Chapter Text
The first time Scott nearly got trapped in the quantum realm, he silently vowed not to make it a habit. In the weeks after that particular excursion to the world between atoms, his dreams were plagued by the echoes of Cassie’s voice calling his name. It felt wrong to associate the innocent, fearful cries of his daughter with the dark recesses of his own head; with the nightmares that left him with shadows beneath his eyes; but for a little while, he had to work hard to remind himself of the cheerful note behind her tone when she greeted him enthusiastically at the front door.
The second time he agreed to go back there, he tried not to let slip his anxiety surrounding the mission. He was doing it for Ava, for something bigger than him and his irrational fear that three of the most intelligent people he knew would somehow fail to pull him back out. It didn’t help when the worst case scenario was the one he happened to be in. But then he’d remind himself that it wasn’t the worst because the weird distorting of time worked in his favour and what should have been five years was five hours and five hours was better than five decades.
The third time was an accident. Cassie’s accident, although he’d never blame her for any of it. He thought he was spoiling her, even now that she was a teenager looking for independence. Part of him wanted to just be the fun dad he’d always planned on being, before prison and more prison and an unexpected five year absence. Part of him was scared to give her another reason to reject him, especially when she was starting to form her own views of the world, to judge him for his behaviour because she understood how everything worked a little better now.
It stung, when she accused him of not doing enough now. He didn’t know what the protocol was, parent-wise. Tell her not to be disrespectful? Get hyper-defensive? Accept that he’d made mistakes? In the end, he compartmentalised it, pushed it down with the self-critical voice in his head that said the same thing whenever he was in front of a crowd in a bookshop, getting applauded. He wondered when his own head would be satisfied with what he had achieved. It seemed setting in motion the events that led to rescuing half the universe from exile wasn’t enough. He often wasn’t sure what else he could do to ever live up to that.
In the end, in the moment, it seemed as if sacrificing the life he’d fought so hard to get just to keep Kang in the quantum realm was the best he could do. He didn’t think before pushing Cassie to safety, sure that Hope would never let her go back through the gateway, even if Scott didn’t follow. What Hope herself would do was an entirely different question.
Once upon a time, Scott had been expendable. He’d been the man in the suit; the thief who stole her job and, a long way down the line, her heart. A part of him still believed no one would come back through that shimmering doorway. A part of him didn’t want to hear the slight buzzing of mechanical wings. If everything he’d done up to now wasn’t enough, the least he could do was save Hope from the same eternal fate.
“Hey.”
Some time later, the dust started to settle around him. There was familiarity as he perched on the side of the bed he’d once woken up in, watched by someone who had once been a stranger. This time, Hope’s tone was her trademark mix of sharp and brittle, more than a hint of care lurking beneath the straightforward exasperation. Scott paused, hand hovering over the too-loose bandages he’d started to wrap over his ribs. He kept his eyes on the folds of material, not wanting to meet her gaze, even as he felt it probe over his bowed head, a heat pooling on his scalp as she took in the crusted blood in his hair and then dropping lower, to the parts of his face that weren’t in shadow. He'd never been as beaten up as this, not even after the worst brawls in prison. His nose flared at the thought; a sudden, raw vulnerability; and he felt the forming bruises and the cracking of the drying red patches pinch his skin.
She took a seat next to him, her knee just in his eye line. He waited for her to speak again, imagining a dozen unlikely statements that might follow the first chastising comment.
“I told you to let me,” she said after a moment, losing the shield and letting a rare gentleness seep through. It wasn’t that she was never affectionate but after he did something reckless, the protective walls tended to go up. The sympathy usually came later, when he’d had enough time to get his own emotions in check so the attention didn’t crush him.
He kept his hands on the bandages as they slipped further from the right place under his non-existent tension. His fingers were trembling now that he concentrated on them, ghosting the folds of the white wrap with a surprising shakiness. His carelessness had exposed the patchwork of black and blue that had temporarily taken over his skin, standing out harshly compared to the pallor that shock had left behind elsewhere. He felt a little nauseous, looking at it, disliking the reminder of Kang and the quantum realm. He had enough difficulty forgetting that place at the best of times; he didn’t need to be thinking about it every time he moved at the wrong angle and jarred a broken rib.
“Scott,” Hope continued, still not sounding like the version of herself that Scott needed right now. He almost wanted frustration, an argument. They could make up later when he didn’t feel so off-kilter. But her hand covered his, instead of swatting it away angrily. And her chin was close to ghosting his shoulder but stayed away, scared of causing pain. And he could feel the heat of her breath against his clammy skin, reminding him once again that he wasn’t entirely back in his own body.
“I’m fine,” he let himself say, even though it was the biggest cliché for someone who really felt the opposite. His voice wavered and he coughed as if he could pretend it was just dryness in his throat but that action hurt the rest of his body and the net result was a pained gasp for breath and an embarrassing prickling behind his eyes and heat in his face, rising too quickly…
“Scott,” she repeated steadily. “Look at me.”
It was the instruction that was too much. He felt too tightly wound, like his insides had decided to jump ship because the rest of his body hadn’t done a good enough job of protecting them. And yeah, his own brain seemed to share the sentiment, pushing against his skull as if it was expanding from the sheer volume of information that there was to contend with.
Quantum people. A world on an entirely different scale to their own. A man – being¬ – who existed beyond time, trying to wipe out branches of alternate universes. The same monster who had said something cryptic about losing and winning that Scott had only just started to play through his head, wondering if by winning they had really lost, undoing all of the work that saving the universe once had already entailed.
A hand cupped one side of his face lightly, startling him out of his thoughts. He pushed against it, less a search for comfort and more resisting the insistent pressure pulling his eyes in her direction. She won eventually though, making him turn his head, doing as she asked and just looking. She was tired. He could tell that much beyond the more concerning display of worry. There was a cut above her eyebrow; one on her cheek; a light bruise starting to colour her left temple. He wanted to brush a finger over each injury and take them away but he could imagine her incredulity, considering his own condition. That same part of him from before that had wanted an argument was tempted to try, just because he knew she would bristle at the idea that she was the one that needed to be taken care of right now. They were obviously made for each other because too big a part of him was already rejecting her attention.
“Hey,” she said quietly. Scott was losing count of how many times she’d been pulling him out of his own head. He wondered if she could see the moment she lost his focus; if his eyes zoned out, looking through her and imagining that entire different universe they’d left behind. Not to mention the universes that Kang had destroyed, his warpath somehow greater than Thanos’ once unbelievable scheme. Scott wondered what he was like in branches of other universes where Thanos hadn’t existed. He wondered if he’d got complacent even earlier - if Cassie had called him out for it. He wondered if he’d spent more time with his own daughter and almost doubled over with the force of the envy he felt towards this imaginary version of himself.
“Scott,” Hope murmured patiently, a small sigh just betraying her. Or maybe it was a sound of concern, rather than frustration. “Let me cover your ribs and then you can wash all of this off before we deal with anything else.” There was a minor stumble when she talked about cleaning his face, a stutter away from the clinical detachment she normally managed when he got hurt.
“I’m okay, Hope,” he said automatically, not trying to push her away but wanting to reinstate that wall between them. He wanted her to detach from it, so he could follow the example. He didn’t want her to frown at him with far too much care because that meant he’d really got hurt and she’d really been worried. It meant something bad had happened – something beyond the usual standard of bad.
The smile he got in response was melancholy, a twitch that edged close to fond before being pulled downwards into a spiral of sadness. He tried to cling to the glimmer of patient amusement at the notion that he was still pretending to be alright but there was too much pain behind Hope’s eyes – pain on his behalf – for him to keep up the illusion that nothing had happened at all.