AN:Oh hayz! I writes the fic! And…it is strangely similar to my Literati fic of the same nature. Sigh. I'm stealing from my own muse. Actually, I'm stealing from all over the place with this one.
Also, I have to apologize to soccer moms everywhere, because I think I let my hatred of children leak into Pepper for a little bit. Sorry.
This was inspired mostly by the adorable 2003 MTV ad for Gothika which had RDJ shopping in Blockbuster. "John Cusack. Say anything. He knows what he's doing up there on screen. Cusack again. I mean what am I his publicist?" "But I'm just kidding I respect you and I don't want any trouble." "Another film I coulda done if I wasn't in the clink." Whooboy. Yes. Love.
Disclaimer: This belongs to a bunch of people who aren't me.
Domestic Cozitude
"This is why I always go shopping alone."
Tony glances vaguely in her direction before he returns his eyes to the can of Cheez Whiz in his hand. "Hmm…what?"
"Put the Cheez Whiz down, Tony."
"I'm just curious what's in this stuff. I've never actually had it before, but from the looks of these ingredients it could survive a nuclear blast." His lips quirked as he tossed the canister up in the air and caught it. "It sounds fantastic. Let's get some." She opens her mouth to protest but he's already lobbed it into the basket of the cart she's pushing through the chips aisle in a frenzy, trying to move through it quickly enough that he isn't distracted by something shiny and fattening she'll end up eating after it spends months in his cabinets getting dusty and stale.
She doesn't do any kind of shopping with Tony, ever, because he always does this. When she first started working for him she took him to the nearest grocery store to acquaint herself with what things he liked best, and when she'd instructed him to get milk he'd come back with Apple Jacks and Fruity Pebbles, a screwdriver, orange-vanilla toothpaste, four boxes of condoms, and a beach towel with a duck on it. And no milk.
Then a few years later (she'd nearly forgotten the glow in the dark Trojans until his next fiasco, but she never let herself forget that, ever, ever, ever again, ever) he'd insisted on taking her dress shopping when he learned it was her birthday. She tried on half a million dresses and though they were all "Very hot. Very appealing." "Very close to sexual harassment, Mr. Stark" he ended up not liking any of them and instead took her to see Vera Wang without even an hours notice, just showed up with her in tow and had Vera design a dress for her and fit her for it. In the end she'd ended up with her very own custom designed Vera Wang, and a Ford model she had to call the guards to escort into Happy's Bentley the next morning.
She did not going shopping with Tony Stark.
At all.
Period.
Ever.
Ever ever ever.
Ever
And she'd said as much when he asked her to take him grocery shopping two…three hours ago when she came to bring him his cappuccino. He'd said he needed a distraction from the thrust capacitors, and then he'd made a puppy face when she'd flat out refused.
And here she was three hours later with only a quarter of her shopping list crossed off and a nearly full cart. Discretely as she could, she reached into the cart and pulled out the paintbrush set and the bodice ripper entitled "Baby Daddy" and stuffed them far into the recesses of a nearby shelf. A woman a few feet away from Pepper glared at the offending objects and then at Pepper, who really didn't have the patience to care whether or not she was upsetting a soccer mom juggling three squealing, screeching, screaming children.
There was no way that woman could have put up with Tony.
Pepper glanced around to look for Tony and found him missing again, so she took the opportunity, despite the woman still watching her with eagle eyes, to stuff a wrench, a stuffed bunny, and three putrid smelling candles onto the shelf as well. She was just pushing her cart back toward the front of the aisle when Tony swerved back into it and headed towards her.
"Do we need Windex? I think we need Windex. We've got all these windows." He made a wide gesture with his hands like he was explaining his house to someone who'd never seen it.
"Mr. Stark, you hire out five maids who clean your windows with their own products once a week. You don't need Windex."
He dropped the squirt bottle into the basket and absentmindedly reached for a can of peanuts. Pepper snatched it out of his hands and set it back on the shelf, pushing the cart in front of her as she tried to remain calm.
She swung down the next aisle quickly, her heels clicking against the poorly lit linoleum floor, and grabbed Tony's hand as he reached for a box of cereal she knew he'd never so much as look at ever again.
"Hey, they say you can always use more fiber in your life."
"You don't even know who they are. And you never listen the "them" anyway."
His hand curled around her wrist for a moment too long, a finger pressing hotly into the curve of bone where her pulse beat against pale skin.
She snatched her hand away and continued up the aisle, her eyes darting across the display for the specialty brand of coffee perpendicular to the Cocoa Puffs that only this grocery store sold. It was missing from its usual spot nestled between Folgers Breakfast Roast and the generic brand powdered creamer.
This was turning out to be the most aggravating shopping trip since the time paparazzi had accosted her while she was buying tampons.
She heard the contents of the shopping cart rustling and glanced up in time to see Tony squeeze a box of something into the space he'd just opened up.
"What was that?"
"Cinnamon Toast Crunch," he told her, grinning, though the tone of his voice made him sound like a child who'd just been caught sneaking something frivolous and full of trans fats into the cart.
"Put it back."
"But I like Cinnamon Toast Crunch. You never get me Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It's Grreat."
His argument was not helping the vision of five-year-old Tony clinging to his mothers skirt as he complained about the lack of sugary cereal in his life.
"Fine. Get the cereal. And that's Frosted Flakes."
"Tony says "They're Great.""
"I said get the cereal, Mr. Stark."
"I wasn't referring to myself there. I was talking about Tony the Tiger. Silly rabbit. He say's "They're Great" not "It's great". You see the difference?"
Pepper didn't even bother to answer, just turned back to the supply of coffee, desperately searching for the small bag she got for the few times she was at Stark Industries – the coffee in the break room was abysmal.
Her eyes darted up and down the aisle, talking in the entire three shelves worth of Starbucks grounds with something bordering on disgust, beginning to get desperate to find her little black and red bag of coffee. If she didn't find it, she'd never be able to go into the office ever again, because there was no way in hell she was going to deal with the gossiping worker-bees who were the secretaries and PA's of every other high-up at Stark Industries without caffeine – and lots of it – in her system.
Absolutely, positively no way was she going down to that office without that bag of coffee – if she had to have everything emailed directly to her at Tony's house for the rest of her tenure as a Stark Industries associate –
"Looking for this?"
Tony held up a package of the beans she'd been searching for, crinkling the foil bag in front of her face just in case she missed the miracle before her eyes. "Where…?"
"Right next to the Captain Crunch, Potts." He grinned at her again, and then turned around to drop the bag into the cart. She took a moment to wonder at his sudden knowledge of her shopping needs – this wasn't the first product she'd never thought Tony ever even noticed that had appeared in his hands as he meandered down an aisle in her direction. He'd found the milk she usually bought and left in the fridge until it turned sour – Tony rarely ate or drank anything that wasn't delivered or in his fridge in the workshop. Then she'd caught him picking out toilet paper – logically and statistically, it was impossible that Tony didn't go to the bathroom, but she'd always thought that things like toilet paper wouldn't even blip on his radar if he had to go shopping for himself. He'd been the one to pick out the Advil and the disposable heat packs she kept under one of the bathroom sinks for herself, just in case.
She'd always taken for granted that Tony just didn't notice these things, but apparently she'd been wrong.
She ignored the fact that Tony had slipped in a box of Lucky Charms while she'd been searching for her coffee, and instead rolled the cart down the aisle in the direction of the back of the store, Tony following behind her at a steady pace.
She turned onto the main aisle in the back, and for the length of about three aisles she was content that he hadn't gotten distracted by anything.
And then her footsteps were the only ones she heard. She turned, glancing desperately behind her, to find Tony eyeing the rack of pudding in amusement. He glanced back at her with a grin on his face. "Do you remember that time with the twins who liked chocolate pudding?"
Pepper ignored the wide eyes of a group of boys who looked thirteen or fourteen and turned on her heel and stomped in the direction of the registers. She'd come back later. When Tony Stark wasn't waxing nostalgic about pudding romps and throwing random things into the cart for no other reason than that the packaging had caught his eye. There was a reason she didn't take him to the grocery store. She was never letting the puppy face defeat her stern will ever, ever again. NEVER
Even if he pulled the earnest card that he sometimes played and that always, always made her cave, no matter what the situation. Even then, she was never, ever taking him –
"Hey, look, it's us."
She'd reached the checkout stand, almost, all she had left to do was clear the magazine's and tabloids and get in line.
But he was right. There they were. On the cover of Us, no less. And…Oh my God, they were on People too!
Oh.
My.
God.
That was them. Dancing at that party, with his eyes on her neck and her nose in his hair, and OHMYGOD he was never supposed to see her looking at him like that! Ever!! Where had those come from??
He picked up the tabloid from the rack and flipped through it with ease, like he did this all the time, and then before he found the article entitled "Has Stark Settled Down?" he tossed the rag into the cart. And then he pulled out People and did the same. And then he grabbed the National Enquirer with the same picture and placed that right on top of it.
Then, as if it didn't even faze him, he wandered off to the rack of candy and started pulling out whatever caught his fancy, tipping that into the cart as well.
The cashier two lines over was ogling Tony's backside, and two more were trying to be discrete about darting their eyes back and forth from their National Enquirer's to Tony and Pepper. Tony either didn't notice or didn't care (it could be one or the other, really. She never really knew with him) and instead grabbed a pack of gum and opened it, taking a piece for himself and offering her one. Which she refused.
"You seem a little distressed."
She tried not the think about the fact that Tony had now seen her looking at him like that. Like she cared more than she should, like she was one of those girls who was trying to be his girl, like…like she was more than his personal assistant. "I'm not."
"You're…flustered."
"I've only got a third of my grocery list, Mr. Stark, because you can't seem to keep your hands off of…anything at all." In her head she had to cringe at the touch of bitterness in her voice at that.
"Mr. Stark. Why are you calling me Mr. Stark? Is it because there are people eavesdropping on this conversation and you don't want them to know how mindblowingly unprofessional we are?"
"I'm calling you Mr. Stark because you're my boss."
"You're calling me Mr. Stark because there's a picture of us dancing on a bunch of tabloids and you're incredibly freaked out by – woah, hey!" Pepper started as his gaze turned to something behind her. "Put the camera down," he said, and Pepper turned to see him talking to a man in a UCSF hoodie with eyes wide and a camera phone pointed at them both. "Kid, I see a picture of Virginia Potts on any blog, webpage, video, newspaper, or anything remotely related to mass media production and I will have twenty lawyers on your ass faster than you can text 'Tony Stark seen in Whole Foods.'" He didn't even check to see if the kid had closed his phone, though something behind his eyes was a little irate. " – by the fact that our relationship is seen as unprofessional."
She didn't really know how he had kept his train of thought, because despite his nonchalance he'd looked ready to knock the poor guy out.
"Our relationship has always been seen as unprofessional, Mr. Stark."
"Well now it's on the cover of People magazine."
"I'm not flustered."
She dropped her gaze to the cart and had to bite back a sigh when she realized that somewhere between the Cheez Whiz and the Windex Tony had managed to grab two packages of multicolored Sharpies and a bouquet of daisies. They'd always been her favorite flowers, though Pepper doubted he knew that. Probably he liked the fact that they were wrapped in gold and red foil.
The girl at the checkout, who looked to be about sixteen, turned bright red when Tony inquired as to her day, and stumbled out a quick "Oh! It's been great!" before turning embarrassedly back to scanning the things in the cart and letting them slide down the conveyer belt to the boy who looked about twelve, and who stared at Tony as if he were God on earth.
Pepper managed to convince Tony that they did not need stamps, ice, nor did they need anything else at all from the store, and got him back out to the car with only a small amount of hassle when Tony demanded Pepper let him steer the cart.
Together they put all the bags in the trunk of Tony's Audi, stuffing things into corners and on top of each other to get it all to fit.
She was still furiously trying to forget the fact that Tony had seen her looking at him like that and smelling his hair that she barely noticed the cart being emptied until Tony handed the last bag to her from the cart and smiled at her for a moment. "It's okay if you're flustered about the picture. I was pretty flustered myself when it was being taken."
And then he jogged the cart back into the store even though there was a cart holder two spaces over.
Her face was burning when he slid into the passenger seat, and she gunned out of the parking lot, nearly hitting the soccer mom and her three kids as they were coming out of the store.
Later, while they're eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch on the couch, watching the late night news, and Tony's gone to grab something from the kitchen, she sees a picture of them shopping together, they're hands touching, obviously having an argument about something or other Tony wants, and she feels a sharp pang in her chest at how very domestic they look.
When Tony hands her an ice cream cone similar to the one he's already halfway through - an ice cream cone he's made himself, she swallows painfully and doesn't mention the fact that the kid from UCSF obviously hadn't taken much heed to his threat.