Written to Swimming in the Flood - Passion Pit, crosspost from AO3.
Sweven: A vision seen in sleep; a dream.
Tony doesn't like to tell anybody about it, but he and Pepper both know why he sometimes wakes up flailing and gasping for air in the middle of the night. They both know that sometimes he has dreams of being back in the Middle East, gasping for air that was mostly dust while he tinkers with too-small screws and cogs and tries to save himself. They both know that he doesn't always succeed, and that is when he wakes up with a scream lodged halfway in his throat and has to slap himself to make sure that he is alive, that he is real, that it was just a nightmare.
Pepper often spends those nights awake beside him, stroking over his thumb with her own, whispering to him under the covers that it's alright, she's here, he's here, it's alright. Tony, for his part, spends the remainder of the night tracing her features with his eyes, tucking loose strands of hair behind her ears, and repeating silently to himself things that he knows for a fact to be true.
One night, Tony wakes her up with laughter, and she stares at him curiously. He giggles in his sleep, says something that she can't quite understand, babbles to himself. Once or twice she thinks she catches her name thrown somewhere in there, but she isn't sure.
She hugs a pillow to her chest and watches him laugh himself back into deep slumber, and there is the slightest hint of a smile on her face as she, too, falls back to sleep.
The next morning, when she wakes up, Tony is sitting up in bed, a tray table on his lap littered with toast crumbs and small, empty containers of marmalade. He sips a cup of coffee (black, no sugar, and Pepper takes in the rich aroma with a sigh and a smile) and scratches behind his ear with a pencil as he frowns over some documents, pushing his glasses further up the bridge of his nose.
"Hey, you," he says, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, a grin sparking across his mouth for the briefest of moments before he goes back to looking at the papers in his hands.
"Hey," she says, languidly stretching and snuggling into the sheets. "You woke me up last night."
"I did?" Tony asks, arching a brow at her.
"You did," she affirms. "You were laughing. Nothing insane or demonic, that would have been terrifying. You sounded happy. Must have been a good dream. I think you might have been talking to me?"
Tony grins, sets down the papers and reaches over to pinch her cheek. "I'm always happy when I talk to you," he says. "Unless, of course, it's when you're trying to make me do work. That's not very happy conversation, you must admit."
Pepper laughs. "Tell me what your dream was about?"
Tony furrows his brow, pinches the bridge of his nose as he tries to remember. "I think...I think I dreamt about having a kid," he says slowly after a few moments. "I was teaching him - I think it was a him, it wasn't wearing a dress, but then again you can never tell - some basic chemistry in the lab downstairs. I think you came in after a while, and you were carrying something...a snack, maybe? And we both shouted at you that you weren't supposed to bring food into the laboratory, that it wasn't safe with all those chemicals floating around. I dunno. It was cute."
Pepper stifles a grin into the curve of her hand as she thinks about the best way in which to tell Tony of the positive stick hidden in her bottom desk drawer.