Author's Note: This is what I like to call a breather chapter, and by that I mean it's a light hearted chapter with some foreshadowing and off color jokes. Basically I pumped this out because it's Christmas (er, well, it is for Serbian Orthodox Catholics like my parents; the rest of you have it on Friday). I just can't write depressing things this close to the holidays, I'm incapable of it. Granted, this chapter's got some foreshadowing, but it's not dark. I just… I just can't be dark on Christmas, okay? I don't care if it's not your winter holiday, it's mine, and I can't be the depressing inner-demon-fighting angst writer I normally am today.
Oh, and if you find this chapter offensive, please remember that these are teenagers living in a diverse multi-cultural city. Realistically these kinds of jokes do indeed come up, and let's be frank: the first thing you'd do if you got a chance to learn a foreign language that virtually no one around you spoke would be to look up the bad words.
Also, forgive the lack of pinyin accents marks on everybody's Chinese. FF dot net wouldn't load them correctly and it's not critical to the plot, so after twenty minutes of trying to get this thing to load them I just gave up. And yes, I'm fully aware that Gene Khan would probably not be affectionate enough to give Pepper a Chinese pet-name in canon, but I liked the idea too much not to use it.
A joke's a very serious thing. – Charles Churchill
Do yourself a favor: do not attempt to make every word in every chapter dead serious. Life is not all serious, even though things certainly get dark and disturbing quite often. But if you recall your own dark days you will note what in retrospect seems a quite jarring collection of happy, light hearted moments between yourselves and your friends. That is realism, not all of this grimdark nonsense modern writers keep spewing out. – Writer and poet Mi Tak Sun
It was amazing to Tony how, even in the midst of things going wrong all around him, hanging out could smooth all of that over.
Having decided to cease their tiring, dead-end investigation into what happened to Obadiah and Whitney after a full day of uselessness, the three had decided to call Gene over and relax. It was time for pizza, video games and general unwinding before Tony would inevitably go back to his one-man investigation. Of course, being that he had more than a few workaholic tendencies, he'd been up all night hacking into every establishment within a mile of Stark International that had a security camera. No clues were there that he could find, although he did have the good sense to ask Pepper to run a background check on the new head of Stark International. The results were very interesting, but nothing worrying. Which meant that after a full twenty four hours of soda fights, hacking and theorizing, 'Team Iron Man' (as Pepper dubbed them) had no idea what was going on.
This was their break, their day off so that they could relax and unwind briefly before they'd have to go back to facing reality. And Tony fully intended to give this matter his whole attention once they had a long break. A long break that involved pizza with olives and extra cheese, and that elixir of the nerds, Mountain Dew. Tony would've gone for an energy drink, but Rhodey's mom had cut him off of those ever since that one time he was up for three days straight. In a fit of hyper-activity he had decided to make every electronic device in the house sing. It took a week before he was able to undo everything, and since then only nice normal drinks without the metric ton of sugar and caffeine were allowed in the Rhodes household. Tony and his mini-circle of friends lay around the living room sipping their various drinks of choices and debating what game to play when the doorbell rang.
"Jianyu-rén!" Pepper chirped cheerfully, hugging him happily in her typical fangirly manner. "Nihao ma?"
"Wo henhao. Ni ne?" he replied, apparently not phased in the least by her hug.
"Wo leile," she grumbled, and the dirty look she shot Tony made him have the distinct feeling they were talking about him behind his back. "A certain someone just had to call me at three in the morning."
Tony was about to object that he had been working and hadn't realized the time when something occurred to him. "When the heck did Gene teach you Chinese?"
"I'm still learning," she said happily, and let out a delighted squeal. "But SHIELD always gives top preference to bilingual applicants! I am SO gonna kick ass when I apply! And if I can get into French next year I'll be even closer to getting my dream job-"
"If you think you're going to learn Chinese by next school year, you're crazy," Gene informed her flatly. "If it took you half the time it took me to learn English, you'd still never make it, Peméi."
Peméi? Tony thought, raising an eyebrow and mouthing the word to Rhodey, who shrugged slightly. "Gene, you do realize Pepper's just going to take two languages at once, right?"
"Stark, people who do that never get anywhere in their education. They just get the two mixed up," the Chinese boy countered logically. "It's a proven fact that your brain can't learn two languages at once and keep them separated; not as an adult, anyway. Only little kids and toddlers can." He paused, smirking suddenly at Pepper. "Oh, wait, you're right. Given her maturity level she should be able to take ten languages and be fine."
Pepper pouted and said something that, Chinese or not, could easily be identified as profanity just by her tone of voice. Tony smirked at Gene retorted with something that made Pepper shriek 'don't call me that you racist jerk!' and began to chase him. The brunette grinned at Rhodey. And he thought Pepper and Gene would never get along. Their circle of friends wasn't big, but all the tension that had first been there between everyone was gone now. Tony felt as if some kind of weight had been lifted from him, if only for a moment, as he watched Pepper tackle Gene and snatch off his sunglasses. She put them on, stepped onto the living room table and did a disturbingly convincing Gene-stare; Rhodey snorted as Gene protested loudly and Tony cheered her on.
"Hi, I'm Jianyu," Pepper said in Gene's typical cool, low voice. "I call myself Gene because I'm a racist douche who doesn't think white people are smart enough to pronounce my Chinese name. I call white people niggers in Chinese because it helps compensate for my small-"
"Peméi!" Gene shouted loudly, though he could scarcely be heard over Tony and Rhodey's barely-contained laughter, "It's not the same thing when we're friends! Think about it, people talk bad about their friends all the time – and it's cool because we hang out. So can I have my glasses back, please?"
"You don't call Rhodey or Tony hong mao guizi and they're your friends," she pointed out, peering over his glasses at him. In a dead-on impression of him, she chuckled and added, "This is awkward."
As Tony high-fived her, the now red-faced Chinese boy attempted to defend himself. "Hong mao guizi is a slur for redheads and you're the only redhead I know! Besides, I can call you and Tony names and be fine, but if a teacher ever hears me call Rhodey something I am screwed." Gene took his glasses off Pepper, who grinned innocently. "One thing I learned really early on in America is that you can call white people anything you want and they don't get offended, but say one Chinese word while looking at a black person and you're in deep."
Tony's curiosity was peaked. Gene didn't talk much about coming to the States from China, other than to occasionally critique ignorant high school kids who didn't know anything about China. Sometimes Gene even felt the need to tell the History teacher just how badly he was mangling Gene's native tongue, and of course there were many times where Gene cursed in Chinese and then deliberately refused to translate it. For the most part, though, that particular part of his past was something that didn't come up in conversation. It wasn't a sore spot, it was just kind of not relevant to conversation or life beyond 'you can read Chinese? Sweet, let's run off to an iceberg together!'. (The fact that this train of logic made sense in Tony's life made him realize he was failing rather hard at the whole 'normality' thing.)
"What, did you get in trouble for saying hi or something?" Tony asked with not just a touch of sarcasm. Gene nodded, smiling faintly. The brunette raised an eyebrow. "Really?"
"Detention. Two weeks. For saying hi in Chinese. Black people are apparently very sensitive." He paused, then added, "No offense, Rhodey. It's just that I can trust Pepper not to sue me if I call her hong mao guizi. She'll be furious and she'll steal my glasses, but she won't immediately run for the nearest teacher, and neither will Tony. Both of them make jokes about race and different groups and you… you don't. You're kind of uptight like that."
"You know, Gene's right," Pepper remarked, as if this were a new idea to her. "Now that I think about it, you never laugh at that kind of stuff. Even the non-race jokes, like when Tony tells me to turn down my hair before the sidewalk starts melting."
"And when your brother visits you always act like you've been hit when he says 'nigger'-" Tony promptly shut his mouth. Rhodey's brother was a touchy subject and bringing him up at any given point was a surefire way to incite Rhodey's wrath. The last time he'd asked about that particular mess Rhodey hadn't spoken to him for the rest of the day. "-But I always thought that was because it mispronounced it," Tony finished weakly, with a grin. Rhodey's glare did not lighten in the slightest. (To be fair, it was true; he tended to say the n-word as if it ended in an a rather than er. Tony wasn't sure how Rhodey said it because he'd never heard his friend say it at all.)
"Guys," Rhodey said coldly, getting all their attention instantly with the intensity in his voice, "Do you have any idea how seriously my mom takes this kind of thing? She may look sweet and nice, but she can and will turn on you in a heartbeat. And guys? She is scary when she's mad. She makes grown men shake when she gets angry."
"We're not your mom," Tony shot back with a still nervous grin. "If anything you're my mom, and besides, do you really think we'd tell on you if you laughed at a joke?"
Rhodey seemed to pause to consider this. "Well, no-"
"And you know we're all joking when we make fun of each other and we're not racist, right?" Pepper asked, quirking an eyebrow at him.
"Well, yes-"
"You do get that it's funny precisely because it's offensive, right?" Gene added in with a devilish grin. "It's only funny because it's so awful. Replace hong mao guizi with redhead and it's just not funny. You get that, right?"
Rhodey was beginning to look significantly relaxed. He smiled faintly, waving his hand dismissively at Gene. "Yeah, yeah, I get it. Nigga hush."
The sheer fact that it was prim and proper Rhodey saying it reduced all of them to hysterics. Gene actually seemed to choke on air, gasping out something to the effect of 'I can't believe you said that' while Tony choked on the soda he'd been sipping. Pepper's incredulous face showed she was trying to pull herself together to say something snarky in response, but she couldn't get over the fact that Rhodey, who swore the least, used the biggest words and was the most polite person in her whole school, had just dropped the n-bomb. The redhead had to lean on Gene for support after a moment. Gene laughed into one of his hands to hide that 'we just did something horrible and I love it' grin that was plastered over both his and Tony's face. Rhodey smiled, reached for a can of Mountain Dew and was about to say something else when he heard a sound that made his blood run cold.
"James Rupert Rhodes!" his mother snarled, silencing all laughter in an instant. "What did you just say?"