Chapter Text
The voicemail icon blinked in the corner of Happy Hogan's phone as he walked through the garage beneath Avengers Tower, his attention divided between staff rotations and a missing socket wrench he'd been tracking since breakfast.
1 New Voicemail
Happy glanced at the screen, already knowing who it was before he even saw the name.
He sighed.
"Kid again."
He tossed his keys onto the workbench, rubbed both hands over his face, and stared at the screen as though sheer force of will might convince the notification to disappear. It didn't.
Penny had started doing this months ago.
At first, the calls made sense. There were real emergencies, questions about patrol routes, or situations where Spider-Girl had gotten herself into something that technically required adult supervision. Happy answered those because that was his job. Then the emergencies turned into questions. Questions became updates. Updates became a continuous stream of consciousness broadcast.
Penny didn't always need anything. Sometimes she just seemed to want somebody at the Tower to know she was alive.
That, more than anything, was what Happy didn't quite know what to do with.
And somehow, without anyone actually agreeing to it, Penny Parker had decided Happy Hogan and Tony Stark were her official supervisors.
Happy still wasn't entirely sure when that shift had happened. Nor did he know when she’d decided he was the kind of guy she could call just to chatter in his ear.
He hit play, letting her voice fill the quiet garage while he resumed digging through the clutter on the workbench.
"This is my weekly field report!"
Penny sounded breathless, the words tumbling over each other with that rapid-fire excitement she got whenever she had too much to say and zero intention of pacing herself.
"I stopped a bike thief, and I talked a guy down from jumping off his apartment building-which, honestly, felt way more important than the bike thing. The bike guy was definitely going to get arrested anyway, but the other guy just really needed somebody to sit with him. Oh, and I helped a lady with her groceries! She tried to pay me, but of course I wouldn’t take any money..."
Happy paused, a grease-stained hand buried deep beneath a pile of spare parts.
There was a loud, rustling scrape on the recording, accompanied by the distinct, heavy thud of her landing on a rooftop while talking.
"Oh, and I figured out how to web two moving targets at once! It’s way harder than it sounds because you have to calculate their velocity against your own momentum, but I think I finally nailed the timing. I'm actually pretty proud of that one."
A short beat of static.
"And I know you're probably going to tell me I shouldn't be testing new web formulas in the field without permission, but technically I am telling somebody because I'm telling you right now, so it basically counts."
Happy closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose.
"That's not how that works, kid."
Of course, she couldn't hear him.
"Anyway," Penny said, her voice dropping down an octave into something gentler, "that's my report. Tell Mr. Stark I said hi!"
Happy stared at the speaker.
"Okay. Bye!"
The line went dead.
For several seconds, Happy just stood in the silence of the empty garage. Then he shook his head with a small, quiet puff of air.
"Kid talks too much."
He hit delete.
Three days later, another notification popped up.
Happy saw it halfway through reviewing a security log and debated letting it sit. Instead, he tapped the screen with a thumb.
"Hi, Happy!"
Penny sounded less breathless this time, though there was still that underlying, persistent brightness in her voice, the kind where you could hear the smile through the phone.
"I know you're busy, so this is going to be super quick."
Happy leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms.
"I just wanted somebody to know there was a warehouse fire on Thirty-Ninth tonight. Everybody got out, though! The fire department got there really fast, nobody was hurt, and I helped clear the back exit because the front stairwell caved in."
A sudden, quiet pause dragged over the line. Her voice dropped, suddenly losing its theatrical bounce.
"...I know that's not really an update you guys need, but... I just thought you'd want to know."
Happy's expression softened for a fraction of a second before he caught himself and smoothed it over.
"That's all." All cheeriness back.
The message clicked off.
He stared down at the screen, the silence in his office feeling a little heavier than before.
"Yeah, kid," he muttered to the empty room. "That's all."
Delete.
Another voicemail.
"I think I finally fixed the recoil on my web shooters-" Delete.
Another.
"I got a ninety-eight on my chemistry exam! I totally blanked on the equation for ideal gas laws at first, but then I remembered-" Delete.
Another.
"I accidentally stopped an armed robbery before breakfast-" Delete.
Another.
"Happy, I'm pretty sure I just saw-" Delete.
Eventually, Happy stopped asking himself what each message was about. They faded into the steady, predictable background noise of his week: Penny's voice, warm and fast through his phone, followed by the familiar tap of his thumb against the screen.
He never stopped being fond of them. He just stopped treating them like anything that required his attention.
The next evening, Happy was driving Tony back from a late night charity gala. Tony was slouched in the back seat, jacket thrown onto the leather beside him, his tie tugged loose enough to signal that the evening had dragged on two hours longer than his patience.
Happy kept his eyes fixed on the rain-slick highway ahead.
"Your spider-kid called again."
Tony groaned, rubbing his eyes without opening them. "What'd she want?"
"No clue."
"Did you answer?"
"Nope."
"Good."
Happy caught Tony's reflection in the rearview mirror. "Thought you liked her."
Tony cracked one eye open. "I do."
"So?"
Tony’s jaw set, a flicker of defensive discomfort crossing his features. "So she's fourteen."
"Fifteen," Happy corrected automatically.
"What?"
"She turned fifteen back in August."
Tony waved a dismissive hand through the air. "Point stands."
Happy let out a faint, quiet breath. "You know, most people who like a kid don't actively try to ignore them."
"I don't actively ignore her."
Happy raised an eyebrow at him in the mirror.
Tony held his gaze for two seconds before sighing heavily. "Okay. I actively ignore her."
"Why?"
Tony turned his head to look out the tinted window. The blur of yellow streetlights washed across his face in steady rhythm.
"Because she's fifteen." He paused, his tone dropping into something far less sharp. "What the hell am I supposed to do with a fifteen-year-old, Happy?"
Happy didn't answer right away. He adjusted his grip on the wheel. "You could try talking to her."
Tony gave him a dry look through the glass. "That sounds dangerously like advice."
"It is."
"Don't do that."
Happy let out a low chuckle and focused on the road. Neither of them brought up Penny for the rest of the drive.
The next call came at 12:43 a.m.
Happy's phone buzzed loudly against the wooden nightstand, dragging him up out of a deep sleep. He squinted through the dark at the bright screen.
Penny Parker
He groaned, pressing his face into his pillow. "...Kid, come on."
He rolled onto his back and stared up at the shadows on the ceiling. For one brief, irrational second, his hand hovered over the phone. It was past midnight, what business did she have calling him that late?
The vibrating didn't stop. Happy pulled the duvet higher up over his shoulders.
"Seriously, kid. Go to sleep."
The ringing cut off. Thirty seconds of dead silence passed. Then the phone started vibrating again.
Happy glared at the glowing screen. "Please don't let this be another thirty-minute story about a pigeon."
He hit decline, and the bedroom collapsed back into quiet.
For a single heartbeat, Happy stayed still, wondering if he ought to call her back just to check. Then fatigue won out. He rolled onto his side and closed his eyes.
Five minutes later, Tony's phone began to ring.
He didn't hear it at first.
AC/DC was blasting through the lab speakers, loud enough that the bass rattled faintly against the glass walls. Tony stood hunched over a workbench, one hand braced against the edge while the other adjusted a component inside the open chassis of a prototype.
FRIDAY lowered the music.
“Boss.”
Tony frowned without looking up.
“What?”
“Spider-Girl is calling.”
Tony stopped what he was doing. He glanced toward the phone lying on the other end of the workbench.
12:49 AM.
His eyebrows lifted.
“That’s new.”
The phone kept buzzing.
Tony stared at Penny's name lit up on the screen. For once, there was no annoyance in his chest, just a vague confusion.
The phone continued to ring. Tony looked back at the prototype in front of him. He should answer. He reached for the phone. His thumb hovered over the screen.
He could answer. He just didn't particularly want to. Not at twelve forty-nine in the morning, not when he was in the middle of something, and not when he had to be up in a few hours.
His mind reflexively stacked up the morning ahead: early board calls, R&D reviews, Avengers logistics, a mountain of backlogged emails, and the simple reality that Penny was a teenager who somehow thought Tony Stark was an appropriate late-night sounding board.
He sighed.
“Decline it, Fri.”
“Declining call, Boss.”
The ringing stopped and the music resumed and Tony turned back toward the workbench. A small voicemail icon appeared on the screen. He glanced at it. For a moment, he considered listening. Then he looked at the clock again.
12:50 AM.
“I'll pull it up in the morning.”
Morning arrived in a wave of emergency board meetings. Meetings bled directly into crisis reports. Reports triggered back to back phone calls, executive sign-offs, and a dozen urgent matters Tony had completely forgotten were on his schedule.
The voicemail remained unheard and Penny Parker never called again.