The house in Malibu was quiet in the particular way it only got late at night, when the ocean outside was the loudest thing left in the world. Tony stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment before he went in, just watching her.
Pepper was at the counter, one hand braced against the small of her back, the other resting on the curve of her stomach like she was listening to something only she could hear.
She'd traded the medical camp scrubs for one of his old college sweatshirts, stretched now over eight and a half months of pregnancy, and she looked up when she felt him watching.
"You're staring," she said.
"I'm allowed to stare. It's my house."
"It's your house and my dinner, so sit down before I decide you don't get any."
He the kitchen and kissed the top of her head before he pulled out a chair, and she let him, leaning back into it for just a second longer than she needed to.
JARVIS had already set the table, quietly, the way he did everything, and the food was simple because Pepper had specifically requested simple.
No elaborate send-off dinner. No candles arranged like a scene from a movie. Just pasta and bread and the two of them, because she'd told him weeks ago that she didn't want their last night together before he left to feel like a funeral rehearsal.
They talked about nothing important for most of it. The baby's kicking pattern, which had gotten stronger and more insistent in the last week.
A ridiculous voicemail Happy had left about parking validation at the hospital. Whether the nursery paint Pepper had picked out was too yellow or exactly the right amount of yellow.
Tony let himself live inside all of it, fully, the way he rarely let himself live inside anything anymore, because he knew what was coming in the morning and he wanted this to be real before it had to become a memory he ran calculations against.
It was Pepper who brought up the mission, not him.
"You don't have to pretend it's simple," she said, setting her fork down. "I know it isn't."
"I'm not pretending it's simple." Tony reached across the table and took her hand, turning it over in his so he could trace his thumb along her knuckles, something he did when he needed his hands to be doing anything other than sitting still. "I'm pretending it's manageable. There's a difference."
"Is it manageable?"
"Everything's manageable if you plan for enough of the ways it can go wrong." He said it lightly, the way he said most things that were actually true, and Pepper studied him for a long moment like she was deciding whether to push past that or let it go.
She let it go. She always knew which battles were worth having with him and which ones were just going to cost them both a night they didn't get back.
"Come to bed," she said instead. "You're leaving in the morning and I'd like you to be actually present for at least a few more hours of it."
They didn't say much after that. Tony helped her up the stairs slower than she needed, and she let him do that too, and once they were in bed she curled into his side, her hand resting flat against his chest where a scar used to be, feeling for the steady thrum of whatever his heart was now instead of what it used to be. Hl
He kept one hand low on her stomach, and somewhere near midnight he felt the baby shift under his palm, one slow roll, and Pepper huffed out a small laugh against his shoulder.
"She does that when you're here," Pepper murmured, half asleep already. "Settles down faster."
'She,' Tony thought. Pepper didn't know that detail yet, not officially, not from a doctor. She just knew it the way mothers sometimes did.
He didn't say anything. He just held on until her breathing evened out, and then a while longer after that, and eventually his own eyes closed too.
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