a/n: ahaha i see i got some Spicy reviews for the last chapter and That ending...whoopsie :D but now it's time to check in on the west coast peeps
also yes we are retconning cassie and maggie's age difference that i previously made in this fic bc why tf not, this is an au of a fic that was an au of a movie franchise so i mean
It's an uncharacteristically clear Saturday morning in San Francisco. The bay is completely visible, as far as the eye can see. The bright red of the Golden Gate Bridge contrasts the light blue sky behind it. Blocks away from the water, laughter fills a small, bustling café busy from the brunch crowd, but Hope Van Dyne and Cassie Lang still managed to get their favorite table by the window.
Cassie yawns, big and loud.
"Sorry you had to get up early," Hope says. "But I need you fully awake to keep Maggie occupied."
Cassie nods very seriously, as if she were an Avenger herself accepting a mission. "Is she on her way yet?"
"I'm not sure," Hope says. She checks her phone, but finds nothing new. "Pepper is supposed to text me when they're leaving, but she hasn't said anything."
"Maybe he just forgot," Cassie says. She pulls out her own phone. "I'll text Maggie."
Hope watches Cassie's thumbs move across the screen with ease. She sips her coffee. Cassie looks up at her, curious.
"Maybe coffee will help me wake up," she suggests, reaching for Hope's cup.
But Hope holds it away. "Uh-uh. Too young."
"I'm fifteen!" Cassie protests.
"And you have four parents, who all unanimously decided you're still too young," Hope says, placing her cup back down on the table. As Cassie pouts, Hope smirks, conspiratorial. "But maybe when you're sixteen."
Cassie considers the peace offering. "Okay. Two more months."
The waiter finally delivers their food—pancakes for Cassie and an omelet for Hope. As they eat in silence, Hope worries how the rest of Cassie's parental unit will take the coffee-allowed-at-sixteen rule she just pulled out of thin air.
After a minute or two, Cassie breaks the silence, looking down at her phone. "Whoa, I think something's happening in New York again."
That gets Hope's attention. "What?"
The noise in the café dies down as one of the staff members turns the news on. Grainy phone video shows space ships descending from the atmosphere.
"Isn't that from yesterday?" Cassie asks.
The news ticker says otherwise, the words "upstate New York" and "right now!" immediately jumping out to Hope.
"That's where the Avengers are," Cassie says, staring at Hope with wide eyes. "And Maggie."
Hope picks up her phone and dials Scott, but gets sent straight to voicemail. She knows he's doing some sort of experiment with her parents right now, but, clearly, the potential apocalypse happening on the other side of the country currently takes precedence.
"Cassie, can you try calling your dad? He isn't picking up for me," Hope says, standing and grabbing her purse.
"Wait! We can't leave without paying," Cassie says. "We also can't waste the food!"
Cassie's been on an environmentalism kick lately thanks to school, but now is hardly the time. She pulls out her wallet and throws two twenties down on the table.
"Call your dad," she says to Cassie, then hurries over to the counter. She tries calling her own dad next. "Hey, can we get two to-go containers?"
Hank doesn't pick up, either. She swears under her breath, but a worker finally approaches the with two takeout containers for her.
"Thanks—"
The containers fall to the floor.
The worker's hands…turn to dust.
In the blink of an eye, he's gone.
"Hope?"
At Cassie's shriek, Hope turns back, and sees several other diners suddenly disappearing in the same fashion. Screams fill the small café as people reach for the friends and family they'd come with, only for their fingertips to meet dust.
Hope hurries back to Cassie, grabbing onto her. Outside, other people disappear into thin air, sending those left running around in a frenzy. A driverless car crashes into a store across the street from them. Another driverless car roars down the street, this one approaching them.
"Look out!" Hope yells, pulling Cassie away from the window as hard as she can. The two dive further back into the restaurant, sliding under people's tables as the car makes contact with the window they were sitting at moments before.
Dust and debris fill the air, Hope's ears ringing from the impact. She holds Cassie as tightly to her body as she can, protecting her head and neck with her arms. As she gathers herself, the screams of the other diners, wait staff, people outside, everyone, fills her ears.
Will more people disappear? Is Cassie next? Are they both next?
Cassie's body shakes in her grasp, and Hope makes out the sound of her soft sobs into her chest.
Hope knows they can't stay here.
"Cassie, Cass," Hope says, releasing Cassie's head. She starts pushing herself up, which forces Cassie to sit up as well. Cassie's red eyes and flushed cheeks meet Hope's face once she's sitting up. Hope brushes away some of the grime from Cassie's cheek with her thumb. "Hey, are you okay?"
"Are we gonna disappear?" Cassie asks, her voice no louder than a whisper. "What about Dad? And Mom and Jim?"
In all honesty, Hope knows just as much as Cassie knows. And she's sure Cassie is aware of that; she's sharp. But she can imagine how terrifying that is from Cassie's point of view—a potentially life-or-death situation where even the adults are in the dark.
She holds Cassie's face in both hands now, making a point to visibly breathe deeply. Cassie copies her.
"We can't think about that right now," Hope says. "We need to focus on getting out of here—and helping the other people get out of here. And then we'll figure out how to get back home to check on everyone."
That's the job of an Avenger or any hero. A job Hope knows that Cassie wants. After all, Cassie is Scott's partner; Hope's just substituting for her in the meantime, until Cassie can join Scott in the field herself.
So, Cassie nods. Hope helps her stand up.
"You start helping people get out the door," Hope says. "I'll check the car for passengers."
"Okay."
Cassie scans the small restaurant and makes a beeline for an elderly couple stuck in the back of the room. Hope carefully navigates through broken glass and knocked over furniture to reach the car.
The driver's seat is empty, as expected, but there's a very terrified man in the passenger seat and a kid in the back. Thankfully, both look more rattled than anything.
Hope manages to get the warped passenger door open after some hard pulls. She helps the man free himself from his seatbelt and get out of the car. Luckily, the back doors are in better shape, so she's able to open it to get to the kid with ease.
"Are you okay?" she asks the young boy, who nods with wide eyes. She leans in and unbuckles his seatbelt, then pulls him out of the car. The man grabs him as soon as he's out.
"Thank you," he says to Hope. "My wife was driving, and then she just—"
"Disappeared?" Hope guesses.
"Do you know what that was?" the man asks.
"No idea," Hope says. "Happened to a bunch of people here, too."
Once the man and kid are out of the restaurant safely, Cassie hurries to Hope's side. The restaurant is empty.
"Good job getting everyone out," Hope says.
Cassie beams. "Thanks." She holds up her phone. "Do you think the phones still work? Mine isn't turning on."
Unsurprising, considering that Cassie, in typical teenage fashion, has a phone with a screen cracked well beyond repair. It normally still works (somehow), despite having loose glass shards that have cut Cassie's thumbs at least three times in the past month. Hope pulls out her own phone, only to find it cracked even worse than Cassie's. She figures it took the full brunt of her dive to the floor with Cassie. Great, no contact with the outside world.
Cassie manages to retrieve her bag from the wreckage and pulls a charger out. She moves to a wall with an outlet that somehow still works, apparently, as Cassie's phone screen lights up the moment she plugs it in.
"It's working," Cassie announces. Her phone finishes powering up, and she frowns. "Still no text from Dad or Maggie…and my signal keeps going in and out." She slaps her phone in frustration, this time cutting her palm on one of the cracks with a sharp "Ow!"
"Okay, let's not destroy the one working phone," Hope says pointedly, taking it from Cassie's hands. She carefully navigates her fingers around the spider webs of cracks and opens the Twitter app, figuring that's the quickest way to figure out what's happening.
The trending page is a mess of phrases and words relating to the sudden disappearances. She scrolls through news reports of wildly different estimates for the total death toll, ranging anywhere from the thousands to the—
"Millions?" Cassie reads in disbelief.
"We need to get a hold of the Avengers," Hope says, exiting Twitter. "Whose numbers do you have?"
"Nat, Steve, Bruce, Tony, and Pepper?" Cassie lists off the top of her head. "I guess Tony won't work…"
Hope pulls up Natasha's number and hits the call button, but it never rings. The call drops within seconds. "Some cell towers must be down."
"Should we go to Dad?" Cassie asks. "Or what about Mom?"
Hope worries that the lack of contact from both to Cassie is an indicator of their fate. But Cassie's still hopeful, and Hope knows she should be, too.
"Why don't we check on your mom and Jim first?" Hope suggests. "Then we'll take them with us to find your dad and my parents."
"Okay."
They'd walked to the café from Hope and Scott's apartment, so they hurry back to the complex so Hope can retrieve her car. Thankfully, it survived the epidemic of driverless car crashes that ensued due to the disappearances, and Hope's able to pull it out of the garage around what crashed cars do sit on the property.
She immediately shrinks the car down to toy size once they pull out onto the street so they can navigate past the cars and other road blocks on the roads. Cassie stares at it all with wide eyes as they pass by. In the silence, Hope finds herself with a chance to think for the first time since everything started happening.
They are looking for five people. Of those five people, what are the chances all, none, or some are gone?
Hope glances at Cassie as the thought makes her heart race.
After a grueling fifteen minutes, they're driving through Cassie's neighborhood. Hope turns down her street and grimaces at an overturned car on the sidewalk. She returns the car to normal size as they pull up to her house. Cassie's parents' cars are still in the driveway; they were definitely home this morning.
Cassie barely waits for Hope to stop the car before she's yanking her seatbelt off and throwing open the passenger door. She sprints from the car and up the stairs to her house, yelling, "Mom! Jim!"
Hope's just getting out of the car when Cassie disappears inside the house. She hurries up the steps and through the front door, arriving to an eerily still scene.
She can hear the heavy falls of Cassie's feet above her, as Cassie runs around the upstairs. "Mom! Jim!"
Hope walks up to the dining table and finds a newspaper haphazardly lying on the ground, the pages all separated. Two lukewarm cups of coffee and a half-eaten bagel sit on the table, next to two cell phones.
"MOM!"
The only thing more deafening than Cassie's scream is the silence following it.
Stomps sound from the stairs. Hope turns just in time to watch Cassie descend slowly, step by step, breathing heavily.
Hope says nothing, simply meeting Cassie at the bottom steps and pulling her into her arms.
By the time they make it to Hope's parents' house, Cassie's all cried out. She spent the entire drive sobbing in the passenger seat, curled into herself. The sight left Hope crying silently herself, because she knows she's likely to be next, looking for parents that are no longer there.
Her parents' house is huge, but it doesn't take much yelling and searching to figure out that nobody's home. Everyone's cars are parked outside. There's nowhere else they could be.
They check the lab in the basement, and Hope recognizes the machinery they were supposed to be working on today—a way to safely travel in and out of the quantum realm. She examines the machine, and it appears to have been used recently, but tea had spilled onto the console that controls everything, frying the circuit board. The teacup lies in shards on the ground below.
Unlike Cassie, Hope doesn't yell or run when she realizes their fate. She just sinks to the floor of the lab with silent tears.
Cassie, who had run off to complete a whole lap of the house minutes prior, finally returns to the lab. Her loud sniffle catches Hope's attention. Hope watches as Cassie slowly approaches her, then sits on the floor beside her.
"I'm sorry, Hope," she says.
Hope pulls her into a hug. "I'm sorry about your dad."
Cassie suddenly stiffens in her arms. "What—what's gonna happen to me? He and Mom are both gone."
At that, Hope releases Cassie, placing her hands on her shoulders to look her straight in the eye.
"I'm not gonna let anything happen to you," Hope says, firm, and it's the most certain she's felt about anything all day. "You understand?"
Cassie nods.
"I'll take care of you," Hope whispers. "I promise."
She presses a kiss to Cassie's forehead, and feels Cassie's arms snake around her neck.
a/n: yes i am just changing who gets dusted as much as i want to make it more angsty and interesting yeehaw. stay tuuuuned
also in case anyone didn't know i still wrote fic occasionally in the 5 years i was gone from this particular fic - i have more recent fics on ao3 where i am also pikapegasus ! and now i'm on tumblr as caatws :) so come hit me up thereeee