Ghost And Bill Foster

In the long history of Hope van Dyne — the daughter of two heroes, the heir to the Pym Particle, the second person to wear the wings of the Wasp — there is one story she likes to tell more carefully than any other. It is the story of the time she did not fight someone, even though everyone expected her to.

It begins with a mystery.

For months, somebody had been breaking into Pym Technologies facilities and stealing pieces of the Pym Particle research. The strange part was that nobody could catch them. Security cameras caught nothing. Motion sensors caught nothing. Guards walked right past empty hallways and never noticed a thing. Pieces of equipment simply disappeared from sealed vaults. Folders of research notes vanished from locked drawers.

Whoever was doing it could pass through walls.

The thief had a code name in the Pym security files: GHOST.

The first few times Hope tried to catch Ghost, the fight ended badly. Ghost was fast — sometimes she was solid, sometimes she was a flicker of light, sometimes she was a fist coming out of a wall before vanishing back into it. Hope's stingers passed harmlessly through empty air. Scott's punches connected with nothing. Even Hank Pym, watching the security footage, looked baffled. Nobody could land a hit. Nobody could even SEE Ghost properly.

Hope was furious. She drilled in the parking garage at midnight, sharpening her reflexes. She built new targeting systems for her helmet. She promised herself that next time, she would catch Ghost. She would END this.

And then one night she actually got close.

There was a struggle in a Pym Tech storage room. Ghost slipped, lost her phasing for just a moment, and crashed into a table. Her hood fell back. The mask cracked. And Hope, drawing her stinger, finally got a good look at the face under the mask.

It was a young woman.

She was Hope's age. Maybe a little younger. She was sweating. She was breathing hard. She was holding her side as though it hurt. Her skin was so pale it was almost gray, and there were strange flickering ripples moving across her arms and her cheek, the way heat rises off a hot road.

Hope did not fire. She lowered her stinger.

She had spent a lifetime studying the Pym Particle. She knew what she was looking at.

"What happened to you?" she said quietly.

The young woman did not answer right away. She just looked back at Hope with eyes that were very tired, and finally, slowly, she said, "My name is Ava."

The story Ava told that night was one Hope would never forget.

When Ava was very little, her father, Dr. Elihas Starr, had been one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s most promising quantum scientists. He had also been a man Hank Pym once knew. Their friendship had soured over Elihas's reckless experiments, and Elihas had eventually been let go. He set up his own laboratory in secret. He ran an experiment he should not have run.

There was an accident.

In an instant, Elihas Starr and his wife were killed by the blast. And Ava, only a small child, was caught in a wave of raw, unstable quantum energy. She survived, but she did not survive whole. From that day forward, her molecules — the tiny pieces that make a person solid — were never quite still. They flickered in and out of phase with reality. That was why she could walk through walls. That was why she could become invisible. That was why no one could hit her.

It was also why every second of every day Ava was in pain. Imagine a tickle inside your bones that does not ever stop. Imagine a buzzing that wakes you up at night and follows you all day. Imagine knowing that, if it gets worse, you might one day flicker away completely.

Ava had not been alone, though.

After the accident, a kind, retired scientist had quietly taken her in. His name was Dr. Bill Foster. Bill had been Hank Pym's research partner long ago — one of the first size-changing heroes, a man who in his younger days had worn the codename GOLIATH and grown to a height of twenty-one feet, fighting alongside Hank as a giant. He and Hank had eventually argued and gone their separate ways, but Bill had kept a kind heart. He had taken Ava home. He had raised her. He had built her a healing chamber that could ease her pain for a few hours at a time.

But the pain always came back.

And Ava was running out of time.

That, Ava said quietly, was why she had been stealing Pym Particles. Not to hurt anyone. Not to sell them on the black market. To survive. She had heard about the new Quantum Tunnel. She had hoped that the same energy that could pull Janet van Dyne home might also stabilize Ava's molecules.

When Ava was finished talking, Hope sat down on a crate across from her. She did not pick up her stinger. She did not call security. She just sat there for a long minute, thinking.

Then she said, "Come with me."

That night, Hope did something her sharper, angrier, younger self might not have done. She brought Ava to her father. She brought Bill Foster, too — because Bill, of course, came with Ava, and Bill had not spoken to Hank Pym in over a decade. The reunion was stiff. The two old men did not know what to say to each other. But Hope kept the room calm. She laid out the situation. She asked her father, plainly, whether there might be a way to help.

The answer turned out to come from Janet van Dyne — Hope's mother, recently rescued from the Quantum Realm.

Janet had spent thirty years immersed in quantum energy. She had absorbed it. She understood it from the inside out. When she examined Ava, gently, with one of her glowing silvery hands, she nodded slowly and said, "I can help her. I can give her some of my energy. It will calm hers."

So they tried.

It was not a flashy moment. It happened in the laboratory, quietly, late at night. Hope ran the controls. Hank stood ready with the Pym Particle stabilizers. Bill Foster sat next to Ava, holding her hand. Janet placed her glowing fingertips on Ava's forehead.

The light that passed between them was soft, silver, almost shy. Like moonlight pouring from a pitcher. Ava breathed in. Ava breathed out. The flickering ripples across her arms slowed. The buzzing under her skin quieted. Her shoulders, which had been tight as ropes for years, finally relaxed.

When it was over, Ava sat up slowly. She lifted a hand and looked at it. She turned it over. She breathed in again, carefully, as if testing whether the air still hurt.

It didn't.

For the first time in many years, Ava Starr was at peace inside her own body.

She did not become Hope's best friend that night. Too much had happened. They had hurt each other. Ava had stolen a great deal. They needed time. But Ava was no longer an enemy. She left with Bill Foster, both of them quieter than they had come in, both of them carrying the careful hope of people who have been given a second chance.

Bill, on his way out, paused at the door and looked back at Hank. The two old scientists held each other's eyes for a long moment. Bill nodded, just once. Hank nodded back. After a decade of silence, that was a beginning.

When Hope finally went up to bed that night — long after midnight, the laboratory still humming softly behind her — she paused on the stairs. She thought about the first time she had drawn her stinger on Ghost. She thought about how easy it would have been to fire, to win, to call it a victory.

She thought about her mother's hands.

And she understood, very clearly, that her mother had been teaching her something her whole life without saying it. The strongest move a hero can make is sometimes not a punch or a stinger. Sometimes it is the quiet, harder move. Sometimes it is choosing to understand.

Hope went upstairs. She slept well that night.

In the morning, the Pym Tech alarms did not go off. Nobody phased through any walls. Ghost, for the first time in a long time, was simply Ava Starr, sleeping peacefully in her room at Bill Foster's house, with the buzz under her skin finally still.