Office Hours, Saturday

[ifwebeworthy]

Don hadn't listened to radio. Don probably should have listened to radio. But, well. It wasn't like he or Thor were expecting any visitors, so he'd had an afternoon of surgery after Thor's class yesterday, and then this morning they'd realized they'd need to hold office hours over the weekend and had to figure out how to make that work.

And now here he was, in his office, trying to catch up on some paperwork while he waited to see if anyone's parents would show up.

(Open office hours are open!

Comments

[if_she_be_worthy]

Well...she was someone's parent.

Jane knocked on the door frame and said, "Hi, stranger."

[ifwebeworthy]

Don dropped the pen he'd been fiddling with. It went--somewhere. He didn't know. He didn't care. "Jane?!"

After a moment he recovered his faculties enough to scramble to his feet to greet her properly. "I--I wasn't expecting you!"

[if_she_be_worthy]

"Obviously," Jane agreed, dry. "I met...well, me yesterday. Except she was also Thor."

[ifwebeworthy]

"Yeah, that's...I don't really know what's going on there. It's great to see you. Please," he said, indicating a chair, "have a seat." He was keeping the desk between them. It felt safer, somehow, that way.

[if_she_be_worthy]

Neither did Jane, frankly. Look, she had tried to lift the hammer once, in the middle of the night while Thor was asleep. Everyone did it sooner or later. Curiosity was a bitch. She knew she couldn't budge the thing, much less pick it up and wield the power of Thor or at least she couldn't then. But she also knew that the multiverse was vast and contained all sorts of possibilities.

"It's great to see you, too," she said. "All alive and stuff."

[ifwebeworthy]

"It's...complicated," Don said in response to all the questions she wasn't asking. "I--well, I suppose we should start with, I'm not Thor."

[if_she_be_worthy]

Jane just stared at him for a moment, waiting for more, and when she realized it wasn't coming she said, "Yeah, Don. I know that." Had he thought-- "I was there the whole time, you know? I remember--I mean, it got messy for a while there, for sure, but you were always...very different people." She couldn't claim she'd always known when she was talking to Don and when she was talking to Thor, in whichever body they happened to be wearing, but she'd never quite bought that Don had been just Thor with amnesia all along. He'd persisted too strongly for that.

[ifwebeworthy]

"I--oh. Well." Don blinked back the urge to cry for some reason. "That's..." Just give him a second here.

[if_she_be_worthy]

Maybe a slight change of subject? She gestured to his walking stick where it was leaning against the desk. "So that was you?" she asked, because she knew that stick. "I wondered." People had been trying to get Mjolnir out of that field since Asgard fell, and then in a crack of lightning it was just...gone.

[ifwebeworthy]

"I couldn't just leave it there," Don said, his jaw set, anger in his eyes. "I was afraid they'd figure out a way for that thing to pick it up."

[if_she_be_worthy]

Jane shuddered at the mention of the simulacrum walking around wearing Thor's face. "It's been quiet for a while. I'm hoping they came to their senses and destroyed it." Probably not.

[ifwebeworthy]

"Probably not," Don said. "So how have you been? I heard through the grapevine--" Facebook stalking "--that you got married, had a kid?"

[if_she_be_worthy]

"Yes," Jane said, and--well, she'd been worrying this whole time about how much she should tell him, and now she decided, fuck it. "But six months ago I filed for divorce. Keith has our son while proceedings are underway, and I suspect he might end up with custody." She managed to sound calm about it, even though she was anything but calm. That was her kid.

[notaqueenbutaking]

Did Val need to check out this Don guy? Abso-fucking-lutely she did. So, while Jane was busy with something else, she found her way to the school to check him out.

"Huh. Shorter than I expected."

[ifwebeworthy]

That was a valkyrie, right there, and if the sight of her sent a pang through Don, who had never properly been a child of Asgard, he could only imagine what it was doing to Thor.

He still said, "If you're looking for Thor, you're going to have to come back tomorrow."

He wasn't commenting on her comment on his height. Look, he knew, all right?

[notaqueenbutaking]

"Both of you, honestly," Val said, walking in and looking around the office curiously. "But--he's lurking around somewhere, isn't he?"

[ifwebeworthy]

"Yes and no," Don told her, wary. "He can hear you, but I'm not his messenger service."

[notaqueenbutaking]

That made her grin. "Got a pair on you, huh? Good."

[ifwebeworthy]

"Thanks, I think," Don said. "Are you a friend of Jane's?" She was the only other person around here with ties to Asgard that he knew of, after all.

[notaqueenbutaking]

Hey, maybe she was here for them! She wasn't. She super wasn't.

Val nodded, plopping down in a chair to sprawl in it a little. "So, what's the deal here?"

[ifwebeworthy]

"Well, I teach health," Don said, "and practice medicine at a hospital on the mainland." Did he think that was what she was asking about? No, of course not. But she was going to need to be a little more specific.

[notaqueenbutaking]

Which was why she smirked and nodded along with what he said. "You sound like Loki when you do that."

[ifwebeworthy]

"Ew," Don said. You take that back, Valkyrie. You take that back right now.

[notaqueenbutaking]

Shan't!

"I said what I said."

Slippery little shit who managed to do one decent thing in the end.

NFB

[ifwebeworthy]

"I'm a creation of the Odinforce that got a little away from him," Don said. "Possibly because of the involvement of Mjolnir. We can't ask Odin, because he's dead, but I definitely wasn't supposed to be as real as I am. Thor and I are bound via Mjolnir, and can only exist one at a time. Does that help any?"