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At this hour, the cryo chamber gives off the only real light in the room, a soft and circular glow like firelight. With the staff gone and the workstations dark, the walls and the ceiling look flung out, further away from where Steve sits on a padded bench at the edge of the light, where the shadows are fending for themselves.
“We ought to get some music in here,” he says, like Bucky’s going to answer, or like he’s in a coma and still listening in some little corner of himself. “I don’t know how much new stuff you’ve even heard. Some of it’s not so bad. Maybe that’d give you and Sam something else to argue about.”
Even talking in here is uncomfortable now, especially when the place is empty and Steve could convince himself he’s the only person awake in the entire building. His voice comes back too large and hollow off the gloomy walls. It’s starting to feel like praying.
He sighs, leaning back on one hand, nudging the sketchbook next to him that’s slowly being taken over by Wakandan architecture, streets and buildings guarded by trees and statues outlined in mist. He doesn’t know why he keeps carrying it here. Steve can’t bring himself to draw Bucky in the chamber, guilt gnawing at him like he’d be freezing Bucky in place even more, giving him another shove out of time, making him a little less living.
So he just sits and watches and feels sick with his own faintheartedness, waiting for the sun to hit the windows until the door sliding open brings him out of it.
It’s the bodyguards that arrive first, like the flash before the thunder. The two women put themselves on either side of the door, and then T’Challa steps in, wearing an inky, purple-black suit with the tie pulled loose and the jacket hanging open. His feet tap light and even across the floor. A cup in his hand trails a ribbon of steam behind him.
“Your Highness,” Steve says, halting halfway out of his seat when T’Challa waves him back down.
“I thought we were past that,” T’Challa says. He looks even more tired than Steve feels, but there’s a small smile on his face as he offers the cup.
Steve automatically moves to accept it, letting it burn his palms a little as the smell of probably phenomenally expensive tea reaches his nose, instead of the coffee he was expecting. “Sorry,” he says awkwardly. “Every time I try to say ‘T’Challa’, ‘Your Highness’ just gets there first.”
“A common problem,” T’Challa says, the smile showing a little more. He gestures to the bench, then sits with a long sigh when Steve nods, holding himself with more easy grace than Steve thinks he’s felt in his entire life, either before or after the serum. He looks briefly at the cryo chamber, then to Steve. “You know the next series of tests isn’t scheduled until this afternoon.”
It’s not a question, or an accusation, but Steve shifts in place anyway, busying himself with the tea. T’Challa has a way of stating facts that makes it seem like there’s a lot of something more underneath.
“I know,” he nods, facing forward again, eyes catching on Bucky’s unmoving face through the frost on the glass, his unrising chest. He isn’t dead, not technically, not permanently. It only looks that way, like a tree in winter. But there’s a burning, resentful choir of things in Steve that can’t tell the difference, holding the rest of him hostage.
In a few hours they’ll wake Bucky up, give him a few basic tests, checks of reasoning and motor function. Then they’ll strap him to a chair and make another try with drugs and reconditioning to unhook the triggers Hydra sewed in, while Steve grips Bucky’s shoulders and swallows bile and Bucky either doesn’t react or tries to rip out of the restraints.
Longing. Rusted. Seventeen. Daybreak. On and on, again and again, until it works or it doesn’t. Steve hears the words in time with his heartbeat now, spends hours in the training room T’Challa lets him use with them grinding between his teeth. They’ve lost whatever casual, innocent meaning they had before. Now they’re defined by flinches and the sounds Bucky tries not to make.
It’s not the same as what Hydra did. It only feels that way when Bucky starts to tremble under Steve’s hands, his skin gone clammy and death-coloured. When the restraints start to rattle and freedom becomes an issue of duration, of relentlessness.
Bucky swears they’re getting closer to making it work. Steve can’t make Bucky meet his eyes when he says it.
“Your government is growing suspicious,” T’Challa says after a while. “More suspicious, I should say. They are fairly sure you’re here, and from there they are making assumptions about Barnes.”
Steve puts the tea down between his feet, trying to think of somewhere, anywhere else safe enough. He could go, try and point them away from Wakanda, from Bucky. He could—
“I politely reminded them that who I have as my guests is none of their concern,” T’Challa tells him, “and that encouraging potentially dangerous rumours could have a negative impact on any future trade agreements.”
Steve blinks, doing a bad job hiding his reaction. “How did they take that?”
T’Challa lifts one shoulder, watching him quietly, that curve returning to the edge of his mouth. His fingers twist one of the rings on his hand. “We were unfortunately disconnected. A problem with one of their satellites, I’m told. Your technology is somewhat unreliable.”
“Not that I want you to second-guess yourself,” Steve says slowly, “but wouldn’t it be easier for you if we weren’t here?”
T’Challa huffs. “Oh, it would definitely be easier. But I made my choice, and they will not change it for me. Besides, I am not put here to do what is easy. I don’t think you are, either.”
Steve manages a grateful nod, and T’Challa looks back over at the chamber, either naturally or so Steve doesn’t have to try to pull blankness across his face and T’Challa doesn’t have to watch as it stretches too thin to use for cover. He guesses if anyone would need to be good at deliberate, mannered ignorance, it’d have to be a king.
“I don’t think it’s working,” Steve says, looking at Bucky now too. “I think he knows it’s not and he’s doing it anyway, like he has to pay some kind of penance.” His voice comes out hushed and beaten small, and that only makes him angrier. “I think maybe part of him believes he deserves to be like this.”
The words skitter along the floor and into the chamber’s light like a grenade, full of awful sound and impossible to take back now he’s let it go. Steve rubs a palm roughly across his face, feeling stubble and the taut pull of his mouth, the shifting muscle in his jaw.
He’s afraid they’re edging closer to that impassable point where he can’t give up and Bucky can’t keep going, where all Steve can do is watch as he fails again, staring back through a thicket at something irretrievable.
He thinks Bucky might keep trying if he admitted he can’t face the alternative. He thinks he’d stop deserving Bucky if he did. That worthiness has never been a guarantee.
T’Challa stays quiet for a minute before he says, “If you like, we can go downstairs to the training room, and I can kick you into the walls a few times. It would probably be more satisfying than sitting here in the dark berating yourself for what you cannot change. More of a challenge, too.”
Steve looks over at him, finds T’Challa with an eyebrow raised and a politely-arranged expression on his face, and coughs out a laugh when it sneaks up on him, rolling his eyes as T’Challa’s grin breaks loose.
“Yeah, yeah, all right,” Steve says, shaking his head and waving a hand while T’Challa laughs quietly. “Forget it, I shouldn’t unload this on you. You’re the king, and I shouldn’t be—I’m just—”
“A soldier,” T’Challa says. “And a tired one.” He lets out another sigh. “Believe me, I understand.”
“I can’t imagine it,” Steve tells him, gesturing to the window. “Having to run an entire country like this.”
“You fought for one,” T’Challa says, sitting back. “The two are more similar than you might think. In both you must know how to be the shield between what you love and what might harm it, and be ready to give everything in its defence.”
Steve leans on the bench again, pushes a hand through his hair. “It was more of an idea that I was fighting for. Or maybe just people. At least I thought it was.”
“What do you think a country is?” T’Challa asks him. “An idea of its people, of who they are and who they could be. And the rest is hope. Something else that is rarely easy.” He smiles, looking away, at something Steve can’t see. “My father told me that once.”
“Did I ever say I was sorry?” Steve asks. “I wish I could’ve known him.”
T’Challa nods, looking at his hands, turning the ring again. “He was a good man, and a good king. It’s strange, but I think I understand him now better than I ever did when he was alive, the burden he carried. There are a lot of things I wish I had asked him.” His eyes flick to the chamber. “We will help your friend. I promise you that.”
Steve swallows, nods. “I just don’t want him to blame himself. I’m not sure we can help him otherwise.”
That moment on the plane comes back to him like a recurring nightmare, Bucky’s voice behind him saying ‘I don’t know if I’m worth all this’. All the things Steve wanted to say and had to douse, the things he felt riddled with that all meant the same thing in the end: I can’t look at you and be unselfish. Not a discovery, just the limit he’s always known was there.
“That will be his part in this,” T’Challa says. “You cannot do it for him.”
“But it’s not his fault.” It catches in Steve’s chest as he breathes, his ribs bending like a sail.
“No,” T’Challa sighs. “But there is knowledge, and there is acceptance, and between the two is a battleground. I know it, and you know it. We have both stood there.”
Steve leans forward with his elbows on his thighs, hands clasped between his knees, carefully inhaling through his nose. “I won’t leave him there alone.”
“You will have to,” T’Challa says. “He fights the enemy within himself. The enemy we all have, that takes us away from who we are.”
Steve meets T’Challa’s gaze, head still lowered. “How do you win against that?”
“You don’t,” T’Challa tells him, knowing. “You have to decide when to leave the battleground, to not look back, and hope for peace instead.”
“And you can do that?” Steve asks, brow raised.
“Most of the time,” T’Challa says, some of the smile coming back.
“And the rest of the time?”
“Ah. For that, I have the Panther.”
Steve huffs, then sits up when T’Challa stands.
“I still have more work to do,” T’Challa tells him. “You should sleep – he will need you later. And the offer to spar stands, if you get tired of the battleground.”
“Thank you,” Steve says. “T’Challa.”
T’Challa’s teeth flash white in a quick grin as he turns, heading for the door. “Better,” he says as he rounds the corner, bodyguards following, their footsteps shrinking down to nothing.
Left alone again, Steve gets to his feet, dragging his sketchpad off the bench. He steps up to the chamber, looks at the display with Bucky’s unwavering, suspended vitals. He looks into Bucky’s face, where there’s what could be peace or could be desertion, depending on the motive you assign to it.
“See you soon, Buck,” he says quietly, pitting memory against the future and trying to think, with real conviction, hope.