Two
The exhaustion hit when she had cooled off. She slumped to the floor, and called, "Bruce?"
"You okay down there?" His voice was unnaturally loud through the speakers.
"Yes. I - can I stay here for a bit? I think I need to sleep."
"I'll be right down."
Fuzzily, Pepper registered Bruce's arm around her shoulders, easing her upright. She tried to complain but no sound came out. He wanted her to walk, but she didn't have to, she didn't need to go anywhere, she would be fine if she could just sleep, just for a little while.
Silently apologising to Tony, Bruce hooked an arm under her knees and carried her bodily into the living room, where he tucked her into an armchair. "One hour, do you hear me? I'm waking you after an hour. We need to make sure your body's coping."
"Mm," Pepper managed.
After an hour, Bruce checked her breathing rate and pulse, and thought better of his threat. She was sleeping normally, and deeply. So instead of shaking her awake he sat down in the chair opposite with a stack of biology journals and his notes from the afternoon, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and began to read.
Darkness fell, and as Bruce stood up to turn on a light, he noticed a light flashing red on Pepper's watch. He bent down and tapped the screen, and a message appeared, projected into the air above her wrist: Extremis heat signatures detected. He felt Pepper's forehead, but her temperature was normal.
"Wake up," he said quietly, shaking her. "Pepper."
She jerked awake, startled, and glanced around at the darkness. Bruce shushed her.
"Did Tony install Jarvis in your watch?"
"Yes. And in my car."
"Okay. I think we might have company. Jarvis is detecting heat signatures."
Pepper rubbed her eyes. "Are you sure it's not me?" Bruce nodded. She lifted her wrist and said, "Jarvis, come in. How many Extremis signatures are there?"
"Rustbucket sensor units one, four and seven have been activated. One severe heat signature, two minor and two at human body temperature."
"Definitely not just me." Pepper looked up at Bruce. "What do we do?"
He grimaced. "That depends. We don't know why they're here or what they're planning. But whatever happens, if I go green, you stay out of the way, hear me? I'm going to lock the labs. Stay here."
Pepper tapped out a quick message to Tony, and checked the number of signatures again. It went up to six, and then seven. Bruce came back, and handed her a pistol. Nine signatures. A message from Tony: I'm on my way, sit tight. Ten signatures. Pepper took deep breath after deep breath. Twelve signatures - and suddenly the room was lit with a glaring white light from outside, and a voice boomed over a loudspeaker.
"Come out with your hands up. We are armed, and we have the house surrounded. I repeat, come out with your hands up."
Pepper saw a grin spread across Bruce's face. She raised an eyebrow, and he said, "Amateurs."
"I repeat, come out with your hands up. We don't want to hurt you. Come out with your hands up."
Bruce stood up and crossed to the door. "Usually they rush the house first. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that if they can get to me before the Other Guy comes out, they might stand a chance. They're wrong. But this way - this way is just idiotic. I'm going to try something."
"Are you going outside?"
"If I go green, run," he said, and flung the door open. The full glare of the floodlights cast a long shadow behind him, and a voice from outside said, "Shit! That's Bruce fucking Banner!"
Still sitting, Pepper counted six figures standing in a rough semicircle. Four of them looked normal, one was glowing at the fingertips, and one - the one with the loudspeaker - was lit up all along the side of his face.
Bruce took a step forward. "Good evening, gentlemen. My name is, yes, Bruce fucking Banner, and I don't want to hurt you either. So why don't you tell me what exactly you're doing here?"
A message from Tony blinked on Pepper's watch screen: Be there in ten minutes.
"How the hell didn't you recognise him, you idiot?" hissed another voice. The man with the glowing fingertips snapped back, "He was supposed to be in New York! I was only looking for Potts!"
The man with the loudspeaker raised a hand and the others fell silent. "There are twelve of us, and we're pretty hard to kill. I reckon we can deal with one of you. So how about you hand over the serum, and we won't have to test that theory out."
Pepper moved towards the door, careful to stay outside of the floodlight beam. Bruce said, "Serum?"
"We know you have it." The hand holding the loudspeaker shook slightly. Now that she was closer, Pepper could see that he wasn't burning in the usual way. Instead, his skin was cracked and breaking, exposing a layer of what looked like molten lava under the surface.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You have to have it." The cracks were moving down his neck now, and his arms and hands were beginning to burn too. From the edge of the group, a voice said urgently, "Mitchell, careful. Don't get too hot."
Five minutes, Tony texted.
"Look at Potts!" Mitchell shouted, visibly shaking now. "There's no way she could regulate like that without serum!" Patches of fire were showing through his clothes. From where she stood by the door, Pepper could feel the heat radiating off him.
Bruce spread his hands wide. "We don't have-" but Pepper stepped in front of him, cutting him off.
"I'll show you where the serum is. Just you. The rest of you stay outside." Bruce stared, and she shook her head at him and beckoned to Mitchell.
His footsteps left dark burn marks on the wooden floor, and by the time they reached the corridor most of his clothes had been subsumed into the flames. "This way," Pepper said, and she thought she saw him nod but by now it was hard to tell.
"Why did Banner lie?" he hissed.
Pepper kept walking.
"Why?" Mitchell demanded. Pepper looked back and saw him pulsating in a way she'd seen once before, in Killian's laboratory. She started to run, pulling him along the corridor with her, the heat of him searing her skin, but they weren't fast enough, she couldn't drag him fast enough, this living ball of flame screaming incomprehensible things behind her, his outline swelling and shifting -
and then something huge and green swept them both up, roaring in pain, and flung them along the last thirty metres of corridor into the rumpus room. The door slammed shut behind them, and Mitchell exploded.
Pepper felt the heat wash over her. She ran for the door, but it had locked automatically. The Hulk was crouched in a corner, clawing at his eyes - blinded by the blast, but not for long. "Jarvis, tell Tony I'm stuck in a Hulk-proof room with the Hulk and I'm going to need backup," Pepper said to her wrist - and realised that her watch had disappeared into the flames.
The Hulk was beginning to grunt and snuffle along the walls, still struggling to see. Pepper pressed her back to the door and hoped, blindly, that he might not notice her. He snuffled in a small circle, feeling the wall with his fingertips. For a moment, she thought it might work.
Then he turned and bounded towards her, growling like a giant dog. Pepper stood frozen to the spot as a giant green hand planted itself on the wall to either side of her, and the Hulk roared, his face inches from Pepper's.
And stopped.
"Hot," he said.
"Yes. Hot." Pepper agreed quietly.
"Hot talk!"
"Yes."
He carefully edged his face towards her and sniffed. "Not smell hot," he said, and Pepper would swear, later, that he sounded disgruntled.
"Still hot."
"Hot." The Hulk agreed, and turned away, continuing to snuffle round the room.
Pepper tried to cool down her watch arm while keeping the rest of her body aflame. It took her a couple of tries, but eventually she managed to call Tony.
"Where the hell are you? Bunch of runaway Extremis wackos picknicking in the garden, and you and Bruce are nowhere to be seen!"
"We're in the room at the end of the corridor - Bruce's safe room. He's green, " Pepper whispered, "But I think it's okay. He doesn't like the heat. He's leaving me alone."
"There's no way I'm leaving you in there with that thing!"
"If you open the door he'll get out and destroy the house. He's very quiet just now."
Tony harrumphed.
"There's a viewing room on the third floor. Go take a look."
"And the wackos?"
"Oh, I don't know! Leave them. They won't go anywhere, they need our help."
"You have a lot of explaining to do," Tony muttered. Pepper could hear him climbing stairs. By the time he got to the observation room, the Hulk was already starting to shrink back to human size. Pepper waited until she was sure Bruce was entirely himself again, and let herself cool off.
"Oh god," Bruce murmured, hunched in the corner of the room. "Is anyone there?"
"I don't know about God, but I'm here," Pepper said. Bruce's head whipped around.
"Pepper! What are you- I told you to run! Oh hell, did I hurt you?"
Pepper's limbs were heavy with tiredness, but she managed to shuffle over to Bruce's corner. She tried to hug him, but he pushed her away.
"You didn't hurt me. I mean, the Other Guy didn't hurt me. I think the fire put him off. He talked to me."
Bruce stared. Pepper decided not to point out how very naked he was.
"Seriously?"
"Yup. He said I was hot."
After a long moment, Bruce began to whoop with hysterical laughter, burying his head in his hands. Pepper put an arm round his shoulders and laughed with him, and this time he let her.
"Hey," came Tony's voice through the speakers, "That's enough naked snuggling with my girlfriend, thanks very much!"
Pepper stuck her tongue out at the nearest camera, and Bruce gave the mirrored windows the finger. Tony sighed.
"I don't know why everyone always says I'm the immature one."
---
"Well, isn't this a lovely tea-party!" Tony remarked brightly.
The assembled company glared at him.
Bruce and Pepper were wrapped in blankets by the fire, cradling mugs of coffee. Six remaining Extremis exiles sat around the dinner table, and Tony was leaning on the mantelpiece, still in his suit.
"Really. I'm just so thrilled to have you all here! What better way could there be to meet new people than to appear outside their house in the middle of the night and threaten them with violence!" He gesticulated a little too wildly and his elbow slipped on the varnished mantelpiece. Clanking, he rearranged himself into some semblance of dignity and continued. "You guys must be really stupid, by the way. Seriously. Threatening Bruce Banner? The smartest thing any of you have done today was run off, and you folks who are still here, well, I guess you were never the brains of the outfit."
"Tony, that's enough." Pepper said.
"Do you think I'm overreacting? You do, don't you!"
"I think you're talking big to compensate for not being here earlier to protect Pepper," Bruce said, "And I think it's counterproductive and frankly obnoxious."
"Hear hear," muttered a woman from the table. Tony rounded on her.
"You know what, you lost the right to have an opinion a while back. So you can shut up."
She stared calmly back at him across the room, and said, "Have you ever felt like you were going to die and there was nothing you could do about it?"
Tony blinked. "Yes, actually. But then I did something about it."
"Exactly."
For a moment, there was silence.
"I did something intelligent, though," Tony managed, but he had lost the flow of his tirade.
"What's your name?" Pepper asked.
"Cooper. Gillian Cooper."
She had dark hair pulled back from her face, and like the other Extremis exiles was dressed in worn black cargo pants and t-shirt. All of them looked like they'd been sleeping rough, but where the others were jittery, Cooper seemed steady and in control. She spoke directly to Pepper, as though Tony and Bruce weren't there.
Evenly, without theatrics, she told her how they had survived. Some of them had been away on leave when Miami fell, and some had already managed to escape - "But those who ran away earlier have been without serum for longer, so fewer of them are left," Cooper added. As time passed, it became harder for them to regulate, and therefore harder to live normally. Attempts to recreate the serum had ended badly. Then a rumour had begun to circulate that Tony Stark had managed to make his own serum, and that Pepper Potts was regulating normally. They had watched the tower for weeks, waiting for an opportunity to steal or demand the serum, but it was too well guarded. So when Pepper had set off in a bashed-up old car, off into the mountains, they had followed.
"But you don't have it, do you," Cooper finished. Pepper shook her head.
"No. And we haven't been trying to make it. Tony's been trying to work out how to cure me."
Cooper raised an eyebrow. "Then you've been wasting time."
A scruffy boy who didn't look older than nineteen leaned across the table. "Coop. What if she's a mark twelve?"
"Mark twelve?" Pepper said. Behind her she heard Tony mutter, "Don't talk about my girlfriend like I talk about my suits..."
"Killian was trying to stabilise Extremis. Had been from the beginning. None of the mark one or twos survived, and mark fives had a three-month lifespan. Mark eights were a better long-term investment, but they needed weekly injections of serum, so they couldn't go far from the base. Most of us are mark eleven - injections every four months. Mitchell was a mark ten, they need serum every two months. It's surprising that he lasted this long."
Two months since Miami, Pepper thought. They had two months left. "And mark twelve?"
"Mark twelve was supposed to be a version of Extremis that stabilised completely after the third injection. No repeat dosages, nothing. Permanent regulation. But we don't know if Killian got there."
"He said he was close. Remember the last Group meeting?" one of the others said.
"He said a lot of things."
Bruce tapped a fingertip against his mug, deep in thought. "I don't think Pepper's - regulating - completely," he said. "Her body's reacting as if to a deficiency of some sort. Almost like anaemia."
"That's how it starts," Cooper replied. "You start to feel ill and tired a lot, if you're due an injection. Then you start to lose control. But even if you're a mark eleven, you shouldn't be feeling it yet, after two months," she said to Pepper. Pepper bit her lip.
"I...am. And I had three injections, so I don't think I'm a mark twelve. Or maybe I'm a failed attempt."
"We'd better fix you ASAP, then." Tony was trying to chirp, but he sounded worried. Bruce put a hand on Pepper's arm and squeezed gently.
"I think we should all go to sleep. Nothing's going to get fixed at this time of night."