Steely Eyes - a post-endgame ironkids oneshot

Some people move on. Not us.

***

Morgan Stark is sitting at her kitchen table and trying to read a book, but her mind is too muddled and off-balance to comprehend anything it says. The words, distant and hazy in meaning, float off of the pages, hanging lazily in the air around her, and they might as well be miles away. She doesn't know why she's aimlessly torturing herself like this, trying to carry on as though nothings changed. It wont make a difference, because...it cant. Everything's changed.

She knows that he's not coming back.

She looks up, hearing a faint thump on the cabin doorstep, mildly grateful for an excuse to put the mostly pointless book aside. The door slowly creaks open and falls shut, and she sees that Peter, his hair messy and the chestplate of his spider-suit tinted black with a thin layer of soot, has returned from wherever he swung off to save the day this time. He had been watching over her during the afternoon, the two of them mostly lost and alone in the looming clouds of grief that hung low over their heads, threatening to consume them completely at any moment. They were sitting like this, isolated and together in equal measure, when he'd gotten got the alert that he was needed somewhere in the city. That was a couple of hours ago. Pepper had been upstairs this whole time, of course, so even without Peter next to her, Morgan wasn't alone at home, but her mother has been...she's been coping in her own way. It has been just under a week since the funeral, but all this...its barely real. It lies, unsettled like a still-falling layer of dust, for what is left of the Stark family to stare at it, unsure of what to do with the gaping hole in their hearts or of how they can possibly continue on. When Morgan had first seen the hologram, sitting on the couch in the late afternoon after the funeral, with those he had held dear standing speechless and emotional, with the beginnings of tears glistening in their reddened eyes, adults and children alike in disarray around her, she couldn't believe any of it. He was right in front of them, talking to them. So how is it that...how was it that he...wasn't? When it finished, she'd asked for it to be played again. And again. She'd watched it over, and over, the daylight slowly waning and the number of people around her eventually dwindling, until the only ones left who could bear it any longer were herself, and her strong, loyal, new older brother Peter. She'd known she could trust him, because he loved their father, and he refused to leave her. He sat for hours, silently imploding, keeping all his emotion and grief pent up and letting it eat him away from the inside, just to stay by her side. Because as the darkness-drenched, star-speckled sky around them, without a moon to cast it alight or a father to gaze at it with her, achieved its darkest hour, she could mouth each and every word along with him as he said them. But he wasn't saying them.

He couldn't be saying them, and wouldn't be saying them ever again, because he was dead.

This is what she was told, and what she is unceasingly reminded of every moment of every day since then. She's reminded that he's gone when she opens her eyes in the morning, and a fleeting moment of innocence, of hope, gets stolen away by the horrible realization hitting her all over again. The realization that she'll never again wake up to his tired, smiling face against her pillow, or his voice calling her one loving nickname or the other from the door as he steps through it with warm arms to give her a hug. She is still unable to understand it, and almost endlessly grapples with it to no avail. All she knows, is that he isn't around to tuck her into bed at night anymore. That she's never again going to see him staring at Peters photo in the kitchen, his gaze clouded, far away and lost in another lifetime. That she's never again going to get to watch him work on his holographic blueprints or designs, practically glowing with a smile on his face and a joke or fond remark readying at his lips. That they're never again going to share chocolate milk at three in the morning when neither of them can fall asleep, for reasons he had never explained beyond a weary smile and reasons that she never felt the need to worry about, because he was there with her, and he seemed content in that. That they're never again going to laugh together, watching and pointing and reading as he walks her through Peters Avengers fanboy page on his old Tumblr account from when he was ten or eleven.