Chapter Text
Pepper learned that she was pregnant the same day she threw Richard’s clothes into the street. She could hear him screaming as he stood next to his car, insults that should have cut deep but didn’t matter because she lived on the fourth floor and his voice barely carried. He looked small, from up where she was. She watched with glee as one of his expensive shirts caught in the branches of a nearby tree.
“Bitch!” he called.
She scoffed. Her hands were trembling so she got back inside, looking for something else to trash. There was a bruise, she knew, blooming along the side of her face. She caught a glimpse of it this morning and puked. She came back to the balcony with his lacrosse gear, which she unceremoniously hauled over the railing. Lacrosse. It should’ve been the first red flag.
There was an unholy screech as the gear hit the tarmac. “You hysterical cunt! You think I won’t come and get you? You think our door can keep you safe?”
Pepper was a very organized woman. Once she’d been done puking, she’d rested her forehead on the toilet seat and thought it through. She’d dismissed moving -- she had the money, now, a stupid amount that Tony Stark himself had thrown at her to make her agree to become his PA. But this place had been hers before Richard had shouldered his way in and left sweaty sports clothes over her comfortable chairs. Fuck if he was going to scare her out. No moving -- so she called a blacksmith, clunky phone in her sweaty palm, still intimately close with a toilet. No running -- so she took photos of her bruises and decided to start saving her voicemails.
She was going to need a lawyer. She was going to need to cover up her bruise as it went from purple to blue to green to yellow. She was going to have a glass of wine and maybe, in a feat of petty vindictiveness, get a cat purely because Richard was allergic.
Their building didn’t have a doorman, but it had Anna DiAngelo, who lived on the ground floor and still had gaps in her smile from missing teeth, was a retired MMA fighter. The fifty-year-old threw one of the lacrosse sticks out of her small yard and smack into Richard’s face. “Fuck off!” DiAngelo bellowed. “Fuck right off, Parker! Or I’ll call the police after I’m done with you, see if I don’t!”
Richard shoved clothes into his backseat, fuming, hollering, tiny and inconsequential from Pepper’s balcony. (She was going to sell his mountain bike on eBay. For ten dollars.) When his car drove off, DiAngelo looked up at her and gave her two thumbs up. Pepper waved back.
She went back inside and tore the sheets of the bed to wash them. She sat down on her mattress again and started planning. Her mom had always laughed in delight at her determined face, the ones that showed even in her baby pictures. “You were just born like this,” Tanya Potts used to say. “Ready to take over the world.” Well, Pepper thought glumly, taking over the world starts here.
Worst-case scenario: Richard came back. Richard broke in. Richard’s buddies break in with him. Pepper went to get a restraining order and it didn’t get through. Pepper lost her job. Pepper was pregnant.
She stiffened. Her breath made a gurgling sound coming up her throat.
New plan: Delay freakout. Get a pregnancy test. Delay freakout. Test.
She rose to her feet again, her movements jerky. She had enough time to get to the store and back before the man came in to change the locks. Delay freakout, she reminded herself forcefully, grabbing her biggest pair of sunglasses, hoping they would cover most of the bruise.
DiAngelo was still smoking on her porch when Pepper went by, footsteps steady, to get to her own car. She looked at Pepper appraisingly. “Are you going to move out?”
Pepper scoffed. “No.”
Her neighbor smiled, missing teeth and all. “Good.”
The supermarket was big enough that she could hide in. No hiding, she conjured up. No running. She thought about yesterday, how she’d stormed past bodyguards and shouldered her way in for once, threatening people with pepper spray and not a single hair out of place. She thought about how Tony Stark had been impressed, and she thought about how she hadn’t cared.
She straightened. She was still wearing her clothes from work, the ones that made being an accountant seem like an important job, and it was easy enough to get herself back into her previous mindset. She felt her face settle and knew the determined look was back again.
She bought three pregnancy tests and cat food.
The cashier rang her up with a bored face.
Delay freakout, done. Get a pregnancy test, done. Delay freakout: work in progress.
She sat on her toilet as her egg time ticked on the edge of the sink. Pepper was an organized woman but making decisions required looking at all the possible outcomes, and so she allowed herself the allotted four minutes to sit silently on the porcelain of the toilet seat. The bathroom had a lock. The bathroom was a fortress. She’d brought a ticking-time-bomb with her inside, but she was alone. And herself, she could control.
Even if the plan currently didn’t have any more steps.
Maybe I’ll have my period right now, Pepper thought, elegant hands crisped together in front of her face. Maybe last month was a fluke.
The timer rang and rattled for a long moment, up until it fell into the sink and miraculously shut itself up.
She thought about calling her sister because calling sisters crying on the bathroom floors was what was done. Calling sisters was probably what had always been done. Pepper was an only child.
She took a deep, deep breath and unstuck her fingers out of her own grasp. She took the test that had been waiting next to the timer and looked immediately. (Tanya Potts, knelt down, ripping off a bandaid.) She stared at it some more.
“Fuck,” she declared, and slid off the toilet seat to puke again. She thought, vaguely amused, At least we’re on theme.
***
Pepper decided to keep it in the middle of the night. The sheets were fresh and smelled of her own detergent, and she’d shoved Richard’s bedside table out in the hallway. There wasn’t a plan. There was Pepper laying down in the middle of her own bed, no preferred side required, hand on stomach and a tiny clump of cells in her uterus.
“It’s going to be a boy,” she told the ceiling. The ceiling said nothing back.
***
The latest plan goes like this: Get a doctor’s appointment. Get baby books. Empty the office. Shop for furniture and paint. Set up a savings account. Show up to the new job, make sure Mr. Stark at least looks like a functional adult. Check the locks every night. Get a cat.
(The plan is laid out on multiple post-its that are stuck to the headboard, all bright orange and as grounding as a night light.)
***
“Champagne?” Mr. Stark offered. It was the first gala he hadn’t put up a fight against attending, but he didn’t look all too happy to be here. Oh, the charisma hadn’t dropped, and neither had the shark smile, but his eyes remained firmly hidden underneath his sunglasses. Pepper’s flaw in her armor, the one that betrayed her emotions to anyone who was smart enough to look, was her jaw. It would tighten, either to suppress a law or to suppress her anger, and her bluff would be caught immediately. The flaw in Mr. Stark’s armor was his eyes.
Pepper thought about the elegant golden signs, outside, that said Maria Stark Foundation and wondered what time of the year did she die. Car accident, she remembered, but it sounded vague and phony, like this. It probably wasn’t vague and phony under the shade of Tony’s sunglasses.
“No, thank you.”
“Let loose a little, Miss Potts. Without this, this evening is never going to end.” He smiled genially at a passing guest. “I’m afraid we’re surrounded by idiots.”
Pepper hummed. She felt her jaw twitch to hide her smile. “You’ll feel right at home, then.”
Mr. Stark hid his barking laughter into his glass and a poor imitation of a cough. “My brand of idiocy is charming, Potts. Comparing my idiocy to their idiocy is offensive.”
“Well, of course, my apologies. Your idiocy is also followed by a generous amount of delusions.”
“So, no champagne? Even to deal with my scintillating personality?”
“I can’t, sorry.”
She could barely see Mr. Stark blink back at her. “Can’t? Are you an alcoholic?”
“If I was, I wouldn’t tell you,” Pepper answered, wondering if she could get away with cuffing him over the head. “But no. Something with less liver-destroying and just as expensive.”
They didn’t call Tony Stark a genius for nothing, despite his best attempts at proving everyone the contrary. It took him all of two seconds to start gaping, stop gaping, and take another mouthful of expensive alcohol. “Pregnant?” he asked, the same way someone would point at a cast and say, Broken?
“Three months,” Pepper informed.
“Where’s the lucky guy?”
Pepper’s jaw twitched again. “Legally not allowed within five hundred feet of me.”
It took a moment for Mr. Stark to reply. “I want to make a terrible, horrible joke.”
“Denied.”
He offered her a tiny sandwich that had been waiting on his napkin in apology. “Do you need a security detail?”
“No.” She took the sandwich. “I have pepper spray.”
Mr. Stark hummed, and his smile was a strange, barely-there thing. “I remember.”
***
Pepper painted the nursery green, and it took all her efforts to keep her new cat out of the room and away from the fumes. The cat’s name was Fisher because that’s what the shelter had called him and it seemed rude to change it, and he was quite possibly the ugliest thing Pepper had ever seen. Despite the employee’s reassurances that he didn’t have a single broken bone, Fisher looked like he’d hit a wall at a very, very high velocity sometime ago and just never recovered.
“Your middle name is Spite,” she informed him, early on in their relationship before she gave up on finding a collar that he couldn’t get out of. “I think mine might be, too.”
***
The couch in Tony’s workshop became Pepper’s couch because she was six months pregnant and had early on developed the skill of staring Tony down. The day she met Colonel James Rhodes, she’d made paperwork overtake her side of the room in neat but towering piles.
“This is getting in the way of me working,” Tony warned, waving a screwdriver at her without looking away from his prototype. “It’s giving me bad vibrations. This is against Feng Shui, you know. You’re disrupting my feng-shuied environment.”
Pepper didn’t look up from her tablet. “Maybe if you signed them, they wouldn’t be here.”
“I’ve signed papers!” Tony defended.
Pepper hummed. “And they doubt your genius.”
A snort at the door made them both startle. The man at the door was tall and still in uniform. His mischievous glee immediately made Pepper file him with the rest of Tony’s People, which otherwise consisted of his driver, Happy, and the artificial intelligence that ran his house. Tony needed friends. (But then again, so did Pepper.)
“Rhodey,” Tony yelped, crashing against multiple worktables to launch himself into his friend’s arms. “I thought you were gone for another month!”
Rhodey hugged Tony back with the ease of a sibling, like they’d grown up learning how to fit together to sleep in the same bed. “Mission got cut short. Had to make sure you hadn’t crashed and burned since I last saw you.”
Tony huffed, leaning back to protest. “You have no faith in me. I haven’t crashed nor burned once! Ask Pepper.”
“Mhm,” Pepper said, noncommittal. “You are cruising at a burning altitude.”
“That’s just because I’m hot,” Tony blurted, the sentence a reflex that mostly accounted to white noise. He pointed at her. “This is betrayal, Potts. I trusted you to amaze Rhodey with my inspiring sense of responsibility.”
“A sense of responsibility would be amazing,” Pepper agreed pleasantly.
Rhodey cackled, moving away from Tony to offer his hand. “James Rhodes,” he introduced himself. He threw a thumb back to point at his friend. “Because of that guy, though, most people call me Rhodey. Including my Mama.”
“Mama Rhodes has good taste, that’s what,” Tony declared.
Pepper shook his hand. “Virginia Potts. I go by Pepper because Virginia is abhorrent.”
“Your name is Virginia?” Tony demanded, voice strangled. “How did I not know this? How could I have missed that?”
“Too busy signing your paperwork diligently, I’m sure.”
“You think you know someone,” Tony scowled, ignoring the jab, “and then it turns out they’re named Virginia.”
“How long until he recovers from this?” Rhodey asked.
Pepper glanced at her watch. “Enough for a coffee break.”
“Virginia.”
***
Pepper has several plans for labour. Pepper has seven plans for labour, each depending on the hospital, and the best to worst-case scenario, and the weather, and the traffic.
None of these plans had Tony Stark driving her frantically to the hospital because her baby has decided to show up a month early and has decided to show right then and now. (Pepper should have known better. That’s her kid in there: being over-prepared and stubborn was pretty much to be expected.)
“Oh my God,” Tony kept repeating, “Oh my God. I’ve read way too many birthing stories.”
“You’ve read what?” Pepper demanded, as disbelieving as she could while trying not to give birth in a multi-million dollar car. It came out snappy and aggressive, but she had a good excuse coming out of her vagina.
“I was curious,” Tony despaired. “I knew about the hurting part and I figured I’d learn about the rest! There is no rest, Pepper! It’s pretty much hurting all the way through!”
Pepper ground her teeth together so hard she could see her dentist wincing. “Tony. Shut. Up.”
“Right! Right, giving birth! We’re doing that!”
“Don’t faint,” Pepper ordered. “Don’t you dare faint behind the wheel right now.”
“I’m not going to faint,” Tony snapped back, very pale.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not going to, Virginia.”
The sound of her first name somehow startled a painful laugh out of her, a strangled thing that morphed into horrified sobbing seamlessly. “Oh my God. Tony. Tony, I can’t give birth. None of this-- I haven’t planned for any of this. Tony, I can’t give birth.”
Tony’s eyes were very, very wide where he’d refused to take them off the road fifteen minutes ago in the fear of somehow totaling the car and killing everyone in Manhattan traffic. “Pepper,” he tried. And then again: “Pepper, I am not equipped to deal with what the fuck is happening right now.”
Pepper hiccuped what might’ve been a hysterical bark of laughter amidst her crying.
“I have the emotional capacity of-- of-- listen, I have a lot of issues, okay? A lot. I’m not equipped. But you know what, it doesn’t fucking matter, because you are. You are the single, most capable person I’ve ever met, and it’s terrifying, and you’re going to kick ass at giving birth like you kick ass at everything else, and it’s going to be fine.”
Pepper took a shuddering breath. And then another. “Okay.”
Tony nodded forcefully. “Okay.”
“Okay. If you don’t get there soon I will kick ass at giving birth in your car.”
Tony swore violently. “Two minutes.”
They do get there, rushing through the line because the baby’s head was crowning in the hallway, much to the terror of the future parents in the waiting room. Somehow, at some point, Pepper’d gotten a vice grip on Tony’s hand, and he was dutifully not complaining even though he looked very, very pale.
Everything was alight with the commotion that came with immediate, expeditious, instantaneous birth where they barely had the time to wheel her into the room, and she was still laid down on the gurney when her baby slipped right into the hand of a baby-faced nurse and screamed with outrage.
Lungs, Pepper thought feverishly, good. He’s early, but it’s okay. Good lungs.
And then she thought: Oh.
“Oh,” Tony echoed, eyes still impossibly wide.
It made Pepper want to laugh, so she did, a bright and inelegant snort of a thing and this time when she started crying on top of it was joyous. She opened her arms until they gave him to her -- and it was a him, she knew it was going to be a him -- and she was stupidly glad to have worn a button-up shirt, today because the sides are easily pulled apart for her son to rest his crying face against her skin.
“Does Dad want to cut the umbilical cord?” a nurse asked, and Tony looked abruptly so terrified that Pepper had to laugh again.
“Not the, uh--” he forwent answering and took the offered scissors to give them to Pepper. He reminded her, “You kicked ass.”
Pepper huffed, taking the scissors victoriously. “‘Course I did.”
She cut the cord.
***
They were both in her room, after that, staring at her sleeping son.
“We’re being creeps,” Pepper informed, not taking her eyes off the boy that had been miraculously declared the healthiest preemie the staff had seen all year. Thank God. Thank God, thank God, thank God.
“He’s tiny,” Tony informed back, entranced. He was sitting in a travesty of a chair, bent over to look at the sleeping baby in his mother’s arms. He blinked a little, to no effect. “What’s-- what’s, uh, his name?”
A beat. Pepper stared at her son, and then up at Tony, incredulous. “I didn’t fucking think of that.”
Tony burst out laughing so hard it made Pepper glad they were in a hospital because he might have needed an oxygen mask.
“Tony,” she said, jaw twitching as a laugh geared up, “Tony. I thought of everything. There was never -- I’ve never -- I completely forgot to pick his name.”
Tony laughed harder.
It took them about fifteen minutes to get a hold of themselves. The baby, shaken in Pepper’s arms, didn’t even stir. “I’m -- I need to find a name.”
Tony giggled, face down on the bed. “Just don’t make teenager-him hate you.”
“Oh my God,” Pepper said, cuffing the back of Tony’s head. “No talking about my baby being a teenager. This is day one, Stark. God.”
Tony shrugged, face still against the sheets. “You gotta pick a good kid name. Something that you hear and immediately think, ah, that’s a good kid right there. Like… Benjamin.”
“I am not naming my kid Benjamin.”
“It’s a good name!” Tony protested. “Solid! No Benjamin is an asshole. Bing-bang-boom, your baby is asshole-ish behavior-free. I just solved parenting for you. No need to thank me.”
Pepper looked at her son for a long, long moment. “Peter,” she finally declared.
Tony raised his head to look at the baby again. His eyes were soft, sunglasses forgotten in the car. “Peter,” he repeated. “Good kid name.”
Pepper, running a finger along the wisp of curls on her son’s head, agreed. “Good kid name.”
***
Pepper Potts didn’t have any friends. It was a damning realization to have when you found yourself alone in your apartment with a not-even-a-week-old baby. The quiet that came after Peter’s trainwreck of a birth took her by surprise, made her mind stumble a little while trying to catch its balance.
Her apartment was made of bricks and plaster and tiles, and within the walls there she was, alone, even as her baby squawked and cooed way too early for his age.
This is fine, she told herself. And it was. Rhodey called from an airbase out of the country to congratulate her and to laugh at Tony. “Is there video?” he demanded. “Did he faint?”
You know, Pepper wanted to say, somehow, he actually helped. But she didn’t, for reasons she didn’t understand and refused to look at too closely. She didn’t tell him, either, that Peter’s middle name was Benjamin. “They asked him if he wanted to cut the cord. The nurse had to get him a juice box.”
Rhodey cackled so loud that she had to get the phone away from her ear, smiling.
But now it’s hours, hours later and Peter was screaming again. Not like when he was born, not outraged, but painful and pitiful and Pepper didn’t know what to do. She had a thousand parenting books and another thousand binders on conflict resolution, and somehow, nothing did it, and she was about to cry because, in the chaos and the vicious heartbreak of hearing her son hurting, she didn’t know who to call.
She was sitting on her floor, breath making a weird stifled sound as she tried to shush Peter, and then an unbidden thought came. You know, somehow, he actually helped. She thought of herself sobbing in his stupid fancy car, and him saying, It’s going to be fine.
“This is pathetic,” was the first thing she said, phone cradled against her shoulder, “because I am so low on friends that I’m calling my boss, who is you, for advice, but Peter’s been crying for an hour and I don’t know what to do.”
“I’m offended,” Tony said. “I’m great at advice.”
“Cruising at a burning altitude.”
“Mhm,” was all Tony said to that. “Is your address listed somewhere in SI’s database?”
“What? Yes. Tony, I need--”
Tony hung up. Pepper geared up to throw her phone across the room and start crying like her son until one of them passed the fuck out. She was ready to hand in her resignation and watch that asshole flounder the next time he needed to give his social security number, when it started ringing again.
“So,” Tony said. “Just realized you can’t actually read my mind. I’ll be there in fifteen.” And then he hung up again.
And he was there in fifteen. Pepper blinked at him from the doorway, Peter still sobbing against her chest. She blinked again. “What?” she croaked.
“Parenthood has damaged your circuits,” Tony declared, before taking her son from her arms and placing him into his very, very awkwardly. Peter continued to cry, unperturbed, snot smearing against Tony’s old MIT hoodie. There was grease smeared across his cheek and smudged in his hair, and he looked vaguely out of breath like he’d run out of his workshop and up her stairs.
Which he’d done, Pepper realized. That and probably broken several traffic laws, considering he’d appeared at her door in under the fifteen minutes he’d promised, and the drive from his place to hers was at least twenty-five.
He was still in her hallway. She stepped aside, and he took that as permission to steer her farther down inside. “Go take a shower. And then a nap. Go, Potts. I’ve cried my fair share, I got this.”
Tony didn’t look like he got this. Tony looked like a man who had held a baby precisely once, and whose entire strategy for dealing with teenage rebellion was a preemptive strike in the form of nice-kid-names. But Pepper was tired, and staving off a panic attack, and somewhere, at some point where she wasn’t paying attention, she’d started trusting Tony Stark. So she nodded, and she went.
Bathroom, lock, fortress.
The water of her shower left her skin reddened and she breathed in the steam like the essential oils her mom used to vaporize in their living room.
Fortress.
When she cut off the water, she was met with silence. She stumbled out of the shower, dried, and dressed as quickly as she could only to stop at the door, unlocking and opening it discreetly.
Tony was standing in her living room, looking down at Peter in his arms. Peter, who was quiet, or almost. It made Pepper want to cry again. It took her a few seconds to realize that Tony was talking.
“Shhh,” he was pleading. Peter whimpered back. “Hey, Pete, hey. Your mom’s very tired, kiddo. Did you know she gave birth to you a week ago? I don’t know exactly how much time it takes to recover from that, but I was there and from what I’ve seen you’re just going to have to be extra-nice to her your whole life, bud.” The baby quietened. “Yeah. Like that. Wow, you’re cute. Your mom is very good at baby-making. Wh-- that came out wrong. Let’s forget that. I’m so glad you can’t talk yet, bambino.”
Peter made a garbled little sound.
“Absolutely,” Tony agreed. Pepper opened the door all the way, and he looked up at her. He asked, “Okay?”
Pepper nodded. She was in a hoodie and sweatpants and she wanted her pantsuit. She wanted to tie her hair. She wanted to powerwalk away from her scrambled brain the way she knew she could.
“Soup,” Tony declared, cutting off her train of thought. “You have some?”
Pepper nodded again.
“Sustenance!” Tony shifted carefully until he was holding Peter in one arm, her baby’s head tucked underneath his chin. “I’m going to not-burn your soup, and you’re going to sit down and laugh at me. Come on.” He found the kitchen easily enough with her open-floor plan, opening cabinets until he got the right one. “Hey,” he called back, “did you know, your cat is the ugliest animal I’ve ever seen?”
Pepper cleared her throat. “It’s to scare the burglars.”
Tony nodded sagely.
Peter got back into her arms, sleeping peacefully, when Tony had to fight to get her can of soup open. As promised, he not-burned it, poured her a bowl, and exchanged it for her son, who settled happily right back against his chest.
“What’s up with that baby smell?” he demanded. “I thought that was a myth.”
“My baby is superior,” Pepper sniffed, before swallowing another mouthful of soup.
“People should stop having babies,” Tony agreed, “there’s no topping that one. You eliminated the competition. All the other babies? Hammer Tech. Peter? Stark Industries.”
“I need to get him patented,” Pepper said around the rim of the bowl.
“Peter Benjamin Potts,” Tony said. His smile was a small, private thing.
“Peter Benjamin Potts,” Pepper concurred, and she hid her own grin in her soup.
***
Rhodey came back from wherever he had been stationed, eyes red-rimmed, and he wasn’t allowed to tell them anything so Tony let him crash in one of his guest rooms and hacked into the Air Force’s records.
Pepper watched as his face hardened. “Shit,” he muttered.
“Do I need to make space in your schedule for you to take over the government?” she asked.
“Not yet,” Tony answered, “but ask me again tomorrow.”
They ended up in the kitchen, Tony pouring over Mama Rhodes’ brownie recipe that he pretty much had to sign NDAs for. Peter sat in his carrier on the counter. He was there in an effort to try and put him to sleep, but he’d spat out his pacifier in favor of garbling noises again. He was five months old, and that was too early for him to start babbling, but he hadn’t gotten the memo.
“You’re never going to be able to shut him up,” Tony prophetized. “He’s going to be that person that you agree to take coffee with and then end up stuck in front of an empty cup for three hours.”
“Mhm,” Pepper said, rocking the carrier on the table, “at least I’ve gotten used to it with you.”
“First of all,” Tony pointed at her, “rude. Second of all, those are your genes at fault.”
“You gave him those traits through osmosis,” Pepper refuted. Peter made a discontented, I’m-about-to-lose-my-shit-in-the-next-few-seconds noise, and she gave up on the nap and took him back into her arms. “The clinginess comes from you, too.”
“You’re fired,” Tony declared.
“You can’t tie your shoes without me.”
“You’re slightly less fired, but I’m offended.”
“I’m okay with that,” Pepper replied evenly, and Peter garbled against her neck.
Rhodey snorted. Both Pepper and Tony jumped slightly, and it reminded her of the first time she met Rhodey, down in the workshop and drowning under paperwork. He looked worn down today, though, like his shoulders weighed a hundred pounds each and he was more than ready for them to fall off.
“Virginia,” he smiled, and the grin steadied at Tony’s annoyed huff at the name. “Is that Junior?”
Pepper beamed back, lowering Peter’s face so that Rhodey could see him. “This is Peter,” she introduced.
Rhodey whistled. “Look at the little man! Very, very cute.” He bent down, smile still in place despite his tired eyes, to trail a finger across the back of Peter’s hand. “He has your nose, Pepper.”
“And her stubborn streak,” Tony sing-sang.
“I quit,” Pepper declared, and Tony snorted.
He squinted at the recipe and looked back at her. “If you don’t un-quit and help me with this, I’m going to slander Mama Rhodes’ legacy and make Rhodey cry.”
Pepper hummed and stood up to circle around the table. Peter was exchanged into Tony’s arms seamlessly, and the baby made another, happy sound. Tony grinned down at him and bounced him a little, which gained him a two-toothed smile and grabby hands to his face. He blew a raspberry against his hand and her son squeals with high-pitched laughter.
Rhodey was staring, open-mouthed. “Pepper. Tony’s in love with your baby.”
Pepper sniffed, reading through Mama Rhodes’ titled handwriting. “Everybody’s in love with my baby.”
“It’s true,” Tony agreed, nodding along to Peter’s babbles. “Oh, really? Yeah? That’s absolutely newsworthy, bambino.”
“He’s going to steal your baby,” Rhodey tried again, going for levity but staring at Tony that way he did sometimes as if he’d suddenly understood the mess of his mind.
“She has pepper spray,” Tony dismissed.
***
Peter’s first word wasn’t in English. Pepper knew, even if she didn’t understand it, that he’d enunciated it perfectly because it was a favorite of Tony’s.
She watched Peter drop his plastic spoon from up in his high chair before raising his arms in what appeared to be baby exasperation. “Minchia!”
Pepper stared at him, and when he caught her looking Peter giggled brightly. She called Tony immediately. “Minchia,” she said in greeting.
Tony tried to smother his laugh. “Well, hello to you too.”
“Minchia!” Peter chimed in from his chair.
Tony paused. “Oh no.”
“Oh no is right.”
Minchia was his first word, and Mama his second, and it set precedent for Peter’s vocabulary because he, somehow, became a bilingual baby. He babbled extensively, the way he always had, mismatching his words gleefully.
“More words to talk our ears off with,” Tony pointed out. “Languages are good!”
And they were, so Pepper didn’t protest when Tony started speaking to her son exclusively in Italian, but when she didn’t understand what Peter was asking for she took her revenge and woke him up at two in the morning.
Tony groaned like a dying man in her ear before she gave the phone to a very, very awake Peter who started babbling as soon as he heard Tony’s voice. “Tony,” Peter started, and then Pepper lost track of the conversation until her baby handed her phone back and informed, again: “Tony.”
“He wants juice,” Tony mumbled. “You already know he wants juice.”
Pepper smiled her most innocent smile even though he couldn’t see it. He huffed at her like he knew exactly what face she was making anyway. “Thanks.”
“You’re evil,” he told her, voice still gravely. “G’night.”
“Buona notte,” she replied sweetly, and it startled a sleepy bark of laughter from him.
Rhodey stared again, months later, around when Peter started taking wobbly steps. They were in the kitchen again, always the kitchen, because it was a strange sort of safe space. (Not like the bathroom, where Pepper strengthened the architecture of her mind, where she allowed herself to cry, but safe nonetheless. Shared, warm.)
Peter babbled a question, Italian easily pouring past his lips, and Tony answered without raising his head from where he was trying to wrangle a baby lock in place. Peter blinked and turned to Rhodey, affronted: “Locks? Per me?”
Rhodey smiled, distracted, still stuck on the scene happening in front of him. “I’m afraid so, buddy.”
“No knife!” Peter insisted. “Mama,” he turned towards Pepper. She hummed back, looking up from her HR paperwork. “No coltello! Petey no!”
“That’s right,” Pepper agreed. And then: “Tony, stop antagonizing my child.”
“He asked,” Tony said, giving a triumphant exclamation when the lock clicked in place. He pointed at it. “I needed my degrees in rocket science for that thing. Do the manufacturers just have it out for parents?”
Rhodey coughed.
Pepper looked back down at her work. “Oh yes, it’s all a big conspiracy. How to defeat the Great Tony Stark.”
Tony whistled, low, which made Peter giggle. “Well, they’re strong competitors. Hammer can finally stop pretending he’s still in the race.”
Later, once Pepper was back home and Peter was snoring (cute little sounds that make her smile), Rhodey called her. She was warming leftovers in a pan when she stuck her phone between her ear and shoulder. “Hey,” she said, poking at a piece of meat until it laid flat. “What’s up?”
“Do you know?” he demanded. “You have to know.”
Pepper blinked. “What?”
“Oh my God,” Rhodey said, and hung up.