Work Text:
It’s two weeks after... the incident when Steve finally plucks up the courage to make the laborious drive to see Pepper and Morgan.
The trees are just beginning to turn, huge plumes of burnt orange and blood red. Green clings onto the vegetation like mould as a reminder of last season’s beauty. It’s something Steve wants to hang onto with both hands to force summer into the present. He yearns to strip the trees of the rust and replace them with vibrant shades of green and pink blossom. He yearns for the sweet smell of honey nectar and sun. Tony loved the sun; any excuse to whip out those godawful red sunglasses. That man always saw the world through rose-tinted glasses, even when Steve had broken his heart, when Nat died, when Thanos roared.
“Give her a kiss from me.” Bruce tells him over hands-free as he speeds down the windy country roads.
“Which one?”
Bruce sighs over the speakers and it crackles like excruciating white noise. “Both. Pep, and the kid.”
“Will do, buddy.” Steve replies with a nod, even though his friend can’t see him. It’s a sub-conscious reaction now, to nod and shake his head to himself when he’s on the phone. Bucky told him it’s because he isn’t using his words properly to express himself so he’s back to relying on visible gestures. Buck’s completely right, and that hurts like a motherfucker.
He parks the car just behind Tony’s favourite Audi, the sleek black spaceship glinting under the setting Midas gold. Knowing that he would never see Tony screech that thing right up to his shoes and lean out of the window with a smug grin causes a pulsing ache to lodge itself in Steve’s throat. An image of the war-torn battlefield that represented what was left of the compound catapults into his mind and he steels himself with a cough. This isn’t about him. This is about the people left behind, and damnit that doesn’t include Steve.
Dust crackles under his shoes as he stands politely on the front porch and rings the doorbell. Nobody answers.
Suddenly, Pepper appears from deep inside the swell of the sprawling house and opens the door. She fixes Steve with a friendly smile that borders on pity. Steve suppresses the urge to run.
“We thought we’d walk to the lake, if that’s okay with you?” Pepper says quietly, her voice breaking on every other vowel. There isn’t a single sign of exhaustion etching her features and Steve envies her wholeheartedly. Sleep was fleeting, nowadays. His bed was huge and cold. It wasn’t empty because he was in it, but every night it felt like a continent and Steve was drifting through the ocean like Titanic all alone.
“Sounds awesome,” Steve replies and revels in how steady he sounded. “Lovely weather.”
“Morgan’s got a speech prepared that she wants to say for her Daddy.” Pepper drops on him and oh fuck no he’s not prepared. He isn’t ready for this.
“She’s a sweetheart.” He rasps. A crescendo of catastrophic evil explodes in his ears and he knows he’s outwardly wincing. And, fuck, Pepper notices it too because her expression shutters off into a complete void of sympathy and Steve wants to scream.
Pepper lost Tony. He didn’t lose Tony; Tony wasn’t his to lose. This woman lost her husband, the love of her life, and she was pitying Steve like he was the widow destined for a life of pain.
There’s a fast rhythm of tap tap tap behind Pepper and she turns to the noise with raised eyebrows. Morgan comes barrelling around the corner like a small brunette bullet and very nearly collides with Steve’s legs. She stops at his feet and looks up at him through her lashes with a wide grin. Her neck has to crick almost all the way backwards for her to be able to properly engage with Steve, so he reverses down a few steps so they’re almost at matching eye-level.
“Hi Captain ‘Merica.” She almost-whispers like she was too afraid he was an apparition that would suddenly disappear. It takes Steve a moment to realise that’s exactly what she’s thinking, because that’s what her four-year-old brain has convinced her happened to her Daddy. “Do you like my wellies?”
Her waterproof boots are neon green with pink flamingos trimming the toe and heel. They’re bright and obnoxious and so typically Tony and Steve adores them. He tells the girl exactly that and she turns to her Mom with wide eyes gleaming with pride. Pepper pushes a hand through her tousled hair and tells her good job and that’s that.
Pepper locks the door behind her with a jolt and gives Morgan the go-ahead to set off. She throws herself off of the porch and disappears past her outdoor tent, still erected with Tony’s spirit laughing carefree on that miniscule plastic chair, and down into the dense trees. The adults watch her go silently and Steve’s lips quirk up into a small smile.
“How are you doing? Okay?”
The question catches Steve off guard. He whirls around to face Pepper and jams his hands into his pockets awkwardly. She doesn’t retract the enquiry. She just waits patiently for him to blurt something out as they slowly traipse down the woodland paths in Morgan’s racing dust.
He wets his lower lip and allows himself to remember, for a split second, what it was like when he’d watched Tony stop breathing. “Am I fuck.”
Clearly, it’s exactly what Pepper had expected to hear. Her face twists into understanding when she nods seriously.
“I know,” she offers, and tucks a stray tendril of hair behind her ear. “You obviously haven’t talked to anyone about what’s happened… I’m kinda hoping you’ll talk to me.”
“You don’t need that.” Steve says straight away, blunt and final.
Pepper catches her lip in her teeth and squeezes down on the flesh. “I do, actually.” She ducks under a low-hanging branch. “I need to know that somebody else is feeling as shattered as me.”
Not exhausted. Shattered, like broken. Shattered: like hearts are into millions of pieces when the one person you would die for passes away themselves. Steve always hated that expression. Passed away sounds peaceful and rehearsed. Death was never peaceful; it was abrupt and deafening and messy.
It doesn’t take them long to catch up with Morgan. She’s sat on a log prodding at a caterpillar when they come silently around the corner and jumps up brightly when she spots them. Pepper lifts her arm to allow the child to burrow into her warm side as they wander further down the embankment. The trees become more and more sparse as they emerge out onto the lakefront until Steve is drinking in the mottled blue when he tips his head up to breathe through the atmosphere.
Pepper pulls him down onto a rock pile and they make themselves comfortable. Morgan pulls out a piece of notepad paper complete with yellow butterfly borders from her coat pocket and stands facing them. Even though she was only four, the small girl oozed confidence. Defiance shined in her eyes and Steve couldn’t help but feel like he was looking straight at Tony.
“I wrote this for my Daddy.” She begins and points behind her at the lake. Steve doesn’t follow until- oh, oh fucking hell. She thought Tony was living in the lake, because that’s where they’d released his arc reactor at his funeral. “He’s not here anymore.” She clarifies to them, just in case they’d missed the last two weeks. Her tiny index finger prods at the thick air with severity. “Momma told me he’s gone to live with the angels, but I think he’s living in the magic lake with the mermaids.” Pepper nods in exaggeration from Steve’s side but he’s too dumbfounded to do anything. “He an’ the mermaids are just friends though, Momma, cos he told me he loves you to infinity!” A radiant smile blossoms over her features before it drops to reveal confusion. “I don’t know how much that is. I think it’s more than three thousand.”
Pepper coughs wetly like she’s trying to cover a sob. She does a bloody good job of it too, because Morgan just beams and goes back to her sheet.
“Daddy used to tell me stories. He tol’ me all about Iron Man, and Captain ‘Merica, and Hulk.” Her small arms bow into right angles as she shows off her muscles and Steve forces himself to chuckle. “I think that he is brave. He was really, really clever, even cleverer than Momma!”
“Not likely!” Pepper singsongs back and Morgan giggles. Her laugh sounds like icicles breaking and it’s beautiful.
“Daddy isn’t here now. I wish he was,” her expression clouds over and Pepper’s breathing hitches. “I miss playing outside with him, and I miss when we would sing Lion King. I miss his special stir fry and his hugs. I miss when he would sneak me popsicles when Momma wasn’t looking…” She trails off, losing interest. Her attention turns to scuffing her boots against the ground, drawing patterns in the mud. “He made Momma and me happy.”
Then, she looks up at them both and throws her hands in the air. A small “yay!” escapes her mouth and she looks so pleased with herself, like she hadn’t just broken two adult hearts.
“Well done, Morgan.” Steve basically whines and drags the back of his sleeve against his eyes. Tears pools against his lower lash line but he blinks them back with every facial muscle he has. “I know your Dad is real proud.”
Pepper just nods, not trusting herself to speak. She opens her arms and braces her torso when Morgan runs into them to climb onto her lap. “Good girl. Amazing work, baby.”
Steve waits as Pepper whispers praise into her daughter’s wild hair. It feels too intimate and like Steve shouldn’t be there. The sun begins to properly set, casting looming shadows into the water.
They sit for a while longer on the rocks as the setting sun bounces off the water surface and back into the forest, dappling the dying leaves with rays of golden hope. Morgan happily scurries around the lakeshore and picks some wild bluebells. She spends an age threading them into Pepper’s hair until droplets of vibrant blue cascade down the waterfall of auburn.
Pepper taps her daughter on the cheek with a dark red nail etched in bronze lightly. “What about Steve?”
He can see the young girl consider the possibility for a moment, before she concludes that Steve was worth saving with tiny flowers and reaches up to stick one behind his right ear. It tickles the sensitive skin at his cheekbone, but the broad smile he’s got plastered to his face is worth it.
Morgan stares up at him, entirely too trusting and too sceptical all at once. Tony radiates through her and Steve has to swallow heavily.
“Did you like my Daddy?”
Steve doesn’t know what to say to that, because well, did he ever? At some points he must have done but those times seem eons in the past.
“Yeah,” he croaks after a short while. “I loved him.” Loved, not love. He wasn’t Pepper; he didn’t have the right to use the present tense anymore.
Morgan regards him carefully for a few seconds before she nods seriously and starts playing with a loose thread erupting from his jeans. “Me too.”
And that- that causes all of the heartache Steve had suppressed over the last fortnight to overflow and ignite his veins in fireworks. He slaps a hand to his mouth and breaks down into heaving, ugly sobs that rack his body pathetically. Morgan doesn’t blink. She just crawls into Steve’s space and arranges herself on his lap like this is normality. Her arms wind around Steve’s waist as far as they’ll go and she rests her head against his heart, feeling the erratic but gentle thumping under her skin. Steve throws away any control he’s got left and rests his chin atop the girl’s crown to sniffle into her hair. Pepper surveys all of this with her own tears erupting down her cheekbones but doesn’t touch either of them. This is needed, she deduces, and waits until Steve can breathe through his nose efficiently.
He holds Morgan tight around her midriff and feels her bony thighs shuffle about on his legs as she tries to make herself comfy. It takes a few minutes for her to fall still, and suddenly she’s fast asleep curled up to a man she’s never really known like a limpet. Night had enclosed the space quickly and now it was a free astrology show. The sky was a carpet of twinkling stars, and Steve wonders which one is Tony.
Pepper clears her throat.
“We’ve both lost somebody we love.” She whispers into the lights. Steve can feel his eyebrows knitting together in confusion.
“Oh no, Pep, me and Natasha, we were never-”
“I don’t mean Nat.” Pepper interjects calmly and sends him a look when he chokes on his exhalation. “You- he always- you know what I mean.”
What, in the actual fucking heavens of all that is holy, can he say to that? Steve’s ribs clench with panic as he goes to defend himself- goes to defend him and Tony- but Pepper’s already looked away like she’s said her peace. Did she expect him to deny it? How could he? He’d seen Pepper lose everything that day and had watched as she’d sobbed for her husband. He’d stood there, blankly, as she had the love of her life snatched away from her. But then again, so had Steve.
“I’m so sorry.” He mutters, not knowing what else to say.
Pepper’s eyes are glassy with unshed tears when she turns to face him again. “Steve.” That one word carried so much pity and sadness. She seemed physically pained to say it, but then it hurt Steve in a million ways to stare at her and little Morgan and comprehend what they had lost. “I was well aware when I got with Tony that I was sharing him with you.”
“You shouldn’t have had to.” Steve tells her, and doesn’t bother to deny anything.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Pepper snorts, like Steve’s flippant brush-off of a dynamic that fired his soul for the best part of his life is stupid. “I was the ‘other woman’, Steve. He loved me and Morgan, I know that. He was my husband, the father of my child, I know I was loved. But, you? He loved you in a different way. It was still fierce, and unrelenting, even when you drove each other to the brink many times- just… different.”
She’s not angry. A fond smile sticks to her lips as she speaks, like she’s recounting the complicated relationships of somebody else and not the man she had loved more than anything.
Steve doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Thank you.” He settles, and shakes his head to himself. “It’s not enough, but thank you. For understanding, for letting it happen for- I- I didn’t- didn’t- um…”
Pepper raises her eyebrows slowly at his stammering. Steve takes a huge breath, and marvels at the mosaic of individual lights projecting onto the ripples of the lake.
“Thank you for letting me have him.” He states very slowly and nearly breaks when Pep’s eyes soften. “Even just for a little bit. It was enough. He was enough.”
Morgan’s scrawny body radiates much-needed heat into his chest, allowing him to breathe for the first time in nearly fourteen days. His lungs scream at being forced wide open as he inhales as much clean, content air as he possibly can.
Pepper leans across to press a soft kiss against his temple. He weaves their fingers together and squeezes.
Up high, high above, a star twinkles extra brightly. It beams down onto the water, and somewhere, Tony grins.