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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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."

Bruce was more inclined to be charitable to the fact that the two super soldiers had found yogurt, they weren't technically inclined (unless it was weaponry or vehicles in Bucky's case) and this was a pretty long way outside of their wheelhouse. So he paused and glanced down at the Captain, words firm but gentle.

"Captain, you're needed more to explain things to the populace. You need to tell them we've triggered an Asgardian trap, that some people have unfortunately passed, but that we have it in hand now so there's no need to panic. Stress the importance of relying on one another, and friendships in these trying times."

Boosting morale and will to live could only help combat this.

"I can handle extracting the virus itself, and I have Tony watching to assist."

There would need to be a discussion later about how information went out because Steve himself hadn't heard about the happenings either. They were still acting too much like individuals. That had to stop. "I'll handle this, Doctor," Steve agreed. "And when this is finished, we need to come up with ground rules so we can make sure everyone is safe and being looked after. All we have left is each other."

He was getting much too good at rousing speeches. He didn't know what they said about him or their situation but he didn't entirely like it.

When Bucky and Steve cleared out, Tony had FRIDAY transmit ships logs to him. "I was working in the aft, where I thought the power supply was. I'm going to guess it has to be there if I got sick a lot faster than everyone else. You'll be looking for something innocuous. Maybe runed."

Bucky went where Steve went, like a shadow at his shoulder, still far too grim faced to be really recognisable as the Sergeant he had once been, but far more human than he had been only a few short weeks ago. At least in the short week it had taken for the virus to take hold and kill, he had healed up mostly from his bullet wounds thanks to the serum, enough to not have Steve fussing at him when he resumed normal life activities.

Bruce let the two of them go and jogged down to where Tony had told him that he had been working, immediately starting to scan the area for anything that might indicate where the trap was originally laid.

"It doesn't affect me," he said, voice conversational even if the topic wasn't particularly lighthearted. "The Other Guy prevents it."

“Figured as much,” Tony said, oddly feeling a lot better than he had when Bruce first came to visit. “Same with Tweedles Dee and Dum. Whatever you three have in your blood, it’s doing wonders for whatever Asgard has to throw at you. We’re lucky about that.” He leaned forward, having FRIDAY zoom in on something odd stuck into the center of the wall. He had tools laying around and the arc reactor sunken in directly beneath it. He’d been using it like a hook for his light actually.

Tony groaned.

“Right there. Whatever that is, that’s got to be what’s causing the problems. I nearly had my face on it for the last few days. I tried prying it off of the wall to start to see what was underneath to ground the reactor but it wouldn’t budge.” And perhaps Bruce had seen the children hooking an end of a rope to it for skipping or making tents on over the last week or so of travel around Earth and then back to this moon.

Bruce had seen the hook before now as well, but he hadn't thought of it as anything unusual, though he had also tried to pry it from the wall in order to make it safer for anyone walking down here so they didn't catch themselves on it. Damn it, why hadn't he seen the tiny runes etched onto the side? Why had he just left it?

"It's probably stuck on with the same sort of magic to prevent tampering. If you couldn't get it off with your tools then-- well..."

He thought that maybe the Other Guy would be the only thing strong enough of ripping it from the skiff and crushing it, but that was a terrible idea. He couldn't control the Hulk, the creature could well destroy the whole ship and then kill more people outside. There was a reason that he hadn't even used that power with the Avengers yet, though Tony had been trying to push him to use it against Loki when everything went to hell and back.

“Seal the area off. There’s only three people here capable of going into that room unprotected. And that’s fine. The reactor has been installed and-- Think of it like Star Trek, Banner. You don’t want to go into the plasma reactor, right?” He was sounding better, having something really meaningful to work on was evidently agreeing with him. “I don’t think we need to remove it. Just keep people away from it. Unless other people are getting sick?”

He was a little out of the loop. Mohinder sat with him from time to time but it wasn’t always that easy to get real information out of the Indian. The man could talk, but he was mostly introspective about it. Tony tended to tune him out after awhile.

“Hey, by the way, I’m still a little mad that you thought I was dying and you didn’t come to see me.” He wanted to put that out there. “What if that was my dying wish? To see Bruce Banner one more time?”

"Then you need to find better life goals," he replied wryly, a hint of sass showing through now that they had actually identified the issue and could hopefully isolate it. "But if you want to know, I didn't come because I thought there was limited time and I wanted to use every second of it trying to save you."

He didn't have many friends, any really, and he counted Tony among them somehow. They just got on despite being so very different.

"I'm concerned about just locking this room up, we have no way to know if that will keep it contained once we have to use the skiff for a prolonged period again to get wherever we're going."

Okay, so that was nice to hear that Bruce was working tirelessly to try and find a way to help him. It wasn’t something Tony regularly or even irregularly expected anyone to do. He had been on his own for so, so long, afterall, even surrounded by other people, he’d been alone. Much too proud to say a thing, he cleared his throat and sat back, arms crossing over his chest as he tried to puzzle this one out. “What’s the other option? Removing the whole room? That just puts more people at risk by leaving it here, in the open. The people who were sick, it was all proximity or did they actually touch it? What about the people that walked the level above it?”

Tony didn’t have the answers, only the questions he was trying to act like a thought experiment for Banner, a sounding board. It was actually how they would find that they worked best, laying out a clear path of checks and balances for their geniuses to bump off of like pinballs in an arcade game.

“I have a lot of scrap metal on board. We can have Rogers weld it onto the ship. No one would be able to get in there then.”

"We don't know for sure that this will keep it out of contamination range, we know too little about magic and we can't risk it. The only thing we can do is try and find a way to get it out and then bury it several miles away from here, it's the only way to be absolutely certain that nobody else will get contaminated."

Of course, then they had the issue of how to actually get it out of the skiff to begin with. Once they had done that, at least he or one of the super soldiers could carry it to a safe location and dispose of it with impunity, but how to actually get it out?

"It's not like a normal pathogen, we have no idea if it will actually just go straight through any welded metal barricade."

“We also don’t know if the ship needs it to function,” Tony pointed out. “Then again, if you reduce the whole thing to scrap, I could rebuild it. Eventually. It’s sort of massive, Banner, and we have only a few months until we have to play Rescue Rangers. I’m good, but I’m not sure I’m that good without a corps of engineers to help me out with welding guns. We spent two weeks onboard that ship. Only the people directly by that thing got hurt.” And so far, he was the only survivor that had taken sick in the first place. “The vast majority of the ship is fine.”

But maybe Banner was right? In a way, Tony didn’t care. Playing at being a hero was not in the cards for him any more. He hadn’t really settled into that role with any certain desire. And going back to that place?

He didn’t want to. He knew that was a bad attitude to have so he was keeping it to himself, but that didn’t stop it from being true.

"It's unlikely that it's needed to function, not being a trap, they have to be able to disable it if the skiff happened to be used by other races. They have alliances, I believe, with others who aren't mortal."

It had to be a failsafe intended to strike thieves. It was highly unlikely that it had been intended to target mortals as these Asgardians seemed almost to believe that their slaves couldn't possibly be anything other than devoted and grateful.

"I need your help here, Tony, we have to get it out. I could-- the Other Guy could-- but it's far too dangerous. Who knows what else I might destroy or who else I might hurt?"

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