Title: No Superhero
Rating: T
Fandom: MCU
Pairing: Pepper/Natasha
Summary: She’s not a superhero. But then the tower is on fire and Thor is also on fire and for once Pepper is not on fire.
Notes: 2667 words. Follow on to Worth.
She’s not a superhero.
She’s not even really a fighter. Words, yes, contracts, sharply written emails, but fighting? No, all her physical skills are defensive. Throws, blocks, that thing Natasha taught her to do with her elbow in the solar plexus, fucking running away.
She’s not a superhero.
But then the tower is on fire and Thor is also on fire and for once Pepper is not on fire. She can control Extremis, but somehow there is ice around her and it’s like the flint in the lighter is gone. Even just heating up is suddenly difficult, like the ice is inside her. She gasps, breathless with the effort, but manages to find a fire blanket in the wreckage of what was Thor’s kitchen and tries to put him because she’s pretty sure even Gods shouldn’t burn.
She wonders briefly if they teach stop, drop and roll on Asgard, like an intrusive thought she cannot help, even if fire dogs are surrounding her. She doesn’t know where the others are, Tony is in LA, Steve is in D.C. but she has no idea where the rest of the Avengers are or what has happened to them. Or any of the goddamn security they have in the building.
One minute she’s looking for milk for her coffee because dammit, the Avengers are the worst roommates she’s ever had, the next blue guys are storming their way up or down the tower. She’s not sure, being somewhere in the middle.
She’s not a superhero, but she grabs the first thing she can reach to use as a weapon because throws and blocks aren’t going to work, she’s not sure dogs have a solar plexus and there’s nowhere to run.
The hammer.
She’d picked it up once. Last December. Had only told Natasha about it because there was no one else she could trust to be discreet. No one else she could really trust with the knowledge that holy crap she could pick up Mjölnir.
Now though, she wields it, makes it her own, throws it in an arc around the kitchen, hitting absolutely nothing the first time but managing to catch it at least. The second throw is much more successful, hitting the dogs and knocking them out. When they’re unconscious she can feel the ice start to shift, and she’s hot, too hot, but manages to keep a lid on it long enough to check Thor.
“You-“
Thor doesn’t get another word out before Pepper can hear a scream and she starts running towards it, instead of away from it.
She’s not a hero, really, but one of the staff is thrown past her head by a woman holding the reins of a flaming dog, while Clint is raining arrows at anything that growls. She throws the hammer in another arc, narrowly missing the Hawkeye but hitting the dogs. The woman growls.
“What the hell?” Clint says, not even pausing in firing arrows. Pepper hits a couple of dogs that appear, along with what she assumes are bad guys who come filing out of the stairwell. She’s not sure, but they’re angry and blue like the woman with the dog so she figures it’s a safe bet that they’re not Stark or Sheild employees.
“Where’s Nat?” Pepper yells. “And Bruce?”
“Upstairs,” he yells, then there is a growl and the Hulk comes tumbling down the stairs, taking several dogs and men with him. The woman has gone, in the distraction.
“Correction,” Clint says, with a grin but Pepper is concentrating too hard on breathing fire on dogs and guys and hitting any that come too close with the hammer.
“What should I do?” she says because she really is out of her depth. Hitting and fire breathing is one thing, knowing what to do in a fight, well, she can just keep hitting and breathing until someone tells her otherwise.
“Nat was trying to get the rest of the tower evacuated,” Clint says, firing an arrow at her, that flies through her hair – Jesus fucking Christ – and hits a dog about to jump on her from behind in the eye. It would be really impressive if she wasn’t so terrified. “The labs were still occupied,” he adds, nocking another arrow. He turns then, shoots a guy – also in the eye – and turns back.
“We can’t get up there though,” she said, breathing fire a little too close to Clint. “Sorry,” she cries, then throws the hammer passed him and into the guy behind him.
“Thor can fly,” he tells her.
“What?”
Clint lowers his bow and looks right at her.
“Thor. Can. Fly.”
He looks at the hammer pointedly and Pepper raises it up and oh god, Thor can fly.
She runs then, because there are still people upstairs and Thor is alive but out of action, and Hulk and Clint are working well in stopping the dogs and guys and the weird ice and fire from getting any further down the tower. She runs to the nearest window and looks out.
“Oh, this is a really bad idea,” she says to herself.
Then she raises the hammer up and…nothing. She doesn’t fly, doesn’t lift off, doesn’t even move. She’s just standing there in a burning building full of dogs and guys who are blue and superheroes and she’s standing there in a channel suit that is never, ever going to be the same and high heels cause it’s 11am and she had just come out of a meeting.
“A really bad idea,” she repeats, before running and throwing herself at the window.
Pepper has fallen and survived, in the docks, though, she wasn’t almost a hundred floors up and she screams and raises the hammer and this time she does fly. Like a bullet, she shoots up, and up, and up.
Right past the roof.
She wonders if Thor had this much trouble when he first got the hammer and thinks she might ask him if she actually lives through this. She manages to turn, still kinda screaming – both internally and externally – and crashes through the window of a lab, in time for a bullet to go screaming past her. There are a group of scientists huddled in a corner, the woman is back and Natasha has a gun in each hand, and oh god, she’d seen video footage of her in action but wow.
Really not the time.
“Pepper,” Nat calls, still firing, moving back towards her. “You okay?”
“No, I am not okay, Natasha, definitely not okay,” she says, even as she throws the hammer and knocks out three guys and two monitors and what she thinks is some sort of scanner. A dog jumps on her, and Natasha shoots it, even as she basically sets herself on fire out of panic more than anything and, well, RIP, her entire outfit.
Natasha looks her up and down.
“Fireproof?” she asks, looking directly at Pepper’s sports bra.
“Yeah, the shorts too,” Pepper says.
The shorts are barely shorts, she knows that, but it’s not what she would prefer to wear under, well, anything, but she’s still not got 100% control over extremis. It’s 99% controlled. She doesn’t set anything on fire, usually, but she really doesn’t want to be naked on the 1% chance she could set her entire wardrobe on fire.
“Tony make them?” Natasha asks, eyes back on her targets now, as Pepper starts hitting things with the hammer. Dogs, men, lab equipment.
“Bruce actually.”
Nat raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything.
“Just green?”
“No, he made a whole bunch in different colours,” she says, ducking when Natasha faces her and shoots something or someone behind her.
“Good to know,” she replies. “Can you get them out of here?”
Pepper looks over the groups of scientists.
“Er, maybe?”
“Okay, how about, this, make a really big hole in that wall,” Nat says, shooting the wall in question for emphasis. Pepper looks at the hammer, then throws it as hard as she can at the wall. Which turns out to be pretty fucking hard because of Extremis and the hammer really does have great leverage. It’s more than big enough to fit through and the scientists don’t need to be told, they’re up and through the hole before the dust has settled.
“Holy –“ Nat starts. “Okay, go, I’ve got this.”
Pepper shakes her head.
“I’m not leaving you.”
“You’re not a superhero Pepper.”
“No, I know, but,” she pauses to yank a flaming dog off the lab bench and throw it at another two heading their way. “I’m here now.”
The woman in blue with the dog on a lead is all anger and ice and Pepper can feel it creeping in around her, inside her.
“Natasha,” she says. “I’m going, I’m going to,“ She stops, grabs Natasha, and throws her – oh god, she just threw her friend – through the wall after the scientists.
Then she explodes.
xxxxx
When she comes too, everyone is looking at her. Even Tony, which is unexpected, because he was in LA this morning, assuming it’s still Wednesday, because Steve is here too and he was in DC and can’t fly. As far as she knows. They could all fucking fly, she wouldn’t know, and the Hulk certainly can jump high enough.
The video of him catching Tony plays in her brain as she tries to figure out if she’s still got all her limbs. So far so good.
She tries to sit up, but then Natasha is there, gently pushing her back down.
“You okay?” she asks softly.
Pepper nods, throat dry and raw.
“You – you – can lift Mjölnir,” Thor says.
He’s sitting on the bed next to hers in the infirmary they had to set up in the tower due to the sheer number of injuries that occurred in the building. That number didn’t even include the Avengers. He doesn’t look much like he was on fire earlier; hair is a little singed at the ends, one eyebrow is missing and his cape is black but he looks fine. So does everyone else. Clint has some stitches, and Natasha is definitely favouring her left arm, but all in all, they’re okay.
She relaxes back on the pillow.
“Water,” she rasps and Bruce is there, helping her drink some water. She coughs, once, twice. “Is everyone okay?”
“Everyone’s fine, broken bones, bruises, couple of concussions,” Tony says. “No one died.”
“Good,” she takes a breath but it hurts. “What happened?”
“You can lift Mjölnir,” Thor repeats.
“Yes,” she says, then she does sit up, pushing back against Natasha’s right arm and Bruces helps her to sit. “I can lift it.”
“Since when?” Tony says.
“Since December,” she says. “I knocked it off the coffee table and picked it up.”
She risks another glance at Thor, the Asgardian is just staring at her. It’s a little unnerving.
“Jarvis can confirm,” she adds, mostly because Tony is looking at her like she didn’t just explode and lifting up a damn hammer is not the weirdest thing she’s ever done.
Hell, it’s not even the weirdest thing she’s done this week.
“You didn’t tell anyone?” Steve asks her but he’s looking at Natasha and for all his patriotic naivety he reads people very well. He’d be an asset in the board room, had told him so, and he’d simply laughed, blushed slightly, and thanked her.
“She told me,” Natasha says, reaching out and patting Pepper on the arm. “And no, I didn’t tell her to keep it a secret. I just didn’t tell anyone either.”
“You really shouldn’t keep secrets from your boyfriend,” Tony says.
“Ex,” she mutters.
“Fine,” Tony amends, “you really shouldn’t keep secrets from your best friend.”
She smiles at that and reaches out for his hand. He takes and squeezes it, keeping hold of her for a moment.
“So, what does this mean?” Clint asks. “Cause, aside from your aim, that was pretty impressive.”
“My aim!” Pepper says, “You shot an arrow through my hair!”
Natasha can’t help but laugh at that.
“He thinks it’s cool,” she says. Pepper laughs, the sounds still rough and foreign to her ears. Clint signs something she is sure is rude, given the fake scandalised look Natasha throws back.
“Seriously, I’m not, I’m not worthy of it,” she says, “It’s a fluke.”
“A fluke is a one-off,” Tony tells her.
Thor stands suddenly, lifting Mjölnir, from the bed beside him and handing it to her. Pepper hesitates but takes it, holding it.
“You are worthy,” he says finally. “I do not decide it, nor does the hammer,” he continues, looking at Mjölnir between them. “The fabric of the universe decides,” he finishes, looking up at her and smiling. He takes the hammer back and then extends his hand. She’s confused for a moment, but extends her own, expecting him to shake it.
Instead, he pulls her into a hug and holy crap he is solid. And warm.
And he doesn’t let go.
Natasha is trying not to laugh, everyone is trying not to laugh at the look on Pepper’s face as she frowns, trying to extract herself from him. Clint breaks first though, then Steve, and then they’re all laughing and so is Thor and he finally, finally, lets go when Pepper glows orange enough to be a little too hot to hold.
“I am glad you can fill the void if ever I am incapacitated,” Thor says, letting her sit back on the bed. She cools down and shakes her head.
“No way,” Pepper says. “I’m not a superhero. I don’t want to be a superhero.”
“You don’t have to be,” Natasha says before the others can say anything. Natasha takes her hand. She laces their fingers together and Pepper flushes at the touch but doesn’t pull away because Natasha gets it.
“I’m the CEO of a Fortune 500 company,” she says. “I’m not a hero.”
“Coulda fooled me,” Clint says and Natasha shoots daggers at him and signs something – probably rude – with her free hand. The man simply laughs.
“Well, Janet from estates was literally thrown through a door at me,” she says, “And Thor was on fire.” She shrugs.
“That’s what makes you worthy,” Natasha tells her softly and Thor nods in agreement.
“We’ll let you get some rest,” Steve says, then pulling Tony and Clint away when they don’t move, coming back for Bruce and Thor.
“Glad your underwear held up,” Bruce says as he’s pulled backwards out of the room. Pepper flushes bright red because holy crap her underwear really is the last thing she was worrying about until he pointed it out and now she’s very aware they’ve all seen her in her underwear.
When it’s just her and Natasha, she slumps back on the pillow and closes her eyes.
“I’m not gonna have to be a superhero right?” she asks.
Natasha laughs, leaning over to kiss her on the lips this time, and Pepper hums into it, not sure what it means but glad of the comfort it, of Natasha.
“No, but mostly because your main weapon seems to be exploding,” she says when pulls back and Pepper opens her eyes.
“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Pepper says and Natasha smiles. “How bad is the damage?”
“From the Queen of the frost giants, the Hulk or you?”
“Oh God.”
“Nothing structural. But you’re going to need to come stay in my apartment for a little while.”
Pepper raises an eyebrow, but can’t hold the look and laughs at Natasha’s attempt to look innocent.
“Is that so?” she says.
“Absolutely.”
Pepper smiles and sits up again, feeling and sounding more like herself. She lets Natasha help her to her feet and notices Mjölnir still on Thor’s bed. Natasha picks it up and hands it to Pepper.
What. The. Hell.
“We should take it back to him,” is all Natasha says as she pulls Pepper out of the infirmary, holding hands.