He’s humming quietly to himself, as he solders the tiny circuit board into place: “I was strolling on the Moon one day, in the merry, merry month of May...” It’s what the Apollo 17 astronauts sang on the Moon, even though it was actually December.
He’s trying to build a pair of small robots. They’re not that complicated. He really should have got them finished by now, but he didn’t factor in that there would be mind-controlling wizards in Baltimore. You live and learn. Anyway, the robots: at some critical moment during the party, they’ll scurry into the room and maybe up Pepper’s leg and onto her shoulder unless he decides that’s just going to freak her out or tear her dress, and each of them will be offering her an emerald earring. One of the robots will make Pepper chase it a little when she tries to take it, people will laugh. Hopefully. Hopefully the whole thing’s cute rather than weird. It seemed cute when he thought of it (and just saying “yes, gift-wrap the box” to the salesperson seemed offensively boring). After the party he thought she could have the robots in her office to, you know, bring her pens or beverages or whatever; Pepper’s workspace is offensively lacking in robots, Tony won’t stnd for it.
But right now the tangles of wire and metal actually seem rather horrific, smeared with black oil and all hard edges you could easily hurt someone with.
That’s not particular to them, though: around this time of year, everything looks like something you could easily hurt someone with. That’s one of the things people don’t get, not that he’s going to tell them. It’s not just a matter of oh, Tony Stark has issues with water now (although, ha ha, yes) it’s that sometimes the whole world stops looking reliably normal: chairs and tables and clocks and pebbles and sticks and cutlery and candles and screwdrivers and Pepper’s eyebrow tweezers, it all looks at best, wrong and fake and from another universe and at worst, like they’re about to be wielded by unseen hands and...
And people, but then it’s not like he never had problems with people even before.
“I was strolling on the moon one day,
In the merry, merry month of May.
I was taken by surprise, by a pair of roguish eyes...”
It is May, but he hasn’t been to the Moon yet. And he’s ninety percent sure he could. It’s really just a question of the math and a quiet weekend. He hasn’t been to the Moon yet, so that’s a reason not to pull the arc reactor out of his chest.
That’s not the only reason. Not the main reason. Just the reason he happens to be thinking of right now.
“In a moment my poor heart was stole away.”
How does he even know this stupid song? Well, the internet exists and he’s a genius, that’s why, but honestly. And it’s not as though he wants to kill himself. He doesn’t. He wouldn’t.
It’s just that sometime he likes having a hunk of metal and really cool science rammed into the middle of his chest, and other times he doesn’t like it at all.
He could cover the robot’s skeletons with something soft. No, he couldn’t, they’d look like freaking Furbies. He’ll spray paint them gold, gold improves everything, and would go nice with the emeralds.
Right now, though, they honestly look like large spiders. “Jarvis,” he says. “Pepper doesn’t have a spider phobia which I’ve forgotten about, does she?” Because he might forget. He’s still the kind of person who forgets things like that about people. He turns the robot over and squints at its flailing legs. “Or... a fear of crabs, if that’s a thing?”
“Kabourophobia, sir, and no, Ms Potts appears at reasonable ease with both the arachnid and crustacean subphyla.”
“That’s something,” says Tony, and calls up a couple of virtual screens over the work bench; surely the articulation was way smoother than this, in the simulation?
The emeralds are from an ethical mining company, or at least a company that says it’s ethical, in fact, it says it gives money to endangered elephants. So hopefully that’s okay and he didn’t inadvertently finance any more war and no four year-olds were sent down mine shafts for Pepper’s earrings. He so nearly didn’t think of that, he so often doesn’t think of all the easy ways to be accidentally evil. But the emeralds will look beautiful on Pepper; that’s the one part of this he’s honestly looking forward to, seeing that rainforest green against her skin and hair, and her smile. And oh, yes, there’s another reason – aspect of the main reason, in fact – that he’s definitely going to leave the arc reactor where it is. Even if right now it feels like one massive scab, begging him to pick at it.
He rubs at his chest. He’s stopped cutting holes in his t-shirts for the blue light to glare out of, all “Hi! Fuck you!” at the world, because he doesn’t need to now, everything’s better in lots of ways, has been for ages. So it’s not that accessible right now, which is probably good.
“Ms Linehan calling for you, sir,” says Jarvis.
Tony sighs, because he’s not convinced at this point that hiring a party-planner actually means you do any less party-planning yourself, but oh well. “Hey, Carolyn,” he says.
He could probably just have Jarvis plan the party. But who knows what Jarvis’s taste is like. He might have okayed that fleur-de-lys theme Carolyn wanted. Or the ice sculpture angels. Terrible.
“Mr Stark,” says Carolyn, “I am so, so sorry about this, but I’ve just heard from Stefani’s manager and she’s too sick to make the party; she thought it might just be a 24 hour thing but it seems it’s actual flu, and I know she’s sorry to let you down, especially because she was really hoping to see the suit, but she’s not going to be well enough in time.”
Tony scowls and pulls at his hair a bit. This fucking party, Jesus.
No, no, it’ll be a good party, he likes parties, he is not going to defeated by a party.
“Okay,” he says, “I’m sending you the twenty most-played tracks off Pepper’s Starkphone. See if you can get any of the artists that’re still alive and don’ t ... sound like sea lions lamenting their dead; huge piles of gold available to be flung. Not Coldplay, though, there is a line and I am drawing it there.”
Carolyn apologises for far too long and finally gets off the phone. There. He dealt with that like a reasonable person. Okay. That’s fine. He’s fine, here. Which is good, because he completely refuses to be the sort of person who has a panic attack because Lady Gaga dropped out of playing at his girlfriend’s birthday party, I mean, for God’s sake.
And all right, it’s not about Lady Gaga, he knows Pepper would be perfectly happy if he just stuck her phone in a speakerdeck, but the thing is, it’s been May for weeks and it’s going to be the 29th and things tend happen to and around Tony in May a lot. Sure, some of it good. May last year, he teamed up with all these sexy, annoying people in weird outfits who now live in his house and cook eyewatering curries in his kitchen and leave arrows in his walls and watch movies with him and fight monsters with him and it’s remarkably unhorrible, so that May definitely had its points. But you know, also Coulson died and New York got half-destroyed, so. And the May before that, there was Vanko and Hammer and getting thrown through walls by his best friend. And the May before that, aha, well, yes.
And there’s his birthday, and then Pepper’s birthday, and he used to like that, that they shared a month, even though it didn’t make him any better at remembering a simple number like “29”.
Now of course, he remembers just fine.
“Tony?”
Oh and now Pepper’s here.
“Jesus, Pep,” he says, flinging an oil-stained cloth over the unfinished robots (and the little box that holds the emeralds). “You’re not supposed to walk in on people who may or may not be wrapping your presents.”
Pepper looks worried. Of course she does, worried is the default state of Pepper, which is mostly his fault. But she’s particularly worried because of what happened last night, which is entirely his fault.
“Sorry,” she says, mutedly, which he wasn’t expecting at all. He was expecting to be told he had to sign something boring or go have a meeting with someone unpleasant or if he was lucky that he needed to go and save the world. “Came by to see how you’re doing,” she says.
“Fine, awesome, just, you know, another average day of geniusing down here, how are you?”
She stares at him. She looks worse than worried, actually.
“Fine. I ...wanted to make sure you were really here,” she says with an embarrassed little attempt at a smile. It doesn’t work very well, what with how her voice wobbles at the same time.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Nothing. I turned on the news. It’s not anything. They arrested this guy. He was going to kidnap this attorney in Florida, he’d written up all these plans—he had this whole... dungeon-thing built under the house, and I just...”
“Okay, but the police have him? The attorney didn’t actually get kidnapped? – I don’t need to fly somewhere and ...?”
“No,” she says with too much force and makes a stunted little movement towards him, but stops before she touches him.
“I’m here,” he says.
“Yeah,” she says, smiling again and it’s wider but not exactly more stable.“Yeah, you are. So. Hug?”
He hates that she feels she has to ask. That after last night/early this morning she maybe actually does have to ask. Like he’s some sort of... person who can’t hug his girlfriend. It’s not normally like this, of course. He knows this is all only temporary. It doesn’t feel true but it is.
“Sure,” he says, and opens his arms, and she comes into them and she fits so right and her hair smells like rosemary and apples, and it’s good, it’s perfect until... except... He couldn’t explain to someone else what’s wrong. Being held by his gorgeous, loyal, sweet-smelling girlfriend is nothing like being held down by men who are carving a hole in his chest or forcing his head into water. But he swears can feel his heart swollen and pressing against the hard casing of the arc reactor (get it out get it out get it out) against the shreds of metal and he can’t draw a full breath he can’t ever draw a full breath...
He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t do anything, but Pepper draws back. “Sorry,” she says, in the same moment that he says it too. She hears it, and her eyes go wide with an expression that he doesn’t understand but certainly seems to intersect with “horror” somewhere and he keeps doing things that make her look like that, he can’t make it stop.
“Okay,” she says, and then, unnervingly, it’s like someone’s pressed a switch behind her eyes and SlightlyWeepy!Pepper goes offline and UnstoppableWorkMode!Pepper is activated, conjuring her phone to her ear out of freaking nowhere, like possibly she has phone-teleporting powers now.
“Carolyn,” she says. “Something’s come up: the party’s off. No, no, it’s nothing to do with Lady Gaga; I’m so sorry, thank you so much for all your work and of course we’ll pay any expenses on top of your cancellation fee. I’m going to recommend you very highly. Thank you. ”
“What – You just – what? Jarvis, get Carolyn back –”
“Jarvis, don’t,” says Pepper, and Jarvis doesn’t, the traitor. “Listen. Executive decision. We don’t do this any more. Tomorrow isn’t a day that needs to be any harder.”
Tony splutters a few things, most coherent of which is: “Pepper, we’re not going to cancel your birthday just because I’m a –” but whatever he is he doesn’t want to say it. He tries instead: “I’m fine.”
UnstoppableWorkMode!Pepper’s edges soften and thaw. And bless her, she doesn’t say: Tony, you are not fine at all.
She doesn’t say: Around about two this morning you were huddled in the corner of the bedroom while I said your name over and over while carefully not touching you so that you’d remember where the fuck you were and let me put the arc reactor back in your chest because of how you’d clawed it out and thrown it across the floor.
She doesn’t say: and every time it comes out it shaves time off how long you can survive without it and one day when it needs to be replaced or someone pulls it out (again) or whatever, then your time will be up and that’ll be it so really what’s the point, might as well yank the thing right now, well obviously not, she would never say that, and it’s just as well he’s managing not to say any of this out loud.
He knows he doesn’t always think like this, won’t always think like this. So surely it has to be possible to just stop.
“Please call her back,” he says. “I don’t want to wreck your birthday.”
“My birthday is now in February,” says Pepper crisply. “February 7th, 1974.”
Tony blinks, side-tracked. “Huh,” he says. “You went older, interesting choice, counter-intuitive...”
“Of course I went older, now I look even more fantastic for my age. Duh.”
Tony feels a grin pull across his face despite himself, a faint loosening of tension in his shoulders and chest, but he shakes his head.
Pepper’s still talking: “And it’ll be nice, a good reason for a party in winter after Christmas, something to look forward to when it’s still cold. And I like the number seven. It’s actually much better like this.”
Tony tries to gather his thoughts, and he’s never been one to do that before starting to talk, so here we go: “Look, for one thing you have to go younger. Otherwise I’ve now missed your birthday by months and am a terrible boyfriend, that, like, majorly undermines my entire redemption arc, Pepper, I am surprised at you, you are supposed to be on board with that. It’s like Tiny Tim moving Christmas just to make Scrooge look bad.”
He gets a small smile out of Pepper during this. “...Tony, if you’re Scrooge, me being Tiny Tim is really problematic.”
“... And for another thing,” says Tony, finding the point, “no, you are not changing your birthday. No, Pepper. Because firstly it’s impossible, I mean, even if we had time travel, which we don’t, I’ve tried, I don’t see any way around you being born in May, this is a fact, there are records to prove it...”
“You can hack into the public records and change it.”
“What?” He’s thrown again-- she says it so straightforwardly, like it’s a completely normal thing to suggest. “Pep, you can’t have a forged birth certificate, what if you ever want to run for public office, it would be a whole thing, who needs that. And you can’t... you can’t keep... letting me mess up your life. I can’t keep letting me do that.”
“Tony,” she says, looking down at her hands. “It’s not like I have family,” (she doesn’t, that’s something else they have awfully in common: just a reputedly grim aunt and a couple of cousins), “No one particularly needs it to be my birthday tomorrow. There’s no one we have to prove a point to.”
“But no one needs it not to be your birthday,” he says, and smiles, to show he definitely isn’t such a person, though he’s pretty sure he’s only managing what she’s already diagnosed as the Wrong Kind of Smiling. “It is your birthday. And it should be awesome.”
Pepper’s face puckers a bit, and please please don’t let her cry, not now, he’s pretty sure he does not have an appropriate response handy, there’s a non-zero chance he might cry himself, fuck.
“Yeah, it should, and you should be able to enjoy it with me, but it isn’t and you can’t and I can’t either. And we don’t have to. I can’t have a happy birthday knowing it’s the day the person I love dreads most in the year. I can’t enjoy a party when you’re miserable. And that isn’t something you did.” He goes to speak again but she shakes her head. “It isn’t even only about you, well, it is, but it’s not just me being sorry for you, Tony. I was not having fun three years-plus-one-day ago either. Not after Rhodey called me, not for the rest of the time you were gone.”
He knows she missed him, worried about him, of course, he knew she would at the time. Wasn’t surprised that she cried. But he’s still only gradually... getting it, what it was like for her, that she cared that much. It isn’t easy to get his head around or know what to do with, not in this frame of mind. But he knows she got chased around by reporters chanting things like, Do you think he’s dead, Ms Potts, does Stark Industries have any comments on the possibility Mr Stark might reveal secrets related to national security under torture, Ms Potts... and obviously that would do things to a person who cared about another person, it would do things to him and Pepper is a significantly better person than he is. And being good really ought not to come with built-in punishments for people who started out good and thus don’t have to do the whole Atoning For Earlier Sins schtick but anyway.
“And it doesn’t come close, I know, but I do not like May 29th either,” Pepper concludes. “So there. Let’s just... stop trying to make it something other than a shitty day and we’ll have a good day on my new birthday.”
He takes her hand, tangles their fingers together. That turns out okay, doesn’t prompt the skin-too-tight world-on-a-knife-edge feeling, so he brings her fingers up to his lips and she slides her hand over his jaw and into his hair and that’s good too. In fact, the more he lets himself think about not having to perform Tony-MF-Stark to hundreds of people tomorrow, the further away the awful feeling gets. Which sucks, he should be able to fix this for them both, shouldn’t be letting her give him things, when it’s supposed to be the other way round.
“Oh, Pep,” he sighs, tilting his head up to her hand as it runs over his hair again.
“So are we done?” says Pepper. “Can we just watch movies and eat pizza tomorrow with superheroes, like normal people?”
“Compromise,” says Tony. “Tomorrow is still your birthday. You now have two birthdays. Like the Queen of England. The one where there’s cake and emeralds and partying. And there’s the one tomorrow which is quiet and we don’t do anything much and maybe your boyfriend is a twitchy screamy mess and but it’s not a shitty day, it’s really not, because you got born and I’m so, so happy you got born, Pepper, all of this would be so unimaginably much worse without you. Well, it wouldn’t any more because I’d probably be dead but, you know. And I’m still making this all about me, aren’t I? I really do suck at not doing that.”
“Kind of, but I’m used to it,” she says, leaning down to kiss him. “And okay, that’s a plan. Except one thing.” He half-opens his eyes to peer up at her. “I’m getting emeralds? Because ooh, I don’t want to wait for those. Are they under here?” she goes for the cloth he threw over the bench.
“Hey, hey,” he says, grabbing her. “Not till tomorrow.”
He gets to his feet and now they’re intertwined and she’s warm and right against him and the lab is full of things whirring peaceably to themselves all round them and Dummy is trying diligently to sweep metal dust off the floor (and actually spreading it everywhere) and there’s no sand, no water, no ... emptiness. This is the place he’s really in, she’s the one who’s really there.
“Okay,” agrees Pepper. “Tomorrow there’s movies and pizza and emeralds. It sounds great.”
Put like that, it really doesn’t sound that awful. “Winter’s a crappy time for a birthday,” he says. “You should so have a summer birthday.”
“Maybe summer is better,” Pepper concedes.
“And we’ll troop the color on your other birthday, Pep, I don’t know what that means, or what the color is, exactly, but we are going to find out and troop it.”
“Well, good. I really only engineered this for extra presents.”
“What about the moon, Ms Potts?” he says, lifting their joined hands over her head to twirl her, like they’re dancing. “How would it be if I flew you to the moon?”
He’s serious, yet at the same time he’d have been happy if she just laughed and rolled her eyes. But instead her eyes go wide and she grins like a schoolgirl and says, “Oh, wow, yes.”
The math, he thinks, bringing her close again. It’s just a question of doing the math. And he can start on that tomorrow. He’ll have the day free.