Chapter Text
Tony woke up to cold sheets and the vague, immediate assurance that someone had committed a crime against him.
He kept his eyes closed for another three seconds conducting a thorough investigation and reached his verdict.
Pepper Potts-Stark had gotten out of bed without him.
Again.
Unacceptable.
There were certain foundational agreements upon which a marriage is built: fidelity, communication, mutual respect, and the most important one by far;not abandoning your husband to the merciless December morning while you wandered off to be productive.
It was somewhere in the fine print, Tony was sure of it.
He reached across the bed anyway, his hand balling in the cold empty sheets.
“Traitor,” he mumbled into Pepper's pillow.
Tony cracked one droopy eye open.
The bedroom was still dim, washed in the cold grey-blue light that usually came before sunrise in winter. More snow had fallen sometime during the night, it piled around Morgan's snowman's feet, which oddly made it look like it had flare jeans on-if only it had legs. The image is absurd, Tony is well aware. The lake was misty above its surface, sparkling with fresh frost beneath the early winter sky. Pine branches bowed under thick whiteness, snow falling in batches as birds awoke.
The clock projected discreetly onto the wall. 6:43 AM
Tony stared at it.
Then he stared harder, just in case intimidation would improve the number.
It did not, but it was worth a try.
Tony's face fell back into the pillow with a pained sigh. “People die at this hour, Fri.”
“Statistiaclly, people die at every hour, Boss.”
“Comforting.” His voice was still muffled by the pillow.
“You're welcome.”
Tony let out a puff of air. Sarcasm was reserved only for him in the mornings, and only after coffee.
He pushed himself upright, blinking wearily at his surroundings.
Pepper's robe was gone from the hook. Her slippers too.
Coffee, was the only thought in Tony Stark's head.
If Pepper had willingly entered consciousness before seven in the morning, caffeine would be involved. Tony could work with caffeine.
He shoved his feet into the worn slippers Pepper had bought him a couple christmases ago-when she complained about Tony complaining about always stepping on Morgan's lego but refusing to wear shoes in the house because then Pepper would complain that-
Anyways. He had enough money to buy new ones, obviously, but there was something about his feet sitting perfectly in the worn grooves, and a tiny piece of lego embedded underneath, that made him refuse to replace them.
He was not sentimental.
He found a shirt thrown over the end of the bed, and wandered into the hallway.
The house was quiet but not in an empty way. It never felt empty anymore.
There was a low hum of heating beneath the floors, chasing away the winter cold. The soft mechanical breathing of systems inside the walls. And somewhere farther down the hallway, one of Morgan's night-lights was on, casting a small golden moon onto the ceiling.
Memories had etched themselves into the house. Laughter filled every hole they had carved.
Home.
That word still hit Tony hard in the chest sometimes.
He had spent most of his life running away from his feelings, pushing away people who cared about him more than he thinks they should. Against his better judgement. Pepper has made him believe that now.
He had spent most of his life living in places that were obscenely expensive, filled with luxury furniture, but still ended up feeling empty on the inside.
The Malibu mansion had been architecture.
The Tower had been ego.
The compound was a polished military base.
But this lake house was different. It had accumulated things.
Morgan's crayons under the couch.
Pepper's reading glasses abandoned on windowsills.
Tony's tools migrating from the workshop-despite repeated threats from his wife regarding child safety, ah yes because a spanner might undo some cogs in Morgan's brain, she's not dumb. And it wasn't like he was leaving soldering irons around like toothpicks. Tony can be responsible when he wants to be. He has matured a great deal, despite others say so.
Shoes lined up by the door.
An obscene amount of blankets nobody remembered buying, nor needing.
Fingerprints on glass.
Life, basically.
Messy. Sometimes irritating. Loud.
But it was his.
It was Morgan's and Pepper's and Tony's.
It was home.
The word stuck in his throat more times than he could count over the years. He was absurdly sentimental.
Becoming a husband and father does that to you, he guessed.
Tony was rounding the corner towards the stairs, one hand on the banister readying to swing himself around, when he stopped.
Pepper was standing halfway down the hall.
Slippered feet. Grey robe. Hair flawless and loose, despite only just waking up, falling over her shoulders in perfect strawberry curls.
She wasn't looking at him-probably didn't even know he was there-she was looking through an open doorway with an odd look on her face.
Tony watched her for a moment.
There was a particular expression Pepper would make when something refused to behave according to her rules of the universe.
First came the crease between her eyebrows.
Then came the slight narrowing of her eyes.
Then-
There.
Her lips pinched.
That was the dangerous stage.
Somewhere, somehow, someone, or something was failing to make sense to Virginia Potts-Stark, and that thing had approximately thirty seconds left to answer her or die.
He quietly walked up behind her and slipped an arm around her waist, hoping for that cute surprised squeak she would make.
But Pepper barely reacted, which was concerning in itself.
Tony rested his chin on her shoulder, holding her against him.
“Morning , CEO.” He said softly, kissing her cheek.
“Morning.” Tony's brows pinched a bit. Her voice didn't sound tired. But something about it made him pause.
“What's so confusing?”
Pepper didn't answer.
Tony followed her gaze into a bedroom on the other side of the doorway.
He waited.
Pepper waited.
The bedroom, displaying an impressive lack of social awareness, continued being a bedroom and did not answer their silent questions.
“Okay.” Tony drew out the word as he felt his brows doing the same as Peppers had.
A sense of oddness filled him.
Tony looked at the bedroom;bed, desk, window, shelves, mess.
Teenager, obviously, if not only based on the mess then by the contents, unless Happy had undergone deeply concerning lifestyle changes.
The bed was unmade, navy-blue sheets twisted and dragged towards the edge, the comforter half hanging, nearly touching the floor. A pillow had been crushed into an improbable shape-that any engineer, Tony especially, would call structurally unsound and a literal pain in the neck-as though its owner had spent years attempting to suffocate it in their sleep.
A dark sweatshirt hung over a desk chair, one sleeve brushing the carpet.
Textbooks were scattered across the desk and stacked on the floor beside it in a tower nearly as high as Morgan.
Chemistry, advanced physics, calculus, and something involving molecular biology that Tony couldn't read from the doorway.
There were notebooks too. Lots of them. Different colours and thicknesses. Pens, pencils, loose pages, a scientific calculator with what looked like electrical tape holding the battery in place.
A cork board hung over the desk with ticket stubs, little scraps of paper, a faded brochure for MIT-that caught Tony's attention, he felt an unmistakable sense of pride-but there was no photos-which also caught his attention, but this time it registered strangely.
Tony's eyes travelled upwards to several Star Wars posters. Original trilogy, thankfully.
“At least whoever lives here has standards,” Tony said, trying to lighten this tense air that had at some point developed.
Pepper looked at him for the first time that morning. “Tony.”
“What?” He shrugged.
Her forehead creased again. But this time it held worry. Tony didn't like to see her worry, it made him worry about her and her worrying and whatever she was worrying-
“Who's room is this?” Her voice was steady but Tony could hear the wobble.
He opened his mouth. But nothing came out.
He looked into the room again trying to find the answer. Something cold and small moved beneath his ribs.
He covered it immediately with annoyance. He always had an answer.
“What do you mean, whose room?”
“I mean exactly what I said.”
“It's-” He stopped. There was no file in his brain that held a name.
Pepper looked at him for a moment before her eyes fell away to somewhere distant and her brows pinched again in confusion.
Tony stepped around her into the room. His chest feeling tight with a question he couldn't answer.
The room smelled faintly of detergent, paper, old electronics and something sweeter he couldn't identify.
Something familiar.
Which was ridiculous. This was his house, obviously rooms in his house smelled familiar.
He walked farther inside, that same feeling growing worse with every step.
There was a rug beside the bed that Tony knew the corner curled up despite several attempts of placing heavy books to warp it back down.
He knew it before he saw it. His foot was already maneuvering itself to step over it.
His eyes dropped and there it was. The corner was folded slightly upwards, it looked little, but Tony knew it was a death trap.
He blinked. His head jerked up away from the familiarity and his eyes landed on the desk pushed up against the wall.
Second draw sticks. The thought came without warning.
He crossed the room and pulled open the top drawer cleanly.
Pens. Post-it notes. A tiny screwdriver set.
Then he tried the second. His fingers went still around the handle.
It had caught halfway.
He lifted it up almost instinctively and it opened with a wooden scrape.
“Okay,” he said to himself, his brows pinching harder together.
“Okay what?” Pepper was still by the doorway.
“Nothing.” Because it was nothing. He kept telling himself.
“That didn't look like nothing.” There was a tilt of slight panic in her voice now.
Tony ignored her and moved to the bed. Added panic will do nothing for his cardiovascular health.
There was a nightstand, obviously, a lamp, a half-empty glass of water, a paperback with an aged worn spine-that Tony was too distracted to read what it was-three charging cables, despite there being only one visible device requiring a charger-because of course there would be a rechargeable laser cutter pen on a teenagers bedside table.
And-
Tony crouched, reaching behind the nightstand. His fingers closed around plastic and he pulled out an empty bag of gummy worms.
The room went oddly silent as Tony stared at it and Pepper stared at him.
Tony slowly stood, his eyes still distant as his brain tried to make sense of the information he knew was there but couldn't grasp.
Pepper's quiet voice broke through the silence from the doorway. She still hadn't come in. “Can I ask why you knew that was there?”
“You can,” Tony was still looking at the empty plastic packet as if it would come alive and tell him all the answers. It didn't. Shocker. “I'd prefer if you didn't though.”
“Tony.”
“I don't know.” He was starting to get a headache with how much his brows had pulled together.
His answer finally brought Pepper fully into the room, she walked with purpose now. Her voice became firm. “What do you mean you don't know?”
He shook his head unconsciously. “I mean I knew there'd be something back there.”
“Why?”
Tony looked away from the plastic to her, trying to make his face convey something that his words couldn't. “That would be the part covered by ‘I don't know.’”
Pepper took the packet from him and turned it over.
Nothing unusual. Nothing besides the fact that Tony had somehow known it existed.
She put it carefully on the nightstand.
Neither of them spoke.
Tony became acutely aware of the quiet because it wasn't normal quiet.
It was expectant quiet.
It was as though the room were waiting for someone. As though him and Pepper were waiting for the breath of existence of its occupant.
His eyes went to the bed.
It didn't look unused-that was the problem.
Guest rooms had a certain sterility to them, no matter how much Pepper decorated them. Beds were tucked too neatly, surfaces were too clean. Nothing ever felt displaced in them.
But this room…it looked as though someone had gotten out of bed yesterday morning and expected to come back that same night.
A hoodie thrown to the side.
A book open facedown on the floor beside the bed.
One sneaker on its side by the door, while its pair was across the room beneath the desk.
A pen without its cap on the floor, while its cap lay on the desk half chewed to splinters.
It was life interrupted mid-sentence.
Tony looked at Pepper and tried to fill the silence with his usual humour because silence made his brain itch.
“Do we have a squattor?”
Pepper did not look impressed. “In the hallway outside our bedroom, in probably the most secure lake house in the world?”
Tony hummed for a second. “Bold strategy.”
“Tony.” She said breathlessly.
“Right. Serious face.” He looked up. “Fri?”
There was no answer.
Tony frowned even harder now if that was even possible. “Friday?”
“I'm here, Boss.”
Something about her silence and then her voice made Pepper's gaze sharpen.
Tony pointed unnecessarily at the room. “Whose bedroom is this?”
Silence.
They waited.
The silence stretched. Three seconds. Four. Then five.
Something in Tony's chest tightened. “Fri?”
“I know who, Boss, but…” FRIDAY stopped.
Tony looked up towards the ceiling.
FRIDAY didn't stop. FRIDAY didn't search for words. She didn't stumble. Didn't hesitate.
The entire purpose of an AI with processing capabilities that made government supercomputers look like pocket calculators was generally to avoid standing around going um.
“But what?” He prompted her.
Another pause.
“I cannot say.”
Tony just blinked up at the empty ceiling. His mind temporarily lagging.
Pepper took over. “What does that mean?”
“The data pertaining to the person who inhabits this room is somehow absent from my database.”
Tony felt the first clean slice of alarm clutch his heart. “Absent how?”
“I cannot determine how.”
Tony rattled off possibilities. “Deleted?”
“No.”
“Corrupted?”
“No.”
“Encrypted?”
“No.”
Tony's eyebrows climbed. “I'm starting to dislike the word ‘no’ more than I did before, and I wasn't even aware that was possible.” He rubbed his sore eyebrows. “Okay, pick a fourth option.”
“I do not have one.”
Pepper folded her arms clearly not liking not getting her answers. That thirty second mark is up in the air. She was going to fillet whoever did this. “But you said you know whose room this is.”
“Yes.”
“What is their name?”
Silence. Then-
“I don't know.”
Tony laughed once. It wasn't amusement. “Okay, hold on. You know them but you don't know who they are.”
“That is correct.”
He shook his head slightly. “Those sentences hate each other.”
“I am aware.”
Tony paused his perusal around the room, unaware that he had been pacing. “Was that confusion I just heard? Can AI's be confused? Something wrong in your code, Fri?”
“No, Boss.”
“Diagnostics.”
“I began running them when Mrs Potts-Stark stood in the doorway.”
Pepper glanced up, her name pulling her out of wherever her eyes had gone. “And?”
“All primary and secondary systems are functioning normally.”
Tony rubbed his mouth trying to hold in another absurd laugh despite the situation. “Can AI's have strokes?”
Pepper elbowed him.
“What? It's a valid question. We've never tested it.”
FRIDAY ignored that.
Then she quietly said the most ominous thing Tony had ever heard her say. “I remember them differently than you do.”
Tony went still.
Pepper's arms slowly unfolded. “What does that mean, Friday?”
“I don't know how to explain it.”
And there it was again. It wasn't uncertainty or malfunction. It was something stranger than his long messy life could handle.
Tony walked to the desk, of his own feets accord, and picked up the nearest notebook.
No name on the cover.
Of course, because it wouldn't be that easy.
He opened it to find rushed written equations on the first page. The margins were filled with dense, cramped handwriting with arrows and corrections.
Tony stopped breathing for a half a second.
Pepper noticed. “What?”
“I know this.” He said it more to himself, his mind still far away.
Pepper had come up behind him to look over his shoulder. “The equation?”
Tony shook his head slightly. “The handwriting.”
He flipped the page over to find more equations and tiny annotations. A doodle of an atom wearing sunglasses and a goatee.
Tony snorted slightly.
Then his mind sobered.
He knew this handwriting. Not recognised it. He knew it.
Like knowing the sound of Pepper's footsteps and what her expressions mean.
Like knowing what Morgan's different laughs meant from the other side of the house without seeing.
It was something foundational that didn't require a conscious thought behind it.
Except when he reached for the memory attached to it, because there should be one, he knew there should be one-
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
No face. No name. No moment
…No memory.
Tony closed the notebook harder than he should have-a needle sized pain stabbed his heart as the sound cracked through the room.
Pepper touched his arm. “We should wake Morgan.”
Tony looked away from the notebook to her. “Why?”
“Because she may know.”
He nearly said ‘know what?’
But the question died before reaching his mouth.
He set the notebook down carefully on the desk and rubbed the back of his neck suddenly feeling an insane wave of something he couldn't place.
Pepper looked around the room again. Something had shifted in her expression. The irritation was gone. Now she looked almost frightened.
He could feel the same look mirrored on his own face. They weren't frightened of the room. They were frightened of themselves.
“I walked past this room yesterday,” she said.
Tony waited.
Her eyebrows pinched. “I must have.”
“Pep-”
“I walk down this hallway everyday.” She looked behind her to the door.
Tony placed a hand on her arm. “I know.”
Her voice was becoming quiet now. “I've lived in his house for years.”
“I'm aware. There were contracts. You signed things.”
She didn't smile. “I don't remember ever thinking about this room before now.”
Tony looked to the doorway.
Neither did he. That was the thing. It didn't feel like a room he'd forgotten.
It felt like before today, reality had just bent over this room. It was there but it wasn't at the same time.
If someone had asked him yesterday how many bedrooms were on this floor, he could have told them.
Or, at least, he thought he could have told them.
But now that he tried to picture the hallway his mental map slid around this door as naturally as water around stone.
Always there but never noticed.
Tony hated that. Hated everything inside his head that didn't make sense.
He was an engineer. Every problem had a solution. And every solution had an answer if he just used his brain. If he could just remember-
“Come on.” Pepper took his hand and squeezed gently pulling Tony out of his spiral and leading him out of the room.
Tony looked back once.
For the strangest moment, he expected someone to be standing there, sleep-rumpled and annoyed, asking why they were in their room.
But the room remained empty.
----------
Morgan accepted the mystery bedroom with considerably more grace than either of her parents.
She had just blinked at it sleepily from the doorway and said in no simpler terms and with the utmost certainty, “That bed is bouncy.”
Then she walked away grumbling about wanting food.
She now sat at the breakfast island, on a ridiculously tall stall that made her look tiny-but she had refused the child seat saying, “Stop treating me like a baby.”- and thus, every morning since then, they would watch her climb up into it without help because when they did help her she just grumbles something about babies again.
She wore dinosaur pajamas and one sock, and was eating a bowl of cereal with a grave expression of someone engaged in diplomatic work.
Tony had said she had Pepper's face.
Pepper had rebuked saying she had his attitude.
Tony pulled a mug from the shelf and set it beside Pepper. Then his own. Then Morgans. Then-
He stopped when he got to a fourth mug on the shelf.
All the mugs were identical except for the different colours and names across them in block letters.
Tony - Red
Pepper - Blue
Morgan - Purple
The fourth one had no name. It was red and blue.
Tony stared at it. That same uncomfortable unexplained feeling rising in his chest.
“Dad?”
“Mm?”
“You're blocking the word search on the cereal box.”
“Tragedy.”
Tony didn't move. He felt frozen staring at the fourth blank mug.
Pepper's coffee paused halfway to her mouth. “What?”
Tony turned it towards her.
The front was blank, not damaged or scraped clean, just blank. But the spacing of the design was all wrong. Small stars and equations and math symbols curled around an empty strip where a name should be, but wasn't there.
Pepper slowly set down her coffee. Her eyebrows scrunched again but they were slightly softer this time as if a piece of a puzzle had been put together, but a thousand pieces were still scrambled in the box.
Morgan crunched cereal in the background of their spiral.
Tony looked up to the ceiling. “Fri.”
“I know, boss.”
“Well, that's helpful and not at all concerning.”
Morgan looked between them and talked with her mouth full. “Wha-t.”
Pepper smiled too quickly. “Nothing, sweety.”
Tony put the mug down.
Four. The number sat oddly inside of him. It felt wrong and right at the same time.
He looked at the breakfast island. There were four stools. Of course there were-that wasn't strange-you bought stools in even numbers.
Everybody does.
Probably.
He shook his head and opened the silverware drawer for a spoon.
He paused.
Four sets had been laid out by the automated kitchen system.
Tony stared at them.
Why was his heart so fast all of a sudden?
“Friday?”
She knew what he was asking. She was probably trying to work it out herself-probably expending an immense amount of precessing power towards it.
“The breakfast routine has always set four places.”
“Why?”
Pause.
“I don't know.”
Tony was highly considering banning that phrase of wording from her coding at this point.
Morgan looked at the unused place beside her. Then at Tony.
“Is someone coming?” She asked innocently.
“No.”
“Oh.”
Tony watched her. She didn't continue eating her cereal. She had that same little scrunch in her brow.
Must be a family thing at this point.
“Morgan.”
“Mm?”
“How many people live here?”
Pepper shot him a look. Tony ignored it.
Morgan frowned. “Three.”
Something in Tony loosened slightly.
Then Morgan looked towards the empty stool beside her and it came back.
Her little brows scrunched. “But…”
Tony's heart tightened. “But what, Maguna?”
She frowned her mothers frown. “I dunno.”
Pepper's voice became very gentle as she leaned in close to her daughter. “What were you going to say, sweety?”
Morgan looked annoyed now. “I forgot.”
Tony and Pepper exchanged a look.
Morgan stabbed her cereal with a spoon even though the laws of cereal physics protested. “Can I have pancakes?”
“Absolutely.” Tony desperately wanted to get off the subject and Morgan had provided the great escape.
“It's Tuesday,” Pepper said automatically.
“So?” Tony raised a brow in question. Positioning himself next to Morgan to act as an offensive front.
“So pancakes are Saturday.”
Morgan looked betrayed.
Tony pointed at Morgan. “This is called oppression. Your mother is a tyrant.”
Pepper sipped her coffee undeterred. “Your father has cholesterol."
Morgan giggled at Tony's mock shock. “Allegly.”
The moment passed.
Almost.
They continued their morning as usual.
Pepper made pancakes.
------
By noon, Tony was annoyed.
By two, he was deeply annoyed.
By four, Pepper had banned him from ever saying mass psychogenic event until he had evidence one existed. She had also put a parental ban on internet access to any psychology research.
He hadn't spoken for a couple minutes after that last one. He had just been managed like a child.
At five, they found four profiles in the living room on the entertainment system.
Tony, Pepper, Morgan, and a blank fourth circle with no name.
At six, they found four coat hooks beside the mudroom door as they came back from a walk.
Tony's jacket hung from one.
Pepper's coat another.
Morgan's tiny purple puffer on the third.
The fourth was empty.
Four sets of house slippers lived beneath the bench.
One was already on Tony's feet.
The other on Pepper's.
The third was there, purple, that Morgan refused to wear, insisting that fluffy socks were better.
And a fourth…
Too large for Morgan.
Too small for Tony.
Too boyish for Pepper.
Pepper picked them up-men's, well worn.
Tony stared. “I hate this.”
“I know.” She whispered back.
“No, I really hate this.”
“I know.”
“I'm considering blowing up the house.”
That snapped her out of this recurring ‘I knows’. “You are not blowing up the house.”
Tony's mouth twitched. “Small explosion.”
“No.”
“Controlled.”
“Tony.” She sounded exhausted. So Tony digressed.
He shoved his hands into his pockets to keep himself from twisting a finger off.
Pepper held the slippers to her chest without seeming to realise what she was doing.
That bothered Tony more than anything else.
“You okay?”
“Yes.” Too quickly
He knew her lies. Knew that if she had asked him the same thing and he said he was ok it would be a lie.
She looked towards the empty hook. “I keep feeling like…” Pepper stopped.
“Like what?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Pep.”
Her eyes flicked towards his. Then towards the stairs that lead upstairs to the hallway which lead to the bedroom.
“I keep expecting someone to come through the door.”
Tony said nothing.
Pepper laughed softly, but there was no humour in it. “I don't even know who.”
He reached for her and she stepped into him immediately. Tony wrapped his arms around her as if he could protect her from this emptiness that sat in Tony's chest too. He kissed the top of her head.
For several seconds, neither moved.
Then FRIDAY said, “Boss?”
Tony looked up, still keeping his arms wrapped around Pepper. “Please tell me you found something.” His voice was almost desperate at this point.
“I completed my diagnostic scans.”
“And?”
“There is no damage to my systems.”
“Fantatsic. So the house is haunted.”
Pepper looked up at him with narrowed eyes.
“I did not say that.”
“Yet.”
Pepper sighed into his chest.
FRIDAY continued. “However, I have identified several behavioural processes within my adaptive architecture that cannot be traced to existing source data.”
Tony's body went still. “Explain.”
“There are routines I have learned in response to an individual whose identifying information doesn't exist.”
Pepper pulled back. “What routines?”
A pause.
Then the lights in the hallway changed, not by a lot, they dimmed maybe twenty percent and became a warmer tone.
The temperature shifted one to two degrees warmer.
“This lighting configuration automatically activates between ten p.m and six a.m when a specific resident leaves their bedroom.”
“Why?”
“It was learnt in my behavioral assessment that this resident preferred these settings.” When neither of them spoke, Friday continued. “I lower the volume of workshop alerts in the evening because they found them distracting while studying.”
Tony closed his eyes.
Workshop. Of course. The notebook. The handwriting. The equations.
“Did they work with me?”
“Yes.” The answer came instantly. “I have several learnt behavioral patterns and settings derived from repeated workshop interaction between you and the individual.”
Tony opened his eyes. “How often?”
“There are no complete records of sessions.”
“Did I trust them?”
Silence. But it wasn't long this time.
“Yes.” Something about FRIDAY's voice made his chest tighten.
“How much?”
“Completely.”
Tony's heart stalled a bit, like a connection misfiring.
There were very few people in the world to whom that word applied.
Very, very few.
“How do you know?”
FRIDAY paused again. Tony was at the end of his rope with these pauses but this time it was as if she was organising the answer that had never been intended to be answered without the information and data correlating to it.
“Your interactions with this individual differed from your established behaviour around colleagues, friends, family members, and potential threats.”
Tony's jaw tightened. His heart picking up the pace.
He took a breath. “Different how?”
“You gave them access to restricted systems and equipment without supervision. I have detected someone else's work within your own, which suggests you allowed them to alter your designs. You allowed them to stay in the workshop while you were vulnerable or asleep without hesitation.”
Tony went still. Very still.
He doesn't let himself sleep or be vulnerable around just anyone.
He had only given that level of trust to four people in his life. Pepper, Morgan, Rhodey, and happy.
FRIDAY continued. “Close proximity with this individual lowered your heart rate and blood pressure significantly, similarities of which only happen around Mrs Stark-Potts and Morgan. In simpler terms, you did not consider the possibility of them being a threat.”
Tony stared at nothing. His mind was pulling and pulling to grasp at something. Anything. Because that wasn't just trust. Not some person he worked with in his lab trust.
No. This was something quieter. It was something that sat deep within him. It was the kind of trust that stopped being a decision a long time ago.
Tony looked up at the ceiling. His mind finding the room like a burnt in image behind his eyes.
“How long have we known them?”
“The earliest behavioral data associated with this individual predates your residence in this house by approximately eight years.”
Eight years. The number rang in his head like an echo of a question nobody wanted the answer to.
Eight years they've known whoever lived in this house. Before they lived in this house.
Tony kept trying to grasp a memory, anything, but there was nothing.
“Were they related to us?”
FRIDAY did not answer.
Tony frowned. “Fri?”
“I cannot determine a legal or biological relationship due to lack of data.”
Tony wasn't sure why those words hurt so much.
Then FRIDAY added, “However, based on behavioral patterns, you treated them as if they were family."
Tony went still. The whole house seemed to go still with him.
His ears rang. His heart pounded in his ears.
Eight years.
The world carried on around him but Tony felt frozen and far away from it all.
Outside, snow still drifted down across the windows. Somewhere upstairs, Morgan was singing to herself.
But it all felt like static to Tony.
Eight years.
Family.
Pepper sat down on the bench beneath the coat hooks. The too-small, too-big, too-boyish slippers were in her lap. She clung to them while staring into nothing.
Tony stayed standing frozen because he wasn't entirely sure his knees would cooperate.
Family.
He looked at the fourth hook. At the slippers. At the stairs that lead up to the hallway toward the room with the unmade bed.
Eight years.
His heart seemed to stop.
“Why don't we remember them?” His question was quiet. He knew the question was useless, FRIDAY had basically already confirmed that she didn't know.
“I don't know, Boss,”
Tony laughed once under his breath. It came out choked.
His knees finally gave out beneath him as he stumbled onto the bench next to Pepper.
“Yeah.” He looked up. “Neither do I.”
-------
That evening, Pepper opened the Christmas cupboard without meaning to.
It was nearly December, and they had planned to decorate over the weekend. As soon as the weather had begun to get cold and snow began falling outside, Morgan had been adamant about making sure Tony had given Santa clause security clearance. She had spent the better half of November making sure he didn't revoke it because Santa had only given Tony socks last year.
Pepper said she had only wanted the wrapping paper, but when Tony found her sitting on the floor twenty minutes after she had disappeared, there were several boxes around her.
Garlands, lights, ornaments, and stockings.
He didn't know how he knew, but he just knew by the look on Pepper's face that the stocking she was holding would be number four.
Tony's stocking lay beside her-red, obviously, obnoxiously expensive velvet, his name stitched across the top in gold thread.
Peppers beside it-light blue velvet, simple and elegant.
And Morgan's-smaller than theirs, purple and covered in tiny embroidered stars.
And the fourth…
Red and blue. Just like the mug.
Tony's heart stung a bit when he realised it looked older than Morgan's. He didn't know why it hurt so much to think that they had loved someone for eight years. Treated them as family. Maybe even a son. And they had forgotten him.
There was that same gap on the stocking as the mug. The design bended around an open space where the fabric was slightly lighter.
There was no name.
Neither had words for the other.
Tony sat beside her and put his hand over hers that rested over the stocking.
Pepper's lips pinched a bit. Not her murderous ‘tell me right now’ pinch. This pinch was sad. It was trembling.
“I know where it goes.” Her voice sounded distant.
Tony instinctively looked towards the living room. To the fireplace.
Four brass hooks were built into the mantle.
His heart kept clenching at these little details they had never seen before. Why had they never noticed? How? They'd never questioned it. But he knew it had always been there. He knew he'd seen all of these fourth things before. But why are they only seeing them now?
Pepper stood and carried the stocking into the living room.
Tony followed her slowly in a daze.
Her hand moved without thought or hesitation. Tony already knew where she was going to hang it before she did it.
Second hook from the right. Between Tony's and Morgan's place.
She hung it.
It didn't look wrong or out of place. It looked…Perfect.
The fabric settled against the brick as though it had fallen back into a groove worn by years of Christmases.
Everything felt still. That was the worst part of all of this. It felt like waiting. Expecting.
Pepper stared at it. “I knew where it went.”
Tony's feet suddenly learned to move again. He came up beside her. “I know.”
Her eyes were tinged red as they started to fill.
That frightened him more than anything had all day. Pepper didn't cry over mysteries. She solved mysteries and sent them strongly worded emails or voicemails because the recipient was too afraid to pick up the phone.
Tony took her hand in his.
She whispered, “How can I miss someone I don't remember?”
Tony had no answer to give her.
His eyes drifted up to the mantle.
There were several framed photos of him, Pepper and Morgan. But in some of them there was-
A gap.
It was so painfully obvious.
One photo Pepper had her arm outstretched around nothing.
Another Tony was laughing at nothing. At no one.
Another Morgan was showing a drawing to nothing but air.
He stared at them for a long time.
He knew this wasn't some trick. He had even asked FRIDAY earlier to review security footage to see if someone had broken in and planted all of this even though he knew someone hadn't. That all of this had been here before today because he had seen it. He remembered it all being here. But it was like he was only truly seeing it all for the first time.
Somewhere, deep inside his chest, something ached with an old, familiar pain of waiting for someone to come home.
He didn't know why. Didn't know whose running footsteps he expected in the hall followed by Morgan's giggles. He didn't know whose half-finished homework laid open on the desk waiting upstairs. Didn't know whose mug sat blank in a cupboard. Whose stocking now hung from its designated place on the mantel. Whose room waited at the end of the hall.
He only knew, with an absolute certainty that made no sense at all, that there should have been four.
That somehow, somewhere-
They had lost one.