Day 1327

Or was that 1326? Did it matter? Are there even days in the quantum zone? Why wasn't he growing a beard? Cassie would like it if he grew a beard he was pretty sure. How did Janet manage to have fantastic eyeshadow after 30 years down here?

Currently, these were the questions that Scott was humoring himself with while sitting and waiting by a globby piece of geometry. Certainly, there was plenty to do, none of which he could really make sense of, let alone explain. He was a mechanical engineer after all, not a quantum physicist like... Hope. He liked to focus on eyeshadow and beards and Cassie and magic quantum healing juice and all the other crazy stuff he's seen precisely because he didn't want to think of Hope. Thinking of Janet was a little too close for comfort as it was but, dammit, that smoky eye was incredible.

He learned early on that tugging on that particular thread would do him no good. After he realized he was stranded, he had spent at least a month trying to figure out exactly what had happened. He had been talking to Hank, and everything had been excellent and then... it wasn't.

Initially, Scott had thought it was just a simple mess-up. Ant-thony Hopkins accidentally tripped the generator, or Gr-Ant Imahara had gotten excited and snipped the chord to the radio, but that idea slipped away as the hours piled up and turned into days.

As the days turned into weeks his thoughts turned darker, try as he might to stop himself. Maybe Jimmy Woo had busted them? Scott might've gotten lucky with fooling Woo while he was under house arrest, but he knew the FBI agent was not to be underestimated. But even Woo would've let them finish extracting Scott. Even if he had been stubborn about it, Hope would've worn him down after a day or two of constant requests. Hank might've thought it was funny, but even he would've insisted after a week. Maybe two.

Well, maybe there had been an earthquake? The parking garage they were situated on wasn't exactly new and probably wasn't up to code. Perhaps the tunnel had been crushed in the van? How quickly could they rebuild it? It hadn't been easy to put together it in the first place, especially now that their options in component dealers had been shaved. Maybe Hope or Hank or Janet had gotten hurt in the aftershock or maybe even...

No, Scott wouldn't consider that possibility. His grip on reality was already tenuous enough, to consider something like that would push him too far. So he didn't think about it. He had long ago come to the conclusion that he wasn't going to be able to solve why he was stuck in this itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny slice of... something witty. He had run out of jokes in the middle of the second year. Even in prison, he had had Luis and the others to joke with.

So, Scott thought about beards and eyeshadow and Cassie. Especially Cassie. Peanut kept him grounded and sane even if he wasn't 100 percent sure he was going to make it out of here. Even after 1328 days, he could still see her with perfect clarity. He hadn't lied to Hope when he had told her that he could've been in jail for a hundred years and never forgotten her face.

And there was that name again. If thinking of Peanut kept Scott together, thinking of Hope threatened to break him apart. Scott knew from experience that thinking of her would just drive him mad with want and desire, not only to feel her body against his again but to also know what had happened to her, to help her if he could, and the crushing reality of being stuck in the quantum realm would just come down that much harder. Thinking of her smile, or the smell of her hair fresh out of the shower, or the bruise she could put on him during a sparring session, would definitely be enough to drive him insane.

Maybe that's why he was sitting where he was at this particular moment? And why he had been keeping track of the patterns of the various time warps he had seen in his 1325 days in the quantum realm? He had had Hope on the mind a lot lately.

Janet might have told him to stay away from the time warps because they wouldn't be able to bring him out, but they obviously weren't there to bring him out anyways. Maybe he'd get lucky and pop out a day or so after he first got trapped here? Or better yet, a day or so before. He could help then, with whatever it was that had kept them from getting him out in the first place.

Just on cue, the time warp phased into existence. Giant and wobbly and unknowable and threatening. He hadn't given them a close look before, he'd been too afraid of them. But he was ready to do something. He couldn't be down here for another 27 years, waiting for Cassie to grow up and become a brilliant quantum scientist just to come searching for him.

So it was with the thought of the two most important ladies in his life that Scott got up and rocketed himself toward the unknown, whatever and whenever that might be.