Assembled: Earth's Last Heroes (A Riordanverse and MCU crossover)

Chapter 20: Bucky

James Buchanan Barnes was getting really tired of crawling.

In the war, he was forced to crawl through disgusting trenches with smells enough to knock out a giant. Now, he was on a different mission entirely: crawling through the laundry room in Hotel Valhalla, searching for some mystical portal that might or might not exist.

He had grown accustomed to dealing with extreme expansions in his version of reality. After all, he'd been injected with serum that had turned him superhuman, brainwashed to forget everything he loved and had woken up 70 years into the future. This almost just felt like another day in the mind-exploding roller coaster. Almost.

Meanwhile, Wanda, Strange and the rest were in the library researching. Researching! Apart from T'Challa, Sam and Groot, who were exploring the kitchens and were probably getting lost. While he was suffocating from the piles of dirty underwear and smelly socks. Can you believe it? He always got stuck with the dirty work anyways.

At least he wasn't alone. But that almost made it even worse.

"Hey, Mr. Bucky, do you think that the portal could be somewhere in this laundry basket?" asked the kid Peter Parker, rummaging through the piles of armor and who-knows what.

"Oh, yes, a magical portal would totally be inside some random baskets of laundry," grumbled Bucky sarcastically.

It wasn't that he didn't like the kid. In fact, the boy was starting to grow on him. Still, having constant blabber around while trying to do thoroughly embarrassing work was---irritating, to say the least.

"Kid, do you have a better plan? Magnus said that according to legend the only way to find the portal was to stumble upon it. And there's no better place to stumble upon stuff, especially long-lost stuff, than the laundry room." He sighed, realising he was only aggravating himself even further, and sat down. "Sorry, Parker. This is a lot to take in."

"No, I understand, Mr. Bucky. My world's been flipped upside down so many times it's basically a burnt pancake now. But I can't think it's anything compared to yours."

He grinned tiredly. "Looks like we both ended up with burned pancakes of lives, haven't we?"

Peter smiled wearily in return. "At least it's still a pancake. Maybe not edible anymore, but still a delicious specimen of food that deserves to be protected."

Bucky stared at the boy. Peter Parker was still just...a kid. Heck, he probably wasn't even legally allowed to drink. "How old are you again?"

"Fifteen."

"How did you end up here? You're still..." Bucky winced. He knew what it felt to be belittled by age, but still...fifteen? This kid didn't deserve all this trouble. In fact, no one did. But to be dead by the age of fifteen from trying--and failing--to save the world--hell, at 101, Bucky was still fed up by it. 

"Well, that's kind of a long story."

"Looks like we have all the time in the world. If there's even still a world out there. Fire away."

Suddenly, Magnus burst into the laundry room. "Guys, I think we found something. Let's go back to the library."

"Oh god," muttered Bucky. "What was that for then?"

"I don't know," said Peter. "But we did find something. The power of friendship."

Magnus shrugged, "Well there could be something down here, you never know."

Bucky kept shaking his head and grumbling as they walked the long way back to the library, where the Avengers and Jason were waiting.

"Can't we just take the short way? I mean, without all the smell and stuff?" groaned Bucky.

"There isn't really a short way," said Magnus. "That's kind of the point of the laundry room."

"You're kidding me. You're telling me you have magical rooms and plates that fill up with food but you don't have some sort of shortcut around the place?"

"This place kind of reminds me of Hogwarts," remarked Peter. "Are you sure--"

"Nope," said Magnus. "Trust me, I wish it was real, but to our knowledge, no."

"Hogwarts? What's that?" asked Bucky. In his head a mental image had quickly formed of a very warty pig sitting in front of a dinner plate that would fill up automatically.

"We really have a lot to catch up on," replied Peter. "One of these days I'll sit you and Quill down and we're going to watch all the movies that have come out since 1970."

They walked in silence, all of them thinking it but not saying it out loud: if they didn't solve this problem, and solve it quickly, there might not be many days left.

Bucky still didn't know what Hogwarts was, but his mental image was most probably incorrect. Why would anyone make a movie of a warty pig and a plate?

They arrived at the library, which was somehow bigger than the laundry room.

"So what did you find?" asked Bucky impatiently.

"Patience, Padawan." said Quill monotonously.

"Hey, finally a relevant reference!" grinned Parker, and the two Peters fist-bumped.

"Wow, I'm very proud," said Bucky sarcastically. "Now can we please get on to the findings?"

"Anyways," started Strange. "We were looking through old hotel guides--yes, they do have those here, and you would be surprised how useful they really are for navigating this hotel. So we looked through the guides, and we found information about a room aptly called the "Forbidden Room". Apparently, it would disappear at random intervals and then reappear at a completely different location, but that room was one of the first ever rooms of Hotel Valhalla when Odin has built it. And no one has ever been inside. The last time anyone has mentioned it was..." Strange squinted at the ancient text. "1,450 years ago."

"Well, that's just great. How do we find something that was last seen 1,450 years ago?"

Jason suddenly snapped to it. ""Wait....1450 years ago....we can ask Hunding! He's been...a valued member since seven hundred something C.E. Surely that's more than 1450 years ago."

"I'll go ask him," piped Magnus, "And...does anyone happen to have a bar of chocolate on them? Hunding loves chocolates."

"Chocolates?" asked Peter. "Hey Suit Lady, do you happen to have a bar of chocolate on you?"

That sounded like absolute nonsense to the rest of the crowd until Peter slumped. "I should've known. The suit doesn't work out here."

"Well, what do you expect? We're dead."

"Okay then, new quest: to find a bar of chocolate to persuade Hunding to tell us." announced Jason.

"This is just like an RPG game," muttered Peter. This modern jargon was making less and less sense to Bucky, but he nodded anyways.

It took a few minutes for this particular mini-quest to be completed, however, as Drax ran up to his room and came back 5 minutes later holding numerous bars of chocolate.

"I just asked for it nicely in my room." said Drax matter-of-factly. "Keep one for Hunding and we can share the rest."

And that was how the demigods and Avengers ended up sitting at the floor of the Hotel Valhalla library and breaking the number-two rule of any library: no food. Well, they had already broken the number-one rule by speaking in the library anyways, but to Bucky this just seemed like a sweet, sweet, maybe too sweet reward for all their troubles.

And then he realised something was amiss.

"Where's T'Challa? And Sam?"

"And Groot?"

"Uhhh...which ones are those again? Oh, the tree and the other guys. They were down at the..." trailed off Magnus, realising something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Just then, the door swung open with an ear-splintering BANG. At the door, looking as if they had just been through Muspelheim and back, stood Groot, T'Challa and Sam.

"What--" started Magnus, but T'Challa cut him off.

"Thor. We need. Thor."