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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No one stopped.

A few of the people they had picked up a few hours ago mentioned bandits who had raided their hold outs, killed a few of them, stole their food-- No one had known exactly who or where they were but that evidently had just changed. Steve had pretty much been living in his uniform for days now, he hadn't had any time alone with Bucky, and made the decision to just keep going until he was too tired to march down the ramp. Now he was thinking that they should have taken the afternoon off.

Oh well. It had been awhile since he ran like this.

Vaulting easily over tractors parked around the encampment, Steve smacked the shooter with his shield, sending him unconscious and jump-kicked a second man who had been rushing up behind him. More bullets were coming from the barn and so that was where Steve headed, kicking up Kansas dirt with his boots.

"Round back, Sargent!" Nkw technically, there was no such thing as the US Army any more and they were very removed from the organization but old habits die hard.

Part of Bucky was already cataloguing whether they should round the weapons up and take them along, or whether that might be asking for trouble. The guns could help in hunting food, but they could also be used if anyone split off and tried to form their own little settlement, or decided to raid the settlement a few miles from them for extra food, because humans couldn't be trusted to not be dicks to each other.

Obedience completely ingrained, he snapped off to the side as soon as Steve called the order, peeling around the back of the barn to head in from the rear and try and take out the people there.

"Stop right where you stand!"

It was a female voice from high up in the bar, shotgun levelled right at Steve's head.

"We'll not be letting you take us or our supplies!"

Though Steve had his helmet on, it wasn't really meant to sustain damage from a close range shotgun to the head and he stopped, hands up and eyes focused on the space in front of him for anything to use.

"Ma'am, we are not here to rob you or to kidnap you. We are looking for survivors. Earth can't sustain human life for much longer. If you'll lower the gun, I can explain better."

He heard her finger shift on the trigger and he prepared to duck. The hammer did not connect, however and Steve focused instead on the calm way the woman's heart was beating. She wasn't afraid. That was a bad sign. "I don't think so, sir," she shouted down at him and so he turned, slowly, to face her.

"If you and your people aren't willing to come with us, that's all right. We just want to ask everyone all together. Can we do that?"

"I don't think that's gonna happen either, sir," the woman called. "You'll drop your shield and take off that armor of yours and maybe I won't shoot you in the back as you leave."

Steve wasn't the only one who had figured out that the people here weren't the sort they wanted to bring anyway. It seemed like all the ones who enjoyed cruelty, all the greedy, all the ones more than willing to punish others to get what they wanted had managed to gather in one place and prey on others around them.

Bucky took out a few more as he crept through the barn, before sneaking back out and towards the front again. It was only there that he saw the men coming in ambush from behind Steve, a dead sprint propelling him forwards all of a sudden.

"Steve! Down!"

The words made it out at the same time as he leaped to tackle Steve to the ground, and the same time that woman shot out. He felt the bullet go right through him and a sudden calm came over him, washing like a wave before the pain, a knowledge that he wasn't going to survive this one. He could already feel himself bleeding out and the damage to his internal organs, but he desperately still tried to get Steve in a safe position.

Shots fired had everyone on board the skiff worried, and though Tony was really against letting Steve and Bucky go alone every time, he managed not to say he told anyone so as he struggled into his armor. It worked. Sort of. He could not fly in it but he could move and shoot and be protected. He was the one that found the soldiers in a pile, Steve holding his shield over Bucky's back and Tony rolled his eyes unseen in the helmet. He could make such a joke now!

Instead, he used his repulsor blast to knock down the barn and trap the people who had been shooting at them in the rubble. That was enough time for Steve to shoulder the shield and scoop Bucky up. He took off running, covered in blood that was not his own back to the skiff while Stark covered their retreat.

"Doctor Banner!"

Bruce was already clearing a path to the little room he had commandeered as a medical zone. There were already two people in there; one little girl who had a head wound, though she should be fine in a few days, and one middle aged man who had broken his leg the day before the skiff arrived.

"In here, lay him down. Everyone else out except Tony, I need you to assist. That means you as well, Captain, I'm sorry."

Bucky, nearly unconscious already, tightened the fingers of his metal hand around Steve's bicep as if he knew that the other man was being sent away, lips moving in a silent murmur of his name.

"Wait what? Assist? With-- Banner, I think you've got the wrong guy--" But he was already getting out of his armor, already moving to scrub up, or get gauze or anything else Bruce needed. That did not mean that he caught Steve's reaction, grabbing at Bucky as those fingers curled around his arm.

The blond leaned over the other man, gloved fingers on his cheek as he leaned over him. "I'm gonna be right outside, Buck. Right outside. I'm not leaving, just clearing space for the doctor," he said, voice steady though with the amount of blood he was covered in, he knew that there was a good chance that Bucky was never opening his eyes again.

Without caring who saw, the Captain kissed his best friend for a fericely passionate moment before he pulled away and removed the fingers from his arm.

"You save him," he said, as if he could order Bruce to do such a thing or as if he wasn't already going to attempt to do it already.

Tony had to be jolted out of that sight, eyes wide and unblinking, to come back down to reality. "Did I just dream that?" he asked Bruce as he helped to cut Bucky's clothes away. "I've almost died a lot of times and no ones kissed me like that."

Bucky almost wished that Steve hadn't kissed him, because it had tasted of blood and salt, and if he died then it would be the kiss that Steve remembered, when he'd rather that the kisses he remembered would be the passionate and breathless ones stolen in the corridors before their next duty called them away from each other.

But he couldn't say it because Steve was already gone, and Bucky couldn't seem to make his tongue work. He just gave the tiniest of whimpers as they began to cut his clothes off him and then sank into the comforting embrace of unconsciousness.

Though the kiss had surprised Bruce too, he really didn't have time to talk about it considering how fast Bucky was fading. Only the serum had likely kept him alive long enough to reach the skiff, but it wasn't a miracle cure-all, and he wasn't a proper surgeon. "Help me with this well enough, and I'll find someone to kiss you like that. We're going to have to go in rough and hard, not ideal, but we have to stop the bleeding. I need you to focus the repulsor on your armour into a thin and hot beam, lower power, we have to cauterise the areas where his organs are ruptured to stand any chance."

"That sounds like a proposition," Tony teased, already slipping into his left glove. It would leave his more dexterous right hand free to do the calibrations, and while J would have really been helpful right now, a screwdriver could do the trick as well. He pumped and primed the blast, narrowed down to a millimeter, and made a test shot at the shield Steve left behind before he grabbed his helmet and scanned the site.

It was probably one of his finest moments, Tony thought, lining up shots, firing, and moving aside for Bruce to remove a bullet or tie off s wound. They repeated the process twelve times before Tony pulled off the helmet and removed the gauntlet to roll up his sleeve.

"I'm O negative," he said simply. He was a universal donor, a lucky thing for a man with antibodies and a super soldier serum running through his body. "It's either this or you pump him full of saline to keep his heart working. I'm going to think blood is the better option, Banner."

The serum was an absolutely amazing thing; without it, Bucky surely would have died several times during this hotch-potch surgery, let alone still have a chance to pull through this. Though god only knew what sort of pain the poor bastard would be in when he opened his eyes again.

"Good."

He doesn't bother asking twice if Tony is sure that he wants to donate blood, not when they need it this badly.

"I'll set up the tubing for a direct transfusion, run to the kitchens and get orange juice and something sugary, you'll need them both."

"See. And you said my piracy of citrus would be a waste," Tony teased before heading to the kitchen and literally tripping over Rogers. "Jesus, Cap. My precious blood. I need that to give to Barnes and here you are trying to make me spill it all over the floor."

When Steve looked up, Tony was almost taken aback by how bad he was taking this. How many times had Bucky almost died on Steve? The answer was far too many. He looked so young sitting there, face blotchy and wet from tears.

"He's going to be all right," Tony promised. "Banner's an amazing surgeon for not having a medical license. Get me some orange juice and some candy." Well, it was better to give Steve a task and why do something himself when he could just have Steve do it? "We can wait for him to wake up together."

When Bruce looked up at Tony's quick return, the engineer just shrugged. "It's called delegation."

The little medical room looks awful, and Bucky doesn't look much better, but it's deceptive. There might be blood everywhere, and Bucky himself is swaddled from just under his nipples to just above his bellybutton in bandages, but it's so much better than it could have been. He's already got a chair set up beside Tony and a length of tubing, as well as two syringes.

"This won't be the most comfortable way to donate blood, I'm afraid, but we don't have the proper equipment. Get yourself comfortable and roll up your sleeve."

He glanced up when Steve entered, all puffy eyed and looking as though his very heart was laid out on that operating table.

"Thank you, Captain, you can put the supplies near Tony. Bucky should live, though that's mostly thanks to Tony's contribution now, he offered to give blood."

Speaking of which, he slid the first needle into Bucky's vein and got the tubing set up, before finding the right spot on Tony's arm to go into.

Steve couldn't take this. His heart couldn't take it. He'd spent half of his life wanting and never thinking he could have Bucky, and then long stretches of time mourning the loss of his friend before the impossible happened. Maybe this was God telling him that he deserved this for every half breathless kiss he and Bucky had shared the last few days. This was a warning. This was his fault. He should have said no, turned Bucky away...

But how could he believe that God would be so cruel? Love was love. He believed that whole heartedly. This wasn't punishment. This Bucky proving how much he loved him by taking those bullets.

And so he took Bucky's hand as Tony pumped his own hand to force his blood to flow more easily through the tube. He kept his back to the two, eyes down cast, following Bruce as he cleaned up to give the pair a little privacy.

He leaned over it and murmured prayers against metal knuckles.

This wouldn't be the end. This wasn't the end of the line.

"We have our whole lives, Buck. You're not leaving me yet," he whispered.

Tony cleared his throat.

"So should I give you my criteria about who I wanna be kissed by, Banner? Or do I get a surprise?"

It was achingly heartbreaking to see how broken Steve was over this. Bruce knew the two men were close, he had observed it the last couple of days and he had also learned about it in class, but to see this extent of it... well, it was obvious that Tony's inclinations had been right and there was a much deeper affection there than just between two friends.

"You can try and give me your criteria, but I can't promise to adhere to it all."

His tone was dry, but that was just his sense of humour. Perhaps it was kinder to indulge Tony while this went on, and leave Steve to his nearly silent prayers. They seemed far too intimate for just anyone to observe.

"I get the feeling they'll be mostly unattainable, but try me."

The truth was that Tony didn't really want that sort of affection right now, but he could fake it. "Blonde, leggy. I'm actually not that picky. I'll take a nine or a ten. Maybe an eight if there's a personality there." He rocked back to grab his juice so he didn't get too dizzy too quickly. "But maybe we should discuss out next move instead. We have almost two hundred on board. We can handle a few thousand. Canada might be the best bet. There are whole cities still left up there."

Steve was being incredibly distracting but it wasn't as if Tony could yell at him to shut up. Tony didn't like being faced with this sort of emotion. Sure. He liked being right but he also hated being right too when it was like this.

Bucky would be fine. Steve would get his fairy tale ending, his Prince Charming would wake up and they could carry on their existence together. Wonderful.

It wasn't that Tony was jealous so much as hurting.

Everything hurt him.

Bruce didn't know about all that had happened to Tony, though he could imagine that everyone who had been taken had hardly had the best or most relaxing time before they escaped, and so it didn't seem strange to him that Tony would still joke about leggy blondes.

He wasn't jealous or hurting over Steve, it actually made him smile a bit. He enjoyed seeing happiness in the world, especially when things were so dire that it seemed like most of the happiness had gone.

"You won't be going down into Canada, Tony, you'll need to rest when this is done and recover. Bed rest, in this medical bay, for at least eight hours. Do you hear me?"

"I think this is the part where I'm supposed to protest. A lot. But I don't really want to go to Canada anyway. Never my favorite place. I don't understand the continued existence of Canada when there's America." He was mostly just talking to talk, because listening to Steve Rogers half whisper to Bucky was grating.

It was like being back in that cage, waiting for someone to come and get him to drink more of that nympho-alcohol. All Steve did was talk to Bucky, who never answered. Not even after he supposedly helped Steve escape the same fate as Clint and Tony had been subjected to.

It made him rub his forehead until he finally turned to the blond and venomously growled for him to just shut the fuck up, for once, "just let there be some god damned silence. I'm trying to give him blood so you two can ride off into the sunset together but if I have to hear your fucking voice, Rogers, I'm going to live with the bandits and become their king for the change to shoot him again!"

Steve looked up, red rimmed eyes confused. Banner would probably think he was crazy too now. But it couldn't be helped.

Bruce certainly looked as if he were taken aback, but there were some explanations he could think of. Perhaps Tony really didn't like Steve, maybe he was secretly slightly homophobic and it made him uncomfortable to see affection this deep between two men, maybe he had feelings for one or the other and this was just rubbing salt in the wound, or maybe it was just that giving blood was making him more uncomfortable than usual.

"Alright, Tony, have some orange juice," suggested Bruce in a calm and yet firm sort of voice, pressing one of the juice boxes into Tony's hand.

Not that the silence would last for long, as Bucky chose that moment to groan his way back into the land of the living. It was amazing really, he should still be near death and at least unconscious for days, but the serum was assimilating Tony's blood rapidly and already gave him the strength to wake. Though he could barely do more than groggily open his eyes.

"...m'not dead?"

Steve didn't read too much into what Tony's issue was. He didn't want to fight with a guy who had actively and was currently assisting with Bucky's recovery. The man said things to upset Bucky in the past but the two of them also spoke often and amicably and Steve thought that they were friends.

He was about to say that he was sorry, about to quiet down, but that was until Bucky spoke himself. Nothing else mattered.

He might have whimpered a little bit like he did when Bucky fell off of the boardwalk and onto the sand when he tried to walk the railing and ended up almost two stories below. That whimper might have been fear as their friends abandoned them, but this one was as if angles had just entered the room and confirmed the existence of God for all the non-believers.

"Not dead, though you did try real hard this time," Steve laughed, hand tightening around Bucky's. "You're such an idiot. You're not bulletproof!"

Bucky could feel an odd tugging sensation in his right arm, the tubing that ran between Tony and himself, but he couldn't lift it up enough to figure out where it was coming from. It didn't matter anyway, because that bloody kiss wouldn't be the last one they shared, and that was enough to have him actually smiling - probably for the first time in front of anyone that wasn't just Steve.

"Shit, really?"

He hummed something that might have been a laugh, but only came out as a pained groan where the make-shift cauterisation inside him hurt deeply.

"And I thought I was-- my mistake."

"And for the record, you can't fly or breathe underwater either," Steve teased back, laughing with a hint of liquid to his eyes. He wasn't going to cry again, not in front of Bucky, so it was just back to business as usual. Even if he did lay a hand over the bandage, trying to apply pressure to the pain. "You're a little bit like Swiss cheese right now so you have to take it easy. Take a nap, you have permission from a superior officer to be a lazy jerk today."

Tony had had enough. "Get this out of me. He's awake. He's fine." He was acting like a spoiled brat, but Steve didn't say a word about that. If Bucky was not only awake but cognizant, he would recover. And recover quickly thanks to the serum.

"It's all right, Doctor Banner," he started to say before Tony yanked the tube from his arm with a curse, tried to stand up, and kissed the floor instead.

Bucky hadn't been awake for most of Tony's childish display and so it took him by surprise when the man suddenly pulled the tubing out and then fell face first onto the floor. "Hey--- what?" Startled, he tried to sit up and see what was happening, only to fail spectacularly and have to close his eyes for a moment against the white hot pain.

Bruce was the one that made it to Tony's side and helped him up, shooting a look over his shoulder at Steve to warn him not to say anything. For some reason it was Steve that aggravated the issues and it would be better if this were left solely to Bruce to handle. Not that he was an expert in Tony Stark, but the man did seem to trust him for some reason.

"Steve, you stay with Bucky, try and get some water in him if you can. Tony, okay just lean on me. You're going to be lightheaded after donating blood so maybe don't try that again."

He steered Tony out of the room as he was talking and into the next little room to get him sat down.

"Okay, how about you tell me what all of that was about?"

The sudden flashbacks were intense. Tony tried to pull himself out of Bruce's grip, but he could barely walk without holding on already and the walls were too smooth to really keep himself up with. His whole body ached, that was mostly due to the sudden lack of blood he currently possessed, but as weak and dizzy as he was, Tony still stubbornly pushed on.

He could feel his heart racing though, thumping wildly against his rib cage as if it was trying to break free. That wasn't helping matters either.

"Every day," Tony grunted as Bruce guided him not to torture but to safety, "for months, I listened to Rogers whisper at Barnes. I know more about their lives together than my own life. It never stopped. There were always whispers. And then you would come and take me away for a little while."

And that was no relief either. Nothing was a relief from those long months.

"I can't-- Banner, I'm having trouble breathing-- I think I'm having a stroke."

"You're not having a stroke."

Bruce's voice was calm and soothing only through instinct, because the rest of him was reeling about what Tony had said. Obviously he had suffered a great trauma, and it made him feel a bit sick to know that the other him had been very clearly implicated in that trauma.

"You're having a panic attack, Steve talking to Bucky like that must have triggered it. It's okay, it's normal, you're not going to die. You just need to breathe, follow me, in for a count of four nice and slow."

Once Bruce had got Tony sat down, he deliberately backed up a few steps to keep from aggravating this further, though his voice remained a constant, just instructing Tony on how to breathe.

Leaning forward, Tony put his head in his hands and repeated to himself what Bruce said. A panic attack. Now, of all times. Why hadn't he been having panic attacks for the months he suffered abuse? Why now, all of a sudden? Of all times?

It took some time to calm down and the intense dizziness to fade. People passed in the halls, but Tony moved his hand to pantomime that Bruce should shut the door and once they were alone and in silence, he hunched back against the seat.

"For the record, that was not a panic attack. I'm just a massive jerk and hate to see affection. That's all." He didn't want his reputation tarnished after all!

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