Chapter Text
"You've remembered everything?"
"Chocolate for Sif, the next volume of the exploits of the mage Potter for Volstagg's children..."
"...bring Tony back another uru sample..."
"...and 'The Epic of the Sorcerer Smith' for you. You are certain that you also desire the Commentaries?" asked Thor. "In truth they are more concerned with the feasting and drinking that celebrated the BiFrost's completion than with its construction."
Jane nodded. "You never know, there might be something useful in there."
He smiled, teasing. "And what would you bring me back from the conference?"
"That depends how much you like branded stationery and mugs."
"Jane, you will not consider spending the weekend with me on Asgard? Heimdall would have you back in good time on Monday."
"I'd love to but I'm the keynote speaker, I can't just waltz in there unprepared and I've been so busy getting the lab back in order after Tony's last little experiment." They both winced at the memory. "Anyway you need to prepare too for this round of negotiations, you can't just spend the whole weekend trying to get me back into bed."
"Merely trying?"
"Okay, succeeding" she grinned. "Off with you then, I'll see you next week."
"Farewell Jane, and I wish you good fortune at your conference."
They kissed, rather more chastely than she would have liked but she know Pepper was watching to see how much the BiFrost opening would mess up her helipad this time. Then Jane stepped back as the rainbow light took him and went inside, to her lab and her notes and her barest skeleton of a slideshow.
***
Jane had always hated conferences even as a grad student. Not the talks, she loved the opportunity to find out what the rest of the field was up to, and not the chance to talk to people about their work, but the enforced mingling afterwards, making awkward smalltalk over fiddly food on sticks. So for once she was glad when her phone rang with the awful ringtone that she still hadn't managed to change.
"Hey!" said Darcy. "So this giant mutated mechanical squid thing turned up off Bermuda and Natasha and the boys have gone to avenge at it, so Betty and I were thinking girls' night!"
"Huh? Squid?" said Jane, her head still full of stars.
Darcy sighed. "We're gonna get baked, paint our nails and watch The Princess Bride. Wanna come?"
"I can't Darce, I have to stay here at this drinks reception. I'm keynote speaker, I can't just disappear."
"Says who? Didn't you have that big conference dinner and give a speech last night? Surely you've done your duty by now."
Jane popped her head out of the alcove and scanned the room. No one seemed to be actively searching for her but..."I really shouldn't Darcy."
"Are you enjoying yourself there Jane? Honestly? How often do we get the tower to ourselves? Pepper's coming."
Jane played her trump card. "What about Ian? You can't bring him to a girls' night!"
"He'll be fine playing games or something, he's been lusting over all Tony's consoles since he got here."
"The guy came all the way from Britain to see you Darcy, you can't just stick him in the common room with an Xbox!"
"He'll be fine. Too much enforced togetherness is bad for a relationship anyway. Are you out of excuses yet?"
Jane groaned. "Fine. I'll be back about six thirty."
***
"So I've basically just accepted that I live with crazy people. Remember that day last week when the whole tower smelled of burnt plastic?" Darcy was holding court from her perch on the back of the couch. The others nodded.
"It wasn't actually Jane or Tony that time. I came down to breakfast and Natasha was standing on Thor's shoulder like the world's deadliest parrot pulling an arrow out of the smoke detector. And the only thing I bothered asking was how Clint had set fire to the coffee maker - not why you'd bring a bow to breakfast or if Thor minded being used as a stepladder while he was trying to eat his eggs, none of that occurred to me till later. Crazy people."
"How did he manage to set fire to the coffee maker, exactly?" asked Pepper in horrified fascination.
"No idea. He just said 'I have a very specific skillset' and then Natasha threw a bagel at him."
They had started the night in Betty's apartment but finished her only two bottles of wine very quickly and Jane had then been foolish enough to mention that she had mead. As neither Betty or Pepper had ever tried mead before the party quickly moved down the corridor, leaving Jane desperately hoping that Pepper wouldn't notice one corner of what was after all technically her couch was supported by a pile of books (she and Thor having gotten rather, ahem, enthusiastic and broken the leg off).
"I'd have thought you'd have had practice with that." Betty smirked at Jane, who decided to learn from Natasha's example and threw a chip at her.
"Don't gets me wrong, Jane is basically a machine for turning coffee into science and thinks breakfast cereal for every meal is a healthy balanced diet, but at least with her I know things are only going to explode in the lab. Did I ever tell you about the time Steve and Thor tried to roast a chicken in the microwave?"
"It wasn't his fault, they don't have microwaves on Asgard!" Darcy loved how fiercely Jane, all five foot three and ninety pounds when wet of her, always defended her enormous, super-strong weather god boyfriend.
"And yet amazingly, these are the people tasked with saving the world and we're all still here." Betty poured the last of the mead. Most of it landed in her glass.
"Believe me, I try to make sense of that every day." nodded Pepper. "Bruce is pretty competent though." she added, mead, carbs and Betty's slightly suspicious brownies having put her in a generous frame of mind. God she hoped Steve never found out about the brownies.
"Do you ever feel like the wrong people are in charge of that? Like you..." Darcy jabbed a breadstick at Betty "are clearly smarter than Bruce because you've never actually experimented on yourself and Jane's easily as smart as Tony and Pepper's obviously smarter than Tony because this tower's still standing."
"I think you forgot the superpowers thing." said Betty, grinning. Darcy waved her hand dismissively.
"Half of them don't have them, and I had to teach two of the ones that do how to use pump soap."
"How about you, what's your superpower?" asked Pepper, playing along.
"Fabulous boobs. What? That's totally a superpower. Also I taser gods. Well one god. Is there any more of that mead Jane?"
"All gone, sorry. There's ale or vodka or some sort of instant daiquiri mix that's kinda horrible."
"You don't need superpowers if you've got a suit. And a death wish." mused Pepper.
Darcy rummaged on the coffee table for her glass, gave up and started swigging the daiquiri straight from the bottle. "Jane's got a suit." she offered, to the astonishment of both Betty and Pepper.
"You've got a suit? How did you get a suit?!"
"I told Tony I'd recalibrate his phase-amplifier for him. Umm, I may have made sure his phase-amplifier needed recalibrating first. Look it's not a proper suit okay, it's just a lightweight prototype he didn't need because it wasn't tough enough, repulsors and pretty much nothing else."
"Why do you have a suit?!"
"It was just an idea I had. So I can't open a bridge between realms yet but I can teleport things a short distance. And I thought, well, for the moment I can use that - if I put the machinery into a suit I could make something that could teleport people. But it doesn't work because I can't get the superconductor coils small enough - basically the amount of power it would take to just carry the thing would be more than the suit could supply."
"She tried everything to minaturise it." Darcy butted in. "Like, everything in her lab and half the stuff in Tony's lab. She didn't sleep for nearly three days. I was this close to just getting Thor to come and squash the thing with Miaow Maiow, just to make sure she didn't work herself to death."
"WHAT DID YOU SAY?" shrieked Jane.
"Chill, chill, it was a joke, you know I'd never do that and Thor would never break your stuff." Not on purpose anyway, there had been the unfortunate incident when a distracted Jane had said "Pass me that please?" and gestured at her screwdriver set, and Thor hadn't noticed it and had brought her the half ton electromagnet it was resting on. It had taken her a week to wire it back in. Thor was now almost too scared to enter her lab.
"No, oh my god Mjolnir! Uru! Tony has some filaments! It's a variable density room temperature superconductor! Darcy I could kiss you!" She raced toward the door and promptly tripped over a magazine rack.
"Hey. HEY!" shouted Betty. "Friends don't let friends do science drunk remember? The lab will still be there in the morning and there'll be a much lower chance of you soldering your hand to the suit or something."
"Don't make me sit on you, because I will!" added Darcy. A reluctant Jane stumbled back to her chair.
"So Jane just invented a teleportation suit. I need another drink. Pass that over." said Pepper. Darcy obligingly handed her the bottle and Betty shouted "Noooooo!" and leapt across the table. It would have looked a lot more impressive if she hadn't caught her foot in a bowl of salsa and gone sprawling onto Pepper, knocking the bottle out of her hand onto the couch.
"The fuck?"gasped Darcy.
"Strawberries." explained Betty, rolling off Pepper. "She's allergic."
Darcy grinned. "See, we're totally superheroes! You just saved Pepper's life."
"I saved her from a nasty case of hives." Betty was trying to pick jalapeños out of her sock.
"Thank you Betty." Pepper had somehow maintained her dignity through the whole incident. "Sorry about the couch Jane."
"That's OK, it's had worse." Jane said magnanimously. She'd just worked out how to make the teleportation suit work, who cared about a couch? Pepper shot her a look usually reserved for Tony.
"If I've spent the night sitting in alien spunk I really don't want to know about it thank you." There was a shocked intake of breathe from Jane and a horrified giggle from Darcy. Betty just sniggered. "What? You think I'd have survived this long with Tony if I was a prude?"
Darcy was still giggling and muttering "Alien spunk!" to herself as Jane turned bright red. Pepper frowned.
"It wasn't that funny. It wasn't was it? Am I missing something here? This must be how Steve feels all the time."
"I think the brownies may have caught up with her." said Betty, as Darcy fell off the back of the couch, still giggling. There was a crash and the couch tilted through thirty degrees.
"You okay down there?" shouted Jane. Darcy laughed even harder.
"Your apartment's full of swords! You've got swords everywhere!"
"Yeah, Thor trains with them sometimes, I don't know why, he only ever fights with Mjolnir and they just clutter up the place. What's up with them?"
"Your apartment's full of swords and I just cut myself! On a fucking table lamp!" She held her hand up to demonstrate, still lying on her back surrounded by astrophysics textbooks.
"I've got some serum down in the lab that might accelerate healing." offered Betty.
Pepper stood up, took in the broken couch, the disaster on the table and the salsa footprints around it. "Okay ladies, I think if people are seriously considering testing something out of Betty's lab on themselves it's time to to call it a night."