Universal Displacement

There's Always Something

Jane stared into the Tesseract with a mesmerized wonder. Her blood thrummed in her veins and sent her heart thumping a faster rhythm. The blue light that shone from the cube blazed and almost seemed to reach out towards her. Jane reached out a hand to meet the light halfway, when another hand gently brushed across her shoulder as if alerting her to its presence and then wrapped around her wrist.

"I wouldn't advise that."

Loki's low voice snaked over her shoulder and snapped Jane out of her daze. She jerked her hand away from the cube and Loki released his hold on her with the action.

"Of course not," Jane said, almost to herself. "Right."

True to his word, this time at least, Loki had found a way to gather scientific instruments for her to use in gathering data. Jane decided she wouldn't ask questions and what Thor didn't know wouldn't hurt him. After all, she was doing this to help save a life. It wasn't like she was here to study the Tesseract for her own selfish interests. She was aware, however, that staring at the cube for too long unbroken sent the Aether thrumming in her veins. Jane resolved not to look directly at the object for long from now on.

She adjusted the energy reader near the cube and turned it on, watching as the numbers spiked higher than she'd ever known them to go.

"This is amazing," she mumbled to herself. "The amount of power in such a contained space..."

She felt another thrill across her skin at the thought, as if her very blood sang out at the idea of it. It made her hands shake in anticipation for things she didn't understand, and she forced herself to take several deep breaths before positioning more equipment for various other readings.

"Yes, fascinating," Loki agreed. He was leaned over next to her and staring at the Tesseract himself. "But are you making any real progress yet? We can't linger here long without drawing attention."

"Just give me half a minute."

Jane was far too interested in the properties of the Tesseract to spare an anxious thought about Loki or whether they might be caught. The data she was pulling from the first few simple tests were groundbreaking all on their own. And S.H.I.E.L.D hadn't wanted to share any of this information with the scientific community!

A device at her side recorded a baseline reading of the cube as Jane worked around it to prepare conditions before trying to illicit a reaction from it. She wasn't sure if Loki would exactly approve, but she needed the information if she wanted to bring anything useful back to Tony. Her eyes caught on the Tesseract a few seconds too long and she felt something overwhelm her senses. Jane's fingers twitched at her sides as she tilted her head to the side, listening to the silence.

"I could end Malekith here and now." Her voice was odd, almost hollow yet lilting at the end as if in wonder. "With space and reality right here..."

Her fingers and wrists twisted and curled as if playing with smoke and darkness started to seep over her eyes.

Something felt like it struck Jane right through the chest, and then she could see herself. She was floating above the earth, dancing on a wave of Aether with a halo of blue light at her back. The power she could yield with only a flicks of her fingers and a wave of her hand made her heady. She could save the planet. She could make it new again. Any question she'd ever had, all the impossible things colleagues said could never be done, she could do. She had answers.

And then she was no longer in the vision. Jane blinked, all the feelings and knowledge from the dream fading, and found she was in an entirely different room than the one that held the Tesseract. Loki stood tall and unimpressed beside her.