fic: The Courting of Tony Stark (1/7)
Title: The Courting of Tony Stark
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Iron Man
Word count: 50,603
Pairings/Characters: Tony/Pepper, Pepper/Rhodey, Pepper/Happy, Tony/Joanna Nivena, Tony/Rumiko Fujikawa, Natasha Romanoff, Jarvis, Obadiah Stane, Christine Everhart.
Summary: It only takes her nine years to say 'I love you' back.
A/N Ridiculously long prequel to Magnetic and related fics. I also played fast and loose with some comics canon, but you don't need to have read the comics at all for this fic.
For Virginia's twenty second birthday, her boyfriend presents her with two bus tickets to New York, a hotel booking, and two passes to the NY Tech Summit, which might not sound like such an exciting prospect, but for the fact that Tony Stark is the main attraction this year
She's wanted to see him in action since she was eighteen and had a crush that rivalled her friends' love for Jason Priestley and Luke Perry. As she worked her way through college, the crush had abated but her interest in Stark Industries grew. The company was doing incredible things, and the more she read, the more she wanted to be involved. It was almost impossible to get a job, though, and since, at the time, she hadn't even have completed her degree yet, so she tried to write it off as a stupid teenage dream.
But the convention is so loud and flashy and spectacular, how could it not reignite that desire in her? She's been dating Brian for two years - they're planning to go backpacking around Europe in the summer, planning to move in together in the fall, and her mother loves him - but she barely sees him the whole weekend. She gets swept up into the crowd and she doesn't look back.
On the first day, Stark gets up on stage and it's... amazing. She's transfixed from beginning to end, even though he's talking so fast she can barely understand him. She hears people saying that he was clearly high, but she honestly doesn't care; she could listen to him talk all day.
At some point over the weekend, a volunteer hands her a pamphlet about interning at Stark Industries. It's an incredibly competitive program that mostly takes graduate and doctoral students studying one or more of the sciences. Virginia majored in Accounting and minored in Art History, there's no way they'd look at her once, let alone twice.
And yet.
And yet two weeks later she gets on a bus and rides it the three hours back to New York, changes into her best pair of heels in a 7/11 restroom - her best friend says her ass looks fantastic in them - and walks into the waiting room at Stark Tower.
She's sure she's the youngest person there, and certainly the most poorly dressed. She sticks out like a sore thumb, really, with her short red bob and her patent leather red heels. A few of them glance at her, but for the most part everyone ignores everyone else as they wait. And wait, and wait, and wait.
A little over three hours later, the doors are shoved along with a voice saying, “Look, I don't have time for this, I have an engagement in half an hour. Cynthia, don't nag, Obi said I could do what I wanted with the interns.”
Tony Stark sweeps into the room followed by a middle-aged woman holding a stack of folders.
He claps his hands together. “Okay! Everyone who's just coming to the horrifying realisation that they might have to deal with me on a day to day basis, there are five emergency exits: two in the back, two in the middle, one at the front.” He frowns. “Actually, four of those are windows and unless you want on the evening news, I'd suggest you use the front exit.”
There's a low murmur and a lot of uncomfortable shifting, but no one gets up to leave.
“Guys,” Stark says, “there's at least one person here who already hates my guts, not including the wonderful Cynthia. Would it help if I closed my eyes?” He squeezes his eyes shut and starts counting back from ten. There's some more uncomfortable shifting and then, to her surprise - because why would you get this far just to give up? - a few people get up and sneak past him.
He seems to know as soon as they leave, because he smiles as he continues to count. “...five, four, three, two, one. Bye!” he calls over his shoulder, before looking at the group again. “Fuck, I thought I'd be able to thin the herd a bit more than that.” He turns to his assistant and asks, “Five people, right? Okay.” He points to a severe looking woman wearing glasses. “You look clever.” Cynthia quickly flips through her stack of files to find the right one as he turns his attention to a guy who appears to have an unfortunate inability to control his sweat glands.
“Kirk or Picard?” he asks.
The guy squirms. “Um, I- uh... Kirk.”
Stark grins and goes back to studying everyone's faces. He skips several people altogether before his gaze falls to her. He tilts his head, and she pushes her chest out, just a little. Her friends had suggested that she could probably get hired by shoving her tits in his face, and although she knew it was a joke, she'd kept it in her arsenal, just in case.
His eyes drop to her feet. “Nice shoes,” he says, and then he's indicating vaguely to two other people. “You and you. Okay passengers, thanks for flying Stark Airways, please put your trays in the upright and locked position.” With that, he spins on his heel and breezes back out of the room.
His assistant clenches her jaw, watching after him for a second. “You five, come with me. Everyone else, thank you for your time.”
Virginia does not go to Europe in the summer.
-
part 1
1998
They put her in the finance department for the length of her internship, then move her to HR, R&D, and Public Relations in quick succession, until, two years later, she's back in Finance and has a better working knowledge of the company than most of the managers. Her first week back, she catches a huge accounting error that could have cost the company millions - she's pretty sure that her department rep takes the credit for it.
Her relationship with Brian fizzled out quickly after getting hired. Really, it was destined to failure the moment she started looking for studio apartments in New York, and she only mourned the loss of her first serious relationship for a couple of days before she was swept up in the intern orientation week, which was at least twice as wild as orientation had been at university.
She only gets to see her family every few months, but... she doesn't miss them. Sometimes she feels guilty about that, but everything is just so... so much that she finds that she can't even hold onto that guilt for long.
If only it weren't for some of her co-workers, she wouldn't have any complaints at all. Most of them are okay: she makes a few friends, though no close ones. Acquaintances that she can go out for drinks with on a Friday night, at least. Then there's Jerry, who never asks her out but makes it clear that he thinks that she should want to. She ignores him quite effectively, smiling blandly when he makes jokes, talking about nothing when they're stuck in the copier room together, until he thinks their relationship has progressed to the stage when he can tap her on the ass while she's leant over the copier, attempting to fix a paper jam. It has not, and, well, she does what her grandmother taught her to do in situations such as these: she hits him.
It's really more of a love tap; with years of volleyball tournaments under her belt, she could have made him hurt. She doubts her supervisor sees it that way, though. She's told that there's going to be an investigation, and that she'll have to attend a hearing next week; she keeps her head down and starts looking for a new job.
She's in her cubicle, doing glorified data entry work when someone pops up over one of the thin walls. People have mostly been staying out of her way; she cringes at whatever this is going to be. “Miss Potts, I presume?”
Any interest in her spreadsheet dies when she hears that voice; of course she knows that voice. She looks up. Tony Stark looks back down at her.
“Hi!” he says and grins.
“I--” She pushes her chair away from her desk and stands. “Good afternoon, Mr Stark. Sir?” she adds as an afterthought, uncertainly.
“'Sir'? Yikes. So, I hear you, like, saved the company a squillion dollars or something.”
“Well--”
“Annnd that you hit someone.”
She bites her lip. “That's, that's true.”
Stark looks at her with big eyes for a moment, then peers over the cubicle wall again. “Can you collect your things and come with me? Yeah? Good.” He's already turning away before she's so much as moved. She grabs her bag and her one lone personal item, a plastic potted plant, and follows him through the maze of cubicles. Heads turn as they pass, and the whispers start like a Mexican wave; her cheeks burn and with her complexion it's a neon sign that says: I fucked up and now the guy whose name is on the door came here personally to fire me.
He stops abruptly as they pass the copier room and she bumps into his back. He flashes her a sly smile. “The scene of the crime,” he says. And of course, of course, Jerry is in there, harassing one of the temps. “You're Jerry, right?” he asks, hanging around the edge of the door. “The, uh, victim?”
“Mr... Mr Stark? Ye-yeah, I'm Jerry West, it's an honour to meet you.” He extends a hand that Stark ignores.
“I know,” he says. “I hear you're on track for a big promotion at the end of the year. Supervisor position, that's pretty cool.”
“Well, there are lots of great candidates, but I'd-- yes, sir, it would be really cool.”
“Again with the 'sir', you guys are really polite around here.” Stark looks at her, then back at Jerry. “Shame about what Miss Potts did, huh?”
Jerry does his best to look solemn. “I think that maybe our wires just got a little crossed, there's blame on both sides.”
“Mm,” Stark hums again, and it's all she can do to not get in there and really cross Jerry's wires.
Stark starts to move away, then stops again. “Oh, one more thing. Um, what was it...?” He snaps his fingers a couple of times then nods. “Right, right. You're fired.”
Virginia maybe squeaks a little with surprised laughter at this. Stark looks at her approvingly.
“Ex-excuse me?” Jerry stammers. The way his face turns from smug to shocked in the blink of an eye is delicious.
Stark shakes his head. “Dude, it's the nineties, sexual harassment isn't cool any more. Come along, Miss Potts.”
She manages to make it into the elevator before she starts laughing in earnest - she tries to contain it, because she's standing across from the boss of the company, but he just grins and there's that sudden feeling welling up in her again, the infectious, overwhelming presence of Tony Stark.
“His face,” Stark says. “Fuck, I love a well-executed prank, no better feeling in the world. Well. Maybe a few...”
She clears her throat, and wipes her eyes as much as she can without smudging her mascara. “This was a prank? Does that mean I'm not fired? I can go back to my desk?”
Stark counts off on his fingers. “Sort of, yes, and... no. Did I get that the right way round? I think I did. Anyway, yeah, no, you're not going back to your desk.”
“I'm not?”
“You're not. Miss Potts, I'm in the market for a new PA. What do you say?”
“I- What?” She tries to rewind the conversation in her head but it keeps catching after 'new PA'. “Me?”
“Yeah.”
“Why? I don't have any of the necessary skills for that.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Are you trying to talk me out of this? Because that's kind of assbackwards. You're never gonna beat the Jerrys of this world if you don't show off what you've got.” He doesn't even turn his last sentence into innuendo; she's shocked. “If you must know, I see from your file that you're extremely overeducated for butt monkey cubicle work, you caught that accounting error that Obi said was kind of a big deal - and yeah, I know it was you and not your rep, because that guy is a fucking idiot, I don't know how we're still in business with employees like him - and you obviously don't mind dealing out some rough justice when needed. You very well may need to do that if you work for me.”
He speaks so quickly, it's difficult for her to absorb the words. The elevator doors open, but one glare from Stark sends the people wanting to get on away. “Who would I be... hitting?” she asks slowly.
“Not me, don't hit me, Miss Potts. Pretty much anyone else, though. I'll expect you to defend my honour at all times.”
She can't help but smile. Damn it, he is incredibly good-looking. “Okay.”
“But most of all, Miss Potts, I'm hiring you because I've had it with boring old people telling me what to do, and you wear incredibly inappropriate shoes for work, which suggests to me that you've got a little bit of fun in you under that atrocious pantsuit.”
She glances down at her open-toed purple heels. She really can't argue with him about the pantsuit, it's quite awful. “They're all I can afford at the moment.”
“That won't be a problem with your new salary,” he says. The elevator doors open on the ground floor and he reaches out to hold them. “Just promise me something.”
“What is it, Mr Stark?”
“Promise me that not a single pair of sensible shoes will turn up on your expense report. I don't think my heart could take it.”
She bites her lip, and can't help but notice how the action draws his eyes to her mouth. “I promise.”
“Cool.” He steps out of the elevator and she follows, still clutching her plastic plant. “So... You know I live in California, right?”
“I...” She thinks about it. She does know that. “Yes.”
“Plane leaves in two hours, can you make it?”
She stands in the lobby of Stark Tower, people passing all around but never bumping into them, like Stark has a five foot buffer zone around him.
She's never been to California.
“I can make that flight, Mr Stark,” she says.
-
The first time she meets Rhodey, all she sees of him is his foot, sticking out from underneath a blanket on one of Stark's vast couches. She's been working for Stark for a month now, and she's already had to escort a dozen people from his house, but they've never been on the couch before. She debates with herself for a moment over whether she should just come back later, but a cursory glance around the room and its littered beer bottles makes her think that it might be wise for her to check that this guy is even breathing.
He is, and in short order he's scrambling off the couch, clutching at the blanket, and leaving very little to the imagination.
“Um,” she says.
“Tony!” he yells.
“Um,” she repeats, and he looks back at her like he wants nothing more than for the ground to open up and swallow him whole.
“Could you, uh,” he grimaces and waves vaguely across the room. “Pants?”
“Oh, yeah, right. Yes.” She looks around the room until her gaze falls on a crumpled pair of pants caught around a chair leg, then quickly picks them up and blindly shoves them at him.
“Thanks,” he mumbles while she keeps her back resolutely turned to him. “Tony!” he yells again, when he's got them on. She hazards a glance at him: it's not a bad view. “Get your fucking ass down here!”
“I don't think Mr Stark can hear you...” she says.
“Oh, he can hear me.” He pauses, frowns and extends a hand. “I'm Jim, by the way.”
She takes it. “Virginia.”
“I take it you aren't his girlfriend,” Jim says.
“Oh, God, no,” she says, and he grins. “I can't imagine what it would be like to be his girlfriend.” Although, really, yes she can. She'd fantasised about that enough when she was younger.
“That is perilously close to defamation of character, Potts.” Stark stands in the doorway, just a touch too long hair mussed and falling into his eyes, wearing nothing but jeans that she can't help but notice are extremely flattering, scratches on his hips that look like they were made by delicate fingernails.
“Mr Stark,” she says in greeting, proud that her voice comes out steady, despite feeling like her entire body is flushing with embarrassment. She really hadn't thought that this job would entail her being in a room with two extremely attractive shirtless men.
“I guess formal introductions are in order,” he says. “Rhodey, this is my new PA, Miss Virginia Potts.”
Jim raises his eyebrows like this means something to him; Stark ignores him, “Miss Potts, this is Major James Rhodes of the United States Air Force. He just came off an eight month tour of duty. We were celebrating him not being dead. He's, like, my best friend, or whatever. You'll probably be seeing a lot of him.” He looks Rhodey up and down. “Though, hopefully not too much.”
Rhodey narrows his eyes. “I'm not entirely clear that I'm not dead, after last night.”
Stark makes a dismissive sound. “Lightweight, you've been away too long. I'll toughen you up again.”
“Sure, Tony,” Rhodey says with a level of affection that Pepper has yet to hear aimed at Mr Stark. They look at each other for a quiet moment.
“Miss Potts,” Stark says eventually. “There are a couple of ladies in my bedroom, could you please give them the complimentary gift bag and escort them out?”
“'A couple'?” Rhodey says.
She takes this as her cue to leave, cheeks beginning to burn at the thought of Mr Stark and these two ladies. It's not as if she hasn't considered the possibility of a threesome before, but Brian was kind of straight-laced and since then she's barely had time to sleep, let alone have sex. Really, though, it's just the idea of Stark, those scratches on his hips, and...
She really shouldn't dwell on stuff like this.
“Well, after you sacked out,” she hears Stark say, “I had to take two for the team.”
-
Virginia quits for the first time after she's kept up for three straight days negotiating Stark getting released without charges from a jail in Mexico. He gives her a fifty percent raise and sends her a new pair of shoes. They're her first Christian Louboutins.
She quits for the second time after he disappears right before a crucial meeting with President Clinton and she has to explain to Clinton's aides that Mr Stark had an 'emergency'. He gives her another fifty percent raise and a pair of Manolo Blahniks.
She walks out of the mansion and doesn't return to work for a week after he crashes his car at the Daytona 500, sustains a concussion and a broken arm, and goes right back to drinking and fucking the next day. He gives her another fifty percent raise, tickets to the opera, a pair of Dolce & Gabbana boots, and brings her along to watch the car get crushed into a cube.
-
At the beginning of the Stark Gala '98, she meets Bill Gates. He tells her that Mr Stark used to beat him at Donkey Kong when Stark was ten.
At the end of the Stark Gala '98, she's holding Stark's shoulders while he dry heaves over a toilet.
“Fuck,” he groans. “Fuckin' poison, fire those caterers, Potts.”
“Yes, Mr Stark.” She tugs him back a little. “Do you think you can get up?”
He groans something but is pliable under her hands, and she manages to pull him up and get him over to the sinks. “Just stay still,” she says, and he mumbles something that she doesn't catch. She grabs a handful of paper towels, wets them, and begins cleaning his face. It's mostly blood: he got into a fight with a guest staying at the hotel the Gala's being held at, when Stark and the guest's wife tried to... move festivities to her room. Mr Stane broke it up pretty quickly, practically picked Stark up by the scruff of his neck and hauled him out like he was a child.
The fight had destroyed what was left of his delicate equilibrium, though; she's been in this restroom with him for a good twenty minutes already.
“Ow,” he says quietly when she runs the paper towel over a cut on his lip.
“Sorry.”
“'sokay,” he mumbles, staring at her hands. “You've got nice hands,” he comments after a moment.
She can feel her cheeks begin to warm. “Thank you, Mr Stark.”
“Tony,” he corrects.
“Mr Stark,” she repeats. “You should really try to sleep the worst of this off. How about we go home?”
He bobs his head. After a couple of minutes of confusion, she manages to get a comfortable grip on him without it feeling too inappropriate. She leads him out out of the restroom and his bodyguard, Hogan, trails after them.
Stane stops them on the way out, looking huge as he places a hand on Stark's shoulder, especially in comparison to Stark. “We've got a shareholder meeting tomorrow,” he says in his deep rumble. “Remember?”
“Yep,” Stark says.
“I expect you to be there, son,” he says. Stark's expression flickers, with guilt, she thinks. He's never so open as when he's drunk, she's coming to realise. Any other time, his face is constant sneering mask.
“I know,” he says.
“Good. Take care of our boy, Miss Potts,” Stane says, and smiles. She wills herself not to be intimidated.
“Of course, Mr Stane.”
-
She gets a couple of hours sleep at home that night before she's back in her car on her way to the office. There's a hundred different things she needs to do, a hundred meetings she no doubt needs to reschedule after Stark's performance last night. She needs to run interference with the media, make sure the wronged husband isn't going to be an issue, and check that Mr Stark hasn't bought any new businesses in the last week.
It takes her all morning, and it's only at one in the afternoon that she's able to go over to check on Mr Stark. Honestly, she's a little concerned that she hasn't heard from him. He had really wanted her to stay, whined at her about it in a tone not unlike a child until he passed out in his bed, still mostly clothed. She covered him in a blanket and left.
The sun is burning hot as she drives with the roof of the convertible down (“Can't go showing me up, now, Potts,” Stark had said when he presented her with the keys.). She makes it there in good time and takes a moment to appreciate the incredible view of the ocean. Mr Stark says he doesn't care for it.
There's another car sitting outside the garage when she gets there to park. She's never seen it before, but it has a Stark Industries logo on the back. Probably Mr Stane, she decides, here to see that Stark's okay. The man's like a father to him. She can't imagine how much wilder Stark would be without him.
She gets into the house and drops her bag in the hall. The place looks like a tornado's torn through it, which is just how Mr Stark left it last night once she finally managed to get him out the door. She sighs; it's really for a maid to do, but Mr Stark is 'off maids' for the moment, while he's going through one of his paranoid phases. She sets about clearing away empty coffee mugs in the lounge from where they're scattered all over schematics for something completely unfathomable. She considers rolling the drawings up and taking them back down to the workshop, but thinks better of it. He tends to freak out if she moves his stuff. She heads to the kitchen with an armful of mugs in varying stages of mould sentience.
“Oh, you're finally up. I don't see what the point is of inviting me over if you're just going to pass--” a female voice starts, then stops when Virginia steps into the room. “You aren't Tony,” she says.
“You aren't Mr Stane,” Virginia replies. The woman is fantastically beautiful, even with her hair scraped back from her face, not a hint of make up to be seen. She has long blonde hair and long tanned legs, and Virginia stares a little longer, clutching at the mugs like an idiot.
“Agreed,” the woman says, then steps forward and relieves Virginia of some of her burden. “Let me help you with that. Ugh,” she says, wrinkling her nose as she peers inside of a mug. “Tony is such a pig sometimes.”
“Thanks. Do you mind if I ask...?” Virginia begins, and the woman laughs.
“Oh God, you probably think I'm some kind of crazy stalker, I'm sorry. I'm Joanna.” She holds out a hand and Virginia takes it. It's slightly damp, and Joanna smells faintly of chlorine. Must have been using the pool, Virginia realises. She's never gone in it herself, though she has vigorous permission to do so.
“Joanna...” she repeats. She doesn't know any Joannas.
“Joanna Nivena?” Joanna tries again, and frowns at the lack of recognition of Virginia's face. “I'm Tony's... fiancée.”
“Oh,” she says. Fiancée? Mr Stark definitely hasn't mentioned anything about that. “Oh, right, yeah. Miss Nivena, I'm sorry. I had a long day yesterday.” She cringes at the excuse, so pathetic, but the woman doesn't call her on it.
“I heard. Tony called me this morning and wheedled until I came over. Already unconscious by the time I got here, though. He's a class act. You must be Virginia Potts, I take it?”
“Right, yes, I am. Sorry, I guess now it's your turn to think I'm a crazy stalker.”
Joanna looks her up and down. “I don't think a suit and three inch heels is the stalker's wardrobe of choice, somehow.”
“It could just be a clever disguise.”
Joanna nods. “Could be. Pretty helpful stalker though, 'cause I'm pretty sure that the beginnings of the plague were being cultured back there.”
“Yeah, not exactly in my skill set,” she says. “Did... Mr Stark mention me?”
“Obi did.” Joanna's eyes flash with something. Not anger, but... something. Virginia thinks about the woman last night. The woman a few days before that. The women he and Major Rhodes brought home. “He said you were keeping Tony in line.”
“I really don't think that's true.”
“Well, nevertheless, you're doing the world a service, Miss Potts.” The smile she gives doesn't quite reach her eyes. “I'm gonna hit the showers.”
-
Through some careful research (typing 'Joanna Nivena' into Yahoo), she finds out that Miss Nivena is the daughter of Andrew Nivena, a corporate lawyer based in New York who worked for Stark Industries in the seventies and eighties. Apparently the two families were close in a high society sort of way. There's not a hint that Joanna and Tony are even dating, though.
Mr Stark doesn't really say anything about her beyond asking if she's still there when Virginia rouses him from his bed in the late afternoon, having completely missed Stane's important shareholder meeting. He seems relieved when she tells him that Joanna had to get to work.
The next time she sees Joanna is a couple of weeks later, in the office. Stark hasn't been in at all, and the last she heard from him he was in Las Vegas; she's working at clearing his schedule and signing a stack of documents that have been marked as urgent for the past week. She's getting pretty good at forging signatures.
There's a knock at Stark's office door where she currently ensconced. He hasn't quite seen his way fit to getting her her own office, yet. “Miss Potts?”
She looks up. “Yes? Oh, Miss Nivena, hi.”
“Is Tony here? He isn't at home, and he's not picking up his cell.”
“No, he's...” When she called him this morning, she heard a woman's voice in the background. “...in a meeting.”
Joanna smiles. “Of course. Such a hard worker. When you see him, could you tell him that the Nan Goldin exhibit opens tomorrow night at the museum. I thought he might like to come with me. It has the word 'sex' in the title, so...”
“'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency'? I've been trying to get tickets to that for weeks!” Virginia says, already feeling herself begin to blush. It probably isn't appropriate to chat with the boss's fiancée like this especially when you're aware that said boss has been sleeping his way around the West Coast since you were hired.
“Perk of the job, I'm a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art.” She pauses and cocks her head. “Would you like to come with me, Miss Potts?”
“Oh, I--”
“Tony has zero appreciation for anything that doesn't explode. Come on, you'd be doing me a favour. I just know my co-workers are going to laugh at me for going out with such a philistine.”
“Well, I mean, if it's for a good cause...”
“Tomorrow, seven o'clock.”
-
Virginia had wanted to major in Art History, she'd chosen a small liberal arts college for that very reason, and she'd been on track for it until midway through her second year. Then, her parents filed for divorce, and suddenly fees were a problem, loans were a problem, and she was working nights at the local coffee shop.
Once her room mate discovered that she'd been a Mathlete in high school, she started to pick up a couple of extra bucks a week tutoring first her friends, then everyone on her floor, math for their science requirements. She was the only one in her dorm that knew her way around a quadratic equation, and her time became highly prized.
Logically it followed for her to declare her major in Accounting at the end of the year. It set her up for a good job when she graduated and it came easy to her, easy enough that she could take on extra shifts at work through her third and fourth years and still come out of it with 3.8 GPA.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, though, is still a great deal more interesting than an end of year budget report.
“How long have you been working here for?” she asks, after she's been around the exhibit three times and looked at every photograph at least twice. Joanna is incredibly patient, following her around, introducing her to the VIPs (Virginia gets several job offers after they hear that she works for Tony Stark), explaining the significance of this angle or that.
“About eight months. I was at Tate Modern before that.”
Virginia thinks back to when she met Major Rhodes: eight months is about how long his deployment was, and he'd asked if she was Mr Stark's new girlfriend. She'd thought he was joking, at the time.
“Me and Tony have been together for six months,” Joanna says, “In case you were wondering.”
“I... was,” she admits. “That's not very long to already be engaged, if you don't mind me saying.”
“No, it's fine, you're right, it isn't long. Tony sort of... took me by surprise one night.” Joanna snags a couple of drinks off a tray as a waiter passes by them, and hands one to Virginia. “We've known of each other since we were kids, but Obi reintroduced us at a party earlier this year. And what about you, Miss Potts?”
She takes a sip of her champagne. It's divine. “Virginia, please. Not a lot to say, really.”
“Well, you seem to know a lot about Goldin and I noticed that Tony's acquired some new art. I don't think Gary Hume is really his speed.”
She shrugs. “He gave me a three million dollar budget and told me to do what I wanted with it. I studied Art History in college.”
“I'm glad he has someone to teach him about culture.” Joanna sips her glass very slowly, eyes tracking various people milling around the room. At length, she says, “He likes you.”
“I think Mr Stark likes everyone,” Virginia replies. He's certainly friendly enough with everyone.
“No, his feelings for people normally range from casual disinterest to 'will they let me fuck them?'.” She clears her throat politely. “You, he likes.”
“I-- okay. I like him too.” She instantly regrets saying this, but Joanna only smiles.
“You're one of the few, Virginia.”
-
She gets four days' holiday over Thanksgiving, and takes it to go home and see her mother and little sister. And her mother's new husband, Roger.
“Tell me everything,” Julia demands the moment Virginia gets out of the taxi. “What's he like? Is he cut? I bet he's cut. Oh my God, does he sleep in the nude? Have you seen his junk?”
“Hi, sis,” Virginia says.
Her family quiz her all afternoon about Stark, about her duties, and which famous people she's met.
“So, how are you really?” her mother asks later, after turkey has been eaten and Roger has been appointed washing up duty. “We've heard so little from you lately.”
“I'm good, everything's good.”
“Really? Because all I ever hear about this Stark man is how he has sex with everyone and gets drunk a lot.”
“Not all the time, he does occasionally sleep,” Virginia says. Her mother doesn't laugh. She forgot: humour like that doesn't fly around here. “But he's not that bad. He's actually kind of... sweet, in his own way.”
“Mm,” is her mother's final comment on that.
The next day, Virginia borrows Roger's truck and drives herself and Julia over to their father's. It's a five hour drive; Julia settles in with her Walkman and Virginia resigns herself to listening to the radio the whole way there.
“Gin?” Julia says after a couple of hours. Her headphones are hanging around her neck.
“Run out of CDs?” she asks.
“Yeah... Hey, so, I kinda got early acceptance into Columbia.”
“You did? That's great! When did you find out?”
Julia shrugs. “Last week. Haven't told Mom and Dad yet.”
Virginia glances at her; Julia's been going on about Columbia for months, ever since they visited it together over spring break, just before Virginia got promoted. “Wasn't it your first choice? Is there somewhere else you'd rather go?”
“No, it's just...” Julia rolls her eyes and shifts her gaze to the window to stare out of it despondently. “Dad got demoted and everything. I don't think we can afford it. Like, you got through college by working every hour you weren't in class, but you're a genius or whatever. I'm not going to be able to do that.”
“First, that is not true. You got into Columbia, clearly you're doing something right.” Julia shrugs again in response. “Second... don't worry about money, okay?”
“Yeah? How do you suggest I do that?”
“By being a very grateful sister. Let's just say that Mr Stark has been very... generous to me.”
Julia turns in her seat and stares at her. And continues to stare until Virginia begins to smile.
“A good person would say that this is way too much,” Julia comments eventually. She bites her lip. “Thanks, Ginny.”
-
She gets back to California on Monday and immediately picks her car up from the parking lot and drives over to Malibu. She hasn't heard from Mr Stark for the entire Thanksgiving break and that worries her. Usually he calls her three, four times a day, to get her to pick his dry cleaning up, order in Chinese, or just ramble about whatever it is that he's working on at that moment.
Joanna's car is in the drive again when she gets there; she parks alongside it and quietly lets herself into the house. She should have thought, maybe they've been holed up here over the holiday, maybe that's why Stark didn't feel the need to call her incessantly.
“Joanna, Joanna, please, I'm sorry, come on.”
She freezes at Stark's plaintive voice drifting in from upstairs.
“It's not that, Tony.”
“I promise I won't ever... I won't ever cheat on you again. Please. I'm sorry, it didn't mean anything.”
“It's not that,” Joanna repeats. “This... it was never going to work.” There's a lull in the conversation, and then she says, “Tony, let go of me,” in the saddest voice Virginia's ever heard. Soon there are footsteps on the staircase and she backs up, looking for some handy shadows to hide in. Too bad Stark's house is all bright lights and open spaces.
“Virginia,” Joanna says as she makes it to the ground floor. All she has with her is a small travel bag. It's probably everything that she's ever kept at the mansion. A toothbrush and a couple of changes of underwear. “Look after him.” She strides out with more grace than Virginia could ever even imagine having.
She edges around the banister and looks up the staircase, where Stark's standing barefoot, in sweatpants, with lipstick marks on his neck. “So, how was your Thanksgiving?” he asks viciously. “Mine was awesome.”
-
She pours him two fingers of scotch; he swipes the bottle from her and takes a pull from it. “Fuck,” he says.
“What happened?”
He hasn't thought it necessary to put a shirt on, and she can't help but mentally tell Julia that he is, indeed, cut.
“Got caught fucking someone I shouldn't have been, didn't I?” he says. He takes another swig from the bottle.
“Mr Stark, Mr Stark.” She tugs at the bottle and it comes easily from his grip. She sets in down out of his reach. “That's not helping.”
“Beyond help,” he mumbles, rubbing at his face.
“That's not true.” She pats tentatively at his shoulder. There's really no appropriate place to touch him when he's in this state of undress.
He peers at her from between his fingers. “Yeah?”
“Yes,” she says. She rubs a little more at his shoulder and can't help but notice the way he leans into her, just a bit.
He drops his hands to his lap. “I really fucked everything up. She was, like, the perfect woman.”
“Well,” she says. “Why did you?”
“Dunno. Something to do.” He grins, though there's nothing humorous about it. “How's that for an explanation?”
“I think... If you don't mind me saying...” He nods for her continue. “I think you weren't that interested to begin with.”
“You think I didn't love her?” he asks, but it's weak and she notes that it's already in the past tense.
“Mr Stark, I have no idea what goes on in your head, but I think that when you put your mind to something, you follow through with it.”
“So, you're saying that I need to find my true love?”
She frowns. That's slightly more of a leap than she was aiming for. “Maybe? Or maybe just put a little more thought into your relationships?”
She wonders if she's gone too far. Lecturing the boss about his love life can't be a sensible career move, but he just ducks his head and smiles. “You're like my fairy godmother and Yoda all rolled into one, Potts.”
“Cinderella, the ball go to, you will,” she says.
-
She quits for the fourth time after she drives over to his house two weeks later. He hasn't been answering his phone all day, and she tells herself she isn't worried, that it's hardly unusual for him to ignore the phone when he doesn't want to be hassled, but he's been so delicate since Joanna left that she gives into her desire to check up on him. He hasn't been out clubbing at all in the past two weeks, doesn't seem to have been drinking, has even attended some of the meetings he was meant to be at.
Last she saw of him was late yesterday afternoon. Stane was about to take him out for dinner. He'd confided in her, in a rare show of openness, that he was worried about Tony's state of mind. Joanna, he told her, had accepted a job at the Met and was leaving for New York on the weekend.
“I think they really could have had something,” he said. “I don't know how he's going to take it.”
They left around six, Stane's arm around Stark's shoulders, and she felt relieved that he had someone else on his side, especially since Major Rhodes was away in Colorado training.
It's been a good twenty four hours since then, and Stane has no idea where he would be. Last he saw Tony, he was dropping him off at home.
She hears the music before she even gets into view of the front of the mansion. There are several cars in the drive. She parks where she can find a spot and walks as quickly as she can in her heels to the house. The front door is open.
The music is deafening when she gets inside; he's incredibly lucky that he doesn't have any neighbours. She weaves as best she can through warm bodies, occasionally having to slap at a wandering hand.
“Mr Stark?” she yells.
“Upstairs,” someone yells back.
There's not so much of a crush by the staircase, and she gets upstairs easily enough. The closer she gets to his room, the more her heart drops. She can hear things being smashed, voices and laughter. It sounds like Mr Stark. She forgoes knocking and pushes his door open.
Several things hit her: the amount of people in his room, the amount of open bottles on the floor, the amount of broken furniture, and, more literally, the bra that's flung in her face.
“Pottsy!” Stark shouts, falling out of the bed. “Join us, won't you!”
She takes the bra from where it lies across her shoulder and drops it to the floor. “What... is going on?” she asks slowly.
He stumbles into a wall. “Impromptu party!” he says loudly and several people laugh.
She clenches her jaw. “I see. The reason being?”
He stares for a couple of seconds, squinting at her. “You talk really clever, Potts,” he says at last.
“Really,” she says.
He nods, eyes and pupils wide. And yes, he does sleep in the nude. Or not sleep in it, more accurately.
“You realise that your house is being destroyed, don't you?”
He shrugs.
“Great,” she says. “Since you're obviously fine, I'm going to go home and sleep.” She turns to leave, but only gets a couple of steps before a hand on her arm stops her. She looks back over her shoulder, and his face is right there.
“I-” he says, and presses his face into her shoulder. “Stay,” he mumbles.
She looks down. Of course, of course, he has an erection. “No, thank you,” she says, pulling out of his grip.
“Please, but, if you... the others could go.” He reaches for her arm again, and she easily evades his hand.
“I don't even know what you're saying, but this is incredibly inappropriate, Mr Stark.”
He glances down. “Oh, I can... deal with that.”
It's all she can do to not slap him. “Goodbye, Mr Stark,” she says instead, and turns on her heel.
“...bye?” he calls after her pathetically.
-
When a FedEx courier turns up at her door late the next afternoon, she refuses to sign for the package. When a mysterious fifty grand appears in her bank account, she ignores it. When she finds tickets to the ballet in her mailbox, she sends them back.
She gets several interviews set up in the next couple of weeks, by working some of the contacts she made at the museum, and by just trying her luck shopping her résumé around different companies. Being formerly employed by Tony Stark turns out to be a huge benefit to her.
Two weeks in, he stops bombarding her with gifts, and she begins to think that it's over. It was her six month adventure that, really, was never going to last. Stark goes through PAs faster than he does toothbrushes, she never should have expected job security. It kills her that she won't be able to pay Julia's fees, though. She still hasn't told her family that she's quit.
She's hoping she won't have to until she's got a new job, though: Hammer Industries contact her in the second week of December and offer her an interview. The starting salary is a lot less than what she was making, but then again, it's a far more reasonable sum of money than what Stark was giving her. The position is in their Accounting department, as a junior manager. It seems almost perfect: a job that actually fits the skill set she has, nine to five workdays, a week off for Christmas and two in the summer. She gets more and more excited about it as the day of the interview approaches and as a treat, she decides to get her hair done before heading to the supermarket. It's just a trim, a little more shaped around her face to make her look older, but she's pleased with it. Her previous bob made her look like a teenager.
“Can I help you with those?” someone asks when she makes it back out to the parking lot, several plastic bags in hand. As always, she knows that voice.
Stark is wearing an oil-stained hoodie and jeans with the fabric worn away around the knees. Under her scrutiny, he shoves his hands in his pockets and looks at the ground.
“How did you find me?” she asks as calmly as she can.
“Uh, your cell.”
“There's a tracker in my phone?”
He glances up. “All corporate employees have them. Didn't Obi tell you?”
She sets her jaw and fishes around in her bag for the offending item. “Take it out,” she says, handing the phone to him.
He frowns at her, but flips it over and slides the back off with quick fingers, pulls the battery out, and removes the SIM card. There's a tiny... something attached to the card that he picks off with his fingernail, flicks to the ground and crushes underneath his shoe. He reassembles the phone and hands it back to her.
“I really thought you knew,” he says.
“Uh huh,” she says. “What do you want?”
“I heard you've got an interview with Hammer Industries. You can't go to it.”
“I can't?” she repeats.
He shakes his head. “No. Justin Hammer is the actual worst; you can't work for him. I won't allow it.”
“You won't allow it?” she repeats, and by the look on his face, he's just starting to pick up on the dangerous undertone in her voice.
“I mean I--” He spreads his hands. “Hammer would be a sucky boss. He's, like, twenty three.”
“And?”
“And...” He bites his lip and stares at her with wide eyes. It doesn't look like he's shaved, or slept, in a few days. “Do you want to hit me?”
She blinks. “What?”
“I know I said before that you shouldn't hit me, but I think you should hit me.”
“Hitting you is not going to make me feel better, Mr Stark.” Well, she doesn't know that for sure, but they're in a Safeway parking lot, and he's already drawing curious glances.
“It'd make me feel better. I mean--” He backs up a step at the look she gives him. “Not in a kinky way. Just... if it'd stop you being angry at me. You're a really good PA, Miss Potts, I want you back.”
It's his hands that do her in, clasped in front of him, fingers twisting together; it hits her that, God, he really is so young. “Do you understand how inappropriate what you did was?” she asks.
“Yeah, no, I know. I'm sorry you had to see my... That. It won't happen again. Scout's honour.” He raises his hand and gives her a Vulcan salute.
“I could sue you for sexual harassment,” she continues. “I'd probably win.”
“I know. Do you want a, um, a raise? Another raise?”
She thinks about it. She believes that he's sorry, but she doesn't believe for a second that something like this won't happen again. She doesn't believe that this is going to be the last time she quits. “My sister's going to Columbia next fall,” she says.
“Okay?”
“I want the company to give her full ride scholarship. Whether or not I remain with you.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, definitely.” His gaze flickers to her, then away, then back again. “So... will you be back tomorrow?”
She takes a deep breath. “No,” she says, and hopes she isn't pushing her advantage too far. “I'm taking a long break over the Christmas holidays. I'll see you in January.”
He narrows his eyes at her for a moment, then his mouth starts to curve into a wide grin. “Well played. Merry Christmas, Miss Potts.”
“Merry Christmas, Mr Stark.”
-
She does quit again, after Stark accidentally blows up part of his workshop, but he follows her out of the house, hair singed and sweatshirt slightly on fire, and by the time she's put it out and cleaned his burns, the matter is forgotten.
Part One
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Iron Man
Word count: 50,603
Pairings/Characters: Tony/Pepper, Pepper/Rhodey, Pepper/Happy, Tony/Joanna Nivena, Tony/Rumiko Fujikawa, Natasha Romanoff, Jarvis, Obadiah Stane, Christine Everhart.
Summary: It only takes her nine years to say 'I love you' back.
A/N Ridiculously long prequel to Magnetic and related fics. I also played fast and loose with some comics canon, but you don't need to have read the comics at all for this fic.
For Virginia's twenty second birthday, her boyfriend presents her with two bus tickets to New York, a hotel booking, and two passes to the NY Tech Summit, which might not sound like such an exciting prospect, but for the fact that Tony Stark is the main attraction this year
She's wanted to see him in action since she was eighteen and had a crush that rivalled her friends' love for Jason Priestley and Luke Perry. As she worked her way through college, the crush had abated but her interest in Stark Industries grew. The company was doing incredible things, and the more she read, the more she wanted to be involved. It was almost impossible to get a job, though, and since, at the time, she hadn't even have completed her degree yet, so she tried to write it off as a stupid teenage dream.
But the convention is so loud and flashy and spectacular, how could it not reignite that desire in her? She's been dating Brian for two years - they're planning to go backpacking around Europe in the summer, planning to move in together in the fall, and her mother loves him - but she barely sees him the whole weekend. She gets swept up into the crowd and she doesn't look back.
On the first day, Stark gets up on stage and it's... amazing. She's transfixed from beginning to end, even though he's talking so fast she can barely understand him. She hears people saying that he was clearly high, but she honestly doesn't care; she could listen to him talk all day.
At some point over the weekend, a volunteer hands her a pamphlet about interning at Stark Industries. It's an incredibly competitive program that mostly takes graduate and doctoral students studying one or more of the sciences. Virginia majored in Accounting and minored in Art History, there's no way they'd look at her once, let alone twice.
And yet.
And yet two weeks later she gets on a bus and rides it the three hours back to New York, changes into her best pair of heels in a 7/11 restroom - her best friend says her ass looks fantastic in them - and walks into the waiting room at Stark Tower.
She's sure she's the youngest person there, and certainly the most poorly dressed. She sticks out like a sore thumb, really, with her short red bob and her patent leather red heels. A few of them glance at her, but for the most part everyone ignores everyone else as they wait. And wait, and wait, and wait.
A little over three hours later, the doors are shoved along with a voice saying, “Look, I don't have time for this, I have an engagement in half an hour. Cynthia, don't nag, Obi said I could do what I wanted with the interns.”
Tony Stark sweeps into the room followed by a middle-aged woman holding a stack of folders.
He claps his hands together. “Okay! Everyone who's just coming to the horrifying realisation that they might have to deal with me on a day to day basis, there are five emergency exits: two in the back, two in the middle, one at the front.” He frowns. “Actually, four of those are windows and unless you want on the evening news, I'd suggest you use the front exit.”
There's a low murmur and a lot of uncomfortable shifting, but no one gets up to leave.
“Guys,” Stark says, “there's at least one person here who already hates my guts, not including the wonderful Cynthia. Would it help if I closed my eyes?” He squeezes his eyes shut and starts counting back from ten. There's some more uncomfortable shifting and then, to her surprise - because why would you get this far just to give up? - a few people get up and sneak past him.
He seems to know as soon as they leave, because he smiles as he continues to count. “...five, four, three, two, one. Bye!” he calls over his shoulder, before looking at the group again. “Fuck, I thought I'd be able to thin the herd a bit more than that.” He turns to his assistant and asks, “Five people, right? Okay.” He points to a severe looking woman wearing glasses. “You look clever.” Cynthia quickly flips through her stack of files to find the right one as he turns his attention to a guy who appears to have an unfortunate inability to control his sweat glands.
“Kirk or Picard?” he asks.
The guy squirms. “Um, I- uh... Kirk.”
Stark grins and goes back to studying everyone's faces. He skips several people altogether before his gaze falls to her. He tilts his head, and she pushes her chest out, just a little. Her friends had suggested that she could probably get hired by shoving her tits in his face, and although she knew it was a joke, she'd kept it in her arsenal, just in case.
His eyes drop to her feet. “Nice shoes,” he says, and then he's indicating vaguely to two other people. “You and you. Okay passengers, thanks for flying Stark Airways, please put your trays in the upright and locked position.” With that, he spins on his heel and breezes back out of the room.
His assistant clenches her jaw, watching after him for a second. “You five, come with me. Everyone else, thank you for your time.”
Virginia does not go to Europe in the summer.
-
part 1
1998
They put her in the finance department for the length of her internship, then move her to HR, R&D, and Public Relations in quick succession, until, two years later, she's back in Finance and has a better working knowledge of the company than most of the managers. Her first week back, she catches a huge accounting error that could have cost the company millions - she's pretty sure that her department rep takes the credit for it.
Her relationship with Brian fizzled out quickly after getting hired. Really, it was destined to failure the moment she started looking for studio apartments in New York, and she only mourned the loss of her first serious relationship for a couple of days before she was swept up in the intern orientation week, which was at least twice as wild as orientation had been at university.
She only gets to see her family every few months, but... she doesn't miss them. Sometimes she feels guilty about that, but everything is just so... so much that she finds that she can't even hold onto that guilt for long.
If only it weren't for some of her co-workers, she wouldn't have any complaints at all. Most of them are okay: she makes a few friends, though no close ones. Acquaintances that she can go out for drinks with on a Friday night, at least. Then there's Jerry, who never asks her out but makes it clear that he thinks that she should want to. She ignores him quite effectively, smiling blandly when he makes jokes, talking about nothing when they're stuck in the copier room together, until he thinks their relationship has progressed to the stage when he can tap her on the ass while she's leant over the copier, attempting to fix a paper jam. It has not, and, well, she does what her grandmother taught her to do in situations such as these: she hits him.
It's really more of a love tap; with years of volleyball tournaments under her belt, she could have made him hurt. She doubts her supervisor sees it that way, though. She's told that there's going to be an investigation, and that she'll have to attend a hearing next week; she keeps her head down and starts looking for a new job.
She's in her cubicle, doing glorified data entry work when someone pops up over one of the thin walls. People have mostly been staying out of her way; she cringes at whatever this is going to be. “Miss Potts, I presume?”
Any interest in her spreadsheet dies when she hears that voice; of course she knows that voice. She looks up. Tony Stark looks back down at her.
“Hi!” he says and grins.
“I--” She pushes her chair away from her desk and stands. “Good afternoon, Mr Stark. Sir?” she adds as an afterthought, uncertainly.
“'Sir'? Yikes. So, I hear you, like, saved the company a squillion dollars or something.”
“Well--”
“Annnd that you hit someone.”
She bites her lip. “That's, that's true.”
Stark looks at her with big eyes for a moment, then peers over the cubicle wall again. “Can you collect your things and come with me? Yeah? Good.” He's already turning away before she's so much as moved. She grabs her bag and her one lone personal item, a plastic potted plant, and follows him through the maze of cubicles. Heads turn as they pass, and the whispers start like a Mexican wave; her cheeks burn and with her complexion it's a neon sign that says: I fucked up and now the guy whose name is on the door came here personally to fire me.
He stops abruptly as they pass the copier room and she bumps into his back. He flashes her a sly smile. “The scene of the crime,” he says. And of course, of course, Jerry is in there, harassing one of the temps. “You're Jerry, right?” he asks, hanging around the edge of the door. “The, uh, victim?”
“Mr... Mr Stark? Ye-yeah, I'm Jerry West, it's an honour to meet you.” He extends a hand that Stark ignores.
“I know,” he says. “I hear you're on track for a big promotion at the end of the year. Supervisor position, that's pretty cool.”
“Well, there are lots of great candidates, but I'd-- yes, sir, it would be really cool.”
“Again with the 'sir', you guys are really polite around here.” Stark looks at her, then back at Jerry. “Shame about what Miss Potts did, huh?”
Jerry does his best to look solemn. “I think that maybe our wires just got a little crossed, there's blame on both sides.”
“Mm,” Stark hums again, and it's all she can do to not get in there and really cross Jerry's wires.
Stark starts to move away, then stops again. “Oh, one more thing. Um, what was it...?” He snaps his fingers a couple of times then nods. “Right, right. You're fired.”
Virginia maybe squeaks a little with surprised laughter at this. Stark looks at her approvingly.
“Ex-excuse me?” Jerry stammers. The way his face turns from smug to shocked in the blink of an eye is delicious.
Stark shakes his head. “Dude, it's the nineties, sexual harassment isn't cool any more. Come along, Miss Potts.”
She manages to make it into the elevator before she starts laughing in earnest - she tries to contain it, because she's standing across from the boss of the company, but he just grins and there's that sudden feeling welling up in her again, the infectious, overwhelming presence of Tony Stark.
“His face,” Stark says. “Fuck, I love a well-executed prank, no better feeling in the world. Well. Maybe a few...”
She clears her throat, and wipes her eyes as much as she can without smudging her mascara. “This was a prank? Does that mean I'm not fired? I can go back to my desk?”
Stark counts off on his fingers. “Sort of, yes, and... no. Did I get that the right way round? I think I did. Anyway, yeah, no, you're not going back to your desk.”
“I'm not?”
“You're not. Miss Potts, I'm in the market for a new PA. What do you say?”
“I- What?” She tries to rewind the conversation in her head but it keeps catching after 'new PA'. “Me?”
“Yeah.”
“Why? I don't have any of the necessary skills for that.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Are you trying to talk me out of this? Because that's kind of assbackwards. You're never gonna beat the Jerrys of this world if you don't show off what you've got.” He doesn't even turn his last sentence into innuendo; she's shocked. “If you must know, I see from your file that you're extremely overeducated for butt monkey cubicle work, you caught that accounting error that Obi said was kind of a big deal - and yeah, I know it was you and not your rep, because that guy is a fucking idiot, I don't know how we're still in business with employees like him - and you obviously don't mind dealing out some rough justice when needed. You very well may need to do that if you work for me.”
He speaks so quickly, it's difficult for her to absorb the words. The elevator doors open, but one glare from Stark sends the people wanting to get on away. “Who would I be... hitting?” she asks slowly.
“Not me, don't hit me, Miss Potts. Pretty much anyone else, though. I'll expect you to defend my honour at all times.”
She can't help but smile. Damn it, he is incredibly good-looking. “Okay.”
“But most of all, Miss Potts, I'm hiring you because I've had it with boring old people telling me what to do, and you wear incredibly inappropriate shoes for work, which suggests to me that you've got a little bit of fun in you under that atrocious pantsuit.”
She glances down at her open-toed purple heels. She really can't argue with him about the pantsuit, it's quite awful. “They're all I can afford at the moment.”
“That won't be a problem with your new salary,” he says. The elevator doors open on the ground floor and he reaches out to hold them. “Just promise me something.”
“What is it, Mr Stark?”
“Promise me that not a single pair of sensible shoes will turn up on your expense report. I don't think my heart could take it.”
She bites her lip, and can't help but notice how the action draws his eyes to her mouth. “I promise.”
“Cool.” He steps out of the elevator and she follows, still clutching her plastic plant. “So... You know I live in California, right?”
“I...” She thinks about it. She does know that. “Yes.”
“Plane leaves in two hours, can you make it?”
She stands in the lobby of Stark Tower, people passing all around but never bumping into them, like Stark has a five foot buffer zone around him.
She's never been to California.
“I can make that flight, Mr Stark,” she says.
-
The first time she meets Rhodey, all she sees of him is his foot, sticking out from underneath a blanket on one of Stark's vast couches. She's been working for Stark for a month now, and she's already had to escort a dozen people from his house, but they've never been on the couch before. She debates with herself for a moment over whether she should just come back later, but a cursory glance around the room and its littered beer bottles makes her think that it might be wise for her to check that this guy is even breathing.
He is, and in short order he's scrambling off the couch, clutching at the blanket, and leaving very little to the imagination.
“Um,” she says.
“Tony!” he yells.
“Um,” she repeats, and he looks back at her like he wants nothing more than for the ground to open up and swallow him whole.
“Could you, uh,” he grimaces and waves vaguely across the room. “Pants?”
“Oh, yeah, right. Yes.” She looks around the room until her gaze falls on a crumpled pair of pants caught around a chair leg, then quickly picks them up and blindly shoves them at him.
“Thanks,” he mumbles while she keeps her back resolutely turned to him. “Tony!” he yells again, when he's got them on. She hazards a glance at him: it's not a bad view. “Get your fucking ass down here!”
“I don't think Mr Stark can hear you...” she says.
“Oh, he can hear me.” He pauses, frowns and extends a hand. “I'm Jim, by the way.”
She takes it. “Virginia.”
“I take it you aren't his girlfriend,” Jim says.
“Oh, God, no,” she says, and he grins. “I can't imagine what it would be like to be his girlfriend.” Although, really, yes she can. She'd fantasised about that enough when she was younger.
“That is perilously close to defamation of character, Potts.” Stark stands in the doorway, just a touch too long hair mussed and falling into his eyes, wearing nothing but jeans that she can't help but notice are extremely flattering, scratches on his hips that look like they were made by delicate fingernails.
“Mr Stark,” she says in greeting, proud that her voice comes out steady, despite feeling like her entire body is flushing with embarrassment. She really hadn't thought that this job would entail her being in a room with two extremely attractive shirtless men.
“I guess formal introductions are in order,” he says. “Rhodey, this is my new PA, Miss Virginia Potts.”
Jim raises his eyebrows like this means something to him; Stark ignores him, “Miss Potts, this is Major James Rhodes of the United States Air Force. He just came off an eight month tour of duty. We were celebrating him not being dead. He's, like, my best friend, or whatever. You'll probably be seeing a lot of him.” He looks Rhodey up and down. “Though, hopefully not too much.”
Rhodey narrows his eyes. “I'm not entirely clear that I'm not dead, after last night.”
Stark makes a dismissive sound. “Lightweight, you've been away too long. I'll toughen you up again.”
“Sure, Tony,” Rhodey says with a level of affection that Pepper has yet to hear aimed at Mr Stark. They look at each other for a quiet moment.
“Miss Potts,” Stark says eventually. “There are a couple of ladies in my bedroom, could you please give them the complimentary gift bag and escort them out?”
“'A couple'?” Rhodey says.
She takes this as her cue to leave, cheeks beginning to burn at the thought of Mr Stark and these two ladies. It's not as if she hasn't considered the possibility of a threesome before, but Brian was kind of straight-laced and since then she's barely had time to sleep, let alone have sex. Really, though, it's just the idea of Stark, those scratches on his hips, and...
She really shouldn't dwell on stuff like this.
“Well, after you sacked out,” she hears Stark say, “I had to take two for the team.”
-
Virginia quits for the first time after she's kept up for three straight days negotiating Stark getting released without charges from a jail in Mexico. He gives her a fifty percent raise and sends her a new pair of shoes. They're her first Christian Louboutins.
She quits for the second time after he disappears right before a crucial meeting with President Clinton and she has to explain to Clinton's aides that Mr Stark had an 'emergency'. He gives her another fifty percent raise and a pair of Manolo Blahniks.
She walks out of the mansion and doesn't return to work for a week after he crashes his car at the Daytona 500, sustains a concussion and a broken arm, and goes right back to drinking and fucking the next day. He gives her another fifty percent raise, tickets to the opera, a pair of Dolce & Gabbana boots, and brings her along to watch the car get crushed into a cube.
-
At the beginning of the Stark Gala '98, she meets Bill Gates. He tells her that Mr Stark used to beat him at Donkey Kong when Stark was ten.
At the end of the Stark Gala '98, she's holding Stark's shoulders while he dry heaves over a toilet.
“Fuck,” he groans. “Fuckin' poison, fire those caterers, Potts.”
“Yes, Mr Stark.” She tugs him back a little. “Do you think you can get up?”
He groans something but is pliable under her hands, and she manages to pull him up and get him over to the sinks. “Just stay still,” she says, and he mumbles something that she doesn't catch. She grabs a handful of paper towels, wets them, and begins cleaning his face. It's mostly blood: he got into a fight with a guest staying at the hotel the Gala's being held at, when Stark and the guest's wife tried to... move festivities to her room. Mr Stane broke it up pretty quickly, practically picked Stark up by the scruff of his neck and hauled him out like he was a child.
The fight had destroyed what was left of his delicate equilibrium, though; she's been in this restroom with him for a good twenty minutes already.
“Ow,” he says quietly when she runs the paper towel over a cut on his lip.
“Sorry.”
“'sokay,” he mumbles, staring at her hands. “You've got nice hands,” he comments after a moment.
She can feel her cheeks begin to warm. “Thank you, Mr Stark.”
“Tony,” he corrects.
“Mr Stark,” she repeats. “You should really try to sleep the worst of this off. How about we go home?”
He bobs his head. After a couple of minutes of confusion, she manages to get a comfortable grip on him without it feeling too inappropriate. She leads him out out of the restroom and his bodyguard, Hogan, trails after them.
Stane stops them on the way out, looking huge as he places a hand on Stark's shoulder, especially in comparison to Stark. “We've got a shareholder meeting tomorrow,” he says in his deep rumble. “Remember?”
“Yep,” Stark says.
“I expect you to be there, son,” he says. Stark's expression flickers, with guilt, she thinks. He's never so open as when he's drunk, she's coming to realise. Any other time, his face is constant sneering mask.
“I know,” he says.
“Good. Take care of our boy, Miss Potts,” Stane says, and smiles. She wills herself not to be intimidated.
“Of course, Mr Stane.”
-
She gets a couple of hours sleep at home that night before she's back in her car on her way to the office. There's a hundred different things she needs to do, a hundred meetings she no doubt needs to reschedule after Stark's performance last night. She needs to run interference with the media, make sure the wronged husband isn't going to be an issue, and check that Mr Stark hasn't bought any new businesses in the last week.
It takes her all morning, and it's only at one in the afternoon that she's able to go over to check on Mr Stark. Honestly, she's a little concerned that she hasn't heard from him. He had really wanted her to stay, whined at her about it in a tone not unlike a child until he passed out in his bed, still mostly clothed. She covered him in a blanket and left.
The sun is burning hot as she drives with the roof of the convertible down (“Can't go showing me up, now, Potts,” Stark had said when he presented her with the keys.). She makes it there in good time and takes a moment to appreciate the incredible view of the ocean. Mr Stark says he doesn't care for it.
There's another car sitting outside the garage when she gets there to park. She's never seen it before, but it has a Stark Industries logo on the back. Probably Mr Stane, she decides, here to see that Stark's okay. The man's like a father to him. She can't imagine how much wilder Stark would be without him.
She gets into the house and drops her bag in the hall. The place looks like a tornado's torn through it, which is just how Mr Stark left it last night once she finally managed to get him out the door. She sighs; it's really for a maid to do, but Mr Stark is 'off maids' for the moment, while he's going through one of his paranoid phases. She sets about clearing away empty coffee mugs in the lounge from where they're scattered all over schematics for something completely unfathomable. She considers rolling the drawings up and taking them back down to the workshop, but thinks better of it. He tends to freak out if she moves his stuff. She heads to the kitchen with an armful of mugs in varying stages of mould sentience.
“Oh, you're finally up. I don't see what the point is of inviting me over if you're just going to pass--” a female voice starts, then stops when Virginia steps into the room. “You aren't Tony,” she says.
“You aren't Mr Stane,” Virginia replies. The woman is fantastically beautiful, even with her hair scraped back from her face, not a hint of make up to be seen. She has long blonde hair and long tanned legs, and Virginia stares a little longer, clutching at the mugs like an idiot.
“Agreed,” the woman says, then steps forward and relieves Virginia of some of her burden. “Let me help you with that. Ugh,” she says, wrinkling her nose as she peers inside of a mug. “Tony is such a pig sometimes.”
“Thanks. Do you mind if I ask...?” Virginia begins, and the woman laughs.
“Oh God, you probably think I'm some kind of crazy stalker, I'm sorry. I'm Joanna.” She holds out a hand and Virginia takes it. It's slightly damp, and Joanna smells faintly of chlorine. Must have been using the pool, Virginia realises. She's never gone in it herself, though she has vigorous permission to do so.
“Joanna...” she repeats. She doesn't know any Joannas.
“Joanna Nivena?” Joanna tries again, and frowns at the lack of recognition of Virginia's face. “I'm Tony's... fiancée.”
“Oh,” she says. Fiancée? Mr Stark definitely hasn't mentioned anything about that. “Oh, right, yeah. Miss Nivena, I'm sorry. I had a long day yesterday.” She cringes at the excuse, so pathetic, but the woman doesn't call her on it.
“I heard. Tony called me this morning and wheedled until I came over. Already unconscious by the time I got here, though. He's a class act. You must be Virginia Potts, I take it?”
“Right, yes, I am. Sorry, I guess now it's your turn to think I'm a crazy stalker.”
Joanna looks her up and down. “I don't think a suit and three inch heels is the stalker's wardrobe of choice, somehow.”
“It could just be a clever disguise.”
Joanna nods. “Could be. Pretty helpful stalker though, 'cause I'm pretty sure that the beginnings of the plague were being cultured back there.”
“Yeah, not exactly in my skill set,” she says. “Did... Mr Stark mention me?”
“Obi did.” Joanna's eyes flash with something. Not anger, but... something. Virginia thinks about the woman last night. The woman a few days before that. The women he and Major Rhodes brought home. “He said you were keeping Tony in line.”
“I really don't think that's true.”
“Well, nevertheless, you're doing the world a service, Miss Potts.” The smile she gives doesn't quite reach her eyes. “I'm gonna hit the showers.”
-
Through some careful research (typing 'Joanna Nivena' into Yahoo), she finds out that Miss Nivena is the daughter of Andrew Nivena, a corporate lawyer based in New York who worked for Stark Industries in the seventies and eighties. Apparently the two families were close in a high society sort of way. There's not a hint that Joanna and Tony are even dating, though.
Mr Stark doesn't really say anything about her beyond asking if she's still there when Virginia rouses him from his bed in the late afternoon, having completely missed Stane's important shareholder meeting. He seems relieved when she tells him that Joanna had to get to work.
The next time she sees Joanna is a couple of weeks later, in the office. Stark hasn't been in at all, and the last she heard from him he was in Las Vegas; she's working at clearing his schedule and signing a stack of documents that have been marked as urgent for the past week. She's getting pretty good at forging signatures.
There's a knock at Stark's office door where she currently ensconced. He hasn't quite seen his way fit to getting her her own office, yet. “Miss Potts?”
She looks up. “Yes? Oh, Miss Nivena, hi.”
“Is Tony here? He isn't at home, and he's not picking up his cell.”
“No, he's...” When she called him this morning, she heard a woman's voice in the background. “...in a meeting.”
Joanna smiles. “Of course. Such a hard worker. When you see him, could you tell him that the Nan Goldin exhibit opens tomorrow night at the museum. I thought he might like to come with me. It has the word 'sex' in the title, so...”
“'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency'? I've been trying to get tickets to that for weeks!” Virginia says, already feeling herself begin to blush. It probably isn't appropriate to chat with the boss's fiancée like this especially when you're aware that said boss has been sleeping his way around the West Coast since you were hired.
“Perk of the job, I'm a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art.” She pauses and cocks her head. “Would you like to come with me, Miss Potts?”
“Oh, I--”
“Tony has zero appreciation for anything that doesn't explode. Come on, you'd be doing me a favour. I just know my co-workers are going to laugh at me for going out with such a philistine.”
“Well, I mean, if it's for a good cause...”
“Tomorrow, seven o'clock.”
-
Virginia had wanted to major in Art History, she'd chosen a small liberal arts college for that very reason, and she'd been on track for it until midway through her second year. Then, her parents filed for divorce, and suddenly fees were a problem, loans were a problem, and she was working nights at the local coffee shop.
Once her room mate discovered that she'd been a Mathlete in high school, she started to pick up a couple of extra bucks a week tutoring first her friends, then everyone on her floor, math for their science requirements. She was the only one in her dorm that knew her way around a quadratic equation, and her time became highly prized.
Logically it followed for her to declare her major in Accounting at the end of the year. It set her up for a good job when she graduated and it came easy to her, easy enough that she could take on extra shifts at work through her third and fourth years and still come out of it with 3.8 GPA.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, though, is still a great deal more interesting than an end of year budget report.
“How long have you been working here for?” she asks, after she's been around the exhibit three times and looked at every photograph at least twice. Joanna is incredibly patient, following her around, introducing her to the VIPs (Virginia gets several job offers after they hear that she works for Tony Stark), explaining the significance of this angle or that.
“About eight months. I was at Tate Modern before that.”
Virginia thinks back to when she met Major Rhodes: eight months is about how long his deployment was, and he'd asked if she was Mr Stark's new girlfriend. She'd thought he was joking, at the time.
“Me and Tony have been together for six months,” Joanna says, “In case you were wondering.”
“I... was,” she admits. “That's not very long to already be engaged, if you don't mind me saying.”
“No, it's fine, you're right, it isn't long. Tony sort of... took me by surprise one night.” Joanna snags a couple of drinks off a tray as a waiter passes by them, and hands one to Virginia. “We've known of each other since we were kids, but Obi reintroduced us at a party earlier this year. And what about you, Miss Potts?”
She takes a sip of her champagne. It's divine. “Virginia, please. Not a lot to say, really.”
“Well, you seem to know a lot about Goldin and I noticed that Tony's acquired some new art. I don't think Gary Hume is really his speed.”
She shrugs. “He gave me a three million dollar budget and told me to do what I wanted with it. I studied Art History in college.”
“I'm glad he has someone to teach him about culture.” Joanna sips her glass very slowly, eyes tracking various people milling around the room. At length, she says, “He likes you.”
“I think Mr Stark likes everyone,” Virginia replies. He's certainly friendly enough with everyone.
“No, his feelings for people normally range from casual disinterest to 'will they let me fuck them?'.” She clears her throat politely. “You, he likes.”
“I-- okay. I like him too.” She instantly regrets saying this, but Joanna only smiles.
“You're one of the few, Virginia.”
-
She gets four days' holiday over Thanksgiving, and takes it to go home and see her mother and little sister. And her mother's new husband, Roger.
“Tell me everything,” Julia demands the moment Virginia gets out of the taxi. “What's he like? Is he cut? I bet he's cut. Oh my God, does he sleep in the nude? Have you seen his junk?”
“Hi, sis,” Virginia says.
Her family quiz her all afternoon about Stark, about her duties, and which famous people she's met.
“So, how are you really?” her mother asks later, after turkey has been eaten and Roger has been appointed washing up duty. “We've heard so little from you lately.”
“I'm good, everything's good.”
“Really? Because all I ever hear about this Stark man is how he has sex with everyone and gets drunk a lot.”
“Not all the time, he does occasionally sleep,” Virginia says. Her mother doesn't laugh. She forgot: humour like that doesn't fly around here. “But he's not that bad. He's actually kind of... sweet, in his own way.”
“Mm,” is her mother's final comment on that.
The next day, Virginia borrows Roger's truck and drives herself and Julia over to their father's. It's a five hour drive; Julia settles in with her Walkman and Virginia resigns herself to listening to the radio the whole way there.
“Gin?” Julia says after a couple of hours. Her headphones are hanging around her neck.
“Run out of CDs?” she asks.
“Yeah... Hey, so, I kinda got early acceptance into Columbia.”
“You did? That's great! When did you find out?”
Julia shrugs. “Last week. Haven't told Mom and Dad yet.”
Virginia glances at her; Julia's been going on about Columbia for months, ever since they visited it together over spring break, just before Virginia got promoted. “Wasn't it your first choice? Is there somewhere else you'd rather go?”
“No, it's just...” Julia rolls her eyes and shifts her gaze to the window to stare out of it despondently. “Dad got demoted and everything. I don't think we can afford it. Like, you got through college by working every hour you weren't in class, but you're a genius or whatever. I'm not going to be able to do that.”
“First, that is not true. You got into Columbia, clearly you're doing something right.” Julia shrugs again in response. “Second... don't worry about money, okay?”
“Yeah? How do you suggest I do that?”
“By being a very grateful sister. Let's just say that Mr Stark has been very... generous to me.”
Julia turns in her seat and stares at her. And continues to stare until Virginia begins to smile.
“A good person would say that this is way too much,” Julia comments eventually. She bites her lip. “Thanks, Ginny.”
-
She gets back to California on Monday and immediately picks her car up from the parking lot and drives over to Malibu. She hasn't heard from Mr Stark for the entire Thanksgiving break and that worries her. Usually he calls her three, four times a day, to get her to pick his dry cleaning up, order in Chinese, or just ramble about whatever it is that he's working on at that moment.
Joanna's car is in the drive again when she gets there; she parks alongside it and quietly lets herself into the house. She should have thought, maybe they've been holed up here over the holiday, maybe that's why Stark didn't feel the need to call her incessantly.
“Joanna, Joanna, please, I'm sorry, come on.”
She freezes at Stark's plaintive voice drifting in from upstairs.
“It's not that, Tony.”
“I promise I won't ever... I won't ever cheat on you again. Please. I'm sorry, it didn't mean anything.”
“It's not that,” Joanna repeats. “This... it was never going to work.” There's a lull in the conversation, and then she says, “Tony, let go of me,” in the saddest voice Virginia's ever heard. Soon there are footsteps on the staircase and she backs up, looking for some handy shadows to hide in. Too bad Stark's house is all bright lights and open spaces.
“Virginia,” Joanna says as she makes it to the ground floor. All she has with her is a small travel bag. It's probably everything that she's ever kept at the mansion. A toothbrush and a couple of changes of underwear. “Look after him.” She strides out with more grace than Virginia could ever even imagine having.
She edges around the banister and looks up the staircase, where Stark's standing barefoot, in sweatpants, with lipstick marks on his neck. “So, how was your Thanksgiving?” he asks viciously. “Mine was awesome.”
-
She pours him two fingers of scotch; he swipes the bottle from her and takes a pull from it. “Fuck,” he says.
“What happened?”
He hasn't thought it necessary to put a shirt on, and she can't help but mentally tell Julia that he is, indeed, cut.
“Got caught fucking someone I shouldn't have been, didn't I?” he says. He takes another swig from the bottle.
“Mr Stark, Mr Stark.” She tugs at the bottle and it comes easily from his grip. She sets in down out of his reach. “That's not helping.”
“Beyond help,” he mumbles, rubbing at his face.
“That's not true.” She pats tentatively at his shoulder. There's really no appropriate place to touch him when he's in this state of undress.
He peers at her from between his fingers. “Yeah?”
“Yes,” she says. She rubs a little more at his shoulder and can't help but notice the way he leans into her, just a bit.
He drops his hands to his lap. “I really fucked everything up. She was, like, the perfect woman.”
“Well,” she says. “Why did you?”
“Dunno. Something to do.” He grins, though there's nothing humorous about it. “How's that for an explanation?”
“I think... If you don't mind me saying...” He nods for her continue. “I think you weren't that interested to begin with.”
“You think I didn't love her?” he asks, but it's weak and she notes that it's already in the past tense.
“Mr Stark, I have no idea what goes on in your head, but I think that when you put your mind to something, you follow through with it.”
“So, you're saying that I need to find my true love?”
She frowns. That's slightly more of a leap than she was aiming for. “Maybe? Or maybe just put a little more thought into your relationships?”
She wonders if she's gone too far. Lecturing the boss about his love life can't be a sensible career move, but he just ducks his head and smiles. “You're like my fairy godmother and Yoda all rolled into one, Potts.”
“Cinderella, the ball go to, you will,” she says.
-
She quits for the fourth time after she drives over to his house two weeks later. He hasn't been answering his phone all day, and she tells herself she isn't worried, that it's hardly unusual for him to ignore the phone when he doesn't want to be hassled, but he's been so delicate since Joanna left that she gives into her desire to check up on him. He hasn't been out clubbing at all in the past two weeks, doesn't seem to have been drinking, has even attended some of the meetings he was meant to be at.
Last she saw of him was late yesterday afternoon. Stane was about to take him out for dinner. He'd confided in her, in a rare show of openness, that he was worried about Tony's state of mind. Joanna, he told her, had accepted a job at the Met and was leaving for New York on the weekend.
“I think they really could have had something,” he said. “I don't know how he's going to take it.”
They left around six, Stane's arm around Stark's shoulders, and she felt relieved that he had someone else on his side, especially since Major Rhodes was away in Colorado training.
It's been a good twenty four hours since then, and Stane has no idea where he would be. Last he saw Tony, he was dropping him off at home.
She hears the music before she even gets into view of the front of the mansion. There are several cars in the drive. She parks where she can find a spot and walks as quickly as she can in her heels to the house. The front door is open.
The music is deafening when she gets inside; he's incredibly lucky that he doesn't have any neighbours. She weaves as best she can through warm bodies, occasionally having to slap at a wandering hand.
“Mr Stark?” she yells.
“Upstairs,” someone yells back.
There's not so much of a crush by the staircase, and she gets upstairs easily enough. The closer she gets to his room, the more her heart drops. She can hear things being smashed, voices and laughter. It sounds like Mr Stark. She forgoes knocking and pushes his door open.
Several things hit her: the amount of people in his room, the amount of open bottles on the floor, the amount of broken furniture, and, more literally, the bra that's flung in her face.
“Pottsy!” Stark shouts, falling out of the bed. “Join us, won't you!”
She takes the bra from where it lies across her shoulder and drops it to the floor. “What... is going on?” she asks slowly.
He stumbles into a wall. “Impromptu party!” he says loudly and several people laugh.
She clenches her jaw. “I see. The reason being?”
He stares for a couple of seconds, squinting at her. “You talk really clever, Potts,” he says at last.
“Really,” she says.
He nods, eyes and pupils wide. And yes, he does sleep in the nude. Or not sleep in it, more accurately.
“You realise that your house is being destroyed, don't you?”
He shrugs.
“Great,” she says. “Since you're obviously fine, I'm going to go home and sleep.” She turns to leave, but only gets a couple of steps before a hand on her arm stops her. She looks back over her shoulder, and his face is right there.
“I-” he says, and presses his face into her shoulder. “Stay,” he mumbles.
She looks down. Of course, of course, he has an erection. “No, thank you,” she says, pulling out of his grip.
“Please, but, if you... the others could go.” He reaches for her arm again, and she easily evades his hand.
“I don't even know what you're saying, but this is incredibly inappropriate, Mr Stark.”
He glances down. “Oh, I can... deal with that.”
It's all she can do to not slap him. “Goodbye, Mr Stark,” she says instead, and turns on her heel.
“...bye?” he calls after her pathetically.
-
When a FedEx courier turns up at her door late the next afternoon, she refuses to sign for the package. When a mysterious fifty grand appears in her bank account, she ignores it. When she finds tickets to the ballet in her mailbox, she sends them back.
She gets several interviews set up in the next couple of weeks, by working some of the contacts she made at the museum, and by just trying her luck shopping her résumé around different companies. Being formerly employed by Tony Stark turns out to be a huge benefit to her.
Two weeks in, he stops bombarding her with gifts, and she begins to think that it's over. It was her six month adventure that, really, was never going to last. Stark goes through PAs faster than he does toothbrushes, she never should have expected job security. It kills her that she won't be able to pay Julia's fees, though. She still hasn't told her family that she's quit.
She's hoping she won't have to until she's got a new job, though: Hammer Industries contact her in the second week of December and offer her an interview. The starting salary is a lot less than what she was making, but then again, it's a far more reasonable sum of money than what Stark was giving her. The position is in their Accounting department, as a junior manager. It seems almost perfect: a job that actually fits the skill set she has, nine to five workdays, a week off for Christmas and two in the summer. She gets more and more excited about it as the day of the interview approaches and as a treat, she decides to get her hair done before heading to the supermarket. It's just a trim, a little more shaped around her face to make her look older, but she's pleased with it. Her previous bob made her look like a teenager.
“Can I help you with those?” someone asks when she makes it back out to the parking lot, several plastic bags in hand. As always, she knows that voice.
Stark is wearing an oil-stained hoodie and jeans with the fabric worn away around the knees. Under her scrutiny, he shoves his hands in his pockets and looks at the ground.
“How did you find me?” she asks as calmly as she can.
“Uh, your cell.”
“There's a tracker in my phone?”
He glances up. “All corporate employees have them. Didn't Obi tell you?”
She sets her jaw and fishes around in her bag for the offending item. “Take it out,” she says, handing the phone to him.
He frowns at her, but flips it over and slides the back off with quick fingers, pulls the battery out, and removes the SIM card. There's a tiny... something attached to the card that he picks off with his fingernail, flicks to the ground and crushes underneath his shoe. He reassembles the phone and hands it back to her.
“I really thought you knew,” he says.
“Uh huh,” she says. “What do you want?”
“I heard you've got an interview with Hammer Industries. You can't go to it.”
“I can't?” she repeats.
He shakes his head. “No. Justin Hammer is the actual worst; you can't work for him. I won't allow it.”
“You won't allow it?” she repeats, and by the look on his face, he's just starting to pick up on the dangerous undertone in her voice.
“I mean I--” He spreads his hands. “Hammer would be a sucky boss. He's, like, twenty three.”
“And?”
“And...” He bites his lip and stares at her with wide eyes. It doesn't look like he's shaved, or slept, in a few days. “Do you want to hit me?”
She blinks. “What?”
“I know I said before that you shouldn't hit me, but I think you should hit me.”
“Hitting you is not going to make me feel better, Mr Stark.” Well, she doesn't know that for sure, but they're in a Safeway parking lot, and he's already drawing curious glances.
“It'd make me feel better. I mean--” He backs up a step at the look she gives him. “Not in a kinky way. Just... if it'd stop you being angry at me. You're a really good PA, Miss Potts, I want you back.”
It's his hands that do her in, clasped in front of him, fingers twisting together; it hits her that, God, he really is so young. “Do you understand how inappropriate what you did was?” she asks.
“Yeah, no, I know. I'm sorry you had to see my... That. It won't happen again. Scout's honour.” He raises his hand and gives her a Vulcan salute.
“I could sue you for sexual harassment,” she continues. “I'd probably win.”
“I know. Do you want a, um, a raise? Another raise?”
She thinks about it. She believes that he's sorry, but she doesn't believe for a second that something like this won't happen again. She doesn't believe that this is going to be the last time she quits. “My sister's going to Columbia next fall,” she says.
“Okay?”
“I want the company to give her full ride scholarship. Whether or not I remain with you.”
“Oh, yeah, sure, definitely.” His gaze flickers to her, then away, then back again. “So... will you be back tomorrow?”
She takes a deep breath. “No,” she says, and hopes she isn't pushing her advantage too far. “I'm taking a long break over the Christmas holidays. I'll see you in January.”
He narrows his eyes at her for a moment, then his mouth starts to curve into a wide grin. “Well played. Merry Christmas, Miss Potts.”
“Merry Christmas, Mr Stark.”
-
She does quit again, after Stark accidentally blows up part of his workshop, but he follows her out of the house, hair singed and sweatshirt slightly on fire, and by the time she's put it out and cleaned his burns, the matter is forgotten.
Part One