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Steve hurries into Wakanda’s secure hospital, his heart frozen in his chest.
“You should come,” Shuri said over the phone, “it’s no cause for worry.”
But he’s worried anyway.
“Yeah, no problem, Cap, no trouble at all, flying you over the Atlantic ocean, you’re so welcome,” Tony says from behind him.
“Thank you, Tony,” Steve says, turning in the door. He finds Tony’s eyes. “I mean, it. Thank you.”
“Uh-huh,” Tony replies dismissively, but Steve can tell he knows Steve means it. It takes a lot of will, a lot of strength, a lot of goodness at heart to fly someone across the Atlantic in your ship so they can help the murderer of your parents get better. Steve is grateful for the way Tony has stepped back and let Steve feel the way he feels without giving him shit, even though he knows it stings. He knows Tony knows he’s grateful. “Call me when you want a ride back, Rogers. I gotta be back to meet the girlfriend for dinner.”
It’s the middle of the afternoon already, the sun shining warmly down on the rolling fields of Wakanda, on their homes and on the cityscape of the capital. It’s the prettiest cityscape Steve has ever seen, because the Wakandans give nature a place in their society.
Bucky isn’t awake and hasn’t been awake since he requested they do the operation on him, but even so, Steve’s glad he’s here, in such a beautiful place—all lush greens and warm yellows and the sheer, sharp lines of skyscrapers cutting through it all.
It feels right, as if the goodness of this place could somehow seep into Bucky himself, taking steps to make him better and to leech all the bad that has been shoved into his brain out again.
“I will,” Steve promises Tony, with as much of a smile as he can manage.
Tony turns on a heel and walks off, back towards the ship he’s just landed in the parking lot.
Steve turns away and looks at the lobby.
People stream back and forth—people who are obviously patients, with wheelchairs, crutches, long blue dressing gowns; people who must be family, sitting in open waiting areas with multiple bags at their feet; people who are clearly on-staff personnel because they’re wearing uniforms, sharply pressed yellows and reds.
Steve spots one coming briskly his way, a clipboard in his hand, and he hurries towards him. “Do you know where I can find James Barnes?” he demands, stepping into the man’s path.
The man is stocky, wearing glasses that make his face look squarer. He looks harried and irritated. “I don’t know.” He moves to step around Steve.
Steve catches his arm—he feels the way he does when there’s a ticking bomb, when gas is spreading, when the enemy is killing people as they speak, the more people the longer he waits: wildly, irrepressibly urgent. “Do you know where I can find Shuri—the princess? She’s working with my friend. I need to speak to her; she called for me.”
The man looks slightly less ruffled at the mention of Shuri, his baleful gaze easing. “Working with her Highness?” he repeats. “I know where her rooms are, I can take you there.”
“Thank you,” Steve says, his breath leaving him quickly. He sucks in another lungful. Tony flew him here, but he feels like he’s just run a marathon, trying for his fastest time, unable tot catch his breath. “Lead the way.”
The man does.
This hospital is different than the hospitals Steve knows, both from before the ice and after. It’s higher tech, with carts transporting necessary materials rolling through the halls seemingly on their own, soaring high ceilings that show the second floor, guarded by railings, all in a soothing deep blue. It’s lit by a skylight and by screens that show directories, maps, instructions for asking for assistance.
It seems to stretch forever.
“Her highness has several cases she works on,” the man leading him says as they go, not sparing a glance back Steve’s way to see if he’s keeping up. “She tries to keep all her cases in the same cluster of rooms so she can access them all easily.”
“I just need James Barnes.”
Shuri has moved Bucky around a lot—first, after they’d been on the run for a while and decided to come to Wakanda, she’d had Bucky up in her own rooms, studying his arm, its attachments, and Bucky’s physical health in general: whether he was damaged physically by being put under and pulled out again over and over, whether his aging was going to continue normally or if he’d age a little slower, the way Steve was.
She’d let him out, on a leash that rankled Steve more than it rankled Bucky, letting Bucky live in Wakanda in his own little place, coming in for check-ups and visitations with an assigned therapist, giving him a taste of a peaceful life.
It was around then that Steve finally got Bucky’s pardon, after a months long legal battle that took more money and time than it did intellect to fight.
That was fine by Steve. Steve, as Bucky always said, never knew when to quit.
And so he never did.
And now Bucky is legally free because of it, deemed to not be in enough mental control and awareness of himself and his surroundings to be held responsible for his actions. It had been even harder to do because Bucky couldn’t—or wouldn’t, Steve couldn’t tell, and if Bucky didn’t want to, that was just as certain as a couldn’t—come to the stand for himself.
“I am, you know,” Bucky said once, as they were recounting their weeks over a pint, even though neither of them could get drunk. It felt right. They always used to drink together as kids, although Bucky didn’t remember that.
“You are what?” Steve asked, setting down his phone after showing Bucky the YouTube video of the end of the trial and the eventual verdict.
Bucky shrugs. “I am mentally damaged. I can’t—there’s something about you I don’t remember. I can’t even have you over for the night because I might accidentally hurt you before I’m fully awake.”
Bucky hardly remembered anything.
He certainly didn’t remember… them. Steve-and-Bucky.
And since Steve and Bucky were living in the goddamn ‘40s with the World War and the draft raging hard around them, there’s nowhere in any museum for Bucky to read about them, the two of them the way they really were. Because who was going to be out and kissing fellows in the streets in the 1940s when they—or at least, one of them—was going to get drafted for the war effort?
No one. None of them.
So they’d kissed behind closed doors, made love in the quietest ways possible on the loudest nights. They’d kissed in the dead of night over Steve’s sketchbook full of Bucky, looking bright-eyed and pretty, they’d kissed right in the mornings before they opened the door to join the real world, they’d kissed in the closet, quite literally, and done more than that in the closet, because no one was going to come looking for them in the closet.
They’d hidden it so well that it’s as if it disappeared. There’s no proof in it left, except for in Steve’s memories.
They’re not even in Bucky’s memories.
“You might have been mentally traumatized,” Steve gives in, “but you’re not going to hurt me. I know you won’t. You don’t want to.”
Bucky had scoffed. “Of course I don’t want to.”
In the end, he decided to undergo the operation anyway.
“It’s going to work,” Shuri promised them both. But it was experimental. She couldn’t have known, at that time, whether it was going to work.
“Whether it’s going to fix me,” Bucky had said, his voice scratchy and rough, his mouth unhappy, pulling down at the ends.
Fix me, Steve thought, is such a terrible sentiment.
“Whether it’s going to help you,” he corrects. “You’re still you, even with Hydra in your head. You aren’t broken.”
Bucky had just smiled his new smile, the one that looked mostly like a grimace, and laid back on the table. “Thank you,” he had said softly.
There had been something in his gaze, in his eyes, before he shut them and went under. It was something that made Steve’s chest warm, his heart do something stupid and young, as if he was a little, scrawny asthmatic kid from Brooklyn again, wrapped up in the man he loved. It made Steve wonder, for a moment, if Bucky had remembered.
“Bye, Buck,” Steve had said, barely able to speak. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
Bucky smiled, eyes still closed. “I know you will.”
The glass slid up over him.
It looked like a glass coffin.
Steve hated it.
“Here,” the man says, pushing his glasses up his nose and gesturing to a nondescript navy blue door with the name James Buchanan Barnes written on the small screen on the front of the door. “This is your room.”
“Thank you,” Steve says hurriedly, pushing on the door. It’s closed, of course. It opens by key card. “Will you—”
The man eyes him suspiciously, as if afraid he’s going to do something that will later get him in trouble, but after a moment, he opens the door.
“Thank you,” Steve says again. “Thank you, I’m sorry for disturbing you.”
This time, when he tries the handle, it turns under his hand.
“Captain!”
Shuri’s standing in the middle of the room, beside a hospital bed to which there are wires attached. When she hears the door open, she turns, and expectant, unsurprised look on her face.
The rest of the room, thankfully, is devoid of occupants.
Her eyes crinkle when she smiles, as if Steve is being particularly amusing.“I thought I told you not to worry.”
Steve can’t see Bucky, though he knows it is Bucky on that wired up hospital bed, so he kicks the door shut behind him and walks around to look.
Steve hasn’t come since Bucky went under. He wasn’t supposed to—they were working very delicate things with Bucky’s brain, mostly with memory storage, trying to weed out not Hydra and the memories of Hydra, but the intensity and power of them, the influence of the words, as Bucky called them.
Shuri said that Steve was too attached to Bucky’s past, placed too deeply into so many of Bucky’s memories, that Steve would disturb the process.
Now’s the first time he’s seen Bucky in months.
Bucky looks… good.
Steve doesn’t know what he expected—blue lips and a stiff body?—but Bucky looks surprisingly peaceful. You wouldn’t know he was in a hospital bed, getting his mind fucked with under his own consent. You’d think… you’d think he was sleeping.
He’s just as pretty as the last time Steve saw him: brown hair brushing his shoulders, smooth and soft-looking, his dark brown eyelashes looking even darker against his pale skin. His chest rises and falls with even breaths.
“Why did you call me here?” Steve scans the bed itself, looking at the places where the wires plug into the side of the bed, though none of them seem to be reaching Bucky himself, searching for a blinking red light or some sign of malfunction.
“Relax, Captain,” Shuri says. “I called you to tell you we’re done.”
Steve turns quickly, his heart skipping a beat. “To tell me what?”
Shuri smiles patiently—an angel of a girl her age—and taps the headboard of Bucky’s hospital bed with some satisfaction. “He’s done. I’m done as much as I can. I cannot erase the memories, but I have numbed what I could. I have attempted to restore his old memories as well—your past, before the ice and Hydra and all of it. I understand you were friends.”
“We… were,” Steve agrees. “We were better friends than you could imagine.”
“And he didn’t realize this before…” Shuri prompts. They’ve briefly been over this before, but not in-depth.
“He didn’t remember,” Steve supplies.
His eyes are still on Bucky, who is so, tangibly real. The lines he has around his mouth from frowning and smiling, the cleft in his chin, the same person that went under a couple months ago. Exactly the same. It’s as if he hasn’t moved or changed at all—even his hair is the same length, and his stubble still dots his chin, like maybe being frozen in that way prevented all growth of his body.
“There’s the thing,” Shuri says, pointing to Steve. Steve blinks back at her for a moment before returning his gaze to Bucky. “Bucky has two lives here, in his mind. One, the life he had with you, before and during World War two, and second, the life he had with Hydra, if I might call it that, though it wasn’t, really. He has two sets of thoughts, two sets of eras in his life, even more so, I think, than you.”
Steve’s nodding along vigorously to this, trying to keep up. This much he does know for real—the transition for Steve was nowhere near as hard as it was for Bucky, as he can see right now in front of him. Bucky’s still transitioning now.
“Well, now that we’ve worked with what we can do for his too-vivid memories and influences and responses to certain more recent stimuli—” She’s talking about the words. “—We also think that his old memories are likely to swing into place once we lift the operation and have removed some of the precedences of the Hydra memories—something else has to take their place.”
“Okay.”
Shuri’s still looking at him as if she expects something from him. It’s the look people give Steve when they’re expecting him to do something, when they’ve called on him to come fix a problem. “We want what he wakes up to to be something pleasant, something that reminds him of his first life,” she says. “Something like you.”
“Oh.” This is good. This is not nearly as bad as the catastrophic possibilities Steve scrolled frantically through in his head on the jet ride here, sure something was wrong. Shuri’s still looking at Steve, as if Steve’s supposed to come up with a way to wake Bucky on his own. “Just tell me what to do.”
Shuri lifts her shoulder, smiling. “Anything you want,” she says, “something that will call on something he’s experienced and remembers, not something new. Something he’d associate with before Hydra, not after it.”
“Alright,” Steve agrees.
Shuri smiles at him some more, reassuring this time, and heads for the door. “I have other patients to look after,” she says, but it’s clear she’s giving Steve and Bucky space for if Bucky does come back, wakes up, and wants to have a conversation with Steve.
Maybe Steve is obsessed and in love and can’t think in objective terms, but to him, the answer is obvious.
He leans over.
Bucky’s face is still, his breath coming gently. His eyes are firmly shut, and he looks beautiful on the bed, his hair fanning out behind him.
Steve kisses him gently on the lips.
So gently.
He just presses their lips together, letting his eyes close, letting his heart out for one free, wild second, feeling Bucky’s breath on his face and Bucky’s stubble against his chin, and Bucky’s chapped, dry lips on his own.
Please, Steve thinks, let this be one of the things you remember.
Bucky’s breath flutters, uneven and awake.
Steve pulls back, searching Bucky’s face for consciousness, for Bucky to open his eyes and see Steve.
What happens is even better.
Bucky’s expression shifts, still half-asleep, still unsure what’s going on. He doesn’t open his eyes, but apparently, he doesn’t have to.
His lips part, as if he’s still feeling the kiss. His fingertips, on the bed beside him, flutter.
“Steve?”