Chapter 11
Chapter 10
She’s in the middle of changing the dressing on Tony’s wound when the door to her bedroom is pushed open and James walks in. He watches her in silence for a few moments, hovering awkwardly by the far wall, before stepping further into the room.
“How is he?”
She shrugs, one-shouldered, picks up a roll of gauze to place over the dressing. “The bleeding has slowed down quite a bit,” she allows, carefully smoothing out the gauze. Lingers, her fingers resting lightly on the strip of the tanned skin turned pale with blood loss. It feels warm under her touch. A little too warm. She tells James as much.
“Infection?”
There’s an unmistakable note of worry in his voice, a reflection of her own, and she bites her lip against it. Sighs, pulling the blanket back up to cover Tony’s shoulders.
“I’ll be keeping an eye on it,” she says. “There’s a pharmacist I know next town over. I can get antibiotics from him, if need be.”
And, hopefully, there won’t be, she thinks. Because, Tony’s strong. He’s gonna beat this. She has to believe it, she has to.
She scans the slack features before her, her chest tight with concern. “You made me a promise, Mr. Stark,” she reminds him silently, smoothing her fingers over a furrow of pain that creases Tony’s forehead even in the unconsciousness of sleep. “Don’t you dare break it now.”
She hears James hum distractedly in response, hears the floorboards creak as the man approaches the bed, hesitating to a stop a couple steps away.
“Something on your mind?” She raises an eyebrow at him, waits him out as he stands there, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth as if unsure how to begin.
He sighs, long and heavy. Runs his palm over his short buzz of hair. “Is it true? About Howard?” he blurts out finally, his eyes a bit desperate, a bit wild.
“What about Howard?” She sees James flinch at her tone. Knows she sounds cold, hostile even, but she can’t help it – the mere mention of that man sets her teeth on edge. Especially now, when Tony lies here, unconscious; when it’s only been hours since she cleaned his blood off her hands; when she can’t help but remember the last time she’d seen him like this….
To James’s credit, he doesn’t back down. Holds his ground even under her scorching glare. “I didn’t know Howard personally,” he begins, cautious but determined, “but his reputation–”
“I know all about his reputation,” she spits, her lips pursing in disgust.
“He was a well-respected figure in Washington,” he objects weakly, like it’s an obligation he feels somehow to defend Howard’s name, and she grits her teeth sharply to keep herself from snapping at him once again.
He’s got more to say, she can see it. So she’ll let him talk and then she’ll decide if what he says justifies her committing murder.
James chews his lip again, blows out another breath. “Look, I misjudged him. Tony. Badly. I… everything I’ve learned today, it’s…” He shakes his head, looking weary all of a sudden, drained. “Tony said something in the car on the way here. I don’t think he meant to say it and I, well, frankly, I wasn’t even sure I understood him right, but…” He flicks an oddly distressed, uneasy glance at Tony before meeting her eyes once more. “Did Howard really…” He makes an aborted gesture in Tony’s direction. “Was Tony…”
“Abused?”
He winces at her bluntness. Nods, crossing his arms on his chest as if to protect himself somehow from the ugly truth of it.
The absurdity of the gesture almost makes her laugh.
“I met Tony when I was in fourth grade. Our principal, Mr. Wolfe, came in to our classroom one day almost halfway through the first semester with this scrawny 7-year-old. Said the kid was gonna be joining our class.” He reminded her of a cornered wolf cub then the way he stood there, staring defiantly at the classroom full of much bigger, older kids – frightened and beaten but ready to fight.
“Fourth grade at 7 years old?” James whistles in surprise.
“Yeah,” she chuckles grimly, remembering the angry looks, the jealous rumors, the taunts that were thrown Tony’s way. “It didn’t go over well with the rest of us, as you can imagine. Everyone saw him as a spoiled rich brat whose daddy probably paid off the principal to get him placed in a higher grade (never mind that he was smarter than everyone there). Who was too good to talk to any of us or to sit with us at lunch. Too good to ride the bus, so he had his butler take him to and from school.”
She runs her hand absently down the blanket, smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles. Stops when she reaches Tony’s hand, her fingers twitching slightly in indecision before she carefully picks it up to cradle in her own.
“Took me months to realize that that butler, Jarvis, was the only person in Tony’s house who actually gave a damn about him,” she admits, her voice thick with self-loathing. Runs her fingers with soothing apology over the bruised, scraped knuckles. “Tony would disappear every so often. Wouldn’t show up to school for days at a time. Everyone thought he was probably tanning on some exotic beach in the Caribbean or something. Only…. only he would come back and he’d be paler than before and he’d walk funny and flinch as if he were in pain whenever people bumped into him in the hallway.” She looks up at James, her lips twisting bitterly. “You don’t get concussions and broken bones while lounging on the beach.”
James runs a shaking hand over his mouth, eyes wide with horrified disbelief. “And nobody… nobody knew?”
“Some people did,” she acknowledges, the old familiar pang of guilt thrumming deep in her heart, making her chest twinge with it. “But nobody could do anything. Howard had the whole town bought and paid for. His staff, the school administrators, the teachers, the doctors – if any of them so much as thought about going to the authorities, Howard’s lawyers would have… these people would have been out of the job. He’s done it, too. It wasn’t an empty threat.” She drops her gaze down to where her thumb continues to trace gentle, absentminded circles along the skin of Tony’s hand. “And Tony knew. That’s why he never complained to anyone. Lied whenever someone would ask him how he got hurt. He’d say he fell off a bike, or tripped walking down the stairs, or ran into a door, or some other ridiculous excuse like that.”
A harsh angry bark of laughter scrapes its way out of her throat, and she clamps her mouth shut against it, clenches her free hand into a fist. Because those lies? She fell for them, too, at first. She fell for them, too. And she never did forgive herself for it.
“He didn’t want people losing their jobs because of him. Didn’t think he was worth it,” she whispers, feeling the shocked horror of that realization gnaw at her heart even now, decades later. “Can you imagine that? The kind of life he had as a kid that would make him believe something like this?”
James swallows thickly, looking vaguely sick. Works his mouth for a moment, the words seeming to flounder in their attempt to break past his lips. “And his mother?” he manages finally in a breathy whisper.
“His mother…” She huffs out a tired, rueful breath. Maria loved Tony, Pepper’s sure of it. Tried her best to protect him from Howard’s drunken rages when she could muster enough courage to do so. Which wasn’t often enough. Not nearly often enough. But she did try.
In the end, it was what got her killed.
“Tony got sick one time over the winter. The flu.” Her lips twitch with mild amusement when she sees the way James frowns at her, confused at the apparent non sequitur. But her smile dims all too quickly as her mind flashes back to that night she visited Tony at the hospital, to the way he sat there, slumped in Jarvis’s cautious embrace, still so frighteningly pale and with that heartachingly lost, broken look in his eyes.
“Howard didn’t believe in being sick,” she spits out, her voice dripping with venom. “His favorite mantra was ‘Stark men are made of iron’. Been drilling it into Tony’s head from the day he was born. Imagine how disappointed he was when he found out that Maria kept Tony home from school because of some flu. So the bastard made Tony stand outside for 3 hours in his pj’s in 20 degree weather. To toughen him up.” She raises one hand in the air, her fingers snapping out air quotes. Drags in a breath, struggling to maintain her rapidly slipping composure. “Tony ended up in the hospital with pneumonia. Jarvis told me his fever got so high, they were afraid they were going to lose him. And Maria, she didn’t take it well. It…uh… it was the first time that Tony actually came close to dying at Howard’s hand and, I guess, it rattled her. Enough so that she confronted Howard.”
“What…uh… what happened?” There’s a hesitancy in James’s question, almost as if he’s asking it against his will, as if he would really rather not know. Not that she can blame him, really.
She doesn’t know all that happened, though. Jarvis wouldn’t even tell Tony all of it, trying to spare the boy (not that it helped any).
She tells James what she does know. That there was an argument, a bad one. That, for a long time after, there was a faded bloodstain on the floor of the Stark mansion next to a broken piece of railing at the bottom of the staircase that led from the upstairs floor down to the foyer. That Tony got so upset when Jarvis broke the news to him that a nurse had to sedate him to keep him from hurting himself. And that Tony believes his mother’s death was his fault because, in his mind, he was the reason for that argument and because he was stuck in the hospital and wasn’t there to keep Howard’s fury away from her.
Tony had vowed then that he wouldn’t let anyone else he loved get hurt because of him. He hasn’t broken that vow since.
Beside her James sinks down heavily into a nearby chair, moves his head from side to side with a wide-eyed, shell-shocked look. “Was that when… You said before that Jarvis was Tony’s guardian. Did he take custody of him then?”
She shakes her head, presses her lips together hard enough to feel the ache shoot all the way up to the joints of her jaw. “About a year later,” she replies, reaching for the blanket again to pull it down from where it’s covering Tony’s chest. “After this.” She points to a small round patch of scarred skin slightly to the left of Tony’s breastbone, faded over time. Hears a sharp intake of breath beside her that lets her know James recognizes it for what it is.
“H-how?” is all he manages, his voice sounding dangerously strained, as though it physically pained him to say it.
She raises Tony’s hand to her lips, turns it gently to press a light kiss into his palm. Lays it against her cheek, letting herself burrow into its familiar calloused warmth, drawing strength from the contact. She’s gonna need it if she has any hope of getting through that particular story without breaking down completely.
“It was the anniversary of Maria’s death. Tony was…,” she closes her eyes briefly, wincing at the memory, “he wasn’t handling it well. Couldn’t really concentrate in school. The teachers were understanding, of course. They knew.” She huffs, resentful. “It was hard not to, what with the news coverage slobbering all over the tearjerker story of the poor grieving widower Howard Stark and his son.” She finds it hard not to gag as she says it out loud now. Back then she felt like scratching out the eyes of every news anchor that waxed poetic about the elder Stark on that ‘difficult anniversary of his wife’s untimely death’.
“They let him go home. I volunteered to drive him – the perks of being 3 years older.” A smile tugs at her lips unbidden as she remembers Tony pouting like a disgruntled toddler the day she got her learner’s permit. She, of course, made sure to milk the advantage fully for the next three years, rubbing it in her friend’s face any chance she had.
Except that day.
“We heard a gunshot just as we pulled up, and Tony… he just ran inside – didn’t even wait for me to stop the car.”
She takes a breath, short and unsteady. Feels it hitch uncomfortably in her chest. She remembers running into the house, following the sounds of raised voices. Remembers finding them all in the kitchen: Howard, his eyes bloodshot with alcohol and anger, a half-sloshed-out drink in one hand and a gun in the other; Jarvis, pale but determined, his hands gripping the countertop as if he were trying to stop himself from lunging at his employer; and Tony, slowly inching closer to his father, his hands raised imploringly as he pleaded with him to put the gun down.
“Howard was drunk,” she says, gripping Tony’s hand harder. She can feel herself start to tremble, can feel her heart stammer wildly in her chest. She doesn’t think she’s ever been as scared as she was that day.
“He was drunk and he was angry, and he decided to take it out on Jarvis. And Tony, he… he couldn’t bear the thought of losing someone else. Especially not on that day. There was already a smoking hole in the wall next to where Jarvis was standing, and Howard wasn’t calming down, he wasn’t even… I don’t think he even knew where he was or what he was doing.”
There’s a watery veil in her eyes, and she raises her gaze to the ceiling to keep the tears at bay. Beside her James sits still as a statue, she’s not even sure the man’s breathing, but she can feel his eyes on her, the shocked, troubled heaviness of his scrutiny.
She forces herself to keep talking.
She tells him how Howard raised his gun again, and how Tony lunged at him, pushing him hard into the wall to get him away from Jarvis. How Howard roared in a drunken rage and swung the weapon at his son, pistol-whipping the boy and sending him stumbling down onto the floor. How his trigger finger jerked at the tail-end of that wild swing; how deafening the sound of the gunshot felt when she was standing so close.
She blinks, letting the tears spill over, running unchecked down her cheeks. Drops her gaze back down to the small pink scar on Tony’s chest, her free hand reaching for it without conscious thought, fingers ghosting over the puckered skin.
A memory washes over her, a nightmarish flood of images she knows she’ll never forget.
Jarvis rushing past Howard to get to Tony, who’s struggling weakly to pull himself up, looking dazed and scared. There’s a small trickle of blood on Tony’s face from where the impact of the barrel broke the skin, and it runs in a thin steady line down his cheek, curving at his jawline to slip innocuously down his neck and stain the collar of his shirt. Another, larger stain mars the front of it, spreading outwards from a small ragged hole in it center, growing and growing and growing. Jarvis presses his hands over it – they tremble, Pepper notices. And isn’t that odd? Jarvis’s hands never tremble, but here they are, shaking like an aspen leaf in the wind. And Tony winces, trying to flinch away from Jarvis’s touch, his face scrunching up as if in pain, but Jarvis doesn’t relent. Jarvis shouts at her, at Pepper, to call the ambulance, and he presses down on Tony’s chest harder and harder and harder. And Tony cries out, Jarvis’s name falling from his lips – a gasped out plea chased with blood that stains them red and drips down his chin when he attempts to speak again. And Jarvis’s face grows ashen with fear, something Pepper’s never seen before. And then he’s lifting Tony up in his arms, and then they’re running, out the kitchen, down the hallway, outside, to Pepper’s car. No ambulance, it’s gonna take too long….
She takes a long, shuddering breath, pulling herself forcibly out of the haunting vision. Glances at her suspiciously silent audience, sitting hunched over in his chair, his head buried in his hands.
“I’ve never seen Jarvis so angry. He was… I honestly think that the only reason he didn’t shoot Howard right then and there was because Tony needed him more,” she muses quietly. “And I think Howard realized that, too. Jarvis told him after - once we knew that Tony was going to be okay – he told him he was taking Tony away. He went back to the house, packed up all of his and Tony’s stuff right in front of Howard and told Howard that he was leaving and taking Tony with him, and that if Howard so much as thought about stopping him that he would rip him apart with his bare hands. And Howard just… let him go. Let them both go. He didn’t fight it. I think he was afraid to.”
Gently, she lays Tony’s hand back down onto the sheets, tucks it under the blanket that she pulls back up to cover his chest. “Very few people know about this. Even here at the Foundation,” she warns, and James raises his head at that, gives her a slightly confused look. “Tony doesn’t like to talk about being abused. Thinks it makes him weak.” She closes her eyes, pained, lifts one hand to wipe at the tears drying on her cheeks. “Another one of Howard’s life lessons,” she adds, her lips twisting in disdain. She’s glad Howard’s dead, but she still thinks he got off too easy. One day, she thinks, she’s gonna drive out to New York to the ruins of the old Stark mansion and dance on the bastard’s grave. Maybe drag Tony and Jarvis along, make it a party.
“The only reason I told you,” she continues, stern, “is because Tony let some of that slip out in your company, and I could see you’ve already started making assumptions. I didn’t want you to make the wrong ones.”
“I understand,” James rasps out, subdued. “I won’t say anything.”
She nods, satisfied, rises stiffly to her feet. “I’m gonna go check on the animals,” she says. “Gotta secure everything for the night.” She still feels shaky and cold, her head swimming with the haunting memories of the past. Some fresh air would do her good.
James doesn’t move from where he’s sitting. Looks at Tony with an expression of pensive worry and a watchful sort of protectiveness that loosens something in Pepper’s chest, fills it with warmth. “I…uh… I think I’m gonna stay with him a bit, if that’s okay,” he murmurs, breaking his vigil for a moment to send a questioning look Pepper’s way.
She dips her head in approval, leans in to plant a quick gentle kiss on Tony’s brow. “Don’t stay up too late, though,” she warns, trying to pull off an easy smile but still falling far too short. “This is a working farm, Mr. President, and we are all in the habit of rising early. As a temporary resident here, you’ll be expected to pitch in.” She gestures vaguely in the direction of the window that looks out onto the field and the barn behind the house. “Them cows ain’t gonna milk themselves.”