Hope Van Dyne feels like she's sleepwalking through the streets of San Francisco, which really isn't ideal when she's flying a hundred feet above the ground during one of her first trial runs as the Wasp. Her thoughts are a little too slow, her blinks a little too long.

She hasn't slept through the entire night since she woke to an armed raid of her apartment by the FBI seven months ago for aiding and assisting Scott Lang in his breaching of the Sokovia Accords, only escaping because that night she'd happened to take the Wasp suit home with her to work on.

She never feels safe anymore, Hope has concluded, and so constant fear and relentless insomnia have become her best friends. There are always too many security feeds to be monitoring and doors to be watching and shoulders to look over.

Focus, Hope. She has to focus.

The mission.

Shit. The mission. Implementing spyware (or rather antware) so Hope and her father can record every movement of each and every threat to them, the most obvious and immediate threat being Scott Lang, the only person other than Hank to have ever worn the Ant-Man suit.

Said mission didn't actually require Hope at all, as Hank Pym had pointed out, as all she would be doing was placing ants in Scott's townhouse when the ants in question could fly themselves there alone.

Hope had hesitated before telling him that she wanted to go, which in itself was a lie. It wasn't that she had wanted to go but that she needed to, hoping that maybe closure was what she needed to sleep at night.

It was hard to get closure on a relationship that wasn't technically a relationship and that never technically ended. They hadn't fought or screamed or yelled, there had been no weeks of pining and unwritten texts and regret, it was more that one day Scott and Hope had been together and the next Scott had been in a maximum security prison in the ocean and Hope had been on the run from the same people that put him there. The song hadn't ended, it had been paused and never played again. Silence was something she'd had to become accustomed to rather than chosen.

She hadn't said any of that aloud though and Hank hadn't pushed her to. Hope's love life was a battleground both were happy to avoid for the rest of their lives, too fraught with ghosts of arguments never had because that would have had to involve Hank showing an actual interest in Hope's life.

As much as their relationship had improved in the last few years, as being on the run together tends to do to anybody, she doesn't think they'll ever be at a place where they can openly discuss Hope being with anyone, and it doesn't help that at the mention of Scott her father is prone to breaking the first thing he sees.

What would she even say, anyway?

Dad, I'm scared to sleep because I dream of kissing in hallways and movie nights and laughing, and I wake up aching.

Dad, I was finally starting to trust someone for maybe the first time in my life and then he went to Germany and fucked it all up.

Dad, I think I'm still in lo-

She doesn't let herself finish that thought, as usual, and instead her mind wanders to the voicemails she sent Scott, one when she first saw him on the news and one after the armed raid.

The first was full of sharp words that tore at her throat but she let out anyway, something about destroying everything he touched and how they should have left him in that jail cell. She can't remember it word for word and for that she's grateful. It could be worse. At least she didn't bring up Cassie.

The second was softer and sadder, everything Hope had left unsaid since she met him. She told him that she hated him then that she missed him, then threw her phone into the river before leaving behind everything she knew.

Her life at some point became a monument to grief, but she's never had to miss someone in this way before. And, God, she's so weary of it. She wants to reach into her body and scrape the rust from her bones and poison her blood with bleach and scrub her brain raw again and again and again until the feeling leaves her.

Hope comes to a smooth halt mid-air when she realises she's outside Scott's townhouse and, for the first time in months, feels wide awake. She's thrown for a second by how much nicer it is than she expected, momentarily forgetting about X-Con's somewhat shocking success and her strong suspicions that Maggie & Paxton helped out at least a little at first.

The door swings open just as she's beginning to wonder how much rent Scott and Luis pay a month so Hope seizes her opportunity, flying over Dave and Kurt's heads and catching only a moment of their passionate debate about which smoothie flavour is the worst.

Hope finds herself hovering in a long hallway and carefully releases the first of the ants fitted with cameras, watching as they find their hiding places and settle in until she has to strain her eyes just trying to find them.

"Luis, we can't afford laser beam alarm systems," Scott's voice echoes down the hallway. "I mean..  It'd be really cool, and... Actually, if we cut down on the bagels... Okay, no, the bagels are part of our selling point, they have to stay. We'll invest in laser beam alarms later."

Hope doesn't remember making a conscious decision to trace the sound of Scott's voice towards the kitchen but she finds herself in the doorway anyway. There's still something built into her that follows the sound of his voice, the same part of her that used to drift closer to him when she woke in the early hours of the morning. It took her a long time to accept that she could be completely her own without having to be on her own but it's taking her even longer to get used to waking in empty beds and strange cities.

Scott and Luis are sat around the kitchen table, or what Hope can only assume is the kitchen table as it's currently overflowing with house maps and camera diagrams and budgets, still arguing over laser beam security alarm systems.

If just realising she was outside Scott's townhouse was enough to make her feel wide awake, seeing him for the first time in the better part of a year feels like caffeine has been injected straight into her veins. She's watched him since Germany, in mugshots and google searches and dreams, pieced together a fractured version of him that was never quite whole. But seeing Scott in person, his slight frown as he listens to Luis' latest persuasion attempt and his hand gripping a coffee mug that reminds her a little too much of his hands on her, hurts more than a photo ever could.

"You know who can afford laser beam alarms?" Luis says glumly as Hope distracts herself with releasing more ants. "Hank and Ho.. Uh, that person who you may or may not have dated for a year and may or may not have not seen since Germany."

"I thought we agreed not to talk about this," Scott says through gritted teeth.

Hope realises with a shock that she might not be able to talk about Scott, but he can't talk about her, either. And it isn't closure, but it's a little bit closer to it than she was before. Still, she has to leave the room before she can hear anymore. She's already struggling to sleep and would prefer not to have anything else to play over in her mind during long nights.

Scott's bedroom is her final destination, but after she releases the last of the ants and watches them disappear, she places a phone on the bed so small it's not visible to the human eye and tosses a blue Pym particle disk at it so it enlarges to normal size. There's only one number programmed into it, though. Hank's. Hope isn't entirely sure what she'd do if Scott called her and she's decided she doesn't want to find out.

The phone's only just in case, anyway. Just in case anything ever happens. Just in case it's ever an emergency. Just in case the world's ever ending.

She's at the window by the time the door swings open.

"Hope?"

She hasn't cried for a long time but the way Scott says her name makes her want to. She turns around even though she knows she'll only find him staring at the phone on his bed and the post-it note where she'd scrawled "Emergencies only" the night before, with only underlined twice. He glances around anyway, even though she knows he must be assuming she's long gone.

Somehow, Scott looks even sadder than his voice cracking as he'd said her name had sounded, and, God, she's so angry at him. For going to Germany without her, and going to Germany at all, and losing the Ant-Man suit, and his recklessness coming at the cost of her and her father's freedom. And, much as she hates to admit it to herself, for ruining something that felt real and letting her love him in the first place.

We're both so miserable without each other , she wishes she could scream, but we can't be with each other, either, and it's all your fault.

Instead, she slips away out of the window and leaves Scott with the phone in his hand, alone.

She didn't get closure, but she got something close to a goodbye, and it's enough that for the first time in what feels like forever she sleeps through the night and wakes to sunlight.