To All Those Brave and Lovely

Pepper Potts

She's down in the workshop again.

Nora isn't really sure if Tony wanted her there, but she came anyways, curling up on the couch with a cup of coffee clutched in her hands.  She's not going to drink it (the taste has always been too bitter for her) but she likes the warmth of it, so hot that it's almost scalding her palms as she sits there.

"Don't you have something better to do?"  He got stains all over his shirt, and oil staining the lines of his palms, but Tony looks happiest like this.  He also looks worried.  Nora knows that it used to be the nightmares that would force her out of bed and down here to him, to cover up her fear with the sounds of the music and the metal.  She would take the nightmares tonight- now she just can't sleep at all.  "Watch videos of kittens on youtube?  Call Peter?  Or, you know, sleep?"

Nora doesn't answer the question.  She never does, because they sound suspiciously like openings to a conversation that might turn into a talk about the possibility of therapists and if she's okay, about PTSD and residual trauma and how there's nothing wrong with asking for help.  Nora has had enough of those conversations.  MJ is an expert at having them.

Instead, she slumps sideways on the couch, a non verbal sign that she would at least try to sleep while she's down here.  She's finding it easier to sleep in the light and the noise, where nothing can be lurking in the shadows to surprise her, and where Tony is only an arms length away.  (She never sleeps alone now.  She sleeps in the car with Happy, or goes to MJ's house just to take a nap on her couch, or falls asleep in Peter's arms when they watch a movie, but never alone, not when memories flash behind her eye lids and every stray touch against her skin reminds her of something awful.  Other people quiet it.  Rhodey tells her that this doesn't mean she's crazy, but Nora thinks he's lying.)

"When are you going to propose to Pepper?"  

Tony's hand slipped, the wrench falling off the metal and down into the wood of his desk, cutting through it.  They both stared at it for a moment, ignoring the muffled curse that she's not supposed to have heard (he treats her like she's twenty sometimes, and ten others), and then he spins around, pointing the wrench in her direction.  

He's avoiding looking at her, and Nora thinks that maybe she should tak pity on him and pretend that they never had this conversation.  Tony loves Pepper, and Pepper loves Tony, and maybe that should be the end of it.  But this topic provides distraction, an that's really what Nora comes down here for, to find some way to leave the memories behind.  To find something that won't make her think of a floor tilting or a boy smiling or hands digging into her skin hard enough to bruise.

(They did bruise.  She spent an afternoon standing in front of her mirror and placing her hands over the places where the fingertips were, trying to cover them up, but she couldn't, because her hands weren't big enough.)

"What do you mean, when am I going to propose to Pepper?"

"Like, when are you going to ask her to marry you?"  She pulls herself to her feet and the room spins, a troubling occurrence that's been happening more and more these past few days.  One doctor says its stress.  The others say its from head trauma.  Peter just says its because she needs sleep and feeds her chocolate.  "Happy told me you have the ring."

"He told you that?"  The wrench falls to the ground, and it was still just the two of them staring at each other across the work shop.  "Listen, kid, I.."

"You love her, don't you?"  

"Of course I love her, what kind of a question is that?"  He looks old in this light, al the lines of his face thrown into sharp relief.  He doesn't look like someone who should be going off to fight villains and carry the weight of other people's burdens on his shoulders.  For a moment, it makes her sad, but then he plucks at the old band shirt he's wearing and picks up the wrench and he looks fine again, like Nora had just been imagining it.  "It'll happen when it's meant to happen. We've got a good thing going."

She heard the things he didn't say.  It's the stuff she fills in from what she's watched and what she's heard, tabloid gossip she stumbled upon and whispered conversations she really shouldn't have been a part of.  Things like how bad things got before, how much he loves her, how scared he is of loving someone, and how scared she is to watch him leave every time for  battle and knowing that even when he promises to stop, he never will.  How Tony is terrified that she's going to leave him behind and that would hurt him more than never really having her at all, and how after all this time, after everything he's done for everyone, the guilt is still pressing down on his shoulders, making him feel like he's not really worth it.  Nora doesn't want to talk anymore, not when it makes him so sad, and not when it turns Tony into just another thing she has to worry about.

(Sometimes, when she thinks about things like this, Nora wishes that he had left her alone after the fall, when she could have stayed alone and with only Eden to worry about.  It might have been easier.)

"I was just wondering."   Nora tried to make it casual again, and went back to her spot on the couch.  The weight was off her chest now, and it made her feel like she could really breathe.  She slumped back into the cushions and pressed her hand against the coffee mug one last time, pulling it away only when she couldn't stand it any longer.  "Do I get to be a bridesmaid?"

"We'll see,"  Tony was smiling at her, though she couldn't really see him through the haze of sleep that was coming over her, pulling her down into the darkness.  There would not be dreams- Dr Banner's prescription made sure of that.  

He turned back to the engine in front of him, smiling.  Nora thinks that this is what his life should have been, just a mechanic in a tiny town with people who cared about him, where he wouldn't have to do things like take care of a group of psychotic superheroes and fly a nuclear bomb into space.  Part of her wonders if he would have been happier, then, or if some people are just destined for pain, no matter where they end up.