On Thursday, February 12, 2009, Virginia Potts turned 35. She had been working with Stark Industries for nearly ten years, at this point, and was unsurprised when, upon waking and going about her morning routine (which included and was not limited to familiarizing herself with her ever-changing (never-ending) task list, which she'd checked before going to bed last night), she found several new tasks added as early as 2:00 this morning, when Tony Stark had apparently decided to start his day.

She quickly called Tony's maid service, explaining the situation and asking if they could send certain items of clothing to the cleaners for her to pick up in a few hours' time. It was a conversation she was intimately familiar with.

Before beginning her work in any official capacity, she took her time, too, to send her measurements in to order a new dress for formal events, billing the expense to Stark Industries. It was her birthday.

She then dressed for her day, fulfilling her duties with the expected smile, adjusting things automatically to compensate for her employer's complete inability to keep his own schedule.

When she thought on how long she'd worked with Stark Industries, it always seemed to surprise her. How the time snuck up on her.

Having become fed up with the emptiness of a life spent standing around and smiling, Virginia Potts had willingly left her modelling days behind to get a job as a low-level administrative assistant at SI because, well, that was what was available for someone with a BA in accounting.

She remembered the day she'd been doing a routine check on the final numbers for some project that had passed across her desk. It should have been nothing, since hers were the fourth set of eyes to look them over. But she'd caught something, and it had niggled at her and bothered her until she'd become convinced that the financial projections for the project were just flat-out wrong.

She'd brought it to the attention of her supervisor who had brushed her off, told her she was mistaken. The thing was, if he'd checked her math and made that pronouncement, she would have accepted it. But he didn't. He just dismissed her concerns out of hand.

Virginia Potts didn't respond well to being dismissed out of hand.

In a breach of protocol that she was fully aware might cost her her job, she had moved with sharklike determination over her supervisor's head to the general manager, Mr. Folan. But he had sneered at her and said, 'These numbers were crunched by Tony Stark, so why don't you just take it up with him?'

When she said she was going to do exactly that, he informed her in a loud voice that she was fired.

She had ignored him, propelled by her sense of moral indignation, and steamrolled into Tony Stark's office.

He had looked up, stunned, as Virginia Potts burst in, waving a sheaf of numbers and demanding to be heard. Stark's secretary had called security, and two bulky men had walked in, prepared to haul her out.

In a voice that had carried all the way down the hall—Tony swore to this day, laughing when he recounted the story, that he still had a ringing in his ears from it –she had bellowed to the guards, 'Don't you touch me! I have pepper spray!'

Tony Stark had burst out laughing.

The laughter did nothing to lighten the besieged Ms. Pott's mood, but Stark came around his desk and waved off the guards. He was still chuckling as he looked over the sheets that she had been clutching. Then he stopped chuckling. His eyebrows knit the longer he stared at the totals in the section that she had circled in an accusing red pencil.

'Wow,' he had said softly. 'I flipped two numbers. The whole projection is off. How the hell did I miss this?' He shook his head. 'What department do you work in again?'

'Well, none. Mr. Folan just fired me,' she had admitted.

'Huh.' He looked her in the eyes. 'Pepper spray?'

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. And then she frowned when Stark started chuckling, again.

'You know, you're the world's worst liar. I've never seen anyone fail so spectacularly.'

'Okay,' she had said in exasperation. 'Yes, I'm a terrible liar. Always have been.'

'Considering the number of people who try to lie to me on a daily basis, that's actually a very useful commodity to me.' He had looked up at one of the security guards. 'Bob…'

'My name's Tom, sir.'

'Good for you. Escort Miss 'Pepper' Potts here to her new office.'

'Um. Which office would that be, sir?'

Stark grinned. 'The big one, next door to mine.'

'That's…Mr. Folan's office, sir,' said Tom.

'Well, he'll probably have to move his stuff.'

'I—I don't understand,' she'd said.

'What's not to understand? You're gonna be my personal assistant. I need someone who will cover my back while never lying to me. Beats unemployment. Huge salary that I'll come up with during a drunken haze.'

'I…'

'Come on, Pepper… you know you want it.'

'Okay, but…' her voice had gone stern. 'You've got to stop calling me Pepper.'

He had smiled and instead replied, 'You'll get used to it.'

And she had.

Pepper made another sweep of her to-do list and messages, rolling her eyes and placing a call to Colonel James Rhodes. "Let me guess. He didn't make it?" she said, in lieu of a polite hello, swiping her security badge and entering Tony's house, heels clacking through the vast foyer toward the staircase into his basement workshop, where she could hear the telltale sounds of his 'tinkering' playlist, which usually included lots of AC/DC. Right now it was apparently Suicidal Tendencies.

"Pepper, we were supposed to take off more than an hour ago," Rhodey's voice complained from the other end.

Because heaven forbid he follow his own itinerary.

Another code as she reached the bottom of the stairs, after which JARVIS obligingly turned the music off.

"I'm gonna try again, right now," she said, even as she spotted Tony Stark, fiddling with a car engine.

The first time Pepper Potts had entered Tony Stark's massive workshop, she had felt as if she were walking into a real-world representation of the inside of his head. Although she had become accustomed to the barely-controlled chaos that the workshop represented, that initial impression had never left her.

The amazing thing was that Tony was never able to find – for example—a particular memo, even if it was in the correct file drawer in the proper file. That was the kind of thing that Pepper attended to with such efficiency that he had stopped noticing when she attended to it. In Tony's workshop, however, Pepper would have stood no chance; she would have been too overwhelmed by the mess.

Yet Tony could locate whatever part he needed or whatever tool he required within seconds, typically pulling it out from under a pile of half a dozen other assorted things. It was uncanny.

"Please don't turn down my music," Tony said distractedly, which she chose to ignore.

"I'll keep you posted," she told Rhodey, before hanging up. "You are supposed to be halfway around the world right now," she added to Tony, pulling up her list, scanning it for last minute items that she could accomplish by virtue of actually being in his presence to make him answer questions, as opposed to texts and emails that he could (and would) ignore.

"How'd she take it?"

He was referring to his overnight guest.

"Like a champ," Pepper sighed. With Tony, you had to be fast. Quick thinking, quick talking, and God help you if you didn't change lanes when he did in regards to the conversation track, because if he lost you, he'd make tangents last forever.

"Why are you trying to hustle me out of here?" he said, frowning, still fiddling with the engine.

"Your flight was scheduled to leave an hour and a half ago," Pepper said matter-of-factly.

"That's funny, I thought with it being my plane and all, that it would just wait for me to get there," he said, pulling a part toward him with a rag.

He had been working on the same 1932 Ford for as long as Pepper had known him. Someone of his caliber of genius would certainly have been able to finish it by now if he had desired to. The fact that he was still working on it, still fine-tuning it, told Pepper a great deal.

It wasn't that Tony hadn't finished it, or wasn't capable of finishing it. It was that he hadn't wanted to finish it. He had come near to completing the engine rebuild any number of times and then always felt compelled to find something wrong and take apart the entire thing to get back to it again.

And if you knew Tony, it was even obvious why.

Sharing space with ultramodern drones and missile parts around the workshop, there were framed photos of Tony and his dad. No famous people standing next to them, as seemed typically to be the case whenever there were photos of Howard Stark on display. There was nothing posed about these photos: They showed a father and son in the midst of working on a variety of automobiles, Tony becoming progressively older through the array of pictures.

One of them showed the two of them refurbishing a classic 1932 Ford. The same one they'd been working on when Tony's father had died, so it had a touch of melancholy to it. The same one Tony kept working on, all these years later.

If Tony were to complete the engine, it would be the end of the last job that he and his father had ever worked on. It would close a door to his past that he wasn't ready to shut.

All that went through Pepper's head in a matter of moments. Then she arranged her face into her all-business expression. "Tony, I need to speak to you about a couple things before I get you out of the door."

"Doesn't it kind of defeat the whole purpose of having your own plane if it departs before you arrive?" Tony turned to face her, sitting on the wheel well of the car, wiping off the part in his hands with a rag, and Pepper knew better than to let him control the conversation, or to assume he hadn't heard what she said.

"Larry called. He's got another buyer for the Jackson Pollock in the wings. Do you want it? Yes or No?"

"Is it a good representation of his spring period?" Tony put the part on the floor, giving Pepper his attention.

"Um. No. The Springs was actually a neighborhood in East Hampton where he lived and worked. Not "spring" like the season," Pepper tried to explain.

"So?"

Pepper sighed. "I think it's a fair example. Um. I think it's incredibly overpriced."

A beat. Then Tony stood. "I need it. Buy it. Store it."

Pepper sighed, but also couldn't help but smile, writing down his instructions. She couldn't tell whether he was buying it because it was of genuine interest to him, or because she had recommended against it and he was purchasing it just to torque her. Probably it was the latter.

He started to walk past her, toward his cappuccino machine.

Pepper spun on her heel and followed him. "Okay. The MIT commencement speech—"

"—is in June. Please, don't harangue me about stuff that's way, way down—"

"—Well, they're haranguing me, so I'm going to say yes.

"No, deflect it and absorb it. Don't transmit it back to me."

"I need you to sign this before you get on the plane."

Tony turned around, his cappuccino cup in his hand. "What are you trying to get rid of me for? What, you got plans?"

Pepper looked up from the document I her hands when Tony walked back toward her. "As a matter of fact, I do."

"I don't like it when you have plans."

Pepper didn't laugh. His tone was so incredulous. She shook her head, instead. "I'm allowed to have plans on my birthday."

"It's your birthday?"

"Yes."

"I knew that. Already?"

"Yeah. Isn't that strange? It's the same day as last year," Pepper quipped, offering a small smile, pointing to the line on the document with the pen.

Tony seemed a little startled. Small wonder. The man had absolutely no sense of time. "Well, get yourself something nice from me."

"I already did."

"And?"

"Oh, it was very nice."

"Yeah?"

"Very tasteful. Thank you, Mr. Stark."

"You're welcome, Miss Potts." Tony quickly offered his signature when Pepper finally took his cappuccino cup from him. He then offered the pen back to her in a trade for his drink, which he downed in one go, like a shot. Then he gave the cup back to her. "Okay."

He walked past her, but she stayed on his heels, if only to ensure he stayed on course to actually leave.

Once she got him out the door, she called Rhodey again to tell him that Tony was actually on his way, and then called the event coordinator to give an augmented itinerary.

And then she smiled, put in the updates to her to-do list, and treated herself to an early day off, as she'd planned.

It was her birthday, after all.

On Friday, February 13, 2009, Tony Stark's convoy in Afghanistan was attacked, and he was officially declared missing.

And Pepper Potts would spend the next three months in near constant state of fear and shock and holding herself together and waiting for news until she set eyes on her boss again.

-o-

AUTHORS NOTE

We interrupt this regularly scheduled retelling of Spider-Man: Homecoming (And Captain America: Civil War) to take you back in time.

A significant year in the life of our heroes.

And...it's Pepper's POV, which I was genuinely not expecting to go on as long as it did. So there's that.

In writing the birthday interlude chapters, I have taken sections of text from that canon tie-in Iron Man novel, as well as dialogue from the first Iron Man film (obviously) so I just wanted to put out there, full disclosure, that there are paragraphs (slightly scrambled in order to fit the narrative flow) written by Peter David, who wrote the Iron Man novel based on the screenplay.

And it's interesting, actually, because it is so clear, after reading the dialogue in the novel, which I assume was originally in the script? That what we got in the movie was pretty much pure RDJ and Gwyneth Paltrow vibing and improvising with the script more as guidelines, because the dialogue in the book felt so much...flatter than how the lines actually ended up coming out in the movie. And it's not even that the lines were bad! It's just that...RDJ as Iron Man made it...better.

So! Another chapter! When I posted two just a few days ago! Apparently this is what I want to write.