quigonejinn

montana_crows, homfg. Wrote me Tony/Obadiah fisting fic for my birthday. It's transcendentally hot. It's wrong. It's transcendentally hot and wrong. I'd link to it right here and tell you to go read it except she hasn't fucking posted it and she needs to and oh FUCK.

Instead, you people get this.

Anthony Edward Stark doesn't go to MIT until he turns eighteen. After his parents die, he doesn't spend two years wandering around the globe, doing every drug, drink, and warm-ish body in sight. He has his wild period, true, and he's still more than a little wild, but at twenty-eight, he marries a beautiful, intelligent woman who adores him. They have children together. It's a good life.

On December 19, 1977, though, Tony is five years old. It's winter in New York, and it's raining. Obadiah turns to the small person next to him.

"Well, Anthony?" Obadiah has an umbrella in his hand.

Tony swallows hard, looks at the backhoe pouring dirt on his parents' graves. He says nothing, but Obadiah stands with him in the rain for a little longer. Then, he puts his hand on Tony's shoulder, and together, they go back to the car. Obadiah tells the driver to take them home; Tony is shivering and blue from the cold. Obadiah tells the driver to turn the heat all the way up, as high as it'll go, so that Tony can get warm.

...

Obadiah is substantially more involved in Tony's life than Howard ever was.

...

As a result, Tony doesn't go to MIT until he's eighteen, and by the time Tony is eighteen, Jim Rhodes is a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force, so they don't meet until Stark Industries gets assigned Jim as its liaison. In college, Tony doesn't have that need, that hunger to make a human connection: he cultivates a wide circle of acquaintances, but he's seasoned. He knows what he wants out of life; he'll have sex with anything that chases after him and drink anything put into his hand, but he spends his initiative in the lab, working.

"Workaholic," his senior project supervisor describes him. "Tony works harder than three grad students put together."

Obadiah gets up in front of the crowd at the Apogee Awards and talks about how the greatest thing about Tony is also the worst. He's always working. Everybody laughs because it is startlingly and utterly true, and they know it. For a man as rich as Tony is, for a man who has that many awards and admiration and magazine covers, he's always working. Always in the lab. He works on fourteen things at a time for his company.

...

Still, despite all the time he spends in the lab, Tony is a man of the world, and it takes a lot to rattle him or make him nervous. Pepper can count on her hands the things that make her boss nervous, but she decides that no, it's not nervousness. Impatience, maybe. That's what the hand opening and closing into a fist means; that's what the look that sweeps over her, but doesn't actually see her, means.

At thirty-three, Anthony Edward Stark gets divorced from his wife, Anne Elizabeth Carter. They have two children, a son aged four, and a just-born daughter. The official reason is that they have irreconcilable differences; the slightly-more-in-the-know reason is that Tony can't keep it in his pants around women. The gossip column blind item is that Tony can't keep it in his pants around either men or women and, just for the hell of it, with the non-blind and barely related item just prior, runs a Tony and Anne posing together at a benefit for juvenile diabetes on somebody's East Hampton lawn. Tony wears a tux and looks directly at the camera and smiles; Anne looks off, a little distracted. They look distant, separated, but it's a still photo, not a video, so it doesn't show Tony tucking Anne's hair behind her ear right before the flash goes off or Anne turning and smiling at Tony after the photo is over. She kisses him on the cheek, and he asks if she wants some more champagne now that she can, you know. Drink again.

In heels, Anne is an inch or so taller than he is, so at parties, if they're going together, she wears silver, strappy flats. Their heads are almost even, and Anne shakes her head and leans over and whispers something in Tony's ear that makes him grin like a wicked, wicked boy and put his arm low on her waist. The diamonds hanging her ears are solitaires that Tony bought her after their daughter was born. Two carats each, hanging from titanium threads.

Still, a good life. Still, a good run. These days, who expects love to last forever?

Five months before Tony gets divorced, Pepper goes to work for him. The story is that she'll help him carve out more time for his family.

...

Tony, Pepper decides, changing her mind, is nervous. There aren't many things that make her boss nervous, but apparently, seeing his children is one of them -- nervous, impatient. Something else, too. Tony wears a suit, as usual, and it's one of his best, a dark blue with pale pinstripes. He's wearing a light blue shirt and a dark blue silk tie with tiny white dots. Freshly shaved, haircut a week ago because Tony gets his hair cut every three weeks to keep from looking like he ever needs a haircut, and his tie flaps in the wind as they come off the plane.

"You got the presents?"

"Inside the car already, Tony," Pepper says. "You should relax, Tony."

He looks at her for a second, then with a visible, almost physical, act of will, he stands up straighter, stops fidgeting with his sleeves, and even changes the way he walks. It's a curious thing because when has Tony Stark ever had to walk into a room where he wasn't the smartest person by at least half of a standard deviation? When has he ever been somewhere that wasn't already halfway in love with him for his charm and money and brains? Tony Stark has had the world eating out of his palm for decades, and yet, Pepper has seen Tony pull that so many times. It's almost a habit. Tell him he should relax, and he actually stops slouching.

Happy holds the door so Pepper can get in after him; Tony counts the presents on the floor with his eyes. Five total. Two for each of the kids. One for the ex-wife. That last was Tony's idea, and the whole drive over, Tony's left hand keeps clenching into a fist, then relaxing, then clenching all over again. Pepper asks for his sunglasses, though, so she can put them away into safekeeping. He takes them off, hands them to her, and they watch the countryside roll around on both sides of them.

North Carolina is pretty country. The hills stay green all summer, but go brown in the winter, and visually, it's a long way from Los Angeles.

Right at the end of the drive, Tony asks Pepper to give his sunglasses back.

...

The photo in the gossip column doesn't show Anne and Tony laughing together, but it doesn't show Tony disappearing ten minutes after that, either. One last drink for the road, he says, if they're not driving. Does she want anything? Anne waits for him by the valet parking spot for forty-five minutes, waiting, holding her silver clutch and watching couples who arrive after her get into their cars.

Sixteen hours later, Tony resurfaces in LA, too busy to talk to Anne or anyone on the phone.

...

There are two kids. The son is old enough to remember living with both of his parents, and he looks uncannily like Tony. They have the same eyes, the same chin. If his father is a little unfamiliar with him, doesn't quite know how to handle him, they're both affectionate enough with each other that it doesn't matter. Tony congratulates him on getting taller, and the kid fastens his arms around his father's thigh. Last time, it was a kneecaps affair.

"Dad," he says, and Tony ruffles his son's hair. The daughter comes running up; with Anthony still attached to his leg like a home arrest anklet, Tony picks her up, and Minerva immediately finds the five thousand dollar, gold-and-titanium custom-fitted sunglasses in his breast pocket and starts to chew on them and put them on her face.

"Hey," Tony says to his ex-wife, who's standing in the driveway, watching him with his kids.

It's a lovely house in lovely country, and the fall sunlight lights the sides of the house. Towards the end of the visit, Tony asks Anne to step into the other room with him; they close the door behind them, and Minerva goes on rolling around in the scraps of paper left over from unwrapping the presents. Pepper has a conversation with Anthony about the first grade; the room is decorated in shades of cream and white.

When Tony comes out of the room, it's time to go. He still has, Pepper notices, the wrapped Cartier bracelet in his pocket, although one corner is dented, as if it's been thrown across the room.

Pepper also notices the wife doesn't ever let Tony be alone in a room with his kids, and on the flight back to Los Angeles, when Tony falls asleep on Pepper's shoulder, she puts her arm around him and lets him kiss her when he wakes.

...

When she started working for Tony, the ground rules were pretty clear: family first. Then work. If Anne calls, she's supposed to interrupt whatever phone call he's on, whatever meeting he's in, he doesn't care if it's with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and His Holiness the Pope. And then comes the first time Pepper goes with Tony and Obadiah for a bunch of meetings in New York. Pepper runs into Obadiah in the hallway outside at 7AM, and they go in together -- to find Tony tangled up in bed with the long cool blonde he'd been eying all night before. The brunette is in the bathroom doing her morning line of coke.

"Hey, Tony," Obadiah says, and Tony starts up out of bed. The girls have the decency to squeak and wrap themselves in clothes and scurry out. Tony is still wearing his boxers and his shirt; he gets up, starts to walk over to the phone, then flops back into an armchair that's upholstered in cream-and-white stripes.

"Anne called last night," Tony says to no-one in particular. "She. Uh."

Like that really justifies cheating on the mother of your children, Pepper thinks and holds the day's agenda and schedule closer to her chest.

"I introduced you to her," Obadiah says, sighing. He's dressed, tie and suit and jacket, of course, and has his hands on his hips. "I -- Tony, this is partly my fault."

This seems to jolt Tony. He straightens out of the chair. "No, it's not. Anne just has it in her head that you -- "

And he notices Pepper standing behind Obadiah, so he stops. She was new; Tony hadn't trusted her. Pepper knows he still doesn't trust anybody all the way, except, maybe, Obadiah. It's just the way he was raised.

...

"Yeah, I -- what do you get kids?"

"How old are they now?"

Tony blinks, and Pepper suppresses a little twitch of annoyance that he's not sure how old his own children are. He's only been divorced for two years.

"Christ, just call Anne and find out what to get them, will you?"

Tony apparently has a decent idea, though, what Anne herself likes. A couple hours later, he's down in the shop and uses the intercom to call up and ask her to get the nicest tennis bracelet at the closest Cartier. How much should she spend on it? He doesn't know, but Anne only likes diamonds, and he signs off without giving Pepper any more detail.

...

"I would wake up at night from nightmares -- " Tony gestures. "And Obadiah would be there for me."

Pepper knows, as a matter of cold, hard fact, that it had been over forty minutes before the paramedics reached the car. Tony's father had been flung from the car; Tony's mother had been driving; the steering column impaled her. Tony had been wearing his seat belt in the back of the car.

...

At the quarterly R&D meetings, Tony slumps in his chair while the civilian aviation and the biotechnology and the pharmaceutical and material sciences groups give their updates. He only sits up when the weapons and the military aviation heads take over.

...

"It's a stupid idea, Tony."

"But I should -- "

"Stupid idea, Tony."

"They're my weapons, Obadiah. My designs. I should be the one out there, demonstrating them in the field. Making the first pitch."

Pepper keeps her eyes down and continues typing.

"No, Tony. It's not the first sales pitch, and you know it. You're not going to Afghanistan. Or Pakistan. Or Iraq. If you wanna go to Brussels and fire off some Eagles at Copenhagen, be my guest, but you're not going to anything resembling an active war zone."

Pepper re-reads the e-mail before sending it.

"I'm not going to risk killing the golden goose, Tony, no matter how remote the chance of that happening is." Pepper doesn't look, but she knows Obadiah has stood up because his voice comes from higher. Plus, the ice cubes in his Scotch clink. Probably when he reaches over and puts his hand on Tony's shoulder. "Stuff like this is what we have Jim Rhodes for."

She clicks "send," and off the response goes to the president of MIT, politely declining the honor of speaking at commencement. Tony doesn't do public speaking well, and he's turned them down every year for the past four years. He doesn't want to this year, and Obadiah isn't going to make him. There's no need for him to do it.

...

Tony, generally, keeps art and music and everything not directly related to work out of his shop. It's where he makes weapons, not where he has fun.

"Not to say that being a patriot is a whole lot of fun," he tells a table that includes the Secretary of Defense and two Senators, with a wink, after they've all had a very, very nice dinner. They laugh and applaud. Shortly thereafter, waiters bring cigars around.

...

Tony keeps his bedroom in Malibu spare, so it doesn't surprise Pepper too much when she sees a photograph of Tony's childhood bedroom: for Tony and Anne's wedding present, Obadiah gives them the Fifth Avenue duplex he owned when he was raising Tony, and at year five and a half of the marriage, when things really aren't working out for Tony and Anne, Tony convinces Anne that maybe it would be better if she and the kids spent more time in New York, since he spent so much time out there. His kids are going to have a chance to grow up in the same four walls that he did.

"Here's the last time this room was furnished," Anne says, and sets a photograph in front of the interior designer. Tony can't be bothered to be there; he's delegated Pepper to be there, and Pepper is pretty convinced this has about as much chance of saving their marriage as a guy with a thimble has of saving a hundred-foot yacht from capsizing in a North Atlantic storm, but Pepper looks over the interior designer's shoulder anyways.

It's meticulously clean. The only furniture in it is the bed and a drafting table with a kid-sized chair and pencils placed low and a kid-sized protractor; Tony sits on the bed. Models of Stark Industries planes helicopters and transports and things Pepper doesn't even have a name for hang from the ceiling, and there's a long, full-length mirror at the foot of the bed. There's a large table for looking at blueprints. On the bedside table, there's a photograph of Howard and Maria, angled very neatly so that the camera will catch it without glare obscuring their faces.

Tony had been nine. The interior designer praises the bones of the room, but Anne catches Pepper's eye, and something passes over Anne's expression that Pepper can't quite read.

...

Anne was pretty much convinced that Tony was having an affair with Pepper.

...

"I would wake up at night from nightmares -- " Tony gestures. "And Obadiah would be there for me."

...

Pepper is pretty sure that Tony is giving Anne money under the table. She gets a generous amount, but it's sharply limited by the pre-nuptial. How did she afford the house in North Carolina horse country? How can she afford to throw a $20,000 diamond bracelet, a gift, no strings attached, no promise to get back together, in Tony's face? Pepper is pretty sure that Anne is still in love with Tony; she doesn't think Tony was ever in love with Anne, but he still gets a look in his eyes sometimes, and --

Some men name their boats after their wives; rich men name their yachts after their wives. One of the few good times that Pepper ever heard Tony and Anne have was when Tony wanted to name the two new missile-shield defense system satellites they were selling to the government the "Anne" and the "Elizabeth." Anne thought this was a horrifying idea, and when Pepper slipped out of the room, Tony had his head on Anne's knee and his arms around her waist and was looking at her beeseechingly while she laughed and tried, not very hard, to wriggle away.

Tony, in his better times, is an easy man to love. Pepper still hasn't found the secret account from which Tony is supplementing whatever Anne gets under the pre-nuptial agreement.

...

On one visit, when Tony is rolling around the patio in a suit that costs as much as a car. He has Anthony on his chest; Minerva runs around them both in delighted, screaming circles, Pepper goes inside because she needs to use a land line since cell phone reception is terrible in this part of the county. Something about the hills, maybe, or the fact that there are more horses than people, and she finds Anne sitting in the living room, behind the French doors, watching Tony with his kids. Anne doesn't like Tony being alone with her children. There's a G&T in her hand, but her mascara is dry and very neat.

"Do you know the real reason why we got divorced?" Anne says. She doesn't look away from Tony playing with their children.

There's no polite way to answer that, and Pepper also suspects that Anne is drunk, so she just asks, quietly, if she can use the land line. Anne waves her into the next room.

Pepper and Tony fly back to LA before dinner.

...

Tony has a daughter named Minerva. Obadiah read Roman myths to him as a kid, he explains, and he's always thought it would be a beautiful name. Anne got pregnant with her in the very months days of their marriage; she knew she was losing Tony, so she let Tony name their daughter whatever he wanted.

Somewhere, high above the Earth, Pepper knows, there are two satellites like stars. One has a ceramic plate etched with the word ANNE and the other, MINERVA.

...

The photographic record isn't particularly rich. Obadiah kept Tony out of the public eye until Tony was twenty-five, until he'd graduated from MIT, then spent three years seasoning in various departments at Stark Industries. There's an article on Tony in the alumni magazine when he's a sophomore, but it's not the cover. There's a Popular Mechanics on Tony, and he is on the cover, but it's not until he's twenty-eight.

He doesn't have a photo-op with Bill Gates until he's even older.

...

Pepper has a talk with the accountants about the ramifications of Tony slipping Anne extra money under the table, and then, she talks to the lawyers. Tony still doesn't admit that he's doing it, so she goes to Obadiah, and he sighs. It's late afternoon in New York; they're both in New York that week, and Obadiah leans back in his chair.

"There's not much use trying to get him to stop if he is, Pepper. He used to be crazy about her, and he's still crazy about those two kids."

...

Tony doesn't keep art or music or cars in his shop, but Pepper knows he keeps a photograph of Anthony and Minerva next to the 3-D vector design table.

...

Despite everything, Tony is a messy sleeper. He keeps his bedroom spare, his workshop business-like, but when asleep, he has a habit of rolling all the blankets around him, curling and folding in on himself. Morning usually finds him tucked into a far corner of the bed. It's an odd habit for a billionaire ex-playboy genius to have. Lingering annoyance with it is one reason, Pepper thinks, that Tony spends most of his nights sleeping on the couch in the shop.

It could, of course, also be sheer convenience.

"Obadiah tried to break me of it when I was younger. Nothing every really worked." Tony says, absently, one morning when Pepper has brought him coffee and he's padding around the workshop, reminding himself of what he did the night before. His hair sticks up on one side; he hasn't brushed his teeth yet, and he's still wearing a gray MIT t-shirt and striped boxer shorts. There's a bathroom, complete with shower, down in the shop; the rest of the house would get wiped out by a tornado, and Tony probably wouldn't notice until he felt like banging something out on the piano.

"Obadiah tried to -- ?" Pepper stops herself in the middle of the sentence.

Tony looks up from 3D vector rendering of what, for all the sense that Pepper makes out of it, looks like a Medusa's head of wires and tangles and circuits. Tony calls it the exploded view. "Yeah. He'd come in the morning to wake me up for the day, and I'd be halfway under the bed. It annoyed him. One time, I managed to fall down between the bed and the wall. More coffee."

He holds the cup out at her. She hesitates, and he doesn't say please, but does look at her very earnestly, so she takes the cup and pours him another from the pot.

Some time later, Pepper has reason to look at that photo of Tony's childhood bedroom again, and she notices that the bed is bolted to the floor.

...

"Scraped half the skin off my arm," Tony says, a little later that day, returning to the subject without antecedent or Pepper raising the subject again. "There was an unfinished edge on the plate holding the vent in place, and it took half the skin off. I had to get a tetanus shot, and Obadiah was furious at the renovators. Blood all over the place. I didn't notice in my sleep."

They're in the lab again, and Tony puts his hand on Pepper's hip so that she won't move when he moves behind her to get to a component he wants to swap out on his latest project.

...

So yes, Tony talks about Obadiah as the single greatest influence on his life. With the kind of crowd he usually plays to, Tony usually follows it with -- "But Ronald Reagan is a close second," which gets a good laugh. Obadiah segues into talking a little about Howard's work at Los Alamos and the Applied Physics Laboratory, and that leads easily to talking about what Stark Industries is doing these days. Tony specializes in making weapons; sometimes, he lends his trouble-shooting expertise to the other areas, particularly in the manufacturing end of things, but as he puts it in one of the few interviews he does, he sticks to things that go boom.

"I leave the rest to Obadiah," he says.

And the first time that Tony falls asleep on Pepper's shoulder in front of Obadiah, she goes a little stiff, not quite sure what he'll do, but he eventually looks up from the spreadsheet printouts he's reviewing, takes notice of the fact, and gives her a little nod as if to say well done, then goes back to his work. Pepper's arm goes a little numb eventually, and she tries to shift Tony so that the whole weight of his torso isn't on her anymore, but he wakes up, and the way he looks at her when his eyes open makes Pepper's breath catch.

Tony, in his better times, is an easy man to love.

Obadiah casually takes his reading and wanders to the cabin in the back of the Learjet and closes the door.

...

Tony has difficulty relaxing when he's the only person in a large space. It's gotten better with age; Obadiah mentions, in passing, at some point, that Tony had been asleep alone in the back seat of the car when his parents died. For days after the accident, Tony refused to sleep at all; he panicked if he was left alone for more than a few minutes at a time, let alone if he was left alone the dark. He didn't actually sleep until after the funeral, after which he was just too cold and exhausted to stay awake any longer and just collapsed over Obadiah's knees in the car.

Pepper can't remember the context, but she knows Obadiah told her.

...

In his worse times, Tony is difficult to be around, let alone love: the afternoon before a black tie benefit to support the Kennedy Center, Tony disappears, totally unresponsive to phone calls and voice mails and text messages, making Pepper frantic with worry and anxiety, and she's just about to call the police from the red carpet of the benefit when, an hour and a half late, his Rolls resurfaces at the curb. Tony gets out -- dressed in tuxedo and everything, though he's wearing those red sunglasses, and Pepper is just about breathe a sigh of relief when she sees him turn around and stretch his hand back inside the Rolls for somebody else, and he reappears with a swimsuit model whose entire out consists of sequins arranged in certain places, and oh God, there's another one, he brought two, no, Three. And oh god , they're not swimsuit models, they're porn stars. They have to be. Not even lingerie models would show up in something like that. With. With.

" -- Miss August," Tony says to the photographer who's snapping his photo like this is the luckiest day of his life. "And this is Miss October. Miss September sadly couldn't make it."

Tony Stark has brought Playboy Playmates to a black tie benefit to support the Kennedy Center. At least Pepper hopes they're from Playboy because the President is in attendance tonight. The President. And his wife.

One of the girls giggles, and the effect is like watching a souffle dance.

"Of all the things to train out of him," Pepper says, gritting her teeth. "You couldn't fix this?"

Obadiah looks at her sharply, surprised, then laughs. "Only the important things, Pepper. Only the important things." He adjusts the scarf around his neck and goes to be introduced to the young ladies.

...

"Go to Afghanistan with the Jerichoes," Obadiah says. "When you come back, we'll talk about it."

Jim asks Pepper to leave the room for what he's about to say, and she gets the bored lack of movement that means "go now, so this can be over sooner," from Tony, so she goes and closes the door behind her. Obadiah buzzes her when it's tome to come back in, and Tony isn't sitting quite so bored and slumped in his chair anymore. He's standing by the window, near his desk, shoulders back, and one hand in his trouser pocket, the other curled into a fist by his side. It tightens, then relaxes. Tightens again. Obadiah sits on the couch, legs stretched in front of him, and Jim stands intermediate to them. Mostly in front of Tony's desk. Had Tony been sitting there, and then --

"Show Colonel Rhodes out, will you, Pepper?"

It's Obadiah, and Tony just goes on staring out the window, so Pepper does. Corporate grapevine says that Rhodes doesn't like either Tony or Obadiah very much. Pepper looks at Jim; Jim gives her an angry little shrug. They've seen each other in the hallways once or twice, had some pleasant conversations while Jim was waiting to talk to Tony about design direction, but he doesn't say anything the whole way out of the executive suites, and out of the corner of her eye, as they're at the door, Pepper sees Tony turn, but the door closes behind her before she can hear a word that he says to Obadiah.

...

"It's a stupid idea, Tony."

"But I should -- "

"Stupid idea, Tony."

...

"I'm not going to risk killing the golden goose, Tony, no matter how remote the chance of that happening is." Pepper hadn't looked, but she knew Obadiah stood up because his voice came from higher. "Stuff like this is what we have Jim Rhodes for."

...

The next time Obadiah flies out to New York, he goes alone and returns alone. He has, in fact, pizza and a six pack of cold Manhattan Specials. Pepper sits on the couch and files the day's electronic correspondence; Obadiah puts the pizza and Specials down. He offers Pepper some of both, but she's eaten already and has never picked up a taste for the Specials, and Obadiah asks for Scotch. She makes him one. He goes to the piano with it and plays through one Brahms waltz, then a bit from Salieri. Tony still doesn't come upstairs, and Pepper offers to go downstairs and get Tony, but Obadiah lifts his eyebrows and goes on playing, so she stays where she is. Tony knows Obadiah is on the grounds; the house system would have told him that.

Obadiah works his way through the Salieri, then goes back to the Brahms. It's a piece that Pepper has heard Tony play with Obadiah, both of them working on the piano together, but Tony still doesn't come upstairs.

Eleven o'clock comes, and the ice in Obadiah's scotch has gone to water. He moves the drink and the coaster to the table, next to the cold pizza, and the Specials, which Pepper eventually put on a plate to keep from dripping into the wood.

He nods at Pepper and goes.

Thirty-five minutes later, Pepper goes down to the shop to see if Tony needs anything else from her, but she hesitates at opening the door. He has his back turned and the welding mask and gear, so she leaves him to it. When she comes in at eight the next morning, he's taken off the welding gear, but still has his back turned. She leaves coffee outside the door and, at lunch, exchanges the empty pot and dirty mug for sandwiches and soda and two slices of cold New York pizza and three Manhattan Specials.

...

Pepper isn't worried: if it were really bad, she would have found Tony at the piano in the morning, asleep on the keys.

...

Pepper isn't worried: if it were really bad, Tony wouldn't come out of the shop with the same lifted-eyebrow expression that Obadiah had at the piano and ask her why she looks so surprised to see him. He goes back into the shop after getting some carrots out of the refrigerator -- carrots don't count as food, Tony, let me call the chef, and he'll make you something, which gets her continued raised eyebrows -- and doesn't come back out for another forty-eight hours.

...

Pepper isn't worried: if it were really bad, Obadiah wouldn't come over and ask, through the intercom, whether he could come down to the shop to see what Tony was working on. Tony wouldn't pause a second, then say he was on his way up.

"Give us a second, Pepper," Obadiah says. Tony is wearing one of his gray t-shirts on over jeans; Obadiah came from the office, and he puts his hand on Tony's shoulder. Pepper goes out onto the patio and closes the door behind her and wanders to the edge of the pool and stays there until one of them -- Tony, it turns out, opens the sliding glass door. He tells her to call for Happy; he's going to get dressed and go into the office, and there's an edge to his voice that Pepper doesn't quite recognize. Obadiah stands in the background, looking a little surprised and thoughtful.

...

Pepper knows he still doesn't trust anybody all the way, except, maybe, Obadiah. It's just the way he was raised.

...

She comes into the house the next morning and finds Tony upstairs, still in bed, curled up underneath a pile of blankets. The house windows haven't opened yet, and they don't open when she sits down on the bed next to him. "Tony, you have -- "

Without opening his eyes, he puts his arm around her waist, and then, Pepper is on her back, underneath the blanket with Tony on top of her. It's dark; he kisses her and undoes the top two buttons of her shirt, then kisses her again and undoes the next three, and Pepper hesitates, then undoes the last one herself, and it's still dark underneath the blanket, but she feels Tony chuckle, and the third time they kiss, it's Pepper who leans forward and puts her mouth on his.

...

"Look at this," Tony says.

They're in the shop, and Pepper is buttoning her shirt again after sex -- twice in a day. She hasn't done that in years, and her hands are still a little shaky. She can't get her thumb to work with her index fingers; Tony is rummaging through something. There's a clatter, and Tony comes back over. Pepper is still trying to get the second to last button, but the light goes strange. She blinks and looks, tracing the source of the light, and there it is by her elbow.

It's tiny and blue and looks like a star. She takes it, gingerly in hand. Heavier than it looks, and she tucks both hands underneath to get comfortable.

"Miniaturized arc reactor," Tony says, vibrating in place with pride and happiness. "Like the one powering my factory."

Tentatively, without quite knowing why, Pepper leans it against Tony's chest, just below the collarbones, on the sternum, and with Pepper still holding it between them, Tony leans forward and kisses her.

...

Tony met his ex-wife in New York, Pepper knows. Obadiah made the introductions.

...

"Go to Afghanistan with the Jerichos," Obadiah said to Jim. "When you come back, we'll talk about it."

Thirty-six hours later, Pepper comes into Tony's office. Tony isn't there; Obadiah is sitting on the couch in his usual place, and he says, "You remember Jim Rhodes, our liason officer with the Army? They hit his convoy in Kunar, and unfortunately, Jim is one of the dead. Tony says he'll be taking his own measures, but I'd like you to set up a scholarship and get working on the press release now."

Instead, Tony spends the next three weeks in the shop, not talking to anyone, and living on what Pepper leaves outside the door. The only half-way human thing in there with him is the photograph of his children, and on one of her trips through to do a little cleaning and restock the refrigerator, while Tony is dead asleep on the couch, Pepper notices that he's turned the photograph face-down. She turns it back up. Tony turns it back down.

"Let me come down and see what you're working on, Tony." Obadiah says.

At one point, while waiting out on the patio for them to be done talking, Pepper turned around to make sure they hadn't come to blows or didn't want her to come back in, and she saw Tony standing in front of Obadiah. Obadiah had two fingers on Tony's chest and was tapping him just below the collarbones, on the sternum.

Before he leaves, Obadiah asks again to see what Tony is working on. Tony shakes his head, grins, then slips out from under Obadiah's arm, away down the stairs.

"Remember what you promised, Ob -- " The last syllable gets cut off by the whoosh of the lab door sealing behind Tony.

...

Anthony Edward Stark didn't go to MIT until he was eighteen, and he didn't become the CEO until he was twenty-five, until he'd had three years of experience. Tony met his ex-wife in New York, Pepper knows. Obadiah made the introductions.

...

When they next fly to North Carolina, it's late October, and Pepper brings a coat for Tony to wear over his suit. The kids are bundled up to play outside because, quite possibly, Anne doesn't want Tony in her house any more than absolutely necessary, and Anthony informs his father that he'd like to jump into a pile of leaves with him. The grounds crew has been through already, though, so the only leaves on the lawn are the ones that've fallen in the past day, and Anthony further informs his father that he will collect them, and that his father needs to sit and watch.

"Get Anne to give me some coffee, will you?" It's brisk, especially if the wind is blowing. Pepper goes inside -- Anne is sitting on the couch, in the dark, watching through the French doors.

"Does he want coffee?"

Pepper nods.

"There's some in the kitchen on the counter."

And there is.

The lights are off in the kitchen, but there's a tray with a thermos of coffee and a mug and a bowl with sugar cubes. No cream or milk. Tony doesn't use either in his coffee and prefers sugar cubes to ground. Pepper takes the tray, and when she comes back into the living room, Anne is still sitting in the dark, watching Tony with their children. Anthony has found something while looking for leaves. A bug of some sort, it seems, and he put it on Tony's palm. Tony holds it out for all three of them -- Minnie has joined them -- and points to the wings and says something. Anthony nods. Minerva starts to say something, then stops.

Tony encourages her.

She says the rest of the sentence. It looks a question from the way she frowns with the entirety of her face.

Tony's stops moving. He looks at his looks at his daughter, and it takes him a moment to answer her, and Anthony still looks confused.

...

On the flight back to LA, Tony says nothing and keeps to his side of the plane. The coat is in his lap, and he stares at the bulkhead. He doesn't fall asleep.

Minerva is turning three in the middle of November.

...

"Does Tony still get nightmares?"

They're back in the shadowed living room in late October.

"Nightmares?"

"You know the ones I'm talking about." Anne turns to look at Pepper, and Pepper shifts her grip on the tray. It's heavy. There's a lot of coffee in the thermos.

"I'm -- I'm not sure it's appropriate -- "

"Obadiah used to read to Tony before bed. Roman myths, mostly, and the Aeneid. You know the story of the Trojan Horse? Tony would have nightmares about being trapped in the stomach and having the horse burn around him. I think it's related to being in the car while his parents died. "

"No, I don't think he does, Anne."

Anne has dark brown hair, dark eyes, and she looks out at Tony, who has settled Anthony on his knee and is explaining something about the insect that Anthony found. A bumblebee, maybe, the last of the season? Caught out in the cold.

"The quickest way to bring him out of them would be to touch him. On the back of the neck or on the chest. Just keep the hand there, apply a little pressure, but when he wakes, it's like he never expects you to be the one there. And you know, that's what Obadiah used to do to him had nightmares -- just hold him until he woke up. That doesn't sound so bad, does it?"

It's October, and the sun is almost gone over the lawn. Minerva says something, and Pepper watches through the French doors as Tony kisses his daughter on the forehead and holds like that for a moment, almost as if he can't bear to let her go.

"And Tony always wakes up right away, but some nights, I used to let them run until they were done."

...

It's a little uncanny, sometimes, how much Anne and Tony look alike when standing still. Same dark hair, similar eyes. Neither of them are very tall, and at times, in the photos of them when they were younger, they almost looked like siblings.

...

Pepper knows, too, that Tony and Anne had at the beginning a discussion about what they would do if any of their children turned out to be like Tony: Anne went to college, did well, had a quiet career at a gallery in New York before she married Tony, and there's a Intel Talent Search finalist poster somewhere with Anne's research results as a fifteen year old all over it, but she decided that she was more interested in art. So yes, Anne, too, is extraordinarily bright, but the question was what would happen if any of their children turned out to be like Tony.

The divorce settlement agreement is explicit: under no circumstances is Tony to seek custody of either of the kids. No matter what their test scores turn out to be.

...

Pepper has a talk with the accountants about the ramifications of Tony slipping Anne extra money under the table, and then, she talks to the lawyers. Obadiah leans back in his chair.

"There's not much use trying to get him to stop if he is, Pepper. He used to be crazy about her, and he's still crazy about those kids. Especially Minerva."

...

It's a little unusual for Pepper to stay the night, but it's an unusual day all around: Obadiah doesn't call once, and as far as Pepper knows, Tony doesn't call Obadiah either. Plus, she brings the laptop down into the shop and works while Tony does. They get pizza; they work some more, and when Pepper is cracking her neck and starting to think about going home, Tony looks up from the arc reactor, which he's taken apart again and has stretched out over his work bench in twenty-eight parts or so, and he says, "Stay the night."

Half an hour passes. Tony puts the arc reactor two-thirds of the way back together, and they go upstairs. Pepper uses her emergency toothbrush and makeup remover -- Tony finds it pretty funny that she calls them emergency toothbrush and makeup remover, and he gives her one of his t-shirts. Pepper turns down the offer of sweatpants or boxers, and Tony leaves her strictly alone while she showers. In fact, he goes downstairs to grab the arc reactor and fiddle with it a little in the bed next to her while she watches the eleven o'clock news, then sets it aside and falls asleep with his hand a couple inches away from hers while she catches a TBS broadcast of -- something. She's so tired that she can't remember anything except for the fact that it has a laugh track, and she turns the television off fifteen minutes into it.

The house lights dim automatically, and after everything Anne has said about nightmares and what Pepper, herself, knows about Tony not liking being alone at night, she thinks a moment, then takes Tony's hand. In his sleep, he sighs and rolls towards her; Pepper falls asleep with his hand on the inside of her forearm and her fingers brushing his stomach.

Tony sleeps through dawn and doesn't so much as rumple the blankets.

...

Obadiah doesn't call the next day. Tony doesn't call Obadiah either.

...

Obadiah doesn't call the next day. Tony doesn't call Obadiah either. An e-mail arrives in Pepper's mailbox from Obadiah's executive secretary, asking for Tony's corporate schedule for the next two weeks.

Tony hasn't figured out a use for the miniaturized arc reactor.

...

Another three days pass. Tony goes back to working on high-Mach turbines for the new scramjets, and Pepper wakes up one morning and finds Tony walking across the foot of the bed with a toothbrush stuck in his mouth. Pepper is about to roll over and go back to sleep because she isn't contractually obligated to arrive for work until at least 7:30AM, and the sun hasn't even over the horizon, but then she squints at Tony, frowns.

"Tony, stop using my toothbrush."

He laughs around her toothbrush, and Pepper lies back down and, smiling into the pillow, falls asleep again.

...

"What should I get for Minerva's birthday?"

Tony, it seems, is actually comfortable with having her in the lab with him now, and the question is, of course, what Pepper should purchase for Tony to give to Minerva on her birthday. Anne has made clear that Tony is not invited for the actual party on the day of, but he's allowed to send a gift, and Tony understands what Pepper meant when he asked the question.

He looks up from his morning newspapers. Hard copies, a habit from Obadiah, apparently, one that he hasn't dropped, so Pepper still brings them to him in the morning along with coffee. That's normal. It would feel abnormal if she didn't. Additionally, who'd been lost deep in staring at one particular section of the Post because he is, in fact, still a New York boy in his heart -- he frowns and chooses his words with abnormal care.

"What do girls her age usually get, Pepper?"

...

"Remember what you promised, Ob -- " The last syllable got cut off by the whoosh of the lab door sealing behind Tony.

...

Once, early into working for Tony, back when Anne and Tony were still married, Pepper came out onto the patio of the house in Malibu. Tony asked her to bring a bucket of ice and a bottle of Scotch -- anything they had in the house was OK -- out to him before taking off for the night, and the house had been empty back then. Tony lived in it before he got married, moved out of it when he got married, moved again when Anne had their first kid. They moved out to New York four months ago. Anne was there with both of the children now.

"I had to drive out and get it," Pepper explains. She puts the bucket of ice onto the patio table next to Tony, then puts the bottle of Scotch in his hand. He nods, a little absently, and later, when she's a little more familiar with the house in Malibu once Tony moves back full time post-divorce, Pepper realizes that the house system would have told him when she left the premises. Kept him posted, too, of exactly where she was and how fast the car was going and which liquor store she'd pulled into.

"Sit down," Tony says. "You want a drink?"

"I only brought one glass out."

There's another patio chair out there, and Tony pours for her into the one glass and swigs out of the bottle directly. They talk; Tony asks about her family, about what she likes to do and what she doesn't like about Los Angeles. Pepper tells him about her crazy college roommate. The sun goes into the sea. Tony tells her a couple stories about himself. Pepper leaves that evening feeling like she's gotten to know her boss a lot better.

Anne was wrong. They didn't even kiss until a year after Tony is fully and completely and irrevocably divorced.

...

One of the stories that Tony tells Pepper that she doesn't really understand at the time is this: when he was five, his parents died. They had been only children of relatively old parents. Consequently, Obadiah raised Tony in New York, and until Tony was about seven, he had a standard seven year old room. Messy. Clothes all over the place. Dirty dishes. Despair of the nanny and the housekeeper. (Pepper doesn't point out that most seven year olds don't have nannies and housekeepers who clean their rooms and cook them Polish food or arroz con pollo and sleep over whenever their guardian is out on a business trip selling next-generation ICBM's.) Posters on the walls. Toys mixed in with tools and half-built projects.

Then, Tony turns seven, and Obadiah comes back from a trip to Washington DC, and Obadiah and Tony have a talk.

"Time to put toys aside, Tony."

Together, they clean his room and put away all the things that belong to being a child. Obadiah orders new furniture; Tony starts going with him on the business trips. Models of the Stark Industries projects that Tony contributes to start appearing on the walls and shelves of his bedroom.

...

Tony never makes an avocation of building robots or life-like intelligence systems. The house AI system is dryly informational, devoid of personality, and Tony's senior project at MIT solves the line-of-sight problem with the first generation of tactical satellites.

...

At one of the meetings, after a bitter morning, Tony and his lawyers and Pepper come back for lunch and wait for Anne and her lawyers to show up. They sit in the conference room and wait. And wait. And wait. Pepper goes out to get coffee. She comes back with coffee. She distributes the coffee, and in doing so, notices an envelope laid on the chair that Anne had been sitting on during the worst of the negotiations. Tony is written on the front in her handwriting, and Pepper hands it to Tony along with his afternoon espresso. Tony opens the envelope, and a shower of paper scraps fall out.

Being a genius of math and physics and visualization and, also, knowing what the fuck is going on, Tony only needs to flip a few over at it before laughing and getting up out of his seat to go look out the window. It takes Pepper and the lawyers five, ten minutes to put the pieces together, and even when they do, Pepper is the only one who recognizes, who has any idea : it's a photograph of Tony's childhood bedroom, torn into pieces.

"I called her over lunch," Tony says, standing by the window with his hands in his pockets. "You remember when I bummed a cigarette from you, Joe, and said I was going out to smoke? Yeah, we talked for a while."

The lawyers go up in flames; Tony won't answer any questions whatsoever about what he said to Anne, or what she said to him, and the senior partner takes Tony aside and not-so-subtly threatens to quit for the second time that week, and Pepper is the only one who notices that it's not just one photograph. The lawyers are yelling and shouting and running around with their Blackberries while Tony stands in the middle of them, hands still in his pockets and an ugly smile on his face. Tony has the pre-nup on his side; Anne has the fact that whatever comes out in any kind of court proceeding is going to make Tony look like the worst human being on Earth.

Also, Pepper suspects, Tony loves his children more than he loves anything in the world, probably even more than he loves himself, and Pepper realizes that in addition to the photo of Tony's childhood bedroom, Anne also tore a photo of her, Tony, and Obadiah into tiny, tiny shreds.

Pepper knows the one, though. The floor at Sotheby's. Tony, Anne, and Obadiah the night they met. It was in Women's Wear Daily. Pepper understands that in the very early days of the marriage, a print of it used to sit on the mantle in the house in Malibu, but it's subsequently moved to Tony's study. The only photo he keeps of anybody in his shop is the one of the children, and Anne has -- Pepper never noticed it before, but she does while sliding the scraps together.

Tony has just started laughing in the face of one of the attorneys. Not one of the more senior ones because he is, in fact, feeling like that much of an asshole.

Yes, it's in Tony's study, Pepper thinks, sliding the scraps together.

Along with every other photo of Obadiah in the house.

...

The suits, the hair, the neatly kept fingernails together with the thick, factory worker's hands. The childhood decorated with nothing but models of Stark Industries planes that Tony helped design. All the furniture in the room neatly scaled to child size, except for the table where Obadiah and Tony used to go over the blueprints. The photograph of Howard and Maria carefully angled so as not to catch the glare.

Tony won't hear anybody say a word against Obadiah.

...

The suits, the hair, the bed bolted to the floor. The full-length mirror at the end of the bed and the stripped bedroom. The way that Tony goes still and tense whenever someone fusses over his hair or suit or tie or jacket. The way Tony jerks out of nightmares with the touch of fingers to the back of his neck. It jolts him out of sleep, frightens him into being awake, and Tony has such dreams of being trapped inside the stomach of a Trojan horse. In fact, there's a photo of Tony and Obadiah on the Aegean Sea the year that Tony turned fourteen. Tony keeps it, casually, on one of the side tables in the New York apartment. A vacation photo, clearly, with the mast of the Seraphim the background and the sea beyond that. It's black and white; Tony looks over his shoulder at the camera. He's all skinny limbs and messy hair; his back is long and tan, but the smile on his face is oddly hesitant. Almost a little nervous.

Pepper doesn't know who took the photograph. Obadiah, presumably? Or one of Tony's girlfriends. There doesn't seem to be anybody else on the boat, and Tony doesn't seem to have a problem with the photo.

Tony won't hear anybody say a word against Obadiah.

...

Together, they clean his room and put away all the things that belong to childhood, but Tony hasn't spoken to Obadiah in a week and a half. Pepper gets a phone call from Anne one day, and she can barely make out what Anne is saying through the screaming and the tears and the hysteria. She gets enough, though, to go down and interrupt Tony in the workshop. Anne insisted on it, and when Pepper tells him, Tony's face goes white.

Eight minutes later, he drives the R8 out of the garage at about seventy miles an hour.

Pepper waits for Tony to come back. In fact, she falls asleep on the couch in the living room, waiting for him to come back.

...

Pepper wakes with an ache in her neck. The house informs her that it's three twenty six in the morning. Tony isn't back. Pepper checks.

Slowly, in the pre-dawn, for the first time that week, Pepper drives home.

...

Pepper wakes in her own bed and checks her phone to see if there are any messages or texts or e-mails from Tony. There aren't any even though it's well past eight in the morning, and Pepper takes the phone in with her to the bathroom to shower. She takes it into the kitchen while she gets breakfast. She keeps it next to her when she goes into the living room, and for the first time in years, watches daytime television.

...

"Pepper?"

Tony finally calls at eleven o'clock. He sounds exhausted. Pepper rubs at the spot on her head where she'd banged it when lunging for the phone. "Where are you?" she says.

"Over at Obadiah's." Tony sounds so tired, in fact, that his voice has that peculiar grainy quality that Pepper only hears when he's been up for forty, fifty hours at a stretch. She can hear some noises in the background, too. It's not clear what the noises are, though. "I'm going to be there all day. You don't need to come over."

"Are you -- "

Pepper can't finish the sentence, and Tony sounds like he's too tired to. Obadiah says something in the background, and Tony doesn't say anything for a moment.

"Just take the day off, Pepper," he says, finally. "You don't need to worry about flying out to North Carolina, either. We're not going to be going for a while."

Tony hangs up, and it's quiet inside Pepper's apartment.

...

It's November in North Carolina, and Anne comes home from comes home dusted with snow. It's not sticking to the ground, though, so she wants to get at least Minnie out into it stops for her first snowfall, but she comes into the kitchen and stops dead in her tracks.

Minerva is too small to sit properly at the kitchen table, so she's half standing, half-kneeling. There's a package torn open on the table, a birthday present two days early, and in Minerva's hands, it's taken the shape of a fully-assembled model plane. The mail only came forty-five minutes ago, Anne knows. Maximum. Minerva turns the model over in her hands, delighted at the way the pieces fit together, the way it gives the promise of flying in the way that a dead bee in October doesn't. Anne can see, quite clearly, the Stark Industries logo on the plane.

Anne gets on the phone with Pepper. Minerva, having discovered that the model plane doesn't actually fly or have a working engine, turns her attention to shredding the packaging, and since Anne is crying and won't leave the kitchen, the housekeeper goes and pretends to be tidying up the family room. Anne is a good person to work for, all things notwithstanding, so the housekeeper makes an effort to give her some privacy, and there isn't much else that she can do.

Pepper can't get Anne to calm down, and Minerva methodically shreds the upper left-hand side of the mailing label.

-- Stark Corporate Drive
-- appy birthday, Minerva, and an early pres --
-- ery truly yours --
-- iah Sta --

...

A day off from Tony isn't really a day off. Pepper goes over to the house to Fedex some things that Tony signed, and while she's there, she goes down the stairs to the shop. She doesn't have access to get in when Tony isn't there, of course; that's how Obadiah raised him, but through the glass, it's dark. The arc reactor is gone.

Tony must have taken it with him to see Obadiah, inside his shirt or in his palm so that she wouldn't see the glow, and Pepper puts her fingers against the glass. She tries to articulate why this makes her so sad, but can't.

...

"Time to put toys aside, Tony," Obadiah says.

...

"Time to stop being a child, Tony," Obadiah says. Twenty years later, Tony wakes up in a bedroom with his fiancee. It's her place, not his, so there's a window air conditioning unit running. She doesn't have central; it's only a studio apartment on the Lower East Side. A double bed takes up half the floor area. Maybe it's the position of the bed in the room. Maybe it's the sound of cars and sirens coming through the windows. Tony is exhausted, too, and turned up outside her door unexpectedly. Anne never quite gets the story of how he ends up in New York when he'd been working in Los Angeles, in London, in Brussels, in New York for three hours, back to Los Angeles, no time to stop by. Tony hasn't slept in thirty hours. No, forty hours. Maybe more.

An ambulance passes outside, and at first, Tony won't tell her what he'd been dreaming about before he woke up, but he puts his arm around her waist and his head against her knee and tells her stories that circle around the truth. By the time that he's exhausted enough to tell her something about the dream, Anne has already put it together. She can read between the lines; this is more than Tony has ever told anyone or ever tells again, and Anne is a smart woman. It makes her hands and feet feel cold even though it's ninety-five degrees and well past midnight outside, and Tony falls asleep against her knee, breath warm against the inside of her thigh. Anne can't sleep.

She marries him anyway.

If it had only been Tony at fourteen, if not earlier, face-down and hanging onto the mattress with his fingers below decks on the Seraphim. If it had only been the bed bolted to the floor or the full-length mirror or the childhood bedroom and letting Obadiah have everything he ever had.

If Tony would only adm --

He remembers enough, though, to take the R8 out of the garage at seventy miles an hour. Anne had divorced him because he wouldn't protect his own children, but this time, the arc reactor gets jammed into his pocket. This time, Pepper never spends the night in Malibu again, and Tony never goes to North Carolina again.

Tony has a lot of practice with giving Obadiah everything he has or has ever hoped to have. Some things don't take admitting, only remembering.

...

Pepper never spends the night in Malibu again. Tony never goes to North Carolina again.

...

Pepper never spends the night in Malibu again. Tony never goes to North Carolina again. Anne probably wouldn't let him see the kids even if he tried.

...

Eight months after the fact, Stark Industries announces a new line that will, according to the press material, revolutionize modern warfare. Pepper stands on the ground at the first demonstration of the Mark I advanced flight suit test for the military; half the Joint Chiefs of Staff are there and a good dozen Senators and Representatives. Six suits pass overhead in tight formation. The air smells clean, unlike after a jet test or a missile test, and thanks to Repulsor technology, the suits dip down so close overhead that Pepper has to hang onto the copies of the agenda in her arms. A few military gentlemen have to catch their hats.

Tony stands with Obadiah, and Obadiah hands him the binoculars. Tony shakes his head, tells Obadiah to keep them, and Pepper turns back to staring at the agenda and watching the horizon when she can. They're on the blacktop two hours past noon, so it's bright. Nevertheless, right before they go supersonic, Pepper swears she can see six arc reactors, hanging beneath a pair of stars in the blue sky.

Pepper watches, but honestly doesn't know if Tony is capable of seeing anymore.

THEEEE END!

And yeah, you know. It's the old Hivemind thing about how movie Tony is really the best thing we can hope for. He actually has a Protosoul. He has people that he cares about and that he lets take care of him. Six stars in this 'verse is six arc reactors shooting away from him, and looking over his shoulder except this childhood vacation ends with, you know. Getting fucked below decks and HORRIBLE NON-CON.

Also, yeah, holy fuck, this is the longest thing I've written by at least a thousand words or so. Which is a lot for somebody like me, and yeah. This started in some kind of crack discussion with

jamaillith as pretty much EVERY FANDOM THOUGHT I HAVE THESE DAYS starts out, and it developed from there. All the good ideas in this are from her -- Minerva, Tony's wife naming her that because she knows she's losing Tony. And the bedroom. And. Everything really, including the bad touch, OK. For once, I was not the one proposing it.

Thanks, as always, to EL HIVEMUNDO, esp.

amonitrate and

dafnap who were major in the HANDHOLDING BRIGADE, and to

montana_crows.