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“My daddy loved you three thousand.”
Peter tried so damn hard not to look at Morgan Stark and see Tony staring back at him – but, God, she looked just like her dad. Those big, brown eyes bore into his, one tiny fist crumpling the hem of his suit coat, as if pleading with him. As if imploring Peter to acknowledge the truth of her statement.
“Really?” His voice broke. Peter blinked away saltwater droplets as they threatened to fall. He’d already done more than enough crying for one lifetime. “Three thousand, huh?”
Morgan nodded, sharp and earnest. “Yeah. Really.”
“That’s...that’s a lot. How do you know he loved me so much?”
The girl glanced around in a conspiratorial way, like she’d just divulged some dark secret no soul but him was meant to hear. None of the other mourners so much as spared the two of them a glance, wrapped up as they were in their own hushed, croak-voiced conversations.
She gestured for him to lean closer. Peter did.
“Come with me.” Morgan stage-whispered around a cupped hand, and the little fingers wrinkling his coat fell to rest on his wrist instead. Peter realized with a start that she was trying to pull him along – to lead him out of the room.
He gulped around a lump in his throat. Hot pinpricks burned at the backs of his eyes. “Okay.”
Was it considered poor funeral etiquette to take an unplanned walking tour of the deceased’s home? Probably. Did the fact that his tour guide was the deceased’s four year old daughter make it a little more understandable? Probably not. Peter followed Morgan’s lead, anyway. He trailed along behind her, stumbling over his own feet more than once when the sheen of tears over his eyes blurred his vision.
Maybe it was the way she marched him down the halls, or the way she set her little mouth in a line of grim determination. Maybe it was the sadness in her eyes when Peter’s first reaction to my daddy loved you three thousand was little more than a skeptical smile and some placating small-talk. Maybe it was...everything.
Whatever it was, something about her was just so inexplicably Tony.
She stopped outside a marbled wood door and paused. Peter stumbled to an abrupt halt behind her. Five petite fingers tightened around his wrist.
“I’m not supposed to go in without a grown up.” Morgan furrowed her brow thoughtfully, as if trying to configure a way around this unforeseen dilemma. “Are you a grown up?”
Familiar, warm hues peered up at him, radiating innocence and curiosity. Peter flinched. His own eyes snapped shut without his permission.
Kid, where’d you come from?
Kid, that’s the wizard. Get on it.
Parker. Pete. Kid, kid, kid.
“Sure,” he choked out. “Yeah, I – yeah. I’m a grown up. I guess.”
Morgan nodded once. The gesture was strong; resolute. His word was all the proof she needed.
What must that feel like, to trust the world in all its filth and squander? To be so naive, so optimistic, that you saw your own inner purity reflected everywhere?
Peter used to know, and holy shit, did he miss that feeling. The lightheartedness of it was still fresh in his mind, that bounce of the step still lingering in the soles of his feet – it hadn’t been long since he’d owned that youth.
Then again, he supposed, it had technically been five years. Was that a long time? Peter wouldn’t know. It felt like five seconds to him.
Without another word, the girl released his arm and used both hands to grip the doorknob. The wood groaned as she shoved it open. A small, quiet lab area greeted them.
“It’s in here,” Morgan whispered, as if it hadn’t quite hit her yet that she would never again be at risk of disrupting her father’s work by being too loud. “Come on – this way.”
He tried to keep his steps light, but Peter could have sworn he heard eggshells crunch beneath his feet. This wasn’t okay. This was not his home; not his territory to tread. As they rounded the corner, a small holotable came into view. Guilt for trespassing pounded like a heartbeat in his ears, quickened, deafening. Everything about the scene screamed wrong, wrong, wrong.
No, actually – it wasn’t the scene that made him want to crawl right out of his itching skin. It was his placement within it.
He didn’t belong there.
Morgan seemed to disagree. As if sensing his distress, the child took his hand and gripped it tight.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’ll make you happy. I promise.”
Peter just barely managed to bite back a cynical laugh before it bubbled past his lips. There was no reason to be anything but grateful for Morgan’s optimism. She didn’t need to know she’d just made a promise that couldn’t possibly be kept. She didn’t need to know how bleak things looked for him right now, so bleak that he wasn’t sure anything would ever be able to make him happy again.
“What is it?” Peter mumbled into the dimly lit lab instead.
Morgan didn’t answer him with words. Their eggshell steps were broken when she tugged on his hand, leading him around to the front of the holotable where a wheeled desk chair sat. She dropped the two fingers of his she held to climb up on the chair and reach across the table.
And then Peter saw.
And then Peter broke.
He dropped to his knees when his legs trembled and gave way. One sleeve flew to cover his mouth while the other hand splayed shaky fingers over his eyes. The goal of Morgan’s little excursion might have been to make him happy, but it didn’t. His corneas burned as he caught sight of what she cradled in those tiny hands. What had given her the idea to say what she did. What implanted the idea in her head that Tony loved him three thousand.
A framed picture of him and Mister Stark sat on the table. It was a familiar image to Peter – he’d saved it as the lock screen and wallpaper of his old phone only moments after it was taken – but his mentor had turned it up a few notches.
Tony framed the picture.
Tony kept it clean and safe on one corner of his personal holotable, like it was special to him.
Like Peter was special to him.
He heard, vaguely, the picture clattering to the table, the chair squeaking as Morgan scrambled down. Two small hands patted his face. Peter only realized he was crying – sobbing, if he was being honest – when she said in a voice trembling almost as badly as he was: “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to make you sad. I’m sorry.”
“No.” Peter lifted his head with a gasping breath. Tony’s daughter swam before his tear-soaked vision, her lips trembling and her own eyes growing misty. “No, you – you didn’t make me sad. Okay? You didn’t. I just...”
I just didn’t know he loved me back.
Of course, Peter always knew Tony cared on some level. The man made no effort to hide it. His panicked begs for Peter to please just stay awake when the fifteen year old got himself shot in Central Park at three in the morning. Leaving the atmosphere and Pete, you gotta let go, I’m gonna catch you. Terror and agony radiating from Tony’s face as Peter faded to dust. Five years later, a vice-tight hug on the battlefield.
But that word had never once fallen from either of their mouths.
Love.
“My mommy was crying this morning.” Morgan sniffled. “I asked why she was so sad, and she said she just really misses daddy, and that made me sad, too.”
Peter wasn’t sure how to respond to that, entirely clueless on how to comfort a grieving four year old, so he only choked on a soft, “Okay.”
Morgan wasn’t done, though. She sniffled again and continued:
“Daddy cried on the picture one time. I was ‘sposed to be in bed. He said your name was Peter and he was sad because he couldn’t see you anymore. Mommy loves Daddy, so if she’s sad because she can’t see him, then...”
Peter swallowed. “...then your daddy loved me, too. Yeah. That...that makes sense.”
And it did.
Suddenly, he wasn’t the only one crying. Morgan’s face screwed up as she finally allowed her own tears to fall. Peter was struck by a brief bolt of panic as this child, so familiar and yet so foreign, threw her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder.
“I want my daddy,” she whispered. “I want my daddy back.”
He wrapped his arms around her and held on for dear life. “So do I.”
The request that followed was so unexpected, it stole the breath from his lungs. Kids really didn’t have filters, did they?
Morgan said through her tears, muffled into the fabric of his now thoroughly rumpled coat, “Will you be my brother?”
So easy. So simple. Like all it took to be family was to ask.
She wasn’t wrong.
Peter pulled back, and as Morgan scrubbed tracks of wetness from her face, he mustered a smile that was only half fake.
“I think I already am.”