To All Those Brave and Lovely

Disney

"Maybe you didn't understand what I was asking."  Tony says, looking pained.  "It's your birthday in a few weeks.  I want to take you on a vacation this week, as a sort of present.  To anywhere in the world.  And you want to go to Disney World?"

Nora shrugs.  She had answered as soon as he asked her, without having to think. And that was the answer she had come up with, without pausing to think about trips to the Bahamas or Italy or other, more exciting places.  "I've never gotten the chance to go."  She shrugs and picks at the blanket.  Nora should be more excited, but it had been a bad day, and its sort of hard for her to feel anything but numb.  "I think I'd like to."

"Alright."  Tony nods, and then claps her on the shoulder.  She was pretty sure he hadn't been intending to do this at all, he just saw she was upset and still relied on grand gestures to show affection.  "Disney it is."

She thinks to ask if Peter can come a day later, and it turns out that Peter could, which is why when she and Pepper and Tony walk through the gates of Magic Kingdom for the first time, he's right there with them.  

"This is awesome."  It seems to disgust Tony that they are finding this so exciting, but Pepper just laughs and shoves the sunglasses up on her head.  They were drawing looks, but so far, no one has stopped them to ask them for an autograh.  The demands of kids wanting nothing more than to see Mickey Mouse sort of limit your ability to gawk.  "Thank you so much, Mr. Stark."

"Yeah,"  Nora echoes, and that's a poor way to describe it, but this is one of the places that always seemed off limits to her.  But now she was walking towards the castle with hundreds to other tourists, wearing a set of mickey mouse ears on her head and an Ariel caricature tatooed on her shoulder.  "Thank you."

The plan is to stay for a week.  

Nora had thought it would be a family bonding type of thing, but Pepper keeps getting calls from work because this was an unscheduled vacation and Tony doesn't do very well with crowds, so for the most part, Nora and Peter wandered around on their own while the adults stayed back at the hotel.

"This is the best week of my life,"  Peter had told her, when they huddled away from the crowd down a back alley where they could still watch the parade, finally out of the sun and with ice cream dripping down their wrists from the cones that they couldn't eat fast enough.  "I don't want to ever leave."

"Reality would suck, after this."  It was like this place was set apart from the rest of her life, where for a few days she would get the chance to actually be a kid, no matter how many people recognized her or what would be waiting for her when she went home.  Even the nightmares and the anxiety, which had been swimming so close to the surface since she had been taken, seemed to have given her a break while she was here.  Or maybe she was just so exhausted with all the distractions swirling around her that she was too tired for anything else.

There were plenty of distractions.  She'd gone on every ride at least twice, and she and Peter were posing with every character they came across.  They'd gotten a backstage tour through Anmal kingdom and got to hold a koala bear, thanks to some zoologist intern that recognized her, and in the magic kingdom they managed to score front row seats for the afternoon tour every day.  And they'd also taken full advantage of the money that Tony had given them to spend, slurping down icees and ice cream and hot dogs, buying matching t-shirts that they probably would never wear out in public.  They even waited a rediculusly long time for a cartoon drawing of the two of them, which Nora was intending to frame and hang on her bedroom wall when she got home.