Bonfire of the Vanities | Tony & Pepper (Jun. 17, 2016)
thefuturistknows:
Pepper was stabilized and kept unconscious, but despite the physical exertions of the night, Stark himself couldn’t sleep as he waited for Dr. Wu to arrive. At first it was the adrenaline and need to stay informed that kept him awake, but as the hours dragged on – and as an indication that he probably needed sleep – he started growing increasingly more paranoid that as soon as he blinked an eye, someone would cut Pepper open without his consent or hers.
Memories of Afghanistan, of waking up strapped to a table with his ribs cracked open, were insistent intruders that night. Panic and random fits of cold sweat eventually gave away to a quiet near catatonia. He was even invited to the psych ward, and he refused to go. After that, in an attempt to add normalcy to the situation, he went to the hospital cafeteria to get something to eat. Rhodey met him there, not because Stark had called him – he’d forgotten to call, he’d forgotten loads of very basic things, like formally calling off the DC trip or changing clothes or the fact that Pepper wasn’t going to pick up her phone no matter how many text and voice messages he left her.
After one look at him, Rhodey decided that he would be dealing with the press came morning light, not Tony. Tony left him to it, although somewhere in his mind, once Rhodey left, Tony was still pretty convinced he was the one who would handle the immediate PR crises. He made speeches in his head that would never see the light of day. JARVIS had cancelled his appointments, but it hadn’t fully dawned on him yet that they weren’t going to happen. He felt disconnected from his own reality, like the clock had stopped when Pepper closed her eyes and he was stuck in some breathless limbo until she opened them, and then the world would only continue to turn once she was awake.
Halfway into Pepper’s surgery, Tony emptied the contents of his stomach into the toilet. He still felt the ghost pain of the arc reactor no longer in his chest and it occurred to him that the blood on his shirt was Pepper’s, not his. It was for that reason that he finally bothered to change into the clean clothes Rhodey had brought earlier.
Forty-eight hours after the June 17 incident, Pepper was finally out of surgery and resting in one of the patient rooms. Her chest was neatly bandaged. Tony had promised himself he wasn’t going to sleep until she’d woken up, but after very few minutes of sitting by her bedside, looking at her and trying to sync his breathing to hers, he drifted off, still limply bracing his stomach, head hanging forward so that his chin touched his chest. He’d always been good at running himself completely dry and then falling asleep in positions that utterly punished his back and neck.
Stark jolted awake eventually. He drowsily called Pepper, but she was still out of it. Tony stared at her for a few seconds, paced for a few minutes, almost screamed, stared some more, spent over ninety dollars on vending machine snacks because he was absolutely convinced that he needed to get to the packages placed last in the machine. His compulsive shit hadn’t flared up like this in years. He craved coffee but he didn’t like the hospital cups, so he ended up in Pepper’s room again, fiddling with the zipper of his jacket until he broke it. He’d been busying himself with trying to fix it when Pepper finally moved.
Now, the original plan – and Tony had pictured this so longingly, so desperately and so much over the past couple of days – was to just sit there, quiet but present, as Pepper regained consciousness. Smile reassuringly and crack some joke as soon as she recognized him. He’d even come up with that joke, but right now, he forgot what it was. And he did a very poor job of staying calm and unobtrusive, he instantly and noisily dragged his chair closer to the bed and took one of Pepper’s hands in both of his, pulling it to his chest. He watched her eyelids flutter, and was suddenly keenly aware that he hadn’t cried since he’d stepped in the hospital. He didn’t want to do it now, he didn’t want Pepper to deal with that.
“I love your hair,” Tony blurted out once Pepper’s eyes were open. He tried smiling after he swallowed the thick lump in his throat. “I mean, when it’s on the pillow like that. I hadn’t…”
The lump was back already. Tony smiled through it again, cleared his throat. His hands were sweating against Pepper’s.
“I hadn’t seen that in a while – hi.”
Pepper’s eyes didn’t even focus on Tony before he spoke. She blinked hard, groaning softly as Tony’s tired, forced smile came into focus.
“Tony?” She felt the pressure of his hand against hers. Of course he was babbling about something completely unimportant. That was how Tony dealt with these things. Pepper knew she must have been pretty bad off.
She looked around the unfamiliar room. Everything was foreign to her. Judging by the pain in her chest and the plastic tubing coming out of her she was in the hospital.
“My hair?” Pepper smiled tiredly. “If I were in better condition I’d tell you to come see it on the pillow more often.”
It started to come back to her: the explosion, the party, saying goodbye to Tony before he rushed off to save everyone.
“Are you okay?” She asked. “What happened? Did everyone make it out okay?”
Pepper tried to sit up but was stopped by the pain radiating from her chest. She let out a moan and laid back against the bed. She finally looked down at her body. She was black and blue and her chest was completely wrapped in bandages and gauze.
Something was different though. Between the throbs of pain in her chest was a weird buzzing. It felt like a radiating energy. Every pulse throbbed through her body as it was trying to adjust to it.
Pepper reached up, gently running her hands over the bandages on her chest. There was something hard underneath. A panic crossed her body. She began frantically feeling her chest and torso, checking if anything else felt wrong.
“What did they do to me?”
