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“I agree,” Peter said, nodding at Morgan, who was busy sucking her thumb and staring wide-eyed up at him. “Cosmological perturbations grow according to the Mészáros Effect until the onset of nonlinearity.” Morgan, not one-year-old, blinked and Peter laughed. “Now if only that made sense in English.”
He poked her lightly in the belly, watching her giggle; eyes a bright, lively brown and hair curly and pale. She was laid back on the sofa at Peter and May’s apartment, her toys and supplies strewn across the floor and coffee table as the baby TV channel played in the background; bright colours and large letters appearing on screen with overly friendly hosts.
Peter babysat Morgan pretty often by this point. He was Tony and Pepper’s go-to, partially because they trusted him and partially because he loved babysitting his little sister. Usually, he’d babysit at the tower or compound, depending on where Tony was living that week, but for once she’d been dropped off in Queens; a last-minute gig when Morgan’s parents were called suddenly to an all-day emergency meeting upon one of their (now former) employees going a little Mad Scientist and trying to blow up the Empire State Building.
(“Hey, Pete?
“Yeah, Tony?”
“How busy are you today?”
“Uh, not very? I mean, I was planning on doing some assignment work, but-”
“That’s great, that’s great. Would you mind looking after Morgan? We can drop her off, but we’ve both been called in-”
“Of course I can! What time do you need me?”
“Uh, in about five seconds- yeah, yeah, we’re outside right now. Hear that horn? That’s us. Please come get the child. She didn’t like the horn and now she’s crying.”)
So, Peter was babysitting, which was great, but also a little bit of a fork in the works of his plan. Originally, he was going to write his assignments for class and then Spiderman around the city for a while. Now – well, he could do the assignment work, mostly, but Spiderman would have to wait until tomorrow.
Morgan giggled and pulled her thumb from her mouth, pushing herself up to grab Peter’s hand with her soggy one. Peter pulled a face that made her laugh, then made a few garbled sounds that made no sense to him.
“Yes, that’s right,” he said anyway. “We do get seasons because the Earth is tilted 23.4 degrees on its axis – that’s a very astute observation.”
Morgan farted, laughed, then farted again.
“Alright, alright,” he said, picking her up and holding her to his chest as he wandered around the room. Morgan settled her cheek on his shoulder, pushing her thumb back in her mouth, the TV singing a song about shapes or numbers or colours.
Peter liked these kind of days a lot.
He had the apartment to himself and just a little girl with incredibly basic needs to attend to. Morgan Margaret Stark, who pooped, ate, and pooped again. Occasionally, she’d take a nap, but otherwise she liked attention and funny faces, and Peter could say anything he was thinking out loud, because she wouldn’t tell anyone what he said. And he could spend the day trying to get her to say his name as her first word while lost in his own thoughts.
It was during this moment of quiet, Morgan in his arms, sunlight warming the kitchen floor, that Peter heard the scream.
His spine straightened suddenly, eyes darting to the window and ears picking up on the yelp that was cut short.
“Crap,” he muttered, then glanced at Morgan as if she’d immediately repeat the word back. “I can’t- Morgan- I mean-”
There was the sound of a struggle, his enhanced ears picking up on the grunts of exertion and whimpers of fear. Peter heard a please and he knew he had to do something.
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” he said, rushing to his room. He settled Morgan on his bed before yanking off his t-shirt and searching for his suit. “What Tony doesn’t know won’t hurt him. He won’t find out about this, Pepper won’t know – no one will know.”
Peter hit the spider emblem and the suit shrunk to size. He steadied a look at Morgan.
“And you’re not gonna tell anyone, right?”
She looked at him and giggled.
“Right,” he whispered, pulling on the mask.
Before he had much of a chance to think about it, Peter picked up Morgan and darted back into the living room, before searching one-handed through all her supplies and finding the baby carrier a moment later.
Peter enjoyed the baby carrier, because it meant he could hold Morgan without actually holding her, which made a lot of things easier. Like being Spiderman, apparently.
He strapped her into the carrier on his back, checking on her briefly before leaving the apartment via the closest window.
Peter had already figured out that he could hear the yelp so easily because it was coming from the alley next to his building, so it wasn’t difficult to climb out the window and shoot a web that would let him swing around to the scene.
Morgan didn’t seem to mind the height; she just stayed quiet and watched as the ground swung up to meet them and Peter landed carefully, so as not to hurt her.
“Hey!” he called when he reached the alley.
Ahead of him was a man in a dark jacket, a knife outstretched, and a short woman with trembling hands, her handbag being yanked into the mugger’s grasp.
“There are young, impressionable minds present,” Peter said. “Please set a good example for them.”
The mugger blinked at him. “What the hell? Is that a baby?”
Peter shrugged, Morgan babbled in his ear. “It’s bring your sister to work day, what can I say? Now, knife down, handbag back to the nice lady, or my little sister’s gonna have to see me kick your butt.”
The mugger snorted, shoved the bag back at the lady and turned on Peter, brandishing the knife. “Get ready for an ass-kicking, Spiderboy.”
Peter sighed. “Young, impressionable minds present,” he muttered, before swooping into action.
The knife was easy to disarm, considering the mugger moved his weapon into just the right position for Peter to safely knock it away with a well-timed kick. He webbed it to the ground where it landed to take it out of play.
After that, it was just him and the mugger as the lady ran further down the alley, to where the chain-link fence kept her blocked in.
The mugger missed all his hits bar one – Peter took one knock to the stomach when he was focusing more on if Morgan was okay on his back than the mugger’s next move. Peter got him back quickly with a right hook and as the guy leaned forward with a groan, Peter headbutted him in the nose, making Morgan laugh.
She was only laughing for a second though, because a fight’s a rough ride to be an unwilling participant to, and soon the movement was making her whine.
“It’s okay,” Peter promised, shooting a web at the guy’s foot, locking him in place. Still Morgan’s whining got higher and higher in pitch until it sounded like she was about to sob. “Karen,” Peter announced, “play Baby Shark through the suit’s speakers.”
“Yes, Peter, though I have to remind you that you’ve referred to this song as what Hell sounds like on more than one occasion.”
Peter took a deep breath, looking briefly into the middle distance. “I’m a hero, Karen. Heroes do what they must.”
“Understood.”
The Baby Shark song started playing, much to everyone in the alley’s annoyance, bar Morgan, who upon hearing the first doo doo doo doo doo doo, abruptly stopped complaining and quietened.
The mugger, leaning to pull at the webbing on his shoes, received another web to his hands, locking them in place. He growled when he found he was stuck.
“Get me out of this!”
“No can do,” Peter replied, over Mommy Shark doo doo doo doo doo doo.
The mugger shook his head, before spitting, “What the fuck is that song? Turn it off.”
“Hey,” Peter said, going for loud and authoritative, which was a difficult mark to hit with a baby on his back and Baby Shark playing out of his suit’s speakers. “Don’t fucking swear around her, she’s a baby you asshat.”
The mugger blinked before Peter looked to the woman, approaching slowly from the other end of the alley.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” Peter asked, and upon her confirmation, he asked Karen to phone the police and alert them to the mugger, before moving to the closest wall.
“Nice to meet you,” he said to the woman, and to the man, “Learn not to swear around fucking babies, dude.”
Peter made his exit and crawled up the wall, making it to the roof of his building and electing to hang out up there with Morgan for a few minutes, to keep up appearances, before abseiling back down to climb through a window back into his apartment.
When he was back, he pulled Morgan off his back, as she garbled something in time to the Baby Shark song that deserved its own circle of Hell.
“Sure, sweetie,” he said, “A lightning bolt is five times hotter than the surface of the sun. You’re right about that.”
Peter settled back into the sofa, checking her over for marks, just in case.
“You’re not going to tell your Mommy or Daddy about our little adventure today, right?”
Morgan hiccupped, said three words that weren’t really words and Peter smiled, pressing a kiss against her forehead.
“Good, we’ll keep it a secret. The Parker-Stark Secret Keeping Society officially has its first secret.”
(The Parker-Stark Secret Keeping Society’s first secret was found out less than twenty-four hours later when the official police report of the mugging somehow got back to Tony Stark, who then took it upon himself to watch the Baby Monitor footage from Peter’s suit. The woman described Spiderman with a baby on his back, and there was only one baby that could possibly be.
“You took Morgan out with you when you were Spiderman?” Tony asked the second Peter’s apartment door closed.
“It was an emergency-”
“An emergency.”
“I had a thing-”
“A thing.”
“I didn’t have time to drop her off with anyone! And it was right outside my building – but don’t worry, it went fine, she was on my back the whole time. She saw nothing, Tony, I promise – I think she even giggled when I headbutted that mugger-”
“When you what-”
“Nothing, Tony. When I did nothing at all.”
“Right, when you did nothing at all. Because if you did something, that fact would make its way back to Pepper.” Peter gulped. “And then so would the fact that you swore around the baby.”
Peter opened his mouth and shut it again. He swallowed. “Good thing I did nothing at all.”
Tony nodded slowly. “Nothing at all.”
The Parker-Stark Secret Keeping Society had its second official secret.)