Work Text:
What is grief, if not love persevering?
Pepper has taken to keeping Tony’s last Iron Man helmet on her bedside table. It’s not the best place for it, honestly, because it means that she sometimes smacks her hand down on it when she means to grab her phone in the morning when the alarm is blaring. Which is what’s just happened today.
It’s a rather hard smack, and sends the helmet teetering for a moment before it falls off the table with a loud thunk and rolls under the bed.
She swears softly, flopping onto her back. Her now silenced phone rests on her stomach.
Pepper feels like she’d barely slept last night, kept awake tossing and turning. One of those nights when the bed had felt too big, even though it’s been over a year since Tony’s death.
She can hear the TV downstairs, which means Morgan is already up.
Pepper has to lay down on her stomach to reach under the bed for the helmet, her finger hooking under the edge of it to tug it back out. She settles cross-legged on the floor, with it cradled in her lap, and runs a finger over the ridges of the faceplate with a soft sigh. There are a few scrapes along the side of the eye socket, but otherwise this one looks pretty pristine. Tony hadn’t used it much; it had been stored in the garage, and left out for her to find after… Well, after.
She peeks downstairs, checking that Morgan is engrossed in her show—she’s sitting on the couch eating dry cereal, watching something animated—before locking her bedroom door and settling on the bed with the helmet. “FRIDAY, play back the recording please.”
FRIDAY doesn’t speak, just starts the playback of the hologram.
Pepper hasn’t watched this in awhile. Not since before Thanksgiving.
It starts with Tony leaning in close. “Is this thing on?” Then he sits down on a chair, stradling it backwards, and says, “Okay, here goes. Hey, Mrs. Stark. I know, I know. Potts-Stark, but I like saying it. If you find this, don’t post it on social media. It’s strictly family viewing only.
“Y’know I did this once before and never showed it to you? Just the once, I swear. It was, um…” He grimaces. “Anyway, maybe you won’t see this one either. You know I’m always full of surprises.” A cocky grin. “And this would be a big one, right? For the half of the population that has no idea what we’re attempting. And I guess for the half coming back too. A good surprise though, right?” The grin turns into something softer, more wistful. “I mean, who doesn’t want their loved ones back, right? That’s why we’re doing this.”
“Okay, a few individualized messages here,” Tony says, rubbing his hands together. “Rhodey, if I don’t make it back, and you do, you get the Lamborghini. I’ve seen you eyeing it. Don’t lie. Happy, I’m giving you custody of DUM-E. That’s not a gift. That’s a burden. I know you’ll carry it with grace.
“Okay, that’s the bozo uncles out of the way. Now kid,” Tony’s expression turns very earnest as his tone gets more serious. “I really hope you’re there watching this, even if I didn’t make it. I hope it still worked and everyone else played their parts perfectly and you’re back among the living, even if you’re probably super annoyed to still be 16-years-old when you should have been old enough to drink by now. If I live through this and you don’t tell your scary aunt I’ll sneak you a beer.”
Pepper frowns, brow furrowed. Who is he talking to? What 16-year-old had Tony known?
Tony goes on, looking about as emotional as Pepper has ever seen him get, “I should have said this when you were alive—I mean, alive before. Because you better be alive now, kid. But I love you. You’re the closest thing I have to a son. And I’ve missed you everyday. So I know how risky this mission is, I mean, it’s time travel. We’re messing with the fabric of reality here. But it’s all worth it if I get you back.
“As for little miss—”
“Stop,” Pepper says, and FRIDAY cuts off the hologram, frozen on Tony, his arms resting on the back of the chair as he gazes out into the middle space, lips parted around a word.
Pepper stares at him. At the way she can see her dresser through him.
Son?
“Who was he talking about, FRIDAY?”
“Ma’am?” FRIDAY asks.
“In the recording. The… the 16-year-old. That he said his— was like his son. Who was he talking about?”
Why hasn’t she heard this part before? Has she heard it? She must have heard this part before. “Was this always on there? Did the recording change?”
“The recording has not been tampered with, ma’am. I don’t know who Boss is referring to though.”
“Play it back,” Pepper demands.
She watches it through three more times, all the way through, and each time Tony’s expression is the same. Whoever he’s talking about, he loved them. Whoever this teenage boy is, Tony had expected him to be in the room. Tony had expected her to know him.
How could she not know them?
- - -
Pepper has to get Morgan ready for school, and then onto the bus, distracted the whole time thinking about the recording and the mysterious teenager. Once Morgan is off to school, she watches the recording again, sitting at the kitchen table, and takes notes.
16. 17 now?
boy
blipped?
That’s all she’s got. The sum total of her knowledge about this teenager that Tony evidently loved enough to leave a message for, to say ‘I love you’ to, to… to quite possibly have invented time travel and died for, if Pepper is reading this right.
FRIDAY is no help. She has no record of any teenagers that Tony knew in her database.
Pepper’s next call is to Rhodey. He’s intrigued when she tells him what’s going on, but says, “I have no clue. This was a kid he knew pre-Decimation?”
“Must have been,” Pepper says.
“Tony didn’t hang out with kids. I mean, he was an amazing father but to be honest, before Morgan was born, it wasn’t exactly something I would have guessed he’d be good at.”
Pepper hums. “Tony was the one who wanted kids,” she says.
“Really?”
She nods, then says, “Yeah. It was, um, right before he got sucked onto that space ship. I think I remember it so well because I thought it was going to be the last thing he ever said to me. He’d dreamed we had a kid.”
Rhodey’s quiet for a minute. “I wish I knew,” he says. “I feel like I should know. I feel like…”
“Like you… walked into a room and forgot why?” Pepper says, trying to describe the feeling she’s had since she watched the recording the first time this morning.
“Yeah.”
She sighs. “Me too. It’s driving me nuts.”
“Try Happy, maybe he knows something.”
- - -
Pepper is a bit reluctant to burden Happy with this problem. Happy has his own problems right now. Just two months ago his apartment had been destroyed in a fight between Spider-Man and a couple of crazy villains, and his ex-girlfriend had been killed in the crossfire. May Parker had still been living with Happy, and he’s not been handling it very well. Pepper’s not entirely sure they were really exes, though Happy says they were just good friends.
Happy seems grateful for the distraction when she calls, and smiles a bit at the recording. “I still can’t believe he left me that bot,” he mutters, when it reaches that part.
“I can’t believe DUM-E survived another building collapse,” Pepper says.
“It’s indestructible,” Happy says.
After watching the part about the teenager, Happy frowns. “Go figure he never says a name.”
“A name would have been helpful,” Pepper agrees.
“He was like that with Morgan too. He hardly ever called her by her actual name. Always a nickname.”
“He used to call Spider-Man ‘kid’ all the time,” Happy says.
“He called Morgan that too. Sometimes,” Pepper says. Not often, now that she’s thinking about it. And usually it was ‘kiddo’ or ‘kiddie’ and not just ‘kid’.
“Did he?” Happy asks.
“Actually, no,” Pepper admits.
“I’m not sure how old Spider-Man actually is,” Happy says, “but he does seem fairly young. College, maybe.”
“No one knows who Spider-Man is though,” Pepper says. “Tony didn’t know.”
“If he did, he never said.”
Pepper sighs at another dead end.
“I’ll call you if I think of anything,” Happy promises.
“Thanks,” Pepper tells him. “We should do dinner later this week,” she tells him. “Morgan would love to see you.”
He nods, and they set a date for Saturday.
- - -
Pepper tries to let it go. She does. She lets it go for the rest of the day. She lets it go until that night, when she gets into bed, rolls onto her side, and stares at the helmet, turned grey in the moonlight coming through the window. Grey like the hologram of Tony contained within it. The hologram where he talks about having a son. A son that she doesn’t know.
She can’t let it go.
Pepper’s life currently is made up of the things Tony left behind. His daughter, first and foremost, and his company and his house and his garage full of tech and his cars and his alpaca and his bed and his closet full of three-piece suits and his drawers full of sweaters. Some of these were theirs together but most of it is just Tony’s legacy and Pepper is its keeper and now there’s a piece of it that she’s lost.
She can’t lose any more of it. Losing pieces of it feels like losing pieces of Tony. It’s all she has left of him.
She starts in his office, ignoring the need for sleep. Pepper hasn’t cleaned out Tony’s desk aside from gathering important papers that have been needed over the last year. There are photos on the desk, one of Morgan at age three, sitting in a floaty on the lake and grinning up at the camera. Another of her and Morgan both, from the trip they’d taken out to California. Another of someone sitting on a stool in his old lab at the compound, their face blocked by the thumb of the photographer. Odd.
Pepper picks it up, turning the frame over. It’s glass, and she can see the back of the print, but there’s nothing written there to indicate why the photo has been printed and framed. It must have always been there but she can’t recall seeing it before.
She finds a couple of other odd photos like that, tucked into a corner of the top drawer. All of them blocked by fingers over the lens or motion blurred and taken in various places at the Avenger’s compound, except for one that has Tony with his arm around Spider-Man. The vigilante is suited up, but Tony’s dressed casually.
Pepper hadn’t realized they were that close. How could they have been, if Spider-Man had never revealed his identity?
Maybe Tony had known, and kept it a secret. He’d made Spider-Man a suit, after all. A couple of suits, actually. Ones that Spider-Man had still been using even after coming back from the Blip.
She sets that photo in a different stack, setting aside this other mystery, and tackles the rest of the drawer.
There are a couple of notebooks in here too, but there’s not much written in them. Tony had typed most of his notes, or just spoken aloud to FRIDAY. He’d rarely written anything down with pen and paper. It makes the few things that do have his handwriting that much more precious, and also that much more mundane. This notebook page has a list of chemical ingredients for something at the top, and a grocery list at the bottom.
She doesn’t find anything in the notebooks, but she pours over them anyway, reading every word. The chemical equations she doesn’t understand, the grocery lists where he always left off butter and condiments.
She puts everything back exactly as it was, except for the strange photos. By then it’s going on 3 AM, and her eyes are burning. Morgan will be up early again, she always is. Pepper can maybe get three or four hours of sleep, if she goes right now.
She feels a bit rung out after looking through all of Tony’s things. There’s a reason she’s avoided it. Leaving his office alone has made it feel like he might… like a part of him is still there, like he’s left work behind. And that’s true, he did leave work behind, but he’s not coming back for it. He won’t ever sit behind that desk again.
She takes the photos, looking at the top one, of the person on the stool, on her way upstairs. Whoever it is has on scuffed sneakers, jeans, and a blue sweatshirt. There’s some sort of yellow logo on the front, just a tiny bit visible. The rest of their upper body is blocked by the blurry thumb in front of the lens.
It could be a teenager. Maybe. But why would Tony print and frame a photo with a finger over the lens? Why weren’t there any photos of his face?
Who the hell was this kid?
- - -
Morgan doesn’t want to go to school the next day. Pepper only slept for three hours, so she’s honestly feeling too tired to deal with the tantrum about to happen.
Morgan is dressed and ready and has on her coat and boots and backpack but she’s stopped halfway down the driveway, refusing to move another inch.
“You like school,” Pepper argues.
“I hate school,” Morgan hisses back.
“Yesterday you liked it,” Pepper says.
“No, I didn’t. I hated it then too.” Morgan crosses her arms, her feet planted.
“You said you liked the book you’re reading at storytime.” Pepper shivers. She’d only grabbed a sweater for this walk down the driveway, and it’s freezing outside.
“It’s a stupid baby book,” Morgan says. “I don’t want to read baby books.”
Pepper wishes they could have had this conversation inside, instead of in the driveway in the remains of the snow from last weekend. “The rest of your class can’t read as well as you can, sweetie. Your teacher gave you that other book to read during quiet reading time, right? Do you like that one?”
“That one is a stupid baby book too,” Morgan says.
“You can ask her for a different one. Or I’ll call and ask her for you. But you have to go to school.”
“I hate school,” Morgan yells, her hands balled into fists by her side, but she storms past Pepper, stomping down the driveway towards the bus stop.
Pepper takes a deep breath before turning and following after her.
Get her to school. Discuss the attitude when she gets home. If she tries now Morgan will never get on the bus. Pepper is choosing her battles.
When she catches up Morgan is wiping at her face with her mittened hands.
Pepper crouches down in front of her, but Morgan ducks her head. “Hey, baby.” Pepper cups her cold face in her even colder hand and smooths her thumb over Morgan’s cheek, brushing away the tears. “It’s okay.”
“I don’t like school,” Morgan insists.
“Is it just the book?” Pepper asks.
Morgan shakes her head. Then nods. “They’re all stupid.” She sniffs. “And everyone is mean.”
“Mean?”
“Because I said…” Morgan hesitates. “I said the books were stupid. And that math was stupid. And that everything else was stupid. And then Austin said I was a freak.”
“That wasn’t very nice of him.”
“He’s stupid.”
Pepper lets that one slide, because she kind of agrees. “I’ll talk to your teacher, okay? We’ll figure something out so that you’re not bored. But can you go today? You can sit with your friend Ava, right? She’s nice.”
Morgan sighs deeply. But finally nods.
Once she’s off on the bus, Pepper watches until it turns the corner, arms crossed over her chest and shivering. Back inside the warm house, she sits at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and looks at the picture of Tony that sits on the shelf by the window.
“Your daughter is too smart for kindergarten,” she says. “And for first grade. And you did not leave me a plan for that.”
Tony had had maybe a year of school before going to boarding school for seven years, and then he’d skipped straight to college at age fourteen. But he’d also been adamant about not wanting that sort of experience for Morgan. He’d wanted her to be with kids her own age in school.
Except Morgan resents it, because she’s bored out of her mind all day long. The rural school district up here can’t keep up with her.
Pepper rests her head in hands. Maybe she should home school. Morgan might hate that more; she’s very social. She loves the friends she has at school. It seems cruel to make her stay here in this house all day long.
Pepper’s call to the school finds her leaving a message for Morgan’s teacher, who’ll probably call later when she’s on break. Hopefully Morgan’s not as angry when she arrives. But if she is… Well, no one’s called about it yet, so it must not be too bad.
Pepper frowns, her gaze going back to the photo. It’s of Tony and… Spider-Man, again. Odd. Pepper knows that photo has been there for years, it’s sitting in front of a photo of Tony’s father, and there’s a photo of her own parents on that shelf too. But why on earth would Spider-Man be there?
Pepper picks it up. Tony’s wearing an even expression, not smiling, serious for the camera. But he’s dressed casually, in a t-shirt and jacket and purple glasses, and he’s holding up bunny ears behind Spider-Man’s head. Spider-Man is wearing the first suit that Tony had made for him, bright red and blue, and has his own hand raised up making bunny ears as well. He’s misjudged the distance though, his hand is too high. Like he did it at the last second. They’re holding a framed certificate between them, flipped upside down. ‘Stark Internship. In appreciation for your successful work with the Stark Industries Internship Program…’
The space for the name is blank.
Why bother taking a photo with a certificate like that and then leave it blank? Tony never half-assed a joke like that. He’d at least have written ‘Spider-Man’ on it.
And why is this photo up here, next to Tony’s father? Next to photos of Pepper’s own family?
How well had he known Spider-Man?
Pepper remembers him talking about him, back before the Decimation. Tony had liked working with him, had made him a suit, teamed up with him on occasion. Given him advice, maybe, if he was young like Happy said.
None of that explains the photos. She hasn’t found photos lying around of Tony with any other teammates. And he certainly knew Steve and the others better, even if they had had a falling out.
Pepper opens the frame up, to check the back of the photo. Tony has written something there: ‘The kid’s first job,’ in his all caps block letters.
The kid.
An echo of “Kid, I love you,” in Tony’s voice from the hologram.
Maybe Spider-Man knows something.
And if Spider-Man knows, maybe Happy knows. Happy had worked pretty closely with him.
Pepper sighs. She’s going to have to wait until Saturday, when Happy comes up for dinner. Calling him again is going to look… desperate. She’s done a good job not looking desperate about anything this past year. She’s done a good job looking like she has everything perfectly together.
She can wait until Saturday.
- - -
The next day finds Morgan in better spirits about school, thank god. Pepper had spoken to her teacher over lunch, and they’d agreed to a higher level math and science book as well as the reading books, and Morgan had been interested in them when Pepper explained over dinner.
A stop gap, for now. She’s going to get sick of doing different work than everyone else in class. The teacher is going to get tired of managing a separate curriculum. Pepper is going to have to find a different solution.
But if they can just get through this school year. If that can just be a problem for next fall…
The CEO of SI calls, asking for a board meeting next week to discuss the fourth quarter earnings. They need to discuss Q1 for next year too, for that matter, but Pepper has been… Well, she hasn’t been busy. She’s not busy at all, anymore. Not compared to when she was CEO. But the days still seem to disappear. Time moves on. She feels like she blinks and a week has gone by, a month. Morgan is taller and her hair is longer and Tony has been gone for exactly one year and three months.
Pepper hasn’t gone through his clothes.
One year and three months and she hasn’t touched Tony’s closet. Or his dresser drawers.
She’s not going through his closet today either. But she does go out to the garage, searching for more clues about the mystery kid. The office in the house had been a bust, but Tony had kept most of his stuff in the garage that he’d converted into a lab space.
Pepper hasn’t been out here since just after Tony’s death either. The floor is a highly polished concrete, and the car parked inside is still half gutted, the engine spread out in parts around the open hood. On the other half of the garage are a workbench and open wall space for the holoscreens he’d always used. One wall holds large filing cabinets and lockers and another the glass cabinets containing his last few suits and the blue suit he’d made for her.
“FRIDAY?” Pepper asks, tentatively, standing in the doorway. Cold air blows into the room behind her.
“Ma’am?” FRIDAY asks, her voice seeming to fill the room. In the house she’s wired into only a few speakers, easier to pinpoint. In here, it’s like it was back at the Tower, pervasive.
“Can you start everything up?”
“Of course. Boss left you full access.”
That’s lucky. It’d be awful to be trying to guess his passwords for things she needs. To be locked out.
She walks around the car, trailing her fingers over the side. It’s covered in dust. She has no idea what to do with it. Maybe Rhodey would be able to finish it. Maybe he could show Morgan. Morgan used to sit in here while Tony worked on stuff, handing him tools and chattering at him.
Pepper doesn’t actually know if Rhodey’s into fixing up cars though. He likes driving them, but that doesn’t mean he likes taking them apart and upgrading them the way Tony had. Happy might be the better one to ask.
The car is a problem for another day. She’s looking for information about this mystery kid. Tony’s mystery kid, who he evidently never introduced her to. Which stings, a bit. A lot, if she’s being honest. She hadn’t thought she’d known every single thing about him, but she thought she’d known most of it. She’d known him for twenty years. Been with him for over fourteen. She’d known him about as well as anyone could.
How was there a whole person in his life, a person he loved, that Pepper didn’t know?
She ignores the workbench—FRIDAY won’t find anything different on the server out here than she did inside—and heads for the lockers and filing cabinets.
Pepper realizes, after a couple of drawers, that Tony was using some sort of filing system known only to himself. It’s not alphabetical, that’s for sure. Not that he even has that many paper records; all of his stuff was digital. There are only three drawers of paper schematics, and they’re all ancient, stuff he must have been hoarding for some reason or another. There’s a blueprint for a missile that SI made in the 80s.
Pepper looks through it all, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and then puts it all back.
Some of the drawers are full of things she really needs to deal with. One has a bunch of arc reactors in it, and that’s probably not entirely safe to just have sitting in the garage. Another has a bunch of tiny arrowheads that she thinks might be explosive, also unsafe. What if Morgan had gotten in here?
She’s going to have to have Rhodey come out and go through all of this as well. All of that sort of thing can go back to whatever Avenger wants or needs it. Pepper doesn’t need it sitting in her garage.
There are two drawers full of stuff for Spider-Man, packed away carefully.
That’s going to be harder to give out. Rhodey doesn’t work with him, as far as Pepper knows. Happy used to, but she doesn’t think they’ve spoken since everything in November.
Also packed into the drawers with gear for Spider-Man are a bunch of random things. There are more of those blurry photos. There’s also a sweatshirt, bright blue with a logo for Midtown School of Science and Technology, and a beanie and a Mets baseball hat. Plus a couple of notebooks full of what looks like notes from high school classes. Pepper pages through them. The handwriting is messy, and the first one looks like it’s for chemistry class, full of equations and chemical compounds and doodles in the margins of beakers and chemical chains.
High school.
She flips through every single page, reads every word, looking for a name. There isn’t one.
“Dammit,” she curses under her breath, slapping the last notebook closed. That one had been Spanish notes.
Why does Tony have some teenager’s class notes? Do these belong to the Mystery Teen? (He’s earned capital letters, at this point.)
She picks the sweatshirt back up, eyeing the logo. It’s yellow.
Blue sweatshirt with a yellow logo. Just like the person in that blurry, framed photo.
“FRIDAY? Do you have anything on Midtown School of Science and Technology?”
After a moment, FRIDAY says, “Midtown is a specialized high school in the New York City public school system. It is located at 999 Jamaica Avenue, in Brooklyn, New York, near Highland Park. It specializes in a STEM and college prep curriculum.”
“Why does Tony have a sweatshirt from a high school in here? Where did he get it?” A pause. “Who gave it to him?”
A longer pause from FRIDAY. “I don’t know, ma’am. I have no record of where it came from.”
“You monitored everything at the old Tower,” Pepper argues. “How can you not know?”
“I have no record of where it came from,” FRIDAY says again.
Pepper clutches the sweatshirt tighter in frustration. This makes no sense. FRIDAY should know the answer. She should know who Tony was spending time with. Tony was never without that AI.
Was it before FRIDAY’s time? Was all the info lost with JARVIS?
That doesn’t make sense either if this teenager blipped. They would have been around after Tony created FRIDAY.
Despite FRIDAY’s assurance that the hologram wasn’t tampered with, Pepper’s starting to have doubts. Ever since she saw it she’s felt like there’s something she’s forgetting. Like she left an item off the grocery list and she’s standing at the checkout, missing something from the cart but can’t for the life of her think of what it is. Something she needs.
The feeling just keeps growing.
How does Tony have these things? It’s clear evidence that a teenager exists, that Tony knew them, but FRIDAY has no records. Pepper has no memory of them.
She feels like she’s going insane.
- - -
Pepper calls Happy and changes their plans for the weekend.
“You’re sure you want to drive all the way down?” he asks, when she suggests it.
“I have some errands I need to run in the city,” Pepper says.
She needs to go to Midtown High School.
“Well, you’re always welcome here,” Happy says. “I mean, it’s your place. I’m the one crashing in it, honestly.”
“Thanks Happy,” Pepper says, meaning it. Happy has been a rock to her this past year, always there for her when she needs anything, and it had been a no-brainer to let him move into their old Upper East Side penthouse when his apartment was destroyed. “I don’t want to put you out though. We can get a hotel.”
“No, no,” he protests. “Stay with me.” A pause. “I want you to, really. It’ll be nice to have someone here.”
Pepper instantly feels bad for not going to see him more often. “Of course.”
“It’s just…” Happy hesitates. “I don’t know. I guess I’d gotten used to having other people around. And now with May gone…”
“Morgan will be excited,” Pepper says.
On Saturday, Morgan is excited about the trip to the city, even if she gets bored pretty quickly in the car. Pepper gives her a tablet to watch TV and play games on, which keeps her amused for most of the drive, but Morgan notices when they don’t stop in Manhattan.
“Mommy, you missed the exit.”
“Which exit?” Pepper asks.
“For SI.” Morgan points out the window. The New York HQ is still in Midtown, just not at the Tower anymore.
“We’re not going there today,” Pepper says. “We’re going to Queens.”
“To see Happy?”
“He lives in Manhattan now, remember? We’re going to see him for dinner and stay with him tonight. That will be fun, right?”
“Is he making lasagna?”
“I bet he will if you ask him to.” Then: “We have to stop somewhere else first. I have an errand to run.”
“Shopping?”
“No. We’re going to go talk to someone. I’m trying to find someone that Daddy used to know. But I don’t know their name, so I’m having to track them down.”
In the rearview mirror, Morgan frowns at her.
“I found something that belongs to them, and we’re going to go ask about it.”
“What is it?”
“A sweatshirt.”
Morgan’s brow is wrinkled up in confusion. But she just says, “Okay,” before going back to her tablet.
The school building looks abandoned on Saturday morning. Pepper climbs out of the car and leans into the back to unbuckle Morgan from her car seat, pretty sure she’s made a mistake coming down here. But it’s too far to drive back and forth while Morgan is in school, so it’s either come down on the weekend or pull Morgan out of school for the day. So Saturday morning it is. Well, it’s almost lunch now. Still.
Morgan is bouncing on her toes. “Is this gonna be my new school?” she asks.
“No, honey,” Pepper says. “We’re here to ask about the sweatshirt, remember?” She holds up the garment, then folds it against her arm a bit more securely. “We just want to, um, return it to its owner.”
“But we don’t know who owns it,” Morgan clarifies.
“Right,” Pepper says. “We have to find them.”
Morgan takes Pepper’s free hand, swinging it with hers. “I like the city!” She proclaims, as they head inside.
The front office is empty, of course, but the doors are unlocked and there are a couple of people further down the hall, which Pepper takes as encouragement. Morgan has to go to the bathroom, so they hunt that down first, and she insists she can go by herself so Pepper waits in the hallway, walking further down a bit and peering into the nearby classroom windows. Everything is empty.
There’s a boy stopped in the middle of the hallway, staring at her, like he recognizes her. Pepper knows the look. That had happened less after the Decimation, when she left the CEO position and retired upstate, but it’s started up again since Tony died.
She ignores him, hoping he’ll move on, but he doesn’t, continuing to stare at her.
Well if he’s going to be rude then he might as well be useful too.
Pepper turns to him. “Do you know if the principal is here?” she asks.
The boy stares at her, mouth slightly open. He doesn’t speak.
“Hello?” Pepper prompts.
“Uh, what?” he stutters.
“I’m looking for the principal. Or someone in administration,” she says again.
“Um.” He shifts from foot to foot, still staring at her. “I don’t think— Mist— Principal Morita isn’t here. Not on Saturdays. But uh…”
“Oh,” Pepper says. It had been a long shot, but she was hoping maybe this sweatshirt is for a specific club. That it might lead her to Mystery Kid, and not to another dead end.
“There’s just football on Saturdays,” the boy goes on. “And, um, sometimes band.”
“Which are you in?” she asks. She honestly can’t tell by looking at him. He looks a bit rough, his hair is too long and he’s wearing too many layers and he looks thin. He’s too small for football, but kickers are small, so maybe. He doesn’t strike her as a band kid either. At least, not what she remembers the band kids being like from her high school.
“Huh?” he asks, looking confused. “Oh, no. There’s a, um, GED class. I’m… I’m taking that.” A pause. “It’s free.” He spots the sweatshirt. “Where did you get that?”
Pepper squeezes it tighter. “That’s not really your business, is it?”
“I…” The boy flounders for a response.
Morgan comes jogging back over then, already talking. “Mom! Someone wrote on the wall in the bathroom. I need a marker so I can write—” She cuts off, catching sight of the boy, her mouth snapping shut.
“Why do you need to write on the wall?” Pepper asks.
“Because what they wrote is wrong,” Morgan says.
“Oh god forbid the graffiti be factually incorrect,” Pepper mutters.
“They wrote something really bad and I need to—”
“I’ve got a marker.” They both turn, and the boy has swung his backpack around, digging through it.
“Don’t—” Pepper starts.
“What did they write?” he asks Morgan.
“They said Thanos was right,” she says.
“What?!” Pepper gapes, looking down at her. Morgan’s eyes are locked on the boy’s backpack. She’s stepped towards him.
The boy produces the sharpie and holds it out to Morgan. “Here you go.”
“I’ll be right back!” Morgan shouts, running back towards the bathroom.
Pepper watches her go, then spins back towards the boy. She’s not sure what to say to him.
“That’s been popping up a lot,” he says. “Some people are— Anyway. She shouldn’t have to see it.” He swings his backpack back on, and takes a step back, away from her. “Um, I gotta go.”
“Wait a sec,” Pepper says.
“Bye. Tell Morgan she can keep the sharpie.” The boy turns, hurrying away from her, as Pepper stops in her tracks, surprised he knew Morgan’s name.
She shouldn’t be, really. It’s not exactly uncommon knowledge. It’s just not common knowledge either.
Pepper turns, heading for the bathroom, and finds Morgan inside the handicapped stall. She’s scribbled out the offensive words with a large black square, but seems to be debating what to write herself.
“You don’t have to write anything,” Pepper tells her. “We can just cross it out.”
“I want to,” Morgan says. Then she slowly and carefully starts writing Iron Man Was Right in big block letters. After she’s done she steps back, and wipes at the ink on the side of her hand. “Do you think Daddy would like it?”
“I think he would absolutely love that we’re defacing public property with his name,” Pepper says.
Morgan grins.
“Come on, wash your hands.”
Out in the hallway, the boy is long gone, and Morgan is upset to not give him his marker back. “He said to tell you to keep it,” Pepper tells her.
Morgan tucks it into the pocket of her coat. Pepper hopes it doesn’t bleed through. “I’ll be ready if we find more,” she says.
More pro-Thanos graffiti. Because that’s a thing that exists out in the world, despite the fact that Tony gave his life to save everyone on this planet, in this entire universe, from that monster. This is why they don’t come into the city. This is why they’ve kept living up at the lake, tucked up in the woods and a half mile away from the nearest neighbor. Being around people means being around this. It means exposing Morgan to all the horrible things people have said about the father she lost way too soon and Pepper just can’t… she just can’t do that to her.
Pepper takes Morgan’s hand. “Let’s go find a teacher and see if they can help us with the sweatshirt,” she says. “Then we can go to Happy’s.”
- - -
The school is a bust. Pepper does eventually find a teacher to talk to, but Mr. Harrington is unhelpful. He’s starstruck, for one, and once they get past that he says that pretty much all the kids at the school have that sweatshirt. And while he worked there before the Blip and after, and says he taught every student in his science class, he doesn’t remember anyone who had claimed to know Tony Stark.
“We had a few who claimed they knew Spider-Man,” he tells her. “But none who said they knew Iron Man.”
“None?” Pepper asks.
Harrington shakes his head. “Not that I can recall. And I’d remember that!”
Pepper smooths the sweatshirt out over her lap, frowning.
Harrington looks down at it. “You said you found this at your house though?”
Pepper gathers the sweatshirt up, and stands. She doesn’t want to say too much to this man. “Thank you for your time. If you remember anything, please send me an email, would you?” She reaches into her purse for a business card.
“Sure,” Harrington says. He takes the card. “Wow, is this your personal email?”
“Come on, Morgan,” Pepper calls. Morgan is across the room, peering at the science projects on the tables.
“Mom, come look,” she says. “They’re growing mold!”
“That sounds lovely,” Pepper says. “We have to go.”
“Can we grow mold at home?”
Pepper pauses, looking between Morgan and the experiments on the table. “Maybe outside,” she says.
“Cool,” Morgan says, finally trotting over to join her. She takes Pepper’s hand to head back down the hallway. “At school Ms. Kennedy is just letting us do stuff like making things float and sink in water.”
“What sort of things floated?”
“Things that were more buoyant,” Morgan says. She swings her arm with Pepper’s. “Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Pepper echoes.
- - -
Happy does indeed make lasagne for dinner. After dinner, he and Morgan sit playing with LEGOs—Pepper’s not sure where those came from; Morgan must have left them here last time they came over—and Pepper tries to put the unsolvable mystery of Mystery Kid behind.
But later that night, she can’t sleep. She wants to blame it on the noise of the city, the traffic and sirens are loud even from this upper floor, but it’s not that. She just can’t stop thinking about the dead end at the school. She’d really been hoping that sweatshirt would lead her to someone. It’s from a high school. Teenagers go to high school! She’s looking for a teenager! There’s a blurry photo of a teenager in Tony’s lab wearing that sweatshirt! But no, every single teenager in that school has the same sweatshirt. She’s going to have to pour over the records of every single student from before the Decimation, check which ones Blipped, and then see if any of them might have known Tony. And if they kept it a secret.
Morgan is fast asleep beside her, which isn’t helping Pepper’s insomnia. She climbs out of bed, wandering out to the kitchen, and finds Happy awake at his laptop, in his pajamas.
“Hey,” he says.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks.
“I’ve been helping out at that shelter, FEAST,” he says. “They’re doing some fundraising so I said I’d work on the email list.”
Pepper peers over his shoulder. “I didn’t know you were still doing that.”
“It helps a lot of people.”
She nods.
“And I think May would like knowing that someone was still carrying on her work.”
She nods again. “I’m sure she would.”
Happy’s gaze on her is all too knowing. This isn’t a thing they should share. This burden of legacy. He hadn’t even been dating May Parker when she died. How can he feel—
Pepper swallows hard. She needs to get away from here.
“I think going for a walk might help the insomnia,” she says. “Could you keep an eye on Morgan?”
“Of course,” Happy says, not questioning her.
The walk wakes Pepper up even more, because it’s negative degrees outside. She burrows further into her coat, bouncing on her heels at the crosswalk, and watches the way her breath fogs in the air.
The light has just turned when she steps out into the crosswalk, and then there’s a screech of tires, and then she only has time to stare into the glare of the headlights bearing down on her before she’s lifted off her feet, out of the path of the oncoming car.
Pepper screams, belatedly, as she flies through the air. She also clings for dear life to whoever has a hold of her, until she’s deposited onto her feet across the street.
She stumbles backward and stays on her feet only because someone grabs her hand and keeps her there.
“It’s alright,” they’re saying. “Ms. Potts, it’s fine. You’re okay. Pepper—”
“What was that?!” she shrieks, gesturing back at the intersection.
“I saved you!” Spider-Man yells back, gesturing as well. The car that had nearly hit her has run up over the curb and hit a lamppost. Its hood is dented in and the driver is leaning out of the door, looking dazed.
“I nearly died!”
“It’s okay!”
“I could have died!”
“I caught you!”
“I can’t die!”
“Ms. Potts—”
“What would happen if I die?!”
“Pepper,” Spider-Man says, his hands raised placatingly. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
Pepper takes a deep breath, hand over her chest. “Oh my god. Oh my god.” Spider-Man is hovering over her, blocking the scene of the accident from her sight with his body. Or trying to, he’s not really tall enough for it. She waves him off after she catches her breath. “Sorry,” she says.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“I just… I don’t really do this anymore.”
“Do… what?”
Pepper gestures between them. “Superhero stuff. Being swept off my feet at the last possible moment. It’s been awhile. I’m fine.” Another deep breath. “Thank you.”
The eyes on his mask are large and unblinking. “You’re welcome,” he says. “I didn’t mean for it to be the last moment. I wasn’t sure if the car was actually going to— But then— Anyway, sorry I didn’t grab you sooner.”
She just nods at his babbling. Then she looks over his shoulder, at the wreck, and catches sight of the street sign, and it occurs to her that he shouldn’t have been here at all.
“You should really get home,” Spider-Man is saying. “It’s super late.”
“What are you even doing here?” Pepper asks.
Spider-Man stares at her, that unnerving, unblinking stare. “What?”
“Don’t you usually stick to Queens? Why are you on the Upper East Side?”
“Oh, um…” Spider-Man stammers. “I was… checking on something… around here.”
Pepper looks him up and down. His suit is new. It’s not the red and black suit or even the gold threaded nanite suit he’s been wearing the past year. She remembers the nanite one because Tony had holed up working on it for a week straight not long before the Decimation. She’d been surprised it had survived to be seen again after the Blip, but Spider-Man had been wearing it in the footage of him destroying the Statue of Liberty a couple months ago.
This one is red and blue, like the one he’s wearing in the photos with Tony at the house, but shinier. The fabric is cheaper. Tony didn’t make this one. “Where is the suit Tony made for you?” she asks.
Spider-Man takes a step back, away from her. “What?”
She gestures at him. “This one isn’t as nice. What happened to the other one?”
“It wouldn’t— It doesn’t matter,” Spider-Man says. He crosses his arms.
“Yes it does,” Pepper says. “Do you know how hard he worked on that stuff? On all the things he made for the Avengers? And you weren’t even on the team, you turned him down. But he still made you a nanite suit and what? You’re not going to use it? You’re making one with stuff from Jo-Anns instead?”
Spider-Man doesn’t say anything. He’s shifting on his feet, and Pepper can hear his teeth chattering.
“What is that even made of?” she asks. “You must be freezing.”
“I’m fine,” he says.
“I can hear you shivering.”
“The nanites stopped working,” Spider-Man says.
“They’re not supposed to stop.”
“Well they did. They’re coded to—” A pause. “They’re not coded to my signature. And I don’t have the equipment to fix them.”
“Oh,” Pepper says. She shifts on her own feet. “What do you need?”
“Nothing,” Spider-Man says. “It’s fine. I made a suit.”
“It’s not as nice though,” Pepper says. “You should have the nanite suit.”
“I don’t need—”
“I want to help you fix it.”
Spider-Man takes a step back. “You don’t need to do that.”
“I need to help you,” Pepper insists. “Look, I’m only a block away. And there’s probably still some of Tony’s stuff in the basement because he was awful about ever packing and moving. So just… come with me. And see if it has what you need.”
“I don’t have the nanites with me.”
Pepper’s not sure why she feels like this is important. But… Tony had made Spider-Man a suit. And it broke. And maybe she can help fix it. Maybe she can help this vigilante he’d cared about, since she’s failing at finding the teenage boy he’d loved enough to die for.
Pepper frowns. “If I give you the address, will you come over in the morning and let me help you fix the suit?”
Spider-Man hesitates.
“I’ll track you down if you don’t show up,” she threatens.
“Why do you care so much?” Spider-Man asks. “You don’t even know me.”
“No,” Pepper says. “But Tony did. And he cared about you. He wouldn’t have made you all that stuff if he didn’t care about you. And I care about the people he cared about. Which means I care about you. So, if the suit he made you is broken and you need his lab to fix it, I can help with that.”
Spider-Man still seems unsure, but eventually nods. “Okay,” he says, voice quiet. “I’ll come over.”
“Do you have something to write down the address?” Pepper asks.
“I know where it is,” Spider-Man says. “What time?”
Pepper blinks, startled by that. But… maybe Tony had had him over before. “Um, after breakfast. Around 10. I can probably get Happy to take Morgan out for the day by then.”
Spider-Man nods. Then he jumps, shooting out a string of webbing, and he’s around the corner and gone before Pepper can turn to watch him go.
- - -
Convincing Happy to take Morgan out for the day is easy. Pepper claims she’s tired, which isn’t really a lie after her sleepless night, so that gets her out of going with them to the museum. She’s sure they’ll find a spot to eat greasy cheeseburgers somewhere too, since that’s their usual go-to. Morgan always enjoys spending time with Happy, and Happy always spends the time telling her stories about Tony that not even Pepper knows, watered down a bit to be child-friendly.
Spider-Man is late. Late enough that Pepper has time to start going through the list of names of all the male students at Midtown High School that Blipped and asking FRIDAY if she recognizes any of them.
That narrows it down to just one, but Pepper’s not sure what to make of it. FRIDAY singles out a boy named Ned Leeds as an associate of Spider-Man’s.
“Did Tony know him?” Pepper asks.
“I’m not sure, ma’am,” FRIDAY says.
“Not sure?” she asks. FRIDAY should either know or not know.
“Ned Leeds knows Spider-Man,” FRIDAY says. “He first assisted him with a fight against Adrian Toomes, otherwise known as the Vulture, in 2016, which involved a planeload of equipment Mr. Stark was having moved from the Tower to the Avengers’ facility upstate.”
Pepper remembers that one. That’s what led to the press conference that Spider-Man no-showed at and that Tony then used to propose to her.
She finds Ned Leeds’ on social media easily, and compares his picture to the photo she found on Tony’s desk, the one with the boy’s face blocked by the thumb over the lens.
It’s not the same boy. For one, she can see enough to tell that the boy in the photo is white, and thinner than Ned Leeds.
Ned knows Spider-Man too though? And goes to the same school as Mystery Kid? What are the odds of that?
“Find Ned’s number for me,” she tells FRIDAY. Maybe he’ll be able to help her more than that teacher.
Speaking of Spider-Man, he finally turns up and scares the living daylight out of Pepper by showing up on the balcony and knocking on the sliding glass door.
She opens it, hand still over her chest. “You scared me.”
“Oh, uh, sorry,” he says.
Pepper peers out at the balcony, which has a dusting of snow on it. “Did you climb up the outside of the building?”
“Down from the roof, actually,” Spider-Man says. He’s wearing his suit, mask and all. He has a puffy coat on over it this time, so he’s not shivering at least.
Pepper frowns, closing the door back up so more cold air doesn’t get in.
“I brought the Iron Spider suit,” Spider-Man says, swinging his backpack off his shoulder and around to the front of his chest. He starts digging through it, and eventually unearthing the housing unit for the nanobot suit.
“You’re not going to take that mask off, are you?” Pepper asks.
Spider-Man looks up at her, and she wonders what expression he’s wearing behind the unblinking eyes of the mask.
There’s an awkward silence. Pepper waves a hand in the air. “It’s fine,” she says. “You never did tell Tony who you were either, did you?”
Spider-Man is silent for too long.
“He never mentioned it, if you did,” she adds.
Spider-Man huffs out a bit of laugh. “Uh, no,” he says. “It’s… safer if you don’t know.”
Well, that’s debatable. Pepper shrugs. “The lab is this way,” she says, turning to lead Spider-Man towards the stairs. “You’ve kept your identity a secret for a long time now,” she muses to him. “Tony lasted two days, you know?”
“Was he supposed to keep it a secret?” Spider-Man asks. He’s slow to follow her down the stairs.
“SHIELD wanted him to,” she says, as she holds a palm up to the door of the lab to open it. “They were pretty upset. But really I can’t imagine Tony keeping it hidden that he was Iron Man.”
“He liked getting credit for things,” Spider-Man says.
Pepper frowns, turning to him. “Yes,” she says, slowly.
Spider-Man takes a half-step back. The mask is expressionless, but his body language is speaking volumes. His shoulders are hunched, and he’s turned away from her a bit, nervously shifting from foot to foot.
Pepper gestures around to the lab. “Use whatever you need. I’m not sure how that nanobot stuff works.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Spider-Man says. He takes a step toward one of the workbenches. “Really, thanks a lot for this.”
“Thank you for letting me help,” she says.
She feels a bit awkward leaving him alone down here, but even more awkward hovering over him while he works. “You can talk to FRIDAY for help. That’s the AI—”
“I know who FRIDAY is,” he says.
“Oh, okay then.” Pepper glances around. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
Spider-Man nods. “I won’t. This is great. Thanks, Ms Potts.”
As she stands there, unsure whether to stay or not, Spider-Man heads for a workbench off to the side of the main one, and sets the housing unit down. He flicks his hand at the air, raising up one of the holoscreens, and doesn’t waste any time setting to work.
Pepper stares. He acts like he’s been here before. Like he’s worked in this lab before.
How well did Tony know him?
Spider-Man hadn’t come to Tony’s funeral. He’d been at the battle against Thanos. And he’d… he’d been there when Tony died. Pepper remembers pulling him away from Tony, in those last few minutes. But that was just because he’d been closest to Tony, physically, when he snapped, wasn’t it? It wasn’t because they’d actually been close, as friends. If they’d been close then Spider-Man would have come to the funeral. He’d have told Tony who he really is—and Tony would have told Pepper, because he never could keep a secret like that.
She watches him work for a few minutes, his movements with the tech eerily similar to how Tony used to work down here. Then FRIDAY interrupts with, “Ma’am? I’ve found that number for you.”
They’re both startled.
“Thanks, FRIDAY,” Pepper says. To Spider-Man: “I’ll just be upstairs, I have a phone call I need to make. Are you okay on your own?”
He nods. “I’ll be fine. Thanks.”
- - -
Ned Leeds is excited to talk to her, starstruck like Mr. Harrington had been, but also confused. “I’ve never really met Spider-Man,” he says.
“You haven’t?”
“No,” Ned says. “I mean, sort of? I’ve been, like, right there a few times when shi— stuff went down with him. Like my sophomore year he saved my AcaDec from falling to our deaths in a broken elevator in the Washington Monument. That was badass. Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am. I shouldn’t have said ass.”
“It’s fine,” Pepper says.
“Sorry,” Ned says again.
“That’s the only time you’ve seen him?”
“Oh, no,” Ned says. “My class trip to Europe we all nearly died when he and Mysterio had that fight on the Tower Bridge. I never believed Mysterio, for the record. And a couple months ago my friend and I were at the Statue of Liberty when he was fighting a bunch of bad guys there too. We both nearly fell to our deaths. I got saved by a flying cloak.”
Pepper has no idea what to make of that. “How do you keep winding up in the same places as him?” she asks.
“Just luck, I guess,” Ned says.
“You never met Tony though?” she checks.
“No, that would have been amazing.”
“Did any of your classmates know him?”
“I don’t think so. No one I remember.”
Pepper bites back a sigh. She thanks Ned for talking to her, and then sits staring out the windows at the grey, wintery sky for a bit, puzzling over this new information.
There’s got to be some sort of connection here, but it seems to keep coming back to Spider-Man. Tony and Spider-Man taking photos together. Spider-Man showing up on all of Ned Leeds’ school trips, even ones abroad and out of state.
Spider-Man talking to Tony right before he died.
She flips through the blurry photos again, until she finds the one she’d taken from the kitchen of Tony and Spider-Man with the Stark Internship certificate. The back still says ‘The kid’s first job.’
Well, she has Spider-Man downstairs right now. No time like the present to ask him what he knows.
- - -
Spider-Man is slumped over the workbench, asleep, when Pepper gets back downstairs.
She stands in the doorway, staring at him, but he’s definitely asleep. His head is pillowed on his arms, he’s still wearing his coat, and he looks… small. Smaller than he usually does, when she sees him in action.
Pepper approaches slowly, but he doesn’t wake up. It takes her shaking his shoulder, and saying his name, and then he jerks, startling hard, and topples backward off the stool. He lands on the floor with a pained sounding cry.
“Oh my god!” Pepper crouches down in front of him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Are you okay?”
Spider-Man sits up, one arm wrapped around his midsection. “I’m fine,” he says.
He sounds like he’s in pain. Pepper frowns. “You don’t sound fine.”
“Well, I just fell on my ass,” he mutters. Then: “Sorry for saying ass.”
Pepper waves him off. “Why does everyone act like I’ve never heard the word ass?”
Spider-Man gets to his feet, but it seems to be a bit of a struggle, and he uses the stool for help, solidifying Pepper’s impression that he’s hurt.
“You’re hurt,” she says.
“I’m not,” he insists.
She reaches out, poking him in the ribs, and he flinches away violently. “Yes, you are,” she says. “Why didn’t you say anything? Come on, I’ve got a first aid kit upstairs.”
“First aid kit isn’t going to help my ribs,” Spider-Man says.
“I’m betting it’s not just your ribs.”
He huffs, but doesn’t argue.
Pepper raises her chin in triumph. “Come on, upstairs.” She grabs his shoulder, turning him towards the stairs.
“You really don’t need to—”
“Now.”
Spider-Man shuts up and lets her push him out the door.
- - -
He still won’t take his mask off. He’ll take off the rest of the suit, peeling it down to his waist so that she can bandage the deep cut on his shoulder that is still bleeding sluggishly and wrap his ribs with some ace bandages, but he won’t remove the mask.
“It’s better if you don’t know who I am,” he says.
“Better for who?” Pepper questions.
He doesn’t answer, but his shoulders stiffen.
While she has him trapped, sitting on the closed toilet seat and waiting for her to apply butterfly bandages to his shoulder, she says, “I wanted to ask you about a couple things, actually.”
“I’m not going to tell you—”
“How do you know Ned Leeds?”
He jerks under her, then spins around to face her. “What?”
Pepper is still holding the bandage aloft. “How do you know Ned Leeds?”
“How do you know Ned Leeds?”
“I just talked to him. He went to Midtown High and he’s been nearby during at least three big fights you’ve been in, going back to before the Blip. Why do you keep tagging along on his school trips?”
“I didn’t tag— That’s not any of your business.”
Pepper stares him down. “I’m looking for a teenage boy who went to Midtown High School and then Blipped. He knew Tony. I think you knew him too.”
Spider-Man stands up, taking a step back, away from her. “You’re… Why are you doing that? How do you know that?”
“How do I know what?”
“You’re not supposed to know about that.”
Her hands are still raised, holding the bandage. She crumples it between her fingers, letting it fall to the floor. “Not supposed to know what?”
Spider-Man just shakes his head.
“Do you know who he is?”
Another shake of his head.
“Are you lying to me?”
He doesn’t move.
Pepper purses her lips. “Look, I want to help you. I do. But I want you to help me too. I need to find this boy. And I just keep hitting brick walls everytime I think I’m getting close. I don’t know his name. I don’t know what he looks like. But I know he’s out there.” She sniffs, blinking hard against the tears that are stinging her eyes. Tears of frustration, partly, but mostly just of compounded loss. She just keeps losing things. Losing people.
“Tony knew him and cared about him and I know for sure he went to Midtown and I’d bet money that you knew him too so—”
“Don’t cry,” Spider-Man says, cutting her off. “Please, don’t… How do you know?” he asks, a bit desperately. “How do you even know that I— that there’s someone out there to look for?”
She pauses, debating for a moment about telling him about the recording. But why not. She doesn’t really have a reason not to. “Tony mentioned him on a recording he made before he died. And there are some photos, but they’re all blurry or messed up. That’s why I don’t know what he looks like. I don’t know why Tony never introduced us but I still need to find him now.”
Spider-Man has looked away, staring down at the floor. He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, but eventually asks, “The hologram? From his funeral? It didn’t… It didn’t get changed?”
“How do you know it’s a hologram?” she asks.
“I’ve seen it,” he says.
“How?”
“You showed it to me.”
“This is the longest I’ve ever talked to you.”
He huffs out a breath. “Yeah,” he says. “I know. You still showed it to me. I thought it would have been erased.”
“I didn’t erase it,” she says.
“No, not you,” he says. “There was… there was this spell. And it made everyone forget. It made it like I never… never existed. So I thought that the hologram would have been changed like I never existed too.”
Pepper swallows hard. “He was talking to you?”
Spider-Man nods.
Then he reaches up, and pulls off the mask. Underneath it is the teenager she’d met yesterday in the hallway at Midtown, the one who’d given Morgan a sharpie. He looks exhausted, his hair in disarray from the mask and his eyes red-rimmed from their conversation.
He looks familiar, in a way that goes beyond having seen him yesterday. Something deeper. Pepper knows that she knows him. She just… can’t place where she knows him from. How she met him. There’s no context.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Peter,” he says. “Peter Parker.”
“Tony just called you ‘kid’ in the recording. He never said your name.”
There’s a hint of a smile on Peter’s face. “He did that a lot.”
“Did he know you, as you, the whole time? Not just as Spider-Man?” she asks.
Peter nods.
“Why don’t I remember?”
“The spell made everyone forget. We had to do it because the… the entire multiverse was breaking apart, and it was my fault, and I had to fix it. And this was the only way.”
Multiverse. That Pepper has heard of. That was the reason Tony’s ‘time travel’ stunt had worked.
It’s still just… too much for her to think about, most days. Mostly because it makes her think that maybe there’s a universe out there where Tony survived, where he’s still alive and where they’re together and happy, and she can’t stand the unfairness of being stuck in this universe without him instead.
“So I did know you?” she asks.
Peter nods. “Yeah,” he says.
There are no memories being unlocked right now, now that he’s told her. She can’t remember anything about him from the past. Whatever spell was done, it was clearly very thorough.
He’s still bleeding.
“Sit back down,” she says. “Let me finish bandaging that up. You’ve got a cut on your face too.”
He hesitates, but then sits down again, and lets her go back to her ministrations.
“So,” Pepper says. “No one remembers you?”
Peter shakes his head.
“What about your parents?”
“They’re dead.”
“Who do you live with then?”
“Uh, no one,” he says.
Pepper nudges him around to face her so that she can clean the cut over his eyebrow. “No one? How old are you?”
“18.”
She squints at him. “Why were you at a high school for band practice yesterday then?”
“I was there for my GED,” he says.
“If you were 18 you’d have graduated already. Try again.”
His lips purse. “17,” he admits.
“And living on your own? Where?”
He shrugs.
It hits her then: his last name is Parker. “Are you related to May?”
He jerks out of her hands. Well, that’s answer enough.
“What happened at Happy’s apartment?”
“She died because of me is what happened,” Peter says.
Pepper steps back, staring down at him. May must be his mother.
“She died because she was close to me,” he says. “Everyone who’s close to me gets hurt or dies or… This is why I didn’t want to tell you. This is why you shouldn’t have looked for me. It’s better if everyone just forgets about me.” He stands up, yanking his suit back up over his shoulders. “I should go. You should forget you ever found me.”
“Peter, I can’t forget.”
“You forgot before. Everyone forgot. It’s better that way.”
“It’s not,” Pepper says. “It’s not better. I’ve been going crazy, wondering who you were and what I was missing and how I’d forgotten this whole person who was clearly someone that Tony loved. He loved you. And other people must have loved you too. I don’t even know if I did or not because this spell made me forget everything! But it feels right, being here with you and talking to you. You can’t just leave again.”
“You’ll be safer if I do.”
“Who cares about being safe?” she asks, nearly scoffing at the idea. “If I wanted to be safe, do you think I’d have married Tony?”
He frowns.
“I was kidnapped and pumped full of fire and nearly fell to my death and was in that same fight against Thanos as you were, and that’s just the big stuff. My life isn’t safe. If I wanted it to be safe I wouldn’t have been with Tony. And I wouldn’t still be in charge of SI and helping out what’s left of the Avengers when they need it. I never wanted a safe and boring life.”
Peter is staring now, like he’s never seen her before. Except now, of course, she knows that he has.
“I’m going to say this, because I think you need to hear it,” she says. “I always knew Tony was going to die fighting something one day. I knew it years before it happened. And I asked him to walk away once and we broke up over it for a while before I realized that it wasn’t fair to ask him to stop, because he couldn’t. It was who he was. He couldn’t walk away from everything and be the man that I loved, and I didn’t want to walk away from him. Him being Iron Man? That was part of why I loved him. Because he was brave and he tried to help people and he was willing to give his life to make this world a better place. And I wanted to help him with that as much as I could.” She swallows hard, but keeps going. “I bet your friends and family all feel the same way.”
He’s quiet for a minute. “I just… I just don’t want anyone else to get hurt because of me.”
“I know.”
He sniffs, and Pepper feels like maybe that’s enough for tough conversations, because she’s not even sure where that entire speech came from. It had just felt… natural to lecture him about self-sacrifice.
Her watch buzzes then, and she glances at it to see that Happy is calling. “Hang on,” she tells Peter, stepping outside the bathroom where she’s been patching him up to answer the call.
“We’re headed home,” Happy says. “Gonna stop and pick up burgers. You want us to bring you back something?”
“Yes, please. Hang on a sec.” Pepper leans back in the door. “Peter, do you like cheeseburgers?”
He’s been looking in the mirror, poking at the bandage she’d placed over the cut on his brow. He catches her gaze in the reflection. “Yeah, of course.”
“Good. You’re staying for lunch.” He looks like he’s going to protest, so she adds, “No arguing.”
After telling Happy to grab extra food and bring it all home to eat, Pepper drags Peter back out into the hallway. “Do you have any other clothes? Unless you want to explain the Spider-Man thing to Happy and Morgan?”
“Um, no,” he says. Then: “Happy used to know.”
She gestures for him to follow her down to the hall. “Did you live there with him and May?”
Peter nods.
“And now?”
“I told you, I’ve got a place.”
Pepper hums at that, wondering what kind of place a 17-year-old who doesn’t even have their GED yet can afford. And wondering why he’d getting a GED, when he’d been enrolled at Midtown before. Maybe that’s to do with the spell too though.
“I think there’s still some of Tony’s stuff here,” she says, leading him into one of the bedrooms. “It should fit you.”
She’s avoided Tony’s closet at home, and there’s not that many things left in this penthouse still, but she’s surprised by how easy it feels to look through them when she’s judging whether they will fit Peter or not. Sorting garments and thinking, these pants are too dressy and this shirt is too small, instead of remembering exactly when she’d last seen Tony wear it.
She does pick out an old band t-shirt, in the end, and Peter’s face crinkles up with a complicated emotion when he sees it.
“He kept trying to teach me the difference between all these bands in the lab,” he says.
She looks down at the shirt. “Black Sabbath?”
“I always told him they all sounded the same. Like old person music.”
Pepper snorts, and then starts laughing for real.
- - -
Happy is suspicious when he gets home and finds Peter sitting on the couch. “Who’s this?”
“This is Peter,” Pepper introduces. She leaves off his last name for now, not wanting to explain everything quite yet. The food will get cold if she does. “He was a friend of Tony’s. He’s going to have lunch with us.”
“Hi Peter!” Morgan chirps. She drops her coat on the bench by the door and darts into the living room. “You knew Daddy?”
Peter looks down at her, looking a little overwhelmed. “Yeah,” he says.
“How did you know him?” Happy asks, still suspicious.
Pepper takes the take out bags from him and starts unloading them onto the dining table.
“Um… I had an internship,” Peter says.
Happy’s brow furrows. “You’re in college?” He doesn’t sound like he believes it.
“High school,” Peter says.
“SI doesn’t have high school interns.”
“It was a special case.”
“Did you work in the lab?” Morgan asks.
Peter nods.
“Maybe you can show me how to get the suits working then because I tried and—”
“Morgan!” Pepper cuts in. “You’re not supposed to go in the garage!”
Morgan rolls her eyes. “I didn’t!” she argues.
“Where else did you mess around with one of your dad’s suits?”
“In his office,” she says, matter-of-factly.
Pepper gapes at her.
Peter has a small smile on his face.
Pepper points at them both. “No suits.” Then: “No Iron Man suits,” she amends, thinking of Peter’s Spider-Man suit. “Get over here and eat.”
- - -
Later, after they’ve eaten and Morgan has quizzed Peter for stories about Tony that she hasn’t heard yet—Peter tells her a funny one about Tony teaching him to drive that Pepper hasn’t heard either, or that she’s forgotten, because of whatever the spell has done to her—Peter goes back downstairs to finish fixing the Iron Spider suit. Pepper had nearly forgotten that was why he was even here in the first place.
“Thanks,” he tells her again, after he’s done. He’s changed back into his Spider-Man suit, but he hasn’t put the mask back on yet. It’s just the two of them down here.
“Anytime,” Pepper says.
He gives her a small smile.
“I mean that,” she says. “I think we should tell Happy. Morgan and I will be up at the lake house, and you’re welcome up there too, but he’s here in the city. He can help you. He helped you before, didn’t he?”
After a moment, Peter nods. “He did.”
“I think he’d like to help you again,” she says. “He’s been missing something too, these past couple months. And it’s not just May that he’s missing. I think he’s missing you too.”
Peter stares down at his feet, chewing on his bottom lip. Eventually he nods. “Okay,” he says.
Pepper holds out her hand, and waits for him to take it.