One Year Later
It had been a year. One year since Jane had fled back to the United States from London. One year since she measured her life in unmarked cardboard boxes and drove North to seek the one thing she needed most after London: sanctuary.
She does not talk about what happened in London, having explained enough to the police and SHEILD what she had suffered. One year since she put Darcy and Erik in the ground.
Jane Foster lives a silent life concealed in a stone, English-style cottage on the northern peninsula of Wisconsin. She remembers visiting the sleepy towns there from when she was a child. After her mom left, her dad no longer had the energy to take her back to a place that had too many memories for the both of them. Jane figured they were the perfect place for her to hide. Only busy nine months out of the year, lots of money to be made by the tourists, then when winter came, they'd crawl back to their cities. A perfect lifestyle for someone not wanting to be found, Jane thought. The tourists don't go outside of the town limits, they stuck close to the local attractions like moths to a flame. With the hype of the summer holiday, no one would be paying attention, among the hundreds of people, to a meek waitress in the local bar. No one would question the quiet girl that lived a quiet life.
The cottage isn't a large homestead by any means, but enough to live on. Two bedroom, one bath, kitchen, dining room, living room. Small. Simple. Perfect.
Jane Foster lives a simple life. It's the daily routine, the bland normality that gives her a sense of control. She needed a bit of control in her life since armored gods among other aliens started showing up on her doorstep. With not a soul to speak to about her experiences, it is easy to avoid answering questions. It was easy to fall into a sense of normality in that quiet northern Wisconsin town. But the ghosts of her vacant thoughts are what keep her up at night: ghosts of intruders, death, and complete and utter hopelessness.
Jane always wakes before dawn, having not really slept through the night previously. The season just slipped into winter, inconspicuously like rigor mortis. Slowly the life drained out of all the living things, the tourists left with the growing chill, green turns to brown, then became coated in a thick blanket of snow. And just like that it became winter.
The faint dawning light touches the diamond-like icicles dangling in the treetops, she chops wood. After that, Jane will make a bowl of cereal that she won't eat much of, maybe a cup of coffee (black, spoonful of honey) she may take a sip or two of. When it's particularly chilly she'll throw a few logs into the fire place and sit on the wood floor. There she'll sit until the flames turn to embers, turn to ash.
She became fascinated by fire, how it consumed everything it touched, turning it black, withering it until its nothing more than dust to blow into the wind. Fire knows no control. It will grow until it's devoured everything it can touch, laying waste to everything it comes nearer to. Jane was familiar with the feeling.
It has been more than a year since she had had any contact from Thor.
He hadn't contacted her since the Convergence. She shakes her head of the thought, a twisting pain in her gut. She tries not to think about what happened after London.
It was after the defeat of Malekith, months after in fact, when she had neither heard nor seen any sign of any unearthly visitors. While Darcy and Erik so easily fell back into their daily routines and research, Jane felt like a rock in a stream, unable to move, unable to breath. Thunder roared the night of the third month, but Thor had still not returned. Jane began to have nightmares, her mind deteriorating in a darkness that consumed her. Every night when she shut her eyes, Jane felt as if she moved like a wisp of smoke from her body, across the sky, through the stars. These dreams were not hers and Jane knew it, she knew it like the way you know your house has been broken into even before you notice the front door ajar.
The dreams were of the Aether. Yes. It dreamed. The Aether, ancient and cunning, latched itself to Jane's mind. A being inside her that didn't belong to the conceivability of a mere mortal like herself, it would only be a matter of time before it'd tear her apart. She could feel it scratching at the walls of her mind, ever going closer to freeing itself and releasing whatever hellish apocalypse dreams it had conjured.
She'd close her eyes and feel the prickle of it crawling through her veins like a pestilence, gnawing at her from the inside, like she had swallowed a ball of flame that cooked her from the inside out until she was a charred, unrecognizable corpse. Every night she'd burn with the heat of a sun not of her realm, hurtling through the sky, destroying, crisping, smiting everything thing she touched. Jane did not allow herself to believe that there was any possible way that the Aether could have held on after Svartalfheim. Malekith had drained her of it, pulled every drop from her essence until she were nothing more than an empty sack of flesh. Yet, every night it was the same, her spirit moving across dimensions, across time, reliving every painful memory, every second of it. Always the journey would end with Jane standing in the decrepit remains of Svartalfheim, a red light descending upon her. What Jane didn't realize was that the Aether sensed the danger to its host, the Aether tried to warn her.
The night of the fourth month, visitors came from another realm. It was not Thor. And Thor never came for his precious Jane Foster, and that, Jane would never forget.
After she left the hospital, it was a quick funeral for her companions. She found she couldn't speak about Darcy or Erik anymore. Jane had spoken to the SHIELD enough about what happened. She found her lips couldn't even form the syllables to their names anymore, not since the funerals.
The nightmares worsened. The Aether filled in the cracks of the shattered pieces the experience left her with.
The red hair dye was cheap, the hair cut even cheaper considering she did it in her bathroom mirror with a pair of crafting scissors. Then she booked a ticket to New York.
Jane can't recall why she bothered packing her research. The stars no longer interested her. In a few cardboard boxes, Jane packed the ingredients to a new life. She landed in New York, a very different New York than she had remembered. She wasn't surprised to find that Tony Stark had pretty much paid for half (if not all) of the city's renovations of destroyed buildings, while simultaneously converting them to clean power. Jane knew that being connected to such a person as he, she would most certainly come under the public eye.
Jane Foster needed to hide, escape questions that were bound to be asked, ones she'd rather not answer. She was sick of questions, sick of explaining. Sick of trying to reason why her hero had not come for her in her most dire time of need.
Jane Foster needed to disappear. First, she went to a bank and emptied her account. Five-hundred thousand in cash was deposited by SHIELD for her troubles. It wasn't nearly enough to cover at the very least the emotional damage caused to Jane. 'Compensations' they called it, like the money could patch up the pain that had already been done.
SHEILD's money, coupled with her life savings was more than enough to start fresh. Jane spent the first day very, very, very, paranoid with all that money in two large brief cases. After the bank, she hit a lawyer's office. Turns out changing your name is a lot easier than you'd think. All she had to do is show her passport, provide the new name, sign the paper, boom. Voila. Jane Foster became Johana (Jo) Smith. She knew it wasn't original in the least, but it'd be enough.
With that done, she filled her suitcase with a new wardrobe, plain clothes fit for cold weather. She knew exactly where she was going, and four to five months out of the year that place was an icy wasteland. The next day she caught a cab to a dealership in the far west suburbs, a shady place but the shadier the better. She couldn't risk people tracking her with credit card receipts or dealership cameras, especially SHIELD. From now on, everything cash, no electronic trails of any kind. The truck was used but sturdy; an old grey Ford pickup, 1978.
Next came the drive. She hadn't been to this place since she was a kid with her parents. The truck obviously didn't have GPS and she was far too paranoid to ask for directions. A lot of time was spent sleeping on the shoulder of the highway, or figuring out she had missed her exit and had to back track miles to get back on the right path. Jane had also never drank so much coffee in her life, not since she had to write her thesis on astronomical theories back in grad-school. She found a new love for beef jerkey and red bull, which was probably going to make her need dental work when she got to her destination.
It was about a four-day drive, up to the Wisconsin peninsula. During a stop, she had got a hold of a realtor on a pay phone (she had thrown away her cellphone at a garbage in Heathrow airport) and found that the house was fairly cheap, hadn't been fixed since the 70's but it was useable. When Jane drove up the relator was waiting, one look through the small house and Jane signed the papers that day. She paid in cash, of course, which earned a strange look from the relator but nothing more than that. Jane crafted the excuse that she was simply paranoid of banks and serially avoided them. Jane had a newfound appreciation for people who didn't ask questions. Most of the furniture was bought with the house, other was rummaged from various garage sales from the good-folk of Sister Bay, Wisconsin. The house itself was miles outside of town, set on three acres of forest property all for Jane. The nearest neighbor was probably a ten minute drive. Jane liked that, liked the idea of isolation, solitude. She hadn't had much of that since London. It was the first Christmas she spent alone, and Jane Foster couldn't have been more content.
Nobody wondered about the misty-eyed red haired woman living by herself in the woods. Summer was fast and full of strangers, no one to recognize Jane, although she wasn't named 'Jane Foster' anymore. It took some time getting used to her new name and identity. To anyone that would ask: she grew up in Chicago, quit college to become a writer and came up to Wisconsin for the peace and quiet to write. It was an easy story for people to understand, and it was left at that. Autumn was short but full of gorgeous colors that coaxed Jane into the wilderness every day. Winter became quiet, and the midnight sky became the enemy. All Jane could see was the vast blanket of stars above her, stitched into an obsidian sky, the moon a pearl in the black sea.
Jane could swear, she could hear the wind whistling through the trees, whispering her name like a prayer. She swears when she looked into the stars, that she felt them staring back. Right into the core of her soul. The Aether shifted inside her, she could feel it like a cold snake wrapped around her guts. It didn't like her looking at the stars. So she didn't.
It been a year since all of that excitement.
Now, Jane follows the same routine everyday with contented ease. She fills the time with sketching. It became the only way for her to 'talk' about her past. Sometimes she sketches the face of a golden god, other times it's a red sky filled with dread. Sometimes it's the trees, other times it's a curved sword. Sometimes it's an animal, other times its two bodies. But what's the difference, it's all prey.
Jane fills the time with walks through her property. Trips into town for supplies. Sometimes to the frozen pier where she can imagine herself plunging into the icy depths and disappearing forever.
Everything has order, a place to be put, a use. Nothing is extraneous, and what is found to be is burned. Like her old passport, old driver's liscense, old birth certificate, old pictures, old life. That first New Year's day was a bonfire of what used to be Jane Foster.
