scott x hope oneshots

in time

The world is so small and so large at the same time.

It's something to get used to all over again, how immense and varied the world beyond the Quantum Realm can be. The Quantum Realm is infinite, but it is hollow and empty at the same time, slow-moving and beyond human comprehension. There had been evolution, slow awareness of living things that had become visible over the years, but it had still been quiet . Peaceful.

The world is alive. There are whole continents– whole planets , now– teeming with people and animals and flora, each living thing with its own thoughts and needs and motivations. The sky doesn't move, and people travel on the ground, and there is so much talking that Janet has a perpetual headache for weeks after she emerges from the Quantum Realm. The world is careening forward, and Janet has been left far, far behind.

Janet is dizzy with wonder, overwhelmed and intoxicated, and it is a relief when Henry leads her back to their quiet beach. The ocean here crashes and falls, the sand is still, and Janet feels more at home here than she ever will in the rest of the city.

Henry hasn't changed, at least. He is more circumspect now, more thoughtful and gentle, and years of grief have muted his caustic demeanor into gruffness. She knows they had once tempered each other, and they still do.

Hope...Hope, her darling girl, is a stranger she loves more than life. There had been thirty years in the Quantum Realm to think of her, to drift into sorrow and longing and wonder at the daughter she hardly knows. Now, she sees Hope and she can't breathe.

Hope is beautiful , is brilliant and accomplished and has taken up the mantle of the Wasp with pride. Janet would happily spend another three decades just watching her, in awe of all she's become. Hope watches her with a similar awe, a similar uncertainty.

"I've missed you so much," she murmurs one afternoon. They sit in the sand, their bare feet just grazing the water that licks at the shore. Henry sits on Hope's other side, an arm slung around her waist, and Janet wants to do the same.

She doesn't. There's an awkwardness still between them, an uncertainty Janet wishes she could chase away. She knows that it will return with time, and she has all the time in the world now. But still, she longs to be as easily Hope's as Henry is. "I am so glad that you two had each other while I was gone."

There is a shift, hardly noticeable. Henry is silent, his mouth tightening. Hope says firmly, "So are we." Something is wrong, and Janet closes her eyes, ascribing the sudden tension in the air to grief at the time they've lost.

Hope lays her head against Janet's shoulder and Janet finally dares to let her arm join Henry's around their daughter's back.

There is Ava now, too. A connection has sprung up between them, fierce and needy, and it is easy in all the ways that Hope is not. Maybe it's only that Ava seems to need a mother , more than anything, and Hope is far beyond that. And Ava needs Janet for now, too.

"I don't know how much more I have within me," she confesses one afternoon. Ava is in the basement with Janet under Hope's watchful eye as Janet feeds her more healing particles. Upstairs, Bill and Henry are debating particle physics together without breaking into fisticuffs, a miracle .

Hope doesn't trust Ava, not entirely, and she still hasn't quite forgiven her for her desperate attempt to suck out Janet's life-force. Janet, as said life-force, is more forgiving. "The more time I spend out of the Quantum Realm, the fewer healing particles I seem to have," Janet says gravely.

Ava stares up at Janet, her eyes hopeless, and she says, "How much more time do I have?"

She thinks she's going to die without Janet. Janet stares at her in alarm, and she says, her voice strained, "No. I'll...of course I'll go back into the Quantum Realm to get you more healing particles. When that day comes. I won't let you die."