Chapter Two:
Wow! Thanks for your enthusiastic reputation. This fic still remains a great cure for writer's block on my thesis, so I hope that you enjoy this latest installment.
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The two Skrulls walked Jane down the corridor after a trip to the doctors for some Percocet for her aching arm, frog-marching her at a pace just beyond the natural stretch of her legs. She clamped down on her pain and clutched at the bottle of pills in her hand, willing herself to focus on her feet and the hard edges of the plastic and not the warm trickle of blood she could feel emerging from under the edges of her bandages.
What was the point, she thought sourly, of taking her to the doctors to fix her arm only to rip it open again?
She would have raised the point, if she could have spoken. Then again, she was almost positive that, whether the subject of Loki's orders—and apparent care—or not, they would not mind hurting her in the slightest. After some of the news reports she'd seen, she was certain that they could snap her neck and leave her dead in the hallway if she so much as looked at them the wrong way.
Maybe it was better that she couldn't speak. Although even considering the idea that Loki might have done her a favor by taking her voice away was enough to make her give herself a swift mental kick.
Jane had completely lost track of what level of the tower they were in, but she could not recall seeing these doors before. Eventually, they brought her to the last room on the left, unlocked it, and tossed her inside. Jane barely had time to regain her feet and turn around before the door shut and locked soundly behind her.
She gripped her arm and winced as she saw the blood running down her forearm. It would be another few minutes before the medication could conceivably kick in; she would have to tough it out.
"Jane?"
The thin voice, coming from the corner of the small room, made her jump. She whipped around, and saw a disheveled red head of hair sticking up from behind a camp cot. Her mouth dropped open, and she mouthed,
"Pepper?"
"Oh, Jane," the usually manicured secretary climbed to her feet and rushed out from her hiding spot, "are you all right?"
Jane let the other woman fold her arms around her, and felt tears pricking hot at the corners of her eyes. She hadn't been hugged…oh, she probably hadn't been hugged since Darcy embraced her at the end of the summer—"so long, it's been…something"—and sped off towards her senior year at New Mexico State. She brought her arms up to grip the rough material of Pepper's shirt, and shook her head, silent sobs jerking her lungs and shoulders.
"Oh, you're bleeding," the other woman moved swiftly, pulling the pillowcase off her pillow and leading Jane to sit down at the edge of the bed. "Let me take a look."
Pepper deftly unwrapped the medical gauze and gasped at the bloody gashes in Jane's elbow. "What on earth happened to you?" she asked, tearing the flimsy material of the pillowcase along the seam.
Jane opened her mouth, and closed it. She let out a silent sigh of frustration and motioned to her throat with her left hand, shaking her head. Pepper's forehead scrunched in confusion.
"You can't speak?"
Jane nodded. Pepper sighed, and wrapped the torn and folded material securely around Jane's arm, tucking the edges in tightly. Once she was satisfied that the wound was covered, she reached into the drawer of the night table next to the cot and fished out a paperback book and a golf pencil, its tip blunt and almost nonexistent.
"I'm sorry," she opened the book to the blank end page and gave Jane the pencil, "it's the best I can do. I think they swept the room for anything that could be used as a weapon; no pens, no light bulbs, and except for the beds, nothing metallic…believe me," she shook her head, "I've looked. That was wedged behind the headboard, so I think they missed it."
Jane scribbled, Loki's spell, can't speak. What's happening?
Pepper read her words and scowled. "That asshole."
Jane cocked her head and gave the woman a thumb's up. She didn't think she'd ever heard the other woman swear before…an impressive feat, given the fact that she was responsible for looking after Tony Stark. A weak smile teased the corners of her lips.
"Well, he is," Pepper gave her an answering smile before going on, "well, you've missed a lot. This may take a while."
The physicist looked around and gave an exaggerated shrug: what else is there to do?
Pepper was pretty good at reading lips, it turned out, because she laughed bitterly and said, "You're right. All right; you know that it was almost right after Thor came back to Earth that we suffered the first major assault; Natasha went missing and we had to leave New York after a week so that it wouldn't sustain any more damage.
"We evacuated to a SHIELD safe house in Berkley, near where Dr. Banner did most of his original gamma research, and regrouped. For the next few weeks, there were skirmishes in major cities all over the country; it seemed as though Loki were trying to test the strengths of each individual team member, because the type and intensity of the attacks was never the same.
"Natasha resurfaced in New Mexico, and Clint went after her…" for the first time in her grim recital, Pepper's voice faltered, "Tony told him it was a bad idea, but he was determined to go…" she was silent for a moment, then gave a shaky sigh and went on, "and that was the last we saw of Clint."
Jane squeezed one of Pepper's closed fists with her good left hand, trying to give her strength.
"Tony went after him, along with Steve and Thor," Jane's hand flinched and she struggled to rein in the wild beating of her heart. Pepper gasped, "I should have told you at the start! Jane, as far as I know—although I've been a prisoner for three weeks now—he's okay."
It was Jane's turn to give a shaky sigh. She nodded: go on.
"Anyway, they went after him, but they didn't find him. And…at the same time, Skrulls hit our compound in Berkley. That was when they got me, although I don't know if they managed to get anyone else. I didn't see anyone else, either on the transport ship, or since I've been here."
Jane scribbled, "Is that all you know?"
The other woman nodded. "That's pretty much it. Since they put me in this room, I haven't gotten out, and no one except the guards have come in to give me food."
"No Loki?"
"No, thank God," Pepper ground out, "I don't think I'd be able to keep myself from going for him. I don't even know why he wanted me captured; but I don't think it was a random event. But nothing's happened…that I know of, at least."
Jane smiled again. Something about no longer being alone was helping her regain her courage. But her smile faded as she remembered something Loki had said during their nightmare conversation:
The man of iron…once the screaming stopped, that is, they all had nothing but good things to say of you…
Oh God.
Loki had Tony…and Pepper didn't know. Jane broke out in a cold sweat, and her hands shook.
"Are you all right?" Pepper's hand moved to her forehead, "You look terrible! Is it your arm, because I have some water, you could take another pill…"
Jane shook her head, mind racing. Should she tell her? After all, it was clear that Loki had lied about torturing Pepper, and from the sound of it, he'd never even spoken to her—so it was possible that Tony was fine and still fighting with the other Avengers.
Then again…she would not have thanked Pepper for hiding the truth about Thor from her—whatever the truth might have been.
She wrote, "I think Tony's been captured."
It was Pepper's turn to shake. Her voice was a thin wisp as she said, "How do you know?"
"He might be lying, but Loki mentioned that he had you, Clint, Natasha, and Tony as prisoners."
"Oh, God," Pepper gasped, "What else did he say?"
Jane would have given anything not to think for one more moment about the conversation between herself and the mad god. She skimmed over the more terrifying moments—her most precious memories littered before her like so much refuse, his long fingers bruising her jaw, that unhinged laughter, I will cut those fingers off—and tried to dredge up the important parts.
"Only that he was going to use me as bait for Thor. Seems like it worked for Clint, and maybe Tony."
Pepper moaned, burying her face in her hands. "That's why he took me," she cried, tears blurring the edges of her words, "oh Tony…" she trailed off, and Jane could only wrap her arms around her shoulders and rock her slowly, trying to soothe her unfathomable sorrow.
"Do you…" she sniffled, trying to force back the emotion, "did Loki say whether he was all right? Do you know if he's okay?"
Once the screaming stopped, that is…
Jane swallowed, and shook her head, lifting her shoulders in helpless confusion. It would do no good to relay her suspicions of torture, especially if they were nothing but a horrible invention on the part of the trickster god. There was nothing either of them could do about it.
Or was there?
Jane Foster had always refused to believe that the events of the world were beyond her ability to control. It was the only way she could continue to pursue her line of—what most other scientists called crazy—research, and not imagine that she was going off the deep end. It was the only way she could have continued to look up at the night sky each night after Thor's disappearance and believe, without a shadow of doubt, that she could rip the stars apart to find him again.
If she was justified in her research, and if she truly had opened the pathways between the stars, then she could figure out a way to get them out of this room. If the other Avengers were in this tower, she and Pepper could get to them, set them free, and together they could escape and rejoin the others.
It was no more difficult a job than engineering an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. Jane smiled, with a hard edge to the expression. She had already done that.
She shook Pepper's shoulder, "We have to get out of here. We can find the others and get them out too."
"How?" the other woman's red curls bounced as she shook her head, "I've been over and over this room until I wanted to scream; there's no way out! And the Skrulls are much too strong; we could never get past them."
"We'll figure out a way. We have to try."
Pepper sighed, and swallowed what seemed to be another denial. "All right. We'll try."
()()()()()()()()
Over the next hour, Jane milked every piece of information about their situation in Stark Tower out of Pepper.
Their room had been one of the servants' rooms; though Tony had most of the help he needed from Jarvis, he also required assistance from a human staff; their room had belonged to the butler. Apparently, the entire floor was the temporary home of some seven different staff members; Pepper suspected that all those rooms had been repurposed as prison cells, but she had never heard anyone else moving around, and the Skrull only ever stopped at her door.
Their floor was connected to the other levels of the building by private elevators which only operated under special staff keys; but if they had a key, they could access any area of the building they wanted.
The tower's interactive AI had been deactivated. Pepper had tried all the voice commands and codes at her disposal, but Jarvis had never made a peep. Jane latched on to this tidbit:
She was running out of paper, but this was important: "If we got Jarvis working again, could he operate the staff elevators without a key?"
Pepper nodded, "He could, but that still wouldn't help us get out of this room. That lock on the door is no technology I've ever seen; it's definitely from the Skrull. And who knows what spells Loki has put on it? Every time I tried to even touch it, it threw off so much heat that I burned my hands." And to illustrate her point, Pepper showed off one pink and blistered palm.
Jane ground her teeth. This plan would have to operate in several stages; on her last few inches of clean paper, she outlined her scheme to Pepper.
Step One: she could try to reactivate Jarvis by manipulating the controls via the butler's interface on the wall. Either the Skrulls had no idea what it was, or Loki had missed the discreet panel in his sweep of the room, but it looked intact. Jane was not a mechanical engineer, but years of putting together her own gadgetry had given her a feel for how machines worked, and it was worth a try.
Step Two: if she could get Jarvis to respond, she would order him to prepare the staff elevator at the end of the corridor. Then, she would have him trip some sort of internal alarm to attract the guards.
Step Three: she and Pepper would incapacitate the Skrull guards and make a break for the elevator.
Step Four: find the Avengers, and go from there.
Pepper took one look at her outline and said, "This is insane."
Jane huffed and arched one eyebrow, clearly communicating: you got a better idea?
"No, but this could easily get us killed! And you have no idea if you can even get Jarvis to respond to you!"
Her lips thinned and she stared hard at Pepper. The other woman finally sighed and said, "I know, I know…what have we got to lose? Here," she pulled two bobby pins from her bedraggled hair, "see if these will help you out at all."
Jane smiled, and hopped up from the bed. Now that she had a direction, something to do, she barely felt the pain from her sore arm. That, or the pain pills had finally kicked in and she was legitimately starting to feel better. Either way, she thought, she was going to try her damndest to get out of this room and get Thor and the rest of the Avengers to make Loki eat every smug word he had ever said.
Getting the console to work was much easier said than done, especially since nothing in the room could legitimately count as a tool. Jane had had to improvise with every bit of ingenuity at her disposal; flattening one of the bobby pins between the springs of the metal cot and using that to pry the smooth console open, stripping the wiring from behind the radiator to act as a circuit connector, and using the mirror from off the wall to reflect enough fading sunlight from outside to enable her to keep working as it started to dip below the horizon.
The whole process was maddening, and Jane had used her frozen vocal chords to scream her frustration more than once as it dragged on. It didn't help that everything she did was more or less a shot in the dark; the technology was much more sophisticated than anything she'd ever built, and though she'd worked with some advanced gear, she had always had SHIELD tech support on hand to help her with troubleshooting.
Pepper, thankfully, was not the sort of person to say "I told you so." In fact, she was the ideal assistant; fetching whatever Jane pointed at, holding whatever needed to be held, and acting as a tireless watchman, signaling every time the Skrull guard approached their end of the hall.
It was finally too dark to work, so Jane replaced the panel on the wall—as loosely as she could—and flopped down on her cot, massaging her tired eyes with the heels of her palms.
"They usually come around with dinner in another half hour," Pepper said, sitting down herself after making sure every sign of their work was erased. "And they bring a candle, if you want to work some more. It never burns longer than an hour, but it's something."
Jane couldn't look up. She nodded, pressing her lips together to keep from crying. This whole scenario was so frustrating, so insane, that she still had a hard time processing that it was really happening at all. Any moment now, she thought wildly, she would wake up and find that the last six months had not happened; that she was still working in New Mexico on a theory that nearly everyone thought was insane.
That she had never met a tall, blond god who could summon thunder.
She took her hands away from her eyes and glared up at the ceiling. No. No, no.
Jane forced herself to relax and breathe deeply. When the candle came, she could keep trying; for right now, she had to take a break so she could return to the project with a fresh mind. She watched the fading light outside the window and battled the insistent thought that she was dreaming—she didn't think that New York had ever been this dark since its founding.
The only ambient light in the entire city was coming from Stark Tower. And even it—as proved by their little room—was not fully lit.
When the buildings outside faded to nothing more than deep blue shadows backlit by a starlit sky, the lock on their door shuddered and hissed. Pepper shuddered and retreated to the far side of the bed, huddling in the corner. It made Jane sick and furious to see such a strong woman reduced to a trembling wreck like this; she sat up and decided that she would never look at a Skrull in fear again.
It was almost impossible. Their long, reptilian faces and flickering tongues reminded her of a Gorn from Star Trek come to terrifying life, but she closed her hands into fists and refused to shy away. Strangely, it was more the knowledge that Loki wanted her alive that gave her the courage to stand her ground than the knowledge that Thor was waiting for her to find him again. The Skrull would hardly hurt either of them when their master wanted them alive.
They were in the room for barely a minute; just long enough to drop the tray and give the chamber a quick once-over. Clearly, they had given up expecting an escape attempt from Pepper, and did not bother to concern themselves with the addition of another weak human woman. Jane hid her smile; pride goeth before a fall, assholes.
The tiny candle did its job, throwing off just enough light to fill the room with trembling shadows. Jane gestured for Pepper to hold it up the moment the Skrulls were out of the room, and pretended not to notice how the light shook as Pepper's shaking hands held it to illuminate the panel.
She worked as quickly as she could, prying back visual feed cables and trying to recognize anything that could reestablish the interface. Her thin tool slipped and threw sparks; she jumped back and shook the burn off her hand, but a blister was already forming.
The male voice sounded as though it were drowning underwater. Pepper gasped, and whispered, "Jarvis?"
Jane dove back towards the panel and twisted the wire she had inadvertently touched. She wigged it this way and that, almost like trying to get a faulty connection to make a clean circuit. After another thirty seconds:
"Miss Potts?"
"Oh, Jarvis!" Pepper's voice wobbled, "It's so good to hear your voice!"
"I cannot access primary systems," the AI sounded exhausted, as though it had been actively trying to work despite Loki's intervention, "many of the controls for the Tower are out of my control."
Jane signaled frantically. Pepper said, "It doesn't matter. Can you access the staff elevators?"
There was a brief pause. "Yes. Those pathways are still unguarded."
"How about security feeds? Can you see where the guards are…can you see where Tony is?"
"I cannot. Security feeds have been disabled throughout the entire building."
Pepper groaned. "Is there anything useful you can give us?"
"I can access physical controls only: door locks, temperature controls, lighting levels…I can open the outer doors as well."
Jane punched the sky. Pepper shared her enthusiasm. "So, if we find where Tony and the others are, you can let us out?"
"Yes."
"Then let's go!"
Jane caught her arm and shook her head. She pointed to the nearly extinguished candle, and then the door lock. There was no way they were going anywhere at the moment, and even Pepper had to swallow her excitement and defer their going until the morning. Helped on by Jane's nods and few scribbled words, the two women made a plan with Jarvis.
Tomorrow, when the guards brought breakfast to them, they would figure out a way to incapacitate them long enough to reach the elevator, which Jarvis would have ready for them. Then, they would discretely search the building until they found the Avengers, figure a way to set them free, and get out.
Their candle guttered and went out, but Jane and Pepper worked long into the night to disassemble one of the cots; the long bars that held the mattresses up were sturdy enough to use as clubs, and if they were lucky again, neither the Skrull nor Loki would see it coming.
()()()()()()()()()
Jane did not sleep that night. The adrenaline from her early success and the chance of escape that morning kept her brain awake and racing. She was alternately dreading and thrilled to face the challenge of the Skrull; at the very least it would feel great to bash her frustrations out on something. But she was afraid; though she thought her life was safe enough—Thor was not yet under Loki's control—Pepper did not have that same security.
If Tony were already a prisoner…
She beat those thoughts back. Pepper was willing to take the chance; nothing else mattered.
Jane rolled over on her cot and tried to find a comfortable angle to watch the rising light through the window. Her foot jiggled restlessly, and she hugged the strong metal bar from the cot to her chest; dawn could not come fast enough.
But eventually it did come, and she and Pepper stood ready behind the door for their guards. Pepper murmured, "They come usually a half hour after dawn with breakfast." No other words passed between the two women as they waited. Cold sweat beaded Jane's forehead and palms, but Pepper looked surprisingly calm.
The lock hissed. Jane raised her weapon.
They were lucky; a sole Skrull came through the door, and one blow from each of their bars was enough to lay him out flat. Jane was beyond taking chances though, and she whacked him three more times as he lay there. Finally, he was still.
"Did you kill him?" Pepper whispered, staring at the prone alien.
Jane shrugged—who cares?—and squeezed herself around the lock in the half open door. After looking at the state of Pepper's hand, she didn't want an injury for either one of them. She jerked her thumb in the direction of the elevator when Pepper came out into the hall, and started to walk.
"Well done, Miss Foster,"
Jane whirled around, brandishing her bar, but saw no one in the corridor besides Pepper.
Pepper, who had not moved a step.
Pepper, who was merely standing, one hand on her hip, and smiling, a wide, deranged smile that she had only ever seen…
Jane's hand went temporarily nerveless, and she almost dropped her weapon.
Loki, she mouthed, and swayed on her two feet.
Pepper/Loki nodded.
"I repeat," and now the voice was a sickening hybrid between familiar friend and barely concealed killer, "well done, Miss Foster."
A furious hissing filled the hallway and the fully conscious Skrull stalked into the hallway.
"Bring her."
Jane recoiled backwards and tried to bring her club to bear, but there was no time before the Skrull was on her and a swift blow to her head made everything go dark.