wildlyconflicted | [For Tony] Item post

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[For Tony] Item post

The end of November brought with it palpable expectation. Too many years, apparently, had December blown in cold and snow-crusted, and now, even after a year that had seen a blistering heat wave before the the dip towards icy temperatures, the hot, humid air seemed heavy with anticipation. Most of the day Pepper has spent inside escaping the cloying heat, but as the sun had dipped toward the horizon, she'd pulled her hair back and donned her sneakers for her evening run, one of the few activities in her day she allotted strictly for herself and no one else. She might not have the opportunity again until January.

The interior of the caves was calm and cool, dark stalactites dripping ominously from the ceiling and casting long shadows in the sporadic electric lighting. Eyes and ears played tricks on you down there, could make you irrationally wonder what might be lurking in the shadowy dips and culverts, but practical Pepper kept a tight rein on reason and her attention on the familiar crunch of her shoes as the sound bounded out and echoed back from the darkness.

An arm branched out from the main thoroughfare, inky and unlit but for one pale blue pinprick of light that caught Pepper's attention and snapped her head around. "Tony?" she called, eyes narrowed uselessly against the dark, but only her own voice returned to her. There were dozens of reasons he could be down there, each rattled crisply off in her head and doing absolutely nothing to assuage the sense of foreboding that had blossomed in her chest or the way the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood up like tiny divining rods for disaster.

She called out again to the same result, contemplated returning to the Compound for a flashlight, waffled. This was ridiculous, she told herself. It was nothing, absolutely nothing, and she'd laugh at herself later. She needed to put on her big girl panties, go see what it was, and if Tony really was down there molesting some unsuspecting co-ed, she had a perfectly legitimate reason to smack him upside the head.

Swallowing down her sense of dread, she stepped purposefully off the main path, footsteps echoing close in the darkness as she marched, focus fixed on the increasingly-familiar glow of an arc reactor. Close enough to confirm it, she heaved a burdened sigh that she hoped fully communicated how much of a trial Tony was to her on a daily basis.

"So it is you-" she began upon approach, but then forcefully choked on her words as her eyes swung upward and sketched out the hulking, shadowed figure that was absolutely not Tony at all.

Without prompting or second thought, she turned and ran, a spray of sand and stone kicked in her wake, and she didn't stop: not once she was outside, not until she'd nearly bowled Tony over, flushed and wide-eyed and sucking in great, panicked gulps of damp island air.

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"Whoa, there, I know you miss me when I'm not around but-" Tony cut himself off.

Pepper Potts did not panic, not on any sort of regular or irregular basis. Once or twice, and the time that came most readily to mind there had been explosions and dead agents of SHIELD.

Probably something more substantial than a bat in the caves, then.

"-what is it?"

Pepper's lungs felt as if they had outgrown her chest, tight against her ribcage as she sucked in sharp, erratic breaths. "Obediah-" she managed, but had to stop for an excruciating moment more while she reeled in the terror she'd let get away from her on her way here.

"In the caves, it- I couldn't tell what-" She paused, cursed under her breath at her ineloquence. "The suit was in there, the big one, I saw the light and thought it was you."

Tony's face went still, the usual evidence of a dozen interweaving ideas playing out over his expressions replaced with severe intensity. He might as well have closed the visor of the helmet, if he'd been wearing it.

"He didn't follow you," he said. It was big, it lumbered, but it had a hell of a stride, it could fly once out of the caves, and it didn't get tired. "Come on," he said, pulling a screwdriver, which might not have seemed much of a weapon, considering.

"Wait-" Pepper began as she hurried after him, and reached to stop him with a surprisingly strong grip to his bicep. "Tony, you can't just waltz in there with nothing but a screwdriver!" What was he going to do, hope that Obediah stayed still long enough for him to dismantle the suit?

"Please," she began again, in earnest. "If you get cornered in there, there will be nowhere to go, nowhere at all."

Tony's glance flicked to the screwdriver. It did, he had to admit, lack a certain something. It could stand to be a little more, he didn't know, sonic, maybe.

"Then I won't get cornered," he said, as if he wasn't talking about dealing with a suit that could potentially put its fist around his head and squash it like a grapefruit. "I need you to hang back. If he's operational and I go down, you need to find Duo Maxwell."

Obadiah liked size so much? He could try 50 foot of suit, see how he liked that.

"You're serious." All she could do was stand there, a figure of total ineffectualness, as Tony continued down the pathway. The sense of déjà vu was palpable, but she didn't bother trying to stop him again, on insisting that he was going to get himself killed.

"If you die in there, I am never forgiving you!" she shouted, with the vague wish that she had something to throw at his fat head other than her shoe.

"Yeah, well," Tony said, half-turning as he walked, "if I die in there and the last thing you did is shout at me... you don't want to revise that?"

He could be wrong, he supposed; it could be a trap, the reason Obadiah hadn't been hot on her heels could be any one of a number of things.

That was why he had the screwdriver, and the contingency plan, such as it was.

But he wasn't often wrong. At least, not about things he was paying attention to. So he could afford a little glibness.

Comic books would have her believe that this feeling, this complete and terrifying loss of control while someone you care about walks into peril, was something she would eventually get used to. That she'd been plucked from home far too early into Tony's superhero escapades to yet be inured to them, but no. No, she was pretty damned sure that this feeling was something she'd never come to terms with. She wanted to smack him for being so flippant when she was terrified.

"No, I don't," she coolly replied instead, and resumed following Tony down the boardwalk.

Well, it was something. And to be fair, if she had, he might have gotten more worried himself.

"Right," he said, as they neared the entrance. "Caves?"

Maybe he should have had her draw a map? That was wasting time, though. Who knew what was going on in there. Maybe he should rethink the flippancy... well, no. But he'd think about rethinking it.

"You're not leaving me behind," Pepper asserted before he had the opportunity to tell her to stay there like some sort of extremely elegant rescue dog. "It's pretty far in there, I'll show you."

Stepping around Tony, she walked primly back beneath the split in the waterfall and into the depths of the caves. If it took every bit of her courage to manage it so calmly, what of it?

"Should you be going..." Tony began, then glanced down at the screwdriver he had.

Right, then. He just remembered the last person who'd run down a cave ahead of him.

"No running off," he said, listening for the distinctive hum of an arc reactor that wasn't his. For the hiss of hydraulics.

"Only if I'm running for my life."

Unfortunately, Pepper's hasty exit of the caves earlier meant that she wasn't certain exactly how far they had to go, or even what the specific cavern mouth looked like. She felt sure she'd recognize it when she saw it, but the truth was that every darkened recess they came to left her dry-mouthed and anxious, her heart hammering so loud in her ears that she felt certain Tony could hear it.

Instinctively she knew, though: as soon as the shadowy cavern came into view, her arm flew out to stop Tony like a protective mother who's has to brake too fast. She'd not even realized what she'd done until she felt the hard edges of the arc reactor beneath her palm, a sharp contrast to the warmth of Tony's chest against her forearm.

"Tony," she said as she turned to him, quiet but insistent, arm still firmly in place as if she could honestly stop him. "Promise me that you won't do anything stupid. Promise me that if it gets bad, you'll run. Promise me."

"Cross my arc," Tony said, without missing a beat. "Nothing stupid."

He took a step forward, leaned around the corner just enough to get a line on the faint glow.

Then he shouted, "Oby, I slept with that secretary you liked!" and immediately ducked back around the corner and flattened himself to the wall.

Nothing happened.

That was promising.

"What if it's a trap?" Pepper hissed, her eyes wide despite nothing having happened. "I walked right up to it," she added with an emphatic brandishing of both hands. "What if he's waiting for you? Maybe we should go get the suit. Let's go get the suit." Her smile was just a little crazed. "It'll only take…an hour to hike up there and put you in it." Shit.

"If it's a trap, it's a bad trap," said Tony. The only reasoning he could think of, if it was a trap, for this, for not just firing a rocket around the corner and taking them both out, was that Obadiah wanted the pleasure of crushing his head personally.

...it was a little unsettling, thought of like that.

"Stay here," he said, in lieu of explaining what he was fairly sure she'd realized, that an hour of hiking wasn't going to cut it, if this was a problem.

He stepped out.

Nothing happened. Again.

Now, to see if his skull ended up like a tin can... he walked forward.

As it turned out, waiting at the end of a darkened corridor while someone you cared about walked into potential peril was only marginally better than waiting at home while someone you cared about walked into potential peril. Front pressed against the wall of the main corridor, Pepper peered around the corner into the shadows, straining her eyes but only barely able to make out the outline of Tony's shape in the pale glow of his reactor. She wanted to call out to him, to ask him what was happening, but was afraid making any noise would be a bad idea.

It remained completely inert, the whole walk up to it. He stood there, the faint, barely visible glow from under his own shirt mirroring that from the center of the armor, and stared at it.

He hadn't built this, but he was responsible for it.

He supposed that it wasn't trying to kill him at this moment should be some sort of a relief. Didn't feel like much of one, though. He tapped on it with the screwdriver, then reached forward and opened it up.

Then he turned around, considered, and shouted, "AAAH- no, just kidding, it's fine. Come on out."

Heart lodged in her throat, Pepper had actually startled, and though her gasp had been small, the cavern echoed it bigger. With a hand pressed against her chest, she turned and sagged against the cave wall, too relieved to be annoyed by Tony's utterly inappropriate sense of humor.

A moment later, she crept warily back into the dark and drew to a stop just behind Tony's left shoulder, wide-eyed as she stared up at the suit. Instinctively, she'd grabbed hold of his bicep, and her fingers trembled despite herself.

"What is it?" she asked, although what she really meant was a host of questions she knew Tony couldn't answer: why that of all things, why here, why now. "Is it real?"

"It's real," Tony confirmed. "It's real, and we're taking it back."

That, as far as he was concerned, was the important part.

Partly because he didn't know the why. What was it doing down here, empty but running? If Obadiah had come along for the ride, wouldn't he have walked it out? Or, at the very least, taken the arc reactor.

He was fond of doing that, as Tony recalled.

Naturally, Tony was already planning what he was going to do with the thing when Pepper had hardly had time to catch her breath. She guessed it was fair, considering how hard she worked at keeping an unaffected demeanor about everything; he couldn't know that there were only two nightmares she ever had, and that thing was one of them.

"How?" she asked, staring up at the mask a long moment before turning to look at Tony's profile. "Don't tell me you're going to get in it." Of course, now that she'd said as much, she could see it was the only option despite her irrational fear of the thing. Tony wasn't supposed to be in this suit, he was supposed to be in the good suit. The idea of him in this one upended her whole worldview.

"I'm not going to leave it here," Tony said, for a moment intent.

For a moment. "Why, you jonesing to take it for a spin?"

He wasn't being entirely facetious; he didn't particularly want to drive Obadiah's monster of a suit. It had no style, for one.

For another, it had been built purely to be a weapon of war.

"What? No," Pepper immediately asserted, leaving no room for argument even had Tony not been joking. "I'm just concerned for your well-being," she continued with a degree more poise. "You've never been in a suit like this, and it's obviously very different from yours. If you hurt yourself, I'll have to get you out of it and carry you to the nearest clinic, and I'd rather avoid that if possible."

"Well, sure. For one thing, it's not as good," Tony agreed, leaning in to examine the larger space for the pilot. "But it's based on mine. I can fly it."

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