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Ava’s fingers sank into the dough, not through it. Bill was still catching her beaming in wonder at things like that. She was still running her hands along walls as she passed, still running outside into thunderstorms to feel the rain on her face — still treasuring her newfound solidity. Her hands, now dusted with flour, did not phase.
“What?” Ava looked up from her half-formed medialuna.
Bill shook his head, giving a warm little smile of his own. “Nothing. Just making sure I roll mine correctly. Subpar pastries would defeat the point of this, wouldn’t they?” He nudged her shoulder, and her quiet joy at this ordinary, painless affection was palpable, and Bill thought to himself that maybe he had done right by Elihas, after all. “I’m learning from the expert.”
“Well, you stand on the shoulders of giants,” Ava said, faux-seriously, before laughing at Bill’s eyebrow-raise and demonstrating again.
The medialunas had been her idea, a childhood favourite from the Starr family’s years in Argentina. She’d reminisced to Bill about the lightly sweetened half-moon pastries before, but any of her time not spent gathering intel on a cure had been reserved for rest in the chamber — with her life on the line, baking was low on Ava’s list of priorities, and nostalgia only slightly higher. These days, she was well enough for both.
When she suggested it, Bill had been pacing the living room, holding his phone in one hand and pinching the bridge of his nose with the other as he attempted to reason with the most aggravating person to ever come back into his life.
“You’re collecting these to further stabilize Ava,” Bill said into the phone for the fifteenth time, teeth gritted. “And you know I appreciate that, Hank, but I need to be there. She and I both should be.” Typical of Hank to take control of a project himself, pushing everyone else out, claiming expertise. That ego hadn’t shrunk a bit. Bill soldiered on. “I know more about her condition than anyone, certainly more than you, and she’s —”
There was a noise from the kitchen — Ava dragging a barstool out of the way and heaving a massive bag of flour up onto the island — and Bill turned to her as Hank launched once again into his usual counterargument.
“Medialunas,” Ava said in explanation, resting her elbows on the counter and her chin on her palms. “While we wait for them.”
“While we —” Bill covered the phone speaker, muffling Hank’s insistence that, since his family was still avoiding the FBI, the presence of two other people implicated in the Pier 39 chaos would only put them all at further risk. “You’re siding with him?”
Ava’s headshake at that notion was immediate and vigorous, but then she paused. When she spoke, her voice was uncertain, and she drew swirls on the counter with her fingertips. “I can’t turn invisible anymore.” Since Janet’s intervention, she had only occasionally noticed startling flickers of phasing — the very reason they were working with Hank’s family — but nothing like the sustained invisibility her containment suit had once allowed her to maintain. “I wouldn’t want to draw attention.”
It was an unusual stance for Ava, Bill noted — quite unlike her to look away from the details of her treatment for even a second, let alone entrust any of it to a Pym. But, then, these were unusual (wonderful, beautiful) times. Weeks ago, he’d watched through tears as Ava threaded solid fingers through those of a newly-returned van Dyne, standing in Hank’s portable lab, stable. Maybe this uncharacteristic patience — this cautious attempt at trust — was just another miracle.
That, and she’d rarely ever ventured outside of their house without her suit, without invisibility or the option for it. It made all the sense in the world for her to be nervous about reintegrating into the world beyond these woods. Bill wasn’t going to push it.
He considered taking another stab at convincing Hank to at least reveal their planned location, so he could drive over alone to join them, but his eyes instead fell on the spread of ingredients arranged on the counter. Flour. Sugar. An orange, for zesting.
“Hey, Hank?”
“What?” came the voice snapping through the phone.
“Do you, by any chance, remember that pie you brought in for one of those holiday get-togethers back at P.E.G.A.S.U.S.? ‘85 or so? Lemon meringue, all tarnished with ashes and soot?”
Stony silence.
“Remember that later, when you come by with the particles and Ava and I’ve whipped up the fanciest, flakiest, most intricate, least burnt pastries you’ve ever tasted.”
Dial tone.
Bill finally set down the phone, heading over to the sink to scrub his hands. “I’ll join you. If there’s one thing the great Hank Pym can’t stand, it’s anyone being better than him at anything, and if there’s one thing he’s terrible at, it’s baking. And he is a terrible baker. Don’t know if I’ve mentioned.”
Ava perched herself cross-legged on a barstool, scanning the recipe. “You’ve mentioned.”
The kitchen was an odd one. Over the years, Bill’s attempts at a molecular disequilibrium cure had turned it into this strange fusion between a cooking area and a makeshift lab. Glass beakers sat on a drying rack beside plates printed with brown flowers. There was a lone centrifuge by the stovetop, next to Bill’s silent phone — no update from Hank yet. The counter it sat on was a glaring bright orange colour, now speckled with flour. An odd kitchen in an odder house, but home. It had become home to both of them.
Ava slid their pan of intricately rolled medialunas into the oven and fiddled with the buttons, setting a timer and turning on the oven light. She turned back to Bill, contemplating. “This recipe didn’t include it, but I remember… my family used to sprinkle these with icing sugar after.”
“There’s some in the pantry, I think.” Ava brightened at this, and Bill got up from his seat. “I’ll find it.”
He had taken six steps past the kitchen doorway when he heard a strangled, horrified gasp from behind him. Pure panic. And he whipped around and turned and ran, scrambling toward her, because —
“It’s happening, it’s happening, Bill, help, it’s happening.”
She wasn’t glitching, wasn’t flickering, not exactly, not like his models had predicted, but she was fading. Falling apart, terrified, ripped to shreds, pieces, molecule by molecule.
This wasn’t supposed to happen, she was stable, she was better —
“Nonononono — hey, look. Ava. No!”
— she was okay, she was safe —
He knocked a barstool on the way and it clattered to the floor and Bill almost, almost reached her. To do what? To throw his arms around her and hold her together against all the force of quantum physics? They’d planned for this. He’d sat her down and talked her through it, all the possibilities, all the predictions. How she would fade and what it would look like, what it would feel like, what would happen to her — but this wasn’t supposed to happen, not anymore, not since Bill had stood, glasses missing, watching Janet hold Ava’s face in her hands and fill his blurry vision with light. All of their planning was forgotten, irrelevant after that — she was safe. He would’ve hit her with a beam of quantum energy, pulled her into the chamber and cranked it up full force, done something. He had a plan, but that was before, and in the absence of a plan he toppled a barstool and lept toward her and tried to catch a ghost in his arms.
— she was gone.
Bill sank to the floor.
They had planned for this.
“It’s going to kill me?”
“I don’t know that for sure. I don’t know. But these readings suggest that it’s progressing at an exponential rate —”
“So I’ll die. I’ll fade away into nothing and I’ll die.”
“Not necessarily.” A pause, a sigh, another line etched into his blueprint of a giant octagonal box with lighthouse lenses for walls. “I don’t know how anyone could have survived this kind of molecular disruption in the first place, or how you’re alive today. The physical stress your body is facing — constant shifting, torn across reality in this manner — and yet you’re here. It’s remarkable. It shouldn’t be possible.”
“It shouldn’t.” The words hung bitterly in the air above the table between them.
“What I mean to say is this. The episodes of intangibility are becoming increasingly prevalent, and more difficult to control. As is the invisibility, as is the pain. With this continued pattern of decay, your body would likely reach a point of simultaneous invisibility and intangibility that is impossible to return from. Fading away, like you said.”
Her hands shimmered in and out of existence as she stared down at them, away from him, refusing to meet his gaze.
“It may kill you. But it also may not. Considering the improbability of your current state, we can't rule out your survival.”
“You just said I’d be gone.”
“In this case, you wouldn’t be. But you’d be unable to physically affect anything around you, and unable to be seen. I suspect unable to produce sound. And I don’t know if it would be possible for anyone but you to know with certainty that you’re still alive.”
Silence. She looked so small.
“I’ll do everything I can to stop that from happening. I’ll help you. I promise.”
Venom in her voice. “Promises didn’t mean anything when they made me kill for them and left me to die.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“But you promise?”
“I promise.”
Was she gone?
Bill’s glasses were askew. The barstool lay sideways on the floor where he sat. He was shaking. His hands were shaking. Clumsily, he turned that years-old hypothesis over in his head, that phasing out of existence might not necessarily mean death. Death or something far more terrible… he’d said that to Hank, just weeks ago. Something lurched in his stomach.
“Ava?”
She didn’t respond. Even if she was still there, she wouldn’t be able to. The ringing in his ears was blaring.
“Ava, I…”
Clutching the leg of the toppled barstool, Bill scanned the place where she just was, searching for something, anything — some glimmer of her, some faint ghostly afterimage. The last he had seen of her were her eyes, and they had been wide and grey and terrified.
Bill swallowed, hard, twice, pushing down his own rising panic and all his confusion and horror. If she was here, she was scared. He fixed his glasses.
“I’m right here. I’m gonna stay here with you, alright?”
Staring into the space beside the oven, he willed his voice to be steady for her.
“I can’t see you right now. I can’t hear you, if you’re speaking. I… I’m going to hold out my hand now, okay? Can you squeeze it for me?” It went against everything Bill knew about the progression of molecular disequilibrium. “Can you try?”
Nothing. Perhaps some imperceptible shift in the air.
“It’s okay if you can’t. I know it’s hard. I know it hurts.”
He didn’t know if she was in pain, but she probably was. His models hadn’t ever suggested it would stop.
Bill had once asked Ava to always tell him when she was hurting, and she had told him that that would be pointless; the pain was constant, chronic, unceasing. Instead, she agreed to tell him what she needed. Sometimes, that was solitude and the dark, and later the light of the chamber. Sometimes she couldn’t stand to face it alone. Bill gave what he could from the other side of the glass: soothing words muffled by the wall, or rambling stories of his Project G.O.L.I.A.T.H. days as a distraction. When she was a child clutching a little white bear — and, oh, the memory made his heart ache — he used to sing to her, softly.
He didn’t know how to speak to her now. What Ava needed. He didn’t know if she could move, if she had fallen through the floor, if she’d run from the room, if she had collapsed beside him in agony, if she was alive — but if she was (and she had to be), he couldn’t abandon her to silence.
“I’m gonna get you to breathe with me, sweetheart. Okay?” He never called her that. He wasn’t Elihas. It didn’t matter. “Can you breathe with me?”
Bill stayed there for a long time. He talked to her. As gentle and calming and stoic as he could possibly be, shakily seated on the floor with her, forcing air in and out of his own lungs as he reassured the space beside the oven. He kept telling Ava he was there. He told her to hold on.
At some point, an idea flashed into Bill’s mind. As the realization struck him, he stumbled to his feet, half in hope and half in horror that it had taken him this long to do this.
“I’m going to…”
His jacket was draped over a chair in the hallway, just outside the kitchen.
“I’m going to get your chamber for you, alright? I’m gonna set it up again. I’ll be right over there the whole time.” Bill glanced back at her, at the empty space. “I’ll set it up right nearby.”
The chamber was in one of the pockets, not the first one he frantically searched through, but the second. Shrunk with a Pym disk, small enough to hold between the thumb and index finger of a trembling hand. He’d picked it up from Hank a few days ago, but had never even bothered to take it out of his jacket pocket. They hadn’t needed it.
Ava did now. Bill rounded the corner, grabbing a leftover blue disc from a pile of equipment and blowing up the chamber to full size right outside the kitchen. The tangled tubing, still strewn across the living room, was long enough to reach, and as he plugged each into its outlet, he spoke to her, told her how many were left. “We’re almost there.” Those old canisters of gaseous nitrogen and other reagents were still full, thank God. “Almost there.”
The chamber stuttered to life, the door handle’s red indicator light flashing on, the green one waiting below it. Finally. He pulled the door open for her. “All ready now. Just gotta get you in here. I’ll wait for you.”
Bill realized, with fresh splintering spikes of panic, that he didn’t know where Ava was. Not that he ever fully had, not since she’d vanished in front of him, but she could have gone anywhere as he’d worked on the chamber. She could already be behind the glass, raging soundlessly at him, snarling for him to close the door and start the energy flow and quell the pain and fix her. She could be struggling in the kitchen still, trying futilely to drag herself toward the machine, not nearly ready for him to start it. She could be anywhere in between.
“I’m just gonna wait for you.”
Could she make it? He’d helped her walk to it sometimes, when the glitching was rough enough that she could barely find her footing. He’d tried, at least. More often than not, she would slip through Bill’s grasp like smoke, and they’d have to readjust and try again every few steps. But she’d always made it there eventually, and the chamber had always helped, at least a little. Much less, toward the end.
Fear of waiting any longer won out eventually. Ava was inside, she had to be, she was stubborn enough to get there. “Closing it up now.” He stabbed at the handle’s button, practically bruising his thumb from the force of it.
Red light off. Green light on. Hissing. Orange light pulsing from the glass, circular waves, flowing inward as Bill stepped back, as he steadied himself against the wooden wall of the kitchen doorway. The chamber, humming, empty.
Seemingly empty.
“Come on,” Bill whispered. “Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.”
Minutes were passing.
“Come on. Come back.”
No familiar British voice phasing to life. No outline of Ava in the orange.
“Come on!” And something snapped in him, and Bill rushed at the chamber. His hands met the glass, slipping over the ridges, gripping the metal frame, shaking it like that would do something, but it wouldn’t move, too solid, too still — fists slamming the machine, that subpar machine. Of course it didn’t work. Of course it wasn’t enough. It hadn’t even been enough to save her the first time, why on earth would it be now?
Bill leaned against it, an arm between his forehead and the glass panes. “Sorry,” he got out. He didn’t look. He wouldn’t have been able to see her anyway.
His phone. His phone. If anything could save Ava, if any hope was left, it would be those new healing particles. All remaining scraps of pride evaporated as he pushed himself off of the chamber and snatched the phone from the counter, scrolling through the contacts and picking his least-favourite one.
But it rang, and it rang, and it became clear that it wasn’t going to stop ringing. Fuck Hank. He dialed Janet.
Still nothing. Somewhere in the middle of it all (ringing phone, ringing ears, rings of glass, rings of light) he’d made it back to the chamber, and he held on to it gently this time, like by doing so he could hold the invisible, intangible girl inside. He told her who he was calling, each time. Hope next. She’d planned to join them, too, for the healing particle extraction, and she was smart and capable and surely would know to pick up.
No Hope. Scott Lang?
The man who’d answered a FaceTime call while tied to a chair was not answering.
Well, it wasn’t Lang’s daughter’s emergency this time. Hank? Hank again? Bill let it ring. He turned back to Ava and tried to believe his own words.
“Help’s on the way. Someone will pick up. We’re gonna get through this. The particles… Janet… we’ll find a way. Like we did.”
The phone buzzed.
“Hank.” And Bill unleashed a storm on him. And Hank said nothing, so Bill pulled the phone from his ear to shout directly into the microphone, to make him listen for once, and that’s when he saw it, rattling at the top of the screen, the source of the vibration.
Emergency alert. Shelter in place. Global devastation. One in two dead. Dust. Ash. Crumbling. Fading. Fading away into nothing.
In the kitchen, the oven timer went off. The medialunas were ready.
