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Pepper has a really nice birthday. A few of her friends from college drive down from Los Angeles and they get dinner, drinking and laughing until the late hours of the night. She trusts Jarvis and Happy to get Tony on the plane on time or at least sort of on time, so she sleeps in late and takes a day to herself. She stays in her pajamas all day and doesn’t think about work at all, except to vaguely wonder about Tony’s demonstration. Hopefully it’ll go well. It’s be one less apology letter she’d have to write.
The next day is back to work as usual, picking up Tony’s dry cleaning and putting together everything he’ll need but won’t use for his upcoming meeting, and the day after that she goes with Happy to pick up Tony. She’s a half hour early, per usual, and she uses the time to reread the forms she needs Tony to sign. He’s not on time, not that Pepper is surprised by that, but one hour turns into four and she’s intensely irritated when she gets a call seven hours after the flight is supposed to land.
“Hello?” she all but growls.
“Pepper…”
“James, where are you? It’s been hours. Tony has a meeting in the morning that I—”
“Pepper.” She stops mid-sentence when she hears the exhaustion in his voice. ”We… There was an incident.”
The white hot anger drops out of her body only to be replaced by icy fear.
“What happened?” Happy turns and looks at her with concern. Colonel James Rhodes explains that what happened, the presentation, his parting with Tony, the attack. The blood drains from her face. “Where is he?”
James sighs. ”We don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“He was just gone, Pepper. We’ve spent all day searching the desert, but so far we haven’t found a thing.”
“So,” she says and swallows thickly. “What happens now?”
“We keep looking.”
The world feels like it’s spinning just a few degrees off, but Pepper is too used to changes in schedule to let it frazzle her. She puts on a calm face as she explains what happened to Happy, to Stark Industry’s investors, to the media who constantly shove microphones in her face.
It’s not like Tony’s dead. He’s missing. He’s been missing before. Pepper has spent many a morning calling hotels asking where he is. He’ll be back. If she thinks of it that way, it’s not so bad. She can go about her business all but running his company and be okay.
Until she remembers she needs a stack of paper she’s sure she left in his lab.
It’s not a big deal. She’s been in Tony’s lab without Tony before. It’s fine. When she punches in her pass code and enters, it’s been a week since he went missing and she finds the room full of ghosts and possibilities that she doesn’t want to face right now.
“Miss Potts?” She starts and clutches at her heart. She’d been so focused on not paying attention to the thoughts that gnaw the corners of her mind that she completely forgot about Jarvis. “My apologies.”
“No, don’t be sorry. Hi. Sorry, I was just…” She gestures vaguely. She goes to his desk, where he would sit and ignore her when she would drop important files on top of his work, and begins to sift through it.
“I hate to intrude,” Jarvis says politely, “but I’ve found rather unpleasant reports by the media about Mr. Stark’s current whereabouts and I was hoping you could clarify.”
Pepper swallows. “They’re true. He’s missing. Colonel Rhodes is searching for him now. They’ll find him soon. He’ll be back before we know it.”
“Of course, Miss Potts,” he replied, sounding unconvinced.
She can’t find the damn file even though she knows she left here and she’s fairly certain Tony wouldn’t have moved it. Frustrated, she begins to tear through the piles of papers, scattering them onto the floor, when a little tug comes at the bottom of her skirt. She looks down to see Dummy looking up at her. He makes a confused little beep and Pepper smiles slightly, crouching down to his level.
“Hi, Dummy,” she says and strokes at the spot she’s seen Tony touch a thousand times.
He beeps and moves his mechanical little head to what she assumes to be a questioning position.
“He’s missing right now, but he’s coming back. He’s going to be home soon. Just as soon as we find him.”
Dummy looks down with a sad little chirp.
“Hey, no, it’s okay. He’s fine. Everything’s fine. Why don’t you pick up these papers? He’s going to want his lab clean when he gets back, right? He’s going to want to make up for lost time.”
Dummy gets to it immediately and Pepper watches as he messily collects the fallen files. She’s known Dummy for long enough to know that he will diligently clean this lab, or at least try to, until the day Tony gets back.
But what if he doesn’t come back?
What happens to all his creations? To Dummy and Jarvis and Butterfingers and You?
What happens to her? What will she do without him?
Her throat gets tight and she takes a shaky breath before putting her face in her hands and sobbing. It’s the first time she’s let herself think about the possibility of him being gone, really gone, and it hurts too much. It’s overwhelming, the fear and the anger and the anxiety, and Pepper can’t handle it. The situation is entirely out of her control and there’s nothing she can do but wait until they find him or his body.
Tony, lifeless in a coffin, never again to quirk his lips and tease her or light up a room with the spark of genius in his eyes. Oh, God.
Pepper cries in a way she hasn’t in years, wholeheartedly and unashamed, sitting on the floor of his lab, surrounded by all he’s created. After a while, she hears a whirring sound and looks up to see Dummy offering her a slightly dirtied rag. She takes it with a breathy laugh and wipes the tears off of her face.
When she gets home, she finds she has an oil stain across her cheek, but she doesn’t let herself cry again.
One week turns into two and a month spans into three and life goes on. James calls her twice a week with reports about scouring the desert and promises to keep going. Pepper fills in for Tony as much as she can; all new projects are on hold for the time being, but she still makes business decisions in terms of funding and stocks. She was always better at those than Tony anyway.
She’s not in denial. Denial implies ignoring an irrefutable truth. Tony is alive. She knows it. A man like that doesn’t die like this, disappearing without a trace. He drinks too much or causes an explosion in his lab or something. He’s alive. He has to be. She refuses to acknowledge another possibility.
She visits his lab from time to time to check in on his robots or when she misses him so much it feels like punch to the chest. His absence is a bruise across her heart that just won’t heal. She can get by, of course. There’s no other choice. But just when she’s almost forgotten it’s there, it aches and she’s has to force down screams of fear and frustration.
After three months, when James calls her at 6:30 am, just like he always does, she doesn't have the energy to try to sound hopeful anymore.
“Hi, James.”
“We found him.” Three words and the whole world suddenly shifts around her, jolting electricity into her.
“What?”
“We found him,” James repeats joyfully. “He’s alive, Pepper. He’s okay.”
“Oh, my God.”
“I know, right?” She can hear his smile. “I was beginning to think…”
He doesn’t have to finish the sentence.
The next day she waits on the flight deck with her heart in her throat. She fiddles with her hands, the hem of her jacket, anything to get the nervous energy out of her system.
The bottom of the plane opens up and she can see James and, god, there he is. After months of waiting and wondering, there he is, all in one piece, looking older and more worn than she can ever remember, but so alive. He walks straight up to her and she tries to hold back her unbridled joy.
“Your eyes are red,” he says, brown eyes tired but bright. “Tears for your long lost boss?”
There are a thousand things she wants to say, everything from “I missed you so much” to “What took you so long?” to “Thank God you’re alive.”
“Tears of joy,” she says instead. “I hate job hunting.”
“Yeah, well, vacation’s over,” he says, bustling away in a way that’s just so Tony.
She’s never been so happy to get back to work.