"Janet?"
She stared at him like she'd seen a ghost. Her hands, which had been wiping down the bar, went still. The glass she'd been holding slipped from nerveless fingers and shattered on the floor behind the bar.
"Hank?" Her voice was rough from disuse, or maybe from screaming during those first years when she thought no one would ever come. "That's... you can't be... I'm hallucinating again. The quantum variance must be messing with my perception again."
Hank launched himself over the bar with surprising agility for his age. His arms wrapped around her before conscious thought could catch up, pulling her close with desperate strength. He was crying, tears streaming down his face as thirty years of grief and hope and desperate searching culminated in this moment.
"I'm real," he managed between sobs that shook his entire frame. "God, Janet, I'm so sorry. I should have found you sooner. I should have..." His voice broke completely. "I never stopped looking. Not for one day. Not for one hour. Every moment I was topside, I was searching. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
Janet stood rigid in his embrace for three heartbeats, her mind struggling to accept what her senses were telling her. Then something broke inside her, and she collapsed against him, her own tears falling as she clutched at his suit with hands that shook.
"I thought... after so long, I thought maybe you'd moved on. Maybe you'd..."Another sob cut her off. "Maybe you'd found someone else. Maybe you'd decided thirty years was long enough to grieve and it was time to let go.
"Never." Hank pulled back just enough to cup her face, his thumbs brushing away tears that kept falling. "I could never. You're my wife, Janet. Till death do us part, and..." His voice cracked again. "Not even death could make me stop searching. I would have looked for another thirty years. Another sixty. Until I died or found you, whichever came first."
Hope had been standing frozen, watching her parents reunite, her own tears streaming freely down her face. Now she moved, crossing the distance between them and wrapping her arms around both of them, creating a three-person embrace that felt like coming home after a lifetime of exile.
"Mom," Hope's voice came out thick with emotion she'd been holding back for three decades. "God, Mom, you're alive. You're actually alive and you're here and I..." She couldn't finish.
Janet's head snapped around, seeing her daughter for the first time in three decades. The little girl she'd left behind was now a woman grown, wearing the Wasp suit like it was made for her.
"Hope?" Janet's free hand came up, traced the lines of her daughter's face. "My baby? Look how..." Her voice broke completely, dissolving into sobs that thirty years of survival had forced her to suppress.
The three of them held each other, crying and laughing and trying to talk all at once. Thirty years of separation trying to compress into moments, words tumbling over each other in a desperate rush to say everything that mattered.
Hank asking about her survival. Janet asking about Hope's life. Hope telling her mother about college, about training, about becoming the Wasp. All of it happening simultaneously in the beautiful chaos of family reunited against impossible odds.
Scott hung back, wiping at his own eyes while trying to maintain some dignity. Domino stood beside him, her scarlet-tinted eye suspiciously bright.
"I'm not crying," Scott said, his voice thick. "You're crying."
"Yeah, sure." Domino's hand found his shoulder, squeezing once in shared understanding.
The reunion continued for several minutes, words tumbling over each other as thirty years tried to compress into moments. Janet asked about Hope's life, Hank explained his search, Hope told her mother how the world had changed. It was messy and beautiful and exactly what a family should be when torn apart and finally made whole again.
Finally, when the initial wave of emotion had passed enough for rational thought, Hank pulled back slightly. "We need to get you home, Janet. Back to our world. I have the shuttle, we can leave right now..."
Janet's expression shifted, becoming complicated. "Hank, I..." She glanced around the bar, at the patrons who'd been pretending not to watch but were clearly invested in this drama. "It's not that simple. There are people here who need me. I've built a life, such as it is. And there's... there's someone you need to know about."
Before she could continue, the bar's door exploded inward, torn from its hinges by invisible force. The wood and metal vaporized into quantum foam before it could hit anyone.
The bar's patrons scattered.
Dove for cover, phased through walls, and disappeared. The exodus happened in seconds.
A figure floated through the opening on a throne that defied gravity and good taste in equal measure.
The man himself wore a purple and blue suit that looked like it had been assembled from a dozen different time periods. Renaissance doublet merged with far-future armor plating. Ancient Egyptian gold worked into modern tactical gear. A walking contradiction of eras that somehow worked because he'd made it work through sheer force of will.
His face was hidden behind a blue mask that pulsed with barely contained energy. The mask of someone who'd transcended simple humanity and wanted everyone to know it.
Behind him, an honor guard of sleek robots floated in perfect formation. Twelve of them, each humming with quantum destabilization fields that made Domino's senses scream warnings.
The man's voice boomed through the bar, carrying arrogance that came from never being told "no" and surviving the experience.
"So, Hank Pym really did come." The words dripped with condescension. "How fortunate. For you, Janet. Your family as leverage." He gestured expansively, the throne rotating to better address them. "And how fortunate for me. Now that I have hostages, you'll finally give me what I want. The Time Sphere. Hand it over, or I start dissolving your loved ones."
The robots leveled weapons that crackled with quantum destabilization fields.
Janet's expression went from shock to recognition to cold fury in the span of a heartbeat. "Kang." she bit out, and the name carried history.
"The Conqueror, if you please." The masked man gestured expansively, his throne rotating to better address them. "Though here, I prefer to be called the Master of Chronopolis. Has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?"
Hank now confused, was picking up on this weird energy between his wife and this stranger.
He turned his attention to Hank, the mask's energy pulsing brighter.
"You know, Janet and I became quite... close... during her years here." The pause was deliberate. Calculated to wound. "While you were topside playing with your precious ants and your Ultron projects, she was here. With me. Learning what it meant to have a real man's attention."
Hank's hands clenched into fists as his breathing quickened.
Kang leaned forward on his throne, clearly enjoying the reaction. "She spoke of you often, of course. How you were too focused on your work. Too obsessed with particles and suits to pay proper attention to your wife. How I was better than you in every way that..."
He didn't get to finish.
Hank's fist, enlarged to the size of a car, materialized directly in front of Kang's face.
The impact was a thunderclap.
The blue energy mask shattered into crystalline fragments that scattered like shrapnel. The force of the blow sent Kang flying backward off his throne, his body tumbling through the air in an undignified sprawl before crashing into the far wall hard enough to crack the quantum-stabilized material.
Hank was already moving.
His size fluctuating wildly as thirty years of pain, hurt and rage found its outlet in violence that transcended simple combat and became catharsis.
He grew to ten feet tall and drove a knee into Kang's midsection causing The Conqueror's breath exploded out in a pained whoosh.
Shrank to the size of an ant and delivered a dozen rapid punches directly into his scrotum and finally expanded back to normal size and grabbed Kang by the throat, lifting him off the ground.
"You." Hank's voice came out as a growl that was barely human, each word forced through clenched teeth. "Keep my wife's name out of your DAMN mouth!"
Kang tried to activate his suit's systems, the suit flickering as it attempted to phase him out of danger. But instead, nothing happened as a single crimson string tied around his throat courtesy of Domino, now relishing the fight.
"Did you think," Hank slammed Kang into the floor hard enough to crater it, quantum-stabilized material cracking under the impact, "you could talk about my wife like she was some conquest? Some prize you won while I wasn't looking?"
Another slam. The floor cratered deeper.
"Thirty years," Slam. "I searched," Slam. "For thirty goddamn years," Slam. "And you think you can stand there and brag about..." He couldn't even finish the sentence. Just slammed Kang into the ground again.
Kang's robots finally reacted, weapons charging as they prepared to open fire on Hank.
Domino had been watching the reunion with genuine emotional investment, her usual mercenary detachment replaced by something softer.
But the moment those robots pointed their weapons at Hank, at Hope, at the sweet family moment she'd been witnessing, something inside her snapped.
The reminder of FURY rose unbidden.
The Fury construct had nearly killed her. Would have killed her if Jay hadn't intervened. And now here were more robots, more mechanical threats, pointing weapons at people she'd grown to care about over the past hours.
Unacceptable.
Her eyes went black, sclera flooding with ink-dark power as the Death Stone's influence manifested through her quantum manipulation.
Massive mechanical hands erupted from the ground all around the bar, then throughout the market, then spreading across the entire city of Chronopolis. They were brown with rust, ancient and corroded and wrong in ways that made reality itself recoil. Each hand was the size of a building, fingers ending in claws that dripped oxidation like blood.
The hands clutched at Kang's robots en masse, dozens of mechanical soldiers grabbed and crushed in rusted grips. But it didn't stop there.
The rust spread. Transferred from the massive hands to the robots like a plague, a corruption that converted advanced technology into crumbling oxide in seconds. Quantum-shielded armor flaked away like dried paint and processors seized as their components degraded beyond function. Energy weapons sputtered and died as their power cores corroded into uselessness.
The entire city watched in horror as the Death stone's power manifested surprising even Domino. Robots that had enforced Kang's tyranny for years became piles of rust before their optics finished processing the threat. The mechanical hands squeezed, and the sound of metal degrading filled the air like a cathedral bell tolling for the end of the world.
Domino stood in the center of the carnage, her hands spread wide as crimson strings wove between the massive rusted constructs.
"You reminded me of something I'd rather forget," she said quietly, but her voice carried across the sudden silence. "So I'm returning the favor."
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