Work Text:
Morgan doesn’t really know what’s going on. She knows that there are people all around her—people she has never met—but people who fit the descriptions of Dad’s stories. She doesn’t know why there are so many people giving her big, sad looks. She doesn’t know why the boy in the pictures—“Hi, I’m Peter”—gave her a big great hug that almost squashed all her bones out. Or why Harley keeps going outside to smoke even though Daddy had told him that it was going to rot his body.
She doesn’t know why Aunt Nat isn’t here.
But—
She knows that her Uncle Rhodey and Mommy keep crying and she knows why, but she doesn’t know why why.
The why is because Daddy is gone. He won’t come back, Mommy said so. But the why why—why he’s gone, she doesn’t know.
When Happy gives her the cheeseburger he promised, Morgan eats it all and sneaks away when he goes to the kitchen to put her plate away. A lot of the other people have left—Uncle Rhodey and Mommy went upstairs ages ago and Harley took his bike and left. So Morgan, bored, does what she has always done and sneaks off into Daddy’s workshop.
His suit is there. It’s broken. Daddy always took care of his suit. Why is it broken? Why.
--
Mommy says it’s time to go back to The City. Morgan has never been to The City, but she knows that in The City she gets to go to school, her Mommy has to work, and Daddy is still not coming back.
School is fun. There are a lot of kids that are her age and other kids who say they are supposed to be Big but are still small like her.
They all keep drawing pictures of Daddy. They’re all over the walls of the buildings and her classroom and stores and the TV. They all say he’s in a better place or we miss him like they know where he went and Morgan still doesn’t know. Why doesn’t she know?
She doesn’t like The City very much.
—
Morgan wants to go to the House By The Lake for her birthday but instead, they get on a plane and go to a beach where Mommy, Uncle Rhodey, and Harley give her a big chocolate cake and presents from them and Daddy’s friends. She gets a teddy bear and new dresses and a necklace—
“This looks like Auntie Nat’s necklace!”
—and the last gift, the one from Harley is a big box that she wanted to open first but they wouldn’t let her. When Morgan finally opens it, she feels like she has bubbles in her heart from how excited she is. She picks up the red and gold Iron Man helmet
”Just like Daddy’s!” She shouts and puts it on.
“How does it feel, squirt?” Harley asks. Morgan can feel him knock knock knock against the top of the helmet.
“It’s big,” she laughs, trying to push his hand off of the helmet. It’s dark and kind of heavy but she thinks that this is what Daddy smells like. She wants to keep it on all the time. She wants to fly like Daddy did, and find him. She really, really wants to find him.
Morgan feels tears start slipping down her cheeks. She wants to stop crying but her chest feels tight and her face feels too warm. She wants to take off the helmet, but if she does then she won’t remember what Daddy smells like.
“Baby, baby...” She hears her Mommy says before she tries to take the helmet off.
“No!” Morgan sobs. She knows she’s not supposed to yell but if her Mommy takes the helmet off how is she going to fly?
“Okay, ducky.” Uncle Rhodey says softly and she’s being picked up. “We need you to tell us what’s wrong or else we won’t know how to help you.”
There are hands on her back and others unclenching her hands. She wants to tell them just how much she’s feeling in her chest but she doesn’t know the words. Daddy would know the words. Daddy knows all the words, especially the ones that are in her bedtime chapter books that he hasn’t been back to read again. The thought makes her start crying again and this time she doesn’t say anything when the helmet is pulled off her head, she just clings tighter onto Uncle Rhodey’s shirt and cries and cries and cries.
Morgan feels like she’s been crying for years and years and her tears have run out when she takes a deep breath. Uncle Rhodey is holding her in his lap instead of carrying her now and Harley and Mommy are sitting around her—Mommy is holding one of her hands and Harley has his fingers wrapped around her ankle. The sun is almost hidden by the water and the noises of the other people are gone and it’s just them.
“I miss Daddy,” Morgan says around her fingers. Uncle Rhodey’s chest rises behind her head, and she hears Mommy let out a noise that sounds like she’s crying. Still, they don’t say anything until Harley moves to sit in front of them with the helmet in his lap.
“Can I show you something, squirt?” He says, lifting the helmet. She doesn’t really want to put it on but she nods anyway. Uncle Rhodey helps her sit up, still in his lap, and helps Harley put the helmet back on over her head. Morgan closes her eyes when the helmet is on her head again, squeezing her Mommy’s hand where it’s still held tightly. “Okay. Alright. J, if you would.”
She can’t hear what Uncle Rhodey and Mommy are saying because all around her there were lights and noises before—
“Hello, Miss Stark.”
“Hello,” Morgan says quietly. When she opens her eyes there are lights everywhere. She can see the beach and when she looks at Mommy or Harley pictures of them pop up with so many words that she doesn’t know how to read yet.
“My name is JARVIS, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” it says before there are pictures of her popping up in front of her. “It seems birthday wishes are in order.”
“J?” Morgan can hear Harley’s voice inside the helmet now too. “Play Tony Stark’s Greatest Hits—make sure they’re PG. ”
“Certainly, Sir,” JARVIS says. Morgan blinks and then there is a picture of Daddy’s face super close to the camera.
“Alright J, uh let’s do this.” Daddy steps back away from the camera and picks up a chocolate cake from behind him and takes a balloon from somewhere that Morgan can’t see. “Okay so. Hey, sweetheart. I hope you’re doing good back in Malibu. It’s—uh, J? What time is it, baby?”
“It is currently 2:45 AM, September 27th, 2011. Most people would be sleeping.”
“I asked for the time, not the sass.” Morgan giggles at the face Daddy makes at the camera. “Great, so it’s your birthday here...in New York...where I am. Uh, so happy birthday! I love you so much, I don’t even know how to express it which you know, is odd for me, because I know words. I know words so well that you are constantly telling me to shut up which hopefully comes from a place of love even when I deserve it but uh, well...Okay, I’ll see you soon, honey. Buh-bye.”
The screen goes back to flashing blues and letting her see outside of the helmet.
“Another one!” She says, bouncing a little in Uncle Rhodey’s lap
--
“What are we doing for dinner?” The Uncle Rhodey being projected from her helmet is young—younger than she’s ever seen him and just barely able to walk on the braces Dad built for him.
“Pizza? Are we feeling pizza?” Dad asks, turning to look at Vision, someone Morgan only knows by name. “I’m sure they’ll deliver up here. We can tip them extra if they don’t.”
“Nuh-uh” Uncle Rhodey laughs. “If we’re tipping someone to bring it out here I want the good stuff—order me some of those Cuban sandwiches from Union.”
“That is a two-hour drive,” Dad exclaims, turning to look at Uncle Rhodey.
“And?” Morgan holds back a laugh and wipes at her face with the tear-stained sleeve of her shirt. She doesn’t know how many Memories JARVIS has stored in the helmet (Morgan has resigned herself to the fact that she is never going to truly know everything no matter how hard she tries) but she knows that it has been a constant in her life since she can properly remember.
“Your sandwich will be cold by then!” Dad shouts, letting his arms fly up in frustration. In the background, Vision disappears before returning a couple of minutes into the fight with a handful of bags from Los Hornitos Bakery.
The idea of a Cuban makes her hungry and she realizes that she’s been unconsciously biting the arrow of Aunt Tasha’s necklace, probably ever since she sat down to watch Memories across the window of her now-empty room.
Morgan takes the time to look around again and the feeling of wrongness that had been swirling around her stomach ever since Peter helped push out the last of her moving boxes out of her bedroom at the Tower.
Not the Tower™️ Dad owned once upon a time, of course, that one had been Baxter Building before the Battle of Earth and after it was attacked one too many times, it now belonged to Parker Industries.
The current Tower, though, the one Morgan sat in wearing a UCLA t-shirt and her comfiest shorts, is known as Stark International Headquarters. It was bought by Mom when they decided to return to the city after the Battle of Earth. It was nestled between the jungle that was New York and not as showy as the one Uncle Rhodey had often told her stories about. The top floor commonly referred to as the Apartment, was where Morgan grew up. Where she celebrated her birthdays with her odd family, where she did homework, and where she was getting ready to say goodbye for good, maybe.
It was weird to sit in this silent room by herself in a place that had for so long been occupied by people all the time.
Was that what Dad felt after the Accords debacle? Morgan frowns, watching as the house surveillance system in the Memory follows Dad around the house. The cut of his outfit doesn’t fit the man wearing it. The suit is sharp around his shoulders and tight around his waist, but Dad’s shoulders are rounded around his body, almost protective of whatever the long fight about the Accords broke in him.
Mom likes to say that whatever was broken then, Morgan fixed when she was born.
She takes a deep breath, holds 1...2...3...and releases it as Dad walks into what she has come to know in the last decade as Grandpa Steve’s old room at the Compound. Her Grandpa was around a lot when she was younger. He was another box full of Memories that even the helmet didn’t contain. He talked about the first time he met Dad as Tony Stark, the man and the hero. The first time he met Dad as a child, the boy and the genius. How they didn’t get along but how Steve loved him with all his heart and did everything he could to protect him from everything and everyone who tried to hurt him. For the longest time Morgan would sit there, taking all the stories in without noticing the lapses in time, it wasn’t until her research for a high school project on the Snap that she realized Grandpa Steve had known Tony Stark through lifetimes that Morgan never would.
Grandpa Steve had known everyone through lifetimes: Bucky, Sam, Mom, Uncle Rhodey, Uncle Bruce, Thor, Happy, Peter, and even Aunt Tasha. He had also known pain through these lifetimes—tragedies that not even her history major would cover. Grandpa Steve was full of Memories that unlike the helmet’s, disappeared when he developed dementia. Morgan had been thirteen at the time, a tragic age in itself, as she watched Bucky and Sam marry in Uncle Steve’s room in the Apartment days before he passed.
“The Serum had been eating away at him,” Uncle Bruce whispered to Mom one night. “Ever since he decided to Come Back.”
The serum had definitely eaten him away. It ate away at his strength, his height, his voice, the light in his eyes, his memories. It made him hallucinate and call Harley Tony and Morgan Pepper. It made him ask for his Ma, someone who he had once told Morgan he didn’t remember what she looked like. Everything that had made Steve Rogers Captain America and Captain America Steve Rogers had slowly disappeared and shrunken into a small, man who gave everything for love, land, and duty.
Sometimes when Morgan sits to watch the helmet, she feels like Grandpa Steve looked like in that bed, being eaten away by lifetimes that do not belong to her.
Deep breath, hold 1...2...3...exhale.
Back on the screen Dad knocks on the door frame twice and moves on to the next room— Aunt Tasha’s room.
Morgan takes the arrow from her lips and holds it in her fist. She often thinks about who she would have been if the Black Widow had been around as Morgan grew up. Would she have been as badass as Lila Barton who works for S.H.I.E.L.D and spends most of her time in space? Or would she still be Morgan Stark, average A student and future sociologist?
She doesn’t remember much of Aunt Tasha: a glimpse of red hair in the sunlight, the feeling of water from the lake house, a bright laugh and soft smile. Most of what she knows about Natasha Romanoff aka Natalia Romanova aka Natalie Rushman comes from Memories that she wasn’t there for.
Most of what she knows about Dad comes from Memories that aren’t her own as well. And boy hasn’t that thought haunted her since she learned what Gone meant when it was used about Dad and Aunt Tasha.
Grandpa Steve Came Back. Aunt Tasha and Dad are Gone.
“Tones?” Uncle Rhodey appears behind Dad and places a hand on his shoulder. “You ready to head back to the city?”
Morgan watches Dad jump slightly before turning to look at Uncle Rhodey. “Yeah,” Dad nods. “I—do you think if I had taken the time to—to listen to, I don’t know, pay attention would I have known? Could I have stopped all of this?”
Uncle Rhodey looks at a loss for words before he frowns. “Tones. Tony. Their decisions to leave and become fugitives aren’t on you—”
“Then why do I feel like they are?” Dad asks. “How am I supposed to look the kid in the eye and tell him we fought for something good? How am I meant to make anyone proud of me when I just ruined one of the best things that I’ve had?”
“You’re so dense, I love you so much.” It’s nice to know Morgan wasn’t the only person told that. “The kid knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s basically mini-you, and if you think you have to protect him then you’re underestimating him. And the Avengers were good, but they weren’t the best thing you have. You have a whole life ahead of you and a life with Pepper and maybe some real mini-yous who will be proud of you no matter what. You have that to look forward to and a real fancy dinner that you’re inviting me—”
“Morgan?” Mom’s figure blurs in the haze of tears in Morgan’s eyes. “Honey, again? You’ve been watching these videos all week—”
“Do you think I would have made Daddy proud?” Morgan asks, hiccupping around sobs that escape as soon as Mom hugs her. No matter the grey in her hair and the wrinkles around her mouth, Mom’s hugs smell and feel the same.
“Oh, Morgan Hope,” Mom says against her hair. “I know you make him proud, sweetheart. He’s probably a little upset you declined on MIT, but he loves you with all his heart.”
Morgan lets Mom keep talking until her sobs have turned into sniffles and she knows they have probably made Harley, their ride to the airport, mad. (He has a thing about not being late to things).
“I’m proud of him too,” Morgan says against Mom’s shoulder and she means it. Morgan continues to be okay with the fact that she’s never going to know everything, what kind of person Tony Stark was, who the Black Widow was, the kind of relationship Dad really had with Steve Rogers, those were all concepts unfamiliar to Morgan.
But she’s proud of Dad. Wherever he is. That she knows.