scott x hope oneshots

i don't know about these heavy hands (maybe they can pull me up)

he doesn't exactly mean to get thrown into a full-on relationship, when she lets Scott Lang kiss her in the upstairs hallway of her father's house. It just sort of happens. This is the way things often go with Scott, she has learned since she met him, and is constantly half-forgetting and learning all over again. Things just sort of happen, whether it's a first kiss with his hand curling around the back of her neck to draw her in close, or catching her hand when they're walking back to his car after a first date that she doesn't remember officially saying         yes       to, or introducing her to his incredibly-huggy daughter who gives her the assumed title of         girlfriend       approximately five minutes later.

   She's trying not to let it scare her.

   Hope van Dyne is not one for jumping headfirst into something like this. She likes to keep both feet planted firmly on the ground, testing before she takes each step to make sure she won't fall. The sheer speed with which Scott and his daughter become immensely important to her is, frankly, terrifying. She shoves that dark, cloudy feeling down, down, down, and pretends not to have noticed it at all. But there is a comfort that comes hand-in-hand with it, too. A stable, secure feeling that she doesn't know whether or not she's meant to trust. A reverence for the quiet evenings she spends on the couch at Scott's house, curled into him with Cassie on the opposite side and a gargantuan bowl of popcorn, buttery fingers and sleepy smiles in the bluish light of the television across the room.

   At the beginning of October, Cassie tugs at her sleeve in the grocery store next to a towering display of candy – boxes upon boxes of it, forming something that looks a lot like the Avengers Tower. "Hope, do you like Halloween?" she asks, blinking innocently up at Hope while she tries to figure out how the hell to answer that.

   She would like to ask Scott for help –         would you like to call a lifeline?       – but he's wheeled the cart entirely too far ahead, and she is stuck. "Um, it's okay," she replies after a moment.

   The girl looks disappointed, and Hope immediately feels guilty. She is not good around children, has never really known what to do or say when she's close to them. She's been trying to navigate being around Cassie since she and Scott started dating, and has been doing a relatively decent job – or, at least, she thinks she has. But now something in Cassie's face has crumpled into a little frown, and Hope can't figure out what, exactly, she was supposed to do differently. Was she supposed to flat-out lie? Would that have been better?

   "What's wrong, Peanut?" asks Scott, casting a concerned glance over his daughter's face when they catch up to him in the bakery section. He tosses four different flavours of bagels, one by one, into the cart.

   She ignores him, turning abruptly back to Hope and placing her little hands determinedly on her hips. "How come you don't like Halloween?"

   Scott glances to her, surprised. "You don't like Halloween?" he asks.

   Hope blinks. "I used to," she admits. And God, she         did.       The first few Halloweens of her life were like something out of the idyllic, peaceful part of a storybook, before everything falls apart. It's strange, thinking how much of her life follows that format (she tries not to, most of the time). Her mother used to prepare for Halloween very carefully, curating the perfect collection of decorations and sitting on the kitchen floor with Hope to carve pumpkins. She handmade Hope's costumes and they were always         just       what she wanted; she took Hope trick-or-treating around the neighbourhood, visited every house at her side, traded a second empty bag for Hope's full one so they could get more candy.

   And then, when Hope was seven years old, she disappeared. Died, or so Hope was told – up until this year, when her father finally told her the truth.