tear the world asunder (dec. 4th)
nexus of causality
rating: pg
characters: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
warnings: major character death (past)
length: drabble
summary: Really, any reality is just the flip of a coin. Or, the one where space-time continuity dies along with him.
author's note: I read more science fiction than is good for me, and I love it.
Someone's been playing with the strings holding the universe together, unraveling reality and creating mayhem with linear time, and she had gotten caught up in it like all the rest of the ash-covered world. He had warned her about it, as loudly as he dared, and she should have noticed given that Tony Stark, who could be as raucous as a rock concert, who could shake the world with his thunder, spoke of this in a whisper. Fate's a funny thing, turned inside out and sideways, and she hits 'answer' when her hands are steady.
"Tony?"
"Hey, Pepper, listen." His voice is startled, strained, tense. "I'm, um, look, I'm kinda short on air - I mean, time," and wouldn't you be surprised, she thinks, understanding what hasn't reached his timeline yet, "but I wanted to call and say - say..."
"Listen to me, you're going to be fine. You need to focus, okay? You're going to be fine."
"Um, I'm actually not so sure about this one, this time, but - why aren't you freaking out?"
Because I love you, she thinks fondly, but there's no point in telling that to her past. Or what it could have been, anyway. He doesn't need to hear those words right now.
"You can do it, Tony. I believe in you."
And then the call drops, cut off by a pervasive deconstruction of reality. The last thought Pepper ever thinks - or never thought, depending on which side you looked at it from - is, It was so good to hear his voice again.
Turning on that connection, on the Mobius loop from 'then' to 'now' and back again, the whole of time and space shatters. It fragments in an out-of-control spiral downwards, splintering and vanishing and echoing back, back again until it slams into a moment where two Starks carry two nukes into an alien portal - and one, at last, survives.
.