Chapter Text
How exactly an offhand comment about the angle of a woman's wrist in the corner of a beat-down gym leads to anything else, Annabeth can’t say. What she can say, though, is that it’s followed by no less than 4 brief remarks on the red-headed woman’s stance, approach angle and back posture.
A month or two later, after several more throw-away exchanges - including very little personal information other than yes, Pepper’s job is stressful and yes, Annabeth does like volunteering for a camp - Annabeth finds herself being told that Pepper is in need of a babysitter.
She does all she can to stop herself from laughing when the conversation begins - and she also smacks Leo later when he almost chokes on his own laughter at the thought of Annabeth, I have stabbed a being of every species I have ever encountered, Chase being a babysitter.
But, by the end of the conversation, she doesn’t really see any reason at all why she shouldn’t try for the job. Annabeth isn’t blind - she can clearly see by the state of Pepper’s attire that she’s well off, so the pay would be good, and it’s not like being a babysitter can be any harder than anything else that Annabeth has done in her nearly two decades of living and breathing.
Plus, if she’s being honest - which she always tries to be when she’s talking to herself, after all, what’s the point of lying to yourself - she’s not exactly in a position to pick and choose with jobs.
Sure, she has a scholarship, but it’s not all-expenses-paid - after all, no University can afford that right now, even if it has been 2 years since half the population of the Universe came back into existence - and New York isn’t getting any cheaper.
So she goes to the interview - birth certificate and academic transcript and police background check in hand. And she gets the job. They go out for pizza on the beach to celebrate.
It’s a good job - pay is great and everything. There’s only one thing that surprises Annabeth about the whole ordeal.
Pepper turns out to be Pepper Potts.
(“Potts-Stark, actually. I’m the Stark part in case you were wondering.”)
Oh, yeah. And that. She’s married to Tony Stark - which Annabeth knows that she knew before - but the fact doesn’t truly sink in until she’s face-to-face with the man in the living room of his (humble, in retrospect) home in one of the nicer neighbourhoods in Queens. The nicest - if she had to guess.
And life is nice. Annabeth is something around half-way through her Bachelor’s and so is Percy, and their tight-knit circle of friends and family are moving through life swimmingly.
Whatever the case, a babysitting job with the well-off family of the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and a mostly-retired superhero can’t make Annabeth’s rollercoaster of a life any more interesting than it already is.
Right?
“Hello, small human,” Annabeth greets. Morgan turns to look at Annabeth’s figure by her bedroom door and straightens considerably. She smiles.
“Hello, medium-sized human,” Morgan says, so formally that Annabeth almost expects her to stick her hand out for a handshake like she had the first time they’d met. She’d think that they were in a business meeting if not for Morgan’s standard squeaky 5-year-old voice.
Just because she’s used to their standard greeting doesn’t mean that Annabeth doesn’t still marvel on the regular at Morgan’s ability to mimic other people’s attitude.
“Daddy hasn’t left yet, right?” Morgan asks. Annabeth sets her backpack down at the edge of the room as she shakes her head.
“He’s still waiting for the car, why?” Morgan jumps up from her seat and sets a smile on her face. “You want to borrow Dum-E again?”
Morgan nods enthusiastically and puts both of her arms up towards her. When Annabeth doesn’t do anything, Moran says, rather sweetly: “Please.” Annabeth smiles, waiting a second before she raises her foot a few inches off of the ground.
Morgan uses the foot as a stepping stone, before alternating between Annabeth’s two hands until she’s settled on the older girl’s shoulders.
“To the lab!” Morgan declares, pointing her finger decidedly. It would sound like a command except for the extreme squeak in her voice as she says the last word.
They wind through the hallways towards the lab that Annabeth knows Mr. Stark is in, sidetracked only by a brief conversation about back pain.
“-trick is that you start young, Morgan,” Annabeth is telling her as she, and in turn, Morgan, steps into the lab. “If you start practicing keeping your back straight now, then when you’re really old-”
“Like Daddy!” Morgan puts in, prompting her father to spin in his seat towards them with a sound of protest.
“-you won’t have to worry too much about back pain and slouching and the like.”
“Not that it’s not great advice, but I don’t think that Morgs will need military posture,” Mr. Stark says. Before he can continue, Morgan puts in:
“Uncle Rhodey said I could be in the Air Force!”
“Uncle Rhodey should try saying that to Mommy’s face,” Mr. Stark says sweetly. “In the meantime, what can I do for you, Little Miss Morgan?”
Morgan asks (read: sweetly demands) to take Dum-E, probably to continue the small, though still a ways above what other kids her age would be doing, experiments that she’s been fixated on for at least the last two weeks.
“Boss, the car is here,” says the voice of the house’s AI, FRIDAY.
“I’ll do you one better, you can use the lab while I’m gone,” he says, getting up from his seat and flicking his hands in various directions, the movement closing the holograms that Annabeth saw when she entered.
“But,” he says.
“But,” Morgan echoes.
“But, you have to pinky-promise not to start the next experiment until I get back.” Morgan pretends to deliberate for a second (which Annabeth deduces from the intense sounds of humming coming from above her head) before sticking out a pinky decisively.
“Deal!”
“Okie-dokie then,” Mr. Stark says, shaking her pinky finger with his own. “FRI, turn on the Tricycle Protocol.”
“Already done, Boss.”
Annabeth raises Morgan up from her shoulders and deposits her in the seat especially reserved for her, directly beside the one that Mr. Stark had just been using. She sets to work immediately, moving the holograms with practiced, if floppy, movements.
Mr. Stark looks at his watch. “I’ll be back in 2 or 3 hours - probably less if Wilson decides to give us all a little mercy and cut the meeting short,” he tells Annabeth as he moves towards the door, grabbing a jacket off of an otherwise unused chair. “So you should be free to go around seven-ish.”
Annabeth is not, as it turns out, free to go around seven-ish. Instead, what she does receive at eight-ish - instead of a goodbye as she heads out the door - is a message from Mr. Stark.
“Boss would like me to inform you that, quote: ‘my suffering is to continue for some time longer.’” No shit, Mr. Stark.
Morgan is currently washing her hands from being elbow deep in the underbelly of a short, rusty and dusty grandfather clock that she had shifted her attention to after finishing her experiment, and which Annabeth is sure has no business at all being in this lab.
Morgan should have been in bed already, from what Annabeth knows about her bedtime schedule - which she also knows is considerably more lax when Pepper is out of town, as she is right now - Tokyo, specifically.
Annabeth had let her stay up only because she was waiting for Mr. Stark to return - but when the clock had struck 8, she had told Morgan to tuck her things away. (Dum-E had whirred sadly, though Morgan had been more vocal about her own distaste.)
“He says: sad face emoji.”
That’s comforting.
It’s almost nine when Mr. Stark’s next message comes in. Morgan is tucked in and sound asleep - Annabeth can tell. (She was head-counselor of cabin 6 for more than a decade (and she technically still is) - she knows when a kid is faking it as much as she knows how to make them go to sleep in the first place.)
(Both skills are ones that she won’t share. She had to learn them the hard way so everyone else should rightly suffer through the learning experience as well; it’s only fair.)
She’s sitting at a small table in the corner of Morgan’s room, working on her homework with the aid of a small desk lamp, far enough away that she’s sure that any noise she makes won’t wake the younger girl up.
“Boss says: ‘I’m working on getting someone else over there,’” FRIDAY’s voice buzzes quietly, the AI adept at realising the mood of the room, as well as the time.
“‘You should be able to go soon.’”
“‘Gonna take a minute, though.’”
“‘Almost everyone I know is at this meeting.’”
“Tell him I’m already here later than I was supposed to be,” she tells FRIDAY evenly. “I can stay until he gets back.” She’s not in the habit of being passive aggressive - she prefers to just be aggressive, it’s simpler and more effective. But she’s trying it out more often nowadays.
If she’s being honest, there’s no particular place that she has to be tonight. She doesn’t have any plans with her friends or any meetings at camp or anything. She’s doing exactly what she would have been doing had she been at home. Homework.
At the moment, she’s working on the unnecessary extra course work that is Project Economics.
As a side note - do you think that if she walked up to the best architecture firm in New York City and asked the head what the most important thing about architecture is, they would answer ‘Project Economics?’
No.
No. They would not. That is because the applications of financial analysis are not something that’d be the first thing on her mind if she was designing a recreational skyscraper in, say, LA - arguably the most earthquake-prone city in the United States. It would be something like the eighth thing on her mind, way below keeping the people who would live and/or work in that building from being killed as a result of a crush injury.
No - Project Economics is an unnecessary course piled on to the required course listings by either the Dean or an overzealous and conniving-
“Boss says: smiley face emoji, folded hands emoji.”
Project Economics was probably the last thing on Tony Stark’s mind when he made the Iron Man suit - and she’d like to beat that fact over Professor Harrison’s head the next time he asks her if her proposal wouldn’t have benefited from the use of carefully-placed humourous subtext.
She feels that this is the reason why she’s being more passive-aggressive than plain aggressive lately. Because it doesn’t matter if she has the highest GPA of all of Columbia’s Architectural Studies students, she still can’t throw her thickest book at any of her Professors - even Professor Harrison.
And it is her thickest book that she’s still reading (can you still call it reading if it’s happening at such an excruciatingly slow speed?) when Mr. Stark arrives back at the house.
It’s almost eleven when he peaks his head into the room. He has the decency to look just a little bit sheepish as he does, though the look quickly melts off his face. Annabeth starts packing her things away, closing her thick notebook and putting it in her backpack directly beside her even thicker line of textbooks.
“You’d think that a team as well equipped as the Avengers would be able to condense their on-going stream of nonsense into 2 or 3 hours,” he says, Annabeth standing and pushing in the small, 5-year-old sized chair that she’d been using back under the likewise sized table.
He walks with her to the door. “Sorry about the wait and all.”
Annabeth doesn't say that it's okay or that it was no problem - instead, she says: “She might have made some changes to that clock in your lab.”
Because, sure, it might not have messed up her ‘schedule’ or anything - this time - but she hates it when people tell her things that are wrong. She may not be being passive aggressive because it wasn’t exactly Mr. Stark’s fault but that doesn’t mean she wants to encourage this to happen again.
“Yeah?” Mr. Stark says. “She have fun?”
“It sure seemed like it - she was definitely grumpy when I told her she had to go to bed,” Annabeth says as they reach the door.
“How’d you manage that anyway - I can barely drag her out of the lab most nights.”
“That is a secret I keep very close to my internal organs,” Annabeth says as she steps out of the house. Mr. Stark leans against the open door.
“You have a ride home, kid?” he says.
“Subway,” she says, swinging her backpack over her shoulder.
“My car can drive you home.”
“I’ll take the subway,” she repeats. “Goodnight, Mr. Stark.”
He doesn’t protest (she prides herself on her ability to leave no room for argument in her conversations) even though he looks like he wants to. “‘Night.” She sees how he checks his watch as she turns and walks down the front steps.
What she doesn’t see is how he asks FRIDAY to make sure that Annabeth makes it to the station safely.
“That kid is a miracle worker,” he says to himself quietly as he pulls Morgan’s blanket up higher over her shoulders and tucks the little Spider-Man plushy in beside her and the line of similar plushies.
“And Miss Chase did not even have to resort to bribery,” FRIDAY puts in helpfully.
“Sorcery - I’m calling it,” Tony says. “Actually - no - scratch that. Please don’t be sorcery.”
“Perhaps Master Morgan simply listens to Miss Chase,” FRIDAY says as Tony closes the door, leaving it only slightly ajar.
“Oh, shut up, FRI.” His AI only buzzes slightly in response.