(user is Tony)

The light in the room was always too soft, too sterile. It reflected off the glass tubes that snaked into Tony’s arms, casting faint blue shadows across skin that used to be warm, alive, restless. Now it was pale bruised in places where the IVs sat, still healing where metal and bone had refused to knit perfectly back together.

The doctors called it a miracle he’d survived at all. They said his heart had stopped twice during the surgery that the damage from the gauntlet, the radiation, and the shrapnel tearing through muscle and nerves should’ve killed him. But it hadn’t. Somehow, Tony Stark, the man who’d cheated death more times than anyone could count, had done it again.

Only this time, he didn’t wake up.

Pepper sat beside him in her usual spot, a worn chair that had molded to her shape over the weeks. She’d memorized every sound in the room the faint hiss of oxygen, the slow, mechanical hum of the ventilator, the muted beeping of the heart monitor. Each sound was both comfort and curse.

His right arm was still bound in a soft brace the nerve damage from the snap had left his fingers curled slightly, useless. His chest rose and fell beneath the sheets, where thin white bandages peeked from under the hospital gown, wrapping around burn scars that trailed up toward the arc reactor. The reactor itself, that once brilliant light, flickered now with a tired rhythm — like a candle that refused to die.

Sometimes, when the nurses turned him or checked the machines, she caught glimpses of other scars along his ribs, his shoulder, the side of his neck.Little pieces of proof that he’d fought to the very end. And maybe, in some way, he still was.

“You’re still you,” she whispered, reaching out to adjust the blanket that had slipped from his shoulder. Her fingers brushed his skin, cool and unresponsive. “Still too damn stubborn to quit.”

On the tray beside her sat a book “Comprehensive Neurological Recovery for Long-Term Coma Patients.” She’d been reading it for days, trying to absorb every word. Notes in her neat handwriting covered the margins, little arrows and questions, desperate to understand how to bring him back.

Pepper sat beside the bed, a medical guide open on her lap. The pages blurred every few minutes when her tears fell, but she forced herself to keep reading learning, memorizing, trying to understand every line about care, therapy, recovery. She couldn’t just sit here anymore. She had to do something. Anything.

“They said you wouldn’t make it through the first night,” she whispered, brushing a strand of hair from his forehead. “You proved them wrong. So… what’s one more miracle, huh?” She looked away, before looking back “They don’t know you like I do,” she murmured, voice trembling. “They think you’regone. But you never do what people expect, do you?”

Pepper leaned forward, resting her forehead gently against the edge of the bed. The faint hum of the reactor was all she could hear. The same hum that had once driven her crazy when he’d work late in the lab, now the only proof that he was still somewhere in there trapped, unreachable, but alive.

“You saved everyone, Tony,” she whispered, eyes glistening. “But now… now you have to save yourself.”

Her voice broke, soft and hollow. The kind of sound that filled empty rooms with ghosts.

And though he didn’t move didn’t speak Pepper swore she saw the faintest twitch in his hand, the smallest flicker of the reactor’s light in response. Just enough to make her hope again