voice test } and everything is blue for him.

[propulsion]

Here's a secret. The secret is: nothing ends. Everything limps along, progresses, spins forward. Happy endings don't happen unless happiness is oblivion, and the lesser things that crawl this spinning rock are not entitled to that particular kind of swallowing conclusion. Things don't just solve themselves, either. Thoughts of this still come with symptoms: short of breath, dizziness, claustrophobia. Panic. Sleepless nights, an empty space next to Pepper Potts, like now.

But see also Exhibit B: Pepper Potts. Running hot. She can't ever just die (ever get hurt) so long as she's like this. Now if only Rhodey could inject himself with something or irradiate himself in such a way as to make himself indestructible, Tony will have a complete set.

Except for him.

"When did he send this?"

Workshop. The machines are quiet, but the computers are on. Projections float glassily in the air, glowing and bright, sensitive to his motions, seemingly his touch. It's ass o'clock in the morning, of course.

"Dr. Banner sent this through to your private server three and a half hours ago, sir."

"You were supposed to wake me."

"Ms. Potts asked that I allow you to sleep, as it's an infrequent enough--"

"Whatever. You are now less useful than an alarm clock, congratulations. Draw up his iterations, where I can see 'em. Please also start the expresso machine."

A bare heel touches the ground, spinning Tony's chair as he drags equations into his line of sight. His arc reactor glows a beacon through the fabric of a Pink Floyd t-shirt, inchoate bristle growing sparse between the harsher lines of shaven goatee. There are shadows around his eyes, but this is the norm.

Comments

[bossfought]

Normalcy has become, in and of itself, kind of weird.

Which is fine. It's fine because there's not a lot left in Pepper's life that can be described using the word 'normalcy' without sarcastic airquotes; it's fine because she's in a relationship with Tony Stark and nothing is ever going to be okay again, something she's pretty sure she should have already made her peace with. Already has made her peace with. It's just (kicking off the blankets, pressing her palm flat to her skin, staring up at the ceiling and not touching Tony at all) taking some getting used to, this-- new way that normalcy has absented itself from her life.

For starters, it's usually Tony who can't sleep. In fact, it's still Tony who can't sleep, and there's actually something comforting about sliding her hand over the empty space he left behind to estimate how long he's been gone (except it's harder to tell, now, everything feels- cooler than it did before) and getting up, knowing where she'll find him, that he'll take the scolding she's mentally preparing exactly as seriously as he always does, that they could spend an hour deflecting back and forth on a single subject, so it's not that she's not talking about dreaming she's fireworks, it's just that they're talking about something else, at the moment.

Normalcy: caffeine, late nights, mixed blessings.

“Really?”