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Umama was busy being Queen Mother. Mourning a husband. Planning a funeral. Consoling a nation.
Shuri was left alone. Alone as one could be, surrounded by the Dora Milaje. The lab was one of the most secure locations in Wakanda, so she remained there under guard. She’d stumbled to her work desk when the news broke. Curled up in a station chair. Stayed there. There, at least, she would be useful. There, at least, if ubhuti called…
She could be useful. She would be useful.
She didn’t feel it. She felt as small and helpless as her sixteen years. For all she was Wakandan, Warrior, Princess, Scientist, she’d watched baba die along with the rest of the world on CNN. Okoye and Ayo had returned with baba’s body, but in the two days since she’d not heard a word from her brother.
“Shuri?”
She woke abruptly, neck sore and breath terrible. She had nodded off against the console.
“Shuri?” Her brother’s face appeared on the kimoyo holo, looking anxious. “Shuri, sisi, do you hear me?”
“Baba is dead,” Shuri accused him. “He is dead and you have not called. You are going after the man who killed him and you did not call me. You should have called me.”
The holo figure of her brother paused. Bowed its head. “Shuri, sisi, I would not involve you in such a thing.”
“I am not a child!” She slammed a fist down on her workstation, abruptly aware how childish she must seem. “I am a warrior of Wakanda, of the royal blood line. I have every right to seek his killer! Just like you.”
“No, sisi,” he looked every bit as old as baba. “You are wrong. Even I do not have that right.”
“You do not get to go radio silent for three days then lecture me,” Shuri insisted. Then, “Do you have him?”
T’Challa nodded. “I do.”
“Bring him. Bring him here. Bring him to justice.”
“He will be brought to justice,” he promised, something final in his face and voice. “But this is not why I have called you.”
“Baba is dead. What do you want, bhuti?”
T’Challa only sighed. Lowered his eyes in weariness. In shame. Oh, bhuti, what did you do? “I need your help.”
“So you fucked something up, and I have to fix it,” she forced a smile. “Typical Tuesday.”
Okay, so White Bois. Two White Bois. That was new.
“Oh, look,” Shuri quipped. “Instead of justice, you have brought me colonizers! Wonderful.”
“Shuri, sisi—“
“Steve’s Irish,” the Winter Soldier grunted as Captain America dragged him to the gurney.
Shuri blinked. “Pardon?”
“Steve’s Irish,” he repeated with laborious breaths and a voice like broken glass. “So’m I. ’N my ma’s Jewish.”
Well, crap. She was seconds into this and she’d already caused a diplomatic fiasco, which was why T’Challa was the face of the country, and she lived in a lab. “Oh, great, now I'm the racist.” Shuri said hurriedly, hands up. “That one's on me. Overgeneralization. Not All White People, eh?”
“White people,” the Soldier snorted, wincing at even that little effort. “You believe this kid?”
The Captain looked to her brother, doubt in his eyes. Oh, Gods, she was fucking this up!
“I talk. I joke,” Shuri rushed, the lyrics to Mulan instead of a proper prayer popping into her head. She shook it. “It’s how I deal. That and coffee. Organic chemistry, Disney movies, Kpop, manicures…”
“I assure you, Captain,” T’Challa affirmed gravely. “If anyone can help your friend, it is my sister.”
“Oh, I see,” Shuri put her hands on her hips. “It takes an international incident to get a compliment.”
T’Challa shook his head in fondness. Sadness. “Your suit did well.”
“Not well enough,” she swallowed.
He laid a hand on her arm, and she leaned into him. “What happened to baba was not your fault.”
It didn’t feel like it. It felt like failure. “Vibranium could have saved him,” she said.
He pulled back, put a hand under her chin, cupped it like baba would. “It saved me.”
“Fat lot of good that did, then,” Shuri grinned through her tears and shoved him. “Baba is gone and I don’t even get the throne. Life is so unfair.”
T’challa broke into a small smile.
“See, this is my superpower, bhuti. I do not need an herb to make you smile.”
The shoulder socket was, to put it mildly, a disaster. Shuri prodded the broken wires curiously. It was primitive, yes, but a beautiful piece of hardware. Powered by the Tesseract, which made it not only a super cool awesome robot arm but a super cool awesome robot arm from outer space. It was a shame about all the blasting. “You couldn’t’ve brought me the arm, eh? And what is this? Adamantium-titanium alloy?”
Barnes cringed away from her tweezers.
Shuri flipped up her electron microscope goggles. “Wait—you can feel that?”
Barnes nodded, eyes shut and a cold sweat on his bloodied skin.
“Damn,” Shuri said, scrambling for the stockpiled pharmacy on the gurney’s underside. “Okay, so the neural interface is even more complex than I thought. Hang on—”
“I don’t like meds,” Barnes withdrew from the needle. “’N I doubt anything you got’s gonna work on me.”
“Oh, you’ll like these,” Shuri promised, threw a thumb over her shoulder at her brother. “We developed them for him.”
Rogers sighed. “Been waiting all my life to say this. Buck, take the damn meds.”
“Yeah,” Barnes said. “I had that one coming.”
“You,” Shuri snapped her fingers at her brother and pointed to the IV. “Do the thing.”
“Me?”
“Yes, bhuti, you. I am busy!”
“My ma was a nurse,” Captain America said in the world’s most hilarious old-times Brooklynite voice and prepped Barnes’ cubital fossa. “I got it.”
“Where did you get that accent, huh?”
“Shuri…”
Mouth. Foot. “Any chance you have the arm?”
The Captain scratched behind his head, embarrassed. “It was a little late to go back for it. And Tony—“
“Tony Stark,” she snorted, manipulating the kimoyo beads on her right wrist to bring up the holo scans. “No need. I have the HYDRA files.”
And just like that the lab exploded. The Captain moved to place himself between her and her patient. Over his shoulder, Barnes’ eyes were wild.
Ubhuti moved in front of her, crouched and ready to spring. “Shuri has been studying them for several years,” he assured them.
The Captain blinked, but didn’t stand down. “Most of the Widow leak on the Winter Soldier is still encrypted. Even Tony didn’t know. That’s how come Zemo—“
“Oh, please, Captain,” Shuri grinned toothily, popping under her brother’s arm and ignoring T’Challa’s protests. “Wakanda has had computers for centuries. Encryption? Child’s play. Literally child’s play. I’m like, sixteen.”
“It’s Steve.” the Captain said, standing down. “Just—Steve.”
“Steve Rogers, Captain America,” Shuri shrugged. “What’s the difference?”
“One carries a shield, and he’s the face of 21st century US fascism and colonialism,” Rogers groused.
“Jesus, Rogers,” Barnes put out a weary hand. “She’s just a kid. No need to go all geopolitical. Sorry about that, sweetheart. He gets real depressing when he’s angry.”
“At least he’s not always depressing.”
T’Challa had the nerve to look offended. “I am not depressing.”
“Centuries, huh?” Barnes grunted. “How long you’ve had computers.”
“One of our War Dogs spied on Ada Lovelace. Impressive mind, if a bit primitive.”
“Shuri,” T’Challa warned.
“Oh, I say one thing wrong and I am in trouble. You brought basemzini!”
“Only because I was assured you could keep a secret.”
“I am excellent at keeping secrets, bhuti. For instance, I have never once told anyone about that time you got in trouble with Okoye for sneaking out by yourself to Paris on Nakia’s first assignment. Never!”
“Shuri…”
“Oops,” she grinned. “Did I just say it?”
Barnes gave a sad little laugh.
“What?”
“Nothin’, it’s just,” his bruised and bloody face had a wistful look to it. “I had kid sisters, too. Three of ‘em. No arguing with ‘em. Little shits. They’re always right.”
“Sorry, bhuti. With regret, you have been replaced,” Shuri said in all seriousness. “I have a new brother now.”
“He doesn’t look much like you,” T’Challa frowned because he was absolutely incapable of joking about anything ever.
Shuri threw her hands up in delight. “He’s adopted!”
“Shuri—“
“What? Umama wouldn’t let me get a dog. Now I don’t need one.”
“I ain’t a labrador, sweetheart.”
“Buck’s not a lab rat.”
“Leave it, Rogers,” Barnes snorted. “She’s just a kid. Besides, how likely do you think it is HYDRA or the Red Room’s got spies in the Wakandan royal family? Dunno if you remember, but they kinda hate black people.”
“Their intelligence for our continent was lacking. They had no interest except obtaining natural resources.”
“Like vibrarnium.” Shuri chimed.
“Bast help me,” T’Challa sighed to the ceiling.
“Ada Lovelace, huh.” Barnes asked. “He meet Charles Babbage?”
“She did.” Shuri emphasized with a grin. “He was pretty fly. For a white guy.”
Barnes made a wheezing sound like laughing, then grunted in pain. “Remind me to tell you about the time me an’ Steve met Alan Turing.”
“Yeah? Turing? It took him, what, a few years to crack Enigma?” She snickered. “But still. I suppose for you he’s the “father of computer science”. As if.”
“Yeah…” Barnes trailed off, then blinked up at Rogers confusedly. “Did…did we really go back to his place and have a three way?”
T’Challa tried and failed to contain his amusement. Shuri nearly swallowed her tongue.
Rogers put his face in his hands.
Barnes lifted his right arm, staring at the IV. “Say, sweetheart, what’s in this stuff?”
“Carfentanyl.” Shuri shrugged.
“Cawhat?” he slurred.
“Drugs, Sergeant Barnes. Painkillers. Specifically, rhinoceros tranquilizer.”
“Rhinoceros,” his voice trailed off dreamily. “’S pretty good stuff.” He slumped promptly over, already asleep.
“Mood.” Shuri said.
T’Challa pinched the bridge of his nose, muttering something about the ancestors in isiXhosa.
“Well that was unexpected if not entirely unpleasant,” Shuri shrugged, addressing the, er, rhinoceros? in the room.
“Sorry,” Rogers’ pale skin had gone bright, blotchy, white-people red. “I can’t believe Buck told you that.”
“This isn’t America,” Shuri rolled her eyes. “No one in Wakanda cares. Besides, Lysette bet our whole class that Captain America and Bucky Barnes weren’t queer. That basic Becky owes me one hundred euros.”
“Sisi,” T’Challa said in his long-suffering older brother voice. “I’m sure the Captain has much more important things to worry about than disagreements with your classmates.”
“Sure, sure, bhuti,” she shooed him. “Now get out of my hair so I can start working on this arm. Actually—put my hair up. I need my hands.”
“It’s uh, it’s not the arm we came here to fix,” Rogers said.
Shuri pealed her eyes away from the scans for a second and gestured. “But it’s broken! Obviously. And I am not going to fix it,” she grinned. “I’m going to give it an upgrade. Ask ubhuti here about the difference.”
“It is not Sergeant Barnes’ arm we wish to fix,” T’Challa countered. “It is his mind.”
“Neuroscience? Sounds complicated. Don’t worry, that is Wakandan for fun.”
“You can fix him?” Rogers asked, leant forward with his elbows on his knees.
Shuri flipped her hair. Straightened her shoulders. “I can try.”
“Shuri can do anything she puts her mind to,” T’Challa reassured him, pulling her hair up into twin buns on the back of her head. “Even behave. I have absolute faith she can succeed in this as well.”
Her brother and Steve (could white guy names get any whiter—?) were off down the hall, conversing in hushed voices, doing “important diplomatic stuff” or something boring like that. They left the science to her, which was alright because ubhuti would have just bungled it. She was studying the neural interface between Barnes’ dorsal root ganglia and the shoulder’s servos when her patient woke up.
“Sergeant Barnes? How are you feeling?”
“Better,” he grunted, still loopy with pain killers.
“Good.”
“You shouldn’t be alone with me, kiddo.”
“Because you’re so dangerous,” Shuri rolled her eyes. Barnes couldn’t sit up if he wanted to.
“I don’t wanna hurt anyone,” Barnes whispered, his hand clutching the sheets, knuckles gone even whiter than his pale skin. “Not you. Not, not Steve. I can’t hurt Steve again. I’d rather eat a bullet than hurt him again. And I can’t—“
“Hey, hey, there is no need for that, okay?” Shuri promised, feeling fierce and protective. “My baba died so that bad men could get to you. There is no better way to ensure this never happens again. That asshole killed my baba, so I am going to fix your brain.”
He grimaced. It was a painful, helpless thing. “Dunno if you can.”
“But I should try, yeah?” Shuri insisted. “And if we keep trying, we will find a way.”
“And in the mean time I’m just a time bomb. I’m a monster.”
Shuri considered it a moment, then shook her head. “More like an alien cyborg from another century.”
“Jesus Henry Christ,” he laughed. “I’m really somethin’ outta Buck Rogers, ain’t I?”
“That’s a good ship name,” Shuri switched subjects. “I like it better than Stucky.” She made a face. “Or Starbucks.”
“Ship name?” Barnes opened his weird white people eyes and slurred. “Starbucks?”
“Celebrity couple portmanteau.”
“Gezuntheit.”
“It’s French!”
“’S all Greek to me, sweetheart.”
“Greek,” Shuri huffed. “I’m Wakandan. Who do you even think I am?”
“Well you ain’t Billy Holiday or Josephine Baker,” Barnes drawled.
“Ugh. You could’ve at least gone with something from this century—this millennium, even. Like Beyonce.”
Barnes whole face wrinkled in confusion. “Who the hell’s Beyonce?”
“Seriously?” She put the Lemonade visual album on over the lab holo.
“‘M sorry I asked.”
“…So say you can fix me. But in the mean time I’m still goddamn dangerous. While we wait—“
“You won’t have to,” Shuri insisted. “Not if you don’t want to.”
“You’d…” Barnes slurred with a sad, startled hope, pupils constricted into pinpricks from the pain killers. “You’d help me die?”
Well that escalated quickly. “What? No!” she flapped her hands to the holo. “Cryogenic sleep!”
Barnes put his head back down with a dull thud. “Think I’ve had enough of the tank for my life, sweetheart.”
“Not like this, you haven’t.”
“What, you got one? From HYDRA? Red Room?”
She made a face as if to say, Bitch Please. Then she said, “Bitch, please. This is my design.”
“It’s just plans, though. It’ll take forever to build, and in the meantime—“
“Sergeant,” Shuri rolled her eyes. “This isn’t some third world country like America. I have a 3D printer.”
“What the hell.” The guy’s vocabulary consisted mainly of monosyllabic grunts, ‘Steve’, and ‘what the hell.’
“Shh, little brother,” Shuri chided. “Watch your language.”
Barnes let out a laugh.
“It’s a molecular printer. It binds particles on the atomic level.”
Barnes blinked. “Yeah? How’s it work?”
“Well, Sergeant Barnes, have you Americans heard of this exciting new discovery called electricity?”
“Smartass.”
Yep.
“So you can really build this thing, then, huh.”
“Not only can, I am building this thing. Right now. It’ll be ready in a few hours.”
“I dunno what to say, kid. You make Stark—“ he cut off. Choked back something ugly that looked like horror and guilt. Bit his lips, and continued quieter. “You make Howie look like an imbecile.”
What? Ew. “I’d say it was a compliment,” Shuri wrinkled her nose. “But any comparison to a Stark is just an insult.”
It was done in a matter of hours. From there it was just connecting cables and canisters of liquid nitrogen. Barnes stared at the thing for a long, long time. Then he sighed. “Steve won’t be happy.”
“It's not Steve’s choice.”
“The other soldiers, they uh,” he broke off and bit his lip.
“There were no others, Sergeant Barnes,” Shuri prompted, knowing something of guilt. “You were a victim. They volunteered.”
“Still did it.” Barnes said. "Still could. Saw the headlines and had to hack my own phone, look at the GPS just to be sure it wasn't me in Vienna."
Okay, yeah…there wasn’t much even Shuri could say to that. “The soldiers?”
“Zemo killed ‘em,” Barnes shuddered. “Shot ‘em right through the head. One bullet each.”
Oh. Well that one she could fix. “There is vibranium in the glass,” she reassured him. “It’s completely bullet proof.”
“Good,” Barnes nodded. “Good.” Then— “You make that stuff clear, huh, kid?”
“It’s more like a mesh? A few nanometers wide. And it’s not pure vibranium. I’ve reinforced it with titanium and graphene.”
Barnes blinked. “Why?”
“The atomic field of vibrainium is susceptible to disruption by sonic blasts at the right frequency and amplitude.”
“Yeah? What the hell makes a sound like that?”
Shuri winced. “Wakandan weapons?”
“Right,” Barnes’s jaw jumped. “Right.”
“No,” Rogers balked. “Absolutely not.”
“This isn’t an argument, Steve. I ain’t askin’ for your permission.”
“Buck, after everything they did to you—“
“Yeah. They did to me. And the one goddamn thing I didn’t have was a choice. I couldn’t live if you took that away from me, too, Steve.”
“Goddamnit, Buck,” Rogers sobbed. “I just got you back.”
“I’m not safe, Steve. Not while I got this stuff in my head. I won’t let HYDRA hurt you or anyone else. Not with my body. Not again.”
“I don’t know what to do without you, Buck.”
“World needs you, Steve.”
Rogers snorted. “I don’t think anyone’s going to be calling Captain America anytime soon.”
“I’m not talking about Captain Goddamn America, Steve,” Barnes growled. “I’m talking about you. That kid from Brooklyn too dumb not to run away from a fight. Who couldn’t run away from a fight. The world needs that guy. Your friends need that guy. Now more’n ever.”
“Fuck you,” Rogers choked.
“Bit beat up for that, pal,” Barnes whispered, running his thumb over Rogers’ lips, leaning in while licking his own. “But I could stand to do with a bit of neckin’. Maybe a suck job—“
Her kimoyo switched off abruptly. “Shuri,” T’Challa glared.
“But it was just getting good!” she wailed.
“Unbelievable.”
True to her word, Barnes went into cryo the next day. And if he had bruises on his neck and jaw that weren’t there the night before, well. Shuri was a sweet summer child who totally didn’t ship it and knew absolutely nothing about them.
Rogers didn’t take it well. At all. Spent the better part of a day staring off into the jungle.
“Will he be okay?”
“Waphukelwe yintliziyo.” T’Challa told her. He is heart-broken.
Captain Rogers—Steve—was moping in her lab like she’d just drowned his puppy. Time to put her big brain to work, then. But ubhuti had other plans. “I need your help.”
“Again?” she let out an exaggerated sigh. “That’s twice in two days!”
He tried to ignore her, then shook his head. “The ceremony.”
She grinned and poked him. “You need Nakia.”
He inhaled like he meant to deny it, then sighed. “I would greatly appreciate her presence.”
“Why, bhuti?” Shuri teased. “You’ll only freeze.”
“I never freeze.”
She crossed her arms. “Bhuti, there’s literally a white boi in the freezer right behind you.”
“Ancestors help me.”
She didn’t say a word to umama. To anybody. Ubhuti disappeared with Okoye that night and reappeared the next morning with Nakia, got his “grand re-entrance” into Wakanda. She found it hard to take the whole thing seriously, given that 1) it was purely ceremonial and boring as all get out and 2) she’d rather be working and 3) she’d seen him like, eight hours ago. But still. She’d given her word, and she’d play her part to perfection.
She met him on the tarmac with a shit-eating grin. Nodded to Okoye. “Did he freeze?”
The Dora’s stern face split into a smile. “Like an antelope in headlights!”
Umama sighed.