Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was probably legal to drive around with a baby loose in the back of a limo, but it didn’t seem safe. Pepper had the driver take them back to the hotel, and then Jess made arrangements to have a new driver come with an SUV that had a carseat in it. They’d probably need more baby supplies at some point, but they were good for the moment.

She and Jess had a lot of calls to make. Everything else, she could think about later. Compartmentalization was something she was very good at.

Violet turned out to take the longest to find, because everything was under her husband’s name, and Pepper had it slightly wrong. Pepper felt guilty being grateful to find he had already died, but she couldn’t imagine the awful mess if he hadn’t.

They were on the road heading north when Tony called again, to tell her Bruce was stuck in the Hulk and they really needed to talk to Violet.

Once she’d set that up, Pepper had nothing to do but sit in the back of the SUV and watch news coverage of the Battle of New York with the worst sense of deja vu.

Violet’s house in Connecticut wasn’t hard to find. Ruby was fussy and everyone was tired when they got there, but Pepper left her in the car with Jess and the driver when she went up to the door. Just in case.

Given her job and her life situation, it had been a really, really long time since Pepper stood on someone’s porch and just. . . rang the bell.

She could hear it echo through the house, followed immediately by a baby's wail, which slowly grew louder. Almost a full minute later the door was opened to reveal Violet, in sweatpants and a messy bun, holding said wailing baby on her shoulder. “Hi."

“Hi,” Pepper replied, immensely grateful just to see someone familiar. She reached out and hugged Violet, baby and all.

He wailed louder but Violet squeezed her tightly. "Good to see you.”

“That must be Neil. I can’t believe how little he is.”

"Yeah. He's about five months and firmly in his colic and cranky stage.”

Violet waved her inside, and Pepper shut the door behind herself. “Ruby is in the car with Jess and a driver. I assume you’ve been watching the news and know they’re fighting in New York.”

"Yes. I talked to Hulk and Bruce. Looks like it worked, he was helping out last I saw.”

“We'll bring you down to the city so we can meet up when they’re done fighting. I’ve got an enormous land yacht out there but I expect some car seat tetris.”

"Yes, and I'll have to pack for the kids. Do Jess and Ruby want to come in and get some food?”

“That. . . is not a bad idea.” Violet worked for Pepper, but she was also a little bit the entire team’s mom. She always made sure everyone ate.

They got Jess and Ruby inside, and even got the driver to let them bring him some food. Violet took one look at Ruby’s makeshift outfit and pointed Pepper at the closet containing Ada’s outgrown clothes. Within an hour they got everyone fed, packed up, and loaded into the SUV.

"Of all the crazy things," Violet said. "This is the craziest.”

“It is,” Pepper agreed. “And I’ve seen a lot more crazy than you.”

"I'm really used to these things having some sort of logical, scientific basis. Time travel is just . . . outside my frame of reference.”

“I once said that about the Asgardians.” They pulled out, and Ruby began to whine again. She was really sick of being in the carseat, and Pepper couldn’t blame her.

Violet reached over and rubbed Ruby's foot to soothe her. "This is a hell of a mess.”

"I think once we’re all—" Pepper's phone was ringing, and she fished it out of her purse. "Hang on, that's Tony."

She'd barely gotten the greeting out of her mouth when he said, "They sent the fucking nuke."

It took her a moment to parse that. "What?"

"We told them not to send the nuke, that a regular missile would be sufficient and they still sent a nuke. I have to fly it-"

His voice broke off, because the connection was spotty or he just couldn't finish the sentence, she didn't know. Pepper was absolutely at a loss for words. That portal was the thing he had the worst nightmares about, the one of the things from his menu of traumas that had gotten particularly deep under his skin.

Perhaps sensing the sudden change in her mother's mood, Ruby's fuss turned into a full fledged scream. "At least I answered this time," Pepper said, just because it was the first functional sentence that popped into her head.

Now Violet reached over and squeezed her hand. "It'll be ok."

"Hey, I love you," Pepper said, just in case he could still hear her. There was a burst of static on the line, and something garbled with the only intelligible word being 'Ruby'. Then the line went dead.

She stared at her phone in shock a moment, then pressed the button to connect to Jarvis. He answered with, "I'm sorry, Ms Potts. I've lost the connection to the suit."

"Patch me in to someone on the ground."

There was a pause, then Sharon's voice came through. "Hey, Pepper. He went in, we've got the portal open and we're waiting."

"Jesus. You mind if I stay on the line until. . . something happens?"

"Of course. We're all just sort of staring -" She stopped a moment and Pepper heard Steve's voice in the background. "There he is, he fell out of the portal. Amanda's on her way to check him."

Pepper closed her eyes and leaned back against the seat, listening to their internal chatter on the line. Tony was unconscious again, Thor had caught him this time. They closed the portal.

"I just got downstairs," Nat said, sounding out of breath. "He's breathing but out cold. Thor took him out of his suit."

Amanda came on the line. "Why? Why would you do that? If his neck or back--"

"The arc reactor is off," Thor said. "I thought I should."

Pepper could only imagine how he'd pried it apart. Thor was strong enough, but he'd certainly ruined it. "Nat," Pepper said because it was a good time for dexterity and not brute force. "Give it half a turn to the left and then back again."

"Got it." There was a lot of shuffling on the line. "Okay, that got it lit up again. But he's still unconscious."

"I'm here, I'm here." That was Amanda, in full Doc mode. "Steve, Thor, hands here and here, roll him up. Good. Hey Pepper, I've got a pulse, but it's erratic. I'm going to give him some oxygen and try to get that under control, but I don't think he's in too much danger."

"Thank you," she said, letting out the breath she was holding. Ruby got fed up with Violet's attempts at soothing and picked up the wail again. Pepper knew Amanda didn't want to be listening to that, and Pepper didn't want her distracted. "Someone call me when he's awake?"

"I promise," Nat told her. "Keep heading this way, we'll let you know where to meet us."

She didn't get a call so much as a text from Tony himself telling her that he was fine, and to meet them at his hotel. They'd sold the hotel in 2015 and it took Pepper a minute to remember where the hell it was.

The ride to the city seemed interminable, though Ruby did finally fall asleep. At the hotel they unload all of their luggage and baby gear onto a couple of carts, Pepper gave the driver an enormous tip, and went inside to get a room for Jess. She hugged Violet in the elevator as she got off on the floor of Bruce's room, and then she and Ruby and the bellman rode it up to the penthouse.

She was many, many levels of exhausted when she walked through the door, cranky baby dosing on her shoulder. "Tony?"

"In here," he called from the bathroom.

Pepper went in there, and he was sitting on the edge of the tub while Amanda tended some wound or other. He looked better than he had the first Battle of New York. Physically, anyway. His eyes looked just has haunted. She felt a lump for in her throat. "Hi."

"Hey there." He stood and came towards them, wrapping them both in a tight hug. "Crazy day, huh?"

She pressed her face into his shoulder, inhaling his familiar scent. She wrapped her free arm around him and clutched his shirt. She could feel the metal of the arc reactor and hear its barely perceptible hum. It had been so long it was strange and familiar at the same time. "You okay?"

"I'm fine. Doc picked the glass out of my hair."
"And now I'll leave you to your reunion," she said from off to the side. "Good to see you Pepper."

Pepper let go of Tony's shirt to wave at her. Ruby begin trying to climb out of her arms into Toby's and she let him take her. "You okay?" she asked again quietly, after Amanda was gone.

He was cuddling Ruby. "I'm better than the first time. But not great."

Ruby snuggled her head under his chin. "Da da da."

"She'd been asking for you all day," Pepper said.

"I missed you, too, Ruby girl." He rubbed her back. "You make my whole day better."

Ruby found the arc reactor and began smacking her hand against it enthusiastically, which made Pepper laugh. She squeezed Tony's arm and went out into the living room. She wanted to put on something comfortable and see about getting some dinner.

He followed, still carrying Ruby. "We should probably get catering and invite everyone. We're all sort of shellshocked, on a number of levels."

"That I believe." She rubbed her eyes. Her pajamas would have to wait, but at least there would be food.

"How did Violet retrieval go?" he asked, setting Ruby on her feet to toddle.

"Good, she went down to Bruce's room." She pointed to the two clear rubbermaid tubs sitting by the couch. "She gave me a bunch of Ada's stuff from when she was that age." She sat and kicked off her shoes. "To Jess's view we were standing on a street corner and Ruby just appeared in my arms - totally naked."

Tony let out a bark of laughter. "I suppose the time travel thing was pretty straight forward after that."

"I'm just glad she's here," Pepper said quietly.

"So am I." He rubbed the top of her head. "It was the first thing I panicked about."

Ruby got as far as Pepper's legs and lifted her arms to be picked up. As soon as she was in her lap, Ruby began pulling at her shirt again. "Ba! Baba."

Pepper sighed. "Honey, I'm sorry, there's no Ba. You have to wait until we get home." She could almost feel Tony shift uncomfortably, and when she looked up at him, she could see it on his face. "Are we stuck here?"

He shifted uncomfortably. "From what I understand about theoretical time travel. . . yes."

Ruby pulled at her shirt again, getting one of the buttons open. Pepper pried her hand away, and Ruby started to cry. So Pepper started to cry, too. A moment later, Tony's arms came around both of them, holding on tightly. "We'll be okay," he told her. "We'll sort it out."

"I just. . . this is the thing I can do. It's silly and I should be worrying about a hundred other. . ." She shook her head, because there was no way on earth he'd understand. She was terrible at being pregnant, couldn't even get there without extensive medical help, she worked long hours and only saw Ruby for an hour or two some days. But every morning, most afternoons, and every night before bed she could nurse her and remember that despite it all she was still Mommy. Not to mention how proud she was that this body part that had been a time bomb most of her life had fed her baby.

She hated her stupid fake replacement boobs even more now than she had the first time around.

"You get upset about whatever you want," he told her. "It's a shitty situation that we had no control over. But in the mean time, you okay if I cobble together a bottle for her?"

"Yeah, yeah. I've been feeding her bottles all day. Violet feeds her bottles all day every day. It's fine." She pointed. "Stuff is in that bag."

"Got it." He kissed her temple and scooped Ruby up, taking her over to the bag and chatting with her as he assembled the bottle. A couple minutes later he was sitting with her in his lap, happily slurping away.

"Thank you," she said, because she should have done that. Though she was very grateful she didn't have to. He took to the mechanics of childcare with an engineer's precision. She found it endlessly amusing that when he changed her Ruby's diaper tabs were always precisely level, or that he insisted on measuring formula powder by weight. And he built endlessly useful gadgets, like her pump and the bottle machine and the babypod and the armored stroller. "I was just thinking about the first time we went through this battle, talking to Phil Coulson about being surprised you were a good partner. I don't know if he'd have believed that you'd be a good parent."

Tony grinned suddenly. "The good news is, you'll get a chance to find out."

That made her laugh, and then patted his knee. "I'm going to go order some food."

"Make it all double," he called after her.

Soon the penthouse was filled with people. A group in the living room argued about dealing with the stones, while a group in the dining room started the search for Bucky. Pepper left Ruby with Violet and went into the bedroom she used as an office while here, because she still ran a large corporation—that was at the center of all this—and remembered the immediate time after the Battle of New York being very, very crazy.

After a while, Violet joined her. "I'm not of much use in either of those conversations, mind if I hang out in here?"

She noticed Violet only had Neil with her. "Are the girls asleep?"

"Yeah, Darcy and Cal helped me rig up some bed rails and they're asleep in the guest room."

Pepper rubbed her eyes. "I'm just trying to get ready for the mess I'll have to deal with tomorrow. How are you doing?"

"Shell shocked, like everyone else. Debating if I want to try to explain time travel to Ada."

"How old is she?"

"Almost four."

Pepper lifted a shoulder. "When Tony was four he built his first circuit board. He probably could have groked time travel. And small children in general are much more likely to buy fantastical things anyway."

"That's what I thought. Plus Bruce and Jane said they'd help with the technical parts of it. She's just. . . old enough to get the vibe in here is weird. And to ask why I'm suddenly in love with Bruce when to her Daddy's only been dead. . . " She sighed and rubbed her head. "It had to be now he sent us back to."

"Could have been worse. Not that that makes you feel any better. But high on the list of things everyone was worrying about today was if Hal was still alive."

"That would have been very awful," she agreed. "And, in fact, the first thing I thought of when I realized what had happened."

Pepper leaned back in her chair. "While they are out there talking about big picture things, maybe we should talk about little picture things."

"I'm good at details. What are you thinking?"

"I was thinking it might be good to go back to the house in Malibu. Not the one you've seen, but the original. It's secure, it's got JARVIS and a ton of space. Not to mention all of Tony's equipment. If we're going to regroup somewhere, it's better there than here, in a public hotel where they're trying to hack secure systems on a laptop."

"Agreed. We should also order some clothes and supplies to be there when we arrive. Cribs, toddler beds, changing tables."

"Baby proofing is going to be interesting. Are you going to be okay coming with us? I mean, your family. . .?"

"I told my mother I was visiting friends and looking into a job, it'll buy me some time."

"You're hired." They still needed a nanny after all. She eyed Neil, thinking two babies and a toddler was very different from two grade-school kids an a baby. "We'll get you an assistant."

"Thank you on both counts."

Something occurred to Pepper, and she frowned. "I was just going to say something about the prestige of taking care of Tony Stark's baby probably smoothed over a lot of questions. . . but as far as anyone knows, we don't have a baby. We don't even live together."

Violet's brows went up. "That you're going to have to explain to the world at large, not just my family."

"Yeah, I know. She doesn't even have a birth certificate."

"SHIELD can probably help with that." Neil squeaked and squirmed and Violet stood, swaying with him. "You'll have to say she's adopted. Unless you think they can create you a surrogate out of thin air."

"I'm guessing they can get whatever paperwork is needed. If not, there's a corrupt government somewhere that would issue a back-dated birth certificate for enough cash. But adopting a child I gave birth to just feels so weird. But we're too famous for the surrogate angle, how would I explain hiding my baby indoors for a year?"

"You aren't eccentric enough to do that. There are some celebrities I could buy that from, but you and Tony aren't on the list."

"You know, when I had my mastectomy there was a surprisingly well circulated rumor that I was hospitalized, and then out on medical leave, because I'd had a baby. At the time Tony and I thought it was hilarious." She shook her head. "I'm sure the rumors will start up again. Adoption might be the best way to prevent people from digging."

"It's the simplest answer."

Pepper blew out a breath. "Okay. Supply lists. Jess can help get what we need ordered."

Violet picked up a pen and started jotting notes as she bounced Neil. "Should we get some more clothes for people?"

"We've got a couple days worth here, I think. Maybe we just go shopping in LA." She smiled a little. "Might be a nice break. But maybe some comfortable things. Toiletries and other supplies. Kid stuff. Towels and linens. We have lots of bedrooms but never that many people at once. Things a hotel would provide."

Violet nodded and wrote it down. "I think several of us could use a little retail therapy."

Pepper chuckled. "Think all of us are going to need all kinds of therapy."

"God yes. So much."

Chapter Text

The night Ruby was born, Pepper had fallen asleep after her long labor, and Tony had sat on the couch in their suite with his newborn daughter tucked up on his chest. It became a habit when she was tiny, when he and Pepper slept in shifts and his were usually spent in a rocker with Ruby right in that spot. Right where the arc reactor had once been.

As she got older, it was still a favorite, particularly if she was fussy or sick or out of sorts. When they had to bring her into their bed at night—which was at least no longer most nights—she usually ended up sleeping on his chest.

But now there was a hard metal circle there, with a light. He had no idea where any of his covers were, and wasn't sure a baby should be laying on it anyway.

Not that Ruby would. And she was as upset about not being able to get comfortable in that spot as she was not being able to breastfeed. There was no babypod. Ruby's favorite blanket had remained in the future.

They took shifts walking and rocking her, like when she'd been tiny, putting her down only to be woken again an hour later. Pacing the living room of the hotel suite at 4:45 AM, while Ruby tried to get comfortable, he realized he'd forgotten just how much he'd hated having this stupid thing in his chest.

About half an hour later, the elevator opened to reveal Bruce with a baby Neil on his shoulder. "Oh, good. I was sort of hoping you'd be up."

"Ruby disapproves of the built in night light."

"Neil disapproves of. . . everything."

Tony nodded. "Join the pacing. There's coffee."

He got Bruce a cup, and they drank them carefully over their babies's heads. "Kinda different from the last time we were here, isn't it?"

"Very much." He rubbed Neil's back. "Better this way."

Tony watched him a minute. "You guys doing okay?"

"I'm all right. I don't think Violet's entirely wrapped her head around it. But she's good at just putting one foot in front of the other."

"She coming to California with us?"

"Yes. Her and your wife are already making lists of things we'll need."

Ruby stirred, and whined. "Technically we're not actually married. Too much paperwork."

"Yeah, well. Close enough."

"I think we could all use a little time to just take a breath and take stock. Now that the adrenaline has worn off. Mostly." They still needed to get Barnes and get rid of Loki and figure out what to do with the stones.

"Your Malibu place is pretty relaxing."

Tony sighed. "I hope so." It was going to be weird to be there, that was for sure.

A couple of hours later, the team going to Siberia stole a SHIELD jet and left, and the rest of them got loaded into cars to take them to the airport. Tony lugged his two badly damaged suits with him, hoping to get them fixed as quick as possible—at least until they could be replaced. Going backwards 5 years in technology felt like going back a century. He was frustrated, and that and the lack of sleep made him crabby.

Walking into the Malibu house was, in fact, very weird.

"Oh, my God I hate everything," he told Pepper as they stored their things in the master suite. he needed to go down and help Team Science with the cube, but was contemplating a quick shower to wake himself up a bit.

"I don't disagree," she muttered. "How long would it take you to build a babypod?"

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. "If I don't sleep, maybe a week? I have to reinvent things."

"Yeah," Pepper said, sighing. "You want to nap a bit? I know you have to make the thing."

"I was thinking shower, but nap would probably be more useful."

"Do both. I'll handle Ruby. I don't have to build any inter-dimensional travel devices." She wasn't wrong, but she sound just as tired as he was--she'd taken most of the previous night because she hadn't been to battle. "Don't argue, I can see it on your face."

He had, in fact, been about to argue. "Get some of the others to help you at least?"

"I will." She kissed him. "I love you and need you sane."

"All right. Have someone wake me in a couple hours."

"JARVIS?" Pepper asked, and it made him smile. He'd really missed JARVIS so much.

"I will wake you in two hours, sir."

Exactly two hours of sleep and one shower later, he was down in his workshop with Bruce and Jane working on thermonuclear astrophysics. They were all lucky he was smart tired. And really wanted Loki out of his wine cellar.

They made slow but steady progress. Around lunchtime he grabbed Bennett to help him run some cabling and they moved the whole production out to the deck. When he went back inside to tell the others is was almost ready, food had arrived.

Something in his stomach helped, but then on account of the show the portal to Asgard would make, he had to call Rhodey to warn the Air Force. The Rhodey from this timeline--the one from 2017 had gone back to California after the fight with Ultron to see his wife, and hadn't been there when Strange sent them back.

"Hey, it's me," he said, probably unnecessarily. "Don't worry about any lights in the sky above my Malibu house for the next few hours."

"Dude! What happened to you? What the hell happened in New York?" Rhodey sounded both alarmed and annoyed. In the original battle, Pepper had been in contact with him, and kept him updated. What with the whole time travel thing, he realized, this time no one had.

Tony rubbed his head. "It's complicated and the short version is that aliens tried to take over the world and me and a bunch of other people stopped them." Just gonna skip right over the nuke.

"And now you're doing something with lights you think is going to alarm my employer?"

"We're sending the main alien back. Look, if anyone above your head gets pissed tell them to call Fury at SHIELD, most of this is his problem."

"Jesus Christ, Tony." Somewhere in earshot, Neil began crying, in that angry wail only very small infants could muster. "And is that a baby? Where are you?"

"I'm in Malibu and. . . look I really can't explain over the phone. Come out in a couple of days and we'll hash the whole thing out, I promise."

There was an exasperated sigh, and then, "I'll call the brass. And see you in two days. This has better be good."

"I promise, it's unbelievable."

The portal worked perfectly, though it was open nearly an hour waiting for Thor to come back. Long enough news helicopters came to film it. Pepper had said she'd handle PR and he trusted she would.

Once Thor had returned, they turned it off and brought it back inside. "My father wants the Tesseract so we can rebuild the Bifrost. I told him right now we couldn't keep the portal open and move it—which is true—and he said he'd have a device constructed. I am not sure how long that will take."

Tony and Jane had started spitballing something they might be able to build to the same ends, but it was only theoretical at the moment. There was a lot about the tesseract no one understood--except maybe Selvig, who'd had a minor nervous breakdown after New York and wasn't in any shape to be involved.

"It was the best I could do," Thor said.

"It buys us time," Tony told him. "It helps."

The rescue mission to retrieve Barnes arrived back at the house in the afternoon. Everyone was in fine, but Tony went up to meet it because he was more worried about Amanda that he'd ever let on.

She'd promised to come in that damn portal after him. It would have been impossible and also made no sense, considering how quickly the lack of oxygen nearly took him out. But the intent was something he treasured.

He did need to build her a suit ASAP, because she was apparently going to keep doing dangerous things with or without it.

Of course now he was thinking about the portal. If he closed his eyes he could see it again. Their big evening planning session involved drinking and he let himself have a little too much. Enough that Doc cut him off. Enough that he made a foot-in-mouth comment about Violet flashing them while she breastfed Neil. Pepper hurled something at his head, and cracked a joke about how many people had seen her boobs for the same reason. Tony wondered if the rest of them could hear the thread of hurt underneath it. He sure could.

They tried to go to bed, but ran into the same problem with Ruby as the night before. She wanted Mama's boobs. And if she couldn't have that, she wanted Daddy's chest. And since she could have either of those she was inconsolable. He knew it made Pepper sad, so despite the growing headache starting behind his eyes, he stayed up and paced with her, piling on sweatshirts in an attempt to make himself comfortable.

Bruce joined him at some point, in what was apparently becoming a tradition. It was nice to have someone to talk to. Eventually they figured out that sleeping on Daddy's chest worked for Neil, and they dozed away on the couch.

Tony watched the sun come up from his kitchen table, eating coffee beans from the bag. The godawful taste kept him up as much as the caffeine.

Nat was the first to wake up, and helpfully pointed out that Violet could probably nurse Ruby to sleep, which made Tony vaguely homicidal on a number of levels. She announced Fury was on his way before he could do anything about it, though.

He got up to wipe off the mashed banana Ruby had flung onto his face, and dump the beans into the coffee grinder. Didn't matter if he woke up Neil now.

The coffee was brewing when Violet came into the kitchen, baby tucked in her arms. "I hear I have you to thank for figuring out how to get Neil to sleep."

"It always worked for Ruby. And Bruce doesn't have a manhole cover in his sternum." He tapped the reactor.

Violet winced. "Yeah, I heard a bit about that."

Steve came into the kitchen before Tony could answer. "Hey, I was going to run down to that bagel place I saw on the way in, anyone want anything specific or should I just get a box?"

"I'll eat whatever," Tony said. "Don't get anything with the strawberry cream cheese, I don't want to have to scrub the counters." Steve looked momentarily perplexed, but nodded. "And take one of the cars, it's like 5 miles down PCH."

"I can run five miles in ten minutes," Steve said. "And I kind of need to burn some energy."

That was a statement made by a man who had a full fucking night's sleep.

Tony sat down again at the table to try and get more banana in Ruby. Bruce came in for coffee, and Violet started to feed Neil. "If it makes you feel any better," she said, "it would still be very difficult to settle her regardless. Crash weaning is hard on them."

"Yeah, that's. . . that's not helping. Pepper or her."

Violet made a sympathetic face. "Pepper's missing it?"

He nodded. She and Pepper were good friends and he knew she was Pepper's go-to for mom issues. "Not being able to is hitting her hard."

"I think I'd feel the same."

"Nat suggested you feed her," Bruce commented.

Her face lit up. "If Pepper's okay with it, I'd be happy to. It would be great for my supply."

"Doesn't Neil need. . .it?" Tony was not at all squeamish about Pepper's milk--he'd made her a breast pump and all, not to mention the not-infrequent incidents of getting it on him during sex and an inadvertent mouthful or two. But discussing Violet's made him kind of uncomfortable.

"I'll make more," she said patiently. "In fact, having a toddler with a good latch will help me make more. I can't do two full time immediately, but I could pinch hit for you and ramp it up. Especially if it will help you all sleep."

Barnes and Amanda were at the coffee maker now. Tony could see she was kind of listening, and he didn't know if a medical opinion was about to be offered. She was probably going to ask him how long he'd been awake.

Sleep sounded really nice. "Might be better coming from you," he said to Violet. "There might be crying."

She nodded in understanding. "I'll talk to her."

Pepper came into the kitchen around the time Steve returned with breakfast. She looked exhausted and he wondered how well she'd slept. "I've got someone working on finding us a place in the DC area."

"Thanks," he said. Ruby squealed and waved at her excitedly.

Her face lit up, and she lifted Ruby out of the high chair. "Good morning, baby. Did you sleep at all?"

"If I suffocated myself in shirts," Tony said. "Somewhat." It had been better than nothing, but he could only take it for so long.

Ruby pulled the strap of Pepper's tank top off her shoulder. "Baaaa."

"I'll go make a bottle," Tony said, getting up before he had to see her deflate.

Violet reached over and touched her arm. "Would it be okay if I tried feeding her? Neil doesn't have the best latch and I'm so out of practice, I feel like my supply is dropping."

Tony was surprised Pepper smiled. "That would probably make her a very happy baby."

"Win-win, then," Violet said.

Chapter Text

It made Pepper a little sad to let Violet nurse Ruby, but the contented, sleeping baby it resulted in made her very happy. Ruby slept through most of their long meeting with Fury & Co, and stayed asleep through a transfer to a crib. There was no babypod, but JARVIS would watch over her.

When she tiptoed out of Ruby's room, Tony was leaning against the opposite wall, looking like he was going to fall asleep standing up. "How about a nap?" she asked him.

"I think I need a full fledged sleep, but we can call it a nap if it helps."

"I love you because you admit that," she said, herding him across the hall to their room. She kicked off her yoga pants and got into bed. She'd slept more than him but not enough, and a nap sounded good to her too.

He peeled off the eight layers of sweatshirts and climbed in next to her. "I hate this thing."

"Mmm?"

"The reactor. I need to get it out."

"We can make that happen," she said. "Though we may need to get some things sorted out first." She turned her head towards him. "They're not going to want to take down SHIELD with Iron Man out of commission." She didn't know how long that would be, but she guessed a while. She felt so awful he was going to have to go through that again. The original surgery had taken 11 hours. They'd had to put him on a heart-and-lung machine.

He grumbled a little. "Bet Doc could do it. In an hour. With a rusty spoon."

Amanda wasn't a heart surgeon. But Pepper felt better about having her around for this. "But she would really make you follow your post op instructions." The room was dark, but the glow of the reactor was in her eye. They'd had covers for it, back then, but she had no idea where they were. Something to look for while awake. For now she just turned on her side so it wasn't in her peripheral vision.

"Yeah," he said with a fond chuckle. "She really would."

Pepper drifted a little, but she could feel him fidgeting behind her, like he couldn't settle. He'd probably had too much caffeine. So she couldn't quite fall asleep. And a thought surfaced she couldn't quite put away. "Six hundred and forty three? Really?"

"Oh God." She heard something that was probably him smacking his forehead. "Yeah."

"I knew it was high, but. . ." She sighed. "I was right not want specifics."

"That is over the course of my life."

She tried to suppress a laugh. "Well, I didn't they were all in one night."

"But you wouldn't put it past me?"

She looked over her shoulder at him. "What, like an assembly line? One thrust per girl?"

He made a face. "I bet there's porn of that."

"Rule 34," she replied.

"Mmm," he agreed.

"It's okay," she said with a sigh. "They did at least make you good in bed."

"Practice makes perfect."

Perfect. . . "Does it bother you I'm back to before the extremis fixed me?"

He turned his head to look at her. "No, of course not."

She shifted onto her side again, not really wanting eye contact. "It's just the franken-boobs and scars and just like so many wrinkles. I'd forgotten how many of those there were." She shouldn't go down that line of thinking. He did not need her pity party right now. They were tired. Before he could reply, she said, "Sorry, I shouldn't have. . . we really should nap." It had been a rough couple of days.

"I love your boobs in all their iterations," he told her sincerely.

She smiled because she knew he meant it. "Thanks."

The bed shifted as he rolled over, wrapping an arm around her and pulling her back into the warmth of his body. He cupped one breast through her tank top. "These, for example, are bigger."

"Half a cup size," she replied. He had liked that when she'd had her reconstruction done. She watch him rub his thumb idly across her nipple and felt absolutely nothing. "I wish I could still feel that," she whispered. She felt him freeze, and added, "No, don't stop."

He chuckled a little, probably at her tone, and kept rubbing, sliding the hand down a little to stroke the skin of her abdomen, just under her breasts. "See, that I can feel," she murmured.

"I know," he replied, kissing the back of her shoulder. "I remember."

The scrape of his beard against her skin made her shiver. His hand was drifting far enough down it prompted her to ask, "Aren't you tired?"

"Mmm, a bit. I'll probably just get you off and pass out."

She slid her hand over his, lacing their fingers together and holding them against her stomach. "Sleep, honey."

He grumbled against her skin, but sighed and gave her a little pat in concession. She closed her eyes and drifted off, feeling him relax behind her. It was a deep, dreamless sort of sleep. She didn't know how long they slept, only that she woke up to his hand going wandering again. She didn't open her eyes, but gave a hum of approval and nestled back against him.

"I'm feeling much more awake," he told her.

"I can feel that," she murmured, wiggling a little. It had been a long time since she'd woken up with him hard and pressed against her, and had sleepy morning sex. Before Ruby, probably, since she was in their bed most mornings.

"How're you feeling?" he asked, hand tucking between her thighs.

"Good," she whispered, eyes still closed, opening her legs a little in invitation. He took it, fingers dipping beneath her underwear. They found her clit with ease, stroking her in little circles. She inhaled a shaky breath and amended, "Better." She reached down and hooked her thumb under the waistband to shove them down, lifting and moving until she could get them low enough to kick off. She'd been a little turned on when she went to sleep, and now she really was.

He stroked her patiently, until she was slick and squirming, then he shifted her to slide in from behind. That. . . that was exactly what she wanted. He moved and she pushed back, deliberately squeezing around him. He made a noise and she felt his mouth on the back of her neck. She wondered if she felt different, in this body.

His hands tugged at her here and there, arranging them into the best angle possible so he could go deeper and faster. When he found what he liked, he made quiet growling noises in her ear. She grabbed onto the sheet beneath her to keep from sliding, as sleepy morning sex turned into post-mission remember you're alive sex. She stopped worrying about her body or the future or the past and just felt. She needed this, needed him.

"Harder," she gasped, trying to keep her voice to a whisper for reasons she couldn't remember in her current state but knew were important. "Fuck me harder." The words were barely out before he pushed her all the way over onto her stomach. She couldn't hold in her cry at the sudden change in angle, but she managed to muffle it in the mattress.

"That's my girl," he whispered in her ear, bracing on his knees to keep up the pace. "Come for me."

She felt the metal rim of the reactor scrape against her skin between her shoulder blades. The circle in the center was hotter than his skin. It hurt, a little, something she'd never mentioned all those years ago, first because it bothered him and later because it became so associated with sex—the hot, fast, spontaneous kind, where they didn't bother covering it—that the feeling itself turned her on. It had been a long time, and she'd forgotten until she felt it again. She clawed the sheets and bucked up to him, pressing into the heat and the feel of him deep inside her.

"Stay," she moaned. "Oh, God, please--" Then she was lost and coming and biting the pillow to keep from screaming.

He thrust a few more times, then buried himself deep as he came himself, pressing her into the bed. They lay there a moment, gasping for air. She circled her fingers around his wrist, and ran her foot along the back of his calf, tiny gestures of wordless affection. The reactor began to genuinely hurt, so she squirmed until he lifted off her.

Tony flopped onto his back next to her. "We still got it."

"We certainly had it back in these days," she murmured. She turned her head and reached to flatten her hand on his chest, just to touch him. "I believe we were still in the christen-the-house phase." Though the battle had changed that a little. He had had a lot of trouble sleeping, and she figured out pretty quickly an orgasm was the best way to knock him out. She wondered sometimes if the sexless stretch after she had her ovaries out--like her breasts, so they didn't get cancer and kill her--had tipped him into his crazy midnight suit-building madness.

She was going to have to have that surgery again. Also. . ."Hey Tony? Tell me you felt my IUD string."

There was a pause and when she looked over, he had his thinking face on. "Yes," he said finally. "I did."

She nodded, watching him relax against the pillows and close his eyes, exhaustion lines still on his face. She suspected they hadn't slept that long. "JARVIS, what time is it?"

"Twelve thirty-six PM."

Tony groaned, and she leaned over to kiss is brow. "Sleep. You haven't gotten much."

"You sure?" he mumbled, already half asleep.

"Very," she whispered. "I love you." She was pretty sure he said he loved her too, but it was pretty incomprehensible.

Still the best way to knock that man out.

*

Tony woke up alone in their bed, and spent a moment confused by the weird light before looking down at the arc reactor in his chest and remembering they were in the past. "JARVIS, kill the shades." The blacked-out wall of windows cleared, and he could see the sun hanging over the Pacific. He'd slept for a while.

"JARVIS, where's Pepper and Ruby? And everyone else, for that matter?"

"Ms Potts is not on the property. She and the other women went shopping. Miss Ruby is in the kitchen. Captain Rogers is feeding her applesauce. Mr. Odinsson took Miss Ada to the beach—She's a highly unusual child, sir. She asks remarkable questions for her age."

He smiled. "Yeah, you like her a lot on the other timeline, too. You're her best friend."

"I look forward to that. Dr. Banner is in his bedroom with the baby," JARVIS continued. "Mr. Bennett is in your workshop in the garage, and Sgt. Barnes and Mr. Barton went for a hike."

If Barnes and Barton were together, he wasn't going to worry about them. "Thanks, buddy." He'd really missed JARVIS.

Since everyone was taken care of he took a fast shower. When he ventured into the rest of the house, he found Steve still trying to get Ruby to eat. "Thanks for letting me sleep."

"Pepper told us you needed it. Which I believe."

"Very much. Considering I need to reinvent several years of inventions in a month."

"No R&R for you, huh?" Steve made airplane noises a flew Ruby's spoon around to get her to open her mouth. "I'd offer to help, but I'm only marginally more technically competent than in the original 2012."

"If you're willing to pitch in with babysitting, that will be helpful."

"I don't mind," he replied. "She likes Uncle Steve. Mostly."

"That's the best any of us can say." He found an apple in the fridge and sat to munch on it. "I may bump the babypods up the list. More sleep will help us all."

"What else are you prioritizing? I know Doc's suit."

He nodded. "Hers. Fix and upgrade mine. The other weapon upgrades I did for the rest of us. Clint's gonna miss his fancy arrows."

Steve sighed. "Yeah, I guess we really are back at square one, aren't we? I missed the magnetic gauntlets during the fight."

Those, at least would be pretty straight forward. "It's overwhelming now, but I think having a list will be better for me in the long run. I won't get stuck on any one thing."

"We can buy whatever time you need. I don't want to go to war before we're ready."

He nodded. "In any case, I better get to it. As long as you've got her handled."

"Good luck."

He gave Steve a little salute, kissed Ruby's head, and headed down to the lab. Cal was down there—he'd given everyone working on the portal device access. Something, it occurred to Tony, would have given him a literal heart attack in 2012.

Cal was going through schematics of some sort, at a speed that impressed Tony, and making notes.

"What're you up to?" he asked, scanning his work bench to figure out what he'd been working on.

"Making supply lists and notes." He paused and looked up. "When we get our DC digs you're going to want your set up replicated. You'll have better things to do than install servers and run speaker wires."

Tony smiled and resisted the urge to ruffle his hair. "I'm giving you a raise."

Cal turned all the way around. "I don't actually work for you in this. . . what term are we using? Reality? Timeline? Whatever. I work for SHIELD. Though I don't really want to go back."

"You're hired. And I think timeline is the most accurate."

"Noted, boss," he replied, swinging his chair back around. "And thanks."

"No problem. I think you do us more good on my payroll than SHIELD's. Also, I've never dropped a ceiling on you."

"I'll try not to be here when this house gets blown up with missiles."

"Yeah, me too."

"We have an accord," he said solemnly. "Though seriously, if you need any other help, let me know."

"I might. For now I'm going to start on some of the more straight forward weapons. Get into that 2012 mind set."

"I don't think I could help with anything you don't consider straightforward."

Tony paused in sorting out his tools and looked over at him. "Wanna learn?"

Cal hesitated. Which was a yes. But he said, "Dunno that my brain runs in your gear."

"Maybe you can't invent it whole cloth, but I bet you can build it." He still hesitated and Tony dangled a screwdriver in front of him. "C'mon, Bennett. You just got an extra five years. You wanna spend them running cables?"

He reached to take the screwdriver. "Start slow."

Tony grinned, suddenly far more excited about his evening.

Chapter Text

After a slightly tipsy trip through La Perla, Pepper's afternoon shopping with her girls ended in them picking up takeout to bring home to the men. . . who had not burned down the house, or let the children fall into the ocean.

Because she was a good friend, she called Sharon to come witness Steve napping in a deck chair with Ruby in his arms before taking her baby back.

"Oh," she squeaked. "My ovaries."

"I figured," Pepper replied.

Ruby stirred, saw her, and called, "Ma! Ma!" reaching her arms up. Ruby said Da and Ba and No, and made plenty of random sounds, but she'd never called Pepper anything close to Mama before, and she felt a lump form in her throat.

"Aww," Sharon said, as Steve stirred and put a hand on the baby to keep her from wiggling off.

"Look who's back," he said, helping her climb down to run to Pepper.

She toddled unsteadily, but Pepper caught her. "Hi, baby. Where's Daddy?"

"Down in his subterranean lair," Steve answered helpfully.

"Did he get some sleep?"

"I think he was out most of the day," Steve replied. "It was pretty late when he got up."

"I'll go check on him," Pepper said, turning before Sharon could make the joke Pepper could see on her face.

She heard voices as she headed down. Expecting to see Tony brainstorming with JARVIS, she was surprised to find him with Cal, working on what looked like a pair of gauntlets. "Hello, boys," she said, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice.

"Hi!" Tony called. "I've taken young Bennett under my wing."

"I see," she replied. "I've always thought you could use a minion."

"He's smarter than the bots," Tony replied, and Cal laughed.

Ruby clapped her hands and reached for him, and Pepper passed the baby down. "Just as Violet's boobs are an acceptable substitute, so is Steve's chest."

"Excellent." He tossed Ruby in the air, making her giggle. "I also like Uncle Steve's chest. Very cozy, very safe."

"If you're going to be my boss, I don't need to know that about you," Cal muttered. Then he added, "Though I don't disagree."

Tony grinned and gave Ruby kisses, eliciting more giggles. Clearly he was in a better mood. "We're almost done with Nat's new stingers and Bennett's going to work on Steve's magnetic gauntlets while I start upgrading my suit and getting the schematics up for Doc's."

"Good," she said. "I spent a lot of your money."

"Productive day for everyone, then."

"We've got dinner if you want to come upstairs."

Cal gave him a plaintive look and Tony nodded. "Food would help."

The conversation at dinner was more casual than this morning or yesterday, which was probably a good thing. People were emotionally exhausted and needed a little downtime.

A bunch of them went out to the pool afterwards, splitting between swimming and soaking in the attached spa. Part of their supply order had been water wings for Ada and float for Ruby so the kids could enjoy themselves, too.

Currently, Sharon was spinning in the water and holding Ada's arms before letting her go to fly out into the water. There was much shrieking and giggling. Violet had parked herself next to Pepper under an umbrella and was smiling. "They're going to have a much better childhood this time."

"You don't talk about it much, out of the context of advice-stories," Pepper said. "I always figured that meant it was pretty rough." She remembered Violet telling her how her husband died--he'd had an aneurism and she'd found him dead in the middle of the night. She tried to imagine handling Ruby's infant days—any days, really—without Tony. Rough wouldn't begin to describe it, and Pepper had all the resources in the world.

"It was awful. I cried a lot in the middle of the night, desperately trying to get Neil to sleep. I had to answer Ada's million questions about death and where Daddy was now and why he'd died. My parents helped as best they could, and I had friends come by and bring food the first few weeks. But everyone else's life moved on and mine couldn't." Neil was swaddled against her chest, sleeping, and she rubbed his back. "I stayed in the house surrounded by his stuff way too long. Moving to New York was the best thing I could have done, even outside of finding Bruce and you all. So in that respect, I think this time will be easier. Even if it will involve a lot of explaining."

"There are companies that specialize in dealing with homes post-death. We can hire one of them to take care of your house--pack everything up and you can decide what to do with it in an organized manner."

"That would be nice. It will also be nice to have the option not to sell it."

"And JARVIS will answer Ada's questions." Pepper smiled. "Apparently he's already quite fond of her."

Violet chuckled. "It's good to know some things don't change."

"Thank you," Pepper said after a moment. "For feeding Ruby. And making it sound like I was doing you a favor."

"We're all dealing with things, big and small. If I can help you with one, I will."

"We'll all take care of each other," Pepper said. "That's the only way we'll survive."

Violet looked back at the pool, where Steve had joined Sharon and Ada, tossing the little girl back and forth, causing big splashes. "I think we'll do much more than survive."

*

Tony spent most of the time in the pool trying not to keep looking at the very obvious bruise on Pepper's back. He'd bruised her with the reactor in the first timeline, too—though by the Battle of New York they'd long learned how to pad it and position themselves so it didn't happen often. Back then he'd been younger and stupider and had kind of liked it. Like he was marking her. Now it just looked like it probably hurt.

"You're making a face that usually makes me worry about you," Amanda said, materializing in the chaise next to him.

He sighed and gestured at Pepper's back. "Feeling a little guilty about wounding Pep."

She followed his gaze, then nodded. "She didn't seem to mind."

He looked over at her. "Did you. . . discuss it?"

"It was noticed when we were out shopping."

It was very noticeable. Why he was embarrassed, he didn't know. He'd once been caught with a naked woman on his desk at work. He shouldn't have any shame left. "It's just, you know. . ."

"After missions," she said. "I do know."

"Yeah, I guess you do." He rubbed his chest idly. "I used to have covers for it, but I don't know where they are."

She squinted at the reactor a moment, then got up. "Be right back."

Baffled, he waited until she reappeared and handed him something dark green and knitted.

"What is it?"

"It was a hat. When I originally knit it. But I forgot the pattern and ended up teaching Clint how to knit with it. So now it's a half-assed reactor cover 'till I can make you a better one."

It was just about the right size to cover it. "Thanks Doc."

"I know you probably want it out," she said. "But that may be a while."

"You can't just do it in the bathroom real quick?"

"Don't recycle your pick-up lines on me," she replied.

He grinned. "When it's time will you scrub in?"

"Will it make you feel better if I do?"

Of course she'd make him admit it. "Yes."

"Good," she said. "Me too."

He smiled and punched her arm lightly. "We're a good team, Doc."

After the sun went down, Ruby got fussy and tired, and Tony volunteered to take her inside for a little quiet time. He fed her a bottle and went into the library to read her a story. It was one of those rooms he didn't go into much because it reminded him of Howard, but it had big leather chairs and was quiet in a crowded house.

Halfway through her story, Ruby tangled her fingers in the knit cover over the reactor, sighed contentedly, and passed out cold.

God bless Doc and her knit goods.

Pepper found him some time later, letting herself in quietly. "She out?"

"Like a light," he whispered. "I think Doc's knitting is magic."

She sat across from him. "I'm going to need to go into work tomorrow."

He sighed, rubbing the baby's back. "I figured it was coming."

"I've been talking with some of SHIELD's legal people, the ones that concoct IDs. We go out of the house with her and it'll be news. We should have the explanation and everything ready to go."

"Gonna have to adopt her, huh?"

"Yes, sort of. But. . ." She took a deep breath, the sort that made him concerned. "Adoption is complicated, and public. There's a court hearing, social workers, all that. Stuff even SHIELD can't fake. So, instead, they can concoct a birth mother. Back date the birth certificate, hospital records, whatever. Put you on the birth certificate as the biological father. You'd pass a paternity test and all. Then the 'birth mother' voluntarily surrenders her to you, no court needed, explains the year, etc. At some point in the future, I do a step-parent adoption."

"Ah. And my perfect record is broken." He studied her. "You okay with this?"

"All the other options are worse," she said, which didn't exactly answer his question. "This makes her legal and ours in the quickest and lowest risk manner." She chewed her lip a moment. "The press will of course do the math on the conception dates in about 3 minutes and have an absolute field day, which will be fun."

He scrunched his face up, doing math. "During your surgery?"

"Thereabouts, yeah. Technically a little before but they'll probably go with the juiciest option."

"Yeah. That'll be really fun."

"I never publicly said what kind of surgery I had," she offered. "So they won't actually be able to state you were cheating on your girlfriend while she was having her breasts removed."

"Well, that's something." He kissed the top of Ruby's head. "We'll get through it."

"Hopefully there will be some noise about how you never change and I'm either a doormat or a saint for forgiving you and raising your 'love child', and then it will go away."

"Maybe Steve dating Sharon will distract them."

"God, I forgot about that. That was a big thing, too." She sighed. "Look, I know it's messy. And it hurts a little to have to adopt my own chid that I carried and gave birth to. And maybe it would be more 'fair' and less embarrassing for us both to adopt her. But this way you at least have indisputable rights, and that makes me feel better."

"That's a good point. I'll work on seeing that as the bright side." He patted Ruby's back. "Want to see if we can transfer her to the crib?"

"Seems worth a shot."

They eased her off his chest into Pepper's arms and he darted ahead to open doors and get the crib ready.

Transfer complete, he tucked an arm around Pepper as they headed back into the hall. "Good day with your girls?"

"Yeah," she said. "I know it seems a little silly, in the middle of all this mess, to go spend an afternoon shopping—and drinking and talking about sex—but this is. . . what I can do. For everyone."

"Hey, I think the more normal we can find in this the better it will be for everyone."

"I know you slept most of the day and are probably going to be working late, but try not to keep Cal down there too long. Darcy got some very fancy lingerie."

He grinned. "Did you get any?"

"Well, yeah. I'd forgotten how good I looked naked before I had a baby."

"Then I promise to retire at an early hour."

She kissed him, sucking his lower lip and grazing it with her teeth. "You do that."

"You're going to be hell on my work ethic," he told her, patting her ass.

Tony and Cal got some productive work in, though teaching someone things made it go slower. He felt like he'd be rewarded in the end. He sent Cal back upstairs after a few hours. . . and then got a little lost in his work. It was midnight before JARVIS nagged him, and he went up to his room hoping Pepper was awake. Or, more likely, was asleep and would let him wake her up. Back when they lived in this house, he'd do that all the time.

When he got up there he found her asleep, in a slippery-looking satin night dress that was almost certainly new. . . and with Ruby curled up in the bed next to her.

He sighed, but made an effort to be quiet as he made his way over to the bed. Ruby being asleep was probably as good for everyone's mental health as a night of sex would have been.

She had her tiny little hand clutching Pepper's neckline, and Pepper was holding one of Ruby's feet. He watched them for second before getting into bed. His girls.

He tucked himself in on the other side of Pepper, kissing her temple as he settled in.

Chapter Text

Ruby slept the entire night through, and Pepper felt surprisingly normal when she woke up in the morning. She let Tony deal with the diaper and bottle so she could shower and get ready. She spend more time than she probably should have digging through her makeup trying to remember what the hell she was doing to her face five years ago, and rifling through a closet full of clothes that looked out of date, and reminded her of things that hadn't happened yet.

She was unaccountably nervous. The rest of them would still get to stay in their bubble—she was the first to have to go out and re-inhabit her life from 2012.

There was just so much to do, a couple of days was all she got.

"You look nice," Tony offered when she re-emerged. He was bouncing a now relatively happy Ruby on his shoulder. "I wish I could help more."

"I know you have a huge amount of work to do here." She came over to kiss his cheek. "SHIELD is setting the wheels in motion for your 'love child' thing, so in a day or two we should be able to go out in public with her."

"Sounds fun. Rip the bandage off, so to speak."

"We'll need to get her a bodyguard. Sameen is still with the IDF, I think." She laughed. "If not, like, still on college."

"I can talk to Fury, maybe we can get a SHEILD agent until we have time for interviews and such."

"That is a really good idea." She looked at her watch. "Happy should be here soon. Don't blow the house up while I'm gone."

"I'm sure the rest of them will keep an eye on me. Amanda muttered something about coming down and knitting in the lab while I work."

They went downstairs, and Pepper went into the kitchen to get some coffee. Steve was making scrambled eggs, but she didn't have much of an appetite. JARVIS informed her the car had arrived, and she headed out. Tony followed her to the door so she could snuggle Ruby one last time.

Tony kissed her cheek. "Call me if I can help with anything by making a scene or something."

Pepper laughed, and handed Ruby back to him. She ignored the confused face Happy made at her until they were actually on the road.

"So. . . was that a baby?"

Pepper sighed. "I'm concerned there will be a car accident if I get into it while you're driving."

"I used to drive a tank for a living, try me." He paused. "Also, there were just aliens."

She didn't want to lie. She didn't like lying. Particularly to one of the very few people she and Tony had both truly trusted at this point in time. But this version of Happy knew nothing about SHIELD, or mystical stones, or any of the other background information that would give it context, and not make it sound like she should be driven to the nearest mental institution. Jess had believed her because she'd seen it.

The public explanation was the easiest. It was the one the world would hear. All of their friends and acquaintances and everyone at work. The press and the board and. . . everyone.

Maybe she'd figure out how to explain the truth later. "Her name is Ruby," she said, looking out the window. "She's Tony's. Her mother left her at the Tower."

Happy was silent a moment. "You okay?"

"We always joked it was mathematically inevitable," she replied. "I'm fine."

"Did you run a paternity test? Because there have been a lot—"

"We did." She was going to have this conversation a lot, too, probably. Though for most of them, she'd probably feel less awful.

"Okay." Another beat of silence. "Looked like a cute kid."

"She is. We are going to raise her. Might want to get a carseat for this thing."

"I'll look into it."

"Thank you." She made a point of avoiding eye contact the rest of the drive. Pity wasn't fun.

The minute Pepper got into her office, Jess bustled in with her schedule and a very long list of things. Half of them, she realized, were Avenger related things. "I promise I will get someone to handle that stuff," Pepper told her.

"Thanks. I don't mind it, but I don't know their needs, really." She studied Pepper. "How are you holding up?"

"One foot in front of the other." She offered a smile, then cleared her throat. "The shady government types who are helping us have come up with a solution to the mystery baby problem. They're making paperwork to the effect that she's Tony's, from, well, an affair. Got left with us, Moses-style."

Jess made a face. "On brand, yet still sketchy. You want me to give PR a head's up the shit storm that's coming?"

"Yeah. Set up a meeting, we'll issue the press release announcing it so it comes from us. The good news is, it's so awkward, I won't get much shit for it. I want to give the Board a heads up, too. It shouldn't matter to them, but. . ."

Jess made some notes. "I'll set it all up. What else?"

"I've got a couple people I need to put on the payroll. I want to see Burt sometime today. The legal shitstorm and lawsuits over New York turned out worse than we expected the first go and I need legal to be ready." Right then, she was so grateful Jess knew the truth. "We're also going to have to reconfigure the interior floorplan of Stark Tower during the repair/remodel. That can wait until next week, but get the gears turning. We also are going to need more office space in DC. I'm going to need to work out of there for a bit and don't want to crown the Government Affairs team."

Her pen flew across her pad. "Got it. Can you give me a contact on the team to work with on the floor plan and retail stuff? Of should that all go through you?"

"Yeah, hang on. JARVIS?" There was no answer, and she remembered she didn't have him installed here, at least not now. She missed the Tower. "Sorry," she said to Jess. She pulled out her phone and called into the house instead, asking JARVIS to connect her to Darcy.

"Hey. Want a job?"

"Sure, doing what?" Darcy was nothing if not flexible.

"Ah. . ." What the hell would she call it? "Avenger herding? Admin, logistics, whatever. Drive the bus. I'll handle Tony, you handle the rest of them."

"Yeah, sure, I can handle that. I've been wrangling Jane all these years."

"Excellent. Jess will call you." She hung up, looked and Jess, and said, "There you go."

"I look forward to working with her. You have a lunch meeting down town, and a conference call in forty minutes."

"Reschedule the lunch," she said, going back to her desk. "I need to get my feel under me before I schmooze."

"Got it. Otherwise, I kept it a pretty quiet day."

It didn't stay quiet. She got yelled at by the mayor of New York City, and then that senator from the Armed Services Committee that Tony had tussled with before—a pompous ass she knew had turned out to be Hydra. She wondered darkly if he'd be such an ass stuck with a couple of Barton's arrows.

At least the ones mad at her took her seriously enough to be mad, and for professional reasons. Explaining Ruby to the board of directors really sucked. The suck ranged from one assuming she was leaving and fretting about the fate of the company to one assuming she was stepping down to care for the baby. The worst might have been the general consensus of 'well, we're not surprised'. Sympathetic or condescending—and there was both—it got under her skin.

Her PR team was entirely unsurprised, but at least were quiet about it. In their defense, some of them had worked for Stark for more than a decade and had handled many, many, many of Tony's train wrecks. This probably wasn't even that interesting, in the scheme of things. They asked her questions about the mother, and having to talk about Ruby's mother in the third person was its own kind of ridiculous.

"Did you know?"

"I'm sorry?" Pepper replied.

The speaker, Kelly, cleared her throat. Kelly had worked for them so long she'd been hired by Howard. "To be very honest, we were always pretty sure that if he did stray, our primary PR problem would the news stories about your bail." That surprised a laugh out of Pepper, and Kelly kept talking. "You're pretty calm. Makes me wonder if the juiciest part of the story isn't news to you. Might help to spin it that way, but only if it's true and you don't want to reserve your right to burn his stuff on the lawn."

It felt like one of those laugh-or-cry situations. "I knew. About the woman. It was early, we weren't fully serious. . .Takes a guy a while to change gears." The words left a bad taste in her mouth. There had been no one between Afghanistan and her. He'd brought a woman home right after and she'd been freaked out by the arc reactor and that had been that. It probably didn't make sense on the surface, but she'd never once doubted his fidelity. He did plenty of stupid things—Ultron, the damn bunker, refusing a nanny, messing with explosives while drunk and causing them to evacuate a 70-story skyscraper on New Year's Eve—but she knew he was hers. He'd never done anything half-ass in his entire life, and that seemed to include love.

Probably why this galled her so badly. But maybe it would help her control the story. The truth was, before they were together she'd had plans prepped for this sort of thing, and even now if someone showed up with a kid who'd been conceived during his party days, she wouldn't have been upset. He'd had a lot of sex and accidents happen.

"It was before my surgery. This is not a tale of an asshole finding someone else to fuck while his partner has a mastectomy. It was a one-night-stand, it happened, I forgave him. End of story. There's no juice."

Kelly nodded. "That's good. I can work with that. If there's no fireworks or juicy gossip, the story can die out pretty quick. You're sure the mother won't decide to sell a tell-all in a couple months?"

Very, very sure. "She's offered to terminate her parental rights and sign an NDA in return for a large sum of money. Tony's personal attorney is handling that."

"Got it. And how's he dealing with sudden fatherhood?"

She couldn't help her smile, happy to say something that's true. "Really well. She hasn't been sleeping well and he's been up with her at night."

Kelly smiled. "I'm glad. Men tend to go one way other the other. I always hoped Tony'd be a good dad. The way Howard used to talk to him. . ." She shook her head. "Tony'll be a good dad."

"Yes," Pepper said, with absolute certainty.

"Okay. I think we're good with this. I'll send you a copy of the announcement by the end of the day."

"Thank you," she said. "Hopefully the news will still be busy talking about the aliens."

"Hopefully they don't think we invented the aliens to take attention off of this."

She laughed, feeling her chest loosen a little. "I think the giant mess helps with that."

*

Tony had gotten used to having people in his space—he and Bruce worked together all the time in the Tower—but the tower had floors of R&D. Labs and workshops, a big machine shop and imaging rooms and giant 3D printer. In Malibu, all of that was in his garage—along with his cars. Which he was super excited to have back after Killian blew them up.

But it was crowded. He needed all the help he could get, and Team Science did not let him down.

He was excited when JARVIS told him Rhodey had turned up. He had training in aerospace engineering and flew a suit of his own. Tony wondered if he could talk him into taking a little leave and helping out.

Tony was also quite surprised at just how pissed off Rhodey looked when he came down the stairs and unlocked the glass door. "Who the hell are all these people?" In his defense, in 2012, the only people with codes to that door were him, Tony, and Pepper--and two of them were forbidden to touch anything. Now there were several strangers blithely disassembling medical equipment on the hood of a Mercedes.

Where to begin. "Uh, from closest to farthest, Bruce Banner, Cal Bennet, Amanda Newbury, and Jane Foster."

"Okay," he said, those names clearly meaning nothing to him. Which was good. It meant the Hulk's identity wasn't known even at Rhodey's level. "We need to have a conversation about your zipper problem. You want an audience?"

"Oh geez, that, right."

Bruce sighed. "Tony, go explain from square one and see if he'll help out."

"Right." He put down what he was working on. "Come upstairs, you're gonna want a drink for this."

Rhodey stepped back from the doorway to let Tony pass him. Halfway up the stairs, he said, "Seriously, that woman is the best thing that ever happened to you."

"I agree. And I swear to everything I hold dear, it's not what you think."

"The press release came from your PR department."

"Yeah, but there's a lot of back story that isn't for public consumption." He glanced back over his shoulder. "What do you know about time travel?"

"That there's no evidence it's scientifically possible." He turned, his eye's falling on Tony's arc reactor. "Of course, so was cold fusion." He looked back up. "Not to mention aliens. Is that was that thing in the sky was?"

"Aliens, yes. The time travel happened separately." They got to his den and he poured Rhodey a drink. "Sit. This is going to take a while."

He took the scotch and sat on the couch. "Sounds like it."

Tony started with the basics—the Battle of New York, the aliens, Loki, flying the nuke into the portal. "Now that you grasp the level of mystical shit we're dealing with. . . The thing, the stone in the tesseract that opened a portal into space. There are a bunch of them, and they do different things. There's one of them that creates time portals. Five years in the future, one was used to send the whole lot of us back here. The Avengers, which is the team we'll be in the future."

"You don't look five years older," was all Rhodey said.

"We were sent into our current bodies, exactly where we were. I was up on the helicarrier, Pepper was on a street in DC. Some of the other team members were strewn about. And Ruby - who is Pepper's and mine - appeared in her arms naked and cranky."

"So there is a baby?"

"Yeah. Well, toddler. But she wasn't from some one night stand. She's Pepper's and mine. Right now, in this timeline, she's a little embryo in a cryo lab in LA. But she's also our daughter."

Rhodey leaned back in his chair and sipped his drink. "Huh."

"That's it? Huh? That's all you have to say?"

"It sounds nuts. You know it sounds nuts. But I can tell that's true. About your daughter. I can see it on your face."

He grinned. "You wanna meet her?"

"I would love to. And then you'll do more explaining."

"We will eventually reach shit I have no answer for." Tony got up and went out into the house, walking to the playroom where Violet was in there with the three kids. Ruby and Ada were making a mess with blocks.

Ruby chortled when she saw him, and pulled herself to her feet to begin her excited wobble to the door. "Da!"

"Hey pumpkin." He crouched down to scoop her up. "Look who's here. It's Uncle Rhodey."

Ruby beamed and held out her arms—she knew him even if he didn't know her. Surprised, Rhodey took her. Tony found himself saying, "The morning after she was born, you came to the hospital at like dawn. Showed me how to hold her better, and then watched her so Pepper and I could nap."

The other man smiled. "Sorry I missed that."

"It was a nice moment. She adores you, though hasn't quite figured out saying your name."

"This is really trippy, man."

"You're telling me? We have team mates and friends who don't know we exist. Not to mention PEpper's going to need to adopt a kid she gave birth to."

"So how come I'm not an Avenger? Or wasn't. Won't be. You know what I mean."

"You were. You just didn't live in the Tower, so you weren't there. There's another guy we gotta track down, too."

"Huh."

"Yeah, you two get along." Tony grinned. "Only sane men in the Avengers."

"Okay," Rhodey said. "Tell me the rest of the story. And what your friend seems to think I can help with."

"Basically, I've got a month to catch up with five years of inventing. And I think you can help." They went back to the study, taking Ruby with them because she was apparently thrilled to hang out with Uncle Rhodey.

"Why so urgent? Don't you have, you know, 5 years? Also, why did you go back in time?"

No matter how many times he said it, it didn't sound any less stupid. "A magician named Dr. Strange came through a portal and told us we had to come back to now to prevent a mad man from destroying half the universe."

Rhodey just looked at him a minute. "You know, I really miss the days when my biggest problem was you being drunk at missile demos."

"Man, those were the days, huh?"

Chapter Text

Despite her hope that it would not be much of a story, there were still paparazzi outside when Pepper left the office, shouting questions at her she didn't listen to. Happy ushered her into the car, and she was surprised to find the seat next to her contained a carseat.

"Thanks," she said as he honked at the crowd.

"Ask and you shall receive, that's my motto. Back home?"

"Please."

"On it." He squeaked the tires a little pulling out, she thought to scare the paps a bit. They drove in silence a while. Pepper pulled out her phone and began looking at the internet articles about her she probably shouldn't be reading. "So," Happy said casually. "Time travel."

Pepper dropped her phone. "What?"

"Jess told me. I mean, I'm already buying aliens, so why the hell not?" He looked at her in the rearview mirror. "Jess could have lost it, maybe, but the car service records from your trip to DC list a carseat request."

She laughed, feeling relieved. "Jess is perfectly sane."

"Yeah, I figured. She tends to be the sanest person I know. And I'm relieved I don't have to give Tony a stern talking to."

"I'm sorry I lied to you. I just. . . haven't quite figured this mess out."

"I figured. Even with the stuff we've seen that's a hard story to throw at someone."

She really did feel better having him know. One less place she had wear a facade. "You should come in and meet her."

He looked at her in the rearview and she could tell he was grinning. "I would love that."

Ruby and Ada charmed him like they did everyone else. Happy insisted he needed to get out the big SUV again and install the carseats so he could take the kids to get out of the house, and Pepper left him making arrangements with Violet.

Then she went downstairs to check on Tony. He seemed to be running an invention sweatshop down there. Even Rhodey had been roped in.

"Hey, Pep," he said, pausing long enough to hug her. "Tony explained, congrats on the kid."

"Oh, good!" she replied. "Please explain it to Vanessa when you get home, she sent me a text asking if I needed an alibi."

"You know, in the future we actually kind of get along," Tony called, his voice muffled from inside a helmet.

Pepper shook her head. "So, how are you guys doing?"

"Pretty good, I think." He took the helmet off. "We have everything that goes into Doc's suit mapped out. The non-suit weapons are done. And I have the schematics for the baby pods and suits done. We'll need to do some manufacture and test runs, but we're way ahead of schedule."

"Wow," she said. She could see he was clearly in his zone. "I won't be in your way. You want me to have dinner sent down?"

There was a chorus of "Yes" from the rest of them. Tony grinned. "I have so many minions."

Amanda threw something at him that smacked the back of his head. Pepper left them to their devices and went back upstairs, because she had work to do.

He came up to say goodnight to Ruby when Pepper and Violet put her down, and then went back to work. She worked through her backlog of email and messages and memos until her eyes were bleary, and then crawled into bed. Some amount of time later, he woke her coming to bed himself, and she snuggled into him with a noise of greeting.

She couldn't fathom how he had any energy, but his hands were wandering. "I'm asleep," she told him.

"You're talking, you can't be sleeping."

"How about I'm not in the mood?" That came out harsher than she intended, and she felt him go completely still. He even lifted the hand he had on her ass up an inch. She sighed. "Sorry. It was a long day. I'm just tired."

He pressed a kiss to the back of her shoulder. "Sorry. Get some rest."

"Mmm." Something stirred in her mind and it took her a moment to remember. "Oh - I know you're busy but I need you to find half an hour tomorrow to talk to legal. They want to ask you questions they won't relay through me."

He sighed, but said, "Yeah, okay, put it on my calendar. JARVIS and the others will make sure i do it."

"Some of the board members probably called them, trying to get someone to answer their condescending questions. Though you do also need to actually sign the affidavit on her birth certificate and update your will."

"I can do that. We got enough done today I'm not feeling as stressed."

Well, that was at least good. "If you die they will take her away from me, otherwise." They had paperwork to that effect in the future, about where she would go if they both died—Rhodey and his wife, though they'd been discussing broaching the topic with Bucky and Amanda so her life would be less disrupted—but here they had nothing. And Pepper had no legal claim on her whatsoever. And Tony had a very, very dangerous job.

He patted her hip. "I'll get it done tomorrow. I promise."

They lawyers ended up wanting him to come into the office, and Pepper got to see the paperwork she knew originated from SHIELD. The birth certificate had a strange woman's name listed under Mother.

Ruby Maria Stark.

She knew why it had to be like that, but the removal of her last name made her sad nonetheless. Ruby had a different birthday, too. There were a lot of petty things that made her sad. None of them were really worth complaining about, but collectively they sat on her shoulders.

Tony and his team worked long hours downstairs, painstakingly recreating equipment. The rest of them had their own work, putting together Hydra lists, making timelines, and mining their own memories for intel.

Pepper navigated the same river of bullshit she had after the first Battle of New York, though this time she was doing it mostly alone since he was so busy. The real estate agent found a house pretty quickly, and since it met the specs she signed off on it without a lot of investigation. It was only temporary.

It was a bizarre and ugly house—probably why it was so easy to get—and its appearance seemed to offend Tony. He came all the way into the Stark Industries complex just to complain to her about it.

He did at least bring Ruby to see her, something that brightened her day enough she forgave him for whining about the house.

"I don't think anyone wants to live in a house without JARVIS," Pepper said, in response to him telling her the AI needed to be installed in the DC house. "We all hated not having him the tower. A lot."

He frowned and tipped his head back. "I can send Bennet out to set it up, he's more than capable. Maybe send Lewis with him, she seems to be doing all the logistical stuff. She can figure out room assignments and furniture."

"She is doing it. Darcy. I hired her officially my first day back in the office." Ruby squirmed and Pepper put her down to crawl on the floor. "I assume you're going to pack up everything in your lair and ship it east?"

"Yeah. Plus Doc wants to set up shop, as does Bruce. They have their own research to catch up on."

Pepper nodded. "So I've looked at it every which way, and I just can't go yet. I'm going to have to spend at least half of my time in California, and half the rest traveling. The holo-meeting tech I was hoping to use to work full time out of DC isn't installed yet."

He nodded and without a moment's thought said, "Want me to stick around and help?"

"You should go with them. They need you and you need to keep working."

"I just feel bad, I know you're dealing with all the Battle fall out."

She rubbed his arm. "And you're sleeping like 3 hours a night. It's just going to suck a little bit." With a sigh, she added, "You'll need to take Ruby with you."

"Yeah, I figured. We can rig up a video or holo thing for just us before we go."

"Yeah." She picked up Ruby, and nuzzled her to inhale her scent. She traveled enough that she and Tony had set up a video system where they both saw Ruby every day, no matter where they were in the world. Pepper had taken Ruby with her when she could, because of the breastfeeding. Now the opposite was true, and she wasn't going to ask Violet to travel right now. Besides, she couldn't take Ruby out of the country. "We'll figure it out."

"We always do." Tony leaned on her desk. "I was thinking. Should we get married?"

She glanced at him. "The lawyers told me it was probably the quickest way for me to adopt Ruby."

"That was my assumption as well. It would give you some assumed rights without a lot of paperwork."

"Okay," she said. "California doesn't have a waiting period, we'll just need a license and to wrangle up someone to do it." She pulled out her phone to make a note. It was efficient and a good idea and really just a paperwork thing. She wasn't usually sentimental. But it was one more petty thing that made her sad. "The prenup will probably take more time, but I'll get someone on it."

Tony reached out and lowered her phone. "No. I'll take care of it."

She looked up at him. "You have a million other things to do. I'll just get Jess-"

"Nope. If we're getting married we're not treating it like a chore or business meeting. Get yourself a nice dress, I will take care of the rest."

"Tony. I love you. I had your baby. You're one of the smartest people on the planet. But you're kind of terrible about planning things. And anyway, we don't have time for a wedding."

He shook a finger at her. "And yet, we will have one. I'm not marrying the love of my life in a court house. Trust me, I'll get this done."

"Okay," she said, because she could see the stubborn set in, and there was no arguing with that. And. . . maybe she was a little sentimental. "I am going to talk to legal about the prenup, though."

"We have a deal," he said, leaning in to kiss her.

*

Pepper was correct. Tony had no real idea how to plan a wedding, particularly one on very short notice. But he was equally absolutely certain he needed to. If only to cheer Pepper up.

She insisted she was fine, but was starting to remind him of that winter after extremis, after the miscarriage, when she kept plastering on a smile and insisting she was fine while slowly sliding somewhere dark.

Last time he'd spent $54m on a house in Hawaii to try and cheer her up. Hopefully this would be cheaper.

When he got home, he tracked down Violet in the play room. "You've planned a wedding, right?"

"Technically. My mother did a lot of it. She and my mother-in-law had opinions." She raised an eyebrow. "Why?"

"Pepper and I are getting married and I promised her I'd plan it."

She sighed and closed her eyes. "I'll make a list of everything you need."

"That will help greatly."

"Amanda has planned a wedding and been in many. Though I know she's busy--you might actually want to talk to Steve. I think he's in charge of his and Sharon's, or was anyway. He's good at planning. If you wanted help." The tone of that last sentence sounded like a very strong suggestion.

Steve was creative and artsy, he'd think of things Pepper would like. "Yes. I will talk to Steve."

When he found Steve, and explained it to him, the other man looked very surprised. "I thought you guys were anti-marriage?"

"Not so much anti as find it unnecessary. That was before Pepper had to adopt her own kid."

"A wedding will help that?"

"It'll make the adoption more straightforward, and give her custodian rights while the paperwork goes through."

Steve shuffled through some of the papers he was holding, and then reached for his notepad. He and Bucky had been hauling boxes and boxes of Howard's records up from sub-basement storage to be gone through. Behind him, Bucky said, "Don't you just need a justice of the peace or something?"

Steve turned. "Don't you have any romance in you?"

"I do, but I don't think he does."

Tony sighed. "Maybe not. But Pepper does. And she's sad and doing her grin and bear it thing. I'm hoping a little romance and a fun party will help with some of that. Make it feel like an actual decision instead of one more thing thrust on her because of some weird superhero antics."

Steve gave Bucky a satisfied look and stood up. "Did you get a ring?"

"No. It's very hard to buy jewelry without getting hounded, I'll have to call someone to come to me."

"That's how I got Sharon's ring," Steve said. His shoulders slumped a little. "Which she no longer has." He shook his head. "Sorry. There's a lot of that. Come on, let's go find Sharon. She'll help."

This was becoming a production, but he gamely followed Steve upstairs to the den Sharon had set up as a control center. She smiled when they came in, but there was a hint of hysteria to it. "Please tell me nothing has blown up."

"No. We're trying to plan a wedding," Steve said. Sharon's eyes widened, and Steve added, "His."

From the other side of the room Nat called out, "Now?"

Tony sighed, and explained it again. Maybe he should just have JARVIS tell the entire house at once. "I need to get someone in here for rings. That's all I've got."

"Go out and buy one," Nat said.

"I would be a press circus," he replied, irritated. He really was going to keep having the same conversations.

"I know. But if you'd like people to stop asking her questions about your side business, walking into Harry Winston through the front door and buying a big diamond will probably change the topic."

He paused. "That's a good point." He imagined the constant questioning was part of her bad mood. "You don't think it'll scream 'I feel GUILTY?'"

"It would if you bought a necklace," Sharon said. "Buy something that is clearly an engagement ring and the tabloids will literally seize in their excitement about a celebrity wedding. It's their favorite topic."

"We'd know," Steve said dryly.

"Well. Anyone want to come shopping with me?"

That evening, they found out via the internet gossip sites which of the Avengers were immediately recognizable in civilian clothes. Captain America, Iron Man, and bodyguards visit jewelry store.

"I hear Clint and Bucky found that hilarious," Pepper told him that night. She was bathing Ruby for bed. Their house didn't really have any kid friendly tubs—or sinks—so to wash Ruby Pepper got in the tub with her. Tony loitered just to watch, though he felt vaguely weird about enjoying her being naked in a tub, since she had the baby in there with her.

But it also was the little patch of time they talked about their days, and he could usually get her to smile at least once. JARVIS had standing orders to tell him to come up for bath time no matter what he was doing.

"Clint is more than happy to be a bodyguard, I think. And Barnes is surprisingly opinionated on gemstones." They had, admittedly, both been wearing dark clothes, sunglasses, and hats. They knew they'd be photographed and didn't want the "Winter Soldier" to be recognized by anyone at Hydra.

She balanced Ruby on her knees and rubbed baby shampoo in her hair. It was starting to grow in for real now, dark as his. "Everybody got their replacement rings? People are still going to have to get married again legally, but the symbolism probably helps." She looked up at him. "We could have a group wedding. Like an assembly line."

He chuckled. "Darcy has offered to get ordained online. I think the Bartons are going to take her up on it."

Pepper dipped Ruby back, pouring cups of water over her head to rinse, Ruby kicked her feet and splashed everywhere. "I heard a rumor you've got a babypod almost done."

"I do. By the end of the week, barring unforeseen disaster. Some of its systems came from Doc's suit, so I had to bounce back and forth a bit."

"You should let Violet have the first one. That baby really does cry like 22 hours a day."

"Yeah, though if there was ever a baby it might not work on, it'd be Neil."

Done being washed. Ruby curled up against Pepper's chest and smacked her hand against Pepper's wet skin, apparently enjoying the noise. Pepper caught the little hand and kissed it. "So, did you get me a ring or what?"

"I did. Engagement and wedding."

She held out her hand. "I like sparkly things."

He arched a brow. "You want is here?"

"Would you prefer I get out of the tub?"

"Well, I suppose you'll be naked either way." He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out the engagement ring box. Sitting on the edge of the tub, he popped the box open to reveal the ring.

Natasha had been specific it should be a big obvious diamond, for PR reasons. Then guys had all asked him if he was sure, or if it was a little too on the nose. But there was a point past which this no longer show, no longer about the press, but about them. So he'd bought a ring with a big blood-red ruby in the center, set with small diamonds wrapped in twists of platinum that reminded him, as close as he could get, of her necklace made of shrapnel.

Pepper stared at it, and said a very quiet, "Oh."

He wasn't entirely sure how to interpret that, and as the silence stretched, he got nervous. "If you don't like it I can go back-"

She sucked in a breath that had a hitch to it, and when she looked up at him her eyes were full of tears. "I like it," she whispered.

Leaning in, he kissed her. "I love you."

"I love you, too," she replied, and Ruby splashed, soaking him in a surprising amount of water.

He laughed and grabbed a towel. "And we love you, little bits."

He took her and got her dried and dressed while Pepper got out of the tub. Ruby was crawling around on the bed when she came out wrapped in her robe. "Sorry. I probably should have gotten out first." She came and stopped in front of him where he sat on the bed, and he had a moment of longing for the baby to be in bed so he could pull on the tie of her robe. She held out her hand for him to put the ring on.

After he did so, he lifted her hand to kiss her palm. "Perfect."

"You did good," she said quietly, stroking her fingers over his cheek.

"Thanks." He leaned into his touch. "I wanted it to mean something to us."

She sat next to him. "Maybe I will go buy a real wedding dress."

"You should. A big fluffy one."

Pepper laughed. "Have you ever seen me wear a ballgown in my life?"

"Felt wrong to request a slinky one."

"It's our wedding, you can request whatever the hell you want."

"Then I can't wait to see you in your slinky wedding dress."

Chapter Text

A woman like Pepper would normally have her wedding dress custom made by a household name designer, but they didn't have that kind of time. If it were the original 2012, she'd probably have talked herself into wearing one of the many gowns she already owned. But she had friends, and they were adamant. So despite being a busy CEO, she found herself in a high end bridal salon, trying on dresses for her champagne-laced audience.

"I'm really glad my brother-in-law made my wedding dress," Amanda said. "And I didn't have to do this."

"I think mine was supposed to be a prom dress," Nat said. Her dress had been bright red.

Pepper was trying on what felt like her 400th dress. "You guys just going to do the paperwork thing this time? Or have full second weddings?"

"Paperwork," Nat said. "He already repurchased the rings." She wiggled her fingers to show the thin band."

"We haven't decided," Amanda admitted. "There's discussion."

"You do have family you have to explain it to," Pepper said. She sighed at the mirror. "I'm not crazy about this one, either. Maybe I should just throw a dart and call it a day."

"What about it doesn't work?" Darcy asked.

"If I knew I would rectify that. It reminds me of all the dresses I already own. Only white. Which isn't working."

"Why don't you try a different style, then? You wears tons of formal wear, your wedding gown should stand out."

"You don't think I'd look ridiculous in a poofy dress?" She held her hands out in the shape of a large skirt.

"No," they all said in unison.

"Poofy dresses are awesome," Violet added.

Skeptical, Pepper said, "I will try one. Do not make me look like a cupcake."

Darcy leapt off and went running into the display samples.
"She likes dressing people," Jane said patiently.

"Should I be scared?"

Jane shrugged. "She has better taste than me."

Pepper decided to make a trip to the bathroom while she waited. Darcy returned with an armload of dresses. There was a lot of fabric. It was like a tidal wave of satin and lace and tule and taffeta.

Interestingly, however, not a single one was actually white. They were champagne and blush and pale silver. "Huh."

"Is that a good huh?"

"It's a surprised huh. I said I'd try."

She rummaged a moment and held out a silvery one. "Start here."

It was satin, yards and yard of silver satin. It was absolutely the largest dress she had ever put on—Sharon had to get up and help her into it. Then she stared, startled, at her reflection. It was genuinely gorgeous. She could wear something like this to the oscars or the Met Gala--only she'd never tried because it wasn't really her style. But. . . she kind of loved it.

"You look like a bride," Sharon commented.

"I do," she said quietly, fussing with the skirt. Up until this moment she'd had no idea she wanted such a thing.

"Wanna show the rest of them?"

"It's beautiful, but it's too fancy. This is a cathedral and ballroom dress, not a garden dress." You couldn't really book a wedding venue on a weeks notice, but Tony had lots of friends and so had secured loan of someone's private estate. "But tell Darcy to bring in the poof."

Sharon gave her a salute and headed out. A moment later Darcy's legs came in, the rest of her obscured by the pile of dresses. When she put them down she got a look at Pepper and grinned. "You look like Cinderella."

She laughed. "I should get your first impressions of all of them; whatever comes out of your mouth unfiltered will probably also come out of Tony's."

"We do have the same filter problem," she conceded. "But I meant that as a compliment."

"I might be a little old for Cinderella," Pepper replied. "You can be on zipper duty while you're here, help me out of this thing."

The next one Pepper put on, she barely glanced at before Darcy said, "Your Quincenera will be lots of fun."

"Right. Next."

The next one was deemed "too cake topper" and the next one was compared to Belle, from beauty and the beast.

"Again, that's not a complaint."

"I'm concerned about this disney princess theme we've apparently got going."

The next one was all tulle—which would not have been her choice—and light pink—which would really have not been her choice. But it was scattered with well done embroidered sparkles and somehow managed to look more old Hollywood than than fairy tale. The back was nearly bare to her waist. She really liked it.

"That's going to require you to be careful with your sex positions this week," was Darcy's comment, making Pepper laugh out loud.

"Come show us something!" Sharon called from the outer room.

Darcy pushed the door open and waved Pepper through. The skirt swished and flowed as she walked. It had a little sweep of a train, but the fabric made it look natural. She stopped when they could see her and bit her lip.

There was a beat of silence, then Violet said, "You look amazing."

She grinned and walked up in front of the big mirrors. "You think? I kind of love this one."

There was a chorus of yeses.

"It has to be that one," Amanda said.

Pepper traced the neckline that plunged between her breasts. "You can kind of see the edges of my scars."

"You could cover it with make up. I can show you how."

"No," she said after a moment. "They are mine."

Amanda smiled. "Good for you."

The dress she bought that day, her various accessories and shoes, and the dress she bought for Ruby were the only things Pepper really knew about her own wedding. No one would actually tell her anything, perhaps because they knew she'd get involved even though she didn't have time. And Tony seemed to really want to handle it--though as far as she could tell, most of the actual details had become the responsibility of Steve. At least he was the one who asked her questions.

It was okay. Tony was as busy as her. Somewhere in there he finished the babypod, and Neil slept in a container of some sort for perhaps the first time in his life.

"This is the best day of either of my lives," Violet informed her as they watched him snooze happily in the hovering pod. Rocking had not been sufficient, but they'd managed to find a combination of gently shuddering and randomly hovering around that pleased him greatly.

"The babypods are magic," Pepper said. "He worked on perfecting it for years, from when we first started trying to get pregnant."

"I really cannot express how much better this round is going to be for me and my kids." She looked over at Pepper. "Did I tell you Bruce and I explained the time travel to Ada?"

"How did that go?"

"Remarkably well. She's insisted we not tell her anything about herself so as not to taint her decisions. And she promised to help me cover when talking to my parents."

Pepper chuckled and shook her head. "That sounds very Ada."

"It is. Somethings do not change."

Ruby was sleeping well in her crib now, and since she'd have outgrown it soon Pepper told Tony not to build a second one. He had quite enough things in his backlog. She was happy it was keeping him busy, if he wasn't going to get enough sleep.

The night before the wedding he insisted on sleeping in one of the guest rooms for superstition's sake. Pepper thought it was silly, and also that he might not sleep at all without her there. But he was fairly adamant about it.

At seven AM there was a knock on her bedroom door and Darcy's voice. "Breakfast is here and hair and make-up will be here in an hour."

"Am I allowed to come downstairs, or am I sequestered?"

"You can come down, Tony's already left."

"Let me just get Ruby," Pepper said, putting her robe on.

"He took her with him," Darcy replied. "You're supposed to relax and be pampered."

Pepper shook her head and came out into the hallway. "This is all kind of adorable. I'm waiting for the plot twist."

"We've secretly replaced your fiance with a life model decoy. We were hoping you wouldn't notice."

They made their way downstairs. "No, but seriously. Did I ever tell you about the time we went on vacation to a tropical island and there was a tsunami? I'm waiting for the other shoe."

Darcy glanced over her shoulder. "If a tsunami comes, Thor will send it away. Enjoy your Eggs Benedict."

Her breakfast was delicious. Hair and makeup arrived right on time, and it was nice to just sit and drink coffee while professionals made her pretty. The other ladies flitted through in various stages of getting ready, to keep her company or to have things done themselves. Amanda informed her this version of her didn't own make up, so she borrowed one of Pepper's stylists to freshen herself up.

They'd decided no attendants, but apparently she had a flower girl, based on the big goofy dress Ada was running around it—which was quite adorable.

It didn't feel real until she put her dress on.

Sharon and Darcy helped her into it and managed to do it all without smudging her make up or damaging her hairdo. When she was zipped and cinched she did, indeed, look like a proper bride.

"He's gonna have to scrape his jaw off the floor," Darcy told her.

"It would certainly be an other shoe if he had a heart attack," she replied. She did a turn. It was such a pretty dress. "Are we about ready to go?"

"We are, the cars are waiting out front. Last word from Team Boy was everything was good on their end."

Happy had come back to the house to drive her himself, in a vintage Rolls Royce that Tony had apparently purchased literally just for this. "He said he'd donate it to one of those charity car places," Happy told her.

Pepper laughed and rolled her eyes. "He really is lucky I love him."

"Yeah," Happy said sincerely. "He really is."

"Let's go get this thing started," she said.

The cars wound their way up into the hills, eventually pulling through an unassuming looking gate—the kind that belonged to someone with a lot of money who didn't want to show off. Quite the opposite of their gate, which had a gigantic 3D S on it.

"Happy, whose place did he borrow?" She asked as they made their way to the house.

"Some Chinese billionaire who's using it as a tax shelter. Tony knew about some of his shady business dealings and kept the info in case he ever needed a favor."

Pepper blinked. "So he blackmailed someone for it?"

"Kinda, yeah."

And she was going to marry this man.

"Steve already yelled at him," Happy said. "If that helps."

The house was unassuming, but she could see the view beyond it was spectacular, and she could see the spindly limbs of very old live oaks rising behind the house.

They were greeted by Steve and Bucky in suits. Steve opened her door for her. "We're to escort you to the bride's waiting room."

The bride's room had her bouquet in it—which was honestly gorgeous. "All the flowers were Violet's doing," Steve told her. "She has Opinions about flowers."

"They are really beautiful."

"We all teased her about her name and caring about flowers," Bucky told her. "I think she had something to prove."

"I'm sure everything will be beautiful." She paused, then said, "Thank you, Steve. I know you did most of this."

He smiled. "It was a team effort, I assure you."

"We're just going to make sure everyone is seated," Bucky said. "And then it will be time."

It was absolutely ridiculous how nervous she felt once they left. Something about waiting, perhaps. Eventually Steve came back for her, bringing her to what looked like the house's family room. Violet was waiting there with Ada proudly holding a bucket of flowers. Pepper looked out the back windows and nearly dropped her bouquet. The house had expanse of lawn leading up to the edge of the hill, where you could see mountains and eventually the ocean beyond. The ceremony area was shaded by a couple of big oak trees, with rows of wooden chairs decorated with an abundance of flowers. And there were many rows. There had to be 150 people out there.

Not a large crowd for people like her and Tony, but far more than she expected on a week's notice. It looked, absolutely and entirely, like a real wedding.

"Ready?" Steve asked. "We weren't sure if you wanted anyone to walk you down the aisle or. . ."

"I can walk myself down the aisle, thank you. I admit I did not picture the aisle as being that long."

"Okay, we'll go get in place then." He kissed her cheek. "You look beautiful."

"Thank you."

There was a white runner creating the aisle leading from the back door, and Ada went out ahead of her to the sounds of string music. Instead of scattering her petals down the aisle, she flung handfuls of them at the crowd. Some fluttered like confetti. Some hit people in the face.

Violet was visibly laughing when she met her at the end of the aisle and tugged her to sit between her and Bruce.

The music changed and everyone stood and Pepper started her way down the aisle. She could see Tony at the end of it, holding Ruby, who was so excited to see her mother she was shrieking with joy and flailing to be put down. Part of her realized this had to look extremely strange to the vast majority of the guests who'd heard the PR story, but right now Pepper just did not care.

When she reached them, Tony finally let Ruby launch herself out of his arms to Pepper. She squealed happily and patted her cheeks.

She juggled the baby and the bouquet, kissing the top of Ruby's head. She settled her on her hip and then looked at Tony, who was staring back at her with what she might call awe. For a moment it reminded her of when Ruby was born. Things were happening and there was a room full of people, but there had been no one else in the world but the two of them and this tiny person they'd made.

After a moment, he reached out and took her elbow, drawing her to stand next to him in front of the officiant.

Who turned out to be Darcy in a black pantsuit, looking quite proud of herself.

"Justices of the peace are hard to get last minute," Tony whispered.

Pepper laughed, because she'd been so busy looking at him and Ruby coming up the aisle, she literally had not noticed. "Didn't have any blackmail material on any of them?"

"Apparently not. And they're surprisingly resistant to bribery."

"His attempts to bribe me into starting it with 'Mawage' like in the Princess Bride got as high as fifty grand," Darcy said. "But I'm afraid of Steve and Violet." She took a breath and started the actual ceremony before either of them could respond.

Pepper's life was certainly never going to be boring.

Chapter Text

There had been a time in Tony's life when the idea of getting married would have caused him to laugh for a good five minutes. It was mathematically obvious that his parents had had get married, and he'd known it all his life. Howard had seemed proud of himself, that he'd done the right thing, so to speak, but not exactly sold on the concept of matrimony. His father loved his mother, but had told Tony more than once he'd intended to remain a bachelor. The womanizing certainly didn't stop, though it did go underground.

If Howard ever noticed how much it hurt his mother, Tony didn't know. Be he'd noticed. Somehow this solidified into a desire to keep all his relationships shallow, and that vows and rings and signed papers were pointless. Pepper blew that first part out of the water, but they'd seemed in agreement about the second. Commitment was choice, and it didn't need to be notarized.

It surprised him just how much he liked the fact that this woman in his arms—dancing to some sappy wedding-y song that Steve probably picked—was formally and legally his

"Have I told you how amazing this dress is?" he asked her as he paused to give her a twirl. "I've never seen you in pink."

"It was the 85th dress I tried on. You should have seen the Disney Princess parade before it." She put her head on his shoulder. "Have I told you how amazing all of this is?"

"We did good, huh? Better than a quickie on the courthouse steps?"

"You're going to gloat forever, aren't you?"

"Only a little." He kissed her hair. "I wanted you to have something good in this reality. Despite all the shit."

Her dress had very little back, such that it reminded him of the first time he'd danced with her. He absently traced his fingers along her spine and she shivered. "I always thought it didn't matter," she said, straightening and lifting the hand with her rings off his arm to wiggle her fingers. "But I really like it. And having an actual wedding made it feel more real."

"It did," he agreed. "And I love a party."

She leaned up to kiss him. "We're really stuck with each other now."

He sighed dramatically. "You poor thing."

"I'm sure you'll find some way to make it worth my while."

He spun her again. "I hear I'm good in bed."

"Six hundred women can't be be wrong," she replied, something he absolutely walked right into. But she let him pull her close again as she came off the spin.

"If you listen close, you can hear them all weeping at me officially going off the market."

"Eh, you were never going to marry any of them."

"Not sure all of them knew that." He kissed her. "But you win."

"I know," she replied, and he could hear the catch in her voice. "I always have."

He smiled tenderly and stroked her cheek. "Love you."

"I love you, back." It wasn't more that a whisper. She leaned into him when she kissed him, looking genuinely happy, and he thought again what a good idea this had been.

They cut the cake and threw the bouquet. It all but smacked Sharon in the face, which he and Steve found hilarious. As the sun set, he found himself in an uncomfortable rental chair, feet up on an other one, Ruby asleep on his chest and Pepper tucked against his side. This had been a very good day.

Sharon floated into his peripheral vision to take a picture of them, and he waved a little when she was done. Beside him, Pepper murmured, "Are you happy?"

"I am beyond happy. I'm utterly perfect."

She made a happy humming sound and settled her head against his shoulder. In the distance, you could hear the distinctive whomp whomp of helicopter blades. Pepper lifted her head and groaned. "The news choppers have finally found us."

"Nope, that's for us," he said. She raised her eyebrows and he said, "We're not spending our wedding night in a house with 17 people."

"We couldn't just drive?"

"It's our wedding night," he replied, as if that explained everything.

Violet had agreed to take Ruby for the night, probably only because he'd made that babypod. He was very glad he had. He and Pepper each gave her a snuggle and a kiss, and then she went back to sleep on Auntie Violet's shoulder.

He tucked his arm through Pepper's as they headed up to the landing pad. "Ready for the shortest honeymoon ever?"

"We'll take a nice one later." The rotors blew her dress skirt everywhere, and he had to help her up inside.

She snuggled up against him again once they were airborne. Some of her hair had fallen from its updo and he played with it idly, twisting it back and forth around his fingers. She reached across him and took ahold of his left hand, running her thumb over his wedding ring.

"You like your ring?" He'd picked out one with faceting, so it would sparkle in the light.

"I do. You did good. On, like, every level today."

"I will admit I had a lot of help." She was never going to believe he pulled it off singlehandedly. "But I pitched in where I could."

He could see Pepper looking out the window and noticing that they were over water. "Where are we going?"

"Somewhere private." You couldn't see the yacht until they'd just about landed on it, and he could see Pepper laughing to herself. "You may want to take off your heels," he said, though he didn't doubt Pepper could stand fine on a heaving deck in a storm in stilettos if she wanted to.

"I totally forgot you'd still have this thing," she said. He'd sold it after they moved to New York. Back in his wild days it had been fun to take it out into international waters for a big party. Shoot off rockets outside the reach of the coast guard, and consume all manner of drugs. Now all he wanted to do was take it to Catalina for brunch.

"I guess there are some good parts of the past. I had more toys."

The helicopter set down only long enough for them to get out, and then flew back off into the night. Pepper shivered in the ocean wind and Tony took his jacket off to drape over her shoulders. "Maybe we should keep it," she said, leaning against the rails.

"I suppose it will have nicer memories to it now." He wrapped his arms around her from behind. "Ruby likes the water. And the others might like to borrow it. Have a nice little spot for people to be alone."

"Privacy will be valuable." She leaned back against him. "You're not going to try to carry me over the threshold, are you?"

"Not if you're going to say it in that tone."

"I suppose you can." She turned in his arms. "You know, I spoke with the married ladies in my sewing circle about wedding nights, and they all said 'lay back and let him do whatever he wants'."

"What's the fun in that?" he asked, scooping her up.

She shrieked and hung on for dear life. "Do not drop me in the ocean!" He ignored that and carried her below deck. The sea was steady, he was fine. The stairs and hallways were kind of narrow, though, forcing him to turn sideways.

The master bedroom was at the front of the ship, a big half circle of a room with a panoramic view of whatever the ship was pointed at. It also had an enormous bed. He'd actually forgotten about it when he called up the yacht. Back then he'd hated having women touching him when he slept, and had wanted to be able to take more than one girl to bed and still have space.

Not that he'd ever pictured it, but if he had, carrying his bride over the threshold would not have involved her saying, "Oh, I forgot about the orgy bed."

"It's not too late to call some friends," he teased, plopping down on the bed with her in his lap.

"I don't think 'let him do what he wants' was meant to include that."

He grinned at her. "No, you're more than enough for me."

Pepper leaned in to kiss him, and then she whispered against his mouth, "So what do you want?"

A shiver of anticipation went up his spine. "Currently, I'd settle for you, naked."

"That can be arranged." She stood, turning to undo the zipper on the slide of her dress. "Did I ever mention there isn't anything under this?"

His brows lifted. "No. That would have been extremely important information to have."

"It was that kind of dress." She had other evening wear that was cut in such a way she couldn't wear anything under it, but they were usually so slinky he could tell. Or she'd whisper it in his ear in the middle of some boring event, leaving him too distracted to have useful conversations. This dress had so much skirt she honestly could have had jeans under it for all it would be obvious. But she pulled it off her shoulders, down her arms and pushed it off her hips so it fell to the ground in a puff of tulle. It was, he realized, the first time one their trip to the past he'd seen her naked in good light. She stepped over the great pile of dress and stood in front of him, reaching to undo his tie.

"You are gorgeous," he told her, cupping his hands around her hips and stroking her skin. She got his tie undone and he leaned forward, kissing just below her navel.

"Thank you," she replied, and he could hear the smile in her voice. She raked her fingers through his hair. "You know, I asked what you wanted, not what you'd settle for."

"Mmm." He kissed the arc of her hip bone. "I'm a simple man. I just want you and me and a few hours of peace."

"You are the most complicated person I have ever met in my entire life." She sunk down onto her knees in front of him, cupping his face in her hands so she could kiss him. The kiss got deeper and messier, and he felt her hands move to undo the buttons of his shirt. He shrugged out of it, tossing it aside, then fell back on the bed, pulling her down on top of him. Her hair was still mostly in its updo, and he began pulling pins out until it fell around her face. Braced on her arms to stay off the reactor, she stretched out so their bodies lined up all the way down. She pressed her toes against the top of his foot and murmured, "You still have shoes on."

He made an unsuccessful attempt to kick them off, but then had laces. Pepper shifted, straddling him and bending back to untie the laces in some kind of yoga move that was. . .really hot.

"I don't want to get in trouble, but you seem. . . bendier than you used to be."

"I am." She straightened and grinned at him, reaching to trail her fingers down his stomach. "Why would you get in trouble?"

"You might be offended on your future self's behalf."

She undid his belt buckle, quiet for a moment. "I am sad about this situation," she said, gesturing at her chest. "I like hearing about the things you like about this version of me."

"Well then." He lifted a hand and stroked the line of her neck with a knuckle. "I like this version of you's bendiness."

She bent down to kiss him again. "Later I'll show you how I can do a headstand."

He buried his hands in her hair. "I can't wait." They kissed for a few moments and he realized she was slowly working his slacks down his legs. She really was more limber. One hand drifted down, stroking her back to grab her ass. After the breast surgery he'd made a point to learn all her other erogenous zones, to make up for the lack of sensation. He heard her breath hitch, and she stilled like he now had her undivided attention.

Kissing the spot where her neck met her shoulder, he trailed his fingers down her legs, tough light enough to make her shiver. Then he slowly dragged them back up, nudging between her thighs to stroke her. She lifted up to make space, kneeling over him in a way that hung her breasts in his face. He knew she couldn't feel it if touched them, but he did enjoy the view.

She was already growing slick when he touched her and grew more so as he stroked. He found her clit and pressed lightly, grinning at her response. It seemed to take her a moment to get out, "Mmm, you're distracting me."

"Oh, I'm sorry. Were you busy?"

"Yeah, I was. . ." He dipped one finger inside her, just a little, but it was enough to make her trail off. He could feel her body seeking something to tighten around, but he knew a light touch could absolutely unravel her if he took his time. She let out a little whimper. "Um. . .naked."

He withdrew his fingers and circled it around her entrance. "Yep. You're definitely naked."

"No, I. . ." She shuddered, rocking her hips like she was trying to get his fingers back inside her. She was so wet she was coating his hand. "God, are you trying to kill me?"

"Quite the opposite, actually." Another dip into her. "You seem to be enjoying it."

She whimpered, sounding both aroused and frustrated. She took a shaky breath and leaned forward to kiss him again, sucking on his lower lip. "I can do this, too." It was almost a growl. Then she crawled back out of his reach and pulled his pants the rest of the way off.

"Naked," she said, sounding haughtier than she ought to given the situation, except that she knew that voice of hers kind of turned him on. And then she had his cock in her mouth before he could respond.

The sound he managed was something like a growl. He bucked up to her, burying his fingers in her hair. The small part of his brain still capable of some kind of thought wondered if she'd believe him if he told her she was better at this than all the women who came before. She knew him as well as he knew her. Then she actually sucked and his mind shut down entirely.

He lifted up into her, losing himself in the sensation for a little while. Finally, he tugged he hair. "Enough, enough."

She crawled back up him, looking proud of herself. "At some point I want you to let me finish that. I liked the way you tasted with this." She tapped the top of the arc reactor.

"I taste different?"

"Mmhm. I assume it gets in your blood just like the palladium did. Just not harmful." She straddled his hips, rising up and sinking back down. Not all the way, just enough to take the tip of him inside her. "And vaguely coconut flavored."

He chuckled, but it was thin and strained even to years. "Pity I can't patent that somehow."

She sunk down slowly, an inch at a time. It was, in it's own way, as impressive as the bendy, and just as hot to watch. He sighed in relief and pleasure when she finally took him to the hilt. Wrapping his hands around her hips, he tugged her gently to urge her to move. She rocked back and forth, starting slowly, and then picking up the pace when he tugged at her again. She arched her body to lean back on her arms--different motion, different angle.

That growling noise spilled from him again and he bucked up to her. She'd drawn him so close to the edge, he didn't think he had it in him to hang on for long. So he slipped a hand between them and pressed at her clit again, giving her the extra stimulation. He was surprised at how quickly her rhythm faltered, and she made a desperate sound that cut right through him. She rolled back up straight and looked down at him, one hand sliding down to cover his hand, the other cupping one of her breast, just for the show. "Had enough?" she whispered.

"I'm about to," he hissed. She nodded, and he could feel her shake. She grabbed both his wrists and pushed his arms back to mattress, leaning forward enough to kiss him and grind herself against. She rode him hard, taking what she needed, moaning into his mouth. He could feel her breaking just as he did. For a moment the lines between them blurred. Then she sank boneless on his chest and he planted, patting her hair affectionately.

He felt her shift, sliding down a little, folding her hands on the reactor and propping her chin on her hands. She used to do that when he'd had it, he remembered. "Hello, husband."

"Hello wife," he replied, enjoying the sound of it immensely. "How are you this fine evening?"

"I am fantastic," she said, leaning up to kiss him. "And so very in love with you."

He cupped the back of her head as she kissed him. "Good. I feel the exact same way about you."

"I hope you didn't expend all your energy. We have an entire honeymoon to fit into tonight."

With a pat on her butt, he shifted her over to lay next to him. "Give me an hour for a power nap and a snack and I'll show you something special."

Chapter Text

At the very top of the yacht was a sun deck. The front half of it had a very small circular pool surrounded by big cushions to lounge on, so you could sunbathe, dip in to cool off, and lay back out. After dark, you could turn it into a hot tub--something Pepper hadn't known despite being on this yacht quite a few times. Of course, she tended to not stay up for the parties.

Somewhere around midnight, after the crew had all gone to bed, they decided to sneak up there and skinny dip. Why it felt like sneaking when he—they—owned this boat she didn't know. But she liked it, so didn't try to talk herself out of the feeling.

The skinny dipping quickly got out of hand, of course. It was cool and breezy up there, which felt good on her skin when he lifted her up on the edge to go down on her, but caused him to pull her back into the hot tub pretty quickly after. Then he turned her against one of the jets and she lost touch with the world for a bit.

She was so wobbly afterwards he had to help her out of the tub, and was very grateful for the half a dozen towels he seemed to have to wrap around them. They were big fluffy beach towels they could snuggle under and lay on the lounge beds in.

The stars were out in force, but you could still see the dim glow of Los Angeles in the distance. "Yeah. We should keep this boat."

He chucked and she could feel the sound as much as hear it, they were wrapped up so tightly. "It's growing on you, huh?"

"I think I have more distance from its previous associations. We were in a different place in the original 2012. I think back then I wouldn't have found the orgy bed funny. It would have made me wonder if you were goin to get bored with monogamy and leave."

"Mmm, and now you're mature enough to acknowledge you're stuck with me."

"It does need a retrofit. Room for everyone and quite a bit of kid-proofing. Neil would be through those deck rails before we left the marina."

"Neil is currently a baby."

She lifted her head to look at him. "He won't always be. And neither will Ruby. We should get rid of the 'nightclub' and its stripper poles and put in some kind of safe play space."

His mouth opened, then closed again. "Nope, too many inappropriate jokes. Play room it is."

"I walked into that. Kids pool, too, and in the shade." If she had her phone, she'd star making notes. "And JARVIS."

"He's always wanted to be a boat."

She put her head back on his chest and listened to his heart and the hum of the reactor. "We have people now. Not just each other. It's. . . nice. I think if I get cancer, which is unfortunately back on the table now, there will be people to take care of you."

"There will," he agreed, kissing the top of her head. "And hey, Doc has an extra five years to cure cancer."

"I need to have the last surgery again. That will help. Though. . ." she trailed off, not sure if she wanted to broach this topic.

"What is it?"

"I am 35. I haven't had extremis or the even more damaging de-extremis-ing treatment. Ovaries are still in there and just a couple months ago on this timeline they spit out 18 eggs. I think I could get pregnant naturally."

He was silent a moment, but she didn't have the courage to look at his face. Then he said, "I think Ruby would love a little brother or sister."

"I'm still thinking about it. You should think about it to. For safety's sake it would need to be pretty soon." She paused. "Probably before this," she said, tapping the reactor. "You'd probably need to wait until at least I was past the vomit comet stage, if not until after it's born."

"I lived with it a while after the Battle last time. I can manage it again. It's like a lot of things, my relationship with it wasn't what it was the first time."

"The timing is terrible, and there's so much to do. So I don't know if it's a good idea. But it's an opportunity this whole mess has provided, so I'd like to at least think about it."

"I promise to think about it." He played with her hair. "You should talk to Doc about logistics."

"What, of her getting to play obstetrician again?"

"I feel like she'd appreciate a head's up."

"And also think about what you want, not just what you think Ruby would want."

"I like being a dad. But yes, I'll give it some thought."

She nuzzled him. "We should probably get back down to bed."

"Yes. I feel like falling asleep up here could lead to bad things." He shifted and got to his feet, hauling her up into his arms again.

When they woke up in the morning, they were in Catalina. Pepper said hello to the Captain, who she hadn't seen in many years. He addressed her as Mrs. Stark. She wasn't changing her name, but for right now she really enjoyed it. Violet sent a text message and short video assuring them that Ruby had survived the night. She had tandem nursed them, which she was proud of.

"Addendum to last night's conversation," Pepper said as they ate their brunch at a cute little cafe on the island. "I wouldn't be able to breastfeed. We're not even starting until you rebuild the bottle machine."

"Well I would have nine months to get it-" She glared at him. "Right. I'll put it on the list."

She ate her waffle for a moment, and found herself noticing every time he moved his hand and his ring caught the light. "God, did we really get married yesterday?"

He grinned. "I have the pictures to prove it."

"Because I know you, I'm going to go ahead and recommend you buy or have made at least half a dozen copies of that ring. You work with your hands and will take it off all the time and lose it. It doesn't matter to me if you wear it or not, but if you go outside without it and are photographed, the tabloids will report our impending divorce. And shave 10 points off the stock price."

Flexing his hand, he nodded. "Already on order from the store."

"It delights me when you do things yourself."

"Clint suggested it," he said around a mouthful of smoked salmon.

"It delights me when others look after you, too."

"We have a good family."

After brunch they walked around for a little shopping. They had a number of people come up to them and even more unsubtly take pictures with their phones. It was some mix of people wanting to shake Tony's hand and thank him for New York, and people who had seen the news about the wedding. You could usually count on people in the LA area to leave celebrities alone, but these were probably extenuating circumstances.

Pepper didn't even mind. Wandering around with no agenda, holding hands with her new husband like they hadn't a care in the world. . .people could take all the pictures they wanted.

In the afternoon, they went back to the yacht. They took the jet skis out, and then did a little scuba diving. They sailed back home while eating dinner on board.

"All in all, pretty good honeymoon?" he asked as they split desert.

"Yeah." She poked him with her foot. "You did good."

"Thank you."

"I didn't think I needed to get married and I didn't think I wanted a wedding, but I find myself very happy about both."

He looked very pleased with himself, which he probably deserved. "I'm glad we did it. It felt good to control something in our lives."

"It did. And now we get to go live in the ugliest house ever built."

"Just like I always dreamed."

"Well, you know, many newlyweds have a terrible starter house."

"I'm not most people."

She laughed. "No. You most certainly are not." She looked at her watch a moment, then back up at him. "We have a little time. Wanna go back downstairs?"

"The answer is always yes."

*

Sometimes getting out of his usual environment—particularly when said environment was busy and loud—helped Tony think. While they were out on the ocean, he turned the problem of the stones, which they still had to deal with, over in his head.

By the time he got back home, he thought he had an idea.

He found Jane Foster down in the labs. "When we were talking to Strange, back in the future, you said you thought the stones couldn't be destroyed, but could be split and scattered."

She leaned back in her chair. "Theoretically. Logistically, though. . .I don't have a clue how. We'd have to blow them up and get half the pieces through a portal. But we need the Tesseract for the portal, but it's also the only thing capable of doing them damage. We learned the hard way trying to destroy the Aether--Moljnir could smash it, but it would re-form immediately. Strange was specific it had to be while we had both stones."

"So we put the two pieces in some kind of container to hold them. Send them to opposite quadrants."

Jane laughed. "You gonna bust out the tupperware?"

He tapped the reactor in his chest. "In the penthouse, Loki tried to mind warp me with the staff and it didn't work, because he hit this. As far as we know, it's the only thing to ever resist the mind stone."

"Isn't that element super unstable? And how much do you have?"

"So is raw vibranium, and my father got that into an alloy in the 1940's. I don't keep a stock, but I do have a particle accelerator in my old missile factory."

Now he had her attention. "I've never seen one of those in person."

He was just making dreams come true left and right. "Well, todays your lucky day then isn't it?"

When they headed upstairs, they ran into Steve. "Hey, I was looking for you."

"And here I am. What's up?"

"I found something strange in your father's files that you may want to come take a look at."

He frowned and pointed at Jane. "Gimme one second." Turning back to Steve, he followed him towards the den Sharon had claimed as mission control. "When you say strange do you mean complicated or evidence to put him in the Hauge?"

"Well, he's dead, so they can't—" Steve stopped, apparently seeing the face Tony was making at him. "I recall the evidence in the SHIELD dump being pretty clear he wasn't Hydra. But it's not that. It's a book of notes and they're all in some kind of code."

Tony sighed. "I've found those, here and there. I'll see if I can sort it out. Dad got a little paranoid in the later years."

Steve handed it over, a thick leather notebook stuffed with papers and post-its tucked into the pages. Tony flipped through it, scanning the writing. "Wow, this is way more than I've ever seen before." He checked the back page, but there was no hints as to the cypher. "Most of his stuff was basic alphabet switching. This is a real code."

"I'm guessing whatever is in it is pretty interesting," Steve said.

"I would think so." He closed it with a snap. "I'll work on it, in all my spare time, though if any of our assorted spies know anything about cryptography, they might be a better fit."

"I'll talk to them. We can scan it in for JARVIS to look at as well."

"He'll like a challenge."

"I'll pull out anything else we find with code."

"Thanks. Anything else interesting in there?"

"So far, I've learned that SHIELD helped your father with corporate espionage—which is probably not even remotely legal—and he had a major dispute in the late 80's with some guy named Hank Pym who could. . ." He turned and look back at Sharon. "Shrink?" Sharon nodded. "Guy worked for SHIELD, but whatever his tech was, he quit and took it with him. SHIELD was trying to replicate it and killed a couple of 'volunteers' trying. Sound familiar?"

Tony shook his head. "Everything comes back around, I guess. Not surprised Dad was on the bad side of that one. Given what I know of the super soldier experiments, you're lucky you didn't end up a stain someone had to clean."

"Yeah," Steve said. "It's only really noteworthy because after that we started seeing the code."

"The timing seems noteworthy," Sharon said. "In 1989, Peggy retires, Pierce takes over SHIELD, Howard gets sucked into experiments that you can tell from the notes make him uncomfortable. . . and then starts writing in code. A year later, he's dead."

"Sounds like we might want to make getting this unencrypted a priority. Dad might have been onto more than I knew."

Steve looked down at the book. "Zola implied they had him killed because he was suspicious." He looked back up. "You know, I have a very clear memory of after Erskine was killed, listening to Howard shout angrily at someone about 'what kind of scientist doesn't keep notes?'."

His father had made a lot of notes. He had books full of them. Like he did his thinking through a pen, the way Tony thought out loud to JARVIS. That habit had allowed Tony to make the element that saved his life (and might now also save the whole universe).

"That reminds me," Sharon said. "Amanda asked us to give her anything your dad had relating to the super soldier experiments. I presume you're okay with that."

"I trust Doc not to go full super villain, yeah. Hopefully it'll speed up her research."

"Starting over can't be fun," Steve said.

"She's taking it with better humor that I am." Not that there wasn't a lot of swearing coming from her corner of the lab. "But she's worried about you."

Steve blinked. "Me? Why?"

"You haven't had your booster," Sharon said. "The one you got when you were in the coma." He turned to look at her. "I asked her if she thought we needed to worry about it or not. She thinks the fight with Bucky when you took down the helicarriers weakened the serum, which was why the next major injury couldn't get healed. That fight won't happen now, but she wants to have a working serum before something else does."

"I did not even think of that," he said. "I'll try not to do anything too dangerous, I guess."

"We'd all appreciate that."

When Tony went back out into the main part of the house, Jane was waiting. "Hey. I had an idea. Am I correct that running the particle accelerator is limited by the capacity of your power plant?"

No one had ever referred to his power plant and limits before. "Yeeees?"

"So you could do more with more juice?"

"Yes." He paused. "Are we bringing Thor to hit my power plant with his hammer?"

"Bolt of lighting is something like 10 gigawatts, and he can pull a stream."

He clapped a hand on her shoulder. "I'll pass on the lame Back to the Future joke in the interest of getting moving."

Jane looked up at him. "Do you have any idea how ridiculous it is to try and catch lighting with a car? With a sixty second window? It might as well have been a year for all they were likely to actually do it."

"We need to hang out more. Go get Thor, let's electrocute shit."

Apparently some angry official from LAX called Pepper to complain, and Nat heard from SHIELD, but the lighting worked. They made what they needed. And Jane helped him explain their divide and encase plan to Thor.

In the end, it was surprisingly straightforward. They cracked apart the mind stone, encased it in two parts, and used the Tesseract to send them to opposite sides of the universe.

Thor went up to Asgard, and returned with a device that would allow him to travel with it.

They dismantled the portal Selvig had built.

If they were going home, it was going to happen now.

"I didn't really think it would happen," he told Doc later in his library. He was getting Ruby to sleep and she was knitting . . . something. "But it would have been nice."

"I understand. I used to hope for impossible things, too."

He ignored the sarcasm. "I do kind of want to track down this Strange guy and punch him."

Doc looked up at him over her glasses. "I'll drive the car."

"You'd think he could have taken another five minutes to explain."

"You would think when you're already dealing with time travel, you can spare some time for informed consent."

Tony looked over at her. "Would you have consented?"

Flipping her work around with deliberate ire, she said, "To save the universe? Of course. But I'd have liked to know what I was getting into."

He looked down at his daughter. "I would never have risked taking her and Pepper."

She nodded in understanding. "See? Consent."

"I feel a little guilty that I'm glad they're here." He couldn't fathom doing this, wondering if he'd ever see Ruby again.

"I don't think you should feel guilty. We take comfort in what we can. And maybe Pepper has somethings she'd like to do over as well." She flipped her knitting around again. "If she has a good enough memory we could crush the stock market."

"As of Saturday afternoon, Pepper is—I think—the third richest woman in the country. I don't think she needs to short the penny stocks."

"Just me then."

Ruby snorted in her sleep, and Tony rubbed her back. "When we get the urgent stuff dealt, I'd like to talk about that biomedical division. Five year head start."

"I'm all for that. I've been making notes as I work on the other stuff."

"Good. We can do some good." He looked over at her. "Hey. Natural disasters."

"Sharon's already working out a timeline." She shifted, doing something with her knitting. "Bruce isn't entirely sure it'll line up exactly, but a little head's up will be nice." She pulled out a little folding pair of scissors and snipped her yarn, then stood a draped a brand new blanket over Ruby. "Identical to her old one."

"You're a saint," he replied.

"I haven't been responsible for two miracles. Yet."

"I have faith in you, Doc."

Chapter Text

Pepper flew to DC with the rest of them, to help everyone get settled. The house looked no better in person that it did in its pictures, but it did at least have plenty of space.

She had meetings in New York, and then in Tokyo, and then she was back in California for a few days. It sucked. It sucked a whole lot. When the Tower was complete, she'd move operational command of Stark Industries to New York City. It's what she'd done in the original timeline. They'd moved a bunch of employees back east, but kept both offices open, and set up extensive video and holo conferencing set ups. But that was probably six months off if she was very lucky. Last time they'd only needed living space for her and Tony and Bruce when they moved. Now they had. . .a lot more people.

"So I talked to Fury today," Tony told her during one of their evening video calls. They put Ruby to bed, and then they talked.

Pepper was in London and it was very late at night. She was exhausted so she'd propped the tablet she was using for the call on the the nightstand so she could lay down. "That sounds vaguely ominous."

"I was hoping he could do something about AIM and Killian before he concocts the Mandarin and starts blowing things up."

"From your tone of voice I'm guessing no?"

Tony sighed. "We're running into the proof problem again. As far as we can prove, AIM hasn't done anything illegal yet."

"What about the bomb in Tennessee? Didn't that happen before the Battle of New York?"

"Yeah, but there's no connection to AIM at all. I can't even determine who it was that exploded."

Pepper rubbed her eyes. "Can I ask Happy to punch him when he shows up to ask me for money?" He'd been traveling with Pepper because Tony was concerned about her safety. At the moment she didn't really blame him.

"I'm totally okay with that. Make sure they're in good view of a camera."

"Might do it myself. Though, the Mandarin shit started before he came to see me. I assume Fury will get into it once that gets going."

"Yeah. We can get on top of it, just not yet."

"It's something," she replied. She looked at him through the screen. "I miss you."

His mouth quirked. "I miss you, too. So much."

"How are you sleeping?" she asked, a little afraid of the answer.

He lifted a shoulder. "All right. Ruby's been sleeping in the bed, which helps. Doc has JARVIS tracking my sleep, said if I get under a certain threshold she's going to sneak me sedatives."

She was glad of that, even if he did still look tired. "So no bedtime phone sex, huh?" It was mostly a joke, given the time difference and the crowded house he was living in—not even getting into the baby. But it was something they done quite a bit when stranded apart back in the original version of these days. At one point, he built a vibrator he could control from the other side of the world.

The suggestion made him grin, which had been mostly her intent. "Maybe if this goes on much longer. I'm getting antsy."

"I'll be back in LA tomorrow night. You and Ruby could come for the weekend."

He tilted his head. "I think I can make that work."

"Good," she said. "I can't wait to see you guys."

"I'll let you know when I have timing."

"I should get to sleep," she said, yawning. "It's almost one, and I have a meeting in the morning."

Tony blew her a kiss. "Sleep well. Pleasant dreams."

Pepper's morning meetings were government meetings, which were always fun.

"I need to find more time to be in DC," she said to Jess on the flight home. "I miss my family."

"My understanding is the holo conference suite is just about done."

Her eyebrows went up. "Really?"

"Yeah, Mr. Stark fired the company we contracted and went in to build the equipment himself." She cleared her throat. "There have been two HR complaints and the contractor is probably going to sue, but it is almost done."

Pepper sighed. "Just pay them whatever their fee was before they do so. And what were the HR complaints about?"

"One about noise, the other about cursing."

"Cursing. Seriously?"

She shrugged. "The report indicates the curses were, quote 'creative and evocative.'"

"I'll yell at him when he gets to LA."

"Thank you. Need anything else.?"

"No, that's it. Take tomorrow off if you want, we've been running a little ragged."

Jess flashed a smile. "You're the best boss ever."

"Can I have off, too?" Happy called from the back of the plane

"As soon as you drop me off." She didn't intend on going anywhere tomorrow.

It was late, and house was dark and quiet when she got there. "Good evening, Ms Potts," JARVIS said.

"Hi," she said. "Are they here?" Ruby had to be asleep but now, but she wanted to at least see her.

"They are. Miss Ruby is sleeping in her room and Mr. Stark is in the lab. He said to let him know when you arrived as he was just killing time."

She kicked off her shoes. "Is he on his way up or do I need to go down and poke him?" He'd moved most of his equipment, including his robots, to DC, so she couldn't fathom what he was doing it down there. Actually, she could. He could make trouble out of anything.

"He claims he has one more screw to tighten and will be up momentarily."

That was something she'd heard before. She decided to go downstairs and retrieve him herself.

He was working on one of the cars when she came in. "Didn't believe me about the screw, huh?"

"Not even a little," she said. Maybe it was her blue-collar upbringing, but something about about his mechanic look did it for her. Grease stained jeans and an undershirt that had seen better days, bending under the open hood of a muscle car. "But I'm not complaining."

He grinned at her over his shoulder. "I missed my cars."

She walked across the garage carefully, because her feet were bare. "You could have some shipped out."

"I wouldn't sully them with that house."

Pepper laughed. "Fair enough."

He fidgeted one last thing, then straightened, wiping his hands on a rag. "Hi honey, you're home."

She held out her arms for him. "Hi."

He kissed her tenderly. "We missed you."

"I missed you too," she said, leaning into him and deciding she didn't care if she got engine grease on her suit.

His arms tucked around her. "We have two whole days."

"Think you can fit some time for me in between car repairs?"

"Mmm, I'll do my best."

She kissed him again, because she didn't feel like talking. It had been too long and she missed him. "Upstairs?" he murmured on her mouth.

"Yes," she replied. She kissed him again. "I'm honestly surprised you haven't lifted me onto the hood of one of these cars already."

"I'm pretty sure that's bad for the paint."

Pepper laughed, and stepped back to tug on his hands. Which, she noticed, had black under every single nail--reminding her why even when they were younger and more acrobatic, they rarely fooled around down here. "Shower?"

"You coming to?" he asked, letting her pull him out of the room.

She started up the stairs, and he was right behind her. "You know, if I'd said that, you would be physically unable to avoid making a joke about the double entendre."

"How do you know I wasn't just setting you up for your own joke? I'm a giver, Pep."

"I will join you," she told him when they'd reached the living room. "But you're not touching anywhere interesting until you scrub your hands."

"Yes, dear." She turned to go up another level of stairs, and he caught her arm. "Hang on." He turned and went into the kitchen. She followed him, because what else was she going to do, and heard the sink turn on before she got there. "All that's upstairs is that bodywash stuff that barely qualifies as soap."

"Dish soap is supposedly good for grease," she commented. Though you really probably weren't supposed to clean your nails with a sink scrubber.

It took him a good two minutes, but when he turned back, his nails were clean and shiny. "Acceptable?" he asked.

She reached out and took one of his hands, lifting it so she could suck his middle finger into her mouth. Dawn wasn't the best taste in the world, but it was worth the look on his face. He groaned and tugged his fingers out of her mouth, stepping close to kiss her roughly. She dug her fingers into his hair and met the kiss. His hands were on her ass as as he backed her into the counter.

"I could lift you up right her," he muttered on her mouth.

She shrugged her suit jacket off. "There's no one here but us."

His fingers fiddled open the zipper of her skirt and tugged it down, before he cupped her hips and lifted her onto the island. "Ms. Potts, I think you have an exhibitionist streak."

Pepper laughed. "This can't possibly be news to you given some of the places we've-" She didn't finish the sentence because he kissed her again. He was undoing the buttons on her shirt—government meetings meant conservative attire—and she was honestly impressed he didn't rip them.

Once he had them undone he cupped her breasts a moment before sliding his hands down her sides, tickling her ribs a little. She shivered, and reached to pull his shirt up. "I really missed you."

"Mmm, I can tell." He kissed her throat. "I missed you, too."

She got his shirt over his head, and the from the ceiling she heard, "I am very sorry to interrupt. . .but Miss Ruby is awake."

Pepper leaned back on her hands and groaned. "I think people in the olden days had so many kids because they didn't get interrupted by baby monitors."

"Probably not." He kissed her lightly. "I'll get her."

"No, I'll do it. I haven't seen her in person in a week." She wondered if it would be bad to say that she'd missed Ruby more. Though if it were flipped he'd probably feel the same. She kissed him. "Go shower."

"I'll meet you in her room if you're not there when I get out." He gave her ass one last squeeze before stepping away.

Ruby was not only awake, but she had a diaper explosion. Which was everywhere. She was super excited to see her Mommy, though.

This, right here, was parenthood. The part they don't ever mention in the brochure. The part where within five minutes you go from expecting to have hot sex on your kitchen island to needing to clean baby poop out of your hair.

"JARVIS, please tell Tony I need the hot water ASAP, and put the shower on in Ruby's bathroom when he's out."

He didn't reply, but about forty seconds later the shower went on full blast and Tony appeared in the doorway in his boxers. "What happened?" Then he spotted Ruby. "Oh dear."

"Indeed," she replied. She had only her skirt and her bra and underwear on, and she stripped them while Ruby was rolling about on the changing table. "Change the crib sheets while I go wash her. And me."

He gave her a little salute and ducked out again to get new sheets, she presumed. She got her and Ruby cleaned off, putting the baby down to sit on the floor of the shower while Pepper washed her own hair. Just as she was finishing, Tony came back with towels and Pepper's bathrobe. "No spare crib sheets, they all went to DC. I put these in the wash." Parenthood had been the thing to finally teach Tony Stark how to operate a washing machine.

Pepper sighed. "I guess we take her in with us."

"She will greatly enjoy that," he replied.

"Sorry," she said as she wrapped herself in her robe.

"Hey, you didn't make her poop." He leaned in and kissed her. "I'm happy to have both my girls in the same time zone."

They got Ruby dried, diapered and in clean pajamas. Tucking her in bed between them, Pepper missed nursing again--but Ruby settled down pretty quick. She'd figured out how to tuck herself up against Tony's shoulder and avoid the reactor, which he had a cover for. She watched him rub the Ruby's back as the baby drifted off to sleep.

"Sometimes I can't help but think about the original incarnation of this," she whispered. "The time after the Battle of New York."

"Those were some weird times. Not that this is exactly normal but. . . I kind of like it."

"We've certainly come a long way, haven't we? I feel like this do-over makes that more obvious than I'd realized."

He nodded. "Put things in perspective."

She reached out and rubbed his arm. "It's nice to sleep next to you."

Twisting a little, he caught her hand and rested it with his on Ruby's back. "You too. I'll actually get a full night's sleep."

Their fingers tangled, and she could feel herself relaxing. "That why you terrorized the DC office with your equipment installation?"

"I'm sure it didn't help my mood."

"It'll be better soon," she whispered. "I promise."

"I know. We're getting there." He lifted her hand and kissed the back of it. "Get some sleep."

*

In the morning, the weather was warm and they decided to take Ruby down to the beach. She was too small to really go in the water much, but she loved the sand immensely. Tony looked forward to teaching her to surf out here, one day.

Pepper's beach reading looked like some kind of contract. His was a report/summary of their research that Team Spy had put together for him. What a pair they were.

"You think we should still buy the house in Hawaii this winter?" she asked.

"I do. It's a nice place and the whole team enjoys it."

"But we will not be purchasing a terrifyingly giant rabbit?" She lowered her papers. "Ruby, don't eat the sand."

"She might like a terrifyingly giant rabbit."

"Medium sized, final offer," she replied, unpacking the bottle she'd brought down for Ruby.

"I'll bring someone responsible to keep me in check."

She made a noise of agreement—or at least surrender—and settled Ruby in her lap to feed her. "Anything interesting in your dossier over there?"

Tony looked down at his papers. "At one point Stane whined a lot to his SHIELD contact that my father was turning into a hippie. Which makes so little sense I'm wondering if it's code for something."

Pepper started laughing. "I'm just picturing him wearing bell bottoms and a flower crown."

Tony grinned, obviously at the same mental image. "It just doesn't make sense. If Dad had a hippie phase I definitely don't remember it. And it's certainly not reflected in the company."

She reached over to take the paper from him so she could look at it, muttering, "Only Steve would put this on actual paper."

"I have five extra years to get him paperless."

"Further down it says your father was talking about making something other than just weapons. Maybe Vietnam was getting to him?" She flipped back a few pages. "Was this around when we were bombing Cambodia?"

"I'd have to look it up to be sure, but it sounds about right." He paused a moment, watching Ruby dig in the sand. "I don't think the old man was entirely heartless. But I never saw any indication that it let it effect his work. Now I wonder."

"He did make that arc reactor. The big one we blew up." She handed the paper back. "But I actually don't think it was Cambodia. 1970. I think it was you."

He looked over at her. "Seriously?"

"Children make you look at the world differently. Even if only a little bit for a guy like that."

"Well, it doesn't seem to have stuck."

"Yeah, but the couple years it did is why you're still alive." She tapped the reactor.

He glanced down, then looked back at her. "Kinda makes you believe in fate."

"We traveled through time. I believe in everything now."

"Amen to that."

Pepper leaned over to kiss him. "We should pack up and try and get Ruby down for her nap."

He nodded. "Probably better to go over this stuff inside, anyway."

She carried Ruby back up to the house, leaving him to pack up their gear and follow. Despite his house being literally oceanfront, it was a bit of a hike to an actual swimmable beach. He needed to make a bot that could truck this stuff back and forth. Something that wouldn't get gummed up by the sand.

Though it was probably going to be a while before he had the bandwidth to make new things, given the backlog of old things he had to re-make.

They washed the sand off their feet before going in, and Pepper took Ruby to clean her in warm water in the sink, and then went upstairs to try and get her to nap.

She required an extra book, but they did get her dozing before tiptoeing out of the room.

Tony tucked his arms around Pepper's waist. "Whatever will we do with ourselves."

"Shh!" She put her hand over his mouth. "If we discuss it, she'll wake up."

He laughed against her palm. "Is that how it works?"

"Shut up," she said sternly, and then she kissed him.

Sighing, he wrapped his arms tighter around her and started nudging her towards their bedroom door. She felt tense in his arms until they got into the room and shut the door behind them. All she had on was a bikini and a beach coverup, a gauzy thing he pulled right over her head--and then gave himself a moment just to look at her. "JARVIS, seriously, do not bother us unless the baby is in danger or serious distress. Otherwise, entertain her."

"I don't think there's anything in my programming for entertaining a one year old."

"Improvise. Show her some holograms or something."

Pepper untied the top of her bikini. "We have faith in you," she said.

"In the future, you're our favorite babysitter."

"I will do my best," he said solemnly.

She had her hands under his shirt now, so Tony was grateful JARVIS stopped talking.

He lifted his arms so she could peel the shirt off, then cupped her face to kiss her again. The talking ban seemed lifted, but neither of them were all that interested in wasting time with that. It was a deep, hot, messy sort of kiss, filled with wandering hands and muffled desperate sounds.

Tony half carried her to the bed as they peeled off the rest of their clothing. They tumbled down in a messy tangle of limbs, still kissing and touching with growing urgency. He tried not to put too much of his weight on her so he didn't bruise her with the reactor, but she didn't seem to be paying much attention. Her legs wrapped around him, trying to pull him closer.

With a groan, he shifted his hips, sinking into her and kissing her deeply at the same time. He felt her clench around him and groaned at the sensation. She inhaled sharply, lifting up, tightening her legs, taking him deeper. "God, yes."

Groaning again, he braced himself on the mattress and settled into a rhythm of hard, deep strokes. It bordered on rough, but that was clearly where she was right now. Her nails dug into his back and scraped his skin, and he could hear when the sounds she made changed in pitch. She lifted up to meet him, until she started to shake and just held on. He could feel her come, and her teeth against his shoulder.

After a few more deep strokes, he followed her, arms shaking so he wouldn't collapse on her and burn her with the reactor. She tugged on his shoulders and whispered, "It's okay."

"I'll hurt you."

"Just a minute," she replied.

She tugged again and he sighed and gave in, tugging a bit of the sheet over to give her some sort of padding. She nuzzled the side of his face. "I missed you."

He kissed the corner of her mouth. "I missed you, too."

"I may have bitten your shoulder."

"I know, I felt it. It was pretty sexy at the time."

She nudged him to shift off of her after a moment, but she rolled with him. She was still trying to catch her breath a little. "That was. . . intense."

He patted her hip. "Clearly we still got it."

Pepper laughed. "You keep saying that like you expect us not to."

"Eventually I'm gonna break a hip."

She kissed his chest. "You'll just make yourself a brace. I've long wondered if a some point we'll have sex in some part of the suit."

"Personally, I'm shocked we haven't already. I know for a fact Steve and Sharon have desecrated the sanctity of his suit."

"We've had to sue a selection of people over the years making porn featuring the Iron Man suit and I have seen too many things that can never be unseen."

He laughed and gave her a squeeze, playing with her hair. "Fair enough."

She sighed contentedly. "It's good to have all of us home."

"It does," he agreed. "Feels right." She snuggled closer and closed her eyes. They had some time for a little nap.

Chapter Text

They flew back to DC together. Pepper was going to work out of the office in the city, and Tony was going back to his invention sweatshop. He made jokes, but Pepper knew he kind of liked it--all of Team Science down there under the house, working together.

It was a hot, muggy day and they all got sweaty and overheated just on the walk from the jet to the house. Ruby made her displeasure known.

The marble-lined front hall of the house was ugly, but it was also cool. Tony barely got the door closed behind them when Steve came bounding down the stairs two at a time. "Peggy had the key to decrypt your father's notebook."

Tony blinked. "I see you've been busy in my absence."

"We went to see her to explain about everything," he replied. "JARVIS already had the whole thing scanned, so he's working on decrypting and transcribing it now."

"How did she take it?" Pepper asked.

"Like someone who ran SHIELD for forty years. I don't think there's any level of anything on the planet that would surprise her."

Tony smiled. "That's the Aunt I remember. She give you and Sharon her seal of approval?"

"She did." He paused. "Your father left the key to her in his will, with a note that said one day you would come and ask for it, and to keep it hidden and tell no one until then."

"Huh." He looked over at Pepper. "Dad comes through in the clinch again. He's more helpful dead than he was to me alive."

She took Ruby from him. "Go unlock your father's crazy ramblings, I'll look after the baby."

"Sharon's upstairs," Steve offered.

Pepper nodded and Tony gave her a kiss on the cheek before heading off with Steve. There was a second floor family room that had been turned into a playroom with a couple of couches, and was a common gathering place. Sure enough, Sharon and Violet were in there with Ada and Neil.

Ruby immediately wiggled to be let down and toddled over to join Ada's block building. Sharon and Violet waved sat Pepper. "Welcome home."

She flopped onto the couch. "Hello."

"You staying awhile?" Sharon asked.

"Assuming the set up at the office works, yes." She looked over at Sharon. "I heard it went well with Peggy?"

She smiled widely. "Very well. Fury had already told her some of it. She was delighted Steve and I had found each other."

"My mother thinks I've lost my mind," Violet said.

"Ouch. Tony mentioned everyone was going and packing their apartments," Pepper said. "Have you been back up there?"

She nodded. "Bruce came up with me and helped pack up some of the kid's stuff and my books. It was so strange. He'd never been there before which seemed so strange."

"There's a lot of strange," Pepper said. "Having Ruby at the Malibu house was strange."

"Being at your Malibu house was strange for me! I'd only ever seen the post-Mandarin version."

Pepper sighed. "I feel like a lot of us would benefit from someone to talk to. Like, a professional. But I can't fathom how to find one who can handle this."

Sharon tipped her head back. "I could look at some of the SHIELD shrinks. See if I can determine one who's 100% guaranteed not Hydra."

"That's probably the best bet—though how you'd determine that, I don't know."

"I'm getting depressingly good at it, though I admittedly haven't looked into the medical people much."

"We could ask Amanda, she knows the medical people."

Sharon nodded. "She'd be a good place to start in any case."

"I was thinking," Pepper said after a moment. "It's going to be strange to be at the Tower, too. It's probably good to be here for a while, because it's completely different."

"Different is a word for it," Violet said slowly.

Pepper laughed. "Yeah, well. I mean, we could fix things, but does anyone want to live in construction?"

She shook her head. "Nope."

"I think the air of surreality helps," Sharon said. "Or at least tips this all into hilarious."

"We have to laugh," Pepper said. "Or we'll all start screaming."

"Should we try to decorate or something?" Violet asked. "Make it feel more like home? I know we're not supposed to be here long but. . . it might help."

Sharon tilted her head. "I could take some photos, hang them up."

"I honestly think that sounds like a fantastic idea."

She gave a little salute. "I'm on it."

Tony stayed locked in the library with Steve through dinner. More and more people migrated in there to help go through the information found in Howard's secret notebook. Pepper could probably help, but she didn't want to get her head in that if she didn't have to. Running a corporation was quite enough. She did go fish him out when it was time for Ruby's bedtime.

He scooped Ruby up and carried her upstairs on the way to bed. "Dad was completely onto Hydra. And had not idea what to do with this information."

Pepper sighed. "That sounds really awful."

"I'm starting to understand why he was such an asshole."

"Maybe even why he rhapsodized about Steve," she replied, sitting on the closed toilet lid to brush Ruby's teeth. "It was a situation that really could have used some Captain America."

"Certainly someone he could have trusted completely."

"I admit, I didn't foresee improvement in your relationship with your father as being one of the silver linings of time travel." Though, she supposed, he had the most silver linings of any of them.

"I mean, he was still a terrible father. But I am having moments of sympathy for him."

"That's probably about what he deserves." She finished Ruby's teeth and rinsed the toothbrush. She looked up at him a moment. "You okay?"

He lifted a shoulder. "I'm hanging in there. I think I'm probably doing better than a lot of the others, to be honest."

"I just know things related to Obadiah are still a sore spot. Particularly since he was worse than you thought."

"I mean, I wouldn't have minded if we'd gone back far enough for us to kill him again. But it is what it is. It's hard to get more betrayed."

Pepper stood, Ruby on her hip. "Don't bait the universe, Tony."

"Good point, that was borderline a dare."

They got Ruby changed and settled in her crib with some rocking and songs. Pepper was grateful how well she was sleeping. She'd adjusted to all this far better than a one-year-old ought to. She supposed it was because all that was important to her had come back in time with them.

That was true of her parents, too.

"I get what you mean about doing better than a lot of the others," she commented as they went to bed themselves.

He tucked an arm around her, playing with her hair. "When I think about what I actually lost or left behind, it's really just bad ideas and mistakes. Not every colossal fuck up gets and honest to god second chance."

"Do you think you've. . . I don't know, learned your lesson?"

"I mean, I'll probably make new, different mistakes. But the shit that lead to Ultron? I've learned that lesson."

She looked at him a long moment. "I can't believe I am saying this. . . but you were right about the bunker, and should probably buy it again."

He managed to avoid grinning smugly, but she could tell it was a struggle. "I can do that."

"Even before that, it might be good to have somewhere safe and well defended to go before you guy try to take down Hydra."

"It's probably available now. And now is a good time to do out of character things. We did just fight aliens."

The grin was resurfacing, and Pepper laughed. "Go buy your missile silo, Tony."

"Thank you, honey," he sing-songed.

Pepper went into the DC office in the morning, and tested the holo-meeting set up for her morning meeting with Jess. Jess was a morning person, and perfectly happy to work East Coast hours.

"It is super empty and quiet in here," Jess told her. "I don't know why I didn't do this years ago. There's even a different shift on at the Starbucks so I don't have to make chit chat with that barista who asks me once a week if I'm still a lesbian."

Pepper laughed. "I'm glad you're happy."

"You look happier, too," she offered. "Which is also nice, I suppose."

"I feel better with my family."

"I'm glad. You're an East Coast girl anyway."

"In my previous timeline, you grew to love New York, too." Jess made a face at her, so Pepper asked, "What's on the schedule?"

They went through Jess's list, and then the schedule, rearranging to account for new information. It was at the tail end that Jess said, "Oh--there's a guy trying to get an appointment with you. Says you used to work together and he's got a business proposition." Jess tapped her tablet. "Name is Aldridge Killian. That's a mouthful."

Pepper's stomach flipped, and primitive dread crawled up her spine. "It's too early."

Jess tilted her head. "I'm sorry?"

She took a breath. "Lets just say the meeting went poorly in the other timeline."

"I'll tell him no," Jess said immediately.

"Don't. I don't know if that will make something worse. Put him off for a couple of days. I need to talk to Tony."

"All right, I'll work my magic." Jess still looked skeptical, but was pretty adamant this time travel stuff was above her paygrade. So she didn't question too deep.

As soon as they got off the call, she had JARVIS put her through to Tony. She could hear clanking in the background, meaning he was probably working. But it couldn't wait. "Killian just contacted Jess for a meeting."

A much louder clank. "Shit, what? Already?"

"That's what I said! What the hell is going on?"

"I don't know." She heard tapping, probably one of his tools. "Let me talk to the group and try to figure this out. I'll call you later."

"I told Jess to stall. I wasn't sure what else to do."

"That's good. Buy us a couple days and maybe we'll actually think ups a game plan."

"I don't want to have to talk to him," she said quietly. "I can't do it."

Tony paused and she could almost see his little nod. "Okay. Then you won't. I promise."

"I know it would be better if we just proceeded as if everything were normal and I just took the meeting, I just. . ." She felt like she might vomit. Or hyperventilate. Maybe both. Suddenly her skin felt so hot she had to look down at her hands to assure herself they weren't glowing.

"Pepper. Pep. Listen to me, okay. Listen to my voice. You do not have to see him. Ever again. We'll handle it. Just breath. Slow through the nose, out through the mouth."

She inhaled, and exhaled. Tony talking her through breathing reminded her of being in labor with Ruby, which was a memory she'd rather think about than this one. Tears stung her eyes as she tried to control her wild heartbeat. "Okay. Okay."

"Okay?" He waited a moment as she took some more breaths and nodded. "Okay. I'll talk to team spy here and we'll send someone in to deal with Killian and figure out why he's come early."

"Thank you," she said sincerely, taking another deep breath. "I may be home early today."

"Good. I was going to suggest as much."

She rubbed her eyes. "If I have JARVIS tell you when I'm close enough, could you run me a bath? He's not wired into the plumbing in this place."

"I'll do that. I'll put in some smelly stuff, too."

That made her smile, just the tone in his voice. "I love you."

"I love you back. Don't work too hard, or I'll call Jess."

She laughed as she hung up the phone.

*

Just the possibility of having to talk to Aldrich Killian seemed to have rattled Pepper pretty bad. Enough Tony was a little worried about her, but she seemed to have steadied herself with a bath and wine and a chocolate cake he'd managed to talk Nat into making.

He also got her to take the first pass at Killian, revisiting her role as Natalie Rushman.

"You are definitely on his shit list," was the top item of her report.

"I already knew he hated me," he informed her. "This is not news."

"He wants something from you, but he doesn't like it. Hence why he wants access to Pepper."

Tony twirled the stylus he was holding through his fingers. "He wants help with Extremis. A lot earlier than he did the first time." He tossed the little stick in the air. "What did we change that effected his timeline?"

Nat sighed and leaned back in her chair. "SHIELD was giving them funding, and someone—I assume Fury—had it pulled. SHIELD told them they knew about the explosion in Tennessee and that they thought the project was too unstable."

He pointed the stylus at her. "That'll do it." He tapped his lips. "So. He wants me to fix Extremis. He doesn't know I know about Extremis. What is the next step here? Do I meet with him and say no?"

She watched him a moment. "Can you handle meeting him?"

"You mean without punching him into a bloody paste?" She nodded. "Probably. I'm still pretty good at the genius-billionare-playboy-philantropist act when I need to be."

"I'm wondering if you should say yes."

He arched his brows. "Are you serious?"

"I don't think he's just going to go away if you tell him no. He's a dangerous man willing to be a terrorist. So maybe we string him along instead. Buy some time."

It was annoying, but she had a point. "It couldn't hurt to see what research he'll hand over in the mean time, too." Doc would certainly be thrilled.

"I'll set it up," she replied.

Killian turned out to be pretty persistent on having a meeting with Pepper. Nat even floated it past Tony and got a hard no. She did manage to set up a meeting between him and Maya Hansen, to talk about the research.

Amanda was interested, and her labs gave Tony a pretext to have the meeting on his territory. Pepper went into the office because she wanted no part of any of it.

It had taken him and Bruce six weeks of work to figure out how to actually fix the Extremis in Pepper, back then. He hadn't committed the solution to memory, so there wasn't going to be an instant solution like Maya had expected, then or now.

Except that he was pretty sure by halfway through the meeting, Amanda had figured it out.

Sure enough, once they'd sent Hansen on her way, Amanda showed him a bunch of formulas she'd sketched out. "She was almost there. I think it was like my work on the serum, she made some assumptions early on and was having trouble thinking around them." She turned the paper back to face herself and added something. "If Killian hadn't forced her into human trials, she probably would have gotten it quicker. That sort of pressure isn't actually conducive to creative thinking, contrary to popular belief."

"Having Pepper at risk of exploding sure made me work fast last time," Tony pointed out.

She waved a hand, still adding things onto her notes. "That's different. Personal stakes are useful. A vague sense of impending doom is paralyzing." She glanced up at him. "Killian is like a child given a science kit too complicated for him. He's either going to make a baking soda volcano or mustard gas. And when the gas starts killing people, he blames the person who made the kit."

"You think she can tell you're capable of fixing it?" Five years in the future, Tony was pretty sure that he wouldn't have even been approached. Not with a woman considered a Nobel candidate for her work biological modifications down the hall. But in 2012, nobody knew who Amanda Newbury was.

"If it was Killian, I'd tell you 100% no, but I don't think she's going to count me out on sight, like he would. She did focus on you for most of the discussion. If she's smart she's looked into me, or will when she gets back to a computer. At this point the most she'll dig up is articles about my injury with MSF and maybe a couple peer-reviews. Nothing relevant to this."

"Well, hey, if he tries to kidnap your husband that probably won't work out too well for him." They were probably of equal strength, and Killian had that fire thing going on, but he sure didn't have any combat training. There were very few people alive that could take The Winter Soldier in a fight, and they mostly all lived in this house.

"If he tries, I hope someone is around to record the beat down for posterity. Pepper would probably find it cathartic."

"Probably." Speaking of Pepper, he pulled out his phone to call her and update her on today's meeting, and it rang in his hand. Though it was Hogan and not her. "What's up?"

"You know that guy you told me to keep an eye out for? He's here in the lobby of the DC office, trying to get in to see Pepper. I know you told me not to start anything with him, but I'm pretty sure I can take this guy. And his smarmy looking friend."

A chill went up his spine. "He has a friend?"

"An assistant? I don't know. Some dude who's sitting like it's his living room a chewing gum loudly. You want me throw 'em out?"

His call waiting beeped, and that was Pepper.

"No, Happy, don't engage. Hang on." He looked over at Amanda as he switched to his other line. "Are you armed?

She arched a brow but nodded, putting down her pen, now clearly on alert.

"Hi Pep, I know he's back again. I'll come over with Doc and we'll-"

"Tony, he is downstairs." She sounded like she was going to hyperventilate.

He waved at Amanda and headed for the door. She bounced to her feet and followed. "Doc and I are on our way over, we'll oust him. And if we can't I'll get Bruce to bring the green guy over. Just stay in your office and trust us and Happy to keep you safe."

"You're coming in your suits?"

"Fastest way to get there."

"Good." He could hear her take a breath. "Just hurry up."

"On it."

He hung up and broke into a jog, Amanda at his heels. "Killian at the office?"

"Yeah." He twisted the bracelet on his wrist to call his suit, trusting her to do the same. "Happy said he had a guy with him. I'm. . . my gut is telling me this is bad."

They made it outside and were met by their suits. "So am I the good cop or the bad cop?" Doc asked as they flew over to the offices.

"At this point I'm fine with bad cop and worse cop."

In New York, as in Los Angeles, mostly he just had to stay out of the way of the airport flight paths. DC had a lot of protected airspace, so they couldn't fly an entirely straight route--getting shot down wouldn't help. The last mile they were so close to the ground they blew hats off pedestrians' heads. He'd probably get shit for it from some government agency or other, but didn't care.

They landed at the building and headed inside. "Are we keeping the suits on?"

Tony grit his teeth, helmet retracting. "Until I know why he's here, yes."

Chapter Text

Stark Industries had a couple of floors higher up in the building, but Killian was still in the downstairs lobby—he was going to give Hogan a raise. Killian had with him that guy that had stolen Rhodey's suit and blown up Air Force One in the original timeline. Tony couldn't remember his name, but he did remember he'd put a large hole in the guy's chest. And, he definitely was enhanced.

Killian turned to stare at them coming in. "Do you just wear that thing all the time?"

"It's the only way to fly. Do you need something, Killian? Because I believe you've been told to leave and yet, here you are."

He gestured at the elevator, which Happy was standing in front of. "I'm waiting for a meeting. He told me twenty minutes."

"It's called stalling, dumbass," he replied. "Hi, boss."

"Hey Happy, nicely done." He refocused on Killian. "Ms. Potts will not be seeing you today or any day. If you have something to say, you can say it to me."

Killian shook his head. "Hey, I know I once tried to hit on her when we worked together, but I didn't peg you as the jealous type. Being this controlling isn't good for a relationship."

"You're right," Amanda commented. "He does have a very punchable face."

He looked at Amanda with interest. "You must be Dr. Newbury. You have a face that needs fixing. I could help with that."

She gave what Tony thought of as her super villain smile. "Hard pass. I've heard nasty things about possible side effects."

"Mmm, true. Science is a work in progress. And I'm confident we'll get that cleaned up."

"Your use of the word we, is interesting, since you don't seem to have a lot to offer to the project. Also, I think you're the one stalling now."

He held up his hands. "I came here to talk about a business venture. I don't know what is going on with two of you, but I am happy to show myself out."

"Do that," Tony said. "And do not come back here."

"That I can promise." He waved to the other guy, and the two of them walked out.

He frowned, watching them go. "Want me to follow them?" Amanda asked.

"No," he said. "Your suit isn't made for that kind of combat, not with two guys with extremis. Killian nearly melted Rhodey's suit. I don't want you guys to get into it."

She looked displeased, but nodded. "You should go see Pepper."

He got out of his suit in the elevator on the way up—which was good because Pepper just about threw herself at him when the doors opened upstairs.

"Hey," he said when he caught her. "It's okay, he's gone."

She pressed her face into his shoulder. "I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm reacting this way. I killed him last time."

"He hurt you. You're allowed to to have feelings about that."

Pepper squeezed him tight for a moment, then let go and stepped back. "Why was he here, anyway? And how did your thing go today?"

"He said he had a business venture he wanted to talk about, but wouldn't elaborate. And the meeting was fine. Doc's already fixed Extremis."

Pepper leaned around him to look at Amanda. "Did you tell them that?"

"Of course not, I'm not an idiot."

She blew out a breath. "Okay, so. . . what do we do?"

"Right now, you pack up and we'll escort you home. Then I'm going to have a chat with Steve and probably Team Spy. If Killian is going to be this aggressive I want to speed up our timeline dealing with him. Clearly using you to punish me is much farther up his priority list than we'd thought."

Pepper nodded and turned to get her purse, but froze halfway there. She sucked in a breath so sharp it was audible. She looked at him and her face was white. "I'm not the worst way to hurt you anymore."

He looked at her a moment, confused, then Amanda cursed and he realized what she was getting at. "Call Sharon and Violet," he told Pepper. "Right now."

Turning to Amanda, he said, "Fly to the Baltimore Aquarium, and find them, you're less flashy than me, you won't attract attention." She nodded and dashed for the balcony doors off Pepper's office.

Peppers hands were shaking as she dialed. Sharon didn't answer. Violet did, and backtracked to where she last saw Sharon. "She's having her paged," Pepper said.

Tony nodded. "Grab what you need, let's get on the road."

"Go in the suit, I'll have Happy drive me. Go, it's faster."

"Okay." He kissed her fast, knowing it was useless to argue, then went out the same doors Amanda had. She was lighter and faster and would make better time, but he still pushed his boosters as hard as he could.

Sharon didn't respond to the page. By the time Tony got there, JARVIS had tracked her cell phone, which turned out to be in a dumpster behind the aquarium.

The place went into lockdown for a search he was sure was futile, and the Baltimore police showed up—fat lot of use they'd be. "I'm going to call Steve," Amanda said, reaching out to squeeze his arm.

He had to call Pepper.

JARVIS confirmed she was in the car on the road to the house. Amanda was already talking to Steve, so he added to talk to her before she got to the house so the news came from him. "Patch me through to the car," he told JARVIS.

"Where is she?" she asked before he could even say hello.

There was absolutely no good way to say this and she would not appreciate him hedging. "He's got her," he said simply. "Her and Sharon."

He could not describe the sound she made. It wasn't loud, but he felt it like a knife in the gut. Like the sound of her screaming as she fell into the fire, it would haunt his dreams. Then he could hear her crying.

There was nothing he could say, so he stood helplessly, listening to her cry, until Amanda came over. "Go home," she said softly. "I'll deal with this."

He started to shake his head. "I can't, I should-"

"I have JARVIS in my suit and can keep the police off our backs better than you. Go be with Pepper, tell James to make sure Steve doesn't do something stupid. I'll be there as soon as I can and we'll all figure out how to save them."

She had a point, and she was certainly more level headed than he was right now. So he nodded, snapped his faceplate back in place and took off.

"This is my fault," Pepper said, because she was still on the line. "I should have met with him. I should have let him take me."

"Honey, no. We didn't know he'd do this."

"It should have occurred to us. We should have gotten her a bodyguard. We should have done something." She took a shuddering breath. "What if they hurt her? She's so little."

"Sharon's with her," he reminded her. "She'll keep her safe. "

"Unless they killed her taking Ruby."

That he didn't want to contemplate. And Steve with no Sharon was not something he wanted to see. "There was no signs of blood or a body. They wouldn't have taken her with them if they didn't mean to keep her alive."

"I need you to find them," she said. "And kill him. I want his head on a fucking stake."

"Yes, ma'am. I will make that happen."

Amanda called him by the time he landed at the house, to tell him that SHIELD had arrived and taken over from the Baltimore PD. Tony didn't know who called them, but he was grateful. He landed on the front lawn and had JARVIS take the suit off before he went inside. Happy's car was in the drive and he didn't want Pepper to have to deal with the suit pieces. She met him in the hall, crashing into him and wrapping her arms around his neck.

"Hey," he said softly. He hugged her tight enough to lift her off her feet. "We'll get her back."

She nodded, but he didn't know if she believed him. If he believed himself.

After a few more minutes, he rubbed her back. "Come on, let's go sit and see what we can figure out with the others."

"What about that building in Miami?" she asked. "Are they there?"

"Heat scans say that building is empty," JARVIS said. "It was the first place we looked."

He lead her towards the nearest room with a couch. "JARVIS, what else is being done?"

"Ms. Romanov has contacted SHIELD, Director Fury and his associates are on their way, but in the mean time have given me access to SHIELD surveillance to aid in my search."

Amanda arrived around then, and Violet and her kids not long after. There was more hugging and crying, with Violet trying to apologize.

"You couldn't have helped," Steve said. "Not against someone who could overpower Sharon." He was leaning against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, in full Cap Mode. Which was probably for the best.

"There's also a non-zero chance that if they'd taken you," Bruce said, "That the other guy would be tearing up Baltimore right now."

"And that would not help anyone," Bucky said. He was standing next to Steve, in an equally faux casual stance, probably ready to physically stop the other man if he tried to do something stupid.

Pepper sank down next to him on the couch. She leaned against him, but didn't say anything. Tony's phone chimed. The number was unfamiliar, but he knew who it was from. By 'we' I didn't mean me, I meant you. I did try to ask nicely.

"He's contacting me," he told the group, not taking his eyes off his phone.

There was a crowd behind him, pretty immediately. JARVIS pronounced the number a wildly re-routed VOIP number. "Do you have what he wants?" Pepper asked.

"He wants me to fix Extremis." That's it? he replied. You want me to fix your goddamned formula?

I'm told you're the only one who can.

"Do it," Pepper said.

He sighed and looked up, finding Amanda's eyes in the crowd. She was one of the only ones who hadn't come to peer over his shoulder. His expression must have said everything, because she simply said, "I need a couple hours in the lab to test my theories."

"No," Steve said. "You don't negotiate with terrorists."

"This is my daughter and your fiancee we're talking about. And I haven't heard any other ideas."

Steve pushed off the wall. "You cough up what he wants and he'll kill them both."

Tony stood up. "You don't know that." Even though, in his gut, he knew he was probably right.

"Do you want to take that gamble? I don't."

"May I offer a suggestion?" Amanda asked, voice a couple decibels higher than usual. "Before either of you whips out an actual dick to measure?"

They both turned to look at her, but she turned her attention to the group. "Thor. Don't you have someone up in Asgard who can see everything?"

"Heimdal. I am currently without a way to get up to Asgard while they are rebuilding the bifrost, but I will see what I can do. He may be able to get a reply to me."

"Please try." He nodded and turned to head for the front hall. Amanda looked back at Tony. "That couple hours in the lab? I could also use it to figure out a way to neutralize Extremis. Shoot a dart in one of his goons, make it a fair fight."

"It took a month of treatments to get it out of Pepper," Bruce said.

"You didn't have me then," she replied with a remarkable lack of ego.

"Do it," Steve said. "Tell Killian you're working on it. It'll buy some time."

Tony nodded and turned back to his phone. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

There was a beat of quiet among all of them. Pepper quietly said, "I'm going to go take a shower. You'll come get me if anything changes."

"I will," he promised. At this point there was nothing left to do but wait.

*

The shower was mostly so she could cry in private. Tony seemed to be holding himself together, and for everyone's good she needed him to keep doing that.

She'd faced a lot of things in her years with Tony. All manner of brushes with death, from those she only realized afterwards, to those she had to watch coming at her. But she had never in her entire life, felt fear like this.

Putting on clothes felt like too much work, so she just put on a bathrobe, and went to sit in the rocking chair in Ruby's room.

She lost track of how long she sat there before Tony found her. He didn't say anything, coming in to crouch at her feet and hold her hand. "Hey," she said finally. "How's it going?"

"Best as it can be. Thor got a hold of Heimdal, just waiting on an answer. Doc's got a couple of antidotes she's working on and Bruce is helping her weaponize them."

She stared over at the crib. "What kind of monster ransoms a baby?"

"The kind of monster that Killian is."

After a moment she looked back at him. "How are you doing?"

"I'm trying not to think about it," he admitted. "If I think about it I won't be of any use."

She nodded, and swallowed. "I'm. . . trying not to get in the way."

He squeezed her hand. "If you need to lean on me, you can."

"I need your head in the game." And not arguing with Steve, which wouldn't get them anywhere. But she leaned forward and hugged him anyway.

He wrapped his arms around her, rubbing her back. "We'll get her back," he said. "I promise."

There was a knock on the doorframe, and they both looked up to see Darcy standing there. "Thor's been shown the location but not the coordinates. Heimdal can't explain it on a map in a way we'd understand. But they are both safe. And Rhodey is here."

Pepper blew out a breath. "That's something."

Tony kissed her temple, standing. "I'm going to go see if I can help them figure out Heimdal directions."

She nodded. "I'll be down in a bit."

He gave her shoulder one last squeeze before heading out. Darcy lurked in the doorway. "You want company?"

"I'm not sure this is a time filling the silence will help."

"I'm capable of silence. If you don't want to be alone. Otherwise I can butt out."

"No, I. . . I should come downstairs." She might crack if she sat here in this room any longer.

Darcy was quiet a moment. "You want a hug?"

It was such a silly thing, but she stood up and held her arms out. Darcy immediately crossed the room and wrapped her in a fierce hug. She was several inches shorter and a decade younger, but there was something very comforting about the hug. Someone who she could lean on.

"Okay," she said after a moment. "Lets go downstairs."

"Okay." Darcy gave her a squeeze and a brisk back rub before letting go. "I got yer back."

Downstairs, Steve was trying to sketch what Thor was describing. . . which seemed to be a very generic square building. "We're hoping if it's good enough, SHIELD might be able to help."

"Where's that DNA targeting tech the Insight carriers had when you need it?" Nat asked.

"Hopefully not invented yet," Tony was saying. He was looking over Steve's shoulder. "it's a commercial building, for sure. Looks mid-century-ish."

"Many of them are," Steve said. "Thor, can you turn or zoom out or anything?"

"It doesn't really work that way. Just that it is in the woods and the hills and that a great fire lurks below. I don't know what that means. This is a bit like a game of telephone."

"Wait." That was Darcy. "Did you say a great fire below?"

He looked at her. "I thought perhaps some volcanic activity, but there is nothing like that in driving distance."

"Maybe it's the furnace," Steve said.

Darcy glanced up. "JARVIS, isn't there some town in Pennsylvania that has a coal fire going on underneath it?"

"Centralia, Pennsylvania. The fire has been burning since 1962. The town was officially condemned in 1990. Current population is seven people."

"Can you scan records for this building?" Tony asked. "Or all the buildings for extremis heat signatures."

"The mine fire would obscure such scanning, at least from orbit."

"Probably why he's camped out there," Bucky pointed out.

"However," JARVIS added. "I have found a building that matches the one in Captain Rogers' drawing." Several images of said building popped up. "I can attempt to get a current picture when the satellite is in place."

"That's it," Thor said immediately.

"I'll call Coulson," Nat said, standing. "See if they can spare us some backup."

"Suit up," Steve said.

The time it took to get everyone armed and organized seemed to take an eternity. Both Tony and Steve wanted Pepper to wait back home, and she was having none of it.

"You stay in the SHIELD van I put you in," Tony said finally. "And you stay there no matter what."

She put her hands on her hip. "Fine. But it you die, all bets are off."

"Agreed."

The team worked out a plan on the flight. Pepper listened with half an ear. She didn't care about the details and trusted them all to know what they were doing.

"SHIELD is in place," Nat said, coming back from the cockpit. Clint was flying. "They said they'll handle arrest and transport of any people so we don't have to involve local law enforcement."

"There won't be anyone to arrest," Tony said.

"We're just killing everybody?" Steve asked.

"I don't anticipate a lot of surrendering. And Killian has now kidnapped my daughter and my wife. Not to mention all the Extremis victims. I'm pretty much at kill on site. And putting his head on a pike as a warning to others."

"Hey," Bucky said, "I am in favor of teaching the lesson a few years earlier in this timeline. Coming for one of ours is not a survivable event. We will find you, kill you, burn everything down and salt the earth."

"The gates of hell will fill with their screams," Thor said.

"I see we're all feeling medieval today," Nat said.

"It is more modern than Hill's Roman reference," Bruce commented.

Tony was still looking only at his co-leader. "Steve, he's got Sharon. You telling me you're going to be pulling your punches?"

"No," he conceded. "But I'm also not shooting someone who has their hands up."

"Anybody put their hands up I promise not to shoot them. Keeping in mind anyone with active Extremis isn't unarmed until we get some of Doc's antidote in them."

"I wouldn't assume anyone with Extremis is dead unless you've take their head off," Amanda said. "Speaking of medieval."

Bucky turned to look at her. "Are you suggesting we decapitate people?"

She batted her eyes. "Darling, I'm practically ordering you."

"I have never found you sexier." He turned towards the small armory on the jet's wall. "There's a machete in here somewhere, isn't there?"

"Check the jungle supplies," Nat suggested, before looking at Amanda. "We're going to end up soaked in blood. Arterial spray is messy."

"Depends. If they're actively engaging their Extremis powers the wounds should cauterize pretty quickly."

"I've severed a couple of Extremis limbs," Tony said. "None of them bled."

Amanda gestured grandly at him, since he'd proven her point. "See? Hack away. And make sure you sever the spinal column, don't just slash from the front and stop when you hit vertebra. Full decapitation."

"We're starting our descent," Clint called.

Tony made his way over to Pepper. "Almost there."

She looked up at him a long moment. "Bring her back to me," she said.

He pressed a hand to his chest. "Or die trying."

Pepper stood up, putting her hand over his. Right now, she absolutely believed that. And if they couldn't get Ruby back—a circumstance her mind couldn't even handle considering—life wouldn't be much worth living anyway.

She would survive. Women did that. He would shatter.

They finished the descent, landing lightly in a large parking lot a few blocks from the building. Tony gave her a kiss goodbye before dropping her off in a SHEILD van.

Phil Coulson sat with her. Apparently he could tap into their comms, so she could listen. They were pretty quiet—for them, anyway. Nobody felt like bantering. Tony was kind of the ringleader of that, and he was in no mood. So it was mostly grunting, muttering, and tactical instructions.

Then, finally, Bucky's voice came over the speakers, "Found them!" Then, sounding rather amused, he added, "They look okay and Sharon has two guns."

Pepper put her hands over her mouth and her vision blurred with tears, feeling almost dizzy with relief. She listened to Tony say he would be right there, blow up something, and then she could make out baby squealing picked up by someone's mic. "Dada!

"Hello Princess. Daddy missed you." His voice was all choked up, and then there was a pause before he asked someone in a much more normal tone if they were going to stay and fight, and promised to be back.

She was out of that van almost before he took off.

Scanning the sky, she spotted him flying over and took a few steps away from the van, meeting him where he landed. Ruby shrieked in delight when she saw her, reaching out. Tony handed her over, then wrapped his arms around both of them.

Nothing in the world had ever smelled as good as Ruby's hair, or felt better than her warm little body, or sounded better than her saying, "Mama, mama."

Tony was still in his suit, and it was a moment before he let them go long enough to take it off. That was apparently all that was holding Pepper up. Her knees gave and she sat down on the muddy ground by the road, holding Ruby and crying harder than she had this entire time.

"She's just fine," Tony murmured, rocking her. "Sharon took good care of her."

"I know, I know." She did. But she couldn't seem to stop crying. She leaned into him, taking a few deep breaths.

"It's okay," he assured her, kissing her hair. "It's okay."

She moved one of the arms she had around Ruby so she could put it around him. After a moment, she asked, "Did you get him?"

"Haven't spotted him yet," he told her. "I'm going to go back and help clear, but I wanted to get her back to you."

"Go. We're okay here." She lifted her head and kissed him, probably a little harder than she should have considering they were sitting on a curb surrounded by a bunch of SHIELD agents. She didn't really care.

He stroked her cheek. "Be back soon," he promised, then stood, going back to the armor to step into it. A moment later, he took off, arcing towards the fight.

"It's okay, Ruby," she said, carrying her back to the van. "Daddy's going to get the bad guy."

"Mama," she replied solemnly.

She looked to the left, and realized she could see press—or at least people with cameras. She sighed, wondering how much footage of them sitting by the road would end up on the internet. She supposed she ought to be used to that.

Once in the van, she changed Ruby’s diaper and got her a pouch, and then watched the building light up.

Next to her, Coulson sighed. "They just can't do anything small."

She chuckled a little. "No, they absolutely cannot. You'll get used to it."

"I suppose I'll have to." He waggled his fingers at Ruby. "Hi there." She gave him a toothy grin. She could charm just about anyone. Had to be her father in her.

When the fight was finally done, they flew home on the jet. Tony came to hold Ruby the minute he was out of his suit, and Pepper let him. It had been a very long day.

"All things considered, it went better than I could have possibly expected." He showered kisses on Ruby's head, making her squeal.

"Better than the last timeline. Though, perhaps, scarier." She looked down at Ruby. "I still would have rathered they have taken me."

"I know. And we would have razed the ground, just the same." He leaned over and kissed her. "It's over now."