All of a sudden Hank was experiencing one of those very cliché moments where the rest of the world falls away and you’re sort of just standing in a black abyss. Where his ears felt like they had popped because though he could still hear her talking -- it was like a hum in his inner ear and this buzzing static sound-tracking a thought played on repeat: ‘It was now 2012, we’ve somehow been transported exactly fifty years into the future. And to Delaware, curiously enough.’ There was no pause of hesitation or uncertainly at what she was telling him because it was, well, Raven and she had never given him a reason to doubt her. So if you took that and then added upon it the fact that one second he had been in his lab and the next he had awoken in someone’s unkempt yard, the evidence had sure enough footing.
He managed to bring himself back to reality within a few seconds (which was honestly a few seconds too long considering his mind had always been open to the possibility of the improbable) and blue eyes shifted back on the girl in front of him. “I was the last.” Hank echoed her, as if saying it out loud for himself would make it easier to digest. “How long have you been here? How long have all of you been here?” By the end of his questions, his gaze had shifting to the ground because the longer he looked at her, the more a stinging regret started to ebb at his insides. It had literally only been minutes since leaving her room but already he was wishing he could breath back in all those terrible things said. She didn’t deserve them. No matter how completely he believed in his cure--
“The cure!” He shouted out (as something akin to a lunatic), possibly cutting Raven off as he spun around in a one eighty and dropped to his knees in the grass. It didn’t take long for him to find the syringe, reaching for it as if it was the holy grail, and staring at it with a pounding heart. If he had lost it… being where he was now with perhaps no way to get back to where all his research was… that would have been it. Even if he started all over again, and assuming that this place had the resources, it’d still be years to recreate what was stored in that needle.
Getting back to his feet for the third time since arriving in Delaware, a tension started to wrap around his bones as he realized who exactly had just watched his little scene and what that might mean given the fresh history involved. Hank turned back around slowly, holding the syringe tight against his leg almost a bit shamefully.