Contingency Plans

If I owned any of the things you recognize, I'd be showing my dog in agility instead of sitting at home writing fanfiction.

Beta'd by Nagia and Sar, title help from Camwyn – thanks, y'all. Any mistakes that remain are entirely my own. Rated for later likelyhood of bad language. I've fudged the timelines a little bit to make this work, but it's set between the first and second movies of each franchise.


"You've got to read this." There was a yellow sticky note in Pepper's neat handwriting on the front of the folder, short and to the point because she knew he wouldn't read anything longer. He'd tossed the file into the trash can, along with the rest of the stack she'd left on his desk at Stark Industries, because anything really important she would have brought to his lab at the house. She'd apparently rescued it though, and now it was sitting in the middle of his workbench, in his lab, at his house. Dammit. It had another sticky note on it, too.

"No, really. You NEED-" Need was underlined 4 times - "to read this." He ignored it anyway, waving a hand through the worksurface to wake up up JARVIS's CAD suite. The most recent version of the suit's pulse cannon did a better job of damping the recoil than the Mark 3, without sacrificing much in the way of power, but it seemed like a waste not to use it for something else. His coffee was cold by the time the door hissed open behind him and he heard the click of Pepper's heels on the concrete floor.

"I know you didn't look at it, Tony." She set one of the two steaming cups of coffee she carried down on the work table, and snagged the folder off the table top. "But you're going to, now."

"Why? I trust you. Take care of it." He spun the display and zoomed in closer to see if the fittings could be bored out any more at that junction without losing the conductivity he needed. Pepper made a frustrated noise and shoved the folder, open, right into the middle of the display. He'd really pissed her off, then; Pepper never interrupted him when he was working.

"That's why you need to read this, Tony. You can even just look at the pictures that they put in for you."

At first glance, he thought the photos were from the fight with Obadiah, but only for a second. They'd been shot in daylight, from ground level, and while Tony didn't recognize the city, it looked vaguely like most of southern California. The quality was terrible, probably a cell phone, and while Tony's first thought was that there had been another armored suit somewhere in storage that had gotten out, the photos were clearly of a different design. For another thing, it was lime green. He kept reading.

"Giant robots? They want us to make something that will take out giant robots? Do they think I'm an idiot? I've already said the Ironman technology isn't leaving my hands." Tony flipped the folder closed and shoved it to one side.

"Giant alien robots, sir." Pepper clarified. "What are we doing?"

"Don't know. Don't care. Figure it out, acting CEO." The alloy that the pulse cannon was mostly made out of was already pretty specialized, but maybe he could tweak it somehow... He barely noticed when Pepper left again.

Two days later, he had Rhodey and a slimy little Fed he'd never met before standing in his office with the same folder.