Ok, so, I've had a quote written down for some time now, and tried desperately to jam it into fics, but to no avail. And then, after nearly four hours of travelling and some serious stress (yay!), this little ditty bitch slaps me in the face. Enjoy!

Pepper Potts, PA extraordinaire, was used to her boss doing some seriously random and strange things; be they odd sexual exploits (she still chuckled every time she thought of just how he had managed to fracture his little toe) or flying around catching bad guys in a gold titanium-alloy suit of armour, so when she saw Tony Stark approaching her from the corner of her eye, wielding to mugs of what smelled like coffee, she immediately went to Defcon One.

Trying to put off the inevitable, she ignored him and continued with what she'd been doing, typing up about a gajillion reports for the Board, which a certain someone should have already done, but whatever. She tried to stop her body tensing up as he placed one of the mugs down on the coffee table in front of her and she muttered a thank you, staring adamantly at the laptop screen.

After a few minutes, when nothing exploded (or imploded, that always sucked just as much), she glanced at her coffee, and then to her right. Tony was sat on the floor in the gap between the sofa and the coffee table, one leg stretched either side of one table leg, his own coffee cup nestled in his lap and his head lay back on the sofa cushion. His eyes were closed, but the cracked open as he heard her stop typing.

Defcon Two.

"Tony?" she asked cautiously.

"Mmm?" he mumbled, eyes still fixed on her.

"What?"

Tony tilted his head more towards her and squinted at her. "What what?"

"What do you want?"

"What makes you think I want something?"

"Because you're you."

He chuckled at this and rolled his head back, closing his eyes once more. "I have this fantasy-"

"Oh, God, Tony, I have a million and one things to do, so could you just tell me what you want so I can get back to work?" she sighed.

"Just listen to me for a minute." He said quietly. She sighed again and he took this as a sign to continue. "I have this fantasy," he began again, slower this time, "where I sit with this beautiful, intelligent woman, for no reason except to just...sit. Now seeing as that woman is you, can you please, for once, just indulge one of my fantasies?" he was met with silence but kept his eyes closed.

He heard a small noise like Pepper was clearing her throat, then the familiar scrape of a mug leaving the glass coaster, a small slurp of hot coffee and the clink of it being replaced. He was about to open his eyes to make sure she wasn't having a coronary or anything when the familiar tapping of laptop keys surrounded him. He cracked the eye nearest her open and gazed at her, and let a smug smile spread across his face when he saw her flaming red cheeks and her own pursed lip grin.

Defcon retracted.