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When he was young, he used to dream, all the time. Used to remember his dreams, too, better than the flicks he took Steve to see when they could scrounge the cash. They were the tales he told at his best friend’s bedside through fever, barely heard but always there—he took whatever piece of Steve was still clinging to this world in those lonely, agonizing hours of watching and waiting and hearing the rattle of lungs and feeling a flutter against fingertips that could hardly count as a heartbeat, only made the cut just because Bucky couldn't bear anything less.
But that’s where he took Steve, with him, on those nights: the places he lived in his dreams.
But then came war. And ice. And the nightmares were waking, and the timeless vacuum was silent. No breath in his lungs, only wisps of oxygen to his brain. Pure, improbable stasis.
There were no dreams. Apropos.
This, though.
This is different.
Cryo here, this chamber, it really does feel like sleep, just deeper: drowning, but peaceful. It’s never dark unless the light hurts, and sometimes it does, and he feels as if he breathes, at least a little, and somehow that makes all the difference, and here.
Here, in a country he’d barely heard of, and never seen, with people who wanted him dead and now hold him in refuge, in sanctuary: here, in the cool of nothingness, he dreams.
And they’re soft, beautiful, delicate things: they’re childhood, and impossible hopes, and he holds them close to his chest with two flesh hands and can inhale the way they smell of candlelight and honey, and he feels lighter, here. He feels lighter, as if there’s a promise in this time, in this quiet still, that might just envelop him close and sweet enough to be a part of him, to calm the fire in his blood that was stoked into a blaze when they shot serum through his veins: maybe he can keep even just a piece of it.
Sometimes, he thinks it’s heaven. He was never really sold on heaven, to be honest, but it feels like every story he’s ever known about what comes after, and cradles you, and gives you solace and forgiveness and relief. So sometimes, he entertains the possibility.
Except then, there’s Steve.
In this perfect serenity, in this shallow-breath of what life could maybe be if the world was right: Steve is always at arm’s length. Steve is never close enough to touch, or to breath in the scent of him: mint and spice and something burnt in offering, like Steve’s life at any stage of it, in any form, was always a gift and a sacrifice all at once. Steve’s never braced against his chest to make him feel his own heartbeat like a real thing. Steve only looks at him, sometimes. Never smiles.
And that’s how he knows: if there’s a heaven, this ain’t it.
Because heaven, if by some stroke of untenably balanced scales was what he got in the end, would be one of two things.
Either Steve would be there first, and fuck, but it’d hurt and heal at once when they touched, when maybe he could taste—
That, or Steve wouldn’t be there at all. And Bucky’d be waiting.
That’s the only heaven Bucky can bring himself to believe in, and so: this falls short. That simple.
But the dreams, in any case: they’re beautiful.
He’s the most broken he’s ever been, he thinks, in body, mind, and soul, but the dreams, somehow: they make him feel whole.
_______________________
Time never meant much in cryo. Could have been seconds, hours. Could have been decades.
For most of it, he didn’t care. It meant nothing. There was pain, but time was meaningless. One first breath, one hard skip of his pulse, one hit, one mission, one done: homecoming to homecoming.
So Bucky’s willing to admit he might just have it all wrong, but.
When he starts to feel it happens—more a drift than a jolt in this place, in this rest, but still a rising to the surface—he thinks it’s only been a very short time. And he went under suspecting years. Resigned to the fact that maybe by the time he came out, Steve would be gone to him, moved on entirely. Wife, kids, white picket fence. Or even worse, even longer: if the serum was less than what they sometimes guessed, maybe there’d be no Steve at all.
Maybe he wouldn’t wake up.
There were a lot of maybes. There were a lot of questions. A lot of unknowns.
But Bucky’d been so tired. And he’d had time to square with what he was, who he was to have done things he couldn’t help, to be what he chose and what was chosen for him, all at once.
And where he might have thought twice, might have tried to go back—to the world, or to the small, simple lives he carved in hiding—where a sign may have swayed him, Steve’s face had been placid, Steve had given just a nod, and had only asked Are you sure?
And he’d been sure that he was tired. He’d been sure he couldn’t have more blood on his hands. He’d been sure his heart was hurting for more reasons than he cared to parse out, and there was a part of him, dark and scared, that hoped that hurting heart in him wouldn’t kick back up right, if the time came to bring him back to waking.
So he’d thought, maybe years. Maybe longer. Maybe always.
And he doesn’t know for sure, but he feels it, somewhere unnameable and maybe beyond explaining, that he’s still warm in some part of him, that the ice hasn’t been around him long enough to seep everywhere.
Waking is quicker than it’s ever been before.
“Ah,” a voice comes through, too clear and too quick, again: “you’re quite good at this.”
Bucky groans, and blinks as the chamber opens and the soft, almost comfortable restraining features to keep him upright are released.
“Have you already figured it out?” he rasps, a little, rubbing his eyes, feeling small and hesitant, suddenly, for no good reason at all.
“Already?” T’Challa’s brows raise. “How long do you suspect it’s been?”
Bucky shrugs. “You don’t look any different.” That’s a safe answer, and Bucky’s not sure why he feels the need to play for safe exactly. He reaches for the sense of the dreams around him, somewhere.
There’s a little touch of honey-warmth beneath a rib on his left, and good god, does he cling to it: closes his eyes and breathes until it catches flame again and breed potential for spreading, maybe. If the world spins just so.
T’Challa studies him for a long moment before shaking his head, slow. Patient.
“That is not the reason for your suspicions.”
Well, shit.
“It didn’t feel very long,” Bucky admits, because he doesn’t want to say the dreams didn’t last long enough, there weren’t enough of them; he doesn’t want to say there are strains inside my blood that still feel warm when my heart beats them back and that’s not how it usually is.
He doesn’t want to say any of that, but somehow, it feels like T’Challa reads it on him, nonetheless.
“Interesting,” is all the man says, though. “We will have to investigate the sensation of temporality in the stasis,” his eyes narrow, though with compassion, oddly; focus, if anything. “Though not with you, James.”
“Bucky.” It’s out of his mouth, demand and askance and begging all at once, before he can think it, can stop it. He coughs, and averts his eyes just a little; just enough. “Please.”
“Bucky,” T’Challa addresses him with a small smile, with kind eyes. Something in that appraisal, that glance feeds the warmth in his blood, leaves his chest still tingling with the ghost of it each time it pumps back around again.
“We will not be investigating that with you,” T’Challa says, royal in it: a proclamation. “You will never be subjected to that device again, or any like it, if we can help it.”
Bucky frowns. “We?”
T’Challa turns away, and glances out the window, surveys the land, all that green, all that quiet splendor put there by no one, left to thrive.
The heat in Bucky’s blood spreads just that little bit more: candle flicker. Sugar-sweet.
“Wakanda has long surpassed the rest of the world in its technology,” T’Challa intones, soft and private, almost intimate, like the sharing of a secret; “but also in its understanding of the human body, to say nothing of the human psyche.”
He meets Bucky’s eyes in the glass.
“We allowed you your rest, and for your Captain to watch you made still, and kept,” T’Challa says. “Because you asked for safety. You asked for peace.”
And he had, partially because he needed it, and partially because he never thought he could have it. He’s not sure what he thinks, now. About much of anything.
“You asked for peace,” T’Challa says again, more strength and volume to the words, now; “yet this means more than your memories, than the chains that still jar your mind, that wrench it from your control, without your consent.”
And no, no: it’s the feel of a gun in Bucky’s hands in the life he knows he’ll always have to walk at least adjacent to, no matter what happens, if he’s to have a life at all; it’s the feeling of being dirty, of being sullied and shattered in ways that can’t be fixed, that will never be wanted, or enough, so no, it’s not just the list of words that shake him from himself, or the memories as just and only that.
It means more, yes: and if that’s not hitting the goddamn nail on the head, well.
T’Challa sighs, and looks at Bucky, pathetic figure that he cuts, one-arm curled around himself as if he’s freezing, instead of just trying to protect the warmth so it might grow. His voice is gentle, apologetic, and his eyes are wary, and sad when he speaks:
“We had the technology to remove the conditioning that remained in your consciousness when you arrived, Bucky.”
Bucky runs that through his head again. And then once more.
“You,” he starts, confused; shakes his head and lets his thawed hair fall against his cheeks, tickling the skin.
“What?”
“Forgive me,” T’Challa says, and it’s not ceremony, or platitude: it’s real remorse for a real confession, given to Bucky with intention and sincerity, and oddly, wronged though he’s being seen as, Bucky feels more as if it’s all a goddamn privilege, than he feels anything else.
“In truth, we gave you a reprieve in the chamber whilst we prepared this.”
And from nowhere, seemingly, comes a shining, gleaming figure, perfected in ways he’d never seen or known before: an arm.
His arm, presumably.
“We can fashion the appearance to be whatever you desire,” T’Challa tells him warmly, but still gentle. “It can look like a match for your right arm, if you prefer, “it can be anything,” he smiles, small and a little sly as he tilts his head, almost on a joke: “Vibranium is, after all, our speciality.”
And he just stares at it: the vibranium arm in T’Challa’s hand, held in wordless offering, obviously ready just to be attached, the technology in it, beyond even that which formed it, even Bucky can recognize that, but it’s unscratched, unmarked, untagged, unbranded, just silver: new. Untouched. Pure possibility.
His.
And god, he, it, just—
“Why?” Bucky finally manages to form the question, turns his eyes to T’Challa with nothing less than pleading to make it clear, to help him understand. “Why did you, why lie, why do this, I—”
T’Challa places a slowly-extended, but honest, real touch to Bucky’s shoulder: human contact.
Shuts him right up, s’what it does.
“From the moment I learned of you, I considered you in paired gazes,” T’Challa says, and oh, yes. Bucky knows this. Telling the story of a dream.
“I saw you through the eyes of a King, and the eyes of a Warrior,” T’Challa says, and yes.
The Panther.
“As a King, you were a victim in need of rehabilitation, in need of care and healing. As a King, I am a protector,” T’Challa tells him, and Bucky nods, yes. As a King, these are his duties. And Bucky suspects he’s a real fucking good King.
“But as a Warrior,” T’Challa carries on; “there was no doubt that your body, your mind for its trigger phrases and Hydra poisons,” he shakes his head, pained by it on Bucky’s behalf, and there’s more warmth for his blood, there, just to marvel at the fact that someone who owes him nothing, knows him only as the fledgling person that crawled out from the thing they made him: that such a person could feel for him.
Incredible.
“There was no doubt for me that these were only the wounds you could not swallow down, push beneath the surface,” T’Challa says, in confidence, between just them two. “You have a battle ahead of you, Bucky,” T’Challa’s eyes drift far away for a moment, but his grip tightens on Bucky’s shoulder at the same time.
“I would like to offer my services in helping equip you to win it.”
Bucky doesn’t have to ask what this battle is. He doesn’t have to know what it will entail.
He understands, deep beneath the heart in his chest. A pull that he’s only ever felt for one other reason.
So that’s the reason he uses his words. To fill what he doesn’t understand; what he fears most.
“Did Steve,” Bucky swallows hard, and shakes off the way his voice breaks on that name; “did he not...”
Did he not want me, did he not want to help anymore, was it finally enough, too much, not worth—
“I do not know him well,” T’Challa breaks through his spiralling thoughts. “But I’d ask you to believe me when I say that I could read in his face how his heart longed to beg you to stay with him.”
There is no judgement, or implication, or certainty there, and Bucky’s strangely grateful.
Possibility, in this moment, feels more to his stride.
“Maybe,” he neither agrees or protests.
“Maybe,” T’Challa nods, seems to read Bucky’s thoughts again, to see all that Bucky intends, to know every layer without it being shown. “But it is that very reason that he needed to believe you were here outside of time,” T’Challa tells him seriously. “That you were where he could not help. Because otherwise, he would have stayed, and he would have tried. And this battle will never heal you through its triumph unless you see it through on your own terms. In the present moment only, with no shared part, or flickering future to lead astray your thoughts.”
And again: Bucky’s not fully clear on what the battle is, what it’s against, or in the name of, fighting for—he doesn’t know.
Strangely, he doesn’t think he needs to. He makes his own missions, now.
“You handle the shield well,” T’Challa observes, more than mere observation, more than idle conversation.
“And I have come to see that a true vigilante will never be governed by the leaders of the world, but a hero,” he looks at Bucky meaningfully for reasons Bucky cannot fathom; “a hero will be governed by the needs of his own heart, beyond vengeance. And hate.”
And those words resonate. Because Bucky thinks he is beyond those, now. He’s killed the people who wronged him. He’s sobbed into the dark until he choked, until he blacked out for the lack of air. He’s was tired. His bones ached once the hate stopped holding them up.
“And this world still needs its heroes,” T’Challa says, and turns, and it’s then that Bucky sees it wasn’t just the arm that T’Challa brought.
Bucky freezes when T’Challa takes the disc, familiar in every way save the color: monochrome, with just a hint of red, and it doesn’t scream of blood, somehow.
Somehow, it lights heat, and gleams courage.
“You seek redemption. You do not need to,” Bucky makes to protest that, but T’Challa holds up a hand.
“Allow me to propose that you seek reclamation, instead. The ability to reclaim how lives rest in your hands,” and he weighs the shield in his grasp with great significance. “The ability to see your reflection and to nod to yourself as an equal to all that you believe.”
Bucky’s throat is tight; his mouth his dry.
“I don’t,” deserve it; he shakes his head. “I’m not,” capable, worth it, wanted.; “I—”
“You do,” T’Challa says simply, pinning him down soul through bone with just his eyes. “And you are.”
Bucky is silent; T’Challa’s damn convincing, but Bucky just… can’t. With this.
T’Challa sighs, and tries again.
“There is nothing to be lost in the attempt,” he offers, still holding the shield for Bucky to take in his flesh hand, and only his flesh hand: all he has, all he is—borne and raised and bled out from his human heart, and maybe that’s what breaks him, what give him shining hope that lights up his body, his mind and that all-too-human heart at once when T’Challa adds:
“There is much, though, perhaps to be gained.”
And if Bucky’s thoughts go to sun-soaked wheat and clear blue skies and the smell of charcoal when it mixes with sweat on big-broad hands, well. That doesn’t matter.
What matters is that he reaches out, and feels the smooth edge of metal with warm-rough skin.
What matters is that he accepts what’s offered, and lets himself wake in the dream of perhaps; of what could> be.