See no Evil
Summary: Peel off your skin and stand naked. OneShot- Tony Stark, Pepper Potts.
Warning: fractured
Set: During and after Iron Man 1+2
Disclaimer: Standards apply.
If there was a way for her she would chose not to choose.
He lays there, his chest bare and a gaping hole inside, looking at her with pleading eyes, and it strikes her: she never saw him vulnerable before. You are the only one I have. Vulnerable and honest. And this is not Tony Stark – this is not the man she knows, headstrong and stubborn to a fault; arrogant and self-confident and self-destructive. Well, the self-destructive part still applies but he looks at her with eyes that tell her he genuinely cares. It matters to him; suddenly something that never mattered has become the most important thing in the world. And Pepper is proud. Tony Stark decides to live. And it means so much more than just the word. There is no way she can do it now – remain impassive and waiting and detached – life is a choice, and loyalty is, and this is so much more than just duty. So she chooses to choose, adheres to gravity in the same way she always did, and does what he asks her to do.
She thinks she fell in love with him long ago but she is so terribly efficient at hiding it.
…
She has become a part of him to an extent that he forgets she is even there.
Obadiah talks on and on while Tony focusses on the pizza box on the glass table. His own company is trying to get rid of him – it frazzles him, makes him irritable, and while he wants to storm off in order to yank their heads back to where they belong (and tear some off in the process, perhaps) he feels the tug his lab emits, the half-finished job waiting for him down there. He decided something, in a cave, in the presence of a dying man (two men died that day and the world still knows about neither of them), and he will go through with it. The world is a terrible place, horrible, painful and terrifying. Why did he never see it before? If he cannot set the wrongs right perhaps he can do a tiny little bit to make it more bearable.
He is walking back downstairs when he turns for the last time, grabbing a second slice of pizza and generally ignoring Obadiah, and then he sees her.
Pepper's become a part of his home to the point he does not even notice when she is in the room. Quiet and efficient, ever-present, when was the last time she had vacation? Come to think of it, it does not matter because he needs her here, anyway. But only as he fights to tear his eyes away from her, from the way her eyes blink tiredly and her frown increases as she hacks into her laptop, he realizes she is so much more than just another piece of furniture.
Back down in his work shop, he notices his hands are shaking. He balls them into fists.
…
His hands seem relaxed on the sides of the lectern.
It is the tiny, almost unnoticeable tremor in his hand that nobody notices except for her that makes her want to run out there and stop all of this. She could do so, tell them – in her calm, no-nonsense voice that works on the entire board and half of the time on Tony, even – to shut up and let him be, because he is still injured and shaky and the fact that she almost lost him more than once in the last weeks only now comes crushing down on her. Tony stands on the dais and seems to be handling the press well. They love him, always did, because who does not love a multibillionaire with a now not-so-secret-anymore superhero identity and a smile women would kill for to see directed towards them. They see Iron Man without his mask and body suit but Pepper sees Anthony Edward Stark, saw his hands shake before he took the sheets of paper, saw the thin sheen of sweat he wiped away before he left and felt the soft hum of the ARC reactor underneath her hands as she straightened his tie. And she knows there are two different people out there. One of them belongs to the people, but the other belongs to no one. Maybe he wants it that way. Maybe she... But no matter what – right now she wants to storm out there and get him back into the silence of his own house, because he does enough as it is already.
…
And it's never enough.
Tony knows whatever he does, it won't ever be enough. There is a world of cruelty out there, of corruption and hate and injustice, and he might be Iron Man. But there are one million of criminals out there, one million terrorists and low-profile killers and arms dealers (just like he once was) and there is no way he can stop them all. He has spent three months in hell and has watched as mankind tried to run down itself in a desperate attempt of self-preservation, the more it struggles, the faster it goes. It is as if someone has given him glasses when before he was half-blind, as if he suddenly is able to see the world as what it is. How could he ever have taken pleasure in all those useless, worthless pastimes? How could he have owned a multimillion-dollar-company like his without noticing what it ultimately lead to? Yinsen told him to value his own life. Tony finds that it is impossible to live without affecting others, especially being who he is. Weapons destroy villages destroy livelihoods destroy lives, destroy and destroy and destroy, and what remains are the ashes of something that could have been. In so many different aspects. And he is a man of action, always was. He has the ways to change something, so he acts. It is just the price that makes him freeze in terror, and the implications of the words I am Ironman. It is what haunts his nightmares: there is no way to save them all, no way to protect everyone, and the thought is the more terrifying as soon as he concludes the chain of logic. There is no way he can forever protect what is important to him.
But he tries, oh how he tries.
…
Hearts are a mysterious thing, Pepper thinks.
When it comes down to it she understands that they are fragile, and can be broken, and she also understands that Tony Stark has a heart, as well. (She encased it in glass for him and it saved his life, it is nothing she will ever forget.) What she does not get is how a person can be so kind, and heart-felt, without realizing about the hearts of others. Because Damn him, he knows she feels something and leaves her standing on the roof waiting for him like a stupid idiot, he gives her gifts and compliments and pretends he relies on her but everything amounts to the fact that his heart belongs to something else. Someone else, she thinks, and she would hate mankind for it if she only could. She can see all the ways he tries, tries so hard. It is a struggle because he has learned not to care and now he has to unlearn it all again, has to allow the world to see him and has to see the world, in return. She knows from experience that it is a painful job, and she's knows him for such a long time she thinks she might have figured him out a fraction.
…
He could built her a skyscraper and give her jewelry and dresses and shoes. He can sign over his company, bring her gifts (he concedes the strawberries were a bad choice but he had made the connection, if nothing else) and sweet-talk her into compliance when he does not want to attend a meeting. But there is one thing he cannot have, and it is the first time Tony Stark sees himself confronted with that kind of difficulty.
It never was about hearts, before.
…
"Really, twenty close-to-naked girls?" Rhodey asks, swirling a glass of wine, and Tony grins and boasts and talks. And Pepper sits in her usual spot on the big couch and feels the insecurity in his eyes, in the way they seek her out. She does not return the glance because there are decisions he has to make for himself, and this is one. Stark Expo. Pepper knows: if there is one person on Earth Tony cannot detach himself from, it is his father. This is his father's legacy, and he has to decide whether to do it or not, and if so, how. Her heart aches to help him – she can sign contracts in his name and invite companies and write press releases – but she cannot take the decision of his shoulders.
Trust that idiot of genius to find his responsibility the same day he finds out that she is not just a piece of furniture.
…
She lounges on the piece of furniture besides him like a queen on her throne.
"I'd do whatever I want. With whomever I want."
Fact: She is everything he likes in a woman. She's enigmatic, this Natalie Rushman, and she's sexy and intelligent and detached. She's also a red-head. Tony's far enough gone to admit a few things to himself. Observations. One: I don't have a lot of time left to live. Pity. He skips right over it, because, yes, he is afraid. Damn afraid. Two: There's trouble out there. Vankov isn't dead. He can't explain how he knows, but he does know. Three: Rushman was supposed to be a distraction. She is not, it is of no use. He looks at her and cannot appreciate her curves any more than he would find joy in a piece of art (Pepper has them all collected and curated and he went and donated them all and her face was so furious but her eyes pleaded in a language he didn't understand, was unable to read despite his being fluent in six different languages, roughly). Rushman's expressive face, her luscious lips – they don't hold more of his thoughts than a financial statement issued by his bank. That part a failure, too. There is a weird pain in his chest region which he attributes to being slowly poisoned by palladium. Four: Anthony Edward Stark is a coward. He doesn't need proof. It is in his memory, etched into it clearly: a plane, and a twisted version of what was supposed to be an omelet (he'd thought it was enough to just smash the eggs into the pan, preferably without the eggshell, strange how the easiest things eluded him, genius that he was). There is a place he should be right now, and someone he should be with, but he is too damn afraid to move. He can tell himself repeatedly that it is for her – she does not run on batteries, she told him, and she never smiled sadder than that moment. He thinks he owes her something but he cannot think of what, so he puts on his suit and shuts out the world, the same way he always does.
…
He takes the entire room with his personality, the same way he always does, when he enters and starts throwing her off even more. Her day has been horrible – she's facing a million bush fires and two thirds of mankind seem to want something from her, including Jenna from accounting – and in walks Tony Stark, grey suit jacket, polo shirt and a box of strawberries in his arm and God if she wasn't so damn angry she'd worry about his looks.
Because he looks haggard, and exhausted, and she doesn't think she ever saw him that worn.
He drives her insane with every word he utters, it has always been that way, and really Pepper has no patience to listen to him now. He tells her he hasn't come to apologize – of course he hasn't, he's Tony freaking Stark – and he stutters around and suddenly seems so terribly awkward in his own office her heart would break, hadn't it already been shattered into irretrievable pieces.
Pepper almost flees the room because the way he cannot even look at her – the way he refuses to meet her eyes throughout the entire exchange – breaks her heart over and over again, and she has no time for this. In the car, on her way to the airport, she wonders what he wanted to tell her and feels like crying. She's never seen him that nervous before.
How desperately she wishes she was able to eat strawberries.
…
She tastes sweet, fruit-like.
He never wants to stop kissing her. Never wants to let go of her. She takes away every disguise he ever wore and Tony is left with nothing to hide himself. No suit, no mask, no arrogance or sarcasm, because everything is futile in her presence. She has long learned to see through him more easily than through a sheet of glass. Realization is a slow process, and a painful one, too.
…
Never fall in love with someone who cannot love himself, her mother told her. As every good parental advice is about to provoke, Pepper thinks, what she does is exactly the opposite she should. Or be prepared to have to save him. She wants to, desperately, but she does not know whether it will be enough.
…
Take off the armor and he is a mere man, but there is more to it. There always is.
He hasn't yet decided which way round it is. Is it that he wears a suit that makes him a warrior, or is he a warrior that simply wears a suit? (He refuses to use the word hero, he feels sick only thinking about it because he might be anything, anyone, but he will never be a hero.) Take away his armor and how much will be left of him? Take away his name and his money and his connections, his house on Malibu, his workshop, his work. Take all this and he is nothing, only a gifted man, but one among many. It is like being stripped naked, loving this woman. Feeling like this is, thinking like this is, too. He designed weapons because it was interesting, gave him something to occupy his mind. Now he saves people with the same dedication he invested into his own enjoyment in the past. And he smiles into the cameras and jokes around for the press, he signs autographs and appears at public conventions but all of this is not what it is about, or at least he has the distinct feeling that there is more to it. It is easy, playing the Tony Stark everyone knows. But when it comes down to it they don't know him at all.
Pepper does.
Sometimes it scares him, scares him shitless that she knows him so well. She knows where to hit him so it will hurt, knows his habits, his likes and dislikes, his way of thinking. He cannot hide from her – could he ever? Her eyes look right through his diversions, misconceptions. Even if he wanted to – which he does not – he would not be able to hide. Of everyone he knows, a betrayal from her side would be the only one he would not be able to bear.
Knowing him and his faults, how can she even remain by his side?
And yet, she is there. Always. Managing his life, both public and private, in her very own magnificent way, getting him to do things he does not want to, makes him eat when he forgets, reminding him that there is a time for sleep and rest, as well. Not everybody runs on batteries, Tony. She's incredibly imperfect in her perfection – and she is perfect for him.
Even if there was nothing he could fight and live for, he supposes, he still would continue on because her faith propels them both forward.
…
There are many days Pepper thinks it is hopeless. She's not strong enough to carry them both, she's just a woman, just a girl. In order to save Tony she has to save the world and she knows she cannot do that, it is not in her power. There are nights she lies awake and agonizes – if he were a simple man, not rich, not brilliant, not loved-by-the-people. If he were not Iron Man. It would be easy to love him then, natural. But she would never have met him in that case, this brilliant genius, prodigy child, distraught son, young entrepreneur, flirty playboy, dedicated scientist, broken warrior. Hero. Because, in her eyes, it is what he is and yet isn't. He is so much more than that. If he only would see it, only could accept it in the same way she does. Tony is so lost he seems like a child, sometimes, and on those days (and nights) she holds him, anchors him to a reality that is a nightmare for him. She holds him although he sometimes does not even notice, she brings him coffee in the morning and manages his appointments and his accounting and his company and makes sure he sleeps. And sometimes she thinks he notices, or even knows, and sometimes she can feel him watching her. And she smiles. Because Virginia Pepper Potts has not been raised to give up easily. She wouldn't have made it this far without absolute faith. She believes in God, and she believes in Iron Man. But she believes in the man she knows he is behind his mask and suit even more.
…
"Pepper," he whispers. "Pepper, tell me, where do I belong?" And his voice carries so much hopelessness, and he looks so, so young, and her heart reaches out to him.
"You belong to me."
And the thought might be an arrogant and selfish one, but they both know it is the only way. Pepper has enough trust for both of them.