Work Text:
I’m trying to make you proud
Do everything you did
I hope you’re up there with God
saying, “That’s my kid.”
- “If You Could See Me Now” by The Script
Peter is the one who finds her.
She’s sitting on a bench swing underneath an oak, the toes of her canvas high tops tracing circles in the dewy grass. Her exhales are white and frosty in the morning air. The sun hasn’t risen yet, but it’s about to, and the horizon over the Atlantic Ocean is painted orange and pink.
She hears him before she sees him, because her eyes are closed. The bench creaks as he sits beside her, sways a bit as he leans back. She reaches out and takes his hand without opening her eyes, and he squeezes it. She squeezes too, takes in the icy coldness of his wedding band, the warmth of his fingers, the cracks in his calloused palms.
“Hey, kiddo,” is all he says.
Not your mom is worried sick or what were you thinking, running off like that. Peter never pushes, never prods, never chastises. Not even that time when she had to call him from a party in the suburbs after she had one beer too many. She’d thrown up all over the leather seats of his car. Not one of her finer moments. She was only thirteen at the time. Too young to be a junior in high school, too young to know how to befriend older kids, much too young to be drinking.
Alcoholism runs in her family.
“Hi, Pete,” she says finally.
“Want to talk about it?” he asks.
She opens her eyes.
A raven lands on one of the headstones and ruffles its feathers. It raises a wing and nips beneath it, preening. She pulls Peter’s arm around her shoulders, leans against him. She wishes she’d thought to wear a warmer coat. All she’s got on is her boyfriend’s varsity jacket, with its red wool sleeves and 24 embroidered on the chest. She’s shivering. It feels like every hair on her arm is erect and quivering.
“I hate him,” she says, so suddenly and so viciously that it takes her by surprise. “I know I shouldn’t, but I do.”
Peter makes a hmm sound in the back of his throat.
She takes a deep, shuddering breath. She’s not crying—she hasn’t cried in years—but sometimes she thinks she would feel better if she still could. The tears burn inside her, hot and wet and unshed, and she doesn’t know what to do with the unnamable emotion coursing through her. She wants to scream, throw something, hit somebody.
“Do you ever hate him?” she asks, hoping Peter will say something—anything—that gets the acidic taste of guilt out of her mouth.
“No,” Peter says. “Never.”
“Oh.”
“It’s okay that you do, though.” Peter squints at the rising sun, shielding his eyes with his free hand. “He’d understand, Morgan.”
“He left me.”
“He died.”
“Same difference.”
She does a pretty good job of living a normal life, for the most part. Their apartment is small. Modest, save for the twelve-person security team on 24/7 duty in the lobby. She buys scented lip gloss and does all her homework. Spends her free time binge watching Netflix and arguing with neckbeards on the Stranger Things reddit forum. Drinks her coffee with almond milk and flirts with the cute barista who makes it for her. She doesn’t have social media, doesn’t go to press conferences with her mother, stays out of the limelight. At school she goes by the name Morgan Potts. It’s better that way. She gets enough attention as is.
“Your dad…” Peter shakes his head and lets out a low, soft laugh that’s almost a sigh. “…he would be so damn proud of you, Morgan.”
“Don’t say that,” she snaps, because she’s heard it countless times over the past week. From her mom, from Happy—even from Rhodey, and he’s usually better than that. It’s objectively a terrible thing to say to a fourteen-year-old who’s graduating from high school—your dad would be so proud!—because all it does is remind her that he’s not here. Her dad can’t be proud of her, because her dad is dead, and dead people can’t feel pride.
Her family can all fuck right off.
Peter’s smile is wan. “If it makes you feel better, he’d be righteously indignant that you picked Cal Tech over MIT.”
“It’s a better school.”
“Take that back.”
“I said what I said.”
“Fighting words, kiddo.”
They sit in silence for a few minutes. Two mourners pass, heads down. The woman is holding a bouquet of pink tulips. The man has a blank look on his face, like a notebook with all the pages torn out.
Morgan forces a swallow past the rock in her throat.
“It’s just…” She trails off, waits for the mourners to get further away. “He saved the world, you know? Brought half the population back and died a hero. It’s horrible that I wish he hadn’t.”
Peter doesn’t respond. She’s being insensitive—he’s one of the people who was brought back. She can’t find it in herself to care, can’t bring herself to stop talking.
“He never got to see me grow up,” she says, her voice a cracked mirror. “He’ll never know me. And he was more than willing to make that sacrifice.”
She’s knows she sounds like a childish brat, wishing her father had chosen her over saving the world. But isn’t that what dads are supposed to do? Put their children before everyone else? She was so young when he died. She didn’t know the first thing about robotics, technology, coding. The conversations she could’ve had with him, the information she could’ve dredged from the recesses of his mind, the things she could’ve learned…it’s all gone now, erased, nonexistent. A hard drive wiped clean.
The first time she brought a boy home, she imagined what it would be like if her dad was around. Would he pretend to chase the guy off with his hand blasters, or make awkward but well-meaning comments about being safe and going slow? Instead, her mom had made dinner and asked polite questions. They ate soup and salad. Brett kissed her on the cheek before he left.
It was a lovely evening. Perfect, really.
“Honey.” Peter’s voice is soft. “He didn’t want to die.”
“Is that supposed to make it better?”
“No,” Peter says. “No, I think that actually makes it worse.”
She doesn’t know how to tell Peter that she spent all day yesterday watching recordings of press conferences her father gave to the media. She wants to make an AI—one that can give her advice about boys and joke around with her and judge her taste in music. She thought there might be enough recordings of him that she could capture his voice’s likeness. He’s forever immortalized on the internet, his snideness, his smugness, his wit.
But there are no online records of the voice he used with her—the gentle, kind, up-and-at-’em-girl tone—and the worst part is she barely remembers it. She has to search her mind as far back as the memories go, and she lives in fear that someday she won’t remember him at all.
He should’ve been there, she thinks. He should’ve gotten to watch me graduate. He should’ve been in the front row.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I broke his holographic table?” Peter asks.
Morgan clicks her tongue. She doesn’t want to hear Peter’s stories. It feels like her entire life revolves around hearing how awesome her dad was. Rhodey tells her college stories about her dad’s general buffoonery, Happy gives her the run-down on his day-to-day life, her mom talks about their relationship. All the stories make him out to be wonderful and heroic, because it’s not right to speak ill of the dead. She’ll never hear about her father’s many faults from the people who actually knew him.
Peter seems to realize she’s not going to respond.
“I spit soda all over it,” he says, laughter turning feather-light. “Grape soda. The table was probably worth more than my entire apartment complex, and it never worked again. The holographs always glitched into a pixilated mess. They weren’t like that before.”
“Why’d you spit soda on it?”
“He made me laugh.” Peter grins sheepishly. “I asked him if he wanted kids, and he said ‘You mean, like, for dinner?’ Dumb joke, but his delivery was on point.”
Morgan’s seen videos of him snapping at reporters every time the issue came up. She’s surprised he didn’t snap at Peter, but she shouldn’t be. Her father loved Peter, loved him like a son, loved him in a way that he never got to love Morgan because she was too little to be mentored.
She tries not to resent Peter for it. Most of the time, she doesn’t.
“He didn’t want kids,” she says.
“Yes, he did,” Peter says gently. “He wanted you, Morgan.”
Morgan scoots away from Peter and folds her arms over her chest. She digs the toe of her shoe into the grass and uses the leverage to move the swing. Forward and back they sway. Forward. Back.
“I think he was scared.” Peter’s watching her carefully—she can feel his gaze on her without moving her head. “He had a pretty terrible relationship with his own dad. He didn’t want to risk having kids and messing them up.”
“He should’ve trusted that instinct,” Morgan says. She means it as a joke, but her voice is brittle. A bitterness like tears floods her mouth. “Aren’t you going to say I’m wrong?” she asks when Peter’s silence becomes smothering.
“There’s nothing I can say to make this better,” he says. “Grief never goes away, not even a little bit. It doesn’t get easier, but you get stronger, and that’s almost the same thing.”
They sit on the bench until the sun has risen, casting waves of golden over the graveyard. The chilly wind kisses her hair, her face. When Peter says, “I’ll drive you home,” she finds that she’s ready to leave, and she gets up without argument. The still-damp grass crumples beneath her shoes.
They pause in front of the stone.
It’s the real grave, not the fake one at the monument in DC. Only close friends and family know where Tony Stark was buried. My father’s corpse is eight feet below where I’m standing right now, Morgan thinks, and she has the sudden and strange desire to laugh. It’s a nice grave, a clean plot, and he was buried directly into the earth. No coffin. He’s claustrophobic, her mother said once. Not he was claustrophobic. Pepper never speaks about Tony in the past tense. Morgan doesn’t think she ever will.
There’s no name on the headstone, no dates. Nothing that could be identified and traced back to him, nothing that could cause the masses to disturb his final resting place. All that’s chiseled into the gray stone is a number.
3,000.
I’m not ready to forgive you, Morgan thinks. Not yet. Maybe someday.
She uses her sleeve to wipe the layer of grit off the top of the stone. When she finally turns around, she makes the walk to Peter’s car at a brisk pace. She doesn’t look back.
The raven watches them leave. It caws, just once, a somber wail. It flies away.