Chapter Text
As time passed things evolved. The hectic, burn the candle at both ends pace Pepper had maintained throughout her pregnancy eased off as she found that while she could override her body’s need for rest even while pregnant she had much more motivation to figure out a way to clear time in her schedule once her daughter was in her arms. Her friendships with Marlena Keener and May Parker flourished. Pepper, always used to being the expert in everything she did, sudden found herself desperately grateful to have friends who’d raised wonderful, kind, intelligent children to seek advice from… And she was equally happy to have Hope to empathize with about unexpectedly finding children a part of their lives although Hope stanchly maintained that changing diapers was not an experience she needed.
On the West Coast Marlena made it pointedly clear that she had no intention of moving into the master suite of the Malibu mansion. She insisted Pepper stay with them whenever she was in the area whether it was to checking in on SI’s West Coast offices or to teach Harley to deal with both the media and his responsibilities as a major stockholder in the company. When Pepper tried to decline Marlena simply conspired with Happy to make it happen. She cheerfully set up a nursery in the master suite’s sitting room and otherwise refused to change a thing about the rooms Pepper and Tony had shared, leaving their bedroom and an office they’d both used when at home intact.
“I’m guessing you and Tony never planned to have kids,” Marlena had told Pepper once. “Every other bedroom in the place is a mile away from the master suite… Trust me you are going to want to keep a closer eye on Nettie than that. Harley and Mercedes would have murdered each other or burned the house down around our ears if I’d left them that much space to get up to things.” She rearranged one of the wings until she had a cozy home where the kitchen, living room her bedroom and her children’s rooms were all within earshot of each other.
One Saturday morning after attending a conference in LA Pepper dragged herself out of the flood of emails that greeted her every morning and frowned when she glanced at the clock, ‘Nettie should be awake and bored senseless with her crib by now,’ she thought quickly shutting down her laptop and hurrying to the nursery.
“Harley and I are watching her, Boss-lady,” FRIDAY announced, seeing the worried frown on Pepper’s face. “We’re down in the lab.”
“You two aren’t demonstrating how to blow things up to an eighteen month old?” Pepper asked, she tried and failed to make the question a joking one.
“I’m not sure about Harley but I have more sense than that,” FRIDAY huffed.
Pepper raised a doubtful eyebrow and headed downstairs.
“We did check about this first,” FRIDAY said. “Really! It may not be totally age appropriate but Nettie’s too smart for baby stuff and way too coordinated for her age group. Did you ever figure out of the coordination was an Extremis-thing or a Tony-thing?”
Pepper shrugged helplessly, because it hadn’t just been intelligence that let Tony build a circuit board at the age of four. Most four-year-olds struggled to master enough manual dexterity to write their names legibly and Tony had been able to perform delicate soldering operations.
She opened the door to the basement lab and started down the stairs.
“Now first you turn the screw counterclockwise.” Pepper’s breath caught at the sound of Tony’s voice. “No it’s not just a another silly human thing. Would I kid you about that?”
Pepper practically ran down the last few stairs. In the lab a hologram of Tony was teaching Dummy to use a screwdriver. Nearby Nettie was sitting on Harley’s lap, the teenager was helping her with physical part as Tony did the same for Dummy.
At eighteen months Nettie had her father’s olive complexion and dark, curly hair and her mother’s oval face and delicate features. Her eyes were a bright blue but Pepper half-way expected them to darken as she grew older and the auburn highlights in her hair gave it a redder cast than Tony’s had been. Nettie’s wine-red dress and the matching bow in her hair were fire-retardant, the fabrics on par with what a firefighter would wear. The need for such precautions undeniably came from the Extremis in her DNA. The little girl watched her father’s image intently as she tried to mimic what he was doing. Butterfingers, You and Dummy had crowded in behind Harley and Nettie to watch as well.
“Boss-lady?” FRIDAY whispered nervously as she detected tears welling up in Pepper’s eyes. “Do you want me to turn it off? Doc Samson said making an interactive hologram wasn’t a good idea but recordings are okay.”
Not trusting her voice, Pepper shook her head.
“Okay, okay, I admit it, air-guitar is not a vital life skill,” the hologram of Tony held up his hands in surrender as Dummy demonstrated then made a noise of protest. “But you had fun learning right?”
The hologram Dummy tilted his arm integratively.
“What’s fun? Geez you don’t ask easy questions do you?” Tony said.
Still at the stairs Pepper glanced up, “But Tony was only seventeen when he built Dummy.”
“We thought Nettie would like it better if we used more recent images,” FRIDAY said. “Copies of Dummy’s memory banks are much easier to modify than organic memories.”
“You mean like B.A.R.F.?” Pepper asked.
“Yep,” FRIDAY sounded pleased with herself. “We adapted the principle to make videos for Nettie of all the things Boss taught us to do, all five of us. I edited out all references to alcohol or sex,” she added virtuously.
“Five? Harley too?” Pepper asked.
FRIDAY hummed an affirmative.
“Fun… Okay well remember how I told you lab chairs must have wheels and demonstrated why?” Tony asked the hologram of Dummy. “I caught you doing 180’s the other day. That didn’t serve a purpose but it was worth doing anyway, fun’s why you like doing that.” Both the hologram and the present Dummy did a quick spin in response. Nettie giggled and clapped her hands. She almost dropped the small jeweler’s screwdriver Harley had given her in respect for her tiny hands but at the last moment she remembered and clenched it tightly.
“Now back to the subject. Turn the screw counter clockwise, it is not a silly human thing… THIS TIME. It lines things up so you don’t cross thread the screw....”
Pepper slipped up stairs and returned with a stack of paperwork. She installed herself on the couch in the corner of the room and went to work with Tony’s voice, along with Nettie and Harley’s filling the background. And maybe let herself imagine what could have been just for a little while.