FIC: the weight of my heart is measured in carats (MCU, tony/pepper, pg)

[carlyinrome]

the weight of my heart is measured in carats, MCU, Tony Stark/Pepper Potts, post-Civil War

Tony buys Pepper a diamond. Exquisite cut, flawless clarity. It practically glows; it is like it sucks every beam of light from the room.

He is nervous, and he is looking at her, and she can't hear the question or tear herself away from the perfect diamond and the thought: I am going to be a widow.

“Tony,” she says, and she wants to say it again, but his name is a gem in her mouth, precious but heavy, and all she can manage is, “I'm sorry, I can't.”

Pepper can't look at him. She looks at the diamond.

***

Pepper's bones shift beneath her skin as she sits up in bed. The moon is absent outside the window, and it's so silent that it rings in her ears.

Twelve hours ago the UN was bombed and she watched Tony's tired face on the news, the suit--Mark God knows how many--dented around him.

They haven't spoken in weeks.

***

Tony reads Steve's letter. Again. Again. Eventually he memorizes it, and sits down to write his own.

Tony stares at the blank page, the pen in his hand, and he shakes as he remembers the look on his mother's face as the Winter Soldier pressed his hand against her mouth, feels his breath knocked from him as Cap comes at him from one side, Barnes from the other.

Help, he writes, and then he scratches it out and writes, Pepper.

***

“Come down here. I need you.”

Pepper can still feel the ring of metal circling her wrist as she pulled the wire from Tony's chest. “Don't ever ask me to do anything like that again,” and he had smiled and looked at her in that way he had when he wasn't being a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, when he was just Tony. Pepper still felt Tony’s pulse like fingerprints etched onto her skin, and it was right then she knew. Everyone told her--even hehad told her--that he was trouble and he was a heartbreaker, but she'd never thought trouble to me, she'd never thought my heart.

That moment was the end of everything, and the beginning.

***

Tony has Pepper’s ring in a box in the breast pocket of his suit like he'll need it any minute, like it hasn't been months since he's seen her. It weighs down his pocket and it weighs down his scarred heart, but then, everything does these days.

He is in New York and she is in New York and Rhodey’s said a hundred times, “Go see her,” and Tony rents office space across the street from Stark Industries, the penthouse suite because Pepper is on the top floor, and he keeps the blinds open but never looks out the window.

***

There are drills coming up through the streets of Manhattan. The sidewalks tilt, throwing pedestrians into the way of hectic traffic with the smell of exhaust and burning rubber and the sound of horns blaring and people screaming and praying.

Someone inside Stark Industries has sounded the alarms, and people are scrambling through the building, hiding in stairwells and under desks. Pepper runs down the stairs in her heels, her skirt tearing along the line of her leg, and she goes out in front of the building and ushers people from the streets into the building and points them to the security officers, who are keeping people away from windows and into the tile-lined bathrooms and the concrete basement.
Pepper looks up to the sky when she hears a tear in the atmosphere. War Machine circles from the left, Iron Man from the right, and the people on the street stop screaming.

The drills spin, throwing up asphalt, tilting the earth, and Happy hugs Pepper from behind and carries her back into the building.
***

Pepper watches the rest on the news, huddled in an office in the building's central core with a dozen others. The drills are wrenched from the earth and police flood the streets as Iron Man and War Machine flush men from under the earth.

It seems like everything is over, and then Pepper hears it outside, feels the building tremble around her before the television screen shows the image of an explosion bursting out from beneath the city streets. War Machine swoops in to pull the bombers out of the earth, but Iron Man was thrown by the blast. Pepper’s eyes desperately search the chaos on the screen for him, and sees a shower of glass from the ninth floor of the Citibank building.

Pepper is running before she realizes it, and she slips from Happy’s grasp like water.

***

Pepper walks through the broken glass in her high heels. The arc reactor in Tony's suit blinks, a beacon in the dark. She kneels beside him, the shards of glass pricking her knees, and rests her hands on the metal shell of the suit.

“Tony.”

There's a catch at the pulse point of the jaw that opens the mask. Pepper presses the catch, grasping so hard her nails bleed, until the mask lifts. Tony's eyes are open, squinting, straining to make out Pepper's features in the dark.

“Tony,” she says again, and she slips her fingers between the metal body of the suit and the warm skin of Tony's neck, like she can lift him out of the suit and into her arms.

“Pep,” he says, and rests his hand on her arm. The electric pieces of the glove pull back, and it's just Tony's bare fingers on her skin, so sensitive she feels the ridges of his fingerprints as he curls his fingers around her wrist.

Pepper remembers that night in Obediah’s lab, the glass raining down on her, and Tony's heart only beating because of the mechanical parts. She'd knelt beside him then, too, pushing past the SHIELD agents summoning helicopters and spiriting away Obediah's body and his monstrous suit. The arc reactor flickered beneath her palm, and she'd been surprised at how hot it had been, like a running engine.

She had known what she was getting into. She'd always known. Pepper had leaned over Tony in his suit, the heat of the arc reactor burning into her palm, and she had pressed her lips to his, breathed her breath into his lungs as the arc reactor sputtered back to life.

“Pepper,” Tony says, and his eyes are on her like they always are, like he can see all of her. Pepper wraps her arms around Tony's torso, and she pulls him to his feet, standing solid in her high heels.

“We better get out of here,” she says, and she takes his weight.

Later, in the hospital, Happy has laid out Tony's clothes, draping his jacket over a chair. There's something in the pocket, altering the line of the suit. Pepper sinks her fingers into the pocket, feeling for Tony's phone, but then she feels velvet and pulls out the ring box. He's been carrying it all this time, and she realizes that she has, too. Pepper looks at Tony sleeping in the hospital bed, and she snaps open the ring box, traces her fingertip around the facets of the perfect diamond.

She looks back at Tony, the stitched cuts marring his face. He's died before, more than once, like an act he's perfecting. Once she breathed life back into his body. The Japanese believe if you save someone's life, you become responsible for it. Pepper remembers the house in Malibu crumbling down around them, Tony's suit fastening itself together around her. “I got you.” “I got you first.”

The truth is, she's been responsible for Tony Stark for a long time, and she's never once regretted it. He's not all she has anymore, but he's all she wants.

Tony moans, fighting against the morphine, and Pepper closes the box, slips it back into Tony's pocket. She comes to his bedside, her hands gently upon his body.

“I'm here,” she says, and she knows it means forever, and she knows that's what she wants.