Chapter Text
It was no surprise everyone ended up in medical after saving the world, but that didn’t mean Peter liked it.
He had some superficial cuts and bruises, maybe a bruised rib or two, but honestly, he’d be fine by tomorrow morning, the day after, tops. It certainly wasn’t the worst he’d ever been injured, but his pride took a sizeable hit when the doctors insisted on monitoring him for a few hours after someone (his money was on Strange) mentioned to them that he’d had a particularly difficult reaction to the snap. Peter was convinced that the sharp, blinding headache and churning nausea he’d felt moments before vanishing was simply an extreme result of his spidey-sense warning of his imminent demise, but it was pointless to try to explain that to the doctors. Because he had tried.
After lying in a hospital bed and distracting himself by admiring all of the cool Wakandan medical tech for what felt like eternity, he’d been tentatively cleared with strict instructions to report back if he experienced “any side effects whatsoever I swear to god Mr. Parker” (he’s not sure if that particular doctor had worked with stubborn superheroes before, but he could imagine this single day contained a lifetime of experience). Peter made a beeline straight for Mr. Stark’s room. If he had gained anything good from the doctors’ extended fussing, it was that he’d killed enough time for Mr. Stark to get out of surgery and into a recovery room.
“Hey, Spidey,” Rhodey greeted when Peter entered. He was the only other guest in the room, perched in a single chair next to Tony’s bedside. He looked remarkably unscathed except for a single cut butterfly-bandaged across his cheekbone. He stood, leg braces whirring softly. “I’ll give you some time with him. I’m starting to think he’s still asleep just to spite me.”
“Thanks, Colonel Rhodes.”
He smiled, “Call me Rhodey. All my friends do.”
Peter grinned in response and stuck out his hand, “Thanks, Rhodey. My friends call me Peter.”
Rhodey crossed the room in a couple of steps and shook Peter’s hand, “You holding up okay, Peter?”
“Yeah,” he responded. “Healing ability. I’ll be good by tomorrow morning.”
“God, what I wouldn’t give for that. Well, enjoy his silence then. It’s a rare gift,” Rhodey joked, and with one last pat on Peter’s shoulder, the War Machine was gone.
Peter sunk down into the now vacant chair. If it weren’t for the dark purple bruises and scattered cuts across his face, Mr. Stark would have looked almost peaceful in sleep. Even his arm didn’t look so bad propped up on top of the sheets, wrapped from shoulder to fingertips in clean, white bandages. The gauntlet had done some serious damage to his arm—Peter had heard some nurses in the hall whispering that there had been talk at one point of possibly removing it—but luckily, they were able to fix him up without doing anything too drastic. God bless Wakanda. It was too early to say how much mobility he’d lost in it, but if anyone could pull through and make a full recovery, it was Tony Stark.
Peter had only been sitting there for a couple of minutes when the man himself opened his eyes.
“Rhodey was right,” Peter said without thinking, and Mr. Stark groaned as he dragged himself into awareness.
“Don’t ever tell him that, it’ll go straight to his head.”
“I think he’d say the same about you.”
“Yeah, well. We were meant for each other,” Tony turned his head to look at Peter. “Hey, kid.”
“Hey, Mr. Stark,” Peter had the sudden urge to reach out and—what? Hug him? Hold his hand? Some instinctive part of him craved contact, but he restrained himself.
“How’re you doing?”
“Mr. Stark, you’re the one who just got out of surgery.”
“Yeah, and I’m the one who asked the question.”
“I’m fine,” Peter responded, rolling his eyes. “Alive. Thanks to you. You saved the world.”
“No biggie. Honestly, it’s becoming old hat at this point.”
“Well, hopefully you won’t have to do it again.”
Tony hummed in agreement, then regarded Peter with eyes that looked only slightly still fatigued. “It’s good to have you back, kid.”
“It’s good to be back,” Peter took a deep breath. “I just hope, after this,” he waved his arms around in a vague gesture, “everything can go back to normal, y’know?”
Tony nodded, then leaned his head back in his pillow. “Don’t worry. You’ll be back to gym class and burnt tuna casserole in no time.”
That suddenly sparked a worry in Peter, one he hadn’t been able to even think about since he’d launched himself from the school bus in what felt like forever ago now, “May! How has she—is she—do you know—?”
A dark look came over Tony’s face, and Peter realized he shouldn’t have asked. Not now, not to the man who had just nearly died to save the world. He couldn’t take it back, though, and Tony closed his eyes for a moment, took a breath, then explained. “After you…were gone, she needed some space. Told me in no uncertain terms that she didn’t want to hear from me again unless I had found a way to fix things.”
“But it wasn’t your—”
“I don’t blame her for feeling that way. You shouldn’t either. I mean, she lost her only kid, and it was…rough…for me too, but I couldn’t imagine…” he looked pained. “Anyway, I respected her wishes. It was the least I could do. So sorry, kid, I haven’t heard from her in a long time.”
“I guess that’s okay, then,” Peter said. He didn’t know what else to say. “I should—”
Suddenly, the door opened behind him.
“Daddy!” yelled a voice. Peter turned to see Pepper enter the room, accompanied by a small form that whizzed past Peter and leaped up onto the bed. Tony let out an audible “oof” as the motion jostled his arm, but his non-injured one still came up to wrap around the little girl, fingers carding through her hair as he looked at her with incredible tenderness in his eyes.
“Hey, pumpkin. Be gentle with the leaps and bounds, alright? It’s been a rough day.”
“Uh…” Peter reactively vocalized. At the realization that someone else was in the room, the little girl’s head snapped up, eyes going wide as they locked on Peter, and she fell to the ground on the other side of the bed, hiding behind it with one hand still clutching the bedsheets beside Tony’s waist.
Peter didn’t need to ask who she was. Not really. His mind had made the connection from the instant she entered the room. Even if she had said nothing, he could see Tony’s eyes, duplicated and staring widely at him from behind the bed railing. The same brunette hair, though lacking the grey that suddenly, to Peter, was so much more prominent on Mr. Stark’s head than it had been the last time he’d seen him. He could see the curve of Pepper’s nose, and as the little girl frowned at him, he could see that she had the same little furrow in her brow he’d witnessed being directed at him and Mr. Stark many times when they stayed up working in the lab too late. She was a perfect mix of both of them.
“Peter,” a sudden vulnerability overtook Tony for a moment, and it looked foreign on his face. But he pushed on. “I’d like you to meet Morgan. My daughter.”
Confirmation. Instantly and silently, something inside of Peter broke.
In the last few moments of calm they had right before erupting through a portal and into the battle, Dr. Strange had tried to explain the mechanics of the snap with a lot of big words and bigger concepts that were a bit too much for Peter to understand. Strange had rolled his eyes when Peter asked for a “TL;DR”, but he had obliged and said that basically, while it hadn’t felt that long for them, five years had passed back on earth.
That should have been significant, but Peter hadn’t thought much about it at the time, too anxious to see everyone again and (literally) get back into the swing of things. When he finally returned to earth, the others had accepted him back into the fray as if no time had passed at all. He found himself preoccupied with helping save the world, and the details of everything else had quickly disappeared to a place far back in his mind.
They all came rushing back now as five years stared him in the face.
Five years was a whole person. A person who could walk, and talk, and form complex thoughts. Did she go to school? Peter couldn’t remember what age that started. She was probably smart, anyway, there was no way she hadn’t inherited her parents’ brains. She was wearing a t-shirt with a Disney logo and a princess on it that Peter didn’t recognize, and he realized that five years meant a whole host of movies he hadn’t seen. References he didn’t know. Memories he hadn’t made.
In an instant, he had seen five years, and in an instant they were stolen from him. The feeling was indescribable.
“Morgan, this is Peter. My…”
Colleague? Mentee? Protégé? Friend? Peter could think of a hundred different words, but he wasn’t sure exactly how to describe their relationship. Mr. Stark was his hero. Had been ever since he was a little kid. He admired him more than he admired just about anyone else, which was a big deal when you’d met a whole comic shop’s worth of superheroes in real life. But more than that, Mr. Stark was a teacher, even though he liked to pretend to break out in hives every time Peter pulled out his homework at the compound. He looked out for Peter. Guided him. Made sure he was safe—or at least as safe as a teenager with superhuman abilities could be.
Of the hundred different words, there was one that hovered prominently in his mind in front of the rest. He could feel its resonance with every memory, but Peter didn’t dare acknowledge it. Not to himself, and certainly not to anyone else.
An arrested expression came over Tony’s face. He seemed to struggle over finding the right thing to say, just as Peter struggled over his own thoughts.
“My…intern.”
Something heavy dropped from Peter’s head, sunk down his throat and settled low in chest. The word wasn’t necessarily inaccurate, but its utterance felt like something being ripped away from him, and his skin burned in its wake. Detached. Impersonal. Despite the fact that Peter could still vividly remember Mr. Stark hugging him in the middle of the battle harder than anyone had ever hugged him in his life, clinging to him as if he was liable to break into thousands of pieces and disappear a second time.
It hurt. But perhaps even worse, the thought suddenly occurred to Peter that with this introduction, with Morgan’s confused stare…she had no idea who he was. She didn’t know his name, and she had certainly never seen any pictures of him.
In five years, Mr. Stark had never mentioned him.
Peter quickly shoved a new kind of pain deep into the recesses of his mind, knowing instinctively he would not be able to deal with it if it lingered. “Hi Morgan,” he said, forcing a smile onto his face as he gave a little wave. “It’s nice to meet you.”
She ducked further behind the bed in response, and Tony sighed good-naturedly. He ruffled a hand through her hair, and Peter noticed that every time he looked at her, it was with a complete and utter adoration that he had never seen on the man before. “Sorry about that.”
“She’s just a little shy around new people. We’re working on it,” Pepper pitched in, squeezing Peter’s shoulder briefly in greeting as she came around the bed to take Tony’s hand. Morgan instantly attached herself to her mother’s side. “We don’t get visitors often; we’ve been trying to live a quiet life ever since…”
She didn’t need to finish her sentence. The three of them looked picturesque, side by side. The very model of loving domesticity. The weight in Peter’s chest wrapped around his ribcage and squeezed.
“I should go,” he said suddenly, voice cracking.
“Peter—” But Peter cut Tony off before he could finish his sentence.
“I need to talk to May,” he said, more firmly this time. Tony’s face softened instantly into an expression of understanding, and he nodded, grip tightening on Pepper’s hand.
“Yeah, of course. Go. Be with your family.”
As Peter fled the room, the last thing he saw was the three of them hugging out of the corner of his eye. The hospital had become stifling. He needed to leave, to get out, but he was in a country he didn’t know in the middle of a continent he’d never been to before. After twisting and turning down various hallways, he eventually managed to find a sunny courtyard. It would have to do.
Peter pushed his way through the glass doors and took a big gulp of fresh air. He practically collapsed onto the nearest bench and pulled out his phone. In a miraculous display of humanity and collaboration, all phone networks had decided to provide worldwide free service for the next week in order to help people reconnect with their loved ones; so Peter had no trouble turning on his phone despite the fact that for all intents and purposes, it had been dormant for five years.
He opened up his contacts and pressed May’s name. The phone rang.
And rang.
And rang.
And rang.
“We're sorry, you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service.”