🕑 Added 2014-11-22 18:00:28 +0000 UTC
“Bartender, could you turn that up, please?” Natasha asked, flashing an insidious smile, and the bartender turned the volume up on the TV mounted above the bar, loud enough to be heard over as desultory a night as this one.
The bar was not at all what Pepper had imagined when Natasha had invited her out for drinks; a country and western place with a population of shitkickers, truckers, and what looked like the Sons of Anarchy playing pool. Pepper guessed Clint had introduced her to the place. She automatically tallied it in her head. There were no obnoxious fratboy shenanigans—everyone kept their heads down and respected each other’s distance, the obvious signs Pepper and Natasha gave of taking the night off. Conversation was muted. Music was Willie Nelson. Beer was reasonably priced and not at all watered down. Natasha had ordered Pepper a bottle of something that smirked of Pennsylvania Dutch. It went down smooth and started a furnace-fire behind her gut. Pepper sipped as she watched the TV.
“As you can see here, dramatic footage of a battle between the Hate-Monger terror cell and Black Widow, foiling an attempt to bring knockoff Iron Man armor into the city of Miami, possibly from Cuba. However, the superhuman you see fighting alongside the Widow is not Iron Patriot or any of the Avengers, but Virginia Potts, the ex-girlfriend of Tony ‘Iron Man’ Stark…”
Some of the whiskey went down the wrong tube. Pepper hacked. “I run the fucking company!”
Natasha shrugged. “At least they’re not bringing up your nudes.”
“I don’t have nudes.”
“Neither did I. But releasing SHIELD’s secrets means releasing all SHIELD’s secrets.” Natasha stole Pepper’s bottle again, poured into a line of shotglasses.
“And here we can see Ms. Potts—reportedly codenamed ‘Rescue’—being hit by that mechanical rhinoceros, actually penetrating through a ship in drydock… I think we have another angle on that… yes, there, you can see her emerging from the other side of the ship, landing there on that car, now she’s getting up and obviously, all of us at KLVX News are very pleased that she and Natasha Romanov, the Black Widow—“
“Natasha Romanova,” the spy stressed. “How hard is it to get right? I’m a woman. My name ends in an A. How low do I have to pull my zipper?”
“—are both well, we’ve received word from the Avengers’ press liaison that both are not seriously injured, though obviously they’re not in a position to be making a statement just yet, we’re expecting a press conference to be held in the morning once all the facts are in—that’s Virginia Potts, CEO of Stark Enterprises and former girlfriend of Tony Stark…”
A file photo came up. It was seven years old, nowadays her breasts were about an inch lower.
“You look cute,” Natasha said.
“Photoshop. See how I don’t have any freckles?”
The newsreader went on: “Virginia Potts, of course, experimented on with the Extremis drug late last year during the Mandarin terror campaign, before being rescued by her then-boyfriend, Avenger Tony Stark…”
“How many times are they going to say you two dated?” Natasha needled.
“Wanna make a drinking game of it?”
“No, just wanna drink.”
“Cheers.”
And on: “We’re told her condition is stable, but obviously many of the side effects of the Extremis treatment are still present. Can we roll that footage again? Yes, you can see here her actually breathing fire owing to her hyper-evolved metabolism, basically manipulating her own body heat like some species of beetles… we’re going now to Dr. Kapoor at the studio in Atlanta, Dr. Kapoor, what can you tell us about Extremis?”
“You paid for the bottle, right?” Pepper asked Natasha.
“I smiled at a nice man and he paid for it…”
“Then let’s take it and go.”
