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Jane blinked twice. “I…” she began, felt her mind fritz out completely, took a deep breath and started again. “I don’t know what to say.”
Thor’s hopeful expression melted her heart. “That you like it?”
Damn, he had the “golden labrador retriever puppy you’d feel awful if you kicked” expression down pat — and he wasn’t afraid to use it. “Of course I like it,” she responded. “It’s great. I didn’t know they made rugs of the Periodic Table. And so big.”
Jane looked at the brightly colored rug on the floor of the farmhouse in the Hudson Valley they were still moving into. “I like it,” she admitted with a bit more enthusiasm, picturing how her six-year-old self would have run screaming around the room in glee at such a gift. “But you’re the one who hired a decorator. Do you really think she’s going to appreciate you adding this to her plan?”
Having a decorator — Thor having a decorator — was part of the current strangeness she was doing her best to ignore. When they’d decided to move back to New York so he could be near his fellow Avengers, Jane figured they'd find a small place for just the two of them and she'd be back to the grind of filling out grant paperwork for funding. Then two things happened. Her inbox exploded with requests for lectures, invitations to conferences, slots in journals, and offers for consultation, including one from a certain observatory in Tromso. And Thor found a rural spread that allowed Jane to do a fair amount of stargazing from the back deck.
She’d squawked about money and he’d revealed that while his father was officially Not Happy his son had forsaken the throne of Asgard for a mortal, privately he’d made arrangements for Thor to receive an income stream that would keep him comfortably on Earth. Maybe not Tony Stark comfortable, but definitely far more than Jane was used to.
She’d protested the farm was too much for just the two of them, she was horrible at housekeeping and didn’t know how she’d manage to keep the place running while juggling the requests she was receiving and get work done. Thor’s response was to ask Darcy to join them and dub her their ármaðr, which was apparently what the chief steward of Odin’s house was called. Darcy immediately had business cards with the title made up, wrangled the inbox, and kept Jane insulated from the folk who wanted to know what sex with an alien once thought to be a god was like.
Thor moved around the rug so he stood next to Jane. "I was thinking," he said, "that you could put it in the lab once the conversion of the barn is finished. The idea was that it might make you smile — as well as provide a handy reference if needed."
He slid his arm around her waist and she leaned against him. "Let me guess. You learned the periodical tables when you were just a very small child."
"I was taught the table when I was small. I would not say I learned it." He smiled down at her. "I fear I was not the scholar of the two of us."
There a tinge of sadness to his tone, as there always was when the subject of Loki entered the conversation, even tangentially. Funny, but after he'd help protect her on Svartalfheim and saved Thor's life at the cost of his own, she could forgive him a bit for what he'd done to New York, if not Eric. She had to, in some way; Thor genuinely grieved and she accepted that. But she could also see him more and more taking comfort in the memories and that was good.
"Okay, the barn, then. Good idea, actually. This type of rug is made to stand up to heavy traffic — and coffee stains. You’ve seen some of the disasters that can happen when you get me, Darcy and a coffee pot in a room together. Oh, and I could use it when I’m doing the school sessions, part of the whole 'Science is fun' theme."
She could see it now, the rug there as she got her coffee, standing on it while she listened to Darcy running down the list of upcoming lectures she was supposed to give, using it to help provide kids with a grounding in the building blocks of the universe. The surface gathering little spills, sugar and creamer ground into the pile, mud from feet on wet days, slush when winter set in...
"Thinking about it," she said, "a wall chart would do better for those sessions. Maybe we should put the rug in here, under the long table."
Thor glanced over toward the trestle table set near the windows. "Beneath your workbench?"
“Workbench” hadn't been the decorator's term for it; the idea had been a "table for casual dining," separate from the dining room itself, which could easily seat all of the Avengers plus other guests. She, Darcy and Thor usually sat on stools at the kitchen island for meals or flopped in front of the television that occupied a respectable amount of wall space in the open plan common room. The table was usually spread with star charts, a laptop and whatever piece of equipment Jane might be messing with at the moment. Maybe she wasn’t scrambling for every dime any more, but she still built much of her own tech.
Another change in lifestyle — instead of seeking quiet while she worked, Jane found herself more often preferring to spend the evening in Thor's company, even if he was watching a movie while she tinkered. "Yes, beneath my workbench. Your decorator won't throw a fit, will she? I'm pretty certain it's not what she envisioned, but I don't want the rug messed up because you gave it to me and I...I like it."
She looked up at him with a smile. "I really do. Thank you."
The smile he gave her in response wasn’t broad, but there was a warmth and happiness there Jane wanted to bask in forever. “Then I will deal with Lucille and you shall have your rug where you wish.” As she opened her mouth to speak, he said, “If she objects, I shall remind her who is the client and that it is to be done according to my wishes, not hers. Come, let us put it in place.”
They spent a good half-hour arranging and rearranging table and rug until the thing was where they both were happy with it. When, later that evening, Darcy wandered in and noticed the addition, Jane braced herself for the inevitable snark. Darcy just looked over to where Thor was putting together the makings of a simple stew, it being his night in the kitchen, looked back and said, “He is soooo crazy about you.”
Jane felt herself blush a little, which only made Darcy grin more broadly, but there weren’t any further jibes. After they’d eaten, as she adjusted the calibration on one of her scanners and Darcy went through the upcoming schedule — reminding Jane she needed some decent luggage because her backpack wasn’t going to make it through the current round of lecture tours — Jane curled her toes against the surface, enjoying the feel of the rough weave against her skin.
The next morning, Thor mumbled sleepily as she gently extracted herself from bed, determined to get some work done on her latest paper while the household was still quiet. Wrapped in her robe, she padded softly downstairs and set the coffee to brew. As the machine burbled away, she wandered toward the windows of the large common room, smiling slightly at the lovely sight of a touch of early morning mist hanging over the green that surrounded the farmhouse.
Soon, though, her eyes dropped to the rug resting on the whitewashed floorboards, the Periodic Table laid out in in neat, ordered rows. Thor wasn't dumb, but as he'd said himself, he wasn't a scholar or a scientist. Asgardians might be more advanced, but that didn't mean Thor didn't thump equipment when it wouldn't react as he wanted it to or had a better understanding of astrophysics or Einstein-Rosen Bridges than she did. He was grounded very much in the world of what he could see and touch — even if that seeing and touching was much broader and weirder than anything Jane had experienced before he tumbled into her life.
But he listened to her talk about her theories with what seemed to be genuine pleasure and gave her a gift that referenced her interests because he hoped it would please her. Frigga had raised a wonderful son and Jane sometimes wondered how she could be so lucky as to be the one he fell for.
There, in the still and quiet of the morning, Jane let herself be six years old, looked at her rug and giggled with glee.
