Re: Tony & Pepper
She gave him a look, both wry and familiar from above the water and wine glasses. It encompassed the idling staff, half of whom were trying to polish things that did not require polishing or clean scrupulously clean tables, and the expectation that she knew the menu well. Pepper had been behind the scenes of too many romantic gestures to expect it to apply to her. "The fish is excellent," she conceded both the point and the expectation. Did Tony know her as well as she knew him by now? The thought made her both nervous and surprised and also somehow pleased, and with the three playing out beneath the surface, she looked at the waiter (who looked like he might choke standing there) and spent at least five minutes putting him at ease instead of thinking about it.
"I didn't think," she said as the waiters disappeared in a thankful whisk of activity toward the kitchen, leaving behind full water glasses and a basket of bread, "This would actually happen." Because there had been the Marauders and then Gotham had called upon Marvel for help, and now Ra's, the smoke of a nightmare had begun to seep back in under the door. But before all that, there had been awkward words in the lab and a sense that nothing was different and nothing was the same.
She played one finger over the rim of her water glass. "This, the museum, the art, the restaurant - it's all very you." But him without someone else to pull the strings, and him in between trips in the suit well against doctor's orders. Pepper didn't say anything about Gotham, but the thin iridescence of the date, shallow as a bubble, trembled against the outside onslaught. Her mouth ticked upward. "You know I'd take pizza in the lab. You don't need to impress me."