A/N: School is a pain, university especially when it comes to interfering with your Fanfic upload schedule. Not sure if much else needs to be said other than a quick shoutout to Squidoverlord for his consistent reviews. Appreciate it, along with all the others who leave reviews of their own.
A notable tension in the room seemed to deflate once that Avenger left the building. It had reached its peak when Luis and Kurt had a brief glimpse of the Hulk lurking within the man, neither one of them wanting to risk further agitating the beast inside. Especially when there was also an eleven year old child in the room. It surprised them both that they were able to withhold what they did from one of Earth's defenders, but after a few hours, the gravity of their actions began to sink in.
"Dude! Did we just lie to a freaking Avenger?" Kurt cried out once Luis escorted Cassie back to the security office to watch the monitors again.
"Uh, yeah, we just did!" Luis replied, breaking out into a grin out of habit like a kid at a carnival. "Hey man, don't worry about it. I mean, not like he's gonna go looking for us anyway. Besides, we can handle this, 's no big deal."
"We are out of depth here!" he retorted, a sense of hysteria coming over him. "That man was manageable, but what about when others come?"
Luis bit his lip for a moment, his bright demeanor wavering slightly. They were regarded asassociates of Scotty's prior to his Accords violation, would people come for him and Kurt? His eyes flickered to the TV they had recently purchased thanks to their new influx of clients, reports of further casualties and anarchy in the aftermath of the 'dusting'—as the newscaster called it—almost fourteen hours prior.
Nah, they got a full plate of problems to chew on for now.
"If they see through our lies…" Kurt reiterated, head in his hands. "What were we thinking?"
"Well… you remember how Scotty was when we first visited him after Germany, right? He just wouldn't stop talking about it, and that's coming from me," Luis proclaimed. "Anyway, the one thing that stood out for me was his vendetta against Tony Stark."
"Vendetta?" Kurt repeated, puzzled by the idea. Scott was never really one to hold grudges, at least in the time he'd known him.
"Yeah man, though that was probably because he didn't talk to him in prison like those other dudes they picked up. So, Scotty tells me 'you can never trust a Stark' and—here's the clincher—that he and Dr. Pym would never let the suit fall into his hands. I couldn't just turn over the man's life work to one of Stark's guys Kurt, I had to respect their last wishes."
"How do you know he is Stark's guy?" Kurt asked, his face creasing in thought. "What, he gave you a list?"
"Uh yeah, actually, he did," Luis admitted with a sheepish smile to boot, trying to recall that conversation he had with Scott.
"Dude! Seriously, what's our play here?"
"Well, security's gonna be at all time high premium rate now with half the world gone, we don't really have to do anything. In terms of business, we've been dealt the best hand of our lives man, even better than that one I had in Rio way, way back. We'll be the, uh, coincidental beneficiaries in the midst of an unfortunate worldwide crisis."
"So you want to stay here after all that? When outside, the city is set for D-Day?!"
"Hey man, normally I'd agree with you, but we've never had to account for a kid in all this before!" Luis said, turning his gaze to Cassie who was fiddling with the security feeds in one of the back rooms.
"I know, but…" Kurt got up as he uttered the words, beckoning Luis to follow as they walked towards a closet. The shrunken Pym lab and Luis's van with the quantum tunnel installed sat in front of them, the controls to manipulate sizes intact. "How long do you think we can keep this secret?"
"You're right, Scotty wouldn't want this stuff to be taken," Luis said, gears turning as he racked his mind for a solution. "Okay, okay, I'll lay out my new plan for you: We leave at the first sight of trouble man, simple at that."
Kurt couldn't help the slight snicker that came out of his mouth, keeping it simple was never Luis's forte, whether it be with his long-winded stories that often didn't amount to much, his record being defaced by result of a failed smoothie machine heist, or simply the way he went about his daily life, just being Luis.
Oh Baba Yaga, if Luis is 'keeping things simple' now, the world is at its end, Kurt thought with a shudder.
"Kurt? You good man?" Luis was eyeing him with a look of skepticism and slight worry, as if he had said too little initially.
"Oh, yeah, yeah, glad we could agree," he replied simply, his concern while wavering, was still present. "Sorry, it's getting late, I should get rest."
"Alright, you do you, man. I'll busy catching up on some reading!" Luis proclaimed, reaching behind his back to reveal a book called Parenting In Unexpected Situations.
"Why do you have that?" Kurt asked quizzically.
"My old girl got it for me. Was with her for a month or so whe-"
Suddenly, an alarm made a wooping noise throughout the building, interrupting what seemed to be a lighthearted story that would alleviate some tension. The three Wombats had opted to upgrade their security after the incident with Sonny Burch, opting to spring for some security coded access panels for entry to the second floor, as well as a lockdown feature which was still a work in progress. Recordings of Luis's voice issuing a warning was projected through the area, more to just throw off potential burglars with his way of words.
"That didn't take long."
Luis's words were brief, but had managed to snap both of them out of their stupor. The two rushed into the security room to retrieve Cassie. A security feed displayed some stragglers gathering around the building's door, arming themselves with whatever was available, which ranged from bricks, crowbars, batons likely stolen from police, silverware, and even a pair of scissors rose among the small group. It wouldn't be long before the mob found their way inside, even with upgraded fiberglass windows impeding their path.
"Uncle Luis, what's going on?" Cassie asked with a whimper, her lip quivering with fear.
"Cassie, don't worry, Uncle Luis is just having a friendly disagreement with those little men down there," Luis said as soothingly as he could muster.
She shook her head, not buying it. It tended to slip their minds that despite how innocent and cute she was, Cassandra Lang was eleven years old, and a smart one too for that matter. "They look like the same men my daddy fought, they weren't friendly when he was Ant-Man."
"Your daddy beat them real good though, right? With his suit to disappear and-" Luis paused, realizing he had found the solution to their problem before he even had to confirm it in his mind. "Cassie, you're a genius! We're getting out of here, I got an idea!"
He ran off to grab the lab and miniature van with the controls, placing it at the back of their main office space before enlarging it. They were going to need as much runway as possible to pull off the jump that was to come. A countertop along with a supporting beam for the building was torn during the transformation, but that was hardly a concern in the moment. Tossing the lab in the back, Luis motioned for Kurt and Cassie to get in, handing the remote to the former as he got in.
"When we smash through that wall, flick the switch before we hit the street," he explained, before igniting the engine and flooring the gas. Screams induced with adrenaline and fear coursed through the three of them as they tore through the infrastructure of the building into a darker night.
Rumours surfaced later regarding the car shaped hole that appeared in the wall of a small second floor office building, with no evidence of the vehicle touching the ground after the supposed jump, but there wasn't a credible eyewitness in sight who could ever explain the phenomena.
Scott startled into consciousness upon a ticklish sensation on his nose. Weary and still feeling the aftereffects of overexposure to the quantum realm, it took him five tries to begrudgingly force his eyes open to accustom himself to… wherever he was now.
Am I—are we dead? The thought came to him in a brief moment of utter despair as this environment was nothing like anything he had seen in his short time in the quantum realm. Which, okay, wasn't much at all, considering his initial experience was a few minutes tops and he hadn't really seen much his second go around either. The small glimpse of the dimension he had witnessed so far had all looked the same to him, the experience once again likely overwhelming his mind with the supernatural.
Still, it felt somehow… different where he was now, he wasn't sure how outside of an instinctive gut reaction. It didn't seem quite as daunting as the quantum realm itself, as he didn't quite feel like his sanity was being hung by a thread. Still, his panic was a more than viable substitute for the quantum realm's manipulation of the mind. Scott took deep breaths to try and steady himself, although Hank did inform him that breathing was more of a formality in the quantum realm based off of his wife's experience. He was smaller than the very atoms that air and its elements were comprised of, essentially being just pure energy himself.
In an effort to wash away dark prospects of bleak futures of nothingness, Scott focused on his current situation, dissecting the events of the day, assuming it had only been a day since he and Hope—Hope, where was she?—had made the biggest mistake of their lives. His heart ached with guilt to last a few lifetimes at the memory of him convincing Hank to allow her to tag along. A simple mission, they had said. In and out. And of course he, Scott Lang, being the efficiency driven man he was, evident when he had tampered with his regulator's unknown forces three long years ago so it wouldn't 'hold him back', had the brilliant idea to allow the two of them to trapped for the price of one trip.
God, somehow he always ended up making the wrong decision to hurt the ones he cared about most. Jail was a first and it had pained him to see how much Cassie loved him at his worst. Germany was quite literally rock bottom at the Raft when he barely even registered a thought about Hank and Hope's wellbeing, but this might've topped them all. Now, he had needlessly pulled both of them into a life sentence in the subatomic region, leaving Hank and Janet defenseless against whoever they had fought against on the surface. He wondered with a brief shudder how long it would take him and Hope to lose all coherent thought and not even be aware of it.
Hope, I need to find Hope, was the only thing his brain could come up in the moment. And it certainly was the thing he needed, in more ways than one. If he was alive (he was alive, right?) after being sucked into that vortex with her, she couldn't be far. It was the least he could do for screwing things up.
When he tried to kick out his legs to move forward, he found them immobilized by some unseen force, though he found the rest of his body could still rotate around, only his legs remained in place, as if a load of cinderblocks rested upon them.
Figures. Apparently, the quantum realm—if that was his current location—was imprisoning those who even ventured upon the dimension. Even the illusion of escape was nothing more than a façade now.
Scott did his best to keep a level head under this new duress, craning his head around to fully take in his surroundings for the first time, eyes searching for anything of significance at this point to distract him. The atmosphere of this new domain was shimmering a dark hue of green, oddly shaped sparkling symbols of orange whizzing past him on occasion as he took in the view.
Suddenly, the realm seemed to shift, as some symbols began to engulf him in even brighter rings of green. Before Scott could make anything of it, the scenery changed once more, the background shifting to a scene that looked straight out of a movie. He might as well have been in an Imax theatre though, considering the event he was watching play out had no bounds. No matter which way he looked, he was still bearing witness to whatever this was unfolding.
A strange man who wore a gleaming necklace of what seemed to be some durable alloy of metal crossed his arms, holding three fingers in the air before moving them back down to his sides. Scott gasped involuntarily when the necklace opened to reveal a glowing green stone that had shined even more vibrantly than the green realm he was just in moments ago. The green rings that had surrounded him now covered the man, as he seemed to exert some sort of energy on the apple in front of him, consuming it before making it whole once more.
It was jaw dropping when watching the man take it a step further, as he inexplicably plucked two pages of what looked to be an ancient spellbook out of nowhere. As the man performed a ritual of some sort, mirrors began to surface in the room, which frightened Scott enough that he almost forgot he was merely a spectator in the moment.
Scott only grew more befuddled as two men entered the room dressed in similar garb—all three were wearing robes of some sort—to scold the one wielding the necklace's power. Abruptly, as if the dimension was editing the event like a movie clip, Scott could hear parts of the conversation that ensued between the men as the scene began to fade away for some unexplainable reason.
"You weren't manipulating the space-time continuum, you were breaking it."
"Temporal manipulations can create branches in time!"
"We do not tamper with natural law. We defend it."
"Spatial paradoxes! Time loops!"
As he heard these final words, Scott tried to comprehend what he had just seen. That man was affecting time somehow with that necklace? What were the consequences of doing it? Those green rings, were they a sign that Scott was now literally trapped in the space-time continuum itself? Who were those men considering they seemed human? And most importantly of all, why was he shown all that?
Before he could even ponder an answer to all his questions, the scenery reverted back to the hues of green with the glistening rings passing by once more. Something had changed though, he sensed it, and sure enough, he was able to move around, the apparent weight on his legs removed.
Simultaneously, an unseeable barrier seemed to break right in front of him, and Scott's eyes widened with an emotion that could only be described pure, unadulterated joy as Hope seemed to materialize out of nowhere before him. He could tell she was having similar feelings at the sight of him, even with her having her suit on, just from the way her eyes seemed to light up in comparison to her glazed, timid look moments prior.
They closed the space between the two of them quickly, neither of them wanting to let go of the other, especially after even just what Scott perceived to be a half hour tops of separation. Eventually, they broke the embrace to compose themselves.
"Hope I thought I had…" Scott couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence as he could feel the waterworks threatening to flow down his cheeks. She nodded with a similar sentiment, her hard resolve breaking in the moment, the two of them hugging once more, tears being shed more freely.
"We're here now Scott, both of us," Hope said after their initial wave of feelings subsided, her voice laced with emotion. The only other time Scott had heard her voice break like that was when Janet had finally returned from the quantum realm. He wanted nothing more than to remove both their helmets and kiss her right then, but he didn't want to risk their bodies being overwhelmed with subatomic radiation, so he held off the thought.
"I… I know," he replied tentatively, before trying to shift the mood with his next words. "You know, it never really hit me just how true the whole 'safety in numbers' idea was until now."
Hope smiled at the quip, taking his hand in hers as if to remind them both that this was real. That against all odds, they had survived like the ineradicable insects they donned. They were still in this together for some benign reason.
Call it fate, destiny, divine intervention, the will of the universe; whatever it was, Scott was glad for it.
"When we were… apart," Hope began apprehensively, sounding unsure of what had transpired on her end for that period of time. Scott knew the topic would come up. "Did you see a… vision of some sort? Guys in robes that looked like they belonged to a cult?"
Scott allowed himself a slight smile at her description, apparently his banter was rubbing off on her. "Yeah, weird, like this place was trying to tell us som-"
A burst of green began to converge upon a point just in front of them, and with it came a notable shift in the area. The scenery flickered back to the black of the quantum realm with the green being compacted into that one area. Scott looked towards Hope for some rational explanation for what was happening, but she merely returned his look of apprehension while steadily nudging the two of them back from the swirling green vortex that surfaced.
A figure finally became noticeable in the midst of the green and as the being moved forward, the colour being released through the realm once more. The two of them gasped as the person's identity was discernible.
It was the very same man they had both seen wielding the necklace, and he exuded an unflappable aura of confidence. The necklace was gone though, replaced by a regal red cape that only added to his level of badassery in Scott's mind. Still, something seemed… off about the man though, even if he was standing before him. He looked as though he was transparent, a ghost of some sort. Hope seemed to mirror his suspicions, assuming a fighting stance in case of conflict. Scott decided it'd be best to assert themselves first, in case the man was a threat.
"Hey man look, I'm a believer that life's full of coincidences and all, but you showing up right after we just saw some video showing how you're some all powerful wizard isn't all that promising. Kind of a bad omen. Tell us the whys and hows now, and we'll reconsider," he said with a loud, stern voice. He couldn't remember the last time he had used that kind of tone.
"You know that I'm a Master of the Mystic Arts?" the man replied, with a genuine tone of surprise and some disbelief.
"If that means wizard then yeah, this place keeps tabs on everyone apparently."
"Interesting, the stone never foretold…" the man didn't finish, his eyes glazing over at the thought of whatever he was about to speak of.
He regained his composure quickly though, looking intently at Scott. "I assure you, I mean you no harm by my presence here. I'm Dr. Stephen Strange, and Scott Lang, I'm asking for your… wait, who is that with you?" He seemed puzzled by Hope's presence.
"I'm surprised you don't know her when you already have my name, we're a package deal being Ant-Man and the Wasp!" Scott exclaimed, to which Hope added, "Smooth, Scott, smooth."
"Wasp?" Strange repeated, as he started to put things together. "Then you must be..."
"Hope Van Dyne, largely known for violating the Accords and hiding out with my father, Hank Pym, former chairwoman of the now dissolved Pym Technologies," she finished, as if she had the introduction memorized like the back of her hand.
"Of course, Hope," he replied with a shake of his head. "I did not foresee this outcome, the time stream may have been inconspicuously altered, but there must be another… now that the endgame is upon us."
"Uh, could you explain what you mean by all that? Preferably not in cryptic riddles?" Scott asked, wondering if this was how the man always spoke.
"Let's just say that Hope's survival wasn't a variable I had taken into consideration in my manipulation of events to save the universe."
Hope's survival? Saving the universe? The two were ready to bombard questions at Strange, starting with how Scott apparently was the key to saving the universe over Hope. The sorcerer held up two shaking hands to stop the onslaught, hoping they would yield.
"I don't much time, I'll explain what I can before I must leave," Strange informed them, watching Scott and Hope carefully to see if they were listening to the words he would have to offer.
Words he may or may not have to utter to ensure the possibility of a restored universe. Words that had a miniscule chance (but still a chance) of causing the survivors to deviate from the endgame he had so meticulously plotted out. Words that would could make, break, or have no effect at all on the outcome. He hesitated for a moment. Was this the right thing to do? Was he even supposed to play a role after the initial defeat?
It was hard determining when and when not to act without the clairvoyance of the time stone, especially with the weight of half of the universe resting upon these actions. Really, really hard.
Of course I had to include Dr. Strange, no fanfic is truly complete without a sorcerer and glowing magic. Could've put Captain Marvel in his place which would make a lot of sense, but I'm honestly not sure how to portray her character if I'm being honest. I'm avoiding all trailers and most spoilers like the plague which doesn't help. I'll find a role for her in this fic though. I probably could've kept Scott and Hope together for this duration of the chapter, but I like writing angst (even if I'm bad at it). More updates in Wakanda next time, and although Avengers 4 is the endgame like it's been said so many times by now, we're only in the beginning of it so far with this story. Much more to come. Hopefully, it won't take a month for next chapter to come out, I've got it planned out, but execution's never been my strong suit.
Anyway, thanks for reading and be sure to follow, fav, and leave a review if you can, all that surely puts a smile on my face. Until next time,
-BasketballIsFun