Disclaimer: I only own the plot and my OCs. Anything you recognize as not mine belongs to Marvel Studios, Disney, and/or their otherwise respective owners.

Author's Notes: Whew, sorry about the late update on this! My medical procedure last Monday went well. The meds I'd been placed on because of it though triggered my vertigo, so...yeah, that was fun.

Penny's made some mental progress since last chapter. Excited to know what you think of it. :)

Chapter title comes from Heart of Glass by Blondie.

As always, hope you enjoy, and until Saturday,

~TGWSI/Selene Borealis

~primis, omega, superhero, genius~

~somebody to love~

~chapter 24: heart of glass~

The story of Penny's life seemed to be that as soon as she solved one problem, three more would take its place. Not to paraphrase HYDRA or anything.

After their talk, Steve was now mostly...okay around her. They had their moments in which she would have to correct his behavior, but he stuck to their agreement of putting aside that day in the gym, and everything which had come with it. He did come on patrol of the city with her another few (read: several times), and they also had to work side-by-side on the one mission she went on after the Dulcetta incident, but there was no awkwardness between them then. No, during those situations he was Steve Rogers, alpha, Captain America, her fellow Avengers team member, not Steve Rogers, alpha, and the soulmate who had a crush on her.

But it seemed the second she worked out things between him, another teammate had to start acting weird around her – Natasha. At the meals she ate with the other Avengers, the female alpha always made sure to sit next to her. She didn't give her the remaining food off of her plate like she had at the restaurant, but her eyes were rapt each and every single time as she studied her out of the corner of her eye. It made Penny consistently finish off her plate, which was perhaps a good thing. She was underweight, and with her metabolism, it went without saying that wasn't a good thing for her to be.

But it wasn't just that. Natasha didn't give her the looks that Steve had – and sometimes still did, nor outside of the meals did she give any physical impression that something was amiss, but there was an...air about her. One which made Penny entirely uncomfortable.

She wanted to ask her, but didn't, refused to even, whether or not she knew about any of it. Or, at least, about her being an omega. That was the obvious truth, and nothing else could be figured out without knowing that. But not only was she surethat if Natasha had learned any details of the truth, she wouldn't have kept it from the others, spy or not, enjoying "having one over" as Stark would probably like to put it or not, but Penny also wasn't entirely sure that she did know anything. And if she didn't, and Penny started asking her like she thought she did...yeah, that wouldn't be anything except for stupid. So, she kept her mouth shut.

...Except, perhaps, maybe, she knew, she shouldn't've. Weasel went on maternity leave in September, which was when he gave her the last four months of her suppressants that he would provide. October, November, December, January. That was how many months she had left. And Penny had been searching since he'd given her the ultimatum in August, searching and searching and searching, but even on the black market, her suppressants were basically impossible to get. She came close once to trying to figure out what they were made of in her personal lab, even getting out all the equipment she would need to break one of the pills down and examine its chemical composition, but then she thought better of it. Her results, most likely, would have gone in JARVIS' database, and while she hadn't asked to check, just the possibility rattled her. She couldn't let Stark find out that way...if he found out at all.

Like during her talk with Steve, before she'd made him make the choice for her, she needed to decide what was going to happen next. Should she keep on looking for the suppressants on the black market, even though she wasn't likely to get them? Should she figure out a way to come clean – because maybe they'd understand like Steve had that she wasn't ready for a relationship now, if ever, and couldn't bear the thought of things changing between them despite the truth? Or should she just leave the Tower, because she knew that hopeful future couldn't possibly ever happen, even if just the thought of doing it made her break down crying?

Because she liked what she had here, as horrifying as that was to admit. She liked the feeling of...having a family again, as much as she knew she didn't. She liked having a place where she felt like she belonged, if she wanted to be truthful with herself.

It was November now, though, and she still hadn't made her choice, if that gave any frame of reference to her state of mind. Her namesake had already been born: Penelope Olivia Wilson, born November 12th at 3:06 AM, with the light brown hair of her omither's and dark brown eyes of her father's. Weasel had given her a burner phone, just so that Wade could text her a picture of him and their daughter. He'd captioned it with multiple texts, one of which had read: Hope you can come see us, Spidey, I've been sooooooo anxious to meet you!

Penny still hadn't replied to it yet. It was three days after the fact.

She couldn't bear seeing him again when he wouldn't even remember her. Weasel was bad enough.

But these were just two of her problems. There was a third yet to come, as she'd said. Technically a fourth, if you counted HYDRA, but that was just one too many, in her opinion.

"...Spidey," Clint said, waving a hand in front of her face. "You with us?"

Penny blinked, breaking out of her reverie. She was sitting at the dining table on the communal floor with him, Natasha, Steve, and Bruce, eating a breakfast of syrniki, hash browns, and turkey bacon – they'd all worked to make it together. Tony was elsewhere, probably working in his labs still. JARVIS had said he'd pulled yet another all-nighter when he'd been asked of his creator's whereabouts and if he wanted to eat with them or not.

"Sorry," she apologized. "What were you saying?"

Clint snickered, falling back into his seat. "Told you she wasn't listening." He yelped as Natasha kicked at his foot. "Hey!"

The female alpha did not say anything. Her warning look was enough on its own.

"We were just wondering if you wanted to celebrate Hanukkah this year," Bruce said. "Or if there were any Christmas traditions you wanted to do. You said you celebrated both, right?"

"Yeah. My aunt was Catholic. So was my mom, until she converted," she answered. But she wasn't sure of when the last time she had celebrated Hanukkah was. It had to have been before Ben died, and her uncle hadn't been overly religious. "When even is Hanukkah this year?" That probably spoke more to her religion, or lack thereof, than anything else, the fact she didn't know.

"It starts on the twenty-seventh," Natasha informed her.

Oh.

That was...soon.

"You guys don't need to celebrate Hanukkah for me, it's not a big deal. I haven't celebrated it in several years. And...I don't really have any Christmas traditions," Penny spoke, before putting a forkful of the syrniki pancakes into her mouth.

Clint was skeptical. "Oh, come on," he complained. "You don't want to do anything?"

Steve seemed inclined to agree with him. "You're right, we don't need to. But we want to," he went. "We're a team." A family. "That's what teams do."

She brushed them off. "Really, it's fine. I don't need anything special."

She didn't even know if she was going to be around for Christmas, she thought, as much as it made her stomach churn as she now prodded at her food with her fork.

"Should I stay or should I go now? If I go there will be trouble, and if I stay it will be double..."

The song by the Clash suddenly popping into her mind made her smile at the absurdity of it all. She hid her amusement by taking a drink from her glass of milk.

Bruce appeared concerned. "Are you sure?"

It was touching that he wanted to do that. But, "I'm sure."

Before their conversation could continue any further, the elevator dinged, and Tony stumbled into the room. He didn't appear nearly as disheveled for somebody who had been up all night as he should've, but there was a grimace on his face as he came over to the table and sat down at the place where there was a plate for him, just in case. "'Morning, everyone," he said, helping himself to some of the food. Not much of it, but it wasn't like there wouldn't have been plenty to go around even if he had, what with her and Steve's metabolisms – Bruce's, too, to a lesser extent. Tony mainly focused on the coffee, pouring himself a mug, chugging down most of it as they said their greetings to him, then setting it back down on the table to refill it again. "What's popping?"

Clint raised an eyebrow. "What happened?"

"What makes you think anything happened, Legolas?" Tony asked rhetorically. He waved his fork around. "What gives you the impression that something is wrong?"

...Great. She just loved the sound of that already.

Not hungry anymore, Penny set her own fork down. Natasha's eyes briefly flicked over towards her for it, but she didn't care.

Steve's mouth thinned. "What's going on, Tony?"

Tony sighed wearily. "Nothing good. I just got off a phone call with the Board of my company," he said. "They want a Christmas gala to be held here a month from now for charity purposes...with all of the Avengers in attendance."

Penny's brain didn't just come to a grinding halt, it short-circuited. "What?"

Tony's only saving grace was that he looked as unenthused about it as she did. "I know. I told them that wasn't happening. They said that was fine for you, but that they want the rest of us – " he gestured to himself and the others with a circular motion " – to attend. On the bright side, I was able to convince them to have it be a charity gala like the ones my mom threw back in the day, so the other rich people that show up will be forced to make some philanthropy."

That made Clint snort. "How chivalrous of you."

"I try."

Steve leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms. "That...doesn't sound so bad."

"You say that now," Tony quipped. "No offense, Rogers, but you haven't been to these modern day galas before. They're hell on Earth."

"You've made them sound like they're not too bad before."

"I've been going to these galas my entire life, I'm used to them. You're not," Tony pointed out. He ran a hand over his face. "Clint and Nat'll probably be fine. But you and Bruce are going to need lessons on how to interact at these events. Sorry, Brucie bear. The sharks aren't gonna let you be a wallflower at this event."

Bruce gave a self-depreciating smile. "I figured as much."

Penny, meanwhile, could focus only on one thing.

"I don't have to go?" she paraphrased.

She knew she had heard him correctly when he'd said she didn't have to. But just those brief seconds of thinking she had to were enough to make her head spin. She – she couldn't go. If she went with her mask on, even in her suit and all, there was still too high of a risk somebody would try to take off her mask to reveal who she was. And if she didn't wear a mask, if she hung out with the Avengers – which of course she would, she'd bumped elbows with the elites of New York, of which Tony had not been part of up until after Harry, but that wasn't the point. The point was, with only a few exception, almost all of the elites were assholes – she'd risk revealing her identity anyways.

It didn't matter that she knew she wasn't going to go, since Tony had created the out for her. In her mind, she was back in the September of 2011, when Norman had revealed her identity. She couldn't go through that again.

She couldn't go through losing one of her mates again...even if she was the one leaving them.

"Hey, you're right," Tony soothed. His voice crashed down on her like waves on a shore on a calm day; they lulled her. Probably into a false sense of security. "You don't have to go. I pointed out to my Board that nobody knows your identity, that you don't want anybody to know your identity, and that you have your right to privacy. None of them particularly liked what I told them what would happen if your identity got discovered at the gala."

"Please tell me you didn't threaten to fire them, Tony," Steve half-groaned, half-chuckled.

"I can't fire them, that's not how the Board works," Tony retorted. But he was trying to refrain himself from smirking, and it wasn't going too well. "But I can buy out their shares at a high enough price, and blackball them from being able to invest in any Fortune 500 company ever again."

"So you basically told them you'd fire them and ruin their lives," Clint surmised. "Nice."

"Why am I not surprised at any of you?" Bruce muttered under his breath.

Natasha remained eerily quiet.

There wasn't really another word Penny could use to describe it. It was like the calm before the storm. Whatever she was going to say, she knew she wasn't going to like it, either.

The others didn't fail to notice the female alpha's reservedness, either. "You got something you want to share with the class, Nat?" Tony asked. "'Cause you look like you do."

"It's nothing," she said.

Clint rolled his eyes. "Come on, we know you. Just spit it out."

Natasha glanced over at her, purposefully turning her head in order to do so rather than looking at her out of the corner of her eye. Her eyes were like sea glass.

"I think you should consider going."

...Yep, Penny definitely didn't like that, either.

Her thoughts went back to that September. How she had been swinging Harry around when it had happened, with him having clung onto her for dear life like he'd been a monkey. He'd liked to see the city from her perspective, but always only afterwards. In the moment –

"Fucking shit! Oh my God, how do you do this all the time?"

She'd always laughed. "Do you want me to put you down some place?"

"No, just – holy fuck!"

She still remembered seeing that clip. "Spider-Woman," the Green Goblin had said, acting like he'd been Norman, a concerned father for his son, not the monster that had coexisted in the man's body. "Spider-Woman is my daughter-in-law, Penny Osborn!"

"What the f – !"

"I'm not going," she said, pushing back her chair. "No, Nat. No."

"You don't have to go as Spider-Woman. No one would recognize you without the suit," Natasha said. Her visage was completely unreadable as she spoke. "But it would be good practice for the day your identity is revealed."

Penny's breathing spiked. "Nope. That's never happening. And I don't need the practice of how to socialize with the upper class." I've already had it. And I didn't care for it much back then. I doubt I will now, either.

"You know it will," Natasha replied. "You're an Avenger. People will be interested in your identity until they know the truth."

"That doesn't mean they're going to find out!"

Silence fell over the room, heavy and thick.

Bruce cleared his throat. "I think I'm going to go down to the lab," he murmured. "Nat, let me know when to come back up. I'll help with the dishes."

"And I'm going to head down to the gym," Steve spoke, standing up from his seat.

Clint did the same. "I'll go with you."

Within a couple of minutes, it was just her, Tony, and Natasha in the room.

"Are you trying to get me to reveal my identity to you?" Penny demanded, seething.

"No," Natasha answered. "I've told you before, I don't have any interests in knowing that information until you're ready for us to."

"Then why the hell are you bringing this up now?" she shot back. "You guys told me when I came to live here there wouldn't be any questions about my identity. You promised me I would be able to keep it."

"I haven't asked you any questions, have I? Almost everything we've come to learn about you, you've revealed yourself," was the return. "But I'm speaking an unavoidable truth, and you know it. As much as we will protect you, we're not going to keep everything a secret forever. You're not going to be able to, either."

"...As much as I hate to admit it, she has a point," Tony spoke. "The people of NYC might be content to let you keep your identity, JARVIS has been watching internet chat groups on theories as to who you are."

Penny wasn't impressed. "Have they ever come close to figuring it out?"

He winced. "Well, no, but – "

"There you have it."

"They do know a startling amount about you, Spider-Woman," JARVIS interjected then. Of course he'd been listening in on their conversation this entire time. "They know you are in your early 20's, female, a beta. They know you are originally from Queens. That still leaves thousands of potential candidates, and for the most part these chat groups do not have the means to narrow down the search. I have referred the ones that do to the police as indiscreetly as I've been able to manage, with at least two arrests having been made as a result."

"So you're agreeing with them too, are you?" she huffed. When he didn't reply to her, she tilted her chair back. It made her feel more like a petulant teenager than was perhaps healthy, but she didn't care. "I hacked into government databases to put safeguards around my identity years ago." Technically, I hacked into them to put my identity back into the databases, but whatever.

"But you know all it takes is one person who knows what they're looking for to find those safeguards and know that they shouldn't be there," Natasha stated. "Then everyone will know, no matter how many lengths you've gone to in order hide the truth."

...Not if I don't run away first, Penny thought.

But even with her anger, the idea was still as unappealing to her as it had been before. She doubted she would even be able to finish packing a bag for her things if she started one.

The Clash song was no longer amusing to her. She had a better idea for a song that could describe this whole situation, but she was going to keep it to herself.

"So, say I go," she begrudgingly proposed – not because she was actually going to go, but just for posterity's sake. "Isn't it going to be odd for a random girl that nobody's ever heard of to attend this gala? I can't go as any of your plus-one's, that'd be too suspicious. People would try to figure out who's the new beta bitch you'd seem to be dating, even Banner. They'd find out who I am, notice the discrepancies, then – " she made the the gesture for a bomb going off with her hands " – boom."

"She also has a point," Tony said to Natasha. "I don't think this is the event we should be doing this with, Nat."

"No, it's the perfect event to do this with," the spy disagreed. "And nobody is going to figure out who you are, because a scientist at SHIELD recently created something he's calling a photostatic veil. It requires a DNA sample, but it can replicate the face and voice of anyone in the world."

Tony's eyes brightened with recognition. "But we don't need to mimic anybody. If I can modify the veil just enough, I should be able to get the veil to project a modified version of your face and voice that are just too different to be recognizable. That...that could work. But only if you want to do this, Spidey," he amended himself with his last sentence.

Penny didn't say anything about her desires. She didn't want to admit it, but she was starting to consider it now. It seemed, she had to say, that Natasha had a plan – and perhaps she was right. If she couldn't get her hands on more suppressants and she couldn't bring herself to leave, as much as that was a future she couldn't bear to think about...

"But how will you explain my being there?"

"Simple." Natasha smirked. "You can't be the plus-one of one of us, that's true. But there is one person who you could go with without too many tabloids reporting on it."

Word Count: 3,513

Next Chapter Title: sunglasses at night