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storiesof2018 · 4 years

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{Partners in the Storm}

Completed: July 12th 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Whatever it takes...'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'See you in a minute…Natasha.'

{Flashback}

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I have no place in this world.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*WHAM*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And you, Captain?" Thor grunted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 hours later…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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storiesof2018 · 4 years

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Against the Ropes

The cost of freedom is high...

That visceral mantra infinitely resonated through his veins against the bestial fringe conducted by Amora the sirenic-vengeful denizen of Asgard. The Enchantress was a viperous Noric spell caster who delivered a reckoning of sorcerous discord in Vanaheim siphoning cosmic essence from rooted extensions Yggdrasill, she was a deceptive spawn-a conjurer of blighted chaos, bounding her allegiance to Hela—the befallen demoness. After the nova-atomic ruination of Asgard when the fiery impaling Twilight sword of the Muspelheim devastator Surtur cleaved off the empyreal bridge, Hela's bloodthirsting-maniacal spirit was dragged into chasmic depths of Helheim—only to become resurrected when a valorous warrior of morphs into a true wraith of Dwarven legend: a dire wolf.

As the damnable knells of his warring humanity were careening a symphonious resilence into his Brooklyn spirit; every moment he was grippingly seized into a feral thrall, being cemented down to a pestilent reality of infectious-morphic possession. Around him, centuries of mortal dereliction and reverence became chilled visages of defeat etched into rows granite headstones—forgotten markers that were decoratively adorned with plump orange-fleshed pumpkins-beacons of amber light hauntingly contrasts against ghoulish sneers—the veristic ambiance of Halloween tradition.

The flavorous palatableness of decadent caramel and peanut butter-infused chocolate bars were shattered in heaps of desiccated leaves explosively ignited unslaked—predatory urges that he couldn't shake off. He was losing the fight. The wrapped candy undoubtingly served as baiting tactic of enticing craven—gluttonous prey to breach his reluctant kill-zone in daring-brazen traction. Against the chasmal bestial dregs of his mortal-razing wolven curse; Steve was detachedly isolated and shackled to an arid oak tree on the backlit environs of Green-Wood cemetery.

Emitting a growly cadence against his jutted fang incisors, in a rampant motion of a blinding thrust, unrestrainedly, Steve angled his canine muzzle up, evading another carious whiff of decomposed flesh that reekingly sailed in the frigid air. The roguish thickness of his golden-blonde fur bristlingly reacted against the miasmic stench of death greeted him in all directions- vitric incandescent of astral energy pulsated over stone headstones, beckoning with echoes of ghoulish assonances that ushered unprecedented -demonic resurrection of the Dark Verse. They were running out of time. A blearing onset of tears feverishly melded against the hawkish depth of Steve's crystalline azure irises as he unwaveringly gazed at the candlelit pumpkins that eerily lit up his passage of heart-wrenching execution.

Around him, blockades of unearthed coffins were mounted near the iron entrance gates, skeletal limbs hung lifelessly in dormant unison over rotted edges of mud-dampened wood, forcing him to inadvertently rear his canine head back against the phantom implosion of a celestial breach.

Unremittingly the wolfy Avenger felt the malodorous command of hellish butchery scourging through him—a carnal pulse of unquenchable hunger—teeming bloodthirst that wouldn't stave down. The furred sleekness of his long muzzle flexed on instinctive accord of his shifting paws. Dragging out a whimpering breath, Steve felt his twined incisor fangs pulse against implosive cadence of latent hostility. "I can't do this to em'..." he raspily choked off against growling strain, pinching his eyes shut against the raw unity of cacophonic—revamped aggression betrayingly rivaling with desperate echoes of his prevailing heartbeat throbbingly rigged to denotate like an incendiary rush of high-octane. "I can't..."

Hunger gnawed at him like fingers digging into his stomach, determined to cause him restless pain until he succumbed to the burning desire to sate his malice. Steve despised the feeling as if it were something as repugnant as a drug addiction that couldn't be kicked. He wouldn't know from experience, but he knew enough to assume the feeling was overwhelming, robbing him of all thought and cohesion as his world spiraled into a distorted reality where everything glowed green, marked as his prey.

He could feel the perverse presence of the blonde Asgardian sorceress that was trying to control him like a puppet on strings. He groaned and gnashed his sharpened teeth that dripped with saliva. He could smell them-two furry bunnies close by. Plump and ripe for the taking. His stomach growled at the thought of wrapping his fangs around their necks and chomping hard.

"N-No...can't. Won't..." He whined, collapsing near a headstone while his eyes spied the shape of a bouncing ball of cindery-brunette fur moving behind another tombstone, followed closely by a chubbier, slower blonde bunny that was busying himself by gobbling up pieces of chocolate bait.

"Don't worry punk, this furball s'not leavin' ya..." A gravelly murmurous drawl throatily challenged with alighted relevance of a brotherly promise; after shimming through the iron bars with gunned momentum, Bucky unerringly braced the pudginess of his chestnut furred body against eroded granite. Trudging into the rigged minefield was disarmingly fueled by full-measured recklessness. Every conscious breach of his thumping paces detonated a hair-trigger pulse.

Raptly scrunching his furred nose with an evident twitch, Bucky stealthily in a measure of cautious urgency, edgily he registered the sugariness of discarded chocolate-only a paw's reach from his tactical position-a distraction to arrest his banking resistance. He was being hammer-locked within a chimeral reality; every defiant pulse of his hellbent resolve felt soul-crushingly useless to ride out. Against his steeled vision's laser-edged periphery, involuntarily he gazed at the paunchy heaviness of the downsized Asgardian Thunderer's wobbling pace; his debauched, unkempt golden furred mass was sluggishly nearing the heap of leaves with telltale—gluttonous intent steering him towards a baited death trap.

"Damnit..." Bucky seethed out a dragging breath of his vexatious timbre, as he bracingly wedged against the headstone, readily with his sniper-honed poise in tactful ease, Bucky lowered in half-crouch against patent tension bolstered on his hind feet; utilizing extensions of shadow to keep him distant from the crosshairs. Against the floppy length of his drooping ears, silvered heat of grayish-aquamarine irises nakedly gleamed against stilted gravity that consciously roped him down. It was an escalating moment of unwarrantable heartache that he couldn't wage through: not without his best friend.

Evicting an vexatious onslaught of untrammeled hunger, the podgy Brooklyn lop grabbed of what appeared to be a half-shelled walnut for his arsenal, with a blinding swipe of a trigger paw, snarlingly with an underhand pitch, Bucky careened his effective projectile with unwavering variances of headlong-brazen precision undeviatingly at the indulging, rotund lion-haired lop, betraying his obscured position; while a myriad of chocolatey scents became mouthwateringly delectable for him to evade, he was knee-deep in the crosshairs. "Thor, you gotta keep it together man...!"

"Huh?" Thor had unknowingly fell beyond the plateau of adulthood and down to the baser instincts, one might expect from an easily distracted child. The air was fresh, the skies were cool, and his stomach growled with unabashed hunger as he savored down the rich taste of chocolate with big mouthfuls. Chocolate. He never knew Midgardians could be so brilliant in developing such sweet delicacies that could not be found in the other realms. It was mouth-watering and filled him with an unquenchable delight he licked his bucked teeth and grinned oafishly over at his companion who appeared rather glum of late.

"As you can see, Friend James, I am perfectly held together. You will not find a more fluid form of Asgardian might and vigor!" He demonstrated by bouncing on his hind legs with a small wobble but succeeded only in landing on his backside. "Oof! Perhaps that was an unwis-Ow!" He groaned when he felt something small hit his head. "Did you just throw a walnut at me?!" he suddenly became indignant.

"I'll admit it wasn't my best throw," Drawling back a terse quip scowlingly Bucky half- quirked his tiny muzzle while harnessing a swift variant of his tactical grace and ducked in mid-crouch his plushy form lower against the carved out pumpkin with defensive ease rapt over his disheveled fur. Quaking vibrations of an earthmoving crescendo hammered phantasmally against his flattened hind paws, glaringly Bucky drove the knifing intensity of his razored glacial irises towards emptied wrappers and smeared fudge stickily caked over Thor's furrier, blubbery mass. He was becoming exceedingly aware of his own unhinged cravings that penetrated him with a flashpoint throb as he rode on the edge of irrepressible hunger.

Quelling back a nauseous rush with chagrined effort, as intoxicating-appetizing scents were arrestingly stealing his warred resolve, Bucky emitted a scathing rasp that was tellingly apparent to a derisive scrunch of his twitching nose—they needed to gun for a breathless measure of untouchable distance. The driving—brotherly need to daringly rescue his best friend—little punk— from Amora's tenebrous-possessive conjury waged through him in a burgeoning tenfold; challengingly eliciting a suicidal—breakneck dash of hopping speed.

"We gotta pull Steve out of this..." Bucky urged out gratingly his deep-timbered resonance fringed into a squeak, as he lifted up his droopy ear against volumes of clamorous ferocity chasing Steve's panting breaths. Slivery traces of moonlight haloed of the wolf's grayish-blonde fur, while Steve deceptively grounded his adamant poise with a sentry-like vigil-the murderous stance of an executioner. They had one reckless—instinctual advantage; the warren of disinterred graves could be utilized as open burrows to hop into."M' not losin' him..."

The telltale steps of a looming predator encroached on the two bunnies as they felt the vibrations beneath their feet. Thor had been drowning in a sea of gluttony throughout the night. But the moment his beady eyes of blue and artificial green took in the looming shadow hovering over them like death itself, he was ripped back to reality and cringed with a sharp yell. "It would appear he hasn't lost us either, Friend James. Odin's Beard..." The fat bunny felt his fur rise on end as a guttural snarl bellowed through the vicinity. A flash of lightning lit up the skies and illuminated the chilling visage of a blonde timber-wolf. Thor could scarcely recognize the shade of cool azure blue in those merciless eyes that were consumed by sorcery. Steven Rogers was the most disciplined and honorable man he knew, but Amora's enchantment turned him into a hungry predator with a mouth-watering taste for rabbits...big fat rabbits like himself! "Barnes, if you plan to talk him down now might be the right time!" Thor boomed as he shrunk back clumsily against a headstone, leaving Bucky to stare down the big bad wolf.

'I gotta dreamin'... Bucky grumbled under breath ruefully, wobbling in a variance of cautious prowess from the headstone, heartache banked with a ricocheting throb in his pudgy form as he reactively tucked his furred paws, warding off clamorous pulses of adrenaline against knifepoint tension cuttingly piercing through the velvet silkiness of his dark chestnut fur. He was staking down his life-humanity in the damn crosshairs, disarmingly useless to engage the predatory aura that infinitely clashed against Steve's valorous-Brooklyn spirit, while he felt Amora's celestial-parasitic energy spawning a ghoulish legion around him.

The miasmal reek of skeletal decay made him choke on feverish breaths, scrunching his furred nose against the obstructive stench, Bucky thrashed a paw up with rapid ease while Thor grouchily headbutted a pumpkin with sluggish motion; unquestioningly clearing a spot to gorge another heap of potion-infused chocolate. 'Hell, does this guy ever quit...' he quipped snarkily, feeling unnervingly outrivaled by the obese Asgardian's hoggish, unrepentant caliber, as he moodily brandished a semblance of clamorous defiance.

Grimacingly, in a low-hop, Bucky edged a breadth closer to Steve's intimidating, chained proximity, a telltale flit of his droopy ears conveyed his unwarranted reluctance as he thready murmured, coaxingly. "Punk it's me..." He gazed up at the captive wolf's incisor fangs menacingly curving underlip to deliver a killing strike, as the growling cadence stuntedly deafened out his urgent timbre, his vision blearing against a fevered pinch of unshed tears. On the edge of reaction, a furrowing pinch tensely notched up over Steve's furred brow, glacial light detracted off his razor-slit pupils -manic aggression stalled in a heartbeat as the Brooklyn lop caught a drag of gulping breath, never betraying a rampant scrunch of his tinier nose. "M' Bucky under all this fur..." he croakily hitched.

Somewhere at the back of his thoughts, Steve felt a gripping sense of terror as he faced down the brown-furred rabbit that he knew was his oldest friend. The brush of agony in his chest increased every second as he was consumed by malicious thoughts of wrapping his jaws around the rabbit's neck and ripping it out. Hunger gnawed at him, turning his discipline into a struggle of wills. "R-Run, Buck…" He snarled through clenched teeth, saliva drooling from his incisors. The stubborn rabbit remained in front of him, fearless of the beast that was fighting to control his actions and the witch that was causing it. "C-Can't fight her…"

'Obey me, my Hound.' Amora's voice commanded his thoughts, filling his being with dread. 'Kill them all…'

"N-No!" Steve howled. His struggle caused him to pant heavily and thrash his paw blindly. His sharpened nails were like knives cutting through the air. He was angry, he was hungry, he wanted something to lash out against. Enchantress' magic entangled with his emotions, worming him into her thrall until his iris' were glowing an ominous green. Steve Rogers had vanished and the wolf had taken over. "Kill them!" The rabbits in front of him were prey. Food for his insatiable hunger. "DIE!"

The wolf charged in a sudden mad dash of speed and ferocity. Bucky and Thor scrambled backwards against a headstone. They were trapped and their end was imminent. They didn't scream nor did they tremble. They were prepared to meet their end together as warriors. Until their world was consumed by a burst of exploding magic as a magician's top-hat was thrown over them. The wolf collided head-first against the headstone-stunned and confused at the sudden intervention that saw the two rabbits disappear from his grasp.

"I think our two rabbit friends have had enough excitement, Captain Rogers." Said the smooth deep baritone voice. The wolf gazed up to see a man dramatically floating down from the sky with a red-cloak billowing from behind him. "You and your master, on the other hand, have a date with me tonight…" Doctor Strange landed across from the wolf who snarled menacingly at him as the clock approached closer to midnight on Halloween night.

You gotta move on...

It felt like his reality was inevitably threatening to pull the pin to detonate an emotional grenade within his grief-razed world; nothing was the same after cosmic snap-the scything purge of mortality ushered by the soul-butchering intergalactic Mad Titan-Thanos; prevailed humanity fostered onto the starvation of hope behind the barricades, echoes of valor dissolved in remnants of heaped ash. He trudged on the accelerated cataclysmic fringe of soul-wrenching failure, throes of anguish grappled him back to that incendiary moment when Bucky horrifyingly became obliterated into earthen mulch as the convergence of the astral plane imploded.

During five years of heartbreakingly enduring the grievous aftermath of the Infinity Gauntlet's atomic wastage; Steve never stopped looking back, he crossed quantum–dimensional paradoxes of time to bring everyone back at the moment Thanos heralded the apocalyptic reckoning of mass-annihilation; only to lose his best girl-Natasha-to the eternal-votive-trade of the Soul Stone. The stakes of infinite price were immeasurable snowy crags of Vormir; a lasting sacrifice of expandable love thrown over the edge of a celestial void- an elysian realm that harvested out souls like a lightning strike. 'Nat bet her life on it...'

Without the brotherly grace of Bucky's hand anchoring him out of throes of interminable heartache, Steve would have never walked on to face new daybreak. His snarky defiant best friend-his Bucky- pulled him off the ropes, got him back in the game, reigniting his dormant Brooklyn spirit. He couldn't look back into the vacuous drift: a beckoning resonance of stowed defeat. He lost everything in five seconds would he breached the quantum realm, never blinking as Natasha vanished into a strand of time with Clint Barton-beyond his reach. Love wasn't disposable; it was a visceral pulse of a dueling heartbeat, a soul-mirroring cadence of a feverous dance. Natasha was more than his combat partner of tactical dynamic-a rebellious intimacy of evocative compromise. She had awoken him out stuporous grief that he punishingly harbored for Peggy Carter; gave him a chance to trust-love- -again in the betraying crossfires.

In the wake of soul-hammering ache that he warringly stowed back, with dismal traction of his impassive reserve, Steve guardingly isolated himself from the reconstructed Avengers Compound; bolstering the enhanced heaviness of his gladiator-like bulk against roughened bark of an oak near the forested lakefront, scones of amber harvest moonlight were ethereally captured in ripples, as the chilling breeze of late-October hauntingly rushed over his leather-sheathed muscles. He needed distance for pent-up ignitable release.

Within the renovated Compound, Thor's 'grand' return with the cosmic piratical ravagers -Guardians of the Galaxy was being welcomingly celebrated; barrels of Asgardian-brewed ale were stacked with indulging delicacies of imported chocolate. Moving towards a vacant log, achingly Steve eased down, resisting to join the reunion gathering-there was nothing for him inside. The denim of his threadbare jeans became stiff over the hard-edged muscle of his calves as he crushingly fisted the material with a clenching squeeze while heartsick tension inexorably gripped him in a tenfold of blinding urgency.

Thinning his sensuous chiseled lips into a feigned grimace that made dimples of his cheek stretch, he blearily gazed up at the hypnotic luminance of full moon above, desperately searching beyond the darkened vistas as he rode out another heart-splintering onslaught. Against disheveled blonde tresses feathering messily over his tear-drenched lashes, the cool azure of his irises grew piercingly stormier in the forested darkness as errant treks of wetness ghosted a feverish sting over his hawkish, angular features. Steve quashed down the urge to rawly scream out her name in a painstaking cadence of explosive agony; trying to hold everything back as he throat strained to release a sobbing breath. "M' sorry, Tasha..."

"Y'know I figured you were out here..." A murmurous drawl throatily cut against the brisk air in a suave-timbered pitch that Steve viscerally registered against phantom flexes of bone-deep tension; in the eclipsing contrasts of patent-bestial- menace as Bucky edged his sniper prowess invested in his nonchalant-honed paces swaggeringly towards the forested lake, keeping a measure of braced distance from the crestfallen First Avenger, who stared passively at the waxen effulgence glowingly haloing over them.

Grabbed in a Hugo Boss slim-fit jacket that intimidatingly delineated over heavy-sheathed cords of banded muscle, in a controlled, impassive stance, Bucky innately detected unwarrantable volumes of clamorous heartache- an irrevocable longing that wouldn't be staved down into soul-neutralizing dregs of reigned failure. Grazing his teeth over the pouty swell of his jutted underlip, he dragged out a tactful breath, his grayish-aquamarine irises silvered alight with telltale urgency. "Are you okay, pal...?"

Steve attempted what should have been a smile of reassurance but to Bucky, it looked more like a grimace of uncertainty. "About as okay as I can get..." Steve answered shifting his gaze towards the starry skies. He avoided his best friend's gaze knowing without needing to look that he could see right through him. In a time long past, Steve never felt the need to hide from those he cared about-especially since he had no one and nothing except for his mom and Bucky...until all he had left was Bucky.

And now he had once again come full-circle, feeling the burden of heartache and loss weighing heavily on him. He wasn't the same kid from Brooklyn anymore who took comfort by opening up. Opening up allowed too many people to get close-people he cared about and ultimately lost. Mom, Peggy, Tony...Natasha…He thought by shutting himself away, he could move past his grief by being a soldier, an Avenger. But now...

"Actually...No. I'm not all right." He answered with a deep exhale. "And I don't think a party is gonna help me, Buck."

The edged rawness of his Steve's hitching timbre was betrayingly strained, Bucky felt his stubbled features tauten against a viscerous slash of razored penetration infinitely gouging over his heart as his best friend unquestioningly barricaded him within torturous extensions of latent anguish-the loss of 'Tasha' to celestial devoid of Vormir was a hammer-blow to the heart-Siberian bloodlines that surgically mutated-weaponized their expandable bodies into lethal-heartless instruments of mechanical agility and tactical precision, never made him abandon a mercy shot when he pulled the trigger on her in the Odessa crosshairs. She deserved redemption-daybreak: not a flatline afterlife.

Forcing himself to lower into a crouch of sniper ease, inches from the occupied log, vexatiously, against a fisting pulse, Bucky dragged his leather motorcycle sheathed fingers with painstaking traction over roughen dirt, not clashing with the teary blur of Steve's azure depths-incarnate echoes of phantom grief. "I know s'it's been a rough slide for ya, Steve..." he murmured croakily in a gravelly drawl, pulling his shapely lips into a half-grimace, ruefully. "Hell, I wasn't there when you needed me..."

"This isn't on you, Bucky," Steve answered some form of his usual self returned to offer his friend the reassurance he needed to know that he was in no way to blame. The pain in his chest festered and ached each time he found himself turning to say something to Natasha. Asking her if she wanted a friendly spar or go have lunch together. Only for the painful reminder that she was no longer there to stab him in his heart, making the void inside grow deeper. Blinking repeatedly, he spared his friend a short glance and felt his somber mood take a more emotional turn as his eyes misted and he fought furiously to withhold his tears.

"Even if you had been here...there was no changing her decision." He shuddered, knowing Clint would agree with him. Natasha fought her oldest friend to prevent him from sacrificing himself for the soul stone. Natasha never believed herself to be a true hero, fearing her past would forever define her legacy. There was no stopping her from taking that jump...unless maybe he had been there himself to do it first. "Some things I suppose are just meant to be…"

It was a bitter pill to swallow, and Steve had hoped time would make it easier. But even after six months had passed, the ache in his heart hadn't stopped and his nightmares about her falling off that cliff hadn't stopped haunting him, just like the Red Skull's words when he had returned the Soul Stone.

"The Soul Stone does not return what was given. It is sentient, it craves life-encapsulates it. Those sacrificed to its power will forever wander the soul world."

"Sometimes life just isn't fair." Steve couldn't stop a single tear from escaping him. He thought life after death would grant peace to those who were benevolent souls, especially those that sought redemption. The thought of Natasha being trapped there… Steve suddenly rose up from his seat, struggling and failing to banish the chilling thought that made his insides twist.

Inwardly he seethed and felt a build-up on the anguish that made him want to punch something. His pulse beating wildly, he could distinctly hear his name being called and Bucky attempting to pull him back.

A cyclonic implosion of white-heat electrified through a bank of encroaching cloud masses that bridged a funneling vortex over the darkened lake- an elysian dimensional breach had irrevocably ushered thunderous dissonance to boomingly echo as spastic lightning forked every two seconds in eclipsing convergence of an atmospheric tempest. Clenching the hard-edged planes of his stubbled jaw against reactive tension, Bucky angled his head, wolfish chestnut tresses flittingly whipped-lashed over graven cheeks as he unerringly braced into an aggressive-honed stance, furrowing his brow into a pinch, confusingly. "Steve..." he rasped out breathlessly as voltaic salvos of incandescent amethyst struck down around them. "W-what kinda storm is this..."

"One we shouldn't need to worry about," Steve replied with a detached voice. If he were in a leisurely state of mind tonight he would have paused to admire the atmospheric spectacle that bathed the night sky in brilliant hues of indigo blue and lime green. It lasted only a moment before its radiance diminished over the night skies. Steve for a moment thought he had seen something in the midst of the tempest. They looked like carvings-runes. He shrugged tiredly, wondering if he was seeing things after going nearly twenty-fours without sleep. "You should get back to the party, Buck. Selina is waiting."

Steve looked at his friend with a somber smile. "I appreciate what you're doing here. I know moving on won't be easy, but without you here it makes a world of difference." Without Bucky, Steve knew he would have no one. He ignored the knife-stabbing pain in his chest and kept a cool expression as he patted his best friend on the shoulder. "Go on, I'll be all right. I think I'll be heading in-in a bit."

The edging directness of Steve's fractured deep-timbered was underlying penetrative, against his unstinted chagrin that raptly stamped over the bristled ruggedness of knife-edge cut features, Bucky felt the unrepented echoes of guilt-ridden heartache grievously mounting into full-acceleration.

Steeling him to wage against the prevalence fed by a maelstrom of anguish, Bucky tucked his motorcycle-gloved into pockets of his leather jacket, aggressively his shapely lips pressed harsher into a taut grimace of feigned tension, stiltedly, accepting the chastened revelation that his best friend-little punk was shrugging him off—unstable distance needed to be widened between them. A despondent cast melded nakedly alight in Steve's downcasted azure irises as the flit of his dark lashes caught errant tears-he wanted to be left alone. "Don't do anythin' stupid out here..." Bucky urged in a gravelly drawl, scathingly, before pivoting on his tactical boots in a variance of reluctant traction. He sucked back a choking drag of breath. "I-I can take a damn hint when M' not wanted..."

Steve knew he had unintendedly hurt Bucky's feelings by his curt dismissal. Something he would need to apologize for later when he was in brighter spirits. But he couldn't bring himself to offer any form of consolation right now. In a moment where he felt stretched and drained of all energy.

The part of him that once longed for the simple life of finding a beautiful dame to settle down with was a fantasy he had stowed away when he lost Peggy Carter to time. He locked away that dream and focused only on the fight. It wasn't the peace he wanted in life, but it was one that gave him purpose.

But that was only when Natasha was by his side. Always by his side, fighting more battles with him over the years anyone in his life-time, including Bucky. She made the fight feel as close to home as he could ever hope. The dream he kept locked away had slowly begun to push through the cracks, giving him that lost hope that he could find a life he always wanted with the Russian beauty who had unknowingly claimed his heart.

But now she was gone. And with her, so was his will to keep on fighting.

"There's days I wonder, Buck, how much longer we can keep going on like this." He says to his friend before he can walk away. The solemnity in his voice made him sound years older. "Fighting and fighting, never seeing an end to the war. Never finding that warm, apple-pie life that we hoped was at the end of the line. Half the time it feels like we're rabbits hopping in circles with wolves at our backs."

His eyes closed to shutter the offset of a tear that threatened to cascade down his cheek. His hands closed into fists in his pockets and the blonde released a shaky breath before meeting Bucky's gaze. "When does the fighting stop?"

As the validity of those retriggered words gripped him into a knifepoint deadlock, everything had inadvertently reversed in that naked moment of a soul-deep throb; the raw tension clashingly racking through him, became stormily evident in his glacial aqueous irises as Bucky with controlled effort driven by ignition of a timeless cadence off Brooklyn resilence-brotherhood; he didn't want to become a disposable extension of quench-out heartache, while trudging on the inevitable-reckoning fringe of a denotative -apocalyptic- powder-keg.

With a vehement shift of his measured paces, impassively Bucky neared his slump-face best friend's side."It doesn't..." he answered back in thickened-pitch, murmurously, his shapely-wide lips tugged half-heartedly with a telltale pinch. A glide of errant wetness sheening over the broad planes of Steve's hawkishly-cut features starkly resurrected invulnerable defeat-a chastening penance "There's always gonna be a fight puttin' us against the ropes, Steve," he drawled in a hitching rasp, throatily."We just gotta keep swingin' when the hits come..."

It was an answer Steve knew to expect. Life without war it seemed was as impossible as life without death. It was an inevitability that couldn't be staved off forever. War was like a virus always lurking; waiting to break out and spread. It just never occurred to him how much it would become a part of his life-of both their lives. He was once a kid who wanted to be a painter. A man who wanted a quiet family life. But he chose to become a soldier, and soldiers always had someone to lose no matter the circumstance of which a relationship was formed. Steve lost partners, friends, family. He needed to make peace with himself after the endgame. It wouldn't be long until the next fight reared its way in, but until then, he had to find peace.

"Let's hope we won't need to be swinging for awhile yet." He said with a soft smile, not quite reaching his eyes. He looked at Bucky in a new light, seeing a man who had endured countless years of mental torture and battles but had managed to find his way to adapt to a normal life much easier than Steve ever did. He envied his friend, but at the same time, he was happy for him. Before he could say anything more, they were both interrupted by a voice calling for them near the compound.

"Hey Cap! Bucky! Pizzas arrived. You guys coming in? I'd hurry, I don't think Thor plans on slowing down tonight." Scott Lang said with a shrug. He held a vodka bottle in hand, wearing black clothes and a Halloween shirt that acutely forbid the presence of clowns. Scott hated clowns apparently, Steve thought with an amused smirk.

"You should get a move on, Buck. I'll be a few minutes," Steve gave his friend an encouraging nod, grateful for the talk he'd given him.

Against the bordering grip of vestigial relevance, Bucky nodded smirkily, his grayish-aquamarine irises glinting alight with echoes of boyish naughtiness; tellingly evident to the wrinkled lines of crows-feet deeply bracketing at his pinched temples-a gracing deliverance of eternal brotherly promise felt graspable-indestructible to ward off. Breaking distance from the rivalrous aura of isolated solace, Bucky did a half-spun on his tactical boots; Scott's dark-hazel irises widened dumbly in frank amusement while sheepishly mouthing 'jeez' at the Siberian beast machine's gladiator-like bulk menacingly shifting accord of poised intimidation underneath his leather jacket.

"I ruined the moment again, didn't I?" Scott uttered out ingenuously, narrowing his dark gaze, he uneasily pressed his lips into a half-grimace. "Don't worry, I totally respect lasting friendships and you guys have yours as a museum exhibit which is very cool..." He continued, humorously without being off-beat in comedic tenor. "Luis wrote our two names in the prison's bathroom stall with a permanent marker, can't be scrubbed off."

In a controlled motion of his gloved hand, furrowed his brow into a tenser pitch, Bucky unerringly grabbed the Vodka bottle out of Scott's leaden grip as he clumsily reeled back. "I got this, Lang..." he quipped huffily under tight breath; the diesel- roughened smokiness of his Brooklyn drawl edged huskily suave in nonchalant tenor, as his pursed lips quirked up, toothily back at Steve. "S'just try not to get caught in the rain, punk..."

"I'll do my best," Steve replied. He watched as both Bucky and Scott went back inside the newly rebuilt compound. It was bigger than it was before with more room to spare for new members but somehow feeling even emptier than it ever was before. With Tony in a coma, and Clint having returned home to his family and Natasha... The compound's only permanent residents were himself, Bruce, Scott, Sam, Wanda and Thor. Clint, Peter Parker and Carol Danvers only paid periodic visits each month that never lasted more than a couple of days. Then there was Bucky and Selina whom often treated the compound as their hotel between their travels. A home away from home.

It was nice to see familiar faces still keeping close but there was a stigma on the property each time he would walk near the apartment that used to belong to Natasha. Used to in the previous iteration of the building before Thanos had levelled it. Pepper had it rebuilt from the ground up with Natasha's room and what few belongings of hers that they had scoured from the ruins intact. The first night it of its completion Steve had spent the night inside of her room, staring blankly at the ceiling in deep thought, trying to piece together some semblance of closure now that one of his closest friends in life was gone.

Every night after that, the pain of her absence had increased to the point where he couldn't be anywhere near her room, knowing she would never again occupy it. They would never again spend a late night of quietly sharing stories about their past before sitting together to watch an old movie he had missed out on. The last one they saw being Schindler's List. The next one they would've seen but never having gotten around to watching was a favorite horror movie of hers she recommended called "The Witches". A movie she had once saw as a wayward girl from the Red Room.

That was how they spent their nights together in the five years they believed they had failed. Steadily, their relationship had begun to change. He felt it, she felt it too. The pull, the attraction-the undeniable trust they placed in each other that was born eight years ago when they were on the run from Hydra. The night before Scott had came back, they had come close to breaching that barrier that had been in place for so long. The line between friendship and romance. They were both battle-weary and wanted nothing more than fall back into blissful normalcy that had been denied to them for so long.

Tears trailed down his cheeks. Rather than hastily wipe em, Steve allowed them to flow. He had to grieve. He had to accept the fact she was gone and never coming back. "Natasha…" He spoke up to the moon, looking to the heavens where he believed all benevolent souls passed into. "Nat...Its tough without you here...Without you helping me to keep me on my feet." He sniffed, stuffing his hands into his pockets. "Sometimes it feels impossible to believe this is how things are...how they'll always be. I thought I would be the one to go long before anyone else. Old man Rogers finally biting the bullet while the war goes on…I miss you, Nat."

He swallowed, feeling his chest constrict with pain that sent chills throughout his whole body. "More than you probably would've thought you deserved. But the truth is you deserve more than any of us. The universe owes you a debt it can never repay. Wherever you are...I just hope you're at peace...And that I'll keep on fighting for as long as I can. Because I know its what you would've wanted…"

The more he spoke, the more it felt like his words were becoming lodged in his throat. It got to the point he had to pause to collect himself. His disciplinary training as a captain kept him together to the point he avoided sobbing. But the cracks in his composure began to show as the tears dripped off his jaw. He breathed deep and released a shaky breath.

"There's more I want to tell you...More I should've told you while you were still here. It's become my biggest regret. One I'll have to live with...Until we see each other again." For a moment Steve felt the void in his chest grow even steeper the further he moved into delicate territory. The shortness of breath he was experiencing could've been explained as a mere overwhelming of emotions that he'd kept bottled for so long. But in truth, he knew it was because he was wrestling with his greater instinct to soldier-up and stow away such a compromising notion that made him feel like the small little guy too who was too nervous to speak to women.

The ache in his heart needed relief and the only way of doing that was to unburden the revelation he'd kept hidden for so long. Shedding a tear, Steve released a deep breath. "...I loved you, Natasha. I always did...I always will." He sniffed. "I guess it just took me too long to realize that living in the past was pushing me further away from having a future I wanted with you. Peggy Carter might have been my dream girl...but you were my best girl."

The imploding resonance of grievous-unendurable heartache grew into beckoning volumes that agonizingly intensified against a half-wake deadening that rapidly shunted an eruptive throb. Mistily, with the dregs of stowed reverence, Steve's teary azure irises blurred out the silvery cast of moonlight, harboring onto visceral desperation rigged through his veins, everything felt utterly defective against stemmed regret that he condemningly allowed to grapple him down. It hurt to breathe-to force himself to trudge onto a victory road without her. Like several ex-G.I's, the warranty of embracing the homefront again was a naive-reckless illusion; after returning from the battlefield, nothing was left to claim: not even a dance.

He wanted questions answered on the snowy crags of Vormir-if there was a grip of chance for Doctor Steven Strange to breach the celestial dimension and reserve those irretrievable 'five seconds' in the quantum realm with the archaic energy of the Time Stone. Maybe the interminable cost of getting her back was unforgivingly stacked up at high price; if he engaged another time heist mission, he would lose a good friend close to the heart by the bargaining extension of the soul-driven penance on the fringe of a cosmic elysian: blood was always payment. Fostering onto a razor-thinned visage of hope wasn't enough. He wouldn't let her become a phantom memory of guilt that he stowed in his threadbare sketchbooks. "You gotta shake it off, Rogers..."

Against the forested contrasts of near-darkness, with balletic-swanlike grace in her advancing prowess, a visceral breach of chaste feminine allure that enticingly became a sensuous-elemental force; a vixenish charade of weaponized to atomize a heartbeat-the sirenic arsenal of combative fusion-a Siberian cadence incarnate ardently echoing a wanton play of intimate challenge.

A cast of moonlight exposed the delicate suppleness of her vibrant pearlescent features that were hauntingly shadowed by the hooded Gothicesque cloak draped over the curvaceous of her svelte exquisite-honed body; disheveled length of her silken ombrécopper-platinum blonde tresses became distractingly evident as she paced closer to his adamant-isolated proximity with a ghosting semblance of tactical ease on casual accord. "I'm not surprised to find you like this, Rogers," A jaunty quip, cannily rasped with a huskier pitch, banteringly, watching as etched lines belied the plusher arch of his sensuous chiseled lips, raptly setting into a firmer grimace."You're really terrible at starting a new life..."

The chill Steve felt travel up his spine nearly had him shaking in his shoes as that familiar voice suddenly spoke to him. Could it be? No...it couldn't. He couldn't calm the racing of his heartbeat nor find it within himself to move in the seconds that followed. He could recall only one time he had become frozen in shock and that was the day he had discovered Bucky was alive and then known as the infamous Winter Soldier. Like on that day, Steve felt a combination of disbelief and dangerous hope. Slowly he turned to look towards the small pond at the edge of the compound where an ethereal cast of moonlight bathed the scenery with an incandescent glow.

What he saw was a lithe hooded shape walking towards him. The longer he stared with waking trepidation, it appeared more like she was gliding on the wind. She possessed the grace of a balletic swan. It was familiar and enchanting. His hope began to grow and so did his apprehension. "Nat?" He called when she was only a few feet in front of him. The memory of her the last time he saw her was so fresh he immediately recognized her signature Black Widow attire beneath the cloak and the stylish long braided ponytail that was a blend of coppery red with flecks of blonde at the bottom.

Her face, angelic and beautiful as he remembered. The shimmer of life reflecting off her teal eyes caused him to freeze in a state of awe and crumbling emotion. This couldn't be real. He had to have been dreaming. When he saw her nod to his call, Steve couldn't control his emotional uplift. He took two quick steps forward and embraced her close into a warm hug. "How is this possible?" He asked trying to keep his composure when he felt like breaking down into sobs.

For a compromised breach in that breath-stealing moment, nonplused shock impassively etched over the smooth broader planes of his hawkishly-set boyish features; traitorous anticipation carnally thrummed in her veins; she detected a viscerous agony deep-rooted in phantom volumes crescendoing in his heartbeat when she gazed into the banking penetrative embers of his oceanic azure irises rawly bleared against fevered wetness that dampened the fringe of his lashes.

His ironclad and unshakeable resistance that made his valorous battle-ready spirit legendary against titanic strife and barbarous carnage were irrevocably cleaved apart. Thanos had shaken him down when the celestial energy of the Infinity Gaunlet had reaped the unforgiving defecation of mortality over Wakanda's jungled battlegrounds, eradicating his teammates-Bucky into heaps of sifted atoms-erased from his reigning symphony of cosmic tyranny.

Five laters later, Steve couldn't dodge another fist-hammering blow to heart when Clint Barton returned from the quantum time bridge without Natasha ever-present at his side. Now, a splinter of hope was gleamingly alight in his vigilant aqueous depths in that suffusive wake of an addictive revelation—the intimate rush of their beckoning heat grew into a decadent-earthen fragrancy of minty vetiver and ambrosian cherry explosively detonating the urgent proximity of their passion-driven arousal. Feeling the bulkier-wide solidity of his tauten chest flex rigidly against the cushioning swells of her neoprene-clad breasts was the starving response of mortal vassalage that she unreservedly craved to slake."Nothing lasts forever up there... it's just harder to get back when you finally wake up on the edge ..." she murmured raspily, the silkier lushness of her quirking lips grazed fervidly over his wetted cheek in sensuous ministrations of intimate precision of ardent-incarnate heat. "It's like a fallback from eternity..."

Steve hung onto her every word as if they were something as precious as a long lost treasure. His thoughts painted a dire and grisly image of what she was describing on Vormir. Clint never went into much detail about the dark realm that served as the final resting place for his best friend. No one blamed him, nor did they press. Steve was a man who grew up believing that a divine power guided their lives and listened to their prayers in their moments of despair. Miracles were something to be mocked and seen as fairy tales in this day and age. But he never stopped believing that such things were possible, even if they occurred in the smallest measure.

But this...this was something beyond expectations. It felt too good to be true…

As he slowly withdrew from the hug, he didn't relinquish their proximity. He kept his hands on her small of her back; afraid that if he let her go she would vanish on the wind just as quickly as she had arrived. He searched her eyes and was drawn by breathtaking allure of their depth and emotion. It was tempered, guarded. "I missed you, Nat…I thought I'd never seen you again." he found himself saying with a pained swallow. "But Clint said there was no coming back from that. He said there was a Stone Keeper there that mentioned it." Slowly he guided her to sit down beside him on a bench. She kept her hood up as she stared into deep space. "Nat?"

A viperous ascension of deception had pulsed a birthing communion of rabid vengeance, predatorily her grayish-teal irises glinted with a tactile demand of ignitable ecstasy-he was carelessly disarmed and separated from his best friend-Bucky. With delicate ease, she lowered down beside him, shiveringly gliding her leather-sheathed palm over his roughened knuckles with answering-ephemeral- a contrast of feminine reverence-enough to increasingly distract his questioning resolve. "Let's just live in the moment, Rogers..." she imploringly rasped, watching his broader jaw evidently set into a reluctant clench-he wanted a harboring reality to believe in again. She had to play down the memory card- trusting variances of their grounded-tactical partnership. "Don't you trust me, Steve..." she breathily urged, waiting for him to breathlessly engage the amorous cadence of mirrored fusion.

It was a question that puzzled him in a moment in what should have remained joyous after months of unrelenting grief. He furrowed his brow and looked at her intensely. "Of course I do, Natasha. Its just...hard to believe you're back. We saved the universe because of what you did. But losing you...it hit all of us hard." He needed her to understand just how delicate things were. He could imagine how Clint and Bruce would handle her resurrection as it appeared. Steve took a moment to openly scrutinize her, wondering why something felt off about this whole thing. And then he realized, she was unblemished... almost as if she hadn't endured any kind of trauma recently...like falling to her death.

It was a superficial detail that shouldn't have bothered him. He tried to stow away the doubt creeping into him that things weren't amiss. That Natasha had come back to them-to him-by the will of some kind of divine intervention. "It hit me hard, Nat. If there was something I could've done-"

"I knew the extent price of getting that damn stone in our hands..." The apparitional force of expandable betrayal was counterpoised, as the possessive flexion of the cool, tentative delicateness of her lithe fingers controlled rigged tension, featherily delivering a stark tracery of faux promise that wouldn't detract the measured gravity of her strained confession. "I couldn't let Barton take the fall not when everything could be reversed..." She dragged her fingers in kneading tack over the taut-corded muscle of his leather sleeved forearm with seductive pressure that arrestingly coaxed his downcasted azure irises to stare at the voluminous curves of her readied lips. "I came back to care of unfinished business that I left here and maybe a dance..."

A flush of heat surged throughout Steve's body when he realized what she was saying. It carried with it a flood of memories that they shared over the years where they toed the line between friendship and something much more. Natasha had always been the teasing sort-flirtatious even in their more exhilarating moments in the field where they fought and danced in ballets of violence that made them work like a well-oiled machine. She had always been hesitant to explore something more serious between them, and he had been too consumed with the fight to seek her out. Could this be their second chance to explore what could've been?

The suspicion he felt had fled as he gazed into her eyes with a softness that spelled longing. "I always hoped you would ask." He said nothing else as he brought his hand across her cheek, testing the waters. She didn't recoil nor shy away from the contact but leaned into it. His heart hammered in his chest and he knew this was the right moment to confess his deepest feelings.

"Nat, I-" Before he could reveal the sum of his affections, he could feel her hands latching onto the hem of his shirt as she pulled him towards her, discarding any notion of tenderness and sentiment. She brushed her rosebud shaped lips onto his own and kissed him, firm and possessive, it shocked him into mind-screeching halt.

Sensing his reeling ease to break their evocative rhythm, grazingly with a painstaking drag of her teeth, raveningly Natasha caught the throbbing swell of his jutted underlip, awareness of his visceral surrender ratcheted against incendiary clashes of fusing heat as the bruising edge of the kiss-like a feverous rush of the burgeoning exchange that searingly branded over his bones, against shifting pressure of their rivalrous-mirrored sync that dizzyingly conceived naked-rapturous havoc of addictive ecstasy.

A throaty moan was hushedly deafened out into a breathless fever-pitch cadence of exquisite abandon, she urged him to chase the demanding tempo; captive in ardent surges of the heart- rampaging intensity fueled stoking deliverance, with no breath of hesitant release. Willingly against the sensuous reality of liquid-boneless heat; keeping his eyes closed, Steve felt his aching lips stretch flaringly wide under the angling crush of her deepening, lusher mouth in urgent-carnal- tenor beyond euphonic measure of restraint: nothing would be reined back.

Unhurriedly, answering his driving need, with virile tenderness invested in blinding motion, adoringly Steve rested the graven-edged curve of his flushed cheek against her jaw almost reverent as her head titled instinctively back and she ravenously supped feverish saltiness of his errant tears gliding over the plushier arch of kiss-swollen lips."Do you want this moment to last forever, Steve?" she murmured in a drag of breath, smokily through the headier depths of their sweltry recaptured kiss; feeling the corded heaviness of his muscled bulk growing revealingly tauter as her lithe palm splayed caressingly over the white material of his undershirt as skeins of verdigris energy incandescently fused into Dwarven sigils over resilient thickness of his enhanced flesh.

It was a blighting infection to curse-weaponize Midgardians into bestial extensions of Nidavellir; to chimerically become executing sentinels of the underworld (Hvergelmir). The celestial effusion railed graspingly through his veins with a soul-arresting unity of chastened throes-a vessel of astral resurrection to herald the rapine-merciless demoness of Asgard's merciless butchery-Hela. "Or just five seconds...?"

Breathlessness was one of the many things Steve was feeling. The taste of her kiss had left him reeling due to its tempting allure that made him want to fall deeper into their passion. But the calm part of his mind that wasn't fogged by emotion and desire, made him realize something about this was...off. He didn't know what he was expecting. The speed of things happening tonight was nearly overwhelming. Natasha was still alive, she wanted to take a dance with him after so many years of traipsing around the bush as friends.

Her words didn't sound like the Natasha he knew… It was then that a painful thought entered his mind and the hope he felt in his chest began to wilt as wariness took hold of him. He didn't push her away, a part of him still caught in the heat of the moment where he wanted to surrender to the latent feelings for her he'd kept bottled up for so long. For a moment he hesitated to indulge his doubt, but knew there was no turning back from it.

"Natasha…" He said to her with a serious voice, gazing into her unblinking teal eyes that looked oddly hypnotic. "What was the last thing you said to me before Vormir? Before…" He swallowed the lump in his throat, knowing her answer would prove or disprove his suspicions.

Reacting to his sonorous timbered drawl, Natasha felt the intimate gliding trace of his roughened fingers becoming tenser over the sleek length of her garbed forearm, capturing her pulse as echoes of infinite distrust tumultuously flashed guarded light of in the hawkish depth of his azure irises, as chiseled edges of his broad jaw set reservedly evident to patent tension warningly clashing against her revamped seductive beckoning like a careening blade-he saw underneath the fracturing charade. Lifting the delicate litheness of her palm up to his flushed cheek with an ardent-guileful contrast of tempered reverence; Natasha whispered in a husky undertone, devious rawness fringed breathy in her jaunty challenge, as hard, angular planes of his features jutted out furrily against morphic-bestial strain- a wolven extension of cosmic divergence. "Is that an honest question, Rogers, or are you just uncomfortable with this play of affection?"

It was an evasive tactic, Steve knew. A play on words to distract someone from their doubts in a delicate moment where something was being concealed. Something Natasha had once taught him. Rather than fall further into this spell of passion that so nearly had him consumed by latent feelings, Steve put his hands on her arms and gently forced her away from him. The look in his eyes was hard with suspicion. "I think you know me well enough to know what makes me uncomfortable...if you were the real Natasha." Saying those words hurt more than a punch to the head from Thanos. The unblinking accusation in his eyes threatened to spill angry tears in this moment of creeping realization.

"Now I'm gonna ask you one more time…" He said with a deep foreboding voice, full of authority as he rose up to his full height. "If you're really Natasha. Tell me what was the last thing you said to me!" His muscles coiled with increasing hostility as he watched her calm demeanor begin to shift into something much more nefarious.

A definite implosion of soldiery valiance clashed against her infectious wake; chimerical heat thievingly gleamed in her steel-gray irises that ravingly belied a incarnate promise of soul-cleaving vengeance that bled into a sardonic curve quirking over the voluminous swell of her lip, as she taunted, raspily. "You were always one step ahead on the battlefield, carousing as a pathetic warrior of mortal liberty, you and Sergent James Barnes ruined my fated desires of reigning over Midgard, preying on HYDRA ranks like a wolf, so I decided to come back here and chasten you into a brutal reality of my will, Captain..."

His worst fear of this situation was confirmed in a manner that left Steve both puzzled and furious. The spill of tears that flowed down his cheeks were quickly wiped away the moment he realized he was undoubtedly facing down a shape-shifting imposter that appeared familiar with him. His eyebrows furrowed into a glare of suspicion. "Who are you really? What do you have to do with me and Bucky?" He demanded. Not-Natasha rose to her feet and faced him down with a haughty malicious gaze. It was a dreadfully wrong thing to be seen on a face he recognized as a deceased friend he cared deeply about. The imposter didn't keep him waiting much longer as she fully discarded the pretense she used to lure him into a thrall of distraction, and she became engulfed in a coat of green magic. It was ominous and chilling. The dread Steve felt in his stomach increased ten-fold when Natasha was no longer standing in front of him but instead a dreadfully familiar blonde that was the cause of many horrors he'd witnessed during the Howling Commandos incursion into Amsterdam. "Doctor Annette Ziegler?"

Feigning rapt disgust at the dumbfounded mention of a utilized charade of a German architect of the Iron Cross science division ushered by Doctor Armin Zola's metastatic tantamount of surgically amputated out mortal vitality with morbific-inventive conjury of obsessively jabbing shunts of mutative serum-devolving young allied soldiers-the POW hostages in dormant visages of bloated-out creatures that were torturously fattened to become executed in sanguineous HYDRA ranks. "That mortal charade was an extension of my deception, I am called, Amora, dear Captain ..." The Asgardian sorcerous-Enchantress- bluntly fumed with envenomed malevolence fringing in her ceremonious tone. "I became rather bored with HYDRA's blighted appetite for tapping veins of immortality, such craven ways as expected when cosmic deliverance falls into their ill hands..."

In fluid unison of her arcing hands, serpentinely, Amora threaded her lithe fingers over tousled platinum-blonde whorls, conjuring up jade-spiked headgear that ethereally appeared on the delicate contours of her temples; the unmistakable Nordic sigil of -Yggdrasill- the cosmic tree celestial-nine gateways was etched in the center: viridian skeins became ghoulishly infused in the sleek-ashen pearlescence of her flesh, merging into veined gauntlets of red aster that sheathed over her wrists like intricate spider-webbing. The fine-bone curves of her exquisite seraphic features were darkly poised in a vitriolic cast of telltale wickedness, as her steel-gray irises grew steelily viperous with soul-lancing intensity.

"Such calamitous devices to wield an extension of Asgardian power..." Amora whispered, seethingly, mirroring the iced azureous depths of his slitting irises."Armin Zola would have ushered your precious Bucky Barnes into dormant oblivion of the cattle stocks if you haven't obstructed his conquest..."

Steve felt little surprise that another of his enemies from the past returned to haunt him in the present day. But the fact that the sadistic Doctor Ziegler was in fact secretly an Asgardian sorceress the whole time made him feel uneasy. It also explained how she was still alive and looking no older than the last time he'd seen her. After he and the Commandos had blown up her lab, they were certain she had died in the blast when she refused to be taken captive. The experiments she was performing for Hydra, using innocent civilians as test subjects to create hybrid monstrosities...All the horrors he had shuttered away from the war returned with full force. It also made him realize why she had targeted him...and Bucky.

"So that's what this is all about? Bucky and I blew away your hideous lab, so you come back and wear the face of my best friend to seduce me?" He couldn't keep the abject outrage from his voice. He knew it was naive to think an enemy of his wouldn't resort to such a tactic to get back at him, but it still filled with righteous fury that made him wish he'd brought his shield out here. "You insult her memory. Whatever it is you think you're doing here, its not gonna work."

Raveningly with a breathless snarl, Amora's imposing valence of her efficacious poise became searingly infective against his virile resiliency that clashingly resonated under heavy-corded bands of tauter planes sculpting his widened chest-the invincible-warring strength that would inexorably meld into layers of canine fur-a morphic fusion was being ushered by cacophonous variances of anarchic mantra, cuttingly shunting through his veins with ferocious-animalistic heat grippingly conceived by the predatory divergence-rebirth of her mutative onslaught.

"You valorous fool, I did not come here to revel with your departed lover's face..." Amora gritted lashingly in sadistic pitch, and viciously gestured a hand up with ghoulish ease as demonical vehemence possessively arrowed within her lithe fingers like an incendiary pulse of suffusive phosphorus white of a vaporous nova explosively flaring against her opened palm; sulfuric miasma reekingly wafted against the October gales.

Piercingly driving the unblinking depth of his crystalline azure irises glacially at the virescent-astral tendrils; with tactical-honed vigilance, Steve harnessed gladiatorial evades of his athletic-combative fluidity, tensely dragging his boot with registered traction in adrenalized fruition: he wasn't backing down. "I need a mortal vessel to deliver an eldritch reckoning of incarnate vengeance, and unfortunately dear Captain, your prevalent humanity will be stripped into feral throes once the moonlight beckons you to howl a bestial cadence of surrender..."

Knowing a hostile situation when he saw one. Steve's natural instinct kicked in as his hand reached his communicator in his ear. "Avengers, I got a breach in the northern quadrant of the compou-" A merciless blast of Asgardian magic hit him square across the chest before he could finish his transmission, sending Steve flying across the lawn where he lay splayed on his back. The rapid beating of his pulse could be heard above his strangled groan of pain. He felt as if his skin had been thrown across a bed of hot coals that were causing his flesh to burn and sting. The absence of his shield made him vulnerable and he was at the mercy of a vengeful driven Enchantress who approached him with a swagger in her steps.

"What's the matter, Captain, not enough bite?" Tauntingly with vampiric ease, Amora crouched down a breadth to indulgently gaze at the atrophied First Avenger; forcefully bracing his thrashing mass onto his leather-sleeved elbows with bruising pressure on rigid accord edged in his heavy, well-defined muscles shifting with burgeoning tenor, as the bulked solidity of his shoulders arched with jackknifing momentum off the ground against the spasmatic onslaught that he couldn't ride out.

Blearily against a nauseous rush, choking off a voiceless whimper; Steve felt a contractive throb of skull-cleaving flexion of his lengthening jawbone in a morphic—outstretched strain that was excruciatingly notching as the curves of his swelling ears grew bushily pointer under disheveled blonde tresses; his twined incisors were rapidly jutting out with canine length over his bloodied underlip. Snarlingly in heaving pants, he railed out deep-throated volumes of predatory assession- a menacing resonance of clamorous aggression. Dementedly, Amora tilted her chin up with an unhinged jerk, she lowered her palms at her curvaceous side, relishing in the converging-enslaved thralls of his wolven infancy. "Feel the celestial essence of fallen Asgard become your unremitting salvation..."

It was at that moment, Steve realized what she was planning to do to him. Memories of her cruel experiments weren't acts of twisted science but rather of dark magic. It was a lethal tool she used like a human would use a gun. Her aim was directed solely towards him and the words she spoke were the act of her pulling the trigger. The moment the last syllable rolled off her tongue, Steve felt dread and pain unlike anything he'd ever felt pour into his body. It wasn't the white-hot one associated with injury or death. This was something evil and unnatural entering him and twisting him from the inside out. The glow of her magic made him feel as if he were being dumped into a world of blinding green light that seared every natural thought and instinct within his body. The deafening roar in his ears caused him to shudder and wish he could hold his ears. His limbs were paralyzed as if something had siphoned off every bit of energy inside of his body and was now using it against him.

Amora's beautiful yet cruel face hovered above him, hands splayed out as her magic began its work of undoing his humanly body from surface to bone. The sight of the full-moon high above robbed his focus until he could only gaze at it as if he were being compelled. It wasn't until he felt the snap of his bones that he realized the roaring he heard in his ears was, in fact, his own humanly cries that were soon replaced by the howling of a creature of the night.

Within the backlit lounge, the rave-up assonance of partying had blaringly amplified in symphonious volume, keeping his appreciative distance in the lounge area that had been reconstructed into an ultra-modern bar with electric neon contrasting against a row of matte black leather stools, Bucky narrowingly downcasted a unwavering glance of his steel-aquamarine irises at a untouched platter of stacked peanut butter sandwiches that Wanda amply had prepared in honor of their fallen teammate-friend Natalia.

Gripping a chilled bottle of vodka with deft ease of his bionic clutch, he owed it to Steve to keep that cherishing memory of Tasha close to the vest-their dynamical variants of sniping combat were harmonically elemental: Natalia was the cunning foxy vixen who daringly cross the Siberian wolf's kill site of weaponized supremacy in the rivalrous cadency of their combative dynamic.

The sterilized ranks of Red Room Academy-the Widow markers- were compromised with the defective insurgence—verminous echoes of humanity that Natalia had rebelliously ignited, performing balletic graces of traitorous defiance. She was the black swan of stage light-an elite operative of seduction. 'My nikogda ne lomayemsya ...(We never break)' Sometimes off the grid extraction -ghost recon missions like in Odessa when Natalia had brazenly hot-wired of HYDRA mountain-terrain vehicle with a targeted nuclear engineer tampered with his battle-tested limits of restraint—comradely mercy in triggered crosshairs. He never delivered an executing kill-shot at her.

'Ty ne mozhesh' bezhat' vechno, malen'kiy pauk...(You can't run forever, little spider)'

He regrets that he never found the time to sit down with her and apologize for their many near-death encounters over the years that ended with him putting a bullet through her. He regrets he never apologized to Stark for taking away his parents, even if he knew to expect a repulsor beam through his heart rather than forgiveness. Too many crimes he didn't willfully commit but Bucky still felt the weight of their guilt.

Suddenly feeling somber, he took a swig of the margarita that Scott had prepared for him and let the soft punch of alcohol momentarily dull his nerves. It lasted too brief before his super-enhanced metabolism washed it out of his system and he was once again feeling stone-cold sober. His blue eyes wandered and took in the homely lounge area where many new friends and acquaintances were getting into the Halloween spirit.

Over by the well-stocked bar stood an enthusiastic Scott Lang preparing another round of drinks while bopping to an upbeat rock-song from a band he'd come to identify as "Queen". Sitting on the bar stool was a very imbibed but also equally exuberant Avenger that till now Bucky would have never assumed to be the Mighty Thor- the Norse god of thunder. Bucky never judged people based off their appearances but he had never imagined the famed Asgardian powerhouse to be so...jolly.

Having heard what the Asgardian had been through over the past few years, Bucky considered this a good sign of recovery after living through so much woe and loss that would've destroyed most people. Speaking of recovery, his stare now shifted over to the nearby couch close to him where he saw a relatively warm sight that put a smile on his face. '

Wanda sat at the back of the couch, wearing shorts and a tee with her hair tied into a ponytail. She seemed to be animatedly engaged with her phone as her fingers rapidly typed away a storm of text messages, ignoring the Halloween movie playing on the gigantic tv. Bucky knew the young Sokovian woman better after having spent time with her after Germany...and the Snap.

Needless to say, to see this kind of life being breathed back into her set him at ease in a way a big brother felt about their little sister coming out of depression. He knew a certain Sorcerer Supreme was to thank for this big turn around. "You know back in my day, when a girl smiled like that, it meant there was one lucky guy not far behind. I take it your friend, the wizard, will be stopping by soon?" He asked her with playful ease watching as a soft blush colored her cheeks.

Registering the suave timbre of his gravelly drawl croakily underlying nonchalant-Brooklyn- charm, in silent vigil, against warring attentiveness, Wanda quickly swiped the lock screen of her mobile phone to power-off; under silken auburn-burgundy tresses that stylishly draped over the delicate fineness of her shoulders; penetratingly her grayish-hazel irises roved at the lounge's bar, amethyst neon gleamed over Bucky's thatch of wolfish chestnut, his shapely lips broaden with a smirky quirk as he disarmingly gave her a sidelong glance, the crows-feet bracketing his temples evidently crinkled with brotherly sweetness alight that she wouldn't discard.

"We're nothing more than friends, Bucky..." she returned wistfully in raspy pitch, trying not to dredge up staved-patent heartbreak that she guardingly barricaded. Vision was more than an evolving synthetic android of vibranium that had been conceived by the plaguing extension of Ultron's binary coding nexus-he functioned with a human spirit-a heartbeat- until that intergalactic Mad Titian's crushing monstrous hand savagely extracted the Mind Stone out of his head, leaving only a gun-metal alloy husk on Wakanda's battleground.

After spending a few months at Clint Barton's farm, Wanda amply welcomed solitary peace, despite the immeasurable-constant heartache stowed to her love-Vision that she couldn't banish. Returning to Manhattan, Wanda tested grounds of relevance- sentiment, embracingly rediscovering her faith in the benevolence of humanity that once viewed her as a destructive mutated spawn of HYDRA; and how connective-kinetic- devices of Eldritch incantations could be wielded out of the chaotic Multiverse planes. It was like breathlessly composing an intimate symphonic capriccio of sorcerous energy with the mystical, snarky virtuoso-Steven Strange. He was preparing her to become a sentry of the astral gateway.

Feigning vulnerable tenderness suffusing the elfin contours of her waifish features, sheepishly, Wanda drew out a hitching breath, lowering his glass, Bucky attentively quirked up an eyebrow against dismal thinness of her accented voice."Doctor Strange helps me distract myself from what I feel every day when I know that Vis isn't coming back..."

Bucky nodded feeling the somber emotions coming from her that reminded him that "The Blip" didn't bring everyone back who suffered at the hands of Thanos. Though he didn't know the android Avenger, and his only encounter with him having been hostile, Bucky knew what Vision meant to the others, especially Wanda. "I didn't know Vision as well as you and the other Avengers, but from what I've heard, he cared about you a great deal, Wanda." He said with a compassionate look.

"And he probably would've come up with some logical explanation about why its good for you to be trying to move on." Bucky watched as Wanda listened to him intently, hanging onto his every word though he could see the ache in her eyes. "This Stephen Strange seems like a great guy. All I'm saying is, don't be afraid to look beyond friendship."

"You mean that you weren't afraid to look into Lina's eyes and tell her what you feel?" she asked knowingly, downcasting her gaze at her leather-sheathed hand, in the moment of breaching her guarded resolve, a tectonic pulse of astral crimson surged burningly through her veins- arcs of ignitable energy that was a chimeral divergence of sorcerous fusion ghosting twistily over her poised fingers as she incandescently melded vaporous skeins of morphic flares into an emotive silhouette of a feline over the bar top, a breadth from his robotic hand. "If I had a chance you like to embrace humanity again with someone who sees a heartbeat in stone, I wouldn't waste a moment, James..."

Bucky nodded appreciating the gravity of her statement. "Someone saw a heart beating inside a human terminator, fresh out of the ice. Nothing is impossible for people like us, Wanda. We just gotta know when to take that leap of faith and make a move." Inwardly, he hoped Steve would one day find the strength to move on after losing two women in his life before ever getting his chance to dance with them. Before Bucky could convey deeper words of sentiment and his experience with Wanda, they both hear FRIDAY chime in. "Attention Avengers: another guest as arrived at the foyer."

"Please tell me its the pizza man. My appetite can only handle so much candy in one night," Thor grumbled as he took a drink of something Scott finished preparing for him. Seconds later, the blonde's eyes widened and he downed the drink in one go, much to Scott's bafflement. "I like this drink. "A Bloody Mary", you called it, Friend Scott? The Lady Mary who invented this drink should be most proud." He sets the glass down in front of the pint-sized Avenger and grins. "Another!"

Bucky's attention shifts away from the scene at the bar and feels his blood-pressure rise when a familiar lavender perfume touches his senses, followed soon by the soft clicking of high-heeled boots entering the lounge. Wanda smirks at his comical expression frozen at the sight of one Maria Hill making her way towards them.

"Just routine check-in boys," The sternness of a feminine undertone of Agent Maria Hill edged distractingly within the backlit proximity of the crowded bar, the haloing strips of neon lighting delineated over the black kevlar of her tactical garb; she was a vigilant night hawk of global surveillance; resourcefully dexterous in stealth recon missions, and always 'riding shotgun' with ex-director Nick Fury. Her raven tinted brunette tresses were neatly fastened into a knotted chignon, not detracting the cool rigidness of her alabaster features that were hawkishly cut as she fluidly side-stepped over globs vodka-infused tomato juice messily shattered on the granite flooring. "Fury wants Cap on a jet to Berlin for hardware upgrades pronto..."

Her genuine presence was imperative within the Compound, briefing Steve with omega-level threats detected on the orbiting grid of Stark Industries satellite network, every contingency was operative with the cyber utility of AI tactical defensive system (E.D.I.T.H.) that was granted binary access to the Queen's web-slinger Peter Parker. Rebuilding an underground SHIELD base in downtown Berlin was a vital countermeasure that Agent Everette Ross had set into high gauge after the defection of the Accords. With a resurrected cabal of HYDRA spawning infectious extensions, the Avengers were issued the green-light protocol. Her reason for engaging a ceremonious audience with them was a faux charade of deception.

Keeping her distance grounded from the bar, her smoky-cerulean irises caught Bucky revealingly stiffening with leashed tension shadowily brandished over his stubbled-graven planes as the heaviness of his jaw tautly clenched, evident to whirring robotic sync of his cybernetic hand that intimidatingly flexed on defensive accord—he saw through her invidious semblance of deceptive contrast. "This is a high priority order, Barnes..." Maria addressed, tonelessly. "Stark left Cap an encrypted file that can't be discarded..."

"Cap is in no shape to be flying back into the field. Have you seen him, Hill? Has Fury?!" Bucky demanded heatedly. Wanda, Thor, and Scott looked at him, sensing his frustration and the tension that oozed off of him. He stares down Fury's henchwoman and shrugs disappointedly. Too many people thought of Cap as just as gun to aim and shoot back in the day. It was beginning to look like not much had changed. "If you put him back out there, you're just giving him another distraction to help stow away all the pain he hasn't dealt with yet. Sooner or later he has to face it. The longer he doesn't, its gonna take a toll." Bucky wouldn't admit it to anyone else, but he was worried about Steve's inability to find a life for himself away from the fight. If the fight was all he had, it would drive him over the edge eventually.

The intrusive decadence of her unslaked-vitriolic thirst of betrayingly fractured against her stoic reserve; with a subtle arch of her eyebrow, Maria's pale-rose lips half-quirked into a stretching grin as she leveled the steeliness of her unwavering gaze at him. Indulging on bloatedly divesting the hunky ruggedness of his boyish features into a wretched vessel of indolent -craven-pudginess was raveningly clamoring her stalled intent of ushering Hela's condemned spirit out of the bedrocks of Helheim. "Before you whip this at Fury, Barnes," she rebuffed in firmer pitch, bluntly. "You should know that the encrypted file is a contingency protocol that Stark designed if loose ends weren't cut on Vomir..."

That name inspired only dread in the stomachs of all those present. The place that Natasha Romanov paid the ultimate price so that the Avengers could succeed. Her final resting place. Thor suddenly appeared like he hit rock bottom along with Scott-both men instinctively reaching for another drink. Wanda's once cheerful look suddenly became a mosaic of remorseful expressions. Bucky was just glad Steve wasn't in here to be listening to his. His jaw tightened and he took a menacing step towards Hill.

"That's a road Steve doesn't need to go down. Especially now. You want to discuss contingencies? Tell Fury to ask his friend Danvers." Bucky said with a dismissive edge to his once cool tone. He didn't give it any thought as to why Hill's poker face showed the faintest hint of dark amusement nor why she didn't put up more a protest as he turned to take his leave. "It was good seeing you Hill. Give Fury my regards." Bucky turned and marched his way out of the lobby, determined more than anything to cool off. He might stop by the gym for a few minutes to work off some steam.

The stoking ferocity of his bridled aggression impelled in Bucky's storming momentum as he begrudgingly tried his damndest not to glance over his tensing shoulder—his glacial aquamarine irises searingly zeroed on her indifferent stance while he vanished into the upper level that would direct him to the training room; unaware that Hill uttered under breath, vilely."Enjoy wielding your mortal strength while you still can, James Barnes..." Shifting her waspish gaze at a bowl of overpriced chocolate bars displayed on the bartop, as she nauseatingly listened to the hearty resonance of the blubbered-gut Asgardian royal's jovial chuckle, Hill curved her lips into a poised sneer, driving the conniving intensity of her gray-cerulean irises snidely at Thor Odinson's hoggish-revolting stash. "Once you revel in a bite, all of you foolish Misgardians will become worthless hostages of my will incarnate ..."

Her magic poured permeated the building like an invisible pestilence ready ravage everyone in its way; seeping into the very molecules of the sugary treats the humans...and Asgardians indulged in by handfuls.

If a certain thunderer weren't so intoxicated by an alluring mixture of alcohol and candy, he would have felt the magical rift in the very close proximity. Instead, Thor finished his cup and frowned at the growling in his stomach. By the Norns, where was that pizza man? He was beginning to consider taking Stormbreaker and flying to the parlor itself to pick up their dinner. Should the parlor face an electrical outage in his current mood, he would not be held to blame. Grumpily, Thor reached towards the candy bowl and picked up a snickers bar. He bit into the chocolate covered peanuts with a sour look. On the couch, Wanda lazily shoved a caramel bite into her mouth while reading from her phone.

Both Avengers grimaced at the bitter aftertaste the candy left, oblivious to the wicked smile forming across Hill's lips as she made her way out of the foyer. "Happy Halloween, Avengers." It wasn't until minutes later that a disgruntled Thor felt a painful pull against his skull as his ears began extending. Wanda suddenly doubled over and groaned. Scott meanwhile had become too imbibed from so many cocktails that he was snoring softly on the bartop.

Within a darkened spacious quarter of the Avenger's Compound, as blissful drowsiness overrode her, Selina intimidatingly registered the bulked heftiness of graven corded muscle-the virile contrast of intimate heat bodily suffusing a feverish onslaught through her veins, Selina clashingly felt the robotic shifting of his alloy bionic arm heavily spooning over the suppleness of her velvet sheathed curves in reverent tenor of naked accord; mechanized coolness of his bracketing palm featherily traced a distractive-hypnotic pressure, delivering a sensuous voltage over the sleekness of her pearlescent flesh.

In that ardent -mirrored stillness of being cushioned by gladiator-honed solidity that melded against her, a vixenish quirk ghosted kittenishly over her pillowy-full lips as a throated resonance of masculine snoring deafened against her ear, the unkempt length of his chestnut tresses wolfishly caressed a ticklish glide over her freckled shoulder-beckoning a novel relevance of need flaringly become orchestral in a riotous volume of their heartbeats, as she blindingly dragged her lithe hand from underneath the curved pillow in alarming reaction to nauseous dampness infused with chocolatey peanut butter reekingly wafting over the matted ravel of sheets. "Urgh-" she moaned in a threaded breath, raspily, scrunching her nose against the intrusive stench. "Buck...Don't tell me you were midnight snacking on Thor's free grabs again..."

A soft resonating chuckle crawled up her skin that left her feeling flushed with heat. "Its Halloween, kitten. Can't hold that against me." Bucky playfully ran his hands up her side, watching as she nearly recoiled on contact and casting him an unamused look. Right. She's ticklish, and kittens don't like to be tickled. His mood may have been somber only a half-hour ago after his chat with Steve, and then frustrated after chewing out Hill. But once he caught whiff of that blood-rushing scent of lavender coming from his room and he felt as if the weight of the world had been relieved from his shoulders.

And now he here found her, still fully dressed wearing tight jeans, black heeled boots and a leather jacket. Her travel bags were left near the wall. She had just gotten in if he were guessing. One look at his bright smiling features, accentuated by the crow-feet at his temples, was enough to show how much her being here meant to him.

"Didn't think you'd be back here in time. Everything go alright in Venice?" He asked, knowing she had been chasing some valuable excavated find before it wound up on the black market.

"The job would have been more thrilling if you came, handsome, but I did leave on an explosive note..." she rasped, purringly, evident to a devious glint naughtily melding in her coffee irises half-smudged with kohl mascara that made her appear untouchable like an Italianesque Botticelli siren against the shadowy contrast of their room; a galvanic pulse-careening them into addictive drags of evocative tension. The urgent heat of their aligning bodies was bakingly surging a denotive rush of incendiary possession as her lithe finger shiveringly traced a phantom brush of chaste—feminine demand over the dimpled cleft of his stubbled chin; bracing muscled flesh of his forearm into the cave-in softness of the mattress, quirkily, Bucky answered her wanton invitation as he edged his shapely-wide lips in a breathless thrust over the exquisite curve of her jaw in unhinged abandon. "Just a few tankers docked in the wrong place for a matchstick throw..."

"There's always a next time," Bucky murmured, planting a soft kiss against her collarbone while his skilled hands began to slowly peel off her jacket. "And believe me, I don't plan on staying behind. I really missed you." The dramatic onslaught of this night had filled him put him on-edge and right now there was nothing he wanted more than to immerse himself in the passion of this unexpected reunion. For weeks he'd worried about Selina, having wished he could've gone with her to chase her next thrill. But he had opted to stay for his best-friend who needed him. But now she was back.

And as his lips began a tentative exploration of her neck up to her jaw, he never felt more invigorated-he felt alive. Meeting her eyes, she smiled into them again, playful and coy but with obvious desire as he hand traced her cheek and his thumb brushed her lips. "You can't imagine how much."

"Well don't keep me guessing, Barnes..." she coaxed, huskily, as the cool pressure of his bionic-vibrainum fingers metallically gentled in kneaded sync, as his palm slowly cradled over the delicate edge of her jaw with reined heat-a starving accord that became mirrored in beckoning pulse of invested reverence over the decadent plushness of her silkier underlip—a tempered caress of his gliding thumb stealingly graced feathery chasteness that enticingly melded a sensual reckoning of amorous-liquid fusion."Careful or I might feel guilty..."

Under the flit of her lashes, as his chestnut tresses shaggily ghosted her flushed cheeks, Selina caught the smokiness of his grayish-aquamarine irises mesmerically gleam as shadowy heat eclipsed over the hard-angles of his roguishly chiseled features as the gaping stretch of his bruising lips headily throbbed cherishing precision of wet heat delivering an errant sheen in the wake of breathless need-the silvery light of his heavy-lidded gaze smolderingly razored with electrifying heat, alight with echoes of visceral urgency."S'just feel me, darlin'..." The murmurous timbre of his Brooklyn drawl scorchingly trapped between the fine silkiness of her alabaster skin. It was a nameless craving that wouldn't quench, holding them mindlessly captive as the desirous thrall of reality began to kickstart their passion-driven ignition.

In a blinding thrust of his bristled jaw of bestial variance, he branded an open-mouth kiss hungrily on her shoulder, against rampant demand that propelled them onto the ignitable fringe of glorious-painstaking ecstasy. Sinking bonelessly into the mattress, through crushing pressure of virile ferocity, devouringly stretching her recaptured mouth wide, Selina felt his coaxing readiness of urgent challenge as she lithely twined her arms over the bunching corded planes of his muscled back, anchoring herself in a succession of coupling moans that were intensifying as they edged deeper into aphrodisiac mania of soul-devasting havoc—a crescendoing duel of abandoned supremacy of their untamed odyssey.

There was no more room for words as they fell into a crescendo of heady passion. Bucky's mind had reverted to its primal instincts that demanded attention. His lips trailed a wet path up her neck until finally, he captured her full wide lips. Hot, empowering, energetic. There was no chasteness involved here as their lips became locked in a firm but amorous dance. The taste of mint and strawberries slipped past his lips and onto his tongue. Bucky felt burning heat encompass him as his hands cupped Selina's face and coaxed her in, deepening their flavorful interlock that was punctuated with deep breaths and noises of pleasure. He could feel her meeting his pace, her pale white digits raking through his hair with one hand slipping into the collar of his shirt. They briefly parted for breath, their intense gazes locked and spelling more than words could. Selina ditched her jacket and Bucky began to make short work of his shirt.

They needed each other. But what neither could have anticipated nor hear was chaotic noises coming from the lobby of the compound. Bucky felt a tingle of unease and discomfort move through him, even as their kissing resumed.

Shatteringly against the rushing tempest of irresistible white-heat that arced through her in a contractive intensity as she dizzily clung the surging-fevered pressure of his angeled lips with a crushing thrust -a rapturous command of stoking hotness; a blood rush careened them onto the intoxicating fringe of mind-wiping voltage that explosively ratcheted them into heart-thundering oblivion.

Each moaning cadence of stolen breath was roughly threaded as Bucky hungrily ravaged his kiss-bruised lips deeper into her plushier mouth as the arrowing glide of their noses crushed in mirrored—tempestuous accord. Lolling her head against the wedge of pillows under tousled wavelets of mahogany, achingly on her own violation, Selina widened her lips as he demandingly tugged with addictive—breathtaking rhythm—driving them into an eruptive release of intimate havoc.

With an incredulous flex of her drifting ministrations over the bracketed ridges that hunkily edged over tauter-defined curves -washboard V-ridges of his sculpted abdomen fringed by the black Armini of his unbuttoned shirt, Selina felt a heavier layer of jutting pudginess was ballooningly registered in clangorous fruition of banked alarm-a mutative tracery of globby flab saggingly fused over the virile litheness of his braced hipbones as he vertiginously arched his back on his cybertronic forearm against a knifing strain of his throbbing gums. Starkly in unwarranted reaction, with blank intensity deadened in her coffee irises, she watched Bucky's nose chubbily scrunched in a waggish rapt-twitch as chestnut skeins of fur morphically deforming his fleshed hand."J-James look at your hand..."

Bucky didn't understand what she meant until he got one long look at his hand and fell into a confused stupor. Whatever it was he was expecting, it wasn't the alarming sight of his hand becoming encompassed by patches of thick itchy fur. "What the hell is this?" He shook his hand repeatedly, thinking for a second he had some kind of furball stuck to him, but his range of motion felt restricted-heavy. He felt as if he were carrying layers of heavy clothes and his skin was sagging. His confusion grew to panic when he saw that the fur wasn't just covering his hand, but also spreading rapidly across his body-his fat body... "Selina, get back!" Bucky yelled as she reached out to touch him. He stumbled backwards, his mass causing him to lose traction and fall off the edge of the bed, pulling the sheets with him. The repugnant taste of spoiled chocolate traveling up his throat until he felt like vomiting it all up. The part of his mind that hadn't succumbed to hysteria was running through a list of possibilities about what he was experiencing. The only conclusion was magic. Something or someone was doing this to him!

"Lina...Arghh..." Gnashing his teeth against convulsive pressure of his lengthening incisors that disturbingly morphed protrusions of bucked curves that bone-splittingly intensified against jutting pulses of an infective-bestial extension as he sulkily dragged a pinching graze, treks of blood slicked over his stubbled chin.

Wrenching his reared head crushingly back in thrashing blur of his grungy wolfish tresses against the mattress; the knife-edge cut of his graven- thickening cheekbones flabbily melded into rubbery-plumpish chubbiness—a bulbous pudge expanding horrifyingly furrier. Grimacingly with dredged up resilence, his thrusting bionic clutch desperately gripped onto the drape of sheets in mechanized variance as his throated groans excruciatingly coupled against raw-edged panic as his bulkier mass exponentially dwarfed underneath the curtaining sheet.

"T-This can't be happenin'..." Bucky railed out, chokingly as the pukey rancidity of peanuts and chocolate became vaporous reek against quivery breaths, his sensuous-wide lips furrily hung agape on devolving accord-nothing could be warded off. "Grahh..." Onrushes of neasous heat were rackingly amplified in his veins as Selina's dark pupils owlishly widened, paralyzingly evident to a breathless gasp as the droopy length of his outstretched ears were became floppily swatched with patches of brunette fur: bunny ears.

It all happened so quickly, but it still felt like a long drawn out torture as if his body was being unmade from the inside out. His mass decreased giving him the feeling some unseen force was sucking the life out of his body. His skin was prickling with discomfort that never seemed to abate but grow stronger. He itched, he felt hot and trapped in the sheets he was wrapped that for some reason were twice as large as they were a few minutes ago. "W-What's goin' on?!" The more confused he became, the more his anxiety began to creep up to the point he was convinced he had to be dreaming all of this. His voice sounded high-pitched, almost chipmunk like. His movements were wild and imprecise as if his traction had been lost along with all feeling of his body.

When he finally tore through the sheets, he released a loud cry and inhaled as if he were suffocating. His attempt to jump away from his trappings sent him bouncing across the room where he landed with a crash against a night-stand. "Ow!" He yelled, having hit his...dewclaw, against the wood. The strange sight along with the realization that he was looking at his own foot trapped him in a thought-maze that made the room spin and his vision to blur. He could distinctly hear Selina calling out to him.

"J-James..." Shudderingly in her panicked utterance, Selina feigned jack-off desperation resonating through her veins; in an unwarrantable tenor, she reeled back against the draped wad of sheets with deadened momentum-a bone-racking shunt of penetrative numbness, propelling her back apparitional drift of resurrected-paralyzing heartache when the genocidal cosmic Titan snapped the Infinity Gauntlet on the forested grounds of Wakanda, the scything astral energy tectonically purged souls in a reaping wake of chimerical eternity; that apocalyptic reality had devastatingly stolen her sniper wolf-Bucky into a celestial realm—she wouldn't lose him again.

Tearily, harnessing controlled deftness of her lithe hand, she lifted up a discarded piece of torn denim while bracing herself with instinctive-visceral poise, Selina unblinkingly gazed at the doughy pudge of dark chestnut fur thrashingly wobbling in clumsy-tactless succession evident to a boyish cadence of throated squeak adorably emitted from the floppy-eared lop's tinier muzzle—she wouldn't abandon him, not when he was delectably precious to hold in her shielding embrace—a little furry cutie.

Bracing her palm in a heart-driving reaction to deter his frantic hopping, Selina tellingly felt the damp velvetiness of his pudgy form bodily collide against her wrist-he was nakedly captive in throes of banking-neasous distress with no avail. "Easy ..." she rasped in coaxing pitch, tentatively sweeping her thump over the droopy length of his flitting ear as the Brooklyn lop rapidly panted out spastic hitches of choked breath-she needed to pacify him down a contractive pulse fatally breached his tiny heart.

Suppressing back a terse breath against roisterous emotion, painstakingly Selina kneaded a chaste glide over his tensing back, as his glacial aquamarine irises smokily betrayed his impassive stubbornness."Hey, Cute boy..." The melodic snarkiness of her undertone gently anchored him back to her open-unwavering reach, as she innately recognized a deceptive aura sinisterly breaching within the Compound; Bucky was definitely targeted in vengeful crosshairs of serpentine—infectious conjury. She needed to get him out of the room. "You're snug with me, remember..."

Bucky would be the first to admit he was in a full-fledged panic the moment he realized what had just happened to him, and worst it wasn't a nightmare. He was a small, fat ball of pudgy fur that couldn't control his mounting hysteria that saw him in a world that was much larger and more frightening than he could have imagined. Was this what it was like for Scott? Would he be able to turn back? Could anyone human understand him? What if someone decided to hunt him for breakfast? What if-what if-. He couldn't control the rapid beating of his heart that made him falter and sway. He felt close to passing out until he felt a surprisingly gentle touch rub warm circles across his furry back. That...That felt pretty good.

He felt his teeth clatter together and his hind foot thump involuntarily. That's when he remembered he wasn't alone. "I remember, darlin'." He murmured, leaning his head against her palm. "Can't believe what's happening. How did this happen to me? We gotta to ask the others. Find out what's-"

"Argh...!" Roaringly a masculine utterance blasted against the door in feral pitch, as rotund fluff-ball of shaggier golden-blonde fur-the leonine Asgardian heir of Odin's throne bunglingly hammer-pounded batter ramming force of his tinier fore-paws; driving all pent-up momentum with indignant brazenness fueling his reckless intrusion.

Defensively, in tactless poise, attuned to the Asgardian's rash intentness, feigning a tenser scowl, Bucky hopped on the pillow with stunted agility, dragging his floppy ears as he beadily glowered aggressive heat melding in his aquamarine irises down at the fuzzier-tubby lop; Thor rebelliously wobbled in doltish pace a breadth near the unwelcomed bedside."Friend Barnes, so you're hopping around in small form as well..." He grumped humorously, his voltaic- cerulean depths became smugly alight evident to his quirking muzzle, as he dodged the edgy chestnut lop's stink-eyed glare. "This isn't the worst magic of the Nine Realms can throw at us...I have fair hope we'll probably change back."

"Thor?" Bucky snorted, torn between amusement and anxiety as the situation dawned on him. If he wasn't the only one to have been turned into an animal, there had to be a threat nearby. "What the hell has happened to us? One minute I have poseable thumbs, then next I have floppy ears!" Bouncing on the sheets he comes beside Selina and looks at her quizzically. "You don't feel sick or anything do ya, Lina? Whatever this is, it had to be-" That's when Bucky saw Thor trying to bite through the wrapper of an uneaten candy bar that had fallen off the nightstand. "Its the candy."

Steeling her incredulous gaze narrowingly at the Reeses' wrapper Thor was piggishly gnawing against the orgasmic-debauched wake of unslaked hunger, unassailably Selina detected an ephemeral inducement of aromatized conjury meltingly seeped within the gooey peanut butter caking underneath the lardaceous, stubbier lop's bloated-out girth. "It was that damn Halloween stash..." she breathed, threadily, as Bucky's downcast grayish-sapphire flitted stiltedly down at emptied wrappers. "Someone decided to play a sick game of Trick or Treat with the candy..."

"No...It's not the candy I had recently..." Thor grumbled with indignant pitch, sottishly, licking off a gooey remnant of peanut butter, his furred girth bulbously flexed against the wake of his gorging-piggish indulgence as Bucky vexatiously gnarred in huffish cadence, readily lasering his steel-aquamarine depths to an untouched pillow on the mattress's edge with unrelentingly precision to shove it down. Slobbily chewing on the orange wrapper, the burly golden lop nonchalantly gestured a stubbed fore-paw to the opened door that he vigorously busted through. "I recognize this furry conjury from Asgard...It's someone having a bit of fun," An evident gleam of unbridled mirth naughtily grew alight in his beady cobalt irises as a jovial grunt stuntedly deterred Bucky's hopping-breakneck momentum. "This will be a good challenge for us..."

"A challenge?" Bucky couldn't contain himself as he lundarted off the mattress, onto the pillow then onto the floor in front of Thor. "Well, I'm glad you're taking this all in stride, Simba. But turning into a bunny wasn't at the top of my fun-list. Hair-dye in my shampoo? Ants in my sheets? Shaving cream on my pillow? That's a prank! Not being turned into a tubby rabbit." He ranted, though Thor just continued to lick at the candy crumbs on his mouth with a blank if not bored look which served to only agitate Bucky all the more. "Give me a name, Thor. Who could have done this to us-"

That was when they all heard a crash coming from downstairs followed by intensive shouting. Not a moment sooner, Bucky and Thor were hopping their way down the corridor with an exasperated Selina up ahead of them. What they found downstairs in the lobby was a bewildering sight that none of them could have anticipated.

"You! You're Bucky's girlfriend, right?! Can you tell him to get down here! There's a super-powered rabbit going ape-s***, and I don't have my suit!" Scott cried from behind his fortified position behind the bar-counter. Across the no-longer immaculate lounge, a tiny scarlet red force of nature was bouncing off every piece of furniture in a mad panic. Scott ducks as a wave of kinetic energy slams against the counter, shattering shot-glasses and sending fruit and alcohol spilling all over him. "Where did everyone go?!" Scott yelled.

Harnessing a balletic variance of agility, in whipcrack reaction, explosively Selina vaulted over the bartop, as her dark irises unblinkingly watched a svelte weasel-like form of vibrant copper frantically scamper over a barricade of lounge cushions, in a panic-crazed onslaught. Pulsing scarlet veins of kinetic energy deafeningly cannoned the brunette-furred lop-Bucky- off the granite floor in the hostile wake of destructive crimson salvos ethereally arcing over them; Scott hastily squatted down into a back catchers stance, and effortlessly caught the propelling rotund—stunned pudge-ball in his opened palms without stumbling traction. Giving him a curt smirk for his daring attempt of heroics, Selina demanded in urgent pitch, breathlessly. "Get their furry asses out of here and find Rogers..." She drove her intense gaze back at the lanky- Slovakian mink distressingly shimming through a cushioned space near an upturn coffee table, emitting pained squeaks."I need to calm Wands down before the whole place drops on us..."

"No! Selina, its too dangerous!" Bucky cried out, as he slips through Scott's hands and tries to bounce towards her. He was suddenly enveloped into massive arms and was brought against that Scott's chest, and that ridiculous Halloween shirt he still wore. "Let go of me, Scott!" Bucky practically growled against the now bewildered Avenger who suddenly looked frozen in comical shock.

"Bucky?" Scott looked at him funnily. "Either I had too many vodka's or you have some kind of shape-shifting superpower you didn't tell us about. Or was I the only one that didn't know?" He rambled. Another wave of kinetic energy slammed against the wall. Scott ducked behind the counter still holding Bucky. To his befuddlement, there was another furry lop now squatting over a pile of spilled cucumbers and was digging in with a startling appetite. "Who is this?!" He wasn't sure how he found himself suddenly surrounded by destructive rabbits, but Scott knew something unnatural had hit the compound and it all happened while he was asleep.

"Damn it, Lang. Let me go! She needs help!" Bucky argued.

"She can handle herself better than you can right now, Bugs."

An incendiary pulse of telestic scarlet fierily imploded with cacophonous tremors, strobing demonic energy hellishly striated over granite flooring, cleaving elevated pieces furniture, dauntingly branching over the bartop with unstable-denotative rabidness of incanted-possessive mantra of Noric utterance. "Dårer, du hindrer kreftene mine ...(Fools you dare to obstruct my power...)"

Against the lancing force of merging tentacles; electrifyingly in a blurring rush of acrobatic graces fueling the detonative momentum of her stoking adrenaline, Selina lithely pounced off the counter in a blood-raiding variance of combative precision, bracing her palms over the floor with balletic accord as she grounded effortlessly in mid-crouch on the sleekness of her toned haunches. "L-Lang get them out of here...Now!" In a bone-whipping jerk, viciously she reared her head up, as mahogany tresses unkemptly draped over her tensing shoulders, and roved the knifing intensity of her coffee irises at chestnut lop thrashing aggressively in the muscled lankiness of Scott's cradling arms, she gritted snappishly."Or I'll enjoy locking your tiny ass in a Gotham safe that isn't uncrackable..."

Scott looked suddenly pale with fright at the thought which ironically caused Bucky to look at him smugly. "She's one kitten you don't want on your bad-side. Trust me, Lang. She'd eat ants for breakfast if push-comes to shove." Bucky chortled.

Propelling the vixenish svelteness of her rodent form, clashingly Wanda bounded onto the cushion in defensive ease as she motionlessly crouched on her tinier hind-paws, rampantly aware that soul-morphing convergence of a heralding-deistic unity in the astral—Élivágar gateways were on the butcherous fringe of a chimeric—damnable resurrection of the vampiric Asgardian demoness—the rapacious, massacring blight of the Nine Realms: Hela.

Uttering a high-pitch squeak, the lasering incandescence of the mutative- telekinetic aura that was haloing galvanically over her silken auburn fur in sorcerous—fissionable contrast as her irises beadily gleamed with surging crimson that melded reddishly into voltaic heat as she witchily twirled a clawed-paw in psionic sync, manically seizing a discarded shard from a vodka glass with a possessive command. "Y-You will not touch me..." she warned squeakily in raw cadence, conducting the serrated piece with throat-gouging trajectory, berserkly aiming the unhinged flares in the exposed direction of where Scott was strenuously hefting up the chubbiest of the ensorcelled lop bunnies. "Stay away..."

The assailing direness of the moment felt suicidally pernicious to engage, steeling herself with tentative ease that belied a hijacking reluctance of vestigial-cunning urgency, as she remained in mid-crouch, Selina unwaveringly edged on her bare arches a breadth closer to Wanda; readily in deft measure of caution, she reached out her lithe hand with a dynamical beckoning of sisterlike trust, coaxingly as she flexed her swift palm open for the distressed mink to protective curl into."Cool it down, Wands," she rasped breathily, as Wanda sveltely nuzzled her tinier muzzle over the delicate suppleness of her braced wrist. "You're in safe hands..."

"That's enough excitement for us tonight!" Scott did what seemed to be reasonably the best option in terms of self-preservation and that of the little furballs in his grip, and that was to high-tail it out the glass doors and into the outdoors. Inside the noises of uncontrolled devastation continue to shake the walls of the compound and send tremors through the ground. Scott didn't make it a few steps outside before the dark-furred lop that he had come to identify as Little Buck, slipped out of his grip, raced up his arm and bounced off his shoulder. "Hey, wait! Where you going?!" The rabbit didn't stop as he raced onwards. "Where the hell is he going?"

He looked at the remaining blonde fuzzball that was nonchalantly scarfing down a small carrot. "Where does all that go?!" He wondered aloud. "Unless you wish to find out, I suggest you put me down, Friend Scott." The bunny spoke with a deep majestic timbre that was familiar. The words had the intended effect as he immediately dropped the blonde lop on a side bench.

"Steve?! Steve where are you?!" Bucky called desperately, bouncing off his feet towards the area he had only spoken to his friend an hour ago. "Oh no…" What he found was an all too familiar sight. One that he left behind inside his bedroom only minutes ago. Steve's empty clothes lay tattered on the ground, but even more, alarming were the tears in the fabric indicating some kind of wild animal attack... "Not you too, Steve... This is bad."

Laggingly enforcing warrior-honed ferocity in his wobbling paces, chubbily Thor bounced near the impassive-despondent Brooklyn lop's side, an errant tracery of heated wetness feverishly dampened velvetiness of Bucky's chestnut fur-heartbreak was devastatingly grappling him onto a condemned fringe into soul-materializing oblivion. As a floppy ear lifted in reaction to hiccuping squeaks that were boyishly whisper-soft, with a measure of vicarious grace, Thor dragged the rotundity of his plumpish mass a hairbreadth closer the buck-tooth sniper.

"We need to find the caped Wizard..." He urged broodily, as his beady cerulean depths roved over Asgardian sigils that were hauntingly etched in the dirt by typhonic witchery that infectiously branded the earthen plane- a diseased incantation that he remembered Hela branded in his father's throne room-Válaskjálf-when she used the Eternal Flame to resurrect the ghoulish-skeletal cavalcade of entombed warriors of Asgard's victorious battles under Odin's reign. Angered, he thumped a forepaw down with bone-crushing momentum "I swear by the grace of Odin, we'll get our friend Steven back..." he avowed, thunderingly. "Trust my rage, Barnes..."

Thor's strength and courage had always been a guiding force for the Avengers in their most dire conflicts. Bucky had only fought beside him on a few occasions since the Endgame, but he knew he didn't make promises lightly. Neither did he. He promised Steve he would always look out for him. No matter what. Till the end of the line, he would always have his back. Turning around he sees, to his relief, Selina coming to meet, gently cradling a mink enchantingly adorned with burgundy- auburn fur in her arms. "Whoever took Steve is gonna learn the hard way what a kid from Brooklyn can do. If they push, we'll punch. And when we do, they won't be getting back up."

Against the putrescent stench of carious flesh reekingly enwreathed over him, groggily emitting a throated resonance, listlessly he felt anchored the subduing heftiness of erosive chains of Dwarven iron forged on Nidavellir; chiaroscuro glyphs of basalt firelight veined into obsidian stalactites that were fused within a cavernous -sepulchral labyrinth as demonical pulses became an orchestral mania that screechingly caromed throughout the fiery chasmal void of the Nine Realms: Muspelheim.

Shifting his bulkier wolven mass in deadened ease, consciously against feverish drowsiness, Steve dragged a fore-paw over gutted-out skulls that were ghoulishly deformed by the scorching cascades of bone-charring magma smelting over jutted crags behind a monolith throne. He was shackled on the edge of a galactic inferno, his blonde-golden fur bristlingly tensed against the phantasmatic contrast of unslaked malice that felt soul-stealingly penetrative. The nectareous-intoxicating decadence of cherry fugitively ghosted over the shagginess of his disheveled fur- a seductive conquest that was heart-ravaging to evade. That phantom—ambrosial scent of the lusciously voluminous lips of his best girl wasn't real-just a noxious apparition of execrable deception. He was downplayed for a lovesick-naive fool.

"Hragh...W-Where am I-" he rasped growlingly in panty breaths, as the vigilant intensity of his azureous irises hawkishly flashed over tenebrous environs that sulphurously converged with draconic heat. On instinctive accord, ferally his long canine muzzle scrunched as his curved incisor fangs barred at the intrusive second, he registered the poisonous—maniacal wickedness of the Asgardian Enchantress—Amora. 'This can't be good, Rogers...'

"I am glad you see you have awakened from slumber, dear Captain..." The malefic raspiness of an invidious cadence doomily slithered over his smoky-blonde fur in possessive scourge against his evident vigilance; sitting haughtily in regal poise with a jade-crafted goblet embellished with twined Noric serpents clutched in the litheness of her covetous fingers, in vexed tenor, Amora grudgingly detected the prevalent variants of his warring, battle-tested resistance. The grayish steeliness of her irises manically glinted with ophidian intensity, as she nastily gestured a blatant hand over fiery skeins pulsing in obstructive columns of volcanic bedrock."Welcome to the forsaken realm of Muspelheim, where you remain my shackled hound as your precious Midgardian home descends into the reaping wake of Hela's glorious carnage. ..." she raved out, euphorically. "You will serve as my wolven executioner as Thor's pitiful blood will herald my reckoning..."

Steve could only glare at her with wolfish animosity spurred by a chilling thought. "What did you do?" He had believed that Annette...Amora's vendetta only had to do with him and Bucky given her history. But the mention of Thor brought a new list of questions that he knew wouldn't be answered. The hellacious landscape that surrounded him boggled his mind but the only thing he could feel was apprehension for his friends back home. "What did you do?!" He raised his voice, the noise greeting him was a wolfish bark that sent vibrations through his whole body.

Against snarling resonance predatorily straining up his throat, in breathy pants, the chained dire wolf menacingly angled his long canine muzzle with racked defiance brandished over tauter-graven edges hawkishly delineated the roguish virility of his golden-blonde fur; the lucent azureous heat of his slitting irises piercingly echoed with the invincible resurgence of his bestial vitality was untamed as feral volumes surrenderingly amplified with an orchestral dirge of cacophonic-unquenchable vengeance. Fierce tension aggressively rode over the bulkier heaviness of his canine form, raggedly Steve barred his incisor fangs in jutting traction. "Answer me...!" he snarled in deep-throated cadence, gratingly. "M' not gonna ask again..."

Malefically, Amora tilted her goblet etched with Asgardian sigils of Níðhöggr-the serpent of the Hvergelmir- down with a virulent flex, painstakingly conveying the stygian rabidity of her possessive-ravening thirst. With the calamitous-apocalyptic devastation of Asgard -the Eternal Flame that conducted ghoulish resurrections of Einherjar warriors needed to become ignited again for Hela's ascension of murderous-conquering warpath. Her new leashed pet would become a harbinger of noxious strife-by her slaughterous command the unbeatable paragon of liberty-victorious champion of mortal hope would soon morph into a wolven dreadnought of Hela's bloodthirsty ranks. "It is a simple answer, my valiant Captain, I've entombed your humanity to serve as my Nidavellir vargr (wolf) of execution on wretched Midgardian ground when dark twilight is heralded ..."

"That won't happen." Steve said with a defiant growl. His stalwart defiance had manifested into anger; not just because of what Amora had done to him but because of what he knew she had done to his friends and fellow Avengers. She was on a warpath that began with him and would end with every life standing in her way. "Whatever you have planned is gonna fail. It took just me and Bucky to stop you back in the day. There are more of us now than you can handle, magic or not." A certain Sorcerer Supreme had come to his thoughts and Steve could only hope that Strange was on top of things back home.

His defiance earned him a dark scowl on the face of the sorceress who drummed her fingers on her armrest impatiently. Steve opened his mouth to say more when he was suddenly struck by an unseen force that wrapped bruising pressure on his throat and every bone in his body. A canine yelp came from his throat. He struggled and watched as tendrils of green sorcery poured from Enchantress' fingertips and made their way towards him.

"You know I could have your warrior strength abandon you, Captain," Amora hissed, sneeringly, the possessive arcs of virescent-morbific- energy raked bone-gripping ministrations over the bracketed muscle of his arching back; the passive coolness of his azure wolvish irises silvered ferally with a deadened clash of phantom resistance—every hypnotic pulse of the Enchantress's assaultive mantra draggingly became a stuporous cadence—exponentially amplifying with a soul-arresting inducement as her gauntleted wrist flexed raveningly in commanding succession. "You will embrace the incarnate powers of Vanaheim or I will take vast pleasure of making you submit into a disgraceful runtish whelp ..."

Steve couldn't bite back a retort of any kind. The unnatural sickening feeling that entered his body made him feel as if he was being drawn and quartered within. As if every bone, nerve and molecule was being split and reshaped into something ruinous. A strangled groan growl escaped his latched throat. His paws dug into the dusty surface beneath him as the whips of magic wrapped around him, digging into his fur covered flesh and exerting Amora's will over him. Dimly he was aware of the feeling of growing bigger, stronger...angrier. The roars of hellfire that made up Muspelheim were silenced by the beating of his own pulse that had sounded like war-drums. He arched and howled causing the fires to roar and a billow of flames to escape with his breath.

His mind was being broken until he felt himself being dragged away into a dark cage. All that was left was the honed instincts of a soldier now coupled with the malice of a deadly beast.

A kriger

That was his name. And all Midgard would know to fear him and revere the name of Amora the Enchantress.

177A Bleecker Street...

After crossing through dead zone environs of Washington Square Park, poised on her razor-edge stiletto-heeled boots on a traffic gridlock, vehemently with a measure practical ease, Selina roved collective intensity of her brandy irises, undeviatingly the length of her black Valentino long coat exquisitely contrasted over her curvaceous litheness as she errantly shivered against the drafty Eastern gales; Selina roved collective intensity of her brandy irises, undeviatingly over a Victorian-Gothic three-story brownstone edifice of the destined-occultic proximity-a harbor point of refuge; the Baroque- Romanesque pipe-iron oculus melded over glass to resemble the Eye of Agamotto in the center buildings' Mansard roof. A dimensional valance of the Dark Verse pulsed infectiously with the caliginous energy of a demonic scourage of astral implosions throughout Manhatten.

With the instinctive reaction of a pulse-arresting earshot against the whooshing obstruction of congested traffic, as iron-straight mahogany tresses stingingly whiplashed over the kittenish fineness of her elfin features, rigidly, Selina gripped the cloth handle of a duffle bag that she thievishly swiped from a fenced basketball court when a group of teenagers from Harlem-projects were competitively distracted shooting hoops. With a devious variance of cool nonchalance, she didn't react to the continuous thumping of racking vibrations in restless unison-definitely the Asgardian chub-ball- against tense bones of her delicate wrist.

'Let me guess he's a Sherlock fan...' A derisive quip of snarkiness fringed in her breathy undertone, in succession of her feline-honed momentum, she vanishingly sauntered over the crosswalk with brazen precision in fervent tempo, involuntarily, until she reached the extension of steps unmistakably inscribed with Tiberian Eldritch sigils-the deceptive passage of the Sanctum Santorum. "This better be the place..."

Stephen Strange quietly sipped on his chamomile tea while silently pouring over an ancient tome he'd borrowed from the Kamar-Taj library. He made a mental note to bring donuts next time as to not incite Wong's prickly reception. The last several months had been exhausting on him ever since he was revived from death after being dead for a little over 5 years. He hadn't aged but he'd missed out on a lot. From Christine's promotion to Chief of Surgery to an uprise of interdimensional conquerors trying to attack Earth when it was learned the Sorcerer Supreme was no longer defending this reality. To think there was a time when he thought being overworked meant signing forms all night.

But now something else loomed on the horizon. It was only last night that one of his magical alarms had been triggered and he was alerted to the possibility that Earth was once again getting an unwelcome visitor. It was Asgardian in origin and it was located near the Avengers' compound. He had assumed it was Thor or a friend of his to arrive so close to Avenger territory, but now he wasn't so sure. That's what led him to seek out Wong and this tome on known Asgardian sorcerers and witches who might still be out there.

It was close to 3pm when he heard a knock at his door. Firm, insistent, commanding attention. He wasn't expecting company. If it were Wanda she would've texted or called beforehand. The knocking resumed, louder than the first time. Stephen shrugged as he rose to his feet and made his way towards the foyer. His loyal companion floated and wrapped itself around his shoulders. "Don't get excited, its probably just a UPS delivery boy." Stephen unlocked the door and was confused by the familiar yet unlikely face to be standing on his door step.

"You're Selina Kyle. Barnes' girlfriend. I assume this isn't a social call?" He asked pointedly. He wasn't listed, so that meant he had to stop giving out his address to superheroes and their significant others.

"I make it my hobby to find places I'm not invited too," A deviant play challengingly quirked over her full-bow lips, as she huskily purred, easing down the hefty duffle bag atop of a black-ochre table where untouchable imperial Qiang spearheads adorned; detecting tension stacking between them, distractingly she braced the sleek planes of her garbed back against the wooden edge, keeping her gloved palm readily flexed on her sidearm 9mm Glock-if he needed effective motivation- if the angles of the game were rigged.

The generous exception of heart-on-sleeve charity was overrated-nothing was ever free to gain, she refused to become an expendable player of the sorcerous-chess-play of vengeful theatrics. "Look, I'm obviously not here for you boys to give me a tour ..." she quipped, briskly, dragging her teeth over the pillowy swell of her underlip, while evading the smug-face, virtuosic maestro of the Eldritch arts scabrous glower of grayish-azure that melded like quicksilver of draconic heat. The hawkish-cut maturity of his suave features brusquely conveyed a rapt of pretentious indignance of his mock-serious demeanor, as the high collar of his scarlet cloak flapped annoyingly over his goateed-jaw. "Someone had fixed a game of sorcerous interest..." she gritted out, stingingly, drawing back a terse breath. "The Compound playhouse was attacked, I'm guessing you already got that call...?"

"I suspected. When I talked to Wanda last night, she said everything was fine." He said now feeling apprehensive to have his theory confirmed. And to add to his anxiety, he hadn't heard from Wanda since. A short tense silence followed as he just stared into Selina's eyes, feeling like he was back in the ER about to digest some unfortunate news. "How bad was it? Is Wanda all right?" He asked.

Narrowing her dark irises fleetingly down at the zipped duffle bag, against reactive impedance, fostering guarded poise, Selina lithely glided her palm with deft ministrations of pacifying tenor nakedly over the pudgy masses thumping crankily in telltale urgency for breathing space; a plaguing hailstorm of apparitional-prosaic-conjury was surgically excising out humanity into verminous-disposable strays. Composedly against knifing onrushes of vein-shunting heartache, decisively Selina utilized an impassive charade-blood was already on her name-her rigged tolerance- love for Bucky- was measured on a hair-trigger in the crossfire of damnable reality. Tugging at the zipper with painstaking flexion, she rasped in a flintier undertone. "I can't really answer that..." She paused to bait out a breath, shakily. "They're not...Human anymore..."

Stephen once prided himself on his intelligence and ability to adapt to new conforms, but despite all that he'd seen and been through he had a hard to accept what he was being told. "You're really not kidding me, are you?" One look in Selina's eyes told him this wasn't some kind of rib and she hadn't come all the way here to waste his time. He noticed the sports bag she brought was an odd choice of luggage for an elegantly dressed woman to be carrying around. And then he saw the small vibrations shake within its interior, and understanding dawned on him. "Show me."

Registering genuine urgency in his cavalier timbre, haphazardly, Selina reached inside the stuffed bag on a tracery of visceral accord driven in phantom rush of ardent reverence hinged in her caressing tenderness, the cool leather of her gloved fingers kneaded chaste pressure over velveteen silkiness of chestnut fur, as the sugary amora of grease-fried doughnut wafted up a blubbering, lumpish golden mass noisily munching on a glazed piece to quash long-starved hunger that exponentially aromatizing him into gluttonous dregs.

Reeling back on defensive traction stubbily of his floppy paws, in scathing reaction, the boyishly rotund lop-Bucky- pinched his tinier muzzle, distressingly hitching out a throaty squeak of as he aggressively conveyed rapt disgust over Thor being a boisterous party-crasher within his snug proximity. "Yeah...I know it wasn't a smooth ride, handsome," Selina rasped coolly, sliding her palm with assuaged delicacy under the doughier pudginess of the droopy-eared Brooklyn lop's girth, securing him temperately in the cradling embrace of her sleeved arms as he unabashedly nuzzled echoes of reined affection with his twitching muzzle adorably while cushily pillowing himself against her forearm-achingly vulnerable. "This furry charm-boy right here is... Bucky."

"Strange." The chestnut furred lop sat on his hind feet and stared up at the sorcerer with an animated expression that no ordinary bunny could make. Quick as it was, he was soon captivated by how immaculate and spacious the interior decor of the house was. It was quaint more than it was spartan and it resonated with his older sense of style. "Wish we could've met under better circumstances. Nice place you got here. I hear you serve drinks with unlimited refills."

Seeing a talking bunny was something Strange hadn't anticipated but after fighting alongside a talking raccoon, he wasn't the least bit surprised. He was however curious. "Is that so? And who would've told you about that, Mr. Barnes?" He asked with an inkling of suspicion.

"Hold on, Wizard...I'll be right out." A hearty cadence of a masculine timbre boorishly arrested Strange's perturbed gaze, as the bulgy leonine bunny clumsily hopped out of the duffle bag in a tactless high-bounce, the floppy drag of his lengthy ears slashingly bashed against the bronze neolithic-dynasty arrowheads. 'Oomph-' Each detached shard clangorously raining down on the reddish-auburn mink who skittishly lurched back on careening traction with her stubbed paws as Selina kept her gloved palm unerringly bolstered on the wooden edge, not wavering her grip. Emitting a thunderous gnarl, flabbily, Thor wobbled a breadth closer to Strange, in a clunky pace, as the scarlet cloak- lashed up obstructing his sluggish momentum, ignoring Bucky as chestnut lop puckishly quirked his scrunched-up muzzle, toothily jutting out his buck-teeth-almost sweet-rollin' the moment. "Don't start with me, Wizard, as you can see I'm having a really bad day..."

"Thor, knock it off, man..." Bucky shrugged feeling his patience wearing thin after being trapped inside of a duffle bag for nearly an hour with the fussy Asgardian lop.

"Thor, huh? Your visits to my home are becoming a weird habit, Mr. Odinson. But at least your new form should make you a more manageable guest." Despite his initial dread over the situation, Stephen couldn't help but feel himself smirk ever slightly at the sight of what could only be described as a lion-bunny of blonde fur wrinkling his nose at him with distaste.

"Yes...It's good for a laugh. Wizard..." Thor grumbled under breath, tetchily, as the razored heat of his cerulean depths were stormily intensifying while he gazed at Strange's chiseled-sculpted lips obstinately quirking into a contemptuous grin, tellingly playing off his smug deviousness that belied nonplussed annoyance. Furrily, with a twitch his pudgy muzzle, Thor eased on his stubby hind-paws, reining down a headlong momentum to propel his ferocity into Strange's trimmed-goatee jaw."Honestly, this form isn't the worst I've been changed into...Being turned into a frog wielding my hammer, that was a good challenge..."

"Good to see you're taking this seriously, Thor." Bucky resisted the urge to give the Asgardian lop a whack with his hindfoot. His cavalier attitude to their predicament was nothing if not annoying but it also made Bucky realize if being turned into a frog was the least of Thor's worries, he didn't want to know what could've been worse for them in this instance. "But we guys from Brooklyn don't like being in a tight spot we can't punch our way out of." Whoever did this was playing games with them and it made him wonder if a certain Trickster wasn't as dead as Thor believed him to be. "You sure your brother isn't the one behind this?"

Against grievous echoes that despairingly he stowed back, in a drag of telltale reserve, Thor lamented, his floppy ears draped over his fore-paws as his furry head eased down, naked gleams of straying tears dampened his shaggier fur, as he choked-off a breath, merciless apparitions of Thanos's skull-crushing hand, the vicing pressure of sacrificial deliverance-salvation- that he felt when the cosmic energy of the Power Stone veined in his flesh as stacked corpses of massacred Asgardians-became lifeless silhouettes of utmost failure in a nightmarish reality where knells of victory became silenced. "As I told my adventurous friend, Sweet Rabbit, I watched that genocidal maniac crush his neck..." Unthinkingly, he swiped a forepaw over his muzzle, sniffily. "Sometimes I wish for him to return..."

"Right...sorry." Bucky felt remorse almost immediately for bringing up the mention of Loki. Despite the Trickster's villainous exploits, Thor had watched him die and there was no disputing what he had seen. But it still begged the question of who was responsible for their predicament. Strange who had silently watched this banter unfold was suddenly stricken by the sight of a mahogany-scarlet colored mink climbing out of the bag. It was female, small but carrying a powerful aura that felt all too familiar as he felt his heartbeat slow to a stop.

"Wanda...?"

As smooth gruffiness of his austere timbre sonorously breached her tinier ears, slinkily, the dwarfish auburn-burgundy mink pounced out of the bag with undeterred momentum, reddish kinetic skeins haloed a gravitic pulse over the arrowheads, squeaking in a low pitch, quiveringly in urgent accord, Wanda brushed the lanky svelteness of her enchanted form against Strange's rigid forearm-the morphic overture that chastened her into cursive throes was an extent of unnamable vergence.

"I-I know what's coming..." Wanda chirped in squeaky pitch, evidently flexing her lithe paws as she telekinetically constructed a crimson Eldritch tendril into three-ring Asgardian sigil. "It's a power I never felt before..." Her jeweled beady irises mirrored the hawkish allure of Strange's grayish-azure depths, urgently. "We can't protect ourselves like this...Death is coming."

Whatever shock and sorrow Stephen had been feeling by Wanda's transformation was dispelled as he listened to the urgency in her voice that begged for attention. His dear witch was attuned to certain frequencies in their reality that even he hadn't tapped into. Her mind was augmented, giving her clairvoyance that was invaluable to the Avengers but it was also a waking curse to her depending on what she'd see. And whatever it was she saw had caused alarm to set into the room. With great tenderness, Strange scoops her into his arms and begins rubbing soothing circles into her back. His cape wraps around his shoulder as if to blanket her comfortably.

"Let's talk in my study," Strange says. With a poof, they had all transported to a different room within the house. Bucky groaned loudly at the feeling of hard pudgy mass landing almost fully on top of him.

"Aauugh! What was that?" He groaned trying to shove whoever landed on top of him.

A vertiginous rush arrested her pulse as in a breathless gasp, rampantly Selina felt the sleek contours of her garbed back collide numbingly against a baroque-style bookshelf; as Tibertian journals and manuscripts precariously barraged down with avalanche-like force. "Next time warn a girl..." she rasped, bitingly, papers messily slashed over her mahogany tresses as she reactively surged her arm up with a lighting-fast jerk of her thieving precision, fluidly clutching a book while she pushed explosively the alarmed floppy-eared bunnies under a wing-back chair with shoving urgency invested in her balletic-honed graces of as more books disturbingly rained onto the wooden flooring.

With echoes of tactical athleticism rioting his wobbling prowess, against the feverish onslaught of dizziness, Bucky joltingly bounced onto the Victorian upholstered chair; his heartbeat frantically accelerated. "Hey, you need to distract them fast, Tricks..." Selina pressed, scratchily, gazing at her sniper-lop crouched paralyzingly low on his pudgy girth, "These little fuzzballs can't take the heat of distress."

"Right. Where are my manners?" Stephen only then realized what Selina meant and was quick to pick off a fruit and veg bowl he kept and had it set on the floor in front of the two distressed bunnies. The sight of fresh produce caused their bellies to rumble and their hysteria to ebb before they pounced, consumed by their primal instincts, to sate their hunger. Strange gently set Wanda down on a sofa cushion, caressing her head. "I need to know everything that happened last night. Every point of view if it helps." Strange said, shifting back into focus as he faced Selina. "Were there any other Avengers affected by this attack?"

Registering his concise deep-timbered undertone skeptically teeming with valid interest, as glacial steeliness of his piercing irises arrested her reluctant pulse, infuriatingly Strange had breached her vehement charade as the draconic intensity edged within his unwavering glower, felt like a scalpel, dissecting her feminine resilience- calling her bluff.

Curvily, Selina caught the lavish swell of her plushier underlip kittenishly with a painstaking drag of her teeth as she purred, breathily, flashing a gaze down at the chestnut lop gnawed messily on a carrot. "Look, everything happened fast when Bucky got his downsized makeover..." she rebuffed, trenchantly "I'm not sure if Rogers was playing frisbee toss on the grounds..."

"Steve vanished." Bucky cut in after wafting down a sizeable piece of carrot. His nose wrinkled as he tried to shut away the tempting smell of vegetables that somehow had the appealing smell of a mouth-watering steak to him. Thor meanwhile continued to shamelessly devour an apple all the way down to its core, blissfully ignorant of the conversation. "He was outside the compound. Couldn't have been more than an hour before the three of us were turned. When we went outside after, we couldn't find him. All we found was those symbols in the ground that Thor leaves behind each time he decides to make his flashy exits." Bunny shot a glare at the blonde who merely chewed while looking at him with a bored expression.

"And the candy you ate, that's what triggered all this?" Strange asked, thoughtful.

"I only had a couple pieces. Thor probably had enough to fill a classroom of kids." Bucky grumbled.

Stephen glanced at the quiet mink on the sofa and watched as she bobbed her head at him to affirm his theory. "So we're dealing with an Asgardian who by all accounts, had a bone to pick with a few of you."

"What makes you say that?" Bucky wondered confusingly.

"Only a few of you were turned. Not Ms. Kyle, not Lang. Rogers is missing; either taken captive or lost somewhere on the property that none of you have located. Anything you'd care to add to this discussion, Thor?" Strange asked with a hint of annoyance as the blonde bunny began making a mess of food on the floor.

Grimacingly as he waged against irrepressible throes of voracious hunger racked through his veins, Thor hefted up his beefier mass strenuously and hopped onto the vacant cushioned wing-back armchair; recognizing that the expense of his Aseir vitality-the blood of Odin was measured on the sword's edge of prevalent-unsated vengeance. He remembered armored cavalcades of his father's Einherjar soldiers being diseasedly enwreathed by viridescent-phantasmic salvos of conjuring infective mantras, grippingly morphing them into verminous rodents-it was butchering wake conducted by a traitorous-mephitical siren: the Enchantress.

"I know of whom you speak of, Wizard..." he countered, gruffly, with hinged temperance, he recalled Odin condemning her to Gjöll-the ice river that bridged souls from the living realm."My father called her the Enchantress of Vanaheim, a deceptive maiden who had tried many times to ravage Asgard when I easily dismissed her affection..." he snorted, heartily. "Clearly I was the best choice...on Asgard."

"Well that explains why she would be after you, but what do Steve and I have to do with her? Or Wanda for the matter," Bucky pointed out. Unrequited love was a dangerous thing that made human beings react with bitter feelings of jealousy, even violence. Add magic and gods to the mix and things would take an explosively weird turn.

"Maybe our mystery guest has been around longer than we would've thought, Mr. Barnes." Strange said as he shifted through the pages on the book he had been reading before his guests arrived. "I've learned of a few Asgardians who've lived among us humans for a long time, and some made their presence felt more vividly than others." He at last found a page he had just read earlier. "Amora." Lifting the book up, he holds it open for Bucky and Thor to look at. "Ring any bells?"

Bucky felt an inkling of dread the longer he stared at the drawn portrait, feeling as if he had seen that face before. A breathtaking blonde beauty with cold eyes that made her look nothing but cruel. The tome was old, the ink of the illustrations however were crisp and clear that they painted a vivid picture in his mind of a face that haunted him during the war. He flinched at the piercing feeling of a migraine in his head that came with the memory of green nails digging into his neck, ready to snap him like a twig. He could feel Selina's hand on his back, and it was only then he realized he had been trembling.

A soul-quaking blankness owlishly widened his grayish-aquamarine irises as Bucky mortifyingly felt bone-chilled surges of paralytic heat immobilizing him with possessive contrast; floppily his lengthy ears drooped over his quaking fore-paws as he became vomitously smothered by an implosion of soul-racking distress. "No...Can't be her..."

Panting out heavy drags of breath, the chestnut lop's furred muzzle gapingly stretched wide in a pulse-razed tempo of a voiceless squeak, while Strange underlyingly feigned a deadpanned countenance. The bestial strength of Bucky's gladiatorial invincibility-the predatory-resurrected entity of the Winter Soldier was thumpingly materializing in anguished fruition of jackhammering ferocity of unstabled heartbeat-he was edging into fatal shock. "Bucky..." Thready, Selina urged in fevered-pitch, kneading the litheness of her fingers over his dampen velvet-like fur, the coaxing pressure of her chaste ministrations soothingly delivered a tenor of hushed grace-reverence. "Settle down, handsome..."

"Yes, why don't we all settle down..." The brawny Asgardian lop challenged, huffishly, steering his cerulean irises wanderingly towards an oak Elizabethan side-table where a plate of chocolate-dipped biscotti remained untouched by his cantankerously scrunched-nose rival-James; bouncily hopping off the chair in thunderous—headlong speed, Thor bounded closer to his sugary revels, only to be deterred by slashing whoosh of Strange's flitting cloak as the scarlet-auburn mink impishly writhed the svelteness of her lanky form sneakily around the table's curved leg, snagging a piece with her delicate-fanged muzzle. "Put that down, Wanda..." he demanded, boomingly, thumping his fore-paw down. "It's already been claimed..."

As Wanda and Thor began chasing the same dessert, it took a minute for Bucky to feel his pulse slowing into a downward spiral once Strange had set the book aside. He had been confused at first why he felt as if he were on a rollercoaster going close to a 100mph. But he was reminded that his new body didn't have the nerve-wracking endurance that came from a peaked superhuman soldier.

"Take deep breaths, Mr. Barnes." Strange said, easily falling back into his old profession of managing patients. Once he was certain the brunette lop was calm enough to proceed, the sorcerer leaned back against his desk with his arms crossed. "I'm guessing that's a familiar face to you?"

"Ziegler. She was a Hydra crony in Amsterdam. I'd never seen evil in a woman till I met her." He shuddered, remembering the pit of withered bodies he, Cap and the Commandos had discovered outside of her lair. Human beings; men, women and even some teenage children.

"She killed over a 100 people in her lab of horrors, turning them into freak experiments that Skull would use against us. Innocent people. They were used as lab-rats and then discarded like trash. She almost killed me and Cap if Peggy Carter hadn't rigged the place to blow. We all thought she died in the blast..."

Evicting a retraction of unwarrantable heartache, composedly, as the amber sconces of lamplight flitted entrancingly over the ivory-white pearlescent of her elfish features, Selina adoringly traced her feathery caresses with heart-driven promise. As she caught the flexing rapt of his soul-careening distress; each gentled—intimate drag of her fingers headily bunched the rubbery suppleness of Bucky's adorable—downsized form under the angle of her ghosting palm, tantalizingly invested with cool stillness; the chestnut lop mirrored her tentative-ardent rhythm, drowsily nuzzling his furrier head against her leather sleeve as she anchored him back into a tamed vigil.

"Okay, Tricks," Selina whispered in a breathy undertone, sultrily, while the Eldritch neurosurgeon's lapis-azure irises strikingly narrowed with clinical intensity at the exquisite precision of Selina's hand gracing a contrast of tactile heat gingerly over jutted swelling of Bucky's rotund girth, as he pudgily shifted in her tensing arms."Obviously we need to crash this Asgardian witch's resurrection party and drive her ass back into the ground ..."

"Yeah, that's not gonna happen, Lina," The brunette short-round lop drawled in a boyish timbre, slurringly in throatier pitch; keeping his tucked hind-paws unwaveringly braced on her cradling sleeved forearm with visceral-arrestive fervency; involuntarily Bucky pinched his twitching muzzle waggishly, the denotive reality—hope of being freed out of the soul-condemning dregs of the Enchantress's morphous curse was irrevocably rigged on a powder-keg. He wouldn't allow his kitten to become a furred-mutative extension of Asgardian bewitchery- a disposable vermin like him. Fostering onto his warred stubbornness, Bucky grazed his pudgier muzzle over her palm with an urgent rush, murmuring against a heavy drag of breath. "I've already lost my good looks, can't let that witch take you...If I gotta stay like this to keep you safe, hell, Lina, it's definitely worth it..."

"As heartwarming as your selfless act would be Mr. Barnes, it would be in vain if the threat of Enchantress goes unchecked. Her master is someone not to be reckoned with, as Thor would tell you if he could think any further than his stomach right now." Stephen said with a dry look as he watched the fat blonde ball of fur who had climbed into the fruit basket and struggled to right his posture. Wanda meanwhile snacked on her treat with the same elegance he found to be endearing in her human form. He couldn't let her stay like this. His personal stake was the same as Selina Kyle's who was determined to restore her lover to his true form. "And there is Captain Rogers to consider." He reminded the lop whose ears drooped even further.

"Steve…Damn it. Who knows what she's done to him. Isn't there anything you can do, Doc, for me and Thor? We can't just sit on our furry a*** and do nothing!" As much as Bucky dreaded the thought of seeing Ziegler...Enchantress again, he knew they collectively stood a better chance if he and Thor were back in true-form.

"Asgardian magic has its own unique set of laws that are different from the ones I practice. As much as I pride myself on my intellect, it's still not something I have mastered. I could very well turn you both into roaches if I tried tampering with it. Our only solution is to either force Enchantress to undo her spell, or find another Asgardian who can." Strange calls his cloak to his shoulders and runs a loving hand across the back mink's head. "Stay safe, Wands." With a quick circular gesture of his hands, the sorcerer opens a rift and through it falls Wong who lands on his backside with a startled yell. His eyes immediately land on Strange and he puffs up with outrage.

"Stephen if you-"

"I need you to babysit." Strange cut in tersely, confusing the librarian who looked around at the surrounding company. "Well, actually, its bunny-sit. Ms. Kyle and I have business to see to."

A cataclysmal twilight of being conducted out of the Dark Verse; the astral gateway that Eldritch sling-ring fierily scythed the airwaves near a cluttered bookcase, exponentially Selina was on the invisible doorstep of a concussive pandemonium-a butcherous warzone of soul-plaguing chaos. With tactical ease against the vitreous pulse of mystic conjury, she readily clutched her brandished Glock; she glanced down at her adorably tenacious sniper-lop and dazzlingly flashed him a coquettish smirk as he roguishly scrunched his tinier nose.

"Play nice, handsome," she wheedled, snarkily, as baldheaded Master of the Mystic Arts stood near the bookcase of shelved Noric literature-maps- with unflappable-studious decorum etched over the jowelly pudginess of his Asian features, Wong tellingly stowed a passive measure of rapport with his grouchier diligence of allowing a thievingly evasive siren of Gotham invade his isolated library-sanctum."Try not to get caught by grumpy Kung-fu panda over there..."

"Keep her safe, Strange." Bucky urged the sorcerer who had by now placated an irritated Wong into doing what he asked. Strange gives Bucky a simple nod though he wasn't at all comfortable with the act of leaving a highly destructive and oafish bunny to have free-reign over the sanctum even with supervision.

"Not that she needs it, but I will." Strange offered. He had a hunch on where to begin their search for the Enchantress. With Asgard gone, it was likely she was occupying another of its realms while using one of the branched gateways to slip into Earth. Without the power of the Bifrost, there were eight possible entry-points into Midgard by which she could enter. He just hoped Selina Kyle knew her limits when it came to dealing with magical foes. "Shall we?" He says to her as the rift opens and on the opposite end could be seen a green field in daylight with an ancient fortress looming in the background.

Bucky holds Selina gaze as she gives one last look. To say he was worried was an understatement. But the strength and coyness in her eyes reassured him. His kitten knew what she was doing. And there was not a force in the universe that should underestimate her skills. She followed Strange through the portal as it lingered open, almost temptingly. Bucky wished it would close faster before he did something he might reger-

"Hey, wizard! You forgot to refill the basket!" Thor boomed. Faster than Wong and even Bucky could comprehend, the fat blonde rabbit raced and hopped towards the portal at top-speed.

"Thor, wait!" Bucky yelled. His feet were carrying him across the floor as Wong made stop him. The librarian crashed into the floor just as the rift closed behind the two lops.

"Idiot." Wong groaned, both at Strange's ineptitude for leaving doors open and for his own surprising inability to catch two bunnies. He only hoped the third one wasn't nearly as destruc-

A vase on the table suddenly exploded with red hex energy. A very sheepish looking Wanda looked at him innocently. This was going to be a long day.

"D-Doctor..." A gnarling breath chokingly rasped against his canine incisors; Steve angled his long muzzle to grip onto the animate scarlet cloak's billowing length with a vicious thrust of bestial-wolven- ferocity; Doctor Strange poised his scarred fingers with inventive, gestural motion, intricately weaving veins of astral energy into fiery crescentic sigils, as the Dwarvish mantra of Amora's possessive spell cast effusively became volumes of a rhapsodic concerto within aphotic vistas of the Multiverse plane.

Ferally, as he sniffed against the obstructive-vaporous reek of carrion flesh oozily wafting out of ground-ravaged coffins, in a predatory rush, Steve panted out ragged breaths, as his lucent azure orbs chimerically gleamed murderous heat, apparent to his unstaunched rabidness-bloodlust. An implosive throb of soul-deep valiance-his Brooklyn spirit- cacophonously deafened as bulkier enhanced cords of fur-sheathed muscle hulkingly flexed in hostile succession.

A vicious cadence of eruptive-monstrous abandon gratingly throttled against his barred incisor fangs as he reared his canine head back, arcing his bushy tail with defensive-intimidating poise that fleetingly conveyed valorous echoes of soldiery resilence. Half-crouching in a heavier stance on his furred haunches, a beastlier contrast of slitting-wicked ferocity reigned in his blood-crazed azureous depths-a possessive extent of the Dwarven curse that Strange keenly recognized. "W-Where are they...?" he snarled, demandingly in guttural pitch, slashing a massive fore-paw over discarded Snickers and Kit-Kat wrappers-nothing would detract him from engaging his targeted-wimpish- prey."Answer me!"

"You're not yourself, Captain Rogers. Hurting your friends is the last thing you would want." Stephen braced himself as the creature that used to be Earth's greatest champion, growled at him with vicious malice. Whatever Enchantress had turned him into was unlike any animal to be found on Earth. It resembled a dire-wolf but the gargantuan shape of his mouth/teeth were almost dragon-like. Kriger. He kept calling himself. If Stephen hadn't endured lifetimes of torture and death from a cosmic evil, he would've felt more than the tremor of unease moving through him as "Kriger" growled at him. "So would be attacking me."

The Kriger roared and did just that, lunging at the sorcerer who promptly gestured his hands and forged the ruby Rings of Raggadorr to defend himself. Several yards away from the fight, two bunnies struggle and poke their heads out from a top-hat.

"What was that?" Bucky groaned. One moment he and Thor were staring into the literal jaws of death that used to be his best friend, the next moment they were inside of a hat. He was treated to the bewildering sight of Selina crouched beside him on the roof of a jeep outside the graveyard, looking at him expectantly. "Lina? Its not what it looks like-"

"Why am I not surprised..." Selina gritted out, seethingly, against the unkempt sleekness of her mahogany tresses, her tigerish coffee irises narrowed vexedly at chestnut furred lop who unabashedly crouched low on his hind-paws within the Victorian-style top hat as the fiery portal vanished. Balletically harnessing up her motionless poise on the jeep's roof, she became a curvaceous-lithesome silhouette against the backlit contrasts of brownstone environs around them; kinetic incandescence of crimson salvos eerily arced over the cemetery grounds, as the iron gate barricaded the skeletal cavalcade demonically mobilized out of coffin-buried trenches as headstones became razed to earth-shatteringly unleash worm-infested denizens—soulless zombiesque husks manically possessed by clamorous—effusive mantras of telestic resurrection.

In the flurrying reaction of a whipcrack earshot, blurringly Selina tensed against the mordacious potency of carrion decay and rancid pumpkin, as she gripped onto the razored-brim top-hat as the length of Bucky's drooping ears furrily caressed the delicate contours of her leather-sheathed wrist. "Well, I guess it's not Halloween without a dance," she quipped under breath, ruefully, feeling his jutted buck-teeth headily graze an evocative reverence of sensuous-virile heat that ardently blazoned a heart-driven promise. Answering that visceral call of bunny affection, betraying her stony glare, against errant blear of wetness, unblinkingly Selina kneaded her palm achingly over his satiny chestnut velveteen fur, holding onto him for another fevered moment. "Always the charm-boy, huh, Barnes..."

Bucky would have responded with his own quip if he weren't so alarmed at the horrific sight that began to take shape. Skeletal arms began to breach the surface of the graveyard. Boney, with decayed bits of flesh tearing off their frame that dragged their way out from beneath the Earth. It was like a horror movie come to life and Bucky couldn't fathom how such a thing could be possible. They numbered in the dozens, maybe more. Old decrepit bodies from over a century past began to limp and stagger their way out of the gates and onto the streets towards them.

"Just great! Can't they find someone else to play with?" He squeaked out, suddenly feeling overcome with the urge to bury himself deep inside of the hat he and Thor had been shoved into. Wait-Thor! "Care to lend us a hand, Thor? Or you know, a hammer?!" Bucky lightly pushed against the blonde lop who conveniently decided now was the best time to take a nap after so many hours of stuffing himself silly.

"Ham-Hammer..." The lion-haired bunny mumblingly snorted with indignant cadence, listlessly tucking himself further into the hat, the beckoning-thunderous echoes of his invincible Asgardian spirit were latent for summoning Stormbreaker as the chubbier sniper lop bodily slammed his podgy mass against his balloon-out girth in urgent-fiercer variance. "Oomph...We don't need hammers, friend Barnes, just more of those fried cakes that I can easily ravage..." he chuckled, mirthfully, oblivious Nordic sigils of Amora's celestial incantation meltingly veined the pavement as the dead-walker legion advanced reekingly passed the entrance gates: a death march.

It was a run off the world moment, adrenaline revved paralyzingly in their veins, a rhapsodic ecstasy ghoulishly converged on the vacant street as transatlantic energy bleedingly amplified into volumes of an earsplitting upheaval of white-noise. Thumping on his stubbed paws, scowlingly Bucky caught the aromatic-distractive scent of a Starbucks brew, dampening over a heap of discarded-emptied NYPD uniforms as his steel-aqueous irises beadily careened knifing intensity over the sidewalk adorned with remnants of stolen humanity. "S'it's gettin' worse..." Stammeringly, whiskey-roughen huskiness of his murmurous drawl staked down that infinite revelation that Amora would tragically utilize the streets of Manhattan as her execution-harvesting ground. "She's gunnin' everyone down..."

Impeding Bucky's hellbent-soldiery- momentum of rebelliously bouncing out of Strange's hat with swift clutch of her gloved hand; Selina undeviatingly readied her Glock with head -decapitating precision as one exsiccated corpses jerkily limped with deformed prowess near the gridlock; hollowed-out eye sockets of ashen flesh eldritchly heated with apparitional embers-a rabid pulse of orcish blood-thirst."Damnit..." she hissed out, breathlessly, jumping onto the jeep's hood without breaking her crouching stance, intensified fiery glyphs destructively ricocheted off storefront windows. Thrashing against black feltlike borders of the cramped magician hat, driven by reckless instinct, Bucky hopped out, daringly propelled down the windshield at breakneck speed on his fluffy rear.

"There's too many of em," he yelled above the sound of gunfire as Selina let loose bullet after bullet into undead skulls. Bucky wasn't sure if Selina knew what she was doing or just replicating whatever she'd seen in a horror movie involving zombies, but she was grim focused and unrelenting. Bucky felt small, terrified of being swiped up and crushed-or worse eaten! A soldier would retreat but an Avenger would fight on, even if the odds were stacked against them. "There's gotta be somethin'." His sights landed on scattered debris. Plastic bottles, newspapers, trash cans… Trash cans!

He had less to work with in the past. Hopping across a short distance, Bucky leaped and threw his entire weight against the side of an overturned trash-can, sending it rolling across the ground slamming into the brittle knees of the undead. They tumbled and spilled over onto the ground which brought them at eye-level with a soda can punching their skulls. "Still got it," Bucky grinned a buck-toothed smile before pitching- dashing and kicking another trash-can towards the mob of marching undead. In the skies above could be heard the growing roar of thunder.

An incredulous pinch twitchily rapted over Bucky's muzzle, as sloughed bones viscidly glozed into oozing-bloodied resin; ghostlier skeletal denizens wavered in demonic traction, lagging on veined pulses of the astral plane of Helheim—a stygian-ruinous entity was mortifyingly fringing out of Dark Verse's gateways, as the blighted wake of Amora's soul-plaguing conjury harrowingly swarmed around them—the Asgardian demoness-Hela was coming.

Against the carious rush of decomposing—wormy flesh breaching her detected proximity, with a deceptive variance of tactical ease, Selina emptied her Glock 9mm in rapid succession of point-blank gunfire, shredding through deformed contours of jutted bone, in a feverish blur, she glanced over her shoulder, against disheveled curtaining whorls of mahogany, fleetingly, her brandy irises caught voltaic pulses of bluish-white heat blindingly forking strobes of incendiary electricity-lightning-against hurricanic gales as shadowed masses of concussive thunderheads deafeningly encroached over the downtown Manhattan."I think this midnight party is going to get explosive, boys..." she quipped with terse snark, raspily, as Bucky's droopy, furred ears alarmingly perked up with a dumbfounded nose-scrunch, a thunderous momentum careening over the darkened horizon with torpedoed ferocity—the Nidavellir battle-ax Stormbreaker was being hailed.

In seconds the candescent sigils of silvered Asgardian glyphs—Odin's prismatic three-ringed seal became searingly etched in the concrete at that irrevocable moment the shaggier, porcine blonde lop heftily thrust his fore-paw out of the hat with beckoning flex as he jovially belted a throaty guttural cadence, evident to a broaden—chucklesome smirk, gaping his pudgier muzzle into skyrocketing—brawling rapture as he felt a bone- electrified torrent of lightning surging in his veins, roaringly. "Yes...I'm still worthy!"

The sight of a pudgy blonde lop raising a mystical axe-hammer was shocking enough to Bucky and Selina. What neither of them had anticipated was what happened after. A lightning bolt descended from the skies, loud and commanding as all chaos came to a stand-still. The area was enveloped in a burst of light, almost blinding to those in the closest proximity. Selina pulled Bucky against her chest and took cover behind an overturned vehicle, holding him close. A roaring wind blew through the vicinity, becoming a whirlwind of electricity that spiraled towards the skies. Once it vanished, a bunny no longer stood in place, but a newly restored god of thunder!

Thor looked perplexed by the outcome as he looked down at his newly restored form, clad in his Asgardian armor and cape. That confusion lasted only a moment before his eyes focused on the encroaching horde of undead corpses that staggered towards him. The Asgardian's eyes crackled with electricity and Stormbreaker roared with anticipation as its wielder charged and began to cleave his way through the dead like a hot knife through butter.

"Thor?!" Bucky squeaked in awe and disbelief. "How?!" Looking down at himself, Bucky was disheartened to see nothing was different. He was still a small, vulnerable rabbit being cradled protectively in Selina's arms.

As Thor's guttural roars bearishly deafened with the hungrier rawness of infinitely conquering the obstructive battleground, as barraging salvos of bluish-white energy, while Stormbreaker destructively boomeranged through Amora's skeletal legion, creating a gruesome hailstorm of bone shards and tattered dirt-smudged clothing akin to an explosive depth-charge of a grenade blowback. Intoxicatingly with unslaked aggression, of high-voltage momentum, the fattish-grizzly Asgardian delivered a hammer-shock against the cement, seismically ensuing a groundbreaking force that caused manhole lids to propel crushingly against parked vehicles.

In blinding reaction of acrobatic-phantom graces, notching up her feline-like agility Selina rushed into the alleyway, vertiginously collapsing on her knees as the litheness of her arms tautly strained to keep her sniper-lop preciously cushioned-snug- against the voluptuous swells of her neoprene-clad breasts, he was being achingly driven with boyish feistiness, involuntarily shifting his chubbier bulk against her cradled embrace, as the racking cadence of his hind-paws thumpingly demanded release.

Caught in an incredulous deadlock of hinged-stark- awareness, Selina immediately grazed her leather-gloved palm over the metallic plates of Bucky's G1 dog tags as she painstakingly eased him down, adoringly kneading his velvety-soft fur with chaste pressure, and kittenishly quirked up her full-bow lips as she caught a heave of stifled breath, teasingly. "I'll admit you do make a cute fluffball, Barnes..." She nipped on her underlip, thievishly gazing into the glacial smokiness of his beady aquamarine irises-she knew what needed to be done. "...but I need a Brooklyn boy to dance with tonight..."

Bucky certainly couldn't argue with that. The stakes had changed and he was a liability out here on the battle-field. The ground shook with thunderous vibrations that were the result of Thor's unleashed rampage on Enchantress' horde. The sight of the Avenger stirred a deep feeling of inspiration from within. A calling that took him back to a time when he was more carefree but also a force to be feared and reckoned with. A glint of metal caught his eyes, close in his proximity he could also smell the old nickel/copper that invoked a storm of memories. The stainless steel dog-tags were tucked safely inside of Selina's shirt. His beady blue eyes were hypnotized by the sight of something that was as much a part of him as Stormbreaker was a part of Thor.

What if?

He felt Selina flick her finger at his nose, grabbing his attention. She looked down at him with an arched eyebrow. 'My eyes are up here.' Her expression seemed to say. It suddenly made him realize where he'd been staring and he would've blushed if it were possible. Smooth, Barnes. "I'm gonna need those back, darlin'. Trust me, I think this will work."

The froggish suaveness of his gravelly Brooklyn drawl underlying became a headier rush in soul-arresting cadence, unadulteratedly with rampant-banking urgency, feverishly Selina angled her head down, as mahogany tresses disheveledly curtained over Bucky while she unerringly removed the metallic chain off the lithe curvatures of her leather-collared neck, as the mordacious reek of charred bone septically wafted off corpse-heaped trenches behind the Greenwood iron gates-the the second wave of ghoulish rancidity-a prophetic reckoning had converged over the blackout environs. Against that apparitional onrush, Selina clenched her delicate jaw with racking strain, as she deftly graced the metal-plated wartime service dog tags over the unbudging chestnut lop's pudgy neck."This better work..." she rasped, bluntly.

The closer the dog-tags got to him, the stronger he felt this magnetic pull that called to him. It was powerful and true. The chain came around his neck with the steel tags coming down torso. He closed his eyes and felt a white light engulf his whole world. Selina had stumbled back onto her feet, watching and hoping until the light had vanished. Bucky stared at two hands in front of him. One of them rough and made of flesh, the other polished and constructed with indestructible vibranium. He was back. It was a feeling as empowering as the tactical garb of the Winter Soldier he wore from top to bottom. The terror he once felt at being such a small and vulnerable creature made him appreciate the strength he now possessed, and the one who helped him to rediscover it.

He looked at Selina with stormy blue eyes, filled with raw intensity that nothing needed to be said. He took two steps forward and pulled her close for a quick passionate kiss. His lips molded over hers, desperate and firm, an outpouring of love and relief for something he feared he would never get to experience with her again. His arms enveloped her into a tight embrace as the dizzying kiss slowly dissolved into a tentative nuzzling of brows. "I'm back, darlin'. Ready to finish this?" He asked with a dangerous smile on his lips.

An untamed-quenchless rush felt suffocatingly implosive as the melding ardency of their kiss-swollen lips became lingeringly contrasted by tactile graze as Bucky's roughened thumb featherily branded a visceral promise over silken pearlescent contours of her cheek exquisitely delivering sensuous-aphrodisiacal heat of masculine reverence. The starving urgency exquisitely arced through her veins in a blinding rush, as her lithe fingers traced over the graven cut of his stubbled features, every defined-angle of virile-hunky ruggedness-the boyish suppleness of his chubbier-fuzzier visage was no longer prevalent on tauter- athletic solidity of heavy-banded muscle underneath tactical Kevlar.

"I thought you'd never ask..." Selina purred sultrily, quirking her pillowy lips into a devious smirk, foxily as the bristled rasp of his knife-edge jaw hotly razored against her flushed cheek, under unkempt tresses slickly askew over their temples, Selina breathlessly mirrored the roguish steeliness of his grayish-ultramarine irises with piratic decadence of her coffee depths as she deceptively slipped the Glock in the readied-mechanized clutch of his bionic hand. They were fringing on demonical-ruinous oblivion-a grueling requiem that sinisterly exorcised humanity.

Gearing up for one last stand on the mortal ground would bring them a breadth closer to eternity. With thieving precision, on her stiletto heels, Selina distractedly sashayed back to the Jeep, half-crouching down, while swiftly reaching behind a rear tire and clutched her new piece of hardware to orchestrate a grislier ritornelle of bullet-raiding mayhem: Heckler & Koch MP5K-PDW submachine gun. "Don't worry I brought a back-up piece..."

"That's my girl," Bucky took the Glock and with Selina beside him moved back out into the fray. They might've been outnumbered when they began but now they stood as an army against the putrid horde of undead littering the street. Dozens laid smashed in heaps of bones and smashed skulls. Down the street could see titanic flashes of light where Thor was cleaving a path back towards the cemetery. Bucky and Selina rushed down the street, picking off any remaining undead that were attacking frightened civilians screaming for help. Bucky smashed the skull of one zombie into dust with one swing of his cybernetic fist. The pelting explosion of lead shattered any others moving in on a pack of teenagers hiding on a school bus.

Bucky glanced over his shoulder at Selina who unloaded the full roar of her submachine gun on a group of 5 undead, not missing a single shot. Bucky's eyes widened as he glimpsed a zombie coming up on her from behind. "Lina! Look-" She spun on her spiked-heel and smashed the undead with a roundhouse kick before it could get a step closer to her. "Out…" He smirked at her with approval as they met each others eyes. His smirk vanished in place of shock as she threw a throwing knife in his direction. It found its mark, hitting a zombie skull that was coming at him from behind. How'd he miss that one? Looking at Selina, he flushed. "I saw him coming."

She rolled her eyes at him humorously.

Together they make it to the cemetery where Thor was wrestling what looked to be an undead rhino with his bare-hands. "What the hell is that thing?" Bucky wondered. In the graveyard could be seen flashes of light and the rippling of a red cape. Strange locked in battle with a similar-looking beast that Thor was fighting, only very much alive. "Steve…"

Undeterred by the kinetic crimson glyphs of Strange's counter-attack, malignantly against a choke-off snarl, Kriger thrust his canine muzzle against the draconic-bestial tenor resonating within the enhanced corded muscle bulkily flexed underneath grayish-blonde fur; the slitted crescents of his vitreous emerald irises gleamingly fused white-hot intensity of predatory-bloodlust- savageness, a pulsing murderous-deadened heat that fueled his inexhaustive-deadlier momentum.

With a controlled sidestep to evade the dire-wolf's thirstier approach, Strange adroitly whirled on his boots, keeping his shaky hands poised to compose astral strands of energy into a geometric shield. "Argh..." Jutting the curved edges of his twined incisor fangs, on viperlike accord of surging -breakneck aggression, ragingly, he yanked at the vivacious scarlet cloak with a jaw-gnashing assault. "C'mon..." he gnarled out, frustratingly against venting, throated pants, relentlessly tugging with a harsher grip in vicious tow as if the defensive cloak became a plaything of tug-a-war. "G-Get off..."

"Don't let him break free," Strange whispered to his cloak that wrapped around the oversized demonic wolf in a vice-grip. The sorcerer had come close to being bitten and maimed many times in an effort to subdue the beast without killing him nor sending him into a pocket-dimensional prison.

Steve Rogers deserved better than that, but already the sorcerer felt his options dwindling the longer he was unable to knock the beast out. Through the corner of his eye he had seen both Thor and Barnes return to the fight, both of them surprisingly back in their true forms. He would have to ask them later how the enchantment was broken.

His attention once again focused on the Kriger who tried to bite a hold through his loyal relic and partner. Strange recited the strongest spell he knew that was powerful enough to tame an Asgardian bilgesnipe. The kriger unraveled and roared, swaying on groggy feet as slowly his resistance began to ebb. "Go to sleep."

"Steve!" Bucky fought and shot his way through the swarms of undead, fearless and determined to reach out to his transformed friend and help Strange bring him back. Something had begun to change in the grim atmosphere surrounding them. The very winds seemed to howl with foreboding with a crackle of lightning illuminating the skies. It didn't seem to be coming from Thor who until now had kept his theatrics minimal to not cause any collateral damage.

Something terrifying was coming.

His suspicions were confirmed when a mystical portal suddenly ripped through reality across from him, barring the way into the cemetery where Strange and Steve continued to fight. Bucky skidded to a halt, feeling dread come over him as he watched an old but familiar face come through.

Against the synth pulse of a transcendental-galvanic breach, the Vanaheim Aphrodite haughtily emerged out of the sorcerous valance of her conjured-hellish- domain of Muspelheim; every voluptuous curve of her statuesque exquisite form was maniacally honed for vampirish-demented seduction. Adorned over the cascading sleekness of her lengthy platinum-blonde tresses wing-curve headpiece of viridian emerald with golden elfin runes was aesthetically braced over her villainous, sirenic features.

Quirking her voluminous lips into a noxious sneer, Amora glowered her steel-gray irises penetratingly at the dumbfounded blankness tellingly etched over Bucky's pinching, stubbled features."Well, this night has become disappointing..." she hissed out, vilely. "It seems you cleverly figured out how to get your worthless humanity back, Sergent James Barnes...That pathetic victory won't last, as I chasten your Midgardian soul into dormant oblivion..."

Bucky rarely felt uneasy when it came to facing down enemies. Even charging a Mad Titan head-on with only an automatic rifle was a moment that didn't fill him with disquiet. But this was an exception. The flawless features of the blonde beauty across from him was a sight that would have once made him blush with awe if he believed he was looking at a normal woman. It was a mask that hid the ugliness from within. A deceptive, evil soul that hungered for power and exacting suffering on anyone that challenged her. He had been one of those brave enough, believing she was nothing but a crazed Hydra lapdog the moment she strapped him to her table and began to scald him with strange objects that he now knew to be magical in nature.

A venomous sorceress who had killed hundreds of innocent people, and who tried to take away his humanity. He wouldn't be running from her tonight. His jaw clenched and his posture became poised. "Ziegler. Or is it Enchantress? I don't really care. You picked the wrong fight to go for a second round." His fleshy digits curled on the hammer of his Glock while his metallic ones discreetly drew his combat knife from his belt. "You hurt millions of people, including my best friend. We Brooklyn boys take that personal." Bucky kicked the skull of an undead corpse at Enchantress' head to disguise his attack then charged in with his knife held high...

Easing her gauntleted hand up sorcerously, with viperous ferocity Amora commanded a shockwave pulse of telestic energy the massive rootlets of desolate trees, ragingly Bucky gunned his intimidating momentum at boot-stomping pace, dodging the arcing slash of his tactical knife, Amora flexed her wrist, as the ground implosively tremored, razed coffins frighteningly toaster-popped against the collapsing fissures as roots colossally bulged out, poised to impale him."You dare to insult me with pitiful weaponry..." she yelled, mockingly, shifting a carnal glance of soul-stealing hunger at his beautiful-thievish kitten vaulting acrobatically over a bullet-riddled heap of skeletal corpses. " For such a heedless turn of mortal valor, I will relish watching your lover's soul cling on the knife-edge of my mercy..."

Bucky then knew true fear; more than anything he could have experienced or comprehended before when he saw Enchantress focus on Selina, and realized what she meant. An abyss entered his body and he felt his very life being sucked into it, leaving him a cold and trembling mess. Enchantress relished the fear in his eyes and with a gesture of her hand, struck Selina with a burst of light that caused Selina to react as if she had been gut-punched. She didn't know what hit her, not could she stop to think. Her eyes land on Bucky, empty without a spark of life to be seen. And then she fell.

"NOOO!" He cried from the bottom of his soul, falling into a downward spiral where his painful reality obliterated his sense of focus. "LINA!" He shed tears uncontrollably, his body fighting desperately to free himself from the plant roots that had ensnared him in a torturous restraint that prevented him from rushing to her side. His mind desperately searched and watched her, realizing to his mutual relief and horror that she was still breathing, slowly. Her eyes were open and unblinking, but more alarming was the fact that she didn't respond, and she was vulnerable to the staggering ghouls of undead marching towards her.

"What the hell did you do?!" Bucky yelled at Enchantress.

The ragged gravelliness of his deep-throated anguish felt sobbingly convulsive as a maelstrom of heart-grippingly defeat unslaked her calamitous hunger; bodily thrashing against the obstructive roots in aggressive tenor flexing over his bracketed ridges of heavy-sheathed muscle straining under frayed layers of Kevlar, Bucky gnashed his teeth, bleedingly choking on voiceless hitches of snarling breath, in feverish rush, he jerked his head back with neck-breaking force-a stuporous throb of catatonic- irrecoverable heartache tragically destabilized robotic- mechanized sync of his grappled bionic arm. He wanted to surgically hammer-drive a stake through the Enchantress's parasitic heart without a breath of mercy.

"M'gonna kill you..." he belted out in slurring pitch, rabidly, jutting out his stubbled jaw in beastly-livid ferocity as his wolfish brunette tresses damply webbed over hard-angles that delineated his bristled cheeks; the banking wetness of floored rawness of his glacial aquamarine irises nakedly knifed stormier with an excruciating onrush of blearing tears against the immobilizing pressure of a disinterred vine that snaked crushingly over his throat in paralytic succession. "G-Grah..."

Sneerily, with a serpentine variance of her tyrannic poise, Amora raised her hand to painstakingly deliver a cobra-strike into his ensnared throat."Your beautiful love has fallen into numbed throes of my power, Sergent Barnes if she prevails after this frightful hour...She'll become a generous extension of the Casket of Winters..." she raved, tauntingly, only to flinchingly reel back as careening whoosh of thunderous-scything precision cuttingly propelled towards her-Stormbreaker. An eruptive flex of bone-racking disgust quaked over pearlescence coolness of her sirenlike-witchy features as she raged out, ballistically. "Odinson...!"

Stormbreaker returned with a chilling whoosh back into Thor's outstretched hand. The blue of his eyes were mirthless despite the flat smile that was graced across his handsome features. "Amora. It's been a long time." He said with a cavalier voice that matched his swagger as he slowly approached the emerald sorceress. "You look well," casually he swats an undead grunt close to him as if he were swatting a fly crossing a spring meadow. "In fact, I would say you are looking greenier and far more diabolically vicious than ever. Though I can't say it is good to see you. That you survived Ragnarok when so many of our kind didn't, must mean the Norns have a sadistic sense of humor that they allowed you to live if only to continue torturing me further."

"You should know me better, spawn of Odin, I never stake my reign in one place..." Amora chimed, vauntingly in scabrous pitch, fiery virescent skeins incandescently wreathed over the barricaded roots. "Hrr-agh..." Against effusive—throated strain, Bucky's shapely-wide lips gapingly widened in rampant heaves of breath against the vicing pressure of contractive ministrations of throat-strangling vines, his lengthy roguish chestnut tresses dirtily lashed over the graven-edges of his tauten jaw, as the roots exhaustingly dragged him in a possessive fringe closer to a vacant trench—grave in demonical succession as phalanx of skeletal fingers twistingly clawed against vein knots of roots, macabrely slashing over the graphite alloy-vibrainum of Bucky's cybernetic arm."Asgard was damned by Odin's grisly betrayal that he concealed into the abyss of his failures..."

As the Enchantress irately registered the shaggy-bearded Asgardian's hastened burliness crashingly advancing to the ghoulish proximity of her resurrected warren, bludgeoning his with unstoppable-adrenalized momentum, the steeliness of her venomous-grayish irises flashed relishingly over a beer-bellied protrusion underneath his forged Nidavellir-steel armor. "I see the rapacious nature of that squalid hog-Volstagg has made you like a true king of Asgard...Fattened by his conquering revels, Mighty Thor..."

"Does that mean you no longer seek my affections? If that's the case, perhaps I should have indulged my appetite for mead and boar a lot sooner to spare myself your obsessive pursuit." He snarked with a dry look which served to only increase the Enchantress' agitation towards him. Thor glanced at Bucky and Selina, seeing how helpless they were-caught in the crosshairs of the Enchantress' wrath that spelled disaster for those in her way. In their youths she and Loki had been almost inseparable in their pursuit of magic. Thor wondered just how much of a negative influence she had on her brother or vice versa.

"It is I you hold grievance with. Not Lady Selina, not James. Let them go, and you can have me." Thor would have surrendered himself willingly if he believed there was a chance of sparing the lives of his new friends and allies, but as he watched the Enchantress' magic begin to entangle James in a vice-grip of death with the veiny thorns, he knew that she would offer no such mercy. "Enough!" He yelled, the fury manifesting with stormy orbs of electricity.

As Thor readily grounded himself into a battle stance, voltaic heat of pulsed electrifyingly over the angular curves of his eye sockets, a combustible intensity was amplifying into a thunderous-elemental fusion as strobes of arcing bluish-white energy radiated over the cemetery, lancing through skeletal torsos of her zombied cavalcade in phantasmic sync."You dare strike me down, Asgardian hog," Amora snarled out in teeth-gritted pitch, as Thor challengingly raised Stormbreaker with a hammer-grip.

Mephitically with an unhinged shift of her footing, Amora fixed her callous-vitriolic gaze back at the fissuring trench as tangled vines graspingly hoisted Bucky's thrashing-bulkier weight over the emptied grave, while he blindingly gored the stabbing precision of his combat Geber knife clutched his leather-sheathed hand, driving unmerciful-desperate force into the thickened root-his wolfish tresses unkemptly whip-lashed in a thrashing disarray over his tensing, bloodied features. "You have no idea what I wield for victory in the dark twilight..." she admonished, raptorially, glancing at the orange-fleshed of girthier-rotund pumpkin-unmarred by the carving knife. "Allow me to show you by damning this Midgardian warrior to a vessel of earthen harvest..."

Bucky couldn't speak, feeling the vines wrap around his neck like a noose preparing to choke the life out of him even as he fought and struggled to cut himself free. The veins had thorns, and as they pierced him, he felt as if his blood was on fire-invaded by an unforgiving force that he came to identify as magic. Dark magic that began to twist and mold him, bloating his gut into a horrific expanse that began to turn orange. What was happening to him? What was she doing? The questions rushed through him until he felt overwhelmed by its weight.

Thor's anger had reached its zenith. A consequence that acted as a double-edged blade, dangerous for both himself and his enemies. With a bestial roar, he lifts Stormbreaker and throws it in Enchantress's direction, only for the Asgardian sorceress to open a miniature portal with her outstretched hand. Stormbreaker flew into the rift before it was promptly sealed, sending it far beyond Thor's reach. Thor stared blankly in mute shock, realizing his error that would have made Loki both groan and laugh at his stupidity. With the opening, Amora commanded her veins to enwrap Thor in the same state as Bucky, twisting and piercing the god of thunder who struggled and roared at her in defiance. "You will pay for this, Amora!"

"Asgard would have been ruled by celestial titans purged into Helheim," Amora condemningly rasped against a viperish hiss; the galactic chaos bringers-Deviants-mutative hellions of the wasteland planet- Morag- that were punishingly banished during the Iron Ages of blood-ravaging warcraft, as the cosmic elements of Infinity Stones were forged -weaponized to deliver soul-reaping -sanguineous tempest of unquenchable carnage if the astral crossways-dimensional paradoxes were breached-if the branches-realms of Yggdrasil were obliterated. Mad-Titian was a rogue descent, seduced by the starvation of cataclysmic wake of soul-butchering defoliation that would have freed his ethereal sires. "The Deviants that were cast into the realm of useless mortals will conquer again once my heralded Queen scrapes off your wretched filth..."

Ravening in unhinged ecstasy, sadistically Amora gestured her lithe hand to shunt venous pulses of penetrative energy freakishly into the jutting massiveness of rubberized, globular flesh inflatingly burgeoning underneath Bucky's Kevlar garb as the mutative-fattened strain of gourd-size chubbiness was saggily glozing out viscid carroty fluid over tauter ridges of swelled bracketed flesh; he was syrupily oozing treks of pumpkin juice. "It's amusing to watch such masculine beauty rapidly dissolve into a bloated vessel that will be a dormant extension of these carrion-infested grounds."

Her dominance exerted, the sorceress reveled in the power she now boasted that gave her complete authority over her enemies. A soldier out of time reduced to a mindless animal, a jaded assassin diminished to a fatten pumpkin...and an unrequited love being torn to pieces for refusing her. Soon all of Midgard would exalt to her and know to worship her powe- The world unended suddenly in a manner that sent the Enchantress teetering and falling into a great nothingness. Her alarmed scream cascaded until she shattered through a water of reflection, causing mirror shards to explode into her surroundings. She laid flat on her stomach, confused until her experienced mind took in the signs. She was still in the graveyard, but no longer just.

Enfolding vitreous spectrums glimmeringly became implosive like conjured prisms that weaved around her, incensed by a display of Midgardian trickery, seethingly as she braced her palms over reeking dirt, Amora reactively careened a verdigris salvo against the crystalline barrier; nothing penetrated through-the scarlet cloaked Eldritch sorcerer-magician- unflinchingly ascended in front of her with draconic tact maddeningly invested in his unwavering stance. "This foolish trick will not contain me..." she railed in biting cadence, nefariously. "There will be no dawning of united hope, accept the reality that the vitality of your precious friends will soon diminish, and when your defeated corpse lays at my feet, my beloved Captain will feast on your heaped bones.."

"Right now he's taking an overdue nap, he won't be doing any fetching within here." Strange snarked with a fearless look. Ordinary men would perhaps grow timid beneath the livid glare the Asgardian sorceress was now giving him. But after standing in the presence of a cosmic evil that killed him hundreds of times in so many horrific ways, he found the likes of Thanos and now Enchantress to be nothing but deranged aliens with delusions of grandeur. But still dangerous, he knew not to underestimate them.

"The Mirror Dimension is a gateway that we lowly Midgardians learned to access for thousands of years. Something I gather, an Asgardian sorceress would think is trivial and beneath her." He let that insightful hang in the air for Amora to absorb. If the fury on her fair features was any indicator she knew exactly what his condescending words implied. "You won't get out of here unless I say you can." Her response was what he expected, a roar and a salvo blast sent in his direction. She hit only air as the salvo passed through him and he stood looking at her with a blank look.

A decoy. Images of Ikkon. Loki would be proud of that, or maybe annoyed at being copied. Enchantress didn't stop, her ire and pride demanded nothing but the satisfaction of bringing this new adversary underfoot and stabbing his neck with her heeled boot. Strange extended his power, creating multiple decoys to stay ahead of his enemy but careful not to expend too much power. The defense would only last so long against a being that boasted not only super-strength and power, but also stamina. "Vishanti," Strange breathed, conjuring an eldritch blade of sparks that he used to move in and engage.

Enchantress grinned evilly, conjuring her own blade before meeting Strange head on. A balletic dance of sparking blades and magical pulses rang out through the dimension, shattering grave-stones and any objects that were contained with them. Enchantress was agile and trained in physical combat, using a series of kicks and twirls to feint Stephen to expose him for an attack. Were it not for the Cloak yanking him backwards in-time, Stephen knew her blade would have dug into his ribcage. Bearing down on her opponent, Enchantress lunged and brought her blade down only for Strange to conjure a Seraphim shield, causing sparks to explode, blinding the Asgardian's vision.

Strange could see his opening and resolved to finish this. "Crimson Bands of Cyttorak!" His hands sprung forward and viscious tendrils of flame and sorcery reached out and ensnared the witch from head-to-toe. Strange commanded the dimension to up-turn as he began to spin the Enchantress around like a lasso, bringing her smashing through trees and gravestones into his trajectory before slamming her to the ground. She laid still, but breathing. Strange wiped a bead of sweat from his face. And Wanda said he didn't work out enough, he thought dryly. His thoughts were taken by a painful groan close by. No longer focused on Enchantress, Strange rushed towards the open graves where Bucky and Thor were still trapped in a planting of veins.

What he saw nearly made him ill as his first surgery. Their bodies were growing in putrid mass of flesh and plant, a horrid conjury of human and pumpkins. "Hang in there, Barnes, Thor. This isn't exactly my area of magic, but I will try something." He would spend the next couple of minutes practicing a number of spells that did little except to slow their transformation. It was then the Enchantress began to stir and laugh at him.

As vampirish intensity chillingly melded in her smoky-gray irises, Amora disarmingly extended out her opened palm, the arrowed edge of her gauntlet pulsed in taunting steadiness."I know that the sentiment of affection is weakness of mortality," she chuckled, witchily, as crimson skeins flaringly ghosted over her flexing wrist, morphing vaporous energy into a quartz orb that she exhibited with a torturous play of deft tenderness, hefting the orb up for Strange to heart-stoppingly gaze at the half-stunned, auburn mink trapped inside. "I've discovered a way to shackle your heart within the devices of my conjury...I will admit this little vermin was easy snare in my coils after I poisoned her with my friendly bite...She accepted thralls of defeat, just like you will..."

And just like that, Stephen felt the balance of power shift away like a landslide, crumbling every advantage he might have created in this confrontation that was now affecting him in a way he wasn't prepared for. He might've been Master of the Mystic Arts who fought titans and cosmic entities with all the bravery and poise that a man in his position, with nothing to lose, could afford. But that all changed when he met Wanda. And now...now he could feel it. The fear, the anxiety gripping him over a situation where he had no control. In the operating room he wrestled with that feeling until he perfected his craft enough to master those feelings with success.

What success could he hope to attain here? "...What have you done to her?" Stephen asked once noticed the mink was barely conscious, stirring in the manifesto prison the evil sorceress had created. Stephen didn't know how she got to Wanda, or if Wong was even alive, but the only then that kept him from on a knife-edge was the thought of risking Wanda's life by doing something terribly reckless-like attacking in a fit of rage.

The suffusive wake of her soul-crippling onslaught felt bankingly glorious as she registered desperate utterance in Strange's deep-timbered undertone that was betrayingly visceral with a raiding throb of unbidden heartache; every phantom measure of his valiant-ignitable resilence had become excruciatingly deadened by her infinite anesthetic of unwarranted failure, it felt like a neo-dissector was arduously severing through his bones-the abducted mink's soul was expandable as she rapaciously straddled him down into calamitous-unavailing throes.

Brandishing up a feigned grimace errantly over his silvery-goateed jaw, reservedly with painstaking traction, Strange descended to ground level as the dimensional aura was telekinetically ushering verdigris energy-hunger- out of the Nordic empyrean realm of Hvergelmir, while Amora distractingly held the imprisoning glass bauble effectively akin to open-handed bargain-a new gambit to play off the rigged decks. "I can sense the urgency you stow back, it reeks off you..." she hissingly scoffed, clashing with the electrified heat of his unblinking azureous irises as she possessively glided a lithe finger over the smooth glass of her orb. "If you wish for this little vixen to go free, yield to the unity of my power..."

A year ago, Stephen's answer would have been a sharp and immediate "no". His devotion to his work had once alienated him from those he cared about. Christine Everheart was one of his biggest regrets. But the silver-lining of losing her, of being a loner, meant he could do his job more efficiently-without compromises. But he was empty, lifeless and bitter. Until meeting Wanda, he had lost touch with how important life was worth living. And now he was at risk of losing her, and failing his duties all at once. He felt trapped and teetered on the edge of a total collapse. Without the Time Stone to aid him, he couldn't even count on a do-over if things went bad. He could do only one thing, and that was choose the only option that felt right to him.

"All right...I'll surrender to you if you let her go." Stephen's turbulent mind went into overdrive, searching desperately for one last trick up his sleeve. When his eyes fell on the slowly stirring Kriger, he felt there was perhaps only one chance left. Slowly he beckoned his Cloak towards Enchantress. A distraction to keep her eyes off of him, and on his loyal companion that floated, laid out like a rug. Discreetly, Stephen opened a portal with a slight-of-hand. A round domed object slipped through out-of-sight. Enchantress flicked her gaze back at him with suspicious eyes, gauging his intent. Stephen hesitantly dropped to his knees, hands held low at the same time Enchantress dropped the mink into the cloak.

The moment she did, she reacted like a viper catching its prey and folded him in a paralyzing grip of vines and magic. The Cloak took off at top-speed, carrying Wanda to safety, leaving Stephen at the Enchantress' mercy. Her hand latched around his throat, causing him to gasp and groan at the vicious sinking of her nails into his skin. Her eyes are intense and malicious to match the grin on her face.

Forcing bruising pressure over the virile resiliency of his broad nape, with a rushing surge of cobra ferocity, scratchingly, the baneful pythoness strafed the litheness of her tenser fingers deeper into his exposed pulsing vein; irrevocably not easing her rabider grip with an echoing flex of choked mercy. Slamming him down in back-breaking tenor, her voluminous lips stretched breathlessly, flashing a razored-length of viper fangs. "Join your felled friends in my conjured oblivion as Hela purges out your wasted soul..."

The gateway of the astral plane-the Dark Verse was being cleaved as tenebrious-inky glyphs luridly imploded a conducted breach within the atmospheric vistas of Greenwood, darkish verdurous of cosmic magery ominously webbed over the earth-razed headstones, a chimeric-apparitional fusion of war-harvesting bloodthirst symphoniously resonated as incandescent voltage tearingly strobed as the vampiresque-feminine silhouette of Odin's bane haughtily emerged, the spider-like edges of an ebon necro-iron headdress arced demonically in rabid poise-the dimensional bridge of Helheim had been anchored.

With euphoric reverence of the slaughterous demoness-the homicidal commander of the Einherjar Berserkers-traitorous oathbreakers to Odin, Amora hastily dropped on her armored knee, welcoming her deific empress with a telltale convey of reined exaltation invested over the ashen fineness of her seraphic features. "So this is what Midgard has come to," Hela fumed in a resonance of mocked-disgust, huskily. "Odin's pitiful mercy will no longer reign, as I unleash my conquering storms of destruction over these mortal insects..."

The sight of the Asgardian goddess of death unsettled Stephen in a way that Dormammu didn't. Hela's malicious gaze was riddled with bits of insanity that were tempered by a sharp focus, knife-piercing and deadly. It spoke of ages of imprisonment and suffering with only hatred being a guiding force. She would casually snap the neck of anyone who so much as annoyed her, let alone challenge her. If that wasn't alarming enough, it was the fact that in her hand she carried along an all too familiar weapon, crackling with electricity. Stormbreaker had apparently found a new owner after being thrown through a magical rift. The goddess of death now wielded the power of thunder and lightning. Strange felt his heart collapse into his stomach at the revelation. He steeled himself when her emerald eyes landed on him and she flashed him with a grin that made him blood run cold. He didn't shy away from her gaze, but knew better than to provoke her in such a delicate moment as she stood surveying the battle-ground and the lines of undead that bowed to her.

With scorpion prowess in her rapine advances, gazing down at her servant-Amora, fiendishly Hela thrust Stormbreaker to a queenly level of her black armor-clad shoulder, impeding her zombied death-marchers with possessive-imperial command. "As firstborn of Odin, I was sired to become the executing raider, unstoppable as blood marked victorious requiems..." she yelled blaringly in growlier pitch, her shadowy grayish-virescent depths hungrily fixed on vacant trenches. "The province of war reaped havoc over the Nine Realms...When I am done with this befallen world, the horizons of daybreak will be smeared with red when the betrayers of Asgard become unworthy for Valhalla ..."

Strange was beyond outnumbered and could only hope that the last piece he set in motion would help turn the tide. His blue eyes searched and could see Barnes. His body was almost unrecognizable at this point. His limbs were completely transformed into olive green vines, all muscular definition still noticeable but unresponsive as he blearily clung to consciousness. His torso had been molded into an orange pumpkin with the only bit of himself still human was the part of his face still visible. "Selina..." Bucky called weakly, a tear shedding from his eyes. "Steve..." His heart was heavy with despair, believing he failed those he loved and called family. Was this how it was supposed to end for them? Alone, miserable in defeat? He prayed, hoping and believing that God was looking out for those that still kept Him in their hearts. "Please..." He called.

Nearby, the Kriger rumbled from his sleep. The residual magic that kept him unconscious began to ebb, bringing him back into a chaotic frame of mind and a burning hunger within. He needed to feast. To carve a hole in the bodies of those his Mistress commanded him to kill. His demonic eyes blinked repeatedly, cringing at the sight of a bright light reflecting off of a metal object in front of him. His paw reached out and swatted only for him to recoil at the force that reflected back at him. A soft ding echoed in his ears, causing him to growl and whine. What was this? Beady eyes focus and take in the shape of a dome circular object with flashy colors of red, white...and blue. The colors were flashy, curiously they were also a source of deep awe, invoking from within a sense of...loyalty. Truth...Liberty...Justice.

He understood.

But more importantly, he remembered.

A moonlit night, lost in a storm of regret where he threatened to drown in his sorrows. He had been uplifted by a mortal-a man...a friend. "B-Bucky...I'm with you..." He growled. And then he roared, collapsing and shaking as if he were under a mental assault from an unseen foe. It was from a force within, buried deep beneath a grave of malice. Memories came like a flood, ceaseless and devastating as they washed away all resistance until he could do nothing but...remember. The agony of his spasms went unheard beneath a clap of thunder that began to pour rain down on the cemetery. The Kriger roared and rolled, feeling the magic within begin to pour out of him like a poison being sweated out. He searched for relief and the shield shone like an anchor to keep him afloat. He latched onto it like a lifeline. At that exact moment, a bolt of lightning struck and a burst of light engulfed his vision. Fur and scales peeled away to reveal hard planes of muscular flesh. Blue eyes opened and a gasp of air followed. "Till the end of the line..."

It was an invincible mantra of a brotherly covenant of kids of Brooklyn revving bone-deep as he blearily gazed into the vibranium of his shield in beckoning-soldiery- urgency, the wolfish disheveled length of blonde-golden tresses were shaggily curtained over the hawkish-graven cut of his broader angular features that were roguishly bristled; under the dark navy blue of his patriotic tactical Kevlar uniform the enhanced flexion of heavier-ridged cords of Adonis-honed muscle bulkily rivaled the feral cadency of the Dwarven curse that stealingly divested him into an Asgardian Wardog. Draggingly in a conscious variance of gripping traction, forcibly Steve braced the rough-leather of his fingerless gloves over uplifted granite of a demolished headstone.

A viscerous rush of stoked adrenaline feverishly in his veins as he clashingly steered the niveous azure of his stormier irises hazily at the morbidly roundish orange-fleshed pumpkins uglily entangled within gnarled barricades of vines-deformed-fattened trophies that the Enchantress would devouringly harvest out. "W-Who are they...?" he choked-off in stammering-throatier pitch, breathlessly, shifting the piercing rawness of his vigilant gaze at cloakless Doctor Strange. "Doctor-"

"There's no time, Captain. You're our last chance here. Make it count," Stephen cut in, straight-to-the-point. His bedside manner was never one of his finer qualities, but in this instance it was all Steve Rogers needed to hear. It's what wiped away that look of befuddled confusion and turned it into that inspiring look of valor that led so many soldiers into battle. He stiffened and groaned as the vines holding him began to grow tighter, squeezing every muscle in his body with painstaking strength that robbed all breath from his lungs. It was enough to draw the attention of the Vanaheim sorceress and the goddess of death who snapped their eyes to him...and then towards Steve.

"Impossible! You dare to take my pet from me!" Enchantress roared. She was prepared to end the life of the upstart Midgardian conjurer who believed himself her equal. With one flicking gesture her enchanted veins would rip him bloody shreds. That all halted the moment she met the pulverizing edge of a shield thrown at her face.

Steve's body was like a motorcycle roaring across the field at breakneck speed, his feet kicking up dirt as he sped and soared. The satisfying clank of his shield hitting Enchantress' face causing her cry out, gave him an added boost of adrenaline as it was sent bouncing back. His hand held out and caught the shield as it came back. The onrush of speed saw him react unpredictably as he rolled and lunged high, narrowly avoiding a scalding projectile thrown at him in retaliation by the blonde sorceress. Steve landed next to Strange, using his momentum to bring the edge of his shield down on the vines wrapped around the wizard's arm, chopping clean through them like an axe through wood.

In her viperous tenor of macabre regality, Hela gestured her knife-like fingers haltingly with deterred poise at Amora while in spookish tread she ghostlily neared the strappingly handsome legendary soldier with infinite-quenchless bloodthirst gleaming rampantly in her quicksilver-ophidian irises under the curved aesthetical malachite-jet fringe of her demonic spidered-legged headgear. "Yield your warrior spirit to me, darling boy, and I will grant your friend a quick death..." Hela lashed out vilely, a disgusted quirk etched deeper into the pale-ashen fullness of her scowling lips, as Steve unerringly braced his vibranium shield against his raised fore-arm with defensive reaction, amusingly Hela extended out her gauntleted hand on lethal accord of murderous intent, shadowy-nitrous veins of astral ether morphed into a sharpened length of an ebon Necrosword that savagely jutted out of her opened palm-a weaponized instrument to orchestrate the battle knells of soul-reaping carnage."The choice is yours, mortal soldier..."

Steve would have felt inwardly shaken at the sight of the Asgardian goddess of death were it not for the adrenaline coursing through his veins. It was a fuel that kept him running, kept him on a reactive edge rather than an inactive one. The howling winds were loud and whipped through the cemetery, causing him to raise his shield to block a piece of debris coming towards him. That was when he saw Selina. His blood ran cold at the sight of her motionless body collapsed over a mound of dirt just near the gate of the cemetery. Her eyes were wide-open and for a moment, he felt fear that grip his heart, robbing all breath from his lungs at the possibility that she had been killed. Another loss that he and Bucky would endure. But as he saw the steady rise and fall of her chest, he knew that wasn't the case.

She was paralyzed in a trance. Alive. But still in danger. The groaning and shuffling of the Enchantress' drones permeated the atmosphere, instilling dread within the First Avenger who watched as they approached Selina's helpless form. "Selina…" Not thinking twice, Steve charged forwards, leap-frogging over a large headstone and kicking the skull off a mangled corpse in his way. Hela and Enchantress both looked on, the former mildly intrigued at the thought of engaging a formidable mortal while the latter was filled with vengeful fury, desperate to be unleashed upon her longtime hated enemy.

"I got you," Steve flung his shield towards necks of a trio of undead, severing exposed spinal cords and skulls in one go. His aim was true, the vibranium tool bouncing off every surface and maiming each of the undead in the way. He leaped forward and scooped Selina up into his arms, carrying her towards cover behind a mausoleum. Meanwhile, Strange worked efficiently with the distraction caused by Steve. His freed hand forged a sling-ring portal beneath him, causing him to fall through with the vines still attached. Enchantress was shocked and couldn't react in time before the portal closed, severing the vines and her power over the Midgardian sorcerer.

"NOOO!" Her vicious screech echoed throughout the cemetery.

Steve propped Selina up against the side of the wall, gently brushing her hair from her face and patting her cheek. "Selina. You got to come out of this. Buck….Bucky needs you." He breathed with a weary look, hoping desperately he could reach through to her.

"S-Soldier boy..." The featherlight pressure of chaste-virile heat was a thermal contrast of urgency traced soothingly over the pearlescent contours of her sleek-elfish features, beckoning shivered-delicate precision nakedly coupled with tentative echoes of brotherly reverence. Against the slumberous barrage of warding drowsiness, with instinctive traction of vomitous accord, Selina braced herself against the stone wall, underneath the fringe of her lashes, she feverishly caught odious bulges of gnarled vines and black-jaded racemes-spires gothically forming a bone-impaling stockade around marble tombstones as a decayed surge of Hela's skeletal-zombied armada clawingly twisted erect from dirt-heaped trenches, hollowed-sockets glowingly radiated crimson embers of astral hellfire."I guess you'll owe me some rest later..." she quipped, breathily.

Steve would've responded with a quip of his own, but then both he and Selina were alerted to the crackling sparks of a familiar sight breaching their hiding spot. A sling portal opened and Doctor Strange stepped through, fully freed from the vines with his cloak once again wrapped around his shoulders. "Strange," Steve's shoulders sagged with relief.

"Good you're both safe," Strange said. 'For the moment.' Steve helped Selina to her feet as they both took a moment to collect themselves. Rain began to pour over them, only adding to their exhaustion after such a lengthy battle that appeared to have no advantage in their favor.

"We need a plan of attack," Steve voiced out, urgently. "We need to call in Banner, Scott, everyone that we-"

"There isn't time for that." Strange discouraged. "Hela and Enchantress individually represent a global threat. Together? The entire galaxy could very well be at risk if they're allowed to carry out their goal unopposed. They'll attack the Asgardian colony first and then they'll reap all life on Earth, turning every soul into monsters to serve them."

"Yeah, unless we can hammer down on this homecoming party" Selina hinted deviantly, the frigid murkiness of October downpour was tangly drenching her mahogany tresses, flitting the brazen-thievish rawness of her coffee irises shiftily at the Dwarven-forged ax-Stormbreaker covetously gripped in Hela's unshakeable clutch-a dynamical conductor of her resurrected-unslakeable vitality out of the Dark Verse gateway."Soldier boy and I will keep the wicked queen distracted while you, Tricks," Lithely, she gestured a gloved had to his Tibetian golden sling-ring that mystically accessorized his surgery-marred fingers."Use that fancy ring of yours to slam a door on this Asgardian hag..."

"Its up to the three of us, Captain," Strange said, agreeing with Selina's proposal. Time to call in help from New York, Wakanda and New Asgard would just give the two Asgardian goddesses time to enact their plan and begin scourging all life on Earth.

Steve for his part, understood the gravity of the danger but was nonetheless concerned about engaging another threat with so few numbers. They nearly lost Tony after the Endgame. But now they were at risk of losing more if they left Bucky and Thor to continuously suffer against the Enchantress' magic.

Seeing Steve's apparent conflict, Strange stepped forward, venturing outside his comfort area as both a physician and a sorcerer. "We can do this. We just need you to lead." 'To be worthy.'

Steve's jaw tightened with newfound inspiration as he felt a tingling of anticipation from his finger-tips. He could feel it calling it to him. "Then let's give em' hell."

Detecting the abandoned resistance—weakness of her fleeing Midgardian opponents, impassively Hela clutched on the knobbed branch handle of Stormbreaker, arcing the curved hatchet-Uru metal edge with a scything command towards Greenwood's iron gates-preparing to siege the Norwegian sanctuary into corpse-filled bastion of her earthen domain as white-hot-meteoric salvos of ethereal light flaringly assailed out her veins-ushering a cyclonic firebolt to irrevocably snuff out traitorous—plagued souls of New Asgard.

"They called this a mighty weapon for Asgardian kings..." she uttered out with hellacious spitefulness in her raspier pitch, the length of black cloak flappingly billowed like a pennant over her metallic-armored shoulders as she thunderously hefted the ax up to electrify the louring banks of darkened cloud masses over the eastern horizon with dimensional incandescence—a spectral beacon of her nightmarish-massacring warpath.

"In my veins channels the Eternal Flame, that will conceive such eldritch deviances of resurrection that I can only wield and once the corpses of this realm fall, they will become useful extensions of my shadow-crossed ranks..." Against the Gothic- smokier contrast shadowing her murderous irises, Hela sneered at the gratifying sight of her younger brother-Odin's champion defeatedly imprisoned within a bulbous-ogre-sized pumpkin vessel. "Well, dear brother it appears, I will reign over the Nine Realms while you waste your last days straining for breath..."

"I believe this bloated fool of Thor's Midgardian friends was the one they called James Barnes..." Amora snickered, currishly, the frenzied smokiness of her grayish irises became snakily alight with vehemence as she haughtily stood at the breadth of the globbing, protrusive—bubblier mass of rubberized orange-hued flesh that was heart-wretchedly being solidified—plumped within the cradling ensnare of rooted vines as torn frays of tactical Kevlar stickily glided off the ballooning, fatter rotundness of an unmoveable—dormant pumpkin. "Shall I allow him to prevailingly burgeon as a morphing symbol of your conquest, Mistress?"

Hela's cruel smirk was matched by Amora's malicious offer. Before the goddess of death could impart her acceptance, her honed senses screamed at her of an incoming threat that arrived with all the swiftness of a prevailing wind. She reacted only a moment too late before her headdress was struck hard by a roaring disk. The clanking metal of vibranium was as deafening as a gong echoing throughout the graveyard, causing her to recoil with discomfort. Amora was the second to suffer as the shield bounced off Hela's headdress and struck the blonde sorceress square in the face, causing her to stumble and curse in Old Norse.

"Get away from my friend." The voice of valor and defiance entered their midst. The goddesses turned equal parts irritated and bemused to see Captain America catch his shield, standing his ground. The mortal man stood mighty in his uniform, taller than even some of Asgard's warriors, and with a focus that could rival Odin himself.

"So this was the mortal who turned into the Fell-beast," Hela gritted in baleful pitch, her wraith-like poise engagingly beckoned a dead-pass challenge of their weaponized-arsenal to conduct tempests of war; arrestingly mirroring the fiercer valiance stormily melded in his cool azure irises-a battle-tested pulse that determinedly rode over the graven-edge contours of his dirt-smudged jawline, as the leather strap of his tactical helmet loosely clung over his uniform's collar. "I desire for him to be kept alive, as I have a much grievous fate for this soldier to endure in the gorges of Helheim..."

"Hela." Steve's focus was on the intricately clad emerald and raven goddess of death. "Thor told me about you." Thor spoke much about what happened to him and Bruce in space. About Hela who had single-handedly overthrew Asgard's armies, killed Thor's friends before taking his eye. She was an older sister he knew nothing about, but was arguably more powerful than him. She made Loki's handiwork look like a child's play in comparison. The turmoil Steve felt over this confrontation threatened to return before he stowed it away as he looked at his two allies beside him. Strange and Selina stood their ground, their attention landing on Enchantress had a score to settle with the Sorcerer Supreme.

"I would ask you to stand down and leave but I don't think either of us is willing to do that." It was rhetorical but necessary to gauge his opponent's perception towards diplomacy. He expected it but nonetheless clenched his jaw as Hela flashed him an amused grin that was chilling.

"Smart boy." She taunted. "Though perhaps not quite if you think you can stand your ground against me."

She was arrogant or perhaps overconfident. Steve wondered if all Asgardian villains were this way and predicted to hear the words "kneel", at any moment. He wouldn't. Not for Loki-not for his older sister. Something in his eyes gave away his conviction which prompted Hela to raise her eyebrows at him curiously. "Well then lady, looks like we're in for a long night." Steve said.

He waited with baited breath as Hela gave Enchantress a nod of approval. With that, the Asgardian sorceress launched herself forward towards Strange, a sadistic laugh escaping her lips. "Stand back and cover me," Strange yelled to Selina who immediately rolled away behind a headstone, narrowly dodging a burning blast of magic and began opening fire on Enchantress.

Steve and Hela stood across from each other, silent and assessing. Her height put her nearly at eye-level with him, her sultry figure was athletic and spoke of ages of experience. Her fingers were wrapped around the hilt of Thor's new weapon-Stormbreaker-and she wasn't shy about demonstrating her needless advantage over him as they began circling one another.

Bracing his shield against the taut-ridges of his Kevlar-clad bulk with a defensive variance of his controlled footing, tensely Steve became attuned to grislier dissonance of her butcherous thirst as the vitric-jade of her spider-edged helm imposingly emitted a miasmic aura, demonically commanding her zombied denizens to march a flesh-ravaging assault into the streets while her predatorily readied to deliver a merciless throat-slashing assault, she was impressed by the unwavering traction of his battle stance, the explosive-blood rush was intoxicating to discard. "So you have chosen death to be your fate..." she jeered, mockingly, leveling Stormbreaker with executing precision to cleave open his chest in with frontal thrust. "I will make your blood rain over the corpses of your worthless friends.."

"Not gonna happen," Steve threw his shield, hoping to distract the goddess long enough to move in for a frontal assault. He charged and rolled towards her, twirling to deliver a whirlwind kick against her solar-plexus. It felt like hitting a brick-wall. His momentum only caused her to stagger but she barely looked phased as she laughed at him and proceeded to backhand him across the ground.

Steve landed hard on his side, but knew the damage could've been much more severe in that Hela was toying with him. He charged at her again, narrowly avoiding her as she brought one of her scythe-like blades down towards his head. He raised his shield to deflect the blow, but the force of her strength caused him to tremble on his feet. She kicked the shield and him with it, sending him rolling on his back.

Vibrations shook the Earth. Blue eyes widened with realization. He dodged left and right as the ground suddenly began exploding with grisly blades. Years of discipline added with sharp reflexes enabled him to maneuver through a maze of death. The blades were demonic and long, protruding from the Earth as if they emerged from hell itself. His arm was narrowly saved by his shield that was scraped in a shower of sparks. Steve grittled his teeth and leaped high using his shield as a surf-board to sail overhead.

As expected, one of the blades plunged upward into the center of his shield, propelling him upward into the air, bringing him high up. Steve closed his eyes and focused, reaching out and feeling a rush of energy travel up his arm. The stormy winds howled and thunder clapped, causing the skies to blacken and arcs of lightning to lance down into the graveyard as a confused Hela looked on. Shifting her gaze between the grave where her diminutive brother was withering away and then towards the skies.

"Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor..."

A thunderous—incanted mantra of Odin's voice clashingly rumbled over the blackened vistas, with a contractive strain of his thrusting hand, impressively harnessing eagle-like graces of his descending, acrobatic momentum over the obsidian protrusion of jutting spikes barbarously elongating to impale him. The soul-driven tenor of his virile resilence surged underneath the silvery navy-blue kevlar, tauten bands of sculpted muscle bulkily flexed with amplified as Steve readily answered the Nordic warrior's cadence, ushering an incarnate reality of cacophonous tempest as voltaic nacreous strobes of whitish amethyst cyclonically propelled an electrifying wake from the bridged dimensional gateways of the Multiverse —a hailed —arrowing ferocity that wasn't sired in the wombs of mortal blood.

Confusingly, in feigned alarm, Hela staggered back over a leveled coffin, her slitting irises widened as incendiary salvos of lightning quakingly lanced heated —careening voltage into the cemetery ground, blindingly singeing the maggoty skeletal corpses in ricocheted succession: Mjolnir was coming. "No...How is this possible, I destroyed that cursed hammer..." A breathless snarl razored out of her throat, gratingly."No mortal can be worthy of Odin's power..."

And just like that, Steve came down from the skies like a meteorite striking the Earth with titanic force. Soil and debris scattered into the air with a shockwave carrying it across. Hela recoiled yet stood her ground. Selina and Strange spared a glimpse from their entanglement with Enchantress and felt immediate hopeful by what they saw. Captain America holding Mjolnir aloft with an unbreakable posture. His veins hummed with a vibrant energy fueled by the arcs of electricity encompassing his body. His close eyelids opened to reveal blue eyes glowing with raw power. Their sights were set on the goddess of death who gazed at him with disbelief.

"You may want to rethink that." And then he charged, bursting with speed and the telltale humming of a twirling hammer in his grip. Hela's shock was violently knocked away with a hard swing, Mjolnir's vengeful might smashing against the side of her head, breaking away a piece of her headdress. Steve didn't give her a moment to react as he dived in, using his shield to block a forceful kick from her boot, the recoil wasn't as overwhelming to him as before. His strength and adrenaline carrying him onward as he began raining a flurry of attacks-shield, knee, fist and hammer across Hela's torso until he felt an equally powerful force clash against Mjolnir in his grip. Stormbreaker was the obstruction, held securely in Hela's hellish grip-emerald green eyes burning with anger.

"You honestly think you can strike me...!" Hela lashed snarlingly, with a hostile counter, she pivoted on her spiked heel in vicious traction; in whirling precision of a slashing thrust of her gauntleted hand, with predatory-hone reaction, ghoulishly she forged darkish mordacious vapors that contrasted into retractable ebon shards of obsidian Neoswords, against the frenzied maelstrom, penetratingly throwing heart-lancing strikes into granite stone and jutted out skeletal torsos. The viscid fluid of smelting decay misted rancidly over gaped-opened trenches; orcish death-walkers screechingly crescendoed into a cadaverous pandemonium of bone-sloughed heaps as the fiery—astral glyphs of eldritch -driven energy were being telekinetically wielded by Doctor Strange across from her kill-zone.

"I know what makes a soldier fall when the mercy of defeat is granted, boy..." The vampiric- serpentine demoness taunted in malevolent pitch, arcing Stormbreaker with executing poise to lethally graze a skull-cleaving assault over Steve's helmet. "Give that wretched hammer to me, and I'll make you an extension of my eternal ranks..."

Gnashing his teeth with a full-throated snarl, roaringly, in lightning-quick reaction, as cool wetness rainily dripped over his sensuous-chiseled lips, Steve defensively braced his athletic bulk into a low split-crouch, angling his shield with his tense forearm, as he dodged a flurrying barrage of knifing hailstorm, bodily gunning his propelling ferocity to batter-ram her with a combative—sledgehammering rush. On a vigilant fringe of his accelerated pace, to duel against the mirrored cadence of tactical supremacy, he called up warred reserves of his enhanced agility—pushing himself to the full-measure limit with headlong momentum as he bruisingly clutched Mjolnir as throbs of blood oozily dripped off the archaic handle.

"Not interested, lady." Was Steve rough response after narrowly dodging a protruding blade hellbent on impaling him. His offensive attacks had done little other than wake-up Hela to the reality that he wasn't an ordinary soldier that could be easily squashed like a bug beneath her boot. His disciplined mind worked in sync with the reflexes of his body; carrying him through Hela's relentless flow of attacks as he searched for his opening. He had been observing her attack patterns. She relied heavily on her ability to summon these demonic blades from outta nowhere and create a more hazardous environment for him than a mine-field. Mjolnir and the shield in his hands kept him in the game. One of her blades was aimed for neck, and a second for his stomach. The hammer smashed one, the shield deflected the other.

The cosmic power flowing through him hummed as if instructing him on his potential-what he could do. Arm raised high summoned lightning into his grip, enfueling him to the brink he felt ready to burst. He released the energy by driving the hammer down against the surface. A shockwave expanded and swept across the cemetery, shattering gravestones and propelling Hela backwards. She held her ground but was distracted long enough for her to miss the edge of Steve's shield colliding with her face. A loud gong rang out, stunning the goddess of death who suddenly felt all air escape her lungs as Mjolnir was thrown smashing against her stomach, knocking her down.

"This is for Thor," Steve murmured, summoning Mjolnir back into his grip. Hela shrugged off her damaged headdress, eyes filled with raw fury and raised Stormbreaker. It was time to finish this. Both raised their weapons to the heavens, calling the lightning to their sides as the winds carried them up high. They rumbling clap of thunder was deafened by the collision of two godly weapons causing an arc of lightning to split open the sky. Hela and Steve came crashing down, falling...falling…

Seeing this, Strange pulled both himself and Selina into the Mirror Dimension while a bewildered Enchantress was left to gawk at the sight of a shockwave of lightning slamming into her.

"Where are we, Tricks...?" An incredulous tenor of Selina breathy undertone raspily echoed as vitreous barriers of mirror-like glass prismatically kaleidoscoped around her; against a feverish shunt of nausea, dizzyingly, in rampant traction of her planking elbows, half-exhausted, Selina arced the svelte contours of the litheness of her neoprene-clad body with balletic poise. Gritting her teeth in vehement strain, her dark irises fleetingly blurred against a sonic blast of lightning, vaporizing the zombied husks as dissected bones splintered in that explosive wake, tarry gloze of liquified-carious flesh viscously trekked over the headstones. "Okay, now that's little gross for a girl to see..." she quipped vixenishly, clutching onto her Glock with a reactive flex. "We need to curb this witch party now..."

"I think its over," Strange said after a moment of watching and waiting for the sounds of battle to resume over the now demolished graveyard. The entire area was littered with debris and enveloped in clouds of dust. The storming droplets of rain had lessened into gentle taps that neither Strange nor Selina could feel. Their hesitation was discarded when they took in the sight of an injured and unconscious Enchantress laying splayed out on the ground. "Stay close," he cautioned. The sparking wheel of magic opened a hole in front of them and the sorcerer beckoned Selina through. They stepped back into their dimension, breathing in the pungent stench of decayed flesh and wet soil. Droplets of rain come down on them and on Enchantress laying at their feet.

Thinking quickly, Strange created a magical rune beneath her, trapping her within its ring. "She won't be going anywhere… But where are they…" He wondered searching and unable to see beyond the blur of their surroundings. Had Hela and Steve done the unthinkable and destroyed each other?

Quelling down a shiver of racked numbness, ephemerally doing her utmost brandished an impassive charade over her elvish features, Selina registered heart-crushing-infective urgency pulsing throughout the ghoulish environs-they were on the blinding edge of hope. Feeling a bruising pinch of her nails against her fisting-gloved palm, she gnawed on the underswell of her lip, under the fringe of her mascara-curled lashes, her gaze searchingly towards an obstructive barricade of upturned coffins; she found a brawny masculine silhouette valorously garbed in patriotic tactical Kevlar, standing in a victorious stance with his legendary shield gripped in his leather-gloved hand. Hard-edged tension rapted over Steve's roguish, bloodied features as he glowered fiercely down at his defeated opponent-Hela-being reined into submission with Mjolnir weightily braced over her armored breasts. "Soldier Boy..." she called out, keeping herself distant. "I guess you like to bring the dance to a new level, huh?"

"Something like that," Steve smiled, glad to see Selina unharmed. He could make out the shape of Enchantress waking up with Strange speaking to her. A hardened resolve took form on the Avenger's face in the aftermath of what had to be his most grueling one-on-one fight he'd ever had. Enchantress and Hela had come to wreak havoc on what they assumed to be a weak and battered world, with heroes too weary to return to battle. Remorse filled Steve's heart as he considered those who were caught in the crossfire. His thoughts were disturbed by the dark ominous chuckling of his defeated opponent. The right side of her face was scorched by the devastating collision of Mjolnir and Stormbreaker. Were it not for his shield, Steve knew he would have been more than just scathed.

"You will never see true victory, soldier..." Vitriolically, Hela grimaced in a wraithlike seethe, the spidered appendages of her ebon headdress gouged into the reeking dirt as she twistily angled her head on straining accord, shifting her murderous gaze at the swelled -out pumpkin fattening into a colossal blob of dormant flesh. "My failure of a brother no longer prevails to your mortal reach...He will tragically join Odin when our horizon breaks..."

"Not if I have anything to say about it." Strange cut through the ominous tension with a commanding presence. Steve and Selina stepped away as they watched a portal begin to open directly beneath Hela. "Might want to hold onto that, Captain." Strange nodded towards the hammer; still keeping the goddess restrained as she now began to struggle and curse with realization. "Farewell goddess of death, I'll tell Thor you said hello." Hela released a roaring scream of fury as the earth beneath her fell away, sucked through into void of time and space. And then she fell into the dark, bitter cold of Nifelheim. Steve caught Mjolnir at the right moment just as the portal sealed behind her. She was gone.

Against the vertiginous onslaught fringing a torturous pressure through her veins, breathlessly Amora felt the feverish slickness of bloodied rivets graspingly contrast over the ashen pearlescent of her arms, delivering an infectious strain of thorn-like Nordic reddish skeins in Eldritch accord. With a reptilian variance of unhinged reaction, the Vanaheim sorceress waspishly flashed a glint of venomous heat at Doctor Strange as the infusive utterance of his celestial incantation of Yggdrasill's light ethereally melded the electrical pulses of Stormbreaker into circlet glyphs-the astral fusion he adroitly composed out of the Dark Dimension. The rigid suppleness of her ashen flesh coiled with cobra-like ferocity as she railed out a throat-crackling snicker, crazily. "You damn fools have unfortunately lost this engaging battle, the mighty Thor and your beloved Sergent Barnes will soon become soulless vessels of earthen decay..."

Warding off paralyzing traction of heart-stabbing momentum on her stiletto heels, Selina neared towards the entanglement of vines stoppingly, careening-rampageous apparitions of desperation excruciatingly became soul-crushing in a breathless onrush of grappling throes of knifing heartache as her brandy irises mistily flitted blank rawness over a lumpish-bulgy orange pumpkin-a mutative deformity of a ballooning prisoner was irrevocably cradled within the mudded depths of the emptied trench.

Angling her chin over her tensing shoulder, as mahogany tresses clingily webbed over her fevered cheeks, Selina felt the errant frigidity of drizzling wetness, the downpour had become a cool-deadening anesthetic; in that denotive moment of starving grace, she blindly clutched onto a gnarled vine, and with a controlled-rampant- precision, her gloved hand edged deeper, as she chastely kneaded reverent pressure of beckoning-intimate- heat over rotund bulbous flesh of the pumpkin's expanding mass. "B-Bucky..." she choked out voiceless hitches of suffocated breath, threadily, caressing her splayed palm over rubbered solidity of the unmovable pumpkin, while Amora's crackling hyena- laugh deafeningly stole the visceral cadence of eternity that became too agonizing for her to answer. "No...P-Please come back..."

Steve had witnessed many gut-wrenching and horrific sights in his lifetime. Witnessing Bucky's many brushes with death always appeared to be a constant that each time it happened he feared it was the final time. The pain never lessened, it only grew. And so nothing could compare to the stark reality that his best friend wasn't just lifeless, but was now completely unrecognizable in the twisted barks and veins that enveloped the grave he was thrown into. Both he and Strange glanced between each other, both grim-faced and morose as they listened to Selina's gentle sniffles over the rotund pumpkin that was once the man she loved.

Gloved hands tightened into fists and Mjolnir returned to Steve's grip. He turned and glared at Enchantress with a tight jaw. "Turn them back now, Ziegler." He demanded. His threat was left unspoken as the hammer hummed with raw anticipation.

Repelled by his adamant stance, against vengeful blindness, Amora mirrored his silvery azure depths, that glacial intensity searingly pulsed with voltaic-stormier heat that melded in his veins; the heathen warren of carrion denizens-legions of mortal warcraft that she forged had collapsed; heralding installations of the slaughterous butchery of Midgard receded back into the fathomless gorges of Hvergelmir. "I find your wretched demands amusing," she hissed, damningly, feeling viscid sludge of liquified bones frothing gloopily over her gauntleted hands. "My powers are unbound and since you denied my Mistress a blood-soaked reign, you shall watch these fattened husks become cursive ghosts in the casts of your dark twilight, Captain..."

"Then I guess that means we won't be needing you anymore. I can think of a few good places to throw you. The Dark Dimension would be ideal..." The biting sardonic words of the Sorcerer Supreme gave Enchantress literal pause as she watched him stand in front of her. Something had shifted in his eyes that were no longer reserved with passive determination. There was an aura of conviction. A judge laying the sentence upon the guilty held at trial before him. The sorceress' first inclination was to dismiss the mortal's power but having been bested twice by him, she knew he was no mere novice. His power was great enough to send Hela to the icy hell of Nifilheim where she would not return. What would he do to her? Amora raised her hand, gesturing for him to stop. Steve exchanged a look with Strange, wondering how serious he was that he managed to intimidate the sorceress. "Unless, you undo your handiwork. Everyone you turned."

Enchantress left with no other option, valuing her own survival than the satisfaction of leaving Thor and Barnes to their miserable fates. Her hands folded together, conjuring a triangle sphere that morphed into an emerald Vanir glyph that expanded and burst as a shockwave of light across the cemetery. Steve and Strange looked around, pleased to see nothing had at least changed for the worst. "It is done. Now...release me, wizard!" She spat.

"I will. Don't ever return to Earth." With that, Strange opened a portal and watched as a screaming Enchantress fell through and into the dark underworld of Hvergelmir where a giant serpent would be keeping her busy.

A silence settled over the area; uneasy and timid. Steve and Strange walked towards the pumpkin graves, keeping a respectful distance from Selina who hadn't moved-who hadn't even reacted to the burst of magical energy that swept through the vicinity. Her stare was vacant and listless, as if her life had been drained into the branches that imprisoned the soul of the man she loved, leaving only a shell behind. Steve and Strange exchange an uneasy glance, worried that Amora might have actually lied to them.

And then something had begun to change. Strange could almost feel it. The cleansing of a dark aura that could no longer remain strengthened due to the absence of its power-source. The glowing orange embers of eldritch magic began to fade like a light being burned out. The vines that were entangled around the grave wilted and peeled, revealing a contorted mass of leaves and ripped clothing. Selina by now had realized what was happening, her coffee-brown eyes wide and unblinking with an undried tear staining her cheek. The groaning of the tree-limbs were like a roar of a dying animal as Enchantress' magic dispersed.

And then, alarmingly, the bulbous pumpkin had begun to expand; morphing as if coming to life before their very eyes until the ribbed skin turned into flesh. The thick round shell had turned into the form of a man who suddenly sprang to consciousness with a harsh gasp.

"What the hell happened?!" Bucky gasped, eyes wide in total fright and confusion until they took in the calming sight of Selina hovering over him. The last thing he remembered was her being paralyzed and surrounded by Amora's undead puppets ready to finish her off. The fear-the terror he felt in his heart had been too real, he thought he had failed her. But now...now… "Lina...You're...You're alive…" He reached up to cup her cheek, tentative and loving with a glistening of emotion in his blue eyes.

An evocative reality became cravingly grounded into stuporous drags of addictive havoc, while she gazed into the silvered heat of his grayish-aquamarine irises, under the wolfish length of his rain-dampened chestnut tresses, Selina felt his whisper-soft touch growing heavier against disarmed tenor that was intensifying with abandoned-intoxicating urgency; shifting against the ridges of corded bulkiness sculpting his muscled chest, she registered the virile smoothness of his larger palm bracketing a tentative flex of amorous pressure against the delicate underside her angled sleek jaw, gliding drift of roughened his thumb swelteringly graced a reverent pulse of sensuous heat over the lusher swell of her glossier delectable lips. They were reaching for an edge of a moment-the mirrored -headier cadence of a decadent rush-the incarnate resurgence of sweet victory that felt starvingly long-denied against the freakish sorcerous onslaughts infectiously conceived by Amora's portentous -doomsday conjury.

Smirking with a kittenish quirk on her full-bow pillowy lips, Selina hushedly became aware of the wafting rank of pumpkin juice drizzly infused over his naked, tauten flesh. "I think both of us need to shower, Barnes..." she quipped under a devious breath, snarkily, as the metallic graze of his cool bionic fingers caressingly threaded a fiercer grip of mechanized precision over her tousled mahogany whorls, in chaste-ardent steadiness that was exhilaratingly conveyed as their foreheads blindly touched with intimate contrast of wet heat, revving up a grip of sensual tension of their passion-driven arousal. "If we get this graveyard stink off, there might be time to dig into a few Halloween spoils..." she purred, naughtily scrunching up her nose. "Or maybe you prefer carrots..."

"Very cute, darlin'." Bucky snarked before bringing her in, poised and amorous as his lips feathered across hers and rekindled the passion that was feared lost. It wasn't a desperate nor lustful meld of intertwining lips, but a dance between two reunited souls who never wavered in their love. The kiss lasted a moment before they were disrupted by a loud boorish groan coming from the grave beside them. Everyone flinched but watched expectantly as a newly restored Asgardian King pulled himself into a sit-up position, groaning like a man who had the worst hangover.

"What did I miss? Did we win?" Thor groaned, grimacing at the taste in his mouth that reminded him of stale veg. His memories of the battle returned and he took in the state of the grave-yard, satisfied and relieved to see his friends were all present and alive, and Amora, he could only presume, was knocked half-way across the universe where she would not haunt him.

"Yeah. Looks like it, Thor." Steve said with a relieved smile.

"Good…" A belch escaped the thunderer who then noticed that Steve was holding Mjolnir to his side. His once most dependable and prized possession had once again found its way into worthy hands to save the day. "Show off..." Thor jabbed with good-humor. It lasted only a moment before the blue of his eyes widened and he felt his stomach rumble. He threw his head over the ledge and emptied the contents of his stomach, much to the amusement and disgust of those present he coughed up pumpkin seeds. "I need ale...Lots of it." He held his arm out and called Stormbreaker into his hands, determined to fly to New Asgard, drink away all memory of this terrible night; and maybe tomorrow finish that candy he left behind.

"Steve…" Bucky approached Steve with Selina on his arm.

"Buck…" Steve smiled, happy to see his best friend had cheated death yet again, and had his best girl keeping him up on his feet every step of the way. "This is becoming a bad habit." He said breaking the tension which earned him a chuckle and a soft pat on the arm from the bearded brunette.

"Don't I know it." Bucky studied his friend carefully. Looking at him again, he saw something he was afraid he'd never see again that night they talked. He saw life, he saw peace, and a willingness to move forward.

Pillowing her cheek against the ridged heaviness of Bucky's fleshed shoulder, grungily under tousled-damp mahogany tresses with an incredulous flit of her dark irises, Selina gazed at the mystical virtuoso as he remained trancedly impassive-locked in a telepathic stupor, the cavalier smoothness of his matured-goateed features raptly edged with stiff concentration as he quakily eased up his scarred pin-hinged fingers a painstaking hairbreadth over pulsing strains of astral energy that beckoningly veined out of a transcendental highway-the breached phantom crossways of the Multi-verse plane: something was coming out.

Keeping Bucky grounded at her side, he clumsily lost reined traction on his combat boots from bone-numbing exhaustion after being morphed into a bulging globular-sized pumpkin-it was hard for him to shake off. Shifting her brandy depth with jaunty deviousness alight, Selina detected the heartsick urgency Strange guardedly masked with a dismissive-snub-clench of his bristled jaw. "Let me guess, someone is calling on the other line of your mystic radar, Tricks?" she purred coolly, a play of slyness fringed in her undertone, he didn't react with his off-hand deadpanning tenor. "Well, don't keep them waiting..."

"I don't intend to," Strange replied. His level of concentration had changed ever since he'd become the Sorcerer Supreme. While the human mind could only perceive certain senses such as sight, hearing, taste and touch; his mind was now attuned to cosmic abnormalities and psychic connections. One more specific of which happened to be with a certain Avenger he'd grown quite fond of. He focused and began to rotate dual digits in a circular motion, opening a portal to the New York Sanctum where he had made an important drop-off hours ago.

The wheeling veins of Eldritch-telekinetic energy blazingly converged over the battle-ravaged cemetery; skeletal remnants became sifts of vapory dust against seismic pulses, clenching his beard-ragged jaw, tensely Steve hefted up his shield while Bucky scowlingly echoed his tactical intent, leveling straight-arm precision of the Glock with triggered readiness as reddish psionic flares of magenta consumingly whooshed over headstones. Gearing up his predatory-sniper-caliber, tautly Bucky pinched his furrowing brow, scanning over a white-stone mausoleum and Gothic statuary with the laser-edged periphery of his vision, not easing his grip on the hammer-lock. "I don't like this..." he drawled, throatily, advancing in mid-step with Selina defensively crouched low on her neoprene-clad hunches near an opened trench."Waitin' for your call, punk..."

Steve wasn't sure what was happening, nor why Strange had just opened up a portal but knew that it wasn't to bring in another hostile entity for them to fight. He calmly gestures for Bucky to stand-down as his eyes take in the sight of a familiar face stepping through the portal.

"Steve..." Within a measured rush of a heartbeat, curvaceously garbed in her burgundy Victorian-steampunk- leather jacket that gothically contrasted a corset-like brocade, Wanda hastily emerged out of the sling-ring portal, raspily beckoning for him in urgent pitch, evident to the elfish sleekness that waifishly belied her Sokovian visage, keeping her sleeved arms forcibly extended wide in telltale strain against the rupturing implosion of the dimensional barrier. "I-I have something to show you...There isn't much time before the gateway closes..."

"Wanda." Strange and the Scarlet Witch greet each other with a heartfelt embrace that could be felt by everyone present. The younger woman smiled and laughed at something sardonic he whispered into her ear, and she responded by whispering something into his own. Strange suddenly looked stunned by whatever it was he was told. Steve, Bucky and Selina exchange uncertain looks, wondering what was up with all the secrecy.

"Doc, Wanda? We all right here?" Steve asked worriedly as Wanda's eyes focused on him.

"You have an appointment, Captain." Strange said, barely containing the smile on his lips as he opened up a new portal. This one leading to what appeared to be an open road in an unknown location. Steve looked between the portal to Strange, and then back towards Wanda, uncertain what this meant.

In those rigged seconds of effusive urgency, heartily Bucky edged a measured step closer to Steve; heart-crushingly fostering the Brooklyn covenant of their unbreakable brotherhood, he needed to let his 'little Stevie' go, the infinite battleground they crossed was barren against the promise of new daybreak-echoes of prevailing valor would never be deafened. Straining a crestfallen quirk of his shapely-wide lips, evident to the Brooklyn covenant of unbreakable brotherhood deeply graced in the bracketing crow-lines of his glacial aqueous irises, smirkily, Bucky murmured out against dredged up croakiness of a breathless pitch, whisperingly, giving him an encouraging nod."Go for it, punk..."

Something had happened, Steve knew. Everyone appeared to realize that. Steve was almost afraid to wonder what though inwardly he couldn't stop thinking about the one face he wanted to see at his side more than any other. One that was beside him through thick and thin for so many years since waking up in this new century. But one look at Bucky who gave his nod of encouragement was enough to uplift him from his somber trepidation.

"Hold onto this for me." He says, handing Bucky his shield. "Till next time." He and Bucky share what almost felt like a parting smile, but both knew this wasn't goodbye. Mjolnir would find its way back to the compound with Strange's help. All that was left was the way forward. He had to move forward, and in this instance, it was quite literal. The twirling sparks of magic that created the gateway stood in front of him and Steve felt as if he were about to step into his future. Everyone watches as he steps through with the portal closing behind him.

"Think he'll be all right?" Bucky asked Selina, nuzzling her cheek. Steve didn't need a guardian or keeper, but a part of Bucky would always worry for his best friend who he looked out for since childhood.

"I think Rogers is going to have the ride of his life, handsome..." Selina rasped knowingly; the virile muskiness of sandalwood nakedly caressed over the pearlescent flesh of her delicate elfish features in a headier rush of their melding arousal, a feverous volition that she gloriously craved against drags of restraint. Flitting her lashes against blearing onrush wetness of errant tears, Selina registered the intimate wake of their evocative-rivalrous sync-a tempered demand for her abandonment he commanded, hungrily.

Every tenor of sensuous pressure ignited a slow-burning fever that wouldn't be quenched; she felt the waging—chaste precision of his bionic hand was shiveringly touch-driven that dueled with her rapid pulse as she kittenishly twined her lithe arms over the broad corded thickness of his nape, blindingly a decadent surge of wet heat of the plushier fullness of her lips ghosted an intensifying promise of boneless mania steamily over the hard-edged planes of his stubbled jaw, as she purringly urged. "You do owe me a Halloween spoil, Bunny Boy..."

Wordlessly he leaned in and claimed her lips in a deep kiss full of promise to make good on her claim later that evening. Inwardly, Bucky felt as if an invisible weight on his shoulders had been lifted and the future would begin to look much brighter for everyone. -

Dawn had begun to peak over the horizon, bathing the skies with a mosaic of colors from vibrant pink to warm yellow. It was a beautiful canvas that the artist within Steve could appreciate as he stood on an open road out in the country. He wasn't sure where he was at first. But one look at a nearby sign told him he wasn't too far away from the facility outside of the city. He silently took in everything; the trees, the fields, the every brightening skies and wondered why he had never stopped to appreciate such a calming atmosphere that could feel like home.

Of course, it only felt like home when it had those closest to you to share it with. He knew he wasn't alone. He had Bucky, he had Sam, he had Wanda, Thor, Selina, Tony-everyone that he could call friend and family. A solemn heart could always yearn but push forward…but it could also be rejuvenated.

'Please Nat...Don't let go...Dammit...'

The desperate flex of Clint's vicing grip had anguishedly stolen her pulse in a tenfold; she felt the nether frostiness of galactic wasteland of Vormir chasmically resonated through her veins in the soul-crushing moment of surrendering herself to the elysian bridge of captive apparitions-souls that were harvested on the sacrificial fringe. It was a trade-off run that she had unremittingly geared up for; a votive-suicidal choice that was measured by the ultimate-immeasurable price of her disposable-infective blood. A contingency extension that she conceived where they downsized into the quantum dimension; knowing the inevitable stakes were high. 'Whatever it takes...'

The damnable-surgical cadence of the Red Room had been finally silenced. In the heart-gouging moment of throbbingly registering the straining-urgent ease of her best friend's bloodied hand on the edge the icy crag; they had one chance to reverse the soul-reaping-genocidal energy of Thanos's cosmic Infinity Gaunlet. The incarnate legacy of the Black Widow had been cleaved with an unforgiving price-she had betrayingly lost her fostered sister Yelena to the surgical devices of that ability-copying parasite Taskmaster who had deceptively composed in the underground ranks-harmonic industry of weaponized-combative- marionettes.

'I use to have nothing...'

She wouldn't give Clint Barton to the Soul Stone; that one part of herself that kept fighting to do the right thing, stoking the battle-tested extent of her undeterred-grievous choice to voluntarily fall into the celestial rift of eternity: staking down her expandable deliverance of viscerous redemption. Everything was beyond reach from the mortal plane-the visceral throb of unbidden-contractive heartache wouldn't staunch out. She needed to get back to him-Steve.

After being side-tracked with greenlight missions of SHIELD, harnessing deceptive-tactical calibers of warranted spycraft; Natasha kept herself unbreakable like granite-distant to the limits of her heart; the killing stage of the Red Room Academy had exorcised out her resistance for combative supremacy tested in the blood-smeared crosshairs. When Hawkeye-Barton's arrow delivered precision of mercy in a market sector of Budapest, she became a defective Widow operative-a Sleeper Agent recruited by the underground 'tradecraft- installation helmed by Nick Fury, utilizing hard-core mechanisms of calibrated survival, becoming a fugitive of her own unforgiving-butchered past.

Then, on the flight-deck of Helicarrier, she met the awakened First Avenger-a soldiery descendent of paragon ranks of American heroism; Steven Grant Rogers was a modernized-valiant-hearted- tenacious 'Perseus' who had daringly cut off the tyrannical head of HYDRA with unquenchable and enhanced resilience when malodorous fumes of bloodshed vented out of the battlemented frontlines of war-torn Europe. He braved the impossible-sacrificed everything to finish the mission when the interminable odds tragically flipped against him.

At first, Natasha emptily valued him as the boyish patriotic 'eagle boy' as Fury selected him to determinedly command the united Avengers when the Chitauri armada invasion ushered by Loki had destructively ravaged over downtown New York, after that day victorious day, open grounds of breached trust didn't falter; nothing was the same-Natasha had found her new dance partner-just like Andromeda.

Now, she felt detachedly anesthetized-grappled out a chimerical paradox, almost like vertiginously wading against a relentless undertow-only half-awake to feel the electrified beckon of love's charity-a retractive grip of anchoring salvation. Becoming aware of the elemental callback as fiery sigils of kinetic magenta ethereally barraged around her-a symphonic resurrection that manifested as celestial branches of Yggdrasill morphed into paradisiac beacons of eternity.

Brandishing a poised semblance of tactical nonchalance, inadvertently Natasha braced the supple planes of her leather-garbed back against the chrome handlebars of parked vintage Harley Davidson, her grayish-teal irises searchingly flashed with catatonic echoes of warred resistance as the knifing questioned careened through her veins: did everyone that nightmarishly dissolved-harvested into sifted heaps of ashy mulch on the battlegrounds of Wakanda come back...?

She had waited patiently unlike a woman who had been given a second chance that she didn't say anything. Not a word, not a sound to give her away as he shuffled about the road, turning a corner until he spotted her behind a cluster of trees by the curb.

Steve ground to a complete halt, unable to mask the look of emotion on his face once he realized who it was he had been brought here to see. The face that haunted his dreams and waking nightmares for months now, and until last night he wasn't sure if he would've ever seen again. "...Nat?"

She stood leaning back against a Harley Davidson, decked out in tight blue jeans, a brown leather jacket with her crimson-colored locks pulled back into a braided ponytail. A small watery smile was across her rosebud lips, but he couldn't, for the life of him, bring himself to succumb to the empowering feeling of total joy. Not after what happened last night.

It couldn't be her... Could it? They stood across from each other in silence, neither making a move forward, but Steve struggled with himself as he took a step forward, and then another, until he was in front of her. His heart beat rapidly in his chest the closer he came and took in that blood-rushing scent of lavender and citrus. That was too familiar to be faked...along with the flecks of blonde mixed with her copperish red locks in her braid. It was her-there was no doubting that.

His heart began hammering so hard he thought it might burst as he gazed into her misty teal eyes that were fighting to withhold their emotions. "What was the last thing you said to me?" He chided almost playfully.

She gave him a watery smile as she tucked in her bottom lip. "Well, I guess it was more than five seconds..." She teased.

And just like that, all doubt vanished from inside of him and his joy soared to unimaginable heights. He raced to her and lifted her up into his arms, crushing his lips to hers in a breathtaking kiss. His heart was quaking inside his chest, making him feel breathless as their lips moved and they breathed into each other like they had dreamed of doing for so many years. It was therapeutic, it was life-giving and shattered the barriers that had been between them for too long.

Steve held her in his arms, almost afraid to let go until she coaxed with a reassuring smile that set him at ease. Neither of them made an effort to wipe the trickle of tears from each others eyes as they basked in each others warm presence. "There's so much I want to say to you, Nat. There's a lot I should've said. I-" Steve began, recalling the remorse he felt last night. His eyes must have revealed so much, or maybe it was the kiss itself, because his words were halted as she cupped his cheek.

Against the stark pressure of wonderous-unfeigned heat that rode stealingly through her with an incendiary-hungered pulse of aphrodisiac voltage as the rampant firestorm of white-heat arced rackingly in her veins; a tenor of novel resistance was caught in a rushing drags of her breath as the bruising shift of his sensuous-chiseled lips over her flushed cheek hotly edged deeper into a vibrant—promise—release of starved ecstasy. Utilizing the ardent flexion her sirenlike caress—a recapturing touch of feminine compromise, her lithe fingers exquisitely traced phantom—feverous delicacy of a kneading pressure over the graven-edged heaviness of his beard-roughened jaw that branded a definite revelation. An exhilarative pulse of naked ferocity tempestuously fueled amorous rhapsody, under her heavy-lidded gaze, Natasha stiflingly mirrored the oceanic intensity of his cool azure irises fringed with tear-dampened lashes: nothing ever felt so real.

Angling the voluptuous curvaceousness of her svelte form dizzyingly against tauten-planes of his bulked solidary—the invincible reality of him garbed in navy-blue Kelvar-a fusing-boneless contrast of sensuous tactilely as the cushioned swells of her lusher breasts; a dynamical—mirrored rhythm that was breathtakingly glorious in a rapturous accord of headier—intoxicating urgency. A ratcheting pulse of naked desire tempestuously fueled amorous rhapsody, under her heavy-lidded gaze, Natasha stiflingly mirrored the oceanic intensity of his cool azure irises fringed with tear-dampened lashes: nothing ever felt so real. "Let's just go for a ride, Steve..." she huskily urged in a smoky undertone with a foxier cadence and blindingly lifted a black visored helmet off the motorcycle's saddle, thrusting it against his armored chest, teasingly. "We both need to live again, don't you think?"

Truer words couldn't have been spoken except for the ones that didn't need to be said. There was a time for that later tonight. Right now, it was a new day and Steve couldn't think of a better way to spend it than this.

"I'm driving." He accepted the helmet with a gracious smile and then straddled himself into the front of the motorcycle. It had been months since he had driven his Harley Street 750. Some who drove bikes were either thrill-seekers who chased the sunset, or troubled souls looking for an escape. Steve drove because he appreciated the simplicity of a nice quiet ride made even more special by the dame who settled herself into the seat behind him. Once Natasha was fully situated behind him, Steve throttled up the engine, feeling it purr beneath his seat as two arms wove around his waist, hugging him close.

The sun was climbing higher into the sky. All was quiet in the countryside to the two souls who drove on empty roads with no clear destination in sight. Neither Steve nor Natasha cared. The road to this kind of tranquility had been loud and chaotic. Their focus had been to save all life, to give the universe another chance at sustaining itself in peace or war. For Steve, much had changed over the past few days, for good and for worse. But if he learned anything it was how important the fight was-and how it gave him this second chance to find the happy ever after he'd always been hoping for. Was it all worth it in the end? It damn sure was.

Natasha saw the world in a whole new light as her gaze watched the passing scenery. From the fields of oak trees, to the streaming rivers, to the robins flying overhead. There was a beauty she had never fully appreciated. But being given a second chance at life made her want to live in a way she had denied herself as the Black Widow. Family was important-Yelena, Alexei, Clint...and Steve. She wouldn't be afraid to embrace that vital part of her existence that was truly worth living for. Her arms tightened around Steve's waist as she rested her chin against his back, smiling as she looked to their new future together.

The End

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