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Pepper’s at the end of her rope, the world fading slowly around her like the daytime sun as it sinks slowly over the horizon. She doesn’t know if she should still wear her wedding ring, or fold it into the little box with Tony’s. She doesn’t know if sending Morgan away for a weekend with Rhodey was a good move or not. She hates how much she doesn’t know. Hates how much she can’t control.
There’s no plan or schedule in existence that can fix any of this. Not a press conference in the universe that could patch the steadily crumbling chasm left behind without Tony there to fill it with his caffeine addiction and his bright presence. Pepper would do anything to have him back, skipping meetings because they’re boring and telling Morgan stories about her big brother they both wish more than anything could meet her one day.
Peter Parker had been a welcome surprise. Unlike anything else Tony had ever brought home with him, he’d shown up one day with a kid. His kid, in every way but blood. Now, Pepper almost can’t stand to look at him. Quite literally can’t stand it. Her knees shake too much with the rest of her every time she tries because, related or not, they look almost identical. Rhodey had shown her the pictures of a younger Tony, she’d seen them hung on the walls of the Colonel’s apartment the few times she’d come to visit with Tony, and the resemblance is uncanny.
She’d been almost positive when she met the kid that he was some product of a night out gone wrong from Tony’s playboy years, and had been fully ready to accept that fact. Still wouldn’t be surprised to see a positive DNA test pop up on her doorstep several years after Tony had shown her the multiple he’d taken to prove to Rhodey that they weren’t related.
Pepper can only try her best. It’s not just Peter she has a hard time looking at, it’s Morgan too. With May dead, Pepper spends every day with the grief of her husband and her friend, and the faces that look too much like Tony’s, that talk and think like he did. With the teenager that has the same habits as the friend she used to go out for coffee dates with once a week to discuss their respective disaster boys. All of it’s gone. It’s all buried six feet under, one at the Stark’s farm, and one at a quaint cemetery in Queens. Right next to Peter’s parents.
Gaining custody had been the next big thing. May hadn’t made it. Dead. Car crash. All during the initial Snap. So Pepper had been prepared to take Peter home once he returned, once Tony was certain Peter would return. May had it in her will that Peter would come to live with them if anything were to ever happen to her, and the whole Blip situation had waved the rest of the technicalities without issue. Peter is legally a ward of the Stark’s, and she couldn’t possibly feel like more of a fraud.
Showing Peter his room had hurt in a way she couldn’t possibly process. Tony had spent hours painting and repainting the walls six different times until he got the shades of red and blue right. Several more hours were spent decorating the space for a dead teenager she never thought she’d ever get to see again. The sunshine kid who’s disappearance broke her husband beyond repair. Morgan helped of course, but she could never replace Tony’s first kid, their first kid. The room had echoed all the things Tony wanted to show him, a closet stuffed with presents for Christmases and Birthdays from the five years he’d been gone. All the love in the world that could never be given, stuffed into little wrapping paper covered boxes.
Looking at them is hard , she thinks, and she hates herself for thinking it. Morgan has his eyes and his snark. Peter has his mind, his face, his hair, and his humor whenever it shines through the misery enough to be heard. His legacy . It’s a bitter thought. A legacy is something you never get to see, after all. Why did it have to be his legacy, and not his family? His kids ? His wife?
Glancing across the table, she watches Peter try and fail again to thread the sewing machine he’s set out. Pepper vaguely recalls him saying he wanted to try making something for May and Tony using something his Aunt used to do. Peter looks near tears by now, frustration and grief building together hideously and making his eyes prick with unshed tears.
Numbly, Pepper sets her long cold mug of coffee on the table, stepping lightly around to Peter’s side. Hesitantly, she wraps an arm loosely around his shoulders, tugging him into her side and watching him melt into a weepy puddle from such a simple gesture. He always does. Always did with Tony, and does now whenever she offers. There hasn’t been a day that she hasn’t tried. It’s hard to look at them . But this? This is okay.
A few deep breaths and stray tears later, Peter shyly looks up at her, doe eyes so miserably Tony in every way. ( How is he not his? He’s Tony’s kid. He’s Tony’s. )
He hesitates a moment, Pepper rubs a hand up and down his arm in silent reassurance, allowing him to gather his scattered thoughts a moment longer. Finally, he croaks quietly, “Can you— I’m sorry— can you teach me?”
Pepper glances wordlessly toward the sewing machine, eyes tracing the scuff marks from the wall she’d bumped it into when she’d moved it into the cabin five years ago. “Yes,” she says, leaning to press a kiss to the top of his curls. “Yes I can.”
It takes an hour, three band-aides, and a handful more crying spells, but they work through it. Peter can sew decently by the end of the hour, and has his first project finished before dinner. Pepper doesn’t ask what it’s for. All she does is make him dinner she knows he won’t stop to eat until he’s done. ( Tony’s kid. He’s Tony’s kid. He’s mine. ) He won’t sleep either. Not until it’s done . So she stays at the table, nursing a new cup of coffee and a book that doesn’t make her want to throw up (a mathematics textbook), intent on staying, not ever will she let him out of her sight. ( My kid. He’s mine. He’s Tony’s, so he’s mine. )
There’s a plan she’s supposed to be aware of for the next day. Pepper was looking directly at Peter when he’d explained, but her mind keeps drifting between frantic thoughts without any signs of slowing. ( He’s Tony’s, so he’s mine. My kid. My baby. He’s Tony’s, but Tony can’t have him. He’s mine. )
The patchwork of fabric that makes up the scarf in her hands is the most wonderful thing Pepper can possibly fathom. A scarf broke her. A fucking scarf. From Peter . From her kid . The thoughts won’t still. Won’t stop. Circulating back and forth between those same variations of thought.
Morgan will be back tomorrow, so they have to finish this today if they want it to just be the two of them. First stop is Tony’s grave, headstone prominent as ever in front of the house. With one of the two remaining patchwork scarves he has, he ties one with an arc reactor symbol around the tombstone, brushing his fingers lightly over the name engraved there. Pepper knows what it says, has read it so many times it’s seared into her retinas far the rest of time. Her eyes stay on Peter instead, ignoring the pressure building behind them as if that alone is enough to will the tears away. It never is.
Peter eventually manages to scrape himself together enough to head for the car, destination two looming shadowy over the horizon and a few hours away. This cemetery, the one where Peter’s family lies, is one of the nicest cemeteries in the state. Kept clean and organized by someone Tony hired a while ago that Pepper made sure to keep employed no matter what. It’s the least she could do for the family her kid lost, and the family of the friend she lost as well. Tulips. She brought May tulips. Peter said she preferred them to roses, and so had May, once upon a time.
The patchwork scarf Peter ties around his Aunt’s headstone has a Spider-Man emblem stitched carefully into it, hand done with one of the needles he’d stolen from Pepper’s sewing kit and an online video he’d found. Pepper sets the tulips down next to her tombstone, in one of the vases she’d set up herself for this exact purpose. It’s numbing for her. To leave them things. It makes Pepper feel like a cat leaving dead mice on their doorstep, offerings because she knows they can’t hunt for themselves. She keeps Peter pressed into her side here, a silent testament to May’s ghost that her kid is safe. That he’s alive and doing the best he can without her. Which, admittedly, isn’t very well.
It’s cold out, and her kid can’t thermoregulate very well, so Pepper has to cut their visit short. The heat stays cranked up as far as it will go all the way back to the cabin. Drive silent aside from occasional sniffles.
The car stops without fanfare. Pepper’s own patchwork scarf and personal spider emblem embroidered into the end, is set neatly around her neck and she fidgets with the edge of it, staring out at the house.
“We’ll be okay, Peter,” she whispers. A promise rather than a reassurance. She’ll make sure of it.
Peter nods tearily. “We’ll be okay,” he repeats back.
— — — — — — — —
Children and parents alike are making noise today. Over a year after Tony’s death, Pepper feels like she can finally breathe a little easier, the grief of her late husband not clogging her chest with so much . Morgan has a playdate in the park today, and Pepper is happy to sit back with a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap as her makeshift disguise for the evening, the patchwork scarf around her neck adding another layer to the whole facade. Morgan looks happy, and that’s all that matters.
A boy is standing a little ways away, hoodie pulled tightly over his face like he’s trying to hide, and Pepper would be worried if not for how unbearably sad his big brown doe eyes look. There’s a weary tired set in them and Pepper feels far too well that she can understand. Grief coats most everything she does, so much so that it’s the easiest thing for Pepper to recognize whenever she meets someone new. The boy seems no different.
Accept there is something different. Something so undeniably wrong about him that Pepper can’t seem to place. It hurts to look at him standing there all alone and not playing with the other kids, but it’s impossible to discern exactly why. It’s almost like she’s seen him from somewhere, there’s something so familiar about him. The shape of his nose and face, the color of his eyes, from what she can see, and the curly hair—
The boy had pulled his hood down, hair longer than she could last remember it being and eyes filled once again with a grief she thought they had chased away together.
Peter Parker was Tony Stark’s kid in every way that mattered. He was her kid just as much as he was Tony’s. All of this, this obsession that had started with so much death all at once.
And she’d forgotten who he was completely.