Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The afternoon set a pattern for the rest of the week. Penny spent the afternoon science-ing. First working with Tony in the lab and then taking her web-bandages to Dr Cho to see what she thought of them, and then setting up some experiments by cutting grown-skin (which was just as weird as Wanda made it sound) and bandaging it with her webs. If that went well Dr Cho said she should contact some animal shelters or vets and offer free bandages in return for animal trials. They might not agree, but if they didn’t overly irritate the skin, her bandages could work really well for animals, as they could pull the edges of a wound together without stitches, or, used differently, work as flexible bandages maintaining more freedom of movement. If animal trials went well then they’d go onto human trials.

After a few hours science-ing Penny slipped into the vents from her room with her Spider Woman mask, heart beating rapidly. She wasn’t sure she was ready for this. She could barely manage to say a couple of sentences aloud when nobody could hear her. But she wouldn’t know if she didn’t try, and it hadn’t been that long ago when being behind a mask had been enough to let her speak freely, even if that hadn’t been a mask with an AI in it.

And she was done letting Skip Westcott control her, no matter how hard and how terrifying breaking that control felt.

She climbed a decent way into the vents, making sure she wasn’t too near any vent openings so she wouldn’t be overheard, and then took a deep breath and pulled the mask on. Her heart beat faster and anxiety swirled just at the thought of what she was about to do.

“Good afternoon Penny.”

“Hi Karen.” Penny blinked, using morse code and then internally scolding herself. She was supposed to be speaking aloud. Her anxiety surged higher and she took a deep breath. Skip couldn’t hurt her anymore. She was safe. Nobody was going to hurt her. And she could talk. She knew she could. She’d done it before. And even if she couldn’t today, it would be upsetting but it wouldn’t hurt her, and it wouldn’t be the end. She was safe. She was ok. Nobody was going to hurt her.

“Hi Karen.” she said again, but this time she said it out loud. Her voice was small and rough, but it was there, and it sent a surge of victory and panic through her.

“It is good to hear your voice Penny, I had thought you didn’t speak anymore.”

Penny took a deep breath, held it for a count of three, and released it, before taking another deep breath and saying “I’m learning how to again.”

“I see, you are doing very well.”

“Thanks.” Penny managed. She felt a little light headed with a complicated tangle of emotions and stresses, and if the vent was any wider she’d have pulled her knees up to her chest. This was going much better than she’d expected but it felt so raw, so frightening. And she knew it was irrational, she knew nobody was going to hurt her, she knew it wouldn’t physically hurt if her voice choked off again and she lost the ability to say a word again, but it was still scary. Penny wasn’t sure whether she was more afraid of herself or Skip Westcott at the moment. Not being able to speak had been traumatic in and of itself.

She stopped trying to talk for a while, reminding herself that baby steps would be much faster in the long run than pushing too hard and giving herself more trauma. Baby steps. She climbed through the vents for a while, listening to the news that Karen was playing for her (Tony’s AI’s were scarily intuitive) and blinking the occasional comment to her in morse code. When she stopped she was pretty much on the roof, and she followed the cold of the fresh air to the wall of the building and looked out at the city through the slats. She didn’t get too close, because Tony had designed the outside security very well, and the view wasn’t as good as from the balcony, but it was still nice.

“I miss the webbing part of patrolling.” she told Karen, the longest sentence she’d managed yet, and she thought maybe distraction was the key. It had been distraction that had led to her realising she could talk as Spider Woman, and distraction seemed to be helping her now.

“Friday tells me you are training hard to be able to go back to patrolling.”

“You communicate with Friday?” Penny asked, suddenly horrified.

“We are coded to send each other relevant information. Would you prefer I did not?”

“Yes.” Penny said with feeling, force making her voice louder and more solid.

“If you get hurt, I am afraid I do not have a choice.”

Penny relaxed “That’s ok. Just don’t tell her I’m talking ok?”

“Of course, I will not betray your confidence.”

“Thank you.”

“You are very welcome. If I may say, you are doing very well. Your pulse is 27% slower now than it was when you were speaking aloud earlier.”

Penny blinked in surprise, not having even known Karen was tracking her pulse, although it made sense that she would. Huh, that was pretty cool.

She was making progress. She was healing.

She was healing.

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Over the next few days Penny settled into a new routine, just as breakneck as her old one but without school. Clint had gone back to his family Thursday morning, but Natasha significantly stepped up her training, adding a gruelling early morning training session to Penny’s schedule in addition to evening training with Wanda, and frequently roping Steve in to help. On top of this Penny found herself roped into suited up training increasingly regularly with assorted Avengers who needed another person to even up teams or who just thought the new girl should learn what they were practising.

When she wasn’t training (or eating her own body weight in food) she was in the lab with Tony or Dr Cho, or being go-between for R D who had thoroughly realised she was much easier to pin down than Tony and yet had still somehow not realised that she kept seriously irregular hours for an intern (there was something to be said for the kind of tunnel-vision SI’s over-specialised head scientists had). When she wasn’t doing that (and learning all kinds of new and brilliant science in the process) she was hiding in the vents for ten or twenty minutes at a time to pull her mask on and exchange a few sentences with Karen.

It was full on and exhausting, but Penny felt like she was thriving for the first time in a long, long time. Maybe for the first time in years. Speaking was hit and miss, two steps forward one step back, but she was making slow progress. And she was making more visible progress in fighting and in the engineering projects she was working on with Tony. He’d made a breakthrew in his nano-technology project and pulled Penny back into it now they wouldn’t feed on each other’s frustration, and they were making progress in leaps and bounds. While at times Penny could barely even keep up with Tony let alone help there were other times when she knew she was helping significantly, and the science was insanely interesting and helping with experimental research this cutting edge was redefining Penny’s cool scale again. Their current goal was miniaturising an iron man glove into a watch, and both of them were seriously enjoying the project.

And in training, well, Penny was throwing herself into it and it showed. She was absorbing more and more into her muscle memory, and combined with her Spidey-sense she was starting to feel like she was actually keeping up in sparring, even if she was nowhere near being able to get an edge on either Natasha or Steve. Natasha had started teaching her the kind of close quarters wrestling she herself favoured though, and she was picking it up quickly and could tell why Natasha favoured it. It played to all her flexibility and skill strengths, and let her take advantage of so many weak spots. At the same time Penny was learning all about pressure points and how hard and fast to hit one to numb a limb or knock someone out, and about how long she needed to squeeze someone’s throat until they’d pass out, and how much longer before she started to give someone brain damage.

Her endurance was also climbing steadily, and she was getting much better at dodging chalk bullets. Half-way through the first full week of the summer holiday Natasha said that next week they’d start with fighting multiple assailants, which Penny suspected was the last major hurdle she needed to work through to be cleared to patrol, which was awesome, despite the fact that Natasha also said they needed to go back to learning to handle guns next week too, which it was fair to say neither Penny or Wanda were looking forward to at all. It couldn’t be helped though, and Penny needed to learn to cope with them, so she’d just have to deal with it like she was dealing with re-learning to talk aloud - with baby steps.

---------------

It was on the Tuesday of the second week of the holidays when her bubble burst and her Parker luck returned with a vengeance.

It started as a perfectly normal day. Penny had gotten up early (although not nightmare early, although the nightmares were still a sporadic presence in her life), had breakfast with Pepper, chatted with Karen for a while (it was so far a good day for talking), done a gruelling two and a half hour training session with Natasha, showered, and climbed into the vents to chat to Karen again.

And then Natasha’s voice had come from her watch again and Penny’s heart had skipped a beat. “Penny where are you? Why aren’t you answering your bedroom door? Please tell me you haven’t climbed out the window again.”

“I haven’t climbed out the window again.” Penny said aloud, before her brain caught up to the fact that Natasha wasn’t here but she was still a person not an AI and that was scary and her voice might not work and nobody knew she was starting to be able to talk again and oh no now she was panicking.

No.

Deep breaths.

“Leaving the obvious for the moment.” Natasha said “Answer your door.”

“Please don’t” Penny managed before her voice choked off, she struggled desperately with her voice for a moment but sound wouldn’t come out of her mouth. A wave of frustration and helplessness washed over her and for a moment it felt so much like she’d been deluding herself in ever thinking she could talk.

“Hey, hey, it’s ok. Deep breaths Penny.”

Penny obeyed, and then tapped against the watch, falling back to morse code. “Please don’t tell anyone, I’m not ready.”

“I won’t, I promise. We can talk or sign about it later, but right now, you need to answer your door, your social worker is coming up.”

It took a second for those words to sink in and then Penny began frantically pulling herself through the vents back towards her room. Her social worker could not know she’d been climbing around in the vents. Penny was 98% certain that was not the kind of thing foster parents were supposed to let their charges do, and ‘they didn’t know’ probably wouldn’t help their case any. She needed to get back to her room and dust herself down 5 minutes ago!

“Penny where are you?” Natasha asked, stress creeping into her tone “Pepper’s starting to panic.”

“My room” Penny tapped back, somehow managing to squirm-push herself along the vent with her feet and stomach and tap morse code with her hands. It was almost true, she’d just rounded the vent corner to her room.

“I’m standing in your room.” Natasha said, sounding thoroughly unimpressed.

Frick.

Now she was closer Penny could see the tell-tale flash of dark red through the vent slats. She pulled herself the rest of the way to the vent and sheepishly swung it open (yes, she’d installed hinges on her vent cover). Natasha’s eyes snapped to the movement and Penny smiled weakly.

“Tony’s going to kill Clint.” Natasha noted casually, and then “Come on, your social worker can not catch you up there.”

This was very true, so Penny quickly climbed out, shut the vent, and jumped down to the floor. She shoved her mask in her cupboard, and glanced round the room to check she didn’t have any Spider Woman stuff out (just in case Ms Weller wanted to talk to her in private) and then brushed herself down quickly to get rid of any dust (although the vents near her room were fairly clean by now).

“If anyone asks, you were listening to loud music, and try not to look like you just got caught stealing cookies.” Natasha said.

“Good idea.” Penny signed, trying to wipe the guilty look of her face.

Ms Weller was already there when she and Natasha emerged from her bedroom. Pepper was shaking her hand and smoothly saying how nice it was to see her again and could she take her coat and generally doing a polite and highly skilled job of delaying her. She was impressively good at being subtle about it as well. Peering around the corner Tony was attempting to brush his hair and inhale coffee at the same time, clearly having been asleep five minutes prior. Natasha gave her a push towards Pepper and Ms Weller and headed for Tony, likely to miraculously make it look like he kept normal human hours and did not have a yo-yo-ing sleep schedule that frequently differed from most people’s by 4 or 5 hours.

Penny waved hello to Ms Weller and tried not to feel like they were completely doomed.

“Sorry, I had headphones in.” she signed to them both.

Pepper, who knew how sharp her senses were and that she frequently struggled to tune out noises, narrowed her eyes briefly in suspicion before wiping it away, probably to come back to later. Ms Weller just waved the apology away.

“How are you doing Penny?” she signed (there had been a reason Penny had been assigned to Ms Weller specifically).

Penny smiled “Really good.” she said, trying to convey just how much she liked living with Tony and Pepper because if Ms Weller had any concerns it could create major problems.

“Good.” Ms Weller said, but a flash of uncertainty and guilt crossed her face and Penny felt a rush of foreboding.

At that moment though Tony came round the corner, hair brushed, shirt tucked in, sans coffee mug and without bags under his eyes (definitely Natasha’s work), smiling a press smile and reaching out to shake Ms Weller’s hand and express similar sentiments to Pepper. On a whim Penny went over to wrap her arm around Tony in a half hug. It was a familiar action, but a little more open than she’d usually be in front of others, but she wanted Ms Weller to see. She wanted her to see how well they were getting on. She’d never acted like this with the Prescotts, not once, not anything like it. Ms Weller would see the significance. She had to, because Penny couldn’t shake the feeling of foreboding and she couldn’t forget that conversation with Pepper when her foster mom had revealed how hard it had been to get cleared to foster, and how shaky their position could still be.

For a moment Ms Weller’s eyes caught on the physical affection between Penny and her foster dad and her eyes widened, and guilt flashed through her eyes again and Penny didn’t like this. She really, really didn’t like this.

They shuffled through to the living room, and made hot drinks and settled on the sofa and nothing had happened that didn’t usually happen on social worker visits but Penny still couldn’t shake the sinking feeling in her stomach. So when Ms Weller said she had good news, Penny didn’t really believe her, she just hadn’t expected just how not good the news was.

“There’s a family looking to adopt you.”

Tony and Pepper yanked in shocked gasps, but Penny didn’t make a sound. She couldn’t have said that. She couldn’t have. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t. They couldn’t move her. Not from here. They couldn’t. They couldn’t.

She couldn’t breathe. She felt like she’d been punched in the gut but she hadn’t because she’d been hit in the gut in training and this felt so much worse. She felt like she’d suddenly and violently been pushed over a cliff, like everything was gone before she even had the chance to fight.

“No!”

“You can’t do that!!”

“She’s our daughter.”

And Penny would feel so, so reassured if it wasn’t for the panic in her parents voices and the way they didn’t seem at all sure that Ms Weller couldn’t actually do it.

“You said someone couldn’t just adopt a kid, you said we could only foster!”

Ms Weller made an uncomfortable noise, and her face was definitely guilty now but Penny didn’t care because if she was never, never going to forgive her if she took her from Tony and Pepper. Not ever. “I said you couldn’t just adopt her. You knew we had concerns about this placement. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? You come in here and...” Tony cut himself off abruptly as Pepper put a hand on his knee and squeezed in warning, but panic was swirling around her eyes and Penny felt like the ground had been ripped from under her and she was heading into free fall.

“Why now? You said yourself last time we saw you that this placement seems to be very good for Penny. What changed?”

The guilt on Ms Weller’s face deepened “I, um, I got an email about Penny being given an IQ test, and the result, and I put it in her file.”

“You mean some family wants her because they think it will make them look good.” Pepper spat, her voice acid, but still threaded with panic.

“And you don’t want her for her mind?” Ms Weller snapped back, clearly stung.

“We got to know her because she’s smart! We love her because she’s Penny.” Pepper snapped back, the words almost snarled, and Penny realised Pepper was angry: deeply, genuinely, soul-deep furious.

But she was also desperate, and Penny could tell. Could hear it in her voice, could read it in her body language, and she could feel her own panic building inside her like an impossible pressure. Ms Weller is saying something about normal family environments and less dangerous homes and the pressure was just building and building and Pepper and Tony must have felt it too because they all say desperate things at the same time.

“We’ll go to the press!”

“I’ll leave the Avengers!”

“I’ll emancipate myself!”

“You’ll what???” three voices and one pair of hands said at once.

“You can’t leave the Avengers!” Penny signed.

“You’re 14, you can’t emancipate yourself!” Ms Weller said, looking like she’d suddenly completely lost control of the conversation and knew it.

“You’re more important.” Tony said, just as Pepper said with dawning hope “Yes she could.”

Tony and Ms Weller turned to look at her in shock, the latter with a disbelieving expression. Pepper held her hands up, placating. “I’m not saying she should, and I’m certainly not saying it would be the best thing, but she could. And if you’re going to rip her from her family against her wishes, then I’m not going to say it’s a bad thing for her either.”

Ms Weller shook her head “This is ridiculous. Look, to be honest, I don’t like this at all either, but this would at least be a permanent stable home.” she turned to speak to Penny directly “I know this is horrible, but you’re 14, no judge is going to emancipate you.”

“Yes they will.” Penny signed back, trying to look more confident than she felt “I’ve been offered a full-ride scholarship to NYU, to start in the fall. And I’m earning my own money working part time as a researcher at Stark Industries. What further sign of capacity to provide for myself do I need?”

“You would also need to prove you can look after yourself physically and mentally.” Ms Weller pointed out, but she didn’t sound nearly as confident as she had a moment before. “You’ve really got a full-ride scholarship? And a job?”

“You’ve seen her IQ result, you know how smart she is.” Tony said, looking like he wasn’t quite sure if he wasn’t going to come to regret going down this route, despite how much it looked like an only hope at the moment.

“And you’d really rather be emancipated than adopted?” Ms Weller asked.

Penny nodded forcefully.

“Alright, I might be able to use that, especially as you do have a chance of winning an emancipation plea. I could make a case that it would be best to leave things as they are.”

“We only need a few more months and then we’re eligible to adopt her.” Pepper said, her voice pleading.

“You’ll still have to deal with those concerns about making her a target and that this is a dangerous home environment.” Ms Weller pointed out.

“Natasha is teaching me self-defence. And I have a watch with a panic button and tracker in it.” Penny signed, highly down-playing her training (Ms Weller definitely did not need to know that Natasha routinely shot chalk bullets at her) and omitting the actual reason she had the watch (which Ms Weller also did not need to know – ok, there was a lot they were hiding, but there were also significant good reasons she should stay with Tony and Pepper that she didn’t know, like the fact that she was a mutant vigilante with little thermoregulation and a much faster metabolism). “And Friday is the best security system in the world, and if any threats do come near the Tower ‘Siege Protocol’ is designed specifically to protect Pepper and I.” she added.

“Hmm.” Ms Weller said, but she nodded “Well, I’ll try, but I can’t make any promises. A child’s wishes always get taken into account, and despite our concerns this is clearly a very good placement, so I can make a case, but I can’t promise anything.”

Penny signed thank you, but she didn’t promise not to get herself emancipated if she failed. She wasn’t going back to another home like the Prescotts. And getting attention because she was a clever shiny new toy was possibly worse than getting none at all.

She had every intention of fighting being moved tooth and nail.

------------

The next week passed in a blur of stress. Even science couldn’t seem to take her mind off it, and Penny spent more and more of her time training, trying to beat her fears into a punchbag and sparring with anyone around and willing, even though she was still mostly losing. She pushed herself in training as if she could make everything OK if only she could conquer this one thing. She drove herself like this might be her last chance to train. Like it might be the end of everything.

When she wasn’t training she was with Tony and Pepper. They ate all their meals together now, Tony even getting up for breakfast at a normal time. Spending every moment they could together like they might not get anymore, and Penny could see her own fear reflected in her parents eyes. They hadn’t talked about it, but Penny hadn’t forgotten that Tony had been willing to leave the Avengers for her.

She wasn’t sure she agreed with it, didn’t think she should be prioritised over the world, but it made her feel warm inside. Made her feel almost safe.

If only she couldn’t be ripped away from them. If only she could be certain that an emancipation plea would work. If only she wouldn’t have to leave Midtown and go to college four years early to make such a plea work.

“Natasha says you’re ready to go patrolling again.” Tony said on Sunday evening, changing the subject without any segue.

“Really?” Penny signed, for a moment forgetting everything she was worried about and focussing solely on Tony.

Tony nodded “She also said it would probably be good for you to see how your skills match up to people less highly trained than Avengers.”

Penny held her breath “So may I start again?”

Tony and Pepper exchanged a quick look, and Penny knew they’d already talked about this. “Be back before midnight, and call for backup if you need it.” Pepper said, and Penny let a grin burst across her face.

She was going patrolling again! She was getting back out there as Spider Woman! After almost two months she could go back to patrolling!!!

Automatically she raised a hand to sign an exuberant thank you, but then she hesitated. There was going to be no better time. There might not be another time at all. She saw Tony and Pepper hesitate, sudden concern flickering over their faces but she took a deep breath. She could do this. She could hold whole (ok, short, but still whole) conversations with an AI that basically sounded like a human. She could do this.

“Thank you.” she said, and the words weren’t as clear as she’d like, weren’t as loud as she’d like, but they were there and they were audible and she’d done it.

Tony did a double take, and Pepper gasped quietly, and Penny smiled nervously at them.

Pepper recovered first “I’m so proud of you.” she said softly, and Penny knew her foster mom understood how hard it was, and how much the quiet but audible words meant to Penny.

“What she said bambina.” Tony said, sounding a little choked up himself. “How long...how long have you been...?”

“A while.” Penny said, slowly and quietly, but her voice was still there and it was a heady, panicky feeling. Like she was standing on a wall and she could fall either way. This could be her breakthrough or it could slam the door in her face, and she wasn’t sure which. “It’s slow, and hard.”

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“Penny, you don’t have to speak aloud if you don’t want to. Being mute doesn’t make you any less.”

“I know.” Penny said, holding Pepper’s eyes so she’d know she meant it. “I want to speak. I want...” she trailed off, struggling to find the words to explain. “Skip Westcott told me not to.” she said finally, “He told me he’d rape me again if I said a single word.”

Penny had thought she’d seen Pepper properly soul-deep angry when Ms Weller had told her a family was looking to adopt her because of her IQ. She’d been wrong. This was Pepper angry. This was soul-deep fury. The cold kind that burns and burns for an eternity.

Tony made an incomprehensible sound and he clenched his knife so hard his fingers turned white.

“He’s in prison.” Penny pointed out, “And he’s going to be for a very long time.”

“Good.” Tony said, more darkly than Penny had ever heard him, his tone void of any of his usual humour and flippancy, with a dark rage glittering behind his eyes.

“Please don’t murder him.” Penny signed “They definitely won’t let you adopt me if you kill someone.” she said, going for humour.

“Right, wait four months until you’re officially ours.” Tony said, which was the exact opposite of reassuring.

“Tony.” Penny signed, meeting her foster dad’s eyes “Don’t hurt him. Not for me.”

For a moment rage still danced behind his eyes, but then it drained away “I’m sorry Pen. I shouldn’t...it’s your choice, your healing, I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK” Penny signed, and she meant it. She didn’t want him to act on it (well, most of her didn’t anyway), but that rage, she understood that rage. She’d felt it.

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“Penny? I know we’ve asked this before, but please consider going to therapy. This is, this is a really good sign, but you’re doing this all alone, and that can’t help.”

Penny avoided Pepper’s eyes, busying her hands eating while she tried to work out what to say. “I am thinking about it” she signed eventually, and she meant it.

But it might not matter. If she got moved then any therapy she got would have to be with someone she couldn’t tell about Spider Woman, and that was too big a part of her story to really deal with anything without mentioning.

If she got moved, there was no amount of therapy that would make her ok anyway.

-------------

Webbing through the night air again was an indescribable feeling. She whooped as she released one web and shot another, yanking herself through the air with a wild, untamed freedom. She whipped herself from building to building, the wind rushing past and her blood singing. She side-tracked on the way to Queens to stop a bike theft, dropping out of the air, rolling neatly on landing and coming up running. The bike thief took one look at her and decided it wasn’t worth it, bolting away down the pavement. Penny shot webbing after him, pinning his leg to the building next to him and bringing him to a sudden halt. “Crime doesn’t pay!” she shouted at his back and as she shot a web at a rooftop and pulled.

“Would you like me to contact the police?”

“No point, no witnesses except me and anonymous vigilante witnessing isn’t generally accepted.”

“That is a shame, at least he won’t be stealing bikes for a few hours.”

“Nope” Penny said, a laugh bubbling up in her chest as she heard him shouting in frustration far behind her.

She reached Queens ten minutes later, and headed straight for a mugging she could hear happening a few blocks away. She swung round the side of a building and fired webs with her spare hand, pinning one mugger to the wall as she stuck her feet to the wall and dropped into a side-crouch, firing another web and yanking out the knife another mugger had pulled out. One the pair being mugged gaped “Hey! It’s Spider Woman!”

“Yep, hi, nice to meet you. These guys bothering you?” One of the remaining muggers pulled out a gun and Penny zeroed in on him, dropping down into the alley. “Whoops, no, I’m afraid I can’t let you keep that gun, you don’t seem to be using it responsibly. Go take a gun safety course. Tip for you, don’t point it at people. Aww, leaving so soon? We haven’t even called the cops yet.” She shot webbing at his legs, sending him sprawling to the ground, and Penny shot a few more webs at him for good measure before hastily turning to deal with the last two, who both rushed her at once. She ducked until the first punch, grabbed his arm and flipped him over her back into the other one, and they both collapsed into a nice and easy pile to web up. “You really should look where you’re going.” she told them seriously, before turning back to the thugs potential victims. One of them had pulled out their phone and was fumbling with it, clearly trying to switch the camera on. The other was just staring at her.

“Hi again, you two ok?”

“Uhh, yeah, I, yeah I think so.”

“Good, although I suggest signing up to a support group or something, getting mugged can be traumatic. Oh, could one of you call the police and give a statement, just so these guys can’t mug someone else tomorrow?” It felt good to talk, felt good to have the words flow easily, safe behind a mask talking to people who had no idea she was Penny Parker, and who didn’t know who Penny Parker was anyway.

“S-sure. Can I take a photo too?”

Penny blinked, thrown for a moment, that was a new one. There were plenty of photos of her online, but most of them had been taken from a distance (and showed her in suits that were just plain embarrassing in hindsight). “Um, sure?”

The couple smiled (albeit a little shakily) and tucked in on either side of her, and one of them held his phone out and snapped the picture.

“OK, you two all good? That webbing will last for hours, or until the police cut them out, so just stick around for the police OK? I’ll keep an ear out for you so shout if you need help. Bye!”

She shot a web up to the edge of the roof and pulled, running up the wall and then leaping into the air again.

“Karen, can you listen in to the police scanner to make sure they do pick those guys up?”

“Of course Penny. There is currently an armed robbery happening two blocks away, the police are in a stand-off. Would you like the address?”

“Yes please, thanks Karen.”

She approached the robbery more stealthily this time, running silently across the rooftops and then climbing down the wall. It was a little 24 hour drug-store, with two cops outside with guns. Inside two masked guys with guns were holding the store owner hostage. Hmmm. She climbed back up the wall a little ways and broke the lock on the window. A little guiltily but she was fairly sure the owner would like to be safe. The window was one of those thin rectangular ones, and a normal human would probably have never managed to get in, but Penny was flexible and able to stick to the roof, and she wriggled and just about managed it (ok, she bent the widow frame a little, but again, the owner probably wanted to be safe. Once inside the store it was easy. She had the element of surprise. All she had to do was aim her webs carefully and she had both guns at once.

The robbers yelled with surprise, and Penny grinned from behind the mask, even though her heart was pounding. “Hi.” she said cheerfully “Sorry, I’m confiscating these.”

One of the robbers pulled out a knife and Penny launched herself through the air, landing between the robbers and the store owner and catching the robbers wrist as he slashed the knife towards her. She yanked him towards her and punched his pressure point hard and fast, twisting his wrist so the knife landed on the floor rather than her arm when his arm went dead. Not stopping, she yanked him in, drove her knee into his gut, kicked his legs out from under him and fired her webs, pinning him to the floor before he could recover. Her Spidey sense instantly flared and she twisted to the side before his friends punch could connect, catching his arm and twisting hard, forcing him to turn. She fired her left web-shooter again, pinning his arm to his back, then kicked his legs out from under him as well and webbed him to the floor. Then she opened the door for the police.

“Thanks for not shooting me. You’ve got it from here right? Oh, I dropped their guns on top of a shelf, canned soup I think?.”

“Spider Woman.” One of the policemen complained, “We had it under control.”

“No we didn’t.” his partner pointed out “Thanks for the assist, little warning would be nice next time, we could’ve shot you.”

“Oh right, yeah that would probably have been a good idea. Sorry!”

“Humph” his partner complained, evidently not a fan, but he waved her off and went to speak to the store-owner.

And so the night went on. She mostly kept to Queens, although she went a little bit outside it a couple of times to stop muggings. Other than the armed robbery, it was a fairly normal Sunday night. A handful of muggings. A few bike thefts. A collection of drunk teenagers to escort home to make sure they didn’t pass out somewhere (and an excellent lesson why not to get drunk herself, although Penny suspected alcohol wouldn’t have a lot of effect on her now, or not for long anyway). She headed back to the Tower at half eleven, swung as close and high as possible and then climbed the rest of the way up until she got to the landing pad, and then heading into the Tower from there. She’d have to remember to leave a window open lower down next time, although it probably wasn’t worth the effort. She dropped by the lab to check in with Tony and tell him that she was back, as promised, then grabbed a snack from the kitchen, changed, and went to bed. It said something about Natasha’s training sessions that she was distinctly less tired after three hours fighting crime and swinging around the city than after a routine training session.

It was probably best she didn’t mention that to Natasha though.

----------------

Penny woke up Monday morning to find seven messages from Karen on her phone with links to news and buzzfeed articles. There was the expected one from the Daily Bugle complaining about the return of the ‘menace’ but she skimmed through that one and moved on to the others. There were three small news reports on her, plus three buzzfeed articles, all of which said pretty much the same thing. Spider Woman was back, she’d gotten distinctly better at fighting, that was probably because of the Avengers, and they still had no idea who she was and here is x wild stab in the dark about this and that celebrity secretly moonlighting as a vigilante (ok, that was just one of the buzzfeed articles). There were three decent photos of her, which were in all of the articles and credited to three separate instagram accounts.

Which gave Penny an idea. She rolled out of the hammock and jumped down to the floor, and grabbed a super-soldier bar (sue her, she was hungry!) and her mask from her desk, and half pulled on the mask.

“Good morning Penny, did you enjoy the articles?”

“Yeah, they were great. Thanks.” Penny said, blinking in morse code so she could stuff half the cereal bar in her mouth at once.

“You’re welcome.”

“Karen? The Avengers all have social media accounts like Instagram don’t they?”

“They do, although not all of them use theirs. Iron Man’s account is particularly active, but Captain America posts only rarely and Black Widow has never posted at all.”

Huh, interesting. “So if Spider Woman made an Instagram account that would be fine right?” she blinked.

“I believe so, would you like me to make you one? I will ensure it can’t be traced back to Penny Parker.”

“Please and thank you.” Penny blinked, finally managing to deal with the overly big mouthful and promptly shoving the second half of the bar in her mouth in just as big of a mouthful.

“Your account is now accessible from your phone. Would you like to post some footage from last night?”

Penny had actually forgotten that there was now a camera in her suit. It was a useful realisation. “Can you pull out a short clip of me webbing? Maybe when I was going to Queens?”

“Finding one now.”

“You’re amazing Karen.”

This was so much faster than making Instagram posts herself. She was starting to realise why Tony relied so heavily on Friday. She opened Instagram on her phone, logged out of her usual account and logged back in as Spider Woman. She started by following the three accounts that had posted the pictures of her in the articles, and then picked a 15 second clip out of several that Karen suggested and uploaded that to Instagram with the caption ‘It’s good to be back, here’s the view from the sky.’ and posted it.

She put her phone down when she was done, some of the high fading. “Karen? What do you think will happen to Spider Woman if I get moved?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“Do you think I’ll still be able to do it if I’m living somewhere else? Could I manage it without getting caught?”

“I’m afraid I do not know. Is that your biggest concern?”

“Not even close.” Penny admitted. It had been amazing to get back out there last night. To swing through the air and help people, protect people. But it wasn’t the thought of never patrolling again that was making her feel like her chest might cave in, it was the thought of leaving Tony and Pepper. And with them Wanda and Natasha and Steve and Clint and everyone. They were her family now. Somehow, slowly and quietly and yet impossibly fast they’d become her family, and Penny didn’t want to go. She desperately, desperately didn’t want to.

Even if she could get emancipated, doing so would likely require that she actually go to college, if she was basing her emancipation on the scholarship. And that meant moving out of the Tower for most of the year, and Penny wasn’t anywhere near ready for that. She was only 14, and she’d only just found them!

It was horrible, the helplessness and the waiting. Waiting for someone else who didn’t know her and didn’t know Tony and didn’t know Pepper to decide something so integral to all of them. Waiting for people who didn’t know about ice-cream and talks in the lab after the science was finished; didn’t know about tea and comfort on nightmare nights; didn’t know about glow in the dark ceiling paint and yoda pyjamas; didn’t know about sleepy breakfasts and chaotic dinners; didn’t know about all the ‘what did you do at school’s and ‘what did you learn with Natasha’s and ‘if you look here you’ll see the wiring...’s and the snacks and the hugs and all the ways they’d become family. People who didn’t know any of this was going to make integrally important decisions about her life, like she was some kind of parcel labelled ‘fragile, handle with care’ and couldn’t be anywhere near the Avengers just because their jobs were dangerous. Everything was dangerous. Uncle Ben had been an off-duty security guard and he was still dead. The people Penny helped at night were just ordinary people, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nobody could ensure safety.

But someone might take away the most important people keeping her safe in a misguided belief that the Avengers were the kind of chaotic you didn’t trust around ‘fragile, handle with care’. Or possibly, they were just worried they’d get pilloried by the public if the Avengers broke a high profile Stark foster kid.

OK, that was a bit on the cynical side. She should probably get up and stop moping. It clearly wasn’t helping any.

Penny just wished they could cut to the end of the chase, that she could just know what was going to happen already. Except part of her didn’t want that, because the only thing worse than this endless waiting game would be being told she was being moved. That she was being sent to this family she didn’t know who didn’t love her and only wanted her for her mind. That she was being taken away from Tony and Pepper.

Even this feeling of an ax hanging over her head would be better than that.

If the ax fell, Penny wasn’t sure if she’d be able to put her pieces back together again.

--------------

Penny spent half the morning training with Sam and Steve in the gym, and then a nerve-wracking half hour with Natasha and Wanda in the firing range, and then the next two hours curled on Wanda’s sofa while they binge-watched an old Sokovian cartoon, which Penny couldn’t understand a word of, until they both felt a little less fragile. She stopped by the food floor on the way (for a suitable definition of ‘on the way’ that includes going down 40 floors and then up again) to Pepper’s office and had lunch with her parents.

It was one of those meals where they talked about everything and nothing, and yet they could all feel the elephant in the room. The one thing they weren’t even slightly talking about. The reason for the way all three of them were stressed out of their minds.

Penny had a feeling Tony was going to do something rash if they didn’t hear soon.

They spun out the time after they’d finished eating, resisting the need to leave to get their work done. Clinging on to the time together because it might be the last in a long time.

Penny wasn’t so sure she wouldn’t do something rash herself if they didn’t hear soon.

Finally Tony reluctantly stood up “Want to come help with the Iron Man watch underoos?”

“Actually, Pen, could you run some errands for me first? I need some paperwork from R D and you know what they’re like. It won’t take long.”

Penny did know what they were like, and what Pepper meant was that it wouldn’t take long if Penny did it. It Tony went Pepper would end up with three new project proposals, four projects pulled back from final stages to have something else added and no paperwork at all. (This wasn’t an exaggeration, it had happened before.)

Penny nodded “I can do that, which scientists?”

Pepper told her, and she headed for the elevator, telling Tony she’d be back soon. Tony grumbled something about Pepper poaching his intern, but quietly, because he didn’t want to be sent to do the paperwork himself.

The heads of the different parts of R D knew her by now, and she got side-tracked twelve times on the way to the scientists she needed to ‘just have a quick look at this, it should be more efficient but I can’t work out why it isn’t’ or ‘could you get Dr Stark to sign this...you’re a lifesaver’ and ‘hey Penny, come and look at this, we got it working’ and ‘could you show this proposal to Dr Stark’. By the time she’d got what she’d come for she’d collected four new pieces of paperwork and spent ten minutes marvelling at a newly working project (and barely resisted the temptation to spend significantly longer getting into the schematics). She did eventually get what she needed though, and checked it over (she’d had to go back to R D before because a scientist had filled out the paperwork correctly half-way through and then evidently gotten distracted because the rest of it was equations and diagrams that looked cutting edge and useless for legal), and prodded one of the scientists into finishing the paperwork. She detoured by Tony’s lab to get him to sign a few of them (she did an excellent forgery of Tony’s signature now but Pepper had threatened to lock them both out of the lab when she’d found out so they weren’t doing that anymore) and to drop off the project proposals, and then headed back to Pepper’s office.

“Thank you!” Pepper said as she passed over the paperwork. “I really didn’t want to have to send Hannah.” Hannah was one of Pepper’s assistants and her right hand, and was recognisable throughout Stark Industries as such, and tended to get treated a little like an extension of Pepper. Which meant that the scientists tended to panic when she arrived because ‘what did the big boss want with them???’. It was kind of hilarious but tended to impact on R D’s productivity. And sending Hannah to Tony was absolutely useless, because Tony found it highly amusing to run rings around Hannah and the poor woman just didn’t know how to deal with him.

“Sorry it took so long, I got sidetracked.” Penny said.

Whatever Pepper was going to say in response was lost when Tony suddenly charged into the room with a look of utter panic and a ringing phone in his white-knuckled hand. Penny glanced at the screen and felt her stomach plunge.

It was Ms Weller.

“What do I do??” Tony asked, dropping the phone onto Pepper’s desk like it was a rattlesnake.

“Answer it!” Pepper replied, making no move to answer it herself and starting to look a little pale.

“But what if-what if....” Tony couldn’t finish the sentence, but neither of them needed him to.

“Then we deal with it. We’ll find a way.” Pepper said firmly, and her eyes were hard with resolve, her CEO Potts determination clashing with the edge of fear in her voice. “We’ll find a way.” Pepper repeated, forcing the fear out of her voice, but Penny wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince her and Tony or herself.

The phone kept ringing, and Penny couldn’t bear it anymore and pressed the green button herself.

“Mr Stark?”

“Present.” Tony croaked.

“Penny’s staying with you.” Ms Weller said, and Penny almost collapsed with relief.

Ms Weller was still talking, but none of them were listening to her. Pepper had gone limp in her chair and Tony was looking at Penny with a level of indescribable relief that she was pretty sure was mirrored on her own face.

They weren’t moving her.

They weren’t moving her.

She could stay with her parents.

Pepper made a choked noise that sounded a little like a sob and Tony was starting to grin like a mad-man and Penny sank to the office floor, her legs shaking as adrenaline flowed out of her body and suddenly she was crying, tears of relief and joy spilling over and streaming down her cheeks and Tony was sitting on the floor next to her pulling her into an awkward side hug that was all elbows and knees and shoulders and all she needed because she wasn’t being taken away. She wasn’t being taken away. She wasn’t being taken away.

Distantly she heard Pepper finish talking and hang up the phone, and realised she must have taken over the phone call when Tony abandoned it. A moment later Pepper was sitting on the floor on her other side, grabbing her hand and squeezing it tight and Penny saw her own relief reflected in her foster mom’s eyes.

They could stay together. There was going to be no desperate emancipation plea, or going away to college or high profile custody battle or whatever else plan B or C or D was. She was staying. They were together. It was going to be ok. They were going to be ok.

Together.