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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As unlikely as the whole thing was, no one at all noticed the three scurrying anywhere. Sure, there were people out and about, but they were all focused on themselves and had no real desire to step out of the comfort them found themselves in to break the mold and start a fight of any sort. Since no one knew that James had defected and stolen the copy of Steven and the small skiff that Loki and the healed wounded used to arrive here a few weeks after the rest from Asgard, and since Thor had nursed his pride with anger and kept mostly to himself as if he was trying to steer clear of the actual Steven during this time of feast and joy, there was no reason to question any skulking.

Loki might eventually realize that they were one boat short, but it had been a fluke to have it arrive late and with the whole fleet docked appropriately, and Loki busy in his pleasures of command, there was no need to go poking around a ship that would be of little worth until the end of the training year.

Once on board, and once the mystery of the skiff taking off into space died down, Clint and Tony filtered away from the bridge to find spaces of their own. Both men were more interested in showering and eating than anything else.

Ten hours from the jungle moon, and ten hours back again, Bucky would be gone just long enough for Steve to get over his anger and for his worry to set in. He’d done a good job of making his own little place on the top floor of what might have been a four story grain silo or perhaps a place of worship free of dirt and encroaching plant life, but even manual labor didn’t provide him with a lot of ability to shift his thoughts elsewhere. Especially when there was running water and plumbing and light sources already in place. Other than tidying up, there was nothing more to do for survival.

Except, perhaps, think about what to do when rations were depleted… His metabolism was high enough that he ate four or five times what a normal person required. That meant that he’d be going through a lot of this quickly. He…no. They. As soon as Bucky and his friends returned, it would be they.

Both Clint and Tony would be treated to the very brief description of where they were going 'an uninhabited moon', and why 'because Steve demanded they be rescued', and then clammed up and basically refused to talk to either of them again. He spent much of the time trying to figure out who he was now that he had rejected his last handler and gained some sense of autonomy again.

Perhaps this was the best he would be.

When he got his memories back more fully, and he could actually start to feel the effects from the traumas that had happened to him, it wouldn't be pretty. So for now, mostly emotionless, he could cope. Steve would probably be really relieved when the skiff came into view and landed back where he had been dropped off the day before, disgorging Clint, Tony, and Bucky without any of them looking worse for wear.

He looked over at the three other men and backed off a step.

"I'm going hunting," was all he said, before he was gone.

"Buck, wait--!" Steve called, but it was too late and he had Tony and Clint to deal with, so he turned his attention back to them, trying not to look too much like he wanted to run after his friend. "I mean-- hey, welcome to our new hope for humanity."

“I already guessed that hell would look like being stuck with you two forever,” Tony said, hands on his hips as he looked up at the place they had watched through mucked up, vine covered glass Steve descend stairs made out of what looked to be hematite. He wasn’t sure what to make of this place. It was something out of a souped up Avatar film, buildings rising out of the jungle, but also part of that jungle too. It looked like what might happen to, say, a small city like Savannah, Georgia in two hundred years after every person left and the wild took over again. You could still make out row homes, taller ‘office’ buildings (if this culture had such things), and the edges of parks or fields beneath the canopy of foliage that obscured the hard lines of man-made material.

Questions concerning what happened to the people here reached his mind but not his lips. He cared enough to be curious but not to satisfy his curiosity. Besides, he was secretly hoping for dinosaurs or giant apes taking over the place. Maybe he shouldn’t have read so many Michael Crichton novels during his downtime because he hated the funky science in them and liked to notate the pages of Pepper’s books.

“Are there lights…?” The sky was darkening slowly as the moon ducked behind it’s gas giant planet, and beneath the ivy and grasses, pinpricks of light looked like they were popping on. It was beautiful and weird. “What’s the power source?”

Bucky mentioned that Steve specifically requested his freedom… But what was the point if all of the engineering here was already sound?

It was so good to see Clint and Tony again. Maybe they hadn't been a team for that long, maybe they couldn't be counted as 'good friends', but they were allies and they were part of a hope that could come to pass for everyone trapped in that place. Steve was determined, this wasn't over just because they were out.

"I'm not sure, but it seems some sort of natural power source, everything is so caught up in the trees and things surrounding this place."

He led them both to the possible grain storage place that he had cleaned out and managed to fit up four beds in, and sat at the table to tear into some of the food while he talked.

"I know it's a long shot, and there's only four of us, but we have to try and take down what they're doing. Tony, we're going to need ways to completely jam their tech, Clint, anything that can fire multiple projectiles... we've got a base here we can work with, but this isn't enough."

“Jumping right in, Cap?” Clint didn’t seem all that impressed. He understood the need to get moving, but he also felt human for the first time in months getting a shower that wasn’t just a shared sponge and water replaced every morning when breakfast was delivered. “Think we can catch a nap or do you want me scouting around the terrain looking for good wood to make a bow?”

That was something he’d never done, but if he could shoot with the best, and create his own projectiles, he could absolutely make a bow. Even if Stark would be the better candidate for the hardware here. He knew that the engineer was starting to look a little haggard. Whatever wonder the ship held, whatever wonder this moon held, it was wearing out it’s welcome. Tony blinked up at Steve and then turned on his heels and marched towards one of the other more or less obscure buildings. A faint purple glow was coming from what probably had been windows before the foliage knocked the glass out and nearly shuttered each with leaves.

Was he running away for right now? He sure as hell was. This was all too much for him. And he needed a little bit of solice.

He just wished he had JARVIS for witty banter and banal judgement.

Steve felt his stomach sink down towards his boots. He hadn't meant to make either of them feel as if they couldn't take time to heal, or like he didn't care what happened to them, it was just important to him to get moving. He also thought that they'd want to know what the plan was, so that they could get thinking on it even while they healed.

He looked after both men, Clint and Tony in opposite directions, and tried to decide which one to go after... or even if he should go after them at all. In the end, he decided not to. He had begun to learn with Bucky that sometimes a little space went a heck of a long way.

So instead he went back to the little shelter and made it more comfortable. He found blankets and cushions, he dug out the debris from the sunken bathtub and scrubbed it clean, then filled it with fresh water. He worked until his muscles ached, and just waited for one of them to be ready to come back, desperately hoping that one of them would and he hadn't been too late.

Half an hour after Steve started his vigil, Clint wandered up to the tower and paused at the big picture window that Steve managed to clear of vines. It gave them a good view of the skiff and the direction that Bucky went off to hunt. He stood at the window, hands in his pockets of freshly washed clothes, back to Steve.

"I guess I thought he'd be a jerk. And okay, okay, he's a huge jerk really but I don't know. Whatever happened to him back there-- Okay. Let's cut the bullshit. We know what happened to him back there."

He let his head fall forward as he turned, looking up through his lashes.

"I didn't think he'd take it so hard. You honestly don't feel like yourself. You're just watching this bad porno where everyone looks really high. You don't even feel anything. And then it's over and everything hurts. But it's not you. I don't think that was me back there. But Stark... And he's had to have questionable hookups right? Seems the type? Well he's more broken up about it than you'd think."

While Steve was grateful that Clint seemed to be coping better, he couldn't really blame Tony for not taking it well, he didn't know how he would have dealt with coming around and remembering losing all that control. Not pleasant. Was that how Bucky felt now? Like he had been out of control for-- how long?

"All we can do is give him time, I'm not sure how else we're supposed to support him."

It wasn't that Steve didn't want to, or that he wouldn't, but more that Tony was an incredibly prickly sort of person who would probably not take well to being offered that sort of help.

"What happened, happened. Nothing can change that, he has to find a way to live with it."

The same as any soldier had to find a way to live with the things they'd done and seen. Either they found a way to cope, or else they didn't.

Clint winced. That was a little harsh, but it wasn’t like he really knew Captain America all that well. He sounded a little like his dad – before all of that other stuff started – like the kind of dude that couldn’t really grasp the modern world, like he was still all tied up in what was proper in the forties and yeah, yeah actually that made a whole huge amount of sense, honestly. He couldn’t fault the guy. He understood what war could be like. He fought little private ones all the time, wherever his handler pointed him.

Clint wondered what happened to Phil, if he was killed or captured, if he was left on Earth. Hopefully the latter. Phil would know to find his kids and make sure Linda was taken care of. Same with Nat.

“I’m not expert on these things,” Clint said, trying to shrug it off. “But you might not want to say that to someone with emotional scarring.” That was a hint about Bucky Barnes too. No one wanted to be patronized that way. “I’m gonna go out on a limb here, but I think giving him a task might do him good. You know what he went through to get where he is now? Man built a power source and power armor and walked across the desert for two days after busting out of a terrorist controlled cell so protected we couldn’t find em. Guy’s tough when he’s got a goal in mind. Maybe. Who knows. I think half the stories about him are made up.”

Clint was just testing the waters here. Steve came across as authoritative, but he was also a little annoying with his preoccupation with Barnes.

"I thought that I gave him something to do, but he shrugged it off and didn't seem like he'd be interested."

He said that he needed Tony to get a look at the technology and invent some kind of machine that would disable or cripple the Asgardian tech, as well as upgrade their own skiff so it wouldn't be affected, in order to help them rescue all the other people left down there.

"Look, I'm not trying to be unsympathetic. I feel for him, you too, I just don't know how the heck I'm supposed to help other than what I'm doing. There's people in there still getting hurt, trying to save them in my priority."

And Bucky.

He wanted to follow Bucky, make sure he was okay hunting, beg more memories from him, but he knew that was a bad idea.

There was a shrug. Just a small one, more of a roll of the shoulders, but still there. A slow smile touched at the corner of his lips, not out of any particular action or inaction, not in response to anything that Steve said, but because he could feel the tension in the air and it made him react more cooly than otherwise. He wasn’t the only one who was highly trained here.

“I’ll handle Stark before he gets settled into Robinson Caruso mode and starts building a plumbing system out of bamboo. You’ve done a whole lot of good here already in the last day or two, Cap. Very…uh….rustic Hogwarts Dormitory. I like it. But I think your head is in some other game right now so how about you focus on that and we can meet up for dinner over some crazy Land of the Lost dino-burger. Flintstones was after your time but let me tell you, I’m feeling like a orange and black onesie tunic right now.”

Clint might have clapped the other man on the shoulder but he really didn’t want to touch anyone. Not even a friend.

And Steve, who felt a little like he’d let someone down and a little relieved that he didn’t have to try to be a shoulder to lean on, slipped out of the room to try and figure out where Bucky had gotten to.

It wouldn't be Steve who found Bucky, it would be Bucky who found Tony.

He had gone off to hunt, as he said, to scout out what sort of animals were even in this terrain and if they should be wary about giant beasts rampaging through. He expected to be followed at some point, he knew Steve couldn't leave well enough alone even with what limited memories he had, and he wanted to get far away before that happened.

He hadn't expected to see Tony Stark stomping through the undergrowth as if he had just been personally offended and wanted time alone. It hadn't been his plan to interact, but then he saw a rather large creature stalking Tony, so the poor man wouldn't get his alone time to think, as he was tackled out of the way very suddenly by a large man with a metal arm, just before something that looked kind of like a tiger-sized boar took his head clean off.

A mouthful of dirt was better than the porridge he’d been eating for months now, but really not by too much. He choked and rolled over, about to yell about how tired he was of being accosted when whatever had attempted to make him dinner took Bucky by the metal arm and started to thrash him around. Tony had never seen a mammal with so many pairs of eyes before, but those teeth and tusks most assuredly told him that he was done for if they came in his direction again.

He'd seen Bucky fend off guards, and reinforced bars, but this…this was impressive. The muscles on the animal’s neck throbbed, but even such huge mastoids did not allow it to so much as dent the arm it was clamped on.

Tony scrambled to his feet, kicking wet leaves and mud with him as he rushed to put his back to the massive, knotted tree just to his left. Three sides were easier to guard against than one.

“Holy shit!”

He didn’t get much off before Bucky reared back and the animal whined as his jaw was wrenched apart.

Bucky had a deep gouge along his ribs to the right where he had initially shielded Tony from the creature, though it clearly wasn't deep enough to be life threatening and it certainly hadn't slowed him down in killing the poor thing. His fierce arm didn't stop at wrenching the jaws apart, he wrenched the bottom of the jaw off and then snapped the squealing thing's neck.

"Said I was going hunting."

It was all he said when the fight was over. It looked enough like boar that it would probably be safe to eat, but he'd make sure to take the first portion and test it just in case.

"You hurt?"

He didn't think much of Stark, didn't really care about him one way or the other, except that Steve did.

Why exactly did Steve care? Oh right. Just to find a way to rescue them. Now technically, that wasn't fair but Tony was rarely a fair sort of guy. He had no business with Steve at all as far as he was concerned. Not yet at least. All he wanted to do was chill out and be alone for awhile but he couldn't even manage that.

Life sucked. It didn't matter how much money you had or how many houses or the number of employees on the payroll, shitty things could and did happen to everyone. That didn't mean that Tony wasn't really pissed off about it.

He was more pissed off that somehow Steve got out of sewing his alien wild Oates somehow, managed to escape, and then sent his looney bin best friend to save him.

Twice evidently.

What the hell was up with that?

"You're the one bleeding, so I think I'm all right. Christ on a pogo stick, you really were planning to go hunting barehanded? What the hell is wrong with you?"

He didn't realise that Stark thought that he had been sent after him to keep him safe by Steve, and he wouldn't have corrected the false assumption even if he had. He had just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and considered that the risk to himself was worth saving one of the meagre people left free.

"I don't need weapons to kill animals."

Gesturing back at the very dead boar creature as if to prove his point, he bent and shifted to lift it up and across his shoulders. It was so big that it made even him look diminutive.

"You shouldn't stay out here, more might come."

And he wouldn't be around to help out if they did.

"Isn't this enough meat?" The dead and pulped up creature was easily Tony's size and though he wasn't sure how he felt about alien boar-cat hamburgers, or eating something that had been about to eat him, he could use an escort back to the overgrown city of Real Life Pandora.

Tony grimaced at how blood soaked Barnes was but just gestured at the carcass.

"I would offer to help you drag it back but... You're already bloody and much stronger than I am." He wouldn't protest his manhood here. He didn't want to be dirtier than half an hour in the jungle already made him.

It didn't take Clint too long to realize that Tony wasn't in any of the buildings surrounding the small plaza where Steve's home base was. He stood in the center courtyard surrounded by the purple glow of foreign, possibly bioluminescent light.

So what did he tell Steve now?

The hope for humanity had wandered off somewhere. Great.

He would have liked to have got something else as well, just in case the boar turned out to be inedible for some reason, but obviously Stark was in no position to go back on his own. He had the slightly wild-eyed look of someone who has been through too much too fast, and he obviously wasn't prepared to defend himself against anything without his signature armour.

So he just jerked his head to indicate that Stark should follow him, and that he would indeed provide an escort back to where base camp had been made.

"Why were you out there?"

It's the first thing he's said in about fifteen minutes of walking, but he just can't seem to puzzle out why Stark would have left the relative safety of their little camp and gone off alone just to get nearly mauled.

"Don't know. Maybe to get swallowed up by the jungle... You ruined that for me by the way." It was said with his signature snark but there was just no joy in his voice, not the way there usually was when he was trolling someone. A switch inside him had been thrown and there was a disconnect between his brain and his body. He was still a genius, but his already present issues with touch and intimacy had been completely stopped on and stretched out under the sun.

He'd snap eventually. He was already worn much too thin and the edges were peeling. Bucky, though he probably didn't quite know it was because of his own experiences, would recognize it more than Steve ever could.

And Steve meant well, thinking Tony to be more resilient than he was, but the engineer wasn't conditioned. He wasn't hurt for a purpose. There was no one to shape him back again into whatever mold was wanted because this had been just abuse without thought of the toll it took.

The Asgardians wanted the offspring. They did not care much about the adults of those plucked from their world.

Most were never expected to leave the training facility, though Bucky and the rest wouldn't know that.

Tony needed structure. He needed support. He needed Bucky of all people.

Bucky... the Soldier... whoever he was, he barely knew how to cope with his own issues yet, but he recognised another man breaking pretty easily. Tony had that same disconnect in his eyes that he knew from his own experiences, and he knew that Steve wouldn't get it. The other man was too-- good, too secure in his own skin. He meant well, and he cared deeply, but he didn't get it.

So he stopped and let the dead creature fall to the floor, taking a seat next to it and stripping off his shirt without explanation or delay. The bloody gash on his ribs looked nasty, but he ignored that.

"I need your help," he said, voice low. "My arm isn't working right now, maybe the boar bit through some electrics, I can't carry it the rest of the way yet."

He would get Stark doing something useful, something focused, and then talk to him. He wasn't even sure why, just that a tiny spark inside of him desperately wanted to do something good for once.

While Tony rolled his eyes at the audacity of some people breaking down right in the middle of the jungle with a boar-cat strapped to their backs, covered in blood and bleeding, he stepped right up to get to work. “Aren’t you more worried about the fact that you’re getting alien spores and blood in your wound? What if you get infected? I’m an engineer, not a doctor.” He didn’t expect Bucky to get the reference. Team Rogers didn’t seem to get anything really.

He kicked at some of the tougher looking scrub, steered clear of the mutilated skull of what was evidently going to be dinner tonight (yum), and took a look at the puckering skin between natural Bucky and artificial Bucky.

“This is pretty top notch. I didn’t know that the Germans or Russians had this sort of technology. Good sports cars and cold winters with a dash of communism to warm up the proletariat but this? This is beautiful. The articulation alone is outstanding. Make a fist?”

He had already located the access panel, almost immediately. That was pretty outstanding for a guy who had never worked on Bucky before.

He didn't particularly enjoy anyone working on him, all that dredged up in his mind were HYDRA laboratories where the technicians were only interested in getting things fixed without any care for the comfort of the one being worked on. But he was well disciplined, so he didn't move when Stark went for the access panel, though he did obligingly make a fist so that the many overlapping plates of vibranium shifted and scraped over one another elegantly.

"It got upgraded every few years, but it wasn't much worse than this when they first attached it in '45."

He doesn't know who designed it or made it originally, only that Zola had been in charge of having it fitted and training the Soldier to be what they needed him to be.

Though he didn’t take back how beautiful it was, or make another comment on the construction, he felt a little saddened by the fact that the inventor of the device was now lost to time. Maybe that would be him. He would have children who would never know him. His armor would be taken apart by people that didn’t understand it and no one would remember that he was the one that put it together. And back on earth, his tower was already crumbling to dust. When it was gone, he’d be too.

That his life had been reduced to sand had him overlooking the fact that nothing was wrong with the arm at all. It articulated just fine, the joints moved perfectly and the pneumatics were clean and precise, moving with little effort.

He got lost in following wires until he noticed little etchings on the inside compartment housing the main power source for the thumb.

Initials, probably. He could barely make them out, though. That was even more sad.

“So what’s wrong exactly?”

"Nothing."

Lying still wasn't exactly high on his list of skills, and making out that there was a problem when there wasn't one had pretty much exhausted his capabilities in that area. He had got Stark to calm down a little, to focus, and that was what he wanted.

"But you needed something to look at. You're caught in your head, falling apart. It's no good."

His words are said bluntly, but not harshly. He's not intending to be cruel, he just doesn't know how to say things with more compassion yet. The fact that he's even trying to help at all is a big step for him.

A little flabbergasted, Tony’s initial thought was to deny, deny, deny. It worked for politicians. But he’d never been the political sort. He gave them the finger, he screwed them over, he tried to be better than his lawyers and the people that made laws in this country or around the world. He wasn’t good at lying. He never saw the need to. And a denial would be a sham. He wasn’t all right. Anyone with two eyes could see that.

And he needed that recognition. No wonder he’d just walked away from Steve, who seemed to want to get right down to business, defeat the Huns, and live the typical Disney Prince charmed life that he always did.

Tony slapped the access panel closed and sighed. “You made me sit in boar-cat blood to distract me from being in my head. Okay, so now we have mental cases leading mental cases. We’ll probably end up blowing this little moon up with our efforts.” But he was thankful. And he said as much in his eyes and he looked up at a purple tinted sky through broad, overhanging foliage.

It was beautiful here. He hated how perfect and isolated it was.

“You’ve been through way worse,” Tony muttered. “I don’t need to be your project.”

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off to work <3

<3

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quick tag between appointments, should be home in a couple of hours <3

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