#chaed

Steve saw (and heard, thanks to the serum) the Ritz Carlton’s top floor window shatter outwards, and while he was still too far away to make out details, his mind readily supplemented the particulars that his eyes couldn’t pick up. There was red and gold amid the crystal explosion of the window. Iron Man. But he wasn’t alone and it wasn’t a normal take-off. He wasn’t flying. He was falling. And with him, dark as the night, was another.

She thought about the aftermath of Tony's disappearance. Sometimes it was so very easy to forget that he'd been gone. Sometimes the whole four years of his absence felt like a fugue state that she could only dimly recollect. The Pepper of then would have given anything to see him again, even if just for a moment. But the longer he'd been back, the more tangible he became and the more she took for granted the fact that he existed again in the world. And here, the Pepper of now was trying to find a way that they could see as little of each other as possible. Love hadn't been enough. Love and perseverance and a deep rooted belief that in the end nothing could keep them apart, not even a portal between galaxies. None of it had been enough. They could blame SHIELD or Steve, or Jim for dying, but if she was being honest, it was not the part of Tony that had changed so much through it all, but the part of him which had remained unaltered that ultimately put the final nail in the coffin. “I'm glad you came back,” she told him. “I will never not be glad you came back.”

He wasn't used to analyzing his morning afters in such lurid detail. He wondered if Pepper was the first woman he'd failed to listen to, or if there had been others whose tight smiles never reached their eyes, girls who'd jumped straight into the shower while he'd basked in his own afterglow, oblivious. But she was still speaking to him over the phone and he had to believe it was for more than just preventing their shared company from imploding. “Take care,” he said pensively as the call drew to an end. “Goodbye, Pepper. I love you.” He realized he’d said the last bit after hanging up. He had said it automatically, out of habit. Verbal punctuation, nothing more. But it felt good, all the same.

But she wanted to see him. She was worried about him. She imagined him drinking himself stupid in the basement, alone. She imagined the media's endless speculation, both him and her being dragged through the tabloid muck. And lastly, she hated the idea to waking up without him every morning, to roll over and see nothing but an empty bed where he should be. This was only supposed to be a break, a temporary thing while she got her head together. She owed it to him to face him sooner or later. At least on paper, she was still his girlfriend. Although what Pepper amounted to on paper didn't count for much. She'd started putting out feelers for other jobs, just to see what her options were, but the slew of polite brush offs told her that nobody was willing to touch her with a barge pole. If the captain of the Titanic had survived, nobody would be falling over themselves to offer him another ship. She was, by association, as toxic as Tony.

Eventually, he found them. One said Rapid response! and another 99% accurate from the day of your missed period! Most were colored pink, with the one on sale (buy two, get three) a horrible baby blue. The lettering was big on all of them, no room for ambiguity. He supposed nobody picked up a pregnancy test ad hoc unless they were in a heightened state of either ecstatic hope or bottomless fear. Well, anyone but Pepper. He could picture her, standing in this same aisle, looking at the same products and flipping to the back of every box before making her choice. Pepper wasn’t a risk-taker. He pegged her for Clearblue, the digital one. It seemed like the most elaborate of the bunch. Of course he would never have certainty. She could have gone for more than one, maybe made a second trip after the first one showed positive because she’d been afraid of a false result. He picked it up and turned it over. A pixelated screen would tell you if you were PREGNANT or NOT PREGNANT. It was undoubtedly some cheap sensor picking up on the same color change as any other test line before flashing its output. It would probably seem reassuringly high end to Pepper though.

Bruce screwed up his face. For a moment Tony thought he’d done it, really done it. He’d always been a natural at pissing people off, but he really had to put in the elbow grease to break down Bruce Banner’s reserves. He felt a weird sense of adrenaline, comfortably different from the raw panic he’d experienced back on the ship when the doc had turned green and nearly ripped him to shreds. There was to be no smashing on today’s menu though, it seemed. Bruce composed himself, swallowed whatever comeback might have tickled his tongue and did a jackknife straight back into science mode. “You said you tracked down the signal.” “Yeah.” “Where did it originate from?” Now Tony leaned back, genuine amusement on his face. That had been a whimsical coincidence if he’d ever seen one. “Funny thing. You ever heard of a craphole called Sokovia?”