Chapter Text
She would always, always be so incredibly grateful for the call that came while flying back to the city as fast as her suit would allow.
“Pepper, it’s Sam- Morgan’s okay. The kidnappers didn’t get far, and they didn’t hurt her. Spider-man took them all down even before I got here, he’s keeping Morgan calm and away from the reporters. She’s alright.”
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t feel suspicious.
“Spider-man needs a new phone, Mommy. Can you give him one?”
“What makes you say that, Morgan?”
“He couldn’t answer when I called him, but Friday left him a message, and he said his phone was broken when he came to Samantha’s house.”
“...what?”
Pepper sat on the edge of her sofa (too new, too stiff, too unlike the comfortable give of brown leather when she and Tony curled up together) and wondered how in the world she’d missed it. Missed her little girl apparently calling an unknown man a minimum of four times every week for over a month.
FRIDAY couldn’t be held accountable. Spider-man was a known Avengers affiliate, even if no one really knew much about him beneath that all-encompassing mask. He’d rescued Morgan, for goodness sake. It should be alright for her to stay in touch.
He came to Samantha’s house
Breathing out through her nose, Pepper once again picked up her tablet. She flicked through the list of logged calls made by FRIDAY to an unknown number - from what the AI had been able to tell her, it was a cheap, disposable phone on the other end, limited capabilities, which meant limited opportunity for FRIDAY to have gotten into it to pick up useful information. She did confirm GPS tracking regularly placed the phone in Queens, but that whoever owned it - or someone connected to them - frequently disabled all features but the ability to accept incoming and place outgoing calls. Most of those outgoing went to a centrally located police precinct in the borough.
Most of the incoming came from FRIDAY herself. From Morgan.
After a moment’s hesitation, Pepper picked one at random to listen to.
The recording clicked and started to play; an unknown voice answered after two rings. “Hey, Mo. School again?”
“Uh-huh,” Pepper’s daughter replied.
“Anything bad happen?”
“No...”
“Really? Not a single space monster dropped in for you to fight?”
Morgan giggled, just a little. “No, no monsters.”
“Well good! Have you figured out if your teacher’s a robot in disguise yet?”
“Yeah. She caught her foot on Jesse’s desk, and did the same thing with her face that Mommy does when she hurts her toe but doesn’t want to say bad words.”
Spider-man made a thoughtful noise. “Mmhm, robots don’t usually do that, in my experience. Probably human, then. Oh well, boring but normal.”
The conversation went on for a few more minutes, Morgan clearly becoming more cheerful as it continued, Spider-man throwing in more jokes and ridiculous statements to make her laugh. Pepper’s heart ached; Tony used to talk to their daughter the same way, nonsensical commentary even when Morgan was still just a newborn. She wanted to believe it came from a similar place of good intentions, but- but. Her stomach refused to lose its knots.
When the recording finished, Pepper set her tablet back down on the coffee table rather than play another one. “Friday? Can you ask Morgan to come down here, please?”
“I’m afraid I can’t, Pep.”
She frowned. “What?”
“Morgan is no longer inside the house, nor is she wearing her digital Stark-Watch.”
Pepper’s heart-rate kicked up. “Friday, where is my daughter?”
“Unknown.”
No.
No, no, no- Tony had been the one to renovate and upgrade the lakehouse when they bought it, to integrate FRIDAY into its very walls and beams, taking his baby-proofing efforts to the extreme by ensuring Morgan couldn’t so much as attempt to crawl from one room to another without the AI knowing and alerting them. Pepper made him walk back most of those protocols as Morgan got older, including the one that prevented their daughter from going outside unaccompanied, but only because Tony made the specialized watch with a direct connection to FRIDAY’s mainframe.
She hadn’t thought to reinstate it when they moved.
Morgan had taken off the watch.
Morgan had left the house.
“Tap into the local security cameras, Fri, and find her,” Pepper ordered, already standing and heading for the front closet. She never wore the belt inside, tried to avoid wearing it too often when going out, but if ever there was a time to have her Rescue suit at the ready-
“Pep,” FRIDAY called, as alarmed as the AI could ever manage to sound. A holo-screen flickered to Pepper’s left, showing a grainy clip of the above-ground entrance to a subway station, complete with bright blue circle drawing the eye to one small figure in particular ducking down the stairs.
“Fri,” Pepper breathed out, “Where is this?”
“Three and a half streets south of here, fourteen minutes ago.”
Limited security cameras in the subway itself meant FRIDAY didn’t know where precisely Morgan had gone, but she confirmed there was a line that led from that station under half the city to Queens. For lack of a better option, Pepper activated her suit and took off to fly a search pattern. She talked to Happy on the way, sending the man rushing from his own apartment to drive over as well, explaining first in a rush and then repeating more steadily what Morgan said that morning, the revelation it led to, Pepper getting upset and sending her daughter upstairs to try and settle her mixed emotions before deciding what to do.
“I shouldn’t have raised my voice,” she said, hating herself with every word. “God, Happy, what if we can’t find her before something awful happens-?”
“Hey, no,” the man cut her off. “None of that. If we don’t have any luck in the next half hour, we call the police and get them to put out an Amber Alert - Morgan’s description but not her name, get people on the street aware and looking. I know Sam and Barnes aren’t in the city right now, but Barton is supposed to be arriving tonight, right? We can ask him to help look, and- and maybe Spider-man.” Pepper must have made an uneasy noise, because his voice dropped lower. “I know, this is all because of him in the first place, but the guy’s been on the ground here for years now, yeah? He’s bound to know people, and even if we don’t know what else is going on he’d probably come running to help find Morgan. If she doesn’t find him first, anyway.”
“You think there’s a chance of that?”
“I dunno if you realize this, lady, but that’s one smart kid you’ve got. If any six year old could sneak across the city to find their favorite superhero, it’s Morgan.”
Pepper huffed a laugh in spite of herself.
At the twenty-seven minute mark from Happy setting his half hour window, FRIDAY picked something up. “Boss, I’ve got a 911 call about a kidnapping.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “Patch me in.”
A brief bit of static, and then she heard a frantic voice: “-no, the little girl’s still here, and the way her brother laid it out you can’t just send regular cops, I need someone from, like, the police commissioner’s office, someone who knows how to get in touch with her mom- I’m talking celebrity status here, normal CPS isn’t going to cut it- ma’am we don’t have time for this, that creep could get scared and shoot the kid any minute-” Pepper could hear the sound of a child crying in the background. Her child.
“Address, Fri, now!”
Forty-three seconds later, she dropped into an alley to let the Rescue suit melt away back into its housing, darted up and around to the bodega’s front door, and burst inside to find a young woman with green hair speaking into her cell phone, a robust man with an apron tied around his waist kneeling on the floor, and next to him-
“Morgan!”
“M-momm-eeee!” Her daughter wailed, immediately scrambling to get down from her chair and race forward. Pepper dropped to her knees, arms wrapping instantly around the small body that slammed into her, relief briefly overcoming her alarm. “M-muh-mom-mee, he- he tuh-took-”
“Nevermind, her mom just showed up.” The young woman ended her call with a harsh jab. “Lady, you need to go after your stepson, fast.”
For a moment, Pepper could only blink, that word slamming into her mind and blocking everything else out. Stepson?
“I don’t care what kind of beef you’ve got going on with Peter,” the woman continued, “But when a guy with a gun came in here to take your daughter, that boy didn’t hesitate to insist on taking her place, and if you don’t do everything you can to get him back, I swear, I’m going to every tabloid and newspaper in this town to tell them Tony Stark had a teenage son whether you like it or not!”
It- didn’t compute. Not really. But Pepper still moved on automatic pilot, standing up with Morgan clutched close, and distantly heard herself say, “Of course. I have to make sure my daughter is safe first, but- I will.”
“You’d better.”
“What- happened, exactly?” Because Pepper’s brain was having trouble getting started again, and she needed a better idea of the terrain before trying to navigate forward. So the young woman started explaining from the beginning: finding a crying child on the street, helping her place a call, getting ahold of ‘Peter’, clearly busy but ready to drop everything for Morgan’s sake. They came to the bodega; the boy showed up not long after. And just when things had calmed down, a man with a weapon came inside and pointed it at Pepper’s baby.
And her- half, brother?
“He spilled the beans about being Tony Stark’s son,” the woman, Trina, went on, not noticing or else flatly ignoring Pepper’s stunned silence. “I realize that’s probably a big no-no for you folks, but between that, the bigger pile of ransom money, and the fact you wouldn’t call in the Avengers to rescue him like for your daughter, it convinced the creep to switch kids.”
Of all things, that managed to drag a response out. “He thought- I wouldn’t?”
Trina’s expression, borderline furious for most of her story, finally softened. “Yeah. He figured him staying a secret weighed bigger with you than his safety. Was he wrong?”
“Yes,” Pepper said simply. If for no other reason than she hadn’t been in on the secret for it to weigh anything at all. She’d put anyone’s safety ahead of an unknown like that, let alone someone who- who saved- “Morgan,” Pepper murmured, head ducking low alongside where her daughter’s face was still buried against her shoulder. “Morgan, sweetheart.” She turned partially away from Trina, who’d finally dropped to sit in an abandoned chair, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Baby - who is Peter?”
The six year old stirred from her exhausted slump, and whispered back just as softly, “He’s my brother.”
“But how do you know him, sweetheart?” How did Tony manage to tell Morgan, without Pepper ever finding out?
“Because he’s Spider-man.”
Half-formed suspicion abruptly confirmed, Pepper only nodded. Movement outside the front window caught her eye; a few moments later, Happy came hustling in through the door, scanning the bodega. “Friday filled me in,” the man said, holding out his arms. “Want me to take her?”
Morgan immediately started crying again, fingers curling into Pepper’s shirt. “Mommy-”
“Shh, it’s okay, baby, I promise - Happy’s going to take you home, and I’ll go get Peter, okay?”
Sniffling, Morgan reluctantly nodded. Pepper shifted her to Happy, and the little girl promptly broke out into loud bawling as she clung to his neck, even with both of them making soothing noises. “Just go,” Happy finally said, taking a step back. “I’ve got a team on the way to handle things here - we’ll see you at the house.”
Heart torn to be retreating from her upset daughter, Pepper nonetheless went out the door, and activated her suit. Gleaming blue and gold metal rippled over her clothes, encasing her body in reassuring weight. Natural light blocked out, her HUD flickered to life, FRIDAY’s data spilling across the visuals with various tags and readings. “Tell me we’re able to go get this kid, Fri.”
“Yes, boss. As soon as Morgan confirmed his identity as Spider-man, I took the liberty of tracking his phone.”
“The GPS is active?” In answer, FRIDAY brought up a map grid, with glowing dots to indicate Pepper’s position and one several streets away. “Okay - get a call through to the police, have someone meet us there. If the kidnapper is still present, I want him arrested right away.”
It barely took a minute of flight time to reach the indicated location. Pepper landed in a crouch on the sidewalk in front of a dilapidated building. A quick scan indicated only one nearby heat signature, close enough she didn’t want to risk blowing up the doors. So, she kicked them open instead.
Three steps took Pepper inside, immediately turning her head to see-
-a kid.
A teenager on the older side, frozen at the top of a nearby staircase, staring at her with obvious shock and growing alarm.
For a moment, Pepper didn’t move. But she forced herself to take a deep breath, and triggered her helmet to retract. Hazarding a guess that this wasn’t the ‘creep with a gun’, she asked out loud, “Peter?”
Something flickered in his eyes. “Y- yes? Uh. Hi.” After a few seconds, he blurted out, “Is Morgan okay?”
That boy didn’t hesitate to insist on taking your daughter’s place
“...yes,” Pepper eventually made herself answer. Then she shook her head and said, “Well, no, she’s traumatized again and refusing to let go of Happy, but she isn’t hurt. Thanks to you.” The kid twitched, and she frowned. “Are you actually Spider-man?”
An immediate wince, and Pepper wanted to bring her husband back to life just to strangle him. “Yes ma’am.”
Dammit, Tony, what were you thinking? “How old are you?”
“Uh- twenty-three?” Peter winced again even as he said it, clearly aware the answer wasn’t going to fly.
Pepper arched a single eyebrow. “Does that twenty-three include being Blipped for five years?”
“...yes, ma’am.”
“Eighteen, then.” Pepper sighed, and went ahead and deactivated her suit fully. As the nanites streamed back into the containers lining her belt, she took a leap and said, “I’m- sorry.”
The kid genuinely blinked at her. “For what?”
For not knowing. For making Tony and Morgan think they needed to keep you a secret. For letting you believe you didn’t matter as much as my daughter. “Several things. Will you let me try to make up for some of them?” She tried raising a single hand, holding it out towards him.
Peter stared, a conflict Pepper couldn’t even begin to understand warring on his face. But just when she tried to think of something else to say, the kid took a step. Then another, and another, until callused fingers curled gingerly around her own.
She tried a small smile. Peter glanced at her face, then dropped his gaze, swallowing. “The, uh. The guy’s downstairs, I locked him in the boiler room. We can just- say I’m Morgan’s babysitter, or something, and that Spider-man saved me.”
“That works.” For the moment, anyway. But Pepper wouldn’t let him go on thinking he needed to hide himself away, to hide his connection to Tony in order to avoid some unknown wrath on her part. Outside, a police cruiser with sirens blaring pulled up at the curb, two officers promptly jumping out. “Let’s give your statement, and then I’ll take you to see Morgan, okay?”
“Yeah,” Peter nodded, straightening his shoulders. “Okay.”
And the two of them stepped back through the open door together.