Chapter 324: Black Widow in the Ant Farm
Venom Robin's physiology didn't include pupils in the conventional sense — the symbiote constructed whatever it needed to simulate human expression. But watching Hank Pym go from a normal-sized man to a twenty-meter giant in the span of a single breath produced something that functioned exactly like wide eyes and an open mouth.
"What the hell, Old Bat," he said, voice barely above a whisper. "You said this guy was Ant-Man. What does any of that have to do with ants?"
Batman's expression, what was visible of it below the cowl, remained unchanged. He had suspected this was possible from the moment he read the Goliath Project file inside S.H.I.E.L.D.'s servers. Pym Particles could shrink matter by compressing it — there was no physical reason the same mechanism couldn't work in reverse. The file had confirmed the theory. Tonight confirmed the application.
Below, the giant called out across the atrium.
"Janet?"
His voice at that scale was less a sound than a physical event. The ventilation shaft buzzed with it. Dust sifted down from the joints in the ductwork.
"Hank." A second voice, crisp and clearly unimpressed. "When are you going to stop delegating every minor thing to me the moment you make yourself too large to do it yourself?"
The sound that followed was small and precise — insect wings, moving fast. It grew louder as it climbed, rising from the base of the atrium to the level of Pym's shoulder in seconds.
"Is that the Wasp? Janet van Dyne?" Venom Robin asked.
Batman nodded and kept still.
The Wasp was the size of a large flying ant — two or three millimeters at her current scale, hovering at Pym's shoulder. An observer without enhanced optics would have seen only a coffee cup apparently floating through the air on its own. Batman's cowl gave him the full picture: Janet van Dyne, in a yellow and black suit, holding a full cup of steaming coffee above her head with both arms, the cup itself many hundreds of times her own size.
"You made yourself enormous specifically to avoid making your own coffee," the Wasp said, landing on Pym's shoulder and setting the cup down beside her. "Your enormous brain can certainly handle a coffee maker."
Pym laughed. At his current size, the laugh registered in the walls.
"Brilliant minds should be reserved for difficult problems. Running a coffee maker doesn't qualify."
"Give me a break, Pym."
While they spoke, Pym hadn't taken the coffee. Instead he carried the small block structure — retrieved from beneath the seventh-floor ant — carefully in his palm and moved toward a table on the ground floor. One shrank. The other grew smaller. They settled across from each other at normal scale, Pym setting the block structure at the center of the table between them.
Batman and Venom Robin watched from above.
Pym removed his helmet. Beneath it was a square-jawed face with heavy brows and blond hair — the kind of face that suggested someone who had spent decades in laboratories and fieldwork in roughly equal measure. He extended one finger and tapped the block structure twice.
"Natasha. Wake up."
Batman and Venom Robin exchanged a look.
"Black Widow is in there," Venom Robin said.
Batman nodded once.
This changed the evening considerably. They had come to Pym Technologies for reconnaissance — layout, security patterns, likely storage locations for the Pym Particles. The acquisition itself was a later problem. Finding Black Widow hadn't been part of the plan at all, but here she was, apparently miniaturized and stored inside what Pym was calling an ant farm, a scaled-down structure being kept on the premises.
From inside the structure, a voice emerged. Professional, controlled, with an edge of deliberate provocation underneath it.
"Disturbing a woman's sleep is extraordinarily rude, Pym. If you want me to leave the door unlocked for you, the arrangement requires that you keep it from Janet."
"Janet is sitting right here, Natasha," Pym said pleasantly.
The Wasp had removed her helmet as well, shaking out short blond hair and a face that looked decades younger than her actual age — which, Batman knew, exceeded a century. Both of them were products of an era that most people alive today only knew from history books, preserved by the same technology that made ants into industrial workers and a man into a giant.
"Ha." Janet's voice had the bright, cutting quality of someone who knew exactly what she was doing. "Still trying to charm your way out of the ant farm, Natasha? It won't work. Hank's head is entirely full of experiments. Your particular skills don't apply."
"That explains why two people who've had a hundred years to figure it out still haven't managed to have children," Black Widow said. The warmth in her voice was entirely artificial. "And that American sweetheart look you're working, Janet — it stopped being fashionable several decades ago."
"At least I didn't have surgery to guarantee I'd never have the option," Janet replied, without any change in expression.
A brief silence from inside the structure.
Then, with the lightness of someone choosing not to engage further: "Did you two come here just for this?"
"No," Pym said.
He accepted the coffee cup from Janet, reached into a pocket, and pressed something coin-sized against the bottom of the cup. Without any visible mechanism, the cup shrank — reduced to a scale that Batman could only track through the optics in his cowl. Pym picked it up with tweezers and set it inside the block structure through what appeared to be a small opening in the side.
"Natasha. Two Hydra operatives are looking for you. I'd like to talk about them."
"Who?" Black Widow asked.
"One is Nathan Garrett. S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, your colleague." Pym leaned forward slightly. "Nick Fury told me Garrett arrived in New York several days ago. He stayed quiet until yesterday's dinosaur invasion gave him a reason to surface publicly."
"Garrett." She repeated the name slowly, like she was weighing it. "And the second?"
Janet answered before Pym could.
"The second one — neither of us knows the name. Nick Fury doesn't either. He calls himself Batman."
A pause from inside the structure.
"We were hoping that as a fellow Hydra operative, you might be able to fill in some details."
Inside the ant farm, Black Widow took a sip of the miniaturized coffee. Batman and Venom Robin could hear the faint sound of it.
"Batman," she said.
"I know who he is, of course."
Pym and Janet exchanged a glance but said nothing, waiting.
"What do you want to know exactly? The face under the mask? His name?" Another pause. "Or how we spent a night together? That's a story worth telling, Janet. You really should try expanding your horizons beyond Pym."
In the ventilation shaft, Venom Robin turned his head very slowly and looked at Batman with an expression of profound interest.
"When did that happen?" he whispered. "No wonder you've been tearing the city apart looking for her."
The exposed line of Batman's jaw revealed nothing.
"Shut up, Robin."
***
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