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It’s been a year and a half since her Homecoming dance, and Tony Stark can’t even imagine his life without Penny Parker…he can’t imagine getting through his weeks without texts from the kid and days spent working together in the lab and flying out to Queens to grab ice cream and deliver it to a rooftop where the two of them eat and chat about their days. He doesn’t think too hard about what that means…about how dangerous it is to let her into his heart like this when he could so easily lose her. But he sees how she looks at him…sees how she comes to him when she needs help, and how she texts him sometimes when she has a nightmare and needs a distraction, or how she’d called him the afternoon after his first meeting with the now-pardoned ‘rogue Avengers’ and asked if he’d help her with some homework, maybe knowing that he needed a distraction too.
It’s been a year and a half…a little over two years since he’d first met the kid, and so many things have changed. The Avengers are back together. He and Pepper are living in the tower again. And this kid…this sixteen year old superhero, has completely wormed her way into his heart, even if he isn’t willing to admit that out loud.
It’s one thing to know that he cares about this kid. But he’s surprised at how warm his heart gets when he watches her bond with the others….with the people who had been his team and then his family…a family that had broken apart and was now being stitched back together.
Rhodey is maybe the biggest surprise, although looking back, he isn’t sure why. His best friend had always been good with kids. The first time he found them together, it was right after she’d started her real internship with him…right after he’d bought the tower back. He’d insisted to both Rhodey and the major news outlets that he’d just changed his mind. He was an eccentric billionaire after all…no one questioned him too much.
Except Rhodey.
“Yeah, I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that you want to keep an eye on a certain teenager.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, honey bear.”
Still, if he was going to give the kid an internship (and he certainly was…he’d break that cycle of shame if it killed him) then he’d need to be a little closer to the city. Besides, he’d thought, what if something happened to her? What if she needed him and he was all the way out at the compound? So he’d bought the tower back, avoiding the floor when the people who had been his friends and family used to live.
Two weeks after their first day working together in his lab, Tony woke up late, following his nose to the kitchen only to find Rhodey and Penny pulling a baking sheet full of cookies out of the oven.
And then it had hit him. “Shit…kid…I forgot what day it was,” he’d told her, feeling a pang of regret and even a little fear. He’d been in another country up until the night before, and he was exhausted, but what if…what if this was it? The first in a long line of let-downs and disappointments?
But the girl had just grinned at him. “That’s okay. Rhodey’s showing me how to make his mom’s chocolate chip cookies.”
He’d lifted an eyebrow. Rhodey, he’d thought with a spark of jealousy. Why was he always “Mr. Stark” but his buddy got “Rhodey” after ten minutes with the girl? Then he’d glanced at the clock. “At 11am?”
“We made pancakes too…you want some?”
And he’d felt himself smiling all of a sudden, watching Rhodey chuckle and clasp her shoulder before going to the other counter to pile chocolate chip pancakes onto a plate.
“Sure, kiddo. Thanks.”
From then on, it hadn’t been all that strange to find the two of them in the kitchen together, Rhodey teaching her how to make everything from omelets to cheesecake. He’d been surprised by his friend’s prowess in the kitchen until he’d caught him reading through a cookbook in his office.
“I’m running out of things to teach her,” he’d admitted with a laugh.
When the Rogue Avengers went back to being the regular Avengers after plenty of meetings and negotiations and long talks, it wasn’t too long before they were around the tower more.
Natasha took to the girl almost instantly, and if Tony didn’t know any better, he’d say she must have experience with kids…or at least siblings. Her smile when she looks at Penny is always fond, and she quickly gave the girl the nickname ‘little Spider.’ Penny looks at her with all the hero worship Tony had seen in her eyes when she’d first looked at him…like she still looks at him sometimes.
She started joining Rhodey and Penny in the kitchen some days, right around the time that Tony started to notice that Penny wasn’t just coming by for lab days anymore. More and more, she’d drop by after school, at first because Rhodey invited her to help him bake something, or because a project for her internship was taking longer than usual and Tony asked if she wanted to go overtime.
The first time she spent the night, it was because one of those same projects had run late, and Tony had offered to let her stay. She’d been shocked to find she had a room on his floor, and that next morning, a Sunday, he’d found her on the sofa, curled up at Natasha’s side, the woman’s arm resting protectively around her back.
He hadn’t asked, not until he’d gotten to his lab and had gotten Friday to tell him what he’d missed.
And that was the first time he’d heard Penny give an account of what had happened the night of her Homecoming dance…the building that had come down on her. She’d whispered the story to Natasha after a nightmare, face hidden in her hands as she’d tried so hard to stop crying, but the notorious spy had just rested a hand on her back, rubbing gentle circles until she’d calmed down.
It wasn’t the last time she’d had a nightmare while staying at the tower, but it was the last time Friday didn’t wake Tony up when she did, thanks to the new ‘scared Spider’ protocol.
When Penny first officially met Sam and Steve, she had been quiet. Withdrawn. She didn’t seem to know how to talk to them, which was a miracle because, as Tony often joked, she could hold a conversation with a brick wall. But one incredulous look by Steve when he learned exactly how young Spider-Girl was had had the girl clamming up faster than an actual clam, her eyes narrowed as they’d darted between Steve and Tony, like she was waiting for a fight to break out.
Then Sam had snorted. “Jesus, Tony. Since when were we recruiting ten-year-olds?”
“I’m fifteen,” she’d told him, voice soft and as close to intimidating as she could get, but her answer had just made him chuckle to himself.
The next time they’d met about a week or so later, she’d been making a cheesecake with Rhodey, Tony sitting on the barstool in the kitchen and watching the oddly domestic scene with a smile. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this at peace.
Sam had taken one look at her and had lifted an eyebrow. “Ain’t it past your bedtime, kid?”
It had been 9:30.
“Careful, we had to mop the floor. You don’t want to break a hip,” she’d shot back, smiling sweetly, and Sam had barked out a laugh. Then she’d held out a plastic container of fresh cookies and Sam had taken one, and that, it seemed, had cemented their friendship.
From then on, he’d joined her on her patrols sometimes, flying overhead and keeping an eye on her, and when Tony watched the footage back one day, he’d watched Sam land on the roof with a bag in hand, and the two had pulled out sandwiches from that place in Queens she liked and ate with their feet swinging over the edge of the building.
She came around to Steve a lot slower. Tony thought that was his fault…she’d seen him after coming back from Siberia and although they never talked about it, he had a feeling that she was firmly on his side. He still doesn’t know how he feels about that…about her trusting him so completely without even having all the facts. So when Steve started coming around more, she tried to keep her distance. She was polite, of course. She smiled at him and made small talk, but she never quite met his eyes…not for long.
Their friendship had started when her suit had called for help as she’d been trying to web up a guy calling himself Kingpin. The guy was huge and strong and when she had fractured her ankle, Karen had ignored her insisting that she could handle this herself and had called Tony.
But Tony had been in DC, and so the closest Avenger had gotten the call.
When Tony had watched Steve arrive on the scene on Karen’s baby monitor, throwing the shield and taking out one of the henchmen who’d been about to put a bullet through his kid’s head, he’d forgiven Steve just about everything.
Together, the two had taken Kingpen down, Steve incapacitating the rest of the henchmen and Penny webbing Kingpin to a wall for the NYPD to find, and then he’d wrapped an arm around her.
“I can swing home…”. Even through Karen’s footage, he’d been able to tell how stiff she was around him.
“Absolutely not.”
“I heal really fast…I’ll be…”
“Under no circumstances are you swinging home. Get on the motorcycle. That’s an order, Spider-Girl.” His voice, in a stark contrast to his words, had been gentle as he’d helped her hobble to his motorcycle. Once she’d been situated, he’d taken her right to the medbay at the tower, sitting with her while a doctor wrapped her ankle and then watching TV with her in the living room until the movie and her speedy healing put her to sleep.
A few days later, he’d started up the mandatory weekly Avenger’s training sessions, and Tony is pretty sure he’d only done so because he’d wanted to help Penny improve.
No one complained.
Penny took the longest to warm up to Clint, and once again, Tony blames himself for that. Everything was very obviously not water under the bridge for Clint, something Penny had no trouble picking up on. So long after Steve had started movie nights where they’d all gathered together in the living room, usually letting Penny pick the movie, and long after she and Rhodey had baked their way through a whole cookbook and she and Sam started going on semi-regular morning jogs, her relationship with Clint was…strained.
She was never rude, and he was never mean…but the two didn’t talk.
And then she’d taken a bullet for him.
It hadn’t been her first mission with the Avengers, or even her first one after the rogues had come back. Usually, Cap had her working background. Get citizens out of the way. Set up a perimeter. She worked with Sam a lot, and he made snarky little remarks about babysitting but she’d threaten to web him to the ground again and that usually shut him up.
This time, she was right in the middle of the action, something that Tony had needed to fight very hard to not think about while he was trying to focus on fighting bad guys, as Penny had put it. And everything had been fine. She’d been keeping up a stream of consciousness chatter with the bad guys who couldn’t even hear her most of the time, but sometimes he’d hear the others laugh under their breath.
And then Clint had spoken up. “Can we keep the comms clear?” he’d barked, and Tony had been about two seconds from biting his head off (how fucking dare Clint snap at Tony’s kid?) when she’d called out to him.
“Clint!”
And then a short, sharp cry before a corner of Tony’s display, the one keeping constant stats on the Spider-Girl, had turned red.
“Penny!”
“What the hell!” Clint had cried, but Tony had spoken over him, hand shaking in the suit. The image in his display told him that the bullet had gone into her shoulder and he knew she would be okay…that wasn’t life threatening…it would just suck. But all he’d been able to think about was how she baked with Rhodey and joked around with Sam and how, just last week, she’d smiled up at him in the lab and he’s realized that she came over all the time now and he loved it.
“Spider-Girl’s hit!” he called into the comms, and Sam was the first to respond.
“I’m on my way…I’ve got her!”
Clint was silent and Tony didn’t even let himself think about that…not when he had shit to do before he could get back to his kid.
The next thing he’d heard was Sam, his voice oddly soft. “Hey, kid. Come on…let’s get you back to the jet, okay?”
Tony didn’t hear her mumbled response, but he heard Sam’s answer.
“Hey, you did good, honey. I’m going to get this taken care of and then we can get back to it.”
It had been a lie…Tony knew there was no way they’d let her fight while she was hurt…all the more reason to hurry up and finish this.
Clint had waited until Sam had gotten her back to the jet before he’d spoken up again. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“Clint…” Sam had started, but Penny’s voice had been sharp when she’d replied, their words only audible to Tony. They’d turned off their comms, but Tony could still hear everything from her suit.
“He was going to shoot you!”
“So you let him shoot you?”
“I wasn’t just going to let him shoot you!”
Tony had finally wrapped up his part, turning and heading back to the jet as fast as his repulsors could take him.
“Penny, stay still. I’ve got to get this bullet out. Clint, if you’re not going to help…”
“Of course you should have! Jesus, you’re fifteen years old! You shouldn’t even be here!”
Tony had climbed out of the suit the moment he’d touched down, flinching at Clint’s words that he’d been able to hear both through his mask and in person as he’d hurried to Penny’s side. The girl had been half laying on a cot, Sam grim-faced at her side as he’d used a rag that must have been soaked in alcohol to clean her bloody arm.
“Hey, kid. You alright?” he’d asked, a stupid question asked in a stupidly calm voice as he’d started to move to her other side, showing a great deal of self restraint by ignoring Barton because the alternative was going to be to start a fight with Barton and no one wanted that.
She’d been staring at Clint, frustration and hurt mixing on her face to make a combination Tony couldn’t stand to see.
“Hey, Spiderling, focus up,” he’d urged. “You okay?”
“You're wrong,” she’d told Clint instead of answering, voice so soft and hurt and young that he hadn’t been able to stand it.
“Of course he’s wrong, kiddo. Look, as soon as Sam…”
“She’s a child, Stark! A child just got shot in the field because you…”
“He didn’t do anything wrong!”
Looking back, Tony had suddenly realized that he’d never actually seen Penny angry. The girl had been on her feet before he’d been able to blink, blood pouring down her arm as she’d yanked away from Sam, putting herself in between Tony and Clint and taking a threatening step forward.
“I was Spider-Girl before he even knew about me! He gave me a suit and he watches out for me and he’s…if it weren’t for him, I might be dead! This isn’t his fault!” She’d gone to point right at Clint, about to keep going, when her knees had buckled and Clint had lunged to catch her, Tony and Sam a half step behind.
“You, out!” Sam had snapped as Tony had fought to keep breathing normally, laying her down on the cot once more. And to Tony’s surprise, Clint had gone. Then Sam had turned to Penny, whatever scolding he’d been about to give dying on his lips when he’d seen the tears running down her cheeks.
“He’s wrong,” she’d all but sobbed, and Sam had gripped her good arm, glancing up at Tony who’d been rooted to the spot.
“Of course he’s wrong, honey.”
Of all the things Tony had been expecting him to say, it hadn’t been that.
“He’s just scared,” Sam had gone on, injecting her with the good pain medicine and waiting a moment to let it take effect. “He’s got a daughter your age, you know?”
“He shouldn’t be mean to my…to Mr. Stark,” she’d muttered, eyes closing as the drugs had started to work.
Sam had glanced up at him, lips twitching at whatever expression must have been on his face. “Yeah, I know, kiddo.” He’d made the incision as carefully as he could, working to get the bullet out.
“Mr. Stark…he…he looks out…for me.”
Tony had taken her hand then, squeezing gently and wondering when he’d let himself start to love a kid this much.
Hours later after she’d woken up in the medbay, Tony had stepped out for only a minute, only to return and find Barton at her bedside.
“I’m sorry, kid.”
She’d been quiet, and so had Tony. Part of him had wanted to storm in…to drag him out by his ear and lock the door behind him so he couldn’t come back. He’d yelled at Penny. He’d hurt her when she’d already been hurt. But then he went on.
“I…when I see you out there…I just…I can’t stop picturing my daughter. And then…then you got hurt because of me…”
“It wasn’t because of you,” she’d argued, voice soft and firm. “I knew what I was doing.”
Clint didn’t argue.
“I just want to help people. I…I have these powers and…and if bad things happen and I don’t even try to stop them…then they happen because of me.”
“That’s now how it works, Penny. You can’t stop every bad thing from happening. You’re just a kid. You shouldn’t even have to worry about stuff like this.” His voice was gentler than before…softer.
Penny’s voice, on the other hand, was firm. “Mr. Stark watches out for me. He’s…he makes sure I’m safe.”
Things weren’t perfect between them from then on out. Not by a long shot. But Clint never yelled at her again. And he showed up to help her with patrols just as often as Sam.