Re: Tony & Pepper
The week had been impossible: more desperate last minute calls to another door that seemed unable to contain its disasters, snapping tension between all parties, Tony going off deliberately to do exactly what he wasn't meant to, the return of a nightmare into physicality and the slight issue with paperclips and static electricity had upgraded to cutlery, loose change and her favorite pen. But it had held this - Pepper deliberately did not use the word date, laden with expectation - as a backstop at the end of it, as if to say Marvel could not be entirely gone if it was still possible to take a break, put on a nice dress and go wherever the hell Tony picked out having lost the habit of picking out anything since she'd taken responsibility for that ten years prior.
She was in fact, drawing up a list of reasons it was a terrible idea, how it could go wrong, what it might impact - a list that got worse with each passing minute stood in front of the vista lost on largely unseeing eyes. When she turned into his touch, it was with a smile that shook itself free from the anchor of certainty that this could in fact, end disastrously and a look that discerned the shirt and the generally clean appearance and the sling in one, warm and approving lift of her eyes to his face. It was unexpected, that effort which had been made within the specific parameter of her, and Pepper's smile was effortless and pleased and accompanied the immediate and sudden drop of the knot of tension held tightly at the center of her rib-cage to the pit of her stomach with the swooping sensation of an elevator dropping all floors in the building without warning.
"Funny," she told him, as her fingers walked up the seam at his good shoulder to smooth his collar into place. "Are you expecting someone else? Should I go?" The heels placed her at exactly his height so that the laughter in the blue eyes was immediately apparent. She looked down at the dress, smoothed one hand over her other hip, "This?" There was a warm sound to the word, a lack of expectation that he would notice, and a pleasure in that he had, "This one's mine. No birthdays. Just me."