PEPPER P. (saltedand) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-08-16 17:35:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *narrative, pepper potts |
Pepper P - narrative Stark Tower
Who: Pepper Potts
When: Recently!
What: Waking up (and going back to sleep)
When she woke it was slow. The recidivism of groggy, dreamless sleep like a tide drawing out on waterclogged sand, the quiet intrusion of medical equipment reeling off an awakening. It was the same room in Stark Tower, the same self-contained and impersonal unit but the blue recessed lights glowed alive and the person in the room bent over the IV line in her arm (when had that happened?) was dressed in papery-white and was decidedly not dead. She was not curled into the corner of a closet, but in a medical-grade bed, nudged against the wall.
She tipped her head back against the crackle of a pillow and looked at the ceiling. A constellation of objects deeply embedded into the plaster looked like an unknown solar system, an art installation. A glance at the medical staff member who was both unhurt and un-terrified, a consequence Pepper expected when attacked by seemingly unembodied metal. No one was hurt. No one was dead. There was no body on the carpet, an expectation she had held as long as holding a breath, that hurt to let go as tightly as compacted lungs eased out a sigh.
She coughed, the medical staffer looked at her, startled. The IV fluid began to drip clear liquid down tubing and she looked at her own wrist, bare freckled on blue waffle-blanket. There were drifts of fog inside her head, a dull retrograde ache that pulsed in time with the beep of equipment, the hiss of a machine.
“I need to speak to the presiding physician,” Pepper didn’t know about what. That she’d woken? But no one had died. The control kindled in a manor surrounded by nothing but green had survived, she closed her eyes as the pillow’s sharply-ironed linen snicked under her chin. Sleep swallowed her whole. When she woke, she could talk to Steve, to Tony. She hadn’t died. Surety sent her dreamlessly back to sleep.