Chapter Text
Morgan’s life of crime begins at a gala.
This seems unlikely, but it’s not, really, considering that a) her mom and her dad abandon her to go talk with a celebrity they’ve met before but want to use to sponsor a new product b) Peter isn’t there because he convinced Shuri to go with him to tear down a crime syndicate in Spain (she’s pretty sure it’s in Spain, anyway), and c) she hates formal events in the first place.
Her dress is itchy, and she doesn’t know why she agreed to come, except, yes, she does because Peter informed her a few weeks ago that her dad is getting flustered about the possibility of her growing up and not wanting to spend time with him now that she’s in high school already, Pete.
Peter does a very good imitation of her dad when he’s worried about something that doesn’t need worrying about, good enough to make her laugh and also good enough for her to offer to tag along tonight, which is why she is standing in front of the dickish son of Justin Hammer, Oliver Hammer.
Good ol’ Justin went to jail for a while before she was born, and while that normally wouldn’t bother Morgan—most of her aunts and uncles have done the same—he got out because of his money. Besides lacking the dramatic flair of a true prison break, it’s sleazy and cheap, just like the family as a whole.
Oliver, however, is her age, and he’s currently talking about the fancy diamond his dad bought off a museum.
“It’s over a hundred carats,” he tells her, expression wide but sharp at the corners in a way that lets Morgan know that this is supposed to impress her. Annoyingly enough, he’s the taller of the two of them, and he stares down the bridge of his nose at her, his black and white suit crisp but plain next to her glittering, indigo get-up. “It’s huge, and it’s a centerpiece in the living room of our penthouse.”
“Wow,” she deadpans, searching the crowd for her mom or her dad. Morgan doesn’t need an excuse to blow Oliver off; her dad’s humiliated his in front of Congress, after all. However, she knows due to previous experience that Oliver is persistent and will likely follow her wherever she may head off to. Her parents are capable of scaring him off, but until they show up, it’s easiest to stay where she is, leaning against a wall with a glass of so-so sparkling grape juice.
“I know,” Oliver sighs dramatically. “You wouldn’t believe how much it cost. At an auction, he could’ve gotten it for less, but since he had to convince the museum—”
“I’m dying to know,” she lies, mostly because she knows he’ll tell her anyway and would prefer to not beat around the bush about it.
“Fifty million.”
Morgan has to slap a hand over her mouth so she doesn’t spit juice over her dress. “For a rock?”
The money doesn’t faze her. Given her upbringing, she’s seen more spent in one go, though Oliver seems to forget that he’s bragging to the daughter of two billionaires. It’s the uselessness of it that gets her. The Hammers could’ve donated that or put it into some start-up or done anything other than blow that kind of change on decor.
“It’s over a hundred carats, Morgan,” he insists as if she’s forgotten what he told her not even a minute ago.
She resists the urge to punch him, glaring not very subtly at him and the hair he’s put too much gel in. “You’ve said, Oliver,” she snipes, irritated with his use of her name.
“I was just making sure you remembered!”
She rolls her eyes. “I remember that you’re a douche just fine. Go bother someone else.”
He sniffs, leaning into her space. “You’re just jealous,” he drawls with no small amount of satisfaction. His breath smells like shrimp. Morgan doesn’t even like shrimp, and to make it worse, when she doesn’t respond, squinting at him in an attempt to comprehend how to begin telling him how utterly idiotic he is, Oliver smirks. “See? You can’t even respond. Girls just don’t get this kind of thing. The diamond’s an investment. It’s gonna’ be worth way more when we sell it later.”
Morgan has a lot of things going through her mind, like she can’t respond because it takes more than two seconds to process his stupid ass, like she knows what a fucking investment is, like this is why MJ says “eat the rich”.
What comes out is arguably more direct than any of that. “Get away from me, or I’m going to dump my drink on you.”
He grins, getting closer on purpose as his blue eyes twinkle with amusement. “What, did I offend you?” And then, the nail in the coffin. “Is it that time of the month?”
He, more than just about anybody after their numerous run-ins, should know better than to call her bluff. With a jerk of her wrist, Oliver ends up with a faceful of grape juice, and she sets the glass down on the nearest table as she storms away from his spluttering.
She’s not sure how carbonated liquid feels in one’s eyes, but she hopes it stings.
She can see her parents still with the celebrity—an actress, Morgan thinks—and she heads across the room. Whether because the gala is in full swing and people are occupied with one another or because of her expression, nobody stops her to chat along the way, nor does anyone take much notice of Oliver’s indignance in the corner where she left him.
She hopes the diamond gets scratched. No, she hopes it gets shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. No, no—she hopes someone takes it and then eggs his fucking house or something equally annoying as insult to injury. If someone stole the thing, not only would the Hammers never find out what happened to it, they couldn’t even buff out the scratch or sell the tiny pieces for even a little bit of their money back. It would all go down the drain, as they deserve, as Oliver deserves, specifically, because screw his investment.
If someone stole the diamond, he’d probably be pretty fucking offended, Morgan muses viciously, but as the silk of her mom’s dress comes more clearly into view, his other comments ring in her ears, his thoughts about what her sex means she does and doesn’t understand.
Wait.
Morgan stops in the hot path she was cutting across the event a moment previous, and an idea occurs to her, vindictive and wildly illegal.
If Oliver was watching, he might be properly wary of the near-manic grin that tears her mouth open and dissolves the fury from her features, but he’s in the corner with a stained, probably designer suit.
Good.
Morgan closes the rest of the distance to her parents—
“There’s my favorite teenager!” from her dad.
“Hi, honey,” from her mom.
—and is already running the technicalities of how she’s going to rob the Hammers blind.
//
Morgan begins with the basics, and by the basics, she means the best hacking tech money can buy. For one, she gets into the penthouse’s security system. Considering it’s Hammer tech, that’s not especially hard, but what does make things a little more difficult is the alarm set into the pedestal the diamond is encased on top of. She discovers its existence in the first place because she watches the camera footage of Oliver’s dad setting it up in an unfortunately smart move; the alarm, set to go off if the diamond is substantially moved, isn’t connected to the rest of their security, which means she can’t disable it remotely.
She frowns at the screen of her laptop, sitting cross-legged on her bed. She’s already blocked FRIDAY off her computer and from her room for this particular undertaking, but she still has to be careful. She’d prefer to do this on holograms, see everything laid out in full, but she can’t risk anyone barging in and asking questions.
She could just let the alarm go off, but as soon as the mics around the place pick it up, they’re wired to phone the police. Morgan has spent a considerable part of her adolescence working out with superheroes, true, but she would prefer not to test the physical abilities she might have as a result by running from the cops.
The logical solution is to steal the pedestal.
Issue: the pedestal is solid marble, and Morgan is a fifteen-year-old girl whose getaway car is a moped. Even if she could carry the whole thing out, her moped has a max speed of thirty-five miles an hour. It’ll slow her down too much, and again, she isn’t interested in running from the cops.
She groans, flopping back on the bed for a long second for the drama of it all before she sits back up to watch Justin Hammer install the alarm again. It takes five rewinds for her to find the answer she’s looking for, and just like at the gala, a shark-like grin overtakes her features.
The alarm is closely connected to the sensors at the very top of the pillar, so if she gets something to laser just below it, she’ll be home free.
Morgan leans back, supremely pleased with her inventiveness. “It’s nice being a genius,” she announces to nobody in particular.
Then, from down the hall of the tower, where they’re currently staying, her mom calls: “Dinner!”
And if in her excitement to get out the door and to the spaghetti she’s been promised earlier that day, Morgan trips over her own feet and a shoe in her path, no one needs to know.
A genius, indeed.
//
Never let it be said that Morgan is unprepared. The night of The Great Downfall of Oliver Hammer’s Sexist Bullshit, she has all her ducks in a row. More than that, she has all her ducks marching in unison and singing songs like the Air Force trainees her Uncle Rhodey has shown her videos of.
As far as her parents know, she’s going to hang out at Riri’s house, one of her friends from school. She has even informed them that she might be late because they’re marathoning all three of the Pitch Perfect movies, which means she has all the time in the world to get this done.
Her tracker in her phone is off, and after a stop at an admittedly sketchy gas station, she’s switched her t-shirt and favorite leather jacket for a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt, both black. When she gets closer, she’ll put on a ski mask too. Or the domino mask she picked up from a party store.
(Logically, she knows she should go with the ski mask if she’s genuinely concerned with covering her face, but the masquerade mask is so much cooler.)
In the backpack she wears, she has all the tools she needs—filched from the labs at the Compound—including the sticky gloves and socks her dad made for her when she was, like, eight and sad she couldn’t climb walls like Peter.
Part of her says he would be less than pleased with her for using his invention to egregiously break the law, and another part of her says that because she’s bullying Justin Hammer and co., he’d look the other way and help her hide the evidence from her mom.
If this goes well, she’ll never have to find out what he thinks at all, but to bolster her confidence, she revs the engine of her moped. She made sure to plan this for a nice day so that her parents would let her drive, even if her mom says she can’t believe the state of New York lets kids under sixteen drive those nowadays, and as the sun goes down over the city, Morgan speeds off.
At thirty miles an hour.
She’ll get to the penthouse eventually, alright. Her moped takes her where she goes without the need for parental supervision, and she’s grateful. It’s part of the reason it’s named the Mayflower: if the pilgrims can flee an oppressive rule, so can she, and by oppressive rule, she means the fact that her parents have way too many resources they can use to monitor her.
Besides, her dad is scared of riding anything remotely similar to a motorcycle, and she thinks it’s fitting that the Mayflower shares a name with her aunt, the person her dad fears most, barring her mom.
At the thought, Morgan grins under her helmet, and before long, a ridiculously nice neighborhood comes into view.
She parks in the closest alley and begrudgingly tugs the ski mask on before she creeps down the street. In all her hacking—which is, unfortunately, the most legal part of the operation—she also came across the blueprints for the building, and she knows the window she’s aiming for: four stories up, arched, and impractical, doesn’t technically open or close.
Morgan has a plan for that, but first, she has to scale the damn thing.
After using her phone to knock out the security cameras, she tugs her gloves, flexing her fingers once they’re situated properly. The socks are surprisingly elasticky, and she stretches them over her shoes because NYC is gross and she would prefer not to step in a biohazard in her quest for vengeance. Then, pleased with her set up, she begins to climb.
It fucking sucks.
She’s always hated mountain-climbers when she’s tagged along to her mom’s workout classes, and they’re even worse twenty feet in the air. She doesn’t get how Peter does it all the time, though she supposes he has freaky spider genes to help him out.
Sweat is sticky on the back of her neck and will probably make her freshly trimmed bob stink by the time she’s done. Her arms are screaming at her, and with every step she takes, she curses Oliver goddamn Hammer for forcing her to cause his family problems. Then, she remembers his smug face and “Girls just don’t get this sort of thing” and keeps pushing.
She hasn’t looked down yet, she realizes, maybe halfway there, and decides that’s for the best. She’s already lied to her parents; she can’t chicken out before she breaks the law and makes doing so worth it.
She takes a few steps and then, accepting that she should really do some cardio or something, decides to take a break. She has time—according to the narrative she’s created, she and Riri would barely be to the Party in the USA scene in the first Pitch Perfect, by her estimate—so she can take a second. Except Morgan, a verified genius except for when she’s being a dumbass, is panting behind the ski mask, so she decides to take it off to give herself a second to breathe.
All goes according to plan for approximately one second. Then, she gets scared about not having both hands on the building, flails for a better grip, and drops it. She watches the fabric flutter in the wind, going down, down, down until she can’t see it anymore.
Morgan wishes she were more upset by it, but frankly, the domino mask has a lot more aesthetic appeal. Granted, her heart stops about three times working it out of her bag and finagling the cheap elastic strings over her ears, but the adrenaline rush makes the rest of the climb less hellish.
Hovering below the window she needs to infiltrate, she once again takes her chances with death as she finds what’s essentially a portable laser hidden away in her bag. Placing a sticky foot on the glass to make sure it doesn’t fall and shatter, she starts cutting a hole big enough for her to crawl through. She’ll admit that eyeballing it probably isn’t the most effective way to go about it, but she’s fueled in her mission by spite, not logistics. It works, alright, and in a surprisingly awkward process, she tucks the laser tool back into her backpack and ducks inside.
She lands, silent as a cat, in a crouch, just like her Aunt Natasha’s taught her, and she holds the pose for a few painstaking seconds, waiting for an alarm to sound, someone to realize she’s there. But the Hammers are at the same event as her parents tonight, and Morgan is going to enjoy the hell out of this.
Breaking: check.
Entering: check.
Now it’s time to commit—according to her research—grand larceny in the first degree in the state of New York.
Morgan likes the way that sounds maybe a little too much, but in her defense, it’s pretty badass. In the darkness of the Hammer penthouse, Morgan grins. Damn, she’s good.
Minding the piece of glass on the floor, Morgan slinks further inside, thinking of the floorplans she studied when she was still trying to figure out how to get past the issue of the pedestal. The living room isn’t far, but the thing about rich people, in Morgan’s lifetime of experience, is that they sometimes have a lot of doors leading to rooms they don’t need—including but not limited to, in the Hammers’ case, a walk-in pantry, refrigerator, and wine cooler—so it’s a careful process to figure out how to get from where she entered to the living room, which is arguably farther away than it should be.
Whatever.
She makes her way down a hallway, and at the end, she stares between a door to the left and another to the right. Why the Hammers have a door to their living room is beyond her—open concepts are much more modern, anyway—and while it doesn’t matter if she gets it wrong, she’d like the satisfaction of choosing correctly the first time. So she stands for a second, thinks, rubs the edge of the domino mask with her pointer finger.
She can’t remember, so she makes an impeccable leap of logic. “Left for living room,” she declares, and is, somewhat surprisingly, right.
A grin so wide it hurts splits her face as she lays her eyes on her prize.
“Fuck you, Oliver,” she murmurs, edging forward with a cursory glance at the cameras set into the corners of the room. She has faith in her hacking abilities and is reasonably sure, being Hammer Tech, that they won’t come back on, but it doesn’t hurt to check, or at least that’s what she tells herself.
She crouches to unzip her backpack. Right on top of the rest of her stuff—her change of clothes, a water bottle, assorted snacks—she finds the laser tool where she left it, and she hums as she flips the switch on it and goes to the pedestal sitting in the center of the room.
The smell is the worst part. Morgan doesn’t know what she expected charred—
(Is that the word? Charred? She’ll go with it.)
—marble to smell like, but it’s not good.
(The ski mask probably would’ve helped with that, along with preventing the coating of dust her lungs likely have now, but Morgan’s not going to acknowledge that—even mentally—any time soon.)
She coughs, freezes because she coughed and is expecting someone to jump out and catch her at work, and then unfreezes because she’s alone, dumbass, now get back to work.
Morgan’s inner monologue is both helpful and colorful, and she thinks that’s great.
The laser is quiet but potent, and Morgan takes care to make sure her fingers stay out of the way. She’s very entertained by the thought of the Hammers trying to figure out why there are scorch marks on the wall. In truth, they’re made from when the laser cuts through to the other side of the marble and Morgan doesn’t turn it off fast enough, but the interior design is ugly anyway. She’s giving them a valid reason to shell out on some redecorating, and hopefully this time, they’ll know better than to put a multi-million dollar trophy on display.
She eyes the diamond from its place within a glass case. It gleams in the orange glow of the laser, shining from every facet of its cut and looking more like a stock photo than something she can theoretically touch, assuming she can pull this off. It’s gorgeous, honestly. Morgan’s never been interested in geology, but any idiot could see that it’s worth a pretty penny. Probably. Hopefully not, actually? Morgan’s plan if she gets pulled over it to say that it’s a prop for a community theatre she’s a part of. And okay, the cover story isn’t great, but she’s workshopping at it. As she’s stealing the diamond. Details.
She shouts when the laser gets all the way through the pedestal, mostly because it makes a burn mark on the couch. It doesn’t set it on fire though, which Morgan appreciates. She’s not interested in an arson charge, and after putting the laser back in her bag, she considers the chunk of marble she now needs to squirrel out of the penthouse and back to the Mayflower.
Well, there’s no time like the present.
While it comes off the rest of the pedestal cleanly, it, unsurprisingly, is still heavy as shit. A breath punches out of Morgan, and she groans as she starts for the door. “Lift from the knees, lift from the knees,” she mutters.
She’s still going to do it because, you know, spite, but not for the first time, she decides she doesn’t have to be happy about it.
(That is very much a lie because, despite the sweat beading on her brow and the ache beginning to form in her arms, Morgan is gloating about the glory of it all but complaining is fun.)
It still sucks to carry around a block of marble, but she makes herself think of the shock that’ll be on the Hammer’s faces, how Oliver won’t have anything to brag about the next time they have the misfortune of meeting, and keeps walking. At the very least, she reminds herself, the journey back to her moped has been shortened.
The security in the penthouse, being Hammer tech, is weird—inconveniently strong in some areas and paper-thin in others. For example, it would take forever to override the facial recognition that allows the Hammers to get into the penthouse and make it open for her, but locking the elevator so that it won’t stop for anyone else on her way down? That’s a piece of cake.
Morgan sets the diamond down for a second before getting into the elevator and pulls a garbage bag from her backpack over it. It’s not discreet, exactly, but it’s surprisingly hard to find a solid burglary bag, so she’s making do. It’s better than walking around with the diamond out and about, anyway, and with a few taps on her phone, she’s rigged the elevator for her purposes and steps inside.
Morgan is of the opinion that the Hammer penthouse is ugly and impractical and an abomination to the very concept of interior design, but she will say that the building’s choice of elevator music—Bon Jovi—isn’t half bad.
“Woooaaah, we’re halfway there—wooaah, livin’ on a—”
The doors ding open, and Morgan darts through the lobby and into the New York City night fifty million dollars richer.
//
The ride home is uneventful, thankfully. For a moped, the Mayflower makes good time, and Morgan gets back to her penthouse—much more stylish than others she’s seen that night—long before her parents. The lack of supervision makes it easier to bust the diamond out of its confines, and she pulverizes the alarm that goes off with a rubber mallet she finds in her dad’s workshop—miniaturized for the house—until it stops.
Justin Hammer legitimately baffles her because—and Morgan doesn’t know how his company is still in business—the alarm itself doesn’t ping the police. It’s the security system wired to the mics in the living room which are supposed to pick up the sound of the alarm that do, but Justin clearly didn’t plan on someone stealing part of the pedestal.
Dumbass.
Morgan smashes the marble and the glass case on top of it apart, stashes the diamond in her sock drawer, and bags up the trash, which she takes to a dumpster a few blocks away.
When Morgan gets back home from that, she changes into less suspect clothes—her favorite pajamas, to be exact, which are some exercise shorts and an old shirt of her dad’s that he originally stole from her Uncle Rhodey—and flops down on her bed.
She really can’t believe she got away with that.
“Holy fuck,” she breathes.
How the hell did she get away with that? It helps that Justin Hammer and his son are loudmouthed idiots with too much faith in their abysmal products, but seriously—what?
Morgan stares up at her bedroom ceiling. “I am a criminal mastermind,” she declares, ignoring the soreness already spreading through her criminal mastermind limbs that just scaled a building.
Then, she turns over, satisfied with a job well-done and with plans to drift off after more exercise than she’s done in one go in at least six months. Except as she’s drifting off, the adrenaline of it all wears off enough for her to truly process that she has a fifty million dollar diamond hidden in her sock drawer and no idea what to do with it.
Shit, she spares the energy to think, and then she promptly falls asleep.
//
Morgan wakes up to the sound of her dad losing his mind down the hall in her parent’s room.
“Pepper! Pepper—Pepper.”
“What, honey?” her mom replies, sounding very much like she’s just woken up too.
“The Hammers got robbed.”
“What?”
“The Hammers got robbed!”
“How do you know?”
“Uh—how do I not know?”
“Tony.”
“I get my news from lots of sources, alright? You’re ignoring the point. They got robbed.”
“Honey, the last time you tangibly interacted with Justin was 2010.”
“But he’s still tacky and horrible and—”
“Fair.”
Morgan grins under her blankets, giggling softly to herself, and then, from her mom again, “How much did they lose?”
“Looks like someone stole a diamond he bought off a museum recently.”
“How much?”
“Take a guess.”
A sigh. “Twenty million.”
“Higher.”
“Thirty?”
“Fifty.”
“Holy shit.”
“Right?”
Morgan hears them dissolve into laughter that gets progressively louder, the two of them feeding off each other in a way that would doubtlessly make her Uncle Rhodey roll his eyes fondly, and she rolls over to get comfortable, fully intending to go back to sleep, when she hears her mom gasp out a breathless question: “Make sure you tell MJ. She’ll love it.”
Morgan’s eyes snap open.
She knows what she’s doing with the diamond.
//
Morgan’s plan from the beginning was to donate it to charity. She certainly doesn’t need the gem, but she’s fifteen and the daughter of two billionaires. There’s not a whole lot of ways she could discreetly get it pawned off—especially not without letting her parents know—but luckily, she has a pseudo-sister-in-law who doesn’t like rich people and is the most shrewd person Morgan knows, next to her mom.
If anyone can figure out what to do with the eensy-weensy felony Morgan committed out of sheer spite, it’s MJ, so Morgan starts thinking about how she’s going to make that work.
Her plan is simple, though it does involve some more illegal entering—hopefully minus the breaking, this time. She has Peter’s patrol schedule down to an approximate science, and if nothing else, there’s always the Spidey Watch blog Ned maintains. She’ll check to make sure he’s out—Peter’s super-hearing is incredibly inconvenient when she’s looking to fly under the radar—and then she’ll hang outside he and MJ’s bedroom window until she sees an opportunity to slip inside and deposit the diamond on her side of the bed. Probably with a note? An explanation of sorts seems reasonable, and she recently ordered a pack of sticky notes with cat faces on them, which she’s been very excited to use.
Yeah, she’ll leave a note.
It takes longer than she’d like, if she’s honest. She may think the diamond is the stupidest fucking purchase ever made, but it does feel somewhat blasphemous—the geologic equivalent, anyway—to keep it with socks she’s had since elementary school but hasn’t gotten around to throwing away. However, bar her underwear drawer, it’s the best hiding place she has, so thus, the diamond stays put until her parents take a business trip to Milan and she bunks with her Aunt May for a few days.
“Be good,” her mom instructs her after a peck on the forehead.
“Save some lasagna for me,” her dad says before a kiss on the cheek.
“Love you!” they both call on their way out the door, suitcases dragging behind them, and Morgan feels a little bad about her plans to commit more crimes in their absence. Just not bad enough to not do it.
Morgan is many things, but a coward is not one of them.
She drives her moped to May’s, and Morgan smiles and plays cards while a Disney movie rolls in the background, doing an admirable job of acting like someone who doesn’t have a rock in her duffel bag worth more than the building she’s in.
It’s a step up from the sock drawer, alright?
So she hangs out with May, who, as always, is cool as fuck and also the sweetest person in Morgan’s immediate family, eats dinner—lasagna, as her dad predicted, because it’s the only thing May doesn’t burn—and when May kisses her goodnight, puts on the same gear she wore for the initial Hammer operation, domino mask included.
(She hasn’t had time to get another ski mask, or at least that’s the excuse she gives herself to keep wearing her face covering of choice.)
Wearing her sticky gloves, she climbs down the building—is this how Peter felt sneaking out for so many years?—and mounts her moped. It’s a Thursday, and Peter always patrols on Thursdays because he says criminals are out because they’re excited for the weekend—“But they’re not really that prepared, you know, because the timing’s not quite right. Who’s ever heard of major crime happening on a Thursday?”
Morgan grins as she takes a turn fast enough that, if her dad was watching, he’d yell at her to slow down.
Thursdays suit Morgan just fine, and she makes her way to Peter and MJ’s apartment easily, knowing the route like the back of her hand.
They’ve lived together for years despite getting married about eighteen months ago, even though Ned—raised Catholic—and her dad—connoisseur of harassing Peter—joked that they couldn’t believe the two of them were, quote, living in sin.
Morgan, for one, appreciates having a place to crash in the event that her parents are being annoying and she doesn’t want to deal with real adults in general. She has a key, and because it’s one of the only desserts both Peter and MJ like, they almost always have a tub of strawberry ice cream on hand. It works, and tonight, she’s going to make it work even better than usual.
Like she did with the Hammers, Morgan parks down the street and gets her gear ready, though is a considerably simpler operation than last time. All she has to do is make sure MJ’s not around, slip in their bedroom, and drop the diamond and its note somewhere she’ll find it. It’s simple, easy, and effective.
It doesn’t mean Morgan enjoys climbing up a ninety-degree angle any more than she did last time.
“This is ass,” she groans, panting for breath. “Why did they decide to live on the top floor? Probably because they hate me, that’s why.”
That is not strictly true because Morgan knows damn well the reason they picked the top floor was because Peter being Spider-Man means he’s not bothered by things like dragging couches up ten flights of stairs and also that he likes being able to crawl down from the roof, but still. Five stories up, she feels, at this point, like the placement of their apartment is a targeted attack against her innocent attempts to make Oliver Hammer’s life a shitshow.
But Morgan Stark is not a coward, and she’s even less of a quitter. She makes her way up to their apartment bit by grueling bit, and when she reaches it, she’s rewarded by hearing MJ in the shower when she presses her ear to the window.
Perfect!
Using one gloved hand, she slides the window open and crawls inside in a very gangly but ultimately successful method of infiltration. Then, she lays on the ground with her limbs starfished around her for a second. MJ takes long showers, anyway, and the water hasn’t even turned off. That being said, Morgan really needs to do more cardio if she’s going to climb buildings without throwing up.
Wait, is she going to continue to climb buildings?
Food for thought, she ultimately decides, but she does need to get going. Sitting up, she rifles through her backpack for the diamond and the note she’s eloquently composed: The Hammer diamond. Worth a shitton. Put to a good cause. Thanks!
Morgan thinks the exclamation mark is a nice touch.
She leaves the note and the glorified rock it was made for on MJ’s side of the bed, and she admires her work for a moment—most notably the fact that she’s setting what was previously a museum exhibit on an Ikea comforter—before heading for the window.
And the several stories she has to traverse again.
The only thing that stops Morgan from letting out a groan is that she hears MJ turn the shower off, and as much as Morgan hates the Hammers, she dearly misses their shittily-cyber-protected elevator as she starts the climb down.
//
Morgan tells herself that she’s done. She got her revenge. She committed a felony. She even has a very fun story to tell in, like, a decade, when her parents probably can’t ground her for it.
Except, the weekend after her stay with May, her dad comes into her room while she’s doing her homework. “Ma-gun-a,” he calls, stretching the word out into a sing-song tone, which is how Morgan knows he has a favor to ask. She looks up from where she’s absentmindedly filling out a worksheet about photosynthesis and cellular respiration and finds his head poking out from the door frame.
A big favor to ask, then.
“What’s up?” she asks, pulling out an earbud.
“What are you doing this Friday?”
She sighs. “What thing do you want me to go to with you?”
“It’ll be fun!”
“What thing?”
He scratches at the back of his neck, looking up at the ceiling of her bedroom like it’s the most interesting thing in the world. “Well, here’s the thing, I don’t have to go, but—” He pauses in what Morgan knows is meant to be dramatic effect. “—the Hammers are going to be there, and I want to talk to Justin about the diamond.”
Morgan grins. “You want to harass Justin about the diamond.”
He doesn’t even try to deny it. “It’s so funny, Mo. I haven’t laughed that hard since that time Clint—”
He makes a compelling argument, and she doesn’t need to hear more. “I’ll go,” she interrupts, “but we have to get burgers afterward. And I choose the restaurant.”
Her dad smiles, his face soft and delighted for a myriad of reasons because he’s a fucking dork, sure, but he’s still her dad, and he’s the best. “You drive a hard bargain. I don’t even like burgers.”
Morgan snorts, the deal is struck, and it would be a normal night if Oliver didn’t come to bother her again when her dad goes to bully his. God, she hates Oliver, but she wants to ask about the ramifications of her heist more than she wants to find a new way to assault him.
“Heard you guys had a break-in,” she comments, cutting him off as he tries to talk about where he’s thinking about going to college—Harvard and Yale are allegedly already talking to him, but Morgan isn’t sure she believes they would bother with someone so idiotic. “Lost that diamond you told me about before. What was it, a hundred carats?”
Some might say she’s laying it on thick, but seeing Oliver’s face pinch in irritation is worth it. “My dad is so mad. Like, obviously, it was annoying that the diamond got stolen, but whoever did it cut through one of our windows, and it rained later that night. The hardwood got super damaged because of how long the water sat, and he had to replace that and the window.”
Morgan lifts a brow, hiding her smile by lifting this event’s serving of sparkling grape juice to her lips. “You guys are billionaires. That’s pocket change.”
Oliver, as expected, is a prick and rolls his eyes. “Yes, Morgan, but the noise from the repairmen is inconvenient.”
“You’re inconvenient.”
Not her finest work, but it irritates him, which is enough.
“Shut up!” He sticks his tongue out at her, and she does the same in return, though they’re both careful not to make too big of a scene. “It doesn’t even make sense. Diamonds are super inconvenient to steal—you have to pawn them off, and it’s a whole thing. My dad knows a guy who’s so old-fashioned he keeps a ton of cash—like, millions—in a vault in his house, and he’s a total asshole. We’re just, like, existing. Why not rob him instead?”
Oliver sounds rather exasperated, but Morgan is way, way beyond appreciating that simple joy. There are a few things about his little rant that jump out to her—that Oliver’s an asshole himself, hence why his family, however illogically, got robbed, for one—but Morgan just can’t help herself, despite the more mature part of her saying no, she’s done enough, come on, she should walk away from this—
“Yeah? And what’s his name?” she asks with a challenge in her voice, and when Oliver plays right into her hands and tells her what she wants to know, another plan begins to form in her mind.