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: If I was feeling more clever, I would adapt I Want It That Way purely to ask why this chapter was so much easier to write than 29, but I'm not, not today ("Heard you say, not today...")

Yes, I've changed the chapter title AGAIN. Tbh I wasn't certain about it because I'm kind of changing up the chapter order of these last 10 chapters than what I originally had planned, so now you have Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees here. Voilà.

Light suggestion: if you have not read/reread chapter 5 specifically in a hot minute, you might want to do that. It'll help give context to this one.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Until next chapter,

~TGWSI/Selene Borealis

~primis, omega, superhero, genius~

~somebody to love~

~chapter 31: stayin' alive~

Everything that happened after that was kind of a blur.

Penny remembered that she didn't stop crying for a very, very long time. For the first time since that November, she was able to grieve properly – over Harry, over her friends, over herself. Fury was right with what he'd told her a year ago: she had killed herself. Her identity, at least.

But now it was back. There were people who knew who she was.

Her alphas knew who she was.

She basically cried herself to exhaustion. When her body eventually gave out, she was aware of Steve picking her up and carrying her, although not without some sort of remark from either Clint or Tony about how any of them could. They went to the elevator and it took them up, but she fell asleep before the doors could even open to whatever floor they went to.

As such, when she came to awareness the next morning and discovered that her entire face was smushed into one of her own pillows, she was surprised.

What surprised her even more was the fact that she was not alone. There were four distinctive weights on the bed. They were spread out enough that none of them were touching each other, save for Clint and Natasha, or her, but they were there. What was more, she could tell by their breathing patterns that they were all sleeping still. She was the only one awake.

She wasn't initially sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, nobody was supposed to be able to enter her apartment except for her, that had been one of the agreements of her living here.

On the other hand, these were her mates, and she was happy that they were here. The previous agreements could go out the window.

She shifted around, turning over onto her back. She was still wearing her jeans, sweater, and bra. Not bad, but also – not comfy.

After some debate about the easiest way to get out of the bed, she just decided to flip up onto the ceiling and crawl over to where her dresser was. She hopped down and opened up the top drawer, rummaging through it for something better to wear. It wasn't hard for her to find a top and a bottom, given that she really didn't have that many PJs in the first place.

Penny took off the sweater and her bra before putting on the shirt. Then she shucked off her jeans, but as she held the flannel pants in her hands and bent over...her spider sense didn't tingle, but all of her other ones let her know that her soulmates were waking up.

"That's a kind of view I can get used to," Tony joked, mumbling.

"Tony, shut up," said Natasha.

Penny ignored all of them – yes, Steve and Clint included, just because they hadn't spoken didn't mean they were absolved of guilt – to put on her pajama pants. It was only then that she turned around. "...'Morning," she said, raking a hand through her hair. It felt like a mess; she could only imagine how it looked.

Yet, every single one of them was staring at her like she was the most beautiful sight they'd ever seen. She could feel the flush it caused, starting in her cheeks but spreading down to below her shirt. Their eyes followed after it.

Ah. So it seemed her mates were a bunch of perverts.

"Only for you," Clint quipped.

The flame on her skin became even worse.

"Did I just say that out loud?"

Steve chuckled. "Yes. But we don't mind." He didn't pat the empty spot she'd created like she was a little kid or something, but he did subtly move his head towards it. "Do you want to come back over here?"

There was some more internal debating that went on.

In the end, she gave in to his request. She laid down on the bed again, shimmying until she was just how she wanted to be, propped up against her pillows. Tony huffed with amusement, but none of them said anything as she pulled the one blanket that wasn't pinned down by one of them over her lap. The silence was almost eerie.

"Are you guys just going to keep on staring at me?" she asked.

"Yes," Tony answered.

She glanced down at her blanket, pinching the fabric between her fingers and tugging at it lightly. Her emotions quickly got the better of her.

"I'm sorry," she murmured. "I know I should've told you guys sooner. But – "

"You were grieving over your husband, and then the universe decided to dump your soulmates into your lap," Tony said. "That's reason enough alone for you not to."

Steve, meanwhile, glanced over at her nightstand. He picked up one of the picture frames. "This is him, isn't it?"

Weakly, she nodded as he handed her the picture. This one was from their wedding day, one of the ones that she'd taken herself instead of relying on the wedding photographer Norman had gotten at the last minute. Harry was wearing a black-and-burgundy suit with a small white lily pinned to his lapel, grinning at the camera brilliantly. His dark brown eyes were shining with adoration.

"Yep, this is him," she agreed, her fingers ghosting down the frame.

"He seems...young," Clint commented.

She snorted. "Well, we got married when we were seventeen, so I think there's a reason for that. We were married for four years."

She watched them all do the math in their heads. "Wait," Tony said, eyes growing to the size of dinner plates. "You're twenty-three?"

Penny grinned weakly. "I told you I was twenty years younger than you, Tony."

"I knew that," he replied. He ran a hand over his face. "I just never really got to thinking about it. Wow."

Clint snickered. "There's a new one."

Before the two men could even begin to bicker, Natasha inquired, "Why did you get married when you were only seventeen?"

"My aunt," Penny responded. She gestured over to one of the other two smaller pictures on the nightstand, the one of Ben and May smiling in the booth at a restaurant. She'd taken the picture of them when she'd been twelve. "My parents died when I was a kid and my uncle got killed when I was fifteen, so it was just me and her. But then she got diagnosed with a cancer that couldn't be cured, and between foster care and Harry's proposal..."

"The choice was obvious," said Steve.

"Yeah."

Steve was pained – all of them were, really. But it was him who decided to make a comment on it. "That kind of story wasn't so uncommon back in my day," he said. "But to think that's still happening now..."

"Things are mostly better for omegas now," Penny argued. They still weren't the greatest, especially for male omegas, but they were a lot better than they had been before. "But I don't want to talk about that."

Natasha moved around slightly. "What do you want to talk about, then?"

"...We need to talk about how this is going to work," she stated. "I – I mean, I know how pack dynamics work – " way back when she'd had her childhood dreams of being part of one, she'd done as much research into the subject as an elementary and then middle school-aged kid could do, but that didn't mean much for them. So much of the data was based off of packs where an alpha was the primis, not an omega like her " – but I'm a little out of my depth here."

"You're not the only one," Clint said.

Tony hummed. "Well, I don't think it's unfair to point out we're not going to have all of the same problems that regular people in poly relationships do." As they all gave him blank looks, he raised his hands in surrender. "What? I'm just saying. The pack dynamics prevent jealousy a lot of the time. It's good to begin with that."

...He had a point.

But Penny felt her brow crease. "Don't you have to, uh...scent me first for it to fall into place? I still smell like a beta. That's not going to change for two weeks."

"I don't think we have a 'usual' situation for this, even besides the obvious," Natasha observed. "When I first began suspecting, I started to feel protective over you." That explained why she'd been giving her food off of her own plate all the time. "But the protection didn't fall against Steve, Clint, or Tony. It included them in the group, which was a pretty strong indicator of the dynamic being reality."

"Likewise, things fell into place when Nat told me," Tony concurred.

"Same goes for us," Clint added, pointing at himself and Steve.

"Okay," Penny said, if a little reluctantly. It wasn't that she didn't believe them, because Clint kissing her last night and the rest of them not getting jealous proved that. But that wasn't necessarily what she had been talking about with her original comment, either. "I get that. But I meant more of...how do we go about starting this? 'Cause I know it's not fair, but I can't just immediately jump into everything a mate bond entails. And what happens if we wind up fighting? I've never been in a fight in a relationship before and – "

Clint squinted his eyes at her. "You and Harry never fought?"

She shook her head. "N – no. We never really disagreed, except about Spider-Woman-related things from time to time..."

Maybe that was why they hadn't been soulmates, she couldn't help but think now. Never fighting sounded good in theory, but a lack of disagreements could potentially mean not knowing what to do when a real disagreement happened. That was what one of the gossip magazines that Gwen had loved had said anyways, if she remembered correctly.

"Let's take it one day at a time," Steve put out there, his hand wrapping lightly around her wrist. "We don't have to figure out everything right now."

"Although, given that you come off your suppressants in two weeks and a heat will probably soon follow, we should talk about what you want to do for that," Natasha pointed out.

There was silence in the room.

Tony nudged at her foot. "Pen? What are you thinking?"

"My heats," Penny whispered. Then, without further ado, she smacked her hand to her forehead and cried, "My heats! How could I forget about them?"

To be fair, perhaps "forget" hadn't been the best word of her to use.

Penny hadn't forgotten the fact that she was supposed to have heats. As an omega, it was a basic, but crucial, aspect of her biology. Every three months, she was supposed to have a heat. Four times a year.

But ever since May had found out about her being Spider-Woman, she hadn't been. As she'd said before, when her aunt had realized that she was enhanced, she'd taken her to a mutant doctor to get her on suppressants, limiting her heats to twice a year. And then, after Harry had died...

There was a reason why it had been decided for her to be on suppressants when she'd been a teenager, at least as long as she'd been unmated and underage (after that, it had been her choice, because the doctor she'd gone to hadn't believed in having to ask her husband for his permission. Harry had agreed, thinking it offensive he should've had any say in the matter when it was so pertinent to her health).

There was a reason why she, Ned, MJ, and Gwen had called her heats "killer." It hadn't just been because of a joke.

But Penny hadn't experienced one unmated in so long, her mind had failed to remember that crucial fact about them –

Until now.

Hence why, after refusing to provide her soulmates any additional context (which had gone over swell, but oh well. They'd live) and getting take-out for breakfast (she didn't have a whole lot of food in her fridge and none of them had wanted to leave her place so soon, even to go down only a floor), she was sitting on an exam table in MedBay.

And this time, instead of being examined by Dr. Chung, it was Bruce who was acting as her physician.

"I really can't say enough how reckless this was of you," he stated – which did not bode well for how this entire fiasco was going to go, good Lord. The male omega ran a hand through his hair as he looked down at his clipboard. "This medication...it's dangerous if you take it this long, Penny."

"I know."

"If you were a regular human, you'd probably already be infertile, and not to mention likely suffering from liver damage."

"I know."

"And your bone density – "

"I know, Bruce," Penny repeated. She sighed. "Can we just get this over with? Please?"

Bruce set his clipboard down on the counter. "I'm going to need to take blood samples," he said. "Is that alright with you?"

Even after all this time, she still felt uneasy at the prospect. But she nodded. Bruce would be safer than any regular person and most mutants in handling her blood since his was radioactive, too. "Just as long as you destroy the samples after."

He went through the process of collecting her blood, finding a vein, tying off her arm, and then pushing in the needle. She watched her blood fill first one tube, then two, then three, then four. He collected another two tubes after that, bringing it to a count of six in total. "I'm going to have JARVIS run these," he told her. "Unless you don't want me to."

"No, that's fine."

She trusted JARVIS with her life.

He went to go deposit the tubes into a box that would take them down to one of the labs where JARVIS ran Avengers-related things for Bruce, Tony, and the like. When he came back, the expression on his face said her suffering was far from over.

"I did some more research last night than I have before into omega and theta heats of mutated or mutant individuals. In order for me to come up with the best treatment option there is for you – that is, deciding how long minimum you need to be off of suppressants – " she cringed at this, but said nothing " – I need to know what exactly your symptoms during heat are."

"Um, well, you know..." She gripped the end of the exam table, rapping her fingers against the other side of the surface. "Cramps, slick production, the gauze...just, more so than what I think is usual..."

Bruce was not impressed. "Let me phrase it this way to be more specific: it's been documented that some mutated or mutant omegas during their loss of lucidity experience somnic hypersexuality, or sexsomnia as it's referred to in the non-heat setting. Is this statement accurate for you?"

...He'd really just been that blunt about it, hadn't he?

"Y – yes," she admitted reluctantly.

Heats were not inherently sexual. Being aroused, more sensitive to touch, and having wet dreams...all of those were typical of omega and theta heats, she knew. Betas too, to a much lesser degree, which was why they could work during them if they wanted to. But while it was common for omegas and thetas to have sex during their heats during their lucid moments, it was not common for them to want sex so bad in their non-lucid moments that it drove them to do...certain things.

Like her.

"And how did your previous doctor classify your somnic hypersexuality? Mild, moderate, or severe? Or did he use the grade scale?"

"He used the grade scale."

"What was the grade he assigned you?"

"...Four."

Bruce sat down on the doctor's stool in the room and groaned. "Out of quick curiosity, considering that your husband was not enhanced, how did the two of you make that work, exactly?"

Penny let go of the table to interlock her fingers together. "I mean, even back then, my heats were only twice a year, and we knew when they were going to come pretty much down to the hour because of the pills. We planned accordingly and used sex toys as needed."

"How long did your heats last while on those suppressants?"

"A week. They weren't allowed to last any longer. Harry would force me to take the medicine if he had to."

"How long did they last without suppressants?"

"Besides my first heat? A week. The first one was two weeks, though – probably because what triggered it was me getting bitten by the radioactive spider that gave me my powers."

If she was being successful at one thing and nothing else throughout this session, it was making Bruce become increasingly distressed.

"I know you probably don't want to hear this, but I'm glad your supplier cut you off when he did," he spoke at last, once he'd calmed himself from presumably Hulk'ing out with some breathing exercises. "While not as dangerous as being on suppressants without a heat for two years...over two years, actually, because you said your last heat was in June of 2011," he amended himself, before continuing with, "the first heat after coming off suppressants is known to be more severe than the typical one. It also becomes worse the longer you are on suppressants. Two years without a heat plus Grade Four somnic hypersexuality...I'm just going to say that you are very, very lucky to have four soulmates in this circumstance."

Unfortunately, his last bit wasn't telling her anything she hadn't already figured out. "I don't even know how I'm going to explain this to them..."

"They're alphas," Bruce deadpanned. "They'll live."

That drew a surprised laugh out of her.

While they waited for JARVIS to finish up the bloodwork, Bruce did some other exams. He did physicals, both of her general body and her pelvic region. It was a little mortifying, having a teammate that wouldn't see her private parts in any other circumstance perform a pap smear on her, but necessary. Even enhanced people could get cancer, albeit in them the condition was much rarer than it was in the general population.

After he collected the sample he needed to be sent off to JARVIS for testing as well, he used the portable X-Ray in the room (a must for superheroes like them) to look at her bone density. Thanks to her powers, she had no signs of osteoporosis caused by extended use of her suppressants, so she was healthy in that regard.

And she was healthy in all of the other ways, too. Mostly.

"You are mildly malnourished, as evidenced by you being underweight," Bruce informed her as he looked over the test results that JARVIS had given him. "We're going to need to come up with a plan for that. But...your liver and kidney functions are perfect, and everything else seems to be in good order. No high white blood cell counts or any other indications of cancer or other diseases, which tracks with what I saw. Now," he changed the subject with, "your treatment."

Oh, no.

He started it off easy. "For the malnutrition, I'm going to need to run some more blood tests in order to synthesize a multivitamin that's best for you. I know in the past you haven't wanted me to study your blood and the permission you gave earlier does not equal a blanket one, but for enhanced individuals, malnutrition is more serious than it would be for other people, especially when caused by bad eating habits. It's better to get you on the road of recovery as soon as possible now than to have to give you a feeding tube later."

"That makes sense," Penny said. "And, uh, I don't mind about the whole blood thing. I'm still not completely comfortable with it, but...I trust you now."

Bruce smiled. "I'm glad. As for the rest of your treatment, while we're going to have to reassess after your next couple of heats to make sure it is not detrimental to your health, given your symptoms, I'm going to recommend a year off of suppressants of any type, whether heat or scent, minimum. Preferably, to be honest, you wouldn't go on them again at all, and I'm not saying that from a sexist perspective. It'll be better for your health overall."

She knew that he wasn't and that it probably would be. The reason why she'd continued to be on suppressants after marrying Harry had been because two heats were all they'd been able to handle. When you had four soulmates instead of one, however, things were different.

That didn't mean the news was exciting to hear. She breathed in through her nose. "What about Spider-Woman? She's supposed to be a beta. The world doesn't know her as anything else."

"We'll work on some scent-blockers that will handle it," Bruce offered as compromise. "That will mean you might have to take a break from Spider-Woman for up to a month or longer, since we can't know how good the blockers will work on you without knowing your actual scent, but – "

"You think we can do it?" she asked, surprised.

He nodded.

It was a relief to think he did.

"Okay, fine. Let's do it."

"One more thing," he added before she could get ready to leave. "What are you going to do about your job?"

Penny briefly sucked on her bottom lip. "I think I'm going to quit. It's not exactly like I can explain before we come up with the blockers why I abruptly went from being a beta to being an omega, right? Why?"

"I was just curious," he deflected.

She saw through him all the same. "Thanks, Bruce. But I was already thinking about quitting before this, it's been coming for a while. You don't need to feel bad about it."

Tony, Steve, Clint, and Natasha were all waiting for her in the waiting room of MedBay. They were fidgeting, Tony's leg bouncing up and down from the mixture of nervousness and caffeine running through him, Steve rubbing the back of his neck over and over again, Clint readjusting his position every couple of seconds, and Natasha twirling a pen around her fingers again. Penny felt bad about it, but she quelled the guilt for now.

Steve heard her first. He looked up, causing her other three alphas to do the same.

"Well?" Tony demanded, standing up. "What did he say?"

"Nothing bad," she rushed to assure them. Well. Being malnourished/underweight definitely wasn't good, but it was probably better for her to ease them into that along with the reality of her heats. "But can we go back up to my floor first? I don't really want to do this conversation here."

Word Count: 3,849

Next Chapter Title: a fifth of beethoven