Wake
+
Several years from this moment,
she will be awakened when the man beside her jumps violently from a deep sleep into full consciousness. She pretends to still be asleep because she knows he hates the thought of disturbing her. She's also got a pre-breakfast meeting, followed by a breakfast meeting tomorrow, both of which she would like to be well-rested for. But this? This is routine. She doesn't need to roll over and look at him to know he's drenched with sweat, that his heart is racing, that he's had another nightmare. Over the years, they have talked about his dreams. There is a surprising variety to them, reoccurring themes more than reoccurring events. Sometimes, he dies. Sometimes, he drinks. Sometimes, he's ripped open and he's not flesh and blood on the inside. Sometimes, he's haunted by the deaths he feels responsible for.
He fishes around the floor for his underwear because he insists on sleeping naked, says its the only way he is comfortable. (Which is fine, but she knows he's lying. He only sleeps naked when she goes to bed with him. If she is detained, or he's napping in the workshop, he gravitates towards pants.) He pulls on his boxer-briefs, finds his robe and wanders off to watch television for the rest of the night. This is also routine. He won't wander far enough away that she can't hear the TV, but she's used to it, and she can go back to sleep.
Two things to keep in mind on nights like this are that Tony has his pride and Tony feels he has a duty to take care of her. He doesn't want to appear weak or needy to her. (He is never the former, but always the latter. She keeps it to herself.) If she dotes on him because of this, part of him will resent her for it. He's also, well...he's a hero. He has an innate need to rescue her, protect her and see that her needs are addressed. It's sort of cute, but mostly annoying. She knows she's not the first woman he's argued with when it comes to his notions of chivalry or being a gentleman. (And he is a gentleman, despite what the tabloids say.) He can't know he's disturbed her, or worried her, because it conflicts too greatly with his idea of who he is or what his role is in their relationship. He is always, always striving to become something greater - it is something they have in common, possibly the most important thing - and while being human is not a step backwards, part of him will always think it so.
In the morning, she is sure she'll find him working or perhaps he'll have left a note about some Avengers business, no worse for wear, his demons chased off for another day. Pepper will prepare for her meetings, skim the news feeds and life will go on. Until morning, she goes back to sleep.
+
A few months from this moment,
she will be awakened by a sudden, loud alarm. It is a time when she has forgiven him just a little bit, but more importantly, she has forgiven herself. Her romantic notions of what They could have been were unrealistic and childish. She had been mad at herself, first and foremost, because she was too old and too experienced to think she was living in a fairy tale. True Love's Kiss is just a kiss. It's not a promise or a commitment. She thinks it was in piss-poor taste of him to go running off into another woman's pants after she'd kissed him good-bye - hence, she's forgiven him, too. A little bit - but it wasn't infidelity. They had kissed before and in the long run, it had never changed anything. Finding out that she'd gone to bed with him nearly immediately after he'd been with someone else made her feel like an idiot taken in by the same old charms he puts on for everyone else. After a bit of soul searching and staring at miserable reflections of herself in the mirror, she realized she was an idiot. But not because she'd chosen to express her feelings for him physically. Taking everything she expected of him as a given made her an idiot. She was too old and too experienced to not treat proper communication with the weight it deserved.
Eyes wide, sheet clutched to her bare chest - she had specifically planned on not sleeping with him on their first real date, but the man knows what he's doing when it comes to seduction - she shouts as she sits up, "What is that?"
Tony is already armored up. "Avengers priority alert. I have to go."
"I'll go with you." She doesn't have immediate access to her armor like he does, but -
"No."
A pile-up of emotion runs through her, colliding and running into one another. It's impossible to pick one from the others - fury and pain and embarrassment - she thought they had an understanding about her as a hero, she thought he respected Rescue, how dare he leave her behind like she was a nobody? "I have every right -"
"You aren't an Avenger."
"I can join." It's such a simple and obvious thing that she can't believe she's never seriously considered it before. "How does someone join the Avengers?"
"You're asked to join."
"So, ask me," she says, climbing to her knees on the mattress, tangled in a flurry of bedding. Her hair is a mess.
He shakes his head, slightly. Iron Man has always been like that, cold, distant, professional. He tends not to emote much or gesture grandly, the way Tony does. He compartmentalizes. He used to do it because his identity was a secret, so Iron Man had to be a different person than Tony Stark in his mannerisms and speech. Now he does it to protect himself. It's one of his walls, another way to be armored. "I'm not the person in charge, I don't have the power to -, I don't have the time to stand here arguing with you. Priority alert. I have to go."
He does.
She fumes. As the days pass, her self-respect takes another beating and that miserable face in the mirror returns. But he doesn't.
In the weeks it takes before Iron Man is spotted overhead again, Rescue saves a total of 147 people from five burning buildings, foils four bank robberies, locates three kidnapped children, returns two derailed trains to their tracks and catches one oil truck that careened off a cliff-side highway. (Not in that order.) Tony comes back pale. He's lost weight and his eyes are sunken. She knows what he looks like when he's been crying. The team is a man smaller than it was when they left. While she wishes she had been there, for whatever difference she could have possibly made, she feels more regret than anger when she holds his hand during the funeral.
He does have the power to ask someone to join the Avengers. Maybe not an official power, like Steve Rogers', but if he offers someone a place on his team, no one will challenge him. She knows he's not going to ask her, not now. Maybe someday, she will have earned the title of 'Earth's Mightiest' but she can't have it just because she wants it. Until then, if it ever comes, she's satisfied with who she is. Her suit was designed for rescue and recovery. There is a human face to every challenge that she has overcome and she remembers them all. When she came out of the anasthetic haze with her first implants, she had felt less human. Now she knows she is more human than human because she affirms the scantity of life every time she puts on her armor, because charity and caring for mankind is the greatest thing people have to offer. She saves people.
Where ever his Avengers duties have taken Tony, his challenges don't have a human face anymore. He looks into the maw of destruction and other massively colorful things like that. He doesn't seem to understand the value of his own life, so she can't help wanting to go where he goes because she never knows what condition he'll be in when he gets back. But the world is a lot bigger than Tony Stark and she cannot focus all of her energy on one man. There are countless other people that need her, that can't count on any other hero to deal with their disasters. Pepper - Rescue - has her own role to play.
0
At this moment,
she wakes up. It's a slow, muddled sort of wakefulness in a dark room. But there is a light in her chest. She can feel its weight inside of her. It's buzzing with energy that she alone can harness. Pepper smiles.
-
A scant few weeks before this moment,
but it feels like a lifetime, possibly a thousand lifetimes - her world came crashing to a halt, because when she woke up, Tony was still in a coma. Steve Rogers had returned to walk among the living. She had asked for a sign that everything would get better and what greater sign could there be than the rise of Captain America himself? Of the one person who had every right to reject Tony without another thought, by his side, simply because the man was in trouble? After everything she had given up for him, after all the people that had rallied around him, Tony was supposed to be okay. But he wasn't. He had been wrong. She didn't even understand how he could be wrong about something as important as his own life. She knew he messed up on his math from time to time - he worked faster than he could really pay attention to - but of all the times to go back and check his work, preparing this operation was the one. She didn't know what to do, she just needed to see him.
She'd been here before. When it was Happy, when it was her husband, and she knew he was never going to be okay, she had wanted to end it all. That was her right as his wife. She didn't have any rights over Tony. He left the choice to whether he would live or die up to a group consensus and they chose live. They chose to remove her replusor rig, to tear her iron suit to pieces, to upload his back-up consciousness and bring him back after he sacrificed himself. He had given up himself, his mind, his legacy to protect everyone from the consequences of his mistakes. He accepted that he alone had to stand up for what he had done, and that if it killed him, then that was it. He said if they wanted him to, he would return, otherwise, he accepted his death.
The choice was made. They wanted him to come home.
She slept through the implementation of his instructions. She had gone to sleep not even knowing for sure if she really wanted to go through with this, though she had every expectation that things would be back to normal when she woke up. It wasn't that she wanted him to die, it just struck her as so deeply wrong that he could plan out a situation like this. So many of their friends and loved ones had sacrificed just as much as him and for them, it had been the end. Tony had planned a backdoor out of his sacrifice all along. Why did he never try to make a backdoor for anyone else?
And yet he was lying unresponsive across the hall. She had never thought it would ever come to this. All the times he said that this was the end, all the times he told her about what he was doing to himself, she had never actually believed him. He fed her End of the Line scenarios all the time and still triumphed. He was a man who had seriously told her on more than one occasion that she was not allowed to be mad at him lest he go out and get killed by villains without having ever made up with her. She wasn't crazy enough to believe that Iron Man was truly invincible, but it was hard to imagine him truly defeated. Throughout all the hardships of his exile from the superhuman community, she'd had only one, tiny moment of doubt.
In the end, his selfish planning didn't amount to anything. It didn't work. He was still in a vegetative state. His eyes were open, empty, glassy.
Maria said if she wasn't careful, her heart would fall right out of her chest. As usual, Maria was dead wrong when it came to her and Tony. There was nothing holding it in anymore. Pepper's heart was going to fall out anyway.
-
Years and years before this moment,
Pepper Potts never dreamed of the world she would one day wake up to.
Disclaimers: Make Mine Marvel! Or rather, these characters, concepts and histories are not mine, but they are Marvel's.