Wings And Stingers

There is a moment, in the life of every hero, when the gear becomes a part of them. The shield, the hammer, the cape, the helmet — it stops being a thing they wear and starts being a thing they ARE. For Hope van Dyne, that moment came the first time her wings unfolded.

It happened in the workshop at the Pym estate, on a foggy San Francisco morning. Hank Pym had spent three years building the new Wasp suit in secret, working late into the night while his daughter slept upstairs. He had tested every component a dozen times. He had calibrated the shrinking dial to a perfect tolerance. He had run the stingers through a thousand fire-control simulations. He had not, however, told Hope a word about any of it.

Then one Saturday morning he led her down the long hallway, past the door she had been told never to open, and into a room she had never seen.

There it was.

Red. Gold. Black. Sleek as a hummingbird. The wings folded neatly along the back of the suit in two narrow housings. The stingers gleamed at the wrists. A round helmet sat on the workbench, polished to a mirror.

Hope did not say anything for a long time. Then she walked to the workbench, picked up the helmet, and held it in both hands. She had drawn pictures of a moment like this in her notebooks when she was nine years old.

"Try it on," Hank said quietly.

She did.

The helmet sealed with a soft hiss. The suit's targeting system flickered green inside her visor. Hank gave her a tiny remote and showed her the button on her shoulder.

"Press there," he said.

Hope pressed.

FWUMP.

Two pairs of wings unfolded out of housings on her back. They were thin as glass and shimmered the color of soap bubbles. They began to vibrate — softly at first, then faster, then faster, until they hummed at a steady BRRRRZZZZ — and Hope, almost without meaning to, lifted off the workshop floor.

She hovered. She turned in a slow circle. She zipped to the ceiling, banked sideways, and landed neatly on top of a tall cabinet, light as a sparrow.

Hank was crying. Not loudly. Just quietly, from a corner of the room.

The wings were only half of it.

Built into the wrists of the Wasp suit were two bio-electric blasters — Hope's own design, refined over years of late-night work in the Pym Tech labs. She called them stingers, after her mother's original suit. They fired short bursts of focused electricity, bright yellow, precise as a surgeon's blade. With a flick of her thumb she could shoot a stinger from full size or from ant size. The targeting system in her helmet drew a soft circle around whatever she was aiming at, and the stinger went exactly where she wanted it.

She tested them on a row of metal training dummies that afternoon. ZAP. The first dummy crumpled. ZAP. The second dummy collapsed. ZAP. The third dummy got a perfect, clean, smoking circle punched right through its chest plate.

Scott Lang showed up halfway through the test, holding a coffee, and immediately stopped chewing his bagel.

"Wait, those are weapons?" he said. "Those are WEAPONS? My suit doesn't have weapons. My suit has — I just have my fists and a TON of ants. Hope, this is so unfair."

Hope shot a stinger past his ear into a fourth dummy. ZAP. The dummy fell. Scott took a careful step backward.

"You wanted me to teach you to fight," Hope said, deadpan. "Not the other way around."

She had trained for this for most of her life. Since she was small she had practiced boxing, jiu-jitsu, escrima, and aikido. She had studied with private instructors in Oakland, in San Francisco, and during her years at university. She had drilled shrinking and growing in the Pym Tech parking garage at midnight when no one was watching — click, small; click, big; click, small; click, big — until the rhythm was as automatic as her breath. While her father was teaching Scott to be Ant-Man, Hope had already been the Wasp in her own head for years.

So when she put it all together — the wings, the stingers, the martial arts, the shrinking — she became something completely new.

Her combat style was a strange and beautiful thing.

She would hover near the ceiling of a room and watch the fight from above. Then she would dive, SHRINKing as she fell, becoming a tiny missile streaking toward a target. Just before impact she would GROW back to full size, landing an elbow on the back of someone's neck. Sometimes she would do the opposite — shrink her whole body but keep her fist at full size for half a second, so the punch landed like a wrecking ball while the rest of her was the size of a button. Sometimes she would flicker, shrink-grow-shrink-grow, faster than the eye could track, while her stingers zipped yellow lines through the air around her.

Scott called it her tactical music.

"Hope," he said once, leaning on a wall and trying to catch his breath after a sparring match, "you are the only person I know who can do calculus while throwing a kick."

She smiled, just a little.

The first real mission with the new gear came a few weeks later. A team of mercenaries had stolen a single Pym disc from a Pym Tech warehouse — just one disc, but it could shrink a delivery truck, or grow a backpack to the size of a bus. Hope went in alone.

She flew through a high window at the top of the warehouse, wings humming. She shrank to the size of a bee and zipped past the first two patrols without making a sound. She dropped onto the shoulder of a third guard at full size, stung him with a stinger, and was gone before he hit the floor. She fought her way through twelve mercenaries that night and never once touched the ground.

She found the stolen disc. She tucked it into a compartment on her belt. She flew out the way she had come.

When she landed in the garden behind the Pym estate, the lights in the kitchen were still on. Her father was sitting at the table with a teapot and two cups. He had been waiting.

Hope walked in, helmet under her arm, hair a little messy, a bruise blossoming on her elbow. She sat down across from her father. He poured her a cup of tea.

For a long moment he just looked at her.

"Your mother would be very proud," he said.

Hope did not say anything back. She didn't have to. She just sat with her father and drank her tea, in the quiet house in San Francisco, while the new Wasp suit cooled on the chair beside her, and the wings hummed once, softly, before going still.