Hoping for a Hero - part II of II [COMPLETE]

Chapter 6: Reviving Hope

- one year later -

I was sitting in the living room when Steve entered. Some days were worse than others, but at that moment, I dared to say I felt almost positive. A slight breeze filled the room and I reached out to feel what sunshine I could when it peeked through the dense clouds.

"Hey," Steve spotted me on the couch and sat beside me.

I leaned into him when he placed his arm around my shoulders. "How was support group?" I asked.

"Oh, the same old stuff," he sighed. There was a moment of silence while he rubbed my arm gently, lost in thought. "You know, I keep telling everybody they should move on and grow. Some do, but not us."

My throat began to tighten and tears threatened to rise, but I refused to let them fall. Not again. "Why do you think that is? It's not like we haven't tried. We have a new life together that we didn't have before, but the past still looms over our heads."

"I have a feeling it always will," his other arm reached out to pull my legs from the ottoman so they rested across his lap. "I'm plum out of answers." When Steve ran out of words, the only other form of communication he had was touch. So, I nuzzled close to him as he simply held me.

Moments like those made living feel bearable. Somehow we managed to decide to push through. We chose every morning to make the best of that day. We did it together and because of each other.

Suddenly, the speaker system projected a ringtone of an incoming call from Natasha. "Accept phone call," I announced to the artificial intelligence.

"Hey guys," Natasha's voice said. "Sorry to interrupt whatever you do every depressing afternoon, but some new intel has come up. Head down to me ASAP."

She hung up without further explanation, but we didn't need any. Her short message was enough to get us on our feet and to her room as fast as we could move.

When we reached her, Scott Lang stood pacing across the floor. I looked at Natasha and asked all of my questions with my eyes.

"He was at the front gate," she replied.

Lang seemed extremely anxious and walked hastily back and forth while muttering under his breath.

"Scott," Steve sensed his panic, "are you okay?"

"Yeah," was the response, but it wasn't very convincing. I walked over to the kitchen to get him a glass of water as he said, "Have any of you guys studied quantum physics?"

"Only to make conversation," Natasha shrugged.

I opened a cupboard to find a glass. "I read a few articles on it when I went to college. It was a popular topic in my friend circles," I said. Finding the cupboard empty, I went to the dish-drainer beside the sink.

"Alright, so five years ago, right before . . . Thanos, I was in a place called the quantum realm."

"Like, some kind of microscopic universe?" I asked, so intrigued that I almost forgot my mission for a clean glass.

"Exactly!" Scott snapped his fingers. "To get there, you have to be incredibly small. Hope, she's my, uh . . . well, she--she was my . . ."

As he stuttered, I filled up a glass with water from the sink.

"She was supposed to pull me out. And then Thanos happened and I got stuck in there."

"Sorry, Scott," I apologized as I handed him his glass of water. He accepted it with a nod and took a swig.

"That must have been a very long five years," Natasha sympathized.

Scott swallowed and raised his eyebrows, "Yeah, but that's just it. It wasn't. For me, it was five hours."

Gradually, more pieces were coming together. "Of course!" I had an 'aha' moment and my eyes lit up with excitement. "The rules of nature here wouldn't apply in the quantum realm. Just like physical things here are bigger, it makes sense that time would also be shorter in the realm."

"Right," Scott seemed to enjoy having someone he could talk with about science. "Everything is unpredictable. Is that anyone's sandwich?" He walked toward the plate that held half of a peanut butter sandwich. "I'm starving."

All of this sounded like gibberish to Steve and he just wanted one sentence that was in English. "Scott, what are you talking about?"

With a full mouth, he continued, "So, what I'm saying is . . . time works differently in the quantum realm. The only problem is," he continued to pace and eat, "right now, we don't have a way to navigate it. But what if we did?"

My mind was spinning. "We could enter the quantum realm at one point of time and exit it at another." I looked at Steve, feeling like this was the thread of hope we had been waiting for. The expression on his face still indicated he was lost.

Scott, though, was still on a roll. "Exactly what I've been thinking. Like, a time before Thanos."

"Wait," Steve held out his hand. "Are you talking about a time machine?"

"No. No, of course not. No, not a time machine. This is more like a . . . " he waved his sandwich in a circle as he tried to think of a cooler way to describe it. Coming up empty, he admitted, "Yeah. Like a time machine. I know, it's crazy. It's crazy, but I can't stop thinking about it! There's gotta be some . . . " Here he started to get choked up and struggled to continue. "It's crazy."

"Scott," Natasha interrupted his mumbling. "I get emails from a raccoon. So, nothing sounds crazy anymore."

"So who do we talk to about this?"

Both Steve and Natasha looked at me. I turned my back to them to think a moment. Equations ran through my brain, possibilities came and went, but the answer to each one was that I couldn't pull this off alone. We'd need a bigger brain than mine. "Stark."