Title: Things You Don't Expect
Author: A.j.
Rating: PG
Spoilers: The Iron Man movie. Six to eight months down the road.
Notes: Originally part of a longer story... well. That longer story sucked, but this opening bit seemed amusing so. Enjoy!

Summary: It takes Pepper six months to notice that she's the one running Stark Industries.

It takes Pepper six months to notice that she's the one running Stark Industries. They are six of the most miserable months of her life; chuck full of meetings, hiring, fund raisers, and hours upon hours of highly technical reading. All of it is done because one meeting turned into four hundred and thirty and her boss is an engineer.

Once upon a time, back when the shine of being the personal assistant of Mr. Tony Stark was new and undented - those were a glorious two days - she'd patted herself on the back for landing what was going to be the highest paid milk run ever created.

Staring bleakly at a desk covered in three-ring binders, old coffee cups, and four separate phones, Pepper wonders if she can make Tony build her a time machine so she can go back in time and beat herself up.

"Yolanda?" Her second assistant ducks her dark head in the door, eyebrow raised. She doesn't remember when she hired Yolanda or Olga, but she has a vague recollection of spectacularly firing Obidiah Stane's evil assistant (turns out he had contingency plans for being electrocuted and they involved an angry, blonde assistant named Marta) and hiring the two cleaning women who'd witnessed it. It had been one of her better ideas, fortunately. Both Yolanda and Olga had been working through their MBA programs with the help of the Stark UCLA tuition reimbursement package. Both could type 80wpm, knew their ways around a spreadsheet and Outlook, and were related to most of the state of California.

"Yeah, boss? You want me to grab Olga?" The younger woman stayed partially hanging in the door, just in case Pepper needed her to flag the other girl down.

"No." Pepper looked desolately at the debris covering her desk, then over at Tony's bigger, considerably emptier one across the way. "No, I just. Yolanda, what the fuck am I doing?"

"Apparently not the financials. Are you okay, boss?" Yolanda's heels clicked quietly on the polished floors of the Stark Industries penthouse office. "Because you look kind of pale and you just swore there. You don't swear."

"I know, I know." Pepper dropped her head, miserably, into her hands and pushed. "Do you know how I spent the last half hour?"

"Is this a trick question?"

The strangled sob Pepper let out could have been a laugh in another life. A long ago other life. "No. I honestly want to know if you know what I've been doing for the past half hour."

"Well," Yolanda's voice was right next to her elbow now. "If you stuck by your schedule - and you usually do - you just spent the last half hour on a conference call with the Stark Industries plant managers in Georgia, discussing the plans for the conversion and production implementation of the arch reactor technology. Am I wrong?"

"No, you're exactly right." Pepper glared at the phone she'd put down just before her massive and life-changing epiphany. "They're on track for the switch-over and might actually be ahead of schedule, depending on when the new shipments of the Japanese computer chips get there. Osaka's been in touch and they're ahead of schedule too."

"Well, that's good, right? If things are going better than SOP, that's something we should celebrate?" The young woman looked at her boss encouragingly, still with no clue as to why she looked on the verge of a sobbing fit. Loss of emotional control and Pepper Potts did not go well together in Yolanda Alvarez's mental map of the universe. In fact, they generally didn't inhabit the same airspace, let alone the same room.

Pepper just numbly shook her head and kept glaring at the phone. "I got through the whole phone call without having to consult any of the manuals. I actually explained bits of the technical composition and marketing scheme to the plant foreman."

"Oh-kay." Yolanda waited.

"Yolanda! Six months ago, this technology was so cutting edge that a team of scientists worked two weeks on the technology - established technology, mind you - and couldn't make heads or tails of the improvements Tony Stark made! I just explained it to a man trained in engineering. ME. And I understood it!"

"Right. And this is bad."

"I'm running this company."

"Ah, okay." There was a clink on the desk and when Pepper looked down, there was a tumbler mostly full of extremely expensive liquor. She knew it was extremely expensive because she'd been the one who'd ordered it last year for Tony's personal use. Damn man hadn't been in the office long enough to actually kill the third bottle. "Figured that out, did you? Olga was guessing it'd take another month or two."

"What!?"

Yolanda's face was kind in the fading natural light of the room. "That you're the boss."

Pepper sputtered a bit, eyes darting around the room and the desks, trying to take everything in. "But how did it happen?"

"Best guess?" Yolanda waved a hand to indicate the large Stark Industries complex out the main window. "Mr. Stark trusts you."

"But why is everyone else listening?"

At that, Yolanda threw her head back and laughed, long and hard. When the giggles finally petered out, she actually had to wipe a few tears away. "Oh, Miss Potts, you are good for the soul. Honey, you're the only one who sounds like they know what they're talking about."

"I was just an accountant!" Her voice comes out high and reedy and the voice of someone who's on the verge of a panic attack. It's not a state of mind Pepper has much experience with, but she figures she's allowed. She just found out she's running a Fortune 500 (okay, more like Fortune 30) company, after all.

"Mmm." Yolanda's hand is comforting and warm on her shoulder; something to ground her into the moment. "And I was just a cleaning lady. Turns out, we're allowed to grow as people. This stuff happens, Ms. Potts."

And then Pepper is standing, teetering slightly because her concentration is shot and she's not actually in the mood for the Monolo's she pulled on this morning. More than anything else, at this exact moment, she wants her pajama pants, bunny slippers, and a week long vacation. And to track Tony down so she can bludgeon him with something heavy.

She blinks, coming to another rather startling realization. She hasn't actually laid eyes on Tony - and CNN's coverage of the hostage situation at that downtown bank does not count - for a few days. Maybe as many as five. That hadn't happened since-

"I- I have to go." Pepper tucks her hair behind her ears and casts a distracted eye around for her briefcase and purse. Proving that she's shaping up to be an absolutely stellar Executive Assistant, Yolanda shoves the Kate Spade into Pepper's loose fingers before turning her around and aiming her at the door.

"Don't worry about your appointments tonight, boss. I'll reschedule. Take the night off. Put up your feet and drink yourself sick. I'll make sure that you don't have anything before 2 tomorrow."

With a few quick pushes and a distracted wave from Olga, Pepper finds herself blinking at the setting sun on the way to her parking garage. It occurs that she hasn't actually gone home before 6pm in... She thinks about it. The time she went home with the flu and slept for twenty straight hours before flying to New York City for a board meeting didn't count. Neither did the early outs on benefit nights.

God, had it been six months? Six months!?

Frustrated, scared, and more than a little freaked out by life in general, Pepper slid behind the wheel of her car. The scream, when it came was loud and long. But it did make her feel better.

-fin-