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When T’Challa and Okoye crest of the swell of land, Bucky knows with a sick, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach what they’re going to ask of him. He’s always known this day would come, but that doesn’t make it any easier. It always ends in a fight, he thinks, his fateful words to Steve two years ago echoing back, and he really doesn’t want to fight. I don’t do that anymore. No matter what he does, no matter how hard he tries, his past always catches up to him.
Deliberately, he tosses the hay onto a pile. It’s harder farming with one arm than it would be with two, and his balance is off-center, tilting to the right rather than the left these days, despite the counterweight of metal that makes up his shoulder, but he doesn’t mind — prefers it, actually — though it screws with his back enough that Shuri has him coming into her lab for weekly massage appointments that, even now, occasionally end with him cowering in the corner or lashing out. Even though he knows he’s not with Hydra, his body still remembers. It’s better than the first several dozen or so sessions, when they had to break it up into five- to ten-minute increments and he had to be tranquilized in the aftermath. These days, he can do a whole hour without drugs and mostly without having flashbacks to being tortured again.
There’s less danger this way, with one arm, even though his brain has been mostly fixed; a near-daily combination of EMDR and talk therapy sessions with Cebisa, his therapist, being removed from central Wakanda to the more isolated and sedate riverside farming village, and an implant the size of a quarter that Shuri had implanted into his prefrontal cortex to deflect the code to activate the Winter Soldier. He still doesn't understand how it works, but it involves nerves and neuro-transmission and cognitive recalibration. All he knows is when Shuri recited the Russian words with flawless pronunciation and sequence, nothing happened, making him cry, holding onto the teenager, in relief. He can’t hurt anyone — or at least not as badly — these days and if he ever becomes a threat again, well, it’ll be just that much easier to take him down.
Despite Shuri’s offers, he’d refused a replacement arm over and over. To his relief, she’d stopped asking about a year ago. He knows she isn’t angry or offended by his rejection; she still stops by his hut almost daily. Sometimes she brings new adaptive equipment she designed for him to try, never forcing him to accept or use them, but always offering him stability and coaxing him into conversations, which he struggles with, even four years out of Hydra, and usually stays to share a meal or snack with him. He’s become a fairly decent cook, if he says so himself, and one of the things that has come back to him was the way his mother never let anyone leave hungry. Occasionally, Shuri helps with simple tasks that require the dexterity of ten fingers even though he's fully capable. The first time she’d seen him tie a knot with his mouth and hand, she’d looked at him with an expression that was unreadable and said, “communities exist for a reason,” before batting away his hand and tying the rope tighter than he would’ve ever gotten it on his own with five fingers. The next time she came, she’d brought several winches of various sizes that he could easily thread and manipulate with one hand. He still uses them.
T’Challa visits, too, but not as frequently, and it’s clear that this isn’t a social call. Not with Okoye and a small entourage. He sees regret and apology in T’Challa’s eyes as the king opens the metal briefcase, revealing a glistening black vibranium arm, inlaid with gold jointing, nestled in soft padding. It's beautiful and slick and deadly, like the snakes he watches for in the grass.
It makes his mouth go dry.
“Where’s the fight?” he asks, his voice flat and resigned.
“On its way.” T’Challa’s tone is soft.
He’s pretty sure he could refuse, walk away, and T’Challa wouldn’t hold it against him, allow him to keep his sanctuary, but he doesn’t want to take that chance. Can’t. Not when there’s a duty to uphold and he’s more than capable of performing it. Not when T’Challa and Shuri did so much for him after the Vienna bombing. Not when he has a stake in the protection and well-being of Wakanda. T’Challa needs his skillset, and as much as he hates it, if he can use what Hydra drilled into him for good…
He exhales.
“I am sorry,” T’Challa says as Bucky turns away, walks several feet and sits on the earth, drawing up his legs and curling on himself. “I wouldn’t have asked this of you if there was any other option.”
“I know,” Bucky says tightly, hand cupping the face of the little brown-and-white goat that had trotted up to his side. He strokes an ear that is impossibly soft, so different from the fur on her body, feels the warmth of another living thing. The goat stares up at him with liquid brown eyes that almost seem to understand. It’s an eye contact and empathy he’s only ever seen in dogs before. Bucky closes his eyes, leans into the goat, forehead-to-forehead, inhales the goat-smell of her fur, and forces his breathing to even. He pulls away. He’d gotten what he wanted, carved out a life that was his, and far away from everything he used to be. He is safe and hidden and no one can ever take it from him. He’s even sleeping better, these days, almost a full night without screams, here and there.
T’Challa sits beside him, not minding the dust. “If I had it my way, there wouldn’t be war. Much less another one for you.” He pauses. “I don’t believe I’ve met this one before,” he says, inclining his head toward the goat.
Bucky shrugs. “She was the runt in the last batch of births.” He strokes the goat along her flank. “Abandoned.” A pause. “I bottle-raised her.” There’s a note of defiant pride in his voice, I can save things too. He reaches down, tears up some grass at his side, and lets the goat nibble out of his hand.
T’Challa studies him. “When this is over, I will help you build a pen. Your herd will need one soon, if only to keep them safe at night.”
Bucky clenches his jaw so hard a muscle pops near his ear. “Shuri hooks that arm up.”
“Fair enough.”
Bucky sighs, slumps, draping his arm over upraised knees. The goat gently butts his metal stump. He reaches out, tugs gently at her ear, and stands. “Let’s go. Daylight’s wasting.”
He sits on the examination table, nerves strung out and knee jittering up-and-down beyond his control. He’d changed out of the comfortable Wakandian garb he’d grown accustomed to wearing, showered the stink of sweat and the farm from his skin, and is now clad in black pants that makes him think a little too much of Hydra and the last time he was dragged into a fight. He exhales slowly, emptying out his lungs the way Cebisa taught him. He flexes his hand, bracing himself for pain.
Shuri places her hand on his. It’s warm. He turns to her, locks eyes. They’re gentle, compassionate. And he suddenly remembers she’s barely eighteen, a few years younger than he’d been when he got shipped out to Europe, and further sheltered by the bubble of Wakanda. She hasn’t really had time to see what people can do to each other, and he hates that he’s dragged the aftermath to her. The hut was safe. Here was where he stripped to his ugliness and was allowed to bleed and scream. Cebisa had said it was okay to compartmentalize like that, to separate where he wanted to experience things.
“I promise I will be as careful as I can and try not to cause you pain,” she says. “This isn’t going to be like Hydra.” She smiles at him and his eyes burn. He blinks, casts his gaze downwards. In his peripheral vision, her brow furrows with worry. “Do you want me to page Cebisa? She’s on call.” Shuri’s fingers hover over her kimoyo bracelet.
Probably knows everything and cleared her entire schedule because Bucky Barnes can be a big baby about the lab and things like needles, he thinks, and hears an inner voice that sounds a lot like Cebisa’s reminding him that he’s been through repeated trauma worse than most people’s imaginations, and crying or screaming or needing extra support doesn’t make him any weaker or less capable. He’s not entirely sure he believes it.
He shakes his head. “Just do it.”
“Get it over with?” Her voice is light, but he can hear that it’s slipped out of its usual exuberance and into the measured tone she uses around him when she senses he’s close to an edge. She’d used it a lot more two years ago, when he’d first been taken out of cryo and needed the gentleness. “All right.” She smiles at him again in that reassuring way that helps, but all the same reminds him just how broken he is. “But if you need me to stop, say so. You don’t need to power through — marathon, not sprint. We’ll go slow and there’ll be breaks if we need them.”
She reaches out, unstraps the black padding from the silver stump. The USSR star is still mostly there, as vividly red as ever. He swallows.
“Remember, this is entirely in your control. You don’t want drugs; you don’t get drugs. You need a break? We’ll stop. You need anything; I’ll see what I can do. We have all the time you need.” Shuri picks up something that looks like a small crowbar. “I’m just going to pry these off and when everything’s attached, I’ll put the black plates on and it’ll be good as new…”
She makes quick work and all that’s left is exposed wires and the inner skeleton. Shuri doesn’t flinch, instead picking up the arm with one hand, lifting it from the briefcase. “I’ve made this as light as I possibly could — I didn’t want to throw you off too much, especially since you hadn’t had as much weight on that side for so long.” She holds it up to his side, aligning it with the naked shoulder socket, but not touching his stump, so he can visualize it. “See, instead of having to take out all the metalwork and unfuse the joint from your existing bone—”
Bucky’s stomach flips at the mental image — and fuck the prospect of the pain that such a procedure would cause; he can’t go through something like that, not again, it’d be Hydra all over and, sweet Jesus, no — that Shuri’s words conjures, and Shuri must see the horror in his face because she falters, setting down the arm, her eyes not leaving his. “Sorry. Too much?” She pauses, giving him the space and moment to breathe, compose himself. Her expression is sad as she places her hand against his shoulder, fingertips resting along the keloid scars along the front and top of his shoulder where welded metal meets flesh.
She waits for him to tighten his lips, jerk his chin toward his shoulder, before continuing, “I’ve made your replacement so it locks with your existing hardware and uses the same wiring since that’s already neurologically connected to you. Nothing more invasive than connecting wires is going to happen, promise,” she reassures him. “I gotta tell you—” She tugs gently at the capped-off wires, allowing them to dangle free for the first time since she’d tucked them in, before he went on the ice and she — mostly — fixed his brain. She begins pulling off the neon-orange plastic ends. “—figuring out the conversions to the Soviet wiring was a bitch. So primitive.” Her eyes snap up to his for a moment. He’s grateful she doesn’t describe what would happen if the wires went live and she’d miscalculated or use words like electrocution…
She smiles encouragingly. “I think you’ll find this one an improvement. You ready?”
She waits for his tight nod before she brings the arm back up to his stump. A moment later, it’s hanging from his stump, a strap looped from elbow to shoulder supporting its weight. She opens one of the panels on the inside of his upper arm. He looks away as she places her hands inside his arm. “This doesn’t hurt, does it?” she asks, clearly not seeking an answer. “All right. Now, time for the wiring….” Even though he doesn’t feel anything, he tenses as she moves, withdrawing her hand to fish new wires and insert them. He tries to think of Steve’s apartment in Brooklyn from way back when.
“You’re doing good…. Just a few more and—” Shuri is still talking, her voice masking the whine of one of her tools. “—I’ll be finished here.” He feels a tightening as one of the wires pull and his armpit grows warm. “After all of this is over, if you want me to take this off, I will. Don’t feel like you have to keep it. We won’t be offended.” A pause. “This bit might be a little uncomfortable…”
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her bring up a metal tool with a bright end and suddenly he’s back with Hydra and….
“Stop!” he bursts out, “Stop! Stop!” A pause, then: “Brooklyn.”
Everything — the sound of the whirring, the bright heat of sparks — stops and he’s still panting.
“All right.” Shuri’s voice is calm, steady, on his left. “Let’s get you lying down so this isn’t pulling on you since it’s not entirely attached yet…”
The next thing he knows, he’s horizontal on the table, something being arranged along his side.
“It’s okay.” Shuri’s voice sounds like it’s coming from far away. “Take a minute. You can go to Brooklyn for a bit.”
He breathes, closes his eyes against the brightness of the sun and sky streaming through the windows. He visualizes the rickety wooden steps and porch that creaked under his weight, the brick that hid the spare key, the faded red brick of the building…. He tries to summon the smell of Brooklyn as it was when he was a kid, all soot and sea…. He lets himself into Steve’s apartment, as much home as his own had been…. He steps over the threshold….
He loses the image, eyes flying open, and sees Shuri still waiting. She hasn’t touched the arm, hadn’t moved and he’s so fucking grateful she knows his safe word from therapy. But he doesn’t think going to his safe place is going to be enough, not when he still knows…. Something must show in his face, because—
“Meds?” Shuri says, holding two tiny oval white pills in one hand and a glass of water in the other.
He barely registers swallowing them down.
When he comes back around, the sky above the carpet of green outside the floor-to-ceiling windows is a dusky purple-indigo bleeding into a deep pink on the horizon that is exclusively Wakandian, something he never tires of seeing.
“How are you feeling?” A voice comes from the shadows. Cebisa.
He licks dry lips, assesses himself with a detachment that borders on being Winter Soldier again. He’s still lying on the examination table, skin tacky with cold sweat, blanket covering him from chin to waist. There’s an added weight to his left side. He feels the padding of the table beneath his left palm and the fingers respond when he makes a fist. “Tired,” he says. A pause. “Thirsty.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” another voice says, this time closer to his side. He turns. Shuri. She is still in the white shirt with mesh sleeves and dark skirt from earlier but she’s let down her braids from their coiled buns. She holds a glass in her hand and, after a beat, brings it to his lips. The water is cool and wet and has a sharp aftertaste that makes him think of ginger but isn’t. It soothes his throat but not the guilt and shame that burns in his belly.
“I’ll be right back, I’m just going to get a couple of things,” Shuri says before setting down the glass and walking away.
“Did I…” He doesn’t bring himself to finish the sentence.
“Nothing happened. You didn’t attack anyone; you didn’t destroy anything. You just had a rough moment, one which you were entirely entitled to.” Cebisa pauses for a moment, letting her words sink in. “Shuri is fine, the lab is fine. How are you?”
Bucky doesn’t say anything.
“You handled it the best you possibly could — you used your safe word, you were able to go to your safe place and calm yourself enough to ask for what you needed. You didn’t attack anyone or give in to your fears. You should be proud of yourself, Bucky.” Cebisa studies him. “When we first met, you wouldn’t have come close to coping a fraction as well. What happened today was enormous progress.”
“But…”
“What you went through today in the lab was the closest to what you endured under Hydra since you came to Wakanda, no matter what Shuri says, am I right?”
He nods.
“Having a new arm reattached must have been an incredibly triggering and traumatic thing for you to go through. You are very brave.”
“It’s duty,” he says. His voice is listless even to his own ears.
Cebisa tilts her head, her expression curious, yet open and nonjudgmental. “How about we stop there for today and revisit that the next time we meet. We’ve talked a bit about that before and I think there’s still more where that is coming from. You’ve been through an ordeal today, Bucky, and tomorrow you’ll be fighting a battle. I think that’s more than enough for anyone to handle.” She stands. “Get some rest.” The warmth in her voice is enough to settle him. A moment later, he hears her leave.
He turns onto his right side, facing the windows, pulls the blanket tighter around him. It’s a different view from the room he’d been in earlier. He’s still in the tower — mountain — whatever — but it’s clear that he’d been moved to another room. In the distance, he can see a silver band threaded through the green. The river. It reassures him.
The door opens.
“It’s just me,” Shuri announces. He hears her footsteps move closer and is grateful she isn’t wearing those freakishly silent shoes of hers. “I got you another blanket.” Fabric settles over him, covers him to his feet. “How’s the arm? It doesn’t hurt, does it?”
“No. It’s good,” he says. He can’t bring himself to thank her or to apologize.
“Do you want another drink? Some meds?”
“No.” He closes his eyes, inhales and exhales. Shuri gets the message and leaves. He doesn’t fall asleep for a long time after that, staring at his hands and flexing sleek black vibranium fingers. They shine in the night.
He’s already dressed in brown cargo pants and a long-sleeved navy blue shirt, missing its left sleeve, made out of some nanotech material that wicks away sweat and heat — Shuri’s invention, he’s sure — as the sun is coming up, painting everything gold, when Shuri comes into the room as though nothing happened last night. She’s dressed in an orange nylon tunic, her braided hair twisted up into two buns. She goes to him, picking up the blue and black jacket from the examination table.
“Let me help you,” she says, her voice almost as commanding as her brother’s. Not for the first time, Bucky thinks she will make a fine queen and Black Panther someday if T’Challa doesn’t leave an heir.
“I can do it,” Bucky says, reaching out with the vibranium arm. It already feels natural, a part of him, like it’d always been there and he hadn’t adapted to not having a left arm. It doesn’t click or whir or stick the way his Hydra arm used to; its movements are smooth and oiled. He can’t tell where the new joins up with the original. Shuri had done a good job.
Shuri looks at him, a firm set to her jaw. “We have a tradition here in Wakanda where those who go off to war are prepared by those who will remain behind.” From her tone, he suspects she means loved ones.
“Shouldn’t you be with T’Challa?”
“No,” Shuri says, surprising him. “He has my mother. There is no use for me there. I’d just be in the way.” She steps closer to him. “Every — and I mean every — warrior gets someone to prepare him and even though you are not a Dora Milaje or part of the border tribes, you nonetheless deserve the same. As a member of the royal family, it is my honor.” She holds open the jacket. After a beat, he threads his right arm through the sleeve and his left through the sleeveless opening, shrugs it on. Shuri turns him around, does up the fastenings. It’s shorter, softer, and looser than the gear Hydra had strapped him in, and the blue and brown reminds him of when he was a Howlie. He can still feel the stiffness of the hidden armor, the protection it will provide. He rotates his shoulders, swings his arms, crossing them and trying out a few fighting stances, testing the range of motion. It moves with him. He’s not restricted, not leashed, and the cut of the uniform is nothing like what anyone else in Wakanda wears. He’s his own person, a semi-stable 100-year-old man.
“You like it?” Shuri is smiling.
It makes him smile back, shy and tentative. “It’s good.” A pause. “Thank you.”
“Sit down.” Shuri pats the examination table. “I’m not finished yet.” He obeys her order; it reminds him suddenly of his own little sisters eighty-some years ago. He supposes they’re probably dead, but resolves to have Shuri help him look them up after the fight. He feels Shuri touch his hair. “Is this okay?” she asks, and he swallows.
“It’s good,” he repeats and a moment later, he feels her brushing his hair gently.
“There,” she says after a moment. “Anything else I can help you with?”
Bucky takes a deep breath. “Take care of yourself. If anything goes wrong… If they breach the defenses… Get yourself out of here.”
He pauses.
“And I’ll make sure your goats are fed, watered, and looked after.” Shuri smiles. “Now, go, T’Challa is waiting for your briefing. The Quinjet will be here soon.”