Iron Man fic: From Russia With Love (And A Catsuit)

[seriousfic]

Title: From Russia With Love (And A Catsuit)
Fandom: Iron Man
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,032
Characters/Pairings: Natasha/Pepper, Tony Stark
Author's notes: Takes place after Iron Man 2. Written as part of help_pakistan for yetanothermask, who asked for and will get Jerkass Tony, Natasha/Pepper, and action. Action/adventure. There's an action.
Summary: What Pepper's diary will look like tomorrow: "Dear diary, today I lost my job, was kidnapped by Blackwater, and kissed a girl. I liked it."



It was all Gabourey Sidibe's fault. If you asked Tony. If you asked Pepper, it was Tony's fault for being a patronizing ass who was way too smug for a man who hadn't done his own laundry in seventeen years. And that was only one time because he was sure he'd invented a much better form of soap suds.

Things had settled back to something regular – not normal, never normal – after Vanko's death and Hammer's incarceration. Tony was adding Avenger to all his business cards and unwound by working on some sort of floating headquarters, but it was better than the time he'd flitted with Scientology (something about "Scientologist chicks." Pepper was eager to forget). And although it was good that Tony wasn't dying anymore, and that he and Rhodey were only arguing about Kanye West instead of which one of them was destroying America, and Pepper did like her job… she missed being CEO, a little. It'd been nice to be able to shut Tony down. Like having a little Tony off button.

But she didn't mind having her old job back. Really.

"Tony," she said, barging into his garage. Usually she knocked first, but he would never have any female companionship in his garage. As expected, Tony was fully dressed, bent over the faceplate of his armor and… adding a nose to it? She didn't ask. "I need your signature on the Brazil check—"

"Not important," he said quickly. "I'm glad you're here, you weren't answering your phone."

"Yes I was."

"No, you weren't, I've been calling—" He looked at his phone. "Papa John's… twenty-four times… you in the mood for pizza?"

"Tony, there was a volcano. You promised to double Steve Jobs' donation."

"Right, right." Tony took the ePad from her and put down a signature like he hated handwriting experts. "Volcanoes are cool." He pitched the ePad into the backseat of a nearby convertible. "Anyway, I need you."

She stared at him.

"To get out of your clothes."

She stared at him.

"And into a nice dress. Wow, that's an amazing poker face."

Pepper picked up her ePad. She just didn't like being apart from it. "Why do I need a nice dress? Unless there's a social engagement that I don't know about, but you do, which is… I'd need JARVIS to calculate how unlikely that is."

"Rhetorical, JARVIS," Tony said before the AI could answer. "The charity ball."

"Which charity?"

"For… charitable people? It's tonight. You should come." He bobbed his head. "You should come with me, I mean. As my date."

Pepper nodded. "That would definitely happen if we were dating." She shook her head.

"I did tell Nick Fury we were dating."

"Maybe you should've told me first?"

"We did kiss. I'm pretty sure you even popped your foot."

"I kiss lots of guys. I don't change my relationship status on Facebook each time."

"Lots of guys?"

"Some guys."

"One guy?"

"Some guys."

"You're on Facebook?" Tony had his own social networking service, which he had improved over Facebook by not allowing anyone to talk about Farmville.

Pepper patted him on the shoulder. It wasn't his fault he assumed any woman he kissed would immediately want to be his girlfriend. It was just experience. "Experience" that Perez Hilton tended to write up so Pepper had to give the news media something juicier than Tony Stark staggering to his (autopilot-ready) car with a whaletail. So far, she had outted four Republican senators. It was a public service… really. "I'll set you up with someone."

"Okay, little black book…" Tony rubbed his chin. "Volume 1 is in the dining room, volume 2 should be within throwing distance of the hot tub, and volume 3 is propping up a table. I don't know which kind… maybe card table? Look around."

"Gabourey Sidibe," Pepper announced proudly.

"Who's that? He sounds like a Jedi."

"He's a she. She starred in Precious."

"I never watched those Lord of the Rings movies."

"It's a drama. She played a proud but battered woman who struggled with domestic abuse and teen pregnancy to achieve her dreams." Pepper got a little teary thinking about it.

"Oh, yeah, I remember seeing the trailer for that before Star Trek. No mood whiplash there. How does she look without the fat suit?"

Over time, Pepper had gotten good at keeping calm without having to take a moment to breathe. "She didn't wear a fat suit."

"Then she lost all that weight naturally? I don't believe it! Atkins Diet, right?"

Pepper had gotten very good at keeping calm without having to take a moment to breathe. "Gabourey Sidibe is a proud, beautiful woman even though her body type is discriminated against by society."

"I didn't know twelve donuts a day was a body type. C'mon, Pepper, you're a WNBA player on the Kinsey Scale, would you go home with her?" He swept his hand accommodatingly. "After you had two drinks?"

Pepper never should've let Tony coax her into "proving" that vapid little pop star's bisexuality last February. She upped the ante. "Gabourey Sidibe is flawless."

"Once you take away three hundred flaws from the middle… all bacon. Why do women do this? If a guy is a tub of meat byproducts, he doesn't say 'oh, Kevin Smith is such a perfect male specimen.' He thinks 'I need to work out so I can look sexy like Jude Law.' You can get all the magazine covers you want, having enough underarm flab to glide like a flying squirrel will never be sexy. Even for a black girl, that is just way too much junk-in-trunk. She doesn't really have badonkadonk, she has badonkadonkadonkadonkadonkadonk. Am I right?"

JARVIS intoned "My programming requires me to exclaim 'Preach!' at this junction."

Tony gave the disembodied AI a finger-gun.

"I break up," Pepper said.

"What?"

"I mean I quit."

Tony looked like he'd worked day and night on a project, checked all the math and painted all the go faster stripes on it, only to turn it on and find that all it did was play the Oscar-Meyer Weiner Song. "You can't quit!"

"You're right. I hereby give you my two weeks' notice."

"Oh. In that case, are you familiar with the delightful Sandra Bullock/Hugh Grant vehicle 'Two Weeks Notice'?"

"No. I didn't see it, I was with you in Brazil, chopping down the rain forest."

"That rain forest had it coming! The point is, much like Hugh Grant only with rugged American machismo rather than bicurious British charm, I intend to wine and dine my way back into your good graces."

"I'm taking my sick days. And my vacation time. And I'm taking Kwanzaa off."

"That's not even a real holiday! Pepper, you're not thinking straight, you're trying to get time-off for imaginary holidays!"

Pepper bent over, bracing herself against a workbench, and glaring at Tony when he looked down her blouse. "Tony, I'm tired of waiting for you to grow up. I don't want to spend the rest of my life playing a disapproving mother. I make allowances for you being you. Maybe you really don't know that normal people don't act like this. But at a certain point, it's willful ignorance."

Tony looked deep into her eyes. "You're fired."

***

Unemployment agreed with Pepper. In addition to Tony's severance pay, there was her substantial backpay (it was easier for Tony to give her a payraise than an apology) and the several shares of Stark Enterprises she'd liquidated (easier for Tony to give her than a birthday present she'd actually want). It was possible she could swing her own promotion into the idle rich, with her own faithful little assistant toiling diligently under her. She had enjoyed her time as CEO with Natalie as such. It'd been like having a twin sister; a ridiculously glamorous, attractive, badass sister. Then Natalie Rushman had turned out to be Natasha Romanov, super spy. Everyone turning out to be a member of the X-Men was not something she would miss about working for Tony. Even if Natasha did fill out a catsuit well.

She was dodging vice presidencies from pretty much the entire Fortune 500, and a few literary agents were offering six-figure advances for a Tony Stark tell-all. But since money wasn't an object, what she really wanted to do was go back to work for a superhero. A non-Tony superhero.

Maybe Nighthawk was hiring.

But before any of that, she was going to fulfill a promise she'd made to herself before that fateful college internship with Stark Enterprises. She was going to follow her true passion and write a children's book. After a career of serving Tony Stark, she should be good at knowing what children liked. She sat down at her computer to write…

Right after she picked up some cigarettes from the store.

She used her bike, because her car was in the shop. In a fit of pique, Tony had ordered out all the 'proprietary Stark technology' she never used. So after a ten-minute ride that would hopefully balance out the violence she was about to do to her lungs, Pepper found herself standing in line with one pathetic pack of cigarettes while everyone else had salad and fruit. This was what she got for working in L.A. She picked up a candy bar to add to her order, decided that looked worse, and put it back. Then the commandoes dropped through the skylight.

Why did a grocery store even have skylights? Fucking L.A.

The leader, by which she meant the one with the most stupidly futuristic weapon, came up to her. "Virginia Potts?"

Pepper stammered. "My friends call me Pepper."

He grabbed her by the arm. "My friends call me 'yes sir, please don't kill me.'"

They waved their guns around in a surely very tactical way as they dragged her out into the parking lot, where a helicopter had landed. They pushed her inside and took their seats like it was a Chinese fire drill. "Good to go," Yes Sir Please Don't Kill Me told the pilot, who promptly grabbed hold of his balls and dragged herself out of the pilot's seat. She shoved her crotch in Pepper's face, kicking both of the men in the seats behind her. Her hands knived into the men on either side of Pepper. Then she looked at Pepper, upside-down in her lap. "Hi."

"Hi," Pepper said. "What?"

The woman righted herself like a ballerina doing a dance move, then took the helmet off. She shook her hair free in a way Pepper couldn't do in a million years. Natalie. Natasha. "Would you like to help me push the bad men out of the chopper? It may be cathartic."

Pepper put a foot against one and gave him a push.

"Feel better?" Natasha asked, throwing thugs out with both hands. "Or still traumatized?"

Actually, Pepper was a little aroused. Clearly, she had been working for Tony too long. "I'll be fine. Just another day at the office. Do you have a paper bag?"

Natasha picked one up from the floorspace, dumped out a sandwich and some yogurt, then handed it to Pepper. She breathed into it until the world stopped spinning. When she looked up, Natasha was eating the yogurt.

"Do you like to fly?"

***

Pepper did like flying. In a plane, first class, with lots of pretty clouds. Not in a helicopter below radar level, flown by a woman who probably had at least a few mental issues stemming from killing people for a living.

"You hit a bird!" Pepper screamed, only partially at the batch of feathers bouncing off the windshield.

"She's fine."

"It's a girl!?"

"Would you like to hold my hand?" Natasha asked.

"Don't you need both to fly the plane?"

Natasha shrugged. "So, do you know how to parachute?"

"No! Why?" Pepper immediately regretted asking, even before Natasha said:

"It's actually really easy."

***

It wasn't.

"Alright!" Pepper cursed (for her, the volume was a profanity), trying to untangle her pumps from the parachute cords. "I've been taken hostage, been an accomplice to killing a bird, and pushed out of an aircraft!"

"You wouldn't jump," Natasha said, already folding her parachute up like a napkin.

Pepper resolved the shoe situation by taking it off and throwing it at Natasha. (It missed.) "Okay! I am not taking another step until you tell me what's going on!"

"Alright," Natasha agreed, and then blasted Pepper into unconsciousness.

***

Pepper woke up with a dry mouth. Natasha was there with two water bottles. "My widow's bite may have left you feeling dehydrated. I have Aquafina and Perrier."

"I'm from the Midwest."

Natasha handed her the Aquafina.

After a long gulp, Pepper said "Not to sound ungracious, but you knocked me out."

"You wouldn't move."

"So you knocked me unconscious and dragged me here?"

"Carried."

"Wow. That's a lot of upper-body strength. I mean, not a lot, I'm 105 pounds dripping wet, but you must work out."

"I exercise for three hours a day while reading intelligence briefs from around the world."

"I walk my dog."

Natasha nodded.

"He's a Boston Terrier, his name is Lint. Who were the guys with guns again?"

"Roxxon Oil. If Stark takes the arc reactor technology public, they stand to lose billions, so they're going after Stark's loved ones."

"And what makes them think I'm a 'loved one'?"

"Stark changed his Facebook status to In A Relationship."

"Oh."

"And your Facebook status to In A Relationship."

"Oh." Pepper shook it off. "So where exactly did you carry me, Frankenstein?"

"An old Russian safehouse. Roxxon has men in SHIELD, but they won't know about it."

"How do you know about it?"

"I used to be a Russian spy."

"Oh."

"I defected. There was a boy. Long story."

Pepper took a seat on some computer equipment that didn't look too expensive. "I've got time." And she liked hearing Natasha's voice.

Natasha crossed her arms and settled across from Pepper in a lean, looking like there wasn't one angle a guy could approach her at without being knocked into next week and waking up the week after next.

Pepper raised her hand. "Before we start… was he cute?"

"Looked like the guy from the Hurt Locker." Natasha looked away. "I shouldn't open up like this."

"It's okay. I need something to take my mind off the assassination attempts while we wait for… I guess something highly classified to happen?"

Natasha nodded. She seemed to keep her body language to that and disapproving glares. "It could take a while."

Pepper got comfortable.

"To begin with, I was just another prototype Russian super-spy, dedicated to destroying liberty and democracy."

The story was long and engrossing despite – or perhaps because of – Natasha's ironic detachment. Her accent slipped as she spoke, blurring into Slavic heaviness when she spoke of Clint. By the end, Lifetime movie tears were streaming down Pepper's face, while a single perfect tear was seen to detach from Natasha's eye. Of course she cried in single perfect tears.

"But you're single now. What happened? Did he die in some freak quiver accident?"

"We had different goals. I wanted to focus on my career, he wanted to focus on banging as many blyadischas as possible… it was amiable. Now he's dating some witch. I'm not bitter, she just casts spells."

A long melodrama with an unhappy ending. It seemed unfair that all that yearning and fighting could be done by two people who just didn't match, but it happened. Of course, it hadn't had romantic moments like The Time Tony Danced With Me; I Wasn't Wearing Deodorant And He Never Got Me My Drink or The Time My Old Boss Shoved His Tongue Down My Throat (His Theme Park Just Exploded). So clearly it was a doomed relationship.

A thumb ring Natasha was wearing flashed. Natasha looked at it for a few moments, then said "Iron Man and War Machine are done with their roaring rampage of revenge."

"War Machine?"

"It's what Colonel Rhodes is calling himself."

"Oh lord, not him too."

Natasha straightened, gentlemanly offering a hand to help Pepper up. "SHIELD agents are clearing your apartment as we speak. In a few minutes, I'll take you back."

"Oh, Lint must be loving that… if you find any weed, I'm just holding it for a friend."

"Your secret's safe with us. We're the government."

"It's therapeutic. Working for Tony drives me crazy."

"I prefer vodka."

Pepper nodded, wondering if Tony's famous male bonding sessions were anything like this, before busying herself with straightening out every nook of her rather natty outfit. Hoodie, sweatpants, and flip-flops. Just the thing one wore to be rescued by a glamourous spy. "Thank you for doing all this. I'm sorry if I caused any trouble… or back strain."

"It's not like that. I volunteered for this assignment."

"Really? Why?"

"You were nice to me. In my line of work I don't meet many people who are nice to me."

"I don't meet many people in your line of work who are nice either."

Natasha dutifully smiled before cracking her neck in a conversation-ending way. "Let's go."

The thing with Tony, the pressure she'd been under, the dozens of movies she'd seen where two attractive twenty-somethings forced together by bad guys bunked down for a while and ended up making-out, not to mention the way Natasha had been eye-fucking her all afternoon (if that wasn't just a Russian… thing); it was no wonder Pepper exploded. "Do you need a secretary? Or a date this weekend?" She had worked for Tony for way, way too long.

Natasha's eyes popped, then she smiled for the first time Pepper could remember. "We could get dinner and talk about whether I could use a secretary."

Pepper exhaled relief. "That'd be great."

"But right now," she put one arm around Pepper after the other, saucily gripping her and lowering her back into optimum first base position, "I'm sure I could use a secretary."

As they kissed, Pepper found one more thing Tony was wrong about. She wasn't a WNBA player on the Kinsey Scale. She was a female gym teacher.

Comments

[na-smith.livejournal.com]

Just, LOL FOREVER.

That was excellent, hilarious, and Pepper's voice was just sort of outrageous without losing the character.

[the-windowbird.livejournal.com]

This is so wonderful.
Love it.

[lurkete.livejournal.com]

:D LOLOLOL

Of course she cried in single perfect tears.

also:

...Hoodie, sweatpants, and flip-flops. Just the thing one wore to be rescued by a glamorous spy.


don't know why but that cracked me up, now the word 'glamorous' will forever be associated for me with spying.

[wkgreen.livejournal.com]

Hehe.. loved the way Pepper and Natasha met up again! :)

Thanks for sharing! :)

[mcity.livejournal.com]

I spent almost two seconds wondering how I should feel about the mental image of Ms. Paltrow making out with Gabourey Sidibe, then I remembered that Gabourey is awesome and got on with my life.

[vulpesvortex.livejournal.com]

This is so awesome!

I was rewatching Iron Man 2 yesterday and I kept thinking, I need to scour the internet for Pepper/Natasha fic, and after a brief google search I came upon this.

And then I saw on the newsletter that you'd only posted it today, what are the odds of that?! (also, this fic is wonderful and funny :D)

[lieut-kettch.livejournal.com]

LOL at the Jeremy Renner reference. And Clint dating a witch. Speaking of which, I'd love to see Pietro and Wanda in the Avengers movie. I am wondering if the rights to the Maximoff twins are Fox's or Marvel's though-- didn't they reference them in X-Men 2?

[7tree-hugger.livejournal.com]

ROFL. The voice was PERFECT. Genius.

[yetanothermask.livejournal.com]

I adore this fic, it's hilarious and everything I asked for. Tony had his own social networking service, which he had improved over Facebook by not allowing anyone to talk about Farmville. I'm still laughing over this part. Thank you so much for writing this. You made my night, dude.

[ebonlock.livejournal.com]

Just stumbled on this fic and I've gotta' say I haven't laughed so much in ages. I was reminded of some of the best 40's flicks with the whiplash inducing dialog and banter. Incredibly written and a much more realistic outcome, given my own take on IM2. Beautifully done!

[peachpai.livejournal.com]

Oh man, this was amazingly fun to read. So many great lines! I loooove it.