take time, take all the time you need.

[whipshots]

WHO: Brigitte Lindholm
WHERE: Southern village
WHEN: All of March kinda
OPEN TO: OTA, with sections for Seifer & Pepper
WARNINGS: Sads over villager disappearance; otherwise nah

---

around the village | seifer (early march, post take-two)
The supplies that she and Jane had scraped the desert for had been salamanders. Not a common occurrence in the area around the village itself, though she’d then grown used to stuffing the things into jars, their skin oddly warm to the touch. After dropping them off in the village supplies, she’d secretly squirreled one of them away to become the smithy’s new pet-slash-mascot, just like Seifer had been wistfully wanting for a while. It was a little bit of a silver lining, and it had gone well for a few days.

But then the slippery little bastard got away.

Which is how the pair wound up spending their pre-lunch hour wandering the village, checking under bushes and porches, both of them carrying oversized jars and squinting for that tell-tale glimpse of red.

“I feel like I should be putting up a lost pet poster,” she sighs.


at the forge | pepper (after they realise tony’s gone /handwaves)
Brigitte hadn’t really experienced the disappearance of someone she knew. She’d heard of it happening, of course, whether it was longstanding residents vanishing or Jacob’s sister being whisked away shortly after arrival. But she hadn’t undergone it herself.

Until the morning when she came into the forge and found that, for once, the fires hadn’t been lit. She was so accustomed to Tony’s brand of early-morning workaholicism that it jarred her, sent her immediately wondering: Another kidnapping? Another mysterious teleportation across the island? It almost felt routine by now: logging into the network, going to check around, maybe receive his marching orders from afar like he’d done back in January.

And then nothing, and then nothing.

The days crept on, with that odd uncomfortable lack of resolution — was this what happened ? you just kind of… assumed that they were gone? — and Brigitte trying to come to terms with it. Which is when Pepper Potts finally enters the forge and finds Brigitte sitting there on a barrel, the kiln unfired and the young woman clutching a pile of papers filled with the man’s hurried scrawl of a shorthand. She’s staring down at it, at a loss.


around the village | OTA (anytime march)
In Tony’s absence, Brigitte steps up her presence at the forge even more and is trying to keep the place running in some kind of order. She still lives at the inn and can be found there for communal meals and relaxing in the evenings, though she’s starting to doze off in the common room too now — pot, kettle, black. She’s spending more time in the library, reading up on the local flora, brushing up on her notes from Bev’s first aid classes. Learning all the little things that she never paid much attention to before: the teas which can ease headaches, others which ease cramps or nausea. It’s the little things.

[ WILDCARD: pretty much anywhere’s fair game! she goes jogging in the mornings, and can be sporadically found in the infirmary/dojo too, though less often now. ]

Comments

[scovillescale]

Pepper shrugs off the apology with another gentle squeeze of fingers and an attempt at a Tony Stark Special, turning someone's apology into dry humor to try and divert feelings. "Don't be, his handwriting is horrific."

But she's not Tony, she's Pepper, and the attempt is so hollow, she could strike it and use it like a dinner bell. So she goes with what she knows, practical reassurance that silently acknowledges the deeper meanings of a seemingly simple statement. This is about so much more than just Tony's penmanship.

"He can't always read his own handwriting," she says, refusing to think of him in any past-tense ways because he's not dead. Pepper doesn't know that, not for certain. She knows he survived Thanos eliminating half of the universe. She knows he's alive on a distant planet. The rest is just hope, and also fear, the kind that will jump to the most outrageous outcomes and call them possible because the alternative is unthinkable.

"Fortunately, making sense of it is something I used to get paid to do, so there was significant motivation to figure it out when he wasn't there." Even though her eyes are ringed in pink, her gaze is steady as she bends slightly to catch Brigitte's gaze, if she can. "I can help you, if you want?"

He wasn't there, I know this pain. Pepper does know a rough outline of at least part of what she suspects is behind Brigitte's words, because she had sat at a desk, with Tony missing - and by many presumed dead - in Afghanistan, with screen after screen of digitally-rendered notes that didn't all make sense. She had looked upon pieces of him left behind, and while she had refused to believe he was dead, she had also numbly acknowledged that if he never came back, there were things on those screens that would go unrealized, things that would become unanswerable questions and unsolvable mysteries.

I can help you, you don't have to do it alone. She'd had Rhodey then, someone who understood and shared the core of her pain, love, even though his was love for his best friend and hers was love for her boss in not-professional ways. Rhodey's also one of her dearest friends, so their connection is strong independently of Tony. Pepper doesn't have the same independent connection to Brigitte, but it doesn't matter. If she wants it, Brigitte can have Pepper with her to know and understand the core of their shared pain, who recognizes that Brigitte's love is love for her father-figure, and Pepper's is love for her chosen life partner.

[whipshots]

I can help you, if you want?

"Please," Brigitte says, automatically and unhesitatingly, with audible relief. No stubborn macho pride here: Brigitte has always been trained to ask for help and supply it in return, to acknowledge her weaknesses. (And right now, she feels like she's all weakness.) Seifer and Thor are her big-hearted blond boys, but they're not engineers, and it was a shock to look around the forge and all its helpers and realise that, of all of them, she was the best-positioned to fill the man's shoes. The most experienced, somehow, when it had always been so easy to take refuge behind Tony and, back home, behind Torbjörn Lindholm. Behind everyone.

She rises numbly, heads over to the stacks of paperwork she's already organised, and shows Pepper what she's been working on. One stack for in-progress projects, another for ones that haven't even started yet, and a third which is all question marks. Until she'd started clearing everything away, the smithy had looked like he'd just stepped out for lunch. Would be back any moment. The wall still has some of his jokes and smudges from his thumb.

Then, after a moment, she asks: "You were paid to work with him? He mentioned you ran his company, back home." Which she'd always assumed was a partner thing, a soon-to-be-husband-and-wife thing, with no idea of Pepper's rise from such humble origins.