Fic: A Genius Billionaire Playboy Philanthropist and a Reformed Russian Assassin Walk into a Bar

[bookishwench]

It was a bad sign that Tony was sitting alone in a dive bar in Delaware at 2:00 a.m., staring at a glass of scotch as though it were a fascinating but deadly animal. The good news is it was still full. He hadn’t slipped yet.

“I’d like a rum and Coke, hold the rum,” Natasha said, sitting down next to him. “Same for him.”

“No,” Tony said, not moving his eyes from the glass. “That seat’s taken, by the way.”

“It is now.”

“You are really pushy, you know that?” he said, finally glancing over at her and giving her a look of exasperation. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Maybe I just happened to be passing through and bumped into you in a freak coincidence,” she said, her voice perfectly level.

“In Delaware?” Tony barked out a bitter laugh. “There is literally nothing in Delaware. Nothing. Nada. Bupkis.”

“Not true,” Natasha said, regarding him intensely. “I just finished a round of disc golf at Brandywine Creek Park.”

“Do you never blink?” he asked, shaking his head and almost laughing.

“Of course,” she said. “Once every three months, just like clockwork.”

“So, why are you here? Fury sent you, didn’t he? I’m assuming he’s probably keeping his one and only eye on me at all times in some form.”

“No.”

“He’s not?” Tony said, putting a hand to his chest. “I’m hurt.”

“No, he’s not the one who sent me.”

“So he is surveilling me! I knew it!”

“You’re not going to ask me who did?” she said, taking a sip of Coke.

“No. If it wasn’t Fury, I know,” Tony said, then sighed. “How long have you and Pepper been in touch?”

“We were never out of touch,” she said, taking the cherry out of the glass and scrutinizing it.

“Let me guess,” Tony said. “The Red Room taught you how to do that trick where you tie the stem into a knot with your tongue, right?”

“No,” she said. “I never understood the point of that. They did teach us how to kill someone with one of these, though.”

“Somehow I believe you,” he said.

He stopped and stared at the scotch and the Coke, his eyes shifting back and forth between them. With a movement that was just a shade too abrupt, he grabbed the glass of Coke and took a sip, but he didn’t move the other glass away. He took a sip and regarded her over the top of the glass, then put it back down.

“What? No ‘Good for you, Tony!’ or something similarly trite?”

“You’re a big boy,” Natasha said. “You know you have a problem. I’m glad if you choose not to drink tonight, but you’re fully capable of making your own decisions without me acting like an annoying cheerleader.”

“You’d look cute in the outfit, though,” he said, swallowing a giggle as he took another sip of Coke.

“I’m not here to sleep with you,” she said.

“Didn’t think you were,” Tony said.

“Clarification on that point is usually necessary with most people,” Natasha said. “Saying it outright makes things less awkward.”

“Fair enough,” Tony said. “So why are you here, if I can ask you that again, which I just did, and I don’t care if I’m repeating myself because I enjoy the sound of my own voice.”

“Pepper told me what happened,” she said.

“I know. But why are you here?” he said. “Did she send you?”

“No.”

“So?”

She seemed to think that over for a moment, taking another sip of Coke and setting the glass back down on the table.

“I thought you might not want to be alone,” she said. “Breakups hurt.”

He looked as though he was about to attempt being funny, but instead his mouth popped shut and he bit his lip for a second.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “They do. Especially when it’s my own fault.”

“That’s not what Pepper said.”

“Because Pepper is an honestly good, decent person,” Tony said, rubbing his forehead. “What’d she say? She was asking too much of me or something?”

“Not in so many words.”

“Yeah, she’s really asking a lot. She wants me to not die. How dare she,” he said, and his eyes shifted back to the scotch for a long second until he cracked his neck and went back to looking at Natasha. “I promised her I’d give up the whole Iron Man thing two years ago.”

“I read the memo,” Natasha said.

“There was a memo?” Tony asked. “What’d it say?”

“That you blew up the entire Iron Legion and were not to be brought into any future consultations,” Natasha said, then gradually smiled. “Fury was livid with you.”

“That’s it?”

“Oh, there was an office betting pool as to when you’d be back,” Natasha said. “Thor won that. He wound up with fifty bucks. Took a few of us out for pizza with it. Nice guy, really, even if he does have a thing for anchovies.”

“At least it wasn’t pineapple.”

“There is nothing wrong with pineapple on pizza,” Natasha said.

“See? Knew you were still evil. Only evil people like pineapple on pizza. Or insane people.”

“Not the first time I’ve been called either of those. Pepper didn’t leave when you came back,” Natasha said.

“No, she stuck in there,” Tony said. “She buried herself in work, though. Fifty, sixty hours a week, going over stuff she could have had someone else do. If it weren’t her, I would have thought she was cheating on me, but it never even crossed my mind. I knew. She was trying to distract herself, but the strain she was under was just…”

He stared at the scotch again.

“She wasn’t happy,” he said, bringing his eyes back to Natasha’s, which remained, as always, unreadable. “You must be incredible at poker.”

“Yes,” she said, not offering any details.

“Anyway, I was the one to suggest a break,” he said. “Me. I did it. My fault.”

“Because you thought it was too much for her,” she said.

“Kind of. There were other things, too,” he said, breaking his eye contact to drink the Coke again.

“What things?”

Tony seemed to chew the inside of his cheek as he searched for the words.

“Did you ever read The Wizard of Oz?” Tony asked.

“That’s a bit of a non sequitur,” she said. “No. We all saw the movie, though. They showed us a lot of American children’s movies to practice our English, make sure we didn’t have an accent. I probably still have all the dialog memorized.”

“The book’s a little different,” Tony said. “Silver shoes instead of ruby slippers, four witches instead of three, the Wicked Witch of the West has only one eye.”

“Great, now I’m picturing Fury with green skin and wearing that dress,” Natasha said.

“Oh, thank you for that nightmare fuel,” Tony said, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, for some reason I was obsessed with the whole series of books when I was a kid. There was more backstory on some of the characters later on. Like the Tin Woodman.”

Natasha said nothing. She just put down her drink and focused on him.

“See, he was just a regular guy once upon a time. Even had a name: Nick Chopper. Not too creative, but there you go. He was only a lumberjack, but he fell in love with a pretty Munchkin girl named Nimmie Amee. Thing is, she was the Wicked Witch of the East’s ward, and she didn’t want her running off and getting married, so the witch cast a spell on Chopper’s ax. Every time he tried to use it, it chopped off one of his limbs.”

“Well, that’s horrific,” Natasha said, sounding a little repulsed.

“He didn’t die, though. Nobody good ever dies in Oz. It’s a rule. A good rule. We should do that here. Anyway, every time he chopped off a limb, he just replaced them one by one with new ones made of tin. First his legs, then his arms, and finally the rest of him until he didn’t have any human parts left, only metal. He became nothing but a machine,” Tony said, then slammed the rest of the Coke.

“With no heart,” Natasha said into the ensuing silence.

“With no heart,” Tony agreed. “The witch’s plan worked. He couldn’t love anymore, so he leaves the girl.”

“But wasn’t the whole point that Oz couldn’t give him a heart because he was always capable of love in the first place?” Natasha said. “He just thought he wasn’t.”

“Sort of,” Tony said, tipping his head from side to side. “In the book he gets a red silk heart filled with sawdust, but he doesn’t go back to Nimmie Amee until someone points out to him that maybe he should see if she still loves him.”

“And?”

“And then it gets really odd. Long story short, some weird inventor guy has all Nick Chopper’s body parts in a barrel along with some other poor slob who had the exact same thing happen to him.”

“I think I prefer Judy Garland singing ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow,’” Natasha said, giving him a look that suggested he was crazy. “You really were into these books as a kid?”

“These and every engineering textbook I could get my hands on,” he said with a somewhat apologetic shrug. “It’s not really that much more violent than your average fairy tale, and somehow Baum pulled off the whole thing being wholesome. Anyway, the inventor uses the parts to build another person, like some sort of benevolent Frankenstein monster that’s part tin and part person. The tin woodman goes off to find the girl, and when he finally gets there, she’s married to someone else: the guy the inventor made out of all his spare body parts. Then Nimmie Amee tells him to take a hike and leave her alone.”

Pepper sat in silence for a moment.

“Okay,” she said. “I get it.”

“Really?”

“You think being Iron Man has killed your humanity.”

“Bingo.”

“And you think what Pepper really wants is the person you used to be.”

“Yahtzee.”

“So you think she’d be better off with someone else.”

“Give the lady a kewpie doll.”

“Uh-huh,” Natasha said, and motioned for the bartender to give her another Coke. “Tony, it’s a story.”

“Yeah, and a really messed up one, I grant you,” Tony said, “but it does have a point.”

“Someone should have dropped a house on the witch sooner?” Natasha said.

Tony glared at her, but took a sip of Coke.

“People change. Sometimes, the soft parts get chopped off and wind up replaced with something cold, or at least something that can’t love the way they want to,” Tony said. “I’m more machine than man now.”

“Tony, you’re not Darth Vader,” Natasha said.

“What?”

“You’re literally quoting Obi-Wan.”

“I knew you were a big nerd at heart,” Tony said, chuckling. “Okay, fine, caught me. I just don’t think it’s possible to have the kind of life I want or Pepper wants and be Iron Man. The two don’t fit.”

“You’re a genius,” Natasha said, shrugging. “You’ve done more impossible things than this. Make them fit.”

He sighed, then stole the fresh Coke the bartender had handed her and drank most of it in one gulp, letting his eyes water from the sting of carbonation.

“I can handle this. I’ve broken up with literally hundreds of women,” he said. “Ask anyone. Heck, by the law of averages one of my exes is probably in this room.”

“This isn’t that,” Natasha said, leaning in a little closer. “Were you in love with any of them?”

Tony tapped his finger on the bar a few times as though he found his fingernail interesting.

“Okay, so, maybe not so many of them,” Tony said finally.

Natasha said nothing, letting the silence get uncomfortable. It was an old trick, one that worked well for making the other person talk to fill the void. And it worked again.

“You think I’m an idiot, don’t you.”

“I did not say that.”

“You think I should go back to her.”

“Also not saying that.”

“You think I’m throwing away the best thing I’ve ever had.”

“I’m only thinking that you stole my Coke.”

“Which means I’m the one who’s really thinking all that, right?” he said. “Well, fine! I am an idiot, I do want to go back to her, and I am throwing away the best thing I ever had! Right on all three counts, Romanov!”

“I didn’t say any of that.”

“No, but you’re thinking it really, really loud,” he said, then picked up the glass of scotch and lifted it.

Natasha stopped breathing.

He looked at, a small drop of sweat on his temple. Then he shut his eyes, put it back down and slid it several feet away along the empty bar.

“I don’t want her crying over my grave,” he said quietly.

“Do you really think leaving her is going to stop her from mourning you if something happens?”

“I… maybe?” he said. “I don’t want her hurt again. She nearly died from Extremis.”

“Yes. And it also saved her life, if I read the file right,” Natasha said. “Then you fixed her.”

“I should have just stayed retired,” Tony said.

“But you couldn’t.”

“But I wouldn’t, you mean.”

“No, couldn’t. You could no more stop being Iron Man than you could stop breathing.”

“Yeah. I think those two things might wind up being connected if I keep this up,” Tony said.

“Maybe you’re right,” Natasha said. “Maybe there isn’t a way to balance it and all of us are doomed to wind up forever alone in this business. Maybe we’re going to be lucky if we even get a grave, let alone anyone to cry over it. But maybe don’t totally shut the door on any hope, either. You’re decent, Stark.”

“And you’re still a liar, Romanov,” Tony said. “But I’ll think about it.”

“That’s all I’m asking,” she said as she threw her hoodie on then paid her tab. “You know how to find me if you want somebody to share a Coke with.”

“I’ve got ways,” he said, watching her slip out the door.

“Hey, is she safe going out there alone?” the bartender asked him. “This isn’t the best neighborhood and it’s three in the morning.”

“Trust me, anyone who bothers her will regret it,” he said, downing the last of the Coke and allowing himself a small smile, “if they live that long.”