Freezer Burn (25/?)
This segment dedicated to kerithwyn, for providing the research opportunity.
Freezer Burn
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
Steve followed the hostess past the long banquette and through the field of tables, feeling a little bit like an elephant in a china shop even though he wasn't bumping into anything and, point of fact, nobody was paying him a whit of attention. Captain America might be on the covers of magazines and plastic-molded into action figures, but out of uniform, he was simply another guy in a suit in a room full of them.
Except none of them had Pepper Potts waving to him with a smile on her face.
Pepper had called him on Tuesday asking if he were free for a late Thursday lunch. He was supposed to be going down to DC to look through the hard copies of some of the original SHIELD files on HYDRA and the '51 raids, but that could wait and so he rescheduled his appointment at the archives and said that for her, he was always free. She'd laughed, of course, but there was a touch of something else there besides the 'I'm flattered' giggle (Pepper was one of the few women he knew who could pull off a giggle) that made him all the more determined to make the appointment.
Pepper made to stand as he approached, but as in favor as he was of equality in the workplace, chivalry had not changed in far longer than the seventy years he'd been sleeping, so he hurried past the hostess to intercept Pepper before she could rise.
"You look wonderful," he said, kissing her on the cheek. "Thank you for inviting me."
"Thank you for coming," she said with a smile that almost-but-not-quite reached her eyes. "I'm very glad to be rectifying what has been a shocking oversight on Tony's part. I can't believe he hasn't taken you here yet."
Steve hadn't even heard of the restaurant before Pepper's invitation, although he'd been across the street at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park (good, but not worth the waiting on line, not when he had his own half a cow and a Weber grill). He didn't go to many restaurants on his own, at least not the kind where he sat and ate instead of picking up an order for takeout. Certainly not to the kind of restaurants that required reservations weeks in advance and for which even lunch could run you hundreds of dollars; his sticker shock at how much things cost now versus how much they'd cost in the '40's had nothing to do with that.
"Neither could Natasha when I told her," he replied, accepting a drink menu from the waiter. Pepper already had something an intriguing shade of peach-blush in a martini glass. Tony liked to tease her about her taste in 'girly' drinks, but it was charming for the same reason her giggle was charming - these were traits at such odds with her ruthless intelligence and steel will. "I think I might get a tour of New York's fanciest restaurants out of that."
Natasha had actually been somewhere between appalled and amused when Steve had asked her if she'd heard of Eleven Madison Park; it had been a moment of levity and near-normality in what had been a very tense visit. She'd been released from the hospital in Cleveland the day after the shooting - miraculously, she'd suffered no long-term or serious damage and had nothing more to show for her injuries than a dressing that needed changing and an arm sling that she'd already stopped wearing by the time she'd returned to New York. She had stayed in Ohio to work on the investigation, at least officially, although Fury was quite open about his belief that she was avoiding a return to the Helicarrier because it would mean having to finally answer questions about the shooting. Nobody disagreed, least of all Steve, which was why when he'd finally sat down with her, he'd been prepared for her stonewalling. Although, it turned out, not to the point where he could keep his temper as she prevaricated and flat-out lied to him about how much she knew and what she suspected.
"Well, let me know when you get to Per Se," Pepper said, smiling up at the new waiter who'd appeared at their side. "We've got a regular table at The French Laundry and Tony owes it to you to offer a comparison of East Coast Keller versus West Coast Keller."
The new waiter was not, in fact, a waiter. He was a sommelier and wanted to know what Steve wanted to drink. Tony and Natasha might've neglected his epicurean education, but they'd done a pretty good job expanding his spirits horizon beyond the pretty thorough wine knowledge he'd picked up during his years in Europe, where even the most hard-living partisan resistance force could still produce a bottle of local plonk for a meal that sometimes was more sawdust than sausage. None of which prepared him for a variety of offerings that felt like an encyclopedia in his hand.
He might have looked a touch overwhelmed because Pepper gave him a gentle smile.
"Something clean," she told the sommelier, which Steve thought was a laughably vague instruction, except the sommelier did not laugh. He nodded, as if Pepper had given him precise instructions down to the measurements, and departed.
The menu, in contrast to the drinks offerings, was shockingly spare, a single sheet of thick paper with a four-by-four matrix of food words. The waiter (actually a waiter) went through the explanation for Steve's benefit, since Pepper clearly already knew what to do. Steve was to pick one box from each row, the first being the cold appetizer, the second being the hot appetizer, the third being the entrée, and the fourth being dessert, and then the chef would return him something featuring each ingredient he'd chosen as a spotlight. Steve wasn't sure what a couple of the options were (was a langoustine a meat or a vegetable?), so he went with foie gras, halibut, squab, and grapefruit.
The sommelier returned with a highball glass full of clear liquid with some green leaves at the bottom that turned out to be lemon verbena infusing gin. There was more of a story, but basically it was a fancy gin and tonic with nicer ingredients. It tasted good, he said so, and both Pepper and the sommelier smiled knowingly at each other.
A team of waiters brought them their first course, which turned out not to be the real first course, but instead a plate with a fancy teacup and delicate sheaths of what they were told was 'seaweed lavash.' The teacup had halibut tea in it, which Steve smiled politely at and mentally translated into 'fish broth,' although it was a far cry from what he'd occasionally had the misfortune of being served during the Depression. These were amuse bouches, Pepper told them as they were left alone, little extras that basically amounted to the chefs showing off.
There was a second one, after a decent interval from when the first had been cleared away and they'd had time to sip at their drinks, this one served in a hollowed-out eggshell. It was custardy and light and might have had egg in it, but all Steve caught from the recitation was 'smoked sturgeon' and 'chive oil' because it was all so beautifully laid out.
"How is Natasha doing?" Pepper asked as the second set of plates were cleared away. "I know she's up and about, but..."
Steve sighed. "She's fine, physically," he replied, taking extra care to cover the total surface of the bread with goat's milk butter because he liked it (Anne and Rubin made their own, which was grassier than this one) and because the attention to detail kept him from showing off his deep frustration. "More or less. She's still in pain, but she's not taking the pills and she's not wearing the sling and she's going to the range to shoot despite explicit instructions not to because the recoil jars her shoulder. However, on the list of things she's doing and done that I'd like to take issue with, that's not going to rank as worth fighting with her about. She's not going to do anything that's going to risk her combat effectiveness, so let her think that she's being a rebel if that's what she wants."
Pepper gave him a wry look that expressed very clearly both that he wasn't hiding his own frustration very well at all and also that she knew exactly how he felt. He was aware that Natasha had been Pepper's problem before she'd been his, but her knowledge of this sort of bone-deep frustration did not come from 'Natalie Rushman.' You didn't spend years cleaning up after Tony Stark without occasionally wanting to throw things at a wall.
Someone else might have rolled their eyes or said something to that effect. Pepper merely raised her glass in salute, winked, and took a healthy sip.
The first course - the actual first course - arrived right then. Steve was presented with a healthy log of foie gras with pineapple salsa and a brioche and then an egg cup with more foie gras under a pineapple froth. Again, it was all almost too pretty to disturb with a knife and fork. Almost.
"She knows who shot her," Steve went on after he'd sampled both of his foie gras variations and offered some to Pepper, who traded him a langoustine with celery cream and green apple 'snow' for a bit of brioche with foie gras and pineapple salsa. A langoustine was apparently a fancy name for lobster. "She won't tell anyone who or why."
Clint and Steve had asked, Hill had demanded, and Fury had ordered, but Natasha had remained mute in the face of both concerned imploring and shouted threats. The threats were idle - Fury wasn't going to actually remove Natasha from either the case or from SHIELD - and the presumptions on her friendships could be ignored, which meant that there was no actual leverage for anyone to force Natasha to say what she clearly knew.
She'd never do anything to hurt SHIELD's efforts to bring down HYDRA, she assured, which when coming on the heels of her refusal to disclose anything about the identity of her shooter was a little hard to swallow for everyone. But it had nothing to do with HYDRA, she insisted, which everyone took to be utter baloney because how else could a sniper know to set up on a roof with a view to a building about to be raided by HYDRA? Just because the shooter had known what was going down didn't mean that he'd been a part of the planning, she'd retorted - the underworld had known of HYDRA and its power long before the good guys had; it wasn't a bad bet to guess that the Avengers were going to show up after a HYDRA hit and it wasn't a bad bet to assume that if the Avengers were going to appear, Natasha would be one of them.
(Clint had gone over to the sniper's nest while Steve had been on the phone with Fury in the immediate aftermath; he'd come away with no evidence but instead with the opinion that the shooter had been a true pro because of where and how they'd set up. The roof had been the easiest shot, but Clint thought that he himself could have picked off someone on the ground in the front square if he'd had what to brace himself with.)
"She has a lot of enemies, not all of whom know or care about what you do as Avengers," Pepper offered, swirling a piece of langoustine around in the celery cream. She chuffed out a sharp laugh that had nothing to do with being amused. "You all do."
And this is why Steve had rearranged his schedule; it wasn't for the ridiculously fancy and delicious lunch with a beautiful woman he admired. It was because the beautiful woman he admired happened to be the CEO of a company currently making the front pages of the Wall Street Journal for all of the wrong reasons and her personal and professional lives were being run through the wringer because the chairman of that company's board had a self-destructive streak as broad as his intellect. Tony wasn't heartless or feckless, at least not intentionally, but neither was he able to keep his personal recklessness from impacting others.
"What can I do?" he asked, because they could skip the opening remarks of that particular conversation and get down to the details.
He hadn't seen Tony in weeks, hadn't heard from him in almost as long; Tony had been too preoccupied by business to attend any of the informal Avengers social gatherings and there hadn't been anything that Iron Man could do that some other SHIELD asset couldn't. There'd been the occasional email or text from a meeting or a plane flight en route to a meeting, but even those had come at a rate much less frequent than Steve had grown accustomed to. Steve had noticed, of course, but he hadn't been idle himself and if he'd considered why there hadn't been random photos of Stark Industries Board of Directors' nostrils or badly-translated text on soy sauce bottles, he'd just assumed that Tony was too busy to be bored. That Stark Industries was fighting for its future was news covered by the regular papers, too.
"I don't know," Pepper admitted as the crew of waiters descended upon them to remove their empty plates and sweep away their breadcrumbs and take away Pepper's empty glass. "I'm not even sure what I can do outside the boardroom."
The sommelier returned with a wine goblet full of something that looked like ginger ale but probably wasn't. Steve waited for him to go away - after Pepper took a sip and nodded approvingly - before leaning forward. He took a sip of his own drink and waited for Pepper to speak.
"It's like we're the wounded shark and everyone can smell the blood in the water," she began slowly, running an elegant fingertip around the rim of her goblet. "We were the most fearsome creature in the ocean, but we're not anymore. Now we're just another wounded animal and now everyone we've ever pissed on or pissed off - and by 'we,' I mean 'we' as the collective first person and not the royal 'we' that's just a polite euphemism for 'Tony' - is watching us swim on, looking for an opening to strike out and get back whatever it is they think we took from them or that they feel they deserve. And Trident is swimming right alongside and I don't know if they're going to join the feeding frenzy once it starts or just swim right on by to become the new big shark."
'If they weren't already' hung unspoken and completely understood.
"All of this would be... not okay, but at least acceptable as part of the life cycle of enterprise and capitalism if we weren't also fighting our own nasty civil war," Pepper went on. "There are always fires to be put out. I'm very good at putting out fires." She gave him a smile that was wry and smug and knowing and charming all at once.
He smiled back, not nearly as charmingly, he was sure. "But," he prompted, since Pepper was the best virtual firefighter he could imagine.
"There's always been a contingent on the Board who never approved of Stark Industries giving up weapons design and manufacture," Pepper continued. "Even after the purge after Obadiah Stane's.... mess, there were always a few who'd never been won over and refused to believe that we could make more money doing other things. They were easy to marginalize when SI was exceeding earnings estimates, but now that we're coming in well below market analyst expectations, they're not.
"Instead of being our token dissenters, they've cobbled together a coalition. One possibly strong enough to take down Tony."
Steve leaned back in surprise. Which the team of watching waitstaff mistook for a signal to bring out the next course, so Steve waited until he was presented with halibut poached in olive oil and dressed with fennel reduction and valencia orange sauce.
"Is that even possible?" he asked once the waitstaff had departed. "I thought Tony had enough shares to do what he wanted."
Pepper rolled her eyes, since her mouth was full of potato. "He's always acted like he has," she said after she'd swallowed. "But his majority isn't so great that he can't be challenged if the minority got sufficiently organized. Which they've never even been remotely able to do - shareholder meetings are like cat conventions and you'll never herd them all in the same direction."
And yet someone had, Steve nodded to himself.
"Trident scooping us on that energy contract in California was the catalyst," Pepper went on, carefully spooning a potato and its sauce onto a clean corner of his own plate and waving her knife to indicate that she did not want any halibut in return. "It's our home turf - the US, California -- and a field in which we've worked very hard and put a lot of money and resources into becoming a leader. And they underbid us by so much that they're never going to make a profit on this. Or, at least, not much of a profit because it's probably impossible to lose money on a government contract. They did this just to mess with us."
"And they succeeded," Steve finished for her.
"More than they could have imagined," Pepper agreed.
Steve swabbed a piece of shockingly succulent halibut through the stripe of orange sauce. "Do you think it's possible that they did imagine?"
Pepper took a sip of her drink. "Possible? Absolutely. But if they did, then they were planning on a different fall of the dice because Stark Industries going back into the weapons business makes us much more of a challenge to take down. Which is not what they wanted. They can play up the 'war and peace' angle, but nobody ever really minded buying Stark hospital equipment back when we were also making missiles."
Trident, of course, had 'promoting world peace' as one of the three prongs of their corporate credo. They'd used it in a veiled comparison with Stark Industries' past, but Tony had always laughed those advertisements off as ludicrous. "We're peacier than you are! Our daisy chains have only ever been made of flowers! Only the Europeans would think that the market would be frightened off by accusing an arms manufacturer of war profiteering. The root of the word 'profiteering' is 'profit' and the markets are never going to be scared of that."
But Tony had found that funny when Stark Industries was a former arms manufacturer. For all of his offers to send tons of granola to Trident's headquarters in Zurich and his childlike glee at outfitting the Iron Man suit with new bells and whistles, Tony was very serious about putting Stark Industries' history of weapons development in the past to stay.
"Can they force the issue?" Steve asked thoughtfully. "Can you stop them if they do?"
Pepper grimaced. "They can and I don't know if we can if they do," she admitted. "I don't know what happens if Tony has to choose between his company and his principles."
Tony talked about his company like it was a burden, an encumbrance he'd been saddled with upon Howard's death, but it was an act, an act Tony didn't try very hard to maintain. He absolutely hated the tiny details, the nitty-gritty of keeping a giant corporation in paper clips and in forward motion, but he loved what Stark Industries allowed him to do - have fun while changing the world. Iron Man had its uses and its adrenaline rush, but Stark Industries could save so many more than Iron Man could, in so many different ways, and Tony viewed the two as complementary parts of the whole that was Tony Stark, billionaire genius playboy philanthropist.
Pepper had spoken to Steve, sometimes directly and sometimes more obliquely, about how Tony had changed since his captivity in Afghanistan. He'd been nobody Steve would have wanted to know, Pepper had assured with solemn honesty, and someone Tony had a real fear of becoming once again.
(Pepper had been so straightforward at how unpleasant and unreliable Tony had been that Steve had asked her why she'd stayed with him as long as she had. "Because he paid me obscene amounts of money to travel the world and brush elbows with the great and the good and I got accustomed to the lifestyle. I had beautiful things and important people curried favor with me to get to Tony and I am not without ego. Somewhere along the line, I started noticing the human being behind the mask that is Tony Stark and I wanted to protect that ember and keep it from being extinguished. But that only came later. It really was the ego for an embarrassingly long time.")
"Will it really come down to one or the other?" Steve took the last bite of fish. "We both know that Tony doesn't actually believe that not making weapons will bring about world peace any faster. And he really likes blowing things up."
Pepper laid down her knife and fork and dabbed at her mouth delicately. "He loves blowing things up," she agreed. "A lot. But he also knows how impossible it is to keep the triggers out of the hands of the bad guys. Stane was selling munitions directly, but you and I both know that even the materiel that's sold legitimately to governments gets lost, goes missing, falls off the back of trucks, gets re-sold or flat-out handed over to allies of questionable quality... Tony's already fought bad guys using Stark Industries weapons. He can handle it as Iron Man, but most victims of bad guys can't and Tony can't save all of them.
"He doesn't want innocent blood on his hands as either Iron Man or Chairman of the Stark Industries Board of Directors."
The sommelier interrupted them then, asking Steve if he wanted another drink. Steve asked if they had aligoté, which they did not, and so he settled for another of the gin and tonics.
"You know squab is just a fancy name for pigeon," Pepper teased lightly as the next course arrived with the same ceremony and elegance as the previous.
"They're cuter when they come in their own confit," Steve replied with a smile. "And if it's one less pigeon hanging out on my kitchen window ledge, I'm okay with that, too."
The squab was tasty, gamier than chicken and reminding him of the 'I-don't-know-but-it-has-feathers' mystery poultry dinners with the Commandos. The first dessert amuse bouche, an egg cream prepared tableside, was even more of a nostalgia trip and he smiled happily even as the waiter gave a spiel that turned this most humble fountain favorite into something more appropriate for a three-star restaurant.
"Did you ask for this?" Steve asked Pepper as they sipped at their glasses. It was definitely an egg cream, but one doctored in ways that Steve wasn't sure improved it enough to merit the changes. He liked it, but he also felt a very strong urge to buy some chocolate syrup on the way home so he could make a proper one - no olive oil, no sea salt - in his kitchen.
"I did not," Pepper confessed. "But if I'd known how you'd light up, I'd have made the request."
The actual dessert, his grapefruit sorbet with a tarragon crème, more than made up for the wonky egg cream. And the tiny carrot cake macarons and house-made marshmallows were cute, too.
Steve felt a little embarrassed to watch Pepper hold out her hand to the waiter, who was presenting the bill to Steve. But Pepper had made it clear when she'd invited him that this was to be her treat and so he thanked her for a truly splendid meal.
"You're welcome," she said, "but I should thank you, too. I needed this more than I thought I did."
Steve didn't ask what 'this' was, but was glad to have been able to provide it, in whatever small part he did.
Happy was waiting with the car on Madison when they left the restaurant and Steve escorted her to it.
"Be good," she told him, kissing his cheek as she got in.
"Always am," he replied primly. "Everyone says so."
"Everyone doesn't hear tales of what you get up to during Avengers activities," Pepper said with an arched eyebrow undermined by a smile.
Steve ended up walking home, down Park to Fourth Avenue to the Bowery to the Brooklyn Bridge. He checked his email when he got home and weeded through the personal messages and the messages that had to do with allowing Natasha to get off the disabled list and back on to active duty and the messages that had to do with HYDRA, which could be subcategorized by the routine ones that tried to sound like they were important and the important ones that usually were low-key. It was one of these last that drew his attention - he could put off the ones having to do with Natasha and Tony's inquiries about what Steve got up to while out with his woman (Tony's choice of words), at least for now.
The email came with an attached document, an informal précis with the title "Whereabouts of Obsertleutnant Wolfgang Strucker after April 1951."
"They found the bastard," Steve murmured, dragging a kitchen stool over with his toe and sitting down to read.
Freezer Burn
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
Steve followed the hostess past the long banquette and through the field of tables, feeling a little bit like an elephant in a china shop even though he wasn't bumping into anything and, point of fact, nobody was paying him a whit of attention. Captain America might be on the covers of magazines and plastic-molded into action figures, but out of uniform, he was simply another guy in a suit in a room full of them.
Except none of them had Pepper Potts waving to him with a smile on her face.
Pepper had called him on Tuesday asking if he were free for a late Thursday lunch. He was supposed to be going down to DC to look through the hard copies of some of the original SHIELD files on HYDRA and the '51 raids, but that could wait and so he rescheduled his appointment at the archives and said that for her, he was always free. She'd laughed, of course, but there was a touch of something else there besides the 'I'm flattered' giggle (Pepper was one of the few women he knew who could pull off a giggle) that made him all the more determined to make the appointment.
Pepper made to stand as he approached, but as in favor as he was of equality in the workplace, chivalry had not changed in far longer than the seventy years he'd been sleeping, so he hurried past the hostess to intercept Pepper before she could rise.
"You look wonderful," he said, kissing her on the cheek. "Thank you for inviting me."
"Thank you for coming," she said with a smile that almost-but-not-quite reached her eyes. "I'm very glad to be rectifying what has been a shocking oversight on Tony's part. I can't believe he hasn't taken you here yet."
Steve hadn't even heard of the restaurant before Pepper's invitation, although he'd been across the street at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park (good, but not worth the waiting on line, not when he had his own half a cow and a Weber grill). He didn't go to many restaurants on his own, at least not the kind where he sat and ate instead of picking up an order for takeout. Certainly not to the kind of restaurants that required reservations weeks in advance and for which even lunch could run you hundreds of dollars; his sticker shock at how much things cost now versus how much they'd cost in the '40's had nothing to do with that.
"Neither could Natasha when I told her," he replied, accepting a drink menu from the waiter. Pepper already had something an intriguing shade of peach-blush in a martini glass. Tony liked to tease her about her taste in 'girly' drinks, but it was charming for the same reason her giggle was charming - these were traits at such odds with her ruthless intelligence and steel will. "I think I might get a tour of New York's fanciest restaurants out of that."
Natasha had actually been somewhere between appalled and amused when Steve had asked her if she'd heard of Eleven Madison Park; it had been a moment of levity and near-normality in what had been a very tense visit. She'd been released from the hospital in Cleveland the day after the shooting - miraculously, she'd suffered no long-term or serious damage and had nothing more to show for her injuries than a dressing that needed changing and an arm sling that she'd already stopped wearing by the time she'd returned to New York. She had stayed in Ohio to work on the investigation, at least officially, although Fury was quite open about his belief that she was avoiding a return to the Helicarrier because it would mean having to finally answer questions about the shooting. Nobody disagreed, least of all Steve, which was why when he'd finally sat down with her, he'd been prepared for her stonewalling. Although, it turned out, not to the point where he could keep his temper as she prevaricated and flat-out lied to him about how much she knew and what she suspected.
"Well, let me know when you get to Per Se," Pepper said, smiling up at the new waiter who'd appeared at their side. "We've got a regular table at The French Laundry and Tony owes it to you to offer a comparison of East Coast Keller versus West Coast Keller."
The new waiter was not, in fact, a waiter. He was a sommelier and wanted to know what Steve wanted to drink. Tony and Natasha might've neglected his epicurean education, but they'd done a pretty good job expanding his spirits horizon beyond the pretty thorough wine knowledge he'd picked up during his years in Europe, where even the most hard-living partisan resistance force could still produce a bottle of local plonk for a meal that sometimes was more sawdust than sausage. None of which prepared him for a variety of offerings that felt like an encyclopedia in his hand.
He might have looked a touch overwhelmed because Pepper gave him a gentle smile.
"Something clean," she told the sommelier, which Steve thought was a laughably vague instruction, except the sommelier did not laugh. He nodded, as if Pepper had given him precise instructions down to the measurements, and departed.
The menu, in contrast to the drinks offerings, was shockingly spare, a single sheet of thick paper with a four-by-four matrix of food words. The waiter (actually a waiter) went through the explanation for Steve's benefit, since Pepper clearly already knew what to do. Steve was to pick one box from each row, the first being the cold appetizer, the second being the hot appetizer, the third being the entrée, and the fourth being dessert, and then the chef would return him something featuring each ingredient he'd chosen as a spotlight. Steve wasn't sure what a couple of the options were (was a langoustine a meat or a vegetable?), so he went with foie gras, halibut, squab, and grapefruit.
The sommelier returned with a highball glass full of clear liquid with some green leaves at the bottom that turned out to be lemon verbena infusing gin. There was more of a story, but basically it was a fancy gin and tonic with nicer ingredients. It tasted good, he said so, and both Pepper and the sommelier smiled knowingly at each other.
A team of waiters brought them their first course, which turned out not to be the real first course, but instead a plate with a fancy teacup and delicate sheaths of what they were told was 'seaweed lavash.' The teacup had halibut tea in it, which Steve smiled politely at and mentally translated into 'fish broth,' although it was a far cry from what he'd occasionally had the misfortune of being served during the Depression. These were amuse bouches, Pepper told them as they were left alone, little extras that basically amounted to the chefs showing off.
There was a second one, after a decent interval from when the first had been cleared away and they'd had time to sip at their drinks, this one served in a hollowed-out eggshell. It was custardy and light and might have had egg in it, but all Steve caught from the recitation was 'smoked sturgeon' and 'chive oil' because it was all so beautifully laid out.
"How is Natasha doing?" Pepper asked as the second set of plates were cleared away. "I know she's up and about, but..."
Steve sighed. "She's fine, physically," he replied, taking extra care to cover the total surface of the bread with goat's milk butter because he liked it (Anne and Rubin made their own, which was grassier than this one) and because the attention to detail kept him from showing off his deep frustration. "More or less. She's still in pain, but she's not taking the pills and she's not wearing the sling and she's going to the range to shoot despite explicit instructions not to because the recoil jars her shoulder. However, on the list of things she's doing and done that I'd like to take issue with, that's not going to rank as worth fighting with her about. She's not going to do anything that's going to risk her combat effectiveness, so let her think that she's being a rebel if that's what she wants."
Pepper gave him a wry look that expressed very clearly both that he wasn't hiding his own frustration very well at all and also that she knew exactly how he felt. He was aware that Natasha had been Pepper's problem before she'd been his, but her knowledge of this sort of bone-deep frustration did not come from 'Natalie Rushman.' You didn't spend years cleaning up after Tony Stark without occasionally wanting to throw things at a wall.
Someone else might have rolled their eyes or said something to that effect. Pepper merely raised her glass in salute, winked, and took a healthy sip.
The first course - the actual first course - arrived right then. Steve was presented with a healthy log of foie gras with pineapple salsa and a brioche and then an egg cup with more foie gras under a pineapple froth. Again, it was all almost too pretty to disturb with a knife and fork. Almost.
"She knows who shot her," Steve went on after he'd sampled both of his foie gras variations and offered some to Pepper, who traded him a langoustine with celery cream and green apple 'snow' for a bit of brioche with foie gras and pineapple salsa. A langoustine was apparently a fancy name for lobster. "She won't tell anyone who or why."
Clint and Steve had asked, Hill had demanded, and Fury had ordered, but Natasha had remained mute in the face of both concerned imploring and shouted threats. The threats were idle - Fury wasn't going to actually remove Natasha from either the case or from SHIELD - and the presumptions on her friendships could be ignored, which meant that there was no actual leverage for anyone to force Natasha to say what she clearly knew.
She'd never do anything to hurt SHIELD's efforts to bring down HYDRA, she assured, which when coming on the heels of her refusal to disclose anything about the identity of her shooter was a little hard to swallow for everyone. But it had nothing to do with HYDRA, she insisted, which everyone took to be utter baloney because how else could a sniper know to set up on a roof with a view to a building about to be raided by HYDRA? Just because the shooter had known what was going down didn't mean that he'd been a part of the planning, she'd retorted - the underworld had known of HYDRA and its power long before the good guys had; it wasn't a bad bet to guess that the Avengers were going to show up after a HYDRA hit and it wasn't a bad bet to assume that if the Avengers were going to appear, Natasha would be one of them.
(Clint had gone over to the sniper's nest while Steve had been on the phone with Fury in the immediate aftermath; he'd come away with no evidence but instead with the opinion that the shooter had been a true pro because of where and how they'd set up. The roof had been the easiest shot, but Clint thought that he himself could have picked off someone on the ground in the front square if he'd had what to brace himself with.)
"She has a lot of enemies, not all of whom know or care about what you do as Avengers," Pepper offered, swirling a piece of langoustine around in the celery cream. She chuffed out a sharp laugh that had nothing to do with being amused. "You all do."
And this is why Steve had rearranged his schedule; it wasn't for the ridiculously fancy and delicious lunch with a beautiful woman he admired. It was because the beautiful woman he admired happened to be the CEO of a company currently making the front pages of the Wall Street Journal for all of the wrong reasons and her personal and professional lives were being run through the wringer because the chairman of that company's board had a self-destructive streak as broad as his intellect. Tony wasn't heartless or feckless, at least not intentionally, but neither was he able to keep his personal recklessness from impacting others.
"What can I do?" he asked, because they could skip the opening remarks of that particular conversation and get down to the details.
He hadn't seen Tony in weeks, hadn't heard from him in almost as long; Tony had been too preoccupied by business to attend any of the informal Avengers social gatherings and there hadn't been anything that Iron Man could do that some other SHIELD asset couldn't. There'd been the occasional email or text from a meeting or a plane flight en route to a meeting, but even those had come at a rate much less frequent than Steve had grown accustomed to. Steve had noticed, of course, but he hadn't been idle himself and if he'd considered why there hadn't been random photos of Stark Industries Board of Directors' nostrils or badly-translated text on soy sauce bottles, he'd just assumed that Tony was too busy to be bored. That Stark Industries was fighting for its future was news covered by the regular papers, too.
"I don't know," Pepper admitted as the crew of waiters descended upon them to remove their empty plates and sweep away their breadcrumbs and take away Pepper's empty glass. "I'm not even sure what I can do outside the boardroom."
The sommelier returned with a wine goblet full of something that looked like ginger ale but probably wasn't. Steve waited for him to go away - after Pepper took a sip and nodded approvingly - before leaning forward. He took a sip of his own drink and waited for Pepper to speak.
"It's like we're the wounded shark and everyone can smell the blood in the water," she began slowly, running an elegant fingertip around the rim of her goblet. "We were the most fearsome creature in the ocean, but we're not anymore. Now we're just another wounded animal and now everyone we've ever pissed on or pissed off - and by 'we,' I mean 'we' as the collective first person and not the royal 'we' that's just a polite euphemism for 'Tony' - is watching us swim on, looking for an opening to strike out and get back whatever it is they think we took from them or that they feel they deserve. And Trident is swimming right alongside and I don't know if they're going to join the feeding frenzy once it starts or just swim right on by to become the new big shark."
'If they weren't already' hung unspoken and completely understood.
"All of this would be... not okay, but at least acceptable as part of the life cycle of enterprise and capitalism if we weren't also fighting our own nasty civil war," Pepper went on. "There are always fires to be put out. I'm very good at putting out fires." She gave him a smile that was wry and smug and knowing and charming all at once.
He smiled back, not nearly as charmingly, he was sure. "But," he prompted, since Pepper was the best virtual firefighter he could imagine.
"There's always been a contingent on the Board who never approved of Stark Industries giving up weapons design and manufacture," Pepper continued. "Even after the purge after Obadiah Stane's.... mess, there were always a few who'd never been won over and refused to believe that we could make more money doing other things. They were easy to marginalize when SI was exceeding earnings estimates, but now that we're coming in well below market analyst expectations, they're not.
"Instead of being our token dissenters, they've cobbled together a coalition. One possibly strong enough to take down Tony."
Steve leaned back in surprise. Which the team of watching waitstaff mistook for a signal to bring out the next course, so Steve waited until he was presented with halibut poached in olive oil and dressed with fennel reduction and valencia orange sauce.
"Is that even possible?" he asked once the waitstaff had departed. "I thought Tony had enough shares to do what he wanted."
Pepper rolled her eyes, since her mouth was full of potato. "He's always acted like he has," she said after she'd swallowed. "But his majority isn't so great that he can't be challenged if the minority got sufficiently organized. Which they've never even been remotely able to do - shareholder meetings are like cat conventions and you'll never herd them all in the same direction."
And yet someone had, Steve nodded to himself.
"Trident scooping us on that energy contract in California was the catalyst," Pepper went on, carefully spooning a potato and its sauce onto a clean corner of his own plate and waving her knife to indicate that she did not want any halibut in return. "It's our home turf - the US, California -- and a field in which we've worked very hard and put a lot of money and resources into becoming a leader. And they underbid us by so much that they're never going to make a profit on this. Or, at least, not much of a profit because it's probably impossible to lose money on a government contract. They did this just to mess with us."
"And they succeeded," Steve finished for her.
"More than they could have imagined," Pepper agreed.
Steve swabbed a piece of shockingly succulent halibut through the stripe of orange sauce. "Do you think it's possible that they did imagine?"
Pepper took a sip of her drink. "Possible? Absolutely. But if they did, then they were planning on a different fall of the dice because Stark Industries going back into the weapons business makes us much more of a challenge to take down. Which is not what they wanted. They can play up the 'war and peace' angle, but nobody ever really minded buying Stark hospital equipment back when we were also making missiles."
Trident, of course, had 'promoting world peace' as one of the three prongs of their corporate credo. They'd used it in a veiled comparison with Stark Industries' past, but Tony had always laughed those advertisements off as ludicrous. "We're peacier than you are! Our daisy chains have only ever been made of flowers! Only the Europeans would think that the market would be frightened off by accusing an arms manufacturer of war profiteering. The root of the word 'profiteering' is 'profit' and the markets are never going to be scared of that."
But Tony had found that funny when Stark Industries was a former arms manufacturer. For all of his offers to send tons of granola to Trident's headquarters in Zurich and his childlike glee at outfitting the Iron Man suit with new bells and whistles, Tony was very serious about putting Stark Industries' history of weapons development in the past to stay.
"Can they force the issue?" Steve asked thoughtfully. "Can you stop them if they do?"
Pepper grimaced. "They can and I don't know if we can if they do," she admitted. "I don't know what happens if Tony has to choose between his company and his principles."
Tony talked about his company like it was a burden, an encumbrance he'd been saddled with upon Howard's death, but it was an act, an act Tony didn't try very hard to maintain. He absolutely hated the tiny details, the nitty-gritty of keeping a giant corporation in paper clips and in forward motion, but he loved what Stark Industries allowed him to do - have fun while changing the world. Iron Man had its uses and its adrenaline rush, but Stark Industries could save so many more than Iron Man could, in so many different ways, and Tony viewed the two as complementary parts of the whole that was Tony Stark, billionaire genius playboy philanthropist.
Pepper had spoken to Steve, sometimes directly and sometimes more obliquely, about how Tony had changed since his captivity in Afghanistan. He'd been nobody Steve would have wanted to know, Pepper had assured with solemn honesty, and someone Tony had a real fear of becoming once again.
(Pepper had been so straightforward at how unpleasant and unreliable Tony had been that Steve had asked her why she'd stayed with him as long as she had. "Because he paid me obscene amounts of money to travel the world and brush elbows with the great and the good and I got accustomed to the lifestyle. I had beautiful things and important people curried favor with me to get to Tony and I am not without ego. Somewhere along the line, I started noticing the human being behind the mask that is Tony Stark and I wanted to protect that ember and keep it from being extinguished. But that only came later. It really was the ego for an embarrassingly long time.")
"Will it really come down to one or the other?" Steve took the last bite of fish. "We both know that Tony doesn't actually believe that not making weapons will bring about world peace any faster. And he really likes blowing things up."
Pepper laid down her knife and fork and dabbed at her mouth delicately. "He loves blowing things up," she agreed. "A lot. But he also knows how impossible it is to keep the triggers out of the hands of the bad guys. Stane was selling munitions directly, but you and I both know that even the materiel that's sold legitimately to governments gets lost, goes missing, falls off the back of trucks, gets re-sold or flat-out handed over to allies of questionable quality... Tony's already fought bad guys using Stark Industries weapons. He can handle it as Iron Man, but most victims of bad guys can't and Tony can't save all of them.
"He doesn't want innocent blood on his hands as either Iron Man or Chairman of the Stark Industries Board of Directors."
The sommelier interrupted them then, asking Steve if he wanted another drink. Steve asked if they had aligoté, which they did not, and so he settled for another of the gin and tonics.
"You know squab is just a fancy name for pigeon," Pepper teased lightly as the next course arrived with the same ceremony and elegance as the previous.
"They're cuter when they come in their own confit," Steve replied with a smile. "And if it's one less pigeon hanging out on my kitchen window ledge, I'm okay with that, too."
The squab was tasty, gamier than chicken and reminding him of the 'I-don't-know-but-it-has-feathers' mystery poultry dinners with the Commandos. The first dessert amuse bouche, an egg cream prepared tableside, was even more of a nostalgia trip and he smiled happily even as the waiter gave a spiel that turned this most humble fountain favorite into something more appropriate for a three-star restaurant.
"Did you ask for this?" Steve asked Pepper as they sipped at their glasses. It was definitely an egg cream, but one doctored in ways that Steve wasn't sure improved it enough to merit the changes. He liked it, but he also felt a very strong urge to buy some chocolate syrup on the way home so he could make a proper one - no olive oil, no sea salt - in his kitchen.
"I did not," Pepper confessed. "But if I'd known how you'd light up, I'd have made the request."
The actual dessert, his grapefruit sorbet with a tarragon crème, more than made up for the wonky egg cream. And the tiny carrot cake macarons and house-made marshmallows were cute, too.
Steve felt a little embarrassed to watch Pepper hold out her hand to the waiter, who was presenting the bill to Steve. But Pepper had made it clear when she'd invited him that this was to be her treat and so he thanked her for a truly splendid meal.
"You're welcome," she said, "but I should thank you, too. I needed this more than I thought I did."
Steve didn't ask what 'this' was, but was glad to have been able to provide it, in whatever small part he did.
Happy was waiting with the car on Madison when they left the restaurant and Steve escorted her to it.
"Be good," she told him, kissing his cheek as she got in.
"Always am," he replied primly. "Everyone says so."
"Everyone doesn't hear tales of what you get up to during Avengers activities," Pepper said with an arched eyebrow undermined by a smile.
Steve ended up walking home, down Park to Fourth Avenue to the Bowery to the Brooklyn Bridge. He checked his email when he got home and weeded through the personal messages and the messages that had to do with allowing Natasha to get off the disabled list and back on to active duty and the messages that had to do with HYDRA, which could be subcategorized by the routine ones that tried to sound like they were important and the important ones that usually were low-key. It was one of these last that drew his attention - he could put off the ones having to do with Natasha and Tony's inquiries about what Steve got up to while out with his woman (Tony's choice of words), at least for now.
The email came with an attached document, an informal précis with the title "Whereabouts of Obsertleutnant Wolfgang Strucker after April 1951."
"They found the bastard," Steve murmured, dragging a kitchen stool over with his toe and sitting down to read.