Hi there! Some of you may know me from over in the X-Men fandom, but I've also recently expanded into writing Iron Man movie-based fic as well. I've been neglecting my account lately and decided to change that today.

This will be a collection of short stories and ficlets that I've done as part of journal prompts or the its_always_been community prompts over on LJ. Unless otherwise marked, all stories/chapters will be Tony/Pepper focused or focus on them individually and will be set in the movie universe. They will run the gamut of genres, ranging from very silly to very angsty and everywhere in between. I can't promise my usual quality or length, but they're something. Bite-sized fics are better than no fics at all, am I right?

To start with, this little fic was originally written for nani1986 over on LJ with the prompt of "careful when you walk in, I'm laying by the door".

Pepper woke up two hours before she needed to, unable to fitfully sleep any longer. Last night had been, against her better judgment, the first night Tony had spent alone since the incident with Stane. If the new …eccentricities that she had seen develop since his return from Afghanistan were any sign of his mental state, then she was positive he was not ready to be left alone after such an emotionally traumatic incident.

To pass the time, she did the weekend version of her yoga routine and made her self an actual breakfast rather than her usual breakfast of yogurt and an Ensure nutrition shake. She showered and dressed and just before she was about to head out the door, checked her phone for messages.

There was one from Tony, received at 2:39 am.

Pepper took a deep breath to slow her suddenly hammering heart. Ok, easy Pepper. If he drank last night, you know there would be at least 15 messages from him and not just one. He probably just sent out something by accident while taking apart his new phone.

She opened the message and felt her heart sink.

'Careful when you walk in I'm laying by the door.'

Pepper made it to Tony's house in record time, stomach twisting in knots over what she might find inside. His tolerance for alcohol was probably lower than he realized and she knew he hadn't been dealing with whatever horrors he had experienced in Afghanistan and frankly, she just hated seeing him like this even when there wasn't any kind of emotional damage involved. Once at the front door she took a deep breath to steel her nerves and opened the door.

The door only opened part way before a loud metallic clang sounded, followed by a human-sounding groan.

"Didn't you get my text message?" Tony griped from the other side.

Pepper poked her head through what small space she had been able to open the door.

"Tony, what…?"

There was Tony, on the floor, in the Iron Man suit. His hair was mussed and there was a healthy amount of stubble along his jaw, but it looked to be more from sleeping where he lay than any consumption of alcohol.

"Still, uh, still working out some kinks in the suit."

"Oh my God, are you hurt? Open the door so I can get in." Pepper began pushing on the door, but with no luck.

"That's the problem, I can't move. Something malfunctioned in the suit last night and it turns out I can't lift nearly five hundred pounds of titanium-gold alloy by myself."

"Are you ok, can you breathe? Should I call an amb—"

"Pepper. Pepper!" Tony shouted over her growing hysteria. "I'm fine, I can breathe, I'm fine. I just can't move; some kind of catastrophic failure happened with the suit. I need you to go find Happy and tell him to bring the engine crane up here from the garage if he can and then find out where the hell Dummy and U got to."

"So you're ok?"

"Yes. I'm fine. Why, what did you think happened?"

Pepper's shoulders visibly dropped from the sigh she released. "Nothing. I just…" a curious thought struck her then, "why hasn't Jarvis helped you? Why didn't Jarvis call meto let me know you were stuck?"

Tony grimaced regretfully. "Yeah…his A.I may or may not have reached the point where he knows to be offended at some of the things I say to him."

It was at this moment that Pepper realized that the mornings of coming in to find a severely hung over Tony Stark who needed the "garbage" taken out had been traded for mornings where she was going to find her boss in complicated situations with robots and machinery.

She wasn't sure which one was better yet. Playboy Tony she had grown to understand over the years. This new Tony…

"I'll go get Happy."

Let me know what you think! I'm dying to know since this is a relatively new fandom for me. :)

M