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Morgan Stark doesn’t remember her dad.
She pretends she does sometimes, pieces together all the pictures, and stories, and recordings he’s left, and pretends she remembers the way he sounded when he said he loved her.
She was four when it happened.
You start forming memories at age two. Morgan looked it up.
She doesn’t know if she has any memories of him. She thinks she can remember things sometimes. She thinks she can remember how it felt to be hugged by him.
Peter tells her about how her dad mentored him and she pretends that he’s alive.
She pretends that he watched her grow up.
She pretends that Peter's experiences were hers and that Tony brought her to ice cream after her first invention got sold.
She pretends she knew him as well as she knows her mom or Uncle Rhodey.
She treasures every scrap of information she has.
He loved cheeseburgers and engineering and her.
Everyone always includes Morgan as an afterthought.
As though she was just part of his happily ever after.
They talk about the boys he found, she doesn’t begrudge Harley and Peter for sharing her dad. They miss him too. She’s watched from the stairs as Peter cried in her mom's arms.
She was four when that happened too.
She curses it sometimes. The fact she can so perfectly remember that scene but the fact she doesn’t know what her dad smelled like.
When she’s ten she has a box under her bed.
Every photo she could find, every newspaper article, every transcript of people talking about him, she has saved.
When she’s thirteen she lights them all on fire.
It was a camping trip she got permission to go on by herself.
Two nights in the woods by her house, close enough to be safe, far enough no one could hear her pain.
She lights a fire and watches the edges of the photoes burn.
She yells up at the night sky and curses him for being a hero.
The world might have needed him, but so did she. He should have thought of her.
Didn’t he know heroes die young?
She watches a photo burn and she cries.
When she’s fifteen she regrets it.
By the time she’s sixteen she knows how to pretend she knew him. She does interviews and talks about her dad, and doesn’t wince, and doesn’t cry.
They say he would be proud of her and she hopes they’re right.
She forgets about him sometimes. She sees her mom crying and she can’t relate. She sees fathers day on a calendar and she thinks of Rhodey.
She still feels a hole inside her, but it’s just another part of her life.
She moves on.
Heroes die young.
Morgan wakes up one day and can’t remember what it felt like to be hugged by her dad.
She never forgets that people make promises they can’t keep, not really.
Her dad told her that he'd be home soon.
It wasn’t a lie.
It wasn’t how she wanted him home though. She wanted her dad's hugs, not a funeral.
It hits her when she goes to Peter’s.
He was her brother and she loved him.
He was a hero and he did the same thing as her dad.
Heroes die young.
She cries at Peter’s memorial.
She cries for her dad as well as for Peter.
She cries because Peter’s friends look so lost.
She cries because someday she won’t remember what his laugh sounded like.
She cries and then she picks herself back up.
They asked Morgan Stark if she would be the next Ironman and she doesn’t tell them that heroes die young.
She jokes it off and they end up forgetting that train of thought and focusing on the newest from Stark Industries.
Morgan sponsors heroes and pays for their equipment in the hope it’ll give them another day with their families.
Morgan goes on.
Morgan lives.