[Fanfiction] Dance in the Middle of the Fighting, Rumiko, Pepper, Marvel 616
“Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.”
― Rumi
A fic about Rumiko and Pepper bonding, since I think that they could have been friends, if Marvel had ever let them talk for more than a few seconds rather than fighting. So I fixed it for them. This fic bears a heavy debt to marya-maximoff's headcanons about Rumiko and Pepper's potential friendship. And thank you to cyborgcap for the beta, as always!
Rumiko and Pepper had never really gotten along. Rumiko was fully prepared to admit that some of that—okay, maybe a lot of that—was really her fault. She could get, well, jealous, she knew that. And Tony had known Pepper so much longer than he’d known Rumiko. He trusted her with things. All sorts of things. His business, his secrets . . . which turned out to be even more profound than Rumiko had been thinking (she’d thought his secrecy was just about bankrolling the Avengers, protecting the identity of Iron Man, maybe about some proprietary tech, after she found out about the whole Sunset Bain thing in particular, and hell if that hadn’t made her want to tear out someone’s eyeballs, but yeah, industrial espionage, her grandfather had always been beyond paranoid about it, too, but no, apparently Avengers business, Iron Man business, really was Tony’s business, so that was another thing Pepper had been in on. Involved with. And all that.). So maybe Rumiko had been a little jealous. And maybe more than a little defensive. And maybe she had shoved the fact that she was sleeping with Tony and Pepper wasn’t, despite Tony’s obvious feelings for her, in her face a few times. Pepper didn’t seem to like Rumiko much either, even before the shoving the banging Tony in her face thing. She wasn’t sure if it was just that Pepper hated every woman Tony got with on principle, or if it was a Rumiko in particular sort of thing.
But Rumiko was trying to make an effort. Tony cared about Pepper, and Pepper seemed like a good person. Who understood Tony. And cared about him, too, even if sometimes she had kind of weird ways of showing it, but hey, Rumiko hadn’t been there since the beginning of their relationship, she didn’t know their history, and being married to (and in love with? She had no idea, honestly) another guy had to make it weird. Not to mention working for him. Rumiko knew how that could mess up a relationship, at least. But Pepper had been having a rough time of it lately. So Rumiko thought it might be nice to take her mind off that.
It wasn’t until after she already made the invitation to go clubbing that she realized it might not be the best thing to ask a woman who’d just had a miscarriage. And who’d had such a close relationship for so long with an alcoholic. But she couldn’t take it back now, so she just left it there, hoping Pepper wouldn’t be too offended if she decided to refuse. Which she no doubt would. Which was why it came as such a shock when Pepper actually agreed. She didn’t even know if Pepper liked clubbing. She guessed she was going to find out, though.
Pepper showed up in a conservative blouse and a skirt that was almost too long, but it was short enough for dancing, at least, and at least it wasn’t so tight she wouldn’t be able to dance, since that was really the point, wasn’t it? Pencil skirts just weren’t going to cut it. By the time they got into the club (she had connections at all the best places, they hardly had to wait, of course, she’d hardly have gone there otherwise), Rumiko was realizing that she was actually horrifyingly nervous. Pepper kept looking at her. It was unnerving.
She hated feeling nervous. It sucked. “So, do you often go out dancing?” she asked. How awkward can you be, she asked herself. Stay tuned! “Do you have like a whole . . . secret life of the high-powered executive assistant thing going on? Because that would be pretty cool.”
Amazingly, Pepper smiled at that. “Not for a long time,” she said. She frowned into the mirror behind the bar and said, surprisingly anxiously, “Can you take a look for me and tell me if my freckles are showing?”
Rumiko stared at her skin, which looked clear and perfectly white-pink, and was vividly reminded of her Auntie Machiko’s desperate attempts to conceal anything that kept her own skin from looking white as snow. “Uh, no, I can’t,” she said. “But why do you care? Freckles are totally cute.”
Pepper blushed, barely visible beneath her makeup. “I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t fit my . . . image, I guess.”
“I mean I understand not going out in the sun because you don't want to get cancer, you know?” Rumiko said, “but I think your freckles are cute. Do you want a drink, or do you not do that? Maybe?”
Pepper hesitated. “Well,” she said. “I mean. Tony isn’t here, so . . . .”
“Cool,” Rumiko said with a wave of relief.
Once they had each ordered a cocktail, things got a lot more relaxed. They got into a discussion about favorite cocktails, since Rumiko ordered the house layered cocktail and it had Crème Yvette in it, which Pepper had apparently never seen before. Pepper ordered a G&T, which to Rumiko had classy PA written all over it. Maybe Pepper really was that cool and collected about her drinks, too. She downed it pretty fast. By that time she was interested in violet liqueurs and asked the bartender to make her an Aviation. The only obvious sign that she was tipsy at all was how impressed she was at the fact that it was purple. At that point Rumiko was mostly through her drink. Pepper was very different now that she was a little tipsy, despite the fact that she hardly showed it at all, much more talkative, and it surprised Rumiko when the music changed and Pepper grabbed her wrist, pulling her out onto the floor.
“I really like this song,” Pepper explained, flushed and almost embarrassed sounding.
“Awesome,” Rumiko said, grinning at her, already moving her arms and twisting her hips to the beat. Pepper was a little bit awkward with the dancing at first, but she relaxed pretty fast. By the time they stumbled back to the bar they were both flushed and sweaty, and Pepper was pushing damp red hair back out of her eyes.
“That was great!” Rumiko told her, tossing her head back and propping her elbows on the bar. “I had no idea you could dance like that. Really.”
“Why, because I’m a white girl?” Pepper asked drily.
“More because you always seem so uptight,” Rumiko told her, then wondered if maybe that had been too much.
Pepper pursed her lips. “Maybe I’ve gotten into the habit,” she said, and took a sip of her drink, then put it back down. “Sometimes I think I’m too used to being the only one fixing things.”
“Tony fixes things,” Rumiko said, then winced. Okay, that had really been too much. The last thing she wanted was to initiate another fight over Tony.
“Not always,” Pepper said. “Maybe I got into the habit of . . .” she shrugged and ran a hand back over her forehead again, tucking her hair behind one ear. “Ignoring that, too. Used to him being part of the problem.”
“You do seem to run an awful lot,” Rumiko said.
“I like being an executive assistant,” Pepper said, as if musing, taking another sip. “I suppose a lot of people would say that was a problem, that I should aim higher. But I like organizing things. And running things.”
“I used to want to run grandfather’s company,” Rumiko said recklessly, suddenly, wondering why she was confiding this in Pepper of all people. “But my parents didn’t think it was an appropriate thing for a woman to do.”
“How medieval of them,” Pepper said.
Rumiko shrugged, smiling a little, though it was wry, too. “They’re good at that,” she said. “I think it was more about thinking no one would take me seriously. That I couldn’t control the employees. That kind of fun chauvinistic stuff.”
“Clearly they’ve never seen you with a man, if they doubted your ability to control one,” Pepper said.
Rumiko stared at her, then burst out laughing. “I should have told them that!” she laughed. “Wow, I was not expecting you to say that.”
“I’m full of surprises,” Pepper said, smiling a little. “Also, I haven’t had this much to drink in a long time.”
Right. She’d been pregnant. And she mostly went out socially with Tony. And. Yeah. Awkward much. But somehow it didn’t seem as bad this time. “That does happen,” Rumiko giggled. “Here, we should eat something. This place does okay food.”
They ended up splitting the nachos and talking about what they’d studied in school. It was weird to find out that Pepper had been a double major in art. Rumiko never would have guessed it. But then Pepper seemed surprised that Rumiko had taken classes in mechanical engineering, so she was good at concealing her own hidden depths, too. Pepper laughed at all her funny university stories, so she got extra points in Rumiko’s book. Pepper went on about her dog for like fifteen minutes, and Rumiko made a mental note to be nicer to the dog. Even if he did always sniff at her shoes and look like he wanted to eat them for lunch. They ended up dancing again, and by the time they left the club and Happy drove them back, they were drunk and sweaty and leaning into each other. Rumiko was surprised when Pepper invited her in to their house, and Happy fixed both her and Pepper coffee and bagels. It was really nice, and they even let her crash on their couch. She looked terrible the next morning, but . . . oh well. It wasn’t that bad.
“I hope you don’t expect me to just let you get away with anything now,” Pepper said, mock-severely, the next morning. She looked just a little hung-over, eating her oatmeal. And yeah, that makes sense. Rumiko knew how office politics worked. And she was still the interloper, coming into Pepper’s realm. And, you know, shacking up with the king and all that.
“I would never dream of it, Ms. Hogan-Potts,” Rumiko snickered.
That was how the next time Pepper picked a fight with her, telling her the way things were, how things had to be, she knew what she was looking for, and she saw the amusement in Pepper’s eyes. She was onto her now. Pepper was the office goddess. And Rumiko knew how to play to a crowd. “I knew it,” she told her, putting on her huffiest spoiled heiress voice. “You’ve never liked me. You’ve hated me from the beginning, and you just expect me to put up with it!”
“That’s right!” Pepper said. “I do! You don’t know how it works around here. I do. And unless you’re willing to help with the filing until you know how the system works, then you’re just going to have to deal with it.”
“Well, you can forget that!” Rumiko told her, and tried not to laugh at the alarmed faces of everyone else in the rest of the office. She stalked out and got coffee and cupcakes, which she brought back and shared with Pepper in her office.
