13. Gift
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By the time she surfaced long enough from Darcy's stream of outrageous anecdotes ("This one professor, Jane, my hand to God, this one professor accidentally showed a class of two hundred students glamour photos of his fully articulated, custom-built wolf costume, and the only person who said anything said 'I don't think that's the kind of cultural attire that's politically advantageous, sir' and it may have been me.") to say her goodbyes and step outside, the sky was getting dark. Her belly ached from laughing and her mood couldn't have been better even if she were certain where her research- where her life- was taking her. She enjoyed the thrill of limitless possibilities, including scary ones, a little more than she probably should.
Half expecting that the lab would be deserted, she huffed in amusement at seeing Luke again passed out on the couch in a sprawl of long limbs. He probably hadn't managed to remain upright and mobile for very long after he'd finished eating, not judging by the way he was dragging around before she left. Or perhaps he had: she noticed two piles of neatly folded clothing had materialised on the coffee table, and turning around confirmed that all the dishes had been washed and stacked beside the sink. Well. Jane couldn't fairly expect him to intuitively master her cupboard's esoteric flatware filing system no matter how smart he was. It would have baffled Feynman.
She leaned in the doorway a moment longer, surveying her lab in the dim blue glow of her various screen savers and the light pollution flooding in through the glass walls. Luke's chest rose and fell, his arm covering his eyes to create some artificial darkness. He must be staying pretty damn close by if he could walk there and back in his condition while she'd been gone. The town was tiny, and the next one over was an hour's drive away. It couldn't be Mandy's B and B, the only official temporary lodging available on the main street, because the sign had said the room was free when they passed it the other day. There was an extremely aged railway hotel somewhere on the outskirts, but she wasn't sure it was actually operating any more. The truckers tended to stay in their trucks and no one else really passed through.
Maybe he had an RV parked in the desert and would die of embarrassment when he was found out. She could imagine it; she might even put money on it. Either way, she would find out eventually.
Content, she locked the lab door and turned back toward her trailer.
.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.
It was like the world's dorkiest, most oddly-matched poker game.
Erik was at the head of the kitchen table wearing a forbidding glower and his Serious Professional Scientist uniform, a charcoal grey Calvert U polo shirt and tweed jacket with matching trousers. Jacket and trousers were both a bit old and slightly too small, but he wore them with fierce dignity. Jane was in a nervous fiddling loop to his left, playing alternatively with a pen, the end of her plaited hair, and the falling hem of her Little Miss Naughty t-shirt (Darcy's idea of a joke, but Jane didn't turn down free clothes). Her jeans had small vampire bite rips in the calf from snagging on an open computer case, but they were intact above the knee so she considered them perfectly wearable. Luke sat across from her dressed in some hand-tailored nonsense, including a white, silk shirt with real French cuffs and cuff-links she strongly suspected of being gold. He hadn't bothered to comb his hair for the second day in a row, and it curled away from his face into a natural tousle which was attractive at a level she found totally unfair.
Three questionable fashion decisions stared each other down across the linoleum in the middle of an ex-auto showroom turned physics laboratory-slash-observatory with showroom windows and a truly eclectic collection of vinyl and chrome furniture. In the desert. At two fifteen in the afternoon, because none of them had remembered to set an alarm and Jane had slept in until a reasonable time to have lunch. But it was all very serious. A serious meeting to be taken seriously.
Jane wondered where she had gone wrong in life.
"Jane tells me the two of you have overcome the hard limitations of particle physics and created cheap antimatter," Erik's voice broke the Mexican stand-off which had settled over them as they took their places at the table. Jane doubted his tone would help to resolve tensions.
Luke wasn't the least intimidated. "So I have been informed. I was not well-versed in the discipline."
"No," Erik agreed thoughtfully, "I could tell that you weren't. How do you account for such a diverse understanding of the mechanisms of the universe without access to the building blocks that scientists use to form those understandings, Jane?"
She started in surprise when he turned the question on her at the last moment, his eyes flicking from Luke's to hers. Jane cleared her throat and folded her hands on the table, trying to take this half as seriously as Erik clearly wanted her to. She had been ready to press ahead and deal with repercussions after the dust cleared, but he seemed determined to get his interrogation in regardless of her protests. At least she'd firmly vetoed disassembling of the device and grilling Luke about the parts. It had involved flashing her biggest, most soulful and glistening puppy eyes; when that didn't work, she'd told him trust was a two-way street and she wasn't prepared to negotiate to what extent he was allowed to torture her research partner.
"He did have some formal background," Jane deflected, nodding towards the mystery himself, "you went to school all over and Oxford for a while, you said, and I can see gathering ideas more than… you know, crunching the numbers, if you're that kind of learner. It's not totally outside possibility, obviously, or we wouldn't be having this conversation."
"But you created new quinary alloys, that's a different area again; where did you learn metallurgy? Not at Oxford." Erik turned back to Luke and blinked innocently. Jane wanted to roll her eyes.
"I'm a hobbyist, Dr. Selvig. I have acquired many trades from many teachers." Luke smiled winsomely at Erik, giving as good as he got, and Jane now wanted to knock their heads together.
Erik seemed to realise he wasn't going to win, or even keep up, in any kind of verbal fencing match and decided to lay his cards on the table. "You're from a small and troubled African nation, but you have access to unknown elements and the advanced application of those elements. You appeared out of the aether to join up with our little operation in the middle of nowhere without asking for any kind of reimbursement for your time. And you don't seem to have anywhere else to be. I don't know what that adds up to, but it adds up to something."
"Naturally," Luke said, "it adds up to my being wealthy and well-travelled and sadly bored by what little stimulation the world at large has to offer to an inquisitive mind. If I pursue novelty and I have means and time to pursue it as thoroughly as I pursued this, why is it difficult to believe that I have discovered a fringe your insular scientific community has never noticed coming into existence? I am surprised at you, Dr. Selvig, discounting the concept so completely after what you have seen first hand."
Erik pulled at the skin under his chin and looked between Jane and Luke with calculation in his eyes. He couldn't know whether Luke was talking about the earlier incidents in his career which he had barely told Jane about or whether Jane had told Luke about Thor. It occurred to her that she probably should have brought him up to speed on the fact that she'd blabbed the big one, but she found herself not regretting failing to do so at all. What was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander.
"All right, granted the fact that there's a non-zero probability of literally anything happening and sometimes it does, there could be three new elements and clean energy being put to good use by private enterprises in Kyrgyzstan right now and maybe you could have discovered this kind of thing on your own." His tone made it clear that he sincerely doubted it, but he was willing to allow it in the interests of moving on. "Even if those components of yours have all the necessary properties as a natural factor of their composition, how were the particles accelerated in such a short beamline- how did you generate the energy needed for the reaction?"
Worrying his thumbnail again, Luke chewed his lip once before answering, "I would think you have some theories."
"I would think so, too, but annoyingly I haven't got the foggiest."
Luke's gaze didn't waver from Erik's face as he digested that, but his eyes subtly widened and his jaw went the tiniest bit slack. Jane could tell he was utterly stunned and could practically feel his burning need to look over at her and try to ask her what the hell she was playing at with eyebrow messages. Instead he took a breath and shrugged with pointed nonchalance. "Could it not also be attributed to the device?"
"You don't know everything it does?" Jane cut in, diverting the line of questioning slightly.
They both turned to her, Erik with an irritated 'I was getting to that' frown and Luke with shining gratitude that made him seem terrifyingly breakable. Luke said, "I never said that I created the alloys," and while his tone was businesslike, his expression was all for Jane, agonised and puzzled and hopeful. She tamped down some fluttery nervous response to all that uncertainty and tried to convey to him not to say anything without making any stupidly obvious gestures.
"You pick up fringe technology and you don't share it?" Erik took the bait, crossing his arms and putting his chin to his chest as he stared Luke down disapprovingly from under a furrowed brow.
"I shared with Jane," Luke defended, and his accent was so clipped that it wouldn't have sounded out of place if he'd started referring to himself in the royal plural like Queen Victoria. "Jane will share with the world."
"Personal pursuit doesn't come before the good of humanity! Scientific progress belongs to the world, you have a duty to- Jane!" Erik spread his hands and gave her a helpless look.
She didn't disagree, but at the same time, it was more complicated than that. Particularly in this case, where she had recently finished deciding that it was more important to pursue her research to its furthest extremity before bogging herself down in the endless bureaucracy and politics of the professional community. Not to mention the shadiness of SHIELD and their private idea of what constituted the greater good. She pushed her pen along with her index finger as she stalled, "I do have a duty, I think everyone does, especially someone with my education and the privilege of an opportunity like this. I take that very seriously, but we do have to use our judgement about when is the right time to go public. It's not as simple as going on the five o'clock news. The community can bury you when you say something they don't like, something that'll shift the paradigm, even if it's the truth."
"Scientists-"
Jane put up a hand and glared sternly at her mentor. "Don't tell me scientists are above factionalism and bias and flat-Earthing, Erik, don't tell me that. I know personally that that is not true. In an ideal world we'd all go where the evidence takes us and remain impartial, but this is the real world. People are people, and people fall short of ideals even when they are trying their hardest."
A computer fan roared to life and all three of them jumped a little. Luke recovered first, but he was still tracing his lip and running obvious calculations over his internal sketch of Jane. She seemed to have given him something to think about.
"Not that it's all awful or anything," Jane added, "I just…"
Erik leaned over and patted her shoulder to show he understood what she meant, a tiny bit of contrition on his face for having nearly put his foot in it.
"I would explain my methods and materials to you both, and I would entrust you with teaching your community about them, but I'm afraid I still lack the necessary finesse with jargon," Luke said by way of conciliation.
"You're doing really, really well," Erik assured him ruefully. "Much better than I did for years when I was learning English terminology, and I had something to translate from. They try to keep it pretty standardised, but physics is an old field."
Luke bowed his head in acknowledgement, making a subtle flourish with his left hand.
"What should be our next step? We've got potential multiple petajoules of pure kinetic energy right now and we can make more any time, now what?" Jane had some thoughts, but she wanted to test the waters and form something that at least resembled a plan of action. She'd never needed so much input before, being- to put it nicely- something of a tenaciously independent spirit.
"I will leave the design and construction of whatever harvesting engine is necessary to your superior experience and understanding," Luke said quietly, his voice low and smooth. Jane supposed it was his lack of defensiveness and the absence of the abrasive veneer of his habitual arrogance which made him sound so much more at ease. It changed him when he managed to relax. "Of course, I will be anxious to assist and to learn."
"Right, but then..." She felt that sensation in her stomach like she was in a roller coaster cresting the first hill, about to go over.
"Then I will have more to say and more to do, and I will craft you wonders from quantum entanglement to rival the miracle of the toaster strudel." Luke grinned mischievously at her, and Jane found herself blushing at someone else's goofy joke. That was a first. He laughed at her reaction and her flush deepened.
Erik looked away with a long-suffering sigh. "Sounds promising. We're going to need to figure out how we'll capture the energy when we allow the antimatter to annihilate. I was planning on going into the city next week, anyway, if there's any industrial material you think we can use. I'll try to bring back enough precautionary equipment to keep us all from drowning in gamma rays if we start poking quarks with sticks. SHIELD gave me a budget for project resources to supplement yours, Jane, but granted the number of zeroes they might not have bothered naming a figure."
"Can we come?"
He practically made a Scooby sound, his head whipping back to face her. "What?"
"Well, Darcy has been dying to show me what I'm missing by choosing to live alone in the desert for so long and it's probably as well we're all there to figure out how we're going to proceed if we find anything workable. It's not like we have access to a reactor core, we might build the whole thing into the bridge opener and save motions. You can help, can't you, Luke?"
"I-"
"I'm sorry, I should have asked that more like an... less... do you want to come? I'd love to have you, but you don't have to or anything."
His slow smile was guileless and adorably lopsided, just the left side of his mouth tugging upward in pleased surprise. "Yes, thank you."
.,.,.,.,.,.,.
The brainstorming session had broken up for dinner around eight and having gorged on half a small roasted chicken she'd made, Jane had found herself feeling thoughtful and claustrophobic. She switched on the neon-starburst fascinator sign that crowned the lab and went looking for kindling.
Stirring the fire with the end of a stick until flames started leaping high and bright, Jane then threw it in and settled her blanket more closely around her shoulders. The dry air was chilling rapidly and the cold was starting to seep into the collar and sleeves of her jacket. She crossed her legs on the ratty lawn chair and pulled her feet up towards her, tucking the edge of the blanket under her boots.
The roof was still her sanctuary. With the chairs turned out to face the desert, the only sign of civilisation she could see was the vague halo of back light from the town encroaching on the edge of the absolute blackness. Jane could fancy herself alone in the universe for as long as that thought remained appealing. It had been some time, actually, since she'd felt the need. Her brooding after Thor's departure and her first few failures to launch had taken the form of a listless revision, paperwork and naps, and she'd been thrilled and busy ever since the funk was broken.
Funny how Darcy managed to be right so often.
She reached down beside her for her Thermos of peppermint tea and stared at the grid she'd formed in her brain and superimposed over the stars, breaking up the night sky into closely observed quadrants and hardly observed quadrants. The coordinates of Thor's Einstein-Rosen bridge were in her Closest Observed Quadrant. Blue-shifted cosmic rays, that was what Luke had been mumbling about in his exhaustion when she'd plied him with scrambled eggs and tomatoes the night before, if you knew where to look when the bridge opened.
Jane sipped her tea and rolled over to look at the fire instead.
She remembered Thor's earnest, ingratiating helpfulness as he tried to offer her his knowledge of the universe. Between the language barrier (technobabble to poetic metaphor), Thor's lack of true interest in the subject beyond that it aroused so much wonder in Jane, and her brain falling asleep on her, they hadn't gotten that far. He'd wanted to tell her his cosmology like a story and she'd spent a couple moments thinking about Asgardian culture and wondering how their technology fit into their society before she'd been unable to stop herself interrupting him with more specific questions. Few of which he'd been equipped to answer the way she wanted them answered.
If they built a bridge, if they made contact with Thor's people: what would come of it?
There was Thor and his new found sweetness, his friends and the reassuring fact that they had defended Puente Antiguo on instinct, but there was also the giant metal deathbot. That was from Asgard, too. She had no idea what had been going down on the other side of that wormhole or what exactly had happened when Thor went home. Were these people really safe, were they allies?
Now that it appeared genuinely likely she really might see them again, sooner rather than later, she had no idea what to expect. She'd been too exhilarated to properly speculate on mundanities back when she was sure it was within her grasp, and then it had seemed like borrowing trouble when she was clearly so far from making progress.
A pebble hit the roof in front of her chair and rolled toward her. Frowning, she followed its trajectory over the side and down to the ground. Luke stood there in jeans and a predictably smart pea coat, his stance slightly nervous.
"May I join you?" he asked stiffly when he saw her looking. He didn't raise his voice at all and if it weren't so dead silent out here at night, she would never have heard him.
Jane sat back and wondered if there had been something to Erik's acerbic comment earlier about whether Luke was just moving in. She decided she didn't care if there was. "Just a second, I'll come down and let you in."
"No need to trouble yourself," his reply drifted up from somewhere below, but she could no longer see him. Momentarily, his hands appeared on the lip of the roof and he shortly pulled himself up as easily as if his feet were on the ground. He walked over to her little camp site and drew the other lawn chair close to hers.
Jane guessed she was sleepier than she'd thought, but she found herself just blinking at him in incredulous confusion.
"It is not a difficult climb," he defended playfully against her look, not even breathing heavily.
They sat together in the quiet for a few minutes. She watched the play of the fire and the shifting of shadows, her eyes sometimes drifting inexorably upward to the stars and sometimes over to him. His fair skin glowed in the warm light while the rest of him was swallowed in darkness, framed as he was by the perpetual black of his hair and clothes. It suited him very well, all that contrast, but she thought it might be nice to rally her sartorial sensibilities and buy him a colour if a suitable opportunity ever arose.
"Jane, today..." Luke tried, his eyes on his fingers twisting together in his lap. "Today..."
"Mmm?" she encouraged, pretending to concentrate on Sirius instead of on him.
He sneaked a glance at her, then dipped his head again. "You did not share with Dr. Selvig your induction that I am personally responsible for the energy of the atom-smasher. Not only did you not tell him I had all but affirmed its truth, you deliberately distracted him from the question and prevented my giving it away when I assumed that you had." Apparently still unable to look at her, he winced at his hands. "You took my part against your own interests, for no purpose I can imagine. Why?"
"I said I'd trust you. I didn't think any one of us needed some Spanish Inquisition hanging over the project from now on, and I wanted to spare you something you're obviously really uncomfortable with. You're giving me a lot, I see that, so I can be patient when there's something you want to keep for a while." She reached over to take one of his hands, forcing him to stop fidgeting. He lifted his head, his eyes moving back and forth between hers, trying to read something he expected to find there. She squeezed his fingers and smiled gently. "I don't want you to feel like... like you're just a means to an end around here. You're not."
His expression told her he didn't believe it, he almost looked nauseated by the suggestion he should. "You wait for me to tell you in fear of driving me off. You indulge me for my abilities as you indulged me at first for my mind. Your curiosity and your need are all that allows me access here."
Jane bared her teeth and let out an exasperated sigh. His paradoxical amalgamation of profound insecurity and pure egoism was severely fraying her patience. "I wanted you to stay before you built the accelerator. I was curious, but contrary to popular belief, curiosity doesn't make all my decisions for me. Everything else aside, I kinda like having you around."
Luke clearly had no idea what to do with this information. His fine eyebrows knit together as he frowned at her. "Why?"
"Well, you're not a little bit clever and interesting, but that's not all there is to being friends. I just like your company. Isn't that enough?"
He turned to look back over the town and his face fell into shadow. Heavy silence seemed to blanket him.
Eventually feeling her gaze drawn back to the night sky by how truly extraordinary Sirius really did look on a flawlessly clear fall evening, she found herself stargazing. The wonder of mere existence was never lost on her when she looked up and saw the distant past looking back. Photons were life and death and knowledge, and Jane Foster saw the infinite quite clearly written across the the span of that visible-invisible quantum of light.
One might say that she looked upon a pinhead and saw angels dancing.
"You never look at the stars," she observed quietly some time later, a little surprised by the realisation.
Luke dropped two chunks of hardwood on the coals of the fire and the light level started to climb again, illuminating his pensive expression. Apparently troubled, he glanced up at the sky as if to confirm that they were where he'd left them.
"Astrophysics obviously isn't your passion. What is?"
There was an extensive pause. Luke looked hesitant and sheepish.
"A theory of everything," he said at length.
Jane giggled. "You don't do anything by half do you? That's awfully ambitious."
"Nonetheless. It is a contrary little secret of mine that my very dearest hope is to discover that the world makes sense."
Not much chance of it, I'm terribly sorry to say, she thought, smiling widely to herself.
He smiled faintly back, his hand slipping into his coat pocket while he dithered. "Jane, I should like... there is something I should like you to have."
Sitting up, she pulled herself closer. "I don't... what for?" He couldn't possibly have some other technological marvel up his sleeve so soon. She forbade it for the sake of her peace of mind.
He drew his hand out of his pocket again, something silver and shiny flashing in the firelight. As he held it out to her, balancing it by the edges between his fingertips and thumb, she saw that it was a few millimetre thick, palm-sized disk engraved with dozens of circles and inlaid with gold flourishes. She took it from him and rotated the outer rim of the disk, the inner circles and rete arm, touching the intricacies of the craftsmanship, appreciating the teeny scale of the precision work and the still functional quality of the whimsical design. The pointers were tiny swordsmen and bowmen.
"It's-" Luke was stuttering, taking her rapt silence for confusion.
She interrupted before he could start floundering, "It's an astrolabe. An inclinometer used since antiquity by astronomers and navigators. When I was a grad student, I had a professor who collected them. This is the most elaborate face I've ever seen in person."
"Yes," the word came out as a relieved sigh.
"It's beautiful." She looked down again, tilting it back and forth to catch the light, taken by it. Not understanding why he'd brought it, she tried to give it back.
Luke shook his head and pressed it into her hand. "It's yours to keep. A gift."
Jane gasped a little, enchanted and reluctant all at once. "For me? What's the occasion?"
His usually impeccable posture had finally broken down, his shoulders hunched and his face tucked in bashfully. His hair fell across his forehead and her fingers itched to brush it away. "I owe you, Jane. I do owe you."
She saw what this was. She saw a part of him so clearly now and for a moment it all made so much sense.
"Thank-you," she said with feeling, reaching over to put her hand on his shoulder, meeting his searching blue eyes with firmness and gratitude. "Thank-you so much, it's beautiful and thoughtful and I love it."
They looked at each other for a long moment. Jane was holding her breath, not knowing how to say what she felt she had to say.
"You know, you don't have to earn your keep to be welcome here. You don't have to mark a tally. I'm not keeping score. Where did you get this?" She held up the astrolabe.
His voice was reedy with hesitation, "I made it for you."
She swallowed questions and emotions and stayed in the moment. "It's wonderful. I'll cherish it. Don't bribe me, Luke. You don't need to."
His jaw worked, but she leaned in and slid her hand down his back, pressing her face into the hollow between his throat and shoulder as she hugged him tightly. He was warm and smelled like rain, but he was so tense. She squeezed once and released him.
"You don't need to."