The Price

Strength

"Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost."

Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice

A.S. Byatt

Sometimes, he dreamed.

But only sometimes.

He saw shapeless things while his body sputtering (almost as if it was a truck stuck in a snow drift). Darkness was there—the only constant beside the cold (or was it heat?)—surrounding him in its arms as if they were good friends.

He often woke up to darkness. Fell asleep to darkness. Dreamed of darkness.

There was a face there, too, occasionally. Brown hair like warm chocolate, eyes like honey, lips red like blood (or a flag. But there was more than red on that flag, wasn't there? He thought so—when there was a time to think).

If this was the afterlife, it was severely disappointing—he couldn't move, for one. Someone said that he would be able to move when he was dead. Unless he wasn't dead. But life was noisy and he couldn't hear anything except for the ringing of silence so he supposed he was dead. Maybe. Possibly.

Anyway. It was disappointing.

Disappointing and cold. Or hot. Something burned and ached and hurt—dear God his lungs felt like they were bursting and doing nothing at all. It was as if his heart was tearing, as if his entire bearing was tearing.

The pain went all the way down to his soul.

Or his stomach.

(It was his stomach.)

Guess that answered whether or not if he was dead. Unless he was being punished. Maybe lying on the enlistment form was a sin. He knew lying was, but really? For just that? Huh.

Pepper Potts, CEO of Stark Industries, never told anyone what Project Shield was supposed to be doing. Many of the exec. board members figured it was a waste of money—no profit came from it, no publicity, what use was a project like that? She never told them that it was Tony Stark's idea and that the money had gone into building a robot that could drill through ice and be handled by remote control.

She especially never told them that Tony Stark himself and Bruce Banner were at the controls.

Instead, Pepper smiled at the ideas tossed around, at how the attack on Manhattan made it clear that Stark Industries needed to get back into the weapons business, and then she calmly asked for any new ideas for the clean energy unit and all talk sputtered to a stop.

Her lunch, an hour later, was interrupted by a redhead wearing a black dress suit and red sunglasses that were just a bit too sporty to be worn with the expensive clothing. "Miss Potts," she said without a smile, though she looked over the lenses in their black frames and her blue-green eyes were bright. "Might I join you?"

"Natalie," Pepper grinned, shoulders relaxing before they tensed up again, her eyes widening just slightly at the corners when she realized her mistake. "Natasha, sorry—"

The agent waved her hand in a lazy 'it's fine' gesture and sat, one leg folded over the other, her heel of her black Saint Laurent's tapping against her pale calf, almost catching on black tights. "Natalie is fine," Her smile was sharp—all angles with less curves—but no less genuine. "Both of them are Americanized versions of my name."

Pepper grins at that slightly reluctant bit of information. "Well, Natasha, what can I do for you?"

"Would you accept that I just wanted to get out of the boys' club house?" The redhead ordered a cherry limeade from the waiter and tapped her nails on the table. A few men passed their table, dressed in three piece suits, but Natasha and Pepper ignored their admiring gazes. "It's like a college dorm."

The CEO nodded and sipped at her own drink, smiling around the straw. "I know, believe me." Their waiter came back and Pepper ordered a chicken wrap while Natasha's English dipped into Italian. "Any other reasons, though?"

"Do you think they'll be able to do it?" Her eyes were unreadable behind the sunglasses, but, then again, Natasha's eyes were unreadable covered or uncovered. "Be able to find him?"

Raising one eyebrow, Pepper bit her bottom lip. "There's better technology now than when Howard Stark first started," She started tentatively. "With Tony alone, no, I don't think he would have been able to because he never had a reason to find him."

"But with Bruce?"

"And Coulson," the CEO added softly, eyes downcast. "I think, now, he has more of a reason. More of a mission."

Natasha gave her one of Natalie Rushmore's smiles—gentle, soft. Everything the PA was supposed to be and the assassin wasn't. "And Tony Stark always completes a mission."

Pepper laughed. "Or dies trying," she grinned. "He probably hasn't slept for days."

"He hasn't," Natasha deadpanned and rolled her eyes, fingers playing with the straw in her limeade. "Neither of them have."

Scientists, both of them thought with varying degrees of amusement. Neither of them could mock the two men for their enthusiasm, though; they had felt the same, burning need to get a job done (even though one's vocation generally ended up with someone dead. Pepper decided long ago not to really think about that side of Natasha's life).

Their meals came and went, the city passing around them as conversation turned from Tony Stark and his robots to the Avengers and, finally, SHIELD—though Phil Coulson wasn't exactly mentioned, there was no doubt he was in the back of both women's minds.

"Are you going back to work then?" Pepper asked around a cup of coffee. "Going to go back to doing secret, undercover things?" From anyone else it would have sounded mocking—but this was Pepper Potts. Ruthless CEO and a sweetheart friend.

Natasha smirked and sipped at her tea. "Seeing that I have two jobs now, there's really no reason for me to go back to them," her eyes glinted with something that looked like secrets and pleasure. "But, yes, I will be working for Fury again. They gave me time off because of, well..." Her hand waved around at the bustling streets of Manhattan.

The CEO could only smile at that because, yes, her friend (and boyfriend) had saved the world. "To victories on the field and in the office," Pepper held up her coffee and Natasha laughed, but clinked their mugs together.

"To victories."

Sometimes, he remembered.

Well, remembered wasn't really the right word seeing that he only saw faces, or remembered to breathe (can you forget to breathe? It felt like lifetimes sometimes), or his heart finally decided to move again (when had it stopped?).

A wood frog crossed his mind. He wasn't quite sure why the wood frog was there or even how he knew it was a wood frog. But there it was—a wood frog. Did it eat wood, he wondered, because there must be some extraordinary reason as to why his brain suddenly gave him a wood frog of all things.

Maybe it had to do with the cold.

Yeah. It was probably the cold.

High on the European side of the Arctic circle, a few miles south of the Norway-Russia border line, a spidery robot climbed it's way over ice and snow. Winds buffered the side, howling, but they didn't bother the machine.

On the other side of the globe, Bruce Banner wore something that looked a lot like a modern motorcycle helmet—the front completely black, the sides painted red and gold. It was like the virtual games in Disney's game park in Orlando, except this one was real.

Tony Stark had two holographic screens in front of him, measuring and calculating currents, wind speed, how fast the plane had been going. "Jarvis, pull up the map my father followed to find the tesseract," the billionaire said, his voice floating through the helmet Bruce wore.

The doctor was looking over the desert of ice, sonar to his right, a metal detector to his left. "You know," he said with mild amusement—the same mild amusement he always had, actually. "This isn't really my field of expertise."

"Is there anyone who specializes in finding frozen soldiers?" Tony grumbled and expanded the map in front of him with two fingers, drawing a line from the small red dot marking where the tesseract had been pulled from the ocean. He tapped a few images and then waved them towards Bruce and they appeared on the doctor's screen. An area fanning out from the dot was highlighted in blue and, in the middle of it, was a small green dot that moved when the robot in the Arctic circle did.

"What areas have we already checked?"

Tony grunted, replaying the choppy, static filled last conversation of Steve Rogers a for what seemed like the hundredth time. "Jarvis?"

"Yes, sir," the A.I. said, both above them and in the helmet. About half of the area was highlighted in red. Bruce didn't jump anymore, but there was a time when the computer had just about given him a heart attack every time it (he?) spoke. It had seemed like neither computer nor Tony had really cared for his blood pressure and... well, it was nice not to have people tip-toeing around him.

Granted, none of the other Avengers really tip-toed around him at all. Natasha had for the first few days—but she had also been chased through the helicarrier by an irate Hulk. She deserved some credit for not abhorring his guts. Clint Barton hadn't been in his right mind, and the fact that he and the Hulk first met each other by teaming up wasn't a bad start.

Thor seemed to want the Hulk to come back so they might have a 'glorious battle'. Unfortunately, Tony was pretty sure that the so called 'glorious battle' would level what was left of Manhattan so the Asgardian never had the chance before he left for his home, Loki at his side. Everyone had been ecstatic to see the trickster go—especially Agent Barton and Doctor Selvig.

Something beeped on the screen and Bruce was torn from his thoughts. "Tony?"

The billionaire's chair squeaked as he turned around, pulling up the image on the other man's screen up on one of his own. "Look at that," Tony breathed, tracing the outline of a lumpy, broken shape. He pulled up one of the blueprint scans for the plane and compared the image on the radar to what had been drawn by Zola over seventy years ago. "Scan for area," both scientists pulled back—Bruce pulling the helmet from over his head and blinking at the bright lights of the lab.

"We're going to need something to pull him out," Bruce ran one hand through his hair, ignoring the way his heart thudded in his chest and a cool sweat broke across his forehead—excitement. That's what this was. For the first time since the Hulk was created, Doctor Banner had the overwhelming urge to giggle like a school girl. Because he was a highly respected scientist, he resisted the urge. "And to get him back here—"

Tony spread his arms, grinning broadly. "Private plane," he said. "Iron Man. Billionaire."

"Mmhmm," the doctor hummed absently even as the computer beeped and zoomed in on the left rudder. "He was in the cock pit, so—" Bruce circled over the area with a finger and zoomed in, overlaying the blueprints with the snow and ice, lining up the rudders. "Here," he tapped where the cockpit should be and pulled the helmet back on, controlling the robot once more.

The billionaire spouted out orders for JARVIS—something about getting one of his smaller planes ready and making sure SHIELD didn't know he was leaving the country for a few days. He put on his suit a few minutes later as the robot was making its way over the frozen plane.

"See you on the other side," Tony grinned before the faceplate closed and he took off.

Bruce shook his head and grinned wiry to himself. "How long will it take you to get there?"

"No more than an hour," the billionaire's voice came through the helmet, just like JARVIS' did. "Probably sooner than that if I don't get stopped by Fury and his merry gang of twitchy porcupines."

"Twitchy porcupines?"

Tony's face appeared in the upper left hand corner surrounded by black and lit up by blue. "They're so jumpy and bristly." The billionaire met the other man's eyes with one of his half-grins. "So; twitchy porcupines."

The robot clambered over a bit of jagged ice, climbing up the little cliff like a spider. Bruce tracked it's progress on the screen as it headed up the dorsal of the plane.

"Doctor Banner," JARVIS spoke up. "Miss Potts has just arrived with Agents Barton and Romanoff. Shall I tell them where you are?"

Bruce guided the robot out of a little valley in the snow. "Yeah, sure," he murmured distractedly as snow collapsed under machinery again. "Tony, I'm going to start melting the ice."

"Alright. My plane just took off and will arrive about an hour after I get here."

"Are you hiding secrets from SHIELD again, Stark?" Natasha spoke up and Bruce jumped, almost ripping the helmet off his head. She laid a hand on his shoulder and a screen popped up beside Tony's head, showing her looking over the screens, Clint at her side. "You found it?"

Tony smiled—wide and bright. "Was there ever any doubt?"

Both the assassins stared at him, hardly amused. Natasha and Clint both played with a few of the images on the screen, expanding them, making them smaller, until the spider robot's footage widened to take up most of the space. "What will you do after you find him?"

"Try to develop a... cure," Bruce murmured as the robot lit up a laser and started to drill through the ice. "If there's any tissue left that can be salvaged."

No one said anything to that. In fact, no one said much of anything after that. There were a few murmurs on Tony and Bruce's behalf, but they were merely updating each other on the status of the ice and where the Iron Man suit was.

"I'm through," Bruce grinned as metal fell with an echoing clang, highlighted from the bright light coming from the machine while the robot peered into inky blackness. "I can't see anything, though."

"Well, any light that lasts since 1945 gains my respect," Tony grinned. "Especially in a crashed plane."

"Even if it's HYDRA?" One of Natasha's perfect eyebrows rose.

Tony frowned for a second. "Okay," he grumbled. "Maybe not for them—hard to be impressed by a group of rogue Nazis."

Snorting, Bruce had the robot jump without a 'by-your-leave' from Tony and breathed out a sigh of relief as it hit the ground and didn't go shooting off in various sized pieces. "Well, you've certainly built your machines to last."

"I didn't factor in you making it jump to it's possible death," Tony drawled. "But I'm glad I took some things into account."

"Look at that," Clint murmured, pointing to the towers of ice. They glistened when the light fell upon them, reflecting like blue diamonds. There was a very thin layer of snow that covered a layer of ice that got thicker and thicker the closer the robot moved towards the front of the cock pit. "That must be where the tesseract was kept."

There was the machine—all tubes and wires, looking like an Egyptian pyramid except for the fact that it was round and black. In which case it didn't really look like one of the great pyramids, but it did tower over the small spider machine so it seemed large and grandeur—sitting in a massive tomb of ice.

Bruce went past it, down over a small ramp and shone the light across a chair and controls that looked as if they were painted white. "He would have been in that chair when he hit," the doctor murmured, easing the machine closer. There was only one hole in the glass, though—and it was filled with ice and snow that spilled across the ground. The stairs up to the chair were covered the thickest, as if water spilled through that hole and washed over the controls and the chair before it all froze.

"He sat there," Clint murmured, his eyes wide like a child's, hand reaching out to the screen as if he could touch it. "He sat there when he died—"

No one really thought over what that meant—well, except for Bruce.

"The initial hit wouldn't have killed him," The doctor said softly, looking over the chair, the controls, any sign of blood or damage—and there was none. "He would have still been alive when the water washed over him and either drowned or... or starved."

Even Tony was silent, unable to make any type of joke about that.

"What's that?" Clint shot out suddenly, pointing at something on the screen. He had moved so quickly that his arm almost smacked Natasha in the nose. "That!" The archer touched the screen and it highlighted on Bruce's and Tony's.

"Is that...?" The billionaire breathed, his own eyes focused on the Spider robot's screen (rather than his own and the doctor thought about telling him to watch where he was going, but what would Tony hit? A goose?).

Moving the machine forward, Bruce had it climb up onto the ice. The circular shield was unmistakable—red and white painted on the outside with blue in the centre and a white stare right smack dab in the middle of it all. A big target, really—it didn't look too different than the purple ones upstairs Clint used to train.

Only that target was made out of the rarest and strongest metal on the planet.

"Gentlemen," Natasha grinned in a way they had never seen her before. "I think you've just found the gold mine."

Tony chuckled, his eyes suddenly moving across his own screen. "I believe, Agent Romanoff, that you mean that we found America's National Treasure."

Clint laughed outright at that one, but it sounded vaguely (only vaguely) hysterical.

The ground quaked and Tony dropped through the hole in the plane and landed. His suit was oddly giant against the small camera on the spider robot, and the red hand that lifted the machine was massive.

It gave Bruce, Natasha, and Clint a better viewpoint, though.

"Let's see what we've got then," Tony murmured and they watched lasers cut through the ice, bit by bit. Chunks were shaved off and kicked to the side where they clattered against iron and steel. A vague form was starting to become visible—as if they were all looking through a dense fog. Grunting, Tony grabbed one side of the large chunk he had separated from the rest and turned it over. "Well, Doc." The billionaire grinned broadly. "Looks like it's your lucky day."

The team stared at the youthful features of Steve Rogers. His blond hair was frozen in a mess, dirt stained his cheeks, and there looked to be quite a few bruises preserved over time on his neck and face. Perfectly frozen. Perfectly preserved.

Silence flooded the lab before Clint spoke up.

"Holy shit," The archer breathed out while Bruce removed the helmet and powered down the spider robot. "We found Captain America." Natasha and Bruce both turned to him, their faces not even remotely closed to being amused even as Clint shrugged sheepishly. "What?" He grinned. "We did!"

"I'll have him loaded onto the plane in an hour," Tony spoke up and they looked back at the screen. I might be able to melt some of the ice a bit before I get him on board."

Bruce nodded once. "Do it," he ran one hand through his hair. "Be sure not to—"

"Damage the tissue. Yeah, I know." The billionaire flashed him a smug, arrogant grin that seemed even more exasperating now that it was lit up by blue light and shadowed slightly. "Don't worry, Doc, everything's going to be fine."

Famous last words, Bruce thought to himself, but returned the other man's smile with his own small and tentative one.

Thank you for reading and please drop a review!

Gospel