"It is weird," Pepper agrees softly. "But I think it's a good kind of weird, mostly." Second chances. Third or fourth or more. What did it matter, except that they got another one?

Her mouth twists sadly as she thinks about him spending his entire life locked away, or at a distance from the people who love him. Never feeling safe. Never being safe.

"Yeah." There's not much else to say to that, is there? "But we don't know what's going to happen in the future. All we can really do is try to make it one that we want to live in, where we get to live in it together. And in the meantime..." She gestures around them. "We find a way to belong here, again. I mean, that's not necessarily going to be super easy, but I think we can do it."