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Wakanda, Bucky comes to realize rather quickly, is a country full of opposites; devoted to both innovation and tradition, ruled by a monarchy that listens to its citizens more than most modern governments, its people friendly and open but guarded. He sits inside a state-of-the-art research facility, listening to the nearly inaudible whirl of the air conditioning that keeps the temperature warm but comfortable, while he looks out at a thriving jungle. And then there’s T’Challa, who keeps extending one hand to the international council they’re running from, while he’s offering to hide him with the other.
Only Steve and Sam and him are still here, because Natasha came and whisked the archer away, for now, believing she can better protect him and those he loves by hiding in plain sight, and the witch will go where they go. Right now, they’re waiting for their benevolent king to finish ruling for the day and tend to his remaining guests. On the agenda today is an inspection of Wakanda’s head scientists to dissect what’s left of Bucky’s arm and discuss how to best fit him with a new one.
Beside him, Steve huffs for the fifth time in two minutes. “T’challa’s late,” he says, and huffs yet again.
One seat over, Sam sighs, side eying Bucky like that, too, is somehow this fault. He does that a lot. Bucky figures he’s not wrong, all things considered. “Dude’s a king. He's gotta be busy. Cut him some slack.”
Steve doesn’t reply, runs a hand down is face and slumps in his chair, which is an impressive feat for someone his size. The size he’s in now, anyway. Used to be all he did, back when Bucky actually knew him, and he figures that no serum in the world could burn away old habits. Plus, he’s still all offense, thrumming with nervous energy whenever he’s forced into sitting idle, so that hasn’t changed either.
T’Challa’s arrival signals itself by a buzz of activity in the main hall, people gathering to welcome their king, and because there’s a lesson on proper manners around men of considerable authority left somewhere in his programming, Bucky stands with his hand pressed flat to his hip. He does so to a questioning glance from Steve – hotshot young soldier Bucky Barnes wouldn’t have done that, probably, back in the forties – and an indifferent shrug from Sam. Both follow his example, though, rising to their feet just as T’Challa rounds the corner and marches into view, surrounded by a flock of scientists in pristine white lab coats.
There’s a memory that wants to claw its way to the surface at the sight, but Bucky does his best to stomp it down. After hands have been shook and introductions have been made, they’re led to a lab that’s bathed in sunlight. Large windows give the same view into Wakanda’s endless green jungle as in the waiting hall, open a smidge so they let in the flowery scent that permeates the air at every step, here, and he relaxes. This place isn’t cold and decrepit and stinking of mold and disinfectant and a persistent undercurrent of human waste. These people are here to help him, not enslave him.
At T’Challa’s invitation, he sits in the examination chair in the middle of the room – chrome and white leather and as comfortable as examination chairs can get – and grits his teeth while electrodes are connected to the stump of the arm he lost, and regained, and then lost again. Machinery beeps. Scientists mumble. It feels familiar, in a strange way, calming yet unsettling. He closes his eyes.
This, he knows how to endure.
***
Each of them are given a room in the… palace, for lack of a better word. Discussions were had about that – safety, proximity to the king, deniability – but they were dismissed at T’Challa’s argument that this is the most fortified place in Wakanda and that he himself doesn’t need anyone’s protection.
Bucky goes to sleep in an obscenely large bed, windows open so the curtains framing them billow with the air streaming in and out of the room, and he wakes maybe an hour or two later to the patter of rain on the pavement outside and the rumbling of a thunderstorm in the distance. He’s not too bothered by that; sleep has been elusive ever since he made a run for it in Washington. He sits up and swings his feet out of bed, walks over to the window. He holds his hand out to feel the rain, finds the sensation pleasurable, and steps outside.
He doesn’t keep count of how long he stands there, getting soaked to the bone. That’s okay though; the rain is cool but the air is warm and he can feel his own body in a way he hasn’t in longer than his faulty memory supplies. His skin is throwing goosebumps, and the alternation between the heat and unpredictable pin pricks of cold makes his every nerve ending thrum.
The sound of his name snaps him back to attention. He looks around in search of the intruder and finds T’Challa, walking towards him through the rain, clad in a shorts and a t-shirt and… well, a bathrobe, basically.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he says and points to the window sill by Bucky’s room, large and elaborate enough that both of them can comfortably sit. When Bucky hesitates, he goes ahead and does just that, gathering the bathrobe closer around his body, then grinning when he seems to realize the wet fabric has ceased to be any protection from the weather whatsoever.
Bucky hesitates, stands there in the rain, shrugging. “I slept for decades at a time.”
“Ah,” says T’Challa. He chucks the bathrobe and folds it, sets it aside by his feet, then squints at the clouded sky. “I never could sleep when there’s a really bad storm outside. Even when I was little. My father found that out early on, and made sure to seek me out, keep me company, until the storm was gone.”
At the mention of T’Chaka, Bucky looks down. He didn’t kill him, he didn’t kill any of them, and he knows that’s common knowledge now. But still, if it hadn’t been for him, they’d still be alive, and it feels like he had a hand in their death.
T’Challa carries on talking regardless. “As I got older, we would go outside if the weather wasn’t so bad to make it dangerous, and he’d tell me stories. You know, the kind of tale that seems random, but actually serves a purpose, teaches you a lesson? He knew a great many of those.”
The I miss him, and that’s why I’m out here alone now goes unsaid, and the silence that falls instead of the words makes Bucky’s skin prickle harder than the rain ever could. He takes a deep breath.
“My sister was afraid of thunder,” he says. “She didn’t mind harsh winds or lightning, but she’d be in hiding as soon as she heard a rumbling in the sky. My mother wasn’t bothered by things such as a little weather, but she’d wake up as well once she realized that, and go to comfort her, every time. Her stories were meant to pass the time and distract from the noise, nothing more, but I guess otherwise they served the same purpose.”
He pauses. The memory forms itself in front of his eyes, a series of them, soothing words mumbled in the dark, not meant for him but welcome all the same. He smiles.
T’Challa nods and gives the space on the window sill another pointed glance. “Tell me about her. About all of them, if you like.”
And even though he doesn’t deserve the invitation, doesn’t deserve any of the kindness that’s been offered to him in the country that lost its king because a madman wanted to wake the monster that simmers underneath his skin, Bucky sits down, to talk about a family long since dead.
***
Between visits to the lab and meetings with T’Challa about the council’s misguided manhunt and video conferences with Natasha or Sharon or Hill or sometimes all three, they develop a routine. Bucky likes routine; he’s had more than enough uncertainty and excitement. He’d had one in Bucharest too; steady times for meals and visits to the market, keeping his journals in between. Those are gone now, stuffed into evidence in a vault at the other side of the world. But that’s okay. His brain is still busy repairing itself, and most of the memories he scribbled down in there were of the kind he doesn’t actually want to keep. An evidence locker might be the ideal place for them, anyway.
Regardless, those are the memories that float to the surface when he lies awake in the morning, his body done resting but the world around him still sleeping soundly. Generic greyscale faces, because the Winter Soldier doesn’t care for people, it cares for missions, bathed in fire and blood. It had dawned on him way back when during the war, before he reunited with Steve for the first time, that for the rest of his life those two things would weasel their way into his dreams. That boy, he thought he’d already seen so much. He had no idea about the horrors yet to come.
Like most mornings since they arrived in Wakanda, a knock on the door disrupts the unwelcome flood washing through his mind, and he sits up, blinks a few times to make the images fade. The door opens and Steve sticks his head in – testing to see whether Bucky’s up, like every day, even though he’s never once found him still sleeping – and walks in without invitation.
“Hey man,” he says, drawing the curtains open and letting in swashes of bright daylight. “Sleep well?”
It’s a platitude, because these days neither of them really knows how to behave around the other. Bucky shrugs, doesn’t miss how Steve’s gaze snaps to the metal stump, accentuated by the movement in a sleeveless shirt. Fresh shock washes over his face, and Bucky almost envies his seemingly endless ability to feel things so deeply, be upset enough for both of them.
His hand rises on autopilot, to cover the stump. “Like every night, Stevie. Don’t ask me stupid questions.”
Too harsh a response, he realizes in hindsight, because Steve crosses the room in a few long strides – he looks so comfortable in this large body, as if he may not have been born with it but always been destined for it – and then pauses, one hand wrapped around the door, about to drag it shut.
“I hardly slept either, when I came out of the ice.” He looks up to meet Bucky’s eyes briefly, but can’t seem to hold them; they flicker around the room. “Spent half the night working out, punching things, trying to break a sweat but never quite succeeding. I know it’s not the same, but… tomorrow, as soon as you wake up, you come find me, and we’ll go to the gym. Worth a shot, right?”
“Yeah,” Bucky replies, lowers his right hand back down and curls it into a fist underneath the sheet. “Worth a shot.”
***
The thing is, his body doesn't feel right these days. Hasn't in forever, and now it's worse, because the weight on his left that he got used to compensating for is gone and his balance is all shot to hell. But Steve's trying, he means well, and disappointing him has never been an option.
And so, when he wakes the next morning at 4 AM, he gets up and gets dressed in sweatpants and a long-sleeved t-shirt, and he marches to Steve's room to wake him. It takes a few knocks before there's rumbling inside, but then there he is, bare-chested and rubbing his eyes, and smiling all big when he realizes Bucky's here to take him up on his offer.
They don't spar. They fought each other twice before, and Bucky's glad they seem to be in unspoken agreement that the memory doesn't need revisiting. It's pushups and kicks, some treadmill running, the sort of pointless exercise meant to occupy your mind by keeping your body in motion. And it works, it does, until Bucky loses his balance for a kick – a simple one too, he could do that in his sleep under normal circumstances, stretched as the word might have gotten in his case – and lands flat on his back. A little stunned, he tries push himself up with the arm that isn't there. Frustration bubbles and boils, and he reaches for a pair of weights sat on the mattress not far from him, throws them across the room where they land with a clang, and looks up to see the worry, the fear, in Steve's eyes.
Because of the monster underneath his skin. Because it could wake up at any moment. Because they wouldn't know until it's too late.
He scrambles to his feet in a way that's anything but graceful and bails, doesn't think about where he's going until he's sat on the windowsill outside his room, breathing in the flowery scents, watching the lush green plants sway in a light breeze while the rising sun paints the sky behind them in an array of pastel.
***
His team of Wakandan scientists are competent and thorough, and the head scientist, a young woman with a kind face, is honest and doesn’t pull her punches. She sits him down after the second week in the palace. Just him; she’s made sure Steve is occupied by talking designs with their engineer for the new arm. But that’s not their only concern. It’s not even the most pressing.
“We’re working on the deprogramming, and some progress has been made,” she says with a genuinely sympathetic expression, crow’s feet appearing around her eyes as she gives him a sad smile. “But it’s going slowly. No records exist about what exactly Hydra did to you, so the counter-measures are all just guesswork.”
He remembers the glass cage in Berlin, unable to do a damn thing while someone else shoves his mind aside and takes control of his body. Goosebumps spread across his skin, despite the comfortable warmth in the lab. “How long?”
She leans forward, the kind of impotent gesture people do when they’re about to hand out bad news and don’t know the other person well enough to offer comfort. “We don’t know. Months. A year, maybe two.”
Bucky looks away from her, out of the large window. He looks at moonflowers and butterfly bushes and cana lilies, and can’t even remember how he knows what they’re all called.
She clears her throat to regain his attention. “There is another option,” she says, voice thin with trepidation. “What we do have is a good understanding of their cryo technology.”
The idea should be repellant. He’d spent so much time stashed away like a piece of furniture, the mindless weapon, and now she’s insinuating that he go back to that voluntarily. But that’s just the thing; it would be his choice. No one would make him. He’d be taking himself out of the equation until they have a better solution.
“I…” he starts, and then his gaze falls on Steve, animatedly talking to the engineer, and he forgets what he was about to say. “I’ll think about it.”
“You do that. Let me know what you decide.” She smiles again and reaches out a hand to pat his knee, gently, like he never hurt a fly and deserves all her sympathy, before she stands and walks away to exchange a few words with Steve and the engineer, all three of them discussing the artificial limb that he just lost all interest in.
***
The palace is quiet during the night. The vaults and hallways are illuminated by dimmed lamps, creating an illusion of firelight, dipping everything in a warm glow and deep shadows. Bucky doesn't know what time it is, exactly – he'd tried to fall asleep for a few hours, and then he gave up, sat up with a huff and got dressed and started walking.
It occurs to him belatedly that he has no idea where he's heading. There are a few well-trodden paths in the palace, to and from their rooms, the lab, the gardens, but it's a large compound and he hasn't seen half of what's there. Nobody stops him, though; he inspires a few quizzical stares from guards and night staff, but there seem to be no barriers, no boundaries, no restricted areas.
He stops when he passes a door sitting slightly ajar, allowing light a shade brighter to spill out onto the hallway and low music to waft into his ear as he walks past. Hesitantly, he pushes the door open wider, and he's not quite surprised when he sees T'Challa pacing in front of large, wooden bookshelves, covering the whole wall from floor to ceiling.
T'Challa seems deep in thought, standing next to a large table made of the same dark wood, but he looks up immediately, situational awareness registering the intrusion straight away. He doesn't seem to mind it though, puts down a book he'd held and smiles. “Sleep eluding you again?”
Bucky nods and steps closer. “Too many thoughts in my head.”
“Ah well,” says T'Challa, faint amusement in his voice. On anyone else, it would have sounded mocking, even, but he manages to keep it free of judgment or arrogance. “If you ask me, that's not always a bad thing.”
“It is, in this case,” Bucky replies, grimacing. “Dead people if I close my eyes. Impossible choices if I keep them open.”
T'Challa narrows his eyes, and Bucky cringes in anticipation of the question that's sure to follow. What choices? Or worse, who are the dead? But he doesn't ask any questions. Instead, he turns around on his heels in a motion so fluid it almost looks like dancing, like a panther jumping rocks, and indicates a row of display cabinets adorning the opposite wall. They show metallic shields and spears, old but well-preserved, the light reflecting off them.
“When my ancestors first discovered the meteor that brought us the vibranium, they thought themselves chosen,” he explains. “Blessed by the gods. Exalted. But like so many blessings, this gift also held a curse.” He turns back around and lets his fingers roam past the books on those shelves, humming slightly, until he's found the one he seemed to have been looking for and pulls it out from between its neighbors. After thumbing through it for barely a minute, he lays it out on the table between them and points at an old illustration. “The radiation from the meteor turned some of their tribesmen mad. Demons. The first Black Panther defeated them. Since then, we had to protect our country against many an intruder meaning to steal from us, betray us for their own gain.”
Bucky squints at the book, then at T'Challa. “I don't understand.”
And T'Challa gives a little laugh. “It's 3 AM. This isn't a lesson. I'm telling you a story, and what you make of it is up to you.”
From this angle, the light in the room makes his eyes look sunken and tired, overburdened, and for the first time since he stepped into the room Bucky wonders why he's still awake. Whether that story was less an anecdote for him, and more a reminder for T'Challa himself. He's the Black Panther now, tasked with protecting his country's best interests.
“Your scientists have offered to put me back under,” Bucky blurts out. Because he needs to tell someone. Because he thinks maybe T'Challa will understand. Because they don't actually mean anything to each other, and whether or not Bucky goes back to sleep has no personal effect on him whatsoever. Because it's easy to tell him. “And I think I want to do that.”
“Why?” T'Challa simply prods. His expression doesn't change.
Everything, Bucky wants to say. All those memories. Living in constant fear of his own mind. The monster within. He rolls his shoulders instead, irritated all over again for the missing weight where the metal arm used to be, buying time. “They said they can't deactivate the code in my head yet. But you can't fire a weapon if you jam the trigger. I'm a weapon. My brain is the trigger.”
T'Challa inclines his head. “That's a good reason.”
As opposed to what other rationale, Bucky doesn't ask. He thinks he knows. Everything. He smiles, much as he's able, and nods his thanks at him. T'Challa returns the gesture, and Bucky leaves him to his own thoughts, his own demons, in order to return to the guest rooms and give sleep another chance.
***
“That's bullshit,” Steve bristles, a little too loud, drawing looks from the people walking past them in the waiting area. “Don't tell me you're considering to go back under.”
An elderly man scuttles by on a wooden cane, giving them a particularly scathing glance, and Bucky regrets that he brought this up right away. He'd known, once upon a time, how Steve would react to every sort of information, and would have couched the topic accordingly. That radar is broken right now, ill-adjusted, and he wanted to be honest and share the news he'd been given. Diplomacy has never been a particular talent of his, and these days he wouldn't even know where to begin.
But the cat's out of the bag, and now they have to deal with it. Bucky meets Steve's eyes and builds himself up to full height. “I'm not considering it. I'm doing it.”
Obviously frustrated, Steve runs a hand down his face and turns to Sam for assistance, who hasn't been in the lab with them since the first day and mostly just thumbs through Wakandan newspapers while they're in there. Possibly. Bucky has no idea, and he doesn't know him well enough to guess how he likes to pass the time. But he joins them – joins Steve – every day.
Met with a silent stare that he willfully ignores, Steve presses on. “What do you think? Say something.”
“Oh, no.” Sam shrugs and firmly shakes his head. “I'm not going anywhere near this.”
Steve glares from one to the other with the same helpless rage Bucky remembers – set shoulders and both hands balled into fists, coiled too tight because things he can't change are happening to the people he loves – only this time it's displayed on a slightly different, larger canvas. But he's got this all wrong. This isn't a fight. Bucky doesn't need his protection. The rest of the world needs protection from him.
The lab door opens, the head scientist with the gentle smile waving him in. “We're ready.”
Bucky takes a step in her direction before he turns and looks back at Steve. “I'm doing this with you or without you. But I'd rather do it with you.”
Swaying on his feet, Steve relaxes his hands, wipes them on his jeans. He exchanges another glance with Sam, who merely raises his eyebrows. Then he sighs and catches up with Bucky in one long stride, following him into the lab.