No Chocolate For Scott
In a sunny day in San Francisco, four people with a small van were in an empty parking lot, minding their own business.
Two of them was Hank Pym and his newly returned wife, Janet Van Dyne. They were side by side, Janet was typing on a laptop and Hank was complaining about the lack of respect he was getting nowadays.
“Well, you wanted a smaller quantum tunnel,” Janet said, looking at the small van over her laptop. “This is… smaller.”
As if wanting to prove Hank’s point, the van’s characteristic horn blared. “Sorry!” Scott yelled from the driver's seat.
“Well, I think it has flare,” Janet said.
Scott activated the controls and hopped out from the van. Hope walked to him with the collection unit and gave him directions of how to use it. Janet’s own, kind of terrifying warnings followed her daughter’s. Scott frowned and didn’t comment.
As Hope started to count, Scott turned to the tunnel and activated his helmet. At one, Hope turned the switch and sent Scott to the Quantum realm.
“Alright, Scott, this is a mic check,” Hank said the moment Scott disappeared. The three waited for him to answer, but they didn’t get one.
After seconds that felt like hours, just as Hope’s hand went back to the switch, Scott answered back.
“Mic check, one, two. One, two. How’s everybody doing tonight in the quantum realm?” Scott asked in an annoyingly cheery voice.
With a sigh, Hank answered him. “Scott, we read you.”
“I just wanna make sure.”
They waited for him to collect enough particles and confirmation. “Great,” Hope said. “Preparing for re-entry in five, four, three, two, one.”
With the simple movement of the switch, Scott came back from the quantum realm. He hold the device up in his hand proudly. “Now we’re done, anybody up for lunch?”
“Now Ava, close your eyes and try to feel and follow the energy running in your veins,” Janet said gently. She was in the chamber with Ava, teaching her to control and make her body accept the quantum healing particles.
“While the particles are healing her, the process is much harder and slower than we want,” Hank said to Bill who was standing beside him with his arms folded. “This should be the reason why the chamber wasn’t helping anymore. Ava's body is having difficulties in letting in new particles. Probably because her body was phasing for too long.”
Bill sighed. They were watching Janet treat Ava inside the chamber Bill had built for her. “Is this the third particle capsule they're using?”
“The fourth one. About to become the fifth when Hope and Scott return,” Hank said. He glanced at the elevator behind them. “We’ll send Hope to the quantum realm this time to try something different.”
“What do you mean different?” Bill turned to Hank.
“Since we began trying to heal her, we only used quantum healing particles, but it doesn’t affect more than an aspirin for her pain. Hope suggested maybe we should extend our particle range. So, this time, we won’t use a capsule that only absorbs healing particles. Instead, we’ll get as various as we can get, and see how Ava will react to them.”
Bill only nodded, and they continued to watch in silence.
With him standing side by side, Hank remembered their old days in the S.H.I.E.L.D. He wondered if he did too, but didn’t voice his question. Less than five minutes later, the elevator doors opened and a very worn out looking Hope and Scott came out from it. They were arguing and certainly didn’t seem to plan to stop.
“For the last time Scott,” Hope said with gritted teeth as they walked beside the quantum tunnel. “I don’t care you thought it was the shrinking disc in the heat of the action. If you were just a second late to shrink yourself, you’d be toast!”
“Maybe, but in the end, I didn’t turn into a toast! We kicked their asses, got what we needed, and turned back in one piece!”
“Scott this isn’t-” Hope stopped and elbowed Scott to do the same. Hank was holding a finger on his mouth, and his free hand was pointed to the chamber. Janet, Ava, and Bill weren’t looking amused by their bickering either.
“Sorry just-” Hope turned to Scott and sighed. “There were some unexpected obstacles,” she said. Hank guessed there was things went worse than Scott’s wrong disc. Seeing his daughter’s state was proof of it. Their suits were covered with ash and blood, Hank assumed. “Still, we managed to get them.”
“What happened? Why did they attack you?” Hank kept his voice as calm as possible and rubbed Hope’s arm.
Hope scoffed. “It was another genius that thought our tech was on sale. But I think they learned their lesson.”
"If you look like this, I can't imagine how are they,” Hank smiled faintly at his daughter.
His small smile was enough to open Scott’s mouth though. “Oh, you have no idea! But you may want to make some upgrades to our suits though. It can become very hot in this.”
Hank’s simultaneous horror and irritation must’ve been shown on his face because Hope immediately squeezed his arm with a grimace on her face.
Hank nodded to her without another word, and Hope let go of his arm. She turned on her heels and walked away with dragging Scott after her.
Hope exclaimed the moment elevator doors closed. “Are you serious Scott!? Did you have to say it that way in front of him?”
Scott scratched his head. “Yeah, now I think of it, maybe it wasn’t the best-”
“Yeah no shit,” Hope cut him short.
Scott grimaced and murmured an apology. Hope sighed but didn’t say anything. They waited in silence until the elevator doors opened to the building’s training area/Hope’s apartment.
When she and Hank were on the run, obviously they had to leave a lot of things from their old lives behind. Including Hope’s old apartment and Hank’s house. While Janet and Hank were living in their old house again, in an isolated beach outside of the city, Hope was still living in the lab. In the time she lived here, she almost turned the whole floor into some kind of a studio apartment. A wide training mat right in the middle of it and the rest the furniture and the open kitchen on the right side of the floor almost looked like an afterthought.
Still, Scott actually liked the place. It was very different from Hope's old apartment, which looked more like a photo from a house design magazine than an actual home. This place was reminding him of the safehouses from various TV shows and movies but in a more Hope kind of way. Because there was a glass cabinet for her Wasp suit on the left wall, and Scott exactly knew where was her secret snack stock in the kitchen.
Hope didn’t look at him again as she walked to the glass cabinet and started to take her suit off. Scott didn’t bother to since he was going to ride an ant to go back to his apartment anyway. So, he just went to the kitchenette for water and whatever sweets left from Hope.
Because of her strict diet, there were no potato chips obviously. Scott thought even the FBI must've known about her sweet-tooth by now, and his hypothesis was as well as confirmed by what he found on her cabinet. "Looks like someone went to grocery shopping!" Scott called out to her over his shoulder. “For someone with a diet like yours, you eat a lot of chocolate!”
“Stay away from my chocolates! I’m still angry at you,” Hope said as she put her helmet on its place.
Scott didn’t mind her one bit and opened the bar in his hand as he walked. He let himself drop to the couch with all his dust, and his feet went to the coffee table simultaneously. “You know I apologized like ten times Hope. Can you let it go?”
“No,” she said, and Scott rolled his eyes.
Scott watched her as she closed the glass door with a click and looked at the suit for a short moment, it needed a proper cleaning just like his suit. She took a deep breath and stretched her arms out. Scott saw a dark bruise on her right shoulder as she walked around the mat to her living room, which was just two sofas and a TV around a coffee table.
“Yeah. Let's not talk about it,” he grumbled when she didn’t say anything. Hope rolled her eyes as she walked over and fetched the chocolate bar from his hand and stepped over his legs. She took a bite from the chocolate before sitting on the empty side of the couch.
“Can you at least try to read what’s written on the thing you want to blow up next time so that you won’t set things on fire? I’d really like you to not burn into a crisp just because of a component.”
Scott frowned for a second, but his expression softened with the realization. “Wait, that's the real reason you're mad at me?" He asked. "AWW, I love you too, bae-bee.” Hope rolled her eyes at the nickname as he put his head on her shoulder and lead her hand with his to bite the chocolate. “Promise, I’ll be more careful next time Jellybean.”
Hope retreated the chocolate before he could bite and elbowed him. “Call me Jellybean one more time, and I’ll turn you into jelly Scott.”
Scott scoffed. “Why are you so mean to me? I just confessed my tremendous love to you,” he said, leaning away.
“Why am I even trying?” Hope sighed and picked up her almost finished book from the coffee table. Scott took out his phone but he started to bumping her foot with his minutes after, only for her to do it back.
Their comfortable silence didn’t even last fifteen minutes before elevator doors opened to reveal Hope’s parents. Bill and Ava were behind them, but they disappeared quickly with the doors closing on them. Janet and Hank walked to them as Hope closed her book. Scott greeted them with a wave.
Janet waved back with a smile as she went to Hope’s side. She stroked her daughter's arm while sitting on the side of the couch. “I heard your mission went slightly wrong.”
“What did you do Scott?” Hank asked directly to him as he sat on the other couch.
“Why you always just straight up assume everything is always my fault?” Scott asked offendedly.
“Because 90% of the time, it is your fault, Scott.”
“Give him a break, Henry,” Janet said.
“Yes, give me a break, Henry! Thank you, Janet,” Scott said gratefully. “Sometimes, I feel like it’s only you who appreciates and supports me in this family.”
“What do you mean by that?” Hank almost sounded offended. “I support you! I let you follow my daughter around don’t I?”
Hope giggled at her father’s words and shrugged innocently when Scott looked at her in betrayal. He looked up to Janet for help, but she was obviously trying not to smile, and she was failing miserably. “I hate all of you,” Scott said defeatedly.
“Now now, if I were you I’d be careful of what I was saying to us, Scott. Maybe our hands would slip next time when you’re in the quantum realm,” Hank said like it's no big deal.
At Hank’s words, the smile on Hope’s face turns into a frown. “I thought I was going in this time.”
“What do you mean ‘this time’?” Scott asks. “I thought we’d had enough particles when we got the fifth one.”
“We thought so too. Until the third one. We just didn’t tell neither to you or Ava that it wasn’t working,” Janet sighed. “Her body keeps rejecting the particles, and I'm not sure why.”
“But she seemed to absorb the quantum energy coming out of you. Both the times when you touched her with your fingers, and she was sucking it out of you from the tunnel.”
“Yes, but now both mom and the healing particles can’t go further than being a temporary solution.” Hope explained. “Ava feels better after treatment, but a couple of hours later, the pain and the phasing returns like it’s never been gone.”
A short silence fell between them until Scott broke it. “But, there is still a chance, right? I’m sure you guys had figure something out.”
“Well kinda. I think it's because of her lack of particles other than healing ones. Her body can’t complete it’s phasing with only one kind,” Hope explained.
Scott nodded. “So, what are we going to do?”
“Well, this time I’ll go to the quantum realm and take all kinds of particles I can get to test them later. That’s the reason why we needed those nano filters we got today. To decompose the particles and figure out the right amount and combinations that can heal Ava.”
“You make it all sound it's so simple- like we’re gonna go try to find her favorite cake flavor,” Scott said.
Janet laughed at Scott’s statement and turned to Hank. “See, he’s starting to get quantum physics.”