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: I've been listening to a lot of Fleetwood Mac lately, hence the chapter title getting changed, again lmao. I'm so sorry, but also not sorry at the same time? The other song by them I was listening to a lot while I was writing this chapter was Sara, but this fic has more of a Christine McVie vibe than a Stevie Nicks one, so...yeah.

Anyways, as always, i hope you enjoy. Until next week,

~TGWSI/Selene Borealis

~primis, omega, superhero, genius~

~somebody to love~

~chapter 27: as long as you follow~

Steve stayed in MedBay for three days, as Dr. Chung wanted to be certain that his recovery from literally getting shot started off well and without any complications.

He was over it by the first afternoon, although he tried not to show it. Penny found it kind of funny. She limited her visits to him to only an hour or two in the afternoon, because she didn't want to disturb his rest too much and she didn't want it to come across too unusual that she was visiting him too much, either. The first day, Natasha and Tony were there when she walked in, showered and dressed after she'd spent the night sleeping at the captain's bedside. There was a tense layer in the atmosphere when she walked in, and Steve looked like he wanted to say something to her, but Natasha patted his arm and conveniently shut him up.

...Weird. Penny didn't know what to think about that, so she didn't think about it at all. "Hey," she said awkwardly, playing with the hem of her sweater. "I just wanted to stop by. Bad timing?"

"Not at all," Tony went. He stood up from his seat. "I was just leaving. Remember what I said, Cap," he added, clapping the other man's shoulder, "you need to be taking it easy for a while. Gunshot wounds don't heal overnight."

That was even weirder. It wasn't like Tony to say something so redundantly obvious.

Steve managed a smile. "I'll try."

Natasha left too, but only with a simple goodbye. In their absence, she loitered hesitantly for a couple of seconds, before she walked over to the chair Tony had been sitting in and took his place. "Hey, Steve," she told him. "How you feeling?"

"Been better," he quipped. That was another understatement of the century, potentially even the millennium. "I don't know, I'm alive. Dr. Chung's already started weaning me off the good stuff."

She winced in sympathy. "Ouch."

"I'll live," he repeated. "That's more than almost anyone else in my situation could say." He grimaced, then gestured to the TV with the hand that was on the opposite side of his wound. "I just wish there was something better on the TV."

Her lips quirked. "Are you saying that House is bad?"

To be honest, she was kind of (read: really) surprised he was even watching it.

"I didn't say that," Steve said. "But watching this show is different when you're the one who's in the hospital."

She smothered her laugh with a, "That's fair."

They talked for a little bit, half-watching the show as they did. She gave him a bit of a commentary, explaining some of the medical conditions that the doctors were spitballing. He was both equal parts fascinated and horrified to hear about them. "It's...amazing what we know now," he marveled to her, though his speech was starting to slur some.

She chortled. "Yeah. Must be incredible to someone who lived in the '30s and '40s, huh?"

"'20's, too," he mumbled back. "Don't you forget that."

"Oh, I won't."

He fell asleep only about ten minutes later, unable to fight the pull of his body healing and the pain medication coursing through his system. She stayed for some time after that until a nurse came in, not quite wanting to leave, wanting to remind herself once again that he was alive. When she got up to leave, as the nurse turned her back to get his new drip bag ready, she couldn't deny herself the urge to grab his hand and gently press a kiss to it. "See you tomorrow," she whispered.

And she did. The next afternoon, after she got off from her shift at work and changed into her casual clothes, she pulled out something from underneath her bed and took it with her downstairs to visit him. There was nobody else in the room this time.

He raised an eyebrow at her. "What do you got there?"

She held it up for him to see. "A chessboard. We don't have to play it if you don't want to. But, I figured – "

He latched onto the idea straightaway. "No, I want to. Please, I'm bored out of my mind."

"Well, I'm glad to give you a new kind of board then."

The eyebrow he'd raised was knitted together with its companion as he tried to parse what she meant by that, the drugs making him a little slow on the uptake. Finally, he sighed. "I guess I walked into that one, didn't I?"

"Better that than the other, other kind of board, right?"

"Stop. I'm not supposed to laugh."

Penny pulled the table next to his bed on her side out so that she could set up the board and the two of them could play. "Brown or white?"

"Brown. I gotta warn you, though, I am unpracticed. And I'm not exactly of sound mind."

"You think I'm sane?"

He smirked. "Are you drugged up right now?"

The answer to that question was way more complicated than he would've liked, even without the truth. She kept it to a simple, "No."

"Then you've got one ahead of me. More like two, since I'm betting you're a better chess player than I am."

She was. The game was pretty much ended in twenty moves – a quick game, which was a good thing. Again, he fell asleep within ten minutes after their game was finished. Again, she spent time watching him after that, until she was disturbed. This time, it was by Clint, who knocked at the open doorframe. "Hey," he said, jerking his head towards Steve. "Everything with him alright?"

"Yeah." She looked at the clock on the wall. "Shit, I need to go out on my patrol."

The third day...wasn't really that interesting. They talked, and then Dr. Chung came in to tell him that she was going to release him after one last examination. Penny said her excuses at that, and went about going back on her patrol.

The entire length of her afternoon patrol, though, just like the day before, she couldn't shake her mind away from that simple, innocuous joke Steve had made. She knew she was going to have to give him and the others the actual answer to that question soon, provided that a new supplier for her suppressants didn't fall into her lap. She hadn't been able to leave before, and she knew she certainly wouldn't be able to now.

But she had no idea where to even begin.

"Aren't you cold?"

Penny blinked, looking behind her. "Hey, Tony," she said. "It's a little chilly, but it's not that bad. I do patrol this city on a regular basis, even in blizzard conditions." Especially in blizzard conditions.

"I won't deny that, although I will say that your suit has heaters, yeah?" He handed her one of the coffee cups in his hands, and they were at the point now where she was not surprised by this. Steve might have been the mother hen of their group, but Tony had more money than he could ever possibly know what to do with. "Latte, two-percent, with gingerbread flavor."

"How very festive of you," she remarked. Her head tilted. "But not peppermint-flavored?"

He gave a shrug. "I didn't know if you were allergic to mint or not."

"Why would I be allergic to mint?"

"You're part-spider, aren't you? Don't spiders hate mint?"

"They do, but I'm only two-percent spider. The rest of my DNA is human." She took a sip of her drink. "This is good. Thanks."

"You're welcome," he responded. "Stark specialty."

"Wait, you made this?"

"Yep," he replied, popping the "p." "I prefer my coffee straight, but my mother was half-Italian, and she thought knowing how to prepare several different types of coffee was a knowledge that was important for her to teach me." He looked away from her and out at the city. "So, what are you doing here? Come out here to think?"

They were standing on one of the balconies of the building, the only one that was restricted to the Avengers. It was probably an odd place for her to be. There was still snow on the ground, a covering which dusted the entire city. Clouds were in the distance as well, grey and carrying tidings for even more snow. The weather channel had confirmed it, last she'd checked.

There were to be no doubts this year: the Christmas, which was only three days away, was going to be a white one.

"Something like that," Penny confirmed.

"Anything in particular you wanna share?"

She went silent. If she really thought about it, there was something she could share, but...

She took a swig from her cup. Afterwards, she set it on the top of the half-wall in front of them, placing her gloved hands right next to it. "It's been two years," she divulged. "Well, two years and a month. It was two years last month."

She watched his crow's feet crinkle. It was a confirmation of how much older he was than her. Twenty entire years separated them, an entire generation of a gap. The soulmate who was closest to her in age was Steve biologically, Natasha chronologically. Clint was twelve years older than her, having been born in '78.

"Your husband?" Tony guessed.

"Yeah."

His tone went surprisingly gentle. "And you didn't say anything?"

Once again, she debated on what to say without really giving anything away and still being truthful.

"I didn't want to bother anyone with it."

"Delilah, no." His voice was firm. "You would not have been bothering anyone."

She felt her throat tighten. "The anniversary was only a week before Thanksgiving."

Thanksgiving had been an...interesting affair for their team. Clint had gone to Iowa to spend time with his sister's family, but since the rest of them didn't really have family or friends to hang out with, they'd had Thanksgiving with each other, Pepper, and Happy. The beta woman had been surprisingly...nice. And because she was a beta, not a theta like Peggy Carter, Penny's instincts hadn't really registered her as a threat.

Anyways, Natasha and Bruce had been the ones to cook. Bruce had made a tandoori turkey with gravy to go along with it, his vegetable samosas they were all obsessed with, cheesy naan bread, and a light cucumber salad. Natasha had made the stuffing with turkey sausage and mushrooms, a sweet potato casserole, and the pumpkin pie. It'd all been incredibly delicious, extravagant, and way too much. Clint had bemoaned for days after he'd come back about missing out on Natasha's stuffing, because between Penny and Steve, there had been no leftovers.

"So, what?" Tony asked, bringing her back to the present. "That was still a week before Thanksgiving if you'd wanted to talk about it. None of us would have minded if did. You were hurting."

"I'm hurting most of the time, Tony."

Her deflection failed to work. His eyes went sad. "I know," he said. "I used to hurt a lot of the time, too. Cheers to mental illness, right?"

He held up his cup, as if he wanted her to clunk hers against it. Something twinging inside her at the absurdity of what they were cheering to, she picked up her cup and did.

"What do you got?" she questioned, which made her feel like she was even more ridiculous for how she'd phrased the question and the manner she said it in.

"Depression, anxiety, PTSD, and recovering from alcoholism and drug addiction for trying to self-medicate those first three," he said. He took a drink before he started speaking again. "I had PTSD long before Afghanistan, for...reasons that aren't really relevant. They're a little too heavy for this conversation," he explained at her look. "Anyways, even after I became Iron Man, I was hurting a lot of the time. It's what did me and Pepper in."

She ignored his reference to his relationship with the woman. That wasn't something she needed to think about right now. "What changed?"

The corners of his mouth tugged upwards. "This team. This family. Whatever you want to call it," he answered. "Having people who trust, respect, and care for you, and who you can in return, does wonders for the brain. Also, Natasha made it abundantly clear to me when she and Clint moved in that she would only be doing so if I got medicated."

She cracked up. That sounded like something Natasha would do.

"Thank you for taking us in," she spoke once she'd settled down. "You didn't have to."

"I wanted to," he countered with a wink. "No point in having all this money if you're going to do absolutely nothing with it."

"I think pretty much every single other billionaire in this world would disagree with you."

"Ah, but I'm not like those other billionaires."

"No," she mused. "No, you're not."

He wasn't like the person or alpha she'd thought him to be, either.

Penny looked down at her cup, her cheeks flaming with shame. "I'm sorry for all those things I said that first night you offered for me to live here. You didn't deserve any of them."

To her surprise, he chuckled. "Eh, I deserved some of them. I don't remember everything that you said, but I was trampling over your boundaries. I was also calling you a kid a bunch, when you were and are very much not."

"...I mean," she went coyly. "I am twenty years younger than you. Compared to you, I am a kid."

He understood what she was implying. "Shut up, I'm not old," he grumbled. "You've been through things I and the rest of the team haven't and, as you pointed out back then, you've been at this longer than I have. I was kind of an ass back then for judging you based off of your age rather than your merits and experience. I apologize for that."

...Wow.

Wow.

"Apology accepted."

"Good. Same goes for yours." He sniffed. "Now, can we go inside? My fingers are going to freeze off if we spend much more time out here."

"Oh, and what would the great Tony Stark do then, without his hands?" she teased as they walked inside.

"I'd have my robots build me prosthetic fingers. Then I'd be even more of a cyborg than I was before I had my arc reactor removed," he shot back.

"You'd really trust your robots to do that?"

She might not have actually seen, much less interacted with, his robots that many times, but she knew from Bruce a good majority of the horror stories involving DUM-E, U, and Butterfingers.

"...Point taken," he admitted reluctantly. "Fine, then. I'd have Bruce make them for me. Get Dr. Chung and that one doctor who showed up on CNN to consult with him."

"You mean Dr. Strange?"

"Yeah, that guy."

Having read and also watched some of the interviews that the doctor had given (he was like, one of the leading doctors in the country right now, let alone neurologists, so of course she had), Penny was more interested than she knew she should've been in seeing what would happen if he and Tony met up. The results would be disastrous and highly entertaining, she was sure.

It was a lazy day for her, one where she didn't feel like going out as Spider-Woman right this second, so she followed Tony into the elevator when he said he was going to go to the communal floor. The only other person that was around when they got there was Clint. He was playing MarioKart, which wasn't too unusual for him. She didn't think it would've occurred to most people that the legendary Hawkeye was a MarioKart addict in his free time – at least when he wasn't pulling pranks or doing something else along those veins.

"Hey, guys," he greeted them, barely looking away from the screen. She thought that was kind of funny, because he was way ahead of the AI players. Even if he took five seconds to make eye-contact with them, they wouldn't have come close to catching up. "Do you wanna play?"

"No, thanks," Penny said. Her video game days were over.

"Give me a couple minutes for my hands to warm up," Tony told him dryly. "We were outside, and I'm still working on getting feeling back into my fingers."

"What the hell were you two doing outside?" Clint returned, frowning. As he finished the race, he gave them his proper attention. "The news just sent out an update like, an hour ago. There's another storm coming in after this one before Christmas. It's gonna be as bad as the Valentine's Day of last year."

She clenched the hand holding her cup of coffee even tighter. Like the blizzard of that Valentine's Day, when she'd been stuck in her apartment, thinking of Harry.

Except...not like that. It sounded like the blizzard was going to be bad, but she wasn't going to be alone here, was she? Tony, Steve, Natasha, and Bruce were all going to be here, like Thanksgiving. Clint, too. She remembered him mentioning offhandedly about a week or so ago that, since he'd gone to his sister's for last month's holiday, he was going to stay here for this one's.

"I wouldn't recommend you going out today," the archer said, specifically looking at her. "It's gonna start snowing again in a couple of hours, and it's not gonna stop until tomorrow morning when it does."

She sighed, putting her cup of coffee down on the nearby end table before she repositioned her body in the armchair she was sitting in, so that she was sitting horizontally and with her legs dangling over the armrest. "Tony, can you – ?"

Her question was met with a blanket to the face before she could finish it. Tony started apologizing for apparently throwing it too high, but she settled the blanket over her and flashed him a smile. "Thanks. Don't worry about it."

The blanket, since it was one of the ones that consistently stayed on the communal floor, smelled like all of them. The scents of her soulmates, as well as Bruce's, weighed on top of her like the blanket, and for the first time ever she didn't quite mind when she felt the now-familiar wetness when she shifted around again. It wasn't like there was that much of it anyways.

After about an hour of Tony and Clint playing the video game, which had quickly devolved into them throwing curses and insults at each other in their fight for first place, when they were in the last race of their fifth game, the elevator dinged and Natasha stepped out. "Oh, God," she deadpanned at once. "Who let you two play against each other?"

"Not me," Penny said, raising her hands defensively. "I'm just an observer."

"Nat, shut up, I'm so close to winning," Clint grunted. He and Tony were tied on the rounds won right now.

"Are you sure about that?" Tony asked.

"What are you doing?" Clint demanded. As a blue shell warning lit up on his side of the screen, he shouted, "Fuck, no! How did you fucking get that in third place? Fuck, fuck, fuck – !"

The blue shell slammed down on him, making him lose first place. With a well-timed mushroom, Tony then beat the AI player that had been in second, zooming across the finish line. He smirked. "And that's how you do it, ladies and gentleman."

"I want a rematch," Clint seethed.

"How about you two take a break, before you wind up killing each other?" Natasha suggested, plucking the controllers out of their hands. Clint began to protest, but it was of no use.

"We don't need a break."

"Uh, huh, sure," the female alpha replied, unconvinced. "Let's watch a movie. If I recall correctly, it's Delilah's turn to pick."

Penny thought about what movie she wanted to watch. "How about Home Alone?" she suggested.

Clint nodded. "Good pick for the holidays."

Bruce and Steve came down when they were about halfway and three-quarters of the way through the movie, respectively. When they were all present, they debated on what to get for takeout, since it wasn't even a question that they would be eating together. They decided on that one Italian place JARVIS had gotten her the meal she'd first eaten at the Tower. She got the same order as she had the last time, the fettuccine with the truffles and butter sauce.

...Maybe, it occurred to her as they were all eating their food, the movie Just Friends now playing and Clint and Tony poking fun at Steve's blatant confusion over the movie, maybe Tony had been right. Maybe one of the reasons why she couldn't bring herself to leave wasn't just because of the fact he, Steve, Clint, and Natasha were her soulmates, or because the team felt like a family to her.

Maybe they really were a family.

Word Count: 3,530

Next Chapter Title: last christmas