Your Fixed Point.
Sep. 21st, 2008 04:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quigonejinnPart 1.
Maybe there is a smile on his face. Maybe not.
Jim calls Obadiah after the press conference, and they talk.
...
General truth known during college: Jim Rhodes was sleeping with Tony Stark.
General truth known behind certain selected closed doors: Obadiah Stane has Tony Stark well in hand.
In multiple ways.
...
Pepper comes down when Tony asks and helps replace the arc reactor. Tony has her shirt and bra off, of course, and she doesn't act like Pepper should be worried at all about seeing her female boss lying propped on a table, topless, and when Pepper goes back upstairs afterwards, the press conference from the Representative from a conservative district in Ohio who had to apologize for having made the really inappropriate comments about why women shouldn't be in charge of major defense contractors -- it's basically over, and the talking heads are just doing the post game.
"Did you get that, Jarvis?" Pepper asks.
"Of course, Ms. Potts," Jarvis says. "I have put it on Ms. Stark's viewing queue for tonight."
There is a moment of silence because Pepper knows -- and Jarvis does, too, insofar as a computer AI that started out as a way for Tony to turn lights out in the shop without having to get out of bed with whoever she happened to be entertaining, and things just sort of developed from there -- that Tony hasn't watched so much as a TV commercial since coming back from Afghanistan. Or listened to a song. Or done anything but stay in the lab and come up, once a day, to work out in the gym.
Occasionally for food, if she doesn't feel like talking to Pepper to ask for it.
...
So Pepper goes home regularly at six for the first time in years, and she watches Nightline. She is in the kitchen getting some leftovers when she hears Tony's name come up, and she uses the remote to turn up the volume.
...
The Board gets together and gives Obadiah a call after the press conference. They talk.
...
Obadiah Stane, after all, has Tony Stark well in hand. Even Jim has to admit that for the real nuts and bolts, for the day-to-day decisions, you go to Obadiah, not Tony.
...
Jim calls Obadiah after the press conference. They talk. A couple days later, Jim calls Obadiah again to touch base, go over in more detail what Jim can tell Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Justice Department and the White House and --
"Yeah, the State Department is coming in, too. Deputy Secretary Anderson called me yesterday to know why we're messing with the arms package to Pakistan -- no reason that you'd know about that. It's not official yet, but he wanted to reach out and see if there was something we could do."
"Christ. Is there anybody who isn't pissed with her?"
The line is a little fuzzy because Obadiah is on his cell phone and reception, apparently, is pretty shitty this far up in the Manhattan headquarters. "Pepper is pissed because Tony is eating all her meals down in the shop and won't even tell her when she's hungry. Tony just shows up in the kitchen and helps herself to food, Pepper says. So it's probably just you. And me."
Obadiah sounds amused, and a moment of silence goes by.
And Jim finally admits, laughing a little despite himself. "Maybe just you, Obie."
...
It's six-thirty, seven PM, and Pepper is in her kitchen with the lights off there, but on in the living room. The remote is on the counter with her, so when she hears Tony's name come up, she turns up the volume, then opens the refrigerator for the takeout Chinese from Tuesday, decides she wants the takeout Greek from Wednesday, but by the time she has the lid off, Pepper has also jammed her thumb down, hard, on the OFF button for the remote to turn that stuff off. In fact, Pepper eats her dinner in the kitchen, standing up at the counter with the lights off and a plastic fork in head, mentally writing a very firm mental note on uninviting the woman from the next Firefighter's Benefit and moving her to the list of blacklisted "Stupid Reporters Who Ask Tony Whether She Wants A Family and A Man and Therefore Make Tony Very Difficult to Handle for At Least Two Days."
There are a lot of interview requests, a lot of access requests, more than Pepper can ever remember, but when the answer is always no, followed by forwarding to Obadiah's personal assistant, it's pretty quick work.
When she's done eating, she goes back into the living room, sits down, and turns the TV on again.
Tony's old arc reactor winks at her from atop the pile of "To Pay on Saturday Morning" bills.
...
Pepper comes into work one morning and is on her way to the kitchen to make espresso because whether or not Tony has been awake for two hours or twelve hours, she likes espresso in the morning.
While she waits for the cup for Tony's espresso cup to warm properly, Jarvis informs her that Ms. Stark has gone to visit Colonel Jim Rhodes at the Air Force Base. This, Pepper decides is good news.
...
While she waits for the espresso cup to warm, Jarvis informs Pepper that Ms. Stark has gone to visit Colonel Jim Rhodes at the Air Force Base. It's a Friday afternoon. This, she decides is good news. They'll get drunk together. Possibly stagger around. Squabble. Tony will try to get into Jim's pants again, and Jim will turn her down, so they'll go out and pick up some girls. Pepper will get a call at 4AM asking her where the closest all-night liquor store is with Jim hissing, not very subtly in the background, at Tony and asking why Tony is bothering the very nice Pepper at such an hour. The girls will have long since passed out on the couch or the bed or where-ever it is that they've ended up, and Pepper full expects to fall back asleep at 4:15AM to Tony and Jim complaining about each other.
Tony is back in under two hours.
It takes fifty minutes to drive to El Segundo from Malibu. Pepper is surprised to see Tony, and Tony shrugs her jacket off, drops it on the table, and disappears down into the lab.
...
Pepper brings lunch down, and Tony doesn't look up.
...
Pepper brings dinner down, and Tony doesn't look up.
...
Here is how it should have gone: Tony shows up at the hangar, tells another bullshit story about spring break, 1987, tells pilots there that it's been a pleasure meeting them, and asks Jim to come work with her on something big. He cuts to the chase and asks her why the fuck she's playing this game. When they sat around and watched Star Wars for the eighty-fifth time, she was always more interested in building the Death Star and talking shit about how the Stormtrooper armor did nobody any good than anything else. Tony stops short, kinda laughs, and tells him maybe that's why she needs help with what she's doing. Rhodey would be a little offended by the comparison between the US and the Empire if he weren't forty-one years old, and he still doesn't like it, but they part on something resembling good terms.
Instead, Jim keeps seeing the kicked-dog look on Tony's face over the top of the forms he's supposed to fill out evaluating the pilots he had been talking to.
Instead, Tony drives home at about twenty-five miles over the speed, pours three shots of Balvenie-made twenty-one year old Scotch into a tumbler, then goes down into her shop.
Pepper hears, just before the door seals, Tony telling Jarvis to see what Obie is doing.
...
Pepper remembers being surprised when realized just how tiny her boss was: she mentioned it to Jim at one point, maybe earlier into working for Tony than she should have because it really isn't professional to talk about your boss with her best friend, but it probably wasn't professional to insist on taking a Congressman out for a Senators-and-billionaires only drinks and strippers night, and clearly, the only way to respond was to stay in the hotel and drink all the alcohol in the bar in her hotel suite. Bar, a full blown bar with a counter and a liquor display and everything and a view of Central Park to boot.
When you're Tony Stark, nothing in your life do mini anything unless it's a skirt you chase or nanobot technology. Jim kinda grinned and talked about how surprised he'd been the first time in college when he realized Tony couldn't reach the top shelf at the library. And back then, she wore baggy jeans and black t-shirts and sneakers and no heels at all, so it should have been really noticeable, and when they got even drunker, after Jim told Pepper a bunch of stories about his sister's new boyfriend, he mentioned how Tony used to wear his sweatshirts and T-shirts in college.
If they were sober, there would have been an awkward silence. Jim would have had to cover up by saying that it was because Tony never did her laundry, so she never had clean clothes, and that's why she lived in Jim's t-shirts sophomore year and junior year, wore his jeans until Jim made a poorly-placed joke about how that was the only way she was ever going to get into them, but Pepper doesn't notice. Instead, she talks about how she should stop wearing heels because even when Tony is in those ridiculous four inch ones, she is still a good four inches shorter than Pepper in flats.
When Tony wants to be, she is the biggest person in the room.
Jim met Howard and Maria: he knows Tony didn't learn it from them.
...
Obadiah comes over. Pepper looks at him, sitting with feet planted wide apart and his arm over the back of the couch, and Tony comes bounding out of the shop with defiance in every line of her body but also, the oddest smile on her face.
Pepper clears out without Tony having to say a word to her.
...
Pepper knows Tony used to have a thing for Jim, and Pepper has moved from suspecting to being pretty sure about Tony and --
...
Tony strips her shirt off over her head and comes walking over, barefoot, in her bra and jeans and the arc reactor. He traces two fingers up her stomach, from the button of her jeans to the clasp on her bra lying on just the underside of the arc reactor. Then, he traces his fingers over the diameter of the arc reactor.
"That's new," Obadiah says. "Did you retire the old one?"
Tony undoes the front of her bra and slides into his lap. He traces his finger over the glass in the middle. Taps a little and notes the way Tony runs her teeth over her bottom lip.
"It's a week or so old," Tony says. "And I don't care how hard I end up coming. You still aren't coming down to see what I'm working on."
Obadiah laughs, runs his index finger where the plate meets her chest to make her gasp, and Tony puts her arms around his neck and kisses him.
...
Tony comes back from Europe, and she goes to her first Directors of the Board meeting. She gives a small speech, but after that, nobody listens or gives her remarks and input the weight she thinks they deserve, so she crashes the after-party at a strip club: one of the Directors leaves immediately. Two others leave shortly. She closes the place down with Obadiah, and they go back to the house she grew up in, where the furniture is still draped in sheets.
And.
"Look, Tony," Obadiah says afterwards, propping himself up on an elbow. The reading lamp by the sofa is on; it shows the little nest of cushions and pillows and blankets that Tony has been sleeping in, but none of the other lights in the house are on, so shadows start five feet out and are almost complete in the corners of the room. "It isn't that they're opposed, in principle, to having a woman in the chair. It just has to be the right one."
Tony looks up, skeptical. She's naked and on her stomach with her legs stretched out behind her. The rug underneath is Chinese, red and blue on a cream background shade or two darker than her skin; Tony grew her hair long enough to be a little past her shoulders.
Obadiah still has his shirt, though it's unbuttoned all the way, but the tidy business suit -- trousers custom, jacket from Barneys', clean white shirt -- Tony had been wearing is in sections starting at the door. The shoes are neatly Tony together, but the trousers are on the threshold between foyer and living room. Her shirt is on top of a cloisonne vase that designed to match mid-winter hothouse flowers, and her underwear is underneath the coffee table, which has the draft Stark Industries stockholder's report, 1991, folded to page 14. It's as clear as the dust on every uncovered surface. Also, Tony hasn't moved up into her old bedroom. Also, Tony hasn't gone into the shop beyond turning the lights on and walking out again.
Obadiah trails the back of his hand down Tony's back, from spine to the curve of her ass. She turns her head away from him, and on the sidetable, there is a photo of her parents standing together at some function. Maria wears a silver ball gown; Howard wears white tie. Maria looks distant; Howard looks uncomfortable.
Obadiah trails his hand his hand up Tony's back, from the curve of her ass to the back of her neck.
A trash truck clangs outside; it's getting close enough to dawn that light will be coming through the curtains soon, and Tony turns to look at Obadiah with a flat, almost hostile expression. She doesn't look away, though, or even look like she's going to look away, so grinning openly, Obadiah gets to his feet.
"I'll get coffee. You need to stay awake through this."
...
"An old family nickname for me," Obadiah explains. "Tony picked it out when she was four because she decided saying my whole first name was inefficient. Four years old."
...
Tony shows up to the next Board with a completed, revised response to RFP for the major unit for next generation of heavy armored mobile warfare, and hers lists no fewer than forty-three separate points and improvements to be made to the proposed Stark Gryffin, ranging from that improved fire suppression to a reconfigured, simplified gun turret.
"Though, gentlemen, I have to say. With the talent that we have in R&D, it is a cocksucking shame that we're still in the business of trying to improve on what the Brits came up with when they decided they were tired of picking horseshit out of their teeth."
Also, four inch heels, a dress shirt unbuttoned halfway down her sternum, an excellent pushup bra, and on the middle finger of her left hand, she has her MIT ring. The thumb of her right hand has Howard's MIT ring, sized down appropriately.
Obadiah leans back in his chair and tries not to laugh too hard.
...
"I don't think the stylist intended you to wear that shirt buttoned down so low, Tony."
"Yeah, I don't think I wanted anybody to pay attention to the shirt."
There is, in fact, an edge to Tony's voice.
...
"I don't care how hard I end up coming. You're still not coming down to see what I'm working on," Tony says.
Obadiah laughs, runs his index finger where the plate meets her chest to make her gasp, and Tony puts her arms around his neck and kisses him. He flattens his palm, and the light of the arc reactor disappears. Tony moans, bends down, and sucks his fingers into her mouth.
...
"Yeah, I don't think I wanted anybody to pay attention to the shirt."
There is, in fact, an edge to Tony's voice, and Obadiah notes it, but doesn't comment and watches her unbutton her shirt the rest of the way.
...
The Board gets together and gives Obadiah a call after the press conference. They talk. It isn't hard for Obadiah to convince them the injunction is their idea when heavy drinking and compulsive womanizing and flashy suits and buying expensive art on impulse are standard behavior. It's even easier when --
...
Jim gives Pepper a call one night on her personal cell phone. She asks about his family, and he gives her a status update on the branches: his grandmother is fine, but his dad is having a little trouble with his right knee. His sister is up for partner at her consulting firm, and the cousin that she met, the one who was studying veterinary science, has decided that it would be far cooler to study theater. Theater. What's wrong with being a vet? Absolutely nothing.
She doesn't really have family that he can ask after, though, so Pepper tells him about her house. That's her proxy. And she spends more time home these days, anyways, and eventually, Jim circles around to asking how Tony is because they haven't talked in a while.
"I know she drove out to the Base. She didn't find you?"
"No, she found me." Jim taps against something three or four times, then apparently gets his courage to ask. "It didn't go well -- Pepper, what is she working on?"
Pepper is sitting outside on her pool deck. She invested in a chaise lounge, and it's why she's out there in the dark. She stretches her legs out to give herself something to do while she thinks about how to phrase things.
"I don't know. She won't tell Obadiah, either."
There's a long silence on the other line, so long that Pepper thinks Jim has hung up.
...
Pepper takes the old arc reactor to get engraved. She has a buddy in R&D, material science, and Pepper explains the lettering that she wants around the edge. He looks at the arc reactor, then at her.
"Five minutes," he says. "Jesus, that's all I'm asking."
"Paul, it's on loan from the boss."
"Three minutes. If she really does have a heart, which I doubt, she'll understand."
"No."
...
She can't answer him because he has one hand over her nose and the palm of the other over her mouth. He holds it.
"You should think about coming to New York for the next board meeting. "
She struggles a little, and he leans in to make the point. "Bring the arc reactor."
He lets his hands off; Tony sucks breath in so hard that her entire torso bends forward, but she also laughs and puts her heels in the small of Obadiah's back and pulls him all the way inside her. "Thi -- " She's short enough of breath that the words don't come easily; the word stutters out in the middle, Obadiah bends down low, grinning a little. They're in her bed with the windows looking onto the Pacific.
"Sta -- stays with me," Tony says and tilts her head back to luxuriate the feel of air in her lungs.
Fighting down the black panic, the memories of water and fear, is half the fun.
...
"She won't tell Obadiah either."
There's a long silence on the other line, so long that Pepper thinks Jim has hung up.
...
Pepper comes down into the shop with coffee and the mail and the engraved arc reactor, in a glass case and wrapped up with brown packing paper.
Tony doesn't really notice.
"I thought you weren't designing weapons anymore," Pepper says.
Tony tries to explain that she isn't, that these are just flight stabilizers, but ends up in a pile on the floor anyways.
...
Here is something to know: Tony does not, in fact, sleep with as many people as people think she does.
...
Pepper comes into work and finds Tony's shirt on the floor. Cufflinks -- Obadiah's, by the size of them -- are underneath Tony's bed. They're 24K gold, so the edges are soft; Obadiah takes good care of his things, but there are deep, matching marks in one of them. Knowing Tony, having seen other cufflinks under the bed, Pepper knows that they're probably toothmarks from being held in Tony's mouth. Pepper has seen Tony mouthing her own every once in a while, and yes, Jim sounds a little shocked that that Tony isn't telling Obadiah what she's working on either, but Pepper knows that, in a confused, Tony sort of way that makes perfect sense: Tony has never been quite so obvious about having relied on Obadiah for half of her life.
Tony trusts him to run the Board, to fix her company. To give her something she --
Pepper puts the cufflinks in an envelope and makes a mental note to give them to Obadiah.
Something else has to give. That's the way it is with Tony.
...
Pepper doesn't like girls. Not that way.
...
Tony's hair smells like expensive shampoo and conditioner and product. Tony's hands smell like mechanic's soap.
....
Pepper knows what Tony's hair smells like from buttoning up her shirt.
Pepper knows what Tony's hands smell like from buttoning her cuffs.
...
One afternoon, with Obadiah and the Board's blessing, Tony closes on a deal to sublet her brain: through certain accounting black operations, a certain dollar amount goes to R&D design to Stark Industries, and Tony promises to come in once a month and give Weapons Dev about whatever has been floating around in the back of her brain. They get to take the ideas and run with them, in-house, as far as they can manage. Thirty minutes at the end of each session is given over to trouble-shooting. They have problems, they bring them to her. Tony promises not to go home and build infinitely better versions of them in her shop with floss and a year's worth of MAD magazines from the mid 1980's; the government pays her company a ridiculous amount of money. It's a one-of-a-kind deal for a one-of-a-kind mind, the three-star general who signs for the government says.
Tony is understandably a little excited about this, and they're in the Rolls -- Pepper, Rhodey, with Tony tucked between them. Tony shakes her hair out of the chignon with a happy noise and says, "Ladies and gentlemen, this calls for a little celebration."
"Tony."
Pepper says it with inflection number 213, which conveys that her boss has a long day ahead of her tomorrow, and that time would best be spent eating a light, nutritious meal, reading some files that need reading, and settling into bed, alone, with an eye-mask.
"Pepper." Tony says it with inflection number -- there really isn't an inflection. Tony is so pleased with herself and the world that it drips and hangs from every sound she makes, including the way she settles back against the seat. No inflection necessary. Golden sun slants through the windows and picks out her profile against the window.
"I think you know where we need to go, Happy."
"I think I do, Ms. Stark." Happy glances up in the rearview mirror, and Tony stretches her legs out. Not as long as Pepper's, not as long as Rhodey's, and if she's sitting this far back on the seat, they don't quite touch the floor if she isn't wearing heels.
"Make me happy." Pause, then a glance around because Tony is just that pleased with herself this afternoon. "Happy."
...
Happy is an second-generation Stark employee: his mom was one of the first typists at the New York office, and Tony and Happy apparently used to play together with the mimeograph machine. She bossed him around; at nine, he would sit in a wheeled office chair, pretending o be a test driver on the latest stealth jet-propelled race car, and three year old Tony would pretend to stopwatch time his tests down the company halls. With age, Tony mellowed enough to let men hold doors for her -- Obadiah put the cap on it by bribing a pair of male PR interns to always hold the door him if Tony was there, and that convinced her that at least sometimes, it was a respect thing, not a woman-and-tiny-and-you-can't-possibly-walk-and-open-that-big-heavy-door thing. Happy is the only one she doesn't mind letting do it, though.
Pepper makes an unhappy noise: they're going to be spending the night in a strip club, aren't they? And she's going to have to stick around to make sure doesn't blow anything up. And.
She catches Happy's eye in the rearview mirror. He grins a little.
...
Obie, Rhodey, Pepper: in addition to being bad about calling people by their proper names, Tony has never been very good at categorizing or compartmentalizing. All she knows is that these are her people. They're the closest analogue she has to friends or family or lovers. Tony doesn't build dividing walls in whatever is left of her heart, and the result is a muddle. In the cave, she tells Yinsen that she doesn't have anybody; in her shop, she tells Pepper that Pepper is all she has.
Obie tries to kill her. Rhodey has history with her. Pepper doesn't like girls.
...
Pepper doesn't like girls, at least not that way, and working for Tony Stark isn't going to change that.
She puts Tony's watch on for her, too, when Tony is busy talking on the phone and changing the channel on the TV and eating breakfast and shooting Obadiah the finger through the video conference link, so Pepper knows what the inside of Tony's wrist looks and feels like.
...
For example, there is the habit that Tony has where, whenever she figures something out, she writes it down with whatever happens to be at hand. Sometimes, it's pen. Sometimes, it's pencil. A couple times, it happened to be Christian Dior lipstick, which was annoying to clean up, but was at least clearly visible: Tony wrote down a materials engineering insight underlying the evasion algorithm on the AS-22 strike missile in lip gloss on the mirror of the master bathroom, and Pepper had to go in and transcribe it in a form that she could send to the engineers. Was that a three or a five?
"It's a three," Tony says. She's standing in the bathroom door in gym shorts and a gray t-shirt; the room is still warm from Tony's shower, and she comes padding over in bare feet to give Pepper a quick, compact primer on rocket propulsion systems. Pepper isn't sure she really understands it, and a month later, it's totally out of her head. In the meantime, though, eight days after the lecture, she is back at the Nevada Proving Grounds with Tony. They watch a General Defense Contractor's entry into the corporate beauty contest faceplant into the bedrock, and Pepper, with her agenda and clipboard against her chest, blurts out, "They forgot about balancing."
A not-insignificant amount of military brass and gentlemen in white lab coats turns around.
Tony has the biggest, most pleased smile that Pepper has ever seen on her boss's face.
...
They're at the strip club. Loud music. A discreet view of the floor show from the back-of-the-back, upstairs-of-the-upstairs VIP area. House management is smart enough to turn on, remotely, the track light directly over the screen of Pepper's Blackberry; it's her turn to be in the middle, so she sits in between Rhodey and Tony on the ends of the booth, and a girl comes sashaying over to see if the good-looking woman is as generous as her boss. Over the top of her Blackberry, Pepper can see height. Long hair. Heels, probably. Pepper blushes up to her cheekbones, can't really think of what to say, so she keeps her knees pressed tight together and her fingers typing into her Blackberry. Blonde, maybe? She doesn't know. Definitely heels. Glitter inside the clear heels, too, in fact.
"No, honey, Pepper doesn't really like girls," Tony says, easily. "But I do. Come over here and show me what you'd do for her."
Pepper makes a noise in her throat; Rhodey shifts on the other side of her. There's a beer in his hand and a Sprite in front of Pepper and Tony has bottle service, of course, and is -- an uncountable number of glasses into a thing of champagne so big that it could probably be used to put out a midsize apartment complex that happened to catch on fire. No, Pepper isn't looking. Yes, her eyes are glued to the Blackberry screen.
"What should I call you?" Tony asks. She leans close, says something in Tony's ear that makes Tony laugh, and the club is no-touching, but the girl touches her hand to Tony's cheek, puts her hand on Tony's knee when she's bending over in front of Tony and between Tony's legs.
Tony puts her hand over the girl's. The girl arches her back, and yeah, Tony's nose must be about two inches from the smallest g-string in history.
...
Pepper doesn't like girls.
...
Pepper isn't interested in girls.
...
Pepper doesn't do Tony's makeup. Tony pays mid-five digits to a man who has won four Oscars and about sixteen Golden Globes to take care of her face for everything from Board meetings to a particularly high-profile drinking binge, flies him or his best assistant halfway around the world sometimes, but if Tony needs a touchup before or after, Pepper is the one who does it.
...
They're in the strip club, and the music is loud with a heavy bass beat, but the girl between Tony's legs isn't following. Tony doesn't seem to mind in the least, and the girl moves Tony's hand from Tony's knee to her knee, and when the girl is done dancing to whatever song is in her head, Tony gives her some extra fifties, and the girl turns around and kisses Tony on the cheek. She leaves a smear of glitter, and Tony laughs and wipes it off with the back of her hand.
"Don't let your floor manager see you do that," Tony says.
The girl grins an -- Pepper keeps her eyes glued to the screen of the Blackberry. About ten minutes after that, Rhodey points out there's no reason for her to stick around. Happy can get her home, and he'll take charge of getting Tony back safely, and yeah, what time does Tony need to be up tomorrow?
...
For a moment, a moment before the girl really starts dancing, Pepper looks away from the screen of her Blackberry, and Tony -- Tony is looking at her, actually. Pepper, not the girl. It's dark, and there is a strange smile on Tony's face. Pepper looks at Tony. Tony looks back at her. It is a funny kind of smile that Tony has, a funny kind of look on Tony's face, and then, the girl between Tony's legs does this thing with her hips, so Tony turns and pays attention to her. The girl is definitely taller than Tony; bent over like that, with Tony sitting, her --
Pepper glues her eyes to the Blackberry. She isn't looking. She isn't --
...
It isn't like this is Pepper's first time through these situations, and it isn't like this is the first time with Tony, either. It's more just -- maybe it was how happy Tony was that night. Smiles are expressive. The expression on Tony's face had said things.
We could.
I'd do this.
You want to?
The way Tony's hair smells. The way Tony's hands smell. Tony, with her face tilted up, eyes closed. Tony always licks the inside left corner of her mouth, so Pepper has to repaint the lipstick there with a brush, and Tony has to hold her breath and keep very still.
Tony's mouth would taste like the breathmints that Pepper keeps for herself in her purse and that Tony keeps stealing.
...
Pepper remembers the time she fished half of an Assignment and Assumption Agreement out from under the bed because Tony fucked the lawyer who brought it to her for signing and thinking, Jesus, right above her head was probably where Tony fingerfucked a Harvard Law grad into coming so hard that Pepper could still see the stain on the bed. Pepper remembers the time that Tony casually decided to sit on Pepper's knee while arguing with Rhodey about something; Pepper remembers the time she accidentally drank out of Tony's tumbler of Scotch and the way it burned the whole way down with Tony watching, knowing that Pepper had drunk out of her glass, but not saying anything and kind of smiling. Tony had looked at her while that girl arched her back and worked herself over Tony's lap.
Pepper grips her Blackberry hard the whole way ride back to her place. Says very little but "Good night" to Happy. Tries not to think about the noises she knows Tony's girls make -- once in a while, Tony comes back for leftovers after a couple hours in the lab. The girls tend to squeal because Tony needs a shower, then start moaning for other reasons. Pepper usually retreats to the art wing and puts on some nice earmuffs, like the kind used on gun ranges, and now, Pepper grips her Blackberry so hard the edges dig into her hands.
Pepper comes into work the next morning. Pepper fishes Tony out of Rhodey's off-base condo. Six days later, on her birthday, Pepper cleans up after Christine Everhart and Tony.
...
Three months later, Tony leans back, and Pepper, very carefully, puts her fingers into Tony's chest.
No shirt. No soap. No watches or buttons or makeup.
...
Bras actually fit OK with a little bit of tugging and strap fiddling, and Pepper knows better than to ask if Tony wants to be fitted for some custom ones. The stylist calls Pepper and asks if there's anything she can do: can she bring her team over? Tony has to be way, way overdue for a haircut. Actually, Tony got one at the Air Force base in Germany, and Pepper turns down the video clip Jarvis is showing her where two of the View hosts are talking about how bad they feel about what Tony went through over there, and one of them explains that Tony is taking it easy for a while.
Three months back, Pepper walks into Tony's closet and stands there, two days after her birthday, the day after Tony goes missing and is probably dead in the dust, and Tony's closet smells like clean clothes. Pepper is diligent about dry cleaning. The maids changed the sheets the afternoon.
No shirt. No soap. No watches or buttons or makeup or breathmints or Tony.
Pepper puts her Blackberry on the dresser and goes and sits on the empty bed. She pulls her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around her knees.
...
Pepper missed Ton --
...
Pepper missed Ton --
...
"I don't have anybody else," Tony says to her and looks her in the eye.
Pepper almost believes it for a whole second: what about Rhodey? What about Obadiah?
"Everybody knows how you are with girls," she says, somewhat later. And guys. And girls and guys together. The relevant one at hand, though, is the bit about girls, but some impulse makes Pepper do stupid things, so she closes her eyes most of the way and leans forward. They didn't dance, but they're out on the balcony, and she can smell Tony. She can see Tony. Through her lashes, she can see the arc reactor shining underneath Tony's gown.
Tony hesitates, then leans forward.
Pepper opens her eyes and lets her breath out. "I need a drink."
...
Still at the strip club: "Is Pepper gone?"
Jim has his feet up on the banquette and looks over at Tony. "Yeah. Happy came for her five minutes ago -- you ready to go now?"
Tony kind of shrugs, turns up one corner of her mouth, and looks away to the floor show below. "I could do with some beer."
...
"You asked. What you're asking about is me." Tony says. Her voice has an odd echo to it. "It's not a piece of equipment. It's me -- "
...
Tony comes home from Gulmira, and Pepper comes down into the shop, expecting to see Tony fiddling at the workbench or watching TV or eating a sandwich. Instead, the grown-up, on-horse-steroids cousin of Butterfingers is unscrewing what looks like battle armor from Tony's chest.
"Face it," Tony says. "This isn't the worst thing you've caught me doing."
Something with eight fingers is trying to take off the back of her calf.
...
Pepper stretches her legs out to give herself something to do while she thinks about how to phrase things.
"I don't know. She won't tell Obadiah, either. When I left, he was over there, and she was drinking and. I think she -- I was supposed to go because they wanted to talk."
There's pause, just a moment, between to and talk.
...
Pepper calls him again, and this time, she is so panicked that he has to tell her to slow down because he can't make out what she's saying. Pepper does slow down, and several thoughts come through Jim's head.
Thought one: Obadiah has gone crazy.
Thought two: No, Tony wouldn't tell Obadiah what she was working on. That has always made Obadiah a little crazy.
Pepper says that Obadiah is trying to kill Tony, but Jim doesn't even need to hear that because he's just had -- "Oh sweet fuck," Rhodey says and changes lanes and floors the gas.
...
Thought three: how long has it been going on?
...
Tony has done a couple of magazine covers, but she's too angry to really make journalists comfortable, so she doesn't have many of them, and she gave the Apogee Award away to a Caesar impersonator just off the casino floor. She doesn't have a chance in hell with Pepper; Jim has had a pretty good idea of the clusterfuck that is the inside of Tony's head since she was fifteen. He has his limits.
Maybe Pepper puts a new heart inside Tony's chest, but only if Tony asks her to. Taking it out again, waiting for her in the dark of the house. Thirty years cultivating and raising and shaping her: Obadiah. Only Obadiah.
Obadiah doesn't have limits.
...
"Jim," Obadiah says and holds his hand out. "Congratuations on the tassel."
Jim is wearing his graduation gown; the tassel hangs in his eyes, and he reaches over and grasps Obadiah's hand. Obadiah turns, puts his arm over Jim's shoulder, and introduces Jim to Tony's parents.
...
Four years of school, and neither of Tony's parents ever come up to visit her. Seventeen years on, Tony still worships her father.
And Obadiah would come up to see Tony once or twice a semester. She took the train to New York a couple times to hang out with him when he couldn't make it up to Cambridge, and Jim remembers fifteen year old Tony, sitting on the floor of his dorm room, phone in her lap, two weeks into knowing Rhodey, and having a long, rambling discussion with Obadiah about corporate bond structure.
...
Thought three: how long has --
...
Jim finds Tony on the floor in the shop Her face is white, and her clothes are soaked with sweat. He steps through the broken safety glass and picks her up bodily. An ambulance. Why the fuck didn't she call an ambulance? What did Obadiah do to her? Why didn't Jarvis do anything? Jim can't see any visible marks on Tony, but he props her against the work bench, and she heaves for breath. She grips his shoulder.
Why are the glass walls around the shop missing?
Tony asks where Pepper is.
"Pepper is fine. She's with five agents. They're about to arrest Obadiah."
The lights are on, and Tony tilts her head down, looks at the floor for a second, then looks back at him, having made the calculation.
"That's not going to be enough."
She puts her hand out on Rhodey's shoulder and pulls against it to stand back up, turn. They start walking towards the suit.
...
Halfway to the suit, Tony's knees go out from under her, and Jim has to catch her.
...
Halfway to the suit, Tony's knees go out from under her. Jim has to catch her.
...
Tony tells Jarvis to execute evasive maneuvers, but hasn't quite hung up the Bluetooth connection before the suit starts moving: on the screen, Rhodey sees a hundred and thirty-eight million dollars of absolute air superiority outclassed by a suit built in a basement.
In his ear, he hears Tony laughing, happier than he has ever heard her.
...
Obadiah settles her on the couch and comes around the side.
...
Objectively, Obadiah was around when Tony was younger, but Tony doesn't remember a lot about him from that period. Clear memories of him start with a conversation, a couple weeks before her eleventh birthday, on a balcony overlooking Fifth Avenue, about how the Pentagon's weapon development bid system works. It's cold on the balcony because it's November in New York City, but his voice is warm, and he laughs when she tells him to hurry up. She already knows that part. He touches her on the shoulder, then on the back of the neck.
...
Halfway to the suit, Tony's knees go out from under her, and Jim has to catch her with one hand underneath each shoulder. Her legs won't work. Tony tries to get them to work, but she can't put any weight on them before they go out on her again.
"Get me to the suit," she says, and he just looks at her face, pale and sweating. The corners of her mouth shake from the effort of having tried to walk.
It would be ridiculously easy to pick her up and carry her upstairs and keep her there.
"The suit has an exoskeleton," Tony pants, sort of hanging there between his hands, and she looks over at the suit.
Jim looks over there, too.
"I'll be fine," Tony says, and Jim looks down at her.
What should he say? It would be really easy to put her over his shoulder and carry her up the stairs. Hell, he wouldn't even have to put her over her shoulder. He could just pick her up, and she probably wouldn't have the strength to kick him, much less get down the stairs again. Pepper has five SHIELD agents with her, and yes, Jim has had a few dealings with them before. It's a small world on the bleeding edge of weapons development. SHIELD can take care of its own damn self and then some. He'd be more worried about Oba --
...
Jim remembers the day of graduation. He remembers shaking hands with Howard and Maria -- it had been oddly formal, and Tony was being more than a little difficult. Howard and Maria didn't seem to notice; Obadiah did.
Jim remembers Obadiah.
Obadiah was the one who took the photo, in fact, of Tony standing between the people she loved most in the world.
...
" -- you think that just because you have an idea, it belongs to you?"
...
Tony can't quite get the words to beg out of her mouth, but she doesn't have the strength to stand anymore. She can't even quite look him in the face; Tony just sort of tilts her chin up and looks off into the far distance. She knows what he's thinking about.
Jim looks down at her.
Jim puts his other hand under her knees and carries her over the shop floor, over to the suit.
....
" -- your Ninth Symphony."
...
Jim guides her feet into the footpieces holds her steady while the chest, with the window in the middle for the arc reactor, comes down.
"You need me to do anything else?" he says.
The turns to look at him, considering, but the voice that comes out sounds nothing like Tony.
...
Jim puts his other hand under her knees and carries her over the shop floor, over to the suit. Tony, despite herself, lets out this noise somewhere between a sob and a gasp and lets her head rest on Jim's shoulder for a moment. She closes her eyes.
Obadiah backhands Tony into the side of a bus.
Tony rips the optic cable out of Obadiah's suit.
"I'd have this girlfriend," Tony says to Pepper.
...
Tony rips the optic cable out of Obadiah's suit, and Obadiah crushes Tony's helmet in one hand. She loses a repulsor, so one weapon down, but more importantly, even if she squeezes a last burst of juice from the arc reactor, no flying. It isn't like she had a lot of options before, but Obadiah has no options. The moment Pepper found Agent Coulson in the lobby, it was over for him, and they both know it.
Obadiah isn't stupid. Tony hangs on with all the strength in her arms and, by extension of the exoskeleton, her mind, and Pepper puts makeup on Tony's hands, on her face. Tony wears an undershirt, then the dress shirt, then her jacket, buttoned fairly high. Tony turns her face, and Pepper checks the coverage on Tony's cheekbone.
...
"I would have this girlfriend -- " Tony says, angling her head and looking Pepper in the eye.
It doesn't work, of course. Tony had been there, after all, when Pepper went up to Not-My-First-Rodeo Coulson and basically told him to call her. Pepper is still straight. Pepper doesn't like girls that way, and Tony holds the look for a moment longer, and then Pepper makes sure the shirt lies smoothly over the arc reactor
...
"Just stick to the cards," Jim says in her ear.
"I think I should say it was just Pepper and me," Tony says to Agent Coulson.
...
"Just make it through this," Obadiah says in her ear. Rain pours down over the coffins; somebody holds an umbrella over them, and Obadiah's hand is pressed against the small of her back.
...
The desert is brutally cold at night and catastrophically hot during the day: she had no water, no cover, no method of signaling. Tony knows she was staggeringly lucky to have been found and unthinkably lucky to be found by Jim, who recognized her on sight, and you should know this by now: identity is not a fixed point. Identity is not height. Identity is neither dress nor costume. Nevertheless, change the shape of the body underneath, and expectations shift. Memories and, to an extent, personality follow. Think of identity as a musical piece with a hundred notes. Play it on a cello, and all one hundred notes are there, but some will be louder, and some will be softer than if you played it on a viola. Or a trumpet. Or a cornet. Same piece. Different sound.
Tony has more more heartbreak; Tony grows up angrier. Hungrier. Tony falls asleep in Jim's college bed, and he has to explain to his roommate, to his RA, to his parents. Tony walks out of a board room, standing every inch of five foot three in flats, seven in heels, and Obadiah has openings, opportunities with the Board, with the major shareholders. Tony wakes up in a cave in Afghanistan with a battery hooked up to her chest, watching a man shave himself in a fragment of mirror. Shortly after that, other men take her into a dark room. It is no longer so cold that her breath hangs in the air, but when the door shuts, for a long, frightening moment, all Tony can think, over and over, clutching the battery, is that she is going to be raped. They are going to rape her. They are going to --
It is, in fact, a relief when they hold her head under water. Tony gives in and agrees to build the missile before they try anything else: the shame of giving in so easily is something that she has to deal with later, but they put her head under water, and she sees the arc reactor. She hears Pepper's voice. She remembers her father. She remembers Obadiah. She remembers that she has loved Jim for twenty years; she is probably in love with Pepper. She loved Obadiah; she comes to love Yinsen. While playing backgammon, she asks him whether he is going to stone her for showing her ankles. He looks confused, then disappointed. Then amused.
Mostly, though, Tony sees the arc reactor. She smells the forge. She knows the strength in her hands and the light in her mind. She mourns Yinsen more intensely than she has ever mourned anything in her life. For the first time, in fact, Tony feels an emotion that has nothing to do with her or her fears or her wants: she doesn't remember going through the camp and burning every person she lays her eyes on. She barely remembers flying to Gulmira. Or the boy. Or the Jerichos. Or the dogfight.
Still.
There is an explosion. She escapes.
...
Christine sits in the front row, unimpressed. Tony grins and leans forward on the podium. It's still too tall to be comfortable. The press eyes her warily, not quite comfortable with her. There has never been a reporter that Tony can comfortably call by his or her first name.
"You need me to do anything else?" Jim said in the workshop.
"Just keep the skies clear."
...
The explosion from the munitions actually helps her gain more altitude than she otherwise have had: the arc downward will start at any moment, and --
When she goes back to Gulmira, after she outflies the F-22's, there is a moment when she skims low over the dunes.
...
Obadiah was the last person living who remembered Tony before MIT, before her parents died, before she made her first circuit board, and she remembers, vividly, the day they stood on a balcony overlooking Fifth Avenue, and they talked about her father's company, her future. Obadiah touched her on the shoulder and the back of the neck to suggest that they go inside when, eventually, it started to rain. Tony doesn't move. Obadiah goes inside. She stays alone.
...
Christine sits in the front row, unimpressed.
"I am Iron Man," Tony says, and the room explodes, and all she sees is --
...
Tony crests the dune, and for a long, glorious moment, all she sees is sky.
So is there anybody reading this chunk of text who didn't give me ideas to appropriate and shit?![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
montana_crows fact-checked for me, and wired_lizard helped me think about the power dynamics and, in a way, was the origin of the story. Her vastly superior Stars genderflip blogathon writing really got me thinking about what Tony would be like as a girl, back in the day. Hivemind held my hand, particularly dafnap the Proofreader/Artiste and jamaillith the Mashup Introducer/Mental Support Mainstay. Without the little fandom of three, this wouldn't be cluttering your f-list.
Here, have an extra bonus GORGEOUS manip, courtesy ofdafnap:
AND HOLY SHIT. Th_esaurus maaaaaaade wee little cartoons.
And now, we've got a little communal sandbox:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
girltony. Come play.
Maybe there is a smile on his face. Maybe not.
Jim calls Obadiah after the press conference, and they talk.
...
General truth known during college: Jim Rhodes was sleeping with Tony Stark.
General truth known behind certain selected closed doors: Obadiah Stane has Tony Stark well in hand.
In multiple ways.
...
Pepper comes down when Tony asks and helps replace the arc reactor. Tony has her shirt and bra off, of course, and she doesn't act like Pepper should be worried at all about seeing her female boss lying propped on a table, topless, and when Pepper goes back upstairs afterwards, the press conference from the Representative from a conservative district in Ohio who had to apologize for having made the really inappropriate comments about why women shouldn't be in charge of major defense contractors -- it's basically over, and the talking heads are just doing the post game.
"Did you get that, Jarvis?" Pepper asks.
"Of course, Ms. Potts," Jarvis says. "I have put it on Ms. Stark's viewing queue for tonight."
There is a moment of silence because Pepper knows -- and Jarvis does, too, insofar as a computer AI that started out as a way for Tony to turn lights out in the shop without having to get out of bed with whoever she happened to be entertaining, and things just sort of developed from there -- that Tony hasn't watched so much as a TV commercial since coming back from Afghanistan. Or listened to a song. Or done anything but stay in the lab and come up, once a day, to work out in the gym.
Occasionally for food, if she doesn't feel like talking to Pepper to ask for it.
...
So Pepper goes home regularly at six for the first time in years, and she watches Nightline. She is in the kitchen getting some leftovers when she hears Tony's name come up, and she uses the remote to turn up the volume.
...
The Board gets together and gives Obadiah a call after the press conference. They talk.
...
Obadiah Stane, after all, has Tony Stark well in hand. Even Jim has to admit that for the real nuts and bolts, for the day-to-day decisions, you go to Obadiah, not Tony.
...
Jim calls Obadiah after the press conference. They talk. A couple days later, Jim calls Obadiah again to touch base, go over in more detail what Jim can tell Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Justice Department and the White House and --
"Yeah, the State Department is coming in, too. Deputy Secretary Anderson called me yesterday to know why we're messing with the arms package to Pakistan -- no reason that you'd know about that. It's not official yet, but he wanted to reach out and see if there was something we could do."
"Christ. Is there anybody who isn't pissed with her?"
The line is a little fuzzy because Obadiah is on his cell phone and reception, apparently, is pretty shitty this far up in the Manhattan headquarters. "Pepper is pissed because Tony is eating all her meals down in the shop and won't even tell her when she's hungry. Tony just shows up in the kitchen and helps herself to food, Pepper says. So it's probably just you. And me."
Obadiah sounds amused, and a moment of silence goes by.
And Jim finally admits, laughing a little despite himself. "Maybe just you, Obie."
...
It's six-thirty, seven PM, and Pepper is in her kitchen with the lights off there, but on in the living room. The remote is on the counter with her, so when she hears Tony's name come up, she turns up the volume, then opens the refrigerator for the takeout Chinese from Tuesday, decides she wants the takeout Greek from Wednesday, but by the time she has the lid off, Pepper has also jammed her thumb down, hard, on the OFF button for the remote to turn that stuff off. In fact, Pepper eats her dinner in the kitchen, standing up at the counter with the lights off and a plastic fork in head, mentally writing a very firm mental note on uninviting the woman from the next Firefighter's Benefit and moving her to the list of blacklisted "Stupid Reporters Who Ask Tony Whether She Wants A Family and A Man and Therefore Make Tony Very Difficult to Handle for At Least Two Days."
There are a lot of interview requests, a lot of access requests, more than Pepper can ever remember, but when the answer is always no, followed by forwarding to Obadiah's personal assistant, it's pretty quick work.
When she's done eating, she goes back into the living room, sits down, and turns the TV on again.
Tony's old arc reactor winks at her from atop the pile of "To Pay on Saturday Morning" bills.
...
Pepper comes into work one morning and is on her way to the kitchen to make espresso because whether or not Tony has been awake for two hours or twelve hours, she likes espresso in the morning.
While she waits for the cup for Tony's espresso cup to warm properly, Jarvis informs her that Ms. Stark has gone to visit Colonel Jim Rhodes at the Air Force Base. This, Pepper decides is good news.
...
While she waits for the espresso cup to warm, Jarvis informs Pepper that Ms. Stark has gone to visit Colonel Jim Rhodes at the Air Force Base. It's a Friday afternoon. This, she decides is good news. They'll get drunk together. Possibly stagger around. Squabble. Tony will try to get into Jim's pants again, and Jim will turn her down, so they'll go out and pick up some girls. Pepper will get a call at 4AM asking her where the closest all-night liquor store is with Jim hissing, not very subtly in the background, at Tony and asking why Tony is bothering the very nice Pepper at such an hour. The girls will have long since passed out on the couch or the bed or where-ever it is that they've ended up, and Pepper full expects to fall back asleep at 4:15AM to Tony and Jim complaining about each other.
Tony is back in under two hours.
It takes fifty minutes to drive to El Segundo from Malibu. Pepper is surprised to see Tony, and Tony shrugs her jacket off, drops it on the table, and disappears down into the lab.
...
Pepper brings lunch down, and Tony doesn't look up.
...
Pepper brings dinner down, and Tony doesn't look up.
...
Here is how it should have gone: Tony shows up at the hangar, tells another bullshit story about spring break, 1987, tells pilots there that it's been a pleasure meeting them, and asks Jim to come work with her on something big. He cuts to the chase and asks her why the fuck she's playing this game. When they sat around and watched Star Wars for the eighty-fifth time, she was always more interested in building the Death Star and talking shit about how the Stormtrooper armor did nobody any good than anything else. Tony stops short, kinda laughs, and tells him maybe that's why she needs help with what she's doing. Rhodey would be a little offended by the comparison between the US and the Empire if he weren't forty-one years old, and he still doesn't like it, but they part on something resembling good terms.
Instead, Jim keeps seeing the kicked-dog look on Tony's face over the top of the forms he's supposed to fill out evaluating the pilots he had been talking to.
Instead, Tony drives home at about twenty-five miles over the speed, pours three shots of Balvenie-made twenty-one year old Scotch into a tumbler, then goes down into her shop.
Pepper hears, just before the door seals, Tony telling Jarvis to see what Obie is doing.
...
Pepper remembers being surprised when realized just how tiny her boss was: she mentioned it to Jim at one point, maybe earlier into working for Tony than she should have because it really isn't professional to talk about your boss with her best friend, but it probably wasn't professional to insist on taking a Congressman out for a Senators-and-billionaires only drinks and strippers night, and clearly, the only way to respond was to stay in the hotel and drink all the alcohol in the bar in her hotel suite. Bar, a full blown bar with a counter and a liquor display and everything and a view of Central Park to boot.
When you're Tony Stark, nothing in your life do mini anything unless it's a skirt you chase or nanobot technology. Jim kinda grinned and talked about how surprised he'd been the first time in college when he realized Tony couldn't reach the top shelf at the library. And back then, she wore baggy jeans and black t-shirts and sneakers and no heels at all, so it should have been really noticeable, and when they got even drunker, after Jim told Pepper a bunch of stories about his sister's new boyfriend, he mentioned how Tony used to wear his sweatshirts and T-shirts in college.
If they were sober, there would have been an awkward silence. Jim would have had to cover up by saying that it was because Tony never did her laundry, so she never had clean clothes, and that's why she lived in Jim's t-shirts sophomore year and junior year, wore his jeans until Jim made a poorly-placed joke about how that was the only way she was ever going to get into them, but Pepper doesn't notice. Instead, she talks about how she should stop wearing heels because even when Tony is in those ridiculous four inch ones, she is still a good four inches shorter than Pepper in flats.
When Tony wants to be, she is the biggest person in the room.
Jim met Howard and Maria: he knows Tony didn't learn it from them.
...
Obadiah comes over. Pepper looks at him, sitting with feet planted wide apart and his arm over the back of the couch, and Tony comes bounding out of the shop with defiance in every line of her body but also, the oddest smile on her face.
Pepper clears out without Tony having to say a word to her.
...
Pepper knows Tony used to have a thing for Jim, and Pepper has moved from suspecting to being pretty sure about Tony and --
...
Tony strips her shirt off over her head and comes walking over, barefoot, in her bra and jeans and the arc reactor. He traces two fingers up her stomach, from the button of her jeans to the clasp on her bra lying on just the underside of the arc reactor. Then, he traces his fingers over the diameter of the arc reactor.
"That's new," Obadiah says. "Did you retire the old one?"
Tony undoes the front of her bra and slides into his lap. He traces his finger over the glass in the middle. Taps a little and notes the way Tony runs her teeth over her bottom lip.
"It's a week or so old," Tony says. "And I don't care how hard I end up coming. You still aren't coming down to see what I'm working on."
Obadiah laughs, runs his index finger where the plate meets her chest to make her gasp, and Tony puts her arms around his neck and kisses him.
...
Tony comes back from Europe, and she goes to her first Directors of the Board meeting. She gives a small speech, but after that, nobody listens or gives her remarks and input the weight she thinks they deserve, so she crashes the after-party at a strip club: one of the Directors leaves immediately. Two others leave shortly. She closes the place down with Obadiah, and they go back to the house she grew up in, where the furniture is still draped in sheets.
And.
"Look, Tony," Obadiah says afterwards, propping himself up on an elbow. The reading lamp by the sofa is on; it shows the little nest of cushions and pillows and blankets that Tony has been sleeping in, but none of the other lights in the house are on, so shadows start five feet out and are almost complete in the corners of the room. "It isn't that they're opposed, in principle, to having a woman in the chair. It just has to be the right one."
Tony looks up, skeptical. She's naked and on her stomach with her legs stretched out behind her. The rug underneath is Chinese, red and blue on a cream background shade or two darker than her skin; Tony grew her hair long enough to be a little past her shoulders.
Obadiah still has his shirt, though it's unbuttoned all the way, but the tidy business suit -- trousers custom, jacket from Barneys', clean white shirt -- Tony had been wearing is in sections starting at the door. The shoes are neatly Tony together, but the trousers are on the threshold between foyer and living room. Her shirt is on top of a cloisonne vase that designed to match mid-winter hothouse flowers, and her underwear is underneath the coffee table, which has the draft Stark Industries stockholder's report, 1991, folded to page 14. It's as clear as the dust on every uncovered surface. Also, Tony hasn't moved up into her old bedroom. Also, Tony hasn't gone into the shop beyond turning the lights on and walking out again.
Obadiah trails the back of his hand down Tony's back, from spine to the curve of her ass. She turns her head away from him, and on the sidetable, there is a photo of her parents standing together at some function. Maria wears a silver ball gown; Howard wears white tie. Maria looks distant; Howard looks uncomfortable.
Obadiah trails his hand his hand up Tony's back, from the curve of her ass to the back of her neck.
A trash truck clangs outside; it's getting close enough to dawn that light will be coming through the curtains soon, and Tony turns to look at Obadiah with a flat, almost hostile expression. She doesn't look away, though, or even look like she's going to look away, so grinning openly, Obadiah gets to his feet.
"I'll get coffee. You need to stay awake through this."
...
"An old family nickname for me," Obadiah explains. "Tony picked it out when she was four because she decided saying my whole first name was inefficient. Four years old."
...
Tony shows up to the next Board with a completed, revised response to RFP for the major unit for next generation of heavy armored mobile warfare, and hers lists no fewer than forty-three separate points and improvements to be made to the proposed Stark Gryffin, ranging from that improved fire suppression to a reconfigured, simplified gun turret.
"Though, gentlemen, I have to say. With the talent that we have in R&D, it is a cocksucking shame that we're still in the business of trying to improve on what the Brits came up with when they decided they were tired of picking horseshit out of their teeth."
Also, four inch heels, a dress shirt unbuttoned halfway down her sternum, an excellent pushup bra, and on the middle finger of her left hand, she has her MIT ring. The thumb of her right hand has Howard's MIT ring, sized down appropriately.
Obadiah leans back in his chair and tries not to laugh too hard.
...
"I don't think the stylist intended you to wear that shirt buttoned down so low, Tony."
"Yeah, I don't think I wanted anybody to pay attention to the shirt."
There is, in fact, an edge to Tony's voice.
...
"I don't care how hard I end up coming. You're still not coming down to see what I'm working on," Tony says.
Obadiah laughs, runs his index finger where the plate meets her chest to make her gasp, and Tony puts her arms around his neck and kisses him. He flattens his palm, and the light of the arc reactor disappears. Tony moans, bends down, and sucks his fingers into her mouth.
...
"Yeah, I don't think I wanted anybody to pay attention to the shirt."
There is, in fact, an edge to Tony's voice, and Obadiah notes it, but doesn't comment and watches her unbutton her shirt the rest of the way.
...
The Board gets together and gives Obadiah a call after the press conference. They talk. It isn't hard for Obadiah to convince them the injunction is their idea when heavy drinking and compulsive womanizing and flashy suits and buying expensive art on impulse are standard behavior. It's even easier when --
...
Jim gives Pepper a call one night on her personal cell phone. She asks about his family, and he gives her a status update on the branches: his grandmother is fine, but his dad is having a little trouble with his right knee. His sister is up for partner at her consulting firm, and the cousin that she met, the one who was studying veterinary science, has decided that it would be far cooler to study theater. Theater. What's wrong with being a vet? Absolutely nothing.
She doesn't really have family that he can ask after, though, so Pepper tells him about her house. That's her proxy. And she spends more time home these days, anyways, and eventually, Jim circles around to asking how Tony is because they haven't talked in a while.
"I know she drove out to the Base. She didn't find you?"
"No, she found me." Jim taps against something three or four times, then apparently gets his courage to ask. "It didn't go well -- Pepper, what is she working on?"
Pepper is sitting outside on her pool deck. She invested in a chaise lounge, and it's why she's out there in the dark. She stretches her legs out to give herself something to do while she thinks about how to phrase things.
"I don't know. She won't tell Obadiah, either."
There's a long silence on the other line, so long that Pepper thinks Jim has hung up.
...
Pepper takes the old arc reactor to get engraved. She has a buddy in R&D, material science, and Pepper explains the lettering that she wants around the edge. He looks at the arc reactor, then at her.
"Five minutes," he says. "Jesus, that's all I'm asking."
"Paul, it's on loan from the boss."
"Three minutes. If she really does have a heart, which I doubt, she'll understand."
"No."
...
She can't answer him because he has one hand over her nose and the palm of the other over her mouth. He holds it.
"You should think about coming to New York for the next board meeting. "
She struggles a little, and he leans in to make the point. "Bring the arc reactor."
He lets his hands off; Tony sucks breath in so hard that her entire torso bends forward, but she also laughs and puts her heels in the small of Obadiah's back and pulls him all the way inside her. "Thi -- " She's short enough of breath that the words don't come easily; the word stutters out in the middle, Obadiah bends down low, grinning a little. They're in her bed with the windows looking onto the Pacific.
"Sta -- stays with me," Tony says and tilts her head back to luxuriate the feel of air in her lungs.
Fighting down the black panic, the memories of water and fear, is half the fun.
...
"She won't tell Obadiah either."
There's a long silence on the other line, so long that Pepper thinks Jim has hung up.
...
Pepper comes down into the shop with coffee and the mail and the engraved arc reactor, in a glass case and wrapped up with brown packing paper.
Tony doesn't really notice.
"I thought you weren't designing weapons anymore," Pepper says.
Tony tries to explain that she isn't, that these are just flight stabilizers, but ends up in a pile on the floor anyways.
...
Here is something to know: Tony does not, in fact, sleep with as many people as people think she does.
...
Pepper comes into work and finds Tony's shirt on the floor. Cufflinks -- Obadiah's, by the size of them -- are underneath Tony's bed. They're 24K gold, so the edges are soft; Obadiah takes good care of his things, but there are deep, matching marks in one of them. Knowing Tony, having seen other cufflinks under the bed, Pepper knows that they're probably toothmarks from being held in Tony's mouth. Pepper has seen Tony mouthing her own every once in a while, and yes, Jim sounds a little shocked that that Tony isn't telling Obadiah what she's working on either, but Pepper knows that, in a confused, Tony sort of way that makes perfect sense: Tony has never been quite so obvious about having relied on Obadiah for half of her life.
Tony trusts him to run the Board, to fix her company. To give her something she --
Pepper puts the cufflinks in an envelope and makes a mental note to give them to Obadiah.
Something else has to give. That's the way it is with Tony.
...
Pepper doesn't like girls. Not that way.
...
Tony's hair smells like expensive shampoo and conditioner and product. Tony's hands smell like mechanic's soap.
....
Pepper knows what Tony's hair smells like from buttoning up her shirt.
Pepper knows what Tony's hands smell like from buttoning her cuffs.
...
One afternoon, with Obadiah and the Board's blessing, Tony closes on a deal to sublet her brain: through certain accounting black operations, a certain dollar amount goes to R&D design to Stark Industries, and Tony promises to come in once a month and give Weapons Dev about whatever has been floating around in the back of her brain. They get to take the ideas and run with them, in-house, as far as they can manage. Thirty minutes at the end of each session is given over to trouble-shooting. They have problems, they bring them to her. Tony promises not to go home and build infinitely better versions of them in her shop with floss and a year's worth of MAD magazines from the mid 1980's; the government pays her company a ridiculous amount of money. It's a one-of-a-kind deal for a one-of-a-kind mind, the three-star general who signs for the government says.
Tony is understandably a little excited about this, and they're in the Rolls -- Pepper, Rhodey, with Tony tucked between them. Tony shakes her hair out of the chignon with a happy noise and says, "Ladies and gentlemen, this calls for a little celebration."
"Tony."
Pepper says it with inflection number 213, which conveys that her boss has a long day ahead of her tomorrow, and that time would best be spent eating a light, nutritious meal, reading some files that need reading, and settling into bed, alone, with an eye-mask.
"Pepper." Tony says it with inflection number -- there really isn't an inflection. Tony is so pleased with herself and the world that it drips and hangs from every sound she makes, including the way she settles back against the seat. No inflection necessary. Golden sun slants through the windows and picks out her profile against the window.
"I think you know where we need to go, Happy."
"I think I do, Ms. Stark." Happy glances up in the rearview mirror, and Tony stretches her legs out. Not as long as Pepper's, not as long as Rhodey's, and if she's sitting this far back on the seat, they don't quite touch the floor if she isn't wearing heels.
"Make me happy." Pause, then a glance around because Tony is just that pleased with herself this afternoon. "Happy."
...
Happy is an second-generation Stark employee: his mom was one of the first typists at the New York office, and Tony and Happy apparently used to play together with the mimeograph machine. She bossed him around; at nine, he would sit in a wheeled office chair, pretending o be a test driver on the latest stealth jet-propelled race car, and three year old Tony would pretend to stopwatch time his tests down the company halls. With age, Tony mellowed enough to let men hold doors for her -- Obadiah put the cap on it by bribing a pair of male PR interns to always hold the door him if Tony was there, and that convinced her that at least sometimes, it was a respect thing, not a woman-and-tiny-and-you-can't-possibly-walk-and-open-that-big-heavy-door thing. Happy is the only one she doesn't mind letting do it, though.
Pepper makes an unhappy noise: they're going to be spending the night in a strip club, aren't they? And she's going to have to stick around to make sure doesn't blow anything up. And.
She catches Happy's eye in the rearview mirror. He grins a little.
...
Obie, Rhodey, Pepper: in addition to being bad about calling people by their proper names, Tony has never been very good at categorizing or compartmentalizing. All she knows is that these are her people. They're the closest analogue she has to friends or family or lovers. Tony doesn't build dividing walls in whatever is left of her heart, and the result is a muddle. In the cave, she tells Yinsen that she doesn't have anybody; in her shop, she tells Pepper that Pepper is all she has.
Obie tries to kill her. Rhodey has history with her. Pepper doesn't like girls.
...
Pepper doesn't like girls, at least not that way, and working for Tony Stark isn't going to change that.
She puts Tony's watch on for her, too, when Tony is busy talking on the phone and changing the channel on the TV and eating breakfast and shooting Obadiah the finger through the video conference link, so Pepper knows what the inside of Tony's wrist looks and feels like.
...
For example, there is the habit that Tony has where, whenever she figures something out, she writes it down with whatever happens to be at hand. Sometimes, it's pen. Sometimes, it's pencil. A couple times, it happened to be Christian Dior lipstick, which was annoying to clean up, but was at least clearly visible: Tony wrote down a materials engineering insight underlying the evasion algorithm on the AS-22 strike missile in lip gloss on the mirror of the master bathroom, and Pepper had to go in and transcribe it in a form that she could send to the engineers. Was that a three or a five?
"It's a three," Tony says. She's standing in the bathroom door in gym shorts and a gray t-shirt; the room is still warm from Tony's shower, and she comes padding over in bare feet to give Pepper a quick, compact primer on rocket propulsion systems. Pepper isn't sure she really understands it, and a month later, it's totally out of her head. In the meantime, though, eight days after the lecture, she is back at the Nevada Proving Grounds with Tony. They watch a General Defense Contractor's entry into the corporate beauty contest faceplant into the bedrock, and Pepper, with her agenda and clipboard against her chest, blurts out, "They forgot about balancing."
A not-insignificant amount of military brass and gentlemen in white lab coats turns around.
Tony has the biggest, most pleased smile that Pepper has ever seen on her boss's face.
...
They're at the strip club. Loud music. A discreet view of the floor show from the back-of-the-back, upstairs-of-the-upstairs VIP area. House management is smart enough to turn on, remotely, the track light directly over the screen of Pepper's Blackberry; it's her turn to be in the middle, so she sits in between Rhodey and Tony on the ends of the booth, and a girl comes sashaying over to see if the good-looking woman is as generous as her boss. Over the top of her Blackberry, Pepper can see height. Long hair. Heels, probably. Pepper blushes up to her cheekbones, can't really think of what to say, so she keeps her knees pressed tight together and her fingers typing into her Blackberry. Blonde, maybe? She doesn't know. Definitely heels. Glitter inside the clear heels, too, in fact.
"No, honey, Pepper doesn't really like girls," Tony says, easily. "But I do. Come over here and show me what you'd do for her."
Pepper makes a noise in her throat; Rhodey shifts on the other side of her. There's a beer in his hand and a Sprite in front of Pepper and Tony has bottle service, of course, and is -- an uncountable number of glasses into a thing of champagne so big that it could probably be used to put out a midsize apartment complex that happened to catch on fire. No, Pepper isn't looking. Yes, her eyes are glued to the Blackberry screen.
"What should I call you?" Tony asks. She leans close, says something in Tony's ear that makes Tony laugh, and the club is no-touching, but the girl touches her hand to Tony's cheek, puts her hand on Tony's knee when she's bending over in front of Tony and between Tony's legs.
Tony puts her hand over the girl's. The girl arches her back, and yeah, Tony's nose must be about two inches from the smallest g-string in history.
...
Pepper doesn't like girls.
...
Pepper isn't interested in girls.
...
Pepper doesn't do Tony's makeup. Tony pays mid-five digits to a man who has won four Oscars and about sixteen Golden Globes to take care of her face for everything from Board meetings to a particularly high-profile drinking binge, flies him or his best assistant halfway around the world sometimes, but if Tony needs a touchup before or after, Pepper is the one who does it.
...
They're in the strip club, and the music is loud with a heavy bass beat, but the girl between Tony's legs isn't following. Tony doesn't seem to mind in the least, and the girl moves Tony's hand from Tony's knee to her knee, and when the girl is done dancing to whatever song is in her head, Tony gives her some extra fifties, and the girl turns around and kisses Tony on the cheek. She leaves a smear of glitter, and Tony laughs and wipes it off with the back of her hand.
"Don't let your floor manager see you do that," Tony says.
The girl grins an -- Pepper keeps her eyes glued to the screen of the Blackberry. About ten minutes after that, Rhodey points out there's no reason for her to stick around. Happy can get her home, and he'll take charge of getting Tony back safely, and yeah, what time does Tony need to be up tomorrow?
...
For a moment, a moment before the girl really starts dancing, Pepper looks away from the screen of her Blackberry, and Tony -- Tony is looking at her, actually. Pepper, not the girl. It's dark, and there is a strange smile on Tony's face. Pepper looks at Tony. Tony looks back at her. It is a funny kind of smile that Tony has, a funny kind of look on Tony's face, and then, the girl between Tony's legs does this thing with her hips, so Tony turns and pays attention to her. The girl is definitely taller than Tony; bent over like that, with Tony sitting, her --
Pepper glues her eyes to the Blackberry. She isn't looking. She isn't --
...
It isn't like this is Pepper's first time through these situations, and it isn't like this is the first time with Tony, either. It's more just -- maybe it was how happy Tony was that night. Smiles are expressive. The expression on Tony's face had said things.
We could.
I'd do this.
You want to?
The way Tony's hair smells. The way Tony's hands smell. Tony, with her face tilted up, eyes closed. Tony always licks the inside left corner of her mouth, so Pepper has to repaint the lipstick there with a brush, and Tony has to hold her breath and keep very still.
Tony's mouth would taste like the breathmints that Pepper keeps for herself in her purse and that Tony keeps stealing.
...
Pepper remembers the time she fished half of an Assignment and Assumption Agreement out from under the bed because Tony fucked the lawyer who brought it to her for signing and thinking, Jesus, right above her head was probably where Tony fingerfucked a Harvard Law grad into coming so hard that Pepper could still see the stain on the bed. Pepper remembers the time that Tony casually decided to sit on Pepper's knee while arguing with Rhodey about something; Pepper remembers the time she accidentally drank out of Tony's tumbler of Scotch and the way it burned the whole way down with Tony watching, knowing that Pepper had drunk out of her glass, but not saying anything and kind of smiling. Tony had looked at her while that girl arched her back and worked herself over Tony's lap.
Pepper grips her Blackberry hard the whole way ride back to her place. Says very little but "Good night" to Happy. Tries not to think about the noises she knows Tony's girls make -- once in a while, Tony comes back for leftovers after a couple hours in the lab. The girls tend to squeal because Tony needs a shower, then start moaning for other reasons. Pepper usually retreats to the art wing and puts on some nice earmuffs, like the kind used on gun ranges, and now, Pepper grips her Blackberry so hard the edges dig into her hands.
Pepper comes into work the next morning. Pepper fishes Tony out of Rhodey's off-base condo. Six days later, on her birthday, Pepper cleans up after Christine Everhart and Tony.
...
Three months later, Tony leans back, and Pepper, very carefully, puts her fingers into Tony's chest.
No shirt. No soap. No watches or buttons or makeup.
...
Bras actually fit OK with a little bit of tugging and strap fiddling, and Pepper knows better than to ask if Tony wants to be fitted for some custom ones. The stylist calls Pepper and asks if there's anything she can do: can she bring her team over? Tony has to be way, way overdue for a haircut. Actually, Tony got one at the Air Force base in Germany, and Pepper turns down the video clip Jarvis is showing her where two of the View hosts are talking about how bad they feel about what Tony went through over there, and one of them explains that Tony is taking it easy for a while.
Three months back, Pepper walks into Tony's closet and stands there, two days after her birthday, the day after Tony goes missing and is probably dead in the dust, and Tony's closet smells like clean clothes. Pepper is diligent about dry cleaning. The maids changed the sheets the afternoon.
No shirt. No soap. No watches or buttons or makeup or breathmints or Tony.
Pepper puts her Blackberry on the dresser and goes and sits on the empty bed. She pulls her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around her knees.
...
Pepper missed Ton --
...
Pepper missed Ton --
...
"I don't have anybody else," Tony says to her and looks her in the eye.
Pepper almost believes it for a whole second: what about Rhodey? What about Obadiah?
"Everybody knows how you are with girls," she says, somewhat later. And guys. And girls and guys together. The relevant one at hand, though, is the bit about girls, but some impulse makes Pepper do stupid things, so she closes her eyes most of the way and leans forward. They didn't dance, but they're out on the balcony, and she can smell Tony. She can see Tony. Through her lashes, she can see the arc reactor shining underneath Tony's gown.
Tony hesitates, then leans forward.
Pepper opens her eyes and lets her breath out. "I need a drink."
...
Still at the strip club: "Is Pepper gone?"
Jim has his feet up on the banquette and looks over at Tony. "Yeah. Happy came for her five minutes ago -- you ready to go now?"
Tony kind of shrugs, turns up one corner of her mouth, and looks away to the floor show below. "I could do with some beer."
...
"You asked. What you're asking about is me." Tony says. Her voice has an odd echo to it. "It's not a piece of equipment. It's me -- "
...
Tony comes home from Gulmira, and Pepper comes down into the shop, expecting to see Tony fiddling at the workbench or watching TV or eating a sandwich. Instead, the grown-up, on-horse-steroids cousin of Butterfingers is unscrewing what looks like battle armor from Tony's chest.
"Face it," Tony says. "This isn't the worst thing you've caught me doing."
Something with eight fingers is trying to take off the back of her calf.
...
Pepper stretches her legs out to give herself something to do while she thinks about how to phrase things.
"I don't know. She won't tell Obadiah, either. When I left, he was over there, and she was drinking and. I think she -- I was supposed to go because they wanted to talk."
There's pause, just a moment, between to and talk.
...
Pepper calls him again, and this time, she is so panicked that he has to tell her to slow down because he can't make out what she's saying. Pepper does slow down, and several thoughts come through Jim's head.
Thought one: Obadiah has gone crazy.
Thought two: No, Tony wouldn't tell Obadiah what she was working on. That has always made Obadiah a little crazy.
Pepper says that Obadiah is trying to kill Tony, but Jim doesn't even need to hear that because he's just had -- "Oh sweet fuck," Rhodey says and changes lanes and floors the gas.
...
Thought three: how long has it been going on?
...
Tony has done a couple of magazine covers, but she's too angry to really make journalists comfortable, so she doesn't have many of them, and she gave the Apogee Award away to a Caesar impersonator just off the casino floor. She doesn't have a chance in hell with Pepper; Jim has had a pretty good idea of the clusterfuck that is the inside of Tony's head since she was fifteen. He has his limits.
Maybe Pepper puts a new heart inside Tony's chest, but only if Tony asks her to. Taking it out again, waiting for her in the dark of the house. Thirty years cultivating and raising and shaping her: Obadiah. Only Obadiah.
Obadiah doesn't have limits.
...
"Jim," Obadiah says and holds his hand out. "Congratuations on the tassel."
Jim is wearing his graduation gown; the tassel hangs in his eyes, and he reaches over and grasps Obadiah's hand. Obadiah turns, puts his arm over Jim's shoulder, and introduces Jim to Tony's parents.
...
Four years of school, and neither of Tony's parents ever come up to visit her. Seventeen years on, Tony still worships her father.
And Obadiah would come up to see Tony once or twice a semester. She took the train to New York a couple times to hang out with him when he couldn't make it up to Cambridge, and Jim remembers fifteen year old Tony, sitting on the floor of his dorm room, phone in her lap, two weeks into knowing Rhodey, and having a long, rambling discussion with Obadiah about corporate bond structure.
...
Thought three: how long has --
...
Jim finds Tony on the floor in the shop Her face is white, and her clothes are soaked with sweat. He steps through the broken safety glass and picks her up bodily. An ambulance. Why the fuck didn't she call an ambulance? What did Obadiah do to her? Why didn't Jarvis do anything? Jim can't see any visible marks on Tony, but he props her against the work bench, and she heaves for breath. She grips his shoulder.
Why are the glass walls around the shop missing?
Tony asks where Pepper is.
"Pepper is fine. She's with five agents. They're about to arrest Obadiah."
The lights are on, and Tony tilts her head down, looks at the floor for a second, then looks back at him, having made the calculation.
"That's not going to be enough."
She puts her hand out on Rhodey's shoulder and pulls against it to stand back up, turn. They start walking towards the suit.
...
Halfway to the suit, Tony's knees go out from under her, and Jim has to catch her.
...
Halfway to the suit, Tony's knees go out from under her. Jim has to catch her.
...
Tony tells Jarvis to execute evasive maneuvers, but hasn't quite hung up the Bluetooth connection before the suit starts moving: on the screen, Rhodey sees a hundred and thirty-eight million dollars of absolute air superiority outclassed by a suit built in a basement.
In his ear, he hears Tony laughing, happier than he has ever heard her.
...
Obadiah settles her on the couch and comes around the side.
...
Objectively, Obadiah was around when Tony was younger, but Tony doesn't remember a lot about him from that period. Clear memories of him start with a conversation, a couple weeks before her eleventh birthday, on a balcony overlooking Fifth Avenue, about how the Pentagon's weapon development bid system works. It's cold on the balcony because it's November in New York City, but his voice is warm, and he laughs when she tells him to hurry up. She already knows that part. He touches her on the shoulder, then on the back of the neck.
...
Halfway to the suit, Tony's knees go out from under her, and Jim has to catch her with one hand underneath each shoulder. Her legs won't work. Tony tries to get them to work, but she can't put any weight on them before they go out on her again.
"Get me to the suit," she says, and he just looks at her face, pale and sweating. The corners of her mouth shake from the effort of having tried to walk.
It would be ridiculously easy to pick her up and carry her upstairs and keep her there.
"The suit has an exoskeleton," Tony pants, sort of hanging there between his hands, and she looks over at the suit.
Jim looks over there, too.
"I'll be fine," Tony says, and Jim looks down at her.
What should he say? It would be really easy to put her over his shoulder and carry her up the stairs. Hell, he wouldn't even have to put her over her shoulder. He could just pick her up, and she probably wouldn't have the strength to kick him, much less get down the stairs again. Pepper has five SHIELD agents with her, and yes, Jim has had a few dealings with them before. It's a small world on the bleeding edge of weapons development. SHIELD can take care of its own damn self and then some. He'd be more worried about Oba --
...
Jim remembers the day of graduation. He remembers shaking hands with Howard and Maria -- it had been oddly formal, and Tony was being more than a little difficult. Howard and Maria didn't seem to notice; Obadiah did.
Jim remembers Obadiah.
Obadiah was the one who took the photo, in fact, of Tony standing between the people she loved most in the world.
...
" -- you think that just because you have an idea, it belongs to you?"
...
Tony can't quite get the words to beg out of her mouth, but she doesn't have the strength to stand anymore. She can't even quite look him in the face; Tony just sort of tilts her chin up and looks off into the far distance. She knows what he's thinking about.
Jim looks down at her.
Jim puts his other hand under her knees and carries her over the shop floor, over to the suit.
....
" -- your Ninth Symphony."
...
Jim guides her feet into the footpieces holds her steady while the chest, with the window in the middle for the arc reactor, comes down.
"You need me to do anything else?" he says.
The turns to look at him, considering, but the voice that comes out sounds nothing like Tony.
...
Jim puts his other hand under her knees and carries her over the shop floor, over to the suit. Tony, despite herself, lets out this noise somewhere between a sob and a gasp and lets her head rest on Jim's shoulder for a moment. She closes her eyes.
Obadiah backhands Tony into the side of a bus.
Tony rips the optic cable out of Obadiah's suit.
"I'd have this girlfriend," Tony says to Pepper.
...
Tony rips the optic cable out of Obadiah's suit, and Obadiah crushes Tony's helmet in one hand. She loses a repulsor, so one weapon down, but more importantly, even if she squeezes a last burst of juice from the arc reactor, no flying. It isn't like she had a lot of options before, but Obadiah has no options. The moment Pepper found Agent Coulson in the lobby, it was over for him, and they both know it.
Obadiah isn't stupid. Tony hangs on with all the strength in her arms and, by extension of the exoskeleton, her mind, and Pepper puts makeup on Tony's hands, on her face. Tony wears an undershirt, then the dress shirt, then her jacket, buttoned fairly high. Tony turns her face, and Pepper checks the coverage on Tony's cheekbone.
...
"I would have this girlfriend -- " Tony says, angling her head and looking Pepper in the eye.
It doesn't work, of course. Tony had been there, after all, when Pepper went up to Not-My-First-Rodeo Coulson and basically told him to call her. Pepper is still straight. Pepper doesn't like girls that way, and Tony holds the look for a moment longer, and then Pepper makes sure the shirt lies smoothly over the arc reactor
...
"Just stick to the cards," Jim says in her ear.
"I think I should say it was just Pepper and me," Tony says to Agent Coulson.
...
"Just make it through this," Obadiah says in her ear. Rain pours down over the coffins; somebody holds an umbrella over them, and Obadiah's hand is pressed against the small of her back.
...
The desert is brutally cold at night and catastrophically hot during the day: she had no water, no cover, no method of signaling. Tony knows she was staggeringly lucky to have been found and unthinkably lucky to be found by Jim, who recognized her on sight, and you should know this by now: identity is not a fixed point. Identity is not height. Identity is neither dress nor costume. Nevertheless, change the shape of the body underneath, and expectations shift. Memories and, to an extent, personality follow. Think of identity as a musical piece with a hundred notes. Play it on a cello, and all one hundred notes are there, but some will be louder, and some will be softer than if you played it on a viola. Or a trumpet. Or a cornet. Same piece. Different sound.
Tony has more more heartbreak; Tony grows up angrier. Hungrier. Tony falls asleep in Jim's college bed, and he has to explain to his roommate, to his RA, to his parents. Tony walks out of a board room, standing every inch of five foot three in flats, seven in heels, and Obadiah has openings, opportunities with the Board, with the major shareholders. Tony wakes up in a cave in Afghanistan with a battery hooked up to her chest, watching a man shave himself in a fragment of mirror. Shortly after that, other men take her into a dark room. It is no longer so cold that her breath hangs in the air, but when the door shuts, for a long, frightening moment, all Tony can think, over and over, clutching the battery, is that she is going to be raped. They are going to rape her. They are going to --
It is, in fact, a relief when they hold her head under water. Tony gives in and agrees to build the missile before they try anything else: the shame of giving in so easily is something that she has to deal with later, but they put her head under water, and she sees the arc reactor. She hears Pepper's voice. She remembers her father. She remembers Obadiah. She remembers that she has loved Jim for twenty years; she is probably in love with Pepper. She loved Obadiah; she comes to love Yinsen. While playing backgammon, she asks him whether he is going to stone her for showing her ankles. He looks confused, then disappointed. Then amused.
Mostly, though, Tony sees the arc reactor. She smells the forge. She knows the strength in her hands and the light in her mind. She mourns Yinsen more intensely than she has ever mourned anything in her life. For the first time, in fact, Tony feels an emotion that has nothing to do with her or her fears or her wants: she doesn't remember going through the camp and burning every person she lays her eyes on. She barely remembers flying to Gulmira. Or the boy. Or the Jerichos. Or the dogfight.
Still.
There is an explosion. She escapes.
...
Christine sits in the front row, unimpressed. Tony grins and leans forward on the podium. It's still too tall to be comfortable. The press eyes her warily, not quite comfortable with her. There has never been a reporter that Tony can comfortably call by his or her first name.
"You need me to do anything else?" Jim said in the workshop.
"Just keep the skies clear."
...
The explosion from the munitions actually helps her gain more altitude than she otherwise have had: the arc downward will start at any moment, and --
When she goes back to Gulmira, after she outflies the F-22's, there is a moment when she skims low over the dunes.
...
Obadiah was the last person living who remembered Tony before MIT, before her parents died, before she made her first circuit board, and she remembers, vividly, the day they stood on a balcony overlooking Fifth Avenue, and they talked about her father's company, her future. Obadiah touched her on the shoulder and the back of the neck to suggest that they go inside when, eventually, it started to rain. Tony doesn't move. Obadiah goes inside. She stays alone.
...
Christine sits in the front row, unimpressed.
"I am Iron Man," Tony says, and the room explodes, and all she sees is --
...
Tony crests the dune, and for a long, glorious moment, all she sees is sky.
So is there anybody reading this chunk of text who didn't give me ideas to appropriate and shit?
montana_crows fact-checked for me, and wired_lizard helped me think about the power dynamics and, in a way, was the origin of the story. Her vastly superior Stars genderflip blogathon writing really got me thinking about what Tony would be like as a girl, back in the day. Hivemind held my hand, particularly dafnap the Proofreader/Artiste and jamaillith the Mashup Introducer/Mental Support Mainstay. Without the little fandom of three, this wouldn't be cluttering your f-list.Here, have an extra bonus GORGEOUS manip, courtesy of
dafnap:AND HOLY SHIT. Th_esaurus maaaaaaade wee little cartoons.
And now, we've got a little communal sandbox:
girltony. Come play.
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Date: 2008-09-22 04:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-24 12:38 am (UTC)