MCU fic: Not With a Whimper, But With a Bang

[domarzione]

Not with a Whimper, But with a Bang

4k words | PG-13ish | Pepper Potts, Tony Stark

Whither Pepper in Phase III?
 

She came close to being murdered (again) that day, she later found out. She had been on the same list of targets Tony had been on not because HYDRA didn't know if Extremis was really gone or just temporarily turned off, but instead because they feared her mind. "Potts's capacity to command the loyalty and quantity of resources sufficient to destabilize the early phases of HYDRA's new order must be eliminated," read the succinct justification for her murder by helicarrier.

They had feared her business sense and her common sense and her connections and her very human strength, which would have been flattering under other circumstances, but she didn't have the time to revel. She needed all of that to keep Stark Industries afloat after the global collapse of the entire military industrial complex. Everyone was suspect. Everyone was afraid. And everyone was most afraid of the ones who'd contributed, however inadvertently, to what had nearly been the murder of twenty million people on the first day of a global coup. Which for the current purposes included Stark Industries, no matter how long ago they'd divested from the defense sector.