4. Ache

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The compromise with Erik and her own, admittedly underdeveloped, sense of caution involved a few limitations on her new assistant. Such as not reading Luke in on the most radical parts of the project and feeling out his responses to it a little bit at a time before they committed to giving him enough information to help with current problems or participate in data gathering. The new, scary, mind-bendy research being at something of an impasse anyway, Jane actually enjoyed going back over the progress she'd made on her own. Before Norsemen started raining from the sky.

Jane also felt it was safe to show Luke her old data from the stellar events she'd been observing when the whole thing had not yet taken a turn for the legendary, but it was difficult to hold back the rest once she did. It was like giving him the build up and no punchline. He took everything in so quickly in their first meetings, his questions weird or basic but very rare, and his understanding much deeper than she could have anticipated from an amateur. He seemed to struggle with terminology and some of the rote math, but never with concepts or applications, including applications she hadn't fathomed.

Within a week, the discussions were getting longer and there were tangential things he was explaining to her. He seemed to hate showing his work in full, quickly growing impatient with the process of laying foundations or supporting his intuitive leaps. There were rudimentary mathematical symbols he didn't even seem to know, but he doodled illustratively as he spoke to her in figurative rather than technical language, and she eventually found his meanings reasonably clear. Usually his left hand would sketch diagrams and orbitals on the whiteboard while his right would flail in gestures or add notations, sometimes it was the other way around. She found his unthinkingly flexible manual dexterity less interesting than the oddly narrow, spiky, un-slanted printing it produced, and that less interesting than what he was trying to communicate with it.

She wondered how someone could so fully grasp the implications of incredibly complex abstract theorems about the nature of matter, but have no idea of entry-level expressions of physical laws. Basic formulae mystified him, but with the variables plugged in he was faster than a calculator. He lacked a lot of her specialised knowledge, but that seemed to be because he had avoided specialisation; he remained equally literate as they drifted further out of her purview, while she was sometimes confronted by problems she had never studied.

When they started arguing about whether the theoretical Einstein-Rosen bridge would be like a tunnel through space-time made of same-universe matter differing only in type rather than kind (a 'short cut', as Jane derisively called it when he started defending the hypothesis) or like a doorway to a legitimately alternate, smaller dimension and back out again, he began at last to come unwound from the tightly controlled coil of formality he'd been in since she'd met him.

"There is one world to live in, if one speaks of 'the world' as all interconnected cosmic reality. There are ways through it, where it is possible to walk between the position and the thrust of a single electron, but-"

"The Uncertainty Principle as a basis for faster-than-light travel through wormholes?" Jane's incredulous tone was cutting. "That's word salad, Luke."

"Do not interrupt." His voice was shockingly deep when he was annoyed. It got closer and closer to a straight up growl the more he lost his patience with her. That was not something she would have expected from such a genteel man, one who practically oozed urbane sophistication, and the incongruity was in danger of making her laugh. Not that it wasn't also very successfully intimidating, because it was. Especially the way his glare would bore into her skull as he grumbled at her in that borderline menacing tone. He had real personal intensity. Super-intensity, even. More than once, she had felt a tension ache building across her shoulders just from being in the same room with his unyielding focus.

He tossed his blazer over the back of a chair and primly rolled up his shirtsleeves as he extrapolated on her wrongness about many worlds and string theory, getting close and talking in a low pitched yelling-whisper. Jane had to suppress the urge to giggle inappropriately in her discomfort when his temper started to slip, but she was used to fighting about science with much scarier people, and she was unwilling to stop him before he got where he was going. He was half into the broad consequences of causal efficacy in the conscious mind before he realised he was drifting too far from her area of expertise for her to properly appreciate the point he was trying to make.

Then he'd looked borderline sheepish. The day was stupidly hot and the lab didn't have proper air conditioning, but the heat had never yet seemed to touch him and she was sure it had nothing to do with the blotchy flush rising in his cheeks and down his milk-pale forearms.

They retreated to opposite sides of the lab to read, she going through her notes, he poring over one of the many textbooks she'd dug out for him. The silence stretched until it felt unbreakable and Jane sprawled across her desk, deciding she might as well be comfortable if he wasn't going to get over himself enough to continue the conversation. Or to apologise again. He apologised to her a lot, always with this wary look in his eyes like he was afraid he'd be left destitute in the science-less cold if she minded anything. This was the first time she'd managed a proper rise out of him. Not that she had been trying.

When she next looked up, evening had long since fallen. She stretched out her stiff muscles and glanced over to find him still propped up over a book. He was precariously perched, cross-legged on top of his chair, and only slightly rumpled by the passing hours. His mercilessly scraped back hair had begun to lift away from his neck in rebellious half-curls, gaining fluff and body as it escaped from whatever product had ironed it down to his scalp. When he pushed a hand through it, it fell long around his face and an errant wave slid across his high, imperious forehead. He looked so young and so vulnerable that it gave her real pause.

The possibility that he might not even be able to legally drink seemed suddenly plausible enough that she interrupted his obvious concentration to blithely ask him how old he was. She hadn't planned on talking to him after the one-sided argument until he decided to suck it up and talk to her first. She had no problem allowing him his sulk, because it didn't bother her one whit to go back to her notes and she fully expected he would crack quickly. But, now that she wanted to talk, she didn't see the sense in going out of her way to indulge his delusion that she was sulking, too.

Nothing personal at all had passed between them in the week she'd been letting him hang out in her lab and the abrupt, indelicate question apparently stunned him. Even though he presumably remembered Jane's version of tact from their first two conversations. He gaped at her.

"What?"

She was going to say something pithy about worrying she was robbing the cradle, but that phrase had way too many connotations she had no desire to raise. "I just..."

"I don't know," he snapped, scowling at her from beneath furrowed eyebrows. "Why?"

Now Jane was gob-smacked. "What do you mean you don't know?"

His eyes flicked back to the book, then roamed furtively around the room. "In Swaziland, where we lived, we didn't keep close track of the years as you do. The anniversary of one's birth was not marked, nor would the precise moment have been recorded. Time was portioned differently, no calendar was kept but the fields and the stars. I was born in my mother's garden, she said once that the acacia was in bloom. Winter." Picking up a pen, he started spinning it between his fingers so quickly that it became a blur. "I could get the approximate year from my passport papers- if it is significant?"

"No, it... no." She folded her arms and leaned on the desk in front of her, trying to work him out. He'd seriously never given her the answer she was expecting to any question she'd asked since the time he bragged that formal education bored him. "Were your parents from there or...?"

"Yes, they-" he paused and glared out the window into the dwindling late-summer twilight. "I was..."

Jane didn't know whether to prompt him or not. She wasn't sure if he'd welcome interruption or if he'd explode. She didn't want to deal with an explosion. She really could use his help around here, and she preferred to avoid the scenario where she kicked him out of the lab for thinking he could walk all over her just because he was upset. If he was upset.

"It doesn't matter." He sighed, slumping slightly, and it looked as though there were the weight of ages dragging down his shoulders.

Jane felt curiosity making suicidal plans for her again. "It sounds to me like maybe it does."

The glare turned toward her and for a moment she knew real fear of him, but it passed almost immediately as he looked down in mixed shame and sadness. Now she was even more invested than before: needing to know, to understand, and her reckless sympathy running rampant. I have no sense of self-preservation at all. I really do need a babysitter. This person could be anyone and I'm poking him with sticks to see if he'll bite.

"It..." Luke began, irritably flicking the pen away; at which point it sailed across the room and buried itself in the drywall up to the cap.

"Wow."

"I do apologise, Miss Foster!" He leapt up, his long-fingered hands wringing in embarrassment. "I didn't intend to let- I didn't anticipate the flimsy-"

"Hey now. This is my lab you're talking about."

"Ah-"

Jane had to laugh at the stricken look on his face, but she was feeling less conviction in her belief that he probably wasn't a SHIELD agent. The scientific espionage theory would be looking a lot more plausible, except that she'd been talking science with him for a week and he obviously wasn't a PhD trying to dumb himself down. More like a prodigy trying to catch up. She remembered his speech about imagination and being tied to the Earth and thought that quality was exactly the thing he was talking about. His lack of indoctrination into How Things Were meant that he fearlessly said things which seemed ludicrous, then went on to explain them to her in a way that made compelling sense.

As long as she ignored ten years of education and went on pure instinct.

As long as she filled in his gesticulations with the first principles he apparently understood but didn't know how to communicate.

"Come clean with me, Luke," she found herself saying, gathering her fly-away hair into a messy bun, "were you raised in a secret ninja village?"

His nose wrinkled and that annoyed look was back. "I am not a 'ninja'."

Putting two and two together, Jane had the dawning realisation that his little pained-annoyed looks meant he was confused and so unused to it that it pissed him off. She bit her lip to keep from laughing again. "Okay."

"You call me strange, Jane Foster, but you are hardly straightforward yourself."

She shook her head. "Straightforward is totally what I am. Normal, I don't know. But what you see is kinda what you get."

"As I begin to discover. Why did you ask me about my parents?"

"I just wondered how far the culture went back or if it was something unique to you in your family. I like to know things, I always want to understand, and sometimes I don't think about, you know, manners before I start blurting all my questions out. I'm sorry." She yanked her hand down before she managed to worry her hair free of the bun she'd just put it in.

Unfazed by her wall of verbiage, Luke leaned on the edge of her desk. "Don't be. Your curious nature is your greatest asset, is it not? My biological mother was a British citizen and a kind of diplomat. She died when I was yet in my minority and I was adopted by the mother of a headman, a prominent woman in Swazi society. I am not certain why she took me in, my inheritance could not be accessed until I presented myself in Britain. Whatever her plans for the future once were, I imagine I've thwarted them with my failure to return. You will have guessed already the winding path taken by my education across villages and nations. So you see, I am a culture of one."

"Doesn't that get lonely?" It was out before she could stop it, her interest surpassing her judgement as always.

He smiled wanly, and he didn't look young any more. "I suppose that it must."

"If we somehow forced open an Einstein-Rosen bridge below the atmosphere, would you want to try to cross it? Is that why you're here?"

Luke ran his hand through his hair again, only provoking it into further curls and greater mess. "Jane, I confess to you that..."

"Yes?"

He turned his back to her and sighed. "I don't know."

Jane studied that back, not missing how stiffly the muscles were drawn taut beneath the delicate material of his shirt. "You don't know if you would try the bridge or you don't know why you're here?"

Luke's trapezius twitched and she knew he hadn't been expecting her to pick at his response. Fair enough, she never really pushed him before when he got all quiet and sincere-sounding. It was time to start, she figured.

"They are the same question."

"But you think it can be done, that's what you're getting at when you're trying to tell me about how you think consciousness as a real causal agent relates to quantum mechanics? You have an idea of how to control it, to make it happen."

"Currently there is the problem of it requiring more energy than it is possible for this entire planet to produce by any known method, and how to calculate one's destination with continuous accuracy without a fleet of supercomputers carried along for the trip, but yes. You are entitled to your scepticism, Jane, but my hypothesis is sound. The uncertainty does your work for you like this: The bridge both exists and does not exist. The space between your starting point and your destination both exists and does not exist. This is how you travel it. You cross the space in a minute fraction of the time it actually takes because you are not traversing the space. Even as you are.

"One may walk in the footsteps of uncertainty, precisely because there is one world with many dimensions and not many worlds of one dimension each." He stared at her in utter stillness, looking for all the world like a particularly pensive stone statue. Then his mouth quirked up on one side. "I postulate."

He sounded more sure of himself than a postulation warranted, the light of shared wonder in his eyes.

"Why didn't you just tell me you were bringing in a working theory?" Jane was not going to tell him he was talking more about the quantum observer effect and folds in space-time than technically the uncertainty principle, because it was her fault for using the wrong term earlier (since it didn't seem likely he knew the terminology... probably) and most people made that conflation anyway. You gotta pick your battles, and she had no aching desire to die on the hill of pedantry.

Luke chewed the inside of his lip as he worried at his thumb, and she noted that it seemed to be his most consistent nervous habit for future reference. "I was apprehensive."

"This is about you supposedly having nowhere else to be again, isn't it? Like, I turn you away and somehow you've got nothing to live for and no one else you could possibly talk to." Jane was impatient now with this idea, increasingly she couldn't see herself buying it no matter how well he was selling, and he'd successfully derailed her a time too many. She sometimes gave people the benefit of the doubt to the point of handicap and it had to stop before someone really took advantage.

But the stark lines of his thinly-fleshed face made it impossible for her to miss the way he subtly grit his teeth at her dismissal of what she remembered he'd called 'painful honesty, indeed' and her heart actually sank. Jane, you jerk, I think he really believes it. What could possibly be your story, you strange, prickly man?

"Well," Luke's high class accent was extra crisp, a knife-edge of politeness, "whether there is anyone else who would understand or not, are you yourself interested in my thoughts or have I been wasting your time? Dr Foster."

The silkiness of his voice as he added the title reminded her of that scary moment earlier; she decided he was the kind of person who could hold a grudge until the heat death of the universe and not to let him labour under any misapprehensions if she could help it. "I'm sorry."

His disdain for that was obvious and he simply waited for an answer to his question without even bothering to dignify her apology with a dismissive gesture.

"You're not wasting anyone's time-"

"Good." He spun around and marched to the chair where he'd hung his blazer, rolling down his shirtsleeves and buttoning his cuffs. Jane had been about to tell him he was the most intuitively brilliant person she'd ever met and that she was incredibly grateful he'd come even if they never agreed on anything, but he didn't seem to want to hear her reassurances. She pretended not to be watching while he pretended he wasn't trying to smooth down his hair (it clung to his fingers and sprang up in tighter curls with each pass of his hand).

Pulling on his coat, he walked past her and paused at the door. "I will return in the morning to discuss the problem of power and calculations in the absence of probability, you may offer further critique then. I shall endeavour not to burden you with my personal state of affairs in future. I remind you that you did ask."

Yep, she knew it. She took off after him, catching the door before it shut and grabbing his arm. Though he was slimly built, it was more like grabbing braided steel cable than flesh and blood, and her nerves fluttered a bit as she craned her head back to look him in the eye. "Really," she insisted, not wavering her gaze from those silvery blue-grey irises, "I made some assumptions and I'm sorry. I'd like to hear about your personal state of affairs whenever you feel comfortable telling me."

He glared down the length of his Grecian nose at her short fingers and her chipped purple nail polish set against the impeccable black of his sleeve. "Release me, please."

She did, frowning at his distant tone. "I won't let you just be all icy polite from now on, you know. I can't stand on ceremony in my lab. I'll prank you if I have to."

Luke straightened his jacket and glanced over her speculatively, the intensity of his stern manner replaced by a hint of amusement and a condescending smile. "I should very much like to see you try. Good evening, Dr Foster."

Not quite forgiven, then. And a challenge issued.

Why did she get the feeling she was playing with fire?