Warning: MAJOR Infinity War spoilers ahead!

So, I wrote this mostly because we don't know if Pepper survived the SNAP; I thought I would do my own take on it. Also, all the feels...I had to process them somehow. This will be mostly Tony / Pepper centric, but I'm considering expanding the story later, once this initial thing is done (because we have a year to wait for the real ending anyway, right?).

I don't own these characters. Enjoy!

Tony Stark hated being wrong.

He had thought, somehow, that when the ashes cleared and the sirens stopped and the galaxy's color was no longer grey, he would wake from an awful dream-sleep. The sun would come out again. The fires would stop. The buildings would look less like tombstones and more like places that were designed to shelter people. The wind, ceaseless as it had been since The Day, would not sound quite so sad.

And lastly, as the forms of his fallen allies came rising over some green, sloped hill, Peter Parker would come swinging around the corner, and he would natter on (as he always did) about movies and saving the world again and "What's next, Mr. Stark?"

Because there would be a "next." There would be a new day—a better day, where the larger part of the world was ignorant to the cataclysm that had so nearly swallowed it whole.

A day when The Day had never come to pass. That's what Tony had thought: that this awful, cruel reality was not reality at all, but a nightmare.

Oh, how he hated being wrong.

Tony supposed that his first mistake was in the assumption that the ashes would clear. He had been standing before a tiny faucet at the back of Quill's ship for nearly a half hour now, scrubbing his hands. The scalding heat of the water, combined with his vigorous, partially-crazed washing, had rendered his skin so red that it was almost the same color as the scarlet plating on his suit.

But the ashes remained.

Twice, he had turned the water off and seated himself on a nearby crate, only to look dazedly down at his hands some minutes later to find that they were just as coated as before.

He was on his third attempt. Tony clenched his jaw as he scraped at his palms, trying and failing to forget the image of Peter Parker's eyes, wide and terrified and then, suddenly, gone. Gone, like everything else.

Everything except the ashes.

He scrubbed harder. His left hand began to bleed.

"Stop." Tony recognized Nebula's voice from behind him; the cyborg had been silent up until now as she rummaged halfheartedly through the crates that were scattered around them. Now, she was seated on top of one, her back bowed and her shoulders slumped, as she—like Tony—glared into her empty palms.

Tony paused his frantic scrubbing and glanced to the side. "It won't come off," he said.

"It's not supposed to."

There was a long pause, broken only by a fractured sigh and the scrape of alloy against leather. Then Nebula dropped from her crate and ambled off in the direction of the cockpit, her boots clicking softly against the metallic deck.

Tony looked down at his marred hands. A droplet of blood arced over the inner curve of his palm; he rotated his wrist, and the scarlet teardrop ceased its cling and plummeted to the floor. He sniffed. How close were they to Earth's atmosphere, he wondered? Tony engaged the comm link in his helmet, hoping to find that Friday was back online, but the only reply to his query was a stream of static.

He plunged his hands back into the water and continued to scrub.

Eventually, Tony gave up on ridding himself of the ashes, and opted instead to wrap his hands in a roll of gauze he had spied earlier. It was another hour before they reached Earth's atmosphere. An hour of tinkering with the damaged portions of his armor and pacing among the crates and deliberately not thinking, because each thought was more horrifying than the last.

It had been quite some time since Tony had experienced a nightmare. When, he wondered, would this one end?

Friday was the one to notify him of their arrival; her systems, it seemed, had reengaged now that they were within Earth's atmosphere. "Welcome back, Boss," she lilted, her Irish accent ringing through his helmet's recently-activated interface.

Tony stood. "Call Pepper," he said immediately.

"Right away."

He stared at the image of Pepper's face as it gleamed upon his interface. As the phone began to ring, he struggled to keep a fresh barrage of nightmarish possibilities from overtaking that image, from turning her to ash. Tony swallowed. He knew the number: it was, of course, impossible to forget—a simple, heavy percentage (he refused to allow words such as "probability" and "likelihood" to cross his consciousness so brashly, refused to give them voice, lest they come true).

"Come on, Potts," he grated. The phone continued to ring. He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Answer. Please answer." But with each echoing chime, Tony's heart rate increased. His chest ached—it was not the deep, low ache that had plagued him since that moment on Titan, but a sharp, unrelenting thing: bright and all-encompassing and completely, utterly consuming. His breath hitched as he fought against an oncoming panic attack.

"Boss," Friday said, "Your heart and respiratory rates are increasing exponentially. Try to take deep breaths."

The ringing stopped abruptly. Pepper's automated voicemail started, but Tony cancelled the call.

He rested his hands upon his knees. She's just away from her phone, he told himself as he deactivated his armor and clutched at the fabric over his chest. She left it somewhere, that's all. She's just...she's going to be….

He could see the ashes through his bandages. Gasping, Tony activated his armor again, and the red of his gauntlets hid them from his view. He breathed in through his nose and exhaled slowly. The wound in his abdomen—sealed and bound with medicated foam, for the time being—throbbed against his torn sweater. "Keep trying, Friday," he ordered, once he had gathered himself again.

But this time, the phone rang on his end. Tony's relief was as potent as it was overshadowed; he looked up to see Rhodey's image over the incoming call notification. He exhaled through his nose before answering.

"Tony," Rhodey sighed, "Thank goodness. Where are you?"

"I'm just getting back to Earth," he answered. "It's good to hear your voice." He spied the smoking expanse of New York through a nearby window and looked away. Before he lost the will to ask, he continued: "How many did we lose?"

Rhodey was quiet for a moment. His sigh was heavy enough to sound loud and grating over the line. "Too many," he said. "Only Steve, Natasha, Bruce, and Thor survived.

"Damn it…."

"Oh, and a new guy. He's...a raccoon?"

"Not the strangest thing we've seen, I guess."

There was another pause; Tony knew the question would come, but the knowledge did nothing to dull the wake of its sting. "Uh, what about...on your end?"

"It's me and someone new," he said, trying and failing to sound optimistic as his eyes fell on Nebula's rigid form, where she sat stiffly in the pilot's seat.

"Oh." Rhodey's voice was low and quiet. "I'm sorry, Tony," he said, reading seamlessly between the lines.

Tony swallowed as he saw a pair of wide, scared eyes. "Me, too." He ducked his head.

"You should know—Cap wants us to rendezvous back at headquarters before we start on damage control."

"Yeah, well, I owe Pepper a nice dinner."

"Uh-huh," Rhodey said, his tone falling just short of amusement. "I thought you might say that. I'll tell him you're busy."

"Thanks, Rhodey."

"Sure thing." His friend hesitated before asking, "Do you want me to come with?" He left the "just in case" out, but Tony heard it all the same.

He blinked several times. "Nah, this one's on me, Platypus," he said. "Besides, we only made reservations for two."

Rhodey grunted. "Alright. I'm here if you need anything."

After giving Nebula the coordinates to HQ, Tony opened the ship's emergency hatch and dropped into the sky.

The city was thick with smoke and something else—something, Tony suspected, that might have been grief, for it tasted of salt. He continued to try Pepper's cell as he flew. He continued to hold his breath with each ring, continued to build that painful ache in his chest as she inevitable failed to answer. He tried Happy's cell twice (no luck there, either) before returning to Pepper's number.

Eventually, Friday silenced the ringing, although Tony hadn't ordered her to. He supposed she would justify it on account of his swiftly-declining emotional status. He told himself that the suit was holding him together as he sped toward their Manhattan condo—and that might've been partially true. But really, it was the stubborn hope that Pepper would be there, waiting for him, when he opened the door.

And if she wasn't, well...there would be nothing left at all to keep him standing.

Tony thought, as he paused to stabilize a falling helicopter and lower it safely to the ground, that he should call May Parker. She should know what happened, after all.

She should know that it was Tony's fault. That he was supposed to protect him, but he couldn't, and now Peter was gone. Gone, and dead, and done.

But he didn't know if May was still...present...and he didn't know how to say it, not yet, but he did know that he wanted to tell her in person and not over the phone, because she deserved at least that much.

And he couldn't do it yet. He wasn't ready.

So Tony took off into the sky again and he waited for Pepper to answer, and when he thought he saw ashes on the surface of his gauntlets, he kicked up his power output and tore through the air with a great, energized crack.

Such was Tony's haste that he reached the condo in a matter of minutes. It was, in comparison to his Malibu home, incredibly modest, as he and Pepper had intended their stay to be temporary. In fact, he was in the process of building them a new home outside of the city—close enough to HQ for security, but far enough away that they would have their privacy. It was one of the things he had planned on telling Pepper over dinner that night.

Tony finally ceased his string of back-to-back phone calls as he stepped up to the wide doors of their condo's second floor (the first served as one of his workshops, of course, for he couldn't live anywhere without a place to tinker—temporary or not). He deactivated his armor; the nanotech suit seemed to melt away, its substance receding back into the power source on his chest like so many rivers of gold and red. Tony tipped his head back for a moment; he pushed a breath through his teeth and knotted a bandaged hand over his stab wound.

It would be fine. He would open the door, and she would be inside, waiting for him. Her red hair would be pulled into a tight bun (she always fastened it that way when she worried, as though the pressure would steady her) and she would have the news up on at least two screens, and she would be on the phone with Happy or Rhodey or one of her friends from the office.

Yes, it would be fine, he tried to assure himself—because she was Pepper. His Pepper. And she was, to him, all that was good in this galaxy, and all that held him together.

Tony ran his fingers through the uncharacteristically clumped and matted mess that was his hair. He took a shuddering breath. He would not think of the ashes. He would not look at his hands, for then he would not have to see it: that sempiternal evil, that cruel, black reminder, an everlasting imprint upon his skin. And so instead he fixed his eyes resolutely ahead, and he opened the door.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think?