Chapter Text
“It’s fine. It’ll heal.”
Pepper Potts has never heard such bullshit in her life but she isn’t about to say so. Technically, Peter isn’t lying. If you were to wipe the blood and dirt off his face, something he has refused to do since taking his place on this hospital hallway floor across from her, he’d either be good as new or well on his way to it.
Peter may be physically fine, which is a miracle considering he’d been dead a few hours ago, but he’s far from fine. Pepper is far from fine. No one is anywhere near fine right now. The universe has been saved from complete obliteration thanks to one man and that one man is the farthest from fine of them all.
Pepper grits her teeth, subtly, and swallows the sob, the scream, that she hasn’t let herself unleash. Not yet. That will be later. When she’s alone and none her of babies, friends, comrades at arms, or anyone else will see or hear her do it. No one sees Pepper Potts break.
Except Tony.
Oh, Tony…
She’d meant it when she’d told him that they’d be okay. She still meant that, knew that one day they would be, but that day may as well be centuries from now.
“It’s fine. It’ll heal.”
The truth, but also a lie. They all know better than that.
“You really should wash your face off, kid.” Rhodey, Pepper recognizes distantly. That’s who’s been talking to Peter. That means Peter is actually sitting across from her for real and isn’t just a hallucination. She’d known that. She’d seen him on the battlefield, pulled him off of Tony so Tony wouldn’t have to see him break, but it’s actually hitting her now. Peter is really there across from her. He’s sitting next to the doorway that holds the body of her husband and his face is covered with dried tears, dirt, and blood. Pepper has never seen him look quite like this before. That really should have clued her in earlier.
”Before you go in there,” Rhodey clarifies, eyes barely flicking toward the door. His face is dry but his eyes all full of everything he’s valiantly trying not to let go of. When he breaks it will also be in private. “You should clean up before you go see him.”
Peter shakes his head. Makes no move to wipe off his face. It’s been five years since Pepper has seen his face, she marvels. Five years and her lost boy hasn’t aged a day.
It’s not something she can put a fixed point on, the moment where Peter became hers. At some point that just happened. It had been the same way for Tony. Peter had (has, she almost joyfully corrects) a way of creeping into your heart and living there without you realizing it’s happened. Just like one day she’d heard Tony pound on Peter’s bedroom door at the compound shouting “Oh yeah? And I’m Iron Dad! Now get your spider ass out of bed!” one day she’d found herself saying to Peter “I may not be your mother but I’m close enough so please for the love of god get off the ceiling before I go find a broom.”Peter had not refuted either of those statements; in her case Peter had practically beamed sunshine at her before he’d nearly scared the skin off her back by back flipping off the ceiling and landing gracefully into one of the overstuffed armchairs.
Pepper doesn’t know when it started but she knows that it was before her heart shattered when Tony came back from space without him. She’d screamed that night, outside the compound and alone, where Tony and the others couldn’t hear. After she’d heard that the stones were gone and with it their last hope of fixing things. Or so she’d thought at the time.
Seeing Peter with blood and dirt on his face reminds her that he’s here. That he isn’t a ghost, a hallucination, a trick, or anything else. He’s a flesh and blood boy who’s come back home after so long away without realizing how long it really has been.
For Peter, Pepper realizes, this has all been just one day. One horrifyingly awful, devastating day.
“I’m not going in.”
Rhodey sighs. “You should.” Firm but gentle. “You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
Peter hasn’t aged a day. He is sixteen years old, just like he was then, but he sounds so much older when he says. “I really won’t.” And he does know, Pepper realizes again. This isn’t the first time he’s sat this kind of vigil and that voice is nothing but the voice of experience.
Even without knowing that, Pepper completely understands. She said her goodbyes to Tony when he was still alive to hear them. Peter did as best as he could. They both watched him die; they don’t need to see a cleaned up and sanitized version of him in a sterile room. She wants her last memory to be of him, of Tony, of that last smile and that last whisper of her name, and not of his lifeless body.
Steve had gone in when they’d first sat down here and then had joined them on the floor in silence for a bit after. Bruce had gone in afterwards, then Clint after him. Thor, Strange, and Wanda had gone in fairly close after one another and had had a special kind of defeat in their eyes when they’d each walked out. She appreciates the thoughts and efforts they must have made or thought about making but she’d felt Tony stop breathing, felt his hand leave hers. As much as this hurt her, hurt everyone, this was a fair exchange. One man for the whole universe.
One man for his family, as Tony would see it.
She doesn’t back Rhodey up when he suggests it again to Peter. Instead she peels herself up off the floor and moves to sit by her boy, draping an arm around him. His head lolls onto her shoulder on reflex. It fits there the same way it had before, like no time had passed at all. “You go on,” Pepper says to her old friend. “We’ll be okay.” She even manages to not flinch after saying that.
Rhodey nods, tightly. “He should still get cleaned up,” he mutters as he gathers himself and every ounce of military bearing he has. Then he walks into the room as if walking to his own execution, the door barely clicking closed behind him.“Thank you, Ms. Potts,” Peter whimpers. “Pepper,” she corrects automatically, as if hasn’t been years since she last had to remind him. “It’s just Pepper, Peter.”
“Pepper.” He sniffs and turns his face into her shoulder and she can feel him tense up to keep the tears back. She holds him tighter and death glares anyone who looks at them with pity.
“We’re going to be okay,” she tells him and herself as she gathers Peter into her arms properly. She can feel Peter holding back his strength as he hugs her and she wishes for a moment that she was still wearing the armour. “It’s going to be horrible for a long, long time but we’re going to be okay.”
“It should have been me,” Peter argues, near apologizing and near frantic, as if his words would come true as he spoke them. Pepper can’t handle that sound. “I was gone anyway. It should have been me, I - “
Pepper pushes Peter away but keeps a tight hold on his shoulders. Anyone else would have flinched by how tight her fingers were, armour or no. “No.” She holds his gaze as firmly as she holds his shoulders. She lets the weight of that word settle into Peter and reverberate into his bones. She wants Peter to know she means this and that she’s more than certainly speaking for another person too. “It couldn’t have been you.”
We would have lost Tony anyway if it had been you,she doesn’t say.
Later she’ll explain everything. Tell him exactly how and why he’s sitting here with her today while Tony is dead in the room next to them. Later, when he’s ready to hear it, she’ll explain and she’ll hug him tight like she does now, rubbing his back and encouraging him to cry.
He does cry, quietly, and Pepper lets herself cry too. She feels the howl that she will let out later tonight retreat further into her.
Then, when Peter has stopped crying and is wiping tears and dirt and blood around his face, trying to pull himself as close to together as he can, he asks for a phone. “I should probably call May.”
Any calm Pepper had is gone and she fights to not let it reach her face. She could kick herself. How could she have been so stupid? She allows herself to acknowledge the fact that it’s not like there has been a good time for the subject of May Parker to come up. They’ve been more than a little bit distracted, but she still feels utterly unmoored and taken aback by Peter’s question. Not that that he has any reason to know any better.
Pepper had also thought Tony would be the one to have this conversation with Peter. Or at the very least they’d be having it together, the three of them. She had never imagined, ever entertained, she’d be doing this alone.
“Peter.” She pauses, takes a breath and tries again. Tries to scrape the words out of her throat. “Peter…”
This is not Peter’s first rodeo with devastating, life altering news. He knows halfway through Pepper saying his name the second time. His eyes go from confused, to shock, to disbelief, and then to a horrible sense of resignation. He’s aged ten decades in ten seconds and but he still finds it in him to hope that he’s misunderstood. “But we all came back,” Peter argues, haltingly. “If she was gone before she’s back now right?”
Now is not the time to explain that people died as a result of the Snap but not because of it. Pepper just shakes her head. “She can’t come back.”
Peter shakes his head hard and fast. “No, no. No.” He rubs his face again, blood and dirt and dried tears streaking across his nose and cheeks. He runs a hand through his hair and Pepper’s heart cries for this gesture she’s seen Tony perform frantically too many times. Her heart cries for the fact that she is stamping the shattered pieces of Peter’s already broken heart into dust with this news. “This is a bad joke,” Peter says with almost a dash of hope. “She’s not gone. Not her, too. Not May. Not her too. I can't-I've already-"
I’ve already lost enough. He doesn’t say it but Pepper hears it and the pieces of her own broken heart turn to dust too.
For the third time today, Pepper pulls Peter to her and this time he can’t hold back his strength fully. This hug hurts her. She will have bruises on top of bruises later and she will never admit to Peter that he caused them.
And then Peter wails. People stop and stare at both the sound and intensity of the boy’s grief. Rhodey comes out of Tony’s room. Pepper shoos them all away. Peter wails louder and the hallway magically empties but for the two of them on the floor and the sound of Peter’s cries. Pepper has never heard anyone make any noise like this before. No one should ever make this kind of sound.
He’s sixteen years old. He should be twenty one but he’s sixteen and he’s lost so much. They all have lost so much but Pepper is watching the death of Peter’s innocence in real time and it’s just as hard to watch as the life leaving Tony’s eyes had been.
“What’ll happen to me now?” Peter somehow manages to not shout this question at an uncaring universe. He sobs it into Pepper’s chest as she runs a hand through his hair, a gesture as familiar to her as breathing. “What am I gonna do now?”
Pepper squeezes him tight. If he thinks she’s letting go of him now he has another thing coming.
“You’re coming home with me. You’re coming home with me, Peter.”