Peter was having a rather rough day at work. He’d had to stay up late the night before to finish all his assignments that were due the day after and upon coming into his office, had been presented with dozens of E-Mails and a definite work overload for the day.
To add to his misery, Pepper Potts entered the office shortly after nine in the morning, while he was trying to sort all the tasks of the day out.
At first he’d liked Pepper and Tony a lot. They were with him almost every day, gave him things to do, had lunch with him and praised his work. But at some point, the wife of his boss had started to perform random tests on whether or not he had got the mail at the right time that day, whether he had named something correctly in the data base and a lot of unnecessary things that were not vital to Stark Industries in any way but something they had agreed on. And it annoyed the shit out of him when he had important stuff to do Mr. Stark had given him and she loaded his desk with minute tasks she could have done herself.
“Morning Peter,” Pepper said as she walked into the office and Peter smiled at her sweetly.
“Good morning Mrs. Potts,” he said and shook her hand.
Then, he was in for a big shit storm. Pepper blamed him for things he wasn’t even responsible for. It took her almost an hour to finish listing every single thing she wanted to complain about, and by the time she left, the 18 year old’s eyes were full of tears. On top of his work overload he had now maybe an hour more of silly things to do that no one even cared about.
Making a to-do list didn’t manage to calm Peter’s nerves; he was completely overwhelmed and overly tired. Then, to add to the misery of that, his phone rang; it was none other than Tony Stark.
“Y-yes?”
“Yeees,” Tony said, mimicking Peter’s tired voice. “Hey kid how’s your day?” He then said in his usual cheery manner.
“It’s okay,” Peter stated.
“Good, I’m gonna need you to get in here and help me sort out a few files,” Tony stated and Peter’s eyes filled with tears once more. He would never get all his stuff done in time.
After hanging up the phone, Peter made his way down the hall and into Tony’s office. He figured that once he’d be in front of the man, his brain would catch on and definitely not cry over something so silly.
Oh was he wrong. The second that he walked into Tony’s office, the man looked at him and asked what was wrong in a worried voice.
And already tears were falling down Peter’s cheeks and he was so stunned he couldn’t even wipe them away.
Tony was by his side within a matter of seconds, put an arm around his shoulder and guided him to sit on a chair in front of his desk, then crouched down next to him and placed a hand on his thigh. “Hey kid, you know you can talk to me. What’s wrong?”
Peter sniffled and finally wiped away his tears. “No, it’s silly,” he croaked out and looked at Tony as a blush crept over his features.
“Hm,” Tony said. “Doesn’t seem so silly to me if it gets you this upset kid,” the billionaire stated and Peter let out a long-held breath.
So slowly, with long breaks in between, Peter explained to his boss that the workload he was getting just wasn’t right and that yes he was an intern, but that he did feel a tad mocked by Pepper with the things she gave him to do, although stating that so carefully it took him a few minutes to form the sentence.
At the end of it, Peter was glad he’d been forced to have this talk because he would’ve never initiated it himself, and now it was Tony’s turn to do something about it.
Tony knew that Pepper had been in a pissed off mood lately. Her menopause was coming, and that was all it took for him to explain to himself why she was being so mean to Peter (and most other employees, really).
Tony placed a hand on Peter’s shoulder once he was done talking and told the kid it was alright, that he would do something about it. He handed the kid a few tissues, patted Peter’s back and sat down at his usual spot again, diving into the work he’d wanted to once the boy had calmed down.
They were finished after a few minutes, and as Peter opened the door to leave, he turned back around. “Mr. Stark?”
Tony looked up from his files. “Yes kid?”
“Could you….”
“I won’t tell anyone Pete,” Tony said with a small smile.