I Can't Make You Love Me || Peter Parker x OC

Chapter 40: Red Flags

Pepper's perspective

Life without Tony was manageable. I hated every minute of it, and I saw shadows of him at every turn, but I knew that hopefully, someday, I would be okay. When he very first landed on the planet that he would eventually set sail from--Titan, I had been told-- he sent out his first message to Happy. In it, he told us of how dire his situation had become and the non-existent likelihood of his return. I saved a copy of that recording, and I played it every night. It wasn't that the words were comforting, in fact, they had become irrelevant to me. What he said didn't matter, it was just the fact that it was him and his voice.

Life without Avery was hard. Not only have the changes to my body been hard to deal with, the mental changes have been detrimental. Physically, I'm not the same. Eating was a chore, as was the time that I spent retching it up afterwards. With the absence of a whole human inside of me, my stomach had become oblong and deformed. Dr. Cho was able to help with the process, using different treatments to return the elasticity of my skin and return me to some semblance of normalcy. For the most part, she had been successful, but with only three weeks of treatment underway, the results were minimal as of yet.

Today marks exactly three weeks since the world fell apart. 21 days ago, Earth was invaded, my husband went missing, and one of my daughters, along with 50% of all creatures on earth, was wiped from existence. According to his own calculations, today would be the last day of Tony's life, assuming that nothing had happened beforehand.

So as I lay awake staring at the night-darkened ceiling, there were a lot of possible culprits for my unease. A combination of discomfort, pain, and mental distress have been keeping me up for several nights in a row, but tonight was something different through, I could just feel it. I couldn't place what it was, no, that would just be too easy for me, but I knew that there was some hidden part to this equation.

Nothing came to me, even after hours of staring up at the ceiling and desperately trying to find something that would either tire me to the point of exhaustion or keep me occupied until it was socially acceptable to be awake. But I was only left to my own devices for a few hours at most before my attention was grabbed in the most unanticipated way possible.

Over the top of the book that I was trying to immerse myself in, a stream of light cut through the window and onto the ceiling. Greatly confused, my muscles complained as I peeled the covers off of my body and stood up, still sore from the trauma of losing a child and being manually reconfigured to best suit the other. My pajamas clung loosely to my body as I padded across the room and out into the hallway. In the time it took me to reach the glass doors of the patio on the main floor, I had already ran into at least three other people. Rhodey and Steve, who looked to be getting about as much sleep as I was, offered me a smile at first and then a confused look as to the source of the light that had drawn us all out from the comfort of our rooms. Natasha was already outside and fully alert, not daring to move any closer to the foreign object that had found residence on the back lawn.

It was a ship.

The lights doubled in brightness and quantity as a hatch on the underside of the ship opened, revealing two silhouettes, one clearly holding the other upright. From behind the ship, a ball of what seemed to be pure white slowly floated downwards before landing on the ground and darkening. The three people walked towards us, and we began to walk cautiously forward, meeting them halfway.

"T-Tony?" I breathed out in disbelief upon seeing what I thought to be the face of my husband 40 feet away from me. In place of my inability to move and anything above a slow walk, Steve ran up to the mystery people, his body visibly relaxing when he confirmed my guess and landed eyes on Tony. Burdening his weight, Steve wrapped Tony in his arms, conveying silent words through the contact. I could see both of their lips moving in conversation, but I couldn't make out any words. Slowly, Steve had begun to trail Tony towards me, still supporting almost his full weight.