The Triskelion, mid-morning.
Ava Starr came into the office without the helmet. It was a deliberate choice—she'd been making it more often lately, leaving the mask on the hook by the door rather than wearing it as a default. The quantum stabilization Advisor Bulma had achieved meant she no longer needed the suit to prevent phasing out. The suit was maintenance now, not survival, and she was still adjusting to the distinction.
"How are you?" Smith Doyle asked.
Ava sat across from him. "Advisor Bulma's assessment is that the quantum state has been stabilized. The replenishment procedure she developed gives me consistent control. I won't phase out involuntarily." She folded her hands on the table. "She recommends I keep the suit for active ability use—it helps manage the deactivation cycle. But the threat of permanent loss is gone."
Smith nodded. He thought about Bill Foster, about the specific kind of relief that comes when a decades-long fear resolves into something manageable.
"You and your father can stop looking over your shoulders on that," he said.
Ava's expression shifted slightly. She hadn't grown up calling Bill Foster her father, not out loud, but she'd stopped correcting it when other people said it.
"Do you have plans going forward?" Smith asked.
"I go where you direct me," she said.
Smith looked at her for a moment. "You've been a black ops asset for most of your career. Off the books, unacknowledged, the kind of agent that S.H.I.E.L.D. maintained a distance from officially." He leaned back in his chair. "That changes today. You go on the active roster. Same rank and treatment as any enhanced agent. Merit accumulation, standard privileges, full acknowledgment."
The emotion that moved across Ava's face wasn't quite surprise and wasn't quite relief. She was still for a moment, and then she wasn't.
"I understand," she said.
"You'll be assigned through a Special Forces unit. Liaison will contact you today." Smith looked down at the documents on his desk. "S.H.I.E.L.D. has a full operational queue right now. I hope you're not looking for quiet."
"I'm not," Ava said.
"Good."
She thanked him twice, which was once more than he needed, and left.
As the door clicked shut, Smith pulled up an encrypted file on his terminal. It was a preliminary field report from Leopold Fitz, transmitted at 0200 hours from inside Pym Technologies.
Target facility secured. Active R&D priority is the miniaturization of organic tissue. Observation of experiment 34-C (live sheep) resulted in complete sub-cellular destruction. Conclusion: Cross's shrinking agent is highly volatile. The Yellowjacket suit remains strictly theoretical at this stage.
Smith closed the file just as Bobbi knocked on the door.
"Hope van Dyne from Pym Technologies," Bobbi said. "She's been in the meeting room for an hour."
"Give me five minutes," Smith said.
He finished his paperwork and walked down the corridor. Hope was standing when he came in—she'd gotten up when she heard the door handle, which meant she'd been tracking sounds in the hallway. She sat again when he indicated the chair with a gesture.
"My time is limited," Smith said, taking the head of the table. "Tell me what you need."
Hope appreciated the directness. She organized herself and started without any throat-clearing. "Two things. The first is about the World Martial Arts Tournament."
She explained Howard Stark's hint to Hank about the wish, the resurrection precedent, and Janet van Dyne's situation. She used the word mother precisely once before moving to the factual question: could winning the tournament produce a wish capable of returning her?
Smith confirmed it. He didn't know whether Janet was dead or trapped—the quantum realm's relationship with conventional mortality was complicated—but Shenron's capacity covered both outcomes. If she could be returned, the wish would return her.
Hope's eyes dropped to the table for a moment, then came back to him.
"Tony Stark won the championship in a prior private competition," Smith said. "He brought his parents back. The method works."
"I didn't know there were prior competitions," Hope said.
"They weren't called the World Martial Arts Tournament then. The second one is about to begin. If you or your father can win it, the prize is yours." He paused. "You're both aware of the field."
"I watched the last one," she said. "All the footage I could find."
Which meant she'd done her analysis and arrived at the correct conclusion: the Ant-Man suit alone wasn't enough.
"I want the super soldier serum," she said, keeping her voice level. "Darren Cross is interested in trading Yellowjacket suit production ability for serum access. He asked me to sound out S.H.I.E.L.D.'s position."
"The Yellowjacket suit isn't a finished product."
He watched her register that he already knew this. Thanks to Fitz's report, he didn't have to guess. She was good at hiding it, but there was a half-second of very controlled stillness.
"No," she said. "It isn't."
"The serum isn't available for direct trade against an unfinished product," Smith said. "But there's something I'm more interested in than the suit." He looked at her. "Pym Particles. The underlying technology. If your father is willing to discuss a formal exchange, that's a conversation worth having."
Hope looked at him. There was a long pause as she calculated the angles.
"Hank Pym's S.H.I.E.L.D. file is still active," Smith reminded her gently. "Ant-Man's operational history is documented."
She let out a breath. "I'll discuss it with him."
"Go home and convince him," Smith said. "If he agrees, come back and we'll structure something. I have a meeting." He stood. "I won't see you out."
Scott Lang had not slept well.
The suit was in his backpack on the floor of the bathroom, and he'd been aware of it all night in the way you're aware of something that shouldn't be there. He'd woken up three times, looked at the bag, thought about returning it, thought about the five hundred dollars he currently did not have, and ultimately left it alone.
In the morning, he finally took it out. The suit unfolded in his hands—close-fitting, heavily textured at the joints, with a helmet design that bore no visible manufacturer markings.
He put it on.
The fit was immediate and exact. He stood in front of the small bathroom mirror, acknowledging that this supposed motorcycle racing suit was quite possibly the best-fitting garment he'd ever worn in his life.
He retreated into the bathtub to get a full look at himself without craning his neck.
Kamen Rider energy, he thought. The guy at the shop would pay decent money for this if it's from a—
The front door opened. Luis's voice echoed through the apartment. "Scott? You alright in there?"
Scott looked at the control buttons on the belt. One had done nothing when he'd pressed it earlier. He pressed the other one.
His world collapsed inward at a speed he had no frame of reference for.
The bathtub rim, which had been level with his waist a second ago, was now forty feet above him. The tiles were the size of parking lots. The drain, eight feet away, was a gaping circular void. The sound of Luis's footsteps on the floor was a seismic event.
"The world looks different from this perspective," a calm voice said from inside the helmet.
Scott made a sound that wasn't a word. "Who's talking?" he managed on the second attempt.
Luis pulled back the shower curtain. Scott looked up at a face the scale of a skyscraper, waving his arms and shouting. Luis didn't hear him at all. He just looked at the apparently empty bathtub and reached for the tap.
Water came down like Niagara Falls.
The voice in the helmet said something about true gold and fire and water, but Scott was already running. The current hit him from behind, accelerating him instantly. He surfed the edge of the tub, found no foothold, and went over the side in a torrent that hit the bathroom floor at terminal velocity.
He landed. He got up. He was completely fine, which was impossible and apparently normal.
The voice said something about resilience.
Luis was taking off his pants. Scott had a moment to register this before the heavy leather belt Luis dropped sent him sliding across the wet floor at considerable speed. He went straight down the drain.
The apartment building's plumbing system was not designed to accommodate a person of any size. Scott bounced off pipes and elbow joints, emerging into the floor below through a ceiling vent. He dropped directly into a party that was in progress at eleven in the morning, landing on a turntable before being immediately launched by the arm of a record player.
The next several minutes were a blur of controlled chaos: dodging shoes, outrunning a vacuum cleaner, surviving an encounter with a rat the size of a horse, using a mousetrap as a launch mechanism, and flying through an open window.
He navigated the exterior of the building in freefall until he hit the roof of a parked car.
The metal roof dented slightly under his concentrated mass. The driver, who had been eating a sandwich inside, looked up at the sound.
Scott pressed the second button. The suit expanded him back to full scale in under a second, but the car roof didn't expand with him. The dent was now massively, undeniably visible.
The driver stared at his ruined roof, then at Scott, and shouted something highly emphatic.
Scott scrambled off the car, pulling off the helmet to breathe real air.
"Not bad for a first run," Hank Pym's voice said from the helmet, dry and unhurried.
Scott stood in the alleyway, his heart hammering against his ribs. He looked at the helmet in his hands. He looked back at the dented car. The adrenaline slowly bled away, replaced by a cold, heavy knot in his stomach.