Work Text:
Notes: In what is maybe the biggest stroke of luck/irony/bizarreness that's ever happened to me, my work bff and I accidentally created Morgan during the year long wait between Infinity War and Endgame. Don't ask me how, I don't know. All I know is that in the hours and hours of theorizing ways that our faves could live through Endgame, we decided that Tony and Pepper needed a kid, that her name was Morgan, and that they'd also end up adopting a kid that had lost his parents in the battle of New York. (I know Tony'd basically adopted Harley and Peter, but this one would be for real, we decided) His name was Jonah, he has a cat named Tortellini, and Morgan gets a brother to grow up with. Sue me, but I'd still love that.
Anyway, this is a drabble I wrote about them. Enjoy!
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This wasn’t the first night that Morgan had coaxed Jonah into testing with her late into the wee hours of the morning, but it was one that her mother hadn’t interrupted yet.
“Mor, you might just be a bad fit for the HUD tech,” Jonah said, taking a sip of his soda without taking his eyes off of his laptop. (Actually, a StarkTop, but that was beside the point) His cat was curled up next to him on the worktable and purring intermittently. This also wasn’t out of the norm, as Jonah was rarely anywhere without Tortellini.
“Dad made the HUD tech,” Morgan sniped without any real malice. “Anyway, I think I’m close. It’s just -” she huffed, shutting her eyes against the barrage of information. “A lot.”
Jonah snorted. “Your dad,” (because though he now considered Pepper Potts his mother, the boy had never met Morgan’s infamous father), “may have created it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can use it. Lineage doesn’t equal talent correlation.”
Finally Morgan pulled off the helmet, dumping herself in a chair opposite to Jonah’s. “Uncle R said he thinks I could be the next great hero, just like Dad.” She poked Jonah’s leg with her toe under the table. “And he’s a Major. Or a Major Sergeant. Or something important to the legion of toy soldiers out there.”
“Sergeant Major, not Major Sergeant,” Jonah corrected, hitting return on his keyboard and leaning back a bit to smirk at his sister. “You’ll look like a Major Idiot if you get his rank wrong in public again. You should probably lay off the energy drinks for tonight.”
She ignored him and found her drink. “Friday, how long until Mom’s alarm?” She asked, angling toward the ceiling, even though Friday was technically connected to all the tech in the workshop.
“Ms. Potts will be awake in 1 hour and 23 minutes, Bossette.”
Morgan tilted her can at Jonah. “We’ve got time for another round.”
Jonah rolled his eyes. “Friday, how long has Mom known we’re down here?”
“I alert Ms. Potts immediately as soon as there are any tests run in the workshop, following the Fire Extinguisher Protocol.”
With a raised eyebrow that communicated Jonah’s, See? better than words could have, he went back to his keyboard. His sister groaned and put her head on the tabletop. “Friday, why do you have to tattle on me all the time?” She whined into the metal.
“I’m not programmed to tattle, Bossette,” Friday’s calming Irish lilt insisted, though the question had really been rhetorical. “I am programmed to keep you safe.”
Tortellini’s tail, swishing slightly, brushed Morgan’s cheek and she looked up.
“Dad did that, yeah?” She asked, though she knew the answer. Her eidetic memory could replay any of the hundreds of hours of videos, both public and from the private Stark server, of her father that she had memorized. Even back in the cabin he had been careful to keep things monitored, which was fun to mine through when Morgan was lonely.
“Yes,” Friday answered immediately. “The Boss was extremely insistent that you should be protected and happy.”
She propped her head up on her hands, Jonah taking another sip of his soda and watching Morgan’s increasingly meandering and emotional mental rabbit trail with the emotional distance needed to take in every twitch of the girl’s face as she thought through her hero sire’s legacy. He loved being part of his family. But he was also bad at letting people in, really in, and watching her display at arm’s length meant he could experience, second hand, what those emotions were like.
With a pause, Morgan seemed to run through a variety of emotions: sadness, bitterness, fond memories, and finally: resolve. “Alright Garfield,” she stood, giving Tort a scratch on the back, “I’m gonna get this damn HUD to play nice.”
A smile teased Jonah’s lips. “You sure you wanna be in the middle of this when Mom comes down?” But Morgan was already booting up the exercise, slamming the vintage Iron Man helmet down over her head. It was a sight to see, really. Something with so many ties to the past: her dad, harder times, battles that changed the future, even Friday’s beloved older brother, and Morgan was ready to take it and squeeze herself into the narrative even if she probably shouldn’t.
“HUD Test,” Jonah said with a laugh, opening a new tab for this iteration of the tests. “Night 24, Round 4, here we go.”