Chapter Text
"DADDY, tell me a STORY!!"
"Morglie, I just told you a story, it's your favorite one! It went like this: Morgan, you need to go to bed! Daddy picked Morgan up, and he threw her into the bed, covered her up with all the blankets, and smooshed her head down into the pillows, and now she's sleeping! See, great story!"
"NOOOOO, DADDYYYYY! That's not a great story, that's a...a terrible story! Tell me a story about an adventure!!"
Putting on a long-suffering sigh, very much belied by the grin he sported, Tony pushed Morgan over in the bed, and stretched out next to her. His arms crossed over his chest, eyes rolled up towards the ceiling.
"Well, what sort of adventure do you want to have, Morglie? I don't think I know of too many adventures..." Tony drawled, as he shot his daughter a sideways look, one sardonic brow raised and a grin dancing at the edges of his lips.
Now outraged at such heinous deception, Morgan huffed. "DADDY, you do TOO know adventure stories! You are IRON MAN, Daddy, you've done all sorts of stuff! Tell me about your Iron Man Adventures!"
Grimacing slightly for a moment, but quickly covering his discomfort with a cough, Tony racked his brain trying to think of anything remotely appropriate to tell the little girl from his so-called "Iron Man Adventures"...
"Well...once upon a time, a long time ago..." And he trailed off, truly unable to think of a story that didn't involve gratitous violence, death, bloodshed, monsters, nuclear bombs in outerspace, aliens...The list of horrors really was quite endless.
"Oh, I know, okay, Once Upon a Time, I had a big house on the side of a cliff in a place called Malibu. It was actually your Grandparent's house, but after they died, I inherited it, and I lived there for many years," Tony answered, getting into the beginnings of his story.
"Did Mommy live there with you, too?" Morgan asked, her dark eyes shinining with curiosity.
"Uhm, no, not--not yet. Wait, yeah, she did, there at the end. Mommy lived with me there towards the end of the time I lived there. But that's not important. Mommy worked for Daddy as his PA for a few years before Daddy pulled his head out of his butt and we started dating." Tony paused here, realizing he had opened A Door, seeing Morgan's sudden extreme interest in Daddy's "head up his butt" and about to ask a billion questions, so he quickly spoke up louder and faster to move on with the story. "ANYWAY, there was this really, really bad guy who called himself The Mandarin."
"Like the little oranges?" Morgan asked, clearly intrigued as to how fruit could possibly be a bad guy...
Laughing, Tony answered, "Well, the name is the same, but this was a bad, bad, dude, not the cute little oranges your Mom gets at the market."
"Oh, okay. So, bad dude!" Morgan answered as she crossed her arms over her chest, head down, chin stuck out, clearly ready to take on this Bad Dude all by herself if required.
"Wait, Daddy, what's a dude?"
"Oh, uhm, it's a guy. Dude is just another word for a man, or a guy. Anyway."
With a grin and as he gently brushed the hair out of her eyes, Tony went on.
"Yeah, so this Mandarin guy, he had kidnapped Uncle Rhodey! And I had to save him! Oh, wait, hold up, there's some other stuff that happened first..." Tony trailed off, trying to get the story straight even in his own head.
"Daddy, your stories are shit." Morgan said, a smirk on her face as she used "Mommy's Personal Word" just as she'd been told not to a few days prior.
"Hey now, I told you, if you don't quit saying Mommy's word, I'm going to sell you to the gypsies!" Tony tried hard to be stern, but hearing Shit out of the mouth of a four-year-old made it incredibly difficult not to laugh.
"What are...Jump-sies? Do they go to the trampoline park? Because I love it there, please sell me to them!" Morgan bounced in demonstration of her jumping prowess, even on mattresses.
Biting his lip and squeezing his eyes closed, realizing that he was never going to win this battle, Tony did his best to keep a straight face.
"No, Morgan, GYPSIES, they, they, uh, they make little girls do ALL THE CHORES, all the time. They never, ever give you time to play or run around, you just spend all your time washing dishes with food REALLY baked on, and cleaning out the chimney with these huge brushes, and you even have to crawl up inside where all the ashes and the bird poop is, and doing *laundry* (Tony shuddered) INCLUDING the folding and matching up ALL the socks, and cleaning up after the horse. AND, you have to live in a caravan. It's cold, and drafty, and they make you sleep in a cardboard box ON THE FLOOR! It's terrible. You don't want to go be with them. Now, can I continue my story, hmmm?"
Giggling, Morgan nodded.
"Well, good, then. Okay, so, this Mandarin guy, he had done some bad stuff in this tiny little town called Rose Hill, it's all the way in Tennessee. That's where I met your cousin Harley. You remember Harley, right? Curly blonde hair, kind of short, askes WAAAAAY too many inappropriate questions? Came to visit us last summer?"
"Ooh, yes, I love Harley! He's the bestest! He told me that when he's older, when he learns to drive a car, he'll take me for a ride!"
"LIKE HELL HE WILL! You are NOT going to--Nevermind, whatever, I'm the boss of both of you, and when *I* say that you can ride with him, you'll both be over thirty. I'll be, like, a hundred years old, so if you scare me to death, it won't matter so much anymore." Tony spluttered, secretly vowing to send a sharply worded email to Harley as soon as he was done here...There was NO WAY that soon-to-be fourteen-year-old LEARNER'S PERMIT HOLDER was driving HIS BABY SISTER AROUND IN A CAR.
Morgan just crossed her arms again and huffed in annoyance, clearly ignoring what her father had decreed. In that instant, Tony knew he was going to pay for Every. Single. Misdeed. In. His. Entire. Life. With. Raising. This. Child.
Slightly terrified, but unwilling to admit it, Tony continued his story.
"So, that's where I met Harley. My Iron Man suit had been damaged and needed to be powered back up, and Harley helped me, but only AFTER he threatened me with a potato gun, helped me escape from yet MORE bad guys with REAL guns, and helped me out when the same bad guys dropped a million billion gallons of really cold water on me and the town. It was a rough night."
Tony paused for breath, even as Morgan nodded and poked his arm to hurry the story back up.
Looking at her sideways, putting a slight growl in his voice, Tony went on. "That's abuse, right there, that is. I think I should call ADULT Protective Services..."
Morgan just batted her extra long eyelashes at him, and he rolled his eyes as he went on. "And then I got home safe AndDefeatedTheMandarinAndWeAllLivedHappilyEverAfter, THE END!" Tony quipped, stringing the last sentence together into basically one giant word.
Rolling her eyes, Morgan grabbed his arm as he tried to get up, refusing to let him cut her story short in such an abrupt way.
"DADDDDDY! That's not how it went, HOW did you get home safe, and HOW did you defeat the bad guys, and what about Uncle Rhodey, he's still kidnapped! Ugh, Daddy, you are bad at stories! I'll help teach you how to do them better!"
Hiding a smirk, even as he relaxed back into the bed, and gently pushed Morgan's shoulders back into the pillows and under the blankets, he pretended to reluctantly continue his tale.
"Well, FINE THEN. Slave Driver. Okay, so, Harley helped me get the suit charging, but it still needed more time to finish up, so I headed out to help Uncle Rhodey, from where he'd been dumb enough to get captured by the Mandarin. I told Harley to answer the phone when I called, and we would figure it out from there."
"So, I drove all the way to Miami Florida, where the Mandarin was keeping Uncle Rhodey. There was a big fight, and I very cleverly outwitted a fake Mandarin guy, and I saved Uncle Rhodey. Then I called my suit from Harley in his garage, and Uncle Rhodey and I went out to where the REAL Mandarin was hiding! He had taken Mommy hostage, and the President, too, but I was way more worried about Mommy. Because, let's be real, I don't know the President all that much, but I know Mommy a whole lot, and she's really, REALLY important. Right?!" Tony paused, looking for agreement from Morgan.
Morgan was starting to get heavy eyed from the familiar and comfortable voice of her father, but for this she woke up enough to nod vigorously. Mommy was, indeed, far more important than any Present-dent. Morgan wasn't even sure what a dented present had to do with anything anyway, but she was too sleepy to ask right then.
Nodding, Tony went on. "Sure 'nough, then. Okay, so, we had this big battle on a pier, and I had all these extra iron man suits I had built, and Jarvis sent them to help me and Rhodey out of our predicament. And, yes, oh, and Mommy saved ME at the end! It was really cool. She was able to beat up the Mandarin, because I had hurt my leg and I was stuck there on the ground, and I didn't have any more suits, and he was going to totally kick my as-- err, kick my answering machine, yeah, uhm, don't say anything other than butt, all the other words belong to Mommy. Actually, don't even say Butt in front of Mommy, okay?" Tony paused, waiting for the child to nod in agreement before continuing.
"But Mommy came up out of NOWHERE, and totally nailed him. And then Uncle Rhodey saved the President, and I had made Mommy CEO of SI, but she decided she did NOT want that kind of drama in her life, and she made me do it again. It was a bummer, but I love her a whole lot, so I let her force me back into running my own company. Task master that she is."
"There. The End. For real this time."
Tony looked over, expecting more questions or an argument, and was surprised to see that Morgan had fallen completely asleep, curled up on her side, and clutching her stuffed Bedtime Bunny.
With a soft smile, he carefully got up from the bed, and kissed her on the forehead for a long moment, savoring the scent of tear-free shampoo, juice-pops, lavender detergent, and freshly mown grass that was his daughter.
"I love you, 3000, Morglie."