WHAT: Carol decompresses from her Very Bad Day with Pepper (and a little bit of Goose) WHERE: Avengers Mansion WHEN: This afternoon, a couple hours after this WARNINGS: Probably just feels! STATUS: Complete
Well, the mountain wasn’t destroyed. That was one good thing that had come from this hell of a day, at least.
Everything was looking up now, a little bit. After Carol and Tony had blasted every cave on that mountain top to bits (all unoccupied and seemingly so for a while; she’d made sure to check), he’d persuaded her to come back to the Mansion for food. It was well past time for lunch, and she was drained emotionally if not physically, so she agreed with minimal grumbling, flying back to join Tony on the Mansion’s residential floor.
She looked a fucking mess when she’d arrived, covered in dirt with long-dried tear stains streaking through on her cheeks. She’d said a quick hello to Pepper before excusing herself to go shower while Tony ordered food. She’d returned in a set of Avengers sweats, including some sinfully comfy fuzzy socks, and trashed her workout clothes immediately. They were torn up beyond repair from her initial hands-on scuffle with the first cave, and she’d rather never see them again, anyway. Not after today.
Thankfully, her next distraction was what had to be a metric ton of food. Wings, pizza, hot dogs, chicken nuggets – and she devoured half of it easily. She had never been a delicate eater, and when provided with a feast that could feed twelve grown men, she was even less so. It was probably not a pretty sight, but in the moment, it was satisfying.
After washing up again to make her face presentable, she gave Tony a long hug before he went off to the lab to get some work done. That left Carol to join Pepper in the living room, and the sight that greeted her actually made her laugh.
“You want to just make it an official joint ownership at this point, Pep?” She padded across the room to join Pepper and Goose. Her smug little Flerken was sprawled across Pepper’s lap like she belonged there, and Carol reached out with both hands to scratch the sides of her face the way she knew she liked. “She started coming inside more last winter, too, but I guess she’s upgraded this year.”
After lifting her head from the back of the couch at the sound of the laugh, Pepper grinned shamelessly, which made both woman and Flerken look equally smug. Pepper's was all in jest (well, mostly - it was still an endless source of amusement that Goose preferred her in proportional amounts to how much she didn't prefer Tony) but she couldn't speak for the feline-passing creature in her lap.
"What can I say, I'm a Flerken whisperer."
Pepper transferred her feet from the couch to the coffee table without disturbing Goose, making room for Carol to join her and leaving behind a sizable chunk of the blanket Pepper had over her and under Goose. Between the blanket and the setting of the lights and the fire to one side of the room – safely behind an ornate screen they had never stopped using even after the Mansion appeared piece by piece in a world where the babies were adults who could (mostly) be trusted around fire – there was a cozy vibe that was very much intentional on Pepper's part. There were social rooms in the Mansion across the spectrum from a formal parlor to a casual media lounge, but this room had been the family room since the Mansion had started to be more home than base and Avengers coming and going had turned into staying. It was a welcoming room despite the remnants of the very original Mansion like its mixture of showpiece architecture; a comfortable room with its well-used furniture built long ago with superheroes in mind; an anything goes room on a multitude of levels, including embracing people who needed the retreat from finished villain fights to personal struggles.
For right now, Pepper continued to pet Goose and wait out Carol's next move, whether it meant tennis-watching some pacing back and forth or her friend taking up the silent offer of the spot on the couch.
Carol was certainly tempted to pace, she wouldn’t deny that. She was still in a bit of a state, even if she was feeling calmer after eating and working out a good chunk of the angst up on that mountain with Tony. She wasn’t the type of person who sat still for long, not unless she was in a good mood and good mindset. Right now, her mood was tentatively better than it had been, but that could still change. Everything was still so fresh and ever-changing.
But she decided to take the seat. Sometimes what she needed even more than burning off her energy was to be close to someone she loved, and even if she hadn’t said so, the offer Pepper had made was crystal clear.
“Brat,” she murmured to Goose, giving her one more quick pat on the head before she dropped into that open spot beside Pepper. She settled under the other half of the blanket and propped her feet up beside Pepper’s on the coffee table, leaning into her side with a tired sigh. “I’m such a mess, Pep. How do you put up with me?”
Pepper couldn't help herself, she chuckled. It wasn't that Carol or her situation was at all funny, it was solely because the question was funny. Even if she took only a small section of her life as reference, dealing with people being a mess was the very foundation and structure of her wheelhouse. Pepper Potts messes included.
"I'm sorry, I thought you'd met my husband before," she said, voice full of warmth and humor and likely an obnoxious amount of love, because so much of her shared history with Tony Stark had become loving anecdotes. "Someday Vallo – and this isn't a jinx, I know it's bound to happen – someday Vallo is going to deage Tony to his twenties and then you'll see that you could never possibly be as much of a mess collectively as that young man could be in a forty-eight hour period. I loved him then and I'd love him now, even if I spent the entire time tearing my hair out."
She tipped her head to the side, resting it lightly against Carol's.
"Even if cosmic disaster followed you around, I would still love you, and that's why I don't "put up with" anything, I choose to be part of it. There's nothing you could do or have happen to you that I wouldn't try to be there for you in some way." She snorted. "That's also not a jinx, that's just decades of experience across dozens of people, including me and my messes."
Carol couldn’t help but smile. The way Pepper spoke about Tony was always so loving. It was sweet, knowing she loved him in spite of what a he was mess in his own right. They all were, the Avengers and all associated acts. She may not have come from Pepper and Tony’s timeline, but she believed with all her heart that was just a multiversal fact. No one could lead a life as a superhero, burdened with all that great power and great responsibility, and not be a mess personally in some way or another.
Knowing that love and understanding extended to her was just the balm she needed right now. She’d already known that, but hearing it again, when she had just been emotionally cut down and was grappling with the selfishness of her actions lately, had her sighing against Pepper’s neck and moving in closer, looping both arms around hers and gently squeezing.
“This didn’t happen to me, though,” she countered quietly. “I brought all of this on myself. I hid from my grief, and when it finally unleashed itself, I did everything wrong. How the hell could I let it get to this point?”
So, maybe it had happened to her, a little; she hadn’t asked for Natasha to get their memories, and that had been a big catalyst for her behavior. But she was the one who let it escalate. She was the one who had turned lovesick and kept hurting not just herself but both Nat and Emme, too.
"Not entirely on yourself. You didn't ask for the complications. And none of us are perfect beings. We're all messy in our own ways." Pepper chuckled low in her throat. "Remember, you're still talking to the woman who ran around for most of her life with feelings that inevitably doomed any romantic relationship I had. I can't tell you how to shut off the things that landed you where you are right now. I could only tell you how to not land the places I did."
She moved her head so she could look at what part of Carol's face she could see at this angle and asked a question that had been asked before, but without the benefits of being this close to all the microexpressions and tiny tells.
"Are you really sure Emme's the one?" Pepper adored Emmeline and with that emotion came the same need to look out for, to protect, that she felt for Natasha and for Carol. Right now, it was three sets of that feeling butting up against the need to also comfort Carol, and even Natasha or Emmeline too if they showed up needing the comfort. She was going to keep asking Carol the question because the question needed to be asked. It was so much easier to lie and hide from the truth when you were doing it to yourself.
"I'm not trying to make Natasha into your Tony." She shook her head lightly. "I don't want her to be your Tony. I just want you and I to both know that you're really being as honest as possible with yourself."
Carol let out a short chuckle that was half-wry, half-genuinely amused at the thought of Natasha as her Tony. She knew what Pepper meant, the archetype she was referring to, but she couldn’t help the way her brain turned more toward the literal. She loved Tony – more here than at home; she hadn’t known him well back home, but she’d respected him – but if Nat had truly been anything like him, she’d have struggled a lot more. He was grounded in his older years here, but she’d heard plenty of the stories of how wild he’d been. It would have been far too much for her to take.
But she sobered quickly, letting Pepper see her face when she spoke. “I’m sure Emme’s the one,” she assured her, insistent. She had said the same thing when all of this had first happened, when she’d reached out to Pepper because it was all so enormous and confusing. She’d hoped then that that conversation would be the end of the confusion, the sounding board she needed to get the what-ifs out of her system.
Turned out, that hadn’t been the case. Turned out, when she reached out to apologize to Nat for pushing their conversation a little too far, it had only escalated into mutual I love yous. She had known Natasha loved her, of course. She’d memorized the letter where the words had first been written long ago, before it had appeared in Vallo and thrown her this particularly rough wrench. But there was something different about reading those words knowing that Nat was there, on the other side, not dead and gone, sacrificed for the good of a universe that, as Stephen would likely argue, had never deserved her.
And it had sent her down this terrible rabbithole of mooning after her ex, worrying beyond what was necessary, paying attention beyond what was necessary, because it felt like she was missing a chance she should have had. Not one bit of it had been fair to Emmeline – the woman she had proposed to, who she wanted to be her wife so badly – and yet, she’d stayed. She let the house hunt push forward. She took Carol’s moods and distractions in stride.
“It’s never been about Emmeline not being enough,” she clarified earnestly, gaze locked on Pepper’s. “You know how I feel about her, Pep. I fell for her so hard, and that’s never gone away. I meant it when I proposed to her, and I mean it now when I say she’s still everything I want. I know she is. I just… I let myself get consumed when Nat was suddenly my Nat. And today…it finally hit me how far I’d let it go.” Her forehead dropped down to Pepper’s shoulder again, the next words muffled against her. “I’ve been so stupid.”
Pepper tipped her head to the side again to rest against Carol's, temple to crown, and let the words sit a second this time. Carol had already been doing a very thorough job of telling herself that she had been stupid, to the point that it didn't need said again by anyone (not that Pepper had wanted to) and anyone arguing the opposite would still come up against Carol's guilt. No mountains, be they rubble, food, or throw pillows, would just erase that guilt. Time wouldn't even erase it, it would just soften it and turn it into wisdom.
"If you want to keep calling yourself stupid, I can't stop you. But – not to intentionally sound like a cryptic spiritual master from your movie of choice – that's what you did, that's where you were," she emphasized. "What are you doing from this point forward? Where are you going?"
She sighed quietly, but just at the topic in general, not at Carol specifically.
"When the next memento from home arrives, when we're watching each other lose years for a week and you're confronted with a Natasha from that time, if an alternate future opens up and drops a child of a what if," the possibilities were more numerous than just those, but they were the most recent, relevant, and likely to be repeated, "the next time you're staring down into the rabbit hole you're climbing out of, are you going to leave it be or end up digging it deeper?"
That was a fair question, but fuck if it wasn’t a difficult one. Everything was raw right now. She still hurt just at the very thought of someone else with Natasha. It was easy to say she wouldn’t dig in deeper. It was easy to say she’d learned her lesson, and she would find a way to be happy for Natasha and move on. But, at least this very moment, she didn’t know that for sure.
“I’m going to try to leave it be,” was how she settled on answering. It wasn’t a definite, but the only definite she felt was how stupid she’d been right now. “I don’t want to feel this way again. I feel like I’ve been out of control, and you know I hate that.”
The control freak tendencies were strong with this one. Stephen had always teased her about that, while dealing with them himself and calling out the common theme among superheroes. Someone who didn’t deal with the need to be in control was probably less likely to take up the hero gig. The guilt and obligation after her time with the Kree hadn’t helped, in her specific case.
Pepper lifted the hand of the arm Carol was curled around and patted her head consolingly with an equally-joking tsking.
"You'll always be among your control freak people here," she said, then dropped her hand back to the blanket covering them. Here applied very specifically to this house, but to Vallo as a whole, which was full of the entire spectrum of control issues. If part of the Outlander population wasn't jumping into the fray of fighting the newest threat then they were at the sidelines actively providing solutions or support. That was just in crisis, that didn't count in their daily lives - and Pepper was just as guilty of it.
"But I'm glad to hear you're going to try," she continued, drumming her fingers lightly on the blanket. "Trying while uncertain is leagues better as an answer than the overconfident definitive one."
Normally, the overconfident definitive answer was exactly how Carol would have responded. But she agreed. It was better to try while being uncertain, and she could only hope her uncertainty ebbed in favor of actual overconfidence as the days passed. She didn’t like feeling that way, and Emme certainly didn’t deserve to see her feeling that way. She’d seen enough of it.
“God,” she sighed, lifting her head to lean back against the couch, arm still twined with Pepper’s. “This has been one hell of a day.” It felt like three had passed, and the afternoon wasn’t even near over.
Pepper chuckled quietly, similarly resting her head against the couch but still facing Carol. It was a more than fair declaration given all that had gone on and the intensity with which Carol processed it.
"We'll inevitably make hard days for ourselves if Vallo doesn't do it often enough," she said, shaking her head a bit. "It's a multiversal constant."
She reached across her body to pat one of the arms wrapped around her other arm.
"Are you staying for a while? If so, what are you in the mood for?" she questioned, nodding at one of the very large, very minimalist, atypical-looking for a TV, sleek screens. They had it all, at least by their timeline standards, but not all media was the same across universes.
That was uncomfortably true. Most of Carol’s bad days prior to all this had been Vallo-wrought, but this was different. It was so intensely personal and had been affecting her in a way even the worst Vallo had brought them hadn’t touched. Her mind, her heart, her relationship – it wasn’t fun. She wouldn’t wish this on the most heinous of her enemies.
But she was okay. She had people to lean on, and she would get through this and set herself right. That felt a long way off right now, but if there was anything Carol Danvers was a pro at, it was getting back up after she’d been knocked off her feet, even after the worst of blows.
“Space documentary, please,” she requested. “Any of ‘em.” She’d eaten those things up, the few there were, growing up, and right now, feeling like a kid again didn’t seem like a bad idea at all.
With a nod, Pepper settled in more comfortably on the couch and decided to delegate.
"J.A.R.V.I.S."
"Yes, Mrs Stark?" Pepper smiled reflexively. That still hadn't gotten old.
"Space documentary. Surprise us."
The screen came alive and files sped across the center like a slideshow on speed until the screen shifted and expanded. For several moments, it was just points of light in a field of black and then one light started to grow. Before long a garishly bright planet with a face was rolling across the equally bright words The ABCs of Space while singing a song that had been seared into her eardrums from the repeat watching habits of toddlers.
Pepper groaned. Of course. Of course her A.I. would throw on one of the needlessly produced brain children of Bobbi Barton and Tony Stark, the most hypercritical and extra people to ever be responsible for infants and toddlers. No one in this house, especially her damn A.I., could ever be normal.
"Cute. Really cute, J.A.R.V.I.S., but how about something more age-"
Her arm was squeezed and Pepper turned to face Carol.
“No, it’s fine,” Carol interjected, the words already half a laugh as her eyes zoomed onto the screen. This wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind – far from it, actually – but it had immediately brightened her mood. And hell, maybe that had been J.A.R.V.I.S.’s goal, she wouldn’t put it past the A.I. for a second. “Let it play.”
Pepper snickered with a small head shake and turned to look at the screen again, just in time for the planet to Electric Slide across the screen and out of frame.
"Remember you chose this," she murmured to Carol, and several seconds later a logo sedately materialized on screen to emphasize what exactly Carol had chosen.