Somewhere in Kandahar
Jane
A gunshot glances off the wall behind Jane’s helmet. Calling it a wall would be charitable; walls have structural integrity, they need to be able to stand on their own, and this one’s crumbled to shit from being used as target practice by the Taliban.
Jane reloads her rifle and waits until the gunfire stops, then she’s up to return fire, feeling the thump-thump of the recoil against her shoulder, spent shells flying. It’s pure, unthinking chaos, all muscle memory and gut instincts. No, she’s never been one to call things what they’re not. Animal. Enemy or friend, there’s something feral about it, the way fear makes them react all the same.
In hindsight, maybe that’s what takes her so long to see it.
“Foster!” her CO screams. “Contact left!”
Jane whirls, her padded knee screeching on the hard dirt, pumping lead into the battered car barreling towards them. But the thing’s off the rails, she sees teeth bared in a hooded face behind the wheel, and Jane has just enough time to push the soldier closest to her out of the way before the bomb goes off.
Light explodes across her vision, whiter than a supernova. She’s flat on her back, air hissing in and out between her cracked lips. Something’s wrong with her shoulder, and it burns, burns, burns. Blood and dust. A fire roars when she turns her head towards it, framed between her grasping fingers. They’re covered in black. She’s fading fast.
As darkness fuzzes the edges of her vision, she sees something small and white drift onto the back of her hand. It’s not ash.
It’s snow.
Somewhere in Vanaheim
Thor
“Thor!”
He swings and swings, moving like quicksilver, the hammer crackling with unspent lightning. It’s him, he’s it, the two of them move like they’re of the same mind and he loves this, loves the challenges he knows he can beat, the praise he’s sure to get.
Oh, it’s about helping the people too. Of course. The Nine Realms are his to protect.
But the glory is his.
He kicks off the ground and hurtles through the air behind Mjolnir, streaking across the battlefield like an arrow. He smashes through a beast rising on its haunches to attack Fandral’s back, tears another off Volstagg before Hogun needs to leave his battle, and narrowly avoids getting a sword point to the face for trying to help Sif.
“I’ve got this under control!” Sif yells, taking down a beast by its horns. “Help Loki!”
Thor nods and searches; as ever, Loki is a flash of green in his peripheral vision. “Brother!” he points towards a looming, dark mass through the trees, breathing fire that catches on the thatch-roofed houses they’re supposed to be guarding.
Thor grins and hefts his hammer again, bidding the sky to split and send down a bolt of pure energy. As his head falls back towards the heavens, something tiny and cold lands against his cheek. A momentary shock of sensation before it fades.
He’s already gone before it melts, whirling and slashing, pure, raw power. But the thought flitted across his mind, quick as it was to fade.
A snowflake.
New Mexico
Jane
Jane dreams of stars. Sometimes they’re only a dusting of pale light against the indigo dark. Other times, it’s the colorful chaos of a nebula, and she’s drifting through the interstellar bloom of dust, trailing her fingertips through the gases that glow and burn. There’s a quiet to them, for all the burning and exploding that stars are — volatile masses of igniting elements — they feel like an eternity. As if they’ve been there for centuries, and will be long, long after they’re all gone. As long as Jane can remember, she’s loved space.
She’s a mass of contradictions like that.
She loves space, but her feet stay on the ground.
She’s smaller than most people, but has more temper and grit than some people have at six-four.
She wants to discover, but she also wants to serve.
Her dad’s like that too. Colonel’s wings on his chest when she was younger, chalk on his elbow now from teaching at the university. Stern to students, smile lines at the corners of his eyes. Army officer with a scientist’s mind.
They’re contradictions together, thick as thieves, a twinkle of an inside joke. It makes her mom smile, watching her husband and daughter surrounded by an unfurling nebula of handwritten math equations.
Jane remembers lying flat on a picnic blanket, picking out constellations in the night sky with her dad.
She remembers winning her first national science competition with a theorem on the stability white dwarf stars.
She remembers getting a letter from NASA at sixteen, asking if she’d want to join them after she finished her degree at Culver University.
She remembers being nineteen and losing her dad, two months before graduation.
After that, the stars get a little further away, a little dimmer for Jane. Too much like dad, to be both scientist and soldier, and one promises to help her defend. To serve.
Flash. Bang. Fire. Pain. Dark.
Jane wakes with a heaving gasp that echoes in the small space, something too big to be contained in a little box. She’s sweating, beads of it rolling down from the tight knot she’s pulled her hair into, darkening the collar of her t-shirt. A dozen bright monitors reflect nothing except particle data, meteorological readings and infrared indexes back at her. She fell asleep in her lab again, on the floor in a blanket instead of the bench that gives everyone a stiff neck, even her. Jane breathes, cupping her shoulder, the one that healed up, the one with the scar, the one she can’t sling her singular messenger bag on without wincing. Her heartbeat slows the more she counts, thumb pressing into the dog-tags around her neck, hard enough to leave an imprint.
She dreams of stars, still. But she’s seen more now, and sometimes, it cuts in with nightmares. Jane crawls out of the cocoon of plaid fleece and pushes the stray hairs off her face, rubbing the drowsiness away. She’s not going to sleep again. Time to work.
This is Puente Antiguo, New Mexico, and tomorrow, she’s going to run a test to prove why she came out here for research. She’s going to prove that an Einstein-Rosen Bridge exists.
Unknown location
Thor
Unworthy.
Unworthy.
UNWORTHY.
The whispers build, steady and dogged until suddenly they’re a roar in his ears, a cacophony of voices, different all of the, as though his ancestors are screaming it, then it all sharpens into a sheer, high shriek and Thor tears himself free. It goes too easily, with none of the resistance he was expecting to meet, and with his eyes still blinded by the lights of the Bifrost he staggers to his feet, feeling dry, cool air against his skin.
Quiet, too quiet. And dark, when Asgard glows like the noon sun.
“Father?” he calls, to no response. “Father!”
Nothing. Thor’s vision begins to return - thousands of times he’s been through the Bifrost and it’s never taken him this long to adjust after the journey - and he whirls, willing Heimdall to see him. “Heimdall!” He roars. “Open the Bifrost!”
His foot catches on something, a stone, and he stumbles. Temper flares up in his chest and he turns his face up to the sky. “Heimdall!”
There’s nothing. Nothing, except -
“- look at these patterns, Erik, they’re like crop circles, but I’ve never seen them so concentric - look -”
It’s a small shape who spoke, Thor realizes. Long brown hair sweeps around in the wind, the woman is bent over the marks left by the Bifrost opening, barely sparing him a look. He must be somewhere far from home, then, if the locals are unfamiliar with the Prince of Asgard. “What realm is this?” he demands. Three of them in all, of varying shapes and sizes, though none of them bigger than him. “Vanaheim? Alfheim?”
“New Mexico?” There’s an odd sound, some high-pitched whine, and one of the beings, short and dark-haired, points a tiny black thing in her hands at his chest. She raises her eyebrows, as though she expects him to kowtow to its might.
Thor will not.
His hand opens and closes at his side, but Mjolnir does not come. He glances to his side for a second, forcing the thought as hard as he can stand, but he knows it to be different. There was always a thread, a sensation that a part of himself was somewhere else. Now he only feels his four limbs, his mass and muscle, right where he’s standing. Grounded.
Thor looks back at the sky, feeling rage and pain in his heart. What is this game? This humiliation? His father must think him weak, to send him to a realm of smaller beings and expect him to be afraid. He lowers his head, leveling his gaze with the tiny weapon.
“Do you think to frighten the son of Odin?” he asks, taking a step forward. He’ll crush that thing in one hand, like crushing a stone. “You, with something so puny -”
Before his foot can touch the ground again, something blasts out of the black box and latches itself into his chest. Thor’s limbs seize up of their own volition and his eyes roll up into the back of his head. The ground rushes up to meet him and he hears a different voice shout: “Darcy!”
A soft pressure lifts the back of his head, stopping it from hitting the ground again, and a shape appears above him. It’s not the woman who attacked him, he can tell from her speech. His skull bucks painlessly in her hand, so she must know something he doesn’t about healing. Thor can’t move, can barely see, but as the night around him begins to fade, he thinks, dimly, stupidly, that she glows like an evening star.
Jane
Jane’s bad shoulder hurts from helping Erik move the drunk stranger to the back of the van. She rolls it a few times, suppressing a wince, while the nurse at the counter deals with the hospital paperwork. She wants to tap her foot, pick at the ballpoint pen chained to the desk, maybe pull her hair out a little and just generally fidget.
“Yo, boss lady,” Darcy says, poking Jane’s elbow mid-twitch. “Not that I’ve had the experience, but it’s probably not a good idea to look like you’re on drugs in an ER at...” she checks her ironic (or maybe un-ironic) Spongebob wristwatch, “huh, ass o’clock in the morning.”
Weirdly, the nurse shoots them a look at the word ass, not drugs. Jane just smiles nervously and tugs at her hair, which feels dusty again and probably needs a wash in her faulty mobile home shower. “Sorry,” she says to nobody in particular. “I don’t like hospitals.”
Erik’s default frown deepens, and Jane cautiously avoids eye contact except for another quick, I’m-okay-really smile. He knows what an understatement she’s just made. Jane hates hospitals, so much so that she’s known back at Culver for being the kind of researcher who’d rather curl up under her desk with her papers, half-dead with the flu, with a homemade IV to self-hydrate and the whole shebang - rather than go to a hospital. Her dad died in the ICU, her mom a few years later after months of wasting away to hollow skin and rattling breath, Jane ended up in one that looked exactly like this after a crappy triage tent in the middle of the Afghan desert, and Donald - Doctor Blake, as she’s forcing herself to call him inside her head -
Wow, she really doesn’t want to get into Donald Blake right now.
“Why don’t you wait in the car?” Erik suggests, his hand already attempting to steer her out. “I can handle the paperwork.”
“I think, legally, that Jane has to be here,” Darcy says. She doesn’t know, and the good thing about her is that she never tries to pretend that she knows more than she does. “Y’know, since she hit Big n’ Blond with her car.”
“I grazed him,” Jane corrects, which probably doesn’t look so good with one hand fisted in her hair. “She’s the one who tasered him.”
“Had a good teacher,” Darcy says proudly, staring right at Jane and oh god she really hopes none of this gets back to the university, or she’ll never get another intern again.
Even a poli-sci major looking to fill her science requirement.
“We’re all good here,” the nurse tells them, business-like. “Patient’s name is Thor, no last name, no date of birth, no ID. We’ll hold onto your number in case the police have any questions, but other than that —”
“—I can get back to Gilmore Girls?” Darcy interrupts. “Sweet. Erik, can I drive?”
“No,” Erik says, but does it kindly, with a pat on Darcy’s back. “Izzy’s might still be open, if we want pancakes.”
“Um, we want. We really, really want.” Darcy falls into step with Jane beside her, who she’s only slightly taller than but who she lords it over to no end. “It’s our first bonding activity after committing a crime.”
“Very funny.”
Jane lets them through the doors first, but she does turn to look over her shoulder, at the empty waiting room, with all its ghosts, and wonders about the stranger with the startling blue eyes.
It’s an odd feeling, almost like her gut trying to tell her something.
Maybe he’s about to be another ghost.
“Jane!” Darcy calls her name again, and she hurries through the exit into the cold night.
It’s like the universe is giving her a sign. Yet another complication, coming her way.
“These were the only clothes I could find that fit you,” she says, while the big guy — Thor, so his name is actually Thor — pulls at the waistband, a little tight on his muscled hips, a strip of which is showing between the hem of the navy cotton t-shirt and the acid-washed jeans. Are hips supposed to have muscles?
Of course, there’s a sticker on the never-unfolded-t-shirt that reminds her who the clothes used to belong to. Never mind that they’re from a box of Donald’s old crap that Jane tossed into the U-Haul that brought her out here. She’d burn all of it, but there’s a stethoscope and a compass in there somewhere that a Goodwill could use. Once she lets go of it enough to actually, physically let go.
Jane’s shoulder aches a little at the thought. Donald’s still a doctor, because of all the issues that piled up in their relationship — urgh, even the word makes her cringe — his work and his patients were never part of it. All the more reason to avoid hospitals. She shrugs the thought off and reaches for the nearest pile of print-outs from last night’s data, and her journal. “So what can you tell me about last night?” she asks.
Thor
Thor learns quickly. He was never the best at his lessons — who could be, with a brother like Loki? — but he’s defeated countless champions and would-be challengers to Asgard because he’s accomplished at reading them. The way they carry themselves, the way they speak, and posture, and fight…all of it tells him a truth about whom he’s facing.
This woman, Jane, she said her name was, watches. She watches, with her hands folded around a plain white cup, ignoring her food, which is no mean feat, considering its tastiness. She looks as though she wishes to ask him a question, but she’s waiting to get the measure of him first. Whether he’s sane, perhaps.
Thor cocks his head at her, still chewing. Her curiosity is unabashed, and she doesn’t avert her gaze, not like the others on Asgard would when they realize they’ve been caught staring. Brown hair, brown eyes. Even so, she’s far from plain. There’s something hungry about her, something endlessly searching — traveling under her skin like the blood in her veins. It animates her, makes her glow.
They watch each other, yet neither of them speak.
Neither of them speak, yet Thor feels as though his questions have been answered. She may have hit him with her metal chariot — a car, they call it, or van — but she’s profusely apologized, clothed him, and brought him to her table for food.
That suffices. He can trust this mortal, long enough to retrieve what’s his, anyway. Cheered by the thought that Mjolnir will soon be in his hand, and his feet back on Asgardian land, Thor shovels the rest of the eggs into his mouth and reaches for more.
Jane
Sand gusts up around the old orange pickup truck. It took a while for Jane to adjust to normal driving, after getting back Stateside. To not swerve every time she sees a car coming towards her, or when her tired eyes play tricks on her after a long day and a pile of dead leaves on a road look like a hidden IED. It makes her jittery, like a lot of things do, which again, go towards explaining why she prefers to be in her lab. That’s why she usually tries not to drive alone, or in silence. Blasting Enya or The Beach Boys from the speakers helps, but somehow she can’t imagine doing that with Thor sitting in the front seat, even if all he’s doing is watching the reddish-brown landscape of sand, sand, and — oh, you guessed it — more sand, pass them by.
“You’re nervous, Jane Foster,” he says, which is uncanny for several reasons. A) no one calls anyone by their full names unless they’re in trouble, and B) he’s right, when she didn’t have him pegged for the intuitive type. The second one makes her feel a little bit bad, for judging. It’s not his fault he’s six-four and blond and broad, anymore than it is hers that she’s five-two and mousy brown.
Jane considers apologizing, but she’s been told that she doesn’t need to and shouldn’t. “Do you…” she begins, and almost gives up halfway, because what a weird question to ask a virtual stranger, “do you ever feel like you’re…I don’t know…too big for your skin? Like you’re on vibrate while the rest of the world is this big, quiet library, and you’re sort of sorry, but you’re also not, because it feels different, scary and just — more?”
Thor’s silent, and when she glances over to check that he’s still alive, she realizes it’s because he’s looking at her with a smile. It changes his face, softens the scowl she remembers from when she found him. He looks younger, somehow, even though he is young. It’s just that sometimes — most of the time — there’s something about him that makes him seem older. The way he talks, maybe, using words like mortals and grand gestures, and the accent, all Shakespeare as a real, speaking language, not a drama set up on stage.
“What?” she asks. “Something on my face?”
Thor shakes his head, and the breeze lazily tosses strands of bright gold across his cheek. “No, there’s nothing on your face,” he answers. “It’s only…what you said, sometimes I feel that way as well. I’ve never heard it explained like that before. But I think you must be right.”
“I’ve been told I’m good at explaining things,” Jane says.
“I can see why. You’re clever,” Thor pronounces, with relish. “Far more clever than anyone else in this realm.”
“Realm.” She rolls the word around in her mouth for a bit. “Realm?”
Thor laughs, deep and low in his belly, and Jane feels her cheeks grow warm as she smiles too. The tires screech and she snaps her attention back to the road as they zig-zag a little, the old wheels straining to keep from rolling down the slope.
Her heart thumps against the steel dog-tags, hidden underneath her clothes. Definitely, she thinks, feeling her skin tingle. Now is one of those times.
Thor
The rain continues to fall, the storm roaring overhead, cold and oblivious to Thor, sunken to his knees in the sucking, black mud, staring at the half-buried hammer that should be his but denies him, denies him and reminds him with stillness, dormancy, that he’s lost the right to wield it.
Unworthy.
He didn’t believe it when his father first sent him to Earth, but he believes it now.
The raindrops feel like lashes of a whip on his skin, his newly mortal skin. No matter how many human opponents he defeated in his quest to return to Mjolnir, to Asgard, it wasn’t enough.
Might alone does not make him worthy, and Thor stumbles. He has no skills in magical trickery to summon what he requires, or great centuries of learning like Loki, learning that might help him make his way in the world. No skills in farming like Hogun, who can make a fallow plain bloom with anything and everything the heart could desire. Fandral can sail, an explorer at heart even though he remains in Asgard as a warrior. Volstagg has his many children, a great master of games and hunting. Sif is a teacher at heart, whether with a book or a sword, with years of experience in healing.
Thor is…
Thor thought he was a king, and that would be enough.
Now he realizes that he’s nothing, and he’s only ever been nothing. Behind his high birth, his armor, and his palaces. Like his father said, a vain, greedy, cruel boy.
Thor lifts his head and howls at the sky. It splits down the middle with a blinding flash of lightning, but the storm goes on, drowning out his great bellow of rage and pain. He’s no longer the eye of the storm, the hand behind its making.
I am mortal.
Numbed, he lets the many hands force him roughly to his feet, his arms behind his back, and follows them without seeing. He could fight them, he could, and win. But to what end? To fight, there has to be a purpose. A goal. Thor doesn’t know where to go from here, as if he’s floating alone, in the vast, empty dark of space.
I am lost.
“After this, you go.” Erik’s voice doesn’t waver, and he’s turned in his seat to face Thor. The darkened, smoky space that they called a bar is quiet, except for music that seems to be coming from the ceiling instead of instruments. Thor’s momentarily disoriented by this, all the questions about glowing lights and things he’s never seen, like a child.
Erik mistakes his distraction for reluctance. “I knew Jane’s father and mother, and I promised them I’d look out for her,” he presses. “You need to move on. Whatever it is you’re looking for, I hope you find it. But it can’t be here. I’m sorry.”
The journal is snug against the inside of Thor’s vest, resting warm against his heartbeat. “And what does Jane think of this?” he asks, without spite. Jane wouldn’t want him anyway, for all the trouble he’s brought her, all the golden promises that turned to nothing.
Erik sighs, long-suffering and affectionate all at once. Like a father, Thor thinks to himself, but doesn’t speak it aloud. There’s a brand between his shoulders, silent and painful. He killed Odin with his disgrace, his betrayal, and his unkindness. Tore their family apart, all because he wanted to be king and a wiser father than he deserved knew better.
“She likes you, she’s not afraid of anything, and when she decides to do something, it’s done,” Erik says at last. “I worry for her, is all.”
“I understand,” Thor says quietly. “I won’t stay.”
Erik nods and beckons to the heavyset man behind the bar. “Two please,” he says, without specifying of what. Yet the owner nods and busies himself with a tap that gushes out amber mead and white fizz. “After one drink. You’ll need it to keep you warm.”
Thor smiles faintly, thinking of the giant flask Volstagg carries underneath his armor for much of the same reasons. The thought makes him grow melancholy again, and he only looks up when Erik slides a heavy glass tankard towards him, as big as his head and full to the brim with — he sniffs — beer.
Ah. At the very least, some things are familiar. Thor murmurs his thanks and starts to drink, big, heaving gulps as politeness demands, to demonstrate trust that your host has not poisoned the drinks. Which is why he’s surprised to see Erik doing the same, eyeing him beadily over the rim of his glass as if he’s keeping score of how much Thor has left.
A contest. For that, Thor is happy to oblige.
Jane
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Jane says, when she drives up to where Find My Phone pinpointed as Erik’s last location, from which he hasn’t moved in about an hour.
Fun fact: when old family friends go mysteriously to mysterious government agency bases set up in the middle of the frickin’ desert to free mysterious tall men who use words like Bifrost and realm and told you he could fly, then proceed not to call for the next few hours, you’re allowed to get worried.
“A bar?” Darcy says, her voice echoing over Jane’s crappy phone’s tinny speaker. “I wouldn’t have gone back to the dorm if I knew he was at a bar.”
Jane only called to make sure Darcy didn’t worry about Erik, not send practical and literal babies out onto the streets to make sure grown men can take care of themselves. She climbs out of the truck and slams the door, pinning the phone between shoulder and ear as she stows her keys in her puffer jacket. “And you’re staying in that dorm, you hear me?” she says in her best 9AM-I-will-fail-you-if-you’re-watching-porn voice she uses for freshman lectures. “Don’t make me call your RA.”
“Psh. He’s probably knee-deep in patchouli cigarettes by now,” Darcy scoffs. “Hey, if Erik and the Wannabe-God-Man got sloppy drunk together, make sure to take a picture, all right? I’m making an album. It’s called How Jane Foster Got L—”
“Bye, Darcy.” Jane hangs up, with love, and stalks up to the door of Puente Antiguo’s only bar, Ernie’s Beer & Pool Hall.
She loves the place for what it is, but mainly the pool. Ernie’s a sweetheart, too. Calls her Genius Lady whenever he sees her in town, saluting her like she’s the Secretary of State. By virtue of the town’s tiny population and proximity to the State Highway, it’s usually full of local residents, temp building crews, biker gangs just passing through, and whatever else crawls out of the woodwork to get wasted on a Wednesday night.
She tries to make herself look intimidating enough not to be messed with, feels stupid when it doesn’t happen, and pushes her hair back behind her ears before ducking into the humid warmth of the neon-sign entryway.
“Genius Lady!” Ernie bellows immediately, which almost makes her jump. “You here for your friends?”
Jane follows the direction of his pointing finger and sees —
“I stand corrected,” she says to nobody in particular, but mostly Darcy. Because Erik’s slumped over one of the tables near the back, surrounded by mostly empty beer mugs, facing Thor No-Last-Name, who looks completely and utterly fine for a guy that was probably beat up Guantanamo-style just hours before and then proceeded to go drinking with a low-tolerance Swede.
“Jane,” he says, and just that, that one, single, word, tells her that he’s pleased she’s here.
He also looks really good with his hair pushed behind his ears, neon lights reflected off his skin and in his ridiculous blue eyes, but Jane makes an executive decision not to deal with that right now.
“Erik, oh my god,” she says, half-climbing into the booth to check on him. “Are you okay?”
Erik hums a mix of what sounds like the national anthem — his, not hers — and the Culver fight song for football days. “Jane,” he stage-whispers, parting his bleary eyes. “Your friend’s the god of thunder.”
“Oo-kay.” Jane returns Thor’s open beam with a slightly more nervous smile. “Whaddaya say we get you into bed, huh?”
“For honor!” Erik bellows, lurching upright suddenly. Jane covers her mouth, desperately trying not to laugh, because the sweater vest, the poof in his hair —
“You want a piece of this?” Erik says to a group of — yup, no jokes — leather-wearing biker guys, and Jane doesn’t expect them to take the middle-aged, partially balding scientist seriously, except a couple of them stand up.
Thor stands too, his smile fading. “Jane,” he says a little quieter. “Friend Erik was a little careless in his words after a few drinks. I fear he may have offended the men at the next table.”
“I can see that.” Jane unzips her puffer jacket, just in case she needs to move her arms, and move them fast, and hastily scoots between a glaring Erik and the — three, six, eight — biker guys.
Snake tattoos, chains and brass studs on their clothes and everything.
Ernie’s polishing a glass, but he’s also keeping an eye on the situation, partly because he likes her and Erik, partly because he doesn’t have a janitor and most messes are his to clean up.
“Look, guys. There’s clearly been a misunderstanding. My friend doesn’t drink a lot, and he’s not used to being in America,” she says placatingly. “The Swedes arm-wrestle each other in bars all the time. I’ve tried to tell him that’s not how it works here, but you know how it is.”
There’s about eight different suspicious glares fixed on her, but when Jane edges a little closer, into the better light, a few of them focus in on her shirt. She looks down. After getting drenched in the downpour, she threw on the next thing she had on that was warm and dry. Her shirt says ARMY, and one of the guys with a head kerchief stands. There’s an identical tattoo on his bicep.
“You served?” he asks, in a very different voice.
Jane nods, and hooks a thumb into her dog-tags, half-pulling them out from under her collar. “Two tours. Kabul and Kandahar.”
“Helmand and Kapisa,” says the lead kerchief, suddenly standing at attention. “Three tours, then some shrapnel put me in a hospital bed.”
They shake hands, and another reaches over his shoulder to do the same. The sharp fray of tension’s gone now, in favor of something warmer and infinitely more friendly. She’s felt it before, when it happens. Sometimes it’s on a crowded subway train, sometimes on the corner of a busy street, or a quiet diner. But it’s always good, the feeling of meeting someone with shared life experience, which she doesn’t get a whole lot. “I was in Kabul too. Then Farah Province.”
“Paktika, two tours. Kandahar.”
“Zabul and Wardak.”
It goes on for a while, and Jane talks with them for a bit, refuses a couple of drinks, just chatting. They’re passing through on a road trip from Albuquerque to LA, saw the sign and thought they’d have a couple of drinks before heading back to the motel, off in the morning.
“Your friend over there, he a soldier too?” His name’s Brad, she thinks. He’s also the one who was closest to beating up Erik for whatever he drunk-shouted over at his friends.
Jane glances back at Thor, who looks almost curious, sitting by Erik with his hand patting the older man on the back every so often. Erik’s still talking, though it’s much, much quieter now. She smiles a little. “No, he’s not from around here, either,” she tells them. “I should probably get back. Make sure my friend gets some coffee in him.”
“Nah, once he’s that drunk, best to wait until he passes out. Makes him easier to haul back to wherever he’s supposed to be.” Terry, this time. He has a mottled burn scar at the back of his neck and a nice smile. “At least you got a friend to help you.”
“Yeah, I do.” Jane pats Brad on the shoulder. “Thanks for not kicking my friend’s ass. Stay safe out there.”
“You too.” They salute her just like Ernie does, and Jane walks back to their little corner table with a little — just a tiny, little — spring in her step. Situations like these make her feel as if she’s defused a bomb, saved the world. Like Jason Bourne, or James Bond. But with less nudity, corn syrup blood and synth music in the background.
“Hey,” Jane says gently to Erik, and mouths we’re okay at Ernie, who nods. “How’re you doing?”
Erik mumbles something that sounds like Swedish and turns his face into his hand. Thor shifts to the opposite side of the booth to give Jane more room to scoot in, and they face each other over a cluster of empty beer mugs.
“What?” she asks. They’re right under a purple neon sign of a dinosaur, so maybe the color looks weird on her. “Something on my face?”
Thor shakes his head. “I had no idea…I did not realize you were a soldier on this…in this country,” he corrects at the last minute, as though he’d meant to say realm again.
“Oh.” Jane plays with one of the lone beer bottles. “Yeah I was. So were they, actually. That’s mainly why they forgot about the fight. Y’know, since we’re all supposed to be on the same side.”
“I don’t find that often to be true,” Thor says pensively.
Jane inclines her head. “Yeah, it’s a real mess out there.”
Thor taps his collarbone, eyeing the dog-tags. “And you wear those as identification?” he asks. “So your comrades know who you are?”
Jane picks up the steel chain, half-debating whether she should hide it underneath her shirt again. Then again, it’s a shirt that says ARMY anyway. “Uh, no?” she says. “It’s not really a must. Some people wear them because it’s habit. It makes them feel safe. I actually have two — one’s my dad’s, and I keep it in a drawer. This one’s mine, and…I don’t know. I guess it reminds me who I am.”
“And who is that, Jane Foster?” Thor asks quietly.
Jane feels warm and comfortable like this, sitting in a cushioned booth in the poky little beer hall in town, underneath a fizzing, T-rex sign in neon purple. She likes this Thor, the one she saw in the truck on the way to the temporary SHIELD base, the one who smiled at her against the setting sun. The one who kissed the back of her hand in town, and asked for nothing.
“I’m an astrophysicist and a soldier,” she says with a light shrug. “I…love the stars, but I love having my feet on the ground. I like the quiet, but sometimes I feel like I could just fly right out of my skin, and…suffice it to say, I am a walking mess of contradictions, further evidenced by the fact that I’m telling all this to a complete stranger.”
“Am I a stranger?” Thor’s eyebrows go up, though his tone stays teasing, and fond. “After you hit me with your mode of transport? Twice?”
Jane laughs, and after a beat, Thor laughs too. Because you have to, at the reminder that you’ve hit-slash-been-hit by the same person, in two different cars, a van and a pickup truck, on two different days. “Must be fate,” she says, mock-solemnly. “The universe can’t lie about things like that.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Thor answers, and this time he lowers his gaze to the table.
Jane tips her head against the cracked leather booth, half-listening to the music playing from the speakers — some kind of Classics playlist, shuffling from song to song — and waiting for Thor to speak. She can tell he wants to. She just won’t push.
“I had it all wrong, I think.” Thor sounds contemplative, the register of his voice lower than before. “All my life, I thought I could be a warrior, living from fight to fight, and it would all be enough. But I…I made a mistake. My father…my father always told me that a wise man does not seek out war, but must always be ready for it. I never realized…”
Jane sits a little straighter, knotting her fingers in front of her while she listens. There’s so much pain in his voice, barely suppressed, and so raw. Something must have happened, since she last saw him.
“What you did, just then, with the men who wanted to fight Erik,” Thor continues, “I was about to leap to his defence. To fight. Which proves I haven’t learned my lesson, because what you did was wonderful. And smart. And kind.”
“Thor…”
He lifts his head with a tight, forced smile. “I am sorry, Jane Foster. I did not mean to burden you with this. I just…I wish I’d learned sooner.”
She wants to reach for his arm, but there’s so many glasses in the way that she’ll just break something and make it worse. Thor looks so truly miserable, too miserable for someone who’s learned his lesson about being selfish or impulsive or whatever else he’s been hinting at.
Then the song changes, and Jane listens for a few seconds before she realizes she has the best — or possibly the worst — idea that doesn’t involve brooding. “Hey,” she says, sliding out of the booth and jumping a little to get to the ground (she’s short, okay?). “Let’s dance.”
Thor blinks at her, and the beer hall. “Dance?” he says blankly. “I am sorry, Jane Foster, but I lack the knowledge of local customs to d—”
Jane takes his wrist before she can remember to feel shy and pulls Thor from the booth, though in all fairness, he’s too big to budge unless he decides to move too. Erik’s sound asleep between the empty beers, and they have a few more minutes.
“I’ll teach you,” she says, dragging him to the part of the floor where a few couples are swaying along to the music, and have been for the last half-hour.
They’re nowhere near familiar enough to slow-dance, but Jane holds his wrists and demonstrates the left-right sway of the hips, pulling his hands back and forth, feet completely stationary, that approximates dancing. “See?” she laughs. “Easy.”
Wouldn’t it be nice to live together /
in the kind of world where we belong?
Jane has a dim memory of her parents dancing in the living room after they thought she’d gone to bed, listening to records over glasses of wine. It’s nothing like this, watching Thor try to mimic her movements, all while she’s holding onto his arms. He laughs, self-consciousness falling away, learning as quickly as he smiles. Jane’s nowhere near drunk enough to justify this, but her skin’s still buzzing like it’s conducting a live current, since Donald, since anyone —
Jane spins herself, holding Thor’s hand over her head as she does it. Maybe the floor’s a little slippery, or she’s off-balance, because when Jane spins back, she collides with Thor, her side to his chest, and doesn’t pull away.
The song’s changed, to something slower and dreamy, even though she could’ve sworn it’s been no time at all. She knows this song; she’s heard it playing at home, Neil Young crooning.
Come a little bit closer /
Hear what I have to say
Jane puts her arms around Thor, as far as she can reach, and Thor mirrors the movement, a little uncertain at first, his clasped hands in the middle of her back. She sways a little from side to side, her face feeling like it’s on fire, heart pounding in time to the music. He’s so warm, the mothballs-and-old detergent smell from Donald’s old shirt gone after the storm and mud, replaced by something that smells fresh and clean like rain. Which doesn’t make sense, yet that’s the only way she can describe it. The way she fits into his arms feels nice, unfamiliar, but simple. She hasn’t felt like this in a while, and she doesn’t want to think about all the unanswered questions, about who he is, who she is, why he hasn’t heard of coffee, or cars, or dancing…for once, she lets the questions go, and dances to the music with someone.
A friend, at the very least.
As the song winds down, and Jane’s cheek is flush against Thor’s chest. No, that’s not quite right. He feels like more than a friend.
“You are fascinating, Jane Foster,” he says softly.
The way he sounds makes her think that maybe he feels it too.
Because I'm still in love with you /
I want to see you dance again /
Because I'm still in love with you /
On this harvest moon.
Thor
Thor wishes he’d given Jane the journal sooner. The little book had been so snug inside his jacket that he’d promptly forgotten, trying to drown his sorrows by out-drinking Erik Selvig. It was a fleeting possibility, quickly extinguished by the lack of strength in Midgardian brews. Thor’s competed with Volstagg at drinking from thousand-year-old oak caskets of mead, made with the juice of golden apples and gilt honey. Now, thinking of it makes him wistful. Even the sweet unknowingness of a drunken sleep is lost to him.
But Jane flips through the journal with fervor, scanning diagrams and closely-written symbols with a bright, hungry look on her face he recognizes from when they’d first met. “Oh my god,” she keeps saying. “Oh my god.”
Thor knows enough context to guess from her lack of a frown that it is a good exclamation. “I am sorry I could not get everything that I promised,” he says. “This was the only thing I could leave with unnoticed.”
“Are you kidding me? It’s great,” Jane answers vehemently. “I don’t have to start my research from scratch with this.”
Thor smiles uncertainly, hoping she means it. He remembers the towering piles of paper and bright metallic squares attached to glass screens that seem to be the Midgardian way of holding information. All of it was seized, and in comparison, a single book filled with handwritten notes seems to be a poor substitute. But not to Jane, because her dark eyes fly up to meet his again.
“Thank you.”
Thor feels the sincerity in it, and inclines his head. “I’m glad I could be of assistance.”
Jane looks around suddenly, casting about the little space at the back of her truck. The wheeled wagon where she lives is tied up a short distance away, but with Selvig sleeping in the bed and
Thor’s shoulders not quite fitting the small space, she’d prudently invited him out to the open air instead. It helps, not feeling as if the walls are pressing in on him, too much like the mirrored room where SHIELD had kept him waiting, where he — where Loki —
A sharp, human pang of sorrow clenches around his heart. Father.
“Aha,” Jane says suddenly, and before he’s fully broken from his thoughts she’s tossing a folded blanket that too thin to be fur at Thor’s chest. It bears a peculiar pattern, boxes of black and blue with lines running through them, the identical version to the one Jane has wrapped around her, only in red. “It gets cold out here, most nights.”
I don’t get cold, is on the tip of Thor’s tongue before he realizes he’s not speaking as the Asgardian anymore. He is of a mortal form now, and it is wise advice. “Thank you,” he says, wrapping it around himself.
Jane nods and leans back against the metal wall between the driver’s compartment and the flat bed of space where they sit, her head tilted back to the stars. The sky is a deeper black than Thor is used to, a sky perpetually tinged with indigo and lilac, midnight blue instead of the inky dark of this galaxy. These are different stars too, fewer and in different constellations than the ones he knew. He fails to see Bor, or the great, lumbering shape of Svaðilfari, or even Freya with her chariot of leaping cats.
It is a lonely thought. Not having even the stars he’d gazed on as a child, in this strange, new world.
“You chose this,” Thor says, not quite a question. The wagon home, thin walls and wheels instead of bricks and mortar. The laboratory. Her cars. All things and places that could be moved.
Transient, and impermanent.
“Moving around like a nomad, chasing the northern lights?” Jane volunteers, with an air of someone repeating a familiar refrain of criticism.
“I apologize, I did not mean to offend —”
“You apologize too much.” She pulls on his arm gently, and Thor settles his back against the truck too, which creaks the metal. “I don’t mind living in a caravan, eating cereal for breakfast and surviving on coffee. I have my work. That’s all I want.”
“You have the heart of a fearless adventurer,” Thor remarks. “You’d sleep in the winter snows and drink from the streams if you could.”
“Oh, I’m a little too tiny to sleep in the snow,” Jane says seriously. “It’d bury me.”
Thor chuckles and Jane half-turns, her hands crossed over the journal pressed to her chest. “I’m afraid too, you know,” she tells him. “These people — SHIELD — they don’t want my research to make it out into the world. They have the resources to stop me, again and again, and I just…I don’t want that to happen.”
“But you’re right, Jane. You’re so close.” Thor beckons for the journal and Jane gives it to him. In the dim light of the little yellow lantern, he flips it to the page where she’d sketched the nebula, a cluster of constellations she couldn’t name, because he knows them. “The Bifrost — the bridge that brought me here, to Midgard — my father used to explain it using the Yggdrasil, the world tree. Nine realms, all connected through its branches. Pathways of energy that could be joined, diverted and called with the right stimulation. Vanaheim, Alfheim, Niflheim, Jotunheim…”
He keeps sketching the branches, naming the realms, then the constellations in runic, and then in English, all while Jane cups her face in her hands and listens, her head bent close to his.
“…and Asgard,” he finishes. “Those that came before you called it magic, and you call it science, but I come from a place where they’re one and the same.”
Jane watches him, her eyes liquid dark and almost unreadable, even for him. She seems to be trying to decide something. Then —
“Tell me about the bridge,” she says. “The — the Bifrost? You know they exist, you’ve used it. But here on Earth, the problem is finding an access point. Other scientists studied gravitational changes and their effect on how we perceived light, but negative mass wormholes have never been found, and even if there were one, to put a human inside it —”
Thor nods, even though the words are unfamiliar to him at first. Others on Asgard, in its earliest days, puzzled over the same question. Ancient texts, written in the oldest runes and worn from millennia. He remembers how Loki used to hunger over the books, wanting to know about travel between worlds, and Thor too, the adventurer’s heart in him fluttering like the wings of a bird.
“The Bifrost gate on Asgard works because it doesn’t look for the energy — not in the way you think. The theory is, if sufficient energy were to be created, the gaps in space where the Bifrost lies could be harnessed and kept open, directed to where we wish. Now, the energy has to be…”
Jane listens, a hand tucked behind one ear, while Thor talks, late into the night. The unfamiliar stars wheel overhead, but for the first time since his banishment to Midgard, Thor feels almost at home.
Jane
“Now this part’s important,” Jane says, very solemnly. Dean’s Office-solemn. Firefly cancelled-solemn.
“You need to watch until the batter — that’s this white stuff — starts to bubble. But you don’t flip it until they pop and stay open. Like now, see?” She slots the spatula underneath the circle of cooking pancake batter (bubbling, so just right) and flips it over to brown on the other side, one of the few things she can make. To perfection, no less.
Yes, pancakes. Life or death with her, serious stuff. The Foster family — for whatever brief time it was fully intact — had Friday Night Breakfasts and Birthday Brunches, so Jane has fond memories of standing over a stove, learning how to make pancakes and French toast from her dad.
Thankfully, for all he doesn’t seem to get about life in general, Thor studies Jane’s technique from elbow to wrist and nods just as seriously as she does. He took a shower this morning, so his hair is slicked back and a little darker than usual while it dries. “These…pancakes look much like the hearty fare at Izzy’s, but I am sure they will taste far superior.”
“I don’t know about that,” Jane says, because she’s pretty sure that there’s a secret family recipe at Izzy’s diner, while her muscle memory for pancakes comes straight from the back of a Betty Crocker box. She mulls over buttermilk-to-cinnamon ratios while she tosses a perfect golden-brown pancake onto the stack of two, and is about to start on a fresh scoop of batter when she has a thought.
“You wanna try?” she asks, holding out the spatula.
Thor’s eyebrows lift, but he takes the spatula and Jane swaps places with him. Maybe they brush hips because someone underestimated the space between counter and them, and maybe that sends a little flutter in Jane’s stomach of long-dead butterflies because she remembers dancing at Ernie’s to The Beach Boys. When she chances a little look through her lashes, she realizes that Thor’s doing the exact same thing.
So he’s got a shy side, her inner approximation of Darcy drawls. This situation would have her leaning over the back of a chair and batting her eyelashes at Jane.
Who pretends she isn’t blushing, because it’s 9AM and there’s nothing to blush about. “You’ve got this,” she tells him confidently.
Two or three burned pancakes and fingertips later, she admits that he doesn’t, but that’s the fun of it anyway.
“Well, someone got laid last night,” are the first words out of Darcy’s mouth, past the Red Vine she’s gnawing at, followed by “owie, ow, Jane,” because Jane takes her by the arm and drags her over to the kitchen table.
Thor doesn’t seem to be too fussed, and turns around with a full plate of pancakes, his burnt ones proudly on top. “Jane was kind enough to offer me a place to sleep at the back of her truck, and I indeed managed to lay myself down flat, although my feet did stick out,” he says so earnestly that Jane has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from doing what she wants to do.
“That’s not what —”
Jane steps on Darcy’s foot, squarely. “Yeah, sorry about that,” she said, having stretched out herself on the front seat of her truck. It was between that and spooning with Thor before their first date, so.
“It was no trouble, Jane.” Thor’s smile could light up the whole New Mexico desert. “As I said, it was a kindness.”
Jane tries not to blush too conspicuously, because she can just feel Darcy’s eyes boring into the back of her skull and how hard she’s trying not to pump her glasses back and forth from her face like a Looney-Tunes character. “So where’s Erik?” she asks, because Darcy would’ve checked the mobile home before coming to the office.
Darcy waves her pack of Red Vines vaguely towards the side door, which opens more or less on cue to admit a zombified Erik Selvig, also known as Jane’s mentor and first PhD supervisor, bumbling sightlessly for a head-collision with the very solid refrigerator.
Jane starts to move, but Thor’s quicker.
“Careful, my friend,” he says, catching Erik with a hand on the chest and steering him gently towards a chair. “Your head must feel like it’s been trampled by Bilgesnipes.”
“Like what?” Erik rasps, and Jane hurriedly slides a glass of hangover cure. Well, for anyone on a research scientist’s budget.
It’s cold tap water with an expired vitamin-C tablet thrown in. Even so, Erik toasts her and downs it in big gulps, clearly wanting to feel a tenth of a percent more human.
They all wait until he finishes, and Jane motions for Thor to pull up a chair around the table. Erik sets his glass down with a thump and blinks bleary-eyed at his surroundings.
“So,” he grunts at Jane, “he’s staying, eh?”
Jane’s eyes flick over to Thor, meeting his because he’d done exactly the same. There’s a waver there, something tentative and all kinds of new, but also familiar and safe, like something she’s forgotten and has to learn all over again.
Jane smiles first, and reaches for her plate. “Yes, he is.”
Correction: Thor could light up the galaxy with that smile.
Jane likes to learn people’s names, really, she does. She always makes the effort with interns, baristas, even the temp that used to hand out office supplies at Culver. But when Thor’s friends show up and they all run for him at the same time, engulfing him in a wave of back-slapping and bearhugs and excited yells — so loud — you’d think he’d come back from the dead.
“Samurai Jack, Ginger Giant, Errol Flynn and…She-ra, I guess?” Darcy mutters out the corner of her mouth.
Before Jane can correct her (or sort of agree, really, who carries a rapier around these days?) Thor whirls around, the blue in his eyes incandescent and she could have sworn he’s about to introduce them.
Then the explosions start.
Jane’s army training kicks in and she drops, dragging Darcy down with her, hurriedly scanning the short horizon between her lab and the outskirts of Puente Antiguo for what caused it. She doesn’t carry a gun around with her these days, but judging by the four strangers who just walked into her lab, she’s already sensing that bullets won’t do very much against this kind of trouble.
“How many people are in this town?” Thor asks, his face grim. His friends wear eerily similar expressions, as if they know what’s coming. “We must get them away.”
“Thor,” says the dark-haired woman, with concern that’s as urgent as it is intense. “There’s something you must know. It’s about your brother.”
Jane may not have a lot of experience with this kind of thing, but she can tell that things aren’t going well. Ernie’s pickup truck is the last to reverse out of the town center, packed with kids and their parents. “You’re staying?”
She glances back, not because she’s thinking about leaving. But because fire plumes out from where the SHIELD blockade was set up.
“I have to go,” she says, and pushes off the hot metal. “Get them out of here!”
If Ernie yells after her, she’s running too fast to hear it. The blood rushes in her head, heartbeat thump-thump in her ears, nothing in mind except where she has to get, A to B, exposed to safe. She can’t see Thor, or his friends, or Darcy and Erik. She stumbles behind an overturned SUV, the shiny black metal caked in dirt, baked into clay. Her boot skids against something, a rifle. One of the agents must have dropped it.
A split second is all it takes her.
Jane Foster is a scientist, but she’s also a fighter.
She swings the gun up to her shoulder, checks that it’s still loaded, ducks out from cover and starts to run.
Thor
Smoke rises into the sky, black and thick as ink. The town is on fire, and it’s all that Thor can do to usher the people — Iz, Ernie — to safety, as if he has the power to guarantee such a thing. He doesn’t, not anymore, and it’s painfully obvious in the way even his friends are thrown aside by the Destroyer. This is a weapon meant to defend Asgard from its enemies, to protect the defenseless, and now it’s been turned on them all by his brother.
Loki.
Thor may have been a god once, but he fell into the very human trap of trusting blindly, believing that family could be more than blood — believing that his brother, for all their rivalries, their petty insecurities that blossom from centuries of growing up together — believing that it could be stronger than his desire to be King of the Nine Realms.
Even now, Thor can hear what Loki would say. A realization that he knows nothing of his brother, and yet he does, all too well. But now, Loki would whisper, green eyes glittering with malice —
Thor has always been a fool.
The shield, blackened, dented, slips through his fingers and lands in the dust.
“Get away from him!” Thor turns at the shout, and sparks appear against the Destroyer’s armor, bits of metal raining down. Jane has one of the human weapons in her arms, bracing it against her torso as it fires, tat-tat-tat. It won’t work, even with her sheer willpower.
The Destroyer’s armor draws back. Fire blooms.
“Jane, no!” Thor bellows, but Sif somehow moves faster, and she tackles Jane out of the way before fire blasts into where she was standing.
They roll behind a building, and break into a run. There’s a shape in the distance, at the doorway to the lab, waving her arms — Darcy, with Erik standing beside her. He’s supporting someone, rust-haired and portly. Volstagg, injured in the fray. Hogun and Fandral look exhausted too, but ready to fight nonetheless.
Thor’s heart sinks and the Destroyer advances.
No. Enough of this.
So Thor says, simply —
“Brother.”
The Destroyer grinds to a halt, and turns its fiery gaze onto him instead. Thor is aware of the dust in his throat, the sweat in his eyes, the ache in his limbs from running. It’s a reminder that he’s human, as human as Jane, Erik, Darcy. In all his time as a god, he’s never shied from stepping forward to do battle, but now he realizes how meaningless it was, his hollow sacrifice. There is no fear in a battle he cannot lose, immortal strength that will allow no mortal blow to be dealt. Jane Foster could’ve died, yet she stood her ground with her weapon until it was nearly too late. A soldier from this Earth, fascinated by the stars that shine in her eyes.
Thor is a coward compared to her strength, but it’s not too late to try.
This, stepping forward knowing that he is now, all too human, this is what it means to be brave.
Thor stops at the Destroyer’s feet, and looks up into its burning eyes. “Brother, I am truly sorry. I failed you, and I failed Asgard. But these are innocent people. So please, if a life must be taken…spare them, and take mine instead.”
The armor’s fire dies, and Thor’s chest loses some of its tension. Loki must be listening. “Thank you, br—”
There’s movement, too fast for his slower reflexes, and it crashes into him full-force. His head whips back, and he tastes blood. Air whistles past his ears, and he lands on his back, staring up at the sky. His vision is colored red, spotted with darkness. There’s a harsh rattle nearby, and it takes him a second to realize that it’s him. In his lungs.
A shadow spills in front of him, an ear pressed to his chest, a hand gentle on his neck. “Thor. Thor.” It’s Jane, and his aching lips draw back in a bloodstained smile.
“Shh,” she answers. “Erik! I need help! Hospital — we need the truck!”
“Jane.” He wishes she would stop for a moment, so he can tell her. “Jane.”
Red droplets mist the air between them, staining her cheek. “What?” she asks, eyes darting across his face. “What is it?”
It hurts, deep inside his chest. A pain he’s never felt before, radiating in black noxious waves up and down his body. But he forces himself to breathe, so that he can say it.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
Jane looks so afraid. That’s not what he wanted, he meant to tell her she’s safe. The Destroyer won’t come back. It did what it came to do, and he’s paid his price. His throat feels thick with something, making it harder and harder for him to breathe. “Jane…”
He remembers music. Dim, glowing lights above cracked leather seats. Brown hair falling around her shoulders. There’s a catch in his breath when she spins away from him, holding onto his hand, and her smile is the first thing he sees in the low, hazy lights.
“Thor…”
She’s crying, cupping his cheek, and it’s her warmth that he feels before he slips away into the dark, falling gently to sleep.
Jane
Lightning. That’s all Jane can say, to describe what she’s seeing. The metal giant gets swept up into the eye of the swirling tornado, lightning and fire crackling through the gray.
Then it’s over, and a blond stranger strides out of the falling winds, fierce and —
“Thor?” she says, when the shock fades from seeing the armor — the hammer — a cape —
Then the corners of his eyes soften just a little, and there he is. “Jane Foster,” he says solemnly. “My brother has betrayed Asgard, and he must be stopped.”
“Right.” Darcy’s the one who speaks, before Jane can. “Loki. ‘Cuz jokes on us, you really are Norse gods.”
“You challenged me to a drinking game.” Erik sounds faint, but he’s Swedish, so this stuff must matter way more than he’s let on so far.
But Jane’s the only one Thor has eyes for, and he holds out his hand. “How should you like to fly?” he asks.
She takes it. “Let’s go.”
Thor
“Jane, I must return to Asgard, but I give you my word — I will return for you.”
She reaches behind her neck and pulls the steel chain from underneath her hair. The medallions that all soldiers wear, and this one bears her name. Thor is about to refuse when she shakes her head, with her uncanny sense of knowing what he’d meant to say.
Thor dips his head slightly, and she guides it gently around his throat, and tucks it under his armor, out of sight. They come to rest near his heartbeat, still warm from her body.
“Keep them safe for me,” she says softly.
Thor nods, and kisses her hand. The right thing to do, as a well-taught warrior hero of Asgard.
Jane Foster knows nothing of these customs, and she’s far too determined for that. Their kiss sears like the Destroyer’s fire, the Bifrost’s hundreds and thousands of colors, the freedom of flying through the clouds, the sizzle of ozone before lightning strikes. It’s all of these things, and Thor breaks from the kiss short on breath, for the first in a long, long time.
“Deal?” she says.
“Deal,” he answers.
Thor
“Are you mad?” Loki screams. “If you destroy that bridge, you’ll never see her again!”
Thor feels the weight of Mjolnir in his hand, and the howl of the Bifrost’s power beneath him. Yes. The steel chain still hangs around his neck, her name against his skin.
Deal?
Deal.
But this — millions of lives on Jotunheim, innocent lives — are not worth keeping a selfish promise. Jane would understand, as a soldier, a protector. She would forgive him.
“Forgive me, Jane,” he says, hoping against reason, that somehow, she can sense it.
No more time to waste now, so Thor draws his arm back, summoning his lightning, and brings Mjolnir down on the Bifrost with a roar. The fallen star’s metal makes contact with a crackle and blinding light explodes across his vision, hurling him back with the force of a dying planet.
And it is over.
Jane
The storm clouds clear, the sun setting in a dozen shades of rose and gold. It’s been hours since the rainbow hurtled down from the sky and swept Thor and the other Asgardians into its light. Since then, nothing. Not even a drop of rain. Darcy kicks up a little puff of dust with the toe of her boot, and Erik glances over at Jane, who still has a hand pressed to where her dog tags should be.
But the storm clouds clear, the day is dying, and staring up at the sky won’t change what she already knows.
“He’s gone,” she says into the cooling air. Then, because she’s a scientist, she chides Darcy before she can step into the Bifrost pattern and ruin the perfectly etched lines. “We have got to grab the kits and document this.”
Erik gives her shoulder a squeeze. “All right, Jane.”
Thor
The sounds of the banquet recede into nothing as Thor makes his way silently through the city, with nothing to accompany him except the slow ebb of grief, knowing that Loki is gone, and more distantly, all the possibilities of different worlds. He’s left Odin standing on the balcony of his private chambers, thinking the same. His mother Frigga squeezed his hand in silent sympathy, having seen his tears and shared his grief, but Thor cannot do it again, not tonight at least.
“Your Highness,” Heimdall says without turning around.
The watcher of the Bifrost cuts a lonely silhouette against the great abyss of night sky and stars, Asgard’s waters rushing past what remains of the bridge and down into the depths below. Thor stood there for days, hoping in vain that Loki would return.
“Heimdall,” Thor greets him, coming to stand at his side.
The shards where the Bifrost split glitter dangerously at him, the iridescent spark dulled from the broken magic that their magicians have been set to repairing. It was the cost to save Jotunheim, the cost of their stupidity, their hubris. Their failings with Loki, their neglect of him that turned his sadness to bitter revenge.
“Not all things are lost to us,” Heimdall says, his gold eyes reflecting the open sky. “No matter how unreachable they seem at the start.”
At another time, Thor would wonder if he needs to practice hiding his emotions. But not now. Grief is right, especially for his brother.
“My father and mother hope so,” he replies solemnly. “As do I.”
Thor stares into the endless night, listening to the water.
“Earth is not lost to us?” he wonders aloud. “How can it be?”
“There is always hope,” Heimdall answers sagely.
“Can you see her?” The question comes before Thor can stop himself, thinking of the steel chain — crude and simple to Asgardian craftsmanship — that still rests around his throat, nestled safely next to his heartbeat.
Heimdall chuckles, the sound rumbling in his throat. “Yes.” His amber eyes search the yawning abyss. “She keeps busy with her work.”
Thor drops his head, nodding. Of course. Jane’s work must continue.
“And yet…” he can almost hear the teasing in Heimdall’s voice. “She searches for you.”
Thor feels warmth on his face for the first time in days, a poignant reminder of the light from a different world’s sun. He smiles.
Jane
It’s been months since the Bifrost shut, and there’ve been no reports of it opening since. Jane’s work area is a mess of charts, underlined reports and doodled-on maps. Her tea cools as she moves to stand near the wide windows of her lab, looking up at the night sky. She’s alone, playing music to drown out the silence.
A new song comes out on the radio and Jane feels a little swoop in her stomach when she remembers.
Come a little bit closer /
Hear what I have to say /
It’s the song from the bar, and Jane listens, her eyes closed, swaying from side to side, her lips against the edge of the mug. She clasps her tea in one hand as she dances alone, raising her fingertips to spin slowly under an invisible arm of a partner.
When we were strangers /
I watched you from afar /
When we were lovers /
I loved you with all my heart
The night stretches on, stars watchful and silent. Jane hums along until the song ends, and, with a lingering look at the sky, returns to work.
Because I'm still in love with you /
I want to see you dance again /
Because I'm still in love with you /
On this harvest moon
It's not just remembrance. It's oh, so much more than that.
It's a promise.
Jane's pen touches paper, ink blooming against the white. Endless possibilities and a mass of contradictions, where anything, absolutely anything, might happen.
She smiles.