PEPPER P. (saltedand) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-06-27 14:25:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *log, pepper potts, tony stark |
Pepper P & Tony S: backdated - Marvel
Who: Pepper P & Tony S
What: Iron suits
When: After the rescue-flight to Philadelphia
It wasn’t difficult to locate the hospital, even without instructions from Steve. The media descended upon the mere sniff of Mr.Stark, Iron Man, showing up in a Philadelphia hospital less than equipped to handle the maddened press. Moderately more difficult was controlling the suit which, Pepper had found, owed a great deal to the intuitive grasp of mechanics that Tony had and that she did not. There was no question of coming by car: getting out of the suit was an intricacy she’d watched only in part and never entirely understood. While she could offset some of the difficulties (manipulating magnetic currents was less difficult in the air, with only one metallic signature to worry about when the building had required being aware of multiple) this didn’t stop JARVIS’s flickering, sarcastic warnings every five minutes and by the time the suit touched down on the hospital roof-top, scorching the tarmac, the tight band of control fastened like iron around the threatening panic, snapped at once.
The suit clanked heavily down antiseptic-d hallways. It was too soon, to be back under strip-lights and the accompanying squeak of orthopedic shoes and the bleep of monitoring electronics. Too soon, both for the physical recovery that had to-date been painfully slow and too soon, when Tony and hospital beds were a vortex of darkly unhappy depression and subsequent acting out. Too soon, for her own sanity. The Philadelphia hospital was undoubtedly good at what it was they did but they were not (as all New York hospitals now had protocols in place for) suited to people in robotic suits demanding admittance to their wards. It took ten minutes of yelling, from within the suit with a chorus of smartphone flashes going off, without even an attempt at surreptitiousness, before Pepper finally got mad enough to just push past, one heavily armored shoulder simply shoving past the protestations of the nurse.
Thrusting inside the door of the room, the windows shaded, the suit clanked inside, but the mask hid any facet of expression and the voice modulated as it emerged from the suit. “You’re alive. Thank god. You’re alright? In one piece? I couldn’t get a straight answer from the reports, JARVIS didn’t know, they didn’t say anything until after the Tower blew, and I didn’t know, what the hell happened?” Even the modification of the voice inside didn’t hide panic in rapid-fire questions.
Tony was doing fine. He was in a private room, but not because he was close to death, just because he had a lot of money and everybody loved Iron Man, as evidenced by the press of media trying to break down the front doors. They had his arm trussed up, and his shirt was open to reveal a really nasty looking bump where the straight line of his clavicle was supposed to be. Both forearms gleamed with treatment on peeling, reddened skin. He held them carefully in front of him on his thighs, thinking morbidly that they were probably a good match to the wonderful display of melted skin that Loki had left on his back a couple years ago. His heels were dangling off the edge of the bed, but he was wearing a pair of hospital blue drawstring pants, saving the overall decency of the situation when a suit clanked in.
Tony stared in shock at the other person in the suit. He had an incredibly intimate flash of what it must be like to meet him in the suit, most notably that he had added a considerable amount of height (with truly necessary additional stabilizers in the feet and calves) and it made staring up at the facemask practically mandatory since he was sitting down. Tony blinked several times, opened his mouth twice, and then finally coughed out, “Pepper?”
His expression spelled out how horrified he was. For that particular protocol to activate, the Tower was probably a smoking crater. “Shit. Someone hit the Tower?” He jumped to his feet, not a smart thing to do with a concussion like he had, and the room whipped around a little bit before it steadied and he strode across the room toward her.
Pepper’s scale of how bad things could be when it came to hospitals began and ended with Tony in a coma. She knew Tony had taken damage in the last firefight, and the one before that, and the one before that - and the raw-red state of his arms were bad, that was certain. But he was upright and not comatose and that was the first assessment she made with a flood of relief that began to knock out some of the adrenaline which was in large part, the only reason to still be going after the the Tower, its aftermath and what remained.
Until Tony stood up, and looked like he was going to pass out again. She hadn’t figured out the catch on the faceplate (possibly because undoing it when you had fingers at your disposal, and from the opposite side was moderately easier) but the reaction - clanking toward him quickly enough to save him the journey - was easy enough to read.
“Sit down,” she said, firmly, JARVIS yelping something about protocols in her ear. “Your AI is shouting at me.” At this distance, she could see the emollient spread thickly over the burns, and Pepper was momentarily thankful she was completely incapable of visible expression, because undoubtedly, the expression he’d given her about the precious Tower was returned. “I’ll tell you about it, but sit before a nurse starts yelling as well. Please,” she added. The voice modification didn’t entirely mask the plea rather than order. His collarbone, she could see, looked broken, and the slow, sickened feeling of certainty that he was going to get hurt - was going to get killed doing this, that had been companion on the trip over, returned in small part.
Tony, on the other hand, was not relieved when Pepper’s presence and identity were confirmed. She could be literally bleeding to death in there, and no one would know; it was part of the design, completely intentional, and hypocritically, Tony was irritated about that at the moment. “Are you okay in there?” That JARVIS was making a nuisance of himself only strengthened his concern. He ignored her order to sit, and kept walking until he was standing in front of her, staring not into the faceplate but at some of the more crucial points that were generally invisible to the naked eye.
His arm was not strapped down too severely, a juxtaposition because they had to do one thing for the collarbone, another thing for the shoulder, and another thing for the burns, and Tony was a notoriously bad patient anyway. He left it hanging where it was and, ignoring her complaints, used his left hand to push her right arm out of his way and access a part of the armor that lit up under his fingerprints. He messed with it out of her sight for a moment and the armor split apart in huffs of steam, not unlike an old dry cleaning press. He stepped back slightly to allow her out, squinting over a compressed mouth at her and looking for injury, which he was sure he would find, in some minor or major form. Pepper would not be in a suit unless she had been in what the dramatics liked to call mortal peril.
Everyone at the hospital had assumed Tony knew about the mess in New York because he was in the suit, and the fact that JARVIS was a computer and could, actually, be disconnected from his various selves tended to elude detection when people thought about the AI as a person. “What the hell happened?” he demanded.
Pepper hadn’t known it was possible to be claustrophobic, inside the suit. She hadn’t given it much thought, Tony’s predisposition to being in armor generally leading to other strands of thought (namely: how close he was to being killed at any point in time). She was not, as a general rule, but as the suit vented open along practically invisible lines, there was more of the relief that drained away some of the electric tension that was keeping her upright, and she took a gulp of air as if the suit had been more of an imposition than it had.
Strictly, she shouldn’t have been relieved at all that Tony, with the bad arm that was scorched flesh (and for some reason that didn’t seem prudent, given his bad patient nature, not strapped up to make it impossible for him to use it), was fiddling with the armor at all. But she was, and she gave a half-gasp, half-sob, and stepped free. Underneath, there was a dribble of blood at the hairline, and some bloody grazes where glass shards tinkled free as she moved out of the suit’s enclosure. There was a lot of soot and dirt and dust, but the explosive ending to Tony’s upper-ground lab had, as a benefit, having been contained within a lot of glass and metal. The metal was something that instinct kicked in for where protocols did not, and while the clothes beneath were embedded with tiny glass pieces, there was not anything that readily looked like it required panic or urgent medical attention.
“The containment unit,” she said simply, and the fatigue had drained into the back of her voice, flat and lacking some of the urgency and argumentative panic. “They went for it and the lab -- the lab is gone.” She looked him over with the same sharp-eyed sweep for immediate peril, “Steve said you were hurt, that you weren’t in contact, I tried the comms the moment the suit -- but you weren’t there.” This did not need elucidating: Pepper’s experience of Tony being beyond contact was that Tony was injured and seriously enough not to argue with whomever was present to be put in contact. “What did they say? What happened, they hit the Tower so quickly.” It came in rapid succession.
Tony put at his one good arm out into the cold space and dissolving mist between them as she stepped out, and yet he didn’t make contact as she caught herself through the stumble--probably a good thing, as most of his arm was probably going to be healing for a while yet. His eyes narrowed on the blood at her hairline, his mouth compressing as he then took in her torn clothing. He ignored the glass raining from her every step and move, and moved around her, brushing into her with one shoulder in an edging, sideways movement designed to push her onto the bed he had left a moment ago. She didn’t look like she could stay standing once the adrenaline drained out of her.
“How many is ‘they’? Is anyone else hurt?” He strode up to the suit, standing still and empty like an abandoned lobster shell fresh out of the pot. Tony began running his fingers along the electronics along the neck and the open HUD display and faceplate, questing for the previous occupant’s vitals and activity logs, which took the form of long strings of numbers scrolling in miniscule blue. He reached in and callously loosed several circuits, making things flicker. He swore under his breath because he couldn’t lift his other arm, and made do.
He crossed the room again and reached down behind the bed for the network port running the TV. He had done this before, and medical IT departments sent them massive invoices for the damage. When he straightened he was dragging blue ethernet cable boasting a layer of dust.
Pepper was very much used to translating expressions that were boredom, or frustration or blank anger from the way Tony’s forehead or the corners of his mouth or the lines beside his eyes pulled into tight formations. She interpreted the compression of mouth to a flattened line as annoyance at the fate of the containment unit, and of his Tower and the absence of being present to be hailed by the suit. Tony hated not to be in the center of everything, and Pepper imagined this was therefore the answer to most things. She did not sit, even when her center of gravity was knocked askew by the glancing motion of his shoulder. She lacked the heels, and on stockinged feet, she was steadier and more capable of remaining upright.
With a lack of composure, her face was readily readable: the terse way her mouth pursed when Tony tried to reach inside the suit with the injured arm, so intent upon doing whatever it was he did with the display (a display Pepper had found frankly distracting much of the time within the suit, lacking either a genius IQ or Tony’s attention-deficit span) that he resisted the limitations of being mortal and injured. As he paid attention to the suit, she was studying the arm with now practiced worry. It was the kind of injury that looked suspiciously like it required dressings, to be kept still and dry and extended time to heal. None of which Tony had time for.
“A lot of people, all at once,” she said impatiently, as he began digging for the cables, “Really, Tony, this isn’t even a hospital that is used to you pulling their equipment around, I don’t even know if our finance team will be working tomorrow to smooth over their concerns about the damage. Must you, immediately? They sent teams,” and she shifted seamlessly from one track of conversation to the next, because while Pepper could not cope with the dimension upon dimension that Tony’s mind operated on, having multiple conversations in the same breadth was the only way to get answers to anything. “There were a lot of us in the building. And yes.” She sobered, and the pallor of her skin flickered blue: she was too close to the display, stood at his shoulder. He was warm and he didn’t smell of soot or burning.
“People were hurt. We tried to get them out, but some people were,” her voice faltered. “And I don’t know how many were out by the time I got there. I didn’t get there quickly enough, or HYDRA’s people -- it just blew.”
Tony barely made an effort to imagine what other people were imagining around him. He was his biggest and his best whenever anyone was looking, knowing that whether their reactions were good or bad, their attention was enough. The nuances between Pepper’s imagined catalog of his expressions and their matching emotions, both correct and wildly incorrect, were far beneath his notice. In mind, as in body, Tony was incredibly macro in his concern. Also, he wasn’t worried all that often, so nobody had any reason to know what it actually looked like, and that included Pepper Potts.
He swore under his breath at the news that a “lot of people” came at once. A lot of people in Pepper’s mind would have been a substantial force that did not try to conceal its activity. Who would have thought HYDRA had been banking so much on the symbiote in the truck? It was like he found some kind of red button and pushing it made every HYDRA agent in five hundred miles go batshit crazy. Speaking of which, he was probably going to owe fifty favors to the Batfamily, and the emo bastards would probably call them in by telling him to Get Out of Gotham on the regular.
“I had something in the new one, it was supposed to attempt to destroy the symbiote if it got to a certain point. It wasn’t supposed to be live. Did they get all the way into the goddamned lab?!” Tony ignored all Pepper’s fluttering about the cabling, cussing another streak when he brushed his arm on the edge of the armor. He plugged one thing into another thing, and the suit lit up like a Christmas tree. Tony stared at all the readouts, and saw the answer to his own question. “Fuck!”
He stepped back in order to get a better look at the readouts, which were scrolling incredibly fast, and kept on popping up with three-dimensional pictures of the battered skeleton of the Tower. Estimated body count was through the fucking roof. Tony’s mouth went tighter and his expression bleaker as the numbers kept going.
Pepper did not believe that Tony considered either his expressions or those of the people around him, but nor did she see anyone else (barring Selina) who understood much of them. But she didn’t need a catalog to see that the scrolling display once the armor lit up in full, blue-glowing regalia, was a punch to the bruised rib-cage.
A rib-cage that would get no better if he kept swiping it on furniture that the hospital hadn’t had the good sense to remove from his vicinity: the local hospitals had learned to either tie down their cabling and embrace a minimalist approach or to provide a convenient point at which to remove it. “They got into the lab,” she confirmed, in the absence of any ability to distract him and appetite to do so -- the display showed Stark Tower as wreckage, twisted ribs of iron and broken glass and her own stomach lurched sickeningly.
JARVIS had helpfully kept a running commentary as reports of the body count came in from all sides, a litany to fly to, until she’d silenced him somewhere over the border of the county. It was enough, both the numbers that were unstoppable against the track of her mind that supplied a thousand ways they might have more comprehensively emptied the building, the names of those who worked in the building and their families’ lives, and to understand that Tony expected to tune into it every time he tried to save the world.
She put the flat of her right hand against the shoulder-blade that looked wholly untouched. “Tony. You didn’t know they’d come in trying to do as much damage as possible.”
Tony blinked, and then gave her a look of eyes that were both dark and white with suppressed anger. “Yes I did. Been expecting it for months. That’s why all the security…” he trailed off, glanced back at the suit, standing there and still smoking ever so slightly, triumphant in that it, at least, had done what it was meant to do.
Tony took a deep breath, obviously steeling himself, and then took her gently by the waist and steered her toward the bed. If she resisted, his grip tightened, and considering all he had to hold on was five fingers and a palm that had been recently scraped to hell, he had a good grip on the soft curve of tattered fabric. It helped that he went with her, temporarily abandoning the suit and sitting next to her on the bed. It was obvious he wanted to touch his neck, which was something that he did when he was stressed, a response to knots tangling up at the base of his neck, evidenced by the angle of his chin. He sat precariously for a moment, not speaking, and then he hit the call button for a nurse.
“We’re going to get you looked at, and I’m going to head back. Need to see how bad it is.”
All the security in the world hadn’t kept HYDRA out when HYDRA was determined to get in. Pepper tracked his gaze to the suit, the suit she hadn’t known even had a protocol like that one. There had been a split second, before the incredible force of the suit closing itself around her, when she had known that this moment was the last one in a chain of moments, the glass splintering inwards and the concrete overhead cracking under the pressure until it collapsed inward. It had felt like death.
She didn’t resist. Pepper had enough strength to argue, but if adrenaline had been steel enough to hold her up to keep going, the absence of it now felt like having rubber instead of limbs. Resisting was, she judged from the way his hand had clamped, more likely to cause him pain than to do much of anything else, and she went where he guided, and was grateful that he sat.
For all of five minutes. “If you’re going back,” she said firmly, “So am I. I am not staying here.”
It was clear that to Tony, the suit was life. He was puttering in it now--purely in his mind as he sat there, waiting for someone in scrubs and sneakers to come running. His battered hands were fluttering, plucking at invisible wire threads with his fingertips, and he was still staring across the room at the projection of the suit, itching to be in it, and as productive as possible. It had achieved its purpose, and kept her safe, and now she was supposed to stay here, and so she’d stay that way.
“What is that thing you always say? Oh, right, ‘Wait for the doctor, Tony.’ Wait for the doctor, Pepper.”
Tony rearranged his limbs across the front of his chest, avoiding his abraded arms and leaning one shoulder ever so slightly to the right, so it kept up a solid point of contact. He didn’t want to look at the blood on her face, and he was well aware if he lay down, he wasn’t going to get up again. Maybe that would work on her.
Pepper knew what it was he was doing. Tony had a particular set of facial expressions and gestures when he was explicitly distracted by one of his pieces of technology, and he was full fathoms-deep in the suit now, whether he sat on the hospital’s bleached-white sheets or stood in front of the suit itself. It was inevitable that he would go over it, and over it - like the containment unit, searching for the flaw or the improvement that could be made to make it better. And having brought the suit, by virtue of having been in it, she knew that as long as he could remain upright he would get into it.
Equally, she was sure the hospital staff would be unimpressed at their patient taking off.
The bed was not soft, it was not comforting. It was simply a stable piece of machinery designed to keep the patient in it from doing damage that would occur if upright and Pepper didn’t think there was any damage that was likely to be incurred other than the kind of headache produced by being stitched (if even necessary) by a doctor in a hurry. And she had no intention of submitting to treatment from this particular hospital longer than it took to convince Tony that she wasn’t harmed.
“You’re martialing my own arguments against me. Are you waiting for the doctor before you try to use the suit to go back?” He’d turned his face away from her, and she didn’t know if it was the livid anger with HYDRA, himself, the Tower collapsing like a construction of child’s bricks over and over again, or something else. She put a hand on the shoulder-blade turned toward her, beyond the abrasions and the hurt. She was relieved, relieved she’d shown up and he hadn’t been under, hadn’t required surgery and somber doctors and days and weeks in a bed, and it felt sick and sad that relief was predicated on him only hurt a little, as if it were no longer possible to hope that Tony came through one battle after another without some sort of injury. “I am not staying if you’re going.”
Tony’s expression turned even more mulish than before, lowering and darkening, particularly around the eyes. He’d put on a few years in most visible age over the last handful of months, and while he was tired, there was something even heavier than years lurking behind his eyes. There was a lot that Tony didn’t say, or preferred not to think, and sometimes it showed when he wasn’t paying attention. He said, “The suit can do everything but give you a CAT scan, but you still gotta get looked at. Don’t be annoying about it. You’ll be two, maybe three hours behind me.”
Tony scowled at the corner of the over-nice hospital room, where cheaper accommodations might boast a tiny television screen. “Now I know why they stuck me in here. JARVIS got cut off in my suit way early on. I had localized comm connection, no satellite.”
With an insulted little gesture at his arm, he said, “They’ve been and gone. Look! I’m all strapped up and everything. I’ll send the helicopter back for you if the doctor says you don’t have brain damage.” He rotated fully to face her and looked into her eyes, as if he might be able to see any such impact in her pupils.
Pepper raised both eyebrows, which was difficult as the blood had dried across the creases of her forehead, but she said nothing about what it was the suit could or couldn’t do. In part because she didn’t know, in part because she was still rattled from having been in the thing in the first place, and because of why. “Two or three hours at minimum,,” she said, but he wasn’t listening to her, he was focused on being cut off.
He looked, however, like the medical intervention had been enough, at least until he began moving around again. In an attempt to stave off the inevitable argument (the blackened look to him she recognized as the pre-meditative stage of the worst of fights as Tony looked for something to tackle instead of the mood) she didn’t object, even if she thought the possibility of brain damage from being encased inside one of his suits would have resulted in a vegetative state for the man himself.
She opened her eyes, and looked him straight back. “Go on.” Resigned. He’d go even if she didn’t.