happy had taken her home, and Tony had finally seen his opportunity to rid them both of that thorn in his side - he couldn’t stand the Civic she drove; while a sight better than her previous Caprice, it certainly wasn’t quite in the league for Stark approval. When her mother led the way in from the driveway they next morning, complete with an armful of Tupperware that smelled overwhelmingly of turkey, they’d both spotted the sleek, silver vehicle at the very same time. While her mother wondered loudly about a secret admirer, Pepper herself couldn’t help but wonder how he’d managed to arrange its delivery on such short notice, and couldn’t help but wish he’d been there to give it to her himself.
She perfects herself as the flawless, the only cog that fits Mr. Stark’s well oiled machine with the aid of time and her own sharp mind, and she manages to reclaim some of her dignity as well, making herself a presence, a viable force; and she’s almost shocked when her efforts don’t simply go unnoticed. The women start to pick up her name, by some perverse system, some strange word of mouth. When Tony insists that she accompany him to this event or that social gathering, when they stalk through lines of spas and dug-out hot tubs and her shoes become discolored in the chlorine mist of a decorative waterfall at this engagement or that soiree, she’s surprised at the looks, at the attention she seems to receive. She politely declines every offer of a dance at benefits, and graciously turns down every man who tries to buy her a drink, but she keeps track of them all in her head. She ultimately finds it very disappointing that people she’s never met before seem to know how she likes her martini, when even after all this time, Tony still thinks she drinks a Tequila Sunrise.
It’s three years later when she falls ill near the holidays once more, though this time it is something nastier, and this time she never makes it back home before passing out on the couch. Instead, she spends an entire week drifting in and out of consciousness in Tony Stark’s bedroom, in Tony Stark’s bed, with Tony Stark’s cold hand on her forehead every few hours. She never asks him if he’d stayed with her, if he’d been worried; but she does realize that it’s Christmas, and he has been home, and he has no one. When she starts feeling better, he helps her to the bathroom, to the one with the Jacuzzi that looks more like a mid-sized pool, and he leaves her under Jarvis’s watchful eye; by the time she returns to clean sheets and a can of Diet Sprite on the nightstand with a bright-pink bendy straw laced through the pop-tab, she’s decided never to leave him alone on Christmas again. Her mother protests when she misses their family gathering, and Pepper won’t tell her that she’s been ill. Instead, she says that she spent Christmas with someone important to her, and leaves it at that - because it’s not a lie and it’s enough of the truth to mollify her mother’s impertinence, and quiet her embarrassing warnings that Pepper’s biological clock is ticking.
When he disappears, she doesn’t say a word. When they tell her that his chances of survival are negligible, her heart twists a bit. When the days start to turn into weeks, she beings to lose hope. She cleans and schedules and fields the press like a pro, and it’s only after they start to lose interest that she begins to despair, because that means he’s really gone, and he’s not coming back, and it’s then that she falls to the floor in the hallway, dropping the expensive linens she’d just retrieved from the dry cleaners and was about to make up his bed with, and she cries, for the first time since that terrible, terrible day that she was born, when she hadn’t even managed to properly bid him goodbye. She cries every night, and she doesn’t step foot in her own apartment once, laying instead on the wrinkled pillowcase that had never made it back onto Tony’s down pillow and wishing she’d had the presence of mind to keep it away from the cleaners, so that she could still smell his after shave on it. Her mother, over the months of his absence, had prudently neglected to mention her lack of a significant other, for which Pepper would be eternally grateful. When Jarvis one day expresses tentative concern for Pepper’s mental state, it only makes things worse, and when he finally does come back, against all hope and sense and every need she’s ever known to turn cold in her veins, she doesn’t mind that he notices how her eyes matched her hair, but even in her joy at his return, she’ll be damned if in the face of that smirk she admits to being a wreck over him. She’s just grateful that he’s too enraptured by his cheeseburgers to notice the few stray tears that leak from the corners of her eyes as they drive, just at watching him; so alive, and sitting right next to her.
She understands that he thinks - that he needs to think - that he’s not the same Tony that she’s always known; but really, she’s convinced he’s more that Tony now that he ever was. The suit scares her, because it’s hard and angry and filled with such power without any real emotion, and because he’s so different when he’s in it. The number of nights that find her situated upon the settee, watching the newly-replaced baby grand across from her as if it held the answers to the universe are too many to mention; the times when she nearly hyperventilates with the sheer magnitude of reality as it compresses her lungs and strangles her heart are too numerous to count, and sometimes she only just manages to slip out of the house as he trudges up the stairs after one of his so-called “missions,” bruised and exhausted, before he can know that she was ever there. It’s on one of those nights when she realizes that he’s more than just her boss, realizes it in such stunning clarity that it nearly knocks the wind out of her. He really is all that she has, and it doesn’t bother her so much as it astounds her, and she drives home shaking, feeling so nauseous and overwhelmed that she pulls over on a side street and spends the rest of the hours left until morning propped against the driver’s side window, breathing harsh and deep and hoping that she has enough gas to run the air-conditioning until sunrise. He comments on the dark circles under her eyes the next day, and when she dozes off while answering his e-mail, she wakes up later to find her laptop safely folded closed on the half wall nearby, and a blanket tucked thoughtfully around her elbows. She’s glad, just then, that Jarvis doesn’t have arms, because it makes her feel warm knowing who it was that paid her such careful mind.
Her resignation, she suspects, is what forced both of their hands, in the end. He wasn’t supposed to find it, not yet, but he does, typed and signed by her briefcase before she can file it away. The first words out of his mouth are to ask if it’s because he keeps asking for her help with the arc reactor, and the hurt in his eyes makes her melt a bit as she tries to explain that she isn’t quitting, that she doesn’t want to leave - so many things that make no sense and really never did, things she can’t verbalize or describe properly, and as a result she can’t convince him that she doesn’t mean what’s in that letter because even she doesn’t know why she wrote it anymore. She’s exposed in black and white, the only things that have ever been solid and dependable in her life, and it’s heartbreaking because she wants more, needs more, and it kills her every time he silently refuses to give it to her. She runs, for the first time in her life, and her pulse jumps when he catches her with a firm grip around the wrist, pulling her against him and watching her with fiery eyes, breathing hard against her until the warmth of his breath becomes the warmth of his mouth and everything else, everything before that instant melts away. She can feel his heart pounding in his lips, and she holds tight to him, suddenly dizzy as he deepens the kiss, as he slips his arms around her shoulders and forces her closer, and she finds that his chest is hard as it heaves against her breasts, and that his hand his searing against the back of her neck. Things don’t go any further that night, except for the fact that she stays, and nothing is different at first, except for the fact that her chest gets a weird fluttery feeling whenever she looks at him, the kind that she thought was only real in films and trashy romance novels, and he looks breathless every time she walks into the room. And it’s little things, baby steps, when things do begin to change - he kisses her on the cheek when she goes home, and she starts to go home less and less, so he kisses her goodnight instead. He keeps his appointments more often than not, and she flat out stops calling him ‘Mr. Stark.’ When they order dinner, Tony lets Pepper pick where from, and when she playfully steals a pepper out of his curry one night, he only grins and takes one of her onions in reply. He buys her a present, of his own accord, for her next birthday - a shockingly tasteful evening gown in deep amethyst with a high, shimmering neckline and a low, draping back that rivals that of the infamous blue number from so long ago, and she’s flattered that it’s a size too small, but knows better than to mention it. They share private smiles and secret looks and he never goes to a party without her on his arm. It takes Pepper a while to notice that there’s no one else, anymore; that she’s the only one. It’s a beautiful feeling, when she realizes it, and after it settles into a general contentment as she starts waking up in his bed, and surges back into joy when he starts waking up next to her, she knows; she just knows, and it’s everything she ever dreamed.
These days, Sunday afternoons often find her in the kitchen, and this particular Sunday is no different. She chops a stalk of celery on the cutting board in front of her, careful not to nick her fingers in the process. The sterile metallic lighting above the island is dimly illuminating her pale skin, making the freckles more pronounced, shimmering off the gleaming gold of the simple band wrapped around her left ring finger (he’d wanted platinum, or a symbolic use of gold-titanium alloy, but she’d insisted on something simple and traditional, and he’d eventually given in). Her mother never asks about her love life anymore - she claims she doesn’t want to know, and sometimes, Pepper can’t blame her. Sometimes it’s hard - too hard; sometimes it’s frightening and dangerous and sometimes she wonders if every day there aren’t more wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, or if the strands of silvery grey at her temples aren’t just tricks of the light, and more than anything she wonders if all of that isn’t his fault, in the end; but she knows she that she wouldn’t have it any other way. She knows, in the quiet moments when he’s safely confined in his workshop drawing up plans for some new project or another to submit to the board and she’s upstairs actually cooking them a homemade meal, when she can hear his music wafting up the stairs and on the echoes all she can hear is the soft whisper of his voice on the fateful day when Anthony Edward Stark took Virginia Margaret Potts to be his lawful wedded wife, when she smiles at the glittering promise of a diamond nestled under her wedding ring and considers the prospect of life without him; she knows that if she were given the opportunity go back and relive the past, she wouldn’t change a single thing. And she knows, suddenly, when he sneaks up behind her and wraps lean, naked arms around her waist, pulling her close enough to feel the hitch between his breaths, close enough to make her forget about the conference call she has yet to set up for the next morning, that this is what she’d been working towards since the very beginning, what she’d always known she wanted.
She is married to her work, and in a way, she always has been.