Compatible Weirdness - Chapter 1
Jan. 24th, 2014 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bungakertasRating: PG
Summary: Phil Coulson (who is a dork) thought he was married to his job. But that was before he met...well, several people, actually.
Characters/Pairings: Phil Coulson|Pepper Potts x Tony Stark|Darcy Lewis, other MCU characters flit in and out too
Warnings/Tags: weird relationships, sedoretu, AU-canon, unusual pairings
Spoilers: Captain America; Thors I and II; Avengers; Iron Mans 1, 2, and 3; Agents Of SHIELD — Basically everything.
Disclaimer: The characters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and all that comes with them are the property of Marvel Studios, ABC, or both. No money has changed hands, and no copyright infringement is intended or implied.
Author’s Notes: I mostly wrote this to see if I could. I’ve never written anything shippy before. (So, naturally, I jump in with a sedoretu-fic. What?) Let me know how you think I did.
The title is based on the following quote. “We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.” Dr. Seuss
*~*~*
Phil Couson did not tell anyone how much he was looking forward to debriefing Tony Stark.
Most of his coworkers probably guessed. Everyone at the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division (they really needed a new name) knew that he was a massive dork (when he wasn’t shooting people or putting the fear of God into them by being terrifyingly impassive). They knew about the Captain America collecting, for example. And that was fine. So they knew he was a little bit of an expert on Stark’s father. And they knew that his favorite sidearm was a SI H18 .45. It never jammed. It never misfired. It was the perfect gun. It had always driven him nuts wondering how Stark had designed such a magnificent weapon, and everyone knew he wanted to ask him that.
Everyone also knew he was far too professional to do that at a debrief. Because he might be a dork, but he knew what the words ‘time’ and ‘place’ meant.
No, the people who knew he was looking forward to the debrief thought that it was because Stark had An Effect on the entire evening moiety. Seriously. He’d seen it written like that before.
Whether there was An Effect or not, Phil was not a teenage girl so he was looking forward to the debrief for professional reasons. His organization had been after the Ten Rings for years. They’d claimed jurisdiction out from under the FBI and CIA so many times he’d lost count (there was rumor that someone in the NSA had actually turned a bulletin board into a dart board filled with nothing but pictures of Nick Fury). He was definitely looking forward to speaking with someone who had actually met these people. Stark knew things. He wanted to know what Stark knew.
He hadn’t expected Pepper Potts.
Virginia “Pepper” Potts, Stark’s personal assistant/handler/babysitter, the perfect evening to Stark’s morning, who carried herself in a way that said she absolutely had not fallen for Stark’s bullshit, spent their entire first encounter stonewalling and lying to him about setting up a time to debrief her boss. And making fun of the name of his division.
Which, to be fair, was eminently mockable.
Then she turned to him, gave him a brilliant smile, and said, “Here.” In her hand was a business card. It was black and sleek and glossy. It had the Stark Industries logo, her name, no job title, and a phone number printed neatly on the bottom. On the back, in white ink, another number was written in a neat hand. Beneath that was an email address.
He fished out one of his own cards, printed on the usual heavy cardstock reserved for government peons. He scribbled his number on the back (his handwriting wasn’t nearly so neat, but it was legible enough for government work), and handed it back.
She tucked it into her phone case with a smile. “I look forward to hearing from you.”
After the press conference, Phil realized that his very favorite gun was not going to be produced anymore. That was incredibly disappointing. He set his phone to send Pepper an automated email every morning at 8:00 asking for a time for their scheduled debriefing. Because he knew she would have done exactly the same thing in his position and probably had done very similar things for Stark over the years. So he knew she wouldn’t mind.
She ignored the email. And she texted him a picture of Stark’s robots Dum-E and U that afternoon. They were playing Jenga.
Phil decided that Stark might be unbelievably brilliant, but he was also incredibly weird. He texted that back to her.
“You have no idea,” was her reply.
When a few days went by with nothing but more texts, Phil decided to take a more direct approach. He used his badge to get into a Stark Industries charity ball that he knew Pepper would be attending. He tried not to think about how even his nicest suit still left him woefully under dressed as he took up a station by the bar to scan the room.
A voice beside him said, “Gimmie a Scotch, I’m starving.”
Phil turned and there, much to his surprise, Tony Stark himself was standing next to him, big as life.
Phil tried not mind how ridiculous he must look next to Tony Stark, wearing his cheap suit and wrinkles, balding, and with just a tiny bit of gray in the hair he had left. He most definitely tried not to contrast that with the fact that Stark looked exactly like he did in all the pictures and was wearing was was, at minimum, several thousand dollars of designer clothes. Though he wasn’t as tall as he’d seemed in the magazines. In fact, they were basically the same height.
“Mr. Stark,” he said out loud, because he was hardly going to let a chance like this pass by.
“Yeah-huh?” Stark said absently, turning to look him over. And then he did it again, up and down, like he was trying to be sure about something.
“I’m Agent Coulson.”
Stark’s lips twitched. “Oh, yeah, yeah! From the…ah…”
“Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division,” Phil said.
While he was rattling off the name, Stark’s drink arrived. Stark collected it, and offered Phil an almost conspiratorial look. “You need a new name for that.”
“Yeah.” Prompted by a desire to at least be able to say this was an actual conversation, he added, “We hear that a lot.”
Stark turned and looked him over again.
“Listen, I know this must be a trying time for you, but we need to debrief you.”
Stark’s lips twitched again, and Phil could practically see the puns surrounding “debrief” that Stark was heroically not making. Perhaps this was why he supposedly had An Effect on the entire evening moiety. Because, as much as Phil was pretending he didn’t notice it, the casual flirting was nice.
“There’s still a lot of unanswered questions and time can be a factor with these things.”
Stark was distracted by something.
Hoping to at least get him to commit to a time, Phil said, “Let’s just put something on the books. How about the twenty-fourth, at seven PM, at Stark Industries?”
He would be surprised if Stark had even heard him. He was gazing at a beautiful evening woman with glorious red hair. She was across the room, and wearing a royal blue dress. Then she turned her head, and Phil realized he was seeing Pepper. He nodded in approval. However oblivious he’d been, Stark was noticing her now.
“Tell you what,” Stark said, holding out a hand to Phil, “you got it. You’re absolutely right.”
Phil was impressed. He hadn’t actually expect Stark to reply to him, let alone say something that was actually in complete sentences.
“We’ll…ah…” Stark cut himself off and then glanced to Phil. “I’m going to go to my assistant and we’ll…make a date.”
He wandered towards Pepper and Phil rolled his eyes. He was not going to get anything more out of either of them tonight, so he left.
The next time he saw Pepper, the agency brass had finally figured out what to call their organization and she was racing out of Obediah Stane’s office at SI headquarters, breathing too fast, and one lock of hair was falling from her professional half up-do. She hadn’t fixed it.
Something was wrong.
He wasn’t sure if this thing was personal, so he decided to give her an escape route. “Miss Potts, we had an appointment. Did you forget about our appointment?” There. If she didn’t need him, she could find some way to beg off from that one.
“Nope! Right now,” she answered, not slowing in her walk. “Come with me.”
He stood, surprised. Not personal, then. And by the looks of things, very serious.
Then she said, “Your office.”
Ah. Serious, and requiring intervention from someone with a LEO job.
Phil took her to his cubicle in the office they held in the city, and as she sat in the dingy, much-less-comfortable-than-it-looked chair in front of his desk, she poured out her story. Tony Stark hadn’t just survived his stint with the Ten Rings, he’d been inspired to build new tech. (Of course he had.) A weaponized flight suit and a miniature arc reactor. (What?) Obediah Stane had been illegally selling Stark weapons to terrorist groups, including the Ten Rings. Stark hadn’t known, but now that he’d found out he was trying to stop him.
Those last two items were going to account for a mountain of paperwork all by themselves, Phil realized. Even if Stark wasn’t involved, some members of his company must’ve been, and that was treason. He was going to be authorizing a few all-expenses-paid vacations to Guantanamo Bay very soon, and even one of those was at least one dead tree all on its own.
He leaned back in his chair. “I wonder if Stark’s really worth it,” he sighed.
“Tony is worth every second of trouble he puts you through,” Pepper snarled at him.
Phil blinked. Because in that second he’d realized two things. First, that he’d spoken out loud. (Dork!) And second, that Pepper was absolutely, irrevocably, hopelessly in love with Stark.
Years later, he told himself that that’s when he started loving her. The two of them were the same. They even had the same job. His just involved more actual use of heavy weaponry than hers did. But they both spent their days making sure somebody else’s mess didn’t get too far out of hand. They had understood each other the instant they met. He’d only had that easy camaraderie with one other person in his life.
At the time, however, he thought none of these things. Because the rest of that night was taken up with hunting Obediah Stane through a darkened factory and then sending the rest of his team to the hospital, and trying to clear the freeway of civilians while Stark and Stane and their suits of armor fought. Then there was getting Stark to the hospital and recovering Stane’s body (what was left of it) from the factory.
It was a long night. But somewhere in the middle of all of that, he found time to change his daily email to Pepper. Now, when it chimed tomorrow at 8:00, it would only say “Good morning!” Because he didn’t want to lose touch with her, but he didn’t want to remind her of the night, either.
Also there was the minor fact that at this point, it just wasn’t worth it to pretend he wasn’t a dork.
With as hectic and sleepless a night as he’d had, he was surprised that when he saw Stark the next morning, he was fairly calm about the whole thing. Although that might be more to do with the fact that he was exhausted at that point.
Pepper, however, looked better. That made it worth it.
Stark looked him up and down again. Apparently he was still trying to decide about whatever-it-was.
That was weird.
Phil walked him through the alibi.
“I was thinking we should say it was just Pepper and me,” Stark protested.
Pepper did not look pleased at this suggestion.
“That’s what happened,” Phil said firmly. “Just read it word for word.”
Stark looked over the cards and his expression grew oddly fixed. “There’s nothing about Stane here.”
Phil knew about Stark’s father, but not really much about him. He did know that Obediah Stane was Stark’s morning father. In fact, he’d been the only living member of the Stark sedoretu until last night. He doubted Stark had called the man “Stane” growing up, but couldn’t blame him for now rejecting whatever that title had been. Phil was a bit unsure how to proceed. So, he opted for—most of—the truth.
“That’s being handled. He’s on vacation.” And because he felt like Stark deserved to know what was going to be said about the man he’d grown up loving, he added, “Small aircraft have such a…poor safety record.”
Stark launched straight into protesting that Iron Man could be his bodyguard, so Phil decided he must’ve safely navigated that particular minefield.
“Just stick to the official statement and soon this will all be behind you,” Phil said. “You’ve got…ninety seconds.” And he left Pepper and Stark alone.
Or tried to. Pepper followed him. “Agent Coulson,” she said, catching him in the doorway. “I just wanted to say thank you for all of your help.”
Phil gave her a tiny smile, trying to keep hold of his professional impassivity when what he really wanted to do was give her a hug and tell her to call him whenever she was in the most minuscule amount of trouble. Spiders in her bathroom, even.
In lieu of this, he nodded and said, “That’s what we do. You’ll be hearing from us.”
Pepper gave him a mischievous smirk. “From the Strategic Homeland Interv—”
“Just call us SHIELD,” he answered, managing to sound reassuring, instead of smug at being able to trump her.
Her cheerful grin would’ve been reward enough on its own, but Stark was looking him over yet again.
Phil did not smile as he turned to take up his place to observe the press conference.
…Where Stark decided to just ignore the whole alibi thing. Apparently that would’ve been too easy.
Chapter Two - Three
Chapter Three - Falling
Chapter Four - Darcy
Chapter Five - Balance
Chapter Six - Tesseract
Chapter Seven - Tahiti
Summary: Phil Coulson (who is a dork) thought he was married to his job. But that was before he met...well, several people, actually.
Characters/Pairings: Phil Coulson|Pepper Potts x Tony Stark|Darcy Lewis, other MCU characters flit in and out too
Warnings/Tags: weird relationships, sedoretu, AU-canon, unusual pairings
Spoilers: Captain America; Thors I and II; Avengers; Iron Mans 1, 2, and 3; Agents Of SHIELD — Basically everything.
Disclaimer: The characters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and all that comes with them are the property of Marvel Studios, ABC, or both. No money has changed hands, and no copyright infringement is intended or implied.
Author’s Notes: I mostly wrote this to see if I could. I’ve never written anything shippy before. (So, naturally, I jump in with a sedoretu-fic. What?) Let me know how you think I did.
The title is based on the following quote. “We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.” Dr. Seuss
Note for readers unfamiliar with sedoretu:
Society is divided into two halves or moieties, called (for ancient religious reasons) the Morning and the Evening. You belong to your mother's moiety, and you can't have sex with anybody of your moiety.
Marriage is a foursome, the sedoretu — a man and a woman from the Morning moiety and a man and a woman from the Evening moiety. You're expected to have sex with both your spouses of the other moiety, and not to have sex with your spouse of your own moiety. So each sedoretu has two expected heterosexual relationships, two expected homosexual relationships, and two forbidden heterosexual relationships.
The expected relationships within each sedoretu are:
- The Morning woman and the Evening man (the "Morning marriage")
- The Evening woman and the Morning man (the "Evening marriage")
- The Morning woman and the Evening woman (the "Day marriage")
- The Morning man and the Evening man (the "Night marriage")
The forbidden relationships are between the Morning woman and the Morning man, and between the Evening woman and the Evening man, and they aren't called anything, except sacrilege.
It's just as complicated as it sounds, but aren't most marriages?
("Mountain Ways" by Ursula K. LeGuin)
Phil Couson did not tell anyone how much he was looking forward to debriefing Tony Stark.
Most of his coworkers probably guessed. Everyone at the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division (they really needed a new name) knew that he was a massive dork (when he wasn’t shooting people or putting the fear of God into them by being terrifyingly impassive). They knew about the Captain America collecting, for example. And that was fine. So they knew he was a little bit of an expert on Stark’s father. And they knew that his favorite sidearm was a SI H18 .45. It never jammed. It never misfired. It was the perfect gun. It had always driven him nuts wondering how Stark had designed such a magnificent weapon, and everyone knew he wanted to ask him that.
Everyone also knew he was far too professional to do that at a debrief. Because he might be a dork, but he knew what the words ‘time’ and ‘place’ meant.
No, the people who knew he was looking forward to the debrief thought that it was because Stark had An Effect on the entire evening moiety. Seriously. He’d seen it written like that before.
Whether there was An Effect or not, Phil was not a teenage girl so he was looking forward to the debrief for professional reasons. His organization had been after the Ten Rings for years. They’d claimed jurisdiction out from under the FBI and CIA so many times he’d lost count (there was rumor that someone in the NSA had actually turned a bulletin board into a dart board filled with nothing but pictures of Nick Fury). He was definitely looking forward to speaking with someone who had actually met these people. Stark knew things. He wanted to know what Stark knew.
He hadn’t expected Pepper Potts.
Virginia “Pepper” Potts, Stark’s personal assistant/handler/babysitter, the perfect evening to Stark’s morning, who carried herself in a way that said she absolutely had not fallen for Stark’s bullshit, spent their entire first encounter stonewalling and lying to him about setting up a time to debrief her boss. And making fun of the name of his division.
Which, to be fair, was eminently mockable.
Then she turned to him, gave him a brilliant smile, and said, “Here.” In her hand was a business card. It was black and sleek and glossy. It had the Stark Industries logo, her name, no job title, and a phone number printed neatly on the bottom. On the back, in white ink, another number was written in a neat hand. Beneath that was an email address.
He fished out one of his own cards, printed on the usual heavy cardstock reserved for government peons. He scribbled his number on the back (his handwriting wasn’t nearly so neat, but it was legible enough for government work), and handed it back.
She tucked it into her phone case with a smile. “I look forward to hearing from you.”
After the press conference, Phil realized that his very favorite gun was not going to be produced anymore. That was incredibly disappointing. He set his phone to send Pepper an automated email every morning at 8:00 asking for a time for their scheduled debriefing. Because he knew she would have done exactly the same thing in his position and probably had done very similar things for Stark over the years. So he knew she wouldn’t mind.
She ignored the email. And she texted him a picture of Stark’s robots Dum-E and U that afternoon. They were playing Jenga.
Phil decided that Stark might be unbelievably brilliant, but he was also incredibly weird. He texted that back to her.
“You have no idea,” was her reply.
When a few days went by with nothing but more texts, Phil decided to take a more direct approach. He used his badge to get into a Stark Industries charity ball that he knew Pepper would be attending. He tried not to think about how even his nicest suit still left him woefully under dressed as he took up a station by the bar to scan the room.
A voice beside him said, “Gimmie a Scotch, I’m starving.”
Phil turned and there, much to his surprise, Tony Stark himself was standing next to him, big as life.
Phil tried not mind how ridiculous he must look next to Tony Stark, wearing his cheap suit and wrinkles, balding, and with just a tiny bit of gray in the hair he had left. He most definitely tried not to contrast that with the fact that Stark looked exactly like he did in all the pictures and was wearing was was, at minimum, several thousand dollars of designer clothes. Though he wasn’t as tall as he’d seemed in the magazines. In fact, they were basically the same height.
“Mr. Stark,” he said out loud, because he was hardly going to let a chance like this pass by.
“Yeah-huh?” Stark said absently, turning to look him over. And then he did it again, up and down, like he was trying to be sure about something.
“I’m Agent Coulson.”
Stark’s lips twitched. “Oh, yeah, yeah! From the…ah…”
“Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division,” Phil said.
While he was rattling off the name, Stark’s drink arrived. Stark collected it, and offered Phil an almost conspiratorial look. “You need a new name for that.”
“Yeah.” Prompted by a desire to at least be able to say this was an actual conversation, he added, “We hear that a lot.”
Stark turned and looked him over again.
“Listen, I know this must be a trying time for you, but we need to debrief you.”
Stark’s lips twitched again, and Phil could practically see the puns surrounding “debrief” that Stark was heroically not making. Perhaps this was why he supposedly had An Effect on the entire evening moiety. Because, as much as Phil was pretending he didn’t notice it, the casual flirting was nice.
“There’s still a lot of unanswered questions and time can be a factor with these things.”
Stark was distracted by something.
Hoping to at least get him to commit to a time, Phil said, “Let’s just put something on the books. How about the twenty-fourth, at seven PM, at Stark Industries?”
He would be surprised if Stark had even heard him. He was gazing at a beautiful evening woman with glorious red hair. She was across the room, and wearing a royal blue dress. Then she turned her head, and Phil realized he was seeing Pepper. He nodded in approval. However oblivious he’d been, Stark was noticing her now.
“Tell you what,” Stark said, holding out a hand to Phil, “you got it. You’re absolutely right.”
Phil was impressed. He hadn’t actually expect Stark to reply to him, let alone say something that was actually in complete sentences.
“We’ll…ah…” Stark cut himself off and then glanced to Phil. “I’m going to go to my assistant and we’ll…make a date.”
He wandered towards Pepper and Phil rolled his eyes. He was not going to get anything more out of either of them tonight, so he left.
The next time he saw Pepper, the agency brass had finally figured out what to call their organization and she was racing out of Obediah Stane’s office at SI headquarters, breathing too fast, and one lock of hair was falling from her professional half up-do. She hadn’t fixed it.
Something was wrong.
He wasn’t sure if this thing was personal, so he decided to give her an escape route. “Miss Potts, we had an appointment. Did you forget about our appointment?” There. If she didn’t need him, she could find some way to beg off from that one.
“Nope! Right now,” she answered, not slowing in her walk. “Come with me.”
He stood, surprised. Not personal, then. And by the looks of things, very serious.
Then she said, “Your office.”
Ah. Serious, and requiring intervention from someone with a LEO job.
Phil took her to his cubicle in the office they held in the city, and as she sat in the dingy, much-less-comfortable-than-it-looked chair in front of his desk, she poured out her story. Tony Stark hadn’t just survived his stint with the Ten Rings, he’d been inspired to build new tech. (Of course he had.) A weaponized flight suit and a miniature arc reactor. (What?) Obediah Stane had been illegally selling Stark weapons to terrorist groups, including the Ten Rings. Stark hadn’t known, but now that he’d found out he was trying to stop him.
Those last two items were going to account for a mountain of paperwork all by themselves, Phil realized. Even if Stark wasn’t involved, some members of his company must’ve been, and that was treason. He was going to be authorizing a few all-expenses-paid vacations to Guantanamo Bay very soon, and even one of those was at least one dead tree all on its own.
He leaned back in his chair. “I wonder if Stark’s really worth it,” he sighed.
“Tony is worth every second of trouble he puts you through,” Pepper snarled at him.
Phil blinked. Because in that second he’d realized two things. First, that he’d spoken out loud. (Dork!) And second, that Pepper was absolutely, irrevocably, hopelessly in love with Stark.
Years later, he told himself that that’s when he started loving her. The two of them were the same. They even had the same job. His just involved more actual use of heavy weaponry than hers did. But they both spent their days making sure somebody else’s mess didn’t get too far out of hand. They had understood each other the instant they met. He’d only had that easy camaraderie with one other person in his life.
At the time, however, he thought none of these things. Because the rest of that night was taken up with hunting Obediah Stane through a darkened factory and then sending the rest of his team to the hospital, and trying to clear the freeway of civilians while Stark and Stane and their suits of armor fought. Then there was getting Stark to the hospital and recovering Stane’s body (what was left of it) from the factory.
It was a long night. But somewhere in the middle of all of that, he found time to change his daily email to Pepper. Now, when it chimed tomorrow at 8:00, it would only say “Good morning!” Because he didn’t want to lose touch with her, but he didn’t want to remind her of the night, either.
Also there was the minor fact that at this point, it just wasn’t worth it to pretend he wasn’t a dork.
With as hectic and sleepless a night as he’d had, he was surprised that when he saw Stark the next morning, he was fairly calm about the whole thing. Although that might be more to do with the fact that he was exhausted at that point.
Pepper, however, looked better. That made it worth it.
Stark looked him up and down again. Apparently he was still trying to decide about whatever-it-was.
That was weird.
Phil walked him through the alibi.
“I was thinking we should say it was just Pepper and me,” Stark protested.
Pepper did not look pleased at this suggestion.
“That’s what happened,” Phil said firmly. “Just read it word for word.”
Stark looked over the cards and his expression grew oddly fixed. “There’s nothing about Stane here.”
Phil knew about Stark’s father, but not really much about him. He did know that Obediah Stane was Stark’s morning father. In fact, he’d been the only living member of the Stark sedoretu until last night. He doubted Stark had called the man “Stane” growing up, but couldn’t blame him for now rejecting whatever that title had been. Phil was a bit unsure how to proceed. So, he opted for—most of—the truth.
“That’s being handled. He’s on vacation.” And because he felt like Stark deserved to know what was going to be said about the man he’d grown up loving, he added, “Small aircraft have such a…poor safety record.”
Stark launched straight into protesting that Iron Man could be his bodyguard, so Phil decided he must’ve safely navigated that particular minefield.
“Just stick to the official statement and soon this will all be behind you,” Phil said. “You’ve got…ninety seconds.” And he left Pepper and Stark alone.
Or tried to. Pepper followed him. “Agent Coulson,” she said, catching him in the doorway. “I just wanted to say thank you for all of your help.”
Phil gave her a tiny smile, trying to keep hold of his professional impassivity when what he really wanted to do was give her a hug and tell her to call him whenever she was in the most minuscule amount of trouble. Spiders in her bathroom, even.
In lieu of this, he nodded and said, “That’s what we do. You’ll be hearing from us.”
Pepper gave him a mischievous smirk. “From the Strategic Homeland Interv—”
“Just call us SHIELD,” he answered, managing to sound reassuring, instead of smug at being able to trump her.
Her cheerful grin would’ve been reward enough on its own, but Stark was looking him over yet again.
Phil did not smile as he turned to take up his place to observe the press conference.
…Where Stark decided to just ignore the whole alibi thing. Apparently that would’ve been too easy.
Chapter Two - Three
Chapter Three - Falling
Chapter Four - Darcy
Chapter Five - Balance
Chapter Six - Tesseract
Chapter Seven - Tahiti
