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And if you're rough enough for love
Honey, I'm tougher than the rest
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Pepper doesn’t generally put much stock in hugs. Unlike Tony, she’s not a very tactile person and can easily do without much physical contact in the day-to-day of their relationship. Therefore, she’s almost surprised at how much of a relief it is to finally be able to hold a bruised, bloody, and admittedly kind of rough-smelling Tony in her arms.
“Okay so far? Do you like it?“ Tony asks playfully, but she knows that beneath the surface, his concern is real.
“It’ll do,” she replies, and if it comes out a little choked up, no one else will ever know.
Pepper wouldn’t usually consider herself a sentimental person, but today isn’t usually, and all she knows is that she doesn’t want to let go of him, not right now or preferably ever. She isn’t sure whether they stand there for minutes, months, or years – the fireworks transforming months of Tony’s red-eyed workshop nights into explosions and sparkles seem to last forever. For once, time doesn’t matter.
They break apart eventually, when the sky has gone quiet and she feels Tony starting to tremble, the adrenaline finally tapering off and his injured leg fighting to take the strain of holding him upright. She lowers him to the ground, and carefully helps him sit back, leaning against a piece of debris. Breathing, once, twice, she looks him up and down. His expression is exhausted but there’s a smile on his lips and every heartbeat cries alive, alive, alive. Then she puts on her CEO face and gets to work.
A few hours later, Tony has grudgingly been checked over and cleared by the local hospital – his ankle is not broken, just badly sprained, and apart from that he got away lightly with a year’s worth of bruises, a mild concussion and the order to take it easy for a while. Seeing as their home has quite literally sunk to the bottom of the ocean, Pepper checks them in to the city’s priciest hotel for the night.
After arranging a set of decent clothes for each of them through the hotel staff and taking a much-needed shower, Pepper puts on her high heels, equips herself with a bunch of documents to hide the shaking of her hands and goes off to meet her assistant in the lobby for a long-overdue press statement.
When she returns, she finds Tony sitting at the table with a notebook in front of him, spewing out equations in a feverish haze. His hands are littered with cuts, some of them swollen and angrily red around the edges, others still shedding drops of blood onto the paper. Holding a pen must be painful, she thinks, but he doesn’t even seem to notice it.
“Tony. Time for bed,” she orders softly. When he doesn’t react, she swiftly pulls the notebook out from under him.
“Hey,” he protests hoarsely, “this is important.”
“I’m sure it can wait until tomorrow.”
“I’m trying to find a way to stop my CEO from potentially setting my Fortune 500 company on fire! It’s quite urgent, actually.”
It pinches more than she expected, but then he turns his head upwards to look at her and through all the blood, exhaustion, and fatigue, Pepper sees the sea of guilt in his eyes.
Her heart clenches. “I’ll be fine for tonight,” she reassures. “And we both really need to rest.”
Tony huffs, but obeys anyway. He gets up shakily, supporting himself on the table, and has made it two steps towards the bed when his knees buckle under him. He lands on his butt before Pepper can catch him.
“Impressive,” she comments, guiding him to lean forward and nudging his head toward his legs. “Got dizzy?”
“Hmm,” Tony nods into his knees. “An’ nauseous. Room’s spinning.”
“You need to be sick?”
He makes a so-so gesture with his hand without looking up, so she gets the trash can from the other side of the room and sets it down next to him just in case. Pepper double-checks that her hands are not glowing orange before squatting close to Tony and gently stroking his back up and down. He shudders a bit under her touch.
After a while, he turns his head, cheek still resting on his knees, and looks at her sideways. “Just for the record, that’s not how I wanted Christmas to go,“ he says weakly. “The original plans involved a candlelit dinner at the Rainbow Room and a Santa-themed strip-tease afterwards…” he trails off.
Pepper can’t help but smile a little. “Come on. Let’s go to bed.” He looks so, so tired, and she wonders whether he’s slept at all since their house was blown to bits. Or the nights before that.
With Pepper’s help, Tony makes it to his feet without incident this time, limping over to the bed and falling into it with an exhausted sigh. Pepper props his injured foot up with an extra pillow, removes her suit jacket and skirt, and then gets in with him, scooting close. They don’t usually cuddle up in bed, but tonight she needs to feel as much of him as she can.
Switching off the lights, she distantly remembers the last time they slept together. It feels like it happened in a different life and, half-asleep, she wonders whether that’s how it will be for them now - another event that cuts their life into a before and after, like Afghanistan, like the very first armour, like that kiss on the rooftop after the Expo. She hopes that it means something good. That maybe, eventually, it will allow her to forget the hours she was in Killian’s hands while her body was burning itself inside out, that it will give Tony something resembling peace, hopes that it might reduce the worries and fears plaguing his dreams.
This time, though, it’s not Tony who has a nightmare.
When Pepper was 22 and had just started her first job in a management consultancy, she had a colleague in her department who asked her out several times, and upon her refusal, would constantly stalk her in the months after. One night when she’d left the building late, he followed her outside, pressed her against the wall next to the entry, and grabbed her breast with one hand, trying to kiss her. Pepper managed to knee him in the balls and run.
When she brought the incident up with their boss the following day, he gave the man a five-minute talk that ended in a few hearty laughs. Pepper, in the outer office, felt each of them like a slap to the face. Two weeks later, she handed in her resignation. The man was promoted and finally became head of sales.
(To this day, Pepper makes a point of never doing business with that particular company).
Since then, she’s carried pepper spray with her wherever she went. Despite this being the incident that led to her applying at SI and finally getting her nickname, Pepper hasn’t thought of it―of him―in years.
This night, however, the memory makes it back into her dreams. She relives the scene in detail, stands outside the parking garage once again, pressed hard against the concrete wall, the man’s disgusting breath wet on her cheek. He slides his hand under her jacket, greedy eyes meeting hers. But this time, he wears Kilian’s face.
“Pep, wake up.”
His fingers are all over her body and she doesn’t want them, doesn’t want him to touch her. She’s disgusted and scared and angry, so angry, her rage burning hot -
“Babe, I’m sorry, but you’re igniting the bedsheets.”
“What?” Pepper blinks her eyes open and everything is gleaming. Her body’s on fire, quite literally, the blanket around her smoldering. “Oh god―” she breathes.
“Calm down, honey. You’re alright.“ Tony’s voice sounds unusually soft, although she can hear the emotion right beneath the surface. “Just take a deep breath, okay?”
When the gleaming subsides, it leaves her shaking, hot tears forming in her eyes against her will. Tony opens his arms and, after making sure her skin has cooled down, she presses herself into him. “I’m sorry,” she mumbles. “I think I dreamed of Killian.”
“Yeah, I realised that.”
She scoots away a bit and glances up at his somber face. “Did you get any sleep at all?”
Tony shrugs and she gets the feeling that he must have been watching her sleep. “I missed you, Pep'" he admits. "So much. I don’t think I’ve ever been this scared, and hell, you know what I’ve done.”
“I’m okay now,” Pepper reassures. She remembers the feeling of foreign hands on her skin and shudders involuntarily. “Well, not really okay, but I’m alive.”
He exhales and closes his eyes for a bit and she thinks maybe he’s falling asleep at last, but then he opens them again. “You got my phone call, right?” he whispers, almost inaudible.
She nods. “I was scared, too. For a minute, I thought they got you.”
“I meant what I said. This whole mess was on me, and I’m sorry.” He talks with a sincerity that she’s barely ever heard of him, that only exists in darkness in the middle of the night after days without sleep, when emotions are raw and exposed, too overwhelming to be kept inside any longer. “I swear that all I ever wanted was to keep you safe. Seems that backfired quite spectacularly. I didn’t catch you―” his voice cracks.
It’s the truth and she doesn’t deny it. But she’s not going to let him get swallowed by the ever-growing guilt in his eyes. “It’s okay, Tony. Luckily, you’re not the only superhero around anymore.”
He nods and swallows. Pepper reaches up and strokes his forehead, his cheeks, lets her hand run over his lips. He smiles a tiny bit and pecks her index finger, then pulls her close against his chest and lets his chin rest on the top of her head.
Pepper has almost fallen back asleep when she hears a loud rumble come from Tony’s stomach. She frowns. “When was the last time you ate anything?”
Tony grunts. “Been a while.”
Now that she thinks about it, Pepper can’t remember the last time she had any food herself either. Definitely not while she was kidnapped, chained to a chair and experimented on. She’s not actually hungry - her stomach is still in knots from nightmares and fear and leftover adrenaline - but she knows what they both need right now.
“Alright. Midnight snack,” she decides.
“Hmm...” Tony squints at her. “But we order in. I don't think I'm getting up from this bed in the next few years.”
“I wasn’t gonna make you.”
“And”—he holds up his index finger—“I want pizza.”
Luckily, being the CEO of a Fortune 500 means that the hotels Pepper stays in have a round-the-clock service that makes getting hold of fresh Italian food at 2am a breeze. She orders pizza, desserts, and painkillers, realising that the dose they gave Tony at the hospital must be wearing off by now.
Pepper accepts the food at the door and then sets the tray down on the mattress. The aroma wafting from the boxes makes her own stomach growl in anticipation. Tony groans when she switches on the light - he’s got a bad headache, from the looks of it – and maneuvers himself into a sitting position with painfully slow movements. He takes the first few bites very carefully, but when his body seems to agree to the food, he digs in with more enthusiasm.
And Pepper knows that they will have to talk about Extremis eventually - about Killian, the mansion, Maya Hansen. She knows that at some point she’ll have to ask Tony how permanent exactly the destruction of his suits is meant to be. And she can sense the answer already, knows that she will be disappointed, but not surprised, knows that she will neither be able to stop him, nor leave him.
But for now, they are just here, sitting together in a hotel bed, bruised, shaken, dead tired, eating pizza instead of turkey for their Christmas dinner. There are no shiny lights, no giant bunnies, no armoured suits. Nothing is as Pepper expected it to be, but, she thinks as Tony steals a piece of mushroom from her pizza with a smirk, if this is the life she must lead now, then so be it. And if they can’t take away each other’s pain, they can at least provide some scraps of comfort.
Between the bites of food, Tony keeps glancing over at her as if to make sure she’s still there. His black eye and the cuts on his eyebrow look gruesome, but at least a bit of colour has returned to his cheeks with his rising level of blood sugar. When the pizza boxes are empty, Pepper sets the tray on the table and they both just lean against each other, quietly, mugs of hot chocolate in their hands.
He falls asleep right there – or maybe just passes out from exhaustion for a few seconds, who knows – and jerks upright when the mug slides out of his hand, spilling hot chocolate all over himself and the bedsheets.
“Great. Just what we needed...” he comments with a broken smile. He tries to clean the stains with a napkin before giving up and simply taking off his sweatpants and t-shirt. The arc reactor is blue and bright below the bruises littering his upper body, and the weird thing is, as ambivalent as Pepper is about everything it signifies, its steady glow is making her feel strangely calm right now.
After all, blue has always been her favourite colour.
“I’m a mess,” Tony sighs when he pulls off the duvet’s cover and realises that the beverage has soaked through it. “You mind sharing?”
He doesn’t say it out loud, because that’s not how they do it. But she can sense his insecurity all the same. He doesn’t even have to say the words, because she knows him, knows the real question he is asking.
Do you still want me? Despite all of this?
“I’m sure we will manage.”
Yes. Always.