Her fingers moved through the hair at his nape. It was still damp, although his skin was already starting to cool. The joys of airconditioning in the summer. She didn't mind Scott's weight, but that wouldn't last forever. Her breathing evened out before his did, as was usually the case. Apropos of her own thoughts and completely unprompted, she said, "I've been talking to Hope lately."
It took Scott a few too many seconds to catch up with the comment. He looked up with a confused expression. "My boss?" Very confused, indeed. Hope Mikaelson was someone he put in hours for at the bar because she'd needed help but it was hardly his real source of income. Still, referring to her as Bosslady and the like had stuck.
"Sort of." Was she being peevish? A little. Hope let out a small chuckle and pushed at his shoulder. The training mat was getting uncomfortable. "Me-Hope. The present me. CEO of the Pym van Dyne Foundation me. Her. Me. It all gets a bit complicated, but we've had some fun discussions about entanglement and the divorce of causality in the multiverse when introducing variants into the mix. With me so far?"
Scott went from confused to giving Hope a Look because of course she was his boss, too. But then his expression became confused again with a bit of alarm. "I thought we weren't supposed to talk to ourselves. Our other selves. Our... this universe's version of us because--" Scott stopped. Had that been a rule? Or had that just been an unspoken, self-imposed rule? Their universes had diverged in a way that this one had not been thoroughly traumatized so their being there wasn't going to bring on the heat or accelerate any timeline.
His expression changed again. Wary, this time. "I'm with you," Scott said, slowly, but pushed himself up to sit while he watched Hope.
She sat up with him and kept her hand on his neck, as much for the connection as for assuaging his concern. "She reached out to me, actually, so if there are any rules about it, she's not afraid to break them. Reminds me of someone I know. Multiple someones. It's only been video chats, though. We know when not to tempt fate." Hope brought her other hand up and smoothed her fingertips over his worry lines. "She knows about our setup here and actually floated the idea of funding it with a generous grant."
Scott blinked a few times, wishing he didn't feel like he was five steps behind Hope in the conversation. And then he caught up. He moved, scooting closer and resting a hand on Hope's thigh as he looked surprised. "Funding the mobile lab? The whole--everything?" Scott asked, knowing he didn't need to go into detail about the laundry list of things they were working on away from the rest of the science minds. Everyone had their own things going but the Pym particles were very much a family project.
He frowned again but it was more his thoughts working their way through logistics. "We couldn't go public, not really. There's already-" Scott stopped again and reconsidered his words. "We have duplicates here already," he conceded; Pepper was CEO of one company that technically already existed and was run by her universal-native self. His expression softened and Scott turned serious. "What do you want to do? All of it, how far do you want to take it?"
"Everything," she confirmed with the kind of smile she reserved only for Scott and Cassie. The warm, wide kind, filled with her namesake. "We discussed the logistics of our work. We can publish under pseudonyms and apply for patents through the Foundation. I want everything, Scott. I don't care about the money itself. Given my track record with Pym Tech, I'm sure that might surprise some people. We could do so much more with what she's offering. Buy a new space. Put Cassie through college if she wanted. I want the world to be better, but the fame, the notoriety? It's not a dealbreaker. What do you think?"
"I mean-" Scott started and his head shook in disbelief as his shoulders came up in a shrug. "Yeah. If that's what you want, that's what we'll do," he said, astounded and in awe of the woman across from him. "What do you need from me?" Because that was really what this all boiled down to: where did Scott fit into this? How could he help?
Hope got to her feet and offered him her hand. He was more than capable of standing on his own, but this was what they did: helped each other. When she'd first gotten to this weird pocket dimension, she wasn't sure what the forced proximity might do to their relationship. Being fresh from the last battle with Thanos, five years just gone, tender didn't begin to describe how she'd felt. Scott had been so kind. Knowing that, acknowledging it, seeing how quickly he simply fell into the orbit of her ideas despite being far more established in this little community than she was, it made her close the gap between them and pull him into a long, deep kiss.
On the other side of it, she said the only thing she could in that moment. "I love you."
Scott took the offered hand without any thought behind it because that was also what they did: they accepted help from each other. He was about to note that she hadn't answered his question when, instead, she was kissing him. And then he was kissing her back. And it was nice. Scott smiled when she did speak. "I love you, too," he murmured. They were both sweaty and it didn't matter. She was the most beautiful woman, powerful and confident and capable. Hope was who he wanted Cassie to see as a role model.
Cassie.
His demeanor shifted and Scott glanced away only briefly. "When you were talking to... to Hope. Is Cassie okay? She's okay, right?" Which was probably the wrong train of thought for most people in that specific moment but it was Scott Lang.
"She's fine. She's good." The other Hope had been scant on the details, because things were already entangled enough, but Hope had made sure to ask about Scott's daughter. It was one of the first things she'd done after asking about her parents. It still hurt not to be able to reach out to them too, but Hope knew they were already pushing things as it was. Possibly. "She's happy."
She ran her fingers through his sweaty hair and circled back to his original question. "Start compiling a list of projects we've been working on. High level, bullet points. I'll start on an inventory of what we have and the equipment we need. This could be really good for us, Scott."
The relief could have been a whole other person in the room with how heavy it was as it ran through him and his body relaxed. She was good, which was better than fine. Happy was even better than good. Hope dragged his thoughts back to what needed to be done; Scott did well when he had tasks.
"I can do that," he said with a nod. "We should pull Cassie in. She doesn't remember some of the work we'd been doing before you got here," Scott said, voice catching on the memory of that horrible week without his daughter. She had come back different but she was still wholly Cassie Lang. "But she can help and add in anything we've missed."
He frowned again. "What happens when the other-me and the other-Cassie start putting the pieces together about what we're doing and come looking?"
Hope moved away from him, but took his hand with a nod. "Yes, of course. She should be in on this from the ground up." If she could have kept Scott from anything in this bizarre dimension they'd wound up, it was losing Cassie again. He'd been a complete shell of himself, barely alive. It was the most frightened she'd ever been for him, and that was including Thanos and when he'd nearly drowned in the bay. "We're in this together."
She raised a brow at him. "Do you really think other-me wouldn't find the ways necessary to keep them from it? And in the inevitability"—Hope rolled her eyes fondly—"that they do find out, we'll cross that quantum bridge when we come to it, all right?"
Scott squeezed her hand and mustered a smile. Of course she had those answers and of course she'd just wait for the inevitable and pivot accordingly. He tugged on her hand and drew Hope in again to kiss her. "So what I'm thinking," Scott said, after a few moments, "is that we should grab a shower. And then I should tell a not-you Hope that I need to stop picking up shifts at Rousseau's since I'll be focusing more on this. But I am going to really, really suggest we get that first one out of the way."
"That, you darling man, sounds like a really great start to the rest of the day." Hope smiled and kissed him again, just a quick peck. "Race you upstairs."