Pepper uses the next morning to organize plenty of things: After three short hours of sleep, she had decided that she needs a couple of days in which she could fully commit to learning magic with Wong.

The sorcerer had assured her it would be no problem if she wanted to stay at the Sanctum as long as she wanted, so she is willing to take the offer.

Happy and Rhodey have agreed to take care of Morgan and Bruce would take her place at the Maria Stark Foundation.

After explaining to Morgan why she had to stay with Uncle Happy and Uncle Rhodey for a couple of days, she kisses her goodbye.

"You can always call me. At any time. But I have to go to help daddy."

"Can I come with you and help daddy too?"

Pepper has to fight the tears, looking at her little girl, determined to help.

"Another time, yes?"

"But I want to!"

Pepper doesn't know what to answer, so she hugs her tightly.

"Promise me to take care of Uncle Rhodey while I'm gone, okay?"

"Okay."

With a heavy heart, she tears herself away from Morgan and nods at Rhodey.

"Hope to see you soon."

He nods back and takes Morgan's hand into his.

-–-

A short time later she arrives at 177a Bleecker Street to realize she had never seen the Sanctum from the outside. It looks disappointingly ordinary.

She heads to the front door and rings the bell.

The person who opens the door isn't Wong. It's not even a person, but a floating red cape. Then, she remembers what Tony had told her about Strange's sentient cloak. At the time she thought it was a joke.

"Hello, nice to meet you," she greets.

The cloak bows to her and motions her to come inside.

"Are you alone? Where is everyone?"

Its answer is best described as a shrug. It wraps itself around Pepper's suitcase to carry it upstairs, down a hallway into a cozy little room.

"That's my room?"

The cloak nods after it set down the suitcase gently on the bed.

"What now?"

Excitedly, the cloak grabs her hand with one of its corners and pulls her with it. They end up in front of a door on the third floor. The cloak opens it and holds it for her.

Behind the door lies the library. Pepper expects to find Wong there, but it is Strange who sits on a table by the window.

Surprised he looks up.

"Oh! I didn't know you were coming so early. How did you get in?"

"The cloak let me in."

Strange looks from her to the red fabric.

"Consider yourself honored. There are not many people it likes."

Hastily he stands up and offers her his hand, scarred, and shaking as it was.

"Great to see you again, Ms. Potts ...or Mrs. Stark?"

"Pepper is fine."

"I'm Stephen."

"I know," she answers.

An awkward silence follows.

He walks to a bookshelf on the wall. Pepper follows him.

"Where shall we begin?" he asks.

"Why didn't you tell me about the complications of the spell?" she asks directly.

"Wong told you about that..."

"Indeed."

"Listen, you don't have to worry about the complications. I'd rather die myself than let you or Tony be harmed."

"Why would you care? You don't know me, and you've known him for how long? A day?"

He turns around, to glare at her in anger.

"I have known Tony Stark for 6,725 years! And I've seen him die over 14 Million times!"

Shocked, she looks at him.

"What?"

"On Titan, before the battle against Thanos, I used the Time Stone find out what future lay ahead of us. I searched 14,000,605 possible outcomes."

"Yes, Tony told me that you looked into the future."

He nods with a bitter grin. "Problem is: That's not how the time stone works. You don't just look into the future. To know a possible future, you have to live it. Live, die, repeat – over and over."

She clasps her hand over her mouth. Merely the thought of what his words implicate scares her.

"In all these possibilities I found no way to prevent Thanos from obtaining the stone."

"Why didn't you try to run away?"

"We did. But there was no corner in the universe far enough that he or his minions didn't find us. Sometimes we managed to hide for years, but in the end, they always got us. Our all-time record was about five years."

He rubs a tear out of the corner of his eye.

"That one was a particularly nasty death – not to say that any of those deaths were funny. But Tony – he always fought with all he had to give, until the bitter end. Reckless idiot! How could I not have fallen in love with him?"

Pepper feels like someone pulled the rug beneath her feet. Strange was in love with Tony?

She looks at the sorcerer who is no longer able to hold back the tears. With his back against the wall, he slides down to sit the floor.

"Imagine how it felt to realize the only way to save the universe is to sacrifice the person you love most."

He looks up at her.

"You say this is all my fault. Don't tell me you're not thinking that!" Bitterly, he nods. "You're right. I wasn't good enough – I wasn't strong enough. I didn't try hard enough finding this one perfect solution. It had to be somewhere out there, and I lack the imagination to find it."

"Maybe this here is it, you know – the perfect solution," Pepper suggests. "It's not all lost yet."

She looks down into his beautiful blue-gray eyes, wet with tears.

At this moment she realizes that he would lose as much as she does when Tony dies. Maybe even more because people will feel sorry for her, but nobody is going to understand his grief.

She sits down beside him.

"All things considered, Tony and I have been fortunate – we haven't lost many of our friends in the snap. We married, we got a wonderful daughter and the cabin by the lake... It wasn't always easy, but all in all, we had five years of happiness. Is it greedy that I want more?"

He stares long at her, pondering what to answer.

"No, I don't think so. That five years of happiness with him – I got them too, you know. We were on the run from Thanos, but we had our strange version of a happy family, with Peter and the Guardians... and Tony, who loved me back." He looks at her, tears streaming down his face. "Five years, that's more than most people get, but it will never be enough. I understand there won't be more for me, but the two of you deserve all the time in the world."

"Why just us? Aren't you jealous?"

"How could I? He told me so much about you. Somewhere along the line, I too fell in love with you. At least his version of you. I loved how much he loved you and had still so much love left for me."

He smiles to himself, and for a moment he looks so young and soft that she wants to hug him.

After a second, he seems to catch himself and his expression changes to the neutral mask he's always wearing.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have told you that. Please forget it."

Without looking back at her, he flees the room, leaving her on her own to deal with the chaos of her feelings.