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Pepper’s phone goes off while she’s standing in front of the bathroom mirror, getting ready for the day. The sound startles her and she jumps, the abrupt movement sending an errant streak of eyeliner across her cheek. She swears under her breath, answering the call with a quick swipe of her finger while she fishes out a tissue and makeup remover.
“Hey Tony, I’m running late this morning so I’m going to put you on speaker. Keep it PG, okay?”
“Challenge accepted.”
“Not a challenge.”
“Not with that attitude.”
“Danny, I can’t find my notecards,” she calls through the open door into the adjacent suite. “Can you run downstairs and see if I left them in the car? Thanks.”
“Danny? Who the hell is Danny, your assistant? I should meet him.”
“You have. Twice.”
“I don’t remember this at all.”
“The last time you met him, he was bringing me coffee. You thought Starbucks had started doing delivery and tried to hire him on retainer.”
“I remember this vividly.”
She laughs, returning to the living room to retrieve the pair of ruby red sling-back heels selected for the day’s events, lined up neatly beside the hallway mirror. “We’re supposed to leave in five minutes, and I can’t find my speech,” she tells him, flipping through her briefcase in a hurry to see if they’ve slipped to the bottom.
“You’re the keynote speaker – Butterfingers, seriously, roll one inch closer to that oil spill and it’s staying in your tread for the day, see if I care -- I’m pretty sure they’ll wait,” Tony says.
“It makes a bad first impression.”
“Not possible.”
“Tony.”
“Pepper, you are stunningly competent and annoyingly charming. They are going to hang on your every word.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Check the pocket of what you were wearing yesterday,” he says. She pauses, considering the suggestion: she’d run through the speech a couple of times yesterday, making last minute revisions. Opening the closet door, she finds yesterday’s blazer hung up neatly on a hangar, a distinctive bulge in the side pocket.
“JARVIS?” she asks, amused.
“You wish. I just won major boyfriend points, didn’t I?”
“Yep.”
“Enough for phone sex?”
“Nope.”
“What if I find your phone, too?”
“Bye, Tony. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
-
To be honest, they’ve been expecting someone to take a shot at Pepper since day one.
Everyone else Tony Stark would reasonably describe as a friend is: 1) his bodyguard; 2) high-ranking military; or 3) also a superhero. Pepper is a feminist but she’s also a realist – she’s a more vulnerable target than any of them, even before they factor in the high visibility of her position. Colonel Rhodes’ itinerary is classified military intelligence. Her attendance at industry events is publicized months in advance.
They’ve prepared for this, of course. JARVIS compiles periodic threat assessments. SI security runs regular extraction drills. She has committed a series of code phrases to memory which describe situations ranging from ‘call under duress – send backup immediately’ to ‘false alarm – some idiot tripped the alarm accidentally.’ At some point, she has to live her life. She was there when Tony walked off the plane after three months in a cave, she watched the ransom video they sent Obadiah. She knows what the stakes are. She stays because Tony is annoyingly competent and stunningly charming in his own right – because when shit hits the fan, he doesn’t take the easy way out. In that, he leads by example.
So no, it doesn’t come as a surprise when someone comes after her. They’ve been expecting someone to take a shot at Pepper since day one.
(She just hadn’t expected it would be literally.)
-
There is blood on her shoe.
It’s not hers, she doesn’t think – about three seconds after the second-floor glass window shattered, she found herself on the ground pinned between Joan and the podium. Arnold came alongside in a crouch, gun drawn, already shouting instructions.
When no further shots were forthcoming, together Joan and Arnold got her up and hustled her through the doors into the hallway beyond, where they were met by a group of even more agents. “Bluebird secure,” Joan said into the radio, and it wasn’t until Arnold dropped a flak vest over her head that she realized that by ‘Bluebird’ they meant her.
“Joan?” she asks, but Joan doesn’t look back, doesn’t respond, still intently focused on the doors. Joan’s weapon has been drawn by now too, two hands wrapped around the handle in a steady grip, the barrel pointed low to the ground, finger on the trigger.
Pepper bites back the metallic taste of iron and looks down. There is blood on her shoe. The pressure in her chest tightens as Arnold finishes securing the last strap of the vest in place. He says something, one of his hands on each of her shoulders, but she misses it due to the reverberation of her heartbeat pounding in her ears. He looks fine, intense but unharmed, so Pepper doesn’t think it’s his blood.
She doesn’t know how much time passes before Mark gives them the signal over the radio, and then they’re on the move again, Pepper the centre of a swarm of agents making their way towards a more secure room. She’s almost dizzy from the adrenaline, a thrum in her chest and a buzzing in her ears. The buzzing changes pitch, growing louder, and Arnold glances at her intently for a second before reaching into her pocket and pulling out her cell phone, which she belatedly identifies as the source of the buzzing.
Oh.
Her hand is shaking too much to answer so Arnold carefully takes the phone from her to answer the call. He hands it back to her just as carefully, his warm and steady hand wrapping hers around the slim device and lifting it to her ear.
“—per, are you there?” Tony says, and the wave of relief strikes her so suddenly she’s speechless with the force of it.
“Pepper? JARVIS, c’mon, if you don’t get someone on the line who knows what’s going on in the next 30 seconds--.”
“-- Tony?” she says.
“-- Pep? Are you okay? Just hold tight, I’m on my way, I’ll be there soon. Are you okay?”
“There’s blood on my shoe,” she tells him.
“I need more context here.”
“I don’t think it’s Arnold’s. He looks fine, and besides, he arrived later.”
“Pepper.”
“Joan looks alright, too. You would’ve been so proud of her, she was right there the moment it happened, the moment someone --.”
“--JARVIS, tap into her necklace, display vitals on screen--.”
“—shot at me, Tony, someone shot at me.”
“Pepper, your heart rate is 140 and your blood pressure is dangerously low. You’re in shock. I need you to take a deep breath for me, right now.”
“I’m fine,” Pepper says, confused.
“You’re not. Are you bleeding anywhere?”
“There’s blood on my shoe,” she repeats, swaying on her feet. Beside her, Arnold swears, his fingertips coming away from her side coated with blood. His hand clamps down on her shoulder. The last thing she hears before she loses consciousness is Joan yelling for a medic into the radio.
-
Pepper has a rule about email on Sundays: if her inaction will not influence the stock price by lunch the following day, it can wait until Monday morning.
If she’d been on time to the airport twenty years ago and caught the flight to New York as planned, she’d be CEO of a green energy company and this policy would be handled by a well-designed set of filters. As it is: the next flight out was to Los Angeles, she met Tony Stark four months later, and this policy is now enforced by an AI capable of determining this morning’s volume level based on last night’s BAC.
Tony’s never met a boundary he couldn’t overstep, but breaking points he understands intimately. The last time she lost track of what time zone she was in and how long it had been since she slept, he sent her to bed and posted Dummy outside her door to ward off intruders. The last time she forgot about a meeting, he gave her the keys to the summer house in Spain. The last time he saw her dry swallow over the counter painkillers, he put a massage therapist on staff.
On good weeks, she goes out: live music and food festivals, museum exhibits and local restaurants, a mix of shopping and entertainment and errands that remind her she is Pepper first and Ms. Potts second. On bad weeks, she doesn’t leave the house, doesn’t deal with anyone she doesn’t want to; anyone will deliver for the right price, and Tony will hardly judge her for getting JARVIS to do her dirty work.
Some Sundays, Tony comes with her. He leaves the fabrication units machining new parts and JARVIS running calculations and emerges from the workshop to shower, put on clean clothes, and join her out on the town. It’s easy to forget Tony grew up a city boy, less so when she sees him bartering with festival artists and picking out tomatoes at farmer’s markets. A baseball cap and sunglasses don’t do much to hide their very recognizable faces, but they’re bothered less in New York than they were in Malibu, where no one gives a shit who you are as long as you’re not in their way.
Sunday ends up being her favourite day of the week.
-
She wakes up in the car, Arnold’s full weight bearing down on the entry wound in her shoulder, trying to stem the bleeding. Past her elbow, her entire right side has gone weak, her fingers cold and tingling. The whole car tilts, and she thinks it’s from blood loss until she realizes the horizon beyond is tilting at the same angle, Mark having taken the corner on two wheels.
She drifts in and out for a few minutes until Joan brushes the hair away from her ear and fits an comm unit in place.
“You with me, Pep?” Tony says.
“Not really,” she says, voice tight.
“Change of plans, I’m going to meet you at the hospital.”
“What was the original plan?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he says, and even now, she can tell when he’s lying. “I’m going to have a quick chat with the guy who did this, and then I’m going to meet you at the hospital.”
“I think I forgot my notecards,” she says.
“Is that really a concern right now?”
“I was really proud of that speech.”
She shifts with the momentum of the car slowing down, and the world washes out in streaks of muted gray. The sharp burn of bile rises in her throat, the pain in her shoulder so consuming it makes her nauseous.
Iron Man reaches the hospital at the same time they do, landing fist down on the helipad. The red and gold figure is blurry from her view in the ambulance bay many floors below, complicated by the mass of people in scrubs flitting around her as they rush her inside, but it is distinctly Tony.
He’s still wearing most of the suit when he joins her in the ER, the helmet tucked under one arm. “Is everyone okay?” she asks him.
“You were shot,” he says, incredulously, and she waves him off.
“No, what --,” he breaks off, mimicking her wave, the gesture exaggerated by the bulky movements in the suit and hiss of hydraulic joints. “You were shot,” he says, voice raw. She thought she’d seen all flavours of Tony Stark, flirty and furious and flippant, serious and sarcastic and stubborn, but she’s never seen him scared like this.
“Hey,” she says, squeezing his hand with her good arm. “I’m going to be fine.”
“I’m supposed to be telling you that,” he says.
“I won’t tell if you won’t.”
-
Pepper considers their anniversary to be the day they first kissed. Tony considers it to be the day she joined Stark Industries. They didn’t realize this discrepancy until about ten months after the Expo, when Tony presented her with a set of iron earrings shaped like arc reactors. When she inquired about the timing, he told her Hallmark informed him iron was the traditional gift for a sixth anniversary.
“But It’ll only be a year in May,” she said.
“What? That’s not our anniversary.”
“Pretty sure it is, Tony.”
“We spent years together before we finally got a clue.”
“And they were wonderful years. They still don’t count.”
The disagreement got worse over the years: one morning, she came downstairs to find a beautifully engraved aluminum ring wrapped in tin foil and a bright red ribbon. ‘Happy 10th anniversary!’ the card read.
Two months later, she gifted him a wooden frame with one of the first pictures ever taken of them as a couple. It was a joint interview towards the end of the press tour to shore up support for SI in the aftermath of the Expo. Tony showed up with a tray of coffee to fuel them for the hundredth iteration of the same questions, and the photographer caught him kissing her on the cheek as he handed hers over. She was smiling warmly up at him, her arm wrapped around his bicep. ‘Happy 5th anniversary!’ the card read.
It was a point of contention between them for a long time before Rhodey, in his infinite wisdom, pointed out that if they stopped fighting about it, they could have twice the anniversary sex.
Pepper and Tony have two anniversaries now.
-
She wakes up exhausted, awareness returning in distinct blocks: first sound, then memory, then feeling. Part of the fatigue can be attributed to the snaking IV tube taped to the inside of her elbow, the cocktail of medication being dispensed rendering not just her shoulder but the rest of her comfortably numb.
In the dimness of the room, lighting pitched low in deference to the hour, Tony’s arc reactor casts his face in shadow. Aside from the bright hallway fluorescents peeking underneath the shut door in the corner, the only other sources of light are the monitors and faint glow of moonlight through the window. She was supposed to be the first speaker of the morning, bright and early – she’s lost a day, now.
Tony had promised her that no one else was hurt, but she can’t stop thinking about Danny, who was standing two feet behind her; or Joan and Arnold, who protected her body with their own; or Mark, who broke physics in the act of getting her here as soon as possible. She was prepared for the idea that someone might come after her, but it never occurred to her how many people that someone might be willing to go through in order to do so. Maybe it did, and she ignored it for the sake of carrying on with her life. It’s hard to say, now.
Tony’s passed out in a chair on the wrong side of the bed for easy reach, the side wrapped in a layer of bandages winding around her torso and under her arm to keep the joint fixed in place. His legs are propped up on the bed, his head down on his chest, his sweater tucked underneath his chin like a blanket. It looks extremely uncomfortable, and given the IV cocktail, she’s pretty sure he’ll be in more pain than she is when he wakes up. He looks exhausted, even the lines of his face normally relaxed in sleep still tense. There’s no doubt he needs the rest. That said, if their positions were reversed, she’d want to know he was awake.
“Tony,” she calls, nudging him with her leg. His eyes first open to slits, and then widen with surprise as he realizes what he’s looking at. His legs drop off the bed when he sits up, several vertebrae in his back cracking as he straightens out.
“Hi, honey,” she says. “How was your day?”
He stares at her for a long minute, not speaking, not blinking, unnaturally still. “Well,” he says at last, not a trace of a smile on his face. “Didn’t get as far as I planned on the piezos for the UAV. The new guidance system for the standalone repulsor is still pulling to the left. And I had to cancel the noon conference call with R&D. “
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” he replies, an edge to it. “Someone tried to take out my CEO.”
“You can reschedule for next week,” she says, but he doesn’t take the bait.
“You know I have a heart condition, right?”
“Tony.”
“I saw the video. Two inches to the left, that bullet hits something more vital.” She swallows hard and coughs on it, her throat sore and dry.
Tony swears softly and gets up, retrieving a glass of ice water from the rollaway side table in the corner. “Here, sip slowly – slowly!” he says, pulling the straw away from her when she downs the first few mouthfuls in a gulp, the water soothing her throat.
“You’re giving all future presentations remotely. Over Skype. From a bunker,” he says when she’s finished, finally beginning to sound like himself again.
“No.”
“It’ll be a very luxurious bunker, extremely classy.”
“Still no.”
“All the latest and greatest in current media, his and hers closets, a pool, the whole works.” She cards a hand through his hair, her hand coming to rest on the back of his neck, and he quiets. She pulls him in closer, the gentlest of tugs, and he follows through in one smooth movement, climbing over the railing.
“Did you pick up my notecards?” she asks when he finishes the careful process of settling in to the free space on her good side without jostling her torso. He is warm against her side, smelling strongly of coffee and aftershave, his leg a comfortable weight on top of hers.
“I spent three hours debriefing with the security team, first responders, and FBI. Interrogated the shooter to confirm they were working alone. Offered Joan and Arnold my firstborn child. Held a press conference.”
“But did you pick them up?”
Tony grumbles, but reaches into his suit jacket, extracting a set of elastic-wrapped index cards. “How do you feel about very fashionable protective gear?” he asks. “All the fall styles. Combat boots in every color.”
-
The first threat against Pepper was received approximately three days following Tony’s big announcement. JARVIS included it in the first comprehensive threat assessment mainly for completeness; it wasn’t credible, wasn’t a major concern, wasn’t anything more than extremely unsettling.
Tony tried to fire her on the spot.
Oh, it was more subtle than that, framed as a promotion accompanied by a generous relocation package to a division overseas, but the intent was obvious: he wanted to get her as far away from him as possible as quickly as possible.
It’s still one of the top five arguments they’ve ever had. Tony had called it an unacceptable risk. Pepper had called it a taste of his own medicine.
It reignites every now and again when some supervillain or extremist group or ex-girlfriend gets it into their head to come after her. It’s never been quite as bad as that first time was, but occasionally Tony sticks his head in her office and says things like, “Australia is nice this time of year, why don’t you visit” or “that car would look great with bulletproof glass” or “meet Malcolm, your new best friend. Also former Secret Service.”
Years after the first fight, curled up on the couch late at night watching one of the three science-fiction films Tony could watch beginning to end with complaining, he paused the film and said, “I owe you an apology.”
“The stock price will recover when the new product line releases next week.”
“Not about that.”
“The picture will have faded from the news cycle by the weekend.”
“Or that.”
“I’m so happy you’ve come to your senses regarding our anniversary.”
“Nice try.”
“Hmm. Go on then.”
“When I signed up for this gig, I was thinking about my conscience. And revenge. And possibly doing some good. But I wasn’t thinking about you, and the position it would put you in. You didn’t volunteer for this, and now you’re at risk because of my extracurricular activities.”
She looks up at him, but his eyes are pointedly fixed on the coffee table in the distance, and he won’t meet her eyes.
“Did I ever tell you what I wanted to be when I grew up?” she asks.
“Acrobat?” he asks, and she elbows him lightly. “What? I know from last night that you’re --.”
“-- Until the age of sixteen, I was convinced I wanted to be a diplomat. I don’t like blood, so I didn’t want to go into healthcare. I have a touch of claustrophobia, so I didn’t want to be a firefighter. And I’m not particularly nurturing, so I didn’t want to be a teacher. But I wanted to change the world.”
There’s no judgment in his voice when Tony asks, “what happened when you turned seventeen?”
“Reality,” she says. “And student loans.”
-
She sees the video for the first time the next morning. It airs on all of the morning shows, following a disclaimer regarding the graphic nature of the content. She’s used to seeing herself on camera these days, but there’s something surreal about this in particular. She doesn’t remember dropping her notecards, or the microphone falling, or Joan pulling her down behind the podium, all of which are visible on camera. She closes her eye and hears the splinter of shattered glass, Danny’s scream, Joan’s voice in her ear telling her to stay low.
The clip prefaces a longer segment on the story, which includes a grainy cell phone recording of Iron Man landing at the convention centre, an exterior shot of the hospital, and a compilation of well-wishes from rival tech companies and Hollywood stars and other people she recognizes from brief interactions over the years.
They close on footage from the press conference, Tony front and centre behind a podium with another four people in the row behind him ready to step in and redirect questions where appropriate. Underneath the suit jacket, the skin-tight mesh under armor is still visible.
“Mr. Stark, who dropped the ball regarding security at today’s event?”
“Tony, was anyone else injured during today’s attack?”
“Mr. Stark, do you think Ms. Potts was targeted because of her relationship with you?” one voice calls, cutting through the crowd. It doesn’t surprise her that Tony answers that one first, because when it comes down to it, he is remarkably easy to read.
“Not at this time.”
“Based on what?”
“I’ve spoken to the suspect in custody. He has not said anything to suggest this is an indirect attack on me, as Iron Man or an individual.”
“Is there a concern that your relationship with Ms. Potts could be used against you, as a weakness?” the reporter follows up. Tony takes off his sunglasses, pinning the man with a look.
“Is there a concern? Yes. But let’s be perfectly clear: in no present, past, or alternate universe could my relationship with Ms. Potts be construed as a weakness on my part. And furthermore, the suggestion that she is only important in the context of her relationship with me is quite frankly ridiculous – it enhances my reputation, but diminishes hers. But you want your quote, fine, let's play ball, here it is: to anyone who thinks they’re going to get to me through Ms. Potts. I encourage you to think of the following: I have put my time, my money, and my life on the line for the continued security of this city and this country, but that is nothing compared to what I would sacrifice for her. Choose wisely.”
“Mr. Stark, are you saying that you would--.”
“That’s all the questions I have time for today,” he says, leaning back from the microphone to whisper something to one of the people behind him. “Today’s security lead will be taking over from here. Now if you don’t mind, I have some notecards to find.”
-
She gives the speech three weeks later, Tony sitting dead centre in the third row.
“What’d you think?” she asks him later. “I rewrote the B section in light of recent events.”
“You had them eating out of the palm of your hand. Can probably skip the cards next time."