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: Yes, another chapter title change. I was beginning to dip my feet into the Tusk Fleetwood Mac album last night, and this song just fit so much better than World Turning, especially for how this chapter ends. Like, it's perfect. Seriously.

Anyways, hope you enjoy, and until next week,

~TGWSI/Selene Borealis

~primis, omega, superhero, genius~

~somebody to love~

~chapter 26: sisters of the moon~

Penny's ears were ringing.

Her sense of hearing was completely gone from the noise, like she was still underwater. Her hands were clamped over her ears as she looked up with half-glazed eyes, shellshocked. She did have her other five senses – sight, touch, smell, taste, and spider, but the aftereffects of the latter were making it kind of hard to think too thoroughly. She could only process what her other senses were telling her.

Twenty seconds after the bomb had gone off, the doors to the ballroom opened, and people tumbled out. None of them looked too injured – although, if she'd had her wits better about her, she could've told you that was of course because the uninjured were usually the ones to get out first – but their clothes were torn in some places and a few of them had soot dusting their skin. The bomb had to have gone off inside the ballroom.

She watched them run either towards the main hallway or past her with open mouths, undoubtedly screaming and shouting. It was a lucky thing for her that she couldn't hear them. Around thirty or so people had fled the room when she caught sight of one person who was injured, and –

Just like that, her brain came back online.

The alpha man was clutching his left shoulder in his hand, blood seeping through his fingers. There didn't seem to have been too many shrapnel injures caused by the bomb, and the rip in his clothes wasn't that large. The injury was most likely small, which meant it had most likely been caused by one thing:

A bullet.

She ran forwards, practically tripping over her own two feet in her haste to get towards the ballroom. The people running past her made it difficult, because it was like fighting against a rushing current, but she didn't care. She had to get into the ballroom.

She had to.

Her knees almost went weak when one of the people that were rushing out of the ballroom was wearing a dark purple suit. His head swiveled around, and then he saw her, and the relief on his face was palpable. "Delilah," his lips said.

They met about halfway. Clint gripped her by her arms, and his touch felt so good, even as his mouth kept moving and she couldn't understand a word of what he was saying. "I can't hear you," she told him. She gestured behind her with a jerk of her head. "The bomber – he took off that way. Went left. You – you have to go get him..."

But Clint only shook his head. What was more, when she tried to run past him, he tightened his hold on her. It wasn't like it was enough to really do anything if she didn't want it to, but it did send a message.

"Clint, what are you doing?" she asked him. "Clint, let me go – !"

Like she'd said, he wasn't able to fight her off when she used even a taste of her strength. She briefly turned around to look at him after she'd slipped past him, and what she saw in his expression made terror seize her stomach and heart.

No.

No.

No.

Pivoting back on her foot, Penny ran into the ballroom, trying to prepare herself for what she was going to see.

There were at least seven casualties on the floor, four of which were dead. Sylvia Holliday was the closest to the door, her eyes glassy as blood pooled around her head from the bullet hole to the back of her head. Charles Standish was another, and the gun laying right next to his hand and the hole in the center of his forehead told her he had to be the shooter. He hadn't been able to cause too much more damage than what he'd already seen, presumably because Natasha had been the one to take care of him.

Tony and Rhodey were both on the left side of the room, the alpha having been knocked down to his ass. He seemed alright outside of that, although jarred as his best friend helped him to his feet. Bruce was nowhere in sight and neither was Hill, but the Hulk-shaped hole in the wall had told her where they had gone. That only left her other two soulmates.

"Steve!"

She rushed over to them, the tears already spilling from her eyes as she collapsed right next to his head. Natasha, she thought, said something to her, but Penny couldn't hear her and nothing she could've said would've mattered anyways. Everything else had ceased to matter the second she had seen her hands pressed to the male's abdomen in an attempt to stifle the bleeding.

"...'lilah?" Steve asked dazedly.

"Don't – don't say anything, please," Penny babbled through a sob. "Oh, God. Oh, God. Steve..."

He didn't listen to her, his lips moving anyways, but his words fell upon literally deaf ears.

Her body began to rock.

What had she thought back during the Battle of New York, when she'd thought Tony was going to go through that wormhole, never to return? She could not lose another mate again. Technically, that statement hadn't made sense back then, and she supposed it still didn't now, because the only mate she had ever lost had been Harry, but...

She felt like she was back then all over again. She could see the white of bone, red, and pink overlaid the picture of Steve before her.

A keen was ripped from her throat.

She felt arms encircle her, and that just made it even worse. She screamed, a wailing and piercing shriek that burned at her vocal cords, and she felt the arms holding her let go. She watched Steve's eyes widen because of it, and she tried to remind herself that meant he was alive. He was living, and he was breathing, and he wasn't...

He wasn't like Harry.

She wasn't sure of how much time passed by after that, because the seconds seemed to pass by like hours. Eventually, however, the paramedics came, and they went to work in a flurry of action. She let them – because make no mistake, she was letting them – put Steve onto a stretcher and begin to carry him out to the ambulance. Natasha helped her to her feet, and the way her hands were stained with red made her moan lowly, but then that scent of patchouli and gunpowder washed over her and, combined with the fire and yew behind her, it made her go quiet.

Clint and Natasha led her to an ambulance that was not Steve's. But, before she could even begin to protest, she was sat down on the bench inside by them and a paramedic. The paramedic tilted her head to one side as he began to clean up the blood trailing down from her ear. It occurred to her she hadn't noticed either of her ears doing such a thing.

A second paramedic got to work along with him, placing a blood pressure cuff on her and setting up an IV line. When the medication entered her bloodstream, she smacked at her lips and recognized the taste that was there alongside the saline, a medication used to help calm beta women and omegas when they were going through shock of a specific kind.

"No," she murmured, scratching at the IV and trying to pull it out. "I don't need..."

Two warm hands grabbed at her own, pulling it away. She tried to rip her hand away, but this time Clint wouldn't let her, and she was too weak from the shock to try and push him away again.

He tapped at her hand with one of his fingers purposefully. Dash, dot, dot, dot. Dot, dash, dot. Dot. Dot, dash, dash. Dot, dot, dot, dot. Dot.

Breathe

Unsteadily, she did as she was told.

He repeated his motions, and she hers, until she started to feel like she was coming back into her body. She placed her other hand on top of his, beginning her own tapping. Dot, dot, dot. Dash. Dot. Dot, dot, dot, dash. Dot.

Steve

His responding message took longer to do, but it made her sag with relief.

He'll live

Steve was going to live. He wasn't going to end up like Harry.

He was going to live.

Her hearing started to come back by the time they got to the Tower. Her left ear, the one that she didn't think had bled as much as her right, gave a distinctive pop! first, making her wince. "Ow."

"Delilah?" Natasha asked carefully. "Can you hear us?"

After a moment, she nodded. She didn't mention how her hearing was distinctively worse than it had ever been after the spider bite.

"What – " Penny began to ask. "What happened?"

Nobody in the fucking vehicle immediately answered her. "Both of your eardrums are perforated," one of the paramedics marveled. "How are you able to – ?"

"You need to be seen by Dr. Chung, once she's finished with Steve," Natasha said. "You're the first person she should be see – "

"Natasha. What happened?" Penny was able to bite out, if only barely. But she soon descended into rambling. "I – I mean, I know what happened. And I saw the guy who placed the bomb. He was white. Caucasian. Shoulder-length dark brown hair, with grey eyes. But – "

Natasha suddenly leaned forwards in her seat. "Are you sure that's what he looked like?"

Penny was taken aback by the abrupt shift in her tone. "Yes? I saw him. We locked eyes. He...he almost seemed familiar," she said, her eyebrows furrowing. She shook her head. "But don't change the subject! What happened to Steve? Who did this? Why did they do this?"

"It was HYDRA," Clint informed her. Natasha shot him a look for it, however he did not care. "What? She deserves to know that's who did it, Nat."

Penny felt the blood leave her face. "HYDRA? They did this?"

A bombing/shooting combo wasn't in their MO. They'd stuck to the shadows for decades, now only nine months after one of their henchmen had unexpectedly revealed their continued existence with his dying breath, they decided to commit an act of terror? That didn't make sense.

"Standish's last words before I shot him were 'Heil Hydra,'" Natasha acknowledged. "And the presence of the Winter Soldier – "

"Who?"

"An operative who's been credited with over two dozen assassinations over the past fifty years," she explained. "Most of the intelligence community doesn't believe he exists, partially due to the fact he has remained mostly un-aged, but also because he hasn't been associated with any one organization for sure. He has ties to the KGB, the Red Room – " her expression darkened as she said the second name " – and other intelligence agencies, but nothing definitive. It makes sense that he's actually been an asset of HYDRA's all along."

"We're here, by the way," the other paramedic said then, looking a little sour at the fact they were still in the ambulance when they'd already gotten out.

At the reminder that they were not alone, Natasha's face became carefully blank. She said no more.

They went upstairs from the Avengers garage to MedBay, the paramedics none the wiser about why they'd been let into the usually restricted garage. It was clear by the lack of almost anybody around on the floor that most of the efforts were currently being spent on Steve. Penny abruptly wanted to throw up, but didn't.

The one nurse available led them all back into the same room at the alphas' insistence. Her right ear finished repairing itself, making her wince once more. The nurse appraised her. "How far away were you from the blast?"

The nurses that worked in the MedBay knew she was Spider-Woman just like Dr. Chung did, so she didn't bother trying to hide the truth from her. "I wasn't even in the same room."

"But with your hearing, that didn't really matter. The sound probably is what ruptured your eardrums, not the sheer force of the explosion," the nurse surmised. "Dr. Chung will make sure your ears have fully healed as soon as she's done with Captain Rogers in surgery."

Penny's mouth went dry. "He needed surgery?"

"The bullet didn't go all the way through. But, our captain's going to be alright," the nurse assured her, reaching out to squeeze her hand. She sent a mindful look over to the IV bag Penny was still hooked up to. "He might be down for the count for a couple of weeks, but he's enhanced, like you."

"Not like me," she muttered.

She'd lost sixty percent of her blood last February and survived. Steve...he'd survive now, but he'd looked so pale, so fragile, so weak.

A surge of anger going through her, she thought about how lucky Standish had been that Natasha had killed him with a bullet to the head. Otherwise, fuck her rule for no-killing in most situations, she would've made him pay.

The nurse redirected her efforts, eyeing Clint and Natasha speculatively. "What about you two? Give me one good reason why I shouldn't have you sitting on a bed like her."

Clint startled to rattle off an answer about how their ears hadn't ruptured, so they were fine, but Natasha kept her answer short and succinct, "She needs us."

Unlike Clint, the nurse accepted this as an answer. Nodding, she advised them that Dr. Chung would be in when she could and walked out the door.

"I don't need you," Penny hissed, her shoulders tensing. She went back after the IV. "And I don't need this stupid thing either. It didn't do jack shit for me the last time I – "

"Delilah," Clint cut over her softly. "The last time you needed it, you were going through mate-bond withdrawal. It doesn't help with the worst of those symptoms, but it does make you feel calmer in other situations, you know it does. Leave it in."

And because it was him saying it rather than Natasha, she listened. If it had been Natasha, she would've been able to ignore it, because frankly the amount of care the female alpha put into her wellbeing, or so when it came to meals, was irritating and she'd kind of already been looking for a way to get back at her for it.

But if Clint was saying it, then she knew it was important that she listened, because he was the "happy-go-lucky" guy on the team. The last time she'd seen him so serious had to have been that day they'd set off their prank on Steve, when he'd calmed her down from her panic attack.

Something on Natasha's person began to vibrate – her phone. "Tony's calling me," she announced, taking out the device. "I'm going to go answer this."

She left the room – and that so wasn't fair of her, but whatever.

Clint's expression softened the moment she left. He crept up to her bed so he was even closer than before, practically hovering over her. "Can I give you a hug?"

His question caught her off-guard. "What?"

"I'm going to hug you," he announced.

His arms encircled around her from the front this time, which was more comforting than it had any right to be when compared to the other way around. His scent got all up and personal with her, causing a distinctive, wet twinge in her stomach, however between the meds in her and what he said next, she couldn't give the slick the proper attention it deserved.

"Let go, Delilah," Clint whispered in her ear. "It's okay."

Like a complete idiot as her shock finished wearing off, she went back to sobbing all over again.

Conveniently, Natasha came back just after Penny's eyes had given up their tears, trailing behind Dr. Chung.

"How is he?" Penny asked the doctor immediately, clenching Clint's hand in hers as tight as she could manage without hurting him. The female alpha could wait.

"The surgery went well. Based off his metabolism, he'll even probably be waking up soon," the doctor informed her. "But I need to make sure you're well enough to leave this hospital room before I go and let you see him."

Penny made a face, but relented.

The examination was quick and relatively painless. "Besides your ears, I see no injuries," Dr. Chung noted. "And those are already healing up nicely. Just in case, don't use headphones or earbuds for the next couple of days, and keep your TV on the lowest volume you can possibly manage. That goes for you two as well," she added with a pointed look to Clint and Natasha.

"I'm sure we'll be fine," Clint said with a loose grin.

Dr. Chung was not impressed. "Clint, this is the second explosion you have been in the close vicinity of without any protection in the past nineteen months. You keep this up, you could be dealing with significant hearing loss ten years from now."

"That is a problem for the future me to worry about. Right now, I'm fine."

"...Don't say I didn't warn you. There'll come a day when you're deaf and have nobody to blame but yourself," the beta muttered under her breath, low enough that he couldn't hear her. Louder, "I'm releasing you from MedBay, Spider-Woman. Steve's in Room 10, when you're ready to see him."

Penny did not immediately get to her feet after Dr. Chung left the room, even though she wanted to. She needed to prove to herself that Steve was alive and well.

"What did Tony tell you?" she asked Natasha instead. It was obvious she wanted to say something.

"He and Rhodey will be coming back shortly. They've been remaining on the scene to work with the FBI. There have been five deaths so far including Standish, and another twenty-five people were injured," Natasha reported dutifully. The sheer number of casualties made Penny's gut twist. If she'd been in the room along with them, maybe she could have been able to... "They've also identified the explosive agent in the bomb. It was nitroglycerin."

That gave Penny pause. "Nitroglycerin?"

"Yes." Then Natasha paused, too. "Why?"

"It's nothing," Penny said.

She filed the thought away for later. There wasn't any good that come with thinking about it now.

Clint and Natasha followed her into Steve's room. The captain was awake, albeit he didn't look like he would remain that way for long. "Hey, guys," he said, speech still slightly slurred. Dr. Chung must've given him the good stuff. Along with this, his face remained pale. "What's shaking?"

...Maybe she wasn't as done with crying as she'd thought, especially now that Dr. Chung had taken the IV out of her.

But she could put on a brave face. She sat down on the closest chair at his bedside, ghosting her fingers along his arm. He's alive, she told herself. He didn't end up like Harry. He's going to be fine. "Not much. You?"

"Well, I don't need a kiss off," he joked mildly. Then he flushed, which brought some life back into his cheeks. "Erm...I mean..."

"I know what you meant," she assured him quietly. "It's okay."

He was persuaded, if only just. "Are you alright? You were bleeding from your ears, and..."

"I'm fine. I lost my hearing for a little bit, but it's back now," she said. She sniffled. "Don't worry about me."

He smiled. "Don't think...I'm gonna be able to do that one." His eyes trailed past her. At first, she thought it meant he was falling asleep, until he went, "Clint, Nat, what are you doing all the way over there?"

The other two alphas came over, sitting down in the other remaining chairs. Quietly, they told Steve what was going on after he'd asked. They didn't give him the specifics, just reiterated to him that Standish was dead, the FBI had gotten onto the scene, and none of the rest of them were that hurt. Penny backed them up with that last statement.

Steve fell asleep not long later, his eyes drifting shut. Almost immediately, he started to snore lightly, making her huff with amusement.

She was tired herself, however she knew she couldn't go to sleep yet. "I need coffee," she muttered, pushing herself to her feet. Her hands twitched. She needed to move, needed to find out how and why HYDRA had planned this, needed to hunt down the other people responsible and make them pay like Standish should've –

"No, you should stay here," Natasha retorted. She was sitting on the other side of the bed, so there wasn't much more she could do than say her words. "Or go back to your floor to sleep, one of the two. Everything is being taken care of by SHIELD."

Penny finished standing up anyways. She began to turn around.

"Delilah, stay. Please."

Again, it was Clint requesting it now, not just Natasha. He clearly thought it was important for her to.

Groaning internally, she sat back down. She didn't look at either of them, just stared at Steve, memorizing the planes of his face, the lines and angles. She thought about how wrong it could've gone all over again, and how helpless she would've been a second time more if it had. Fate had given her this one mercy for a change, but that was no guarantee it would continue to do so in the future. It didn't exactly have the best track record with her.

Eventually, when exhaustion started to pull down her eyes, she rested her head down on the nearest part of the mattress that his body wasn't taking up. She closed her eyes.

Before she knew it, she was asleep, too.

"How long have you known?"

"You mean how long have I had my suspicions, or how long have I known definitively?"

"Nat."

"Fine. I only got the confirmation tonight, but I've been suspecting ever since she and Steve started avoiding each other."

"Jesus Christ, Nat! And you didn't say anything?"

"I wanted to be sure before I did."

"But it wasn't your secret to keep!"

"Keep your voice down. And you're right, it wasn't. But as long as there was even a chance that I was wrong, I couldn't in good conscience..."

. . .

"How are they?"

"Sleeping, as you can see."

"Don't get cheeky with me. I just spent hours having to deal with the FBI, and now I'm gonna have to be cashing in on as many favors as I can with the media."

"Don't you do that on a regular basis?"

"Yeah, but this is different. I've never had anyone call me 'Alpha' before while I was injured from a gunshot wound on the floor. Especially not after I became our extra level of famous. This is going to be a pain in the ass to cover up."

"You'll deal with it."

"Of course I will. But...you both realize they're not mated, right? You know what that means."

"I think I know it better than you do."

"...What's that supposed to mean?"

Word Count: 3,869

Next Chapter Title: as long as you follow