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whitewolfbumble · 5 years

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The World Isn’t Over Yet

A Steve Rogers x Reader Fluff Fic

Summary: Somehow you were never in love at the same time.

Prompt: Time Travel AU

Pairing: Steve Rogers x Reader

Warnings: Some IW angst/fighting at the beginning, but that’s it! This is fully a love story.

Word Count: 6k

A/N: Thanks to Umbrella Academy (particularly Five) for inspiration for your abilities for this one. Bear with me as we jump around in some different times of Steve’s and your life in this part (it’ll get linear in the coming parts, I promise, just stick with me here). There’ll be a couple parts so let me know if you want to be tagged. This is for @sgtbucketbarnes 1k Writing Celebration! Hope you enjoy darling!

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He should have kissed you.

Specifially, he should have kissed you that moment on the helicarrier all those years ago. He should have held you to him; in the protective grip of his arms, he should have never let you go. Your body pinned to his, your lips sealed against his, tasting the salt of the ocean on your skin and the warmth within.

He would have threaded his hand in your hair, fingers brushing across the curve of your cheek. He would have snaked his arm around you and drawn his hand under your shirt and up your back. He would have felt the goosebumps erupt over your skin and heard your contented sigh as he trailed his hand lightly up your spine.

He should have kissed you like that right from the start. Or he should have done it the next day. Or week. Or year. Or anything.

But kneeling in the gritty, hot dirt of a Wakanda, with towering trees and beating sun filtering through them, he was still. Silent. Unable to reconcile what had happened.

Because Thanos had won.

Because you were gone.

Because he had failed.

It was too much, too impossible to fathom or believe, that you were just gone from his life. In some real way, you had always been a part of his life. Even when Steve had nothing, he had you. You had always been there for him.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this...

When he met you- not for the first time, though it was the first time you met him- he soon saw you were already halfway out the door. You doubted the team from the beginning, unable to see how- just as everyone did- this band of misfits could get along. Then something switched in you, and though Steve never asked what exactly, on the battlefield of those New York city streets something shifted.

During that first mission, when the team wasn’t yet a team and almost broke apart at its seams, you had stayed. You had toughed out fight after fight and battle after battle for years.

And he had loved you for years.

The better part of a century, actually.

He remembered waking up in the 21st century, on a small cot while the breeze gently swirled the yellow curtains, the radio playing an old baseball game. Immediately he had looked around to find you.

When the reality of waking up decades in the future hit him, it was a shock to be sure. Because if he was here, that meant you were gone. Probably six feet under, having lived your life without him. He could’ve handled anything, just not losing you. He honestly didn’t know how he got through that time in a foreign century without you.

Then, standing on the helicarrier, the members of Fury’s “Avengers” project came to assemble to fight a man (or something like one) called Loki. And somehow, someway, you were here, standing on the tarmac with jet fighters and S.H.I.E.L.D operatives prepping for this mission. You were apart of this. Inexplicably and miraculously apart of his life again.

And it was another shock to his system again, but a different kind. Maybe more like the shocking of seeing your spouse walking down the aisle on your wedding day, or holding your baby for the first time. Not the icy grip of pain, but a warmth spread through him at seeing you. The fearful memories of being trapped in the cold hard Arctic ice was quickly barely a blip in his mind.

When you shook his hand, Steve could barely string two words together. His head wasn’t filled with the sight around him or Natasha’s introduction; his mind was filled with you.

You were hot New York nights. Rainy Brooklyn alleyways. You were sweet candy floss and Coney Island roller coasters. You were a warm gaze and shining eyes. A gripping, teary hug after the war on a dirt road. A first kiss. Lasting love.

You were something he hadn’t felt since the forties.

You were home.

Unlike what Steve remembered, now you were windswept hair and the salty, shimmering spray of the ocean as the engines roared to life. There was something so young to how you looked though, something hard and closed off like he had never seen before.

But it was still you, and everything in his heart and soul screamed that out. The sound of the turning, rumbling engines drown out those shouts and the beats of his heart.

He was sure the electric snaps of a love he thought lost, could be heard coming to life again. He was coming to life again. The days of solitude and trying to reenter a life that held nothing of his past, nothing he could grasp onto or broach, melted under the touch of your hand.

You’re back.

When you shook his hand, you merely smiled at him.

“Pleasure to meet you, Steve,” you had said easily. It had been so simple and so confusing.

You released his grip and turned to Bruce beside him, the same polite gesture and reserved look in your eyes.

You... didn’t know him? Didn’t remember him?

… How could you not remember him?

During those years up until Wakanda, he had answered that question.

Because you hadn’t met him yet.

So he knew there must be hope in getting you back, right? That didn’t mean there was a guarantee that he would come back from it… But somehow that didn’t seem to matter as much. Nothing matter as much as you did to him.

Whatever it takes, Y/N. However long it takes, I'm bringing you home.

_______

This scene was all too familiar.

The crumbling buildings, cars on fire, sirens in the distance, and aliens streaming out of a portal above Stark Tower. The pain from the Wakandian battlefield was still white hot in his heart and soul, the chaos of this fight he knew his Avengers would win barely registering as he slunk through another crumbling alleyway to where he knew you would be.

He waited in those shadows, counting the painful seconds until you would appear. He couldn’t wait long and felt the pain of both losing you from Wakanda and the bitter joy of getting to see this earlier, younger version of you now.

Scott’s plan to go back in time using quantum energy had worked. Now it was up to the team to change the timeline of the universe itself, altering or corrupting or destroying the Infinity Stones before they could destroy the universe.

But not until he saw his universe. Not until he saw you.

Running on weary feet with a tight clench to your jaw, Steve caught you moving through the street, looking as battered as the buildings that surrounded you.

But goddamn it, you were still perfect and the sight of you stopped time itself.

Pulled to his spot with the weight and intensity of his stare, your eyes connected with his, immediately with equal parts bitter ice and longing heat flooding him. But those eyes of yours? He was swimming in them, pulled under by those younger, deep eyes he had fallen in love with across the century.

Those eyes he thought were so beautiful, the same thought as when he first saw you, long before he was Captain America. The quiet genius and knowing behind them. The fire behind them. The compassion and caring and strength.

They caught sight of him and swallowing down the rush of everything impossible he was feeling, Steve signaled over with a nod. Confused, you pulled a face and wearily sprinted over the rubble to him, ducking briefly as a Chitauri whizzed by overhead.

You could have zapped the distance, teleporting the short way to his spot, but the battle was well underway and you didn’t yet have the strength you one day would. Not the kind of endurance and power you would grow into as the years passed.

He so vividly remembered you like this. Your joking and lively spirit, your distrust in your abilities and in others, but your love for both all the same.

“Where did you come from?” breathlessly you asked, stepping up to Steve and into the shadows with him, hands on your hips. “And I thought I was the teleporter of the group.”

Steve was just as breathless as you were, but for a completely different reason.

You were here. You were alive and well, with dirt and sweat on your face and that fire in your eyes. That fire he missed and longed for night after night since you were taken from him.

“Yeah, Y/N,” he said, voice ever so slightly strangled as though in pain. He watched you flit down to see if he was injured. “We’ll go there in a minute, I just needed to… to tell you something first. Something you need to remember, alright?”

He couldn’t help his hand reaching out for you, tucking your loose and wild hair behind your ears, his fingertips brushing across your cheeks. It was just enough contact for that electricity to spark somewhere deep inside him all over again.

He swore you could probably see it in his eyes as that electricity turned to something more intense and more determined as the memories of losing you in Wakanda flashed in his mind.

“I’m going to make this better,” Steve said, the deep timbre of his voice allowing for no waiver or doubt. “I’m going to fix this.”

His hands gripped your shoulders, pulling you closer before quickly enveloping you in his embrace. He felt you tense and brace yourself under him, but he didn’t let you go. He should never have let you go.

“No matter what,” he continued, determination lighting up his blue eyes as stood face to face with you and pressed himself closer. “I’m going to be here for you, Y/N. Always.”

You swallowed, a tight smile on your lips and blush on your cheeks, trying to play off the sudden and confounding closeness. You didn’t know Steve; not like this, not like you would.

“Well… I- I’m not one for staying in one place, Steve,” you joked shakily, feeling the beat of each others heart as chest to chest you were pressed together.

When he bent down, you froze, his lips just brushing against yours as he spoke. He could feel the shaking breath from you, the tightness of your muscles under him. He wanted you to melt under his touch, to melt into him over and over again.

“I’ll be here for you, Y/N,” he whispered into you. “Always.”

When he breached the distance, time stopped again. His lips sealed to yours and his grip only became tighter around you. He kissed you like it was the first time. Like it was the last time. Like he would never come back from what he was about to do.

The touch of your lips parting under the demand of his own burned him, searing his mouth and tongue and body and mind. Pressing deep in your back his hand trailed up your spine, clutching on to you as though someone would rip you away from him at any moment. It was wet and desperate and deep and in that moment Steve Rogers drown in you.

You could have pulled away. Could have said stop. Could have teleported to the other side of the city or him a hundred feet in the air for that matter.

But instead, you held onto him like an anchor in the storm.

He had taken is time through these years, but he wasn’t waiting anymore; he had waited too long already.

And when he pulled apart he saw what he had wanted to see all this time, what he had dreamed about seeing again since he was a scrawny teen in Brooklyn. That look in your eyes. The same loving one as was in his own, consumed and sparkling and beautiful.

Steve only barely registered someone approach from behind him, knowing his time with you that had just started was already running out.

“Cap, we gotta go,” Scott said quietly behind Steve. He had taken too long already, time slipping through his fingers.

Kissing your cheek, Steve lingered an extra moment, needing to feel the heat and life in you again.

“I will see you soon, darling,” he whispered. It was hard and it was a promise and he would die to uphold it if that’s what it meant to get you back safely. He couldn’t imagine living in a world where you weren’t apart of it, where you had turned to dust at the snap of a finger. He wouldn’t and couldn’t allow that.

He watched as your brows pulled together, those beautiful eyes shimmering with a feeling you couldn’t understand as he stepped back into the shadows.

I’m bringing you home, Y/N. Whatever it takes.

_______

You had been resolved to kick some alien ass, then get both the hell out of dodge and the hell out of this dysfunction Fury called a team.

That was top of your list, though your bucket list had always been a short one.

Getting your ass handed to you by an Asgardian god in Germany? Almost crashing into the sea because the Hulk was loose on a deathtrap they called a helicarrier some thirty thousand feet in the air? Being on the front line in stopping an alien invasion in downtown Manhattan?

Yeah, sufficient to say none of those had been on your to-do list. Yet within the span of two days, you had managed to cross them all off.

The rather electric and painful looking end of some high-power spear was thrust towards your stomach, just narrowly missing you as you threw yourself back. Hands clutching at the weapon you gripped on to it, forcing it up and back into the head of the chittering, rasping alien. You spun, retching it from its hand before spinning it around your body and using that momentum to thwack its head, that painful looking end pointed right into face gap of its helmet. You groped for the weapon discharge button and found it. With a bright purple blast, the thing went down hard, you collapsing on your knees in exhaustion.

That was the last of the horde that was on your flaming and crumbling street, but hardly the last of the invaders. Tony whizzed by in a flash of red and gold, with the thundering, ground-breaking thrum of what you could only describe as some armour-clad whale floating in the damn sky chasing him.

Heaving in the dusty air, your lungs burned with the stench of burnt flesh, rusted metal, and the pinching pain of exhaustion that stabbed at your sides and lungs. This fight had yet to run its course, but you were near spent already.

Getting up from your knees you stayed bent over, hands on your thighs as you internally cursed yourself and your damn stupid decision that led you here of all places.

How the hell had you ended up here? You?

The person that had barely spent a week in one place since you were fifteen years old? The same one that spent the better part of the last many years successfully evading S.H.I.E.L.D. and this damn Avengers Initiative?

Because at the end of the day, you weren’t a hero. Despite what Fury believed and despite the accounts of people you’ve saved or disasters you’ve averted… Well, you still didn’t think you belonged here.

This team wasn’t a team and you didn’t have a reason to stay around once this was over. You never had a reason to stay anywhere really, because you never stayed long enough to find one.

You put one foot in front of the other, gritty noise of your footfalls drown out by the all-out war surrounding you. Slowly picking up speed, you were basically speed-walking but that was all you could muster. Muscles weary, body cut open and spent, you couldn’t risk using what was left of your abilities unless you were really desperate.

You had only really just begun to explore your powers and test your limits beyond zapping in behind bad guys and ruining their day. You were getting better at it you, learning to build endurance and distance too. At least you thought so.

But after teleporting maybe 30 times today already (which definitely was an all-time record), you weren’t sure how much juice you had left.

It was like stepping into nothingness for just a second, but that nothingness took a little bit more of your battery power each time. When you instantaneously moved from where you were to where you wanted to go, it was like you were a little more depleted.

You barely noticed the first few times, but oh boy you were feeling it now. Your feet felt like lead, your mind was fuzzy, and your heart was hammering dangerously hard in your chest and threatening to give out.

Turning a corner you looked up the bright sun and blue sky, marred (understandably) by the blood-thirsty army flying in like those monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. You opened your mouth to signal to the team via your commlink, but someone beat you to it.

“Y/N,” came Steve voice in your ear, weary and determined. “The bank on 47th past Madison; Barton says they’ve cornered a lot of civilians inside. Meet me there in three.”

“On it,” you huffed, turning east towards the sounds of exploding cars and crumbling buildings, biting your lip to keep from groaning as you fought your instincts to teleport closer. If you were going to be of use, you had to save the energy you had left.

Besides, Steve couldn’t teleport and you did have those three minutes.

But dumbfounded, you briefly wondered if he could teleport like you did.

The blonde and built man was standing in the shadow of an alleyway, the intensity of his gaze drawing yours right to him as you were running by.

“Where did you come from?” you asked breathlessly as your curiosity and confusion led you right up to him, shaded in the shadow of the building. “And I thought I was the teleporter of the group.”

You threw the joke at him, light and easy, as you didn’t particularly know the man besides what they said in the museums and from the last couple days with him. So not too much.

“Yeah, Y/N,” he said, voice strained enough to make you think he was injured somehow, though from the looks of it seemed no worse for wear. “We’ll go there in a minute, I just needed to… to tell you something first. Something you need to remember, alright?”

Your eyes grew wide and you blinked rapidly as Steve tucked a stray strand of hair behind your ear. The light, barely felt warmth of his fingertips caressed across your cheek, and you fought the swell of heat flood your chest and threaten to creep up onto your face.

“I’m going to make this better,” Steve said cryptically to you. “I’m going to fix this.”

You opened your mouth to comment something to the effect that you would too. Exhausted and pushed to your limit, you wouldn’t go until this mismatched group of so-called heroes won the day together, even if you were planning on hightailing it right after (though he didn’t have to know that).

Stunning you where you stood, Steve’s hands gripped your shoulders, pulling you closer before enveloping you in his embrace and holding you fast, pressed tightly against his chest. For a moment you couldn’t speak, not sure what shocked you the most: him pulling you into an intimate embrace or the caring, longing look in his eyes as looked down to you, just a breath away from you.

“No matter what,” he continued, a mix of conviction and fervor. “I’m going to be here for you, Y/N. Always.”

You swallowed, a tight smile on your lips and blush on your cheeks, trying to play off the sudden and confusing closeness.

What in hell was all this?

“Well, I’m not one for staying in one place, Steve,” you said shakily, feeling the beat of your hearts as chest to chest you were pressed together. His nose was practically to yours, his lips almost teasing your own with how close they were.

You never had closeness. Never knew someone long enough to build it up, actually.

But when you first met Steve, you had felt it. It was an intimacy that you weren’t sure was real, as you could barely define the word itself, much less understand how it felt.

As Natasha introduced you two on that helicarrier his eyes had positively lit up with nostalgia, with knowing, and a caring and a friendliness no-one had ever looked at you with.

You hadn’t wanted to let go of his hand- even if it was merely just a formal handshake- and he didn’t either, his grip lingering until in masked confusion you pulled away. You had felt him staring at you in (the rare) quiet moments since, a heat blooming across your skin every time he did.

But now you felt it tenfold, the burning desire of a someone unwilling to let you go. Someone looking at you as though they really saw you, right down to your core. It made the deepest part of you shake, trembling under the weight of something so inexplicable and overwhelming and wonderful.

And as he leaned down, closing the slim distance between you, that weight and heat shattered inside of you as his lips brushed yours.

“I’ll be here for you, Y/N,” he whispered against the softness of your lips. “Always.”

When he breached the distance, time and sound and reality stopped.

His lips sealed to yours, stealing your breath and your thoughts and your desire to be anywhere but with him, always.

That weight that had been there was now gone, replaced with the feeling of floating, of longing, of remembering something you still didn’t yet know. It was confusing and impossible and you melted- body and soul- into him for that brief and endless moment.

Somehow he knew you. Knew your lips, knew exactly how to kiss you. Knew the pressure that made your knees wobble and head spin. Knew how to move his tongue against yours as it penetrated your mouth. Knew how to stop time and steal your very breath away. Knew how to draw you out and pull you apart piece by piece.

Arms around you, he bound to you to him and anchored you in a way you didn’t think you wanted or needed. You were made to be a thing without bounds, without limits or chains, without anything or anyone holding you down. Appearing in one spot then disappearing without a trace.

But this was so different; he was so different.

He didn’t feel like a vice or a prison.

He felt like home.

When he pulled apart he didn’t move away from you, didn’t release you from him. Steve looked down, his nose to yours and watched you with the heat of what you couldn’t believe was love in his eyes. Yet there it was all the same?

A million questions came to the back of your mind, swirling and hammering away for attention and for answers. But for a moment, you ignored every one. You simply breathed the same air he was, felt his warmth encircling you, watched those beautiful blue eyes look absolutely enraptured by you.

All too soon, a man you didn’t know- maybe a S.H.I.E.L.D operative? Though he really didn’t look the part- interrupted, and the intimate bubble you had created with Steve began to burst.

“Cap, we gotta go,” the man said quietly behind Steve. He gave you a tight smile and a small nod, and you weren’t exactly sure what it meant. You weren’t sure what any of this meant.

Steve seemed to hate breaking away from you, with anguish flashing in his eyes and soft and deep press of his lips into your cheek. He lingered, holding you still, while he set his jaw and those pained eyes turned intense again. They shone with resolution and loss and longing. For what or whom you didn’t have the words to ask, mind fuzzy with that life-changing kiss and this life-changing invasion.

“I will see you soon, darling,” he whispered.

You knew what it was. A promise.

That confusion broke through to the surface, clouding your eyes and pulling your brows together as he reluctantly broke away from you, replacing the warmth of his body with the sudden coolness of the air.

You would see him soon… You were fighting this battle together, weren’t you? You still had to go to the bank to help those civilians, right?

He watched you as he walked backwards down the alley in the wrong direction from where he should be going, your eyes shimmering with a feeling you couldn’t understand.

Why did that seem like a goodbye?

And more importantly, why did you- someone who said goodbye to everything and everyone like it was the very air you breathed- hate it so bitterly?

Those questions carried you to 47th and Madison, Steve emerging from the bank and covered in more dirt and grit than you thought possible in a couple minutes. People were fleeing across the street for shelter, their lives saved (along with countless others today) by the one and only Captain America. The one who had just kissed you and stirred something you in you didn’t think was possible.

… But how had he beat you here and got these people out?

“You got here fast,” you said, unable to keep a bit of a grin off of your face, despite the circumstance. “I was kinda delayed for I guess an obvious reason. But clearly, that didn’t stop you.”

Steve seemed oblivious to it, panting as he walked passed you, eyes on the sky as Thor and Bruce hammered and punched through that whale-thingy, with Clint on the corner of a building overlooking everything and shooting everything non-human.

“The city’s crawling with them, I almost didn’t make it in time to save those people either,” he said, missing the point of your comment completely. His eyes scanned the destruction and chaos as it attacked on all fronts. You watched his back as he stood out a ways in front of you, his attitude and stance all mission minded now. “We’ll need you up top now; can you get there?”

“... Uh, okay?” you responded a little quieter and confused, yet again.

“Just…” Steve looked down a moment before turning around to you. “Be careful.”

And there, you saw it again. Just that hint of longing in those light blue eyes and that edge of something… maybe regret? But it was so different somehow from just minutes before. He was so different.

Something struck you then, like for some reason you thought this Steve in front of you looked somehow younger.

But the longing in his eyes- though drastic in their degrees- was there. A sadness and distance there also. Not pained like it had been. Not so weary and heartbroken.

Or maybe you had just imagined it.

Imagined those feelings you thought you saw when he kissed you. Maybe you had only wanted to see them. Perhaps Steve, in a moment of terror or panic during this insane and incomprehensible battle, just needed a moment of human comfort. Maybe it hadn’t really meant what you thought it had. What you had felt.

The flash of pain of that was bitter and real. But you surprised yourself in that it didn’t change your mind, and couldn’t change that shift in you he had been the catalyst for.

“I’m here for you, Steve,” you said, walking up beside him, eyes dead ahead.

You paused, looking down between you, wondering if you reach out and took his hand, if that same warmth would be there. You took in a deep breath, weariness and confusion and fear of belonging somewhere pushed aside.

Because you didn’t get any of this, but for a moment with Steve you had had a sense of home. Of belonging.

And you were willing to stick around for as long as it took if it meant feeling that again.

“Always,” you said, repeating his words.

In a flash of light and rush of air, you zapped away and back into the fray.

_______

One moment had been a bright and warm day in Africa. The heat of sun on your face and shoulders and yet another alien army fighting for control. They wanted to destroy everything and everyone you loved and fought for and stood beside all these years.

You zapped in front of Thor, throwing your bruised arms around him with a beaming smile on your face. In shock he took a step back, dropped the two beings you barely registered and holding onto you as you jumped into his arms. His own grin burst on his face the moment he felt your familiar embrace.

“God, I missed you!” you exclaimed as he set you back on the ground.

“As I missed you, Y/N,” he responded, pride and joy on his weary face.

“But you are late, you know,” you smirked, eyes looking behind the Asgardian. “You’ve got some catching up to do, so let’s not waste time, hmm?”

In a whoosh of air you were gone, appearing several meters in the air some distance away from Thor and the two others he brought with him.

You happened- as planned- to appear above one rabid dog of an alien who had pinned Bucky to the ground. The soldier was fighting for his life, knife in hand as he tried to get the upper hand.

You came crashing down on top of the thing, two knives twisted into its back before you pulled them out and slashed deep into its neck. The creature screamed out before convulsing and flailing, Bucky having just enough time to roll out of the way before it collapsed.

Before it hit the ground you had zapped off of it, standing beside Bucky as you grabbed his flesh arm and helped him to his feet.

“This is too much like old times, I think,” Bucky said, taking a moment to catch his breath.

In a moment you were gone, then just as fast you were back next to him with his machine gun in your hand, taken from a spot some twenty feet away where it had landed after a particularly hard tackle to the ground. Absently you passed him the weapon and rolled your eyes.

“Oh, yeah,” you said sarcastically, wiping your forehead on your sleeve with a grin, the other hand holding on to him. “All those times we fought aliens together, right.”

“Aliens, Nazis…” He brought the gun up quickly and looked through the scope, shooting off a few ear-ringing rounds as one blood-soaked alien thundered towards you. It went down like a ton of bricks with a couple shots to the head. Bucky lowered the weapon and shrugged smally. “Look the same to me.”

You were about to pull a face and ask when in the hell you and Bucky had fought Nazis together. But something past his shoulders caught your eyes, and in another flash you were gone.

In the blink of an eye your back was against Steve’s, weapons in hand. The man didn’t so much as flinch, as after years fighting together then on the run together you knew each other’s moves as well as anything.

“Hoping you’d show up,” he called out, fist punching into the creature trying to tear him apart. Your first response was a grunt as you drove your knives into the one coming at you, trying to stop the clawing talons from piercing you.

“Always do,” you said back, pausing as the alien finally went down. “You’re a magnet for trouble, Rogers. I don’t think I should stray too far from you.”

“Don’t think I want you too,” he half-shouted back above the roar of the alien below him.

Your stomach suddenly turned as tens of others charged right for you, fangs dripping and the scent of death rolling off of them.

You had been a thing to behold today, bouncing around from spot to spot and saving the team time and time again as the hordes of these monster kept coming. They relied on you, leaned on you, trusted you to be there to save them while they were saving others. But for the hundredth time today, you were back with Steve, always finding your way to him whatever chaos was thrown at you.

This one wouldn’t be easy though.

You braced yourself, hard line of your set jaw as tight as your grip on your weapons.

Because you weren’t leaving Steve. Not now in the face of rabid death, not ever.

_______

The whiplash that coursed through you was enough to almost crack bone. You felt your spine fuse then release, kneecaps bulge before snapping back, and joints scream and pop through your entire body. For an overwhelming agonizing moment, it was like your insides were trying to get out of your body, pushing out and trying to burst from your skin.

A high pitched whine was as much as you could voice, the sudden pouring rain that pelleted your skin causing you to shake as your rattling mind tried to throw together some kind of explanation.

Blinding headlights assaulted your eyes as a blaring horn pushed you from your spot on the road careening towards the rough brick of a building. Clipping the corner you fell into an alleyway, landing in mud and debris, with limbs practically unresponsive.

Splayed out on the ground you turned your head up, eye squinting in the dim street lights of this rainy, dingy city.

… A road? You teleported yourself right onto a damn road?

You hadn’t done that since you were thirteen, landing in the middle of a highway and scaring the bejesus out of you and the driver, managing to teleport away before you were turned into roadkill.

Struggling to get up, a wave of dizziness struck you, your already skinned palms trying to hold onto the side of the building you had crashed against. Your fingers spread out against the brick, a moan in your throat as you battled a wave of dizziness, nausea, and a complete sense of being lost.

Wait… battle?

A memory, only just having happened moments ago struck you: Thanos, in the flesh, with his middle finger and thumb pressed together before a snap.

You looked around, ignoring the crushing dizziness and lingering pain of the battle in Wakanda having happened just second ago, and your trip to this place.

Where even were you?

You remembered screaming Steve’s name… then you were just here.

Your intuition and practice over the course of years told you something about this. That the nanosecond of travel felt different somehow. Terribly different. It was less like stepping through a void and more like the exact opposite, full of sound and colour and movement beyond what you could comprehend.

Here it was so dim and dark, the night sky overtaken by storm cloud beating water merciless on you. As it was night here, you knew wherever you were it was probably on the other side of the world.

A string of venomous curses erupted in your mind at that realization. God, you had to get back to Wakanda now! You had to get to you friends and to your Steve before Thanos destroyed the entire planet.

The clattering of thin, tinny metal rang out from the alleyway across from yours and woke you somewhat from your hazy, fury-filled spiral. Through the pouring rain you could have sworn in the darkness you saw a flash of blonde.

Without looking at the road you raced across the street, a yellow Cadillac taxi swerving to avoid collision with you and the driver swearing as he sped by.

“Steve!” you yelled hoarsely, the shout coming out more like a whisper.

Anything else faded on your tongue as you entered the alleyway and saw the person in front of you.

He was shorter than you, with blood on his face and his fists up, fighting a rather larger boy whose back was to you. And maybe he was ninety pounds soaking wet but it was still him. You remembered that small boy, seeing him in a museum and pictures and Bucky’s descriptions of him.

For a moment you stilled as the boy caught your eye, a deeper and more profoundly sickening realization hitting you.

You hadn’t just teleported to a different city, had you?

No, you had traveled back in time.

And ever promising to be your anchor, you had traveled right back to Steve, just not the one you knew.

_______

A/N: Listen. Was this a masterpiece? NAH. Are there lots of mistakes in here? Fucking oodles I’m sure. Will I fix this up at some point because you deserve better? Yes, because you do. I started this yesterday and finished it literally just before posting, so congrats for getting this far. Next parts will be better and more linear. Someone just hug me alright? Alright cool thanks.

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#sgtbucketbarnes1k #steve rogers #steve rogers x reader #steve rogers fluff #pre-serum steve #avengers au #avengers fluff #marvel #marvel fluff #time travel #time travel au #the world isn't over yet

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storiesof2018 · 4 years

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{Partners in the Storm}

Completed: July 12th 2020

An infectious mantra of the vindictive scourge of New Asgard had calamitously seized him into gluttonous-possessive dregs of Vanaheim conjury; the prevalent valiance—the invincible—thunderous fusion of his warrior—Asier spirit became exceedingly cleaved apart in rapid succession of a hoggish thrall; a nauseous stench raunchily enwreathed over discarded packets of super-size-emptied Cheetos, pizza boxes and KFC buckets of grease-fried drumsticks as implosive hunger accelerated in a heart-wrenching tenfold.

It was a vacuous slop-heap worthy of gourmand Asgardian hog, bowls of iced Coors beer scuzzily adorned over the stone mantle of his crackling hearth; the murkier ambiance reekingly contrasted his unabated torrents of heart-arresting depression within the Nordic environs of Tønsberg—a Misgardian fjord anchorage of western coastline fishing.

Drunkenly Thor had painfully deafened out the apparitional—grievous volumes of his unendurable-plaguing- failure that was staked down the battle-razed Wakandian grasslands as the prophetic harvesting of mortal souls devastatingly scythed the cosmic branches of Yggdrasill with the Nidavellir forged Infinity Gaunlet.

The barbaric general of the Black Order--slayer of Xandar-Proxima Midnight denizen commanded monstrous symbiote ranks of Outriders who berserkly claw through kinetic barriers that were sonically pulsing out of Mount Bashenga-a hellish diversion of mobilized carnage. When Thor arrived with his cybernetically-altered friend Sweet Rabbit and animoprhic Tree by the dimensional-prismatic salvos of Bi-Frost, he had driven his reckoning of merciless vengeance on the slaughterous planet-massacring titian who cataclysmically purged out the refuge cruiser vessels of his Asgardian people-his family. He craved the rancid blood Thano's grotesque head to victoriously drip over his battle-ax Stormbreaker...The blindness of his banked grief careened the ferocity his murderous precision-he missed.

He was on the hairbreadth of a knife-edge of victory-the empyreal vitality of his beloved father-Odin- viscerally pulsed infinite reckoning. In that gracing -controlled fusion, he ferally propelled Stormbreaker into the carnage-reaping dreadnoughts' armored chest with the rampageous momentum of unwarrantable heartache that he stowed for the stout-hearted sentinel of All-fathers Heimdall and his prankish-weasely- brother Loki; only to hear defeat suffocatingly paralyze him in those fissionable—detonative seconds of a titanic-incendiary unity of the Soul Stone. In that earth-breaking snap of his purplish hulking fingers, Thanos had devastatingly conducted his apocalyptic-genocidal holocaust of eradicating humanity into astral remnants of ashy mulch to herald a paradisal rebirth.

' Y-You should've gone for the head...'

After those unprecedented five years of detachedly wallowing in his unstinted grief, Thor was pursuingly beckoned to fight with the Avengers, using the subatomic paradoxes of quantum dimension to engage a Kronos heist-a downsized flashpoint race of seizing all the Infinity Stones with salvaged Pym Particles—a suicidal mission to bridge an unvanquished reality—hope. Everyone who 'blipped' out of existence was resurrected out the celestial dawn of the Soul Realm. The high detriment of their callback victory was unforgivingly staked with an insurmountable price of losing his dearest friends: Tony Stark and the fiery Natasha Romanoff.

Returning to his earthen throne of New Asgard, Thor was severed from his rebellious-brawly- joviality; he chasmically surrendered to the grievous-pathetic reality of being an obese shut-in, listlessly reveling on imported kegs of Scottish ale and Netflix streaming collections of the Hobbit trilogy and Dreamwork animated films- he was hopelessly reaching the breaking point of chubbily being a languorous-indignant hog: ogre.

He was being piggishly induced with a distractive horde of his fattening snacks when the exquisite- viperous maiden of Nordic witchery- Amora; who played a deceptive charade against him, nefariously using Jane's fair maidenly visage to enticingly breach his desolated solace with her sirenical-vengeful tactics of punishingly fouling him into a lovesick thrall, maniacally conceiving a quenchless entity of gorging-bestial impulse that suffused his veins—ushering hunger mania to ignite a revamped onrush of beefier pudginess over his muscled Asier flesh.

Roaringly, in tactless precision, with his grungy blonde tresses shaggily weaved into leonine dreadlocks, grouchily, Thor dug the chubbier flesh of his hand through a bag of Doritos as his bulbously fattish mass was saggily braced against frayed cushions of his sectional couch, his isolated hovel became a domain of junk-food indulgence and Playstation4 video games with the rivalrous basement gamemaster- Noobmaster.

At the moment Thor was engagingly viewing his favorite Midgardian cartoon of a humorous portrayal of Vikings-How to Train Your Dragon-he cherished the scenes with obsidian scaled bat-winged dragon: Toothless. A magnificent beast of skydiving ferocity that was spawned out from Muspelheim, who explosively blasted out electrified salvos of voltaic firebolts. "By Odin, now that's my kind of dragon..." he slurred in bearish pitch, huffishly easing up a brewskie can, as broken-off cheezies disgustingly jutted out the grizzly swatch of his mussed-thickening beard."Friend Barnes, come watch this very cool drake unleash my power..."

Bucky sat at the edge of the kitchen island as he stared at the series of text messages Steve and Selina had sent to him. 'Please don't let Thor out of your sight, Buck.' 'Don't get stir crazy, handsome. I'll keep in touch.' The brunette released an audible sigh as he ran a hand through his thick dark tresses, wondering how he got roped into playing babysitter to a depressed thunder god with an eating-disorder inside this bedraggled house. He should be out there in the field, helping Steve and Selina chase down this evil witch that had been causing the Avengers trouble the past few months. But since Steve had more experience with this Enchantress, he had to take point, and he also needed backup-enter Selina, who under no circumstances had the patience to play babysitter to Thor's antics.

So that left Bucky to look after Lebowski as the Avengers had come to joke about Thor. Bucky thought he looked more like an out-of-shape Mufasa who spent too much time playing video-games. Hearing Thor call him, Bucky sighed as he pocketed his phone, feeling his stomach grumble with hunger. "Yeah, I'm comin'." He made his way into the living room, kicking a few empty bottles of alcohol before finding a seat near to the snack-table. "You're the King of Asgard, Thor. Doesn't that afford you some kind of butler?" Bucky asked pointedly as he dusted crumbs off the sofa before sitting down.

Nonchalantly easing back against a cushion, with sluggish intent, against a deep-throated belch; Thor clumsily reached out his sheathed-cloth hand towards a bowl of chilled beer on a cluttered table as he registered Bucky's derisive pitch scathingly fringed in his gravelly Brooklyn drawl, his electric-cerulean irises fleetingly glanced at the charcoal-gray vibranium of Bucky's cybernetic arm, Wakandian gold skeins mechanically embellished the bionic plating, that readily poised into tensing fist, dragging a warred grip over his denim-clad knee.

The sniper Avenger-White Wolf- had returned from his latest recon stint with military-honed Sam Wilson, with the 'greenlight' order of CIA Agent Everette Ross, fully-decked with a tactical arsenal, they destabilized the underground installations of rogue HYDRA and traitorous Jarbai guerrilla alliances with the seamier -notorious EKO Scorpion commander of Sokovian Armed Forces- Zemo within the graffiti borders of a dystopian crime den: Madripoor.

The governmental sterilization of the World Council had marked the Avengers as verminous deviants-'loose cannon' fugitives to the Accords. The valorous mantle of freedom-home-grounded idealism was more than a cheat-face sham worn on a recruited patriotic soldier named John Walker-U.S. Agent.

Grumbling under breath in a hearty timbre, muzzily, Thor yanked on the metallic ring of his clutched beer can, thirstily relishing the fizzed noise as his heavy-lidded gaze dazedly fixed on the athletic solidity of tauter ridges of heavy-corded muscle that athletically delineated underneath Bucky's tactical slim-fit bomber jacket. Every fluid shift of bulkier -enhanced resilience was predatorily edged with a flex of bestial readiness- intimidation. James Barnes was an invincible-legendary warrior that hailed from Brooklyn; who had been mercilessly stripped by HYDRA demons from his soldiery valor."I-I don't need a Midgardian servent called...ugh- a but-butler..." He admonished, belchingly." My stout friend Volstagg kept these massive Dwarfish hogs to clean such grand messes..."

If he had seen a pot-bellied hog wobble its way into the living room, Bucky wouldn't have been the least bit surprised. Thor was a pitch-perfect example of a modern-day Viking living in a lazy squalor. Not that he would say that to him of course. He thought the world of Thor who had been an invaluable ally and friend to the Avengers. He respected him and thought he was a fun guy to hang around with, but his state of living over the past few years made Bucky feel as if some form of intervention was necessary if someone were only physically up to the task of taking on a grumpy/grieving thunder god.

"Did he also eat three boxes of extra cheese with jalapenos and a whole quart of Coors?" Bucky remarked in a state of bewilderment as he fished through the empty pizza boxes for any leftovers. There was an entire keg of beer beside the couch that made Bucky wonder if Thor simply chugged the entire thing due to the lack of cups surrounding him. His stomach groaned again just as Thor barked with laughter as he watched his movie.

Attuned to his impassive-standoffish bunkmate's amplified barrages of rigged hunger, smirkily, emitting a full-bellied chuckle, haphazardly the Asgardian shifted the protrusive-tubbier flabbiness of his blubbery girth in lumpish succession. "Hold on, friend Barnes, I'll get you a box..." he snorted, woozily, grabbing an unopened box of S'mores pop tarts with a rampant stretch of his fleshier arm. Stacked on a threadbare ottoman was an excessive horde of imported pop-tarts in flavorous variety that was evident to his draconic gorging.

Broodingly to his vexatious chagrin that wouldn't detract his menace-honed poise, Bucky drove the razored steeliness of his grayish-aquamarine irises down at the generous box appetizingly landing on his tauten-cords of athletic sculpt of his thigh. Clenching the stubbled heaviness of his dimpled jaw, graven ruggedness of his boyish features cuttingly delineated underneath unkempt wolfish chestnut tresses shaggily ghosted over his furrowed brow that raptly tensed into a dumbfounded pinch as he consciously flexed his bionic hand in reluctant tenor over the boxed pop-tarts. "Here...Have a go with these boxed delights first..." Thor demandingly grunted, in huffier pitch. "I have many revels to share..."

Bucky stared at the box of proffered treats with hesitation. He prided himself on maintaining a good fit regimen. True he had the super-soldier serum in his blood that helped him to burn calories faster than a normal human could, but he still felt as if he could be picking up a bad habit if he were to start now. But as he looked at the jovial look on Thor's face, Bucky knew it would be rude to refuse this nice gesture from him. Besides he could also do 50 push-ups to burn whatever calories he consumed. "Of that, I have no doubt. But thanks." Bucky took the box of S'mores pop tarts and popped open the box, settling in further into his seat to watch the movie.

"Didn't take you for an animation guy. Did Jane show you these movies?" Bucky hoped he wasn't touching a sore subject with the thunderer as he felt generally curious to know how taught Thor much about modern pop-culture and entertainment.

An errant blear of stowed anguish mistily gleamed in Thor's stormier cobalt irises as he crestfallenly hefted up a beer can-liquid anesthetic to desperately deaden out a concussive pulse of soul-consuming heartache; after the reddish tentacles of vaporous Aether-the Reality Stone- had possessively effused in Jane's veins during the galactic convergence of Yggdrasill's transcendental-wormhole gateways of the Nine Realms, he became detached from his Jane's quirky-gorgeous presence, her pixieish smile that dazzlingly grew alight when he stared into her brownish-amber irises, stoking up girlish curiosity -incarnate virginal grace of true Asgardian maiden.

He desired to return to her-to fully surrender his warrior's heart -to foster the inventive name of Donald Blake and ignite a new reality on mortal ground. Sniffily, Thor did his utmost to choke back a throat sob, feigning indignance he gulped down a breathless swig, crushingly denting the emptied can with flexion of his reined strength. "I rather you do not mention her name..." he urged out, bluntly."We had a mutual dumbing when the mechanical demon Ultron was sired by Stark ..."

Too many regrets led the way to self-destructive instincts, Bucky knew. Thor's grief stemmed not just from the loss of friends and family, but also from broken relationships that he probably, until now, didn't fully appreciate. Or probably couldn't. No one ever said the life of a thunder god/Avenger was an easy one that offered spare time for dating. He knew it wasn't his place to question Thor and bringing up Jane would be a sore spot, but he also knew that Thor's unresolved issues were what made him an easy target for this Enchantress that was gunning for him. "Some things happen for a reason, Thor. I won't bring her up if that's what you want, but I wouldn't be much of a friend if I didn't tell you there are healthier ways to deal with this."

Bucky left it at that as he opened the box of pop-tarts and pulled out a wrapper. Thor maintained this glum look on his face as he reached for another can of beer. Bucky wasn't sure if he was reflecting on what he just told him or if the Asgardian was simply too absorbed in his own perpetual grief that he was just blocking out everything that turned into noise. Bucky bit into the pop-tart with a small bite; tentative and testing. His tongue immediately watered and his taste buds burst with unimagined flavor. "Hey these are pretty good," he said, taking a much larger bite this time, and then another.

Unbeknownst that an inchanted- rhapsodical-tenor of the Dwarven curse was chimerically suffusive through his veins in the burgeoning divergence of chastened throes that grappled him into a stuporous vigil; Bucky noncommittally chewed on a chocolatey piece with a blatant quirk tugging at his shapely-wide lips, the sugared gooeyness of marshmallow had stickily clung over his cleft-dimpled chin as he aggressively tore open a fresh packet.

Against the porcine deviance of his burgeoning thrall, gruntingly, akin to a debauched hog, Bucky wolfed down the entire box stuffily in one hand-full. "Relish in these delights, my friend," Thor chuckled jocundly, as he gazed at emptied wrappers clinging messily to Bucky's denim-clad thighs. "More rounds to come..."

Bucky was too absorbed in the rich chocolatey taste that had assaulted his taste-buds to give Thor's words another thought. These pop-tarts tasted too good. How did dessert snacks come so far? Was there another box around here? What else had he been missing out on? He had to buy more. More! More! A trickle of drool escaped his opened mouth as he chewed and he let it trickle down his stubbled chin unimpeded. His blue eyes were fogged by a cloud of gluttonous hunger that had been awakened with a single bite. "Roouuu aaahht ooorre?!" He asked through a mouthful of sugary delight. His lips were caked with melted frosting and crumbs had trickled into his neatly trimmed beard.

To his utter dismay, the box of pop-tarts was empty and his feet were carrying him towards the snack table in search of something equally delicious to consume. "C'mon, Thor. Where's your secret godly stash?" Bucky said absently after swallowing down the entire mouthful he had stuffed into his mouth.

A rampageous fervency of hoggish abandon-mania- had effusively clashed over Bucky's warred restraint with no avail; stomping his tactical boots with sniper-honed precision menacingly fringed with headlong momentum, clunkily he sashayed paces, advancing back into the pig-sty of a kitchen.

Grunting against -throaty drags of heavier breath, he poised his bionic hand with mechanized readiness to blindingly swipe off an untouched pepperoni and cheese Bronx-style pizza that he recalled Steve leaving on the obstructive countertop. "Friend Barnes, do not touch what has already been claimed..." Thor belted out, thunderously, detecting a portentous revelation being serpentinely conducted by Amora's soul-damning spell cast veined within his infective stash as Bucky with a telltale play of boyish cockiness, toothily quirked up his shapely-bow lips into a rascally smirk. "You are not acting like yourself..."

It was like his nose had taken on a life of its own as it carried Bucky into the kitchen where he furiously searched for something sweet to engulf in his taste buds. His thick dark tresses were a disheveled curtain of strands across his temple that he paid no mind, too consumed with the intoxicating allure of a mouth-watering pastry he could smell inside of the fridge. His metallic hand yanked open the door and his blue eyes were wide and hypnotized by the sight of a strawberry cake with whipped cream pasted on its edge. The white static in his ears deafened Thor's booming protest from the living room when he pulled the cake out from the fridge and unceremoniously planted his mouth into its sweet expanse.

"Mmhhmhm!" He released an uncharacteristic sound that was too animalistic for a human to make as he indulged his rapidly increasing appetite with large messy bites that left clumps of pastry spilling onto his chest. Unbeknownst to Bucky, something primal and sinister had taken control of him. His human mind howled with anguish at the back of his thoughts, telling himself to stop. He could feel someone grabbing him, wrestling the plate of cake away from his grip which triggered an onset of visceral aggression. "Graaahh!" Bucky snarled throwing his weight against the blonde doofus in front of him who held his sugary treat.

The two heavyweights collided like titanic forces, stumbling across the kitchen in grappling holds in an explosive mess that sent plates, tables and dishes spilling across the floor as if struck by a tidal wave. Bucky grunted and heaved with delirious eyes as he pulled on Thor's hair, trying desperately to grab the plate. Thor's teeth clamped onto Bucky's hand, only to howl in pain when he realized he bit the wrong appendage that was too metallic for his liking.

"Argh...!" Thor yelled out boomingly, as his gums numbingly pinched with throbbing strain against the cold vibranium scraping against his incisors, a crescendoing rush of eruptive fierceness, vertiginously emitted a guttural roar, he bodily gut-rammed Bucky with unstoppable linebacker tackle, hulkingly fueling a bull-rush into the granite island. Gnashing his teeth against panty breaths, snarlingly, thrust his cybernetic arm, Bucky delivered a vicious haymaker of breathless-mechanized ferocity that robotically scythed the deadlier precision of a straight-arm chokehold over the bulging swatch Thor's beardy throat on immobilizing accord.

"Y-You're distracting me from that lightning dragon ..." Feverishly with aggressive-seething- reaction, Thor bashed his head bruisingly against Bucky's forehead with skull-breaking- 'knockout' momentum, as he alarmingly registered a heavier—globby tubbiness ballooningly sheathed over bracketed ridges of taut-edged muscles swelling increasingly underneath Bucky's leather jacket in bulbous tenor: he was fattening up.

The cake he had been attempting to retrieve had long since slipped off from its platter, staining the floor in thick discarded clumps. A normal human would've lamented the waste of such a tasty treat now soil by germs and bacteria upon the floor, but Bucky's mind was too engrossed by, too consumed by gluttony that he felt no care as he lunged for the floor, wobbling on all fours to claim his prize. But something felt wrong. The cold hard slap of reality struck him with a jolt of agony lancing up his back. A strangled gasp escaped him and he fell haphazardly onto his side. "T-Thor…" he groaned, barely able to see the blonde through his blurry vision. His subconscious collapsed from exhaustion and his waking thoughts crept over, making him realize what was happening. The overwhelming aches in his body, the suffocating scent of sugar, and the sight of thick patches of dark fur sprouting from his skin.

"T-Thor, what's happenin-NGGHH GAAAH!" Pain had become a malevolent entity that attacked him from head-to-toe in an onslaught so sudden, he couldn't control the spasming of his body. His voice transitioned into a deep guttural squeal that shook the walls of the kitchen, the sound of clothes tearing was an unending chorus that joined.

A bilious-mordant reek of hoggish sweat had vomitously wafted off his sweat-glazed flesh that meltingly sloughed into doughier pudge flabbily over rubberized muscle; arching his back in convulsive torque of a jackknifing momentum, corded-litheness of his muscled thighs rampantly bridged against chunkier-horrified traction as bone-cleaving onslaughts gruelingly atrophied him into dregs of morphic submission. "Urgh...What the hell..."

Raggedly, Bucky choked out quivery—oinking breaths in heaving staccatos as his leather bomber jacket tatteredly shredded over the globby pudginess of his outstretched mid-drift as tauter washboard ridges that were hunkily bracketed with graven- cut thews of his gladiator-defined muscles bloatedly fused into a protrusive rotundity that globosely swelled into a bulging girth. Rigid veins that cuttingly threaded his muscled arm dissolved under skeins of chestnut fur."Hr-Argh..." he gutturally railed out in distressed pitch, as the jutted extension of his tusk-like incisors grislily pierced his deforming underlip that hung agape with a bloodied stretch as dragging heaves of throat-belching oinks became thrashingly coupled with voiceless havoc.

Blearily against a fevered rush, Bucky grimacingly eased his cake-smeared hand off the floor, as unkempt wolfish tresses grungily webbed askew over hawkish-edged contours of his pudgier stubble jaw, the feverous heat of his deadened grayish-aquamarines irises blanked owlishly wide as he mortifyingly gazed at the smooth-virile- length of his fingers bone-splittingly dwarfed into varicose—furrier blobs of mutative flesh, puffily swelling in bubbled unison over cleaved bone—pig hooves.

Bracing deformed servos of his cybernetic arm over the blubbery chubbiness of his ballooned-out stomach, against white-hot upheavals of stark panic, jerkily Bucky reared his enlarging head back against vertiginous—dredged agony, wrenchingly pinching his eyelids shut as the masculine sculpt of his taut nose inflatingly elongated in a fleshier—wedged-like length of a hideous porcine snout: he was riding on the divested fringe of sorcerous—hoggish infancy. "Der'mo..." he grunted with coupled seethes of Russian cadence, thrashing on his back frantically against the bone-cripplingly pressure that immobilized his rivaled momentum against hammering-punches of contractive throbs racking blobbily over the swollen expanse of his furred girth as he vented out a full-throated snort, distressingly. "Arghh..."

His mass had both expanded and shrunk into a ball of pudgy fur upon the kitchen floor. The world grew bigger as he grew smaller, unmade from the inside out as he became entangled in a mess of torn clothes and discarded food. Bucky couldn't hear his own voice anymore despite his urging cries to Thor for help. His face ached as if his nose had been pulled out from his skull. A piggish squeal ripped from his new snout that protruded from his head. His beady blue eyes were floored with panic as his thumping hands turned into hooves. The blonde Avenger could only look on in muted shock as one of his newest friends was subjected to the cruel sorcery of the Vanaheim witch who had cursed him. Bucky Barnes was no more-all that remained in front of him was a disgruntled and distressed Dwarven Hog.

"THOR! What happened to me?!" Bucky cried out as he began to run in circles.

The beastlier resonance of the enchanted sniper hog's snorting utterance ragingly caromed through his odorous shack; harnessing the massive burliness of his Asgardian strength that countered with a breakneck rush of Bucky's stoked adrenaline, reactively Thor hefted up a cleared-off platter bracing it smudgily over his paunchy chest as Bucky's protruding tusks were dauntingly angled to lance into the Asgardian's exposed flesh.

Grunting out a long-drawn breath of grogginess, in defensive cadence, the grayish-chestnut furred Dwarvish boar ferally poised his bugly head, the stormier heat of his razored-sapphire irises piercingly slit as he readily grounded his fatter mass to deliver battle-ramming force into fleshiness of Thor's muscled calf. Huffing out a vehement snort, Bucky draggingly waddled his languorous paces on stubbed hooves."I see it's this has become a good challenge for us, friend Barnes..." Thor chuckled, in gregarious cadence, towing an unopened bag of spicy Cheetos a breadth from the chubbily rotund Brooklyn hog's fore-hoof that welded with silvery flecks of defective vibrainum-alloy. "I do relish a challenge that I easily can win..."

The insurmountable weight of his predicament was a load Bucky desperately wanted to discard. Questions of how and why ran through his mind in a ceaseless loop until he remembered what Thor was enduring because of that evil witch. She didn't just curse Thor, she tainted all the food that he touched. Bucky released a deep and abysmal wail that was a myriad of rage and remorse. He shouldn't have eaten that pop-tart. He knew that if he compromised his regime that he would regret but now he was feeling it in spades. "No. No. NO. NO!" He squealed, battle-charging towards the fat Asgardian King and ramming his tusks into the platter he thought he could use to shield him.

"Damn it, Thor! You knew this would happen!" This knowledge inspired only feelings of anger and frustration towards the big blonde doofus in front of him that tempted him to eat those snacks, and made him become this fat disgusting hog.

Brandishing his vestigial ferocity against the unyielding hog's bludgeoning momentum that ferociously equaled a bilgesnipe-a monstrous reptilian triceratops-like beast with curved antlers. With a quirk smug nonchalance tugged at his bristled lips, unflinchingly Thor clutched onto the shaggier thatch of chestnut bushily adorning over Bucky's humped back, in that apparent moment of stilted trust, he stoppingly reined down the ensorcelled boar's aggressive, nasally snorts that lividly gusted over his flabbier hand with a painstaking flex of his controlled strength.

"The Enchantress...Is just the worst for traitorous conjury on Midgardians..."Thor grumped under breath, sorrily."She was in the great company of my mother until the witchy maiden practiced the forbidden sorcery of Nidavellir turning Einherjar soldiers who defended Asgard into..." He feigned a terse grimace, as Bucky scathingly glared at him with knifing intensity. "Stout-bellied... urgh..hogs like you, friend Barnes..."

Seconds passed as Bucky found himself unable to wrestle his way out of Thor's godly strength that hadn't diminished a bit despite his weight-gain. Bucky's turmoil was like a burning fire that slowly began to dim until his rage was replaced by fatigue. It felt as if he had been running a marathon and was only now coming to a breathless stop. His stamina felt drained and he wanted to do nothing more but to lay down and sleep. Why? Why did he feel this sudden urge to just lay down and do nothing? Why did his stomach groan as if he hadn't eaten a thing? Bucky groaned as he digested Thor's words and their implications.

"Story of my life…Always being someone's weapon." He grumbled. He was only ever used as such. By his own country, KGB, Hydra and now some Asgardian witch who had a bone to pick with Thor and the Avengers. When Thor realized that he was calm enough, the Asgardian released him and Bucky fell onto his backside, gloomy and exhausted. "This isn't what I signed up for," he groaned as he looked down at his hooves, stained with strawberry frosting. "There's gotta be a way out of this Thor?"

The deep-timbered huskiness of Bucky's murmurous drawl agonizingly conveyed soul-gripping rawness of underlying disgust, angling his pudgy furred snout against a ghoulish—sulfuric miasma of carrion reek eerily sailing over them. With his ears floppily drooped over his fuzzier cheeks, the sniper-hog jumpily reeled back on his stubby-cloven hooves, vigilantly detecting a proximal-tenebrous breach of a celestial pulse encroaching vaporously around them.

Stuntedly in an intrusive wake, Bucky tensed against phantom throbs racked bristlingly over his muckier, bedraggled fur as vitreous Nordic sigils of crimson-telestic - aster fierily branded wooden floorboards in demonic fruition of incanted acerous stalactites- a paralytic mantra of Amora's execrable noxious witchery had barraged around them.

'Forbli i kongens skalor ...(Remain in your king's squalor...)'

"W-What the hell is that..." Bucky grunted starchily in dumbfounded pitch, flashing his silvery-aquamarine irises with rapt confusion at the nacreous-runic glyphs consumingly veined the over floor, incinerating emptied pop-tart boxes. "That can't be good..." He scrunched up the overlapping pudge of his jowelly snout, against gruffer quip of breathy snarkiness, downcastly. "Hell, what's next M' gonna pop out some wings like a Valkyrie horse..."

The urge to sate his growing appetite had been an overwhelming constant for Thor the past number of days. Amora's enchantment against him was more than just an act of petty vengeance for spurning her in the past; it was also a surgical strike against the hierarchy of New Asgard. Brunhillde had gone off-world to seek out Sif and her other sisters among the stars, leaving Thor in charge-and vulnerable. Thor would've been content to endure this familiar punishment to amuse himself.

But as he watched Barnes suffer the under the same spell, being turned to a disgruntled hog before his eyes, Thor ignored the hunger cravings and listened to the unmistakable roars of unwelcome guests coming to his home. "You may need them, James. For I fear this is a threat that cannot be simply outrun." Thor mused. At that moment, the front doors in the foyer were struck viciously by an oppressive weight outside causing a visible dent to be seen from inside. Twin vicious growls breached the silence, sending chills of anticipation down the spines of both Thor and Bucky.

Tilting the pudgier heftiness of his furred snout with repugnant ease, arrestingly Bucky sniffed a whiff of miasmatic reek smellily ghosting underneath the shack's wooden door against earthshaking vibrations monstrously ricocheting feral momentum from their unwanted-destructive-company. "Great..." he seethed out a throated grunt, ploddingly shifting on his stubbed hooves with clunky traction, as his floppy ears twitched up, Bucky registered a snarling cadence of bloodthirsty rabidness; they were unquestioningly being hunted.

Clamorously in demonic mania, the door hinges bent against the undeterred barreling force that propelled outside in stomach-curling tempo, as the periphery of Bucky's sniper-vision heatedly caught a glimpse of two massively-ghostlier Asgardian wolves-hog reapers- gouging their jutted incisor fangs tearingly into splintered wooden planks in vicious succession. Every vicious rush of their predatory-wolven- agility was raptorially sired to abandon visages of mercy in their kill-zone. "Well, M guessin' the big bad wolf is huffin' at your door, Thor..." Bucky quipped, stuffily, and fixed his aquamarine depths beadily on Nidavellir forged battle-ax-Stormbreaker propped against hearthstone. "Now might be a good time to use your...uh... thunder ax?"

"Hmm? Oh yes." Thor realized, snapping from his initial daydream then lazily held his hand out. He appeared neither concerned about the wolves' moments away from breaking down his door, nor the telltale signs of animal fur that were also beginning to slowly sprout like watered grass, from his skin pores. It was a familiar itch-an irritation that he'd endured in his past-time, and he knew that Amora's curse would not spare him for much longer. "Now might also be a good time for you to practice your trotting, Friend James. I will give you the head-start while I teach these beasts some manners."

Bolstering the rotundity of his obese mass, against the instinctive - adrenalized tenor racking over his shaggier chestnut fur; underneath of denim that sheathed over his flabbier backside, warding off suffusive disgust, Bucky pinched his eyelids shut as the wiggly burst of a corkscrew tail uglily twitching out—he was fully an oinking blubbered-ball. "Damnit ..." he grunted in vexatious breaths, throatily, stomping a fore-hoof in evident disgust, as he glowered at the beckoning flex of Thor's outstretched hand blurringly thrust up to clutch the hailing ax- Stormbreaker. "M' not leavin'..." A railing snort vented out of him; he wouldn't become a defective-balloon-ass tub of hoggish flab. Pivoting on his stubbed hooves with heavier footing, clumsily he torqued back the sagginess of his protrusive underbelly, aggressively jutting his snout up. "Give me somethin' to hit..."

The moment he said those words, Bucky wished he could take them back. The door to the front of the apartment suddenly came crashing down in a roaring explosion of wooden splinters. Two gargantuan shapes lunged through at the same time, breaking apart the door-frame as their colossal weight crumbled the structure like paper. Beastial roars shook the interior, causing the glass cups to shatter and the dwarven pig to squeal in shock. These weren't wolves. They were enormous hellbeasts that looked like they crawled from the pits of hell. Their dark charcoal fur made them look pitch as shadows. Their glowing red eyes were wide with malice, and their grueling chops dripped with hunger.

Thor released a war-cry as he swung the hammer-edge of his axe against the first beast to charge at him, smacking it through the kitchen wall in a shower of debris and crackles of electricity. "Graaaggh! Have at thee!" Thor kicked a chair, sending it skidding across the floor towards the second wolf who lunged up high to avoid the object, which left it wide open for Thor to swing the blade-edged of his axe towards its neck. Blood and viscera sprayed across the kitchen and the beast howled its death-wails. Thor snarled as he pried his weapon free from the dead-carcass, face stained with its blood.

"Down, James!" Thor cried out as the wolf he sent crashing through the wall, reemerged with its predatory gaze set on the hog close-by.

Suppressing a neasous onrush of unrelenting viciousness malignantly straddling him against the fridge's door; thrashingly in a defensive variance, Bucky gnashed his tusk against the immobilizing pressure of the draconic wolf's power-slamming-bulkier weight that crushingly forced him to emit a guttural squeal as he rampantly thumped his fore-hooves with side kidney punches only to feel the wolf's fanged incisors graze agonizing intent of a deadlier assault viscidly over the doughy globbiness of his blood-dampened back. "Grah..."

Fostering onto vestigial dregs of his enhanced resilience, snarlingly in combative tempo, Bucky launched his bulgy form with plow-driving steam, unerringly angling his tusks down, in wonky rapidity of a half-somersault, he punchily bowled underneath the Asgardian wolf's exposed girth, as he arced back onto his hooves, bodily jackknifing up his bestial opponent against a logged wall. "P-Pick on someone your own size..." he drawled out gratingly in heaving grunts, drilling his tusks slashingly deeper as he gut-hooked into the bloodstained muscle with gouging precision, not faltering in his blinded momentum. "M not done yet..."

The wolf thrashed and howled as the tusks dug into its abdomen and spewed its blood onto the floor and Bucky's back. Bleeding like a...stuck pig, courtesy of a pig. Thor ignored the irony of this as he marched forward. The beast had stopped moving as it went limp. Thor seized its head and snapped its neck just to be certain. He shoved the dead-weight off of Bucky's back and released a shudder of discomfort. It had been weeks since he exerted himself in this fashion, and while Thor would've ordinarily enjoyed the feeling of battle, the increase in adrenaline made the Enchantress' spell easier to race through his body like a poison.

Amora knew of his proclivities for battle and debauchery and made them into deadly ingredients to fuel his peril. He grimaced and fell back against the wall. His enormous gut hung from the bottom of his shirt. At one point he was a vain man who prided himself on his handsome looks to appease Asgards finest maidens. He no care for how far he drifted from the physical specimen he once was. But now he couldn't ignore the stabbing feeling of dread that entered his abdomen. "T-There will be more of them, James. We are no longer safe here," he groaned.

"Yeah, I kinda figured that..." Bucky grunted, huffily, narrowing the pudgy length of his snout as he strenuously attempted to drag his metallic fore-hoof over the smeared trek of bloodied drool. "Oh c'mon...Tamping down a guttural resonance of rubbery oinks, that was scathingly underlying his chagrined exhaustion, groggily he waddled against the drooping strain of his barrel-sized girth closer to the slump-faced Asgardian-Thunderer with apparent measures of enforced caution in his molasses-paced advances while Thor rumbled out a slobbish belch, unmovingly at his puckered snout. "Urgh..."

The jowelly folds of his porcine snout rapted with teeming disgust, as the lascivious potency of the viperish witch's demented-nidorous conjury became sordidly obstructive against boozy fumes enwreathing the chubbier fleshiness that blobbily sheathed over bohemian Thor's ogre-sized belly, furrier blondish swatch damningly fringed over his lubberly navel: soon they would soon mirror blimped-out hoggish visages. They needed to locate a rendezvous point within the forestial proximity to stealthily dodge another hunting party of a wolven blood-storm. "We gotta move fast..." Bucky urged, pressingly, flashing the glacial smokiness of his beadier irises unwaveringly at hiking backpack that he omitted on the kitchen's countertop."Use that to carry the stuff we need...Don't even think about packin' those damn pop-tarts..."

"I did not tell you to eat the entire box," Thor said, releasing a dry chuckle as he pulled himself up to stand straight on his feet. The world spun on its axis and the Asgardian groaned as his head throbbed with an intense migraine. The result of too much mead and no doubt his slow physical transformation into the rotund beast that Amora intended for him. "Besides given our present predicament, I doubt sugary snacks will agree with us." At that his stomach groaned an affirmative to which Thor held his sagging stomach with one hand and picked up the backpack with the other, stuffing it with various fruits and bottles of water that he had, until now, never thought to consume.

"For what its worth, Friend James, I am sorry you have to endure my peril alongside me." His apology must've surprised him as Bucky cocked his head and then shook it. They both started with anticipation once they heard another howl in the distance. Right it was time to go. "Come. I know somewhere we can go." Thor kicked open the backdoor and let the cool night air wash over both him and Bucky as they made their way out into the night of New Asgard. The town was mostly asleep, and Thor and Bucky had to wonder just how Steve and Selina were doing on their end.

'Whatever it takes...'

It was a symphonious anthem that had unitedly resonated on the obliterated grounds of the Avenger's Compound as mechanical-galactic leviathans thunderously haloed a doomsday reckoning over the collapsing edge of assembled mortality; fusion cannoned salvos barraged in rapid succession from monolith Accuser warships, harrowingly conducting a hurricanic pandemonium of ear-splitting-slaughterous carnage. Staggering exhaustingly on bulldozed slabs of cement and smoldering hulls of the dismantled QuinJets, like a bloodied sentinel-defender of enduring humanity, Steve had voluntarily challenged a tyrannosaurus-scale deathmatch with the behemothic Mad-Titian- or what Tony snarkily deemed him as- the cinematic planet-consuming villain of a 1980's animated series: Unicron.

Bracing the vibrainum shard of his broken shield over his bruised forearm, adamantly Steve harnessed every heart-surging fiber of his soldiery valor-determination as injurious bone-crushing assaults of monstrous power-dives chokingly robbed his breath. Nothing derailed his full-measured paces of chivalrous traction as Outrider hordes rabidly swarmed out grounded obelisk-like hive ships to macabrely gorge on his teammates-family.

With the hulk-sized gauntlet that was enhanced with the comic-fused ingots, the ragtag Avengers had one 'skin of teeth' chance to end Thano's prophetic soul-massacring apocalypse before humanity was atomically exterminated by the Infinity snap; with the sling-ring portals wheeling in astral unison that Steven Strange conducted with a play of illusionist deception: Bucky, Sam, T'challa, Shuri, Wanda, and Groot trudged out of the vacuous-celestial elysian of the Soul Realm, as they mightily assembled with salvaged echoes of valiance-as the odds were rigged against them. He owed his best girl-Tasha-one last dance.

Like stampeding quarterbacks the Avengers cleared the homefront battleground, as the proton galactic defender-Captain Carol Danvers propelled her supersonic momentum, torpedoing warship vessels into junker heaps. She was a starlight beacon of mortal invincibility-jet-fuel surged through her veins.

When Doctor Strange gestured his scar-marred finger commandingly to Tony, everything went into flatline numbness of white-noise as the hot-red armored gauntlet of Iron Man anguishedly thrust up with sacrificial ease-as he direly became a conductor of scything celestial-gamma energies of the Infinity Stones; purging Thanos into cindery remnants of phantom mulch that heralded their victorious daybreak; the immeasurable loss of his -friend-punishingly sledgehammered against Steve's torn heart: he couldn't shake it off.

After the lakeside gathering as mourning Pepper Potts embracingly hugged little Morgan on the dock, tearily gazing at the small raft adorned with petaled ivory roses that wreathed over the cherished keepsake arc-rector- the heart of Tony Stark-sailing away from their reach. Carrying out the bargaining promise that Banner made to the Ancient One in 2012, Steve had finished the time-heist mission, using the quantum tunnel dimensions as he navigated through subatomic bridges-wormholes of reserved time in a light-speed acceleration that imploded with Pym Particles; he was a delivery-boy.

As Steve reached the final dropoff point of Vormir's snowy dolmens, he engaged an unfathomed audience with a demonic chimera that was ghoulishly cloaked in vaporous tatters, hiding wraith-like contours of a jutted crimson skeletal visage-the Red Skull- who became a phantom stone-keeper when the Space Stone banished him out of reality. For seven decades, he accepted the trial of condemningly being a modernized Charon-ferryman, ushering beckoned souls into astral vistas of eternity.

The Red Skull had reactively accepted back the Soul Stone, in return for payment, allowed Steve to glance down into the infinite void as he achingly harbored onto the unbearable-contractive apparitions that eternally pulsed a visceraous-tragic frequency of expandable heartbeats over the mountainous edge; Steve tried his damndest not to gaze down at the bloodied smears were grimily painted on granite dais carved with runic mezzotints of Yggdrasil; gut-wrenching evidence of harvested souls offered to the celestial ether. Traces of Natasha's sacrificed blood hauntingly outlined where she had readily swan-dived after her suicidal backflip off the cliff-out of Clint's desperate grip. 'Let me go...'

Against the celestial auroras of explosively converged with the incendiary voltage of quantum lightning over the obelisk-dolmens etched with fanatical-spookish- glyphs that revealed the Soul Stone was a harvesting sentient entity that galvanically suffused wielding hosts to usher felled souls into bridged transatlantic—crossways of the Elysium Planes—a tradeoff payment with no retractions of that irrevocable cost.

He couldn't bring her back, or infinitely offer his soul in exchange to gain a warrant of Natasha's resurrection as he reluctantly gazed with a naked trek of anguished tears into the cosmic etherealness of vacuously stole her away; surrendering his wartime GI tag dogs that were engraved for a hellbent Brooklyn kid in the snowy gales to reverently grace the phantom memory of her against knifing rush of denotive heartache. 'We won, Nat...' he murmured against choked-off sobs, onrushing feverish surges of pent-up wetness blearily dampened over the fringe of his lashes—he couldn't look down as the final seconds of his Pym time-watch subatomically propelled him back into the quantum dimension. 'We won...'

Clutching onto his timeworn compass with tightfisted strain, guardedly in measured reserve, in dismal ease, warringly Steve braced the enhanced bulkiness of his sculpted back against one of the Quin-Jet's hydraulic pole as the ramp painstakingly descended over forested terrain of southwestward Norway, sconces from lampposts mounted on a stone bridge flickered hazily over iron spires of castellated environs gothically adorned a Neo-Renaissance castle-the Romanesque marble stronghold that Enchantress-Amora- had covetously staked her invidious reign.

Evicting another onslaught of unbidden heartache that crescendoed in tenfold that he rode out; being disconnected from his chivalrous-Brooklyn kid- bravado felt inexorably dormant as knifing pulse dragging over his battle-torn heart. On the grounds of war, the victorious-irretrievable cost of salvation-new dawn was casualties; he lost Tony and his best girl-Tasha- to the last stand of their Endgame mission. Nothing would change that soul-demolishing reality.

With steeled impassiveness vigilantly brandished over hard-edged planes of his angular-boyish features, tactfully against a combative flex of his stowed determination, Steve adjusted the leather-buckled straps of his legendary patriotic shield over his Kevlar-garbed forearm. Blonde-golden tresses featherily hung over his temples, roguishly intensifying his Adonis -honed virility, that hunkily contrasted with his dark navy-blue Strike uniform.

As unfeigned soldiery valor ricocheting in his tensed veins, the First Avenger tautly pressed his sensuous-chiseled lips in a half-grimace, cementing his battle-readied stance as the steeliness of his turquoise- azure irises piercingly roved over the forested grounds of Amora's caliginous domain. Everything felt penetratively close to vest; the Vanaheim temptress-viper- had graspingly marked down his burly friend-Thor into her perfidious-morbific crosshairs of a fattening scourge that perpetually overhauled Asgardian indulgences in unquenchable-rapine- tenfold. He needed to impede Thor's piggish junk-food binge."Look sharp..." he cautioned in a deep-timbre drawl, sonorously."I get the feelin' Amora won't go down easy..."

He was met with silence. The only noises to be heard were the crickets chirping into the night. The blonde glanced over his shoulder to search for his partner for this mission. He found her still seated in the c***-pit of the Quinjet; strapped in and deeply immersed with her phone. The impatient tapping of her finger against the screen told him that she was waiting for a message. Steve released a troubled sigh, not at all bothered by the fact Selina was distracted but more to do with the wistful longing that came by the absence of his traditional partner these past several years.

"Hey." He called out to her from the entry-ramp. "Everything okay?"

Brandishing an impassive charade of distractive nonchalance, grudgingly, with distractive ease, Selina had arced her stiletto-heeled boots unerringly over the co-pilot's chair armrest-she was riding shotgun. Hearing the brotherly cadence stoically fringed in his low-pitched Brooklyn drawl, inadvertently, against the offhand rapt of cool vehemence clenching in the delicate contours of her jaw, Selina feverishly clutched her iPhone, as she unblinkingly gazed at the ''decrypted' message LD screen-countermeasures of tactical infiltration were subtlely employed.

After receiving a 'tip-off' location-blackspot from a Stark network grid surveillance AI drone E.D.I.T.H, that alertly detected a high-level occultic-arcane threat generating within the mountain borders of Norway, they had stealthily engaged mystical recon within shadow-zone proximity. Asgardian vendettas were destructively unstable in avalanche-like effect, burying everyone into a cataclysmal-slaughterous crossfire—the Enchantress was a malefic, devouring siren incarnate of carnal thirst—who played the smokescreen charade of Jane Foster to bewitchingly violate Thor's frayed-out heart, only to chasten him into fattening oblivion.

The Eldritch hardware-accessories that Doctor Stephen Strange had delivered them were activated by a Tibetian-Kamar-Taj -incantation that composedly weaved fiery veins of astral energy into a mystical barrier of protection. "Just figuring out how to play with Tricks wordgame," she deadpanned in a sassier undertone, bluntly, as the tigerish decadence of her brandy irises vixenishly epitomized against the bordering slits of her sleek domino mask. "I think Bucky might leave a few dents in Thor's slop-heap if we don't curb this down..." she rasped, jauntily, with collective flexion of her lithe hand, she holstered a 9mm Glock on her neoprene-clad thigh while Steve adamantly took point. "You ready to have some fun knocking on this Asgardian hag's door, Soldier boy...?"

Steve shrugged with a small smile tugging at his lips. "So long as it's fun we can handle." He watched as she sat in deep thought with her deactivated phone still in hand. "He'll be all right. Believe me, Bucky's handled a lot worse than looking after Thor." He knew Selina didn't need any kind of reassurance, but it felt like the right thing to say-if not for her benefit than his own. "Let's try and make this quick."

He held his hand out, beckoning her to follow him down the ramp. He watched her hesitate as she put away her phone. She was still worried, Steve knew. From what he knew about their relationship, Bucky and Selina rarely if ever worked so far apart without communication. This was a stealth and incursion mission, one that Steve hoped they were prepared for as he held the magical dampener that Bruce and Shuri made. Hopefully, it would work on the Asgardian sorceress and they could safely capture her.

With a sardonic quirk playing over the pillowed lushness of her voluminous lips, curvaceously, as she utilized her feline-honed momentum of sashaying accord, coolly Selina descended the ramp, the silky glossiness of her waterfall-straight mahogany tresses entrancingly cascaded over the svelte fineness that athletically toned her neoprene-garbed shoulders, despite, she preferred a measured extent of personal space, Selina had grounded herself tensely at his soldiery—virtuous side; their dynamical caliber was blindsided—overrated trust was viscerally akin to mechanized precision of a scalpel and hammer: an incarnate tactical reliance nakedly fueled by an electrified—addictive dosage of high-octane shunting in their veins.

Emitting a breathy scoff, as her full-bow lips quirked, deviantly, Selina glanced at his alloy-vibrainum shield readily braced over corded flesh of his muscled forearm as she unnervingly feigned an eye-roll. "I think you need more effective toys to play here, Rogers, tossing your frisbee isn't going to work..." she rebuffed in a coquettish undertone, banteringly, with a thievish swipe of her gloved hand, deftly she palmed a Kimoyo -taser- bead that Wakanda's spunky impish fashionista Princess Shuri had virtuosically designed with a kinetic destabilizing pulse as Okavango tribal sigils electrified in sync with purplish amethyst--a pocket accessory for a girl to never dance without. "Lucky for you I always bring a backup piece..."

Steve offered a gracious smile with a bemused quirk of his head. "Not really my style, but I guess we can't afford to be choosy here." He said as he accepted the taser bead and fixed it to his belt. His style of combat had evolved since the days he only wielded a shield and pistol into combat. The modern world offered too many variables and opponents that meant to be Captain America, he had to take things up a notice.

From wielding a magnetic shield, to a mystical hammer, Steve figured a taser was the least outlandish thing he could carry.

"Bucky always said you were resourceful in a fight-adaptable." He commended the domino-masked brunette who eyed him thoughtfully.

"Playing safe is never my style for kicks, Rogers..." Selina retorted back, coyly, as she bolstered herself with controlled poise at the bottom of the ramp. Not wavering his battle-ready stance, the heavier tautness of graven-ridged muscles flexed bulkily underneath his tactical Strike uniform-a resilient-invincible solidity edged over his enhanced flesh as Steve reservedly clenched the broad-set of his jaw; impelled by a gut-sense resonating through his veins, he gleamingly flashed the stormier intensity of his azureous irises piercingly at the obstructive bridge —something wasn't right.

In a balletic variance of her reactive grace, felinely Selina mid-crouched low on the sleekness her neoprene-clad haunches, as instinctive strain tellingly became invested in the conscious drag of her lithe fingers over gnarled roots snarking out of the ground. She was precariously aware that Asgard's viperous bane had deceptively rigged them onto a sorcerous powderkeg; obsidian sentinels of Gothicesque twined stallions were eerily mounted on the bridge passageway as verdigris sigils of astral heat tectonically pulsed over the razed stone in detonative fruition.

Involuntarily her kittenish nose scrunched against the morbific stench of putrefying flesh odiously wafting out of the stagnant-corpse-infested bog that luridly captured the backlit sconces of ghoulish torchlight—carrion hordes of desiccated Nordic-Viking- warriors macabrely adorned with crescent-edged Breið-øx axes deathlily clutched in their leathery skeletal hands. "Yeah, this place is kinda spooky..." she gritted, threadily, and with her unerring trajectory of dead-straight precision, she pitched the activated Kimoyo bead, without faltered deterrence of his back-catcher agility, Steve had openly caught the Wakandian gadgetry as tremorous—paranoic vibrations of earth-quaking force ruptured cacophonously underneath the Quinjet: a seismic wakeup call for Amora's zombified legion. "We need to stay at this level of ground..."

Steve held his balance but was just as concerned by the seismic activity as Selina when it felt as if something evil was ready to erupt from the Earth. The First Avenger held his shield in one hand and the kimoyo bead in the other. "Stay sharp, stay close." He cautioned as they began to move across the landscape. The cover of trees kept them veiled from the moonlight, but at the same time made their trek all the more hazardous. "Take point," Steve called once the path became too pitch dark for him to see. The Gothamite activated her night-vision goggles and spied the path ahead. The gnarly trees were like teeth protruding from the ground into the skies. But in the distance, the Enchantress' fortress glowed like a spire of unholy magic.

That she had her fortress erected so close to New Asgard would've been as strange as Baron Zemo renting an apartment across the street from the Avengers Compound. Steve repressed a shudder as a gust of howling wind moved down his back. He ignored the unsettling feeling that he and Selina had walked into a horror movie of some kind. But the fact that they could hear no birds nor crickets said that something was off out here. "Selina?" He called worriedly as she came to a stop. "What is it?"

In fleeting reaction, haltingly Selina felt the apparitional 'white-noise' pulse over the forested warren, a banshee frequency demonically amplified in a manic tempo; crimson incandescence of astral heat veined nocuously over skeletal deformities of hollowed-sockets —dismembered bones of exsiccated flesh thrashed jerkily around the helmeted-Viking denizens in possessive rabidness; mobilizing cavalcade of death-walkers screechingly converged onto the bridge in defensive succession—answering the stygian hail of infinite battle.

With a thievish flex of her gloved hand, blindingly Selina unholstered onto her Glock, undeviatingly aiming point-blank at tarred-maggoty corpses that ghoulishly ascended out of the boggy trenches. "Tell me, Soldier boy, are you afraid of ghosts..." she bantered, snarkily as cold vaporous rust knifed scrapingly down her throat. Whirlingly with a balletic rush of her poised footing, Selina tactfully crouched onto her razor-edged heels; rapidly slotting out a full cartridge with a staccato hailstorm as she punched back trigger shots as resin mucus-like ooze from blow-off skulls dropped gloopily over the alloy rim of his shield. "We need to crash this witch's party... Fast."

Steve smirked despite himself. "Let me guess, Bucky?" Steve queried with a knowing look. In the darkness, he imagined Selina was giving him a puzzled look over her shoulder. "He loves Ghostbusters."Sometimes he thought he could hear him humming the song in the shower. He didn't get to dwell long on the funny memory when his enhanced hearing began to pickup the telltale groans of death coming towards them.

If it weren't for a marathon of Night of the Living Dead movies with Sam Wilson, Steve would've been mildly confused by the sounds. Instead, he was now clutching his shield and the kimoyo bead with a vice-like grip in anticipation. So this is what Selina meant. "How many are there?" Steve asked. His eyes glared into the darkness. He thought he saw a glint of moonlight reflecting off of metal. A twig snapped closeby and the Avenger didn't hesitate to throw his shield. It buzzed like a saw through the air, cutting down a ghoulish monstrosity in half. The shield returned to his hand in time for him to smash in the head of a second one.

What alarmed him wasn't the fact he had just killed an undead zombie. It was the sight of decaying flesh and empty eyes staring into nothing. Those clothing worn were modern humans-New Asgardians. "This is not good."

As the patriotic shield metallically boomeranged into Steve's readied clutch, with unwarrantable ease of her incredulous traction, fringing her paces a breadth from the skeletal Asgardian remains; dragging out a terse breath, Selina flipped her sleek cat-eared googles up and fixed her brandy irises stiltedly down at the swampy -ghostlier mist creepily arcing over the deflated heap of soiled garments-an exorcised soul. "This is a really cheap trick to play against Thor..." she rasped, grittily, as the clothing meltingly dissolved back into the ground-a soul-numbing revelation that Amora was a reaping siren, collecting traumatized Asgardian strays into her mutative- orcish legions. "We need to figure out this damn hag's angle..."

Steve didn't pause as he smashed, kicked and punched his way through the rapidly growing throng of undead Asgardians that were now beginning to surround him and Selina. Their battle had moved them from out of the woods and into the open field. The cloud coverage caused a clap of thunder to boom in the skies. If Thor wasn't in such an isolated state, Steve would've taken the noise as backup. But they were on their own on this. Strange had left with Wanda to settle a threat in a different dimension, Bruce was helping Tony in his coma, Carol was off-world, Rhodey and Sam were injured from Amora's last attack. Steve and Selina found themselves back-to-back, moving as one as they unleashed a flurry of attacks.

Kicks were landed, bullet-casings were spent. The smell of decay was suffocating just as the groans of death were deafening. Steve didn't stop and didn't relent as he raised his hand, calling for his last resort to aid him. He felt the kinetic pull as the magic of Mjolnir responded to him and flew out from the quinjet. Like a star shining in the darkness he could see the enchanted hammer closing in towards him, feel its power singing with anticipation to reach his hand. His hopes were obstructed when a green-sorcerous field of energy engulfed the hammer like a bubble, causing it to fall like dead-weight to the ground. A familiar and sinister laugh descended on them as the undead horde came to a stop.

Steve and Selina panted for breath, focused and still ready for a fight. The horde still surrounded them, trapping them, allowing their master to come forward.

"This is an unwelcomed surprise, dear Captain..." A throatier huskiness of a feminine undertone of malevolence rasped smokily underneath a vampiresque hooded cloak, with ceremonious prowess, serpentinely the conjuring-galactic blight of Vanaheim advanced passed her Élivágar ghoulish ranks in cobra-like haughtiness of queen entity; eroded war-axes berserkly thrust up in reverent—inchanted unison as verdurous stalactites of tenebrious heat veined twistily over jutted out bones welded into chainmail armor.

Arcing the delicate litheness of her Nerco-gauntleted hand, sneerily, with sensuous ease, Amora distractively pulled down the darkish hood, as rope-braided platinum-blonde whorls disheveledly cascaded over the cool seraphic fineness that wickedly contrasted with her exquisite witchy features as the vitriolic intensity of her grayish-teal irises malignantly glinted with demented thirst at the vibrainium shield-a Midgardian trophy she covetously desired. "The Odin spawn has gluttonously deigned himself to become a grieving hostage of his utmost failures..." she hissed in envenomed pitch, raveningly. "A new reign of power will conquer over the desolated vermin of Asgard once I cut the loose ends..."

With a guileful charade quirking hypnotically over the cherry lushness of her voluminous lips, carnally Amora radiated a decadent-aphrodisiac fragrancy that was headily penetrative to damningly breach masculine arousal, Selina detected the intrusive reek as the odious stink ghosted fervidly over her kittenish nose with seductive-tactile precision of viperish inducement—a siren's coaxing of bewitchery to exponentially drag Steve into her amorous-morphic thralls. On breakneck accord, urgently Selina gripped the Kelvar material delineated tauter-muscle cords of his forearm, knowing that he was on the septic-compromised fringe of Amora's demented-viperous play of chimerical havoc.

"I do relish severing your wretched humanity into a craven existence..." she taunted against waspish breaths, poutily, gazing at the plushier firmness of Steve's chiseled lips ardently set into a half-grimace, evident to his disarmed resolve. "You really think coming here will purge that drunken Odinson's piteous curse, when another dear friend of yours, Captain, fatteningly bloats out his grunting defeat..."

"Bucky…" Steve and Selina share an uneasy look between each other at that, feeling dread encompass them. Their entire focus had been on saving Thor that they hadn't stopped to consider any potential contingencies the Enchantress would have in place if they tried to intervene in the Asgardian's decadent state. They had left Bucky in charge of Thor's care. That meant… "What did you do?!" Steve demanded hotly. His greater inclination was to be diplomatic in the face of hostilities but he knew this was one woman that wouldn't be bargained with. She wanted Thor to suffer and would have no qualms about making his friends pay the same price. Steve gripped his shield tight while Amora smirked at his clear agitation. "What did you do to him?!"

Sneeringly with a painstaking steadiness of her extended palm, witchily Amora beckoned astral fusion of verdigris energy, indulgently fashioning vapory tendrils into a lucent orb that she hefted up stoppingly to the fiercer gleam of Steve's oceanic azure irises; sweat-damp blond tresses fringed his bruised temples, with vigilant tact of his steeled focus, he unwaveringly gazed into candescent auras merging into a Nordic glyph of 'playback' memory. "If you wish to see your beloved Sergent Barnes's shackled visage all you have to do is peek, dear Captain..." Amora coaxingly rasped, gliding her fingers over the astral luminescence of the vitreous jade bauble.

Suppressedly against rampageous viciousness, gnashing her teeth, breathlessly Selina angled her Glock to deliver instant kill-shot, as her gloved finger shakily grazed over the hammer trigger-lock."It seems the handsome fool blindingly reveled into the gluttonous flavor of my curse..."

A glowing light emanated from within the Orb as if it took on a life of its own. Clouds of magic circulated from within and images fluttered past. Steve and Selina could see Thor and Bucky inside of Thor's house. They were talking in the living room until Thor handed Bucky a box of pop-tarts. Bucky didn't just eat one, he ate the entire box like a starving pig, making a mess of himself. What happened then was a nightmarish symphony of events that saw Thor and Bucky grappling each other in the kitchen over a piece of cake until Bucky began to change before their very eyes.

"Oh no..." Steve voiced with a sorrowful look. Selina's expression was stone-cold empty but the pain in her eyes was unmistakable as she kept her mask in place. The vision of events culminated with Thor and now a pig-Bucky fighting off pair of wolves inside of the kitchen until the beasts were killed. Once the images had ended, Steve and Selina couldn't tear their gazes away from a hypnotic concentration of energy building up from within the orb. It grew brighter and stronger until it burst like a shockwave, hitting both Steve and Selina, sending them falling to the ground.

A vertiginous onslaught dizzily grappled her into deadened submission; circlet glyphs of Amora's Nordic incantation eldritchly ravined over the ground, chasing her warred heartbeat in an exhaustive-vomitous rush as whitish salvos of incandescent energy flaringly careened through Selina like a depth-charge shockwave-an eruptive anesthetic that searingly assailed her bone-deep in paralytic succession. Each pulse agonizingly surged an implosive -accelerated numbness as onrushing barrages of her charmingly hunky sniper-wolf becoming an oinking tub of blubbery-piggish flab had suffocatingly exorcised her resistance in heart-knifing tenor-the parasitical-invidious magery of Amora's venomous thirst amplified in slumberous-cursive deviance of unbidden surrender. 'No..."

Motionless like collapsing marionette of granite, Selina was bruisingly dragged onto the svelte planes of her back as jutted tentacles of gnarled roots slithery bracketed over the delicate contours of her wrists—everything deafened out against the infective fusion entombing her. Blurringly, in a cottony haze, her lashes damply flitted as virescent skeins of morphically fused over ridged bulkiness of Steve's mid-drift, as he chokingly railed out a throated-voiceless screech against torpedoing force that slammed him against a diseased tree with back-breaking momentum. "S-Soldier boy..." she gurgled threadily, disheveled length of her mahogany tresses slickly webbed askew over the feverous, elfin curvatures of her delicate jaw as she desperately thrust her gloved hand with notched-up strain, reaching for him. "Steve..."

"I-I can't-GAAAH!" Steve couldn't contain the cry of agony that breached his lips. He gnashed his teeth and groaned through a hailstorm of sorcerous torture. The Enchantress' magic permeated his body, his bones, his cells, and began their heinous work of undoing the man from the inside out-transforming him into a creature to suit her will. His shield fell from his grip, his trembling posture brought him to his knees as he struggled to fight through the spasms that controlled him, and face the evil woman that was doing this to them. Selina couldn't move. It was as if her entire body had been shut down and she lost all feeling to her limbs.

The tension in the air was morbid in the seconds that followed. Steve's entire body caved in on itself as if he were imploding from within. Gazing at his gloved hands he watched as they slipped off his rapidly decreasing mass. His face and neck itched as if he had a colony of bugs invading his skin. But in reality, it was patches of bird feathers sprouting from his skin. His blue eyes closed, accepting the inevitable of what was happening as he built a mental wall around himself, taught to him by Doctor Strange, to protect the one avenue of himself that was more important than his body: his mind-his soul.

Within moments, Captain America had vanished in a mass of crumpled clothes and equipment. His tactical vest flayed on the ground as something else reemerged, squawking and thrashing to escape the prison of garments that kept him confined.

Temperstously heralding a butcherous—cyclonic valance of her earthen- corpse armada, Amora crouched a breadth at the discarded vibrainum shield with vulturous poise, hungrily Amora glided a possessive tracery of gauntleted palm over the alloy star insignia without a deterrence of hesitation, manically the rapturous heat of her ophidian depths gazed at remnants of navy blue Kevlar sheathed over feathery checkered wings of silvery-ivory as raptor-talons rampantly gouged into clumps of dirt in blinded traction, screechingly in a throat-piercing cadence, the Avenger hawk lurched joltingly on his curvaceous girth, as the steely-bluish plumage of his silken tufts ethereally delineated the virile litheness of his ensorcelled—passerine form. Jutting the sleekness of his golden-curved beak, Steve uttered, in a squawking hitch raspily. "T-Thor's gonna stop you..."

"It seems your valiant warrior beauty has been stunted into a craven form that is befitting for you, dear Captain..." Hearing the monstrous grunting of her orcish, skeletal denizens, Amora virulently glanced at the malachite-ebon Necro spears—demonic instruments forged out of the chasmal—tenebrious veins of Helheim being arced up, as torn black Einherjar pennons grotesquely ribboned over corroded poles gripped in the skeletal clutches of her resurrected breed of wraithlike 'carnage-reapers' that nightmarishly spewed out of her sorcerous cauldron; as the maggot-ridden phalanxes were staggeringly advancing out of her forested warren in a rabid fusion of murderous barbarity-a death march.

Underneath warped helms, reddish embers fierily crescented within jutted-edges of hollowed eye sockets—a soulless bloodlust that wouldn't be contained. "Now I'll leave you to lament in the skies," Amora gestured to his feathered wings, sadistically. "...while I bring forth my carrion legion to fully deliver my reckoning of mortal harvest over New Asgard..."

"Leave em' alone..." Against a hawkish screech in his raw-pitched timbre, Steve urgently conveyed his unbreakable measure of Brooklyn valiance in the wake of a cabalistic-hellish mantra of phantom starved battle-cries that dissonantly crescendoed in a demonic ambiance like terror knells; latent skeletal heaps of desecrated Einherjar warriors of Odin jerkily convulsed as matrix infusions of celestial-psionic energy of tapped out of Nastrond-the Shore of Corpses- electrifyingly melded greenish heat into the detached-gutted bones that creepily spider-clawed to become realigned with iron-forged limbs for Amora's slaughterous-apocalyptic conquest of mortal butchery.

Half-exhausted by the divested strain, joltingly defiant tension grounded him, Steve reactively braced his feathered wings into a taut arc over svelter curves of his lithe girth as he gaspingly felt the hammering momentum of a ghoul's armored foot, bodily propel a blinded assault of careening ferocity into his feathery back with merciless-breakneck traction. The bone-knifing spasms of racked anguish exceedingly caught his stunned heartbeat as incendiary throbs of white-heat blearily robbed his vision-it was a death blow. "No..."

This wasn't how he imagined himself finally fading away. Death wasn't something he feared for as long as he'd been a soldier in life. But this wasn't the end he envisioned for himself. The agony of defeat only hurt him by the thought of having failed. Failed the mission, his country, his friends, his family. Steve Rogers tried to cling to whatever avenue of hope that he could muster to safeguard him into the next life. His one comfort was a life-giving allure of cool teal eyes that often used to smile at him with warmth. His thumping heart swelled before it began to steady. He could distinctly feel tears trailing down his now feathery cheeks as he closed his eyes and welcomed the dark embrace.

'See you in a minute…Natasha.'

{Flashback}

Surgically bred to exist as a Soviet marionette of weaponized seduction, Natasha had utilized the identity of being a loose cannon deviant-fugitive as the blotches creed of the Accords denoted a firestorm of inevitable -rigged-betrayal against the Avengers, just one matchstick throw of deception had cleared the decks against governmental protocols of sterilization, dissecting out warrants of liberty- justice into the relevance of 'high rolling industry of lucrative degeneracy.

Everything was staked down by militaristic-seditious paragons of ironfisted authority erased margins of error off the chessboard-they were vermined selloffs. Reality had double-clutch into maximum overdrive when Steve rejected branding his freedom-soldiery valor- on a warranted contract that was designed by the World Council. By the upheaval deadlock tensions of hard-core Brooklyn defiance, voluntary he became a nomadic resistance operative; discarding the 'A' insignia off his threadbare uniform-never looking back.

'I'm not the only one who needs to look over their shoulder...'

For painstaking months of harboring onto encrypted arsenals of SHIELD contingency safeguards to evade Interpol surveillance -beating dodge with a Clean Slate algorithmic hardware that was covertly delivered to her by an unknown Gotham alliance of Selina Kyle-calibrated devices of preservation, Natasha had remained in the shadow zones, marked as a rogue insurgent after traitorous-egotistic- back-stabber- Tony Stark betrayingly sold her out to Thunderbolt Ross.

Using her intentive tradecraft of furtive espionage, she went back to a harbor point in Budapest, smoking out her fostered sister of the Red Room: Yelena Belova-she trudged into a warzone as the mutative legacy of the Widow operatives evolved into combative-disposable ranks of tactical-balletic supremacy, programmed to leave bloodied silhouettes in the chastened wake of reactivation.

Her Russian family reunion ended at a grievous- deceitful cost when a genetically-enhanced viper strike penetrated her compromised heart. She went blindly deep into the macabre crosshairs, damnably resurrecting ghosts of the past-only to lose everything because of the conditioned measures of heart-driven restraint, she had evicted charitable tenets of Siberian mercy, and inexplicably hesitated to pull back on the trigger-that visceral dynamic that was promisingly salvaged became cleaved apart when Yelena was retired; to give her a redeeming chance to run-live.

Within the slummy-humid ambiance of a rumpy safe house in Atlanta, Georgia gripping onto the plastic mold of a half-emptied lime flavored Gatorade bottle, impassively, with stark tension riding through her veins; standing on fractured ground Natasha detachedly isolated herself from the installations of a dispatched rabble of SHIELD agents-corrupted enforcers that pegged her down for profitable bounty.

Now, she was on a tipping point of the knife-edge-fostering to the synthetic relevance of normalcy; she couldn't invent new spycraft devices of her convenient incarnations; everything was jeopardized-even her trust bracket with Fury. Easing down the bottle onto a makeshift table; faint electric sconces of light burnished her unkempt copper-auburn whorls as she was ravishingly garbed in a black camisole that was curvaceously fitted snug over the bustier curves of her voluptuous breasts, shiveringly Natasha registered a galvanic pulse of rivalrous -indescribable anticipation: she had a visitor.

There was a soft brush of movement coming from the kitchen that would've been almost impossible to detect if she hadn't been standing in total silence. It could've been construed as something as ordinary as a rodent moving through the walls. But then she saw a tall shadow creeping across the wall and knew that her instincts were as sharp as ever. Before she could draw her pistol from its holster, the intruder stepped clear into the room and she had frozen in bewilderment to see who it was. Then again, given how much he'd learned about her over the past few years she shouldn't have been so surprised.

"There was a spare key under the swan statue on the porch step." Steve said as he rested his tall broad form back against the wall, hands stuffed into his pockets. "Didn't think you'd mind if I let myself in." His blue eyes flicked up to meet her teal concentrated orbs that were boring into his soft expression. His handsomely cut features weren't the clean-shaven presentation of Steve Rogers, Captain America. Instead, they were the bearded residue of an exiled wanderer. He was dressed in a dark pair of blue jeans, black sneakers and a black overcoat with the collars drawn up against his neck. Not the kind of clothing you'd expect from America's golden-boy who was a public figure. Exiled had changed more than just his appearance, it also made him look as hollow as the subaquatic prison-the Raft- he sprung their friends from.

A high-voltage surge of dredged-up awareness evocatively rushed through her veins-her revving instincts were being sidetracked as she headily registered the addictive vetiver mintiness of Gucci aftershave, a distinct virile scent ardently igniting up a feverous abandon. The graven-angular planes of his boyish- chiseled features were hawkishly edged with untamed virility-a rugged fierceness as his tousled golden-blonde tresses unkemptly clung askew over his dirt-scuffed cheekbones: he appeared emotionally blunted.

Pillowing the cool suppleness of her silken cheek against her denim-clad knee, with an evident play of guarded nonchalance, Natasha unerringly fixed her grayish-teal irises in the direction her makeshift kitchen. "If you looking to raid out my fridge, the best I can offer is a peanut-butter sandwich..." A jaunty quirk half-tugged over the voluminous lushness of her lips, as she coaxed with a smokier huskiness in her undertone, brusquely gazing the hunkier solidity of his Brooklyn-Adonis corded bulk imposingly delineated underneath the cloaking length of his black long coat. Placatingly, as his cool azure depths fixed observant intensity on her stockpile of peanut butter jars and loaf Wonder bread, setting his broader jaw into a firm clench, Steve measured the intrusive breach of his driven advances with chaste precision towards her blackout proximity. "Not that I will, since you didn't knock, Rogers..."

"Had a bite on the way over if you could count beef jerky as lunch." He responded with his own brand of wit with a small smile to accompany it. Being out in public wasn't something he could risk these days when his face was plastered all over the news. As a wanted fugitive, the days of eating at cafes and diners were gone and now he would have to settle for quick stops for snacks at the local gas stations. If this reality unsettled him, he didn't let it show. "But I didn't come here looking for food. I came to find you." He said, suddenly serious as he leaned off the wall and crossed his arms. "You've been on the news, Nat. Ross almost got to you…" He was worried when he saw the broadcasts all the way from Wakanda. He had been hesitant to leave until that image of Natasha surrounded by guns burned into his consciousness.

"Things got complicated..." Natasha murmured edgily, the harshness of her grated pitch was underlying her a fallback of phantom betrayal; nothing would suppress her unwarranted failure; not when she was downplayed by the ability-replicating leach who harbored a photographic-combative arsenal, lethally becoming a mirrored 'knockoff' opponent. He was geared up like a demonic Power-Ranger, stealing all tactical endurance-fight versatility that he nightmarishly imitated from her teammates-the Avengers.

Staring at the greenish tactical vest that her baby sister-Yelena had worn for their point-break mission to end the final rebirth- evolution on the Widow-markers, Natasha felt achingly paralyzed by a traitorous onslaught of soul-crippling heartbreak. "In this terrible business, there's no guarantee to beat the dodge..." Quashing down a knifed sting of remorse, edgily she gnawed on her underlip. "I had to finish something close to home... Dig up my old ghosts...Only to make new ones. "

"Some fights can't be avoided." Steve agreed with a somber look. Hiding the past never changed the fact it would always be there ready to catch up to you. There was no use in ignoring it, doing so would only make things harder for you and those you cared about. If he had known that then, maybe...maybe he and Tony wouldn't have gone to war with each other. "But it doesn't mean they need to be fought alone." Something in his expression must've given him away as he noticed Natasha's inquisitive eyebrow raised at him. "I got them out of the Raft. All of em. Bucky he…" He swallowed a lump of emotion that had suddenly built up in his throat, threatening to seize his strength of will and cause him to expend a torrent of emotion down his cheeks. "He's gone back under. Doesn't trust himself anymore than the whole world does right now."

As Steve dragged out a heavier breath against his sonorous timbre, Natasha understood the fractionable ground he crossed, the soul-damaging reality of Bucky tragically plunging into the icy gorge of Swiss Alps, Steve had indefatigably tethered himself to a perpetual crusade to avenge his best friend; only to agonizingly discover that James Buchanan Barnes was remade by the operational-enhanced butchery conducted by the obsessive-sadistic insanity of the HYDRA parasitoid Armin Zola; hee endured cerebral PSTD deterioration of electrical anesthetizing of the lobotomic mind-sweeps of the dentist chair, that had punishingly violated him to become an unhinged-mechanized amnesic.

The dossier file NO 17 unveiled extreme details about the mangled flesh of his left was surgically amputated for a HYDRA cybernetic implant of titanium bionic alloy and electro psychiatric conditioning that gruelingly mutated Bucky into the robotized ghost operative of Russia's endless winter-the Winter Soldier. For seven decades of being unthawed out a cryogenic pod of liquid nitrogen; murderously he existed as hybrid sniper-wraith, a reactivated Siberian phantasm for termination. Within the Novgorod dormitories of the Red Room Academy, James was chemically sterilized-training her virginal classmates-little ballerinas- under the brutish command of the maniacal warren General Vasily Karpov.

'I have no place in this world.'

Against pessimistic tension of contagious vulnerability that resonated behind the stage light, little Natalia became his elite protegé of combative kata supremacy -Система-, every balletic evade was invigoratingly dynamical-addictive, they harnessed elemental mastery-a gladiatorial ruthless that defiled operative compliance. Trysts of juvenile affection became vitiated when she felt the scalpel blade cut her deep-purging out her womanhood-humanity to finally evolve her into a 'corrected' instrument of venomous seduction.

When she awoke from the removal procedure, Natasha felt the woven stitches painfully brand her forever into the septic reality of a deadened heartbeat. She remembered when James had deftly carried her defective-comatose form bridal-style out of the paralytic whiteness of the operating room-never leaving her side. "If T'challa knows Barnes's is worth a risk of saving..." A nostalgic quirk tugged over her full lips, coolly. "...then I guess HYDRA didn't fully erase him..."

"There's an old saying, 'you can't keep a kid from Brooklyn down' when the going gets tough." He smiled as he felt a touch of nostalgia. "These days though its hard to know what we're fighting for when the lines are blurred. I thought that by standing up to the Accords we were protecting not just the world, but each other… But now...now I feel like we're all alone out here." He sighed with a downcast look.

There was a part of him that longed for the simpler times when the world wasn't such a chaotic mess of politics, ideals, and intergalactic threats that loomed on the horizon. He might've been lost with his place in the world but he felt at peace with it. The modern world he had found a place in it as Captain America. The shield of liberty who would always find a new battle to face. He wasn't at peace, but he wasn't lost. Not with those surrounding him that he called friends and family. The pinnacle of which was the woman in front of him who not only uplifted him in his moments of sorrow but helped him to steer his course moving forward. "I...missed you, Nat."

The valid reverence of his Brooklyn timbre reached her compromisingly deep, stoking up an intimate demand of unspoken-forbidden desire; nothing would be leashed down against the headier rush of long-denied havoc; there was no flirtatious play of bantering snarkiness, she couldn't break for distance as his roughened-tip fingers cherishingly dragged feathery ministrations of a tactile-dexterous caress of errant grace over the daintier contours of her lithe knuckles. "Steve..."

It was reckless surrender against the hell storms of their betrayal -they were no longer SHIELD operatives-Avengers, just directionless fugitives who daringly made their own symphony of resistance-they needed this grounded moment. "Don't say anything unless you mean it,.." she murmured hushedly, against gritted breaths, each shift of whisper-soft pressure ardently echoed a sensuous fervency against her pulse in a wonderous-naked accord. Under the curly fringe of her lashes, on volatile reaction, she entrancedly gazed at the plushier sculpt of his chiseled lips, beckoning with a sheen of virile heat that became cravingly addictive."We've played this game of affection before, haven't we...?"

He knew he had begun to cross a line that had been toed between them for the past several years. Steve wasn't very good at flirting with women. Not in the way that Bucky and Tony were, so confident and playful in their banter they could charm even the most reserved of individuals. Steve was direct if not subtle in his intentions as most honest men were in his past-time. But there was always something about Natasha that brought out a side of him he never knew existed. A bolder sense of confidence that made him feel fearless. His blue eyes that were once so quiet were now speaking loudly the words he wanted to share with her for so long. "It was never a game to me." He said as his digits caressed the her palm, beckoning her to come closer to him. "And I think you know me well enough to know how I've always felt about you, Nat." His eyes gazed deeply into hers, lost in the sea of bluish-green that were mesmerizing and made him ache inside. They were so beautiful and captivating, he could feel himself easily getting lost in her enchanting stare that affected him in a way no other woman before had. Not even Peggy.

Her rosebud lips parted and he felt her warm breath flutter and send tingles across his skin. Her expression was torn in a way that he was familiar with. The line between friendship and romance was slowly being erased as they drifted closer. "Tell me to stop, and I will." He said to her, eyes genuine but hopeful. "Tell me you don't feel the same, and I'll believe you..."

"Alright, since I do owe you a good answer..." Disarmingly against the visceral-hungered command, she gazed into the smoldering coolness of his oceanic azureous depths as the kneaded flexion of his smooth-calloused fingers adoringly echoed tentative-featherlike steadiness, a novel-masculine heat that arrestingly invested with each unfeigned shift of cherishing reverence. A blinding need that outpaced against her warred heartbeat—abandoned urgency of rhapsodic ecstasy—a glorious mania—she knew it was damn real.

The heated contrast of the bulkier stretch of well-defined muscle underneath his shirt tautly aligned with svelter cushiness of her aching breasts, Natasha breathtakingly felt the unbeatable vitality of Captain America; the steeled bands of his enhanced-invincible solidity became her anchoring strength. It was an undeniable-exhilarative promise that fervidly coupled in the fiercer tempo of his reined arousal, their faces were so close, as the arrowing drift of his nose shadowily grazed over her temple, so achingly tentative in feathered succession. Under the long fringe of his eyelashes, a glacial blueness of his silvery-turquoise irises became seraphically vitreous-gleaming with a tempestuous intensity of the Aegean sea; her infinite reality of uncharted paradise.

Unhurriedly, she felt the clamping pressure of his larger palms bracket over the delectable lushness of her denim-clad curves in rhythmic unison, with driven momentum, Steve backed her against the wall, as she dragged out a feverish breath. "I think we both need this..." Natasha coaxed, huskily against the bristled planes of his thickened jaw that starkly rasped over the alabaster flesh of her beard-pricked cheek; as rakish golden-blonde sweltry tangled with her fiery copper tresses. Heart-poundingly an exquisite floodtide of answering heat readily contrasted as the firmer grip of his shifting fingers dizzyingly tugged at her flimsy camisole straps with raging urgency, as his muscled forearm braced over the sleek planes of her back, arching the flush swell of her ampler breasts with a definite-sweeter cadence of headier euphoria against heavier corded rigidity of denser muscle brawnily sheathing his garbed chest. "No holding back, Rogers..."

Without an instinctive deterrence volition, groaningly Steve angled his sensuously-chiseled lips with a surging rush of irresistible wet heat, decadently fusing with the aphrodisiacal cherry of her voluminous lips. They engaged hungered duel of rampant pressure shudderingly careened them on into panting drags of mirrored-intimate release, the flavorous throb of their melded lips hotly deepened under the crushing pressure of headier rawness; everything cindered as the reverent gentleness of his palm cradled over the delicate contours of her jaw with sensual tacks of his razed sanity-he was reaching for her through the riotous eruption of breathless heat-a dynamite nova, trapped flamingly between them.

"Y'know we probably needed this break..." he drawled in throatier heaves, breathily against her kiss-swollen lips, as she blindingly clutched the bunches of his shirt with a sirenic litheness invested with each flexing-possessive knead of her fingers, urging him to dare beyond the symphonic- gloried rhythm of their bone-liquifying communion.

A fever-burned trek of wetness errantly glided off his bristled cheeks, unabashedly Steve drew out a guttural moan that was breathly caught between the bruising stretch of their opened-mouthed kisses, devouringly increasing ardent -breathless- ferocity that was steamily incendiary; he supped on the passion-heated lush of her swelled lips, edging her into their mindless-dizzier oblivion. The subtle graze of his thumb featherily brushed the underside of her feverish jaw, anchoring her into his virile heat, as he bitingly tugged on her jutted underlip with breakneck traction; every seared thrust of his plush lips viscerally countered with tenors of her soul-deep awareness-nothing was held back as they surrendered to high-octane maelstroms of untempered ecstasy that stole the world away. "Just live again, Steve..."

To live again meant to return to a place where he was happiest in life. The blissful memory he kept himself enclosed within a sanctuary where his friend, his partner, and great love Natasha Romanov would embrace him was what kept him going. It gave him the strength and will to see through the agony that awaited him in the real world where he couldn't find her beside him. He felt the memory slipping away as the darkness was disturbed a pale sickly light. A salvo of verdigris energy that was anything but benign in its intentions as it jerked him back into a choking fit of discomfort. His eyes snapped open and a strangled gasp for air rattled through his body.

His feathery body… Questions swarmed through his subconscious. Who was he dreaming about? Why was he entangled in a pile of human clothing? Why couldn't he flap his wings? He tried to wring himself from his prison of clothing before his hawkish eyes landed on the blonde human peering into him with a hypnotic stare. No. This was no human woman. This was someone much more. Her beauty was spellbinding just as the luminous field of green energy that sulfurously encompassed her body. Understanding passed through him as the feathery hawk squawked and bowed his head obediently. "Mistress…" he cawked. "How do I serve you?"

Malevolently, Amora relished the craven docility that gratingly edged in the Avenger-hawk's low-pitched timbre; a stuporous intimacy had been conceived, as the valorous tension that rode through every tauten-edged muscle of warrior-honed solidity was doused into a pathetic vessel enchantingly sheathed in bluish-silvery feathers. With demented swiftness, as her ashen lips quirked evilly into a vampirish sneer, Amora beseechingly, outstretched her gauntleted arm, sconces of moonlight gothically exposed the intricate viridian sigil of Helheim.

"Come to me..." Amora gestured her newest-feathered captive to latch his clawed-talons over her wrist as skeletal-walkers twitchingly advanced in battlemented legions of necro-craft weaponry towards her destination of sanguineous conquest-warpath. "You shall prevail over the Midgardian heights, my beautiful Captain," she commanded, spitefully."By the morphic designs of my scourge, you will find me that gluttonous spawn of Odin..."

Amora's voice was like a magnet drawing him towards a state of immobility. A prison where he was helpless to do nothing but obey her. His mind was resisted despite the fact his body was betraying him. "Fight it…Fight it...Steve." The enchanted hawk flapped his wings and trembled as the pull became ever more intense, sending waves of agony through his head until he could take no more and cawed loudly into the night. It was like the walls he erected to protect his mind were being bulldozed to the ground, leaving him at the mercy of his oppressor. The hawk blearily searched and allowed his eyes to roam his surroundings, trying desperately to ignore the evil woman's viperish nails that petting the back of his neck with sharp strokes.

Not too far from him the score of undead ghouls still surrounded him like a pack of wounded predators eager to feast. That was when his eyes landed on a strange but alarming sight. The crumpled mess of empty neoprene garb where a familiar pair of kimoyo beads lay along with a domino mask. Ivory feathers flapped in the pale moonlight as a small dark shape shifted, giving light to a beak and beady eyes. A second passed, maybe two, but it was enough time for reality to once again lay a cruel fact upon the hawk as he stared upon the enchanted swan. "Selina…"

A vertiginous pulse mephitically suffused in a rampant- nauseous wake; as the Brooklyn drawl of Steve's exhausted timbre brushingly graced a tentative-brotherly caress of telltale urgency over the lithe svelteness of her deadened form. Blurrily, Selina warded off arrestive onrushes of knifing contractions; lithely dragging her mahogany-tipped ivory feathered wing in blinded precision, slumberous grogginess feverishly overlapped her vision as she deftly gripped onto shreds of tactical neoprene that restrictedly encompassed over her lady-bird form. Involuntary, with a conscious variance of her tempered mobility, Selina eased the delicate-sleekier curvatures of her feathered head queasily off the putrid rancidly of clumped dirt."S-Steve..." she murmured against threaded breaths, raspily. "Ooh..."

"I got you," the feathery hawk reached out his talon-feathers to try and gently steady the swan on her webbed feet. The world spun and they held tight not to fall into a spiraling daze of dizziness. But the waking reality they were facing didn't change the irrefutable fact that they weren't human. Not any more. The Enchantress had done the very thing she had sworn to do to Thor, and perhaps Bucky. "Stay with me," he trilled beneath his beak. He could feel the Vanaheim witch's shadow looming over them and knew that whatever control she had over them was about to be exerted. "Just play along, we'll get out of this." He urged the swan.

As Steve's lengthy feathered wing chastely ghosted pacifying heat over the svelte lankiness of her elongated neck; against the cursive raid hear-splitting of her morphic deviance, gawkily on her black-webbed feet, involuntarily the Venetian swan braced the fringe of her mahogany-tipped wings over the roughened bark of a tree, voluptuous-feathery- exquisiteness of her ravishingly-enchanted sylphlike form unstintingly eased with balletic traction of her wonkier footing, as her autumn-brandy irises mistily gleamed with the naked rawness of evicted alarm. "S-Soldier boy..." she rasped out voiceless heaves, and distressingly gazed at Avenger-hawk's lithe contours strikingly adorned with bluish-slivery feathers that virilely contrasted with streaks of blonde-he was adamantly gorgeous for a patriotic bird. "Can't say I'm liking your new look..." she bantered with a, flintier pitch, sultrily, nothing detracted her brazen play of deadpanned snarkiness. "I guess we did rattle the witch's cage, huh?"

Before Steve could respond he was blasted by a field of green sorcery that ensnared him like a noose. He didn't struggle this time, finding he had almost no strength left to resist the Enchantress' wrath as she levitated him off the ground and held him directly in front of her. Her green eyes, beautiful but vicious, smiled at him as she clicked her tongue, ready to command him.

"You will not defy me, dear Captain..." Flexing her gauntleted wrist, vitriolically, against a raving hiss, with kneading ministrations, Amora brushed her index finger in a possessive succession over Steve's curved beak, as telekinetic pulses of verdigris skeins of energy bone-grippingly infused his tuffed feathers, the predatory steeliness of his azure orbs blanked owlishly with astral heat of her resolve incarnate as he flappingly thrashed his wings. "Embrace the shackled dregs of your wretched form," Waspishly, she cast a sidelong glance at the snowy feathered lady-bird uneasily nesting on her ripped tactical garb."...or I will destroy James Barnes's adoring swan maiden without a flit of consequence..."

Her threat breached his defiance and Steve felt himself brought even lower to a point he could find no means of fighting back. The evil woman wasn't just powerful but also cunning in her way of manipulation. Steve was never a man willing to sacrifice the lives of those he fought with and cared for. He would be the one willing to lay down on the wire and let the others climb over him. Selina didn't sign up for this. Neither did Bucky. But as he watched the creature that was Selina discreetly begin to waddle her way towards the woods, he knew that sometimes the path to victory meant temporary defeat.

The swan was a symbol of purity to the world and one that a deadly hawk would dutifully protect, even if it meant taking the fall. Gazing into the Enchantress' eyes, Steve found his resolve to hoped to God that he was making the right decision. "All right...You got me." The mental barriers he used to protect himself shattered like glass in that instance, and the Enchantress' raw power consumed his mind, causing him to let out an ear-splitting screech into the night skies.

Harnessing the furtive collectiveness of her inventive precision, thievingly Selina reached for her iPhone, conveniently the electronic device was still intact as she briskly hefted up her feathery wing, gliding the length of her ivory skeins with virtuosic delicateness over the phone's tinier keyboard; every hazardous-dicey- second felt atomically rigged against insatiable-ghoulish mayhem concussively encompassing the forested warren, she couldn't allow the grief-stricken Asgardian newcomers to become demonically harvested for Amora's zombified death-walkers. "This better work..." she gritted thinly, sending an'urgent text' message to Wanda's dialing number as she gazed at the Avenger-hawk soaring upwards as he propelled out his wingspan like jet-rushing warbird above her. "Bring the heat, Wands..."

As the brackish stench of Norwegian sea refreshingly sailed from the darkened cliffside, mossed-sheathed henges of the ancestral Viking tribes bordered the craggy edge, dolmens engraved with the runic- circular sigils of the Bi-Frost. It was a transcendental-gateway that branched from the cosmic veins of Yggdrasil, a conductor that Odin had electrifyingly utilized when he descended to Midgard during the Bronze Age of Scandinavian warcraft-now historic sentinels of Viking lore-forgotten -hellacious emergence of mortal strife that vented on the carrion-razed grounds of bloodshed.

Carrying the incarnate mantle of his beloved father wouldn't valiantly define Thor's sired-thunderous- reign of being a true son of Odin, all traitorous errors-deception- that conceived his bloodline needed to be staunched out: for good.

Clutching onto the knotted-Groot arm- handle of Stormbreaker with a voltaic flex of his pudgier cloth-sheathed hand, broodily Thor registered lament knells of Nordic ambiance -orchestral requiems to grant worthy passage for the befallen souls of Asgard to the gloriously majestic halls of Valhalla (Valhöll)-where the victorious-noble-hearted slain of Asier journey into vales of eternity after crossing the rivers of Fólkvangr-the banks of his mother's reign.

Countless lives of his displaced people were tragically cleaved apart when the merciless alien executioners- the Black Order had bloodthirstily massacred Asgardian refugees on the transport ark vessel that Loki had stolen from the freakish-crazed Grandmaster during Korg's gladiator ranks uprising—by the vaticinal helm of the 'crab-sack' Mad-Titian, who impaled a genocidal pandemonium of traumatic-butcherous devastation within the decimated transport ship, all to obtain the energy cube-Tesseract- because of Loki's insidious-damnable play of sabotaging trickery. He defeatedly lost his brother under the skull-crushing grip of Thanos's colossal deliverance of neck-breaking mercy.

"The sun will shine on us again, brother...'

Grunting raggedly, as Bucky stubbily trotted down the hillside notches of eroded stone, as his warred resistance became numbingly deadened against the catatonic-fattening divergence of unabated hunger throes; he churningly felt the morphic bloatedness of Amora's penetrative-abdominous witchery was exponentially outstretching the protrusive rotundity of his girth into squishier flab—nothing availed.

"Grah...I kinda feel like a furry marshmallow," Bucky quipped snarkily, as fissionable onrushes of his untrammeled appetite crescendoed in a stuporous wake as the nectareous sugariness of juicy plums had arrestingly revamped his gluttonous impulse piggily ravage the backpack of rations strapped .

Jutting the furred length of his tusked- snout, Bucky demandingly nudged against Thor's booted calf, against the unalterable strain of his tactless aggression, he gnawed ornerily at threadbare leather, biting the ratty material with harsher tugs. "C'mon Thor..." he grunted in raspier timbre, snobbishly."Quit hoggin' everything to yourself..."

"This is where my father said Asgard is not a place but people..." Thor sniffed in a grumblier resonance, sullenly, digging his pudgy sheathed hand into the backpack, rummaging for another beer can. "Odin vanished into dust specks because Loki stripped his Asier power and banished him before I had a chance to save him ...Everyone I loved is gone, for some twisted miracle, I endure because that's what failures do..."

Unkemptily tresses of shaggier brunette errantly clung over his puckering snout, as he glaringly drove the grayish-sapphire of his unwavering irises at the bedraggled Asgardian ZZ Top, lifting a crushed beer can sloppily to his bristly -swelled lips with glugged moan. "Y'alight Thor..." the sniper boar drawled, throatily in murmurous grunt, quashing down an oinking breath, as he sniffed telltale wetness-angst dampening greasily over Thor's grizzled beard. "Hell, you gotta stop blamin' yourself for what happened..." he treaded, gromlessly in croaky pitch, twitching his furred snout. "What M' try'na to say... uh...we can't let this damn weight gain put us on the ropes..."

A sarcastic chuckle had fluttered past Thor's wet lips that were awashed with the repugnant taste of alcohol. "I don't suffer needlessly, Friend James." He said with a frazzled voice that sounded as if he were half-asleep. "Have you never stopped to think perhaps we are suffering the price of our past misdeeds? Our failures?" His empty expression never left as he stared at a wet splotch in the ground that was revealed by the rivulets of blood on the leaves. As he listened to the hog grunt in apparent confusion, the bloated Asgardian shrugged as he sank back against a tree and slowly slid to the ground. "I've seen the same pain in your eyes-the same remorse of killing so many, and failing so many. How are we not guitless?" He said with a broken voice, so unlike the boastful proud warrior that could inspire legions, but rather like a withered soul close to leaving its empty shell.

Trying his damnedest to ground his bulbous mass, grimacingly Bucky hoofed a brewskie can with sluggish precision towards a stone marker, every collapsible second of undeterred restraint had consumingly saddled him into porcine dregs as his grayish-aquamarine irises dismally gazed at the crestfallen Asgardian Thunderer's flabbier hand indifferently slipping into a frayed satchel that was loosely strapped underneath lumpish pudge of his globbed-up swelled paunch-clutching an irresistible jumbo-sized Kit-Kat bar; his furred snout raptly pinched into a taunted scrunch. "Yeah, it's a question that kinda pops in my head," he quipped in throatier pitch, dryly. "Guess a kid from Brooklyn never quits..."

With a cautious wabble, innately Bucky hankered down on his chubbier backside near the massiveness of Thor's bulked-Aesir solidity, emitting a half-exhausted grunt. "I know bad things are gonna keep happenin' to guys us.." he admitted ruefully, angling his snout down with heart-racking ease. Thor was the heir of Odin-a true champion of Asgard, not a mechanical-enhanced' Siberian beast machine', surgically condemned to a traumatic -lobotomized penance of guilt-riddled amnesia.

While in a catatonic-bloodstained drift as HYDRA's muzzled ghost sniper operative, he did unforgivable horrors of HYDRA killswitch terminations. Every choked-off scream distorted into an electrical-mechanized frequency of radio static. "You're not damaged goods, Thor, hell, not like me...I've done things you can't shake off..." he grunted with a contemptuous scrunch, despairingly. "If anyone deserves this damn strike-out...It's gotta be me."

A remorseful Thor looked at the hog beside him in a new curious light as he realized his speech was becoming further from human and yet he understood him still all the same. The All-Speak of course afforded him such a blessing, but the Asgardian knew enough to realize that he understood the hog because as the seconds ticked by he was succumbing to the same fate as him. He knew his words of despair had inadvertently caused his friend emotional pain by reminding him of unwilling sins from the past. Thor leaned towards him with a hand raised. "James, you cann-aauggh!"

It was as if he had been pierced by a knife in the darkness. The jolt of agony that ripped through his body was unseen, dark, and cold. The bloated Asgardian king tumbled over onto his side with a hand held against his massive gut. His bluish-gray eyes were wide with his lips pressed tight into a harsh grimace. It spoke volumes of the discomfort surging throughout his body that he wouldn't abate. "I-I can't without it any longer." He groaned, spasming as his flesh became enveloped in patches of fur spreading like wildfire across his body. The hog in front of him oinked and looked on in distress.

A tremulous aura of voltaic heat pulsed flashingly over the furrier pudginess of Thor's fisting hand, as the bladed Uru edges of his Stormbreaker ax, became disarmingly cemented into the ground. In gut-lurching reaction, Bucky wobbled back, as rampant pants of oinkish cadence snortingly vented out of his upturned nostrils, as the floored rawness of his beadier aqueous depths trepidatiously narrowed at the bloodied-mutative extensions of Thor's jutted incisors freakishly crooking out of his quivery underlip with bone-splintering traction. Nakedly, a possessive barrage of sorcerous anguish forced his globous rotundity into deadweight, the strained material of his lounge pants tearingly ripped as excessive-lardier mounds of glozing flesh became alarmingly pinkish as skeins of blonde fur hedged over his muscled thighs.

Underneath the ratty muss of Thor's straggly braided dreadlocks, the rounded flesh of his ears floppily widened into a beastly length of the morphic accord, groaning out pained breaths raggedly, in vertiginous-uncontrollable tempo, he anchored the fleshier bands that melded his bulgy forearms with heavier momentum as phalange bones of his deforming hands split into an engorged mass that irrevocably fused into a bloodied obsidian hoof. Convulsively in blinded distress, the hulkish Asgardian warrior-king flailed spasmodically within his rumped garments against the ballooning wake of porcine obesity as the sagged of bearded jaw grossly fused with blondish-gray fur —emitting out snorty -guttural heaves, Bucky urgently nudged his tusked snout into cushiony globbiness of Thor's blimped-out girth. "You gotta fight this...Damnit." he grunted, pressingly."C-Can't let her win..."

"D-Damn you, Amora…" A disgruntled curse spewed past his drenched lips that spewed saliva onto the floor. A heaving lurch rattled his rotund mass as he struggled to right himself. Instead, the blondish furry pig released a choking roar and emptied the contents of his stomach all over the ground in a violent spasm. "Aarrgggghh...What was that- that I ate?" Thor mumbled. He felt considerably lighter and more focused. This wasn't his first foray into the realm of transformation, but he couldn't recall it being this unpleasant in the past. He listened to the groan of disgust coming from his porky companion and flashed him a friendly smile. "Ready for another adventure, my new friend?" He waddled forwards bumped his mass against Bucky's shoulder in what would've been the human equivalent of a pat on the back.

Emitting a derisive grunt, with an onerous scrunched wrinkling his tusked snout, Bucky uttered out 'ooph' as he backslid wobbly on his stubbed hooves against the burlier Asgardian hog's affable momentum flabbily ramming into the humped blobbiness of his tensing shoulders. Keeping himself poised with tactical impassiveness, he became attuned to forested dissonance of nocturnal denizens that ravenously marked their paunchy-hoggish forms into a kill-zone. His floppy-spaded ears twitched on a defensive accord with a cautious tilt of his snout. "Yeah...Okay we gotta make sure that we're not really..." He oinked moodily, with a droolier breath globbing over his puckered underlip, and shifted his aquamarine depths towards a notched dolmen shadowing the cliffside-they needed to hide fast."... being followed, cause I get the feelin' those attack dogs are gonna us on helluva of a run..."

"Verily. Amora won't rest until she has us strung up and ripped apart by her ghouls." Thor added which did nothing to soothe Bucky's increasing anxiety over their situation. For his part, Thor only appeared as bothered as if his favorite shoes had been stained. The Asgardian boar was of course larger than Bucky in both stature and mass. His natural height and weight had apparently transitioned over to his new form which meant he was not an entirely helpless hog waiting to be gutted. But it also meant couldn't be as stealthy and would make it much easier for their pursuers to catch on to. As Thor waddled between the trees with Bucky beside him, they found it harder to make their way through the darkness that seemed to stretch for miles until they stopped dead when a screech pierced the night skies.

A galvanic pulse of visceral urgency had electrifyingly imploded over towering pines, as whitish auras of moonlight ethereally flashed over a hawk-like silhouette that predatorily sailed above them with vigilant precision; it was definitely a raptor-hawk. Stretching out his flesh-gouging talons to deliver a lashing strike, the feathered intruder screechingly readied for a dive-bomb sweep, his vitreous-azure orbs widened into a soulless back as he slashingly delivered his attack over the chubbiest boar's furred rump, viciously thrashing his dagger-edged wings in fiercer-blinding succession. "Y-You're not gonna run..."

Thor released a gut-wrenching squeal that before none would expect to draw from the Asgardian Avenger. The knife-digging excruciating pain of talons ripping into his furry flesh sent licks of white-hot agony through his body that couldn't be ignored. The stinging pain was like a scolded burn that pulsed and took on a life of its own as the hog grunted and heaved, throwing himself back into the shadow of the trees while Bucky did the same. "Stay out of sight," Thor groaned, shuddering as the pain slowly began to subside but leaving him feeling shaken by the suddenness of it. What the hell had just attacked him? That was no ordinary hawk.

Unkemptily, as his shaggier chestnut tresses strayed over the jowly pudge of his tusked snout, banking down his tenacious-hellbent spirit, with combative tack, Bucky enforced his wobbling pace a breadth underneath a canopy of pined branches as he reacted to the sky-diving aggressiveness that swoopingly over them; a whipsawed assault of raptor-like talons cuttingly dragged bloodied treks over furred lumpish of globbiness of Thor's exposed back."Damnit..." A half-drawn grunt scathingly rented out of the Brooklyn hog, as he furrowed the overlapping flab of his brow into a concentrative pinch, and lowered his blobbier rotundity into a mid-crouch on his cloven-hooves, as jacked-off awareness exceedingly drove the razored coolness of his sniper vision unblinkingly up at the high perch, gazing at their winged attacker-a bluish feathered hawk- latched over a gnarly branch. "There-" he jutted out his snout against a full-throated grunt, breathlessly. "We gotta knock him off..."

"Aye. Leave that to me," Thor took in deep panting breaths, his mind suddenly far from the thought of a warm comfortable couch and a box of pop-tarts and now diving into the thick of confrontation. Literally. His rotund heavy mass was dragged and thrown from its hiding spot as he charged into the trunk of the tree. He threw his waist rather than his head, the heaviest part of his body that could withstand a club. His weight smashed against the trunk of the tree, causing its branches to groan and snap. "Hyraah!" He cried as he did it a second time, harder than the last. The cawing of the hawk pierced the skies as the winged predator lost grip of his perch and fell between the branches, trapped as he tumbled down to the ground.

A strobing onslaught of phosphorus white blindingly racked through him, numbingly akin to high-voltage of a kimoyo taser; against a careening headrush, the Avenger-hawk screeched out deafening pitch, arcing the sharpened-edges of his bluish-gray wings to instinctively shield the graven litheness of his feathery girth. "Argh...T-Thor-" he choked out stammeringly in Brooklyn timbre, losing defensive grip on his dagger-edged talons, backstroking his wings he thuddingly collapsed on his back. "G-Get out of here...They're comin' fast..."

"...Steve?" Thor and Bucky exchanged a mutual look in their disconcertion. It couldn't be. Had they imagined his voice? Part of them hoped that they had; holding onto the hope that Steve and Selina hadn't suffered the same fates as them. The bird-hawk's feathers were a distinct indigo blue with flecks of azure. His eyes didn't reveal dilated pupils but a distinct awareness-a familiarity that was undoubtedly human. "Damn." Thor cursed with dismay. "I suppose the mission did go off as planned?"

"Y-You gotta run. Both of you," Steve cawed before he suddenly swiped at the startled hog with his wing, causing a gust of soil to swash into Thor's face. "C-Can't fight her...for long," the Avenger-hawk's talons dug into the earth, trying desperately to keep himself rooted and not surrender to the urge to pierce the pig's throat with his beak. "B-Buck...Selina, she…"

"Steve, my friend..." Tamping down a heart-knifing throb at the alarming revelation at his shield-tossing-teammate-friend- was morphically downsized into a predatory bird, Thor curbed down the unwarrantable tenor of onrushing defeat that was skyrocketing into detonative acceleration as reality became tectonically fissionable like he was trudging on depth charges; an empyreal convergence of psionic aster eldritchly scythed over the Bi-Frost dolmen henges—the earthen conductors of the Nine Realms—the deistic vitality of the All-fathers. "We must stop Amora's madness..." Thor grunted, boomingly, as he stomped his chunkier forehoof with hammering momentum over the hawk's thrashing wing. His cerulean depths grew fiercer alight with turbulent intensity as bluish-white of voltaic heat stormily pulsed as he gazed at his Titian-slayer battle-ax. "We need to fight together..."

Bating out a tremulous breath as she registered distressing screeches emanating out of Steve's beak, daintily Selina waddled out of the shadowed underbrush; the cool satiny pearlescence of her milky-white feathers ethereally contoured against the sleekier-fineness of her curvaceous girth, making her appear like an untouchable sirenic incarnate against the radiance of moonlight that burnished over the svelte arc of her mahogany-fringed wings. Involuntarily with practiced variances of her balletic graces, she twirlingly pivoted on her webbed-feet; her dark irises captured vaporous glyphs energy merging with the dolmens-a beacon point to lure the zombied swarm at their proximity-they were the fresh appetizers. With a brusque snap of her beak, she quipped under breath, snarkily. "This is better a good thrill...'

Slung lankily over the delicate curves of her graceful neck, knotted scraps of neoprene concealed the salvaged arsenal of Wakandian kimoyo beads; the skeletal Élivágar cavalcade was hellishly swarming their advance as she caught the vomitous reek of decayed-wormy flesh stinkily assailing over the northward forest."The spooky party is coming fast, boys..." Selina prompted in threadier pitch, raspily, as the clangourous volumes of corpse-worn armor deafeningly amplified in rabid-berserk succession. They pegged in a warzone.

Incredulously, Selina flashed her dark-brandy irises at the heart-devastatingly sight of two obesely blimp-out hogs; the furrier grayish-chestnut boar dumbfoundedly stretched his jowelly underlip agape, hitching out nasally snorts. "James..." Against the mirrored cadence of irrevocable-stunned- breathlessness, with ephemeral coolness of her feathery wing, Selina achingly caressed a phantom brush of visceral-sensuous reverence over a shagged thatch of wolfish brunette fur that grungily draped over the chubbier folds of his tusked-snout.

"Don't say anything..." she coaxed, breathily, edging her delicate beak shiveringly over the bulging flab of his sagging cheek with nameless urgency as she tearily gazed into mesmeric frostiness of his aquamarine irises-gliding the headier silkiness of her curved feathers kittenishly over his swelled underlip, even behind the fattish grossness of his beastlier-hoggish form, undeniably she reached for him."Well, you do make an exception for an oinking chubb-ball..."

The sudden appearance of the ivory-feathered swan caused Bucky's mind to ground to a halt as he entered total shock. If the appearance of the hell-diving hawk turning out to be his best friend wasn't alarming enough, the presence of the mesmerizing swan speaking to him with the voice of the woman he loves pushed things over the edge. "Selina?!" He was equal parts amazed but also saddened by what his kitten had endured. This chaotic mess had delivered one tragedy after the other to him and his teammates but now that they were together, even as transformed animals, Bucky couldn't help but feel mildly reassured. He took in the swan as she waddled forwards towards him, pausing near a shrub of bushes where the moonlight offered a clear view.

Even in the dim-night, he could see trace amounts of her in the swan's stature as she c*** her head at him. He couldn't help but release an amused grunt. "Its a good look on you, darlin'." In an attempt to lighten the mood, his countenance turned playful. "Does this mean you'll be layin' some eggs soon? I mean, it has been a few days since we…" He let that comment hang in the air for her to grasp, and he half wondered what sort of sassy comeback she'd deliver to him in her new form.

"Better play down a different card on that, handsome..." Selina retorted against a laconic breath, snarkily and with a blithe quirk of her beak, utilizing distractive-ambivalent coolness of her lithe poise, vehemently, she played deviant nonchalance as the gravelly suaveness of his oinking timbre became arrestingly evident to Bucky's toothily smirk that conveyed piggish-boyish- dorkiness as he unabashedly snorted out a throaty chuckle. Dazedly, on his cloven-hooves, feigning a heavier wobble, angling his furred snout Bucky headily nudged a chaste tracery of amorous pressure over her wing—just enough to feel her with virile sweetness; the contrast addicted her as every moist graze of his snout nakedly invested a tangible-cherishing reverence of over her ivory feathers. Giving him a sardonic glare of tigerish- brandy, Selina teasingly whirled around on her webbed feet with a subtle vixenish sashay that unnervingly flitted her tail feathers. "Careful, Barnes, I might enjoy keeping you guessing..."

"I'm rather good at this guessing you speak of..." The rotundest of the ensorcelled-warrior- hogs interjected in gruffer pitch jocosely, easing his brawlier weight off the Avenger-hawk's slacken wing; Thor gruntingly shifted his vitric- cerulean depths at the infuriated-bodacious-swan maiden who pointedly knifed him with a dead-straight glare of her rapt disgust, as he smugly gestured a forehoof intently at the neoprene sash that readily adorned over the busty curves of her feathered girth."I like feisty lady-bird of yours, friend James, she can gladly join us the battle..."

"Knowing her, I'd say she's a few steps ahead of us, Thor." Bucky impishly praised her with a knowing glint in his blue eyes. Those who underestimated a cat and tried to cage them were met with claws when they least expected it. Before he could continue with his line of thought, the group became alert to the snarling noises of undead drudgery encroaching on them.

"Unfortunately, so are they." Steve cawed with a painful grimace as he hid his head between his wings. The telltale sliver of sorcery creeping up his spine was like a knife being dragged upon his skin, warning him that his oppressor wasn't quite through trying to reign him back in. "We-We can't stay out in the open like this," he flapped his wings furiously, perching himself up on a rock to get a good view of the 100 or so undead Asgardians that were trudging towards them.

He knew their chances of defeating a score of monsters like this was small if not impossible in their current state. But he knew there were different ways to fight and outsmart the enemy.

As the miasmal fumes of carrion flesh stinkingly assailed over their exposed proximity, Selina quickly unknotted her neoprene sash, revealing her Wakandian arsenal. "Yeah, it's not much to beat the dodge with boys..." she quipped under breath, ruefully, and with painstaking ease of unhampered reaction, she grazed her feathered wing shiftily over the vibranium EMP bead, activating a nano pulse wave as the nsibidi sigils glowed bluish amethyst in sonic fruition."We need to keep these worm-fests distracted from reaching Tubby's new home..."

"You know I love it when you come prepared to a fight, darlin', but I'm not so sure its gonna be as easy as that for us." Bucky sighed with a pitch of anxiety creeping into his bones. His hoggish form gave him something of a sixth sense when it came to observing the world around him. He could hear as far as the wind blew, and what he was hearing was the gnashing snarls of ravenous hunger that begged to be sated. Those ghouls were undead and hunting them down, and something told him they weren't in the mood for birds on the menu. Thor for his part didn't appear too bothered which probably meant he was too used to these sort of scenarios involving monsters. 'Well good for you, blondie.' Bucky thought with a touch of annoyance. "We need a plan of attack. Steve?" Bucky asked their new eyes and ears in the sky who seemed to be in deep thought.

"Enchantress wants us to feel helpless into what she made us. Wants us to give up and become chow or her puppet on strings; prove to the world that we're all muscle and no spirit. I say we prove her wrong." The hawk snaps his gaze to his friends, an elusive swan, a headstrong pig, and a reckless boar. They had their strengths and weaknesses, but together they could prove to be a devastating combo, and maybe-just maybe, they could aggravate Amora enough to get her out into the open.

"Someone needs to play the hag's mark of interest..." Selina murmured cunningly, gesturing a wing intently on readied accord at the blondish furred-dumpier Asgardian boar who sloppily munched on pieces of granola bar that he undoubtingly snagged out the raided backpack. "Time to work up your fast charm, Tubby..." Gritting against sardonic breaths, she angled her taut beak with a fleering smirk, challengingly. "Or maybe you should roll on your back for a belly rub..."

Thor released an uncharacteristic snort that the others weren't sure was a chuckle or a scoff as he finished chowing down his snack. Bucky half-wondered where he was keeping these granola bars he seemed to be pulling out of thin-air. Steve shook his head at their candor and began to flap his wings to gain altitude. "Just don't get killed out there. Your best weapon is to evade and distract. Bucky and I will draw as many of Enchantress' bogies away from the city. Thor we need you to draw her out into the open. And when she is...that's your cue, Selina." Steve could feel the unease rolling off of Bucky's shoulders at the thought of Selina putting herself so close to that witch's wrath.

But as a swan, she had the best chance of all of them at getting close to Amora. Once Steve flapped away into the skies, Bucky hesitated a moment to follow after him as he shifted his dismal gaze to the ivory-feathered swan. "You gonna be all right, darlin'?" He asked worriedly.

Despite they were on the conjured fringe of butcherous throes of a nightmarish warzone, smirkingly as Selina heard the pudgy sniper-hog's murmurous drawl edged with suaver a timbre, in a naked-headier contrast of unabandoned precision invested with the feather-light pressure of her wing, she caressed his drizzly snout in reverent tempo; she pillowed her tinier head against cushy flab of his cheek, stoking up an implosive rush of breakneck adrenaline. "Don't worry about me, handsome..." she urged, bluntly, as he grunted in fervent strain, cravingly riding out another duel of heartbeats with her. "Besides when do I ever get caught..."

"Never before, so don't start now." He murmured against her slender neck. He immersed himself in their intimate proximity, and the comfort it brought him to know that no matter what forms they were in, they were together. But as he listened to Thor's anxious grumbling while the snarling undead drew closer, Bucky knew that they couldn't stay this way for too long. "See you soon, kitten." With that, Bucky watched her flap away to carry out her role in this plan. Thor meanwhile released a deep grunt as he stepped out into the clearing to face the oncoming horde.

In an undeterred measure of teeming seconds, verdigris salvos of telestic energy blindingly lanced through forested darkness; cacophonous banshee-like screeches of demonic rabidness emanated out berserker unison 'army of one' as greenish-acid sigils veined over mottled skeletal flesh underneath gnarled layers of black chainmail as the Élivágar ranks ghostily mobilized to battle-charge their first wave of terror assault on the seaside ridge. Helmed deformities of jutted cheekbones lolled on iron-armored shoulders erratically, as hollowed-out visages of Odin's slain-honorable warriors who defended the citadels of Asgard had tragically become the Enchantress's wraith slayers-vessels of her conquesting-massacring butchery as their leathery fingers thrust up warped edges of Nerco spears, hailing to usher tides of slaughterous carnage. "T-This can't be..." Thor grunted breathlessly, staring at the disgraced fallen.

In the midst of Thor's sorrow over his fallen brethren, a cinder-furred hog and a blonde hawk charge towards the ghoulish horde by land and air. The cold night air nipped at them with the roaring wind smothered by the monstrous groans carried by the horde. They numbered in over two dozen, men and women charged with building a new settlement on the outskirts of New Asgard until Amora's deathly magic sucked away their life-force and then reanimated them as lifeless constructs. They were spread out to cover more ground on the barren fields, which made it easier for the hog and the hawk to run through them.

Bucky suppressed the knife-digging fear that came with the anticipation of being tackled and ripped to pieces as he charged through the numerous walking undead, stealing their focus as they gnashed their teeth and snarled at him in pursuit. Others were unprepared for the bird of prey swooping down on massive wings only to dig its talons into their eyesockets and scrape the dead flesh from their withered faces. Aerial combat was something Steve never felt comfortable at, preferring to keep his feet on the ground, but as he dived, attacked and retreated he found himself falling into an easy pattern that enabled him to carry out their diversion.

"Whoa!" Bucky squealed as he saw three undead prepared to block his path as they converged on his location. He didn't need to turn around to know that he was being surrounded. Acting on sheer adrenaline, the hog continued his break-neck pace and barreled right through the calves of a construct, causing its limbs to tear completely by the sheer force of his charge. Bucky ignored the gruesome feeling that wafted through him and continued on his path. He looked upwards to see Steve circling the horde, cawing at them in loud piercing volume. "We got em', Steve!" Bucky grunted as he realized the horde had their entire focus on both him and Steve and not on Thor and Selina.

With a serpentine variance of her encroaching pace, bedizened in her emerald cloaked garment, as the intricate winged-curved headpiece aesthetically fused over the sleekness of her cheekbones, skeins of viridian-Nordic- runes etched hypnotically giving her an ophidian visage of a tyrannic cobra; Amora haughtily sidestepped discarded remnants of chainmail armor melded with sloughed bones that dissolvingly glozed with tarry resin that viscidly seeped into mud-dampened earth; gripping onto the leather-buckled straps of Captain America's vibrainum shield, tauntingly Amora upped her seized Midgardian trophy as the alloy deflected off whitish scones of moonlight as her steel-grayish irises covetously became fixed on Nidavellir forged ax-Stormbreaker- a harvester weapon of mortal cleansing.

"It seems you have lost your worthiness as that fattened Dwarven vessel conceived by my will, Odinson..." A viperish sneer wickedly tempered over the voluminous swell of her ashen lips, as she glared at the porkier blondish-furred hog, who slouchily dragged the bulbous expanse of his protrusive underbelly over emptied Élivágar helmets. "By your continuous failures..." Vauntingly, Amora gestured her lithe fingers over skeletal dregs of carious flesh. "You have damned those wretched souls of your craven realm to become gutted out by my Twilight legion..."

The hollowness of the abyss he felt within himself and made Thor feel lifeless for the past few years. Ever since he lost his home, his lover, his friends, his family...his brother. He had tried to fill that void by indulging in gluttony and discord. But the pain never abated. If anything, his string of failures had seemed to become a constant as he found himself without the will to raise himself up from his pit of squalor and self-pity. That was until a fateful meeting with his mother-compassionate Friggia-across time and space and set him back on a path towards resurgence. The way back to fighting strength was a path to becoming worthy again-worthy of the thunder, of becoming king of Asgard.

"Failed?" He huffed with a deep snorting breath. "Perhaps I did once, allowing my rage to blind me to my duty. Of being decisive as my father taught me to. But I am not Odin, Amora. Nor am I any longer the Thor you would charm with honeyed words and love potions. I am an Avenger." The boar stomped his hooves, grunting with such ferocity, the ground shook as a clap of thunder roared in the heavens, unsettling the Vanaheim sorceress. "And If I must die to save what remains of my brethren, so be it. But I won't be going it alone!"

Dredging up his thunderous ferocity that jacked through his bulgy flab, ragingly on his cloven-hooves, with an immense onrush of his full-strength resilience of battle-honed gnarl, bearishly Thor propelled his unstoppable momentum into headlong-charge of apparent ramming, heftily angling the jutted curves of his tusks with flesh-gouging precision into her ironclad calf. Animalistic hostility was notching-up as the blondish grizzly hog snorted in ragged-guttural abandoned.

Not wavering in her grounded footing, cobra-quick readiness, Amora slithery caught his reckless trajectory of defensive intent, evading his bull-rushing pace. "If you dare to strike me down, Odinson your wretched friends will serve to feed my legion..."Amora fumed, seethingly, gazing at the voltaic embers of his whitish-cobalt irises become searingly electrified-the uncontainable-untamed vitality of Asgard -lightning of the Nine Realms was infinitely converging through him.

Bracing against the heavier gusts of Thor's hoof-stomping momentum, as her platinum-blonde tresses whip-lashed over her tensing jaw, venomously, Amora flexed a gauntleted hand with conducting prowess-orchestrating her rhapsodic symphony of blood-smeared mayhem. "Perhaps you must endure a graver reality of true defeat when I snuff out the heart of valor you have anchored onto ..." she hissed out with crazier pitch, ravingly, gazing at the hellbent sniper-hog aggressively punctured a bonier torso of a zombied Élivágar soldier with screwdriver precision of his tusked snout, blackish-oozier sludge of glopping leathery flesh pulpily hung over crimped armor. "Or should I chasten, dear James, further into his gluttonous oblivion...?"

Gliding over the battlemented corpse-infested warren, stealthily against exhilarative rushes that surged over her ivory wings, become a white silhouette of ethereal radiance against nocturnal contrasts of shadow cuttingly Selina flapped with diving graces in an instinctive succession of weightless momentum, keeping her black-webbed feet tucked under the silken velvetiness of her tail feathers as involuntarily she registered tremulous quakes that ratcheted ground-deep, vaporous tentacles of Eldritch-mephitic energy had cyclonically morphed into obsidian-verdurous Nerco spires that deafeningly jutted out with bursting force creating an obstructive bulwark, that chased her exposed flight path."I guess it's gonna be a hard play..." she quipped, breathily, narrowing her dark irises calculatingly at Thor's derailed position. "Great..."

Thor felt the power of the thunder surging throughout his boarish body, engulfing him with the might of a thousand storms. But without the physical strength of his Asgardian body to channel his power, he was like an electric eel aimlessly moving about in the hopes of striking his oppressor. Amora was cunning, swift and knew him well enough to anticipate his maneuvers. He did not expect to defeat her on his own.

With her focus squarely concentrated on himself, it left her blind to all that surrounded her such as the ivory swan diving towards her for an attack. Only to his dismay, he watched as the Enchantress proved herself more attentive than he had given her credit for as she maneuvered and struck Selina with a compulsion spell, causing the swan to drop the beads held by her beak and to wander listlessly off. An evil cackle wafted from Amora's emerald painted lips, mocking their efforts to subdue her.

"Enough, Amora! This is between you and I!" Thor stomped his hooves into the ground with such anger it caused a bolt of lightning to strike a tree, setting a fire into the night. The cawing of a hawk breached the chaos as Steve circled the field and made a desperate dive to retrieve the kimono beads that Selina had dropped. But Enchantress' eyes followed him with a gleam of malice.

Against the feverish periphery of her vision, scowlingly Amora gazed at the Avenger-hawk razoring the length his wingspan over barren heaps of smoldering armor; she hefted up the shield, white forks of electrified heat discharged in atmospheric succession as cosmic energy of Yggdrasill galvanically impaled branches through anvil-sized of thunderheads dauntingly looming over the Northern horizon. Carnally with unslaked vulturous thirst, she flashed Thor a viperish sneer as implosive seismic tremors became a distraction in the damning wake of her sorcerous mantra that balefully resonated in commenting tenor, as reddish-astral- glyphs of a destroyer incantation demonically arced over her flexing hand. 'La krigerånden gi etter for dødelig nederlag ...(Let his warrior spirit yield to grounds of mortal defeat...)"

"NO!" Thor released a chilling squeal as arcs of nefarious sorcery shot towards the hawk with the precision of a lance cutting through the air. The hawk had no time to react before he was struck mid-air with the burning grip of eldritch magic ravaging him from the inside out. A strangled cry ripped from his beak, as he spun in concentric circles like a smoking turbine. Time ground to a halt as the second hog watched in muted horror as the hawk that was his best friend began to fall from the skies.

"STEVE!" Bucky squealed, unable to control his stride as he slid across the ground, coming to a stop beside Thor. Down the hawk fell in free-fall, giving neither movement nor sound as he plummeted into the lake where he vanished beneath the surface.

Within seconds of heart-stunned reaction, like a silvery bullet against the gleams of moonlight, irrevocably Selina dove into the darken murkiness of the disturbed lake, urgently she pushed every unbridled limit of her curvaceous form as her feathery wing throbbingly reached through drifts as she deftly scooped up the motionless hawk- that alarmingly became deadweight-she didn't let go. Breaching the surface in a desperate rush against gnarled lashes of muggy reeds, nakedly she felt a visceral tempo of dynamical -brotherly grace; a virtuous heartbeat stoppingly flat-ling against ivory contours of her feathered girth. Angling her delicate beak on the reverent accord, she cradled Steve with tentative hoist over her tremulous wings, as straying heat of feverous wetness errantly dampened his bluish feathers. "S-Steve..." she murmured in choking hitches, sobbingly, feeling no pulse edging back under her unfeigned caress. "W-We can't let this damn hag cheat us out..."

The Hawk couldn't respond with the strength to offer reassurance as he teetered on the brink between life and total darkness. He felt cold, detached from his own body despite the fact he was being uplifted from the cold murky waters that were once a mystical site for the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings that ferried their honorable deceased into the next world. Some called it Avalon, others believed it was a fjord into Valhalla itself between mighty cliffs far ahead. The moonlight streaked across the clear surface, allowing the hawk to look upon his rescuer and release a soft chirp.

"Didn't think cats could swim," Steve said with a weak sense of humor. Amora's magic still burned inside, mercilessly seeking to shutdown his body and reap his soul. "Apparently neither can eagles...She's got us on the ropes, Selina...I don't know if…"

"Hey, we're going to get everything back..." Threadily, Selina urged against gritted breaths, as her brandy irises flitted mistily down at the paralyzed hawk, he was bone-chilled slack in the bow of her silkier wings, the mesmeric vibrancy of his silvery-bluish feathers sickeningly abated, flexion echoes of his invincible-valorous spirit became suffocatingly exorcized as he forcibly strained against the contractive onslaught, thumpingly his tinier heartbeat was fading out-notch by notch.

With subtle pressure of her whisper-soft ministrations gliding over his motionless form, composedly in beckoning variance, Selina gazed at the cool azure of his hawkish orbs soullessly blacken out —the indomitable vitality of the First Avenger was being purged. Reversing direction, Selina assuaged onto definite-unwarrantable relevance of hope, readily shifting the litheness of her bustier girth with evident paddling strokes of her webbed-feet as she reacted to the urgent cadence of her votive-expandable choice, fringing depths; snorting in deep-throat heaves, the beasty sniper-hog rubberily thrashed on his stubbed hooves against Thor's obese rotundity in desperate tenor as Bucky chokingly oinked out his breathless anguish-her unabandoned readiness to save his best friend-little punk, was direly registered in hundredfold. Incandescent auras of the opalescence moonlight had gleamingly haloed over her ivory-mahogany feathers—it was a callback payoff-that would chasmically leash her down into sacrificial elysian. "Whatever it takes, remember..."

"Lina...Kitten!" Bucky released a hapless cry as he watched a brilliant light engulf the lakeside where the ivory swan had cradled the dying hawk against her bosom. It was benign in the sense it offered hope but sorrowful at its expense. It had captured the attention of Enchantress which gave the focused Thor the opening he needed to charge with a brutish grunt, barreling his weight towards the legs of the distracted sorceress, toppling her with such force it was like she'd been hit by a speeding car. Bucky was snapped back into focus, feeling a surge of emotions grip him in the face of watching his kitten vanish in a burst of light only for the shape of a man to emerge from within it.

"She did it…" Bucky oinked, torn between sorrow and gladness but feeling as if he were far removed from this fight as he charged towards the now motionless swan.

The light was unlike anything he had seen before, it made him think he had transcended the mortal plane and entered the next phase of existence. But he could still feel. He could still smell and taste the murkiness of the lake water on his lips. He felt life-he felt freedom from the invisible shackles that had been restraining him for what felt like a lifetime but it had only in fact been a couple of hours. But freedom was priceless, but the price paid for his had been too great to him. Steve Rogers collapsed onto his knees and coughed a small of puddle of water from his lungs. His blurred vision sharpened into focus as the light faded and he was left gazing down into the alarming sight of a motionless swan at his knees.

His knees. Hawks weren't supposed to have the smooth creamy surface of human skin covering bone and muscle. A trembling hand entered his line of sight and he flexed his digits, watching them respond to his will. He was back-he was human. "Selina..." He remembered the swan that had dived into the lake to save him from being swallowed whole. His bewildered features became morphed with sorrow as he laid a hand on the swan's head, tearfully stroking her feathers. "The fight never ends...Thank you." He sniffed, vowing not to let her sacrifice be in vain. His muscles coiled and he repressed a shiver once he realized he was naked. The remnants of his gear was ahead and he took long purposeful strides towards it, jaw clenched with determination. "Whatever it takes..."

Against cacophonous rabidness of the bludgeoned ferocity that bruisingly careened her into the monolithic henge with back-breaking force, ear-splittingly, Amora released a demonic screech, as her fingernails clawed in vicious traction over cindered mulch; she glared at the fattest of the Dwarven hogs' -Odinson with maniacal heat of bloodthirsty lividness, her steely-grayish irises melded into rapine lazurite as she arched her back up with vampiric momentum, as the length of her cloaked garment spookily draped over her braced arms while she clutched onto an ebon Nero-spike, tauntingly leveling the conjured armament with executing precision over the blondish swine's repulsive head. "On this crimson night, the verminous spawn of the Allfather will choke on my reckoning..." Witchily, she hissed, and relishingly drove the spike a hairbreadth from the lumpish sagginess of his furred neck."Your traitorous blood will cleanse my Helheim legion, Thor Odinson..."

Thor could see his end in sight, knowing that he had finally pushed Amora far enough that she was no longer interested in torturing him. Only the feeling of his blood coating her hands would satisfy her sadistic nature as she brandished the spike between her fingers and began to drive it low. His thoughts sped rapidly, allowing him to glimpse many faces he had come to love and mourn. But he felt peace, feeling no sense of failure to fall as a warrior and not as a pitiful hog. That was when his ears detected a buzzing pitch in the background that was as familiar to him as the friendly face it invoked.

*WHAM*

Amora cried out in shock as a cylindrical object smacked into her, causing her to stumble off of the defenseless hog and lose track of her weapon. Thor listened to the telltale sound of metal bouncing off of a hard surface before the object sailed back through the air and into the hands of it wielder. Captain America-Steven Rogers. "YES!" Thor roared with jubilation. Steve didn't relent as he stormed in on his downed foe with his shield in hand, ready for her as she climbed back onto her feet and began to conjure a projectile of magic.

"Y-You dare..." Seethingly in venomous tenor, Amora glowered at the navy-blue Kelvar of a tactical- patriotic uniform that fittingly delineated over corded bulk of graven muscle, surges of enhanced vitality rode every curve of heavier flesh as the avenging-timeless soldier adamantly poised in a mid-crouch with his vibranium shield readily braced over his forearm; like a hunkish Percus who challengingly dared to breach her grotesque domain. The hawkish virility of his chiseled features edged with fiercer sharpness as he unwaveringly grounded a stand of Brooklyn defiance. "So you lost your wings, little warbird..." she lashed out, nastily appalled by his evasive tack of resisting her possessive conjury. "Perhaps you will prevail better in a hoggish form like your dear James Barnes, to wretchedly fatten in your mindless revels while I gut out the swan maiden's worthless heart..."

"You won't be hurting anyone else tonight, Lady." Steve resisted the urge to lash out in anger at her cold taunt. His focused mind watched her movements closely, gauging her for any signs towards her next attack. Amora relied on her wit and cunning to get her opponent to lower their guard. Her horde had been effectively cut off from aiding her when Thor's lightning strike had toppled a burning tree that blocked them. She was alone and Steve wasn't. "Thor?" Steve beckoned to the hog as he climbed up on his hooves and stomped them, causing a rumble of thunder to rattle the skies.

"Aye. Let's make this quick!" With that the Asgardian hog charged, his body like an electrical conduit in motion as it sizzled off his body. The Enchantress grimaced as she opened a small rift for her to escape from while another opened nearby. Steve pitched his spear at the rift, narrowly missing the blonde sorceress as she tuck and rolled across the floor. His shield bounced just in time for Thor to catch it between his teeth and give it an extra added electrical boost-sending it on its continued trajectory towards the Avenger.

Amora engaged Steve in hand-to-hand combat; finding her physical strength to be greater than his as she broke through his boxing guard and landed a palm strike against his torso. *WHAM* She released a cry of both pain and rage as that accursed shield hit her in the back, sending a surge of electricity throughout her body that toppled her to her knees. Steve recovered from his attack and recovered his shield, bringing it upwards in a swinging arc hitting Enchantress beneath the jaw in a devastating uppercut.

"That was for Selina!" Steve hummed with a deep breath. His blue eyes were ablaze and his body burned with adrenaline. Thor charged at a downed Amora only to seize up in a strangled cry as she struck him with a paralytic spell. Steve raised his shield in time to block her assault but could feel the pressure mounting on him.

Bracketing her armored calves with vising sync, rapaciously Amora straddled herself commandingly over the athletic solidity of bulkier tautness fused with his Kevlar midriff investing carnal demand; platinum-blonde tresses sweltry webbed over her exquisite-thinned cheeks as she viciously drilled a pulse-stealing throb with her fingernail into angular contours of his broad jaw that raptly became hard-edged against her injurious-divesting assault. A raptor-like gleam of her steely irises entrancedly belied her merciless intent as the knifing pressure of her ebon-winged headpiece jutted into his bloodied cheek, delivering a waspish sting of penetrative-infectious entity of her sanguineous vengeance.

Gnashing his teeth, forcibly with deadened momentum, Steve hefted up his shield, drawing out ragged heaves as he bashingly clashed his arm-driven thrust of reactive pressure against her throat as her gauntleted palm vitriolically splayed a kneading caress over graven-edged ridges of muscled flesh on wanton accord of her serpentine thirst.

At the shore of the lake, a desperate hog trots into the cold ripples in panting grunts to envelope the seemingly lifeless swan in a sorrowful embrace, spilling rivulets of tears onto her beak. "Come back to me, kitten." He cried, hoping and praying for a miracle to bestow upon them.

On the field, Amora's aggression was something Steve couldn't withstand for long as he could feel her magic begin to pour into once again. Like a knife slowly being dug into his sternum he felt as if struggling would make it much easier for her to cleave through him with her magical shards that dug their way into him. The magic poured through, reshaping his mass into the desired state of the wielder who wanted him to be as vulnerable as his friends on stubby hooves. The mass of cheeks had begun to fatten with patches of golden-blonde fur sprouting from his skin.

"I will savor watching you fatteningly burgeon into a dormant hog, Captain..." Amora raved, dementedly clamping her fingers over his leather-sheathed wrist. Keeping him arrestingly captive in her ravenous throes, she predatorily gazed into the feverish rawness of his glacial azureous irises, oblivious that reddish-magenta flares of psionic energy had telekinetically whooshed over maggoty-skeletal heaps of her subdued ranks. "You will never throw this wrenched shield again..."

"Get away from him..." Blazingly as crimson salvos grew into Eldritch beacons of hellfire, feeling a telepathic rupture pulsing from the astral bridges of Multi-verse plane; earthen barricades of Nerco spires crushingly warped against ignitable shockwaves of kinetic fusion that propelled out of the fiery sling-ring portal-dimensional gateway of occultic convergence. With pythonic swiftness, infuriatingly Amora roved a basilisk glance over her armored shoulder at the auburn-copper haired Slovakian Avenger-a 'scarlet phoenix' who had crushingly quashed the deviant-prophetic Titan-the genocidal equalizer of the Nine Realms into fused contortions of dismantled metal husks: a vengeful cradle of restraint.

Stepping over discarded skulls and ebon spears, playing off a hair-trigger deadlock of her sorcerous challenge, vixenishly Wanda grounded her laced boots near a stone dolmen, as her delicate-elfin waifish features heated bakingly under unkempt tresses draping over her Gothicsque corset, psionic auras of mutative energy fierily veined over burgundy leather of her Burlesque Victorian-steampunk jacket as her eased her wrister-sleeved arm, genetically conjuring a vapory pinkish flare as her irises glowed laser-red. "I said..." She blasted a crimson salvo blindingly into an Einherjar death-walker as skeletal flesh meltingly dissolved into sifts of cindery ash. "Get away from him...!"

"Wanda?" Steve choked out deep breaths, unable to mask his surprise. He could feel his humanity slowly creeping back to him after Enchantress' spell was interrupted by the most unexpected of saviors. He pulled himself up to his knees with his shield in tact while the Sokovian Avenger took point in front of both him and Thor, staring down the infuriated Asgardian sorceress.

"As a friend of mine would say, "you are so screwed now", Amora," Thor boasted with renewed vigor at seeing the second most powerful Avenger arrive (second after him of course, he was certainly still the strongest ever!).

Wading against a denotative fringe of her ruinous-unslaked indulgence, painstakingly in malodorous fruition, Amora shifted on her lithe haunches with a viperish rush against the blubbering-hog- flab that plumpishly stretched under the Kevlar of Steve's inflated midriff and dragged her fingernails on the deceptive tenor of a scorpion-crawl over a helmeted skull as virescent glyphs burningly etched over desiccated bones in conjuring-hellacious unison. "This foolish annoyance will, unfortunately, become a piteous vessel of my craven throes of butchered mercy..." she crackled in sadistic pitch, lashingly easing her gauntleted hand up as the possessed skull grisily catapulted with a vicious thrust of unstoppable gravity akin to a volleyed soccer ball, cannoning down at Wanda like a shell bomb. "You might have cleverly ensnared Thanos within the grips of your faulty power, but make no mistake you will fail this time,..."

With trembling hands that were now free from the shackles of dark magic, Steve picked up his shield and tightened the straps around his forearm. He felt like himself, but more importantly, he felt whole. His calculating blue eyes narrowed on the sorceress who wasn't idle in her attempt to gain the upper-hand despite being outnumbered. Her long dainty digits spiraled and conjured a myriad of emerald glyphs that he surmised was to form a defensive barrier for herself. "We can't let her defenses rebound. Thor-bring the thunder! Wanda, distract her!" Steve urged his team who looked apprehensively at him.

"And you, Captain?" Thor grunted.

"I'll keep her busy." Steve didn't wait for them to agree to his plan knowing that speed was the essence. Each moment they wasted meant their enemy could regroup or retreat. No. This needed to end now. For Bucky. For Selina. Steve charged towards Enchantress and raised his shield just in time to repel a projectile of burning energy that burst towards him from one of the glyphs he was charging through. Hot pain licked at his shoulders but he pushed through barrier after barrier using his shield until his target was in striking-range. Lunging forward, Steve kicked Amora off-balance, allowing Wanda the chances to use her hex-energy to dispel the defensive glyphs surrounding the sorceress.

Amora regained her balance by kipping up to her feet. She feinted a leg-swipe only to land a right-hook to his shoulder. And then another. It felt like being beaten with a club, but Steve reacted in time to raise his shield to block the next attack. Amora roared with pain as her fist struck the most versatile metal in the galaxy, causing spasms of pain to lance up to her shoulder.

"I can do this all day." Steve panted to the infuriated witch who glared at with a newfound hatred to rival that of Thor's.

"I will make you choke on those words," Amora seethed, lividly, her steel-grayish irises pulsed with draconic heat as the First Avenger tensely leveled his shield with controlled poise of combative defense invested with each drag of his footing, a bloodied gash revealingly smeared over his graven-contours of his dirtied cheek as the vigilant flit of his cool azure irises betrayed no deterrence of submission-he wouldn't relent. The orcish cavalcade of her wraithlike Einherjar soldiers was on the implosive breadth of unleashing their apocalypse-run over New Asgard; the miasmatic rabidness of insatiable bloodlust oozily wafted off skeletal flesh-they were bred out of the hellish-phantasmatic cauldron of her portentous witchery to slaughterously raid-out anything that echoed a detected heartbeat on their carious path.

Against vertiginous onrush of dizziness exhaustingly rode bone-deep, Steve grounded his athletic bulk, measuring each predatory-viperish tenor of her shadowed assault, reacting as skeletal fingers of unearthed denizens creepily jutted out of the sludgy ground in manic sync, twistingly clamping onto his Kevlar-padded calves to paralyzingly grapple Steve onto his knees in the accelerated dissonance of a flesh-slashing onslaught. "As much as I desire to allow your Midgardin spirit to prevail, your spirit will become an extension of my reborn army..."

Before she could renew her attack against him, Amora caught sight of the fleeing hog heading to the clearing holding out his hoof. An arc of lightning flashed in the distance and there was a brilliant light being conjured from the ground up to the skies! An impossible act of nature, unless...the Stormbreaker! The Odinson's newly forged weapon sang through the air as it came towards its intended bearer. Amora watched as Thor commanded it from afar, calling down bolts of lighting to scorch the plains where her undead horde had begun to climb over the burning log.

With a screech of rage, Amora sent a whip of eldritch magic towards the hog and ensnared his throat in her talons. Before she could snap his neck and end her vengeful crusade, she was levelled by another blast of that accursed psycho-energy from that upstart Midgardian witch!

"Its over. Surrender!" Steve yelled at Amora as she powered through Wanda's next assault. The witch's furious green eyes landed on him once more.

Harnessing cobra-quick ferocity in the nefarious cadence of her ghostlier prowess, with a geomatic circlet of verdigris energy rotating chimerically around her gauntleted wrist, in a beckoning command of sorcerous unity, thievingly Amora blazoned her veins with the astral gateways of tenebrious vistas of Helheim, rampantly infecting Steve's corded flesh with a benumbed -morphous paralytic of soul-immobilizing deviance she had morbifically conjured to amputate out his pathetic humanity into a languorous-obese vassal of boarish gluttony. "Få ham til å oppblåse sin verdige ånd ... (Make him bloat out his valorous spirit)" The Nordic utterance of her penetrative mantra condemningly assailed over her earthen warren in explosive-damnable frequency. "Let this mortal soldier carouse over the battlefield in ranks of mindless swine..."

Steve knew a cornered animal when he saw one. The unbridled desperation that emanated off of Amora meant the sorceress was through fighting for dominance she was now fighting to survive-or to escape. A reckless state of mind but also a dangerous one that spelled disaster for whomever stood in her way. That being him. She was like a live grenade about to go off. Having experience with such a scenario from so long ago, Steve knew what he had to do-and that was to jump. The emerald sorceress had opened a portal behind her just at the same time she prepared to unleash a familiar spell from her fingertips. It lanced through the air like a javelin, seeking its prey in the form of a battered soldier ready to sacrifice himself for his friends.

Gritting his teeth, the soldier raised his only defensive weapon and clung to it with such strength it caused his muscles to strain against the tight fabric of his undershirt. The projectile slammed against the shield causing a deafening gong to billow out into the field, only for the projectile to be sent back to its source. The sorceress's emerald eyes widened and she had no time to react before her own magical spell struck her down.

"No..." A breathless timbre of railing alarm rubberily deafened into a hoggish grunt, the morphic deviance of her calamitous scourge irrevocably knifed through her stunned veins, defeatedly, squealing in urgent pitch, the Enchantress convulsed in a thrashing upheaval onto her knees as her viper-like incisors bleedingly protruded over the voluminous swell of her jutted underlip; the cascading length of her platinum-blonde tresses dauntingly ebbed out of her deforming skull, evident to a droppy twitch of her floppier ears that widened in swelling-grislier tenor underneath her ebon headgear.

Within rigged seconds, Amora inflatingly felt her the suppleness voluptuous breasts fleshily meld into girthier roundness of her outstretching abdomen -like a prolific sow. Cradling her gauntleted arms frantically over the globular pudge, Amora snorted as viscid mucus gloopily out of her upturned nose that jutted in mutative deformity of a piggish snout as she uglily blimped into an ogrish mass. "You honestly believe you're still victorious, dear Captain..." she emitted a snide rasp, grudgingly, mirroring the niveous coolness of his silvered azure irises, that didn't waver. Flexing his leather-gloved hand, with apparent ease, Steve reined the blondish Asgardian hog with an unshakeable measure of passive 'stand-down' impedance against the electrical surge of high-voltage. "Your precious James Barnes and his swan vixen will endure the rest of their evanescent days as pitiable creatures..."

Steve maintained a stoic facade in the face of the sorceress' words that were meant to diminish her defeat. He gave no reply nor reaction even as Wanda came to stand beside him and the deep panting of an approaching hog came up from behind. Thor and Wanda watched with him as Amora's own magic began to undo her from the inside out; twisting and transforming the beautiful woman into an unremarkable sow no different from the animals she had forced others to become. Her whimpering cries had now transitioned into guttural squeals of distress that unnerved Steve and Wanda, but greatly satisfied Thor as he watched her roll and struggle to move in her new form.

"She was always a sour one in defeat." Thor remarked. What surprised Steve and Wanda was how much more discernible Thor's voice had suddenly become. When they both looked over towards him, the Asgardian hog was shimmering with a benign unnatural glow, no different from the one that had encompassed Steve. "Well now, this is a bit odd…" Thor murmured.

The cacophonous mantra of Eldritch tenor coupled quakingly with a nacreous surge that prismatically emanated over Bi-Frost dolmens; utilizing her sorcerous caliber, Wanda formed a mystic barrier enwreathed over the oafish Asgardian hog as whitish strobes of lightning blindingly discharged over the horizon vistas of the Norwegian coastline, boomingly heralding the apparitional-thunderous resonance of Odin's caroming voice commanded Stormbreaker to raise off the fissionable ground as recalling knells of Asier worthiness launched the Nidavellir battle-ax with skyrocketing momentum.

As electric salvos arced over the repulsive fattening sow-vaporizing her ebon Nerco-spires into smearily misted ash over the furrier sagginess of pudge of her snout, Amora belted out a huffish-voiceless squeal, only to register a hoggish cadence echo back. After receiving an expected text on her Stark-phone, involuntarily Wanda had used a Tiberian sling- ring to pull an undetected vanishing-act out of Manhatten Sanctum Santorum before Master Wong returned from his periodic tuna melt run-Steven Strange had critically instructed to read Kamar-Taj manuscript collections of Eldritch intentions-tapping into subtonic paradoxes the quantum plane. Being a mystical sentry, Wanda understood the unstable measures of her restraint-to never fully pull the pin. "Everything you took from us is now reserved back.." Wanda addressed smirkily with blunted terseness in her Slovakian timbre. "No one will fear you anymore..."

The relief of his enemy's defeat had led to an influx of surprises to the assembled heroes who watched as Thor trotted over towards Stormbreaker. His trusted weapon gleamed in the pale-moonlight, beckoning him closer to its comforting thrawl. The energy humming off its surface made the fur on his body tingle and rise on end. Thor understood what it meant and could not help but to send a silent thank you to the all-fathers and the norns. Thor brushed his snout against the bark handle that was once a limb of his friend Tree. Stormbreaker sparked and a salvo of lightning enveloped him. Instead of feeling pain, he felt relief.

From head-to-toe the vile dark sorcery was purged from his body like an evil poison. He felt himself grow and was now standing again on two feet as the strong powerful man he always was. Releasing a chuckle he could not help but run his hands over his face, finding a wise bushy beard and smooth skin. He was Thor-he was a man. He was...still fat, and very much half-n***. "I miss the spells that could restore my clothing." Thor lamented as he wrapped the torn vestments of his pants around his modest parts and offered Steve and Wanda a sheepish smile. Wanda rolled her eyes while Steve appeared both relieved and thoughtful.

"Not just you," Steve agreed. "But if you were restored, maybe…" he was almost too afraid to hope. It was familiar in a sense of desperation that once the dust settled a wrong could be made right. The lost would be found.

"What?" Thor wondered aloud as he lifted his axe over his shoulder. Instead of saying anything, Steve took off towards the shore of the lake, leaving Thor and Wanda to stand guard over the still squealing sow that was imprisoned in a cage of hex energy.

The skies were now a lighter shade of blue with dawn approaching on the horizon. Steve dashed through the trees, able to find his way easier now despite the clusters of trees and vegetation. His eyes landed on the two shapes nestled close against one another beneath a shade of trees. His feet come to a halt and he feels his breath pause within his chest as he took in the sight of a man and woman locked in a tearful embrace. They were both half-n***, covering each other by their arms circling each others backs. Her face rested against his shoulder as he stroked her hair and the small of her back.

Bucky and Selina lean back long enough to gaze into each other's eyes and then come together again in a passionate kiss. Steve recognized them immediately and had to avert his eyes with a small smirk forming across his lips. "Same ol'Buck." He muttered. He gave the couple a moment before gently clearing his throat. "I'd ask if you two are all right but something tells me you're better than that."

"Don't spoil the moment, Soldier boy..." Selina bantered out snarkily, against the implosive abandon that cravingly surged headier in the gloried tempo as she threaded her lithe fingers brushingly through the unkempt length of Bucky's wolfish chestnut tresses with quenchless urgency as he bracketed chaste pressure of his flesh-hand over the delicate contours of the underside of her jaw, featherily gracing a pulse of amorous heat that swelteringly coupled with the reverent glide of his splaying thumb-the virile strength of his evocative caresses demanded an intoxicating tracery of phantom awareness.

Each tactile drift of his intimate steadiness became a kiss-starved rapture of dueled-boneless serenity contrasting into aphrodisiacal decadence, the mesmeric smokiness of his aquamarine irises had smolderingly beckoned as the ivory skeins of her feathers vanishingly melded into cool pearlescence of her nakedness- the blobby pudginess of hoggish flab tautly dissolved into hunkier corded flesh that sculpted over graven-ridges of his muscled solidity.

The mechanized coolness of his cybernetic arm shiveringly ghosted a possessive rush over the svelte planes of her back as Bucky throatily jutted the open-mouthed stretch of his shapely-wide lips over the glossier lushness of her flushed pillowy lips that delectably cushioned against the shifting drag of his kiss-swollen lips, abandonly moaning in feverous cadence, he bruisingly thrust passion-damp heat, catching her breath with sensuous ferocity as they were floored into liquefying release-deliverance. "B-Buck..." she urged raspily, as the hot wetness of his mouth blindly surged the kiss deeper-not letting her go. "Okay...Slow it down, Barnes..."

Bucky couldn't quite explain what had come over him, but he was like a man who had just come out of the desert dying of thirst. And Selina was freshly drawn water from a well that he just couldn't get enough of. So he had kissed her, drank in her exhalations with mind-numbing relief as he basked in the feeling of her touch, of having her in his arms again. It was heady and addicting-were it not for Steve's presence nearby he had a good feeling of where things would lead to, and he had to repress the groan of annoyance that begged to be released once he and Selina parted lips. He could see the mutual frustration in her eyes and conveyed a silent message to her that spoke plainly, "Later." Once that was done, he flashed his best friend with a sardonic smile. "You always did have impeccable timing, Steve."

"So I've discovered," Steve replied with a guilty smile. Together both Bucky and Selina rise to their feet. His torn pants still fit snug around his waist and he tears off the remains of his shirt for Selina to tie around her chest as a make-shift tank top. They hold hands as they follow Steve out from the tree-line and into the open.

"Its mornin'," Bucky murmurs. They all sigh as a ray of sunlight washes over them, bathing them in a warm feeling of reassurance. The field however is still littered with dead corpses that used to be the people of New Asgard. Steve, Bucky and Selina all become crestfallen at the sight, knowing that their victory had come at a great cost. "Did we win, at least?" Bucky asked Steve who beckons them ahead. They see a surprising sight none had anticipated as Wanda uses her power to transport a visibly distressed sow through a sling-ring portal before stepping through it herself. "When did Wands get here?" Bucky asked genuinely shocked until he glanced at Selina with an inkling of suspicion. "I'm guessing we got you to thank for that, darlin'?"

Registering the suaver timbre of his gravelly drawl, kittenishly Selina quirked the fullness of her burgundy lips, unstintingly evident to the vixenish gleam of her brandy-coffee irises that held devious light, bracing her supple-toned arm with pacifying -feminine heat over muscle-cords of his tenser back as Bucky clunkily grounded traction in his warring paces-shaking off the sluggish wobbling that had bulgingly controlled his piggish momentum—only hours before. The berserk-o Vanaheim scavenger—hag was on the receiving end of her bestial-morphing conjury-a fattened prisoner of her cheated-out devices."Well, I did make a fast call, farm-boy," A deviant scrunch of her pert nose evidently conveyed with a jaunty quirk over her full lips as she purred huskily against the hard-edged ruggedness of his stubbled jaw. "Besides you know how I like to bend the angles when I play ..."

"That's my girl," Bucky kissed her brow lovingly and hugged her closer against his side. Steve watched them with a bittersweet smile across his tight lips. Despite the scope of this threat and the lives lost, he was happy to see that Bucky wouldn't have to endure the same loss as himself. Some wounds took longer to heal, but eventually, they would be made easier to live with. Shifting his gaze he watched as the only remaining member of their group made his way towards them with a swagger in his steps which made the roundness of his belly more noticeable. Still wasn't a sight any of them had grown used to when it came to the thunder god of their team.

"Everything good, Thor?" Steve asked the blonde as he came in front of them, Stormbreaker held against his shoulder.

"Ms. Maximoff will see Amora off to the Wizard Supreme where she won't be troubling us again. At least we should hope not." Thor grumbled with a weary frown across his face as his gaze spanned across the hundred dead citizens of New Asgard he had failed to protect. Men, women and children who paid the price because of a vengeful woman he had scorned. "But, I am afraid Amora made a lasting impression that won't be ever forgotten."

His melancholy must've been noticeable to his friends. Bucky of whom had stepped forward to place a hand on the blonde's shoulder and squeezed it reassuringly. "Your people will come back from this Thor. With you leading them, I know it." At Thor's confused frown, Bucky lightly jabbed his shoulder. "If there's anything I've learned about you, it's that you could be as stubborn as a pig."

"Buck…" Steve groaned with a look that said 'come on, man.'

Thor caught on immediately and released a deep hearty chuckle as he patted his heavy stomach. "Well played, James. You yourself made an entertaining ally in our quest for triumph. You should come by more often. You and I would do well as Fortnite teammates on the PS4."

Bucky looked at Thor with incredulous eyes and a lopsided grin. "You're on, Blondie." He looked down at his own heavy stomach and surprisingly didn't feel nearly as indignant about it as he would've before. "I have the stomach to keep up with you too."

As the group make their way towards the Quinjet, Thor and Bucky amicably discuss their favorite choices in entertainment and foods, leaving Steve and Selina a moment to themselves. Steve looked down at her with remorseful eyes once she realized he was staring. "Thank you for saving me," he said with a tight smile. "I'm used to someone else having my back, but you're a helluva partner."

With flit of her lashes, brandishing a visage of guarded nonchalance Selina ruefully gazed at feathery remnants of bluish-ivory tuffs that contrastingly whirled over her lithe hand against the frigidness sailing over the Northern sea- an exhilarative beckon of wonderous freedom- an elemental conquest that starvedly urged her to dare those rushing heights of implosive adrenaline.

The battle-tested grounds of her partnership wasn't expandable in their combative dynamic; infestations of lunatic-schizoid chimeras were becoming alliances with spawns of HYDRA orchestrated by Baron Zemo. The dance of mayhem wasn't over. Shifting a collective glance of her coffee irises at the Quinjet hovering over the lakefront, Selina decisively gnawed on her underlip, tellingly clutching the silken feathers as she purringly challenged, as she gazed into the hawkish intensity of his cool azureous ireses-a tempestuous-banking ferocity that wouldn't be curbed down. "Well, you do owe me a flying lesson to call it even...

Steve smiled graciously. "I like the sound of that." He always had a knack for skydiving without a parachute. Something told him the fearless Selina Kyle, like a real cat, would land on her feet without one. The thought made the Avenger feel a twinge of nostalgia but also an inkling of anticipation moving forward. He wondered how many more missions Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman, would be willing to partner up with him on in the future.

2 hours later…

The Quinjet flew in a holding pattern above the eastern shore of the Avengers Compound with the landing door open. The auto-pilot kept the bird flying high at a safe distance above the lake below, but to the two remaining occupants seated in the pilot and co-pilot's seats, they were blissfully at ease with themselves as they kicked back and enjoyed their third cup of beer, despite it only being 8am.

"You know, Thor, even for a god of thunder, 8am has to be too early for you." Bucky remarked as he sipped his drink. Thor was far too into his cup to respond as he chugged a huge pint then let loose a thick belch.

"It pays to be King, my friend, I can revel as early as the sun rises. You should do like our friends, and enjoy the splendors of our victory to their fullest." At that, they both watch as two shapes zip past the windshield of the cockpit in a free fall dive, gliding in the air like two birds soaring majestically.

"10 bucks says it's a draw." Bucky offered to which Thor gave him a flat look. "What, you can't expect me to pick favorites between them."

"Then that is not a fun wager...100 says they won't concede defeat without a rematch." Thor challenged to which Bucky chuckled and took a larger swig of his beer.

"Fine, 100." The two friends clinked their cups together, and resolved to enjoy the skydiving spectacle that was sure to invigorate their spirits after such a long hard-fought victory. Nothing felt more hopeful than the forging of new friendships and partnerships moving forward.

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