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Origins, Odyssey, and Outcomes

Summary:

When Pepper met Penny Parker, she had no idea where it would lead, but neither she nor Tony ever regretted it.

A collection of moments from Penny entering their lives to finally getting the news they'd all been waiting for.

 

Last in the Silent Screams and Surprising Saviours series.

Notes:

So, good news and bad news: Bad news, this is the last thing I'm posting in this fic, and after this it's over :-( Good news, it's 16k long, has multiple parts and, to mark the ending, I'm going to post all the parts on consecutive days.

Also, for anyone (probably most of the population!!) who doesn't know, Odyssey means journey. I'm slightly scraping the barrel for alliterating titles!!!

Chapter 1

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Pepper would be the first to admit that she’d messed up the first time she met Penny Parker. She’d walked in braced to deal with Tony’s latest and her first thought on discovering Penny there had been irritated confirmation that Tony had kidnapped an intern. Her second thought, on discovering which intern, had been that this was very bad publicity. It had startled Pepper a little, when Penny called her on it, and triggered a sharp prickle of shame. It was followed by distinct surprise and an odd sense of awe when Penny clearly doesn’t hold it against her. It was the first time Penny surprised her, but it was far from the last.

 

Tony asked Penny to be his personal intern, and she sorted out the paperwork for it, but she hadn’t been sure Tony wouldn’t come to regret it. She’d suggested he take an interest in the intern program because she’d thought it would be good for him, but she hadn’t expected him to take that much of an interest. He would keep Penny as his personal intern for the course of the intern program of course, he wouldn’t disappoint the kid, but she figured he’d grow bored or frustrated with her after a couple of sessions. It was a pattern she’d seen many times with SI’s top scientists, and she doubted a 14 year old intern would fare any better. Bruce had kept up, and been good for Tony, but Bruce was gone, and with no imminent likelihood of returning, and Tony was struggling without him.

 

But then Tony came up from his lab the next day talking about how Penny had helped him rebuild a car engine design, and how the formula she’d reverse engineered out of Spider Woman’s webs was incredible and his face had been lit up and his body language animated, and she’d had the first inkling that this was going to be different.

 

By a week later she was absolutely certain that this time was different. For the first time since Bruce went missing someone else’s name came up in every other conversation about his work. By two weeks later she had lost track of the amount of times Tony had said something along the lines of ‘I showed Penny this today’ or ‘Penny and I worked on that today’ or ‘She’s a natural, even I didn’t pick up that so quickly’. And more than his words, Penny’s influence on Tony was visible in a dozen other ways.

 

On internship days Tony came out of his lab at regular hours, always by 7.30pm, looking relaxed and satisfied rather than like at least half his head was still in the lab. There was a particular smile on his face when he woke up on internship days. The list of complaints about Tony breezing onto an R&D floor and hounding scientists had fallen to almost none. The problems from R&D that made it onto her desk because Tony had been ignoring them halve. Even with Bruce that hadn’t happened. Tony not only had someone to bounce ideas off, but he also had someone to teach. It made helping with the more boring R&D stuff interesting for him, and it was giving him a sense of deep satisfaction Pepper hadn’t seen him have for a long, long time, if ever. The internship was supposed to be for six months. Pepper set up three separate reminders to make sure Penny’s internship was extended at least two months before it was due to run out. She’d extend the entire internship program if necessary.

 

Around week two she started dropping in on the internship sessions whenever possible, taking paperwork to the lab for Tony to sign even when the backlog hadn’t reached critical stage yet. Penny was important to Tony, more important than she suspected Tony himself realised, and she wanted to check in with them herself. Tony almost certainly knew what she was doing, but he didn’t call her on it. Penny signed little to her when she dropped in, but tended to watch her with slightly wide eyes for a moment before she went back to whatever she was working on. It was notable however that while she looked deeply absorbed in what she was doing, she never looked overwhelmed or frustrated, and Tony never looked bored. Even more impressively, Tony looked completely relaxed as Penny moved around his lab, a space he won’t even let most of the Avengers in. Pepper hung around for a few minutes one internship session, watching them work together, building some kind of hologram machine. Several times Penny built a new component for Tony before he could ask for it, and several times Pepper saw Tony look at a piece hovering in the air but leave it there, smiling to himself when Penny put it into place a minute later. Neither talked much, either aloud or in sign, but they communicated with glances and gestures, asking each other to have a look at something and keeping an eye on what the other was doing. Both had clearly forgotten she was there, and she slipped out quietly, musing that mentoring suited Tony but a little worried that he might be a little too attached. The only people she’d seen Tony so relaxed around were herself, Rhodey, Happy, and sometimes the other Avengers.

 

That worry only grew when Tony came up from his lab one day towards the end of March half-smiling and half-frowning, talking about how ‘the kid’ had serious bruising on her head and didn’t seem to see any issue in not telling her parents. It was surprisingly open for Tony, who usually pretended not to be worried about anything and anyone. She told him as gently as she could that Penny was living in foster care, and might not be that close to her guardians. The look on Tony’s face made it clear that Tony was already too invested.

 

By a week later Pepper was growing increasingly aware that she was also worryingly invested in a girl who was nominally just an employee. It wasn’t just Tony’s attachment to Penny anymore, or how she was giving Tony a sense of fulfilment he deeply needed, it was Penny herself. She may not have shared more than a handful of sentences with Penny herself, but she’s heard a huge amount about her from Tony. She knows that her best friend’s name is Ned, and that they’ve been best friends since first grade, and that they’re both obsessed with Star Wars. She knows Penny’s favourite teacher is a math teacher she is fairly sure is turning a blind eye to her sleeping in class. She knows that Penny’s favourite place to eat in the world is Mr Delmar’s sandwich shop, but she doesn’t often have the spare change to go. She knows that Penny is most likely a genius but is quiet and never draws attention to that fact, especially at school. She knows that Penny instinctively goes out of her way to be helpful, but never asks for help herself, and is surprised when it is offered anyway. She knows Penny doesn’t like loud music but loves pizza, and what clubs she’s in at school and a dozen other little details.

 

And she knows more worrying things too. She knows that since the day Penny came in with bruising on her head Tony’s noticed more bruises, on her arms and once on her collarbone. She knows Penny is always shivering, and never turns down a meal, and only talks about her group home if directly asked. It’s a collection of alarming signs, and Pepper hoped their suspicions were wrong but helped Tony send an email to child services raising concerns anyway. It is the sensible, responsible thing to do and not a sign that they’re both over-invested. The fact that Pepper grabs a cereal bar from the cupboard one internship morning and then hands an unopened box of them to Tony though, suggesting Penny might like them, probably is. And the fact that she checks her email for a response from child services several times an hour hoping to get more than a ‘thank you for contacting us we’ll look into it’ also is. And the fact that Tony’s learning sign language definitely is. And the fact that she sends a follow up email to child services when nothing has changed a week and and a half later definitely is. The fact that she shouts at the computer loudly enough for her assistant to hear and come running in when she gets a response back saying they checked it out and everything is fine is also a very clear sign that she and Tony are way too attached to an intern.

 

So when Tony comes back to their floor after an internship session in early April with his shoulders set and a painfully familiar stubborn look on his face Pepper is fairly sure it is going to be about Penny. It is. Tony declares he’s going to foster Penny, and said that it was ok if Pepper didn’t want to be involved but he wasn’t going to be talked out of it. And Tony has done a lot of reckless, badly (or not at all) thought out things in his life, many of which he came to regret, but Pepper knows this isn’t going to be one of them. And it’s a shock, not least because they have only talked about kids as a vague idea in a distant future, but Pepper knew what her response was. “I want to be involved.” she said, and she meant it. Tony couldn’t leave her out of this if he tried.

 

Unfortunately, fostering Penny was much easier said than done. The process just to become a foster parent was long. They pull multiple strings, and donate a sizeable sum to the city, to get on top of the pile of applicants, but they manage it. It helps that they have raised concerns about Penny before, but it is still testament to the amount of influence she and Tony combined have. It’s not something Pepper wants to make a habit of, throwing their weight around, but in this case it is very useful. They start completing online classes every evening to qualify as foster parents, and as soon as they complete them a week later someone is sent to do a home inspection. They pass it (of course they do, Tony tidied up his lab and all the Avengers floors and even convinced Natasha to hide the assorted weapons she’d stored around her and Clint’s floor in case they inspect other floors, although it proved unnecessary), but they don’t get cleared to foster. They are told, slightly apologetically, that there are too many things against them. Not only are they unmarried, but Tony has a history of alcohol, drugs, and instability, and lives a dangerous life with other people who also live dangerous lives. Pepper did her best to point out that Tony’s behaviour had been drastically different in recent years, and those same dangerous people were powerful protections for Penny, but her arguments fell on deaf ears. They were not cleared to foster.

 

To make matters worse, when Pepper calls Penny’s social worker, Ms Weller told her she’d found no evidence of abuse in two surprise inspections at the group home, and Penny seemed fine when she checked on her. In vain she repeated the bruises Tony had described to her, Ms Weller would not be moved. As far as she was concerned, Penny was fine.

 

Most people at that point would have had to give up, but Tony and Pepper weren’t most people. Instead they asked Natasha to look into Penny and appealed being refused permission to foster. But as Natasha’s initial look into Penny finds nothing useful, and as child services continue to resist, even Pepper starts feeling a little helpless. It isn’t helped by Tony’s reports that Penny has taken to wearing jumpers all the time, even with the heating turned up high. She envies Tony a little, getting to see Penny regularly for hours at a time. It’s something she doesn’t have a good reason for, and dares not make a reason in case it gives child services another reason to label them a concerning home.

 

So when she returns to her office at the end of the second week of May to find Penny standing in it looking lost and uncertain she is surprised but happy, although that happiness dims a little when she realises Tony has once again locked her in her office because there is a threat vaguely nearby. It’s irritating and inconvenient but she sets that aside. Penny however is clearly horrified at the realisation that she doesn’t have her phone and can’t contact her guardians to tell them she is missing curfew.

 

She calls Penny’s guardians and informs them of the situation, and braces for a hundred questions about safety, but Mr Prescott just thanks her for telling him and asks that Penny text him when she gets her phone back. It throws her that a parent, even a foster parent, can be so blasé about their ward being so near an Avengers level threat, no matter how bizarre that threat was. He hadn’t even asked how Penny was coping, or expressed any kind of concern at all.

 

She tries not to react outwardly, but it only makes her more worried that something is wrong, and that feeling only deepens when Penny looks utterly unsurprised at how quick the phone call is. It is painfully clear this is normal. She eyed the hairbands around the sleeves of Penny’s jumper uneasily, wondering what they were hiding. When Penny walked across the office to sit down, Pepper felt her heart sink down to her stomach. She’d been around the Avengers enough to recognise the careful way that someone walked and sat when they were in pain and trying not to make it worse. When Tony said she had bruises, she hadn’t really realised how badly hurt Penny might be.

 

So she goes to chat to Penny rather than trying to get work done, even though Penny could probably work out this wasn’t usual behaviour for her. She told Penny she was good for Tony, and about Tony caring about her, and Penny said that Tony showed it and Pepper felt so proud of how much Tony had grown over the last few years. But then she asked to see Penny’s wrists, and their moment of bonding ends as Penny makes excuses, and then resists, and then finally reluctantly pulls up one sleeve to show a couple of bruises, dark against pale skin, but refuses to show her other arm.

 

She backed off, because she didn’t want to step over a line or infringe on Penny’s privacy, and told Penny she didn’t have to show her, but she did need to see a doctor. She knew nobody moved that carefully unless they were in serious pain, and she couldn’t in good conscience have dropped it entirely, even if Penny was just her employee. But this seemed to be even worse, and Penny rapidly started spiralling towards a panic attack, and even though Pepper managed to divert Penny’s focus and calm her down, it made worry twist deeper and deeper in her chest. But that was nothing compared to the feeling when Penny did show her her wrist and Pepper saw patterns of blue and purple bruising in the unmistakable shape of fingers.

 

The horror hit her like a physical blow, and she barely stopped it from showing on her face, instead blanking her expression entirely, but her mind had spun with horror. How hard did you have to squeeze somebody’s wrist to leave bruises that bad? How painful was it? Was this the worst Penny was hurt? Was this the first time? Who did it? Why? How could she stop it happening again?

 

She asked if Penny’s guardians had done that, mentally begging the answer to be no, but she was only marginally relieved when it was (and it was clearly true, Penny wasn’t good at hiding her feelings and truth was marked all over her face) because Penny wouldn’t tell her who did do it. She gave her an answer sure, told her it was a fight at school, but it was clearly a lie. The only true part of the story was that her foster parents would kick her out if they knew she’d been fighting and that she’d have to move away if that happened. That fact only added coals to the rage burning in her chest. Someone was hurting Penny, leaving black and blue bruises on her body, and her social worker didn’t want to hear about it, too convinced that everything was fine. Her group home was so little invested in her that they’d kick her out at the first bit of trouble and the system wouldn’t clear her and Tony even though they did want her, and would actually look after her.

 

But there is nothing she can do about any of that in the moment, so, against her better judgement, she caves to Penny’s pleas not to tell her guardians, and instead asks Penny to come to her if she’s in trouble. Silently, she begged Penny to talk to her, to tell her the truth, but Penny hadn’t.

 

Having to tell Tony about the bruises on Penny’s wrist was one of the worst things Pepper ever had to do. She felt helpless, like she did when Tony went on insanely risky Avengers work and she could only sit and wait, only worse because Penny was 14 and there was no one watching her back out there.

 

To make it worse, Sunday evening Natasha told them she could find no explanation for Penny’s bruises, and that a deeper investigation would have to be more invasive. Growing desperate, they agreed to Natasha watching Penny and searching her room. Perhaps if they could find who was hurting Penny they could do something? Or if they could prove the Prescott’s were at least neglectful they might be able to convince child services that they were a better option. Pepper hoped she wouldn’t come to regret it. Tony somehow convinced Penny’s social worker to let her stay the night on Monday to complete an important project by a deadline.

 

Penny was quiet and visibly daunted by the presence of the entire Avengers team on Monday evening, and Pepper almost regretted agreeing to this, but Natasha wanted to observe Penny more closely, and if (Pepper wished it was when, but she was slowly losing her certainty that they could convince child services to clear them) Penny came to live with them then she’d need to meet the others at some point. And to their credit, the Avengers did their best to give her space and not overwhelm her, and overall it went fairly well. And she got to see Penny in person, rather than just hear how she was doing from Tony.

 

Afterwards Natasha (looking a little perplexed and frustrated) headed off to Queens to see what she could find out from searching the Prescotts, and Penny went back to the lab with Tony, and Pepper figured that was pretty much it.

 

Except it wasn’t because Pepper was woken in the middle of the night by Penny running to the bathroom to puke after a nightmare. Her heart ached for Penny (nobody should have to have nightmares like that, especially not someone so young), and she did her best to help. She didn’t mention, for the moment, the fresh bruises dotted across Penny’s lower arms and legs, although the bruises she’d had last time had healed surprisingly quickly (she’d understand why later, and wonder how she didn’t notice it, but that morning she had bigger things on her mind). She reluctantly raised it over breakfast though, but Penny wouldn’t answer, even when she pressed (and she was practically begging at that point), and she could feel her heart sinking as Penny finished her breakfast and went to grab her bag.

 

It was a special kind of helplessness, being unable to help your kid. Except Penny wasn’t their kid, because they hadn’t been cleared to foster. She couldn’t make Penny see a doctor, or stop whatever was going on from hurting her. She couldn’t do anything. All she’d achieved was getting Penny to push her away. The moments of closeness they’d had in the early morning as Penny let her support her through the aftermath of the nightmare had seemed like years away as Penny refused to be driven to school and said she didn’t want walking down to the subway. Pepper went with her anyway, even though it stung deeply (deeper than Pepper had wanted to admit, deep enough to scare her because she was dangerously, dangerously attached to a kid she hadn’t been cleared to foster, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to fight the pain) that Penny clearly didn’t want her there. She told Penny she cared about her, made certain Penny knew that, and gave her her personal number and almost begged her to call it if she needed help, and hugged her as she said goodbye, and it had cut deep when Penny ran away afterwards. She’d understand why later, but in that moment, all she’d been able to feel was a bleak despair and a sharp hurt as Penny fled.

 

She’d wondered if this was what parents felt like when they fought with their kids, and had had to remind herself again that Penny wasn’t her kid. They hadn’t got cleared to foster. Penny wasn’t her kid.

 

Natasha had found nothing useful, and Pepper hadn’t thought it was possible to feel more helpless but she did. She and Tony spent a good portion of the day discussing what they did from there. They threw increasingly desperate ideas around, including both moving out of Avengers Tower (a bad idea from a security perspective, but might help get them Penny) and getting married (likely not to help if they did it so hastily, but they kind of mutually proposed to each other, so that happened) and even blackmail, but there was nothing that either of them are confident would work. They kept trying anyway, spending hours on the phone with Penny’s social worker (who was growing less sympathetic and more plain annoyed) and then anyone they could reach who might be helpful. It didn’t get them anywhere. When she started learning sign language she wasn’t sure whether it was a sign of enduring hope or denial.

 

On Wednesday Penny and Tony fought, and Pepper wondered if Penny would even agree to be fostered by them if they could somehow get cleared to foster. She hadn’t understood it, Penny had seemed fine on Monday, and upset but not overly so on Tuesday morning. And it had been her Penny was upset with, because she pushed too hard asking about her bruises, not Tony. But somehow Penny was upset enough to say terrible things to Tony (Tony refused to tell her what she said, but Friday told her later when she asked, and Pepper had only needed to take one look at Tony’s devastated expression to know something terrible had happened). Natasha reminded them, shortly before going to talk to Spider Woman, that teenagers lash out, and said that it might actually be a good sign that Penny trusted Tony enough to lash out, but it was thin comfort. That comfort was stripped away entirely when Natasha returned with no new leads and the information that Penny knew she’d been spied on. She’d thought understanding why Penny was lashing out would help, but it did the exact opposite. Penny was never going to agree to be fostered by them now, and it was Pepper’s own fault. She should never have agreed to Natasha following her.

 

Then, just as it looked like things couldn’t possibly get any worse, Penny ran away. They didn’t even know about it until almost a day afterwards, when Penny’s social worker called to check she wasn’t at the Tower. She’d gotten into a fight with a kid at school, and then she’d run away. Pepper remembered that Penny would get kicked out of the group home if she was caught fighting. She must have thought she had nothing left to lose. Pepper thought about the card she’d given Penny, with her personal number on it, and telling her to call if she got in trouble. And then she remembered that Penny knew Natasha had been spying on her, and who must have planned it, and how unlikely Penny was to call her after that. She sat down and, for the first time since this had started, gave in to tears.

 

For ten minutes she broke down, and then she shook herself and pulled herself together. She put on make-up and abandoned phone calls in favour of going down to child services offices and shouting at several people at length for not doing anything to help Penny when they’d raised concerns a month ago. It was funny the way that not having anything to lose (but this isn’t true, she had so much to lose, Penny was out there somewhere on the streets and anything could happen and Pepper was terrified) removed inhibitions and allowed her to just plain shout at people because they were incompetent and useless and a vulnerable teenager was out there alone. And somehow, miraculously, ridiculously, Penny’s actions and her shouting achieved what no amount of string-pulling and pleading had, and she and Tony got cleared to foster because they at least had realised something was wrong. When they found Penny (and they would because they had to, and Natasha was looking and if anyone could find her it was Natasha) they could foster her.

 

Tony cried in mingled relief and fear when Pepper told him, and Pepper almost burst into tears again on the spot but she managed to call Natasha and catch her up first. Natasha thanked her for the update, said she had a lead and was following it up and hung up, and suddenly there was nothing else that needed doing right now and Pepper didn’t have anything to keep her moving and she burst into tears again.

 

She did her best to keep busy as the hours wore on, but it was hard. Natasha sent occasional updates saying she was getting closer, or that she’d got evidence Penny was fine a few hours ago, but otherwise there was little comfort. She buried herself in work in an attempt not to break, although her stress levels were so high that she bit the head off several important people she usually had more than enough patience to deal with, and had to tell her assistant to cancel the rest of her meetings for the day. Night fell and Natasha still hadn’t found Penny, and Steve and Vision between them coaxed her and Tony into getting some rest, but neither of them slept well. Knowing Penny was sleeping rough somewhere was more than enough to make sleep brief and uneasy.

 

Saturday passed even more slowly than Friday did. Rhodey managed to get a day’s leave and flew back to help and mostly kept Tony from spiralling, and that helped Pepper but she still couldn’t stop thinking about all the things that could be happening to Penny. She filled out the forms child services sent them and caught up on work and then found more work to do, more things to keep busy with. Penny’s social worker came round with her stuff from the Prescott’s, which was good because if she’d had to go herself she probably would have punched them, and she put it away in Penny’s room, and put clean sheets on the bed and spent a few minutes just crying and begging the universe to bring Penny back safely. Child services sent her more forms, and she and Tony sent them back signed and officially became Penny’s guardians.

 

She went to Midtown to find out what happened there and sort things out and lost her temper a little (ok, a lot) when she heard what Flash Thompson said to Penny. She couldn’t stop Penny from getting suspended given she’d beaten Thompson up (Pepper had only just restrained herself from telling Principal Morita ‘good’) but she made sure Thompson was punished too and made very, very clear that she would bring legal action against the school if that boy ever went near Penny again. She took vindictive pleasure in how pale the principal went and made sure he knew that nobody else was to know she and Tony were fostering Penny. The last thing Penny needed was that media storm when she got back (and she would be back, Natasha would find her, she had to. Penny would come back safe and sound and this would be ok. It would. It would.).

 

When she ran out of work to do and things to sort out she went back to learning sign language, studying until deep into the night because Natasha still hadn’t caught up with Penny and she was scared, she was so scared. It was like Tony disappearing in Afghanistan all over again, endless waiting and waiting and waiting and not knowing. When she told Tony that he squeezed her hand and grimaced in silent apology for things neither of them could change. They fell asleep on the sofa eventually, sheer exhaustion winning out over stress, and woke with the dawn after sleep haunted with nightmares of what could happen to a tiny 14 year old girl on the streets.

 

Natasha called them three hours later rather than texting, and Pepper’s first thoughts when Natasha’s number flashed up on her phone screen were terrified. She half expected Natasha to say she’d found Penny’s dead body, but instead she said “I’ve found Penny, she’s fine, upset and overwhelmed, but safe.” and the relief was so dizzying she went light headed. Tony managed to hold himself together enough to ask where they were, and Natasha said Boston and that she’d got her bike and was going to drive them back and to get some sleep because they sounded like they hadn’t slept in the last two days. The same was probably true of Natasha, but she said they’d get some rest anyway. She and Tony slept like the dead for three hours and then made themselves look presentable and like they hadn’t spent the last two days falling apart.

 

Natasha brings Penny back, and prodded her into an explanation that was completely beyond anything Pepper had even considered but made everything click together perfectly, and both she and Tony messed up when they observed aloud that Spider Woman could speak and it is a very rough beginning to their family. And while it got better for a while after that Penny ran away again only a couple of days later, but Pepper hadn’t really expected this to be easy and she wasn’t one to give up easily (nobody who stuck around Tony Stark was the kind of person to give up when things got difficult) and she persisted. There were days when she wanted to cry at how clearly Penny didn’t expect this to be permanent, but there were also days when she knew it was sinking in, and slowly but surely they became family and Pepper knew nothing could take that away.

 

Notes:

Hope you liked Pepper's POV of the beginning chapters!

Comments make me happy :-)