Endgame Help

Of all the strange and unlikely returns in the long history of the Avengers — and there have been many — there is no return quite like Hope van Dyne's. She came back, after five years, exactly where she had been the moment she left. The fog was still rolling in. The same seagulls were still crying. And for one long second, she did not know the world had moved on without her.

To understand how she got home, you have to go back to the Snap.

A few weeks earlier — by Hope's count, only minutes earlier — a giant purple villain named Thanos had gathered all six Infinity Stones into a single gauntlet and snapped his fingers. The Stones obeyed. In a single instant, half of all life in the entire universe simply vanished. People turned to dust mid-sentence. Pilots disappeared from the cockpits of airplanes. Children turned to ash in their parents' arms. Half of everything. Half of everywhere.

Hope vanished.

So did Hank Pym. So did Janet van Dyne. The whole Pym family, which had only just been reunited after the Quantum Realm rescue, was gone in a heartbeat. Scott Lang, the only family member to survive, did not even know it had happened — because at the exact second of the Snap, Scott had been inside the Quantum Realm running a calibration test. The tunnel he was using had been operated, at the surface, by Hope and Janet and Hank. When the three of them turned to dust, the Quantum Tunnel shut down. Scott was sealed inside.

For Scott, time stretched strangely. Five hours felt like five hours. He had no clock. He had no idea anything was wrong.

On Earth, five years passed.

The world during those five years was a quieter, sadder place. Half of every classroom was empty. Half of every soccer team was missing. Half of every family was gone. Some heroes — Captain America, Black Widow, Tony Stark — tried to keep going. The rest scattered to grieve. Nobody knew how to fix what had happened, because nobody believed it could be fixed.

And then, in an abandoned warehouse in San Francisco, a small brown rat got hungry.

The rat sniffed its way across an old van. It hopped onto a panel of controls inside the van — a panel for the Quantum Tunnel. The rat stepped, with one curious paw, on exactly the right button.

The tunnel turned back on.

Scott Lang stumbled out, hair sticking up, eyes wide, a little dizzy from the strangeness of it all. He thought he had been gone for five hours. He walked outside and saw a world he did not recognize. He ran to a memorial wall covered in names of the missing. He saw his daughter's name on a list of the saved, but he saw so many other names on a list of the lost that he sat down on the curb and just stared.

Then he had an idea.

A wild idea. A Scott Lang idea. The kind of idea Hope might have called brilliant and reckless in the same breath.

If the Quantum Realm could keep him in stasis for five years, while only five hours passed on his side, then maybe — just maybe — the Quantum Realm could be used to travel back in time. Maybe the Avengers could go BACK to the moments when the Infinity Stones existed in the past. Maybe they could collect the Stones, bring them to the present, and undo the Snap.

It was a long shot. It was almost impossible.

But Tony Stark, who had been mostly retired and very quietly raising his little daughter, listened to Scott's pitch and put down his coffee. Then he picked up a pencil. Then he stayed up all night with the equations. Then he came back the next morning and told the Avengers it was actually, maybe, possibly going to work.

For weeks Tony and Bruce Banner — now a strange, gentle, professor-sized version of the Hulk, calm and kind — built a brand-new Quantum Tunnel large enough for the entire Avengers team. They called what came next the Time Heist. They scattered across the timeline. Cap went to a battle in New York. Tony and Scott went to the same place at a different angle. Thor and Rocket went to Asgard. Nebula and Rhodey went to Morag. Bruce went to a temple. Natasha and Clint went to a faraway planet to retrieve the Soul Stone.

They collected all six Infinity Stones.

They paid a terrible price for them — Natasha Romanoff fell for the Soul Stone, and Scott and Hope would mourn her later. But they got the Stones.

And then, in the workshop, Bruce Banner pulled on a borrowed Iron Man gauntlet specially fitted with the six Stones. Tony and the others stood back. Bruce closed his eyes. He prayed for it to work. He snapped his fingers.

Across the universe, the missing half of everything came back.

Hope van Dyne came back.

She came back standing exactly where she had been the moment she left. She was at the controls of her father's portable laboratory by a quiet pier in San Francisco. The fog was rolling in. The seagulls were still crying. Her dad was next to her, looking confused. Her mom was next to her, looking just as confused. They blinked at each other in the soft gray light. For one long second, none of them knew that anything had changed.

Then Hope looked at the laboratory monitors. The system clock said five years had passed.

Five years.

Hope's brain, the way Hope's brain always did, snapped into focus immediately. She turned to her parents.

"Suit up," she said. "Now."

She did not yet know exactly what had happened. But she knew the Pym Tech communicator had a blinking red emergency signal from the Avengers compound across the country, and she knew that signal was for a fight, and she knew the Pym family was needed.

In ninety seconds Hope was in her Wasp suit. In two minutes Janet was in hers. Hank shrank the laboratory back into a rolling suitcase, threw it into the van, and they drove. They did not understand yet that they had been gone for five years. They did not yet know that Scott had spent the last weeks rebuilding the Quantum Tunnel without them. They only knew that the Avengers were under attack.

By the time the Pym family arrived at the ruined Avengers compound, the sky was full of portals. Wakandan warriors poured through one. Wizards from Kamar-Taj poured through another. Asgardians, Guardians of the Galaxy, Ravagers, ant colonies, the Ravager fleet — everyone the Avengers had ever helped or fought beside was joining the fight. A younger, angrier Thanos had been pulled forward through time with his entire alien army, and he intended to undo Bruce's snap and finish what he had started.

Hope and Janet flew.

Side by side.

Mother and daughter.

The OLD Wasp and the NEW Wasp.

Both of them in their suits, both of them with wings humming, both of them weaving through falling debris and alien fighters and shrapnel and smoke. They flew in perfect formation, the way only two people who shared the same blood and the same training could. Janet covered Hope's right side. Hope covered Janet's left side. Their stingers zipped through the sky — Janet's bright bluish-white, Hope's bright yellow-gold — knocking enemies out of the air one after another after another.

Far below them, an enormous shape moved through the rubble. Scott Lang had grown to his full Giant-Man height. He smashed alien war machines into the ground with two enormous fists. BOOM. He kicked over an entire troop carrier. CRASH. He scooped up the Vault containing the new Infinity Gauntlet and sprinted across the battlefield with it. The whole Pym family — the suitcase laboratory in his pocket, his daughter Cassie safe at home, the Wasps in the sky above him — fought together for the first and only time.

And of course, in the end, the Avengers won.

Tony Stark snapped his own fingers at the very end, using the Stones one final time, and dusted Thanos's whole army. The cost was high. The world would mourn Tony for a long time. But the universe was whole again. Half of everything was back where it belonged.

Hope landed in the rubble. She found Scott — full-sized, exhausted, covered in dust. He saw her. He had been waiting for her for five years.

She just walked into his arms.

He hugged her so hard her wings folded. Janet, watching from a few steps away, smiled the smile of a mother who had her daughter back and her daughter's friend back and the whole world back, all at once.

It had been the longest five seconds of Hope's life. Five seconds for her. Five years for everyone else. But she had come home, and she had come home in time, and the Pym family had not just survived the Snap — they had helped end it.