AN: Written for the prompt: MCU, Tony/Pepper, Trying to talk Pepper into wearing the Star Trek TOS uniform and going to Comicon with him
"Go away, Tony." Pepper tucks a strand of hair that has escaped her bun (again) behind her ear and squints down at the paperwork before her. She isn't going to get glasses. Nope. And Tony won't be paying for them. Because working past midnight on fine-print contracts on a regular basis hasn't ruined her vision at all.
Tony continues to wave a blue shirt just at the edge of her peripheral vision. If she looks up, she knows he'll be doing his best puppy eyes. Which he should know have no effect on her and haven't since the first year she worked under him and realized he'd manipulated her ruthlessly to do everything from cover up a sex scandal to putting toothpaste on his toothbrush because he was too lazy to do it himself. "C'mon, Pep, it's just for a couple hours. You wear a shirt, I wear a shirt, we make fun of people in fur suits…"
"I don't watch Star Trek."
"So?" He all but flops the shirt on her desk. She glares. He grins. "I bet a quarter of the people in costume aren't fans of what they're wearing. Friends coerce friends into superhero costumes all the time."
"In what world?" she wants to ask, but that would be giving him room to wheedle under her defenses. "Tony, I don't even like comics. Or Star Trek," she adds after a second to head off his argument that Star Trek wasn't a comic.
"Such a travesty!" Tony sighs with all the melodrama of a stereotypical teenage girl. "We need to fix that."
"You're not paying me to like what you like," Pepper says. He hasn't paid her at all lately. She pays herself. Huh, and look at that, a sub-clause in the contract that effectively makes all the other bits protecting Stark Industries' property void. Well, that won't do. She'll have to send it back with proposed revisions and a warning that if they tried to slip a subtly worded loophole into their contracts again, SI wouldn't be doing business with them. She draws a vicious circle around it in red pen. Tony plucks the pen from her hand. "Tony give me my pen back."
"No."
"Give me the pen back or I'll sic security on you."
"They can't throw me out of my own company." He pouts, holding the pen behind him and not so subtly keeping the blue shirt in plain view.
"They can and will," Pepper says, "because when you made me CEO, you gave me the power to do that."
"Did I?" He frowns and tries to think back to that.
"I can pull up the paperwork. It has your signature on it and everything."
"I don't remember reading that." The arm holding the shirt droops. "Or signing that."
"Exactly." Pepper fishes around in her desk for a new pen, scribbling out a subtle threat in the contract margin.
Tony sighs. The pen is dropped back on the corner of her desk, and then she has Tony's arms wrapped around her shoulders and an arc reactor digging into the side of her head. "Please? Just this once? It's not like you don't need a break. It could be fun. Just…think of it as networking or something. Publicity."
Pepper squeezes her eyes shut and takes a very slow breath and lets it out even slower. "You're not going to stop until I give in, are you."
"No."
"Fine." It isn't like she was getting anything done anyway. "But I'm not wearing the shirt."
"That'll do." He hugs her and grins like a kid at Christmas and she just gave him the best gift ever.
Later, she stands inside the convention center in a sea of costumed people and realizes she looks ridiculous not wearing a costume. She turns to Tony.
"Do you still have that costume?"
Tony holds up one of the two briefcases he's carting around (one clearly the Iron Man suit) and rattles it at her. "Thought you might change your mind."