It was sunny outside, warm; the sound of birds chirping merrily could be heard underneath the city's usual car horns and trolley bells and bustling crowd. Laughter drifted from the street nearby, kids playing some game involving sticks and string and ribbons, with their mothers sitting to the side admonishing their progeny when they got too close to the traffic.
It was wrong. All of it.
In the movies, scenes like this were always dreary, dark, gray; everything was supposed to be silent for miles around, a bubble of lifelessness to be left untouched until the big finale. Laughter should not exist, not here.
Not today of all days.
But it does, because the rest of the world keeps turning, keeps going, keeps moving forward toward the brighter tomorrow it had been aiming for longer than any man could remember.
They can't be blamed, of course; it's not their fault they have absolutely no idea what today of all days is.
Today, for the world, time marches on.
For Hank, time stops.
The sunlight is inconsequential, the warmth nonexistent; the chirps of birds and chatter of people and buzz of human activity is all meaningless. The laughter of children is an awful, stabbing taunt at the edge of mind that won't leave him alone, but he ignores it. All of it.
He has somewhere to be.
He opened the rusting iron gate with his left hand, his right still pinned to his chest by the sling holding his injured arm stationary. The terrible screech of the old hinges grates at his ears, making him wince, and his mini entourage of ants scatter slightly at the disruption, but they regain formation like the loyal little workers they are.
He nodded to them, before leaving his troops at the foot of the path; irrational as it may be to desire privacy from insects, it felt better to go forward alone.
He still couldn't do this with anyone else around. The only reason Hope wasn't here with him.
His steps, usually so measured and even like a soldier's stride – side-effect of working with SHIELD, never really went away even now – now dragged reluctantly on the gravel, wanting nothing more than to abandon the journey halfway and never make it to their destination, but he didn't stop. He couldn't. He owed her too damn much to not even visit.
The cemetery was small, and overgrown, and there was very little point to the gravestone; Janet van Dyne had left no body behind, no coffin to be buried or corpse to decompose, no ashes to scatter on the wind with a dramatic speech about life and the general goodness of all who lived on this Earth.
Not even a scrap of her uniform had come back from the mission, and she hadn't even been able to get the full military honors she rightly deserved for saving the entire country's ass. It still pissed Hank off to this very day.
But today wasn't about getting pissed at Carter and Stark and the other long-dead idiots at SHIELD.
Today was about her.
"Hey, Jan," he said with an aching heart and smarting eyes as he stared at the simple slab of rock that was supposed to signify the impossible spitfire that was his wife. "Sorry I took so long. I'm an old fart now; could barely stand up this morning, I was so stiff."
No reply, but that was okay; she never replied to his stupid stories back in the day either, just rolled her eyes and smiled that sweet 'why-do-I-tolerate-this-idiot' smile only he'd ever been able to wrangle out of her.
Hank blinked, huffed a breath; dammit, it never got any easier, even after all this time…
"We got a new guy," he managed, somehow bypassing the lump in his throat. "Scott. You'd like him, even if he is full of shit half the time. He's running around in my old suit, joined up with those other costumed losers I told you about."
Teeth dug into his lip, hard enough to hurt but not actually draw blood, as what he wanted to say next lodged in his throat and refused to exit as anything more than a rough cough.
He cleared his throat, blinked his stinging eyes rapidly. 'Just say it, damn you.'
"Hope, uh," he coughed again, "Hope is- she's Wasp, Jan. She got that upgraded suit we were working on, started going on missions with Scott. The Ant-Man and the Wasp, working together with the Avengers. Saving the world or some shit. They're- they're a damn good team – not as good as us, of course – when they aren't too busy making out. You should see them. The audacity. They know I'm watching them on the news and they do it right in front of the camera. I want to kill him; you'd love the idiot, Jan!"
His voice cut off as he choked, the tears finally winning out and spilling down his cheeks, leaving him speechless as his vision blurred.
It didn't matter; even without sight, he knew the message engraved on the stone as if it were tattooed on his own body:
Janet van Dyne-Pym
Born August 1954 – Died July 1987
Beloved Wife, Mother, and Friend
You Will Be Missed
It was ridiculously inadequate.
Janet van Dyne was – is – so much more than a name and a date and some bullshit about being a friend.
No words on this earth could describe the flirtatious sex-bomb feminist deviant that had swept Hank completely off his feet with her charm and understanding of quantum theory who brainstormed with him for hours about the hypothetical micro-universes lying just outside of this dimension.
There was no simplifying the caring, hot-headed, ridiculous woman who stormed into his lab the day after Ant-Man made his debut and flat out demanded he make a suit for her because she was going to help him, dammit, or so help her God, she would never go out for dinner with him.
How could you describe the tornado who had in fact went to dinner with him, more than once, then spent all hours of night and day in his lab helping him design a second suit, smugly slapping a picture of a bee down on his work table and proclaiming she needed wings as soon as fucking possible?
You couldn't explain the woman who'd so enthusiastically kissed him after the Vermont mission, who played hard to get for months afterwards before happily tackling him after Belgium and asking him flat out if he wanted to marry her, never mind the fact that their coms were still on and the entire SHIELD task force could still hear them.
How could anything explain the way she made Hank feel? How her smiles lit up his world, drew him out of his chaotic, scientific head and into her colorful reality. How her bright, cheerful stubbornness tempered his mellow, somber possessiveness. How the sight of her mid-flight, zooming forward to knock a man senseless with a single punch, made his heart both stop and beat a hundred miles a second. How her voice in his ear quieted the incessant ramblings of his stupidly smart brain and made him feel a little less overwhelmed by everything the world could throw at him.
How could anyone reduce Hank's soulmate, Hope's role-model, the Wasp, a hero in her own right – to three simple words?
Wife, Mother, Friend.
Worthless titles. But accurate all the same.
"You should see her, Jan," he hiccupped, digging with clumsy fingers in his jacket pocket to grasp at the wrinkled newspaper clipping he'd cut out this morning. He pulled it out, held it numbly, barely refraining from crushing it. "She flies through the sky like a bird of prey, takes the assholes by surprise; she doesn't even need Ant-Man around to do the job. Like you; you never really needed me there, did you? Maybe for the more complicated science stuff, but everything else you had covered. Because you- you're Jan van Dyne. You didn't need anyone. Not like I needed you."
His voice broke, and God dammit, this was fucking ridiculous; twenty-nine years and he still ended up bawling like a baby. She would've slapped him for this if she… if she were-
"You're still out there, aren't you?" he croaked, now simply glaring at the innocent rock chunk that he half wanted to destroy violently with a sledgehammer. "You're too stubborn for this shit. Being you, you just decided to float around in infinity instead of dying like a smart person would. You stuck around like Scott did."
Mention of his successor's name sent Hank's whole body to trembling, and he managed to stalk forward and sink in front of the unworthy stone monument with his wife's name engraved at the top. "He came back from there, you know. He's dumb as a brick, so if he can make it, there's still a chance you can make it too. The only reason you haven't is because I'm too much of a dumb shit to think of a way to help you until now; but I've got a few ideas," he admitted, and the shine in his eyes wasn't tears anymore; it was determined, wild, almost feral.
"You're coming home," he decided. "You're coming home, and I won't stop until you do, got it?"
No response, but this time it didn't leave him feeling crushed.
Hank grinned, pressed a quick kiss to the paper in his hand, before setting it down in front of his wife's only medal of honor. He climbed to his feet, swaying unsteadily on creaking knees, ignored a stray tear working its way down his face.
"You're gonna see her fly Jan, so help me God," he swore, before spinning away to march purposefully away, gathering his army of insects to him with a thought.
He had work to do.
Left behind, at a certain grave, a newspaper clipping fluttered slightly in the breeze, but didn't budge from its place.
The Wonderous Wasp Strikes Again! Forty-Two Men and Women Owe Their Lives to the Heroine After VistaCorp HQ Caught on Fire-
A stunning yellow-and-black figure was visible in the accompanying picture, wings a blur and only the hint of a blob beside her indicating she wasn't actually alone as the article assumed.
But that was alright.
Ants would do anything for their Wasps, after all.
A/N: O.o This is what happens when I stay up past three in the morning. Angst and dumbness. Hank and Janet make me cry. I must have a reunion or I swear to the Lord I will harm something. Probably a wall. With my fist. Which will harm me. Ow.
P.S. Hank wouldn't actually swear this much, would he? He swore in the film, and the way I think of him, as a veteran SHIELD agent who lost the love of his life, I think he'd swear. Especially when distressed. IDK you tell me.
~Persephone