Author's Note: yay! Been working on this one for a few days now. This one is inspired by the birthday conversation. (You have plans? I don't like it when you have plans.) And then when he wanted to know what she'd gotten herself from him for her birthday, he sounded so genuinely interested, and it's that tone of voice that resonated with the prompt of "soft." Everything else grew out of that, because obviously Tony doesn't talk like that all the time, and Tony and Pepper spend more time in each other's company than out of it, it seems, so it makes sense that she'd be familiar with all his tones of voice and would relate them to different facets of his personality.

Oh, and this piece actually has a title! The first one that does...and it's not mine. It's actually stolen from the title of one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, entitled "The Sound of Her Voice." Seventh season, I believe. Good stuff.


100 Prompt Challenge

#19 – Soft

The Sound of His Voice


Ms. Pepper Potts would know the sound of her boss's voice anywhere. It was a familiarity bred through hours and hours of working together. Well, perhaps that wasn't quite the right term. "Together" implied some sort of mutual goal. Tony Stark was both her boss and her work – though some days he was more effective at being work than boss. Deep down they both knew that when he'd signed her on he'd effectively signed his life away. Of course, so had she. As the CEO of one of the biggest corporations in America, Tony Stark was always on the go. And as the personal assistant to Tony Stark, so was she. She had to be ready to leap into action at a moment's notice, and so many times it was his voice and not his words that gave her her cues.

From board meetings, to press conferences, to sound bites repeated ad nauseum on cable news channels whether she was with him or at home trying to relax after a long day. His voice was the soundtrack to her life, always there, always just a little louder than anything else happening around her.

The boss voice is dry, staccato. Sometimes absentminded. It reminds her of the voice of a surgeon speaking to his nurses mid-procedure. It might sound curt to anyone who only hears but doesn't listen, but Pepper doesn't mind the lack of courtesy clauses. Please. Thank you. Question marks at the end of statements that aren't questions at all. She doesn't miss their presence. They aren't needed because he knows that she'll do whatever it takes to get the job done. Doesn't matter what the job is. As his employee Pepper is the physical manifestation of his voice and will. He never says please because he knows he never really has to ask. His confidence in her – though sometimes a little over-inflated – is both please and thank you enough.


Potts would know the sound of Stark's voice anywhere. Stark's tones were not the same as her boss's. Her boss was someone who understood the daily grind of keeping a business in the black. When they were employer and employee they were a team, he the hand and she the glove. He had the power to get things done and she was there to protect and enable.

When her boss turned into Stark though, that was when she turned into Potts. Potts had had great success in high school as a babysitter, earning upwards of two hundred a month because she had the force of will to babysit groups of children. Large groups of children. And when Stark was out in force, she became Potts, the woman with experience in corralling the obstinate and unreasonable.

Stark was the public persona of business. He was the man who appeared on magazine covers, who showed up to charity events, and ribbon cuttings, and interviews. He was the media darling, the charming face of the company, the smooth talker who would say outrageous things with a wink and a smile.

Potts had lots of opportunities to manage Stark. And as any good babysitter knows, tone of voice is the difference between a child who's hurt and a child who's just pissed off. Stark's tones were no different, and she'd learned all of them by heart.

The hard, rapid-fire pace when he was being a smart-ass.

The flat tone he adopted when trying to talk his way out of murder. Usually with great

success.

The drunken slur – still fast; the seductive murmur that was differentiated from the slur

only because it was slower.

The tired, cynical tone he'd slip into when she'd pressed him into one appearance too many without giving him any time to be alone with himself for even five minutes.

All of it, as familiar to her as the sound of her own voice. Sometimes more than, if they

were arguing. Or what passed for arguing between them. She was too aware of her

professionalism to truly argue and he knew that she was too aware of her professionalism to truly argue. But Stark was who he was, and he would just plow over her if she gave him half a chance.

Potts never did. He never stopped, so she'd learned to keep up.


Pepper would know the sound of Tony's voice anywhere. It wasn't just a matter of having become intimate with it over years of close acquaintance, and obscenely late – or early – phone calls, or from countless instances where he'd wander through his home calling for her at obnoxious levels.

It was…god, it was just Tony. The man talked. To anything. Even to the computers that couldn't talk back. And she didn't think it was that he just loved the sound of his own voice. He was just a talker, and she knows every nuance.

The gravel first thing in the morning; the energy in the late afternoon and evening; the enthusiasm when talking shop with his engineers. The fuzzy quality when he was distracted by something other – sometimes she thought anything other – that what she was trying to talk to him about. Tony teased, and Tony joked, and Tony would talk to himself constantly if he ever forgot that someone else was in the room with him.

But the thing that was most uniquely Tony was when he talked to her, when he talked to Pepper. His voice – dry, amused, frustrated, exhausted, whatever – would become so very soft. Not quiet. It wasn't the volume that would change. And she wouldn't even really label that quality as tenderness either. If pressed, Pepper would say that sometimes – like that morning he'd left for Afghanistan – his voice became the audible equivalent of an old cotton t-shirt that'd seen hundreds of washings and was full of holes, but was still softer than silk in spite of it.


The phone rang at 4:23 am, of course. Four in the morning was one of those transitional hours, like eleven in the morning and five in the evening. Eleven was too late to be morning really, too early to be afternoon; five wasn't quite afternoon or evening; and four in the morning was too close to the time she usually woke up anyway for her to bother to go back to sleep and too early for her to even think about getting up.

They say it takes 90 days to either form or break a habit. For three months, Pepper hadn't had to answer a single phone call that didn't occur during regular business hours. She has to grope along the bedside table to locate her phone. By the time she finds it, her voicemail has picked up. Irritated, she flicks her wrist and the screen lights up, displaying a phone number she doesn't recognize.

Probably a drunk – The phone goes off again, the light from the screen hurting her eyes.

"What?" she mumbles into it, her voice just a little sharp. There's dead silence on the other end of the line. "Hello?" Her tone is sharper this time, demanding. If she's going to be robbed of her last half hour of sleep, then she wants to know why…

It occurs to her that there's one person in the world who would still have a very good reason for calling her this early and who might be hesitant to say anything.

Oh god. Oh god. "Rhodes? Rhodey, is that you –"

"Pepper."

She told herself she was dreaming. For three months she'd done all she could to ignore the echoes of that voice, once so pervasive nearly to the point of irritation. For three months he was a running commentary in the back of her head until she took to playing music nearly as loud as he had. Did. But the level of the music never quite drowned out all the snatches of conversation her brain had stored up without her permission.

"Pepper… Look, I'm sorry. Rhodey told me it was early still over there, and clearly the math isn't beyond me, but I got…impatient."

Twelve weeks of trying to forget her boss's voice, trying to forget Stark's voice…it never even occurred to her to try to forget Tony's voice. She would know the sound of his voice anywhere. And it's so, so very soft, as if he truly regrets waking her up for any reason.

"Tony. Oh my god, Tony."