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PEPPER P. (saltedand) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-05-03 18:35:00

Thomas and Pepper - Part I
Who: Pepper and Thomas
What: Betrayal and tea
Where: An upmarket Manhattan hotel
When: Recently. Fuzzy timeframes.
Warnings: Nada.



The hotel was expensive in a discrete way. The entrance was glass, and steel and the reception desk was glossy and Pepper paid it absolutely no attention at all as she passed the concierge and moved through the lobby into the gorge of the hotel sitting-room. This too, was lavish: gold-leaf on picture-frames and thick carpet that gave little traction to impossibly high heels, but what Pepper noticed were the bones of the building. The steel that ran beneath the brickwork, the ranks of cutlery in the backroom: when she felt least safe was when metal ran like a live current through the periphery of her attention. Understanding what it was that held her, how it was rooted to the ground, that was calming and her mind plucked along the new knowledge of how exactly this hotel had been constructed as welcome distraction.

She looked immaculate, if a little over-dressed for afternoon tea. The skirt-suit was the faint dove-gray of precipitous clouds over New York in early spring, and the shoes had heels slim and strong as stiletto blades. Pepper did not wear distress the way most people did, an outward display of rending, of comfort, of reaching for what was soft and yielding. She sought out the unbending, the comfort of unbending infrastructure: constructed suits and metal, always metal. The distress could be seen in the faint span of lines at the corners of her mouth, at her eyes, and the way her hands twisted in her lap but it was small. It telegraphed to no one. There was no one.

She had gone over the possibilities on the way, the breeze catching at her from Stark Tower all the way to the glossed front of the hotel. Either Thomas was mad, or he was confused or (which seemed the most bleak but equally the most possible under the circumstances) the mild flirtation that had been a giving indulgence over the months, enough to make clear that there was a world where flirtation was enough, even attractive - had been coldly cultivated for the benefit of some ulterior motive she didn’t understand. There was no one to tell about her own foolishness: Doctor Banner was a distant presence, pleasant enough but a stranger. Captain Rogers didn’t cross her mind. Tony -- it was a betrayal, an unwitting one, but it was enough of one that the sleek device stamped with the Stark logo in the soft leather bag at her feet had been turned off entirely.

She waited and she fretted with the composure of someone holding very still until the storm broke overhead.

Thomas couldn’t afford to come through the fine front doors; there were too many eyes watching him, too many people who knew what to look for, who were waiting for vulnerabilities, and he was holding one in his arms.

In a massive expenditure of power and accumulated resources, Thomas made the meeting safe.

The first thing that changed were the windows: the tint of them turned a pale, sakura pink, a twisting form of color that crawled up the glass, a physical sign of metaphysical movements. Other voices and steps, the sounds of the traffic outside, even the movement of the potted palms in the breeze of the HVAC, all that seemed to grow more distant, warmer, fuzzier, as if the entire building were slowly sinking under a comfortable ocean. A number of moths, brown in color and generic in shape, rose up from the floor without explanation, to bounce and flutter against the newly sunset windows, creating motion where there was stillness.

Five breaths later, Thomas entered the room. He wasn’t wearing a suit, but a polo shirt and black jeans, peculiarly foreign. His gray eyes were momentarily hidden, because in his arms he held his daughter. Amanda was nearly eight, with her parents’ sharp intelligence and new yellow shoes with ladybugs on the buckles. She had her face turned away from the room and pressed into Thomas’ chest, and he had one hand protectively over her head. Behind him, something cold and hungry lapped at the more ordinary darkness that didn’t belong on that wall, a doorway that shouldn’t have been. It closed with a sound like a chest wound behind him.

“You can look now,” Thomas said, dropping his hand to put it down to join his other arm and hoist her higher above his hip. She was too big, really, for him to be carrying her around like this, but he didn’t put her down. “Miss Potts,” he greeted, visibly uncomfortable.

She noticed the dimming of the light first, the rosy hue that it cast across plushly-upholstered furniture and as it fell across her lap, the loss of sound as if the room had become enclosed, cocooned from interruption. The distant hum of voices from the concierge’s desk, that was gone and the rush of traffic (already somewhat muffled by the thick walls) was gone completely. Pepper glanced from her palms to the door, and was startled by the entrance.

Whatever it was she had expected, it had not been the presence of the child slung in arms. Thomas was not softened by it: somehow the contrast of a young girl, very ordinary (pretty, and who looked around her the minute she was given permission with a shrewdness that was reminiscent of the adult behind her, but ordinary) created a sharpness, a heightened awareness that the polo shirt and the jeans did nothing to obfuscate. This provided no clarity, but greater complexity. Pepper looked from the man to the girl and back again, and the vestiges of any apparent distress were immediately and obliquely smoothed away.

“Mr. Brandon.” The uniqueness of his entry wasn’t lost on her, nor the vague unease that the sensation the entrance brought with it: it was cold, like standing in a draft that played over the back of her neck and then it was gone, but her fingers rose to the lapel of her suit.

“This is your daughter?”

“Yes,” Thomas answered, his speech measured and something about the way he was standing creating more tension than his words dismissed. “This is Amanda. Say hello, Amanda.” Amanda, obedient, said hello. She looked Pepper over with what appeared to be dispassionate interest, and the twisting of her waist suggested that she was more prepared to get down than Thomas was ready to let her go. His arms remained locked, and so did his knees. His face was somehow becoming grayer, not steel gray like his eyes, but colorless and fatigued. He blinked hard, like a driver on his twelfth hour on the road. Amanda did not try to squirm down, but hoisted herself higher on his chest with an arm around his neck.

“I apologize for the peculiarity of the entrance. I am being watched, and Amanda is not known in this world by her connection to me, and I am trying to keep it that way.”

“I’m a secret,” Amanda said, proudly. Thomas frowned, attempted to shift her, and caught himself in a stagger on his bad knee. He controlled the loss of balance and put Amanda down, who began to frown in a miniature picture of his own a moment before. “Daddy.” The word seemed to take both of them by surprise, and hastily, Thomas sat down in an incongruous chair with a floral cushion. He blinked heavily again.

Pepper had begun to wonder how many secrets the man who held in his arms his daughter with perfectly ordinary (in fact, enviably nice) shoes - who looked indeed, as if she were perfectly ordinary, actually had. This was not obliquely clear: she smiled at Amanda, and the look of it opened up her face like shutters folding back from windows, clear and cool light.

“You’re a secret in very nice shoes,” Pepper said, by way of greeting, and then abruptly rose in a movement neither graceful nor elegant when she saw the cast of Thomas’s half-step forward and the ugly way he twisted onto the leg he favored. He was whitened, washed out and the rosy-pink light that cordoned the room off from the world outside, couldn’t do anything to hide that. She sank back down into her chair, when it looked as if Thomas was at least intending to stay put (albeit temporarily) and as if the girl balanced against his knee was too, and she tried, with some difficulty, for inscrutability.

“Is this why?” It wasn’t an explanation. It wasn’t even the rudiments of one, but she understood in a distant way that parents did things for children that overcame morality. Amanda, in the yellow shoes, whose existence was a secret and whose connection to Thomas was an apparent danger, might be the kernel of motivation, if not explanation. One eyebrow curled toward her hairline.

Amanda was too smart to be taken in entirely by one compliment to the yellow and ladybugs, but it certainly didn’t hurt. Being nearly eight did not make her immune to vanity, and while her father wasn’t particularly susceptible to such things, it wasn’t possible to ignore Thomas’ attention to his attire. Amanda seemed to think that she could mimic Thomas’ concentration on intimidation and impression with variations in yellow footwear. Her attention to Pepper’s greeting incurred no hostile response, and there was not yet anything behind her frank, youthful echoing nod.

Nods-as-greetings worked better for the taciturn adult and not so well the golden child, yet Amanda’s attention was on Thomas. They hadn’t spent any longer than an hour together for months, and before the change Amanda had been accustomed to her father's constant presence. She hadn’t missed the changes in him since she had met him here in this New York; no child of his would have.

Thomas shifted on his chair and let his spine curve into it ever so slightly, elbows relaxing, shirt wrinkling in loose lines over the bones of his shoulders and the length of his chest. Cold sweat was prickling at one temple, a faint, faint sparkle in the carnation cast from the outside-that-was-not. “No,” he told Pepper. “I was here without Amanda for… for several years.” He looked down at his daughter, who looked back at him with a visibly grave expression. It was taking her physical effort to not ask questions, and he gave her a vague smile. “No time at all passed for her. Her appearance here complicates things.” The gray eyes gave Pepper a pragmatic, apologetic look. “Shipping,” he said, “is not my only occupation.”

“Amanda,” he said, abruptly, on the heels of this sentence, “go bring me the key from that door.” He pointed at the far end of the tea room, where the ornate double-doors stood closed. She gave him a suspicious look, because she suspected she was being sent away so she would miss the interesting bits of the conversation, and she was right. But a certain discipline had been instilled in her, probably by Thomas’ unconscious expectation of total brilliance and excellence, and she trotted off, ladybugs bobbing.

Quickly, Thomas turned back to Pepper. “I was trying to negate a threat when I recruited you. I knew it wouldn’t be willingly, but it was for the greater good. The Winter Soldier was leaving a trail of bodies, and if my organization attempted to deal with him, we would end up involved in SHIELD, HYDRA, and whatever other struggles the Avengers care to involve themselves in. I wasn’t sure if there would be another opportunity.” Behind him, Amanda was inspecting the door handle as if it was a puzzle, obviously irritated and in a rush to get back to the interesting conversation being held without her.

No, shipping was clearly not his only occupation. Pepper barely had time to assess the dynamic that existed palpably between father and daughter (adult, she thought, of the exchange that was almost entirely without words. It was keen observation from two pair of eyes that mirrored one another in their sharp scrutiny and assessment. Adult, and very clearly they understood one another) before the ladybugs were dancing away over the expensive carpet and the rationale was laid out as coolly as tea might be served.

“Why on earth didn’t you just say that?” Blue eyes were startled, pragmatism winning out over the complexities of hurt feelings or betrayal. “Why didn’t you ask, instead of --” Her hand shaped the vagaries of curses, of whatever it was he could do that turned the environment into the soundlessness of security, of whatever had torn a hole in between here and wherever it was he had been before. “Instead of forcing the issue?” It was not that she knew anymore about the Winter Soldier, or HYDRA or SHIELD or anything else that was more or less exceptional.

“You didn’t recruit me,” her voice sharpened on the word, the abstract concept of it offensive for more than one reason. “Unless recruitment practices have changed vastly over the last twenty minutes. No one has recruited me. You shanghaied me, when you had no need to.” The blue gaze rose from the twist of her fingers, to Thomas’s face, obliquely irritated. “Recruitment is extended to those with skills required. You were indifferent to that. You made me a surveillance system.”

Thomas sat back a moment and just looked it her through his fatigue. It was intensive, that look, though it was without a stare or frown. He did not smile with any amusement. He was impressed by her, by her strength of character and her certainty in herself as she sat there against him. He had demonstrated a great deal of his power in this single arrival, in the movement of the situation to his will. He had to bend time and space to bring himself and his daughter here, but she would not be intimidated. Yes, impressive.

“I couldn’t just say that. The Hand is not an organization with a club card, Pepper.” He slipped and said her first name. His attention was distracted, the gray eyes lilting back toward his daughter, who was finding the key a strangely illusive puzzle, there and yet not there, a rubik’s cube between dimensions. It would have been a cruel trick in any other circumstance, probably, but it kept her occupation. She did not call out to him for help or questions, though she did glance suspiciously back at him, just out of range of the conversation.

He winced visibly when she said the word “surveillance system.” It was true, and he couldn’t quite deny it. “I am sorry. I thought it necessary, at the time.” Max was right, of course. No avoiding that, either. “It was the safest way to get what I needed, without putting anyone in danger. It seemed sensible at the time.”

There was a great deal out in the world that intimidated Pepper. This ranged from the profoundly mundane: the death or the near experience of it of someone she cared very much for, to the bizarre and powerful and forceful, the invasion of New York. Her own abilities had been neatly parcelled off within the walls of her tidy mind. Thomas had great power, that was clear. But she had known a number of people with great power, who were by their nature, leaders. Thomas operated as if he were entirely without knowing what stood at his back, if anything at all. But she was not intimidated. She looked at him back, the blue eyes were frank, if a spark of irritation remained present, as did the tight lines at the corners of her mouth. She knew more than most how situations could be bent to someone’s will.

“The Hand?” This then, was the organization he spoke of, when he talked of ‘recruitment’. “Are all its members commandeered into playing a part?” But she watched the creases at the side of his eyes as the verbal barb landed. Good. “You don’t trust anyone, do you?” Her gaze followed across the room to the little girl, out of the conversation’s reach, clearly doing what she was asked because there was no question of not doing so, but with the inquisitive parry of looks sent from her corner that said she hadn’t missed the conversation’s likely turn toward the interesting while she was absent.

“How was this safer than merely asking me? How would asking me put either of us in danger?” But the apology had mollified some of the outrage: the anger was cooler, steelier. The taste of iron which had been temporarily in the air, dissipated.

“The Hand does not commandeer. It takes, it shapes, it invades in the dark.” He said this all with quiet certainty, without appearing to feel the bleak certainty apparent in the words. “It is a body of its own. It will kill to protect itself, without discrimination. If it was the Hand who had you, you wouldn’t know yourself. You wouldn’t breathe without direction. You would be dead, but you would know it, nothing but a tool, until your blood was more valuable than anything else you could provide. The Hand,” Thomas said, letting out a breath of his own that hurt his chest like hot air, “must be controlled.”

“There’s trust. Hard to come by, but it came.” He lifted one hand, hard with scars, and made a tiny gesture in the direction of the door, where his daughter was solving a tesseract puzzle a piece at a time. “She came.”

Thomas put one hand out and plucked a sugar bowl from the center of the table, dragging it forward on its ceramic edge toward him, and tipping the white sugar grains in a small pile out over the floral tablecloth. Hundreds of sweet prisms spread out and then up, caught in the movement of power in the air and twisting as if in an invisible current an inch off the table surface. “If I asked you, the decision would be yours. I would have had to tell you about the Hand, which alone is a broken commandment. It’s dangerous for me, and for you.”