Chapter Text
Morgan sat on the balcony, focusing intently on the shape of the leaves on the oak tree next to her as she sketched. It was one of those sweltering summer days when it was too hot to be outside for long, but the AC made it too cold to stay inside.
Wiping sweat from her brow, she cast a resentful glare at the brownstone building she lived in. Her mom had bought the penthouse unit of this place two years ago, and it still didn’t feel like home. It was just some place they stayed at when they were in the city.
Still, her mom had paid about a gazillion dollars so they could have a nice condo in a quiet part of Queens. Morgan figured the AC could at least work properly.
If Daddy was here, he would’ve installed FRIDAY and made sure the temperature control was perfect.
She pushed the familiar pang of sadness down as she grabbed a new colored pencil from her pencil pouch. Burnt sienna would be perfect for the tree trunk.
She was using indigo to shade the underside of a few branches when Uncle Happy poked his head out the window.
“Hey, kid. I got a couple calls coming up. You need anything before I log on?”
Morgan shook her head. “Can we go to the pool after you’re done with work?”
She knew it was going to be a ‘no’ right away from the way Happy’s brow furrowed. “I had to assign a double security detail for your mom’s gala tonight, so there would be no one available for back-up. Maybe tomorrow?”
Morgan bit back an unhappy groan. “Yeah, whatever,” she grumbled.
“I’m hiring more people, Morgan,” Happy told her. “In fact, I have an interview with a candidate right now.”
Morgan gave a sarcastic thumb’s up.
“Your art camp at school starts next week,” he reminded her. “And I’ll take you swimming tomorrow.”
Morgan just shrugged in response, waiting until Happy heaved a sigh and disappeared back through the window.
Unlike most of her classmates, she’d been dreading summer break. At least she could be independent within the walls of her school. Outside of school, Uncle Happy and Uncle Rhodey were some of the only people Mom trusted to watch her. Every playdate, every summer camp had to be carefully vetted and prepared for.
It had all been different back when they spent most of the year living at the lakehouse. They could visit the nearby town without any precautions. And when Daddy was alive, going out in the city hadn’t been such an issue, because he always had a gauntlet just in case —
Morgan threw down her pencil with an aggravated groan, burying her head in her hands. She didn’t like being grumpy to Uncle Happy. But she also hated being cooped up all summer — hated living in the city — hated how busy Mom was with work — hated how different everything was.
Thinking about how much life had changed in the past few years made her stomach tie up in knots of sadness. It was more comfortable to focus on being annoyed and angry with her circumstances, and she jumped to her feet, suddenly needing to do something. She eyed the street below her, contemplating whether she could get away with sneaking out for some ice cream. She had enough money in her piggy bank, and she knew there was a frozen yogurt shop about a mile away.
Happy would be distracted for a few hours, but the security cameras in the alley would definitely catch sight of her if she climbed down the fire escape. And then her mom would freak out and probably impose even more restrictions on her independence. So maybe that wasn’t the best plan.
She surveyed the tree next to the balcony, wondering if she could somehow shimmy onto one of the branches and climb down without being caught on camera. But it was a long way down — six stories — and she didn’t have enhancements or a superhero suit to keep her safe if she fell.
Then her eyes settled on the roof.
She’d never been up there before. She was only six when they moved here, and her mom had given her a long lecture about how dangerous it was to play on the fire escape and how she was never allowed to go on the roof. There was a locked gate blocking the entry, and she’d been more willing to listen to her mom’s rules back then, so she’d never tried it.
But now…
Tossing aside her coloring supplies, she ducked into her room and grabbed the lock-picking kit that Uncle Clint had gotten her for her seventh birthday. Mom had frowned when Morgan opened it, but fortunately, she hadn’t confiscated it from her. She’d experimented with it a bit but quickly lost interest. Until now.
“FRIDAY, input access code 674-MHS,” she instructed her tablet. It turned out that nobody else besides Daddy really knew how to keep FRIDAY up to date or install her in new locations. Uncle Rhodey tried his best, but he was a busy guy. Morgan missed having FRIDAY wired into the ceiling here, but at least she could still access the AI on her StarkPad.
“Good afternoon, Mini Boss,” FRIDAY greeted her. “What can I help you with?”
“Gimme everything you got on lock-picking, FRI,” Morgan instructed. She liked to emulate how her dad used to talk to the AI.
“On it, Mini Boss.”
FRIDAY began to pull up articles and videos that would be of assistance.
Morgan had access to nearly all of FRIDAY’s systems, but looking up lock-picking would likely trigger the age-restriction filters. Her actions would be reported, but it didn’t matter.
It wasn’t like there was anyone left to read the reports anymore.
***
The next afternoon, something came up, much like Morgan had been expecting.
“Sorry, kid,” Happy apologized, and to his credit, he looked genuinely remorseful. “I have to go to the compound for an emergency meeting. Mrs. Jenkins is on her way over to keep an eye on you.”
Morgan rolled her eyes. Mrs. Jenkins was one of the few other people who were entrusted with Morgan’s care. She was an old friend of her mom’s parents — old being the operative word. She was 82 and spent most of her time sleeping or trying to teach Morgan to play a weird card game called ‘bridge.’
“I’ll make it up to you, I promise,” Happy said. “You want me to pick up some ice cream on my way back to the city?”
Morgan sighed. She knew Happy tried his best — he was basically her full-time babysitter and the full-time head of security for her mom and Stark Industries. It was a lot. Plus, his girlfriend May had died suddenly a few years ago, and she knew the loss still weighed on him, just like Daddy’s loss.
“Stark Raving Hazelnuts?” She asked.
Happy looked relieved. “You betcha, kid.”
She darted forward and gave him a hug before he left. He seemed surprised, but he caught her in his arms nonetheless and squeezed her tight. It wasn’t as good as a bear hug from Daddy, but it was probably the closest she could get to that kind of hug now.
***
Mrs. Jenkins fell asleep in the middle of a game of cribbage. Morgan pumped her fist in the air in silent celebration, tiptoed around her babysitter carefully, and darted to her room. She slipped out the window and onto the fire escape, where she opened up her lock-picking kit and set to work. It was nice to have a challenge like this in front of her: to use her hands to fix a problem she was having. It reminded her of the long afternoons she’d spent tinkering in the lab with Daddy.
Fortunately, her practice the afternoon before paid off, and it only took her about fifteen minutes before she heard the satisfying click of the lock opening. Morgan was quick to pick up on things like this; she had the engineering touch, as Daddy had described it. She proudly pushed open the gate and stepped onto the rooftop.
It was kind of anti-climactic — especially since she'd visited her mom's office on the upper levels of Stark Tower many times — but the view was nice, nonetheless. She could see herself coming up here more often, making it her own little hideaway.
In fact, there was an area about 8 feet long and 6 feet deep that was blocked off on three sides by the HVAC system. It would probably make a good fort. It was shaded, so it would be cool in the summer, and it was near the building’s heating system, so it would be warm in the winter. She could drag her sleeping bag up here, and it would be like a more depressing urban version of the treehouse Daddy had built her at the lakehouse.
She hurried over to investigate the small sheltered area, only for her heart to stop dead in her chest.
There was someone inside!
Morgan let out a shriek and automatically back-pedaled, but she tripped over a rock and went sprawling to the ground.
“Whoa, hey. It’s okay. I’m sorry I scared you.”
A guy popped his head out of the HVAC area, holding his hands up to show that he was unarmed. His eyes widened with disbelief when he saw her — probably recognizing her from the paparazzi photos that sometimes slipped through the cracks.
“Morgan?” He breathed, staring at her like she was a ghost. He clambered to his feet and took a step toward her, immediately freezing in place when she flinched away and scuttled backward.
Morgan suddenly wished she’d listened to her mom’s rules and stayed below on the fire escape.
“My uncle is the head of security for Stark Industries,” she warned, trying to keep her voice from shaking as she slowly rose to her feet, dusted off her shorts, and prepared to run. “And he’s downstairs with a whole squad of special forces agents who will come up here the second I scream.”
To her disappointment, the guy just looked kind of amused by her (admittedly empty) threat. He was young — maybe about twenty or so, and he didn’t seem very intimidating at first glance. He was much taller than her, but not as tall as Uncle Happy. His curly brown hair was untidy and a bit too long, and his cheekbones looked sharp, like he wasn’t eating enough. She peered around him and could see that he’d already claimed her fort as his own sort of shelter.
“Are you homeless?” She blurted out. Realizing that she sounded rude, she quickly added, “My mom can probably help if you are.”
“What? No,” the guy said, shaking his head. “I live over there.”
He pointed toward a block of tall, rundown apartment buildings in a seedier area of the borough.
“I’m a college student,” he added, perhaps sensing Morgan’s skepticism. “It’s common for college students to be broke.”
“Why are you on my roof?” Morgan demanded.
The guy lifted his laptop in the air. “The college library is closed for the summer. I can’t afford WiFi, so I tap into other people’s networks when I need to work. You have a good connection here.”
“What are you working on?” Morgan asked. Finally, something new and interesting to focus on!
The guy clutched his beat-up laptop close to his chest. “A really important project. It’s a secret.”
“I can keep secrets!” Morgan said eagerly.
He gave her a disappointed look. “You should not be saying that to strangers, Morgan. You shouldn’t be talking to me at all, in fact.”
The fact that he knew her name should’ve made her feel frightened, but he didn’t say it like he was some kind of creep. Instead, he said it like he knew her already, which was…weird.
Regardless, he had a point — Morgan wasn’t sure what had come over her. She normally wanted nothing to do with strangers, especially because of the weird encounters she’d had after her dad died — people coming up to her on the street, trying to touch her hair or hug her, weeping because she was the child of the messiah who had died to save the universe. That was a big part of the reason why Happy and her mom were so vigilant about security.
But something about this stranger felt…familiar.
“What’s your name?” She asked.
He gave her a long, searching look, something sad in his eyes. They were kind eyes, a deep, warm brown that she would probably paint with burnt umber and a hint of ultramarine.
“Peter,” he said softly, as though it should mean something to her. It didn’t.
***
She didn’t see Peter for a week after that, even though she checked the roof every morning and afternoon. She figured that she’d probably scared him off, but she couldn’t quite give up on her hopes that she might encounter him again.
Why did she care?
It was a good question, one that she found herself turning over in her mind repeatedly. She couldn’t explain why her heart sank every time she peeked in the HVAC area and found it empty. It troubled her, but she had a “tendency for novelty-seeking,” as her kindergarten teacher had informed her mom after Morgan glued everything in the classroom's lost-and-found bin together in a fit of boredom. Her life was particularly dull at the moment, so she supposed it made sense that she’d latch on to the closest mystery she could find and try to solve it.
Fortunately, things were looking up a little bit in other areas of her life. Happy had probably talked to Mom, because Mom was doing her best to be home by 6 every night. That meant that Morgan got to have dinner with her, and after dinner they played board games and gave each other manicures.
“I’m sorry work has been so busy for the past few weeks,” Mom apologized, smoothing a strawberry sticker onto the nail of Morgan’s ring finger. “Especially since your school year just finished. I hired a new EA to help me at the office, and I’m going to completely block off a weekend at the end of the month. I was thinking we could go to the beach — maybe South Carolina —”
“Can we go to the lakehouse instead?” Morgan blurted out.
Mom was excellent at hiding her emotions — she had to be, in her line of work — but Morgan knew her well enough to notice how her mouth tightened ever so slightly.
“Of course, honey,” Mom said. The smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, and Morgan felt bad for asking. Then she felt annoyed that she felt bad, because the lakehouse was their home! It brought Morgan comfort. It reminded her that no matter how different her life was now, the good times of the past were real, and they’d actually happened. Her dad had been a real person, and he’d taught her to skip stones in the small lake there, hosted about a million tea parties for her dolls and stuffed animals on the front lawn, and tucked her in bed with a kiss on the forehead every night. She’d learned the scent of coffee from him and about fifty words in Italian — swears included — and his stubble had tickled her cheeks like sandpaper when she’d hugged him. It had bothered her at the time, but now she would give anything to give him just one more scratchy hug.
Those things were real, no matter how much Mom wanted to forget them.
She knew Mom didn’t like going there because it reminded her so much of Daddy. She tried to be understanding of that, she really did. Her old therapist, Ms. Noreen, had talked to her about how different people grieve in different ways.
But…it did make her wonder…if Mom could hardly stand to look at the lakehouse because it reminded her so much of Daddy, then what did she think whenever she looked at Morgan and saw Tony Stark’s eyes staring back at her from Morgan’s face?
***
A few nights later, Morgan awoke from a nightmare. The clock next to her bed read 12:17, and she let out a frustrated moan as she flopped back onto her pillow. It always took her forever to fall asleep when she woke up in the middle of the night, and she had to be up early in the morning for art camp. They were going to mold animals out of clay tomorrow, and she wanted to be on top of her game so that the sea turtle she was planning in her head turned out perfect.
She contemplated waking her mom up, but Mom was leaving in the morning for a two-day business trip, and she needed her rest. She wouldn’t complain if Morgan crawled into bed with her to sleep, but Morgan felt restless, not tired.
It had been one of her strange nightmares where she couldn’t remember the actual contents of the dream. The only clues were the sharp pang of loss she felt when she woke up and the tears streaming down her cheeks.
For some reason, whenever she had nightmares about Daddy dying, the dreams were crystal clear. Sometimes the dreams were about when Uncle Happy and Mom sat her down and told her that Daddy was gone — other times she dreamed that she was at the lakehouse, walking from room to room and calling out for him but unable to ever find him.
Then she had dreams like this one, where she knew she was grieving over a terrible loss, but she couldn’t remember what had made her start crying. In fact, a lot of her memories of the months after Daddy’s death were like that. Ms. Noreen had told her that was normal, that her brain was just protecting her, but she wasn’t so sure. Morgan rarely forgot things. She had "a mind like a steel trap," as Mom liked to say.
She hopped out of bed, unable to stand the idea of sleeping again. She jammed her feet into her slippers, pulled on a sweatshirt that was hanging off the back of her desk chair, and ducked out onto the fire escape, letting out a sigh of relief at the feeling of cool, humid night air and the distant noises of traffic, so different from her quiet, cold, tomblike bedroom.
She had never gone up to the roof at night, but she found herself gripped by a desire to do so. Sometimes, when she was really little and she couldn’t sleep, her dad would take her out onto the porch of the lakehouse, and they’d look at the stars together. The stars wouldn't be visible here in the city, but she might be able to feel the breeze on her face and shake the uncomfortable, sad feeling in her chest. So she clambered up the metal steps and pushed the gate open, retracing a now-familiar path.
She froze in place when she noticed a slight glow emanating from the HVAC area.
“Peter?” She called, hurrying forward.
Sure enough, Peter poked his head out. He didn’t seem pleased to see her, however.
“You shouldn’t be up here.”
“Hang on a second…” She put her hands on her hips as something occurred to her. “Have you been coming up here late at night on purpose to avoid me?”
To her annoyance, he nodded. “Yes, because you shouldn’t be talking to strangers, Morgan. We don’t know each other.”
“We could know each other, though,” Morgan pointed out. “If you weren’t avoiding me.”
Peter sighed. “I’m sure you have plenty of friends your own age that you can spend time with instead of me.”
Whether he’d meant to or not, he’d hit a nerve.
“Oh, right, because it’s so easy for me to get out and make friends when I have to have a security detail escorting me around at all times,” she snapped sarcastically.
Peter winced. “I’m sorry you have to deal with that. But I really can’t be friends with you. I need to work on my project, and…it’s best if you don’t get involved with me at all.”
She didn’t like how he was talking to her. The first time they’d met, he’d seemed shocked to see her. His tone and eyes had been so expressive. Now, everything about him was carefully neutral. Designed to make her lose interest in him.
She wasn’t sure why she felt so hurt that a random guy on her rooftop didn’t want to be friends with her, but something bitter and painful had taken root in her chest nonetheless at his rejection. She got the feeling that she would never see him again after this — he would find another rooftop to work on, and that would be it.
“What are you working on?” She asked in a desperate bid to find a topic that would make him stop trying to get rid of her. “Is that math? I like math.”
She squinted at his laptop, where she could see a document full of numbers, graphs, and calculations.
It seemed to backfire, because he quickly angled the computer away from her.
“Go back to bed, Morgan,” he told her firmly.
Morgan couldn’t help the shiver that came over her at the idea of going back to bed. She hugged herself tightly.
“Yeah, no thanks.” She meant for it to come out sounding sarcastic, but it just sounded weak and shaky.
To her surprise, even though she hadn’t meant to do so, she seemed to have finally sparked Peter’s interest.
“What’s wrong?” He asked, setting his laptop down and turning to face her, his eyes concerned as they scanned her face. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. “Just bad dreams.”
“You should tell your mom,” he urged instantly. “I’m sure she wouldn’t want you to deal with that alone.”
Morgan shook her head. She wanted to be annoyed with Peter for thinking he knew anything about her life and was at all qualified to give her advice, but…she was just tired and sad. And tired of being sad.
“Mom works a ton. She needs to sleep. And…she doesn’t like to talk about him. My dad, I mean. She’ll do it if she thinks I need to talk about him, but I know it hurts her.”
She stared out at the city lights as she spoke. She shouldn’t speak to a stranger so freely — she knew that. Peter could be a reporter for a tabloid for all she knew — he could’ve orchestrated all of this to get the inside scoop on her and her family. He could be recording this conversation right now.
But it felt good to get the words off her chest.
“I’m sorry,” Peter said softly.
She knew what came next, and she wearily braced herself for whatever platitude he was going to say about her dad — that at least he’d died a hero, that she could carry on his legacy, that time heals all wounds.
“My parents died when I was six,” he said instead of the usual cliches. “It really sucks.”
Her gaze snapped up to meet his. “It really, really sucks,” she agreed.
He gave her a long, assessing look, and then let out a sigh, patting the open space next to him. To her disappointment, he shut the window with his calculations and opened up a program on his desktop.
“Have you ever played Minecraft?”
Morgan tilted her head, trying to remember. “I have,” she realized. “But…it must’ve been a really long time ago because I don’t remember when. Maybe at one of my friend’s houses.”
Another odd case of her memory failing her!
Peter’s face tightened slightly, but he smiled. “Okay, then you should be a big help to me.”
She let out an excited gasp and jumped to her feet. “Wait, let me go get my StarkPad! Then we can both play at the same time!”
His expression looked almost indulgent for a second before he frowned. “Don’t expect this to be a habit,” he warned her.
“I won’t!” She promised, but she crossed her fingers behind her back as she hurried down to her room to get her tablet.
***
True to her prediction, her meetings with Peter did gradually become a habit over the following weeks. He seemed determined to rebuff her, but frankly, he wasn’t very good at it. He was weirdly susceptible to her puppy dog eyes whenever she mentioned feeling lonely or sad about her bad dreams, which was kind of funny, because that tactic only worked on Mom about 2% of the time and Uncle Happy about 58% of the time. Peter was close to 90%, which was where Daddy’s puppy-dog-eyes susceptibility rate had been.
Sometimes they played Minecraft; sometimes they just chatted. Peter was a chemistry student at a community college, and sometimes he explained his lab projects to her (although he refused to tell her any more about his top secret personal project). Morgan showed him her artwork from camp, and he oohed and aahed over it in a way that felt more genuine than Happy’s fumbling, obligatory attempts to praise her creations.
For her part, Morgan felt better. It was like she was walking around with a secret that nobody else knew about, but for once, it was a good secret — a new friend instead of feelings of loneliness and grief over her dad. A small bubble of happiness and excitement in her chest instead of a thorny weight.
Still, she knew that she was taking a major risk. She couldn’t even fully explain to herself why she was so determined to trust Peter when she had no reason to. Her mom (and Daddy when he was still alive) had talked to her a lot about how kids shouldn’t need to keep secrets from their parents, and how any adult who asked her to keep a secret wasn’t a safe adult.
But Peter hadn’t asked her to keep a secret. In fact, he kept repeating that he wanted nothing to do with her. If he was trying to cozy up to her for some nefarious purpose, surely he wouldn’t be actively reminding her not to trust him, right?
“Peter!” She whisper-shouted as she popped up onto the roof. “I’m going out of town tomorrow, so we have to finish fighting that Divine Beast tonight!”
Peter had introduced her to Breath of the Wild and was helping her play on her Nintendo Switch. She and her mom were leaving to go to the lakehouse for the weekend tomorrow, and she didn’t want to leave without making progress in the game first. There was no response, which was unusual but not unheard of. Peter didn’t come up here every night — he probably had to sleep like a normal person at some point. Although, he seemed pretty nocturnal to her. Maybe he had a part-time night job or something. Still, she had mentioned the trip to him, and she’d kind of hoped that he’d care enough to say goodbye.
With a sigh, she scuffed her toes against some pebbles. She was about to turn around and head inside when a low groan of pain distracted her.
She froze, gulping. It was a scary thing to hear a sound like that by yourself at night.
“Peter?” She asked, her voice tremulous and thready.
There was only a cough in response, but it sounded like Peter. She hurried forward, letting out a gasp when she reached the HVAC area where he hung out. Peter was slumped on the ground, his face utterly white, his previously blue t-shirt soaked red with blood along his left torso.
“Peter!” She choked. “Let me get help!”
“No!” Peter managed to grunt. He looked like he was in a lot of pain. “Please don’t. I’ll be fine, Morgan. Honest.”
Morgan shook her head, feeling queasy as she tried to remember the first aid she'd learned in Girl Scouts. “You don’t look fine. You need help.”
He pushed himself weakly into a sitting position, wincing and sweating. “Morgan, I swear to you, I will be okay. It looks much worse than it actually is. It’s really important that nobody knows I’m up here, okay? If you tell your mom or Happy, I won’t be able to come here anymore. And I need to come here for my project.”
Morgan wrung her hands nervously. She wanted Peter to keep coming here, but she didn’t want him to die because she hadn’t gotten him help.
“I’ll tell you what,” Peter told her, offering a small, pained smile. “It would help me a lot if you could get me a towel and some water and a first-aid kit, if you have one.”
She nodded, rushing away to do just that. She felt like she was on a secret mission, tiptoeing through the condo and gathering up the requisite supplies without disturbing her mom. She was afraid of what she’d find by the time that she made it back to the roof, but Peter actually seemed to be a little stronger. He was sitting and breathing more easily, and the tightness in her chest eased slightly.
“What happened to you?” She asked, handing him the supplies he’d requested.
“Got mugged on my way over,” was all Peter offered, wincing as he dabbed antiseptic on his wound, a deep, jagged cut on his torso. “Turn away; you’re not going to want to see this.”
One of the good things about being the daughter of a late superhero was the fact that her mom kept a super-mega-hardcore first-aid kit on hand. Upon seeing it, Peter had immediately honed in on the suture kit.
“You’re gonna stitch yourself up?” She scrunched up her face. “Gross!”
He let out a short laugh. “Yeah, it’s pretty gross, huh? It’s not the first time, though, and it probably won’t be the last.”
Who the heck is this guy? Morgan found herself wondering as she turned around.
Her eyes caught on his half-open laptop, and she leaned forward slightly, trying to get a glimpse at what he’d been working on. She was in her grade’s most advanced math class, but Peter’s work was far beyond her ken — long strings of numbers and characters that she had no hope of deciphering.
Then, her eyes caught on two letters that she knew very well — T.S.
It could’ve been a total coincidence — T.S. could’ve stood for any number of things, or it could’ve been some kind of mathematical variable. And yet…Peter had said that he needed to be nearby to work on his project. What did that mean?
It seemed like he hadn’t actually meant to admit that fact to her, but had done so impulsively in his desperation to convince her that she didn’t need to get help and alert anyone else to his presence. Why would he need to be here to work on his project? When she’d first asked, he’d claimed it was about the internet. But surely there were other places around the city with good, if not better, internet?
Could it be that he needed to be close by because he was somehow hacking into FRIDAY through her tablet or Mom’s computer? Could T.S. stand for Tony Stark?
She shook her head to clear it. She was probably being paranoid, but...
What if he’s trying to steal the plans for the Iron Man suit? A little voice in her head whispered. You should tell Mom or Uncle Happy, just in case.
Peter didn’t seem like he was plotting some evil scheme to overthrow the government by becoming an evil Iron Man, but it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that someone had tried to steal the suit over the years. Mom would want her to share her suspicions immediately, just in case. But if she did so, then Peter would be gone — either because he’d been thrown in jail for trespassing or because he’d run away. He’d never come back again, and then she’d be all alone with her nightmares and her long, lonely existence in the condo.
Daddy wouldn’t act right away — he’d keep an eye on the threat and plan what to do if something went wrong.
“Morgan? You okay?”
Peter’s voice interrupted her thoughts. He’d finished stitching himself up and was now looking at her with concern.
“I’m sorry you had to see me like that — it wasn’t my intention.”
“I’m fine,” she told him briskly, standing and dusting off her hands. “I have to go, though. Mom and I are leaving early to go upstate.”
He was studying her. “Okay,” he told her with a smile. “Have a good trip.”
She just nodded before slipping away into the darkness. What a strange night — she wasn’t sure what to think.
The mystery of the guy on her roof was only growing as the nights passed.
***
To her disappointment, Peter’s injury cast a pall over the trip to the lakehouse.
As they drove out of the city the next morning, she couldn’t shake a sense of dread and anxiety. What if Peter had been more injured than he’d let on, and he’d died in the night? What if he’d lost too much blood? What if he got some kind of infection from stitching up the wound improperly?
She should’ve gone back up to check on him before they left, but she hadn’t had any time. Mom wanted to beat the commuter traffic, so they left before the sun finished rising.
She shouldn’t have cared so much about the sketchy stranger mooching off her internet, but it just…brought back a lot of bad memories of when Daddy died. She hadn’t been there on the battlefield to see it happen, but Mom and Uncle Rhodey had. Neither of them would tell her many details, but that almost made it worse, because her mind liked to imagine all sorts of terrible things. Had Daddy looked like Peter had last night — slumped over and pale, his face wracked with pain? Mom swore it was peaceful, but that seemed like the kind of thing you were obligated to tell a little kid, regardless of the actual truth.
The thought made her nauseous, which Mom misinterpreted over nerves about being at the lakehouse.
“We can stay as long as you want, honey,” she assured Morgan as they parked and looked up at the familiar house. “But if you need to leave early —”
She knew that Mom meant well, but the coddling and tiptoeing around Morgan’s feelings just made her even more on edge and irritated.
“I don’t,” she told her mom bluntly, climbing out of the car and slamming the door. She ran to the barn without looking back, ignoring the stab of guilt she felt over being rude. When they’d moved to the city, they’d boarded Gerald with one of their neighbors, the Tates. Mr. Tate had promised to bring Gerald over for the weekend, so she set to work preparing his stall for him.
The familiar chore felt good after so long. Most of the calluses in her hands had faded, and she enjoyed the burn in her palms from the rake.
By the time an hour had passed, she felt much calmer and more at peace. She always forgot how loud the city was until she left it. Her mom found her lying on a pile of hay, listening to the sounds of birds chirping and the trees rustling in the mild breeze.
“You want some lunch?” Mom asked, holding out a plate and a water bottle, which Morgan accepted, sitting up.
“Thanks,” she mumbled. To her surprise, Mom sat next to her, seemingly uncaring of her designer jeans getting dirty from the barn muck.
“It’s supposed to rain this afternoon,” Mom told her. “But tomorrow should be sunny. I was thinking we could take the canoe out on the lake tomorrow.”
Morgan nodded. “That would be fun.”
“I was also thinking about the time your dad flipped the canoe on accident — remember that?”
She couldn’t help but smile at the recollection, surprised that Mom was bringing up something about Daddy without being prompted. “Yeah — I remember.”
Daddy had been fishing, and when he’d stood up to reel in his catch, he’d lost his balance and flipped the whole canoe over. Morgan could still feel the cold shock of the water and the initial burst of fear as she went under, but it hadn’t lasted long. Daddy had grabbed onto her right away, and she’d barely been on her own in the water for more than a single second.
“You were right,” Mom told her. “It was a good idea to come here.”
Morgan looked at her mom with surprise. Mom reached out and gently tucked Morgan’s hair behind her ear.
“I’m sorry that it’s hard for me to visit here. Tony would want us to keep doing the things we loved to do together, even if he couldn’t be here for it. Thank you for reminding me of that.”
Mom wrapped her arm around Morgan’s shoulders, pulling her close. Morgan relaxed into the embrace, appreciating the peace offering on her mom’s part. If she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend that she was four again, waiting for Daddy to come join them in the barn. Her eyes stung and burned when she opened them, but it hurt in a way that felt a little good, with Mom here next to her and sunlight painting the familiar old barn in warm stripes.
***
The rain showers did visit later that afternoon, and Morgan found herself wandering around the house with nothing to do while Mom was on a work call that couldn’t be rescheduled. She stopped in the kitchen, staring at a photo that she’d forgotten about — a picture shoved to the back of a shelf above the sink, showing Daddy standing next to Spider-Man, holding an internship certificate as a joke.
Morgan hated Spider-Man with a burning passion.
Maybe it was irrational, but she didn’t care. Spider-Man was the reason why she didn’t have a dad anymore. Daddy had gotten it into his head to reverse the blip not because he wanted to bring all those people back, but because he wanted to bring Spider-Man back. And he’d died because of it.
She’d heard Mom and Uncle Rhodey discussing it over drinks one night about a year earlier. Neither of them could remember interacting with Spider-Man themselves, other than seeing him at a few fights and battles over the years.
“I just don’t know what the pull was for Tony,” Mom said, shaking her head. “I go over and over it in my head, but I can’t make sense of it. He was going to leave it alone, but then the idea of Spider-Man staying dead pushed him to act. I mean, he was always the self-sacrificing, heroic type, but to take on something so risky for a hero he barely knew?”
“Spider-Man always struck me as being very young,” Uncle Rhodey offered. “Maybe his death was something Tony felt like he had to rectify, especially after becoming a father.”
Overwhelmed with anger at the prospect of Spider-Man having any place in the house that Daddy had loved so much, Morgan climbed up on the counter and wrenched the frame off the shelf. She roughly opened up the back of the frame, grabbing the photograph. She contemplated ripping it up, but something stopped her at the last second. Instead of putting it in the trash where Mom might find it, she tucked it inside her StarkPad case to dispose of privately later.
Then she decided to do something less depressing than glare at old photos. She vaguely remembered that she had some craft kits lying around from past birthdays and Christmases that might be entertaining. For some reason, she decided to check the closet in the guest room. She’d never spent much time in here, and she couldn’t remember them having many guests over the years. Uncle Happy, Uncle Rhodey, and Uncle Bruce each slept here sometimes when they visited, and Daddy’s friend Harley had come up for a week one summer when she was really little. The decorations were kind of weird. There was a periodic table and Star Wars poster on one wall — maybe one of their sporadic visitors really liked the franchise.
Opening the closet, she was surprised to find a random assortment of items stored there. A few college math textbooks that were too new to belong to anyone from Daddy’s generation. A Lego kit and one of Daddy’s old MIT t-shirts. Morgan grabbed it off the hanger, deciding she’d claim it for herself. It would still be way too big to wear as a normal shirt, but it would be a comfy pajama shirt. She sniffed it, hoping it would still smell faintly of Daddy’s cologne-and-motor-oil scent. But Daddy’s smell had been replaced by a different smell — one that was oddly familiar, but she couldn’t place it.
With a shrug, she shut the closet door, dropping the shirt into her laundry hamper as she returned to her room. If she couldn’t make sure the shirt smelled like Daddy, at least it could smell like the lakehouse.
***
The rest of the visit to the lakehouse passed peacefully, but Peter’s injury was never far from her mind. She awoke in the middle of the second night with tears streaming down her cheeks. She’d had a nightmare where Daddy was dying in front of her on the battlefield, but when she ran forward and lifted his mask, she saw Peter instead.
In a fit of desperation, she tried logging on to their Minecraft server, but there was no recent activity. That probably didn’t mean anything, though — maybe he was busy working on his project while she couldn’t distract him, or maybe he’d picked up extra shifts at his night job.
She pushed open her window, only remembering at the last second where she needed to put pressure so it wouldn’t creak. It had been too long since the last time she’d stayed in her room here. Shaking her head at herself, she climbed out onto the roof. The clouds from yesterday had dissipated, and a tapestry of glowing stars stretched overhead. The sight brought a wistful smile to her lips.
Someone had come up here with her the night after Daddy’s funeral. She couldn’t remember who — probably one of her uncles. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing Uncle Happy would endorse given his safety obsession, but who knew. Adults got really weird when someone died.
Morgan had held it together through that whole week — she’d been so young then, she recognized now. She hadn’t truly realized what it meant for Daddy to die until after the funeral was over. There was nothing to do past that; no organized activity to prepare for — just the rest of her life stretching in front of her without her dad.
She’d been utterly overwhelmed by the slow realization that this was permanent.
“I’m scared,” she’d whispered whoever was on the roof next to her.
“Yeah,” the person had said, instead of apologizing incessantly for her loss like everyone had been doing that week. “I’m scared, too.”
They’d sat together, this mysterious person and Morgan, both scared and grieving, holding hands and looking at the cold, vast sky above them — at these very same stars.
It sounded ridiculous now since she couldn’t remember the person she’d been with — maybe it was just a figment of her imagination like all the other things she half-remembered from that time period. Her mind protecting her somehow, as Ms. Noreen had said.
But it had made her feel better to know that she wasn’t the only one who was frightened by the prospect of life without Daddy.
***
“I’ve never seen you so excited to return to the city,” Mom laughed the next day as Morgan practically shoved her toward the car. “Is the condo finally growing on you?”
She seemed happy — lighter than Morgan could remember her being for ages — and Morgan didn’t want to spoil it by saying that she was actually worried about the random guy with a stab wound who spent his nights conducting top-secret research on the roof of their penthouse. That would definitely put a damper on Mom’s good mood, and it would lead to Morgan being grounded for the foreseeable future.
“I start swim team tomorrow, remember? I don’t want to miss it,” she replied instead.
They reached the city by dusk, just as the sun slipped below the horizon and the sticky heat of the day began lifting. Morgan normally liked people-watching when they were out and about like this, but she couldn’t help keeping her gaze fixed forward today, her leg jiggling with nervous energy.
It seemed to take an eternity for them to unload their bags and eat dinner. Morgan breathed a sigh of relief when Mom finally poked her head in Morgan’s room at 9:30 and told her to turn the lights off. She burrowed under her covers for another 15 minutes, and then she was up like a flash, sliding the window open and racing up the stairs to the roof.
“Hey, Morgs,” Peter greeted, seemingly in high spirits. Instead of lying in a puddle of his own blood like she’d feared, he’d made a lot of progress while she’d been gone — apparently his work had progressed from theoretical to practical, because she could see that he was building the skeleton of some kind of machine or contraption.
When she remained silent, he gave her a curious look. “You okay? How was the lakehouse?”
His face did something funny when he saw her new pajama shirt, and he opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something before shutting it again.
Morgan was surprised to suddenly find herself furious.
“You can’t do that,” she spat. “Just show up bleeding all over and tell me not to get help. I didn’t know if you were even still alive. So don’t ‘Hey, Morgs,’ me.”
She crossed her arms over her chest.
Peter continued looking at her with confusion before his face softened slightly. She wasn’t sure if she liked the way he was observing her — like he understood, without her having to say it, why she was so upset about someone being badly hurt around her.
“Hey, I’m okay — look, see? I heal really quickly.” He lifted the hem of his t-shirt, and she could see that the deep gash from a few days earlier was now an angry, fading red line.
She just scowled at him. This whole thing was dumb — getting attached to some dumb guy who had no business being here just so he could probably die like her dad. Like Aunt May and Daddy’s friend Natasha.
“I’m sorry for worrying you,” Peter told her soberly.
“Whatever,” Morgan muttered, pivoting on her heel and stalking away.
She’d never done that before — she’d always been the one pushing for Peter to acknowledge her. But Peter couldn’t be trusted, she reminded herself — she had no clue who he was and why he was up here. Plus, she didn’t need him in her life, not when she had Mom and Uncle Happy. That was enough. Two people was plenty. Any more than that, and you started running the risk of losing someone.
Peter didn’t call after her or try to stop her from leaving. She told herself that it was a good thing, but deep down, she wasn’t quite sure.