Thanks to everyone for reading/following/reviewing/etc! It's really encouraging to see how many of you have enjoyed the story so far :)

I should probably say that I haven't read any of the comics, so as far as Tony's suit and stuff goes, I only know what I know from the movies / ravenously Googling for details that probably don't exist. That said, there will be improvisation (I'm sorry for any and all details that I get wrong).

Anyway, thanks again, and I hope you guys like this one. Let me know what you think?


"This is a bad idea," Pepper fretted as she carefully grabbed Tony's arc reactor from the floor. She held it out in front of her as though it might explode at a moment's notice.

"You'll be fine," Friday droned. "Remember, I'm connected to the armor's systems, so I'll be there to guide you along the way."

Pepper brushed her thumb along the reactor's blue core; it was warm to the touch. She had donned an Iron Man suit only once, back when the Malibu mansion was under siege, and the moment had been so brief—the circumstances so terrifying—that she had hardly known what was going on.

And yet….

She looked down at Tony, who was still slumped against the wall. There was no time to debate with herself. His life was at stake—and Pepper would be damned if she let him die now, after they had finally found each other.

Pepper took a deep breath and released it through her teeth. "Okay," she hissed, bringing the reactor closer to her chest. "Okay." She turned her head to the side and made a face.

"Tony authorized you to use this suit, should the need arise," said Friday. "Go ahead and connect it to your chest."

At the word "connect," Pepper imagined a pair of spider-like legs emerging from the reactor's plated edges and reaching hungrily for the veins beneath her skin, like some kind of metallic parasite.

There came a trembling pressure around her right ankle. Pepper looked down and into Tony's bleary, half-closed eyes; his fingers were wrapped weakly around her leg. "Come on, Potts," he rattled, his voice little more than a grated whisper. "Take me out...for a night on the town…."

Spurred on by that glimmer in his eyes, Pepper zipped up her (Tony's) jacket and slapped the arc reactor on top; there was a series of clicks as the device fastened itself to the leather—not to her skin, thankfully. She could feel its subtle warmth through the fabric. Pepper breathed in and looked back to Tony. "Okay," she began, mustering her courage, "What do I do now?"

Tony peered up at her from where he sat, slumped and bleeding on the floor, and a pained grin tugged at his lips. He released his hold on her leg; instead, his bloodied hand came up to rest lightly against his sternum.

Pepper shadowed the motion and covered the arc reactor with her palm. Rays of white-blue light streamed through the gaps between her fingers. She exhaled and pressed once, hard, against the device, and the suit activated.

Streams of scarlet, gold, and silver bled from the reactor's core. Pepper extended her arms as the reaching alloys spread toward her fingers and down her legs, encasing her in a protective shell. The inner layer of the armor expanded to cushion her joints. There was a brief, lancing pain in her left ankle as the padding pressed in, but then the support seemed to stabilize the injured joint, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

There was a section that remained incomplete—a relatively wide patch over her left shoulder—and she assumed it was a result of Tony's recent battles. The air in the workshop seemed suddenly cool when compared to the suit's automated temperature systems; Pepper looked down at Tony, and he managed to produce a somewhat convincing smirk.

"Hot."

She rolled her eyes at that. "How do I put the helmet on?"

"The suit has interfaced with your nervous system," Friday told her, "so it will respond to 'thought commands.' That is, you will it, and the suit does it—assuming the function is possible."

"Wow. Okay…." Pepper squeezed her eyes shut and scrunched up her brow—eliciting a faint chuckle from Tony—and as she pictured the helmet in her mind's eye, there came the high, flickering sound of the suit's activation. She opened her eyes to find that the world was now a surprisingly vivid display of screens and numbers and visual readings. Pepper knelt beside Tony. Her interface showed a readout of his wounds; blue reticles zoomed in on the tear in his side and the raw, muddled wounds on his hands.

"Tony," Pepper said, and his heavy-lidded eyes drifted up to her. "I'm going to have to carry you. Try to stay awake, okay?"

He grunted. "Mm-hmm." As Pepper reached for him, she noticed the bloodied glimmer of something in his left hand. It was her engagement ring. Her chest tightened; gently, she plucked it from his palm, and as the armor of her ring finger receded, she slipped it back on (she would need to clean it later). Then Pepper wrapped an arm around his shoulders and under the bend of his knees, and she hugged his wounded frame to her chest as she stood. He was amazingly light, thanks to the suit.

"Friday, open the door for us, please."

"You got it." Tony had modified the workshop door to look like nothing more than a seamless wall from the outside. Thankfully, he hadn't damaged it in his destructive throes. The rails hissed smoothly as the door opened, and Pepper, clutching Tony, stepped into the night.


Friday's voice hummed through the helmet's systems. "Since your hands are full, you'll need to deploy the suit's repulsor wings to keep you stable and give you an extra boost."

"Right." Pepper looked up, where the stars were still hidden behind the clouds. "Flying."

This is a really bad idea.

A pair of angular, paneled attachments formed between her shoulder blades (the images on her interface looked rather small to be classified as "wings," but Pepper trusted Tony's—and, by extension, Friday's—judgment). She glanced down at Tony, who appeared to have fallen asleep. "We need to hurry," she whispered, more to herself than anyone else.

"You're right," said Friday. "Now, up you go!"

"Wha—" Pepper's startled exclamation was cut short as, suddenly, she was propelled into the air. A steady stream of energy peeled from the soles of the armor's boots; in a matter of seconds, she had breached the sea of her neighborhood, and its slow and reluctant lights flickered dimly below her. "Friday!" Pepper snapped, clinging desperately to Tony for fear that she might drop him, "Not okay!" (had she just thought that she trusted the AI's judgment?)

"You needed a boost."

"I needed to get my bearings," she growled, trying and failing to keep her mind from assessing her current elevation. Unfortunately, her interface did the assessment for her; she was currently 107 feet from the cold, broken pavement, and all of the other carnage below. "Shit!"

"'Sometimes, you gotta run before you can walk.'''

"Don't quote Tony," Pepper scoffed, though her voice was exceptionally high-pitched because of her fear. "It's a cheap move."

Friday deftly ignored her exasperated jab. "You can level out now," the AI said. "I've programmed HQ's coordinates into the suit's systems, but the autopilot function isn't working properly."

"Why?"

"It has to do with the disconnect that occurred when the suit left our atmosphere. I can't repair it on my own; Boss will have to do it later, when he's recovered."

Pepper sighed.

"Just angle your torso down a little, and the rest of your body will follow. The repulsor wings will kick in shortly to help keep you level," said Friday. "And try to relax. It's much more difficult when you're stiff."

"This is crazy," Pepper muttered. She kept her eyes trained on Tony's features and carefully began to straighten out her form. Soon—or long enough for her to stifle the worst of her tremors, at least—she was relatively close to being parallel with the streets below. There came a muted, energized kick; another stream of light burst from the repulsor wings on her back, and Pepper felt some of the strain in her abdomen release as the attachments fanned out, providing her with better stability and greater speed.

Maybe a little too much speed, in fact.

She was coming up on a maze of skyscrapers. "Uh, Friday?" She ventured, adjusting her grip on Tony (more for her comfort than his). "Think we can slow this thing down a little?"

"You'll be fine."

"You do see the mess of skyscrapers in front of me, right?"

If the AI was capable of producing a human sigh, she would have. "You're thinking of the suit as a tool, Pepper. Instead, try to imagine it as an extension of your body."

Pepper made the mistake of looking down at the ruined streets. "I—what?" She could feel the suit's climate control kick in as her body temperature spiked; cool air slipped along the surface of her skin.

"You don't need to weave through them, unless you want to."

"Oh." Pepper mentally kicked herself. Of course she didn't have to; she could just fly higher, instead. "Right." Feeling a little more confident after her involuntary "boost" into the sky, Pepper craned her neck back (at the protest of her concussed head) and rocketed straight up. The suit responded nicely; with the added propulsion of the wings, she cleared the apex of the oncoming buildings with surprising ease.

"See?" Friday pressed as Pepper headed forward again, caught somewhere between the clouds and the city's surface. "You're getting the hang of it already."

It was strange, Pepper thought, but the ravaged sorrow of New York's remaining citizens didn't seem quite so daunting, so raw, when she was up there. She wasn't thinking about what it would be like to collide with the pavement below. She wasn't worried about losing her grip on Tony's form. She even wondered—for a fraction of a second—if, perhaps, she had only imagined Happy's disappearance, and every other awful thing she had witnessed since then. It was as though she and Tony were safe up there, suspended above the carnage, with only the slow rain and the wind and the mournful city lights to keep them company.

It was as though the world was not in shambles.

But it was.

Indeed, Pepper was reminded as soon as she looked down upon Tony's bloodied visage, and again when she realized that many of the city's lights were not lights at all, but fires.

"Tony?" She doubted that he could hear her over the rush of the wind and rain. "Tony."

Slowly, his eyes opened. "Ah," he grunted, and a trickle of blood was swept from his lips as soon as it appeared, blown adrift by the wind. "S'okay," Tony said, so quietly that Pepper wouldn't have been able to hear him if it weren't for the suit's amplified sound system. "You got me, Pep." His bloodshot eyes skated down to assess their current elevation. They widened slightly before he looked back to her, and he added, "I hope."

Pepper watched the blinking indicator on her interface. According to Friday's calculations, they would reach HQ in less than twenty minutes. "I've got you," she affirmed.


They were nearly upon the base when Pepper realized that she had no idea how to land. "Friday?"

"Feet first," the AI responded. "And disengage your repulsor wings."

But they were moving too fast, and Pepper had become rather accustomed to their previous height—so much so that she didn't realize how fast the ground was coming up to meet her when she started her descent.

"Forget it—Pepper, tuck and roll! Shut off the wings—the wings, Pepper!"

In her defense, Pepper did, in fact, disengage the repulsor wings—but not until she was just feet from the cold ground. She wrapped her arms around Tony and, as if by magic, a wide shield formed around her right forearm, encasing him. She hit the grass on her side with a great crash. Pepper rolled, spinning so rapidly that she was instantly dizzy, and when the spinning finally stopped she was sliding through the grass and dirt like some scarlet, fractured meteor. Eventually, she slammed into something solid and ricocheted onto her back, smoking.

Her helmet disengaged. Pepper coughed into the night sky, shaking. "Tony? Are you okay?" The shield melted away, and Pepper peeled her arms apart to find him curled on top of her, wheezing. "Tony? I'm so sorry, I—are you—"

"...Potts," he mumbled groggily. "I think...that was even worse than my first landing."

She breathed a sigh of relief. "Are you referring to the piano incident?"

"Maybe."

Pepper huffed a weary chuckle and, with great effort, she managed to scoop him back up and bring herself to her feet. She boosted out of the trench she had created (oops) and skirted around the crumpled dent she had left in the side of the building (that could be fixed easily, right?) before making her way to the entrance.


As it turned out, Pepper hadn't even made it to the door before someone emerged to greet her—"greet" meaning "armed with an enormous hammer-axe-thing and crackling with unnatural storm energy."

"Oh," Thor stopped short when he recognized her. "Uh, come in, Pepper." The lightning-glow in his eyes receded as he stepped aside, and the door slid open. He peered down at Tony, who was unconscious once again. "I'm glad to see he survived. He cannot stand on his own?" Pepper shook her head, and she caught a fleeting glimmer of worry in Thor's multicolored gaze.

"He needs a doctor. Where's Bruce?"

"Well, he was sitting very still and staring dejectedly down at the floor, last I saw." Thor's red cape rippled behind him as he strode through the wide entrance hall.

Pepper blinked; her head was throbbing again, and she realized, suddenly, that there could have been a very different answer to that question. She didn't know who had managed to survive, yet. "Oh."

"Banner!" The Asgardian called as he began climbing the stairs. He glanced briefly at Pepper, ensuring that she was close behind. "Take him to the procedure room," he ordered. "I'll find Banner."

Pepper nodded as they reached the top of the stairs and parted ways; Thor took off at a brisk trot, and she continued on to the relatively small medical area at the end of the hall. It was just large enough for two beds and an assortment of emergency equipment. She gently laid Tony upon the nearest bed and remained above him, waiting.


It was only a few minutes before the clamor of footsteps sounded outside the door.

"I'm not that kind of doctor, you guys," she heard Bruce say. "But I'll try."

Rhodey sighed. "That's all we're asking."

Pepper turned around to see the two of them, followed by Natasha, Thor, and Steve Rogers, come striding through the open doorway. Bruce spotted Tony's still form and rushed immediately to his side, glancing briefly at Pepper as he did so.

"Hey, Pepper," he said, softly.

"Hi, Bruce."

The doctor sighed. "Alright," he mustered as he rolled up his sleeves and fiddled briefly with his glasses. "Nat, I'll need your help. The rest of you—give us some space, okay?"

Pepper leaned forward on one foot. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Not at the moment." He pressed his lips together. "I'll let you know as soon as anything changes, okay?"

She pinched the bridge of her nose and was reminded—somewhat painfully—that the armor was still on. "Okay."

Rhodey extended an arm and placed his hand upon her shoulder, as if to ground her. "Come on, Pepper," he murmured. "We'll make you some tea while we wait."

And so she followed him out of the room, and as the armor receded back into the arc reactor on her chest, Pepper felt the rest of the world come bearing down on her shoulders yet again—the world, and the reality of what had happened. Everything became a blur; she saw the smudged, bloodstained ring upon her finger, and she lifted a shaking hand to knead her brow. Rhodey and Steve pressed closer to her as they walked; their presence, flanking her on either side, served as a guiding force that kept her upright until she reached the living area and collapsed onto the couch.

Still, she had to know, had to ask that question, the one she had been too afraid to speak aloud to Tony, lest he crumble.

The room fell deathly silent.

And there, in the quiet, was her answer. The percentage—no, not a percentage, for souls and lives could not be measured in mere numbers. They were too weighty for that. Too important and real and gone. They were too familiar, for they sounded like Peter Parker and Bucky Barnes and Happy Hogan and moms and dads and sisters and brothers and friends and—dare she say it?—children.

Thor hovered close by; Steve began brewing a pot of tea; Rhodey sat down beside her.

And when the words "fifty percent" escaped Rhodey's lips, both denying and confirming the very substance of her thoughts, Pepper wept.