There's a justice system in your head
For names you'll never speak again

-T.S.

.

"I'm going to make a suggestion."

"And I'm going to hate it."

They've been back together for a week. He really shouldn't be trying his luck, shouldn't even consider that luck is tangible or his to begin with. Pepper could leave as easily as every else did.

As she did. Several times.

Tony keeps looking out the window. They're thirty floors up. Parse that, pop psychologists. The man who's spent his whole life falling is not afraid of heights.

I am Iron Man.

"I think you should see a therapist." Pepper has belted her robe with a perfect knot. She has two immaculate espresso cups in her hands.

Tony laughs, thinks better of it, and so it's more of a scoff. Which is not much better at all. "You're kidding."

"I'm not." She sits down on the arm of his chair, so that her knee is right next to his left hand. He doesn't move his hand.

This is how it starts. Pepper tries to fix him. She sees the shattered hull of a man or a monster and says, "Let's start with the corner pieces," and just like that, Tony's going to be jigsawed into a real boy again.

His fingers feel stiff. He takes the cup and drains it.

"You deserve to be happier than this," Pepper says. And just like that, she lifts his hand and slips it over her knee.

Like she loves him.

Like she is right about what he deserves.

.

Rhodey is cheerful.

And that means Tony has no right to complain, because it's one of his machines—two of them, actually—that smashed his lower spine, and it's one of Tony's machines that lets him move at all, which doesn't make things any better for Tony's guilt.

The worst of it is that Sam Wilson isn't a bad guy. He was just following another guy.

And Tony even let himself believe, in his heart of hearts, that that guy, the one with the shield and the jaw and the scorn for liars and tyrants—

He let himself believe that that guy was more than a man.

And whose mistake is that?

.

Two years. Peter Parker does better in school once he gets past his first few near-death experiences. Tony's achingly proud of him.

He should keep his distance, he really should.

Peter can't see him as more than a man.

That's where things go wrong.

.

"I didn't even like him," he says one night.

"Hmm?" Pepper rolls over, presses her palm against his shoulder. He still remembers the shards of the suit digging inward, all around the arc reactor. The look on Steve's face. Unflinching.

Steve would have killed him if he'd had to.

The only reason he didn't have to is because Tony was too weak to fight any longer.

Big man in a suit of armor—

"Thought he was an arrogant, self-righteous dick," Tony says. "Should've stayed that way."

"I'm so sorry, Tony," Pepper says, even though it's been two years and things are fine, they're really fine now, even if Bruce is gone and Natasha is gone and Steve is gone and Tony still has panic attacks sometimes, even though Pepper tells him she's never leaving him again. Pepper wants him to reach out to Steve.

Pepper is looking for the corner pieces.

He did try therapy, because he thought it was the only way she would stay. And the doctor was a woman with very kind eyes and she said, "When did it start, Tony?"

And that was too much of a question to answer, so he just made something up.

"He's my friend."

"So was I."

Sometimes he thinks it's the only time he never told a lie.