Terrestrial Constellations: Chapter 4
Chapter 4: Leave it to Darcy to lighten the mood
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There were few things Jane found more comfort in than the night sky. As a child she would spend many a summer night in the field behind her house, nested in the sun warmed grass next to her mother, picking out constellations, making wishes on shooting stars, and just talking. Always there had been a sense of safety and peace on those lazy evenings, and she treasured the memories.
She was reminded of that comfort and closeness now as she and Darcy lay on reclining lawn chairs under a sky ablaze with stars. The mood had lightened considerably as they lounged before a cheerful campfire, wrapped in blankets and armed with quarts of ice cream. Gabbing and giggling like teenagers Jane found herself, for the first time, talking to someone about her relationship with Donald and the reasons why it had ended.
“So… the sex was bad.”
Darcy turned the spoonful of mocha toffee crunch ice-cream over on her tongue. The light from the campfire crackling happily away in the brazier danced over her features, making her look much younger than she was.
“Not bad, just… polite?”
“Polite?” one brow rose, and she laughed, “Like… ‘Hi, how’s the weather,’ polite?”
“Well… yeah, kind of. I don’t know any other way to describe it. He was just always so calm and composed… sometimes it felt like… like a courtesy if that makes sense and he was like that about everything. Whenever we’d argue, no matter what I said or did, he’d always reply in this soft, reasonable tone.”
“That would be seriously annoying.”She dug her spoon back into the carton, “Is it why you left? ‘Cause he wouldn’t fight like a normal person?”
“It was one of the reasons, I guess. There were a lot of other problems, though. He was very controlling; dictated where I should and shouldn’t go, how I spent too much time on my research, stuff like that.”
“And he was bad in bed.”
“Yeah, and.” Jane laughed. “When he proposed… it was like, for the first time, I could really see what my life had become, and what it would turn into if I stayed with him. We fought and I left. When he didn’t come after me I guess I thought that he had finally understood, finally listened. Obviously I was wrong.”
She hadn’t scrutinized her relationship with Donald in a long time. Not since, she realized, she had met Thor. But she had begun pulling away from Donald long before she’d left him physically. Purchasing the building her research station was based in, buying the camper she would use when she had worked too late to drive back to their apartment. Little things.
In a grim twist of irony, Donald’s own actions had driven her into Thor’s path. To annoy him and defy his control, Jane had done deeper and deeper into the desert for her research which had led to the mysterious storms which had led to Puente Antiguo, the research station and, finally, to the man she loved.
“I wonder how Thor will deal with him.” Darcy mused, “Somehow I can’t picture him being overly friendly to the douche bag that put a move on his girl while he’s away.”
“If he even wants to come back.” Jane murmured in reply, and quickly stuffed a large spoonful of sweet, sugary comfort into her mouth.
Jane had never believed in fate or destiny before. She had never believed in soul mates, or that two people could meet once and just know they were meant to be together. She had never known that you could know someone for a few days, and love them as though you’d had a lifetime together.
Until Thor.
Now she felt as though she were standing on the edge of a precipice, and had no idea if he would be there to catch her when she jumped from it.
“Come on, Jane, he wouldn’t have told you he’d be back if he didn’t mean it. Something happened up there. You know it.”
“I know… I know, it’s just that sometimes I’m so afraid that-“ she sighed, closing her eyes against the tide of emotion that surged endlessly inside of her, “That we’ll get the portal working, only to find out that he never wanted to come back. I’m so scared that I just imagined that he… that he… cared about me.”
“Oh, please, everyone saw the way he looked at you. You’re, like, connected or something.” She plunged her spoon into the container again, and looked at Jane with surprising astuteness, “Know what I think?”
“No, but I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“I think that while you’re making the portal to his world, he’s looking for a portal to you. Something happened to the pie-frost thingy, and he can’t use it.”
“Bifrost.”
“Whatever. So, like, either you’ll get the portal working and bring him through, or he’ll find some other Einstein-Rozen-whatsit-”
“Einstein Rosen Bridge.” Jane sighed, exasperated at just how often she had to correct that one. She was beginning to think that Darcy did it on purpose.
“Whatever, you know what I mean, he’ll find some other way to come back here.”
“I hope you’re right.” Jane sighed,
“I’m totally right.” Darcy admonished, jabbing her spoon in Jane’s direction emphatically, “Just you wait and see.”
She laughed, surprised to find that Darcy’s absolute faith in Thor’s promise could chase away her own doubts. He had given her his word that he would return for her. She needed to trust him and that, as Darcy said, he was looking for a way to keep his promise.
“HEAR THAT, THOR?” her friend suddenly shouted at the sky, “JANE’S TOTALLY PINING AFTER YOU, SO HURRY UP AND GET YOUR SEXY ASGARDIAN ASS BACK HERE!”
“Darcy! There are Shield Agents right over there.” She gestured wildly to the black car parked at the far end of her unfenced back yard.
“So?”
“Oh my god!” dropping her spoon into her ice cream, Jane covered her face with her good hand, laughing even through the humiliation.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
The days and weeks that followed were difficult, but productive. Jane began physical therapy only two weeks after the injury and only after a lengthily fight with her Doctor. Due to the fact that it was her first dislocation, the much put-upon physician had preferred to wait three weeks to begin her recover. Jane had wanted to start after one, and eventually they had agreed to compromise.
Dr. Gantz had reluctantly admitted that her arm was, actually, healing very quickly and had conceded to stop arguing with her. She still had to rest the appendage frequently, and she was limited in how much weight she could carry, but it was nice to be able to bathe and dress without Darcy’s help.
As Jane’s arm healed, Darcy found herself busier than she had ever been. There seemed to be an innumerable amount of things that Jane wasn’t supposed to do, but would attempt if no one was around to stop her. When Darcy wasn’t writing out calculations, she was typing up reports, carrying books, or fixing coffee.
Jane was often surprised that Darcy didn’t up and quit over the amount of responsibility that had abruptly been heaped upon her shoulders. More often than not the two of them would be up well into the night; Jane with her theories and charts, Darcy with her homework.
Stark’s presence was both a great help, and a great hindrance. The power-stabilizer he was creating would allow them to keep the portal open for several minutes, but getting it to do so without blowing the Portal’s main computer was proving to be more of a challenge. Stark loved a challenge, however, and was often turning up in Jane’s office, research station, and sometimes even her house with new ideas and schematics.
He had learned quickly not to show up at her house until after eight, and to bribe his way in with coffee.
The cause of the explosion was still a mystery. There had been traces of chemicals around the door outside the Observations room which, if mixed, could have created a small scale explosion given the right catalyst. The trouble was that it was missing the trigger, and no deployment devise had been found.
Further more, the prankster him/herself had not made a move since the explosion. The S.H.I.E.L.D agents in charge of the investigation had no leads, no suspects, and were as stumped as they could be. Tony had analyzed the footage as well, but had been able to offer no additional insight.
A tense atmosphere hung over the Base now. People spoke in hushed, anxious whispers and everyone felt the need to look over their shoulder. It was understandable, considering that at least half the personnel at the base had either the knowledge to build a bomb, or the resources and intelligence to figure it out.
Things with Donald had progressed as she had feared they would. He would appear two or three times a week, never on the same days, intent on wooing her back to him. He would bring gifts sometimes; flowers and candy and other small tokens and would leave them on her doorstep when she refused them.
His visits were like a blast from the past, entrenching her in unpleasant flashbacks of the history she shared with him.
Three years ago his actions would have made sense. It was exactly what she had expected then, for him to turn up unannounced and try to charm, persuade, or beleaguer her into compliance. It was a tactic he had used often; wearing her down about an issue, twisting her words, and exhausting her until she gave in. It was how he had convinced her to move in with him.
So his blatant refusal to accept and respect her wishes wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary, however, it felt off this time. There was something in the intensity of his persistence that seemed unnatural. Nothing she said seemed to make him remember how much they’d argued the last few months of the relationship, like he had re-written it in his mind to be some sort of lover’s paradise.
While she couldn’t say she felt threatened so much as annoyed, it was unsettling enough that she had put in a call to a friend who still worked at the same hospital with him. It was a conversation that had yielded few answers to Jane’s questions. As far as anyone knew there hadn’t been a tragedy in his family, he hadn’t lost a patient, and he hadn’t seen anyone regularly since Jane.
She’d try and sic S.H.I.E.L.D on him if it weren’t for the enormous lump of pride that kept getting in the way. That, and the fact that he would question to many things that they didn’t want reaching mainstream media just yet, prompted her to hold off.
But his visits were such a strain. A stress on top of so many other stresses sometimes it felt like she couldn’t breathe for the pressure of it all. She worried now that Thor might ask Heimdall to look down on her and might misinterpret Donald’s frequent appearances as something else, something more than it was. The thought had bothered her so much that she had dissolved into tears during Donald’s last visit and had (embarrassingly) begged him to leave.
Only Darcy, fresh from class and very upset to find her temporary home besieged, had been able to chase him away.
The war between her assistant and her ex had grown by epic proportions. The ritual of battle was nearly always the same; Donald would act as though Darcy didn’t exist, and she would ignore his ignoring her. She would talk for Jane, talk to Jane over Donald, talk incessantly about Thor or, as she called him, ‘Jane’s hunk of a boyfriend’, and generally be as obnoxious as she possibly could.
The amount of time that Donald could stand this without snapping was remarkably short, prompting him to leave quickly.
With every encounter, Darcy’s ability to utterly pulverize Donald’s stoic calm grew. It was like she had an instinct for what buttons to push and when. The way Donald acted, as though she were unseen and unheard, only encouraged her. It was ostensibly childish the way he acted (setting aside her assistant’s own actions), but for the dark looks he would cast Darcy’s way now and then, and the way his hands would clench into fists whenever she spoke.
She had started to see it as a kind of timer, ticking steadily down to zero. Each confrontation counted off another number. Jane couldn’t see the numbers, though, or have any way to know how many were left before Donald’s rigid control shattered.
Nothing Jane said could seem to convince Darcy not to bait him. The younger woman would just smile in that sleepy, secretive way of hers and claim innocence.
She sighed heavily, rubbing at her eyes in a futile attempt to erase the pressure building between her temples. Life had been so much simply when she’d lived alone in a camp trailer, idling her evenings away in front of a telescope. Now she had to watch her closest friend waltz her way into something potentially harmful, something that Jane didn’t fully understand. Her father figure had barely spoken to her in the last six months, all because Jane herself had dragged him in S.H.I.E.L.D’s path.
And she could barely step outside her house without tripping over Tony Stark’s ego.
Speaking of…
“Good morning, sweetheart.”
“Hello Tony. Stop calling me sweetheart.”
Jane watched the infamous Ironman saunter up to her desk, take off his sunglasses and cast a curious look at Darcy’s empty work table, “Where’s the kid?”
“In class, like she is every Wednesday morning.” Thank God.
Jane had been horrified to discover that her assistant seemed to function on Tony’s level and somehow the two of them caused as much disruption and chaos as the Prankster himself. Jane wasn’t sure if it was Darcy’s age in proportion to Stark’s inherent immaturity that gave them some sort of bizarre common ground, or if it was the fact that Darcy was as smart and cheeky to him as he was to everyone else.
It was weird, whatever it was. She liked Tony, and she liked Darcy… but she liked them both a great deal more when they weren’t in proximity to each other. She wasn’t sure how Stark saw Darcy (or the world in general, really. The man had more moods than Dr. Lao had faces), she just knew that the two of them were a potent mix of chaos.
“Well I was going to tell you both together, but….” He grinned, “I’ve solved the stabilizer problem.”
“How?” Jane sat up straighter, ignoring the ache in her shoulder when she shifted her arm. Sore, she thought distantly, she’d need to give her arm a rest soon or it would tighten up unbearably tonight.
“Well, it’s going to take some work to fix. Some of the materials we used to build the Stargate-“
“Don’t call it that.” She huffed, “Darcy’s been influencing you.”
“No.” He replied, “I’ve been influencing her. Now, the new power stabilizer is perfect, but it’s reacting oddly to some of the materials used in the Stargate’s original design.” He unrolled a set of blueprints over Jane’s desk, nearly knocking over her cup of coffee.
“You’ve completely redesigned it. And you…” she stared aghast at the top of the blueprints “You named it after me!” Not that it wasn’t flattering… it was only that The Stark-Foster Rosen Bridge was not, at all, what she had envisioned calling it. Darcy’s hand was in this somewhere, she just knew it.
“Of course I did. Your theory made it possible, my genius made it happen.” He edged a hip on her desk, “This design is based heavily off the information you got from M.C. Hammer, and the calculations you worked out based on the storms you chased down. In effect, it is going to synthesize a miniature storm in a controlled setting.”
“How on earth did you manage that?”
“I know. I manage to amaze myself sometimes. It’ll work with an RT unit as a power source, the new power stabilizer, and be able to keep the portal open for at least two minutes, if not more, and its tamper proof.” He looked at her over the top of his sunglasses, “And by tamper proof I really mean booby-trapped.”
“Tony, don’t think that I’m complaining, but… it took us six months to build the portal we have.”
“Five weeks.”
“Impossible!” She protested, wincing when she instinctively jerked her arm back to gesture.
“Five weeks. Coulson has already reviewed the plans (not that he understood them) and received Fury’s ok. The materials are on their way and you and I are going to start reprogramming the computers as soon as your assistant is back to fetch and carry.”
Five weeks.
She was going to see Thor in five weeks.
Unable to stop herself, Jane jumped up and threw herself on Tony in an awkward one-armed hug that made him laugh and state that he was flattered, but was a happily engaged man.
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I think that Stark and Darcy would get along frighteningly well. They have the same brand of sarcasm and are, I think, about on the same maturity level. I can see them frolicking through the halls together slipping salt or something into Coulson’s coffee, hijacking the face book profiles of random personnel to leave weird status postings, and even shanghaiing Jane into playing hooky from work.