Fic: Helpmate, 1/5
Fandom: Iron Man (movie) AU
Pairing: Tony Stark/Pepper Potts (slash)
Spoilers: Possibly something from the movie might've slipped in. But really it’s all AU and speculation.
Notes: 2283w. See this post for reasons why Shia LaBeouf is 893523524968x better as Pepper Potts than that Paltrow woman. With pictures!
Summary: Installment the first, in which Pepper meets Tony, and vice versa.
Fanonical movie poster made by: delighter, queen of my heart.
I. Silo Niobe
Pepper Potts gets a job in Malibu when he gets done with being nobody. Really, he wants to be a race car driver. But he’s undereducated, inexperienced, and has a juvie rap sheet from the odd auto theft in his old neighbourhood in South Central. So he finds himself three strikes down to start. And so he lies to his bosses, his landlord, girls he meets on the bus, at work. He lies, and he smiles, and they like him better when he’s twenty-four and a UCLA dropout, than eighteen and hating his dead father. That said, they still don’t like him much.
The restaurant that hires him is the kind of place that keeps a full-time promoter on staff from the day it opens. Carla, in her orange Monolo Blahniks and silky hair, is smart and mean as a shark, and pretty much ignores Pepper as he busses tables and delivers drinks around her and the servers. He watches her, though. She has Guillaume, the owner and chef, in her palm, and he pays for her BMW and her clothes even as he cheats the dish pigs and night porters out of a legal wage.
Pepper looks at Carla, and sees his paycheck in the gold plating on her blackberry. He kind of hates her, how she struts through the foyer with whatever designer or starlet she’s picked up. Most of them probably don’t even know she works for the restaurant, they think she’s like them. She serves them - orchestrating the best-looking waitresses, the quickest and driest drinks, the amuses-bouches compliments of the chef - and they never even notice that she’s anything but a pair of long legs. She grooms and glosses them like nervous lapdogs.
Pepper could be like her. Better, he could be better. Ditch the black on black, the professional invisibility for a different kind of subtlety. He could arrange the names, places, faces and dates into something balanced and whole. He could make it so that a table always opens up at the exact right moment for the exact right person. He could create a whole dazzling galaxy around a single person.
The night Tony Stark comes in, three girls with recognizable faces all on a string behind him, Carla’s still out collecting. It’s a Tuesday, half the covers are empty. The man’s come in on his own, goddamn tastemaker that he is. This one visit will get them more publicity than a rash of food critics or sexy ads. Silo Niobe is still a painfully new restaurant, and Tony Stark is always ahead of the curve.
Pepper watches from across the room as the maitre d’ has a silent spasm of ecstasy, seating Stark. There is a small but vicious squabble behind the bar as the servers argue for jurisdiction. Lydia - always Carla’s first choice anyways - prevails, and rolls out with a complement of free martinis to start massaging her tip.
Pepper rolls more silverware, and watches Tony Stark get loudly, belligerently drunk. Scotch after scotch, the martinis going to the girls.
The place fills up, especially when Carla shows up with her catch of the day. She seats the B-Listers somewhere where even they can gawk at Stark and his accoutrements, and immediately goes over to start spinning her web. Even through the din, Pepper catches the man’s response: scalding irony, a quick dismissal. He sees right through her.
Pepper’s silently delivering drinks to a couple of critics in the next booth when Stark’s entrees are delivered.
And Stark says, clearly, for half the restaurant to hear: “What did I say? Did I say ‘yeah, prawns, yes please, dish them out,’ or did I say that if you serve me those shrimp I’ll go down to Seaworld and cut you off a slab of whale meat? Was I not clear?”
People pause, the girls at Stark's table cover their mouths with their hands and cast glances around, joyfully embarrassed.
Pepper watches Lydia try to smooth things out - she stands her ground, apologizing directly and trying to take the plate away. But she’s doing it all wrong. Stark holds onto it, tugging, “Well you’ve already fried the little suckers, haven’t you? You’ve already cozied them up into my steak, no big deal. Just take it back to the kitchen and knock them into the trash, right?”
Lydia claims the negative, Pepper sees Carla already heading into the kitchen to order a new three hundred dollar ribeye. He inches sideways, towards them, seeing an opportunity.
Stark continues, relentless. “This is just carelessness. You think if I built bombs that just occasionally threw in some extra firepower, no biggie, just kill a couple extra hundred people, I’d still be in business?”
Carla comes back, hands open, to say that a new steak is coming, please accept our apologies Mr. Stark, no offense was intended and we hope that-
Stark gestures with his empty tumbler, raising his voice. He doesn’t sound angry, just strident. This is a lecture rather than an argument. “Are you kidding me? Is that what passes for efficiency around here? How do you people make any money? How do you even sleep at night?”
Pepper has two glasses of liquor on his tray - meant for some non-entities near the bar - and he steps over to the table, between Carla and Stark. If Stark’s lecturing to an audience, he’s the student with the answer to the trick question.
He puts one glass in Stark’s hand, and picks up a prawn - shelled, just a curled little pink penis - and eats it. Tosses the other five back in quick succession. Stark is staring at him, eyebrow up. He looks about ready to deck him.
And Pepper says, without stepping back, straight to the man’s face, “Now they aren’t wasted, you wanna eat your damn steak?”
The man takes a sip of his scotch.
After that, Stark comes in three times a week; often after 2am, or sometimes in the morning when the crew is doing their first prep of the day. Always he wants something extravagant, or at least impossible. Extravagant given the time and that half the staff have either gone home or have yet to arrive. Impossible given that the Silo Niobe is a Mediterranean/North African fusion concept from the French school, and Guillaume would rather cut off his own hand than broil a burger.
Stark only deals with Pepper. Seating, ordering, serving, tipping. Single malt highland scotch, cash tips under the empty glass that cover Pepper’s rent. Because every time Pepper gets the burger, and finds the pastry chef for the 9am crème brulee, and always, always has Stark’s table waiting for him.
The man’s obvious preference would almost be worth it for the tips alone, if it weren't for the rest of the staff. The servers resent his jumped up status. Carla can’t even look at him without spitting blood, she hates him so much. Guillaume refers to him as Tony’s boy, and gave him a fifty cent raise after Stark’s appearances started to draw a crowd of diners-slash-gawkers, but the chef still doesn’t speak to him directly. For those four days a week when Stark doesn’t come in, Pepper mostly just wants to scream, or curl up, or mash out everyone’s teeth with his polished black shoe.
One Saturday night at 9pm, when there is a line out the door and people are three deep at the bar, waiting for tables, Stark comes in by himself. Ladyless and adjusting his sunglasses against the failing sunlight outside.
Pepper sees the valet take the keys to STARK2, and immediately clears out the group who’ve been sitting in Stark’s booth since 5pm. Local politicians and their very young mistresses. Pepper hears himself say to them, “We’d actually love to open up a private room for you,” and then leads them out the service entrance, into the rear parking lot. He deadbolts the door behind them, and goes to fetch Stark.
The man’s standing with an eyebrow raised at the front podium, staring down the maitre d’ without a word. Just standing: one hand in a pocket, shoulders straight. Watching him as he tries, helplessly, to deny more people their reserved tables.
As soon as Pepper steps in beside him, though, Stark takes the offered tumbler straight off Pepper’s tray and downs it. He smiles wide, like he’s getting his back scratched, and follows Pepper tamely to the booth. Immaculate table cloth, gleaming steak knives, no trace of its prior inhabitants.
Even as he leans back into the leather, Stark says to Pepper, “Why don’t you sit down. Kick back, kid, don’t you ever stop?” He pats the table invitingly.
Pepper blinks. He looks from tabletop to Stark’s face and decides he’s joking. Maybe a test. So he ignores the comment and presents a menu. "Tonight's special, Mr. Stark, is cactus lamb shank with roasted leeks and truffle risotto. Would you like to start with your usual?"
"Yes,” Stark says, brushing aside the idea with a hand. He leans forward on his elbows and looks at Pepper from under his eyebrows: “Tell that girl with the attitude to run and get it. I said sit down."
Pepper shifts his weight on his feet: looking to where Carla is seated with a table of her conquests. She’s the one with the attitude. Her attitude makes Pepper suspect that there’s no force on heaven or earth that will get her to run and fetch Tony Stark's chicken wings and thirty-year-old single malt.
But Stark says, again, "Sit down, Pepper." And then he levels a look at Carla, who struggles politely for a bare minute before letting herself notice him. He crooks a finger, and she comes. Picks her way across the room in her hemline and heels.
“Mr. Stark. What a pleasure. May I help you?” she sounds as convincing as a drug store clerk. Pepper can see that she’s abandoned her game because she hates Stark for coming in on his own, making all her hard work look second-rate in comparison to her boss and everyone else. Pepper enjoys it, heartily.
Stark says - sweet and ingratiating - “I’d like my usual, please.” He turns his head to Pepper, who is still standing around like a trained monkey, and says in a sharp, irritated voice, “Sit the fuck down.”
Pepper sits down. It’s automatic. He glances at Carla and says, low: “That’s a dozen honey-garlic chicken wings and the Sherry Oak Macallan, neat.” It’s an explanation, meant to be helpful, but she takes it as an order and tries to set him on fire with her glare before she turns away.
“I ever have to give you an order four times in a row again, you’re goddamn fired.” Stark says, sucking the last droplets from the bottom of his tumbler.
Pepper clears his throat and says, “Yessir.” He’s not about to argue semantics. Probably if Stark stopped coming in he would get fired. It’s not like he’s made any friends doing this.
They sit there like that, in silence, and Stark examines Pepper like a dubious purchase. Pepper tries to be still under the scrutiny: painfully aware of his cheap, over-ironed black shirt; the way his hair is slicked back like a gangster’s because it’s getting long now and he can’t afford a haircut; how he didn’t shave that morning.
Stark examines him, and Pepper eyes Stark’s designer sunglasses, pushed back into his hair, and the green silk kerchief poking out of his suit’s breast pocket. He looks like he’s come from an office or a gala event, but he’s got engine grease underneath his fingernails. When Pepper notices that, he almost smiles.
Carla comes back with the order, and Stark ignores her. He starts in on the chicken wings and Pepper averts his eyes from the mess.
Stark says, through the gristle and sauce, “Alright. So why do they call you Pepper?”
“Because it’s better than Virgil.” Pepper has no inclination for anything other than complete honesty with this man. He only lies to people he knows he’s smarter than.
Stark smirks up at him. “Good answer. Unexpected. Your turn.”
Pepper stares back, at a loss.
Stark snaps, “What did I say about repeating myself? Ask me a damn question.”
Pepper doesn’t pause again, he blurts, "Why do you come here? You hate the food, you won’t eat anything on the menu. You hate the staff and the crowd. I read that interview in the Herald-Express where you trashed the décor.” He makes a halfhearted gesture toward the spiky paper light fixtures, the rotating water feature in the foyer, the sunset orange walls hung with bronze masks.
“Hate’s a strong word,” says Stark, speculatively. He glances around the dining room to reconfirm his opinion of it. “I like the liquor. And I sure do like getting my fast food served to me on bone china.”
Pepper doesn’t say anything about the dozen trips he’s made down to the Burger King drive-through in a borrowed car, while Stark sits with his whiskey and his girls in his booth.
Then Stark says, with a cocked head and a sly smile, “So Pepper, do you enjoy fetching my cheeseburgers?”
Pepper doesn’t even pause - the difference between his life as a bus boy and his life as Tony Stark’s personal waiter is already so profound that there’s no hesitation - “Yes sir, absolutely.”
After that, Stark orders him a bowlful of peeled prawns and a soda, and writes down Pepper’s weekly salary on the bill, which they both sign. Pepper’s wiggly Ps float next to Stark’s smoothly illegible scrawl, a bit of honey garlic sauce smearing the edge.
To Pepper’s knowledge of Stark from that day forward, which includes the man’s vast and complicated dayplanner as well as a catalogue of media clippings detailing his social habits and events, Stark never eats at Silo Niobe again.
Part II: Beating Off in the Secretarial Pool
Pairing: Tony Stark/Pepper Potts (slash)
Spoilers: Possibly something from the movie might've slipped in. But really it’s all AU and speculation.
Notes: 2283w. See this post for reasons why Shia LaBeouf is 893523524968x better as Pepper Potts than that Paltrow woman. With pictures!
Summary: Installment the first, in which Pepper meets Tony, and vice versa.
Fanonical movie poster made by: delighter, queen of my heart.
I. Silo Niobe
Pepper Potts gets a job in Malibu when he gets done with being nobody. Really, he wants to be a race car driver. But he’s undereducated, inexperienced, and has a juvie rap sheet from the odd auto theft in his old neighbourhood in South Central. So he finds himself three strikes down to start. And so he lies to his bosses, his landlord, girls he meets on the bus, at work. He lies, and he smiles, and they like him better when he’s twenty-four and a UCLA dropout, than eighteen and hating his dead father. That said, they still don’t like him much.
The restaurant that hires him is the kind of place that keeps a full-time promoter on staff from the day it opens. Carla, in her orange Monolo Blahniks and silky hair, is smart and mean as a shark, and pretty much ignores Pepper as he busses tables and delivers drinks around her and the servers. He watches her, though. She has Guillaume, the owner and chef, in her palm, and he pays for her BMW and her clothes even as he cheats the dish pigs and night porters out of a legal wage.
Pepper looks at Carla, and sees his paycheck in the gold plating on her blackberry. He kind of hates her, how she struts through the foyer with whatever designer or starlet she’s picked up. Most of them probably don’t even know she works for the restaurant, they think she’s like them. She serves them - orchestrating the best-looking waitresses, the quickest and driest drinks, the amuses-bouches compliments of the chef - and they never even notice that she’s anything but a pair of long legs. She grooms and glosses them like nervous lapdogs.
Pepper could be like her. Better, he could be better. Ditch the black on black, the professional invisibility for a different kind of subtlety. He could arrange the names, places, faces and dates into something balanced and whole. He could make it so that a table always opens up at the exact right moment for the exact right person. He could create a whole dazzling galaxy around a single person.
The night Tony Stark comes in, three girls with recognizable faces all on a string behind him, Carla’s still out collecting. It’s a Tuesday, half the covers are empty. The man’s come in on his own, goddamn tastemaker that he is. This one visit will get them more publicity than a rash of food critics or sexy ads. Silo Niobe is still a painfully new restaurant, and Tony Stark is always ahead of the curve.
Pepper watches from across the room as the maitre d’ has a silent spasm of ecstasy, seating Stark. There is a small but vicious squabble behind the bar as the servers argue for jurisdiction. Lydia - always Carla’s first choice anyways - prevails, and rolls out with a complement of free martinis to start massaging her tip.
Pepper rolls more silverware, and watches Tony Stark get loudly, belligerently drunk. Scotch after scotch, the martinis going to the girls.
The place fills up, especially when Carla shows up with her catch of the day. She seats the B-Listers somewhere where even they can gawk at Stark and his accoutrements, and immediately goes over to start spinning her web. Even through the din, Pepper catches the man’s response: scalding irony, a quick dismissal. He sees right through her.
Pepper’s silently delivering drinks to a couple of critics in the next booth when Stark’s entrees are delivered.
And Stark says, clearly, for half the restaurant to hear: “What did I say? Did I say ‘yeah, prawns, yes please, dish them out,’ or did I say that if you serve me those shrimp I’ll go down to Seaworld and cut you off a slab of whale meat? Was I not clear?”
People pause, the girls at Stark's table cover their mouths with their hands and cast glances around, joyfully embarrassed.
Pepper watches Lydia try to smooth things out - she stands her ground, apologizing directly and trying to take the plate away. But she’s doing it all wrong. Stark holds onto it, tugging, “Well you’ve already fried the little suckers, haven’t you? You’ve already cozied them up into my steak, no big deal. Just take it back to the kitchen and knock them into the trash, right?”
Lydia claims the negative, Pepper sees Carla already heading into the kitchen to order a new three hundred dollar ribeye. He inches sideways, towards them, seeing an opportunity.
Stark continues, relentless. “This is just carelessness. You think if I built bombs that just occasionally threw in some extra firepower, no biggie, just kill a couple extra hundred people, I’d still be in business?”
Carla comes back, hands open, to say that a new steak is coming, please accept our apologies Mr. Stark, no offense was intended and we hope that-
Stark gestures with his empty tumbler, raising his voice. He doesn’t sound angry, just strident. This is a lecture rather than an argument. “Are you kidding me? Is that what passes for efficiency around here? How do you people make any money? How do you even sleep at night?”
Pepper has two glasses of liquor on his tray - meant for some non-entities near the bar - and he steps over to the table, between Carla and Stark. If Stark’s lecturing to an audience, he’s the student with the answer to the trick question.
He puts one glass in Stark’s hand, and picks up a prawn - shelled, just a curled little pink penis - and eats it. Tosses the other five back in quick succession. Stark is staring at him, eyebrow up. He looks about ready to deck him.
And Pepper says, without stepping back, straight to the man’s face, “Now they aren’t wasted, you wanna eat your damn steak?”
The man takes a sip of his scotch.
After that, Stark comes in three times a week; often after 2am, or sometimes in the morning when the crew is doing their first prep of the day. Always he wants something extravagant, or at least impossible. Extravagant given the time and that half the staff have either gone home or have yet to arrive. Impossible given that the Silo Niobe is a Mediterranean/North African fusion concept from the French school, and Guillaume would rather cut off his own hand than broil a burger.
Stark only deals with Pepper. Seating, ordering, serving, tipping. Single malt highland scotch, cash tips under the empty glass that cover Pepper’s rent. Because every time Pepper gets the burger, and finds the pastry chef for the 9am crème brulee, and always, always has Stark’s table waiting for him.
The man’s obvious preference would almost be worth it for the tips alone, if it weren't for the rest of the staff. The servers resent his jumped up status. Carla can’t even look at him without spitting blood, she hates him so much. Guillaume refers to him as Tony’s boy, and gave him a fifty cent raise after Stark’s appearances started to draw a crowd of diners-slash-gawkers, but the chef still doesn’t speak to him directly. For those four days a week when Stark doesn’t come in, Pepper mostly just wants to scream, or curl up, or mash out everyone’s teeth with his polished black shoe.
One Saturday night at 9pm, when there is a line out the door and people are three deep at the bar, waiting for tables, Stark comes in by himself. Ladyless and adjusting his sunglasses against the failing sunlight outside.
Pepper sees the valet take the keys to STARK2, and immediately clears out the group who’ve been sitting in Stark’s booth since 5pm. Local politicians and their very young mistresses. Pepper hears himself say to them, “We’d actually love to open up a private room for you,” and then leads them out the service entrance, into the rear parking lot. He deadbolts the door behind them, and goes to fetch Stark.
The man’s standing with an eyebrow raised at the front podium, staring down the maitre d’ without a word. Just standing: one hand in a pocket, shoulders straight. Watching him as he tries, helplessly, to deny more people their reserved tables.
As soon as Pepper steps in beside him, though, Stark takes the offered tumbler straight off Pepper’s tray and downs it. He smiles wide, like he’s getting his back scratched, and follows Pepper tamely to the booth. Immaculate table cloth, gleaming steak knives, no trace of its prior inhabitants.
Even as he leans back into the leather, Stark says to Pepper, “Why don’t you sit down. Kick back, kid, don’t you ever stop?” He pats the table invitingly.
Pepper blinks. He looks from tabletop to Stark’s face and decides he’s joking. Maybe a test. So he ignores the comment and presents a menu. "Tonight's special, Mr. Stark, is cactus lamb shank with roasted leeks and truffle risotto. Would you like to start with your usual?"
"Yes,” Stark says, brushing aside the idea with a hand. He leans forward on his elbows and looks at Pepper from under his eyebrows: “Tell that girl with the attitude to run and get it. I said sit down."
Pepper shifts his weight on his feet: looking to where Carla is seated with a table of her conquests. She’s the one with the attitude. Her attitude makes Pepper suspect that there’s no force on heaven or earth that will get her to run and fetch Tony Stark's chicken wings and thirty-year-old single malt.
But Stark says, again, "Sit down, Pepper." And then he levels a look at Carla, who struggles politely for a bare minute before letting herself notice him. He crooks a finger, and she comes. Picks her way across the room in her hemline and heels.
“Mr. Stark. What a pleasure. May I help you?” she sounds as convincing as a drug store clerk. Pepper can see that she’s abandoned her game because she hates Stark for coming in on his own, making all her hard work look second-rate in comparison to her boss and everyone else. Pepper enjoys it, heartily.
Stark says - sweet and ingratiating - “I’d like my usual, please.” He turns his head to Pepper, who is still standing around like a trained monkey, and says in a sharp, irritated voice, “Sit the fuck down.”
Pepper sits down. It’s automatic. He glances at Carla and says, low: “That’s a dozen honey-garlic chicken wings and the Sherry Oak Macallan, neat.” It’s an explanation, meant to be helpful, but she takes it as an order and tries to set him on fire with her glare before she turns away.
“I ever have to give you an order four times in a row again, you’re goddamn fired.” Stark says, sucking the last droplets from the bottom of his tumbler.
Pepper clears his throat and says, “Yessir.” He’s not about to argue semantics. Probably if Stark stopped coming in he would get fired. It’s not like he’s made any friends doing this.
They sit there like that, in silence, and Stark examines Pepper like a dubious purchase. Pepper tries to be still under the scrutiny: painfully aware of his cheap, over-ironed black shirt; the way his hair is slicked back like a gangster’s because it’s getting long now and he can’t afford a haircut; how he didn’t shave that morning.
Stark examines him, and Pepper eyes Stark’s designer sunglasses, pushed back into his hair, and the green silk kerchief poking out of his suit’s breast pocket. He looks like he’s come from an office or a gala event, but he’s got engine grease underneath his fingernails. When Pepper notices that, he almost smiles.
Carla comes back with the order, and Stark ignores her. He starts in on the chicken wings and Pepper averts his eyes from the mess.
Stark says, through the gristle and sauce, “Alright. So why do they call you Pepper?”
“Because it’s better than Virgil.” Pepper has no inclination for anything other than complete honesty with this man. He only lies to people he knows he’s smarter than.
Stark smirks up at him. “Good answer. Unexpected. Your turn.”
Pepper stares back, at a loss.
Stark snaps, “What did I say about repeating myself? Ask me a damn question.”
Pepper doesn’t pause again, he blurts, "Why do you come here? You hate the food, you won’t eat anything on the menu. You hate the staff and the crowd. I read that interview in the Herald-Express where you trashed the décor.” He makes a halfhearted gesture toward the spiky paper light fixtures, the rotating water feature in the foyer, the sunset orange walls hung with bronze masks.
“Hate’s a strong word,” says Stark, speculatively. He glances around the dining room to reconfirm his opinion of it. “I like the liquor. And I sure do like getting my fast food served to me on bone china.”
Pepper doesn’t say anything about the dozen trips he’s made down to the Burger King drive-through in a borrowed car, while Stark sits with his whiskey and his girls in his booth.
Then Stark says, with a cocked head and a sly smile, “So Pepper, do you enjoy fetching my cheeseburgers?”
Pepper doesn’t even pause - the difference between his life as a bus boy and his life as Tony Stark’s personal waiter is already so profound that there’s no hesitation - “Yes sir, absolutely.”
After that, Stark orders him a bowlful of peeled prawns and a soda, and writes down Pepper’s weekly salary on the bill, which they both sign. Pepper’s wiggly Ps float next to Stark’s smoothly illegible scrawl, a bit of honey garlic sauce smearing the edge.
To Pepper’s knowledge of Stark from that day forward, which includes the man’s vast and complicated dayplanner as well as a catalogue of media clippings detailing his social habits and events, Stark never eats at Silo Niobe again.
Part II: Beating Off in the Secretarial Pool