If I don't write it, it looks like it'll never get written and world-hopping is a specialty of mine (see: Bleach fandom fanfic "Chasing Shadows" for the proof in the pudding). So I'm giving in and joining yet another fandom. My other specialty is unpopular canon pairings so it looks like I'm par for the course.
Jane Foster was not by nature a suspicious person, she generally believed the best of everyone and they generally proved her right more often than wrong, so she felt generally justified in her overall faith in humanity.
:However,: she thought with a frown as she ran over the numbers once more and they added up quickly and easily. Too easily. :I think Darce might have been on to something with this one.:
She'd gotten a sudden urgent request from the science division manning the observatory in Tromslo Norway (of all the obscure, frozen-over, backwoods corners of nowhere!) to come and help them parse the data with some upper atmospheric anomalies they had been getting recently. Granted, unusual energy spikes and possible inter-spatial relations had been something of a specialty of hers for the last several years, but these supposed anomalies they were supposed to be studying weren't very... anomalous. There were some slightly migratory magnetic fields and the luminescent plasma had shifted a little bit, but nothing terribly out of the norm for this area and time of year. The most anomalous thing she'd seen so far had been some very small spatial radiation from a weak fizzle of a solar flare, but that was easily caught and corrected for.
:Something's rotten in the state of Norway, and it isn't the fish,: Jane thought suspiciously to herself.
There was nothing here that could possibly account for a call in practically the middle of the night (interrupting a very promising line of research she might add) pulling her away from her lab and research with the promise of an enormously fat (suspiciously so) paycheck if she'd just nip on over half way across the world and add up a few things for them. The money was too good for a poor woman like her who lived on cereal and ramen to walk away from, but that didn't mean she didn't find her mysterious benefactors generosity to be fishy as hell. The sorts of businesses that ran research divisions the size of the operation she was assisting with were generally all about their profit margins. In her experience this preoccupation with profitability general meant that those businesses were usually incredibly tightfisted with their research funds. It seemed out of character for a team that seemed perfectly capable of solving their own atmospheric data incongruities to fly in a relatively obscure specialist like herself half way across the world at enormous expense to the company pocketbook and not a whole lot of impact to their bottom line.
:If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. There's got to be a catch somewhere. I don't like this,: Jane thought.
Added onto the inexplicable generosity was the slightly unsettling fact that everyone there seemed so solicitous of her. It felt like every time she turned around one of the team members was asking how she liked it there and they hoped she was comfortable and if there was anything at all she needed she was to let someone know and it would be taken care of right away. It was nice to be treated like an honored guest, and she knew she was pretty easy on the eyes (add to that the cachet of being foreign) but Jane wasn't so famous even in this relatively exclusive field of research that her presence would excite the five star treatment.
The ingratiating hospitality she could shrug off with the thought that perhaps the Norweigians were just that open-hearted and they wanted the new girl to feel welcome, what she could not shrug off however was the hotel room. It was a top of the line, five star resort-type hotel the likes of which she had once dreamed of honeymooning in back when she and Doctor Donald Blake had been tentatively discussing the future of their relationship. Her bedroom could have fit her whole lab in it and the bathroom alone was twice the size of her camper! She had five-star meals delivered directly to her suite with the implication that she was to put anything else she wanted directly on the tab and whoever was footing the bill for it would pick it up.
:All of this on top of the enormous consulting fee?: Jane thought to herself. :I don't buy it. It feels like I'm being manipulated somehow but I can't quite tell how or why or who's doing it, though I have my suspicions about that last one.:
Anyone else would probably be so overjoyed at a free vacation on top of more money for a weeks work than they saw from a grant in two years. Jane however had recently been a victim to a faceless organization that thought it was more than perfectly allowable behavior to march themselves into her laboratory and steal her lifeswork like the Grinches Who Stole Christmas of astrophysics! So seeing this much money being thrown around made her more than a little bit wary about how much power someone would have to back up all of that money and what precisely they wanted to bother with a relatively small fry like her over it.
:Those jackbooted SHEILD thugs have got to be involved in this all the way up to their shiny little sunglasses somehow,: she thought.
She would never have seen any of her research again, and would have had to start all over, if it hadn't been for Thor nipping her notebook away from their thieving clutches and then later bargaining with that sunglasses-wearing bastard Coulson to get all of her stuff back.
:I could have forgiven SHEILD if all they ever took was just my data, after all, I have all the end product in my head anyway,: Jane thought to herself.
But not a month after everything had gotten back to normal and she, Eric and Darcy were on to a very promising trail in their work indeed when that smug, pasty little bandit and his band of suited cohorts had come riding back into her life and stolen away her Eric! She needed him! And they'd just up and absconded with him like the jackbooted little thugs they were. They wouldn't let her talk to him, everything was top secret, he couldn't even hint at what he was working on, and the one and only time they'd let them meet he'd been pale and unshaven and sunken-eyed, like he hadn't been getting enough sleep.
:Those insouciant, pushy... I just hope they're not keeping him chained in a basement somewhere parsing out particle data until his ears bleed!:
He had tried to reassure her that he loved his new line of work and everything he was doing (that he couldn't talk to her about) was so fascinating that he lost track of himself but Jane didn't like it one little bit. Yes, Eric had always been just a little unkempt but it was sort of the nature of the beast, once hot on a lead, all the little details took a back seat to the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Still, even with interesting new research, Eric had always made time for her. He and her father had been colleagues and best friends, and Eric had always been like a much-loved favorite uncle to Jane, a surrogate father, a friend, confidante and mentor. Jane could not forgive that faceless, heartless SHIELD for stealing such an important part of her life away from her, not while she was still so troubled by missing another as well.
:Maybe I should have gone with them instead,: she thought with a twinge of guilt.
SHIELD had originally tried to offer her a position with them but there was no-way she was working for some faceless, nameless, mysterious entity that no-one held accountable and just felt like they could ride roughshod over anybody they wanted to just because there was no sunlight in their dark little corner of the government. She didn't trust any of them so she turned them down. Forcefully. And ignored them when they persisted. She wanted nothing to do with them. A month later they'd taken Eric on a tour of their facilities and he'd promptly dropped her, and all of the work they'd done together, like a hot rock.
:Stupid SHIELD and their fancy research facilities,: Jane grumbled resentfully in her thoughts.
Part of her couldn't blame Eric for going with them, but she missed him. There was another she missed just as much... which seemed odd when Jane thought about it logically. She had known Thor for barely a fraction of the time that she'd been under the guidance of Eric, it was strange that his absence in Jane's world would be as great as someone who had been there with her through thick and thin for her whole life.
It had been maybe three days, and she'd spent fully half of that time figuring that he was a certifiable nutcase, but even now she couldn't deny that she'd felt inexplicably drawn to him... even when she'd thought he was crazy.
:It doesn't hurt that he's really, really easy on the eyes I guess...: Jane thought with a small inward twinge.
But physical attractiveness alone didn't explain all of it. In everything aside of her research Jane was the sort of woman who tended to play things safe for the most part. She didn't even have any parking tickets (and after having spent her college years in new york that was a certifiable bragging right)! There had been something about him that had made her want to help him even if the things she ended up doing were more reckless than she usually attempted.
:I laughed more when he was around than I had in what felt like a very long time to me,: Jane recalled.
That was actually saying something. A very small part of Jane's tenacity when it had come to her research had been simply a desire to bury herself in her work to help her get over a good old fashioned heartbreak. The middle of the desert in Arizona was about as far away from New York as she could get a research grant for and still remain within her feild of study. She'd still had Donald's clothes for crying out loud... with the name-tags still on them! Even months and months after The Fallout Jane had still compared every man she'd come across unfavorably with her ex-boyfriend right up until Thor had come along.
:In a basic mental comparisson, one would think the Thor I'd met in the desert would have come out the sure loser. I mean, from all that anyone could tell he was a homeless man wandering the desert naked and either crazy or delusional or both.:
No job, no identity except one that no-one in thier right minds would buy for a second, no prospects, and nothing to call his own not even any clothes on his back.
She'd come to care for him in a very human sort of way, loved the kindness she found within him. True she had always found his strange naivete to be a bit odd, but also to be charming in its own way. There was certainly nothing childlike about him but his incongruent ignorance of basic things about her world had made her laugh (even as they unsettled her from time to time). She couldn't precisely pinpoint when her feelings for him had deepened; when he had gone from "that crazy guy out in the desert that she felt guilty for hitting with her car and therefore as responsible for as a pet owner who takes in a stray" to "the person I know I could trust with anything, who respects me for my strength and who is kind if not always observant, and chivalrous if not always entirely mannerly, and who always wants to protect the people around him."
Jane had always thought the whole macho lets go out and fight and let the weaker ones stay at home was an outdated relic of the past and belonged that way. Thor had managed to make her see the other side of the argument and he'd done it with actions rather than argue endlessly about it. For Thor it wasn't about prowess or glory or power or any of that, it was to sacrifice ones self by stepping into the path of danger in order that it should be averted and others too weak to defend against it would not be harmed.
She didn't love him because he was handsome or charming; lots of men were handsome and charming, she didn't even really love him because he was brave or honest, many others were brave and honest as well, and it certainly wasn't because he was some sort of demi-god-like being from across the stars. He had won her heart for good and all the moment he had ordered her to get those who could not defend themselves to safety and had stepped right in front of the destroyer, begging it to take his life and spare everyone else (of course she was horrified a brief second later when it did as he'd asked). She loved that he was handsome and charming and brave and honest but she most loved his human side; the man who had given her notebook back and apologized for not doing more, and who had been in pain and on the brink of death but been relieved that she was safe.
:And come hell or high water, I'm going to find a way to make it back to him,: Jane thought.
The one reason she might have entertained the notion of working for that faceless, probably conscienceless organization SHIELD would have been that they had access to better equipment and technology. Those toys however, Jane knew, would have come with a price. That price would have been that any new discoveries that she'd made about the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, they would have had immediate access to, and even worse, would have been the ones to decide precisely what should be done with it. A military organization like that would have one thought about what to do with any powerful discovery Jane might make... weaponize it. Jane was a pacifist at heart, she believed that science should only ever be for the benefit of all people. She knew that Einstein had always deeply regretted that much of his work had been used to develop a way to murder people on a scale unknown to the world up until then. Jane couldn't stand the thought of any of her work being used to hurt others. That was why she wouldn't go anywhere near SHIELD or allow them any form of access to anything in her computers or her notes. She couldn't use the best toys, but Jane figured she was far from being out of options.
:Both my father and Eric always told me to try the harder path first, and if that doesn't work, then look at my other options.:
Working for SHEILD would have been the easy path, and to her mind it would have been the wrong one. Working for a military organization with no control over how her work was used was not at all the sort of way Jane wanted to cross the stars.
:I'm far from out of options...:
It had been the chance remark by Darcy (of all people!) that had led Jane down her current, and very very promising trail of research. She had said that if Thor's people had been to Earth then it was quite possible that the relatively primitive earth culture they'd contacted had worshiped them as deities. The knowledge that a theory was now a given fact had led Jane to think that since the Asgardians clearly had been to earth they might have left something of themselves behind, some form of technology that resembled magic, and if that were so then there was a possibility that this "magic" could enable her to reconnect with the other world. Jane fancied herself more of an active sort rather than some princess in a tower waiting to be rescued or whatever. Something must be preventing Thor from keeping his word and returning to her, if that was the case then she would just use her lifeswork to go and visit him (and earn herself a nice, shiny Nobel Prize in the bargain).
She'd carefully combed through the academic journals and postings that might loosely pertain to what she was looking for, and the slush pile had been enormous. Archaeology in the field pertaining the ruins and Norse mythology could be a pretty strange end of the spectrum on the best of times... adding in any theory about actual visitation from a being not of this world was simply begging for all the weirdoes to come crawling out of the woodwork! Most of them were crazies spouting off theories based on pseudo-science at best and fantasy on average. Trying to find a sane, rational person who was willing to look beyond the pale but still retained perspective enough to want to keep most of his findings rooted in provable fact rather than conjecture had been an odessy in and of itself. However, she had found such a person. Doctor Sven Oslo, an archaeologist who specialized in the study of ancient Nordic ruins and the application that their mythology might have been based on truth. He was currently running a dig site on the upper northern fjord-coast, just off an area called Senja. Apparently some heretofore undiscovered carvings had been found there, runestones carved directly into a cave that contained references in code to pieces of Norse Mythology, specifically, to the Bifrost Bridge. The scientific community scoffed when the archaeologist had approached them with his findings, but Jane had jumped at the chance to discuss his work with him. They had been exchanging emails back and forth for some time.
Doctor Oslo felt that some of the equations Jane had come up with in recent days hot on the trail of her own recent work would fill in the gaps that had come up with the strange way that the runes carved into the site were positioned. He had invited her to come and visit the site in the hopes that a fresh perspective from a feild utterly unrelated to the usual tropes of translation and archaeology might shed some light and allow them to break the code. In fact, Jane planned to cut her little working vacation a bit short and nip over to the dig site later that day. If Doctor Oslo's research was half as promising as it seemed, jane might well be on her way to creating her own Einstein-Rosen Bridge before the year was out.