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(Pepper doesn’t find her missed call until long after the news channels have looped Iron Man falling out of the sky, being resuscitated by the Hulk, and wandering off into the wreckage of New York’s streets for at least the third time. She’s got a string of calls from shareholders, her family, Happy and Rhodey, at least some of which she should respond to with a steady responsible Stark Industries CEO voice in the near future, but in the middle of the list is Tony’s name. She looks at his name and she looks at the time and she thinks: oh.
There’s no voicemail, and Pepper is mostly relieved that she wasn’t there to pick it up.
Part of her, of course, the hysterical part that for a moment thought Tony was dead and she’d spent their last night together teasing him amid a building site – that part of her wanted a voicemail, an eloquent action-hero message she could play over and over. But she signed on for being Tony Stark’s girlfriend, and the chances are he wouldn’t have managed to say what he actually wanted to, and one of them would’ve given out before the discussion was through.
Baby steps, Pepper has learned with Tony: baby steps.)
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Pepper has watched Tony Stark date people before.
Well, that might be being generous with her words; she’s watched Tony interact in a romantic or sexual fashion with other people, anyway. ‘Dating’ in any real sense of the word has generally been beyond him in the time Pepper has known Tony; the only person he’s ever really been committed to has been JARVIS. Well, and Pepper, but it took him several years and some near death experiences to notice it.
Howard and Maria Stark left out a lot of the fundamentals of parenting, but they did impress upon their son the importance of always showing up somewhere with a gift. For most people, this just means a bottle of ten dollar wine or a bouquet of gas station flowers; on one memorable occasion, Tony had bought an entire vineyard so that he could rename all the wines after the current object of his affection.
(Pepper had called them an hour later and discreetly cancelled it all; god knows, the world didn't need Tony Stark owning his own vintages.)
Over the years, Pepper has watched Tony shower women with everything his money could buy: the contents of a Victoria's Secret catalogue, apartments full of flowers, desserts flown in by private jet from Europe, venues hired for the night just for him and his date. He's bought them signature perfumes, beach houses, Manolo's entire autumn collection, and patches of real estate on the moon.
It would be simple to say that Tony thinks that gifts are easy; that it's easier to make a woman's eyes light up with thirty-four designer handbags than it is to take the time to actually win her over. Gifts are quick and simple and breathtakingly impersonal, and they get the job done. But this isn't Pepper's first or second or even third rodeo, and she has seen Tony at his best and his worst and all the places in between, and she knows that Tony hides behind gifts because he's frightened that that's all he has; that underneath the glitter and sparkle and the five-hundred chocolate-dipped strawberries delivered in a swan-shaped ice sculpture there's nothing there that's going to make someone fall for him.
Pepper knows what's there, lurking beneath the smirk and the sarcasm and the self-destructive masochism he's somehow turned into a career, but she's not sure that Tony does yet.
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She cannot fucking believe that Tony pulled the Giant Stuffed Animal shit on her.
(Still, at least it's bigger than any of the stuffed animals he's sent women before. She gets a sick sense of satisfaction out of that, even while she's fantasising about poking the rabbit's eyes out.)
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They wouldn't have gotten this far if Pepper wasn't really good at the waiting game, at letting Tony burn himself out first so they can get it over with before moving forward. So she catches up on her paperwork and has the thousands of roses he sends donated to a nearby hospital, hands out hundreds of Tiffany blue boxes to her employees as part of their bonus, and, well, she does keep the shoes. She's only human, and anyway, she's been buying shoes with Tony's money for years; it's nice that it's legit for once.
After the string quartet shows up when she's trying to have a lunch meeting and refuse to leave until they've played her Tony's horrifying mixtape of romantic hits, Pepper realises that he's getting frantic, and a frantic Tony makes appalling choices. She’s probably going to have to intervene before he buys her a library on a university campus, complete with a statue of her in a bikini in the entrance atrium; it wouldn’t be the first time.
Besides, Tony has started looking at her with a facial expression that’s a weird mixture of his intense research face – like if he manages to edit the equation slightly she’ll finally explode in a shower of satisfying sparks – and that of a household pet, who keeps bringing you dead mice and can’t understand why you don’t love them more. If she doesn’t put a stop to this soon, she’s probably going to end up with her own private island and some kind of constellation named after her and things are going to unravel.
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Things unravel anyway.
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“I wanted to get you I’m Sorry I Got You Blown Up balloons,” Tony rambles into her hair, “but I figured that involved spending money.”
Pepper’s not sure how long she’s been in the hospital, everything is thick and muzzy and blurred, but Tony is his usual too-bold self, arguing with the doctors when they want him to leave, eating his heart out when he thinks she’s too hopped up on painkillers to notice, and being there in increasingly worn band t-shirts whenever she opens her eyes, no matter how late or how early.
She presses her fingers to Tony’s cheek, tips brushing the corner of badly-healing black eye, and he isn’t glossy, isn’t glittery, isn’t tabloid-bright: he’s jagged edges and wild eyes and more raw than either of them would like, but he’s not Iron Man or Tony Stark or anything other than hers right now. He’s not trying to rebuild their home or his lab or the suits; he’s just there, watching bad daytime TV and drinking endless cups of vending machine coffee and not shifting around with that endless energy he usually has that implies he’d prefer to be in about sixteen places at once.
Rhodey got her balloons, anyway, because Rhodey isn’t under any caveats, and Pepper makes sure when she smiles it’s as genuine as she can get it through the crowded fog of her lengthy hospital stay.
“I don’t need balloons,” she says softly, and: “we’ll talk about how this isn’t as much your fault as you want it to be when I get out of here.”
He makes a softly wounded noise and presses his face into her neck, and Pepper closes her eyes and doesn’t let go; it’s enough, for now.
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It’s weeks later, when the nightmares have mostly stopped and the news broadcasts have mostly stopped showing footage of the burned-up wreckage that was once their home before Tony decided that their domestic sort-of-bliss needed some more reckless endangerment in it. Pepper can walk into her office every morning and nothing’s been brought in overnight that isn’t paperwork, and she can come home at the end of the day to a home that doesn’t look like it was invaded by a blizzard of Hallmark cards. She and Tony take their good nights and bad nights in turns, and he’s still looking at her with something ticking behind his eyes, but it’s the good kind of ticking, she thinks, the kind she’ll allow to continue undisturbed.
Eventually, one evening, he locks their hands together, and she feels something cold in the palm of her hand. He looks anxious but pleased, sort of glowing, and when he takes his hand away she’s left holding a ring. A small, perfect, shining ring, delicate, perfectly sized.
It’s beautiful.
“First thing I made in the new workshop,” Tony says, voice one step off babbling, trembly and soft. “All scraps I had on hand, not a dollar spent.”
Pepper thinks about telling Tony that maybe he has a future in jewellery design, if he isn’t making weapons or robot suits these days. She thinks about teasing him, see, that wasn’t so hard, was it? She thinks about burying her face in his neck and shrieking like all the young women he showered with presents over the years.
“Thank you,” she says, simply, not entirely surprised to find that her throat is trying to close itself up. “It’s beautiful.”
Tony’s face relaxes, and his eyes light up, and she presses their foreheads together to grin her matching delight before she kisses him.
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