"Paradigm Shift-ish"
A sudden and radical change in belief or perception.
Chapter One
Tony falls asleep in the suit.
They haven't been inside the East 79th St. townhouse for ten minutes when Pepper returns to the parlor to find him flat on his back on an antique tufted leather Chesterfield.
For one awful moment, she thinks he's dead.
But then an armor-clad arm shifts to rest against the chest-plate and Pepper has never in her life felt so relieved to hear the thrum of servos and the clink of metal on metal.
Tony looks like a bad surrealist painting; ruined helmet perched on an antique chess table in the foreground, red-and-gold-plated man lounging on priceless furniture in the background.
The part of Pepper that is still a little hysterical wants to wake him up, just in case. The part of her that has just kissed this man wants to hold his (still gauntleted) hand and cry.
Asleep, it is painfully obvious that Tony is ill. He bears dark smudges under his eyes, the lines of his face are sharp, his crows' feet more pronounced than ever. Even unconscious, the lines of his forehead are furrowed in a grimace.
"Yes, for the moment I'm not dying."
He'd sounded nonchalant, a little bored, using his 'next, please!' voice to barrel past the fact that he wasn't dead. Even now, Pepper doesn't know if she's furious or hurt or terrified. She suspects it's all of the above.
It had taken them three hours to give statements to the police (...and the Feds, and the Guard, and every three-letter organization in the book). It had taken another two hours to get out of Flushing, rendezvous with Happy and fight the traffic into Manhattan. She and Tony had both spent the car ride on speaker, cycling through Paterson, Bloomberg, Fury, and what had seemed like half of the Department of Homeland Security.
Happy had brought them to the curb, loaned Tony his jacket (which, to no one's surprise, did not cover much less render inconspicuous the Iron Man suit), and stayed to park the car.
And now, Tony is asleep.
Pepper stares at him for a moment until she finally looks down at her BlackBerry and texts: 'J-how to remove Mark VI by hand?'
The answer comes back fast.
Mark VI employs custom XZN variant screw drives. Manual disassembly not suggested. E 79 houses disassembly apparatus on 2F.
"Thank you, JARVIS," Pepper mutters to herself, relieved that if she can just get Tony to the second floor, they'll at least be able to get the suit off. She sets down the phone on the side table and steps forward to crouch beside him, her heels digging into the antique Oriental rug.
She reaches down and unbuckles the straps, slipping her feet out of the constricting shoes and digging her toes into the wool. Barefoot, It feels strangely intimate for her to be here kneeling beside him as he sleeps, exhausted.
Her phone is buzzing, but she ignores it in favor of reaching for one of Tony's hands, still encased in the gauntlets. She hasn't done this very much, but she is familiar enough with the suit's workings that she thinks she'll be able to at least get some of the pieces off, even if the suit does seem to be a new model.
Her fingers scrape against the scuffed and dented metal until finally she finds what she's looking for. She slips her thumbnail into the catch and pushes it, and the forearm panels separate with a hiss of escaping pressurized air.
It's a tight squeeze, but it's enough. She pulls his hand free of its metal casing and sets the glove down on the chess table, taking his hand in hers.
"If you wanted to compromise my virtue, all you need to do is ask."
Tony's voice is roughened, weary, but playful. And instead of a quick riposte or even an eye roll, Pepper is dismayed to find that she has tears in her eyes.
She swallows sharply and leans away from him in an effort to hide her embarrassment, but his freed hand grabs her biceps and stops her short. "Hey," he says, and she can hear his discomfort even though she's not looking at him. "Come on. Knock that off."
Two parts concerned and one part indignant, his tone is enough to make her smile a little, but just for a moment. She keeps her gaze away from him and reaches up to scrub at her eyes. "Sorry," she mumbles, and she can feel her cheeks warm in a way that they never have no matter what innuendo he's tossed at her over the years.
The whir and thrum of the suit means he's moving, sitting up. She rolls back onto her heels, shrugs out of his hold on her arm and stands up swiftly. "I should get that," she says, because she can't think of anything else. Her BlackBerry buzzes again, beeps twice for another missed call.
"Pepper," Tony says firmly, and she finds herself meeting his eyes despite herself. He stands up, and is it her imagination, or is he swaying a little? "I'm fine," he tells her quietly. "Really."
The words fly out before she has a chance to vet them. "Would you even tell me if you weren't?"
He blinks at her for a second, then releases a heavy sigh. "I deserve that."
"Yeah."
There's a moment of awkward silence between them. Tony looks at her intently, his eyes dark and intense and his entire body still. "I did try," he says finally, and his tone is quiet, sincere. There's no reproach in his voice, but Pepper hears it there anyway.
The sting of tears and the consuming guilt combine and Pepper throws herself at him, arms wrapping around the twisted and gouged metal of the suit and face pressed tight against his cheek. It's an unwieldy embrace; the suit was made for a lot of things, but not this. It only lasts for so long until the uncomfortable dig of the metal into her chest makes her lean back.
He doesn't let her get far. Instead, he strips off the other gauntlet, drops it onto the floor with a muffled clunk and takes her shoulders in her hands. Her shoes off and him in the suit, he is much taller and if it wasn't strange before, the fact that she's looking up at him is enough to make this even more surreal.
The kiss on the roof was fueled by a mix of desperation, anger, relief, passion. This one is gentler, and Pepper doesn't even realize it's happening until his mouth is hot on hers, lips soft but a little chapped. The kiss is chaste at first, until the flutter of anxiety and nerves and passion in her stomach make her stand on her tiptoes, place her hands on his cheeks and really kiss him.
When they break apart, he's grinning and she's panting a little, out of breath. "Still got it," he tells her cheekily, and she looks up at him, one eyebrow crooked.
"You never had it," she tells him shortly and his smile fades a little.
"You're right," he tells her seriously. "But Pepper, I-"
She shakes her head. "Not now," she tells him firmly, and takes a deep breath. To her surprise, he actually falls silent.
She raps a knuckle on the chest-plate. "JARVIS told me the equipment to get this off is on the second floor."
He nods, opens his mouth to say something inappropriate, and decides better of it. "Yeah. Moved it here from the Expo, thought it might be handy."
"Can you walk?"
She knows they were just kissing, knows that he'd told her he's fine, but she's sure now that she had seen him sway a little, and the damage to his suit means that he's going to be hurting tomorrow.
"Is that a serious question?" His wry tone tells Pepper that he's laughing at her on the inside, and she doesn't have the patience for it.
"Tony."
"Yes, I can walk. Come on, let's strip down." He winks at her and she pretends not to see it, because that's what she always does.
It takes them several minutes to get upstairs. Tony is tired, and his exhaustion in conjunction with the narrow staircase means that by the time they've made it to the second floor, Pepper has mentally filed away a list of drywall and paneling damage that will need to be repaired.
Judging from the missing furniture and the stacked Stark Industries crates, Tony apparently intends to set up one of the larger spare bedrooms as a second launch pad. The disassembly robots are powered-down and the only other equipment Pepper sees is a sheet of smart glass along the longest wall.
Tony strides over to the glass and claps his hands impatiently, waiting for the display to come alive. "Let's go, look alive," he instructs.
"Can I do anything?" Pepper asks after a moment. The login screen sequence has begun and Tony looks back at her with a small grin.
"I got it. You just enjoy the show," he tells her with a smirk and turns back to the glass. This time Pepper doesn't hide her smile.
He taps in a few commands and the robots boot up. By the time they've arranged themselves around the makeshift launch pad, it takes ten minutes for the armor to come apart, until all the various parts are scattered around the room like some kind of suburban dad's Christmas Eve nightmare.
Outside of the suit, Tony is diminished. The neoprene bodysuit hides nothing, and without either the layers of metal or a carefully tailored suit jacket, it's suddenly obvious to Pepper that he's lost weight and muscle mass.
How had she not noticed?
Tony extracts his feet from the boots-the last pieces to go-and then picks his way carefully across the minefield of red and silver and gold metal.
"Come on," Pepper says needlessly, as he reaches her and wraps a heavy arm around her waist, burying his face in her shoulder.
Never mind that they'd spent ten minutes downstairs kissing; the suddenness of the physical embrace, the shock of feeling him against her without any kind of barrier between them-it is enough to surprise Pepper into non-reaction.
"Smell good," he mumbles into her collarbone, and his breath and lips and beard tickles and jolts her out of her surprise.
"You don't," she replies tartly, winding her own arm around his back. "Shower time, let's go."
"A little forward of you, Potts, but if you insist," he says, and she can feel his smile against her skin.
Pepper rolls her eyes and steps towards the doorway, and his arm slides from her hip to grasp her hand in his. He lifts hers to his mouth, kisses the knuckles, makes eye contact. "Pepper, I-"
Again she cuts him off with a sharp little nod. "Shower time," she repeats, and she pretends not to notice the confusion in his eyes, the uncertainty.
She pulls him into the hallway and they walk down to the master bedroom in silence.
When they're two-thirds of the way there, he suddenly stumbles and slips against the wall with a heavy thump. Her throat goes tight and she is afraid, more afraid than she had been seeing the drone's chest piece glow red, more afraid than the moment that she'd gone from standing on the terrace to one thousand feet in the air.
"Tony? Tony, are you all right?"
He's leaning against the wall, and breathing hard, and his face is pale in the dim light. "I'm just-a little dizzy," he admits to her without meeting her eyes. "It's nothing. I'm fine."
"Stop saying you're fine, you are clearly not fine," she snaps at him and wraps his arm around her shoulder with the ease of practice. She has done this many times over the past ten years when Tony would come stumbling back to the Malibu house or the hotel or anywhere really, so stupid drunk that he could barely walk.
It's a lot easier without stilettos on.
"Come on, Tony," she whispers, and it occurs to her that all the lines between them over the past years, all of the barriers and borders have been torn down. She has no idea what to do or how to handle this. It's terrifying.
They make it to the bedroom and he immediately slumps onto the bed, still breathing heavily. She goes immediately to the bathroom, grabs a towel and holds it under the faucet, her hands steady despite the quick pitter-patter of her pulse in her ears, and rushes back out, the slap of her bare feet sounding strange in the silence.
He looks up at her, smiling and his eyes half-hooded. "Hey."
She holds the towel up to his forehead, feels the heat radiating off him and the problem is suddenly clear. For all his flaws and mistakes and outrageous behavior, Pepper has always been able to more or less trust him. Tony is honest because he is accountable to no one, because he enjoys the shock value of telling the absolute truth, and because he's actually a damn bad liar.
Or so Pepper had thought.
The towel drips cool water into his eyes, back into his sweaty hair, down his cheeks. He sighs. "Feels good."
"Do you think you have a fever?"
He shakes his head. "Just tired. And I haven't, ah, eaten anything in a while. Can't keep anything down, really."
The sight of those ubiquitous green smoothies-god, Tony had been going through them like gangbusters. She'd even put in a standing order for kale, wheatgrass, spinach and every other green thing at the local Whole Foods a few months ago, once the onetime hangover cure had turned into a daily regimen. She hadn't even realized that he'd stopped eating other things.
Part of her wants to laugh. She'd known something was going on, yes, but the famously competent Pepper Potts hadn't even noticed that her boss was dying.
He yawns once, then reaches up to the zipper at his throat and fiddles with it. "Should get changed."
"Yeah," Pepper says, taking the towel from his forehead and standing up again. "I'll find something for you to wear."
He has a full closet here, just as he does at every other house. She steps inside and begins to search for something he can sleep in. She finds a lot of suits and dress shirts, but not much else.
She spots a chest of drawers beneath the closet bar, and retrieves an undershirt from the top drawer-crisp and new, it's not one of his well-worn MIT tee shirts, but it is better than nothing. Another drawer yields a pair of boxer-briefs and sweatpants, which she tosses over her arm.
By the time she steps back into the bedroom, Tony's flight suit is a crumpled, sweaty mess on the floor and he is fast asleep in the bed, sprawled facedown into the pillows and top-sheet haphazardly pulled up to his hips.
She exhales deeply, trying to get rid of the tension in her chest along with the CO2. She wants to crawl in beside him, to hold him in her arms and listen to him breathing. Instead, she folds the clothes in a neat pile on the bedside table, crosses over to the bathroom to turn off the light, and settles down in the antique Morris chair by the window with her phone. She intends to stay awake, to monitor Tony and the 24-hour news channels and Stark Industries, but it's so late at night that it would be more accurate to call it early morning, and now that the adrenaline is leaving her system she's just so tired, and...
Pepper wakes up warm, and lethargic, and relaxed. One heavy arm is draped around her waist, and when she curls her toes she can feel Tony's feet against hers, cool and still.
She smiles, relieved to finally be here with him. She feels the press of the reactor against her back, hears its hum and it occurs to her that she has been waiting for this day for a long time. Waking up with Tony.
The silk of her nightgown slips soft against her thighs as she turns to face him, and he doesn't protest when she takes his fingers in hers, gives a kiss to one of the scuffed knuckles.
His face is slack, mouth slightly open in his sleep and the lines she'd observed on him when he'd fallen asleep in the suit are gone. His skin is still pale, the difference in tone dramatic against his dark hair.
She reaches up to press her palm against his face. "Good morning, Tony," she whispers, trying to aim her morning breath away from him.
He doesn't respond and Pepper suddenly realizes that his arm is still wrapped over her ribcage, his face is smooth, and his thighs against hers are firm and cool.
He's not dreaming; his eyes are unmoving beneath his eyelids.
It takes her a second to realize that he's not breathing either.
She shrieks and pulls herself away from his frozen embrace, the stiff arm that clutches her body to his, her feet scramble and twist and her heart is pounding-oh, god-
"Pepper!"
Pepper opens her eyes.
"Relax," Tony says, staring at her with concern. Her shoulders are gripped in his hands. "You were just dreaming."
Her stomach is in her throat and Pepper is afraid she's going to throw up but she can't take her eyes off of him, his scruffy and bruised face that's still just a little bit pale, the shock of dark hair that's not artfully mussed so much as actual bed-head.
She opens her mouth to speak but instead of words a hoarse croak comes out. She licks her lips and tries again. "What-what time is it?"
"It's, ah-eight thirty," Tony tells her after checking his wristwatch. "Are you all right?"
The image of Tony, pale and cool and dead, suddenly superimposes itself onto the real, alive Tony and Pepper shuts her eyes tightly to escape it. "Fine."
"'Stop saying you're fine, you're clearly not fine,'" Tony parrots back to her what seems to be a strange mix of Katharine Hepburn and falsetto. "Isn't that what you said?"
Pepper opens her eyes to shoot him a glare that's half serious and half amused. The shock and horror that she had dreamt are dissipating along with her troubled sleep and she takes a single deep breath. "Just a bad dream."
She takes a second to look at him, and realizes somewhat belatedly that he's buck naked.
"Tony...!" It's not that's she has never seen him in the buff before-in fact, she's willing to bet that she has seen Tony Stark naked more times than any other woman on the planet, which is a bizarre kind of achievement-but it's different. It feels intimate.
He looks down at himself, and then back at her, and grins. "You screamed, Potts," he tells her pragmatically. "I came running."
Nonetheless, he sits back down on the bed and covers his lower half with the sheet. "What were you dreaming about?"
"I-Tony, we need to get up," Pepper says after a moment, using her crisp and professional tone to change the subject. She looks down at herself and winces at her wrinkled dress. Her neck aches from an unintentional sleep in a very old and and not-terribly-comfortable recliner.
"I'm up," Tony says, in a very specific tone that leaves unsaid the "in more ways than one" that Pepper knows he's dying to tack on.
She glances back at him, and sees it.
Dark, veiny lines, extending out into his chest for the radius of the reactor. Unnatural tributaries that have settled blackly beneath his skin in strange angles and patterns. Pepper is horrified.
He sees it on her face, and looks down at his chest. "It should fade," he offers helpfully. "JARVIS says they're subcutaneous lesions that should fade once the Palladium is fully out of my system and the area has a chance to heal."
Pepper barely hears him. "Palladium," she repeats dumbly, still staring at the literal, actual proof that Tony was poisoned. That he'd been dying.
"Um, yes. I had to, ah, I had to synthesize a new element in the shop. Well, synthesize it in a stable form so that it could be sustained, you know, because any jerk-off can fool around with a particle accelerator and slam together some Ununoctium. Sustaining Starkidium was the hard part. That's what I think I'm going to call it, by the way: Starkidium. Or Starkonium. Maybe Howardium, after my dad." Tony pauses in his babbling . "Would you say no to Pepperidium?"
At that Pepper tears her gaze from the lesions on his chest and back to his face. He looks strangely earnest, apologetic, uncertain. It's an unusual combination, and she realizes that he's trying to explain, trying to show her something.
"That's what... that's what Natalie meant, the new chest piece?" Pepper motions towards the triangular implant. "I noticed the new suit."
He nods. "Yeah."
"And the Palladium... it was poisoning you?"
Another nod. "It's a semi-toxic heavy metal," he explains. "Exposed to my bloodstream in the reactor... well, it was bad news. But I'm fine now. I fixed it. Brilliantly, I might add. Might even get a Nobel Prize for it, if I wanted to tell anyone. Which I don't. Well, maybe a little."
Pepper takes a deep breath. "You're sure?"
He nods. "Yep. Gonna have JARVIS check my math as soon as we're back in Malibu."
Pepper looks at him carefully. "Okay," she says, and a second later Tony has reached out for her hands and pulled her from her chair and over to his mouth; she is startled enough that she lets it happen, even though she's standing and he's still very naked with only a sheet between them.
She supposes that it shouldn't feel like they're moving fast-given that they've followed the When Harry Met Sally timeline of romance-but it does.
Tony stops the kiss and smiles at her. "I could really get used to this."
The last of her anxiety melts away, and Pepper takes what feels like her first breath of the day. "Me too," she tells him, enjoying Tony's suddenly wide eyes. "After you shower."
TBC
Notes
Paterson and Bloomberg are David Paterson, then-governor of New York, and Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City (and fellow billionaire). Ununoctium is synthetic element no. 118, also called Uuo and the heaviest element in the Periodic Table.