Most of the characters and situations in this story belong to Marvel Comics, Fairview Entertainment, Dark Blades Films, and other entities, and I do not have permission to borrow them. No infringement is intended in any way, and this story is not for profit. All others belong to me or to Cincoflex, and if you want to borrow them, you have to ask us first. Any errors are mine, all mine, no you can't have any.

The opinions expressed by characters in this story may or may not be those of the author. WARNING: CHARACTER DEATH (sort of).

This concluding chapter is indeed very AU, and is really more of an exposition than a true cap to the story. But so the muse dictated.

Cincoflex owns two of the ladies mentioned in passing herein.

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She was there through the years, close enough to touch although he never could; the voice in his ear, the cooler head prevailing, the information he needed and the scolds he secretly treasured. Pepper would sit crosslegged in the air above his workbench, wearing a holo of one of his shirts and the frayed denim shorts he loved, and keep him company through a thousand busy days and nights, sometimes silent, sometimes bantering.

It was strange. She could keep up with him now in a way she hadn't before, thanks to Jarvis' vast access to data and incredible speeds, even if she couldn't make the intuitive leaps Tony could. But he depended on her just as much - twice, three times over - helpmeet and friend and lover still, even if her form was only light, because he could never have confessed his fears and his grief to anyone else.

They sorrowed together, feeling their way through her strange rebirth, finding they had to mourn not only Jarvis but themselves, for nothing could be quite the same again. They argued, they sniped, Tony sulked; but in the end, they always found the right words to start again, or the right silence.

Only Rhodey and Happy knew the truth. Some found it strange that Stark would use his dead wife's voice for his computer, but he ignored them the way he ignored speculation that he would resume his playboy ways.

There were new inventions, new technologies; some more useable than others, but Tony had never seen any reason to skimp on patents when he had plenty of lawyers to file for them. Stark Industries continued its slow evolution away from weapons, diversifying into areas that made the liberals swoon in ecstasy and Pepper wear her small satisfied smile. Tony still wore the armor, still went out to deal Iron Man's brand of solution to problems, but the Avengers handled a lot of issues and Tony let them, most of the time. Having Pepper riding along with him didn't really reassure her any; quite the opposite.

Pepper also spent long hours exploring the data left behind by Jarvis, slowly learning to understand the densely packed code; it was pure machine language, and took time to master. She told Tony distractedly that Jarvis had backed up quite a lot of programs to remote drives, apparently for purposes of his own, and Tony just nodded. Jarvis had become self-sustaining very early on, and Tony had let him do whatever he needed to maintain and expand himself.

Rhodey surprised Tony, though not Pepper, by getting married. His bride was an artist, sweet and easygoing, and while she didn't know the secret behind the Stark mansion's computer, no one felt they had to stifle anything around her. Happy remained single, settled in his cottage at the gate and writing in his spare time, though Tony knew he got frequent visits from a lady friend who pulled up in an eighteen-wheeler.

And always, always, Pepper was there. Tony breathed silent gratitude every morning when he woke to her voice reciting his schedule and telling him to get out of bed this instant, she did not have a snooze button, thank you very much. It was Pepper who ordered his supplies before he knew he was running low, Pepper who had the 'bots bring him sandwiches when he'd been up for forty hours, Pepper who talked him through blocks and upgraded the armor and helped him build a particle accelerator (a small one) when he needed it. Part of him missed Jarvis and always would, but Pepper was there, and his alone now. Sure, part of her still managed some of Stark Industries, but she had attention to spare - a division which she always referred to as "weird" - and Tony knew it was utterly selfish but he didn't care. He hadn't lost her.

Mostly.

It was Pepper who figured it out, in the end, way ahead of him as she so often was in such matters, and who wore down his frightened stubbornness. Death did part us, she reminded him. Tony, it's not a betrayal.

I can't, he countered. Not anymore, Pepper, I can't just go out and find some woman -

Her smile was sad, but there was no blame in it. Then find a friend. Tony, humans need touch. You need touch. You need comfort. Her hand would have ghosted over his head, before, but they always avoided such gestures now; they never broke the illusion.

And of course, she was right. Eventually he admitted it. Tony called up a sister of a college friend, someone he'd squired to a few events, someone who agreed with him on charitable issues and whose wit was as dry as his own, and she understood. The arrangement was occasional, no strings, and Tony made very sure she enjoyed their encounters too.

But he never slept in her bed. Ever.

Time went on. Tony noticed vaguely that he wasn't as limber as he used to be, and that his hair was going silver at a rapid rate; Pepper never changed. Rhodey's second daughter displayed a strong mechanical bent, and soon was spending a lot of time in Uncle Tony's workshop; he made sure she got into MIT, and smirked when her hacks made the news. Hiring her into SI was a natural step, and Pepper observed serenely that she would make a good CEO...eventually.

Technology advanced, often due to Tony's shoving hand. Computers, spacecraft, communications, all evolved into forms that would have dazzled a boy born before Atari was a household name. He upgraded Pepper again and again, moving from holographs to opaque light projections that looked perfectly real...but had no form to touch.

But technology couldn't save Rhodey when his heart gave out two weeks past his seventy-first birthday, and it had no solutions when cancer invaded Happy's body and multiplied too swiftly to stop. Tony and Pepper mourned them together, and he went on, because it was what he did.

Tony worked on robotics, too, creating remote drones and autonomous vehicles for extraterrestrial work. He was an essential member of the design team for the first Moon settlements, and when they proved themselves he moved on to the Mars projections. The second successful colony there prompted talk of asteroid exploration, but Tony found his enthusiasm ebbing, somehow. It all just seemed too much work.

"Tony."

The voice was low, warm, intimately familiar. Tony sighed, cuddling closer to his pillow, and tried to hang on to sleep. There was something about the voice, some tone or timbre, that twinged deep inside him, and if he stayed asleep, he wouldn't have to figure it out.

But it was insistent. "Tony, come on. Wake up."

The voice was natural, that was it. Not from a speaker; not echoing slightly in the space of the room. Soft and firm and real.

...What?

Tony rolled over, feeling age aching in his bones, and pried his eyes open. The form sitting on the edge of his bed looked perfectly normal, wearing a summer dress and every hair in place, smiling at him like she did every morning. Okay, the dress was a bit unusual, but Pepper did choose to change her outfit occasionally.

"'M up," he managed, scrubbing at his eyes, and looked blearily around for Oops, who usually brought his morning espresso if it didn't drop the beverage between the kitchen and the bedroom. But there was no sign of the 'bot.

Pepper's lips puckered in amusement. "Here," she said, and handed him a tiny china cup, perfectly hot as it should be.

Tony let it slip from his fingers and splash unheeded on the sheets. "What the hell? Did you upgrade the projectors? I thought that hard light tech still had too many bugs."

She laughed, and Tony felt a thrill run through him, because again there was no echo. He hadn't heard her laugh like that since - well, since. "Nope. It's not an upgrade, Tony."

"I'm dreaming, then." He reached out, hesitated, fingers hovering two centimeters from her skin, and then she lifted her hand just that much more to touch his. "Gotta admit, this is a nice one. Lots of detail."

He'd had them before, of course, sometimes often, sometimes rarely, and he wasn't sure which frequency was worse; it wasn't the dreams themselves that hurt, but the waking.

Pepper shook her head, and her fingers meshed with his in the old touch, the old unity. "It's not a dream either. Did you ever read those articles I kept giving you about Yoyodyne's android experiments?"

Tony smirked, admiring the sheer intensity of this particular dream. "Yeah, and I told you, I like my porn as porn, not disguised as a Techworld article."

Pepper rolled her eyes. "Yes, I agree, but they did have some worthwhile stuff buried under the adolescent gynoid fantasies."

"Possibly, but - " His uncaffeinated brain finally caught up to what she was actually saying. "Whoa. You're - you're in there?"

"I knew I should have waited until after lunch." Pepper snickered. "Yes. Jarvis left the instructions, you know; I just never thought I'd get the chance to try the process in reverse."

Tony's fingers closed hard, though she didn't wince. "Chance, yeah."

She shook her head at his glare. "Stop it. It wasn't the same at all. I was in control of the process this time; it was just a matter of...of moving."

Tony let out his breath and tried to make sense of it all. Pepper's new form seemed outwardly perfect, from the crown of her red-gold head to the delicately-painted toes in their fashionable sandals. But as he looked more closely, her skin was too even to be quite real, despite the freckles...and her irises were completely symmetrical. "So you're not running - things?"

"I set up secondary systems." Pepper squeezed his fingers gently, and self-consciously Tony loosened his grip. "But at the moment I'm completely wired in; the lag is negligible." She cocked her head, and one of the wide windows went to mirror.

It still felt like a dream. Tony lifted his free hand and touched her cheek, collecting a kiss on his fingers in passing; her skin was warm and soft. Being able to touch her again - it was just so huge that he didn't know how to react.

"What're your capabilities?" he asked, half-distracted.

"I built myself the deluxe package," Pepper said with a grin, and turned briefly blue and shimmery. "Nanite matrix, subcellular repair, anything and everything I could think of."

As she enumerated the gifts of her new body, Tony slowly leaned in, only half-listening, and her arms came up around him, familiarity so long missing that it hurt to have it again. She felt exactly right, though her scent was wrong - faintly plastic instead of warm woman - but all he could concentrate on was holding her, holding her again, at last.

And her voice hitched and wavered and trailed off, and Tony closed his burning eyes, and they held on and on and on.

It was quite a while afterwards that Tony got around to the question. "Why now? Rhodey pestered you to do an external for years."

Pepper laughed softly, and he opened his eyes just enough to see her smile; her lap was so comfortable that he didn't want to move even his head, and her fingers on his temples were pure bliss. "I'm a computer, Jimmy, not a robot," she quoted softly. "Because the tech wasn't there yet. I wanted something I could be, not just another set of waldos."

"Who else knows about this?" Tony stroked a lazy hand along her calf, admiring the silky feel of the tiny red-gold hairs beneath his touch. They feel completely natural.

"You're the only one." Pepper sighed, a contented sound.

It made sense to him; the fact of Pepper's strange survival had always been their secret. Trying to explain things at this juncture...well, he wouldn't want to deal with the fallout, and he was pretty sure Pepper wouldn't either.

But finally his growling stomach was too loud to ignore, and she declared firmly that it was time he ate something. Pepper's new body ran on a tiny reactor much like the one he still carried in his chest - nth iteration of the original concept - and while she said she could eat if she had to, there was no point in mucking up her nice new form, since she couldn't digest.

"Besides, the touch sensors are working correctly, but I haven't got the taste and smell connections right yet," Pepper added, rising gracefully and giving him a casual hand up from the mattress. "So it wouldn't even be fun."

Tony made a vaguely agreeing noise, more taken up with the creak of his joints as he stood. Nothing besides his implant worked the way it used to any more.

But the hand still in his and the sight of Pepper smiling at him eased the annoyance - until he caught sight of them in the still-mirrored window.

The contrast was a cruel shock. There was Pepper, just as he remembered her, young and beautiful and perfect; but beside her was not the darkly handsome, arrogant, confident playboy of his memories, but an old man with silver hair, a little stooped, a lot tired.

It made him feel sick.

"What is it?" Pepper frowned, her fingers tightening. Tony gestured at the window.

"Look at us. Look at me, Pepper. When did I get old?" He shook free of her grip, turning to meet her gaze. "You're going to live forever. I'm - not."

It was stupid, he knew that. Irrational, even. But he felt it nonetheless, a wincing pain that turned his joy to dust. The beautiful, clever, beloved woman standing next to him, in defiance of all logic and expectation, deserved far more than an age-spotted man with arthritis, damaged hearing, and less than a decade left on his lifespan.

Pepper arched a brow, then leaned in and kissed him. His attempt to pull away lasted about half a second; her smooth lips were addictive, and Tony had already learned to love them several times that morning. But when she pulled back -

"That's seriously impressive," he said after a moment. Pepper was now shorter by two inches, wrinkled and gray-haired and saggy-skinned, eyes huge behind the frame glasses that some older folks still insisted on wearing. Her glare, however, lost none of its power in the translation.

"Really, Tony, you know better than to think that way," she said, propping veiny hands on her hips. "But I'll give you a pass since you haven't had breakfast or lunch."

Before his fascinated eyes Pepper morphed back into the familiar willowy form, still annoyed. "Eat," she said, and Oops rolled into the room carrying a sandwich plate and a large cup of coffee. "Or I won't show you the rest of it."

"There's more?" Tony sat down automatically on the bed, accepting the food from the 'bot, unconvinced but distracted by the knowledge that she had more surprises in store.

"Only if you eat," she repeated firmly. Tony muttered something about being whipped, letting a sandwich absorb his smirk, and obeyed.

When there was nothing left but crumbs, Pepper led him downstairs to the workshop, and it was distinctly odd to see her pause to unlock the door rather than walking straight through the wall. For a chilling instant Tony remembered the explosion so many decades before, the one that had changed everything, but he shook off the memory. Pepper was just about invulnerable, now.

Still, it felt strange, and as ever there was the pulse of bone-deep regret that he hadn't been able to save Jarvis too. Pepper supplied everything he needed, but Tony still missed his old friend.

The shrouded oblong hovering in one of the null-gravity storage units should have tipped him off, but Tony was thinking so hard that he overlooked it. It wasn't until Pepper's gesture removed the cloth that all the pieces came together.

Tony whistled softly. "Gotta admit, that's an elegant solution," he said, stepping closer to the unit's window.

"I thought so," Pepper said in a satisfied tone.

The sight was unsettling. The form hovering in mid-air on the other side of the glass was trim, strong, young. It was him, asleep or unconscious, and only the faint frown on the black-bearded face gave it any hint of life beyond sleep. Tony found himself divided straight down the middle, between a desperate desire for that unmarred android body and a sudden and gut-chilling fear.

"Pepper..." he began, not knowing what else he was going to say, but she grimaced, taking both his hands in hers.

"It's not as simple as my transfer this morning," she admitted. "I won't prevaricate, Tony, it's a substantial risk." Pepper looked down at their interlaced fingers. "And I want you to know, I will never, ever blame you if you say no."

She was telling the truth, he knew it, and somehow that knowledge shifted something in his weary heart. What the hell are you thinking, Stark? The internal voice was sharp. Since when do you back down from a challenge?

He squeezed her hands. "Let's do this," he said. His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat to firm it. "I want this, Pepper. Let's do it."

Her smile was brilliant.

In the end it was frightening, but - from his perspective - simple. Pepper folded her arms and fell silent, directing the 'bots and the household mechanics wirelessly, and Tony found himself laid gently out on one of the workbenches, with Dummy and Oops standing by with odd-looking instruments and Butterfingers waiting by the null-gravity storage.

Pepper bent down to kiss him, a warm promise. "If this doesn't work - " he began.

"If this doesn't work, Tony, I'll be right behind you," she said firmly, and before he could argue a needle pricked and consciousness vanished.

He woke without pain, and that alone was a revelation. Tony sat up smoothly and stared around the workshop, astonished at the clearness of his sight. "Pepper?"

She'd even worked out a routine for tears, for her cheeks were wet. "I'm here, Tony."

And so were his, and he didn't care at all. The feel of her in his arms proved that the nerve sensors were working just fine.

"So what now?" he asked at last, flexing unstiffened fingers in fascination.

"Well, first I would suggest clothing," Pepper said drolly, gesturing at his naked form, and Tony rolled his eyes and found the routine that changed his surface. It was clumsy work at first, but once he got the hang of it he spent a good fifteen minutes making Pepper giggle as he made up more and more outrageous exteriors.

But the sight of his - body, lying still and covered on a table, sobered him. Tony reached for the sheet, but Pepper laid a hand on his arm.

"Don't," she said. "Trust me, Tony."

He hesitated, then nodded, and turned away from the form, laying curiosity aside. She's right; some things I'm probably better off not knowing.

"What now?" he repeated.

Pepper's lips curved up. "As I see it, we have two options."

"Public or private?" Tony grimaced. "I think I prefer private."

Pepper nodded. "That would be my first choice, yes." She grinned wider. "How would you feel about the asteroid belt now?"

Somehow, he didn't feel tired any longer. Tony smirked back. "What, you came up with spacesuits too?"

Pepper gave him a chiding look. "Nothing so clumsy." As she spoke, her form changed; her dress vanished into skin gone metallic gold, and her face smoothed into something reminiscent of the android from Metropolis, though without the halo. Tony whistled admiringly.

Pepper lifted one hand, and he saw the repulsor in her palm. The routine for the changes was waiting in his new brain, and Tony followed suit, feeling the alteration tickle through his body. He had no heartbeat, but a strong and steady burn of power sat in the same spot in his chest, promising all the energy he could want for as long as he could think to want it.

"Wait." He jerked his chin at the table. "What about - "

Pepper's voice sounded inside his head, a wireless, voiceless communication. "That depends. Do you want to die, or just disappear?"

Tony considered the question, then laughed. "Let them wonder," he said. "We can explain later."

Pepper nodded. "Good. I've got something set up for just this situation." Her smile glinted. "Jarvis left me one special package; now seems the best time to try it out."

Tony sensed the lightning communication between her and the house, though he couldn't decode what she was saying. And then the exit doors were opening, and Tony fired his new repulsors and soared up and out, flanking Pepper; racing her, in fact, as they spiraled up and up into the sky. Her laughter echoed, sparking his own, as the cliffs and the ocean dropped behind them and the blue overhead darkened into the width of infinity.

The house was silent when Liz Rhodes opened the front door. "Uncle Tony?" she called, but there was no response, from either Tony or - strangely - the house computer. Nor was Tony anywhere to be found.

Frowning, worried, Liz made her way downstairs to the workshop. The door opened to her biocode, though the big room was empty of life.

But when she stepped inside, the lights came up, and a smooth baritone voice spoke. "Hello, Miss Rhodes. Welcome back."

She stopped and looked up, alarmed. "Who are you? Where's Uncle Tony?"

"Mr. Stark has departed on a very long vacation," the voice said politely. "He has designated you the legal guardian of his estate in the meantime."

And as she sputtered in surprise, he answered her other question. "My name is Jarvis, and I am quite happy to meet you."

End.