Fix on Fail
For years, she has been the only person who can go into his garage when he isn't there. It was never an express permission, but more the fact that she knows all of his passwords and about a fourth of the Iron Man's voice commands. However, she's never had any particular reason to be there without him. So, even though he has always been at least vaguely aware of the possibility he will find her there, Tony Stark is always surprised when he actually does.
It is the first time since the business with the mind-wiping, and the brain death, and the weeks of running, and about a million other things that he should not have survived but somehow did that Tony has been able to pull himself to his feet long enough to amble his way to his nearest workshop. He has places scattered all over the world--places to stay, places to sleep, places to work--and while he doesn't harbor any illusions that they are all exactly as he left them, when they needed places to run to, he had them. He is feeling enough of himself that he can no longer resist the siren call of hardware that is waiting for him. He wants to do something with his hands.
He wants to create. To feel needed again, even if it is only by an inanimate object. It's been too long.
It is not until the doors whir open in response to his keypad command that he sees her. Seated on a stool, back hunched over in a posture that he knows from experience will ache tomorrow. Her suit, the one he'd built on a whim and he can still barely believe she actually uses, is standing sentry next to her. The lit eyes let him know that it's on even though she isn't wearing it. Her back is to him, but he recognizes enough of the cables coming out of the suit to know that she's got it hooked up to her implant.
He feels a twinge that he really can't place. It's not affection or guilt or happiness, but maybe a mixture of all three. He adores her, loves that she is in the unique position of really understanding what it is like to be him, but the fact that the repulsor embedded in her chest is absolutely necessary for her survival makes him feel a little sick. He'll never admit that to her, of course. For all she knows, he thinks it is the absolute coolest thing to ever happen to her. He supposes from a neutral perspective, it is pretty cool, but he could never wish this life on anyone. But when the choices are a life with a machine in the chest or no life at all...well. The decision makes itself.
After a few seconds of watching her silently, he leaves the doorway and walks into the garage. She doesn't look up and he smirks to himself because it is getting a little crazy, how alike they are. In fact, he doesn't think she is even aware that he's there. He isn't really being quiet, either. Finally, Rescue seems to have had enough of it, because J.A.R.V.I.S. says, "Ms. Potts, it appears Mr. Stark has come to reclaim his domain."
Pepper lets out a surprised squeak, drops a few components on the floor and whips around to face him, all nearly simultaneously. "Tony!" The surprise on her faces melts into concern. "Are you sure you should be up?"
He's pretty sure, but that isn't what is interesting him at the moment, so he says, "What are you doing?" He settles himself on the stool next to her, body angled towards her.
"Oh, I'm," she looks at the components on the floor, "I'm," she slides off the stool and crouches to gather them up, looking somewhat frustrated as she does so. "I just got to thinking that I ought to know how to repair Rescue. I can't just wait for you to fix her. If I'm in a fight, that is, and she gets damaged. J.A.R.V.I.S. knows all the schematics, so he's been trying to walk me through what to do if this or that fails."
Not allowing himself to linger on 'I can't wait for you' portion of her statement, Tony says, "You improvise."
"That's easy for you to say," Pepper replies, reorienting her tools, "you know this stuff inside and out. I can barely understand J.A.R.V.I.S.'s directions."
"High-end technology of ultramodern destruction is not introduction to mechanical engineering material. Trust me. But that's not what I meant. In the field when something breaks, and if you're pretty lucky, it won't break, but if it does, you're probably not going to be in the position to do repairs at all. You do something else. You improvise."
That does not seem to mollify her and she says, "I don't know how."
She damn well knows how to improvise. Tony knows he's pulled a lot of shit over the years that has required her to think on her feet. If she didn't have this skill, she would never have lasted so long in his world. He can't tell her that, because she'd never listen, so instead he says, "You'll learn."
"What if I don't? I'm not cut out for this. This isn't my life. It's like..I don't know..a vacation from my life."
Tony laughs and Pepper scowls at him. "If people trying to shoot you down is a vacation, you really do work too hard."
"I'm serious."
"I know." Inspiring rookie superheroes to greatness was never the job of the Iron Man. He was versatile, Tony knew, and he'd been valuable to the superhero community. He could fight both long distance and close combat. He had natural brains and mechanically augmented brawn. In a pinch, he wasn't bad without the machines, either. He could problem solve in theory and had the money to make it reality. And while he had made a good speech or two in his day, he was not the orator. Tony didn't really know what he could do to encourage her, so he settled for trying to make her understand that he knew how she felt.
The Tony Stark-Pepper Potts Feelings Connection is something that has always been just beyond his reach. From an intellectual stand point, he is often aware of her feelings and opinions on various matters, but its not the same as empathy. His friendship and his love were selfish, always rooted in how he felt and what he wanted from her. She dealt with him in more or less the same way, seeking and dismissing him at her whim. They both are guilty of using each other over the years, but they support each other as well. She's neither driven him to better himself nor seek his own destruction. Tony has known women for whom he's striven to the greatest heights of his life and he's been left a ruined, empty shell by others. Pepper has never been either of those things. Right now, she is the person he wants to sit beside, the person who he suspects may be able to take him as he is. But he knows by now that none of that matters at all if he can't reach her. If they can't connect. They've never been at a place where the feelings of one could be embraced by the other. But today...today, he understands her. "I've been there, Pep. All the doubts, all the wondering if you can really do it, I've been there. You don't know how many times I've asked myself if I really needed to be Iron Man, if the world really needed me to be Iron Man. I've had to figure out if the guy in the metal suit or the guy in the business suit is the real me."
"It's different. We're different."
"I know."
"I didn't want this." She stops, licks her lips, looks away and then back at him. "I didn't. I never once envied that you got to go out and punch bad guys. I never, ever thought about asking you to make me a suit. But now I have one and even though its insane, I want to keep it. I want to be Rescue. But I think I want to be Rescue because being Rescue means not being Pepper. I mean, my life was completely out of control. Norman Osborn was ruling the world, you made me the CEO of Stark International five seconds after liquidating it, the Initiative was falling apart, my friends were dying. I thought I was never going to see you again. And then here's this suit. Here's this way to fight back against all that. To take control back. I don't want to give that up," she cocks her head to the side, "but at the same time, I don't know if I should have it. It's not me."
Tony takes the broken bits of machinery from Pepper's hands. He's resisted just taking it and fixing it himself ever since he walked in and his self-control has dried up. He's popped it open and is inspecting the inner workings of Pepper's project. He doesn't know what to say to her. She is telling a very familiar story, but she doesn't to want to hear that.
"I don't need you to fix that."
"I want to."
"I'm not asking you to fix me, either."
Tony says, "I wasn't trying to," but he realizes as he says that it's a lie. She's going through some sort of identity crisis and he's been trying to walk her through it. To get her to the end where all of these issues about who she is and what she does about the things around her are resolved so that she can go on to live who she is and what she does. He looks at her and he knows that she knows that he knows it was a lie. He tries to hand back what he took--it is a perfect replica of the brain of Rescue's communications array--but she doesn't take it, so he puts it on the table, and takes her hands. He rubs her knuckles with his thumbs. "Sorry."
"It's okay." She doesn't sound like she forgives him. She sounds like his apology doesn't matter to her at all. He's going to stop apologizing to her. That is a resolution he makes right then because as much as she complains about his tendency to not apologize, she never wants to hear it when he does.
It's hard to figure out what she wants.
He rubs a little harder, a little faster and with a little more urgency. He wants her to tell him what she wants, but all she says is, "I'm a mess right now."
He squeezes her hands. "You're not. Everyone in this line of work feels this way."
"It's different."
"It's not."
She ignores the contradiction. He really does know what he's talking about, the crisis of self-confidence that all superheroes inevitably face. That doesn't mean he knows what to say to her. Pepper doesn't want him to talk her into artificial confidence, but he really only has two options. He can agree with her or he can disagree. Agreeing didn't work, so he changes tactics.
"It is," Pepper insists.
Finally, Tony asks, "How? How is it different? How are we different?" He has never in his life felt closer to another human being and he doesn't know how to say that.
"The world doesn't need Rescue. The world got along fine without me."
"The world doesn't need the Iron Man, either. The only one who needs Iron Man is me."
"Tony, that's not true. No one would know what to do with themselves if you weren't around."
"They'd manage. They'd be very happy to manage. I've screwed things up, Pep. We can't sit here and pretend that the mess the world is in isn't my fault."
"I'm not going to listen to this. I've had enough, Tony, I really have."
Flabbergasted, he asks her, "Enough of what?"
"Of this!" She wrenches her hands free of his and waves them, gesturing at nothing. "Of this mania surrounding you. Of people acting like you should have known aliens were coming or that the Green Gobli--for God's sake, the Green Goblin was going to get your job--oh, yes, that's completely obvious, I don't know how you didn't plan for that--of you, and this martyr complex of yours. You know what I think? I think you're mad that you're alive. I think the fact that people love you and would do anything to save you pisses you off. I think you want to be dead so that the rest of us can cry about how we didn't appreciate you enough and you can be all smug and dead. Well, it didn't happen that way, Tony. Deal with it." With a series of angry-sounding snaps, she unplugs all of Rescue's cables.
He holds his hands up in surrender because he doesn't know where this is coming from. He says calmly, "I'm not mad. Dying wasn't part of my plan, promise. I just forgot the nuances of the plan as I went. It all worked out. I knew I'd forget. I planned for that."
"You could have told us."
"You were better off not knowing."
"You don't understand anything."
"In my day, I have on occasion run into things I don't understand. It doesn't happen very often. I'm something of a genius. One of the greatest minds of our time, actually."
She's looking at him like he's a complete idiot. He gets that look from her more than he has from any other person that he's ever met. He knows why he gets it from her, but he can't fix it. It is because he takes life on his own terms and right now, she wants him on hers. But unfortunately, he cannot just pop into her brain and look at things from her perspective. From where he stands, the less information Pepper has, the less information can be forcibly extracted from her by immoral men with creatively cruel minds and government back up. The less confident she is in what he is doing, the more she is forced to take into her own hands. She used that suit because she didn't have faith that he could get himself out of the jam he was in. If she knew he had a plan, if she had faith in him, then when he needed help, he wouldn't have had it.
"Pepper, everything I needed to happen happened because I set it up that way. And that includes you being in the dark."
"You could have asked for help."
"I will next time."
She frowns. Maybe she doesn't believe him. Maybe she doesn't know if she'll be willing to don the suit again. He doesn't know. She says, "Tony."
He answers her, "Pepper," but he smiles when he says it.
"It's not true, you know."
Tony waits.
"The world does need Iron Man."
He's shaking his head and he knows it looks like false modesty, but he is completely sincere. He knew from the very beginning that when push came to shove, he was doing this for himself. He has forgotten how to live without being a hero. He really, really doesn't want to remember how. He is halted in his shaking by her hands on his face. She makes him look at her. She doesn't allow disagreement.
"Tony." One of her hands slides back. His hair is still much shorter than he really likes it to be. She can't get a good grip, but she fists his hair as best she can anyway. He's looking at her because he doesn't have a choice, but its not like he wants to look away. There's a tenderness in her eyes that she's never directed at him before, ever. There's a firmness, too. That one, he's used to. All the same, he wants nothing more at this moment then to turn the shop's cameras on, so that he can record that look and keep it forever. It's a voice command. He can't talk. He can't even think about talking. The very concept of recording at all is abstract. The only concrete things in his world right now are her eyes and her hands. Her mouth enters this hazy world when she says, "I need Iron Man."
He launches himself at her. He can't not, after an admission like that. He's got his arms around her and he stood up with such force that he knocked his stool over, but he doesn't hear it. He's kissing her frantically, desperately. They are safe in his workshop. It's not another doomsday embrace. But that doesn't change the fact that he is desperate for her and needs to convey it. Her hands are still on his face, cupping the back of his head. Pepper returns his kisses and he is absolutely certain that he can taste her need for him. He can hear it in the blood rushing through his ears and he can see it behind his eyelids.
She pulls her lips from his after some unmeasurable time and says with a heavy breath, "If Rescue means there's no Iron Man--"
Tony doesn't let her finish. He has to kiss her again. He needs to. Pepper is stubborn, though, and she manages to pull away again. This time, he answers her first. "It doesn't. It doesn't."
Pepper exhales hard, as though she really feared this was some sort of one-or-the-other situation. The hand that was on his face drifts down to his shoulder and she squeezes, almost as though she wants to verify that he is sturdy beneath her. Evidently, Tony is sturdy enough, because she says, "Okay. Okay." The corners of her mouth have turned up just the slightest bit and to Tony, it looks like a weight has been lifted off of her. He leans in again and stops just short of actually touching her. And because she is Pepper, she knows what he wants. And because today is some amazing day where they actually managed to understand one another, she leans in and kisses him tenderly.
He wants to tell her how he feels. Not jokes or flirtations or a brief comment sandwiched in between a million other things. But the words don't exist yet. He'll have to invent them.
Tony Stark can create.