Pepper had thought the couch would help. It would make Tony look as if he were sleeping, until the two women who spoke with calm warmth, as if they could unpick all that was wrong, figured out how to wake him. But it didn't; it made it look all the more wrong. He was still and the woman who examined him, her voice rich as southern sunshine asked why.
Pepper's voice was soaked through and she didn't care about it, anymore than she cared about the slow trickle of wet sliding from her hair ends down her shoulder-blades. Her face was drawn and white and her eyes red but she nodded when Bucky said he'd been working. And this was all awful, but she liked him very much just then; she gave him a look that was gratitude, and sat, on the chair that had been drawn up close, and her fingers knotted together.
"He was ...unhappy." She spoke toward her knuckles, examining them carefully without seeing them. "But I didn't think he would have, not intentionally. He goes off like that, for days on end. It's normal," but the pills weren't normal at all, and Stark Enterprises produced nothing that was designed to kill.
"He does his thing. JARVIS shuts off communication to him on his orders, he'll be gone several days and nothing. He's been doing it more frequently, but I didn't think he was inventing something in particular."