A/N: So, this is my first Tony/Pepper story. Well, part Tony/Pepper, part Tony-centric, part numbers, etc. I do hope that you enjoy it, though, and please review with your thoughts! Update: I made some minor changes to this, no big deal. Also, if you don't get the ending, just private message it to me, and I'll explain it to you :)
"Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them."
― Paulo Coelho
1.
It might've been a Tuesday, or a Wednesday. It was somewhere in between Sunday and Saturday, though, and for this, Tony is sure. He's old, now, and he can't keep names straight, and his wit is becoming lazier by the second, but he is positive that on the day that Pepper Potts left him (people had started to call her 'Virginia,' though Tony never truly saw why) it had been raining.
Of course, that seems to be an appropriate factor in loss, isn't it? And it rained so much that year that, with all the deaths and births surrounding it, Tony must've been imagining the pouring against the windows. And maybe the umbrella clasped in Bruce's weathered hand was just dreamed up. Perhaps the thunder hadn't been so much in the human world as it was in the world of Tony's mind, where it rained for a good long time.
2.
His aged face shocks him several weeks after. Tony Stark had been looking in the mirror since a girl had once called him "cute," and it had never failed him until now. The reflection was looked like something of an omen, Tony thought, as he softly fingered the previously invisible wrinkles, the greying hair around his ears, the prominent veins in his neck. He considers for a moment, that he might call a doctor, call S.H.I.E.L.D. even, as if this were some evil plot of Loki's.
Though Loki hasn't shown his face to Tony's in years, and he hasn't needed a doctor since Afghanistan. He closes his eyes for a moment, wallowing silently in thought and excuses, convincing himself that when his eyes open, he will see the young Tony Stark again-
And perhaps Pepper's voice might even ring in his ears for the first time in what feels like eternity.
He's disappointed.
3.
He's been thinking a lot about death, lately. Of course, he hasn't painted Stark Towers black yet, and he doesn't lie in the middle of graveyards on cloudy days, but the thought has been reaching to him. He begins to check off all the casualties, all the sicknesses, all the people that he'd let slip in and out of his life.
He counts seven knowns-he starts with his father, and ends with Clint Barton, with several important and unimportant people in between. Bruce still lives in the depths of Stark Tower, and Steve sends him Christmas cards from somewhere in Ohio every year. Thor never dies, he reminds himself, when he starts to think back to the last year he saw the terribly young god. Natasha was towards the latter of the seven, Coulson in the beginning.
(Pepper may've been the eighth, but it slips his mind. Accidentally, maybe, but perhaps not.)
4.
He remembers when he'd thought that he was going to die.
Sure, it was when he was younger and his hair more full, and when the name "Steve Rogers" was nothing more than a story. But the feeling replays itself in his heart as his birthdays pass, and it probably rains more in his head than it does in reality. He begins to count back instead of forward-is he seventy, eighty, or is he ten, nine, eight? Seven more years to go?
It's strange-some people go the lengths of the earth to live longer, while Tony sits in the midst of Stark Towers and waits for precious life to be over.
And sometimes, he reminds himself, he also once thought he was going to die first.
5.
It was a Friday, he discovers. After years spent wondering and mindlessly swatting away at the thought he finally asks Bruce absentmindedly in the middle of breakfast, and Bruce answers him accurately.
He asks him immediately after, what day is was today. Friday, Bruce says.
He wonders how long it's been.
6.
It was most certainly a Monday, because the night before Tony had been complaining about an upcoming work week and Bruce had gone to church. It wasn't raining, but it was cloudy, and for that, everyone was grateful. Sunshine was just obnoxious when it timed itself around a death.
The number of attendees was surprising. A lack of them, more specifically, Bruce thinks, as he looks about the funeral home, then the graveyard. Tony's parties were lavish with life, and people, and human presence, and his funeral was everything but. Some called it irony, but Bruce never liked the term.
Steve drives in, somewhat familiar-looking children following him. Thor doesn't arrive, but lightening strikes so close to the hospital that Bruce knows better. There's a young man with sandy hair and familiar shaped eyes whose last name is Barton, for a moment, Bruce almost smiles at a memory.
Everyone else is a stranger.
7.
She stands in the back, somewhere close to Jim Barton, somewhere far from the casket. No one sees her-or maybe some did, and just looked away. She is aged now, and her eyes don't spark.
She wonders how long ago it'd been since she had left Tony Stark.
She does remember, it had been raining.
Fin.