fic
Because it's chaos_harmony's birthday. Pepper feelings translated into fic. Or maybe two fics? Work(s)-in-progress, I think. Give it some time before I post it somewhere other people will notice it. This probably should (may eventually) be a Five Things fic, but at this point there are only two things.
What nearly everyone forgets about Pepper is that she was at MIT, too. Not for engineering, of course -- business. (People often forget that MIT has a business school, too, so Pepper never really minds too much.) That's where she met Tony, originally. Pepper didn't grow up with designer heels -- she earned her way through college, mostly by working for the Admissions Department, and Tech Callers, and various administrative offices. She was good at people, and logistics, and schedules, so she liked and did well at all of these jobs, and that was why someone recommended she send her resume in to an overpaid position giving tours at Stark Boston. "It's a thankless job, working with Tony Stark," the supervisor who told her about the opportunity said. (He'd been at MIT with Tony, himself.) "But I know you can do it, and they pay a lot better than any job you'll get on campus." And Pepper needed money, and figured it couldn't possibly be worse than calling people asking for money. So she applied, and met Mr. Stane very briefly, and had a job. (Mr. Stane glanced at her, smirked a little, and said, "Don't let Tony harass you, and you'll be fine.")
In preparation for the first tour she was supposed to give, Pepper spent a day walking through Stark Boston, meeting all the researchers who were going to be showing off their toys. The last person she met that day was Tony Stark himself. That first time, he seemed nice enough, if a bit scatter-brained. But she found she liked him, even if he seemed incapable of remembering her name for more than five minutes, and informed her that her suit didn't fit properly. He talked about his robots with rabid enthusiasm and even explained what he was doing in a way that she mostly understood. Considering every step of her job application and orientation process had carried provisos like "...but you have to deal with Tony..." she was pleasantly surprised.
A week later, she actually gave her first tour of Stark Boston to group of visiting investors. When she got to Tony's lab space, she found its owner absent and the lab desk covered with a mess of diagrams, moldy coffee cups, and empty liqueur bottles. Pepper, who only displayed stress when she couldn't do anything about it, casually dropped her scarf on the bottles and began recapitulating what Tony told her the week before about his research. When one of the visitors asked about meeting the man himself, Pepper smiled with thoroughly repressed irritation (it looked pleasant) and explained in her most patronizing tone that Mr. Stark was a very busy man, and Stark Boston was only one of several R&D facilities he supervised. As far as Pepper could tell, that supervision was entirely nominal, though of course the investors didn't need to know that. According to gossip, Tony did all the real innovation in the basement of one of his several houses and dropped the prototypes off at R&D without much explanation. The point of R&D was to reverse engineer the prototypes and figure out how to affordably reproduce Tony's genius.
The night after that tour, Pepper got a commendation for handling Tony's absence from Mr. Stane's secretary. Pepper eyed it incredulously (a combination of doing her job shouldn't require special thanks, and if anyone should be thanking her, it was Tony himself) and went back to her problem sets.
****************
Pepper always called him Tony in her head. At first it was just the fault of Stark Boston. Tony was on a first-name basis with most of the world in a celebrity sort of way, and he was emphatically on a first-name basis with all his R&D employees. According to the newest MIT undergraduate slave labor (UROP, sorry, UROP), you couldn't possibly feel respectful and distant from a boss who alternately tried to buy you a party during your physics midterm and abused your attempts at coding. "I mean, in some ways it sucks, because usually you can usually think -- oh, well, he just doesn't understand how hard MIT is, but it's Tony fucking Stark. He knows exactly how hard it is, and he'd already finished when he was my age."
And then Pepper called him Tony in her head because she categorically refused to be polite (in her head) to someone who had missed every tour he was supposed to speak at, and had no conception of the word apology, and regularly called her "hot red-headed chick" when he forgot his name (which was often).
And then at some point, she realized she didn't call him Tony because he was rude and egotistical, but because she also couldn't find it in her to (mentally) designate adulthood to anyone who looked so genuinely confused to find someone shaking him awake and insisting he go home when he fell asleep in the lab -- like no one had had bothered to do so before. And she couldn't think Mr. Stark when she brought him chicken soup at his ridiculous house halfway across town because he clearly had the flu and wouldn't go to the doctor and she was sort of afraid he would starve. Really, you couldn't call anyone with Tony's complete inability to look after himself Mr. Anything.
And then she thought of him as Tony because even though he was technically her boss at the moment, he was also kind of friend. She'd learned how to make him show up to at least some of his presentations, and he knew how to make her laugh, and always remembered her name (even though he'd insisted Virginia made her sound stupid and used her mother's unfortunate diminutive of Pepper). And when her boyfriend dumped her and she was suddenly homeless, Tony didn't mock or advantage, he just gave her keys to his outrageous house and told her to choose her favorite guestroom and stay for as long as she wanted.
When Pepper graduated the second time, none of her family could afford to fly out, and she didn't really want to go through the whole dog and pony show again. So she ended up in Tony's living room, a newly-minted MBA, sharing a bottle (all right, several bottles) of expensive champagne with Tony fucking Stark. She started giggling out of nowhere when she suddenly realized she wasn't working for Tony any more, and it wasn't even her job to make sure he didn't die of alcohol poisoning, and yet she was still here, stealing his champagne. "What?" Tony demanded, still clear-voiced and somewhat articulate, though she suspected he would have trouble walking in a straight by now.
"I'm not even working for you any more," Pepper explained, as if it made sense.
All the expression fell off of Tony's face, as if he hadn't even thought of that yet (at all). "But -- you're not going anywhere, are you?" Tony said, as if Pepper were going to keep living in his big, echoing house now that she had two degrees and a real job and everything.
She laughed at him for real this time. "Tony," she said, long and exasperated on the 'o', the first time she'd said his name aloud. "I job have offers from Lockhead Martin and Goldman Sachs and many other people, and most of those jobs will not be in Boston. I am not going to keep sleeping your spare room."
Tony made his most Tony pouting face. "But I don't want you to leave." And because he was Tony, he downed the end his champagne and went to collect a bottle of whiskey. (She was right, he was having trouble with straight lines.) As he sat down on the couch again, cradling straight whiskey, he exclaimed, "I know! You can just keep working for me! I need a PA, Obie says, especially since you're leaving, but the people he sends me are always stupid or quit or won't work with me. Pepper, it'll be great! We can move to Malibu. Don't you want to go to California? I'm getting bored of Boston, and you'll be able to visit your grandmother!"
"Tony --" Pepper interjected quickly, finding that the exasperated pronunciation of his name had apparently stuck. "Tony, you can't seriously be suggesting that I take my very hard-earned degree to fetch you coffee. For one thing, I have student loans to pay back."
Tony waved this aside. "Do you actually want to go be an office drone? What are those other people offering to pay you? Never mind, I'll pay you twice that. You can quit whenever you find something you actually want to do. C'mon, Pep, it'll be fun!"
Pepper eyed him across the cushion their feet were sharing, wondering when this had become her life, wondering whether this was some odd Tony-game of drunk chicken. But no, he wasn't that drunk yet, she knew all his stages of drunk, and he was serious. And she thought about the fact that of all her many friends, she was voluntarily spending her graduation celebration with Tony Stark, and thought about her college debts (because private college was not cheap, okay?) and shrugged and raised her champagne flute and said, "Well, Mr. Stark, you've hired yourself the most expensive PA in history."
What nearly everyone forgets about Pepper is that she was at MIT, too. Not for engineering, of course -- business. (People often forget that MIT has a business school, too, so Pepper never really minds too much.) That's where she met Tony, originally. Pepper didn't grow up with designer heels -- she earned her way through college, mostly by working for the Admissions Department, and Tech Callers, and various administrative offices. She was good at people, and logistics, and schedules, so she liked and did well at all of these jobs, and that was why someone recommended she send her resume in to an overpaid position giving tours at Stark Boston. "It's a thankless job, working with Tony Stark," the supervisor who told her about the opportunity said. (He'd been at MIT with Tony, himself.) "But I know you can do it, and they pay a lot better than any job you'll get on campus." And Pepper needed money, and figured it couldn't possibly be worse than calling people asking for money. So she applied, and met Mr. Stane very briefly, and had a job. (Mr. Stane glanced at her, smirked a little, and said, "Don't let Tony harass you, and you'll be fine.")
In preparation for the first tour she was supposed to give, Pepper spent a day walking through Stark Boston, meeting all the researchers who were going to be showing off their toys. The last person she met that day was Tony Stark himself. That first time, he seemed nice enough, if a bit scatter-brained. But she found she liked him, even if he seemed incapable of remembering her name for more than five minutes, and informed her that her suit didn't fit properly. He talked about his robots with rabid enthusiasm and even explained what he was doing in a way that she mostly understood. Considering every step of her job application and orientation process had carried provisos like "...but you have to deal with Tony..." she was pleasantly surprised.
A week later, she actually gave her first tour of Stark Boston to group of visiting investors. When she got to Tony's lab space, she found its owner absent and the lab desk covered with a mess of diagrams, moldy coffee cups, and empty liqueur bottles. Pepper, who only displayed stress when she couldn't do anything about it, casually dropped her scarf on the bottles and began recapitulating what Tony told her the week before about his research. When one of the visitors asked about meeting the man himself, Pepper smiled with thoroughly repressed irritation (it looked pleasant) and explained in her most patronizing tone that Mr. Stark was a very busy man, and Stark Boston was only one of several R&D facilities he supervised. As far as Pepper could tell, that supervision was entirely nominal, though of course the investors didn't need to know that. According to gossip, Tony did all the real innovation in the basement of one of his several houses and dropped the prototypes off at R&D without much explanation. The point of R&D was to reverse engineer the prototypes and figure out how to affordably reproduce Tony's genius.
The night after that tour, Pepper got a commendation for handling Tony's absence from Mr. Stane's secretary. Pepper eyed it incredulously (a combination of doing her job shouldn't require special thanks, and if anyone should be thanking her, it was Tony himself) and went back to her problem sets.
****************
Pepper always called him Tony in her head. At first it was just the fault of Stark Boston. Tony was on a first-name basis with most of the world in a celebrity sort of way, and he was emphatically on a first-name basis with all his R&D employees. According to the newest MIT undergraduate slave labor (UROP, sorry, UROP), you couldn't possibly feel respectful and distant from a boss who alternately tried to buy you a party during your physics midterm and abused your attempts at coding. "I mean, in some ways it sucks, because usually you can usually think -- oh, well, he just doesn't understand how hard MIT is, but it's Tony fucking Stark. He knows exactly how hard it is, and he'd already finished when he was my age."
And then Pepper called him Tony in her head because she categorically refused to be polite (in her head) to someone who had missed every tour he was supposed to speak at, and had no conception of the word apology, and regularly called her "hot red-headed chick" when he forgot his name (which was often).
And then at some point, she realized she didn't call him Tony because he was rude and egotistical, but because she also couldn't find it in her to (mentally) designate adulthood to anyone who looked so genuinely confused to find someone shaking him awake and insisting he go home when he fell asleep in the lab -- like no one had had bothered to do so before. And she couldn't think Mr. Stark when she brought him chicken soup at his ridiculous house halfway across town because he clearly had the flu and wouldn't go to the doctor and she was sort of afraid he would starve. Really, you couldn't call anyone with Tony's complete inability to look after himself Mr. Anything.
And then she thought of him as Tony because even though he was technically her boss at the moment, he was also kind of friend. She'd learned how to make him show up to at least some of his presentations, and he knew how to make her laugh, and always remembered her name (even though he'd insisted Virginia made her sound stupid and used her mother's unfortunate diminutive of Pepper). And when her boyfriend dumped her and she was suddenly homeless, Tony didn't mock or advantage, he just gave her keys to his outrageous house and told her to choose her favorite guestroom and stay for as long as she wanted.
When Pepper graduated the second time, none of her family could afford to fly out, and she didn't really want to go through the whole dog and pony show again. So she ended up in Tony's living room, a newly-minted MBA, sharing a bottle (all right, several bottles) of expensive champagne with Tony fucking Stark. She started giggling out of nowhere when she suddenly realized she wasn't working for Tony any more, and it wasn't even her job to make sure he didn't die of alcohol poisoning, and yet she was still here, stealing his champagne. "What?" Tony demanded, still clear-voiced and somewhat articulate, though she suspected he would have trouble walking in a straight by now.
"I'm not even working for you any more," Pepper explained, as if it made sense.
All the expression fell off of Tony's face, as if he hadn't even thought of that yet (at all). "But -- you're not going anywhere, are you?" Tony said, as if Pepper were going to keep living in his big, echoing house now that she had two degrees and a real job and everything.
She laughed at him for real this time. "Tony," she said, long and exasperated on the 'o', the first time she'd said his name aloud. "I job have offers from Lockhead Martin and Goldman Sachs and many other people, and most of those jobs will not be in Boston. I am not going to keep sleeping your spare room."
Tony made his most Tony pouting face. "But I don't want you to leave." And because he was Tony, he downed the end his champagne and went to collect a bottle of whiskey. (She was right, he was having trouble with straight lines.) As he sat down on the couch again, cradling straight whiskey, he exclaimed, "I know! You can just keep working for me! I need a PA, Obie says, especially since you're leaving, but the people he sends me are always stupid or quit or won't work with me. Pepper, it'll be great! We can move to Malibu. Don't you want to go to California? I'm getting bored of Boston, and you'll be able to visit your grandmother!"
"Tony --" Pepper interjected quickly, finding that the exasperated pronunciation of his name had apparently stuck. "Tony, you can't seriously be suggesting that I take my very hard-earned degree to fetch you coffee. For one thing, I have student loans to pay back."
Tony waved this aside. "Do you actually want to go be an office drone? What are those other people offering to pay you? Never mind, I'll pay you twice that. You can quit whenever you find something you actually want to do. C'mon, Pep, it'll be fun!"
Pepper eyed him across the cushion their feet were sharing, wondering when this had become her life, wondering whether this was some odd Tony-game of drunk chicken. But no, he wasn't that drunk yet, she knew all his stages of drunk, and he was serious. And she thought about the fact that of all her many friends, she was voluntarily spending her graduation celebration with Tony Stark, and thought about her college debts (because private college was not cheap, okay?) and shrugged and raised her champagne flute and said, "Well, Mr. Stark, you've hired yourself the most expensive PA in history."