but my hand's been broken one too many times | Iron Man 3 | Tony/Pepper
t: but my hand’s been broken one too many times
f: Iron Man 3 (with wider MCU)
p: Tony/Pepper
r/wc: PG-13/5445
ch: 10iloveyou - 7. complicated
s: Tony raised himself from the dead and brought back a miracle or a deal with the devil, depending on which way you look at it, and Pepper’s never gained much perspective over the Iron Man thing and, if she’s honest, probably isn’t about to any time soon.
n: [Title from Tom Odell’s Another Love.] This has taken forever to write and is a mixture of crushing angst and (hopefully) humour, so, hey, just like the movies then! IDEK anymore, just, take it. I think it’s not bad, so it probably doesn’t make any sense. Also, this was meant to have more of Pepper and Rhodey being bros in it, so I’ll have to write more of that sometime. Possible trigger-warnings for all the PTSD and panic going around in here.
Tony’s tendency to play everyone and everything as a game that he can somehow win is something you can get used to in time, though that makes it ever more shocking each time he finds another line to crack underneath his heel on the way past.
The real reason people told Pepper not to fall in love with Tony Stark wasn’t anything to do with employee relations or even the fact that she should get out of the house with the robots once in a while, as it turns out.
She’s holding more pieces in her hands than she knows what to do with.
-
Pepper met Rhodey twice: the first time, he assumed she was going to sleep with Tony and then leave abruptly, trailing mascara and irritation and missing paperwork and maybe even a lawsuit in her wake.
He’s apologised many times for that over the years, usually accompanying the words with another cocktail. He’s good at apologies, Rhodey; Tony could take some pointers. In any case, Pepper’s forgiven their first, somewhat abrupt, meeting, if only because most of Tony’s PAs before her were truly astonishing train wrecks. Some of the lawsuits are still dragging on even now, no matter how much settlement money Pepper pushes their way. Maybe they’re just suing now because they weren’t smart enough to play the long game.
Anyway, Rhodey mentally dismissed Pepper the first time as just another redhead to fulfil just another craving, even if those words are Pepper’s and he wants her to take them out of his mouth. The second time, a few months later, when Rhodey got back from his tour to find Tony less crazy-eyed and having managed to keep at least a couple more hair, dental and medical appointments than usual, he shook Pepper’s hand hard enough for her to know that he meant it, and ever since, they’ve presented an absolutely perfect united front.
They didn’t really have any other option, after all.
-
Nights like this, Pepper misses Phil Coulson. She misses him a lot of the time, actually, more than she’s been allowing herself to show because she knows Tony has… well, Tony has many conflicted and complex and frankly self-indulgent feelings about Agent Coulson, and Pepper doesn’t want to pile her feelings on top of those because that might just make the whole thing collapse. Again. Some more.
Anyway, Phil would know what to say in this situation, or, if he didn’t, he’d have the right shade of rueful smile and what-can-you-do sigh, because he fell sideways into this superhero thing too, though at least he was facing forward when he fell. Pepper didn’t know what was happening until it was too late to back out of it, though she’s not sure she’d have many choices differently. She’s not sure half of these recent decisions have even been choices. And Phil would’ve understood that too.
Natasha ends up stepping into the breach, which is, yeah. She and Pepper have a careful relationship at best, but there’s more honesty in it than there was to begin with, and, well, Pepper’s never had a whole lot of friends to call her own. She watched The Devil Wears Prada and rolled her eyes when Anne Hathaway walked away at the end. This possibly means she has Stockholm syndrome, but then that’s why Stark Industries employs a number of incredibly highly-qualified psychiatrists.
Thursday night, Natasha brings new shoes and vodka, and Pepper tosses aside the briefing she isn’t really reading and allows Natasha to pour her a careful measure of a bad idea.
“I guess weeks where you don’t nearly die are weird for you,” she observes at last, because every time she closes her eyes she sees in flashes of flame, like something hotter than sunshine pressed to her lids. “Where’ve you been, anyway?”
“Classified, classified, Hulk-sitting, classified, Paris,” Natasha reels off.
“Isn’t Hulk-sitting classified?” Pepper asks, reaching for the bottle. Drinking with a Russian might kill her, but at least the vodka is decent stuff.
“Tony knows where Bruce is more often than we do,” Natasha responds drily and, yes, well, Pepper has received a half-dozen phonecalls from Bruce in recent weeks, with his is Tony aware that I’m not a trained psychiatrist concerns. She likes Bruce; he’s the first person Tony’s felt like saving in recent years who can punch him in the face when he inevitably goes too far.
Pepper nods, fights down an accusatory the explosions were big enough and none of you bothered to come running? because if they start assigning blame now it’ll never stop and frankly she’s tired enough.
Natasha can probably read it in her face anyway; she shrugs, a smile flicking across her mouth that’s nearly sad but never apologetic.
-
“Remember those months when we thought Tony was dead?” Rhodey says, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Not… as such,” Pepper responds, because what she mostly remembers is trying to get dressed and go to work every day in four inch heels when it felt like part of her was missing, cliché though it sounds, and, well. She remembers Rhodey coming back from every search mission ever more dejected, ever more unhappy and frantic, showing only in his eyes and shaking hands.
He jerks a quick smile, more tired than words will allow, and Pepper wonders briefly if it was better back then. When they were the only people who loved Tony Fucking Stark, the man who died out in the desert and brought home his metal Frankenstein to eat him up from the inside out. She’s felt Tony die a dozen times now, but that first time… that first time was something else.
Tony raised himself from the dead and brought back a miracle or a deal with the devil, depending on which way you look at it, and Pepper’s never gained much perspective over the Iron Man thing and, if she’s honest, probably isn’t about to any time soon.
Rhodey’s suit isn’t gone, of course, though the new software passwords might actually take Tony something like two minutes to crack instead of the usual thirty seconds; still, Pepper looks at the way he isn’t quite sleeping, isn’t quite smiling straight, and reflects that Rhodey isn’t getting any perspective on this debacle either.
“Me either,” Rhodey says at last, something rueful in his mouth, and Pepper doesn’t even know why, but she laughs.
-
Pepper closes her eyes, and Killian traces a finger down her jaw.
Pepper closes her eyes, and her skin peels off her bones, burns bright before her, floats away on the breeze.
Pepper closes her eyes and she’s falling into nothing.
Pepper closes her eyes, and boom.
And then Pepper opens her eyes, and she’s sweaty and nauseous at four a.m., and in the bed beside her Tony is twitching in his own sleep, fingers buried knuckles-deep in the mattress. When Pepper manages to wake him, it takes a long moment for her to be able to pull his hand free, foam fragments stuck beneath Tony’s nails.
“At least it’s not a waterbed,” he says at last, bloodshot and shivering, New York in the cracks in his lips.
As it turns out, getting two sets of PTSD to align and coordinate is beyond even Pepper’s organisational abilities.
-
The housing situation is still pretty interesting.
Rhodey suggested they get another giant rabbit and hollow this one out to live in, because Rhodey is Rhodey, and Maria Hill keeps sending them unused SHIELD safe houses, which usually end up amounting to basements full of burned-out weaponry, and Tony hasn’t finished building his Avengers Dreamhouse or whatever he’s going to call it because Tony much prefers tinkering with stuff to actually having said stuff. Pepper knows this, because unlike everyone else in that house, she actually learns.
They’re currently living in hotels until the hotels kick them out. Pepper’s tried sitting Tony down to talk to him about not getting them kicked out, but that whole thing went about as well as could be expected.
(“I apologised, but you know I don’t like being handed things.” “Well, I don’t like my boyfriend inviting psychopathic murderers over for lunch, but you did it anyway.”)
Rhodey’s got spare rooms, of course, and a job that means he isn’t home all that much, but he’s never forgiven Tony for blowing up his microwave that time when they were young and somehow even more irresponsible than they are now, so he’s never going to put them up.
Pepper considers sleeping in her office sometimes, but someone’s got to keep an eye on Tony’s sleep schedule, and anyway the couch makes her neck ache.
“You realise we’re probably going to have to live in a house someone else has built, don’t you?” Pepper tries over room service breakfast that neither of them want to eat, Tony flicking past things impatiently on his tablet, Pepper reading an actual newspaper with actual news in it that one of them should probably know. Stark Industries’ stocks are picking up, somehow. Tony Stark always was a superhero, she muses, though she doesn’t look at him as she thinks it.
Tony sighs, exasperated, and Pepper takes that for assent. “And you’re not allowed to try and move the stairs on a whim,” she adds, because she knows him of old.
“I don’t do that anymore,” Tony tells her, an expression on his face that he probably thinks is innocent.
Pepper snorts into her coffee, kicks him underneath the table.
“I have met you before,” she points out.
Tony huffs, like all of this is being extremely trying, but Pepper knows it isn’t. She could make it be, if she wanted to, but Tony knows that as well, and concentrates on his breakfast.
-
Happy’s looked better, but Pepper’s mainly just relieved that he isn’t dead. He’s developed a maybe pathological reliance on Downton Abbey, and she and Tony are currently in crisis talks regarding what they’re going to do about season three and the various characters who don’t make it out alive, but those troubles aside things could and have been a lot worse.
To Pepper, Happy’s been an even more permanent fixture than Rhodey, because Rhodey’s left to go to his job but Happy’s job is Tony. He’s not dealt well with the last couple of years, with Tony suddenly becoming, well, Iron Man. The way Happy sometimes tells it, he spent what felt like most of the nineties waiting for Tony to die of a drug overdose in someone’s bathroom. Now, of course, they’re just waiting for him to blow himself up in the sky somewhere - new methods, same old neuroses.
“I kind of thought you were toast this time,” Pepper admits softly. It’s the middle of the night and she should be asleep but she’s not. She shouldn’t be visiting, but nobody says no to her anymore. She doesn’t know if it’s because she’s CEO of Stark Industries, or because something a little bright and murderous stuck around behind her eyes, but she’s not going to ask. Not yet.
“I’d never die on you, Pep,” Happy replies easily. They’re watching a Law & Order rerun, and only the setting is different in a situation they’ve done so many times before.
“What about Tony?” she asks.
“Oh, I’ll die on Tony,” Happy shrugs, “but not you, never you.”
Pepper bites into her lower lip, forces something like a smile. “I didn’t come here to let you make me ugly cry,” she tells him.
“You didn’t wear mascara,” he points out, and Pepper’s answering laugh is maybe a sob.
-
“I got the girl and I didn’t know what to do with her,” Tony says.
It’s late or it’s early and Pepper feels sick, feels shattered, feels like she could fall into pieces just from breathing. They need to call in Rhodey, they need to call in Bruce, they need to call in someone else to cup Tony’s fragments in their hands while she just gets some rest.
“You bought her a giant rabbit,” she says, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes, in another bed that isn’t hers, another ceiling she doesn’t recognise, another night of too many airless breaths, another bitter I maybe wouldn’t have moved in with you if I’d known you were going to blow all my shit up that she doesn’t say, knowing the response would be I’m me; of course you knew I was going to blow all your shit up. “Go to sleep, Tony,” she adds.
“I can’t sleep,” Tony replies. “Maybe I’m not even trying to anymore.”
Pepper thinks she might be crying a little, but she doesn’t move her hands to check. She doesn’t know whose madness she’s living in anymore.
(She was dead for several minutes, actually. Her skin blazed back, her back unbroke, her breath shuddered into her lungs, but she was definitely dead for a while. Tony didn’t catch her, and the ground was harder than she’ll ever be able to describe.)
She’s all out of good advice. She’s all out of helping.
“Okay, Tony,” she replies. “Okay.”
-
“It’s getting worse,” she tells Rhodey, because there’s no point lying. “One day we’re just going to wake up strangling each other. And that’s the best case scenario.”
It seems like destroying your aggressor with the superpowers he himself gave you is the new damsel in distress, which, well, Pepper presumes there are worse things.
Not that she’s ever been waiting around for Tony to save her; it’s always been the other way around, the part of the job description even the small print didn’t describe.
“I don’t know what to do, Rhodey,” she admits, cards on the table, because Tony has panic attacks and she has flashbacks and for hours her body tried to unmake itself and Tony’s heart runs itself these days and nobody is Iron Man anymore but nobody is sleeping either.
Rhodey curls his fingers through hers, grip tight and steady and confident in a way that Tony’s never really is.
“We’ve never known what to do about Tony,” he reminds her softly. “We told him to stop and he just kept locking himself in a tin box and trying to blow it up. And then we took away the boxes, but it doesn’t mean he’s not still lighting fuses.”
Pepper sighs, doesn’t let go of Rhodey’s hand just yet. “The worst part of that metaphor is that it isn’t a metaphor.”
Rhodey eyes her carefully. “You said he promised you he’d stop tinkering.”
Tony has never encountered a promise he couldn’t break, so Pepper just made sure that she’d know where all his new secret labs are hidden. Nick Fury knows. Bruce Banner knows. And Rhodey might not have map coordinates, but she bets he could get them at a moment’s notice.
“This is not my first rodeo,” Pepper reminds him quietly, and his smile is nearly relieved.
-
“I’m going to be Batman next,” Tony announces. He’s drinking coffee and doodling something directly onto the hotel room table. It’s four a.m. and Pepper woke up to find the bed empty; this option is better than most of the others, though by Pepper’s count he’s been awake for a solid couple of days now.
“I thought you were still Iron Man,” Pepper says mildly, pulling her robe a little tighter around her, feet cold on the floor. “Are you going to be both now? Have you called DC and checked how they feel about this? Because I’m pretty sure there are going to be copyright issues.”
Tony waves a hand. “I can be Batman, Rhodey can be Robin, you can be Catwoman, and Jarvis can be Alfred, he’s really good at being stoic and British and melancholic.”
“I think you mean long-suffering,” Pepper corrects him, sitting down close enough to be near but still maintaining a safe distance. “Have you asked Rhodey how he feels about trading in his big metal suit for what basically amount to Daisy Dukes?”
“Rhodey’s got the ass to carry them off,” Tony says sagely. Pepper tips her head and pictures it; maybe he’s got a point.
“If you’re going to be Batman, don’t you need a cave?” she asks carefully.
“All you need to make a cave is some dynamite, Pep,” Tony tells her.
“Oh good,” Pepper says, mild, “I was worrying this was some kind of dangerous delusion brought on by sleep deprivation. What are you going to do for a cape?”
Tony pulls a heap of fabric up from the floor beside him and spreads it across the table.
“Do not tell me those are the drapes from the dining room downstairs,” Pepper says.
“They’re actually from the bar,” Tony replies.
Pepper decides that she’s not going to win this one and it’s time to go back to bed. “You’re kind of short for Batman,” she tells him when she reaches the door, because, well, she can’t be the supportive girlfriend all the time.
-
Rhodey gave her The Captain America Thing: The Sparknotes Version when she’d managed not to sleep with Tony or get otherwise fired after three months.
Pepper’s filled in the blanks for herself in the years since, and kind of vehemently wished she hadn’t, even though it’s basically one of the eternal things that can be filed under Problems Caused By Howard Stark. There are many of those, and the Captain America Thing has really only gotten more complex since they actually found him.
Behind every joke, every flippant comment, every reluctant truce Tony builds with Steve Rogers, there’s the line Tony hides from everyone: you were my dad’s favourite creation; me, I’m just the replacement that never quite measured up. It’s so pathological, so deep, that he doesn’t talk about it, doesn’t even know that Rhodey and Pepper know, and Pepper’s not about to wrench it out of him when everything else has already cascaded out of the box.
Once the shock wore off, she wasn’t even that surprised when he turned himself into a superhero; mostly, Rhodey pointed out, it was a relief he didn’t start calling himself Captain Iron or something equally awkward.
Pepper lies to her parents on most phonecalls home, and always has done; in the old days she made up a social life while she wrestled Tony’s dry cleaning into her car at two a.m., and now she crosses her fingers behind her back as Tony paces like a caged animal in a room they’re going to have to compensate the hotel for as she brightly says that she’s safe.
Captain America’s costume is the most ostentatious red, white and blue possible and he’s not one to back away from a threat, but he wouldn’t have fucked up like this, and some nights, she can see it in Tony’s sleepless eyes.
Pepper spent years as a personal assistant, and her coping methods have evolved appropriately. Howard Stark’s grave is always kept with bouquets of fresh flowers, each bearing a card with the message: thanks so damn much.
-
“You should probably talk about it,” Natasha says, over lunch on SHIELD’s tab.
“I absolutely do not want to talk about it,” Pepper replies. “You don’t talk about any of this.”
Natasha arches a significant eyebrow that could say all kinds of things but which admits nothing, and most of the time Pepper doesn’t remember her goading Tony into the worst forms of public self-destruction to prove a point. No one told Natasha that her methods had to be nice.
“I’m fine,” Pepper insists, the words sticky in her mouth, overused and false every time.
“I’m sure you used to be a better liar than this,” Natasha remarks, easy, and Pepper curls her toes in her shoes.
“Don’t,” she says quietly, and while Natasha’s expression says that while she isn’t going to back down on this, she at least isn’t going to do it in public.
“What’s Tony like as a responsible boyfriend?” she asks instead.
Pepper thinks longingly of when she could shove him off to his lab and get a couple of hours for a bubble bath or some paperwork, and smiles ruefully. “Exhausting,” she admits.
She almost can’t wait for when Tony finally gives up on all this and starts slinking off to his secret bunkers full of machinery; she wants to be first in his heart, of course she does, but Tony wasn’t designed to only be focused on one thing, and if she becomes that thing, Pepper knows only too well it’ll destroy her.
-
Pepper just loves the shareholders’ ball, particularly when it turns up at a point when neither she nor Tony should be in public. This year, she has the added worry that Clint Barton will tumble out of the ceiling, because Nick Fury has sent a bunch of what he’s calling “security” and what Tony’s cheerfully calling “trolling”.
“You look pretty,” he says quietly, standing in the bathroom doorway, while Pepper stands in front of the harsh mirror lights and dabs concealer over the bruise-dark circles under her eyes, the stress rash that spatters her cheeks.
Pepper smiles, the first in days that feels real, and beckons Tony over.
“I’m not wearing make-up,” he tells her firmly, though it would absolutely not be his first time - Pepper’s seen all the photographs, the video footage and the police report - but he stands there and lets her smooth away the exhaustion and the stress, until both of them look something like they did before New York, back when Tony was still pretending being Iron Man was some kind of quirky fun hobby, and Pepper was still pretending she didn’t know all this shit was going to collapse in on itself sometime soon.
“We fake it pretty well, don’t we,” he observes at last, looking at them both in the mirror, where they both look much better than they do in real life.
“We’ve had practice,” Pepper reminds him, goes out to find her shoes.
It’s a long night, one where Pepper just wants to drink the driest, dirtiest martinis the bar will make for her and she can’t let herself because the last thing anyone needs to see is Pepper Potts, CEO of Stark Industries, barefoot and crying under a table somewhere, doing some kind of version of out damned spot with hands that don’t even slightly glow anymore. It won’t inspire confidence.
Tony’s response is to get spectacularly fucking drunk, and Pepper lets Rhodey take care of this because one of them needs to willingly talk to reporters and tell them that things are getting better and absolutely nobody is behaving erratically anymore and things have never been better.
He shows up later, that slanted smile Pepper hasn’t seen for a long time tilted across his mouth, and she loves him and hates him in equal measure. He’s acquired a name label from somewhere, bitch, please scrawled across it.
“If you’re about to pretend you’re a total stranger and try to finger me in the bathroom, I’m not in the mood tonight,” Pepper says lightly, sipping her tonic water and pretending that it’s got gin in it. A lot of gin.
Tony’s grin turns wolfish. “I used to be a superhero, you know,” he says, raw pick-up line.
“Yeah?” Pepper bats her eyelashes, every inch the groupie. “Get back to me when you can sleep through the night.”
She could feel bad about leaving him there, but she doesn’t. Not tonight.
-
Brunch with Rhodey the next day, where he winces and keeps his sunglasses on, Pepper picks at eggs benedict and a well-deserved bloody mary and says: “I’m being a bitch, aren’t I.”
Rhodey looks startled, putting his cutlery down. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
Pepper pinches the bridge of her nose, perseveres. “Rhodey, you probably know more about this relationship than I do, you don’t have to be diplomatic.”
“Most people would’ve thrown in the towel long before the giant rabbit incident,” Rhodey says, shrugging, “I think it’s kind of beautiful that you two are still together now. You can’t expect to go back to normal any time soon.”
Pepper’s laugh trembles. “Really.”
Rhodey takes off his sunglasses. “My first tour of duty, I came back, and my left hand didn’t stop trembling for four months. This shit doesn’t come with a quick fix or even a fix that makes sense. You help it along, you wait it out, and if you need someone to babysit Tony so you don’t have to then goddamn ask.”
“I think SHIELD are still calling me ‘Yoko’ behind my back,” Pepper admits, something which she sometimes finds funny and sometimes really doesn’t.
“Then they absolutely deserve to deal with Tony next time,” Rhodey tells her on that nasty grin he only gets out on special occasions, and which makes Tony’s look adorable and puppyish in comparison. “By the way, he’s still hounding me about being the Robin to his Batman. Do we need to stage an intervention yet?”
Pepper starts back on her brunch, the conversation back to things she could handle in her sleep. “He’s designed his Batmobile,” she says, “and it’s pretty hideous, but I think we hold off until he starts sourcing bright green hotpants.”
“Who’re those for?” Rhodey asks, and then his eyes widen when Pepper gives him a significant look. “Oh no. Oh god no. No. Absolutely no.”
“They come with matching booties,” she adds mercilessly, cheered up enough to order another bloody mary.
-
The thing about Tony Stark - well, one of too many things about Tony Stark, he lives half his life like it’s a Smiths song - is that he’s always been a prisoner.
For a man who has so much publicly, it’s amazing how many parts of him are hidden away, untouchable, invisible except for the occasional twist to the corner of his mouth, moments when Pepper knows not to ask, wouldn’t get a straight answer if she did.
There was the childhood, anyway, years of being trapped into trying to make his father proud and getting nothing in return, pushing himself further and harder and viciously to be more, to be better, to be enough. And then when he was gone… well, none of that has really stopped, it never really stops, and it doesn’t matter that a friendship of some kind is stringing between Tony and Steve, there’s a string of accusation threaded through Tony’s face when he thinks no one is looking.
Being locked up inside his own persona was Tony’s fault, playing the enfant terrible long after when he should’ve outgrown the role and tugging them all along with him, never quite sure when he was doing what he wanted or what he assumed everyone thought he wanted, and while Pepper knows Tony would never even think for a moment that he lived all those years as a lie, he wasn’t entirely honest either, and she’s starting to learn what it’s like to live with the world’s eyes on your back, breaths held for a misstep.
And maybe the less she says about Iron Man, about being shut into a metal suit that he gradually merged his identity with until man and tin can were inseparable… yeah, the less Pepper says about that the better, because she has no doubt that Tony will relapse one of these days, and it’s best if she’s just resigned for it.
Now, she sits awake with a book cracked open by the light on the nightstand, trying to recall what the plot is and if she’s enjoying it, eyes constantly drawn to Tony being eaten by his own nightmares, unable to wake him because he’ll automatically try to break her wrist if she does, and she hates the look in his eyes as he realises. Every time.
-
To tell the truth, Pepper would’ve been happy with an apartment while Tony rebuilds a house to his increasingly ridiculous specifications that will involve too much glass and a basement that she’ll never want to go into even if they don’t have secrets anymore. They can’t have one, though, because other people should never be exposed to Tony in an enclosed space, even when he’s not fumbling his way through three kinds of PTSD, an identity crisis, and some kind of grieving Pepper’s pretty sure the therapist can wiggle out of him even if she can’t.
The new house is nice, in that it looks like it came out of a catalogue, there’s kind of a lot of shiny wood everywhere, and Rhodey laughs his ass off the first time he walks in.
Tony hates it, but in a way that’s kind of hilarious and passive-aggressive rather than an actual problem. It should, Pepper reasons, make him speed up a little on rebuilding a home he wants to live in; for some reason the only projects Tony can get done quickly are the ones that explode. Pepper’s just relieved she doesn’t have to keep apologising to concierges every few hours.
The bedroom is cosy enough, at least, with a television opposite the bed, the complete boxed set of Buffy The Vampire Slayer sitting neatly on the dresser beneath it. Tony’s started watching it at bedtime; Pepper’s trying to figure out if he’s trying new methods of sleeping, or if he’s turning his attention to vampires now he’s gotten all the mileage he can out of robots. She isn’t sure whether he’d want to make them or just hunt them down, and which prospect is likely to be the least messy. Of course, it’s possible that he just likes cheerleaders. That’s fair, though Pepper still grits her teeth sometimes because she was never a cheerleader; she did the school paper and the yearbook and, well, her tits never did really come in. It’s funny, the things that stay with you.
“Do we have to start baking muffin baskets and Desperate Housewives-ing with the neighbours?” Tony asks doubtfully after a few days of wilfully rearranging furniture and whiny phonecalls to Bruce.
“I actually disabled the oven when we moved in,” Pepper replies. When Tony raises an eyebrow she raises one back.
“I can probably fix it,” he points out after a minute.
“And then you can sleep on the couch,” Pepper agrees brightly, and something softens a little in his eyes.
-
The sixth SHIELD psychiatrist isn’t completely awful, and Pepper startles herself by how much she actually talks when there’s no one to protect, when she isn’t talking to someone who understands everything already.
Her mascara is still a little smudged when she lets herself into the house, where Tony is sprawled on the couch watching reality TV. He flicks the set off when he sees her, though, and is unnervingly silent for a long moment.
“This is why I can’t have nice things,” he says softly.
“I was never particularly nice,” Pepper replies, removing her shoes, putting them on the shoe rack that she picked out specifically because Tony loathes it, and walking into the kitchen to get a glass of water.
“Nicer than me,” Tony says, hands in pockets, following her.
“Yes,” Pepper agrees, “but most people are nicer than you, Tony, so there’s no point feeling bad about it now.”
He stares at her for a long moment and then bursts out laughing; real, honest laughter of the kind she hasn’t heard from him in longer than she can remember. It takes a moment and then she joins in, slopping water over the faux-granite sideboard.
“This is why I need you, Pep,” Tony says, simple. “You-”
“If you’re about to say I keep you sane I will punch you,” Pepper tells him, “I know you burned the dining room set in the backyard today.”
Tony looks sheepish. “You heard about that, huh.”
“You keep acting like I haven’t met you before,” Pepper says. “I was the one who had the fire extinguishers fitted in this house. They don’t actually come as standard.”
Tony’s expression is a cross between annoyance, admiration and affection; it’s Pepper’s favourite.
“I do love you, you know,” he says. It comes out semi-disbelieving, like Tony’s still not sure how he got himself into this situation, and Pepper likes that because, hey, that makes two of them.
“Damn right you do,” Pepper agrees, and she kisses him before he can say anything else, like we’re gonna be okay, aren’t we, because yeah, they probably are, but recent years have taught her that statements like that only come back to bite you on the ass, and anyway, who’s quantifying ‘okay’ these days anyway?
f: Iron Man 3 (with wider MCU)
p: Tony/Pepper
r/wc: PG-13/5445
ch: 10iloveyou - 7. complicated
s: Tony raised himself from the dead and brought back a miracle or a deal with the devil, depending on which way you look at it, and Pepper’s never gained much perspective over the Iron Man thing and, if she’s honest, probably isn’t about to any time soon.
n: [Title from Tom Odell’s Another Love.] This has taken forever to write and is a mixture of crushing angst and (hopefully) humour, so, hey, just like the movies then! IDEK anymore, just, take it. I think it’s not bad, so it probably doesn’t make any sense. Also, this was meant to have more of Pepper and Rhodey being bros in it, so I’ll have to write more of that sometime. Possible trigger-warnings for all the PTSD and panic going around in here.
Tony’s tendency to play everyone and everything as a game that he can somehow win is something you can get used to in time, though that makes it ever more shocking each time he finds another line to crack underneath his heel on the way past.
The real reason people told Pepper not to fall in love with Tony Stark wasn’t anything to do with employee relations or even the fact that she should get out of the house with the robots once in a while, as it turns out.
She’s holding more pieces in her hands than she knows what to do with.
-
Pepper met Rhodey twice: the first time, he assumed she was going to sleep with Tony and then leave abruptly, trailing mascara and irritation and missing paperwork and maybe even a lawsuit in her wake.
He’s apologised many times for that over the years, usually accompanying the words with another cocktail. He’s good at apologies, Rhodey; Tony could take some pointers. In any case, Pepper’s forgiven their first, somewhat abrupt, meeting, if only because most of Tony’s PAs before her were truly astonishing train wrecks. Some of the lawsuits are still dragging on even now, no matter how much settlement money Pepper pushes their way. Maybe they’re just suing now because they weren’t smart enough to play the long game.
Anyway, Rhodey mentally dismissed Pepper the first time as just another redhead to fulfil just another craving, even if those words are Pepper’s and he wants her to take them out of his mouth. The second time, a few months later, when Rhodey got back from his tour to find Tony less crazy-eyed and having managed to keep at least a couple more hair, dental and medical appointments than usual, he shook Pepper’s hand hard enough for her to know that he meant it, and ever since, they’ve presented an absolutely perfect united front.
They didn’t really have any other option, after all.
-
Nights like this, Pepper misses Phil Coulson. She misses him a lot of the time, actually, more than she’s been allowing herself to show because she knows Tony has… well, Tony has many conflicted and complex and frankly self-indulgent feelings about Agent Coulson, and Pepper doesn’t want to pile her feelings on top of those because that might just make the whole thing collapse. Again. Some more.
Anyway, Phil would know what to say in this situation, or, if he didn’t, he’d have the right shade of rueful smile and what-can-you-do sigh, because he fell sideways into this superhero thing too, though at least he was facing forward when he fell. Pepper didn’t know what was happening until it was too late to back out of it, though she’s not sure she’d have many choices differently. She’s not sure half of these recent decisions have even been choices. And Phil would’ve understood that too.
Natasha ends up stepping into the breach, which is, yeah. She and Pepper have a careful relationship at best, but there’s more honesty in it than there was to begin with, and, well, Pepper’s never had a whole lot of friends to call her own. She watched The Devil Wears Prada and rolled her eyes when Anne Hathaway walked away at the end. This possibly means she has Stockholm syndrome, but then that’s why Stark Industries employs a number of incredibly highly-qualified psychiatrists.
Thursday night, Natasha brings new shoes and vodka, and Pepper tosses aside the briefing she isn’t really reading and allows Natasha to pour her a careful measure of a bad idea.
“I guess weeks where you don’t nearly die are weird for you,” she observes at last, because every time she closes her eyes she sees in flashes of flame, like something hotter than sunshine pressed to her lids. “Where’ve you been, anyway?”
“Classified, classified, Hulk-sitting, classified, Paris,” Natasha reels off.
“Isn’t Hulk-sitting classified?” Pepper asks, reaching for the bottle. Drinking with a Russian might kill her, but at least the vodka is decent stuff.
“Tony knows where Bruce is more often than we do,” Natasha responds drily and, yes, well, Pepper has received a half-dozen phonecalls from Bruce in recent weeks, with his is Tony aware that I’m not a trained psychiatrist concerns. She likes Bruce; he’s the first person Tony’s felt like saving in recent years who can punch him in the face when he inevitably goes too far.
Pepper nods, fights down an accusatory the explosions were big enough and none of you bothered to come running? because if they start assigning blame now it’ll never stop and frankly she’s tired enough.
Natasha can probably read it in her face anyway; she shrugs, a smile flicking across her mouth that’s nearly sad but never apologetic.
-
“Remember those months when we thought Tony was dead?” Rhodey says, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Not… as such,” Pepper responds, because what she mostly remembers is trying to get dressed and go to work every day in four inch heels when it felt like part of her was missing, cliché though it sounds, and, well. She remembers Rhodey coming back from every search mission ever more dejected, ever more unhappy and frantic, showing only in his eyes and shaking hands.
He jerks a quick smile, more tired than words will allow, and Pepper wonders briefly if it was better back then. When they were the only people who loved Tony Fucking Stark, the man who died out in the desert and brought home his metal Frankenstein to eat him up from the inside out. She’s felt Tony die a dozen times now, but that first time… that first time was something else.
Tony raised himself from the dead and brought back a miracle or a deal with the devil, depending on which way you look at it, and Pepper’s never gained much perspective over the Iron Man thing and, if she’s honest, probably isn’t about to any time soon.
Rhodey’s suit isn’t gone, of course, though the new software passwords might actually take Tony something like two minutes to crack instead of the usual thirty seconds; still, Pepper looks at the way he isn’t quite sleeping, isn’t quite smiling straight, and reflects that Rhodey isn’t getting any perspective on this debacle either.
“Me either,” Rhodey says at last, something rueful in his mouth, and Pepper doesn’t even know why, but she laughs.
-
Pepper closes her eyes, and Killian traces a finger down her jaw.
Pepper closes her eyes, and her skin peels off her bones, burns bright before her, floats away on the breeze.
Pepper closes her eyes and she’s falling into nothing.
Pepper closes her eyes, and boom.
And then Pepper opens her eyes, and she’s sweaty and nauseous at four a.m., and in the bed beside her Tony is twitching in his own sleep, fingers buried knuckles-deep in the mattress. When Pepper manages to wake him, it takes a long moment for her to be able to pull his hand free, foam fragments stuck beneath Tony’s nails.
“At least it’s not a waterbed,” he says at last, bloodshot and shivering, New York in the cracks in his lips.
As it turns out, getting two sets of PTSD to align and coordinate is beyond even Pepper’s organisational abilities.
-
The housing situation is still pretty interesting.
Rhodey suggested they get another giant rabbit and hollow this one out to live in, because Rhodey is Rhodey, and Maria Hill keeps sending them unused SHIELD safe houses, which usually end up amounting to basements full of burned-out weaponry, and Tony hasn’t finished building his Avengers Dreamhouse or whatever he’s going to call it because Tony much prefers tinkering with stuff to actually having said stuff. Pepper knows this, because unlike everyone else in that house, she actually learns.
They’re currently living in hotels until the hotels kick them out. Pepper’s tried sitting Tony down to talk to him about not getting them kicked out, but that whole thing went about as well as could be expected.
(“I apologised, but you know I don’t like being handed things.” “Well, I don’t like my boyfriend inviting psychopathic murderers over for lunch, but you did it anyway.”)
Rhodey’s got spare rooms, of course, and a job that means he isn’t home all that much, but he’s never forgiven Tony for blowing up his microwave that time when they were young and somehow even more irresponsible than they are now, so he’s never going to put them up.
Pepper considers sleeping in her office sometimes, but someone’s got to keep an eye on Tony’s sleep schedule, and anyway the couch makes her neck ache.
“You realise we’re probably going to have to live in a house someone else has built, don’t you?” Pepper tries over room service breakfast that neither of them want to eat, Tony flicking past things impatiently on his tablet, Pepper reading an actual newspaper with actual news in it that one of them should probably know. Stark Industries’ stocks are picking up, somehow. Tony Stark always was a superhero, she muses, though she doesn’t look at him as she thinks it.
Tony sighs, exasperated, and Pepper takes that for assent. “And you’re not allowed to try and move the stairs on a whim,” she adds, because she knows him of old.
“I don’t do that anymore,” Tony tells her, an expression on his face that he probably thinks is innocent.
Pepper snorts into her coffee, kicks him underneath the table.
“I have met you before,” she points out.
Tony huffs, like all of this is being extremely trying, but Pepper knows it isn’t. She could make it be, if she wanted to, but Tony knows that as well, and concentrates on his breakfast.
-
Happy’s looked better, but Pepper’s mainly just relieved that he isn’t dead. He’s developed a maybe pathological reliance on Downton Abbey, and she and Tony are currently in crisis talks regarding what they’re going to do about season three and the various characters who don’t make it out alive, but those troubles aside things could and have been a lot worse.
To Pepper, Happy’s been an even more permanent fixture than Rhodey, because Rhodey’s left to go to his job but Happy’s job is Tony. He’s not dealt well with the last couple of years, with Tony suddenly becoming, well, Iron Man. The way Happy sometimes tells it, he spent what felt like most of the nineties waiting for Tony to die of a drug overdose in someone’s bathroom. Now, of course, they’re just waiting for him to blow himself up in the sky somewhere - new methods, same old neuroses.
“I kind of thought you were toast this time,” Pepper admits softly. It’s the middle of the night and she should be asleep but she’s not. She shouldn’t be visiting, but nobody says no to her anymore. She doesn’t know if it’s because she’s CEO of Stark Industries, or because something a little bright and murderous stuck around behind her eyes, but she’s not going to ask. Not yet.
“I’d never die on you, Pep,” Happy replies easily. They’re watching a Law & Order rerun, and only the setting is different in a situation they’ve done so many times before.
“What about Tony?” she asks.
“Oh, I’ll die on Tony,” Happy shrugs, “but not you, never you.”
Pepper bites into her lower lip, forces something like a smile. “I didn’t come here to let you make me ugly cry,” she tells him.
“You didn’t wear mascara,” he points out, and Pepper’s answering laugh is maybe a sob.
-
“I got the girl and I didn’t know what to do with her,” Tony says.
It’s late or it’s early and Pepper feels sick, feels shattered, feels like she could fall into pieces just from breathing. They need to call in Rhodey, they need to call in Bruce, they need to call in someone else to cup Tony’s fragments in their hands while she just gets some rest.
“You bought her a giant rabbit,” she says, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes, in another bed that isn’t hers, another ceiling she doesn’t recognise, another night of too many airless breaths, another bitter I maybe wouldn’t have moved in with you if I’d known you were going to blow all my shit up that she doesn’t say, knowing the response would be I’m me; of course you knew I was going to blow all your shit up. “Go to sleep, Tony,” she adds.
“I can’t sleep,” Tony replies. “Maybe I’m not even trying to anymore.”
Pepper thinks she might be crying a little, but she doesn’t move her hands to check. She doesn’t know whose madness she’s living in anymore.
(She was dead for several minutes, actually. Her skin blazed back, her back unbroke, her breath shuddered into her lungs, but she was definitely dead for a while. Tony didn’t catch her, and the ground was harder than she’ll ever be able to describe.)
She’s all out of good advice. She’s all out of helping.
“Okay, Tony,” she replies. “Okay.”
-
“It’s getting worse,” she tells Rhodey, because there’s no point lying. “One day we’re just going to wake up strangling each other. And that’s the best case scenario.”
It seems like destroying your aggressor with the superpowers he himself gave you is the new damsel in distress, which, well, Pepper presumes there are worse things.
Not that she’s ever been waiting around for Tony to save her; it’s always been the other way around, the part of the job description even the small print didn’t describe.
“I don’t know what to do, Rhodey,” she admits, cards on the table, because Tony has panic attacks and she has flashbacks and for hours her body tried to unmake itself and Tony’s heart runs itself these days and nobody is Iron Man anymore but nobody is sleeping either.
Rhodey curls his fingers through hers, grip tight and steady and confident in a way that Tony’s never really is.
“We’ve never known what to do about Tony,” he reminds her softly. “We told him to stop and he just kept locking himself in a tin box and trying to blow it up. And then we took away the boxes, but it doesn’t mean he’s not still lighting fuses.”
Pepper sighs, doesn’t let go of Rhodey’s hand just yet. “The worst part of that metaphor is that it isn’t a metaphor.”
Rhodey eyes her carefully. “You said he promised you he’d stop tinkering.”
Tony has never encountered a promise he couldn’t break, so Pepper just made sure that she’d know where all his new secret labs are hidden. Nick Fury knows. Bruce Banner knows. And Rhodey might not have map coordinates, but she bets he could get them at a moment’s notice.
“This is not my first rodeo,” Pepper reminds him quietly, and his smile is nearly relieved.
-
“I’m going to be Batman next,” Tony announces. He’s drinking coffee and doodling something directly onto the hotel room table. It’s four a.m. and Pepper woke up to find the bed empty; this option is better than most of the others, though by Pepper’s count he’s been awake for a solid couple of days now.
“I thought you were still Iron Man,” Pepper says mildly, pulling her robe a little tighter around her, feet cold on the floor. “Are you going to be both now? Have you called DC and checked how they feel about this? Because I’m pretty sure there are going to be copyright issues.”
Tony waves a hand. “I can be Batman, Rhodey can be Robin, you can be Catwoman, and Jarvis can be Alfred, he’s really good at being stoic and British and melancholic.”
“I think you mean long-suffering,” Pepper corrects him, sitting down close enough to be near but still maintaining a safe distance. “Have you asked Rhodey how he feels about trading in his big metal suit for what basically amount to Daisy Dukes?”
“Rhodey’s got the ass to carry them off,” Tony says sagely. Pepper tips her head and pictures it; maybe he’s got a point.
“If you’re going to be Batman, don’t you need a cave?” she asks carefully.
“All you need to make a cave is some dynamite, Pep,” Tony tells her.
“Oh good,” Pepper says, mild, “I was worrying this was some kind of dangerous delusion brought on by sleep deprivation. What are you going to do for a cape?”
Tony pulls a heap of fabric up from the floor beside him and spreads it across the table.
“Do not tell me those are the drapes from the dining room downstairs,” Pepper says.
“They’re actually from the bar,” Tony replies.
Pepper decides that she’s not going to win this one and it’s time to go back to bed. “You’re kind of short for Batman,” she tells him when she reaches the door, because, well, she can’t be the supportive girlfriend all the time.
-
Rhodey gave her The Captain America Thing: The Sparknotes Version when she’d managed not to sleep with Tony or get otherwise fired after three months.
Pepper’s filled in the blanks for herself in the years since, and kind of vehemently wished she hadn’t, even though it’s basically one of the eternal things that can be filed under Problems Caused By Howard Stark. There are many of those, and the Captain America Thing has really only gotten more complex since they actually found him.
Behind every joke, every flippant comment, every reluctant truce Tony builds with Steve Rogers, there’s the line Tony hides from everyone: you were my dad’s favourite creation; me, I’m just the replacement that never quite measured up. It’s so pathological, so deep, that he doesn’t talk about it, doesn’t even know that Rhodey and Pepper know, and Pepper’s not about to wrench it out of him when everything else has already cascaded out of the box.
Once the shock wore off, she wasn’t even that surprised when he turned himself into a superhero; mostly, Rhodey pointed out, it was a relief he didn’t start calling himself Captain Iron or something equally awkward.
Pepper lies to her parents on most phonecalls home, and always has done; in the old days she made up a social life while she wrestled Tony’s dry cleaning into her car at two a.m., and now she crosses her fingers behind her back as Tony paces like a caged animal in a room they’re going to have to compensate the hotel for as she brightly says that she’s safe.
Captain America’s costume is the most ostentatious red, white and blue possible and he’s not one to back away from a threat, but he wouldn’t have fucked up like this, and some nights, she can see it in Tony’s sleepless eyes.
Pepper spent years as a personal assistant, and her coping methods have evolved appropriately. Howard Stark’s grave is always kept with bouquets of fresh flowers, each bearing a card with the message: thanks so damn much.
-
“You should probably talk about it,” Natasha says, over lunch on SHIELD’s tab.
“I absolutely do not want to talk about it,” Pepper replies. “You don’t talk about any of this.”
Natasha arches a significant eyebrow that could say all kinds of things but which admits nothing, and most of the time Pepper doesn’t remember her goading Tony into the worst forms of public self-destruction to prove a point. No one told Natasha that her methods had to be nice.
“I’m fine,” Pepper insists, the words sticky in her mouth, overused and false every time.
“I’m sure you used to be a better liar than this,” Natasha remarks, easy, and Pepper curls her toes in her shoes.
“Don’t,” she says quietly, and while Natasha’s expression says that while she isn’t going to back down on this, she at least isn’t going to do it in public.
“What’s Tony like as a responsible boyfriend?” she asks instead.
Pepper thinks longingly of when she could shove him off to his lab and get a couple of hours for a bubble bath or some paperwork, and smiles ruefully. “Exhausting,” she admits.
She almost can’t wait for when Tony finally gives up on all this and starts slinking off to his secret bunkers full of machinery; she wants to be first in his heart, of course she does, but Tony wasn’t designed to only be focused on one thing, and if she becomes that thing, Pepper knows only too well it’ll destroy her.
-
Pepper just loves the shareholders’ ball, particularly when it turns up at a point when neither she nor Tony should be in public. This year, she has the added worry that Clint Barton will tumble out of the ceiling, because Nick Fury has sent a bunch of what he’s calling “security” and what Tony’s cheerfully calling “trolling”.
“You look pretty,” he says quietly, standing in the bathroom doorway, while Pepper stands in front of the harsh mirror lights and dabs concealer over the bruise-dark circles under her eyes, the stress rash that spatters her cheeks.
Pepper smiles, the first in days that feels real, and beckons Tony over.
“I’m not wearing make-up,” he tells her firmly, though it would absolutely not be his first time - Pepper’s seen all the photographs, the video footage and the police report - but he stands there and lets her smooth away the exhaustion and the stress, until both of them look something like they did before New York, back when Tony was still pretending being Iron Man was some kind of quirky fun hobby, and Pepper was still pretending she didn’t know all this shit was going to collapse in on itself sometime soon.
“We fake it pretty well, don’t we,” he observes at last, looking at them both in the mirror, where they both look much better than they do in real life.
“We’ve had practice,” Pepper reminds him, goes out to find her shoes.
It’s a long night, one where Pepper just wants to drink the driest, dirtiest martinis the bar will make for her and she can’t let herself because the last thing anyone needs to see is Pepper Potts, CEO of Stark Industries, barefoot and crying under a table somewhere, doing some kind of version of out damned spot with hands that don’t even slightly glow anymore. It won’t inspire confidence.
Tony’s response is to get spectacularly fucking drunk, and Pepper lets Rhodey take care of this because one of them needs to willingly talk to reporters and tell them that things are getting better and absolutely nobody is behaving erratically anymore and things have never been better.
He shows up later, that slanted smile Pepper hasn’t seen for a long time tilted across his mouth, and she loves him and hates him in equal measure. He’s acquired a name label from somewhere, bitch, please scrawled across it.
“If you’re about to pretend you’re a total stranger and try to finger me in the bathroom, I’m not in the mood tonight,” Pepper says lightly, sipping her tonic water and pretending that it’s got gin in it. A lot of gin.
Tony’s grin turns wolfish. “I used to be a superhero, you know,” he says, raw pick-up line.
“Yeah?” Pepper bats her eyelashes, every inch the groupie. “Get back to me when you can sleep through the night.”
She could feel bad about leaving him there, but she doesn’t. Not tonight.
-
Brunch with Rhodey the next day, where he winces and keeps his sunglasses on, Pepper picks at eggs benedict and a well-deserved bloody mary and says: “I’m being a bitch, aren’t I.”
Rhodey looks startled, putting his cutlery down. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
Pepper pinches the bridge of her nose, perseveres. “Rhodey, you probably know more about this relationship than I do, you don’t have to be diplomatic.”
“Most people would’ve thrown in the towel long before the giant rabbit incident,” Rhodey says, shrugging, “I think it’s kind of beautiful that you two are still together now. You can’t expect to go back to normal any time soon.”
Pepper’s laugh trembles. “Really.”
Rhodey takes off his sunglasses. “My first tour of duty, I came back, and my left hand didn’t stop trembling for four months. This shit doesn’t come with a quick fix or even a fix that makes sense. You help it along, you wait it out, and if you need someone to babysit Tony so you don’t have to then goddamn ask.”
“I think SHIELD are still calling me ‘Yoko’ behind my back,” Pepper admits, something which she sometimes finds funny and sometimes really doesn’t.
“Then they absolutely deserve to deal with Tony next time,” Rhodey tells her on that nasty grin he only gets out on special occasions, and which makes Tony’s look adorable and puppyish in comparison. “By the way, he’s still hounding me about being the Robin to his Batman. Do we need to stage an intervention yet?”
Pepper starts back on her brunch, the conversation back to things she could handle in her sleep. “He’s designed his Batmobile,” she says, “and it’s pretty hideous, but I think we hold off until he starts sourcing bright green hotpants.”
“Who’re those for?” Rhodey asks, and then his eyes widen when Pepper gives him a significant look. “Oh no. Oh god no. No. Absolutely no.”
“They come with matching booties,” she adds mercilessly, cheered up enough to order another bloody mary.
-
The thing about Tony Stark - well, one of too many things about Tony Stark, he lives half his life like it’s a Smiths song - is that he’s always been a prisoner.
For a man who has so much publicly, it’s amazing how many parts of him are hidden away, untouchable, invisible except for the occasional twist to the corner of his mouth, moments when Pepper knows not to ask, wouldn’t get a straight answer if she did.
There was the childhood, anyway, years of being trapped into trying to make his father proud and getting nothing in return, pushing himself further and harder and viciously to be more, to be better, to be enough. And then when he was gone… well, none of that has really stopped, it never really stops, and it doesn’t matter that a friendship of some kind is stringing between Tony and Steve, there’s a string of accusation threaded through Tony’s face when he thinks no one is looking.
Being locked up inside his own persona was Tony’s fault, playing the enfant terrible long after when he should’ve outgrown the role and tugging them all along with him, never quite sure when he was doing what he wanted or what he assumed everyone thought he wanted, and while Pepper knows Tony would never even think for a moment that he lived all those years as a lie, he wasn’t entirely honest either, and she’s starting to learn what it’s like to live with the world’s eyes on your back, breaths held for a misstep.
And maybe the less she says about Iron Man, about being shut into a metal suit that he gradually merged his identity with until man and tin can were inseparable… yeah, the less Pepper says about that the better, because she has no doubt that Tony will relapse one of these days, and it’s best if she’s just resigned for it.
Now, she sits awake with a book cracked open by the light on the nightstand, trying to recall what the plot is and if she’s enjoying it, eyes constantly drawn to Tony being eaten by his own nightmares, unable to wake him because he’ll automatically try to break her wrist if she does, and she hates the look in his eyes as he realises. Every time.
-
To tell the truth, Pepper would’ve been happy with an apartment while Tony rebuilds a house to his increasingly ridiculous specifications that will involve too much glass and a basement that she’ll never want to go into even if they don’t have secrets anymore. They can’t have one, though, because other people should never be exposed to Tony in an enclosed space, even when he’s not fumbling his way through three kinds of PTSD, an identity crisis, and some kind of grieving Pepper’s pretty sure the therapist can wiggle out of him even if she can’t.
The new house is nice, in that it looks like it came out of a catalogue, there’s kind of a lot of shiny wood everywhere, and Rhodey laughs his ass off the first time he walks in.
Tony hates it, but in a way that’s kind of hilarious and passive-aggressive rather than an actual problem. It should, Pepper reasons, make him speed up a little on rebuilding a home he wants to live in; for some reason the only projects Tony can get done quickly are the ones that explode. Pepper’s just relieved she doesn’t have to keep apologising to concierges every few hours.
The bedroom is cosy enough, at least, with a television opposite the bed, the complete boxed set of Buffy The Vampire Slayer sitting neatly on the dresser beneath it. Tony’s started watching it at bedtime; Pepper’s trying to figure out if he’s trying new methods of sleeping, or if he’s turning his attention to vampires now he’s gotten all the mileage he can out of robots. She isn’t sure whether he’d want to make them or just hunt them down, and which prospect is likely to be the least messy. Of course, it’s possible that he just likes cheerleaders. That’s fair, though Pepper still grits her teeth sometimes because she was never a cheerleader; she did the school paper and the yearbook and, well, her tits never did really come in. It’s funny, the things that stay with you.
“Do we have to start baking muffin baskets and Desperate Housewives-ing with the neighbours?” Tony asks doubtfully after a few days of wilfully rearranging furniture and whiny phonecalls to Bruce.
“I actually disabled the oven when we moved in,” Pepper replies. When Tony raises an eyebrow she raises one back.
“I can probably fix it,” he points out after a minute.
“And then you can sleep on the couch,” Pepper agrees brightly, and something softens a little in his eyes.
-
The sixth SHIELD psychiatrist isn’t completely awful, and Pepper startles herself by how much she actually talks when there’s no one to protect, when she isn’t talking to someone who understands everything already.
Her mascara is still a little smudged when she lets herself into the house, where Tony is sprawled on the couch watching reality TV. He flicks the set off when he sees her, though, and is unnervingly silent for a long moment.
“This is why I can’t have nice things,” he says softly.
“I was never particularly nice,” Pepper replies, removing her shoes, putting them on the shoe rack that she picked out specifically because Tony loathes it, and walking into the kitchen to get a glass of water.
“Nicer than me,” Tony says, hands in pockets, following her.
“Yes,” Pepper agrees, “but most people are nicer than you, Tony, so there’s no point feeling bad about it now.”
He stares at her for a long moment and then bursts out laughing; real, honest laughter of the kind she hasn’t heard from him in longer than she can remember. It takes a moment and then she joins in, slopping water over the faux-granite sideboard.
“This is why I need you, Pep,” Tony says, simple. “You-”
“If you’re about to say I keep you sane I will punch you,” Pepper tells him, “I know you burned the dining room set in the backyard today.”
Tony looks sheepish. “You heard about that, huh.”
“You keep acting like I haven’t met you before,” Pepper says. “I was the one who had the fire extinguishers fitted in this house. They don’t actually come as standard.”
Tony’s expression is a cross between annoyance, admiration and affection; it’s Pepper’s favourite.
“I do love you, you know,” he says. It comes out semi-disbelieving, like Tony’s still not sure how he got himself into this situation, and Pepper likes that because, hey, that makes two of them.
“Damn right you do,” Pepper agrees, and she kisses him before he can say anything else, like we’re gonna be okay, aren’t we, because yeah, they probably are, but recent years have taught her that statements like that only come back to bite you on the ass, and anyway, who’s quantifying ‘okay’ these days anyway?