Or "the one where Pepper tells Phil to get his head out of his ass." Because that's what friends do. Takes place between the 5 and the +1 of If Ever You Should Need Me.
Phil would really rather keep this to himself. But keeping problems to yourself rarely gets them resolved despite how much he tells himself the reverse is true. So when he and Pepper are out for a coffee one day, he finds himself spending most of their time together contemplating how to bring the topic up. If he wants to bring it up at all.
"Penny for your thoughts?"
He looks up from his coffee and untouched donut to see her smiling over her mug at him. After a moment of contemplation, he purses his lips and shakes his head, waving a dismissive hand.
"It's nothing."
"I know there's something on your mind that isn't even close to 'nothing.'"
"And how might you know that?"
"Because other than when you had the flu three weeks ago, I've never seen you leave a donut untouched for more than five minutes."
Phil offers the redhead his flattest stare as she smiles innocently back at him. There's really no hiding anything from Pepper Potts—as Tony Stark would be the first to tell you—and even presuming you do, manage to hide something, you're going to wish you hadn't when she finds out about it. And she will find out about it.
He leans back in his seat, resting one hand on the tabletop, his index and middle finger tapping in some subconscious rhythm as he thinks. It's not as though he doesn't want to pick her brain on the matter. But considering the topic… Well, no helping it now.
"Steve asked me to marry him," he tells her.
Phil watches as her face moves from disbelief to absolute delight.
"Oh god, Phil, congratulations!" she says emphatically.
He winces. The glow abruptly leaves her features.
"You didn't."
"Pepper, please—"
"Oh my god, Phil!"
"Pepper."
"What is wrong with you?"
He's surprised when she punches him in the arm. It doesn't hurt all that much, really, but when you've been tortured and beaten and stabbed through the back with an alien artifact of unclear origin throughout the course of your notable career, that's hardly any surprise. It still doesn't stop him from flinching, though. Because Pepper is angry and when Pepper is angry, your logic takes a vacation.
"I can't believe you. I honestly can't believe you," Pepper says, her fingertips pressed to her temples.
"In my defense, I had a good reason," Phil says.
"Which was?" Pepper prompts.
"He asked me in the medical wing of the Helicarrier shortly after we pulled him from the ocean," Phil says. "I didn't say 'no' I just couldn't bring myself to say 'yes' right then."
Pepper sighs at that, looking, of all things, relieved. "Why didn't you say so?"
"I was going to before you took a leaf from the Hulk's book."
She arches an eyebrow looking vaguely amused.
"Okay, I deserved that," she admits. "But considering last month you were coming to me wondering if you should ask him, you can understand why I was more than a little confused."
He nods slowly, drumming his fingers against the table once more. For a time he's quiet, staring at the patterns in the wooden tabletop. Even thinking about talking about this is making him uncomfortable, but the sooner he gets it off his chest, the better it will be. And if he trusts anyone with information this sensitive, it's Pepper.
"He could have died. He was in pain, scared, and heavily medicated," Phil says, trying not to recall it too clearly. "I didn't want him to feel locked in to something that was likely a kneejerk reaction. I told him he could ask again when he was feeling more himself and he didn't seem averse to the suggestion."
"But?" Pepper says.
Phil takes a slow, deep breath.
"Our professions are dangerous. We know that. We all know that. But aside from that is the plain and simple fact that I'm middle aged," Phil says. "No, I don't care about how others view the apparent age difference between us. That's never bothered me, no matter what the tabloids like to say. What bothers me is the fact that I'm only going to get older. He isn't. He doesn't age like the rest of us, which means that, even assuming I were to live to retirement age and eventually died an old man, he'd still have years and years ahead of him. And that's an unlikely scenario. In all likelihood, I'll die on the job long before then."
"You can't think that way," Pepper says softly.
"Thinking any other way would be naïve," Phil counters. "They're facts. We can't go through life ignoring them."
"You're not listening to me," Pepper says insistently. "When I said that you can't think that way, I meant that you can't apply those facts to this situation as though they matter."
"They do matter."
"Do you think they matter to Steve?"
Phil frowns.
"I'm not following," he admits.
"You know him. Do you think he hasn't thought of these things just as often as you have?" Pepper asks. "He asked you to marry him after he basically relived the event that took everything away from him. Maybe it wasn't as much of a kneejerk reaction as you thought."
Phil is silent for a time, processing that information. He feels Pepper's hand on his knee, patting fondly and as he looks up she's smiling warmly at him.
"You're afraid of leaving him behind. And that's okay. You know, I can't say that what you said isn't true," she says. "Given the things everyone's come up against in the past few years, it's very likely that it could end that way for some of us. Or all of us, even. We just don't know. I try not to think about it if I can, but that's the point, Phil. Instead of using that fear as a shield, you should be embracing it. Or do you think refusing to marry him will somehow spare him from the pain of losing you? Or you from the pain of losing him?"
Phil's lips draw into a thin line as he sits rigidly in his seat. This was a mistake. This is not a conversation he wants to have in public, but he supposes he's the one who brought it up anyway. At the very least he can be thankful there's no one sitting especially close by and the patrons closest to them seem to be too immersed in their drinks and electronics and mundane conversations to spare them so much as a passing glance.
"The fear of one of us dying before we're married shouldn't be a motivation for marriage," Phil counters.
"And you think that's why he proposed," Pepper says, sipping her beverage.
"I just think he should consider what he's asking for a while longer," Phil replies. "I don't want him to rush into this."
"You don't want him rushing into it, or you don't want to be rushed into it?" Pepper asks.
"They're essentially the same," he says.
"They're really not."
He sighs heavily at that, which is her cue to stop playing Devil's Advocate. She learned years ago that when something's bothering Phil, trying to get it out of him is like pulling teeth. If he's admitted this much to her, she's sure there's something far more complicated festering beneath it.
"All I'm saying is that I think you're thinking way too hard about this," she says. "Do you want to marry him?"
"Of course I do," Phil says, looking her dead in the eye.
"Then the rest doesn't matter," Pepper tells him. "I mean, it matters, but just not in the way you think it does." She glances at her phone, spying a text message from Tony begging her to pick up some baked goods—apparently he has a sixth sense for when she's out with Phil—for him and Bruce. Because science is hungry work. Shaking her head with a small smile, she looks back to the agent sitting beside her. "You seemed so ready for this a few weeks ago. Why this sudden change of heart?"
Phil takes a moment to think of how he wants to answer. He doesn't like this, opening himself up. In his line of work, opening up is liable to get you or someone else killed. He supposes it's something of a character flaw when that translates to your personal life. There's a reason the junior agents often think of him as a robot and though anyone close to him would say they're very far off base, Phil thinks that perhaps there's some merit to the idea. He's getting better, of course; it's just happening very slowly.
"I've always thought," he says slowly, "that at some point in my life, I would find someone with whom I was comfortable and we would eventually be married and have children. It's something I always wanted. After joining S.H.I.E.L.D., after all the failed relationships and the knowledge that I would always put the job first, I realized that it was, in a way, selfish of me to continue to want those things. Though not impossible, they were highly improbable. It would be unfair to weigh someone down with the kind of pseudo-relationship I was offering.
"But then Steve came along. And it's different with him, because he knows what to expect. Where before I would miss a date because I was on assignment or completing paperwork for one, he's right alongside me for it. There's nothing to miss. He's so…"
Phil pauses, frowning again, trying to think of a way to sum Steve up. The problem with this being, of course, that you don't just sum up a man like Steve Rogers. If given the opening, Phil's certain he could talk himself hoarse and still have more to say. He thinks of all the things he wants to say, that he should say. How Steve is heroic and noble. How he's good and kind and all of the things Phil thought he would be. How he's more than that. How he's not afraid to call Phil out on a bad call, on his bullshit, on his inability to open up. How that startling honesty so often leaves Phil feeling cut bare, hung out, how he hates it and loves it at the same time, that Steve can do that to him.
Instead he just shrugs helplessly.
"I've made my plans and set my course and suddenly I've been presented with the very real possibility of having some of the things that I convinced myself I never would," Phil explains. "I was so overwhelmed by that possibility that I failed to consider what it meant. Years of careful planning would have to be reworked. Not to mention all the reasons I've already given you. Besides which is the simple fact that we will never be a normal married couple, not with who we are. Marriage is a risk. It opens up the door for innumerable difficulties in our line of work.
"I keep finding all these very logical reasons as to why this is a terrible idea. If this were anything else, I wouldn't have looked at it twice. If it were a strategy for an op, it wouldn't have even made it to paper. And yet somehow I can't just dismiss it like that."
"I'd be worried if you could," Pepper says with raised eyebrows. "Look. You're very good at your job. I don't think there are many who could claim to do it better. You're also very disciplined, which is why I think that sometimes you need to hear something from someone else before you can accept it."
"And just what is it you think I need to hear?"
"That it's okay to be selfish for once in your life."
"I can promise you I've been selfish plenty of—"
"Phil. Stop running away from this."
Phil looks to her sharply, taken aback by the accusation.
"I'm not running away from anything," he retorts. "I've presented you with several viable arguments—"
"To make yourself feel better," Pepper cuts in.
All he can do is stare. For once, he has no response.
"Sometimes you're a lot like Tony," she says softly.
When Phil's jaw clenches and his shoulders tense, she can't help but laugh. Hearing himself compared to Tony Stark is undoubtedly, in his book, one of the worst insults he could possibly receive.
"I know you don't want to hear that," she says, "but it doesn't make it any less true. You hide it better than he does, but when it comes right down to it, both of you are afraid of getting something that you want that you don't think you should have. Because you can want something and that won't do any harm, but actually getting it? If you have it, you can screw it up."
Phil purses his lips and looks down. Tony very nearly always gets what he wants, but there is something at the top of his list that Phil knows he's afraid of having, and that's Pepper. Being in a relationship is different than being married, there's so much more weight to it, so much more to consider. It's a little frightening to think that he and Tony have that in common.
"This is something I can't afford to screw up," he says, his hand curled into a fist on his thigh.
"I agree. Which is why you need to relax and stop approaching this as Agent Coulson instead of Phil," Pepper says. "This isn't a mission or an op. This is your life and his and both of those outweigh anything else. Now, I know he's off with Clint, Natasha and Jasper for the next three weeks and in that time, I'm forbidding you from spending even one minute thinking about this."
Phil can't stop his lips from curling upward in a small smile.
"You're forbidding me."
"Yes, I am."
"And just how will you know if I've disobeyed you?"
"You say that like you think you can hide something from me," Pepper says with a laugh.
Phil has often heard people make the joke that Pepper Potts could rule the world if she wanted to. They all laugh, but it's really not a joke.
"Okay. No thinking about it for one minute for the next three weeks. And just why am I doing this?" he asks.
"Because when Steve asks you again, you're going to answer with the first thing that comes to mind," Pepper says.
"So you're fixing the outcome," Phil points out. "Because you know I'll say 'yes.'"
"If you know you're going to say 'yes' then where's the problem?" Pepper says. "It's not healthy to let your heart do all the talking in a relationship, but it's just as bad to leave it all to your head. So give your head a rest." She makes an annoyed, if somewhat affectionate noise when her phone goes off. "Apparently Tony is going to die a horrible death if he doesn't get a cheese danish soon. Give me a second to grab a few at the counter and then we'll head back."
"Dr. Banner likes their apricot scones," Phil notes absently.
He clears their table, disposing of his untouched coffee and donut, finding he doesn't really have the stomach for them. Perhaps that flu is lingering a little longer than he'd thought. They depart when Pepper returns with a bag stuffed full of baked goods and merge into the throng of people moving through the New York streets like an ocean current. It's a silent walk for once, as Pepper gives him time to digest what they've just discussed. It's not until they reach the Tower lift that she breaks the silence.
"I know I was being a little pushy on the subject," she says, "but you do know it's your choice, right? If you don't want to marry him, you don't have to."
"I know I don't have to marry him," Phil replies. He takes in a deep breath and exhales slowly, feeling a fraction of the tension he's been feeling disappear. "But I want to."
Pepper smiles, bumping shoulders with him.
"I still get to plan it."
"That's something I know I have no say in."
"That's right you don't."