girlonstage asked: I have been feeling a desire for a happy Pepper and Tony fic, and if you wrote that, most certainly read and enjoy it. Also, hello! Hope your day had a thing that made you smile really wide :D
Mmmm well I got to get dinner on the dime of my summer program, all the students in it were there and the bill was pushing $400 and I spent the whole time talking with a few people including this dazzlingly gorgeous (although probably straight) girl in the program, so THAT was good, you are so sweet. I’ll admit I’m pretty tired to toss off a ficlet right now (between work and socializing and starting editing on one of my Actual Real Completed Novels, I have exactly zero brain), BUT, I’ll tell you about one fic I kind of want for this pairing.
Okay, so if I wrote this thing I would call it “Twelve” and it would be literally just happy, there would be very little angst, which is…probably why I haven’t gotten around to writing it, let’s call a spade a spade. But it would be all the times the number twelve has appeared in Tony and Pepper’s relationship, and I’m sure I’d come up with more while I wrote the thing, but here are a few that would definitely make the cut (with a total disregard for official timeline).
- THE FIRST TIME: Tony has fired…so many personal assistants, okay, and definitely a few quit on grounds of “HE IS IMPOSSIBLE” after finding him asleep half-under a car or after he took apart their coffee machine or something, so Peggy Carter (I’ll fight you for Peggy as Tony’s quirky British aunt) is like “I’m going to handle this, kid,” and gets ahold of the massive list of Stark Industries employees and starts sifting through them for potentials. Once she has her list of possible candidates, she hacks into Tony’s work (actually she has his password because she knows him and he might be a genius but he’s also sentimental) and changes one value in a file he’s about to send out and makes sure it’s going to go to all of her selected candidates and ships it out. The next day a woman in a pair of ruthless heels with a stubborn set to her jaw and orange hair marches into Tony’s office and announces that there’s a mistake in his math–it’s 0.12 off.
- ANOTHER TIME: So Pepper’s been considering quitting because her boss is…Tony Stark, and like even once he shapes up that’s got to be stressful, and she’s only been working for him for a few months at this point. So she takes a few minutes to steel herself and goes down to the lab and finds him drinking, which is…normal, honestly, but he’s not doing anything and the bots are all quiet and he’s just sitting there getting drunk and he looks so pathetic that she can’t bring herself to just quit. Pepper sits down next to him on the lab bench and he says hi, very quiet, and she asks what’s wrong, because Pepper’s like that, and he admits quietly that it’s the anniversary of his parents’ death. She should have known this, in retrospect, because the death of Howard Stark was BIG NEWS, but still: kind of slipped her mind. And he just sighs, this deep bone-shaking sigh, and leans to the side until he reaches her shoulder and says even quieter that it’s been twelve years now (he looks maybe twenty-ish in the flashback at the start of Civil War?), and Pepper decides she can put off quitting until tomorrow.
- ANOTHER TIME: Pepper turns in her resignation twelve times. She also storms in to snatch the letter out of his hands and chew him out for his latest transgression and snarl “Of course I’m not quitting” when he reaches for the letter twelve times. She stops somewhere around the two year mark.
- ANOTHER TIME: During Iron Man. Tony’s been missing for twelve days. Pepper has been handling media relations that whole time–she hasn’t cracked her perfectly smooth professional face once. She locks herself into her office, orders JARVIS to keep everyone out, and cries for two hours that twelfth day.
- ANOTHER TIME: The twelve percent thing in Avengers? Yeah, that’s a running joke, what percent of the Tower Pepper’s responsible for, there would be a bit dealing with that.
- ANOTHER TIME: I don’t fucking know, like, how much do you think the Chitauri damage is going to cost to fix? It’s fairly localized damage, but it’s impressive. So Tony and Pepper have a chat and they decide to donate twelve million dollars to the reconstruction effort, in addition to other stuff.
- THE LAST TIME: Tony takes Pepper out for dinner and reserves the whole restaurant because he DOES actually learn from his mistakes and Pepper doesn’t love being made a public spectacle, and after the meal when she’s looking down at the dessert menu he sets a black velvet box on the table with a ring in it. The ring has a central sapphire–as blue as the dress ‘he’ got her for her birthday–surrounded by twelve minuscule diamonds. She says yes.
