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"Think they bought it?" Tony tilted his head all the way back so he could get a better view of Pepper changing out of her black dress from his position lying sprawled out across their bed. Now that all of the funeral guests had gone home she was free to slip into something more comfortable and less somber. Even upside-down, it was a sight worth (fake) dying for.
"Well, everyone put on a good performance, even with certain distractions..." Pepper turned around, hand on hip, and gave Tony a stern look that he met with a not-at-all apologetic smirk. He'd kept a running - and colorful - commentary going in Pepper's carefully concealed earpiece throughout the whole ceremony; if not for her years of cultivating a near super-human ability to maintain her composure in the wake of Tony's... everything she'd never have been able to keep a straight face. There was no need for that discretion now, though, and she allowed her amusement at her husband's general irrepressibility to show. "But I expect there'll be plenty of conspiracy theories anyway, there usually are with this sort of th-"
"There'd better be!" Tony exclaimed, a bit indignantly. He rolled over onto his stomach and propped himself up on his good arm, waving his fancy new prosthetic one demonstratively in the air in front of him. "I mean, I have to be at least as famous as Elvis at this point, right? Why should he get to have all the fun?"
Pepper laughed. "It's even actually plausible for aliens to have been involved, in your case," she observed.
"Exactly!" It hadn't, in fact, been aliens that had kept today's events from being a hell of a lot more depressing, rather some beyond-bleeding-edge Wakandan technology mixed with a dash of (literal) magic, but there were a few aliens in the general vicinity when it all went down. That had to count for something. "I'm just saying, if the tinfoil hat brigade doesn't come through on this, I'm demanding a refund."
"Oh, is that so?" Pepper laughed as she sat down on the bed next to Tony and twirled a finger playfully through his hair. "Now, if you can bear to tear your attention away from the tabloids for a moment…"
"Hmm?"
"Listen." She nodded towards the bedroom window. Based on the volume of splashing and excited shrieking echoing in from outside it seemed like Morgan, Rhodey, and Happy were still thoroughly occupied with their task of fishing Tony's old arc reactor out of the lake. "I think we've got some time to kill."
Tony grinned. "Pun intended?" He pulled Pepper the rest of the way down onto the bed. "I like the sound of that."