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: Hi, everyone! Sorry about this chapter taking a little bit longer than I thought it would. Ngl literally a good chunk of the problem stemmed from the fact I could not find a good song to name this chapter after. When Hungry Like the Wolf by Duran Duran finally popped into my mind I felt like the biggest idiot because the choice was so obvious, but whatever.

If you're wanting a hint on something important (I am not going to say what it is): pay special attention to how Iron Lad refers to something in this chapter. Also maybe reread some of the earlier chapters. I will neither confirm nor deny your guesses though :)

Also unrelated, but I finally saw Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse yesterday! I give it somewhere along the lines of an 8.5/10. It was really good, but I did have some issues with it (if you've read heavy, dirty soul, one of the fics that's in the multiverse series this fic is in, you probably know what some of those issues are).

But, anyways. As always, I hope you enjoy. Until the next chapter,

~TGWSI/Selene Borealis

~primis, omega, superhero, genius~

~somebody to love~

~chapter 38: hungry like the wolf~

Penny knew that she was being followed.

Ever since she'd went on that date with her alphas to a French restaurant – and could she just say, the owner of the restaurant, another friend of Tony's, had given her déjà vu. She felt like she'd met him under very similar circumstances before, but the only-in-a-dream kind of way – she was aware that she had a certain interloper who didn't belong. He was always in her peripheral, and it seemed like no matter what she did, no matter if she went out as herself or as Spider-Woman (though it was infinitely more hard for him to keep up with her as the latter), he was there.

She was kind of (read: really) over it. After the alpha order he'd placed on her, she would've thought that he would've been brave enough to confront her and say whatever it was that he wanted to say to her face. But no, instead he hadn't even taken up his suit again, instead he hid under disguises that only she noticed because only she had the precognition and memory of his face to search him out, and every time that she noticed him, she either wasn't in the situation to do anything about it or he vanished into a crowd before she could catch up to him. And the only reason why he was able to do that was because he was wearing scent-blockers, the same scent-blockers that had prevented her from identifying him as an alpha until he'd used the voice.

Fucking coward.

It didn't help that, despite the sketch she'd given, they still had no idea who he was. Fury and Tony had put the sketch through literally every single database that they could access, which between SHIELD and JARVIS' hacking capabilities was pretty much every database on the planet, but they'd come up with nothing. It was continuing to look like Iron Lad didn't exist until he'd popped up on their radar – or, if he had, that he'd somehow hacked into all the relevant databases without being noticed to erase his existence.

(Of course, there was a third option: that magic was involved.

But Penny didn't think that was the case here. She knew what an erasure via magic looked like, and whatever was going on with Iron Lad didn't give her the same vibes. Plus, in retrospect it had been shocking enough that Tao had even taken her request seriously even with her probably knowing that Penny would've gone to Agatha otherwise. It was almost like she'd expected it for reasons outside of that.

Almost like she had her own...impetus for having done it.)

She wished that, whatever it was Iron Lad wanted from her, he'd just get it over with already. It'd make both of their lives easier. Then she would finally be able to spill the beans about what he'd done without worrying about the potential information they'd lost when her alphas chased him down (because yes, Natasha had done the same as him once upon a time, but the difference was she'd apologized for it and Penny knew she still felt bad about it to this day even with having been forgiven) and he would be free to do whatever he wanted after that. Then SHIELD and the Avengers could take down HYDRA, and everything after that would be just fine. Better than fine. It'd be perfect.

(Almost.)

But alas, over the course of the two weeks after the restaurant date, he obstinately chose to remain hidden in the shadows and crowds.

Finally, two days before the anniversary of Morbius almost killing her, which had led her to moving into the Tower and eventually coming clean to her soulmates after months and months, she'd had enough. She got ready for patrol that afternoon, a swirl of anger and irritation brewing inside of her. Steve watched her from the doorway of her bedroom, dressed in his everyday clothes, concerned. "Are you sure you want to go on your own for patrol this afternoon?" he asked.

"You're such a mother hen," she said, meaning for it to come out as good-natured teasing. But there was an edge lacing her voice. She sighed. "I meant that completely in a good way."

"I know you did," he answered amusedly. "Something's bothering you, isn't it? And you're intending to deal with it today."

"...Yes," she admitted. She walked over to him, temporarily leaving her mask on her bed. "But I need to deal with it on my own. Trust me."

He smiled. "I do."

He pulled her into a kiss, cupping her face in his hands. As was the case with any of them, the kiss quickly had the potential to become more than just that. His hands fell away from her face, settling on her hips, and then began to go further down.

She cut them off there. "Sorry," she said, breaking away, her breaths coming out in shallow pants. "But I really do have to deal with what's bothering me."

"Okay," Steve agreed easily. But his eyebrows knitted with concern. "Are you gonna tell us what it is once you've dealt with it?"

For some reason, she felt like this was one promise she couldn't make.

Thus, "We'll see," was all she replied.

This patrol, Penny changed up her tactics.

This time, rather than trying to chase down Iron Lad when she spotted him, she decided that if he really wanted to bother her today, he would have to come to her. She did her standard few hours of taking care of the citizens of the city and making sure no world-ending threats cropped up that would require the Avengers, then she bought herself a snack and sat down on the ledge of a low-rise rooftop, her legs hanging over. She sent a text out to the group chat that she might be later than usual in getting back tonight just in case, before she waited.

And waited.

And waited.

About thirty minutes after sunset, just when she was about ready to call the quits and go back to the Tower (she was hungry, dammit), she heard a familiar whirring noise. Iron Lad's boots landed on the rooftop with a thud. "Spider-Woman," he greeted her.

She wasn't all that enthused. "Well, well, look what the cat dragged on."

Unexpectedly, she heard him wince. "...Yeah," he said. "Listen, I need to talk with you."

"Oh, is that why you've been following me for the past two weeks?" she snapped, getting to her feet. She crossed her arms as she turned around, glaring at him fiercely. "Not because you've wanted to be a creep, but because you've wanted to 'talk' with me?"

"Among other things," he commented. Clearly, he was holding multiple things back. His hands twitched awkwardly. "Would it help first if I apologized for ordering you?"

Penny blinked. "You're actually apologizing for that almost a month after you did it?"

"In my defense, you were out of commission for one of those weeks, and the week after that I had to hang low." His tone became noticeably clipped on the second part. "You just had to give Fury a sketch of my face, didn't you?"

"You've still been hacking into SHIELD?"

"When I need to? Yeah." He didn't sound apologetic about it at all. "You don't realize how much danger you've put people in by doing that. I mean, me, personally?" He gestured towards himself. "I could care less about how much danger I'm put into. As long as I take down HYDRA with me, I could give less of a fuck if I die. But they know who I am. And now that they know I'm after them, my family is at risk. And I didn't just fake my death for that to happen."

Wait...

"You faked your death?"

"Not the point," he growled.

Her arms fell out of their crossed position.

Well, this was awkward.

She quickly came up with something to steer back the conversation. "You know, you've talked a lot about trust when it comes to me and the other Avengers, but you haven't given us – me – a lot of reason for the other way around," she pointed out. As Iron Lad spluttered, another unexpected reaction from him – had she caught him on an off day or something – she stepped down from the ledge and walked around it, swinging one foot in front of the other slowly and with exaggeration. "You haven't given us much to work with, you placed an alpha order on me – "

"I just apologized for that!"

" – And now you've decided to talk with me again after two weeks of stalking me," she continued, acting as if he hadn't spoken. "I get that you're untrusting because of HYDRA, but I can't – I won't – help you unless you give me more information. That's it. After what happened with the killer robots, I'm done helping you unless you give me a reason to, even with your apology. And I'm sure the rest of the Avengers will say the same once I tell them what you've been doing"

She was bluffing, of course. "With great power comes great responsibility," and all that jazz.

Iron Lad fell short. "You didn't tell them that I gave you an order?"

"Did you want me to?"

"No, but – " He moved to rub at his jaw, even though the best he could do was rub metal against metal because of his suit. "...Huh. That makes a lot of sense."

Irritation and worry both sparked through her. She was tired of him talking about things that he knew she wouldn't get. She was tired of feeling like she was just this close from developing the urge to strangle him.

"What?"

"Nothing," he said. "I guess you have a point. What do you need to know?"

"You mean, besides your name?"

"Yeah, you're not getting that."

Penny felt a muscle in her face give a noticeable twitch at how she wanted to smile at that. She was mad at him. He didn't deserve a smile. "You have a family?"

"A mother and a sister," he reported dutifully.

"And they think you're dead."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because it's better off for them this way."

That was such a non-answer.

Penny resisted the urge to stomp her foot over it, like she was a toddler throwing a fit and everything.

She clasped her hands behind her back. "How did you find out that HYDRA was around? And don't say it's because of those radio transmissions you found," she warned him as he looked prone to do just that, "because I know that's not the case."

Again, a bluff.

But she had a feeling her guess was right.

Sure enough, with much reluctance, he revealed, "I didn't know about those transmissions beforehand; I did find them only when I was screwing around with the radio for the fuck of it. But...I knew HYDRA was still a thing before that. I got caught up in one of the companies run by them. They promised me a bunch of things, like making enough money that my mom wouldn't have to be working all the time and us still living paycheck-to-paycheck. I believed them too, like an idiot. Next thing I know..." He trailed off.

What files had he looked into again specifically the last time they knew he'd hacked into SHIELD? He'd looked at her file, the rest of the Avengers', Project Rebirth's, and –

She felt the blood leave her face.

"You got injected with Extremis, didn't you?" she whispered.

She'd known that he was enhanced, he'd pretty much revealed that to her. And he'd looked into the SHIELD files on Advanced Idea Mechanics.

Iron Lad laughed without humor, raising his right hand in a salute. "Bingo."

"But...how did you survive?" She was scrambling for answers now, and she didn't care in the least. "Extremis was ridiculously unstable and – it kept on blowing people up! Tony said even Pepper would've needed a stabilizer if she hadn't wanted to get it out of her system, because – "

"Yeah, well, I'm a special case," Iron Lad cut her off. "They weren't sure why. And it didn't – it didn't fix everything that was wrong with me, but it did enough."

Her eyebrows crinkled. "What do you mean by that?"

He let out an exasperated sigh. "I've just given you a lot. Do you still not trust me yet?"

He was frustrating, had she ever mentioned that before?

She got where he was coming from, really she did after everything she'd been through. She'd deleted herself from existence out of grief, but also to protect her friends, and he was letting his mother and sister believe that he was dead for that reason that was secondary for her. And she knew how hard it was to know that from their point of view, to know that your family and friends were moving on without you (whether they knew it or not) because you couldn't give them another choice.

But Penny needed more than just the talk about his personal life or how he'd been experimented on by HYDRA (Tony was absolutely going to lose his mind when he found out that AIM had been a subset of HYDRA all along and Killian and Hansen had been working for them, she thought absentmindedly) in order to trust him fully, even after his lead about the killer robots had helped. It sounded harsh, but it was true.

She put a hand on her ship, shifting the majority of her weight onto that side's leg. "You're keeping something else from me. What is it?"

"Nothing."

"Bullshit."

Iron Lad didn't say anything to this, only growled.

She rolled her eyes. "If you want me and the rest of the Avengers to help you take down HYDRA, we need to everything about them. Otherwise, we and the rest of SHIELD can't come up with – "

"HYDRA is SHIELD."

Another blink. "Pardon?"

"HYDRA is SHIELD," Iron Lad repeated. She wasn't the only one pacing anymore as his shoulders raised in a defensive position. "I was hoping that you guys would figure that out on your own since three of you are geniuses and another two are super spies, but whatever. Fine. There you have it. I just gave you the rest of the information that you needed."

Penny felt like the world had just been ripped out from under her. Her knees grew weak and the rest of her legs weren't far behind them, turning into jelly. "Y – you're joking," she bit out.

"Do you think I'm the kind of person who would be joking about this?" he accused. "You know as well as I do that the US government in its various alphabet soup agencies made a bunch of deals with Nazi scientists after the war. Quite a few of these scientists were HYDRA. The recently-created SHIELD scooped up most of the HYDRA ones, and as far as I can tell, they never really stopped what they'd previously been doing. They just found a way to work within SHIELD so that no one who they didn't want to ever found out."

"'You cut off one head, two more take its place,'" she quoted. The saying had a newer, more bitter meaning now.

Her lips were dry. Trying to wet them didn't do anything, however, as her mouth was like the Sahara fucking desert.

"Exactly," Iron Lad said. "I know HYDRA is entrenched in SHIELD, but I don't know how far the conspiracy goes. I knew you were unlikely to be compromised when I went to you, and the same goes for the other Avengers. I doubt that Fury is, either. Guy seems like a controlling bastard, but not the type that wants to take over the world, if you know what I mean." It was now her turn to splutter, because that was her godfather he was talking about, and she knew that Fury wasn't part of the HYDRA scum. He couldn't be. If he was, she would've known as far back as that meeting in McDonald's not to trust him...right? But the alpha before her could've cared less about her protests, turning his head to look up at the sky. She could practically see the grimace behind his face plate. "There. I've put pretty much every single card that I can on the table. But I can't talk about this anymore. Not tonight."

"Iron Lad, wait – " Penny spoke, stumbling forwards, her mind still reeling from the absolute shit-show he'd just revealed to her.

He didn't, of course. Blasting off, he left her on that rooftop, shaken to the very core, and feeling like a whole fucking lot that she'd thought she'd known over the past eight-something years had been a lie all along.

. . .

. . .

Then again, if Iron Lad was to be believed, that was basically the truth.

The room was silent after everything she'd just said.

It was even worse than the first time around, when she'd revealed that mutant guy had said, "Heil, HYDRA." Bruce was holding his head in his hands, looking like he was bordering on turning into the Green Guy but just barely keeping it together. Steve's face was tinged green. Tony was swirling his glass of scotch in his left hand, his eyes as dark and swirling as they had been last year when he'd shot Morbius off of her with his repulsers. And as for Clint and Natasha...

The two of them were eerily silent. Penny knew this probably sounded kind of mean of her, but she hadn't thought there would ever come a day when Clint would be as silent as he was right now. He was leaning forwards in his seat, clasping his hands together. Natasha was clutching the armrest of her chair with her right hand. Both of their knuckles had turned white.

Penny had known the second she'd gotten herself together enough on that rooftop to come back to the Tower that Iron Lad's reveal about SHIELD was not a secret she would've been able to keep to herself – not that she would've wanted to, anyways. It had made dread twist in her stomach after she'd changed out of her suit in her bedroom and then had gone to the communal floor, because despite her tardiness, the others had all been in a good mood. And she'd known that she'd been about to destroy that, and they had too the second they'd all seen her face.

"Pen?" Tony had asked. "Everything okay?"

"...No," was initially the only answer she'd been able to give him.

JARVIS had turned off his audio and video feeds on the communal floor and initiated Barn Door Protocol when she'd asked. Penny had hated doing it, but if HYDRA had infiltrated SHIELD, if they'd been there from the very beginning, she wasn't sure if she could trust the AI to not have been compromised without any of them realizing it. It wasn't a slight against Tony by any means; he was a genius, but none of them were infallible.

And she wasn't sure if she could trust anyone outside of their circle ever again.

"I can't believe this," Steve whispered at last, echoing the same sentiments he'd made several months before. "We'd defeated HYDRA. You're telling me that – that Howard, Peggy, and Colonel Philips just welcomed their scientists with open arms?"

"Dear old Dad, always the hypocrite," Tony muttered. Steve gazed at him disapprovingly, to which Tony raised a hand. "We've been over this before, Cap. I get that he was your friend, but the Howard Stark you knew and the one that I did were very different people. If it's any consolation, though, I doubt that he knew HYDRA became a thing under his watch. Dad was a lot of things, including ethnically Jewish. He wouldn't have condoned a Nazi organization trying to take over the world."

Steve's face was pained. "But Peggy and Philips...I doubt either of them knew what was going on at first, but there's no way to know if he knew or not. And I don't know if I was to fly all the way to London – " again, that spark of jealousy returned for Penny, but she ignored it " – that she would give me an honest answer."

"We need to come up with a plan," Bruce put forward, removing his hands from his face and sitting up. His eyes were still tinged that radioactive green, but his heartbeat was below the threshold. Maybe the Green Guy had recognized the importance of them needing Bruce right now. Penny wouldn't put it past him. "If HYDRA really is SHIELD, we can't go to them to deal with this. We'll have to take them down from the inside out...by ourselves, with the help of Iron Lad or not."

"'If.'"

Clint frowned. "Nat, you heard what the guy told Penny."

"I did. But, how are we supposed to believe him?" Natasha raised her chin, her grip on the armrest tightening even further. Penny heard a slight squishing sound from the fabric, like it was threatening to break underneath the pressure. "His explanation of knowing when the attack on Grand Central Station was going to happen but why he wasn't able to warn us about the gala is convenient. Outside of the flash drive, he hasn't given us any further evidence to substantiate his claims besides his word. And he's only talked to Penny, not the rest of us, although he says that he doesn't think any of us are HYDRA."

"And we're not," Steve vowed, for posterity's sake.

Tony raised an eyebrow. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Nat?"

"That I want to bring Iron Lad in, even if it means dragging him, kicking and screaming?" she returned.

The other alpha flashed her a grin. "Exactly."

Penny fidgeted uncomfortably. For some reason, she really didn't like this proposition. Maybe it was simply because it hadn't been too long ago that she'd been in the same position as Iron Lad, and if Tony and Nat had hunted her down in the same way they were talking about now, it would've alienated her from them even more and made unification that much more difficult.

But the situations weren't really comparable. They were like apples and oranges.

Still, she had to ask, "Do you really have to do it that way?"

Both Tony and Natasha turned to look at her. "For all we know, he could be HYDRA himself. He admitted to working with them, if what he said about AIM is true. According to him, he didn't know it at the time, but that could be another fabrication," she stated plainly. And that...that was a good point. "And wouldn't that be exactly what HYDRA would want us to do: tear down SHIELD so that it would become that much easier for them to enact their plans for world domination?"

"Well, maybe, but – "

"What else would you have us do?" Tony questioned.

Penny deflated. She knew what her response was going to be, and along with it she knew what their reactions would look like.

She persisted anyways. "I could try talking to him again. One of you guys, probably Steve, could come with me. If I ask him for some more evidence, maybe – "

"Maybe he'll realize we're onto him and attack you."

She huffed. "I'm not helpless, Nat."

"I didn't say you were," the female alpha replied. Her features softened. "But, regardless of whether or not Iron Lad is telling us the truth, we can't let him keep stringing us along. We need concrete proof before we act. If we don't have it, either way, HYDRA could get the upper hand. That's not an eventuality we would want."

...No, it's not.

Penny ran a hand through her hair, shaking her curls. She hoped Iron Lad would forgive them – forgive her, after the tentative rapport they'd built – after all of this was said and done. Because her insides were already squeezing and churning with guilt at the thought of the look he was going to give her when, not "if," Tony and Natasha brought him in. Once again, he was going to feel utterly betrayed.

"Fine," she said. "If you want to do it because you think it's the best idea, then do it."

Clint, Steve, and Bruce gave their assents as well, with their degrees of reluctance following in that order.

Thus, with no opposition to the plan, Iron Lad's fate was set in stone.

Word Count: 4,110

Next Chapter Title: tear it up