Love In The Asylum

It’s maybe a little selfish, but she has enough to deal with, calling caterers, sending invitations, booking rooms, buying new suits for Tony, and it’s not as though his schedule gets any less hectic just because it’s that time of the year. She doesn’t need to be watching every time she sneezes for someone to be filming it.

A lot more of it is concern for Tony. For all that he adores being the center of attention and knows how to play the media like a violin, she hates seeing him around reporters; the more personable charm he has oozing off of him, the more he blocks himself off, and the less of the real Tony he reveals. The transformation is as jarring to her as she imagines it would be for one of those reporters to see him smeared with engine grease and eating coffee grounds straight from the can.

So it’s understandable that she doesn’t want a horde of reporters dogging him for weeks, making him even more closed-off and grim than he is already. Because around this time of the year Tony tends to get a little…well, odd is the best word to describe it. Locking himself in his workshop for days at a time, picking fights with the SI board members, snapping at her over nothing. His driving gets worse, if that’s possible.  He downs whiskey like it's water, and about as often. It's not that he changes - it's more that he's distilled, into something like 100 proof instead of 20. If Tony during the rest of the year is a hassle, Tony near the anniversary of his parents' death is a disaster of national proportion.

And then it all comes to a head on the actual night of their deaths, when Tony has his inevitable yearly meltdown and doesn’t surface again for two days, still reeking of alcohol and other people’s sweat.

Pepper doesn’t know what it says about her life that her boss’s mental breakdowns are so predictable that she has them written into her schedule, but she does.

“Are those –?” she asks, barely able to hide her grin.

“Captain America and the Howling Commandos. Have you ever seen the film reels of their missions? Absolutely incredible. I, uh, found them under the bed earlier,” he finishes sheepishly.

She crosses her arms and tries to look stern, failing abysmally, she’s sure, since she’s practically going cross-eyed trying not to laugh out loud.

“And you are doing…what, exactly?”

“Strategizing,” he says. “Calculating troop deployment based on weapons and ammunition stocks, known skills, factoring in Captain America’s Super Soldier abilities. Not that I ever fight alongside anyone else, but it’s an important skill to keep in mind.”

“Of course,” she says. “I should have guessed. Strategizing. I’ll just leave you to it, then.”

As she leaves the room, she can’t resist tossing back over her shoulder a cheerful, “have fun playing with your dolls, sir.”

“They’re action figures, and I’m not playing,” he shouts back.

But a few minutes later, the murmuring picks up again, and when Pepper leans in close to the door to listen, she hears Tony’s voice, pitched deeper than he usually speaks.

“You’ll never walk away from this, Baron Zemo! You may have a team of highly trained Nazi soldiers and a giant laser death ray, but they will never be able to stand up to…Captain America!”