In Your Eyes // Steve Rogers

Ant-Man Returns

Very suddenly, out of nowhere, one day Kona and I were playing fetch and I received a call from Steve.

"Hey," I answered.

"I need you at the Compound," he said immediately. His voice wasn't soft. It was urgent.

I agreed and stood from my chair, calling Kona to my heels. We ran through the house to grab the keys, jumped in the car, and I drove hurriedly to the Compound. I parked the car by the entrance and left it, figuring I could move it later. I was worried. Steve said nothing over the phone about what he needed me for.

Kona found him and Natasha upstairs in the Conference Room. I pet her head proudly for tracking them, met Steve's eyes, and he turned to the corner, where Scott Lang was pacing wall to wall.

"Scott," I breathed. I pointed at him and turned to Steve and Natasha. They nodded; Scott was, in fact, standing alive in front of me. I shook my head. "What the Hell? Scott. I thought you were dead. I looked for you, I..." I trailed off when my words didn't seem to pull Scott from his state of pacing. I looked to Steve.

"Scott?" asked Steve worriedly, raising the volume of his voice. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah," said Scott. He stopped in place, put his hands on his forehead, and then dragged them down to his chin. He shook his hands out and looked between Natasha, Steve, and I. "Have any of you ever studied Quantum Physics?"

Natasha shrugged. "Only to make conversation."

Scott nodded appreciatively. "All right, so, five years ago, right before Thanos, I was in a place called the Quantum Realm. It's like its own microscopic universe and to get in there you have to be incredibly small. Hope-- she's my..." his eyes suddenly drooped. He huffed out some air and continued, pushing through the reminder of the woman he clearly adored, "Uh, she was my... Um, she was supposed to pull me out and then Thanos happened and I got stuck in there."

"I'm sorry. That must have been a very long five years," said Natasha.

"Yeah, but that's just it: it wasn't. For me, it was five hours."

Natasha, Steve, and I shared a look of confusion.

"See, the rules of the Quantum Realm are different than the rules here--" Scott stopped talking when his eyesight came in contact with a sandwich across the room. He was running for sandwich by the time he finished asking if it belonged to anyone, and once a second of silence passed, he shoved it into his mouth.

"Scott, what are you talking about?" asked Steve, trying to get him back on track.

Scott was quick to swallow his sandwich. Between bites, he continued, "So, what I'm saying is time works differently in the Quantum Realm. The only problem is, right now, there's no way to navigate it. But what I'm saying is what if we did?" he asked us. He set down the sandwich to continue to pace nervously again. "I can't stop thinking about it. What if we could somehow control the chaos and we could navigate it? What if we could enter the Quantum Realm at a certain point in time and then exit at a different point in time, like.. like before Thanos?"

"There's other ways to time travel," I breathed in shock, at the same time Steve asked, "Are you talking about a time machine?"

"No, of course not, it's more of a, uh... Like a..." Scott wobbled slowly from one foot to the other, struggling to find a word that would make the idea more plausible. He frowned. "Yeah, a time machine. Look, I know it's crazy, I know, but I can't stop thinking about it. But it's nuts, I know. It's crazy."

"Scott, I get emails from a raccoon, so. Nothing sounds crazy anymore," said Natasha honestly. She looked to Steve and I, to which we nodded in agreement.