Who: Jane Foster and Tony Stark What: Retrieving Jane's lab equipment from New Mexico When: After her network post Rating/Warnings: Green
Tony Stark landed with a light clank next to the quinjet, at the upstate headquarters. It was a quick flight from New York City and the new nanotech was working well, despite the fact he had to wear a makeshift harness around his chest to keep the reactor tech housing on his chest. It was a bit inconvenient and he was already drawing up some designs to replace it. Rather than obsessing over that, he was ready for a quick flight to New Mexico, and some time spent with one of the big brains he'd heard so much about.
It was also his teammate's ex-girlfriend, so....a little awkward? Maybe.
The metal of the suit shimmered over his skin as it retracted back into the housing and left Tony standing in a business suit on the landing pad. He opened the rear hatch and prepped for take off, waiting for Jane Foster to arrive.
When Stark said he would send a car, Jane wasn’t expecting something that cost as much as a house. The leather seats were buttery soft and the wood paneling was smooth to the touch when she ran a fingertip over the inlay. Monogramming the seat backs might be a little much though. Happy, the driver, offered use of the bluetooth to stream her music and they passed the ride to the Hamilton soundtrack while Jane reviewed notes on her phone. Music was a good distraction since Jane was too terrified to break out the granola bar in her bag and eat in the car.
Jane climbed out of the car before Happy could get the door for her once they arrived. Stark was already waiting. “Thanks for this,” she told him, then turned to give another smile of gratitude to Happy.
Monogramming the backseats was a necessity. How else would someone with billions of dollars remember that it was one of the cars they owned? One of the cars that Tony ate sometimes ate greasy cheeseburgers and milkshakes in, when Happy threatened to crawl back there and force feed him if he didn't eat it on his own.
"No prob, Doctor Foster," Tony said, waving at a departing Happy before he held that hand out for a proper handshake. "It's a pleasure to meet the one person who can probably explain in mind-bendy science terms what the hell Strange did to our timeline."
It was good that it would be a quick flight at a high altitude, the quinjets were able to take upper atmosphere flights without issue, and even hold up in outer space. But there'd be enough time to talk it over before getting to her lab and seeing what sort of bells and whistles she wanted to pick up. He imagined glitzy and big equipment, since Shuri had spoiled them all, and Tony was used to using holograms for technical specs.
“I don’t know. I keep thinking about it in terms of what I’ve read in novels. But if I can start by building a good model, it’ll help. And I want to see if I can set up something similar to whatever alert system Dr. Strange has. I have to have my equipment for that.”
"Tell me about it. I've been racking my brain on how this happened since day one," Tony said, showing her onto the jet and giving her time to get buckled up before they took off. Once they were airborne and the autopilot course plotted on set-it-and-forget-it mode, the pilot's chair swung around so he could face her.
Curiosity drove Tony to do the things he did. There was a burning need to know as much as possible, and having their think tank in place was a good way for everyone to collectively pool ideas and problem solve. With science. Magic was still too mumbo-jumbo, even if Tony was a believer in it now. It was impossible not to be, under the present circumstances.
"You mean the magical alert system that he has for newly awakened arrivals?" Tony shrugged a little. "I'm willing to bet there's some anomalies there that could be sensed. It happened with Friday when I got hit, so she charted an unexplainable and super brief energy spike. I'll pop over that data to you, so you can try to calibrate your equipment."
Jane turned away from the window, where she’d been watching the earth get very small very quickly. She hadn’t found anything to compare to the rush of travelling by Bifrost but Quinjet beat commercial air. “Most magic has an energy signature in my experience,” Jane said, pulling a granola bar from her bag. “I got pretty good at tracking energy from the Bifrost. I can compare that to your data. That should give me a place to start.”
"Uhh, about that Bifrost thing," Tony said, reaching over to where his stash of snacks was. There was a pouch of almonds and dried berries, and some Japanese juice boxes that had a purple octopus holding a green lollipop on the front. Hell only knew what flavor that was. All it said was "POW!!!" and a bunch of kanji underneath.
He was stabbing the skinny red straw into the hole as he kept talking, "Thor mentioned you rode on it. Offhand, before he took off to hop around through Wonderland for a few years. You weren't able to get any data when you traveled through it, were you? Because traveling through a purposefully constructed wormhole would've been a goldmine. Data-wise."
“No,” Jane said around a bite of her granola bar. “I didn’t have any equipment with me. It was kind of a sudden trip.” The corners of her mouth turned down. “I was in the middle of being arrested at the time, actually.”
Tony's face lit up with sarcastic delight.
"Why doctor Foster, you rebel," he teased. "No wonder you got wrapped up in a whole lot of weird crap you never expected. That's what happens when you run with Norse thunder gods. Expect the unexpected."
He sucked on the too tiny straw for a moment and then made a hm! noise, as though he just thought of something.
"Hey, all this study of the Bifrost. I read some of your papers. Outta curiosity, how close were you anyway to recreating something like it?"
“Theoretically or practically?” The both of them knew enough to know that something that seemed possible on paper often wasn’t when applied practically. “I’m pretty sure I have the math. I need the equipment and a power source.”
"I bet you've already got your brain wrapped around theoretical possibilities. And all the variables. Soooo...practically?"
He was turning around to check the jet's inbound trajectory and double check the course heading. Check, check, and double check. If it was only him, he wouldn't bother until nearly landing. Because the cargo was a brainiac like Jane, it was bubble wrap mode. Even if the quinjets weren't really made for this kind of travel for extended periods of time, it seemed like it did just fine after further mods. Enough that Hulk rode one into space and made it to another planet.
"I mean, I know power sources, and so does Shuri. So you're in double luck there. I'm sure having your equipment's gonna help a lot, too. You've probably got a lot of kick ass stuff, right? I'm ready to oogle it."
Tony kept right on talking about physics and engineering geekery, until the quinjet landed outside Puente Antiguo, within walking distance of Jane's laboratory. Saying it was hot and dusty was an understatement. The minute that Tony opened the hatch, he waved a hand around in front of his face.
"Like heat wafting out of an oven," he joked. "And someone forgot to put the cookies in. Bummer."
“It’s not that bad,” Jane said with a roll of her eyes. In fact, there was a faint breeze and it stirred the ends of her hair while she got the door to the lab open. The place had been gas station and service center back in the 60s. Maybe the oil company had gone bust or times had changed too much when Americans started pumping their own gas but the place had fallen out of use. A mid-century modern building with a full wall windows in the back had been left behind, waiting for someone to have a need for it again. Jane had bought it and the equipment inside with what was left of the money from her father’s life insurance policy after she paid for her two doctorates.
Since she gave up lecturing, Jane spent most of her time here in the lab and it showed. The place was anything but tidy: pages of equipment readings were about, dirty dishes, an open box of Frosted Mini-Wheats, a couple of novels laying around, and half covered by unopened mail - an old copy of US Weekly with ‘THUNDERSTRUCK - THOR DUMPED’ as the cover story. Against the wall of windows was a bulletin board. Tacked up was a faded sheet of paper, edges curling, of an outline of a man in a storm cloud; and a poster-size 3-D model of a wormhole. The lab equipment was well worn, and occasionally patched with duct tape. A soldering kit was on the lab bench beside a well-stocked tool kit.
“So...this it.”
Standing in the midst of scientific chaos, was Tony. He was very much a bells and whistles kind of guy, and had the big fat bank account that would fund a billion and one pet projects in high tech labs for the next fifty years, and then some. But this? This looked like his dorm room at MIT. Right down to the open box of cereal. He preferred Frankenberry cereal way back then, but to each their own.
What? He didn't take Edwin Jarvis with him to college. He had Rhodey - his much more neat and orderly BFF - to yell at him about the mess piling up.
And that she had a soldering kit and tools, and used duct tape? It was the sort of ingenuity he liked. Sure, it wasn't cutting edge or the newest thing out of Wakanda, but it showed Jane was willing to improvise. And that she just might be as obsessive as he was.
He picked up the copy of US Weekly and mouthed the word 'ouch' because he knew what those breakup headlines were like. He flipped that aside and glanced at the photo on the board as he passed by.
"This is sure something," Tony said, pointing at the photo on the board. "That looks familiar."
He kept right on going, poking at the papers and then the equipment, picking up what looked like the remote controller from a Toys R'Us race car.
"You make your own stuff," he said, not even a question. And then an honest question, "How much was your research funding budget?"
“That was my first Bifrost reading,” Jane said, glancing towards the bulletin board. That printout had been tacked up for almost a decade now, ever since she looked at it and realized a crazy man’s stories of magic might be real. “That’s Thor, back when he first turned up here to earn back his hammer.”
Her journal was on the lab table and slipping it into her bag gave Jane a little time before answering Stark’s question. “What does that matter?” Her tone was defensive and a little resentful of talking money with a billionaire. In the beginning, her budget was only big enough to keep her in Eggo waffles. Today she was self-funded. Those fancy lectures paid well (though not nearly as well as the tell-all offers of her and Thor’s relationship that she turned down) and she saved. “My equipment works. Probably better than most because I built it myself.”
"Just wondering," Tony said, putting down the controller and picking up another thing that was the size of a toaster and...oh, that was an actual toaster. He quickly put it down. "I like that you built everything yourself. It means it does exactly what you want it to do. It just sucks that the people that are trying to do really ambitious research like this, don't get a headstart with too much research funding."
He started scooting some readout papers together, tapping them into a neat stack and handing it over to her.
"Selvig was up at the Avengers headquarters," he finally explained. "Upstate. He spoke highly of you and your work. By then the awkward with Thor, and you were doing seminars and stuff. I read the lecture script you gave in Europe a couple of years ago. It was impressive."
Jane pu the papers on a stack with a bunch of others and set about disconnecting the leads from her equipment. “Yeah well, when I started most people thought I was nuts.” There was still an edge to her voice and a frown on her face, though it was hidden when her hair fell forward as she bent over the cables. “After Thor showed up, people started listening but only half of them for the right reasons.”
She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked over at Stark. “I had people approach me who thought I could get them in with you, actually. That I was some kind of connection to the Avengers. And then after everything that’s happened… New York, London, it should have kicked off the greatest focus on science and research since the space race. Instead all anyone cares about is better ways to fight. So yeah it does suck that no one is funding research like this but at least I’m still doing the work and no one can tell me what to do with it when I’m done.”
Tony listened. He was rich, sure, but he talked at enough college students and inventors and scientists to know all about money woes, and then being called crazy on top of it, for daring to try anything that was considered fringe science or off-the-wall as far as inventions went. He'd been labeled 'eccentric' but, really, that was still another label for 'crazy'...and one Tony couldn't argue with.
That's why he was quiet for a long moment, before reaching for a nearby empty file box, and putting it on the table in front of him.
"One of the good things about being self funded, is you get to take it anywhere you want. You did the work, and you don't have to follow anyone's rules."
He looked at some of the equipment laying around, small hand held devices and lots of scraps of paper with calculations on them. He started putting them in the box with a great deal more care than was probably expected of him. If anything, though, he respected science and technology above all. And other people's work was to be respected as well.
"Sorry you got hounded," he said, without looking over at her. He wasn't good at the whole social interaction thing, and often just tried to breeze through it like a cocky little shit, because it was expected of him. "Especially if it had anything to do with me. Usually I'm the one doing the hounding. Not the other way around."
“It wasn’t really about you,” Jane said, wrapping cables around her arm. “It was just about the idea of you. Or of the Avengers. I was just the most approachable.”
Things that were even attached to him, remotely, seemed to go wrong. It was the reason that Tony kept few attachments. There was only three people he trusted entirely, with his life, and that was Pepper, Rhodey, and Happy. So hearing that still put a frown on his face. For a split second, and then it was gone.
"The way I've heard it, a lot of it is about me. Not in a good way." It was usually about how whatever went wrong was his fault. He shook his head, pointing over toward some tools and circuit boards. "Want these too? What about that toaster? Every lab needs a toaster. Those go with coffeemakers."
“Those yes, toaster no. Toasters they have in New York.” Jane had most of her equipment uncouple and piling up in front of her. “Can you load this stuff while I grab some clothes?”
"Sure. I got this," he replied, giving Jane a little wave as though there was nothing to worry about.
He stacked up a couple of boxes and brought them out to the quinjet, which gave him a chance to peek at some of the other things she made, up close. On the return trip inside, he was armored up. Because the hell if he was doing manual labor in New Mexico's 90 degree temps, without full body coolant. Plus he could carry more, which would make all this go faster.
She’d finally gotten around to renovating the lab to build a bedroom for herself, so Jane didn’t have to go out to the trailer for her personal things. She shoved jeans, shirts, and underwear into a duffel bag. Items from the laundry chair went into a hamper to be cleaned when she got back to New York. The only item not to be quickly shoved away came from the back of her closet. A blue grey dress with a breastplate. The dress was from Asgard and therefore priceless. Jane knew a couple of Asgardians who might want that little piece of home.
Jane stopped short when she walked back out to the lab, duffel slung across her shoulders, wheeling the hamper, and holding the dress carefully to keep the hem off the ground.
“Something wrong?” she asked Iron Man.
"Nope!" He picked up several items and walked past like he was on a stroll, only in full armor. He paused for a second, scanning their surroundings before continuing outside. "Why? Should something be wrong? If you leave that roller thing there I can carry it out for you. And nice Asgardian couture."
He went out the door, the suit not as loud as it used to be with the whirring of gears. He was talking all the while, too.
"You know, I keep thinking about this broken universe thing," he said, his voice automatically amplified through the suit to accommodate any distance between them. "You're a physicist. Besides being able to measure the anomalies, do you kinda get the sense maybe Strange is holding back some info?"
Jane chalked the Iron Man suit up to peak Stark and left her stuff there for him. She went back to packing up her lab bench. “I”m still trying to understand the event. Multiverses are a common theory. They should be stable. This one isn’t. Strange made this, it’s possible he might have an idea of how it works.”
The helmet retracted away after he came back inside and listened to what she said, just so they could see eye to eye.
"Yeah, but that's the thing. He's not volunteering it. Even when he came to me for help. I get the whole multiverse thing too, but if this one's unstable...that can't be good news." He shrugged a little, picking up the items she left. "What's that entail, other than weird stuff sometimes leaking through from other places, and time and space effing up every so often? In your opinion, I mean."
“Worst case scenario?” Jane gave a wincing sort of half shrug. “The entire thing collapses and this reality vanishes out of existence.”
Tony was silent and still for a moment. He winced as he thought about that, too.
"Yeah, I was worried that would be the answer that question. Still had to ask." He also shrugged a little, as though trying to brush a bad thought aside. "Any ways you know of to stop it, if that gets close to happening?"
“Maybe.” That was hardly committal - or encouraging. “Depends on what’s happening. In a long shot maybe we try something like what I did during the Convergence to stabilize things. It all depends and there’s a lot I don’t know yet.”
It might not seem encouraging, but it was something. And something was better than nothing.
"Yeah, I'd like some definitive answers. So let's get you back there so you can get started." He picked up some more stuff and made another trip, before looking around to see if there was anything left. "Did you decide if you're snagging some lab space at Shuri's, or if you want some at our place with Hope, Banner, and me? Either-or's good. And if you need less light pollution, there's still the upstate research center. Gotta know where this stuff needs dropped off."
“I think I’m going to be splitting my time. Most of my equipment can go to your lab. I’m going to be at Shuri’s lab when I need a telescope.” Some of her more portable equipment might travel back and forth when she needed it.
"Sounds like a plan. If you need a place to stay, Shuri's got you covered."
It looked like they were packed up, so Tony gestured toward the loaded quinjet with one hand.