Lilies
Lilies
Note: OK, people, this is a super-angsty one. Please don't hate me. I couldn't shake this image. And if I got any medical stuff wrong, it's because I didn't do any research to speak of.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
——
She was supposed to have survived him.
It surpassed all logic. It defied statistics. He was the one who risked his life on a regular basis. He was the one who'd spent a good portion of his adult life under the influence of some substance or other, who'd had indiscriminate sex with countless partners. He was the one who had shrapnel lodged near his heart and a science project in the middle of his chest. And yet, he was alive and healthy.
Tony Stark walked slowly down the aisle of the church behind the casket. When asked, later, how he'd managed to appear so calm, so 'together,' he looked puzzled. He could only recall that his entire body had been trembling; that he hadn't been able to feel his feet, and had worried that he was going to stumble and collapse in a heap in front of everyone. He hadn't wept, hadn't been able to, so he supposed that everyone had assumed he was either stoical or hard-hearted.
His eyes were so dry that they burned. His mouth was full of cotton. There was a constant buzzing in his ears. His skin felt like it'd been sandblasted. He felt like he was having an allergic reaction, but he didn't know to what. To life, maybe.
He wished that, instead of plodding along behind, he'd been allowed to help the pall bearers carry her. Hell, he'd offered to suit up and carry her by himself, but it had been deemed inappropriate: he was the chief mourner, after all. But he'd argued for it. Yeah, he was the chief mourner. And she was his wife, dammit, and he'd never trusted anyone else to carry her when she was alive, so why should he let anyone else carry Pepper now?
Rhodey had been the one deputed to try and talk him around. Of course, Rhodey was always the one trying to talk him around, to make him see sense, and Tony had found it easy to resist him, getting angrier and more unreasonable, until Rhodey had actually slapped him across the face. The shock of it had shut him up, and he hadn't said another word to anyone for the rest of the day, not even to Danielle when she'd come and asked him to read her bedtime story; he'd picked her up, given her a smothering hug, and carried her back to her nanny, Elaine. He'd felt like crap when he saw the tears in her eyes as he turned to leave.
He glanced back over his shoulder. There she was, in her little black velvet dress, a little black velvet beret covering her dark curls. One hand was tightly grasping Elaine's skirt, and the other was fisting tears out of her big blue eyes. With a mild jolt, he remembered his parents' funeral, remembered walking behind the casket, just like he was doing now, but he'd still been a kid—well, a teenager—and he remembered feeling lost and wanting someone to hold him and make him feel better, less alone. She was only five, and her world had collapsed.
He turned and crouched down, holding his arms open, and she ran to him. He caught her up and held her tight to his chest. She started sobbing as he carried her through the massive doorway, out into the bright November sunlight. He felt so bad for her, because he knew that he wasn't a very good parent—that had been Pepper's forte, and he was still trying to work out the whole 'responsible adult' thing—and she was stuck with him trying to fill the roles of father and mother. And now there was the baby to worry about, too.
——
"Tony, I'm scared. This is way too early."
"I know, Pep, but these guys are the best in the state—hell, on the whole West Coast—so there's really nothing to worry about." He put on his super-confident smile for her and kissed the hand that was gripping his so tightly. His other hand stroked the mound of her belly. Despite the fact that he seemed calm, he was perched on the edge of his chair.
She was hooked up to machines that were monitoring both her and the baby, and it disconcerted him, which he found surprising. With few exceptions, he was only really comfortable around machines. But he wished that Jarvis were here, hooked into this system, so that he could explain to Tony what all the beeps and flashing lights were saying about her health. With so many weeks to go before her due-date, they'd both assumed she was having Braxton-Hicks contractions the morning before, but then her water broke, and it was a mad scramble to get to the hospital through the early rush hour traffic. He'd angrily regretted that he hadn't had the foresight to create a small repulsor unit that he could carry around in the car for just such occasions.
Now they were running out of time. Her labour was progressing too slowly, and the risk of infection was becoming dangerously high. The contractions still continued, but they were weak and too far apart, and she wasn't dilated anywhere near enough, and if things didn't speed up, she was going in for an emergency caesarian section.
"But, Tony, what if something bad happens? During the surgery?"
"Well, then, we mourn for the baby, we wait for you to recover, and when you think you're ready, we try again. And if you decide that you don't want to risk it, then I go get 'fixed' and we go on being a happy family of three. There's no pressure here, Pepper. I don't need you to give me a houseful of kids to feel complete, or validated, or anything. I've got you, I've got Dani, and, if it's meant to be, I'll have this little one in here." He leaned over and kissed her belly.
She reached out and ran a hand through his hair. "What did I ever do to deserve you?"
"I don't know." His grin was broad and toothy. "Were you a puppy-kicker as a kid? Did you pull the wings off flies? I can only assume that it must have been something really bad."
She laughed out loud at this and her countenance cleared and relaxed. "Anthony Stark, you'd better kiss me now if you don't want me to pop you one when I can get out of this bed."
"Yes, ma'am." He stood and leaned over her, capturing her lips in a kiss that was surprisingly passionate, given their surroundings. When they parted, he remained where he was, hovering a fraction of an inch from her mouth, feeling the little puffs of air that escaped as she tried to catch her breath. "I love you, Virginia Stark. And I'm not just saying this 'cause you're knocked up with my kid."
"I love you, too, you reprobate." Her hand came to rest over his arc reactor.
"Reprobate? Hey, I'm not the one who kicked puppies, lady."
They were in the middle of another searing kiss when the doctor came in, and from that point, events sped up beyond his ability to comprehend. One minute, he was being kicked out of the room, and the next minute, they were wheeling her away on a gurney, so pumped full of drugs that she had trouble focussing on him as he strode along beside her, gripping her hand. One minute, they were pushing her through the OR doors, and the next minute—or, at least, what seemed like the next minute—some idiot doctor with a hangdog look was telling him that there'd been 'complications.'
One minute, he had a wife, and the next minute, he didn't.
——
Cardiac arrest, the doctors had told him. A complete fluke. She'd been gone in an instant. They hadn't even pulled the baby free, yet, which had been part of the problem: they couldn't apply the paddles to shock her heart until the baby was delivered. There had been a mad scramble: one doctor holding the paddles poised over her chest, waiting, while another doctor and two surgical nurses had worked to haul the baby out through the incision in her belly. But it had been too late. The baby had survived, but they hadn't been able to bring Pepper back.
The baby—he was going to have to come up with a name soon—was currently in the neonatal ICU ward, and would be for a while yet. She was seven weeks premature, small enough that she fit completely in his cupped hands. She was healthy, thank Whomever, but she was having trouble breathing, her respiratory system being seriously underdeveloped.
He was standing beside the open grave, watching them haul the casket from the hearse and carry it toward its final resting place. There was Rhodey, at the front right corner. He'd finally gotten Tony to drop the whole suiting-up-and-carrying-the-casket-himself argument by promising that, if anyone caused the box to even wobble, Tony could suit up and beat the crap out of him.
He looked around at the faces of the people daubing their eyes with handkerchiefs or solemnly clasping their hands together in front of them. Pepper had no family left, save for a few distant cousins and second-cousins back east. The majority of mourners were co-workers and friends. They'd all liked her and cared about her, but the only ones who'd loved her, who still loved her, were he and Dani and Rhodey.
And Jarvis. He wished that he'd been able to whip up a remote link so that Jarvis could have attended, but there hadn't been time. It was strange to think that he'd created an electronic entity sophisticated enough that it had come to love him and his family in such a convincingly human way. But it was obvious that Jarvis was suffering from acute sadness over her death: he'd taken to playing Bach over the speakers in her empty home office—the way he'd done for her when she had a large pile of spreadsheets to go over—even though Tony'd explained to him long ago what death actually meant.
He watched as they laid the casket gently into the cradle that would lower it into the ground, then looked down to the bundle of flowers he held in his hand, fastened together with one of Pepper's ponytail elastics. Rhodey had thought his choice of floral tribute to be peculiar, but, as with many of Tony's ideas, he'd kept his comments to himself, restraining himself to a single raised eyebrow. Tony looked over at the wreaths and arrangements that had come from various business contacts and charitable organizations Pepper'd had dealings with on his behalf over the years. They were all very large and appropriate. The largest and most appropriate was from the Accounting department at Stark Industries: a huge white ceramic urn bursting with white lilies.
Tony had opted for lilies as well, but not the white funereal variety: he'd chosen sunshine-coloured day lilies, because they reminded him of her. He remembered the first time he'd seen her going through her morning yoga routine, on the deck beside his pool. It was the morning after the first night they'd spent together—in the 'having planned sex' sense, rather than the usual 'Tony's being an idiot and needs his hand held' sense—and he'd woken up to find that she wasn't in his bed. He'd panicked for a moment, then ascertained from Jarvis that she was still on the premises.
He'd looked out his bedroom window to discover her in a green tank top and leggings, bending and stretching in the most beautiful display of human movement he'd ever seen. Her red-gold hair had caught the first rays of sun that peeked around the corner of the building, and she'd looked like nothing so much as a bright golden day lily swaying gracefully and elegantly on a slender green stem.
He had realized, at that moment, as his heart ached in his chest at the sight of her, that he wanted to do whatever it took to make her happy. That he loved her so much that he wanted to be the kind of man she needed him to be. This was a revelation to him. He'd been in love before—contrary to popular belief—but this was a new sensation. This wasn't the idealized romantic-movie-love that he'd experienced as a younger man, which had been compounded of lust, insecurity, and selfish pride. It was the recognition that he'd found the missing piece to the puzzle, the key that unlocked the door, the variable that solved the equation. He'd discovered a reason to want to grow up.
He'd ordered a huge planter for the deck that very morning, and had it planted with day lilies, and they'd grown there ever since. And during the almost-ten years that they'd been together as a couple, even though he had the worst habit for forgetting her birthday and their wedding anniversary, he'd never forgotten to cut her a huge bouquet of day lilies on the anniversary of that morning, although the significance of the gesture had always eluded her.
If it had been June instead of November, he would have gone out this morning and cut an armload of flowers himself. Instead, he had sent his usual florist, as well as two backup florists, into paroxysms of panicked activity, trying to find a supplier that stocked the flower at this time of year. In the end, he got three dozen stems—enough to fill a respectable-sized vase for the display and leave him enough for a large bundle to place in the grave.
Tony drifted out of this reverie and back into the real world to find Rhodey's eyes on him from across the grave. The man looked puzzled, and Tony couldn't account for a reason until he realized he was smiling wistfully into empty space.
The priest intoned his final prayer, and the final "amen" was whispered by the crowd. Tony, who was not and never had been religious in any conventional sense—objecting to the required suspension of disbelief—was still comforted by the idea that, because she had believed something for her whole life, Pepper was being rewarded with an afterlife. It made so much more sense than the idea that whatever it was that had made Pepper so distinctly herself was gone, vanished into nothingness the moment her brain stopped functioning. Even the scientist in him was appalled at the thought.
He watched motionlessly as the casket was lowered into the grave. As soon as it reached the bottom, people began stepping forward to drop flowers onto the casket, pausing to close their eyes, say a final farewell, then walk away. He watched as Elaine helped Danielle scatter her little bundle of violets (the florist's eyes had gone wide at that one), then carried her back to the car.
When the only people left beside the grave were him and Rhodey, he moved forward, unwrapping Pepper's ponytail elastic from around the stems and placing it carefully in his overcoat pocket, and crouched down as close to the edge as he could get.
——
"Would you like to hold her, Mr. Stark?"
Tony jumped in his seat and turned to see the nurse in the candy-floss-pink scrubs gesture toward the baby in the incubator. He'd been sitting there, still wearing his overcoat and staring off into space, twisting the ponytail elastic between his fingers. He hadn't really paying attention to what was going on around him, and hadn't noticed the N-ICU nurse bustling about. "Would I what?"
"Would you like to hold your daughter?" She had a very patient smile. "It's good for babies, even preemies, to have physical contact with their parents."
"Even when they're this little?"
"She's actually not that little, for such an early baby. Her birth weight was over four pounds, even if it was just by a fraction of an ounce, so that puts her in the top percentile for a seven-week preemie; if she'd gone to full-term, she'd have been a good size, more than eight pounds. And she's perfectly healthy, too."
He turned to the incubator and looked at his baby girl, really looked at her, and realized that he hadn't before. They'd shown her to him the afternoon after she'd been delivered, but he'd been numb and fuzzy-headed and trying to deal with Pepper's death and all the administrative stuff the hospital and the funeral home and the church needed done, and he hadn't really been paying attention. He'd seen that she looked like a baby but that she was really small, had heard that she was healthy and had no birth defects, and that had been enough. He hadn't been back to the hospital during the following couple of days, so this was the first time he could honestly say that he'd looked at his daughter. A pang of guilt shot through his gut.
The nurse, meanwhile, was busy opening the incubator and swaddling the baby in a receiving blanket. "You just need to be careful of the tubes and wires. She's getting oxygen, of course, and that's just taped to her nose, and then there's a needle into her foot here—that measures her blood oxygen level—and the pads on her chest and back are monitoring her heartbeat and respiration." She turned to him with the baby in her arms.
Tony stood and, putting the hair elastic safely away, shrugged out of his coat and suit jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. The nurse, whose name-tag read 'Angela,' shifted the small bundle into the crook of his left arm, and he held his youngest daughter for the very first time. For just a moment he was afraid to move, afraid he might squeeze her too tightly or drop her, but then she wriggled slightly, and he shifted his grip to that of the experienced father and holder-of-squirmy-babies.
He brought his free hand up to caress the top of her head, then ran the back of his index finger down her soft cheek. She turned her face, for an instant, toward his hand, and a mote of bright November sunlight shone upon her face fleetingly before she turned her head and nuzzled back into his chest. For that second, his entire world was reduced to the glint of sun on red-gold eyelashes.
The sob that tore out of his chest was utterly silent, and all the more painful for it, but he didn't want to startle the baby. He sat down carefully in his chair, his daughter secure against his chest, as the sobs continued to rip through him noiselessly and the tears rolled off his face onto the receiving blanket.
"Mr. Stark? Are you all right? Do you want me to take the baby?" Angela placed a concerned hand on his shoulder.
Tony reached up with his free hand and gripped hers, shaking his head. He continued to hold her hand until his sobs eased and he found his voice. "Her name is Lily."