So, some of you may know this. I am an author by trade, despite being a minor. I have been published by Writopia and by Columbia Press' book program. None of it's big, but I love it, and I want the respect that being a published author garners.
As such, I do not like to be run-of-the-mill.
As such, all MLP references will be, heretofore, tangential at best. No more ponies, no more bronies.I take my writing seriously, and, sadly, the majority of the internet does not take that fandom seriously. So. No more.
This is a sequel to Friendship Is Science and a companion to My Little Science Bronies. I am kind of hand-waving the implications of Iron Man 3 because Tony Stark is Iron Man the same way Thor is Thor; they were born with that power and that potential, and nothing can revoke that. Not the Allfather and not some weird pseudoscientific plant-based magical healing solution. That glowing little heart of Tony's will always illuminate him, and his suits will always be tinkered with, improved.
That is all.
Pepper frowned into the mirror. Gracefully as it may be, she was aging.
The stress of it, of keeping a company running and of living with the knowledge that, at any second, Tony - trembling, screaming, half-broken and half-mad from falling through the void between Branches - Tony might have to fight again, wasn't helping, either.
He said he'd tell her, said he would have made an omelet and told her, but he never got the chance. Sometimes, she woke in the night to hear him whimpering, grunting, gasping through dark, clinging dreams that left him bruised and gutted in the earliest hours of morning, and when he finally stilled under her cool, smooth palm on his forehead - "Go to sleep, baby, you're safe" - her own heart clenched sickeningly because he looked dead, looked hollow and cold and gone.
That was scarier than reading the files JARVIS had compiled on Tony's palladium poisoning, scarier than watching the news from the battle of New York, scarier than seeing how still Tony had been and for how long - the idea that, somehow, she would lose him and be incapable of stopping that loss.
It hurt more to know Tony Stark than to like him. Strangers liked him - he was charismatic and handsome and about twenty four per-cent swarthy, and he was richer than God. Very few people knew Tony Stark.
If you knew Tony Stark, you knew that he regularly helped foster parents when the financial strain of caring for the abused children of strangers became almost too much to bear, that he went overboard on gifts because he couldn't articulate how deeply he cared for you, that he couldn't articulate his affection because he didn't hear it growing up - because his family had been near-loveless from the very start and, for years, he hadn't known love was a real thing - and that he made sure JARVIS took down important information on people because his brain moved so fast that it crushed details like that beneath its cogs.
That he engineered and fabricated weaponry and gear for his team, despite hating weaponry and warfare, because he trusted them so implicitly - despite war-torn and bloodstained pasts, ledgers so red they wept with it - that he couldn't conceive of them misusing it.
She loved him. It was clear and sharp and blazing, fresh snow that covered up the ugliness of the world and stung when it touched bare skin, and she had loved him since first meeting him, since she'd shaken his hand, brisk and efficient, and his hand had been callused and his finger had stroked her wrist while he looked straight into her eyes - up, with the height of her stilettos - like he wanted to swallow her whole and carry her, warm, inside his hollow, love-lorn chest.
She loved him so it hurt, so it scared her and scarred her, and she couldn't bear the weight of it.
Tony, humming along to AC/DC, poured her a mug of coffee, setting it down before her and, Faberge-egg tender, cupped the base of her skull through her thick hair and kissed her. "Mornin', babe."
Helpless to stop it, she smiled. He tried his damnedest to be happy for her sake, to be cheerful and butter-smooth; stiletto-sharp, he saw the bags under her eyes the morning after his nightmares and, linking together halves of joints so everything moved smoothly, saw the correlation and he loved her, so he tried to stop hurting on the outside. "Morning."
Tony grinned, impish and wild, and said, "What do you want for breakfast, Pep?"
"What do we have?" Pepper sipped her coffee, smiling softly at the hint of chicory and cayenne pepper in her cup, the sweetness of the quarter-teaspoon splash of cream that JARVIS reminded him to include. He tried. He tried so hard, too damn hard.
"Uhh, let's see." He leaned into the fridge, rifling through their stores. He needed to go for a grocery run, soon. "We got eggs, a red bell pepper, half a jalapeño, some turkey bacon, a tomato, and half a carton of milk. Oh, hey! I can make you an omelet."
I was gonna make you an omelet and tell you!
Pepper's lungs flattened out like road kill and she let out a sick, dry huff, like she'd been punched in the gut and was trying not to show the pain.
"Babe?" Tony was at her side in an instant, one rough, warm hand on her shoulder while the other cupped her cheek and stroked her hair, looking into her widened blue eyes with a panicked sort of ache. He wanted to protect, to rescue, to salvage and to heal. "Pep, baby, look at me. What's wrong?"
Pepper shook her head, sinking into the crook of his shoulder. "Tony, no. Don't... Don't call me that."
"What?" Tony's hand migrated onto her neck, the top notches of her spine, and circled gently there. "Pepper. What's going on?"
Christ, she wanted to kiss him then. He acquiesced. Always and forever, he stopped when asked. Babe and baby were no-go's, so he stopped, seconds after being told to, with no learning curve.
"I - Tony, you were going to make me an omelet."
Tony blinked, understanding in an instant, hands going trembling-tense and hard against her silk blazer, careful not to wrinkle her clothes or tighten on her body, bruising.
"You were going to make me an omelet. You almost died, Tony! I can't... Jesus, it's terrifying. Every time I see you asleep in your workshop or on the couch, you're so still - it looks like you're dead, and my heart just shreds itself."
"Pepper, I - "
"No! Tony, I wasn't there. Either time. Three times, you were dying, and three times, you couldn't reach me or reach out to me or talk to me! I don't have the right to be traumatised by this, okay? I know that. But I can't keep kissing you every morning with the knowledge that when I get home, I might have SHIELD waiting on that couch to tell me that they lost you on some mission. I can't love you when I know that there is a very real, highly probable possibility that I will lose you in some sick, awful way, and that I couldn't do a thing to save you."
Tony, sitting beside her, just nodded, one hand raking through his hair. It stuck up like crazy, thick and dark and silky, and she wanted to run her hands through it. "I get it, Pep. Every time I put on a suit, I can't wait to take it off, get home, and see that you're safe. It's terrifying to think that while I'm off fighting some giant squid alien thing, you're here, alone and unprotected."
Pepper let out a wet, broken blurt of a laugh. "Giant squid alien thing?"
"It's possible!"
"Sure. Of course it is." Her left hand found its way into his hair, stroking with delicate tapered fingers over his scalp, and his eyes fluttered shut. "I still love you, Tony. I don't think it's possible to know you and not love you. And I can be your CEO and your friend and your roommate, if need be. I can be your emergency contact and your PA and everything I've been for you, because I love you like I always have, but I can't sleep next to you every night because the next night, that spot might be permanently empty. I can't be your girlfriend if you keep doing this."
Tony nodded, twisting his neck to kiss the inside of her wrist. "I can't sleep beside you every night knowing that there's danger, very real danger, that could take you from me because I've stopped fighting."
Pepper smiled, reaching up to cup the back of his neck, stroking the short hair at his nape, and she kissed him softly, a smear of red streaking his stubbled cheek. "Only one thing has to change, okay?"
"Okay."
They sat, silent, for a moment, resting comfortably against each other like they'd been moulded to fit, before Tony said, "You still need breakfast. I can scramble some egg for you, cook up the veggies on the side."
Love is not sex, and death is not loss, and loss is not death, and an omelet is just an omelet.
"You're just saying that because you can't get your omelets to come out in one piece."
"What? I am insulted, Ms. Potts. Am I really hearing such an esteemed person as yourself cast aspersions on my omelet-making capabilities?"
Tony stood, deftly cracking eggs into a bowl and mixing in milk, dicing jalapeños and bell pepper and tomato and sliding them in with the side of a knife, cooking the bacon until it was chewy so that it'd be perfectly crisp after he'd chopped it into omelet batter - juice, mixture, whatever it's called.
He made her an omelet that did not fall apart, and she ate it without combusting. She went to brush her teeth, stepping carefully into a pair of Manolo Blahniks, and clacked tastefully to the car.
Happy took a look at her through the rearview mirror and furrowed his brow. "You okay, Pepper?"
"Surprisingly, yes." She pulled out her StarkPhone, surreptitiously checking her lipstick before opening her itinerary for the day. "Tony and I just had to handle something, but we're... He's gonna be okay, and I'm gonna be okay."
Happy's frown deepened, but he pulled out of the drive, carting her off to HQ. Four miles passed in comfortable silence before he asked, "Why did yous two break it off? If you don't mind my askin'."
Pepper smiled, sliding up front quietly, her dress rasping against the leather seats. "We love each other. I can't watch him throw himself into danger on a daily basis, knowing our track record with danger, and he can't sit idly by while I could be attacked."
Happy nodded, smiled over at her in a moment. "Y'know, it's a pretty safe job, Head of Security. Anyone bum-rushes me, I got a taser, a gun, and a body built like a tank."
"You wouldn't hurt a fly," Pepper said, smiling softly. "We had to hire someone just to fire the woman who kept stealing the business deal champagne because you saw her once with her little boy."
"I am tough as nails, Pepper." Happy turned back towards the highway, face set soberly. "And his name was Timothy. He liked trains."
Pepper huffed a quiet laugh, red lips pressed together to stifle it, and Happy's face split wide in a grin.
She stayed in Tony's Malibu house. It was easier - her clothes and her computer and her life all inhabited it, tucked into corners and folded in drawers, taking up half of the shower caddy and half of the toothbrush holster by the sink. She pattered in and out of his bedroom for three days before, on the fourth, he insisted that she take it.
"I spend most of my time in the workshop, anyways, and I have enough shirts in there to not look or smell homeless when I come out for a snack. You've been fourteen minutes slower to get ready as of late, and you spend exactly that long going from my room to yours and back again with your stuff for the day."
So she took his room, and her morning routine was restored in its efficiency.
And maybe he sometimes stumbled in at three in the morning, falling into what had once been their bed, sleeping before he'd even hit the mattress. She didn't mind.
Maybe she still kissed his cheek on occasion, just before she left, cheeks flaming red as she ran to the car where Happy, all-knowing and silent as the ages, just drove them both to work.
He didn't like it, not by any stretch of the imagination. He felt beyond jealous, sometimes - his ex-boss and his boss, broken up and yet, ineffably, still somehow together. They were beautiful together, like the photos that come in frames, too pretty to cover up with your own awkward photographs. Vibrant and chemical and magnetic, they drew each other in like they were both moth and flame, incapable of hurting each other through direct action but pained by the sight of each other's work.
He didn't like that, either. That Pepper still hurt over Tony's heroics, his battle scars and his bruises, the new suits that clanked around in the garage at night, reminding her that love was not immortalizing.
Pepper sat down in the passenger side seat, legs crossed and lipstick quietly smudged. Careful and practiced, she swiped the smear away and fixed the scarlet paint on her lips; Happy wondered why they still kissed, wondered how long this one had lasted, wondered how Pepper's lips would taste and feel - coffee, certainly, and winter mint toothpaste, smooth and faintly tacky from her just-applied lipstick.
"You and Tony broke up months ago," he said, quiet and still, hands clenched on the steering wheel.
"H - Harry..."
He blinked. Tony's been introducing him as Happy for years, decades. Nobody knows him by anything but that unless they read his files.
"It's complicated." Pepper sighed, tucking her compact back into her purse. "It's always going to be complicated."
"I'm a pretty uncomplicated guy," Happy - Harry - said, eyes flicking over her so often he forgot, twice, that he was driving. "I like Downton Abbey, blueberry muffins, and having enough free time to knock a punching bag around. I like things simple, Pepper; I make things simple."
Pepper smiled, sneaking a quick look at him through blonde lashes so pale the sun makes them translucent. He's big, soft. Simple. "I could handle some simplicity."
They turned a corner, idling behind a crosswalk at a red light.
Harry rested one hand on Pepper's knee, the other cupping her slim waist, as he leaned in and kissed her softly. It's quick, sweet - simple.
When he pulled away, her face was almost as red as her lipstick and she was grinning like a mid-morning half moon.
Tony still slept in their old room on occasion, but over the next month, it was empty more and more often. When it was inhabited, it was usually by two, Pepper curled up on Harry's broad chest, his arms looped over her.
One rainy morning in March, Harry helped her box up her things and move into his apartment - sixteen minutes from HQ, it a shower/bath combo built for a man twice his size and a boxed set of Downton Abbey that sat, in varying states of fullness, below his TV.
He couldn't make omelets. They always broke when he flipped them, scrambling in the process, but he made them with a tablespoon of sriracha mixed into the egg whites - high cholesterol ran in Pepper's family - and skimmed milk - because she preferred the taste - so Pepper was okay with it. She was okay with hearing the grunts and thuds of him whaling on his punching bag, the squeaks of chain on hook, because he came to bed by nine and he was extra warm against her cheek.
He loved doing laundry, though. He hand-washed things that needed hand-washing happily, careful of linen dresses for California and wool suits for New York, and she carefully rubbed lotion into his hands when they came back wrinkled and smelling of soap, appreciating the smoothness of most of his hands and the roughness of his three calluses - one on his thumb, from cocking guns and deploying tasers, one on his pointer finger from pulling triggers, and one on his knuckle from holding pens.
Pepper appreciated simple - oversized sweatshirts that smelled like cigarettes and the orchids in the lobby, red wine and cuddling under blankets to watch Downton Abbey or a James Bond movie, coarser hair on the nape of his neck and the way he hissed, grinning, when her fingernails caught as her hands tightened in it so she could kiss him properly. Hell, she loved simple.
She loved Harry, and, blasé, she told him as much when she handed him a blueberry muffin one bright, sweltering Thursday morning and kissed him in the car.
He didn't stop smiling all day.
Tony grinned. He knew that smile, the one plastered on Happy's face. That was the Pepper-Potts-Loves-Me smile.
He wasn't jealous; he wasn't the type. Rather, he walked up to Harold Hogan and hugged him, congratulating him and promising not to make too much of a fuss.
There was, of course, a colossal fuss, but there's no such thing as too much fuss when the people you love most in the world are happy.
I think at some point, I was gonna make this sexual somewhere, but that just didn't happen. I'm really happy with how this turned out. Everything is Heppy and nothing hurts.
Please review.