𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐄𝐍𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐂𝐄𝐃| 𝐒. 𝐑𝐎𝐆𝐄𝐑𝐒 |

twenty one

Scott paces up and down the meeting room once Steve and Natasha let him in. He's struggling to comprehend the fact that he was stuck in the quantum realm for a whole five years when to him, it was only a couple of hours. 

"Scott. You okay?" Steve asks, staring at the man in front of him. 

"Yeah." Scott wipes his face with his hands. "Have either of you guys ever studied quantum physics?"

Natasha shrugs. "Only to make conversation."

"Alright, so." Scott begins to explain. "Five years ago, right before Thanos, I was in a place called the Quantum Realm. It's like it's own microscopic universe. To get in there, you have to be incredibly small. Hope, she's my...was my...She- she was supposed to pull me out. And then Thanos happened...and I got stuck in there."

Feeling bad, Natasha gives Scott a sympathetic look. "I'm sorry, that must've been a very long five years."

"Yeah, but that's just it." Scott shakes his head. "It wasn't. For me, it was five hours. See, the rules of the Quantum Realm aren't like the rules up here, everything is unpredictable." 

Steve, confused, tries to wrap his head around everything that's being told to him. "Scott, what are you talking about?"

"So, what I'm saying is, time works differently down there. The only problem is right now, we don't have a way to navigate it. But what if we did?" Scott begins pacing again. "I can't stop thinking about it, what if we could control the chaos? What if there was a way...that we could enter the Quantum realm at a certain point in time and exit at another? Like-"

"Like before the snap?" Steve finally catches on, his heart pounding with the possibility of being reunited with Milana again. 

Scott clicks. "Exactly. I know, it's crazy, but I can't stop thinking about it. There's gotta be some way we could pull this off. Who can we talk to about this?"

Natsha and Steve look at eachother, knowing only one person who could pull off something as crazy as time travel. Even though Steve hasn't really seen Tony since the heated argument they had five years ago, he figures he'd be able to convince Tony to help. 

-

The trio take Natasha's car for a long drive into the woods, where they come across a wooden home near a lake. They get out, astonished to see Tony walking towards his porch with a young child on his hip.

Tony stares at the three of them for a moment, before going inside his home to put the child down and comes back outside with some tea.

"We know what it sounds like." Scott chuckles nervously after telling Tony his plan.

"After everything you've seen, is anything really-" Steve begins.

"Quantum fluctuation messes with the Planck scale, which then triggers the Deutsch Proposition." Tony interrupts. "Can we agree on that? In layman's terms, it means you're not coming home."

Scott pipes up. "I did."

"No. You accidentally survived." Tony corrects. "It's a billion-to-one cosmic fluke. And now you wanna pull a...what do you call it?"

"Time Heist." Scott sips his tea.

Tony chuckles sarcastically. "Of course. Why didn't we think of this before? Oh, because it's laughable. Because it's a pipe dream."

"The stones are in the past." Steve sighs. "We could go back, we could get them."

Natasha nods. "Exactly, we can snap our own fingers and bring everyone back."