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! Welcome back! Not much to say about today's chapter – just that its title comes from Piledriver Waltz by Arctic Monkeys.

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

~TGWSI/Selene Borealis

~the heavy souls 'verse~

~life in technicolor ii~

~chapter 17: piledriver waltz~

"Hey, Aunt May," Penny said as she watched her aunt step into the communal floor from the elevator. Her eyes widened. "What'cha got there?"

"Hi, Penny," May replied. She didn't protest as Penny got up from the couch to help her, grabbing one of the two heavy – relatively-speaking – paper bags from out of her arms. Penny peered inside it, noting the presence of what looked like baking ingredients. "I thought that I'd bake a cake for Steve, Sam, and Nat, but the kitchens here are much better than the one at my apartment, so I decided to do it here."

Penny smiled. "Really?"

She didn't mean it in a teasing tone, far from it, she thought that the idea was nice, but May took it as such. Her aunt rolled her eyes. "I know I'm not the best cook," she said – and maybe that was true, from how others talked about the creations that she had made in the past, but Penny obviously wouldn't know, "but this is one recipe that I'm good at making. Your grandmother taught me it, before she passed."

If the laws of cartoons applied to reality, Penny had no doubt that there would be literal sparkles shining in her eyes. "Wait, you mean – ?"

"Your grandma Eileen," May confirmed. "Yep. Now, come on. Let's get this stuff in the kitchen."

Penny didn't know much about the history on her mom's side – or her dad's side, for that matter, but that was different. Her dad had no problems in talking about his mom, Maria Stark née Carbonell, but he did about his father, and she knew that was because Howard hadn't been the best of fathers. Borderline abusive, even, if not outright.

And truthfully, the same could be said about her mom and May's father. He'd raised Mary to be an assassin for HYDRA. If that didn't count as child abuse, Penny didn't know what else would. So her mom hadn't talked about him hardly at all when Penny had been growing up, and May wasn't too keen on talking about him either. Nor had her mom talked that much about her own mom, Penny's grandma Eileen, because she had died when Mary had been four, so her mom had never had too many memories of her.

But May did, as she was born six years before Penny's mom. Her own mother had "left" – since she had found out that her father had been a part of HYDRA, May had tried doing research into her own mother, however the results had not been great. It seemed like she'd vanished off the face of the Earth...or been killed – not long after May had been born, so Eileen had been a lot like a mother to her in those handful of years before she had died of her illness. Unspecified, which probably meant that Penny's grandfather, John Fitzpatrick, had had something to do with it, probably so that he'd been able to mold Mary into just what he'd wanted her to be...

But, anyways. Enough of the family history. It was pretty depressing all around.

"What kind of cake are you baking?" Penny inquired as she helped take the groceries out of the paper bags, laying them out on the island counter.

May winked at her. "An Irish cream cake." That...probably should've been obvious from the presence of a bottle of Irish cream. Oops. "And technically, I'm baking three cakes. One for each of them."

...Wow. "That's a lot of work," Penny noted.

"Mm, not as much as you might think," May replied. Her eyes glanced up at the ceiling. "FRIDAY, can you put on some tunes for us? You can't have a decent baking session without some music."

"Of course, Ms. Reilly. I will create a playlist to both of your tastes."

"Thank you, FRIDAY," May said.

Only a few seconds later, music began to filter through FRIDAY's speakers. The first song was actually something more to Penny's tastes, Life in Technicolor II by Coldplay. May hummed. "Is this by that one band you like? Twenty one pilots?"

Penny almost laughed. The bands sounded so completely different, she didn't know how her aunt could mix up the two. "No, this is a song by Coldplay."

"Oh. They're the ones who wrote that one song, right?" May snapped her fingers, trying to think. "Yellow?"

"Yeah."

"That song was playing everywhere the year you were born and the one before it. They've come up with a few more hits since then, haven't they?"

"Uh, huh. You've probably heard the ones Fix You, Viva La Vida, Paradise, and Princess of China. Oh, and the more recent ones, A Sky Full of Stars and Adventure of a Lifetime."

"Those do sound familiar..."

May bustled about the kitchen, pulling a yellowed notecard out of her purse and reading off the direction for what temperature the oven should be set at. Once she set the temperature on one of the two ovens, one stacked on top of the other in how they were positioned in the wall, she went to the cabinets to pull out a whole host of things. Multiple mixing bowls, utensils, and etcetera.

Penny watched her as she leaned forwards, into the island counter. She didn't really have anything better to do. It was a Wednesday, and her dad and Matt were attending a meeting in one of the conference rooms over what had happened in Argentina, Pietro and Wanda were...somewhere in the Tower, Clint and his kids had gone back home this morning, and Natasha had already kicked her out of her room in MedBay that morning as well. Penny felt like maybe Nat was getting tired of her clinginess, but in her defense...Penny didn't like seeing her hurt. She didn't like seeing any of them hurt. The last time she had seen her mom was that night Oscorp had come after them in the apartment, and...

Yeah, that was something she and Anne had talked about during their emergency meeting on Monday. Her fear of losing another adult figure in her life, after she'd already lost two. What she needed to do to cope with it, which meant not spending every single second that she could at Natasha's bedside like she wanted to, making sure that she didn't die.

And she wouldn't die. Really, the only reason why she and Steve were in MedBay still was because of the rest they needed.

May glanced up at her, eyes sharp from behind her glasses. "Do you want to help me?"

Penny blinked. "What?"

"I asked if you wanted to help me," her aunt repeated.

She shook her head – not to indicate her denial, but rather her confusion. "No, I heard you the first time. I just don't understand...why do you want me to help? It's not like I'd be able to eat the end results."

"It's not like I would have let you eat the end results anyways," May quipped back. The result was that Penny let out a startled laugh. "Just because you can't taste whether or not the end results are good doesn't mean you won't ever be able to cook. I just saw this segment on the news the other day about a woman who is allergic to most of the stuff that she bakes, but she bakes them anyways for other people who have multiple severe allergies."

"Really?" Penny asked.

"Mmhmm," May hummed. "Maybe that could be you...if you'd be interested. Cooking isn't hard, as long as you follow a recipe. Which you already know how to do with your webs."

Penny thought about it. She used to cook sometimes with her mom, back before the spider bite. Her mom had always told her that one day she'd have to teach her properly, that there were plenty of places out there where you couldn't rely on takeout for a good meal like you could here. But then...the spider bite had happened.

From what she remembered, she hadn't been that bad at cooking. Not great, but certainly not as bad as Harley and her dad.

Besides, if an animated rat could cook, why couldn't she?

"Alright," she agreed. "What do you want me to do?"

May jerked her head towards the sink. "First, go wash your hands. We don't want to get vampire germs all intermixed in the batter. Don't know what might happen."

Penny laughed again, her cheeks flushing. "May!"

After she washed her hands, her aunt started to show her what they were going to do. She was a patient teacher, letting Penny process what she was saying and ask her questions when need be.

"Wait, isn't Irish cream alcoholic?"

"It is, but most of the alcohol evaporates while it's baking. For the part of it that doesn't...it probably wouldn't be recommended for kids to eat now, but do you think people cared about that in the '60s and '70s? They were still letting people use lead-based paint then!"

Penny did her fair share of putting in the ingredients. May did most of the grunt work, all the while the music continued to play in the background. At one point, May let out a laugh of her own because of this. "What's up with the lyrics to this song?"

Penny was unsuccessful in hiding her grin. "It's Piledriver Waltz by Arctic Monkeys," she explained, "they're kind of known for weird lyrics like this."

"It sounds like they're trying to do a spinoff of the '50s or '60s."

"Oh, their next album is even worse with that..."

Although it was a relatively short song, she was able to hum along to the tune. She even sung the lyrics, "I heard the news that you're planning to shoot me out of a cannon," under her breath, which made May roll her eyes as she finished off the verse with, "I heard the piledriver waltz, it woke me up this morning..."

When they were done with the cake batter, she helped May pour it out into the six cake pans necessary – they were making three two-tiered cakes. Only four of the pans were able to go in at the same time, so they put them in for the thirty-five to forty-minute period it would take them to bake. Then May informed her that they were going to make the Irish cream sauce that they were going to soak the cakes with before they put them in the freezer for two hours; while they were in there, they were then going to make the frostings. There were two different types, chocolate and white chocolate, which would be supplemented with a caramel drizzle on top.

It was a lot of work – like, a lot of work – but strangely...Penny was looking forwards to it. It was soothing, in a way. Even after her emergency meeting with Anne on Monday, she still had all of this pent-up energy inside of her. All of her worries, her concerns...but when she was here with May, working on the cakes with her, she was too concentrated on learning to really think about them. And baking, presuming that everything turned out alright, like making her web fluid, presented an opportunity where she could control everything, as long as she followed the recipe. She wasn't helpless to the circumstances of her life, to Natasha and the others getting exposed to toxic gas thousands and thousands of miles away where she wasn't able to help them, to the inability to stop from killing people because of her twisted biology, to Skip...

When they were just about done with the Irish cream sauce, Penny heard the dinging of the elevator. She looked up from the bowl that May was whisking the hot Irish cream and chocolate chips together in. She only heard one heartbeat and pair of footsteps, and she immediately identified those as of her dad's: the former was always just a little too quick.

Tony appeared in the huge archway to the kitchen, looking mystified. And tired. And sad. Not for the first time since he and the others had gotten back from Argentina, Penny had to acknowledge that he looked like both of those two last things quite a bit, but now in the aftermath of that mission he looked them even more so. "What are you two doing?"

"What does it look like we're doing, Tony? We're baking."

Her dad made a noise in the back of his throat, running a hand over his face. "I can see that, I'm just...confused."

"At what?"

"That it's going well so far."

Penny stuck her tongue out at the "so far."

"Family recipe," May said airily, as if that explained everything. Although, with the context that Penny had, it kind of did. She looked over at Penny with a smile. "And I don't know, Tony. I'd say that your daughter is a pretty good cook. Certainly better than Harley."

Penny snickered. "He'd both hate and love that slander if he were here right now."

"He would, wouldn't he?" May agreed.

"Wait." Tony was bewildered. "What do you mean, 'good cook?'"

"She's following along with what I'm teaching her just fine." May bumped Penny's elbow with her own, as if to prove her point.

"She can't even eat food!"

Penny lifted a spoon they'd used earlier that May had had her wash off but leave out for later. "It's like Auguste Gusteau once said, 'Anyone can cook.'"

Her dad let out a long exhale, looking like he wanted to pinch the bridge of his nose. This was also the most animated she had seen him in a long, long time (really, ever since the Accords had been signed by all of the Avengers in May), so she wasn't going to complain about that. "You just quoted Ratatouille at me, didn't you?"

"Yes," she said cheekily.

"Alright, point taken." Then, his expression shifted as a gleam twinkled in his eyes. He smirked. "But you know, if you're going to learn how to cook, I may or may not teach you your grandmother Maria's lasagna recipe."

He said it like it was a bad thing, she thought, even though it wasn't. Well, in his defense, it wasn't like his attempt at teaching it to Harley had gone all that successful. Also in his defense, that had been because of Harley's cooking abilities, not his own. Penny loved her boyfriend very much, but he must've inherited all of the cooking genes from his father and not his mother, and it showed. She'd be laughing from that event up at the Compound earlier for years to come, she was sure.

But Penny didn't remark on all of these inner musings of hers. All she did was say simply, if not a little shyly, "I think I'd like that, Dad."

Since her first attempt at cooking since the spider bite had gone so well with May, as the cakes had come out perfect and Steve, Natasha, and Sam all loved them, the time that her dad taught her Nonna Maria's lasagna recipe occurred that weekend.

She called her dad's mom "Nonna," because as he'd explained to her, his mother's father had been Italian, as in he'd come here through Ellis Island and everything. He'd been wealthy but had also desired to do something "meaningful"with his life, so he'd established a Christmas tree farm, of all things, in upstate New York. He'd married and had Maria later in life, like Howard, so he'd died of old age when her dad had been eight.

Harley watched as she helped her dad in the kitchen of the penthouse from his seat at the bar counter, looking disgruntled as he propped his cheek against his hand and his elbow against the bar. "You know, this isn't fair," he complained lightly. "How are you able to cook better than I can when you can't even eat food?"

"The bar is ground-level for that. Deal with it," Penny said.

Tony chuckled. "She's got you there, kid."

Harley sighed. "Yeah, I know."

Don't let him fool you. It didn't really bother him all that much. Cooking wasn't really something he was all that interested in anyways.

(She knew. She'd asked and specifically told him not to lie. His heartbeat had been sure and steady as he'd replied to her that it was fine, that he didn't care, and that he was just happy that she had another hobby she was interested in and maybe Tony would finally stop bringing up the previous lasagna incident. They both knew that that last one wasn't happening anytime soon, though, no matter if Penny excelled at making the lasagna or not.)

Her nonna's recipe was a little bit different than it had been originally, as when her father had brought it over with him from Italy, it'd had beef and pork in it. But, although Howard had been an atheist, he'd been raised Jewish, and so Maria had switched over to all-beef for the meat sauce. If Penny had still been able to eat food, she wouldn't have minded this: she and her mom hadn't eaten pork, either, because Richard had been Jewish. It was a habit they'd kept after he'd died, even though her mom had been agnostic.

They made the noodles from scratch and by hand. Her dad kneaded the dough himself, not quite trusting her super strength from causing something to go wrong with it, which...was perhaps a valid point. As they worked, literal years seemed to be wiped off of his face, his wrinkles smoothing out, the harsh lines becoming softer.

Penny wondered what it would have been like if they'd known each other from the beginning, if her mom had told him the truth and the two of them had agreed to some sort of split-custody. Even with his past problems before he'd been kidnapped in Afghanistan, with how good of a father he was to her now (the best kind of father), she didn't think they would've been a problem. He probably would've gotten sober long before the cave. Maybe he would've taught her this lasagna recipe long before now, back when she would've had a chance to taste it. Maybe he would've taken her into the lab as soon as he could've to show her how to use everything – with proper safety protocols, naturally.

Maybe she could've had three parents at one time instead of just one after Richard had died, because maybe in that alternate reality, he wouldn't have died at all.

She didn't voice these musings of hers out loud. There was no point. She couldn't change the past (of their reality, if the theory of alternate universes Vision had talked about before was to be believed), and nor could anyone else.

She did have something that she wanted to ask her dad, though, while they were here.

"Dad?"

"Yeah, Pen?" Her dad wasn't looking at her, too busy with laying the initial layer of noodles down onto the first tray. They were making three trays of lasagna. She'd explain why later.

Penny bit her lip. She glanced over at Harley, who was looking back at her. He knew what question she wanted to ask; they'd talked about it before. He gave her a small, one-shoulder shrug.

Well, here goes nothing.

"Are Matt and Natasha ever going to get together?"

Her dad almost dropped the noodle that he was holding, which probably would've ruined it, because he would've tried to catch it if it had, thus tearing it. And yeah, sure, they'd made extras just in case of that, but it was the principle of the thing.

As it was, her dad studied her face, momentarily pausing in his work. "What makes you say that?"

Penny had to stop herself from scoffing. "You mean, besides the way that he was at her bedside just as much as I was over the past week?" she asked instead. Her dad winced at that, because yeah, obviously her point had been taken. "How they interact with each other and move around each other...I didn't pick up on it for a while," she admitted. "But it seems kind of obvious now."

Her dad let out a low chuckle, which confused her. It seemed to confuse Harley, too, judging by his reaction. "Yeah, I suppose it does," Tony said. "But sometimes things aren't that simple, Pen."

Penny tilted her head. "Why not?"

She knew that romance wasn't always that easy in the real world, not like it was with her and Harley...though, to be fair, they'd had their issues too. There were plenty of cases out there of what all those romance movies Wanda had taken to enjoying recently referring to as "right person, wrong time," or people realizing after years of being together that they didn't work together as a couple anymore. That latter one was especially relevant: not only were divorce reasons so high in the country right now, but also an example of it could be found in Harley's parents...kind of. Ish. Harley's mother hadn't realized that there were any relationship problems at all going on between her and his father until his father had left one day for "lottery tickets" and never come back.

But...Matt and Natasha just seemed like they'd be so good together. They were like her honorary uncle and aunt. They'd committed to helping her together before they'd realized that she was Penny Parker, Tony's missing daughter, back when they'd thought that she was just Spider-Woman and Lolita, and they'd done it in a way that almost went deeper than teammates.

True, perhaps she wouldn't have this opinion if she'd been able to meet Bruce Banner, since he and Nat had had something going on between them of sorts before he'd disappeared in the wake of Ultron. But she hadn't, so it was a moot point.

(Also, it was a rather moot point, but Matt and Natasha weren't the only couple she thought would be good together on the team. Moot, because with the passage of time since May, she had to acknowledge it was becoming less and less likely that that would ever happen again.)

"A variety of reasons," her dad said. "Sometimes, people want to get together, but they're scared of things changing if they do – they don't want things to be messed up. "Other times, it's because of other factors, like...trust."

"...Trust?" What did that have to do with Matt and Natasha? In some respects, they seemed to trust each other more than –

Oh.

Oh.

"I see," she hummed.

Her dad huffed amusedly. "No, you don't, but that's okay. You're still young, that's not your fault."

Now, she did scoff. "Okay, Cat Stevens."

"I know I'm raising you right if you know who that is," he replied. He nodded then, as he'd finished getting the first layer of noodles laid out on all three of the pans. "Alright, now it's time for us to do the first layer of filling. Which do we do first: ricotta with basil or the sauce with the ground beef and the shredded zucchini?"

"Um..." She had to look down at the notecard, which she was sure was intentional. Nice change of subject, Dad. "The sauce?"

"You would be correct. Now, this part you're gonna help me with again. You're also gonna layer the noodles on top of it."

She did as he instructed. There were equal layers of meat and ricotta filling in the lasagna by the time that they were done. She and Tony sprinkled a mixture of parmesan, asiago, and mozzarella cheeses on top of the last layer noodles, which was also topped with some of the sauce that had been set aside before the rest of it had been mixed in with the ground beef and zucchini. Then they put all three pans into the oven for about forty-five minutes with foil on top. The last five minutes of baking, they would take off the foil.

"You did a good job, kiddo."

Penny beamed at the praise. "Really?"

"Yep." Her dad popped the "p" in the word, as he often did. "Everybody will be very impressed, I assure you."

Yes, you read that right. That was why they'd been making three trays of lasagna: because tonight, they were making dinner for all of the Avengers – even Rhodey and Hill were coming – to celebrate how Steve, Natasha, and Sam had all finally been released from MedBay. Natasha and Sam were still under rest orders, so no training or anything like that until Dr. Cho cleared them, but at least they weren't stuck in the MedBay hospital rooms anymore.

And it totally hadn't been nerve-wracking, the idea of making a meal for everybody even though she knew the team wouldn't care about having to order takeout in the end if things didn't turn out well, up until she'd actually started cooking dinner with her dad. No siree.

"But," her dad pressed on, "you do know what's next, right?"

She tried to remember. "...The salad?"

"Yes," Tony confirmed. Then he tossed his head towards Harley. "And I don't care how bad at cooking you are, making a salad technically isn't 'cooking,' so this is something that you can do."

"Yeah, yeah," Harley said, even as he slid out of his seat not entirely unlike a liquid.

They put Harley on the duty of halving the cherry tomatoes and slicing the pepperoncini peppers, since that wasn't something that he could screw up too badly. Penny worked on cutting the heads of lettuce and radicchio as well as the red onions after her dad showed her how, while he worked on the lemon vinaigrette. They combined all of these ingredients together along with some mozzarella pearls and roasted chickpeas, the last ingredient for the crunch in lieu of croutons. Harley was then booted back to the bar counter as she and her dad worked on the cheesy garlic bread, which was the other side they'd agreed upon to go with the main course. Harley took a picture of her chopping up garlic for the shits and giggles, which resulted in him getting a picture where she was half-glaring at him, half-smiling, because she could admit that she would've done the same thing if she was in his shoes.

When everything was ready, the lasagna and cheesy garlic bread having come out of the oven, Pietro, Wanda, and Vision were called up to help take everything downstairs. "Man, this all looks and smells delicious," the speedster said.

"No taste-testing until you get your own plate," Tony warned him. "And Vision, no phasing through matter with the food, please."

Wanda smiled. She clearly found those two admonishments funny. "Thank you for making dinner, Tony, Penny," she spoke, holding the giant bowl of salad in her hands.

"Oh – no problem," Penny said, grabbing two cartons of blood substitute out of the pantry. Her thermos was already wedged between her torso and arm.

"Do we have everything?" her dad asked, acting like they couldn't just come back up here and get what they needed if they didn't. Seeing that they did, he answered his own question with, "Alright, let's go."

Word Count: 4,563

Next Chapter Title: save me a place