Chapter 2
In her flat in London, Jane Foster stood with her mobile phone pressed to her ear. Like her four previous attempts, the call went to voicemail.
"Hi, Erik. It's me again. I'm getting those readings almost constantly now and you're still not here. I don't know where you are but if you aren't here soon, I'm going to go check them out before they disappear like the others. Call me when you get this."
She pressed the button to end the call and shoved the phone into her pocket. At the same time, her front door opened and Darcy walked in, holding the door open for a guy she didn't recognize whose arms were full of bags that Jane assumed contained breakfast if the tray of coffee cups in Darcy's hand was any indication.
"Good grief, don't you ever sleep?" she said by way of greeting.
"Good morning to you too," Jane replied. "And of course I slept. Why do you think I didn't?"
"You were wearing the exact same outfit yesterday." Darcy looked over her shoulder. "Intern, breakfast goes on the counter. Cutlery is in the drawer beside the sink."
Jane looked down at herself. Was she wearing the same clothes? She couldn't actually remember if she'd gotten them from the closet or just picked them up from the floor. She was trying hard enough to remember that it was a moment before Jane registered what else her friend said. "Intern?"
Darcy flopped into one of the kitchen chairs while the guy set about following her directions. "Yeah. I have an intern now."
"Since when do you need an intern?"
"Since SHIELD started footing the bill for your research and we actually have some payola."
Jane glanced over to where the intern was busy unpacking various baked goods. "So, you're paying him."
"Uh, no. Interns don't get paid," Darcy answered as if it should have been obvious.
"But you're my intern."
"And?"
"And I pay you."
Darcy held up a finger. "Nope. Technically SHIELD pays me."
"Yeah, because I told them to. It's not fair to... I'm sorry what's your name?"
The guy looked up. "Ian. Ian Boothby. It's an honour to be working with you, Doctor Foster."
"It's not fair to make Ian work for free when you're getting paid for the same job."
"Don't worry," Darcy said. "It's not like he's going hungry or anything. I feed him at least twice a day."
Jane crossed her arms with an exasperated sigh. "He's not a pet, Darcy. He's a human being with human expenses. I'm sure you've got bills to pay, right Ian?"
Ian ducked his head somewhat sheepishly. "Um, well, I live with my parents so not really, no."
Darcy cocked an eyebrow. "See?"
"Oh my god," Jane muttered under her breath. "Look, I'll talk to SHIELD about getting him on the payroll but if they say no, you've got to cut him loose so he can get a real job."
"Actually, if it's all right with you I'd like to stay on either way," Ian spoke up, stepping over to the table. "I'm a fan of your work, Doctor. I don't mind working for free."
Jane looked at Darcy who was wearing an obnoxiously smug grin. "Fine. Just make sure Darcy remembers to buy you lunch."
She crossed the room to the counter when Ian had laid out their breakfast options. Everything was either drenched in frosting or filled with chocolate. Clearly Darcy's idea of breakfast food was anything with enough sugar to give someone a cavity after three bites. Jane picked out a chocolate croissant and snatched the coffee cup that had her name scrawled on the side, mentally bracing herself for the probable stomach ache that would result from a breakfast of only sugar and caffeine. She was only one bite into her food when her scanner went off again.
"Whoa. What was that?" Darcy asked, craning her neck to look at the device.
"I don't know yet," Jane replied. She set her food down and picked up the scanner, careful not to touch the display with her sticky fingers. "I started picking up these readings early this morning. I've never seen anything like them outside of the Einstein-Rosen bridge."
"So it's like the rainbow bridge thingy?"
"They're similar but not exactly the same. The Einstein-Rosen bridge-"
"Why don't you just call it the bifrost? It's way shorter."
"-is an intergalactic pathway. It's focused and controlled. This is something else. It's like the laws of physics just randomly cease to exist in places. I was waiting for Erik to get here so we can go check it out, see if it has anything to do that alignment theory he's been going on about."
"Cool," Darcy replied, reaching across the table and tearing off a piece of Jane's croissant. "Road trip."
Jane let that pass without comment. The three of them ate breakfast while they waited for Erik. The new intern carried the dishes for all three of them to the sink when they finished and returned to the table where Darcy patted his head like a dog. Jane did a double take sent her a look which Darcy answered with a shrug. Her intern was clearly enjoying having her own gofer to boss around, which was fine as long as she didn't take it too far. Not that Darcy was a bully or anything, just that she didn't always think things through and the guy seemed so eager to please that he'd do just about anything they asked without question. Put those two things together and it could lead to all sorts of trouble.
All through their meal, Jane kept one eye on her scanner, which trilled often, and another eye on her phone, which remained dead silent. Once she finished eating, Jane started chewing on her fingernails, getting more and more antsy to get out there and see what was going on. After another phone call went unanswered, she decided to call it.
"All right. We can't wait any more."
"We ridin' out?" Darcy asked, edging forward in her seat.
"Yeah."
"Finally. Intern, come."
"His name is Ivan," Jane reminded her, scooping her scanner off the table.
"Um... it's, uh, Ian... actually," Ian corrected her in a typically English fashion. That is to say, apologetically.
"Right. That's what I said," Jane answered, eyes focused on the screen. "Come on. We need to head west."
The drive through London was chaotic as it tended to be with Darcy behind the wheel. Despite her insistence that she'd, "Totally mastered driving in London", Jane was sure she'd felt her heart stop at least twice on the trip.
"This is it. Turn here," Jane directed.
Darcy took the turn at a speed that would make a Formula One driver proud and followed it with a stop so sudden it had all of them testing the tensile strength of their seat belts. Darcy shut the engine off and hopped out but Jane was a bit slower to unfold her tense posture and start moving again.
"Come on, granny," Darcy called out from the other side of the car. "You're holding up the show."
"If you hadn't driven like Mad Max on speed, I wouldn't be moving like this."
"Oh, come on. We've got something to do, finally. This is exciting. Look, even the intern is excited."
Ian, who had been looking around with a gleeful smile turned to Darcy. "Ian," he corrected with a slight nod.
Darcy more or less ignored him. "You want the phasemeter?"
"No," Jane replied, bending forward to put her hands on her knees and take a few deep breaths.
Darcy turned to Ian and tossed him the keys. "Bring the phasemeter. It's the toaster looking thing."
"I know what the phasemeter is," he muttered, a little put out.
Jane shook her head and straightened up, which is when something caught her eye. The scanner led them to an empty industrial park, complete with abandoned shipping containers. The containers themselves weren't unusual, but the fact that they were stacked in a way they had no business being stacked was. There were two separate pairs of them, each standing on end. For each pair, a third container lay across the two upright ones, like some kind of tribute to Stonehenge. Jane didn't realize she was staring at the strange sight until the scanner went off again, drawing her focus back to why they were there to begin with. Looking at the screen, she oriented herself in the direction of the readings.
"Come on. This way."
The three of them approached one of the empty buildings. It had been a warehouse before its abandonment, with a peaked glass roof and a set of huge doors large enough to accommodate trucks. Once inside, the sound of their footsteps echoing off the walls disturbed a pair of pigeons, the beat of their wings an ominous soundtrack to their procession. The pigeons in turn disturbed someone else. From deeper in the building, the trio heard the sound of more footsteps.
"I am not getting stabbed in the name of science," Darcy declared. She raised her hands and called out, "It's okay, we're Americans."
"Is that supposed to make them like us?" Jane hissed.
Before Darcy could answer, a few curious faces peeked out from around the nearest corner. Two boys and a girl. One of the boys and the girl shared similar features and Jane wondered if they were siblings.
"Are you the police?" the girl asked.
"No," Jane told her in her best non-threatening voice. "We're scientists. Well, I am."
"Oh, thanks," Darcy murmured. Jane rolled her eyes.
One of the boys spoke up. "We didn't do anything. We just found it."
"Found what?" Jane asked, intrigued. "Can you show me?"
The three kids exchanged a wary look.
"I promise, you won't get in trouble."
After a bit of silent consultation with each other, the children nodded. They led Jane and the interns into another wing of the building. Jane's jaw fell open in amazement. In the middle of the large space was a cement truck. A cement truck that was floating, actually floating, like it was suspended from invisible wires. It was one thing to see indications of anomalies on her scanner but it was something else altogether seeing it with her own eyes. Her heart thudded in her chest, the thrill of discovery speeding up its tempo.
The other boy, who up until then had hung in the background, now took the lead. He went straight up to the hovering truck. Placing just three fingers under the front bumper, he lifted the truck even higher. With just a slight turn of his wrist, he set the heavy vehicle rotating like it was on an invisible spit.
"That doesn't seem right," Darcy blurted. "Cement doesn't float."
The girl grinned. "That's not even the best part," she said. "Come on."
The young trio led them to a stairwell that went up to the highest part of the warehouse, startling a few more pigeons as they climbed. Telling the adults to wait, one of the boys climbed a few landings higher before stopping. There, he leaned over the rail and dropped his half-full bottle of soda over the edge. What's so extraordinary about that, she wondered. Obviously gravity was working as normal in this part of the building and-
The bottle vanished, derailing Jane's thought midstream. "Wait, where'd it go?" she exclaimed.
The boy's sister pointed up to the broken skylight above them. Jane looked up just in time to catch sight of the bottle reappearing overhead. It fell down through the space and disappeared at the same spot as before. Three more times it fell, picking up speed each time as it would if it were falling from an extreme height. On the fourth trip, the other boy reached out and caught it.
"That's incredible," Jane breathed, her mind spinning with the possibilities. She looked around, and found an empty soda can to drop. Like the bottle, it too disappeared, but when she looked up to wait for it, it never reappeared. "What happened?"
The little girl shrugged. "Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't."
"I wanna try," Darcy said. "Jane, gimme your shoe."
Jane didn't answer because her scanner went crazy in her pocket. She fished it out and checked the display. Her heart sped up even more. Now it was showing almost the exact same readings as when the Einstein-Rosen bridge connected to Earth. This could be the breakthrough she needed to create a stable bridge without Asgard's help. If what she was seeing was accurate, there was an interdimensional portal right there in the warehouse. Her soda can might have landed on another planet!
Only, the readings on her device weren't coming from the stairwell. Perplexed, she started walking the direction they appeared to originate from.
"Don't touch anything," Jane called out over her shoulder without tearing her eyes from the display.
The scanner led her away and into another section of the building. She stopped once to check on the others before she left their sight. All five of them were taking turns dropping items down through the portal, the interns fitting right in with the kids. A frantic beeping drew her attention back to her device. The readings were off the scale, almost as if a bridge was about to open right on top of her. There was none of the telltale atmospheric disturbances of the Einstein-Rosen bridge, however. Something else was happening.
Jane walked the direction the scanner indicated. All of a sudden, she was almost yanked off her feet. Her rubber boots slid across the concrete, giving no resistance as something pulled her body forward. The unseen force dragged her down the corridor as though the direction of gravity had shifted ninety degrees. She stumbled through an open door at the end and into another dark room.
She turned around back the direction she came but she couldn't see the door at all anymore. She called out, "Darcy?"
The sound. Something about the sound of her voice was wrong.
Jane called Darcy's name again and listened as it echoed. It didn't sound like the brick walls of the warehouse. In fact, it sounded much too large to be inside any building.
She faced the direction the gravity distortion had pulled her and found her eyes were adjusting to the light. With each cautious step forward, she could make out more and more of her surroundings. It was definitely not the warehouse. She was in a cave. No, more like a cavern. The space was monstrous, so much so that when she reached the edge of the outcropping she stood on, she couldn't see the bottom below.
"Okay. So, not in Kansas anymore."
Looking back the direction she came again now that she was used to the dark, Jane saw no sign of the door or anything that looked like the warehouse.
"It was another portal," she said aloud to no one. And going by the readings she saw before she got sucked into it... "I'm on another planet."
For any other scientist, the idea should have been amazing. For a scientist who had devoted most of her career to the theory that interstellar travel by means of wormholes was possible, it should have been beyond amazing. Perhaps if Jane had made the journey deliberately, she might be able to appreciate the enormity of what just happened. She might have been awed by the fact the she could be the first human to set foot wherever she was. She'd have been brimming with excitement at the thought of the amazing discoveries she could make there and bringing that knowledge back home. It was exactly the kind of thing she dreamed about ever since childhood.
But reality wasn't what she dreamed. She had no idea where she was or how she got there. And the scanner, her only hope of finding the portal she passed through again, was gone. She flexed the fingers of her now empty hand as she gazed at her surroundings.
"Okay, Janie. Don't freak out," she told herself. "Work the problem."
She looked around for anything that might shed any light on her predicament and something did. Quite literally. Across from where she stood was a pillar, a massive square piece of stone jutting up from the ground. And something around the middle of it was glowing.
The pillar, which looked a man-made object, was totally out of place in a what seemed like an otherwise untouched natural environment. Jane went to take a closer look, noting that the stone of the pillar didn't match the cavern. But that wasn't the only odd thing. What she initially mistook for a band of red light encircling the pillar was actually a gap. The pillar was in two pieces, the separation between them just about Jane's eye level. She couldn't see anything holding the two sections apart but they were definitely separate and the source of the red glow was definitely inside the gap.
Her eyes narrowing, she placed her hands on the side of the pillar and leaned close, peering into the space. A red viscous liquid hovered inside, floating like it was in zero gravity. A prickling sensation traveled down her spine and Jane had the rather unnerving feeling that while she was watching the red thing, it was doing the same to her.
Without warning, it lunged at her like a viper. It wrapped around one of her hands, pinning her in place. She tried in vain to jerk free but couldn't. All she could do was watch in horror as it seeped into her skin until every last bit of it was inside her. Only then could she move. She yanked her hand away from the pillar, almost falling to the ground with the motion. The top half of the pillar slammed down onto the bottom half but Jane hardly noticed the crash as she frantically scrubbed at the skin of her right arm with her other hand. She could still see the red stuff glowing under her skin, could feel it crawling through her veins. A queasy feeling swept over her as she stumbled away from the pillar, desperate for a way out. The next second, everything went black.
~~~|~~~
It was a scant few days after his return that Thor began to grow restless. Before spending time on Midgard, he never noticed the slower pace of life in the Realm Eternal. Aesir lives were long, and therefore unhurried. By contrast, mortal lives passed in what felt like the blink of an eye, yet they filled each moment with more living than Thor ever thought possible. It was exhilarating being among them. The exploits of his fellow Avengers in particular were always an adventure, and so unlike what he was accustomed to. But they were not the only Midgardians dominating his thoughts of late.
Thor smiled as he pictured the petite scientist who captured his attention while he strolled through the halls of his home. Jane Foster was a jewel among her people. A mortal who was fascinated by the workings of Yggdrasil before she knew what it was, who understood the workings of the bifrost better than Thor ever would. Who rivalled even his brother's intelligence.
His smile fell at the thought of his brother. Though Thor promised their mother he would be more understanding of Loki's moods, he had yet to actually seek his brother out since their quarrel at the dining table. He rationalized his avoidance by telling himself it was that he was waiting until he could be sure he had patience enough to deal with him. That was part of it, true. The greater part, one that he didn't want to admit to, was that he was still cross with his brother and was choosing not to see or speak to him. In fairness, Loki had not sought him out either, so the feeling was at least partly mutual. Either that or Loki was using distance and silence to punish him for... well, Thor wasn't sure. Their interchange over dinner earned him a certain amount of spite but Loki's moods were mercurial well before then and Thor was stumped as to the cause. His brother was a mystery on the best days and there hadn't been many of those in recent times.
Not since before they recovered the Tesseract.
Thor's steps came to a halt. Now why had he never made that correlation before? It seemed as obvious as the sun in the sky now that he had. Things changed after the incident with the Tesseract. Loki himself mentioned something to that effect, hadn't he? He said some believed his tumble between the branches of Yggdrasil had scarred him in some way. Thor hadn't paid any attention to such murmurs, knowing Loki learned to traverse similar paths while still a youth. Surely the simple fact that this time the journey was initiated by the Tesseract should not be enough to prompt such a shift in his brother.
And yet...
Thor remembered the sight of his brother upon finding him inside the SHIELD facility. Loki hadn't looked well at all, was even injured, though he tried to deny it at first. Could it be that the effects of being pulled to Midgard by the Tesseract weren't as easy to disregard as Loki claimed? It took an obvious physical toll. Could it not have taken a mental toll as well?
The question burned in Thor's mind the rest of the day, aching to come out his mouth, but he didn't voice it. To question Loki about such a thing when his temper was this volatile was to risk losing a hand or some other vital body part. Perhaps that was exaggeration but nevertheless, whatever form Loki's retribution took, it was sure to be unpleasant. Thor could find his cape catching fire at random intervals or that Mjolnir's handle was as slippery as an eel. He might wake to find his hair and beard changed to some ridiculous colour or partake of a meal of fine delicacies only to find everything tasted like dirt. One could never be sure when the revenge would stop either. Loki's capacity for vindictiveness was greater than anyone else Thor knew.
He sighed in frustration. Speculating on Loki's behaviour accomplished nothing except giving him a headache. The only way to know what troubled his brother was to ask him directly, which might just lead to another kind of pain.
Thor looked out over the city, pondering what to do. In the distance, he could just see a spire on top of a golden dome. Before he was aware he was moving, he set off in that direction.
Inside the gleaming gold observatory stood Heimdall at his station gazing out at the stars.
"You're late," the terse guardian said before Thor could greet him.
"Late for what?"
"It's been three days since your return. Every other time, you have waited only one day before coming to inquire after a certain mortal scientist." Heimdall paused, turning his head slightly to regard Thor from the corner of his eye. "Or have you come seeking answers about your brother?"
Thor shook his head with a rueful smile. "Am I to have no secrets from you?"
"No," Heimdall replied dryly. "But nor does anyone else in Asgard. So take heart, my prince. You are not alone your plight."
Thor came to stand beside him, looking out through the opening through which Heimdall observed the cosmos. Each time he did, he wondered what the guardian saw through his unique eyes. To be able to see all nine realms with their trillions of souls was something Thor couldn't begin to comprehend.
"How fare the stars?"
"Still shining. The Convergence approaches." Heimdall twisted his sword in the pedestal and the observatory began to turn, widening the viewing space. "The universe hasn't seen this marvel since before my watch began. It's effects may be dangerous, but it is truly beautiful."
"I see nothing," Thor admitted. To him, the stars appeared no different than the hundreds of other times he stood in that very spot.
"You will, my prince. But perhaps that is not the beauty that you seek."
A jest from him was as rare an occurrence as the Convergence itself and it was a moment before Thor recognized the comment for what it was. He stared at first before a brief laugh bubbled up and out his mouth. Still smiling, he turned his eyes back to the stars, trying to find Midgard and its corner of the galaxy among them. Heimdall was right, of course. Though Thor's journey to the mortal realm was mere days ago, there hadn't been time to see her then. Jane's research had taken her to another continent and the Avengers needed his help elsewhere. The separation left his heart with an unfamiliar ache.
"How is she?"
"She's quite clever, your mortal," Heimdall said with hint of admiration. "She doesn't know it yet but she studies the Convergence as well. Even..." He trailed off and took a step closer to the observation window, his eyes narrowing.
"What is it?" Thor asked, hand instinctively finding Mjolnir's handle.
Heimdall's voice was grave. "I cannot see her."
~~~|~~~
Far beyond the sight of even the all-seeing Heimdall, Jane Foster floated on a crimson sea. Such a peculiar dream, she thought. While she slept on, others awoke. A derelict ship and its inhabitants came to life. For the first time in five thousand years, Malekith opened his eyes.
Their time had finally come. The Aether had awoken. At long last, darkness will fall.