AN: Thanks to krikanalo, Qweb, and Marvel-Tolkien Fangirl for reviewing the last chapter. This should help clear up a few things, and then there's one more chapter with the complete resolution of the story, and which sets the stage for the next story in this "Ant-Man" story arc.


Because his talk with Dr. Pym took so long, Scott was not able to pick Cassie up from school that afternoon. Instead, Scott arrived at the apartment around 4:00. He walked up the stairs to their top-floor apartment, and walked down the hallway past the apartment where the two men had been doing surveillance. He had to work very hard to keep his expression neutral and stifle a laugh when he noticed that that particular apartment's entrance was blocked off with police tape. However, he nearly lost it when out of the corner of his eye he noticed a couple wasps still buzzing around the ceiling.

Scott reached his apartment, pushed the door open, and dropped his duffel bag just inside the doorway, expecting Cassie to immediately run up to him and give him a hug. Instead, he saw Liz and Cassie sitting at the dining room table having an animated conversation with a strange woman. The stranger was slender with long black hair pulled back into a ponytail. He was even more confused to see that she was wearing a black single-piece synthetic leather catsuit with a black-and-silver emblem patch on the right shoulder in the shape of an eagle. Scott could not quite place where he had seen her before.

"Hello?" Scott asked. Liz and Cassie both spun around to look at him, startled.

Cassie immediately jumped up from her chair and ran over to Scott, who bent over to pick her up. "Daddy!" Cassie cried happily, kissing him on the cheek and hugging him tightly around the neck.

"Oh, I've missed you, bumblebee!" Scott said, hugging her back. The two of them stayed in that position for a long moment, before Scott looked over his daughter's shoulder at the two women still sitting at the table.

"I take it your 'project' was a success?" Liz observed, making air-quotes around "project" and giving him a knowing look.

"Yeah…" Scott replied lamely. "I'm sorry, who are you?" he asked, looking at the other woman. "You look vaguely familiar; have we met?"

"As a matter of fact, we haven't met formally, though you have seen me before," the other woman said with a small laugh. "I was in the diner to protect Miss Elizabeth Byrne last year when you saved her life and made my job both considerably harder and considerably easier."

"Hang on, you were there to protect me? Why?" Liz asked, giving the woman a look of confusion.

The woman told her, "Your father is an important employee of Stark Industries, and my Division contracts most of our equipment, including some very… unique… equipment, from Stark Industries." She rose to her feet, walked over to Scott, and offered him a hand, saying, "My name is Maria Hill; I'm an Agent with the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division."

"The who?" Scott asked, looking at the offered hand suspiciously. "Is that like the police? Because Dr. Pym said he wasn't going to call the police."

"Wait—'Dr. Pym'? As in Henry Pym? He's my chemistry professor this semester at UCLA, and a family friend," Liz said, looking at Scott in surprise. She turned to Maria and said, "You didn't tell us that Dr. Pym was the Ant-Man."

"The same," Hill nodded, barely giving Liz a glance. She turned to Scott and told him, "No, we're not the police, but Dr. Pym did call us, right after you left his office in fact."

"Why did Dr. Pym call you?" Scott asked suspiciously.

"He's been working with us for decades," Hill answered calmly, letting her arm fall back to her side. "He was actually one of the first scientists to join the S.S.R.—the Strategic Scientific Reserve—during the Cold War, back in the early 60s. Howard Stark himself recruited him for the S.S.R. shortly after Pym made his discovery."

"So why did he call you today?" Scott asked again.

"He made you his successor as Ant-Man, correct?" Hill asked. Without waiting for a response, she answered the question, "Don't bother denying it; Dr. Pym told me himself."

"What about it?" Scott asked, still suspicious.

"I'm here to offer you a job," Hill explained. "Pym's old job, to be precise. He worked for us on a contract basis in the Intelligence and Counterintelligence Department, as well as in Research and Development, in addition to his work at Stark Enterprises."

"You're offering me a job?"

"Yes," Hill told him. "We would like you to come to work for us as an espionage and counterespionage specialist. We can also give you the opportunity to work with the technology you love so much."

"So you want me to be a spy?" Scott said, confused. "I don't know if Dr. Pym told you this, but I'm no spy."

"Perhaps not by training," Hill replied, "but you already have most of the skills you would need, coupled with your suit, to complete all the missions we would assign you. The rest we'll teach you in our basic training."

"Oh?" Scott said, interested.

Hill pulled out an external hard drive and showed it to him. "You recognize this?" she asked. "It's the same external hard drive that you told Dr. Sondheim to turn over to the police. She turned it over to them, and they immediately passed it on to a pair of agents from the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division."

"You might want to change the name," Scott observed with a laugh. "So were you guys responsible for the whole 'taking down a street gang' thing?" Scott asked, raising his eyebrows.

"Yes. Creating cover stories for these types of incidents is one of our directives. Of course, considering that Ant-Man is moderately well-known, that simplifies things substantially; we don't have to explain away the millions of insects that the police found in the warehouse, since dropping the name 'Ant-Man' explains it pretty easily. We do have to put together an alibi for you, however," Hill explained. She handed him a plain manila folder. Scott opened it up and saw a pair of plane tickets and a couple other documents inside. "You were in Atlanta meeting with your parole officer. He wanted to check up on you and see how your new job was working out for himself instead of having to trust the reports from your LA parole officer. But hopefully you won't need this; the best identity protection you have at this stage is anonymity."

"So you've seen what those thugs did. Why do you want me?" Scott asked, looking up from the documents.

"We want the man who was able to sneak into Stark Industries with about 4 hours' preparation and without a super suit and didn't raise any alarms. We want the man who singlehandedly took apart an entire criminal organization in the space of two days. We want the man who traced that criminal organization across the country from just a few scraps of information and with no support team or backup. We want the man who singlehandedly fought and defeated an overwhelmingly larger force. We want the man who gathered enough information to put all of those criminals away for two decades. In short, we consider this hard drive to be your job application. And we accept," Hill told him easily.

"What would this new job mean?"

"Well, the benefits are extremely competitive," Hill began. "You can see the world. You'll be serving your country. We will expunge your criminal record entirely…"

"I mean, will I be able to keep my daughter?"

"Some agents have," Hill nodded, "though typically they're married and their spouse is the primary caregiver. Divorced… I wouldn't recommend it. But you would probably get to see her at least every couple months, possibly more often."

"Then I refuse," Scott said steadily. "Everything I've done has been for her, and I don't want to lose her again."

"Mr. Lang," Hill said, "the way I see it, you have two options: You can stay here, keep working for Stark Industries as a security guard, do some computer programming on the side, have your daughter living with you, and pull out the Ant-Man suit on occasion. Or else you can join our Division as an Agent, be a fulltime 'superhero,' do everything you did over the last two days on a more regular basis while serving your country and your world, with much better benefits than you get from Stark Industries, and see your daughter every couple months, but still more often than in prison."

"Don't remind me." Scott thought for a minute and turned to look at Cassie, who was still in his arms. "Well, bumblebee, what do you think I should do?" Scott asked her gently, giving her a squeeze. "Do you think Daddy should go off to join Miss Hill's Super-Secret Security Squad, or should I stay here with you?"

Cassie looked at him with her big blue eyes, and squeezed his neck. "I want to be here with you and Miss Lizzy, Daddy. But I want you to be a hero," she finally said.

"Are you sure, Cassie?"

"I'm sure, Daddy," she nodded seriously. "I want you to be a hero."

"Well, Agent Hill of the Seriously Long Names Division, I guess it's decided. I'm going to be a fulltime superhero," Scott finally said. "But I need at least two weeks to finish at Stark Industries and get things settled with Cassie."

"Done. Report to this address when you are ready," Hill told him, scribbling an address on a napkin. "Welcome to the team, Ant-Man."


AN: It occurred to me after writing this chapter that thus far no one's been overly thrilled when Maria showed up to recruit them for the Avengers/S.H.I.E.L.D. Of course, Scott's reaction wasn't nearly as interesting as Rhodey's! (see Chapter 1 of "Avengers Plan B")