Fic: Helpmate, 2/5
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: 2256w. See Part I and the picspam thesis.
Summary: Pepper adjusts his life to fit around Stark's.
Fanonical movie poster made by: delighter, queen of my heart.
II. Beating Off in the Secretarial Pool
There are no days off. Stark doesn’t take them, so either does Pepper.
He puts on a suit each morning. Always black, a bit of charcoal or candystripe or grass green if he’s feeling dangerous. In his first week, he figures someone saw him trailing Stark around at the office, and then sent someone else out shopping. So now he has this supply of crisp dress shirts, narrow pressed slacks, and black ties all picked out by some anonymous secretary with immaculate taste and probably unlimited funds.
To get to Stark’s house on the cliffs, he commutes on the bus from his rented room on the shady border of Inglewood, which takes a couple of hours and a handful of transfers. It means he gets about four hours of sleep a night, but he doesn’t mind. He reads library books about structural engineering and military history and looks out the window at the ocean when he gets motionsick.
He arrives at 4am when Stark’s still asleep, so he can have an hour to himself. Drops an espresso shot or two, logs into the network, books and cancels appointments with clients, staff, girls. Filters through Stark’s email and trashes or delegates ninety-five percent of it.
It took him maybe three days to figure out what Stark does and does not care about. The man is a complicated and self-destructive wreck when it comes to his personal life and his working relationships, but give him a pure math or engineering problem from the factory floor and he’ll lock himself in his lab for days. This realization is how Pepper comes to classify Stark’s benders in one of two ways: Type A (alcohol) or Type A-plus (work).
By the time Stark rolls himself out of bed in the mornings, Pepper’s got egg whites, turkey sausages and a vitamin-enhanced smoothie ready on the counter. Stark slumps out in his shorts, and stands hovering over his food, inhaling it. Pepper also pours a cup of organic light roast, and never says a word until Stark has flipped through the Times - still standing, shifting from foot to foot and rolling his shoulders - and finally looks up from the wreck of newsprint and dishes to say, “Good morning, Pepper.”
Every morning, this is what happens.
Except one morning, when Stark gets back from a sales call to Moscow at 4:30am and finds Pepper asleep on the couch. He’s half undressed, on his way up to bed when he notices the glare from the floor lamp. He stops unbuttoning his shirt and says, “Jesus, Pepper. Why aren’t you in bed?”
Pepper jerks upright, firstly worried that he’s drooled on the Italian leather, and secondly mortified. He can remember checking the time at 1am. He’d been trying to bang out a press statement for some environmental policy changes Stark is supposed to give in a phoner this afternoon.
His voice comes out in a warble, and he coughs, “Mr. Stark. I, uh apologize. I forgot to go home.”
“Home?” Stark migrates to the kitchen, where he gulps a few handfuls of water out of the tap. And a thick pause indicates that he’s probably perplexed by the lack of coffee, like maybe he’ll just skip sleep entirely tonight. “Haven’t you been sleeping here?”
Stark comes back out and looks down at Pepper, who’s still in his slacks and socks, pink-striped shirt open at the throat and rumpled into a mess of creases. His tie and shoes are on the floor, his blazer draped over an ottoman.
Stark throws a thumb toward the eastern wing. “Your bedroom’s down the hall, genius.”
He leaves Pepper sitting on the couch and heads down the stairs to his workshop. “You can bring down my breakfast when it’s ready. And cancel whatever we had for today, I had a thought on the plane.”
So Pepper moves into Stark’s house. The only thing he brings that’s actually his is an alarm clock, because he doesn’t trust Jarvis to wake him in a humane manner.
It turns out that the eight hours Pepper used to spend on the bus and asleep Stark uses mainly for debauchery. The man goes out probably six nights a week, on average. Half the nights he goes out he comes back alone. The other half of the time he comes back with company. That’s the math. So, three nights a week, between the hours of 2 and 4am Pepper finds himself calling the drycleaners for pick-ups and deliveries of feminine couture.
Actually, the exact words Stark used, when he explained that his guests were to be dressed and gone by 7am, were: “Get anything that comes off before the bedroom door.” Pepper suspects the high occurrence of undergarments - on top of the skirts and blouses and gowns - strewn across the slate floor of the foyer are a point of pride with Stark.
There are also the times when Stark has his own parties. Mostly they’re impromptu, so maybe a better term would be after-parties. They certainly aren’t the same as the galas Pepper constantly hounds Stark about attending. Maybe that’s why Stark likes them so much better.
Six weeks after he moves in, Pepper is sitting around in his shirtsleeves after midnight, (he can work later, now that he doesn’t spend four hours on the bus) finishing up his list for the day by drawing up tomorrow’s, when a herd of drunk A-listers are shepherded in, Stark goading them like a sheepdog.
They’re loud, and extremely well-dressed. So well-dressed that Pepper suspects Stark may in fact have blown off the ballet fundraiser dinner he was supposed to be at and gone to that album release party instead. A trio of young men in sneakers and suits head for the bar on the balcony immediately. Most of the others seem to be content to find places to collapse around the living room, women who mostly ignore Pepper. Pepper, who sits stiffly in the middle of his piles of paper, his laptop perched on his knees, mouth slightly open. He recognizes faces, he knows names.
And when Stark opens his arms wide and announces to the room, “Everybody, welcome to my home, I’d like you all to meet my gracious and hard-working wife, Pepper,” suddenly they all know his name, too. And they take it as a license to grace him with flirtatious smiles and small talk that he doesn’t quite know how to respond to, even politely.
From across the room, Stark lifts an eyebrow at the laptop, and Pepper hurries to clear away his work and make excuses that will get him down the hall, into the eastern wing, and out of his boss’s party.
But he’s barely through the kitchen before Stark catches him: a touch on his shoulder, “Come on, kid. Don’t run away.”
Pepper doesn’t want to turn back around. But he does, laptop clutched in his arms, and says, “My apologies, Mr. Stark. Is there anything else tonight?” Because, no matter how many times he’s thought it’s been a test and it wasn’t, he can never stop thinking that Stark is waiting for him to screw up, make a mistake, show his South Central roots and his complete lack of professionalism.
He’s known Stark for barely half a year, but Pepper can’t imagine anything worse than losing this job.
Stark gestures at the balcony, “Yes, there is. Come talk to these people for me, and let me pour you a drink.” He pushes Pepper in the right direction, while pulling the laptop out of his arms. Stark leaves it on the counter, “Lord. You obviously need this more than I do.”
The finger of bourbon Stark hands him smells awful, but it goes down smooth. And after two Pepper is looking at a room full of strangers and remembering that he used to be pretty good at telling people what they liked to hear.
Most of them just want to hear about Stark - who they all call Tony, even though Pepper’s fairly sure not a single one of them has known him for more than a few hours - and he hones his rough edges thinking up creative ways to not answer their questions, charming or pushy as they are. But these people seem to find it cute, his avoidances, and he doesn’t run out of faces to talk to as the drinks keep coming to his hand and the music gets louder.
One woman in particular has heavy waves of hair and dark dark eyes, which he finds very fascinating. She’s wearing a t-shirt and a tiny skirt, and she smiles at him even while she sips from her glass, and he finds himself telling her about the neighborhood where he grew up, hoping she’ll say she knows, yeah, she grew up near there. That’s all he wants to hear. A scrap of familiarity in all this, someone who can see through him.
She doesn’t say it, but she keeps smiling, and her bare leg is warm beside his on the couch, and she puts her right hand on his knee as she says, “Maybe we could go somewhere quieter?”
Pepper smiles back at her, stands up and notices a certain bleariness in his vision. He thinks he’s pretty sure he knows what she’s suggesting. He thinks he could just bring her back to his bedroom. He tells himself Stark won’t mind, Stark does it all the time.
But Stark’s standing with a knot of people between them and the kitchen, holding his whiskey and smirking. Probably at one of his own jokes. Pepper tries to edge past him, thinks better of it, and gives the man a nod, instead. “Hitting the sack, Mr. Stark.”
Stark diverts his attention to Pepper. The smirk fades as he sees the woman edging in close behind. Pepper turns to look at her, too, and sees the way she positively glows under Stark’s gaze. He feels his own mouth twist as Stark reaches forward to take her hand.
She introduces herself as Tegan, and Pepper realizes that he didn’t actually know her name until now.
Stark says, “Tegan, you’re a lovely girl. Would you do me a favor and check on something very important for me?”
Pepper actually feels his jaw drop as Stark leans forward and says something low into the girl’s ear. She gives him a long look from under dark lashes, and turns away. She doesn’t even glance at Pepper again, even though he tries to watch her go. But Stark has him by the elbow now - a grip as firm as if he was taking him by the ear - and tugs him into the pantry, instead.
Still, Pepper is pretty sure she went upstairs. He is pretty damn sure.
Close up, Stark’s clothes smell like cigars and the cold wind off the ocean. He slips the door shut behind them, the bright light flicking on automatically. Pepper winces, finding that he suddenly doesn’t want to look Stark in the face. He stares at the dusty spice rack and long glass bottles of olive oil, instead.
“I think you should probably go to bed.” Stark says. His voice is surprising for its lack of spite. He sounds almost gentle.
Pepper shakes his head without looking up, not trusting himself. He’s angry, and confused, and still pretty drunk. He thinks Tony Stark is a huge fucking hypocrite.
“Pepper?”
Pepper unclenches his jaw and looks up, “Yessir.”
“Good,” Stark reaches over and loosens Pepper’s tie, slides it off his neck and hands it to him. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
A few hours later, Pepper stumbles out of his bedroom and into the kitchen for a glass of mineral water and a handful of acetaminophen. The guests are gone, the house is dark, but he can hear - well, he can hear what he always hears from Stark’s bedroom. A woman’s voice, chuckling and breathless. Stark’s voice, alternately quick and specific or sounding low and long. Pepper estimates that they’re maybe halfway through - the shrieking hasn’t started. Stark sure as hell likes screamers. Or maybe he just turns all women into screamers, it’s hard to tell.
Pepper swallows his drugs, some B12, a couple of other pills. Tony Stark’s unpatented hangover prevention cocktail.
But instead of going back to bed, as he knows he should, Pepper pads closer to the stairs. There’s a garment lying on the bottom step. He inspects it in the half-light of the moon, but doesn’t recognize it, some silky black thing. He keeps moving up, and finds a lemon yellow blouse, a pair of thigh-length stockings and a wool skirt. No t-shirt, no denim miniskirt. Pepper hears the woman’s voice rise notably in pitch and Stark’s own voice urging her on, and feels himself blushing. He’s still angry at Stark, but he’s equally ashamed for getting drunk and horny and losing sight of priorities.
The woman starts shrieking. They always do, and it doesn’t help.
He collects what he can pick off the stairs and throws it in the hatbox for the drycleaner.
When Pepper lays back down in his bed, some part of his semi-drunken brain tells him he can still hear them going at it. He gives himself a hard-on thinking about it, and ends up finishing himself off in the ensuite with the tap running.
And with a dry spell laid out as a term of employment, Pepper spends the next five years jerking off to Tony Stark’s sex life, instead.
Part III: The Names of Our Wounds
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: 2256w. See Part I and the picspam thesis.
Summary: Pepper adjusts his life to fit around Stark's.
Fanonical movie poster made by: delighter, queen of my heart.
II. Beating Off in the Secretarial Pool
There are no days off. Stark doesn’t take them, so either does Pepper.
He puts on a suit each morning. Always black, a bit of charcoal or candystripe or grass green if he’s feeling dangerous. In his first week, he figures someone saw him trailing Stark around at the office, and then sent someone else out shopping. So now he has this supply of crisp dress shirts, narrow pressed slacks, and black ties all picked out by some anonymous secretary with immaculate taste and probably unlimited funds.
To get to Stark’s house on the cliffs, he commutes on the bus from his rented room on the shady border of Inglewood, which takes a couple of hours and a handful of transfers. It means he gets about four hours of sleep a night, but he doesn’t mind. He reads library books about structural engineering and military history and looks out the window at the ocean when he gets motionsick.
He arrives at 4am when Stark’s still asleep, so he can have an hour to himself. Drops an espresso shot or two, logs into the network, books and cancels appointments with clients, staff, girls. Filters through Stark’s email and trashes or delegates ninety-five percent of it.
It took him maybe three days to figure out what Stark does and does not care about. The man is a complicated and self-destructive wreck when it comes to his personal life and his working relationships, but give him a pure math or engineering problem from the factory floor and he’ll lock himself in his lab for days. This realization is how Pepper comes to classify Stark’s benders in one of two ways: Type A (alcohol) or Type A-plus (work).
By the time Stark rolls himself out of bed in the mornings, Pepper’s got egg whites, turkey sausages and a vitamin-enhanced smoothie ready on the counter. Stark slumps out in his shorts, and stands hovering over his food, inhaling it. Pepper also pours a cup of organic light roast, and never says a word until Stark has flipped through the Times - still standing, shifting from foot to foot and rolling his shoulders - and finally looks up from the wreck of newsprint and dishes to say, “Good morning, Pepper.”
Every morning, this is what happens.
Except one morning, when Stark gets back from a sales call to Moscow at 4:30am and finds Pepper asleep on the couch. He’s half undressed, on his way up to bed when he notices the glare from the floor lamp. He stops unbuttoning his shirt and says, “Jesus, Pepper. Why aren’t you in bed?”
Pepper jerks upright, firstly worried that he’s drooled on the Italian leather, and secondly mortified. He can remember checking the time at 1am. He’d been trying to bang out a press statement for some environmental policy changes Stark is supposed to give in a phoner this afternoon.
His voice comes out in a warble, and he coughs, “Mr. Stark. I, uh apologize. I forgot to go home.”
“Home?” Stark migrates to the kitchen, where he gulps a few handfuls of water out of the tap. And a thick pause indicates that he’s probably perplexed by the lack of coffee, like maybe he’ll just skip sleep entirely tonight. “Haven’t you been sleeping here?”
Stark comes back out and looks down at Pepper, who’s still in his slacks and socks, pink-striped shirt open at the throat and rumpled into a mess of creases. His tie and shoes are on the floor, his blazer draped over an ottoman.
Stark throws a thumb toward the eastern wing. “Your bedroom’s down the hall, genius.”
He leaves Pepper sitting on the couch and heads down the stairs to his workshop. “You can bring down my breakfast when it’s ready. And cancel whatever we had for today, I had a thought on the plane.”
So Pepper moves into Stark’s house. The only thing he brings that’s actually his is an alarm clock, because he doesn’t trust Jarvis to wake him in a humane manner.
It turns out that the eight hours Pepper used to spend on the bus and asleep Stark uses mainly for debauchery. The man goes out probably six nights a week, on average. Half the nights he goes out he comes back alone. The other half of the time he comes back with company. That’s the math. So, three nights a week, between the hours of 2 and 4am Pepper finds himself calling the drycleaners for pick-ups and deliveries of feminine couture.
Actually, the exact words Stark used, when he explained that his guests were to be dressed and gone by 7am, were: “Get anything that comes off before the bedroom door.” Pepper suspects the high occurrence of undergarments - on top of the skirts and blouses and gowns - strewn across the slate floor of the foyer are a point of pride with Stark.
There are also the times when Stark has his own parties. Mostly they’re impromptu, so maybe a better term would be after-parties. They certainly aren’t the same as the galas Pepper constantly hounds Stark about attending. Maybe that’s why Stark likes them so much better.
Six weeks after he moves in, Pepper is sitting around in his shirtsleeves after midnight, (he can work later, now that he doesn’t spend four hours on the bus) finishing up his list for the day by drawing up tomorrow’s, when a herd of drunk A-listers are shepherded in, Stark goading them like a sheepdog.
They’re loud, and extremely well-dressed. So well-dressed that Pepper suspects Stark may in fact have blown off the ballet fundraiser dinner he was supposed to be at and gone to that album release party instead. A trio of young men in sneakers and suits head for the bar on the balcony immediately. Most of the others seem to be content to find places to collapse around the living room, women who mostly ignore Pepper. Pepper, who sits stiffly in the middle of his piles of paper, his laptop perched on his knees, mouth slightly open. He recognizes faces, he knows names.
And when Stark opens his arms wide and announces to the room, “Everybody, welcome to my home, I’d like you all to meet my gracious and hard-working wife, Pepper,” suddenly they all know his name, too. And they take it as a license to grace him with flirtatious smiles and small talk that he doesn’t quite know how to respond to, even politely.
From across the room, Stark lifts an eyebrow at the laptop, and Pepper hurries to clear away his work and make excuses that will get him down the hall, into the eastern wing, and out of his boss’s party.
But he’s barely through the kitchen before Stark catches him: a touch on his shoulder, “Come on, kid. Don’t run away.”
Pepper doesn’t want to turn back around. But he does, laptop clutched in his arms, and says, “My apologies, Mr. Stark. Is there anything else tonight?” Because, no matter how many times he’s thought it’s been a test and it wasn’t, he can never stop thinking that Stark is waiting for him to screw up, make a mistake, show his South Central roots and his complete lack of professionalism.
He’s known Stark for barely half a year, but Pepper can’t imagine anything worse than losing this job.
Stark gestures at the balcony, “Yes, there is. Come talk to these people for me, and let me pour you a drink.” He pushes Pepper in the right direction, while pulling the laptop out of his arms. Stark leaves it on the counter, “Lord. You obviously need this more than I do.”
The finger of bourbon Stark hands him smells awful, but it goes down smooth. And after two Pepper is looking at a room full of strangers and remembering that he used to be pretty good at telling people what they liked to hear.
Most of them just want to hear about Stark - who they all call Tony, even though Pepper’s fairly sure not a single one of them has known him for more than a few hours - and he hones his rough edges thinking up creative ways to not answer their questions, charming or pushy as they are. But these people seem to find it cute, his avoidances, and he doesn’t run out of faces to talk to as the drinks keep coming to his hand and the music gets louder.
One woman in particular has heavy waves of hair and dark dark eyes, which he finds very fascinating. She’s wearing a t-shirt and a tiny skirt, and she smiles at him even while she sips from her glass, and he finds himself telling her about the neighborhood where he grew up, hoping she’ll say she knows, yeah, she grew up near there. That’s all he wants to hear. A scrap of familiarity in all this, someone who can see through him.
She doesn’t say it, but she keeps smiling, and her bare leg is warm beside his on the couch, and she puts her right hand on his knee as she says, “Maybe we could go somewhere quieter?”
Pepper smiles back at her, stands up and notices a certain bleariness in his vision. He thinks he’s pretty sure he knows what she’s suggesting. He thinks he could just bring her back to his bedroom. He tells himself Stark won’t mind, Stark does it all the time.
But Stark’s standing with a knot of people between them and the kitchen, holding his whiskey and smirking. Probably at one of his own jokes. Pepper tries to edge past him, thinks better of it, and gives the man a nod, instead. “Hitting the sack, Mr. Stark.”
Stark diverts his attention to Pepper. The smirk fades as he sees the woman edging in close behind. Pepper turns to look at her, too, and sees the way she positively glows under Stark’s gaze. He feels his own mouth twist as Stark reaches forward to take her hand.
She introduces herself as Tegan, and Pepper realizes that he didn’t actually know her name until now.
Stark says, “Tegan, you’re a lovely girl. Would you do me a favor and check on something very important for me?”
Pepper actually feels his jaw drop as Stark leans forward and says something low into the girl’s ear. She gives him a long look from under dark lashes, and turns away. She doesn’t even glance at Pepper again, even though he tries to watch her go. But Stark has him by the elbow now - a grip as firm as if he was taking him by the ear - and tugs him into the pantry, instead.
Still, Pepper is pretty sure she went upstairs. He is pretty damn sure.
Close up, Stark’s clothes smell like cigars and the cold wind off the ocean. He slips the door shut behind them, the bright light flicking on automatically. Pepper winces, finding that he suddenly doesn’t want to look Stark in the face. He stares at the dusty spice rack and long glass bottles of olive oil, instead.
“I think you should probably go to bed.” Stark says. His voice is surprising for its lack of spite. He sounds almost gentle.
Pepper shakes his head without looking up, not trusting himself. He’s angry, and confused, and still pretty drunk. He thinks Tony Stark is a huge fucking hypocrite.
“Pepper?”
Pepper unclenches his jaw and looks up, “Yessir.”
“Good,” Stark reaches over and loosens Pepper’s tie, slides it off his neck and hands it to him. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
A few hours later, Pepper stumbles out of his bedroom and into the kitchen for a glass of mineral water and a handful of acetaminophen. The guests are gone, the house is dark, but he can hear - well, he can hear what he always hears from Stark’s bedroom. A woman’s voice, chuckling and breathless. Stark’s voice, alternately quick and specific or sounding low and long. Pepper estimates that they’re maybe halfway through - the shrieking hasn’t started. Stark sure as hell likes screamers. Or maybe he just turns all women into screamers, it’s hard to tell.
Pepper swallows his drugs, some B12, a couple of other pills. Tony Stark’s unpatented hangover prevention cocktail.
But instead of going back to bed, as he knows he should, Pepper pads closer to the stairs. There’s a garment lying on the bottom step. He inspects it in the half-light of the moon, but doesn’t recognize it, some silky black thing. He keeps moving up, and finds a lemon yellow blouse, a pair of thigh-length stockings and a wool skirt. No t-shirt, no denim miniskirt. Pepper hears the woman’s voice rise notably in pitch and Stark’s own voice urging her on, and feels himself blushing. He’s still angry at Stark, but he’s equally ashamed for getting drunk and horny and losing sight of priorities.
The woman starts shrieking. They always do, and it doesn’t help.
He collects what he can pick off the stairs and throws it in the hatbox for the drycleaner.
When Pepper lays back down in his bed, some part of his semi-drunken brain tells him he can still hear them going at it. He gives himself a hard-on thinking about it, and ends up finishing himself off in the ensuite with the tap running.
And with a dry spell laid out as a term of employment, Pepper spends the next five years jerking off to Tony Stark’s sex life, instead.
Part III: The Names of Our Wounds