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Looking up at the stars can go two ways.
There is a wonder in the connection of constellations. In the way, even millions of miles apart, stars are brought together in books and charted together in maps. Bright lighthouses in the vast sea of space. Pinpricks of light in a suffocating blanket of darkness.
There is also a terrible sadness in the sky, in the cruel desolation of the universe, pulling further and further apart. Stretched too thin across time. In the shifting gears and the subtle changes and the imperceptible differences. It changes over billions of years until nothing is as it was and there isn’t any comfort in the familiar.
For Morgan Stark the stars are a connection. In the constellations she sees her father. These little orbs are the same ones he would have looked at, linking them through the unstoppable march of time, long after his has run out.
She has grown up with the stars spread out across her bedroom ceiling. Glow in the dark dots that her uncle Steve spent hours painting the week after his last battle. Each and every star stretched out across her ceiling is in exactly the place they would have been on that night. She keeps the faint memory of uncle Steve pressing a soft kiss to her forehead close to her heart. He was gone a few days after that.
Her uncle Rhodey brought her a box of her dad’s books. Journals and numbers and weird symbols, his genius spilling out onto every page. She doesn’t understand it quite yet, but she knows her father has given her a map to the future. In the box there was a notebook filled with stars charted to specific events. He has notes on the night he first met uncle Rhodey, the day his parents died, and the night he and mom first kissed on a rooftop in Flushing, New York.
The stars are fresh in her memory even as the curve of his smile fades away, dimmed and fuzzy like the light in his warm brown eyes. The stars are still there even when all that’s left of her father is a roaring legacy, changing the world for a better future.
Morgan shifts on the porch, leaning against Dum-E who beeps insistently at her. She doesn’t know if he understands that her dad is gone, or if Dum-E is still waiting for him to come back. Sometimes Morgan thinks a part of her is waiting too. Like in the next moment over her dad will be there, bright and alive bringing with him the smell of motor oil and the promise of blueberry pancakes.
It’s okay though, that she doesn’t get to have her father. He burned too brightly, too fast. He was a shooting star that the universe made a wish on. The world got their superhero and he was their saviour.
Morgan will be okay. She has her family, she has Dum-E and she’ll always have the stars.