Title: Redesign This!

Rating: PG-13

Pairing: Tony Stark/Pepper Potts

Disclaimer: I don't own Pepper Potts or Tony Stark (although I wish I did), or any of the rights to Iron Man…just Jo. She's mine.

Tony took the stairs two at a time. The building smelled of growing things, soil and life. It wasn't a smell he was used to, but it seemed to make the air warmer and thicker. The building was set up like a college dormitory, with hall bathrooms and names on the doors instead of numbers. On each floor the walls changed colors, from a deep blue to olive green to terra-cotta to bold red, where he finally stopped.

He checked himself and knocked on the door made of a solid wood, deep in color, and marked "Joanna." A call came from inside, and then a burst of cluttered noise.

"Dammit!" There was another clang and the door swung open violently. "Yea- Tony?" A woman stood there in a tank top and jeans. She had a long, pleasant face rounded by a halo of dark brown hair and marked with a look of speechlessness.

"Hey babe, what's up? Mind if I come in?" He wedged past her and into the apartment. The air was thick with life and all visible surfaces were cluttered with hydroponics and solar stills. A solar generator hummed in the corner with wires trailing out a window, thrust open in spite of the July heat. A warm breeze fluttered over the papers on a corner desk.

He finally faced her. She was warm and her skin smeared with dirt. Her hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail, already falling out. It was obvious she wasn't the same spirited twenty-something he once knew. Now she was a spirited thirty-something and just as desirable.

But her face was turned into a scowl, "What the hell are you doing here?"

"I need a favor."

"How did you find me?"

"It's not a big thing, you'll like it. Right up your alley," he cast another glance at the hydroponics.

"I don't want you here."

"You remember the arc reactor development?"

"What? No. No, no. I don't work for you anymore. I quit, remember? I'm done."

"I remember you quit," he narrowed his eyes, his mouth drawn into a line, but then the look lifted. "That's why it's not a job, it's a favor, just a favor."

"No, I don't want to help you. It's over. I'm not doing it."

"It's rude to turn down something before you hear it."

"I'm not freelancing my ideas for your weapons."

"It's not about the company, it's a personal thing-"

"I bet it is," she crossed her arms.

"Listen to me. It's not for the company- which doesn't manufacture weapons anymore, in case you hadn't stuck your head outside in the past six months- it's for me."

"Ooooh! For you. Well that's a different thing then." She shut the door and crossed to hold down the fluttering papers.

"Don't be a bitch, I asking for a little help, that's all."

"Me being the bitch, that's a new one."

"Hey, you're the one who left the company and wiped the servers of two years of work. We should have sued your ass for that. You're lucky you have a career at all."

"Did you come here just to bully me?" She got close to his face and he could smell her over the wood and dirt of the apartment. An organic, human scent.

He cocked an eyebrow, "Well, we could come to a compromise."

She met Tony at MIT- not while he was in school there, while he was giving a talk years later. At an excitable 23, she was intrigued by the way Stark technology was so far ahead of any competitor. The internship came a year later, and then a full-time job. She was sleeping with Tony on a regular basis, between helping him test ideas in the workshop. It was her main project to develop the finalized plans for the full-sized arc reactor when she stumbled across the early plans for the Jehrico on Tony's personal servers and finalized her falling out.

Before the government could approve of the application, she set fire to the warehouse where the prototypes were contained and released a targeted virus to the server files. It was a fiasco, with Tony at the center. Despite the lost data, the prototype was redeveloped in little under a year, but she never returned to Stark Industries.

Tony had fought not to sue her, although the company was claiming millions in damages. In reality he had everything he needed in his head and all plans went along with little problem. He was pissed, of course, but there had been little signs for the last few months of her employment that she was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the nature of the company, and with weapons systems at all. She was becoming more stand-offish about the weapons aspects of work, and openly hostile towards the people on that side of the company. The government tried to pursue her for arrest, but Stark Industries dropped all charges and she effectively disappeared from the radar.

She spent her first year in a small commune in Colorado, where the most modern technology was the ox-pulled plow. It was a small place, about fifty people, and far from a utopia. A constant smell of human odor pervaded, to almost disgusting degrees when indoors, and the winter was cold and bitter, but she survived and moved on that spring to Arizona where she lived out of her car and caught odd jobs on the side. It was a dangerous living but she learned to use everything she had.

Eventually she came back to Malibu to take a job with a solar panel plant and start developing more environmentally friendly sources of energy, a passion that began with the reactor. She had won a few in awards in the past three years for her hydrogen engine and compact solar still design, but she never went back to Stark Industries, and if you asked her why she left, she would have called it her "Peaceful Revelation." Tony called it 'going hippie.' He never quite understood.

But he could never turn down an old coital acquaintance. In the dim midday light of the bedroom, the arc reactor glowed cool. She sat straddling his stomach, tapping her fingers against it.

"Is it really an arc reactor? The reactor was a good idea, but unwieldy. Do you know what you could do with this technology?"

"Yeah, don't tempt me." He moved his hand away and swung her off of him.

She thumped lightly onto the bed and sat up, reaching for her underwear, "So, what else do you need me for?"

"Do I detect sarcasm?"

"What do you want?" she spat.

"I want you to help redesign this, actually." He tapped the metal in his chest.

She turned around, her eyes lit up for a moment and faded, "What for?"

"It still produces a plasmic discharge-"

"Oh god, in your body?"

"I'm glad you see my problem."
"Well it's going to have to have some sort of waste, that's the way it was designed. It was just that the plasma is less detrimental than CO2 exhaust-"

"It smells too." She looked him in the eye, "You know, if that helps motivate you."

"Why'd you come to me?" She clipped her bra in the back and reached for her jeans. Tony watched her body disappear piece by piece like some backwards striptease. "Haven't you got someone at the company you can assign?"

"This is a little more personal than a cooperate assignment."

"Oh really, Iron Man?" She darted an eye at him lying on the bed.

"So you do watch the news? Good to know you're not as much of a hermit as you look." She swatted at him with a slight smile.

"Do you have a duplicate I can use? Or do you just want me to pull that one out?"

"Two, at the house. You know, just in case."

"You want me to come by?" she cocked an eyebrow this time.

"Well, since I have the high-tech workshop," he said, pulling himself up from the sheets, "I think it would work a little better if you have the resources you need."

She frowned, it had been awhile since she worked in Tony's shop and she preferred her home office, but for this project it might behoove her to do it. "I have to finish this project," she swept her arm towards the solar generator, "so maybe in a week?"

"Whenever you want, babe," he got up off the bed and began to pull on clothes. "I'll be there."