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Tony is a volatile person.
He tries not to be, because he knows - God, he knows - the people around him deserve better. He just… gets angry a lot. And he tries to handle it. He should be able to handle it.
But it rises to the surface in less than seconds and burns him from the inside out - and he knows his response isn’t proportionate, especially not when it stems from a comment that should have been innocent, or a joke that he could have handled on a better day, or a well-meaning piece of advice, but he can’t help it . Even when he clenches his fists and his jaw and succeeds in not actually resorting to violence or saying something unforgivable, it still generally results in scathing remarks. He then turns those insults into nicknames and jokes and tries to turn people’s view of him into funny but rude instead of downright asshole, which succeeds most of the time (but might explain why his public image is somewhat… disjointed) . Those closest to him have either left him or accepted that part of him at this point. Most have left. He tries to make it up to the rest with gifts - money, things or inventions, depending on the person in question - and hopes for the best.
He also tries to tell himself that people don’t deserve his frustration when they don’t understand him or can’t keep up - hell, he’s always been classified as a genius, an abnormality, and he knows (in theory) that he’s the outlier, not them. He can’t quite get around that one, though, so he gave Pepper the company and has been alone in his own lab since about 2009. He’s not always sure that’s a functional solution, but he imagines it’s better than the alternative. It works most of the time. Sometimes, he gets lonely, which makes him angry, which means that day is lost to him and he’ll have to try again another day. He keeps his bots around for company, though, because any fault of theirs is a fault in his programming and if he doesn’t want to live with their faults anymore he can always fix them.
He tried therapy, after the battle of New York. Two different times, actually. It didn’t work out, unfortunately - he gave up his second therapist when she couldn’t keep up with him. Or possibly when he got tired of trying to explain things to an outsider. One of those.
He gets angry when he drinks, too. A little bit of alcohol has always made him relax - a glass of wine or two, or a large splash of whiskey, or a colorful drink at a summer party. He’s at his very best at low inebriation - he’s funnier, more allowing, more inviting, better at negotiating, friendlier. He wants to be that person more often - preferably all of the time. He’s come to realize, though, that inevitably, regardless of context, he won’t stop at those initial glasses. (He guesses that makes him some sort of alcoholic, even though he doesn’t drink every day or even every week, but he’s never quite scrounged up enough courage to look up any definitions.) And so it follows that inevitably, he ends up making bad decisions of (in a best case scenario) drinking himself into oblivion, joining someone in their hotel room for a bad but enthusiastic fuck, or vomiting his guts out over a staircase railing somewhere - or (in a worst case scenario) that he seeks out harder drugs, or ends up in a fist fight over some apparent insult he won’t even remember come morning. Hell, he’s not entirely sure he hasn’t gone around sexually harrassing people when in that state, because he wouldn’t put it past himself. And always, regardless of what kind of bad decisions he’s made the previous night, he wakes up the day after with guilt swelling in his throat to the point of nausea, and he’s always furious .
All in all, he reminds himself of Howard, and he can’t stand it. He never wanted to turn out like him, and it kills him that apparently he couldn’t stop it.
Because here he stands, palm smarting, with the last heat of his anger doused by ice-cold shock, and he sees the feeling mirrored in Pepper’s slack jaw, her mouth slightly open.
Her hand slowly rises to cover her cheek, already reddening, and he can’t breathe.
She can, though - she breathes now, a deliberate, steady kind - an inhale to prepare -
- and whatever she’s going to say, he can’t hear it. He can’t .
He turns and leaves instead.
“Tony”, she says hoarsely, but he doesn’t stop until he’s in the elevator, pushing three buttons on random when he finds his throat too constricted to tell FRIDAY where to take him but needing to get away away away .
She doesn’t follow.
He wouldn’t have known what to do if she had.
He ends up on one of the conference floors, the kind where all the rooms have windows for walls and every piece of furniture is sleek and white, and it is not in any way what he’d aimed for, but he can’t do anything about it now.
“Leave”, he rasps to the group of people in tailored suits in one of the rooms, not able to care whether they stare, or laugh, or whether they can see straight through him. “ Get the fuck out. ”
They get the fuck out, and Tony can collapse on the floor with his back to a window, floor-to-ceiling, overlooking Manhattan and letting the spring sun in.
The day is beautiful, he has time to notice, before turning his back on it.
“JARVIS”, he gasps, then starts again, “FRIDAY, shutters”, and FRIDAY obligingly makes every window gray and opaque.
Tony is a volatile person, which means that when he single-handedly just ruined his life, he can only sit gasping for air with his heart beating so fast it almost jumps out of his chest for thirty-four seconds.
Then, because he was going to implode , he has to get up to overthrow every piece of furniture in the room, throw the chairs into the gray windows and only become angrier at the lack of breakage, and scream until his vocal chords won’t obey him anymore.
Falling back down, sitting in the wreckage of what used to be a conference room, he wishes he was human enough to cry.
She sits down at the kitchen island, and wonders what to do now.
The rules say that she walks. Straight out, no regrets, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.
Her own rules say that she walks. Because she’s told him she would.
She’s gotten to know him far better than most, possibly better than anyone else except maybe James Rhodes, over the past ten or eleven years.
She knows his best sides. Tony, who remembers something she said once, in passing, that she liked or admired - a painting by a specific artist, or a flavor of ice cream - and half a year later took her to a grand gallery opening by a now beyond thrilled artist, or fetched her that exact tub from the freezer when she comes home from a late night flight craving something sweet. Tony, who has just the right kind of dry and sarcastic humor to always make her laugh, even when it’s sometimes deeply inappropriate - who can raise a single eyebrow to something in a meeting referencing one of their numerous inside jokes and she will have to force the corners of her mouth to stop twitching. Tony, who gifted her a company, because she wanted to run it and he believed she could. Tony who knows her quirks and bad sides and loves her anyway, or perhaps because of them.
She thought she knew his worst, because she’s seen him at some godawful lows. One of those lows was about half a year after the Malibu house and the Mandarin and Extremis, when they’d relocated permanently to New York, and Tony was in a terrible mood. Pepper assumed at the time that it was a combination of being desperately homesick for California but trying to hide it, the fact that he’d recently quit his therapist because she couldn’t keep up with him and felt like it was a failure to quit, and that he hadn’t slept properly for about a week. She assumes now that it had been nightmares that kept him up - most likely either about the wormhole over New York or she herself falling, because God knows she dreams about that too. But she hadn’t quite known at the time how deeply either had affected him, and so she thought it was plain pigheadedness keeping him in his lab at all hours, building a back-up suit not quite six months after he’d destroyed all but one as a gesture, as a promise to her.
And so she had lost her temper, after that week, because even though she acts as if she’s even-tempered and patient that is only part of it, not all that she is - and Tony had yelled, and she had yelled right back, and he had, with dark eyes and thin mouth and what looked like ice-cold, collected fury, yelled again and then swept everything off of his lab table in one forceful move, silencing her with the sudden sound of metal parts, tools, a laptop and two or three coffee mugs crashing to the floor not two feet from her.
Nothing of what had flown off the table and broken touched her - it flew into the wall to her right, and stopped rolling in front of her feet, and littered the floor in front of her in a shape like a fan. It stopped clinking and rattling and the lab was completely silent.
She didn’t move, and Tony didn’t move, and nothing else happened.
And yet, her heartbeat picked up pace, and her mouth was suddenly dry, and she was able to say nothing. So she left his lab on knees weaker than she would have anticipated, and he didn’t call her back.
They had spent the rest of the day apart, but that evening, as she sat in the sofa in her pajama pants and Tony slowly walked in with dark circles under his eyes but a soft, vulnerable look in them, she had said: “Tony”, and he sat down on the other sofa, at least ten feet away from her, as if he didn’t dare come closer.
She knew then that he would never forgive himself for frightening her.
She had practiced what to say beforehand, because that is the kind of person she is. And she said it softly, because she knew how it would cut. But it had to be said.
“I want to be with you”, she said then. “I do. I love you.”
“I know.”
“If something like that happens again, Tony, I’ll have to get out.”
“I know.”
And he looked wrecked, and solemn, and she believed him.
She said: “You need to find another therapist.”
He inhaled sharply and looked away.
“Tony.”
“It won’t work, Pep”, he said. “I’m just…”
She thinks she heard all he didn’t say.
“It has to work. You can fix anything. Make it work.”
He looked back at her then, and there was something desperately sad all around him, almost tangible, and he eventually said: “Okay.”
They went to sleep after that, with their limbs tangled up, pressed closely against each other, both drawing comfort from another solid body against theirs.
She wishes for that now, but knows she can’t have it. She couldn’t, now.
Tony probably couldn’t, either.
It is not yet two in the afternoon, and she wishes it was later so that she could pour herself a glass of wine, for something to do with her hands. She runs one of them through her hair instead and sighs, and if it is a bit shaky, who could blame her, really.
One of the worst parts is, she thinks, how much she aches for Tony’s sake.
Because she knows that if he’ll never forgive himself for frightening her, three years ago, the same can be said for hitting her, and as the sin is greater, so will his punishment of himself be. He will feel awful, right about now, and she doesn’t quite know what to do about that fact.
Her cheek has stopped hurting.
And yet, and yet.
She decides it is late enough for a glass of wine after all. There is an opened bottle of dry Riesling in the fridge, because Tony insisted she should have a glass yesterday if she wanted, even if he wouldn’t join her in drink. She sips slowly, once back on the bar stool at the kitchen island, and hums slightly in approval at the taste. She’s developed quite a taste for good wines ever since she first began sharing Tony’s apartment.
So much in her current life is as it is because of Tony Stark, really.
The way she dresses, the way she does business, the furniture she has in their apartment at the Avengers Tower, her favorite TV shows and most of her inside jokes. Her favorite vacation spots, most of which she never could have afforded before Tony, but most importantly - most of which she never knew existed before Tony, and therefore wouldn’t know to like.
Even her name, she reflects, is his doing - before she took the job as his assistant, she was Virginia, or Vin. Now everyone but her parents, including her sister, calls her Pepper.
And she likes it all. She likes who she is, these days - Pepper Potts, CEO of Stark Industries, confident, comfortable, calm. Tony’s girlfriend, and he still introduces her to people like he can’t quite believe she answers to that title, like she is a wonder, like she is the best thing that ever happened to him.
They took a break, earlier this year, after he came home from Sokovia battered and bruised and guilt-ridden and despairing, when she couldn’t stop watching news clips from the city falling from the sky.
She knew exactly who had built all those robots they fought in Sokovia and she doesn’t doubt in the slightest that he’d had good intentions building them, the best of intentions - but he had promised her no more suits , no more excess, only what was necessary and he’d blown them all up like fireworks before her eyes. And then he’d built something that wasn’t suits, so he hadn’t broken any promises, but she saw he knew that was only technicalities, he knew what he had promised and this was not it. He didn’t say anything when she packed two bags and carefully brought her favorite coffee cup, the one that felt like home. He never called to ask her to come back, not once, and all their conversations about practicalities and business were extremely polite and their break impacted no one but them.
So she knows what it feels like, leaving, because she’s done it before. She knows it breaks her in half.
She knows the longing will set in her bones like an ache, because she’s lived it. She loves him, so much , and the only reason she bore it before was because they agreed to a break, not a break-up, and she knew a break was good for them both, really.
Her thoughts won’t still enough for her to figure out whether a break-up would be good for them both, too.
She empties the wine glass and pours another.
She’d get to keep everything she wanted even if she left, if she wanted to - the business, the art, her way too flashy car that she nonetheless loves, even the apartment, should she want to, because Tony will never, ever begrudge her anything and he will feel it is justified.
It’s never been about the things , though. Not even about her career and her position at SI, which she admittedly can’t see herself without just now.
It’s always been about Tony.
And she knows - she knows she knows she knows - she shouldn’t feel conflicted. She told him she’d walk, and so she should. She’s read up on abusive relationships, and she did so again after the incident in Tony’s lab a few years before, and she knows this is how they start.
She aches - for herself, for him, for them - and she knows she must leave.
She knows, now, as she takes another sip of her wine, that she will not.