Disclaimer - I own nothing. If I did, my boyfriend would have to make good on his promise to let me cheat on him with Tony. Frequently.
Summary - Pepper ponders her inscrutable boss and the chinks in his golden armor that he fights so hard to conceal, in the setting of an unorthodox company retreat.
A/N - After long days of obsessively reading and rereading the various fics of this booming Iron Man community, and wishing that I could join in the creative efforts of such talented people, I have decided to dive back into the world of Fanfiction. My absence has been long, and as such, I hope that this endeavor is not too forced, and is rather on the whole an enjoyable experience.
Rated Teen for language throughout, and the general inappropriateness that is Tony Stark.
The camp described here is a real place; its name is Camp Scherman, and it is to all the wonderful people there and at the other Girl Scout camps I've attended that I dedicate this.
The Golden Knight
"Potts, did you ever go to summer camp?" Tony asks suddenly, in-between something and God knows what else, judging by the soot and grease that obscures half his face.
There are a lot of things about him that are easy to forget, because there's so much about him that's unforgettable that some things just slip through the cracks - such as the fact that he's pushing forty, that he's one of the most brilliant engineers of his generation but doesn't know his own damn Social Security number, that he lost both his parents in one fell swoop and nearly lost his own life not so very long ago. That at any given moment, if his math was wrong, he could still lose it. And it's at that moment, when he's halfway in and halfway out of the room where his assistant who endeavors never to forget anything sits, that she remembers all of those things, all at once, without really knowing why.
"Once," she answers. "I hated it."
"Good," he shoots back, already leaving, because he never seems to stay. "We're going."
For one shiny moment she thinks he means the we she'd refused to discuss weeks before, but it has the evanescence of a shooting star, the quick brilliance of his smile, of light on the suit that has already earned him the nickname the Golden Knight. The Invincible Iron Man, the other papers say. Would they still say that if they knew about the shrapnel that lurked beneath his skin, shrapnel given life by his own careless genius?
No, she knows he doesn't mean we. She knows that her Golden Knight is off chasing windmills again and that it's time for her to go reel him in, to remind him that he can only dream the impossible dream after he's gone over the budget proposals for next quarter. To remind him that she's not his Dulcinea, that there's shrapnel beneath her own skin that she has no reactor to save her from, only good old-fashioned tough skin. She feels them draw closer to her heart every time she watches him stand up from a chair, because she'll never forget watching him lurch to his feet and trundle towards her and demand a hamburger after months apart, as if she hadn't cried every night that he was away and sometimes when she passed by his empty office. As if she hadn't cried for him even before he was spirited away. She'll never forget how she sent a Don Juan to Afghanistan and got back a scarred Don Quixote. She's not sure which incarnation frightens her more, leaves her more uncertain of who she is. Because if she doesn't have to hold herself perpetually at arm's length, out of his grasp, then what does she have to do? The dance has changed, and no one bothered to tell her the new steps.
Well, right now she has to figure out what this next wild fantasy is, so she closes her laptop and puts her heels back on, because she's feeling fragile right now and they make her feel safe, and follows him down to the garage. She shuts down her unexpected train of thought on the way there, but the first sound she makes when she finds him is still one of despair. Not because the specs he's working on aren't the ones R&D asked for (though that's what he assumes it is and she does nothing to upset his world the way he does hers on a daily basis), but because she can see the bruises spangling his shoulders from his latest tilt at windmills with RPGs.
"What was this about a summer camp, Mr. Stark?"
"We're going. All of us. You, me, Rhodey, hell, maybe even Coulson, that guy needs a break too. A few other people from the office. It's called an 'office retreat'. They're quite popular, you know, Potts."
"Forgive me if I think the little Girl Scouts will be a little puzzled by the big hairy men who show up on the first day."
"Not that kind of summer camp, you pedophile. It used to be for little kids but parents are less inclined to send their kids away because of sickos like you, so they offer it up for other stuff now, like business retreats. Which I believe we all sorely need."
"I believe that what we sorely need is for you to go over the numbers for next quarter and at least draw a smiley face on those blueprints R&D sent over so that those poor engineers stop tearing their hair out."
"What about this poor engineer? I want s'mores, dammit!"
"Then go make some on the stove! And don't burn the budget proposal while you do, or the guys from accounting might go suicidal."
"Potts, half the flavor of a proper s'more comes from wood smoke, which is only produced by a campfire. Don't even think about it, dummy." He points threateningly at the suddenly perky robotic arm. "And you're only proving my point, you know. If the engineers are tearing their hair out and the accountants have gone suicidal, now is very much the time for a company retreat. And a hell of a lot of s'mores."
"I'm not even talking about this until you do what I asked." She says, holding out the folder and refusing to look at him as he draws nearer, because she knows if she looks into those coffee eyes she'll see too far in.
Tony takes the folder, glances at the budget proposal, draws a smiley face on the blueprints, and hands it back.
"There. Now, I was thinking we could all leave next Friday after the workday is over, take a bus up to this place in the San Bernadino mountains, spend Saturday and part of Sunday there, and be home that night. Come on, Pepper, we wouldn't even be missing any work. Don't you want to stay up late singing songs and telling ghost stories?"
She wants to scream, partly at him for taking her literally when she asked him to look at the numbers and draw a smiley face on the blueprints, partly at herself for not knowing he'd do just that, and partly at him again for going and changing the rules on her and not bothering to leave her a memo. She really wants to, too. It would feel so good to scream until her lungs hurt and then turn and leave without telling him why, so that he could be the one caught in an unending state of flux. She wants to scream so he'll finally ask her if she's okay, so she can tell him that she's not.
But Pepper Potts doesn't scream. She never does, not when it really counts. She calmly unsheathes her BlackBerry and asks him who he wants the memo sent to. He names off a few specific names and just lists the department in some cases, until by her mental tally he's invited about thirty people. She promises to drop off a list for his final approval before she leaves for the day and she's about to walk away when she sees him wince and raise his hand to massage the area around the arc reactor.
"Tony?" She asks, her own heart clenching.
"I'm fine." The tension in his frame unwinds after a moment and he gives her that shooting star smile. "See? All better, mom."
"What was that?"
"Nothing. It just hurts sometimes. I'm fine, Pepper. Honest."
She wants to ask him more. If it hurts the way she hurts when she looks at him as he's bent over his worktable and oblivious to the world. But the words won't touch her lips, the way his won't. She must not have been careful enough to hide her thoughts, because soon his eyes cloud too and he steps forward.
"Here, give me that folder again."
A little part of her relaxes as she does, and mentally she notes that looking distressed and abandoned is a good way to get him to do his work. Then he hands back the folder and sees that Tony Stark has decided to draw a penis next to the smiley face on the blueprints from R&D.
"Anthony Edward Stark! What the hell is this?"
"You said those engineers needed cheering up! Trust me, it's a guy thing. They'll love it. And it's proof to you that I'm perfectly fine."
"It's also proof that you're unprofessional, immature, and - " She stutters to find a third damning word, because suddenly all of the other ones she used to use (drunk, horny, etc.) don't fit anymore.
"Come on," he grins. "You know if I was anything else, you'd be out of a job."
And maybe that's what really scares her. That as he's growing up, he just might be outgrowing her. That look must be on her face again, because he reaches out and rests a hand on her arm.
"Really, Pepper. I'm more than fine. I'm the Invincible Iron Man."
As she walks away and pretends as he pretends that she doesn't seem him rub his chest again, she whispers: No you're not.
And the fact that neither of them is, is what really frightens Pepper Potts.
Next Friday, the selected thirty who are partaking in this bizarre little field trip are all lined up outside of Stark Industries' main office, looking more like they're about to be carted off to Auschwitz than to summer camp. That's because all of their traditional guises have been stripped away. There are no more business suits and ties or skirts and pumps. There are mandatory jeans, t-shirts, scuffed up back-packs. They eye each other like wary animals, made cagey by the sudden upheaval of their world.
Tony, the little bastard, looks perfectly at ease, of course. He'd probably be perfectly at ease even if he was dropped into a den of lions naked as the day he was born. He'd already have a plan, too. Pepper hates him just a little in that moment, not just because she's totally out of her comfort zone but because when the bus arrives and he triumphantly claims the back, she follows not because he asks her too (although he does) but because of the force of a habit so strong that it hasn't been broken by the upheavals that swirl around Tony Stark on a daily basis. She wonders if love can be considered a habit. The one time she dared to broach the subject with him, he simply said that love was a chemical addiction. Like alcoholism, she'd added, and that had been the end of that.
But it wasn't. The question was never whether or not she loved him, but whether or not she could love him. For years it was the faults that worried her. Now it was the chinks in his golden armor - that tantalizing vulnerability that made her wonder if she could be strong enough to love him, to protect him, the way he really deserved. If he'd always be there for her the way she deserved.
"Hey, Rhodey, what was that song about the birdie you taught me that one time?" He shouted from beside her. And to her horror, he soon had the entire bus of serious businesspeople chanting about a little bird with a yellow bill, whose 'fucking head' was smashed by the end of the song. She decided to bury her face in her BlackBerry rather than listen to the engineers - who, sure enough, absolutely loved Tony's penis gag - start making obscene and dorky jokes that she only half understood. She'd only have signal for a little while longer, and she meant to make it last.
"Potts, turn off that damn phone. I mean it. We are here to focus on s'mores, embarrassing stories, and possibly some midnight skinny dipping. If I catch you with that thing I'm throwing it into one lake and you into the other."
"There's two lakes?"
"Honor and Promise. You know me, I like things over the top."
"Oh? So which lake is the BlackBerry going into?"
"Promise, because I promised I'd do it if you didn't take a freaking break for once in your life."
"And why am I going into Honor?"
The eternal know-it-all just shrugs. Because that's the only one left, he mutters, but she senses that's not the real reason. She turns her BlackBerry off. Moments later, Tony is goading Rhodey into chanting out some other nonsensical (and highly inappropriate) marching song, and she is watching this child trapped in a man's body and wondering what his real childhood had been like. He'd probably never been to summer camp before. He hadn't done a lot of normal childhood things, as he'd revealed piece by piece in his sudden confessions. He'd never chased an ice cream truck or been in a school play or asked a girl to prom. And what had passed for his childhood had ended all too soon, with the destruction of his family and his ascendancy to the throne of Stark Industries. It had ended a second time not so long ago, when Obadiah Stane tried to kill him. So she wasn't surprised, really, when she stopped by the mansion on some Saturdays to 'take out the dry cleaning' and saw him sitting on the foor in front of his plasma TV watching Looney Tunes and eating Cap'n Crunch. For years she complacently accepted all of his paradoxes, but she couldn't be complacent anymore because he wasn't, and she found herself wanting to shake answers out of his inscrutable smile more and more often. That maddening, beautiful, damning smile…
The trip on the bus was shorter and rowdier than she'd expected as she watched her normally professional fellows devolve into a crowd of frolicsome twelve-year-olds. She couldn't quite bring herself to join in, but she had never been good at joining in. Standing back and organizing, yes, but joining in? Not so much. Not for lack of wanting. So when everyone rushes off the bus, enchanted by the special magic that is Tony Stark when he's flying high, she follows at a more sedate pace, wishing for her heels, because they give her the illusion that she is on even ground with her pseudo-boss. If acting like a colossal child protected him from the real world, then her Jimmy Choos protected her from him.
God, she hates him as she loves him.
To Tony's great disappointment, no s'mores are scheduled for tonight. They eat dinner in an echoey mess hall and, as if its high school all over again, she's drawn to sit at a table filled with other women, where they giggle and gossip about the other men in the room, who are continuing with their chant about the yellow bird. Strangely, Pepper has never been a pariah here, despite her strange proximity to Tony; in fact, some of these women have point blank asked her what it takes to get into his bed before, as if she's the respected gatekeeper of his bedroom. A heart of steel, she'd said once. But even steel - like iron - has its melting point, and she's realized over this last week that she's reached hers, that she can't even look at him anymore without wanting to simultaneously kiss him and kill him, without wondering which action would change their world more, without feeling the abyss that's yawned beneath her feet since - since -
She's so caught up in what she's feeling that when the counselors announce that it's time to pick groups for the cabins, she instinctively goes to Tony's side.
"Uhh, sorry Potts, but girls aren't allowed. They've got cooties, you know." He's eyeing her like cooties are a visible problem and she's got several smack in the middle of her forehead. You're my problem, dipshit, she wants to say.
She starts. "Not a single innuendo? You're off your game, Stark."
"You'd never be an innuendo, Pepper." He murmurs, in his rich voice, so low it's intimate, too intimate.
"True," She says. "But I'm not your Dulcinea either."
And she walks away before either of them can say anything else.
The next day they're woken at six, and the first thing Pepper thinks when she opens her eyes to the sound of the counselor's too cheery voice is that Tony is not going to be happy. He hates waking up, regardless of what time it is. It's because morning is the time of day when you have to face everything - what happened the day before, what's about to happen. She's watched him wake up before, watched him stretch and smile and gradually start piling the layers up, one by one. He touches the arc reactor first, to assure himself his heart is still beating. He starts making cracks about having wet dreams about her again. He asks where his Cap'n Crunch is. He whines about going to meetings. And with everything he says, everything he does, she watches him assimilate the parts that make him Anthony Stark, the way the machines in the basement assemble the armor that makes him the Invincible Iron Man.
But it's not him, she's beginning to realize. What's really him are the chinks in the armor - the shrapnel that necessitates the reactor, the lost childhood that makes him whine after Cap'n Crunch, the lack of intimacy that brings on the liquor and women. And the more and more he reveals those chinks, the more and more lost she feels, because the real Tony Stark just might be even more unforgettable than the one who went to Afghanistan months ago.
They're being woken up at 6 for what Pepper can only describe as an exercise in insanity. There are several small camp stoves set up around the circle of cabins, and each tired road warrior is given only one utensil, and asked to make a pancake.
"Feel free to partner up or barter for a different utensil," One of the counselors calls. "This is a great exercise in teamwork and negotiation!"
"Potts!" is all Pepper hears, and before he even said it she knew he was going to ask for her. "Make me a pancake!" He grumbles when she reaches his side.
"That's hardly negotiation, Mr. Stark."
"Make me a pancake please."
The counselor had only given Pepper a piece of tinfoil. Tony had a spatula. She thought she just might slap him.
"Tony Stark, I'm going to lose all semblance of respect for you if you can't make yourself a goddamn pancake."
"NCA!" a nearby counselor calls, approaching her.
"What?" even Rhodey, the master of military acronyms, was confused by that one.
"Not Camp Appropriate." The beaming blonde, who in another lifetime Tony would've already bedded by now, wags her finger at Pepper. "I'll have to take that tinfoil, now."
Pepper gapes in astonishment as she has the audacity to take it directly out of her hand. "How else am I supposed to get breakfast?" Her voice rises in rage.
"Negotiate." The counselor shrugs. "That's the point of the exercise, isn't it?"
She's about to wheel on Tony and blame his stupid whims for all of this, but when she meets his eyes they are unexpectedly kind.
"I'll make one for each of us."
She doesn't even have to negotiate, and she thinks it's funny that the two people most often praised for business acumen are failing miserably at a counselor's test. She tells him as much and he laughs, pouring the batter onto the hot pan and shaping a rough circle with his spatula.
"If you want, I can flip it when it's ready." She offers.
"Believe it or not, Potts," he pauses and flips the pancake perfectly. "I'm not completely helpless."
"Do you actually know how to cook?"
"Of course I actually know how to cook! I make a breakfast that puts Denny's Grand Slam to shame."
Why? She wants to shout in his ear. Why is there so much you refuse to share with me?
He does share the pancakes, but she's not really one for conversation during breakfast. He's too busy laughing at Rhodey's sadly failed pancake, which he had to make with tinfoil, to notice that she's staring daggers at him. Or, worse, he notices but does nothing.
The rest of the day is taken up by various camp activities that have somehow been warped to develop the virtues of business - leading a blindfolded partner around a playground to demonstrate the necessity for clear communication, canoe races for further teamwork building, and so on. One of the counselors nervously offers an optional workshop on dealing with sexual harassment in the workplace, but Tony just laughs it off by saying that if there's anything sexual going on around his office, no one's complaining. When his eyes land on her, she assume he's looking for a rebuke, because she swears he gets off when she yells, but there's an entirely different look in his eyes. One she's never seen before, one that makes her want more than ever to find out who this new Tony is. Who the real one is.
Before she has time to notice, it's sundown, and it's finally time for a campfire and some s'mores. The counselors retreat as everyone takes a seat and begins their search for the perfect marshmallow.
"How do you take yours, Pepper?" He asks her.
"Lightly toasted, with an even gold and brown color. Let me guess, you take yours- "
"En fuego." He grins, watching as the tender white puffball is immolated by the fire.
And she wants to say something tender to him then, something that says she knew he'd like it that way, because she's starting to figure out the real Tony, but she can't really think of anything. So she settles for making sure she has a pair of graham crackers and a slab of chocolate already waiting for him when his marshmallow is perfectly roasted.
"Look out for yours," he points out. She glances back and sees that it is in fact burning.
"That's okay. You can just have a double-decker."
And when she gives him the second marshmallow and meets his eyes, Pepper Potts realizes she could live forever without saying anything to him, as long as she could keep doing things that made him look so touched. Then, as is so typical of him, he does something unexpected.
"Meet me by Lake Honor after everyone else has gone to bed."
She's too intrigued to say no, although her better judgment screams against it. She and Tony, alone in the wilderness after dark, and with her feeling so uncertain and him acting so uncertain? But she's physically incapable of saying no where he's concerned. She loves him too much.
So she waits until everyone else has wound down for the night and retired to their cabins, including Tony, who makes sure to catch her eye before he goes. She takes her leave of the others too, but instead of going inside when she reaches her cabin, she circles around it and heads for the dirt road that leads through the majestic oaks to the big placid lake named Honor. It sits on the very edge of the camp grounds, and beyond it seems to lie the edge of the conceivable world. By moonlight the far shore is only a dim imagining, and she waits there in the warm night air for Tony to appear.
Before long he's tracing the same path she took, and her heart clutches in her throat, the same way she imagines his does on those rare occasions when he says it hurts. He's dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, and although she's seen him in less (far, far less) it seems almost indecent with her in her shorts and sneakers and tank top, and no one around but the man in the moon, so she searches for a scrap of decorum in the darkness.
"You wanted to see me?" She says, as if he's just summoned her to his office.
"Uh, yea. There's no easy way for me to say this…"
That statement is a prelude to so many things in the movies: I'm letting you go. I don't feel the same way. I'm seeing someone else. I'm gay. I'm pregnant. I love you. He takes too long deciding on which one, and she's drowning in the moonlight that's more revealing than the harshest light bulb.
"Look, it's just, ever since I suggested this trip, you've seemed, well, off. Not yourself. Missing a few screws. Take your pick. I wanted - I wanted to ask why." He's uncertain, and that's because he's bullshitting her so badly for his motives in coming out here that he can't even look her in the eye. But, now that she was staring down the barrel of the gun herself, she finds she can't say it easily either.
"Tony, why did you want to take this trip?"
He walks away from the road, further onto the shore of the lake, where upended canoes lay like beached whales. She follows him.
"I'd never been camping before - not willingly, that is." He says with a wry tone that always indicates Afghanistan. "It seemed fun. Innocent. A nice way to spend the weekend. Aren't you enjoying yourself?"
She ignores the last question in favor of everything he leaves unsaid - that there hasn't been enough peace in their lives since his unwilling camping trip, since he announced to the world that he was a self-styled superhero, since Nick Fury and SHIELD burst onto the scene. That there has never been enough innocence in their lives. And she's tired of always having to read between the lines, to peek into the chinks, in search of the real Tony Stark.
"Look at me," She says at last. "I've been off since you asked about this trip because right at that moment you asked me - I couldn't help but think that that was something the old Tony never would have asked to do. And it wasn't a bad thing, it was just new and different and there's been no one to give me a debrief on what's been going through your head since you came back, and suddenly I feel like I don't know who I am anymore, because for the last few years the one thing I could always count on in some weird twisted way was you, and if I can't figure out what's going on behind your eyes I don't know if I can function anymore, and it's not just because I'm your assistant and it's my job, it's - it's - "
"Pepper, Pepper, hush, it's okay - " He's reaching out for her, but she takes a step back, because there's one more thing she has to say.
"I need to know, Tony. I need to know what's behind the mask."
He reaches out once more, and this time she doesn't take a step back. He takes her hand by the wrist and places it on the arc reactor, and even through the hum of the space age machinery she can feel the beat of his very human heart. Invincibility and vulnerability, all in one place. All in one man.
"What's behind the mask is the other half of you."
And all at once, even though it shouldn't, everything makes sense, and she's drawn to rest against his chest, and even though it was him that was taken away for so long, she's the one that's finally come home.
He holds her like that for a long time, running his hands up and down her back, breathing in the scent of her hair, until at last he asks:
"Who's Dulcinea?"
She laughs a little, and replies: "Dulcinea is Don Quixote's fair lady. She's never actually present in the book: she's just this impossible image that he has built up in his mind, this beautiful, virtuous, nonexistent lady to whom he dedicates all his victories. I've - I've known ever since you came back that your feelings towards me had changed. I knew that I was part of the reason you wanted to be better. But I couldn't stand that you didn't share that with me openly. When I said I wasn't your Dulcinea, what I meant was that I didn't want to be someone you kept on a pedestal and idolized from afar. I want you to let me in, Tony. I want to fight side by side with you. I - "
" - love you." He finishes, before she can even hesitate, and when he says it he says it for both of them.
Then he starts to walk backwards, drawing her with him, until the cold water of the lake is lapping around their ankles, and then their knees and thighs, until she's up to her chest and she fears that soon she won't be able to touch the bottom. But he puts his arms around her waist and lifts her up as he carries her, so that she's floating or flying, take your pick, towards the edge of the universe, and she feels so secure with his warm body pressed against her, because invincible and invulnerable are two different things, and she's glad that he's one and not the other.
"I swear to you by this lake, Virginia Potts," he whispers in her ear. "That you'll never be my Dulcinea."
And then he finally kisses her.
Pepper is sad when summer camp is over, but not sad that they went. When she looks at Tony she can see all the things she fancies everyone else forgets - that he's pushing forty, and there's still shrapnel in his heart, and he's lost so much, and he really needed these two days in the wilderness to relax and forget. He wants everyone else to forget that he's not invulnerable too: everyone but her, because on the way home he reaches out and takes her hand, and holds it for the entire ride, and through that simple touch says more than he ever has before in all the years she's worked for him. I'm lonely. I need you. I love you.
From that day forward, whenever Pepper Potts sees the morning headlines proclaiming the latest victory of the Golden Knight or the Invincible Iron Man, she no longer wonders if they'd still write that, if they knew the real Tony Stark. It doesn't really matter so much then. What matters is that despite the glint of his golden armor, she sees the chinks, and through them sees the real man underneath. She sees him. And she loves him, more than anyone ever has or ever will.
And if that's not invincibility, she doesn't know what is.
A/N- Well, after a fevered day at my computer, I am done. That came out more introspective and crazed than I thought, and I pray it makes sense to anyone who's not me! Review and let me know if it did. Cheers!
- Verona