Scott's eyes had gone so wide they looked painful, whites showing all around the iris. "Oh god. Oh god. Hank was right. We just attacked a goddess. We're dead. We're so dead." His voice climbed higher with each word, approaching genuine panic. "Hope, if you can hear me, I'm sorry I got us killed because I didn't recognize divinity when it kicked down our door!"
"Scott," Hope managed from the floor, her voice still weak but gaining strength as the electrical aftershocks faded from her nervous system, "shut up. You're not helping."
Domino's brain finally started functioning again, cutting through the shocked paralysis.
Goddess?
Her?
Neena Thurman, former mercenary, current mother, woman who'd spent most of her life surviving on luck and bullets, now apparently qualified for worship.
The absurdity hit her like a freight train doing ninety.
She'd altered reality like it was stitching clothes and fought FURY before wielding the Death Stone and bringing back forty-seven thousand people from death.
And somehow it had never occurred to her that people might interpret that as divine intervention.
This was stupid and shortsighted on her part since she should have seen this coming from a mile away.
Jay had warned her, mentioned the Cult of the Lightbringer, and the way people looked at him like he was the Second Coming, even the worship that came with power on this scale.
She'd thought she was exempt, that being in Jay's shadow would keep her out of that particular spotlight.
Apparently not.
Her hands clenched into fists, nails digging into palms before unclenching and flexing again.
"Get up," she said to Hank, and the words came out harder than intended, carrying an edge that made Scott flinch. "I'm not here for worship. I'm here because Gaea herself is in danger, and you're part of the solution, whether you know it or not."
Hank remained prostrate, forehead still pressed to the floor. "A goddess commands, and I obey."
"I'm commanding you to get up and stop calling me that."
"As you wish, Divine one."
Domino's eye twitched violently. "You're doing this on purpose now."
"Perhaps." Hank rose slowly, joints popping and creaking with the protest of age, but his expression carried amusement beneath the reverence. "Though I assure you, my faith is genuine."
He straightened, brushing dust from his knees with deliberate care that suggested he was buying time to organize his thoughts. When he met her eye, the humor faded into something rawer. "I was a man of pure logic once. Still am, in most respects. Science was my religion, empiricism my scripture. But after losing Janet..." His voice roughened. "After watching her disappear into the Quantum Realm while I could do nothing but watch..." He paused to take a breath. "Decades of searching with no success, where every calculation came up empty and every experiment failed. I became..." His hands trembled before he clasped them behind his back. "Bitter doesn't cover it. I even pushed Hope away because seeing her reminded me of what I'd lost. I was a literal definition of an asshole."
Hope's jaw tightened from where she leaned against the wall, but she said nothing and just watched her father with an expression too complex to parse.
Hank's hands trembled slightly before he clasped them behind his back. "Then I saw it. The Lightbringer himself, bringing twelve hundred souls back from death and broadcasting it live across the world. That rattled me..." He laughed, the sound carrying something almost like hysteria. "Rattled me to my core in ways I can't fully articulate. Decades of scientific certainty, years of believing I understood the fundamental laws of reality, all of it turned to ash watching one man resurrect the dead."
He laughed, the sound carrying bitter self-awareness. "I even had a proper breakdown, if you must know. Locked myself in the lab for three weeks straight without much sleep, running calculations until my vision blurred, trying to find the scientific explanation. There had to be one. Energy can't be created or destroyed, consciousness can't just reappear from nothing, death is..." His hand dropped. "Was supposed to be final. It had to be…"
Scott shifted uncomfortably, clearly wanting to help but having no idea how while Hope pushed off from the wall, crossed to her father, and her hand found his shoulder for a moment then withdrew.
"But there wasn't an explanation", Hank continued, his voice steadier with Hope's touch. "No equation balanced and no theory held." He turned back to Domino. "So I started reaching out and finding whispers of the Cult of the Lightbringer, through my contacts in SHIELD, and I joined out of curiosity. Told myself it was anthropological research for studying mass delusion."
His smile turned wry. "Except it wasn't a delusion. I saw Jay convince Gaea, Mother Earth herself, to help her children. Saw her golden light falling like rain, blessing random people with her power, turning ordinary humans into guardians. People stepping up to save each other, showing me what humanity could be when given the chance."
His gaze fixed on Domino with intensity. "Then came you. Doing what even Jay couldn't. Bringing back forty-seven thousand people from death's grip. Do you understand what you did beyond the miracle itself? You fundamentally challenged the concept that survival drives evolution, that death is the ultimate teacher. You proved love and choice matter more than nature's brutal calculus."
Domino's throat went tight since she'd never thought about it like that and had just focused on saving lives, on using the power she'd been given, not on the philosophical implications.
Hank's voice carried absolute conviction now, the tone of a scientist who'd found proof of the divine and couldn't deny the evidence. "So I knew that if I had any shot of getting Janet back from death's jaws, I needed you both. The Lightbringer's Powers and the Goddess's Luck."
He gestured at Scott and Hope. "Thus, I accelerated everything. The Yellowjacket project Darren Cross was developing, weaponizing my life's work, had to be shut down. And Cross himself..." Hank's expression hardened. "Well. He made his choices and we made ours. So, we planned a heist, and broke Scott Lang out of prison specifically for this."
Scott's head whipped toward Hank. "Wait, back up. You... you broke me out? Of San Quentin? I thought I escaped!"
"You thought you picked the lock on a maximum-security cell by yourself?" Hank's eyebrow rose. "Scott. You're talented, but you're not that talented. I disabled the security systems, created a blind spot in the cameras, left the tools in the maintenance closet you'd pass on your planned route, and made sure the guard rotation gave you a twelve-minute window." He shrugged. "Your 'escape' was orchestrated down to the second."
Scott's mouth opened, closed and opened again while his hands spread in a gesture of helpless confusion. "My life… my entire recent life… is a lie."
"Focus, Scott. Dad just..." She glanced at Hank, something painful crossing her face. "Manipulated the circumstances. Like he does."
The weight of old hurt sat heavy in those words.
Hank flinched. "Hope..."
"Focus," she cut him off, but her hand found his shoulder again in a complicated gesture that said both 'I'm still angry' and 'we'll deal with this later.'
Hank turned back to Domino, visibly pulling himself together. "We trained Scott and Hope for weeks. Drilled them on the suits, on Pym Particle physics and on the mission parameters. Planned the heist on Cross Industries to steal the Yellowjacket prototype and destroy all the research." A flash of something that might have been pride crossed his face. "And after we succeeded, Hope and I became the sole owners of Pym Particle technology."
"We were in the process of reaching out to you through Fury's channels, but..." Hope added, her voice gaining strength as the electrical aftershocks continued fading. Then her gaze swept the destroyed hallway, the unconscious ants and the general chaos. "Looks like the Goddess fast-forwarded everything and just showed up instead."
As they talked, Hank led them deeper into the house where the basement stairs descended into cooler air, the temperature dropping noticeably with each step. Fluorescent lights flickered to life automatically, revealing a space that spoke of obsession made physical.
The lab sprawled out in chaotic organization.
Workbenches lined the walls, covered in equipment that ranged from cutting-edge to vintage as electron microscopes sat beside hand-built particle splicers. Computers running complex simulations hummed while holographic displays floated in mid-air, showing equations and dimensional models too complex to even understand.
But it was the details that told the real story.
A mug of coffee sat on one bench, dust coating the surface and the liquid inside long since evaporated. How long had it been sitting there? Months? Years?
Stacks of notebooks filled entire shelves, each one labeled with dates spanning decades with different handwriting in the margins, notes scrawled by two people working together, then suddenly just one person's handwriting continuing alone.
A chalkboard covered one wall, equations scratched and erased and rewritten so many times the surface had worn pale. At the top, in faded letters: "Quantum Tunnel Stabilization" and a date from thirty years ago.
And photographs.
Everywhere, photographs.
A woman with dark hair and a brilliant smile, standing beside a younger Hank. The two of them in lab coats, holding up a container of red liquid between them, both grinning like they'd discovered the secret of the universe.
A family photo of Hank, the woman, and a young Hope, at some kind of science fair where the woman's arm wrapped around Hope's shoulders, pride radiating from every line of her posture.
Janet van Dyne.
Present through her absence as the ghost that haunted every surface.
Hope stopped at one photograph, her hand reaching out but not quite touching the frame which showed her mother in the Wasp suit, helmet off, laughing at something off-camera.
"I was eleven," Hope said quietly, her voice barely above a whisper. "When she vanished. Old enough to understand she was gone somewhere but too young to understand why Dad couldn't bring her back."
She turned, and her eyes found Hank with an expression that cut to his heart. "Too young to understand why he pushed me away instead of holding on to what he had left."
Hank's face crumpled, but then he rebuilt the mask, even if the cracks showed through.
Scott, clearly drowning in the emotional undertow and desperately searching for solid ground, cleared his throat. "So, uh. This lab. It's... it's really something. Very..." He gestured vaguely. "Science-y?"
Domino almost smiled despite herself since the man had absolutely zero ability to read a room, but at least he was trying.
"It's a shrine," she said quietly, moving through the space and taking it all in. "To a woman who's been gone for thirty years and a man's refusal to stop searching."
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