Work Text:
Fires of Tony’s making are burning.
They’re sitting on the couch on the main floor in Malibu. The Wrath of Khan is on because Tony couldn’t stomach another hot take on what happened in Monaco. Natalie is gone for the night. Pepper has her Louboutins kicked off, her feet kicked up on the coffee table. She’s wearing this blouse that shows off her collarbone and tapping away on her laptop.
Tony thinks that you don’t know the time you have until you’ve wasted all of it.
He’s realizing his life is expansive. It’s overwhelming. It’s wearing a permanent line into Pepper’s forehead. She smiles less, lately. She snaps at him a lot. She tells him he’s not meeting his R&D marks, that the Expo is a distraction, that he needs to sell the Board on the Clean Energy Initiative so they turn some kind of profit this quarter. He deserves it; he’s been sleeping too much. She transforms his absences into dedication and his escapes into glamor. She’s a superhero in her own right.
They’re going through the NDAs that arrived via courier 30 minutes after they stepped off the tarmac. He’s supposed to be signing things, but right now he can’t feel most of his arm. His feet prickle with pins and needles even though he’s been tapping absently. He feels as though he is watching his life spooling by. The stocks are tanking and Stern has been on every major news outlet talking about how Tony needs to surrender the suits but all he can think about is Vanko spitting blood at him.
You lose. You lose.
The news outlets don’t understand the significance of what they saw on that track, but Tony clocked it as soon as he powered the thing up. That glow. The design.
He should be well beyond matters of ego, but it’s eating at him. The idea has already crawled in and lodged in his chest: he’s not special. The thing isn’t his anymore. Just because you have an idea doesn’t mean it belongs to you. He still hears it in Obie’s voice sometimes, upon waking, soaked in cold sweat.
“Do you think the board will go for the Energy Initiative,” he says. He swills his whiskey around. He’s not supposed to be drinking, but it’s one of the only ways he can keep the pain at bay long enough to fall asleep.
“If you showed up for board meetings, you wouldn’t need to ask me that.”
“I’m gonna sell you my shares,” he tells her.
Pepper slams the lid of her laptop shut.
“What – I can’t afford your shares,” she says. “The board thinks the sun shines out of your ass even when you tank the stocks 60 points, they think Iron Man was the best thing to ever happen to this fucking company–”
“You’re mad at me,” he says. He looks at his hands and sees the bloom of dark veins starting over his wrists. He pulls his shirtsleeves down. “Don’t be mad at me.”
She closes her eyes and pats her laptop. She’s shaking. “I don’t know what’s going on with you,” she says, “but you need to pull it together.”
“I was just attacked,” he says, and he knows it’s glib, but he’s not ready for her undiluted anger. “I’m rattled, what do you want me to say, Pep–”
“Don’t,” she snaps. “I want you to understand how shitty this is on my end, because I can say that now that I’m CEO, and you are spinning out and every time you do something that people can take pictures of it makes a problem for me, and I would like to be doing my job, my actual real job, but instead I’m your secretary–”
“Natalie is my secretary–”
“Nope, I didn’t sign up for this,” she says. “I signed up for Tony Stark, I didn’t sign up for the Iron Man stuff, do you know how much you’re costing legal right now? You can’t do whatever you want just because you want it! You can’t precipitate international incidents and, and, and drive race cars–”
“I owned the race car, Pepper, that’s the point, it’s mine–”
“What were you thinking,” she breathes.
Tony was thinking that he wanted to feel alive, so he climbed into that race car and ended up climbing out of a burning wreck. Rhodey always says he’s addicted to adrenaline. It’s one of his lesser failures, he thinks. Death by collision with the world watching didn’t seem bad, yesterday. A severed spine is predictable, neat.
He didn’t plan on the fight. He didn’t even get to die for his effort. He is so fucking tired of being a spectacle.
Pepper is tired of it, too. There’s a foot of extra distance between them, right now.
“I thought, Carpe Diem,” he tells her. He waves his glass around. “It’s my birthday, I can do what I want on my birthday–”
“I think you do whatever feeds your addiction,” she tells him, and he blinks and blinks and stares at the melting ice in his glass. “I think you’re lying to me about something, and I think you put me here so I could helm a sinking ship.”
Always so perceptive, even when she’s wrong.
They both know he can’t (won’t) give up the suit; he lives for the thrill of it. These people are going to keep coming out of the woodwork until he’s dead. The world is full of Vankos and Obadiahs and people who want to see him pay for something.
He wants to see himself pay, too, he’s just not sure he’s gonna live that long.
“How we deal with death…is at least as important as how we deal with life, wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Saavik?”
Sometimes he wishes he hadn’t told anyone about being Iron Man. It was a split decision, something that burst into life seconds before it hit his lips. He tells people he doesn’t regret it, he’s told Pepper that. He has told the lie so many times that he’s close to believing it.
If he hadn’t said anything, he could bear this invasive, unbeatable thing by himself, he could quietly write Tony Stark out of the story, he could stage something, he could bury the suits, he could give them all to Rhodey and he’d never have to use his actual face to do it.
“Pep,” he says, quietly, after the necessary interval. “I made you CEO because you’re the best, and I’m–”
“A mess,” she asks? She blinks her eyes, smooths her hair back into place. “I’m sorry,” she says. “That was mean.”
“It’s fair,” he says, with an aborted little nod. He makes a note to put the shares in his will. “Pepper,” he says. “I’m not lying, ok, there’s just a lot going on right now–”
“Tony, I can’t do this right now,” she tells him.
He should tell her. He should be honest or she’ll never forgive him.
She looks exhausted. Her mascara is getting cakey, her hair is falling out of the twist she likes to wear. She looks like she hasn’t slept in a week, and it’s his fault. He imagines what she’ll say. She’s going to get angry, angrier than she is already. She’s going to disavow him. She’d be well within her rights to walk out the door and not come back.
Patience is finite, even Pepper’s.
The words don’t come, so he puts one hand on her knee, gently, tentatively. She’s wearing pantyhose. His callouses catch on the nylon. He doesn’t dare breathe. His breath will smell metallic; his blood toxicity measured 58% at last reading.
Pepper’s head snaps up. She meets his eyes - a stalemate for a moment, him perched on the edge of the couch and her looking at his hand, her eyes bright and dangerous. He imagines her mourning. He sees it all in that instant: they’ll call her to ID his body, they’ll ask her about the funeral arrangements. She’ll feel betrayed. She’ll sit in his office and drink the bottle of Patron that he keeps in the liquor cabinet just for her and she’ll yell at his ghost for the mess he’s left her.
They’ve gotten so close, so many times. Their windows are short and ephemeral and both of them are always afraid to close the distance, to take the plunge.
“Do not,” she tells him. She brushes his hand away. She stands and flattens out her skirt. Her whole body is wrong. All the tension rushes back into her, all at once. She grabs her laptop and puts her heels on one at a time without even bending over. “Go to bed, Tony,” she says.
Tony decides that his worry was for nothing. He’s going to die with her hating him.
Better. Easier.