Chapter Text
When Tony sleeps, that first week back on earth, he does so in quick snatches here and there. After arriving back on earth he only pauses to speak to the others for a few moments before grabbing a few essentials and flying himself and Pepper out to an old property in the woods - secluded, not another human within a mile, but unmistakably earthen, undeniably home. He dozes in the garage, at the kitchen table, in the back of the car, propped up against a tree. Sometimes Pepper coaxes him into the bed beside her and he holds her while she sleeps, awake and terrified that between one breath and the next she'll disappear.
The first couple of days he vacillates between needing to be physically touching her and not being able to be in the same room as her. He'll sit next to her on the couch while she's working, hold her hand while she's on the phone with her colleagues. He's under the impression that her network is still reeling internally from recent events, to say nothing of the outside world that they're trying to help.
He'll stay with her until it becomes unbearable - with his eyes open he worries about seeing her turn into dust in front of him, but when he shuts his eyes all he can see is Peter's last moments. He tries to focus on Pepper's words as she talks to drown out the memory of the kid's last moments, but then he starts worrying about what will happen if her voice cuts out suddenly. He'll sit with her as long as he can, then he gets up, presses a kiss to her forehead or cheek so she doesn't worry about him, and walks out of the room. He escapes to the workshop and puts on music, turning it up until the specific details of the worst case scenarios can't fully form in his brain over the noise and the terror melts back to a more manageable level. Or he'll go running in the woods to give himself some sort of outlet for all the adrenaline his body is creating. He never runs too far from the cabin, though, just in case -
FRIDAY mentions the unhealthy rise in his heartbeat after a fresh wave of panic sweeps through Tony, and he snaps at the AI. "You're not telling me anything I don't know, pal. Don't bring it up again unless I'm actively dying."
Pepper lets him have his space, but she also demands at least one meal a day with him and tries to keep him in sight as much as possible. It's not a problem - he can never stay away from Pepper for too long. Despite everything, looking at her still settles some part inside of him. And when he's gone he's constantly worried that something will happen.
Tony spends two days in his workshop crafting a bracelet for Pepper and one for himself. He sits her down to a candlelit dinner and gives her the bracelet, asks her to never take it off. The bracelet he wears vibrates slightly to the time of the heartbeat sensor in hers, and he can feel it when he presses the metal against the skin of his wrist.
Tony doesn't sleep well but he does sleep. He knows he's having nightmares, but thankfully he can't remember them when he wakes up.
After breakfast that first morning, Pepper makes a list of everything they'll need to bring to the cabin. It takes several trips back to New York to grab everything.
When he first walks in to his old workshop, he has to stop because front and center is the car he'd been working on for Peter. The physical body was mostly finished and he'd been working on the car's AI. He'd been meaning to write a custom AI for the kid, personalize it. Maybe if he'd been content to just load FRIDAY onto the system, he'd have had the chance to give it to him before --
But now the car is sitting unfinished in a spot of honor in the middle of the workshop, just like --
and Tony can't stand thinking about it, so he throws a sheet over the car and makes it all the way to a workbench before collapsing with his hands over his face, blinking back tears.
Later he meets up with Pepper, who had been packing all their more personal items. He walks in on her crying, holding a framed photo of her and her parents from when she was a teenager. Her father had died of natural causes years earlier, but her mom had been another casualty of the snap. Tony puts his arms around her and she turns her face into his shoulder.
When they return to the cabin, the photo goes on the nightstand next to their bed. Pepper suggests that he could find a photo of his own to put alongside it. He privately pulls up Peter's Facebook profile later, scrolls down the page past dozens of posts his friends have made after his presumed death, to the posts he'd made in the last few weeks before --.
He ends up on May's page somehow and finds an account in her friends list that he's instinctively suspicious of. The suspicious account's set to private so he hacks into May's account (password security, folks, come on) and finds that it's full of photos of Peter (not Spiderman) with the Avengers. There are a couple of formal group shots but mostly they're just selfies, some posed, others of Peter's smiling face in the foreground and an Avenger or two doing something stupid in the background. Shuri's in a lot of the photos, and Tony realizes that he doesn't know what happened to her. He tries to block out the thought.
Tony's in a few of the photos, of course. He saves all of those and prints out the one Peter had posted of him "accepting the scholarship" - not the formal one, but the one where they'd been goofing off, having fun with it. Pepper has some spare frames, of course she does, so he frames it and places it on the nightstand next to Pepper's family photo.
Pepper convinces him to lay down with her that evening and she drifts off to sleep while he runs his fingers through her hair. It's been a few days since they came out to the cabin and he's better at this now; with every passing day that she doesn't disappear in his arms he becomes more convinced of her permanence. Eventually his attention is pulled away from Pepper and he stares at the photo of him and Peter, faintly visible in the light of the arc reactor. His thoughts start to spiral and the next thing he knows he's shaking and Pepper's sitting up on her elbows, turned toward him with a look of concern on her face. He opens his mouth to offer some sort of explanation or maybe to forestall any questions she might have, but nothing comes out.
"Tony, sweetheart," she starts. "I'm sorry. I know he meant a lot to you."
Tony nods, and the photo grows blurry as his eyes begin to water.
"We can take the picture down if it's making you upset."
"No," he manages. "I can't... I can't... bury him like that, I can't -" and the word triggers something in his brain and now he's thinking about whether May (is she alive?) or the kid's school friends (are they?) had held a funeral for Peter, or had they been holding out hope that he was still alive, like Pepper'd been doing for him? Someone should really try to contact his family, Tony decides, he should do that tomorrow, why hasn't he done that already? Maybe if they haven't held a funeral yet he could attend. It'd kill him inside, but it's no less than he deserves, and he should be there to honor Peter, his memory.
Although maybe his friends and family wouldn't want Tony there - after all, he is in some sense the kid's ki-
the man who's responsible for-
And he's hyperventilating and Pepper's helping him sit up and pushing his head down to his knees. She grabs the trash can and hands it to him and he grips it tight with one hand, the other over Pepper's chest as he tries to breathe along with her. His shirt is sticking to him so he strips it off after a couple of minutes and the rush of cool air against his skin helps a little to shock him out of his panicked state. Pepper goes to the kitchen and returns with a glass of water which he drinks slowly and some painkillers to knock out the headache that they both know he'll be getting shortly. She grabs some tissues and wipes off his face, throws them in the trashcan which she gently detaches from his loose grip and places right next to the bed.
"We can talk about it later," she offers, and Tony would rather not, but he's too wiped out to even respond. He sits on the edge of the bed for a couple more minutes before he slides back down to a horizontal position. Pepper turns him onto his side and curls around him, one arm slung over him and pressing against the arc reactor. He pulls the band of his bracelet tight against his wrist and focuses on Pepper's heartbeat.
The next morning when he wakes up Pepper has breakfast on the table. He can tell by her face that they're going to be having one of those conversations that he doesn't like, and he's doubly right. It starts out in the middle of the meal -
"I really think you need to talk to a doctor and get back on your meds."
- which isn't a complete shock after last night's events. He'd stopped taking them a while ago, and it'd seemed to go okay. Pepper had voiced concerns, but Tony's used to that. He's done a lot of kind of stupid, risky stuff, and Pepper's usually concerned, but it also usually turns out okay for him.
He hadn't even seriously considered picking the meds back up again after his return to earth. For one thing, there was the practical aspect that it was kind of hard to get a doctor's appointment right now - the 50% of doctors who remained were still busy treating the survivors of the snap who'd been injured in the aftermath (car wrecks, plane crashes, instances of gun violence in the immediate panic and other crimes as some areas descended into chaos).
But the other thing is... it's not like he feels he deserves this (although, yes, there is that too), but despite the near-constant anxiety and occasional waves of terror, he really hasn't felt like he's been overreacting. The medicine he'd been on had been meant to fix the maladaptive cycles in his brain, but everything he's been feeling has honestly felt like a rational reaction to him. He's never felt this out of control before, but world circumstances are literally the worst they've ever been, so he feels pretty justified in not... handling it well.
Pepper's using her dead-serious voice, though, and Tony really does trust her with this, so he promises to call a doctor and see about getting back on the meds.
Pepper lets him finish the rest of his meal before she pulls out the other punch by way of disappearing into their bedroom and coming out with the photo of Peter.
"It's not healthy right now for you to be staring at this constantly, not when this is so fresh.
"I know what you said last night and I'm not suggesting that you try to get rid of Peter or forget about him, but how about we do something like this," and she puts the photo on one of the upper shelves in the kitchen, "where we can see it but it's not staring you in the face."
Tony considers. The picture isn't at eye level, doesn't catch his eye at a quick sweep of the room, but when he's looking at the shelving specifically it stands out as a prominent piece. He tilts his head in acceptance and Pepper smiles at him.
His stomach is full and he's still kind of exhausted so he makes his way over to the couch and passes out. When he wakes up he can hear Pepper moving around somewhere else in the house and his phone is on the coffee table, a sticky note on it with "Call the doctor" in Pepper's handwriting. He picks up the phone but the first call he places is to May. He holds his breath as the phone rings, lets it out all in a rush when she finally answers.
(They had held a funeral for Peter two weeks after the snap, she says. She thought that she and the kids needed closure, and even though they didn't have proof that he was actually gone, she'd had a feeling. Tony tries to hold back tears as he apologizes for not being able to make it, apologizes for her loss, and she responds as if she thinks he's apologizing in the general way people do, instead of as the person responsible for --. He finishes the call quickly while he can still speak normally, doesn't correct her.)
(He calls an old doctor friend of his to consult on what medication he should be on and at what dosage. He doesn't bother asking for a script, just walks into the SHIELD infirmary and grabs what he needs. If they care, they can bill him.)
Over dinner one evening Pepper tells him her vision for a garden in the side yard, with a possible future expansion into the back if everything goes well. She's incredibly busy still but he catches her researching what kind of sunlight various plants need and how to get rid of pests naturally. They lay down together one evening with a tablet opened to a rough sketch of the grounds. Pepper asks him questions like "Where do you think the tomatoes should go?" and "What about blueberries, do you want blueberries?" and Tony responds as if he has a single opinion on anything. He's not sure where this newfound interest in horticulture came from, but he knows right off the bat that the garden will never be less than 100% Pepper's. She's not really asking because she cares what he thinks about it but because she wants to share this part of herself with him. So he just agrees with everything she suggests or turns the questions right around on her. (Except the blueberries. Pepper doesn't particularly care for them so if she grows some it'll be up to him to eat them, and just - no.)
Pepper leaves the next Saturday morning and returns with packets of seeds and tiny trees rooted in buckets, a couple of shovels and a bunch of fertilizer. She tackles the trees first and Tony watches her progress in snatches as he does laps around the grounds - the exercise is good for him. She takes breaks - it's pretty hot out - and has to run inside every once in a while due to all the water she's drinking, but by sundown she's got all the trees planted and is starting to prepare the ground for the seeds. It's not time to plant all of them yet, she explains, but he can see where the footprint of the garden will be once it's complete. Before she drifts off to sleep that night she asks him whether he'd mind working on an irrigation system for the garden, and he stays up half the night in bed beside her, looking up information on how to do that. It's not something he has any previous experience in and he actually has some fun trying to work out how to give Pepper the most well-watered plants possible.
Pepper makes an afternoon trip a few days later and comes back with all manner of gardening books. Most cover information she's mentioned to him before, and there's an honest-to-God Farmer's Almanac stacked on top. He's not sure what the point is of having the physical books, but this is Pepper's project and the stack of books helps fill out their one bookshelf, making the place look even homier, so he doesn't bother to mention it.
They've settled in to a comfortable routine, now, and the cottage feels more and more like home to Tony every day. The meds are starting to kick in a bit, or maybe he's just got some distance from the... events. Either way, he's able to spend time apart from Pepper without either of them growing concerned: a few hours in his workshop here, a trip to the store there. Then there's a conference that Pepper's been asked to speak at. She'll be gone one night, maybe two, depending on how things shake out. Tony thinks he'll be able to handle it.
He thinks he does alright the first day. He's decided to work on the irrigation system while she's gone and he spends a lot of time in the workshop perfecting the program he's written to respond dynamically to changes in heat and precipitation. When he's finished he sets out to get supplies so he can start actually laying pipes, but he emerges outside only to find that it's dark out. A quick check with FRIDAY informs him that it's two in the morning. He decides he's not going to find any stores open at this hour, so he picks up a shovel, turns on a couple of lanterns, and gets started digging a path for the pipework. He finishes as the sun is peaking over the trees and he's a bit hungry so he eats a couple of power bars and passes out for a few hours.
He wakes when Pepper calls to check in with him between sessions and he chats with her while on his way to the store. He comes back with supplies and spends the rest of the day laying pipes. He decides to wait for Pepper to come back before covering everything back up, in case she wants to make any changes. He's hoping she'll be back this evening - this is the longest they've been apart in a month and he's starting to feel a little bit anxious.
Unfortunately she calls late into the evening. Things have run long, there are more attendees than they'd been prepared for, and every person they miss talking to is a person that may not donate to rehabilitation efforts. Pepper promises she'll be back home the next afternoon.
Tony tells her everything's going great and he can't wait to show her the garden. He tells her that he loves her, and through the bracelet he can feel her heart skip a beat in response.
He starts thinking about what Pepper said about donations and remembers (it's not like he forgets, but sometimes the practical applications escape him) that he's also filthy rich. He calls his secretary, who seems a bit surprised to hear from him, and asks to be transferred to whoever runs the charitable arm of his company. He's put on hold for a couple of minutes and then is on the line with a young man who refers to himself as "Tanya's replacement". The bulk of the processing power in his brain is trying very hard to not let him think of something, so what comes out is, "Yes, how much, percentage wise, of SI's yearly earnings is being donated to charity right now?" He furrows his brow at the answer. "Double that. Triple it. And I want all of it to go to rebuilding efforts for, uh. Recent events. You know." The man protests that the money's going to have to come from somewhere, and whatever department that is isn't going to cooperate. "Tell them that if they have a problem they can bring it up with Pepper." He hangs up. He rarely invokes Pepper - it's really not fair to the underlings - but he honestly doesn't have the energy right now to deal with anything.
He's still outside, so he makes his way to the bench in the back yard and sits. He's been doing a pretty good job of not worrying about it up until now, but Pepper's continued absence is starting to make him feel unsettled. It's not just the amount of time she's been gone, but also the distance between them. She's in Europe, and even if he were to use a suit, it'd still take too long for him to reach her if something were to happen. True, she's just at a conference, but that's not a guarantee of safety; people have tried to take him out at conferences before... and he respects the group that Pepper works with, he really does, but how much experience do they have trying to secure an event?
He's concerned but not panicked, which he vaguely registers as progress from where he would have been a few weeks ago. He's exhausted, though, and falls asleep on the bench. He wakes up hours later to Pepper sitting beside him, looking tired and but smiling lovingly at him.
"The garden looks very nice," she greets him with.
He's so pleased to have her back that he doesn't respond, just stands up and pulls her into a hug. She lets him for a moment, then pulls back a bit and brings her hands up to his face, grazing the ends of his hair with her fingertips.
"I was going to wait to tell you, but I've got some news."
"You've... secured a huge donation and you don't ever have to do more schmoozing again?" he guesses.
Pepper smiles. "Nope."
Tony snaps a finger and points at her. "World peace. You figured out world peace."
"No, Tony," she speaks softly. "I'm pregnant. We're going to have a baby."
A baby. They're going to have a kid. Pepper's going to be such a good mom, and Tony's going to try his best, but he has no idea how to be a dad.
He spends a month reading everything he can find about how to be a good parent. He looks up how to diaper a baby, how much force to use when you're burping one, what kind of food they can and can't eat, what developmental milestones to be on the lookout for. Pepper's researching too, but not at such a frantic rate. She buys a hammock and spends a lot of time outside, either gardening or swinging gently in the shade between two trees. She gives notice to her charity colleagues that she won't be able to continue working for much longer and starts scaling back her role in the organization and at SI. Tony builds a bench wide enough for the two of them plus a little one. He consults Pepper on the placement, and she plants flowers around it.
Pepper starts to show, and he can't take his eyes off of her, although, what else is new? He finds every excuse he can to touch her stomach - a hand around her when they're dozing, hugging her from behind - eventually he gives up on trying to be subtle about it and starts reaching out whenever she's close enough. She laughs at him for it but doesn't turn him away.
Then it occurs to him that his inability to parent isn't the only potential danger to the baby, and he kind of goes overboard. Things in the outside world have calmed down somewhat over the past few months, but it still doesn't seem like a great environment to raise a child in. He mentions this to Pepper and she points out that they don't spend any significant amount of time outside the cabin grounds anymore, and this has been one of Tony's safehouses for years, a perfectly respectable place for a child. He concedes the point in theory but starts going over the security protocols with a fine-tooth comb, looking for any points of vulnerability.
Tony's always been paranoid, but this is a new sort of thing. He doubles the amount of security on the perimeter of the grounds, installs screens in every room of their house that will display the identity of anyone trying to come down the drive. He contemplates the woods for days, concerned about what could be hiding in there, and in the end just builds three separate robots specifically to patrol the area and sniff out any unwanted guests. He tracks down the current location of everyone who's ever tried to harm him and makes sure that none are still an active threat. He thinks about the Winter Soldier and he's not glad that the man's gone, but at least he doesn't have to worry about him coming after his child.
He hacks into the three airports that are close to the cabin and leaves behind facial recognition software designed to alert Tony and Pepper if anyone who's tried to harm them lands at the airports. It helps him breathe a little easier.
He's not really been speaking to the other Avengers. With some distance from the events and the medication dulling some of the processes in his brain that were, maybe, contributing to Tony's state of mind when they were fighting, Tony doesn't feel anger towards most of them anymore, but neither does he want to try to reinstate broken friendships. Clint's birthday passes and Tony digs out a bow he'd been working on ages ago. He sends it to Clint via Natasha, because he's not exactly sure where the man is these days and he doesn't want to dig into the vague rumors that have started to pop up.
Steve drops by a couple of times and Tony doesn't know what he thinks he's doing. Tony brushes him off with the same carefree attitude that he uses on everyone that he doesn't want to talk to but also doesn't want to completely burn bridges with. He invites Steve in for a meal, completely drops out of the conversation and leaves the whole thing up to Pepper (it's not rude to her, she actually likes him well enough), then unsubtly ushers him out the house with increasingly obvious excuses. "As pedestrian as it sounds, we're all out of clean clothes and I have to do the laundry," morphs after the second visit into "We tivo'd something and it's about to come on." - Tony's not sure whether Steve catches the inanity of the statement or whether it passes him by. Steve shows up a third time and Tony tries "The plants are supposed to be growing today and someone needs to supervise them." Even Pepper rolls her eyes at that one and takes over.
"I'm sorry, Steve, but I think we're both a little bit tired right now. Would you like a tour of the garden before you go?"
"No, but thank you for the offer, Ms. Potts. And thank you for lunch; the lasagna was lovely." With a slightly harder voice, he turns to Tony and says "Would you mind walking me out? I wanted to talk to you about something."
Tony shrugs and pushes up from the table, starts walking out the open door, leaving it up to Steve to catch up. Tony's all the way out to Steve's car before he says anything.
"So things have been pretty difficult for everyone since the snap," he begins, and Tony inclines his head, not out of curiosity but just to show he'd heard.
"I've started a support group. We meet on Mondays and Thursdays at an old YMCA. Actually it's technically two groups, but some people come to both." He stops there, as if that's the sum total of what he'd meant to say, but when Tony doesn't respond he continues. "I was wondering if you'd like to come with me next time."
"Look, Steve, as much as I'm sure people would get out of hearing me say that everything's going to be a-okay and things will be back to normal eventually, I'm kind of busy here and I don't think there's anything I can say that you haven't said already."
Steve shakes his head. "First, I think you have some fundamental flaws in your conceptualization of what a support group is, but I actually meant to ask whether you'd like to come as an attendee, not some sort of motivational speaker."
Tony laughs in his face.
"Look, pal, you are barking up the wrong tree. Additionally, this: I don't want you setting foot on my property again. Now, get out." He spins on his heals and stalks back to his house, slamming the door shut behind him. A few minutes later he hears Steve start back down the driveway.
Steve tries to come back two weeks later but Tony meant what he said so he denies access when the first cameras pick the car up, and it's good to know that their front line defenses work, at least.
Once he's taken care of immediate security concerns, Tony starts going over the failsafes he'd installed in his old projects, especially the code that runs FRIDAY and all the security measures on the property. He already keeps multiple local backups of any programs that normally run on the cloud, spread out geographically so a well-aimed blast can't take them out all at once. That part's not paranoia, just a practicality, and it's saved him more than once. But before the snap, even his worst case scenarios had all assumed that the world's general infrastructure would survive. Now he spends his days revamping his old systems so they can run as light as possible, because the smallest increase in efficiency could buy them more time. He worries about the power sources - they've got enough backup power that they can survive here for months in an emergency, using electricity only on the essentials, but that's not good enough anymore.
Tony researches solar panels - he knows the basics from when Pepper had suggested that SI make a push towards green energy, but if he's going to be outfitting the entire grounds with them himself then he's going to have to learn more. He puts panels on the roof of the house and the garage, on the insides of both buildings where there's sunlight and where he thinks Pepper will let him get away with it. He installs some in the woods next to the road leading up to their house, just out of sight from the road, and wires them up to the security systems so they'll have continuous power as long as the sun still shines.
Tony thinks about the sun not shining and it's weird, because he spent the first several decades of his life knowing for certain that the sun would rise each morning, but... he doesn't have a lot of certainties anymore. He thinks of the sun gone, thinks of the apocalypse scenario where he loses Pepper and the baby (the same thing, God, those are the exact same-). It'd just be him left, him and the cockroaches, both apparently fated to survive everything. He'd find Hawkeye, he decides. Find him and join him and....
The problem of how to make sure the solar panels don't eventually get covered in dirt or leaves or snow and become useless if he or Pepper are for some reason unable to clean them stumps him for a while. Eventually he builds tiny robots, multi-legged things, and programs them to check on and clean the panels if the solar intake falls beneath a certain threshold. He names them SPIDERs (Solar Power Intake Detector and Emergency Response) and releases them out into the woods.
They're programmed to swing from tree to tree on occasion as they move around, and that wasn't operationally necessary but it feels right.
One day, Tony looks at the photo of Peter in the kitchen and the twinge in his heart is sadness rather than self-loathing.