In their defense, they didn't mean to get into trouble. They usually didn't. Scott's only really truly chased trouble a few times, probably the first of which was robbing Hank's house, another was actually falling in love with Hope, another of which was getting purposefully sucked into the quantum realm for fun.
He decided not to think about that just now. It certainly didn't have the pain of before, the five years of everything getting tinier and tinier, but it was nothing but distracting.
The bad guy of the hour had appeared out of nowhere, clad in a metal suit that made him look like what would have happened if they'd tried to make an Iron Man suit in the 80s. Unfortunately, this one was fitted with huge guns with age-appropriate fusion capabilities.
He and Hope flitted around the suit, shrinking and growing as usual, punching and shooting and firing as usual. They'd thought it was just a run-of-the-mill robbery, but when the man emerged from the power plant with even more powerful weaponry, Hope had screamed, "He's collecting energy from the plant somehow!" and that had started Scott's headache.
Hope had agreed to give him point on the mission for once, which meant that he got to order her to go into the power plant to figure out how to shut it down or at least prevent Metal Man from getting any more advancements that he really didn't need, while he got to play an airborne version of Whac-a-Mole.
"What do you even want?" he called out at the metal suit. He couldn't rightfully call the bad guy a guy yet; he hadn't seen his face.
He narrowly avoided a punch and shrunk again, skittering over the metal man and searching for somewhere to infiltrate the suit. "I seek to destroy the remaining Avengers," the suit proclaimed in the definition of a monotone.
"Well, I'm honored you're calling me and Hope Avengers since that is true and very few people acknowledge it, but you'd find more interesting ones further north," Scott muttered to himself as he finally found a crack in the armor. "We're really very boring. We just have cool suits."
"Scott," Hope said in his ear, "I don't know where he's getting the extra power. Please be careful out there! And don't tell the metal man about our tech, that's just stupid."
"Don't worry, honey, I'm being careful!" Huh, he couldn't find the power source of the suit. Didn't seem to be a human in there at all. Which was pretty creepy, and it proved his prediction of the technological revolution—this is why he didn't let Cassie get an Alexa thing and had refused to let the next advances of it from the five years into his and Hope's new house—until he found the command center.
Hope groaned. "You're in the suit, aren't you? I'm coming to help."
"Hope, I've got it—" He broke through a few crucial-looking glowing cords. Immediately the suit started heating up at an unexpected rate. "Ooh, getting out of here now, I think the suit's gonna blow. You be careful too, honey." He punched a path straight out of the suit and found himself in the bright sunlight again.
"You have only scratched the surface of my mechanisms," the suit declared. "You cannot hope to defeat me!" Just as Scott was growing again with the intention of running away as quickly as possible—Antoni II was getting fired for this, not being around when needed—he felt a great burning in his side and a wetness that could only be blood.
As he fell to the ground conveniently normal-Scott-sized, he saw the suit lower its gun. Ah, crap, he thought. Hope was going to kill him if the blood loss didn't do it first.
He saw, just barely, Hope fly in and start growing. She grew enough to pick him up (which was a weird feeling) and run out of the way of the explosion.
Scott felt himself being set lightly on the ground again and his helmet fly off his face. Hope knelt before him, tears in her eyes, hands pressing his side painfully. "Scott, don't do this to me, please no—"
"Hey, hey, it's okay," he managed. The sky was turning sort of black around him, and he was suddenly pretty sure that too much blood was pouring from him. Gross. Also embarrassing—surviving Thanos' army and being sent to the past and future multiple times and going to the quantum realm but being defeated by a metal suit? Ouch. He would never live it down. So he decided to add one more (potentially) embarrassing thing. "Hey, Hope, marry me?"
Her eyes widened and he really wanted to hear her response, because it was probably going to be either a bitingly clever no or a yes, either of which he would have liked to hear since he always liked hearing her voice. Instead, the blackness of the sky took over his vision, and he drifted away. The last thing he heard was Hope's scream.