7. Spirits
.
It was a strange week.
Erik- back from a few days at SHIELD, probably at least half spent refusing to report on Jane's new lab hand- had not exactly thrown caution to the wind just yet. Between ominous predictions and cynical proclamations about how obvious the trap being laid was, however, he was waxing disturbingly near to giddy about Luke's undeniable brilliance. He was quite taken with the observer-quantum-uncertainty-something that Luke was still trying to adequately explain to them, but then Erik had always had the soul of a poet hidden under his lab coat.
Recalling his staunch disapproval at regular intervals, he'd tell Jane that no one so useful could possibly have just wandered in by chance and that Luke's lack of technical familiarity pointed to him being a spy given a crash course rather than an eccentric hobbyist. Erik was suspicious of coincidences in the best of times, which these were not. He was still upset about Norse mythology being somehow, tenuously, related to fact.
Jane was inclined to think that Luke's impatience, peculiar ignorances, and general air of a genius who doesn't quite realise that he is a genius were all far too genuine to be part of an act. If he were a spy, surely he would be easier to take and more believable. There would be some neatly constructed plausible lie to answer all their questions, not evasive vagueness and confused stares. Someone would have briefed him, someone would have taught him to act more like a regular dude. Anyone who could fake the glowing enthusiasm for the cosmos and the ecstasy in seeing her recognise and understand his ideas about it that he'd been exhibiting could certainly fake ordinariness.
She had a weird, baseless hunch that he could have convinced her he'd been born and raised in Puente Antiguo if he had wanted to.
Darcy, joining them through the magic of Skype and her hopelessly out-of-date webcam, was still firmly of the opinion that divine providence was at work. Which, contrariwise, made Erik's eyes roll heavenward as if to appeal directly to God for a refutation.
"He's no secret agent, you guys. Secret agents aren't awkward and mysterious, they train on purpose not to be. He sounds exactly like the typical brainy loner who does this stuff for fun just like he says he is," Darcy adjudged, looking up at the camera from painting her toenails. The original purpose of the call was Jane checking up on her not-really-protégé's credit situation, as there had been some concern on that front, but all was apparently well and the conversation had drifted back to Mr Mysterious. Darcy's new favourite topic.
Not sure if she was quite in the camera's line of sight, Jane shot her open laptop a cautious look as she chewed her lip. "How so?"
"Majorly gifted quiet types don't stand out academically, right, because the curriculum bores them but they don't make waves about it and nobody knows that's what's going down. Between being quiet and getting shit for nerdiness, they're not so into socialising, so they don't really have an idea of what normal is all about or where the smartness line actually is. They're out being mad bright and getting esoterically super-informed without realising how easily they become all niche and advanced class about stuff, and then they interact and don't get that regular people aren't slow, they're quick. They think everyone else is just being dense." She admired her hot pink toes and smiled in satisfaction. "You guys picking up what I'm putting down over there?"
Jane shook her head fondly at Darcy's characteristically uncanny ability to put her finger straight on it. "I was actually kinda thinking the same thing."
"Right? I dated a Computer Science type once and let me tell you, they have a very warped idea of what is and isn't common knowledge. You're much more aware that some of us still live on Earth. I may not be an astrophysicist, but I'm not totally blonde either."
"Hey, I'm on the fair side over here," Jane warned, fluffing the end of her ponytail meaningfully at the camera, "and I own your credits."
Darcy pulled some kind of cheeky face, but the jumpy, crappy video made it hard to catch. "You have the soul of a brunette, boss. Anyway. How goes it? You think we'll be touring Asgarden next summer?"
"Asgard, and no, probably not." She sighed and rested her chin on her palm glumly. "I feel like we've made huge leaps in understanding, but the practical application seems miles out of reach. The kind of power you'd need to even think about trying to open a stable wormhole is stupid."
"Not to mention getting your hands on exotic matter." Erik mumbled, frowning at some equations on one of the half dozen computer screens that lit the lab.
"Double not to mention how to direct it. Luke said something about designing a device that can produce antimatter and being able to manipulate the properties of what it produces, but he has to be confused or trying to Punk me or something." Jane thought back over it and honestly couldn't make a decision. She wouldn't have thought he was the type to pull her leg, but then he'd practically dared her to acknowledge the glove and start a prank war whenever she felt like it because he'd be ready for her.
Returning, as promised, the morning after Jane's faux pas, Luke wore his familiar black suit in a way that managed to project an increase in formality without undergoing any tangible change in tailoring. His hair was so firmly glued to his head that it looked painted on and slightly slick with whatever he'd combed into it to convince it not to fall naturally. Already severe as a marble effigy, his profile seemed even sharper and his forehead even higher. If he was trying to look like the angel of death, he was well on his way.
Jane couldn't contain her exasperated smile when she opened the door to him and took in his rigid stance, his shoulders so painfully upright that he looked like he was wearing body armour. In spite of his tremendous effort towards grimness, his prim expression (with slight pretensions to martyrdom) was a bit too adorably obvious for her to despair of stopping this sulk before it really got started. "Don't you own jeans? I swear I remember telling you about the dress code."
A tiny wrinkle formed between his eyebrows and he glanced down at himself, then at her slightly threadbare blue jeans (not intentionally distressed, they dated back to her freshman year and came by their worn knees honestly), smiley-face sun t-shirt (not worn ironically), and the frumpy cardigan she always threw on top in order to pretend she had a deliberate casual-academic look. Or to curl up in, if necessary. It was like a portable couch, down to the odd bits found in the cracks.
He said nothing until their eyes met again, "Your 'dress code'... is 'jeans'?"
She wondered if he understood which item of clothing the word referred to, or if he'd even got that far. It was hard to tell with him, he might just be dripping delicate scorn on her sartorial choices. Did people wear jeans in Africa? They sure did in Oxford when they could get away with it. She just nodded. "Yes. Jeans are the dress code. From now on, buddy."
He blinked to himself a moment and then made to go past her, waiting until she sensed his intention and stepped aside to give him space. "I shall correct my attire before our next meeting. I do prefer to stand on ceremony, Jane, though I'm... Oh." Catching sight of Erik leaning over a computer nestled among the tech detritus on her worktable, he stopped dead. "I did not realise..."
Jane hurried over to rescue him from the wave of politeness which seemed to have swamped him speechless. "Luke, this is Erik. Erik, Luke."
"Dr. Erik Selvig, yes?" Luke asked, leaning toward Erik to shake hands. He managed it with the natural ease which he had painfully lacked when he met Jane. Was shaking hands all the time an American thing that he hadn't got used to yet? she wondered. Or maybe she just intimidated him. That was likely.
"You know my work?" Erik threw an amazingly unsubtle This is Suspicious look her way.
Luke smiled with utterly disarming charm, touching a finger to the side of his nose like he was sharing a secret. "I have perused your submissions to publicly available journals most avidly, Doctor, since I discovered your connection to Jane."
"That interested, were you?"
Luke's smile turned boyish, his tone conspiratorial, "Am I to be faulted? Is not Miss Foster standing alone in her field?"
Erik's eyebrows rose.
"Annnnyway." Jane put herself between them, fiddling with the notepad she'd been carrying. "Luke's got a new angle I'd love to get your thoughts on if you're interested in, you know, something besides embarrassing me."
They'd spent the entire ensuing week sitting around in the living room-ish quadrant of the lab yelling at each other about physics and outlandish, sci-fi-esque theories of wormhole travel. Luke, disadvantaged by his limited understanding of jargon and almost total unfamiliarity with notation, was reduced to asking for frequent explanations, sometimes through gritted teeth. It wasn't that he seemed to mind needing to learn or asking questions: he'd been doing that happily enough with Jane and only became impatient when she continued to explain after he felt he'd got the jist, but he obviously hated to fall behind the conversation. When they argued over his head, she finally noticed on the third day, he got this look on his face of what she could only describe as seething resignation. Like a star player sitting on the bench but determined to wait for the coach's call. Like he was used to it, expected it, and bitterly resented it at all once.
She was becoming desperate in her curiosity to know what his real life was. What had made him into the odd person that confronted her, what his education had been like. So she ended their Friday evening bickering at a semi-sensible mealtime and announced they were going to the bar for dinner.
If liquor couldn't loosen his lips, she'd send out for some sodium pentothal.
It was, luckily enough, the first day he'd managed to bring himself to obey her edict to dress more like a normal person and less like he'd just walked off a runway somewhere. It would cause enough comment just parading someone so inherently noticeable in front of the bored locals, he didn't need to flagrantly not belong in their scruffy company. Even in black denim, black t-shirt, and a charcoal blazer, he cut such an august figure that she worried people would gossip he was incognito European royalty or something. Not that she ever caught herself theorising in that direction.
As they walked to the bar she repeatedly only just stopped herself from grabbing his hands to still them as he gesticulated uncontrollably when he was really into what he was saying, and she tried to interrupt as gently as possible when interruption was necessary:
"Luke, Luke, you're almost explaining Special Relativity. We've got a pretty good handle on that. Just finish what you were saying about calculating destinations with those principles in mind, I promise I can steer you right if you start going wrong there."
"That's just a vacuum chamber. I could set one up in the lab, it wouldn't be that hard."
"It'd be anacoustic, though, so you couldn't."
He always turned to look at her with a burningly intent, searching expression, his eyebrows slightly drawn up in the middle and making his focus seem tinged with sadness somehow. He didn't come across as terribly aware of what bleeding edge technology wasn't capable of for someone who read scientific journals, seeming mildly inconvenienced and personally disappointed when she called out his suggestions as functionally, rather than fundamentally, impossible.
Then he got this thoughtful look that she found a little bit disconcerting.
It was like he was dead certain she was wrong and both smug and miffed about it.
.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.
He made a dismayed, disgusted, confused face at the menu she couldn't even begin to work out, so she took it away from him and ordered an enormous amount of beer and a bunch of finger food. She was going to find out at some point what the hell he'd been eating and where he'd been staying, because she had to know. He clearly hadn't been coming in here: the wait staff took turns 'checking' on them and then huddling in the corner to whisper to each other. Probably spreading it around that Jane had finally revealed her reason for turning down every date she'd been offered since her arrival in New Mexico. It would be everywhere in the morning that her exotic, male model, secret agent, foreign dignitary boyfriend had come to visit.
At least the small town assuming Luke had to be with her with her because he'd come through the door in her vicinity meant she didn't have to watch half the bar try to hit on him. Entertaining as that might have been.
Erik wasn't too keen on her beer selection and called for another pitcher of something else. Which was probably where trouble began, because it made ordering two of the same seem like a good idea when the first ones were gone.
Luke had tasted the beer and looked slightly surprised before going back for a bigger sip, so Jane figured her plan to get him drunk enough to loosen up was well on its way. The fact that the plan became increasingly fuzzy as the evening wore on reminded her that she was much, much smaller than either of the men and would likely be off her face before they could get past buzzed. Slowing her consumption to a crawl allowed her to observe her mentor getting happier with every pint and Luke being utterly unchanged. And that the room was still tilting a bit more than usual.
He could not possibly have so much more alcohol-mitigating muscle mass than Erik did, he was too thin. Yet, beer disappeared from his glass just as quickly and he remained incongruously, annoyingly sober.
"Luke, be real with me, because it's seriously killing me." She leaned her elbow on the table to support her cheek, ignoring the wounded glare she was getting from Erik for interrupting his anecdote mid-sentence. "I'm a scientist and my curiosity is the curiosity of ten regular men."
"I have noted that about you, strangely enough."
She frowned at him, at his mild tone, wondering if he was aware that sarcasm was anger's ugly cousin. "Well, answer me then!"
"I would, Jane," Luke allowed in the same patient voice, "if you had asked me a question."
Jane stared at the empty and half-empty pitchers on the table and tried to recall the conversation. She watched Erik's fingers clumsily playing with a wayward curly fry and couldn't even remember what she had been thinking about. "I asked it in my head."
"Alas, I am not privy to what dwells there unless it makes its way out."
"You really think you can make a matter-antimatter annihilation engine of a not only humanly possible, but easily workable size?" Erik suddenly asked, snapping back to much earlier in the evening. He swayed slightly, his words stumbling over each other. "What do you know that all of the scientific community doesn't know?"
Smiling enigmatically, Luke poured himself another beer. "Much, I should think."
Erik frowned at Jane and she shrugged. In her cups and at this precipice of weirdness, she was prepared to believe it.
"And you have a desktop-sized particle accelerator that somehow doesn't need outside power. That's what you're telling me."
Luke sipped and Jane watched him lick his lips a little more shamelessly than she would have if her bloodstream weren't so flooded by judgement impairing chemicals. He didn't seem to notice. "Perhaps."
Erik staggered to his feet. "This is worse than the other guy."
"And look how that turned out." Jane muttered, more optimistic than it made any sense to be. Maybe it was just the beer, but right now she thought Luke could do all the things he was intimating that he could. His knowledge was so weird. So empirical. Maybe he'd experienced the natural world somehow differently and his insight was genuine. Stranger things had happened; to her, even. She blinked as Erik turned away. "Where are you going?"
"Home to bed. I think I'm dreaming again."
They stared at him as he made his slow way to the door, then they looked at each other.
"I will escort you back to your laboratory," Luke announced with a certain gentlemanly propriety that registered his disapproval of Erik leaving her to her own devices in a vulnerable state. She was about to object to the possible implications of this sentiment when he stood up- with all of his accustomed grace and not even the smallest sign of intoxication- and she pitched forward trying to follow him. He caught her by the shoulder and held her up unobtrusively with just the tips of his fingers. "I must insist you take my arm, under the circumstances."
Giggling to herself over his ridiculous manners, she slid to the edge of the booth and curled her hand under and around his raised forearm, using him as a crutch to lever herself up and semi-accidentally flinging herself off the raised platform they'd been seated on. He didn't give a millimetre for a single instant under the sudden pressure of her entire body weight swinging on the extremity of his fully extended arm, the muscles had not even braced involuntarily against the unexpected load. "Do you work out?" she blurted as she got her feet under her again. He was so strong.
"Out of doors?" he asked, puzzled, steadying her again with his free hand as he began to lead her towards the exit. He had to bend down so she could lean on his arm, and vastly shorten his long stride to accommodate her drunken gait.
She tried to muffle her laughter in her sleeve and snorted. "No. Never mind."
The cool night air woke her up a bit and she touched her flushed cheeks self-consciously. "Luke, really, what are you doing here? I keep asking and you keep deflecting."
"I have answered you at least twice, Jane." He spoke slowly, as if she were very stupid.
"Okay, so you're super fascinated by my research and I grant you that no one is doing what I'm doing. I guess that makes sense, but Luke, you are terrifyingly brilliant, you've got money. If you're so interested and have so many ideas, I don't get what you need me for." There was a part of her that was feeling almost as afraid as she was excited by the possibilities she recognised in his thoughts, part of her that had enough room left after the professional awe and pride to be insecure. This was her life's work and he was grasping it all so quickly, there was an academic misfit at the back of her brain racked with fear of losing her extremely hard-earned place to someone who was just naturally, effortlessly better.
When he answered, he sounded far away, "You said it yourself, Jane. You are a scientist. I am an amateur."
"Right." She clutched his arm a little harder as they descended a curb to cross the street. "So why do you say you have nothing else to do in the whole world? That can't be true."
"Can't it?"
She shot him a look, trying to glare so many daggers at his aristocratic profile that he'd actually feel the sting. "Apart from the obvious, there's also the fact that you're rich and interesting and charismatic, you could probably make your 'not obscene' fortune truly offensive in any career you felt like trying."
"Likely I could," he conceded, "But what would be the point? Did I ever lead you to believe that money and notoriety are the things I desire to gain from this enterprise? What is 'the obvious'?"
"I mean, the obvious fact that you can't hurt for company."
He slowed their already glacial progress. "How is that?"
Sensing something dangerous lurking around this conversation, Jane swallowed her instinctive sharp retort and tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was just confused. "Like, I doubt Johnny Depp goes home alone unless he wants to."
"Who?"
"He's an actor."
"Oh, yes," he said in a manner that suggested he'd heard of him after all. Jane doubted it.
She was sure he was missing the plot still anyway. "Really, really good-looking."
He stared ahead blankly, apparently not seeing the relevance of this information. "Ah, indeed. Not having any prize-worthy features, I try to save myself the energy consumed in envy by avoiding notice of such things."
Jane nearly choked. He turned to her with a look of equal parts such profound reproach that she wanted to bake him an apology cake and a warning of terrible anger should she persist in this course.
"Oh," she murmured in total shock, "you're serious?"
He'd stopped altogether, his head tilted as he looked at her uneasily, his lips pressed together with an air of palpable defensiveness. She noticed his hair coming unstuck again, falling slightly away from his scalp above his ears but still in its shellacked lines where the comb had pulled through. The hand not supporting her was shoved into his pocket and his posture was as staunchly upright as ever, though he seemed to be leaning away from her.
"Are you going to stand there and tell me you're not aware of what you look like?"
It was almost like she'd slapped him. He opened his mouth to make what was obviously going to be the most hurtful comment he could think of probably followed by some tirade about what he thought he looked like, but she headed him off at the pass, finally convinced he was operating under some very serious delusions.
"You are incredibly handsome, I cannot believe you don't know that. Did you not see those girls at the bar with their tongues hanging out? Didn't Darcy harass you? She must have. She has no filter between her brain and her mouth and she told me what she thought of you. Like, whatever your issues, you can't tell me you went to University and everything and didn't find out that you were hot."
He was turning an interesting colour and he was fidgeting frantically with his jacket, his voice strangled as he answered, "I assure you I did not. At home... it was very clear that I was not... No one there would have considered me attractive. I fit absolutely none of the standards, and I was very much aware of it. I find it difficult to believe standards could be so different elsewhere."
Jane felt like this might be the weirdest encounter she'd had with him yet. It couldn't be countenanced. It just could not. The evidence was overwhelmingly against it. Even right then, uncomfortable and discombobulated to the point that he looked as though he'd like to die on the spot, he was so preposterously lovely that she honestly could not imagine a world in which he was not Considered Attractive. She wanted to kiss along the lengths of his beautiful fingers and run her hands over the wide breadth of his shoulders and down the long muscles of his back to his slim waist. She wanted to scratch her nails gently through his hair until it fell soft and curly, the way it obviously wanted to be. Hell, she wanted to kiss that strange, haunted look off his heartbreakingly pretty face and nuzzle his perfect cheekbones.
Yep, she was drunk. Point being, there was no way this man could be called ugly. He could not be this insecure.
Patting his arm, she tried to smile reassuringly. "Honey, things are that different. Believe me. Now help me get home before you have to carry me."
He was saying something in response, but she didn't really hear; the last couple beers were metabolising and she was still getting more sloshed. They were at her trailer before she'd really regathered her brain cells. She got the door open, but she stared at the steep steps and large gap between trailer and ground with mournful certainty that she wouldn't make it. Luke made a wordless 'permission to touch?' motion and, at her nod, held her gently by the elbows and lifted her over the stairs entirely, waiting for her to get a grip on something before he let go.
He bowed to her slightly and shut the door before she could think of anything to say.
There would be a lot of thoughts to be had about this in the morning, she was sure. Right now, however, there was only sleep.