wildlyconflicted | [For Tony]

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[For Tony]

The world filtered through to her in pieces. Flashes, distant and muddled, too real to be a dream but too obscure to be reality: Tony's voice, strangled with fear and impatience; lights first bright and then dim; the efficient brush of fingers across her skin. Instinctively, she felt she ought to be up, doing something, anything, but every part of her was inexplicably heavy, weighed down with the mantle of sleep. For a long time she gave into the perpetual downward tug into the murky, drifting depths and let herself float there in the dark.

Consciousness returned to Pepper with a sudden, sharp intake of breath. Eyes slit open, the colors of the room were muted, desaturated, as faded as she herself felt. Disoriented but too worn to care much, she stared blearily at the ceiling.

A bed. She was in a bed. And she hurt more than she could have imagined was possible.

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He was still wearing the armor. It was battered, more than it had been. Terrible hadn't gone down easy.

The house... the house hadn't gone down easy, either, but in a different sense. He hadn't even cleaned the dust, the ash off. It would've meant getting up and leaving. Having the armor on meant he didn't have to, trying to get the grime off would have defeated the purpose.

It was probably symbolic, too. Everything seemed to be, all of a sudden. Especially the glowing circle in Pepper's chest.

"Pepper?" he said. More cautiously than usual. If she wasn't waking up on her own, he didn't want to do it. He almost didn't want to it either way, he didn't want to face it. He wanted her awake and well, but he didn't want her to have to wake up and know to do it.

At the sound of her name, Pepper slowly blinked, gaze shifted and widened to find Tony there staring worriedly down at her, inexplicably in his armour. The intake of breath to speak sent a jolt of pain outward from her chest and she winced, panting before she actually managed to form words.

"What-" she began, throat dry and rough, the sound wanting to stick fast in her throat. "What happened?"

What happened.

Everything exploded, that's what happened. The past blew up in his face with a literalness liable to induce despair.

"You had-" he started, but it caught in his throat. Shrapnel didn't seem to cover it.

"A Jericho leveled the house," he said. "I took care of- I dealt with it."

He hadn't taken care. His whole life, he hadn't taken care, and look where they were. He hadn't taken care of Pepper, that was for sure, because look where they were. Look what was in her chest.

She couldn't remember any of it. Straining her mind produced nothing through the thick haze of her memory, and after a moment Pepper gave up on it, if only to avoid compounding her headache. Forgetting might be a better option, anyhow; she could piece together enough to know it wouldn't be a pleasant recollection.

She'd been there, obviously. In the house, when it happened.

"It's okay," she instinctively assured Tony in a rasp, and shifted a hand to pat weakly atop the mattress in his general direction. Even with just his face showing, he looked absolutely miserable. "Everybody else- Nobody- It was just me?"

"Really not," Tony said, staring at the spot where she'd patted the sheets but not actually moving. It really was not okay, and he would not in any way categorize it as such. Even if it was a thing people said. "You were the only- yes."

Casualty didn't seem right. She was alive. But, still, it was the word that came to mind.

If Pepper had been the only person hurt and she was in vast amounts of pain but still very much alive and seen to by capable physicians, she didn't see why Tony should seem so cagey. Guilt had rattled him, surely, but this was practically reticence from a man who typically didn't know the meaning of the word.

Carefully, Pepper reached a hand to curve against her cheek and forehead, confirming that she was scratched and bruised but not horribly disfigured. She briefly wiggled her toes to confirm she wasn't paralyzed or missing a limb. Her chest felt as if she'd been sat on by an elephant, but she was apparently all there. Was he really so distraught that she'd been in danger? That she got banged up? He wasn't nearly so upset after the dinosaur thing.

Forgetting herself, she drew a too-sudden breath to ask what he was hiding, and for a couple of seconds the pain was practically blinding, sharp and hot, radiating from ribs and breastbone. Instinctively her hand flew up to press against her chest and there stilled as fingers caught on the curve of metal beneath the blankets.

Immediately, Pepper began shaking.

She didn't want to look. She couldn't make herself look. This couldn't be happening, it wasn't happening. There was no possible way.

"…Tony?" she managed, a thin, shuddering sound, plaintive and childlike.

That was probably just about the worst sound he'd ever heard, a sound that went on the list above the whine of the missile that had exploded that day years prior and put the shrapnel in his heart.

He remembered this. He remembered waking up with a car battery plugged into his chest. Empathy wasn't exactly a Tony Stark strength, exactly, but he had lived here in this moment and he had not enjoyed it.

"Pride of the Freedom Line," he said, bitterly. "If the blast doesn't kill you, the shrapnel- it was the only way to keep you alive. I had to do it."

The moment had taken on a surreal, dreamlike quality that Pepper hadn't experienced since she'd been informed of her father's death. The information being relayed was just so unbelievable that her mind couldn't process it despite that her body was making an admirable attempt. She'd gone incredibly pale and tears tracked lines across her freckled cheeks.

She wanted desperately to believe that none of it was real, that she was perhaps still dreaming or even coma-ridden, but Pepper Potts had not earned her reputation by succumbing to irrationality. Furthermore, she hurt far too much for it to be untrue.

Covering her eyes with one shaking hand, she turned her head away, grief-stricken for reasons she couldn't yet place.

She wasn't talking. Over, under, at all. Which certainly made sense. He just didn't know how to operate against a Pepper that wasn't talking at the same time he was. He could say something, but if she wasn't saying something at the same time, it was... hollow. One-sided. Uncontested. Something.

Wrong, was what it was. All of this, it was wrong.

He wasn't in the business of collatoral damage. It should be him in that bed, or nothing at all.

"It'll be-" he stopped, because while he could be flexible on facts, he wouldn't outright lie and say okay, something like that. "I gave you the new one. No palladium poisoning. So."

He swallowed. He still had nothing, basically.

That roused her with a quickness, and Pepper turned damp, red-rimmed eyes on Tony, who was still sitting there looking utterly hangdog in that damned armor.

"What?" she said, not nearly as forcefully as she would have liked. Her voice still sounded impossibly weak, the act of drawing breath too much of a trial for much more.

"No," she added in a whine, and then was crying again, fat, unabashed tears sliding down her cheeks. Had all those long, horrible months been for nothing?

"Hey," Tony said, reaching for her hand, nearly clutching. The hiss of the movement reminded him that his hands were in the gauntlets, and to not apply any pressure at all. He wished he'd taken it off, now. "Hey. It's fine. You're fine, your system- you'll adapt."

It may have been the first time in Tony's life he'd assumed someone was reacting to news about themselves, rather than him.

"I wasn't talking about me, you idiot," Pepper cried, wiping at her cheeks with her free hand. The action was more to comfort her than anything else: Fresh tears kept replacing the ones she swept away.

"We'll share it," she insisted, and her chin lifted slighty, some steel coming back into her spine despite the damp state of her face. "Until you can make another new one, we'll switch out." The look on her face suggested she was prepared, even in her current state, to battle him on this if need be.

Edited 2012-02-16 08:50 (UTC)

This was, strangely, better. She was crying... the precise same amount, actually. But there was at least a little more fire there, too. It wasn't tamped out.

"...maybe not that fine," he said, finding that this allowed him to straighten up some, too. "I had the suit to protect me, you're-"

Injured. Not broken but... battered. Because, as had been going through his mind, of him. Which was just another reason not to cave on this one.

"I'm not going to weaken your immune system right now. Non-negotiable. When they clear you to be up and about we'll argue about it again."

By that time, hopefully, he'd have put together his own replacement.

"No, we won't argue about it again," Pepper insisted with a slight shake of her head. "Once I have a clean bill of health and if you haven't come up with a new one by then, we're sharing it. Period. I didn't go through hell for half a year to watch you be poisoned again."

Through the cottony throb of her headache, she wondered if it would be possible to switch them out by herself while Tony was asleep. She wasn't above it, but was also at that moment highly medicated.

"I'm not watching you be poisoned by an arc reactor I made, that's in your chest because of a missile I designed," Tony said, leaning back slightly, lacing his hands together and staring at them. "This is on me, Pepper. I'll take the hit, because I should have- I should have taken the other one. There shouldn't have been one."

Somewhere, he'd messed up. Hadn't seen everything coming, hadn't covered all the angles. Some genius.

"You're so stupid!" Pepper abruptly cried, giving into her tears again, her normal eloquence beyond her. "Why are you so stupid, Tony? I love you! If you get sick, it hurts me and I get so scared and— Don't you know I couldn't go on without you?"

She flopped her hand in his direction in a vaguely insensed fashion, wishing she had something to throw at him since she clearly couldn't give him a solid shove to wake him up.

"This isn't about you. Just stop it," she added, and hiccupped around a sob in a completely childish manner.

Edited 2012-02-16 09:40 (UTC)

"...no," he said, after all of this, but responding rather belatedly to the middle question. He hadn't. It hadn't exactly occurred.

"I don't- we'll discuss it when you're better. Pete's stopgap means it'll barely be getting sick-"

Which was an argument for her side, as well.

"-later. Iloveyoutoo."

That Pepper's initial impulse was to assume she'd heard wrong probably said quite a lot about the nature of their relationship. Yet she'd spent nearly two decades becoming masterful at catching this man's turns of phrase; despite the knee-jerk assumption, she knew precisely what had been said from the moment it left his mouth.

For quite a long time, she stared at him in complete startlement. And then it actually hit her.

Every time her chest hitched it sent a fresh wave of pain radiating outward from her breastbone, but she couldn't stop herself, couldn't reel herself in to be anything even approximating dignified. Both hands at her face, shoulders shaking, she sobbed.

As usual, not the response he'd intended.

Now he just felt worse, and stared at her, aghast and completely at a loss.

He twisted in his seat, in case there was a doctor about to render some kind of medical assistance to Pepper's condition, which was...

...about the same, just with extra crying. Not a medical issue. Emotional. His fault. Some more. And he had exactly no basis for figuring out how to proceed. He started pulling a gauntlet off, anyway; h'd had about enough of sitting there in the armor, and touching even her hand with the metal in the way wasn't even the slightest bit the same.

"...could have timed that better."

The crying went on for quite some time. Pepper had hoped that if— when Tony finally managed to utter the words she might be a little less of a mess, but it was a final straw in a very substantial, overwhelming pile.

"Could you hand me a tissue please," she finally managed on an unsteady exhalation, perilously close to blowing her nose on the sheet, which was not exactly what the moment called for.

"Does someone have a- there's a bandage," Tony said, seizing on this as an opportunity to actually do something, where that something was rummage on the table next to her. "And- yes. Tissue."

He handed it over, with the hand he'd managed to get the armor off of, watching her cautiously, as if she might-

Well, as if she might start crying again.

The tissue was a good thing, a sort of flimsy paper lifeline to Pepper's sanity. Wiping her face and blowing her nose and generally collecting herself gave her something to focus on. It also kept her from having to immediately reply to the sentiment. Now that it had finally happened, she hardly knew what to say.

She might have agreed that yes, his timing was extraordinarily poor. Not only did he deftly choose a moment when she was already emotional, but he waited until she'd been at death's door to comprehend how important the gesture was. She could have made a very strong case for his being absolutely horrible at this.

The thing was, that wasn't at all what she wanted to do.

"Thank you," she finally settled on, a flush high in her cheeks as she peered at Tony over the now-ragged tissue.

"Least I could do," Tony said, adding a moment later, "probably... literally."

The crying had subsided, and she wasn't yelling at him. In other circumstances, he'd have counted it a win.

In other circumstances, she wasn't in a clinic bed and they hadn't been arguing over who got to wear the poisonous arc reactor. (Him, obviously. He'd have to find a doctor to back up that it would always be a bad idea this close to the accident. Which meant finding a doctor he could pay off with air conditioning or something.)

"No, I mean for everything," Pepper replied, her voice still a little less steady than she would have liked. At that point, though, everything was a little less steady than she would have liked.

"Not just that- Although that was nice. Um." She floundered, her thought processes frustratingly slow. "Unexpected. But I mean all of it, getting me out and the chest piece and-"

Only then did it occur to her that he must have literally taken it out of his own chest to hand it over for her. Through the thrum of her headache and the powerful urge to cry, she realized that he probably would have done as much even if he hadn't had a replacement.

"Just thank you," she finished, chin still trembling a bit despite her best efforts to reel in the waterworks.

"So do I," Tony muttered, pulling the gauntlet off his other hand.

The most he could have done was ensure none of it had been necessary. Been better prepared. Done... something. Kept the house standing. More importantly, kept Pepper standing, instead of laid up here.

"You're welcome," he said, louder, overriding the previous thought. "Thank you. For... not- Do you need more painkillers? Doc!"

The shout intensified a headache already amplified by Pepper's earlier crying jag. Wincing, she held up a palm for Tony to cease despite that she very clearly did, in fact, need some more painkillers.

"Please stop shouting," she said, and laid her other hand across her forehead as she closed her eyes. "And stop beating yourself up. You saved the life of the woman you love. And she loves you. I love you. Painkillers would be good, though. Without shouting."

"On it, ditto to the... love thing, I'll be right back," Tony said, jumping to his feet, mentally brushing the request to stop beating himself up aside. He felt it was still justified. Kept him honest. From slipping.

Now, though, he had a doctor to track down and browbeat into providing additional painkillers.

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