#just a quick one shot I’m doing inbetween by big fix-it story

[hay-389]

A little snippet of something I’m working on. It’s mainly supposed to be from Morgan’s POV, but there will be a little of Tony’s, Pepper’s, and Peter’s added in the full story.

So, at the end of the school day, roughly around 12:00 pm, she sat coloring at a table waiting to be picked up. It was a Friday which meant her dad would be getting her. Usually Uncle Happy and her dad rotated shifts and on occasion when her mommy didn’t have any work she would show up and surprise her. Morgan knew the schedule like the back of her hand so she wasn’t surprised when her dad strolled into the classroom like clockwork wearing his usual pair of black shades and baseball cap.

“Daddy!”

“Hey there Morgana, ready to make a prison break?” He knelt down to her level, eyeing the picture she had all her focus on before he interrupted.

“Whatcha got there, kiddo?”

Tony picked it up off the table and held the slightly crinkled paper up to the light to get a better look.

“That’s you daddy,” Morgan informed him, slightly rolling her eyes and huffing because it was obviously him dressed up as Iron Man. She used the perfect shade of red and yellow to color his suit in. How could he not tell?

“Right, of course, that’s me. And I’m totally kicking those guy’s butts because they’re the super villains hell bent on ruining the day.”

Geez, did she have to explain everything to him?

“No daddy, you aren’t fighting them, you’re flying away.”

“Now why would I fly away from them when I have perfectly good repulsors on my hands that can blast them into next Sunday? Hmm.”

“Because, those are the bad people who took you away. That’s you escaping them.”

For just a moment Morgan watched as the wide grin across her father’s face fell into a grim expression. It didn’t last very long, just a few seconds, but she knew she saw it because it was very similar to the one he sometimes wore when telling her stories about her dead brother.

“Who told you that, Morgan?”

“Ethan.”

“Well,” her father spoke, exchanging his rather sad look for a smile. Morgan thought it looked kind of fake. “I think Ethan is too nosey for his own good. Let’s get out of here.”

Her father didn’t say anything else, instead grabbing her book bag and lunchbox from her cubby, then waving goodbye towards her teacher and helper as they left the classroom. She held his hand as they walked to the car and occasionally looked up to see her dad staring down at her drawing. It didn’t seem he liked it all that much. Had she upset him by coloring it?

Morgan stayed quiet as she was buckled into her car seat and even when they pulled away from the school and started heading towards the ice-cream shop she knew he was taking her to. It was normal every Friday for them to stop—it was their own little secret. She would get two big scoops, one cotton candy and one chocolate, in exchange to keep quiet about it from her mommy who didn’t like it when she had loads of sugar.

“What’s wrong, Mo? You're usually bursting my eardrums with all the talk about how school went. Why so quiet?”

“Daddy,” she asked, a serious expression on her face she clearly inherited from her mother. “Did I make you sad?”

Tony startled at the question, his fingers drum, drum, drumming on the steering wheel trying to think back on why she would assume such a thing.

“When you saw my drawing you looked unhappy.”

Huh, maybe she had inherited Pepper’s scary ability to be able to read him like an open book too.

“No kid, your picture didn’t make me sad. I love your drawing. I just…I haven’t thought about that in a really long time.”

“How come?”

That was certainly a good question. A complicated one asked by someone way too young that if she really understood the horrors that went on in that cave in Afghanistan, then she probably wouldn’t have asked it in the first place.

It’s been over a decade since Tony found himself clawing his way out of there, about 13 years now. Since then he’s had so much happen in between that time. He became an avenger then fought aliens. He watched his son grow up into this bright brilliant teenager only to lose him in his arms not long after. He got married to Pepper and had Morgan. He gave up being Iron Man and moved upstate to a quiet little cabin in the middle of the woods. Those were just the major events, not even including all the other shit he had to deal with along the way.