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“And that’s it?” Steve asked, peering down at the screen in front of him. “That’s gone?”
“Yeah, it’s gone,” Morgan said happily, a massive smile on her face. “Then you just tap on the arrow. Not that one; the back one.”
“This one?”
“No, silly.” Morgan reached over and pointed on the opposite side of the screen to where Steve was pointing. “That one. The one facing to the left – backwards.”
“Oh.” Steve chuckled at himself and shook his head. “Which takes me to the menu?”
“To the inbox,” Morgan said, her eye roll softened by the fondness in her tone. “You press the button at the bottom to get to the inbox.”
“Huh.” After a moment, Steve did so and let out a happy laugh when he saw what had happened. “Hey; there’s your name!”
Morgan’s laugh was loud and she leant her forehead against Steve’s shoulder. “Yeah. That’s your inbox, Steve. It’s all of your incoming emails.”
“So when you send me one, it’ll be here?”
“Exactly.” Morgan pushed herself back up and smiled. “I’ll show you your outbox, too.”
Before she could, there was a cough from the doorway, though neither Morgan or Steve jumped.
“I hope you aren’t teaching him where to find the por–”
“Do not finish that sentence, dad,” Morgan warned, not even lifting her eyes from the tablet in front of her. “I don’t want to think about that.”
Tony sighed. “Damn it. I miss the days that you blushed and squealed when I embarrassed you.”
“Hm. Now it’s a daily occurrence and I’ve built up a tolerance.”
“Just getting my fill before you leave me again.”
“And that’s why I’m teaching this old man how to email,” Morgan said, nudging Steve in the side. “I miss him too much when I’m away and my only time to see him is having to wait until he pops up in the background when you call me.”
If Morgan noticed the way that Steve’s cheeks flushed and Tony preened, she didn’t mention it.
“Very kind of you, baby. But I need to interrupt for a moment. Bit of an Avengers emergency, I’m afraid, and I need a helping hand in the control room. Not that he can do much with the computers if he still hasn’t mastered email.” Tony shuddered dramatically and then gasped Steve made some sort of aborted gesture behind the tablet.
Morgan laughed. “I’m in my twenties,” she reminded the men in the room. “I can handle you swearing.”
Before Tony could open his mouth, Steve let out a shout and Morgan jumped. “Ha! I did it! Did I – wait, Morg, did I do it?”
Leaning over, Morgan took a quick look at the screen. The email had in fact been sent, a small picture of an arrow wrapped around an envelope there as proof. “You did,” she said, laughing when Steve wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close in victory. She turned and pressed her face into Steve’s shoulder at the kiss that was dropped to her hair. “You’ve sent your very first emails.”
With his arm still holding Morgan to him, Steve turned back to the tablet and squinted down at it. “So to send another, I just press these three dots?”
“No, no. You press the pencil – over here, see?”
Using the stylus Morgan had grabbed from her own tablet, Steve carefully tapped where he was being shown, grinning when a blank email popped onto the screen. “Ha! I did it again! And then your name goes in this box and… wait, what did I do?”
“As hilarious as this is,” Tony cut in, a smile clear in his tone, “I really do have to cut in.”
“Of course, sweetheart, sorry.” Steve started to pull his arm back from around Morgan and made to lock the tablet in his hand. “You can go back to college now that I know how to talk to you, Morg.”
Morgan laughed when Tony held up his arm in protest, glaring across the room.
“No, she cannot! Who do you think you are? Telling my baby she’s allowed to leave me, giving her all of these ideas about the free world.”
Steve looked to the ceiling as he stood from the couch, setting his tablet down on the arm. “I thought you said there was an emergency?”
“Right.” Tony glared at Steve for a moment more before he jerked his head. “Only minor. Just need some extra eyes, ears, and hands. Sorry, Morg. Just got to borrow your Uncle Steve for bit. I’ll send him back to you later and you can show him how to get to the interesting sites.”
“‘Uncle Steve’,” Morgan said with another roll of her eyes and a delicate snort. “It never gets old.”
“What?”
Morgan stood up and straightened her skirt as she crossed the room to her dad. Resting her hand on his arm for a moment, she brushed a kiss to his cheek. “Didn’t work when I was ten, isn’t going to work now.”
As Morgan left the room, she could just picture the two men staring after her in confusion before they would turn to each other with mirroring expressions of bewilderment. After a moment, her dad was sure to laugh it off and Steve would blush to the tips of his ears before stuttering out that they were meant to be in the control room.
One day, she told herself as she walked away. When she pulled out her phone, she laughed at the email that sat there from Steve. It was the first one he’d done; the one that he’d hidden from her view with a large hand just so that he could write something silly (and riddled with spelling errors due to his fat fingers) that she could read later. She sighed at the ending; a carefully drafted ‘love you, Morg. Your Uncle Steve’.
One day they’d get it.
/
Morgan laughed as Steve closed the application once again and cursed under his breath.
“Don’t press it so hard,” she said, tapping on the icon again and bringing the white drawing pad back onto the screen of Steve’s tablet. “Just touch it once. Lightly.”
Steve’s concentration was palpable as he focused on following Morgan’s instructions. “And then what?”
“Then you pick whatever colour you want.” Morgan gestured at the colour palette across the bottom of the screen next to the small images of pens, pencils, and erasers. Steve had finally mastered email and Morgan felt a little more confident in showing him a few more things that he could do with his tablet, starting with drawing apps.
Nothing would ever match up to a good old-fashioned pencil and paper in Steve’s eyes and Morgan knew that, but she also knew how hard her dad had worked on perfecting a drawing application across the latest models of Stark Pads. When Steve picked his first colour, Morgan sighed and tucked her legs underneath herself on the couch.
Settling down against Steve, she watched as he drew the start of the New York skyline she was so used to looking out over.
“Don’t you think it’s time?”
“What?” Steve looked up from his tablet for a moment and lifted an eyebrow at her.
“I’m not here anymore,” Morgan said, not meeting Steve’s gaze. She’d thought about what she would say a hundred times, ever since she was a child. There was no rhyme or reason for why the words were suddenly tumbling out of her mouth, or why it wasn’t her dad she’d decided to talk to in the end, but she wasn’t going to falter now. “I’m not around all the time and you’ve both stepped away from full-time superheroing. Don’t you think it’s time you admitted it? Everybody can see it, Steve. We’re all waiting.”
“Morg–”
“Uncle Steve,” she cut in, her voice almost a plea. It hurt now. It was real and she was scared. She’d known for so long that this was the real thing, not just a figment of her imagination or some sort of childish longing for a family. “I’m not a child. I can see it and I know you can, too. Dad sees it, feels it. You have to know what he’d say. Please.”
Much to her dismay, Steve didn’t give a verbal response. All he did was lift his arm and pull her close to his side, squeezing her tight as her eyes fell closed.
“Look, Uncle Steve.” Morgan sniffed and opened her eyes again to tap at Steve’s tablet. “The first colour you chose on here was brown. A hundred colours and you chose brown.”
“Amber,” Steve murmured, eyes on the screen. “It’s amber.”
Morgan knew. Of course she knew.
It was the exact colour that Morgan had looked into every night growing up when her dad kissed her goodnight. She’d seen that shade shining bright with tears, and she had watched it dull and darken whenever she shouted something she would immediately regret. It was the colour that she saw every day in the mirror, in every photo she took of herself. Of course her dad had found a way to recreate it in digital form and of course Steve had chosen to use it.
When Steve stayed quiet, she sighed. “I promise you, Uncle Steve, it’s not just you.”
There was a long moment of silence before Steve sniffed and pressed a kiss to Morgan’s curls. “Didn’t your dad say something about games on this thing? It’s been a while since I played solitaire.”
/
Morgan shifted the pile of books into the crook of her left arm as she struggled to unlock her apartment door. She’d been back at college for two weeks and was missing her dad something fierce. Life was good. Her hours were filled with classes and studies, evenings spent in bars or dancing the night away with friends and she wanted nothing more.
Well. There was something she wanted.
Every night she spent a few minutes emailing Steve, laughing at the way he tried to use modern slang or attempted to add a picture of his view and ended up sending her a photo of his blurred feet instead. He was such a big part of her life and something deep within her yearned to make it more official. Steve had been there for as long as she could remember; cooking meals for her when Tony was called away on business, wiping away tears caused by scraped knees or stupid boys, taking her shopping or even to have her nails done around her birthday.
He wasn’t just her Uncle; he was her best friend. She’d spent her childhood years watching Tony like a hawk, desperate for her dad to not live alone and broken-hearted. She knew it wasn’t something she’d made up and the need inside of her to have both men together and happy was only growing stronger with her age.
Morgan nearly dropped all of the books in her arms when her phone pinged in her pocket. She wasn’t used to having it on loud and all of a sudden it was going off like a crazed thing. Finally managing to push her door open and throw her books onto the coffee table, Morgan fished her phone from her back pocket.
“Alright, alright,” she muttered when it chimed insistently yet again. “I’m here. What do you possibly want?”
Her screen was lit up with messages from her dad. Heart beating a little faster at the amount of messages coming one after another, she swept her thumb across to unlock it and her mouth fell open. Because there, right there on her screen, was a picture of Steve asleep.
That in itself wasn’t unusual. Everyone that lived in the tower – and many that didn’t – thought it their personal mission to try and catch Steve in positions that were deemed too ‘normal’ for the famed Captain America and Morgan’s camera roll was filled with photos of Steve half asleep and drooling, or eating with grease dripping down his hands, or mid-way through a sneeze.
What was tripping her up was the fact that the picture was taken in Tony’s bed. That was her Uncle Steve, in her dad’s bed. It was her dad’s hand curved around his shoulder and Tony’s old and ratty Black Sabbath t-shirt that Steve was nuzzling in to.
Warmth bloomed in her chest, hot and fast. A smile grew until she felt as though her face was going to split into two. Before she knew it, she was laughing. Bright, bubbles of laughter flew up her throat and past her lips, echoing in the hallway as tears started to run down her cheeks.
She’d always been a happy girl, but she couldn’t remember ever feeling like this. It was everything she’d ever wanted and her hands started to shake as she scrolled past the picture to the messages underneath.
>Guess you gave us the push we needed, kiddo.
>He’s sort of cute. When he’s asleep, I mean.
>Hey, baby? Are you there?
>Guess you must be working hard. Or drinking hard. Might be a bit early for the second one, but live it up!
>Don’t tell Steve I said that. Don’t want to ruin this before it starts and you know what he’s like about rules and ‘adult behaviour’.
>I’m going to join him in a nap. Too much excitement for an old man like me. Text me when you’re out of class and have a spare moment to talk.
>Reckon you’ll still want to call him Uncle? Maybe we should talk about that.
>Miss you, kid. Love you.
>And thanks, baby. Thank you so much.