Chapter Text
Peter tries to be a good babysitter (Big brother? Caretaker? Superhero stand in?) for Morgan when she needs it, and he thinks he’s done a pretty good job.
Pepper and Tony recently made the move back to New York so that Morgan could attend a public elementary school and make friends at the start of first grade. When they settled back into Manhattan, Pepper spoke one thing into law: if they nor Happy can take care of Morgan, then Peter’s in charge. Which...happens more often than one might think.
But it’s fine. Great, even. Peter thinks it’s pretty cool, beating out Rhodey (okay, so Rhodey lives in D.C and isn’t exactly a viable candidacy for second place babysitter, but it’s still outranking a colonel which basically means...he’s a general. Peter Parker’s a general. And Spider-Man. General Spider-Man of the Avengers) and taking care of Morgan is easy enough. The kid is wicked smart for her age, no surprise, and she thinks that building with lego is fun. So after things like countless trips to the park and one kickass Disney princess lego castle built, Peter would say (not to brag) that they’re like, best friends.
And then he ruins everything.
With a smoothie.
“How old do you have to be to do a real science experiment?” Morgan asks. She’s standing on the tips of her toes as she watches the woman behind the counter stuff the blender full of fruit.
Peter, with his mango smoothie already in hand, takes a long sip. “Well,” he presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth before continuing because ow cold. “The only difference between screwing around and a science experiment is writing it down, so….” he trails off, taking another long sip as the loud noise of the blender echoes off the walls of the smoothie shop. “If you’re writing it all down, you’re sciencing. Simple as that.”
Morgan nods as the woman slides her drink down the counter with a smile. Little Morgan bounces on her toes in order to reach for it. Peter watches as Morgan grips the plastic cup and stares at the straw, almost hesitant, before she starts sucking down the smoothie the same way Peter is.
“You got an experiment you want to do?” Peter asks as he takes a seat at a small table. She sits across from him, legs folded underneath her for a height boost, and nods, before she takes out her matching blue sparkle notebook and pencil from her backpack.
“Yeah,” she taps the smoothie cup. “I’m doing one right now.”
Peter doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but something tells him it’s not good.
“I’ve never had strawberries,” Morgan clarifies, and then, all at once, Peter relaxes. Sort of. Okay, not really, but he’s halfway to stopping the oncoming heart attack and that’s got to count for something.
“Okay,” he drags out, confused, because on the other hand, how the hell has Morgan never had a strawberry? She’s not that picky of an eater. “So this experiment is to, what? See if you like them?”
She takes the most dramatic pause, as she finishes writing down all her “science”. Her handwriting isn’t exactly calligraphy (or, maybe it is. It’s not like he can ready calligraphy, even if it is all fancy and a practiced art) but he can still make out her notes and the title of her experiment:
Strawberry Allergy Test:
Dad: not allergic
Mom: allergic
Me : _____________
In that moment, he knows what a heart attack feels like.
Tony’s gonna kill him. Pepper. Then, Happy. Rhodey. And then Strange is going to use his golden circle voodoo to somehow resuscitate him and let them do it all over again.
Basically, he is so, so dead.
“Oh my god,” Peter nearly yelps as he grabs the smoothie away from Morgan, despite her protests. “Pepper’s allergic to strawberries? Why didn't you tell me!?”
“She is, but we don't know if I'm allergic because Dad never lets me have one, just in case. So I thought I'd do an experiment to try and find out.” Her eyes are squinted slightly as she carefully taps her lips with her fingers. “Are my lips swollen?”
They aren’t, thank god. “Morgan. When Pepper says allergic, how bad-“
“She uses the phrase deadly.”
“Ohmygod.”
Morgan just might be evil and cruel, because she’s unsympathetic to Peter’s cardiac arrest that she caused . She stops messing with her mouth and presses her palms to her cheeks before sticking out her tongue. “Is my tongue swollen?”
Peter doesn’t know a ton about allergies, but he knows enough that the serious reactions always happen pretty quickly. If nothing happens within the next thirty minutes, she’ll probably be in the clear but it’s only been about…oh, three minutes since she sucked down the first sip of that smoothie. That strawberry bomb could go off at any second.
Which just... can’t happen. Not in a smoothie shop. Not on General Spider-Man’s watch.
“We have to go to a hospital.” Peter declares, sitting up so fast he ends up upsetting his mango smoothie. Normally, he’d offer to help clean it up but he’s facing the possibility of accidentally killing Morgan Stark so he hopes he’ll be forgiven.
Morgan pouts and tries to reach for the smoothie again, but Peter grabs and tosses it in the trash can across the shop like the NBA star he is. Which is to say that one...kinda spills everywhere too. Oh, this poor shop. He’ll never be able to go back.
“I feel fine,” Morgan argues.“I can breathe and everything.”
“That could change at any moment! Allergic reactions are fickle. If you die from this strawberry smoothie I swear, I’m gonna-”
Morgan stands up along with him and presses herself close to him; he can smell those damn strawberries on her breath. “...spidey sense?” she whispers.
“Huh?”
“Your spidey sense,” she repeats again. “You feel it when there’s danger, right?”
He’s not really following. “Uh, Right.”
“Do you feel it now?”
Peter feels a lot of things right now: his hair turning grey, his blood pressure skyrocketing, his heart about to give out. But...no tingle of his spidey sense. Peter Parker might be freaking out, but the Spider-Man in him is giving Morgan the all clear.
“...No,” he admits, much to Morgan’s glee. “No, I don’t.”
“So that would mean,” she scribbles down more notes on her notebook. “I’m not allergic. Experiment complete.”
God, this kid is something else.
“Morgan,” Peter croaks out quietly, “My sixth sense isn’t exactly a litmus test for allergies. We need to get you to a doctor.” Just because he trusts his spidey sense with his life doesn’t mean he completely trusts it to save everyone else's. It’s complicated like that.
Morgan’s whole face scrunches in a pout. Five minutes. It’s been five minutes since the strawberry of doom. “I told you. I can breathe fine. My throat doesn’t hurt. Do we have to?”
Sure, that’s good news. But. “One thousand percent. Let’s go.”
She barely gets her notebook back in her backpack before Peter’s dragging her out of the shop. Once on the sidewalk, Peter starts fiddling with his bracelets that hold his nano tech Iron Spider suit, and Morgan gets even more excited considering she very well might be poisoned at this very second.
“I get to swing?” she whispers. “You never let me swing!”
“Yeah, well,” Peter discreetly drags them to the nearest alley, allowing the suit to cover what he’s already: he’s thankful that the early spring heat left him in only a tee and some shorts, because it’s not always the most comfortable to layer underneath it. “You tell me if you start to feel sick,” Peter commands, as if it’ll do much good. It’s five blocks to the nearest hospital, May’s hospital, and he has Karen contact her to explain the need for fifty epipens for Morgan on standby (and maybe a sedative for him) as he swings over there in record time.
Two minutes. He’s killing it. (Pun...not intended).
And Morgan is still insisting she feels fine.
Peter manages to find yet another corner of obscurity to change back into Peter Parker right outside the hospital. (The great part about being a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man in New York is that eventually, the novelty wears off and Spider-Man is as common as every other weirdo sighting. People don’t really pay him much mind.) Morgan is still fine, tentatively touching her lips and cheeks as he rushes them inside. The nurse at the emergency room waiting desk has to listen to Peter ramble on about how he’s the worst babysitter because the kid might be dying but not yet and strawberries are the worst and do you have an epipen.
May comes down maybe three minutes later, out of breath maybe, but pretty calm, and leads the two of them around back, explaining that they just need to watch her for a few minutes in case of a severe allergic reaction. All in all, a better explanation that Peter can give.
“I think she’s okay…” May says as she looks Morgan over on her cot; the kid nods along with that assessment. “We’ll keep her here for a bit to make sure, but Pete: I don’t think she has a strawberry allergy. At least not one as bad as Pepper’s.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” Morgan scoffs. She’s already reaching for her notebook in her backpack once more to scribble more notes. Peter lets her this time, opting for silence as he buries his face in his hands and tries to get his heart rate down. “How long do I have to stay here?”
May has the nerve to look amused. As if her beloved nephew wasn’t about to be guillotined on the front steps of Stark Industries. “An hour. Just to be safe.”
“A whole hour!?”
“That’s what you get for tricking Peter into letting you try strawberries.”
“It wasn’t a trick,” Morgan stresses, and Peter wills himself to look up and give her the stink eye. “It was an experiment. Peter said it was, as long as I write everything down. Otherwise it’s just screwing around. But not a trick.”
“Morgan,” Peter sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. May puts a pulse oximeter on her finger to keep track of her heart rate, but Peter’s pretty sure that it’s just there for his ease. “Experiments have safety protocols. Scientific methods. A hypothesis that everyone in the room knows about before said experiment may or may not blow up.”
“So….I did science wrong?”
“Yes. You scienced wrong.”
Morgan grumbles, looking back down at her notes. “But I wrote everything down! I made notes. I kept track of my symptoms -”
Peter reaches forward and grabs Morgan’s hand, bringing it to his mouth to leave a few quick kisses. “You scared me. This wasn’t safe. You can’t ever, ever do that to someone. If something happened to you...” he trails off, staring at her heart rate, and wills himself to remain calm.
She looks puzzled. “But you’re Spider-Man,” she whispers. “It had to be you. Dad or Mom wouldn’t know if I was going to be having a reaction, but you would. You always know when something dangerous is gonna happen before it happens because of your Spidey sense.”
“I -” he stutters, “It doesn’t really work like that.”
She taps the notebook, a shit-eating grin on her face. “My experiment says it does.”
May wheezes out a laugh at his expense.
Everything is terrible.
“I even figured out what it takes to swing with Spider-Man,” she goes on. “But that one was just an accident.”
This time May’s laugh is ear-splitting while Peter’s jaw nearly falls to the floor.
Morgan be such a little shit.
While Peter tries to remember what words are, Morgan flips the page in her notebook, settling in for another half-assed experiment. “What if we did an experiment to see how Dad would react to seeing us eating strawberry ice cream?”
Oh, man. Peter already knows what would happen. Chaos. Tears. A call for an ambulance that definitely wouldn’t be for Morgan. “Kid, your dad has a bad heart. And a bad arm. Bad ankles. Every single joint of his needs a spray of WD-40. We’re not doing this to him. He survived the infinity stones, but if he sees you with a bowl of strawberry ice cream he just might drop dead.”
That doesn’t seem to worry her. At all. Poor Mister Stark. “He’ll be fine! He’ll see I’m not allergic and be okay.”
Peter’s not so sure. “This isn’t even an experiment. This is a prank.”
“But if we write everything down… then it’s an experiment, right? ”
“No.”
Morgan starts swinging her legs back and forth off the side of the cot. “Fine. So it’s a prank. But you did say you wanted to prank him back after what he did to Karen.”
The memory immediately gives Peter an oncoming migraine. He has no idea where Tony got the idea to temporarily swap out his AI for a replacement that sounded exactly like Daffy Duck but he definitely still hasn’t forgiven him for it. It took him a week of absolute insanity and the loss of several brain cells for him and Ned to go through the code and reset Karen.
So, Peter can’t be faulted when he finds himself saying: “Okay, yeah. Let’s prank him.”
May swears as she leaves to go back to the ER floor, grumbling about how she refuses to be a part of this charade, as Morgan cheers.
“But just Tony. Your mother is a saint who brought you into this world and doesn’t deserve this kind of torment.”
“Agreed,” Morgan nods, already scribbling her plans away even though Peter has definitely explained this is not an experiment. He starts talking dramatics and logistics of the prank: setting the scene as something casual and having the realization be slow and delayed. “Should we leave the carton out so he’ll see it?” she asks.
“Maybe. But he’ll probably figure it out pretty quickly without it. Pink ice cream is usually strawberry flavor.”
“How long do you think it’ll take him to notice?”
“Two minutes. Tops.”
“I say...five.”
“Five?”
“Yeah, five.”
Peter snorts out a laugh. “Fine. It’s a bet.”
“No, it’s a prank.”
“It’s both.”
“But it’s not an experiment?”
Peter whines, letting his head fall forward onto Morgan’s cot. He feels her pat his head in a very condescending there-there gesture. “Oh my god.”
She reaches around and starts poking at his cheek. “Can we leave early? I told you I’m fine.”
“No. You’re going to sit there for the remaining 42 minutes or whatever it is until May says you’re in the clear.”
“But I’m not allergic.”
“You’d better hope not. Otherwise the prank is off. You’ll go into anaphylactic shock, Tony will kill me, and then you’ll have to go my funeral instead.”
“Your funeral would be really boring.”
“Gee. Thanks.”
“We could still do the prank even if I am allergic.” She reasons. “There’s cotton candy flavored ice cream, that’s pink. He might think that’s strawberry.”
Peter blinks. “We should do a DNA test on you while you’re here. I fear you might be part demon.”
“Uncle Rhodey says the same thing.”
“Uncle Rhodey is right.” He sits up, checks her heart rate one last time and finally, finally feels at ease. He thinks she’s right. Turns out, Morgan’s not allergic to strawberries. But that doesn’t mean they won’t wait out the full hour per protocol. “Hey, did you even like them?”
“Like what?”
“The strawberries.”
“Oh.” She pauses, then shrugs. “Not really. The mango smoothie is way better.”
With a groan, Peter lets his head fall forward one last time, intent on not moving until their full hour is up.