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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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."

"Alright then," he said, and folded his arms. "Tell me what your plan is for getting them out of there."

He looked, for a moment, more like Bucky than the Soldier. Just an exasperated friend who always had to talk down his more headstrong companion. It was funny how people meeting them for the first time assumed that Steve was the good boy and Bucky must get that poor scrawny guy into trouble, when really it was more often the other way around.

Nothing had changed with the serum, Steve was still the same bull-headed idiot just with more muscles.

"If you can give me a plan that doesn't involve you dying in the first half hour, I'll help you."

Maybe that was only because Steve constantly lived like he was going to die the next day. There wasn't much reason to hold back. He tried to be nice to the women that Bucky set him up with (even if they all wanted Bucky despite the fact that he was dating one of their friends). He was always polite, always standing up for everyone no matter how much smaller he was than they were. But he did have that trouble maker streak in him. He was more apt to stretch the truth and get them into situations that maybe weren't the best for anyone. It was just the sort of boy he'd been and now the sort of man he was.

"I've had two seperate concussions," Steve said, the corner of his lip twitching even if his eyes still spoke of sadness. "I think I deserve some time to figure that one out. While I was getting my beauty sleep, did you find out anything more than navigation from this thing?"

It was easier to seize on the chance to change the subject, at least as far as he was concerned. No more talk about a past that Bucky didn't remember fully or how much, right this moment, he looked like that guy out of uniform who always had a little bit of wit to his charm and could still pull anyone he wanted to.

Except for Peggy Carter.

That still amused him, how immune she was to his best friend.

Not anyone he wanted to.

He had never managed to get the blond that he had really wanted, and he never would. So that was two that slipped through his net, though he could hardly blame Peggy for preferring Steve, he thought most of the girls back then had been idiots not to prefer him when he was clearly the better catch.

The Soldier quirked an eyebrow, but he didn't argue much.

"You have twelve hours to give me a reason," he said, and he would hold Steve to that deadline pretty severely, even that was a generous amount of time. But for now he shifted to show Steve how he had figured out which the life support controls were, gravity, and how to open communication channels with other vessels on their frequency. Not that he planned on doing that at all.

Twelve hours didn't seem fair for coming up with a full blown out plan but Steve took it. He wasn't going to make a fuss over how arbitrary that was. He knew that Bucky likely was acting with autonomy for the first time in a very long time and so he would just follow along with him.

Mostly. Until his plan wasn't good enough. And then there would be fighting. It was just in their cards, nothing he could directly help, unfortunately.

"Feels like we're in a dime book," Steve said after awhile. He was smart, had always been smart, and the serum helped him along with that but it was still an amazing feat that everything ended up making some sense to him in the end.

Life support. He was grinning every time he thought of it, despite what that meant. He was just a little slower on the language study than Bucky was because he didn't have a background in linguistics like his friend now did.

"Listen. I'm going to find out if there's food on this thing. And if there is, I'm going to eat a lot of it. I'll come back in... Four hours. Hopefully with a plan you like." He mostly just wanted to sleep, though. But sleep wasn't going to help his friends.

Four hours and a full belly later had Steve brighter eyed than he had been. He'd cleaned off his face and washed his hands and his hair too and while he might still be in dirty clothes because he refused to wear anything he'd found in any of the rooms, he looked a thousand times better.

"We need to get Tony out first. He'll be able to figure out how to get this thing to jam the communications of the other ships," Steve said, hands on his hips. "So we will make a targeted strike to where he's held. Anyone we can free, we will. They'll be able to help us and create a diversion. Our mission will be to bring Stark on board and get out of here as quickly as possible."

The Soldier didn't sleep.

Though he hadn't slept in a long time, and though he was bone tired, he refused to sleep until he knew that Steve was properly safe. He had a mission, and that took priority over literally anything else, even the needs of his own body. He'd continue on long past the point where he should have collapsed from dehydration or exhaustion, and never let on that he was hurting.

That plan was... terrible.

"That's not a plan, Steve," he said, slightly annoyed. "That's telling me that someone else might have a plan if we can get him out. It's flawed, I've been watching all three of you and he's broken."

He doesn't think that Stark or Barton have it left in them to be productive or care what happens to them or anyone else.

Maybe now was not the time for tough love but Steve found himself annoyed at how easily his compatriots could be dismissed. "He's not broken. He was drugged. And caged. They said the same thing about you, too. And I didn't let that stop me. And look at you now." He didn't mean to say that he felt responsible for Bucky's breakthroughs, just that the man wasn't as broken as he seemed to think he was. Or, he was able to work and formulate a plan even while being broken. Steve wasn't a semantics sort of guy. "I've seen what he can do. He's better than his dad ever was and Howard could do some pretty amazing things."

It was a shame that Tony wasn't there to hear the praise. That alone might snap him out of this mess.

"There's only two of us here, pal. So yeah. To make this plan work, we are going to need some help. Would you feel better if it was more covert? We can extract Stark." And Clint. "We can get the rest on our next pass. Take a bigger ship. Work with me here, Buck."

He was supposed to be calling him James but that was almost impossible.

Steve certainly knew how to hit so that it would hurt, so that the blows would land. Was he broken? Yes, he had been feeling and remembering some odd things, but he didn't think he was malfunctioning that badly, not if he were able to still fulfil a mission, even if the parameters had been set by him.

"Just Stark, covert."

He would allow that concession and he didn't chide Steve for calling him Buck, even though the name made it feel like there were fingernails running over his brain on the inside of his skull.

"We take this ship somewhere safe first, establish a base, then go back for Stark."

Steve didn’t like to wait, but sometimes he knew that it was more strategic to do so. Falling back was not a retreat in the full sense of the word, it was meant as a way to gain perspective and come back hitting harder than ever. “Is there anything in the ship’s computers that tells us where might be safe?”

It turned out that there were many habitable moons all along the corridor between the destination that Bucky had initially picked and their starting point. There were even some outside of their plotted course. All had beautiful write ups and holographic (well, magical, but Steve couldn’t wrap his head around that) images to go with them. Steve pointed out two that would work. One looked like it sported abandoned mining towns, likely abandoned when whatever resource they had been after ran out. The other looked lush and had overgrown settlements.

“Maybe it’s….for farming? Like how they used to tell us in school that it makes sense to let fields lie fallow for a few years between harvests to rebuild the soil?”

He wasn’t sure which he liked better but both had buildings and resources to live on and looked safe.

Looking deeper into both moons suggested was something that had to be done before one was chosen, the Soldier was far too cautious to want to just go to an unknown place without getting all the information first. Further research using the thing which he equated to a computer but which was obviously magical, indicated that the mining towns had been driven out by a poisonous gas from the mines. No good.

But the other moon, the overgrown and lush one, had simply been abandoned by the residents when they had managed to secure a larger and even more profitable moon to farm their produce on. This one was perfectly inhabitable, with wildlife and plants both fit to support life.

"This one," he said, already inputting the new data that would change their course. "I'll leave you to set up a base and go back for Stark, it'll be easier to infiltrate on my own."

“Buck.” Nails on a brain or not, Steve couldn’t help himself. “No. Listen. I look like his… I have a double there. I get that you have a lot of covert training, but I can get away with walking around there without anyone really noticing me. I’ll just need you to buzz off my hair.” He had fought against his double on the shop that ultimately saw his Thor’s demise and he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they were twins, right down to eye color. There was also a small scar on the other Steve’s forehead right over his eyebrow from who knew what, but that could be faked. He’d seen some pretty amazing films with special effects makeup so realistic that Natasha Romanoff had had to calm him down that it was all fake.

But if done correctly, no one would question him going into the place where Stark and Barton were held. The other Tony was a frequent visitor so why would the other Prince’s… He couldn’t even think the word and the thought died after. He didn’t need to finish anyway to know what he wanted to do.

“We’ll set up our base and you’ll take me back. I’ll get Stark.” And Barton…and anyone else he could get easily. “And we’ll meet up with you. That way you can monitor the situation. That’s the best way to do it. We can argue some more when we get…wherever that place is called.”

It looked beautiful and foreign, not like Europe from the war but something more exotic and Other. He was a little excited to explore it.

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