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: Didn't necessarily decide to change the chapter title, more so decided that this chapter's plot worked better here than where I was going to put it originally. We'll go back to the chapter that I meant to be after chapter 8 originally next chapter. :)

Chapter title comes from Southern Nights by Glen Campbell.

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

~TGWSI/Selene Borealis


~primis, omega, superhero, genius~

~no questions asked~

~chapter 9: southern nights~


" – There's nothing more you can do! He's my responsibility!"

"Again, he's my – !"

Penny jolted awake.

That was all that she did. She didn't sit up gasping for air like she had even several months ago, just jumped as she hugged the pillow her head was on even tighter in her arms. Her eyes wide open, she took in the familiar surroundings of her bedroom on her floor, noting the sun shining in through the windows, the time on her alarm clock – seven-thirty in the morning, and...the empty expanse of bed right next to her.

That...hadn't happened in a while.

The nightmare had. A lot of things had changed in the past five months or so, but that was not one of them. The presence of her soulmates when she was sleeping made it much less likely for the familiar dream to happen, as the average had gone down from a minimum of two times per night to a little less than once a week. But, that meant that it still happened.

Which was another plus for her soulmates spending the night with her: they were almost always there to help her through it, whether that meant waking her up before the nightmare was even finished or holding her hair back for her as she threw up. The latter aspect had also been occurring less as per late, more like somewhere between once every month to once every other month. Six weeks, then? Whatever was halfway between four and eight, if you wanted to get real technical about it.

She didn't have a soulmate in her bed right now, however.

Groaning, Penny rolled over onto her back and looked up at the ceiling. She fisted a hand through her curls. "JARVIS..." she started to say, only to yawn. She tried again: "JARVIS, where's Steve?"

If she remembered correctly, he was the only one who had come to bed with her last night. Harley had wanted to stay on his floor with Bucky, Clint and Natasha had been doing whatever, and Tony...

Guilt churned in her stomach. Tony.

"Captain Rogers is out for his morning run, Miss," JARVIS reported. "He will be back shortly."

Penny stilled. "What? Already?" His healing factor wasn't nearly as good as hers and Harley's, and he'd only been released from the hospital yesterday. He needed rest.

"Captain Rogers seemed unusually agitated when he woke up this morning, Miss. I think he needed to let off some steam."

She wasn't going to bother to try to argue with hm on that, it would be fruitless when it was Steve who she needed to talk about that with. "Is he coming back?"

"I believe that he is planning on having breakfast with Mr. Keener and Sergeant Barnes, but I am sure that they would be happy for you to join them, if you wish."

She nodded absentmindedly, processing the information. There was something more pressing on her mind. "And Tony?"

JARVIS hesitated. But before she could ask again, he said, "I think he would still prefer to be alone, Miss."

"I should have figured that," she muttered. Louder, "Thank you, JARVIS."

He didn't reply to her, but that wasn't anything too unusual.

In the ensuing silence, she brought her hands to her face and dug the heels of her palms into her eyes.

Yesterday, she, Steve, and Harley had gone down to MedBay after Bruce and Dr. Chung had concluded their meeting. Bucky had been sitting on the bed in the room they'd put him in. His back had been facing them as he'd looked out at the city through the floor-to-ceiling windows. His hands had been clenching the mattress of the hospital bed, but not right enough that he would've ripped the fabric and stuffing.

He'd heard them walking into the room, as the door had ben open so that one of the nurses could come in quickly if need be. He'd turned the upper half of his body halfway to face them. His grey eyes had seemed...lighter, a contrary emotion to everything he had been told about how thoroughly HYDRA had wrecked his mind and his body over the past several decades.

"Steve," he'd said. "Омега."

"And don't forget about me," Harley had said cheerfully.

"Hey, Buck," Steve had greeted him, smiling tiredly.

They'd all sat down, as Steve had pulled up two chairs so that they were facing Bucky and Harley had chosen the one in the left corner of the bed, on the same side as theirs. "You wanted to talk with me?" Penny had asked. She'd fidgeted with her fingers; she hadn't been nervous or scared of him, it was just –

Bucky had watched her with rapt eyes, but he ultimately hadn't commented on that. "I'm sorry," he'd spoken instead. It had sounded like it'd taken him quite a bit of effort to manage it in English, but he had.

Penny had been baffled. "What on Earth do you have to apologize for?"

"For hurting you all," he'd stated simply. "For...killing Stark's parents. He...is angry, isn't he?"

"That's not on you to worry about, Buck," Steve had interrupted him.

Bucky had pressed on anyways. "Stark doesn't want me here, does he?"

"He'll come around," Penny had said. She'd made sure to come across as a lot more confident about that than she actually felt. "He...Tony's a reasonable person."

Harley had snickered from the background.

She'd craned her neck to glower at him, then refocused on Bucky. "He is," she'd repeated. "But you don't need to worry about him right now. You should be focusing on getting better – and you will." He'd looked like he'd been doubting the veracity of that. "You will."

Bucky had seemed to ponder that. Then, his chest had rumbled, which had surprised her, but not in a bad way. Not at all – she just hadn't ben expecting him to make the sound so soon. "Thank you, Омега," he'd whispered, his voice ragged.

She'd left not long after that, because she'd wanted to check up on Tony. Except, when she'd asked for him again...JARVIS had given to her a similar response as the one he had just given her and the one when she'd asked the first time yesterday. And he'd kept on giving her that response, over and over again.

She'd failed Tony yesterday. That much was obvious to her the more and more she'd been thinking about it. She shouldn't have – she shouldn't have rushed to Bucky's defense like that. It was true, it wasn't his fault that he had killed Howard and Maria Stark, but she should've given Tony more than a few seconds to handle the initial information. She shouldn't have overloaded him. And really, she should've omega'ed up and told him it all before they'd even arrived at the Tower, if she really wanted to be honest with herself...

Yet, she couldn't change the past and do it all over. What was done was, unfortunately, done.

Now, she had to live with the consequences and try to work for a better future.

Standing up from her bed, she went into her bathroom and went through the motions of taking a quick shower. Once the shower was complete, she pulled her damp hair up into a ponytail with one of her signature scrunchies before she exited her bedroom, heading for the kitchen. The TV was turned on in her journey to her destination, as she grabbed the remote off of the coffee table and pressed the correct button. CNN was the station that she'd had it on to last, which must've been last night. She barely looked at the headlines, just muted the channel because she didn't feel like listening to their spiel before she finished walking across her apartment and started to get her coffee going.

It was only when she finished making her coffee and took a sip of it that she looked at the TV again, somewhat more interested now in the news than she had been minutes prior –

– Which resulted in her almost spitting out her coffee at the headline that she saw: IRON LAD'S IDENTITY TO BE REVEALED DURING TODAY'S AVENGERS PRESS CONFERENCE AT 1 PM.

"JARVIS?" Penny asked faintly. "What's that about?"

"Mr. Keener decided that, now that HYDRA has been revealed, there is no longer as much of a necessity in hiding his identity as there had been before. Moreover, he thought that this would be a diversion from the initial media response to HYDRA's continued existence, which has been mostly negative towards the government and the Avengers, the information that is being discovered because of the data dump, and Sergeant Barnes' status as a prisoner of war and involuntary agent for HYDRA."

Well, JARVIS seemed to be fairly understanding of Bucky's circumstances, if nothing else.

She set down her coffee mug before she ended up spilling it. Her hands were shaking. "And he didn't – he didn't think to tell me that he was planning on doing this?"

"I suspect that Mr. Keener wanted to make sure that he couldn't talk himself out of this. It was a heat of the moment decision."

...That sort of made sense.

She had a lot of things that she wanted to say about it (none of them against Harley, don't worry, it was more of how she just wanted to make sure that he was absolutely certain in doing this. There would be no going back from the decision to thrust his private identity in the limelight like there had been for her), but she stuck to just one: "Is he planning on telling his mom and sister before the big reveal?"

"He is planning on calling them around ten o'clock, yes."

"And what about the others? Who else is attending this press conference?"

"Just Captain Rogers, Ms. Romanoff, and Mr. Barton."

"Not Bruce or Tony?"

"Dr. Banner is busy, and Boss declined."

She chewed her bottom lip thoughtfully. "Is Tony...going to be okay, JAJR?"

He took some time once more before answering. "Mr. Barton's advice is perhaps the most sound. If Boss has not gotten any sleep in another thirty-six hours and hasn't seen you, I will allow you access to his lab, regardless of if he wants me to or not."

...So he wasn't sleeping.

Great.

"That's..." Her throat tightened. "That's not necessary. I don't want to make things worse than they already are."

"I do not think that this course would make that likely."

"Hmm. I'll think about it, then," she compromised.

Penny watched the news for a bit longer, picking her mug of coffee back up. The anchor – along with a panel of "experts," of course – was talking about who he and they thought Iron Lad was and various other aspects about this whole HYDRA shebang. From what she could tell, their theories for Iron Lad's identity ranged from a random nobody (which was technically correct), to a Stark Industries employee or an apprentice of Tony (regardless of how he had said during previous press conferences and interviews that he'd had no idea who Harley was before he'd fought with them to stop the killer robots), to...wait for it...him being Tony's son.

Against her luck, she was sipping again at her coffee when this was brought up. She wasn't able to stop herself this time from spitting out her coffee: it went everywhere, much to her chagrin. She grimaced. "Jeez, where do they get these people?"

JARVIS didn't respond to that, either. He'd gotten better at ignoring her rhetorical questions.

She ripped off some paper towels from the roll to clean up her mess. At eight thirty, when JARVIS announced to her that Steve had gotten back from his morning run and would be showering before he went up to Harley and Bucky's floor, she headed over to the elevator herself. She could help Harley work on breakfast for them. Clint and Natasha, she was sure, would be fine eating with just Bruce, or by themselves. "Floor ninety-one, please, JAR."

"My pleasure, Miss."


"...I can't do this."

"Harley, you want to do this," Penny said.

"I know!" he grumbled. He was pacing back and forth in the space between his coffee table and TV, his grip on his phone simultaneously so tight and not tight enough from how he was restraining himself from breaking it due to his super strength that his knuckles were white. "But I can't. How am I gonna tell my ma that I let her...? How is she ever going to...?" He abruptly threw his phone towards his couch, where it landed in between Penny and Nat, before he buried his face into his hands. "Nope, I can't do this. No way in hell."

"Do I need to call her for you?" Natasha asked dryly.

In the blink of an eye, Harley lurched forwards, nearly tripping over himself in the process, and snatched the phone back up into his hands, away from where she could've grabbed it. "Nuh-uh! You're not doing it, either!"

Harley had still been confident in his decision to do this at the breakfast she and him had had with Bucky and Steve. The two super soldiers and best friends had gone down to MedBay afterwards for Bucky's first physical therapy session, and Clint and Natasha had come up for moral support for Harley a little while later. Bucky's therapy would be over with by the time that the press conference would be going on, which had made Penny decide that she would stay up here with him for moral support. She'd thought about going out on patrol during the press conference to make it look less suspicious that Spider-Woman wasn't there, her stance on her identity notwithstanding. Since Bruce and Tony weren't going to be there either, though, it didn't seem as much of a pressing matter.

But, none of that was neither here nor there right now.

After Steve and Bucky had left, Harley's confidence had quickly and steadily diminished as the time that he wanted to call his mother at got closer and closer. It was rather uncharacteristic of him, but Penny understood where he was coming from.

Still...

"They're your mom and sister, Harley," she said. "You don't want them to find out at the same time the entire world does."

"I could just not tell the world my identity at all," he snarled. "I'm not even sure why I decided to in the first place."

"You know why," Natasha deadpanned.

Penny, meanwhile, winced. "I mean, sure, but – "

"Then it's settled!" Harley stopped pacing. "I'm not going to – gah!"

As Harley had been speaking, Clint had gotten up from where he'd been sitting on the other side of Penny and pulled him from the back by grabbing a fistful of the Linkin Park band t-shirt that he was wearing. Harley was still dressed in his pajamas – not like Penny was one to talk.

"You're going to tell her," Clint said, turning him around so that they were staring at each other. His voice was almost rumbling in his chest, just like that day when he'd helped Penny down from her panic attack and then they'd proceeded to prank Steve. "You know that it's the right thing to do."

"We're not going to let you get cold feet," Natasha agreed.

Harley whirled around at her. "And what are you going to do about it?"

She jutted out her chin. "Do you really want to know?"

Clint watched them, a smirk starting to twitch at his lips. "And that's your second reason right there for why you're doing it: I wouldn't test her, Harls," he concurred.

Harley's shoulders slumped. "What if they don't forgive me, though?" he whispered. "What if they don't want anythin' to do with me anymore when they find out what I let HYDRA do to me? What I did afterwards, even if it was to stopHYDRA?"

Déjà vu, Penny thought.

See, look, she'd be honest here: she understood where Harley was coming from because she'd thought a few times before about how undoing Tao's spell might have gone if it would have been possible to undo it, especially in those first few months after it and Harley's death when she'd had no one, no one at all. She'd made the right decision, she'd never really doubted that and still didn't, but thinking about her friends...

MJ, Gwen, and Matt all would've been pissed at her if the spell had been undone. Wade probably would've been understanding. Fury's reaction probably would've been the same as it had been when she'd told him what had happened back in Brooklyn, albeit with a slightly more paternal tone because he would've remembered being her godfather.

But they all would've forgiven her in the end, regardless of how they would've felt at first.

She didn't doubt that also would be true for Harley's mom and sister. In fact, Penny told him as much: "They'll forgive you, Harley. But, even if they don't, we'll be here for you, no matter what."

She was the deciding vote; naturally, it came with the territory.

"Fine," Harley snapped. He let Clint lead him back to his "L"-shaped couch and set him down in between him and Penny. Then, the theta shuddered in a deep breath and unlocked his phone. Because he'd locked it, he had to put in his mom's number again.

He gazed at the screen for a hot second, unblinking, before he pressed the "call" button and brought the phone to his ear.

Penny was abruptly reminded of how he and Clint were the only ones of them with living and available family left. Natasha did have living family left in her adoptive father and sister, it just wasn't likely that she would ever reunite with them. Tony did have Rhodey as his honorary brother, but it wasn't quite the same with them.

But while Clint's sister did know that he had met his soulmate and was quite happy for them, she didn't know any of the details outside of that and had her own husband and kids to worry about and take care of in Iowa. The two (living) Barton siblings lived entirely different lives.

The phone rang three times. Harley's face became more and more pained the longer that it went on.

Then, however:

"Hello?" a woman's voice asked from the other side. She sounded young. She was young: Harley's mom had had him when she'd been eighteen, making her forty now. She was four years younger than Tony.

Which, okay, that had the potential to make things more complicated than Penny had initially thought, given all those theories CNN had been spewing. His mom might actually think before they explained everything in-depth to her that her son had that kind of kink or something.

That was definitely a thought for later.

Harley's expression crumpled at just the sound of his mom's voice. He sniffled, wiping at his nose. "Hello. Is this Mrs. Keener?" he croaked out.

"This is she."

"Um, ma'am...can I talk to you for a moment about your son? Harley Keener?"

Natasha developed a look that could only be described as "what the fuck are you thinking?" Clint literally face-palmed. Penny knew she wasn't much better.

"No."

Harley froze. "Um...what?"

"If you're about to tell me that my son is dead, who – whoever the hell you are, I don't want to hear it," Evelyn Keener snapped. "Unless you have proof, I don't want to hear another word that comes out of your mouth! Yes, I know that my son is most likely...dead, but until there's absolute and God-damned certain proof, I will cling to my hope as long as there's still life in my breast, do you hear me?"

Penny saw Clint hide his returning smirk out of the corner of her eye. Guess that answered the question of where Harley had gotten his stubbornness from.

Harley wiped at his nose again. "Oh God," he whimpered. "Ma, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

That brought his mouther up short. "What?"

"It's me, Ma," Harley said. "It's Harley. Your son. I thought I – I was gonna break the news to you gently that I'm still alive, but – "

All at once, the line clicked.

The phone dropped from Harley's hand. He stared down at it, mystified.

Penny, Natasha, and Clint all did the same. Penny thought that her mouth was even open.

Had his mom seriously just – ?

Before she finished the thought, his phone started ringing again. The phone number on the screen was the one that she recognized as his mom's. Harley grabbed his phone without any hesitation, accepting the call and bringing it back to his ear. "Mom?"

"Give me some proof that it's you," she demanded.

"What?"

She repeated her statement.

He floundered for words. "Um...ya named me Harley James Keener. I was born on July 23rd, 1992. Abigail came ten years later. I got diagnosed with cancer when I was twelve, diagnosed with stage II osteosarcoma in my right leg. Got it amputated, but it didn't matter. It quickly spread to my lungs. Spent years fightin' it. When the treatment started to make me feel really bad, Abigail and I used to cuddle on the couch and watch that stupid Teen Wolf show and – "

"Oh my God!" his mom cried out. The last detail, Penny knew, was what had done it for her. Everything else could've been found out with enough research, if Harley hadn't erased almost all of the government and medical files on his existence. "It's you! It's really you!"

Harley grinned brokenly. "Yeah, Mom, it's me. Shit!" he winced as there was a crashing sound from the other side. "Don't fall!"

"I just – I had to sit down," was the response. "That was the sound of somethin' fallin' off the table. It's fine. Everything's fine. Oh, I wish Abigail was here right now. It's a s – school day. She's at school." It was obvious that his mom was beginning to cry, just like him. "Oh, Harley, my baby..."

Penny didn't actually think that was a question, yet nevertheless Harley treated it like it was. "Yeah, Ma?"

And that –

That just seemed to ignite something in his mother. Just as soon as her weeping had come, it was gone. "Harley James Keener, where the hell have you been?" was her new demand. "It's been almost two years since you left! Not only that, but you let me and your sister believe that you were dead!"

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Why? Why did you do that?"

Harley glanced over at Penny. She nodded encouragingly.

A ghost of a smile appeared on his face. "It's...kind of a long story. Longer than I might have time to tell you."

"Well, I've got all day. Today's my day off at the diner."

"I know it is," he said. "It all begins, I guess, with this advertisement I saw online about this study that was lookin' for volunteers. They were offering money, a lot of money, and I thought..."

True to form, it took Harley a long time to get through his story, even though he ended up glossing over a lot of things to save time and spare his mother from knowing just how much he had gone through. She was strangely – from what Harley had told them all about her – silent through most of it, just listening to him explain how he'd allowed himself to be experimented on, found out that the people who were experimenting on him were working for HYDRA, and etcetera.

She did speak up right before he got to the part about him making his suit, though. "That Iron Lad guy that showed up earlier this year and they've been talking about him revealing his identity on the news today. That's you, ain't it?"

"Yeah..."

His mother sighed. Loudly. "Harley..."

"I had to do something," he said obstinately. "Fightin' with just my powers – that would have revealed my identity to them too easily. I needed something better. And you know I've always liked Iron Man – it wasn't hard for me to figure out the arc reactor technology once I put my mind to it."

"But all that danger you put yourself through, Harley! And especially in the past week..."

"It was necessary."

"This wasn't your battle to fight, Harley."

"No, it was," he disagreed. "It really was."

Penny was almost nervous that they would end up coming to a fight over that, but they didn't. His mom didn't dare to ask if the only reason why he was calling now was because he'd decided to reveal his identity to the world. Maybe she sensed that he still he more to tell. He plowed on in his story, explaining this and that, until finally...

Harley glanced back over at Penny. He didn't need to say the words: his eyes were asking permission all on their own.

Biting her lip, she nodded.

"There's one more thing I gotta tell you, Ma." He paused. "But you've gotta swear that you won't tell anybody about it, maybe not even Abigail if you don' think that she can keep it a secret."

"What? Harley, I ain't going to – "

"Please, Ma. Just trust me. Ya know I wouldn't be asking you to do this if it wasn't deadly important."

His mother went quiet for several, long seconds.

"...Fine, Harley. I promise I won't tell anybody, not even your sister, if it really is that important."

"It is. I, um, scent-matched. I met my soulmate."

"What?" his mother gasped. Harley flinched back, but he needn't have worried. "Oh, Harley, I'm so happy for you! What's their name?"

"Her," Harley corrected. "Her name is Penny."

"Does she have any other soulmates? Or do you think you're the primis?"

"No, she's the primis. She has five others."

"Five?" His mom sounded like she was going to have a heart attack. It made Penny smile. "That's a – are they all registered? I'm sure it would've been on the news – "

"No, none of us are registered yet. I guess you could say for security reasons. It's, uh, another long story, and not mine to tell."

"Is she nice?"

"Very nice."

"Are you happy?"

That was perhaps the most important question of them all.

"Very happy," Harley said.

"Then that's all that matters." Mrs. Keener sniffled. "All I ever wanted was to see you happy. All the years you were sick, and then when you left, that's all I wanted. I'm – I'm not going to lie to you, this is a lot for me."

"I mean, it's been a lot for me too."

Natasha snorted.

"But I'm happy for you," Harley's mother reiterated. "And I love you so, so much. And you have to promise me that you'll come home soon. I have to see you face-to-face. Abigail has to see you face-to-face. She's been so distraught ever since you went...and so determined that you've been alive. She needs to see you."

Harley swallowed thickly. "Yeah, she does. But things are gonna get even more hectic up here than they already are."

His mother chuckled weakly. "I imagine. You probably have to hang up now, don't ya? It's a quarter till noon."

"I can talk for a bit longer," he protested.

Natasha shook her head at him. He really couldn't. He still needed to get a shower and get dressed, and they still needed to meet up with Steve to go over what they were going to say at the press conference at one.

"It's alright, I know that you have to go. We can talk later."

"I...I love you, Mom."

"I love you too, Harley. I love you so much."

They said their goodbyes, and then Harley hung up the phone. He brought it back down t his lap. Tears were streaming down his face.

"There, that wasn't that bad, was it?" Clint asked.

"No, it wasn't," Harley spoke slowly. He smiled. "It was perfect."


Word Count: 4,695

Next Chapter Title: big love