A/n: Oh, hi there! You may not know me. My name is Invaderk, and I haven't updated this story in almost a year. Well, a few things happened, but nothing really worth noting besides that I stopped writing for a few months and this is the first thing I went back to when I picked up a pencil again. That being said, it's REALLY difficult to crank out something respectable when you take that long of a break! Holy crap guys, the first draft was GOD AWFUL. So I fixed it a little, then passed it to the pros. Here I must thank the prompt and wonderful cardxiv, who read the entire story all at once, then went over the insane amount of pages of this chapter and got back to me within twenty four hours. So thank you, oh so much! :D

Hopefully the 70-something people who have this on their alert list will find this story and re-connect with it the way I have.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Happy Reading!

VI. Revelation

“Ooh, ow—ouch. Are you almost set, Tony?”

An idle Wednesday morning finds Pepper on her feet. Though her legs are still as useless as the shoes she’s wearing (flats for today instead of the usual monsters, to make the process easier), Tony has rigged a nifty machine that allows her to hoist herself into a standing position, holding on to a bar above her head as if she were preparing to do a set of chin-ups, until the machine can support her weight.

Tony marches about the garage, preparing for the weekly physical that the doctor had recommended they utilize to make sure all of Pepper is still in working order. Of course, the doctor had been referring to a simple reflex test, maybe even a blood test “if you think you have proper technology, Mr. Stark”. Pepper, upon hearing that gem, had had to press the side of her fist to her mouth to stifle a laugh. Doctor Morgan Stanley has no way of knowing, in his defense, that Tony has equipped his garage-slash-makeshift hospital with a full body scanner, X-ray machine, blood pressure and electrolyte testers—everything one could possibly need for a routine (or not so routine) checkup.

“Hold your horses, Pepper. I’ve just got to type in the… there we go.” Tony straightens up from the control panel and turns around to look at his PA. The white lab coat that he’s thrown on to make himself feel more official whips about his knees as he walks, and hangs open so that she can see the glowing reactor beneath his black beater. “How’s that?”

With a sigh of relief, Pepper releases the bar and finds that the machine is holding her weight nicely, giving her the appearance of hovering inches above the ground. She seems unperturbed to the strange floating sensation caused by several powerful magnets, instead looking down at her hands and flexing her fingers to increase blood flow. They feel like lead. She flexes them some more.

“We have got to find a new way of doing that, Boss,” she says. “I don’t know how I managed to hold my weight up that long without my arms falling off. I definitely couldn’t have done it before the accident.”

Tony hates how they call what happened to her an “accident”. Sure, it was accidental and unfortunate, but calling it an accident makes it seem so ordinary. He’d rather call it an incident. That word at least implies that there is someone to blame, or that it was out of the normal range of catastrophic damage. He fights off this surly thought with a swig of coffee and begins to go over the routine checkup that the two of them have become so accustomed to practicing. Test blood pressure levels, check hormone and blood chemical levels to see if the booster shots have been doing any good, feel progressively worse as Jarvis announces the tests to be negative, again. All part of the scientific process as Tony and Pepper have come to know it.

“Yeah, well I’ll bet you didn’t have to do any weight lifting before your spine was nearly crushed,” says Tony, with his eyes glued to the computer screen as the machine dutifully hums its labor.

“Au contraire,” replies Pepper with a grin, now setting her arms down by her sides as is customary during this checkup session. “I used to be the pushup champion at the gym, back in the day. Although I’m sure I could beat my record now, with all the wheelchair pushing I’ve been doing. The physical therapy has helped too,” she adds, almost as an afterthought. She’d been doing all sorts of exercises to prevent muscle deterioration, including sets modified pushups and sit-ups that look so ludicrously sexual that she refuses to let Tony be around while she does them. But even those muscle-building practices don’t compare to the strength she’s gained simply by wheeling herself around.

Tony doesn’t respond as he walks about the machines in long, quick strides. Much like the first time he performed a physical examination on his PA, he’s got a pencil stuck behind one ear and a clipboard in hand. Unlike the first time they went through the exam, however, Pepper isn’t fighting back tears. Medically speaking, she has nothing to cry about. Her fractures are healing as well as could be expected (better, even, because of Tony’s vigilance). She feels wonderful inside and out—physically, emotionally—and her mother’s latest shenanigans have not been able to affect her mood. Some time has passed since her mother and sister tried to force their way into the house, but the nonsense didn’t stop there. Last night, she and Tony were watching Jim Cramer scream and rant about AIG when she received a phone call from the hospital; from what they told her, speaking in rushed tones, as if it were she who caused all of this, her full set of medical records seems to have vanished. The last person to have the files was Doctor Stanley, when Pepper’s mother had demanded to see them during a private appointment.

Tony seems to read her mind, looking up from his clipboard to comment, “I still can’t believe those professional idiots let your mom get her hands on those records… and then they had the nerve to ask me for backup information, after the hard time they gave us in the first place. I don’t baffle easily, but I must admit… I am baffled. There’s no other way to say it. The duplicity is overwhelming.”

“Yes, well, it’s to be expected, I guess. My lovely mother has a way of going over the top,” Pepper responds, wincing as one of Tony’s robots prods her in the side. She shoots it a glare and continues, “You really should give them that information, I think. It would benefit us in the long run.”

He shakes his head in annoyance, but agrees. They lapse into a comfortable silence while he continues the exam, reading screen after screen of information, writing things down, sometimes threatening his robots when they don’t follow his exact directions. Pepper observes all of this with affection, never voicing her amazement at his proficiency but appreciating it all the same. His ever-calculating mind is at its best down here, in the garage, where he makes great leaps in science with his inventions but never lets them leave the room. This strange body scanner she’s in is a medical miracle all in its own; it could be worth millions, but Tony won’t let it mainstream until he’s sure it’s flawless enough to bear the Stark emblem.

Setting down his clipboard at last, Tony turns to where Pepper is hovering as if weightless, and throws his arms wide.

“Everything looks perfect,” he says with a shrug. He shakes his head, dropping his arms. “Everything but my boosters. They’re not doing a damn thing. Peter checked my chemistry, he says it looks fine—even revolutionary—but something’s not clicking.”

Pepper frowns, though not solely for herself. She has become patient with these boosters as Tony works them out, albeit a little nervous that something will harm her more than she has already been harmed. As if being bound to a wheelchair is not enough, she doesn’t particularly relish the idea of being brain dead, or permanently comatose. “You and Peter agreed that you need to—what was it you said—bring out the ‘big dogs’? I forget exactly, but you get the point: maybe you just need a second opinion on the math.”

“My math is never wrong,” he mutters, more to himself than to her, but then he catches the unimpressed look on her face and adds, “but you’re right. I do need a second opinion.”

“Then get one. Here, help me down, I’m meeting Jim for lunch and it takes me forever and a half to get ready.”

Tony punches in a few keys on one of many computers, then helps her down from his electro-contraption and into her wheelchair. While he turns off the machines, she reminds him of the luncheon he has to attend with his Freedom Project engineers, though she can’t offer a good response when he asks why he has to waste company money by taking the office nimrods to a hibachi grill. She knows he’ll end up enjoying the so-called ‘business’ meeting anyway, once the first few rounds of sake hit the table. They’ll end up talking physics and he’ll solve all their problems before they can even get their heads around the math. These men are the MIT and Stanford graduates, the best up-and-coming in their field, yet when Tony Stark enters the room they turn into a bunch of tittering schoolboys. Pepper’s seen it. She wonders how impressed they’d be if she told them how he disintegrated her toast this morning while she was fixing his filing errors.

Tony rests a hand on her shoulder, giving her a gentle shove towards the elevator.

“Give Rhodey my best,” he says lightly, already turning back to his work. “Tell him to get his ass over here for dinner sometime. I feel like I haven’t seen him in years.”

“Sure thing, Boss.”

“Oh, and wait—!”

Pepper, with the elevator already closing her away from him, has to jab the silver ‘door open’ button to keep him in sight. Tony crosses the floor that lies between them, pulling a slip of paper out of his back pocket, and presses it into her outstretched palm.

“I need this book,” he says casually, although there’s that curious look on his face, the one that has never boded well with her in the past. “Can you pick it up on the way back? I know you have to go to the pharmacy to get that prescription, and the bookstore is just down the road…”

Suspicious, Pepper tears her eyes from Tony to unfold the note (which happens to be half a scrap of Stark Industries paper, complete with coffee stain) and reads the underlined title that lies amidst a series of scribbled math equations:

Paraplegia for Dummies.

Tony Stark can build a suit of armor from scrap metal in a cave, right under the noses of terrorists with guns and God knows what else. He can turn a room full of the smartest men in Malibu into drooling fanboys. Hell, he can fly. But even the world’s best and brightest sometimes need a Dummy’s Guide. Pepper shakes her head, too preoccupied with being on time for her lunch date with Rhodey to think about why Tony doesn’t look this sort of thing up on the internet, and slips the folded note into her breast pocket.

“Don’t forget to go to your meeting,” she says, looking up at him where he stands with one hand in his pocket and the fingers of his other hand tapping absently on his arc reactor. The click-click-click sound of his bitten nails on the cover make her think, with a pang, of the sound her heels used to make on the floor as she chased him down the hall with a clipboard of unsigned paperwork.

Tony gives his head a nod to get a stray lock of hair out of his eyes, and offers her a half-smile.

“You know me, Potts. I never forget.”

He might be joking, but as she lets the elevator take her up to the main floor, Pepper can’t help but think that, at least recently, his statement holds an unsettling amount of truth. She hasn’t had to chase him down to sign a single paper—not even the useless dress code memo that he has a tendency to neglect so that the woman at the front desk continues to wear a low-cut blouse with most of the buttons undone. For now, she pushes the thought aside, opting to focus on getting ready to leave. She sends Happy a quick text, checks her email (ten new messages since an hour ago, probably all from various board members in New York and Orlando), and heads to the shower.

-

Pepper finds Rhodey sitting at a table for two in the small, privately owned deli where they have arranged to meet. Forever in uniform, he sits straight-backed in his chair, his condensation-dotted glass of water untouched on its coaster. His serious aura eases up only when she wheels herself through the door and offers him a cheerful smile. Rhodey smiles back, waves with a slight movement of his hand.

“Long time no see, Pepper,” he greets her, leaning one elbow against the plastic-coated armrest of his chair once she situates herself at the table. “How’ve you been?”

They take care of all the customary, somewhat awkward “How are you? Oh, I’m fine” chatter over salads, talk a little about the recent jump in S.I. stocks over the last few weeks, even discuss her therapy, and how Tony’s been so uncharacteristically focused through all of this madness. That’s when the real issue begins.

Rhodey waits until the waitress has served their meals and walked away from their table to voice his concerns about Tony.

“Listen, Pepper,” he begins, taking a sip of water to buy himself time. Pepper eyes him, frowning and stirring the French Onion soup that she had so looked forward to all morning. She has a feeling that she might not be hungry much longer, not with the concern in Rhodey’s voice. He continues in even tones, “I’ve been thinking about all of this, and I feel like I need to ask: what are you going to do about your housing situation?”

She’s thrown so off guard by his question that she stares, dumbstruck with her spoon halfway to her mouth, for a good three seconds. It feels like a whole lot more.

“My… housing situation?”

“After all this has blown over, I mean,” Rhodey clarifies. “You’ve been living at Tony’s place for the last few months, and I was just wondering what you plan to do when you recover from the, uh, incident.” He makes a vague gesture at her wheelchair.

Slowly, Pepper sets her spoon back into the soup bowl and sits back in her seat. Rhodey’s question is not one that has never occurred to her in the past, but she tends to avoid it whenever the subject arises. In the beginning, when she was sitting in that itchy hospital bed, the idea of moving in with Tony—even for a period as short as six months—seemed inappropriate, absurd. In the first few weeks, she’d adapted to her new room and home office, but had still missed her cozy little apartment. Now she barely thinks of it at all, even though she still has to pay the rent on it every month. Rhodey responds to her silence by raising his eyebrows inquisitively at her.

“Have you thought about it at all?”

“Well, yes, but…” Pepper trails off.

“But?”

“I don’t know, Jim,” she replies at last, sighing. She shakes her head and turns to her soup, stirring it absently with her spoon. She had been right about her appetite. The wonderful, almost tangy aroma of her soup is not half as appealing as it had been when the waitress placed it in front of her. “I’m trying to take it a day at a time right now. It’s a little overwhelming, trying to be at home—at Tony’s house, I mean—and at work at the same time, doing the same amount of work with half the energy.”

Rhodey doesn’t seem convinced by her weak excuses, as much as she tries to push them. “But you haven’t been doing the same amount of work, have you?” He presses through bites of his garlic chicken panini. “Tony’s picked up some of the slack since you were in the hospital. I’ve seen his work desk, Pepper. It’s organized. I don’t have to nag him half as much as usual to get things done. He just does it.”

“What are you getting at?” says Pepper, apprehensive. She takes a nervous sip of water and tries not to notice how the ice clinks against the glass more than it should. “Do you think Tony doesn’t need me anymore?”

There it is! That she should become disposable, or lose her place as Tony’s unyielding lifeline, is her greatest fear, more even than the fear that she will never walk again. Her legs can be modified with some clever invention, if not healed altogether eventually. Should Tony continue on his path towards self-sufficiency at the rate he’s been going, it’s only a matter of time until he’s making his own excuses and remembering business meetings. She feels the potential for loss more than ever as the words leave Rhodey’s lips, as she sits across from him and frowns into her lukewarm soup (of which she has yet to take a single spoonful).

She does still have work to do, of course. Tony can’t run a company and still tinker around with her remedy (not to mention that he still goes overseas to fight crime whenever the need arises), but the work has been, admittedly, neither as stressful nor as rewarding. She sends a dozen emails but doesn’t get that sense of accomplishment that used to follow a day of work. It may stem, in part, from the lack of that wonderful sigh of relief, the one she used to get from kicking off her four-inch heels at the end of a long day and dropping backwards onto the recliner in her apartment. More than that, though, is the absence of security. The potential to lose the job that she loves, exasperating as it is, when coupled with the potential to lose—dare she think it?—the man upon whose disorganization she relies…

Rhodey stares.

“I’m sure he does need you, Pepper. I know he does, in fact,” he reassures her, reaching across the table to take hold of her hand. “I didn’t mean to make you doubt…”

Pepper, looking up as she feels his warm hand take her cold one, lies, “I know he does.” She smiles placidly, a forced smile that she’s perfected after years of business meetings.

“Oh. Well, good then. I was just trying to figure out what you plan on doing once Tony fixes you up.”

“I know I’ve been a bit of a burden on him these last few months, but it’s a little soon to be making those sorts of plans. I assume that once everything’s back to normal, I’ll move back into my apartment and Tony will eventually drift back to his old habits.”

“I don’t think you’ve been a burden,” Rhodey says decisively. He shakes his head as he takes another sip of water, peering at her over the rim of his glass. “How’s his drinking been?”

“A little better—” she begins, but he cuts her off before she can elaborate.

“Has he done anything particularly reckless since you’ve been living there?”

“Well… no, but—”

“Has he missed a single meeting?”

“No, he hasn’t!” Pepper sets her spoon down on the table. “But it’s not all about me. You know how Tony is. He can do anything as long as it suits his agenda. Sooner or later, maybe a year from now, or even later, he’ll revert. It’s not like him to take care of himself when he has so many other things to do.”

Pepper isn’t sure whether she believes her own words, but the feeling she gets from saying them is bittersweet. The part about things going back to normal, at any rate, for when the time comes, she will eventually stop calling the Malibu mansion her home. As much as she has been enjoying Tony’s added presence in her life, and as lonely as her apartment will likely feel once she settles back in, Pepper realizes that she is in no position to get comfortable. And yet, Tony’s been trying so much harder to do things right, and she’d hate to see him lose his progress.

“Exactly.”

“My God, I am so confused. What are you saying?”

“I think you know what I’m saying, Pepper,” says Rhodey. He then, having apparently decided that his message is clear, goes back to his panini. Pepper puts her face in her hands and sighs.

-

Pepper stops to pick up Tony’s book on her way home, after swinging by the pharmacy for the prescription her doctor thinks will aid in strengthening her healed but fragile ribs. Lunch with Rhodey had been a little rougher than she’d anticipated, so the deluge of phone calls that swarms her phone is most welcome. She sits in the back of Happy’s car, arguing with sleazy businessmen between stops to the pharmacy, book store, and, eventually, Tony’s place. By the time the SUV pulls up the driveway, darkness has touched all corners of the city and the air has lost some its warmth, as if a cold front has begun to move in. Happy helps her out of the car and bids her goodbye, and within a minute she is quite alone, sitting just inside the front door of the house.

The lights are dimmed overhead in a way that casts the modern-designed hall in a warm, inviting light. Tony is nowhere to be seen—but then again, he rarely leaves his garage unless she is present, and even then his appearances can be both seldom and brief. If she listens through the low hum of the house’s generators, Pepper can hear the ocean many feet below, crashing against the rocky base of the cliff. The house is often quiet like this, which is one of the many perks of its somewhat isolated location. She sometimes wonders if her boss has ever stopped to listen to the sounds of the waves as she does when she’s wrapped in the sheets of her bed, drifting through the middle ground between sleep and consciousness. Likely he has, but she supposes that he didn’t spend many nights alone before she moved in, and those where he was he probably spent in the soundproof garage or passed out in a booze-induced stupor.

“Jarvis?”

“Yes, Miss Potts?”

“Is Tony out with the suit?” She doesn’t like to say it in a way that suggests Tony is fighting and potentially harming himself or others. It’s been a while since she had to dab Neosporin on his bleeding shoulders, and she likes to think that ignoring the truth behind his outings will maintain this absence of injury.

The A.I. responds in his familiar accent. “No, Miss Potts. Mr. Stark is currently in his workspace with an affiliate. I have informed him of your arrival, and he has instructed me to place an order for tonight’s dinner. Would you like me to relay any messages to him?”

“No, but thank you, Jarvis.”

“It’s my pleasure, Miss Potts.”

Happier in knowing that Tony is safe and not hundreds of miles away, duking it out with the world’s most vile weapons dealers, Pepper wanders through the house without any particular intention. The workload for today is largely taken care of, save for a conference call that she needs to attend at eight with a liaison from Malcom Metals and a number of fast-talking lawyers from both companies. Otherwise, the night is hers. She would typically symbolize her approval by changing from her pencil skirt and blouse into something a little more casual, but she feels that it would be inappropriate with an “affiliate” in the house. To look anything less than professional could lead to uncomfortable questions and comments, or worse, a tabloid publication.

As if the face of Stark Industries isn’t under enough pressure already, it makes Pepper’s hands clench to think of some of the garbage people have published about her, and that it could actually affect the company. Once in a while she’ll Google her own name and look for potential trouble. Mostly there is nothing to be concerned about; maybe a comment by some haughty journalist will strike her as particularly rude, but for the most part, the results are harmless. She did once try searching Tony’s name, only to accidentally stumble upon a rabid fan sight dedicated to Tony Stark pornography of all types, fictitious or otherwise. Red-faced, she’d quit the browser before she could see anything she might regret.

Now Pepper wheels up to her desk, unpacks her laptop, and checks her email. The number in the corner of her inbox begins to multiply, and she becomes happily immersed in her work until dinner.

-

“What’ll ya have? Bourbon, coffee, Hawaiian Punch…?”

“Tea would be great, actually.”

“You got it.”

Tony heaves himself up and away from the paper-coated desk, where he has spent the last three hours pouring over countless sheets of intricate equations, some typed and others scrawled haphazardly on stationary, even a few written on restaurant napkins. Every single number, every decimal point, he’s analyzing and examining and tearing apart and reconstructing to perfection. But, luckily for Tony, he is not alone in this exhausting endeavor. He turns away from the garage’s “kitchen” counter after a few minutes with a steaming Stark Industries mug in either hand, and passes one to his affiliate and friend as he sits back down.

Taking the mug with a word of thanks, Reed Richards doesn’t look up from the envelope upon which Tony has scribbled out a complicated proportion. So far, neither man has found any significant error—no errors at all, actually—in any of the formulas.

Tony’s neck aches from leaning over the paperwork so long. He stretches in his chair, arching backwards until his muscles catch and he shivers visibly. Reed has shown no such qualms, but it must be different for him, Tony thinks. The guy can stretch however far he wants, whenever he wants. The joy of it probably isn’t the same.

“How’s Sue and the family?” asks Tony, not keen on getting back to the equations after several hours of nonstop reading. A solid five minutes of rest are in order.

“Sue’s well. The family’s well,” replies Reed, turning another sheet over on the table. “Sue says I have a tendency to become distant when I’m doing the whole ‘save the planet’ thing, so I’ve been trying to spend extra time with them. How’s Pepper, aside from what I’m looking at here?” He gestures towards Pepper’s medical file with one hand.

Shrugging, Tony replies, “She’s fine, I guess. She’d probably be better if I hadn’t almost gotten her killed, but you know… I guess we all have our bad days.”

Reed looks up at the tone of spite in Tony’s voice, frowning thoughtfully. “Are you still letting the past rule how you feel?”

“If you mean constantly thinking about the guilt, then yes.” Tony takes a gulp of tea with the bitter air of self-loathing that tends to attack him whenever he thinks about the incident. “It’s taken over my life, Reed.”

“How so?”

Reed pays Tony his full attention now. He sets his pencil down and doesn’t react when it falls over the edge of the desk and rolls away. Tony can feel that odd, constricting sensation in his chest, which doesn’t make him want to discuss his personal ailments any more than he already does.

“Well, for starters,” Tony begins, straightening the unbuttoned collar of his shirt in a most dignified manner, “I haven’t had sex in almost three months.”

“How does that even relate to Pepper?” asks Reed, taken aback.

“Because—” He pauses, eyebrows furrowing as he tries to put his jumbled thoughts into a coherent line. Having never vocalized his concerns before now, it takes him a few moments to figure out what he’s trying to say. “I feel guilty whenever I think about going out and spending the night with some nameless woman. I think of Pepper and I can’t bring myself to do it.”

“Pepper’s been injured since July, though. Since it’s November, that means you’ve been able to get over at least once, right?”

“Yeah, well, when’s the last time you went for three months without getting laid, Reed?”

“Point taken.”

“And I felt worse afterwards anyway,” Tony adds. He raises the mug to his lips to take a sip, but the scent of lemon tea suddenly makes him feel sick. The idea of eating or drinking anything (except maybe a scotch) makes his stomach clench. “And then Pepper’s crazy mother kept accusing me of trying to kill her, and it was just one of those ugly situations where you know she’s wrong, but at the same time you can’t convince yourself.”

When Reed doesn’t offer him any words, Tony keeps going. It almost feels good to talk about it. What’s haunted him for so many months has begun to rise to the surface, threatening to overflow from his mouth in one big outpouring of word-vomit. The scalding porcelain of his coffee mug keeps him from slipping into silence, because if he does, he’s not going to be able to talk about it again. Tony confessing his innermost thoughts (without the aid of his liquid courage, no less!) is a rare and strange occurrence. So he tightens his hands around the mug, regardless of how much it burns, and presses onward.

“After the… incident, I spent an entire week in a drunken stupor. I’m surprised that I still have a liver, quite frankly. But when Jim Rhodes told me that she was coming around, I—” Tony breaks off, shaking his head at the ceiling in disbelief. “It was the single most frightening and wonderful thing I’ve ever felt. And then, the first time she tried to stand up and ended up on the ground… I freaked out. From the moment I scraped her off the sidewalk to right now, I’ve been pounded with guilt.” Now leaning the side of his face against his hand, he presents Reed with a look of solid resignation. “I need to make things right. I can never forgive myself unless I do.”

With his eyes cast down into his tea, Tony hears rather than sees Reed heave an audible sigh. He taps a finger against the side of his searing mug, watches the clear ripples spread out over the surface, then hit the barrier and bounce back. And bounce back. And back. He can feel the silence pressing down on him from everywhere, inside and out.

Finally comes the hesitant response: “I’m not sure this is even about you, Tony.”

Startled, Tony snaps up, nearly knocking over his mug in the process.

“What?”

Suddenly he feels himself standing in the blocked alley with Pepper, feels the weight of the Iron Man on his shoulders as she shouts, frustrated, “Tell me something. Why does it always have to be about you, Tony?” Her flushed cheeks and torn skirt are as vivid in the memory as when the event took place, even if their surroundings have blurred with time. The effect is… well, it’s startling, for starters.

“I don’t mean to offend you, of course,” Reed adds hastily, taking the look on Tony’s face for one of a man affronted.

“No, no, that’s not—” In the midst of his flashback, Tony can barely form a coherent thought. Pepper’s words keep ringing in his ears as if he’s experienced some sort of epiphany, or found a long-lost connection to the past. “What do you mean, exactly?”

“I mean that I think your motives are confused. You’ve spent months slaving over this problem as if it’s to satisfy a need of your own. But look at it from, say, my perspective. Even if you are responsible for her injuries—and I’m not saying you are, Tony. That’s a completely separate and debatable topic—but even if you were responsible, you could have handled it in so many different ways.” Reed reaches across the room and picks up the escaped pencil without rising from his chair. “You could have left her to the hands of the doctors, since they’re obviously more experienced in the medical field than you are. You could have funded the project and research, or even taken a part in it. Sooner or later, Pepper probably would be on her feet again.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Tony interjects, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling. “But I don’t work with maybies.”

“Exactly!” says Reed, and turns back to the sheet of paper he had been surveying before Tony’s comment. “So you took an active role in her recovery. From my perspective, all I see is a guy so determined to help one woman that he moves her into his house and single-handedly spends months on a solution that may or not work, just so she can go back to living a normal life. You’ve changed your living habits because you want her to be comfortable and happy, and stopped indulging in casual sex because your conscience says it’s wrong. Tony… that doesn’t sound like something one person—you in particular—would do for just anybody.”

“Pepper isn’t just anybody.” Tony’s watching Reed work, taking in his words, considering each of them with the same sort of care he might use while handling active explosives. “She and I have worked together a long time. She’s been putting up with my bullshit for years, and even now that I have a secret identity, she’s still right beside me, every time I do something stupid. Press conferences, business stuff, whatever. Pepper’s more than just another employee.”

Reed looks up from the paper, the tip of his pencil hovering over the sheet like a snake waiting to strike its dinner. “Would you like my honest opinion?”

“Well, I didn’t bring you all the way from the New York City to be my shrink, but since you’re here, you might as well get that session in, too.”

“Okay.” There is a pause, in which Tony is certain that he can feel his heartbeat sending waves up through his arms and into the table. Then, after a few moments of pensive thought, comes Reed’s statement: “I think that you’re giving guilt too much credit for all the work you’ve done here. This concoction is absolutely brilliant, Tony—” Reed holds up a fistful of papers before letting them fall back into the mountainous pile on the table, “But I don’t think it’s the labor of remorse. I think you’re confusing guilt with something else, something more powerful.”

Tony stares. His brain is whirring at top speed, struggling to process the enormity of Reed’s words and eventually coming to one gut-wrenching conclusion. He can’t say it aloud, but he understands it the moment he reaches into his mental bank of previously unused words and pulls out the one that fits. The one word that changes everything, from his perspective on the past few months of his life to that horrible moment on the hot city streets of southern California, when Pepper was lying on the ground with blood in her hair and he was sure that it meant the end of her, the end of everything.

“Even if it’s not for yourself, somehow you always make it personal,” she’d snapped. “Why is that, Tony?”

Because, as he’s beginning to realize, this time it is personal. It is. And then again, it isn’t. Tony Stark, in all his ingenuity, can do nothing when confronted with this life-changing truth but put his face in his hands and sigh.

Reed says nothing for the next few minutes, for which Tony is grateful. After a long, full silence, the former makes a small murmur of recognition and Tony looks up, dazed but curious, at the sound.

“What? What is it?” Tony asks, emerging from the fog.

Reed raises his eyebrows, makes a mark on one sheet of notes with his pencil, and then slides the sheet across the table. Tony feels that his hands are sweating as he lifts the page of numbers and finds Reed’s notation.

“The six in the hundred-thousandth’s place of decimal ninety-eight should actually be a five,” says Reed, evidently satisfied with his handiwork because he leans against his seat and arches backwards as Tony had done before—only when Reed does it, his arms reach the ceiling. “I guess it’s a good day for revelations all around.”

“I knew they called you Mr. Fantastic for a reason.” Tony’s already wiping his hands on his jeans and rising from the table. Reed follows suit a moment later, pushing the wheelie chair neatly into place, and the men head upstairs together. “Sometimes you can actually be pretty smart, when you put the effort into it.”

“You’re hilarious.”

-

The boy who drops off dinner isn’t too happy to see Pepper when she opens the door of the mansion and wheels on to the front step with her checkbook perched, open, on her lap. For one, he’s wearing an apron, and has a smear of what looks like pasta sauce all over the side of one sleeve. Coupled with the distinct frown pasted on his face, Pepper finds him to be both alarming and amusing.

“I didn’t know Bianchi’s had a delivery service,” she says with genuine interest when she reads the print on the boy’s apron.

The annoyed response is, “We don’t. Whoever placed the order offered to pay a hundred dollars extra for delivery, so they made me drive it over. I’m a dishwasher.”

“Oh! I’m sorry about that.”

“It’s a hundred and fifty-seven dollars and eleven cents.”

Only Tony would pay a hundred fifty seven and eleven cents for some calzones and garlic bread, Pepper thinks as she writes out the check and signs it with her neat, curving signature. She passes it to the would-be delivery boy, then as an afterthought takes a twenty-dollar bill from her purse and presses it into his hand. The boy, as a consequence, leaves in higher spirits and Pepper feels less snobbish for making him drive all this way so that she can eat.

On her way to the kitchen, Pepper nearly plows someone over as he appears unexpectedly at the top of the staircase, and the only way she manages not to crash into him with her wheelchair is by grabbing the wheels in both hands and allowing the box of food to topple from her lap. She gasps in surprise and mingled horror as the box, as if in slow motion, flies towards the ground. But before it reaches its untimely doom, the man reaches out with one arm and snatches her dinner from mid-air.

“Careful, Pepper!” says the man, cheerfully.

Pepper needs a moment to register the man’s blue full-body spandex and gray-streaked hair before she exclaims, surprised, “Reed! How are you?”

She accepts the box from his outstretched hand with a word of thanks. Tony emerges from the staircase next, and in her initial, pleasant surprise at seeing Reed (who, unlike in the case of Spider-Man, she’s met on multiple occasions), does not notice the curious manner in which Tony looks at her. For some time they stand in the foyer and make small talk, about Reed’s workings up in the Big City, of Sue, of Pepper’s adaptations and how she’s been dealing with her ailments. Before long, Reed makes his exit, politely turning down the invitation to stay for dinner with the explanation that he needs to get home to his wife, who “will likely strangle me if I’m not home for supper”.

And on that note, he shakes their hands one last time and leaves through the back door of the house, where Happy is waiting with the car. While he is claiming to have nothing personal to do with the Iron Man, Pepper pointed out to him after the Spider-Man visit, it is probably in Tony’s best interests not to have super heroes strolling in and out of the mansion through the front door. Together Pepper and Tony watch through the newly-repaired window until Happy’s sleek SUV rounds the corner and fades into the dark.

Pepper cranes her neck backwards to put Tony in her line of sight, for he’s standing behind her with his hands shoved into his pockets.

“How’d it go?” she asks, anxious behind her façade of calm.

“Marvelously,” he replies, looking down at her.

“Would you like to join me for dinner?”

Tony pulls a hand from his pocket and rests it on her shoulder. She almost jumps at the touch, but manages to halt any reaction by tightening her grip on the heavenly-smelling box of food that sits, hot, on her knees.

“What do you think about dinner and a movie?” he asks. “I’ll have Jarvis put a cult classic up on the big flat screen and we can throw popcorn at the TV whenever someone says a stupid line.”

Pepper smiles. “Sounds like a date.”

“Hey, don’t get ahead of yourself, Potts. Dates aren’t dates unless they end with your clothes on my bedroom floor.”

“Or on your ceiling fan, more likely,” she jests, shrugging his hand off of her shoulder. “Besides, my new prescription would knock me out long before the point where clothes are usually thrown around. I think it’s best if we just worry about dinner tonight. We can watch a movie as long as the state of my clothing isn’t put into jeopardy.”

“I could make it quick if you like,” says Tony as she begins to move from her spot in front of the window. “You won’t even know what hit you—ach!”

In the process of backing up, Pepper accidentally lets the wheel of her chair roll over Tony’s foot. Grinning, she heads back to the kitchen, the scent of fresh Italian food following her down the stretch of hallway. Tony hops on one foot briefly, cursing under his breath, before following his triumphant PA out of the foyer.

-

They do end up watching a movie after dinner, a black-and-white French film called “La Grande Illusion”. Tony’s feet are propped up on the coffee table, while Pepper keeps her hands folded on her lap so that she can’t accidentally brush her boss’s leg when she moves around. At first, Tony objects to watching a movie in French, claiming that having to read subtitles takes away from the experience, but Pepper shushes him and soon enough he’s so absorbed in the movie that he misses his mouth when trying to take a sip of scotch and pours it all down the front of his shirt.

The couch shifts beneath her as Tony, swearing at his own inattention, tells Jarvis to pause the movie so that he can pour himself another drink.

“What do you want to have, Pep?” he asks as he strides over to a mini-fridge disguised as a cabinet.

Though Pepper, who hasn’t had anything stronger than a glass of wine in the last five months, would very much like to indulge in a nice drink before bedtime, the labels of her countless prescriptions flash before her eyes and she has to decline. When she tells Tony that she’ll just have an ice water, he calls her a buzz kill.

“Tony, I’m fairly certain that if you were ever gravely wounded, you wouldn’t make it a week,” she sighs, accepting the glass he offers her before he plops back onto the couch. Pepper, without the stability of her lower half, bumps against Tony and almost spills both of their drinks again. “Not from the injuries, but from the combination of prescription medicine and alcohol.”

This jibe he does not appreciate, though he pretends that it doesn’t affect him like it does.

“Well then let’s hope it never comes to that,” he says dismissively, taking a sip without glancing at his frowning assistant. Then, turning his attention to the flat screen: “Jarvis, rewind to the beginning of the play scene. I have no idea what just happened or why those men are crossdressing.”

The movie resumes and Pepper does her best to get into it, but she has a difficult time regaining her focus now that it’s been disrupted. She can smell the spilled liquor on Tony’s shirt, and though she disapproves of his routine nightcaps, the scent keeps him on her mind despite her best efforts. She leans away from him, propping her elbow on the armrest of the couch, but can still feel his low laughter as he watches the soldiers on screen dance and sing in women’s clothing. In her struggle to pay as little attention to him as possible, she doesn’t see when Tony glances at her, eyes her profile for a few seconds, and then sets his drink to the side.

Just before the end of the movie, Jarvis announces that there’s been an altercation in the Middle East, one potentially involving salvaged S.I. weaponry. Tony’s on his feet so fast that this time Pepper does topple sideways into his empty seat, unable to stabilize herself fast enough against the armrest of the couch.

“How long ago, Jarvis?” demands Tony, checking his watch.

“Only a few minutes, Sir. If you hurry you can get there before the situation reaches the media.”

“Get the suit ready. I’ll be down in literally thirty seconds.”

The hem of Pepper’s skirt has slipped up her thigh and she pulls it back down, feeling that sense of detachment from her own body that comes from not feeling; she might as well be tugging someone else’s skirt back into place, for she does not experience the sensation of the fabric sliding over her skin and pack into place. This unpleasant thought does nothing to make her feel any better about Tony and his situation. Quite the opposite, it only furthers the looming sense of desperate fear in the pit of her stomach. It makes her think of her dream, the dream that Tony does come back from his mission, but so damaged that she can do nothing but cry at his side while he slips away.

Tony turns to where Pepper has just heaved herself back into a sitting position and adjusted her rumpled clothes.

“I’ll be back soon.”

He always says that, and usually when he does return, it’s hours later and he’s so battered and exhausted that he doesn’t make a single lewd comment while she tends to his wounds. But what can she say? That she doesn’t want him to go because she had a dream once that he was injured more than usual?

Because Tony does not belong to her, and because Pepper does not feel entitled to voice the selfish desire that he abandon his duty and stay home, stay safe with her, all she can say is, “Ok.”

“Don’t wait up for me, Pepper.”

“Please be careful, Tony.”

Tony offers Pepper a half-smile that he probably thinks is reassuring, then tears his eyes away from where she sits, looking as small as she feels, and heads downstairs.

Pepper turns to the window, where outside it has begun to rain. The clouds drop pinpricks onto the window, and the drops of water bead up and roll down until they drip, drip, drip their way down to the ocean. She watches from the couch until she hears the unmistakable sound of the garage door and sees a brief streak of red and gold strike fire across the overcast sky.

Silence again.

-

-

A/n: So, there it is! More now then ever, feedback is appreciated while I try to get back into the swing of things. If you caught anything that rubbed you the wrong way, let me know. If you DID like it, let me know! By the end of the story I should be back on par with where I was before.

Thanks again to cardxiv (whose work you can find on the tonypepper livejournal community), and to you, the reader, for coming back for more!