Chapter 2
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The next thing the therapist tossed at Tony is Maladaptive Daydreaming..
Apparently it's a coping mechanism... It seems like the more he sends Morgan to therapy the more stuff the therapist diagnoses her with .. it's a process, Rhodey tells him, reminding Tony of Rhodey's own long journey of going through trying to process his own trauma and then Rhodey tried to talk Tony into going to therapy himself which Tony had shrugged and said he'd think about it like always but really it was just empty words he didn't want to deal with or process his pain,he felt like he needed to cling to his pain because if losing Pepper ever stopped hurting then he'd feel like he had betrayed her ... He just couldn't let go.. not yet.. maybe not ever ...
Tony would love to join Morgan in those Maladaptive Daydreams so Hyper-Realistic that they could both have Pepper back and just stay there in that nice bubble where reality couldn't touch the three of them.. but someone needed to be able to function and he was the adult so he didn't get the luxury of living in a daydream..
On good days he can get Morgan to focus on him enough to get her to eat on her own. On bad days he has to spoon feed a shell of his daughter because the therapist suggested not trying to jar her out of her fake reality as she could be scared, confused and might even turn violent as her perfect world was taken away, the therapist wants Tony to work on letting Morgan come out of it on her own or to coax her gently towards distractions if he noticed her starting to space out.. as if those all weren't things Tony was already trying.. all he can do is hold himself together and not break down when his daughter sits robotically and has a tell-tale glassy look in her eyes that says she's not in this reality but the one she made up.. .. he's got the entire Penthouse locked down and fortified one hundred percent so she can't wander off in a dazed state and wind up God knows where..
Rhodey has been coming up to the penthouse with requests on Tony's signature for one thing or another..
In the chaos a woman named May Parker rose from the ashes with a charitable organization she and her nephew had put together called F.E.A.ST. an acronym for Food, Emergency, Aid, Shelter and Training.. Rhodey had gotten Tony's signature for May the be able to use The Tower to run her charity from which was how so much of The Tower had wound up becoming a shelter for those in need.
They've turned half of what used to be Avengers Tower into a Shelter for housing orphaned children as the disappearance and deaths of so many adults have left so many children without a guardian to care for them that the normal system was overloaded within hours of what people were now calling The Blip as people had just Blipped out of existence in the blink of an eye...
There was another third of The Tower turned into a shelter for people who had lost their homes because of The Blip, people like Senior Citizens who no longer had anyone to care for them and people who had been displaced such as a few Asgardian Refugees that had made it to Earth or the dozens of people that had flocked to New York City from other Countries around the world, many whom had come to try to find if any of their relatives or friends in the city were still alive...
Another part of The Tower was being used to train any and all who were capable and willing to learn things like First Aid, how to help run the kitchen, how to sew, there were classes training people to help rebuild the many buildings that had been destroyed by fires or by cars, trucks, busses, semis and planes, crashing into them. The Senior Citizens who were able took up teaching people things like how to crochet, how to knit, (which apparently were not the same thing like Tony had thought), how to garden which several New Yorkers that were still alive did not know how to do, how to make lace, how to macrame, how to scrapbook, just whatever things they knew how to do that they thought someone might want to learn really, which, seeing the state of the world right now, any skill that wasn't rooted in destroying something was a useful skill for anyone to learn...