THE DEATH SEASON ▹ final avengers ✓

09 | the guardians

There's so many things she can say, so many conversations she's thought up in her head. Somewhere along the way, she stopped talking to him about life, about the funny things, about the sad things, even about the painful things until she just stopped talking to him about anything - even the good things. After all, it's not like either of them could have just forgotten what happened. And then after what happened in the airport and the Raft, well, Tony was beaten to a pulp and Lisa almost died. The two didn't exactly leave things on a great note for him to meet her kid and to happily walk her down the aisle. Still, she probably owed her family that; she owed them something better than finding out from the likes of Christine Everhart.

"You'd be surprised." Peter suddenly pipes from where he sits off to the side, giving a reassuring nod to Lisa as he tries to give an answer for his clearly struggling sister, "Things move fast in the life of Lisa Stark-Udaku."

"Well, that's true, I definitely can't say I saw myself being blasted up into the cold-hearted space vacuum of terror, like, an hour ago and yet here I am." Letting out a dorky laugh, Lisa gives a grateful smirk that Peter reciprocates before his brown eyes fall back towards the metal floor.

"And you're pregnant now." Tony awkwardly states.

Lisa's eyes nearly pop out of her head and Peter's head shoots up and even Stephen looks over in shock.

Tony panics, "Or you were before or you used to be or you were just, in general..." He makes a rounded gesture over his stomach before he harshly shakes his head and squints, "But not that you look pregnant because you don't! You look great, really, seriously, honestly! Or not that you didn't look great when you were, I just didn't notice because... I-I mean, you just said you had a daughter and, and-," The man cringes and then squeezes his eyes down at the ground, "God, I wanna die."

With an awkward laugh, Lisa just quirks an eyebrow and smirks at him a little, "Somehow I seem to remember you being smoother than this, but yeah, Dad..." The girl wraps her arms over her stomach, giving a faltering smile, "She's turning two."

Tony stares at his daughter for a long second, his mind flashing back to how Lisa was when she was two. That's when he first met her, after all. There must be something significant about that number. He always seems to find his girls just then.

"But she's got this attitude like she's sixteen." Peter suddenly adds in with a dorky laugh.

"That sounds familiar." Pleased to have the attention off his babbling, Tony crooks an eyebrow down at his daughter and cocks his head to the side.

"Hey!"

"I'm not surprised." Peter tiredly sighs, leaning back and resting his arms against a metal beam behind him, "She's impossible to keep out of trouble every time we're together."

"Oh!" Lisa scoffs and looks over at him with disbelieving eyes, "Look who's talking, Mr. Let's Hop Out of My School Bus to Go Fight Aliens, ha-ha!"

"Whoa, hey!" Peter perks up with a grin, "I saved your butts, didn't I?"

Tony and Lisa simultaneously give matching expressions of total doubt, "Nope. Mm mm. Nah. Don't remember that."

Peter throws his hands up, feeling so fed up with the two Starks he constantly has to deal with. But then the three quietly laugh at each other before slowly growing silent as they remember the situation surrounding them, that they're flying far from home and that they're about to face a monster that is so much stronger than all of them combined.

"Stark-Udaku..." Tony quietly repeats after a few moments of this silence, slowly giving Lisa a small and sort of proud smile, "You kept our name."