Chapter Text
2001
Pepper’s first year of working as Tony’s assistant had a steep learning curve: all the things he was supposed to do, all the things he did regardless. What she could talk him out of - not much - and what she could talk him into - more than she’d thought. Stark had a lot of eccentricities and issues but Pepper generally considered them to be beyond her jurisdiction. She wasn’t there to nanny him, so if he wanted to live his entire life as a frat boy, that was fine.
The name ‘Darcy Lewis’ first cropped up in the spring, when JARVIS’ calendar made mention of her upcoming birthday. There were no tasks pending for it, nor a reminder alert. It was just there. There weren’t many birthdays in Tony’s calendar, and those that were there were almost always forgotten anyway. There was his parents’, Col Rhodes’, and Obadiah’s birthdays. People who meant something more than business or flattery to Tony. But Pepper hadn’t ever heard of anyone Lewis. Inquiring with JARVIS, Pepper found that Darcy Lewis was a young girl living in Sacramento with her mother and grandparents. She had been in the local paper recently for winning a prize on a school history project, and on her next birthday would turn twelve years old. Oh, and the fact that she was Tony Stark’s illegitimate daughter.
Pepper couldn’t really say she was surprised; she’d dreaded the inevitability that she’d have to help Stark deal with a paternity lawsuit. What startled her was the age of the girl - Tony had been only nineteen when Darcy was born - and the fact that she seemed to be none the worse for her father’s party-hearty lifestyle. In fact, there was very little that connected Darcy Lewis and Tony Stark at all. After discovering this, Pepper made a nuisance of herself by trying to get Tony to acknowledge and admit to her that he had a daughter. She tried asking about birthdays she should be shopping for, tried questioning him when he told her to keep days free. He gave her odd looks at some of the things she said, but never came out and said it. She, rather cheekily, looked into Tony’s personal finances to see if he had sent something on his own, but no. There were regular child support payments to Darcy’s mother but nothing obvious that would suggest Tony had taken any interest in being part of his kid’s life. Eventually, at the end of a long day and just as she was about to head home, Pepper was forced to be blunt.
“You need to sign your daughter’s birthday card,” she said, sliding a Hallmark card and a pen across the bar towards him.
Tony froze over the drink he was mixing. He raised his eyes to hers slowly, and stared suspiciously at her. Pepper held firm, did not look away, and said nothing. Tony looked from her, down to the card and back again.
“Who told you? Rhodes?”
“JARVIS, actually. It was in your calendar,” Pepper said, trying to remain as pleasant and unthreatening as possible. Like this was just something that happened in every professional relationship, every office was aware of each other’s illegitimate children and it was no big deal.
“Right,” he conceded and took the card, not letting up in the evaluation of Pepper’s motivation. He was still unsure about how to handle this, a little nervous even. He quickly scribbled in the card and sealed it in the envelope, preventing Pepper from reading it, then pushed it back across the bar to her.
“Thank you,” she said, brightly, “was there anything you wanted to buy for her?”
He made an apathetic face, “Honestly, teenage girls are not exactly my set - for which you should be eternally grateful, by the way - so your guess is as good as mine.”
“Well, what have you gotten her before?”
“Uhh…”
“The last record for Miss Lewis indicates you transferred two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to her trust fund at the end of the last quarter,” JARVIS recited.
“There you go,” Tony shrugged, “What can’t a kid do with another quarter of a million?”
Pepper was appalled. She hadn’t really expected to find that Stark cosied up to his kid every other weekend and braided her hair, but it was as if he knew nothing about her at all and didn’t care to either. She dreaded to think how the poor girl felt about her father, “So… have you ever given her a gift before?”
“Um, the gift of anonymity?” he offered, “financial security? The gift of life? I don’t know.”
“So, no?”
“No,” he said in a clipped tone.
“And you don’t think there’s anything wrong with that?”
“Remind me again how this is your call, Miss Potts? Oh, right, it’s not.”
There was no missing the defensive tone, but it meant the walls were well and truly up. Pepper’s heart sank a little and her shoulders dropped, “Will that be all, Mr Stark?”
“That will be all, Miss Potts.”
She swiped the card from the bar, half tempted to open it to make sure he hadn’t written anything too insensitive, and couldn’t resist adding sardonically, “I’m sure it’ll be fine. If you’ve never sent anything before, she won’t be disappointed. Goodnight Mr Stark.”
Pepper strode out the door and did not see the stricken look on Tony’s face.
She was unable to get Darcy Lewis out of her head all evening. She stared at the peach envelope of Darcy’s card all through dinner. She’d have to post it tomorrow, and it was probably less conspicuous if it went with Pepper’s own personal mail rather than Tony’s. As she sat trying to watch tv, her eyes kept darting over to the card propped up on the sideboard with her fingers tapping on her wine glass. She couldn’t quite articulate why it bothered her so much. Tony made some pretty distasteful choices that she mostly managed to tolerate, but her mind just didn’t want to let this one slide. She’d seen all the newsreels and read all the press about Howard Stark but she knew that, behind closed doors, the relationship between Howard and Tony had not been the best. It gave her a heavy, guilty feeling to think that Tony and Darcy would be just the same, if not worse. Okay, this girl was probably better off for not having to watch her father get drunk and bring home multitudes of women. But did that really mean she should never know Tony at all? Or that Tony should not know her? Despite his glaring flaws, Pepper liked Tony, she knew there was plenty good in him. He was just not good at people. Like an under-socialised cat. Tony didn’t have the first clue how to go about being a good father, she realised. But the onus to fix that was hardly on a twelve-year-old girl, so Pepper was going to take it upon herself to be the go-between.
With a surge of energy, she opened up her laptop, determined that Darcy would receive a birthday gift from her father whether he liked it or not. Tony might have said it was not her business but she was making it her business. Pepper certainly didn’t consider it wrong to disregard Tony’s instructions for the benefit of a child.
Having sent an email full of politely worded total lies, Pepper sat back and took an extra large gulp of wine. She hoped Tony wouldn’t fire her for the audacity, it was sort of what he’d hired her for in the first place. And she wondered if Darcy would send anything back, a thank you note maybe. A father’s day card was probably wishing for too much. Even just a phone call or an email, to let Tony know he could close the distance. She forced to the back of her mind the thought of Darcy’s mother returning the gift unopened and telling Tony to keep away. It might break her heart, even if not Tony’s.
But the conversation had apparently flipped a switch in Tony’s brain. The next day she found him down in the workshop, without having gone to bed, staring at a bunch of photographs scattered all over the desk. Next to the framed one of Tony and his father there lay a series of school pictures from the last seven years or so, spread in a rough timeline, showing a dark-haired girl go from a gap-toothed kindergartener to a sixth grader starting to shape into a teenager. Darcy had inherited a subtle resemblance to her father; hair, nose, cheekbones. Different eyes, and full, pink lips.
“She looks like you,” Pepper said, gently touching her hand to his shoulder. He peered up at her, sleep-deprived, emotionally drained, and hungover.
“Her mom sent them to me,” he said hoarsely, “Chri…. Kar… Kerry. I never really looked at them much.”
Over Tony’s shoulder she could see a trail of discarded envelopes, leading back to an open drawer where the pictures had been stuffed unceremoniously over the years.
“I probably overstepped the mark,” Pepper admitted, “with what I said yesterday. I’m sorry.”
Tony frowned, “you were right, though. Doing a pretty shit job there, Stark. I figured if I kept my distance, she wouldn’t… history wouldn’t repeat itself. But it does. You said she… she wouldn’t be… disappointed,” he choked up a little and sniffed it back, “But she will be. It sucks. Every year, hoping this time it’ll be different. And when it’s not, you feel stupid for getting your hopes up,” he swallowed thickly, “I guess we finally found something I don’t know how to fix.”
“Well…” Pepper started, sure she was just as unqualified for this as Tony, “maybe start with little things, um…”
“Like a birthday card?” he asked, a small and bitter laugh escaping him, “Okay, so… you’re a girl, woman, what would a girl want for her twelfth birthday from her deadbeat billionaire father? A pony? Is that too much?”
Pepper coughed awkwardly, “I might have taken the liberty of pulling some strings at Apple. They owed us one for that protective casing alloy… so I tactfully asked that they reciprocate with an advance on one of their new mp3 players. Won’t be out until the fall. I didn’t tell them who it was for.”
Tony looked at her with a smile tugging at his lips, “oh you’re a keeper.”
After that, with Darcy’s card and gift already wending their way to her, Tony seemed to be mostly content to let the whole thing lie. Occasionally, Pepper would catch him with a forlorn expression as he eyeballed the mail she brought in but nothing was ever said. It was several weeks until any of it arose again, with the arrival of a small card. It featured a pair of dogs - puppy and adult pugs - and was written in looping handwriting with flowers over the i’s:
“Thanks for the iPod, it’s awesome! Happy Father’s Day, from Darcy :)”
It wasn’t much and Tony tried to downplay how attached he suddenly became to a greetings card, but Pepper saw the way he held on to it for far longer than was necessary, rubbing his thumb across the writing. But it was an enormous step in a really good direction.
“So what next?” Tony asked with a cough, “It has a smiley face, look, Pep. That means I’m in, right? She’s not telling me to go suck a bag of dicks so… do we invite her for Christmas?”
‘I think she’ll want to spend Christmas with her mom, Tony. Why don’t you invite her for the summer?”
“Uh… all summer? Wait, shit, like this summer?” Tony winced.
“Okay, maybe that’s too much, too soon. Especially if you’re not going to cut down the cussing at all,” Pepper conceded, “Thanksgiving? It can only be for a few days. What would you normally do for Thanksgiving?”
“Get drunk and watch tv with Rhodey…”
“Well, then, maybe for a change you don’t do that and have Darcy over. You guys can just hang out and get to know each other a bit. I’m sure Colonel Rhodes won’t mind.”
Pepper whirled around and got on with the rest of her day, making a mental note to find a phone number for Darcy’s mother and set it right in front of Tony so he couldn’t delegate the invitation. He watched her walk away and muttered, “we’re still inviting Rhodey too, right?”
It took some cajoling, and some stern glaring with arms folded, but Pepper did manage to get Tony to call Kerry Lewis and ask his daughter to come out for Thanksgiving. Darcy’s mother had been surprised and uncertain about his motives. There had been a thick silence as Tony listened on the phone, before choking out, “hey, kiddo…”
Tony’s first conversation with his daughter was not long, and not deep. He was visibly nervous, and blurted out his invitation with faux-nonchalance, “so you wanna come hang out with your old man for the holidays?”
He must have been met with a positive response, and he kept up a string of ‘yeah’ and ‘uh-huh’ before assuring Darcy that he would take care of all her travel arrangements. Which naturally meant that Pepper would be taking care of them instead. Tony signed off with an awkward goodbye and hung up, staring at the phone for a long time.
“Well?” Pepper prompted.
“Yeah, we’re a-go,” Tony tapped his fingernails on the counter, still processing the whole thing. He offered nothing else and decided that this new, paternal avenue in life needed more contemplation. In the workshop. He practically barricaded the doors and holed up for hours, only letting Pepper in when she brought up matters strictly not related to Thanksgiving. And the ‘head in the sand’ routine continued for even longer; Tony only talked about his daughter’s visit when Pepper needed practical decisions, like which bedroom she was going to sleep in, dealing with caterers ahead of time. Tony could cook up all sorts of things but dinner was not one of them, and there wasn’t enough money in the world to make Pepper do it.
And Obadiah wasn’t helping. He kept whispering in Tony’s ear about this, that and the other thing that should be kept out of sight of teenagers, like he expected a twelve-year-old girl to execute a corporate takeover or something. Don’t let Darcy into the workshop, it’s dangerous. Don’t let Darcy into the office, there’s sensitive information. Stane even managed to wrangle Tony into an early meeting at Stark Industries, leaving Pepper to take Darcy if she wanted to go Black Friday shopping. Pepper had no clue if Darcy even liked shopping.
Her only real ally in this was Colonel Rhodes. As much as Rhodey could, and often did, go along with Tony’s shenanigans, he was getting a much better handle on this fatherhood deal. Sort of. Vicariously. On Tony’s behalf. He thought it was a great idea, and couldn’t wait to meet Darcy. Rhodey was the one to help Pepper make sure there were at least some age-appropriate movies on offer and impress upon Tony that B-Movie Horror Night was not family entertainment, a phrase which garnered a shudder from Stark.
Around the start of November, Tony also decided he didn’t want to go drive to the airport and collect Darcy for fear of being recognised. Pepper stopped short, since he never usually shied away from the spotlight, but he insisted that it was ‘in Junior’s best interest’ and could Pepper please pick her up instead. Which was how she found herself waiting in a crowded airport on one of the busiest days of the whole year.
“I don’t like this,” Happy muttered, “too many people, too much traffic.”
Pepper remained stubbornly silent, Happy had been grumbling all day about getting through busy airport traffic, and to respond would only encourage him. She knew he had everyone’s best interests at heart but it was also seriously annoying. The plan had been to arrive in the airport only moments before Darcy did, but that was shot down when Darcy’s flight had been delayed. Not by too long but enough that they were still left waiting in arrivals, and Happy was certain someone with a camera would spot them picking up a young girl and make a fuss about it.
A steady stream of bustling people headed out from baggage claim, all frantic and eager to get out of the airport and find their families. Pepper leaned up onto her tip-toes just a bit, suddenly worried Darcy would not see them. As the crowd flowed past them, Pepper caught a glimpse of dark hair and pale skin. And then she laid eyes on Tony Stark’s daughter; a girl who would stand no higher than her father’s chin. She wore braces and thick glasses, and looked much older than twelve. She was peering up, trying to see past all the people in front of her, looking uncertain and walking slower than the rest of the crowd.
Pepper elbowed Happy in the side, he grunted and alertly held up the piece of paper with Darcy’s name on it for her to find. She approached them still at a timid pace, with her eyes darting around them to scan the faces of the other people gathered to collect their loved ones. Her sneakers squeaked on the floor as she came to a stop in front of them, and she gave Pepper a wholly unconvincing smile, “my dad’s not here, is he?”
Darcy was already prepping herself for disappointment and Pepper tried hard not to show she noticed, “No, but he’s waiting for you back at the house. He sent us to pick you up instead. I’m Pepper, and this is Happy, he’s the driver.”
Darcy looked sceptically at Happy, who was hyper-focused and twitchy, and couldn’t seem to help herself from commenting, “are you really, though?”
“I would be if we weren’t about to get snarled up in holiday traffic,” he replied, looking at Pepper instead of Darcy.
But Pepper paid him no mind, determined to be optimistic, “are you ready to go, Darcy? Your dad will be looking forward to seeing you.”
Darcy nodded unenthusiastically and shuffled after Pepper and Happy. She had only brought a backpack as luggage and refused to let Happy carry it for her, which only made him more ansty. They did indeed get caught up in traffic, and Pepper sent Tony a text to let him know. He didn’t respond, so Pepper was forced to either make gentle conversation with Darcy or stay silent for the entire ride. Darcy, for her part, gave perfectly congenial answers but was equally happy to stare out of the tinted windows. She peered down the LA streets and Pepper offered to take her shopping, making sure to phrase it in such a way that did not specifically include or exclude Tony.
Eventually they pulled up into the front driveway. Darcy climbed out of the car without waiting for Happy to open the door, and she spent a good few minutes gawping at the house and its gorgeous setting. The front hall was empty, she could see the tv was on in the sitting area but there was no-one there. There was terse whispering from around a corner and a clunk of a glass on a countertop, then Tony was shoved into view. Pepper saw Rhodey’s quickly retreating arm go back around the corner to the bar. Both Darcy and Tony stood stock still, staring nervously at each other. Tony began fidgeting anxiously with his hands.
“Hey, kid.”
“Hey, Dad.”
Tony smiled with a distinct edge of panic and discomfort, “yup, that’s uh… that’s me. Good flight?”
She shrugged, “it was short.”
Then the pair of them just stood, looking at each other with no idea what came next. Pepper suggested that Tony show his daughter her room, which alleviated none of the discomfort whatsoever. With her backpack set down on the bed Darcy shed her coat, revealing a battered Captain America t-shirt that Tony looked down at with barely concealed contempt. Darcy grew nervous under her father’s staring and folded her arms over her chest.
“So… yeah…” Tony mumbled, averting his gaze to anywhere but his daughter, “how’s things… how’s school?”
“It’s okay. It’s school.”
“Yeah. You get to the bit where they let you set stuff on fire yet?”
“Uh, I don’t know. I’m not really into science. I managed to set the sprinklers off in Home Ec but they gave me detention for that.”
Tony nodded and managed a weak smile, “not a scientist then?”
“Nah. I like history, though. I won a thing last semester.”
“Yeah, I saw that. Good for you.”
It was like watching a car run out of gas and splutter to a halt, and it was agonising. It was just the worst luck that Tony and Darcy would have so little in common. Pepper turned to go back downstairs and father and daughter hastily followed her. At the bottom of the stairs, they found Colonel Rhodes, and Pepper quickly introduced them in the hopes of taking some of the pressure off Tony.
“You can call me Rhodey,” he said, offering his hand to shake, “I help keep Tony outta trouble, most of the time anyway.”
Darcy shook his hand but remained shy and quiet.
“You want a soda? Or something else,” Rhodey asked, and beckoned Darcy to come look behind the bar for something she’d like. Tony followed along behind them, like a puppy with no direction. Or maybe he was hoping to pick up tips from Rhodey, since Darcy seemed to warm to the Colonel far easier than she had to her father. Rhodes spoke to her like an adult, just shooting the breeze with someone new, rather than the awkward, terrified conversations from earlier. Just as Pepper thought Darcy was going to relax, following Rhodey’s friendly lead, Obadiah strode in from the hallway, full of cheer and giving Darcy the bright and confident treatment usually reserved for investors.
“So, this must be the guest of honor, huh? The little lady settling in alright?” he said, patting Darcy on the back heavily. Darcy looked at him like he’d walked in with a beard full of Christmas lights but Obie took no notice, “Let’s get dinner on the table, shall we?”
The result was the most awkward Thanksgiving dinner Pepper had ever experienced. Stane was far too genial and treated Darcy like she was a lost Russian princess. Tony was uncommonly quiet from his seat at the head of the table, trying to subtly stare at his daughter and casting acidic looks at her t-shirt. Darcy asked Rhodey some rather piercing questions regarding the invasion of Afghanistan for a middle-schooler. And Pepper drank a lot of wine. Next year they were so getting takeout.