Chapter 2

Tony Stark knelt in front of his mother's grave, remembering the last two times he had attended a funeral. The most recent occasion had been for his father, although that had later proven to be premature. The slot next to his mother was empty once again, as the empty coffin that had been placed there for his father – as sometimes happened when there was no body for a person who was declared legally dead – had been removed after his return.

Tony hated funeral homes and cemeteries for this reason, and avoided coming to them except to pay respect to his mother each year. He particularly hated this one even more since the supposed passing of his father, but it was not just that. He felt uneasy here since the last time he had come to pay respect to his parents. Something had felt off about the place then, and it still lingered now.

He stood up from the marble floor, placing his hand on his mother's engraved name a final time, and then stood back. His mother was not buried outside in the cemetery, but rather inside the mausoleum, within the funeral home itself. With so many people living in New York City, there was not much room for graveyards, and Maria Stark, true to her philanthropic nature, had not wanted to take up a beautiful patch of land where another family could grieve in peace over the passing of their own loved one. She had instead settled to have her body interred within the marble walls of the enormous mausoleum, where many other expired residents also rested. Names were engraved over stone slabs set into the walls down many of the twisting, echoing halls of the place.

Tony turned away from his mother's name and began walking, intending to make his way back to the main room where everyone was waiting for the service. The heels of the shiny black shoes that came with the tuxedo he wore clicked upon the floor and echoed through the hall. As he came to a crossroads of hallways, he paused for a moment, trying to remember which way to take that would get him back to the service hall.

As he paused, he thought he heard a strange sound off to the side; an odd scratching, rustling, rasping sound. He turned his head down the hallway to the left, but could see nothing beyond the corner where the hall eventually turned. Frowning slightly, allowing the mystery of that strange noise to take his mind off of the depressing event that would soon be taking place, Tony Stark turned completely left and walked down the hall to the corner. He looked beyond, but saw nothing except more hallway with the names of the interred dead engraved all along the walls.

Shrugging, he headed back to the crossroads of the halls and continued along the path that he had intended to take before he had heard the noise. As he walked, he thought about what he was here to do today. He was to be a pallbearer for Harold "Happy" Hogan, his high school friend whose wake was taking place elsewhere in the building, and who would then be carted out to the cemetery afterward for burial. It would be the third time he had come to this funeral home for someone he had known.

The young man came upon one more hallway junction, the last one before he got back to the main hall in this enormous place, and as he was walking through it, he heard that noise again. This time, it came from his right, and he turned his head in that direction the moment he heard it. He saw, for the briefest instant, a flash of brown cloth, low to the ground, moving around the corner down the hallway on the right.

Frowning again, Tony immediately moved down the right hallway and to the corner. He turned and looked, but again it was just more hallway, this one coming to a dead end about fifty yards away, with no features other than the shining marble and the etched names of the dead along the walls.

The inventor shook his head and determined that the sorrowful events he was enduring today were getting to him. He settled on this as the explanation for seeing and hearing things as he walked through the massive mortuary, and as he was about to turn back around, a hand clasped down upon his shoulder.

"Ugh!" Tony yelped in surprise as he spun around, the hand releasing him as he did so. Standing before him was a tall, elderly-looking gentleman with gray hair, wearing an old mortician's tuxedo and black tie. Tony gulped from the surprise that he had been given from his sudden appearance.

"The funeral is about to begin… sir."

An intense stare and a single raised eyebrow accompanied the tall man's message. Tony calmed his fast-beating heart.

"OK," he said after a nervous gulp, nodded to the mortician and warily moved around him, heading back to the main viewing room and intending not to stop in this creepy place again until he had rejoined Pepper and Rhodey.

xxxXXXxxx

The three friends sat next to each other upon one of the pews in the viewing room, Pepper in the middle, holding one of her two best friends' hands in each of hers; Tony on her right, Rhodey on her left. The two boys wore tuxes, while the redhead wore a black blouse, jacket and skirt with black shoes. Each of them was currently lost in their own thoughts as they stared ahead. The Reverend had just finished making his speech, citing the same, tired old passages of the Bible and platitudes meant to bring some kind of comfort or hope to those in attendance. It did nothing for the trio of Team Iron Man. Around them, Happy Hogan's family members, as well as a great many of their classmates at the Tomorrow Academy, all stared straight ahead to the open casket; some weeping, some keeping their sadness inside, some bored.

Happy himself was looking peaceful, as was the goal of such showings. He was in a coffin that was able to fit his length, although it barely was wide enough to accommodate his broad shoulders. He was dressed in a tuxedo, his skin pale but unblemished, a slight rosiness to his cheeks from the makeup applied to them.

As the announcement was made that it was time, the crowd stood up, some of them moving towards the exit so that they could make their way out to the cemetery where the final part of the ceremony would commence. Tony and Rhodey were both going to be pallbearers for their departed friend; Pepper had no involvement in the funeral itself, and did not wish to. In fact, she was not going to stick around for the ending. She had had all she could bear already. With a sniffle, she hugged Tony and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, which he then returned to her.

"I'll see you after, OK," he said to her, squeezing her shoulders gently. She nodded to him, but remained uncharacteristically silent. She waved goodbye to Rhodey, then moved past Tony into the central isle and headed for the exit. Happy had been her friend, and she had even dated him for a short time, but the memories of her own mother's funeral were too painful for her to bear, even now. She had managed to sit through the eulogy, and walk up to Happy's open coffin and pay her respects to him, but it had taken all that she had to do so, and she could not bear to see him be put under. Perhaps Tony was strong enough to go through that after having gone through a funeral for both of his parents, but she was not.

As she began her exit from the funeral wing of the mausoleum, she spotted in the back row an unexpected face: Gene Khan. He locked eyes with her for a moment, gave a curt nod, and then exited through the double doors, getting lost in the sea of his former schoolmates. Pepper was surprised to see Gene here, as he not only had been incognito since the Makluan invasion, but he had despised Happy Hogan. She supposed that he considered it a matter of honor to pay respects to someone he had known that had died so young and tragically. He probably was not going to stick around for the rest of the service, either.

Almost to the door, not able to move any faster due to the people shuffling out in front of her, Pepper noticed from the corner of her eye an older man, strikingly tall, standing in the back corner of the room; he appeared to be the mortician/funeral director on duty. He had longish gray hair that ended parallel to his jaw line, and possessed somewhat pale skin. He worn a black tuxedo and tie, and looked pretty thin, befitting his apparent age. He was standing with his hands held behind his back and did not appear to be watching the exiting crowd. Rather, his eyes were fixed rather intently on the casket and the on-display body that it contained. He was staring at it with the intensity of a hawk, as if waiting for the right moment to do something. She supposed that he must have been waiting to guide the five men who had volunteered to carry the coffin to its destination to move into place, so that he could direct them where to go.

Just before she reached the exit, the elderly mortician's black eyes seemed to move away from the coffin and stare straight back at the ginger's own hazel ones. The mortician raised a single eyebrow and appeared almost to smirk for a fraction of a second, before his attention returned to where it had been before. Pepper did not know why, but she felt a chill run down her spine from this odd little moment. She took in a deep breath of fresh air as she finally made it out the door, and she felt even more grateful than before that she would not be attending the rest of the funeral, although she did not know why that was.

Pepper headed to the place where she had parked her scooter, and began looking around at the wide graveyard that surrounded the mortuary. While the redhead would not be in the company of those who would witness Happy's burial, that did not mean that she was leaving completely. She made her way past the other vehicles that were gathered along the stretch of asphalt that ran along next to the mortuary, reaching her purple and silver scooter and placing the helmet upon her head. She hopped on the scooter, started the motor, and pulled away along the thin asphalt road.

Once she was sure that she was far enough away to avoid being seen, Pepper did something that she knew she should not, but she was not really in a state of mind for considering consequences today. She drove off of the path and onto the grass, carefully maneuvering between the hundreds of headstones that littered the landscape, taking great care to avoid actually riding over anyone's grave. She kept a look off to the side so that she could keep the funeral in sight. When she saw the hearse that was carrying the casket come to a stop, she also stopped, and turned the scooter's motor off.

As the ginger took off her helmet and shook her hair out, she thought she heard a strange sound off to the side; an odd scratching, rustling, rasping sound. She turned her head and looked around, but all she could see were dozens of headstones surrounding her, as well as a few nearby trees with their branches moving slightly in the calm breeze. Seeing nothing that could have made that sound, Pepper shrugged and dismissed it, then dismounted her scooter. She gently tipped it over and laid it down flat so that it would not stand out from a distance, taking from the carry pouch on the side her pair of high-caliber binoculars.

She lay down on her stomach, knowing that the grass was fresh and vibrant enough to avoid messing up her formal clothes, and put her binoculars to her eyes with her elbows resting on the grass. She could see through the lenses as the back of the hearse was opened and the casket pulled out. In addition to Tony and Rhodey, Happy's father and uncle, as well as his closest friend on the school basketball team, all held onto a side of the coffin, moving together to bring it into place, where it was suspended by ropes and a rectangular frame over the six-feet-deep hole that had been dug into the ground.

Pepper willed herself to keep her eyes from watering up, knowing that pretty soon, the casket that held Happy's body would be lowered out of sight and covered over with dirt, and it would be final; he would be truly gone forever, with even his remains eternally out of reach of anyone who knew him.

As she wiped away one small bit of moisture that built up in her left eye, she heard that strange sound again, behind her. She turned her head around, looking over all of the grave markers around her to see if anything stood out. For a brief moment, she thought she had seen something move. It had looked as if a piece of brown material sliding along the grass had moved behind one of the larger headstones.

"Hello," the redhead called out, wondering if perhaps someone was nearby, visiting a deceased relative perhaps, and was kneeling behind the headstone. When no reply was forthcoming, Pepper shrugged and dismissed it as having been some kind of small animal. What she had seen had probably not been a cloth at all, but the brown fur of some little creature – a squirrel, perhaps

She turned back to the site of the funeral and placed the binoculars to her eyes once more.

xxxXXXxxx

The service was over and people began to disperse, nobody present really wanting to witness the departed young man be covered over in dirt, including his family. As the crowd moved away, fresh cries of sadness rising into the air as they did so, Tony Stark remained, looking at the shiny casket a little longer. After a moment, he heard his best friend move up beside him and sigh. Tony sighed in return and turned to him.

"I just can't believe that it happened like this."

Tony shook his head and lowered his eyes to the ground between them. Rhodey nodded in agreement, looking like he was not completely present at the moment, mentally speaking.

"I know, man. It just doesn't make any sense. I mean, why? Why would Happy kill himself? And why do it in a cemetery, of all places, man?!"

Rhodes's aggravated tone denoted his confusion and denial over the details they had been given. According to investigators, Happy's body had been found three days ago, in this very same cemetery, just a few hundred yards from his final resting place. He had been found with a knife in his chest, which had cleaved his heart in two and killed him almost instantly. The police had concluded that there was no sign, nor indication of foul play, and so had ruled out the possibility of murder. Judging by the position of his hand at the time his body was discovered, it had been concluded that Happy had taken his own life.

This had been very hard for the large jock's three friends to take. Pepper had wept into the night, Tony had fought the urge to do the same, and Rhodey had seemed to come unplugged from the moment due to the shock.

"You want to head over to my place," Rhodey asked after a few more moments of silence between them. Tony shook his head, took a deep breath, and looked around at the graveyard.

"I think I'm gonna head to the temple and do some work on the armor. It'll keep my mind occupied."

Rhodey nodded his agreement, gave Tony a hang-in-there punch on the shoulder, and began walking towards his car.

Realizing that he was the last one present, other than the creepy old mortician who was standing a ways back behind one of the headstones, Tony gave a final nod to the casket that held his friend's body, then turned and began walking away.

xxxXXXxxx

Pepper watched her boyfriend walk away from the burial site, knowing that it was now time for her to go. Just as she was about to lower her binoculars, she noticed something odd and readjusted them. She watched as the tall, old man in the suit walked past the grave and toward the hearse that had brought the coffin out to the spot. She had figured that the tall guy would now lower the coffin into the grave and begin covering it with dirt. She supposed, since he was such a skinny and elderly fellow, he was going to call in some of the groundskeepers to fill in the grave, and had simply not had them be nearby during the funeral out of respect for the grievers.

However, as Pepper watched from afar, the hearse began to back up, right over the graves that were between the narrow driving path and Happy's coffin. None of the headstones were hit, but it was clear that the car was driving right over the graves themselves. Pepper shifted her view back in the direction where everyone had parked their cars to see if anyone was seeing this, but the last few cars were already pulling away slowly. Nobody else seemed to be around to witness this. Pepper knew that this was illegal behavior, and would likely anger surviving family members of those buried in the graves being driven over, as well as a few clergymen, at least. She continued watching so she could report as much as possible to the authorities.

Once the back of the hearse was only a few feet away from the coffin, the vehicle stopped and was left idling as the tall mortician got out of the driver seat and walked to the back of the hearse, opening up the rear compartment where caskets were held during transportation.

Pepper stared intently through the lenses of her binoculars, her knuckles starting to turn white as she gripped them tightly in concentration, paying as close attention as possible. After a few moments, when she witnessed what happened next at the burial site, the redhead slowly lowered the binoculars, her face marked with an expression of mingled shock, confusion, and disbelief.

"What the–?!"