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Pepper isn’t just tired, she’s mentally and physically exhausted. It’s the kind of exhaustion that has sank into her bones and taken root, clinging to her skin like wet clothes she can never quite manage to peel away. It’s always there, wearing her down little by little each day, a constant, heavy presence looming just over her shoulder.
Stocks at SI are up. Another facility has opened in Arizona. Shareholders are pleased, morale has never been higher, and R&D has secured funding for its work on new avionic technologies. Everything is perfect and still, Pepper comes home feeling like she’s standing on something that’s slowly been cracking. That one wrong move, one unguarded moment, could send everything cascading down around her – the company, her reputation, her personal life – like she’s been holding it all together with sheer force of will, and it’s starting to slip.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
The house is completely dark when she pulls into the driveway, her headlights sweeping across the expanse of windows, gaping like open, hungry mouths just waiting to devour her whole. She’s had a shit day, and a small part of her wishes something menacing would swallow her up, put her out of her misery. At least it would quiet the constant murmuring in her brain, she thinks.
Once inside, she tosses her purse and keys onto the small table in the foyer before balancing on one foot to slip off one stiletto, followed by the other. She groans a little in relief as she does so, thankful her feet can be flat on the ground after a fourteen-hour day in heels. She bends down to retrieve her shoes so she can put them away in her closet and notices pair of Tony’s tennis shoes laying haphazardly in the middle of the floor, like he was in too big of a hurry to take them off properly (the laces are still tied) and put them away. Pepper gathers them up too with an irritated sigh and takes them upstairs despite the promise she made to herself two weeks ago that she was going to stop doing things like this.
Tony is a grown man, he can clean up his own messes, she’d told herself one afternoon after she’d spent five minutes cleaning up the errant socks in the bathroom and the dried toothpaste left in the sink.
He’s home, Pepper knows. Probably has been for hours, if she had to guess. She can hear the faintest drum beat of some 70s or 80s rock anthem coming from Tony’s workshop as he works on whatever his latest hyperfixation is. More than likely, Tony is buried in a suit of armor, the same one they’ve been fighting about for months. Pepper knows it without asking, and the knowledge lands somewhere between irritation and shame. Irritation that this has become a recurring theme in her life and shame that she’s struggling with not wanting to do anything about it, despite knowing how this so easily affects Tony. She should go find him. She should say something before it gets worse. But she doesn’t because she doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to pull him out of whatever spiral he’s disappeared into.
When Pepper flips on the bedroom light, the mess is exactly where she left it this morning, not that she’s surprised. A pair of socks, half inside-out, lay on the floor at the end of the bed; a balled-up, grease-stained T-shirt and a single pair of sweatpants are piled next to Tony’s hamper because apparently proximity to the hamper counts as effort now. The suit jacket she picked up from the dry cleaners two days ago is still sealed in its plastic, tag dangling from the sleeve, and is now flung across the armchair in the corner like an afterthought. On his nightstand, a half-drunk, long-forgotten cup of coffee sits bare against the wood despite the empty coaster in the corner.
She starts cleaning because what else is she going to do? She cleans, not because she wants to, but because she knows if she doesn’t, the mess will still be there tomorrow and the day after that. Their shoes go in the closet, lined up neatly with all the others. The dirty clothes find their way into the hamper. The suit jacket comes out of its plastic and goes onto a hanger. She dumps the coffee down the sink in the ensuite bathroom, wipes down the countertops and latches the shower door closed.
Sometime in the last ten months, she stopped asking him to try and maybe she’s partially to blame. Pepper can admit that, knows she’s not entirely blameless.
Pepper changes into a pair of yoga pants and an oversized tee before moving through her nightly skincare routine on autopilot. She swaps her contacts for her glasses and twists her hair into a loose bun, pausing only to grimace at the dark spots under her eyes that serve as a stark reminder that stress and too many short nights is finally catching up with her.
The thought of tomorrow, though, makes her breathe a little easier: a last minute, unplanned vacation day. She rarely, if ever, takes a day off. She can sleep in, go to afternoon Pilates, maybe even make progress on the book that’s been sitting untouched on her nightstand for over a month.
For the first time all day, she can feel the corners of her mouth quirk up instead of pulling down into a perpetual frown.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she mutters when she steps into the kitchen.
There are dirty dishes in the sink because of course there are. The mountain of neglected paperwork waiting on her desk had kept Pepper late at the office, which meant Tony had been on his own for dinner. He’d managed just fine, apparently, judging by the dirty Tupperware and cutlery.
At least the dishes made it into the sink this time, she thinks to herself as she turns on the tap and squirts a bit of dish soap onto a clean sponge, resigned to cleaning up another one of his messes. There aren’t enough dishes, even with the two additional coffee mugs she ran across upstairs, to justify running the dishwasher, so she does them by hand. Pepper scrubs at the dishes until they’re clean and gives them a quick rinse before placing them into a rack to dry. They’ll be there in the morning for her to put away, she’s sure.
Her life has slipped into predictability and routines, and she has to laugh at how absurd it sounds – dating Tony Stark should hardly come with routines. If she doesn’t laugh, she’ll end up in tears.
It’s getting late and Tony has yet to stop working on whatever is hogging all of his attention. The sounds of rock music continue to be interspersed with all-too familiar noises: something humming beneath her feet, the occasional clanking of metal on metal, a loud scrape across the concrete floor. Pepper will be lucky if Tony surfaces long enough to collapse on the old corner couch by the Roadster for a forty-five-minute nap before diving headfirst into solving another one of the world’s supposed problems that he’s convinced himself of needing his immediate attention.
Two overly full glasses of wine and a rare night off from checking and responding to her work emails hasn’t helped any. The exhaustion she’d dragged home continues to cling to her like a second skin, coiling through her muscles until they physically ache. Her shoulders are tight, her neck is screaming at her, and her head throbs with a dull insistence she knows has nothing to do with the wine she opted for instead of a real dinner. She’d wanted a peaceful night at home, one where she could decompress and not feel like she was being taunted with each room she walked into. There is absolutely no reason her nervous system should be on this high of an alert.
She tries distracting herself, first with the news, then with some reality show she’s heard her assistant discussing with one of the girls from finance on occasion. The show is full of catty name-calling and over-the-top fake diary room entries, and while it doesn’t offer much in terms of substance, Pepper can see and appreciate the appeal in it. She decides to sit through all forty-two minutes of the show before killing the television, telling herself she should go to bed for the evening. Before she makes her way upstairs, she takes her empty wine glass to the sink and considers popping into the workshop and at least telling Tony she’s home and is going to bed. She opts not to because she knows, deep down, there is a very real possibility things would quickly shift into an argument she has no business starting, let alone ending.
Once upstairs, she tosses her glasses onto her nightstand and collapses on top of the covers with a grunt. She can’t be bothered with her nightly routine of carefully removing the decorative pillows and placing them neatly in the storage ottoman she’d purchased specifically for this purpose. Instead, she rolls over and faces Tony’s side of the bed before giving the pillows a few hard shoves until they’ve all tumbled onto the floor. She’s not sure why that little act of defiance feels so good, especially when she knows come morning, she’ll be the one picking them up and putting them back in their rightful places.
Tony has always told her she’s the one constant in his life. Maybe that’s why he’s always pointed out her predictability and she’s been refusing to see it. Over the years, she’s shaped herself to fit that narrative, quietly trimming away pieces of herself, little by little, until what remains is exactly what he thinks he needs her to be.
She wonders, sometimes bitterly, if he even notices the cost. The nights she stays up thinking about board meetings and budgets, the quiet sacrifices she makes so his chaos can continue to run unchecked. Yet, despite it all, she’s still here, the steady presence he claims he can’t live without, the one constant in a life that feels like it’s on fire more often than not.
It’s exhausting, shaping herself to fit the version Tony has come to know and expect. She’s strong, competent, reliable. But beneath that exterior, there are cracks she’s learned to ignore. The problem is that they’re starting to become too big, too deep, to continue ignoring.
She rolls over to turn the bedside light off, kicking a little at the covers so they bunch up near her feet. Now that she’s horizontal, she has no intention of getting up to properly pull back the covers and after enough kicks and shifting across the blankets, she’s made it a bit easier for her to slip beneath them. It’s nearly impossible for her to turn her brain off after a day like this one, but she somehow, miraculously, falls asleep quicker than expected.
According to the alarm clock on her nightstand, it’s nearly four in the morning when Pepper is startled awake by Tony clumsily stumbling into the end of the bed, as if it hasn’t been in the exact same place for the last four years. She considers pretending to still be asleep for all of two seconds before she pushes herself into a sitting position so she can reach over and turn on the bedside light, bathing herself in the warm glow.
“Shit. Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you,” Tony says as he glances down at the scattered pillows on the floor. “Was the ottoman not cooperating or something?”
“Something like that,” she mutters. “Are you just coming to bed?”
“Trying to, yeah.”
“It’s four in the morning, Tony.”
“I said sorry.”
“For what? For waking me up? Or are you sorry for the dirty dishes you left in the sink or for the meeting you blew off at Stark yesterday? Or are you trying to apologize for something I’ve yet to find out about?” she snaps.
Tony holds up his hands and takes a step back, defensive. These sudden fights happen more than he’d like to admit, but he’s never been one to back away from an argument, even if it would be best for everyone involved.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, biting hard down on the word sorry. Pepper doesn’t miss the irritation that seeps through his words, nor the way he avoids everything she’s just called him out on. Her jaw is set tight as she stares at Tony on the other side of the bed, the pair of them locked in some silent battle of who will be weakest and break first.
For once, Pepper gives in first.
She tears her eyes from Tony’s and pushes away the covers, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Her fingers flex repeatedly against the edge of the mattress before she decides to stand, snagging her glasses and putting them on as she does so.
“Where are you going?” Tony sounds exasperated, but not because he senses Pepper is angry. It’s more of an exasperation that stems from the fact he feels Pepper is being unreasonable at an ungodly hour when he just wants to sleep.
“To the gym,” she replies curtly, turning to yank the covers on her side of the bed back into submission because despite everything, chaos has rules that must be followed.
“It’s four in the morning. You have the day off; can’t you go later?”
“Why go later when I’m awake now?”
Tony hangs his head and expels a heavy sigh as Pepper walks to the opposite side of the bedroom and begins opening various dresser drawers to retrieve her gym clothes. He’s always been the one labeled as stubborn, too rigid, the one with a temper and short fuse. He wishes the world could see this side of Pepper, the side most people think she reserves only for the board room and talking to the press.
“Jesus, Pepper. Put the clothes down. Will you just get back in bed?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m mad. I’m mad. At you.” She slams a dresser drawer closed with more force than necessary. “I’m mad because it’s four in the morning and I’m awake on a day I didn’t have to set an alarm. I’m mad because it was after nine before I got home last night, tired and exhausted and there were dishes in the sink and dirty clothes on the floor and shoes in the middle of the foyer and a million other little things. So instead of coming home after a day from hell to just relax, I had to play housemaid first. So no, I can’t just get back in bed.”
Pepper slides her fingers beneath her glasses, causing the tops of the frames to dig into her forehead as she presses her fingers against her eyes hard enough to cause spots to flashbulb in her vision. It’s so quiet in their bedroom, Pepper can only hear the sound of her breathing. She stands like that for several long moments before she drops her hands.
“I was stuck at work trying to dig myself out from under a pile of paperwork that I’d hoped to get to during the day,” she continues. “But I couldn’t do it when I wanted to. You know why? Because after weeks of pulling strings and calling in favors to get you in a room with someone at Alchemax – something you asked me to do, mind you – you blew off the meeting to do God knows what! They didn’t want to meet with me, Tony. They wanted you! Instead, I found myself in a fifteen-minute crash course covering genetics and pharmaceutical advancements before being thrown into a three-hour meeting you asked for and everyone ended up leaving disappointed.”
Tony looks at the ceiling, breathes heavily.
“I was told you crushed that meeting. Truly,” he says when he looks back to Pepper. “You don’t give yourself enough credit.”
“I give myself plenty of credit. You take advantage.”
“I would’ve been there had something not come up!” he shouts, startling both himself and Pepper.
The suits. That’s what came up. Pepper knows it before she even asks the question. She almost doesn’t ask but knows she has to. She wants to hear the words come out of Tony’s mouth, hear him admit that the suits took precedence. Again.
“What was so important that you had to cancel with Alchemax without running it by me first?”
“I . . . JARVIS sent notification there was an anomaly in some data I’ve been scrubbing and rerunning. There’s been something going on with the arc reactor. Something finicky.”
God, she wants to be so mad. To yell and have a real, true knock-down, dragged out fight with Tony. But he makes it so damn hard for her to keep her resolve when he’s like this, fingers twitching at his sides, eyes darting to all the possible weak points in their bedroom. It’s one of his automatic tells, the one alerting Pepper to the fact that despite him being in their bedroom, there is still a piece of him down in the workshop, unwilling to step away for even a few minutes. There’s a good person in there, a person who cares, who tries. She knows this in her very core, knows there are demons he struggles with that she can’t even begin to fully grasp and understand, no matter how hard she tries to.
“Have you called your therapist?”
It’s another question Pepper knows the answer to, though she’s not asking because she needs to hear him say it. She asks because bringing up his therapist and the frequently cancelled appointments almost always guarantees a fight.
“I don’t need to call my therapist every time I opt to work on something that could very well save the entire world instead of doing the dishes. They’re just dishes, they’ll be there tomorrow.”
Pepper scoffs. “Why worry about doing the dishes when you know I’ll be there, ready to clean up whatever destruction you leave in your wake, you mean.”
“Fucking hell, Pepper. I didn’t know a couple of forks and a Tupperware container was going to set you off like this.”
“It’s not just the dishes, Tony! It’s the dirty clothes you can’t be bothered to put in a hamper, the dry cleaning you can’t hang up, the meetings you refuse to attend, the fights you pick when I ask you to go the farmers market with me instead of leaving you to rot with your suits. It’s you not coming to bed at a decent hour, you not making an effort. It’s putting the suits and next-gen tech above me. Above you. Above us.”
“It was one meeting, Pepper.” Tony scrubs a hand down his face, glances at the alarm clock taking note of the time. His ten hours of sleep in four days has finally started to catch up with him.
“A meeting that I worked hard on securing for you!”
“I know that! I appreciate everything you do for me!”
Pepper sighs, almost defeatedly, and shakes her head. “You sure have a shit way of showing it, Tony. You were so wrapped up in that brilliant brain of yours, worrying about a threat that you can’t even prove exists, that you couldn’t even be bothered to call and see if I’d made it home.”
“I knew you made it home safely,” he says quietly. He sits on the edge of the bed, his shoulders slumped, hands dangling between his knees. “JARVIS told me.”
“Do you hear yourself right now? This isn’t normal, Tony. Hiding yourself away and obsessing over suits and aliens and terroristic arms dealers while using a highly trained AI robot to keep tabs on me shouldn’t be the norm.”
“Why are you making this such a big deal, Pepper?”
“Because it is! This is so much more than dirty dishes left in a sink, Tony! I can’t help it that your inability to do the simplest tasks is what finally broke me!”
“You’re mad. I get it. I’m sorry. Do we really have to have this conversation right now?”
This is typical of Tony, wanting to run and hide from anything that remotely resembles conflict when the person arguing with him is hitting a bit too close to home. Pepper could get back in bed, yes, but God, she’s so tired of sweeping things under the rug.
“You keep saying that, but I don’t think you even know what you’re trying to apologize for. So yes, we really have to have this conversation right now. Seems like as good a time as ever,” she says.
“Pepper, I’m tired.”
“And you think I’m not? I am so fucking tired, Tony.”
He sighs, irritated. Irritated at Pepper, at himself, at this stupid fight they shouldn’t even be having. He doesn’t understand why she’s fighting him so hard on the suits, on the amount of time he’s been spending in his workshop as he works to create something that all but guarantees the safety of the world and more importantly, hers. Does she not remember the Chitauri? The Ten Rings? So he misses his hamper on occasion and doesn’t always put the cap back on the toothpaste. Big deal. If she wants a fight, he’ll give her one.
“You’re not the only one who has things going on, Pepper. You don’t get to have a monopoly on being tired and feeling like you’re being pulled in a thousand different directions,” he tells her. “You can tell me no. You know that right? I can plan my own meetings, check my own emails. I can toss in a load of laundry and place a grocery order. I am capable of doing things myself.”
Pepper lets out a short, humorless laugh, folding her arms tight across her chest like that might keep something ugly or broken from spilling out.
“I know that,” she says. “I know you’re capable. That’s not—” She cuts herself off. “That’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point? Because from where I’m standing, it sounds like you’re mad at me for letting you help.”
“Letting me help? I don’t do things just because you give me permission to do them, Tony.”
“You know that’s not what I—,”
“I’m mad,” she says, voice rising despite herself, “that you automatically assume I will. That it’s just understood that I’ll catch the things you drop and smooth over the messes because that’s what Pepper does.”
“You’re not playing fair,” he snaps. “I don’t make you do any of that.”
“No, you don’t,” she agrees. This seems to throw him, her ability to so easily take blame for her part in all of this. “I do it because if I don’t, things fall apart. We’d be out of milk, you’d have shareholders breathing down your neck, you wouldn’t be able to find your favorite sweatshirt, the landscapers wouldn’t get paid. Our lives would be falling in around us and to keep that from happening, someone has to be the adult in the room. Somehow it’s always me.”
Tony’s jaw tightens. “You think I don’t carry anything? You think I don’t feel the weight of everything?”
“I think,” Pepper says, choosing her words carefully, “that when you’re overwhelmed, you disappear into the suit. Or the lab. Or a bottle. And when I’m overwhelmed, I keep going. Until I can’t anymore. I don’t claim to always understand whatever it is you’re dealing with, but I’ve known you long enough, have seen all of your dark, ugly parts, to know that whatever this is isn’t healthy."
The words hang heavy between them. Tony looks away first.
“So what, you want me to feel guilty?” he mutters. “Because trust me, I’ve got a whole warehouse full of that already.”
“I don’t want guilt,” she says, softer now. Tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. “I want you to understand that there’s a real problem here and you can’t keep expecting me to do all of this alone when this is supposed to be a partnership. I can’t point to the exact moment you started to pull away, but it’s been a while and I keep losing a little bit of you every day. I can only take so much before I can’t anymore. Everyone has a breaking point, Tony. I’m finally reaching mine.”
“I never asked you to plan my life,” he says to the ground.
“Yeah? Well I didn’t ask you to tear it apart every time it starts to matter. I’m one person, Tony. I can’t keep living for the both of us.” Heat has returned to her voice now and Tony has never known when to stop while he’s ahead.
“Wow. Dramatic,” Tony says.
Pepper slams her hand down on the dresser and bites out, “Stop doing that!”
Tony looks up when her hand connects with the furniture and he doesn’t like what he sees reflected back at him in her expression. “Stop what?”
“Acting like this is a game, pushing me away on purpose. Acting like you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.”
“All I know is that you’re overreacting.” The words are out before he can stop them and he blanches, watching as Pepper’s face starts to fall. He hates himself a little for being the reason she’s looking at him like that. Her expression is quickly replaced with something harder, something meant to put – and keep – distance between them. It’s not an expression Tony is familiar with, at least not on Pepper.
Pepper straightens slowly, like every muscle in her body has locked into place.
“Take that back,” she says. Her voice is dangerously calm, and Tony wishes she’d start yelling. This is so much worse than yelling.
Tony opens his mouth, then closes it again. He’s crossed a line he never should’ve been toeing to begin with, he knows as much, but he can’t help but let his pride get in his way. Again. “I’m just saying I think you’re blowing this out of proportion.”
Pepper lets out a breath through her nose. “You don’t get to decide that,” she says. “You don’t get to tell me what hurts and what doesn’t.”
“That’s not what I—”
“It is,” she cuts in. “It always is. The minute things get uncomfortable, you minimize. You joke. You dismiss. And if that doesn’t work, you tell me I’m being too much.”
Tony flinches as if he’s been smacked. “I never said that.”
“You don’t have to.” Her mouth twists bitterly. “You imply it. Loud and clear.”
“So what, I’m the villain now?” He runs a hand through his hair. “Congratulations, Pepper, I guess I’m sorry for – what – being who I am?”
She laughs then, but there’s no humor in it. “That’s the problem. You think this is about you being Iron Man, or Tony Stark, or whatever larger-than-life version of yourself you want to hide behind. It’s not.”
“Then what’s it about?” he snaps.
“It’s about trust,” she tells him. “It’s about me finally letting myself be honest about what I need and want from you, and you setting those things on fire the second they stop being convenient.”
Tony freezes. “That’s not fair.”
“No,” Pepper agrees quietly. “It isn’t. But neither is being the person who always bends first. I stand beside you. I clean up after your messes without being asked. I believe you when no one else does. And the one time I ask you not to pull the pin on my life just because you’re restless or scared, you do it anyway.”
“Scared?” Tony scoffs, but it lands weak.
“Yes. Scared that if I stop orbiting you for half a second, you’ll have to sit with yourself.”
Tony feels as if the wind has been knocked out of him. “You don’t get to psychoanalyze me, Pepper.”
“I’ve been doing it for years,” Pepper says. “I just finally stopped lying to myself about it.”
Silence crashes down between them, thick and unforgiving. Tony looks at her like he’s seeing her for the first time. Long gone is the version of Pepper who actively works to translate his chaos into something manageable for him. She stands there, only a few feet between them, though it feels like a chasm.
“I’ll call my therapist,” Tony says after what feels like an eternity.
“Don’t call on my behalf,” she says quietly before disappearing into the closet. She returns moments later with her gym bag and carefully places her clothes and shoes inside. “You need to call for you. Because it’s something you want, not what I want.”
“I know,” he says. His voice is quieter now, stripped of his usual bravado. “I . . . needed you to hear me say it. Out loud.”
Pepper pauses at the doorway, her back to him. For a second he thinks she won’t turn around at all.
“I hear you,” she says finally, turning to face him and lean her shoulder against the doorframe. “But you telling me what you think I want to hear without some genuine effort isn’t going to magically fix everything.”
“That sounds . . . final,” he says, his voice tinged with what Pepper thinks sounds like uncertainty.
“No, it sounds like me setting a hard boundary.”
“I’m bad at those.”
“I know,” Pepper replies. “That’s why I’m drawing it.”
Tony looks down, rubbing absently along the scrapes across his knuckles. “I don’t know how to do this without screwing it up.”
“Mm,” she says as a way of acknowledging what he’s just admitted. “I don’t expect you to be perfect. I know things will be messy, that these things take time. But I need to see effort, want to know you’re trying and not just saying things in an attempt to placate me. Not knowing how to do something doesn’t mean you get to opt out.”
“I’m not trying to,” he says quickly. “I just . . . every time I think about changing something, it feels like I’m going to knock out a load-bearing wall. Like if I touch it, everything is going to cave in.”
“Everything is already caving in and you’re barely holding up the wreckage. Call your therapist, keep your appointments. Dr. Feldman is good for you.”
Swallowing, Tony looks up at Pepper as she hovers in the doorway to their bedroom. “And us?”
Pepper hesitates, just long enough for it to hurt.
“That depends,” she says, “on whether you actually do the work or whether this is just another empty promise you make because you’re scared of losing me. You always talk about it like there’s some external threat. A crisis. A disaster you have to get in front of. But those things aren’t what keeps breaking us.”
“So you’re saying it’s me?”
“No, not just you. It’s both of us. We’re human, we’re selfish. But you have to know when to stop, when to take a step back and recognize that what you’re doing isn’t helping, that what you’re doing is hurting,” she tells him, voice a bit softer now. “You think if you control enough variables, nothing can hurt you. It doesn’t work that way. The damage doesn’t come from the things you’re afraid of, it comes from how you respond to that fear. I need you to stop treating me like a threat you have to manage instead of a person who can choose to stand with you.”
“I don’t want to lose you. I need you to know that.”
“Then don’t make me disappear to keep you comfortable.” Pepper studies him for a moment, like she’s committing this version of him to memory, the one stripped bare and without jokes to hide behind, without the armor.
Tony nods, finding it difficult to find the right words, and while the silence is an uncomfortable one, he doesn’t speak.
Pepper shifts her weight, glancing over her shoulder and into the dark hallway. “I’m going to the gym. You need sleep, Tony. You’ve been running on fumes for days. Don’t think I haven’t been taking note of your unrumpled side of the bed.”
“You’re . . . leaving?”
“To go to the gym, yes,” she says, tone gentle but firm. “There’s no way I’m going to be able to go back to sleep. The few hours of space will do us both some good, I think. Sleep. Give your brain a break from running in circles.”
She leaves him in their bedroom and Tony listens for the soft click of the front door signaling that she really has left, even if it is just for a few hours like she’d said. He lies back against the pillows, staring hard at the ceiling as he tries quieting his brain long enough to fall asleep. He hates how quiet the house has grown in the minutes since Pepper left; it seems final in a way he doesn’t quite know how to sit with, and he finds himself wondering how long the silence is supposed to last and whether the space between them has already started to stretch too far.
It’s the uncertainty that gnaws at him, and for the first time in his life, he isn’t sure if showing up will be enough.