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storiesof2018 · 1 year

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Winter’s Dragon

The bone-numbing frostiness had become a wintry valance over the midland vistas of Bergen as the picturesque dock houses that scenically boarded the icier waters of the mountainous fjords-the quaint ambiance of lakefront environs was a harbour-point for Instagram snap-shots of Christmas-break tourism. A ghoulish aura of a telestic scourage portentously veined within the cliff-side dolmens while a vulturous denizen maniacally remained seated within the rear seat of a parked matte-black Voyah SUV, possessively clutching a Nordic dairy that he deceptively obtained from the auctioned market, the frayed leather was engraved with runic sigils of Nidavellir lore-twined Skeggøx axes with a draconic crest branded in the middle of the ragged cover.

Sneeringly, the nefarious collector, pressed the automated button as the window descended, as his fleshier leather-gloved hand commandingly gestured over his roguish sentry to intimidatingly advance with a menace-honed swagger near his armoured vehicle. Despite that, he grudgingly abhorred expandable-Migardian vigilance, he needed a 'bulletproof' drudge for his theftuous-dimensional gambit of unleashing a tempestuous-chimerical entity that was dormant within the Nidavellir relic-SoulBinder.

"Once you see the object in sight, bring it to me, Sergent Barnes..." he rasped out, malignantly shifting his callous glower of ebony-raven over the rectified Siberian beast machine's cybernetic arm of Wakandian vibrainium that mechanically whirred on robotized accord. Garbed in a tactical navy-blue jacket that bulkily delineated the bracketed tautness of his enhanced solidity of graven-corded muscles that cuttingly fused against tactical kevlar, impassively, Bucky grounded his unshakeable poise a breadth at the rear door, his bionic fingers readily ghosted over a holstered Makarov 9mm pistol as the hard-edged ruggedness of his stubbled jaw tensely rapted with vexatious edginess: he wasn't in the mood to car-sit a brutish governmental alliance- dealer- for World Council. "Follow all extents of necessary protocol if the item strays from your reach..." he ordered in gruffer cadence, irritably as the coppery-ginger swatch of his bushier jaw raptly twitched with latent hostility against warred restraint.

"Do whatever it takes to get it back, yeah I know!" Bucky finished with an annoyed huff. To say he wasn't happy with his present op would be about as candid as saying he enjoyed walking into a public square twirling his 9mm around like a damn baton. The mission parameters detailed an object of high-value and Asgardian origin located in a mining shaft off of Norway and ready to be sold off on the black market. The newly reformed SHIELD had dispatched him and Wilson to locate the object and recover it quietly-or failing that, guns blazing. Bucky didn't like it. It felt sloppy with too many civilians and potential hostiles that could blend in easily. It also didn't help that his handler, this seven-foot-tall lumberjack who looked like he should be power-lfiting in a Strong Man Contest instead of running as a handler, gave him all sorts of weird vibes.

"You still haven't told us what's so important about this item?" Bucky pointed out as he neared the latch of the door. He wasn't expecting an answer, but merely a sign of anything untoward about this mission that already felt so far out of left field, he was anticipating a knife to his back in some form.

A tenser flex of hulkish leather-sheathed fingers malignly dragged over the door latch with snakelike precision as he gazed into the mesmeric steeliness of Bucky's grayish-aquamarine irises-a tenacious-deadlier fierceness piercingly mirrored his blackish depths while he impassively flipped through pages of the archaic dairy. "The item harbours a lost mystery that was forged within the depths of a quelled star..." he answered in a growlier pitch, his bearish features lividly rapted with hinged annoyance at the incessant questions that murmuringly resonated out the pretty-boy Midgardian; he was a butcherous-anarchic dreadnought of Vanaheim who slaughterously vanquished the zombified Berserker sentinels of Helheim's gates. Since Thor Odionson had recklessly decapitated the Muspelheim dragon-Zalgo - with the Bi-Frost.

With an unquenchable thirst to usher his galactic warpath, like a conquring raider, he scoured the cosmic gateways of the Nine Realms for a Dwarven weapon -SoulBinder-that imprisoned a calamitous -draconic essence that was spawned by Níðhöggr-the Hvergelmir basilisk and the Jotunheim's Frost Beast-that would morphically become resurrected within a pathetic vessel of disposable mortality. "Bring the item to me intact, and do not open it...For what prevails inside will destroy everyone here..." he warned, gratingly.

"Hmm, good to know!" Bucky remarked dryly. The big burly handler had a Norwegian accent, and something about his speech told him that he was probably from New Asgard or spent a lot of time there recently to be familiar with this sort of thing. The warning signs were still there and Bucky tried to ignore the gnawing feeling that something was still off about this whole thing despite being given a fair warning about the item in question. The door opened and stepped out, meeting with a small unit of well-geared and well-equipped agents waiting for him. He recognized a few of them having coordinated a few assignments with them in Amsterdam and Prague. They looked at him tensely, many aware of his past both as a war veteran and a former Soviet assassin.

Some might not have been comfortable around him but one thing was clear, they respected him and his ability to lead which was enough for Bucky at this point in his new profession. "All right, squad. The package we are looking for is to be considered high-priority and extremely dangerous; possibly alien in nature. Its critical we keep a low-profile while we survey the area the sale is taking place. We don't want any civilians caught in the cross-fire. I want eyes in the sky and on the ground-keep the item in your sights every step of the way."

His men gave nods of understanding and no objections. Bucky nodded as he signalled for them to head out. "Let's get in gear. Jankowski, bring up the rear, I'll run point. "

Together Bucky and his team made their way into the city through the back-alleys. They maintained a casual disposition, shifting their way through civilians-children and teenagers idly crowding the streets with their phones while the team did their utmost to appear inconspicuous. Bucky followed the waypoint on his phone where their contact reported the item to be located-an auction house in the middle of the street of a rather quaint-looking town. "I've got eyes on the building. Stay alert, everyone. I'm going in."

Curbing down his adrenalized rush of sniper-honed momentum, swaggeringly, Bucky drove his stealthier prowess near the edifices of the rendezvous point-a merchant shop, evading the congested throngs of maddening tourists as he restrainedly advanced closer to the extraction point-the amber sconces of lampposts gleamingly contrasted against the golden skeins that melded with the charcoal -gray vibrainium alloy of his cybernetic arm that crushingly shoulder-rammed against the ripped leather jacket of a skater-punk teenager who gaspingly dropped his smartphone. "Uh...Sorry..." he murmured against throatier gravelliness, huffily, conscious of the bone-jarring rigidity of his bionic arm while he unwaveringly sashayed around the obstructive crowd with a tactical variance of his deadlier-mechanized graces.

The rancid stink of insidious deception viscerally entrenched him-the Nordic relic that was located within the cavernous mountains of Tønsberg-New Asgard-was a high-rolling spoil for parasitic HYDRA traffickers-not an easy-fence for syndicated-piratic installations of the anarchical cesspool-dystopia of Madripoor to rapaciously auction in High Town. Getting pegged into the rigged crossfire that was back-stabbingly a damn cheap shot of Baron 'sock-head' Zemo -he smokescreen his own delusive machinations of playing down the vengeance card against the Power Broker, disposing batches of the Beta serum to ignite a power-keg of seditious mayhem.

Against his peripheral vision, in a earshot, Bucky caught a glimpse of the synchronized footing of the recruited 'strike-force operative team stealthily mobilizing near a black cubed van-arsenal of taser batons holstered on their armoured-padded fatigues-dispatched 'sweepers' to clear-out riotous obstruction. Pressing his ear-comlink, scowlingly, Bucky gnawed on his poutier underlip as he dragged out a whispery breath, tensely. "Jankowski...Stay on my six until I secured the package...Do not engage."

Against the proximal obscurity of the close-off room, encompassed within a vitreous exhibit cube that readily was secured on a desk, brandishing up her patent composure over the pudginess of her saggier ashen features, Doctor Maja Hansen flitted her greenish-hazel irises tremorously over the metal amulet that gothically carved into a draconic visage-a Nordic protector that had demonically adorned the prows of the raider Drekkar-Drakeships -her algorithmic translater of the runic glyphs deciphered the prophetic incantation: 'Bring frem ilden som føder en dragehjerte...Bring forth the fire that births a dragon's heart...)' Reeling back on wobblier traction, blankly, she gazed at the amulet that psionically radiated whitish-astral energy in damnable fruition-a celestial emergence of uncontainable-ravaging- entity was on the denotative fringe to converge into a morphic unity. "D-Dreki.." she blurted out, frantically as the lazurite-diamondlike eyes of the amulet trancedly pulsed with hypnotic intensity. "Hold deg unna(Stay away)..."

Creeping up an empty staircase, Bucky maneuvered his way across the hallway like a shadow, sneaking past passing workers and proprietors looking to sell their items at the next auction. They were so consumed in their own business that none of them paid close attention to the striking man built like a gladiator and garbed in tactical wear. Bucky kept a relaxed posture with one hand rest against his side where his concealed 9mm was kept and the other followed the waypoint on his phone. The item was just in the office at the end of the hall. His eyes zeroed in on one armed guard talking into a radio looking uneasy. "Squad, I have eyes on the target's location. Stand by, I'm going in."

"Copy," another of his agents named Stokes responded into their communication. "I've spotted a cluster of vans out in the courtyard, lots of mountainous buggers packing heavy heat. Let's make this one quick, shall we?" She sighed, clearly itching for a fight. Bucky rolled his eyes as he proceeded onward deciding on a more leisurely approach.

"Hey!" He called the guard who looked up at him with confusion. "Excuse me, I'm looking for the men's room."

"All right, hold it right there, pretty-man." The guard raised his weapon reflexively as Bucky closed the distance between them like a javelin and rocket punched the man through the door, the name-plate on the glass reading Doctor Maja Hansen.

Against the upsurges of heart-jolting alarm that imploded through her veins, Doctor Hansen collapsed onto her stubbier knees the second her office door burstingly exploded off its hinges in the destructive wake of a jackhammering-breakneck momentum of a straight-arm ferocity that cannoned through her door akin to a wrecking-ball as her owlish stare became vertiginously fixed onto the gun-metal vibrainium of a cybernetic fist that whirringly arced over the debris with mechanized precision. Forcing down the pressure of his muscled knee bodily onto the sentry's throat, gnashingly, on immobilizing succession, Bucky straddled the corded litheness of his kevlar-clad thighs over the uniformed guard's paunchier mid-drift as he blindingly whipped a stun-baton into the wall. Bracing herself against the desk, stuntedly, Doctor Hansen emitted choke-off gasps, as she clumsily reached for the silent alarm button underneath a drawer. "S-Stay back..." she urged, breathlessly, registering the kinetic pulse amplifying within the dome barrier. "I-It's unstable..."

With the guard subdued, Bucky's immediate focus was on the squirming woman at the back of the room, hiding behind her desk. Though she wasn't carrying a weapon he didn't relax his guard as he stood up and made his way towards her. She must've been SHIELD's contact who informed them about the item. "I'm supposing you're the one that told SHIELD about the artifact? It's all right, Doctor. I'm here for the handoff." He placates her. She didn't seem convinced, or perhaps she was still too apprehensive about the thing in her hands. He picked up a small case beside the desk he presumed was meant for the hand-off. His sharp hearing picked up the sound of gun-fire and loud screams outside of the building-his team had engaged the Hydra-controlled mercenaries. "We don't have a lot of time-"

"Y-You must destroy it..." she urged in a throat-railing scream as the rapid-fire hailstorm of submachine rifles deafeningly penetrated her office with no avail, bullets ricocheted within plaster as whitish vapours smoggily enwreathed around them. Jutting out the heaviness of his stubbled jaw, harnessing the combative swiftness of his acrobatic graces, Bucky somersaulted behind the desk for evasive cover; keeping his bionic arm straight for dead-straight accuracy, he pulled back the hammer-lock on his Makarov as he unerringly answered the rabidity of the 'executioner sweepers, delivering kill-shots with a reined callback of warring hesitance. Thrashingly, one armoured HYDRA enforcer gurglingly slumped against the doorframe as blood misted from rivulets that drippily oozed behind tactical goggles. Screechingly, Doctor Hansen crouched near Bucky, desperately yanking onto his Kevlar-clad shoulder. "I-It's not what it seems..."

Bucky could barely hear what she was saying, his ear filled with a storm of communications from his team. Stokes and Jankowski were under fire. "RPG! RPG inbound!" One of them began yelling.

An explosion seemed to rock the building, the effect about as devastating as an earthquake causing the floor to crack and splinter. "Doc, get back!" Bucky yelled as he put himself between her and the gunman's line of fire. A few of the bullets ricocheted off the vibranium surface of his arm and struck the walls and ceiling. In the chaos, one of the bullets scraped Maja's leg causing her to gasp and fall to the ground. Her eyes were wide with pain and mounting horror as the weight of the amulet left her hands and soared across the floor. It was like watching a grenade being thrown in slow-motion, her scream of dismay piercing the barrage of gun fire while Bucky executed a clean head-shot to the enforcer's, killing him. A chill crept up his spine as his superhuman senses registered the Doctor's desperation. He saw the item falling and immediately reacted on instinct and lunged to catch it. His weight slammed into the floor, crashing through it as if it were made of paper. Pain exploded throughout his body as it fell through fire and rubble down three stories until he crashed on a bed of broken planks and rubble.

"NGH! Aaauugh," a strangled groan escaped his mouth, soot and ash covering his body while blood trickled from his brow and palms. The icy-hot surface of the amulet seared into his flesh, a cut on his hand spewing blood onto its surface. The draconic eyes upon the amulet sigil glowed red, a bestial growl emanating from within. Bucky laid dazed, trying to pull himself to his feet. Static crackled in his ears. "S-Squad, ngh! Status-report!" No answer. "Damn it, someone talk to me!" He yelled, pulling himself onto his knees, blue eyes scanning the ruined courtyard and the numerous bodies scattered throughout the area.

A cacophony of bullet-razed staccatos of ear-splittingly pandemonium amplified in mortified succession around him Raggedly, Bucky dragged his cybernetic fingers against the cemented debris as he became irrevocably grappled into dregs of bone-crippling exhaustion. Sweatily, his dishevelled chestnut tresses were askew over his bruised temples -a suffusive fusion of white-hot anguish searingly whipsawed through the bulkier resiliency of his graven-corded midriff-gushing through his intestines burningly like shunted dosages of volcanic magma. Every bone-vicing contraction had spasmodically forced him to gurgle out pukish breaths against the onslaught. "Hraggh..."Against teeth-gnashing strain, chokingly, he braced his kevlar-clad forearm over the heavier roundness of the bulging tautness of his abdomen. "Oooh.."

Emitting out huffier snorts, gapingly his shapely-wide lips stretched against the morphic traction of his incisors that disturbingly curved over his poutier underlips like viperous hook-fangs. "W-What the hell..." he snarled out in throatier heaves, as the owlish intensity of his dilated pupils reptilianly morphed into draconic razor-slits against voltaic sapphire that electrifyingly melded with his feverish aqueous depths. Thrashingly, against the hijacking-apparitional unity that hellishly crescendoed through him in possessive fruition; Bucky collapsed onto his back on jackknifing tempo, registering the vibrainium servos of his bionic arm demonically warp into a monstrous-beastlier appendage as his robotized fingers twistedly lengthened into claw-like deformation as the reddish dot of lasered-scope of DI Optical DCL-110 submachine gun vividly haloed over discarded remnants of concrete underneath him-the mission was rigged. "N-No..."

"Target locked," the rough burly voice of Jankowski came around the bend of bloodshed and mortar, creeping across the floor like a shade ready to prey upon him. Bucky's vision swan in a haze of red mist that made him believe he was dying. The edges of his vision were like smoldering embers ready to scorch his eyes from the inside out. He watched as Jankowski stood across from him with his rifle aimed at him, joined soon by the other members of the squad; Stokes, Griffin, Keegan. All of them followed Jankowski's lead as they aimed their weapons straight at him like a firing-squad waiting for the order to execute.

Bucky couldn't muster the strength nor will leap into action, his body paralyzed by an unseen force, his world humming on a spectrum that was consumed by raw power and rage.

"Tougher than he looks," Stokes remarked with a note of admiration in her voice. "Too bad this is where it ends for you, Winter Soldier," the blonde snarked, dreaming of cutting his pretty face while at the same time lamenting the fate of it.

"He's got the Soulbinder," Griffin pointed out, his steady gaze becoming grave once the entire squad realized something that Bucky wasn't seeing. "By the damned Norns! He's opened it!" The mood of the squad suddenly became petrified, their gazes sweeping from left to right, unsure of what to do as they watched a spectral entity that was inhuman, fly out of the amulet and swiftly leaped into Bucky's body.

"S-Stay back..." Raspier brays of growlier viciousness seethingly chuffed out of his throat, scrapingly his vibraium claws predatorily scythed over upturned concrete; restrainedly, against choke-off pants, Bucky hunched onto his tattered knees as spasmodic barrages of rampageous-hellstorm aggression that cyclonically imploded within his tensing veins. Bluish skeins of voltaic energy acceleratedly pulsed the enhanced rigidity of his deadened bones as the murderous heat of his grayish-aquamarine irises smolderingly blazed intensity of whitish-lazurite against his flitting lashes. Crushingly, he gripped onto a metal coil that jutted from razed plaster and stabbingly jabbed into the armoured calf the proximal enforcer. "G-GET OUT OF HERE!"

Bucky's body spasmed like a puppet whose strings were just pulled by an unseen force. His deathly gasp billowed from his throat with a puff of steam. All was silent as if he had just sucked away all the oxygen in the room. The physical changes that manifested caused the Squad to call in backup. Only seconds later more armed men filtered into the room, some carrying heavy equipment. Slowly, steadily, Bucky rose up to his feet, his posture lethal like a predator rising from its slumber.

"Steady your hands, everyone," Griffin cautioned as the team of a dozen agents shifted uncomfortably, some eager to pull on their itchy triggers while the others wanted to turn tail and run. "Get the containment field ready, fast! Before the thing wakes him-" And that was when the first gunshot had gone off, the bullet aiming straight for Bucky's chest. The bullet bounced off his chest as if it struck an impenetrable wall made of blue energy. Everyone looked at the foolish agent who lost his composure. He looked about ready to soil his pants.

A rumbling noise shook the courtyard as Bucky inhaled deeply with shuttered eyes, his shoulders flexing backwards. It may have been a trick of the light, or their own minds betraying their fear, but Stokes and Jankowski could swear they beheld the shadow of draconic wings extending across the wall behind him. They were well and truly effed now! "Screw this noise, fire!" Jankowski roared.

"No wait-" Griffin yelled, but the team threw caution to the wind and began unloading their clips. Bucky's eyes snapped open, and there was nothing but a primal rage to be seen in his eyes-ancient and unforgiving. His teeth bared into a malicious snarl, he flew across the yard with lightning-quick speed, driving his bionic claw through the chest of one of the soldiers. Blood exploded everywhere in a burst of gore. The gunfire ensued and Bucky withdrew his claw only to slash at the throat of another gunman. He picked up the gagging soldier like dead-weight and used his body like a bowling ball to topple pins of soldiers.

His mind was lost, all thought and rationale was ruthlessly smothered by overwhelming emotions that drove his body to inflict pain and vengeance. Hunger, anger, pain and sorrow all coalesced with the feeling of perpetual enslavement should these men try to take hold of her…of him. He didn't stop his rampage, even as several of the soldiers fled into retreat. His bionic limb was slick with blood, steam and fire smoking from his digits. His eyes were wide and feral. In the distance, the wailing of sirens heralded the coming of more danger.

Hunger gripped his belly. He had to run. He would be no one's slave. Never again.

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Against the unbidden heartache that betrayingly chastened her into grievous requiems of her isolated penance, she had become a condemned fugitive within the dregs of her traitorous reality-the soul-crippling obsession of resurrecting the existence of her precious spunk-hearted boys-she became a venomous phoenix -devastator of unquenchable vengeance within the dimensional paradoxes of the Multiverse, harnessing demonic incantations of that prophetically fueled her pernicious desire to wickedly harvest out the celestial energy of a dimension-hopping teenager.

When she destroyed every blighted -infectious remnant of the forbidden spell book with her psionic energy, she vanishingly went off-grid-shutting herself from the world that judged her to be a villainous -destructive monster who punishingly deserved to become imprisoned within the vitreous barrier of the Mirror Dimension after she catastrophically decimated the monkish temples of Kamar-Taj with her tornadic rampage. Clutching onto a ceramic mug of brewed tea, Wanda steamily breathed the honeyed amora, somberly, Wanda roved her greenish-teal irises over the forested snow-laden vistas of her secluded cabin, wisps of gossamer snowflakes had dampishly powdered the vixenish sleekness of her copper-scarlet whorls as she tucked the litheness of her denim-clad knees against her svelte chest, shakily whispering out a raspier mantra like a bone-deep promise. 'I-I will never hurt anyone again...'

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Night had long since fallen, by the time Bucky had collapsed against an oak tree. If it weren't for the mental disquiet he was feeling over what had happened his afternoon, he would've thought it odd that he didn't feel the slightest bite of winter's chill. His mind was a maelstrom of anger and confusion. His squad had betrayed him-tried to kill him too in fact. And what did he do? He...lost control and repaid the favor. It shouldn't have bothered him as the rules of engagement meant he was inclined to defend himself against hostiles enemies. But what he'd done to them...The viciousness, the brutality... It was worse than anything the Winter Soldier could do. Nothing about it was clinical or precise. It was like a wild animal had taken control of his actions and was set loose.

The questions of why his squad had turned on him were replaced with how and what about himself. That rampage both horrified and satisfied some dark part of his mind that he didn't realize was even there until he had fled from the scene of the mission. He ran as far as his superhuman speed would allow him to, running out of the city and into the country, far beyond the radar of SHIELD and whomever they might send. This was bad-whatever this was. He'd killed dozens of agents, whatever their affiliation, he'd be a hunted man. "What the hell am I doin'?" He asked himself tiredly, the cramp of hunger in his belly reminding him that he hadn't eaten since this morning. Try as he would to ignore the feeling, it was gnawing at him like an itch needing to be scratched that just got more unbearable the longer he tried to ignore it.

"Meat," the word fell past his lips without him realizing it. His voice was coarse and growling. His senses flared wildly to the point the dead of night looked like like a glowing wasteland of cold. It was beautiful but also frightening. He tried to close himself off, but there was something clicking in his mind-a resonance that called to him. Beckoning him. His feet were pulling him in the direction without him realizing it. "Gotta eat...gotta sleep," his breath billowed out on the wind.

He was reminded again he didn't feel any cold. It was nearly the end of the December, the temperature was dropping near zero this far north of the equator. He should be shivering himself close to hypothermia wearing only his tattered uniform that was meant to endure this kind of cold. The super-soldier serum kept him warm, but not immune. "Whats happenin' to me?" He wondered. That was when he saw it. A solitary cottage at the edge of the woods. It was looked cozy and hospitable, and judging by the lights on in the windows, it was also occupied. Maybe he could ask for a phone? He'd lost his gear in the chaos, and 21st technology might be new to him, but he knew better than to use a line that could be tracked.

He struggled with himself, knowing he might be putting whoever was inside in danger. Just as he made up his mind to continue on walking, the front door opened. Who he saw was the very last person he'd expected to be out here. "Wanda?"

Hearing the croakier scratchiness gutturally fringing his whiskey-roughened drawl, telekinetically, Wanda registered a malodorous potency-sulfuric rancidness that odiously wafted off the ripped kevlar of his darkish-blue tactical uniform, as she readied her lithe fingers to defensively conjure up reddish salvos of psionic energy that striated over her veins; unblinkingly she gazed at the snow-bound intruder who stumblingly bolstered the graven ridges of corded solidity that bulkily delineated his garbed back against her wooden steps.

Trepidatiously, Wanda became attuned to a viscerous callback of his tenacious-brotherly spirit that anchored her when every visage of their mortality was dissolvingly purged into mulchy remnants of vaporous ash by genocidal -apocalyptic unity of the Infinity Stones. They were damningly ushered into the celestial Elysium-the Soul Realm."B-Bucky..." she rasped out, confusedly, watching him groaningly slump onto his buckled knees on vertiginous tenor, his dampish chestnut tresses unkempily feathered his bloodied temple. Against the whitish sconces of moonlight, fixedly, against a dredged-up modicum of her incredulous perplexity, Wanda steelily roved her greenish depths onto the knife-cut ruggedness of his scruffier features-a tracery of bestial deviance menacingly raided within him as she detected the morphic nexus of a cosmic sentient that was irrevocably driven by unslaked- monstrous retribution. "W-What happened to you...?"

Whatever Bucky had been expecting to find, whomever he was expecting to meet out here so far in the middle of nowhere this certainly wasn't who he was expecting. The addled soldier staggered like an injured rover over the mounds of snow, keeping his balance against a tree close to a small picket fence. "Wanda?" He was incredulous, wondering if this was by far a coincidence or if one of the Avengers had been dispatched to find him after the calamitous mission he'd run from this afternoon. But he hadn't seen Wanda in over a year, from what he'd heard she'd gone off the grid after Westview and wasn't even an active Avenger anymore.

Once he was certain he wasn't in fact hallucinating this surprising encounter, Bucky shuttered away any lingering confusion and reached out to his friend imploringly. "I need your help, Wanda. Are you alone?" He didn't want to impose. A lot could happen over a year and the last thing he wanted was to put her or whomever she was with in danger. "Please, I'm not gonna last much longer out here." He groaned to illustrate his point, a spike of hunger lancing through him to the point he fell to his knees, growling softly.

With a deterrence of jacked-off caution investing her guarded poise, tentatively, Wanda measured her paces closer to him as he groaningly emitted snortier breaths, tactlessly plowing his leather-sheathed fingers over slushier mounds as the euthermia levels of his receptor heat were intensifying against white-hot surges that alarmingly bludgeoned through his veins-he was burning up. "H-Hold on, Bucky..." she urged in breathless pitch, watching yellowish viscous drool smearily trek over the heaviness of his dimpled chin as the bestial length of his toothier incisors stabbingly dragged into his jutting underlip. Against his floored mobility, in anguished tenor, wrenchingly Bucky torqued back onto his tremorous knees, as she crouched at his bulkier side. Caressingly, her daintier palm kneaded tactile ministrations over his broader nape, as he moaningly retched out pukish heaves that gustily vented out of him. "Y-You need to come inside with me..."

"C-Can't s-stand…" His bones felt as brittle as shattered glass, his muscles were like pins and needles slowly but surely beginning to lose all feeling. A set of hands pulled his good arm over a shoulder. The wafting scent of Wanda's citrus shampoo had a calming effect on him as her strawberry blonde locks washed over his hair. A spike of heat moved through his stomach coming up his chest. He worried he might throw-up his morning breakfast all over her. "C-Careful, Wands…" He grunted as she helped him up and began the arduous task of walking them both up the steps. "D-Don't wanna puke all over your nice door-mat," he said, finding the "Home Sweet Home" puppy mat to be oddly cute. Despite his attempt at levity to keep his own composure, his initial discomfort began to manifest into a crippling pain.

His empty stomach groaned and growled like an agitated animal, causing the heat of his body to become stifling hot. The temperature alarmed Wanda who looked at him with mounting worry.

"J-Just hold on, Bucky..." The vomitous potency of his gut-sloshing barrages enwreathed her, rackingly, Wanda did her utmost to guide him into the doorway with strenuous traction as Bucky slackly pillowed his fevered cheek against the svelte contours of her garbed shoulder. Dragging the enhanced resiliency of his bulkier mass toward her boxed couch wasn't an easy feat, dampish rivulets of saltier clamminess sweatily glazed over the stubbled planes of his graven-edged cheek as the Slovakian phoenix braced her daintier palms sedately onto her kevlar-clad shoulder, quickly easing him down onto the cushions with rampant precision.

Gnashingly, Bucky jutted out his dimpled chin as the burgeoning pressure of knifing contractions excruciatingly notched into a heart-clamping tenfold: nothing availed. His eyelids twitchily flitted against the sweltering bleariness that hazed over his vision as he blindingly gripped onto a cushion."Don't worry, I'll get everything under control..." she murmured under breath, placidly, splaying her lithe fingers over his clunkier GI dog tags that hung his broader neck with the engraving the soldiery-valorous identity of a hellbent Brooklyn kid: James B Barnes. "I'm going to help you..."

"F-Food, Wands…S-Starving," he muttered with pain-filled moans punctuated by his bionic claws grasping the heat of his belly. Wanda had carefully plopped him down over a spacious couch, helping him to sit back against the cushions. His demeanour looked haggard and worn, like a man who hadn't slept in weeks. Alarmingly, his sweaty skin looked cold and clammy, the heat that was wafting off his form did not appear as chilly as an arctic breath. Bucky repressed a shiver, barely seeing Wanda as his vision swam in a blue haze where everything sharpened into glowing white outlines causing him to shutter his eyes. The grip of hunger in his belly increased, causing him to bare his teeth, revealing rows of sharpening incisors to Wanda's stricken gaze. A flash of light burned in his thoughts, he saw a mountainous dark shape wreathed in blue flames. He felt someone shaking him out of his delirium.

Keeping her palms forcily bolstered onto tauter ridges of his bulkier chest, Wanda gazed at frostier skeins of bluish-ultrasonic energy glowingly pulsing against blood-rushing torrents within the varicose swollenness of his bulging extremities, desperately, she ghosted her daintier fingers as reddish psionic energy geometrically melded into twined hexagonal glyphs of an Eldritch counterspell fierily over Bucky's thrashing form while she feelingly detected a white-noise astral communion of a feral-draconic rabidity that possessively effused within him. Against the fringe of his eyelashes, the feverish dilation of his owlish pupils morphically razored crocodilian-like slits that piercingly fused with his lucid silvery-aqueous depths."S-Stay with me, Bucky..." she panted, raspily, glancing at the unopened box of Cheezits on her polished table. Gesturing her lithe hand with a telekinesis command, the box speedily whooshed to her reach. "I-I don't have much...This will help with your hunger discomfort..."

Bucky had snatched the box off the table without a second thought. He all but tore open the box with his clawed digits as if it were made of plastic and raised it over his mouth. Wanda looked on in silent bewilderment as the cheesy-crackers spilled into his opened mouth like a cascading rainfall. He messily scarfed down the snack with large mouthfuls, inhaling them as if they were made of air. Almost immediately the throbbing pincer in his stomach began to ease, the smoldering heat in his chest and the stifling cold of his skin pacified. Oblivious to Bucky, his state of ravenous hunger brought about a manifesting physical change as the surface of his skin slowly began to grow into a scaled texture along his neck.

"Mmph, that's…that's good," he said once the contents of the entire box had vanished into his mouth. It wasn't meat, but it soothed the ache in his belly if only for the moment. Bucky licked his cheese-caked lips, a moment of clarity returning to him as he looked at Wanda with hopeful intent. "Do you uh…got any more?"

His friend arched an eyebrow, her lips pressing into a thin-line. She was thankful she had only just begun to make dinner. It was an hour later Bucky was sitting at Wanda's dinner-table scarfing down a bowl-full of her famous dish. He'd had 3 servings already and were it not for the empty pot on the stove, he would have become lost in his oblivious hunger. Wanda patiently sat next to him, watching him closely as if he were a fascinating riddle she wanted to solve. The more he ate, the more his focus returned to him along with the sinking feeling of unease once he realized his body was changing.

He'd avoided thinking too hard on what had happened this morning, his adrenaline-infused mind constantly keeping him distracted in his haste to flee out into the country. Now everything was catching on, and he knew that whatever goodwill Wanda was bestowing him with he couldn't take advantage of for long. Seeing her again, Bucky was filled with equal parts gladness and concern. She had changed since he last saw her. Maybe not much physically, but there was a hardness to her eyes that wasn't before. A haunting weight that he recognized as guilt.

"Its been awhile, Wands. Look, I'm grateful for what you're doing for me. But you should know that everyone misses you back in New York. Why did you leave?" He asked.

Staunching out a traitorous heartache that implosively erupted within her chest, mistily, Wanda glanced at the metallic picture frame that was emptily hemmed over the cracked glass that was salvaged from a bookshop in West View-she used every pulse of her telestic spell-cast to doomily hijacked a desolated township of infective hopelessness that become a sitcom paradise for chirpy honeymooners and garden-party busybodies; she held dormant minds entracedly captive within the kinetic dome. She ruined lives because of the desire to play a housewife to purge out the soul-gripping agony of her perpetual grief. "I-I've done bad things to good people, Bucky..." she murmured in a shakier pitch, watching him confusedly furrow his brow as the feverish glassiness of his reptilian irises flashed at the picture frame. "I allowed my pain to control me...I wanted to change the reality of being alone, but I lost everything..."

A somber silence filled the room as Bucky considered the gravity of her words. He wasn't sure what to say at first. He knew that Wanda had been close with the man-droid known as Vision but it wasn't until their refuge in Wakanda that he understood just how close they were. Despite not having gotten off to a good-start with the synthetic hero years before, he thought Vision was a better man than most humans he'd met. He and Wanda seemed to love each other-and Wanda had to watch him die at the hands of Thanos, only unlike the rest of them, Vision never came back from that. He couldn't imagine what that did to Wanda after.

"Whatever you did, Wanda, it's clear you're not a bad person from it," he began easily. "Love…it can be painful, it can make us do things we never imagined ourselves capable of just to cope with the grief…" It painted a vivid picture. A woman as powerful as her could definitely be more creative and relentless in her grieving stages. Seeing Wanda frown at him, he was quick to clarify, "I'm not trying to excuse what happened, just letting you know…that there's always a way back from it." As far as he knew, none of the Avengers held anything against her, especially Barton who missed her like a little sister he hadn't seen in years.

"Y-You cannot possibly fathom the mistakes I own in my heart..." A raspier hiss of underlying malevolence lashingly erupted up her throat as the virescent intensity of her irises reddishly blazed into electrified magenta that was demonically akin to a Skynet cyborg -T-800- laser-vision. After doing a Terminator-saga binge with Sam's tech-savvy nephews, Bucky learned about futuristic -titanium -alloy executioners who relentlessly pursued targets in humanoid-skeletal forms. Underneath the synthetic eyeballs were laser-red optics that deathily glowed to scan for their kill-shot marks-Wanda couldn't be a humanoid extension that was genetically conceived by the genocidal vibrainium death-bot who prophetically ushered his planet-ravaging Armageddon over Sokovia."I locked myself away from everyone because what now exists is a monster..."

Bucky outwardly remained composed, but a flame of recognition caused his blood to rush with hot indignation. A primordial force within growled at the witch's magical aura flaring threateningly. The chaos magic weeping off of her emotions poured over and Bucky's clawed hands balled into fists upon the table. He steadied himself, eyes shuttered in an effort to calm the storm. He couldn't look into her eyes too long, he knew that haunted look of remorse and self-loathing all too well. "Maybe I understand a bit more than you think," he said with a deep growling resonance. He palmed his temples and gazed absently into space, "You can't imagine the body count I've created over the years. The amount of pain and suffering the Winter Soldier's actions caused." It was unholy ground he was treading across, each step brought with it a burden of crippling memories he would never be free of. But he kept his poise and met Wanda's intense gaze. "I know what it feels like to see yourself as a monster... Punishing yourself won't make things right."

He could see his words had little affect on her. No doubt she'd been stewing in her guilt for awhile now and convinced herself that she deserved nothing less than total isolation and loneliness. He wouldn't be able to pull her out of this funk with a simple pep-talk. There was probably more she wasn't telling him; so many issues that she clearly wasn't willing to divulge.

As the murmurous gravelliness of his throatier drawl snarlingly resonated within him, restrainedly Wanda eased down her lithe hand fractionally against the wooden edge on tampered accord; the reddish energy-ball that she psionically conjured vanishingly fizzed into her tremorous palm while a feverous upheaval of aggressive viciousness explosively ratcheted out Bucky with growlier breaths. A possessive mania of untenable-gatecrashing ferocity combustibly raided through his veins as the muscled tautness of his sloughed flesh dewily became scaled-reptiloid texture. Raggedly, Bucky gnashed his toothier-incisor fangs as he uncontrollably thrashed against the chair, jerking his head back with blood-rushing traction. 'Shrapp...' The kevlar of his tactical uniform splittingly ripped against the whirring-robotic momentum of his vibrainium-clawed hand that lashingly propelled a ceramic bowl off the cluttered table. "Grahh..."

In a heart-arresting reaction, breathlessly, Wanda dragged out her chair in that fleeting second, a barrage of tomato broth drippily splattered on the fridge door. "B-Bucky I didn't mean..." she panted out, breathily, as the wide-blown lividness of his whitish-sapphire irises predatorily gleamed with the acetylene-murderous intensity of a voltaic hellstorm-this wasn't him. A celestial emergence of quenchless-destructive hunger was astrally suffusing him -inducing him to bestial dregs of morphic compliance. While she harnessed the forbidden incantations of the Dark Verse to sate her vengeful reckoning, she gained knowledge of dimensional chimeras -galactic harvesters that consumingly purged out vessels of mortality, infecting hostages with soul-binding unity. "D-Don't give it control..."

"I-I don't know what I'm dealing with," he grunted, rubbing the scrunched-up bridge of his Romanian nose. "I knew something was off about this job. Either SHIELD hasn't cleansed the Hydra stink, or someone is playing games with them-with all of us." He went on to regale Wanda with the specifics of the operation, how he and an extraction team had been sent out to recover a Norse relic and how his team had betrayed him the moment he'd recovered it. "All I know is I've probably got a big target on my back now. Whatever that thing was, they were ready to gun me down for it…until it opened and whatever was inside jumped into me." As if on cue, he felt something inside of him flare with poignant discomfort, sending a spike of icy cold heat across his skin.

The steely blue of his eyes contrasted with the reptilian slits as they looked at the scales growing across his hand. The texture was hard as leather and getting tougher by the hour. Looking into Wanda's eyes, he found a visceral resolve that had been absent before. "I don't know how much time I've got. But I'll be gone by mornin'. I don't want to bring this fight to your front-door."

Gnawing on her plushier underlip, ruefully, Wanda gestured the delicateness of her lithe hand at the cherry-ochre armoire that was conveniently stacked with threadbare blankets she had gathered from thrift vendors -she needed to remain off SWORD's algorithmic surveillance and occultic radar, she used contingency measures of safeguarded identity to ensure off-grid preservation while hinging every rioted pulse of her calamitous witchery-she was damningly condemned to look over her shoulder every daybreak. Conjuring up a 'Pleasantville-like' reality branded her a loose-canon fugitive-she deserved to be permanently caged within serrated-vitreous barriers in the mirror dimension."I-I have everything you need for the night..." she returned, threadily, while Bucky dragged his kevlar-clad forearm shudderingly over his clammier brow, frostier smokiness puffily ghosted out of his shapely-wide lips, as bluish vapours chillingly sailed around her. "Get some rest while I search for answers to what has infected you..."

Bucky watched her leave the living room with a relief coming over him. He cared about Wanda, a friendly familiar face in his moment of need was a welcome sight. But he worried about her too. She'd been through a lot, that much was obvious, and she was still struggling with the weight of her mistakes and how to live with them. If circumstances were normal, he would be eager to stay and spend more time with her. But he was in trouble, and so was she. He could see in the apprehension in her eyes too that she wanted to be alone and keep a low-profile. Rising from his seat, he pads over to the armoire and picks up the pile of blankets. Each step across the room felt like he was treading across slippery ice. The world spun and he fought the urge to collapse and heave the contents of his freshly filled stomach. Inwardly he recited a mental exercise taught to him in Wakanda-a way of balancing one's body with their soul. His fought to regain his equilibrium as if it were dangling off the precipice by a rope he couldn't pull.

He collapsed on the couch on his side, pulling the blankets up to his chin as shivers began to wrack his body. "Sleep it off," he uttered with trembling lips. His eyes closed, his body trembled with morbid anticipation. He felt like an eggshell ready to crack. He zoned out from the world surrounding him, and everything came into darkness. He was standing in a dark field out in the country-gray skies were apocalyptic high above him. Snow fell like ashes from the skies, and he felt a whoosh of hurricane winds blowing at him. Bodies were everywhere-gutted and eviscerated, their faces mangled or bearing the faces of raw anguish in their final moments. Viking warriors-or were they Asgardians? He couldn't fathom what he was seeing nor why he was here.

A unearthly roar split the skies with a crack of lightning illuminating a winged shape descending from the skies above him. It was massive, bigger than a stadium and ten times as loud. His blue eyes gazed unblinkingly, disbelief and awe shimmering in their depths as a mythical beast-an honest to god ice dragon-descended towards him. Each flap of its wings caused the hurricane winds to fan the icy flakes into sharp needles. The titanic lizard landed on its hind-legs, bringing the weight of its mass lumbering low till its frontal legs bore the bulk of its weight. The earth itself shook and Bucky cowered in astonishment-but he didn't run. Not that he could if he would-the beast's mass covered everything as if it consumed the world around him. It gazed at him with intense eyes-hungry yet curious. Its mandibles clicked, its hung open, revealing rows of sword-sharp teeth made of ice.

"Hver ertu? (Who are you?)" A voice breached his thoughts, the language he didn't recognize but somehow he was able to decipher the words despite the incredulous shock that the dragon had just spoken to him. "Skiptir engu. Ég skynja mikinn styrk í þér. Þú verður gestgjafi, dauðlegur. (No matter. I sense great strength in you. You will be my host, mortal."

The voice was feminine in its cadence, deep but soothing almost enough to make him drop his guard. Bucky blinked away the shock as he gazed at the female dragon with wide eyes once her words had registered in his thoughts.

"Who-what-what are you talking about?!" He cried. Dread didn't begin to describe what he was feeling as the dragon opened its colossal maw, revealing nothing short of a morbid abyss down her gullet. It was like staring into the void where nothing but oblivion awaited. But nothingness gave way to a brimming chill as a blue light began to build up at the back of the dragon's throat. That chill turned to frigid petrification as Bucky sensed what was to come. He now paling with deathly anticipation and could only scream at the top of his lungs-in both fear and defiance-as the dragon inhaled deep, her chest puffing out.

A surge of blue energy climbed up her throat before it exploded from her maw-the frosty fan of ice and blue flames shot at him like a tsunami. His world was filled with a roaring pain and power as he became consumed in the dragon's arctic breath. The darkness gave way to a blinding light that brought him back to reality. Bucky's eyes flew open, a violent spasm causing his body to fall from off the couch and onto the floor.

A bone-liquifying onslaught searingly notched through his veins on amplified tenfold against heart-vising contractions, gaspingly, Bucky jackknifed the virile-litheness of his lumpier denim-clad thighs with pelvic-jarring momentum as he thrust the globbier-leathery deformity of his enlarging hand onto an upturned cushion. The mutative length of his jagged fingernails vitreously gleamed like a frostier diamond as he slashingly punctured the material, trying his damnest to blindingly anchor onto a modicum grip of trepidatious sanity. Against the bleariness of his vision, dizzyingly, he reared his throbbing head up as white-heat blazingly strobed like a flash grenade into his retinas at the intensified moment he throbbingly pinched his eyelids shut. "G-Gotta fight Barnes..."

On floored panic tempoing in erratic mania, heart-stoppingly, Bucky grew aware of the bulbous-paunchiness that suffocatingly outstretched underneath his tactical jacket on globbier fruition as venomous acidity of sulphuric bile pukishly gushed up his scaly throat. Every muscled thew of his athletic-honed resiliency was puffily fusing into a blobbish-leathery mass. "Hrghh..." Against the imploding dam-burst of girthier pressure, he disturbingly registered the roundish swollenness that inflatingly jutted into blimpish rotundity that chunkily glozed over the graven-edged ridges that hunkily bracketed his washboard abdomen, protrusively melding with the bulkier contours of his V-cut obliques as he became mortifyingly atrophied within obesifying-hulkish throes. Burstingly, his kevlar-jacket tore against the pot-bellied deformity as bluish-obsidian scales fleshily thickened around his dwarfing navel. "Urgh..."

This couldn't be happening. How was this happening?! He hoped he was dreaming, that this was a horrid manifestation of his fear brought about by his illness over the past several hours. But he knew in this day and age, reality had a way of being more terrible than what anyone could imagine. The burgeoning of his gut only increased his state of panic as he struggled desperately to fight the invisible force within him that was twisting him into a tortured crouch. His hands slammed into the floorboards and dragged across, the claws on his lengthening digits had carved into the surface, the groan of the boards smothered by the beasty growl tearing through his teeth.

Hunger made its vengeful return to his belly, gripping him with ruthless efficiency to drive him in pursuit of more sustenance. He was racing towards Wanda's kitchen with mad haste and digging into her cupboards. Nothing registered as sufficiency among the healthy edibles and ingredients. He all but tore the refrigerator door off its hinges and yanked out a package of ground beef. He dug into the uncooked meat like a mindless animal only to churn at its raw uncooked state. "W-What's wrong with me," he groaned, spitting out the meat. Anger and frustration coupled with his pain, ingredients for disaster causing wafts of cold fury to spew from his lips.

He caught a glimpse of a reflection in one of Wanda's cooking pots. Something horrifying was looking back at him. He stumbled and dragged himself away only to feel a crippling sensation in his limbs as if his joints had been snapped. "Grrggh!" His pain only seemed to escalate as a hard-digging pressure in his spine began to expand and push outward. A crack of lightning outside illuminated the interior of the homely living room hauntingly, casting a morbid shadow of a twisted inhuman-monsterous upon the walls. Bucky's muscles expandingly grew beneath his rapidly scaling flesh.

Collapsing onto his scaly-fleshed haunches, whimperingly, Bucky gnashed his fanged-incisors against the bone-splitting misalignment of his arching spine, every vertebrae detachedly bulged against morphic traction as spikier bones reptilianly jutted out of the hunching contours of his widening shoulders. Vertiginously, he scrapingly braced his clawed-hands on the floorboards on a planking stance as his GX-8 tactical boots meltingly oozed into viscid tar against the scaly mass that heftily realigned into draconic hind-paws. Gapingly, his pointier fangs jutted over his leathery underlip in viperous traction, as the pudgier angularity of his sagging jawbone uglily outstretched into an elongated- crocodile snout. "R-Raw..."

On morphic sync, ironclad horns piercingly serrated the massiveness of his Tyrannosaurus-like head while his spinal bones excruciatingly retracted into beastlier length as weightier-pterodactyl wings explosively thrashed against the dented fridge with typhoonic gusts. "N-No..." he belted out, roaringly, as vaporous bluish wisps smokily puffed out of his largish nostrils. Swimmingly, his feverish vision caught a soul-crippling glimpse of a behemothic silhouette of a winged beast- a monstrosity that nightmarishly towered over the fridge as navy-blue kevlar dregs of his uniform tatteredly clung the immense bulkiness of his scaled girth.

"N-No...I-It can't be-" Teetering on the edge of oblivion, his mental strength had finally been depleted amidst his struggle. Darkness seeped in at the corner of his blurring vision. The world seemed to lose its colourful saturation as everything became ensconced in ethereal bluish- ice. He saw the massive shadow gazing back at him-his shadow. But the voice that breached his consciousness wasn't his. The haunting hum of a lullaby crept in, soothing his worry and all sense of anxiety as he collapsed to the floor.

"Hvíld stríðsmaður. Á morgun veiðum við og ný öld hefst (Rest warrior. Tomorrow we hunt, and a new age begins)." And then, sleep finally claimed the newly turned dragon soldier.

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Against the orangish ambiance of iron-welded braziers that fierily haloed over hulkish bulkiness of his scarred back, Kjell reverently poised onto his Nidavellir-armored haunches, gripping onto an ebon-Nero battle-axe with his bearish fingers, as he whisperingly murmured out incanted mantra in Nordic timbre."Þegar úlfastundin líður, megi eldur minn loga skært. Megi það draga óvini mína að öxi minni, að ég skal úthella blóði þeirra í dýrðarbardaga. (As the wolf hour passes, may my fire burn bright. May it draw my foes to my axe that I should spill their blood in glorious battle.)" He recited the warrior's solemn vow spoken for millennia by the Vanir faithful who longed for the old ways. The days when the Vanir thrived in both sorcery and science. Before the Asgardian conquest that forced Vanaheim under Odin's thumb, before the light of their dragon's fire had been extinguished by his runt Thor. Vanaheim was strong and unattainable before Freya, his former mentor, thought to sow peace among the Aesir dogs by wedding herself to the One-Eyed King.

Kjell and his brethren of true faithful had been forced into exile for centuries. Until Ragnarok had come and wiped away the Aesir filth that had for centuries thrived off the backs of the other realms, especially the Vanir. No more. With Odin gone and his wayward runt Thor shirking his duties to galavant across the stars, the Vanir could rise again. But only by recovering the vestiges of its strength. Unfortunately, such a simple task was proving to be more difficult than expected. Hearing the revving of Midgardian engines, Kjell rose up and exited the tactical SHIELD tent and watched as the remnants of his hired mercenaries staggered, their numbers less than half what their initial sum. Jankowski staggered out, his face covered with soot and bandages.

"It seems your failure to recover the lost item has been measured into a pitiful defeat..." The gruffiness of his cadence thunderously bellowed out him while malignly glaring over his beefier shoulders at the verminous-craven Midgardian -the Strike Force alpha-Jankowski-who pathetically became a crash-test dummy against the deadlier ferocity of the Nidavellir she-dragon. "Now that fugitive Sergeant Barnes harbours a destructive power that could demolish a mountain..." His stubbier fingers creepily brushed over crystal- amethyst fang that covetously adorned the steel-forged necklace-a victorious token of his nest-raiding purge. "I will not be denied my conquest to sire that felled power..."

The SHIELD agents exchanged annoyed and worn looks with each other, some too proud to admit they had been horrendously beaten and torn to bits, others were simply at a loss over the days events and only now just realizing what it is they signed up for.

"The only thing I'm imagining is why you neglected to tell us we were swiping a monster-housing relic that could blow up in our faces!" Jankowski shot back indignantly. "We lost 13 men to whatever the hell it was that came out of that thing."

"Looked like a damned demon is what it was," Stokes grumbled, clearly shaken over the brutality of witnessing so many soldiers ripped to pieces. She herself cradled a bandaged limb where the possessed Barnes and swiped at her forearm and nearly severed it. "I'm itching for some payback," she fumed. "We're going after him, right?"

The team seemed bolstered with the feeling of retribution only to be put off as the Vanir warlord began to laugh at their audacity.

"You had branded with rancidity of your failure..." Sneeringly, his coppery-bristled fringed lips conveyed macabre amusement when the Migardian-SHIELD- drudges that he assembled for the retrieval mission of the Nidavellir amulet -SoulBinder-that had deceptively vanished from Odin's Vault during the Berserker raid when the genocidal mania of his planet-ravaging conquest bloodthirstily sought to unleash the celestial spirit of Vanaheim ice-breather-Sigrun-who had been torturously shackled to his sanguineous-warmongering command to devour the valorous-battlemented ranks of the All-Father's sentinel legion-the Einherjar. Maliciously, Kjell scraped the razored edge of his Nero-axe over the granite flooring, his beefier hand fisted as he deathily gripped onto the ebon-steel handle with homicidal precision. "Do you what happens to warriors blinded to wretched defeat..." he murmured, tauntingly, as the raptorious gleam of his darkish irises callously roved over the alpha-leader who in heart-gouging seconds would smearily become a disposable -bloodied corpse underneath his ironclad boot. "They fall and ...DIE!"

The SHIELD agents had little time to react, especially those who were already injured, when the Vanir warlord raised his battle-axe with inhuman strength and cut them down with frightening speed. Gunshots went off yet the bullets bounced harmlessly off of an enchantment shield emitted by a pulse of energy coming from his necklace. His roar was one of aggression and ruthlessness, blood staining his arms and face once he cut down the last of his hired mercenaries who thought to beg uselessly for his life. Pathetic. He hoped that one would suffer in shame in the dregs of Nifelheim. "As you Midgardians so boast, if something must be done-better it to be done yourself," he grunted.

Still caked in the blood of the dead agents he stood before an opened laptop he had been browsing, containing a detailed dossier on James Buchanan Barnes. A famed Midgardian soldier and also an infamous assassin with a kill-count that was not to be scoffed at. His enhanced strength and speed would no doubt be a beacon for the dragon-spirit to house herself in his vessel. Kjell believed a Midgardian operation such as this required Midgardian resources, but hunting a dragon was something these mortals could not contend with.

"Winter Soldier. I will find you and claim what is mine." Their battle would be legendary and shake the very walls of Valhalla to beckon them both.

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La ditt dragehjerte synge ekko av min regning (Let your dragon heart sing echoes of my reckoning)... A clamorous mantra possessively revved through his icier veins. Against the deadened grogginess that exhaustingly roped into the stuporous dregs, groaningly as the frostier smokiness of his puffing breaths, Bucky consciously eased up the scaly bulkiness of his fore-claw. A growlier moan resonatedly erupted out of the massiveness of his longish throat, as he thermically registered the feverous onslaught ebbing against blood-shunting torrents of icier onrushes that were numbingly akin to infusions of liquid nitrogen that kept him catatonically anesthetized him into a cryogenic dormancy. A suffusive—bestial residency was irrevocably hijacking every pulse of his warred heartbeat—his sensory receptors clashingly throbbed against the stoking firestorm that burgeoned within him. A snortier huffiness gruntingly throttled against his pointer-draconic fangs as he shifted heavily against the floorboards, unaware of the bulbous rotundness of his girthier mass that had droopily grappled him down. "N-Not gonna comply..."

"Rís upp! (Rise!)" The voice boomed in his temples like a wardrum. A groan of agony bellowed from his mouth that seemed to shake the room itself. He shuttered his eyes in attempt to suppress the spell that felt as familiar and ominous as the programming Hydra had instilled in him. His body nearly collapsed in his attempt to stand on his own two feet, his balance somehow challenged due to the oppression weight of his own torso keeping him slouched on all-fours.

Everything felt different. Everything felt smaller somehow, constricting as if he were venturing down a narrow tunnel that just seemed to get smaller with each lumbering step. The throbbing pressure of intrusion brought on a throbbing pain in his skull. He grumbled and stirred, snapping at the invisible presence that slowly began to recede as his focus returned. His throat felt dry, so much that he pondered entering Wanda's kitchen for a glass of water. His steps caused the house to shake-a striking stimuli that caused his vision to sharpen into dumfounded focus at the sight of a beastial reptilian claw crunching against the floorboards.

Bucky stared at them, twitching his muscles only to see the draconic claws respond to him. "N-NO! W-What happened?!" His voice and the thunderous intensity of his movements finally alerted the lady of the house who entered the room with wide eyes.

"W-What..." Gaspingly, Wanda heaved out choke-off breaths, the stupefied intensity of her teal-hazel irises owlishly roved over the draconic leviathan who clumsily staggered on heavy-footed paces, as the massiveness of his spikier tail whippingly arced on reactive tenor against her granite countertop; the jutting fanged-grimace of his pointer fangs sulkily rapted into a derisive scowl as she gazed into the reptilian-orbs of whitish-sapphire that were mesmerically alight with frostier steeliness as the dilated pupils hypnotically razored into viperous slits. Lurchingly, the Sniper-dragon eased up the vibrainium deformity of his foreclaws with strenuous reluctance, doing his utmost to bridle down his skyrocketing panic, as he gnashingly braced the immense rotundity of his scaled girth against her fridge. Poising her lithe fingers to deliver a gut-blast of her psionic energy, the waifish delicately of her vixenish features impassively brandished into a defensive semblance as the draconic intruder pythonically outstretched his leathery-horned neck. "W-Where is Bucky Barnes..." she lashed out, demandingly, flitting her reddish depths onto remnants of bluish Kelvar on the floorboards. "You are not an extension of my nightmares, but you have done anything to Bucky, I will become yours..."

It wasn't just a warning coming from Wanda, the man trapped within the draconic vessel knew that for certain having seen a Mad Titan held at her mercy. Despite the bewitching aura of power, she gave off, something inside of him balked with ferocity at the notion of being threatened. Something old and primal that saw the little witch in front of him as a child snapping her fingers. A flare of adrenaline flushed through his veins like icy-fire. Every scale, every cell of his body hummed with ravenous intent. "G-Gnh! W-Wands…S-Stay back!" He growled, fighting the urge to lash out. A buildup of pressure in his chest felt suffocating-all he wanted to do was scream and unleash the storm inside of him. "C-Can't c-control it! G-Gotta-"

The dragon's increasing tone of desperation was so loud, his movements like a whirlwind within the tiny confines of the small house. He had to get out of here. The desire to stretch his wings and soar was overwhelming to him. His eyes closed as he staggered, each step causing his massive form to unintendedly cause a mess of havoc in the kitchen.

The hurricanic gusts of his pterosaur-like wings flappingly whooshed against the logged beams above them, bracingly, Wanda grounded herself a breadth at the granite counter, poising her daintier fingers in tenser sync, weaving reddish-aster of Eldritch conjury geometrically veined into defector Mandala shields as cookware utensils clangingly propelled out of the off-hinged drawers against the Sniper-Dragon's rampageous-destructive wake. "Easy..." The measured shakiness of her lithe palm featherily caressed his leathery-scaled foreleg with tactive reverence; sweltry heat crushingly huffed out his largish nostrils in fervent succession against the whisper-soft ministrations over the spikier grayish-obsidian fleshiness that iridescently glimmered like voltaic amethyst underneath her splaying palm-becoming quakily attuned with a mania traumatized heartache-a mother's unbidden grief that agonizingly echoed within the immensity of his draconic form. "I-I won't hurt you..."

He wasn't worried for his own safety as he became lost in an all consuming panic of untamed aggression. He felt like a rat trapped in a maze he couldn't escape from. No matter where he looked, all he could see was the enormity of his grown mass. His shadow blotted out the light of the great outdoors entering through the curtains, his hulking reptilian mass stretched so far across the floor, there was no way of hiding it through the corner of his eyes. So the dragon shuttered his lids, seeking solace in the darkness, but remarkably, it only opened a window to a realm of different sensations. His sharp hearing could detect even the faintest of sounds from Wanda's slow-measured breaths, to the tapping of water from the leaking faucet by the sink.

It pulsed in his mind's eye, like seeing the after-effect of a flame that no longer burned. Was this magic? He could sense Wanda approaching cautiously, he fought the urge to snap at her to stay back, whatever was inside of him didn't trust her power that was as chaotic and uncontrollable like a flood. "I-I'm…M' a monster…" He said, unable to lie to himself anymore. "Always been…"

Hearing the whiskey-roughen gravelliness of his raspier timbre sniffily hitching out of his crocodilian snout, collectively Wanda advanced with tentative footing, easing up her lithe palm to brushingly pacify onrushes of his jack-up panic. "No, you're something that my precious boys had dreamed of riding over West View..." A saltier bleariness feverishly dampened her lashes against the heart-gutting anguish that stabbingly robbed her breath. "A dragon isn't a monster in books but a protector of realms that he soars above...He can breathe lightning and fire in the sky..."

That inner feeling, that presence inside of him swelled as if receiving praise. But the man would have laughed if he wasn't so worried doing so might cause the ceiling to come down over them. Everything suddenly seemed so small and made of glass. "I'm not a protector...I'm not even me, anymore," he growled lowly. He was nothing but a walking time-bomb waiting to go off at the slightest trigger. He could sense Wanda standing in front of him, daring to bring one of her palms up to rest against what felt like his nose. An act that would have felt mildly weird if he were still a man, but somehow his new body and all the sensations that came with it registered it as a soothing act of compassion. He slowly peeled his eyes open, his luminous blue orbs peer at Wanda, seeing her in a new light that was both breath-taking and intimidating. Her human visage burned bright like a candle just emanating wisps of scarlet energy. He would have thought it was awesome if he weren't daunted by the thought this new-field of vision came with his new form. "Eg er dauðinn (I am death...)." The words slipped through his mouth, his voice but not entirely his own.

Wanda peered at him closely, hands hovering close to his temple. "W-What's happened to me..." He asked her desperately.

Warding off a modicum of her resistance, trepidatiously, Wanda graced the scaly contour of the Sniper-Dragon horned brow as he distressingly huffed out gustier pants that frostily raked over the suppleness of her arm with a bone-shunting frigidness of hypothermic iciness that knifed through her veins. A telekinetic fusion of celestial -rabid energy had stirringly hardwired within the Brooklyn drake's who lumberingly stomped his massive clawed-feet on wobblier traction near the cabin's doorway in eath-quaking paces. The razored length of his arcing wings cuttingly scythed over upturned furniture as Wanda's coppery-blondish whorls disheveledly whipped against the delicate contours of her jaw at the heart-jolting second, Bucky aggressively thunked his reptilian-elongated snout against the door."B-Bucky, I need you to calm down..." she urged in threadier pitch, listening to a guttural snarl viciously erupt out of him as the massiveness of his spikier tail intimidatingly bashed against the floorboards. "Y-You've been infected with a cosmic deviance that has changed you into a dragon..."

"No kidding!" Bucky growled a scathing retort. His ire over his situation and the feeling of being trapped in this tiny cabin had begun to wear away his composure to the point anger had replaced his distress. "Seems like no matter what I do, I become someone else's weapon!" He roared, a gust of icy cold mist escaping through his nostrils as he envisioned the SHIELD agent who had set him up. His temper was flaring. "When I find that smug scumbag who sent me-I'll…ngh!" He knew he shouldn't be cross, especially with Wanda who had done nothing but help him, but that feeling inside of him fed off his frustrations and provoked him into reacting. He needed to get outside! He needed to stretch his wings!

"I need to get out of here, Wands! I can't-I need-" His huffing breaths had grown heavy and deep, spewing whipping cold air throughout the cabin as his mood continued to decline. "I need answers! There's…there's something else inside of me." Something old-something powerful."

The frostier intensity of his slitted aqueous draconic orbs predatorily gleamed with murderous ferocity as Wanda riskily conjured trigon glyphs that reddishly arrowed over the sniper-drake's spinous brow—she was fusing a telekinetic drift within his seized mind. Flitting her eyelids against concentrative tension, she trancedly ventured into the cerebral barriers as visages of discarded golden pennons that were tatteredly branded with the Asgardian sigil of Draupnir fringed over axe-cleaved remnants of obsidian eggshells shatteringly adorned within a snow-trenched nest while mountainous-gutted-out heaps of befallen dragons lifelessly obstructed a battle-ravaged fortress. Staked within the raided nest was an ebon necrosword-a morbific conductor that noxiously herald butcherous scourge over the icier realm of Vanaheim. "W-What's inside you harbours much pain and betrayal...I think it's...Female."

The grip of shock didn't last long over Bucky, the fresh recollection of his waking nightmare sped up in his thoughts like a rapid projection. Anguished and distressed over a dark revelation spewed to him by the colossal force of a female dragon claiming to use his body to house her spirit. "I-I heard her voice-so much pain, so much anger." A vengeful fury that was desperate to unleash itself on those who ravaged her kin. The dragon growled, mournful and tired as he gazed towards the narrow-doorway too small for him to fit through. He knew that going outside wasn't a smart thing to do. The moment he was spotted, he'd have missiles and F-18's from every nation eager to take him out in fear of destruction. He had to get this thing out of him, somehow. "I gotta get this out of me. Can you help me, Wands?"

"I-I promised myself I would never go back to him..." Gnawingly, Wanda dragged her teeth over her plushier underlip, stingily feverish wetness bleared her vision-she couldn't abandon the unrectifiable promise of enduring a leashed-down reality of isolation; the demonic carnage of her 'sleep-walking' incantation that hellishly contaminated Multiverse paradoxes was an extension of her cataclysmic-maniacal witchery. The corruptive malignancy that was inscribed on the forbidden pages was decadently addictive-a rapturous ecstasy that grippingly fueled her grievous desire to steal back her boys. Destroying the prophetic runes of the Scarlet Witch, she heartbreakingly detached herself from the Avengers-her family. "Now, I have no choice..." Easing up her lithe hand, fluidly she gestured in a clockwise motion as kinetic energy fierily wheeled into a transcendental portal. "We need Stephen's assistance to change you back..."

Bucky remembered the wizard when they fought together against Thanos' armies. He never met him personally but it was clear that Wanda had some kind of bad history with him. Bucky was almost reluctant to put her out on the spot and risk her isolation for the sake of him. Too many people stuck their necks out for him over the years to the detriment of their own safety. For a moment he reconsidered, but the steely resolve in Wanda's eyes made him realize this was something she needed to do as well. The dragon gazed into the massive portal that easily accommodated his height. He'd traveled through one before and still wasn't sure he'd ever get used to it.

But if Wanda believed this wizard could help him, he wasn't about to get skittish now. "Then let's go see a wizard," he entered the portal with thunderous steps, Wanda acting as his guide every step of the way as they began their next journey.

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Every infinite-quantum paradox that damningly warped fractions of reality had ushered an apocalyptic concerto of sorcerous mayhem-incursion; he scraped the matchstick of the rigged powder keg when he restitched the memory incantations of Kof-Kol for the zippy-hearted Queen's web-slinger-Paker-who made the votive choice -trading his own existence-identity to obstruct the dimensional gateways-the villainous rouges gallery of parallel realities-variants of Spiderman heralded by the archaic cube: Macchina di Kadavus. Stripping his ego of being a pompous neuro-surgeon who virtuosically showboated his rivalrous -medical proficiency at Metro-General, he discovered a soul-driven task of humility within the monkish temple of the Kathmandu- the mystical refuge of Kamar-Ta-since he gripped onto the mantle of being the sentinel of the Multiverse, he shuffled with full-house decks of hell-storm reapers that nocuously wanted to flat-line humanity.

Now, with a hinged penance of his bordered-up isolation, Strange endured a desolate existence-spending his vacuous days reading dustier manuscripts, while staving down his riotous vexations with brewed mugs of Earl Gray. Braced against the black-ochre Victorsque desk that Wong had purchased during a charity auction, edgily, Strange flashed the draconic steeliness of his lazurite-azure irises over Arthurian tomes he 'sling-ring' borrowed from the British Museum archives -even reading Sherlock Holmes novels to staunch-up the 'nail-biting' doldrums. "I wonder what fun we'll have tonight, he grumbled out, sardonically, gazing at this scarlet-damask cloak twitchily draped over an iron-spiked hatstand. "Oh do stop giving me the silent treatment...I've already lost to you at chess..."

Stephen wouldn't be the first or even the last to admit he was lonely. Sentimentality was a window that allowed too much heartache and sorrow to come through. It was a window he had shut long ago after enduring a traumatic loss in his childhood. That window had opened if only for a time when he had met the brilliantly beautiful Christine Everheart, the love of his life and also the only one he believed was capable of understanding him. The real him hidden beneath all the snark and cool cold cunning he used to mask the vulnerabilities he felt inside. In his quieter moments he envisioned how they might have been if fate allowed them to plot a course together without all the chaos of magic and intergalactic threats that had consumed him over the past several years.

But it was all a dream-a glimpse into another reality where he was too different to be called the same person. But that window was firmly shut now. Christine was a happily married woman to someone who could appreciate her fully without the weight of the galaxy on their shoulders. Stephen Strange and Christine Everheart weren't meant to be-some things remained unchanged and some people were just meant to be alone. Stephen no longer mourned what was and what could never be, he'd seen what grief did to those unable to let go.

All things considered, he believed he was where he belonged and that was enough to keep him going. Shifting in his chair he looked at his magical companion flatly. "All right, maybe a few more games if it'll get you in a chatty mood-" That was when he felt it-a magical pull, a familiar rift in the presence of his domain that raised mental warning alarms. A portal began to open in the foyer. "Yeah, I feel that." He was up out of his chair and rushing on fast feet.

A telestic nova of vaporous reddish-aster psionically wheeled into a portal, keeping his marred-pinned fingers poised a breadth of his tunic-garbed chest, inscrutably Strange fixed his grayish-azure irises on the curvaceous-svelte intruder-a celestial -Sokovian phoenix incarnate who ghostily sauntered out of the kinetic portal with cautious advances. Fiery-scarlet whorls unkempily cascaded over her lithe shoulders as she breached his Victoriansque study. Detecting the glyphs that edritchly veined into the geometric Tao Mandalas-defensive safeguards over the floorboards, disarmingly, Wanda eased down her daintier hands, conveying her tentative approach. "Hello, Stephen..." she rasped in a sultrier pitch, whisperingly, registering the earth-quaking thumps of the Sniper-Dragon who lumberingly wobbled behind her. "I-I need your help..."

"Wanda," Stephen greeted her cordially, though there was a touch of wariness to be seen in his eyes as he took in her arrival. He didn't relax his posture, try as he would, some things were difficult to get past. It was only eight months since they had last seen each other, and also when they nearly killed each other. It was unfortunate that their paths had brought them into a violent clash that had spanned across alternate universes. When he decided to stand against the Scarlet Witch's murderous intent to kill America Chavez and harvest her power to travel across the multiverse, he was in the most draining fight of his life that forced him to break his code and confront hard truths about his life. He didn't regret saving her life from the ruins of the Darkhold temple, nor keeping her fate a secret from Wong and the Avengers, but seeing her now in the flesh, easily breaching the New York Sanctum's wards brought too many unsavoury memories. "You know I don't like these kinds of house-calls. If you needed help you could have just sent a text," he snarked. He was confounded by the feeling of heavy footfalls shaking the floor beneath them...and the looming dark shadow following Wanda from behind.

"I know that I'm not welcomed but some Asgardian curse has infected Bucky Barnes..." Wanda murmured out, breathily, her virescent-hazel irises roved over the austere-cut of Strange's hawkish features as his goateed jaw rapted with composed restraint at the second he gazed at the elongated leathery-horned reptilian snout of the Sniper-Drake who growlingly thrusted his massive head out of the portal with viperous traction of his longish- pythonic neck. The blimpish rotundity of his jumboizing mass was ethereally sheathed with grayish-obsidian scales that metallically fused with a deformation of vibrainum plating. Reeling back on perturbed reaction, passively, Strange gazed at the draconic-hulking behemoth who snakily jutted out his forked-tongue a hairbreadth over his twitching cloak, resonating snarlier pants."H-He changed last night..."

Whatever Stephen was expecting to be the nature of this unexpected visit, watching a ten-foot behemoth of a dragon come stomping into his foyer wasn't even close. The draconic serpent stood larger than a horse, his height bringing him within reach of the second floor balcony high up. His very steps shook the ground floor of the sanctum, the soft flapping of his retracted wings caused a whoosh of wind to blow out a number of candles around the room. The creature's enormity nearly blotted out the sunlight from the glassdome high above, casting ominous shadows. Wanda stood unphased, and quite frankly a little bit radiant alongside the dragon that made Stephen blink away his spellbound state. A tugging on his shoulders told him his little friend was just as anxious as he was feeling as a waft of cold air spewed into their midst with each deep breath the dragon took.

Stephen took only a couple of steps back, hands pulled into fists and resisting the urge to summon a defensive spell that could upset his apparently new acquaintance. "Wanda?" Stephen began testily, eyes not breaking away from the dragon's hypnotic gaze that was quite frankly, unnerving if not soul-piercing. "I leave you alone for eight months after the Darkhold and now you decided to become the Mother of Dragons?" He couldn't help but snark-a defence mechanism if anything with facing such a colossally absurd dilemma. "And I'm sorry, did you say he's actually Bucky Barnes?!"

"Yeah, she's not lyin' Doc..." A grumblier snort derisively huffed out of the Sniper-Drake on vexatious tempo as the spikier length of his tail whippingly bashed against the glass barrier of the antique cabinet that pristinely showcased imperial Qin dynasty Terracotta armour that contrastingly melded with the Victoriansque black-ochre walls of the marble-floored study. Aware of the immensity of his clawed-feet, grimacingly, Bucky slumped his bulbous-reptilian form against a bookshelf, while dustier Tibetan scrolls annoyingly bonked over the arching length of his tucked wings. Quashing down the smokier iciness of his panty breaths, snortily, Bucky dragged his fore-claws against the shelves, as his silvery-aqueous orbs piercingly flashed onto Strange with dead-straight intensity. "An extraction mission in Bergen roped me in the crosshairs...Now, M' something that one of Viking pals of Thor kinda rides..."

"You don't say…you really don't," Strange uttered, himself at a loss for words over this development. Just a couple years ago he was fighting an intergalactic warlord, then he was helping Spider-Man hunt down criminals from an alternate universe; just when things couldn't get any more chaotic for him, he faced his gravest challenge in the form of the Scarlet Witch across the multiverse only to then have said witch show up in his sanctum with a massively gargantuan dragon claiming to be Bucky Barnes.

'This job certainly never gets dull,' he thought. Pinching the bridge of his nose he frowned as he watched the dragon's unintended destruction of numerous priceless artifacts. A simple repair spell would hopefully do the trick-the dragon whipped his tail causing a vase to trip over and smash. "Ugh, is it possible to hold still for a few seconds?" He grumbled, flipping his cape over his shoulder, mentally preparing himself for a short magical examination. "This will be quick-" His hands flourished a magical glyph, and the dragon reacted sharply.

As Strange unerringly gestured his pinned fingers into tutting sync as tetrahedron constructs of Eldritch glyphs possessively whip-sawed over the jumbo-sized drake, growingly, like a viper-strike, Bucky jutted out his leathery-reptilian snout on defensive accord while the amplifying viciousness of the infective-draconic 'gatecrasher' that explosively ratcheted through his feverous veins. A rampageous-beastlier onslaught of his jacked-off aggression quakingly imploded as he registered the soul-binding communion-a murderous rabidity that irrevocably floored his warring resistance with no avail. "G-Gotta...Stay back..." he warned against choked-off heaves in a vomitous tenor, belchingly, as sulphurous bile droopily trekked over the scaly rotundness of his blobbier girth. Without reining down vestiges of his destructive momentum, thrashingly, Bucky shoulder-rammed his titanic-chunkier weight into the bookshelf as he railed out, hissingly. "S-She's gettin'...MA-Argh!"

Stephen Strange had dealt with difficult patients before in his previous profession who weren't comfortable being examined but nothing came close to this. Dragons were innate creatures of magic and whether or not Barnes intended to or not, his mood could lead to the Sanctum being toppled from within which would cause irreparable damage that he no longer had a Time Stone to fix.

"Or I suppose this can wait for another time," Stephen replied tactfully and wisely dispelled the exam. "Something tells me you're housing more than just a bad temper inside of you," he observed. Sharing an exasperated look with Wanda, he wondered just what the hell she was pulling him into. "Try not to do anything strenuous, Barnes, if at all possible." Stephen rubbed his chin and flicked his gaze at Wanda sternly. "I thought you wanted to lay low? Ferrying a dragon here of all places? This isn't laying low! If Wong finds out about this we-"

"The sentient entity that has possessed Bucky isn't a corruptive remeant of the Darkhold..." Wanda countered in a terser, pitch, huskily, easing up her lithe palm to soothingly reach the Sniper-Drake's elongated snout, the whisper-soft pressure of her daintier fingers caressingly delivered pacifying ministrations of the spikier curvatures that melded with his grayish-ebony scales; a teeming deterrence of vulnerability telepathically pulsed underneath her featherlight touch. Frostier breaths chuffily gusted out his leathery nostrils as he rumblingly groaned against the burgeoning pressure of icier air that made him ballooningly feel like a pump-up zeppelin. "He came to me for help..." she urged, as Bucky stormily razored his whitish-sapphire orbs with deadlier intensity onto the stoic watchkeeper, menaicngly thrusting his raptor-like head back on aggressive traction as the pesky animated cloak flappingly whooshed against his scaled-back, only to speedily evade a snappish bite of his dagger-lengh fangs. "Stephen...Get control of your friend...Now!"

"Enough!" Stephen commanded. His magical friend appeared to have grown rather miffed at the dragon's calamitous presence bringing disaster for all the Sanctum's decor and seemed intent on agitating the dragon further with a mock-face off. The dragon growled at the cloak, a sudden decrease in the temperature causing Strange and Wanda to shiver slightly. "I said enough or you can forget about playing chess," with a snap of his fingers, the cloak flung itself back towards him like a scolded child intent on appeasing their parent. The dragon wasn't pacified, if anything, its primal urges had risen to the forefront with his ire. The wanton dark look in his eyes made the hairs on the back of Stephen's neck rise up. "Easy, Barnes. Easy. Allow me to be a good host before you think about turning me into an ice sculpture."

Thinking quickly, Stephen cast a spell reserved for when a certain hungry Asgardian stopped by and conjured forth a barrel's worth of freshly caught fish before the dragon's eyes. Almost instantly, the dragon's fixation on the Cloak was shattered as the wafting scent of sustenance gripped his focus. Bucky didn't stop to think as he dipped his enormous snout into the barrel and hungrily consumed its contents.

The savorous aroma of briny fish intoxicatingly sailed from the wooden barrel, grumblingly, Bucky eased down his longish snout with tactless-snobbish precision as he indignantly sloughed the plumpish rotundity of his saggier mass against the stairway's cubed balustrade while the obstructive length of his spiker tail viperously coiled over the mosaic-tile flooring. "Y'know M' gonna be packin' in more..." he murmured in a cantankerous drawl, starchily, patting his fore-claws over the blubbery-scaled paunchiness of his mountainous girth as he became debauchedly roped into a fish-hoarding thrall. "S'just keep em' comin', Strange..."

At that, Stephen merely sighed and cast the replenishing charm. Immediately the barrel of fish restocked itself to the brim, much to the dragon's approval. There would be a certain fishing company very disgruntled to find much of its produce having vanished. Magic didn't allow you to create much out of thin-air but merely to conjure the ingredients from an alternate plane of existence. "Just try not to get too cozy, Mr. Barnes. As gracious as I'd like to be, even I'd rather not try to explain this one to Wong if he finds out I'm keeping an alien dragon in my foyer." Stephen didn't like this. Not one bit. But at least this situation could be containable and Bucky Barnes seemed to be in dominant control of himself…for now.

Pivoting to face his other guest, Stephen adopted a cool look. "I need you to tell me everything you know, Wanda. Everything he's told you. If this is what I think it is, Bucky hasn't even faced the worst of his new changes."

Despite the patent semblance of his medical-honed composure, measuringly, Strange encroached his guarded footing a breadth closer to her proximity-the visceral tension that portentously echoed heartbeats of duelling restraint was eruptively akin to white-hot surges of dynamite. She wouldn't betray her gutted-out heart-become a captive into a definite promise of deliverance-hope-to exorcise the conjured visages of her 'Pleasantville' home that paralytically grappled her into throes of unbidden anguish. Dismissively, Wanda braced her sleeved arms over the voluptuous swells of her wool-garbed breasts, evading the relevance of trust that she warringly harboured with Stephen Strange. "He was infected by a Nordic pendant that was carved with the Asgardian runes of a dragon...When he touched the necklace that contained female essence was awakened..." she murmured against the velvety raspiness of her Sokovian cadence, as she troubledly gazed at the Sniper-Dragon become slobbishly enmeshed into a rapacious stupor of untrammelled hunger while he scarfed down barrels of saltier trout. "I'm prepared to keep Bucky safe until we can unbind the dragon's possessive hold over him..."

"I don't think that's gonna be as easy as we'd like to think," he said quietly. His studious mind recalling all that he'd learned during those long hours researching in his astral form. "From what I've gathered over magical possessions, the older the spirit; the more powerful its hold will be over its host. Even as an enhanced human, Barnes can only keep himself in check for so long before he'll start to experience more drastic…side-effects of his new form. And I don't just mean getting a bigger appetite, or even bigger in general." Running a hand across his brow, Stephen searched for a solution that didn't involve calling in Wong to lend him assistance in a forceful exorcism that would undoubtedly just aggravate the situation and risk Barnes' life.

Then again, it wasn't just his life that concerned Stephen. "You said he came to you, chances are whoever is after him will probably track him down at your little house. You can't go back there," he cautioned with a hint of worry.

Refusing to cater to his blunted uneasiness, tentatively, Wanda grazed her palm over the horned iron-like scales that pointily jutted over Bucky's widened brow, groaningly he emitted snortier breaths hungrily against the ravenous upheaval of his insatiable-draconic appetite. The vomitous rancidity of gutted-out fish stinkily wafted from the hoarded barrel, while remnants messily clung to his fore-claws that scrapingly dragged over the marble flooring as he gorged another conjured heap. "I know the sakes of my choice, Stephen..." she rebuffed, tersely, glancing at the hawkish-edged contours of Strange's goateed jaw raptly clench grudgingly evident to his contemptuous glower- the warranty of expandable trust had been snuffed out between them -she couldn't purge out the villainous maleficence-hunger of the Scarlet Witch. "Send us to a place where I can make him feel safe...Even another realm where no one will find him."

"Safe? Like where, Middle-Earth?" Stephen grunted, prompting her to frown at him. The sorcerer sighed, realizing he had to dial back on the sarcasm. "All right, that wasn't fair."

"You two sound like an old married couple, you know," Bucky grumbled with equal parts amusement and annoyance. "Besides, don't I get a say in what happens to me next?" He asked, his focus much sharper now that he had indulged to his heart's content. "I'm not gonna just wait around to be someone's puppet again."

The dragon had a point, Stephen realized. Wanda and Barnes had come to him for help in an impossible scenario that none of them could have anticipated. Like it or not, dealing with magical threats to the world fell into his current job description and he knew that in the wrong hands, Barnes could either be captured and used as a weapon of war…if the spirit possessing him didn't take control of him first. He needed time-time to gather facts and find a solution. At least with Wanda, Barnes would be protected.

The sorcerer wouldn't admit it, but it was refreshing if not a little nice to see her acting a bit like her old self. A compassionate woman acting in the best interests of protecting a friend. "There's a mountain-valley in Greenland, sparsely populated and as far as I can gather, under no surveillance from intelligence agencies around the world. You can both lay low there while I find some answers…But I'm not a miracle worker, Barnes. This is uncharted territory, and I can't promise you anything."

The dourness of Strange's trenchant cadence had stingily whip-sawed through the blimpish immensity of his draconic form, gnashingly, Bucky quashed down icier breaths as his silvery-aqueous orbs unwaveringly lasered over discarded remnants of chewed-up trout that he stuporously-piggishly ravaged, the fishy saltiness clingily melded against his longish-reptilian tongue as the scaly heaviness of his elongated snout eased over the banister on vexatious accord. With a slithery motion of his spikier-python neck, twistingly, Bucky detected a thermic pulse of Strange's heartbeat, as reddish veins of extremities creepily became ultraviolet against his vision. Restrainedly, against his mortified jacked-up alarm, blankly he glanced at the picturesque Queensborough Bridge-a harbor-point for a colossally plumpish drake to intimidatingly perch over congestive traffic until NYPD patrol choppers haloed over him. "Do whatever it takes to get me off these ropes, Doc…" Bucky rasped in a growlier drawl, murmurously, bracing his chunkier haunches on wobbling traction against the Hulk-renovated stairway. "I-I have a feelin' it's gonna be one helluva of a fight…"

On that they could both agree. Stephen wasn't very good at giving meek reassurance. He didn't know Barnes very well, only by reputation. But if there was one thing he could count on was Barnes' tenacious determination upon entering a battle-field. The man would fight to his last breath to achieve victory. But this was one battle-field that would perhaps be the most burdensome he'd ever faced-an internal battle for survival. The sorcerer gave the dragon a nod, promising only to try and help him escape his predicament if not conquer it, then set about opening a sling-ring portal.

He pictured the destination in his mind's eye and the sparking wheel of eldritch magic tore through the fabric of reality revealing a cold mountainous plane in th distance. "Let's hope we succeed. Not just for your sake," Stephen said. His cryptic comment held a hint of foreboding that Wanda picked up on but didn't question. The dragon tentatively began to approach through the expanding portal with careful steps. His rumbling scales twitched, reacting to the change of climate on the otherside and a feeling of pressure building in the pit of his abdomen.

He thought he felt something shifting-a strange feeling he just attributed to his new body. But it made him self-conscious as if sensing a weak spot that needed to be protected. Before following Bucky through the portal, Wanda paused to look at Stephen who remained behind. A tension remained after what happened to them months ago, one that they felt the need to address but knew it wasn't the time nor place. "I'll be seeing you, Wanda." The sorcerer said as if sensing her thoughts. "Be safe."

She said nothing though her lips pulled into a stiff smile that resembled more of a grimace. Strange watched her leave, the portal closing slowly behind her. Left alone in the gloom of the Sanctum's foyer, the sorcerer composed himself before turning sharply on his heel. "Time to get to work."

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Advancing his orcish paces bearishly over the snowbound vistas of the isolated cabin, with a deadlier variance of a rabid huntsman, malignly, Kjell gripped onto his ebon Nero-axe, the hulkish bulkiness of his battle-honed solidity was heavily garbed by an Uru-forged cuirass-Vanir sigils of dragon skulls had macabrely etched over the armour-plating as he readily braced against the wooden doorframe. A sulphurous potency of draconic breath reekingly sailed against his nostrils-a venomous miasma of the Nidavellir she-dragon-Sigrun- that was damningly addictive to evade. "Så, mitt lille kjæledyr, du har kommet tilbake til din here(So, my little pet, you've come back to your master)..." he rasped, gruffily, lowering onto his armoured haunches as his stubbier fingers possessively grazed over metallic GI dog-tags.

"You won't elude me for long," he vowed, clutching the tags in his fist. The etched name and serial numbers were a searing reminder of the prey he was hunting. Bucky Barnes was not an ordinary man, but an infamous killer who watered the grounds he strode upon with streaks of blood. And now he was perhaps more dangerous than ever! Kjell frowned in both frustration and confusion to realize that his prey's trail ended here. The sure signs of devastation inside of the cottage revealed that he was already well into the transformation. Whether Barnes was still in control of himself or whether Sigrun had risen to claim him remained to be seen, but one thing was certain: Barnes must have known whomever lived here.

How else could he have vanished from this place without a trace of leaving? Face locked into a stern growl, the Vanir warrior circled the living room, his stature making him appear as a giant in a dwarven-like dwelling. He glimpsed only a few photographs framed upon a night-stand. A fair young woman smiling brightly being held in an embrace by another man with ashen colored locks. Kin perhaps. What struck him the most were the other two individuals situated behind them when the photograph was taken. A red-haired maiden with a cold calculating stare and the other a blonde man sporting an iconic shield that was known throughout the cosmos belonging to another legendary Midgardian warrior.

"Avengers," Kjell surmised. The woman who lived here was an Avenger. It meant Barnes was perhaps further beyond his reach than he imagined. "No matter," hefting his axe upon his shoulder he marched out of the house. If his one-man hunt should turn into a declaration of war upon Midgard's champions, so be it. Nothing and no one would stand in the way of claiming his dragon.

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As the vaporous - auroral light of prismatic salvos atmospherically cascaded over the mountainous vistas of the lakefront ambiance that contrastingly dazzled against the niveous purity of the snowdrifts that barricaded her rustic cabin-a paradisic 'off-radar' serenity that Wanda had cravingly desired. Palming onto a steamier mug of brewed Chai tea, edgily, she remained on the wooden steps. After three months of salvaging vestiges of humanity against the draconic scourge that morphically imbued within the robotized-sniper fugitive-she had eldritchly conjured up sealer-glyphs of a Vishanti 'barrier' incantation over the grounds of her isolated location.

Keeping herself readily poised, gossamer snowflakes featherily powdered her braided coppery-ginger tresses, Wanda flitted her teal-virescent irises searchingly over discarded branches that were slashingly gutted out with bestial claw-marks as she registered the seismic vibrations thumpingly encroaching with clunkier momentum towards a snow-laden barn that harboured a Polaris snowmobile.

Catching a glimpse of his longish-spikier tail that leadenly dragged over snow mounds, devaintly Wanda quirked her plushier lips into a half-smirk, as she reactively listened to a growlier revving of huffish snorts moodily resonating near the barn. Fleetingly, she glanced at the 55' inch flat-screen television mounted on the wall behind her. "You know, it's your turn to select the movie night, Bucky..." she reminded in a sultrier pitch, coaxingly, gesturing her lithe hand to an opened window for grouchier Sniper-Drake to broodingly slip his massive -reptilian head through. "We have many choices..."

The vibrations shook the ground with such force, if Wanda were not used to the strength of them she would have thought it was an earthquake threatening to ravage all in its wake. Darkness stretched over the vicinity like the clouds had come out to block out the sun. She sat fearlessly peering up at the titanic serpent that was as awe-inspiring as a meteor shower descending from the skies. His rough scaled exterior sparkled like sapphires in the pale light of the sun, his gargantuan wings stretched out as he dragged his claws over the mounds of earth already imprinted with his digits. The ice-dragon stood as enormous as an apartment building and as imposing as a storm moving inland. A beastly grunt moved up his throat, the scales on his neck visibly twitching as he let loose a heavy puff of breath.

Icy mist wafted from his closed jaws, luminous blue eyes peered down at Wanda with a softness unbefitting his imposing form. A tense moment followed as the dragon centered himself and took a seat he had carved himself on what had become a trench of earth. It wasn't deep, but it brought him closer to gaze at the huge television that looked about as small to him as a cellphone. His swollen large abdomen prickled and the beast released a mournful whine of pain. The past three months had been difficult. Not only had he grown 4 times larger, he'd also gotten much fatter. Trying to make himself comfortable as his fatigue threatened to sap his energy, Bucky looked at Wanda tiredly.

"Something cheerful would be good, Wands. I don't think action movies would suit my mood right now," he said. A tale he once heard Banner say to Steve on how to cope with stress was to watch cartoons that did wonders for one's mental mood.

"I-I know what you are feeling, Bucky..." A huskier somberness fringed in her whispery undertone, breathily as she eased up her sleeved-palm against the gustier flurries, viscerally detecting a tempo of abdominal heartbeats in latent unison. Tremorous palpitations that were akin to depth charges underneath the bulbous paunchiness of his saggier girth. Reddish tendrils of psionic energy ghostily veined over his protruding scales-wavelengths of ultrasonic pulses electrifyingly revealed tinier forms within layered thermic shells-dragonlings. Shakily, Wanda gnawed on her underlip at the moment the Sniper-Drake exhaustingly bolstered his fore-claws against the porch steps on vertiginous traction. "We're going to figure everything out together, no matter the changes..."

Bucky wasn't sure what to say to that. When he and Wanda had been first sent here by Strange, he wanted her to leave and go back to her own private life of seclusion. He never meant to drag her into this unnatural chaotic mess his life had once again found itself in. He wasn't her responsibility to be looked after. Yet here she stood with him, despite the hazardous risk to her safety around him, she was fully committed to helping him steer through this ordeal. He'd only ever believed Steve was willing to go to bat for him like this, and maybe even Sam. It was humbling-to say he appreciated Wanda's friendship was a vast understatement.

"Thanks," he finally managed to say with a rumbling breath. A surge of gripping discomfort moved through his body, and the dragon fought the urge to let loose a frustrated roar. They were in Greenland, over a hundred miles from civilization in the mountainous valley, but one could never be too careful. He watched as Wanda flicked through a number of animated movie options-How to Train Your Dragon. She gave him a look with soft amusement while he grunted no. She moved onto the next option-Kung Fu Panda.

He nodded, "I like the Panda."

With a deft glide of her thumb, Wanda pressed the 'enter' button on the remote, unblinkingly she gazed at the Sniper-Drake resting his pudgier reptilian snout against the window's ledge—he was being roped onto the morphic fringe of undeniable-stuporous havoc. Watching him slouch onto the drooper swollenness of his girth in tentative variance as his fore-claws splayed over the jutted expanse of his incubating brood, quirkily, Wanda smirked as he snortingly emitted a huffier breath, underlying his chagrined vexation. It was tellingly evident he spent most of the day near the lakeside to sate his uncurbed-hoggish appetite with salmon hoards. "Did you eat well today...?" she asked in silkier pitch, brusquely, as the Dreamworks crescent logo became displayed on the screen. "I have prepared more barrels in the barn for you..."

"You know I can't say no to some good salmon," A rumbling growl of contentment stirred from deep within the dragon's belly. The mere thought of sustenance was an uplifting thought that would curb his anxious mood due to his present state. In truth he half the time worried he would've exhausted the region's supply of fish give how much he'd eaten over the past few months. Four barrels worth were enough to keep him sustained for nearly a week when he started, but now it was twice that amount. It didn't take a genius to wonder why. After months of denying the surreal thought that new life was blooming inside of his new form, Bucky knew that's exactly what was happening. Each week his mass seemed to increase and his hunger with it. The twitching throb of discomfort in his belly was from a burden he felt instinctively protective of. "Especially with these little guys growin' each day," he acknowledged, watching as the screen showed a peaceful valley of various anthropomorphic animals going about their daily life.

He absently wondered if he as a dragon would ever find such a place to belong among sentient animals such as those in the movie. For awhile he and Wanda watched as the panda named Po did his utmost to attend a martial arts ceremony to see the fabled Dragon Warrior be named. A snorting chuckle escaped the dragon as Po flew high on a rocket-chair. "He's as stubborn as Steve, but probably as clumsy as me."

As the guttural snarkiness of his murmurous drawl snarlingly rasp into a hissing pitch, telekinetically, Wanda became attuned to a crescendoing-beastlier deviance that grippingly raided through him like an incendiary pulse of soul-arresting voltage. Feigning her tenser strain, fixedly Wanda roved her grayish-teal irises over the blobbier rotundity that inflatingly jutted out the outstretching bulginess of his girth on plumpish fruition. The morphic upheaval of his fattening onslaught alarmingly revealed the boulder-like shapes of unhatched dragonlings-eggs.

Bracingly, she was aware of a rampageous mania of the apparitional frequency-white-noise that possessively suffused within him. Wading against her dredged-up anguish of losing her adorable-spunky boys into a collapsing- amputated paradox ushered by the DarkHold was suffocatingly torturous, she wouldn't allow Bucky to catatonically become a listless vessel into the dregs of soul-paralyzing heartache."Tonight I want you to stay close, Bucky..." she urged out, pressingly, mirroring the voltaic steeliness of his dilated orbs as he caressingly dragged his fore-claws over the swelled mass of his weightier underbelly."The infective essence of Sigrun wants full control when you begin nesting...She wants to be a mother again."

Dread seeped into his being from a resonance deep within his mind. He was dimly aware of Wanda's concerned voice whispering words of comfort to him, but Bucky felt himself sinking into a harrowing plane of absence. It was coupled with a creeping feeling beneath his scales of a presence waiting for the right moment to seize control of his being. A rumbling growl emanated from his being, his muscles coiling with restraint and anticipation as an ethereal but ominous melody played in his thoughts. It was ancient-hummed by a voice from another world and had experienced more than any human could imagine. It was the humming lullaby a mother might sing to her sheltered off-spring to give comfort and a promise of loving security.

To Bucky, it was a harrowing warning of the presence whose name he had learned from the sporadic visions he encountered over the past three months. "Sigrun…" A crackle of lightning outside of the barn illuminated the dim shelter. The silhouette of a female gazed back at him from the shadows with a chilling smile. Bucky glared at her. "Get out of my head…"

The vaporous iciness of huffier breaths rampantly gusted out of his largish nostrils, thrashingly, Bucky whiplashed his spikier tail against the rampageous upheaval that implosively spawned through him as the hypnotic cadence of Sigrun's malignancy- agonizingly dissected his cerebral resistance-he was being grippingly anesthetized into the lobotomic dregs of stuporous compliance-inducing him ear-splittingly into a rabid cacophony of murderous- static. A telekinetic frequency that electrifyingly raided within his veins. Against the intensified onrushes of bone-racking ferocity, Bucky pinched his scaly eyelids as whitish strobes of voltaic heat blazingly concussed into his golithian-draconic form. "S-Stop..." Tremorous heaves quakingly rasped out of his reptilian snout, as hypothermic onslaughts of an icier fusion that was akin to liquid nitrogen had convulsively stunted through his swelled-out girth-robbing thermic pulses of heat that protectively fused over his dragonlings. Gnashing his dagger-like fangs, scowlingly Bucky waded against the irrepressible onslaughts of bestial mania, aware that Wanda splayed her lithe palm over his sapphire-obsidian with feather-like ministrations on pacifying accord. "G-Gotta fight..."

As if sensing his innate resistance to the thrall of total compliance, a ferocious growl spiked within his mind from the presence within. The silhouette stretched across the decrypted walls of the barn and rush of chilling mist swept over the room, drawing him away from reality and into a nether-realm plane. Darkness surrounded him and he felt as if he had fallen into a void of cold abandonment. A flicker of lightning revealed the mirrored visage of the draconic ancient.

"You cannot resist me forever, mortal!" Sigrun rumbled as she prowled about his form, serpentine eyes glaring at him covetously. "Defy me and your struggle will only increase your burden. Run from your perils and I will force you to devour them! Pretend to be all you are not: hero, friend…father."

A tense silence followed, the female dragon's eyes gazing at his swelling stomach with longing and conviction. "It changes nothing. It will not change what you are-a monster, a killer bred for war. Your strength will fail and the hatchlings you carry will be mine!"

"Y-You're not gonna take em'..." A snarlier breath viciously erupted out of his longish throat, grimacingly, Bucky arched up his spikier tail, against the jackhammering vibrations that intensified like depth charges against the bulbous rotundity of his protruding girth; the murderous fieriness that deathily gleamed within the She-Drake's lurid sapphire orbs predatorily scythed over him with a celestial intensity of purplish-aster. With full-measure resilience, Bucky stomped down his talon-like claws on aggressive tenor, deafening out the noxious assonance that morbifically became heart-vising to evict. He grew viscerally aware of whisper-soft caresses that Wanda placidly splayed over his reptilian snout as Eldritch glyphs reddishly veined over his roughened scales-a deterrence of the apparitional unity. "G-Get out..."

Sigrun hummed and growled, eyeing Bucky as if amused by his resistance. "You believe you know pain and suffering? You cannot fathom the burden you carry, mortal. Child-bearing is not a privilege, it is a gift that you will not deny me. I have slept and I have dreamed of this moment-do not think it will be so easy to deter me." Steadily the She-Dragon raised her wing, watching with mute satisfaction as Bucky was forced to do the same for a few seconds before he wrestled control away from her. Sigrun snapped her teeth, bringing her face mere inches from his in a heated staredown. "That little witch of yours won't keep you safe forever. Once your body becomes mine, I will devour her and anyone else you seek to put beside you."

Pinching his scaled orbs against the concussive strain that explosively revamped through him, impassively, Bucky tucked his pterosaur-like wings over his globous underbelly, evicting the skull-hammering barrages that anguishedly grappled him into catatonic throes. "Y-You're not gonna control me..." he growled out, vehemently, harnessing a callback mantra that Ayo-the stoic-faced Dora Milaje lieutenant reservedly guided him to recount against the parasomnia apparitions that seeped out of his unforgivable -bloodstain ledger when hypnotic mechanisms of Armin Zola's reactivation words of Sleeper-killswitch protocol induced him into murderous-robotized compliance."Andiyi kunikezela (I won't yield)..."

"What? No!" The she-dragon growled. The resurfacing of his training kicked in a sense of determination and discipline Bucky hadn't felt for some time. It both stunned and infuriated Sigrun who felt her control of Bucky slipping away almost completely. The void around them appeared to grow brighter, the cold itself fading to a warm feeling of relief. Realizing that this mental battle of wills was not ending in her favor, Sigrun slowly retreated into the cold shadows, her eyes never straying from the concealed bulge of his belly. A vicious roar bellowed from her as she stomped her paws, cold mist spewing from her maw. "This is not over! Rest while you can! I will hunt you in your dreams, AND I WILL BREAK YOU!" Her roar rang in his ears long after he escaped her isolated plane.

The surroundings of the barn returned to him, and he was shaken to his core to realize his stomach was rumbling with intense heat. He reacted instinctively once he registered the presence beside him, his protective side rising to the forefront as he snapped and growled at Wanda. "Ngh! W-Wanda…s-stay back, I-"

Detecting a tumultuous firestorm eruptively intensifying within the Sniper-Drake, with a modicum of caution, Wanda graced her lithe palm caressingly over the bulgy roundness of his lumpish girth-registering the viscerous tempo of dwarfish heartbeats against the ultrasonic frequency-an indescribable rhythm crescendoing with every heart-notching surge of his draconic ferocity. Angling his longish neck on viperous traction, growlingly Bucky heaved out frostier puffs against her dishevelled coppery whorls as his silvery-aqueous orbs were piercingly alight with voltaic heat, gazing at the paunchier massiveness of his ballooned-out girth. "I-I can feel them..." she murmured, shakily, as her delicate rubied lips quirked into a half-smirk, urging Bucky to clunkily lower onto his taloned-haunches. "T-They are not giving up on you, Bucky..."

With each intake of air, he felt himself coming down from his aggressive state. The burdening pulse of life in his belly made him feel self-conscious of his surroundings and distrustful of anyone and anything. Wanda's power made the true beast within him wary, but he knew her as a friend and resisted the urge to lash out as she touched his belly. The tightness growing within him was getting stronger. "Won't be long now, Wands. They'll be coming out soon," he growled somberly. Seeing the fierceness in her gaze he lowered his own. "I don't know how rough it'll get-what I'll do. Maybe its best you're not around for this."

The underlying reluctance murmurously fringed within his guttural timbre, fervidly, Wanda splayed her daintier palm with feather-soft ministrations over his spikier hind, every tactile caress of her lithe fingers became was fervidly invested with a tracery of pacifying heat against the saggier heftiness of his tensing underbelly. The gut-racking spasms of abdominal-tractable contractions skyrocketed tenfold as Bucky exhaustedly plunked over a snow trench with strenuous readiness. With a breakneck thrust, he reared up his elongated snout, braying out huffier groans against the excruciating onrushes of bone-vising pressure that irrevocably ratcheted through his behemothic form. A whitish iciness alarmingly melded over his obsidian-grayish scales as his vibrainium talons sonically electrified on mechanized tenor, as he unrestrainedly stomped down his fore-paw. "S-Stay with me, Bucky..." Wanda urged, pressingly, watching his longish tail whippingly plow over the frigid ground as he moaningly panted out breathless staccatos, raggedly. "You're not alone in this..."

Gnashing his dagger-like fangs against his viperous tongue, snarlingly, Bucky eased the protrusive rotundity that ballooned-out his lumpish girth with the arduous momentum of his jackknifing hind-legs as the snowballing pressure of his restless dragonlings throbbingly manifested in contractive fruition-nothing receded. "W-Woah..."

The feeling was unimaginable, like a part of himself-a resonance-was being ripped out, or rather 'pushed out'. And yet he still felt connected to that resonance. His eggs. The man that still lived inside of the dragon was dumbfounded by this, still not having come to complete grips with his predicament that he still wished to be rid of. But as time passed and he had come to adapt and grow familiar to his new body-his new form-Bucky felt protective of the growing lives in his belly. The eggs had finally been laid and the dragon released a gusting roar of glacial ice that blasted high out into the skies. Snowfall fell as Wanda looked up at the skies in wonder. Bucky felt his life-energy simmer and sulk, the need to replenish himself grew heavy but his focus was only on the eggs he could now see tucked safely beneath him.

"I-It's done…I did it."

A kinetic synergy of the boulder-sized eggs galvanically pulsed against his tenser scales, groggily, Bucky eased with a variance of swan-like graces over his nested brood, stowing back vestiges of jacked-off hesitancy as he tucked his spikier-pterosaur wings against the rotund bloatedness of his deflated girth-the weightier strain of his torpedoing dragonlings ebbed against the heart-stopping-gobsmacked revelation that he miraculously delivered baby drakes in that fissionable succession.

Warding off collapsible exhaustion, instinctively he plowed his vibrainium fore-claws over a snow mound, as his thermal heat cozily entrenched the unhatched brood. The granite-like sleekness of his shielded eggs became wondrously addictive the second he felt egg-punching of draconic fierceness jabbing underneath him. The possessive cadence of Sigrun's insatiable bloodthirst -vengeance bankingly ebbed into white-noise against the riotous vibrations thumpingly rapting in feistier sync. "N-Not gonna be on the ropes long, huh..." he drawled, throatily, shifting his frostier orbs at Wanda tentatively crouched at his massive scaly flank. "S'thanks for havin' my back...Wands..."

When Wanda gave him a reassuring nod, Bucky felt an ease that he hadn't experienced in months-maybe longer. He knew Wanda would look out for him, that she would stand with him if the worse should happen when it came to this monumental shift in his life. It felt nice to be reminded of what true friendship was like. He'd missed it.

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Against the dredged-up heartache that irrevocably roped him into a soul-crippling thrall, scowlingly, Bucky eased up the scaly heaviness of his elongated -toothier snout off the frigid ground that had infinitely become a harbour point of his grievous solitude; the forested ambiance of heavy-branched pine ethereally contrasted gossamer snowflakes that icily powdered over the mountainous vistas.

As Bucky warded off a tempered vestige of stoked edginess that implosively razed within the hulkish massiveness of his draconic form, impassively he braced his girthier rotundity punchily over a dug-out trench of snow. "You gotta be kidding' me...Really?" he grumbled against huffier breaths, throatily, registering the pulsations of restless movement underneath him-becoming attuned to every kickback vibration that alarmingly thrummed against the protective shells of boulder-sized eggs, growlingly, Bucky flashed the diamondlike intensity of mesmeric aquamarine that frostily gleamed within his reptilian orbs at the claw-plowed nest. "Hey don't even think about it..." he murmured in a gravelly timbre, scrunching up his leathery-fanged snout as bluish fumes smokily vented out of him. "Grah..."

As if sensing his unease, the resonations against his scaled belly increased almost aggressively as if in defiance. It would've been mildly amusing if not for the prickling stress creeping up his gargantuan spine. He huffed and heaved, his intake of air as deep and intense as a hurricane as it caused dust and debris to scatter. The icy hot sensation boiling in the pit of his stomach increased with his ire, like a boiling pot of water it caused steam to seep from his cavernous nostrils. "Settle down!" He grumbled uncomfortably, his tone causing a pulse of vibrations to seep from his massive girth and into the shell of the bronze-colored eggs nestled against him.

Slowly the tremors ceased and the dragon felt his lingering stress slowly begin to dissipate. The heat of his mood was absorbed by the three eggs, almost as if the tiny spawns within were content to have aroused such a vehement reaction that allowed them to feed off his temperature. It was a not so crazy thought towards a relatively crazy scenario he found himself in. Before he could settle down into a more comfortable prone position, the dragon's ears twitched-his magical aura became attuned towards the breach of a gateway conjured by human hands.

A sorcerer's hands.

"Don't be alarmed, Barnes..." a deep aristocratic voice beckoned from somewhere close by. The volume and suddenness of it causing the Sniper-drake to rear up into a defensive position as he stood protectively in front of his nest. "Clearly things have gotten a little complicated for you..." he deadpanned, testily, roving the hawkish intensity of his grayish-azureous irises at the granite-like eggs. Nonplussed, he reassuringly advanced a breadth at the snow-trenched nest, swatting at his demask cloak with a rapt of annoyance over his suave-chiselled features. "It's not really that surprising that you could be a Led Zepplin mascot for their New Asgard tour... " he razzed, banteringly, as Bucky arched his spikier tail on vexatious accord. "Okay, let's just simmer down your Smaug temper..."

"You know M' a helluva lot bigger than a gold hoardin' dragon..." The snarkiness of his whiskey-roughened drawl thunderously strummed up his bulkier throat as fiery skeins of bluish heat electrifyingly melded over his obsidian-grayish scales, shifting his dagger-like claws on a vehement traction, Bucky thrust out his longish- crocodile snout with snappish traction, while his spikier tail blindingly whiplashed against the snow mounds. The enigmatic-deadpanning sentinel of Manhattan's Sanctum Santorum was definitely intruding on his nesting ground. "Gotta say...Not the best time for a visit, Strange..." he rasped in snarkier pitch, growlingly, curbing the pent-up urge to aggressively yank the damask-scarlet cloak off Strange's back. Composedly, the mystic neurosurgeon roved his lazurite-azure onto the behemothic sniper-drake who grudgingly remained poised like a brooding swan over his nest. "Yeah..." He scrunched up his reptilian snout, derisively. "...these little guys kinda don't like you around em'...Sorry."

The sorcerer lowered his hands as he regarded the colossal dragon with a dry look. "Maybe not as you think. As you well know, Mr. Barnes, trouble never stops coming for those that have a knack for it." He knew that better than most. In his short ten-year tenure as a master of the mystic arts, Stephen had faced more global threats than his predecessor had in the past 100 years. There were always more threats out ready to rear their ugly heads in at the most opportune moment. There was a time he would have come close to p*** his pants at the thought of gazing up at the maw of a mountainous creature from Norse Mythology like a living breathing fire-or ice rather-breathing dragon.

Such things were supposed to exist only in fairy tales meant to awe and captivate children. Stephen had seen horrors beyond description in worlds beyond this one that made a harrowing experience like facing an ice-dragon seem more tame by comparison. When the former human-turned-dragon released a rumbling noise that shook the terrain, causing the hairs on Stephen's neck to rise, he knew it was wiser not to test his patience. "Given your new..shape of living, let's just say that you've drawn many eyes towards you-some more insidious than most."

"Yeah, tell me somethin' I don't know..." Staunching down his bone-gripping anguish, grimacingly, Bucky pinched his scaled-lidded orbs shut, knowing that he was damningly pegged into morphic throes of being ice-breathing dreadnought who taxingly popped out eggs like an overstuffed hen. Razoring his voltaic-sapphire depths over nonplussed rapt that hawkishly edged over the austere contours of Strange's goateed features, he dragged out vaporous plumes of icier breaths, gnashingly jutting out his viper-like fangs on defensive strain as Strange techily mirrored his aqueous reptilian orbs with an inscrutable glower.

Tucking his spikier-leathery wings unrestrainedly against the bulbous swollenness of his weightier girth, Bucky viciously scythed a massive claw over the frigid ground-bone-deep exhaustion irrevocably dragged him into a groggier stupor as he pressingly registered the mystical neuro-surgeon unflappable 'poker-faced demeanour tensely shifting with contemplative scrutiny. "This is what happens would ya try to dodge cheap-shots from whackjob maniacs..." he railed out, snarlingly, heaving against the frostier onrush-the iciness of his panty breaths. "YOU BECOME A MONSTER... LIKE ME...!"

The dragon's ire was as frigid as an arctic wind blowing within the vicinity. Stephen was thankful for the spells he'd learned to protect himself from extreme temperatures otherwise he was sure he'd be an ice sculpture at this point, whether Barnes intended him to be one or not. Listening to the dragon's sorrow, he felt a familiar discomfort that he'd had decades of experience with. He was never good with bedside manners and giving comfort to those who needed emotional support. He once had a cold and clinical way of looking at the world, but over the past several years he'd grown a deeper understanding and appreciation towards his fellow man, especially those who took the same risks in life as he did in defending their world.

"I know it's not a pity party you're looking for, Barnes, so you'll be glad to know I'm not here to offer any," Stephen shrugged as he paced the floor. "I won't lie and say I know what you're going through, but I do have some idea on what caused it. If you'll listen." When the dragon gave a deep annoyed growl, his maw looming imposingly above the tiny human, the sorcerer felt the faintest of shivers creeping down his spine. "I'll take that as a yes." A tightening around his collar was a sure enough sign his breezy friend didn't approve of him beating around the bush and provoking the magical beast that was capable of reducing them both to shards of ice.

With a few graceful gestures he conjured a myriad of projections to better glean his tale to the vexed dragon. "The relic you opened in Norway is unlike any magical artifact from the ancient world-its power strong enough to contain a power as great as the sun. Soulbinder. Built by the Dwarves of Nidavellir for the Asgardians during Odin's campaign against the Vanir and their dragons. It was a relic used to capture the spirit of a dragon after it was slain in battle. The Vanir had a way of binding themselves to these flying furnaces, each time a dragon was slain, its spirit would find a new host to be revived in."

"The last dragon was killed here on Earth over a thousand years ago by Thor, its spirit trapped in the SoulBinder where it was presumably lost in the aftermath of a Vanir invasion led by this charming brute they called Kjell."

Seethingly, Bucky outstretched his fanged-maw agape as salvos of whitish lazurite-blue energy icily blasted out of him against a full-throated roar while pine tree searingly exploded in his destructive wake as he listened to Strange voice out that sordid name of the vulturous- warmongering taskmaster who orchestrated the extraction gambit with high-rolling players within the syndicated hive of the World Council- roping him down into a smokescreen crossfire of expandable deception to acquire the Nidavellir pendent-SoulBinder."Argh...You're tellin' me that M' being hunted?" Thrashingly, Bucky shifted his vibrainium claws on earth-shaking fruition, consciously aware of his precious eggs beneath the roundness of his bulgy girth. "That Viking bastard wants these eggs... Kjell massacred all the drakes like me who resisted his damn control...He attacked the nests first."

Strange quietly considered things, troubled by the ire in which Bucky's mood was provoked by the memories of Sigrun. It had been months since Barnes had been turned into a dragon-an actual mythical creature of legend-and the things he was capable of still unnerved the sorcerer who had very little experience with them to go on. "My knowledge when it comes to your Vanir stalker is a bit sketchy, I'll admit, except that he seems to be relentless and won't stop until he finds you…" Or someone kills him. Strange quietly let that implication linger in his mind, hoping the dragon didn't pick up on it and react rather impulsively.

"He won't find you, not unless you stay put," he cautioned, not liking how the dragon bristled and growled lowly. Stephen sighed. "Its not just for your protection, but everyone's…including your off-spring." His hope was that Barnes would maintain control over the restless spirit inside of him, but how long would it be before he and Sigrun would become one and the same?

"I-I know when M' being followed..." A raspier growliness fringed against his murmurous drawl, as he protectively braced the spikier length of his tail over his brood. "If the area becomes compromised by his damn scent, M' bringin' these little guys to Wakanda..."Against his fervent vision, apparitional barrages of Sigrun's traumatized memory vividly flashed with imagery of mountainous vistas of a carnage-ravaged wasteland as spired henges that were bluish vitreous monoliths jaggedly bordered heaps of zombified Berserker ranks that Kjell ushered out of the chasmic realm of Helheim, ebon-Neco-axes were discarded within gutted out carrion hordes of Svartálfar-Kruseed Elves-macabrely bestrewn over the frigid ice-beds-felled legions of genocidal warpath. Rements of draconic skulls grievously adorned the blood-smeared grounds of the battlefield as Kjell viciously butchered a chained dragonling without a grip of the mercy of his death-strike-collecting fangs to become melded into Vanaheimr daggers. "K-Kjell didn't just kill the drakes, he made weapons out of their bodies..."

Stephen could feel the disgust and anger pouring off of the dragon with each word. That the Vanir warlord would go to such lengths to enslave and butcher the native dragons of his world was morbid, cruel and a testament to his brutality. But it was also not an act unheard of in Earth's dark history. What puzzled him was the inconsistencies he'd gleaned from what Kamar Taj knew about Kjell and what Barnes was telling him. "Yeah I'm pretty sure he was called the Vanir Butcher for a reason, not just because it sounded like a fearsome title," Stephen said as he strode a few cautious steps until he seated himself upon a smooth slope of rock close to the dragon. The dragon's rumbling of discontent made him sigh.

"Sorry. Look I understand how upsetting this must be for you," he said placatingly. "Truly I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like to have all those memories and atrocities in your head. All I can do is caution you to remember to keep them separated from you. They're Sigrun's memories, not yours." The dragon seemed ticked off by his callousness and leered his head close. Strange resisted the urge to react defensively as he held up his hand. "Trust me…Bucky. If every instinct you have is to protect your off-spring, do it like you are now. But don't let those memories consume you. This is what Sigrun wants from-to share her pain, to give into the hate she feels so that you'll react how-"

"Leave now...Damnit..." Snarlingly, Bucky vented out icier gusts, as bluish vapours foggily wisped out of his largish nostrils as he snappishly jutted out his incisor fangs, Strange was heedlessly trudging on a denotive minefield of pent-up viciousness; teeming onrushes of bestial hunger arrestingly imploded into a rapine mania that wouldn't be staved down. Tendrils of reddish energy arrowed over Strange-pulsing with every blood-pumping heartbeat. A saltish aroma mouthwateringly wafted off his stoic prey-he wasn't going to pack in salmon. "Y'know I haven't eaten for a while..." His sapphire orbs fierily gleamed with the rabid blankness of draconic hunger. "Gotta say you're startin' to smell damn good, Doc..."

"...All right, if that's what its come to," the sorcerer shrugged. Stephen knew when he was playing with fire, at least figuratively in this case, and to sit still and test the dragon's patience was a sure fire way to getting himself turned into an ice sculpture. He wasn't afraid, he'd faced far more terrifying entities and experienced countless agonies by them. But he did respect Barnes' desire to be left alone and would oblige his demand. However the sorcerer would be remiss to simply leave without getting to the point of his visit. Rising from his seat, he flexed his fingers and tentatively opened a slingring portal to lead him away. Looking at the mountainous dragon peering at him, he allowed his remorse to enter his voice. "I want to help you, Barnes. I really do. If that means chasing down this warlord butcher, that's what I'll do. But I need you to work with me. Is there anything you can give me-anything that will help track him down?"

As the brusque cadence of Strange's gruffer timbre clashingly raked over him, reining back the full-fledged urge to devouringly shred him apart to slake down his ramped-up appetite; keeping his eggs sheathed with thermic heat inadvertently grappled him into listless-immovable throes, he wouldn't risk leaving his nest to gulp down on riverbank salmon.

Dragging his vibrainium fore-claws, lashingly, Bucky wrestled against the mephitical-telekinetic resonance of Sigrun's hunger-induced commands that rapaciously was akin to powder-keg of dynamite in his bulbous girth. Seethingly, Bucky thrusted his reptilian snout back, underlying his warred resistance while the continuous vibrations of the unhatched dragonlings thumpingly ramped in distressed unison. "I...Uh..." he rasped out, stammeringly, flashing his whitish-sapphire orbs blurringly at his dragonlings. "I can't trust myself anymore...Fallin' deep..." Sulkily, Bucky eased up his massive pterosaur-like wing, to barricade his eggs from Strange's incredulous glower as the fiery energy of the eldritch portal sparkingly wheeled over him. Pinching his orbs shut, gnashingly, he caught mind-arresting glimpses of the behemothic she-drake thrashing within iron-netting as she was burningly shackled on -Tønsberg cliffside that was cosmically branded with Asgardian runes of the Bi-Frost. A slaughterous reckoning of Kjell's barbaric- genocidal conquest was bloodthirstily staked on that Nordic harborage. "N-New Asgard...Might be a place to start lookin'..." he snarled with a deadlier hiss, warningly."Now go!"

The ground seemed to shake at the dragon's roar, his ire causing the temperature in the vicinity to drop several degrees making Stephen shudder slightly. Despite his unease over the thought of leaving Bucky Barnes unchaperoned as he struggled to fend off an ancient dragon spirit inside of himself, the sorcerer knew when to leave well enough alone and now was the time to adhere to the dragon's wishes rather than test him. Besides, he had to see Wong and reassure him for the umpteenth time that Barnes was still in complete control of himself and they had nothing to worry about… "Until next time, Barnes, be well," Strange turned and made his way through the portal. "...for your sake and all of ours." A rumbling roar echoed in his ears as the portal closed behind him.

Yep. Nothing to worry about at all.

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The frostier ambiance of the forested environs vitreously gleamed against the window, organish scones of candlelight flickered as Wanda guardedly the lithe svelteness of her willowy form braced the granite countertop, garbed into a bluish-pallid flannel shirt that loosely draped to the bustier plunge of her ebony-laced camisole while she deftly gripped onto the metallic handle of a kettle-pot, shifting her virescent-teal detachedly irises at the emptied mug. Staving off a trepidatious heartbeat of edgier resistance, painstakingly, she eased down the kettle, as she detected a pulse incendiary voltage-unbidden ferocity that electrifyingly tempoed with the psionic fusion of her Eldritch incantations-the Sniper-Drake's nest was disturbed. Vaporous tendrils of her reddish energy fierily wisped over her lithe fingers, she needed to become a protective sentinel of the unhatched dragonlings-to return at Bucky's side. "N-No one will dare take your babies away..." she rasped, tetchily, as the hellish intensity of crimson -aster blazingly flared within her dilated pupils. "I won't let them..."

"Let's not make things too complicated again, shall we..." Strange admonished, huffishly, as he slanted against the doorframe, his damask-scarlet cloak shiveringly rapted against the snow-damped hood of his navy-blue parka. With reserved poised, composedly, he approached the granite counter, measuring his paces with defensive edginess brandished on the serrated-hawkish contours of his austere features. "Now, we don't want to wake up moody Smaug out there..." he deadpanned, snarkily, easing up his marred-pinned fingers to speedily unzip his jacket, while she impassively braced her sleeved arms over her voluptuous breasts on dismissive accord. "Barnes has gone into full dragon-mode now...I suggest we stay clear of his nest, Wanda...He's not going to let you near those eggs."

Hearing the vexatious gruffiness fringing against his sonorous-timbre cadence, offishly, Wanda stiffened as she guardedly lowered down the kettle. "Bucky trusts me to protect him..." she gritted in a raspier undertone, tremulously, gliding her lithe fingers over the obsidian granite, as reddish skeins of her psionic energy fierily pulsated akin to a heartbeat, tensely, evident to her leashed-down restraint. She was attuned to his underhanded Eldritch counterspells that he conjured within the Kamar-Taj sanctum-to shackle her rampageous-hurranic fury into a glass barrier. She became a portentous harvester of the Multiverse paradoxes -destroying the book of Vishanti with monstrous rabidity-she played the chess game of dimensional reality with him-a Queen Gambit of a sacrificed pawn against his sorcerous counter-moves. "I won't let you imprison him in the Mirror Dimension, because we both know that's how you solve all your problems with monsters, Stephen..." she murmured, ruefully. "When those eggs hatch I will be at Bucky's side...And I will destroy anyone who breaches that nest..."

"If you think this isn't gonna end badly, Wanda, you haven't been paying close enough attention," Stephen said, releasing a weary sigh. Though he maintained a stature of poise it was clear by his slouch that he had been up many nights in his restless pursuit of knowledge when it came to Bucky's situation-not to mention trying to keep him far under the radar from the entire world. Seeing Wanda lean against the countertop with a challenging look for him to elaborate, Stephen rubbed his temples and shrugged.

"Barnes isn't who I'm worried about. It's what's inside of him. That ancient spirit is gnawing at him day in and out in her effort to not only claim his body but also his eggs! I brushed the surface of Sigrun's thoughts and what I felt was nothing short of pain and rage. If she takes control of him…" A grave silence followed, the implications hanging like a pendulum swinging perilously lower. "You won't have to destroy everyone, because she will. If dragons fly…" Everyone caught in the crossfire will die, he knew. "Unless I can find a way to draw out that spirit, containing him is the only option…" He doubted that would even work for long; dragons were magic incarnate, who's to say they couldn't breach dimensions at will?

"You prevented me from having the one I desired most in our realities..." A tempered malevolence witchily brandished over the cool suppleness of her vixenish features; stoking torrents of psionic energy ricocheted through her veins in hellish fruition, as veined reddish skeins demonically melded into a gothicsque burgundy -ebon tiara over her tousled copper-auburn whorls. Stiffeningly, Wanda gnashed her teeth against the deadlock strain of her unstaunched grief-heartache."I lost my precious boys and you broke all the rules again to fix everything...Now I have a chance to redeem my mistakes by protecting Bucky Barnes, and you're not going near that nest again..." she warned, hissingly, knowing Strange would play down his cards with a cheater's hand. "Those hatchlings will be my redemption of the Multiverse..."

The tension in the room was rapidly escalating, old simmering wounds that had gone unhealed were in danger of reopening and causing havoc to bleed out. "Don't get self-righteous with me, Wanda. I may have broken every rule set forth by the sorcerers before me but it's only been out of a necessity to preserve all life, not for personal gain!" He defended. That's not to say he had never been tempted. He had been; so many times. It would have been so easy to use his power to somehow, someway, reverse time and salvage everything he'd lost and sacrificed in an effort to protect all life in the universe-Christine…Donna. He'd learned from his mistake by aiding Spider-Man that time and the multiverse couldn't be meddled with.

Stephen unflinchingly brought himself face-to-face with her, his expression stern but also beseeching. "If its redemption you're seeking, Wanda-for Westview and for every life lost in your violent pursuit of a family, this isn't the way to find it."

Staving down a tempestuous upheaval of heart-razed anguish, grittily, Wanda mirrored the cool quicksilver of his lazurite irises that hawkishly gleamed with intensified-draconic fieriness as his darkish-gray tresses dishelevedly feathered over his broader temples. She wouldn't become a traitorous captive into the hijacking dregs of an unspoken violation against her damnable heart. She wouldn't betray her interminable love for Vision. "Everything I loved was taken from me...If you lost the one person you loved more than anything, you would understand my pain..." she rasped, irascibly. "Just imagine a reality where you lost your heart...Christine."

He recoiled slightly at that. He understood the pain of love lost, but not in the same way Wanda did. Christine was alive, that was enough to give him peace despite the bittersweet reality that she found happiness in the arms of another man. Vision was simply just gone-brutally ripped away from her by a Mad Titan. He shuddered to think what he might have done if Christine had been killed and he had the power to undo it. His heart sank to the pits of his stomach. While he wouldn't concede her point, he knew that she saw the effect her words had on him the longer he gazed into her eyes.

He had never been so awe-struck by the color green before in his life, he felt drawn in-locked under her spell. He swallowed and closed his eyes realizing how close he was getting, figurative and literally. "Christine is gone… And I have to find a way forward in life without her and without succumbing to every impulse telling me to undo that. I've grieved that loss Wanda…have you?"

"Don't you dare ask me that question..." Wanda lashed out, viciously, her pupils flamingly lasered into voltaic crimson as she mistily glared down at her daintier hand, conjuring up dredged apparitions of the moment she raided SWORD's laboratory of disassembling butchery-they dissected Vision into robotic leftovers of singed wire and synthezoid vibrainium-just scraps to harvest. When she glided bone-deep reverence tremulously over Vision's detached head, everything became atomically denotive- paralyzing within her. "I-I grieve for every moment that I can't feel him...Or hear my boys ask me to tuck them into bed..." An implosive surge of destructive ferocity burningly scythed as she restrainedly gestured her lithe fingers in the direction of the cabin's door. "Now, the magnificent creature out there needs me to protect his brood, and I will be at his side without you, Stephen..."

The storm of mental projections were harrowing and gut-wrenching. Stephen had looked on silently, understanding the pain those memories caused her. But he wasn't convinced of her claims. Perhaps she HAD begun to grieve until her powers had conjured that taste of heaven in her own little world in Westview. Westview had derailed things for her mentally and emotionally by distracting her from the truth of her loss. So much that she hadn't yet taken that last step in the grieving process. Wanda hadn't truly learned to let go. The Darkhold only pushed her so far over the line to the point she hadn't even realized she had crossed it.

He kept those thoughts to himself knowing it would only incite her anger even more as he sensed the dangerous surge of chaos magic. The rage those memories of her lost loved ones incited were fuel for the Scarlet Witch's power. He wasn't here for a fight, but as he listened to her vow to protect the ice dragon and his nest, he could hear the covetous drip in her voice. The thought of the Scarlet Witch riding a dragon-controlling a pack of them in the skies-unsettled him deeply. He feared they might inevitably come into conflict once more.

Releasing a remorseful sigh, Stephen turned away from her piercing gaze. "I'll take this as my cue to leave." With a familiar flourish of his wrists, he conjured a slingring portal that would take him back to the New York Sanctum. He could feel Wanda's eyes on him as he stood at the front of it. Despite every instinct telling him not to get too close to this situation, just like every procedure he'd conducted as a surgeon, he wavered as he shifted to look back at her. "I don't want to fight you, Wanda. I never did in fact. I truly am sorry for what you've lost…but I'll do whatever I have to make sure this world isn't threatened by dragons."

…Or you. The implication was left unsaid but heard plain as day. With nothing left to say, Stephen turned and left through the portal, leaving Wanda staring after him.

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As he registered the seismic pulse of deliverance tremoring underneath the blimpish rotundity of his abdominous underbelly, groaningly, Bucky vented out icier breaths as his spikier grayish-obsidian electrifyingly resonated thermic heat over his snugged brood. Snortily, he eased up his elonged reptilian snout on vertiginous strain as he became heart-stunning aware of the globular heaviness of the draconic eggs that felt piercingly akin to shards of glass-egg shells. "Um...What..." he rasped out, breathlessly, as telltale nudging of a tinier form drowsily rapted against his massive foreleg. A soul-raiding barrage of thunderstruck panic had irrevocably skyrocketed as his luminous sapphire orbs unblinkingly caught a mortified glimpse of a dwarfish paw starkly adorned with the frostier incandescence-celestial starlight.

Rampantly, with instinctive precision, Bucky arched up the length of his ironclad tail off the slushier mound and blankly drove the owlish intensity of his glacial depths onto adorable kittenish-like triplets-dragonlings feistily snuggled against his hind-leg. Their roundish draconic heads undeniably had snubbed reptilian snouts with pointier ears that were felinely curved as their sleekier wings remained shiveringly tucked against their smallish forms. The daintiest of his brood-a little girl- angelically contrasted with the niveous vibrance of his domain- whitish-turquoise while his twined males had grayish-ebony scales that blazingly melded over their pudgier forms. In that heart-stealing moment of his riotous euphoria, Bucky angled his larger head gently over the fussier hatchlings, adorningly, he graced whisper-soft caresses with a pacifying tenor resonating against the delicate form of his spunkier baby girl. "S'okay...M'here little dorogaya (darlin')..."

The words he uttered were so instinctive and natural he didn't stop to fathom how unbelievable this moment was. The eggs had hatched! He…he was a father. The thought was both humbling and filled him with unconquerable joy that he never knew existed. Deep in his chest, a warmth blossomed and he felt a wash of energy that made him feel older beyond his years. But that feeling wasn't crippling, no. If anything it was empowering. Sigrun's emotions poured over to join his own-a mutual sense of pride and happiness over the sight of baby dragonlings, the first to be newly born in over a thousand years. Hearing their tiny chirps, feeling their nuzzling snouts brushing against the tender heat of his girthier underbelly made Bucky and the spirit inside of him quiver with emotion. "Yeah…I'm your Papa…and you're mine."

Groaningly, against a wonderous onrush of intensifying-gloried joyousness that implosively duelled with the entity's teeming rapture, Bucky thrusted his draconic snout fervidly over his baby girl's svelter form, viscerally aware of her kittenish delicacy as she chirpily nudged her tinier head against his spikier-pythonic neck- a mirrored closeness-nexus - that was breathtakingly addictive to deny. Each featherlight caress became tacitly invested with chaste steadiness-reverence-while the chubbier males feistily swatted at his tail. An insuppressible revelation had embracingly anchored him against infinite sweetness as he blearily gazed into the little she-drake's orbs that vitreously gleamed like diamond-edged sapphire-a real heart-stealer. "H-Hey little kiddo..." he murmured with breathless hitches, sobbingly, gliding the kiss-soft leatheriness of his puckered fanged-snout against her tinier head. "M' gonna call ya...Frost."

A scathing surge of discomfort moved through his body, throbbing against his skull. Sigrun didn't approve of the name choices, no doubt the Vanir Ice Dragon wanted something more traditional. 'Tough,' Bucky let the thought simmer and agitate the she-dragon inside of him. These were his children-his dragonlings. That protective instinct that he came to recognize as paternal only strengthened as he shifted his wing to provide a sheltered blanket over his off-spring. The two feisty males seemed full of energy as they crawled around his leg as if they were spanning the height of a mountain. They were fascinated by him, by their surroundings. Bucky had only imagined having children a few instances in his life when he thought he found the perfect dame for him, but he never envisioned it quite like this. He'd always wanted both a daughter and a son. Now he had more than that.

He was brought out of his musings when one of the two runts gnawed on his scaled muscle causing Bucky to wince with surprise. "Ouch, careful there, little guy." How the heck did he have teeth so sharp already, unless... A puff of smoke suddenly spewed from the dragonling's mouth, it was as sudden as a burp but there was no mistaking the tiny ember of yellow flame that followed. "Whoa!" Bucky grunted in astonishment. The other male dragon was quick to leap and dodge away from the small burst of flame with amazing speed.

The chubbiest male drake tellingly harboured a tenacious -hellbent-spirit of 'Brooklyn boy' naughtiness as he squeakily emitted out growlier chuffs, while clumsily prowling behind the scaled-resiliency of his Daddy's foreleg with shiftier evades of his kitten-soft poise. Quirking up his puckered snout, toothily, Bucky snorted out a throatier chuckle, as he deftly narrowed his massive head a breadth at his little 'firecracker' with measured affection." Yeah...You're a stubborn one, huh...Blaze..." he quipped in a whispery-roughened drawl, croakily, bopping the stealthier hellraiser's kittenish snout while the chubbiest of his brood sneakily wedged against the bulbous rotundity of his protrusive underbelly. "You're definitely gonna be one who gets out of the...uh...Dodge."

Despite the skull-pounding mania of Sigrun's phantasmal-calamitous emergence of rabidly inducing him into catatonic throes of bestial severance, Bucky evited out her telekinetic cadence as he blearily gazed at the pint-sized baby drakes-they weren't insomniac PSTD hallucinations that condemningly dredged within the traumatized HYDRA-plagued recesses of his amnesic mind, he wasn't being chemically anesthetized within the Siberian cryogenic pod as demonic tentacles chokingly grappled him a comatose-paralytic slumber. They were beautiful visages of redemption-hope. "Don't worry little kiddos...M' gonna keep you safe..." he whispered against chest-racking sobs, gutturally, nuzzling Frost's velvety-ivory wings. "We're gonna be flyin' soon, malyshka ..."

It was a strange feeling to be so happy about. The thought of flying high among the clouds with his children, feeling the soaring winds whipping against his scales. It wasn't something he had experienced-flying. For so many months he'd kept himself grounded, hidden from the eyes of the world in fear of causing fear and chaos, but now…now nothing sounded more majestic and liberating. As if sensing his good mood, the three dragonlings chirped and hopped along his massive size, Blaze trying steadily to stretch his tiny wings, looking at them with curiosity. Dodger and Frost were nipping at rocks, the two of them making use of their small talons as they tried to lift them up and throw them across the ground.

It was a fascinating and cute thing to watch and Bucky felt so enchanted by it. He knew then, deep in his heart, whatever anxieties he'd felt about being a dragon, about never being able to be human again, were slowly evaporating in the face of a newfound purpose in life. The Ice Dragon smiled, rows of sharp teeth beaming bright as wafts of cool air blew from his nostrils. The Earth rumbled and the weather reacted to his mood, gentle flurries falling across the mountainous valley. He was oblivious to his surroundings-nothing else seemed to matter to him. That was until a prickling sensation at the edge of his mind stole his focus. "We are not alone," she growled in his thoughts.

A homicidal aura of butcherous-diseased malignance had nocuously assailed the forested environs, snarlingly, Bucky registered the malodorous rancidity of eviscerated dragon skull that macabrely fused with Uru armour of a Nidavellir cuirass as warped ebon pauldrons demonically jutted over of his bulkier shoulders-he was dragon-slayer incarnate. Advancing with bearish momentum, sneeringly, Kjell hoisted up his Nero battle-axe with an imperious command, mobilizing a zombified-skeletal deformities of his death-walker legion who berserkly dragged iron-barbed netting over the snowdrifts. "Bring the Winter Drake to me...!" he barked out, virulently. "Leave his wretched spawn to perish..."

It took only a moment for Bucky to realize what was happening and he was suddenly overcome with an unshakable killer instinct to trample and devour all in his wake. Months of being kept hidden and agitated him, the labour of his burden nearly diminished his strength, but the sight of the infamous Vanir warlord who had deceived him made him vengeful, compounded by the overwhelming fire of hatred he was feeling once Sigrun had overcome his collective thoughts. "KJELL!" Bucky roared in a voice that wasn't entirely his own. Alarm set in as his dragonlings whined and shrieked with fright, sensing the mounting danger that was building as they instinctively sought to hide themselves behind their father. "Sigrun, stop!" He yelled in his thoughts. He struggled to reign in her temper which caused the ground to quake and hurricane winds to build as she extended his wings. "HE WILL DIE!" She roared, even as the hell-walkers began to surround them both.

Torquing his behemothic-cumbrous form on his spear-edged talons with viperous-honed precision, the Siper-Drake razored the whitish-heat of his aqueous orbs fervently at the orcish Draugr cavalcade twistily staggering closer to his nest-Einherjar helmets grotesquely adorned blackish resin skulls, as malachite-virescent skeins demonically veined around their hollowed-out eye-sockets fierily radiating demented -cabalistic bloodlust. "Do you remember the glorious purge of your befallen domain ..." Kjell bellowed out, ravingly, hefting up his Necro battle-axe like a composer of a symphony of mayhem. I have slaughtered all the Vanaheim drakes with this forsaken army that ushered out Helheim's gates...I am banamaðr...The slayer of dragons and I will gut your hide, Segrent Barnes..."

Harnessing surges of his untrammelled ferocity, defensively, in aggressive succession, Bucky whip-lashed his spikier tail whooshingly over an icier mound with explosive momentum as he frantically nudged his baby dragonlings underneath his saggier underbelly. Against desperate traction, he angled the plumpish rotundity of his girth over a snow-mound as Frost rackingly tucked herself underneath his massive wing. Jutting out his reptilian snout with a pythonic-strike , gnashingly, Bucky clamped his incisors fangs over a bonier torso of a Helheim zombified raider on vicious -deadlier succession. "Gragh...Stay back..." Growlier heaves roaringly vented out of him as his sapphire-lazurite depths predatorily glared at hell-walkers' thrusting gnarled hands jerkily at his petrified dragonlings- little guys. "Leave em' alone..!"

"I will not be denied the she-beast's spirit that pervades within your verminous form, Winter Soldier..." Kjell snarled against a gruffer cadence, rancorously, as his coppery-bearded jaw scruffily clenched against brutish strain-his callous raven-slate irises evilly glared at the wraith-like Berserker gripping onto a metallic Uru chain that heavily weighed a spikier ball-a Nidavellir mace. "Yield to me, Sergent Barnes, or I will stain your icy domain with the blood of your craven hatchlings..."

Come try us and we'll CRUSH YOU!" The dragon bellowed. Until now, there had never been a just cause for Bucky and the spirit within him to come to a mutual understanding. Sigrun's draconic ire towards humanity and the Aesir were as unquenchable as an fiery inferno, and just the same her intentions for his off-spring could only be considered cold and unyielding. But they both recognized the Vanir Warlord as a ruthless threat that needed to be dealt with. Sigurn's motives were vengeful while Bucky's were merely defensive, but he found himself unable to suppress the flood of her emotions pouring through him. Hate, pain, malice.

He could feel every loss, every whip of agony that she and her kind-their kind-endured at the hands of the Berserker who turned on them when the Vanir Drakes would no longer support his campaign against Odin and the Einherjar invasion. It wasn't enough for Kjell to repel Asgard, he wanted to conquer his own realm in the aftermath and in time, all of the nine.

Bucky had had his fill of conquerors and this was one he would take satisfaction in trampling under his foot. When he felt his dragonlings were safely nestled beneath cover, he unleashed the might of his aggression as he let loose an arctic blast of cold. A score of draugr were immediately reduced to shattered pieces of ice, their armor and decayed flesh crumbling like glass before the might of the ice drake's whipping breath. Months of reserved energy and latent fury were released upon the attacking waves but for every draugr that fell, another seemed to crawl out of the ground in an endless cycle.

'Kill Kjell! The draugr are linked to his seidr,' Sigrun roared at him. Bucky aimed his focus only to see the warlord had raised his berserker staff and slammed it to the ground, "Eldsprengju!" A blast of fire, yellow and hellish whipped across the ground and slammed into the ice drake, staggering him. 'Fight on!' Sigrun chided, 'take to the skies!' Bucky felt draugr crawling onto his back as he attempted to follow the spirit's lead. Their sharp knives and axes pierced and stabbed at his scaly hide savagely. They were like needles, barely enough to cause harm but enough to prevent him from spreading his wings. "Can't!"

"Gildra!" Kjell roared. A crippling sensation moved across his body as Bucky felt a blanket of agony ensnare him in the form of a net. The net was enchanted to sharpen around its square edges the more its prey resisted. The dragon flayed and flapped his wings, his movements causing a small hurricane of winds to sweep through the valley sending icy rocks flying across the skies. The net squeezed tighter, Kjell's magic feeding the spell as he slowly approached with a sadistic smile. "You are both mine!"

Against the heart-stopping-insurmountable anguish that devastatingly imploded within his draconic form, snarlingly, Bucky gnashed his incisor fangs as the heftiness of iron netting burningly raked over his spikier flesh-he was uncontrollably being roped down into a paralytic deadlock of gruelling submission-akin to being viciously dragged back into the nitrogen-anesthetic- vapours of cryostasis pod that sadistic General Karpov catatonically entombed him into after being maliciously shunted with an IV of glucose by the HYDRA medical assistants. 'Molodets, soldat (Well done, soldier)...'

Every vestige of his resilence was being irrevocably amputated, the spikier barbs of the netting excruciatingly knifed into his girthier-deadweight mass as the hell-walker's yanked him. Vertiginously, Bucky lashed his fore-talons on a tarry skeletal torso-he wouldn't become ripped away from his baby dragonlings. "Arghh..." he railed out against choked-off gravelliness, sniffily, doing his utmost to evict the heart-gouging desperation as he nudged the kiss-soft pressure of his longish snout brushingly over the kittenish delicateness of his angelically precious little girl who clingily snuggled against his fore-leg. The squeakier whimpers of the pudgier males rampantly amplified in distress unison as Dodger and Blaze tremorously swatted their dwarfish paws over his spikier horns-they were reactive aware of his soul-crippling heartache. "F-Frost...Dodge...Blaze...Everythin's gonna be okay..."

The dragonlings whined and screeched, together watching as their father was completely ensnared in the netting and being pulled away by the scores of draugr being led by their battle-master clutching his staff. Ruefully, Kjell looked at the ice-drake and sensed the defiance still burning within. "Say goodbye to your little spawns-it will be a slow freezing death for them out here. You and I will have much catching up to do." After he broke the dragon's will and enslaved her, he would settle old debts before returning home.

As he followed his minions through the portal he conjured, Bucky could only do the one thing that was left to protect his babies. A magical warmth blew from his snout, bathing the hiding dragonlings in a magical barrier that would safeguard them from the elements and raiders. "Love you, little guys."

Kjell's seidr sensed the opening of another portal-the magic used for this one was different from the Midgardian magic its sorcerer's utilized. In a word, it felt…chaotic. "Hmm, the infamous witch at last makes her appearance."

A kinetic tremor of reddish salvos telekinetically concussed as the Sokovian phoenix emerged out of the eldritch portal, the svelte exquisiteness of her curvaceous form was gothically embroidered with vampiresque brocade aesthetically meshed with skeins of ebony-burgundy that bustily fringed over her voluptuous décolletage-the visage of Scarlet Witch. Glaring at Kjell, her pupils fieirly gleamed crimson-aster -hell-storm intensity that demonically contrasted with her intricate rubied diadem as she malevolently eased up her lithe hand, conjuring psionic energy to damagingly blast on the Uru netting that searingly entrapped the Sniper-Drake. "You will release my friend...Or I will exhaust all your power with a snap of my fingers..."

The Vanir warlord lingered a moment, if only to sate his curiosity as he beheld the frightening force of destruction he'd heard tale of. A mortal who's very power was enough to cripple the Mad Titan to the point of desperation. His senses stretched out and he was amazed by the power he sensed in her. Given time and experience she could perhaps one day grow to rival Freya herself. Yet he remained fearless in the face of her harrowing threat, grim focus causing him to shift his gaze towards the snowy alps. "You are powerful, Young One. Chaos magic favors you, but you are far too undisciplined and experienced to contend with a Vanir God!"

His warrior instinct encouraged him to engage the Scarlet Witch, to sate the battle-lust he had harbored for the Winter Soldier in a climatic duel, but he knew that to do so would endanger his plans. Besides, he had what he wanted. Raising his battle-axe that doubled as a staff, he poured his magic into its base and slammed it to the ground. "Glettings Bara!" A shockwave of magic swept through the valley, its force colliding with the alps and the snowy summits causing them to rumble. An avalanche began to swoop downward, mercilessly aimed towards Wanda and the three dragonlings.

"Farewell, Little Witch." Kjell taunted as he sauntered through the portal, closing it behind him.

A thunderous eruption of hurricanic snow-gusts unstoppably cascaded down the mountainous peak in those heart-alarming seconds of an earshot, breathlessly, Wanda propelled her jack-up momentum at the breadth of the vitreous barrier jaggedly fused with icier spires that cradled over the distressed hatchlings. Panic manifested grippingly tenfold as she blearily roved her virescent-hazel irises onto the adorable-draconic brood shiveringly huddled within the dome.

Bracingly, Wanda glided her daintier palm with tentative precision over against the frostier coolness of the barrier. She couldn't allow these precious babies to mercilessly suffocate underneath heaps of bone-crushing snow. Quashing down the apparitional heartache of her dredged-up grief when she erased the 'Pleasantville' reality of Westview like digitized pixels-codes-that she conjured on the grounds of her unbuilt home. "I-I'm not going to leave you, little ones..." she promised, threadily, as psionic energy meltingly striated over the ice. "We're going to make out together..." Without hesitation, she reached for the kittenish she-drake who timidly bopped her tinier snout against Wanda's sleeved forearm, as she protectively embraced the cub-sized dragonlings, viscerally, aware that astral fieriness of a sling-portal eldritchly wheeled beneath her crouching form. "Y-You're going to be safe...I'm not going to let anything will happen to you...I promise."

The avalanche was upon them, the walls of snow as high as skyscrapers ready to bury them in a tomb of ice. The portal opened fully in time to swallow Wanda and the dragonlings nestled against her side. They fell through the rift not a moment too soon before it sealed up over them. The scenery and atmosphere immediately changed from withering cold to homely warmth as they landed with a soft thud on a carpeted floor. A cascade of snow came down on top of them, a harrowing indicator of how close they'd come to being trapped.

The dragonlings chirped and flapped their wings, alarmed by the change in their surroundings. Instinctively they gravitated towards Wanda, a source of protection yet they were still distressed over the loss of their father. The Scarlet Witch did her utmost to soothe their worry, feeling mildly reassured of their safety once she recognized the warm study belonging to the New York Sanctum. As if on cue, a caped silhouette loomed in the doorway. "Good to see you brought the kids, Wanda. Finding a dragon-sitter isn't very easy in this day and age." Stephen quipped as he entered the study, his mood sobering immediately as he knew what this situation all meant.

"Bucky?" He asked worriedly.

"H-He was taken away from them..." Wanda answered with tremorous raspiness, huskily, staving off vestiges of the hypothermic iciness that numbingly knifed through her veins, disarmingly, she registered a gravitic tenor of pent-up distress feverously resonating off the scaled velvetiness of baby she-drake's kittenish form. Chirpily, Frost nuzzled her tinier snout against the lithe contours of Wanda's forearm, while Blaze emitted growlier squeaks as he bitingly tugged at her dampish copper-auburn whorls. Feigning a grimace over her plushier lips, Wanda glanced down at the quick-footed drake sneakily pouncing onto a Tiberian-weaved rug. Keeping his poker-faced countenance impassively brandished on the hawkish planes of his graven-cut features, edgily, Strange glided down the stairway with measured tack-maintaining distance from the Barnes' dragonlings. "These little ones are Bucky's children, Stephen...We have to protect them like the lunchbox heroes we used to be..."

"Hmm," Stephen watched the little scaly trio with curiosity as they gravitated towards Wanda while at the same time appearing curious of their surroundings. They were so small, roughly the size of small puppies, it was easy to forget they would one day grow to be as huge as skyscrapers. He'd be lying if he said he wasn't the least bit worried about their fate, not just as a protector of Earth but as a doctor who'd seen time and again what a lack of proper nurturing did to young ones. The dragonlings needed protection, but they needed their father most of all. "They'll be safe here," he said, surprising Wanda by his acceptance, "until I find a way to get Barnes back from a Vanir warlord fully intent on turning him into his slave and using him to conquer Earth." Just saying it made the whole thing sound preposterous. How did his job get this chaotic?

Against a modicum of nascent awareness that notched every duelled heartbeat of her resistance, unblinkingly, Wanda mirrored the cool steeliness that hypnotically melded with the silvery-lazurite of his irises- his dishevelled brunette- raven tresses were featherily askew over the serrated curvatures of his temples as Strange tensely braced the alethic-honed solidity of his cloaked back against ochre stairway railing, apprehensively glancing at the chubbier 'hellraiser' baby-drake scampishly prowling near the steps, huffing out vaporous bluish embers flamingly like an igniting acetylene torch. Stubly, quirking up a vixenish smirk over her plushier-bow lips, Wanda scooped up Blaze in a swift underhand motion at the second he lashingly swatted at the damask length of the spirited cloak. "Maybe you should keep your cloak friend distant from here..." she urged in her Sokovian timbre, jauntily."Until I get these little ones under control..."

"Yeah all right, but in the meantime," with a flourish of his hands, their surroundings suddenly changed as they all teleported instantaneously into another room. The speed of the act made Wanda stumble in surprise slightly, though she retained far more grace than a certain god of thunder did when he first visited. "You can use this room," he said, stepping forward and pulling off a stack of clothing from a nearby chair. The scent of sandalwood and leather was heavy along with incense. A look at the king-sized bed and open closet filled with tailored suits made Wanda realize this was his personal bedroom.

"Its not exactly a dragon's den, but it should keep them comfortable." There was also the convenient mending spell he placed on the room should something gets accidentally incinerated in here it would magically repair itself, not that he'd mention that. His trusty friend on his shoulders gave an insistent tug; finding their new company to be curious like a child seeing a new baby brought home. Oddly cute but also a recipe for disaster if they came together and started wreaking havoc without a chaperone.

How Wanda seemed to fill the role of a nurturing den-mother seemed astoundingly natural…then again, motherhood wasn't something new to her. The sorcerer's expression became solemn as he watched her usher the dragonlings up onto a set of cushions she placed on the floor. It amazed him how different she looked, how…happy she seemed in that role. This was what she had lost-what she had committed the most violent of acts in order to regain. He never imagined what it would be like to have a child for himself, even in his most intimate moments with Christine when they thought they could have a future together. But he knew enough to realize that parenthood changes people and leaves a lasting impression.

He inwardly hoped Wanda could find that happiness again. Despite everything she had done, he believed she deserved that second chance. His musing was cut short when he saw her shift towards him with a curious side-eye. It was subtle yet done in a very sleek and alluring way. Blinking with a flush of heat, Stephen knew where his thoughts were headed and gave her a tight smile. "I know how important they are to you-and to Bucky. We'll find him, Wanda."

They had to.

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The bone-vising Uru metal had pinchingly clamped over the horned contours of his reptilian snout, every warred motion of his conscious resistance had paralytically deadened him with tasering pulses akin to cerebral electroshocks of being strapped down into the HYDRA-modified dentist chair. Groaningly, Bucky dragged his fore-talons over metallic flooring against warded-off grogginess, as he registered the blimp-sized massiveness of his abdominous girth that mountingly burgeoned against the obesifying strain -he was getting bigger.

The heftier weight of the Uru shackles immobilized him while the tornadic spirit of the Vanir she-drake clashingly demanded him to unleash his draconic fury. He became crippled with onrushes of untrammelled -knifing heartache that numbingly grappled him into throes of vacuous oblivion. Pinching his dampish orbs shut, gnashingly, Bucky reared his crocodilian-like snout up hulkishly against the clunkier shackles, as a voltaic pulse of white-heat bluishly radiated over his spikier grayish-obsidian scales.

"No...Damnit..." Bucky choked out, sniffily, easing up his clawed fore-paw to swipe off the straying wetness of unspent anguish. Being torturously severed-amputated from his precious draconic brood gutted him soul-deep. In those joyous moments of watching them beautifully hatch against the bulbous resiliency of his massive girth-he welcomed the reality of daybreak. Now, he was exhaustingly shackled into throes of dormant compliance, while his babies freezingly huddled within the icy cradle of their ravaged nest-he failed to protect them. "Gotta fight, Barnes...For those little kiddos..."

His anxiety rose to a feverish pitch with a spike of anger triggered by the wafting stench of Vanir magic. The scent of spilled blood and scorched flesh hung heavily in the air like a bad omen. Once he had become aware of his surroundings did the Sniper-Dragon become apprehensive with the sight of a laboratory equipment and hi-tech technology. The room was vast, almost the size of a stadium, dark and miserable as a pit with only a small ray of sunlight entering through a sealed skyview window. Even more ominous were the numerous dead scientists and security guards dressed in yellow hazmat suits strewn out along the floor like butchered cattle. Crimson death stained the pristine-white walls where the infamous logo of the Advanced Idea Mechanics was matted with bloodshed.

A dark sadistic chuckle entered the dim atrium and the dragon tensed up as his dreaded foe sauntered into view. "Awake at last, are you? Did you sleep well? I couldn't tell with all the mewling and whimpering you pealed so pathetically." Kjell, the Vanir warlord and sorcerer stood like an ant before a giant but radiated pure strength and savagery while holding a bloodied axe in his hands. "Like what i have done with the place? These Midgardian men of science may be mad as hatters but their resources are vast and useful across this realm." The dragon snarled and jerked at his restraints, causing the room shudder from the strength of his vibrations. But the restraints AIM developed held and Bucky found himself unable to lash out at the Kjell who smiled tauntingly. "Consider this place your new home-one where you will be educated to serve your true nature."

Hearing the abrasive gruffiness of Kjell's virulent cadence, snappishly, Bucky jutted out his pointier fangs on defensive traction, growlingly, he yanked against the Uru-iron muzzle that kept him restrainedly bolted to the cement flooring. The revamped -cool-blooded ferocity of pent-up rabidness was typhonically channelling within his dreadnought rotundity as the vitreous intensity of his whitish-sapphire orbs raptorially gleamed at the Vanir dragon-slayer, full-fledged aggression intensifyingly tempoed into unhampered-draconic bloodthirsty. Whippingly, Bucky arched up the spikier massiness of his tail, knocking down eroded crates in the wake of his Tyrannosaurus-like destruction. With flitting rapt of his scaly eyelids, unwaveringly, he lasered a dead-straight glare onto bearish-poised-genocidal huntsmen's Nerco battle-axe. "You think you can just put me on the ropes without a fight..." Bucky panted against the guttural staccatos, raggedly. "C'mon, I dare ya to step closer...!"

A bark of laughter escaped Kjell, his eyes full of dark sadistic humor as he paced the floor with his axe resting on his shoulder. "Clever, but I am not goaded easily. Plus you have no challenge to offer me; slaying dragons was a favorite past-time of mine back home, I'm sure Sigrun would have told you that by now." The harrowing reminder of his past crimes against the Drakes of Vanaheim triggered an aggressive struggle in the dragon, the ancient spirit within no doubt having been roused from her own dormancy only to find herself unable to extract her blood debt from the warlord. "Dragons are of no challenge to me, I have slain too many to feel threatened by an inept host. The Winter Soldier on the other hand…" A look of longing came upon his features, disappointment clear in his eyes. "He would have been a fun challenge. Our battle could have been legendary."

Glancing down at the warped vibrainum-alloy servos rigidly melded into his scaled fore-paw, Bucky scatchingly, roved his aqueous depths onto the golden skeins that shinily embellished over his mechanized dagger-like talons contrasted with nano pulses of kinetic amethyst kinetically electrified into Okavango glyphs-a Wakandian branding of redemption. Within the forested vistas of the Border Tribe, he endured traumatic onslaughts as being grappling into the hypnotic 'kill-switch' reactivation of his conditioned programming when Dora Milaje lieutenant-Ayo-recited the Soviet mantra -trigger words that refashioned him into mechanized-lethal compliance. He wasn't the robotized Siberian phantasm -a reaper of HYDRA who had flatlined his marked targets with dead-shot precision-never a blink of mercy. ""M' no longer the Winter Soldier..." he growled, throatily, hefting up his robotic fore-paw. "I was given a chance to be called Bucky Barnes again..."

"It doesn't matter what you call yourself!" Kjell scoffed with an indignant look. He'd read Barnes' history, how he had once been a crass yet capable soldier before being molded into a killing machine. His moniker was one given to him by his enemies. Yet he molded that name into something to be feared for decades upon this realm whether it was of his own free-will or not. The past few years saw the man attempt to right the wrongs of his past and scrub away the stains of contamination in his mind that made him a relentless force. "You believe you can simply wipe away your past? Become a hero? Get a clean-slate? That isn't how it works! You are a killer, like me! Countless have fallen by our hands, their souls sent to the gates of Valhalla or to the dregs of Nilfilheim. Just or not-we sealed their fates because we are-or in your case, "you were"-simply superior!" Baring his teeth, sneerily, Kjell extended the battle-axe handle until it slammed into the ground. A blast wave of Vanir magic swept the room, bathing everything in a searing violet hue causing the dragon to recoil with pain. "And you will be again! I have an old debt to settle...and you will help me collect it!"

As shockwaves of the purplish-white voltage of celestial energy blindingly radiated off the Nerco axe, gnashingly, the Sniper-Drake braced his fore-talons over the cement on strenuous tenor, every bone-zapping salvo had electrifyingly ratcheted off his grayish-obsidian scales like a concussive blowback of a flash grenade. Bracing against the voltaic onslaught that psionically amplified into xenon firebolts of white-heat, thrashingly, Bucky yanked on the iron shackles with breakneck force. "Rargh...You're not gonna control me...!" he vented out a full-throated roar of manic viciousness, quakingly, as Sigrun's heart-scything rabidity jackhammered explosively against his draconic skull on powder-keg succession. The narco-axe's energy unremittingly surged as Bucky uncontrollably slashed his vibrainium talons a hairbreadth at Kjell's armoured chest. "M' gonna kill you...Morder (Murderer)!"

"There she is," A sadistic laugh bellowed from Kjell who watched as the dragon's pupils narrowed to full draconic slits, revealing a familiar presence. "Þarna er gamli glæpamaðurinn minn. (There's my old partner in crime!) Sigrun! Still holding a grudge, I see. You should be thanking me for giving you this second chance! After Thor put you out of your misery it was I who preserved your spirit in the SoulBinder rather than let you fade away into the astral oblivion where the rest of your kind sleep. You are not blameless, drekanorn (dragon witch)! The Vanir do not tolerate desertion, your kind would have let my people become forever subservient to Odin and the Aesir filth rather than reap glory for us all!" He watched the dragon's struggle become even more feral and aggressive with each word he spoke in an attempt to break free and crush him. "What changed Sigrun? When did your kind become so soft and lose its taste for war?!"

"Du ødela slektningene mine... Jeg vil aldri tillate deg å herje reirene mine igjen(You destroyed my kin... I will never allow you to ravage my nests again)..." The growlier rawness of the Sniper-Drake's timbered cadence snarlingly erupted into fissionable rage against the sledgehammering ferocity that murderously pounded through his colossal form on denotative fruition. Seethingly, with panty heaves, Bucky thrusted his longish snout against the clamping heftiness of the muzzled -shackle, the serrated length of his incisor fangs were cuttingly poised to decapitate the Vanir maniac-every torturous callback of the heart- devasting pandemonia of massacred drakes being screechingly gored by his bloodthirsty Svartálfar raiders tormentingly caromed within him.

Against throat-grating snarls, Bucky was viscerously attuned to the she-drake's unwarranted agony that she heartbreakingly endured under the command of Kjell's planet-scourging barbarity-warpath. The celestial branches of Yggdrasill were poisonously infected by his sanguineous vengeance that consumed galactic realms. As the electrical frequency that sonically pulsated from the battle-axe was disturbingly akin to the white-hot voltage of HYDRA's cerebral repressing machine when Zola strapped him down as the rotating headset searingly fried every conscious thought of resistance into a narcotized mania of white-noise static. Bracing his massive fore-talons on a predatory stance, huffily, Bucky lasered his diamondlike whitish-sapphire orbs onto Kjell as the vaporous iciness in his bulbous girth tempestuously stoked up his pythonic throat. "Y-You're forgettin' that she only scratches at my mind...The rest you damn bastard is all...Me!"

Kjell snarled as his vexation continued to climb in the face of Bucky's outspoken defiance. "Perhaps it is; only a mortal could be so impudent as to defy my glory." Another beat of his axe-handle against the floor caused another flow of cosmic bifrost energy to slam into Bucky, the force so staggering the drake cried out and lost his balance, falling to his side. Fuming, Kjell made his daring approach within arm's reach of the downed dragon. Tilting the blade of his axe pointed towards the dragon's snout he barked with a commanding tone.

"But my blood burns for retribution, my soul hungers for victory. Ragnarok robbed me of my vengeance against Odin and his precious Asgard, but the filth of Aesir has spread to this realm. You will be my instrument of destruction, Winter Dragon," a sadistic glee entered the warlord's eyes-cold and savage. "Or by the Norns, I will find your wretched hatchlings where I left them, and I will make them suffer endlessly. I will wear their scaled hides upon my armor as another trophy of conquest!"

Fear and rage flared through Bucky's being as he attempted to rise. "If you try to hurt them, I'll-"

A downward swing of the battle-axe brought the blade piercing down into the dragon's arm. A howl of pain shook the atrium, Bifrost energy flaring over his body like violet flames ready to consume him as the warlord exerted his fury. "SUBMIT! I've not come this far to be refused by a shackled mortal. The Aesir will finally perish! Their cries of death will be heard all the way to the gates of Valhalla where Odin himself will know I have triumphed! Unless you want your hatchlings to suffer, New Asgard must be reduced to icy glass!"

Emitting a guttural protest against the brutish pressure of Kjell's iron-clad boot, trepidatiously, Bucky pinched his mistier aqueous orbs shut as collapsible-heart-slamming resistance became damningly amputated out of his behemothic form; he wouldn't allow his baby dragonlings to anguishedly become expandable collaterals staked down into the butcherous crosshairs. Warding off the vicious-rapacious ferocity to devour Kjell, snortily, he puffed out icier vapours that frostily wisped into bluish smoke out of his scaled nostrils -he was on the hairbreadth of the insurmountable deadlock of swapping the fractions of humanity-the spirit of a hellbent- tenacious Brooklyn kid into catatonic oblivion to keep his precious brood safeguarded. "I-I'll do it...For em'" he growled, sniffily, as Vanir runes engraved into the Nerco battle-ax hellishly whipsawed Nordic sigils of purplish aster into his massive horned brow. "R-Ready to comply..."

Removing his bladed-axe from the dragon's brow, Kjell grinned with satisfaction. Already he could taste his victory looming close as his connection to the dragon was sealed by his binding spell. His lips drooled like a wolf ready to savor a chunk of meat that had long since been denied to him. "Haha! Good! Now rise, my Winter Dragon! Glory awaits! Glory to Vanaheim and to us all! Let them know the bite of winter's fury!"

Arching his spine, the Ice Dragon raised his head and let loose an arctic blast of sheering cold that shot through the room of the Atrium towards the heavens. His scaled mountainous mass was consumed with Bifrost energy, enhancing the strength and force of his power causing ominous storm clouds to form all across the globe. Battle-axe raised, Kjell laughed with manic glee as a winter storm the likes of which Midgard had never seen had just begun.

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The fussier chirps sneakily resonating off the rambunctious dragonlings embracingly clashed against the feverous grogginess that cozily anchored her within the sheathing heaviness of the damask Tibetian cotton blankets; she was aware of the puppyish wobbling of the baby drakes as they clumsily prowled over the king-sized mattress on sneakier unison. The mauve drapery that luxuriously hung over the Victoriansque mahogany Baroque wooden bedposts were being aggressively yanked by the chubbiest of the brood who clamped his tinier fangs over the cascading length. Gaspingly, on breakneck reaction, Wanda eased off the silken pillow, unblinkingly roving her virescent-hazel irises onto the feisty male."Oh...No..No..." she rasped against breathless hitching, padding her lithe palm over a lumpier blanket-only to feel a velvetlike wing of the angelic snow-drake tremorously rapting over her sleeved wrist. "If Stephen finds you little ones destroying his expensive bed...That won't good."

As if emboldened by her claim, the chubbiest of the hatchlings jerked his head and an audible tear sounded through the room. The drape tore off the post and the tiny dragon chirped with satisfaction causing Wanda to sigh. Before she could fathom what she might say to this, the drape astoundingly reverted back to its original place and in tact, surprising Wanda and the feisty dragonling. "Not to worry," a familiar voice said. Stephen entered the room, a tight smile on his face as he observed the trio on his bed. "A rekindling spell, useful for protecting priceless artifacts…and keeping cups full for thirsty Asgardians'." He made his way in tentatively. The hour was late and the sorcerer would be retreating to one of the smaller rooms to get some sleep, but not before checking up on his guests. His cape still hung from his shoulders, the enchanted relic vibrating in the presence of Wanda and the three dragons.

So much power-so much energy in one place, and yet Stephen felt mildly calm as he watched her gently stroke one of the dragons. "They've taken quite a shine to you, Wanda."

Despite hearing the gruffer cadence placidly tamping against his sonorous undertone, curvily, Wanda half-quirked up her plushier lips as whitish-scaled dragonling tentatively wobbled on her delicate-stubbier fore-talons on instinctive traction, nudging her daintier snout clingily over Wanda's denim-clad thigh with kitten-soft pressure. Against that visceral sweetness, nakedly, a blearing onrush of wetness dampened her lashes as she kneaded a shakier caress of her palm over the velvety spikiness of the she-dragonling's arching back."I-I feel connected with them..." she admitted in breathier pitch, harbouring onto a modicum of the protective-motherly spirit that was unforgettingly birthed in Westview. "They need me to protect them like a mother, Stephen...Until we free Bucky."

"What will you do after that?" Stephen asked, neither suspicious nor grave but rather hopeful. A somber silence ensued. It went without saying that once Bucky was reunited with his children, the modern day Earth was no place for dragons to soar above the clouds. Having kept Wong in on the essential details, it became clear that Bucky would inevitably have to be relocated if they couldn't find a way to restore him. Was Wanda prepared for that? Had she already grown too attached to these innocent little drakes that she might take exception to that? "Wanda?"

When it became clear to him he wouldn't receive a straight answer, Stephen sighed as he wandered to the window gazing out at the quietness over the city. He couldn't keep his delicate thoughts contained anymore. "I know you said…you feel protecting these drakes will make up for all the things you've done since Westview. But will it be enough for you after they've gone back to their father?" He could almost feel her stare on him, the heat of it perhaps a sure indicator she knew what he was asking. Turning around he met her stare, his blue gaze once again warm and beseeching. "Can you simply…let go?"

Had she truly been able to let go of it all? Vision? Tommy? Billy? She carried the pain of them still inside of her, that much was expected, but she hadn't allowed herself to fully move past that loss. She wasn't a heroic Avenger anymore, she had retreated from that way of life after losing those closest to her. She was a woman who closed herself off, refusing to go back out into the world where she could still do so much good.

Fostering onto a modicum of her tampered resistance, stingily, a bleariness of dredged-up anguish trekked glisteningly down the alabaster suppleness of her delicate-edged cheeks as that heart-stunting-irrevocable revelation paralyzingly deadened her into apparitional throes of unabandoned heartache. Flexing the pacifying ministrations of her lithe palm cherishingly over the whitish-turquoise velvetiness of baby drake's scaled belly with tremorous-undeniable steadiness, guardedly, Wanda listened to their kittenlike chirps squeakily resonating in tempoed unison.

"Y-You know since I've had these little ones with me, those nightmares in that paradox reality no longer exist..." she murmured, gratingly, every day the precious drakes were detached from their Daddy, her visceral-soul-deep bond had become desperately inseparable. She couldn't wage against the upheaval of maternal instincts that unavailingly rode through her veins."Maybe that's selfish, but it keeps me from unleashing...Her...Again."

Fleetingly, Wanda gazed at the serrated angularity of his graven-edged-austere features pensively conveying reserved tolerance as he edgily steered his lazurite-azureous irises at the hell-raising dragonlings swatting at his ochre bedpost. "I've seen a reality where a dark version of myself destroyed every fabric...Threads of existence sucked away into a vacuum because I opened up the Dark Hold to save that world..." he whispered, gravelly, knowing that every intricate mechanism of dimensional paradoxes was geared by interminable decisions that apocalyptically conducted symphonic mayhem-chaos. "The decisions we make to fix our mistakes weigh down a price of sacrifice ..." He knew that harbouring baby Vanir drakes -cosmic leviathans that would harness destructive power cataclysmically ushering another dimensional incursion-a gatecrashing 'world tour' of the Dark Verse. "Whatever this douchebag warlord has planned for Barnes, it will only by a domino effect of grand-scale chaos..."

"You have to let me help, Stephen..." she urged in threadier pitch, hushedly, as the chubbiest of the dragonlings-Blaze- toothily chirped while he thrusted his stubbier fore-paws over the damask comforter, lasering his silvery- turquoise orbs unwaveringly onto his timid brother as he growlingly readied his fiercer 'tough-guy' momentum to scrappily deliver headlong tackle onto Dodger, only to clumsily nosedive into a lumpier sheet as his scampish twin whirlingly somersaulted down the mattress and bonked his tinier snout against her denim-clad knee.

She was pegged on the infinite fringe of crossing a threshold of redemption the infective-corruptible essence of the Dark Hold had been purged-she destroyed every trace of the demonic runes-she would never again conjure up sorcerous deviances of mordacious witchery. Reactively, Wanda splayed a tentative rush of her palm with kiss-soft pressure over his spikier hind-pacifying him with motherly grace. "I know that you can't trust me...If we can find a way to give Bucky a chance to have a family, then let's do it together..."

Stephen had wandered closer towards the bed, watching Wanda and the drakes play with each other not unlike watching a family of pets being attended by a nurturing owner. It looked natural, and pure. Whatever reservations he had about Wanda's grief driving her actions, he knew that she had nothing but the best of intentions for these innocent creatures. In an act that surprised even himself, Stephen had reached and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder, drawing her gaze to his hand and then towards him. "I want to trust you, Wanda. I believe you want what's best for them, and you're right-they need you to protect them…and they need us to bring back their father…together." He kept his hand on her shoulder longer than he should have, the green of her ethereal eyes were enthralling and deep rendering him speechless for the moment. The strategic part of his mind told him that having the Scarlet Witch on his side against a Vanir warlord demigod was a smart tactical standpoint.

But he knew deep down he just wanted her there with him…to do what she did best. Help people-help the innocents who needed her; like a hero.

As the vicerous contrast of undeniable-electrified trust gently bracketed the svelter litheness of her garbed shoulder, disarmingly, Wanda became aware of the dexterous rigidity of his pinned fingers caressingly gracing a novel promise of measured chasteness as each of his featherlight ministrations were starvedly coupled with a fervent tracery of his intensified resistance. Aware of his attentive closeness, Dodger chirpily bopped his tinier snout against Strange's muscled forearm, emitting out a puppyish whimper. "I think he wants you to join us..." Wanda quirked up her rubied-petalled lips, as she coaxingly grazed her daintier palm over the mattress, composed hesitance tautly rapted over Strange's austere graven-edged features, while the baby drake fussily nuzzled within the protective cradle of her sleeved arms. "It's okay, they don't really bite...Yet."

"How…reassuring," Stephen uttered, transfixed more than anything as the tiny reptile crept up his arm. The small beady eyes peered at him curiously, the tiny chirps he made were cuter than he could've fathomed. "Whoa, hey!" Before he could stop him, the dragon finished crawling the length of his arm until he was perched onto his shoulder. He nuzzled the nape of his collar as if seeking tender warmth. The sorcerer felt his magic hum, literally hum. His muscles felt like they were vibrating and reacting to the creature's proximity. It only occurred to him then that the dragon, Dodger, was basking in the aura of his Cloak as if he were being nourished by its magical nature. "Found a cozy place to perch, did you?"

He sat himself down, smiling despite himself as he watched the other two dragons react the same way towards Wanda, drawn to her by her aura and the warmth she exuded. "Its…amazing. I can almost feel their bond." Dodger chirped and rumbled, nipping and whining against his brow. "They might be hungry."

A kinetic pulse psionically radiated off the angelic-rambunctious she-drake as the starlight iridescence of her whitish-turquoise form electrifyingly contrasted against the lamplight sconces of the bedroom as she kittenishly pounced onto a wedged pillow behind Wanda on spunkier accord, bluish vaporous frostily puffed out of her daintier snout. "I can't really say what these little ones eat..." she admitted, hushedly, kneading her lithe fingers with pacifying caresses brushingly over the velvety pudginess of Dodger's scalier girth as he distressingly chirped out high-pitched squeaks. The undeniable need-affection for their Daddy was escalating tenfold. "Bucky never had a chance to feed them..."

That explained much. Stephen didn't know anything about nurturing a dragon, his only experience was the barrels of freshly caught fish he'd conjured for Barnes to eat on his first visit. He wasn't even fully grown yet he'd consumed enough fish to fill an entire boat. "Well if their dad's appetite has taught us anything, they'll want meat-a lot of it." It took little work for him to find the right spell to fill the two trays of cut red meat and fish he'd had cut into tiny bits. The trio of drakes dug in with ravenous hunger, Dodger and Blaze cutely began to tug on a piece that was caught between both their teeth; their competitiveness allowed their sister to feast on the other bits until both brothers realized their lapse. Strange and Wanda chuckled as the trio began to wrestle around playfully, the two sorcerers each holding a bowl of ice-cream in their laps.

Becoming viscerally aware of the gravitic steadiness of their intimate proximity, feverously, Wanda evicted the suffusive deterrence of her warred vulnerability as she glided a deft tracery of her palm delicately over the scarred remnants of metallic pins that welded into his fingers-they were blindly edging pass the safeguarded threshold of unwarranted desire. A rampant surge of his bone-deep resistance thrummed over his fractured knuckles-the infinite chasteness of unspoken reverence clashingly notched an addictive - tameless fusion against their duelling heartbeats. The feather-soft glide of her lithe fingers arrestingly recaptured his warring pulse on tempoed -intensified communion. "T-Thank you for letting me stay here..."

He could sense the genuine sentiment in her tone. It went without saying, given their past, the Sanctum was the last place Wanda should be in. The sorcerers of Kamar Taj wouldn't want her within ten feet of any santcum. As Sorcerer Supreme, Wong was less forgiving than Stephen when it came to breaking the rules. Stephen was risking much by giving her and the drakes sanctuary, Wanda understood that, probably even appreciated that. Stephen half-smiled as he set his bowl aside. "You're welcome. But if Wong evicts me, maybe you'll let me crash at your place next time," he said dryly. He noticed the light in her eyes left only to be left with scrutinizing seriousness. "That was a joke, by the way." Then he realized she wasn't looking at him, but looking past him towards the window. "Wanda?"

A white-noise frequency heralded the cyclonic emergence of astral crossways that portentously amplified over the panoramic environs of the Greenwich borough; impassively, Wanda impassively grounded herself a breadth at the half-draped window, driving her virescent-hazel irises onto gossamer icier skeins alarmingly creeping over the glass-planes; registering a hypothermic onrush of bone-shunting iciness through her veins as she became attuned with a calamitous manta of Nordic incantation telekinetically concussed over the industrial labyrinth of Matthanten on apocalyptic fruition. "I feel..." she hitched out, shakily, gliding her palm against the frosted glass as the whooshing eruption of blizzardy squalls tornadically funnelled within rotating cloud masses-a dimensional valance of the Bi-Frost was seismically converging over the Atlantic vistas. "We need to find Bucky...There isn't much time left."

Stephen felt a chill creep down his spine that had little to do with the drop in temperature he could feel outside. Snowfall this heavy in May on the eastern seaboard? Not possible. His magical senses were attuned to ancient magic that was erupting across the globe and knew Wanda was right. "No…no there isn't." If Kjell had Bucky, then he had the power to turn the whole world into a frozen realm of death.

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A henge of Nordic runestones engraved with sigils of the Drakkar-Norsemen longships- that ferried passage to the celestial realm of Valhalla were unmovingly positioned on the center flooring of the Sanctum Santorum's library as virtuous icicles jaggedly cascaded over the iron-pipe Romanesque oculus that adorned with the glass window; gustier squalls of the white-out 'Day After Tomorrow' blizzard cataclysmically entombed the scenic brownstone Greenwich borough. A soul-reaping tempest was being siphoned from the cosmic branches of Yggdrasill. Puffily, garbed in his Columbia University hoodie, painstakingly, Strange clutched onto a mug of brewed coffee with his gloved fingers, his grayish-azure irises roved onto leather-hide tomes of Nidavellir mythos that he borrowed from Wong's 'private -lockdown' collection. Unblinkingly, he gazed at the heap of pillows that were a makeshift nest Wanda had constructed for his babysitting routine, dozily nuzzled like kittenish raptors underneath his demask cloak were the chubbier hell-raising males. "Yeah, I'll admit that's cute..." he grumbled, tersely, watching Blaze's forked-tongue snakily graze over a pillow.

He was pretty sure what he was about to do would break a few long-standing rules set forth by the ancient masters. Learning to key into one's astral-form was one of the first training exercises a sorcerer would learn at Kamar-Taj; it helped one to connect with the realm beyond the physical plane. While Stephen himself had mostly used such an ability to keep his mind active while his body rested, he'd never truly ventured further than that. He was well aware that there were other realities out there-dimensions that existed in the same physical place as his own and beyond. Over the years he'd gained a certain wisdom about his occupation. Some rules could be bent, others were too certain to be broken.

Communing with the otherworldly beings that dwelled in the realm beyond life was about as hazardous as dipping a toe into a roaring river-you could be pulled in and drowned. Old things lurked in that plane-mythical beings dreamed out of the snippety minds of Homer and Lovecraft. He would've never considered such a risk if it weren't for the state of things in the world.

A week. A week of endless snowfall in a blizzard storm that was literally encompassing the entire world. The news was covering the "apocalyptic spectacle" as it was being called by doomsayers across the web, citing the dark omen to be the start of Fimbulwinter, a Norse prophecy that foretold a deadly winter that would last many years. Ragnarok might have come for Asgard but it seemed Midgard and other realms wouldn't escape the delayed wrath of the prophecy heralded by the Vanir warlord.

Hundreds had died already across the world amidst this storm, several thousands more were at risk. That number had no upper-limit of growing. He had informed The Avengers about Kjell and his goal. The superhero team along with the world militaries worked tirelessly to locate the demigod but it seemed Kjell's magic and years of working as a clandestine SHIELD operative had taught him enough about how to mask himself from every sophisticated radar system in the world. Wong and the other sorcerers were working tirelessly to track down the Kjell, the Sorcerer Supreme having instructed Stephen to "watch the Scarlet Witch" and the dragon off-spring inside the Sanctum.

He was benched, in a sense. But Stephen knew Wong well enough to know his friend didn't want to know what dim-witted risky idea he'd come up with next to approach this threat. He didn't blame him. He wasn't sure enough about this plan himself, but he promised Wanda he'd do everything he could to find Bucky. That's what he intended to do. The key to finding Barnes and Kjell were the dragonlings. With them...maybe he could peek in on the other side.

"Here goes nothing..." Sitting himself in a lotus position, he clenched his fists resting upon his knees and focused his aura, stretching his senses into this realm and the frabric of reality. He could feel the seidr of the dragonlings burning brightly beside him, their strength carrying him like wings beyond the furthest reaches his own human spirit could soar. "Sortnar Goða sól. Veturinn naer. (Twilight of the gods. The winter is near)" His tone was deep and harrowing, the tone and dialect strong enough to resonate with those who might hear it. He felt the physical world slipping away, his mind and spirit were cast into a void of cold nothingness. "Gamlir...vakna...kasta logum þínum. Hoggur biturt sverd...vakna...VAKNA! (Old ones wake. Cast your flames. A cruel sword descends. Wake!)

A gravitic pulse kinetically thrummed within his veins as he became possessively ushered into a tumultuous vortex of celestial energy as bluish salvos of quantum fire erupted into white-hot novas that sonically ratcheted off mountainous astroid-like crags while vaporous shockwaves of reddish-amethyst fierily converged over planetic dunes. A thunderous snarl of bestial cadence deafeningly quaked at the readied moment, Strange poised his grounded stance on the gateway edge, catching a glimpse of a behemothic silhouette of astral energy whooshingly descending onto a dolmen above him. "Hvilken dødelig våger å gå inn i mitt rike(What mortal dares to enter my realm)..."

Stephen felt speechless as he beheld the scope of this otherworldly plane of existence. To say it was beautiful was a vast understatement, it felt primordial and pure. So much raw energy and magic flourished in this place, he felt like an ant before the storm. The voice that greeted him would've had the hairs on his body rising up, the depth and pitch were rumbling like an earthquake. His astral body now stood upon a chunk of rock with a smooth surface. Peering up towards the enormous shape that eclipsed the nova of colors, he saw a being whose size could dwarf buildings if not mountains. The size and stature of the wings were majestic as they stretched and flapped to carry the titanic shape from the dolmen towards the edge of another asteroid-like rock high above him. Stephen kept a non-threatening posture, not that it would do much good otherwise in his realm. The Nordic speech somehow registered in his thoughts that he was able to decipher the being's tongue.

"Meistari í dulrænum listum (A master of the mystic arts)." He began. First impressions were crucial and he hoped that would be enough to pique the primordial being's interest. "I come from the realm of Midgard seeking the aid of the High Vanir Draconic Defenders. An ancient enemy of yours now threatens my world!" He did his best not to appear intimidated when multiple silhouettes began to gather on the other asteroids above him, a circlet of wyverns and drakes appearing like judges to gaze upon a lone tiny human at the center of their realm. "My name is Stephen...Stephen Strange."

A thermal smokiness gustily emitted out of the spikier massiveness of draconic snout pythonically thrusting down to Strange's level, marred scales of crimson-obsidian tatteredly clung to axe-edged gashes that were branded under his yellowish reptilian orbs the viperously gleamed alight with murderous intensity. "Duften til Vanir-slakteren forurenser kjøttet ditt(The reek of the Vanir butcher taints your flesh)..." Dragging his spear-like foreclaws scrapingly over the jagged crag, predatorily, he arced the immensity of his leathery pterosaur-like wings, reacting to a telekinetic aura that viscerally radiated off the Midgardian intruder. A fiery pulse of volcanic heat dangerouslyglowed underneath his battle-worn scales akin to magma striates against his eruptive ferocity. "Den lukten...Hvorfor bærer du lukten hennes...(That smell...Why do you carry her scent)..."

Stephen mustered his calm in the face of the dragon whose looming presence reminded him too much of his encounter with Dormmamu many years ago. Though his physical body wasn't present in this realm, the magical nature of this being and his own astral form could still manifest a connection that would be hazardous should the dragon prove hostile. It wasn't difficult to surmise whose scent he was referring to. "Síðasti drekinn. Sigrun. Hún hefur verið endurlífguð í líkama dauðlegs manns. Drekadrepinn leitast við að nota hana til að eyðileggja heiminn minn. (The last dragon. Sigrun. She has been revived in a mortal's body. The Dragonslayer seeks to use her to destroy my world). For the sins of the Aesir, he seeks to destroy all that remains. I cannot challenge him without your aid..."

"Hjelp(Aid)..." Snarlingly, the Vanaheim alpha-drake jutted out his basilisk-like fangs on defensive traction, as his fork-tongue viperously glided against the spikier fleshiness of his crocodilian jaw that viciously stretched to burningly devour the spectral trespasser of his celestial realm. "Vi har ikke en slik triviell enhet...Ikke da de tåpelige asgardianerne forkastet vårt kall under renselsen av mine slektninger We do not harbour such trivial unity...Not when the foolish Asgardians discarded our call during the purge of my kin)..." he roared in a growlier pitch against fiery heaves, quakingly as Strange unwaveringly braced for a flamethrower assault of combustible-draconic fury. "Ja...tror ikke jeg husker domenet mitt herjet av Neros-økser...Hvert reir ødelagt av hans slaktehender. (Yes...Do not think I remember my domain ravaged by Nerco-axes...Every nest ruined by his slaughterous hands.)"

Stephen didn't know enough about the Aesir-Vanir war to judge which side was just and which had been deserving of cruel punishments. Vile crimes tended to run rampant in war. Sometimes and when battle-lust grew unquenchable it tended to spill over into other places where innocents would get caught in the crossfire. Midgard happened to be that middle realm at the center of Yggdrasil where their war met its end. Only he wasn't sure the dragon spirits were aware of that, or if they even cared. But he knew there was something else that still might resonate with them.

"What if I told you…there is a chance your kind can flourish again?" He was met with curious rumbling, his claim no doubt something that wasn't expected. "Sigrun's new vessel has birthed three drakes. Their magical essence is powerful-so much that they have carried me here to speak to you." The dragons upon the floating rocks all began to react, their shock and disbelief was apparent and Stephen latched onto this advantage desperately. "Don't you see?! The Aesir are all but gone, your war is gone! But your kind might live again-but not if Kjell is allowed to enslave or butcher them once again."

A pulse of reddish-aster fierily gleamed over the spikier length of his reptilian neck as his ebony scales incandescently thrummed with kinetic energy, slitherily dragging the massiveness of his titanic leathery wings against the monolithic dolmen, the alpha-drake unwaveringly flashed his cobra-like yellowish orbs onto Strange's intricate amulet that was fastened around his broader neck-the Eldritch conductor of dimensional mayhem. Growlingly, he eased up his marred fore-paw on the heftier strain, reaching for the blighted relic as psionic skeins vaporously arrowed off the jagged horns of his draconic head. "For gjenfødelsen av mine slektninger...Jeg vil slutte meg til denne kampen med deg, Midgards trollmann. (For the rebirth of my kin...I will join this fight with you, wizard of Midgard.)"

Hope flowed through Stephen with the drake's response. Maybe they might stand a chance against Kjell after all? That hope was immediately followed by apprehension once he realized what this would mean for himself. He was about to return to his own body with another passenger righting his cloak-tails. The risk to himself was unspoken but clear as day. He promised Wanda he would do everything in his power, he would keep that promise no matter what. Releasing a relieved chuckled tinged with nervousness, Stephen took a submissive posture with his arms extended. "Then...as a mad genius once said, 'Its showtime!'" The fire drake Omr arched his spine, the mountainous shape of a force of nature preparing to release all its wrath as he inhaled deep. Stephen closed his eyes, waiting. The fire that washed over him roared with all mind-consuming strength, but he didn't feel the harrowing pain of heat burning away his flesh. He felt power-unimaginable waves of it pouring into him like a storm being siphoned into a bottle.

"Stríð! Blóð! Valhöll varast þú Endir nær. Heimur mun brenna" (War! Blood! Valhalla be warned. The end is here. The world will burn)

Stephen groaned, fire and fury pouring through his veins and the amulet causing him to glow-to burn bright like a candle. His humanly features shifted, draconic and harrowing.

"Ómr. Með hefndarfullum eldi færir banamanninum dauða eins og spáð var. (Omr. With vengeful fire, brings death to the slayer as foretold.)

The chanting, the flames, the power-Stephen felt himself losing mental focus amidst its storm and he could only laugh insanely as he felt the strength of the primordial fuse with him. His spectral shape held its ground, combating the fury of the dragon that sought to roughly possess his mind. "Þú ert sverð mitt, en ég er höndin sem beitir því. (You are my sword, but I am the hand that wields it.)" He mentally challenged Omr. The dragon growled but seemed to acquiesce his claim as they were slowly pulled out of the astral plane and back to the mortal one. This time it would be different. It had to be.

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Icier gusts stingily whiplashed against ninja-like balaclava sheathed over the delicate contours of her jaw, emerging out of the fiery portal that eldritchly wheeled a breadth at the runic dolmens, protectively Wanda clutched onto the strap over a duffle-bag as her virescent-hazel irises fleetingly glanced at the preciously-feisty Barnes dragonlings cozily snuggled underneath the puffier layers of a Columbia University hoodie. Every measure of her snow-ladden advances became precarious as she trudged closer to the mountainous ridges of the Galdhøpiggen summit.

The prismatic cascades of the Bi-Frost electrifyingly funnelled into heavier tornadic cloud masses - bluish salvos of voltaic heat blindingly forked into the atmospheric dome, incandescently forming the celestial branches of Yggdrasil. as squally headwinds whooshingly gusted over the choppier depths of the cliffside fjords of New Asgard.

Bracing herself against the ground-breaking tremors that ratcheted underneath her boots, Wanda reactively crouched onto her lithe haunches, not easing her grip on the bag's strap. Emitting out whimpery squeaks, kittenishly, Frost nudged her daintier reptilian snout against Wanda's sleeved wrist-a pacifying sweetness that viscerally fueled her warring desperation. "W-We're going to save him together, little one..." she rasped out, threadily, kneading her gloved palm with whisper-soft caresses over the dragonling's velvetlike whitish-turquoise scales. "Nothing bad will happen to him...I promise." The putrid-tenebrific stench of carious resin of the skeletonized Draugr ghostily enwreathed around her -Helheim sentries mobilized to deter her from reaching the Sniper-Drake. "Stephen...Now might be a good time..."

A brief yet foreboding silence seemed to permeate the atmosphere as if the very storm itself sensed a unique disturbance to its strength. And then the Earth itself seemed to shake. The ground trembled with booming vibrations as if a thunderous bolt of lightning had descended onto the snowy terrain. But it came again and again-each boom stronger than the last. The biting chill on the wind seemed to become humid as steam broiled up from the snowy banks. It was an ominous sight as if the fire's of hell were heralding the arrival of an ominous force of nature. A draconic set of feet stomped through the portal, talons sharp as daggers as they pierced the snowy earth causing the snow to melt beneath its touch.

A thunderous roar deafeningly ratcheted out the sling-ring portal as the leathery immensity of crimson-burgandy pterosaur wings menacingly arced over the runic dolmens-the draconic behemoth thumpingly crawled out of the dimensional threshold with earth-quaking stomps.

The creature that menacingly emerged was a sight to behold, a draconic behemoth thumpingly crawled out of the dimensional threshold with earth-quaking stomps- the leathery immensity of crimson-burgandy pterosaur wings titanically arced like ship masts. The wing whipped like hurricanes with a single flap of their shapes. The scales along its hide were like rubies with a hint of sapphire along its muscular torso. The eyes were bright as candles and sharp as knives as they peered at the mountain and the storm raging at its summit. The dragon rumbled, his snout parting with his mandibles clicking. "Well…this has to be the craziest stunt I have ever pulled." The words that came out were undoubtedly Stephen Strange's, but his voice and tone were like a craggy cavern. "This could get ugly," he cautioned to Wanda with a hint of worry. He worried what a battle between dragons could do to Earth if it arrived to that point. Adding a warmongering demigod wizard to the equation spelt utter disaster.

He didn't want Wanda and the dragonlings caught in the crossfire.

The spikier massiveness of his iron-clad tail whippingly scythed above Wanda as she placidly gazed into the voltaic fieriness of his lazurite reptilian-orbs that viperously gleamed with predatory intensity while the pointier length of his crocodilian-like-fangs gnashingly held onto the spirited-demask cloak with tactful poise. Growlingly, Stephen eased up his taloned fore-paw as psionic energy kinetically veined into trigon Mandala sigils that reddishly haloed over his mountainous form on eldritch sync. Restrainedly, he stretched out the intimidating length of his wings as unwarranted-combustible aggression burningly surged up his pythonic throat as he emitted a grumblier snarl. "Find Barnes on the highest peak...Use the kids to reach him."

Without a deterrence of measured caution, tentatively, Wanda splayed her daintier palm over the Fire-Drake's leathery crimson fleshiness of his jutted snout on reverent-cherishing tempo as the hottish gustiness of his braying puffs feverously caressed her disbelieved scarlet-auburn whorls. The gracing pressure of her lithe fingers over the spikier curvatures of his draconic snout was featherily invested with kiss-soft delicateness -a novel contrast of untampered urgency that rampantly stoked an incendiary maelstrom within her. Growlingly, Stephen countered the instinctive-hungered demand of the celestial drake's skull-pounding fury that irrevocably stampeded over his captive heart as he blindly nuzzled his fanged snout against her sleeved forearm. "I-I need you to come back..." she murmured with her raspier Sokovian cadence, fervidly. "Don't the spell take hold of you, Stephen..."

Where he once felt an increased sense of wariness in Wanda's presence, Stephen now felt reassurance in a way that was comforting. What he was doing was risky. Were it not for the danger of a frozen apocalyptic Earth he wouldn't have considered. The longer he remained in this dragon form, feeding off the aura of strength granted to him by Omr's spirit, the greater the risk of him succumbing to its will. If it happened, he knew if anyone stood a chance at stopping him, it was the Scarlet Witch. Wanda didn't want him to lose himself the way she had when the Darkhold corrupted her wish for a family she longed for. To him this was another day at the office of the magical horror-show his life had become. But it felt nice to have someone who cared that he made it back.

Gazing into her eyes-those deep pools of greenish-blue, he felt something dangerous flutter inside of him; it gave him hope. The dragon-sorcerer rumbled beneath her touch, for the first time letting those worries and all inhibitions he felt when it came to his feelings for her evaporate with a heartfelt plea. "If something happens…I trust you to do the right thing, Wanda. I'm glad you're here-I need you here." Her magic sung to him like a lullaby easing the prickling fury of a dragon inside of him that craved retribution. Desolation was upon New Asgard and it was up to them to stop it together.

Aware of the depth-charge ferocity that unbridledly jackhammered within the enormity of Strange's draconic form, Wanda didn't repress the visceral prompting that desperately careened her untamped resistance onto the fissionable-duelling edge of rampant surrender as her invested ministrations ardently caressed over his iron-clad scales, bracketing her daintier palms shakily over the reptilian length of his elongated snout-reining him back into a connective-infinite moment with her. "Don't pull your punches..." she urged in a raspier pitch, tersely, watching the Fire-Drake subtlety quirk up his fanged-snout. "Today we're Avengers..."

Puppyish whimpers squeakily resonated out of the nestled dragonlings as Blaze jutted his tinier-fanged snout feistily against the duffle bag on aggressive tenor at the second his whitish-sapphire orbs unwaveringly gazed up at the Fire-Drake intimidatingly towering over him. Puffily cuffing out smokier breaths, reddish skeins of thermic heat pulsingly veined over his grayish-obsidian scales like magma. Emitting chirpier squeaks, the pudgier hellraiser thrashingly rapted his velvety bat-sized wings against his drowsy twin who fussily swatted a fore-paw over his spikier back as Wanda quickly gripped onto the duffle bag straps. "We need a clear path..."

It was easier said than done, perhaps. It was only now that the two had the chance to survey the desolation of the Vanir warlord and Ice Drake he controlled. Where there was once a thriving and blossoming Asgardian village was now a withering ruin covered with ice and snow. Pockets of Einherjer could still be seen sailing their doomed vessels in a desperate attempt to reach the mountain where the source of their peril was only to be blasted by icy shards raining down from the heavens. Those who somehow managed to dodge the piercing shards were finally put down by a magical beam of Bifrost energy that cut through their vessels, sending them plummeting to their doom. New Asgard's shield barrier had fallen and the town was slowly but surely being overwhelmed by the elements.

"New Asgard is falling. They don't have much time." He rumbled.

Stephen wondered where Thor was in all of this. Last he heard the wayward Thunder god was off among the stars "finding himself" for the hundredth time while his people suffered in his absence. Stephen's thoughts caused the beast within him to growl with disdain. Maybe it would be for the best if Thor didn't show himself any time soon while vengeful dragons were on Earth.

He realized his own presence itself seemed to have caused a commotion among the remaining Asgardian defenders who began screaming warnings and commands once they sighted him. "Aesir…" He growled in a voice that wasn't his own. A visceral sensation ran beneath his scales and his breath was hot with hatred.

Wanda looked on, dread pulsing inside of her as she saw a number of the Einherjar rallying to form a protective phalanx with the one called Valkryie leading them. She resisted a violent impulse to simply swat the Asgardian warriors away with a blast of her chaos magic. The Scarlet Witch wanted to exert her strength. But the rational part of her mind told her the Asgardians were frightened and lost in the heat of battle. The odds of swaying them towards their noble intentions were low.

"Clear a path, Stephen, I'll hold them back." She urged.

The Fire Drake didn't question her as she conjured a barrier around the Einherjar to keep them protectively bubbled. The Dragon squared his back, his feet digging into the snowy earth as a rush of power flowed through him. The spirit within roared with a feeling of life. Stephen had never felt such a burst of strength inside of him before. It was so…intoxicating. His eyes flashed golden as a build-up of heat moved up from his belly and along his elongated neck. The buildup was so intense, it felt as if his very soul was preparing to explode with the heat of the sun. Once the dammed-up pressure became too much, he released it.

The banks of snow were flash-melted into water, rock and tinder were disintegrated as a wall of dragon fire was shot across the meadows and forests. The impact struck the base of the mountain, causing the storm to distort as if an opposing force of nature had just risen to challenge it. The Earth rumbled and the howling winds fell silent. Stephen's teeth were bared in a ferocious growl as he glared up at the summit of the mountain where a solitary humanoid shape stood upon an outcropping.

"KJEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLL!" His roar shook the mountain, sparking fear into the hearts of those who heard the awful noise.

Detecting a white-noise pulse of telestic unity that demonically amplified into shockwaves over ice-ravaged New Asgard, tentatively, Wanda hoisted the duffle bag onto the scaled fleshiness of Strange's winged back as she gripped onto the spikier rotundity of his bulbous girth, propelling herself up with desperate momentum. "L-Let's go..." she murmured, breathlessly, saddling her lithe demin-clad haunches over the broader length of his pythonic neck as she protectively cradled the nestling dragonlings against her puffier-sheathed chest, scrunching her nose against the carious rancidity of tarry-resin miasmically wafted off the Helheim legion of the Draugr who screechingly crawled out of snow-heaped trenches with berserker traction, rabidly thrusting out their skeletal gauntleted hands at the petrified Asgardian children dodgily hiding beneath a Mjölnir vendor cart. Poising her gloved hands, reactively Wanda conjured up a reddish psionic engery-ball to slingshot onto the resurrected death walkers. "Get away from them..." In seconds of her comet-like hailstorm, the warped Uru amour that creepily fused over the jutted-bonier contours of the Draugr meltingly glozed into viscid smelt on incendiary succession.

The sight of the Fire Drake in the skies with a witch riding him above the frozen battle-fields was a hypnotic sight for the Asgardians who continued to fight on. Lady Sif recognized the warrior riding the back of the great beast as one of the famous Midgardian heroes known as the Avengers. Until now, the shieldmaiden believed that Earth's Mightiest Heroes had either fallen or abandoned this fight. A hopeful smile pulled across her lips as she watched the Scarlet Witch rain down bolts of her unique power down upon the Death-Walkers that were marching on them. "Hold fast!" She cried out to the other maidens-in-training and the city guardsman. "Keep the Draugr at bay. Stand clear of the Fire Drake and its rider, they are aiding us!" With her one good arm, she hefted her sword and cleaved off the head of a death-walker and used her leg strength to kick it off. The Asgardian defenders were still unsettled by the sight of the dragon, ages of battles and legends surrounding them did not wear off easily, but they were quick to follow Sif's lead and fought on.

While the Fire Drake was a sight of dread and hope for some, it only brought disbelief to the one set of eyes glaring at it with unveiled fury. "Impossible," Kjell sneered. He stood upon a rock outcropping hundreds of feet about the snowy rocks; just below the summit of the mountain. Flurries whipped across his blank features but neither wind nor sleet shattered his focus as he watched another dragon rise out of the depths of Hel itself to challenge him. How was this possible? All the drakes were dead. He had been so certain. It was why had to seek out the SoulBinder to begin with because he believed the last dragon had been slain hundreds of years ago. Now here was one-openly defending the Aesir filth that he sought to destroy! Were the Norns playing games with him?

His focus was so concentrated on the newcomers he felt a pull at the edge of his psychic connection with the beast under his control. It was faint at first. The rumbling growl of a beast close to waking from its slumber. Peering up at the Ice Drake standing upon the summit like a frozen sentinel, he cursed Bucky Barnes' stubborness to combat him. After the Fire Drake disrupted the spell with his dragon fire, Kjell had heard the roar and felt fear in his heart, but not for his own safety but for the ruination of his plan. The Draugr he summoned would keep the Asgardians busy but with the Fire Drake now here, he knew that it had to be commanded by someone. Another foe had risen to challenge him.

"The Witch," he realized. "The Wizard." Fists tightening at his sides, the Vanir demigod felt mild irritation in his bones. "Ósvífnir dauðlegir (impudent mortals)."

As the maelstrom of insuppressible ferocity paralytically ebbed against the soul-draining onslaught, exhaustingly, the Sniper-Drake reared up his crocodilian snout, bluish vapours of his icier breaths puffily wheeled over his largish nostrils-the maniacal command of Kjell's possessive-carnivorous barbarity that hypnotically roped into him a stuprous-catatonic thrall numbingly deafened into radio-static into his cerebral recesses. Dredging up vestiges of his tenacious-hellbent resilence, snarlingly Bucky waded through the heart-crippling mantra of shackled compliance; gnashing his pointier fangs as icier spume excruciatingly gushed out of him. "Argh..." Viciously, he dragged his fore-talons over the snow mound, gripping onto his warred equilibrium as his dilated whitish-sapphire orbs unblinkingly lasered onto the Necro-ax gripped into Kjell's bearish hand that kinetically radiated a telekinetic frequency-anesthetized him into throes of strenuous- immobilizing dormancy. "G-Gotta break it..." he rasped against growlier heaves, throatily, as reddish-hot cannonades of psionic energy blindingly flashed below the summit. "W-Wanda..."

"Your persistence is vexing and futile," Kjell snarled up at the dragon as he sensed his will-power strengthening. With a slam of his battle-axe hilt to the rocks, he commanded another surge of Vanir magic to sweep over the Ice Dragon. "Hlýðið! (Obey!)" His spell slammed into the dragon with the strength of a tidal-wave, but much to his alarm, the creature showed signs of resilience. He sensed not one but two life-forces rising to combat him. "Sigrun. Barnes. Your strength will avail me yet," glaring scathingly at the dragon, he knew that he couldn't resume the Fimbelwinter storm to finish off the Aesir, not with the immediate threat of the Fire Drake and the Scarlet Witch closing in on him. There was only one course of action left to take. "Your friend's believe they can stop me? We shall see!"

With a gesture of his axe, he commanded the dragon to climb down and present himself. With a focused stride, Kjell climbed the Ice Dragon's neck, settling himself into a mounted position upon the base of his neck. Bucky's mind was tethered, his basic functions once again under the Vanir warlord's control as he set his sights on the Fire Drake heading towards them. "Gefðu þeim dauða! (Give them death!)" He kicked the dragon's sides and spurred the serpent to take flight. A mighty roar filled the skies, the flapping of wings caused the frozen trees upon the ground to whip and crack. The Ice Dragon rumbled and gnarled, the Vanir upon his back holding his axe aloft as the distance between himself and the Witch flying the Fire Drake began to close. "Come on!" He snarled with battle-eagerness.

In that heart-plummeting moment of registering the zeppelin-sized leviathan-Bucky- rocketing momentum flappingly sky-dive off the craggier peak, telepathically, Wanda became attuned with his unfettered resistance-heartache that was deep-seated within his colossal form. As her auburn-scarlet whorls stingily ashed against the delicate suppleness of her jaw, Wanda achingly gripped onto the hulkish Fire-Drake's spikier horns that menacingly protruded out of his draconic head. "W-We can't lose Bucky to him..." she urged, pressingly, fitting her virescent-hazel irises mistily onto the snugged Barnes' dragonlings as Frost kittenishly nuzzled her tinier snout against her sleeved forearm-the baby she-drake's velvetlike wings iridescently pulsed with bluish amethyst -a celestial vitality that she defensively harnessed in the wake of rampant distress. "Stephen, I need you to fly us closer...I have an idea to break Kjell's spell over him..."

"I don't think that will be a problem," Stephen growled out. Kjell riding the Ice Dragon was flying straight towards them over the forests. The sorcerer could sense the magic coating James Barnes' mind, wrapping him in shackled torment as he was used as a flying puppet controlled by the Vanir demigod on his back. "Brace yourself!" Stephen warned. The Asgardians battling the waves of Dragur all looked up; some with awe and others with mounting dread seeing the two dragons heading straight for each other at them at break-neck speed.

"Fall-back! Take cover!" Lady Sif commanded the Einherjer with her squire Axl beside her. They knew what was coming. No sooner had the words left her mouth did the roar of dragon-fire pierce the skies causing them all to shirk with pain. Fire and ice sprang to life, shot from the maws of the two dragons. The beams collided as they came within striking distance, a forceful collision of ice and fire sent a shockwave bursting throughout the skies, the vibrations shaking the very earth itself. Wanda gripped Stephen tightly, groaning at the intense numbing feeling of heat and cold washing over her from her seat.

The magical charm she learned to keep her body protected from the elements kept her safe, but not in total numbness to the pulverizing force. The two beams warred like opposing forces of nature, canceling one another out. Mist and vapors began to smother the atmosphere creating a dense fog. Through the roaring noise of magic, a dreaded voice taunted them. "Wanda Maximoff and Stephen Strange! Arrogant mortals believing they can contend with the powers of a god! I will have you both devoured along with your world!" Kjell aimed his battle-axe, launching a blast of magic towards Wanda. She ducked as Stephen veered and flapped his wings. The two dragon's beams broke off as they chased each other across the skies.

"Knock him off..." The scratchier malevolence of Wanda's undertone hissingly ratcheted with untamped viciousness, she needed to deliver a counterspell against the Vanir magery by irrevocably ushering the villanious entity of the Scarlet Witch to become unleashed again. Gesturing her lithe fingers, telestically she conjured up Nordic sigils of Midgard that eldritchly veined the obstructive cloud masses with a barrier spell. "We have him trapped with my little spell..." Witchily, her plushier lips quirked into a deviant smirk, vaporous crimson-aster intricately fused into a gothicsque diadem that piercingly bordered her vixenish features as her pupils hellishly flashed laser-red with malefic intensity-the passive semblance of resistance dissolvingly moulted against her possessive emergence."The runes will deter Bucky's flight..." Without a deterrence of caution, she glided off the Fire-Drake's neck with vampiric swiftness, clutching the strap of the duffle bag. "We're ending this...Now!"

What came next was a frightening combustion of chaos-magic that lit up the skies like scorching candles blinding everything magical in its path. Kjell felt powerful surge as if he were being swept into a nebula of cosmic energy preparing to rend him to pieces. The Ice Dragon chittered and grunted, feeling the energy sap at its strength as if it were a black-hole preparing to devour him. "What in Hel is this?!" Kjell struggled to keep his mount flying on its trajectory, he'd been set on catching them off-guard with an ambush to the side, Barnes' enormous maw held open wide ready to catch the Fire Drake and his rider between his teeth. It felt as if they had collided with an invisible wall, their momentum beginning to plummet in the collision. "Cursed witch!" Hefting his battle-axe, Kjell took aim, Bifrost energy coating the blade of his weapon he intended to cleave into his enemies. Wanda's gaze snapped to the right at the same time the Fire Drake's eyes shifted to the corner, his iris' burning sharp. Kjell's heart sank.

"Got him," Stephen growled. The Fire Drake whipped his tail in a 180 degree arc, his spin causing a whirlwind to shake the Ice Dragon's aerial stability. Kjell let loose a prolonged cry as the impact knocked him from the saddle causing him to plummet hundreds of feet down to the snowy banks of the forests bordering the battle-field. With the Vanir warlord dismounted, Stephen and Wanda were immediately pounced by controlled Ice Drake. Stephen felt the stinging numbness of ice stab into his shoulder and let loose and howling roar. "He's not gonna stop," Stephen grunted as he began to fly at retreating pace. Wanda held tight, glancing behind them as wind whipped at her hair. The Ice Dragon was pursuing them, their trajectory bringing them further away from her binding runes. "Whatever you're gonna do, make it fast!"

Against mounting desperation that imploded through her veins, Wanda spooned her daintier palm over the angelic she-drake's pudgier belly with tentative precision until Frost was adorably cradled into her bracing arms at the perilous moment the bone-spearing iciness of Bucky's gustier heaves snowily whooshed over them. A hypothermic onslaught vertiginously racked her on deadening fruition, blearily Wanda gazed at the little male scrappers-Blaze and Dodger chirpily outstretching their dwarfish-velvety wings in fussier sync against the blizzardy squalls."Y-You can bring him back, little one..." she whispered breathily, angling her sleeved forearm as the voluminous lushness of her chilled lips featherily glided kiss-soft pressure over Frost's tinier-roundish head. "Don't be afraid..."

The trio of dragonlings chirped in unison as if responding to Wanda's soothing encouragement with brave determination. A heart-warming and cute sight, their bond was clearly developing fast it was as if they were of one mind. They were still small, practically the size of puppies but as their tiny wings stretched and they squeaked in a growling pitch, they looked as strong as their father. Smiling, Wanda gathered them up in her arms. Alarmingly, she realized that their altitude was steadily beginning to diminish. "Stephen?" She called out to him worriedly. One of his wings was further extended than the other, his rumbling hot breath was heavier as steam wafted from the pierced ice shard in his shoulder.

"I'm fine!" The Fire Drake grunted, "but we might have to cut this flight short…" Stephen felt his strength was sapping. The Ice Dragon's power had clearly been further enhanced by Kjell's sorcerous tampering to make him an even deadlier weapon. The power that Omr imbued him with wasn't infinite, it would last so long as he remained in healthy condition. The injury to his shoulder was growing more grevious by the minute. He couldn't keep airborne for much longer. The world around him began to seem much larger than it was only moments ago. The roaring strength of his mass was becoming smaller. There was no stopping what came next. Looking over his shoulder, the Fire Drake's features steadily began to grow more human-like, but then there revealed a look of remorse. "Wanda…Be saf-"

His body fell as his wings vanished. He didn't scream, he didn't react-his words lost to the roaring winds as Wanda watched him fall to certain death.

"Stephen!" Against the riptide of heart-knifing panic, gaspingly, Wanda railed out choked-off screams in breathless pitch, her vision stingily robbed by the dampish bleariness of unspent anguish, she gazed at the scaly immensity of his draconic rotundity morphically dissolve into the graven-edged rigidity that athletically delineated underneath his dark-blue kimono tunic as he unconsciously plummeted beyond her reach. "N-No..." A torpedoing whoosh of his spirited demask cloak swoopingly dive-bombed toward him like the supersonic mach of a F-18, catching Strange's motionless form with the gentleness of the animated 'magic carpet' as he wispily glided onto a snow-laden peak. "He's safe now, little ones..." she murmured, hushedly, cradling the preciously feisty dragonlings in her arms on strenuous tenor, while she clashingly registered the behemothic-monsterous proximity of the Ice-Drake behind her. An ear-piercing roar sonically blasted out of him as the viperous intensity of his grayish-aqueous orbs predatorily gleamed with murderous fury-she was attuned to a visceral heartbeat of his warring resistance to viciously snap his pointier fangs at her. "Y-You're not going to hurt me, Bucky...I can feel you fighting this spell."

She knew there was a chance things could go wrong in this endeavor, but she also knew how powerful the love was that a parent would hold for their off-spring. As the Ice Drake had his sights set firmly on her levitating form, Wanda knew it was time. "Fly little ones!" She didn't have to release them or even repeat herself to their small young minds. The drakes chirped and jumped out of her arms, their small wings stretching wide and catching the wind on their expanse. They flapped and screeched, flying in unison as the distance between them and the mountainous mass of their sire closed immediately as he flew. They didn't attack, they didn't even touch him. They flew together in unison like a halo circling above his head. The Ice Dragon sniffed and rumbled loudly, his maw opened wide in search of the witch who flew to a safe unseen distance.

The Ice Dragon rumbled as his gaze caught sight of the three tiny ones flying over him. The sight of them was curious, the spell controlling his thoughts assessing them as ally or foe. But that grievous grip of control shattered as they landed on his brow, chirping and screeching into his head in a tender caress that felt soothing. The haze of his chaotic thoughts were rapidly becoming clearer as a storm of memories emerged from within, and as they did a warm wetness coalesced in his eyes. He knew these drakes. They were his. "Blaze…Frost…Dodge…" Their names evoked an empowering surge of joy and strength, the feelings of which humbled even the vengeful spirit of Sigrun who had begun to feel quieter."

"K-Kiddos..." The murmurous gravelliness of his throatier drawl sobbingly hitched out of him as Frost brushingly nuzzled the spikier underside of his reptilian snout with kitten-soft pressure of her tinier head- an intensified deliverance starvingly tempoed with her addictive sweetness. Mischievously, Blaze swooped over the bulkier length of his neck with headlong-scampish graces. With swifter agility, Dodger flapped his velvety wings stealthily underneath the blimpish chunkiness of the Snipe-Drake's girthy underbelly. Against his girth-racking pants, chokingly, Bucky felt the venomous-septic potency of Kjell's noxious bloodlust implosively ebbing —the heart-arresting -inseparable closeness of his baby drakes exhilaratingly notched up a rapturous dam-burst of unstoppable elation-hope. Fiercier tension rapted over his spikier-horned brow, braying out guttural huffs, moaningly, Bucky angled the scaly leatheriness of his toothier snout delicately over his kittenish baby-girl with cherishing precision. "I-I'm back, detishki (kiddos)..." he rasped in a whispery undertone, promisingly, the cool steeliness of his aqueous orbs glisteningly bleared with dampish heat. "M'not gonna let you go..."

He teared up in a surge of fatherly love he wasn't expecting. He felt amazed and proud to see his trio flying with him, their tiny wings stretched and wide and flapping in the wind. The tender reunion was edging towards a creeping sense of dread in his belly as his thoughts centered on a resonance he knew as Sigrun. He wasn't expecting to hear the weakened strain of her voice that echoed in his thoughts. "J-James…I'm afraid our time together is nearing its end." She sounded tired and weak. Words he wouldn't have ever imagined associating with her brought on a creeping sense of alarm that something was wrong.

"Sigrun? What's happening?" He could feel it. The wind beneath his wings began to feel heavier, his wings stiffer as if he were becoming a floating rock. She didn't respond to him. His joints and tendons were aching as if he were being quartered. A mournful growl escaped him, drawing the notice of his drakes who began to making worrisome noises. The roaring winds were growing louder, his mass and speed causing him to plummet from the gray skies. "Sigrun?! We're falling!" HE was falling, like a 747 that had its engines shot out, the Ice Dragon was steering himself into a glide, unable to keep himself airborne.

His belly smashed against the tip of trees, smashing them to splinters on his downward trajectory that carried him towards the mountain. A snowy peak loomed large ahead, a kilometre short of the summit. The Ice Dragon howled and screeched, watching as a bluish field of light began to encompass his body, burning from within. Blaze, Dodger and Frost all squealed in fright as they watched their father's body vanish and a small solitary shape fell into the snowy banks of the peak.

Against onrushes of jackhammering panic, gaspingly, Wanda gazed at the bluish dome of celestial aster that seismically pulsed on morphic fruition over the Sniper-Drake's unconscious form; the obesefied rotundness of his blimpish girth had deflatingly sloughed as heavier obsidian-grayish scales fleshily popped off with no avail. In seconds, the lengthened-reptilian contours of his draconic snout disturbingly vanished, revealing the graven-edge angularity of his scruffier-hawkish features as his poutier shapely- bow lips twitchily quirked up. Groaningly, with vertiginous traction, Bucky dragged his vibrainium palm over a slushier mound on robotic tenor, as the dark-navy blue Kevlar of his tactical jacket fittingly delineated the corded ridges that hunkily bracketed his washboard abdomen. Measuring, her tentative advances, Wanda eased onto her denim-clad haunches as Dodger squeakily nose-dived a breadth at her thermal boots. "It's okay..." she whispered in a threadier undertone, hushedly, watching Frost nudge her kittenish snout featherily against the rugged heaviness of his bristly dimpled-chin.

His eyelids fluttered as he felt the dragging caress of leathery scales upon his cheek. The world was a blur of wintery ice and ash. He was cold upon his back, his blue eyes gazing up at the desolate storm clouds above that brought a gentle cascade of snow-fall down upon him. A cold flake landed on his cheek. He blinked as it turned to liquid and streaked down his skin. His human skin. "Am I dreamin'?" He groaned as he attempted to rise from his supine position only to feel the jagged edge of a rock digging against his back. A blurry female shape hovered over him, he recognized her scent and felt mild reassurance.

"Wanda…" He remembered what had happened. Everything-turning to a dragon, hatching baby drakes, being captured and used as a weapon, the battle in the skies… The world sharpened into focus and he was all the glad to see his three babies nestled on his lap, their tiny claws digging into his kevlar-weaved torso while they looked over him happily. Wanda herself looked touched as she watched the baby drakes pounce and play in their father's lap. Bucky looked himself over, astonished yet confused to see two familiar hands-one human, one cybernetic, hovering in front of him. He was human again. But how?

Could that mean?

"Is it over?" Bucky wondered aloud. He was surprised to say he was concerned when he called out to Sigrun in his thoughts and didn't receive a response.

"I-I think ..." Against the blearing periphery of her vision, fleetingly, Wanda glanced at the zombified legion-the draugr that berserkly spider-crawled out of the icier ground on demonic succession; the skeletal deformity of their Uru gauntlet arms gloppily oozed with blackish resin as malodorous vapours biliously wafted off their emaciated -wraithlike forms. On full-measured reaction, crushingly, with teeth-gnashing strain, Bucky drove his bionic fist into the icier ground, his shaggier chestnut tresses dampishly clung over his tenser brow as he protectively braced the heavier resiliency of his mid-drift above the dragonlings. Grounding her defensive poise, readily, Wanda flexed her lithe fingers as the cavalcade of Helheim death-walkers encroached around them, bonier hands viciously lashed against the gossamer snowdrifts, reaching to grip onto a baby drake's spikier tail. "G-Get away from them..." A reddish salvo of her psionic fury burningly arrowed into the jutted-out torso of a ghoulish raider who screechingly disintegrated into a smouldering ash heap as the discarded Einherjar helmet that fused over a malachite skull creepily rolled against Bucky's tactical boot.

"That evil Merlin is still out there," Bucky grunted as he kicked the helmeted skull out from in front of him. His first instinct was to find the nearest weapons cache and rain hell down on the horde of undead that crept forward like an unstoppable plague. But the tiny squawks and trilling of his baby drakes was a cold reality check that he had more to worry about than ever before. They were flapped up high, their wings carrying them up to his shoulder, Frost herself latching onto Wanda's shoulder as she assumed a defensive pose. "Please tell me the Doc is still alive?" Bucky asked Wanda, remembering the harrowing sight of the Fire Drake falling out of the skies after he blasted him with a piercing breath of ice. He and Strange had a lot to talk about if things worked out in this scenario. Together the grouped edged further along as they found a safe path leading down the peak and into the snowy forest. The scratching roars of the undead traveled high and wide. They had to keep moving.

Propelling the adrenalized onrushes of her untrammelled momentum, cuttingly, Wanda sauntered against gnarled branches that bleedingly whiplashed against the chilled suppleness of her delicate jaw. "Urgh.." Consciously, in an earshot, she was aware of the ghostlier proximity of draugr that portentously crawled up dormant pine trees, their tarred-bonier legs creepily outstretched on the frigid bark like shadowy arachnids poised to ambush them. "B-Bucky stay back..." she urged out, frantically as he tactfully strutted behind her with sniper-honed graces, his sweltry grayish-aquamarine irises piercingly lasered over a half-skulled denizen who viscidly spurted out blackish resin from the gaping stretch of his demonical sneer.

"Yeah...That's kinda ugly..." Bucky quipped out, starchily, pursing his shapely-wide lips into a tauten grimace as the odorous reek of carrion flesh nauseatingly barraged him. Stuntedly, he eased down onto his corded haunches with vigilant readiness as his baby drakes tremorously nudged their stubbier-fanged snouts against the mechanized rigidness of his bionic arm. Warding off a fissionable modicum of his full-fledged protectiveness, gnashingly Bucky flashed the dead-straight intensity of his aqueous irises edgily at the predacious-skeletal deformity hissingly perched on a knottier branch, the verdigris embers spookily pulsed within hollowed ossein of his jutting eye-sockets, glaring at his little she-drake tucked against his muscled thigh."C'mon...Just try it, pal..."

"I'll handle this..." Wanda countered back, harnessing up her vampiric swiftness as she glided onto a high branch, damagingly thrusting her gloved hand into a skeletal rib cage as her psionic energy infectiously striated over the hollowed-out bones on a concussive tenor as sulphurous vapours of a morbific -apparitional deviance spectrally gripped her into a deadened trance. A incantious frequency amplified, entrancedly scything through her veins as the decorous -pacifying timbre of a velvety British cadency arrestingly ushered her into a telepathic stupor.

'...Wanda...Come home...'

"No...Stop it..." Covering her ears, shudderingly, Wanda vented out quivery breaths that anguishly scoured up her throat as intricate skeins of yellowish energy- the cosmic- sentient matrix of the Mind Stone prismatically weaved over her, melding digitized particles into a masculine silhouette of celestial vitality. Harbouring onto vestiges of unbidden heartache, she was viscerally tethered into grievous-paralyzing dregs of her atomized reality. "We'll say hello again." A dredged-up mantra throbbingly jackknifed in her chest as she unmovingly clutched onto the legal document printed with 2800 Sherwood Drive-the deed to her Westview home: she couldn't let go. Saltier wetness feverishly trekked over her delicate cheeks as she eased up her gloved hand, reaching for the untouchable remnants that dissolvingly materialized like stardust flecks. "Vis...Let me feel you again... Please!"

"We can be together again, Wanda…Just like before." The voice was closer than ever before. A waft of cold wind whipped her strawberry blonde locks across the side of her temple. She instinctively turned, peering through the cluster of trees and snow-covered foliage. He glided into view, silent as a shadow, graceful like a dove. The frame of his familiar sculpted android body was bright and colorful, not the mute lifeless shades she remembered in that nightmarish memory where he'd been disassembled post-mortem. His face however was neutral and grave, commanding her focus despite the gentle softness of the words that followed. "Come with me. Leave them to their own fates. They don't deserve you."

Vision held her gaze, his demeanor cold as he watched her struggle between following him and looking back at Bucky and the baby drakes. "Wanda, what's wrong?" Bucky called to her worriedly. His eyes widened with alarm, seeing a helwalker coming up on Wanda's blind-side with an ax raised. She was too distracted by something to realize it. "Look out!" A small beam of flames struck the hel-walker suddenly, the undead warrior screeching in an awful pitch. Wanda blinked in surprise as did Bucky who looked at his left to see Blaze hiccuping cutely with puffs of smoke coming from his mouth. Bucky smiled proudly. "Good boy." Blaze puffed his chest as if preening.

Bucky's expression fell as he watched Wanda rush into the forest as if chasing someone unseen. "Wanda!"

The heart-notching achiness became meltingly incendiary through her veins, against breathless heaves, Wanda launched her desperate momentum within the forested environs, and onrushes of trepidatious hesitance forced her to blindingly pinch her eyelids shut with anguished strain. The excruciating scourge of unwarranted-inexorable heartbreak forced her quakingly collapse onto her denim-clad knees as the document landed into a slushier trench. She couldn't dare to gaze at the revived chimera of Vision who floatingly drifted over her with a beckoning gesture of his outstretched hand as the stark rigidness of his vibrainium palm featherily caressed her tear-dampened cheek with amorous reverence. Gnawing on her voluminous underlip, shakily, Wanda reeled back, detecting a robotic-artificial coldness that disturbingly stole her warred pulse. "NO...YOU'RE NOT REAL!"

"I am as real as you made me once! You can do it again! We can have our own little world again free of this. Leave them to suffer…" The disembodied voice of Vision clashed with something sinister, goading her into the recesses of temptation and all the power she commanded from within. "Wanda…Don't you love me? Don't you love our children…DON'T YOU?!" Vision's form violently shifted through the trees, the aerobic maneuver causing the trees to whip and crack. The world spun and she braced herself as she fell onto her denim-clad knees

Through the thicket not far off, the injured shape of Stephen Strange staggered forward, the left arm of his robes ripped to reveal frost-bitten skin underneath. A bead of sweat trailed from his brow. The sorcerer concentrated on healing himself while his faithful companion hung off his shoulder, guiding him through. "Gotta find them…" He said to himself with quivering lips. The whistling wind moved through the trees. In the distance could be heard and felt the faint tremors of battle. He could see a path of blood upon the snow, the scarlet red standing out like paint upon a blank canvas.

"Stevie…" A voice whispered, soft and young. His shoulders tensed as shock entered his body and stole his breath. "Stevie!" He whipped around, eyes boring through the opening to see a small solitary shape standing at the tree-line. A face he hadn't seen in decades, but one that occasionally frequented his nightmares. A face belonging to someone he loved, someone he failed…someone too young to die. "Donna…" He uttered with a broken tone. It wasn't her. His rational mind siphoning through every scientific and magical explanation that would allow him to see his dead sister. "You can't be here."

"Come on, before mom finds out we came out here!" She giggled, walking backwards towards the hill. It was a short distance over the frozen lake she'd been wanting him to play with her at.

"Donna, no! This…you're not real." He said with forceful determination. This hallucination had to be brought on by a head injury. That had to be it. She didn't stop walking backwards, her playful expression slowly but surely becoming grave and cold. "Aren't I?"

Warring with his conscious thoughts and impulse, Stephen hesitantly took a step forward towards her, knowing what waited for her down below. "Aren't I real? Oh that's right…You let me drown."

"You failed me. You failed everyone!" She screamed just as the ice cracked beneath her and she plummeted into the icy depths. Stephen fell to his knees, eyes lost as the world cracked into a mosaic of harrowing images. He saw his master release her last breath on an operating table while he helplessly said farewell in astral form; he saw Stark, his last moments filled with resignation before he made the ultimate sacrifice in a gamble set forth by Stephen himself. So many lives he couldn't save. What good was it being the Master of the Mystic Arts when you couldn't save those who depended on you?

"It…It should've been me," he lamented. He felt ready to give up and accept the crushing weight of his inability to make a difference in this fight. A tug on his shoulder, he saw his loyal companion seem to wrap around him as if in a hugging gesture. The streak scarlet red mist ignited a fresh surge of new memories. Wong…Christine…Spider-Man…American Chavez... Did he truly make a difference? Did he really help them? He reached out, searching for that connection he felt at the edge of his thoughts. He heard a voice reaching out to him. It was HER voice.

Unknown to Stephen, the world around him remain unchanged even as the blind bubble of Vanir magic encompassed him, permeating his mind and thoughts.

Gripping onto a desperate fringe of sanity against the soul-vising anguish that crushingly hammered against her skull with cerebral havoc astentacles of crimson-aster vapourously jutted out of the Vision apparition's synthetic torso , mortifyingly warping the resiliency of automatized vibrainium into skeletal deformity as clumpier wires snakily dangled out of his vanishing limbs. He wasn't Vis-just a telestic manifestation that was ushered from a grief-razed paradox that unavailingly raided through her bone-deep in tenfold.

Gaspingly, Wanda braced her tremorous arms over her ample breasts as hexagon mandalas geometrically wheeled into sealer glyphs of Vishanti around her-Seraphim shields that eldritchly obstructed the demonic hailstorm that paralyzingly barraged her. "No...Get out of my head...!" she emitted a full-throated scream, lashingly blasting a psionic salvo at the ghoulish-humanoid chimera as incendiary energy destructively veined within the robotic form, sloughing remnants into digitalized pixels. She wouldn't allow the heart-knifing onslaught to perpetually roped her into a deadlock of unbidden grief that she vengefully harboured for her beautiful-spunky-boys: Tommy and Billy. "Y-You're not real in my heart...!" she rasped with threadier pitch, hissingly, as she tearily roved her bleared depths onto the Eldritch runes. "I-I have a precious family to protect,.." With vertiginous traction, determinedly, she eased onto her thermal boots at the second, a masculine cadence sonorously caromed over the snow-bound forest. "Stephen...Hang on."

As the bearish flexion of his fleshier hand possessively gripped onto the ebon handle of his Nerco battle-axe, virulently, Kjell scythed his parasitic—torturous concerto of macabre wretchedness over the forested environs—an incanted valance of Helheim magery that siphoned out phantasmal apparitions of their dredged failures. Every grievous pulse of heartache consumingly fueled his slaughterous reckoning to purge the verminous essence of Asier that was an extension of Yggdrasill; he would be victorious of his conquest. "Yes...Insolent wizard... Feel the shackles of your pitiful misery chokingly drag you away from her...!" he bellowed with throatier gruffness, sneerily, the calamitous malignancy of his mind-razing scourge hindered Strange's eldritch counter-assault over him. "You dared to cross the province of my battleground as I reap the spawn of the All-Father with the fell-beast of Vanir..." Fumingly, Kjell thrust up the Nerco axe, his raven-black irises murderously shifting onto the icier riverbank as Strange perilously trudged closer. "Now, I will relish watching you perish into the frozen depths like your beloved kin as I make Barnes and his craven whelps into my drager (dragons) of eternal winter..."

Before he could heft his axe to slay the sorcerer in his vulnerable state, Kjell felt disquiet as the magical tethering he'd woven had been violently severed by chaos magic. A feat that should have been impossible-his spell was powerful enough to enrapture even the strongest of Aesir in the maddening clutches of desire and misery. A rushing intake of air from behind him came as Stephen's eyes snapped open, a shaken but clear look in his eyes. All the fears and pain he'd harbored were slowly but surely washing away with a new clarity that stemmed from his desire to be better than he was before. The face that gave him hope of that once filled him with dread but now there was only a calm serenity to her soulful green eyes.

"Kjell…" He said with a deep assertive tone. The Vanir felt his illusion tearing away. Growling with frustration he wasted no further time by throwing his battle-axe in Stephen's direction. It flew like a javelin intent on piercing the kneeling sorcerer's back. He was whisked away by the protective clutches of his cloaked companion on his shoulders.

"I will have your head, mortal!" Kjell roared as he retrieved his axe. The Vanir warlord had been both enraged and in disbelief as he realized the source of the Midgardian sorcerer's power had stemmed from. That he had not only entered the draconic astral plane but had also been bestowed their power was an insult to everything Kjell had worked towards and achieved. That a human could be entrusted with such power was laughable as it was infuriating. He would savor killing Stephen Strange slowly. "The dragon's burns inside of you, but it won't save you from my blade!" He stomped in search of his quarry into the snowy woods. His vengeance would return after he'd dealt with the witch and the sorcerer.

-----

Every warring instinct of protectiveness electrifyingly surged up blood-thumping vestiges of his draconic ferocity, with fatherly tact, impassively, Bucky crouched onto the corded bulkiness of his garbed haunches as Frost chirpily nuzzled her kitten-soft head against his tactical GX boot. The addictive 'heart-stealer' closeness of her daintier form was breathtakingly coupled with undeniable affection-a visceral revelation that he wasn't emotionally compromised. Damn, it was real. He was no longer muzzled into the unforgivable- traumatized dregs that suffocatingly flatlined his resistance-making him damaged goods for sadistic HYDRA officials to excruciatingly lobotomize after every completed 'kill-shot' mission. Now, he was given a chance for his newfound deliverance by stopping the genocidal butcherer from eradicating the refugees of New Asgard.

"You're one helluva of a sweetheart..." Bucky murmured in huskier pitch, sniffily, caressing the velvety sleekness of his baby girl's wings with the delicateness of his smooth-roughen palm. "S'it gonna be okay, little darlin'..." Veering his grayish-aquamarine irises at his rascally hellraisers swatting their paws over a discarded helmet, unabashedly, Bucky quirked up his shapely-bow lips into a toothier smirk as he eased off the snowier ground, readily clenching the servos of his bionic fist on unshakeable-deadlier accord. "It always ends in a fight, kiddos..."

The sounds of battle were an ongoing symphony that showed no signs of slowing down. Jaw tightened with determination, Bucky knew what he had to do.

----

The final magical tether had snapped as Wanda breathed a deep sigh. The illusion of her torment slowly began to vanish by her resistance. She thought she might feel sorrow to see Vis fade away, instead, she felt only peace. His memory could be at peace. But that moment was fleeting as a harrowing feeling of dread settled in once her surroundings revealed numerous dead bodies caked in the snow. For a moment, they looked like the people of Westview she had once bound to her own blissful reality. But they were in fact the lifeless brutalized husks of dead Einherjer slain in battle. Kjell hadn't wasted a moment when she unseated him from the skies, he began cutting down any Asgardian he came across. Wanda looked at her appearance, she was back in her scarlet garb. She looked around, searching.

Against her flitting eyelashes, Wanda caught a heart-stunning glimpse of the demask cloak swoopingly embracing Strange akin to 'magic carpet' as grimacingly plodded over the snow-laden ground on the staggering footing that exhaustively conveyed his desperate vigil. Dragging out chestier breaths, the hawkish gleam of his silvery-azureous irises unwaveringly steered onto her, while she troubledly glanced at the bloodied gash smearily dripped over the serrated-edge of his cheekbone-obviously, he trudged against the nightmarish illusions that nocuously raided their captive minds. "S-Stephen..."

With heart-driven swiftness, breathlessly, Wanda propelled her urgent graces toward him, dizzyingly, she grounded herself at his side, easing up her burgundy-leathered palm as she tactilely bracketed the knife-edged contours of his goateed jaw with feather-soft pressure with ardent ministrations; the feverous aura of their disarmed-reverent closeness had evocatively tempoed with a savourous longing that increasingly blazoned her pent-up resistance with electrified onrushes of bone-deep voltage-a gloried revelation of dynamical trust. "I-I just want to feel again ..." she whispered, breathily, only to stiltedly register the ground-thumping vibrations that seismically erupted from a mountainous ridge, in seconds, a hulking orcish abomination-a mindless drudge spawned from the chasms of Hel gruntingly barrelled his monstrous speed at them, with a massive Uru axe clutched in his plumpish hand. "We have to stop him before he corrupts Bucky again.." Glaring at the Nidavellir troll over her meshed-garbed shoulder, her full-blown pupils reddishly lasered psionic intensity onto the gigantesque ravager. "Destroy Kjell's axe...I'll deal with this creature."

"Wanda, wait-" The ground shook as broken bits of stone rained down on them from above. Stephen and Wanda were quick to erect a magical barrier to protect themselves from the falling rubble. The creature that had emerged from the cavernous abyss of Helheim was colossal; Stephen himself was awed by the sight of the bearded hulking brute that stood easily over 12 meters. It stood towering over the trees top above them, groaning for combat. His leathery flesh was caked with snow and crags of rock.

Near a hill-top, Kjell looked on with sadistic joy. "I have had my fill of you Midgardian interlopers. None will deny me my vengeance!" With a gesture of his battle-axe/staff, Kjell commanded the troll to begin his assault. A beastly growl emanated from his bearded mouth, his gnarly face masked by an ox-horned rusted helm. "Sendu þá til Hel! (Send them to Hel!)" In his arms, the troll wielded a broken pillar of stone to be used as a make-shift club. It looked down on Stephen and Wanda with squinted eyes, peering at the small-shaped humanoids as if they were ants to be stepped upon.

The troll roared and raised his foot to step on them. Its foot connected with the magical barrier causing it to recoil in pain. Wanda stood fearlessly in front of the troll, casting numerous hex projectiles at its exposed torso, only to see them barely stagger it. Kjell's magic shielded the creature in what appeared to be his last ditch attempt at subverting his enemies. Stephen caught Wanda's gaze, the look in her eyes was determined and beseeching. He nodded and turned to face the wizard, flying towards him, his cloak billowing in the wind.

Kjell smirked ruefully at him. "You are bold but foolish to challenge me alone, sorcerer. My teacher was F*** herself, there is no magic in existence I have not mastered!"

Stephen didn't react to his boasting, his mind clear and focused on what needed to be done. His own anger towards the Vanir for the mental torture he subjected him to however simmered to the surface. "I think I speak for all Midgardians when I say, "get the hell off our planet!" Thrusting his palms and whirling his digits, Stephen opened a portal in front of Kjell and in quick succession conjured the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak to latch onto the battle-axe. Kjell reacted sharply and clutched his axe with both hands, yelling as he used his superior strength to pull Stephen towards him.

The whip was dispelled as Stephen was pulled through the portal and into Kjell's clutches. The Vanir grasped him by his throat and began choking him. "This will soon be MY planet," he sneered. "After I have tamed my pet and settled by debt with the Aesir, I will shatter all that you love and hold dear," he pointedly looked towards Wanda then back at Stephen. "And I will make you watch as I do it!"

"You talk too much," Stephen grunted, with his free hands he conjured a defensive spell, using the Images of Ikonn to confuse Kjell as he saw multiple versions of the sorcerer ensnare him with the Bands of Cyttorak. Once he was freed of his opponent's grasp, Stephen bombarded Kjell with Bolts of Balthakk. The fiery projectiles hitting the Vanir from multiple corners. Repelling numerous of the bolts with his magic, Kjell slashed and hacked as Stephen defended himself with his seraphim shields. The fiery sparks of magic colliding with magic caused the spark of the ancient within Stephen to pulse and feed off of the energy.

As if sensing this, Kjell snarled with anger. "Enough!" He raised his axe down, the bifrost energy coalescing as he brought it down upon the hill-top. The mound of snowy-terrain exploded causing the two duelists to fall and the out-pour of fiery projectiles to stop. Stephen climbed to his feet caked in snow while Kjell stomped to his feet. "I will show you true magic! ISSPREGNIA! (Ice bomb!)" A deadly beam of frost shot from the tip of the axe and was aimed with laser-like precision towards Strange. Stephen went air-brone to elude the first attack; a cluster of trees were shattered into icy shards. The shields of seraphim protected him as Kjell aimed the magical attack up at him.

"Leiptra!" Kjell's bellow called forth a beam of bifrost magic from the heavens, shocking Stephen who became caught in its trajectory sending him crashing to the ground. "GLETTINGS BARA!" The axe-head slammed to the ground sending a shockwave across the terrain. Stephen held his ground, the Tao Mandalas absorbing the brunt of the attack. Kjell's eyes and flesh were pulsing violently with Vanir magic, his berserker rage reaching a maddening apex. The dispel of their maneuvers brought them to a charging point, Kjell roaring as he hefted his axe, Stephen's shield aimed to collide. The impact was explosive enough to send them both toppling to the ground in a tumble of snowy rocks and broken branches. Stephen felt his physical stamina being challenged, but the spark of draconic magic burned hotter inside of him, lending him more strength.

As fiery hexagonal Tao Mandalas shields explosively whipsawed against the ebon iron of Kjell's dragon-skull cuirass, twistily, Wanda flexed her daintier fingers over her leather-sheathed palm, harnessing the kinetic firestorm of crimson-aster in her veins as she defensively blasted comet-like salvos onto the rampaging troll- vaporous fieriness psionically fused hex energy over the lumpish massiveness of his battle-ramming arm. "You have no idea who you're dealing with..." she gritted her teeth against raspier malevolence, viciously gesturing her spider-like hand like a puppeteer as his wartish flesh alarmingly singed into wisps of cindering ash. "Goodbye..."

"I can fix this..." Brandishing a poker-faced semblance over the hard-edged ruggedness of his goateed features, composedly, Stephen became aware of the final-curtain overture- the ice-capped valance of Fimbulwinter that was calamitously fueled by Kjell's slaughterous-insatiable warcraft; he was being grappled into a logjam precipice-a gambit that played against the dealt hand of vengeance as infinite symmetry of victory and defeat weighed the scales of mortality- harvesting out the celestial essence of Asier. With his virtuosic calibre of a neo-surgeon, he needed to amputate-cut off the reserves of Kjell's doomsday conjury before the Jotunheim tempest-snowstorm apocalyptically entombed New Asgard into a soul-razed warren. The Vanir dreadnought was barbarity incarnate-a cosmic entity that he couldn't imprison into the Mirror Dimension. "I won't be the one holding the knife..."

Confusion marred Kjell's features, his beard and braided locks catching numerous snow-flakes as the high-winds steadily began to increase in intensity. The thunderous vibrations of the Scarlet Witch battling the troll had begun to subside. He knew his puppet had been slain, a realization that would have unnerved him were it not for the dropping chill of cold piercing his exposed flesh. It was a bitter cold that permeated his own magical protective layers on his body, dreadful as Helheim itself. He stayed his hand for a moment in slaying the sorcerer as his sharp hearing took in the sound of a whirring mechanical limb. With it came the crunching snow-bootsteps heralding the methodical gait of a presence he did not think to see.

"Drekadrekarinn! (The Dragonslayer!)" A deep baritone voice yelled over the howling winds. Kjell recognized it and was filled with shock. Through the howling wind of flurries, he walked with his arms held out, as if he were commanding the storm-the embodiment of winter itself. His blue eyes were piercing and sharp as the combat knife sheathed to his kevlar vest, his proud warrior-like visage a thing of Midgardian legend. The Winter Soldier had come! "You and I got unfinished business," Bucky said with a lethal tone, his voice climbing higher and more threatening as did his stride, "you wanted the Winter Soldier. Well…HERE I AM!"

"Barnes." Kjell managed a dangerous smile that resembled more of a grimace. Whatever notion he held about recapturing the Ice Drake to exact his vengeance had shattered with the reappearance of the human he had once been. His excitement boiled over with the anticipation of having the fight he had been longing for. But at what cost? The Vanir warlord vowed vengeance, his bloodthirst for it would not be quenched until he'd wiped out New Asgard and all of those who defended it. Beginning with Barnes. Stalking forward to meet his opponent, he chuckled darkly.

"You should have fought harder to retain your grip on Sigrun's essence. You would have at least died in a grand spectacle worthy of your renown. Instead you will be as ignoble as the rest of your Midgardian brethren, and die at the edge of my blade!" Hefting his axe, Kjell began to charge, his focus on the downed sorcerer lost as he rushed to meet his opponent head on. Bucky fearlessly raced towards him, matching his intensity with his own. Kjell swung just as Bucky slid along the ice, back arched beneath the swinging blade. Unsheathing his knife, he tuck and rolled, tripping Kjell out to his knee. In one swift execution he pulled out his knife and thrust it down towards Kjell's back.

"ARGH!" Kjell reacted in time to catch the blade in his hand-literally. Bucky blinked at the gory sight of the titanium steel pierced through the brute's opened palm. Blood pool and spilled from the punctured wound but Kjell merely laughed despite the fury in his eyes. "Good one, but you will have to do better than that!" Yanking his hand away, Kjell pulled the knife out of Bucky's grip. Bucky responded with a leaping knee that hit Kjell's jaw.

It felt like hitting rock, the Vanir barely reacted to the blow but quickly struck Bucky across the face in return. The pulverizing blow sent him skidding across the icy now, his shoulder colliding with a rock. Shaking off the attack, Bucky was unarmed but for his strength and determination as Kjell raised his axe to take another swing at him. "Leiptra!" The runes along the axe glowed violet with the warlord's eyes. Bucky dodged the blow, watching with morbid awe as a boulder-sized rock was obliterated. A thrashing backhand to Bucky's torso was met with a block of his cybernetic limb-the vibranium proving to be a match for the brute's strength as he recoiled from the impact.

Seizing the advantage, Bucky decked Kjell twice with fast jabs followed by a haymaker. The warlord tumbled backwards off-balance. Licking his lip he tasted the coppery flavor of his own blood. "I will take that limb as a trophy once I kill you!" Kjell snarled.

"Yeah, well come and get it!" Bucky goaded him. Kjell began another vicious swing, the pulse of bifrost energy sweeping away caused numerous branches and trees to catch fire. One of them stood taller than the others, majestic and proud, planted by the Asgardians upon their settlement into Midgard. Stephen looked on, bothered. It was like watching Yggdrasil burn. He knew deep down that Kjell's bloodlust wouldn't stop at vengeance, not until all the realms and Yggdrasil itself were reaped with the flames of war.

The sorcerer stood to his feet as he saw numerous lumbering Deathwalkers coming from trees. Hel had no shortage of dishonored dead to feed the warlord's army. They would only keep coming so long as their 'master' kept the door open for them. His gaze directed towards the scent of burning tinders where he saw a welcome sight.

Hearing the squeakier cadence distressingly ratcheted over the craggy ridge, heart-stoppingly Wanda flashed virescent irises onto Einherjar armoured death-walkers berserkly stretched out their bonier-obsidian fingers over a snowier trench as their rabidity screechingly amplified into a demonic frequency of white-noise in ghostlier fruition. Branded on their desiccated flesh- malachite runes of Niflheim witchery telekinetically pulsed in countered succession. "No..."Jutting up snubbed pudginess of his reptilian snout, aggressively, Dodger pounced his chubbier form onto a gauntleted arm, his icier aquamarine orbs bluishly gleamed with the voltaic intensity that kinetically radiated off his grayish-ebony scales as he shockingly electrified the zombied draugr with lightning pulses.

"Very cool..." Wanda uttered in awestruck pitch, watching Blaze scrappily lash his tinier clawed-paws with feistier precision onto a skeletal calf, rampantly, slashing off tarred bones. Huffily, Frost gusted out her icier breaths that freezingly crystallized a Helheim raider into a vitreous statue-an icy fusion élivágar. Quirking her voluminous burgundy lips into a half-smirk, blindingly Wanda levelled the corpselike draugr with hell-storm cannonades until their skeletonized flesh burningly dissolved into ashy sifts. "Let's go help your daddy, little ones..."

Bucky knew he couldn't rely on defensive maneuvers to win this fight. His speed and sharp focus were keeping him in the game as he dodged another swing of Kjell's blade and struck Kjell in the chest with a powerful vibranium fist, staggering his opponent. Bucky charged at him, tackling him against a rock. The rock cracked beneath from the collision. Bucky struck Kjell across the face, instead of afflicting the mage, he only woke him up. Growling, Kjell headbutted Bucky, dazing him before latching onto his throat in a chokehold. But grunted under the punishing hold, his pulsing throbbing in his ears. The manic gleam in Kjell's eyes was unrelnting. Bucky felt a measure of concern in his being as he felt the faint pulsing of Sigrun's conscience. "Sigrun, we can't let him win. You gotta get back in the fight with me!"

The intractable rabidness of Sigrun's astral ferocity explosively depth-charged through his enhanced resiliency-infusing his gloved hand as his vein-threaded knuckles surged with the last apparitional vestiges of her draconic spirit-icier racemes pulsingly veined over the rugged scruffiness of his knife-cut features as his fingernails morphically lengthened on beastlier sync into raptor-like claws as he snarlingly thrashed against the bone-vising pressure of Kjell's hulking grip that crushingly robbed teeth-gnashing heaves of his choke-off breaths. "Grahh..." Hammering his robotized fist onto the ebon pauldron jutting out of Knjell's armoured shoulder, desperately, Bucky rammed his booted foot into the dragon-skull armour, as his dilated pupils frostily razored into viperous slits as he became irrevocably driven by Sigrun's untenable fury.'Gi ham ingen nåde (Give him no mercy)...'

Heeding her advice, Bucky gathered what remained of his burning stamina to break free of Kjell's grip. His clawed-cybernetic hand latched onto Kjell's throat in kind, surprising the warlord demigod who choked and gagged beneath Bucky's astonishing burst of strength. For a moment the two remained locked in a tug of war like two animals determined to overpower the other. Bucky's teeth were bared, his cheeks scrunched up into a draconic sneer, steam billowing from his nostrils. Seething, Bucky felt Kjell's chokehold slacken, it was enough to give him the oxygen and advantage he needed to drive a kick to midriff. Kijell grunted, so Bucky kicked him again and again.

"Why d-don't y-you just die!" Kjell cried. Surrendering himself to Bucky's choke-hold, Kjell raised his battle-axe high. Bucky saw the violet burst of bifrost magic and brought his vibranium limb up. Time seemed to slow down as if the world itself had held its breath for what was to come. The enchanted blade struck the vibranium first that greeted it, the energy recoiling off the metal's properties causing an explosive blowback that sent both warriors flying across the icy terrain.

Bucky rolled along the ice, his clawed hand catched the ground, slowing his momentum as he fell into a couch. Hald of Kjell's body was singed with violet flames, his scorched flesh a nauseating reek to those who could smell it nearby. Half-his face was blackened, as he reached for his axe. "Valhöll kallar! (Valhalla calls!) But today is not the day I will reap the splendors I have achieved in life." He groaned defiantly, sensing Bucky's approach. His magic steadily began to heal him, but his strength was tied to his axe. Without it he was vulnerable… "After I kill you, I will raise your infant drakes to be my siege weapons across the realms!"

"Like hell you will!" Bucky rushed to stop him.

Before Kjell's hand could land upon the handle, he watched with horror as the icy beneath them appeared to crack open. A cold unlike anything he had ever experienced rose up to ensnare his arm in its merciless grasp. His nerves were severed, his breath was lost in a deathly gasp. It was like being touched by Ymr himself-it felt so harrowing, his siedr could not contest against its power and his magical shield was shattered. "N-No-ARGH!" He was hopeless to do anything but watch as his weapon sank into a icy-doom; like the icy river of élivágar from Hel itself. "My axe!"

"Let's see you reap your splendor without it!" Floating high over them, Doctor Strange held a focused expression, digits working fast in creating Nordic runes that heralded an icy peril for the Vanir warlord. Kjell rose to his feet, beaten but defiant as his sword arm was all but lost in an icy cast that slowly began to spread.

Bucky said, marching towards him, not with a vengeful stride but one that promised swift justice. "You're not gonna threaten anyone ever again. Not my kids, not my friends, not this world or any world!"

Advancing with his boot-stomping momentum, intimidatingly, Bucky yanked a jagged icicle-like shard off cindered warpage of branches with the robotized force of his vibrainium fingers as he swaggeringly encroached a breadth closer to Kjell with deadlier -mechanized prowess. His dishevelled chestnut tresses roguishly clung to his sweatier temples as the diamondlike steeliness of his wide-blown aquamarine irises smolderingly intensified with murderous heat that gleamed onto the Vanir butcherer. With a defensive variance of his tactical readiness, piercingly, he angled the icicle on knifepoint readiness, while Kjell ravingly crackled against bloodied sneer-blackish welts oozily marred gloppier resin over singed fleshiness of his grizzled features.

Snarlingly, Bucky half-spun onto his clunkier boots with dead-straight graces, fiercely, driving his Kevlar-clad elbow into Kjell's bulkier throat with bone-splintering aggression. Spurts of pukish blood dampishly sprayed over the ruggedness of his stubbled jaw as Kjell's larger head disturbingly jolted back. "Argh..." A throat-shredding roar gutturally erupted out of him as he stabbingly corkscrewed the icicle into Kjell's fleshier hand with untrammelled viciousness-he wasn't holding back. Surging his bionic hand up over Kjell's armoured nape, Bucky propelled a side-jab haymaker of his knuckled fist into the maniacal brute's gashed temple.

"I will not be BESTED by YOU!" Kjell raved, sensing his end to be near, his berserker rage rose in a last ditch effort to defeat his foe and shoved him off. Bucky rolled to his feet as Kjell came to his knees, attempting to rise.

Bucky shot a glance at Strange who fended off a pack of draugr closing in. "Doc, care to do the honors, or do you got somethin' for me?" He asked with a dangerous look.

"Oh, I've got something," Stephen smirked. With a flourish of his wrists, reality bent and cracked around him. Bucky himself was amazed by the sight but sobered immediately once he recognized the shape of the vitreous object. The sorcerer thrust his palm and sent the sharded weapon across the icy terrain and into Bucky's vibranium hand. A swift turn and a wet sluicing sound cut through the tension. Kjell raised his bearish fist to attack only to emit a choking gasp. Eyes wide, the Vanir warlord blinked as all became cold and numbing.

Against snarlier heaves, gnashingly, Bucky clutched onto the mirror-dimension shard with knifepoint precision as he thrustingly jabbed the crystallized fragment into the broader fleshiness of Kjell's larynx; the roguish shagginess of his chestnut tresses sweatily clung askew over his gashed temple. Gaspingly, the Vanir butcherer surged the heftiness of his gauntleted hand, crazily jerking onto the shard with retractable traction at the countered second, Bucky drove the merciless-robotic force of his throat-puncturing assault into his thyroid cartilage. Staring him dead in the eyes, viscidly, blood gushed out of the massacring-genocidal butcherer's throat as Bucky's grayish-aquamarine depths predatorily scythed with murderous iciness -draconic ferocity that consumingly intensified with Sigrun's insurmountable vengeance. Every breakneck jerk of the sluicing onslaught agonizingly pierced Kjell bone-deep while he loweringly uttered against the whispery gravelliness of his Russian timbre. "do svidaniya..."

He watched as the light faded from Kjell's eyes. After millennia of waging war, the flame of vigor was finally snuffed out along with his life essence. The mirror shard in Bucky's hand shattered and dissolved while the bloodied husk of the Vanir demigod/warlord fell back like a toppled tree. The ground shook, the lake of ice cracked beneath his collapsed mass. Passively, Bucky and Strange looked on as an icy grave opened up and the body was devoured into a sunken abyss; wisps of soul energy faded away.

Silence filled the atmosphere, the storm clouds above seemed to lose their frenzy. They parted away to allow the first rays of sunshine to shine upon Midgard in several weeks. An experience felt all around the world and more keenly by the surviving Aesir and the Midgardian heroes who defended them.

"It's over…" Stephen said, releasing a sigh of relief.

"Yeah…It is." Bucky felt a calm wash over him as the sunlight bathed his skin in a warm ethereal glow. The sense of inner-peace he felt wasn't just a result of achieving victory, but from the spirit within. A spirit who was finally being granted rest. Sigrun's life-force sang with the jubilation of a liberated prisoner finally attaining justice. Wondrously, Bucky watched as her spiritual form departed from his body.

"Þú hefur heiðrað tegund mína. Ég er ævinlega þakklátur. Þakka þér...James. Vertu sæll, stríðsmaður (You have honored my kind. I am forever grateful. Thank you...James. Be well, warrior.)."

As telekinetic salvos of whitish-amethyst ethereally pulsed against the niveous iciness of the battle ridge-the astral essence of Sigrun was being grippingly ushered into the celestial drift of the dimensional gateway where the befallen Vanir drakes soaringly reigned over the cosmic dunes of their eternal plane. Against the soul-tearing moment of throbbingly registering the cerebral nexus-the draconic bond that possessively morphed him into a zeppelin-sized drake, Bucky thrusted up his bionic hand, reaching the vaporous comet of bluish energy that dissolvingly whooshed into the snowy headwinds: Sigrun was free. "Have peace..." he murmured in a throatier pitch, his shapely-bow lips heartily quirked into a toothier smirk as the squeakier feistiness of his baby drakes preciously amplified. "O, parent (Oh, boy)..." Crouching onto his denim-clad haunches, fervidly, his bleary ultramarine irises smolderingly gleamed with the mesmeric radiance of his Brooklyn spirit as the ivory-sapphire dragonling—Frost pounced her daintier form kittenishly over the snow-drift, her velvety wings excitedly fluttered as she crawled towards him. "C'mere, little darlin'..."

He gently scooped her up into his arms. Frost climbed up onto his shoulder easily, her chirping mouth nuzzling his stubbled neck. Not far ahead, he could see Wanda and Strange surveying the field until their gazes landed on each other. Worry took over as he looked for Blaze and Dodger. "Where are ya, kiddos?" That was when he felt a pouncing weight collide with his back. Bucky slipped along the slick icy terrain and landed onto his side. "Oomph! Oh, hey, there you are! You little rascals," he laughed. The happy chirping noises made him grin and laugh as his "boys" climbed up onto his torso, their wings flapping merrily as they embraced their father.

Relief surged through Bucky now that his children were safe. But as he instinctively inclined to rub his head against theirs, there was a somber-feeling of inadequacy within him; he wasn't the dragon they knew as their father whom they needed. …And he needed them. Bucky kept a tight smile as he brushed a tender hand along their necks, murmuring in a soothing timbre. "You did good, daddy's really proud of ya."

Registering their visceral- undeniable affection heart-meltingly implode within him, sniffily, Bucky gnawed on his poutier underlip, hefting off his baby girl within the mechanized rigidness of his vibrainium arm that cherishingly nestled her against the bulkier solidity of his kevlar-garbed chest-he wouldn't abandon them to become heartbreakingly fostered by New Asgardians-a damn attraction for throngs of Instagraming sightseers post on their account profiles. Being detached from spunky little kiddos would be soul-crushingly unforgivable: he couldn't go back to the fight.

Angling his shapely-bow lips, featherily, Bucky dragged kiss-soft pressure over her tinier head-dampish heat bleared his vision as he was roped into a deadlock of his full-measured choice. Dredged-up memories of watching his best friend-Stevie-vanish into the quantum-subatomic timeline with the Infinity stones barraged him tenfold-Steve went back to his 'best girl' Peggy Carter to share a new life of dancing with her. "Steve..." he murmured against throatier scratchiness, gently caressing Blaze's spikier head with his bionic hand, while Dodger fussily snout-bopped his vein-threaded palm on mischievous-addictive tenor. "I-I can't leave em'..." Pinching his eyelids shut against the heart-punching achiness, Bucky yanked out the metallic chain of his GI dog-tags, his silvery-aqueous irises tearily gazing onto the engraving of his name 'James Buchanan Barnes' as he tensely gripped onto the chain. "They're my mission..."

It was time to take a new journey through life, a journey that he at this point in time believed he had missed out on: fatherhood. He just hoped the possibility was still in the cards for what he had in mind. Flicking his gaze towards Strange and Wanda, he watched as they shared a few quiet words even he couldn't make out. They stood close together, close enough to affirm what Bucky suspected about them even if they themselves hadn't yet fully realized.

"They'll be hunted by every government agency in the world now that they know they're here," Stephen said to Wanda with a degree of sympathy in his voice. Even if the New Asgardians were to take them in, that was only a temporary solution to what would inevitably become a world-wide concern. The dragons wouldn't just be sought after by world powers but also every criminal syndicate in the world who believed they could exploit them. "I might have a solution," he offered, "but it would mean being...worlds away." A modern Midgard was no place for them to flourish. Meeting Bucky's gaze, Stephen knew that he knew it too. He felt Wanda's placating hand touch his shoulder, drawing her gaze to him.

Gripping onto the burgundy velvetiness of the demask cloak, urgently, Wanda cajoled him into a deterrence of heart-notching caution, she wouldn't evict the joyous-motherly- connection that she beautifully harboured with the adorable baby drakes-they anchored her onto the infinite fringe of redemption. A straying gleam of wetness feverishly trekked over her supple cheek as she trustingly mirrored the decisive resolve melded within his grayish-lazurite depths-aware of the inevitable goodbye."Y-You have to promise me those little ones will be safe..." she whispered in a breathier undertone, threadily, bracketing her lithe palm over the serrated contours of his goateed jaw. "Find them a good place to be happy...Where they belong without the darkness we hold, Stephen."

The softness of her voice and the luring depth of her eyes caused something familiar in his chest to flicker. It was dangerous-but also life-giving. He knew how important this was, not just to the world but to Wanda herself who fostered and cared for the baby drakes over the past several weeks. They weren't just a means of redeeming herself for the wrongs she'd done in the past. The drakes and Bucky had in a sense become family to her. Reaching up to take her hand in his own, Stephen marveled at the softness of her touch, never once thinking about the raw dangerous power that lurked beneath her skin. In his heart he longed for her to find a measure of continuity and rebirth in her life to take away the pain of her loss. Finding a new home for dragonlings was something he would do for her.

Giving her hand a soft squeeze, he didn't shy from holding it far longer than a friend would. Looking into her eyes he nodded reassuringly. "Let's go give them a new home."

Bucky met them half-way, his drakes flying off his shoulders and onto Strange as Bucky engulfed Wanda in a big brotherly-like hug. "Thank you, Wands. For not giving up on me," he said into her hair. He'd lost Steve who followed his own path of happiness, he and Sam weren't always as close as they could've become as friends. But he had Wanda to look out for him when he had no one. That meant the world to him.

The whispery raspiness of his contralto-roughened drawl arrestingly graced her at the moment she felt the robotized gentleness of his vibrainium palm splaying against the svelte curves of her garbed back, with measured steadiness invested with his brotherly reverence, shakily Bucky glided his poutier lips over the delicateness of her temple with kiss-soft -brotherly reverence-he was a cherished friend who gave her a redeeming chance to become loved again. Against throat-racking sobs, Wanda desperately clung onto him tighter, registering the kittenish sweetness of the angelic she-drake adorably nuzzling against her boot. "James.." she hitched out, raspily, pulling away to blearily gaze at the rambunctious twin drakes naughtily flapping their bat-sized wings around them. "Family lives forever..."

"Yeah, I guess it does," he smiled as they parted. Somberly he looked around at the devastation that the battle had caused, it wouldn't be long before more sets of eyes and ears would wander this way. He and his dragonlings couldn't stay put for too long. That line of thought gave him poise. There was a strength to his posture that there hadn't been before, a certainty that the way ahead for him was a path he would have no regrets following.

"While I was under Kjell's control, I could feel just how powerful…how dangerous I could become." It went without saying that his children would grow to be just as powerful as him if not more. They needed a safe place to thrive, away from society. "I've had time to do some soul-searching and when I think about it…These little guys might be the best thing to happen to me. I love em'." He said with an affectionate smile to which his drakes cawed and chirped in unison. He met Stephen's gaze, beseeching. "...But they're gonna need me as the dad they remember. I need that back…"

Stephen was a little surprised if not relieved as he realized where this was going. "You want to be a dragon again?" He remembered how distraught and dismal Bucky had been when Wanda first brought him into the Sanctum. Stephen at the time had anticipated Barnes snapping under the duress of his grief. He didn't think he'd ever grow to prefer a life with wings. But he supposed fatherhood had a way of changing someone's life around. It wasn't something he had yet to understand, but it was something he could respect and appreciate.

"Can you do it for me, Doc?" Bucky asked hopefully.

Stephen would have felt flattered but the implications of such a question cast doubt upon himself. Dragons were creatures born of magic. Transforming a human being into one wasn't as simple as turning a human into a wolf. It meant elevating one's mortality to something beyond that. It was Vanir magic; something Stephen had never practiced before. It was a magic so powerful that it required the attunement and strength of a non-human to master which was held exclusively by the likes of Freya, Amora and even Kjell.

But if his trip to the astral plane had granted him anything other than a temporary solution towards combating a dragon, it was the knowledge and strength to practice such magic. Omr's knowledge and strength burned inside of him, giving him a finer understanding of the old ways and the magic created by his kin so that their race may thrive. He did make a promise, not just to Wanda, but to the dragon spirits who gave him their strength and wisdom so that he might save their race. Looking between Wanda and Bucky, he could see they were both cautious but also curious if it was within his power.

"This might get a little intense, Barnes..." Gesturing out his scarred fingers a tectonic pulse commandingly ruptured over the peak as jagged stones and wooden remnants of an unearthed Drakkar plowed over the snowier ground kinetically forming into a henge with circular traction around Bucky, in telestic succession. Keeping the dragonlings tangibly reined back into the protective cradle of her crimson-sleeved arms, Wanda gazed at Triskele sigils that were psionically branded onto the runestones- a Nordic incantation. Broadening his shapely-bow lips into a breathless smile that nakedly accentuated the crow-lines fringed at his temples, Bucky readily grounded his unshakeable poise into the center of the henge. A fatherly vibrance dazzlingly glowed off the hard-edged ruggedness of his boyish-suaver features as he smirkily nodded at his brood.

With his rule-breaking resolve, Strange intricately siphoned out the draconic essence of the astral plane-a morphic deviance that was sired from Níðhöggr-the serpent generator of the Vanaheim drakes. A concentrative pinch rapted over Strange's brow, harnessing a surgeon-like vigil, he deftly fused Eldritch sigils into bluish-aster geometric tao-mandalas against the gossamer flurries of niveous radiance whirlingly funnelled over the runic henge. He was tampering with forbidden deviances of transcendental sorcery -just like when he riskily beckoned the demonic spirits of the Dark Hold to possess him for zombied-walking. "Ved isete tåke fra Vanir, la James Barnes ånd havne i et fartøy av en drage(By icy mists of Vanir, allow James Barnes's spirit to harbour into a vessel of a dragon)..."

The result was instantaneous as he felt magic pour through him, and unlike the first time it happened, Bucky felt no pain-no invasive presence consuming his body. It was all natural, like a missing part of him that had been lost was slowly returning. The overwhelming surge of strength caused him to crouch down onto all fours, posturing himself as the transformation poured from every cell in his body, molding flesh into scales. His eyes were closed, his size and mass were expanding to colossal proportions. The spectacle of the Vanir ritual caught the eyes and senses of several Aesir who lingered at the edge of the battle-field. Lady Sif stood a cautious distance away with her Einherjer, looking on with wonder as an Ice Dragon was birthed from the incantation.

The sweeping outpour of magic simmered as Stephen held his arms aloft, watching with astonishment as the spell appeared to have worked. The Ice Dragon stood to his full height, his glory overshadowing the valley as his wings stretched high and wide. Bucky let loose a growling noise of comfort like waking up from a nap and feeling his muscles awaken from a dormant slumber. Blinking and shifting on his clawed feet, the dragon was looking over himself with mild relief. "It's good to be back!"

Stephen looked at Wanda who was smiling happily, especially as the trio of dragonlings appeared to be humming with excitement as they flapped their wings and flew towards their father.

Dragging the girthier rotundity of his scaled, underbelly, thunderously, Bucky emitted a huffier chuckle as the spikier length of his reptilian snout toothily stretched agape when the hellraising male-drakes sneakily dive-bombed onto the ironclad massiveness of his pythonic neck. "Woah, pullin' a fast one on me, huh, kiddos..." he quipped out, snortily, easing up his draconic head off the slushier ground as Blaze clumsily slid between the leathery arc of his razored pterosaurwings. Chirpily, Dodger hefted up his chubbier form with wobbling momentum until he pudgily nuzzled his roundish head against the immensity of Sniper-Drake's horned brow. "Definitely, gonna put me on the ropes.."

"The scourge of the Vanir's ravager will eternally suffer into the depths of Hel..." Gripping onto the leathered pommel of her Nidavellir twin-edged longsword, measuringly, Lady Sif grounded her battle-tested poise; the dishevelled cascades of her braided ebony-raven whorls draped over her chainmail shoulders; unwaveringly her grayish-cobalt irises hawkishly gleamed with unwavering vigilance as passive tension edged over the stonier contours of her pearlescent features. Clenching her broader jaw, fixedly, she gazed at the Sniper-Drake's vibrainium fore-claws that metallically shimmered with the golden skeins -runes of Midgardian valour. "For defending Asgard's people, wizard, I have news that Lord Freyr of Vanahein will harbour James Barnes and his young kin within his protected realm..." she rasped out, sternly. "You must leave before they're discovered..."

It had been a backup plan Stephen was prepared to fall back on if he had failed to find a way to return Bucky back into a human; he'd find a new place for him to safely call home. There wasn't a place on Earth where they could hide him and his children for long. So what better place to send him to than the ancestral homeworld of the dragons that came before him? He greeted Lady Sif with a thankful nod for making all of this possible though part of him still felt cautious and concerned for the family of drakes. "You're certain they'll be safe there?"

"Vanaheim is a green-realm, rich with game and protective magic that will keep them sustained. They may encounter bands of marauders on occasion, but none that could so much as pose a serious threat to them," Sif explained. Stephen and Wanda exchanged a look with Bucky who hovered over them. Truly he wasn't expecting a private paradise for him and his babies, but this otherworldly place seemed like the closest thing to it. He was impressed and thankful that the Doc had gotten the Asgardians to pull this off for him.

"At least I won't be bored," Bucky quipped with a snorting chuckle that spewed wisps of cool air.

"Wanda?" Stephen looked to her, having explained to her before what this plan would entail.

"I'll need to visualize the destination for them, if you don't mind." Wanda said as she held her hand near Sif's temple. The shieldmaiden appeared mildly uncertain with having someone see into her thoughts, but knew it was necessary without a bifrost or seed of Yggdrasil to aid them in transportation. She looked at Wanda and gave a consenting nod. "Show me where," Wanda asked her. "Stephen…take my hand," she then instructed him. He slid his hands into hers, reassured by the warm feeling it brought him.

Acting as a bridging conduit between Stephen and Lady Sif, she poured her magic and telepathically saw into Sif's thoughts. It was like seeing into Middle-Earth, an ancient realm with wondrous temples and structures with forests and lakes spanning across the entire realm. She saw two gigantic wolves chasing the moon across the sky as the night heralded the coming of dawn. She saw great falls and a nesting ground camouflage by cliffs and thicket of trees. "Beautiful," she marvelled.

"It is," Stephen agreed, red wisps of hex energy surrounding his temple as he saw what Wanda saw. Steadily, he funneled everything he received through the psychic connection. He had never had the chance to see Asgard before it was destroyed, but the realm of the Vanir was majestic enough to make the sorcerer crave a chance at exploration. Maybe someday… "I've got it," he finally said, feeling Wanda sever the connection between them and Sif. Inhaling deeply, he stepped forward with poise, eyes bright and determined as he slipped on his slingring. His digits rotated in a circular motion and an enormous portal opened up before them.

Shifting his frostier diamondlike orbs of whitish-sapphire, Bucky gazed at the cosmic auroras of bluish-amethyst that prismatically contrasted over Pandora-like vistas-a forested harborage of Asier eternity where Sigrun and her draconic kin entrenched their nesting grounds-a paradisal domain that kinetically pulsed with the harmonic frequency of ancestral -sapient -energy. Nudging his crocodilian-fanged snout against the svelter delicateness of his baby-girl's winged back with gentled pressure, tentatively Bucky steered her near the fiery portal, Blaze and Dodger cozily snuggled against his scaly flank.

"Amazing…" he rumbled as together, he and his drakes looked beyond the portal that led into the otherworldly haven that waited for them. A new life and a new beginning. Bucky rumbled with contentment, marveling at this slice of paradise that he felt undeserving of but extremely grateful for. "Guess this is it…" He looked down at the two magic users who had been with him through thick and thin. "Thank you both…" Wanda's soulful eyes poured into him, encouraging yet also somber. Bucky didn't want to say goodbye, he couldn't. This wouldn't be the end. Lowering his muzzle he rubbed Wanda's arm as she enveloped him in one last hug. "If you ever need me, I'll always be ready." He said, as a brother or as a fighter-he'd be there.

As the iciness of his mintier breaths chuffily gusted over her dishevelled auburn-coppery whorls, caressingly, Wanda kneaded a featherlight tracery of her reverence that invested with tremorous ministrations as her daintier palm lingeringly glided over the spikier roughness of his elonged snout. Her tear-fevered gaze unblinkingly roved over the voltaic-proton energy luminously surging over the obsidian mantra-like scales that arced down his broadened shoulders as the adorable-scampish male dragonlings clingily wedged against his foreleg. Branishing feigned composure over her vixenish features, inexorably, Wanda became attuned to his Asier vitality -the incarnate essence of the Vanir drakes that celestially resonated within his behemothic form. "I-I will see you soon, Bucky..."

Quirking her plushier rubied lips, sniffily, Wanda eased onto her curvier haunches as Frost kittenishly wobbled a breadth closer to her on her stubbier paws, unwarranted heartache intensified with notching desperation-she couldn't say goodbye. "Y-You keep them safe, little one..." she whispered against raspier hitches, shakily brushing her lithe fingers over the cool -velvetiness of Frost's whitish-turquoise wings. "Watch over the boys for me..."

Bucky could see in the short-time she had watched over his babies, Wanda had developed a bond with Frost, maternal in a sense. He was warmed by how close they'd become. Seeing his boys fuss about, picking at something shiny on the ground, Bucky realized what it was. The one thing left of the man he used to be-the man he still was inside his new existence. Deftly lowering his head, he scraped a protruding horn near his snout along the ice until he immediately caught the plates of steel. The GI dogtags had seen countless decades of battle-fields and helped him through his greatest trials with a reminder of who he was. The name and serial number on the engraved plates stared back at him, just as another set of human eyes gazed at them too.

"Hold onto these for me, will you?" He held them towards Wanda. "Until we see each other next time." Wanda took the tags off his horn and clutched them close. She understood, this wasn't a goodbye. Bucky looked at Stephen with profound respect and gratitude. "You're a helluva wizard, Doc. If you see Steve…" He paused in thought, choked with emotion he didn't realize he'd been holding until now. "Tell him…tell him I'm finally where I belong and I couldn't be happier."

Mirroring the heart-deep serenity that nakedly gleamed alight in Wanda's mistier teal-virescent irises, he quirked the puckered leatheriness of his reptilian snout into a half-smirk as he ticklishly rapted his draping wing against his little scrappers who cunningly pounced on the spikier length of his tail. With swan-like graces of vivacious precision, gigglingly Frost swatted her dwarfish paw over the chubbiest of the heart-stealin' brood. "C'mon kiddos..." he whispered in a snortier pitch, murmurously, scooped his feisty baby-drakes with his massive wing as they chirpily slid onto the heftier rigidity of his scaled back. "S'it's gonna be a fun ride...Don't let go..." With earth-thumping stomps, lumberingly, Bucky stretched out his pterosaur wings, acceleratedly, gunning his take-off momentum. "Doc...Wands...M' with ya..." Against a wholehearted roar, boomingly, he soared into the fiery portal-the gateway of Vanir with the heavyweight-thunderous mach of a B-17 bomber. "Until the end of the line..."

It was almost like watching the end of a fairy-tale movie reaching its joyous climatic end. A family of dragons were now soaring high through the clear blue skies of Vanaheim for the first time in over a thousand years. Their wings were flapping majestically, the sunlight reflecting off their unique scale tones of whitish-turquoise, grayish-ebony and icy blue. In the distance could be seen great falls pouring through lush jungles and rainforests. It was a wondrous sight that Stephen and Wanda would never forget as steadily the portal began to shrink and close; sealing away the dragons into their new home.

A short silence fell in the aftermath. With the battle over and the dragons having departed, the Asgardians fell into a collective unit. Some bantered over what they just witnessed while most resumed the tribulation of collecting their fallen and rebuilding their destroyed homes. Lady Sif gave Stephen and Wanda a nod of thanks for their help before leading the relief efforts. The two magical wielders stood in place, lost in their thoughts as the toll of the battle and all they experienced began to weigh in on them.

Without the deterrence of hesitancy strumming through her veins, composedly, Wanda eased up her lithe fingers against the curved burgundy of her vampiric diadem as the eclipsing fieriness of psionic crimson that bewitchingly melded within her pupils dissolved at the moment she delicately removed the visage of the Scarlet Witch, dropping the gothicsque headpiece onto the icier ground. "I-I'm ready to become someone good again..." A coquettish smirk blithely played on her plushier lips, as she enticingly traced her leather-sheathed palm over his cloak's velvety collar. "Just maybe not on a lunchbox."

Stephen released a dry chuckle, a small smile gracing his lips as he turned to face her. "You did great, Wanda. The whole world will know about it. I think your heart's always been in the right place." He could see a slight look of conflict on her face. He stepped closer towards her, reaching up to gently take her hands into his own. "Regardless of what's happened between us in the past…I think we work well together. ...I think we've both helped each other in ways that we've needed. So I wondering if-" He felt a heaviness in his chest as her eyes, that had the luring strength of sheer suns, brought him to a shattering point. He could either press forward or turn away like a coward. He was no coward. But when it came to matters of the heart, he still had trouble conveying the right words. "Actually, I think, um…What I'm trying to say is-

"Don't..." Angling the curvaceous exquisiteness of her svelte-bustier form against the rigid solidity of his garbed chest, feverously, Wanda duelled against the intensifying need that ramped through her veins as the lithe fineness of her palm amorously graced reverent ministrations over the hawkish contours of his austere features. She wouldn't push him back-safeguard her grief-razed heart with deadbolted resistance. With a kiss-soft pressure, she traced his chiselled lips with a featherlike caress on an evocative tempo, readily, Wanda became floored by awareness of the shakier gentleness of his pinned fingers tactively flexed along the underside curvature of her jaw on heart-starved tempo.

"Say anything..." she whispered in a raspier pitch, hushedly, easing up her daintier hand over his broader nape with sensuous abandon. Under the fringe of her eyelashes, she gazed into his silvery-lazurite irises -a psionic voltage burningly strummed with a coupled fusion of their hungered intimacy. "J-Just feel us..." Ardently, she captured his tremorous lips into the headier-ambrosial decadence of a breathtaking kiss. Groaningly, Stephen emitted out throatier pants on rampant demand-he wasn't holding back with reservations of naive hesitance. 'Mmphh...' Blindly, driven by every unadulterated instinct that he reined back, the smooth firmness of his recaptured lips dragged over her plushier underlip, increasingly stealing the aphrodisiacal sweetness of her mintier breaths as he rapturously edged them into passion-blank mania.

There was something purely life-giving about Wanda's lips. If Stephen were a man dying of thirst in the desert, her kiss was as rejuvenating as fresh water from a well. He hummed and he groaned as heat flushed through his body, his own lips overlapping with hers in a vigorous dance that allowed his affection to pour forth. He regretted many things in the past-the most prominent being letting good things pass him by. He let one love get away, to feel this act of passion with someone he'd grown to care for, he felt reborn.

Their lips melded together slowly, intimately. A spark ignited inside of her that Wanda hadn't expected to feel again. Did she love Vision and her children? She always would. But she had never truly grieved their loss; not until today after conquering her demons. To have grieved deeply meant to have loved fully. Opening her heart again to the world, and to the man in front of her, would give her every reason to keep going and start anew. And for the first time in many years, it was something she wanted to do. With him.

Steadily, their lips parted but they remained close, fully enveloped in the heat of their embrace and the magnetic pull of their locked gazes. Mutual smiles blossomed on their faces.

Today was certainly a day for new beginnings.

---------------

{Vanaheim}

The forested environs that bordered the runic dolmens that were etched with the sigils of Vanir majestically contrasted against the mountainous ridges that became a paradisal domain that was eternally protected by the celestial essence of Yggdrasil as the assonance of harmonic serenity that wondrously manifested. Shifting on her thermal boots with cautious graces, Wanda registered the gustier iciness that frostily chilled over the supple contours of her delicate jaw, the glossier fieriness of her coppery-auburn whorls sleekly cascaded off her layered shoulders as her teal-virescent irises riskily glanced at the sling-ring flickeringly portal wheeling behind her. "Are you ready for this...?" she rasped in a sultrier undertone, placidly, gesturing her lithe hand. "Bucky is waiting for us..."

Through the portal stepped through the tall and reserved shape of a man the world believed had vanished into time once again. The Battle For Earth had claimed a large chunk from the man known as Captain America's fighting spirit-his sense of duty set aside in place of a desire for a simple quiet life. Steven Grant Rogers was clad in brown hiking boots, blue cargo pants and a brown jacket. His blonde head was topped with a Dodgers ballcap, his smooth face sporting a generous thick beard.

"This is place is…incredible," was Steve's first reaction to the rich forest like landscape that gave off a scent of fresh rain-water. The skies were clear and blue, the sun shining happily in the distance. He was followed by the striding practical form of Stephen Strange, dressed in casual wear though his body glimmered with a cosmetic Vanir spell he'd mastered to alter his state of clothing.

"That's what we thought too when we first saw it. Quite frankly, its not a bad retirement spot." The sorcerer said as he closed the portal and stood next to Wanda who like him, was admiring the sight of an old Vanir temple not too far away. A statue of Queen Freya (or F*** as the Aesir called her) stood outside of it.

"Well it would certainly beat moving to Florida," Steve quipped. "The gators down there are menaces."

"I think the only lizards to worry about here are the flying ones," Stephen raised his eyebrows as he and Wanda heard, or rather felt, the presence of magic drawing close. The whoosing of wind and the flapping of wings. "Speaking of…"

"S-Steve..." Against the heart-racking urgency, soaringly, Bucky ramped up imposing momentum as he eased down the scaled massiveness of his fore-talons with lumbering traction. With cautious steadiness invested with his menace-honed poise, gutturally, Bucky jutted out his reptilian snout a breadth at the Secret Avengers who trudged within his nesting domain.

Evicting jacked-up vestiges of his defensive instincts, unwaveringly, the razor-slit intensity of his mesmeric whitish-sapphire orbs viperously lasered over his best friend-Stevie Rogers-who reservedly grounded his adamant footing near the fiery portal. After Steve willingly had used the Pym particles for his delivery-boy mission within the subatomic paradoxes; Bucky had capped his unbidden grief, he couldn't look back. Watching the dumbstruck bafflement unabashedly rapt over the graven-edged angularity of Steve's hawkishly boyish features-the aura of their inseparable brotherhood underlyingly clashed within his draconic form. Shifting the paunchiness of his girthier rotundity thumpingly, the Sniper-Drake arced his spikier wings on swanlike variance, gazing into the half-hearted smirk that quirked over Steve's plushier-chiselled lips as he waggishly stretched the puckered leatheriness of his fanged snout into a toothier smirk. "Yeah...Punk...It's me..." he drawled out with murmurous gravelliness, stammeringly. "Gotta say, it's damn good to see you..."

"Wands…Doc, I'm glad ya came. Thanks for bringin' him," Bucky said as he looked at the two of them standing beside each other. He noticed how comfortable they stood next to one another and felt gladness in his bones knowing what that said about their relationship.

"Bucky…" Though Steve knew what to expect, he still had difficulty wrapping his head around the idea that his best and oldest friend had willingly turned into a dragon. Even after everything he'd seen in his life-time, Steve didn't think there was anything left that could surprise him to this point. Life still had a few curve-balls it seemed, and this was one he never saw coming. The dragon was enormous, colourful, majestic and full of life. His scaled draconic features were pulled into a wide grin that uncannily resembled Steve's memory of Bucky as a human. Whatever bittersweet feelings he still felt over his friend's fate evaporated in that moment as if he could literally feel the joy seeping off of him. "It's good to see you too.." he said with a warm smile.

"I was worried when I didn't hear from you," Steve continued, stepping forward fearlessly, "I couldn't believe them when they told me everything that had happened. How are ya feelin'?" he wondered genuinely.

Bucky smirked as he listened to a trio of caws and screeches that caught everyone's attention. Steve looked puzzled until he was awed by the sight of three smaller dragons, scales of vibrant colors, flying down from the cliffs to land next to Bucky. "Better than ever, pal. Better than ever, thanks to these three."

Frost nearly tackled Wanda with joy as she flapped her wings and rubbed her snout against her side adorably. Wanda laughed and hugged her tight. "Good to see you, little one."

Dodger and Blaze squared their postures like attentive soldiers as they gazed at Strange and Steve. Strange nodded with a smirk as the drakes mimicked his gesture. "Hey kiddos…" Bucky said loudly, "say hello to Uncle Steve."

The dragonlings almost in unison clicked and squeaked aloud with tiny voices "Uncky Steeeeve!"

Wanda's eyes grew large with awe, Stephen's eyebrows shot upwards and Steve chuckled with surprise. "Talkin' already, huh?"

"They got me on the ropes like you won't-hey, kiddos wait!" The dragonlings took off into the air, falling into their daily game of tag as they soared into the skies towards their nests. Groaning, Bucky looked at his friends. "You guys packed your hiking gear, my place is way up ahead. Try to keep up!" He winked.

The Ice Dragon took off into the skies as the three humans looked on with wonder. Stephen and Wanda's hands found each other's. Steve beamed with pride as he shouldered his backpack. "Way to go, Buck." Steadily the three began to follow the path towards the mountain, the Vanir sun shining happily upon them.

The end.

July, 1st, 2023

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