To All Those Brave and Lovely

The Lonely Pieces

Fear has a taste.

It's like metal, cold and bitter in your mouth, melting over your tongue and sinking down into your teeth like you're never going to get rid of it.  Nora had thought that she had had her fair share of fear, that once you go through so many bad things you stopped feeling it the same way you had before.

But that was before she had to huddle under a metal cage for an hour until a pair of hands reaching through and pulled you out.  She had to grab onto him and let herself be heaved back into the light (like being reborn, she had thought later, but that didn't make sense) tumbling that short distance back down the ground.

"Where's Tony?"  It was Peter that had pulled her out.  After the fighting was done, he had pushed past Steve and Natasha and ripped his way through the metal that had encase her, even though it shredded his skin and broke his fingers.  But she wouldn't learn that until later.  "Peter.  Where's Tony?"

He was the one to reach her first, so he was the one who had to tell her.  Nora knew the answer before he even opened his mouth.  "He couldn't..."  Peter swallowed, hard, and there were tears in his eyes.  This was hurting him, too, but Nora couldn't care about that, not when she was being ripped into pieces.  "Without the suit, he's just a man.  He couldn't take them."

"Did they hurt him?"  She looked over his shoulder to see the others, and all she could see was Pepper sobbing onto Natasha's shoulder.  That's what makes it hit home, because she had never before seen Pepper break down like that.  "Is he alright?"

"They took him, Nora."  Peter wasn't going to lie to her.  She dind't think he had the energy to, not when this was beating him down just as much as it was everyone else.  "We don't know where he is."

She falls back into the closet again.

Pepper comes to draw her out, even though Pepper is crying and exhausted and probably not willing to deal with this right now.  Still, she crawls inside, puts her back against one of the pillows and stares up at the fairy lights.  "Tony hung all these up, you know."  Her voice was scratchy, like it hurt to talk.  "I know you thought it was me.  But it was him. Said you liked to look at the stars and artificial ones would just have to do."

Nora fumbled for her hand and held it tight.  There had been no word from SHEILD, nothing from Stark Industries, and none of the Avengers were able to turn up anything, either.  And no body.

That was important.

"I was so mad at him."  Nora said, and when she finally started talking her face sort of crumpled up, until she was clutching Pepper and crying into her shoulder.  "I was so mad, and it was so stupid, and I was so awful.  Peter told me it was stupid, I knew it was stupid, but I was just being stubborn."

"He loved you."  The words seem to tear their way out of Pepper's throat, and Nora could only think how selfish it was of her, to fall apart right when they all needed her to be strong.  "And he knew you loved him."

"But I was horrid."  She was gasping for breath now, on the verge of panic, right at the tipping point.  "I said such horrible thing.  Why did I do that?"

"You were being a kid."  Pepper smoothed her hair down, tried to calm her.  Maybe that was an excuse, but Peter was a kid and he had saved the country without telling anyone about it, Wanda was a kid and she had felt her brother die without falling apart.  "That's all it was.  You were just being a kid."

"With no word from either Stark Industries or the Pheonix, as the terrorist group has come to call themselves, we're being forced to face the facts."  It was a panel of newscasters, all of them putting in their two cents to argue over the fate of Tony Stark.  "He's dead.  It's time to admit it.  There's a whole in the Avengers, and he's dead.  SHEILD just needs to accept it and start working to replace him, because let's face it, we do need a replacement for him."