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Tony’s in his workshop when his music shuts off abruptly. He sighs and raises his goggles off his face to see who has breached his inner sanctum. His face breaks into a grin as he spies Pepper standing just inside the doorway.
“Hey babe,” he says, putting down his tools and stepping around the workbench to hug her. Pepper laughs and steps back, raising a hand to stop him.
“You’re covered in grease, Tony.” He shrugs. “You still think I’m sexy.”
Pepper laughs. “Be that as it may, no touchy until you clean up.” Tony wipes down as much as he can, washes his hand and drags a towel over his wet hair. Aside from a shower, it’s as clean as he’s getting at the moment.
He takes the seat that Pepper indicates on his stool and grins at her. He’s lucky and he knows it, having Pepper in his life. She’s beautiful, kind, loving and puts up with an enormous amount of crap from him. And she loves him. After everything, after Afghanistan, after Obie, after the Expo, after Loki…after all of it, she stood by him. She loves him. Tony grins. Maybe he won’t share his family’s fate of genius that self destructs. Maybe, he can change his fate.
“JARVIS, go offline per protocol Alpha-Beta-Niner-Zeta-Five,” Pepper says, brining Tony out of his musings.
“Pep?” he starts to rise, but her hand on his arm, moving up to his shoulder halts him.
“It’s fine, Tony, I just want some true alone time with you. No cameras, no one watching, just us. Just for a few hours, you can do that for me, can’t you?” She purrs in his ear, her tongue snaking out to trace the shell. He shutters.
“Confirm offline mode, JARVIS. Reboot system in one hour.” Pepper frowns.
“I feel safer when he’s on,” Tony mutters. Pepper sighs. “Ok.” She glances to the ceiling, waits to see as the cameras all blink off and the subtle hum in the walls stops, signaling the constant guardian of Stark Tower has gone to sleep.
Tony turns, encircling her in his arms, brushing his lips over hers. Pepper deepens the kiss, backing Tony more firmly against his workbench. His brain is whirring, trying to decide if it’d be wrong to make a joke about bending over the table when a sharp pain erupts in his neck. His hand flies up and brushes over…a needle? A fog is rapidly settling over his mind and his limbs are dragging him down. He slides off the stool and lands with a thud on the workshop floor. Panic floods his mind.
Someone is in the Tower, someone is in his workshop, they are going to hurt Pepper, and he needs to save Pepper. Through the roaring and pain in his head, Tony is distantly aware of the click of heels on the tile floor. The shoes enter his rapidly narrowing vision and then someone is leaning down over him, strawberry blond hair falling in his face, tickling his nose. He looks up into the face above him. The face of his attacker, who is holding an empty syringe. It doesn’t make sense; his brain can’t process what his eyes are seeing because kneeling over him is Pepper.
Pepper.
No, no, no. This isn’t happening. This is not happening. It’s a dream, a terrible, awful dream. He’s fallen asleep in his shop again, that’s all. Because Pepper loves him and would never hurt him and why is she smiling?
Pepper reaches out and gently traces her fingertips over his face with a reverence that she’s used a hundred times. “Shhh, Tony, Shhh,” she soothes him. “Calm down, that’s right, it’s going to be ok.”
She’s right, of course she’s right, Pepper is always right, even when he doesn’t want to admit it, she’s right. If Pepper says things are ok, then they are. Tony takes one breath, then another, then frowns, because it hurts when he breathes and that’s not right.
“Just calm down,” she repeats, “Just calm down. All I have to do is get this out,” and now her fingers are moving off his face and tracing the ARC reactor and his heart is thudding in his chest, “and everything will be fine. You’ll see.”
Tony thinks he may black out for a few minutes because the next thing he is aware of is the whirring of a tool and the smell of smoke and suddenly, horribly, there is one sharp tug in his chest and then the reactor is free, its out, Tony can see the wires hanging from it and just like that his world snaps back into focus and he knows that this is it. This is the story of how Tony Stark dies.
Pepper is still smiling and touching him and it’s all so wrong now, because he’s dying, why doesn’t she see that he is dying and it’s Pepper’s fault. She packs away the ARC reactor and Tony can feel his heart thudding in his chest. It’s a race now, a sprint to the end. The shrapnel will work its way into his heart and kill him in minutes, but that’s ok, because Pepper took the reactor and she’s killed him and Tony doesn’t want to live in a world where Pepper doesn’t love him. Now she’s talking so Tony tries to focus in on her words, those last few words.
“Things were never meant to get this far, Tony. I want you to understand that. This all should have ended years ago, with that trip into the desert, but I guess they don’t make terrorists like they used to because they couldn’t even kill one guy. Then you came back and Obie was supposed to fix his mistake and he almost did, you remember that. But then,” and now she’s laughing, “then he tried to have me killed, so naturally I had to have him eliminated. Then SHIELD got involved and I had to wait because they sent that red headed bitch and the super nanny out to babysit you, but I’m nothing if not patient. I figured the palladium poisoning would take care of things for me, and then barring that you tried to fly a nuclear missile into space but no, no, nothing so simple as an alien invasion can kill the great Tony Stark. So here we are Tony. Here. We. Are. So, really, when you think about it, you have no one to blame for this but yourself. You understand, don’t you?”
He tries to make a sound, to apologize, to fix it, anything Pepper wants, because she can’t leave and his vision is starting to go black at the edges. She frowns slightly, then her eyes widen.
“Oh, oh, this is great, this is perfect. You believed it all, didn’t you? You really did. You thought that I loved you. Oh, Tony,” she pats his cheek like he’s a child. “Tony, who could ever love you?” She laughs again, then leans in and brushes one final kiss to his lips. She stands, picks up her case and Tony listens as her heels click on the tile as she walks away. Silence rains heavy in the lab.
By his estimate, the reactor has been out for eight minutes when he hears footsteps coming down the stairs. Not the click click of expensive heels, but something else. The lab door opens and someone is talking to him.
“Mr. Stark, I received a notification that JARVIS went offline. Now, I’m sure you are just doing some routine maintenance and I’ve come all the way over here for nothing. If I have come over here for nothing, I can assure you, Mr. Stark, that I am going to bury you in expensive reports and requisition forms for the next six months because there is a new episode of Say Yes to the Dress on tonight-“ the voice suddenly cuts off when Coulson comes around the corner and sees him.
He freezes for half a second, then explodes into motion, his gun coming out of his shoulder hostler as he slides to his knees next to Tony. For someone who had taken an alien spear through the chest not eight months ago, Coulson moved fast. Once he sees no immediate threat his hand comes up and taps the ear piece. “Barton, we have a break in at the Tower. Stark is down, JARVIS is down, the reactor is out.” Tony can hear Clint screaming in Coulson’s ear but he can’t quite make out the words, though the panic in the archer’s voice is clear. Things are starting to sound very far away and fuzzy when something sharp hits him in the face.
Coulson slapped me, he thinks. Wonder how long he’s wanted to do that.
Tony blinks up at him, tries to force the other man’s face back into focus.
“Stark, look at me. Eyes on me. Do not close your eyes again, is that clear? Focus on me and only me.” He’s trying, his is, but things are getting very hard. He forces himself to look into Coulson’s eyes. Phil’s eyes. If he’s going to die, at least he can call the other man by his first name. Huh. Phil has nice eyes, a wonderful color mix of green and blue and grey and why hadn’t Tony ever taken the time to really look at him before? He had kind eyes. Very kind eyes.
“Thank you for the compliment, but try not to talk, ok?” Phil says and huh, that had all been out loud. His mouth always had gotten him in trouble.
He needs to tell Phil about Pepper. He raises his hand, and when did that get so hard and taps the hole where the reactor had been. “Pep,” he moans.
“I assure you we are trying to locate Ms. Potts,” Phil says. No, no, he doesn’t understand. Tony reaches down, grabs Phil’s hand and touches the hole with it. He then moves Phil’s hand away. “Pep,” he says again, hoping, praying that Coulson will understand. He does, his eyes widening, the hand not clutching Tony’s flying back to his ear piece.
“Pepper Potts is now to be considered a hostile in position of the ARC reactor. Repeat: Potts is now a fugitive suspected of the attempted murder of Tony Stark.” Tony nods, they understand now. His team will find her, they’ll avenge him. It’s ok now. He’s just going to close his eyes for a few minutes. He’s so tired. Phil is yelling at him again, he sounds worried and upset and maybe even a little scared. He hears his name.
Tony, Tony. Don’t close your eyes, Tony. Not Mr. Stark, or Stark. Tony. Phil’s never called him by his first name before. It’s nice, he thinks, to not be alone. To die with friends by his side. He closes his eyes and can’t hear anything else.
---------
Tony never expects to open his eyes again. Yet that’s exactly what he’s doing. His eyes flutter open and he takes in his surroundings. He’s in a hospital bed that much is clear. He looks around. On one side of the bed, slumped in a chair is Phil, his tie undone, jacket off and shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, watching him.
“So Cap isn’t the only one you watch sleeping then, huh?” Tony croaks out, then succumbs to a coughing fit. Phil leans forward, and helps him to drink from a straw. The ice cold water is soothing to his throat. As Tony settles back against the pillows, he’s aware of a tightness is his chest; he looks down and with a jolt, realizes that there are wires leading out of the bandages wrapped around his chest and into…a car battery.
“For fucks’ sake, really?”
Phil quirks an eyebrow. “I had to make do with the materials at hand. There wasn’t enough time to try and find a spare reactor before you would have had irremediable damage.”
“Yeah, but did you have to use the Ferrari battery?”
Phil’s lips quirk at the edges. “My apologies. Next time I need to keep you alive, I’ll try and find a Geo Metro instead.”
Tony smiles. “Now you’re thinking.”
He needs to ask, he has to ask, but he’s not sure he wants to hear the answer. “Pepper?” he whispers.
Phil straightens up in the chair. “Once the call went out, the team assembled, plus we got some help from outside sources. Ms. Potts was discovered attempting to leave aboard a private jet bound for China, where the extradition laws would have prevented her from being forced back to the United States for trial.”
“Thor fried the engines, Barton shot her in the kneecap, and Natasha…well, let’s just say it’s going to be difficult to wear high heels with 10 broken toes. You will need a new plane, as the Hulk ripped both wings off. Ms. Potts is currently in a SHIELD holding facility, under heavy guard. The X-Men and the Fantastic Four are offering up their services as well until you are back on your feet and the ARC reactor is having a battery of tests run on to make sure it’s safe for transplantation back into you, all run by Dr. Banner. Lt. Colonel Rhodes provided an assist in finding the plane using Air Force radar. Once JARVIS came back online, he’s been running constant updates on your medical care. You’ve got a lot of people that care very much about you, Mr. Stark,” He paused. “Tony.”
There was one name that Phil hadn’t mentioned. “What about Steve?”
Coulson smiled. “Captain Rogers arrived at the Tower as I was finishing hooking you up to the battery. He’s refused to leave you side, even to aid in the search for Ms. Potts. I forced him to go to the debrief, under threat of court martial but he should be returning with the rest of the team in a few minutes.”
Sure enough, Tony could make out voices coming down the corridors. Steve was first around the corner and stopped in the doorway.
“You’re awake.” He broke into a huge grin and dove into the room, grasping Tony’s hand. He turned back towards the door, “Hey guys! He’s awake!” Suddenly the room was filling up with people. Thor’s booming voice telling Tony the story of the capture of the great deceiver, Clint distracting him with shiny objects, Bruce checking the monitors and the battery and Natasha leaning down, in deep conversation with Phil.
Through it all, Steve’s hand never left his. Eventually Rhodey arrived. His team assumed around the clock care for him, and they were all there when the reactor was placed back into his chest.
With his team, his friends around him, Tony had a thought.
Maybe Pepper had been wrong. Maybe someone could love him. Maybe, a lot of people did.