Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Hearing is always the first sense to come back to him. His eyesight is always shot for a few moments after being awoken.

But this time he doesn’t recognize the voices. Every voice is unfamiliar, speaking a language he doesn’t know.

Steve?

The last thing he can recall seeing. Steve’s face, mournful and angry and loyal and hopeful, all at once. That was real, wasn’t it?

“He would be here if he could, my friend.”

Yes, that is a voice he knows. We’ve both had enough of fighting, it says. But then it turns cold and dead and angry. Claws and weight and pain and the screech of car tires. The Asset comes screaming to the forefront.

Threat threat threat

Thrashing against the bonds that keep him immobile. The phantom fingers of his left arm scrabble to tear the bonds away. The voices turn alarmed and angry.

One little voice makes itself heard, a soft shock straight to his brain. “Sergeant Barnes?”

Yeah, orders came through. That’s his voice this time, falsely cheerful, a thin veneer over a festering layer of guilt. Why are you going the one place he can’t follow? And why are you lying about it?

Sorry.

The little voice answers. “That’s okay. James.”

No one ever calls him James, not that gently. A woman’s voice, angry. James Buchanan Barnes. A little girl poking him hard in the ribs. You’re in for it now.

“I think we moved a bit too fast. How about you rest some more, and we’ll try again later?”

Okay.

Once, a thousand lifetimes ago, or maybe just in a dream, he played hooky from school. Mom worked the early shift then. He got up early enough to walk the girls to school, then headed straight for the hospital. For Steve, white and tinged blue like the bleached bedsheets, his breathing squeaky and shallow. They took his inhaler, stomped it to bits.

In the dream or memory, he pulled up a chair, propped his feet up on the edge of the bed, and slept on and off all day. It was worth it, so worth it, even when Steve scolded him, especially when Steve told him to get his smelly feet off the bed, and was he raised in a barn?

When he opens his eyes, the ceiling above his head is white and bright and it smells like something undefinably “hospital”.

“Steve?”

Footsteps. “Not this time, either. Just me.” That little voice from before.

He turns and forces his gaze to focus. The face that slowly glides into focus is young, regarding him with a detached sort of curiosity. “How’re you feeling?”

Never, ever, has someone brought him back to consciousness and asked him that. What is the proper answer to that question? He’s still blinking rapidly trying to clear his vision. “I don’t know.”

“Fair enough.” She glances at something a foot or so above his head; his peripheral vision is still shot but it might be a display screen of some kind. “Vitals are about what I expected, at least.” She looks back down at him. “Oh, I’m Shuri, by the way.”

“Bucky.” The answer comes automatically. Shuri looks as though she wasn’t expecting it. Come to think of it, neither was he.

“Yes, I know,” she says, picking up a tablet and typing something on it.

“No. You didn’t - you called me James earlier. That’s not my name.”

“You remembered.” She makes a thoughtful noise in the back of her throat and punches something else on the tablet. Shuri looks up from her tablet and glances at him sideways. “So you like ‘Bucky’ better than ‘James’?”

“Yes? Steve calls me that.”

She makes another thoughtful noise. “Okay. But what do you want to be called?”

Another question he has no idea how to answer. He’s not supposed to want anything. He doesn’t know how to anymore. But Shuri is waiting for an answer, so Bucky just shrugs.

“Then I’m sticking with ‘James’ for now. ‘Bucky’ kinda sounds like something you’d name your dog, anyway. No offense.” Shuri steps casually back out of his sightline. She’s behaving awfully casually, given his unpredictable history. He wriggles his hand experimentally. No restraints.

“It’s - it’s safe?”

“It is,” she calls back. She’s clearly distracted and doing something else, but lifting his head up off the table to see what she is doing is too much effort. “But we’ll get to that.”

“Are you sure? Why aren’t I restrained?”

And she laughs. Shuri actually laughs. “Please, do try to roll your ass off that table. But wait till I start recording.”

She has a point. They may have managed to wake him up more gently, but the absolute uselesness of his limbs at the moment is familiar.

“How long have I been out?”

“Uh. Let’s see. Nearly nine weeks.”

“That’s it?”

“It would’ve been sooner, but we’ve been busy.” There’s a forced lightness on that last word.

“And - Steve?”

“Left a week after you went under. He hasn’t been back since, but my brother’s heard from him a couple of times.” He can hear her typing away on a keyboard.

“Who’s your brother?” Is this something he’s supposed to know?

The typing sound ceases promptly. “T’Challa?” she answers, incredulous.

“Oh,” he answers lamely. “Does that make you a princess?”

“That’s exactly what I am.” She comes back into his field of vision and he turns to look at her. She’s got her chin angled upward and her mouth pressed in a thin line. “And you’d best not forget it, white boy, unless you want to learn why we call outsiders panther food - ” Then her eyes sparkle, and her face splits into a wide grin. “Nah, I’m just fucking with you.”

Trying to keep up with her is exhausting. Slowly he pushes himself into a sitting position. “People don’t. Don’t really do that with me.”

Shuri clears her throat awkwardly. “Well, James, you’re going to find that things go a little differently here. Are you ready to get to work?” she asks, and Bucky doesn’t answer, just appraises her in turn now that he can get a good look at her. Jesus, she’s just a child. A princess, a sister, a daughter. He slowly looks around the room, a workshop or a lab of some kind, but the purpose of this place is entirely secondary to the fact that as far as he can tell, they are alone.

“Are you ready to at least try?” Shuri asks again, and Bucky turns to look at her. He does not answer, just clenches and unclenches his hand. He could swear he still hears the metallic whisper of his left hand doing the same. Shuri’s own hands twitch at her side, as if considering touching him and then thinking the better of it. “You don’t have to be afraid. You’re safe here, okay? No one’s going to hurt you.”

For a long moment he just stares at her, trying to parse out what she has just said. Of course no one here would hurt him. None of them could. “But I could hurt you,” he croaks finally.

“But you know what? We have a plan. If you ever go…” she trails off and gestures vaguely to her own head, which Bucky takes to mean either crazy, or homocidal, or somewhere in between. “Can I tell you about it?”

He nods, once.

“Can you stand? I’d rather show it to you.”

He does, slowly, and unsteadily, and when Shuri throws out a hand and grips his upper arm to steady him, he manages not to flinch at the contact. Though he does bite his tongue almost hard enough to draw blood.

Shuri leads him to a glass door that slides open with a touch of her finger. Standing on the other side, watching the two of them with wary expressions, are two women, tall, clad in red, clutching spears. He remember seeing more of them when he and Steve landed in Wakanda.

“James, this is Mukondi and Dhakiya.”

They say nothing, but incline their heads slightly, almost at the exact same time and almost at the exact same angle.

“They’re part of the Dora Milaje, my brother’s personal guard,” Shuri continues. “They’re here to listen and watch for signs of trouble. Or, if I call for help - ” she punctuates this with a tap of the beaded bracelet on her wrist, and what that means, Bucky has no earthly idea - “they come in. They watched the tapes, from D.C. and Berlin. They sparred with your friend Steve.” They look formidable, to be sure, and they could wound the Asset, but they would never be able to put him down. Some of this must have shown on his face, because all of a sudden Shuri is whipping a small vial out of her pocket and waving it in his face. “All they have to do is get you down long enough for me to jab you with this. It’s a sedative and yes, it will work on you. I formulated it to, based on readings I got while you were in cryo. Steve let me test it on him.”

Affection and gratitude and amusement all throb in his heart at the same time. The corner of his mouth turns up in a smile.

Shuri grins back. “Captain America. Really willing guinea pig when it comes to you. Anyway. This knocks you out, we strap you down, you wake up like you did just now, and we try again. Thank you!” she chirps at her steadfast guards, and then she slides the door closed again and gestures for Bucky to follow her back into the lab. “Look, you trust Steve, right?”

He nods, once.

“And Steve trusts my brother. And my brother trusts me. So you can trust me too, okay?”

It’s a reach. But he nods again.

“Good. I know what I’m doing. C’mere, I want to show you something.” She leads him to the massive work table where he heard her typing before, and she grabs a tablet off of the surface. She perches on the edge of the table and gestures for Bucky to take one of the chairs. She taps the tablet a few times and suddenly a hologram bursts into the air above it. A three dimensional scan of a brain takes shape.

An exhibit on human anatomy at the natural history museum, Bucky ogles eyeballs in jars with fascination, examines slices of brain tissue between plastic slides, Steve close behind, turning greener with every room they pass through

“Did you remember something?” Shuri is asking.

He nods once.

“Good to hear.” Shuri gestures towards the hologram, and it zooms in on a section of the brain.

“Is that…mine?” he asks.

Shuri nods. “Yep, from scans we made while you were out.” The image is punctuated by pinpricks of red, clustered together so tightly it’s almost one solid color. “The red is the part they damaged,” Shuri explains, though he’s figured that out already. “We sent scans - anonymous scans, of course - to our best neurologists, and they’d never seen anything like it. Steve said he looked at your files, and he thought it was drugs and electric shock, but then he started looking all pinched up so…”

Bucky shrugs, to indicate that explanation sounds right. He has no more insight than Steve does when it comes to specifically what Hydra did. Probably less, if Steve has some kind of file. Bucky’s certainly never seen any files.

“This is the part of your brain that recalls memories. Here’s the good news, though.” She flicks her wrist again, and the hologram changes view to another section, drenched in hardly any red. “This is where memories are stored.”

“They’re all still there,” he murmurs. The notebooks now locked in some anonymous evidence locker, quite literally stained with blood, sweat, and tears told him as much, but still, it’s nice to have proof.

“Exactly. So now we repair the damaged part, so you have some control over it, and it’s not just your brain throwing random memories at you all the time.”

“Where are…where were the words?”

Wordlessly, she manipulates the hologram once again, and this time the section she zooms in on is clustered with angry black spots. “This is the first scan we took. It turned out to be less complicated than we thought,” she says, and her tone is the most subdued he’s heard from her so far. “Basically classical conditioning. You know, like Pavlov and his dogs? Just with torture instead of a bell ringing.”

“So how’d you get rid of them?”

Shuri smiles. “Good question, James. It was literally a clusterfuck, but it wasn’t so bad once we deconditioned one word at a time. With medication, to help your brain cells repair themselves, and with images and recordings that decoupled the words from their acquired meanings.”

“I don’t remember all of that. You did all of that while I was asleep?”

She laughs again. “Of course! If you remembered any of it, then I did something very, very wrong.”

“Then how do you know it worked?” There’s a desperate edge to his voice he wishes he could take back. Shuri’s expression softens. Wordlessly, she pulls up a new scan for him; it’s the same section of his brain, just minus the black spots.

“Partly based on the scans we took after the treatment. And we did a test where we played back a recording of the trigger words while you were unconscious and measured your brain activity and physiological reaction. A spike in cortisol levels - so, it was stressful to hear them, even unconscious - and that was the only result. But I hear what you’re actually asking. Yes, the only way to be completely, absolutely sure would be for someone to use the trigger words while you’re conscious and see what happens.” She pauses, basically the longest she’s been silent since he awoke, letting him take all of that in. “Do you want to do that? If it was Steve - somebody you trusted - ?”

There’s that question again, of what does he want. But this time he knows the answer. He shakes his head. Hearing those words again - from anyone, but especially Steve - would break something in him. Bucky is barely even together as it is, but he knows this much.

“Okay.” Shuri nods. “But the option’s there, if you ever change your mind. You’re allowed to do that, you know.”

“I know,” he snaps, and Shuri just smiles again.

The hologram disappears and Bucky glances down at the tablet in her hands. Something in him, some long forgotten part of him, is…curious.

“You can play with it,” Shuri offers, holding the tablet to him. “It’s your brain, after all. There’s case notes and neurology articles and stuff on there, too. It’s kind of neat, right?”

“I used to like this kind of stuff. Technology.”

Shuri grins. “Then you are in absolutely the right place.” Bucky is beginning to think she’s right.

They fall into silence; or rather, Shuri does, as Bucky’s default is silence. She flits around the lab, working on this or that, muttering to herself, but he has been taught to tune out all extra sensory input.

It is easy, so easy to slip back into those old patterns of thinking, that personhood is something for other people, not him. And perhaps that is why he devours everything he can bring up about his own head on the tablet, a desperate attempt to ground himself in the facts on the screen. They tell him what Shuri has also told him - that the triggers are gone - but even those “facts” are only colored lights arranged in a specific pattern on a screen. How can he trust what he cannot prove? He considers again her offer to test it out, like any good scientist would, and he tries to imagine what would happen if he heard the trigger words again, repeats them over and over in his head until they blur together and blend with the dull roar of his own pulse pounding in his ear, and then someone is calling his name and it’s like a dream, where he is both the actor and the observer, his hand closing tight around Shuri’s throat and lifting her easily off the floor -

“James? James!”

There is a deafening clatter as the tablet slips from his sweaty palm to the floor. Shuri is standing in front of him, bending down to his eye level, her hands twitching at her side as if she is once again considering whether it would be a good idea to touch him or not. Her face is pinched with concern and apprehension. Her throat is unblemished.

Bucky clenches and unclenches his fist and just concentrates on breathing.

“How about we take a walk?” Shuri says at length. “I’m kind of hungry anyway. And you haven’t seen your guest suite either.”

She’s been careful to frame it as a suggestion, she’s too smart not to, but Bucky’s been conditioned enough to know an order when he hears it.

Still, though, once he is outside, waiting while Shuri finds something to eat, he has to admit the fresh air was a good idea. Shuri returns momentarily with sandwiches and fruit.

“There’s a cafeteria on the top floor,” she offers in answer to his unasked question. “This complex isn’t just my lab, it’s the biggest mine in Wakanda.”

“Vibranium.”

“Yep,” Shuri says through a mouthful of bread.

He does not have much of an appetite but he is used to eating when he is told he must. The fruit she’s brought is round like an apple, but with a taste that’s a cross between a mango and a banana. After the first bite he just stares at it.

“What’s wrong with it?” Shuri asks.

“It’s…really good.”

Shuri just laughs. “Welcome back to being a human. Stuff tastes good!”

He smiles before he even realizes he’s doing it. He says nothing for a while, just savors the taste, the sticky flesh against his fingers, the warm breeze that keeps them company. Maybe he can do this. Maybe.

“Sooo…how much did you read before you went into a full blown panic attack?”

He shrugs. “Just. Classical conditioning, like you said. How they put that shit in me in the first place.”

“The triggers are gone, I promise. But short of saying them to you and seeing what happens, which you said you didn’t want to do, I don’t know what to tell you,” Shuri says, though not unkindly.

“I believe you,” he answers, and he realizes he does. He did not know about the trigger words all the time he was on the run from Hydra and from Steve. And even then it was a shit time, but at least then he could isolate himself to an abandoned warehouse on the edge of town or something when he no longer trusted himself to be around people. Even then, he could tell himself the fiction that he was in control, and almost believe it. “I didn’t even know about the triggers, until he started saying them.”

“And then it was all about the trigger words, right? Then it was all about knowing they could just switch you on and off.”

He nods. “I don’t know why I thought…”

Shuri hums thoughtfully. “You thought getting rid of them would be more like turning a corner. More fanfare and confetti. Yay, you’re free!”

“I didn’t think I would still be so scared.” It comes out in barely more than a whisper.

Out of his peripheral he sees her shoulders rise and fall, and then she finally reaches a decision. Shuri reaches over and pats the back of his hand. “Well, James, that’s what your army of therapists is for.”

Chapter Text

It surprises him, how quickly the days fall into a routine. The same thing happened in the days after D.C., when he was on the run. Perhaps it’s just a side effect of his shattered mind, that he craves the predictability of a schedule. Maybe it’s human nature to wish for routine. Or maybe after seventy years of being told what to do when, maybe he just doesn’t know how to live any other way than with structure. It’s not an unpleasant routine by any means, though. Up early, since he was always an early riser, and some things haven’t changed, then a run around the palace grounds, then a shower and breakfast, and then he meets with one of many shrinks, though apparently you aren’t supposed to call them that anymore. There is nothing that wears him out more than being asked to talk - about himself no less, Jesus Christ - for an hour, and so inevitably lunchtime finds him in Shuri’s lab, where he doesn’t have to say a word if he doesn’t want to. She has no end of things to chatter about, from whatever she’s working on to her favorite movies to embarrassing boyhood stories about her brother.

At first she tells him in no uncertain terms that he is not to touch a thing, and more than once she snaps at him to stop wandering around and distracting her. But then one day he catches her on a good day. She’s playing loud music over some kind of invisible stereo system, bopping her head in time to the music as she works over the suit she’s made T’Challa. “That’s not the one I fought him in,” he remarks. “How’s it work?” She turns to him, and her eyes are sparkling and there’s a grin on her face.

“You know what? No one ever asks me how it works or how it’s made. It’s always ‘eh, Shuri, you’re taking too long, Shuri, when it’s going to be finished, Shuri, I broke your beautiful, beautiful work again’. C’mere, I’ll show you how it works.”

The next day, she actually asks him to hand her a tool.

“Stop being useless and give me a hand with this,” Shuri says laughingly one day, and it’s such an innocent turn of phrase that he doesn’t think twice about it until she does, her expression going flat for just a second.

“I thought you were giving me a hand,” he deadpans. And God, but the grin she gives him then is infectious.

As Shuri works, Bucky tries to parse out what it is that she is even making. “I was thinking about how we’ll have to go in there, surgically, and clean up …” She gestures vaguely at his shoulder. “Hospitals use robots now, tiny ones, to help with surgeries. I’m working on improving the design.”

Shuri sees a problem and immediately goes to work on how to solve it. Even the problems that have already been solved; her mind is working on how she can solve them better. At first he thought she was a know-it-all, and he still does, but the difference is that now he thinks she’s earned that opinion of herself. It feels familiar, like he knew someone once who was the same way. Steve? his mind offers, always the first fill in the blank, but no, this time he’s pretty sure Steve isn’t the answer.

This is infinitely preferable to - how did Shuri put it? - his mind throwing random memories at him, but at the same time, now that he knows they’re all still there and intact, now it bothers him when he wants to remember something and can’t.

So the day that Steve shows up starts out as a day like any other, following the same routine until the moment when he walks into the lab and Shuri is talking to Steve at her usual rate of a mile of a minute. Once she sees Bucky lurking in the doorway, she stops abruptly. “There he is! Hi, James.”

And Steve turns, just staring straight at Bucky. His mouth hangs open just a little, like he is shocked to actually find Bucky in the same spot where he left him. Like he wasn’t actually expecting Bucky to be alive, and awake, and most importantly, no longer a ticking time bomb. Bucky doesn’t say anything; he thought he’d have more time to warning and therefore more time to figure out just what it was that he wanted to say to Steve. But then, Steve doesn’t say anything either. He just swallows heavily, crosses the distance between them, and pulls Bucky into a sudden embrace.

“Captain!” comes Shuri’s sharp retort behind them. “What were we literally just talking about? Boundaries! Consent!”

“Right, right,” Steve mutters, relinquishing his hold on Bucky. “‘M sorry, Bucky, I just - ”

And yes, for a moment, the sudden contact winds him up from that old reflex that touch equals pain, but below that instinct is one that’s even older, ingrained even deeper, and that’s the one he listens to when, wordlessly, Bucky closes the now-unwelcome gap between them and throws his arms around Steve. Steve winds his arms tight around Bucky and mumbles something unintelligible into Bucky’s shoulder.

They stay like that for a long while, until Shuri pointedly clears her throat behind them. Bucky forgot she was there. Steve huffs out a laugh against Bucky’s shoulder and disentangles himself slowly, head still bowed.

“You guys are cute and all, but maybe you want to move on to the declarations of undying love outside of my lab?” Shuri says, somewhere halfway between a request and an order. When Bucky turns his watery expression to her, she’s regarding them both with a mixture of amusement, annoyance, and pride.

“What, the old men are distracting you?” he asks.

“Go show him a romantic sunset or something,” she teases.

She has a point, though, and so the two of them amble out of the lab and onto the palace grounds. The immediate emotion of their reunion over, however, they lapse into a slightly awkward silence.

Bucky slowly becomes aware that Steve is staring at him and doing a terrible job of concealing it. It’s not as though they haven’t spoken at all since Bucky woke up; Steve’s got a burner phone and Shuri is teaching him how to text (even as she bemoans that cell phones are so twenty-first century), and there’s Skype when Steve has a stable internet connection.

“How’re the others?” Bucky says, in an attempt to get Steve’s attention off of him, just at the same time that Steve asks, “How’re you feeling?”

“They’re good,” Steve says pointedly. “I don’t get to talk to all of them that much, but…” He trails off, and Bucky feels a pang of guilt at this; after all, he’s the reason Steve’s a fugitive, the reason Steve can hardly risk a word with his friends. “Sam and Natasha are good. They ask how you’re doing.” Steve smiles. “Nat was the one who told me I should come here. She said I was getting sloppy, that I needed a break.”

Bucky frowns, and the images of Steve in that stupid garish uniform, clueless and blindly throwing himself at Hydra, waving at Bucky concealed on a hilltop, flash in his mind. “Were you? Getting sloppy?”

His smile widens. “Probably.”

Bucky doesn’t smile in return. “I should be there, watching your back,” he says, even though the thought of fighting again makes his stomach churn.

“No,” Steve answers firmly. “You’re exactly where you should be. I wouldn’t ask you to leave.” They have come to the top of the hill. The sun is beginning to set. They stand shoulder to shoulder for a few moments, admiring the view. Steve hums appreciatively. “It’s gorgeous here.”

“You used to draw the sunset,” Bucky remembers, suddenly. “From the fire escape.”

“I don’t draw much, these days. You’ve been remembering a lot, haven’t you?”

“I guess.” Bucky smiles ruefully. “I don’t know what I can’t remember.”

A casual observer would not have noticed the sudden tension in Steve’s jaw, but there are certain things Bucky can still pick up on, even with his memories as wrecked as they are. And suddenly Bucky realizes he knows exactly what it is that Steve’s been so busy doing these last few months. “It’s Hydra, right? Your missions.”

Steve scrubs a hand over his face and then straightens like it’s nothing. It’s a gesture Bucky saw him do a million times in the war, and it startles him. “It’s mostly Hydra,” Steve admits. “Small fry, you know. Clear out a hidden base here, flush out a spy there.”

It should be Bucky’s battle, and for a short time after D.C., with no idea what else to do with himself, it was. “Kinda hard to use a rifle with one arm,” he croaks. “Otherwise I’d join you.”

Steve just nods, once, though his face tightens at the empty space beneath Bucky’s left shoulder. Apparently they can’t seem to settle on a topic that doesn’t make the other one feel like shit. “With this kind of view? I wouldn’t want to leave. Shuri tells me they set you up with a pretty nice place. What’s it like here?”

And there is maybe just a hint of jealousy in that question, but Wakanda is a safe, easy, topic, and Bucky finds it much easier to talk about the present than the past, anyway.

The past catches up with him often enough as it is. Usually at night, whether he’s asleep or not, his defenses just seem to be lower then. He doesn’t always remember the nightmares that jolt him out of sleep, and it’s not like he wakes screaming every night, but of course, his broken brain chooses the day Steve is there to throw a really bad one at him. It starts with a mission, like most of his nightmares; a simple elimination, leave no witnesses - and then a child’s voice in the dark asking for water, and then a little boy crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, an empty plastic cup decorated with cartoon characters still clutched in his little hand - and then someone somewhere is screaming, screaming -

And then there’s Steve’s anxious face, mere inches from his and Bucky only panics harder, because if Steve is here, then they’ve got him too, and they’ll try to make him kill Steve again, and maybe this time he won’t be able to break free in time - but then Steve is cupping Bucky’s face in his hands and saying something soft and gentle and Bucky forces himself to focus, to hear the words.

A dream, just a dream.

“Jesus,” he gasps, slumping forward, and Steve grabs on and holds him tight.

“A bad one?” Steve asks, but Bucky cannot answer, because if he opens his mouth he’ll have to explain it wasn’t just a nightmare, it was a nightmare of something that really happened.

The thing that makes it hard to come out of a dream like that is the sense that follows where he feels like he’s no longer an actor in his own life but rather a stagehand watching the action from the wings. Time slips away. ‘Going away’ is how he’s started to think of it. The shrink told him the proper term is ‘dissociation’ and that honestly it would be more of a surprise if it didn’t happen from time to time.

“Aw, you woke me up for this? James,” comes a new voice, suddenly, drawing him back. Nobody calls him James, nobody, except for - oh. Shuri. Wakanda. Her small hand settles feather light on the back of his hand, and at first he starts at the contact. Her tone is gentle, even if her words belie the annoyance of someone abruptly pulled out of a perfectly average nightmare-free slumber. “C’mon, James, you have, like, fifteen therapists and I am certain at least one went through these grounding exercises.” She slips her hand into his and gives it a little squeeze. “Squeeze my hand, count to five. That’s it. You know where you are. You’re safe.”

Safe. Safe on the floor of the bedroom in his apartment in Wakanda. He is sitting propped up against the bed; he must have rolled out of it at some point. The room is lit only by the soft lamp on the bedside table.

“I’ve never seen him like that,” Steve says. It sounds like he’s far away, or maybe underwater. “I knew he had dreams, but…”

“You know that thing old Windows computers would do where the screen went blue because of a system error - no, of course you don’t, sometimes I forget who I’m talking to - when it gets too shitty, basically, he shuts down, and then you have to wait and let him reboot himself.”

“I’m not a computer,” Bucky says. He means it to sound rueful, but it comes out scratchy as if he hasn’t spoken in weeks.

“Well, hello!” Shuri chirps. “Welcome back.”

Slowly he drags his head up and he takes in the sight of Shuri in a t-shirt and shorts with little cartoon penguins and Steve, hovering anxiously in the background. “Water?” Bucky asks Steve, who gives a wordless nod and practically sprints out of the bedroom with the relief of someone who has finally been given a task to do.

“He doesn’t get it,” Bucky rasps at Shuri, as soon as Steve has left the room. “It’s not a dream. It’s real. I did those things.” He has no idea if he’s making any sense at all, but Shuri only nods, her expression suddenly uncharacteristically serious.

Steve returns with a glass of water, and as soon as he’s handed it off to Bucky, Shuri lets go of his hand. “I’m going to borrow Steve for private word, if that’s okay,” she says, and she stands and steers Steve out of the bedroom as soon as Bucky nods his consent.

They only step out into the hallway, though, and Shuri does not even bother to shut the bedroom door all the way behind them. Bucky catches the end of Steve’s sentence - “shouldn’t’ve come.”

But Shuri’s derisive snort in response is loud and clear. “Cap, the raging PTSD was a thing long before you dropped by. Look, I know this kind of thing is hard to see, but - it’s all normal. It’s part of the process. He’s doing really well because he really wants to get better. But you can’t just - don’t ‘Captain America!’ at him thinking it’ll fix him.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means - when he first came out of cryo, I asked him what he wanted to be called. All he said was, ‘Steve calls me Bucky.’ Steve, he’s got to learn how to be a person again, first. What do you Americans say? Crawl before you sprint, or something?”

“Or something,” is Steve’s mumbled response.

“Remember what we talked about. Don’t say, ‘do you remember’ because sometimes the answer will be no, and then you’ll both just feel like shit. Tell him stories. Be his friend. Let him figure out the rest.”

When they step back into the bedroom Bucky pretends that he hasn’t heard every word of their conversation. Steve looks properly chagrined, and then Shuri gives Bucky a meaningful glance, and he realizes she let him hear it on purpose.

“You guys okay? Can I go back to bed?” Shuri grumbles good naturedly.

“Yeah, Doc,” Bucky answers. “Get your beauty sleep.” She sticks her tongue out in response, because she is the incredibly smart princess-child that also just talked him down from a panic attack.

Once she’s gone, Steve slowly settles himself on the floor at Bucky’s side. “She’s something else,” he says with genuine admiration. “She seems to really like you, Buck.”

“She’s been…” And there aren’t words that come close to expressing the gratitude he has for Shuri. “Doc’s great,” he finishes, lamely.

Steve is silent for a long time. “You used to call Jean that. Doc.”

His mind conjures up the image of a girl in glasses with her dark hair in a perpetually messy braid, nonchalantly brandishing a report card with all As. “Doc,” he murmurs.

“Because she was the smartest out of the five of us kids. And she always made sure we knew it,” Steve offers.

He wondered, once, whether his middle sister was so smart only because, as the middle sister, she needed some way to distinguish herself, caught as she was between Becca’s charms and Louise’s comedic tendencies. Of course he called her Doc. She was so serious, from the moment she was born. How could he have forgotten that? And how could he have so thoughtlessly bestowed that nickname on someone else?

“I remember. I wish I remembered better,” he says, finally, though his voice cracks when he does, and Steve cringes a little.

“I know.” Steve sighs, and lays a hand on Bucky’s shoulder. It’s a tentative touch, no doubt influenced by Shuri’s lecture on not pushing, and Bucky’s heart swells. God, Steve’s trying so hard. Bucky leans into the touch, and Steve takes it as an invitation to slip his arm around Bucky’s shoulders and tug him closer.

Steve chuckles suddenly. “D’you r - when we were kids, this movie came out. It was this vampire thing - Nosferatu. We told your mom we were going to see - I don’t know, maybe a Marx brothers movie or something. The whole walk home we insisted we weren’t scared. But Mom was working late that night, and when we got back to your house you made a big show of inviting me to sleep over, you know, like you were being a gentleman about it. And then we couldn’t sleep so we turned the light on, and at one point in the middle of the night I kicked you or something in my sleep and you went halfway tearing into your parents’ room.”

“Becca tattled on us,” Bucky says suddenly. “My mom got us up for school extra early, even though we’d hardly slept.”

Steve huffs a laugh. “I forgot about that. That must’ve been about the time we realized we were going to have to start bribing Becca if we wanted to do anything fun ever again.”

Bucky is smiling; he’s been smiling for the entire story. “What other kind of stuff did we do? I just - it’s like, I just have bits and pieces.”

So Steve starts to tell aimless tales of their youth. He doesn’t stop, not for a long while, not even when Bucky’s head slumps against his shoulder and he lets his eyes drift closed.

Chapter Text

“What, Doc, are you a surgeon, too?” he asks as Shuri steps into place alongside the surgeon that shook his hand that morning and smiled warmly as she introduced herself as Dr. Ibori. Jesus, everyone in Wakanda is so nice. He is ribbing Shuri a little, yes, but he’s half-serious. After all, she was the author of a couple of the papers loaded onto the tablet she’d given him.

“You watch yourself, or you’re getting a Hello Kitty arm.”

He’s learning to parse which of the things that come out of Shuri’s mouth are pointless pop culture references he’s missed. But the doctor interrupts their banter before it can really get started. “You are certain that we cannot convince you to be put under general anesthesia?” she asks.

He shakes his head, trying to ignore churning in his stomach like he’d felt last night, when Shuri had texted him a warning that the surgeon would try to get him to agree to it. “No. Not if you don’t - not if you don’t have to.”

Dr. Ibori presses her lips in a thin line. “If you move too much - ”

“He won’t. You don’t have to put him under.”

Foggy panic gives way to surprise that Shuri is siding with him over the doctor.

The surgeon sighs and her expression softens. “We’ll be as careful as we can, and this exercise is only so that we might have a better idea of what we’re dealing with, but it’s going to hurt, son.”

“I don’t care about that. Don’t put me under.” They didn’t knock me out when they put the first one on, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it. Shuri looks uncomfortable enough as it is.

“A local numbing agent, then. At least. I’m not sure how effective it will be, but it should be better than nothing.”

He hesitates a moment, then nods, once. His eyes never leave the doctor as she prepares the syringe and injects the contents into his shoulder.

I’m in control I’m in control I’m in control

It doesn’t hurt, at least not at first, as the two of them begin to poke and prod at his shoulder. It’s just a sort of odd pressure. The numbing agent and the work they’d done to shut down the damaged connectors when he first arrived are enough. He watches what they are doing, as best as he can, if only to ground himself in where he is now and who he is with.

“So much scarring,” Shuri murmurs. “We’ll have to clean it up. Not right now, though,” she adds, for his benefit. “Why would they…hm. Wait a minute, what is this?”

Stars explode across his vision and his next breath comes out in a strangled gasp, but Bucky doesn’t move.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Shuri murmurs, “but we need to see the way they hooked this thing up…” She trails off, and then straightens up, removing her hands from the ruined machinery of his shoulder. “It’s a mess,” she says, horrified comprehension dawning on her features as she looks down at Bucky, sweat beading on his forehead. “How…how many iterations did they go through before they ended up with the one you were wearing?”

Wearing, as if the prosthetic had been something he could slip on and off at will instead of the most weaponized part of him. The truth was, Stark had only done what Bucky himself considered doing many times. “I don’t remember. A lot.”

“At first I thought, with the technology available at the time, they made mistakes, didn’t realize the damage - but they knew, didn’t they, and they just didn’t care. They were sloppy on purpose.” Shuri’s voice grows tighter with every word. “You don’t treat an animal like that, let alone a human being.”

Bucky closes his eyes. “Yeah, well, you don’t treat a weapon like either of those things.”

“Here, Princess,” says the doctor from her place at his shoulder. “This looks like the main anchor.”

No sooner are the words out of her mouth that a lot of things happen at once. Another burst of pain, this one much more intense than the last. He screams. Thoughtlessly Shuri lays a hand on his knee and at the touch Bucky jerks halfway off the table. This time the pain nearly drives him into unconsciousness, and above the ringing in his ears he can hear the doctor cursing under her breath, and he thinks he might be bleeding.

“What color do you want it?”

Shuri’s words may as well have been in Xhosan, for all the sense they make. He stares up at her, glassy eyed.

“What color do you want it?” she asks again. It sounds like she’s trying not to cry.

“The arm?” he manages, finally.

“Yeah.”

He may not have all of his memories, but Bucky is pretty sure it is the most absurd question anyone has ever asked him in his life. His next sharp intake of breath could almost be mistaken for laughter. “Not silver. No red.”

“I figured that much.”

“Shuri, I don’t care. Make it whatever color you want.”

Famous last words.

Shuri insists later that the pain was worth it. Now she has a much better idea of how to construct the prosthetic, and more importantly, how they’re going to get the remnants of the old one off of him without doing any more damage. That surgery Dr. Ibori does insist on putting him under for, which Bucky reluctantly agrees to. “You’re going to feel sooooo much better when we’re done,” Shuri tells him, practically bouncing on the balls of her feet. “And the one I’m building is going to look amazing.”

And she’s right, at least on that first count. The absence of the pain and tightness in his shoulder is like when Steve would get better and Bucky would breathe a little easier at the absence of the sound of his wracking coughs.

A week later, Bucky learns that he and Shuri have different definitions of what ‘amazing’ looks like. The prototype arm sits covered on the table in Shuri’s lab. He’s half expecting her to whip the sheet off like the cheap magician he took his sisters to see once. “Close your eyes,” Shuri says eagerly, and Bucky flinches from his place atop the table, legs dangling over the side. “Oh. Well, or not. But I wanted to do it this way so you could tell me what you feel once it’s on, without any visual input. And it’s just a prototype, not a full hookup. All you’ll feel is a little pinch.” She’s got some kind of obnoxious techno music playing in the background. It’s different, so different, and he realizes he’s come to trust Shuri. You can humor her, after what she’s done for you. So Bucky closes his eyes.

“Oh, and you don’t mind if I take pictures once it’s on, do you? So I can go back and see where the fit needs adjusting.” If his eyes were open, Bucky would have seen the glint of mischief that accompanied this request, but as it is, he just nods his consent. Shuri has a habit of humming under her breath when she works, so he concentrates on that. “Okay, here we go - don’t try to move it until I tell you, and - there.”

Bucky sucks in a breath. “That was more than a little pinch.”

“Fine, big pinch. How does it feel? Pain, tingling?”

“Tingling, yeah - like I fell asleep on it.”

“Kay. Good. Try shrugging, one shoulder at a time.” She walks him through a couple of exercises, asking questions after every one. She’s impressively thorough. Except for the one thing she hadn’t considered.

“The balance doesn’t feel right,” he says, eyes still closed. He has to admit she had a point; it’s much easier to answer her questions based on feeling alone.

Instead of the quip for insulting her briliance that Bucky was expecting, Shuri makes a noise in the back of her throat, the one that Bucky is learning means she’s stumped. “I’ll go back and run the numbers again, but - ” She trails off, long enough that Bucky almost opens his eyes, but then Shuri speaks up again. “Could you be compensating for the weight of the other one?”

He considers this. She could be right; after all, it took him a while to even walk with proper balance once he came out of cryo. His silence is answer enough.

“Well, I’ll figure it out. Those are all the questions I had. You wanna open your eyes and take a look?”

So he does, and for a long moment, he says nothing. Shuri’s mouth wobbles with poorly concealed amusement. “Shuri,” Bucky begins slowly, “why did you make me a pink arm?”

She regards him with wide, innocent eyes. “You said any color I want. And it’s not pink, it’s rose gold.”

“The hell is that supposed to mean? It’s pink.”

“You’re just lucky I went with rose gold instead of millennial pink.”

“That’s not - those are not real colors!”

She’s giggling at his spluttering indignation, and then Bucky’s eyes land on the phone in her hand. “Oh, you did not - ” He makes a clumsy lunge for the phone and Shuri dances out of his reach.

“Research purposes!” she says, sing-song.

Many hours later, in the middle of one of his sleepless nights, his phone buzzes. His heart skips a beat; he can’t think of anyone that would sending him messages this late at night except for Steve and he fumbles for it.

It’s a nice look for you. He frowns for a second, and then groans audibly. “She did not,” he mutters. The phone buzzes a second time.

Nat says rose gold prosthetics are a genius move. Shuri could make a lot of money

Shuri does not need too be called a genius her egos already huge

Texting is hard with one hand, and eventually Bucky was forced to say screw it and accept the misspellings and lack of punctuation if he was ever to respond to anyone in any kind of timely fashion.

also i hate you, Rogers

Love you too Buck. Good night

“Jerk,” Bucky mutters as he sets the phone aside, unable to suppress the grin spreading across his face.

Chapter Text

It hits Bucky, one day, while watching Shuri work, that despite her easy, teasing manner with everyone she comes across, she doesn't seem to have any friends outside of the palace. Maybe it's just an inherent problem with being born into royalty, even a royal family this approachable. She's never happier than when her brother is around, or when he's due to return after fixing some problem through either diplomacy, vibranium claws, or both.

And he never sees her as off balance as the day her brother comes home not on his own two legs, but borne in to the medical wing on a stretcher. It was just a slip-up, a close call; thankfully not a fatal one. It happens to the best of them.

Despite all that, Shuri is livid. Bucky finds her in her lab like usual, pecking furiously at T’Challa’s suit, instead of at her brother’s side. Even hanging back, unsure whether his presence would be a welcome distraction or an unwanted intrusion, Bucky can see that the suit’s been riddled with bullet holes. Shuri is muttering under her breath constantly, which is in and of itself not unusual, but the tone is typically not this vicious. Only a few words here and there are even in English, but the rest of them don't exactly sound very pleasant.

Bucky decides to gamble on welcome distraction. Distraction never worked on an angry Steve, reminds a voice in the back of his head, but then again, Shuri is not Steve.

"Need any help with that?" Bucky offers cautiously.

"Nah," she says, voice brittle with false cheer. "I'm good." But just a moment after she says it there is a flash of purplish light and Shuri yanks her hand back from the suit as if burned. "FUCK!" She turns and throws an accusatory glare at Bucky. "You're distracting me!"

He holds up his hand in a gesture of surrender. "You don't think that maybe it's time for a break?" he asks, without even realizing he's adopted the same kind of non-threatening, suggesting-not-ordering tone she always takes with him. She seems to recognize it, whether consciously or unconsciously, and she deflates a little.

"Maybe," she admits. She begins to set her tools down with a deliberateness that Bucky does not normally see in her. Normally she tosses things haphazardly about, insisting that she has her own system to keep things organized. “My father was always good about making sure I did not get so wrapped up in a project that I forgot to eat or sleep.” As soon as she’s said this she lapses into another uncharacteristic period of silence. She’s spoken to Bucky generally about her family before, but T’Challa’s the only one she speaks of in specific terms.

"You miss him." It’s an obvious, awkward statement, but without her usual chatter he’s the one grasping for something to fill the space.

"No shit," and her voice comes out hard and bitter, too much for someone her age, especially a kid as bright and brave and good as she is.

A long time ago, Bucky was good with words. He’s never had occasion to wish that were still true until now. "I'm sorry," he offers lamely. That should have been enough, but because he spends a lot of time with his own guilt he keeps going. "Even though - I didn't carry out the bombing, but he did it to get to me. It feels like I'm -"

"No!" The violence contained in that one word stops him dead in his tracks. "It has nothing to do with you!" To his surprise she's crying openly now, furiously swiping at her eyes. "You don't get to make Baba's death about you! Can't you see anybody's pain but your own?"

"Shuri - "

"Oh my God, James, just leave me alone!"

So he does, slipping out of the lab without another word.

One morning months ago, Shuri took one look at the bags under his eyes and announced, apparently unprompted, “I like YouTube when I can’t get my brain to shut off.”

“What’s YouTube?” He decided to take the bait.

“It’s a website, where people post videos of, like, everything ever. You want cat videos? You want to learn how to build a computer from scratch? You can watch someone play your favorite childhood video game. Did you know they do this thing in the U.K. every year where they roll a wheel of cheese down a hill and a bunch of people all try to grab it? It’s on YouTube.”

Part of him thought it was ridiculous, that this was the kind of shit people spend their time on, and another part of him was glad to know that he awoke in a world where people can spend their time on this kind of shit. It’s why he tolerated it every time Shuri stuck her tablet under his nose to watch another Vine compilation. Some things haven’t changed in the last eighty years. Kids still laugh at other kids doing dumb stuff.

So he’s restless that night, unable to sleep, and that’s how he ends up watching YouTube until the small hours of the morning. And that’s how he ends up texting Shuri a link, even though he doesn’t imagine she’ll respond, especially since he’s not even sure he’s doing it right.

The one at 2 and a half minutes is the only one Ive ever understood

Thouhg its a little bigger than a dinner plate. And heavier.

To his surprise, the phone buzzes within a moment.

i keep telling you, half the point of vine is to not make sense

but also, please send him that. plsss

He smiles at the screen, pleasantly surprised to have a response.

He wouldn’t get iT

exactly why you should send it

I’m sorry abouut this afternoon. I know some thing here are not my place

There’s a long moment before the screen lights up again, and he worries he’s just set her off again.

i’m sorry too. i shouldn’t have lost my shit at you

wait you havrnt been in the lab this whole time have you?

Uhhhhh

Christ take a break already. You can't protect him by working to deaAth

There's another long pause after that, and he begins to think he's done it again, upset her when all he meant to do was look after her, and then -

can i come over there and bring a movie

This request surprises him. She’s been in his space before, but never to just - what to people say - hang out? You bet. its yuor palace right?

She appears at the door to his apartment in twenty minutes, subdued and red eyed, with The Fellowship of the Ring and a bag of spicy yucca chips under her arm, his favorite, and her unspoken peace offering.

"Would you have read the book when it came out?" she asks as she queues up the disc and Bucky struggles not to eat every chip before the opening credits.

"What book?"

"The Lord of the Rings? J.R.R. Tolkien? I never remember when they were first released."

Bucky frowns. He knows that name. "I read The Hobbit," he says suddenly. "To my sisters. Steve hated it. I don't remember why. He wrote more books?"

"Mmhmm," she nods, sinking into the couch as she presses play. "They made movies of all of them, too. This is kinda like the sequel to The Hobbit."

He sees why she picked this one, then. It's easy to get lost in another world, at least for a while. And it does the trick. By the time Gandalf faces off against the Balrog, Shuri is curled up at the other end of the couch, asleep. Bucky stands carefully, retrieves a blanket from the bedroom, and drapes it over her. She stirs and opens her eyes just enough to give him a sleepy smile.

He lets her sleep long after the movie has finished, and he wakes her accidentally when his phone buzzes with a text from Steve and he can't muffle his laughter fast enough.

Who is that? Should I know? That's a fake accent, right? Is he a threat?

So he shows the message to Shuri who laughs at "poor, confused Steve" until she starts to cry instead, her face buried in her hands, and Bucky just rests a hand on her knee.

Eventually her sobs die down, and she goes so quiet that he thinks she's fallen asleep again until she speaks softly. "Right after you went to sleep, there was this whole thing where our long-lost cousin showed up and staged a coup." He quirks an eyebrow at this; it sounds like the kind of outlandish plot point that made up the radio dramas his mother listened to while she folded laundry. He's half waiting for her to say that she's just messing with him again, but then again, she probably would not have just gotten through weeping on his couch if this were an elaborate joke. “T’Challa - there were a couple of days where we thought he was dead.” She falls silent again and this time she turns to him, a silent plea for him to just understand without further explanation from her, the way she has done for him a million times before. And Bucky thinks he does understand, at least partway, so he just nods, and Shuri sighs loudly and curls herself under the blanket. She looks so small. Bucky keeps his hand on her knee until she falls asleep again.

He must doze off at one point, too, because suddenly Bucky is opening his eyes to brilliant sunshine and an awkward crick in his neck. Shuri is gone, her borrowed blanket folded neatly and draped over the arm of the couch. There’s a text from her on his phone.

my idiot brother is awake so i went to go see him. didn’t want to wake you. if you liked the movie we could watch two towers next. also. thank you.

Chapter Text

“Ready?”

He nods, tightly.

“Okay. One, two, three.” Shuri sounds as even as ever, as if hooking up advanced prosthetics is something she’s done a million times before. There’s a strange click, and then pain explodes across the back of Bucky’s skull. “Still with me?” Shuri asks, and for just a moment, he isn’t. But the pain subsides quickly and then he pries his eyes open to find that he is still in Shuri’s lab instead of in some grimy basement surrounded by leering scientists, and now there’s a shiny black prosthetic attached to his shoulder. He drags his eyes up to meet her hopeful and expectant expression.

“It’s not pink,” he rasps.

“Nope!” Shuri grins. “It’s gonna feel weird for a bit, but tell me if it doesn’t stop hurting, okay?” She walks him through the same sorts of exercises she did with the prototype. He marvels at how quickly the initial pain fades as his nerves make sense of this new piece of him.

It’s going to feel weird, she said. He knows she meant the physical sensation of it, but it’s uncomfortable mentally, too, to have a functioning replacement of the most weaponized part of him. If she hadn’t already begun drawing up the plans while he was still asleep, if she hadn’t been so excited at the challenge, he would have demurred and told her not to bother. Shuri is watching him with barely concealed excitement as he stands and flexes the fingers. She’s proud of it, obviously, and she has every right to be. It’s a marvel of engineering, and he wishes he could give it the appreciation it deserves.

“I think you need to get out of your head a little and really test it out.” She has her hands folded behind her back, and her eyes are sparkling.

“I think you’re just saying that because you really want me to test it out,” he answers.

“My brother’s got a pretty cool training ground outside the city. He always acts like it’s some big secret, but I’ve known about it forever, and he’s not even in the country right now.” Ah, and there it is, that mysterious glint in the eye common to every little sister ever. “Ooh, and I can show you my baby!”

“Your what now?”

Shuri’s baby, as it turns out, is a car, one of many housed in a massive garage beneath the palace complex. The car is unlike anything he’s ever seen; unmistakably unmodern, but it doesn’t look anything he saw on the road before or during the war. Definitely Wakandan. But the metal body lacks the telltale shimmer he’s come to associate with vibranium. “It’s not vibranium?”

“Not the whole body, no. I’ve been working on it since I was ten. It’s my baby.”

“How old is it?”

Shuri grins. “Much older than me, and much younger than you.”

Bucky is not clear on exactly where they are going, but it strikes him as Shuri pulls out of the garage that this will likely be the furthest from the palace he’s been since he and Steve limped in from Siberia months ago. This moment is such a far cry from that one. Shuri’s music blares over the stereo, as vibrant and alive as she is. And loud. He doesn’t thing he’s ever heard her listen to something that isn’t loud.

“Am I ever going to get to pick the music?” he asks, only because he knows it’ll get a rise out of her.

Shuri twists her face into an exaggerated grimace. “Nobody wants to listen to your dead white guys. Increase volume!” she commands the car. Of course she’s upgraded it to respond to voice commands.

“Listening to music at too high of a volume can cause damage to - ” the car stereo begins to patronize.

“You’re not my real mom,” Shuri announces loudly, drowning out the rest of the warning.

Bucky has just barely time to register that the noisy pop song is sung in Russian before Shuri yells, “Next!” and the stereo obligingly switches to the next song.

They are out of the city proper by this time, the buildings around them growing less dense and Shuri responds to the relative lack of traffic by ramping up the speed, bopping along to the music. Bucky unconsciously drums his new metal fingers against his knee.

The companionable silence is broken suddenly by the sensation of a sudden cloud blocking out the sun. They both become aware at the same time that something is not right. There’s another car on the nearly-empty road, and it’s barreling straight towards them. Shuri makes a choked noise in the back of her throat.

No time to think, only to react. Bucky leans across and yanks the steering wheel from Shuri’s slackened grip, turning it sharply and steering the passenger side into the path of the oncoming car.

The world bends like a rubber band, then snaps back into place.

Boots grind broken glass into the pavement. The stench of oil and blood. A man whispers a name he used to know. “Howard,” a woman sobs.

“James,” a different woman sobs. “James?” A soft shock straight to his brain.

“Here. I’m still here,” he grunts.

The music has stopped, replaced by the computer cheerfully listing off their injuries.

“Passenger: multiple abrasions, contusions, whiplash. Driver: concussion requires medical attention, multiple abrasion and contusions.”

“Shuri?”

Her eyes are wide and unfocused. Her nose is bleeding freely. She flails a fist at Bucky. “Where’re they? I can fight.”

“The hell you can. Stay down. You get down and you don’t move an inch until I come back,” Bucky says, cupping her cheek with his flesh hand until her eyes focus on him and she nods, barely. Her hands are shaking too badly to undo her seatbelt, so he does it for her. She crumples down to the floor of the car.

Another explosion of glass, and a bullet embeds itself in the headrest of the driver’s seat.

White hot fury shoots through every inch of him and he kicks the door open, flinging himself out of the car and directly at the shooter in one swift movement. The gun fires. Pain explodes in his side. It doesn’t slow him down even half a step. He wrenches the gun from her grasp and slams the end of it into her teeth.

There are others, a bunch of them. They’re pouring out of the other vehicle, like some kind of hellish clown car, its front end crumpled to oblivion. Bucky does not think, does not need to. Rush the one on the left. Left arm up to block the bullet from the one at his 10 o’clock. Dodge, weave, a sweeping kick to the leg. Keep them away from the car, from Shuri. It’s the only thing that matters.

“For a king so reluctant to fight, T’Challa’s been keeping quite a weapon under our noses!” shouts one of his assailants. The statement makes no sense. When has T’Challa ever been unwilling to fight? And because the fucker is clearly bored enough to start with the villainous banter, Bucky swings around and punches him directly in the face. Blood spurts from the man’s nose and splatters onto the shiny black of the arm Shuri made for him, the one that he never wanted to use to fight. And it is only then that the second part of the statement sinks in. The thug called him a weapon.

“Longing!”

It is the clunkiest Russian accent Bucky has ever heard, but there’s no mistaking the word. It throws him off for just long enough and the rest of them get the drop on him, kicking him in the bullet graze in his side and grabbing him by the shoulders, by the hair, when he goes down.

About ten feet away, the last to step out of the other car, is a balding Wakandan and in his hand is a notebook that Bucky sees often in his nightmares.

“Don’t,” he gasps.

But the man keeps reading.

The blood roaring in Bucky’s ears drowns out all other sounds except for the voice shouting at him from across the pavement.

And then nothing, nothing except the sound of his own heartbeat.

No, it’s more than nothing. It’s anger.

Just a bubble at first then it gathers momentum, coursing through his veins with every thud of his heart.

The Asset feels nothing, nothing but blind obedience.

But Bucky? Bucky is nearly blind with fury.

He’s shaking all over, whether from terror or adrenaline he can’t say, but even so, it is nothing to shake off the grip of the thugs trying to hold him down. It is nothing to smash two of their heads together and it’s nothing to throw all of his weight into a kick aimed straight for the third’s kidney. The man repeats the failed commands, reading faster and louder as Bucky strides toward him until he’s screaming the words all together, like a vile prayer.

“Soldier! Soldier!” he squeals.

Bucky’s hand closes around the man’s throat. The notebook tumbles out of his grip. He lifts his would-be controller nearly a foot off the ground.

“I’m not your fucking soldier,” he snarls, and tosses the man into the wreckage of the other car.

The world goes quiet again, save for the quiet grunts and groans of the injured, and the deafening roar of Bucky’s pulse pounding in his ears. There’s an angry red star on the ground. It’s burned into the back of his eyelids. Bucky picks up the notebook and tucks it inside his jacket. It feels like a weight lifted from his shoulders, at the same time it feels like the notebook is burning straight through his shirt and searing his skin.

His whirls to see Shuri’s car marked with additional bullet holes. Bucky’s throat closes up.

No no no no no no

He sprints over and wrenches open the door to the driver’s side, nearly pulling it off its hinges in his panic. Shuri is still conscious. She flinches at the sound, then turns her wide eyes up at him. She’s covered in blood, though, and Bucky drops to knees immediately, checking her over for gunshot wounds, but the blood is only from her nose when she smashed it in the crash. He hopes it isn’t broken.

“Hey,” Bucky murmurs, trembling with relief. “Let’s get you out of there, sweetheart.” Bucky picks the glass out of her hair. Even as a first model this left arm is a marvel. His old one was touch sensitive enough to pull a trigger, and that was about it.

“My baby,” Shuri whimpers, surveying the damage to the car as Bucky gently lifts her from it. “Baba gave it to me. We worked it for years.”

“If anybody can fix it up again, you can. You fixed me, huh?” She only turns her head and buries her face in his shoulder and huffs out what the thinks - hopes - is a laugh.

“Walk with me.”

Okoye’s tone brokers no arguments, so Bucky stands, noting that the bandaged wound on his side is already tugging less painfully, and falls into step alongside her long strides. She has barely even bothered with a greeting. She’s always treated Bucky with the utmost professional courtesy, alongside an undercurrent of suspicion. Fair enough. If she hadn’t, he would’ve wondered what T’Challa kept her around for.

“How is she?” Bucky asks.

Okoye’s expression softens just a millimeter. “She’ll be fine. They are keeping her in the medical ward overnight, just in case, but she’ll be fine.” Then she straightens and she’s all business again. “Tell me everything.”

So he does, every minute detail, even the notebook and the words, even though his voice wobbles just a little when he gets to that part. Okoye’s expression grows stonier and stonier. The most disturbing part of the whole day is the fact that they were attacked outside of the palace walls, in a car barely able to withstand gunfire, and his soldier’s mind makes it hard to dismiss that as a coincidence. He knows that Okoye is too smart not to have come to the same conclusion, but he voices it anyway.

“It had to have been someone on the inside,” she agrees, but she sounds - if not less disturbed than Bucky, then less surprised at this possibility.

This throws him a bit, and so his next words come out stuttering and awkward. “Look, if you want me - if I need to go - ”

Okoye slows just a bit and throws a sideways glance at him. “Go? As in, leave Wakanda? Why would I want that?” The question of where he would go remains unasked.

“Because they knew I was here. Because they were after me.”

"What happened today had nothing to do with you," Okoye snaps.

There's a beat filled with an awkward silence. "With all due respect, ma'am, it...kind of feels like it does." Now Bucky is only more confused. Shuri said much the same thing once, angry and terrified at the prospect of losing her brother.

Okoye sighs. “Fine. It has less to do with you, and more to do with certain factions that believe they know better about what’s good for Wakanda than our king.”

It’s all starting to click into place, like the prosthetic in the connectors Shuri put in his shoulder. “Shuri told me there was a coup.”

Okyoe looks at him sharply. “The ideas that man spread are a cancer that has infected more of my kin than I thought. You were only caught in the middle. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She nods. “Good.” She resumes her long stride. “The king and his mother are on their way back as we speak. And I have a lot of work to do.” And maybe it’s just a trick of the late afternoon light, but Bucky could swear the corners of her mouth twitch in the beginnings of a smile. “She…could use some company.”

Shuri is sitting up in bed when he enters the medical ward; cleaned up and bandaged she looks much like her usual self. She flashes him a grin. “My whitey in shining armor!” She even sounds like her usual self.

He says nothing, just gives her a lopsided smile and eases into the chair by her bed. “Feeling better?”

“Yes. Bored, though. You just brought yourself? Nothing to do?” But something in his face must betray the stress of the day, because she falls silent for a moment and looks from his face to his jacket, still hanging open. “Did you bring me something to read?”

He retrieves the notebook and turns it over in his hands, staring down at that ugly red star. “Nah. Unless Soviet-era user manuals for brainwashed assassins is your idea of a good read.”

“What’s in it?” she asks. “Besides the words.”

“Honestly? I have no idea.”

“You’re going to get rid of it, right?”

“I’m gonna burn it.”

“Good.”

He looks up at her in the vehemence in her voice. Shuri’s eyes are bright and burning. “Don’t even open it,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what’s in there. None of it has anything to do with you.”

He nods slowly. Even so, what if there is something in there he should know? About what they did to him. Or about what he did.

Shuri reaches across and swats his hand. “You’re not listening!”

“All right, all right!” Bucky tucks the book back in his jacket and holds his hands out in surrender. “I thought you were supposed to be resting.”

She ignores this completely, nods towards his left arm. “Well? How’s it performing?”

“Nuh-uh. You’re not working. You’re resting.”

Shuri huffs in annoyance. “This is resting. See? I’ve got a blanket on and everything.” She pats the thin white sheet draped across her knees.

Bucky reaches into his pants pocket and deposits a deck of cards in her lap and grins when Shuri groans in annoyance. Steve brought the cards on one of his stops, and Bucky had surprised both of them with how many games and rules he actually remembered.

“That’s right. I’m subjecting you to old white guy entertainment,” he says smugly, dropping the deck into his hand and shuffling it; haphazardly shuffling it, anyway, still getting used to the functionality of his new hand. “How many Vine compilations have you made me sit through again?”

“That’s different. I’m catching you up on what you missed. Also, those are funny and you know you like them.”

“Yeah, well, here’s what you missed.”

“It doesn’t count as missing it if it happened before I was born,” she huffs, but even so Shuri takes up the cards Bucky’s dealt her.

For all of her whining about boredom, it isn’t long before her cards lay discarded in her lap and her eyes drift close. Like the girls when they were little, insisting they weren’t tired, on the nights when both their parents had to work and Bucky was in charge. Carefully he replaces the cards and pulls the blanket up over her shoulders. Then he sits, and looks out the window. His mind is scattered and distracted. This could be Brooklyn, Steve draped in a hospital bed, if you replace the incessant chatter of birds and wildlife with car horns and barks of laughter from the passersby below. And just like those long vigils at Steve’s side, there’s no question in Bucky’s mind that this is where he’s supposed to be right now.

Another spectacular Wakandan sunset has long since ended when suddenly there are voices speaking in hushed tones in the hallway behind him. He stands abruptly, startled, and Shuri stirs at the sound. “Mother,” she whimpers, her face crumpling, as the dowager queen brushes past Bucky to settle on the edge of Shuri’s bed and gather her into an embrace, murmuring in Xhosa. T’Challa, aged ten years in a day, is close behind her. He looks through Bucky for half a moment before his gaze slides to Shuri, and he joins his mother and sister on the bed and gathers them both into his arms.

It’s Bucky’s cue to leave, and he does without a word.

He waits until the little fire is burning healthily. No doubt the Wakandans have got some kind of laser-powered incinerator he could use, but this is something he has to do his way. He turns the notebook over in his hands one more time. He flips open the front cover. He hesitates for a moment. And then with his flesh hand, so that he can feel the paper against his skin, he rips the pages out and tosses them into the fire, first one by one, watching them crinkle in the flames, and then in big chunks until finally he is standing there holding the empty cover. Then he tosses that in too, watches, nearly hypnotized, as the flames lick the red star.

The last time he stood in the darkness, eyes glued to the slow moving curl of burning paper, he was in an alley, burning his draft notice, swearing to himself never to tell a soul the truth of its existence.

That had been the first time that he remembered something about his life differently than the rest of the world did. And it confused and frightened him, because surely he with his scrambled brain was the one misremembering? Why would he lie about it, anyway? Surely he was wrong about this thing, the one thing that he could not just ask Steve to confirm or deny. Even now he is not sure why, all those years ago, he chose to lie about enlisting. Was it because he did not want the rest of them to know how afraid he was? Did he hope that the lie would finally get Steve to stop barging into enlistment offices throughout creation?

And the idea of being drafted instead of enlisting was so unfathomable because after years of being told to fight, Bucky had forgotten that there was never a time when he actually wanted to fight, unlike Steve who had probably come out of the womb swinging. Bucky had simply forgotten that he just fought anyway, because there had always been bigger things to consider than what he wanted.

But watching that book burn was a balm to all his fears that if he ever had occasion to pick up a weapon again he might never be able to put it back down. He realized that fighting back that afternoon had never been about saving Shuri, just as all those years ago it had never been about saving Steve. Both were fully capable of taking care of themselves.

No, it was simply about standing up straight between someone he cared about, and someone that intended to do them harm.

T’Challa practically stomps up behind him, overcompensating for his ability to move silently, and waits to speak until he is sure Bucky has noticed his presence. “A very alarmed guard,” he begins, a hint of amusement in his voice, “comes to tell me the American is starting fires in my palace.”

Bucky shrugs. His eyes never leave the fire before him. “I didn’t want to wait.”

T’Challa comes to stand beside him, glancing down at the red star that shrivels before them both. “No, I expect you didn’t.”

Bucky finally tears his eyes away to glance sideways at T’Challa. He looks less pinched now, though Bucky cannot say with any accuracy how long he has been out here. Ten minutes? Four hours? “How is she?” Bucky asks.

“Shaken, and in need of rest, despite that show of bravado she puts on. But she is alive.” T’Challa’s expression grows as distant as Bucky’s must have been, staring into that fire. “It should never have been her. Or you. I’m sorry you were dragged into our problems like that,” he says, finally.

“No, don’t - don’t apologize for that. This is - Wakanda is the closest thing I’ve had to a home since - ” Bucky honestly has no idea how to finish that thought, so he trails off and leaves T’Challa to fill in the blanks.

“Wakanda could not have endured another loss. I could not have endured it.” T’Challa’s voice cracks, and before Bucky knows what’s happening T’Challa is pulling him into a tight embrace. “Thank you,” he says, his hands coming to rest on Bucky’s shoulders. “I owe you an unpayable debt.”

Well, that’s an unintentionally ironic statement if Bucky’s ever heard one. Jesus, no wonder everyone here is so good, if this is their king. Bucky laughs out loud, a humorless sound. Even in the dim firelight the quirk of T’Challa’s brow is unmistakeable. “I’m sorry, it’s just - look, after what you did for Steve and me? After what Shuri did? Look, if there’s anybody here with any unpayable debts it’s me.”

T’Challa just smiles, gives Bucky’s shoulder a final squeeze before dropping his hands. “You’re a good man, Bucky.”

And it’s nice to hear, even if he doesn’t always believe it. But at least he knows that from now on, his actions are his own. They can’t control him anymore. Shuri had made sure of that.

“I’ll never hear the end of it, will I,” Bucky says to the dying flames. “That her method of getting that stuff out of my head really worked.”

T’Challa chuckles under his breath. “No, my friend, you will not.”

“I had three little sisters,” he says, by way of explanation, though Bucky is not sure what he is explaining - how he knew that Shuri will endlessly tout her genius? why he turned the car and put himself in harm’s way - and he can see T’Challa regarding him curiously. They stand there for a few moments longer, until that last symbol of Hydra’s control is nothing but glowing embers.

“Shall we?” T’Challa offers, beginning to turn away. “There is nothing out here left for you,” he adds heavily. Then he seems to give himself a little shake. “Besides, after today, I could use a drink.”

“Amen to that,” Bucky mutters, turning and following the king of Wakanda back inside.

They are back in the lab before long, Bucky and Shuri, and Shuri tells him it’s time to move on to the next phase of his rehabilitation. There’s a little village, she tells him, quiet and peaceful, where he can start to be around people again.

Is it a coincidence, he wonders, that she brings this up now, after a Wakandan rebel helpfully proved that Hydra’s words no longer affect him? Or is it really just time, as she says? And is it Bucky’s imagination, or does she sound a little regretful when she says it?

He nods as she describes the place, and a little peace and quiet, especially after the incident the other day, sounds wonderful. But…

“Would you come visit?” he blurts out, surprising them both.

Shuri’s expression softens. “Sure. We still have to watch the rest of The Lord of the Rings, right?” But then her face snaps back into the expression of sparkling mischief that has featured so prominently in his time here. “Anyway, James, you’re kind of my favorite white person.”

Bucky grins back. “I’ll do my best to keep the top spot.”