#ironspider florist au | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

starkeristheendgame · 4 years

Note

Tony hadn't been the same since pepper died in a car accident and leaving him with their daughter, morgan. Then everything changed when he and morgan goes to a flower shop and meets florist peter.

I loved this one! Gosh, there were so many ways I wanted to take this. Thank you so much for the prompt, Non! I hope that this satisfies you. I was so tempted to make this a two parter 😅 If you enjoyed this, please consider giving it a reblog!

TW: Mentions of grief | Grief processing | Allude to depression SFW

This time of the year always rolls around quicker than he can prepare for it. Her birthday is hard. Their wedding anniversary is harder. But this...The death date...It hits like a freight train, an unstoppable force of grief and nostalgia that if not for Morgan would render him useless.

As it is, dates outside of Halloween, Christmas and her own birthday don’t really mean much to her at this age, so where he wakes up immediately wanting to go back to sleep for the next week, she wakes up and begins bouncing on his head, shrieking about cereal and flowers.

“Wh’was ‘ah ‘bout flowers?” he grumbled, rolling away out of the danger zone of her spindly little legs. This was a day of shit-pot luck, though, and no sooner had he settled on his side away from her did a flailing elbow strike him across the temple.

“Flowers! You left a note on the fridge that said we needed flowers today,” she chirped, planting her tiny hands on his bare shoulder and shaking him with strength no six year old should possess. When his brain had stopped rattling around like a marble in a bean can he grumped and groused his way into sitting upright, rubbing at his temples.

After Morgan had gone to bed he’d stayed up, drinking the whiskey he’d promised himself he wouldn’t buy and looking at the photographs he’d promised he’d never unbox. It was the same every October 11th, a habit harder to break than being addicted to crack. It left him worse for wear each time, doubling his misery.

“Alright, bug. Go make yourself cereal. Daddy’s gonna shower and get dressed.” Her bony little heel caught him in the kidney as she scrambled off the bed and he wheezed as he pulled himself upright, staggering into the bathroom.

Not for the first time, he considered enrolling her in a martial arts class. She could be a champion by the time she was ten, if not just for the fact that all her opponents would be in the accident and emergency room.

He ran the shower too hot and stayed until his skin felt over-hot and numb, and forced himself to dress in a semi-nice shirt and the cleanest pair of jeans he owned. When Pepper was alive he’d always dressed to impress, loving the way she’d tease him or grab him by the shirt to drag him back into the bedroom, but these days the outside world was lucky to see him at all.

Morgan was on her second bowl of Lucky Charms when he dragged himself downstairs, and she looked at him intensely for a moment. “It’s Mommy’s death birthday, isn’t it?” she asked after a moment and he forced himself to contain the flinch, wandering over to her and soothing a hand over her hair, before he tugged her against his stomach in a hug.

“It is,” he confirmed roughly. It’d been five years but it was still like rubbing citrus over a fresh wound. He hugged her tighter for a moment, then let her go. “That’s why we have to get flowers today. We have to take them to Mommy’s grave.”

He reached for the lopsided note on the fridge and crumpled it, then threw it in the waste bin.

Pepper had wanted an ‘environmentally friendly’ burial and had been one of the first people in Manhattan to be buried in a ‘grave pod’, a hemp pod filled with seeds and fertiliser and her body. Over the past five years her burial had birthed a small silver birch tree with a sprinkling of wildflowers at its base.

The stupid tree made him smile each time he saw it, no matter how much his heart hurt. It was just the type of person she’d been, to do something so out-there and environmentally conscious, even in death. He was smiling now just at the thought of it, a quirk of his lips chased by bitterness as he let Morgan pull him down the street.

He always let her choose the flower store they went in it, and today she steamrolled other pedestrians out of the way on her mission to reach a gold and blue fronted store that proudly proclaimed itself as The Natural Gallery.

The store front was covered in various bushels and bunches, and even had a small stand full of singular flowers that were clearly left overs or on their way to wilting with a sign say ‘take one and spread some happiness!’

The scent of flora and soil was rich when Morgan yanked him through the doorway, and Tony breathed it in deeply as he looked around. The store’s arrangements inside had been organised like a rainbow, a solid curve of shelves that ran in a horseshoe shape from one wall to the other and behind the service desk.

Morgan immediately abandoned him to peruse the selection and Tony wandered up to the desk, peering with vague boredom at the unorganised mess that covered the desk as he waited for them to be served. There was a rustle from an open doorway just off to the side, a dull thump, and then what looked to be a teenager came staggering through the open space in a cloud of glitter.

Tony took a wary step backwards and was prepared to make his excuses to leave when the teenager turned around, and he suddenly found himself utterly disinterested in speaking at all. The young man was a touch on the shorter side but leanly built, with a chiselled face clinging to the last of its baby fat and the most doe-ish set of brown eyes he’d ever seen, shade matching the glitter-dusted mop of curls that sprawled over his temples.

Pretty. That was the word for it.

“I knew I heard you guys! Hey, I’m Peter. Sorry about the carnage, it’s a birthday thing,” the young man gasped, shaking off his shirt and bounding up to the desk with energy that could rival Morgan’s.

“What can I do for you today?” the florist asked, leaning against the counter in a casual pose. Tony noticed for the first time then that he was wearing a women’s style wifebeater, a shirt that proclaimed in glittery pastel letters Nazis deserve to be punched.

“I uh, I need flowers. For a grave.”

The florist’s cheery face immediately morphed into something softer. Tony hated that so he looked away. Hated the stupid expressions of pity and sympathy that people cast him every time he mentioned Pepper or her death. But when he forced himself to meet Peter’s eye again, it wasn’t exactly pity that he was met with. It was just something...Gentle.

“Of course. Are there any flowers in particular you know they liked, or any arrangements you had in mind?” the florist was already reaching for a notebook and the sample book as he spoke. Tony glanced over his shoulder to reassure himself that Morgan was still mooning over the pretty flowers, then turned back.

“Colourful. None of that... Sad, plain crap,” he breathed after a moment, keeping his gaze off to the side. Morgan had found an abandoned flowerhead on the floor and was cradling it carefully in both hands as she waddled towards them.

“Alright, I think I have an idea for an arrangement. And when are you looking to pick up?” Peter continued, flipping to a blank page in his notebook and immediately beginning to scrawl in slightly messy cursive.

“Today. Any time.”

The florist seemed surprised, pausing and chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip, but then he nodded and jotted down another note. “I can get something done in half an hour? I’ll just need a $10 deposit, and-- Oh, okay.”

Tony held out his bank card, gaze dropping down to Morgan as she approached the counter. “Take the full cost now,” he instructed blandly as she set the flower down on top of the counter.

“Mister! This one lost his friends. And his body,” she greeted, pushing the flower across the counter towards the florist, who cast her a warm smile and picked up the flower head with the same careful cradle of his palms.

“Oh dear, so he has,” he agreed, inspecting the flower carefully. “But that’s okay, because I know of a special job he can do even without a body.”

Morgan appraised him for a long moment before speaking. “Flowers don’t have jobs. They don’t need money,” she informed him seriously, before he turned to look up at her Father with pleading eyes. “Can we get cheeseburgers?”

Weak as he was, he couldn’t deny her anything even when he felt like this, and once the florist had rung up his card and handed him the receipt they left the store and headed to the nearest burger van.

Morgan chose her customary single cheeseburger with so much ketchup it dripped out of the sides, and they sat down on a nearby bench to people watch as they ate.

“I think his shirt is right,” she piped up after several bites, and he cast her a weary, wary gaze, reaching out to rub ketchup off her mouth with a napkin.

“Who’s shirt, bug?”

“The pretty flower man. His shirt said we should punch Nazis. I think it’s right.”

Tony blinked at her and wondered where she’d even learned about Nazis (perhaps he should have paid more attention to the curriculum sheet her elementary had mailed him) before he bit into his own burger, watching passively as a particularly bold pigeon chased after a small, fluffy dog.

They’d passed almost twenty minutes by the time they threw their wrappers in the bin, and Tony let Morgan tow him along back to The Natural Gallery.

Peter was ready for them when they stepped inside, despite the fact that they were five minutes early. The young florist was half-hidden behind a large arrangement of colourful flowers that made Tony’s chest constrict when he saw them, and he weakly let go of Morgan’s hand so she could power on ahead to the counter.

Peter looked over to greet them and seemed to realise that Tony needed a moment, because he immediately began to talk to Morgan about the flowers.

“The tiny blue ones are called forget-me-nots. Your Daddy didn’t want anything plain, so I used these instead of a flower called baby’s breath, which are tiny white flowers. These big ones are sunflowers, these are roses, and look, here’s the flower you found on the floor!”

Tony forced himself to wander closer. The arrangement was an artful splash of primary colours tied together with what looked like coloured rope, and the slightly rumpled flowerhead had been sewn into the front of the front of the rope, almost like a brooch.

It was the exact kind of simplistic yet artistic thing that Pepper would have loved, and Tony could feel his throat start to close up the longer he stared at it.

Peter didn’t do him the indignity of offering any pandering sympathies or well wishes, the energetic florist simply explained the meaning behind the flowers used, explained the rope was hemp dyed with red wine so it was all 100% biodegradable, and gave Morgan a pretty, yellow flower to tuck behind her ear.

Tony left him with a $10 tip for being a ray of sunshine despite the fact that he’d undoubtedly been a prickly, unapproachable customer, and that was the end of it.

Until a few months later, when Morgan hauled his ass straight back to The Natural Gallery like a greyhound after a rabbit for Pepper’s birthday.

Her birthdays were probably the ‘easiest’ of all the dreaded dates. It was more nostalgic than painful, and he often passed the day away looking through old memories and thinking of all the birthday plans they never got to do together.

This year, however, Morgan insisted on getting Pepper flowers as a present, and hadn’t even hesitated between the car and her single-minded charge to the florist. Tony was beginning to suspect this was premeditated.

The store hadn’t changed much since they’d last been here, and the florist was already at the counter with another customer when Morgan barged through the door.

“Hello again, little Miss. Stark,” he waved at her as she hauled Tony towards a display of pink flowers, and he frowned before remembering his name had been on his bank card and he’d told the florist to hold the arrangement under ‘Tony Stark’. It was painfully obvious Morgan was his daughter, so it was also easy to denote that her name would be Morgan Stark.

Still. The kid had remembered, out of all the names and people he’d seen in the months since.

It didn’t take long for the young man to finish up with the customer, and then the florist stepped around the counter, coming towards them with a broad smile. Tony desperately tried to remember the guy’s name, even as he found himself distracted by the lazy-casual outfit the teen wore.

His nails were painted purple.

“Peter! Mommy needs flowers for her birthday!” Morgan shrilled in greeting, and Tony could feel his expression twist. She said it so simply, as if ‘Mommy’ was just at work or home and it made that familiar sinking weight in his chest grow. In front of them Peter’s nose scrunched when he smiled, and he set his hands on his hips in mock thought.

“Hm, that’s a good present for a birthday! Do you know what flowers Mommy likes best? Or her favourite colours?” The florist - Peter - was just as cheerful as Tony vaguely remembered him being the last time. Tony piped up before Morgan could talk again.

“Same as last time. Please. Colourful.”

Peter seemed to get it instantly. His cheerful smile took on the softest warmth for a moment, before it became vibrant and lively again as he looked down at Morgan. “I think we can manage that, hm? If your Daddy doesn’t mind you being my assistant for a few minutes?”

“Daddy doesn’t mind,” Morgan answered on his behalf, and Tony found he didn’t have the motivation to argue, standing back and watching and Peter let Morgan pull him all around the store, pointing out every bright and pretty flower she came across.

Against his own will, something fragile and new began to bloom in his chest. It felt horrifyingly like warmth, like something...Verging on fond.

And it wasn’t entirely for Morgan.

The florist was a natural with her. He didn’t talk to her like most people talked to young children, infantizing and almost condescending. He listened intently to every word she said and taught her little snippets about each flower she pointed out, letting her touch the petals and letting her tow him around without ever reaching for her first, mindful of the fact that she was not only her own person, but the young child of a stranger.

He allowed himself to briefly imagine what it would have been like if Pepper had lived. If they’d had a son before Morgan, so she could grow up with a doting older brother that would smile at her the same way and indulge her every whim. Another doting family member to wrap around her little her finger.

“And one for Daddy too!” brought him out of his twisted musings and he looked across the room. Peter stood with a little wicker basket full of orange and red flowers, and Morgan had what looked to be a tulip tucked behind one ear.

Peter was holding another in his hand, and when he looked up the teen tipped his head a little, arching a brow with a smile that said may I?

He grunted, and while Morgan busied herself with preening in a tiny mirror, Peter crossed the room towards him.

“She’s wonderful. I hope if I ever have children, they turn out like her,” the teen murmured as he reached out and carefully tucked the flower into the breast pocket of Tony’s jacket. This close he smelt like flowers and a refreshing undertone, like clean water.

There was flower pollen in his hair and his lips were bitten a rosy pink. Freckles dusted the bridge of his nose in the barest hint of colour.

“She takes after her Mother,” he said it before he could even think about the words, but Peter’s smile remained steady and warm, with none of the usual overly sweet pity he was often met with.

“She takes after you, too. The perfect mix, I imagine.” And was that... A touch of teasing, maybe? The slightest sparkle in those eyes? Tony shifted under the scrutiny and looked over Peter’s shoulder, back to his daughter.

He supposed it was true. Morgan had every bit her Mother’s personality, but looks wise she’d taken after him the most. Her dark hair, fair skin and shapely jaw were all his features.

“She’s better than I am,” he breathed after a moment. She had none of his bitterness, none of his cynical bones. Perhaps it was her youth, but not even losing her Mother had soured her outlook on life. When he looked back Peter was still staring at him, and Tony realised just how close they were still standing.

Evidently, he wasn’t the only one.

“Are you gonna kiss ‘im?” Morgan asked from a little way across the shop, and Tony jerked, looking at her in alarm, but Peter simply gave a light chuckle, turning away and moving back towards the counter.

“Your Daddy is very handsome, but I’ve got to organise these flowers for your Mommy! If I get started, do you think you’ll remember to come back in twenty minutes when they’re ready?”

Morgan solemnly promised to be back here in exactly, precisely twenty minutes, and immediately demanded that Tony took her to find some juice. Tony held her hand as they walked out of the store, and he frowned down at her.

“Don’t say things like that again, sweetheart. I’m not going to kiss random people. Especially not on Mommy’s birthday.” It came out perhaps a little sharper than he’d intended, and he bought her an extra juice to make up for the almost hurt way she’d looked up at him afterwards.

The flowers were just as beautiful as last time. He left Peter with another tip, and tried to ignore how Morgan spent ages telling Pepper’s tree all about the ‘pretty flower boy’ that was ‘her and Daddy’s new best friend’.

He didn’t have the heart to correct her, and he had the sneaking suspicion that the next time she came with him to get flowers for something, she’d drag him straight back to The Natural Gallery.

He was half right, as it turned out. Morgan’s apparent adoration for the florist had transferred into a love for flowers, which became a blatant excuse to visit Peter again when it became clear Tony didn’t know anything about plants beyond shoving seeds into the soil of their backyard and hoping for the best.

“Peter will know!” she announced, after five minutes of the two of them standing helplessly in the plant food aisle of their local gardening store, staring at no less than forty different brands and bottles of plant feed.

“Honey, he’s just a store florist, he might not know everything about actual horticulture,” Tony tried valiantly, but she would hear none of it, and first thing the next morning she woke him up by kicking him squarely in the middle of the spine and shouting PeterPeterPeter!

Thus, he found himself hobbling gingerly into The Natural Gallery barely an hour after its opening time, grimacing at the early morning sunshine and cradling his coffee, which he’d had to pour into a travel mug because the longer he’d taken to drink it, the darker Morgan’s stare had gotten.

“Hi! Welcome to-- Tony?” Peter came up short where he’d popped around the corner, looking surprised to see them. It had been less than three weeks since their last visit, and the teen looked the most put-together Tony had ever seen him, far too chipper for this hour.

Morgan greeted him with a wave that bordered on violent, and she promptly ditched Tony in the doorway to bound up to the counter.

“We want a pretty garden but Daddy is useless and doesn’t know anything about flowers, so you have to come to our house and help us!”

Tony shot upright then cringed and reached for his back like an old man.

“Now, hang on. We never said anything about him coming over,” he warned Morgan, casting Peter an apologetic glance as he forced himself to catch up to his runaway child, giving her a stern look when he finally leaned against the counter. Morgan, unperturbed, looked at him like he was a simpleton.

“How else is he gonna help us plant flowers? Duh, Daddy,” she huffed at him, before she looked back across at Peter.

“I want pretty flowers like the ones you have. Daddy bought all the seeds and everything but it still looks plain and boring.”

He was almost offended on behalf of his garden. He had a very nice lawn, thank you very much, and the few flowers that had somehow survived with Pepper being there to care for them still came doggedly back every year.

“Morgan. You know the rules about going to strange people’s houses and inviting strangers home,” he reminded her pointedly, mock flicking her between the eyes.

“But Peter is our friend, and you said friends are allowed home as long as I ask and you make sure its safe!” Morgan protested, and Peter cooed.

“Aw, I think you’d be a wonderful friend, Morgan, but your Daddy is right. But! How about I give you and your Daddy some tips to write down for getting a really nice garden, and maybe you can take pictures when it all blooms and come show me?” Peter’s looked up at Tony when he said it, and Tony found he couldn’t do anything except - somehow - smile.

God, Pepper would have loved this kid.

It took Peter offering Morgan a freshly bloomed pink lily for her to fully accept the fact that she couldn’t bring her new ‘friend’ home, but eventually she came around to the idea, and Tony found himself in a surprisingly spacious back area of the store, surrounded by various floristry supplies and flower off-cuts and Peter tapped around on a slightly beaten up laptop, showing them different plants that were generally ‘safe bets’ to have in a garden, fertiliser types and the most common downfalls many a hopeful gardener faced when starting out.

As Morgan leafed intently through one of the many flower-based magazines laying around, Tony forced himself to speak.

“Sorry. She gets ahead of herself.” He didn’t need to elaborate on what he was referring to, but Peter just cast him a broad, warm smile, and nudged their shoulders together lightly.

“Don’t apologise. She’s a delight. I almost wish I was her age again. I don’t mind when you guys come here. It makes the day a little bit brighter. Who knows, maybe one day I might even get to see you smile.”

And Peter more or less embodied the smiley face emoticon at the end of the sentence, grinning sunnily at Tony before Morgan thrust a magazine page in his face and demanded to know what flower was being shown in the picture.

They left with a stack of print-outs and magazines, and as Morgan sat in the car on the way home she looked across at him thoughtfully.

“Peter is very pretty.” She probably meant it as a question, but it came out so firmly it sounded like a statement. He let the car roll to a stop and side-eyed her warily.

Was this her first crush? No, it couldn’t be. She was six. Tony hadn’t had his first crush until... Okay, yeah, no. It could very well be her first crush.

“Do you think so?” he asked after a moment, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. She looked at him like he’d just asked her what 1+1 was, and rolled her eyes before she looked forwards again, apparently not dignifying him with a response.

The next morning she woke him up right at the strike of six, and not even an hour later he found himself on his knees in the dirt of the garden, diligently rooting around in the dirt to pluck out weeds, rocks and to replace no less than half of the dirt with fertiliser from a big, stinky bag while Morgan dutifully moved each and every critter they came across to safety.

It took him four hours, but eventually every border of the garden had been re-dug, replanted and soaked through with the garden hose. Tony schlepped off to the shower with a groan, almost regretting the outcome of raw dogging his wife, no matter how good it had felt at the time.

He lathered himself up thoroughly and felt somewhat more alive by the time he made his way downstairs for another well earned cup of coffee.

To his both his joy and his dismay, gardening with Morgan became A Thing. Twice a week if it didn’t rain they dragged the hose out of the garage and watered all the grass and tiny little green shoots and once every two weeks they both found themselves kneeling in the dirt to painstakingly weed the soil and make sure their little ‘baby flowers’ as Morgan called them were growing unhindered and healthy.

Perhaps worst of all, he found himself thinking about Peter each time he tended to the garden or watched Morgan chat excitedly to her teachers and friends about all her new flowers and the pretty flower boy who taught her and her Daddy how to have a nice garden.

He thought of that sunny smile and those bright eyes, the curls that permanently looked like the kid had just woken up and the random assortment of clothing he seemed to just roll out of bed and throw on.

He’d had one or two hook ups since Pepper had died. Had briefly tried dating before he’d found he hated the differences too much, hated the lingering cloud of Pepper over each potential relationship, hated the way other kisses tasted like betrayal. Yet here he was, thinking about the lips on a kid he’d met three times.

Almost three months had passed, and Morgan had dragged him back to the gardening store to see if they had any pretty ornaments they could put in the garden. He turned to ask her if she wanted to bunny or the fox when he realised with a jolt of cold panic that she was no longer at his side. He tried to calm himself and glanced up and down the aisle, but she wasn’t in sight either.

Alright. Calm. She was probably the next aisle over. She knew not to wander off without telling him, but maybe she’d been distracted or he just hadn’t heard her. He set the ornaments down and jogged to the end of the aisle, stepping around the other one. No Morgan. No Morgan in the one on the opposite end, either.

“Fuck!” he huffed, spinning on his heel. The checkout desks? Maybe she’d tried to find a toilet-

“Tony!”

He spun on his heels and stared as he spotted Peter trotting towards him, hand in hand with one Morgan Stark, who looked happy but a little meek, especially once she met his eye.

“Hey, Mr. Stark. I’m so sorry, I was here buying seeds and I turned around and she was right there. She said she was here with you and she saw me walking and wanted to say hello. We came straight back to you, didn’t we, Miss. Stark?” Peter asked, looking down at where Morgan hung off his arm like a guilty koala.

“Uh huh. Because walking off from Daddy without saying isn’t good and makes him sad.” She evidently repeated from something Peter had said, looking up at the florist before she let go of his hand and bounded across to Tony, clinging to him when he lifted her up.

“Sorry Daddy. I didn’t want to make you said. I just wanted to see Pretty Peter,” she mumbled into his shoulder.

Peter’s cheeks were pink when Tony looked across at him again, and there was soil under his pink fingernails and dusted on his shoulders.

He took in a breath.

“Well... Maybe I can give Pretty Peter my number. Just so next time you run off because he’s better looking than me, he can call me so I don’t get sad, huh, bug?” he ran a soothing hand down her back when she pulled away to grin and him, and Peter’s cheeks looked like hot coals by the time Tony hesitantly glanced up at him.

“I’d like that,” the florist beamed at him, shuffling sweetly on the spot. “And, for the record... I think you’re plenty good looking.”

136 notes · View notes