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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Yeah. No deal. Tony pulled again at the hand, feeling his skin bruised up already, and gritted his teeth. “I want proof. What proof do you have?”

Because just talking shit on his parents is something that happened an awful lot. This might well be no different but Tony wanted assurances otherwise.

He kept his voice low, but at least his muscles finally relaxed. He wouldn’t promise about not doing something dumb because he always did dumb things. It was his MO. But at least he’d hold off for the time being.

"Even if I carried that sort of proof around with me, it would be pointless giving it to you. You need to do your own research, or you'd just think I was handing you more lies."

But if Stark dug into it himself - and he had the means to now that he had a place to begin and the smarts to do it - and found the truth, it would be much harder to denounce as someone just trying to smear her name posthumously.

"I'm letting you go now, and I'm leaving."

Hopefully before Rogers showed up, not that he knew JARVIS had called in the cavalry.

It had only been five minutes from the time Tony tried to hit Bucky to being let go. There was absolutely no way for Steve to make it in time. Tony didn’t move when Bucky released him, though there was so much nervous energy in his legs that he almost jumped up and ran after without even being able to help himself.

Right now, he was a HYDRA collaborator. By birth, by deed. His stomach ached and he ran a hand over his mouth.

HYDRA hadn’t existed for decades and now... now he was learning that was not the truth.

Steve would find him at work with his research, would find images of himself and Bucky before Bucky supposedly died, and all of the early members of SHIELD too. Screens were thrown up everywhere.

As soon as Bucky let go, he was gone. It was a testament to the skills he had been trained with that he managed to escape such a fortified building so quickly and quietly, but within another five minutes he was well hidden and regretting his choices.

Steve showed up ready for a fight, shield in hand ready, but found that Tony didn't seem to be in any immediate danger, though... why did he have a bunch of screens up about things that happened long ago? Like it always did, seeing Bucky's face made his stomach sink. That was the one thing he truly regretted, the friend he failed.

"...Tony? JARVIS called me, he said you needed some help. Everything okay, pal?"

“Yeah. No.” What a non-committal and confusing thing to say! Tony spent too much time in Malibu not to pick up a few thing here and there from Californians. The last word always was the correct one on linked together, oppositional fragments. No, no he was not all right.

He moved some screens around and brought one down from the air to the desk in front of him, flicking through images of his father and his mother before they had died. Before he was born. He was so mad that he was leaving angry little streaks on the glass surface.

“What do you know about the Winter Soldier program?”

Okaaaay.

Steve knew that Tony sometimes got a little funny if he got involved with a project and stayed awake too long, obsessing and getting lost in his own little world. But usually it was Pepper that had to deal with pulling him out of this, Steve was a bit out of his depth.

"Nothing," he shrugged. "Is it something you're working on?"

Why would he know about it? Unless Tony was worried someone in his company had leaked the information or something? God, he was so lost.

The way Bucky said ‘Winter Soldier’ made Tony think that there should be some sort of knowledge to scrounge up about it. But there wasn’t. Tony could find brief mentions here or there in the SHIELD archive pointing at a code name for a weapon program but none of it was coming together and aside from a few titles or subtitles of papers, there was nothing at all. He cross-referenced all of this with behavioral programs but there was no such thing in SHIELD that he could find.

His mother didn’t make waves at all. She was part of SHIELD, but she seemed like a background member. Her name was never mentioned without his father’s and Bucky seemed to think that this was her own project. His father never dealt in biological sciences so it just didn’t make sense.

“Think a little harder. It would be some sort of HYDRA code name.”

"Some sort of history project? HYDRA have been gone a long time, Tony."

Though the mention of them so unexpectedly couldn't stop a shiver going down his spine. They were what represented the worst of humanity to him, the festering limb inside the already despicable Nazi Party. They had tortured Bucky, left him different after even if neither of them had spoken about it.

"I don't know the name, are you sure of it?"

Winter Soldier? Definitely didn't ring any bells to him.

Shit.

“Happy early birthday. HYDRA isn’t gone. Might actually be part of SHIELD. Or SHIELD entirely. Jesus. Just sit. Stop hovering.” He pushes some of the screens towards a blank area of the desk, scratching lightly at the glass as he did it. His mind was too focused right now.

He couldn’t be careful. It wasn’t on his nature to be careful anyway.

“Look for a behavioral testing program on human beings. Some sort of... I don’t know. Some sort of initiative to change a person’s response patterns.” Bucky called it conditioning. Tony hated the word but said it anyway: “Conditioning.”

"Wait-- wait! Tony, you can't just throw something like that down in front of me and carry on like it's no big deal. What do you mean that HYDRA is SHIELD? Where did you get this information from?"

He felt like he was missing huge parts of the puzzle here. Tony had to have a reason to suddenly suspect this, and to latch onto whatever this Winter Soldier project was. He glanced around the screens a bit helplessly, suddenly noticing that a lot of them seemed to contain his parents.

"...you don't think Howard would..."

“You don’t understand how each piece of your motorcycle works, but it does. You’re going to have to trust me,” Tony insisted, which he realized wasn’t exactly in Steve’s nature, but he wasn’t prepared to lay his cards on the table. Especially not after having a HYDRA operative in his house, several times. Not after Bucky had him help him out. That was really bothering him, almost as much as his mother’s potential involvement.

Thankfully, it didn’t look like there was any evidence for that. So far.

“I wouldn’t put a whole lot passed my dad,” Tony grumbled. “Listen, we’re doing this my way. We have a hypothesis. HYDRA is alive and well, possibly having infiltrated SHIELD, and there’s something called the Winter Soldier program aimed at likely weaponizing and brainwashing people. Got it? We’re looking for evidence to support or dismiss that theory, that’s it.”

Steve gave Tony a hard look, he had the sense that he was being hustled here and he wasn't such an idiot as people seemed to think he was. He wanted an explanation, but apparently he wasn't about to get one right now. Maybe that was understandable if Tony actually thought that his Dad might have been involved in something shady.

He sighed and took a seat at one of the screens, much slower in navigating the pages because of it not being a technology he was particularly used to, but thorough and focused.

It would be Tony that found the proof. Sort of.

A backdoor into some of SHIELD's files and then more backdoors and more encryption and-- a mention of the Winter Soldier project. Not much, just one short paragraph.

Though attempts have been made to replicate M. Stark's success with the Winter Soldier program, no viable success has been made. The voluntary assets are not comparable.

When Tony suddenly vacated the table, Steve would be able to glimpse what he had found. Technically, that M. initial could stand for Mr. but Tony doubted it. They would have included the r, the line justification didn’t rule it out. And, as was usual in the fifties, the first name of female researchers were often distilled to a single letter.

He hated it. He hated every single moment of blazing white heat that reached through his chest to lick at his eyes. It hurt. All of it. And yet he could not say the words to indicate that he had discovered the problem.

Or that Bucky had not been lying.

He stood in the corner of the room, looking out at the city, and after pulling his phone from his pocket to call Pepper, decided against it and slipped it back into his pocket. This was bad enough without her good intentioned misunderstanding.

Steve looked over at what Tony had been reading before he suddenly disappeared, but it still didn't enlighten him. Obviously Stark was involved in something, but there were no details. There wasn't even anything that definitely said this Winter Soldier project, whatever it was, was HYDRA.

For all they knew, this had been a project to design winter clothing to help soldiers deal better in cold climate combat. He hated that he didn't have the whole picture and was frustrated at Tony for keeping it from him.

"Tony..."

He rose and followed him to the window. "You're scared one of your folks was on the wrong side of this war, I get that, but if I'm gonna help you then you need to tell me what's going on."

“So that’s the problem. The only known person ever to make it out of the other side of the program bypasses my security measures like they’re nothing. It might as well be hair secured with cellophane tape stretched across a door. It’s possible that he also implanted the information.”

Tony’s shoulders hunch and he pinches the bridge of his nose.

“My whole Tower is compromised, Steve.” Not Rogers. Not Cap. Tony is in real danger of feeling something and that’s a big problem. He doesn’t do well with that.

“I’m going to show you something. And then we are going to track him down and get answers: J? Play back the last few hours of our visitor.”

He didn't think that Tony had ever called him Steve before, and that-- well, that scared him more than pretty much anything else that could have been said right then. If Tony was genuinely concerned that a HYDRA agent had been in his tower and implanted information to implicate his family, then a bit of fear was probably understandable.

But fear turned to incredulity and then outright shock as JARVIS played back the last few hours.

Bucky. Bucky. God Almighty, that was Bucky, and he had a metal arm and he looked like those men who came back from the front with something missing behind their eyes. The actual conversation about the Winter Soldier barely sunk in, he was too busy watching the familiar way that Bucky's lips formed words or the way he sat. His heart felt like he was breaking.

"...where?! Where is he?"

He no longer cared about answers, he just needed to find his Bucky.

“Did you miss the part where he can literally get around my security?” Tony didn’t mean to shout but he did end up doing it anyway. His entire body was on edge and all he wanted to do was grab Steve and give him a good shake. He should have gotten out all of his violence already but Bucky gave him more than enough to play with here.

Bruised up, ego hurting, and if people did actually have souls (he wasn’t convinced) then that hurt too. He couldn’t stand it.

Of course, there was no way that he wasn’t going to put a tracker in the arm he had fixed. He’d done it when Bucky mentioned his mother but refused to deliver the goods. And he’d done it so that there would be no more without warning arrivals of the other guy.

He rolled his eyes. “J? Where’s our resident asshole?”

Steve literally couldn't care less about Tony's security system, he wouldn't have cared if Tony had said that Bucky managed to get a whole circus of performers in here and they were still rampaging around the lower floors, because that was Bucky. The one person in his life that he had cared about above all others, perhaps even above his Mom, the one that had always been there for him and protected him and cared about him.

The person he had failed.

No, right now he cared about literally nothing except tracking Bucky down and finding out where he had been all these years, what had happened to him, and why he had never come back if he had the capability to, since he obviously had the capability to hunt down Tony.

"The target," said JARVIS, unsure yet how to properly address Bucky in his system. "Is currently on the seventeenth floor of an abandoned and condemned apartment block on Keeble Avenue."

It was probably stupid to try and stop Steve Rogers, but Tony had to try physically, he actually initiated contact, moving as if to wrap his hand around Steve’s wrist. Verbally, he shouted ‘hey,’ fairly nonsensical really. Steve was in no way paying attention to him. The guy who had become his closest friend now was thinking like that mother orca from the documentary that just came out, lashing out for his friend.

It didn’t matter who stood in the way. And that was why Tony was standing alone in the Tower half a minute later as Steve races towards the building JARVIS had described.

Bucky had no idea that he had been traced, he was one of the best in the world at escaping notice and he was fairly confident that Stark didn't (yet) have the technology capable to track him - but that was his own mistake for not realising that the man had bugged him even while he fixed his arm.

He was too late to escape by the time that he realised someone was in the building with him, on his feet with a gun pointed at the door as it flew open to reveal... Fuck. How had Steve found him? Obviously Stark had betrayed him, but how had they known where he was?

He didn't lower the gun even a minute amount, expression hard.

"Get out."

Tony would really be up in arms about the betrayal aspect here. It’s not like he and Bucky are friends. They were barely even friendly. And Tony did sort of want to kick his ass from here to the moon so—

So it was probably about right for Steve to be there, unarmed, without even his shield. Maybe that had been stupid on his part because Bucky might lash out, but Steve was thinking with his heart instead of his head. And that was probably the number one complaint that Tony had about him in the friendship department. The blond was effortlessly the dumbest guy Stark knew.

And everyone was dumb compared to him, so you know that isn’t the best vote of confidence there.

“Hey.” Up went his hands. He hadn’t removed the tacticle, fingerless gloves he wore on missions. “I’m just here to talk, pal.”

This wasn't the first time that he had seen Steve, of course, that had been from a distance through a sniper scope before he realised that, for the first time ever, he couldn't follow an order to kill. That had been what made him break free and run, though he still half considered going back because of how fucked his head was.

But it was the first time that he had been close enough to see those big blue eyes looking at him like some kind of whipped puppy.

"I don't have anything to say."

Nor was he lowering his gun.

If Steve could put a number to the pain this was causing the way people do to broken bones or illness, it might rank right up there with the time that he had gotten pneumonia and fell out of bed. Steve had never been a complainer but he would admit to smarting pretty badly after that one. And this? This felt like his gut had been punctured.

“Why not?” he asked, probing gently, never lowering his hands. He didn’t want to spook Bucky more than he already had. “Used to be a time when we would tell each other everything.”

Mostly. Sometimes Steve didn’t fill Bucky in when he did illegal things. Just in case Bucky was ever questioned. Steve might be a do-gooder and a God fearing man but he knew when to step over the line and he was never afraid to do the right thing, despite the law.

There were so many truthful answers to that question - he no longer really remembered the times they told each other everything, he didn't want to put Steve in danger from his programming, he was too broken to even find the right words more often than not. But he went with a lie; a lie designed to hurt Steve and drive him off, to save him from all of this mess.

"You let me fall."

He barely remembered that, only the agony of his limb severing, the freezing cold of the snow, and the look of sheer anguish in Steve's eyes. But he used it to lie anyway.

"I hate you, you failed me. Now get out."

That hurt worse than a bullet or three would have but Steve sucked it up. He could deal with heartache because it tended to be all he felt when he was alone in his apartment reliving memories he couldn’t get away from. It was why he was always so eager to head into Manhattan, despite the traffic. Tony was a distraction as well as a friend, and just maddening enough to make Steve forget that everything he knew was gone or broken.

Especially since Sharon never remembered him anymore. Sometimes that was better than having her remember that he wasn’t at her bedside once a week like clockwork and she was seeing him again for the first time in sixty years.

“I know, pal,” Steve said without wilting, though the pain in his eyes was intense. “I hate myself too. But that’s why I can’t fail you again. Why did you leave Tony’s? It’s safe there.”

No one was taking that flimsy attack as anything real it seemed.

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