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Nadia smiled at her favorite adoptive Super Hero dedushka and pulled down the lever. It took effort, but she avoided so much as glancing at the best button on the dashboard—the big red button that matched the car’s exterior paint job to a tee. The one that would send the car flying—off the pavement and straight into the skies.
That was only for occasions much more special than this one.
“We are going—”
Nadia shook her head. “Jarvis. I know where we’re going.”
“Ah,” he sighed. “Of course you do. And don’t forget to check your mirrors.”
Nadia carefully stepped through the door, her surprised face (now Jarvis Approved™) in place before she even heard the words.
“Surprise!”
Nadia was greeted by more balloons and more streamers. This time, it was just inside the front door of her own home in Cresskill, New Jersey, and the greeting party was a little smaller. Holding open the door, Jarvis pulled out a tiny cardboard party horn and blew into it. It let out a pathetic little celebratory psheeeeeeeee! that Nadia both loved and appreciated deeply.
Inside the living room, two of the most important women in Nadia’s life stood under a big banner spelling N-A-D-I-A-! (A real banner this time, not one that Ying had put together like she was trying to blackmail a police officer from the 1970s.) They wore bright metallic party hats and spun noisemakers that made crackling sounds as they rotated. It was ridiculous and wonderful and it was the best unsurprising surprise Nadia had ever had.
“Happy name day, Nadia!” The woman on the left stepped forward and held her arms out, the noisemakers still in hand. Barbara Morse—Bobbi, to her friends and to people she had only tried to kill on fewer than two occasions—wasn’t a hugger, but Nadia appreciated that Bobbi knew she was absolutely a hugger and thus attempted to meet her halfway. Most people knew Bobbi best as Mockingbird, the kick-butt S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and Super Hero who walked tall, used to be married to Hawkeye (Barton, not Bishop), and fought crime with two big sticks.
But not Nadia. No, Nadia knew of Bobbi long before she became friends with Bobbi, and not because of her stick prowess (though that was, inarguably, remarkable). Nadia knew of Dr. Barbara Morse, PhD, from her attempts to re-create the Super-Soldier Serum (you know, the one that turned Captain America from a string bean into a Dorito). She was one of the most advanced biologists at S.H.I.E.L.D., and Nadia had read all of Dr. Morse’s research from her lab in the Krasnaya Komnata.
Nadia loved Bobbi’s science, sure, but Nadia had always really loved the way Bobbi wrote about science. Most researchers weren’t gifted writers, but Bobbi had a special way of making her science jump off the page and dance, each theory and equation jetéing and bourréeing across its reader’s mind.
Okay, maybe Nadia was projecting. But it was how she felt.
For her part, Nadia knew that Bobbi had just been thrilled to meet someone who wanted to talk with her about extradimensional matter instead of her extra-dumpable ex-husband (whom she was absolutely smarter than, and yet was Bobbi on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s list? Exactly).
NADIA’S NEAT SCIENCE FACTS!!!
Mockingbird’s sticks are actually dual battle staves (a way better name than “sticks”). These batons are hollow rods made of a steel alloy and can be wielded separately or screwed together into a bo staff that can extend up to eight feet. Bobbi keeps her opponents perpetually off-balance, and uses the momentum of her strikes to trip opponents into the rods. That is how, if you ever get on Mockingbird’s bad side, she will use your own body weight against you to break your own legs. I would recommend very much not getting on Mockingbird’s bad side.
Nadia felt immeasurably lucky to have Bobbi in her life, and like so many of the good things in Nadia’s life these days, it was thanks to the woman standing next to the dining room table, hands clasped in front of her and a proud glint in her eyes. Janet Van Dyne stepped forward with a smile, placing a light kiss on the crown of Nadia’s head while Nadia was still engulfed in Bobbi’s epic biceps.* Janet was formidable both in reputation and in reality. When Nadia looked at her, she saw exactly the kind of woman she hoped to be when she was older. Poised; buff; lovely; terrifying. The perfect combination of feminine attributes, Nadia thought.
A fashion designer and very wealthy socialite, Janet first found her way to Hank Pym after her scientist father was killed. Hank, impressed with Janet’s intelligence, provided her with Pym Particles—and Ant-Man and the Wasp took flight to exact justice and thwart evil together for the first time.
Janet (who, in an extremely Hank move, looked very much like a younger version of Nadia’s mother, Maria), eventually married Hank. The two of them fought crime alongside Thor,* Iron Man, and the Hulk. It was Janet who first decided to call their epic team “the Avengers.” Janet would tell you that wasn’t a big deal, but Nadia felt like it was definitely a big deal.
When Nadia arrived in America, Janet was kind enough to take her under her biosynthetic wing. She’d opened Nadia’s eyes to everything from super-heroism to BB’s Tacos and from Lizzo to high fashion and “custom couture.”*
Above all, though, Janet had shown Nadia what it meant to be part of a family. To have people you could rely on and who relied on you in return. Which was why, when it came time to fill out the first of dozens of forms that would eventually confirm her citizenship, she didn’t sign as Nadia Pym or even Nadia Trovaya. Nadia had never had a last name, and there was only one that had ever really meant anything to her.
Van Dyne.
So she was Nadia Van Dyne, stepdaughter to the woman behind the Avengers, chooser of families, and unwavering champion for goodness and optimism in a world that often threatened to eradicate both. Nadia was the reason that G.I.R.L. existed, but Janet was the reason that it—and Nadia herself—could become Unstoppable.
Not everyone can say their stepmom invented the Avengers. But Nadia could. And that made her proud to be part of Janet’s family every single day.
“We know you probably already knew,” said Janet, smiling at Nadia, and shutting the door behind her and Jarvis. Nadia smiled at her stepmom, grateful that she didn’t have to keep up the ruse. Nadia and Janet had come by their alter egos in different ways, but they were very similar when it came right down to it.
Nadia trailed Janet into the dining room—and was actually surprised for the first time all day.
“Oh my—” she said, her hand coming to her mouth in genuine shock. “You did all this?”
Rows of boxes covered every square inch of the floor. The shelves had been emptied; the walls were mostly bare; even Nadia’s coffeemaker had been packed away.
“We wanted to get you something you wouldn’t get yourself for your name day,” Bobbi explained, pulling up a chair at the small dining room table in the center of the space. It was the only thing on the main floor that still looked lived-in—there were table settings for four set up on its surface, ready for dinner. “You’re slammed with stuff right now. We handled the house.”
Nadia felt like twenty pounds had been lifted off her shoulders in an instant. Jarvis had brought her to this house in Cresskill after she’d shown up on the Avengers’ doorstep in New York, fresh from the Red Room. It had been her father’s. She’d thought the house might give her a sense of family, of belonging, but it had never felt like home. Her family, her belonging, existed outside of these walls.
