Polar BEARriers (Gming by Hotpants!)

[aa_valkyrie]

It is cold, and daylight is sparing. The world is craggy, crinkled stone, snow and ice. The crisp snap of the air and the crunch underfoot of stone and snow is not the perfect ideal for stealth, but it will have to do. Transport stowed in an inlet bay behind them, there has been considerable territory to traverse of the frozen isle before the HYDRA perimeter loomed up in more than the paired binoculars of the human(ish) contingent of the joint Avengers/Asgard/SHIELD team. Now, in this remote and gloomy chill, it would be easy to forget that there is anything for kilometers but a frozen world and, of course, the looming threat that spires dark ruin against the sky in the distance.

The team has split for the first careful circuit of the perimter, Barton with the Valkyrie, Brand with Sif. Brand is more cautious than is her wont, perhaps intimidated to silence by what her sharp green eyes see through the long-range binocs. The telltales of her unique appearance are largely obscured to view by the dense, close-set weight of her parka, and right now she is wielding viewing equipment and cameras with her guns safely stowed and obscured. Well. If there is to be a fight, Sif is right there.

Now, after that first probing loop, the teams are moving back through shadow and ice to their initial rendezvous point. Unusually, Brand's tongue stays held.

It is likely not a surprise that Agent Barton uses any opportunity that he can to climb any outcropping of rocks to get a better view on the expanse of HYDRA perimeter, nimble and almost curious in the way he scales anything that is large enough to climb. He even makes a joke about it to Valkyrie at one point, an offhanded, "Never saw enough trees in the city as a kid." He rejoins his partner each time, however, and slings his bow back onto his shoulder despite the fluff of his cold-weather gear.

"They could have added some spikes somewhere, made it more inhospitable. It's like they didn't try hard enough," he says as they catch up to the others.

Blonde and fair against the craggy stone and the broken lines of ice that coat the rugged landscape, Valkyrie wears not a parka but a thick cloak of fur. Her blade strapped to her back as she and Clint follow their own path around site. While she wears her armor, in deference to the cold, she has pulled on a pair of snow pants, their ends tucked into her fur lined boots. She seems not to mind the cold. While Clint climbs high, she stays low to the ground and strays almost dangerously close to inspect older tracks and grooves cut into the ice. "Is your urge now spent by rocks?" She wonders in turn, smile slight.

Sif is more silent than not as she and Brand survey, moving sure-footedly over snow and ice, and marking the position of patrols and weapons, even when she's not certain what they are. She snorts softly at Barton's crack as the teams reunite. "They are missing little else," she agrees, "Perhaps a moat." She pushes back her hood, the soft grey jacket the only real difference from her usual attire, armor, tunic, boots, twin swords at hip and across her back. It can't be that much colder than or more dangerous than Jotunheim, after all. "We have marked patrols, but they are spaced too far apart to be the chief means of securing this place."

"I'm sure you saw the watch towers," Brand remarks. She is all plain and businesslike, her stance a brace of weight that lists to one hip; she is a shadow in cold weather gear, grim and strong. "He's got eyes everywhere. Not just eyes, either. Barton, this is more your area than mine." She gestures toward him with the binoculars, possibly referential to his famous vision, and then glances back up and over her shoulder toward the distant fortress. Her breath puffs past her nose, steaming her sigh in the gloom as her dark green brows arch. "But we'll need to circumvent some motion detection if we're going to get in closer. Not sure what kind."

She peels off a glove so that she can rub at her nose with one finger, faint crinkle starting at the bridge of her nose. "As a paranoid, I'm professionally impressed."

"Not nearly enough, until we get closer," Clint replies to Valkyrie with a hint of a smile, already cracking from human frailty and the leech of moisture from his skin. "I didn't see what motion detection system he was using, but I don't doubt he has one." The agreement there as he slides a look along with hers to the castle as well, frowning at what is likely a watch tower in the distance.

He adds, after a moment, "Did see something interesting, though, in my climbing. Had a couple of blast doors stuck into the side of the mountain. Not many places they could lead, wouldn't you think?"

"A moat around the castle may brace it further into the realm of old than even this landscape might provide. It would do no good in the winter, skirted with ice," Valkyrie opines, crossing her arms with flat expression. "Perhaps the bears would make for better sport?" Attack bears. She nods her agreement at Clint's word's, an echo of agreement as to what he saw.

The channels that flow between the islands of Svalbard are still and dark, sluggish current mottled with fields of thickening ice as the season cools. Aside from the odd cluster of hair-trigger mines, there has been little to fear from it and no real reason to worry about having the sea at one's back.

Until now.

Against the regular tickle of water to ice, a rogue slosh might catch on ears attuned to anything out of key. A ripple in the surface spreads gently out from the source. Then a trio of small bubbles.

"Motion detectors," Sif nods, "Seem likely given the patrols. Or-- cameras. Both. Perhaps the rockier approaches might be less-well-guarded? Those that require some climbing, or an arrival by sea like this one. We could see how close those might allow us." She does not sound very optimistic, though. She plucks at the finger of a glove, and returns her hand to sword hilt, shooting Valkyrie a thin smile for the mention of the bears and then asking Hawkeye and Brand, "What do you suggest? You are more familiar with the technology at work here." She glances at the water, looking at it and the bubbles for a moment before holding up a hand to stop conversation, and then pointing, sword loosened in its sheath with a gesture.

Brand closes her fingers around the loose glove, jerking in a pivot on the heel of one combat boot. Of course, she is holding a pair of binoculars and a glove, so her whirl is not actually as combative as it might immediately appear. She follows the gesture of the Asgardian with her glance, and she nods once, acknowledging; her gaze flicks across the others. she hooks the binoculars back around her neck but, rather than mess about with the glove, tucks her hand at her hip, angling for the familiar comfort of the pistol that rests there as she sidesteps, her focus trained on the shift of the water. (Yes, Abby, shoot the sea. That will help.)

"Could try setting off an EMP to get close, but that seems a little heavy handed for recon wo--," Clint starts to answer. If any part of his body would be considered superhuman, it is his eyes, not his ears. And as he is not looking at the water, but rather at his team (who are so lovely to look at), he does not notice that difference in the water until Sif makes that gesture. Where she loosens her sheath and Brand draws a pistol, he shrugs his bow into his hands. He doesn't want to feel left out.

At Sif's gesture, Valkyrie lifts her brows with interest and lays a hand across the hilt of her sword. The steel slips from its sheath in a whisper of a draw, just kissing it before releasing. "A guest."

Four or five meters out from the initial disturbance, a white shape spills up through the surface like a bouy. Slippery smooth -- a long, thick neck, two eyes and a coal black nose.

It is a bear.

Water churns sluggish beneath a tread of massive paws. It blinks and snuffs and flexes its snout, pelt plastered flat to the pin of its little ears and level skull.

There is something strapped to its head.

It looks suspiciously like a camera.

It takes a split second for Brand's reaction to register.

When it does, it is this. She says:

"You've got to be fucking kidding me."

Without drawing her pistol, the green-haired woman moves, on some avoidant instinct dodging out of the way as she hunts for something that she can use as cover. Planting her lone gloved hand on one of the crags of stone, she pitches herself forward, bounding over it to roll behind it in the snow and crackling ice that marks the harsh rock -- ow -- to hunker in the shadows.

It might be more effective as hiding if she weren't cursing. "Fury is going to flip his shit--"

There is no way to tell whether the camera is transmitting or recorded, and so in the split second that it takes one Clint Barton to catch an arrow in his bow and pull, he makes a decision. That arrow, a regular, plain arrow given the time it takes to manufacture any of his special arrowheads and the fact that most of them were in SHIELD at the time of the takeover, is released to fly directly into that dark lense of the camera. Then he is running back to find some cover. "Only if we get caught," he calls to Brand.

Oh hey, a bear! Sif watches it rise out of the water, and then brows furrow at the camera on its head, but that's taken out by Hawkeye before she really has a chance to figure out what it is. She glances over her shoulder at the hum-- denizens of this realm as they jump for cover, and remains where she is, watching the animal as she smoothly draws her blade. She looks over at Valkyrie, and grins. "What are you doing?" she calls back to Barton and Brand.

Cold blue eyes narrow at the sight of the bear and the camera atop its great, beastly head. Then Valkyrie cracks a smile, lowering her blade a fraction as she regards the wet and noble beast. "Sif, it is the great white bear that I spoke of to you on the way up. They make great sport." Hunting polar bears. Possibly with just a knife. Hello bear. Bending her knees, she almost oozes into a battle-ready posture, prepared for combat after ages for sudden death and ultimately delighted by it. "You think the beast in league with Schmidt because of its camera. I am sorry my magnificent friend, you are ours to be slain."

Stricken, the second bear startles into a recoil and a lash at the water powerful enough to spray those ashore with pins and needles. It grunts and gruffs and chops its jaws at damaged rigging about its own ear, white fangs set broad against black gums.

The first bear erupts onto the ice from the fading pock of its last ascended bubble, maw open on its way to bellowing into a waterlogged charge. All muscle and fur and saliva slung thick from his chops, he slings icy water forth full steam in his barrel for Valkyrie and Sif.

In the split second he draws near enough to swipe, either of them might glimpse a touch of green behind his eyes.

And another camera.

The second bear is making slower progress, ambling landwards at a sideways paddle while it flusters at its harness.

Brand rubs her bared, snow-chilled knuckles along her forehead, scowl deep-grooved across her expression as she peers over the stone. "He has eyes on the goddamn wildlife," she snarls. "I'm sure no one will notice that you shot that, by the way--" Her breath puffs past her teeth, voice dropping lower as she scrunches low behind the rock.

All right, now there are two bears. With cameras. This is beyond escaping notice. She pulls out the pistol from its holster, and looks down at it in the curl of her fingers, pale in the gloom and shadow. "Shit," she says. "That's two."

"Thank you. I thought I did a good job myself," Clint huffs as he bounds up the nearest outcropping of rock, scrambling for purchase with frozen fingers to get to a high place. Bears don't climb, right? He's read that bears don't climb. It is going to take him a moment to get himself into a good position.

Clint. Bears are all about climbing, stop taking advice from the internet. "The camera, yes?!" Valkryie calls through her toothy smile, darting forward towards the second bear as he barrels down on them. She sidesteps the swipe of his paw with a neat motion, her blade sliding forward like a fish in the water to snap at the camera atop his head. A sizzle of heat curls from Dragonfire, cutting through the air with the hiss of steam.

"So it is," Sif replies to Valkyrie with a wolfish, slyly-spreading grin. Blade drawn, she spins it in her hand, watching as another bear appears as well. "One for each of us," she grins. If that splash stings, she doesn't show it, moving in tandem with Valkyrie, ducking beneath the bear's swing and coming up to its other side, reaching out to jab at it, to distract from Valkyrie's mission. As she does so, she takes a peek back at Brand and Barton's positions, and that other bear, too.

Parka's hood fallen back around the dark gleam of green that is her drawn-back hair, Brand pops up from behind her careful cover. With the bears focused on the more obvious threats of the sword-bearing women, she cuts a slighter, dark figure emergent from shadow and ice long enough to train her weapon on one of the animals, think, I am about to shoot a goddamn polar bear, what is even happening in my life, and aim.

She doesn't fire. She turns her head, looking over her shoulder back toward the curving arc of the road and the distant and more human threats of the populated village. "Ladies," she says, "how made are we?"

Does Clint count as 'ladies'? ... Probably.

Clint nods his agreement to Valkyrie's assessment, even as he draws an arrow along his bow in a ready position. He most certainly does not count as ladies, but he does look back to the village. "No human activity that I see," he calls, from his higher vantage point.

The first bear makes a sound like a sinking ship as he crushes to a halt, paws splayed wide through trenches he's torn into ice and snow. Overshot and with a slash at his ear, he blusters and bellows and groans rage in a ragged plume as he lurches around to snap after Sif's jab at his side. Quicker than he looks, he crunches down on anything that catches in open jaws, whites rolling at the corners of his eyes as he struggles to keep both Asgardians in front of him.

The second bear is just now dragging itself up onto rock and ice. Less explosive than the first, she takes stock of her mate whirling and gnashing between bright blades and blinks passively over at Clint and Brand instead.

Then she's trundling that way, picking up speed into an easy lope as the last of the camera harness tags away into the snow.

"Or one to share with the others! A shame they would miss out," Valkyrie counters with a slanted grin, eyes bright. There is a life in her in battle brightening her motions as she dances with the deadly bear. It's teeth catch on the end of her blade and a bit of her cloak, breaking it not, but leaving a heated burn upon its tongue. Hot blade. Hot blade.

"What?" Sif does not understand this question from Brand, and so does not respond to it in any helpful fashion. "I suppose it is only fair," she allows to Valkyrie, grin flicking wider before she puts her focus once more into the battle at hand. The bear proves slightly quicker than she had expected, and it takes a roll to one side to avoid a snap. Back on her feet in a blink, she sprints at the beast's side between limbs, reaching up to grab a handful of fur and try to swing herself up. Onto the rampaging polar bear. What could possibly go wrong?

As the polar bear that she sights on begins picking up speed, Brand stands her ground, gun pointed at it. Her eyes stray back toward the incoming animal rather than the more elusive, inchoate threat that is the road, the perimeter, the town. That's a predator. Whatever basal instincts she was bred, whatever differences between her biology and that of an ordinary human: predator, prey.

"Barton," she says with a peculiar kind of neutral blandness, even as she cocks the hammer of the gun with the quiet and familiar metallic click. She still does not fire. "Sound carries over water." Her eyes flicker toward Sif, Valkyrie, and the ... apparently angrier of the bears. But the flick doesn't last long; saccadic, her eyes dart back to the one moving toward her.

Clint does not need to be told twice, his bow swung around to sight on the moving animal. It takes time to sight, to predict where the beast will be when the arrow lands, but when he looses his arrow on the bear, it is aimed for where its throat should be. Sadly, it is still just a plain arrowhead, but it's probably for the best. "You shoot if you have to, Brand," he says, even before he lets go. Perhaps he's worried that a single arrow won't take it down, with good reason.

The bear could lose its goddamn mind, that's what. Still carrying its weight again in freezing water, the beast cuffs itself in the face with its own paw as if to swipe acid from his tongue as he rears. The same paw hooks back for Sif over the buff of his shoulder like an iron rake, claws each as long as her hand stretched wide only to slam down into the snow without catching in flesh.

Side-stepping into a rolling shuffle away to put distance between himself in Valkyrie, he gives into distraction and breaches heavily over onto his back, plunging the full of his weight belly-up to grind his rider off into snow and ice. And then to tear at her, if he can keep her smothered beneath him, breath hot and sweet with seawater and rot.

Brand's bear does not seem phased by the gun. She is all business and her business is disemboweling and devouring trespassers, lips peeled back into the rumbling beginning of a bellow that ends in a choke. Tongue lolled thick through her teeth, she tries again, stumbles -- and thunders into an all out rampage with Brand set red in her sights. 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

The white bear's roll to its back provides an opportunity to a ready blade, still hot and searing as Valkryie brings it forward. Her boots leaving crisp marks in the snow, dwarfed by the bear's own. She stabs as if moving to slice along its gullet. Or at least to distract it from tearing Sif's own dainty flesh.

Dainty? Please. Sif ducks low against the bear's back as it swipes, and then is just lifting her blade to aim a strike at its neck when the bear decides to try to crush her instead. She attempts to throw herself clear, but gets partially caught, breath dashed out of lungs, paralyzed for a few seconds. It gives the bear at least a chance to get in a slash, should Valkyrie not succeed in drawing his attention quickly enough.

The crack and roar of gunfire is not subtle.

Brand has stood steady as the bear approached, and her aim is as centered on the creature as the creature was on her. She is being charged by a bear. One bullet? No. She'll empty the goddamn clip if she has to, little jerks of her tense frame as she compensates bobbing the dark green queue as her breath puffs steam past her parted lips. As she shoots, she glares, as if to say: I refuse to die of bear attack.

As Brand fires, Clint sweeps his view and the aim of his bow back to the village and castle, watching for activity with a strain to the corner of his eyes. Anyone coming?

The bear makes time. And pays for it. Blood is ripped bright from jaws or claws and gargled into with a rabid fixation before Valkyrie's sword sinks into muscle slabbed through his neck. Blood runs in to blood. Wounded now, and turned around the wrong way, he rears around again with dizzy haste, drool clotted red in a sling from his chin. His eyes burn more brilliant against the contrast created by the battle, green on crimson when he feints a lunge at Valkyrie and jaws in for Sif in a last ditch effort to taste flesh.

The female bear is carried through lead by locomotive momentum. Halfway through the clip she is dead or close enough for it to matter, but short of well-timed roll aside, Brand might find herself beneath a pile of wet bear all the same. The water is uncomfortably cold, the blood is uncomfortably hot. So it goes.

Up on the rocks, Clint will hear a sound he should know well: the hiss of a bullet past his ear from a sniper unseen. The gun is far enough away that -- with the wind blowing the way it is -- there is no audible report. Half a mile away, Johann Schmidt bolts another round into the chamber.

Well, I guess this is what could possibly go wrong. Curiosity satisfied! Sif takes a slash of claws as she scrambles backwards, scraping across armor and where there is none biting through leather and flesh. She grimaces and bleeds, but Valkyrie buys her enough time to get out of the way and to her feet, second sword drawn from across her back to meet the beast's lunge with a blade.

Those are not the eyes of a normal bear. Green and as alien as Valkyrie herself is to the icy shores, clutched in the throws of a make not its own. All joy slides from her expression. It becomes just a task, movements quick and fierce as she moves to drive the sword into the polar bear's skull. If she can.

"Fuck--"

At this point, Brand is pretty much taking a massive bear to the face. She tries to scramble to the side, but the bear has momentum, and the cover being what it is, the immediate escape route is partly blocked by crags of stone -- and frigid sea water, into which she does not dive.

Hot blood and mangled fur and considerable weight to bruise and maybe nearly suffocate under: these are the wages of ... SHIELD. Ow.

Whoops. Clint flinches instinctively from the heat of the bullet passing, his gaze snapping to the likely direction it came from. If he does mark a good spot for a sniper to sit in (and as a sniper himself, he likely does), it is useless given the disparate weapons between them. There is no way for his arrow to make that distance. Instead, he announces flatly, firmly, "Time to go." Wrap up your bear fights, ladies.

"Now. Time to go /now/, before we get picked off like sitting ducks." In case they were in doubt of why, as he himself slings his bow onto his back and moves to scramble quickly. He does not want to be a unmoving target, at least.

Sif's blade buckles through the bear's sternum; Valkyrie's pierces up through the jaw and out the dome of his skull. Dead twice over, he sinks, weight suspended between braces of Asgardian steel as the light dims from his eyes and then fades entirely.

A muscular twitch stirs the mass of bear burying Brand. Air bubbles through the open wound in her throat.

Somewhere, Schmidt is waiting for another opening.

Brand says something that sounds a lot like, "Wgnnnnrlgfck."

She is under a bear. It is going to take some doing before she is going anywhere.

Aww, playtime's over? Sif would give Clint a look, but she is busy helping kill a polar bear, so it will be just a second. When the bear is good and dead she jerks her blade out, wiping it on wet fur before looking around again. "Where is Brand?" she asks, frowning. She limps over towards the other bear. Brand, did you get eaten?

A sad look for the dead beast, Valkyrie's motions echo's Sif's before her blade is replaced in the sheath at her back. "What do you mean, Hawkeye?" She questions, probably rougher than she means to. Then she looks around at Sif's observation and frowns. "What /is/ she?" Deep snow drift? Hole? She follows the dark haired warrior towards the bear, kicking its side. It'll make a noise if she is in there, right?

"Don't know how I could be any fucking clearer. We have to leave five seconds ago," Clint replies, a bite of urgency to his words as he stalks swiftly towards their moored boats and starts swinging equipment into it before he moves to get it started. He might even be praying to the engine at this point, to start in the bitter cold. "Sniper, and he could take a potshot at any of our heads at any moment." He glances up at the talk, eyes narrowing. "Fuck. She must be under the bear." Because, really, where else would she be? Going to take a leak?

Brand's strength is not superhuman. The bear is too heavy. It might shift a little bit as she attempts to wriggle out from underneath it. Her groan might sound like it is coming from within the bear.

"Either the bear has devoured her whole or she is beneath it," Sif guesses, frowning, and looking to Valkyrie, "We will have to lift it off, it seems." Which will definitely take both of them. She steps down, flicking a glance towards the castle at Hawkeye's warning, and doing her best to find an angle where bear and/or rock are between her head and it. Then she grabs some bear and heaves.

"Let's hope it is the latter. I do not think she'll be in a good humor if the bear has eaten her," Valkyrie quips mordantly. Glancing back her shoulder at Clint, she nods, and hastens to aide Sif in lifting the bear /off/ of Brant. Heave! Ho! WHOMP. "Alright, Brand?" She questions as the SHIELDies' distinctive green hair comes into sight. I mean, other than the whole having a /bear/ fall on you thing.

"Quickly," Clint stresses, in case they weren't already aware of the urgency. The motor on their skiff finally finds life, and he keeps it running as he waits to drive them all away. He's learned long ago that women can handle themselves. This just isn't lack of chivalry. (Or maybe it is. Who knows.)

"Ngh," Brand says in summary. She clambers to her knees, wincing and puffing out her nose. She looks kind of the worse for wear. "I'm a little fuckered," she says, combat boot scraping as she levers herself up on one foot from her knees. It's the technical term. But she does manage a mumbled, "--'Sget out of here," lifting a hand to beg aid in getting to her feet and getting moving.

Oh good, there she is. The second Brand is more or less free, Sif drops her part of the bear, sparing a glare for Barton's continued nagging and saying, "We are coming as quickly as we may." 'Fuckered' gets a glance and she looks Brand over quickly, but lets Valkyrie help her up, limping her own way to the boat, skidding a little on the ice at the edge but climbing in successfully.

Valkyrie laughs, a sudden bark of sound, at Brand's vocal use of 'Fuckered'. "Spirit." Good swear. Good swear. She readily takes that request for a hand to pull her too her feet in a manner that requires almost no effort on Brand's part. Then she scoops her up and carries her to the boat. There is no need to wait for her to get moving. It is only slightly more dignified than a princess carry.