Chapter Text
She had sequestered him out to the flanks of the Borderlands as soon as trouble rumbled on Wakanda’s plains. “I can help,” he’d told her at once. “I know war.”
“This is not war,” she laughed, tight, kissing his forehead fondly. “This is family.”
And Bucky had not known about that for a good many years, so he did not argue again.
-
He lay on the sheepskin rug, staring up at the reedy, sloping roof of the tent, listening to the distant storm of the fight: the kind of howling yell that travels far on the wind, clashing spears, the wail and roar of great beasts that he’d glimpsed, briefly, domestic and chewing the cud as Shuri flew him out of the city. There were familiar noises every so often. The high-pitched whine of a laser firing. The stark, distant boom as a ship crashed to the muddy ground, shoring up the earth, deep enough to dig up bones.
His mind supplied the sound of gunfire, a false echo. Old-fashioned and desperate. He could still hear the ring of his sniper after each single shot.
Everything was quiet again by dusk.
His squabbles with Steve, all the way back when, had settled down at a similar pace. Morning anger dissipated into eye-rolls and truces by sundown. They’d argue over girls, money, politics, the war. “You always gotta play devil’s advocate,” Steve would mutter, and Bucky always laughed at him, how stubborn he was, and only made it worse.
“Don’t be sore with me,” Bucky would wheedle, always the first to give in.
“Then don’t rile me up so much,” Steve snapped back.
Family feuds had a short-burning kind of heat, Bucky supposed, from what he could remember.
He waited, and hoped he would see Shuri again soon. He liked her, and she seemed to like him, and both things were painfully rare.
Everything was quiet.
-
He had always expected to be woken by Steve’s grim stoicism and a dry mission brief; instead, the first thing he saw was Shuri’s bright face, both of her hands holding his as she helped him down, weak legs and shaking shoulders, from the cryo-chamber.
She took everything slowly. Introduced herself first, let him know that he was in Wakanda, and that he was safe. Told him, truncated, what she knew of him. “You’re not such a ghost these days,” she said slyly. SHIELD’s files, all splashed across the dark web, outed him with just enough detail to matter.
She had a bedroom kitted out for him, next to the lab, and told him not to touch anything in a voice that suggested he could do just the opposite; but Bucky had always been good at following orders.
He slept badly, feverish. The deep mattress belied a level of comfort he hadn’t known in years, and made him uneasy. The last time he slept on something this soft, he dimly recalled, was in Alexander Pierce’s lofty compound. Only ever a single night; the specifics well-scrubbed from his tired mind.
The next night, Shuri gave him a beaded bracelet that glowed a gentle blue. “Just talk into it if you need me,” she explained.
“A baby monitor?” he said, his eyebrows raised.
“Ah, he jokes!” she grinned, clapping her hands together joyfully.
He mustered a smile for her. He was out of practice. Two years in Romania had left him with a tight, close-mouthed smile, more an acknowledgement than an emotion: a nodded thanks to harried women in coffee shops and noisy marketplace men. He had moved often but with irregularity, renting a new apartment every few months, and locals never got to know him well enough for the genuine pleasure of a regular.
But her smile was radiant enough for the both of them.
It was two more days before she explained that while he slept, she had sent a series of electrostatic pulses through his nervous system, a kind of shock therapy - “Nothing like Western medicine,” she was quick to say, unhidden disdain in her voice - that, in layman’s terms, had rebooted his operating system.
“I un-brainwashed you,” she beamed.
He did not want to mock her enthusiasm. “I don’t think it’s as easy as that.”
“I didn’t say it was easy,” Shuri chided. “I said I did it.”
She got up to Daybreak in his trigger sequence before he stopped her frantically. His remaining hand was shaking, badly, and he had wanted to reach out and grab her neck, stopper her breath, crush the words in her throat. “Stop,” he gasped, like he’d run for miles. He realised he was leaning forward in his chair, opposite her, crouched like a leopard, and he made himself unclench all over, tried to settle back.
“Trust me,” she asked him.
“I can’t,” he replied. She did not know him. He was a loaded gun.
“We don’t use guns here,” she said, smiling.
All the more reason to handle him with care; or better yet, not touch him at all.
“It’d be better for everyone if you just--” He rubbed his face, sighing. He was sweating thickly, and his hand was still trembling. “If you just put me back on ice. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the effort, but--”
Shuri held up a hand to halt him, with such self-belief in her action that he shut up, immediate. All at once he remembered he was not speaking to a girl, any girl, but to a princess.
She told him a story. “When I was small, all I wanted was to be the Black Panther. To protect my kingdom and my people. I wanted it so badly that I challenged my brother, a prince then, for our grandfather’s ring - for his place in the line of succession. We were both just people, just muscle, sticks and stones and human bones. I thought wanting it more than my brother meant I could win.”
Shuri laughed, a noise too old and bitter for her youth. “I lost very poorly.” She twisted around, lifting the hem of her shirt so that he could see a faded scar on the back of her hip. “T’Challa timed his blow badly. He had meant to nick me, to prove a point, and instead cut right through my puppy fat. He cried, afterwards, you know. Cuddled me and cried.”
“How old were you?” Bucky asked quietly.
“I was nine years old. And now,” she said, pointing across the lab to the mannequin nestled in the corner, its saber-toothed necklace bright under the cavernous light, “I am twice as old as that and have built my brother a suit to save the world with.”
She leant forward, and took his hand, dry skin between the webbing of his fingers and dank sweat on his palm. “We each have our own strengths. Sometimes we just have to learn what they are.”
He liked how confident she was.
Bucky already knew he was a weapon.
He just didn’t know whose anymore.
-
He spent four days rising with the sun, waiting to see if Shuri came back. Months on the move in Eastern Europe had taught him how to carve a routine for himself, so he set to it.
He took an afternoon to scope out the lay of the Borderlands. Shuri had housed him by a watering hole, maybe two miles from the nearest village, an easy walk for the local kids, who made a game of spying on him from the copse of fruit trees around the edge of the lake. He bared his teeth at them and growled to make them giggle, pretending to flee only to reappear minutes later, still breathless with laughter.
They must have heard the battle too, and were utterly unperturbed by it all.
He was still strong enough that he could climb the trees with his one hand and bare feet. Plucked bush pears from the lower branches and let them drop to the golden grass. He stored any that were unripe in his tent, and ate the rest, the fatty fruit dripping juice down his palm.
He washed in the lake. It was cold but he was used to it: hot water was expensive, back in Brooklyn, and he’d always let Steve take the first bath, putting up with the chilly dregs while Steve toweled himself dry in the corner of the bathroom. They hosed him down, in Russia, and continued to do so when he was loaned, forcibly, to Pierce’s Strike team. Put him in a tiled room and sprayed the blood off his hands and body. Nobody got close enough to scrub him. It often clumped under his fingernails, he remembered.
Here he could strip down and float, at his leisure, on the calm water. Let the sun dry him. Dress again, in his loose, afternoon-warm clothes.
The local children got bolder. They brought him bowls of cooked rice, dried strips of meat, and a kind of milk that wasn’t dairy but he couldn’t quite place. It tasted fresh and he swallowed it gratefully. In return, he let them poke at his pale cheeks, laugh at his scruffy beard, and play with his lank hair, tying it up into little rat-tails with pieces of braided string. One little boy got carried away, pulled his hair into four messy bunches, and he waved them all away, gently. “Okay, okay,” he said, and they shrieked with delight at his hoarse voice. “Just one’ll do.”
Bucky felt calm, and it unnerved him.
He liked that the floor of the tent was hard under his back. It helped him sleep at night. He dreamed of memories more than he dreamed of waking nightmares.
He dreamed of Steve; and rose with the sun.
-
Shuri came back to him with a steely gaze and a proud grin, and reminded him, for a moment, of young soldiers who crowed they’d won the war at the end of every skirmish. Raising toasts in their damp tents, with flat beer in mud-flecked bottles.
Those men were all dead now, and Steve, the only one left alive, had never had any use for beer.
-
She came back to him in a buzzing light aircraft, and three armoured women helped her take a hovering steel crate out of the cargo bay. He had cleaned up, when he heard their approach, gathering up all the sucked-clean pits of his stone fruit. He assumed she’d take him back to her lab, now that blood had been spilled and scores settled.
“It’s nicer out here, don’t you think?” she said, taking her unfamiliar tools out of the crate.
She brought the lab to him.
“Do you want an arm,” Shuri asked, “or a weapon?”
“The latter,” he said, without pause.
She eyed him side-on, a little curious and a little annoyed. “Do you want an arm,” she asked again, “or do you want a weapon?”
Bucky thought about it.
“Both,” he decided.
-
They talked easily. She never expected conversation from him, and was happy enough with his silent nods and one-word answers. She liked the sound of her own voice in a way that was endearing. She only talked of things that interested her, she claimed, but she was a curious girl, fascinated by everything; she could definitely ramble.
Shuri measured and tested him with instruments he could not begin to understand, like they had in Germany, in Russia, but she explained everything she was doing, each step of the way. She tutted about the crude titanium fastening, fixed, forever, in the nub of his arm, and lamented she could not pull the whole thing out and start over with vibranium.
He was uneasy, to be conscious through all this. He only had fluttering, grey memories, waking bleary, half anesthetized, to find his severed arm reattached anew, heavy and brutal. He wished he could sleep, and let her work.
Shuri sensed his unease, perhaps, and put her equipment aside, and carried on with her hands. Whether it was of any use to her or she just wanted to soothe him, he couldn’t find it in himself to argue.
He liked the way she touched him, from the very start. Without fear.
They talked, and he found it too easy to dredge dark thoughts from the dank pool of his mind.
“You thought I murdered your father,” he said, quiet.
“Yes,” she replied breezily, testing the tension around his shoulder with the small pad of her thumb. “And I would have been happy for my brother to kill you. But he didn’t, because you didn’t.”
“I would have.” It was a little difficult to say, even if it was true. “One time.”
He couldn’t remember killing Howard Stark; but he remembered the sound of his wife screaming, scratchy audio from an old video tape.
She pushed both thumbs up into his armpit, and he flinched, sensitive there from an old, awkward stab-wound. “My brother worries about what-ifs too. Either you did something or you didn’t.”
He did remember the desperate face of the woman who had thrust her flick knife into the fatty cavity under his arm. The blood in her brunette hair, her wide, shaking eyes. They protruded almost cartoonishly as he throttled her. The strength in his weaponised fingers cracked the bones in her neck, sheared her spine. She had seemed startled about dying.
“I did a lot of things,” he murmured.
“You are not the only person who has ever killed,” Shuri said, too bold.
Bucky could not bring himself to say, yes, but--
-
He liked her pride: in her country, her parents, her brother. He used to talk of Steve, in his absence, with that same pride, and was always met with incredulity. Nobody could believe how fiercely that little firecracker burned.
“Tell me about Steve Rogers,” she said, sounding sly, and he huffed out a dry laugh.
“Sounds like you already know.”
He liked when she was in a flighty mood, all her expressions and gestures exaggerated. She shrugged, and her shoulders brushed the bottom of her earlobes. “People have mocked my brother for dressing like a cat, but at least he does not drape himself in a flag.”
Bucky’s laugh was real this time. “Yeah, Steve never cared much for it either.”
“So tell me,” she said again, nudging Bucky’s shoulder playfully.
He hadn’t had the chance to bolster Steve in so long. “He’s a good man,” Bucky murmured. “He was never meant to be a perfect soldier.”
He told her about how Steve’s feet were so skinny he used to stuff newspaper down one side of his shoes to keep them from slipping off. He told her about how he’d push a handkerchief to Steve’s bloody nose after he picked on someone twice his size, washing the cloth in their little sink afterwards; how it’d clogged, more than once, and left a pinky swirl of standing water for days and days, smelling of rot. He told her about getting Steve drunk one New Year’s Eve, his small body even more lightweight than Bucky’d imagined, a quarter bottle of cheap hard cider and he’d spent the count of midnight with his hand rubbing Steve’s skinny back, over the notches of his spine, as he threw up vehemently into the toilet bowl.
Bucky pulled up short, embarrassed. “This isn’t--what you wanted to hear, I’m guessing.”
Shuri had been tooling around with a screwdriver as he spoke, his arm taking shape between her proficient hands, both of them sitting cross-legged under the tent’s canopy. She had an aimless sort of smile on her lips, unselfconscious and pleased.
“I like the way you talk about him,” she said. She shot him a look he couldn’t quite decipher. “Do you miss him?”
“All the time,” Bucky said, without thinking. He scratched his bristly chin, something to distract her from his painful honesty.
“My brother says we miss the ones we love most of all when they are within arm’s reach. But he only says that because he has to go on diplomatic missions with his ex.”
“Steve’s not--”
“Your ex?” She was grinning, clearly goading him.
“Aren’t you s’posed to be working?” he snapped, playful with her in a way he thought he’d forgotten.
“Tou-chy,” she said, sing-song, and smiled like she knew something he didn’t.
Shuri knew plenty he didn’t. Bucky had surely learnt that by now.
-
The next morning, her little aircraft was back, bearing new cargo.
“Buck,” Steve said, like it was the only word he knew.