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I don’t feel so good–
Penny wakes screaming .
This isn’t an unusual occurrence anymore, and May doesn’t come check on her, so she just lies there, feeling her heartbeat pulse in her gums and saliva cling heavy to her tongue and her throat whilst sticky tears track rivulets down her cheeks. Three blankets crush her, turning her sobs into laborious, heaving things as she struggles to to get air in–but anything is better than the terrible feeling of floating and then pain as her body splits apart atom by atom, cold fire licking over her skin and stabbing into her bones, right down to the marrow.
(Warm, strong arms wrapping tight around her–the sharp scent of motor oil and ozone–a low, kind voice so fond of quips– Papa ?)
(Golden sparks to herald his arrival–a fond indulgence in his voice as he scolded them both–dark hair haloed by green fractals– Dad ?)
(But why remember a deadbeat now?)
She tries to explain once, and May doesn’t laugh, but she gets a little smile, and asks how Penny knows about atoms already. She tries to get Penny to talk to someone, a doctor, but Penny doesn’t know how to explain without sounding mad so she lies and says she just misses Ben. The lies feel like balloons inside her belly, threatening to carry her off in the wind ‘til she’s lost like Saharan sand on the snowy Alps and she’s cold like she’s ash ash ash –, but they get her out of the visits.
It’s early spring and it’s so, so cold. Every morning when she gets ready for school, she makes sure to have thick woolen tights under her skirts, and two jumpers on a long-sleeved top, and a fur-lined coat that she’s so reluctant to take off in the classroom, the teacher restricts her breaktime and threatens to keep her here after school before Penny finally takes it off. She’s the one who wins in the end, though, because sitting in silence in the classroom over break means she’s not outside on the playground, bereft of heat.
School is… dull. More than usual. Sometimes she daydreams, but she always gets the questions right when she’s called on so she doesn’t get told off like the others do. She thinks that, if she wasn’t already scoring well before, someone would find it strange that now she scores perfectly. But, May doesn’t want her skipping grades because the doctor said it would be bad for her (severe dissociative disorder and suspected ADHD and trauma) so she hands in her perfect tests and doesn’t pay attention in class.
At lunchtime she goes to the library–it’s the library or the playground and the playground is cold –and the librarian is nice. He shows her where the storybooks about superheroes are. She finds a book on spiders and reads that instead.
In the hallway, Flash jeers at her with his friends. “Even your Mom didn’t want you,” he hisses at her, bursting into peals of laughter, and running out the school gates into the open arms of his mother.
As a treat for being top of her class (and for not complaining too much about how boring school is) they go to the Stark Expo at the end of May. She tries to drag May away, blinking back tears of frustration and early grief when May scolds her for being naughty. When she starts sniffling, May buys her an Iron Man mask to get her to relent. She bursts into tears.
It feels like something important is going to happen–she looks at the glass ceiling and the robots and Justin Hammer posturing on stage and thinks everything here is going to shatter .
May is mortified, trying to shush her because people are looking, Penelope , but they don’t know they’re going to die, they’re going to die, do they know they’re dead do they know what it feels like to die do they know they’re going to find out?
One of the people looking is a smart-looking woman in a business skirt and business jacket and business heels. Her hair is red and Penny thinks Pepper . Bell peppers in choriatiki, scotch bonnet peppers in joloff rice, cherry peppers in beef tartare, the freshness-sweetness-spicyness tickles her tongue as she thinks about dinner in the warm summer evening on the terrace with the faint buzzing of people below them and the open sky around her sat high about the New York skyline and yet steady ground below her. (Steady arms around her, a sharp blue glow, a fond grin– Papa ?) But Pepper turns away from her without a word.
Oh–she looks around and people are screaming. Pepper is gone. May is gone. The only thing left is a grey robot and it looks uncannily like what should be safe but its raising a repulsor and out of instinct she jumps back, bracing for razing light as her breath hitches. Instead, a heavy thud behind her and a red arm extends to defend her, blasing the robot apart.
“Good job, kid,” Iron Man quips at her, voice robotic and modulated through the suit’s speakers, before taking back off.
“ PENNY! ” May shouts, running barefoot towards her and Penny shakes out of her stupor and remembers to run too, to safety. May grasps her arm and drags her out and away from the shattered glass. “Penny, Penny, don’t do that to me again,” May says, kissing her forehead tenderly despite the frenzy writ in the lines of her face. “Stay with me next time. You can’t go off into your own little world when you’re in danger.”
Penny nods, and turns her gaze out the window. On the street, backlit by the convenience store in pale amber, there’s a woman walking with a child, the boy held carefully on her shoulders and babbling, though she can’t hear it from here. The woman laughs, and she thinks about how she doesn’t want a Mom, really, she just wants–
I don’t want–
Penny wakes screaming .
There are cobwebs stuffed into her eyeballs and her ears, her throat is full of bristly spider legs stabbing into it and when she swallows she can feel them cracking under the force and crumbling to dirt and dust and ash. She’s trembling.
She brings a finger to her mouth and bites at her cuticle until it stings, blood welling up. Then, she switches to the next finger, until her fingers are bloodied and her nails are painted red and she feels hazy and grounded enough to fall back asleep.
May feeds her frozen macaroni, and sends her off to bed with a glass of milk. On impulse, she asks for a bedtime story, so May tells her the story of Arachne. How a girl who was the finest weaver in all the land challenged a goddess to a contest, and was turned into a spider for her pride.
There’s a spider in the corner of her room with a new cobweb. Strong legs and glinting fangs, she wonders what it thinks of the Mother of Spiders, whether it can understand. Prideful Arachne, reduced to lurking in corners.
There are no pictures of Richard Parker in the house. Ben would only mention him if he’d had something to drink, which he rarely did. Penny only managed to make him talk once about his brother, searching for why she wasn’t with him and Mom , but there wasn’t much he said that was complimentary.
When Penelope Teresa Parker was two months old, Richard and Mary came to stay in Queens for a week. They brought a crib, her entire wardrobe, and kilos of formula. On Monday, they arrived in the afternoon, and went to a restaurant together, leaving Penny with a babysitter. All the adults had a few drinks, and the babysitter swears that Richard and Mary were there to pay her and send her home.
When Ben woke up the next morning, they were gone.
They never came back.
They go to the circus, one Saturday. It’s getting warmer now, but still, even though she’s sweating and her tights are clinging in the creases of her knees, she doesn’t take off her coat. May lets her, determined that there will be no fits and no scenes and no tears, today, just fun.
It’s magical . There are showers of sparklers and smoke that accompany the ringmaster’s entrance, acrobats, flying from trapeze to trapeze as though unconstrained by gravity, big grey elephants with gilded tusks that shake the tent’s foundations when they step.
For the final act, they bring out the lions and have them jump through hoops and strut around the arena, proud as anything. One of the girls draws everyone’s attention with the torch she carries on, lighting the final ring with great flourish and a bow.
(Golden rings of light and power that promise infinity–an elegant hand on her shoulder to congratulate her–worried muttering and a needle stitching together the flesh of her arm– Dad ?)
“Penny!” the teacher snaps, “pay attention. Now, use your calculator to find out what is one sixth of fifteen.”
“Two point five,” Penny snaps back, annoyed. She turns back to the window. She can feel the teacher’s glare on her, but she doesn’t care–school is boring , she’s not learning anything anyway. There’s no point in being here so at least the teachers could respect that, and not break her out of her reverie.
She’d almost remembered what it felt like when Papa hugged her.
I don’t wanna go–
Penny wakes screaming .
She coughs and chokes on the phlegm sliding down her throat, mummified in the heavy blankets and struggling to get out of them. She falls to the floor in the process and is left panting, knees cracking as she hits the floor shins-first, falling forward and clipping her jaw. She whimpers.
Arachne watches impassively from her bedstand, web spun about the lamp sitting there.
At lunchtime, she goes to the library again. She goes to the non-fiction section again and stares, disappointed, when she realises she’s read everything.
There’s a computer, though, which she’s allowed to use, so she looks up other libraries because she’s sure there’s somewhere else she can find books. There’s one in Queens, but it won’t have the books she needs and it’s not where Dad took her.
A little research yields the name 177A Bleeker Street.
Something about it seems right.
She has no money, and she doesn’t want to steal, so on the last day of school, when she knows nobody will miss her for a while, she sets off for Manhattan. It’s a long walk and her feet start to blister and her t-shirt is plastered unpleasantly to her skin under her sweater, and the fibres of her tights bite. She didn’t think to bring anything to eat (traversing the city should be so much faster, she should be able to fly ). Her mouth is dry, like a desert, like dusty earth, like dry ash.
By the time she arrives on Bleeker Street, her legs and her stomach are cramping, and she feels dizzy and warm. Everything looks distorted, like the heat is warping reality all ‘round her, black shapes flickering at the edges of her fingers, long, spindly legs reaching for her.
(Where’s Dad? He should be here)
The ripples grow and shadows undulate through the world as she drops to the ground.
They bring his daughter into the ER for heatstroke and it’s only coincidence that allows him be the one to treat her. Stephen spends longer than is strictly necessary fretting, double-checking everything, enlisting Billy to be her nurse (he trusts his friend to be competent, and pay more attention to her than most of the other staff here).
She’s not mine , he reminds himself, looking over her tiny body. Laid out like this, in a thin hospital gown, she looks dead. (He remembers her fading. He faded first, but Penny felt it coming, clinging to them–him and Tony–, trembling and panicked and desperate.) His hands do not shake as he gently brushes her hair from her eyes, lingering to check her temperature, brush down her cheek.
Dad–I don’t feel so good–please–Papa I don’t wanna go–
She’s a stranger, he reminds himself. If she opened her eyes right now she would ask for May.
He walks away.
“Mrs Parker?” he asks May, unnecessarily. He recognised her–but there’s only blank politeness in her eyes. “Penelope is just this way.” He catches himself before he calls her Penny , but only just.
It’s evident in the tired lines of her face that May is devastated; this must weigh heavily on her. He leads her to the room, then backtracks to the main desk, and waives the fees.
I’m sorry–
Penny wakes screaming .
The sheets are wrong and she is floating she isn’t real isn’t real isn’t real, her fingers are ash her heart is dust her bones are made of sand.
A nurse comes running in at once. Penny’s gotten used to calming herself down alone and it doesn’t help that there’s a new unknown ( danger! ) so close to her, touching her freezing, flaking skin. She brings her fingers to her mouth and bites down, tugging away strips of flesh when the nurse grabs her hands away. Her mouth is full of iron, heavy and salty with sleep, and blood dapples her lips like poorly-applied lipstick.
She takes a moment to breathe. Look around her. The sheets are white, and airy; the air conditioning is humming in a high, inconsistent pitch; the nurse is wearing scrubs, still holding onto her hands, his grip too tight for comfort. Seconds slip by uncomfortably, and he releases her hands, smiling warmly at her.
“What happened?”
“You passed out on the sidewalk,” he–Billy, says the name tag–explains kindly, “of heatstroke. It was very dangerous for you to walk for so long without anything to drink, especially in the heat. Luckily, a doctor was there, and brought you here immediately.”
Oh. “Where’s May?"
“Your aunt just went to get something to eat.” He hesitates, worry twisting his face momentarily, before he smiles again. “Do you want to see her?”
Penny nods, like it’s obvious, and Billy’s shoulders untense, his smile widening somewhat into something less forced.
“That’s great. I’ll call her now.”
He stays in the room, but makes the call. He’s still there when May comes in, face pale, with purple half-moons stamped under her eyes, bending over to gather every part of Penny into a crushing hug. “You’re okay. You’re alright,” May says, breath ghosting over Penny’s head. When she pulls away from the hug, her eyes are sparkling. “You need to–be more careful. Don’t do that again. Promise me. Don’t do that to me again. Don’t go wandering off on your own.”
She babbles like that for a little longer. Billy is still in the corner, watching, contemplative.
Arachne watches too.
I don’t feel–
Penny wakes screaming .
There is mud sliding down her throat, reedy river water and Titan’s dust and her ashes, she coughs wetly and sobs into her pillow, burrowing under layer and layers of sweaty blankets as ice stabs her bloody fingertips, ice stabs her scabbed face–still warm from the sunburn–itchy and paradoxical, ice stabs her heart and shatters into glass-dust like she shattered into sand. She’s floating, held down by pounds of fluffy blankets and her sweat freezes into moss-grass-emerald-green crystals against the nape of her neck, it smells of sweetness, over-sweet, pungent, rotting fruit–apples with maggots writhing in the brown sludge–and rotting eggs like dead children. Grief congeals on her tongue like cooling fat.
Dad , she thinks, spitting, despair cloying, stumbling to the sink and letting ice-cold water seep into an ice-cold body and wash away the debris of her panic, Papa, please, please I need you–
May? Where are you!
“NO!” Penny shouts, frigid tears oozing, warm copper on her tongue from her ravaged fingers, shoving them into her mouth and down her throat–May grabs them out and she screams , the screams that May’s been ignoring for months and pushes away, sending herself stumbling, staggering, falling to the floor whilst May towers over her, arms piled high with summer dresses
“ People are looking, Penelope, you will calm down now , young lady,” May insists. There’s an edge of tired frustration to her tone, hiding in the annoyance. She’s right. People are staring, eyeballs bulging and pitying grimaces, as they tug along their own little children.
“But–but it’s cold! ” she insists, desperate–she was ash and dust and sand in the wind and it was cold –but May has no patience left, and takes the dresses to the till without Penny trying them on.
She gets caught at the door. Scarf and hat and mittens, tights under shorts and jumpers on long sleeves. (She’s going to see Papa. His tower is in the middle of the city, and May only said not to go to Bleeker Street again.)
“Penny, you’re not going on on your own, and you’re certainly not going out dressed like that,” May almost-snaps, voice softening as she finishes her sentence. Her lips are thin and pressed together so hard they’re turning white. “Look, why don’t you go and put on one of your nice new dresses, and then we can go to the park together? We can get ice cream.”
Ice cream is for sunny days and movie nights, artisan madagascan vanilla and cornish sea-salted caramel, with ripe strawberries and chocolate fountains; sly remarks of don’t tell your Dad when she takes an extra serving of it–not frosty should-be-warm summers where nothing is right and she’s alone.
Frowning, Penny brings her thumb to her mouth. It’s ruined, shredded, stinging. She turns back to her room, climbs under the covers, and closes her eyes. (Tries to remember Papa’s steady hugs and Dad’s proud smiles. Fails.)
When she wakes up that morning, her throat is sore, but she feels normal. No bad dreams. The July heat has helped, chasing away the cold. Only good dreams last night , she thinks, trying to grasp the tail ends of her imaginings, but they slip through her fingers like sand or dust or ash. Her fingertips are red-cold, and her nailbeds sting. Her fingers look off and it takes her a minute to realise why.
She’s clawed them off.
There’s a pile of nails–little round things, translucent–on the bed, and sitting atop them Arachne, with its powerful legs and big fangs. She looks back at her fingers. Red with blood, it oozes slowly and gets on her pyjamas, her bedsheets. Her spider moves off the pile of nails–clean and bloodless nails–and goes to the sheets. It’s cleaning them for her. She smiles.
It approaches, gets closer to her bloody fingers.
Bites down.
Cold fire floods her veins and Penny remembers to s c r e a m .
May hasn’t rushed into her room because of her screaming in months, but Penny sustains it this time, enough so that May does check (if only to shut her up) and May shrieks too when she sees the state of her fingers.
Bloodless, neat, fleshy tips.
Her spider crawls down her back, or maybe that’s nerves, and follows them to the hospital. The doctors are appropriately horrified and they don’t hide it very well. Billy is her nurse again, and he greets her with a more strained smile, this time. He’s the one who carefully unwinds the bandages around her fingers every day, sees the sticky yellow pus mingle with pink-red blood. They don’t mix on the bandages, colours distinct, but her mind conjures orange sunsets and orange skies and orange ruins on a planet lightyears away.
They bring his daughter into the ER again, a scant month and a half since he last saw her. (For one, terrible, selfish second, he’s glad she’s back. Glad she’s been injured, because this is all he’s ever going to get. Brief glimpses of a stranger. A helpful one, perhaps, but still, he can’t bring himself to face her.) He’s treating another patient anyway, a woman who had a seizure, and he doesn’t find out that Penny passed through until he checks the records a couple hours later.
He suggests that Billy be her nurse again, ostensibly because she already knows and trusts him. Billy frowns at that.
“She’s a sweet kid,” he says, uncomfortably serious. “But her aunt… I don’t know. She ran away, you know? What kind of aunt lets that happen?
“She said she wanted her dad, last time she was here.”
Stephen’s hands tremble.
You made me Arachne , she thinks, looking at her spider. Thick, pointy legs create indents on the skin of her stomach where the spider sits, content as anything. Its fangs seem smaller, somehow, but glisten nonetheless, slick with saliva.
It crawls up, until it’s by her neck, and Penny’s breath catches as she imagines one leg spearing her throat open (like he speared open Papa’s side), but it moves on, down to her swaddled hands. Billy just changed them, and they smell of flowery laundry detergent and septic. It starts nibbling at the cloth, unravelling it (aren’t spiders meant to weave?) until her fingers are exposed to open air and it stings , the oils that were rubbed in now wholly absorbed. Slowly, slowly, it puts its mouth to her fingertips, and starts to clean.
That makes you Athene.
Stephen heads to the front desk to waive the fees, again. This is expensive, and he knows that May’s income isn’t always reliable. It’s simple enough to pull up the bill–some $6000–but, to his surprise, it’s already been paid in full. Anonymously.
(He thinks about the anonymous fund he set up, so that Penny will be able to go to any University she wants without sinking into debt.)
He wonders about Penny’s real father–the one she asked for–, and wonders who payed the bill, and wonders if they’re connected.
He doesn’t go into her room.
If all goes well–Penny will never have to meet Tony. She’ll be happy, living with May in Queens. She’ll get a full ride scholarship to any university in the world and she’ll never have to worry about anything–Richard and Mary Parker are CIA and long dead, but Penny and May don’t know that, so she’ll get massive inheritance from them. Controlling shares in SI. State-of-the-art labs. Vacation houses. More money than she’ll know what to do with.
But she’ll never know him, never get tangled up in his noxious influence, never have to deal with his too-short temper and over-long binges, never have to fear his enemies taking it out on her.
(He’ll never get to see her eyes light up as she figures out a problem, grin as she groans at his faux-ineptitude with slang, hear her quipping as she takes on a villain she shouldn’t have to all in order to protect those around her, hug her and hold her tight, never ever again.)
It’s for the best.
Eventually, she’s allowed to go home. May looks at her like she is porcelain and waits on her as though she were a princess. She orders pizza as a treat, and winces when she realises Penny won’t be able to pick up the pieces with her bandaged hands. They look like snowballs taped to her fists, cutting off the circulation and squeezing tightly tightly tightly. May can’t see her fingers tremble because of them. She can feel her heartbeat where the blood pumps, feeding energy into the soft empty nailbeds, and yet there is no warmth in her blood, she feels it sticking and pressing and buzzing. There are grains of sand stuck between her raw fingers and the bandages–or maybe she’s crumbling again, body made of shortbread biscuits and sea-beaten chalk.
May lets her turn the heating on in her room; as an apology. As a peace offering. As a sign of defeat. (Penny doesn’t mean to be bad, she knows that May falls asleep crying quietly as often as she wakes screaming… she misses Papa. He’d know what to do.)
The heat envelops her like a desperate last hug, arms shaking and hands trembling as she sobs and feels her very being c o m e a p a r t – it grounds her because it was so cold then and now she plasters her back to the radiator and ignores the bright spots of agony that precede a burn
I don’t–
Penny wakes screaming .
She beats her confined hands against the bone of her chest and feels her ribs tickle from the inside, tiny, venomous fangs scratching and nipping at her cartilage and her lungs and her bones making her breath come out in agonising gasps. The blankets aren’t heavy enough on her so she jams her feet into the wall and tries to stick to it and make sure she doesn’t float away–
May runs in– May May May –and she hasn’t come to see Penny after she wakes for months and she’s panicked and out of her depth and she grapes Penny’s wrists tight and bruising, she’s crying too, and begging Penny to “stop, please stop, Penny you’re going to hurt yourself you need to calm down.”
May’s voice grounds her. She lets her arms go slack, blinks heavily, blearily, and watches the sun creep up the opposite apartment building, and pretends that she can’t feel her blood drop to subzero.
There’s no milk left in the fridge for her birthday pancakes, so May tells Penny to be good for ten minutes, whilst she pops out to the corner shop. Ten minutes of no supervision, after ten constricting days of hawk eyes and hovering–Athene bit her so she’s sure she’ll be herself again, she just needs to try it out.
Carefully, she unwinds the bandages, and cries out in delight at the full nails she finds there. If she can heal, then–
She rushes for the nearest wall, stopping short just when her nose touches it. She extends a hand, tentatively, places both palms flat on the wall, one foot, another foot; she cries out again, because she’s on the wall, she’s herself again! Abandoning caution and hesitation, she crawls up the wall, passing by Athene’s web, and hangs herself upside down from her feet. She twirls, delighted, and jumps –
And falls .
Penny screams .
Penny’s leg is broken–open fracture, her tibia sticking out, starkly white against the crimson blood welling–, and Stephen, as discretely and fast as possible, ensures he’ll be the one treating her. He doesn’t know when, exactly, her powers developed, only knows she wasn’t born a mutant, but he doesn’t want to take any chances. New York State’s laws regarding mutants aren’t yet friendly enough for him to risk anyone else discovering her healing factor.
They bring her into the ICU already sedated, and he forces his nerves and anxieties to calm. He has a job to do.
(Billy looks at him strangely. He’s a neurologist, not an ICU surgeon, and he’s normally a lot more relaxed, a lot more confident, even in cases far more dire then this one. If pressed, he’ll say it was her age. Everyone caves when faced with children.)
There are bruises on her wrists that make every part of him bristle with anger, fresh fresh bruises that must be from this morning. He doesn’t have time to be angry right now, so he compartmentalises. Her fingernails are grown back in their entirety so he throws caution to the wind and doubles her dose of sedative when no one is looking. He can heal her, if worst comes to worst, but he can’t explain a baseline human waking up in the middle of surgery–and he wouldn’t wish it on her. He wants her to be safe and happy and healthy, and he wishes he’d never even seen her, this time round, if only it would mean she was alright.
When she wakes up, Penny is in Metro-General hospital. Lying down in a familar too-thin gown that won’t block knives or fists or moons, and leaves her shivering from the chill of the air conditioning.
But, something feels wrong, something feels off, her senses are all but shouting at her and it’s making the lights–white and sterile–feel over-bright, and the rhythm of the heartbeat monitor slams into her with the force of flying debris and isn’t regular enough for her to get used to it or calm down; it’s speeding up as she starts to hyperventilate, breath getting shorter. She’s half-expecting Billy to rush in and grab her wrists and crush the bone shatter it grind it to dust or dirt or sand–she shoves fingers down her slimy throat and tastes ash.
“Penelope?”
She stops breathing all at once. Freezes. Ice blossoms in her lungs, fracturing and pitching glacial petals through every limb. Dreams like this never end well and she focuses on the flux of darkness in her vision instead (she can’t bear to see him die again) and lets her eyes roll up and screws the lids down tight.
“ Penny–! ” There are hands on her wrists convering the ring of bruises May left. Gentle, elegant hands that startle her enough to inhale sharply, letting out a high-pitched whine of distress at the dizziness that accompanies the sudden inflow of oxygen. A sharp exhale, too, and she’s sobbing again. A soft, soothing voice coaxes her through it, one hand tracing patterns over her palm, the other lovingly carding fingers through her hair. She feels calm enough to blink, once, twice.
He looks into her eyes and something flashes in his; he steps a professional distance away, and takes all the warmth of the room with him. His smile is disaffected. Her leg starts to throb. A black hole opens in the pit of her chest and bristled legs climb out stab into her throat.
“I’m Dr. Strange,” he introduces dispassionately, “and I’m the one who’s in charge of treating you–”
“Dad?” Penny asks, voice small and uncertain. It almost cracks, and the legs in her throat crack like salt crystals. He has to remember. He has to. He can’t just be a stranger. I see you die in my nightmares , she thinks, half-hysterical. “Don’t you–” remember me? She can’t finish it.
“Oh, Penny, you–” In a single second he’s covered covered the distance back to her, arms wrapped around her in a warm hug. She hugs back tightly, feels a wail of joy and relief build in her chest and lets it out, clinging shamelessly.
“ Daddy ,” she whispers, tightening her grip and letting him hold her through her heaves and sobs.
“Shh, it’s alright, everything will be okay. I’m here. Everything’s okay, I promise.”
“I love you. I’m sorry I left I didn’t want to–” her breath hitches and she breaks down into another gasping sob.
“Shh, shh, it wasn’t your fault. I love you. Never think that it’s your fault. I love you,” he repeats, and for the first time since she dreamt of ash Penny lets herself believe she’ll be okay.
It takes incredible willpower to tear himself from Penny’s side, and only once she’s asleep and her dose of painkillers has been increased so her leg won’t bother her at all. There’s nothing in the world he’d love more than to take her home to the Sanctum this instant, but… there are complications.
For one, May doesn’t know him. She wouldn’t let him take her niece home with him, even if it was simple as just asking her permission.
For two… Benjamin Parker died six months ago. In those six months, Penny has been in hospital three times; the first from a suspected attempt to run away resulting in severe heatstroke, though no fuss was made about it at the time, it being the first instance; the second, a horrifying act of self-mutilation that simply doesn’t occur in happy children; and finally, an open fracture in her leg as a result of being left alone.
It doesn’t paint a pretty picture.
Social services talked to Billy about it. He says that Penny always seemed happy to see her aunt, and doesn’t think Mrs Parker is doing it out of malice, but young children can be very hard to deal with, especially for a relatively young, single woman dealing with loss.
It makes Stephen wince, because he knows that May was an excellent guardian for Penny, knows that she’s a good woman with a good heart; but Billy has a point. May simply isn’t equipped to deal with an enhanced child traumatised to the extent that Penny is.
As for himself… he’s not a registered foster parent. Though, as a doctor, he should be able to qualify. He certainly has the means. The guest room in his apartment wouldn’t be hard to repurpose, and Penny clearly adores him.
It’s definitely something to consider.
For now, he turns the corner, and prepares to face May with that information.
Jarvis brings up an alert on his HUD that something on Penny’s file pinged as unpaid, so it’s automatic for him to ensure it’s paid in full, swiftly and anonymously. He closes his eyes, breathes in and out, and reminds himself that staying separate is for the best.
The best evaporates when he sees that she’s in hospital again. She had heatstroke in late June, tore her nails off in August, and now only a week later she has a broken leg. It’s too much; he can’t stand the thought of her in pain, him completely blind as to the severity of her condition.
Iron Man, he decides in a moment of weakness, will be making a public appearance to comfort sick and injured kids. It’ll be enough to see her, just this once. Just to make sure she’s okay.
Just this once, and never again.
May looks worried, and her eyes are red-rimmed. She sits down next to Penny, taking hold of her right hand, whilst Dad sits the other side.
“Penny–you know I love you,” May starts, voice hesitant. Uncertain. “No matter anything else, I love you.”
“I love you too,” Penny says earnestly, her stomach starting to turn; May’s not usually like this. There are flies and butterflies and dragonflies dancing inside her. Dad squeezes her hand reassuringly, and she squeezes back, hard.
“And, I want what’s best for you.” Penny nods, and May continues. “Even if that means making hard decisions.” She’s blinking hard, now, but she keeps going. “And I don’t think that staying with me is best for you.”
A bout of dizziness strikes, and Penny feels unmoored. Her eyes widen, and she presses her lips together so that she doesn’t cry or shout or scream. She doesn’t want to make a scene, not in front of Dad.
“It’s not because I don’t want you, or I don’t love you, Penny I promise I love you, so, so much.” May’s actually crying now, wiping away the tears furiously. “I love you, and I want you to be happy. And… I don’t think you’ve–been happy–since–not since Ben–” She covers her mouth with her hand, unable to go on.
“What’s gonna happen to me?” She turns wide eyes on Dad, who’s smiling gently, like everything’s going to be alright, and something in her decontracts.
“If you’d like, you would stay with me–”
“Yes!” Penny all but shouts, just barely remembering that hospital walls are thin. “Yes, yes, I want to stay with you!” Dad gets a tiny frown on his face, and Penny realises: “But I can still see May, right?”
“Of course,” Dad assures her. She turns to grin at May, who’s still crying, and feels her own smile fade.
“Don’t worry, it’ll be okay,” Penny says, “I bet you can come visit straight away!”
“Of course,” Dad repeats, and then, softer, “May, would you like to step outside, just a minute?”
May nods, and the door closes softly behind her. Penny turns to look at Dad properly, and suddenly the flies come back.
“I can really stay with you?”
“The paperwork is on my desk. I just needed you to say yes.” Her spiders inside her catch the flies, ensnaring them all in their webs and tear apart their wings, quieting the fizzing drone of nerves. The room feels warm, and her smile is blinding.
Stephen brings May to his office to finalise the paperwork. Technically, he still has a course he needs to take on helping traumatised children, but the hospital has been very accomodating, and he can do part of it through astral projection as his body sleeps, so it should be done before Penny is released. She can come straight home with him when she’s discharged four days from now.
“Can I offer you something to drink? Tea, coffee?” he asks as they enter, motioning for her to have a seat.
“Coffee, please. No milk, two sugars.”
Penny gets her coffee order from May, he notes. There’s an awkward silence as the machine whirs, the pleasant aroma filling the space. He brings her mug over, locates the files, and hands her a pen.
He feels bad for her. She doesn’t deserve the scrutiny and unkind looks that Billy and his friends were shooting at her, doesn’t deserve the emotional turmoil that comes from realising what she’s done, doesn’t deserve to be separated from her niece.
(She didn’t deserve to be so thoughtlessly rejected–and he knows Penny didn’t mean it, can’t quite grasp it with her head so muddled at only nine years of age, but May doesn’t know that Penny is his daughter, and all she saw was her child picking a stranger over her.)
He wishes he knew how to help, but he’s never been good at providing comfort or distraction, and anything he would say now would be lemon in a fresh wound, so they spend the time largely in silence, broken only when May asks for clarification on a few legal terms.
I feel–
Penny wakes with Dad by her side, running a warm hand over her cheek–his fingers drip with honey-thick honey-gold honey-sweet magic, chasing the dregs of cold away. The blanket is thin but she feels whole. Stable. Her hand is flesh and blood and bone. Her body is hers, and the spiders are quiet.
“I love you Daddy,” she says, reaching for his hand–so much larger than hers–and squeezing it. He smiles fondly, dropping a kiss on her brow.
“I love you too, Penny.”
In Tony’s opinion, Metro-General Hospital is a pretty nice place. The pediatric ward is brightly painted, with green grass and cartoon suns and all the colours of the rainbow represented in the flower murals. The staff is happy to have him, and visiting all the kids is great; they’re in one of the communal areas, and there’s lots of pictures taken, he accepts a lot of drawings (he keeps them safe to look at later, when he’s feeling down), shakes hands with a lot of parents. On a whim, he voids everyone’s medical debt, and then there are tears and breakdowns and cries of jubilation, and he makes a note to harass Ellis more about free healthcare if this is how people react.
Then, because he hasn’t seen Penny, he asks about going round to kids who can’t get out of bed. It takes him through the ward for kids with chronic and terminal illnesses, and his heart goes out to them. Palladium poisoning was hell, and he understands better than most how it feels to know your time is coming soon.
(There’s no reason for him to be anywhere near the ER, and he’s unduly relieved. Stephen works here. He can’t imagine what sort of embarrassing, out-of-place reaction he’d have if he saw his fiancé–who, notably, has no memory of him. It’s a can of worms he doesn’t want to open.
He’s not sure his reaction to Penny will be any better, but he’ll have the Iron Man helmet to hide behind, at least.)
In and out, he reminds himself. A picture, an autograph, a quip about the Stark Expo, and the door.
“Hey, kiddo,” he says, pushing the door open, “you ready to meet a real-life superhero?”
Penny, who was fixated on something cradles in her palms, abruptly jerks her head up. Her mouth hangs open, jaw trembling, and he abruptly realises that, she’s only seen him at the Stark Expo, and that might bring up some bad memories. Damn, damn, damn it all, this was a bad idea. He shouldn’t’ve come. He should’ve left after seeing the other kids–
“Papa?” she breathes out, eyes wide as satellite dishes, before crinkling into happy half-moons. “Papa!” she says, louder, holding her arms out–on instinct, he checks behind, to make sure no-one else is lurking who she might be speaking to–before all but staggering forwards, disengaging the suit to ensconce her in a hug. She’s trembling, so he makes sure to steady himself, give her a solid foundation with which to ground herself.
“ Penny ,” he murmurs into the crest of her hair, but no words follow. He’s content to be able to hold her.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.” The reply is thoughtless, instinct; Penny will always, always be loved.
Eventually, Penny pulls away from the embrace, her grin stretching to the edges of her face, eyes sparkling. “I’m glad you’re back,” she says, tone heartfelt. “Now you and Dad and me can–”
“Wait–wait–your Dad is back?” (It’s almost too much, the idea that he could have everything back in one day.)
“Yeah!”
“Well shi–itake mushrooms.” Penny giggles, so he winks and presses a finger to his lips. “Don’t repeat what Papa says. Especially not where Dad can hear it.”
Tony takes a moment to breathe, really breathe, and tries to figure out what to do. As much as he wants to stay with Penny for hours (and he will be spending time with his daughter) there are other kids who want to see Iron Man. It wouldn’t be fair on them to bail.
“Hey, Spiderling,” he says, snapping her focus back to him. “I still have some rounds to do. Kids to cheer up, autographs to sign, you know how it is. You’ll be okay for a bit? Promise I’ll be right back. Might track down your Dad, too, sound good? I’ll see if we can swing takeout for dinner.”
“... And you’ll come straight back?”
“Th-or himself couldn’t stop me.” (Thankfully, she doesn’t notice that little verbal slip, nor his catch. But, dark humour worked on a teenage Penny–he probably shouldn’t mention Captain Genocide to an infant.)
“Okay. But only if we have burgers.”
“Deal.”
Penny frowns at Athene, cupped in her hands. It looks put out from being restricted–it was climbing onto her cast, hungry, and it was okay when it was her fingertips but she needs to be able to walk.
“Not this time,” she orders, uncertain if Athene will obey. An unpleasant chill gusts through the open window. (The little spider has become her friend, spindly, powerful legs, sharp, venonous fangs, bloodlust, and all. She doesn’t want it to have all been a trick.)
Eight eyes blink back at her, bemused. It scuttles towards her head, instead, and starts weaving a cobweb on the medical equipment. Penny smiles.
The sun is rising, he’s just off a ten-hour shift in the ER, he had to negotiate visitation with May Parker, and he hasn’t seen his injured daughter since yesterday; frankly, Stephen is in a bad mood. He has little tolerance for everyone around him who keeps trying to get his attention, despite him being off-duty as of half an hour, holding him up from seeing her, and collapsing into the visitor’s chair for a night of bad sleep, in case she needs him to soothe her nightmares.
And those nightmares are a whole other problem. They’re not quite memories and they’re not quite visions, some worrying blend of the two that there’s no way to ward off except to be constantly vigilant, and the lack of sleep is starting to affect his temper more than usual.
Approaching Penny’s room, he can feel another presence in there with her, and is ready to lambast May for breaking hospital visiting policy, regardless of her emotional turmoil right now. He enters with the first syllables of his tirade on the tip of his tongue, and stops short.
Sitting on the chair to the left of Penny is Tony Stark, Iron Man armour standing guard over the two of them as they doze. There’s a bag of takeout in the trash (the doctor part of him hisses at the cholesterol and salt in that), but one box and a salad left on the nightstand with a set of cutlery–for him, he realises.
He’s too tired to do anything but blink. He settles into the chair, scarfing down the food, eyes trained on his fiancé. Pushing down the urge to laugh hysterically in triumph, he conjures a blanket to keep him warm (August it may be, the window is open and it can get chilly) and drifts off.
Penny wakes peacefully.
For the first time in six months, everything is okay. Papa and Dad are gone, but there’s a note in Papa’s handwriting saying they’re just checking her out, and they’ll be right back, and a donut and an apple for breakfast. Athene winks at her from her web on the IV drip, disappearing behind one of the monitors just as her fathers open the door. Dad’s pushing a wheelchair, and Papa’s typing on his phone, though he puts it away quickly.
“Good morning, Penny,” and “morning, kiddo,” greet her.
“We’re breaking you outta here,” Papa declares pompously, walking over to ruffle her hair, and steal a bite of her donut, grinning as he dodges her swipe at him. Dad is rolling his eyes at their antics, but he’s smiling, all fond and indulgent.
“We’re going home?”
Papa’s expression softens into something genuine, and Dad comes over to check her pulse at her neck, and gently brushes her hair from her face.
“We’re going home.”
Fin.