fossilised | Jotunheimr

Jotunheimr

Thor Odinson was not ready to be King.

That much had become suddenly and sharply clear to Odin All-Father, a sharp pain that he would rather not have had. He had been blinded too long by love for his only heir, seeing only his affable way of gaining friends and his strength on the battlefield, but ignoring how he had become spoiled and arrogant. He had glossed over the reports from Thor's tutors that his son had not studied the other realms or the duties of a King as he should, and had instead spent much of his youth carousing with his favoured companions, hunting or getting into trouble together.

But this... this was beyond a childish scrape.

Egged on by his friends, or so it had come out since the act, Thor had decided to go to Jotunheim - a forbidden act - for the sole purpose of finding one of its inhabitants and slaying it. A proof of his mettle as a warrior, to kill one of the fearsome giants, the monsters of the icy realm. He felt ashamed, sick at heart that his only son could be so ignorant as to think that any race were just monsters. He might have hoped these were just rantings, but he saw preparations begin to take place and he knew that they meant to commit treason by disobeying his orders of no contact with Jotunheim and perhaps start another war.

Arrangements were hastily made, pushed through Frigga who had more goodwill remaining to her among the Giants, and when Thor arrived at the Bifrost, he would find Odin standing by the great sword rather than Heimdall, his one eye forbidding.

"Why are you so eager to seek out war, my son?"

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For the briefest second, Bucky looked stricken. The hollow hardness fell away and he looked like someone wounded and scared, about to cry, but it only lasted a moment before fear and anguish overwhelmed everything else. That phrase, something about it was like fire scorching him and he lost control.

With a snarl, he pulled the trigger of his gun three times in quick succession and shot Steve in the gut and chest. He missed the heart and lungs, though, even if he should have been able to hit them from much further away. Panic flooded him when Steve crumpled unconscious and, before he knew what he was doing, he had Steve in a fireman's lift and was sprinting through the city to the sound of honking horns and yells from people left behind.

He didn't stop again until he was stood in front of Tony Stark, no longer caring what the man thought about the truth of his mother. He couldn't say anything, just mutely held out the unconscious Steve in blood-drenched arms.

“Oh my god. Are you a cat? I can feed myself. I don’t need you to show me affection through pain and bring me stuff you kill!” Maybe that was kind of weird? Tony didn’t have the usual reactions to things. It was almost like he was incapable of being human save when he was alone.

“Captain Rogers is not dead. He is losing a great deal of blood, however, faster than his body is able to replenish it. I would suggest, sir, that he go to the hospital.” JARVIS was at least minutely helpful.

“You think? Shit. Fine.” It would take a few moments to get to his cars. “J, clear the path. You,” he pointed at Bucky, “follow me.”

He’d need someone to put Steve in the car. Fuck his life. And his all leather interior.

He didn't follow.

What he did was put Steve down on one of Tony's workbenches and grab the nearest sharp tool that he could get his hands on, and slice straight through his metal arm. It had to have been something in there that let them track him, and so it wasn't safe any longer, and he didn't have the technical know-how to dig it out himself.

So it was better to amputate the problem.

He looked up at Stark, looking more like a feral animal than a person, with blood all over him and tears spilling down his cheeks that he wasn't even aware of out of guilt and fear, and then he just ran.

Tony would be left to haul Steve to the hospital himself. Not that he would be alone for long, as they rushed him off to the OR, an innocuous looking red-haired woman in scrubs sat down next to him as if by random chance.

"A run in with the Winter Soldier, hm?" She murmured over the rim of her take-out Starbucks coffee cup, quiet enough for only Tony to hear. "Is he going to be okay?"

“Do you think I’m in any way capable of lifting—“ But Bucky was gone and Tony cursed before loading Steve up on DUM-E. It was not his most graceful maneuver.

Tony hadn’t ever sat by a friend’s bed before (or waited for one in an emergency room waiting area) so this was a new and weird experience for him. He presses his knees together before crossing them and was just sinking into an old copy of Wired magazine when the voice roused him from a really boring article about the future of AI that he was quoted in but had forgotten he had given an interview for.

Natalie. Natasha. Whoever she was.

Tony tilted back his head and tossed the magazine aside. “Which one? The guy that cut his arm off in front of me or the guy he shot? I haven’t heard about either. Technically, the blond should be all right by now.”

But he was being fucking stubborn.

Natasha had quite enjoyed being Natalie for the brief period she had to be, it had been a nice change of pace from some of her previous undercover jobs - much less painful death and messy red in her ledger. She had even come to quite like Tony Stark, he wasn't as bad as his bluster made him out to be.

"He doesn't miss, you know?" She set the cup on her knee, as if she were talking about something as mundane as the weather and not about a legendary assassin. "So I have to wonder why the good Captain is even breathing with three shots in him."

She ever so gently tugs up the hem of her shirt to reveal a white puckered scar.

"He got me once, a long time ago, and I should know that he doesn't miss."

Tony only glanced at her scar without really looking. “So what? He left you live too?” Well wasn’t that nice? “The guy is an asshole, my mom was evidently HYDRA and oh yeah— There’s such a thing as HYDRA.”

Not even Natasha would know that so Tony was pretty pleased to have one over on her. He didn’t feel for Bucky the way Steve did anyway so the fact that Bucky missed on purpose (and he’d have to at that close range) meant that he’d just reacted the way most people did with Steve.

Sometimes you just wanted to shoot the guy to shut him up. Classic.

He sighed and dropped his hands into his lap. “Go tell Fury. I’ve got the sitting and waiting under control.” It wasn’t like it was the first time that she’d seen him pouting.

"You think he doesn't already know, why do you think I'm here?"

Knew about Steve Rogers, at least, and the possibility of the involvement of the Winter Soldier. But that news about HYDRA being alive and well was a new one, even to her, though it made some sort of twisted sense.

"You're saying that this run in with the Winter Soldier had something to do with your Mom having less than savoury connections when she was alive?"

Interesting, but it seemed flawed to her.

"Now isn't the time to behave like a baby, Stark, this is bigger than you could imagine."

“You should try me sometime. My imagination is pretty huge.” So the answer to baby behavior, obviously, was that Tony Stark was going to participate in it, without shame, no matter how Black Widow night try to inject some shame into that.

He had already been turned down for the Avengers Initiative, so this visit couldn’t be about that. And no one was going to want him to try and track the One Armed man— Shit. That was exactly what this was about.

“The guy shot Steve Rogers. He’s not like Mild Mannered Banner,” he muttered, assuming that the woman knew all about his connection to Ross there with the surveillance equipment on the Hulk. “He left his arm in my living room. I don’t know what you want me to do about any of this. But if you’re going to sit here and wait for the doctor, I’ll take that as my cue to go.”

Tony only played heartless when too many people were looking. And Black Widow’s eyes might as well have been all of SHIELD’s.

Hell. She was probably HYDRA anyway.

He might be playing heartless for her benefit, but she was much more skilled at reading people than he was at pretending, and she already knew him quite well. He was rattled by Steve being hurt, he was obviously hurting deeply about this information he had found on his mother, and he was angry at the Soldier for his part in all of this.

"You'll look for him even if that isn't what I told you to come here and do, let's not pretend otherwise, I've just come to back you up to stop you getting killed."

She wasn't interested in hearing that Stark had ended up dead out of a need for either answers or revenge. And she was pretty sure that it would eat at him until he got one or the other.

"Someone else is coming to sit and wait for Steve to wake up."

Tony didn’t even have to ask who as he stood. There was only one mega creepy agent out there and it was the same one that use to harass him about Loki before the two aliens stopped coming around. Poor Steve. Hopefully Coulson wouldn’t go all crazy fanboy on him while he slept.

“Let’s go.”

It didn’t bother him working with the woman that had purposefully inserted herself into his life as his assistant. She had gotten to know him and had, in turn, managed to save his life and Pepper had really come to rely on her too, even if Natasha wasn’t around much since she had other assignments and didn’t do the whole social thing. She was handy with his computer systems though and as Tony had DUM-E put the arm in storage, he worked on reprogramming half of the equipment he used to track Banner to track Bucky instead.

It would be surprisingly easy, once Tony took a look at the patterns he saw in Bucky’s movements over the last few months from motion capture cameras throughout the country.

Natasha was backup for this, as she said, though she was also there for other reasons - to observe Stark and make sure he didn't go too far, and to bring in the Soldier to SHIELD custody if it all possible. Those things, however, she didn't think that Tony needed to know.

So she held back and secured the corridor once Tony decided he had tracked down the Soldier, the identity of which she was still unaware of, to make sure he didn't manage to slip past and escape.

Tony would find Bucky in the loft conversion of an office building, half collapsed against a box of wiring as he tried to bind up the remains of what had been his prosthetic before this afternoon.

Tony approached with his hands in his pockets. He was slow, methodical. Considering the amount of blood and oil and whatever else he’d followed in from the stairs, he was already pretty sure that he knew what he’d find.

Half-dead, sure, but the guy was like Steve. They both were too stubborn to die.

“He’s going to be all right,” Tony said, not lying since Coulson had texted each and every update several times over. How the guy got his number— Fucking SHIELD. “You know that already. You didn’t shoot to kill. Just to shut him up. I’ll have to try that some time.”

He didn't have the strength to fight right now, but that didn't mean that he wouldn't do it anyway if he had to. He had been trained ruthlessly to keep fighting and keep moving even long after he should have stopped breathing. He doesn't, for now, he just glares up at Stark.

"I didn't mean to hurt him, but he wouldn't leave. I told him that I hated him and he still wouldn't leave."

If he sounded a bit broken, well... that's just what Steve Rogers did to him. Always had.

“You have met Steve Rogers, right?” The guy was on a different wavelength. You could punch him (or hate him or shoot him actually) and he’d just get right back up. What an asshole. How freaking infuriating.

Tony kind of wanted to punch him now too, mostly because he wasn’t here to handle this. And because he bled all over his car. Happy was less than happy to be forced into detailing duty.

“So what’s the plan now? You bleed out here, you send your bestie back into a spiraling depression, and then I have to deal with him even more— I helped you. And this is how you repay me?”

"You bugged me, and then you sent him to me, you didn't help me."

It would have been kinder to just refuse to fix him in the first place and send him out with a malfunctioning arm. At least he would still have had partial use of it, not been in danger of bleeding out, and not with Steve Rogers now knowing he was alive in the world.

"You need to get out of here, I'm not safe to be around."

He still had his gun, after all, and he wouldn't be so inclined to miss when it came to Stark.

“Anything I use is tagged,” Tony snorted. “I thought you did your research.” He wasn’t getting close to the mess and he was not even remotely a surgeon. But JARVIS was chirping in his ear that blood loss and sepsis was a genuine issue at the moment, though his scanning capability was much less refined here than at the Tower. “I have to protect what’s mine. And you knew Steve was my friend. You knew he’d figure it out. And I guess you knew that you’d have to shoot him?”

No. That had come after. But why? Pushing Steve away was ridiculous. The guy didn’t stay gone. And Tony should know. They’d actually become pretty good friends fairly quickly.

“When get wakes up, two things will happen. He’ll chase you down or he’ll lose his shit because you died.” And Tony really didn’t want that to happen. He was bad at consoling people. “Either will still happen whether you shoot me or not.” It was only Steve he really cared about.

"But I don't understand why!"

The words burst out of him all of a sudden in a kind of frustrated plea. Perhaps it was the bloodloss, or perhaps it was just the way his head was thudding with confusion, but he needed to vent this out just for now.

"I don't know why he'll follow me or why he wants to be my friend or why I couldn't kill him. I don't know why I remember his goddamn eyes staring at me as I fell and I don't know about any of it."

He wasn't the enemy here, he was just a confused as hell victim of HYDRA, not really understanding life on the outside.

“No one understands him,” Tony said, meandering around the blood pool as it This was a natural course of business. “That’s part of his charm.” And he did mean that. “You’d know better than anyone. He probably drove you crazy.”

And he totally agreed about those eyes. Damn. How was Steve not constantly dripping in pussy? Hell, tony himself would even spend the night with him. Pepper would understand. And probably want a turn too.

But that wasn’t the point of this conversation.

“It’s who he is. He cares about things most people wouldn’t get. Like me. And you. Fighting it is pointless. And so was cutting off your arm. I’m good at finding people. I’ve got this red head with me that probably knows about how to fake being a doctor enough to patch you up. Can I call her?”

"No, I wouldn't know that better than anyone, I don't remember anything about him other than those stupid eyes on that one day."

His head was like Swiss cheese and even though it felt really dangerous to be admitting that, it felt necessary in order to get Stark to understand just where he was coming from in all of this.

"All I wanted was the coolant fixing, that's it. I didn't want to remember your Mom, I didn't want to get tracked down, I just want to be left alone. Please."

“If I leave you alone, chances are that you’re going to die. And we went over exactly what will happen if you die. I’m one man, Barnes, and I can’t handle a weepy blond.” Thank God Pepper wasn’t weepy. He was already a pretty bad boyfriend but that would highlight just how bad he was.

Tony watched Bucky for a moment before he slipped his hands out of his pockets and pulled up the knees of his pants. He settled into a crouch, frowning.

“I don’t want you to shoot me. But I’m not going to leave you alone.” Bucky was sort of like a really expensive wine and Tony was going to put a bow on him and give him to Rogers. “You have answers. And we have protection.”

Stark wasn't listening or he'd understand that Bucky didn't have any answers. His memory was full of holes and he couldn't guarantee if the bits he had would be the bits that were useful to him. Nor did he even want to go with them and be useful, he just wanted to sink into obscurity and figure out who the hell he was.

Apparently the universe was a bitch and didn't want him to do that, though.

"I don't want to be near him. I'll let you take me, and I'll answer your questions, but Steve doesn't come near me. Understand?"

“That defeats the whole purpose,” Tony grumbled. “Listen, if it was as simple as giving you a phone and letting you run off to be a recovering Manchurian Candidate, I’d do that. But you have information we need and you’re the only person in the world that makes shooting Captain America seem like a lesser crime so... I can’t promise that I’ll keep him away from you. And you can’t shoot him again. But if you want to kick the puppy by ignoring him, that’s on you.”

Tony didn’t really think that Bucky had a choice so he actually wasn’t worried at all about him refusing. He’d probably be unconscious in a few more minutes anyway.

“After you’re done almost dying and you give us everything we need to know about HYDRA, you can run off to do whatever you want. Deal?”

"No. But you're not offering me a deal, you're telling me that you're gonna take me prisoner until I give you the information you want. If this was an exchange, I'd have the option to walk out of here or not talk to you."

Which, contrary to what it looked like with all that blood everywhere, he probably could still do. He could even fight his way out if that's what it came to, depending how many people other than this 'red haired woman' he had brought with him.

"At least have the courage to be honest about what you're doing, instead of pretending like I have a choice."

“Different kind of deal. That’s the easy way. The hard way is we take you in by force. Accommodations aren’t so 5-star.” It wasn’t a threat. Tony didn’t threaten. It was just the reality of the situation. “I’d rather do this the easy way. Get you some help, you help us, and then you can run away again. Think catch and release.”

Obviously they could track Bucky down whenever they wanted. Not so obvious was Tony’s ability to cage Bucky whenever he wanted, though.

The guy had shown him about his loopholes. For better or for worse, it meant that Tony could shut them down and use his tech to contain the Winter Soldier.

“No one really wants to hurt you. And who knows, whatever my mom did to your head…maybe we can undo it.”

He had promised himself that he wasn't going to be trapped again, and now it looked like that really wasn't his choice any more. The look he shot Stark was one of genuine loathing, but he didn't protest being taken out any more. He just walked, head down, like a prisoner out to where the Widow was waiting.

She glanced at him and then over at Tony, eyebrows raised.

"For someone not even involved in SHIELD, you cause a whole lot of paperwork, you know that? Come on, where are you even planning on taking him? Can't admit him to a hospital, I'm pretty sure he doesn't legally exist."

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i don't have a nat account so pretend Bucky is Nat

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