We learn behaviors from our parents, but Richard and Mary are dead before they have the chance to really influence Penny Parker. Penny has Mary’s dark curls and Richard’s brains.
But that’s all they are: Richard and Mary, who everyone says she looks like.
When Penny thinks of herself in relation to others, she has always been Ben and May’s child more than she has ever been Richard and Mary’s.
She holds herself upright, never slouching, because Ben taught her to face the world head on. Penny never felt unwanted, even though she knows they never planned to have children because May had never let her doubt the extent of their love.
But it’s in more than Ben’s lessons on responsibility and May’s unwavering support.
May says she speaks like Ben — her use of puns and her accent and the way she rushes out all her words in one breath as if she never has enough time to say what she want — but Penny also knows that her instinct is to scream Italian profanities when she stubs her toe. She prefers her pizza “on the crunchy side” as Ben used to say, because despite him being the best cook she’d ever met, he always managed to burn frozen pizzas. She speaks fluent Italian, and learned the swear words first, because she grew up the child of fiery quick-to-anger but quick-to-forgive May instead of sweet soft-spoken Mary.
Her home is an apartment in Queens and not a house upstate, and she wouldn’t have it any other way — can’t imagine it being any other way.
That’s the part that stings. If Richard and Mary were to run into her on the street today, they wouldn’t know their daughter, and she wouldn’t know them. She never got the chance to know them, and they never got the chance to know her.
Penny Parker is May and Ben’s child and Ned’s best friend. Her parents will never meet Ned, and they will never meet really meet their daughter.
She doesn’t really feel like their daughter. She never had the time to fit into that role. She is Ben and May’s little girl who speaks a mile-a-minute about computers and is quick to anger but quick to forgive. She can’t clearly remember a time when she was someone else — someone else’s.
Penny doesn’t remember learning that her parents were dead, and Penny only vaguely remembers the months after Ben died.
She does not remember sitting at a table with Ben’s old jacket wrapped around her and staring blankly at the door — waiting for him to come home and knowing he won’t because she watched him die. She does not remember the months of wading though grey days until she could curl up in her aunts bed and sob only to do it again and again and again.
What she does remember is that a woman Ben had worked with, Martha, had come up to them after the funeral, and Ben had never liked her. (She understood why.)
Martha’s voice had dripped with false sympathy as she had asked what May was going to do with Ben’s niece. She had asked if May was going to keep Penny in the same way you might ask if someone was going to keep a stray cat they had found — one with lice and heart worms.
Penny hadn’t even had the time to be properly offended before May had swept her behind her and snarled, “Fuck blood. Penny’s is just as much mine as Ben’s. She’s not going anywhere. She’s mine.”
She remembers that Martha had scampered away with her tail between her legs, and May had turned on her and used that voice that left no room for questions. “You’re my baby.Don’t forget that.”
Penny had nodded dumbly, and May had caught her icy fingers and held them tightly as they braved the condolences of the funeral goers.
Ben’s death was so very different from her parents.
It’s not that she doesn’t love them or that she doesn’t grieve them, but more than anything, she misses the idea of them. It isn’t visceral like Ben’s death.
It stings that her parents will never know her, but a good part of the hurt is that, when it comes down to it, it doesn’t really matter.
She remembers so little of them. There is no hole where they were supposed to be. There is not a hollow ache in the base of her stomach when someone says their names. There is only what might have been, and it’s hard to grieve someone you never knew.
The fact that she doesn’t miss them properly is as bad as the actual loss.
But by God, she misses Ben, and there is hole inside of her where Ben is supposed to be.
She doesn’t really remember her parents, but oh, she remembers Ben. His absence is tangible. It hangs off corners of the apartment. It taunts her every time she looks in a mirror. It’s in every frozen pizza she burns and each time she reaches for her phone to call him only to be hit with grief all over again.
Being an orphan, she thinks she knows more about grief than most her age, but Ben dying is like nothing else. It’s like she’s drowning and burning and breaking apart. It’s like being trapped in a nightmare where everything is crumbling to ash except it’s not a dream. She is awake, and Ben is not — he never will be.
Penny does not remember her parents funeral, but she always imagined it had rained. She thought she must have cried and the sky must have cried with her, but she doesn’t know for sure.
It doesn’t rain at Bens funeral. They bury him in November, and it is cold. She doesn’t remember what May said in the eulogy. She doesn’t remember anything that is said.
(She didn’t cry at the funeral, which is somewhat ironic, because everyone expects you to cry at a funeral, but no one expects you to burst out crying in the middle of a Chem lab a week after you come back to school.)
She remembers that it was so bitterly cold that if it hadn’t been so sunny there could have been snow, but there wasn’t snow or rain. It was just cold.
(Later, she’ll think that the cruel frigid air is far more fitting than the rain, but at the time all she can think is that she wouldn’t be so cold if Ben was there. She wouldn’t be there at all if Ben was there.)
She doesn’t remember the months following the funeral very well, but she remembers that they had been brutally cold. The ice had seeped into the her chest and made a home there.
(And a part of her had relished the cold, because it was something. If she was shaking from the biting frost than at least she was sure she was alive — that she hadn’t died in that alley way, even if sometimes she wished she had.)
It’s only fitting that she meets Tony Stark on the first day of spring. He swoops into her life and promptly throws it into a garbage can and lights it on fire.
(But fire is life and warmth as well as destruction. There are no redeeming qualities in ice. It is only cold.)
She fucked up, and he fucked up. May found out about Spidergirl and slapped Tony Stark in the face before demanding he tell her everything.
Penny should feel bad about loosing the wrath of May on Mr. Stark, but honestly, she was just glad it wasn’t directed at her anymore.
And it sneaks up on her.
One early April day, Tony Stark shows up in her living room.
It feels like she turns around, and suddenly, another winter has passed. She has a room in Avengers tower, and Tony Stark is her secondary emergency contact. Mr. Stark and the Avengers are permanent fixtures in her life. She has lab days with Mr. Stark and spends weekends at the Tower. She spars with Natasha and plays pranks on Clint.
Flash no longer bothers her. Ned seems more at ease. May works less, and she smiles more.
Penny’s life is good.
Its like an kick in the stomach. Like frostbite taking hold. The realization that she is happy probably shouldn’t cause a breakdown, but it feels like a horrible betrayal. Penny is happy, and Ben is gone.
She stares at herself in the mirror of her bedroom in the compound. Her hands clench around white marble counter tops.
It’s been two winters since Ben died. Her hair has gotten thicker and it’s grown out a bit. She hasn’t needed glasses in years thanks to the spider bite. Her eyes are older. She’s seen the things Ben always hoped to protect her from. She’s watched people die in empty alleyways and wished she could join them, and she pulled herself back together and tried to fix the world.
She isn’t sure Ben would recognize her anymore, and she spirals.
She’s already forgetting him. She can’t quite recall what his voice sounded like when he woke her in the morning or the way he liked his coffee.
She remembered her parents at one point, didn’t she? Is she going to forget him too? Will Ben become something distant and far away? Will being called his niece feel like sleeping in a bed that doesn’t belong to her and smells of strange laundry detergent — wrong in a way you can’t quite put your finger on?
She doesn’t want to become someone Ben wouldn’t know, but she’s suddenly terrified that she already is.
The girl in the mirror isn’t just Ben’s and May’s. She’s learnt Russian from the best assassins in the world that she has assisted in saving more than once. Bruce Banner taught her how to cook curry, and Tony Stark is the one who taught her to tie a tie when she took M.J to the prom. She has a girlfriend Ben will never know.
Ben will never know who she has become, and that is like losing him all over again.
It’s like being fifteen and swinging and swinging and hoping to lose herself completely in the streets of a city that stopped feeling like home the moment that gun went off.
(And maybe she clings to the bitter cold, but it has been her friend for so long. If she’s shivering, than at least she knows she’s alive and that she hasn’t forgotten him. The cold is proof that he existed — that she loved him.)
In fact, it’s exactly like that. She falls into the familiar motion — left web, drop, right web, drop, left web again.
She swings and swings and swings until the pain in her chest has dampened to a familiar hollow ache and the sun has been set for a long time.
Penny kicks her legs idly. The rooftop has no real significance. It’s high and isolated and it has a good view. She used to come here a lot — back when she couldn’t bare going back to her empty apartment.
A shiver that has nothing to do with the freezing air runs down her spine.
Tony’s on a lab binge, and he wouldn’t question her disappearance for another couple of hours. Bruce would respect her space. Thor wouldn’t be able to find her. Cap probably could but he wouldn’t unless he was really worried. Clint is on a mission.
She knows it must be one of them. She knows there isn’t any danger in the same way she always knows when there is — Spidey Senses and all that.
“You can come out, Nat.”
Natasha materializes next to her and lowers herself to sit.
“Goddamn, spider-senses.”
It gets a laugh out of Penny. It’s not Ben’s laugh. It’s too hollow and thin and quiet, but it is a laugh.
(She laughs like an Avenger. Like a haunted soldier. Like someone who wakes up screaming.)
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong? Or will I have to dangle you off this roof?” Natasha never has been one to pull punches.
“How do you always know when somethings wrong?” Penny wonders aloud. “It’s kind of creepy.”
“I know you.” Natasha responds simply.
“Ben always seemed to know when something was wrong too. He’d always make it better. I always thought he could fix anything.” Penny trains her eyes on the city scape. “He’ll be dead two years next week.”
“November 1st.”
Penny doesn’t bother asking how Natasha knows the date her uncle died. It doesn’t take a spy. Anyone with a search engine can figure out the day Ben died. Anyone with a search engine can find out that Penny watched him die.
“He’d want me to be happy. I know that, but I didn’t think I could be happy without him.”
Natasha is silent. She knows there’s more, and she waits patiently for Penny to find the right words.
“There isn’t a place for him in this happiness though. Not anymore. I don’t think he’d recognize me anymore.”
“Maybe he would, or maybe he wouldn’t. I think he’d be proud though. You do a lot of good kid. You save people.”
“But I didn’t save the one that mattered.”
“Try telling that to the family of the man you saved last week. Or to the woman who almost lost everything in that mugging.” Natasha holds her shoulders in place, and forces Penny to look at her. “It mattered to those people.”
Penny snorts. “God. You sound just like him.”
“I’m glad.” Natasha smiles. “It sounds like your uncle was a smart man.”
“He was.” Penny gives a sad smile. “I wish I hadn’t loved him so much. Then maybe it wouldn’t hurt so bad.”
“Do you really think that?”
“Only a little,” Penny admits. “I think, at the core, grief and love are the same. I think that we are made of the pieces of people we interact with. I like my pizza the same way Ben did, and I write my A’s with the same little curl as him. I didn’t have parents to shape me, but I had May and Ben. Ben — he wasn’t my dad, but he was as good as.“
Penny’s voice has dropped to a whisper. She’s never said these things out loud before. Its the kind of philosophical discussion she can’t have with Tony or any of the others. It’s the kind of talk she tries to avoid most of the time. It’s the kind of thing that can only be whispered in the dark of night on an empty roof where she grieved until it was all she was. Until she was more grief than girl.
“I wonder how much of myself is from him. It must have been a lot, because I thought I was going to die with him. I wanted to — sometimes.”
“Pen,” Natasha sounds heartbroken and terrified. There’s a strange sort of power in that.
“Not anymore. Not for a long time.” She’s hasty to reassure Natasha. “I used to come here a lot though. I didn’t want to go home. I thought that I’d alway feel like I was at the bottom of a grave.”
“But not anymore?” Natasha asks — noting the past tense.
“No. I’ve started using Tony’s dumb nicknames. I like my cookies gooey in the middle because that’s how Steve makes them. I practice the breathing exercises Bruce taught me every morning and if you tell him I like them I’ll send a mass email of the security footage from the last Christmas party. See, I’m a person who casually blackmails people. I got that from you. I got the dry Russian sarcasm from you too.”
Ever eloquent, Natasha lets out a confused sound. “Huh?”
Penny smiles. “You guys are a part of me now too. Most days that’s a good thing. Except, I did accidentally call Steve, Capsicle, yesterday and then when I realized what I had done, I started cursing up a storm in Russian, except Bucky was right there. So, Steve was annoyed, and Bucky was horrified, and it was an all-over disaster.”
Natasha laughs, and after a moment, Penny joins her.
“Thank you.”
And it’s Natasha and not Steve or Tony or Clint, so she understands. She doesn’t ask why Penny first came to this tall secluded roof. She doesn’t make Penny tell her the things she left out.
She silently offers Penny a hand as she gets up.
Natasha chuckles as they walk back. Penny stares at her in confusion, which only make her laugh harder.
“What?”
“I’m proud of you for trying, but if you ever try to blackmail me again, it will not end well for you. I know fourteen different ways to kill you with a paper clip.”
Penny smirks. “You wouldn’t kill me. You love me too much,”
“Shut up,”
“It’s true though,”
“You’re a menace.”
“But I’m your menace.”
“Yes. That you are.”