[She'd been bored maybe an hour or so into convalescence. Blankets and machines and an IV taped over a cluster of freckles half-way up her inner arm she hadn't known she'd had but could identify now with her eyes closed. Sleep had come, after the first wave of consciousness, sleep that she had rolled in and out of like a tide-mark on a particularly recalcitrant sea. Pillows, and a bed she didn't know that bothered her back in a way that made her think by the time she was forty she'd be complaining about it and every time she opened her eyes she was looking at a ceiling pock-marked by whatever metal had once been in the room but had now been carefully removed. There had been a lamp. She remembered. Generic, but the light source became nothing but the blue, recessed glow of the rest of the Tower.
She gave up on the room the minute she could walk around. It smelled like sickness and fear and she didn't like either of them, but there was nowhere to go. The room that had been 'home' for the better part of two months was upstate, and the apartment that had been home considerably longer was sub-let. There was nowhere familiar, nowhere that felt like the insides of her eyelids and bad dreams would show her the death of anyone she knew would be warded away by comfort. And then she thought of the penthouse.
By the time the suit touched down outside and JARVIS flared into life with a quiet, 'Ms Potts, can I confirm your location?' that practically had a throat-clearing cough to begin with, she was curled at the end of the couch in the penthouse, pyjamas and a blanket and something black and white and old projected onto the far wall -- and the laptop tugged onto her lap but largely ignored. The world, Pepper had discovered, did not wait for temporary CEOs to convalesce. But at JARVIS's intrusion, she turned her head toward the glass, and the clank of metal over metal that heralded an arrival she'd thought impossible.]