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“Hey, Pete,” comes a yell, echoing from behind the half-wall splitting the dining area from the living room he’s currently desecrating.
“Mm’ busy,” he calls back, words muffled around the puckered end of the balloon clenched between his teeth.
“Now,” the yell comes again, more forcefully this time.
Peter pinches the balloon tip between his fingers, feeling stupid, and ties a knot to close it off. Bright red floats down to meet the rest of the gumball-esque display littering the floor. He’s got half a baggie of limp balloons to go yet and he doesn’t want to keep going, at all, actually. Maybe going to see what Poppy wants is more of a welcome distraction than he had initially thought.
“Tony,” Peter says as he walks past the kitchen on the way towards the bar, where Poppy is hiding. “Tony, why am I blowing up balloons manually? With my mouth and my precious, precious air? Don’t you have a machine for this?”
Tony looks up from the cake he’s icing terribly. It looks like it’s decorated with stripes of cinnamon toothpaste and chunky cement. “Uh, because it’s funnier this way?” says Tony. In his hand he’s got one of those flat spatula things for smearing the frosting around and Peter wants to laugh, but it also sorta sucks, because this is supposed to be so special and perfect and Tony is making the adult equivalent of a mudpie.
Though, really, the cake is so much funnier this way. It'll probably get a much better reception than anything beautiful and professional would. Harley loves it when Tony is incapable, after all. “Look at your face,” Tony says with a snort. “You look like a tomato, Pete. Don’t asphyxiate, Jesus, it really shouldn’t be this hard for you. Don’t you have, like, enhanced lungs? Superhero lungs like a pair of wind turbines?”
“Is Peter having trouble blowing?” comes the overly saccharine question from the doorway. There waits Poppy June Keener in all her five-foot-nine glory, taller than both Peter and Tony and probably more powerful than them, too, with those bass-playing calluses on her fingers and cat-eyed glasses on her regally upturned nose and cheekbones like the golden edges of the Grand Canyon. She’s sixteen now and Peter thinks she could easily just fucking eviscerate them, rip the crown jewels from between their legs and use them to bedazzle her favorite fanny pack or something.
“You shouldn’t know anything about euphemisms, young lady,” says Tony, pointing the spatula at Poppy. A sizable glob of icing falls onto the counter. “Shit,” Tony says, and he laps it up on a finger, licking it clean. “And—hey, did you leave my baby daughter over there alone? The fruit of my loins, the one bright spot within my dark days?”
“She can’t even walk,” Poppy says, “where is she going to go? Besides, I just came over here to get Peter to help me hang the banner. Momo finished adding her artistic touches to it.”
“Miss Keener. Are you implying that you dipped my baby in paint?” says Tony.
“Yup,” says Poppy.
“Mi stai rompendo le palle,” Tony murmurs, closing his eyes and shaking both hands with his middle and pointer fingers pressed to the tip of his thumb. “She’s a kid, I’m not mad, at all, I couldn’t be less mad—” and then less to himself, “go check on my kid, what are you loitering for? You left the baby in drive at the top of a hill and if I find her totaled in an intersection it’s both of your heads.”
Poppy flicks one eyebrow.
“It’s Peter’s head,” Tony amends quickly.
“Hey!” says Peter, already scrambling over couches and chairs towards the place he knows Morgan is stowed. “I want to make it absolutely clear that I had nothing to do with this.” He finds her underneath the bar, sitting on the enormous banner that Poppy was in charge of decorating, her hands painted blue and her bare feet red. She’s got a rainbow smeared across her legs and a handprint on her cheek that is far too large to be her own. “Poppy, I see you left your signature on the piece,” Peter notes idly, grabbing Morgan under the armpits and hoisting her into the air, keeping her far away from the front of his very new, very clean shirt.
“Is that a handprint. On my baby.”
“Is that oobleck on my brother’s cake?”
“You know what? Touche.”
Peter says, “I’m putting her in the little sink bathtub thingy. May’s coming soon, right? May can finish the bath, but until she gets here—” Peter leans his head towards Morgan’s and slips into some disgusting baby-speak, “—you can just splish-splash around, is that right, hash brown? Sweet potato? Curly fry?”
“I thought the other kid is the potato one,” Tony says distractedly, back to meticulously icing the cake. The more icing he smooths down, the more lopsided it gets, and the more the red and gold and white blend into brown.
“She gets to be the fun types of potatoes because she’s more fun than Harley. Is that right, baby face? Oh my G-d, she’s so chubby and cute. I’m gonna explode right now.”
“Can you hurry up so we can hang this darn banner up?” Poppy grouses. Peter is fairly certain she’s rolling her eyes. Her eye rolls carry seismic force. This one is a Richter five-point-three.
Peter fills the tiny tub just slightly, the water lukewarm. “Here, Mo,” he says, unceremoniously dropping her into it.
She is frighteningly stoic for a second before she wiggles her toes and then squeals, slapping the water’s still surface.
“Yay,” Peter agrees. “So fun, Mo. Tub time. Get so clean.”
She wiggles her head side to side and gives an enormous grin that makes Peter’s knees weak.
Poppy yanks on his hand. An old—does three-days-healed count as old?—shoulder wound twinges, but he goes with her to hoist the banner.
“Wait,” he says, when they’re back at the bar, the banner crumpled but bright with paint speckles, handprints, and little swirly designs. “I want to get a good look at it first, admire your handiwork.”
“Can you actually not?” Poppy says.
Peter looks over his shoulder at her incredulously. “It’ll just take three seconds, Pop. It's not like it'll put us behind schedule.”
She opens her mouth, then closes it. Her eyebrows are hanging low. When she thinks, she and Harley get the same little notch on their forehead. When she bites her lip, however, he sees her front tooth isn’t twisted the same as his. “Just,” she says. She flaps her arms helplessly. “Put the thing up, mother of pearl.”
Peter studies her a moment. “Poppy,” he says slowly. “We’re about to have a heart-to-heart, aren’t we?”
“No, we most certainly ain’t,” she says.
“Uh uh uh,” says Peter, and he pounces forward, slinging an arm around her waist before she can think to squeal and make a break for the hills. He scoops her over his shoulder like Santa’s sack and dumps her onto the couch. She bounces on the cushion, flushed and murderous and ruffled, and Peter plops himself down next to her, wiggling himself comfortably into the crease and folding his arms.
Silence rings for a moment, broken only by Morgan’s idle splashing and quiet babbling.
“I’m not gonna start this,” Peter says. “I’m waiting on you, sugarplum.”
Peter doesn’t know how or where or when he collected a handful of stupid grandpa nicknames for all his sister-adjacent figures but he’s got them like warm towels on a red-eye flight in a little cart he pushes constantly and he always ends up goddamn mortified right after they slip out but he can’t exactly pluck them back out of the air and swallow them up, so. He deals with the consequences.
Poppy, it turns out, softens like butter on fresh bread when you’re sweet to her. Peter is fairly certain it’s the only reason she admits, “I just want him to have, like, the best birthday ever, y’know? Since Ma and I couldn’t make it out to New York last year for his eighteenth and all.” She rubs her nose frustratedly. “I want him to know we miss him. And love him. And, like, appreciate him, too, even if we can’t get him all the fancy doohickeys Tony and you make with him.”
Peter thinks he’s the melted one now. “Aw, Poppy,” he says, and he wrangles her into his side, all sinewy shoulder jabbing into his ribcage, but her chin rests on his collarbone and he thinks that right there is utterly precious. “I can tell you right now that Harley knows you guys love him.” Peter does not need to mention the bad days, the doubting days. He’s sure they are obvious, even if unsaid. And they’re rarer, now. “And you know that guy cries at the drop of a hat. He’ll love this. He’s, like, sent into hysterics when he sees a worm on the sidewalk, so this will just destroy him.”
“Okay, that’s true,” Poppy says.
“He’ll love it all,” Tony hollers from the kitchen.
Peter and Poppy jump a little. “You were not invited into this conversation, you big fart,” Poppy yells.
“Woof,” says Tony. “Sorry, sibling time, I shoulda’ known. I’m tactless, I have no sense of people skills, like, at all, that’s on me—”
“I’m begging you to stop,” says Poppy, slouching further into her seat and rubbing her eyes under her glasses.
Peter says, with the air of a man being shown his own gallows, “You get used to it.”
To which Poppy responds, “If I ever get used to him, kill me to spice it up.”
Peter laughs and ruffles her bangs into her eyes. “Hey,” he says. Then, singing, “Don’t worry, Poppy—everything will turn out alright.”
She closes her eyes and grumbles unintelligibly, but her shoulders are loose, so Peter chalks it up as a resounding win.
The banner goes up, spelling HOLY SHIT, YOU’RE OLD, in unrepentant block letters. Streamers dangle from the ceiling, Stevie the cat comes out from her crypt in Harley’s bedroom to swat at the balloons dancing across the floorboards. May arrives, washes a pruney Morgan, and dresses her in the most adorable little overalls set Peter has ever seen in his entire life. Seriously, it gives him agita.
The snack table is set up with three flavors of hummus, those enormous pretzel log things that Harley likes because he’s a sadist, chopped vegetables, and some cheesy something Tony made literally just for himself. Peter has his camera slung around his neck and his finger is perched on the shutter button. His stomach is sort of rolling. He feels for Poppy.
She’s perched right near him, on the arm of the couch, as if she’s ready to fly bird-like as soon as the door opens.
“Why are we—why are we all waiting here like geezers who have nothing better to do?” Tony says, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “We look so stupid, c’mon, let’s at least hide or something—”
“Harley is scared of loud noises,” Peter says dutifully, the same thing he had said the first time Tony brought up hiding, and the time May suggested it, and when Pepper texted to ask if they were in place because they’re rounding the corner nearest to the building now.
He hears the scuffling in the hallway—Harley’s stupid, worn-out skate shoes on the carpet, and the sound of his heartbeat and Pepper’s and his Ma’s like intertwining melody lines and here comes the rousing chorus—
The door opens and they erupt in all manners of squealing and jumping and shouting, “Happy birthday! Happy birthday, Harley!”
And he stands there, a little gobsmacked, with Pepper holding his shoulders and his Ma grinning wide and clapping, and his eyes gaping behind the lenses of his glasses, and Stevie the cat runs up and sits on his foot, and Peter snaps picture after picture, and Harley starts to unceremoniously cry.
“Aw, Harley,” comes the chorus, and Poppy beats them all there, tossing herself into her brother’s arms with enough force to knock them back into Pepper.
“Guys,” Harley sniffles. “What the fuck. What the fuck.”
Peter keeps clicking pictures. Of Harley and Poppy and Pepper and Missus Keener, of May holding Morgan and shaking her little hand like she’s cheering, of Tony sneaking bites of the cheese thing on Triscuits. Of the balloons and the banner and the cake, and before he knows it he’s got an armful of lanky Keener, smelling of cinnamon soap and October sun, and he can feel Harley’s grin pressing into his shoulder with the way he leans himself over Peter, swallowing him up in his big dumb long arms, pressing him against his stupid skinny chest.
“Thanks,” Harley says with a hiccup that makes Peter aww aloud, squeezing Harley to him. “This is real great, real nice, thank you.”
“Wasn’t me,” Peter says, and he opens one eye just so he can send a wink Poppy’s way. “It was all your sister, really.”
Harley rotates them, still knotted together, ninety degrees so they can both stare at Poppy as she blushes and kicks her sock into the carpet with a shrug.
“Thanks, Pop,” Harley says fervently. “Love ya, kid.”
She flips him the bird, but the set to her lips is all satisfied.
“Can we eat my masterpiece cake now?” Tony says, suddenly in their ears, wrapping his arms around them. “I spent all day making that thing. It’s Chopped material, truly.”
“But the true test is whether Ina Garten would have made it for Jeffrey,” Harley says sagely.
“I,” says Tony. He presses a kiss onto Harley’s head and then says, “So, cake, yes, cake, happy birthday and all those—semantics, cake time, yes yes cake.”
Poppy catches Peter’s eye as they head towards the kitchen and Peter taps her knuckles with his. “You did good, Pop Rock,” he says.
She grins. “Couldn’t’a done it without my doofus brother.”
Peter basks in that all night—in the type of warm contentment that can only be found when soaking in the yellow light from waxy birthday candles with your favorite people on your every side.