Based on allofthefeelings-at-tumblr's Ghost Hunting AU. Implied Sam/Steve and Nick/Phil, and inspired by Robin McKinley's Sunshine. This is a ghosts/supernatural and magical world sort of AU-fusion.
Jane hated the autumn equinox.
In Fall the Academy opened the tunnels that connected its various buildings to make movement between them safer in the lengthening nights, and being an unpaired Seer, Jane was obligated to use them any time they were open, day and night. She hated them, though; they were dank, the runewards on them made her skin crawl, and all manner of gross vermin liked to nest in the less frequented branches. Which, of course, were the ones Jane walked the most. Thus, Jane hated the autumn equinox, because it was the start of half a year walking in dark underground passages to avoid apparitions.
She adjusted her backpack and muttered, "I'm not really unpaired," at the sign over the west campus tunnel entrance as she passed under it. Darcy snorted and double-checked her weapons (rune-inscribed dagger, mandated by the Council for all unpaired Champions, and an enspelled Taser which Tony Stark of the School of Engineering swore by).
"Sorry, the fact that I'm a solo Champion who hangs around you doesn't really count."
"It should."
"It should, but, it doesn't."
Jane sighed. It had seemed obvious that Darcy—who'd been assisting her and Erik on various experiments for the last two years—would be a good match for her. They got along well enough by Jane's estimation (which was, admittedly, minimal compared to what the Council expected), and Darcy had already protected Jane during a handful of incursions. Yet the tests all said the match was poor, that they'd be unlikely to form the link, to say nothing of binding a proper spirit into a scythe to seal them as a proper pair of wardens.
"Yeah," Jane said absently, and turned her mind to her work for the evening. It was a good distraction as they wove through the tunnel towards the southeast end of the Academy grounds, where the Physics building and its Astronomy facility sat. There was a lunar eclipse coming up, and incursions were always worse during an eclipse (always, no exceptions). Anything she wanted to record during it had to be ready to go before the eclipse started and she was locked up in the Vault along with every other unpaired Seer. All of that was sufficient to occupy her mind for the handful of damp, smelly minutes they were underground, and then they emerged into the failing afternoon once more.
The evening and night sped by. Between Erik's frantic concerns over their more recent findings (the new focusing elements had doubled their resolution but that in turn had just raised more questions) and the grant deadlines (it was easy to get funding since incursions were clearly linked to moon and sun orbits, but that just meant more paperwork) and the Academy's Councilors wanting her to give a presentation on the upcoming eclipse she could hardly catch her breath.
About an hour before dawn, Darcy said, "Hey. You know that coffee shop will be open in like, fifteen minutes."
Jane glanced up from the night's readings. "And?"
"And, if we leave right now, we can get the first batch of pastries before the lines form."
Jane bit her lip. She knew she was hungry, though getting herself to care could be a struggle. On the other hand, this was good data, and it would be a lot harder to work on back in the housing complex. The wireless signal there was awful, and her laptop wasn't powerful enough to crunch the numbers.
Darcy said, "Erik left like, an hour ago."
"Because he'd been here since noon."
"And, because Agatha made him."
Erik's Champion didn't accept excuses of any kind. She was old-school, though; from the era just after the first Event. She knew how to wrangle her Seer.
Darcy made a pouting face. Jane sighed. "Okay, okay," she said, and packed up. Darcy punched the air in victory.
The southeast campus tunnel entrance was across the central courtyard, between the teaching hospital and the botany building. The area was generally well-lit, more to put people's minds at ease than anything else. Ghosts didn't care much about man-made light, after all. The walkways lead through a simple desert garden, the kind that was easy to maintain year round here in the drought-ridden years since the first breaches had opened.
As they walked from pool of light to pool of light Darcy explained what had happened the last time she hadn't shown up at Barton's early—a story which involved a run-in with Councilor Romanov—and Jane half-listened. At first she was thinking about her presentation, but gradually a strange sensation began to steal over her, and she found herself thinking about something else entirely.
Jane wasn't used to feeling any kind of strong apparition this far inside the school grounds, not even in the dead of night on a new moon, so it caught her off guard. She froze in place and grabbed Darcy's arm. "Wait," she said.
Darcy and Jane had been through enough incursions that Darcy knew that tone of voice. She pulled out her Taser. "What."
Jane had to scan the courtyard twice before she could see it. Her heart froze in her chest.
"There."
It was a ghast. They were some of the most dangerous apparitions the Event had produced; violent, life-consuming, drawn to humanity, and immune to many things weaker ghosts shied from. It was said they'd been formed from those who'd suffered the most and perished in the worst ways during the Event, and they looked appropriate for that kind of origin. They had only the faintest suggestion of humanity in any of their features: maybe a blackened skull or a mouth of crooked teeth or skeletal hands somewhere in their roiling, liquid-like forms of red and black.
All of this was, of course, why any public facility was warded top to bottom against them. Lesser apparitions could sneak through gaps in the runes, find loopholes in spells, but not ghasts. Except this one, apparently.
It saw them at the same time Jane saw it. Or more likely Jane's notice drew its attention; such was the life of anyone born with the spirit sense. Regardless, it was on the approach. Jane grabbed Darcy's hand and drew the rune to share her sight hastily, muttering the cantrip as she went. If they were paired it wouldn't be necessary to share her sight this way—but they weren't. She could tell when the weak bond had formed because Darcy jerked in surprise.
"Is that a ghast?" Darcy said. "How the hell did it get in here?"
The closer it got the more locked up Jane felt. "I don't know but we—we have to—"
"Oh yeah." Darcy wasted no time; she took aim with the Taser and fired. The leads flared twice: first as the basic electricity went into the ghast, ostensibly disrupting its physical manifestation, and a second time as the spell woven into the device raced along in the electricity's wake. The ghast made a sharp hissing sound and pulled back—and howled.
It wasn't really a howl, per se; really it was more of a moan, and it set Jane's head to pounding. But it had the flavor of a howl, of a song. Of a call. It also made her breath come short.
"We have to get out of here," she said. "We have to get inside the greater ward."
"Ya think?" Darcy said, and yanked the leads free from the ghast. It staggered back and moaned again.
"No, I mean—it's calling for—something else—"
The high-pitched shriek that tore through Jane's mind had her on her knees with her hands over her ears.
"Shit," Darcy said, and pulled out her dagger. The wailer bolted into the open from the shadow of the Physics building, wriggling fast along the ground in a grotesque approximation of a large lizard. It's pale, mushroom-colored shape was more solid than Jane was used to seeing, especially this far inside the campus grounds. And it was making a beeline for them.
"Okay—this is bad," Darcy said. She pulled a summoning stones out of her belt pouch, dropped it on the ground, and smashed it with her boot heel.
The magic-borne flare of orange-white light shot into the sky. Almost immediately an alarm sounded somewhere else, then another, and then another.
The ghast had reconstituted itself and was closing on them. The wailer cried out, making Darcy stumble as she tried to drag Jane to her feet.
"H-how long until they—can get someone h-here—"
"Not long. I hope." Darcy was putting on a brave face, but Jane could hear the concern in her voice.
The ghast seemed to be winding up for an attack—and something tore through it, something with a counter magic powerful enough to make the ghast recoil and snarl. The something was a hammer, and the hammer was being swung by a man.
Jane didn't see much aside from his Champion's colors and long blond hair in a queue. She couldn't really focus at all between the wailer's cries and the school's alarms and the ghast's presence weighing on her mind like an elephant's foot.
"Jane, spell," Darcy said. The man had the ghast's full attention, but the wailer was ignoring him in favor of them. Jane dug in her pocket, where she always kept something strong written down for emergencies, and yanked it out—why was this wailer so solid, she'd never seen one this opaque before—and rattled off the words while she drew the symbols.
The wailer screamed and lunged, and the spell hit it like a net, allowing Darcy to knock it aside. Darcy brought her dagger down on the wailer, and it howled, which made Darcy wince but not leave off. The howl grew thinner and lower, then petered out, and the dagger fell through the dissipating creature and struck the brick walkway underneath it, striking a spark. Darcy climbed to her feet and moved to check Jane over.
"Hey, are you okay?"
"The ghast," Jane said, trying to find her footing. "We have to—help with the ghast."
"Okay, sure, but what've you got, because my Taser didn't do a thing and this dagger's done."
"Backpack. Th-third pouch, there's a v-vile of water and—and a few cant-trips—"
"Got it, got it." Darcy yanked them out, uncapped the bottle, and handed Jane the scraps of paper. She thought she could hear (or maybe feel?) others coming, they'd be here soon. But soon enough?
The ghast loomed, snarling and clawing at the man as he swung the rune-riddled hammer through it. Any time the head passed through the ghast's form a fiery trail would tear off a ragged piece, but it reconstituted itself a moment later.
"Throwing," Darcy said, and flung the holy water. Jane stammered over the spell, though it still caught. The water flared as it struck the ghast—and nothing happened.
This isn't just some random specter, it's a greater apparition, Jane thought. "We need more than just this," she said. "This won't be enough."
Jane heard a loud ringing sound, like a heavy bell, and saw the hammer go flying away from the man. It bounced off the ground and clanked away into the darkness surrounding them. The ghast snarled and rose up, roiling black and red and silver, and made to flow over the man towards Jane and Darcy.
Then he did something Jane had never seen before—he grabbed the ghast, barehanded, digging his hand into it. Jane swore she could feel the deadening chill of its effect on his arm as the gray soaked into his skin up to the elbow. She felt every hair on her body stand on end, and heard him say, "Duck."
Before Jane could comply, Darcy had shoved her to the ground and covered her. The force of the lightning strike stole the breath from Jane's body. It wasn't mundane lightning; there was magic behind it, directing it (in as much as any elemental force could really be directed) and shaping it and sending it into the ghast. As the entire courtyard blazed to life in stark white light and pitch black shadows, Jane thought it wasn't unlike Darcy's Taser, just on an astonishingly more powerful scale.
Then the shockwave of the lightning strike's accompanying explosion hit and she blacked out.
She woke gradually to the warm sense of being cocooned in layers of spells. She could smell a sweet, spicy tea nearby, and sensed both Darcy and Erik in the vicinity. She risked opening her eyes, and was unsurprised to find herself in the infirmary, next to a window showing watery daylight.
Darcy appeared in Jane's line of sight almost immediately. "She's awake," she said over her shoulder. Erik joined her in short order.
"How're you feeling? They said that was the most powerful apparition that's ever made it past the Border Gateway."
"It felt like it," Jane said, and sat up. Erik offered a mug of the tea, and Jane took in a deep breath of it. She could smell orange, cinnamon, and allspice, and underneath that a minor restorative charm. She had a sip. "Is everyone okay?"
"Yeah, he zapped it good enough that Councilor Fury took it out no problem." Darcy sat on the edge of Jane's bed and practically wriggled. "So. They ran tests. Do you want to know what they said?"
"For Daybreak's sake, let her rest, we don't need to go over it right this instant—"
"I've never seen a score that good," Darcy continued. "I mean, I know Steve and Sam had a good score, you can totally tell but it's rude to ask—"
Testily, Erik said, "So of course you looked at Jane's."
"Jane and I have been practically paired for like, two years, I'm allowed," Darcy said.
"Acting as her escort isn't the same as being paired."
"Seriously, an elementalist Champion. You struck gold."
Jane mostly ignored Darcy and Erik's argument, and instead focused on her mug of tea. At least no one had been seriously injured. Or worse. "Do they know how it got through the wards?"
"A better question is why," Erik said. "It didn't go to the Chapel or the Vault like the big ones usually do."
Darcy raised her chin. "I guess we were lucky a blond elementalist and I happened to be in the area."
Elementalist, Jane thought, and remembered the lightning. So he hadn't been using a prepared spell. He'd summoned it himself.
She set the mug of tea aside. "Where is he?"
Unpaired Champions and Seers were kept in the same infirmary wings, on the off chance good matches might form by happenstance rather than the government's mandated testing. Some still swore by the old methods of going through mock trials—that was how Councilor Fury had been paired with Councilor Coulson—but the tests were widely considered more accurate. Leadership wanted the strongest bonds possible fighting apparitions, and they wanted that strength to be quantified. Still, the desire to give fate a chance was strong enough that it produced things like the 'other halves' section of the teaching hospital, which Jane was grateful for as she made her way down the hall. It meant she didn't need to go very far, and since her head was still a little sore and her spirit sense tender that was only a good thing.
He was alone in the room. The hammer Jane had seen him using was resting on one of the two bedside tables. Now that there weren't any ghosts trying to kill them (or worse...) she could see it was wreathed in spells and had runes carved along the beveled edges and in a circle along the top. Next to it was some sort of large, lumpy rock.
The man himself was lying on the bed, eyes closed and breathing slow and even. At this proximity Jane couldn't help but feel a twinge of intimidation, because he was enormous. In fact aside from Steve Rogers, Jane wasn't sure she'd ever met someone so big (and word was Rogers owed his size to pre-Event magical experiments in super soldier serums). The Champion's shoulder-length, dark blond hair was out of its queue and badly in need of brushing, and his left arm was completely bandaged. The astringent smell of the healing salve which was as much herbal as it was magical was so strong it made Jane's eyes water. She blinked the tears away and tried to ignore the feeling of the magic making her throat tickle. He looked a little worn out, like he could use a few days of sleep, but otherwise, he seemed fine.
His eyes snapped open (bright blue) and he sat up as soon as she came within a few feet. He seemed to recognize her, and relaxed, sinking back against the pillows. For a few seconds he just looked at her. Finally, just when Jane thought she might have to be the first one to speak, he said, "You and your Champion are well?"
His voice was deep, and he had an odd accent Jane couldn't place. She found herself suddenly nervous for no particular reason, and took a breath to steady herself. "Yeah. Thanks, ah, to you."
He made a low sound and shut his eyes, grimacing. "I apologize for using elemental magic with both of you so close, but it seemed necessary. I've never seen so powerful an apparition within the Ward."
"Yeah, me neither. And definitely not a ghast." Jane bit her lip. "I mean, I'm not a Champion, so I have no idea how you judge that kind of thing. Darcy was pretty grateful for the help, though."
He nodded and opened his eyes. His expression seemed tight, almost resigned. "She defended you admirably."
"Well, I'm her boss. I mean, one of her bosses. If a ghast gets me she might not have a job anymore, and Champions don't get paid that well." Jane winced. "Which, I'm sure I don't have to tell you."
He frowned, and for a panicked moment she thought she'd insulted him, but he said, "You're her employer."
He was confused, she realized. She said, "Yeah."
Carefully, he said, "Then she is not your Champion."
"Oh, no." Jane shook her head, and coughed a self-deprecating laugh. "I'm not paired, not with Darcy. Or anyone, actually. She's just my Council-assigned escort. Can't have unpaired Seers wandering around." She gave him a wry smile. "Our test score's so bad it's laughable."
He stared at her, unmoving, for long enough that Jane felt the nervousness returning. She told herself it wasn't the sharp color of his eyes or the intensity of his expression, yet still she started to fidget. "Is...something wrong?"
He blinked and shook himself out. "No, I—no. Nothing is wrong." He seemed to be trying to collect himself. "How can it be you're unpaired? Usually..." He stopped himself, probably because it was amazingly rude to say 'Being unpaired by your age is kind of bizarre'. It helped that Jane was used to that sentiment, and anyways, it was probably his pain meds talking.
She shrugged. "Bad luck? Erik says my profile's kind of weird, so finding a match was always going to be hard." She gestured at him. "What about you? How come your Seer's not here yelling at you for grabbing a ghast with your bare hand, I mean," she couldn't help the half-hysterical laugh that the memory called up, "Really you should at least have some of those gloves—"
Her voice caught when she saw the look on his face, and she felt like she knew what he was going to say before he said it.
"I have no Seer. I am unbound."
"...oh," she said in a small, soft voice. She ran a hand down her face. "Right, they—the tests. They wouldn't have bothered if you, I mean, if we both weren't." Something occurred to Jane. "But, if you're not paired, how could you see it?"
He reached over to touch the handle of the hammer. "This was forged by my ancestors. It gives me a limited ability to see the apparitions if a Seer is nearby." He started to say something else, then stopped. After a moment, he said, "They've already tested?"
"Yeah."
He licked his lips. "What did it say?"
Jane rubbed the back of her neck. She didn't want to admit that Darcy had looked at them, because in the US looking at someone else's test results wasn't done. Who knew how taboo it was where he was from. "I don't know. I haven't looked yet. I wanted to..." He raised his eyebrows, and she looked out over the room. Damn it, she was blushing. "I wanted to make sure you were okay. First."
He smiled at her, bright and even a little mischievous, and she thought maybe this was a sign of how he usually was. She tried her best to glare, and he looked away, radiating faked innocence. His gaze moved to the rock, and he leaned over and picked it up. To Jane's untrained eye it seemed similar to sandstone, though unlike any sandstone she'd ever encountered this gleamed with wide, smoky, glass-like inclusions, and when he ran his fingers over it, none of the sand came free.
"What is it?" Jane asked. He offered it to her.
"A fulgurite. From the lightning, where it struck the sand in the courtyard. Councilor Fury gave it to me."
She gripped it, feeling the rough edges of the fused sand digging into her palm. She'd expected to sense some residual trace of the ghast, or possibly hear an echo of the wailer's voice, but there was only the clean, pure essence of raw earth transmuted into something new.
"He thought it might be good for using to make a scythe," the Champion said. Something in his expression suggested a touch of awkwardness as he broached the subject. "I'm far more skilled with Mjolnir, but there should still be a scythe."
Jane smiled and offered it back to him. When his fingers brushed against hers she let the touch linger rather than pull away.
"It might," she said. "But, ah, if we're going to be going through all of that, I should probably know your name."
Relief brightened his features. "Thor," he said.
Thor. "I'm Jane. Jane Foster."
"Jane," he repeated, softly. She thought maybe he hadn't intended to say it out loud. "I am pleased to meet you. Jane."
Jane decided it was the best autumn equinox she'd ever had.