Tony began holding ‘family dinners’ at least once a week not long after he’d been cleared from bed rest. In fact, he’d tried to convince Pepper that he could just as easily attend a family dinner while still confined to bed rest with the use of holoscreens or even a really flat recliner.
She said no.
She said that the minute he saw Morgan and Peter and Harley in the same place he’d either ruin himself trying to get in on their fun or stress himself out when he saw what their idea of fun was.
Once he was up and hobbling around family dinner was instated promptly, with home cooking and store bought pies because neither Tony nor Pepper could be fucked making dessert after the amount of cooking they’d already done in order to feed their entire, insane family.
The amount of potatoes necessary to feed four adults, an alien, a child, a sort of adult, and a mutant spider-kid was legendary. And the inspiration behind the new automatic potato peeler, new to the market from the Stark Industries Home line™
Eventually family dinners became more like normal dinners because if it happens multiple times a week, it’s no longer a special thing, it’s a completely normal day. So, on a normal tuesday dinner, with everyone present and bowls of bolognese in front of them, Morgan made an announcement from her seat at the head of the table.
“I was talking with Gerald today,” she said, and everyone nodded in understanding. “And he said that he’s lonely. He wants a friend,” Morgan told them, very seriously, with tomato sauce on her eyebrow.
Tony gestured to Pepper, who was sitting across from him and attempting to wipe sauce from Peter’s hair (an earlier incident documented for further study). “See! I knew Gerald was lonely, and now he’s told Morgan. We’ll get him a friend,” Tony declared.
“No Tony, we’re not buying a sheep,” Pepper intoned without looking away from Peter’s hair. “Or a llama or a goat or a cow. Gerald is fine.”
“No he’s not Mommy,” Morgan replied. “He’s sad, look,” she pointed out the window at said alpaca, who was headfirst in a blueberry bush. Tony groaned into his hands while Peter, Harley, and Rhodey all started cackling. Harley choked on his mouthful and Nebula smacked him all too gleefully across the shoulders from her perch on the nearby kitchen bench.
“He looks just fine, honey,” Pepper told her daughter.
“No, he only eats blueberries when he’s sad. He told me,” Morgan adamantly corrected, slurping up a noodle.
“Don’t eat like that it’s gross,” said Pepper, “We’ll think about getting Gerald a friend. A small one that doesn’t need shearing or milking, Tony.”
“But Harley told me that ‘think about it’ means no!” Morgan blurted out.
“I did not!” Harley refuted. “I taught her how to pull spaghetti through her nose and out her mouth.”
“Rank, dude,” Peter screwed his nose up.
“Yeah, have a bit of class man,” Rhodey agreed, leaning back in his chair. “At least teach her something useful like how to hotwire a car.”
Before Tony and Pepper could interject with mirrored expressions of parental disbelief, Nebula chimed in. “Amateurs, I taught her how to use a switchblade.”
How the Pet Proposal turned into a genuine inquiry was unclear, but what was clear were the lines that had been drawn. Namely, the fact that everyone had a different opinion about what animal should join their household and Gerald, who still did not know nor care.
Morgan was surprisingly silent on the matter, but happy to listen to her family bicker in circles about the merits of each animal.
Tony wanted a sheep or a goat, both of which Pepper refused to entertain the idea of. She refused to have another animal that tried to eat the washing, made strange noises at stranger hours, or required a haircut based on the seasons. She also argued that another farm animal was going to be a gateway to an actual farm, something she would have no part in and it had nothing to do with her weird fear of chickens. (“I’m not afraid of them, they just remind me too much of our Board of Directors”).
Peter pulled the very much expected dog angle, showing the household a powerpoint over dinner of the various puppies and dogs in need down at the local animal shelter (“This is Custard, he was found in a bin Mr Stark. A bin. He needs a home, isn’t he cute?”). He emphasized this with drawings he’d done with Morgan and videos of dogs doing stupid things that sent his sister into hysterics. He must have had some sway because for the next week the only thing Morgan wanted to watch was Lady and the Tramp. Pepper said no because she didn’t want the smell of dog in the house, it was easy to see she was close to convinced, at least she was when the meatball scene was playing on the TV and her children were badly singing along with La Bella Notte.
Tony might have made a massive donation to all the shelters in the state in Custard’s name when the week ended and no dog had joined their family.
Pepper’s idea was probably more fitting for Morgan’s age; a fish tank. She would concede to a large tropical tank in light of her family’s increasingly eccentric ways (it is very hard to one-up an alpaca and talking coffee-machine, thank you very much), and there was a perfect space for it in the lounge. She said that fish were very soothing to look at and comparatively low maintenance to various farm animals and dogs that required training. Even when Harley countered the fish argument, Tony filed away plans for a lovely pond outside - an anniversary present, maybe?
Harley wanted a parrot. He’d settle for any bird friendly enough to be handled in the future and smart enough to teach to swear. The young adult was subtle in his approach, unlike his adopted brother, and slipped in stories about his old neighbours lorikeets that trash talked and learned to tease the cat. He suggested that he could make the cage himself so that it was big and special, and that the only pet smart enough for the Stark household was a parrot or any animal capable of speech. He even brought out blueprints for a large cage about a month into his carefully laid plans for a pet bird. Peter said that he would not live with any animal capable of making him feel even moderately insecure of his place as an intelligent being, and Tony refused to live with another thing that could backchat him more than his current children and wife and friends already did.
(“C’mon Tony, what’s one more person calling you a shithead over breakfast?”
“Who’s calling me a shithead?!”
“Uh- no one, definitely not me, and definitely not after the toaster incident”).
Nebula was slightly more concerning in her interpretation of child-friendly pets, and with the seriousness of a funeral director explained to her Earth family why they should consider adopting one of the wild raccoons that lived in the woods as a pet. Nebula liked the intelligent mammals, and thought it would be very amusing to see Rocket’s reaction to such a similar looking Terran species. On her nighttime strolls she often watched the family of them rustle around in the moonlight, rummaging for scraps left around the outdoor table or trying to break into the very sophisticated bins Tony had set up outside.
Alarmingly, Morgan seemed more receptive to the idea of a feral raccoon as a pet than any of the other suggestions and very quickly Tony and Pepper had to explain to both of their daughters why wild and possibly rabid animals were not good pets.
They did set up a little raccoon watching post on the deck though, with a good view of the den the family lived in. Nebula and Morgan would sneak out in the dark and eat M&Ms in the silvery light of the full moon.
Rhodey didn’t know what was wrong with his family.
“Couldn’t you just get a cat, like a normal family?” he asked.
“No, why?” replied Tony, affronted as he patted Gerald, who did not seem to be suffering in his loneliness; though that could be on account of the friendship bracelet Morgan had made for him tied to his leg.
“Cause your neighbour’s barn cat just had a litter and kids love kittens. C’mon man, even I know that much,” Rhodey said.
“Okay, first of all, how do you know our neighbour, I’ve only met her once; and two, I think Pepper’s ideal pet is something that doesn’t need it’s toilet cleaned,” Tony frowned over at the small stable where Harley and Peter were supposed to be cleaning up Gerald’s mess. A suspicious lack of complaining and the distinct sound of the missing blow torch from the garage answered the question as to what the pair were doing.
Rhodey shrugged and scratched Gerald’s chin. “Dunno man, a cat seems like a good pet for Morgan and the whole family. So what if it needs a litter box, you have four kids. Make one of them empty it.”
“Absolutely not!” Peter skidded out of the barn, clutching a rotary phone and a welding mask in his arms.
“Gerald craps more than enough, I’m not cleaning up any more animal shit than his!” Harley yelled with a very sooty face for someone supposed to be shovelling.
“I thought I wouldn’t need to clean up someone else’s turds until you were in your nineties, Dad!” bemoaned Peter. Harley hi-fived him.
Tony turned to look at Rhodey, who was grinning at him. “Show me the cats.”
The entire family, Happy included, went to see the litter of kittens and while everybody fell in love they did not take any of them home. As it turned out, both Happy and Harley were quite allergic and spent most of the visit blearily looking at the fluffy little balls through streaming eyes and explosive sneezes. Nebula was quite charmed by a little grey one that Morgan helpfully named Sushi, and Tony now had an entire album on his phone dedicated to photos of his wife and kids snuggling kittens. But they did not bring any of the kittens home, because Morgan cried when she found out that no, she couldn’t have all of them, and no, she couldn’t bring the kittens’ mother with them either.
By the time a month had gone by and Gerald had stripped all of the berry bushes without permission, no decision had been reached, until one family dinner time, over plates of pancakes, Morgan revealed her choice.
“I want a bunny. And he has to have a friend ‘cause they get lonely,” she said, with whipped cream in her hair and maple syrup smeared over her cheeks.
Tony used his sleeve to wipe away some of the stickiness and looked over at Pepper, who watched with fondness. “Yeah?”
“Okay,” Pepper agreed. “We’ll get some rabbit things tomorrow, like a hutch and food, how about that?”
“No rabbit of mine is living in a store bought hutch!” Tony protested, procuring a tablet from thin air and drawing up plans immediately. Peter and Harley joined in, calling suggestions from their places at the table beside Happy and Rhodey respectively.
Pepper should have known better. Her suggestion of the fishtank weeks ago lead to a collection of blueprints for a custom inset tank in the wall.
“A rabbit is the small herbivorous one with the large ears and small round tail, correct?” Nebula leaned down to ask in Morgan’s ear, very seriously wiping some more of the syrup off of her face, the side Tony didn’t get.
“Yeah, and they hop and bounce!” Morgan jolted in her chair in an imitation of a bunny.
“Tony- it’s a rabbit,” Pepper replied, viewing the quickly growing plans for a rabbit hutch upside down. Peter had abandoned his seat completely and was now eating his pancakes whilst standing behind Tony so he could offer suggestions to the blueprints. “It doesn’t need a floating platform - no, or a hammock, I know you liked them but they were for ferrets and rats. I don’t think rabbits like hammocks- Tony-.”
“How about an escalator powered by hydroelectricity from the lake-”
“Stupid, rabbits don’t need escalators,” Harley cut Peter’s idea off. “It needs to look like a replica of Stark Tower, only the best for this bunny.”
Pepper sighed and leaned back in her chair as her husband and sons bickered.
“See I’d disagree, I think a nice replica of Buckingham Palace would be better, and Morgan did say she wanted to be a Disney Princess last week,” said Peter.
Tony scoffed. “You just want an excuse to solder ‘Bunny-ham Palace’ into the wood.”
Peter sniffed. “Of course I do, it’d be stupid not to.”
“And who said it’s being made out of wood, Tones, I reckon steel framing is the best way to go,” Rhodey added wisely.
“And I don’t want to be a Disney Princess anymore!” Morgan crowed. “I want to be Blue, like Nebbie!”
There was a pause to smile at the little girls adoration of her big sister, though Nebula seemed to have taken it literally and appeared to be considering ways to turn Morgan blue.
“I suppose some of that dye Harley has been working on could work…” she muttered, blankly holding Pepper’s warning stare as the woman shifted it from her eldest daughter to her eldest son, who was unaware of his impending grounding.
Three days later and the were all in the car (“It’s a minivan, Tony”, “Don’t call it that, it’s an Audi.”) heading back from the animal shelter and pet store, Morgan clutching a large blue carrier on her lap, arms too short to fully embrace it. Peter was peering into the side of it, uncaring of the dents he was pressing into his forehead from the plastic carrier digging into the skin.
Inside, a brown lop-eared bunny and his friend who was much larger and grey with upright ears sat huddled in a small pile of their own hay bedding.
“What are you going to name them, honey?” Tony asked from the driver’s seat, glancing in the rearview mirror at the seven other people crammed into his car, plus pet supplies.
(Christ. How did his life get here?
He fucking loved it)
“The brown one is Dandelion, he said so,” Morgan told them all sagely.
“And his friend?” Pepper prompted.
Morgan took a moment to think on the name of the grey one, apparently it hadn’t introduced itself to her and the shelter hadn’t given her a name. “Her name is… Optimus Prime.”
Dandelion and Optimus Prime (frequently shortened to Oppy) lived in the largest, custom made hutch Peter, Harley, Tony, and Rhodey could have built in two days. Made out of steel, it had a sign laser engraved with ‘Bunny-ham Palace’, a hammock the rabbits never touched, and two blue handprints, one much larger than the other, decorating the side.
Gerald still ate the blueberries. He didn’t seem to care.