Title: Thirteen Conversations (About One Thing)

Rating: PG -13

Disclaimer: Everything you recognize from any other source either doesn't belong to me or is a purely coincidental occurrence. Anything that you've never seen likely belongs to me. I write for enjoyment and no copyright infringement is intended. Title belongs to Karen and Jill Sprecher, from the film of the same name.

Author's Notes: Complete and utter teeth-rotting fluff-and-angst. For serious. Broody, mawkish angst, and fluffy, fluffy UST. Well, not really just that, because it's definitely a conversation I wanted them to have, and admittedly, the original plan for this conversation involved more angst, but I pushed that back a bit because A) it didn't flow well, and B) I'm in the mood for a bit fluff. The tone is a little different this time around, as is the style - though only slightly - and it mostly stems from the fact that it was written in a number of places, in a number of mindsets, and I liked what they all brought to it, so I tried to knit them together versus trying to homogenize them (that also offers my excuse for the wait - I've been in and out of town, of late).

In any case, nothing really new gets established here, more things just get a bit more grounded, fill out a bit, and the whole to-do does roll around in fluffy, semi-steamy dancing-around-one-another interaction, and that's always a fun thing, right? Maybe?

Thirteen Conversations (About One Thing)

Conversation Three: An Element of Depth

By rights, it's not her responsibility to take care of these sorts of affairs anymore: to make certain that Mr. Stark makes his flight to Asia on time; she's still the CEO, after all, and she could have easily sent any one of her own assistants to collect the man and get him on his way. Granted, it may have taken a number of them to manage it, and only then after considerable effort - and he probably wouldn't have gotten on his way until the conference had already adjourned - but the fact remained: her job description no longer included babysitting Anthony Edward Stark.

Nevertheless, she's fairly certain that it is her responsibility to take care of Tony; and really, it had been for longer than she can clearly recall, now, even before they'd taken up this... whatever this was they were doing - she doesn't like to put a name to it, for fear of dubbing it something more than it is, giving it more weight, more substance than she's prepared to be mistaken about - and so, even though she hasn't talked to him about resuming her position as his PA, it's her heels that click on the steps, her hands that clutch his portfolio as she runs through the highlights in her head, the bullet-points he needs to know before he hits the tarmac.

The bass of his music thumps, vibrates in her chest, plays against her pulse as she keys in her pass-code, the noise assaulting her for the first moment, sore in her ears before she cuts the feed with a press of her fingertip. Lips pursed, she waits a moment, protracted and lingering, until the last echoes of cacophony fade, her steps the only sound that breaks the soft hiss-and-clank of metal and heat coming from his central workstation.

He looks up before she stops, watches her walk for the last few paces; and he's never done that before - she knows it in the way her lungs seem to tighten for an instant, caught between breaths in the permeating smog of sweat and exhaust; creation and chaos and... Tony.

Just Tony, really.

"You're going to go deaf, you know," she comments idly, doing her best not to stare at the smears of grease, the slick of oily residue on his bare skin - at the creases of his knuckles and the edges of his wife-beater; tries not to imagine inching the fabric away, sucking his fingers into her mouth between a moan.

He chuckles, and she grins despite herself; the sound is light - out of place here, in the aftermath of raucous metal - and it diffuses the weight, the heat of the moment gathering in her mind. "Least of my worries, Pep."

His fingertips pinch at something she can't see over the sprawl of parts and pieces littering his worktable, and he squints his eyes, crinkling them at the corners, and she notices - suddenly - the difference between the way the folds of skin align when he's concentrating, as opposed to when he laughs.

She moves to begin speaking, inhaling sharp and swift in preparation for the brief she'll have to deliver in under a minute if she plans on keeping his ever-wandering attention; she's out of practice, even after only a few weeks, and it feels a little daunting, slipping back into this role - anticipating, knowing the rhythm of Tony's very being well enough to remain one step ahead of him at all times.

But it's also easier now, somehow; it feels a little like coming home.

His gaze shifts suddenly, breaks from the mess of wires and gears in the gap where he's removed the casing from a long arch of bowed metal, coats of chafed and gouged red dulled and scratched, just inside the open circlet cut for his reactor. She imagines that it's essential work, things that have to connect and conduct just so, and if his eyes hadn't been on her, weren't locked with her own as his lips part to speak, she may have felt a pang at the thought, the way it hits too close to home that he's tinkering now, not with weapons or toys, but with the technology that keeps him going, keeps him functioning from day to day. Keeps his chest heaving, his blood pumping, his heart beating.

Keeps him alive.

She's not sure she'll ever really get used to that.

A sound crashes from behind him, across the way near one of the numerous wet bars installed in various corners on this floor of the house, and the subsequent shatter of glass, muffled by whatever it might have been holding, cuts them both off.

"Jesus," he huffs, almost growls under his breath, fingers tracing his hairline in frustration and streaking black across the skin at his temple as he turns from her, stalking toward the source of the commotion; she should know better by now, really, but she follows - curiosity, much as it had often led to more trouble than it warranted with him, had never been a habit she'd managed to shake.

She rounds the corner - dodges one of the countless piles of shattered partitions, crumbled concrete and drywall swept, clumped into heaps resembling order, rendering his work area even more of a maze than usual as she tries to keep her heel out of the dust sent billowing from a mallet or a jackhammer - in time to catch his palm cupped roughly around the neck-like stretch of the robotic assistant he'd apparently set about the task of preparing his drink. She stifles a laugh as he gestures between the floor and the countertop, following the puddles of spillage that dot from the blender to the mound of broken glass and the clumped, oddly-colored soup-like beverage that marks the scene of the crime.

"You know," Tony laments as he leans into the bot, lowering his voice with a hint of a sneer; "naming you Dummy may have, in retrospect, been giving you too much credit."

It never fails to amaze her, even after all this time, just how lifelike he could make a machine, how expressive those metallic cylinders and and hard lines could be when bowed in shame just so. She lets her mind trail back to her first few weeks with him, watching the boxy sort of robotics he'd toyed with - cutting edge for its time - and smirks a little at the progress.

"It's a drink," Tony continues to disparage the robot, causing the impossible arch of its framework to sharpen, deepen. "One. Drink. All I ask if that you don't spill the whole thing before I can actually ingest it."

"Have I given you reason to fail at such rudimentary tasks? Have I offended you somehow?" he asks rhetorically, though poor Dummy buzzes mournfully enough to draw a sympathetic frown from her at the verbal barrage. "Have I treated you as something less than what you are? Because quite frankly, what you are, what you literally are, is scrap metal."

The machine nearly skims the floor with how low it's sunk, whirring and humming pathetically as Tony nudges his toe disparagingly at the base of the robot. "Yeah, you're lucky I don't put you out with the trash on..." he pauses thoughtfully, before wrapping up weakly with a nondescript, "on trash day."

"Tuesday," Pepper offers, because he certainly wouldn't know.

"Exactly," he nods at her, turning quickly back to the bot with renewed tenacity; "Tuesday. With the trash." He steps carefully around the broken glass, retrieving another from the cabinet and pouring what's left in the blender until it fills just below the brim. "Clean this up," he gestures idly as he takes a drink, a subtle film of chartreuse clinging above his lip; "think you can manage that?"

The tip of his tongue sneaks out from between his lips after he lifts the glass to his mouth again, cleaning off the residue, and it's only then that the incongruence, the abnormality dawns on her, hard and fast - a bolt of lightning, practically, for the way it singes, strikes fear through her very core.

"Tony, what's..." she starts, cautious, fighting not to jump to any conclusions; because he hates that "green gobbledegook," as he'd so eloquently termed it when she'd been on a juicing kick in '04, and she'd only managed to convince him to try it again - long after she herself had lost the taste for it - when he'd been having trouble getting back on his feet after he'd gotten back from Afghanistan, after...

He only drank that when he was hurting - and now, apparently, when he was dying. And he hadn't been out in the suit since Flushing Meadows.

"Tony," she exhales, a sharp pain seizing in the center of her chest as every manner of devastating revelation flashes through her mind; more things he's kept from her, more lies between them - more obvious pains she's left him to shoulder alone.

"Pepper," and there's a part of her that catches the teasing edge that coats the tail-end of her name - that name he'd given her, that had stuck; fit better, now, than her own, it seemed - but it can't outweigh the sudden, stinging worry.

"You said that," she forces past the lump in her throat, the pulse pounding there, a little breathless; "you said... you're okay." She says it quickly, flatly - fact. Incontrovertible fact.

She's not willingly to accept anything less.

"You're okay, so why are you," she stares at him, at the drink, and what she thinks it means - what it can't mean, can't but has to mean, because, because...

Tony, on the other hand, is staring at her as if she may have unwittingly grown an extra head. "Of course I'm... oh." He must catch the way she's staring at him, at the glass in his hand or at the barely-visible pink above his neckline, healing remnants under the skin. "Oh, that," he adds, a little dumbly, his free hand rubbing against the back of his neck, and she doesn't miss how his fingers finds the bruises, the echoes of the marks.

"It's fine," he says quickly, eyes wide enough that she can't doubt his honesty; the look in his eyes that she's grown to know, that had once told her he didn't have anyone else, that had asked her inn passing whether she often thought about that night on the roof.

The look that had been too clouded to be true when he'd told her he simply didn't want to go home. At all.

"I'm fine," he continues, leaning his weight at the hip against the countertop, lifting his glass but pausing again, hovering just before his lips make contact: "I mean, fine being a vague, amorphous sort of descriptor, but I'm not, you know, dying," he rambles, narrowing his eyes at her with something between supposition and concern; "if that's what you're worried about."

She sees it in his face as it dawns on him that that's exactly what she was worried about; he heaves a sigh as he sets the drink down and locks his gaze inside of hers for the longest stretch of seconds; reassuring. Present.

"Seriously," he reiterates, finally; "Just... habit really, shocking as that might seem. Plus, it is good for you," he inclines his head toward the glass before turning awkwardly toward the upright cooler at his back. "And you're the one always telling me I need more green in my diet, so, yeah."

He tosses her a bottle of Perrier, as if that closes the matter - and maybe it can, though she doubts it. He doesn't even wait to see if she catches it; she does, hands clasped tight around the glass, slipping against the condensation just as the cooler door sucks shut. "Cheers."

She opens the bottle, ignores the way he toasts the air in her direction with his verdant shake; takes a deep breath, and feels exhausted for a long moment, the tension shucking off of her, but not without consequence.

"What are you working on?" she asks between sips as she recovers, to distract herself, maybe. She follows him around a random, still-standing section of his particle accelerator, the humidity produced by whatever he's been tinkering with pulling at the messy bun twisted up against the back of her head, loosing stray strands against the nape of her neck.

"Just a few adjustments to the suit, for the new reactor." She takes in the sprawl of metal and wires, less-than-recognizable as his full suit where it lies in layers and pieces. There'd been a time when it had unnerved her, the spectacle of him beneath the alloy, behind the mask, but now, the dissembled mess of his protection laid in front of her is almost more disturbing, more unsettling than the idea of him safe under its weight.

"Figured if I was going to go ahead and make the repairs, I might as well stick a few upgrades in while I was at it." He walks around the workbench, eyeing up the nondescript slabs of tech and steel with a practiced gaze, noting things she can't even begin to fathom in the melee.

"Care to join me for a test run?" he asks, nonchalant, as he removes his shirt in one clean motion, tossing it across what she thinks might be some component of his propulsion system, maybe; she honestly can't quite tell - isn't paying the idea much attention, really, as she tries her very best not to stare openly at his naked flesh: the golden skin, the definition beneath, the slow dusting of curls that lead below the fly of his jeans, drawn down from his navel.

"What..." she splutters a little, the last swallow of her water still moist against her lips; "You mean," she gestures, a bit lost, between the armor and the ceiling; iron, metal, flying, me - her hands as much of a jumble as her thoughts as she gapes a little at the mere prospect of it.

And it's too bad - her mind whispers traitorously, impossibly - that he'd have to whisk her about the skies with all that metal in between them; she almost dares to wonder whether he could do it without a shirt on.

"Just a spin around the block," he shrugs as he rubs his palms against the thighs of his jeans, as if it's nothing - commonplace, to offer a flight down the coast on a unspectacular Wednesday morning.

"I refuse to drive with you," she starts, tone incredulous as her eyes fix upon the sky outside, glazed through the windows, and she tries not to imagine the rustle of the breeze in her hair, or how the hard wrap of his hold around her middle would feel a few hundred feet above the ground.

"Which is something we're going to have to work on, you do realize," he interjects, the careful scrape of a long, trapezoidal piece of half-assembled armor against the worktop surface echoing around his voice as he lifts it; holds it out in front of him with a critical eye.

"What on earth makes you think I'd want to fly with you?" she finishes, though the disbelief is tempered as she processes the metal plate he's holding, the tangle of integrating circlets and leads, delicate filaments snaking out along the circumference of the opening meant to attach, to draw in against his chest. She watches the almost prism-like design as the light plays inside the newest model of his reactor implant, framed by the empty space in the armor where he hefts it carefully up to test the fit. And it's funny, really, in a strange sort of way, how her pulse jumps, pounds a little harder when she sees it, when it's visible - it makes her nervous, only not quite; more like anxious, maybe, because her chest tightens and she can't look away: she feels exposed on his behalf, even as he doesn't seem to pay it any mind.

"Well, we wouldn't technically be on earth, would we, because we'd be in the air," he points out in that frustratingly endearing way of his, mocking and yet warm, light all at once as he moves to step into the base of his chestpiece. "Semantics, admittedly, but clarity of intention is a virtue, Potts, and-"

"Wait," she interrupts suddenly, and to her surprise he complies, almost automatically- elbows bent, hands stilled with the sheen of newly-molded plating glinting off the lights overhead. He follows her gaze to where it's fixed upon his reactor, glowing between his pecs, half-obscured where he'd been about to attach the plate - she can tell that he suspects, at least, knows what she wants, but he doesn't move to acquiesce on his own: he simply waits, features blank but strong, and watches her: watches as her needs and desires and all the hows and the whys mingle, bleed into one another behind the blue-grey of her stare.

"Can I?" she asks - the question she's wanted to ask for weeks, for months around that tightness in her chest that's more than anxiety or nerves, that feels more like the air being sucked out of a room or breaking the surface of the water after too long of a dive. She knows her eyes are too wide when she looks at him, knows he can read her in the moment - all of the want and the fear in her laid bare for his perusal, his consideration, but he doesn't react to it, doesn't seem to mind; he doesn't even flinch - just puts the armor down and walks toward her, willing; waiting.

She doesn't expect the uncertainty, the nerves that spark in those eyes even as he seems so sure; she doesn't expect his skin to feel so warm, or the metal on her fingertips to be so smooth when she reaches out - quick, before she loses her nerve. His eyes don't quite meet hers, too hooded and downcast to cross her glance, but she can tell they're stormy, conflicted; he's uncomfortable, she can see it, but never once does he waver. He doesn't hide from her.

And that; that means more than anything else.

"It's," she starts, trying to break the strained silence that's come upon them as her touch lingers around the reactor, but her heart's too loud, too hard against her ears for the words to take hold; mouth too dry for the syllables to gain purchase on her tongue. He doesn't seem to notice though, not with the way that the heat of his skin brands deep, strong and unforgiving against the pads of her fingers as she traces, lilts against the now-faint grey lines, grids mark etched, flat but still heavy, twisted in his flesh as tight as it settles in her gut. She swallows hard, following them from where they fade into where his biceps press against his side, where his collarbone lines below his neck, wandering inward to the circle of tepid metal just above his heart. She pauses where the trails cut off against the port in his chest, and it's only then that she catches the beat beneath the steel, the way his pulse races under her touch, hard and fast; the way his chest, beneath the lines and the scars, heaves a little too deeply, too quickly - brushes the swell of her breast when she leans too close.

She'd been afraid of it, from the first time she saw it; the skin around the unpolished metal angry and red, the blood so close to the surface under the scarring that it was hard to tell whether the wounds had ever healed, or if they were still gaping, still exposed. And she'd been right to fear it - how many times had it almost killed him, how close had he been to death just weeks ago, just days? - but the glow of it, the subtle thrum of it below her fingertips - so much more constant and unfaltering than the rhythm thudding on beneath; she'd never noticed how beautiful it was, how bright - how it burned not outside of him, separate from himself, but perfectly in tune with him. Maybe it never had, before; or maybe she'd just never noticed.

She doesn't realize that he's moved until his hands cup against her hips, the pads of his thumbs tracing lazy half-moons from the jut of her pelvis to the line of her skirt, fingers splayed through the fabric of her clothes, his broad hands against her stomach. She feels the pace of his heartbeat surge, the throb seeming to hit a little harder, and there's a flash of something singular, something raw and burning in her that she's known forever and yet had always shied from, denied and brushed aside; had never quite paid enough mind to know its strength, its worth.

His touch lingers, drags across the lines of her ribs, skimming her chest beneath her blouse, and she swallows a moan, stiffens silently against a shiver when he pauses, the breath in his lungs stilling for an instant as his fingers dust, catch in the gather of fabric at her breasts and run, a tease, against the hint of a curve pressed in against her arms. The moment stretches longer than she can track, can hold, and all she can taste is the hammer of her pulse in her throat, all she can feel is his touch on her skin and his heart against her touch, the rhythm of it all condensing to a constant, reeling sort of hum.

"You know, it's a shame you don't want to fly with me," he murmurs, his tone husky, breath weighty on her cheek as he pulls her from her musings, as the idle stroke of her touch around the curve of the reactor slows to a stop - just an unguarded, unmasked point of contact, now, meaning everything and nothing; and suddenly, the world goes warm - the air around her, that she breathes, the brush of his skin: all of it filled irrepressibly, irrevocably, with him. "Being up there," he exhales slowly, "it's..."

His eyes lift past her, through her, before they cross back to center on the features of her face, before he breathes in deep and slides the tip of his nose against the side of hers, his exhalations hot as his lips move, form the syllables close enough to feel, to catch on her skin; "Beautiful."

And the word is more, as he stares it into her, burns it against her eyes into something firmer, deeper; the word means more than cloudscapes and sunrises above sea level.

"Besides," she feels the word as he picks up again, like a purr along his sternum, stuck inside the lines of her palm; "I didn't hear any complaints the last time."

"You were saving me from an explosion," the words come out as half a whisper, but at least they're steady; the only thing about that is, really, as he presses closer, a hairsbreadth between them - his bare chest grazing against her when their ragged breaths align. "And as I recall, I protested enough for you to feel the need to cut me off before I'd finished."

"Hmm," a smile curls across his lips and his eyes narrow deviously; widen with lust and something fathomless that aches in her chest as he leans in and closes the gaps, the reactor catching her hand between them as his breath settles on the dip of her upper lip, his tongue slipping staccato against her mouth with the consonants: "Maybe I should try that again."

And they haven't kissed yet, not like this; the way he pulls her into him, the force of it coupled with something tender, betraying the need that crackles, surges between them; a tension unresolved that's finally reached its breaking point - and not merely, she suspects, because they've finally acknowledged what's always been there, what's grown between them, unassumingly, beyond their lines of sight. And so if it feels like less of a choice and more of an imperative, a unquestionable necessity - requisite, if either of them was going to make it out alive; or maybe, instead, if either was going to stay inside of this, together, without falling apart - she's not going to question it, not going to analyze why his lips feel hotter, why she notices the breaks in them, the rough patches when they catch at the corners of her mouth as he delves farther, deeper; as his tongue runs across the roof of her mouth and he drinks her, breathes her in as she lets her bottom teeth graze against his lower lip, his taste heady and full as she presses into him. Her petite hands are nothing to be trifled with as she wraps them around his shoulder blades and crushes him to her, nothing left between them but the wrinkles of her shirt and the heat gathering, condensing on their skin.

She whimpers when he nearly sucks the breath from her as he pushes them into the edge of the worktable, her heels giving her the advantage of the surface hitting just near the top of her thighs; she wants to fall back, to give in to the momentum of the moment, of his gravity and his weight against her, his chest upon her own - she wants it, wants it with everything she is as his fingertips draw against the line of her jaw and he cups her cheek with one hand and her hip with the other, his body fitting between her knees with lazy, instinctual precision. She wants it, but they can't.

They can't right now.

She feels the shift immediately, the way that the buzz, the high around them begins to subside, and she can tell he picks up on it just as quickly - experienced as he is with these sorts of situations, she thinks a bit wryly - and the sigh, the gasp that escapes them both when they part feels subtle, ordinary: momentous in a silent way that she doesn't comprehend yet, but knows is something new, something different - something she'd like to understand through experience, familiarity; through knowing it intimately, often enough to recognize it on sight.

His chest veritably shudders as he pushes up and off of her, staggers away a little drunkenly - reluctant, she flatters herself to imagine, only it's not just her imagination; she's pretty sure it's true. She's no stranger to the look in his eyes, and she's pretty certain she knows what it means; knows, because it tingles in the pit of her stomach and sends heat pulsing through her veins anew, leaves the unresolved tightness in her writhing, aching all over again, the taste of him like a drug on her tastebuds, burning like fire with every slowing - racing, slowing, racing - throb of her heart.

She sucks a steadying breath in, cold and thick through her teeth, and she does her best to calm everything in her, to let it go for the time being on the promise that they'll be back here again, and soon; with the careful run of her tongue across her gums to replace the frantic exploration of his own, she steers them away from the precipice.

For now.

"You've been drinking that?" she says with a smile, smacking the words against the backs of her teeth, the grainy texture of proteins, of fibers there likely imagined out of necessity; to distract from the overwhelming tang of him beneath the fleeting impressions of green, and she tries to focus on the sensations beyond the heat in her stomach, the thump of her pulse - the tension between her legs.

And he takes pause, if only for an instant, processing the absurdity, the change in tone and intent for just a moment before he laughs; really laughs - in a way she's rarely seen him do it; his shoulders shake and his eyes squint and his cheeks grow ruddy with the effort of amusement, and she feels everything else melt slowly, impossibly, blissfully and tortuously away; wonders if this is what he looked like before the world came crashing down around him, or if it's something new entirely. "Not that I had much of a choice in the matter," he retorts with a wry sort of mirth; "but you get used to it, actually. S'an acquired taste."

"Hmmm," she moans, keens, and they're still close enough that he can hear the undertones, the meaning in it; and she can't deny it's gratifying when she notices the way he clenches his jaw as it echoes.

"Wonderful as this distraction's been, Tony," she purrs through a smile, infusing just the slightest edge of authority in the sound; "you're late for a flight to Hong Kong."

And certainly, it kills the mood on the surface; but they've started something, here - taken a step that can't be unmade, and she knows that however long it takes to get back to that place, it will be waiting for them.

She sees it in his eyes, in her eyes reflected back in his; they've jumped ship, passed the brink. They can't avoid it forever.

And besides: the way his lips part as he pants, catches his breath again; the way her sight seems a little brighter, a little hazy - the way they're both still breathing each other's air - she's pretty sure that means avoiding this is no longer a priority for either one of them.

And she's more than 'pretty sure' that she's okay with that fact.

Tony takes a moment to adjust, as if walking from the darkness out into the sun: he blinks once, twice - seeming to erase whatever visions he'd been forming behind his eyes with the motion, putting them away for safekeeping, a later date - before he, too, lets it go with an exaggerated sigh.

"You know," he says, finally, his tone tinged with a whine; "there was this moment, a very brief moment, mind you, in which I imagined that we had gotten past the point of haranguing."

And it's kind of uncanny, how quickly it happens, how that word washes away the last vestiges of the humming contentment, the vibrating high of the taste of him on her lips; how it darkens the edges of her perception with something sinister, churns in her stomach like foreboding mixed with loss, and - worse still - the false hope of the impossible coming true, just because her heart was breaking, and he was gone, and she didn't know how to survive in the wake of the pieces left behind.

She barely hears the rest of his good-humored ramble; not that she needs to, she knows it by heart: "You've no idea how disappointing it is to find that I was, in fact, mistaken." She doesn't quite process the way he strides to the sink and washes from the elbows down without her instruction, or how he spits orders at Jarvis and the bots like clockwork, a well-oiled routine of encrypting files and safeguarding works-in-progress that should probably impress her, really, except that she's still lost, swimming in the memories she thought she'd gotten over, thought she'd left behind.

Memories she thought she'd laid to rest, until she learned she'd almost lost him again.

"I know I've pointed this out to you before," he tosses over his shoulder, even as he dries his skin and shrugs on a clean shirt without his usual degree of petulance; "but somehow, having my own plane makes me significantly disinclined to care so much about being on time."

And of course he's said it before; of course he has, and the smirk on his mouth, the glint in his eyes as he turns and winks at her does nothing to keep the memories of that day - that horrible day that had plagued her dreams for so long, too long - the day she was born twisted from a day of celebration into three months' worth of mourning. She remembers the details with despicable clarity: the high neck of the shirt he'd been wearing, the way he shrugged on his jacket and slid into the Audi and unfolded his sunglasses with one foot flat against the cement floor, hung across the threshold between the doorjambs, the other hovering already above the gas pedal. She remembers the way he'd slipped his shades over his eyes, and she remembers how she'd missed their color underneath the tinge of red - everything rose-colored, because Tony Stark lived a fantasy, except he didn't, not that day.

Except; maybe he did. Maybe he did, because he'd come back. Against all odds, he'd somehow managed to come back.

And there's nothing in the world she's more grateful for than that.

She bites her lips against the urge to say something, or maybe to sob - she hadn't given these shadows enough credit, apparently, for how easily they take her over, even now - and she realizes in that moment - unexpectedly, unsurprisingly - that she can't let him go, let him leave; not after she'd felt him pressed against her like that, watched the way his eyes had darkened with need and lust and unspeakable things, not when his flavor still outweighed her own in her mouth: beyond all likelihood and logic, she couldn't, wouldn't watch him walk away like that again.

Not today.

"I'd," she coughs into her hand, and it draws his attention for the last half of a second, his eyes meeting hers above the lip of his glass as he drains the last of his chlorophyl cocktail; "I'll be accompanying you, actually."

His faces sours as he swallows the dregs too quick, his response delayed as he clicks his tongue reflexively against the roof of his mouth to temper down the taste. "You're what?"

"I'm coming with you," she says, this time considerably more confident, as if the first time she'd just been practicing, and he'd merely been distracted enough to think she'd been unsure.

"Why?" His eyes narrow; he'd noticed, and she can't help but be a little bit flattered - a little bit perturbed that he'd picked now to heed the little fluctuations in her voice, now to figure out what they may or may not mean.

"I have to meet with someone." And her jaw tightens, her chin tipped up a bit so that the point of her nose goes a little bit higher, her eyes heavily-lidded as she stares him down with an authority she can own even as she improvises - because maybe it hadn't worked out this time around, but she really did have the makings, the bearing of an chief executive officer.

"Someone?" he counters skeptically, eyebrow quirked just so, head cocked with the question of it - she's usually so much more precise.

She clarifies, blinking too quickly as she doubles back mentally: "Director Leung." She pictures the tall-yet-shorter-than-her-in-heels man in his early thirties, with his prematurely-thinning hair and his careful expressions. She averts her eyes by grabbing at the portfolio she'd set on the counter and shuffling through the various paperwork stuffed within - she may be able to fool the corporate world, but he knows her, and will be able to call her bluff if she gives him an in: even a playboy picks things up over the course of a decade.

"He and I have a few things to iron out regarding the particulars of the agreement before I'm officially ousted from my position," she adds, in an attempt to solidify her argument.

"You're the one who wanted out," he reminds her pointedly before backtracking to address the matter at hand; "I thought that was the whole reason I was going."

"Two heads are better than one, Tony," she counters, adopting a non-nonsense sort of air as she schools her expression and closes the portfolio with a forceful, final snap. "And admittedly, while I'm not expecting them to be experts on the matter, I certainly don't know even the first thing about how the arc reactor works,"

"That's a lie," he cuts her off without remorse, his eyes bright when he turns them on her.

"What?"

"You probably know more than most of the people who worked around that thing every day," he tells her, crossing his arms carefully over his chest as he considers her with more intensity that she thinks the exchange actually deserves. "You popped one out of my chest, and snapped another one back in."

"After nearly killing you," she quips sharply, as if it's so small a matter in the grand scheme of things that it actually requires reminding.

As if sometimes, her nightmares don't show her what may have happened, had there been no 'nearly.'

"Details," he waves her off as he grabs for his jacket, slips his arms into the sleeves, stretching the cotton across his chest taut, tempting, only she doesn't think he knows it, doesn't think she teases her on purpose.

This time.

"You know how to access the fail-safe mechanism to overload the reactor core. I think like, maybe, twelve people in the world know how to initiate that protocol."

She wills her mind not to go there, not again.

"You know that they're important enough not to get rid of," he says softly, his voice taking on a strange quality she doesn't recognize - not in him, at least - as his fingers press along the jut of the reactor where it shines through his shirt, a gentle smile curling the corners of his mouth with a sort of a melancholy nostalgia that she can't read, can't know if it's good or it's bad.

He steps toward her, then, and gathers her hands in his own - leaves the space between them to yawn, but when runs the pads of his thumbs across her knuckles, it's oddly, intensely, wonderfully intimate, just standing there with him.

"You know lots of things," he murmurs, the sadness in his smile giving way to something almost shy, and somehow - and she's not at all sure as to why - but somehow, that's the most glowing compliment he's ever paid her.

When he lets go, it takes a moment before she can focus on anything but the fact that she misses the feel of his fingers around hers.

"Shall we then?" She blinks, and he's already walking; he stops when the echo of her heels doesn't follow, spinning on his the balls of his feet and backing away at half the pace, smirking as he reads the mild confusion in her face. "Me. You. China. Wasn't that the plan?" He turns again, on the trust that she'll follow this time.

And she does, of course; but her eyes linger on the workbench for a moment, the still-wet basin of the sink, water droplets clinging to the sides, and it's only then she sees it, unimposing, quiet in the corner.

He's rehung the Barnett Newman she loves so much.

She knows he doesn't understand why it's her favorite, but that's not what matters. What matters is that it's still there, and what's more: there's no trace of Shepard Fairey to be seen.

With a grin, she follows him to his newly-returned car collection, hoping he chooses something that doesn't exceed a maximum of one-hundred-and-sixty miles an hour.

Then again, she's not sure he owns very much that fits that description.

The flight seems longer than it should be, though she manages to catch a quick nap along the way; and if it just so happens that said nap takes place upon the chaise that Tony'd somehow managed to squeeze along side of her on, her head tucked beneath his chin and his arm draped lazily around her waist - well, she's certainly not complaining.

When they land, just before they disembark, he slips an arm around her hips, presses the silhouette of her against his side and breathes her in from the crook of her neck to the curl of her hair, his lashes tickling her jawline, the skin just below her ear as his eyes slide close. He exhales against her - heavy, full - his lips firm yet yielding when he presses them to her cheek like a promise of something better, something more before the sun breaks through the open door and they have to pull away.

He slips the last button of his jacket into its hole with deft fingers as they alight on foreign soil, his hand outstretched and his smile soft but genuine as he greets the waiting executives and the smattering of dignitaries they've toted along to impress the infamous Mr. Stark. He takes it all in stride, of course: his Chinese stilted but accurate until they transition naturally into English after pleasantries are exchanged. She almost holds back behind him, slipping into the role of the assistant - after all, she reminds herself, she's not here as the exiting CEO of Stark International, and even in the short span where she had been in charge, she hadn't had the opportunity for face-to-face interaction like this - but before she can process the habit, his hand brushes at her waist, bringing her up alongside of him: nothing untoward, or suggestive of anything than the fact that they're equals, partners.

As she inquires after the Chairman's son, who she remembers had just joined the PLA when they'd last been in Hong Kong, she hears Tony inquiring after the negotiations headed up by Director Leung; who, Tony says, he recalls has been in Kuwait for the past three weeks, and wouldn't be returning for another four.

And she knows she's been found out; had never fooled him at all, in fact. She doesn't delude herself into thinking that he'd misinterpreted her intentions, her need to come along; she does, however, wonder why he allowed it, why he didn't put up a fight.

She ducks her head as she feels a blush creep up her neck, hoping that she can pass it off on the heat; but she catches his eye as she averts her own, and the smile he flashes her as they walk together after making their greetings is brilliant, catches against the sun, and there's something there, now - an understanding, maybe, an appreciation; but Pepper likes to think that maybe it's an element of depth, a sense of affection or care.

But something's there, alright; and whatever it is, she likes it.