Raising Hybrid Puppies [a Starker coffee shop AU]

Chapter 24

He's done it. Only took him two decades but Tony has finally rendered Pepper speechless.

Well, he's managed to make her gape like a fish for a few seconds before, but never got that properly slack-jawed, "What the Hell"-type expression he's been aiming for.

And damn if he isn't enjoying this moment.

His smirking finally gets Pepper out of the funk she's been in, though the next stage still mostly consists of stammering. "Wha– are you sure? Do you have any idea of the impact this would have on our projections?"

"Nothing conditional about it, Pep. And the projections are gonna be fine –"

"How? I mean it, Tony, this isn't rhetorical – and what happened to 'we can't give out bombs to idiots'? Now you'd basically be giving them out for free!"

"Oh, I solved that, don't worry, Pep! Got enough safeguards in place to shut everyone up. Seriously, the number of people who could hack their way into the reactor tech is miniscule. Down to one, basically. That'd be me, in case you're wondering," he adds with a wink. "I'm telling ya, this is gonna be what takes me to Stockholm –"

"Damn it, Tony, you can't finance a company on a Nobel Prize alone."

"And I'm not trying to; I've come up with a fully automated production process! The entire thing's gonna be incredibly cheap to run and maintain and all we've got to charge people for are the manufacturing costs."

Tony spreads his hands, all tada, yet Pepper still stares at him like he's grown a second head instead of a ridiculous amount of stubble. Okay, it might be veering embarrassingly close into beard territory but cut him some slack – he basically just solved the world's energy crisis, he's allowed to forgo personal hygiene for a week.

"You haven't showered in a week?!"

Tony winces. He said it out loud again, didn't he...

Pepper takes a deep breath, her eyes never leaving his face. "Alright. Let's say I agree to this. Let's say I'll even help you make Mr. Bodenkamp believe you're not pulling an elaborate prank on him."

"Who's –"

"Our liaison at Audi, for Christ's sake, the guy you appoin- you know what, never mind. Even if I get him to believe we want to basically hand over perfectly safe engine-compatible arc reactors to him as well as to everyone else who finds a use for them –"

"Which is gonna be everyone," Tony gloats. Oh, how the masses are gonna flock to him. His image is so close to being salvaged, he can taste it.

Pepper makes a dangerous noise at the back of her throat so he mimes zipping his mouth shut and waits for her to have reigned herself in enough to get to the point she's been trying to make.

"Even if anyone's going to believe that you actually managed to build a commercially viable arc reactor that can't be manipulated into an explosive device and even if, on top of all that, the public trusts you enough to –"

"Come on, I wouldn't even need to ask the mayor for permission to add one to the city's power grid; you know, thinking about it, I wouldn't even need to call – guess a text would suffice to send that guy running. Yeah, we'd need to give 'em a couple of weeks but I'd bet half my shares that all the fearmongers who're gonna be up my ass about endangering the public are gonna dance to a different tune later. Cause how on earth could they've possibly gone a single day without a self-sustaining energy source to charge their phones so they can tweet complaints all day?"

"But why?"

Tony blinks. "What do you mean, why? Clean energy! Incredibly cheap clean energy! Sure, Canada and Saudi Arabia aren't gonna be happy I'm basically making their oil imports redundant but it's not like I'm gonna stop selling the tech for break-even costs at the border, that'd be stupid, don't wanna start a world war –"