Title: Operations of the Heart
Author: fading_tales
Pairing: Tony/Pepper (Iron Man)
Disclaimer: I do not own Iron Man or any of their characters.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: What do you do when you think you just lost your chance at true love? You self-destruct.

II.

The line drawn between light, meaningless flirtation and something more is clearly drawn between them. At least it was. Everything got blurred when he came back after Iraq. Those lingering gazes of his that she could usually brush off as mindless male biology carry a new hint of something more serious, more intentional, more dangerous than harmless flirting. She starts to play with the idea of being something more than a friend to him. She surprises herself by matching those intense looks of his with her own. At times their banter would turn silent and all they would just stare at each other meaningfully. All the feelings they had could be conveyed in such exchanges that could not, should not, will not be communicated with conventional words. It was… enough.

Thursday mornings she meets with Hammer Industries. True, Stark Industries and Hammer Industries are business rivals, but they're also colleagues. They would do well to put their heads together and strive towards a common goal instead of trying to undercut one another at every turn. A show of camaraderie will do S.I.'s new green and humane image some good. A point she's careful to remind Tony every time he complains about her spending too much time over there. Not like he has much choice. This was the compromise the government proposed after Tony announced to the world that he was a superhero. He's made his bed and now he's going to lie in it.

Despite all these things she says, she dislikes Thursdays. She does her best to be professional despite the many romantic overtures made by head honcho, Justin Hammer, and has been carefully, diplomatically rejecting his advances for quite a while now. Nevertheless the unpleasantness these meetings were necessary. Unlike Stark Industries, Hammer's company continues to manufacture deadly weapons and it makes her sleep better at night if she knows what they're up to. Pepper is fully aware of what is at stake with the government issued Stark-Hammer joint projects. What Stark Industries might consider a step to saving the planet, Hammer Industries can very well turn into the next Jericho if she lets them. It helps that she's friendly with the head honcho. Pepper and Justin had both gone to the same business school, although not at the same time, but still there was a sort of camaraderie from that common root that lent to an amiable relationship, at least when he's not hitting on her.

That particular Thursday meeting should have went like clockwork…except that Pepper had to reschedule because of a small emergency earlier in the day involving Tony, a few fire trunks and dummy running around spraying everything in sight with a fire extinguisher. She finally manages to get to H.I. headquarters and the receptionist had let her in to Justin's office to wait. She had been working on filling out some paperwork as she wait when her pen runs out of ink, it was just one of those days that never go right, and she goes over to Justin's desk to get a new one. There's several pens lined up neatly on the left side of his desk and Pepper reaches for one. She knows Justin won't hold borrowing a pen against her; after all he has met Tony before and knows how hectic her days are usually like. The paperwork she's working on was due yesterday but thanks to Tony's accident prone tendencies all her work has been severely backed up. As luck would have it Pepper's day just continues to go downhill.

Through sixty percent happenstance and forty percent genetically wired clumsiness, Pepper manages to knock down one of Justin's paper weight. It just so happens that the expensive paper weight was hiding a switch on Justin's desk top and it just so happens that in Pepper's efforts to steady herself she activates that switch which opens the hidden compartment in Justin's oversized industrial desk.

It was all so simple. She just needed a pen. Unfortunately, Pepper has a penchant for stumbling upon evidence of nefarious underhanded plots against her boss and the world at large.

One of the hardest things about Tony and his superhero alter ego was that she could only watch from the sidelines. With every other aspect of Tony's life she had some degree of control, but with this all she could do was wait and pray that he comes back after a mission in one piece. The number of bullet holes she counts in his armor increases exponentially, the number of cuts and bruises peppering his body even more so. It makes her nervous, anxious, frustrated, so much to the point that she had begun to hate the sight of him in his iconic red and yellow suit. She no longer stay to watch him leave for a mission, but rather busies herself upstairs with the preparing the proper antiseptics and bandages for when he comes back.

She just wants to be able to do… something. She is willing to do anything to not feel quite so helpless. So after finding damning evidence that Hammer Industries had somehow stolen the specs for a Mark V suit and most importantly the arc reactor, she could not have very easily sit on her hands or twiddle her thumbs.

Nevertheless, she would give much to not be in her current situation at this particular moment. Hell! You'd think a genius like Justin Hammer would know to accident-proof his stash of spoils won from corporate espionage. What was the world coming to if all it took was a frazzled executive having a bad day to uncover illegal corporate conspiracies? It would be funny if it wasn't happening to her.

A swell of déjà vu washes over her as she recalls being in a strikingly similar situation with one Obadiah Stane. The same feeling of shock and betrayal stabs Pepper in the gut. You'd think she'd be able to handle it better the second time, but nevertheless she can feel the cold sweat trickling down her temples and despite her efforts to control her emotion, she can't stop the trembling of her hands.

From outside the mahogany office she hears the muffled voices of Hammer and his secretary speaking. She looks up from her crouched position and sees the blurry silhouette of Justin Hammer approaching through the frosted glass of his office door and she makes quick work to put everything back the way they were and gets back to her seat right in time for him to open the door and greet her.

"Pepper, did you wait long?"

"No, not at all. It was my fault the meeting had to be rescheduled anyways."

"Tony being difficult?"

"Not any more than usual."

"Well, if you ever want a change of setting…"

She struggles to conjure up a convincing smile despite the nervous twitching in her jaw.

"I'm very happy with Stark Industries, thank you."

"Ah, well…you can't blame me for trying," he says with a smile.

The way his eyes crinkle up looks genuine, but really Pepper can't tell who to trust anymore. Obadiah use to smile that way, too.

"I can't say that I'm not disappointed. Sometimes I think these meetings are merely formality and an excuse to see you on a regular basis."

"You flatter me, Justin."

She's tries to keep her comments calm despite every nerve in her body telling her to run and fast.

"Are you okay? You look a bit…"

He's walking over to his desk, giving its contents a once over and she panics a little.

"…tired," he finishes.

She's not out of the woods yet.

"It's just one of those days. I haven't had a chance to eat yet."

Justin glances at his wristwatch and frowns. "It's already five thirty."

"Already?"

She mentally slaps herself on the forehead the moment the lame answer left her lips. The nervousness makes her a little stupid. Of course it is five thirty. That's the time she rescheduled the meeting to wasn't it? Pepper tends to obsess over little details under stress.

"If you don't have anything else… what do you think about moving this meeting to a restaurant? You could call it multi-tasking."

Her instincts are screaming at her to say no and make a quick exit. This is all too much like the last time she spoke to Obediah, right before he tried to crush her with his giant robot suit. For the second time in the last ten minutes she asks whatever higher being up there why is it that she's always the one caught in these perilous situations.

"I…"

"Come on, Pepper. It's just dinner."

"Just dinner."

"Just dinner," he repeats. "Unless you want it to be something more."

He waits patiently for her answer and a smirk graces his lips when she answers, "Alright… but just dinner."

Pepper is no spy, she knows this. The only logical reason that she can think of for being so stupid as to try and go undercover as Hammer's girlfriend in order to unearth his diabolical master plans was that she's finally going insane from the massive overtime stress she has endured being Tony Stark's P.A. for so long. Maybe prolong exposure to some sort of radiation or another that fried the part of her brain that kept her from doing crazy things. She blames Tony for all of it.

Really. It's all Tony's fault.

She was supposed to be the voice of reason. He was the one that came up with crazy ideas that ends up with her working overtime to clean up after. It used to be so easy when he was just Tony Stark, billionaire man whore who was an engineering genius on the side. Not that she was saying he was a complete monster. He had his occasional sweet moments, too. But it was just so much easier when he was this stereotypical playboy. She could compartmentalize her work life and her personal life back then much better. Then he had to go all noble on her and become a super hero. She always used to admire his genius. Now she admires the man behind the genius. The one that jettisons off to halfway across the globe on a rescue mission because of unruly, violent insurgents in a third world country or to brave crumbling buildings to unearth victims of a massive earthquake. Tony was supposed to be the hero here, not her.

But he's not here right now and she is. And she can't, in good conscience, turn a blind eye. As Pepper conjures up the will power to say yes to Hammer's dinner proposal, she tries her best to recall all the super heroine stories she's ever heard of and try and imagine that they all ended happily.

Dinner with Justin Hammers goes from singular to plural quickly over the course of the week. Tony is not happy. If situation was not happening to her she might have laughed at the sheer idiocy of it all and the potentiality for the basis of a bad rom-com movie. She'd be willing to fork over quite a bit of money (Stark Industries pays her well. They would have to since she's the only one who seems to have any semblance of control over one Tony Stark) for someone else to walk a mile in her shoes for just one day.

She becomes friends with Hammer's assistant, a source of great knowledge of when and where the man would be at all times. This gives her little windows of opportunity to snoop in his office and the headquarters under the appearance of a doting girlfriend. She's leaving him a little gift or he forgot something at her place. Those were her excuses. Or when Hammer ever goes off agenda, she always has the 'surprise girlfriend visit' defense. When they have actually scheduled to meet she always makes sure that she shows up when Justin is expected to arrive shortly, but early enough that she would have time to "wait" in his office.

The amount of stolen intelligence property from Stark Industries she discovers is staggering. She has no idea how Hammer could have gotten his hands on the complete blueprints of an arc reactor. Tony had always been very good at keeping his trade secrets secret. She suspects there's a mole in the company and that thought alone sends chills down her spine. The thread she follows leads her to a tangled web of conspiracy that she quickly realizes is too big for her to handle. She needs to end this and fast.

Her plan takes an unexpected turn when the impossible happened. Justin Hammer proposes. And at the worst time possible. She's still reeling from the emotional turmoil from last night with Tony. In his workshop. On the table. The mere memory of it makes her blush a bright red. She was emotionally and physically drained what with maintaining double personas constantly for the past three months. Tony's sad puppy dog eyes didn't help matter. It was stupid and reckless and potentially dangerous what with her supposedly in a serious relationship with Justin Hammer. Who, by the way, just proposed. As in holy matrimony. The whole shebang.

Something went seriously wrong.

She somehow manages to excuse herself without answering her proposal despite the onslaught of television reporters and rushes home. There were too many odd things going on at dinner. Something was off. She doesn't get much time alone with her thoughts however because sure enough there's a persistent knock at her door. And sure enough it was Justin.

"So what are you going to do Pepper?" Hammer asks. "You haven't answered my question yet."

"Are you serious?" She asks, trying to keep the trembling from entering her voice.

There's a slightly menacing twinkle in his eye accompanying that disarming smile that makes her stomach clench.

He knows. Oh god! He knows.

He must have found out some time ago, but when? She doesn't know the details, but the jigsaw puzzles are finally clicking into place. It explains the whole grand proposal at dinner with the press ready with their little cameras flashing. Truth be told, she's surprised she lasted this long. In retrospect, it might have been quite obvious something fishy was going on with the relationship when she wouldn't let him get past second base. Those are kinds of things would tip off a guy you're suppose to be serious about that you're really just into him because he's hell bent on destroying the world with evil technology stolen from your company and that you're just trying to stop him because you're really in love with your boss and he's sort of a super hero that would frown up world destruction.

"You know I don't like to play games," Hammer replies with a smirk.

What does he call what he's doing right now? He's toying with her. The way a cat would toy with its victim before it eats it. He's trying to see how far she's willing to go.

"I need to think about it…"

Stall. That's what she needs to do. Just stall and hope that angels will come out of the ceiling and whisk her to safety whilst erasing everyone's memory of the last few months. Yeah, she just needed a freaking miracle.

"Time is money, Pepper. You know that. What's there to think about? Stop trying to stall. Tell me… what's it going to be?"

A long silence that is so thick you can practically slice it in the air gathers between them. A sort of calm overcomes her in the duration. She realizes that there's not much she can do at this point except see it through till the end. Tony might have been the gambler in their little club, but Pepper knows a thing or two about poker faces.

"Yes."

There's the thing about Pepper. When she's backed into a corner with no way out and her sympathetic system kicks it it's almost always fight rather than flight. Her mother had always called her hardheaded.

"Yes?"

"Yes… I'll marry you, Justin," Pepper's voice answers simply.

He smiles the most infuriating, amused, self-satisfied smile she's ever seen and she regrets that fateful day she opened the drawer to his desk and discover all those missing Stark technology blueprints. If only Tony would invent a time machine they would all be saved a lot of trouble. Even as she thinks this she can almost hear Tony, from a happier, easier time, chiding her about the paradoxes of time travel. As if he doesn't break several laws of physics on a daily basis. God, she misses him. If Pepper would allow herself to feel anything at the moment, she would probably break down and cry.

A/N: Thank you for all of those who read and reviewed! I feel like I made Pepper a little out of character in this chapter… I will try to get it better in the next. The plot is bit a contrived, I know. And lots of plot holes and mistakes abound. It's my first time writing an IM fic so it's a little hard to get into the groove of things. This was just a little fun fic I was trying out while I obsess over the new movie coming out. I hope you all still enjoy it. Once again, thanks so much for reading!