The Rather Extensive Consequences of a Failed Experiment, chapter 2

2010, Pepper Potts & Mycroft Holmes (II)

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Pepper Potts liked coming to England. She always made sure to do a few fun things when she travelled abroad. Mostly touristy things, and she always made excellent business deals that Tony could never fault her for. It was the highest form of praise he could give, of not faulting you for what you did. This particular trip was more secret than most, as she was involved in a delicate contract which was slightly more under the table than either she or Tony liked, but there was nothing for it. Mycroft Holmes, at least, was a pleasant enough man to deal with. She'd never met him in person, but his correspondence through phone calls and email was nice—concise, to the point, and intelligent. Pepper didn't like to be surrounded by idiots, and neither did Mycroft Holmes.

She was excited to meet him, she decided as she was led far into the building to Mr. Holmes' office. He wasn't in, at first, and so she sat down primly until the assistant left the room. Pepper looked around, trying to see everything about Mr. Holmes before he arrived—the art a person collected and displayed was often a key to their personality. For instance, Tony could care less about Jackson Pollock, but he wanted to own as much of the man's work as possible—because it was pricy and expensively ugly to others. So Pepper wanted to see what kind of art Mr. Holmes wanted to show off.

Family photos were the ticket, today, it seemed. There were recent, nice photos of a forgettably brown-haired man with another man who had curly black hair and eyes which were not so much blue as they were gray. Another with the same two men, a bit younger with an older couple—their parents, it would seem. After that a grainy, discolored photo of the same man and wife, much younger, with two young boys. The dark haired one was clutching fiercely to a pirate hat, while the brunette appeared as studiously boring as possible.

A few more formal photos of Mycroft Holmes' father (she didn't know which one she would be dealing with, but by the severity of this office it was likely the brunette) at younger ages, as well as a wedding picture in black and white that looked like it was from the late thirties. The man in it looked as though he and Tony had the same ideas about hair care, but Pepper soon looked past that photo to another one, featuring the same man in his teens with a much older woman at his side—his mother?

There were another two photos on the mantelpiece, one of a man who had washed out eyes—probably a fierce blue, lost to the black and white of the photo—and fiercely curly hair and a young woman. Another wedding picture, then. But it was the man standing behind him, one hand on the younger man's shoulder, who startled Pepper. That man looked as though he could have been Tony in fifteen years. Which brought her attention to the last photograph on the mantel before actual paintings started to be hung above the photographs.

The man in the last photo was the spitting image of Tony Stark.