Sleepless Nights
Hope was suiting up and it was taking all the will inside her to do so.
She was taking trembling breaths, sometimes sniffing. Her mind was a mess and she thought she’s never felt this loathed and afraid to do anything in her life.
She understood how her father felt that day now.
Telling a little girl that her father is lost, probably won’t ever coming back…
Because of a stupid malfunction.
“You sure you want to tell her, Hope?” Hank had asked, standing.
Hope couldn’t even bear the thought of another little girl waiting in the dark with fear for her parents to show up. “Yes, she deserves to know what happened to her dad.”
Hank nodded, probably lost in his own memories of a little girl waiting for her mother. “And, you sure you want to do his this way? You could bring her here, and all three of us can explain.”
“No,” Hope answered. “What if Maggie or Paxton decides to check on her when she’s away. Don’t think they can handle her missing too, and we then have to explain things to them. But Cassie is his daughter and she deserves to know.”
Hank nodded defeatedly. “We’ll find a way Hope.” He looked at her eyes. “We always do.”
“Just like we did to Ava?” Hope didn’t look at him as she checked her blasters. “It took us thirty years to find mom and Ava is only holding on, and right now Scott’s probably hiding from a t-rex.”
Hope took a deep breath to contain herself and shut her eyes. “It’s just… We’re so lost dad… so-”
“No,” Hank said. He walked to his daughter and held her by the arms, forcing her to stand still and look at him. “We are not lost, Hope. We’re figuring out. Okay? You’ll say these exact words to Cassie because her dad isn’t gone. Because we are figuring it out.”
Hope couldn’t help but think that those exact words could’ve changed her childhood. Only if her father had held her just like he did now back then, things might’ve been so different. She realized he was doing it now; he’d failed when she was little, but he was trying to do it now. He was being there for her now, for another little girl.
Hope bit her lip and looked at him before nodding once. She snapped her helmet on and shrunk. Hank followed her tiny form to fly out the window and into the night.
Sneaking into Cassie’s bedroom was easy, a cracked open window enough for Hope to fly in. A soft yellow light was looming in the room from the open window, causing her fluff animals and toys almost look like statues in the dark, watching the tiny, winged figure fly across the room.
Hope looked at her as she fled over her. Cassie was asleep of course; it was well past midnight. Hope guessed Paxton and Maggie would be too, but decided it wouldn’t hurt to take a look at least to the corridor.
She stuck out her head from the hole and looked around. All the doors on the second floor were closed and there was no TV or any other sound to be heard. It eased Hope just a little and she fled back to wake up Cassie.
Hope went to her right side and grew back to her real size. She opened her helmet and took a deep breath. She reached out and gently shook Cassie’s shoulder. “Cassie? Sweetie wake up.”
Cassie’s eyes shivered, then slowly she opened her eyes. For some seconds, she blinked into emptiness before focusing on Hope and almost yelled her name if Hope haven't immediately closed her hand on Cassie’s mouth.
“We need to be quiet, or else we can get caught,” Hope whispered to her quickly. Cassie nodded and, to Hope’s surprise, her arms went around her neck to hug her.
“Nobody knows where daddy is. He was supposed to come and pick me up yesterday but he didn’t come. Paxton thinks he’s missing…” Cassie whispered to Hope in haste and worry. They broke apart and Cassie looked up to her with such innocent hope that Hope’s heart clenched painfully in her chest.
Hope took a trembling breath and bit her lip. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat with no success and looked into Cassie’s eyes. “Your dad is in the quantum realm, Cassie.”
Cassie frowned. “The place where Janet was?”
“Yeah.”
“But dad said she was trapped in there for thirty years,” tears were welling up in her eyes when she whispered. “Dad’s trapped there too?”
Hope was burning inside. She was cursing for her father to send them together just for a couple of extra particles. She was angry at Scott for agreeing to go in the first place. She was mad at herself for letting him.
“No,” Hope said. “He isn’t, because unlike my mother we now have the technology to find and bring him back. We’re working on it. We’re… we’re figuring it out. I promise we’ll bring him back to you, okay, Cassie?”
Her eyes were still teary, but she nodded.
“And, you can’t tell anybody about this,” Hope stroked the little girl’s hair. “If the police or FBI finds us, he may stay trapped for good.”
Cassie nodded. “Okay, I promise.”
Hope nodded herself too, and this time she hugged Cassie. “I promise Cass, we’ll find him.”
Hope felt little arms hold her a bit tighter before letting go. Hope got up and walked to the window. Not knowing what to say, she looked at Cassie and wished her goodnight before shrinking and flying out through the window.
In the cool of the evening when everything is getting kind of groovy…
Hope’s working hands stopped as the song’s calm and familiar melody filled her ears. She marveled at the fact that hearing one song could throw off her balance so quickly and harshly. Apparently what people were saying about the phenomenon was correct.
She wasn’t even actively listening before that particular song, but her hands didn’t start to work again until half way through the song. Shaking her head, she forced herself to focus back to her task at hand: Cable lining the ‘quantum compass,’ which they finished the design only four days ago, and were building it now to use it in their search of Scott in the quantum realm.
It has been a month since he got sucked by a time vortex, and Hope, Janet, Hank, and even Ava and Bill, were still trying desperately to find a way to save him. They found a game-changing idea two weeks ago: building a quantum compass.
After two years of searching, theorizing and discovering the quantum realm and its physics to find her mom, Hope is both terrified and amazed that there’s still so little they know, and so much more to discover.
But everything’s different from that two isolated years with her father; this time she has her mom with her, and it's something she wanted for all her life. Just her to be around, speaking with her while drinking coffee, teasing her dad about his choice of ties, or just standing side by side while looking to a laptop and writing codes to navigate their way in the quantum realm, it’s more than she ever imagined.
Only if it wasn’t to find a very lost Scott in the quantum realm, who was probably in a different dimension by now or still being dragged through time at the moment. But, Hope and her parents had promised Cassie to bring her dad back, and this Wasp wasn’t going to leave her Ant-Man in an unknown dimension.
Her mother had survived down there for thirty years until they were able to locate and bring her back. Remembering their talk on parents and their love for their daughters, Hope knew that Scott would not give up fighting. He would not stop hoping and trying to find ways to come back, and that was his part. Hope and everyone else’s role was doing everything they can do to find him.
Now they already had both the technology and a guide in their hands to find Scott. The only thing they needed was determination, which Hope had in a significant amount inside. But, her good thoughts and mood only lasted ten seconds before her brain replayed a memory to crush almost all her hopes.
Don’t get sucked into a time vortex; we won’t be able to save you, said, her mother when they were sending him for particles for the first time.
It had almost sounded funny back then, like something Janet made up to mess with Scott like she sometimes did to Hank and Hope. And oh, how many times she had wished it was just a joke of her mother’s.
Even though Hope had never even thought of believing- or rather accepting her mother’s words in this one. “Once, it was impossible to bring you back too,” Hope said after her mother tried to talk her about the odds. “Now, we drink coffee while going over fashion magazines.”
Hope continued to her work with the low sound of music and faint patters of the giant ants around her. Other than them and little buzzing sounds coming out of the compass, the lab was silent in the middle of the night.Until an alarm sound came out from one of the monitors.
The sudden and unexpected noise made her jump on her chair. Hope sighed in relief when she realized the alarm didn’t go off to inform her of the FBI, but something from the quantum realm.
She got up and got faster at each step she took to the monitor. The ants got out of her way as she passed by them. When she arrived and silenced the alarm to see what triggered it, a gasp escaped from her lips.
UNIDENTIFIED SIGNAL DETECTED
Hope frowned and allowed herself to freak out only for three seconds before pulling herself together and getting to work. She looked around for a chair and a giant ant brought her a stool without her needing to order it specially. Hope sat and started to type to the open laptop in front of her.
She bit her lip in concentration as she hastily typed an algorithm to analyze the signal’s waves. With the recent quantum lessons from her mother, it only took her about only a couple minutes to adapt the algorithm they used to find her mother to examine, and hopefully, locate the signal. With a shaky breath, she typed enter and waited with a burning feeling in her stomach to the process to begin.
She jerked with a rubbing feeling on her leg. Looking down, she saw her cat Opal looking up to her with his beautiful blue-green eyes. His tail curled side to side before meowing softly and bumping her leg with his head.
Despite her nervousness, a soft chuckle escaped from Hope. “Sorry for the alarm, my tiny panther.”
She picked him up and cuddled him. Her fingers stroked his soft, black fur as she watched the numbers change on the computer screen until they suddenly stopped.
“What is this?” Hope murmured as she stared at the results. After reading them once, then twice, she figured it out. I can't believe he did it, against all Hope’s prejudice, Scott had used the morse code in a message to get help. The danger isn’t aliens, but getting stuck in another realm counts I guess.
There was a storm of thoughts inside head but at the same time, her most burning question since two months was answered. He’s alive!
“Mom! Dad! I found a trace!” Hope called out as she entered her parents’ house. She was holding her laptop with some notes under her right arm and two pastry bags was in her left hand. There was a massive smile on her face for the first time after months. “Scott’s alive and he sent us a signal!”
Opal entered the house after her and Hope closed the door behind them. She then sprinted from room to room on the first floor, went to the kitchen in hopes to find her parents there but the kitchen was empty. Though it didn’t upset her as she dropped the paper bags on the counter and started to scatter out her calculations on the table. She was excited, almost giddy, and felt like a little girl couldn’t wait for her parents to see her newest drawing.
“Hope?” Janet said as she entered the kitchen. She was wearing a dark red bathrobe and slippers. She walked over to look at Hope’s notes while suppressing a yawn.
“Sorry if I woke you up,” Hope bit her lip. “But this is big. I believe Scott left the vortex and somehow found a way to send us a message in morse code. The quantum antennas received it last night. He says he felt like five hours passed before the vortex spat him out and he built a basic signal generator from scraps for us to follow.”
“But how do you know it’s Scott? Does he know the morse code? How can you be so sure?”
“Because he once lectured me about how governments should build telegraph stations again in case if the next alien attack on earth would cut the internet around the world.” Hope stops at her mother’s confused frown and adds with a calmer voice. “And at the end of the message he wants us to tell Cassie that he’s sorry he couldn’t pick her up from school, but he’ll make it up to her later.”
“Henry! Henry, are you here?” Janet called as she and her very excited daughter made their way to Hank’s -and now, Janet’s too- lab.
They found him on his desk, asleep with his head on his arms and in yesterday’s clothes — a mess of papers, pens, and plans around him.
“Dad?” Hope went beside him and gently shook his shoulder to wake him up as Janet started to tidy up the mess to open area for Hope’s plans.
With a deep yawn, Hank straightened in his chair, and his hand immediately went to his aching neck. His back was no better. “I should’ve come with you instead of working five more minutes Jan.”
“Yes, you should. I tell you that all the time,” Janet said and rubbed his neck and shoulders. “Hope found something last night. A message from Scott.”
With that, all Hank’s sleepiness disappeared, and he started to pull the papers towards him. “What do you mean? The suit doesn’t have that kind of equipment-”
“He came out of the vortex, dad. He says he was in the vortex for five hours then it spat him out. He must have found some basic stuff where he stranded and built an amateur radio to send us signals.”
Hank continued to read the papers as Hope shared a look with her mom for a short second. “The first thing antennas caught was his message, but the signal after it doesn’t stop. He wants us to follow the signal, just like the way we did with mom.”
Hank was staring at the papers blankly now. “But Hope-” he started, but Hope didn’t listen and just grabbed a board pen from his desk instead.
She went to the whiteboard and started to write her formula to calculate how far he went in the quantum realm in the five hours he was in the vortex. “Quantum realm is in constant change inside it, but our world stays the same. So we need to find exactly which point he left the vortex. The signal he’s sending is helpful, but useless if we don’t spot the exact source to grow back to find him.”
“Yes that could work but- How did he grow back?” Hank asked in frustration. “He didn’t have a growing disk with him this time. How did he find the necessary equipment -that he is familiar with- to build something like that?”
Hope stared at her father for a short moment. “What do you mean he didn’t? How are so sure?”
“Because I emptied the suit's pockets when I was working on it. He put it on without any discs or any Pym particles enough for him to grow back. He must’ve been pulled out by somebody.”
“Mom?” Hope asked Janet almost pleadingly, and her daughter’s voice broke Janet out from her reverie. She took a deep breath before going beside her daughter.
“Two possibilities,” she took the board pen from Hope and drew a line. “Scott is either found by the native creatures of the quantum realm, probably one of the peaceful ones, so they helped him send a message and a signal. But… I doubt it. The groups with tech like that usually weren’t friendly or helpful.
“The other possibility is,” Janet was now drawing vertical lines on the upside of the first line she drew. “He got pulled out by someone… from another time, or universe.”
She circled an intersection in drawing. Then circled another, just two lines right. It’s meaning was clear as day and it made all three stop talking as they let the weight of it drop.
Hope broke the silence. “We can still track him down using his signal though.”
“No,” Hank started and got up from his chair though Janet could see Hope already made her decision.
“No? Are you seriously going to leave him alone down there waiting for us to come? What do you think I’m going to tell Cassie? That I left his dad in another realm because my dad said so?”
“It’s too-”
“Enough.” Janet held out her hand and shushed them both. “Hank is right, it’s dangerous- BUT, so was saving me.” Her husband and daughter listened without interruption. “If it weren’t for him I wouldn’t be here with you. And he went to the quantum realm because we told him to. We need to clean up our mess.”
“But you’re talking about time travel Janet. Alternate universes! How can we know that he isn’t captured or even still alive? He’s message says he got out after five hours. If we suppose he built the machine in the same week, it took two months to signal to arrive here. She can’t possibly think of spending two months in a pod following the signal.”
“Mom spent thirty years down there,” Hope looked away from her mother. “It’s not impossible.”
“And I don’t think it’ll take two months to find the source,” Janet said. “If we spot the source’s exact spot, we could align Hope’s entry in the shortest angle to the source.”
Hank looked down with a weary sigh. He leaned back to his desk in defeat. The sight broke Janet’s heart, but she knew they had to do this.
Hope walked beside him and squeezed his hand. “I’ll do this, dad, with or without your help.”
“I know,” Hank said and squeezed back. Janet went to his other side and took his other hand. They stood like that for a couple of minutes, Hope and Janet’s heads on Hank’s shoulders, silently making promises to each other of the things they knew they had no control over, but doing it nonetheless, only to not lose their hope.