![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Fill 2: Beginnings/Endings
Jul. 25th, 2025 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
innitmarvelous_og Tony Stark came back but not all of him did.
Tony was very much a mortal man, and shouldn't have survived snapping his fingers and using all six of the Infinity Stones - yet he had for a few minutes afterwards. He had then continued to survive with the intervention of Stephen Strange. Strange had used the Time Stone to reverse time to the moment just before Tony died, then he had looped the moment.
Once Tony was frozen in time to the moment just before his death, he was quickly moved to Wakanda where their best doctors began working to save his life. The damage from the gamma radiation of the stones was extensive, and as Tony once told Bruce, that much exposure, should have killed him. It had, in fact, killed Tony but through the intervention of magic and the best medical technology Wakanda had to offer, he would survive in body.
Surviving in the soul was another matter entirely altogether.
The light in his eyes did not shine as bright, it was so much dimmer. He also didn't smile as much or as easily. He didn't want to tinker, he didn't joke, and the occasional Miss Potts no longer slipped from his lips. He also seemed afraid to hold Morgan as though he were afraid she was breakable and when he did, he looked like he was about to fall apart. ~~he would give Pepper a look~~
Of course, the professionals said he'd been through an incomprehensible ordeal which had brought with it unprecedented physical and mental trauma. They all said that he needed time, lots of time, to heal.
Pepper gave him time, space, and patience - of course she did.
And in the end, that almost broke her.
It was on a night after Morgan was in asleep in bed and after the house had fallen into quiet again, that Pepper found herself sitting along at the kitchen table, watching as the moonlight rippled on the lake's waters.
Finally, she blinked, coming out of the trance the light and her own thoughts had put her in. She reached across the table to pull the paper and pen she'd put there closer to her, and then she began to write.
Tony,
I don't want to write the words that I am about to write, but they are the truth: You have not been the same man you were before you stopped him. I feel it in every quiet moment between us, and again in every word that goes unspoken between us.
But you... no I need you to know this:
Iron Man is not the one I fell in love with.
The man I fell in love with is the man who once made me coffee the wrong way five days in a row just because he wanted to see me give him an exasperated smile.
I'm in love with the man who forgets our anniversary, but then he made me a necklace from some armor scraps he melted down.
I fell in love with the man who came home from Afghanistan all those years ago.
And I love the man who beat impossible odds to do it again, even if he's hurting with pain I can't began to imagine.
Tony, you don't have to be who you were, because it may not be possible.
I know the act of saving the world, the universe cost you something that I'm not sure I will ever fully understand.
That's okay.
I am just grateful you are still here with me, and I want you to stay here with me.
I promise you that we will find our why together through the dark.
I love you, Tony.
She stared at the last lines she wrote for a long time, and then she left it on the table by his chair on the porch, where he'd sit for hours staring at the lake.
The letter was gone the next morning.
She found a note by her favorite coffee cup, written on a napkin. It was only five words in Tony's unsteady handwriting (he'd had a hard time learning to do things with the new arm he's gotten in Wakanda), but it definitely belonged to him.
I'm still trying. Love you.
Pepper softly smiled, the first real one she'd had in weeks.
She felt encouraged, even though she knew they may never go back to being who they were before Tony snapped his fingers.
But maybe they would become something new.
Together.
