12Disclaimer: Nothing from this Marvelous universe is mine.
Summary: Jane Foster is not, and she knows this, an idiot. Idiots don't publish ground-breaking research or have IQs of 169. Unfortunately, wisdom and intelligence are not always interchangeable, and optimism isn't always wise. Tie-in fic to Chapters 39-40 of 'Drown'.
Warnings: General creepiness, threats of rape.
Miscalculations
Jane Foster is not an idiot.
Idiots don't get scholarships to MIT and go on to receive doctorates in astrophysics. They don't publish ground-breaking research before they're thirty and they certainly don't get hired by SHIELD. She's got an IQ of 169. She's smart. She knows this. Unfortunately, smart doesn't equal wise in cerebral equivalents, which is why she's sitting in the passenger seat of a car without her phone, her taser or Darcy, and Brager is driving her to wherever it is that he wants her to do whatever he wants her to do, and where, once she's done it, he'll probably kill her.
She shouldn't have believed him, in hindsight, when he'd said he was new and offered her a lift to the site of the meteor crash.
She shouldn't have lent him her phone when he said they'd broken down, and could he borrow it to call his car insurance for help?
She should have packed her taser. Or at least capsicum spray.
What will he do to her?
He's taking her somewhere. He'd told her as much, when he hadn't returned her phone.
God, how did this become her life?
Stop it, Jane. Get a grip, her inner Darcy tells her. You're not dead yet.
Deep breaths. Deep breaths are a good thing, right? They're supposed to help.
"So," she starts, "Just what is it that you expect me to do for you?"
Please don't be sex.
"Track something for us. More specifically, someone. You remember Loki, right? Led the invasion on New York nearly four months ago. He teleported somewhere. You are going to find him. And once you have, you're going to ask him, nicely, to hand over something of ours he stole, or we'll drive a dagger through your pretty little neck."
Her eyes stray to the passenger door. Locked.
There's no way to unlock it on this side.
"Loki? As in, Thor's brother who massacred half of New York?"
Brager snorts and Jane frowns. It's not that much of a hyperbole.
"The same. Spineless bastard, targeting people as weak as you to kill. "
Like you, you mean, she doesn't say.
She doesn't want to provoke him. She's fond of living. She doesn't want to die.
"How exactly do you expect me to do this? I've got no equipment. No data. I can't just—pull numbers and figures out of thin air."
"You'll have equipment."
"What sort of equipment?"
"Everything you usually do, minus the computer. And if you try to send any communications out to anyone," Brager says pleasantly, "We might, before we kill you, just be tempted to drive a cock through your pretty little ass."
OoOoOoOoO
It turns out that threatening to kill someone is actually a very good motivator.
Jane doesn't like drawing graphs by hand—they're not precise, and her lines are never as straight as she wants them to be even when she has a ruler—but she discovers that despite not having done it since undergrad, she's actually not bad. She also masters the new equipment in twenty minutes. At another time, she might be interested in just how these people had managed to replicate so closely machines she's so heavily modified, and how they've managed to fit it all into the back of a Quinjet and still leave enough room for a desk and a desk chair, but not now. Now she just wants to wake up and for all of this to be some crazy nightmare.
It's not long before she puts together the patterns. An abnormality, consistent with an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, occurred at Stark Tower, Manhattan, roughly an hour ago. Thor? She doesn't know but god she hopes so. If ever she needed rescuing, it's now.
"Ignore that. Loki disappeared after that."
"Okay," Jane says.
Brager scowls at that. She's not sure why.
She'd try to hit him with… with something, only he's always watching her.
She goes back to looking at data, instead.
There's another abnormality, softer somehow, less intense, in Spain.
"That'll be Strange. Ignore it too," he tells her.
The only other one is in New Mexico, but it's wrong, somehow. It's like someone tried to create a bridge, ran out of steam half-way through, and either squeezed out or got forced back by a malformed slash at the end, rather than the graceful, symmetrical sets of data she's used to. It's an outlier, and she's never enjoyed outliers.
"Why are you hunting him?" she asks, scribbling on the graphs before her, "You're obviously not the good guys. Shouldn't you be on his side?"
"Loki stole something of ours. We want it back. It's not rocket science."
Maybe she should stop here, but Brager doesn't sound like he'll kill her if she doesn't.
"Why'd he take it?" she asks.
"Because the bastard's hanging with the Avengers, now is why."
Her fingers freeze, before she masters herself.
Okay, so in principle she's against the fact that the Avengers are working with a mass murderer. In principle. But in practice, she doesn't want to die. She really, really doesn't want to die, and she'd prefer it if she also wasn't raped. If they're going to take her down and make her ask Loki when they get there, there's a chance he'll take them out and save her, right? If he's a good guy now, if they think threatening her might make him do what they want, there's a chance.
It's better than being quietly disposed of for failing up here.
Screwing up her courage, she points out the abnormality in New Mexico.
Maybe it's not the best move, but it's better than dying here.
OoOoOoOoO
They don't take her with them.
They leave her on the plane. Apparently, she's going to be pleading via video feed.
Jane props her head up on her hands, and tries to breathe.
She's miscalculated.
She's misjudged everything.
There won't be any last-minute rescue.
She's going, if he refuses, to die here.
Maybe she's not so smart after all.