Bunker - Dec 19
LOCKED To BRUCE & THOR
If there is one single thing Jane Foster is absolutely sure of in life, right now, this very moment, it is this: She really hates Asgardians.
...Okay so, maybe
hate is kind of a strong word —
Is supremely, intensely irritated and inconvenienced by might be a more accurate fit, but it isn't nearly as easy to say. And maybe it's just semantics, maybe if Thor was in front of her, that irritation would be blunted or at least replaced by irritation at how attractive he is instead, but the fact remains that right now, right this second, sitting in a "safe house" that is seriously not even safe, Jane hates Asgardians.
She was minding her own business — In
Shanghai and minding her own business — when the Guys in Suits and Sunglasses turned up and took her gently-but-firmly by the elbow,
Dr. Foster, please come with us, yada yada. SHIELD doesn't care that she was in the middle of some very important calculations with Asia's foremost expert on relativistic astrophysics — Wait, is SHIELD even a thing anymore?
Not that it matters, because she's in a safe house now, and the whole point is that Loki dared to enter Earth's atmosphere. Because of course he did, of course he couldn't really be dead. He's the intergalactic version of a bad penny, and the protocol is, when he turns up, she gets shoved into a room somewhere.
And Jane knows better than anyone that there's no sense in arguing about it, but she does it anyway, because they take away everything on her — Her notes, her cell phone, her lip balm — and give her a five-year-old copy of
People and think that's appropriate. Thor also apparently dared to enter the atmosphere along with his brother, and how does she know this? His selfie was on
Instagram and she saw it over one of her guardian/captor's shoulders while she was yelling.
It's really Too Damn Much, she thinks as she takes a break from railing to slouch into a chair with a huff, having no idea at all that the next time she opens her eyes, she'll have to re-calibrate that barometer altogether.
Behind Town Hall - Dec 20
OTA
Jane has found a telescope. In a place where you're lucky to find a pen and paper, this feels like a major coup, but there had just been this guy like, hey, I got this as a present and I am a botanist, please don't break it. He did not, strangely, seem that concerned about what she might discover with it, but to each their own, right? As long as their own involves Jane never giving this telescope back.
One thing she'll give this place: The light pollution is virtually nil. She's been warned, emphatically in a few cases, that there are Bad Things in the woods that will probably think she is a snack, so it's nice that she can just head out to the fields behind the town hall, cleared and lonely now that winter's arrived, and sit with her new telescope and the pencil and little bit of paper she begged from the same guy, and make observations — Tiny, cramped observations that she has to lean very close to the paper to see because of how dark it is, even here in town. From a distance, she probably looks like a wayward woodland creature balled up against the chill until she swings back up again, telescope lifted to her eye.
Is it cold out here? She hasn't really noticed.