Iron Man: Heart (Gotta Have) 1/1
Title: Heart (Gotta Have)
Fandom: Iron Man (movieverse)
Author: Ghani Starkiller @ mrs_peel_fanfic
Rating: PG-13 for language
Disclaimer: Marvel and the filmmakers own 'em, I just play with 'em.
Characters/Pairings: Tony/Pepper, small bit of Rhodey
Summary: In wake of a devastating attack, Tony works himself ragged to make sure he doesn't lose the one thing he's just beginning to understand is worth keeping.
A/N: Merry Christmas, Jadey! This isn't exactly heavy on the pr0n (that'll come later) but I thought it was a lovely little story that fit your wish for Pepperony fic! And I must say, if it seems as if I stole the story shamelessly from the recent run of Invincible Iron Man, well, I did in a way, but I don't know what fan didn't think of this from the get-go. Inspired by Jade's icons of Gwyneth here.
This, Tony thought in those first few dizzying moments of confusion and chaos, is why you’re not supposed to let the bad guys know your real identity. The wreckage smoldered around him, enormous melted heaps of twisted metal; as his vision began to clear, he looked to his left and saw what he thought was probably all that was left of the jet’s control console, now nothing more than a warped mess of wire and crushed alloy. The smoke pouring forth from the wreckage shrouded the sky, making the sun seem as if it were a giant, dull red eye staring down at him disapprovingly.
He sat up, from his lungs came a groan as if by the action of dragging himself to his knees he pushed all the air from his chest. Instinctively, he groped at his jacket, pulling the tatters away, feeling the comforting hum of the miniature arc reactor just beneath his scorched shirt; there was no fluctuation or faltering, it had been undamaged. He took a deep breath, testing himself as his fingers poked and prodded at his own ribs; he choked on the smoke but felt nothing internally out of place.
And then the memories began rushing back to him, taking his breath away anew: No one had been on the jet, thankfully; as he blinked away the noxious fumes from his stinging eyes, he could see the pilot making his way to him through the blazing field of shrapnel. Happy was at his side. He gestured at them to stay back; they hesitated, obviously unhappy with the order but reluctant to disobey, especially with the wreckage still so unstable.
But someone had been standing next to Tony; he could still see her smile as she glanced down at her Blackberry, consulting his schedule as she pretended to ignore his gentle teasing. And then the world ruptured in the blink of an eye, consumed in this hellish nightmare.
Pepper.
“Pepper!” He tried to shout her name but through the contaminated dryness in his throat came only a hoarse croak. “Pepper!” he said again, and this time he noticed the harsh cracking of his voice, caused more by his churning emotions than the burning inside his mouth. There was a deafening roar in his ears, a persistent buzz that muted even his words; his voice was like a muffled pounding inside his own head. He stumbled to his feet and, ignoring Happy’s frantic gesturing, staggered further into the debris.
The arm was thin and pale, so very fragile looking and out of place within its surroundings that Tony spotted it immediately. The palm of the hand faced upwards, the fingers slack, curled only towards the tips, a sign of unconsciousness. A large piece of rubble buried the rest of her from view. He grappled with the metal, cursing as it bit into his hands, both the jagged edges and the infernal heat. If only he had his goddamned suit; he’d be tossing the wreckage around like oversized baseballs.
Frustrated, using all of the worst words he knew-and some he hadn’t even realized he knew-he kicked at the debris, begging it, God, anyone who would listen, to just fucking move! He felt so absurdly helpless, small; one of the smartest men in the world, and the most powerful when he wore his suit, and he couldn’t even make this stupid fucking thing budge one inch!
Giving a wordless cry of desperation, ignoring the blisters forming and rupturing on his palms almost simultaneously, he heaved until he felt his muscles would rupture. And then he felt it falling away from him, convinced that he was falling, collapsing under the strain. Almost uncomprehendingly he looked down, saw that his feet were still beneath him and that Pepper was sprawled there, her ginger hair around her like a cloud. He knelt beside her, brushing it away; there was a gash on her forehead and she was pallid and wan, but otherwise she looked unharmed.
And then he turned her over and uttered another exclamation, unaware of how much it sounded like an animal’s pained wail: Her blouse, or what remained of it, was bloodied, at least one visible shard of scrap metal protruding from her chest just above her heart. He glanced back over his shoulder; he could just see Happy hovering on the edge of the field of rubble. Should he move her? Would it prove to be fatal, or was this dithering over what to do more harmful than acting?
Gritting his teeth, he gathered her into his arms and, pushing from his knees, lifted her, cradling her frail, thin body against his chest. The ambulances and the fire crew were just arriving as he reached the undamaged part of the runway, his knees finally buckling beneath him as he marveled that he’d been able to make it as far as he had. Rhodey was there-when had Rhodey gotten there? Tony couldn’t seem to remember-and he held Tony up as much as he guided him towards a waiting stretcher.
He was shaking his head adamantly at Rhodey even though he could barely here what he was saying over the commotion within his own head. “No,” he insisted in a too-loud voice, ignoring Rhodey's emphatic gesturing, “no, I stay with Pepper!” He climbed into the ambulance after her, catching out of the corner of his eye Rhodes’ resigned sigh and the shake of his head; whether it was for him or for Pepper, Tony didn’t want to guess.
Tony couldn’t remember how long he’d been staring at the x-ray; long enough that both his eyes and his head had begun to throb from the strain. The diagnosis was chillingly familiar. The doctor was talking, saying things Tony already knew from experience, things he’d been able to figure out on his own; he ignored the surgeon easily, glaring past the lightboard humming on the wall in front of him to the window inset beside it. Pepper lay on a table, machines attached to nearly every surface of her pale skin, a mask obscuring her face; the only thing that Tony recognized of that broken and fallible figure was her hair, limp, listless, but nonetheless beautiful for its shocking color.
She was stable-for now. She wouldn’t remain so for long. The clock was ticking.
Tony rubbed his thumb and forefinger into his eyes until bursts of light sprang up into his vision. His workstation was a mess; Dummy couldn’t possibly keep up with the churning turmoil of Tony’s brain. He discarded ideas as soon as he’d thought of them; Jarvis was barely able to get a word in edgewise as Tony uncharacteristically snapped at the A.I. every time it attempted to support an idea that Tony had already scrapped as rubbish.
“When was the last time you slept?” Rhodey asked. Tony hadn’t heard him come in, had paid absolutely no mind to the slight pop of the opening and closing of the securely-coded and sealed door that led to his garage workspace. Tony rubbed a hand down his face, realizing how much of a beard he’d grown in-what? The past forty-eight hours? Seventy-two? “You’re going to kill yourself, Tony,” his best friend said softly.
He turned reddened eyes and a haggard, almost haunted face on Rhodey as he snapped, “No, I’m going to kill Pepper! I mean, this is what I’m supposed to do now, isn’t it? Save people?” He picked up a hunk of metal he’d briefly worked on and then cast aside, hefting it like a baseball and throwing it as hard as he could into the wall, shouting in frustration; it left a dent where it impacted. “What the hell good is it being a goddamned genius if I can’t even figure out how to save the woman I-” He couldn’t finish the rest of the sentence; he knew that, with Rhodey, he didn’t have to.
Pepper awoke with a small gasp, the oxygen mask smothering the lower half of her face almost immediately swallowing the sound, choking her. She grappled with it, pulling at the elastic band that kept it in place with stiff and sore fingers. She lay there for a moment, her breathing heavy, panicked, as she stared up at the uniform panels of the ceiling, the fluorescent lights. She was dead, she’d been sure of it. She could recall with an odd sense of clarity her final moments.
“Don’t you take anything seriously, Tony-?” she’d begun to ask with a sly smile and a chuckle when the world went wrong. And, as if reliving it in slow motion, she could see the very place where the plane ruptured, the plating buckling as flame burst forth. She’d been facing the bomb exactly when it had gone off and in those painfully prolonged seconds, she understood: This is my last breath, these are my last thoughts.
She blinked the harsh light from her eyes, coughing through a raw throat and reaching desperately for the Dixie cup of water that sat on the bedside table. She felt a constricting tightness in her chest and gasped once more; it wasn’t an ache but the sense of something different, something that hadn’t been there before. She placed her hand over her heart and then she felt it, the very slight circular rise and indent the size of a silver dollar. Her heart began to beat faster as she instinctively recognized the small anomaly embedded in her chest.
“Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Tony said, and she started, only now becoming aware of her environs in a larger sense. He pointed at the heart monitor, the rising numbers in the corner of its black screen. “Try to take it easy for a while, huh? You’ve already given the old ticker quite a workout.”
She stared at him blankly, trying to decide if there were too many words to speak or not enough; her hand was placed firmly over her heart, working the hospital gown into her fist. “You did this?” she said finally, her words cracking from disuse. He nodded solemnly.
“It’s not so bad, really,” he assured her after a moment of silence, allowing this all to sink in. “It’s a more efficient design than mine, actually; smaller, more streamlined.” He leaned towards her confidentially, the playfulness returning to his grave face as he told her, “And absolutely no inorganic plasmic discharge; I am happy to say that you are entirely pus free. Dr. Mutter agrees: if you continue to improve, we might be able to remove it in time.”
“It’s running my heart?” she asked, her voice still even, hard to read. Tony didn’t think he could bear it if she started to cry. He nodded.
“To 300 times its natural efficiency,” he informed her. He shrugged, trying to appear casual. “Well, actually, 287.999, but I thought I’d round it up for you, make it sound a bit more dramatic and less, well, insanely brilliant, which it is, by the way.” For the first time, she smiled and he felt his own touch his lips.
“Proof that Virginia Potts has a heart,” she chuckled softly.
His smile roamed to one side, a quixotic sort of quirk against his cheek. “You didn’t need that thing in you to demonstrate that,” he said, his voice husky, gentle. Her smile became a bit bashful, color returning to her pallid cheeks.
“It’s…humming,” she said with wonder, closing her eyes and listening to this new sensation, feeling it pulse slightly throughout her with every heartbeat.
“I think-I think that’s because you’re close to me,” he all but mumbled, finding the toes of his shoes suddenly to be the most interesting thing in the room as he scuffed the linoleum floor with them. “Because I’m near,” he corrected himself. “It happened to me when I was next to the original arc reactor.”
“Tony, this is remarkable,” she said breathlessly. “You gave me…my life, I don’t even know how I’ll repay that.” Her eyes fluttered shut as the brush of his fingertips tenderly grazed her sallow cheek, running along her cheekbone. She looked up at him, their eyes meeting, unspoken words exchanged in this most intimate of ways.
He thought of Yinsen, how he’d given him the same gift, and of his advice not to waste it. He was sure that Pepper wouldn’t; she didn’t need to be told. It didn’t need to be said. Neither did the other sentiment waiting impatiently on his lips; he licked them instead, to steady them. “Don’t think this gets you one of those fancy extended vacations, either,” was what finally came out, the teasing bravado failing somewhat, the words lacking his usual playfully barbed tone.
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Mr. Stark,” she responded with a mischievous twitch of her mouth. She reached up then, and, keeping on hand on her own heart, placed the other over his. The vague electrical throb made her fingers tingle, like a science experiment from when she was in grade school.
“Take the week off,” he told her, his voice husky as he swallowed deeply. “After all, you gotta have heart.”
THE END
Fandom: Iron Man (movieverse)
Author: Ghani Starkiller @ mrs_peel_fanfic
Rating: PG-13 for language
Disclaimer: Marvel and the filmmakers own 'em, I just play with 'em.
Characters/Pairings: Tony/Pepper, small bit of Rhodey
Summary: In wake of a devastating attack, Tony works himself ragged to make sure he doesn't lose the one thing he's just beginning to understand is worth keeping.
A/N: Merry Christmas, Jadey! This isn't exactly heavy on the pr0n (that'll come later) but I thought it was a lovely little story that fit your wish for Pepperony fic! And I must say, if it seems as if I stole the story shamelessly from the recent run of Invincible Iron Man, well, I did in a way, but I don't know what fan didn't think of this from the get-go. Inspired by Jade's icons of Gwyneth here.
This, Tony thought in those first few dizzying moments of confusion and chaos, is why you’re not supposed to let the bad guys know your real identity. The wreckage smoldered around him, enormous melted heaps of twisted metal; as his vision began to clear, he looked to his left and saw what he thought was probably all that was left of the jet’s control console, now nothing more than a warped mess of wire and crushed alloy. The smoke pouring forth from the wreckage shrouded the sky, making the sun seem as if it were a giant, dull red eye staring down at him disapprovingly.
He sat up, from his lungs came a groan as if by the action of dragging himself to his knees he pushed all the air from his chest. Instinctively, he groped at his jacket, pulling the tatters away, feeling the comforting hum of the miniature arc reactor just beneath his scorched shirt; there was no fluctuation or faltering, it had been undamaged. He took a deep breath, testing himself as his fingers poked and prodded at his own ribs; he choked on the smoke but felt nothing internally out of place.
And then the memories began rushing back to him, taking his breath away anew: No one had been on the jet, thankfully; as he blinked away the noxious fumes from his stinging eyes, he could see the pilot making his way to him through the blazing field of shrapnel. Happy was at his side. He gestured at them to stay back; they hesitated, obviously unhappy with the order but reluctant to disobey, especially with the wreckage still so unstable.
But someone had been standing next to Tony; he could still see her smile as she glanced down at her Blackberry, consulting his schedule as she pretended to ignore his gentle teasing. And then the world ruptured in the blink of an eye, consumed in this hellish nightmare.
Pepper.
“Pepper!” He tried to shout her name but through the contaminated dryness in his throat came only a hoarse croak. “Pepper!” he said again, and this time he noticed the harsh cracking of his voice, caused more by his churning emotions than the burning inside his mouth. There was a deafening roar in his ears, a persistent buzz that muted even his words; his voice was like a muffled pounding inside his own head. He stumbled to his feet and, ignoring Happy’s frantic gesturing, staggered further into the debris.
The arm was thin and pale, so very fragile looking and out of place within its surroundings that Tony spotted it immediately. The palm of the hand faced upwards, the fingers slack, curled only towards the tips, a sign of unconsciousness. A large piece of rubble buried the rest of her from view. He grappled with the metal, cursing as it bit into his hands, both the jagged edges and the infernal heat. If only he had his goddamned suit; he’d be tossing the wreckage around like oversized baseballs.
Frustrated, using all of the worst words he knew-and some he hadn’t even realized he knew-he kicked at the debris, begging it, God, anyone who would listen, to just fucking move! He felt so absurdly helpless, small; one of the smartest men in the world, and the most powerful when he wore his suit, and he couldn’t even make this stupid fucking thing budge one inch!
Giving a wordless cry of desperation, ignoring the blisters forming and rupturing on his palms almost simultaneously, he heaved until he felt his muscles would rupture. And then he felt it falling away from him, convinced that he was falling, collapsing under the strain. Almost uncomprehendingly he looked down, saw that his feet were still beneath him and that Pepper was sprawled there, her ginger hair around her like a cloud. He knelt beside her, brushing it away; there was a gash on her forehead and she was pallid and wan, but otherwise she looked unharmed.
And then he turned her over and uttered another exclamation, unaware of how much it sounded like an animal’s pained wail: Her blouse, or what remained of it, was bloodied, at least one visible shard of scrap metal protruding from her chest just above her heart. He glanced back over his shoulder; he could just see Happy hovering on the edge of the field of rubble. Should he move her? Would it prove to be fatal, or was this dithering over what to do more harmful than acting?
Gritting his teeth, he gathered her into his arms and, pushing from his knees, lifted her, cradling her frail, thin body against his chest. The ambulances and the fire crew were just arriving as he reached the undamaged part of the runway, his knees finally buckling beneath him as he marveled that he’d been able to make it as far as he had. Rhodey was there-when had Rhodey gotten there? Tony couldn’t seem to remember-and he held Tony up as much as he guided him towards a waiting stretcher.
He was shaking his head adamantly at Rhodey even though he could barely here what he was saying over the commotion within his own head. “No,” he insisted in a too-loud voice, ignoring Rhodey's emphatic gesturing, “no, I stay with Pepper!” He climbed into the ambulance after her, catching out of the corner of his eye Rhodes’ resigned sigh and the shake of his head; whether it was for him or for Pepper, Tony didn’t want to guess.
Tony couldn’t remember how long he’d been staring at the x-ray; long enough that both his eyes and his head had begun to throb from the strain. The diagnosis was chillingly familiar. The doctor was talking, saying things Tony already knew from experience, things he’d been able to figure out on his own; he ignored the surgeon easily, glaring past the lightboard humming on the wall in front of him to the window inset beside it. Pepper lay on a table, machines attached to nearly every surface of her pale skin, a mask obscuring her face; the only thing that Tony recognized of that broken and fallible figure was her hair, limp, listless, but nonetheless beautiful for its shocking color.
She was stable-for now. She wouldn’t remain so for long. The clock was ticking.
Tony rubbed his thumb and forefinger into his eyes until bursts of light sprang up into his vision. His workstation was a mess; Dummy couldn’t possibly keep up with the churning turmoil of Tony’s brain. He discarded ideas as soon as he’d thought of them; Jarvis was barely able to get a word in edgewise as Tony uncharacteristically snapped at the A.I. every time it attempted to support an idea that Tony had already scrapped as rubbish.
“When was the last time you slept?” Rhodey asked. Tony hadn’t heard him come in, had paid absolutely no mind to the slight pop of the opening and closing of the securely-coded and sealed door that led to his garage workspace. Tony rubbed a hand down his face, realizing how much of a beard he’d grown in-what? The past forty-eight hours? Seventy-two? “You’re going to kill yourself, Tony,” his best friend said softly.
He turned reddened eyes and a haggard, almost haunted face on Rhodey as he snapped, “No, I’m going to kill Pepper! I mean, this is what I’m supposed to do now, isn’t it? Save people?” He picked up a hunk of metal he’d briefly worked on and then cast aside, hefting it like a baseball and throwing it as hard as he could into the wall, shouting in frustration; it left a dent where it impacted. “What the hell good is it being a goddamned genius if I can’t even figure out how to save the woman I-” He couldn’t finish the rest of the sentence; he knew that, with Rhodey, he didn’t have to.
Pepper awoke with a small gasp, the oxygen mask smothering the lower half of her face almost immediately swallowing the sound, choking her. She grappled with it, pulling at the elastic band that kept it in place with stiff and sore fingers. She lay there for a moment, her breathing heavy, panicked, as she stared up at the uniform panels of the ceiling, the fluorescent lights. She was dead, she’d been sure of it. She could recall with an odd sense of clarity her final moments.
“Don’t you take anything seriously, Tony-?” she’d begun to ask with a sly smile and a chuckle when the world went wrong. And, as if reliving it in slow motion, she could see the very place where the plane ruptured, the plating buckling as flame burst forth. She’d been facing the bomb exactly when it had gone off and in those painfully prolonged seconds, she understood: This is my last breath, these are my last thoughts.
She blinked the harsh light from her eyes, coughing through a raw throat and reaching desperately for the Dixie cup of water that sat on the bedside table. She felt a constricting tightness in her chest and gasped once more; it wasn’t an ache but the sense of something different, something that hadn’t been there before. She placed her hand over her heart and then she felt it, the very slight circular rise and indent the size of a silver dollar. Her heart began to beat faster as she instinctively recognized the small anomaly embedded in her chest.
“Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Tony said, and she started, only now becoming aware of her environs in a larger sense. He pointed at the heart monitor, the rising numbers in the corner of its black screen. “Try to take it easy for a while, huh? You’ve already given the old ticker quite a workout.”
She stared at him blankly, trying to decide if there were too many words to speak or not enough; her hand was placed firmly over her heart, working the hospital gown into her fist. “You did this?” she said finally, her words cracking from disuse. He nodded solemnly.
“It’s not so bad, really,” he assured her after a moment of silence, allowing this all to sink in. “It’s a more efficient design than mine, actually; smaller, more streamlined.” He leaned towards her confidentially, the playfulness returning to his grave face as he told her, “And absolutely no inorganic plasmic discharge; I am happy to say that you are entirely pus free. Dr. Mutter agrees: if you continue to improve, we might be able to remove it in time.”
“It’s running my heart?” she asked, her voice still even, hard to read. Tony didn’t think he could bear it if she started to cry. He nodded.
“To 300 times its natural efficiency,” he informed her. He shrugged, trying to appear casual. “Well, actually, 287.999, but I thought I’d round it up for you, make it sound a bit more dramatic and less, well, insanely brilliant, which it is, by the way.” For the first time, she smiled and he felt his own touch his lips.
“Proof that Virginia Potts has a heart,” she chuckled softly.
His smile roamed to one side, a quixotic sort of quirk against his cheek. “You didn’t need that thing in you to demonstrate that,” he said, his voice husky, gentle. Her smile became a bit bashful, color returning to her pallid cheeks.
“It’s…humming,” she said with wonder, closing her eyes and listening to this new sensation, feeling it pulse slightly throughout her with every heartbeat.
“I think-I think that’s because you’re close to me,” he all but mumbled, finding the toes of his shoes suddenly to be the most interesting thing in the room as he scuffed the linoleum floor with them. “Because I’m near,” he corrected himself. “It happened to me when I was next to the original arc reactor.”
“Tony, this is remarkable,” she said breathlessly. “You gave me…my life, I don’t even know how I’ll repay that.” Her eyes fluttered shut as the brush of his fingertips tenderly grazed her sallow cheek, running along her cheekbone. She looked up at him, their eyes meeting, unspoken words exchanged in this most intimate of ways.
He thought of Yinsen, how he’d given him the same gift, and of his advice not to waste it. He was sure that Pepper wouldn’t; she didn’t need to be told. It didn’t need to be said. Neither did the other sentiment waiting impatiently on his lips; he licked them instead, to steady them. “Don’t think this gets you one of those fancy extended vacations, either,” was what finally came out, the teasing bravado failing somewhat, the words lacking his usual playfully barbed tone.
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Mr. Stark,” she responded with a mischievous twitch of her mouth. She reached up then, and, keeping on hand on her own heart, placed the other over his. The vague electrical throb made her fingers tingle, like a science experiment from when she was in grade school.
“Take the week off,” he told her, his voice husky as he swallowed deeply. “After all, you gotta have heart.”
THE END