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“Okay, sweetie,” Pepper said, brushing a kiss against her son’s head. Peter, six and small, grinned up at her. “I’ll see you when I get back from work.” She kissed Tony goodbye next, and he picked up Peter, holding him to his side as they walked Pepper to the door.
Their Malibu mansion caught the light best in the morning, Pepper thought. Situated on the side of a cliff, overlooking the ocean, Pepper could leave her house drenched in sunlight, smelling the sea breeze.
“I’ll bring back dinner,” Pepper promised, turning as she reached the front door. Tony reached out, lightly grasping her hand and pulling her back in for another kiss. She was already five minutes late due to her boys; she figured another few seconds couldn’t hurt.
“Mm, and then we can get to work?”
She rolled her eyes. “I for one will be working all day.”
“Not that kind of work, Mrs Stark.”
Pepper smiled, coy. “I have no idea what you mean.”
Her son wriggled out of Tony’s grip, his father letting him down as Peter insisted on running back towards the kitchen.
Pepper pushed the front door open as Tony replied, “I’m sure you do, but if you need a little reminding, I’m talking about the kind of work where we make another Peter but slightly smaller.”
“Peter’s already small for his age,” Pepper mused, pretending to be oblivious. “If we made someone much smaller, we wouldn’t be able to see them.”
“That’s a yes, though, right?” Tony confirmed, holding the door open for Pepper as she left. Tony always made her late for work. She had a meeting in less than half an hour, and Happy was still sitting in the driveway, engine rolling and waiting.
“You know it’s a yes,” Pepper replied. “But we’re having a girl next time. I like the name Jessica. Or Morgan.”
“What about Peter II?” Tony asked. “That way we wouldn’t have to think about it.”
Pepper was half way up the drive. She waved a hand at him. “Absolutely not. We’re not doing that. Bye, baby!” She called the last part out as Peter came running back to the front door, clutching his favourite blanket.
“Bye, Mommy!” Peter replied, waving back.
Pepper climbed in the car and Happy drove off, taking her to work. She had back-to-back meetings all day, regarding the new contracts for the US military. The Jericho missile was almost completed, Tony had promised, and since their contract was up for renewal, Pepper was determined to get them a better deal. She also had to book dates for the Afghanistan weapon demo, and she was fairly sure Obadiah wanted to speak to her about reaching out to Pym Tech for a sharing of resources and design – Pepper was fairly sure Hank Pym despised Tony and his company for all he was worth, but she could at least humour Obadiah for the time being.
Tony had never been interested in the meetings and CEO work involved with running a company; he was the mind behind the technology, and that’s where he kept himself. While Pepper was in the office every weekday, Tony only went to the official SI labs three times a week – choosing to spend the other days at home with Peter, rather than leaving him with their nanny.
(For what it was worth, the press was dead wrong about Tony Stark: Pepper couldn’t imagine anyone being a better father.)
She knew they were going to spend the day working on an engine. Tony was sure Peter could handle it, and he wanted to let Peter do as much of the work as possible. Their son, unsurprisingly, was a genius.
An intelligent child with a good heart, who wrapped everyone he met around his little finger. They were planning to leave Stark Industries to Peter one day, should he want it, and Pepper knew that if he took it over, he would create something bigger and better than anything they’d accomplished.
Pepper strode into the SI HQ like she owned it (which, technically, she did), and slid into her first meeting, apologising for being a few minutes late. Thoughts of her husband and son slipped from her mind as she conducted the meeting; this was her element, this was where she excelled.
Pepper Stark (née Potts) was the CEO of the world’s largest tech conglomerate, and it was the one of the two things she knew how to do. The other was raise Peter.
Stark Industries and Peter were the most important things in Pepper’s life, and she intended to keep them for as long as humanly possible.
-
A little before two-thirty PM, Pepper’s phone rang.
She apologised to Obadiah, sitting across from her in her office, as she read Tony’s name come up on the display.
“Hey, honey,” she greeted. “Is everything alright?”
“They took him,” she heard Tony say. His voice was hoarse, wracked with something like pain, and she straightened, frowning.
“Tony? Are you okay?”
“They took him,” he repeated. “He’s gone. They- They-”
“Honey,” Pepper said, standing. She caught Obi’s worried gaze and matched it with her own. “What’s going on? Who’s gone?”
“Peter,” Tony replied, his voice cracking. “These men – Peter’s gone… They had guns-”
Pepper’s gaze shot to Obi. “Call the police,” she told him. “Send them to my house.”
Obadiah pulled his phone out without hesitation and started talking to the person on the other end. Pepper turned to the window, Malibu stretching out before her. When she opened her mouth to speak, she found herself choking on the words.
“Tony,” she started after a second. “Tony, where is he? Where’s Peter?”
“I don’t know,” Tony replied. “I don’t know- there was a bomb-”
“A bomb? I’m coming home right now. Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m fine. JARVIS is down. He’s- he’s gone, Pep. He’s-”
Pepper was already striding out of the office, Obi in toe. She looked to her assistant, grounding out orders for her meetings to be cancelled and rescheduled and for Happy to be out front in the car by the time she got there.
It was difficult to swallow; something was stuck in her throat.
Peter Peter Peter.
Where was her son? Maybe he was in the house somewhere; maybe Tony was performing an elaborate joke – if he was, she’d kill him, divorce him and then kill him again. On the phone, Tony had stopped speaking, but she could still hear his shallow breathing. She promised she’d be there soon.
She promised over and over and over.
-
PETER STARK MISSING
That first night, Pepper couldn’t do anything but cry. Her baby. Her only son; the love of her life was gone, missing, taken and she was sitting in a fucking office, telling Obadiah Stane why Hank Pym didn’t like Tony.
She should’ve been there.
She should’ve been there to help. To stop them. To be taken in his place.
He was a child. He didn’t deserve this.
That first night, after the police left, their mansion taped away as a crime scene, and the married couple moving into a nearby hotel where nothing could spit out memories of Peter, Tony spent hours retching into the toilet.
She cried on the edge of the bathtub; cried until she was dry heaving, hyperventilating, unable to breathe as her lungs spasmed in her chest. Even they couldn’t survive without Peter’s presence.
Beside her, Tony vomited until there was nothing else in his body; acid burning his throat until all there was left was bile. Even then, he retched and gagged because there was nothing else to do at two AM, twelve hours after Peter had been wrenched from their trembling hands.
That first night, when there was nothing left of Tony and Pepper but broken shells, they held each other on the bathroom floor. They held each other, staring at the tiles and torturing themselves with dark, painful thoughts. Neither slept that night, and neither slept for many nights after – not when the likelihood of finding Peter alive began to dwindle, nor when the police couldn’t track the van that had taken Peter away and had been ditched, completely devoid of DNA and evidence, on the side of the road.
There was no sleep left for Pepper. All she had left was her husband, as thoroughly destroyed as her, by her side, and Peter’s blanket, clenched tight in her fist.
-
Don’t believe what the reporters say, Tony and Pepper Stark never once stopped looking for their son.
-
They scoured Malibu, then California, then the Western coast. Search parties gathered in the thousands to look for signs of Peter Stark. They found three other missing children in the progress, but not the one that Pepper couldn’t breathe without.
She spoke on the radio, on the news. There were press conferences too often. She said the same thing each time, begging for anyone who knew anything to come forward. Pepper needed the slightest inch of hope.
As the days passed, hope was something the Starks were in short supply of.
Three weeks after Peter was kidnapped, a doctor pressed a prescription for sleeping pills into her hand and told her that she needed to rest or she wouldn’t be alive when Peter came back. For the first time since he’d gone, she vomited. She didn’t stop all night; not when Tony joined her in the bathroom, his hand pressing slow, gentle circles across her back, and not when he eventually fell asleep in the bath.
She vomited until the sun began to rise on California, then she got up, got dressed and went right back to searching for her son.
-
Tony only went because Obi insisted.
Pepper could handle herself for a few days, but seeing her husband climb the steps and onto the plane, she felt like something inside her was being taken too. Like Tony had become a vital organ that kept her alive.
Without Peter, she needed Tony to keep her standing, and now he was on a plane, heading to Afghanistan.
It’s only two days, she told herself. Two days and you can breathe again.
-
TONY STARK MISSING
Two days turned into three months and Pepper couldn’t remember what it felt like to exist. Because all she was doing now was lying there, in a bed that wasn’t hers – protective custody had thrown her into a motel that smelt like piss, but honestly, she didn’t have it in her to care anymore – and wasting away.
Horrible thoughts clawed at her insides. What if they’re both dead? What if they’re not and being tortured? What if you’re next?
She didn’t eat for four days and she took the prescribed pills like they were the only thing keeping her alive. Whatever sense of strength and determination she’d kept about her after Peter’s disappearance seeped into a puddle by her feet after Tony left.
There was nothing else for her. Her entire existence had collapsed in on itself and the people she cared about most in the world had vanished without a trace.
Assumed dead, she corrected, as if it mattered. Tony Stark was missing in action, assumed dead.
At night, she stood at the blind-covered windows, peeking through the slats at the motel’s parking lot. Police stood around, keeping watch, but Pepper couldn’t help but imagine the men with guns, storming the 66 Motel and reuniting her body with her families’ in some cell, blood and piss puddling and life drained from their eyes.
On those nights, she stared across the room at the pots of pills on her night stand. Pills to calm her down, help her sleep, stop her wanting to die.
On those nights, Pepper had to force her shaking hands to steady by her sides; force herself to turn back to the window; force herself to not go just yet, wait out one more day.
“They’ll be home tomorrow,” she’d tell herself. They’ll be home tomorrow.
-
If there was one thing everyone said, every time they thought of the woman Pepper Stark, they said this: “She’s the strongest woman I’ve ever seen.”
Pepper Stark, after vomiting her guts into a motel toilet, showered, got dressed and went outside. Every. Single. Day.
She went on TV again, on the radio; held more press conferences that swore a hatred to all the sons of bitches that had thought themselves clever to make an enemy out of her. She’d burn them all down one day; she’d destroy them, tear them apart and she’d begin again. After razing the terrorists that took her family, she would create an empire of her own and no one would ever have the chance to hurt her again.
Pepper Stark had a lot to do. She couldn’t spend her days in the dark anymore. She had a husband and a son that needed her. She had a company she had to run and a legacy to uphold.
Pepper was not born a Stark, but she was the strongest of them all.
-
The day Tony Stark returned from Afghanistan, Pepper let herself break in the daytime.
Breaking was only for the nights, when people couldn’t see her; when they couldn’t find out that she wasn’t made of ivory and instead made of glass. Now, in the daytime, she shattered, and the glass shards sprayed everywhere.
Her knees buckled when Tony raced forward to hold her and they sat on the ground, wrapped in each other. When she kissed him for the first time in three months, it was like coming home.
In the car, on the way to pick up cheeseburgers and then head off to the press conference, Tony tugged her bag into his lap.
“What are you looking for?” she asked. Her hands were empty; devoid of a clipboard or phone – she needed something to keep her busy. She was overwhelmed with joy at the sight of her husband, but the waves of guilt passed over her too often. She couldn’t be happy when Peter was still gone.
She couldn’t smile like this when her son was six months missing.
(The likelihood of finding him alive was so small, Pepper thought it smaller than even the fragments of glass that sliced up her insides.)
“Mirror,” Tony replied, rifling through the bag with his one good arm. The other was strapped to his chest in a sling. “I want to know what I’m dealing with before the confer-” Tony frowned, pausing. Then Pepper watched as he drew a small blanket out from the bag. She couldn’t remember how to breathe again.
As she struggled to inhale, Tony gripped the blanket with a gentle hand. He brought it to his face, maybe hoping to smell a scent that Pepper had caught in many months. She saw the tears well in his eyes before they began to fall and unclipped her seatbelt, sliding into the middle seat.
“Oh, honey,” Pepper whispered, slithering an arm around his torso, careful of his hurt arm, and resting her head on his shoulder.
“He’s not back yet,” Tony mumbled.
“He will be,” Pepper promised. He will be.
-
Her husband was Iron Man and Pepper had to stop herself every day from asking him to make her a suit too. She had a son to rescue, she had skin that felt more like glass every day, she needed to do something.
“I am Iron Man,” Tony told the world. She wanted to stand up there and call herself Iron Woman, as if the press wouldn’t call her that anyway. She wanted to make the world vomit like she had; she wanted to mutilate it from the inside and pull her baby boy out from the wreckage.
Pepper Stark went back to work as if she didn’t dream of obliterating the Ten Rings and razing their men until Peter was found.
She woke up every morning, still feeling his arms around her.
-
Obadiah Stane messed with the wrong family.
The blue of the arc reactor would be seared into the backs of Pepper’s eyelids for the rest of her life.
-
By the first anniversary of Peter Stark’s disappearance, there had been almost twenty thousand reported sightings of him across the globe. Not a single one of them led her back to her son.
(Tony and Pepper stayed in their room all day with a photo album, Peter’s blanket and a bottle of what Tony called the worst tequila he’d ever tasted.)
-
Jessica Stark. Morgan Stark. Peter II Stark.
All dreams that would never become a reality; all babies Pepper would never hold in her arms. She wanted a little girl once, but she wanted her son back more. She couldn’t raise a child with the fear that clawed at her heart; that maybe they’d be stolen from her too.
And what if Peter did come back and he felt replaced? What if the new baby didn’t feel loved as herself, but as a substitute?
Tony and Pepper Stark agreed not to have more children, and they still looked at the front door every day, as if one day, their son would walk right through it and return home.
-
On the tenth anniversary of Peter’s disappearance, Pepper thought about her sixteen-year-old son.
“Do you still think he’s out there?” she whispered into Tony’s chest. They were curled around each other in bed; the same way they did every year, every time they missed him too much, every night when they woke up with nightmares of his disappearance.
“I hope so, Pep,” Tony murmured back. “I hope he was raised by a nice family – even if he doesn’t remember us, I hope he’s had a good life.”
Pepper smiled at the thought; her son in some house, bustling with people, taking a slice of toast with him on his walk to school. He’d be incredibly smart and kind – maybe he’d have lots of friends, loving surrogate parents, the puppy he’d always wanted when he was little.
It was the nicest thought she could have, with him gone; that he’d found happiness somewhere.
“I hope he has people who love him,” she said.
“He does,” Tony replied. “He has us.”
-
FRIDAY sent Peter Parker’s medical tests to Tony’s phone. Peter had saved her life; had risked himself and held the weight of a falling building for her. Tony was frowning at his phone.
“Tony?” she whispered. “What is it?” She couldn’t see the screen and reached out, tugging on his hand to show her.
“FRIDAY,” Tony said. “What is this?”
The AI sounded above them, quiet, as not to wake Peter in his hospital bed. “That is a table comparing the genetic markers in-”
“Why was this compared?” Tony asked.
Genetic markers? Why would you compare genetic markers?
“I noticed the similarities during the scans and suggested to Dr Cho that the test should be run,” FRIDAY explained.
Genetic markers are compared in paternity tests. But FRIDAY wouldn’t compare those unless there was a good chance that they’d be a match. Tony’s face was unreadable as he stared at the screen.
Pepper frowned. “Tony, what does this mean?”
“You know what it means.”
Don’t say things you don’t mean.
“I need you to say it.”
He paused and his voice came out choked. “That’s Peter.”
There was glass in her stomach, cutting open her organs and slicing down her muscles. Blood pooled in her stomach. “That’s Peter,” she said anyway. Was she coughing up blood yet? Was it dripping from her lips? “Our Peter.”
“Our Peter.”
Pepper clawed at her mouth, stifling the sob that shuddered out of her mouth without warning. Peter Peter Peter. Tony’s arms pulled her into him, tightening around her shaking body and holding her close.
Our Peter.
She’d spent nights staring at the ceiling, thinking about his laugh, and days trying to hide the scarring that his disappearance had caused across her body. There were battles of will power against the peace of death and there were entire weeks, spent huddled away, hoping for a shred of news to come in about Peter’s whereabouts.
Here he was. Right in front of her. “He’s home,” she said through heartache and tears. She pressed herself into Tony’s spaces; using the skin of his neck to stifle the cries that loosened from her throat. At last. I can breathe again. “He’s finally come home.”
“Yeah, Pep.” Tony’s voice was barely audible. Her family was back together again; everything she’d wanted for ten years was finally within her reach. “Our boy’s come home.”