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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“Let ‘s do it.” Hadn’t they wasted enough time? The answer was yes, a hundred, thousand times yes. All that Steve wanted was to be with Bucky so why not? “I’m not really sure where we go for rings though,” he rubbed the back of his neck and then lightly tipped the pie out of their nest-bed so he could be closer to his…uh… His fiancé? It felt amazing to say that. It made him feel giddy and his cheeks actually turned pink as he laced his fingers with the other man’s and leaned their shoulders together.

He’d had no trouble getting used to the metal arm. It was part of Bucky now and just as wonderful.

“Maybe…uh… I kind of hate to ask Tony.” After everything that had gone down, he really ought to be their last choice for ring-bearer.

Bucky raised an eyebrow, already imagining what sort of issues Tony might take with being asked to provide some rings for them-- or maybe he'd take Bucky by surprise and that would be what flattered him enough to bury the hatchet for a while. It was hard to tell with the engineer sometimes.

"We don't need 'em right away, we know, we can wait."

He might broach it with Tony at some point if he caught the man in a good mood, but they had a whole lot of shit to deal with that had nothing to do with their engagement and everything to do with the survival of the human race. Not least because, even if they didn't know it yet, they had a small girl on board who had the hibernating gene of a new super-virus.

"I don't know how long I can actually wait though, Buck," Steve said, free hand coming to rest on Bucky's thigh in probably the most off colored way he had ever managed to be and that effort alone left him more than a little embarrassed followed immediately by mortified. What had he just said?

Bucky had been raped as part of his torture. He'd been raped as part of his duties to his handlers. And here was Steve, trying to push marriage onto him as a way to facilitate love making. The girl on the ship was a problem for another time but at the moment, still tasting of apple pie, Steve Rogers was feeling a horrible sense of guilt wash over him.

"No. Forget there was any meaning on that. We don't ever--". He ripped his hand away, cheeks red. "We never have to-- I can be married to you without. I've gone this long, I don't need it. Just you."

Bucky's expression went very blank very quickly. It wasn't that he didn't trust Steve, and he sure as hell had imagined them together in all sorts of non-family friendly ways when he was younger, but for some reason he hadn't even thought about it now. Of course Steve would want sex, and he had every right to assume someone who wanted to marry him would want to sleep with him.

He did want to... didn't he?

And now Steve looked mortified, as if being suggestive with his own future husband was a crime to be guilty of, and not something perfectly reasonable. He had no idea what to say because he both wanted it and he didn't, he desired Steve and he was scared as hell about anything physical there.

"Quit apologising," he said, trying not to sound too hoarse. "We'll work it out, it'll happen someday. I'm not letting them take this from me."

That might actually be fairly similar to what Loki might be saying right about now as Anthony knelt on the bottom of his furs and sat back on his heels. They still hadn't been able to find that skiff and now with the poisoned world cleansed from the branches of Yggdrassil, forever closed off and set to collapse, it was unlikely that they ever would find it.

"The scouts returned from their hunt around the breach in the void," he said, not sure what Loki's mood was going to be. "We don't think they made it back through." And that was disappointing. Thor was already angry about losing James. Again. And Bruce was really making progress with the genetic testing of their doubles.

Anthony felt sad for all of them.

The one silver lining was that they had the children two of them sired. The women were very round with child and it would only be a few months now before the first of the children were born.

Loki had been furious at Thor for allowing several of their slaves to escape and even to steal one of their crafts, just to save his own pride in not telling anyone the moment they had slipped their bonds. His older brother was in disgrace, even those left on the training moon had seen their crown prince fall a little from perfection. Not that he had fallen far, he still had loyalty and love for all made mistakes on occasion, but this was no small mistake.

Naught had been found of them, or the skiff, which meant a loss of four interesting subjects. Still, they would doubtlessly perish out there, the skiff was not intended for long distance voyaging and they were both unprepared and ignorant of how the wider universe worked. They may already be dead.

"Then we must forget them. We have cleared the cancerous Midgard from Yggdrasil and must turn out attention to their Asgard, which has clearly also fallen from what it should be."

"Yeah so there's no activity," Tony relayed to the staring behind him on the bridge of the skiff. "They haven't found us, at least to in any way our scanners can detect. Pretty sure we can land safe."

"Do it," Steve said, his arms crossed over his chest so he didn't feel the inappropriate need to lace his fingers together with his fiancé. Right now he needed to work and work meant no distractions.

The bridge was tense as they broke the atmosphere of the moon and, as expected, their power supply dropped significantly. If Earth was still there, if the ability to get back to their universe was still there, they wouldn't have the power to do it. Tony's mind was already working on that problem. They had decided yesterday that it was better if he wasn't in the new planet committee since he made everyone angry at him and that suited the engineer just fine. He would rather do what he loved. Build.

"I'm giving us a week on the surface," Tony said. "It's going to be cramped with eleven hundred and thirty-two people in what we have cleared but remind everyone that this isn't about being comfortable. It's about a pit stop."

It would take just under a week. Six days, in fact, for Tony to incorporate a version of an arc reactor into the skiff, powered by space radiation. It was probably his finest work ever. He just didn't feel like it was. In fact, he was pretty sure he was coming down with a flu. And he wasn't the only one. Sequestered away, he emerged to find almost half the population in the early stages of a flu. It didn't worry him so much, though, but he didn't see what Bruce and Mohinder were seeing as the first few children died.

Bruce was exceptionally worried as he watched children, who should have thrown off a virus like this if it had been a normal flu, begin to die. It brought to mind the great influenza epidemic that hit Europe straight after the first world war and killed more people than the war itself. It had been war that did that then, and war that might have brought something now.

He pulled Mohinder aside, gentle brown eyes concerned, and gestured to one of the little huts slightly off from the others.

"I think we need to get Tony to set up a barrier around one of these huts, and quarantine the sick. Only I should look after them because I've-- uh, got a strong immune system, and they're not going to get me ill."

It was an extreme measure, but the population was already so depleted that they could hardly stand to see a wave of sickness wipe out what they had left. It could be that he worried over nothing and this was just a flu, and those children just susceptible, but he would rather be safe and not need the quarantine, than bury his head in the sand and watch everyone die when it became too late to contain it.

"I think we need to tell people what is happening." How Mohinder made it as a field agent was anyone's guess. The man was so mouthy, so overly willing to discuss anything. He sighed, glancing over his shoulder at the single story building that they were using as a hospital of sorts. Everyone had fanned out into the settlements within a mile or so walk of the central hub, the one where Steve initially claimed the five story tower like building as his head of operations.

Jungle had been cleared from the roads. People were working on rationing systems and trying to figure out how best to handle their new lives with Steve Rogers as defacto mayor. No one challenged him. Not yet at least.

A half smile to the Indian's lips came with a sigh.

"Doctor Banner, I know what you are. Who you are. I was on the extraction team, remember?" Was be that forgetable? Actually, Mohinder didn't want that one answered. "And I agree. You're the best man for the job. It helps that you have medical knowledge too. The rest of us can consult from a safer location. I think-- oh god-- Mr. Stark?"

Tony looked worse than horrible. His skin was gray and his eyes were too dark, glassy. He stumbled towards them, trying to grin. "Any pepto docs? I'm not feeling great hwre."

"There might be nothing to tell," said Bruce, though he obviously didn't believe that. "The moment we start telling people that we could have a deadly virus on our hands, we'll have anarchy. Our quarantine will be flooded with people who don't have it, but think they do and are desperate for a cure, some of the actually ill people won't come for fear of being locked away, and it might turn the healthy on the sick out of fear."

Trust him. It might not have been like this, but he had been in small villages before where outbreaks had reacted like that on a smaller scale. He wanted to keep this as calm as possible.

"We just tell everyone that the virus is contagious, that's why there's a quarantine, and we urge everyone affected to come to us for help. No panic, but help."

And that was when Tony showed up, and Bruce swore under his breath, having to take a couple of deep and calming breaths. "Alright, Tony, looks like you've got this flu bug going around. Don't worry, we're working on an antidote, but right now you just need to come rest in the main medical hall, okay?"

“Oh great. No really, perfect. So happy. I’ve been hoping I’d catch some space virus. Is this one going to bring out all of my animalist tendencies? Will I want to oil up and run around with a sword like Sulu or just smash things? Mmmm… I should leave the smashing to you,” Tony said, letting Mohinder get under his arm to keep him up. He didn’t really like how Mohinder encroached on his territorial friendship with Banner, but he did feel like he was going to fall over.

“This isn’t good, Doctor,” Mohinder said in Tamil. He doubted that Tony understood or spoke that language. “He has not been around anyone, just refitting the ship that brought us here. How could he have caught this so quickly?”

The answer, once Bruce saw it, would be obvious. The parentless children and the two women that had been looking after them had made their home in one particular part of the ship. So far, the people that were sick were those that had either helped out, or had bunked around them, and of course, all of the kids. Tony had been doing his retrofitting in the same area.

Asgardians didn’t like their things stolen. And children, known for being grabby little things, had disturbed whatever had given them the illness down in the hold.

It wasn't for another four hours, as Bruce puzzled through where the virus could have come from, that he realised it was probably to do with the ship itself. Suddenly excited, he leaped up and called out to Mohinder to stand outside the quarantine zone and to send a runner for him if anyone went into an emergency state, he had to go and investigate the ship.

If he could find what had caused the illness, isolate it, then it should be the building blocks for both a cure and a vaccine. A vaccine first, in order to help others from catching it and be able to work on assisting the sick, and then a cure.

The more he learned of the Asgardians, the more he detested them. What monsters to leave a pathogen on board to hurt others, to enslave, to rape and kill... It was enough to have his hands tinging green as he worked desperately through the night.

All of the children that first contracted the illness died by morning. The adults, with stronger immune systems, were holding on a little better, but by the following evening, and just before Bruce would be able to find a substance to base his vaccine on, they had died too. They’d been exposed to the substance for at least three days longer than Tony had in total, however. Rogers and Barnes had too, since their room had been in the bowels of the skiff as well, but their immune systems were stellar.

Mohinder had initially promised Bruce that he would get him if any of their patients in quarantine took a turn for the worse, but instead, he’d gone through the barricades on the building instead to try and ease the suffering of the others. He held their hands as they died and sang to some of the children. It just was not easy to watch them all go.

At least Bruce would discover that the pathogen did not spread to others second hand. It had to be absorbed into the skin through touch directly, a strange virus that hardly seemed like an evolutionary organism so much as a manufactured one. A vaccine, therefore, wasn’t necessary. For the moment.

When he finally returned to the quarantine, Mohinder looked ragged. “Mr. Stark is the only one left. There have been no new exposures reported and I suppose I’m living proof of that.” He did not apologize for being here despite orders. Mohinder had never been great with orders anyway. “He’s not quite to the delirium stage of the illness. But he’s been asking for you.”

Nearly four dozen people dead.

That might not seem much, it wouldn't have been even seen as an epidemic only a few short months ago when the world had no idea that Asgardians were real, but now it was a desperate situation. Bruce was angry as hell that Mohinder had ignored him, not because he needed to seem like the boss, but because it was a reckless endangerment of life when there had been no need.

"Get into bed."

His words were clipped and annoyed. "You probably have it too, and I need to work on a cure. Tony will thank me more if he's cured than he will for my presence."

He turned without another word and sequestered himself in his small room to work frantically on the cure. God, if he didn't save Tony, they might well be fucked, they relied on him for many engineering solutions to help save their lives.

The arrogance of the Avengers always hit Mohinder so hard. Banner was an expert on many things, a genius in his own right, but Mohinder was far more experienced with viral infections and genetic diversity than Bruce was. He’d been studying the incubation period of the infection and the way it shut the body down so easily. There were no catastrophic organ failure, the fever was never extreme. It was like the people here were just giving up and laying down, closing their eyes. It seemed almost like the Hindu tales of curses more than an illness. It sapped a person’s will to live.

But Bruce wouldn’t listen to him. He decided to try and do everything on his own. And Mohinder yelled at the door Bruce had sequestered himself behind trying to make a vaccine for an illness that did not need a vaccine.

Tony, however, wasn’t really growing worse. He was still sick, still groggy and whiney, but he wasn’t shutting down like the others. He had filled four notebooks up already, just trying to get all of his thoughts and ideas down so someone would be able to carry on with him. “Tell Banner these are all for him when I go,” Tony said, coughing up some phlegm before requesting more paper. “And do not tell Rogers about this. I yelled at him about paper being a commody a week ago. He’ll never let me live it down.”

When Bruce finally emerged, Mohinder were there to tackle him if need be.

“You idiotic man, you will listen to me!” Mohinder never came on strong before. This was sort of liberating.

Bruce didn't think it was arrogance to tell someone with a normal immune system to remain out of the infection zone. Much as even in a hospital, an expert doctor would not be expected to simply expose themselves in order to find a cure, Bruce wasn't discounting Mohinder's expertise. He was so short with him because he was worried, because he felt that would be another person lost.

When he came out and Mohinder accosted him, he did stop though he looked flustered and angry still.

"What is it, Mohinder? Why aren't you in bed like Tony?"

There was less of a snap to his voice, harried and concerned rather than furious, but he was an angry man by nature so there was, of course, still some anger there.

Whatever momentary violence had accompanied Mohinder’s outburst faded away and he took his hands from the front of Bruce’s shirt. The man needed to shower, he was getting a bit ripe. At least Mohinder wasn’t going to say anything about that at the moment. He pressed a stack of notebooks against Bruce’s chest since he promised to deliver them, but the notebooks weren’t the problem.

“I’m not sick, nor do I believe that I will get sick. And Mr. Stark is not growing any sicker. He’s busily at work trying to pour every ounce of thought onto paper and… Doctor, the Asgardians are a race that embraces magic, something lost upon modern human beings. Have you ever heard of Kala-azar? It is a disease passed only by the bite of a sandfly and can not be passed on to others. There is a whole epic dedicated to the explanation of what called the black illness, from magic to the touch of a god. I think this might be similar. The old tales tell that those contracting kala-azar lose the will to carry on and will lie down and die in the fields or in the mountains unless their families can keep them motivated. Dr. Banner, there are no new cases. None. No one is even showing illness and those children didn’t just stay below deck. They were all over our food supply, all over everything. So were Captain Rogers and Sargent Barnes. Now please allow me to assist you.”

Mohinder was always long winded, though his stories tended to be calm and introspective, his voice soft and sweet.

Not so this time, it all just came bubbling out.

Far from looking comforted, Bruce looked aghast and horrified. He believed what Mohinder said, he was a smart man and he could see the connections when they were laid out for him, but how the hell did they combat something like this? He swallowed hard, hands trembling just a bit.

"How do we keep this from ever spreading again? This is a very precarious time, everyone's will is struggling after seeing their home and loved ones destroyed before their eyes. If all it takes is an hour of despondency, the human race won't survive to get to a new planet."

A selfish tiny part of him couldn't help but wonder if this might affect him despite the Other Guy, if magic might be the way to put him out for good.

“We need to find the source and clear it out. Destroy it. Who are the only people that have come to contact with it and aren’t suffering anything?” Mohinder pulled off his lab coat, rubbing his eyes. “I’m going to get them. You really need to sit with him though. Keep him going. Maybe let him help you— I’ll be back.”

It took ten minutes of trying to find Rogers and Barnes for Mohinder to remember that he had a communicator. It was just so foreign from a phone or a radio and speaking into a crystal was just strange to him that he forgot all about it. Luckily, Steve was quick to answer, though he sounded a little breathless and was more then a little shirtless when his image came across the crystal. “Doctor?”

He glanced at Bucky. They were both in the middle of doing to heavy duty furniture hauling to make sure everyone was comfortable for however long it took Tony to get the skiff back up and running. Neither of them had heard about the epidemic. About the deaths. Bruce had done well keeping it under quarantine too. Mohinder wasn’t really sure how to say all of this but he tried anyway. “We believe that there is a magical or higher science based sickness linked to a specific area in the spaceship we’ve been traveling in. Dr. Banner has been hard at work identifying the problem. We…have casualties. Mr. Stark has become ill as well. We believe you and Sergeant Barnes were also exposed but are showing no symptoms. Likely because of the serum.” Actually, though, it was because the two were in love and had everything to live for. “Please return to the Village quickly?”

Eleven hundred people had been saved from Earth.

Four dozen of those people were now gone.

Steve Rogers was going to have to get a better handle on those that were left. They could not keep acting alone.

After this was all over, Bruce would remember how competent Mohinder had been and he would make sure to thank him. It might be the start of a better working relationship between the two, though they actually had to get this sorted first. He let Mohinder run off to deal with alerting Rogers and Barnes, while he jogged towards Tony's room.

He couldn't spend long there, he needed to get onto the skiff and isolate what had caused this, but Tony had been asking for him and he deserved to be told what was going on. If only because he was a stubborn bastard, so if he was told that the illness would get him if he gave up, he'd stubbornly never give up just to fuck with Asgardians.

Bruce slipped into the little side room that Tony was frantically writing in and gave him a small smile.

"Got a moment to talk?"

Tony really did look about as bad as he had before, his hand pausing over the book he had been writing in to look up through lidded eyes at the other man. “I’ve had loads of time. You’re the popular one.” His smile was weak but fierce. He flipped a page in his book and rubbed the edge of his pen against a few days worth of stubble. His signature goatee style was all but obliterated. “So listen, I know this thing is fatal. I’m doing my best to get everything out that I can. Mohinder give you the other books? I’m still feeling about the usual so I’m going to try to get all of the reactor notes I can into this book before I take a nap and…”

His eyes narrowed. Bruce looked pensive. He wasn’t sure if that was going to be good for him or not.

“If you tell me any more people have gotten sick, I’m going to have a little fit and then go back to writing so spare me.” Funny. Had Tony contracted this just a few days before, he might even have been the first to go. He had been so despondent and depressed before. The Asgardian trap to cleanly kill off anyone who had taken their things, if that’s really what this ended up being, would have taken Humanity’s best hope for finding a new place to live away from them.

Banner should be proud of himself. It was his kindness and friendship that was keeping Tony afloat…after all, that was why Tony was working so hard. For Bruce.

"No, nobody else has become sick and we're looking into how to dispose of the safeguards that the Asgardians set in order to make people sick. But that's not what I need to talk to you about, this sickness... it's not natural."

Bruce at least assumed that Tony wouldn't have an issue with believing this, considering that he had spent time with the Asgardians and must have seen their magic first hand. It was still something that he had to get his head around, truthfully.

"Apparently it saps the will to live, being determined to live is a cure of itself."

It sounded ridiculous to his own ears, and still deadly dangerous. When did their lives become so-- farcical?

Turning his head against the pillow, hand finally pausing, Tony looked up skeptically at Banner. "I have a will to live. How do you think I've gotten this far?" It was probably why he was only partially sick. He still felt like crap but he wasn't getting worse or recovering... That did bother him. Did he have only a partial will to live...?

He could answer that easily. He was only living now to make sure humanity was safe. But he didn't have anyone. That was his own issue, it wasn't like Banner and Suresh had really teamed up after all. Right now, Mohinder didn't much like Banner at all. He just couldn't know that.

Tony carefully put his pen down.

"Get me out of here then, Banner. If I'm not contagious and I have to want to live, then I need to be useful."

Bruce had no idea why Tony had only become partially sick, he didn't know what gave the engineer will to live and what sapped it, and how he could be in this weird half state between the two. He could only assume that he couldn't get it because of the Other Guy, like all other illnesses, because he definitely had very little will to keep going most of the time.

"Okay, but I still want you to try and take it easier than usual. This might be magical, but I'm pretty sure that running yourself into the ground isn't going to make things any better for you."

He offered a hand in case Tony needed it to get up.

"I'll take you to your room and set up a video link with me so that you can help while I investigate the skiff."

"I want you to know how hard this is for me to sit back and watch," Tony grumbled until he wobbled on his feet. He didn't correct himself, but he was still really glad that he'd be going back to bed. Of course, he'd been so busy in the skiff that he just had to take his old spot that Cap set up for him, barely private and small. Tony might have the hardest time adjusting to life now, but at least he was feeling shitty enough not to make it a thing at the moment.

He let Bruce tuck him in and had FRIDAY transferred to an earpiece for Bruce to wear while he went to explore the ship.

He'd find two super soldiers already there, both crouched down to peer at what looked to be a black box sitting in some purple goo. Tony rolled his eyes as Banner approached them slowly. "That's kid yogurt. You'd be looking for something part of the ship itself. Not a smear of blueberry snack food."

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