Archive of Our Own ^beta

1.

For three weeks, after Bucky wakes up, his world is still.

They give him rooms in the palace’s upper floors, away from the bustle of the city. A bed where he sleeps without dreaming. A closet full of shirts with one arm sewn neatly just below the left shoulder, as if they were designed that way.

Smiling palace staff bring him meals three times a day, and nod their heads to him, and say little. Shuri or T’Challa come by for tea most afternoons — boiled loose-leaf, rich with milk and heady with sugar, the Wakandan way — but neither of them makes him talk when he doesn’t wish to. They fill the silence with stories of Wakandan history and culture, their own childhoods, Bast and Hanuman and heart-shaped herbs. T’Challa tells him, sometimes, about Steve.

Steve is away in Syria, solving the world’s problems. They’re not even problems of Bucky’s making, this time — alien weaponry is above his fucking pay grade, and there’s a heady relief in that knowledge, a loosening of his limbs. Yeah, maybe he’d like it if Steve were here, but — Steve’s getting along fine without him. Steve has a life of his own now. Allies. Bucky thinks of the terror in him, falling from that cliff so many years ago, and soothes his long-ago self: You were wrong. He made it without you. He’s doing good. He’s doing fine.

The remainder of his days, he wanders freely, through richly decorated chambers and glass-paneled hallways, into soaring galleries where birds flit among great trees growing impossibly tall from painted vibranium pots. He turns away, sometimes, from snatches of Xhosa in the corridors — they raise something unpleasant in him, memories best left alone — but it’s nothing like the Soldier, nothing like the jaws that used to spring wide to swallow his whole self.

It’s not perfect. The colors still get too loud for him sometimes, the light and the smells of lemon and spices and the ring of distant laughter make him press his back to the wall. He doesn’t dare venture to the busy streets of the city, avoids being around more than a handful of people at a time. But it’s — he’s — better. Than he ever imagined he could be.

He feels like a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Like all the raging winds that used to drive him, to action and to shelter both, have finally sighed away.

Then he turns a corner one day, and looks through a sound-proofed plate glass door, and comes face to face with a nightmare.

The room is full of people. Shuri and T’Challa and their mother, Ramonda; Okoye and two of the Kingsguard. Three immense men Bucky’s never seen before, dark-skinned with stern faces, their shoulders clad in furs. Their leader, bigger still, stands at the center of the circle, a soundless snarl in the line of his upper lip.

He has another man in his grip, clasped by the scruff of his neck. A white man, skinny and rat-like, writhing in his captor’s grip. Feet scrabble on the floor. Hands struggle uselessly against broad dark fingers. Eyes dart wildly, pleading, from one face to the next. They land on the door.

For a bare instant, when Bucky’s eyes meet those of the HYDRA agent, neither of them moves.

Then the man’s face tears open in a rictus, a horrible silent scream, and the people around him are reaching for weapons, leaping to their feet; then their heads are turning toward the door. Toward Bucky. Who’s frozen — who’s falling away inside his own mind — who can’t run.

The door opens, and the scream splits the air, no longer muffled. The agent is sobbing, is gasping through terrified tears — “Please don’t. Not him. I’ll do anything, tell you anything —”

“Sergeant Barnes,” says T’Challa, mildly, flanked by two somber-faced guards. “Would you please come in?”

2.

So this is how M’Baku first meets the White Wolf Bucky Barnes: with one hand on his club and the other full of wriggling umlungu, quick-lunging, death in his heart, until the lady Okoye steps into his path and stops him short.

He glares at her, and she glares back. The man in M’Baku’s grasp screams louder, kicking for his freedom, and they both ignore him — he is a spy. A trespasser. Not worth the red dirt he was caught on. “Please don’t,” he shrieks again, “I’ll tell you whatever you like — please don’t let him near me —”

His yelps threaten boredom. M’Baku tightens his grip, broad fingers on either side of the man’s spine, and feels him gasp and quail.

“It’s all right, Lord M’Baku,” says T’Challa mildly, stepping up beside Okoye, one hand — one hand — on the newcomer’s shoulder. “Sergeant Barnes is a friend.”

M’Baku stares down at his King. Mountain-lightning flashes in his veins. He is here, the generous ally: bringing T’Challa his spy. Sharing the wisdom of the Jabari. The word of their border-runners, the profits of their ambush. Only to find another of this milk-filth’s kind, a spy right here in the very palace, and — what? Welcomed among the Golden Tribe? Unshackled and free?

We will not have it, ring his own words in his mind, a promise of centuries, unfulfilled. I say, we will not have it-oh!

His King stares back, unmoved. Yield, man, say his eyes.

M’Baku yields.

The newcomer enters the room without a sound, dream-walker. His hair is long and limp around his face. Skin pale, eyes wide and blue.

Despite himself, M’Baku’s gaze follows them. They look like chips of glacier ice, like the high-mountain flowers that only bloom for a day.

He doesn’t act like T’Challa’s friend. He doesn’t act like anyone’s friend, standing stone-limbed there as soon as the door closes behind him. His gaze doesn’t twitch or travel the room. Those glacier-eyes just bore steadily into M’Baku’s captive’s face.

With a foolishness M’Baku should have long outgrown, he wishes they were looking at him.

“Sergeant Barnes,” says Princess Shuri in English, voice gentle. She lays one hand on the newcomer’s arm. “Are you all right? Do you know this man?”

Barnes blinks, slow. He doesn’t speak, but his chin jerks in a nod.

Shuri sighs and looks down, then back up at his face. “Can you tell us who he is?”

Glacier Eyes’ voice is raspy. Ill-used.

“HYDRA operative,” he says, toneless. “One of my handlers, once.”

T’Challa’s hand twitches. Shuri gasps, then swears in Xhosa. She takes Barnes by both of his shoulders and moves him back, away. He goes unresisting, and sits when his knees hit a chair. Shuri leans low, murmuring something to him that M’Baku can’t hear.

“Excuse me,” he says loudly, shaking the spy again for emphasis. “What is HYDRA? And who is this — this — umlungu?”

No one answers; no one is looking at him. “Zhelaniye!” the spy in his grip shouts suddenly, half-choking; both his hands grapple ineffectively with M’Baku’s at his neck. “Rzhavyy —”

Barnes is on his feet again. Leaf-trembling runs down his limbs. He stands there shaking as Shuri clasps his arm again, his face — “Barnes? Sergeant Barnes. It’s all right — I told you, those won’t work on you anymore and we tried it, remember? We tested to make sure —”

Barnes stands and shakes as if he doesn’t even know she’s there. He has, M’Baku realizes for the first time, only one arm.

The spy in his grip chokes again, more loudly. M’Baku looks down to make sure he’s not holding him tightly enough to kill him, and finds the man is foaming white at the mouth.

M’Baku drops him, lurching back. T’Challa swears loudly and starts forward. Shuri glances between them all, wide-eyed and horrified, and Barnes continues to shake.

“Hail HYDRA,” gasps the spy, around his mouthful of poison, and dies.

3.

He’s in the chair. He’s in the chair and they’re fitting the guard to his mouth; the handler’s eyes glitter for a moment as he presses it deeper with his palm, as his thumb and finger close over the Soldier’s nose.

The Soldier can’t breathe. The Soldier doesn’t breathe. He stares up motionless into his handler’s face until the cruel smile fades to fear.

Bullies, his mind supplies, in some forgotten, boyish voice; I don’t like bullies, no matter where they’re from —

His body braces itself, instinctive, for the cleansing fire of electrodes that aren’t there. The voice will go away; that’s what the electrodes are for.

No. It won’t. The voice is Steve, and he told Bucky he’s never going away again. Not like that. Not for good.

Someone is speaking in a language he knows. It rises and falls and clucks on the consonants, musical; he might like it if it didn’t make him think of the girl. She’s small and blonde, with solemn dark eyes, and he’s supposed to kill her, to clamp his metal hand around her throat and let it be done.

No, a voice is telling him, not with that arm, it’s too quick — you need to make it look like the ANC dogs did this. Make them see she suffered.

He hesitates. Remembers hesitating.

Then we’ll do the same with a little black girl, maybe a handful of them, no one gives a shit about black girls and we need them angry —

The Soldier doesn’t want to.

What, you think you can resist me? Cold, cruel amusement. Zhelaniye. Rzhavyy —

“— think he wanted? Why now?”

Bucky blinks, slowly. He’s in Wakanda, not Port Elizabeth; it’s 2017, not 1983. The dead man on the floor wasn’t in Port Elizabeth, either. He’d have been in diapers at the time, crying on swingsets.

“— if there are more. Track them down.”

They’re speaking in Xhosa. That’s why he went to South Africa. That, and the words: Zhelaniye. Rzhavyy —

No. No, those don’t work on him now.

“Do you think they’re after him?”

“It could be anything. Vibranium technology — now that we’re opening to the world —”

HYDRA’s gone. What’s left is only its splinters, the many writhing worms that infected the body it used to be.

“I thought HYDRA was gone. Captain Rogers and his friends —”

“But there are still plenty of them out there. Captain Rogers is trying to keep their hands off the Chitauri weaponry, among others. If they’re after ours —”

Bucky’s mind is swimming through ocean water, towards a light. Captain Rogers is Steve.

“Ross shot down the jets Killmonger loaded with weapons, but it was impossible to recover every item. If someone makes it onto our land, somehow — if they scavenge the jungles —”

“We still have no idea that’s what they want.”

“Call this Captain Rogers, then,” says the immense fur-clad leader, scowling. His fists are empty, and they don’t look like they’re happy that way. “Let him sort out why the scum he should have killed are trespassing on Jabari land.”

T’Challa and Shuri are looking at each other. “That — might be wise, my King,” offers Okoye. “Rogers knows HYDRA best; he’s been fighting them since the 1940s. If he can help patrol for them —”

No.

Steve can’t be here. Not if any more of Bucky’s old handlers are out there lurking in the Wakandan hills. Steve can’t face them. Bucky can’t — if the words work —

Zhelaniye. Rzhavyy. Semnadtsat’ —

“I’ll do it.”

It takes half the room turning to stare for him to realize he’s spoken aloud. Bucky swallows. The man in fur — the one who caught Bucky’s old handler — is staring at him like he’s got animal dung smeared on his face. Like he’d as soon throttle him as let him leave this room.

“I’ll do it,” says Bucky, again, more forcefully. He’s speaking in Xhosa, he realizes; maybe they didn’t know he could do that. “I worked for them. I know them better than anyone. Don’t call Steve.”

It’s a longer speech than he thinks he’s mustered in weeks. Years, maybe. For a long moment, everyone keeps staring at him.

Then the fur-clad man straightens. He’s enormous, drawn to his full height. He looks down his nose at Bucky, chin jutting. His nostrils flare.

“We will expect you,” he says, in English, “in the morning.”

And before anyone can add anything further, he’s sweeping from the room, his warriors falling stone-faced into line behind him, the dead HYDRA agent abandoned on the floor.

4.

M’Baku rises, as wise men do, with the dawn.

The sun streams naked through the east-facing window of his bedchamber, crowning the mountain peak. It is meant to do this: to burn the ridges blue-black and white-rimmed, to dazzle the snows. M’Baku’s eyes water as they should.

His grandfather’s grandfather built this palace here, on an omen and a dream. It’s a story Umakhulu tells often, watching him over her weaving with beady eyes — of the great Sipho, her own ancestor by another line. The words Hanuman spoke to him, in the place between sleep and death: Use my trees to build your home-in-the-sky. Let the dawn rays carry you news of the untrodden places, and they will be mine. And you will be mine, and your children, and one will arise one day with my might in his veins, and all Wakanda will be his. This is my promise to you.

Umakhulu once thought the prophecy spoke of him.

Well. M’Baku’s grandmother is getting used to disappointment. He splashes cold water from the basin on his forehead, his cheeks, and goes to start the day.

---

Buhle and Thando meet him in the sparring rooms, both of them already cold-flushed and laughing from their run to Hanuman’s Gate. M’Baku greets his cousins grinning, blood hot in his veins, and sinks into his fighting stance.

Thando laughs and twirls his staff in a lazy arc. “Okoye and your impuku will be here by breakfast,” he comments as he circles, then lunges in for a blow.

M’Baku deflects it, side-stepping quickly so Thando has to right himself to keep up his guard. Impuku; M’Baku’s rat. The white man Barnes. The name sits ill with him, a flood-rumbling in the rivers of his veins. “You saw them?”

“They left their jet at the Wezulu Meadows, as you and T’Challa agreed,” Buhle offers, swinging fluidly into the space at Thando’s left. She moves snake-slow, deceptive; when she’s older, M’Baku thinks, she’ll be one of the best fighters they have. “They ascend now on foot.”

“Then I will have to beat you on a schedule,” M’Baku tells her gravely, and strikes.

Afterward, slick with sweat and flush with triumph, he returns to his private rooms to bathe, the furious clack of staff on staff still ringing in his ears. The sun is higher now, sky-consuming, and when he looks in the mirror he likes the way it shadows the muscles of his chest. He dresses in leather and fur, and uses his sharpest razor to neaten the lines of his beard.

His kimoyo beads, he dons last — they still feel strange around his wrist. Umakhulu doesn’t like them. They’re useful, though, and once his aunt Unathi started wearing them, the rest of his warriors followed suit. They can speak to each other, now, from miles apart. They can show each other what they see.

There’s one new message, confirming what he already knows — that Barnes and Okoye have departed, and when they expect to arrive. M’Baku runs a thumb over the central bead, thinking of T’Challa’s grave face, projected in miniature. This man Barnes. I would ask you to be — patient with him. He came here to heal from long years as another man’s weapon. Shuri has repaired the mutilation of his mind, but he still bears many wounds in his heart.

Patience is not M’Baku’s strong suit. He looks at his reflection, and thinks of the ice chips Barnes carries around for eyes.

A knock on the doorway. “My lord? Your guests are here.”

M’Baku turns. He dons his biggest grin. “Then let’s show them how to dine like Jabari.”

---

Okoye, in the red of her armor and the jangle of metal and beads, has always looked out of place in M’Baku’s mountain halls. He likes that about her. Barnes, though, blends in — dark clothing, hair the color of wenge wood, snowfields for skin.

M’Baku likes that less.

The last white man who set foot in these halls was Everett Ross. M’Baku tells Barnes this, then smirks and adds: “I hear he tried to kill you.”

It is not what he planned to to say. But his skin feels too tight all of a sudden, emotions chasing each other beneath it: anger and desire and contempt. It is one thing, for Barnes to stand free in the Golden Tribe’s realm. Here is another.

Barnes says nothing, just meets M’Baku’s stare. He is not shaking, as he was yesterday. His body looks unbalanced with its single arm, but he stands like he doesn’t care.

You cannot talk, M’Baku wants to snarl, as he once did to Ross. You cannot breathe my air and tread my ancestors’ floors. You cannot talk, but Barnes isn’t trying to, and M’Baku feels a sudden vicious tangle of desire to make him.

It’s long-deferred anger and something else, hot and sharp and unfurling in his gut, acidic; it makes him want to act, to move, to catch Barnes by the throat and see if he’ll fight back. If he’s really the weapon T’Challa seems to believe. To possess, or to let Barnes stop him. To make those eyes show something other than blank.

“Well?” he barks. “Did he try?”

Barnes’s expression barely flickers. For a shadow of an instant, his eyes meet M’Baku’s. “Guess so,” he says, after a moment. “Can’t say I really keep track.”

Okoye’s shoulders hitch in a tiny, suppressed laugh.

If M’Baku didn’t know her, he’d call it a giggle. He turns to stare at her, levelling the full force of his affront, but her shoulders only shake harder, mouth working furiously to suppress a smile.

Suddenly, M’Baku is laughing too, the heat of his challenge-blood leaving him. Barnes doesn’t move, but for just one moment, M’Baku thinks he sees the corner of his mouth twitch toward what might be a smile.

The other one talked too much, he thinks with satisfaction, and you don’t talk at all. Well, we’ll change that. Won’t we, Sergeant Barnes-oh?

Out loud, he says, “My warriors have starved themselves waiting on your tortoise-pace. Let’s eat!”

5.

The long wooden tables of the dining hall are already laden with food when they enter, serving staff materializing from alcoves with even more steaming bowls and platters laden with fruit. Bucky smells goat’s milk and honey, the heavy maize porridge Wakandans call umpoqhoko. When he hesitates in the doorway, M’Baku turns to raise an eyebrow at him, then moves away, clapping the backs of his warriors. Bucky stands there for a moment, unmoored, then moves to the end of an out-of-the-way table to find a seat.

No one immediately joins him — Okoye is deep in conversation with the warrior woman called Unathi, and she needs to start her return journey to the capital soon regardless — but Bucky doesn’t object. He digs in methodically, following the example of the warriors he sees shoveling umpoqhoko and various toppings into the lightweight wooden bowls that sit at each place. They’re a little hard to handle, one-armed, but he can cope.

If Shuri were here, she’d be forgetting her food, up out of her seat and darting around to investigate the room’s construction. It’s cleverly fitted and joined without a nail to be seen, rich wood in all different hues. T’Challa would be striking up a gentle conversation, voice low, speaking with respect of Jabari traditions and history.

If Steve were here —

The thought startles Bucky, and he tenses for a moment, then relaxes into it. If Steve were here, he wouldn’t feel the need to fill Bucky’s silence. He’d be looking around sharp-eyed, observing, posture easy. Even back when he was small, Steve walked into every room like it was the only place in the world he was meant to be.

The food is delicious, rich and sweet and heavy with flavor. Experimentally, Bucky allows himself to imagine Steve across the table from him. Eating with the simple pleasure it always gave him — even before the serum, when an ice cream cone might cost him long hours later, frail body hunched over with pain.

Steve’s own body doesn’t wage war against him anymore. Neither does Bucky’s, and he tries to believe it: closes his eyes and loses himself in sensation, relaxing each muscle by degrees.

He hears the footsteps coming, but doesn’t open his eyes. He gauges their weight, instead, their rhythm, and when he looks up, he’s right: it’s M’Baku dropping into the seat opposite him.

They regard each other for a moment. Then Bucky shrugs to himself and returns to his food.

His bowl is nearly empty, but the last few bites don’t want to cooperate. Without a second hand to hold it in place, the bowl skids across the table under his spoon. He drags it back, judges the friction of the table’s surface, and refines his approach angle; on the second try, he thrusts neatly down, coming up with a good-sized spoonful, and moves it to his mouth.

Across the table, M’Baku is watching him.

Bucky ignores him, though his skin prickles with something that’s not quite unease. He finishes the bowl, and moves to refill it.

“Is it hard,” M’Baku asks, “going through life as a cripple?”

His voice is loud and almost bored, shoulders set as if ready to give offense. He’s looking at Bucky sidelong, like he means to telegraph disinterest, but his eyes are sharp and curious.

Bucky considers. “No,” he says. Plenty of things are hard.

He doesn’t mean it as a joke, but M’Baku tips back his head and laughs. The muscles of his throat gleam in the lamplight, powerful. One or two of his warriors glance at him, but none break off their own conversations or the steady business of eating.

“I like you,” M’Baku declares, when he’s done laughing, “better than Ross.” His grin widens. “You talk less.”

There’s no response to that, so Bucky doesn’t attempt one.

They eat in silence for a while, alone at their table, heads down. Bucky can feel M’Baku’s eyes on him, when his own are elsewhere. It’s an unfamiliar sensation. Not being watched — he’s used to being watched — but this is different, somehow.

People watch him because they’re afraid of him. Or worried about him, in Steve’s case, which sort of makes his skin want to crawl off his body and slink away into the darkest hole he can find. Shuri watches like she’s trying to puzzle out how to finish fixing him, T’Challa like he’s composing a progress report.

The way Zemo watched him was all too familiar — eager calculation. Barely disguised greed.

M’Baku watches him like he enjoys it. Just watching; like that’s enough.

He wants something. They always want something, a part of his brain whispers. The same part that says: It always ends in a fight.

When he finishes his second bowl, M’Baku takes a long swallow of water and comments, “My King says you used to fight for them — these men you call HYDRA. Is that how you lost your arm?”

Bucky looks at his eyes. He doesn’t find pity there, or hatred. “No.”

M’Baku doesn’t laugh this time, but he does smile, long and slow, watching Bucky’s face.

There’s something heady about this. Like good food and hard work, like climbing through the thin air of the mountains this morning; things HYDRA had taken from him, he thought maybe forever. The sounds and smells and colors feel easier, when he’s moving through them. Attention seems less invasive when it’s laid so bare.

He busies himself with a third helping, exploring the feeling. He used to know what to do, when a person watched him like this. Mostly girls, in Brooklyn; a few men during the war. Steve used to watch him like this, all the time. He could look up. He could smile, slow.

“Why don’t you want your Captain here?” M’Baku asks.

Bucky goes still.

This time, when their gazes meet, there’s heat there — heat, and something else. Suddenly, Bucky doesn’t want to be watched this closely. Suddenly, there are goosebumps on his skin.

“You don’t want to help us,” M’Baku continues, ticking off words with his hands. “You are tired, and afraid. But you want him to help us even less. Why?”

There’s a roaring in his ears. Bucky thinks of Steve’s throat, fragile and fluttering in the grip of his metal hand. Steve with his face swollen and battered — I’m with you ‘til the end of the line. Thinks of loathing Steve, wanting him dead, with every bone in his body, every inch of his skin.

The problem with remembering isn’t that he wasn’t in there, doing those things. The problem is that he was.

He realizes he’s clutching the table for balance, knuckles white, like he’s standing on the edge of a cliff. He hasn’t answered M’Baku’s question. He isn’t going to answer M’Baku’s question.

M’Baku tilts his head, watching him. Then, abruptly, he says, “Come,” and stands.

A few of the Jabari warriors glance up, but none of them moves to follow. Bucky obeys, after a moment, the legs of his chair scraping, and finds that he’s not too dizzy to walk. He follows as M’Baku leads him out into the hall, up a flight of stairs.

They emerge onto a broad balcony. Bucky hangs back from the edge — he’s plummeted off of enough precipices for a lifetime — but the view is almost enough to make him forget the ache of fear. It’s stunning, high snow-capped peaks with ridges of rock jutting out amongst them. They look different, somehow, from those of the Alps. Steve would be able to explain that, with his artist’s eye.

“You see that ridge there? We are crossing it today.” M’Baku points, tracing the line of the horizon. It’s rocky and treeless, bright under the sun. “From there we can venture down to Wakanda’s border. These mountains fall into desert where not many humans survive.”

Approaching your enemy by their wildest border makes sense, if you can manage it. Bucky nods, grounded by talk of strategy. “That’s where you found the spy?”

“Yes.” Leaning across the railing to look out, M’Baku looks almost like an overgrown child. A visceral memory punches Bucky in the gut: Steve dangling over the rail at the end of a pier, gangly and pale and grinning. Ice cream-sticky hands and the smell of salt, seagulls calling far above.

There are no seagulls here — maybe a vulture, high in the blue. M’Baku has his head turned, watching Bucky like he can’t quite figure him out.

“Do we frighten you, Sergeant Barnes?” he asks, and it comes out more quietly than any of his questions before.

Bucky blinks. “My name is Bucky,” he says.

“Bucky.” M’Baku pronounces the name with obvious skepticism, equal emphasis on each syllable. He looks out over the mountain peaks again, then asks, abruptly, “Do you know why I wear this fur around my shoulders, Buck-ee?”

Bucky looks at it. It’s silver-gray, and dense; it looks warm. He shakes his head, silent.

M’Baku shrugs massive shoulders. “It comes from a wolf. I did not kill her. She gave herself to us, when she was old and ready to die.”

He looks back again, to be sure Bucky’s watching, and then his finger sweeps upward. Bucky squints against the sun, and sees a high point of rock, jutting up against the sky. He shivers; the cold up here is more than he likes to think about, and the point looks colder still.

“When our warriors die,” M’Baku tells him, “we bury them there. In the sky. The old wolves come for them, the ones who are too weak to hunt or fight. And if we have honored them well, they come here to die, too, and give us the warmth of their furs.”

Bucky considers this. He’s seen many furs, on M’Baku’s warriors. “You never hunt them?”

“We will not make them fight,” M’Baku answers, gravely. Then his face creases in an impish smile. “Besides. We don’t kill any animals. We are vegetarians .”

He pronounces the word in exaggerated English, clearly amused by it. But there wasn’t any meat at breakfast, Bucky thinks; he’s seen goats and chickens in the paddocks around the palace, but few roosters, no pigs.

It’s hard to imagine — a life that requires no killing at all. No bloodshed.

“Here,” says M’Baku, gesturing at the pelt around his shoulders; “you may touch it, if you like. My grandfather was the first to wear it, when he was young.”

Bucky obeys, slowly. The guard hairs on the pelt are coarse, the underfur thick and warm. M’Baku smiles like he’s repressing some joke, and Bucky lets his hand drop.

M’Baku reaches out, then, a mirror gesture. His grin widens, teasing, and his knuckles brush Bucky’s hair where it falls loose around his face. “I will not make you fight, either, White Wolf,” he says. “You, too, I think, are old and weary of the hunt.” He tugs a lock of Bucky’s hair.

Where this is going, Bucky doesn’t know. But a moment later, the door swings open, and Unathi’s there, frowning. “There you are. We all are ready; General Okoye has already departed. Come, if you wish to make the plains by dark!”

It’s new to Bucky, the exasperated fondness with which Wakandans treat their rulers. M’Baku scowls. “Get on with you, old woman,” he grouses; “we’re coming.”

“You’d better be,” Unathi threatens. She spares a glance at Bucky, at the way his shoulders hunch around his ears, the light jacket he wore from the capital. “I’ll be there soon. I’m going to get that boy a cloak.”

6.

The way east begins as the way up, winding through M’Baku’s city’s terraced streets. Children run out to call and wave at them, and then to point and stare at Barnes when they see him. “White Wolf,” M’Baku tells them, gravely, and when they take up the cry, it makes him laugh.

“Please accept our apologies for him,” he hears Thando murmuring, behind him, in Xhosa. “He has been like this ever since he was a child.”

“And knocking you down since then, too, blood-cousin,” M’Baku says loudly over his shoulder. Thando only laughs.

Beyond the last buildings, the trail steepens, snake-wending its way up toward the crest of the ridge. M’Baku’s capital is built where it is for a reason: above the trees, guarding the mountain pass. The Jabari have held Wakanda’s eastern gate for centuries, while the kings below grew fat and complacent; that’s what Umakhulu says.

That doesn’t mean crossing to the mountain’s eastern slope is easy. The glare off the snow is enough to make them squint, and the wind picks up as soon as they’re out on open ground. Weather up here can spring at you from a cloudless sky. M’Baku’s warriors are used to this upward toil; when he looks back at Barnes, his head is down like the others’, feet moving mechanically. Around his shoulders, he holds his cloak wound tight.

Barnes asked M’Baku to call him Bucky. He tests the name in his mind again: Buck-ee. Bucky.

At the pass itself, the wind is a knife. It slices through armor and furs, laughing at them, and draws tears to warriors’ eyes. M’Baku stops there, reveling in the full blast of it; he shouts out a storm-laugh of his own into the gape of its jaws. Then he turns to find Bucky, standing behind him, less than an arm’s length away.

M’Baku reaches for him, pulling him close by the elbow, and feels the other man go stiff for a moment before he yields. “That is the path to the place of wolves,” he shouts in Bucky’s ear, over the roar of the wind, pointing: the ridge narrows to a blade’s edge, in places, then sweeps a broad curve to the south. “We go this way,” he adds, and points ahead: down.

He always loves descending this side of his mountain — more even, perhaps, than the other, where his people’s farms and villages dot the slope. Here, everything is wilder. Eagles nest on promontories; rainforest rises through the mist. They walk down into it, through the open scrubland of the high slopes and into the dense tangle of wood and vines.

There is a path, of sorts, but it hardly takes a day to swallow itself up. M’Baku pushes through vines, wayfinding. His touch lingers, sometimes, on the trunk of a particularly fine tree; but this side of the mountain is not for felling. This is the stronghold of the wild creatures — the gorilla and the hornbill and the elephants who haunt the forests in seasons of famine — and it is not his to disturb.

At some point — he’s not sure when — Bucky moves up to walk by his right elbow. M’Baku points things out as he sees them, great termite mounds and plants that bear medicine and brightly colored birds. Bucky nods every time, his gaze sharp as he listens.

He seems looser, down here, about the shoulders and the hips. Freer. M’Baku wants to touch them, to feel the way he moves in his predator’s skin.

After long miles, the forest gives way to woodland, then savanna, and they’re continuing down, out of the greenery and into the places where the soil is black and red and the trees are gnarled tight and silver; where the life shrinks from the heat. There’s a spring there, surrounded by yellow-barked acacia trees, and that’s where they spend the night.

The journey is too long for a man on foot to make in a single day. Okoye and the King have more than once offered use of one of their jets to patrol this border, but M’Baku has always turned them down. You can’t feel the country on your skin if you don’t let it breathe around you, sink into it; that’s one of the things Umakhulu taught him, but Unathi, too. It’s the warrior’s path. To hear bird-silence, you must first listen to the birds.

He wants to tell Bucky this, so he does, and Bucky hesitates before he nods.

“They never wanted me to do that,” he says, in a voice that creaks like old metal. “Act on instinct. I was trained to be — mechanical.”

“Were you?” M’Baku asks, curious.

Bucky seems to think about that. He looks into the distance, and chews ever so slightly on his lip. He says, “I wasn’t. No.”

For a moment, M’Baku’s almost dizzy with wanting; Hanuman, but he’d love to know this man’s mind! His mind and his body too, the grace that moves in it, the battles waged behind the ice of his eyes. Bucky Barnes, he thinks, you’re too interesting for your own good-oh. “You remember it?” he asks, out loud.

Bucky’s jaw tightens. “I remember all of it,” he says, and goes to help Thando gather firewood without another backward glance.

---

They sleep in a makeshift thorn fence, a guard against lions — all of them close together, shoulders to hips. When M’Baku wakes in the morning, Bucky is already stirring the coals of the fire, setting water to boil as the others yawn and stir.

They press onward into the broad, flat, thorn-studded plains.

It looks lifeless here, but it isn’t truly. In a few months, when the rains come, this gravel will flush green with new growth; the wizened thorn trees will fountain leaves. Even now as they walk, they glimpse the occasional flick of a lizard-tail, darting away to small hiding-places. They pass a small group of gerenuk, the antelope that stands on two legs like a man. Occasionally, they cross broad elephant paths: trampled by plate-sized feet, studded with heaps of dung as big as a human head.

It’s mid-morning when they locate the site where Unathi and her warriors captured the spy.

The place itself is without distinction. It’s near the official boundary of Wakanda, though few but M’Baku’s Jabari scouts would know that by sight; the desert out here is too empty for border-marking. There are signs of the struggle, still, scuffed footprints in the dust.

Bucky stops dead to look at them. M’Baku holds up a hand, and the others halt too.

He watches the White Wolf’s eyes travel over the scene: the fur-smudged footsteps of the Jabari warriors, the HYDRA agent’s crisp ones. They dance around trees and between thorn bushes. Once, they trample straight through one — Jabari pressing in, the spy stumbling back.

“He expected backup,” Bucky says.

M’Baku feels the ripple that passes through his warriors. The ones who were there that day, especially: Unathi, Bhule, L’Wazi. “How can you tell?”

“Hang on.” Bucky kicks aside some dirt, and picks something up from the ground: a small, dark rod enmeshed in a tangle of wires. It emits a faint, frantic beeping, exposed to the air; Bucky considers it for a moment, then takes one of the wires between his teeth and jerks it free. The beeping stops.

“Self-destruct explosive. He ditched it,” he says, offering the object to M’Baku. It’s barely the size of a child’s finger, innocuous-looking in its loops of wire. “Maybe you want to analyze it. It’s disarmed.”

“Why didn’t he use it?” demands Unathi. “If he was going to kill himself anyway? He could have taken some of us out, too.”

“I told you,” Bucky says; “he thought he had backup.”

7.

They track the handler’s footprints down elephant trails, through thorn thickets. Two miles later, they find the reason his backup never came.

It’s the smell that reaches Bucky’s nose first. The air is foul with death, that particular chemical stench that arrives after corpses cook a few days in the sun; death smells nothing like life does. A half dozen vultures take to the air as they approach, flapping heavily, bellies brushing the trees. Their beaks are dark with old blood.

M’Baku leads the way past a screen of trees, face taut against the smell, and then they see the elephants.

There are eight of them — the vast gray mountains of their bodies limp and crumbling, torn open by scavengers and dragged in the dust. Flies buzz, deafening, a black swarm. One lands on Bucky’s face, another, seeking the moisture of his eyes. He bats them away.

The elephants’ faces are mangled and bloody. On each one, both tusks have been cut clear.

“That must be a thousand pounds of ivory,” breathes the woman called Bhule.

Unathi’s mouth is a hard line. “More.”

All of Bucky’s being wants to turn and leave this place. But M’Baku is moving out among the corpses, fury in the line of his shoulders, and his warriors follow.

Among the bodies, there are signs of a fight. One great old matriarch has bullet holes peppering her chest and face, as if she went down charging. Others have trunks intertwined, heads turned toward each other in death. At the ring’s very center, they find a ninth body: a calf, entangled between its mother’s legs, a bullet hole directly between its eyes. It’s too young to have tusks. Its mother’s trunk is still wrapped protectively around it, severed at the base so the killers could get to her ivory.

“They are — sacred,” breathes Unathi, in a horrified whisper. “They are as wise as humans, as loving. To do this —”

Other years, other mass graves, threaten to blanket Bucky’s vision. He thinks he’s shaking. He wishes he had a gun, a hand to rest on its barrel as he walks.

They do the work they need to. Grisly footage recorded on kimoyo beads, death wounds located and described; L’Wazi hands Bucky two bullets, both grimy and sticky in his hand. One is standard HYDRA issue. The other is not.

L’Wazi nods when Bucky tells him this, as though he’s not surprised.

At last they retreat with gratitude, hardly speaking, holding fabric over their noses and mouths, until they’re clear again of the smell. Unathi leads the way, and stops once they reach a clearing, but M’Baku doesn’t; he veers off abruptly, striding away through the thorn trees. His broad back is rigid under his leather armor.

Bucky glances around at the others. None of them move to follow, so he takes a step himself.

Unathi puts her hand on his shoulder. “Leave him, child.”

Her eyes are sad, and kind. But there might be more poachers out there, or HYDRA; there might be anything else. Bucky removes her hand, and follows M’Baku.

---

He finds him vomiting quietly into a thornbush.

Bucky stands back. He’s not squeamish, but he’s never liked vomit. M’Baku wipes his mouth on the back of his hand — his knuckles are bloody — and looks up at Bucky and away again with angry, guarded eyes.

“What?” he demands.

“There might be more of them out there. It’s not safe to be alone.”

“They weren’t alone,” answers M’Baku; meaning the elephants, Bucky supposes. He’s still not looking at Bucky. “I didn’t know your HYDRA were also poachers.”

Bucky shrugs. “Last I checked, they’re not. They are opportunists, though. Probably hired local poachers to guide them here, and took the chance for profit when they saw it.”

M’Baku looks away. His shoulders are hunched, defensive. “I’m not a coward. I fought T’Challa for the throne. I led my people to join his war.”

“Did you kill anyone?” Bucky asks.

Because he’s remembered, suddenly: it was on the second Howlies mission, Steve’s first kill. His first up-close-and-personal kill. It surprised you, how hard he shook afterward. You didn’t know how many men you’d killed by then. You wondered if you were already dead inside.

For an instant, M’Baku looks like he’d like to be offended. Then he sags. “I don’t think so.”

“Good.”

M’Baku looks down at his bloody hand. He rises, slowly, from his knees. “They’re — evil,” he says, like someone who hasn’t met evil before.

“Yes,” Bucky agrees.

---

It takes some searching to locate the poachers’ footprints, among all the tracks of scavengers that have come to the carcasses — lions and jackals and hyenas. The trail is cold. It leads off and away into the desert, pointing east, farther than the Jabari, in their furs and wooden armor, have any desire to go.

There’s a part of Bucky that wants to hunt them. To disappear silent into this country and stalk them down; to visit death upon them, as they deserve. He doesn’t. The longing for it aches in the back of his teeth.

M’Baku calls Okoye on his kimoyo bead and reports to her, voice low and dead as rotting wood. After that, they’re silent, the lot of them, the whole way back to the camp by the acacia trees.

8.

M’Baku’s rage is hot and cool within him. He climbs the mountain, step after step, head down, and watches his hands clench and unclench into fists.

Umakhulu, you taught me to hate, he thinks. You taught me that I had enemies. You taught me their destruction was worth dying for —

The words run out on him. He watches Bucky’s lopsided gait, his missing arm, and thinks of men who would hurt him like that. Who would kill for casual profit. All the enemies umakhulu ever gave him were shadows of the real thing.

9.

Back in the Jabari capital, Bucky watches M’Baku thank his warriors, sending each on their way with a brittle smile. Last, he turns to Bucky and takes his hand.

“General Okoye will meet you at Hanuman’s Gate,” he says. Then, smiling a little wider: “You should come stay with us. You look more like a man up here. Less like a milk-drowned mouse." 

Bucky lets himself smile back. “Too cold up here for my taste.” They’ve let him keep the cloak, though; he likes it. He likes it here, too, likes M’Baku and the strange friendship evolving between them. “You’ll call me? If you get word of trespassers again?”

“Okoye will know it first,” M’Baku points out; she’s already deploying a network of Shuri’s new monitor drones, keyed to the biosignatures of the poachers they gleaned off the dead elephants. Then, he adds, “Yes. But I won’t make you fight.”

An emotion he can’t remember feeling since the 1940s tightens in Bucky’s throat. He nods, unable to speak, and turns to go.

“Bring your Captain next time!” M’Baku calls after him.

Bucky doesn’t flip him off, but he does grin, just a little, into the knot at the collar of his cloak.

10.

Bhule is waiting at the archway that opens onto the palace’s family wing. “Umakhulu won’t like that,” she observes, turning her staff idly in her hand.

M’Baku glares at her. His cousin is too smart for anyone’s good. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he declares.

11.

Bucky finds Shuri two days later, hard at work in her lab. She looks startled to see him, so far from the heights of the palace and his usual secluded haunts.

“I want to live in the country,” he tells her. His voice surprises him with its firmness. “Somewhere warm. Where I can smell dirt and be useful.”

Shuri blinks at him. Once, again.

“And I want more wraps, like the farmers wear.” Bucky adds, belatedly, “Please.”

---

Shuri and T’Challa have long told him to ask for anything he desires, and they’re as good as their word. They install him at a small goat farm, half a mile from the newest settlement, which is populated by two elderly couples and a dozen or so children. They’re all, Shuri tells him, orphans of the civil war.

Bucky loves them instantly, fiercely. They teach him to herd goats, how to milk one before the next steals the treats in your pocket, how to bale hay and plant maize and cook on an open flame. He has some cooking tricks of his own — he didn’t spend all that time with the Howlies for nothing — and he shows them, when they beg.

They call him White Wolf, as M’Baku did. When he asks Shuri, she shrugs and tells him one of the girls is Okoye’s niece; nicknames get around.

He asks her, “Will you tell me about the war?”

None of them have yet, not really; he senses that the wound is still fresh. Shuri studies him for a minute. “I will,” she says.

And she starts to, on long walks through the villages and countryside. She introduces him to people who lost parents, brothers, lovers. To people whose own family fought them on the other side.

The Wakandans they visit speak freely of horror and grief. They reach out for Bucky’s hand, often, as they talk, and he gives it to them. It feels hallowed in some way, this act of speaking; Bucky’s never learned how to let his pain be pain.

---

“Come, Sergeant Barnes,” says Shuri, the second morning, and he looks at her oddly; has she always called him that? “Bucky,” he says, as he said to M’Baku, as he said to Zemo; as, so many times, Steve has said to him.

There is power, he thinks in naming things what they are.

12.

Twice more, that summer and fall, the White Wolf Bucky Barnes comes to help M’Baku track his spies.

The new drones alert him to any border activity, and M’Baku was resistant to them at first, but he has to confess they’re useful. Twice, they find the place where a trespasser has been; twice, the culprit has already faded into the desert like so much rain.

The rains do come. At home in the palace, there’s fresh snow almost every day; down on the plains, the desert performs its annual miracle of greenery. Insects buzz everywhere, teeming. The winged termites are so dense that they die in droves, and drift against tree trunks like snow.

Nakia is in China, embedding herself in black market circles; she believes that a splinter of HYDRA have contracted with poaching syndicates through their international buyers, and are using their knowledge of the terrain in their attempts to infiltrate Wakanda’s Jabari border. She believes, also, that they are after vibranium technology. She doesn’t think they know Barnes is even there.

M’Baku watches Bucky sway, a little bit, when Nakia relays that piece of information over the kimoyo bead. He’s not easy to read, this White Wolf, but he has his tells.

“I will not make you fight,” he says that day, as they’re arming up, but he means it this time even more than usual. I would murder those who did, he wants to add. I’d murder them with my bare hands and not feel sorry for a day.

Bucky smiles, reed-thin. “Before you ask,” he says, “I’m not bringing my Captain this time, either.”

The shared joke jolts M’Baku out of his dark mood; he laughs, pleased. “Why not? Do you fear the great wild Jabari will serve him up for supper?”

Bucky’s mouth twitches. “You’re vegetarians,” he answers, but his mouth catches on the word, and his eyes are unhappy for a moment, like he wants to say something more.

He doesn’t.

“He is very old, your Captain,” M’Baku points out, adjusting his gauntlet. “My grandmother is very old; she is hard to reason with. Perhaps you fear your Captain judging our modern ways.”

He says it like a joke, and it is one. Maybe it’s true, though. M’Baku doesn’t know much of the world outside Wakanda, but he knows America does not love black men; then even less than now.

Bucky’s frowning. “I’m old,” he objects absently. “I’m older than him. Lived more of it, too. I’ve never met your umakhulu.”

M’Baku snorts. “Of course you haven’t. She barely speaks to me, ever since I tossed the family dreams in the shitter.”

He uses the English word Bucky taught him, their last trek to the desert. Then, he was reveling in the fresh curse words, sprinkling them liberally in every sentence, to Bhule’s laughter and Unathi’s annoyance. Now, his audacity surprises him, and his bitterness.

Bucky’s watching him closely. He looks a little like M’Baku feels, sometimes; like there’s something he’d like to exact vengeance for, bloody vengeance, if he could only find who’s responsible. “I wouldn’t want it,” he says, finally. “Carrying a nation around on my shoulders like that. I’d never want it, for anyone.”

He says it with a fervor M’Baku’s never heard. M’Baku remembers, suddenly, that Captain Rogers is Captain America, too, or was. That Bucky spent years by his side.

Were you, he almost asks, did you —?

But his warriors are ready. He gives Bucky one nod and straps his fur on, tight, and goes to lead the way over the pass once more.

13.

The rainy season passes. Bucky takes the hay in, and takes the hay in again.

M’Baku comes to visit one day, unexpected, grinning broadly at Shuri’s shoulder like he can’t quite contain the surprise. “We had meetings, ” he says, voice dripping disdain; “so I thought I’d skip them and come see where you live.”

Shuri scowls at him. “It’s important that the Jabari be represented in our meetings with outside powers, you know,” she scolds. “ You were the one who insisted on being included.”

“They are talking about Starbucks, today,” M’Baku answers, with dignity. “I do not care about Starbucks.”

“You will when you try an iced frappuccino,” Bucky tells him; he learned some things in Romania. “Want to help milk the goats?”

For all he grew up around goats, M’Baku has never tried to milk one in his life. He sends several of Bucky’s best nannies scampering off in disdain, pails dry; one of them turns to bite him on the eyebrow. “Ow!” exclaims M’Baku, sitting down hard with a hand to his face, and Bucky can’t help it; he roars with laughter.

The children show up a little while later, like they’re magnetically drawn to watching important political figures fail at basic tasks. Thabo is Bucky’s favorite; it’s his idea, after a while, to take M’Baku back to the village to milk their goats. “For practice,” he says, face deadly sincere.

In the end, M’Baku achieves one success: he picks a nanny up bodily with one hand, pinning it to his chest, and gropes at its udder with the other. At last, a narrow stream of milk patters into the pail — and dies out again, as M’Baku’s face falls in a parody of dismay.

The children are falling about themselves with laughter. “We already,” a girl gasps, “we already milked them today!” and then their laughs are turning to delighted shrieks as M’Baku mimes rage. “I’m going to — eat you!” he declares, with a swipe toward Thabo, who scrambles out of the way just in time.

I wish Steve were here, Bucky thinks, as he watches the children and the Jabari leader chase each other around the paddock, goats scattering out of their way. I wish he could see this.

I bet he’d draw it if he could.

It surprises him. Not the wish — he wishes for Steve every day of his goddamn life — but the failure of the accompanying twinge of terror to appear.

14.

It’s after another fruitless mission — the information relayed to Okoye, who’s traveling in Switzerland with T’Challa; the warriors dispersing from the hall — that Unathi looks at Bucky as she unbuckles her armor and demands, “Well? Are you staying for supper?”

Bucky blinks once. “All right,” he says, slowly, and stops halfway through shouldering his bag for the long trek back down the mountain.

Unathi is grinning like a wolf. M’Baku frowns. “Umakhulu —”

“My mother is going to learn to live in this century,” Unathi says, flinty, and smiles even wider than before.

Later, when she’s gone, M’Baku tells Bucky: “You don’t have to stay. It’s a — family thing, tonight, the anniversary of my grandfather’s completion of the western wing. It will be boring.”

Bucky asks, “Would you rather I leave?”

It’s growing dark outside. Even if it weren’t, the answer would be no.

Bucky’s never seen M’Baku’s palace in all its night-splendor.

“Stay,” he says.

---

By dark, the Jabari capital reveals itself more truly than it ever does by day. Light gleams from every house up and down the hillside, illuminating the city’s glittering expanse. The palace’s winding corridors burst with light too, in the space between every wooden rib, like the snake in the story who swallowed the sun. Hanging bridges spangled with lanterns connect different wings. Hanuman’s immense wooden likeness gleams.

After they’ve bathed and dressed, M’Baku leads Bucky across one of those bridges to the western wing. Bucky keeps pausing, intrigued by the torches, as they walk. “These are just — wood?” he asks, and M’Baku nods. “It grows on the western side of our mountain. It burns clear and cool, so it’s safe to use in our halls.”

Bucky keeps glancing, too, over at M’Baku in his formalwear, the long split-sleeved overcoat and the metal cuffs on his arms.

That gratifies him; he knows how he looks. He likes that Bucky knows it too.

As they cross the threshold of the western wing, M’Baku watches Bucky pause, sensing the difference: the wood here is in different colors, joined in clever new ways. Great logs of it are almost bone-white, others rippled red. Torches are placed with care, showing off each room to its full effect. Bucky’s head keeps turning on his neck to take it in.

The family is assembled in the small dining room: Bhule and Thando and Unathi and her husband, a soft-voiced woodworker who looks at her as though she hung the stars. More of M’Baku’s cousins, on both sides of the royal line, half a dozen or so in all. Some of them are also warriors, and M’Baku knows Bucky recognizes L’Wazi, Esihle.

At the head of the table, Umakhulu presides.

“Grandmother,” says M’Baku, loudly, “I brought a guest.”

Heads swivel. M’Baku bites his lip, enjoying this; if he’s going to be his grandmother’s life’s disappointment, he might as well do it all the way. He imagines how she must look to Bucky: this wizened old crow-woman, jewelry glittering at her ears and neck, turning to stare at him with vicious eyes.

“Milk-filth,” she says, slowly, tongue clicking disdainfully on the consonants, “are not guests.”

“He understands Xhosa,” M’Baku informs her.

Her eyes snap from Bucky to him. “Good.”

“Meet my family,” M’Baku mutters, and steers Bucky to sit next to him at the place left open, right at the table’s foot, as far from Umakhulu as can be.

---

The evening begins with food, many courses of it, and beer, too; Bucky drinks the strong brew without hesitation, which makes M’Baku proud. After that come the toasts. M’Baku himself gives the first one, short and sweet: “To my utatomkhulu, who built the world on a mountain!”

Unathi rises next, laughing, beer slopping in her mug. “My father,” she begins, “was a man with a goat’s eye for mischief.”

She continues from there, and the warriors bang their tables at the appropriate points: the tale of utatomkhulu’s raising, his feats of strength and cleverness; his adventures among the mountains and behind. His wooing of Umakhulu — the lady in question does not twitch a smile at this — and his ever-grander quest to build something new, something the Jabari had never seen before.

“So he left!” declares Unathi. “He left his wife and his two young children, and he went wandering, as mountain souls sometimes do.”

Next to M’Baku, Bucky shifts slightly in surprise. Perhaps he didn’t know of this — it is little-spoken phenomenon of Jabari culture, this lust to leave, to see the world. M’Baku has felt it himself, though he’s never heeded the call. Life here is narrow, and sometimes hard.

“But he came back,” Unathi says, in a quieter voice. “He came back with a caravan behind him, laden with wood from all over the world! In strange new colors we Jabari had never seen before, and when he joined it with our wood, the best in the world, he at last was ready to build a place to call home.”

That’s the traditional end of the story; next comes the parade through the palace, the celebrations of ebony and sassafras and birch. But Unathi doesn’t set down her mug. She fixes her mother instead with a look, and adds, “Some of us might do well to remember that our proudest heroes loved the abelungu, too.”

Then they’re all rising, skidding back their chairs, as Thando lets out a whoop and beats a fist against the door’s lintel, moving to lead the way. M’Baku falls in with the rest behind him, and Bucky leans close to ask, “I thought your people were completely isolationist. I didn’t know —”

“No. Many of us wander,” M’Baku answers, placing a hand on Bucky’s back because he can. Bucky doesn’t shy from the touch. If anything, he presses back against it. “My parents among them, since I was a child.”

Bucky twists to look at him, surprise clear on his face. “They left you? To live in exile?”

M’Baku smiles at him. “Why is that so strange? Is it not what your Captain does, too?”

He sees the startled look in Bucky’s eyes. He isn’t sure how he ever found them unreadable; there’s some hurt there, some longing. M’Baku swallows. Bucky’s mouth is turned down a small frown; he wants to touch it, to turn it right side up.

They’ve paused too long. They’re alone in the corridor, the whoops of M’Baku’s family moving on without them. With the way Bucky’s turned toward him, M’Baku is almost embracing him, hand still on the small of his back.

Without warning, the kimoyo bead trills on his wrist, lighting up red.

He lurches back, startled, and feels the blood heat his face. When he swipes at it, it’s Okoye’s head that appears, expression tight and furious.

“The drones just picked them up,” she says. “They’re making their move. Thirty or more of them . I’d send the Dora, but half of them are here with me and T’Challa; Shuri’s in Oakland with our other autonomous jet. I really wish you had let her give you one, but now —”

The world rocks, realigning. It’s happening; it’s happening now. “We will stop them,” M’Baku rumbles, fury lacing through his veins. “We will meet them on the slopes.”

“They are planning a diversion,” Okoye says, more quietly. “They carry explosives with them, and torches. They mean to set the mountain on fire.”

15.

“I have a jet,” Bucky says.

He swallows as Okoye’s head swivels to look at him. M’Baku doesn’t move — his shoulders are locked, an almost-visible fury simmering under his skin — but he looks up to meet Bucky’s eyes under heavy brows.

“Just a transport jet. No guns. Shuri lets me use it; it’s down at the Meadows. I could carry your warriors.”

Okoye sighs. “If you’re willing to take an unarmed transport jet, I could send —”

“I’m already here,” Bucky interrupts.

M’Baku’s chin rises by fractions; he’s looking at Bucky properly now, something complicated in his eyes. “Are you sure?” he murmurs, and Bucky hears the echo of the promise in the question: I will not make you fight.

Is he sure? He’s sure he doesn’t want the Jabari forests burned to ash. He’s sure he doesn’t want this country infiltrated by anyone who means it ill. He’s sure he doesn’t want HYDRA to set a foot near these people, now or ever again.

“Yes,” he says.

---

Bucky lands the plane directly below the great wooden gorilla that holds the whole palace aloft, knowing how the Jabari must hate this: they’ve never, in all their years of proud isolation, allowed a Wakandan jet to pass beyond Hanuman’s Gate. The warriors board with stony faces, piling close in the small hold. M’Baku is last, wearing his battle armor now, leather and fur and his full wooden breastplate; he’s daubed marks of paint on his face.

He meets Bucky’s eyes and gives a single, grim nod. Bucky hits the button to close the hatch.

It’s different, watching the familiar paths race below him through the window of a cockpit. The jet shakes and judders in the mountain winds, but Bucky keeps it level, gaining elevation; in only a few minutes, they’re over the pass.

By night, the snowfields glitter, but the forests below them are dark. Bucky brings up Okoye’s coordinates on his kimoyo beads, sets a heading. He thinks of what M’Baku said, that first time, about bird-silence; he feels strangely orphaned, making this journey with nothing but the whisper-roar of engines in his ears.

They slow as they near the coordinates. This plane has no cloaking, no targeting systems, no sophisticated sensors; it’s designed for shuffling materials from point A to point B. It doesn’t matter: HYDRA isn’t being subtle.

When Bucky finds them, they’ve already reached the acacia spring, and they’re lighting it on fire.

He hears choked curses behind him as the others see it — sharp fury and dismay. M’Baku’s hand is on his shoulder. “Circle away to land. We can —”

“I can let you out here,” Bucky tells him.

For an instant, M’Baku’s silent; then his grip tightens. He says, in a low voice, “I will not make you fight.”

“I can let you out here,” Bucky repeats. “I don’t need to land.”

And he doesn’t; he’s a better pilot than that. On his second pass by the spring, HYDRA sees him; they’re shouting, raising their guns and firing, and bullets ping off metal. For a moment, Bucky lets them; then he cuts his thrusters and drops.

“Now,” he grates out, angling his wings, kicking the front thrusters back in gear and jamming the button for the hatch.

M’Baku sees what he’s doing; “Go!” he shouts. “Go, go!” And Jabari warriors are springing from the back of the plane, landing on their feet, as Bucky drags its ass end through grass. His nose is tilted up at an absurd angle, the plane fighting to ascend, but he doesn’t let it — skims the ground, bumping, just fast enough to keep himself aloft. The Jabari leap out, one after another, into the night.

“You’ll be —” M’Baku starts; the last one on the plane.

“I’ll be fine. I’ll be here. Go,” Bucky snaps, and M’Baku does, just in time; a tree looms dead ahead. Bucky jerks the controls back into alignment and shoots up into the night.

It takes a minute to recover from that maneuver, gaining altitude, circling back around. This time, no one fires on him; the HYDRA strike team has more immediate problems. They’re shouting, struggling to organize. Blasts of gunfire split the air, and Bucky nearly cringes away when a shot catches Thando full in the chest — but his wooden breastplate merely glows, impact absorbed by the vibranium in its grain. Like Steve’s shield, thinks Bucky, dizzily, as Thando swings his club into his attacker’s head.

He dips a wing to circle again, keeping the battle in view. The flames are climbing the acacia trees, lighting up the warriors’ faces; Bucky catches glimpses of them like snapshots, mid-yell, gritting their teeth as they swing their weapons.

M’Baku is fighting a man in dark tactical gear and a helmet. He seems to have lost his gun, but he fights well with hands and feet, blocking and punching. When M’Baku knocks his helmet clear, Bucky knows him; and a part of himself is shrinking into ice, shaking, because this, this was a bad one.

Then M’Baku’s club strikes the back of his head, and he slumps face-down to the earth, still.

Another loop. Buhle and Unathi are fighting together, in the thick of it, and they’re trying to make it to the trees, Bucky realizes; the man with the flamethrower is still at his work, and they mean to stop him. HYDRA agents swarm them — too many. The other warriors are tied up in battles of their own, and here are a half dozen men, more. Unathi’s staff is alive in her hands, beating them back. She pulls one in and breaks his neck, clearing Buhle’s way —

— but as she does, another seizes her hair, dragging her from her feet. Two more men grab hold of her arms, immobilizing them, and Bucky can see Buhle screaming as a fourth steps between her and her mother, a fifth. The man who has Unathi by the hair reaches for his gun — he’s going to shoot her, point blank in the head, and there’s no one who can reach them; no chance —

Bucky points the plane’s nose at the ground, throwing it into a steep spiral. His wingtips scythe, deadly — if he misjudges this chance —

He crashes to earth, bumping wildly, spinning. His wing cuts the HYDRA agent’s legs out from under him with a scream.

The bullet flies wild and strikes Unathi’s gauntlet with a thrum. She twists free of the others and runs for her daughter, down on one knee against two adversaries at once. The agents who held her, until a moment ago, are staring openly at the jet; one raises his Kalashnikov and fires a stream into the cockpit’s glass.

It shatters. Bucky ducks. That’s fine; that just gives him a quicker way out.

He rolls neatly into the dust, instinct taking over. He’s on his feet a moment later, gripping the shooter by the wrist and forcing his arm down; his next bullet catches his comrade in the gut. Bucky wrestles the rifle free, one-handed, and brings the butt of it down between its owner’s eyes. He makes a small sound and collapses into the dirt.

I will not make you fight —

The rifle is too much gun for a one-armed man. He clears its chamber and jerks the magazine free, then dumps it on the ground. He picks the handgun, instead, off the body of the first man he killed, aims, and hits the first of Buhle and Unathi’s attackers square in the back of the skull.

“I had him!” Buhle shouts back, which is fair; she did. Unathi takes down the other, and they’re running again for the fire-setter.

The two of them can handle him. Bucky turns toward the rest of the fight.

---

It doesn’t take too much longer, after that; or maybe it does, and he’s somewhere outside of his head, punching and kicking and firing with a single-minded focus. He fights his way through to M’Baku, who looks up with something horrible in his eyes. Bucky just nods at him, and moves on to his next target.

Then they’re done, every last HYDRA agent dead or captured. The Jabari move among them, tying hands and checking for weapons and other nasty surprises. When Bucky reminds M’Baku about the cyanide teeth, he looks tempted for a moment to let the surviving HYDRA agents deploy them as they please, but Esihle produces a pair of pliers from somewhere with a nasty-looking grin.

The bodies, they drag into another pile, checking to be sure they’re dead. Several Jabari are wounded, but they all survived. Bucky has six kills, M’Baku three. His hands are shaking as he drags the man Bucky saw him kill — the handler — into the firelight.

Bucky has a handgun. He itches to shoot the body again, again and again, just to be sure.

M’Baku is standing like he thinks Bucky’s anger is for him. Words are hard to find, but Bucky dredges them up. “He was a. Bad one. The shit he did, to — to me —”

The words run out again. M’Baku looks stricken. But he answers after a moment, voice cracking, “I’m glad he’s dead.”

16.

Buhle and Unathi take charge of building the firebreak, clearing brush and hacking shrubs away from a zone big enough to contain the blaze. It hasn’t spread far, yet — the mountain looms behind them, dark and untouched — but the little forest around the spring is a smoking ruin. They watch it burn in exhausted silence, sweaty and soot-streaked, nostrils full of ash.

Bucky comes to stand next to M’Baku when it’s all done. His eyes look hollowed out, dirt on his cheeks, blood running from a split lip down his chin. He turns his body a little toward him, at one point, and says in a smoke-cracked voice: “Sorry I wrecked the jet.”

M’Baku looks over his shoulder. One of the jet’s wings is sheared neatly off, the other bent at its hinge. The glass of the cockpit is shattered, a dark hole gaping where its pilot — Bucky — would have been.

He would like to keep hitting things. But there’s no one left to hit, anymore.

17.

It’s a little less than an hour before reinforcements arrive: the Dora Milaje, in three jets, with more than enough space to transport both the Jabari and the prisoners. Their faces are tight and grim with the awareness of how close catastrophe came, which is about when Bucky lets himself notice, too, and has to quell the shaking in his hand.

Thando is wounded; a bullet to the meat of his thigh. Buhle has a long, blistering burn up her elbow, and L’Wazi’s hair is matted with blood, but he insists he’s fine. M’Baku still insists on supporting him into the jet, a firm hand on his arm just above the elbow. When L’Wazi pauses on the ramp for a moment, M’Baku looks back, tension lining his face, at Bucky.

One of the jets takes the prisoners directly back to the capital. That makes it a little easier to breathe — Bucky finds that he can suddenly hear more of his surroundings once they’re out of sight, follow more of the conversation. The last jet stays behind to assess the wreckage and begin cleaning up.

The flight back is a quiet one. Unathi and Buhle sit close together on either side of Thando, both their faces drawn with worry and relief. There’s a kimoyo bead stabilizing the wound in his leg, now, bound by a thick bandage, and he’s grinning wider, joking more loudly, to ease his mother and sister’s minds. Bucky lingers near the hatch, standing, unable to quiet his racing pulse quite enough to sit down. M’Baku’s sitting directly behind the pilot, alone, his face a silent storm cloud, elbows propped on his knees.

When they touch down below the gorilla once more, and when the ramp lowers, it’s M’Baku’s grandmother who greets them.

Her face is tight and furious, and before they’re even out of the jet, she’s ranting in fast-paced Xhosa; about her grandson’s stupidity, that this is what comes of trusting white men, that she told them all years ago. M’Baku walks by her, still supporting L’Wazi, as if he can’t hear. Behind him, Bhule and Unathi walk Thando down the ramp. None of them look at their mother and grandmother as they pass her by.

“— all Wakanda was supposed to be his, would have been if he’d been man enough, but no; instead he dallies with the Golden Tribe and their pet impuku —”

Suddenly, two steps, beyond her, Thando pulls his mother and sister to a stop. He straightens painfully and turns, lifting his chin and meeting his grandmother’s eyes. “All Wakanda is his, Umakhulu. And he is hers. He saved her tonight.”

“And that impuku saved Mother’s and my lives,” adds Bhule, quietly. She tangles fingers with her brother’s hand.

Their grandmother stares back at them so ferociously it surprises Bucky it doesn’t make a sound, the clash of metal on stone. Bhule shrugs, and tugs Thando’s hand, and all three of them turn to continue up the steps into the palace.

Bucky lingers as the rest of the warriors follow. Perhaps he shouldn’t go with them; the Jabari might not welcome his presence right now. He could ride back to the capital with the Dora Milaje and let them be.

There’s no reason for him to come back here again. Not if this was the long-awaited main force of the HYDRA attack. The Jabari can get on with their lives without a stain of milk-filth to be found.

At the top of the stairs, M’Baku steps back out of the palace door. His eyes are searching, brows drawn together. He can’t see Bucky where he waits in the jet’s dark hold.

Bucky doesn’t want to leave.

The last of the warriors are already halfway up the steps. He walks down the ramp alone, meeting Umakhulu’s gaze; he holds his shoulders square, not hiding his missing arm. There’s venom in her eyes.

When he draws even with her, she raises a hand in the universal gesture: stop. He obeys.

“Thank you,” Umakhulu grates, in heavily accented English. “For my daughter and granddaughter.”

She still looks like she wants to kill him. Bucky can respect that. He bows his head deeply, once, and continues up the stairs.

---

It’s later — much later — before they’re finally done.

They wind up reporting to Okoye again, on a conference call with the Dora Milaje and Nakia; even T’Challa puts in an appearance, returning from a dinner with the ambassador of somewhere-or-other. Nakia has taken her own prisoner, ferreted him out in Hong Kong and stripped him of his cyanide. She’s fairly confident he’s the one who’s been calling the shots on the entire operation, and the Dora’s interrogation of their captives seems to confirm it. T’Challa is negotiating with Everett Ross to return their prisoners to the US to face trial for past crimes. That news washes Bucky with relief that leaves goosebumps in its wake; he doesn’t want these men in his city.

At last — at long last — it’s over. Unathi rises from the table, stifling a yawn, and claps Bucky once on the shoulder on her way out the door. M’Baku slides the kimoyo beads off his wrist, letting them land on the table with a clunk. He stands, leaving them there.

Bucky stands too. M’Baku gives him a tired smile.

When their eyes meet, though, it fades. Behind it, his eyes are miserable. They look like they did that day with the elephants. They look like Steve’s, almost, on the bridge — Bucky?

Bucky goes very still.

M’Baku looks down, blinking hard. Back up again. His hand grips hard on the back of a chair, then releases it suddenly, and he’s reaching out —

His thumb brushes, lightly, over the tender spot where a HYDRA punch split Bucky’s lip. There’s blood in Bucky’s mouth, still; why hasn’t he noticed that? He can taste blood. But the blood on his lip is dried and scabbed, and when M’Baku rubs at it again, it won’t go.

M’Baku drops his hand. He drops his gaze, too, but he doesn’t move from where he stands. “I made a promise and I broke it,” he says, voice cracking, to the floor.

I will not make you fight. Bucky’s throat stops up, hard; he’s choking, suddenly, on the decades of impossible choices, or of no choice — the death and the misery and the fear. Steve, on that fucking bridge; Steve’s face giving under his metal fist, I’m with you ‘til the end of the line —

Yeah, Bucky knows about promises.

“You always ask why I don’t want my Captain here,” he says, out loud. He hears his voice: it’s toneless, honest. “I’ve been breaking my promises to him for eighty years.”

M’Baku makes a soft, desperate noise in his throat. His hand rises to touch Bucky’s face again, but this time, he steps in to follow it; this time, the press of his thumb is followed by the press of his lips. His hand drops to curl at Bucky’s hip, but he’s drawing back at the same time, enough to ask, “Is this —?”

His words cut off with a grunt as Bucky slams into him. As Bucky tilts his head and seals their mouths together, tongue to tongue.

18.

Bucky is —

Hot mouth, quick-running, down M’Baku’s neck and over his jaw. One hand, but it does the work of two, fierce on the buckles of M’Baku’s leather armor, stripping it away. Pale body golden by lamplight and silver under the moon, and he throws back his head when M’Baku touches it, lets his dark hair spill over bare shoulders, over sheets.

Bucky is fire-blaze focus, and he feels like a fire, too; his skin tastes of smoke, his touch burns on M’Baku’s skin. His eyes don’t cloud, though, when they’re on M’Baku; his eyes are fierce and dark and bright, like glaciers, and they don’t look away.

Bucky is careful, sometimes, like he knows there’s a fractured place deep somewhere in M’Baku’s chest; like he thinks he can help smooth it closed. Bucky is still, for an instant, when M’Baku touches his metal shoulder like he touches the rest of him, out of his head with wanting, unadorned.

So that is the night they spend together, M’Baku and the White Wolf Bucky Barnes: urgent and laughing and wild, teeth flashing, hearts singing, until they sleep beneath the moon together and wake to the sun, blazing over the mountain and into their unshadowed eyes.

19.

They dress like they’ve been doing this for years, unbothered by nakedness. M’Baku collects the trail of their clothing, while Bucky watches him from the bed. He sits to deliver it, grinning, and Bucky finds himself grinning back.

“So,” says M’Baku, as Bucky shoulders on his shirt, his brightly colored wrap. “You are going to call your Captain, yes?”

Bucky thinks before he answers. Promises broken, he said, but there are enough of those going around to choke a horse.

Steve’s mom used to say that — enough to choke a horse. Bucky never quite knew, as a kid, what that meant. Steve’s mom: her name was Sarah. She’d save the old newspapers for Steve to wear in his shoes.

‘Til the end of the line is all well and good, but when there’s a new line —

M’Baku is watching him. He’s smiling, still, but there’s something softer in it; something fond, something letting-go. When Bucky looks at him, he reaches out and tugs his earlobe, breaking into a wicked grin.

Bucky scowls and bats his hand away, seizing his little finger and bending it backward to the point of pain. M’Baku laughs and squirms, tries without success to break Bucky’s grip, then gives up, raising his free hand: “I yield, I yield!”

Steve would like M’Baku, Bucky thinks.

He releases M’Baku’s hand. He pulls him in by the back of his neck, instead, and kisses him; one more time. When he’s done, he leans back. Lets go.

“Yeah,” he says, finally, smiling. “Yeah, I guess I will.”