Cruel Vengeance

Avengers Tower

November 2011

Jane hated worrying.

She couldn’t even quite bring herself to focus on any of her recent work, though Loki’s magery had resulted in some absolutely fascinating new theories, not even related to Einstein-Rosen bridges but to dark matter and Higgs-Boson particles and the fields they generated that mysteriously created the property known as “mass”–but while the lure of her science sat there, she couldn’t really dive into it. Not like normal.

“Something’s wrong with me,” she hissed, pacing around her lab.

Not two minutes later, Darcy walked in, hands full of takeout.

The smell of fried rice and sweet-and-sour chicken hit Jane’s nose. She realized it had been… a while… since she last ate. “Thank God,” she muttered.

Darcy grinned. “Nope, just me, though I’m told there’s a resemblance.”

“I don’t see it,” Jane deadpanned, snatching the larger bag and inhaling the smell. It had taken her years to get used to Darcy’s humor, but she’d made progress.

“I knew I shouldn’t have shaved off my beard.” Darcy boosted herself up onto the nearest countertop and pulled out a cardboard box and a pair of chopsticks.

“You got me a fork, right?” Jane asked.

“As if I could forget your absolute lack of chopstick skills,” Darcy said, laughing. “Remember the noodles?”

Jane winced. On a trip to Japan two years ago, she had humiliated herself by slopping noodles down her dress in the middle of a dinner. “I tried to block it out.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a fork in there,” Darcy said, deftly transferring a bite of rice, eggs, and mixed vegetables to her mouth.

Jane dug into the bag. Fried rice, General Tso’s, sweet-and-sour chicken, all her favorites. “I just don’t get why, out of all the utensils they could’ve invented to eat rice, two sticks won out.”

Darcy snorted. “Pfft. Japanese people would say the same thing about forks. And rice-growers in feudal Japan didn’t exactly have a lot of food on the plate, so maybe it was like…  utensils that only transport a little bit of food didn’t really matter?”

“You’re guessing,” Jane said, because she knew her friend, even though anthropology was not her area of expertise.

“Totally.” Darcy eyed an unopened can of Red Bull. “I wonder if I can chug that. Been a while since I tried to beat my record…”

“No, we are way past the days of timing your energy drink chugs for entertainment,” Jane said. “And you pumped up on chemical energy is not particularly pleasant for me.”

“Oh, but I love it,” Darcy said with a wicked grin.

Synapses fired. “That,” Jane said, pointing. “I really don’t get people, or I’d have seen this sooner.”

Darcy blinked. “What?”

“That right there is why Loki likes you,” Jane said.

“Okay, hold on, non sequitur? Where is this coming from?” Darcy made a vague circling motion with her chopsticks.

Jane wiped a piece of far-flung rice off her counter and studied it while she answered. “That face. God of Chaos, right? Lies and Mischief? You fit the chaos part, and the mischief.”

Darcy sucked in a breath, paused, and let it out again without speaking. Jane suspected she’d reflexively summoned some cutting comment that Jane would never think of, like she used to back in college, as a defense, and then held herself back.

“That’s ridiculous,” Darcy said at last. “As if he’d… you know, go for a Midgardian.”

“Thor did,” Jane pointed out, and it barely stung anymore. That he’d left. She didn’t want to date a man who caved to political pressure and walked away from her anyway.

“And it’s still a dumbass idea, which I’m pretty sure I told you back in Middle Of Nowhere, New Mexico,” Darcy retorted. “For one thing, he’s like. A thousand years old. Or something. And for another, in twenty years I’ll be middle aged and he’ll look the same. How is that a good plan?”

“Since when do you do long-term planning?” Jane asked. It was meant as a joke, but the second the words were out of her mouth she realized, and winced. I wish I were better with people.

“You know the last time I tried to get all serious and planny about a relationship,” Darcy said. “Marya. And some clusterfuck on the freeway handed me my heart back in pieces. I don’t really feel like trying again, especially with someone who’d never stick around.”

Jane paused. “Sorry.”

“Shut up and eat your food,” Darcy said, but without heat. She stabbed her chopsticks in Jane’s direction. “I wouldn’t talk about it unless I wanted to. I’m fun like that.” She paused. “Loki’s fun to talk to, okay, I’ll give him that. And hot. But no.”

“Okay,” Jane said. She wanted to talk… to help Darcy with Marya, maybe, or her grief, or something. She’d watched Darcy with the rest of the world for the years. Her friend taught a master class, but no matter how Jane studied, she couldn’t seem to pass the exam. Awkwardness turned to dismissal, inquiries sounded like she hadn’t cared enough to remember things about people in the first place, gestures became strange and foreign. Eventually, she’d stopped trying. Even with Darcy, who knew Jane better than anyone else, she was still at a loss.

Jane did solutions, not feelings, so she offered what she could. “I know a guy I could set you up with.”

“After–what was her name? Laurie? No, thanks,” Darcy said. “She stood me up, remember?”

“Family emergency,” Jane protested.

Darcy rolled her eyes. “Oldest cop-out in the book.”

Jane didn’t want to think Laurie, an acquaintance from college, would’ve done that, but she had to accede to Darcy’s superior awareness of others’ motivations. “Fine, Laurie didn’t work out. But this guy’s really nice.”

“You literally say that about everyone,” Darcy muttered. “Except like Coulson and Fury.”

“Coulson’s okay,” Jane said. “He took my research that one time, but he gave it back, and he was really easy to work with…”

She trailed off when Darcy started laughing and almost inhaled a noodle. “You just proved my point, Janey, you forgive too easily. But whatever. Nice guy, what’s his name?”

Jane opened her mouth to answer, but then her phone rang.

She frowned at it. It was the Stark Industries company line, and it almost never did anything except sit there. Anyone who knew her contacted her via email or one of the online forums used by astrophysicists and other related scientists used to talk to each other, and anyone else was usually handled by PR (Darcy) or JARVIS diverted them for her.

“You better take that,” Darcy said, hopping off the counter. “Gimme your trash, don’t want food smells gumming up your machines.” Jane habitually catalogued the finger-waggle Darcy used to follow up that statement as she handed over the bag of mostly eaten takeout.

Darcy piled their waste in her arms. “Fill me in on Nice Guy later,” she called over her shoulder, and then she was gone.

Jane grabbed the phone. “Dr. Foster, Stark Industries,” she said.

“Jane? It’s Helen. Helen Cho.”

“Helen!” Jane said. She couldn’t decide if she was more surprised or genuinely pleased to hear from her old… huh. She didn’t actually know what to call Helen. So Jane drew from her repository of Darcy-lessons and said, “How are you doing?”

“Your social skills have improved,” Helen said. She’d never been one to mince words, Jane remembered. “I’m all right. How is Stark Industries treating you?”

“Better than being on the road with grants from CERN,” Jane said truthfully. “Since they thought I was a nut case.”

“In all fairness, you are,” Helen said. “But you’re a nut case who’s usually right.”

Jane sighed. This was why she and Helen hadn’t gotten along. Jane never could tell jest from sincerity, and even if she made that basic distinction, jokes could be based in truth, or it could be a sincere thing to say but meant either kindly or maliciously or frankly or… No. too many variables. She chose to take this as a compliment. “Uh. Thanks.”

“Yes, it was a compliment,” Helen said. “We’re all nut cases in one way or another. That’s why we end up in fields like this. Which is why I called you.”

There we go. Darcy would’ve said from the beginning that Helen wanted something. “You need something?” Jane asked. “Grant money? An introduction?”

Helen paused. “Wow, you have gotten better. Look, you’re at Stark Industries. Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, employs you. The Avengers live in his tower. I’m working on something that could be very beneficial to them, and to a lot of other people as well, but my funding just got cut.”

Jane pinched the bridge of her nose. Her headache was coming back. Maybe she needed water. Or maybe the stress was finally catching up to her. Most of the people who she actually cared about were currently picking a fight with an international drug cartel. “You want me to get T- Stark to fund you.”

“Yes, and based on the fact that you almost just used his first name, I suspect you can,” Helen fired back.

Jane almost automatically said yes, because scientists did things like this for one another, but then she checked herself. Tony wasn’t just a businessman anymore. If people thought Stark Industries was still making weapons, or… well, she couldn’t actually think of anything else, but she knew Darcy could come up with sixty different reasons that Jane shouldn’t just introduce anyone to Tony. Screening process, she’d call it.

But she didn’t want to just stonewall Helen, either. “How about… you can find me on Formulae, right?” Jane asked, naming the main online forum that researchers used to find peer edits, partners, or advice.

“Yes.”

“Send me what you can,” Jane said. “I’ll see what I can do.” There. Darcy could help her deal with this now, with the political or societal ramifications. Jane hadn’t promised anything, and hadn’t asked anything unreasonable either.

Helen paused. “I appreciate the caution,” she said. “Deal. I won’t send over anything too sensitive–wouldn’t want someone stealing my work–” joke or warning? Jane thought wildly– “and you can check it out.”

“Thanks,” Jane said. “It’s… good to hear from you, Helen.”

“You as well,” Helen said.

The line went dead.

Jane sighed. Every time she thought she had things managed, someone threw a new complication into the equation and she had to balance all the variables again. She and Helen had a complicated history involving competition for multiple science awards in their undergrad years, a very public shouting match, two accusations of plagiarism (both against them by other peers), and four highly successful co-designed and co-led research projects. Not to mention, Jane had a sneaking suspicion that putting Helen and Darcy in the same room would be comparable to releasing two highly combustible gases near one another and hoping no one lit a match.

But in the end, what mattered was whether her research was valuable, whether it deserved funding. So Jane set her personal issues with Helen aside and resolved to simply let Darcy and Tony handle this when it arrived. She would work with Helen if that’s what it came to. In one way, at least, she and Helen were alike: they put their work before everything else.

I can’t sit here and do nothing, Jane realized.

She didn’t want to get into anything too complicated or delicate. She had three sets of data waiting to be crunched, but that kind of calculation she did half in her head, and if she was interrupted she sometimes had to start over. The last three attempts to generate Loki’s Higgs-Boson anomalies without him present had failed, and she couldn’t think of anything else to try until she got him back on the table, and there was no way she’d try to cause quantum tunneling without a hell of a lot more controlled variables than she had now.

Loki… Loki’s blood work.

Jane frowned. It was really Bruce’s area of expertise, but she knew she could probably at least understand the core concepts, and it would at least be a distraction.

“JARVIS, can you get me the blood work results for Thor and Loki?” Jane asked.

“One moment, Dr. Foster.” A faint hum came from the ceiling, where the network cables were laid, and then Jane’s main screen chimed. “The data transfer is complete.”

“Thanks,” Jane said, and kicked her swivel chair over to the screen.

The files were almost identical. She shoved away a pang when she saw Thor Odinson written across the top of one data sheet, focusing on the columns of numbers and analyses both mechanical and human-generated.

It was challenging and interesting, to immerse herself in something she didn’t totally understand, something from another field. Jane liked biology well enough, so she caught on quickly, and started going through everything. Bruce seemed to have concluded nothing particularly new from Loki’s results beyond corroboration of Thor’s, an addition to the database they were beginning to create of extraterrestrial–offrealm–life.

But Bruce was thinking in terms of genes and heredity, chemical balances, not…

Jane narrowed her eyes. Something was wrong here.

She was used to analyzing data scattered across graphs and noticing the correlations, the patterns, even if the causations and formulae evaded her. Genetics was no different; probabilities and possibilities and mathematical impossibilities came together to create a set of atoms and molecules arranged in just the right sequence to provide information on how to build a body. She had no reason to assume that Aesir genetics worked very differently, based on this and on her experiences with Thor, so it made sense that his data seemed to follow a cohesive pattern.

Loki’s, though. Something was off about it.

“JARVIS,” Jane said at last, sitting back. “Please run a correlation scan on the basic genetic information of Thor versus Loki.”

“We do not know enough, at present, to truly compare their genes,” JARVIS said. “Elements of Aesir blood remain beyond my ability to quantify. However, I can perform an analysis of the information we have managed to acquire.”

“Good,” Jane said, thinking. “Focus on… the math. Formulas, ratios, sequences, that sort of thing.” She frowned at the screen. “I can’t quite put my finger on what’s bugging me here, but you’ve got extra processing power.”

“It might take some days,” JARVIS warned. “There is a vast amount of data generated by blood work performed for both Thor and Loki.”

“That’s fine,” Jane said. “And, uh. Don’t tell Loki this is going on.” She hesitated. “Or Bruce.”

“My protocols direct me to inform Mr. Stark upon his return to the Tower,” JARVIS said. “Given that he agrees with this decision, I will do as you request.”

“Thanks,” Jane said, and went back to staring at the screen.

She could be wrong. She almost hoped she was, because if she was right… Actually, Jane didn’t know what it would mean if she was right. Nothing good, probably.

Not that it would matter if Bruce or Tony or even Loki was injured or killed in this fight…

“Shit,” Jane said to the empty lab. She was right back to worrying.

After another few minutes, Jane sat forward and swiped the blood work files out of the way, opened an Internet browser, and navigated to Formulae. If she couldn’t concentrate on her own work, at least she could use this time to catch up on what her peers were discussing.