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When Morgan is three, she gets her first imaginary friend. His name is Peter. Probably Tony’s fault for telling her too many stories about the legendary Spider-Man. His heart damn near bursts out of his chest the first time Morgan runs down the stairs and yells ‘me and Peter are going on the swings!’ before slamming the front door shut behind her.
Tony lowers his dishwashing brush and breathes out slowly, then shakes his head and lays it aside entirely. He reaches for the picture on his shelf: him and Peter at the tower, both doing bunny ears. Peter, with that eternal ‘I can’t believe I’m actually here’-look.
He puts it back behind the wineglasses and looks out the window for a while at Morgan, alone on the swings, talking animatedly to the empty air around her.
He pulls his sleeve down and reaches out to wipe the condensation off the glass. The windows have been more fogged up than usual, lately.
-
It makes his heart stutter in his chest the first few times when Morgan mentions Peter, but after that it becomes strangely comforting. Like having the kid around, somehow. A few months in, Morgan starts to insist they should have an extra chair at the table so Peter can have dinner with them.
“Should I set a plate out for him as well?” Tony suggests.
Morgan looks at him like he’s an idiot. “He can’t eat.”
“Of course.”
“He can’t talk either.”
“So how’d you know his name is Peter?”
“From your pictures.”
“Ah.” Tony somehow assumed that Morgan had an invisible friend her own age and just named him ‘Peter’ because the name was familiar. He didn’t expect she was literally imagining his kid as her best friend.
-
He builds his own hygrometer to measure the humidity in the house, but it gives him readings of a very normal 39 percent level. That’s weird. He wipes the condensation off the windows again. Morgan left uncoordinated little scribbles in them. She’ll be learning to write soon, before she even gets to kindergarten.
-
“Do you think it’s because she doesn’t have enough friends to play with out here?” Pepper worries when months later, Morgan’s fixation on her ‘Peter’ has only increased.
“Imaginary friends are really common.”
But Pepper worries like she always does, and calls the elderly couple living across the lake. They are taking care of their granddaughter Rosie, only a year older than Morgan, whose parents both snapped.
Rosie comes over. Morgan shows her around the house, and finally says, “that’s Peter!” pointing at the corner of the couch.
“Hi, Peter!” Rosie says brightly.
They play all day, and when Rosie’s grandfather picks her up, she excitedly tells him how much fun she had playing with “Morgan and Peter”.
This is not the effect that Pepper had hoped for, probably.
-
It does go away, eventually. Morgan mentions Peter less and less as months go by, and seems less sure of herself when she does mention him. She no longer says things like “we played in the grass all day and he showed me where to find all the bugs”, but she says things like “I think I saw him today, behind a tree”.
The scribbles on the windows are becoming slowly more well-formed. Almost like actual letters. “Is that my name, there?” Tony asks Morgan once, tapping at the window.
Morgan squints at it for a while like this is the first time she sees it, then shrugs. “Maybe.”
-
On Morgan’s fourth birthday, Tony realizes she hasn’t mentioned Peter in several months, now.
-
Rogers and his damn groupies come to visit. They came up with the dumbest plan he has ever heard. It’s not even worth thinking about.
He stays up all night thinking about it.
He runs about a million models but comes up empty. When morning light seeps through the curtain and he hears Morgan stir upstairs, he lets the hologram of his nth attempt dissolve into darkness with an irritated wave, then drops his head into his hands with a long exhale. “Damnit, kid, I just don’t know,” he mutters. The way Peter would bounce around him in the lab and offer ideas that were little gems, sometimes; those memories feel particularly vivid, today. He has these rare moments, when he thinks about Peter so intently that it almost feels like the memory becomes a physical thing, like Peter is actually here.
He heads to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. He presses the button on his espresso machine, leans one shoulder against the fridge, thoughts still racing. Time travel. Why should he waste his time? But how can he not?
And then he freezes.
Written in the condensation on his window are some actual legible letters.
INV MOEBIUS STRP
It looks like it was written painstakingly slowly, with great precision, the lines of each letter wavering slightly. Where the hell did Morgan even hear about a Moebius strip?
Hang on. An inverted Moebius strip. He staggers, pressing his fingers against his mouth. “Holy shit.”
“Shit!” Morgan yells from down the hall.