fossilised | I come from a land of ice and snow

I come from a land of ice and snow

Asgard sat atop the branches of Yggdrasil since time began, and little had changed in their society in the years since. Each Asgardian was long-lived into the millennia, their lands were fertile, their people brave and strong. They had their vassals, their allies, and their enemies. Yet even those who opposed them respected the might of the Golden Dias, and the royalty who sat upon it. Currently that was Odin Borson, though he grew weary more easily now and had begun to consider passing the throne to his eldest son.

He had been blessed with many children, but only two that he considered worthy of his lineage and status. His firstborn, Thor, strong and honourable and everything an Asgardian warrior should be. His second son, Loki, was not natural born, though none knew that but his wife. He was different, a creature of magic and mayhem, of sharp intelligence. Both were worthy, but together they would take Asgard to a new prosperity, he was certain of it.

Midgard, where the mortals dwelt, was a land raided every few centuries for stock. It was seen as a breeding ground, much like a corral for cattle. Mortals were lesser, short-lived and weak, they were fit only as slaves. The last raid had taken place when Loki had been but a baby, nearly a thousand years ago, but the mortals that had been taken had been bred and cared for so that a healthy slave population still thrived. Slaves were given a weakened mixture of Idunn's crop with their food, to extend their natural lives to at least a few centuries in order to make them worth the effort to train. They had no rights, but they were taught well that this was their natural position.

All slave children were raised in a central pen and taught the same when small, those that then displayed talent at cooking, riding, hunting, housework, artisan skills, or singing were then measured off to be specially trained for higher masters. Every five years those who could afford to buy a slave, or those of high enough status to simply demand them, came to the corral and chose. Those who were chosen were special, were envied, and those who were not ended up working the fields out in the far reaches of Asgard, the most menial of work.

Anthony and Steven had been friends since they were little and being raised in the large pens together. Both had excelled, Anthony at crafting and Steven at warrior's skills, but neither were chosen when they were five, nor ten, nor even fifteen. Now, at twenty, it was their final chance to be chosen before they would be assigned to one of the meanest farmers beyond the borders of the great capital. Steven woke Anthony as the dawn rose, mingled excitement and nerves on his face.

"Anthony! Wake up, I've got news! I heard the overseer talking to one of the passing guards, and Princes Thor and Loki are coming to the corral today."

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Though it was far, far too early to assess what in Bucky’s mind had changed from being programed to listen to Thor to being more like himself, Steve couldn’t help but hope as he was propped up against a wall and watched through one very swollen eye as Bucky raced away. He put an arm over busted ribs, knowing he’d heal sooner rather than later, and was in the process of trying to get up to his feet when Bucky returned with the tunic.

Steve grabbed onto Bucky, both as leverage and to pull him close so that he could whisper. He had a feeling that whatever he was now, however, he could hear just fine even if Steve barely whispered. “Can’t leave them.”

He was talking about Clint and Tony, yes, but also all the rest. Steve didn’t believe in ‘For The Greater Good’ scenarios. He fought until everyone was free, even if that was highly unwise.

“We have to try to free everyone, Buck, or I can’t go. There has to be a place that we can hide until we think of a plan.”

Right up front, Captain America was including him in the strategizing, but that was just how Steve was. He might have a mind for tactics, but he also had a mind to listen to every voice. He’d always been like that, though, even when he was young and Bucky Barnes and he would come up with elaborate pranks or decide how to spend their weekends getting lost in North Jersey.

Something about that response seemed right and only cemented Steve in his mind as someone to protect. It was a stupid goddamn response, there was no way to get everyone off this moon considering their firepower compared to the firepower that their enemies commanded, and trying would just be tantamount to suicide.

So he nodded, as if that made sense... and then launched himself at Steve with the aim of knocking him clean out with a blow to the side of the head.

If Steve was going to endanger himself by trying to save other, worthless, people, then it was the Soldier's job to make sure that couldn't be allowed. He was going to protect Steve no matter what, even if that meant protecting him from himself.

Steve had looked about as graceful when they cut him out of the ice a year or so back, meaning to say that as Bucky carted him off, limp from too many blows to the head. His arms dangled down Bucky's back.

By then, Thor had recovered enough to give chased, though his pride was too great to actually call for help. Was the prince having a moonlight romp? No one asked. No one called after him, save for Frandal to see if he was coming back.

He wasn't. Thor was going to kill James, mad, broken human.

And maybe Steven too. What did he need a double for anyway?

The trouble was that he could not find the pair, no matter how hard he looked, and indeed only found a discarded robe behind a building.

The Soldier was highly trained and, even if he didn't know for sure that he was being pursued, logic and a natural healthy dose of paranoia told him that he would be wise to proceed as if he were. That meant that he stuck to shadows, he carried Steve quietly like a ghost and, as soon as he could, he stuffed the other man inside a sack to make him less obvious as an unconscious slave.

It took hours for him to find the transports.

When he did find the skiffs, he then spent another few hours working out how to get aboard one, and then how to work it. Eventually, he had nothing left to do but grab Steve in his sack and make a break for it. It was do or die, make it out or they'd never have to worry about being imprisoned again.

His whole mission now was to get Steve to earth. The first mission he had given himself, and he intended to see it fulfilled.

The price Asgard paid for being too sure of themselves was that no one noticed the skiff missing until Thor crashed his way into the command building where his warriors were far into their cups. Guard duty on this technology wasn’t a priority. A Midgardian not schooled in their ways couldn’t possibly figure out how to take a skiff, after all. It wasn’t as if anyone anticipated someone like the Soldier being captured. Or breaking loose. Or stealing one of the assets collected from the culling.

Thor was a hunter, he enjoyed a game of pursuit, but to do so now, once he had been shown that a skiff was missing, would prove him to be unworthy. That anyone could escape was unthought of and so, swallowing his anger in favour of his pride, he allowed the pair to go.

They would die in the crossing. A skiff could not make it from the training village to Midgard, surely, and if it did…well, it wouldn’t take them back to the correct Midgard. The pair would suffer and die horribly no matter the situation and though Thor was not cruel, he had other things to worry about.

When Steve woke, it would be with a groan. He could feel his teeth aching in his jaw and his whole body felt constricted and tight.

“Buck? Hey, Buck, you there…?” The vessel was small by Asgardian standards, but it had many, many rooms and Steve was alone.

While it was true that interdimensional travel had not been high up on the list of things that the Soldier had been trained to do, he was trained to adapt while on a mission and do whatever necessary to bring it to completion. The controls only took an hour or so to master, and the language it used only a couple more hours.

By the time Steve woke, they were on their way... somewhere.

He didn't know where any of the coordinates actually brought them out, so he had brought up one of the saved sets of past coordinates and put them in. They could end up in Asgard, back home, in another version of home, or somewhere else altogether. Either way, they would be gone and could work out a new plan from there.

The Soldier heard Steve stir and slipped down to the room he had left him in, standing in the doorway warily.

"That's not my name."

Let's get that established.

So they were still on this? “James then,” Steve said, not willing to really argue the matter at the moment. He had trouble getting up, but that was only because they weren’t on as solid a surface as his body thought. He’d adjust in a moment, a lot quicker than any other person, but it did take that extra moment. He leaned against the one with one hand until he could straighten up.

He still felt a little bit sick to his stomach though, but that was from the head trauma and would pass when his body fixed that too.

His face was still covered in blood when he looked up at Bucky, and then down at him as he straightened up. His eyes darted around him, over his shoulders, and he frowned awkwardly.

“Uh. Where are we?” He wasn’t going to like the answer. He could feel it.

James would do. Even that made him feel a bit uncomfortable, but it was the designation that his last handler had given him, so it was easier to respond to. Last handler because, at some point, he had made the decision to go rogue. He still wasn't entirely sure why or what the hell was happening in his head, but that's just how it was at the moment.

"Don't know."

He gestured for Steve to follow him, and he'd wait until the other man was steady enough to do so. The view outside was breathtaking, just Void and space all around their little vessel.

"But we're away, we escaped."

Steve wasn’t going to complain about the name. He’d not been James to him in years, not since they were children, and then again only when he had asked if Bucky’s name was on a list of deceased 107th soldiers before he high tailed it into Austria to rescue whomever he could. He’d not said the name outloud since he’d been granted access to Bucky’s file from SHIELD. He’d been really gone by then, gone by 70 years.

But he could get over it. It was just a name and if Bucky was comfortable with James, then James he would be.

Forcing himself to focus, Steve was determined to follow Bucky out of the room and down a corridor that would seem narrow to an Asgardian...even Steve found it to be just a bit tight.

He wasn’t prepared for the destination, however. He didn’t have any capacity to find the sight on deck beautiful. The endless black felt claustrophobic. The pin pricks of light felt cold and hostile. He knew them to be stars, but they were so far between…. His mind didn’t have the capacity to understand the great distances involved in stars or why, on a planet with atmosphere, they could look so close when in space, they were barely visible at all.

“Oh…okay…so… We’re… Uh, James, maybe you should show me how to work this thing.”

It was such a shame that Bucky wasn't himself right now. He used to love science fiction books when he was a kid, they were the cheapest novel to buy and always packed full of adventure and cool new gadgets. To actually be in space on a real craft, adventuring with his best friend... it would have driven him wild with excitement.

But the Soldier just looked on the stars and endless void with the same blank and dispassionate gaze that he levelled at everything else.

"Why do you need to know?"

There was a part of him that didn't trust Steve. He might do something stupid like try to get back to that prison world and rescue everyone else.

The question was at least easy to answer and Steve leveled his gaze on Bucky. It was easier to see that joyless face than it was to look out at nothing. “If one of us goes down, there needs to be backup.” And though he was a pilot, he didn’t want to mess around with anything that Bucky had already done. Asgardians couldn’t be too much like humans, not with the way that they acted, and so if their culture was so different (it wasn’t, humans had had slaves for a long, long time, in many, many cultures) than their technology could be too. The truth was, Steve just needed something to do.

And he needed to be allowed not to dwell on what had happened to them all back there… And he needed to find a way to take this ship back to where they had come to rescue everyone else.

He just was smart enough not to say that out loud.

That did make sense and so he stepped aside to show Steve how the controls worked. They were pretty simple once the basics were down, but to have figured out the basics required a large amount of experience in blind flying many different craft. It was just lucky that the Soldier had been trained in all these areas.

He sat up on the edge of the skiff, not seeming at all frightened by the sheer drop into nothing over the side or curious about how the hell they were able to breathe, and just watched Steve.

"I remember calling your name," he said, out of the blue, low and steady. "For months, until they told me that you were dead."

It would be easy to turn the ship around, since their current destination had been plotted from the original embarkment point. All Steve would have to do it put in the old coordinates. He was happy about that, or at least satisfied enough to know that he could use this skiff to go back once Bucky was safe. His friend was not in any shape to come with him…he was too unpredictable. Normally, Steve would drop everything for Bucky but as far as Steve knew, the majority of their species was left in that training facility.

He needed to save them. He needed to—

His whole mind blanked out as Bucky spoke and Steve turned his eyes up from where he sat to state aghast at his friend. That broken mind knew him, somewhere, deep down. And this confession broke his heart.

“I guess I did die in a way. Put my plane down in the ocean and… Well, it took awhile for them to find me.” The corners of his lips turned up. “Took even longer to find you. Real sorry about that, pal. If I had known… I would have come after you a long time ago.”

"I remember breaking."

It was a strange thing, like seeing the memories in a filter of an old movie rather than real events that happened to him. It let him talk about them more candidly and without emotion, though there was something deeply disquieted about them.

"I held on for so long, I knew you would come. You came before, you walked behind enemy lines with no backup and pulled me out, I knew you'd come. And then they said you were dead, they showed me the footage of your funeral, you weren't gonna come and I wasn't there to save you either. I failed you, and they broke me."

Now Bucky wasn’t saying this to hurt him. He knew that. He wasn’t an idiot, despite all of those blows to his head, but it hurt enough that he felt his eyes sting. The tears were coming in pinpricks, poking through the shell of his calm exterior and easy smile until he had to blink rapidly to try and stop himself from acting foolish. These things hadn’t happened to him. There had been nothing he could do about them. And yet, the guilt he felt for being the cause left him with an angry poker in his stomach. He hadn’t felt this way since his chronic asthma attacks when he was left hanging on the ropes or lagging behind everyone in mile jogs.

He had no right to be upset either. Bucky was finally opening up and sharing and all Steve wanted to do was stop him. It was unfortunate. Swallowing back his own personal discomfort, holding his head high, Steve forced himself to stay at attention as tears fell in a curious speed from his lower eyelids to his cheeks and down across his perfect chin.

“I should have come looking. We knew HYDRA experimented on you. I’m the one that failed, James. What happened to you was my fault.”

"Why didn't you look?"

The question held no accusation, but Steve would be forgiven for hearing it that way. After all, he had come for Bucky when everyone told him that he was dead the first time, why not the second time? Why had he abandoned him to the fate that HYDRA held for him? That wasn't fair, nobody could have known that he would survive that fall, but it was a question in the back of his mind anyway.

He saw that Steve was close to tears, but he didn't take back the question or change the subject, he just sat and stared at him, waiting for an answer. Though what he would decide was an acceptable answer was anyone's guess.

“It was war.” Bad answer. It was an excuse. “Because you fell from an impossible height…” He could have checked. It would have taken a few days, and maybe that was a few days that they didn’t have, but he could have done something. “I went back to that bar… The one I asked if you wanted to join the Howling Commandos, to join up with me… It was completely destroyed and… I wasted so much time feeling sorry for myself. I did wrong by you, Buck. I…”

Steve looked up to try and keep the tears from overwhelming him, but it was just too much and he couldn’t do it. He ended up with his head bowed like a child, guilt and remorse becoming one, and lifted a hand to his face to try and pinch the tears behind his eyelids.

This was not how a man was meant to act, he told himself.

"I'm sorry."

The sight of Steve crying dislodged something in the Soldier's chest, made him want to cry himself, though he still didn't understand why. He leaned forwards and very briefly, very gently, laid a hand to his shoulder and then took it away... probably the first non-violent and voluntary touch that he had given in decades.

"I'm going to get you back to safety."

He didn't say that he would stay with him after that. Honestly, he had no idea what his plans were beyond that. It didn't matter right then, his mission objective was just to get Steve back to a place of safety. Whatever happened after that could come next.

"I don't need to be safe," Steve said quietly. "I've never needed to be safe. You used to tell me to try running away from fights sometimes but that's not who I am. I can't sit back and just let it all happen." Maybe that was too much to say and maybe that would give his intentions away, so Steve barreled into the rest. "Taking you back is probably a bad idea too." If HYDRA still existed, if the world still existed, they could so easily get Bucky back under their control again.

Steve wouldn't let that happen and so he returned to his seat, warmed by the touch to his shoulder, and leaned against the console.

"We could do this together," he said softly. "We can find a way to save them. You got us here and no one's coming for us so we can figure out a way to save as many of the rest as possible."

Maybe someone else would use the excuse of atonement, a way to rectify in themselves their misdeeds and shortcomings, but not Steve.

"Don't knock me out again, Buck. I know that you know me enough even now to figure out that I'm not lying. We can't go anywhere to stay. Just to regroup."

He wasn't going to leave Tony and Clint to that horrible fate.

"Why do I care what happens to them?"

It was strange but oddly exhilarating, in a way, to argue with someone. It made him feel like he might get punished any moment, but he honestly didn't care right then. He would take the punishment, because enough of himself had leaked out that he knew that he wouldn't be in someone's control again.

"You're my mission, nobody else."

He would leave them all die, let them all be trapped as slaves forever, if it kept Steve safe. Though he could hardly deny that he told the truth there, he wasn't going to be safe wherever he went.

"We won't stay together, you won't be in danger then."

The way Bucky put that actually had Steve laughing. He still felt horribly guilty but he couldn't help how it felt for him to hear that Bucky remembered enough about himself to be overly protective. "Can't be your mission if you just plan on leaving me anyway." As funny as it had been, realization hit as hard as his friend.

Bucky was planning in leaving him. Steve was going to speak to why Bucky should care about humanity but instead, he was being selfish. His blood, which had been boiling with guilt, turned instead to ice.

"Please. Don't leave me again. I don't deserve it," he whispered. "I left you, I left you to suffer, but we aren't at the end of the line yet, pal. We promised each other." He wasn't above begging. "Help me with this and... And we can go anywhere. We're in space, James! Space! We can do... Go, go anywhere."

At the end of the line...

Why did that phrase speak to him so strongly? He felt as if he had been doused with cold water, his already stern expression becoming even fiercer. He didn't want this, he didn't want to be forced into a friendship that he barely remembered (or did he?), he didn't want to go anywhere with Steve (right?), that was-- it was--

He didn't know how, but his face was suddenly damp. He hadn't cried in such a long time that he honestly didn't realise what was happening, instinctively stifling any sound to make it totally silent.

"It's suicide to go back there."

Men don't talk about feelings so Bucky's tears, like Steve's own, would just go unmentioned. Instead, Steve focused on the words. Their conversation was a little disjointed, neither wanting to acknowledge a lot of what the other said, both for very similar reasons despite the context, but the background interference changed the dimensions of it. Steve wanted to reach out. He did not. So, there was no choice but that one line of conversation.

"I can't live with myself if I don't." It was blunt, but truthful. Defiant, but kind, too. "I know I just asked you to come with me, but I understand if it's not something you can do. Don't... Don't make this about some mission to save me. You've saved me already. You got us out of there and put power back in our hands. And that's more than I could have done myself."

When was the last time that they had cried together?

Steve didn't think there was a time. He'd shut Bucky out when his mom died. And there was never any other reason to mourn.

The last time Bucky had cried when Steve had been nearby had been when he got his discharge papers. Drafted. He had never told Steve that, never told him that he had tried to stay home from the war to try and take care of his dumb ass, scared that if he left then he'd come back to find that Steve had picked a fight with the wrong person and ended up dead. He wasn't scared of the Germans or being shot at, just of losing his best friend.

But he never could have told that to Steve. The idiot had been too full of patriotic pride and thought that every able bodied guy should want to sign up at once, Bucky didn't want to see the look of disappointment in his eyes when he realised that Bucky had to be drafted. So he told him that he enlisted and cried to himself that night.

"You won't live if you do, why should I let you?"

Can't talk about any of this stuff, only the problem at hand.

"You won't help them, they're already dead. Save yourself and, if you gotta do something, then help make sure the rest of the population are prepared for if this happens again."

It was a good argument. Don't risk yourself when you can help others without doing so. The General tried to tell him that. Even Stark had suggested he try it too. But this was a guy that threw himself on grenades and jumped into heavily fortified enemy territory. He always did his best when he was pretty sure he was going to die but also pretty sure that he was going to be helping people out in the long run.

He had to try.

"We don't have a quarrel here. We don't have to fight one another. You asked me why you should care about the others-- Well, why do you care about me? Because you remember me, just a little bit, and you want to keep that safe, right? It's important to you. Well... I've seen what they're going through. And I can't shake it. The Asgardians are bullies. I can't let bullies keep on going. If we don't stop them now, you and I will be long gone by the time they come back again. And no one will remember."

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