Chapter Text
(If you are reading this on any PAY site this is a STOLEN WORK, the author has NOT Given Permission for it to be here. If you're paying to read it, you're being cheated too because you can read it on Archiveofourown for FREE.)
With Obi gone, Pepper was the only one left who knew the truth about Tony. She wouldn't even have been sure he knew if at her job interview Obi hadn't advised her to dye her hair red so that Tony would take her seriously. That hadn't made much sense to her, but the possibility of landing the job certainly seemed worth it- easy enough to go back to blonde later. Whether the hair color had anything to do with it or not, she wasn't sure, but Tony did give her opinions more weight than most people's- far more than he did to S.I.'s board, certainly.
Then Tony made a vulgar pass at her soon after she began working as his P.A. She was considering her alternatives (she was furious, and Tony's defense that he couldn't help himself because of the way she looked made her even angrier; honestly, she had on a downright demure green skirt set over a white silk blouse) when Obi heard the commotion and came into the room. Tony was flitting around her, talking a mile a minute, waving his hands and making her wonder if he was going to stroke out and save her the bother of filing a sexual harassment charge against him when Obi came in, took off his own brown jacket and draped it around her shoulders. She was even more insulted by that, but the instant the coat landed on her, Tony shut up and backed away. He really looked freaked out. He mumbled something that might have been an apology, and fled.
She decided Tony wasn't a sex-maniac, he was just a maniac. She'd heard rumors he wasn't 'all there', but dismissed them as the assumption people made that genius was only a step away from insanity, and Tony was definitely a genius. Pepper was highly intelligent, and she had a hard time following him when he was thinking aloud.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Stane, but I don't think I can continue to work as Mr. Stark's personal assistant."
"Eh, don't be hasty." Obi sighed. "Tony's... special, but he really likes you, and you're doing a great job keeping him focused, not flying off on a million tangents."
"I think Mr. Stark needs someone with an entirely different skill set than mine." She looked at Obi's jacket. "What's this all about?"
"He's... it's a thing with colors. Wear anything other than green and I promise he won't get out of hand like that again." Obi posed dramatically. "My hand to God, Tony is harmless. He just needs a little discipline."
Pepper raised her eyebrows. "I certainly didn't sign on for that!"
Obi chuckled. "No, of course not. Tony... he's like a child, in many ways. No impulse control, but no meanness, either. A red-headed woman in a green dress... it just... it's one of his little quirks."
Pepper should have said no. And really, Obi's generous, no argument, 'I'll write you a check right this moment' settlement for the harassment wasn't the reason she overruled her common sense and stayed. It was the look on Tony's face. He really needed help, and Obi obviously liked the situation the way it was, with Tony dependent on him running interference with the board, and guiding the direction of the company, while Tony globe-trotted, fooled around, and occasionally had fits of manic energy brilliance.
So she stayed, and didn't wear green, and after a few days of Tony looking as if a sharp word would chase him away, they settled into a routine. Tony would dance around at high speed getting into trouble, flirting constantly and taking to bed as many willing women as he could find, then go down to his workshop and potter about until he suddenly ran out of energy. The first time she found him passed out on the garage floor with a bottle just beyond his outstretched hand, she thought he was drunk, but she didn't smell alcohol, and the bottle was an unopened Sunkist Orange soda. He woke up when she shook his shoulder, and seemed disoriented, but kept trying feebly to get to the soda. She snatched up the bottle, opened it and helped him to drink, suddenly worried that he was actually ill. She asked the first thing that came to her mind, "Mr. Stark. Tony! Do you have hypoglycemia?" He didn't answer her, just finished the bottle and dropped it before trying weakly to get up and head for the refrigerator. "Wait! I'll get more."
Halfway through the fourth soda, he paused. "Sorry about that, Potts." He gave her a fair facsimile of his usual grin. "I forgot I'd locked down Dummy until I could find the glitch... you know where he rolls around in circles every time the air conditioning cycles on?"
"So?" Tony looked normal, but that explanation lacked a great deal of relevance.
"Dummy's programmed to bring me a smoothie every two hours." Tony shrugged. "When I'm working I forget."
"Have you seen a doctor? This isn't normal, Mr. Stark." Sometimes he needed the most obvious things pointed out to him.
Tony pushed to his feet. "Stark men are made of iron." He smirked. "That was my dad's motto. But no, really, I'm perfectly healthy, I just need a lot of calories." He shrugged. "Weird metabolism, dad got it checked out when I was a baby." He gulped down the last of the soda and tossed it into the nearest trash basket. "That will be all, Ms. Potts."
And as far as Tony was concerned, that was all. He refused to go to a doctor, he refused to have his blood tested, he refused to talk about it. He wouldn't even tell her what the results had been of the tests done when he was an infant. He was infuriating! But despite everything, she was actually embarrassingly fond of him, so she accepted the fact that if she didn't look after him, no one would.
It wasn't as if she had a life outside of her job anyway. Being a P.A. often entails some extra-business duties, but being Tony's P.A. was like being his secretary, administrator, HR wrangler, media relations agent, transportation and security staff manager, guard dog (all right, bitch, she was honest enough to admit she was very bitchy sometimes when chasing off Tony's one-night stands. She wasn't proud of it, but it got the message across much faster than anything else she'd tried, yes, Tony had sex with you, no, that's not the start of a relationship, if you hang about you're just setting yourself up for humiliation), nutritionist, go-fer, dresser, nurse, cosmetician, conscience, human-to-Tony interpreter, and in general, cat-herder. She was fairly sure she was the best paid P.A. in the world. She was absolutely sure she was worth every penny. And she loved it. The times when she didn't hate it. Mostly she was too busy to think about it.
One day Tony sent her to search for something he absolutely had to have now (he really, really didn't), which he thought was possibly in the basement. The basement was bigger than the rest of the Malibu mansion, and mostly filled with crates marked things like 'Seraphim Tactical Satellite, Mark 1', 'S.F. Anderson to Asimov, signed first editions', 'Ski clothes' and 'Semi-Permiable Membranes, Exp. 1-125'. And that was only the 'S' group. The gadget he wanted wasn't in a crate, he insisted, he was sure he remembered putting it in a box marked 'Torsion bar tool- JD43 suspension setting links (1973 Jaguar Serril E type)'. So she wriggled behind the 'T' crates to the narrow aisle along the 'T' shelves and began hunting half-heartedly around. With any luck, Tony would decide in the next five minutes to work on something else and call down to tell her to give up on the search.
She had her hand on a box a minute later when he called. "Hey, Pep? I found it in the garage. In the trunk of the Jaguar."
"Of course." Pepper sighed and turned to go back when her eye caught sight of a box fallen behind the shelves. Based on the principles of Feng Shui (well, her interpretation) if she ignored it, that would turn out to be the next vital piece in a Tony treasure hunt, after she'd forgot where it was. She picked up a long-handled manipulator and wriggled the box out into the open. The cardboard was an odd gray/brown/green that looked really old. She wiped the dust off the top and read 'Property H. Stark. TONY'. "Oh, Tony, I've found an old box of your father's! It has your name on it."
There was a few second's pause before Tony asked over the intercom, "What's in it?"
Pepper broke the remnant of brittle rubber band around the box and opened it. "Looks like a diary and photo album." She was a bit excited, just a bit.
"Eh, dump it."
"Are you sure, Tony? Don't you even want to look at it first?" She knew she sounded wistful. It just seemed a shame.
"I'm sure. But hey, knock yourself out. There won't be any naked pictures of me on a bearskin, but... if you really want one, I'm sure something can be arranged."
Pepper smiled. "No thank you, Mr. Stark, but I would like to look through the box, if you really don't mind."
"My old man took photos of his inventions and his journals were always lab notes. I've got better stuff of my own. Really don't mind. Read and incinerate, or try decoupage, that was a thing. My mother did it a few times. Have fun, Potts." And then the intercom clicked off.
Pepper thought it would serve Tony right if she did find something sentimental, even if it was only a note about Tony's first tooth, wedged in between experiments, so she decided to take the box home with her and look it over thoroughly at her leisure.
***
The photo album was indeed pictures of Tony as a newborn baby up until he was perhaps four years old. The photos of him as an infant were very nearly clinical. At first there was even a series of him on a scale, and on a white surface with a ruler laid beside him. Pepper reminded herself that Howard Stark had been a scientific genius, too, and he must have loved data as much as Tony. Tony had been a small, slender baby, but apparently as active then as now, judging by the blurs his arms and legs usually were in the photos. Each of the photos was numbered but there were no captions.
She stopped randomly leafing through the photo album and opened the journal. The heading made her freeze. She'd misread the box. It wasn't TONY. It was T.O.N.Y. His name was an acronym. Tesseract One Neonatal (Y-Chromosome variant). Dear God, Tony was right. The journal was lab notes on an experiment. Her hands trembled as she put the journal down. "I need a drink. A strong drink. Possibly more than one."
***
Several gin and tonics later (she didn't have the patience to mix a martini) Pepper returned to the box. If Tony was an experiment then the medical tests Tony had mentioned should be described in the journal, and she'd be able to find out what's wrong... well, what's different about Tony.
Howard Stark was meticulous in his methodology, unlike Tony's random spurts of inspiration. He began by mentioning the Super-soldier program, which had succeeded once, directly before the creator died taking vital secrets of the process with him. There followed a description of the improvements made to 'the subject' and a glossed over account of the search for the body of 'the subject' which resulted in the discovery of something else. Something unique, an object which he described as a 'tesseract- a hyper-cube existing in more dimensions than humanly perceived'. Howard Stark called it the ultimate power source, and more, the ultimate 'truth'. He referred to other notebooks that he'd given to a friend once he'd reached a dead end in studying the Tesseract itself.
But this journal was about the things the Tesseract had told Howard. Pepper felt a chill run down her spine. The Tesseract told him how to build the arc reactor, which apparently functioned in a way similar to the Tesseract but in a lesser way due to... Pepper didn't understand it, and neither did Howard, much to his expressed frustration. According to Howard the Tesseract told him he was incapable of understanding it, of recreating even the fullness of the power potential, which was the smallest part of the Tesseract.
It also told him how to create someone who would eventually be able to understand it. Howard had resisted the idea of human experimentation, but it had reminded him of the Super-soldier program, and convinced him this would be something similar, resulting in an individual whose physical makeup and... destiny?... would combine to complete Howard's life work. Howard kept making objections, this wasn't the same at all, Steve Rogers had been an adult, who had been fully informed of the risks, and chose to participate in the experiment. What the Tesseract urged was prenatal interference with an innocent.
It was like listening to a person arguing with himself. In fact, there were two different sets of handwriting. The 'Tesseract' was bolder, darker, jagged letters almost digging holes in the paper. She read on in horrified fascination as the Tesseract won the argument. It selected Maria Carbonell as the 'egg donor' and 'incubator'. At that point Pepper had to get up and go be sick for a while.
She returned, hands shaking, and resumed reading. Maria had been chosen not only for her genetic contribution, but for her high maternal instinct which the Tesseract said would compensate for the fact that Howard Stark had never intended to have children and had no paternal instincts at all. And for the fact that she was totally malleable to male influence, and could be easily persuaded to accept that Howard knew best and... oh, Pepper needed another drink, she was far too sober to be reading this. No. No, she could do this. This was long in the past, over and done with, and maybe Tony was a bit eccentric, but he was all right, even if his father had been insane, or had multiple personality disorder, which seemed the most likely explanation for the journal.
And then there was a sketch, a very detailed and scientific looking sketch, of a hummingbird, of all things. She blinked. Howard really didn't seem like a bird watcher, or a naturalist of any kind. She read the description below the sketch. The rufous hummingbird is a small hummingbird, with the female being slightly larger than the male. The male practically glows in full sunlight- bright orange on the back and belly and has a vivid iridescent red throat. Females are green backed with rusty flanks and patches in the green tail, and often a spot of orange in the throat. Like all hummingbirds they are promiscuous, and do not form pair bonds at all. They are the most courageous North American hummingbird, relentlessly defending their possessions, whether territories, feeders, or even temporary feeding places on migration, even against hummingbirds twice their size. They are wide-ranging and breed further north than any other hummingbird. There was an added notation in a different color ink. Hummingbirds possess the fastest metabolism of any non-insect Earth species. This, combined with changes to the neural network will provide the subject with the ability to mentally run multiplex and complex calculations simultaneously while extrapolating theoretical avenues towards achieving practical Tesseract technology.
She put the journal down again. Tony's a hummingbird. "Tony's a hummingbird." No, saying it out loud didn't make it any more real. She decided one thing- there was no way she was ever going to tell Tony what was in the journal. Even if this was all in his head, Howard Stark had thought of Tony as an experiment. That would hurt worse than Tony's off-hand remarks about his father being 'too busy' or even 'glad when Tony went to boarding school'.
And if Howard really had been crazy, Tony would wonder if it was inheritable. Sometimes she'd joked about him being crazy, but she didn't mean it.
Once the 'experiment' began, Pepper had to flip past a lot of pages in order to keep from flinging the book across the room. Numbers began to appear after Tony was born, and the text obviously matched up with the photos. Howard had been disappointed. That was obvious.
There had been tests. Pepper skimmed really, really quickly over the details until she got to the results. Tony required a lot more calories than a normal person, but if he was exposed to cool temperatures his body temperature would fall by up to thirty degrees as he went into a metabolic 'torpor'. His heart and breathing rate would also slow along with his basal metabolism, letting him get by on much less energy. Well, that explained why Tony's bedroom was air conditioned like Antarctica any time he didn't have an overnight guest. Except for his high calorie needs there didn't seem to be any obvious health concerns.
Howard had not been pleased, though. He'd been expecting something like an infant Super-soldier, not an undersized, hyperactive, self-absorbed, noisy, demanding creature who required feeding several times an hour at first. Tony didn't sleep more than four hours at a stretch until he was three years old. To make matters worse, Tony didn't speak until he was four. His first sentence was, "I need batt'ry for my circui' board." That was written at the end of the journal, with an exasperated 'about time' added after it and a brief description of the purpose of the circuit board, which was to be hooked up to a light sensing device which Tony had also created from the scraps in Howard's workshop (where Tony wasn't allowed, but he was too small and too fast to keep out) and a light bulb. In effect, he'd designed an automatic night light.
The journal ended there. Pepper wondered if Tony had got his battery.
***
So Pepper became an expert on hummingbirds. She viewed Tonyisms through hummingbird-colored lenses until she believed the journal. When Tony said, 'Gimme a Scotch, I'm starving', she looked up the caloric value of Scotch. At 70 calories per ounce (for the highest proof brands) she understood why that was his favorite. A martini was almost as good. And he never seemed to get drunk- she guessed he just processed it so fast the toxic stage was unnoticeable. For him, alcohol really was food. Hummingbirds couldn't digest alcohol, but if they could, they'd certainly take advantage of a high calorie/low volume source of energy.
He was bright and fast and flawed, annoying and adorable by turns. And he was hers in a way that no one else would ever be.
And then he was gone. Missing, captured, not even dead so she'd know he wasn't suffering. It was hot in Afghanistan, hot and dry. He'd be burning up, starving before their eyes, and they wouldn't even know.
***
"Tony, you need to go to the hospital." Pepper said the moment Tony got into the limo and immediately refused to be sensible. She didn't know how he'd survived, and at this moment she didn't really care. She just wanted to make sure he really was all right. And then he insisted on cheeseburgers and she knew he'd be fine.
In the car she'd tried to help him with the food, since his arm was still in the sling, and she'd seen the light in his chest when his shirt briefly opened. It was... horrible, and alien, and... familiar. "Tony," she whispered. "Is that..."
"Oh. Yeah. Button me up, Pep?" He looked at her with those bright, pleading eyes, and of course she did what he asked. He said, too softly for Happy to overhear. "Miniaturized, using recycled Stark weapons in a freezing cave. Dad would have been so proud." Tony grimaced and bit into another burger. Pepper was quiet, remembering the journal. Howard would have been proud... but of himself, not Tony. And Obi had been Howard's partner. This was what he'd been waiting for all these years. She'd have to keep a closer eye on Tony. Obi would be pressuring him even more.
And then Tony did a direction reversal any hummingbird would be proud of and told the world, and Obi, never forget Obi, that S.I. was out of the weapons manufacturing line. Tony breezed past her and was gone, leaving her mind in a whirl. She barely noticed the reporters and the government agent at her side. Oh, Tony, barely out of one cage, and he was flying into trouble again.
When she saw him in the suit the first time it made her heart sink. Now that he could fight and fly he certainly would. He never had any fear of heights or even the slightest bit of sense about falling. She totally failed to find any usable information on domesticating hummingbirds. They were intelligent, and could form attachments to people, but you really, really couldn't put them in a cage. She looked at the dents in his shiny, shiny red and gold suit, and all she saw were fallen feathers.
***
And then she killed Obi and nearly killed Tony. She tried not to think about Obi and focus instead on Tony being alive and well. Things would be better now. Tony was going to fly and fight to reclaim his possessions, but the U.S. Air Force wouldn't be shooting at him, and sooner or later he'd catch up on all the mislaid inventory- how much could there be? People didn't buy munitions to decorate their playrooms- a lot of it must already be used up. And then Tony could return to being a promiscuous, migratory nectar seeker with Pepper ready to chase off anyone who tried to clip his wings. Sure. Everything would be fine.
***
Pepper was mad at the whole world. Tony NEVER got drunk. She could not imagine how he'd managed that. Maybe something he ate? She was furious at Howard for not leaving a care and feeding manual with Tony. She was angry at Rhodey for indulging Tony's enthusiasm for fighting and WRECKING the WHOLE house. She still remembered what a pain it had been finding contractors able to meet Tony's ridiculous specifications for repairing the damage done by his reckless Iron Man experiments. This... this was a total disaster. On top of the wrecked house, and the horrible publicity, and the lawyers no doubt lined up to complain about injuries caused by drunk guests falling when running away from the mayhem, she had to take on the U.S. AIR FORCE to at least make sure they didn't reverse-engineer the suit that Rhodey got away with.
AND she had to make sure Tony's ego-fest Exposition went well, and... just everything. Natalie was remarkably efficient and helpful, and explained that she hadn't been flirting with Mr. Stark, she just thought he'd been depressed lately, and she was trying to cheer him up for his birthday. Pepper had to admit that was true, and if it was just that Natalie was ambitious, well, Natalie would do better working as Pepper's P.A. than Tony's. Maybe you couldn't tame a hummingbird, but you could decide what flowers were in his garden.
Tony showed up to make noises that didn't sound like an apology, or anything else sensible, and she just DID NOT have time. Maybe he had mixed-up instincts, but he did not have to make life so HARD for her and there was no way she could explain it to get through to his damn bird-brain!
***
Hammer was unbelievable. She wondered if his parents had played with bird genes, only in his case, maybe they'd crossed with a domestic turkey. One of those fat-assed white birds that had all the intelligence bred out of them. He strutted like a turkey, and gobbled like one. She didn't like the look of his display, robots based on guesswork from seeing Iron Man in action. Tony wasn't going to like it, either. Who had given Hammer a slot, anyway? Heads were going to roll.
And then. Of course. Tony had to fly in, colors blazing, to defend his territory. In this case, though-- Hammer, and Rhodey in the stolen suit, dancing in Tony's Expo? Yeah, she was pretty hot under the collar about that too.
And then everything went to hell. Hammer was lucky Natalie, who turned out to be some sort of enforcement agent, took him down, because Pepper would have nailed him with a spike heel in the gonads. She was sick of being CEO for a company that got involved with homicidal lunatics on a regular basis.
"YOU'RE DYING?" Pepper couldn't believe it. Tony thought he could hand her his company and she wouldn't notice when he died? She was so going to demand that he sit still long enough to tell her what happened, and how it was fixed, and make sure it was NEVER going to happen again. How could she live without Tony to bitch at and care for and protect from the world, and laugh at him, and smile when he's being ridiculous and go all warm and hot and bothered when he's working and all grace and power and pure masculine hotness... oh, God, she doesn't think of him as a pet, or a child and those are not loyal employee or even motherly feelings. She was so doomed. She'd kept her hair red so Tony's instinct would make him pay attention to her, but she'd forgot that he didn't have to do anything but be himself to keep her eyes on him as he glittered around her.
She stumbled outside of the pavilion, and did her best to make sure everyone was being taken care of. There was a smashed robot in front of her. Everything was overturned and nothing made sense.
The robot started... doing something. Pepper stared at it curiously.
And then Iron Man landed in front of her, grabbed her and launched. There were explosions, bright lights, cool metal arms holding her as they raced through the night, chased by death. They landed on a roof and Tony ditched his helmet. He was wide-eyed and jittery, bruised and battered and, oh, so very bright. And so infuriating. She shouted at him. He was defensive. And then they were kissing. And she wasn't wearing green. And it wasn't weird. It really wasn't.
Maybe she'd go back to blonde. She didn't think she needed to attract Tony's attention any longer.