Title: Something With Wings

Author: Elspethdixon

Rating: PG

Warnings: Contains references to self-harm

Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work.

A/N: Written for axolotl_lan.

Something With Wings

Hank has loved only two women in his entire life.

Maria kissed him, the first time, the two of them alone in her father's lab. Hank had been twenty-four, still working on his Phd, and girls – women – had been a thing more mysterious to him than any scientific puzzle. Organic chemistry and particle physics and entomology could all be learned. Maria's inexplicable decision that he was interesting, "cute," and that time spent making out with him in the chemistry lab was time well-spent couldn't be explained by any amount of logic.

He asked her to marry him the day after he defended his dissertation, two months after that first kiss.

She and her father were killed just weeks after the wedding. Hank told himself that he'd never love anyone again.

Hank had been twenty-five when Jan Van Dyne had blown into his new lab like a whirlwind, shopping bags dangling from her elbow and heels twice as high as any Maria had ever worn still not making her tall enough to look Hank in the eye.

She looked so much like Maria – the same dark eyes, the same glossy brown hair, the same elfin face – that it hurt just to look at her.
He avoided her for an entire month, making sure to stay away from the lab every time Van Dyne mentioned that his "little girl" would be coming. Apparently, that made him "mysterious" and "a challenge."

Sometimes, though, she dropped in without warning, and Hank kept his eyes determinedly on his work, offering monosyllabic answers when she asked silly questions. Maria had worked with her father in his labs since she'd been a teenager, understood exactly what Hank had been trying to do with mass and dimensional physics and human body chemistry.

She'd been quiet, soft-spoken, her Eastern European accent making her words sound more serious than they really were. Jan was never quiet. She was like a butterfly, fluttering all over the lab, touching things, wearing ridiculous clothing that completely violated every safety rule known to man – open-toed shoes, short skirts, long, dangly jewelry.

When the lab was attacked, and Van Dyne was kidnapped, flighty, butterfly Janet came and found Hank where he'd been kneeling in the wreckage, sorting through the shattered glassware on the floor in search of a test tube or flask that was still usable. Her strappy gold stiletto heels with the ankle straps crunched firmly over broken glass.

Hank stood automatically – from his spot on the floor, he'd been able to see right up her short skirt.

"You're going to help me," she said, the words not a question. She picked up his ant-man helmet and handed it to him. "I want powers, too. I'm going to find my father."

The physical alterations took much better on Jan than they ever had on Hank – wings were sex-linked, in some ants, but it was more than that. She'd been meant to fly.

Not a butterfly, though. He'd been wrong about that. She picked her own name, unintentionally matching his – the nearly five hundred wasp species in the vespidae family were members of the superfamily Vespoidea, closely related to formicidae – and more than lived up to it.

It was more her name than Ant-Man or Giant-Man or Goliath were ever his, and when he started calling himself Yellowjacket, it fit better than any of the others, not just because it was a name that summed up the nastier, less controlled parts of him, but because it was a deliberate match for Jan's. Ant-Man and Goliath weren't good enough for bright, wealthy, care-free Jan Van Dyne – there was a part of Ant-Man that would always be Maria's, and giving up the name banished her ghost alongside the twisted record of past failures - but Yellowjacket could match the Wasp.

It was the first deliberately romantic thing Hank ever did, so of course, it backfired horribly. Marrying Maria had ended in tragedy. Marrying Jan ended in disaster, and again, it was Hank's fault.

He tried lots of romantic things after that – weekends in Vegas, flowers, naming a newly discovered species of aphid found in the nests of a member of the Myrmicinae family after her – but none of them seemed to work properly. He didn't even tell her about the aphids, after Tigra laughed at him and told him that no girl on the planet would appreciate having her ex-husband name a bug after her.

"They have a symbiotic relationship with the ants who raise them," he'd tried to explain. "The colony can't survive without them."

Tigra had made a face, her whiskers pulling back in disgust. "That's really gross, and also way too needy. Send her a birthday card or something. Or you could try moving on."

Tony didn't think it was stupid, but he'd named a kind of computer circuit after Indries Moomji, and, later, a particular software algorithm after Rumiko Fujikawa, so he wasn't exactly an unbiased source (he claimed the Fujikawa algorithm was so-called because it had been developed in consort with programmers at Fujikawa Industries, and that naming it after the other company was a gesture in honor of the Stark-Fujikawa merger). Plus, he wallpapered his house with pictures of Steve Rogers, which was significantly more obvious than Hank's single picture of Jan that he kept on his nightstand. He had no pictures of Maria.

Then the sky fell, and Wanda Maximoff was possessed by Mephisto (or maybe Chthon, or maybe Immortus had brainwashed her – Hank had never been clear on the details, afterward) and then the skrull had come.

After that, there as no more need for romance, whether it worked or not.

He'd loved Maria for a year. He'd loved Jan for most of his adult life, with everything that was in him, even the crazy, broken parts. There would never be anyone else after her.

The last romantic gesture Hank made was another name change. He'd lost Maria's ghost when he'd stopped being Ant-Man. He was going to keep Jan's with him forever.

When she came back, appearing out of the same swirl of Chaos that restored Tony's lost memories and rebuilt the Vision out of nothing, Hank was afraid to move. Afraid it was another hallucination, like the ones he'd seen the last time he'd stopped taking his medication, when he'd wanted, needed to keep from sleeping, to keep working, fighting, and couldn't afford to be slowed down by chemicals that didn't always work to begin with.

Clint had belted him across the face when he'd realized what Hank had been doing. Had taken the broken glass from the shattered Erlenmeyer flask away and bandaged Hank's wrist up and held Hank still with arms that were much stronger than Hank had ever suspected while Hank screamed at him.

Clint had gotten Bobbi back. Clint had come back. He didn't understand, it wasn't fair, it should have been Jan who came back. Or Hank who died. Or Tony. Or Clint, again. Anyone but Jan.

No one had looked Hank in the eye for a week after that. Only Tony, who didn't remember why Hank ought to have hated him, who couldn't remember losing his own loved ones, who was broken inside in some way so profound that looking into his eyes was like speaking to a stranger.

Now, Tony was crying on the floor, a ball in Steve's arms, choking out incomprehensible sounds that might have been apologies, and the Vision was cradling Wanda's motionless form in his arms, red lighting from her fading powers still crackling over his body – she'd never be an omega mutant again, after today, Hank suspected, had probably burned half her powers out with what she'd done to repair the world – and Jan was standing there, still wearing the Wasp costume she'd died in, untouched and perfect. She was holding a slot machine token in one hand.

When she saw his costume, she laughed.

"What have you been doing?" she demanded. "And why are you wearing my clothes?"

Hank just stared, his mind blank. There was a reason, a hundred reasons, but just now, no words would come to him. "To remember you," he managed.
Jan shook her head, slowly. "That's either the most disturbing thing I've ever seen, or the most romantic."

Then she was hugging him, and Hank's knees gave way, and he buried his face in her neck and the smell of her hair.

"Next time," she said, while her hands dug into his back hard enough to hurt, "just name some species of bug after me. Something with wings."

~End~