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Sweat trickled down the back of her neck and pooled between the cushioning and her back. It was hot. Incredibly, incredibly hot, and for whatever godforsaken reason she just couldn’t move. It was as if gravity had increased tenfold just on her sternum and had pressed the rest of her body down with lead weights. Pepper quite frankly didn’t understand how Tony survived, day in, day out. But goddamn it, she was determined! Blinking away the sweat that dripped into her eyes, she braced one hand on the ground and slowly, creaking joints and all, pushed herself upright once more.
People needed her. Now more than ever. Between the aftermath of the Chitauri and Tony destroying and subsequentially rebuilding some of his suits, and finally specializing one of her own, Pepper decided that if suits were going to be used – suits were going to be used on her basis and her basis only. And of course – another alien attack brought on by a lapse in portals and some other science stuff Pepper couldn’t just quite wrap her head around – in Paris, France was deemed her basis.
It had been her and Rhodey scouting the perimeter they had set up along the Champs-Élysées when the creatures that spouted fire and had poison spines much like a mutant porcupine had overtaken them too quickly and the defense they had called back to another area of the city was too far for help. Pepper fired another repulsor beam, and another, and another, until a pain and aggression ridden shout echoed from her mouth over the coms.
All she heard in response was Rhodey chuckling before he appeared beside her in his own suit, the large metallic guns appearing out of his shoulder piece. “Rescue, I’ve got this sector covered. Do what you gotta do,” she nodded and headed for the American Cathedral which was being used as a refuge shelter.
Pepper used the suit differently than Tony did. Tony was about sheer force and snark, a flash and a wild hit. Pepper named her suit Rescue for a reason. She didn’t want to show off. She wanted to help.
Helping was what Pepper was particularly skilled at doing. Showing off? Not so much…
When her metal-booted feet touched ground just outside the doors of a completely ravaged office building three streets away from the Cathedral, Pepper lifted her face plate and felt relief at the cool, yet dusty breeze sweeping past her sweaty cheeks. It felt as though she were trapped in a metal sauna, suffocating; but, it was unsafe to lift the faceplate during battle.
Shaking her ginger hair free as the rest of the helmet came down; she searched amongst the wreckage, peering in every door, searching in every room. The dust and smoke made it hard to see and the sirens and crashing made it even harder to hear, but at long last she was greeted with the sounds of coughing, and crying.
Pepper was dangerously out of breath, but managed to shout as loud as she could into the building itself. “Je peux vous aider! Quelqu'un est-il blessé?” (I can help you! Is anyone hurt?)*
A small cry reached her ears.
“Ici! Ici!” (Over here! Over here!)
Frantically, Pepper pulled cement block after cement block away from a set of fallen stairs when three sooty faces appeared from around the corner. They had been trapped, in the basement, since god knows when this building fell. She felt her heart clench as she eyed them all up.
“Miss Potts, it appears as though the youngest has a broken leg and kneecap, and the girl is well on her way to inhaling far too much dust.”
“Thank you, JARVIS,” Pepper whispered and gently lowered herself onto the ground inside the basement. A father and two children stared at her in awe, pupils dilated in what she assumed was fear. Raising her hands non-threateningly in the air, Pepper knelt on one knee at the feet of the youngest boy. She knew she couldn’t control her emotions, and it was clear from a look at her face that she was fighting back a grimace, panic, and sheer concern.
“Où êtes-vous blessé?” (Where are you hurt?)
The boy pointed and his lower lip quivered. His big sister, a girl with bright blond pigtails that were dirtied with dust, began to cry and latch onto her father’s pant leg, hiding her face. Determined and suddenly angry at the aliens (though Pepper knew it was an irrational and quite particular anger) to leave these poor human beings stuck in a basement to die, she gently lifted the young boy into her arms and held out a hand to the girl. Her heart felt as though it were splitting in two.
The girl looked up at her father who had clean streaks from tears down his cheeks, and he nodded, whispering a phrase of consolation. Her hand felt tiny in Pepper’s metallic casing and with as much gentleness as she could muster, lifted the girl into her arms and held both of them tight before firing the repulsors in her boots. When all three of the family were out of the wretched basement and reunited on the front steps of the building and had received news of the Cathedral being used as a refuge, the man stopped her, shouting.
It had seemed as though he hadn’t been able to stop crying and as Pepper’s brain frantically tried to translate the French, she only managed to catch a few words. “Please”, “no”, “my infant”, “my baby girl.”
Pepper froze. It almost felt as though her entire body had been locked inside the suit from an unseen force.
“He appears to have said that he has a small baby girl on the fourteenth floor where the office nursery is, but Miss Potts – ”
“JARVIS…”
“Miss Potts I must warn you that the building is no longer stable -”
“Shut up!” Pepper screamed and she flipped the headpiece and face plate back over her head. Tears coursed down her face as she shot off into the sky, counting the floors as the whisked by, all the while JARVIS warning her of inevitable collapse and the dangers of smoke inhalation. Luckily for her, she had a filtration system…
Unlucky for the infant whose death was probably nearer than ever before…
The infant was far from the first and the family not the only one to be disconnected and reunited throughout the course of the battle. Chaos reigned supreme and Pepper raced from one end of the city to the other for what seemed like hours and hours, often starting on foot and forgetting she wore a suit which enabled her to fly before attempting to help every soul she heard crying.
It was hard to set priorities upon whom to help, whom to rescue…
A daughter with an elderly father, a family of seven trapped in the metro system, a pair of siblings leaning on each other and at the mercy of the poison quill embedded in one side.
The trials of a senseless battle; the simultaneous helplessness and empowerment in rescuing those she could and bringing them to safety. It was exhausting.
Later, Pepper sat, legs splayed and helmet discarded, on the green grass in front of the Eiffel Tower. Sweat was beginning to pool again and she disconnected the gloves from the rest of the suit and ran a hand through her tousled hair. “I almost couldn’t do it…”
“Pepper, don’t…” Rhodey began, retracting the various guns and weapons he had used in defense of the city of Paris (and on a larger scope – the world). “Tony does the exact same thing; I know what you’re thinking.”
“No, Colonel,” she looked up at him, eyes pleading and beginning to turn wet. “I almost couldn’t do it.” After a long moment of silence, Rhodey too had disengaged his helmet and sat beside her, leaning back into the grass and watching the residents of the destroyed city finally begin to reemerge in fear. Pepper hiccupped, laughed, and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “But I did.”
A smile crossed Rhodey’s face.
“You did.”
“Should we help them clean up?”
Another moment of silence. Rhodey shook his head. “If I were them, I’d want to rebuild myself.” They shared a glance and Rhodey raised a brow. “It’s what we did after New York.”
Pepper fiddled with her fingers and smiled, sniffling all the while. “I suppose you’re right.”
“You did enough, Pepper. We should probably get home.” Rhodey’s voice was soft, and the suggestion lulled Pepper into a feeling of satisfaction. The look on the scared infant’s face as she held it in her arms, sheltering her with her armor and flying out before the fifteenth floor collapsed and knocked the integrity out of the fourteenth, sending a domino effect down the entire building…the look of her father as she handed the child over, crying silently inside her armor… that look would never fade from the backs of her eyelids.
Yeah, yeah maybe she did do enough.
Unlike Tony, Pepper hated flying home in the suit. She didn’t want alone time to think about the faces she had seen of those she couldn’t help; she only wanted those of joy at the recognition that she did help some, to the best of her ability. She liked flying in comfort, as well, so she gratefully boarded the plane out of Charles de Gaulle airport (which miraculously still had a runway open, or maybe that was just the flash of her CEO card and the jingle of keys to the Stark jet) and sank into her seat with aching bones.
…No heels for a while, then.
Pepper had just drifted into a half-lull, towards dreams probably filled with paperwork and expense claims, when the television monitor on the wall clicked and came to life.
“Peeeeppperrrrrr…Pep! Pepper!”
“Oh my god!”
“Relax, relax, it’s just me!” A flash of a trademark Stark smile jostled Pepper from her near-nap completely. “Soooo, sweetheart, how were the aliens?”
Pepper placed a hand on her forehead and rubbed viciously, feeling the excess remnants of sweat and dirt coat her fingertips. “Tony, please…”
“Pepper, come on! You know I can’t stand anticipation and the media has got such a slanted view on whatever us super-folk do and I want a stellar report card directly from my baby girl! All As,” Tony quipped, raising a brow on the screen. “Or your banned to the sofa. Though to be fair it’s a rather nice sofa…”
“Tony, please, you know how I feel about your nagging! You do your super thing, I do mine, that’s that…” Pepper began.
“Ass-kicking skills?” Tony interrupted, ignoring her.
“…A.”
“Repulsor skills?”
“A-.”
“Saving screaming children skills?”
A flash of the small girl whose brother had the broken leg flittered in front of Tony’s screen. “…B+”
“Pep.”
“Fine. Decent. A-.”
On the screen, Tony paused. His eyes glistened with something akin to pride and concern and he scooted his stool closer to the feed. It was clear he was in his lab at Avengers Tower. She could make out several of Bruce’s beakers littering a far away countertop. “You okay?”
Pepper gave him a small smile. “I rescued a baby today,” she whispered. A corner of Tony’s mouth lifted and he leaned back in his chair. Pepper swore she saw pride in his face.
“That’s my girl… you know what, when you get back we’re getting hot dogs.”
“Tony…” But it was too late, the rant had already begun.
“- I’m talking big hot dogs. Big, legit, New York hot dogs. None of the Paris shit you’ve been eating, though snails were probably alright – ”
“- Tony I wasn’t there to dine out on snails – ”
“ – I get that, but if you did – ”