PEPPER P. (saltedand) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-07-05 07:32:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *log, pepper potts, steve rogers |
Who: Pepper P and Steve R
What: Things fall apart, the center cannot hold~
When: Immediate aftermath of Tony's request and Bruce's phone call
Where: Pepper's apartment.
Warnings: The likelihood of this getting ugly is off the freaking charts.
Pepper's sense of self had remained strong - stalwart - through ten years of working for Tony. She knew exactly what she liked (punctuality, specificity, privacy) and what she didn't (sloppy work, indecision, gossip) and had, in moments in the past thought privately that perhaps that sense of self had been why she had lasted as long as she did. She knew her own body without bashfulness, the myriad freckles and where they were, the single strand of white - not gray - hair that had come in on her twenty eighth birthday and remained smoothed back into the severe knot worn to work, had embraced sex when it came her way and eschewed it without romantic involvement. This had largely meant no sex for the better part of five years, apart from a disaster of a set-up date from an old, well-intending friend. She knew what she could do well: mental arithmetic, solving last minute problems, that particular brand of dry wit that she'd become accustomed to Tony laughing at and what she could not: watch poor decisions being made up close, writing a press-release for longer than an hour, walk any length of time in her own high heels. All of it was unraveling, thread from a spool at a rapidity that felt like a nightmare and over a length of time that felt like torture. She had begun feeling as though she wasn't her, hands and hair and a face that looked as if it had been altered sometime in the night minutely enough for her to be wrong but not completely the day of the hotel, of that grotesque journey from Tower to hospital to apartment, and the lot of it had been dug deep, buried at the foot of foundations that shored up a decade-long friendship with the determination of Tony first, Tony always until she had forgotten it was there, slowly decaying. Now it was unspooling as if the roll must come to an end, as if all of who she was and what she was was being determinedly undone, an interminable loop-the-loop and no end, no getting off, no room to breathe. In the empty apartment, the unplugged phone blessedly silent and the switched off piece of Stark tech abandoned by the door, Pepper gulped heaves of air into lungs that felt compressed, forcibly deflated. There was no room to think, no room to decompress, the determined weight of irrevocable alteration pressed upon her like piled stones. It had been intimate. The halting, stuttering phone call with the man she trusted most in the world -- the person -- on the other end, exhausted and strained but still willing, it had felt like stripping off pieces of skin when she had been wholeheartedly flayed, with the dissonance of who she had been and who she now had to be magnetic polars, refusing to line up. But it had been private. Tony had been unshaken, and in the brief, wild moment of being able to exert some influence over something with calm radiating from the voice in her ear like being in his lab with one of his infuriating experiments ticking down to nothing on the table and the engineer's own self-belief soothing, she had thought it possible -- until a dial tone, until he was gone. The pans had crashed, wall into wall into wall, careening like rubber balls. And then there was quiet. Focus. She had told herself the same truths she had told herself the first day she'd almost cried at her desk, overwhelmed and under-controlled and she had told herself, pull it together or you'll never forgive yourself. Inchingly slowly, one pan had begun to judder, to separate itself from the whole and then the phone had rung, over and over and over, until its shrill permeation of the shatter-thin self-control had forced answering. And it had felt like being skinned in whole, once more. Like the calm on the phone, that certainty - not in Tony himself, but in her, the coaxing, utter belief without condition or perameter - had never existed. As Bruce spoke, the air shrank. It was splitting open, anything left of her, Pepper thought wildly, would not be there. It would be gone. Passed around and around, and she couldn't think and Bruce had never had this, this done to him, awaking with something new, grotesque, stitched to his person without his assent or permission or involvement or waking knowledge. Electric as raw wire, Pepper suspended at the base of those foundations with the turbulence of what was behind thin glass roiled and flipped and twisted, a turgid dark morass kept thinly at bay. And people knew. People knew every miserable inch, and the woman for whom control was everything, privacy paramount, did not cry from the sheer exhaustion of having cried everything already. But now it was quiet. Now, in the devastation of her apartment, thin-skinned and twisted into the very corner of her couch, she could begin to fit the pieces of herself back around this new self and work out how she, Pepper, could coexist with this truth. Her head ached, her throat full. But control. She could learn it. She could do it. There was a knock at the door. |