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Turns out the worst part of freedom is the night.
He's not free, really, not ever, but Wakanda feels like the closest he's going to get. He can walk in sunlight, and eat food he chooses, food he prepares, never a nutrient tube shoved rough down his throat. Nobody tries to shoot at him or lock him into a glass box or trigger him into a machine built for one thing. It's a better kind of freedom than being on the run, even. There are - friends, he guesses, is probably the word he's looking for, although Steve's gaze is always a little too desperate and he's never had a friend who's as much of an asshole as Sam Wilson. (He likes it better, the way Sam's always just a little mean. It's not as heavy as Steve's longing, and it's easier to push back against in a way that doesn't leave his mouth tasting like ashes.)
But. The nights. He doesn't remember what it's like to sleep. The beds are too soft, and the sheets too warm, and when he sleeps, he dreams.
He leaves the covers off one night, the AC on arctic blast, lets himself go goose-pimpled and shivering, and the cold is almost like the tank. Except he wakes to realize he's been dreaming, still, and his face is wet with something he can't remember, and he's tired, he's so tired, and his body feels like a machine gone to rust in disuse.
He gets up, pulls on the nearest clothes to hand. Everything Bucky owns is soft, now. Clean brushed cotton, organic like that means something. Nothing darker than slate grey, and everything soft and loose and as comfortable as they can make it. Apparently, in the future, clothing can be made more comfortable than Bucky would have believed. It's really something. He tucks the empty sleeve back into his shirt, pads out into the hallway, doesn't bother to flick the lights on. He knows, by now, where he's going. There's a room a ways down that looks out into the jungle. It's quiet, and the leaves are silver with moonlight against the dark of the sky, and Bucky takes a breath, curls up on the padded bench, lets himself sink into something halfway between sniper focus and a lack of being at all.
He doesn't know how long he sits there. The light is different, maybe, when he's startled by footsteps in the hallway, and he blinks out of his concentration. He's getting better at being a person and not a weapon, he is, which is why he manages to keep himself sitting and his hand only goes briefly for a knife that's not there. T'Challa looks impassively serene, the night sky lighting up the planes of his cheekbones and jaw and shoulder, and Bucky forces himself, very deliberate, to ease into something that might pass for relaxed.
"Are you well, Sergeant Barnes?" T'Challa asks, and Bucky thinks his stance isn't fooling T'Challa at all.
"Fine," he says, flat. "Peachy." It's rude, probably, to talk to a king this way. Bucky should call him your highness, maybe, or bow when he approaches. Manners, Sarah Rogers snaps in far-back memory, and Bucky tightens his jaw against it.
"I did not mean to intrude," T'Challa says, smooth and courteous as ever, and Bucky sighs, drags his palm over his face, feels the stubble that he should get around to shaving, maybe.
"No," he mutters after a minute. "You didn't. Sorry. I just. Couldn't sleep." T'Challa looks at him a moment longer, and then tilts his head, glances at the space next to Bucky.
"May I join you?"
"Sure," Bucky says, shifts a little to make room. "It's your house. Palace."
"While you are here, Sergeant Barnes, it is your house," T'Challa tells him evenly. "Your space, to do with as you wish."
"Bucky," Bucky says, voice rough around the lump in his throat. "Just Bucky is fine. I haven't been- Sergeant Barnes. In a while."
"Bucky," T'Challa repeats, sounding a little amused, and falls into silence, poised and still beside him. Bucky fidgets, takes a breath, touches his fingertips to the cotton of his pants. They stare out into the jungle, a pause like the air is shivering. Breathing in unison, Bucky realizes, and swallows hard.
"I can't-" he says, after a beat. "They all want something from me. I can't." He looks sideways, sees T'Challa nod once, gravely. "The way Steve is around me," he continues, quiet. "He wants... I dunno, a guy from seventy years ago. And Wilson looks at me and wants his own friend to return from war, and Hydra wants their weapon, and the UN wants its scapegoat, I guess. Perhaps they should have me. I did enough for it."
"They have their villain," T'Challa says, "and they will not have you. What makes you think I don't want something from you, Bucky Barnes? I would have killed you in the space of two breaths, a month ago."
"You got your absolution on a mountain top," Bucky shrugs, "and you invited us here. Gave us shelter. Good enough for me." T'Challa looks at him, then, smiles slow and easy and proud.
"True," he acknowledges, "true. What, then. What do you want from me?"
"Seem to remember you being pretty good at fighting," Bucky says, and T'Challa smirks.
"Pretty good," he says,all sharp teeth and bright eyes. He's mocking and a little arrogant, kingly in a way that Bucky doesn't even resent, and he smirks right back, tucks his too-long hair back behind one ear.
"Yeah," he says, "well. You wanna go a few rounds?"
Nobody's sparred with him since they got here, since Tony Stark blew off his arm and turned him from weapon to wounded bird, since Zemo murmured words that brought soldat rising to the surface like old bones. As soon as Bucky's feet hit the mats, as he ties back his hair, he feels his body shedding the rust of tiredness, feels himself vibrate with the thrill of it.
They have to work slow at first. Bucky's balance and center of gravity are all off, muscles overcompensating for a weight no longer there, and T'Challa is solicitous, stepping him through strikes that won't even leave a bruise. He's keeping his claws sheathed, Bucky thinks, even though neither of them are in suits or tac gear, just expensive cotton and bare skin.
"Stop-" Bucky hisses, after the fifth time he tries to swing with an arm that's cold with Siberian snow and doesn't respond to his commands, and he has to pause, suck in a breath. "Stop being so kind," he demands, and T'Challa's eyes flash as he grins, a quick baring of teeth.
"If that is what you want," he concedes, and when he hits the next time, it's harder, a kick that Bucky feels vibrate right through his bones.
Soldat, Bucky thinks, and his blood sings, and he hates being their weapon and hates how it always ends in a fight but the fight, like this, clean movement, action and reaction, it's simple in a way that nothing is anymore, and he wants it so much his throat is tight with yearning.
They tumble together, kick and flip and roll and pull back to their feet. T'Challa's claws are sheathed, and Bucky's in cloud-grey cotton and bare feet and no metal, and T'Challa touches him like he's not going to break into fragments or into an explosion. T'Challa is all grace and quickness, lithe beauty in movement Bucky can appreciate now they're fighting for the joy of it and he's not filled with a terror that this man will tear his throat out, and he steps back inside his own head, lets himself watch from the small space behind his eyes.
He can tell T'Challa is pulling his punches, still, and he guesses it's fair, fighting against a one-armed assassin who's maybe a bit hollow-eyed with too little sleep. T'Challa is about principles, maybe, and fairness, and goodness. It's probably why he and Steve get on so well. When he gets the advantage, kicks T'Challa's feet out from under him, he knows T'Challa is letting him take him down. It doesn't stop him getting him pinned, bodies close and Bucky's hand tight on T'Challa's throat.
He pauses, breathing hard. Hair stuck damp to his forehead, sweat down his spine. Fingers fanned out over dark skin, a flutter beating quick under his thumb. Bucky can feel the heat of T'Challa's skin, and for a fleeting moment, misses his arm with an ache that leaves him flexing a phantom fist. He imagines, briefly, the cold metal warming blood-hot at the contact points.
He could tighten his fingers. Longing, his handler could say, daybreak, and if this were his left hand Bucky would crush T'Challa's throat in the time it took for the neural connection to transmit the command. Even without the arm, he's still strong enough to choke him, watch him flicker out in a series of gasping breaths beneath him. Eyes widening with panic and mouth opening for air that would not come. Wakanda would be a prize to bring home for Hydra, carrying it in his jaws, their best and most obedient dog returning to its masters.
Instead, he holds his hand there, deliberate and very careful, and moves his fingers minutely. Strokes them up under T'Challa's jaw, and feels the rhythm of his pulse stutter. Bucky knows T'Challa's letting him hold him down - they've fought enough he recognizes all the ways in which T'Challa could shift his weight, throw him off, have him pinned in half a minute - and if he were less tired, he'd wonder what that means. He's got T'Challa on the floor, and his hand is on his throat, and T'Challa is letting him.
It's the first time Bucky hasn't felt like his whole body is a weapon in maybe seventy years. He blinks, and twists his mouth, and feels T'Challa swallow, the movement of small muscles under Bucky's palm. It's a cue to loosen his grip, shift his thumb away from the pulse that's insistent, now, to drag three fingers up the line of T'Challa's throat and jaw to his mouth. Presses fingertips to the swell of his bottom lip, tentative, and watches T'Challa smile under his touch. Soft, it's soft, and Bucky abruptly doesn't know how to cope with this. He's trained to handle a submachine gun and suture a bullet wound and make a bomb out of grocery store chemicals, but none of this.
"James," T'Challa says, quiet, and Bucky's about to say Bucky, it's Bucky when something clicks in him like clockwork tumblers falling into place.
"Yeah," he says, and his voice is rough. He swallows, takes a breath. "Yeah," he says again, and shifts his weight, tries to move away. T'Challa catches him by the hips, holds him in place, looks up at him from the floor. His eyes are hooded and dark, curious and hot with something Bucky feels burning him up. Bucky feels like his own pupils are blown huge, like there's too much light in his vision, and he blinks once, twice, catches his lip with his teeth.
"What do you want, James Barnes?" T'Challa asks, voice low and smooth, and Bucky closes his eyes. Imagines kissing him.
Longing, he thinks. Homecoming. It's enough to make him pull away.
"Sleep," he says, throat tight, and leaves without looking back.
He doesn't see T'Challa for days. He's a king, after all, and Bucky is there on his grace, and T'Challa's scientists are trying their hardest to put the tin man back together. It's not the worst thing Bucky's ever been through. Bright lights, and a machine too much like the tank for him to do anything except dig his nails into his palm and drag breaths into his lungs one by agonizing one. The taste of rubber like an echo in his mouth, and a halo of sparks. Nothing hurts, not yet, not in any way that matters, but they'll have to go further if they want to pry loose this bomb buried so deep. Bucky can feel it there, an unexploded grenade sitting behind his eyes. The rusted pin, waiting for someone to pull.
Steve's eyes are big and soft and wet when he looks at him after, and Bucky looks away, stares at his hand. Four crescents dug into his palm, and blood under his nails. He wants to wipe his hand on his thigh, but he's wearing something the color of the lightest ash, today, and blood will stain. He gets up, leaves the room, washes his hand under cool water. Doesn't make eye contact with himself in the mirror. The cuts in his palm are already healing; he's still a super-soldier, even if he's a broken one.
"I can't sleep," he tells his doctor on the fifth day after that, and she nods like it's normal, asks questions he does his best to answer. He comes away with a bottle of meds that wrap him in a cloud soft like organic cotton, hammer his head down heavy into a night dreamless as cryo sleep.
Daybreak, he thinks on waking, and tastes metal.
Bucky finds T'Challa in the garden, flanked by the women Bucky knows now to be bodyguards, and exceptional ones. T'Challa smiles at them, speaks softly and says something Bucky cannot hear, and they melt away without acknowledging him at all.
"James," T'Challa says, sounding sincerely glad to see him, and touches his palm to Bucky's right shoulder. His hand is warm through Bucky's shirt, warmer than the sunlight on their skin, and he feels himself sway into it.
"They did more tests," he says, as if T'Challa won't already know everything happening in his own kingdom. "No luck. It's- still-" and he runs to a halt, gestures at his head. Benign. It's not, it's malignant, it's eating him away like rust. If he thinks hard he can sense the pressure.
"Yes," T'Challa agrees. "They will keep working. Meanwhile, are you well?"
He's not. T'Challa looks at him, and nods, once, like he knows, and picks fruit off a tree, hands it to him, picks another for himself and settles all feline grace on the grass. Bucky sits heavily, clumsy with the lack of weight pulling at his shoulder. He feels off-balance all the time now, but this is new. T'Challa has him dizzy with wanting, and he hates it. Loves it. Wants it. It's complicated, and Bucky doesn't have the energy to pick these threads apart.
"Eat," T'Challa urges, and bites into his fruit, and it's enough that Bucky does the same. It tastes unfamiliar and cleanly sweet, flesh yielding under Bucky's teeth. The juice is sticky on his fingers, and he licks them clean, sees a rivulet of crimson juice run down T'Challa's wrist and onto his forearm. It's like blood, like damage, startling in its vividness, and Bucky watches narrowly, imagines catching his hand, pulling it to his mouth. Dragging his tongue down smoothly muscled skin.
Longing, he thinks, and knows what he has to do.
"I want-" he says, and stops, and T'Challa tilts his head. What do you want, James Barnes, Bucky hears him say again, and feels the pressure of his hand on T'Challa's throat, the yielding softness of T'Challa's lip. The joy of movement, the heat of skin on skin, and sunlight on his face, and fruit in his mouth. Soft grey cotton the same shade as his eyes. A space in his head. Yearning that's not longing, a want that Bucky can have, and rest, and to feel his body a body again and not metal and rust and weaponized orders he can't resist.
"Put me back in the tank," he says, and it's not enough at all, but it's something he wants, and it's something T'Challa will give.