[The apartment was small and it was in an unfashionable neighborhood which gave some indication as to how Pepper had afforded it years prior and she continued to live there now, due to a mixture of habit and comfort. It lacked recessed lighting and automation, but it was hardwood floors and shabbily comfortable furniture and she had not realized she had an attachment to a particular place until she was ill in some other place and found herself wanting particular things that belonged there rather than elsewhere. It inconveniently held a tenant; she thought trying to find some way of accelerating the short-term nature of the tenancy in the immediate aftermath of a health-crisis would be considered cruel.
Normal had been shunted around by so many crises, superhuman and intensely, minutely human that she had little attachment to it at present. She'd thought at first that the proximity would alarm him, the unit several floors below, but if Tony was panicking, the suit contained it. Pepper tried to picture it, couldn't and let it go.
With her knee protesting being pressed up against metal casement, Pepper slid down in the space beside the suit, a yielding of spine that announced comfort rather than a feedback loop on relationships and her chin moved upward to look at the face-plate of the mask with eyebrows adjusting upward a degree, an unspoken question. Where had the pizza come from?
And then the questions drew her further into the inner workings of a computer that did not so much float as hold itself above the floor a precise distance, and the arched non-verbal question was absorbed into the crinkled forehead of concentration.]
I can tell the metals apart by feel, not what they are but how they differ. It's like trying to describe colors without knowing the vocabulary. And I know what's inside without looking, but it's the way it feels. I could tell you the parts, but I don't know their names.