Fic: Sentinel, part VII - Iron Man
Previous parts.
Thanks again to
besyd for beta duty. Sorry for the big delay between parts this time.
7.
Each time was different, each time defied routine. This time the note read Out to Lunch.
It was a yellow Post-it and Tony's scrawl was smeared and illegible, but Pepper had been deciphering his handwriting for seven years. And the contents didn't matter, because his words didn't mean anything, not at all. The armor was gone and there was a note and that was all she needed to know. The first time he'd gone AWOL she'd tried everything she could think of -- she'd called his cell phone, she'd called Rhodey, she'd badgered Jarvis. This time she knew better than to bother.
At first she did okay. She kept busy. Her email inbox was as full as ever. There were calls to make - Brett Maguire wanted to schedule a meeting to discuss the practical applications of arc reactor technology; Stark Industries' PR department, disgruntled over the company's sudden change in direction, not to mention the lawsuits, wanted a few hours of Tony's time, which once again she had to put off indefinitely; and Lyle Masterson, the old engineering colleague of Ibrahim Yinsen's at Cambridge, had finally returned her call, but when she dialed his number the secretary who answered told her he was out of the office on personal business.
Around eleven Dr. Maya Hansen, a scientist at Nangen Microsystems, a subsidiary of Stark Industries that focused on medical nanotechnology, called. Hansen had prepared a prospectus for a new line of research on which, of course, she wanted Tony's input; and because Tony had never quite learned to draw the line between his duties as CEO and his love of shiny new technological innovations, he had told Hansen to toss it in his lap -- his words, or so Hansen claimed -- when she was ready. Given his interest in miniaturization, Pepper wasn't surprised that nanotechnology had caught his attention.
"I'm sorry, Dr. Hansen, but I'm afraid Mr. Stark's schedule is immovable for the foreseeable future. But I'll be sure to--"
"I know how busy Tony is, Miss Potts," Hansen cut in. "But I'm certain he'll make time for me once he hears about the success I've had in preliminary tests. He was very enthusiastic about the project the last time I saw him."
Pepper absorbed this, considered the slight emphasis Hansen had placed on Tony's name, the red flags it triggered. She was reasonably sure that even Tony Stark drew the line at seducing his employees -- or at least he had since she'd been his assistant. That didn't mean he hadn't slept with Hansen before the scientist came to work for SI, of course, but Pepper decided it was best if she didn't pursue that line of inquiry.
"Yes, Mr. Stark takes great interest in every new technology developed for his companies," Pepper managed. "Why don't you send the report my way. I'll see what I can do about scheduling a meeting if he's interested after reading my summary."
She didn't add that she had no idea when - or if - Tony would ever be back to read it.
The document arrived in the form of a huge pdf file, so Pepper spent most of the afternoon wading through dense text on a subject she knew next to nothing about, which wasn't anything new; but it required a level of concentration she just didn't have and so she found herself reading and re-reading the same passages, absorbing nothing. Coffee didn't help. Instead it set her heart racing and sharpened her already alert senses until she was jumping every time the air conditioning switched on or her phone rang.
After the third time reading through a passage detailing Hansen's experiments with nano-neural interfaces and the possible applications for traumatic brain injury, Pepper gave up. Closed the report, saved her notes, shut down her laptop and carried it downstairs.
The shop was quiet and chilly. Nothing had changed since she'd searched it that morning, looking for any sign of where Tony could have gone. The clothes he'd been wearing at the office last night were still draped over his desk chair, and sitting abandoned near one of the computer monitors was a half full glass of the wheatgrass protein shake he drank when he was too busy to think about food. The left over liquid had separated and congealed into a watery sludge, so Pepper dumped it down the sink in the kitchenette and rinsed out the glass. Tony Stark was her job, yes; picking up after him this way really wasn't part of that, but then she couldn't really do her job while he was out throwing himself in the way of tanks or missiles or whatever it was he did when he took off in the armor. She couldn't do much of anything but settle on the leather couch with her laptop, watch CNN on the workshop's flatscreen and wonder whether the lack of breaking news about Iron Man was a good sign.
So she waited, she waited until the sun vanished and the screen of her laptop went blurry and she realized she hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. By the time she got back to her apartment it was after ten and she fixed a grilled cheese sandwich and then made herself eat it. Somehow she managed to fall asleep.
"I'm terribly sorry to wake you, Miss Potts, especially at this hour."
When she'd fumbled at her nightstand for the phone she'd expected to hear Tony on the line -- 3 am calls were not necessarily out of the question with Tony, and she was so out of it at first that the fact that he'd taken off for parts unknown completely slipped her mind -- but instead it was Jarvis, voice calm and polite as ever. Pepper momentarily forgot Jarvis didn't actually exist, because for an A.I. he sounded remarkably hesitant.
"I know you wouldn't have called if it wasn't important," Pepper managed; unable to shake the feeling that she was three steps behind in a conversation that had just started. She'd only been asleep for a few hours but it had been enough to leave her with that strange strung-out lethargy that had become all too familiar since Afghanistan.
Belatedly, it hit her: Jarvis had never called her before. Never. And then she remembered that Tony had vanished. That Tony was out playing Iron Man, and--
"Indeed," Jarvis said, breaking into her spiraling thoughts. He paused again, as if thrown by the precedent the call represented. "Miss Potts, according to the new emergency protocol Mr. Stark installed I am to contact you first in the event of--"
Emergency protocol? "What happened?" She was awake now, if still groggy, and she tossed back the blankets and crawled out of bed, reaching for the lamp. She should have known. She should have known something had happened the moment she heard Jarvis' voice.
"I'm afraid the autopilot has been activated on Mr. Stark's armor," Jarvis said.
"Autopilot?" He had autopilot programmed into that thing? For a moment the wonder of it short-circuited her mounting panic. Only Tony would think to install autopilot in his personal suit of armor. Then again, only Tony would think to build himself a personal suit of armor in the first place.
"Yes. The emergency protocol was triggered when the autopilot became active and I lost contact with Mr. Stark." Jarvis' speech patterns weren't usually this... well, robotic, but maybe the circumstances had driven him back to his roots. And again, what Jarvis had said hit her on a delay, as if she getting the message from a satellite phone.
Lost contact.
Adrenalin flooded Pepper, leaving her knees full of jelly and the edges of her vision too bright, like a flash had gone off in her face. She traded the cell phone for her ear piece and it took her three tries to get it secured to her ear because her hands were shaking.
"What do you mean, you've lost contact with him?" she said once the earpiece was in place. She stripped off her pajamas and dug through her dresser for clean underwear.
Jarvis hesitated, and she imagined she could hear him clearing his throat, which would have been an eerily human expression given his lack of the necessary anatomy. "Mr. Stark is not responding to verbal contact and the armor's autopilot function has been brought online in order to maintain altitude. I have contact with--"
"What is the autopilot function programmed to do in this scenario?" Pepper interrupted, a curious calm replacing the shakes as the implications started to sink in. Jarvis had lost contact with Tony. Tony didn't have control over the armor, and she didn't know what that meant precisely, but it couldn't be good.
"The armor is programmed to return to Mr. Stark's workshop," Jarvis answered, something close to worry creeping into his voice. "I estimate it will arrive at five a.m."
Two hours. Pepper stared at the wall across from her bed, at the antique silk fan Tony had brought back for her from a defense conference in Tokyo last year. It must have cost more than the contents of her bedroom, and he'd handed it to her like it was a tourist stand trinket. He never remembered her birthday but he'd given her that fan, and on Christmas Eve last year he'd taken her and Happy to dinner at Patina, and she'd known it was his only private celebration because he didn't have anyone else but Rhodey and Rhodey always spent the holidays with his family. Obadiah hadn't been there, and at the time it hadn't occurred to her to wonder about it, but now… now she couldn't afford the distraction.
"Where is he? Do you have any information on the armor's condition? What happened?"
There was a long silence, as if Jarvis was deciding which question to answer first. When he spoke again he was excruciatingly polite. "I'm sorry, Miss Potts, but Mr. Stark has prevented me from revealing his location and the circumstances of his mission."
Pepper let out a curse she knew would shock Tony to hear. She yanked on a pair of wrinkled jeans left on top of her laundry basket. Of course he'd told Jarvis not to say anything. He wouldn't want her worrying to be informed by facts. The secrecy was going to change, once she… if… goddamn him.
She shook it off, because Jarvis was continuing. "But I can report that the armor has extensive damage to the helmet and right side."
Pepper filed this away and ignored the images that wanted to spring to mind. Tony, his chest wrapped in bloody bandages, his bowed head framed by guns. "Is the armor intact enough to make the return journey?" she asked instead, pulling a tee-shirt over her head and stuffing her hair into a ponytail.
Jarvis paused again, probably running some kind of scan. "Yes. The flight capabilities have not been damaged enough to prevent return."
"Can you get any kind of diagnostic reading on Tony? Is he okay?" Where were her keys? In her purse - which was out on the kitchen table, where she left it the night before. She was moving too slowly, still. She needed caffeine, but she couldn't spare the time.
"The armor is not programmed to monitor Mr. Stark's physical condition," Jarvis answered, and there was regret there, she could have sworn there was.
Pepper added one more item to the list of Things That Will Change.
By the time she reached the house her heart was in her throat and she had to pry white knuckled fingers away from the wheel of her car. Jarvis was a steady voice in her ear, counting down the time until the armor's arrival. She thought maybe her decision not to call Rhodey might have been a mistake but after the confrontation in the office she didn't want to risk making things worse for either of them. Especially since she had no idea where Tony had been.
"One hour thirty minutes," Jarvis announced.
Pepper paced through the house, calling up news reports on the screen in the living room window, scanning CNN for any clue at all, but everything seemed relevant and nothing gave her what she was looking for.
"One hour ten minutes."
She flicked off the news and then asked Jarvis to bring it up again ten minutes later. She descended into the workshop and dug out the prodigious first aid kit. She traced her way up the tunnel to the driveway outside the house, straining her eyes for any sign of the armor among the lights in the sky. She stalked back upstairs to make a pot of strong coffee, which only turned her stomach when she tried to take a sip. She found herself standing in the parlor, staring out at the inky night, at the water below, and this time Jarvis's voice startled her.
"Forty minutes, Miss Potts."
When the armor finally arrived it took her by surprise. Jarvis had just announced ten minutes, so she'd descended the stairs into the workshop, but when she stepped through the glass doorway there it was, coasting through the tunnel, and if she hadn't known it was on autopilot she wouldn't have been able to tell the difference. It headed for the assembly station and the robots anchored it in place.
Pepper crossed to one of the work tables and set her mug aside. Hovered there, shivering a little in her tee-shirt, all at once feeling weirdly underdressed. How close could she stand? How close was safe? A chemical stench caught in her throat -- the smell of the car accident, the burning Honda - and for a second she was back there on the freeway, watching Tony disappear into the smoke. Had it only been two days? It felt like weeks.
"Jarvis." Tony's voice was distorted by the suit, alien and flat and somehow mechanical. Not Tony at all, but recognizable nonetheless. "Get me out of this thing."
For a brief moment, Pepper let her eyes close. He was conscious, then, at least.
"Sir, the emergency protocol was initiated when I lost contact--" She got the impression Jarvis was trying to warn him of her presence.
"Yeah, I know," the voice said, thin and weary even through the distortion. "Later. Just... get it off me."
He didn't realize she was there, yet. She hadn't been on hand for any of his returns since Gulmira, since he usually came and went in the middle of the night; but this time she was, this time she was there. Thanks to Jarvis, she was there. Pepper waited a safe distance away from the robot arms as they freed Tony from the armor piece by piece. She gripped the cold metal edge of the work table with one hand, watching as the mechanical shell parted from the man inside. Her lips thinned at the blood painting his face and matting his hair, at the way he didn't fight against Jarvis, just submitted to the disassembly in silence.
The armor came away to reveal more blood, wet and dully shining against the black of his flight suit. After he was free and the equipment disappeared he was left wavering in the quiet of the workshop only feet away from her. He had that thousand-yard stare she'd only seen once before -- the last time he'd gone out, when he'd gotten back late enough that he was still in the workshop when she arrived for work. She'd found him hunched on the couch with an ice pack held to one knee and he hadn't quite returned to himself enough to notice that she was right in front of him until the third time she'd called his name.
This time, standing there not two yards away from her staring into nothing, he looked so unsteady she was sure he was going to fall, but he didn't - he just stood there, face white under the red, and then blinked. His left hand flew up to his throat and he fumbled with the zipper of the flight suit but he was too clumsy to make it work. She gave him a moment and then stepped forward, making sure he was aware of her presence before she pushed his hand away and slid the zipper down to his waist.
The material felt slick against her fingers, from sweat or blood - she didn't take the time to look, too focused on Tony's hitching breaths near her ear, the fine tremor she could feel running through his body when she touched him. This close his human scent broke through the burnt odor that had overpowered her before the armor came off, but even so he smelled sharp and metallic, like damp rust. There was a jagged tear in the suit and underneath she could see that something with enough force to breach the armor had driven metal fragments into the flesh of his shoulder under his right collar bone, the largest of which looked to be a little smaller than her hand. He staggered against her hip as she peeled the material away from the wound, her fingers moving slowly, trying as best she could to avoid touching the shrapnel embedded in his flesh.
"What happened?" she asked as he stepped back out of her reach and took over stripping down to his sweat stained tee shirt and boxers one-handed.
He shook his head and avoided her eyes. "It won't be on the news," he said.
That wasn't what she'd asked, of course. She wasn't sure if the statement was supposed to reassure her or not, whether it was fact or wish. The bloodstain spread a little as he moved, soaking into the white cotton of his shirt, but there wasn't as much blood as she'd expected. The adrenalin must have already worn off because he held his right arm tight against his chest as if it hurt to move.
"We're going to the hospital." As much as she needed the words to come out firm and no-nonsense her voice broke, just a little.
"Pepper," he said. "You can - you could -"
"No," she crossed her arms, hugging herself. "I'm not going to pull that piece of- No, Tony. You need someone with medical training; I'm not going to- I'm calling an ambulance and-"
"Not like this," he interrupted. His left hand trembled as he shoved it through his hair, leaving it standing on end where it wasn't stuck to his head with blood. "Let me… let me clean up. First. Let me… I'm… Yeah. Sticky." The words fell out in a breathless jumble.
He needed a doctor. She wasn't sure why she gave in so easily, but his desperation was hard to face and it didn't seem like he was in immanent danger, so she didn't protest. Just nodded. Let him go.
She didn't trust him not to pass out, though, so she followed him as he shuffled to the workshop's small bathroom then sat on the toilet while he washed off the blood and sweat behind the frosted glass doors of the shower. When the water cut off she handed him a towel, helped him step into the pair of slacks she'd found draped over his desk chair, the charcoal grey pinstripes he'd been wearing the last time she'd seen him, stripped off and left behind before he'd taken off for… wherever. Buttoned the pants and then helped him pull the wrinkled dress shirt over his uninjured arm because his hands were shaking too hard to do it himself; left the shirt draped over the injured shoulder, since an involuntary, wordless sound escaped the back of his throat every time he moved his right arm even a little. It wasn't ideal, but she didn't want to take the time to find something else. Didn't want to leave him alone.
He wouldn't meet her eyes. His whole body had gone rigid at her first touch and he didn't relax, not even after she'd let him go and he set to buttoning the shirt himself, clumsy and one-handed, moving as if from habit, so she didn't interfere. He seemed to catch himself after fastening the bottom two buttons and she left it that way, giving him some space. She didn't touch him again. The wound still oozed blood and was ragged and raw around the edges where the metal protruded and she wasn't at all sure now that she wanted to know what could have left him so without fight that he'd actually agreed to the emergency room this easily, when he'd refused to see a doctor of any kind since returning from Afghanistan.
She'd just pulled out her cell phone and had started punching in 911 when Tony spoke for the first time in what felt like hours but was probably twenty minutes, tops.
"Wait," he ground out.
"No," she shot back. "No, Tony. I don't know anything about this. You need a doctor. I'm not-"
"Yeah," he interrupted. "I'll go. But… you drive."
"Tony-"
"I don't need an ambulance. I don't want… if there's an ambulance…" He shook his head. "Pepper, I'll be okay. I'll make it to the ER. You can drive me, it'll be okay."
In the end she let him convince her. Let him have that much, since he was doing what she wanted anyway, and it might stave off the inevitable publicity for a little while. It was twenty minutes to the nearest hospital, her hands clenched on the wheel while beside her Tony lapsed into one-word responses to her compulsive attempts to make sure he stayed conscious and then stopped responding altogether but turned his head toward her so she could see that his eyes were still open.
The bleak intensity of his stare was unnerving enough that she had trouble keeping her attention on the road but she made it without killing them both. By the time she pulled the car into the drive to the ER his breathing was coming in short, agonized gasps. She took one look at his face, pasty and beaded with sweat, his forehead and cheek slicked with blood again from some hidden wound under his hair, and made a decision.
"Stay here. I'm going to get help," she said. He didn't argue with that, either, didn't say anything, and she refused to think about it because if she did she wouldn't be able to do what needed to be done.
By the time she returned two minutes later with a couple of paramedics in tow Tony couldn't get out of the passenger seat on his own and his face was closed off and wan and when he finally went slack and boneless as they tried to move him it was almost a relief. The paramedics didn't comment at the blue light clearly visible in his chest. Just eased him out of the car as if they'd expected the collapse and his head lolled back loose as a newborn's, supported by one of the EMT's hands as they lifted him onto the stretcher and Pepper wished her mind would shut off too because this wasn't something she had the skills to process, not in the least.
He came to while they were waiting for the surgeon, in a curtained-off area of the ER, a hospital security guard planted outside to scare off any gawkers. She'd already explained the arc reactor in Tony's chest the best she could, emphasized that they shouldn't touch it. The attending physician clearly thought they were both insane, but he did as she asked and left it alone.
Of course, the first thing Tony tried to do was sit up. The attending rushed forward and pressed his uninjured shoulder down, holding him in place.
"Mr. Stark, we need you to remain still. There's shrapnel in your shoulder, and if you move you could make things worse, okay?"
Tony blinked at the doctor. He didn't look very focused, but after a long moment he nodded and sunk back to the mattress. "Where's Pepper?" he rasped.
She stepped forward, into his line of vision. "You're going into surgery in a few minutes," she said. "But they need to ask you some questions. They want to know what happened."
Tony swallowed and closed his eyes. "Yeah. Okay." When he opened them again they were hard and blank.
"Your assistant told us she found you in your workshop. Can you tell me how you were injured?"
They had him on oxygen, but even so he was having trouble catching enough breath to talk. "Accident," he managed. "Working on a new design. Misjudged a calculation and... woke up on the floor."
The doctor nodded, shot a quick glance at Pepper. She held very still. Everyone on the planet knew by now that Tony Stark was Iron Man. But the doctor didn't press either of them. Tony was also a weapons designer, after all, or had been until recently; and it wasn't inconceivable that one of his designs might have misfired on him. It was hard to say whether the doctor bought the story, but Pepper didn't contradict him. He hadn't asked her to lie outright for him. That was something, she supposed. She was a terrible liar.
He was so pale. His eyes looked sunken into his skull. He was--
No. That had been before he'd woken up in the ER, before they took him into surgery.
She was in the hallway. In a blue and white hallway. Standing with her back to the wall. She wasn't precisely sure how she'd gotten there, and for a moment she didn't recognize her surroundings at all. Every hallway here looked the same to her, low ceilinged and bland, the walls broken here and there by paintings of the type Tony would have mocked as Corporate Expressionism. Art that was so forgettable that she couldn't even use it as a landmark to figure out where she was.
After a little hunting she came across a sign that told her she was a hall away from the surgical waiting area. When she found it, there were two other people in the room, a couple who drooped with exhaustion, leaning on one another for support. They didn't look up and she picked the seat farthest away from them. Picked up a magazine and flipped through it, unable to read a word.
"It's good you didn't attempt to remove the shrapnel yourself, Ms. Potts. The largest piece had compromised Mr. Stark's axillary artery."
She sat in a plastic chair, her knees pressed together and her hands clenched together and her attention focused on the surgeon and she was pretty sure she'd forgotten how to blink.
The surgeon, a woman in her forties with a cap of short black hair and a brusque, no-nonsense manner, had ushered her back to an office a few halls away from the waiting room; but the privacy didn't help. Instead the little room closed around her, too normal, too lived in. There were pictures of a smiling couple on the surgeon's desk, and it took Pepper two minutes of staring to recognize the woman in the picture as the surgeon facing her in wrinkled scrubs.
"The metal was hot enough to temporarily cauterize the wound. If you had pulled it out chances are he would have suffered significant blood loss."
Pepper nodded, and the tension in her shoulders made the movement feel jerky. She'd let Tony control the situation, and she knew better. Corralling Tony was her job.
The surgeon regarded her coolly. "Time was of the essence. Allowing him to change, bringing him here yourself. The shrapnel could have dislodged, with all that movement."
She knew better. She did. She knew better than to listen to Tony. She should never have... Pepper cut off the thought. She didn't have time for it now.
The surgeon's expression softened. "He's very lucky. He made it here and I was able to repair the artery. The damage from the other pieces of shrapnel was minor. We'll have to watch for infection, as with any penetrating trauma--"
Pepper heard the rest, but stopped trying to make sense of it. Saved it for later.
They let her in to see him briefly after they moved him out of the operating room. She wasn't family, but he was Tony Stark, and it didn't matter. He didn't have anyone else.
His eyes were open when the surgeon led her into recovery. His eyes were open but he didn't seem very aware.
"Tony?" He turned his head, just a little, towards the direction of her voice. She tried to smile. There was no expression on his face at all, just bruises and cuts and the oxygen tube.
He was still hooked up to so much equipment that it was hard to get a sense of him underneath it all. His bare feet stuck out from under the white blanket a nurse had spread over him to fight the post-anesthesia chill. Pepper covered them up again and then touched the back of his left hand just below the spot where the I.V. was anchored. He curled his fingers, so she held his hand, but his grip stayed limp and he didn't squeeze back. Then his eyes slipped closed and someone told her it was time to leave.
It would be an hour or two before he really woke up. If he woke up. He'd wake up, they said he'd wake up. Besides the shrapnel wound there was a hairline skull fracture and a bad concussion and a couple of broken ribs but they said he'd wake up. Her watch said it was eleven forty-five but she didn't know if it was day or night until she left the anonymous hallways and ventured down to the first floor to get herself a cup of coffee in the cafeteria and saw the sun shining in the parking lot outside. Glinting on the chrome of the cars. Day, then.
She was in line to pay for the coffee when her pocket vibrated and she startled so hard she nearly dropped her cup. When her turn came she handed the cashier her $1.85 and then carried her coffee to an empty table. Pried her cell phone out of the front pocket of her jeans and found eight messages she hadn't noticed before: one from Brett Maguire, two from Mary Littlejohn at the office, one from a number she didn't recognize, one from Rhodey, and three, including the most recent, from Agent Coulson. She deleted them all.
"Miss Potts--"
She'd just pressed the call button for the elevator back to Tony's floor. As she turned towards the voice, her paper cup of lukewarm coffee sloshed a little, the liquid running down the back of her hand. The man who had stopped her had a round, bland face, a sparse beard, and looked as if he didn't see the sun very often - a pretty unusual feat for a resident of Los Angeles. He reminded her of a history professor she'd had back at Bard, which didn't fit at all. Pepper blinked, knowing she should recognize him, but her mind remained stubbornly blank.
"Lester Briggs, Miss Potts. The L.A. Times? We met a few days ago."
Oh. She should have known. Of course someone had found out Tony was here. Of course. "I'm sorry, Mr. Briggs. I'm afraid--"
"Can you confirm that Tony Stark was admitted--"
She couldn't seem to find the words to make Briggs go away. Dealing with the press was her job. She did this every day. Why couldn't she find the right thing to say? "--it's really none of your--"
"Because I received information this morning that he was brought to the emergency room with serious injuries. There wasn't a police report, so I have to assume it has something to do with the so-called Iron Man--"
At the mention of Tony's alter ego, Pepper lost all that remained of her tattered professionalism. "Don't you write for the business pages, Mr. Briggs?" she snapped, speaking on instinct, speaking without thought. "I wouldn't have pegged you for an ambulance chaser." As soon as the words left her mouth, she went cold.
"I'll take that as a yes," Briggs said, not unkindly. He didn't try to follow her onto the elevator when it arrived, but he didn't really need to, now did he? Not when she'd already given him what he wanted. Briggs had confirmation, and the story would hit the L.A. Times website within hours. Maybe even minutes. The rest of the media would follow, if they hadn't already found out. And it was her fault.
She'd lost her coffee cup somewhere between the elevator and the women's bathroom. She'd meant to go straight back to the waiting room, but by the time she got off the elevator her stomach was in cramps and she'd broken out in a cold sweat and her heart was in her throat and the bathroom was right there. She'd thought she might be sick but nothing had come, so she huddled on the floor, arms wrapped around her knees, and just breathed.
The wall was rough against her back, the cold bleeding through her thin tee-shirt. Everything had gone flat and unreal, like the sinks and the stalls and the white porcelain toilets and the trash cans were really cardboard cut outs on some kind of stage set. The tiled floor was too close, the walls too far away. So she sat there for a long time, until things started to regain their proper dimensions.
Later, much later, she found herself in a private room, sitting in a less than comfortable chair next to a high hospital bed. The arc reactor had piqued the curiosity of the hospital staff but mostly they were too aware of the aura of Tony Stark, billionaire eccentric and occasional superhero, to do more than gawk from the doorway as they passed, and Pepper's fierce stare scared off even the bold. She'd threatened them with the mother of all lawsuits if anything was released about Tony's condition or if she so much as caught a whiff of the press anywhere near his room. She must have been convincing because so far they'd been left alone.
No one told her to go home, no one insisted visiting hours were over, and she decided that notoriety might have its advantages after all. She was jittery with exhaustion but the thought of leaving for the night had only fleetingly entered her mind because every time Tony opened his eyes he searched her out as precisely as one of his targeting systems.
Since coming out of the anesthesia he hadn't said much. He hadn't told her where he'd been or who had the firepower to so damage the armor. Instead he dozed fitfully, doped up on painkillers and the lingering anesthetic. Pepper couldn't sleep, too wired by questions she didn't dare ask until they were back at the house and he'd snapped out of the dazed shock he'd been wrapped in since the armor came off.
His skin was grey beneath the scrapes and cuts and the beginnings of a black eye and even though he never truly fell asleep he also couldn't seem to stay awake for more than a half an hour at a time, and on top of that a nurse came by to wake him every few hours to check his responses. While Pepper knew his injuries in Afghanistan had been much more extensive - should have been fatal, in fact - he'd had three months to recover by the time Rhodey had brought him back. This was different. This was new to her. This wasn't something she'd ever wanted to see.
Pepper wasn't stupid - she knew he'd been injured before. He'd been sore and stiff after returning from Gulmira and though he'd done a decent job covering it he'd been in pain for a week following the fight with Obadiah. Since then she'd caught him more than once with ice packs and she'd made sure to keep the ever-expanding first aid kit well stocked - but there had never been anything like this. This was - this was blood transfusions and oxygen tubes and three hours of surgery. This was one step away from the I.C.U.
As she sat next to the hospital bed watching Tony shift in his sleep, unconsciously searching for a position that didn't hurt, Pepper tried to compose her letter of resignation in her head. Somehow she never got past the salutation.
Thanks again to
besyd for beta duty. Sorry for the big delay between parts this time.
7.
Each time was different, each time defied routine. This time the note read Out to Lunch.
It was a yellow Post-it and Tony's scrawl was smeared and illegible, but Pepper had been deciphering his handwriting for seven years. And the contents didn't matter, because his words didn't mean anything, not at all. The armor was gone and there was a note and that was all she needed to know. The first time he'd gone AWOL she'd tried everything she could think of -- she'd called his cell phone, she'd called Rhodey, she'd badgered Jarvis. This time she knew better than to bother.
At first she did okay. She kept busy. Her email inbox was as full as ever. There were calls to make - Brett Maguire wanted to schedule a meeting to discuss the practical applications of arc reactor technology; Stark Industries' PR department, disgruntled over the company's sudden change in direction, not to mention the lawsuits, wanted a few hours of Tony's time, which once again she had to put off indefinitely; and Lyle Masterson, the old engineering colleague of Ibrahim Yinsen's at Cambridge, had finally returned her call, but when she dialed his number the secretary who answered told her he was out of the office on personal business.
Around eleven Dr. Maya Hansen, a scientist at Nangen Microsystems, a subsidiary of Stark Industries that focused on medical nanotechnology, called. Hansen had prepared a prospectus for a new line of research on which, of course, she wanted Tony's input; and because Tony had never quite learned to draw the line between his duties as CEO and his love of shiny new technological innovations, he had told Hansen to toss it in his lap -- his words, or so Hansen claimed -- when she was ready. Given his interest in miniaturization, Pepper wasn't surprised that nanotechnology had caught his attention.
"I'm sorry, Dr. Hansen, but I'm afraid Mr. Stark's schedule is immovable for the foreseeable future. But I'll be sure to--"
"I know how busy Tony is, Miss Potts," Hansen cut in. "But I'm certain he'll make time for me once he hears about the success I've had in preliminary tests. He was very enthusiastic about the project the last time I saw him."
Pepper absorbed this, considered the slight emphasis Hansen had placed on Tony's name, the red flags it triggered. She was reasonably sure that even Tony Stark drew the line at seducing his employees -- or at least he had since she'd been his assistant. That didn't mean he hadn't slept with Hansen before the scientist came to work for SI, of course, but Pepper decided it was best if she didn't pursue that line of inquiry.
"Yes, Mr. Stark takes great interest in every new technology developed for his companies," Pepper managed. "Why don't you send the report my way. I'll see what I can do about scheduling a meeting if he's interested after reading my summary."
She didn't add that she had no idea when - or if - Tony would ever be back to read it.
The document arrived in the form of a huge pdf file, so Pepper spent most of the afternoon wading through dense text on a subject she knew next to nothing about, which wasn't anything new; but it required a level of concentration she just didn't have and so she found herself reading and re-reading the same passages, absorbing nothing. Coffee didn't help. Instead it set her heart racing and sharpened her already alert senses until she was jumping every time the air conditioning switched on or her phone rang.
After the third time reading through a passage detailing Hansen's experiments with nano-neural interfaces and the possible applications for traumatic brain injury, Pepper gave up. Closed the report, saved her notes, shut down her laptop and carried it downstairs.
The shop was quiet and chilly. Nothing had changed since she'd searched it that morning, looking for any sign of where Tony could have gone. The clothes he'd been wearing at the office last night were still draped over his desk chair, and sitting abandoned near one of the computer monitors was a half full glass of the wheatgrass protein shake he drank when he was too busy to think about food. The left over liquid had separated and congealed into a watery sludge, so Pepper dumped it down the sink in the kitchenette and rinsed out the glass. Tony Stark was her job, yes; picking up after him this way really wasn't part of that, but then she couldn't really do her job while he was out throwing himself in the way of tanks or missiles or whatever it was he did when he took off in the armor. She couldn't do much of anything but settle on the leather couch with her laptop, watch CNN on the workshop's flatscreen and wonder whether the lack of breaking news about Iron Man was a good sign.
So she waited, she waited until the sun vanished and the screen of her laptop went blurry and she realized she hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. By the time she got back to her apartment it was after ten and she fixed a grilled cheese sandwich and then made herself eat it. Somehow she managed to fall asleep.
"I'm terribly sorry to wake you, Miss Potts, especially at this hour."
When she'd fumbled at her nightstand for the phone she'd expected to hear Tony on the line -- 3 am calls were not necessarily out of the question with Tony, and she was so out of it at first that the fact that he'd taken off for parts unknown completely slipped her mind -- but instead it was Jarvis, voice calm and polite as ever. Pepper momentarily forgot Jarvis didn't actually exist, because for an A.I. he sounded remarkably hesitant.
"I know you wouldn't have called if it wasn't important," Pepper managed; unable to shake the feeling that she was three steps behind in a conversation that had just started. She'd only been asleep for a few hours but it had been enough to leave her with that strange strung-out lethargy that had become all too familiar since Afghanistan.
Belatedly, it hit her: Jarvis had never called her before. Never. And then she remembered that Tony had vanished. That Tony was out playing Iron Man, and--
"Indeed," Jarvis said, breaking into her spiraling thoughts. He paused again, as if thrown by the precedent the call represented. "Miss Potts, according to the new emergency protocol Mr. Stark installed I am to contact you first in the event of--"
Emergency protocol? "What happened?" She was awake now, if still groggy, and she tossed back the blankets and crawled out of bed, reaching for the lamp. She should have known. She should have known something had happened the moment she heard Jarvis' voice.
"I'm afraid the autopilot has been activated on Mr. Stark's armor," Jarvis said.
"Autopilot?" He had autopilot programmed into that thing? For a moment the wonder of it short-circuited her mounting panic. Only Tony would think to install autopilot in his personal suit of armor. Then again, only Tony would think to build himself a personal suit of armor in the first place.
"Yes. The emergency protocol was triggered when the autopilot became active and I lost contact with Mr. Stark." Jarvis' speech patterns weren't usually this... well, robotic, but maybe the circumstances had driven him back to his roots. And again, what Jarvis had said hit her on a delay, as if she getting the message from a satellite phone.
Lost contact.
Adrenalin flooded Pepper, leaving her knees full of jelly and the edges of her vision too bright, like a flash had gone off in her face. She traded the cell phone for her ear piece and it took her three tries to get it secured to her ear because her hands were shaking.
"What do you mean, you've lost contact with him?" she said once the earpiece was in place. She stripped off her pajamas and dug through her dresser for clean underwear.
Jarvis hesitated, and she imagined she could hear him clearing his throat, which would have been an eerily human expression given his lack of the necessary anatomy. "Mr. Stark is not responding to verbal contact and the armor's autopilot function has been brought online in order to maintain altitude. I have contact with--"
"What is the autopilot function programmed to do in this scenario?" Pepper interrupted, a curious calm replacing the shakes as the implications started to sink in. Jarvis had lost contact with Tony. Tony didn't have control over the armor, and she didn't know what that meant precisely, but it couldn't be good.
"The armor is programmed to return to Mr. Stark's workshop," Jarvis answered, something close to worry creeping into his voice. "I estimate it will arrive at five a.m."
Two hours. Pepper stared at the wall across from her bed, at the antique silk fan Tony had brought back for her from a defense conference in Tokyo last year. It must have cost more than the contents of her bedroom, and he'd handed it to her like it was a tourist stand trinket. He never remembered her birthday but he'd given her that fan, and on Christmas Eve last year he'd taken her and Happy to dinner at Patina, and she'd known it was his only private celebration because he didn't have anyone else but Rhodey and Rhodey always spent the holidays with his family. Obadiah hadn't been there, and at the time it hadn't occurred to her to wonder about it, but now… now she couldn't afford the distraction.
"Where is he? Do you have any information on the armor's condition? What happened?"
There was a long silence, as if Jarvis was deciding which question to answer first. When he spoke again he was excruciatingly polite. "I'm sorry, Miss Potts, but Mr. Stark has prevented me from revealing his location and the circumstances of his mission."
Pepper let out a curse she knew would shock Tony to hear. She yanked on a pair of wrinkled jeans left on top of her laundry basket. Of course he'd told Jarvis not to say anything. He wouldn't want her worrying to be informed by facts. The secrecy was going to change, once she… if… goddamn him.
She shook it off, because Jarvis was continuing. "But I can report that the armor has extensive damage to the helmet and right side."
Pepper filed this away and ignored the images that wanted to spring to mind. Tony, his chest wrapped in bloody bandages, his bowed head framed by guns. "Is the armor intact enough to make the return journey?" she asked instead, pulling a tee-shirt over her head and stuffing her hair into a ponytail.
Jarvis paused again, probably running some kind of scan. "Yes. The flight capabilities have not been damaged enough to prevent return."
"Can you get any kind of diagnostic reading on Tony? Is he okay?" Where were her keys? In her purse - which was out on the kitchen table, where she left it the night before. She was moving too slowly, still. She needed caffeine, but she couldn't spare the time.
"The armor is not programmed to monitor Mr. Stark's physical condition," Jarvis answered, and there was regret there, she could have sworn there was.
Pepper added one more item to the list of Things That Will Change.
By the time she reached the house her heart was in her throat and she had to pry white knuckled fingers away from the wheel of her car. Jarvis was a steady voice in her ear, counting down the time until the armor's arrival. She thought maybe her decision not to call Rhodey might have been a mistake but after the confrontation in the office she didn't want to risk making things worse for either of them. Especially since she had no idea where Tony had been.
"One hour thirty minutes," Jarvis announced.
Pepper paced through the house, calling up news reports on the screen in the living room window, scanning CNN for any clue at all, but everything seemed relevant and nothing gave her what she was looking for.
"One hour ten minutes."
She flicked off the news and then asked Jarvis to bring it up again ten minutes later. She descended into the workshop and dug out the prodigious first aid kit. She traced her way up the tunnel to the driveway outside the house, straining her eyes for any sign of the armor among the lights in the sky. She stalked back upstairs to make a pot of strong coffee, which only turned her stomach when she tried to take a sip. She found herself standing in the parlor, staring out at the inky night, at the water below, and this time Jarvis's voice startled her.
"Forty minutes, Miss Potts."
When the armor finally arrived it took her by surprise. Jarvis had just announced ten minutes, so she'd descended the stairs into the workshop, but when she stepped through the glass doorway there it was, coasting through the tunnel, and if she hadn't known it was on autopilot she wouldn't have been able to tell the difference. It headed for the assembly station and the robots anchored it in place.
Pepper crossed to one of the work tables and set her mug aside. Hovered there, shivering a little in her tee-shirt, all at once feeling weirdly underdressed. How close could she stand? How close was safe? A chemical stench caught in her throat -- the smell of the car accident, the burning Honda - and for a second she was back there on the freeway, watching Tony disappear into the smoke. Had it only been two days? It felt like weeks.
"Jarvis." Tony's voice was distorted by the suit, alien and flat and somehow mechanical. Not Tony at all, but recognizable nonetheless. "Get me out of this thing."
For a brief moment, Pepper let her eyes close. He was conscious, then, at least.
"Sir, the emergency protocol was initiated when I lost contact--" She got the impression Jarvis was trying to warn him of her presence.
"Yeah, I know," the voice said, thin and weary even through the distortion. "Later. Just... get it off me."
He didn't realize she was there, yet. She hadn't been on hand for any of his returns since Gulmira, since he usually came and went in the middle of the night; but this time she was, this time she was there. Thanks to Jarvis, she was there. Pepper waited a safe distance away from the robot arms as they freed Tony from the armor piece by piece. She gripped the cold metal edge of the work table with one hand, watching as the mechanical shell parted from the man inside. Her lips thinned at the blood painting his face and matting his hair, at the way he didn't fight against Jarvis, just submitted to the disassembly in silence.
The armor came away to reveal more blood, wet and dully shining against the black of his flight suit. After he was free and the equipment disappeared he was left wavering in the quiet of the workshop only feet away from her. He had that thousand-yard stare she'd only seen once before -- the last time he'd gone out, when he'd gotten back late enough that he was still in the workshop when she arrived for work. She'd found him hunched on the couch with an ice pack held to one knee and he hadn't quite returned to himself enough to notice that she was right in front of him until the third time she'd called his name.
This time, standing there not two yards away from her staring into nothing, he looked so unsteady she was sure he was going to fall, but he didn't - he just stood there, face white under the red, and then blinked. His left hand flew up to his throat and he fumbled with the zipper of the flight suit but he was too clumsy to make it work. She gave him a moment and then stepped forward, making sure he was aware of her presence before she pushed his hand away and slid the zipper down to his waist.
The material felt slick against her fingers, from sweat or blood - she didn't take the time to look, too focused on Tony's hitching breaths near her ear, the fine tremor she could feel running through his body when she touched him. This close his human scent broke through the burnt odor that had overpowered her before the armor came off, but even so he smelled sharp and metallic, like damp rust. There was a jagged tear in the suit and underneath she could see that something with enough force to breach the armor had driven metal fragments into the flesh of his shoulder under his right collar bone, the largest of which looked to be a little smaller than her hand. He staggered against her hip as she peeled the material away from the wound, her fingers moving slowly, trying as best she could to avoid touching the shrapnel embedded in his flesh.
"What happened?" she asked as he stepped back out of her reach and took over stripping down to his sweat stained tee shirt and boxers one-handed.
He shook his head and avoided her eyes. "It won't be on the news," he said.
That wasn't what she'd asked, of course. She wasn't sure if the statement was supposed to reassure her or not, whether it was fact or wish. The bloodstain spread a little as he moved, soaking into the white cotton of his shirt, but there wasn't as much blood as she'd expected. The adrenalin must have already worn off because he held his right arm tight against his chest as if it hurt to move.
"We're going to the hospital." As much as she needed the words to come out firm and no-nonsense her voice broke, just a little.
"Pepper," he said. "You can - you could -"
"No," she crossed her arms, hugging herself. "I'm not going to pull that piece of- No, Tony. You need someone with medical training; I'm not going to- I'm calling an ambulance and-"
"Not like this," he interrupted. His left hand trembled as he shoved it through his hair, leaving it standing on end where it wasn't stuck to his head with blood. "Let me… let me clean up. First. Let me… I'm… Yeah. Sticky." The words fell out in a breathless jumble.
He needed a doctor. She wasn't sure why she gave in so easily, but his desperation was hard to face and it didn't seem like he was in immanent danger, so she didn't protest. Just nodded. Let him go.
She didn't trust him not to pass out, though, so she followed him as he shuffled to the workshop's small bathroom then sat on the toilet while he washed off the blood and sweat behind the frosted glass doors of the shower. When the water cut off she handed him a towel, helped him step into the pair of slacks she'd found draped over his desk chair, the charcoal grey pinstripes he'd been wearing the last time she'd seen him, stripped off and left behind before he'd taken off for… wherever. Buttoned the pants and then helped him pull the wrinkled dress shirt over his uninjured arm because his hands were shaking too hard to do it himself; left the shirt draped over the injured shoulder, since an involuntary, wordless sound escaped the back of his throat every time he moved his right arm even a little. It wasn't ideal, but she didn't want to take the time to find something else. Didn't want to leave him alone.
He wouldn't meet her eyes. His whole body had gone rigid at her first touch and he didn't relax, not even after she'd let him go and he set to buttoning the shirt himself, clumsy and one-handed, moving as if from habit, so she didn't interfere. He seemed to catch himself after fastening the bottom two buttons and she left it that way, giving him some space. She didn't touch him again. The wound still oozed blood and was ragged and raw around the edges where the metal protruded and she wasn't at all sure now that she wanted to know what could have left him so without fight that he'd actually agreed to the emergency room this easily, when he'd refused to see a doctor of any kind since returning from Afghanistan.
She'd just pulled out her cell phone and had started punching in 911 when Tony spoke for the first time in what felt like hours but was probably twenty minutes, tops.
"Wait," he ground out.
"No," she shot back. "No, Tony. I don't know anything about this. You need a doctor. I'm not-"
"Yeah," he interrupted. "I'll go. But… you drive."
"Tony-"
"I don't need an ambulance. I don't want… if there's an ambulance…" He shook his head. "Pepper, I'll be okay. I'll make it to the ER. You can drive me, it'll be okay."
In the end she let him convince her. Let him have that much, since he was doing what she wanted anyway, and it might stave off the inevitable publicity for a little while. It was twenty minutes to the nearest hospital, her hands clenched on the wheel while beside her Tony lapsed into one-word responses to her compulsive attempts to make sure he stayed conscious and then stopped responding altogether but turned his head toward her so she could see that his eyes were still open.
The bleak intensity of his stare was unnerving enough that she had trouble keeping her attention on the road but she made it without killing them both. By the time she pulled the car into the drive to the ER his breathing was coming in short, agonized gasps. She took one look at his face, pasty and beaded with sweat, his forehead and cheek slicked with blood again from some hidden wound under his hair, and made a decision.
"Stay here. I'm going to get help," she said. He didn't argue with that, either, didn't say anything, and she refused to think about it because if she did she wouldn't be able to do what needed to be done.
By the time she returned two minutes later with a couple of paramedics in tow Tony couldn't get out of the passenger seat on his own and his face was closed off and wan and when he finally went slack and boneless as they tried to move him it was almost a relief. The paramedics didn't comment at the blue light clearly visible in his chest. Just eased him out of the car as if they'd expected the collapse and his head lolled back loose as a newborn's, supported by one of the EMT's hands as they lifted him onto the stretcher and Pepper wished her mind would shut off too because this wasn't something she had the skills to process, not in the least.
He came to while they were waiting for the surgeon, in a curtained-off area of the ER, a hospital security guard planted outside to scare off any gawkers. She'd already explained the arc reactor in Tony's chest the best she could, emphasized that they shouldn't touch it. The attending physician clearly thought they were both insane, but he did as she asked and left it alone.
Of course, the first thing Tony tried to do was sit up. The attending rushed forward and pressed his uninjured shoulder down, holding him in place.
"Mr. Stark, we need you to remain still. There's shrapnel in your shoulder, and if you move you could make things worse, okay?"
Tony blinked at the doctor. He didn't look very focused, but after a long moment he nodded and sunk back to the mattress. "Where's Pepper?" he rasped.
She stepped forward, into his line of vision. "You're going into surgery in a few minutes," she said. "But they need to ask you some questions. They want to know what happened."
Tony swallowed and closed his eyes. "Yeah. Okay." When he opened them again they were hard and blank.
"Your assistant told us she found you in your workshop. Can you tell me how you were injured?"
They had him on oxygen, but even so he was having trouble catching enough breath to talk. "Accident," he managed. "Working on a new design. Misjudged a calculation and... woke up on the floor."
The doctor nodded, shot a quick glance at Pepper. She held very still. Everyone on the planet knew by now that Tony Stark was Iron Man. But the doctor didn't press either of them. Tony was also a weapons designer, after all, or had been until recently; and it wasn't inconceivable that one of his designs might have misfired on him. It was hard to say whether the doctor bought the story, but Pepper didn't contradict him. He hadn't asked her to lie outright for him. That was something, she supposed. She was a terrible liar.
He was so pale. His eyes looked sunken into his skull. He was--
No. That had been before he'd woken up in the ER, before they took him into surgery.
She was in the hallway. In a blue and white hallway. Standing with her back to the wall. She wasn't precisely sure how she'd gotten there, and for a moment she didn't recognize her surroundings at all. Every hallway here looked the same to her, low ceilinged and bland, the walls broken here and there by paintings of the type Tony would have mocked as Corporate Expressionism. Art that was so forgettable that she couldn't even use it as a landmark to figure out where she was.
After a little hunting she came across a sign that told her she was a hall away from the surgical waiting area. When she found it, there were two other people in the room, a couple who drooped with exhaustion, leaning on one another for support. They didn't look up and she picked the seat farthest away from them. Picked up a magazine and flipped through it, unable to read a word.
"It's good you didn't attempt to remove the shrapnel yourself, Ms. Potts. The largest piece had compromised Mr. Stark's axillary artery."
She sat in a plastic chair, her knees pressed together and her hands clenched together and her attention focused on the surgeon and she was pretty sure she'd forgotten how to blink.
The surgeon, a woman in her forties with a cap of short black hair and a brusque, no-nonsense manner, had ushered her back to an office a few halls away from the waiting room; but the privacy didn't help. Instead the little room closed around her, too normal, too lived in. There were pictures of a smiling couple on the surgeon's desk, and it took Pepper two minutes of staring to recognize the woman in the picture as the surgeon facing her in wrinkled scrubs.
"The metal was hot enough to temporarily cauterize the wound. If you had pulled it out chances are he would have suffered significant blood loss."
Pepper nodded, and the tension in her shoulders made the movement feel jerky. She'd let Tony control the situation, and she knew better. Corralling Tony was her job.
The surgeon regarded her coolly. "Time was of the essence. Allowing him to change, bringing him here yourself. The shrapnel could have dislodged, with all that movement."
She knew better. She did. She knew better than to listen to Tony. She should never have... Pepper cut off the thought. She didn't have time for it now.
The surgeon's expression softened. "He's very lucky. He made it here and I was able to repair the artery. The damage from the other pieces of shrapnel was minor. We'll have to watch for infection, as with any penetrating trauma--"
Pepper heard the rest, but stopped trying to make sense of it. Saved it for later.
They let her in to see him briefly after they moved him out of the operating room. She wasn't family, but he was Tony Stark, and it didn't matter. He didn't have anyone else.
His eyes were open when the surgeon led her into recovery. His eyes were open but he didn't seem very aware.
"Tony?" He turned his head, just a little, towards the direction of her voice. She tried to smile. There was no expression on his face at all, just bruises and cuts and the oxygen tube.
He was still hooked up to so much equipment that it was hard to get a sense of him underneath it all. His bare feet stuck out from under the white blanket a nurse had spread over him to fight the post-anesthesia chill. Pepper covered them up again and then touched the back of his left hand just below the spot where the I.V. was anchored. He curled his fingers, so she held his hand, but his grip stayed limp and he didn't squeeze back. Then his eyes slipped closed and someone told her it was time to leave.
It would be an hour or two before he really woke up. If he woke up. He'd wake up, they said he'd wake up. Besides the shrapnel wound there was a hairline skull fracture and a bad concussion and a couple of broken ribs but they said he'd wake up. Her watch said it was eleven forty-five but she didn't know if it was day or night until she left the anonymous hallways and ventured down to the first floor to get herself a cup of coffee in the cafeteria and saw the sun shining in the parking lot outside. Glinting on the chrome of the cars. Day, then.
She was in line to pay for the coffee when her pocket vibrated and she startled so hard she nearly dropped her cup. When her turn came she handed the cashier her $1.85 and then carried her coffee to an empty table. Pried her cell phone out of the front pocket of her jeans and found eight messages she hadn't noticed before: one from Brett Maguire, two from Mary Littlejohn at the office, one from a number she didn't recognize, one from Rhodey, and three, including the most recent, from Agent Coulson. She deleted them all.
"Miss Potts--"
She'd just pressed the call button for the elevator back to Tony's floor. As she turned towards the voice, her paper cup of lukewarm coffee sloshed a little, the liquid running down the back of her hand. The man who had stopped her had a round, bland face, a sparse beard, and looked as if he didn't see the sun very often - a pretty unusual feat for a resident of Los Angeles. He reminded her of a history professor she'd had back at Bard, which didn't fit at all. Pepper blinked, knowing she should recognize him, but her mind remained stubbornly blank.
"Lester Briggs, Miss Potts. The L.A. Times? We met a few days ago."
Oh. She should have known. Of course someone had found out Tony was here. Of course. "I'm sorry, Mr. Briggs. I'm afraid--"
"Can you confirm that Tony Stark was admitted--"
She couldn't seem to find the words to make Briggs go away. Dealing with the press was her job. She did this every day. Why couldn't she find the right thing to say? "--it's really none of your--"
"Because I received information this morning that he was brought to the emergency room with serious injuries. There wasn't a police report, so I have to assume it has something to do with the so-called Iron Man--"
At the mention of Tony's alter ego, Pepper lost all that remained of her tattered professionalism. "Don't you write for the business pages, Mr. Briggs?" she snapped, speaking on instinct, speaking without thought. "I wouldn't have pegged you for an ambulance chaser." As soon as the words left her mouth, she went cold.
"I'll take that as a yes," Briggs said, not unkindly. He didn't try to follow her onto the elevator when it arrived, but he didn't really need to, now did he? Not when she'd already given him what he wanted. Briggs had confirmation, and the story would hit the L.A. Times website within hours. Maybe even minutes. The rest of the media would follow, if they hadn't already found out. And it was her fault.
She'd lost her coffee cup somewhere between the elevator and the women's bathroom. She'd meant to go straight back to the waiting room, but by the time she got off the elevator her stomach was in cramps and she'd broken out in a cold sweat and her heart was in her throat and the bathroom was right there. She'd thought she might be sick but nothing had come, so she huddled on the floor, arms wrapped around her knees, and just breathed.
The wall was rough against her back, the cold bleeding through her thin tee-shirt. Everything had gone flat and unreal, like the sinks and the stalls and the white porcelain toilets and the trash cans were really cardboard cut outs on some kind of stage set. The tiled floor was too close, the walls too far away. So she sat there for a long time, until things started to regain their proper dimensions.
Later, much later, she found herself in a private room, sitting in a less than comfortable chair next to a high hospital bed. The arc reactor had piqued the curiosity of the hospital staff but mostly they were too aware of the aura of Tony Stark, billionaire eccentric and occasional superhero, to do more than gawk from the doorway as they passed, and Pepper's fierce stare scared off even the bold. She'd threatened them with the mother of all lawsuits if anything was released about Tony's condition or if she so much as caught a whiff of the press anywhere near his room. She must have been convincing because so far they'd been left alone.
No one told her to go home, no one insisted visiting hours were over, and she decided that notoriety might have its advantages after all. She was jittery with exhaustion but the thought of leaving for the night had only fleetingly entered her mind because every time Tony opened his eyes he searched her out as precisely as one of his targeting systems.
Since coming out of the anesthesia he hadn't said much. He hadn't told her where he'd been or who had the firepower to so damage the armor. Instead he dozed fitfully, doped up on painkillers and the lingering anesthetic. Pepper couldn't sleep, too wired by questions she didn't dare ask until they were back at the house and he'd snapped out of the dazed shock he'd been wrapped in since the armor came off.
His skin was grey beneath the scrapes and cuts and the beginnings of a black eye and even though he never truly fell asleep he also couldn't seem to stay awake for more than a half an hour at a time, and on top of that a nurse came by to wake him every few hours to check his responses. While Pepper knew his injuries in Afghanistan had been much more extensive - should have been fatal, in fact - he'd had three months to recover by the time Rhodey had brought him back. This was different. This was new to her. This wasn't something she'd ever wanted to see.
Pepper wasn't stupid - she knew he'd been injured before. He'd been sore and stiff after returning from Gulmira and though he'd done a decent job covering it he'd been in pain for a week following the fight with Obadiah. Since then she'd caught him more than once with ice packs and she'd made sure to keep the ever-expanding first aid kit well stocked - but there had never been anything like this. This was - this was blood transfusions and oxygen tubes and three hours of surgery. This was one step away from the I.C.U.
As she sat next to the hospital bed watching Tony shift in his sleep, unconsciously searching for a position that didn't hurt, Pepper tried to compose her letter of resignation in her head. Somehow she never got past the salutation.