"Ooh, Morgan," Peter exclaims, and for a teenager with no children in his family, his words sound so easy and natural, "That dress is sooo pretty. Whatcha' got there?"
"This — this my Princess Lilia cup, see?"
Morgan twists left and right where she stands, almost spilling Lucky Charms all along the floor in her eagerness.
... Pepper isn't sure if she should explain that it was a Disney princess from a movie last summer.
She was more than happy to keep Tony's word and visit with Morgan, especially since her daughter's play room had been spared the toll of battle; something about it felt like a sign, that everything would be alright in the end — but for Tony, it's nightly terrors that keep in him a cold sweat, asking after Morgan and the others when he wakes. Asking after Peter. She was no stranger to Tony's many blockades that he tended to place around him, especially after the death of his parents, and of Jarvis. With the betrayal of Obadiah all those years ago, one of the few people he had left to look to for help and trust? Those blockades only got more intricate. It was why, as much as he drove her insane and tested the durability of their relationship, she at least understood. Oh, she still resented it often and had plenty to complain about to her friends, but she understood.
Then Tony and Steve fell hard after the Accords. Pepper wasn't surprised that that particular stab had struck bone and made Tony all the more eager to work by himself, watching the other heroes from afar. Tony used precise calculations, wrote up many blueprints for the walls he'd built around himself. He toiled away at ways to still protect people, but keep a measured distance from the hearts of those around him. Safeguarded himself.
And Peter Parker swung in like a bull in a china shop, smashing headlong into those barriers and nearly giving himself a concussion in the process.
Pepper wasn't surprised that this was the boy who snuck through the billionaire's defenses when she'd met him all those years ago. She had heard of Tony's bright idea to employ a novice superhero in capturing the rogue Avengers back when; he had been alarmingly too prepared to get an angry lecture from her, when she pulled up Peter's file and saw '15 YEARS OLD' in bold, confounding text. The guilt at his actions had been evident in his lack of rebuttal, at the very least. Then in the later months that followed an ill-fated Homecoming dance, Peter had started wandering into the lab more and more, sprinkled with bruises and cuts and sporting mussed hair. Pepper was still silently pissed off about the whole Germany thing — but at least she could see where her husband had been angling from, even if his aim was careless in the grand scheme of things back then.
Peter was a common presence, and Tony tried to make up for the stumbles before. And soon 'kid' became so regular in Tony's vernacular, it was almost akin to the sound of a hen squawking and pecking along. Kid, kid, kid. The kid broke his wrist. The kid is working on his science project. The kid's turning sixteen. The kid screwed up big time. She found that instead of being up late to work on his latest suit, he would sometimes be monitoring screens when FRIDAY would announce any kind of anomaly in Peter's health. She found that instead of going out to some political party and opening up new avenues, he would secretly be elbows-deep in a project with an over-excited highschooler. Sometimes Tony would pretend he was just in the neighborhood and pick him up outside of his school. It wasn't exactly an every day event, these visitations, but Tony's eyes had seemed to grow more and more hawk-like as months fell away from the calendar.
She thinks that Peter had longed for someone to fill a particular hole in his heart for many months, by then. Maybe both he and Tony had. As much as May had been Peter's lighthouse in the storm, and as much as Pepper had read about post traumatic stress and left herself open to Tony's needs, sometimes that's just not enough — sometimes you need something so particular, it just fits, like a nut to a bolt. What Harley Keener started as a begrudging admission from Tony that children weren't so bad eventually turned into him and Peter eating sandwiches on a couch, covered in oil and talking about technical science-y things Pepper couldn't even begin to wrap her head around.
Tony loved Peter. And she had a feeling Peter loved Tony long before Iron Man walked into his Queens apartment talking about grants.
So she wasn't shocked, when Tony mentioned that he'd dreamed of having children before.
Of having 'a kid'.
Pepper slides into one of the pink plastic chairs lining the play room and can't help but feel like this was all meant to happen — her, watching Morgan vibrantly explain the details of her tutu, whirling with energy while Peter sits cross-legged and nodding to every logical and illogical sound coming out of the toddler's mouth. He looks over the moon — for once.
It's only been three days in total since the boy woke back up, but Pepper is no stranger to monitoring the mental and emotional state of a superhero: he was smiling, yes, but there was something dark and brewing under the boy's skin. There was doubt in his eyes and a hesitancy to the way he smiled, like he was nervous at the thought of having a positive human feeling. It wasn't exactly a shock. He had essentially woken up to a world that carried on without him for years. She'd spoken to Sam a lot about it when they lingered about the parking lot earlier, and he had noticed it, too.
"Don't drop me," Morgan commands, as Peter lets her sit on his shoulders to add more megablocks to the tower they're forming. She has a fist in his hair and it probably hurts about as much as when she does it to Tony, but Peter just winces and endures it, giving a thumbs up.
"Noooo, I won't, I swear."
"Spider-Man swings, swings from up — up high, high up here, you see?" Morgan motions wildly to the tip-top of the multicolored tower, which is more like a skyscraper now in her capable hands. Peter blinks in awe at that, and Pepper laughs a little.
"Of course she knows about Spider-Man," she tells Peter, "Why wouldn't she?"
"R—right," Peter says, looking touched, and maybe a little lost. "Right, Spider-Man's pretty cool. Pretty solid dude."
"I think so, too," Pepper adds, enjoying the familiar way the boy flusters.
The skyscraper ends up crashing down in ruin about five minutes later, and both of them have to quell the heartbroken wails of a very upset child (who had not been laid down yet for noontime beauty sleep). Morgan snores away with her furnace of a mouth buried in Pepper's neck, limbs sprawled akimbo over her, and Peter begins the oh-so-arduous process of rebuilding the stack so she has something nice to wake up to after her tantrum-nap. Pepper observes the boy with a knowing little look, and says finally, "Are you doing alright, Peter?"
"Hmm?" Peter looks up, and it seems a bit comical that he's so wide-eyed beside a stack of children's toys. He had lost some weight in the six months he'd been resurrected, but his shoulders are broad, muscular, and creaky with the unseen weight pressing over him. He looks too big beside the tiny chairs at the tiny table.
"You've gotten this talk a lot, I know. But I also know you haven't really said much other than 'I'm fine' or some variation."
Peter huffs a laugh, pressing and pulling large LEGO blocks apart, the gesture entrancing.
"I'm fine."
"... Very funny. But... I want you to know that I'm not Tony, and I'm not May, and I'm not any of your co-workers. So if you're worried about saying something that'll worry them — you can always talk to me." She adjusts the dead weight on her chest, Morgan's hair tickling under her chin. "Just like the time you called me when you tried a funny joint that one time?"
"Oh god, don't remind me," he says with a blush. But he seems to get the sincerity in her offer. She gives him plenty of time to say something, anything, or perhaps nothing at all. "It's — it's stupid. It's really stupid, Pepper."
"No, it probably isn't," she chides, with no heat behind it. The certainty in which she says it seems to encourage him.
"It is, though. Mr. Rogers had to deal with everyone he cared about being old or dead, when he woke up from the ice. Mr. Rogers had to deal with whole decades going by — and everything was so different for him, you know? Crazy different. But he still put on the suit and kept working so hard, and yeah, things didn't exactly go so smooth — but he did what he had to, and he's stronger and braver than me, because I'm sitting here feeling like everything's screwed up." He looks up at her sharply, sucking in a breath. "Ned's in college. He and MJ, they've got their own lives. They moved on and they've got new friends, and they're okay. They're dealing, like everyone else is. There are pictures of them online with people, and I — I have no clue who any of them are. Tomorrow I'm supposed to go meet MJ at some cafe, and I have absolutely no clue what to say or how to even start to be a normal person again."
He puts his head in his hands and smooths his hair back and continues tiredly, "I feel like I can't — I can't catch up. I feel like I can't catch up with being Peter, and I can't catch up being Spider-Man. The idea of getting in my suit and going out into Queens makes me feel sick, but I have to. I have to, because that's my responsibility, and I — everyone here is so far ahead in helping fix things, and I feel like I'm drowning in it. I don't feel like I can defend anyone. I don't feel like I can just carry on and go to therapy and try to be better, because I couldn't even do anything to save the person who helped me get here. And why to do I deserve to live if Gamora's still gone? Why me?"
It's a flood of honesty, and she feels a sliver of Peter's weight pressing on her own shoulders when he looks at her and tells her all this.
But they aren't all things she's never heard before, either. If Peter just sat down and told Tony about all this, he'd feel so much less alone.
But she knows why Peter is scared to talk to Tony. Or to May.
Or to anyone else he feels might rely on him and his once steadfast and enduring nature.
One thing must be addressed, first and foremost.
"You deserve to be here as much as any of us, Peter."
This 'Gamora' would agree, surely.
"I don't deserve all this," he says, "People took care of me for six months. Six whole months. I don't deserve some chair in the kitchen, and I don't deserve all these nice text messages, or these pamphlets, or the presents May wants me to open at home. Everyone made sure I was safe and healthy for six months, and I couldn't do a single thing to protect the only friend I had in that place...!"
"Peter," she cuts in, before he can spiral into this dark place any further. He looks at her, alarmed, as if he hadn't noticed how far his mouth had gone without him. When she motions for him to come over at last, he crawls over without delay and not daring knock over the skyscraper he'd built back up. He seems like he's sure what she's going for, and that's alright — she just tugs him over by her side and puts one arm around his shoulders as they sit. He breathes with some uneasiness as she talks. "You have so much going on inside. And I'll tell you what I told Tony: you can't leave it in there. I won't tell you how to get it all out or who needs to be the one who hears it, but I will say you have to. The only rule to it is doing it safely, and making sure you're alright in the end. We're all messed up rooms; it's just a matter of finding the right way to fixing the crooked pictures and broken chairs."
Peter nods with eyes fluttering closed.
"Don't close yourself off," she murmurs. "Please, if anything all else fails — don't close yourself off. We like you out in the open, with us."
"... What if I can't be what I was before? What if it's all changed forever? What if I'm just messed up?"
"Everything changes — for better and for worse, every day, every lifetime... We all just have to decide how to navigate it."
He nods, letting her embrace him still.
"What can I do? What should I do?"
She thinks about it for a long moment as the two of them sit among discarded dolls and messy portraits of heroes.
Spider-Man is a blue and red splatter in a lot of them. Tony made sure of it.
"Well... You fixed a kid's toy tower. I think... that's an excellent start."
The nighttime air is cooled, especially when sitting under the big whole in the ceiling. Bucky finds himself particularly at peace when he can just find a wall and find some to enjoy the view of a whole moon; the sky in Wakanda was a hell of a sight, a little more inspiring than the city's near invisible swathe of stars, but this is home. This is New York City, a place where memories seem to resurface every moment he lingers in its rocking arms. He expects Rocket to pop out from his late-night work on the Benatar, or maybe Steve to linger around and even now continue to pester him about how he's doing — but instead he gets Peter walking out, looking lost and blank and —
And for a moment, he's worried. The kid was going to go back home with May tomorrow, but he looks alarmingly close to how he looked when he used to walk him to the bathroom, or back to his room for some much needed sleep. He starts moving to stand, eyes rounded with some worry behind his long and intrusive bangs. "Kid?"
"Mr. Barnes?" Peter says, breaking the illusion. The soldier relaxes a fraction, the rhythm of heart beat slowing and steadying.
"What're you doing out of your bed? Does May know you're wandering again?"
"I told her I needed to walk a little," he says. "Um. I — I'd like to talk... to you. If it's alright. About... some things."
He sits back against the wall, slowly. The gloomy but serene blue from the moon's luminescence leaves sharp shadows on Peter's usually rounded and youthful face, and it occurs to him then that Peter is waiting with bated breath, like he's not sure if he'll be turned away or not.
Bucky just rests his arm over his knee and gets comfortable.
"... Sure, Peter. Let's talk."
The boy finds a place to sit beside his fellow soldier.
"I'm—" Peter starts, "—not fine."
That's a damn good start.