Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Hope, still toweling off her hair, stepped out of the bathroom and into the guest bedroom that Maggie and Paxton had lent them for a few days. Scott was sitting on the bed with a borrowed laptop, scrolling intensely. 

He looked up as she sat down next to him and tossed the towel into the small laundry hamper in the corner of the room. 

“There’s a new worldwide housing crisis,” he said jokingly. “Can you believe it?”

“It’s definitely not like over three billion people were just brought back from the dead or anything.”

He gave a stressed smile. “Not at all.”

She swung her legs up onto the bed and scooched closer, looking over his shoulder to look at the screen.

The thought that she had missed five years was still settling in her mind. It didn’t feel like five years- only a moment, but yet the gravity of everything she’d been absent from was very present. And her absence had very much weighed on Scott. He hadn’t said anything, but she knew him well enough that she could tell. She didn’t think he’d ever been this quiet in all the time she’d known him. 

But she didn’t know how to make it better, so she just kissed his shoulder and leaned in closer and tried to lighten the mood, her fingers dancing over to rest on the touchpad of the laptop. “How are things looking right now?

“Not great. If you have any ideas on what to do, be my guest.” 

She pulled the laptop onto her lap as Scott leaned back into the pillows.

“Worst case scenario,” he said through his hands. “We just crash at your parents’ for a bit- it’s big enough.”

“Oh yeah. My dad would love that,” she said sarcastically. Hank had about lost his mind back when Scott had lived at his house for a few weeks during 2015.

She continued scrolling for a few minutes. There was laughing on the TV in the living room as some show played in the background. She’d always been behind on whatever was airing and at this rate she’d never catch up, though she supposed she and Scott could certainly try. 

Her heart did a weird skip as she realized just what they were doing- looking for an apartment, planning an actual life together. They had been doing that before, right before Germany. In fact, they had been planning on moving into an apartment together that spring, before he had run off with the Ant-Man suit and everything had fallen apart.

But now… maybe things could work out. And she wanted them to.

“Wonder what it was like in the Avengers Compound,” she said, again trying to lighten the mood. 

“Not that fun,” he said. She glanced back at him, but he was looking out the blinds on the window to look at the backyard. He didn’t offer anything else for a moment.

“It was just lonely,” he added, giving a chuckle that was likely supposed to be reassuring but instead came out as sad. “And I didn’t sleep well for a long time- I was normally up half the night. But I think it was the same with a few others too. We were all in the same situation.” 

Scott gently slipped his hand into hers, their fingers intertwining. 

“There were some nights where I was convinced you were never coming back.”

She was sure that no one who had been gone for the five years wanted to hear that, that the person they loved had given up hope that they would return- but who could blame them for thinking it. But before she could tell him that, he went on: 

“And I shouldn’t have had those thoughts, about giving up hope that you’d come back. I know it was five years, but it was only a couple months for me. All I could think about was how those few months when we were back together felt like a second chance, and now I’d lost that second chance and it wasn’t even my fault.”

Hope was bad at comforting. She always had been because she was too rough to touch and uneven around the edges. Even now, she wasn’t even sure what to do, and she felt like she’d been thrown into this world with no preparation, a world where a lot of people were hurting, and she was bad at fixing things. He squeezed her hand gently, maybe a reminder that she was actually there, while his other hand gripped the comforter.

“No one blames you if you felt like giving up,” she finally said quietly, and meant it. “There are millions of people across the planet who were in the same boat. Kind of hard to imagine a solution to a problem that severe.”

“I know, I just- Everyone else around me was used to it,” he said and she hadn’t ever heard him sound like he did now before. “They’d dealt with their grief for five years and it hurts but you live with it. But it was all new to me and I felt ridiculous for how upset I was-” And then the dam broke. 

Hope wasn’t sure who wrapped their arms around the other first, but she held on to him as he cried, and he did the same, and he cried all the tears that had been welling up, the tears you can keep down only for so long, the tears that come out when you’re too tired to hide them anymore. Her hand drifted up to trace mindless shapes and letters into the back of his shoulder until he let go some indeterminable amount of time later.

“I’m sorry-” he said, shaking his head. 

“Don’t be,” she said and leaned forward to kiss him gently. He lifted his hands to brush his thumbs over her cheekbones and his eyes were tearing up again. The last time she’d seen him felt like yesterday to her; he looked at her as if it had been forever. It was the same look he’d had two years after Germany.

Hope wondered if she’d ever fit into this world again. 

“I’m here now,” she said and he nodded and leaned forward to kiss her again, maybe to reassure the both of them. She didn’t know how else to help months of grief. Maybe he didn’t either.

Hope woke up some time later. Scott had rolled over at some point in the night, but his arm was still around her waist. She took a glance at the alarm block to see it was barely even five in the morning, and she wished she had his ability to sleep like a rock. 

Though, she realized, he likely hadn’t slept well in months, She shifted over a bit , trying to not wake him up, and after a moment leaned closer to kiss his temple gently and run her fingers through his hair.

Hope leaned back into the pillows, still running her fingers through the waves of his hair. He’d told her the day before that he had gone on a drive to the nearest town one day to get a haircut (and to get away from the other Avengers for a bit) and they’d butchered it horribly.

She was still having issues with how much time had passed, and she simultaneously didn’t know how to be patient with herself with it. Yesterday, Cassie had been a little girl, all the calendars said 2018 instead of 2023, and Scott had less gray in his stubble.

Laying there, all of her anxieties could get to her, the anxieties about everything that had changed. She’d been cut off from everything before, but it wasn’t like she had been dead , which, according to everyone who had been around, she had been. Her recollection of dying had been her parents fading away before her eyes, her panic at not knowing what was happening as she began to fade away herself and then suddenly- they were back, and the sun was shining but the van and all of their equipment had vanished before them. But still, before anyone could tell her what had happened, she knew that the world had changed and she had not been given the opportunity to change with it.

 They had forgotten to turn off the bedside lamp the night before; she traced the shadows on the opposite wall with her eyes, trying to stop her heart from racing.

As if on cue, Scott gave a yawn and lifted his head. 

“You okay?” he asked, noticing she was awake, noticing the way she seemed to be frozen. 

“Yeah,” she said. “I can’t sleep.”

He lifted his head higher. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Hope hesitated. He’d been through enough already these past few months. She didn’t want to worry him more. So she gave a small lie. “No, no. I’ll be okay.”

Scott shifted closer, wrapping his arm tighter around her and leaned to kiss her cheek. 

“What time is it?” he asked quietly.

“Five something,” she muttered.

“So it’s still acceptable to go back to sleep?”

“Yes.” You helped save the world, have all the sleep you want.

As a matter of celebration, all five of them decided to make breakfast and eat it out in the backyard. Scott was still asleep and Maggie was already set on surveying her flower garden to see what had happened over the past five years. She would soon discover that Paxton and Cassie had diligently taken care of it while she was gone.

“Take these plates outside, Cassie?” Paxton asked, setting a stack on the table for Cassie to take outside. 

“It’s nice to see you both again,” Paxton said, surveying the contents within the fridge. He found the orange juice jug and put it on the counter and Hope picked it up to take it outside. “Of course I saw Scott again a few months ago, but as soon as he made sure everything was fine here, he told me he had a plan and was already on his way to New York.”

Scott hadn’t told her everything about how he had gotten out of the quantum realm. And it just hit her now that the only way the van could’ve gotten from San Francisco to New York was by driving. Certainly he’d tell her about it all eventually.

“It’s nice to see everyone too. Though,” Hope said, with what she hoped was a casual laugh, one that didn’t showcase her anxiety, “it kind of just feels like yesterday.”

“Well, I’m just glad to have everyone back,” Paxton said. 

Hope could imagine the rest of the world that had grieved felt the same way, while the other half stressed on how they could try and fit in. 

She ate breakfast with her family as the sun shone down on San Francisco, as if it was as happy as the rest of them, and tried to ignore everything in turmoil she felt inside. 

Chapter Text

“Just when I make it back after thirty years, all of this happens.” Her mother sat down next to her on the beach. It was just the two of them that day. The beaches had been crowded that summer, but after noon there was always a lull, and it was nice to take a blanket out and sit. 

Hope and her mother had skipped a lot. They’d skipped over the middle school and high school angst, and the tears when she moved out, and everything else in between and after. And now, they both dealt with the weight of being gone.

Maybe that was something they both understood.

There were children playing nearby, kicking a ball back and forth. Hope wondered if they had all vanished together five years ago, or maybe if they had grown up together in the chaos the world had turned into being. 

“I know my mind was preoccupied with the battle,” Hope said. “But when the portal opened up to spit us back out in San Francisco, I didn’t realize just how different everything would be.”

She’d already been fairly separated from day to day life while on the run, but she hadn’t been completely cut off. The world had been the same, she was just not part of the everyday. 

After stepping out of the portal that had been provided for them, Scott and Hope had walked down a street they had walked down dozens upon dozens of times before, and all the changes were enough to make her anxious and worried. Shops that had been there for as long as she could remember were long gone. Everything seemed to be neglected. Something had happened. 

“Five years?” she had asked him, her hand in his as they stood there on that street, starting to flood with happy people. 

Scott had just nodded. “Five years.”

Her mother sighed. “I don’t even know where to begin sometimes. I came back and we were on the run, and next thing I know I’ve been gone another five years. And you can’t hide. In a weird way,” She paused. “I feel a little less alone after everything. There’s more people trying to find their place in a very different world too.”

Hope wished she could say the same, that she felt solidarity with the other three billion people around the world. And maybe deep down she did, but it was hard for her to find it.

They sat in silence for the rest of their trip, listening to the waves and the seagulls overhead, before heading home. 

She and Scott had moved into the guest bedroom of the Pym-Van Dyne house, partially to get out of Maggie and Paxton’s house and hair, and in turn finding a way to ruffle all of Hank’s feathers.

“There’s a housing crisis, Hank,” Scott had said one evening, before her father had stormed off, likely grumbling about how a man who had been dead for five years had the right to live in his own home without having to share the space with his daughter’s partner. 

There was a large chair sitting in a corner of the study that had been there for as long as Hope could remember. When the sun hit the house at a certain angle during the afternoon, the whole corner would be bright, and the seat of the chair was big enough that somehow the two of them could sit together. Granted- one of them would have to be practically sitting in the other’s lap, but neither minded.

They sat there for at least a little bit each afternoon. On one particularly memorable occasion, they had somehow both dozed off while reading, only waking up to the sound of the door to the study slamming and her father grumbling to himself, likely about how glad he’d be when they found an apartment.

But that day, her legs were draped over his lap and a science journal was propped up on her knees. Scott had tried to read a bit but quickly lost interest. 

“I’ve heard enough about the quantum realm and physics for a while,” he muttered. “A month and a half of it in the Avengers compound.”

“Well, I’ll try to not talk about it too much.” Science had also taken a back burner during the five years, with half of the most brilliant minds in the world gone. She wondered what the future would be like. 

“A lot of reading to catch up on,” Scott said. She knew he didn’t mean anything by it, he wasn’t trying to make her anxious and he wasn’t trying to make it sound like she was behind on everything going on in the world. He kissed her cheek and she tried to focus on that instead of everything else. 

With a wild amount of luck, they found an apartment and quickly paid the deposit, moving out to preserve both their and Hank’s sanity.

The first night, there was nothing in it but an old couch Kurt and Dave didn’t want anymore, and an air mattress in their room that likely had a hole somewhere, because every morning they would wake up a foot lower than where they had fallen asleep. Scott had left a fair bit behind when he had driven to New York, and they still needed to go and pick it up. 

Their apartment. It still felt strange to say, and it all still felt like some weird distant thing, a might-have-been long ago.

“You okay?” he asked again, rolling over to face her. They didn’t have any curtains yet and the light from the streetlamp was free to traipse into their little bedroom. Even as it was dim, she could see the outline of his face and he leaned forward to kiss her gently. 

You can be honest with him. 

“Can’t sleep,” she said, rolling onto her back to look up at the ceiling. She had read into it- psychologists were starting to study the effects of the Blip and it seemed like a lot of victims had the inability to sleep. Her own experiences could attest to that, and she was ashamed to say she’d spent many an afternoon reading over the forums. Who had she turned into? 

“I read that a lot of people can’t sleep after coming back.” Hope forced herself to not look at him. “It’ll go away eventually, they think.”

It was deadly quiet. 

“I’m sorry.” He reached an arm over and stopped himself. “Is it okay if I..?” 

She nodded and he wrapped an arm around her, burying his nose in her shoulder. 

Her own exhaustion must have gotten to her eventually, because Hope woke up, she looked over and saw him gone and hadn’t even known when she had drifted off. Looking up at the ceiling, she reached around for her phone at the side of the bed, grabbing it and then taking a glance at the screen. 

Scott: Out to get bagels :D

That was smart. There was no food in the apartment at the moment. And while she was still very warm under the blankets, she felt a little guilty he hadn’t woken her up to go with him. Their apartment wasn’t even very big, but right now it seemed enormous and empty. In the afternoon they were heading to the storage facility that had been housing all of his other things during the five years to fit what they could into the back of the car. That would help at least a little bit. 

Scott still needed to work it out with Maggie and Paxton, but if Cassie wanted to, she could spend time at the apartment as well, and the second bedroom would be all hers. In a weird way, she couldn’t even process it was Cassie. She was far from the little girl she had been a long time ago, but one look in her eyes and you knew she was Scott’s kid. 

After pulling up the blanket again, Hope must have dozed off, because she was awoken again by the front door of the apartment shutting. She tossed the blankets off and climbed up off the half-deflated air mattress to find him with the paper bag in the kitchen counter. 

“Sorry for leaving,” he said, reaching into the bag and pulling out a carefully wrapped bagel in wax paper for her. “Just wanted to clear my head for a bit.”

He passed her a coffee. 

“Thanks.”

The caffeine fought her exhaustion decently, and they drove over to the storage unit. A few other people were there as well, sorting through their belongings and carrying them out in old cardboard boxes. Hope wondered if they were truly all going through the same thing. 

“Hope!” Scott said, pulling something out from the rubble of the Lang storage unit and brandishing an old lamp that very well could have been on the set of the Golden Girls episode they had watched the night before. 

“I forgot about this. This could go by the couch.”

“Oh, absolutely not.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s hideous.”

Scott set the lamp back down, giving her a playful frown. “Didn’t know you had such intense interior design opinions.”

“Only occasionally. I have standards.” And she was laughing in spite of herself, because he made her happy in his ridiculousness and the sun was shining and just maybe everything would be okay. 

They’d go to a thrift store before going to Maggie and Paxton’s for dinner and find a lamp that agreed with both of their tastes. And they didn’t have a table to put it on yet, but it sat in the corner of their tiny living room and it suited the place just fine.

Chapter Text

Within a week the apartment started to look considerably less empty. There was finally a table for the lamp and the bedrooms had bed frames, and they finally didn’t have to use the busted air mattress they attempted to fix with duct tape anymore. Cassie was planning on spending an evening over to set up her room and they could finally eat meals at the tiny table set up in the kitchen, rather than on the floor. 

And it was very nice to have a lazy evening in their own space. 

“Do you understand what’s going on in this show?” Scott asked. Hope looked up at the laptop they had sat on the coffee table.

“A little bit. I think.” It was a show that had come out during the Blip and that Cassie had recommended to them, and all of its episodes ranged between too cheesy and too unbearably sad. She wondered if everything felt like that to those who had been left behind those five years.

She leaned back into his arms and one of Scott’s hands drifted up to undo the braid she had worn her hair in all day, undoing the tie that held it and slipping it onto his wrist. When the strands were untangled, he ran his hand through all of it.

The credits for the episode rolled with the next one about to start when she reached forward to stop it. 

“Is that fine?” She suddenly couldn’t stand watching another episode tonight. She just needed quiet. She just needed to sit.

“Of course.”

Hope leaned back into his arms, pulling the old t-shirt she had stolen from him down where it was riding up. She had just closed her eyes when music started blasting from the apartment upstairs.

“Ah. Didn’t miss that about living in an apartment,” Scott said.

“Part of the fun, I guess,” she said, leaning back to kiss him.

Scott had been setting up his work laptop for X-Con (the software on his old one had told him it would have taken about a month to complete all of the updates, and it wouldn’t hold a charge anymore) when he got the text from Maggie. Hope had been on the couch, tying her sneakers in order to go on a run. 

In the year they had spent together after the Pym Tech heist, in the time after Germany, he had rarely spoken about his parents. She didn’t know much except that they’d been unbelievably upset when their son had robbed Vistacorp and gone to prison, and hadn’t spoken to him since. They only spoke to Cassie. 

“Well that’s something I didn’t want to deal with today,” Scott said, tossing his phone onto the kitchen counter. 

Hope turned her head to look at him. 

“What is it?”

Scott rubbed his face with his hands, but picked his phone up and handed it to her. “If you want to read.”

It was a text from Maggie. 

Maggie: Hey Scott. Just thought I might want to let you know that Cassie got a call from your parents the other day- they had both been a part of the Snap. I apologize if you didn’t care to know at all, but I thought it would be best to tell you. 

Hope was quiet. She was yet again reminded at how bad she was at all this. 

“I should feel guilty,” Scott said. “Guilty that I…” He gestured to nothing. “I have to admit that they had barely crossed my mind.”

“But what do you have to be guilty for?” Hope asked, drawing nearer to him, the words tumbling out of her mouth before she could even think to say them.

If they had survived the Snap, would they have cared if their own son was gone? Hope was surprised at the bitterness she had deep inside about an incident she had been told little about.

“I don’t know. Just that I spent two months back and I didn’t even just…” He paused, taking a deep breath. “See if… they were still around.” He drummed his fingers on the countertop.

“Your mind was preoccupied,” Hope suggested.

“Yeah.” Scott closed his laptop. “Eleven years,” he continued after a very long moment. “They stopped talking to me in 2012 and I was gone until now but… still. And I guess… I didn’t even try to reach out either.”

And you don’t have to, Hope thought to herself, but she didn’t know how to say that. He’d always have better intentions than her, and she wished she had his sense of wanting to always do good.

“I don’t know why I ever spoke to Hank again,” Hope said. Her voice came out a lot quieter than she wanted it to. She had spent a long time wondering about it after 2015 and at that point now in her life she was sure she would never have the time or energy to get a true answer from herself. “Cause I was angry for a long time, and I- I still feel it sometimes.” It seemed like a resounding theme in her life. Hope couldn’t remember a time where she hadn’t been angry over something. “But even though there was… the situation with Darren and Pym Tech and everything else going on… it was up to me to do that and make that phone call again. And I think I wish I could tell myself back then that I don’t think there’s ever a right answer and I’m not sure anyone can give you that right answer either.

“I don’t think it’s bad that they didn’t cross your mind.”

Scott took a breath that she couldn’t interpret. “Yeah. You’re probably right. And it’s a whole mess I’m not sure I want to reopen at the moment. Thank you, Hope.”

The jog she was going to take turned into a walk with Scott, and in the moment she might have preferred that. Maybe there was something better about the start you made for yourself, the second chance you made for yourself. Hope figured most people were figuring out what their second chance looked like. For now, she was happy to be on that walk with Scott, his hand in hers, in a world that seemed very different and in some ways terrifying, but easier to manage when you had someone to share the load.

Cassie spent the weekend for the first time at their apartment. She was finally on her summer break. 

“I can’t believe I have summer reading,” she had complained that Friday night. “Not when it’s the best summer in five years and no one wants to do the work.”

“Well it’s just one book,” Scott said, handing her a plate of pizza. “And I don’t remember The Great Gatsby being that long a book.”

“Still too long,” Cassie said, picking up a slice of pizza solemnly. 

If Hope was certain of one thing, it was that she wasn’t entirely used to Cassie being that old. It only felt like a few weeks ago she was about to go into middle school, and in the blink of an eye she was halfway through high school and stressing about college applications. But Cassie was Scott’s joy, and Hope was incredibly fond of her too. 

The next day they made sandwiches and took it out to the park, where dozens upon dozens of others were also out enjoying the evening. Cassie took her soccer ball with her to practice tricks, and Scott eventually got up from the blanket to pass the ball back and forth, which lasted all of about fifteen minutes before he returned to where Hope was sitting. 

“She’s gotten too good in five years,” Scott said, opening up his bottle of water. “I’m not sure I can joke that I’m going easy on her anymore.”

“What was that?” Cassie called from a distance.

“Nothing,” Scott said, grinning. “Just that I think you need some more practice before team tryouts.”

“Ha,” Cassie replied with a deadpan. “Very funny.”

Scott turned back to Hope, and leaned forward to kiss her, and she herself grinned in turn. And everything felt alright.