She couldn't even remember making her way to the hospital. She could hear the phone conversation with Agent Hill rattling around her head as though it were stuck on repeat but nowhere in her mind could she remember actually travelling. All that came to mind was the panic.

"-flying over Afganistan when it happened-"

Of course he was. He always seemed to be there when disaster struck. She only prayed that this time was nowhere as bad as the first time.

"-don't know what he was hit by. Must have been armour piercing,-"

She was going to burn that suit. No. She was going to take it apart peice by peice, and if she couldn't do that then she'd bribe Bruce or Thor into doing it for her. Either way there was no way she was ever going to let Tony in that death trap again.

"-got him back into the country-"

Oh god, what was she going to do?

"-coded twice-"

He couldn't die. The thought was preposterous. He was larger than life, not devoid of it.

"-critical condition-"

She forced herself to think straight as she jogged down one of the seemingly never ending monotonous hospital corridors, heels in hands. She'd been a board meeting when she'd got the phone call. She'd left and hadn't gone back in, not even to say she was leaving. Her head swivelled from side to side desperately looking for a sign or nurse who could tell her where to go.

"Pepper?"

She skidded to a halt, "Steve?" She asked eyes wide. He was down one of the halls she'd just passed and when she looked past him she could see the rest of the Avengers, all in varying states of health. She walked down to them, eyes searching each face, hoping not to see the tell tale signs that someone was going to have to tell her the unthinkable.

"He's still alive." Steve blurted.

For a second it felt as though a weight had been lifted from her heart but just as quickly it clamped back down again, "What do you mean still?" She asked her voice climbing in pitch, her breath coming too fast.

Natasha hobbled over on what looked like a broken, but already cast leg, "They won't tell us anything." She said with an uncharacteristic amount of bitterness bleeding through into her unusually accented voice. Pepper doubted that emotion was unfamiliar to the assassin but it was the first time she'd heard any evidence of it.

"Why not?" She asked uncomprehendingly.

Bruce piped up from where he was sitting on what looked like a highly uncomfortable chair with his head resting against the wall, eyes closed, "We're not family or next of kin."

"I'm his next of-" her voice trailed off as she remembered the papers that would have made her his next of kin sitting unsigned and unsent away on his desk. She knew he'd had no qualms about signing them, she even thought he looked a little excited at the prospect of being tied to her at least a little more officially than they were, "Shit." She whispered. No one said anything but from their faces she could tell that they were all thinking the exact same thing.

Clint was passed out propped on the only other chair apart from the one Bruce sat on, with bandages and stitches holding one arm together and staples trying to seal one of the gashes in his forehead. His face had been cleaned but crusted blood still matted his collar.

Bruce hadn't opened his eyes, and from the way he was opening and closing his fist Pepper wasn't sure what colour they'd be if he opened them. The gentle brown of the scientist or the rage fuelled green of The Hulk?

Steve on the whole looked the best out of any of them, physically at least. His healing abilities had made themselves known as bruises faded from black to purple and cuts started scabbing over. Mentally, however he looked like he might be about to crack. His hands twitched compulsively, as though frustrated by his own uselessness, and while she'd never dream of calling him out on it, his eyes were glassier than they would have been normally.

Natasha obviously hadn't fared too well either if her cast and sling were anything to go by. It looked like she had a shadow of a bruise stretched across her cheek bone but under the harsh fluorescent lights, Pepper couldn't say for sure. She turned to look for the last member of the team but found him conspicuously absent.

"What happened to a Thor?" She asked quietly, unsure if she actually wanted to know.

Bruce answered, "Tony wasn't the only one flying when they started their attack." His voice was weary and the lines that graced his face looked deeper and more condemning than Pepper could remember.

"Is he okay?" She asked worriedly.

"Fine." Said Steve, rubbing a tired hand across his face and looking as though he were ready to drop, "He was already healing up by the time we got to him, but we still thought the healers in Asgard would have a easier job of patching him up than anyone could here."

As relieved as she was to hear that Thor would be fine she still blanched that Tony and Thor had been caught in the same attack and the damage had been enough to send Thor back to his own realm. Thor was a god. If it could mess up a god, what had it done to Tony?

She felt her knees go slightly weaker than she was comfortable with. Before she knew it she was leant against the wall, trying to keep upright. "How is he?" She asked, her voice suddenly husky as the very real danger that Tony was in struck home, "What's wrong with him?"

Steve opened his mouth but after a pause it was Natasha who spoke. "He was hit midair, pretty high up. When he fell he shattered his right leg, cracked two ribs and broke three. One of them punctured a lung-" Pepper thought she might be sick. The two thoughts of Tony and injury just didn't merge within her mind. She'd seen him sick and injured before, but never to this level. Natasha continued quietly, "He was hypoxic by the time we got him on the carrier. When he was put on oxygen we thought he'd be stable but-" she swallowed, an incredible show of weakness for such a hardened woman.

"-we didn't find out about the bleeding until much later." Finished Steve, refusing to look her in the eye. "He was talking to us all, obviously in pain, but he was being snarky and sarcastic so we figured it couldn't be as bad as it looked. Then he started seizing."

Pepper's hand flew to cover her mouth as a pained moan almost escaped her. Why did this always happen to him? What if this was one brink of death visit too many? Her heart flatly refused to entertain the notion but her head was already trying to figure out the odds.

Steve waited for her to regain what was left of her control before he started again, "When we got here they said he had some pretty serious internal bleeding, and a fractured skull."

"What happened when you got him here?" Pepper asked weakly. Steve floundered before looking to Bruce. The scientist opened his eyes at last, and through the haze of panic that had hidden her rational thought from her, she was glad to see the familiar comforting brown.

"He was taken into emergency surgery. They wanted to get the bleeding under control. Once," he said stressing the word, leaving Pepper in no doubt that he had deliberately avoided using the word 'if', "they get him out of this surgery, he'll be left to get some of his strength back before they do anything other than stabilise his other injuries."

Pepper nodded, "So what do we do?" She said looking around at each of them. Steve sighed, the action physically deflating him, Bruce's head fell back against the wall with a muted thump as his eyes slid closed once more.

"We wait." Said Natasha already making her way back to Clint.

~o~o~o~

It had been hours. Pepper had sat through every single one of them, wide awake with her mind coming up with worse scenarios with each passing minute. All she knew was that he was still in surgery. They had been told that much but beyond that the nurse refused to tell them anything. She'd all but given up getting any new information for the night when a different nurse walked back into the room.

"Anthony Stark?" She asked looking at all of them in turn, either sleeping or hanging on to the fringes of consciousness. Pepper sat back upright from where she'd been leaning against the wall, feeling her neck crick as she moved too suddenly.

"Us!" She said quickly as the others blinked themselves awake blearily. "That's us!"

"Right," muttered the nurse flicking through the charts in her hand as though to find the right one, "he's out of surgery for now and he's been sedated."

It was like she could finally breathe again. Pepper sucked in a lungful of air as it hit home; he survived the surgery, she wasn't going to hear about him having died on the table. "Is he okay?" She blurted before she could stop herself. She wanted to wince at the stupidity of the question but refused to back down.

The nurse seemed to understand as her eyes softened, "He's not out of the woods, yet." She warned, "He's in a medically induced coma and still in intensive care, critical but stable."

Pepper swallowed convulsively trying to rally what was left of her conviction that Tony would be fine, "Can I see him?" She whispered.

The rest of the team perked up around them, anxious for her answer. The nurse just looked pained, "I'm sorry." She said with real sympathy in her voice, "But I really can't let you in unless you're related or next of kin."

Natasha stepped forward and started asking more questions, most of which Pepper couldn't even begin to decipher but Pepper's mind was elsewhere. It was stuck on Tony. Tony, who wouldn't be waking up for quite some time but who would be completely alone and broken amongst machines and wires. It sounded awfully familiar from what he had told her of Afganistan and she wasn't going to make him revisit that place, even if only in memory. She couldn't let that happen.

Smoothly, and without drawing attention to herself she held her hands behind her back and began working the ring on her right hand off of her index finger. She tried to look as though she knew what she was listening to when Bruce stepped in and began to ask even more technical questions. She slid the ring onto her fourth finger on her left hand, and turned it around so that only a plain band of metal showed. She silently thanked whatever had led her to grab it from her dresser as she ran out of the tower to arrive in time at that board meeting.

She gathered her confidence around her like a coat. That was the only thing that would make this plan work. She cleared her throat and immediately the others fell silent. The nurse turned to look at her again, "Excuse me, but I really would like to go see Tony."

The nurse looked deflated as though she had expected this, "Look, I'm sorry I really am, but you're not family or-" she fell silent as Pepper moved her hand so it was splayed out for them all to see.

"He's my husband." She said shortly, willing her voice not to tremble or her face to twitch and give the whole game away, "So can I see him?"

The nurse looked at her, but this time with the sympathy pushed back of her eyes and suspicion taking the forefront, "If you and Mr Stark had got married wouldn't I have heard about it Miss Potts?"

Pepper fought back panic at the very pertinent line of questioning. They were all over the newspapers and magazines; the press would have a field day if they announced that they were going to get married. She floundered internally as she thought of anything that could get her through those doors and to Tony.

"Would you want something like that splashed over the papers, Miss?" Came a strained but good humoured voice. Steve, too, had joined them and looked down at the nurse with an earnestness that no one else would have quite been able to pull off. Pepper froze in shock as the nurse's wide eyes swivelled back to her but at Steve's meaningful but oddly level look she merely looked as though Captain America backing her up in the middle of a lie was a completely normal thing to happen.

"No, of course not-" the nurse said uncertainly but Natasha cut over her smoothly, just the right amount of inflection tainting her voice to feign sincerity,

"It was a quiet ceremony, we didn't want anyone getting wind of it, of course."

The nurse looked stunned, "No, of course."

She looked at Pepper again but this time there was no suspicion veiled in her eyes just suprise and a little bit of sympathy. Pepper pounced on it, letting her own ire and irritation flood back into her words. She reached into her pocket and dug out her phone before looking back at the other woman, "Of course, if you still don't want to let me in," she said crisply, "I can always phone the company lawyers?"

The young woman's eyes were wide as Pepper's finger hovered over the screen threateningly, "No!" She said quickly, "I'll take you through...if you'll follow me...Mrs Stark?"

Even though the last part came out as a question and she heard Natasha breath out sharply through her nose, in what could have passed as a laugh. Pepper knew the story will come crumbling down around her under the slightest investigation but she couldn't care less if she tried. Not with Tony laying hurt, injured and alone.

They walked through a different tangle of hallways, rather than the ones that Pepper had run down in her desperate search for anyone that knew what was going on. She was pretty much lost after the first three turns but her Nurse navigated them confidently though she kept thowing nervous glances to Pepper. Just when they reach what Pepper assumed could only be the last room she actually threw out an arm and grabbed her before she could finally see Tony.

"I just want you to understand," she said obviously choosing her words carefully, "that it's going to be a shock seeing him like this but no matter how bad it looks, he made it through the surgery."

Pepper inclined her head in understanding though she was already reaching towards the door handle.

Nothing could have prepared her for seeing Tony.

For a wild second her mind screamed at her to get out of the room, to go where she couldn't see him and it wasn't happening. But that wasn't what she did. That would be the last thing she would ever do, not when Tony needed her, especially like this. She gritted her teeth and injected some steel into her resolve. She would be strong enough for both of them.

Slowly, as though any sudden movement would break the stifling stillness of the room she walked over to his bed side. She was irrationally glad that she hadn't put her heels back on since running through the corridors; the clinical click of her heels on polished floors would have broken her when Tony lay dying.

He looked dead already; if it wasn't for the steady tone of his heart moniter she would have believed he'd already passed. He was pale, so pale that his veins stood out as traces of colour, winding beneath the surface of skin that made the white sheets look colourful.

He was laid unmovingly in a organised chaos of machinery and wires, all twining together and delving into his flesh. Sheets hid the rest of him; draped over an elevated leg and tightened over his chest with his shallow breathing. If it wasn't for that tiny minuscule rise and fall he could have been a corpse. A shaky hand rose to her mouth of its own accord.

"It's always a shock the first time." Said the nurse firm the doorway softly. Pepper started; she had completely forgotten she wasn't alone. She wished she could say she had seen him look worse but it would've been a lie. Even meshed together with that infernal suit sitting in the remnants of the battle that had cost him his only father figure and nearly both their lives he had looked better than this. At least then he was moving.

"Would you like to come back or-" The nurse quailed under the glare Pepper sent her.

"I'm not going anywhere." She said resolutely, hating the tremor that shook her voice. Gingerly, she picked her way to the chair that stood by Tony's side. Otherwise known as her place, she thought sadly. She reached out a hand but it just hovered uselessly. It seemed like every inch if him was covered in machines or tubes. She hated them but she would hate to disturb them even more.

The nurse opened her mouth and moved as if to guide her but Pepper had already carefully navigated the various equipment until her hand was just shy of his. She wanted more than anything to take his hand and wait for this to be over but that wasn't going to help anyone.

With the very tips of her fingers she brushed the skin on the back of his hand. He looked more delicate than she could ever have believed. When he didn't shatter under her touch she did it again. Stroked past the tubes in his skin and traced the veins.

He was cold.

She waited until the nurse left the room before the chill of his touch tipped he over the edge.

It wasn't just tears or sobs. She wailed.

She tried to hide it, muffle it or just smooth the ugly sound from existance but she couldn't. No one came in to try and comfort her or stop her from crying for which she was glad. She wouldn't have been able to. Tony Stark, the man who loved her and she loved back, was laid unmovingly in a hospital full of strangers where he might die and there was nothing on this earth that she could do about it.

She cried until his chest ached and her stomach rolled though her hand continued its steady comfort on his cold arm.

Tony laid there pale, indifferent and unmoved as the woman beside him cried herself into a broken semblance of sleep.

(Part 1/2)