The Night is Dark and Full of Terrors
The Night is Dark and Full of Terrors
It felt like yesterday, it felt like an eternity….the day she walked to watch all of the faces she knew and did not know, mourning the loss of the one she loved…the loss she was, and still to this day was not convinced was truly lost. She had already learned that the majority of Tony Starks that had crossed into this world through Paradox’s shared similar faces. There could have even been a Paradox where “her” Tony duplicated. After all…he went through a worm hole…what if by that logic…there were Tony paradoxes throughout the dimensions, crossing and uncrossing the tides of space and time.
She had spent countless hours trying to get to the bottom of it. Consulting all of his resources. Consulting all those who knew him, to learn what had happened. The funeral, the story behind it, it all felt fake…hollow…made up, even the body in that Casket was a false representation. The spirit she had come to know and love did not rest in that body when she saw it. She was certain of it, and even on the off chance it was trapped in this hollow shell, it was alive and well. It was waiting to burst out.
As it turns out, it was closer to the latter. For all her time away, for all the time that passed since that Christmas….Christmas…was the last time she saw him. She always felt as if…something strongly tied to their fates would happen on a Christmas, that season. From birth she always felt a pulling, a fate…during that time of year. The moment she heard the grave was exhumed and immediately covered up, that is when she became very fierce in how she demanded answers. She came up empty though. Her flower she left at the grave secretly was still there. She wandered why…why all but that was taken. After some digging, after using the company resources, she went on a hunch. She scanned for all energy signatures matching with the Infinity system.
Sure enough, after breaking through a horrid maze of false positives, databases and encrypted passwords…she found a signature that she tracked moving to an isolated location, almost totally off the Grid. Nowhere near the house they called home, nowhere near the company. She would be damned if she didn’t follow it, she knew it could easily belong to yet another paradox, she had found many other signatures, and she came up empty, finding an empty suit, or a paradoxical twin of the one she loved. She got off a plane, haggard and exhausted, as she took the first steps out of the airport, through check out, and finally, to the outside world.
It was a dark night, and a quiet suburb just beyond the busy atmosphere of the Airport. Pepper Potts, Maddened with determination to get to the bottom of the mystery deemed as a suicide, among so many other issues…would not let anything get in her way. She had booked a miserable little room where nobody would suspect her to be found, only miles away from the desolate location where the signature she had tricked, using data signatures and hardware signatures that she knew were her Stark Industries matches.
Only one Tony Stark used those signatures, because she didn’t allow any of the others to touch the labs or the corporation whatsoever. “I will find you again Tony…don’t you dare go anywhere!” She declared vehemently, but as she did she fell to her knees as a tear fell, and she fell unconscious with it over the bed of the room in the dusty motel. This wouldn’t stop her for long…just an unavoidable set back.
