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“I’d rather be strapped in,” says Bucky. “Can’t you strap me in?”
He’s sitting on the table in Shuri’s lab. They’ve been over this, agreed on things, ever since she woke him up. She’s showed him the instruments she’ll use, the digital construct of his brain, and explained what she means to do: flush the trigger words from his system, extract them gently from the underlying memories, leaving his battered life story behind him, his, intact.
I can take some of the memories too, if you want, she’d added, cautiously. If there are things you’d rather not have. But I’d need you to think about it, and I’d need time to fine-tune the algorithm.
No, he’d answered, surprising himself with his certainty. But he’d worked hard enough at regaining those memories, those years in Bucharest; setting them in order, looking them in the eye. He doesn’t want to lose parts of his story again. Even the bad ones. Even the worst ones, the ones that send the fine trembling down his limbs, here and now, steeling himself for one final operation.
Shuri looks down at him. Her eyes are shrewd and uncomfortably kind. “It won’t hurt, you know.”
He hates that he’s like this. He wanted to be awake, insisted on being awake, but he’s still tumbling deep inside himself. He tries to breathe. Tries to focus on the now.
He likes Shuri’s accent. It’s nothing like Zola’s, or Pierce’s. Her face is nothing like theirs, either. Her lab — her lab is sunny, with floor to ceiling windows, and trees waving their branches outside. A bird alights in one of them. It’s colorful, impossibly colorful, purple-black head and orange belly and wings that spark blue and green in the sun.
It can’t be real. He’s come out of cryofreeze into an impossible hallucination, a world too perfect for a fractured creature like him. It’s made up. A simulation. A trick —
“Superb starling,” Shuri interjects, in the scolding tones of a tolerant younger sister. “Lamprotornis superbus. Remember?”
Bucky breathes in hard, then out again. He consciously unclenches his fist. Lamprotornis superbus. The syllables are difficult, like stepping stones across a river. They take his full attention. They don’t seize at him like the Russian ones do, don’t set his nerves and muscles shrilling with furious dread. He closes his eyes, lets his thoughts flow around them. Lamprotornis superbus. One sound after the next.
He vaguely remembers a time when reality seemed objective. Fixed, absolute. Even through torture; even through his presumed inevitable death. There was his body that strived and suffered and did as he asked. There was Steve, at home, unfailingly pure, safe from the war. From killing people. Only then Steve was there, changed and unchanging, throwing himself across flaming chasms and saving Bucky’s life. And then cold, and other things, flashes of reality and unreality, every one of them so different: cars, food, landscapes, people, ephemeral and inconsequential, mere set dressing for a Mission that didn’t end.
Only the Mission wasn’t real either, just an implant in Bucky’s skull, and lately he’s tried setting his faith in smaller things. Things he can see with his eyes. Things he can touch.
Lamprotornis superbus. It’s another mouthguard, sturdy and familiar. A solid thing to hold between his jaws.
“Not,” says Shuri tartly, “that we need a colonizer’s Latin nomenclature for Wakandan birds. But since it helps.”
Bucky blinks. Nods dully. He knows how it must look, when he disappears into his head like this. With Steve, those few days of madness, he’d wanted to try not to; wanted to be brave and strong and vulnerable and human. It’s part of why he’d asked him to leave. Just until he’d — gotten himself sorted out, he’d said. It was cruel, but he can’t do this with Steve here; can’t stand up to the hope in his eyes, the love.
He’s strong enough to make this final submission. But he’s not strong enough to do it like a real person would.
He says, “I’d rather be strapped in.”
Shuri purses her lips. She seems to be deciding something. “No,” she says. “But hang on. I’ll be right back.”
Bucky sighs, staring out the window. He’s shirtless on a table, a familiar enough position, even if he is free to move. The starling has flown off, replaced by a flock of chattering golden weavers. They’ve started winding grasses around the tree’s twigs — the skeletons of nests, like hollow, dangling spoons. That’s good. Something to mark the passage of time. Ploceus castaneiceps, Bucky thinks. Ploceus cas-tan-e-i-ceps. Castaneiceps. Ploceus.
“Will this do?” Shuri asks.
He startles to realize she’s come back into the room. She’s carrying a heavy, printed blue cloak, of the kind he’s seen the border tribe wearing. Inside it, he catches the telltale glint of vibranium. “I’ll wrap it around you,” she says, “so you can hold it yourself, with your right hand. As tight as you want. But I won’t strap you down.”
Lamprotornis superbus. Ploceus castaneiceps. It might work.
“Okay,” Bucky says.
---
It isn’t fucking easy. It’s his choice, he knows it’s his choice, but he knew it was his choice other times, too, times that he’s started to realize it really wasn’t; times that he’s excavated, those two years in Romania, hauled one by one out into the light of day until they threw him back, slapped him quivering like raw meat on his apartment floor. But he did it, he held them in his head and learned what they were, and he’s not sure he’s better for it, not sure he isn’t just even more of a broken shell of a man.
It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t matter. It’s someone touching and tweaking, changing his brain, and he shakes and sobs and bites his lip bloody, Shuri’s frantic words of comfort just cold points of light on some distant horizon, but he has the cloak. He grips it tight and twists it hard and harder still, until it presses in on every inch of his trembling body, and then he can somehow ease up the tension in his jaw and release his lip, gasping, and breathe, “Lamprotornis superbus. Ploceus castaneiceps. I’m sorry —”
“Don’t be sorry,” says Shuri. Her face is wet, but her hands are steady. She’s crying as she works. “Don’t be sorry, Sergeant Barnes, you’re doing great, you’re almost there.”
It’s Bucky, Bucky wants to say, isn’t sure why he hasn’t said before. But forming the words is a task too great to imagine. Lamprotornis superbus. Ploceus castaneiceps. He cups his running soul within his single trembling hand.
He says it later. He doesn’t pass out during the operation, but he does after, exhausted, and wakes under the thatched roof of his banda . It’s far away from the lab, away from glass and metal and instruments and anything that feels like Hydra. Just children with painted faces and Shuri, hair long around her shoulders, waiting outside by the lake in the morning sun.
“Good morning, Sergeant Barnes,” she says. There’s a formality to it, like she knows the weight of the moment; she seems older than her years.
“Bucky,” he says. A first step. A stone laid.
She squints at him carefully. “How are you feeling?”
“Good,” he tells her, and finds that it’s something close to true.
---
He doesn’t keep the cloak.
It wouldn’t feel right, given the wounds still fresh and healing in Wakanda, a civil war as heavy with anguish as that between Tony and Steve. W’Kabi’s betrayal, the border tribe’s losses; it’s not a symbol that belongs to him.
He does keep to the wrapped Wakandan style of dress, though. He finds that there’s something comforting in it, an innate part of himself that quiets when he fists the fabric and pulls it around him tight. It hides his missing arm, too. It draws fewer stares — though, as the so-called “White Wolf,” he’s getting kind of used to drawing stares.
It takes him a while to learn the details of that war. Shuri doesn’t mention it, explicitly; just that the border tribe has its sorrows to tend. She answers when he asks, though, and that, more than anything, makes him start to truly believe that this life of his might be real.
It’s on one of their walks down the escarpment. A few miles from the waterfall, in gentler country, but still rugged; Bucky can walk out the door of his banda and onto the winding path, past the termite mounds and elephant caves and down into denser and denser trees. From certain overlooks, he can gaze out at the parched valley floor, far below. Recently, it’s been scarred with floods from the coming of the rains. The gravel they leave behind flushes the lurid green of new grass, and miraculous clouds of leaves froth from the prehistoric, gnarled towers of the baobab trees.
Most days, Bucky makes the walk to the valley and back alone, pleasant and easy on the way down, a sweaty toil on the return. Sometimes, he encounters a lion, trades abyssal stares down the length of the path, or cautiously eases past a buffalo grazing in a patch of grass. Once, he scales a tree in flight from a charging rhino, and learns he can still do that, even with only one arm.
Shuri laughs when he tells her that story, and says that he’s lucky it wasn’t an elephant, which would have simply knocked his refuge down. She also says he needs the exercise, the long hikes and the hard sprints both; that his body’s unused to prolonged intervals of normal activity, adapted as it is to fifty years of alternating deep freeze and intense bursts of action.
“You’re lucky it didn’t give out on you in Bucharest,” she declares. “At least you had the arm then. Without it, it’s all on you.”
Shuri has all kinds of theories about Bucky’s arm. She says it was practically a second brain, a power source, a virus; that its removal, unwittingly or not, accomplished half of his cure, leaving her with the simple job of cleaning up the mess it left behind. She says it like the grueling work of mining his own memories was nothing; like he doesn’t still wake up screaming hard enough to send the pigeons that roost outside his banda whittering into the night. (Treron calvus. African green dove.) She says it like the mess in question isn’t Bucky’s entire life.
She also says she can make him a new arm, if he wants. He hasn’t answered yet.
“You know I go five times farther,” he tells her, “when you’re not slowing me down.”
He’s still remastering humor. His delivery is deadpan, but Shuri cackles with laughter anyway, and swats him in the shoulder. “I’m not a supersoldier,” she says. “You should be embarrassed you only go five times as far as me.”
Bucky smiles. A hornbill calls from the tree above them — Bycanistes brevis. The name in his head gives him courage to ask the question. “The children talk about a war.”
Shuri’s face falls. Or — tightens, ages somehow, reminding him that she’s only seventeen. That her mocking kindness might be fallible, occasionally naive; that he can live with that; that he wouldn’t want her to really understand.
She says, “It happened while you slept.”
The story folds out of her, then: her father’s death, T’Challa’s coronation. The arrival of their father’s estranged nephew, the duel at the falls, W’Kabi’s defection; the grief and the flight, the razing of their home.
It’s more than he ever could have imagined. She was isolated, exiled, all but alone; she believed that her brother was dead.
Bucky listens with growing amazement. “And you didn’t —” he starts, then swallows. “I’d have fought for you.”
Shuri smiles sadly. “I know,” she says. “The others don’t, or — forgot you might, I think.”
Just when he thinks he understands the world, it once again slips from his grasp. Bucky says, “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
She turns to look him full in the eyes. She is, he thinks, not for the first time, impossibly lovely; impossibly whole, impossibly herself. “If I had, in the state you were in, and asked you to kill for us,” she says, “what could we say we were even fighting for?”
---
Shuri is complicated.
There was a time, not long after Bucky first woke up, when he felt the way most soldiers do about beautiful nurses soothing their wounds from the war. She seemed hazy, angelic; salvation with gentle hands. It wasn’t attraction, exactly — he doesn’t even know what that looks like, what people mean when they say it, how in the hell they define it other than Steve — never has — but it was something, enough to make him feel deeply ashamed when he realized she was only seventeen.
It still makes him go a little close-mouthed and blank-faced around T’Challa. A lot of things make him go close-mouthed and blank-faced around T’Challa. He knows he didn’t kill the king’s father personally, but he can’t begrudge him his one-time quest for revenge.
(It is NOT your fault our father is dead, Shuri had scolded him when he dared to voice this, once. Zemo killed him to frame you. And he framed you to get to Captain Rogers. Should we fault Captain Rogers, then? It’s as much his doing as yours.)
They shouldn’t, of course. He still can’t shake the feeling that he’s got a lot of dead parents in his wake.
Shuri’s never blamed him for the death of her father, though. Shuri’s been through tragedy, and a war, and come out bright and glowing; he sees her sadness, sometimes, but it looks like part of herself. Shuri is easy to talk to, easy to love; she has no time for his bullshit, and she taught him the names of birds, and she fixed him, he can’t deny she fixed him, he’s still a snarled mess of a man but where his mind was once a raucous static sea, he now can find something resembling solid ground.
Gratitude can grow uncomfortable roots. Sometimes Shuri and the children are the only people he wants to see; the only ones who don’t make him want to crawl into nothingness from the shame. She’s everything that repaired him, everything he wishes he knew how to be, and that’s not —
It’s not fair. It’s no more fair than any of the other women he used to cast as ideals; symbols of something, an out for Steve, a family, a normal life. There were a lot of women, back in those desperate wartime days, and they were occasionally silly and frequently breathtaking, but few of them ever felt real.
He’s realized, with time, that a lot of the ways he used to think of women don’t quite fit in the twenty-first century. That they feel stale, casually dehumanizing. Bucky’s about ready to be done with dehumanizing anyone. Maybe even himself.
The other thing he’s realized about the twenty-first century is far more unsettling. It’s that if the way he thinks about women doesn’t fit, the way he thinks about Steve does.
It’s the way he’s always thought about Steve. His mom’s name was Sarah. He wore newspaper in his shoes. It’s the way he’s all but certain — despite everything that’s happened, despite how blatantly Bucky doesn’t deserve it — Steve still thinks about him.
---
He wonders if the kids have nightmares.
They’ve been through a war, after all. At least one of them has a missing mother, slain on the field of battle. He tells Bucky that with a hard look in his eye, a proud look; that she was one of the Dora Milaje. A hero.
He says it as though to point out that Bucky is a sorry excuse for one. Bucky is inclined to agree with him. Then he thrusts his shepherd’s stick into Bucky’s hand, face breaking into a grin, and tells him to pen the goats.
This is the children’s job: caring for their families’ livestock while their parents are away. Herding them to fresh pasture, and back to the safety of the boma, enclosed in an acacia-thorn fence.
They make it look easy. It isn’t.
Three hours later, when the last recalcitrant billy is finally corralled, the children collapse in the hoof-beaten dust, clutching their ribs from laughter. They’ve trailed him throughout his odyssey of errors — the near miss by the well, the hillside counteroffensive, the calamity of the forgotten gate — tireless in their hilarity. If only he could find a way to make animals laugh, Bucky thinks, he’d be far better at getting them to go where he wants.
“White Wolf cannot even herd goats,” one of the boys declares, prying himself off the ground to climb onto a nearby boulder. “We should be Avengers.” He strikes a pose. “Captain Americaaa!”
“Captain America is lame,” says a girl. “I want to fly.”
Bucky’s still not sure how to take the fact that they consider him an Avenger. Howling Commando is a title he can own, maybe — an honor that lives comfortably in the past. But the kids know he showed up with Steve and the others, somehow, and in their mind, that makes him one of them.
His chest hurts. It’s not entirely from the lingering laughter.
“Sir,” says another boy to Bucky. He’s always the politest. “Sir, you don’t think Captain America is lame.”
Bucky finds that he’s smiling. Sometimes, his dreams are of hitting Steve, over and over again, and he wakes up sweating and screaming, curling in on himself as though that could make him stop. But other times, they’re of Steve running, just running, like he never could when they were kids; running for the joy of it, running for the feel of the wind.
“Well,” he says. “He can’t fly. But I’d say he gets around.”
---
Steve is in Syria, in the middle of a war zone.
Bucky knows this because T’Challa told him. T’Challa, who tried to kill him once, who would have hurt Steve to do it . T’Challa who has none of his sister’s humor, or hides it, and walks like his shoulders bear the weight of the world.
Steve is in Syria, in the middle of a war zone, and it’s not his first, and it won’t be his last. Bucky’s been in a lot of war zones, too, maybe even more than Steve has, but he hasn’t usually been on the right side. Not that there is a right side to these things, half the time, but there is right, Bucky thinks. Steve wouldn’t be there if there weren’t something to do that is right.
For a long time, Bucky wouldn’t have been there if there weren’t something to do that was wrong.
It’s easy to take that and say, I’m done. To say, I am the master of my own mind, and I am slowly learning to live in it. Let me do that and have peace.
It’s easy to remember the screaming in his skull and the arm on his shoulder and the rifle in his hand and want to leave it behind, to leave it all far behind, learn to herd goats for real. Nothing with a rifle goes to good.
But Steve’s done it. Steve’s always done it, even before he could fight, even when he was still a shrimpy little kid in Brooklyn, throwing himself in bullies’ way. Bucky couldn’t do anything but follow him, then. Couldn’t do anything but follow him back to Germany, back to the war, Zola and Hydra be damned. He’s always had Steve’s six. Time was, he thought he always would, even when it all was over; even when having Steve’s back would mean setting him free.
He remembers believing it as he tumbled from the train. On that long, surreal plunge past the walls of an icy gorge — thinking, I did it, thinking, I’m dead, thinking, I never have to deal with after, I never have to watch him marry Peggy, and he’s strong now, he’ll make it, I did it, he’ll make it alone —
But Steve didn’t make it alone. Not really. He’s hurled himself off his own cliffs, time and again, for Bucky, and for the first time Bucky thinks of that waking up, those first impossible weeks, and what that must have been like with no practice, no Shuri, no experience in the realm of not knowing your world.
Steve’s carried on, Bucky knows. He’s found his fights and fought them, found his people and saved them, just like they always did. It would be easy to think he’s fine. That he’s where he wants to be. That Bucky is nothing but a handicap, an old debt, an obligation.
But Bucky’s been to the Smithsonian. And he’s seen the desperation in his old friend’s eyes.
There’s a pair of sparrows nesting under his banda's eaves. They’re brown and black and gray and they mutter to each other constantly, waking with Bucky in the morning and keeping him company as he falls asleep. They talk through the night, too, fussing when he wakes them up with dreams. They nested here anyway, though. He’s always had the dreams.
He’s sitting outside in the morning, watching them come and go, when Shuri arrives for their weekly walk.
She watches with him for a moment without speaking. Then she says, “You have been blessed. They are not common here. We believe they bring good luck.”
“House sparrow,” Bucky agrees. “Passer domesticus. I looked it up.” Shuri raises her eyebrows at him, delighted, impressed, and he grins. “They’re common as dirt in New York.”
“Aah,” she says, teasing, “New York,” and draws out the word, an absurd parody of snobbery, an accent that he thinks is supposed to be upper-crust English; it's certainly not American. It’s hard to remember, sometimes, that she’s a princess. It’s hard to remember she’s a world-class engineer. On days like these, she’s just another smartass kid.
He shouldn’t be surprised. He’s just a kid from Brooklyn. There’s another one out there waiting for him, somewhere.
“Shuri,” he says. “If you’ve got the time. I think I’d like to see about that arm.”