The world had descended into blackness that was gnawing painfully at the edges of Jane's consciousness. She could feel it trying to get in, and knew she had to keep it out somehow. If she let this thing eat her, the entire last couple of weeks would have been pointless. She and Wanda would have caused a civil war in Asgard and become wanted criminals in a floating skull in space, all for nothing. She refused to let that happen. Jane had never intended that her life be meaningless. She certainly wasn't going to let her death be.
Even when she was a child, Jane had always wanted to be a part of something bigger. While her sister Kelly planted a garden and collected a menagerie of pets, Jane had already been looking at the stars. She'd wanted to learn everything there was to know, to see further out in space and back in time than anyone ever had, to learn what made the universe tick. What she'd seen from Earth and Asgard had only been baby steps in that grandest of all possible adventures, and if that was where it stopped... find, but she would not let the Reality Gem win before she mastered it.
Do or do not, there is no try. Jane wasn't trying. She would wield the gem against Polyphemus. She just had to show it who was boss.
The pain got worse as the Gem's grip on her tightened, as a reddish-black whirlwind like a tiny tornado surrounded her body and lifted her off her feet. Jane gritted her teeth and focused on her vision on Asgard, the moment when she thought she'd been most in tune with the Aether. At that time it had put her in touch with the mind of Malekith, urging her to destroy. Now Malekith was dead, and there was only Jane and the Stone that was devouring her. She could imagine that same black sky hanging over Manhattan...
And then suddenly, it happened: rather than the pain consuming her, she consumed it, and Jane opened her eyes.
Or did she? She wasn't quite sure, but she could see again – she seemed to be floating high above the ground, with the city spread out below her like a map. There was the quinjet, impossibly tiny, moving in to catch Wanda as she fell. The crowd of protestors blocking Park Avenue looked like brightly-dressed ants, and yet Jane found that if she wanted to she could look closer and pick out individual faces, or read the print on the newspaper one woman was holding. It was fascinating, like a first look through a microscope, but then she realized that the paper's front page article was about Europa heading for Earth. That brought her back to what she was doing. She couldn't get distracted now. She had to look up.
There it was, that second moon. This time, Jane was sure she did not do anything physical – she just raised her attention to the brilliant alien half-moon hanging above the familiar one, and immediately she was there.
Jane had seen Europa in pictures. It always looked sort of like a banged-up old ivory cue ball rolling through space, smooth except where Jupiter's enormous gravity had cracked its surface open, like squeezing an orange until the peel split. It looked very much the same now as it had to Voyager or Galileo, but there was a far more immediate sense of its size as it hurtled through the heavens. If set down on Earth, Europa would have the diameter of Antarctica.
The other difference was that photographs had always made the cracks in the surface look rusty brown, but now they were black. There'd been living things in that ice, mobile and sensate. Polyphemus had sucked up their rudimentary minds and killed them all, and without them, the rest of the moon's hidden ecosystem was swiftly dying, too.
Jane's jaw clenched, at least metaphorically. What did Polyphemus think gave it the right to do such a thing? What did it want, besides to destroy every living thing it could find out of sheer jealousy that other beings felt their tiny lives had meaning while Polyphemus knew its own vast intellect did not? What did it plan to do once it had extinguished every mind in the universe? Would it simply settle down somewhere to stew in its own bitterness?
Then she discovered that Polyphemus could hear her. She hadn't even been speaking aloud, just wondering to herself, but it had heard her and it had the nerve to be offended by what it had heard.
How dare I? it asked. How dare you, tiny thing, presume to know what I am thinking? I am the greatest mind in the cosmos. You say you want to be part of something bigger. I am the biggest thing there is. Someday I shall consume the universe and then re-make it according to my own will – and you, insect, will give me the power to do that. You have an Infinity Stone.
These ideas were not spoken aloud in so many words, but the ideas intruded on Jane's own consciousness as if echoing in her skull and rattling her bones, and she was for a moment puzzled by their meaning. She had an Infinity Stone, yes, but it was the Reality Gem. Polyphemus was entangled with a different Gem.
Any Stone ought to do, said Polyphemus. I need only figure out how to master it.
The surface of Europa opened. The actual crust of the moon remained unbroken, of course, but space warped as if a giant sinkhole opened in the crust, and white tendrils snaked out to wrap themselves around Jane.
What her reaction to this would have been ten minutes earlier, Jane didn't know – but in that moment, she wanted to laugh. For something that put on such airs, Polyphemus was so tiny! She swatted the tentacles away like mosquitoes, and they recoiled in surprise. An exclamation of surprise and pain impinged on her awareness in the same nonphysical way as the previous words. Polyphemus had been expecting the Aether to be something it could just insinuate itself into, as it had with the Mind Gem. Its calculations hadn't told it that it could be shut out like that, and it began going back over its math, trying to figure out what it had done wrong. It found nothing. The Infinity Gems were singularities... surely all singularities were identical!
For perhaps the first time since its creation, Polyphemus was afraid. For the first time it found itself confronted with a power greater than itself. The tentacles shrank back, and the surface of Europa closed around it.
Oh, no, you don't!
Jane hammered on the surface of the moon. No hand came down – the Reality Gem had torn her body apart, she realized, and in the moment she was, to her own surprise, not really bothered by that – but the ice cracked and split. Water gushed up, quickly freezing as it met the cold of space, but of course there was no sign of Polyphemus. It wasn't under the water or in the centre of the rock. It was folded away in a pocket of space that no outside force could access.
Tiny thing! it jeered. Even with all that power at your disposal, you cannot touch me! What a view you will have, you and the bearer of the Mind Gem both, as you watch your world shattered!
Jane was about to strike the surface of Europa gain – even if she couldn't reach Polyphemus, she could break the moon into bits too small to be dangerous and send them hurtling back into space. At the last second, however, she stopped herself, because it occurred to her that she did know a way into spaces that were inaccessible. Odin had taught her to create a short-range artificial wormhole that connected a pocket in space with the larger, normal space around it. That was exactly what the hidden dungeon in Asgard had been. She only needed something to draw with.
Chalk wouldn't do, not on a canvas as large as the surface of a moon, but Europa itself provided the materials. The Gem's power reached out and dug into the icy crust. First it repaired the damage Jane's blow had done, and then began rearranging the dark material in the cracks into circles and runes. There were no clumsy approximations here. With her mind augmented by the Infinity Stone, Jane knew exactly what each shape, each corner, had to look like, and it all made perfect sense in a way her mortal mind could not have begun to comprehend. Within seconds, the surface of Europa bore not random scars from tidal flexing but a gigantic magic circle, and Jane reached through and caught hold of Polyphemus.
It was surprisingly fast. She grabbed and squeezed, and with a cry of surprise and rage, the crystal matrix splintered. The white liquid dispersed into the countless trillions of nanomachines that made it up. These tried to scatter, but Jane caught each one and crushed it to atoms. Within seconds, it was over. The chorus of angry voices faded to a whisper, and then melted away into the bottomless silence of space.
Then, and only then, did Jane feel the sea of oily black pain well up to drown her again. She tried to swim, but she didn't have a body anymore – it was just her mind and the Infinity Stone, hanging in a void millions of miles from Earth. Sheer determination had kept her on top so far, but now that she'd done what she'd come to do, she was starting to sink. If she'd had a head, it would have been pounding. If she'd had lungs, her breathing would have been shallow and weak.
But she realized there was one more thing she needed to do. If Jane left Europa where it was, even without Polyphemus inside it, its trajectory would still send it smashing into Earth. She threw all her remaining strength against it, and it went spinning back out into the solar system. What would the astronomy textbooks of the future say, she wondered, to explain why Jupiter had once had four large moons, and now had only three?
Her vision went red. It washed across the stars, extinguishing them by threes and fours. When she turned back to look at Earth and the Moon, she saw only pinkish specks that were slowly smearing out of focus to merge with the darkness around them. They were safe now, though. There wouldn't be any impact, and there wouldn't be any Polyphemus consuming the minds of the creatures who lived there. Her job was done... and she could go now.
Red darkness welled up, thick and heavy and ice-cold. And if Stark had managed to say that last thing he'd wanted to say to her, she would have now agreed with him. It wasn't that bad at all.
Jane expected it to end there. Curiously, it did not.
Instead of slipping into nothingness, Jane became aware that she was not alone. There were other... she didn't want to say people, but there were definitely other presences here, and some of them were weirdly familiar. She struggled for a way to understand what she was perceiving. Information didn't seem to be coming in through the normal sensory channels. Maybe what she needed was a metaphor, a place in which she could imagine herself. She thought of the Astrolabe room on Asgard...
Suddenly, there she was, surrounded by tall, carved granite columns, with the simulated galaxies hovering in the dome over her head. Jane didn't really feel physical again, but she definitely had the mental picture of herself, in her jeans and wolf shirt and a blanket scarf, standing there looking up at the projections. And sure enough, there were other people in the room. Some of them looked human. Others... not so much.
There was a spindly-limbed, black-eyed creature that Jane's inner nerd would have immediately identified as an Asgard were it not for later life experiences. Another was a stately being at least eight feet tall, with translucent flesh shivering with bioluminescence, as if the entity were some kind of humanoid squid. A third figure, sulking in a corner, was familiar indeed – ashen-faced, white-haired, and point-eared, it could only be a younger, not-yet-scarred version of Malekith.
The one who stepped up to greet her looked human in the same sort of way that Asgardians looked human, in that he was humanoid but far more beautiful than any inhabitant of the Earth. He had long strawberry-blond hair and a neatly-trimmed beard, a hooked nose and a helmet with two curling horns on it. His armor was charcoal-coloured leather, decorated with entwined gold and silver wires, and Jane realized where she'd seen him before. He'd been in the book Odin had shown her.
"So you are Jane Foster," he said.
"You're Thor's grandfather!" she exclaimed at the same time.
King Bor nodded gravely. "That I am. Like you, I became entangled with the Aether, and like you, I failed in the end to keep my hand from it. I thought I could wield it to do good, but my will was not strong enough. It consumed me, and the throne fell to Odin."
"That is what we all tried to do," the tall squid creature said. Its voice was female, with a weird vibrato. "And now all of us are here."
"We're... we're inside the Reality Gem," Jane realized. She looked around, as if thinking she'd see some sign of it, but there was only the space she'd imagined, the Astrolabe with its dark tapestries blocking out the external light. For a moment she wondered what she would find if she tried to go outside, then realized it would be exactly what she expected to find. All of this existed only in her mind. "We're all part of it." Stuck in this limbo for the rest of all eternity.
"I'm afraid so," said the squid creature. "It's not as terrible as you're thinking – in a few centuries you'll start to lose your individual identity, and then you won't care anymore."
"That's not reassuring!" Jane protested.
"No, it is," said King Bor. "Because as long as we're in here, our will still has power over the stone. Malekith preserved you for thirty hours while you were host to the Aether, but I helped you to maintain control, because I owed him his destruction." He looked over his shoulder at the elf, who did not move from his seat in the corner. "Now the two of us are trapped in each other's company for the rest of time, and will eventually merge into a single being. We both agree, it seems fitting."
"Did you help me with Polyphemus, too?" asked Jane. She felt a little disappointed. She'd wanted to think it was something in her that made her capable of what she'd just done, but this did seem far more realistic. The Vision had been both right and wrong – the Stones themselves did not want things, but the people permanently entangled with them did.
"We did," King Bor said. "We felt you deserved it – you weren't like us. We all wanted power for ourselves, even if we sought to do good with it. All you wanted was to save your world, and you knew you would die doing it. You asked nothing for yourself." He put a hand on Jane's shoulder. "And now that we have helped you, I would like you to help me."
Jane supposed she couldn't deny him that, as long as he didn't want help destroying the universe or something... but what could she possibly do for him while they were both in here? "I'll try," she said. She was no longer aware of the outside universe, but maybe that was just a matter of will. "What do you want?"
"I want Thor's happiness," was the reply. "He will have little enough."
The top of Avengers Tower was in ruins, but that was nothing new – one of the reasons they'd moved after Ultron was because the Tower was too damned obvious a target and too hard to fix when it got wrecked. Cubes of shattered safety glass were scattered across the helipad, and through the windows Tony could see the penthouse furniture overturned and papers blowing around in the high-altitude wind.
He wasn't sure what he'd expected to find on the helipad itself – but he landed to find Dr. Foster lying not far away, face-down and unmoving among the wreckage.
Tony hung back. He wanted to go check on her and yet he didn't, because he knew he would find her dead. What was he going to say to Thor? Thor would probably understand the necessity of it, but that didn't mean he wouldn't be absolutely crushed. He might be a towering slab of blond beef with god-like superpowers, but Thor seemed to have a difficult time holding on to the people he loved. After losing his brother and now probably both parents, having to lose Dr. Foster too just seemed cruel.
Wanda, however, did not hesitate at all. She ran to kneel next to Dr. Foster and began shaking her. "Jane!" she said. "Jane!"
That was when Tony first realized that Dr. Foster's clothes had changed. When he'd dropped her off, she'd been wearing the dark blue gown she'd come back from Asgard in – Wanda was still dressed in a cherry red one. The body on the roof was in blue jeans and a black t-shirt, with a khaki vest and fringed boots. When had that happened?
"Jane!" Wanda insisted, and to Tony's absolute astonishment, Dr. Foster sat up, pushing her hair out of her face. She looked entirely whole and healthy, and she stared down at herself for a moment, then up at the sky where Europa already looked smaller, and then turned her head to blink in confusion at Wanda.
Wanda threw her arms around Dr. Foster in a big hug. "You're all right!" she exclaimed, overjoyed.
"No!" Dr. Foster pushed her away, then looked down at her own hands in apparent shock. "No, no, I'm not all right. This... this isn't me."
"What do you mean, it's not you?" Wanda asked. "I can feel your mind." She reached to touch Dr. Foster's temple. "I know it's you."
"It's not me." Dr. Foster caught her hand and pushed it back. "It's... it's a copy of me." She looked to Tony, her eyes searching for understanding, but he didn't even begin to know what she was talking about. All he could think of was that they all needed to get off the top of the building, before any un-noticed structural damage reared its ugly head. He went to help Wanda get Dr. Foster to her feet.
"You're gonna be okay," Tony told her.
"No, I'm not okay!" she insisted, although as far as Tony could tell she didn't have so much as a bruise. "Listen, when somebody gets killed by contact with an Infinity Stone, apparently it's a lot like what Polyphemus did. It absorbs you and you become part of it. There were other people in there who'd tried to use the Gem to get power for themselves. They helped me fight Polyphemus, but then King Bor – he's Thor's grandfather – he said he wanted Thor to be happy..."
"Seat belts," said Tony, as they got her settled in the quinjet. He didn't know whether to listen to Dr. Foster or not. She sounded desperate to get her point across, but for all he knew she was just babbling after the Infinity Stone had driven her off the deep end. Wanda did up her belt for her, while Tony strapped himself back into the pilot's seat.
"So they made a copy of me," Jane went on, "out of matter that had never interacted with the Aether, so I wouldn't have to worry about the entanglement anymore." She was running her hands over her arms and shoulders, as if to make sure everything was still there. "Jane Foster is dead, and I'm... I don't know what I am, but I know I'm not Jane Foster, because she was okay with this duplicating herself thing, and I'm not!"
The recent past had been full of moments when Tony had known exactly what he needed to say and regretted not saying it. As he took off from the helipad again, he thought that at least this wasn't going to be another one of those moments, because he had no idea what he could say about this. What would he want somebody to say to him, if he woke up one morning and realized he was just a copy of the real Tony Stark?
"What am I going to say to Thor?" Jane asked. "He'll be so happy to see me, and then..."
Then it came to him. "Quasi-set theory," said Tony.
Jane paused, frowning. "What?"
"Jane," said Wanda, before Tony could continue. "Do you remember when you got your first telescope? It was a Christmas gift. You were seven years old." When Tony glanced back, he could see Jane's eyes light up red for a moment, as Wanda dug into her memories. "You insisted on setting it up right away so you could use it that night, even though there were record cold temperatures that year, and you saw the moons of Jupiter for the first time."
"Yeah..." said Jane slowly, and Tony began to think maybe she wouldn't need his idea.
"It's our memories that make us who we are," Wanda told her. "If you remember that, then you're still Jane Foster."
"It's not the same," Jane insisted.
So Tony played his card. "Quasi-set theory," he repeated. "All subatomic particles are identical, right? Every up quark is exactly the same as every other up quark, and the same is true of downs and electrons and all the other little particles. If I had an electron in my right hand and one in my left, and they had the same spin, absolutely nothing would change if they switched places, right?"
"Of course," said Jane. "Subatomic particles have no dimensions, so they can't have any features."
"Correct," said Tony. "So if every quark is identical, then so is every proton and neutron. If those are all identical, then every carbon atom is identical to every other carbon atoms. And if you're made of identical atoms and have identical memories and taste in t-shirts, then the laws of physics state that there's no way to tell you aren't Jane Foster, so you might as well be. Like I said – quasi-set theory!" He was very pleased with this line of reasoning. That was what he would have wanted to be told in the same situation: that even if he wasn't the original, it simply didn't matter.
But she still wanted to argue with him. "That doesn't work," Jane said, shaking her head. "Because my particles are different – I'm not entangled with the Reality Gem. There's no way to break quantum entanglement, even the Asgardians and the Brisings can't do it. They had to rebuild me molecule by molecule."
"Identical molecule by molecule," Tony pointed out.
"And isn't that a good thing anyway?" Wanda asked.
"Maybe." Jane tugged uncomfortably at her shirt. "I just don't think it's me."
Tony turned back to the controls. He should probably focus on what he was good at, which clearly wasn't reassuring people... but a couple of seconds later he had another idea. "You said you weren't okay with being duplicated," he said, "but she was okay with duplicating herself. Is that really something you think Jane Foster would do? Because if it's not," he added, "then it's her who's not the real one. She's just a part of the Aether. You're Jane Foster."
"I..." she began, then just sat back in her seat, shaking her head. "I don't know. I really don't."
That was better than nothing, Tony supposed. Maybe Thor would be able to help her with this, or maybe they could get her to see a therapist or something. He was just glad that even if he hadn't made it any better, he'd at least managed not to make it worse.
Tony tapped the radio. "How's it look, Vizh?" he asked.
Europa is still moving away from the Earth, the android confirmed. Its current trajectory will take it past Jupiter again, but my calculations suggest that the planet will not be able to recapture it. Instead it will be flung out of the solar system into interstellar space.
"Sorry about that," Jane murmured.
"I should hope you are," said Tony. "In case I need to repeat it, that was my favourite moon. I think Pluto should be allowed to be a planet again, just to make me feel better."
Is Wanda safe? the Vision asked.
"She is,"s aid Tony, "and so is Dr. Foster, sort of. We're still working that part out. When are you expecting to be back on the ground?"
Tomorrow morning, I hope, the Vision said. While I am in transit, I think we had better start thinking about our next problem.
For a moment Tony couldn't remember what the Vision was talking about, then he slumped a little as he remembered the hundred and one other things they'd been too busy to deal with. "Oh, right," he said. "No rest for the wicked around here."
"We have another problem?" Jane asked.
"Of course we do," said Tony. "You didn't think the universe was going to cut us a break, did you?"
The Vision explained. Brisingr's closest approach to Earth is in less than three weeks, and while the world has been panicking about the impending collision with Europa, the United Nations has decided to prioritize and finally reach a decision regarding the Brisings' claim to Venus.
Tony was downright proud of the sarcasm in the word prioritize. That was JARVIS talking, right there.
"Oh, no," groaned Jane.
They have decided not to let the Brisings settle, the Vision said. They are planning to destroy the vessels as they pass Earth.
There probably wasn't anything the Vision could have said that would have made Jane, or the copy of her, or whatever she was, feel worse. She could have done something about that if she'd still had the Infinity Stone... she could have created a new planet for them at Alpha Centauri or something... a place where they could settle down, humans couldn't stop them, and everybody would still be able to talk to each other. Or she could have restored their home in Andromeda. Or something... she had no idea what she would really have been capable of with the Stone in hand and maybe that was a good thing. But she'd been so focused on saving her own world, why couldn't she have thought of anyone else's?
As she stared out the window at the countryside rolling by and stewed in all this, Stark suddenly turned in the pilot's seat and asked, "what happened to the Aether?"
Jane blinked and looked down at her hands again, half-expecting to find herself still holding it, but of course she was not. "I... don't know," she said. The last time she remembered being aware of the outside world, she'd been floating in space somewhere, looking at a Europa that seemed no bigger than one of those inflatable yoga balls. For all she knew, the Reality Gem was still up there. Maybe it was embedded in the ice where she'd she'd last touched it as she'd pushed the moon on its way.
Stark considered that. "Probably all for the best," he decided.
"I'm sorry about your mother's ring," Jane added. She might have already said that, but she couldn't remember. "If you want to keep the Quantum Pot, I guess it's yours." That would be awkward to explain to Thor, but a promise was a promise.
Stark grimaced. "It was just a rock," he said, although his voice was pained. A moment later, however, she realized that the pain wasn't about the ring, when he said, "I've lost more precious things while trying to save the world."
What was he talking about? Jane looked at Wanda, to see if she knew.
"JARVIS," said Wanda quietly. "His computer."
"Get out of my head, Maximoff," Stark growled, but then he sighed. "Yeah, I guess I'm gonna have to actually talk to the Vision about that one of these days, aren't I?"
"It might help," Wanda offered. "Do you want me to..."
"No," he cut her off. "No, I'll do it myself. When he gets back to Earth. Hold me to that, okay?"
"I will," said Wanda, and Jane couldn't tell if it were a threat or a promise.
When they landed in the hangar at Avengers HQ, Darcy and Eric were there waiting for them. Darcy had been sitting on the floor next to the door, resting her arms on her knees and looking generally miserable – Eric leaning on the wall next to her with an empty coffee mug in his hands. The way they looked up when the ramp lowered and people began coming down made it clear that they expected bad news. So when a facsimile of Jane stepped out, whole and healthy and in her own damned clothes, they were first shocked, and then delighted.
"Jane!" Eric exclaimed, dropping his cup in surprise. Like the others at the compound, it bounced.
"Jane!" squealed Darcy in the same moment. She scrambled to her feet at the same time as she lunged forward, almost on all fours as she threw herself on top of Jane and gave her a hug that felt as if it would leave bruised ribs. "Oh, my god, you're okay! You did all that tell Thor I'm sorry and I was sure you were a goner!"
I was," said Jane.
"But you're all right now!" Eric said, and wrapped his arms around both women.
"I am,"Jane agreed. For a moment she considered just not telling them... but she had to. It would have been a lie not to. "I'm all right, but I'm not really Jane Foster."
Darcy and Eric both drew back in surprise, but after a few confused moments, Darcy laughed aloud.
"Why are you laughing?" Jane asked, confused and a little offended. It hadn't been a joke.
"That's the end of Howard the Duck!" Darcy said. "When he goes, I am not Howard anymore! in the deep voice, and then he says ha, fooled you!" She grinned, but then it slowly faded away as she saw Jane's serious expression. "You're... how are you not Jane?" she asked. Her arms fell to her sides as she stepped back, frightened now. Eric put his hands on her shoulders.
That hurt, to see the two of them afraid of her. "I..." Jane licked her lips. "Let's sit down, and I'll explain."