Buratino

By the time they touch down in Wakanda, Bucky is exhausted in a way he hasn't been for decades. The fight at the airport, the fight with Stark, the several fights getting in and out of the Raft with Steve's buddies... it's been a busy afternoon since lunch.

He's beaten to hell and his equilibrium is still so far off without the arm that he's listing to port when he walks and that's the side with the broken ribs. Steve, who has looked better himself, keeps stopping himself from trying to help him walk because Bucky gives him dirty looks every time he tries. It's not that he couldn't use the help -- his balance really is shit -- but right now, at this moment, Steve doing one more thing for him would be one thing too much.

T'Challa meets them at the landing strip with a phalanx of Dora Milaje and a gawky teenage girl who cannot hide her curiosity. It's only after T'Challa introduces her as his younger sister Shuri that Bucky can see that she's not hiding her grief very well, either. The girl's just lost her father and Bucky can assume that T'Challa told her that he didn't do it, but he doesn't know if she knows that he was still the cause of her pain.

He's not the Winter Soldier anymore, but he's not done being a pawn in other people's games. He might never be done.

Shuri, it turns out, is the someone T'Challa thinks could fix him and it's Bucky's turn to stare. She sticks out her tongue at him and he laughs, which sends a shooting pain like a cattle prod through his ribcage and his eyes tear involuntarily. Which in turn reminds everyone that he and Steve are in need of both medical attention and a shower, maybe not in that order.

T'Challa and Shuri and their parade lead them indoors and through hallways that look ancient and from the future all at once. Wakanda has been pulling a better and longer con than HYDRA ever did and Bucky can roll with it more easily than Steve can because he's a lot more used to being lied to by people he is supposed to trust. But up close, all of the evidence that Wakanda is not what it said it was is a little intimidating. With HYDRA, Bucky was in on the joke even if he wasn't in on the joke on himself. Here, every step is a reminder that he didn't even know there was a joke being played, but it doesn't scare him and he's not sure why. He doesn't feel powerless here, just tiny.

Steve is gawping just as much as he is, which is good because it keeps Steve from watching him.

They wind up in what looks like a lab -- the kind of lab that he and Steve were made in -- and this time, Bucky doesn't mind Steve's worried glances because it's hard to stand still and easy even if he can't see leather straps or metal cuffs or smell the ammonia-like stink of the fluid HYDRA used as a paralytic before they worked on him. They're already standing next to each other, so if Steve bumps his good (less-bad) shoulder, it's not going to be a thing to anyone else even if they see it.

"This is the medical clinic for the Dora Milaje," T'Challa explains. "Where they come for treatment. We can find you male doctors and attendants if that makes you uncomfortable."

He's smiling as he speaks, pleased with his own joke, but Bucky can tell that T'Challa's very aware that that's not what's bothering him and, not for the third time, he wonders what the Widow told T'Challa about him.

"This one could use the experience of getting undressed in front of women," Bucky answers, gesturing at Steve. Who sighs, embarrassed, and it's not until after Shuri giggles that Bucky realizes that she's returned from wherever she disappeared to the second they got here. He winces; she may be the genius her brother promises she is, but Bucky was raised to keep the bawdy stuff away from young girls' ears and, his own little sisters or the little sister of his generous host, that could have been timed better.

T'Challa brushes off his concern while acknowledging the apology and Bucky is relieved.

The doctors and nurses arrive and there's a flurry of explanations in Xhosa because it's clearly startling for the new arrivals to have two white guys standing in the Dora Milaje's inner sanctum. But then the conversation switches over to English and it becomes only marginally more understandable because the tools of the Wakandan medical trade aren't anywhere in his imagination. He and Steve take turns standing on a spot marked by a pair of feet that turns out to be a full-body scanner that renders its images out of sand -- 3D models made out of glowing, gravity-ignoring sand. Both of them get yelled at for moving during the scanning so that they can better see the results, but it can't be helped. It's fascinating and beautiful and it looks like art and magic, even the spots that clearly show that yeah, he's got a couple of ribs cracked, some ligament damage in his right shoulder, and a bruised kidney. Even Steve's hairline ulnar fracture is somehow elegant, a seam of emerald surrounded by gold.

There are other tests to be run and blood to be drawn, but it's none of it like the exams he underwent as the Soldier and he gets through all of it without freezing once. He doesn't know what he looks like to the doctors, the cybernetics and scars underneath the fresh wounds and dirt. He knows what he looks like to Steve, whose emotions are still broadcast on his face like a Times Square billboard, but he makes it easy on the both of them by pretending not to see.

Once they are both done, they are returned to the main room where T'Challa and Shuri have been waiting. Shuri is handed what look like a couple of marbles and she rolls them in her hand for a moment before one of them explodes into a 3D projection of his left shoulder. It's amazing and Bucky doesn't even care that it's his body on display because he's wonderstruck. There are color-coded lines of light showing the bone, muscle, nerves of his own flesh, and then the metal parts of the prosthetic still attached. He has seen scans of his arm before, but not like this, not like a presentation in a museum instead of a diagram behind a butcher's counter. He reaches out to touch and pulls his hand back, but Shuri walks over to him instead.

"Those green stars are the interface points," she explains to him, gesturing with her free hand near the jagged break and encouraging him to touch. There's nothing to touch, just the faintest feeling of static electricity, but he runs his fingers along the lines just the same. "They're all intact. The damage over here is entirely on the mechanical side, which will make cleaning it up very easy. The damage over here..." she trails off, her hand by the rendering of his collarbone.

"The damage there was done long ago," he tells her wryly and not unkindly. She might be a genius, but there's a lot in the world she's not old enough to understand.

He's told to shower first because he is more injured that Steve, who in turn has what to discuss with T'Challa that might be about him but could just as easily not. Steve's penchant for choosing every single battle extends past him.

The stump of his arm isn't shooting sparks or leaking coolant anymore, but it's probably not a good idea to get it wet and he asks for a plastic bag or something to cover it while he cleans up.

"A plastic bag?!?" Shuri repeats, horrified and offended. "We are not savages here."

She asks something of the nurses in Xhosa and they direct her to a bank of drawers built into the wall. She rifles through one to emerge with what looks like a roll of duct tape and a dishcloth from across the room but looks a lot more high-tech up close. She makes a chicken-flapping gesture with one arm to get him to raise his stump and she and one of the nurses drape the cloth over it and then secure it with the tape, which is really a mesh of some sort backed by adhesive. At a touch, the cloth shrinks down to mold to the contours of the prosthetic and he thinks they've just vacuum-packed his stump.

"Hunh," he says as he reaches carefully across his body to touch the result, which feels like moleskin. The look on his face must be something because Shuri is beaming.

He's taken down more hallways to a space set up like a hospital room, since the Dora shower facilities are both communal and in use. There's a male orderly waiting for them and Bucky politely cuts him off when he starts to explain, understanding why and not needing the solicitous effort to make this less awkward. It's not awkward to him because he's very used to being washed and prodded and paraded around naked with zero concern for his comfort or dignity. It's not a high-powered hose pointed at him from behind a wall of storm troopers with rifles at the ready with the safeties off; he's good. And he might actually not mind the lifeguard watching him swim around in the shower because he's never tried to clean himself with one arm. He's never done anything with one arm before now. He's done damage to both his real and prosthetic arms while in the field, but he continued to use them anyway. And the two times that he had his prosthetic upgraded, he was more or less welded down to a table with a catheter for the duration.

Turns out his battle dress is absolutely a two-hands-only project. He could get most of the buckles one-handed if given enough time or desperation, but some of them require holding the rest of the material in place and pretty much all of them require him to twist in ways that clearly aggravate his injuries and so he lets Fezile do it rather than argue that he's used to it. He tells Fezile to just cut off the undershirt because there's no way it gets worn again. They get the rest of his clothes off between them and sort what can be washed and repaired and what can't be before they head to the shower.

Lathering up a washcloth one-handed is pretty much beyond his capacity, but the rest of it is fairly straightforward and he'd have done it all on his own except Fezile doesn't want him hurting himself and Fezile is already starting to get concerned about Bucky's lack of concern.

"This is the most kindness I've seen in seventy years," he tries to explain, which is no kind of explanation to anyone who doesn't already know the story. But it does get Fezile to appreciate that he's not actually trying to cause himself pain; he's just accepting of it happening. And the marks on his body that aren't the fresh wounds Fezile dresses probably explain more than he has to say anyway.

Steve is already clean and dressed and wearing a super-cool looking brace on his busted forearm by the time Fezile deposits him back in the clinic. (Seriously, it's iridescent and all smooth curves with patterned designs on it.)

"Oh, that's what you look like now," Steve greets him, looking him over with a mock-critical expression that's not entirely faked. "Might not have recognized you without the schmutz."

Bucky gives him a two-fingered salute before looking around. Shuri and T'Challa are both gone and the doctors are huddling in a corner having a confab. When they see him, however, they lower their voices and he rides out the quick shot of panic that rolls through him because he can assume what they were talking about and what comes next. Steve, who'd been sitting, stands up and chooses that moment to poke at the covering on Bucky's stump. Bucky frowns at him because he's not that delicate and Steve raises both eyebrows in a fashion that sometimes means "does it look like I care?" and sometimes means "fight me" and sometimes both.

"T'Challa has some kind of emergency council meeting and Shuri ran off to do..." Steve trails off with a helpless shrug. "Something to do with your new arm. You're getting a new arm, by the way."

Bucky wants to say something about the arm and maybe not being ready for a new one yet, but then the rest of what Steve said penetrates. They're in a country that has just lost its king and the guest of a man who has just lost his father and those facts are intertwined. T'Challa has a very full plate and he had a very full plate before he offered sanctuary to two old soldiers and the hope of freeing Bucky from the last of his chains.

"Don't," Steve tells him. "They want to do this, so let them."

He rolls his eyes instead of pointing out that Steve is, possibly literally, the last man on the planet who should be telling anyone to accept help and comfort. He's spent time with Steve now, the Steve of now, and he appreciates that while there are ways Steve has changed drastically since 1944, they are outnumbered by the ways he has not. He got asked more than once by Wilson and Barton and Wanda if Steve really has always been like whatever he was being at the moment. And most of the time the answer was yes. The Steve of now is no more likely than the Steve of then to let someone take care of him without a fight. The problem now is that the Avengers fighting Steve is different from the Commandos fighting Steve. To the Avengers, Steve is an icon more than a man; to the Commandos, he was a jumped-up chorus girl with less field time than Morita's socks and "with all due respect, sir, sit your ass down" got results.

Steve is spared being more explicitly called on his bullshit by the breakup of the doctor huddle and their approach. What follows is a brief and surprisingly understandable explanation of what they want to do to him -- with his permission. They're very clear that he gets a vote -- that he gets a veto -- and make sure he has no questions before they go on to the next part. It's partly that they've clearly been warned about his history, but also because they seem to genuinely want him to understand and see the potential value in every suggestion. Like they're selling 'free choice' as much as they are 'corrective surgery.' It's unnecessary -- Bucky thinks he has completely regained the ability to say no and thinks Steve would agree if asked -- but he appreciates it nonetheless.

It's not hard to understand the big picture, which involves repairing the ligament damage in his right shoulder and removing the prosthetic stump entirely from his left. He's accepted that as necessary and obvious from the get-go and they appreciate that and don't dwell on it. The bigger sell for them is that they want to remove all of the stuff on his left side, down to and including the metal cap on what's left of his humerus. They want to rebuild his arm from the foundation up and they want it to be the strongest foundation possible. It will allow for a greater range of options, they tell him, if the work is Wakandan all the way through.

"Options like lasers fingertips?" he asks, mostly to freak out Steve. But they say sure, if that's what he wants, and that probably freaks Steve out more.

The reason that he is getting the big sell is that such an overhaul will require several surgeries and they aren't sure he's willing (or able) to go along with that. If he's not, then they can remove the damaged parts and build him a new arm that will work with what Zola gave him. And it's that last part that wins out over the very real fear of surgery. "Get rid of all of it," he tells them firmly. "Take it all and melt it down and throw it in the deepest slag pit you've got."

He's maybe a little bit more vehement than he should have been judging by the looks on everyone's faces. He smiles, trying to ease the tension. "Laser fingertips would be very cool," he says, "and I'm willing to work for them."

He has no idea if he is willing or if he's able to back up his words, but they'll cross that bridge later. They won't do more than remove the damaged parts on the first go-round anyway, so he'll have a chance to change his mind.

The surgeries are set for two days from now -- his right shoulder doesn't hurt enough to rush things -- and he and Steve are brought upstairs by a little boy who is some kind of royal page. Poor kid's having a lot of trouble maintaining what is presumably the decorum of his job in the face of the fact that he's seeing his first two white people up close. It's adorable and very funny and both he and Steve do their best to not laugh at him because that would be cruel. They are led to a suite of rooms, an apartment almost, and their tiny guide tells them in very halting English that this is their home. He then bows deeply and backs out of the room... only to scurry back in, bow once more, and tell them that Anathi will be in to see them. And then he bows again with great ceremony and runs away.

The two of them lose it the minute the door clicks close and Bucky doesn't even care that it's making his wrapped ribs bark.

They go carefully exploring, finding two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchenette, and a balcony almost as big as the sitting room. It's rimmed in tall plants for privacy and it has a table and chairs and then two loungers and he and Steve exchange a glance and head straight for them with a smile.

It's only once he's settled that he exhales deeply and allows himself to acknowledge how tired he is. There's an emotional component to it that he doesn't really want to think about right now, but he's also just weary for the old-fashioned reasons. Steve is, too, and they both fall asleep pretty quickly. Steve first because he can hear the quiet whuffing that is the closest Steve gets to actually snoring.

When he wakes up, there's a bell sounding and he blinks stupidly for a second because he has no idea where he is for a hot second and that's an uncomfortable if very familiar experience. But he sees plant fronds and then Steve pulling himself up to sitting and he relaxes because if 'Wakanda' takes a moment, 'Steve' does not.

It takes them both an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to open the front door because there's no doorknob. They get it by accident, Steve waving his hand over a glowy thing Bucky had pressed to no effect a minute before.

On the other side is not Anathi, but instead T'Challa, who doesn't call them on their door-opening idiocy but maybe kind of wants to. At least until it becomes clear that they are missing a bit more essential information about their stay and their quarters and what has been planned for them because Anathi was supposed to have visited by now.

"It's a complicated time," Steve suggests carefully.

"Hospitality to guests is not complicated," T'Challa responds.

"You've been a lot more than hospitable," Steve returns with enough emphasis that T'Challa drops it. Instead, he tells them that they are in the guest quarters set aside for the Jabari representatives during a meeting of the Council.

"But the Jabari never show up," T'Challa goes on, amused at some joke neither Bucky nor Steve are meant to get. "It is good to finally get some use out of this space."

There is more, but it more or less boils down to that T'Challa is up to date on the medical stuff -- including reminding Bucky that he doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to. "Which includes anything my sister wants to do to you. Especially anything she wants to do to you."

He shows them what turns out to be the Wakandan version of the room service menu, a tablet computer that includes options for everything from summoning a cleaning crew or food to adjusting the climate control. He makes suggestions for what to order for dinner and encourages them to rest.

"I am sorry for the reasons that have brought you to Wakanda," he says, and Bucky knows he's thinking of the explosion that killed his father as much as anything that followed. "But at the same time, I am glad for new eyes to see it. We hide from the world and so I must hide my pride in my wonderful country. In my wonderful people and all they have accomplished. I hope you find this place as remarkable as I do."

The next day is busy in a less-demanding way. There's a lot of talking and a lot of eating and Bucky likes the latter much more. His consumption has been organized around nutritional requirements instead of appetite since he showed up at basic training in 1942 and he's been keen on fixing that. The Wakandans charged with keeping him fed are delighted to assist him in this -- he's game to try anything so long as he can eat it one-handed. Unlike Steve, who now that he can eat anything doesn't.

"You're allowed to branch out beyond what your poor Irish potato farmer grandparents ate," Bucky tells him as they sit in a garden with a table groaning with platters between them, the first time they've seen each other since breakfast. Bucky's on second helpings of everything, but Steve has restricted himself to tubers and chicken and salads after the initial foray. "The goat stew's really good."

Steve makes a face. "It's very goat-y," he replies. "And I eat fine. I just don't like spicy things."

Bucky rolls his eyes because that's merely the tip of the iceberg of what Steve doesn't like. "You weren't such a picky eater before," he says. "Nobody should be that hard to feed in Germany."

Even Wilson got tired of Steve's martyred look at having to eat currywurst because street food was safer to pick up than going into a grocery or restaurant and Steve hadn't wanted to try the other options because they were too weird for him. Barton had joked that he would have packed his kids' snacks if he'd known this was going to be a problem.

"There's probably going to be some kind of deal for whoever wants to take it," Steve says instead and it takes Bucky a beat to register the change in subject. "Lang and Clint are going to want to go home, however they have to do it. T'Challa's going to try to make sure they don't make it too hard on Lang."

Lang has a rap sheet and a kid he wants to see and that's a bad combination without adding 'internationally wanted terrorist' to the mix. Steve's mad at himself for making it worse for him, despite there being no way for him to know in advance and it being Lang's choice to go along once he realized what was up. Lang's mild case of hero worship's not on Steve, although that's yet to penetrate.

"So what are the rest of you going to do?" Bucky asks, spearing more veggies he can't identify but likes very much. "T'Challa's not going to let you run your Secret Avengers out of Wakanda."

He pretends not to see the flash of disappointment in Steve's face at 'you' instead of 'we.' He knows Steve wants him to ride shotgun on the next adventure and he also knows that Steve knows why he can't and it's for more reasons than just the crap in his head. Steve could stay -- Bucky is sure T'Challa would let him stay -- but he won't and Bucky is more resigned to that than anything else. Steve hasn't figured out how to stop fighting yet and it's pointless to ask more of him until he does. This is one of the biggest changes in Steve and Bucky doesn't know if it's something the future did to him or if it was their own war. Or Bucky's own 'death' in their own war. Back before Bucky fell from the train, Steve hadn't planned on being Captain America forever.

"I don't know what we're going to do," Steve admits, not pretending that he doesn't know that Wanda and Wilson are going to follow him wherever he winds up. "T''Challa and I were kind of talking about that, too."

Bucky chews and swallows. "What is there to talk about?"

T'Challa may think the Accords are a less grand idea now that they are practice instead of theory, but that's still a long way away from supporting Steve's rebellion on the sly. Although the guy does run around in a costume on the sly, so what does Bucky know?

"He's not sure bad oversight is better than no oversight," Steve answers with a one-shouldered shrug. "He doesn't like the Avengers running around doing what they want. He doesn't like Thunderbolt Ross turning them into his personal death squad or sending them off half-cocked with crappy intel. He's not sure which is the bigger problem. He's very sure that neither of them are as big a problem as what he has to do to take care of Wakanda right now."

Bucky doesn't miss the that the Avengers are 'they' and not 'we.' Steve assures him that this would have happened with or without him, that it was an inevitability and that Bucky's being the instigator is simply coincidence. That part Bucky believes absolutely -- Steve is done obeying orders he doesn't believe in and if it wasn't this, it would be something else. But it would have maybe been easier for Steve if it were something else, something that pitted Steve against Ross alone instead of against his friends. Then maybe he'd still have some of his life intact instead of it being a smoldering ruin in upstate New York.

"So he's gonna punt for now?" Bucky asks instead of bringing that up. They'll have that conversation again, probably more than once. But it doesn't need to be right now. "Let you just do your thing so long as he doesn't see any of it?"

Steve shrugs again. "Maybe a little more than that," he says. "He's got to figure out how to be king while also being the Black Panther and that's going to mean that he's got to work on the first part more than the second. Wakanda's well protected, but its protector's gonna be a little busy and..."

Bucky puts his fork down. "And he can't officially sanction your actions, but if you just happen to wind up where he might have offhandedly mentioned there was a problem..." he trails off. Steve's wry smile tells him that he knows what Bucky is going to say. "You are gonna be Wakanda's shabbas goy."

Once upon a time, the Barnes family lived on the same floor as the Goldsteins and Bucky -- and Steve -- knew the asking-but-not-asking that might happen on a Saturday even if they didn't understand the what and why of it. It was never "can you turn the light on?"; it was finding Feigy Goldstein reading in the hallway because the apartment had gotten too dark to see and then offering to turn the light on for her. And if Feigy maybe started singing in the hallway to make sure someone came out to see her, well, that was okay. Eighty years later, T'Challa is possibly whistling on the landing.

"We haven't exactly hashed out details," Steve demurs, but that is as good as a yes.

Bucky pauses. "You're not doing this for me, are you?"

Steve gives him a look that since 1924 has amply conveyed just how unimpressed with you he is. "No, Buck. I am not selling myself into servitude for your room and board. You are T'Challa's guest on your own merit and, if anything, I'm sponging off of his goodwill toward you."

Bucky doesn't understand T'Challa's generosity and it is making him nervous. He kind of knows that, but it feeds into itself. Some responses are hard to break and kindness, when it doesn't weird him out, makes him paranoid. He can, in some abstract way born of Sunday mornings on a hard pew at St. Anne's, appreciate that man is supposed to be good to those less fortunate, but it's been a long time since St. Anne's and Bucky's not sure what to do with this kind of grace. It's a language he doesn't speak anymore. Steve's been translating when he realizes it's necessary, which isn't all of the times it is.

"Shuri thinks laser beam fingertips are too old-school," Bucky says, which he only realizes after the fact is probably out of nowhere to Steve. Except it's not because Steve only looks relieved, not confused. "She did suggest grappling hooks, though. That might be more useful. The kid in the spider suit definitely had a few good ideas."

Shuri actually had a lot of suggestions, but the grappling hooks were the only one he didn't dismiss outright. She has a bit of mad scientist in her, a delight in pushing boundaries matched with the self-confidence that she could do whatever she dreamed up doing. It's more fascinating than scary up close; Shuri's joy and her desire to share it has absolutely nothing of the darkness of the HYDRA scientists who'd experimented on him. Watching her is like sitting in sunshine by comparison and he felt warmed by it.

Steve shakes his head in defeat. "You do what you want. It's your hand."

The hand is still pretty far down the line, however, and there are a lot of challenges to conquer before he can even consider it. The next day is his first surgery -- surgeries -- as the Wakandan doctors will have a go at both of his shoulders. He's fine right until he's not and Steve is there when that happens. So is Shuri, who doesn't understand the nature of his terror, but is very sure that talking him through it will help.

"Knowledge is power," she tells him as they sit next to a giant machine that looks more like a carnival ride than a medical tool with its vivid colors and wild designs along the sides. "Let me show you how we do things here in Wakanda."

She makes Steve get inside the machine and then brings up a 3D sand image of his body that Bucky is allowed to touch.

"I'm poking you in the head," he tells Steve, who cannot see a thing stuffed into the machine as he is. "Maybe now you'll make sense."

The sand image flips him the bird and Shuri's laughter echoes around the room.

Using Steve's sand body, Shuri shows him that fixing his right shoulder won't even require local anaesthesia. "Nanites," she explains. "It will be a quick prick from a needle and they will do the rest. Including stabilizing the repaired ligaments while they heal, so you will be able to move you arm freely right away."

Which is why the doctors even suggested doing both at once -- he wouldn't be left without a working arm at any point and apparently this was explained to him at the time, but it didn't register. Steve, now out of the machine, confirms to Shuri that it was, in fact, covered.

"This one's got the attention span of a gnat," he says, tilting his head toward Bucky. "Got him in trouble in school."

Steve is such a bad liar that even a sixteen year old girl who barely knows him can tell he's bullshitting. "You were very good in school," she tells Bucky firmly, like he needs to be reminded of that lest he believe Steve. "You started university. You should finish your studies here."

That makes him laugh, which Shuri misinterprets and visibly gears up to press the point.

"Brooklyn College was more than just eighty years ago," he says before she can build up steam. "Even before this--" he waggles the stump, "-- it would have been a laugher."

But Steve isn't laughing. "You could do it," he offers. "It'll be easier than last time if you're not working during the day. You were going to use your GI Bill money for it."

The Commandos had sat around a pub table and pondered their futures when they'd found out the Readjustment Act had passed, Bucky remembers suddenly. Like a lot of his memories from back then, it isn't precisely forgotten, just sort of misplaced until something -- usually a Steve-shaped something -- knocks it free. "City College," he murmurs, mostly to himself but Steve breaks into a wide grin at the confirmation that Bucky does, in fact, remember that night.

"He was going to switch schools and become a civil engineer," Steve tells Shuri conspiratorially, like he's ratting Bucky out. "Design the tunnels they were going to use when they pushed the rest of the elevated subways underground."

Shuri's eyes light up. "Oh, wait until you see our subway tunnels," she tells Bucky. Then she snaps her fingers. "But first, Sergeant Barnes, we need to fix your shoulder. Get in the machine, please."

The procedure to remove his busted prosthetic isn't nearly as simple, lighthearted, or non-invasive. They offer to knock him out entirely, but don't seem surprised when he rejects the suggestion. The staying-awake option comes with an electrode the size of a nickel that gets stuck to his left pectoral right where the scar tissue thins out; it has got more nanites and they are going to numb his shoulder without drugs. Which is very much a relief. Unfortunately, the staying-awake option also requires him to lie still on an operating table for hours as they crowd over the remains of his left arm and he cannot fight off the panic that produces. He tries, very hard. He's wearing earphones so that he can listen to soothing music that cuts out when the doctors want to explain something to him or ask him a question. When the music doesn't work, he has Steve in his ears talking to him about everything and nothing and Bucky tries to focus on the voice as much as the words. The voice that got through to him past seventy years of torture and mind-wiping and he wants it to be enough to get him through this. But he can feel tears sliding down his cheekbones past his ears and finally the doctors have to stop because his racing heartbeat is making the monitor beep with concern.

The knocked-out option becomes the only option because they cannot stop the procedure where they are -- they have to either push through or put things back on. Bucky agrees, then tells them to hurry before he changes his mind. The last thing he hears before he goes under is Steve promising he'll be safe.

He wakes up in a hospital room very much like the one where he showered a few days ago. It might even be the same room, except this time the curtains are pulled back and Steve is sitting in a corner with a tablet in his hand. He's got a minute to collect his thoughts before Steve realizes he's conscious and puts the tablet down to join him bedside.

"You still can't go through a metal detector," Steve tells him, "but you weigh less than you did this morning."

Bucky turns his head slowly to the left. It's all covered up with much heavier stuff than what had been on before, but he can still tell that there's a lot less there than there had been. He always forgets that his left shoulder is partially intact under the metal cap, so the real drop-off in mass is where the metal bicep had once been and now there's just a well-padded nubbin. He tries to move it and can't; it's held in place.

The operation went fine, Steve goes on, and the doctors took advantage of the extra time afforded them to get a little more done than they had originally planned. "Cleanup work, they said," Steve says with a shrug. "They'll explain it to you later and maybe you'll get more of it than I did. I just looked at the pretty sand pictures and nodded."

Neither of them talk about his freak-out on the table. Steve goes back to his tablet and Bucky falls asleep again. When he wakes up the second time, Steve tells him T'Challa stopped by and will see him later.

By the time he's released the next morning, T'Challa has seen him, Shuri has seen him twice, and the doctors have come and given him a very dumbed-down explanation of what they did. Which more or less boils down to the cleanup work Steve said. They tell him that everything they told him at the beginning still holds -- he can stop now and they'll be able to replace the arm with what's left or they can continue on and take out the rest and replace it with Wakandan tech. They also tell him that he should wait a few days to answer. Which is just as well because he has no idea what his answer would be. He wants it all gone, but he doesn't want to feel like he did on the table again, not even for a good reason. He's not keen on being completely knocked out for reasons that he won't explain to Steve entirely because he doesn't want to deal with the argument that will follow.

Steve does not know that he's asked Shuri about a cryo tank. (Shuri doesn't think he's serious, but he is.) And Steve will not take that revelation well and Bucky does not want to spend whatever time he has left awake fighting with him about a choice that's really no choice at all. Not when he's a danger to everyone as he is -- and not when he's in danger of losing himself to the next sicko with the right keys to unlock the monster in his head.

Getting knocked out for the arm procedure will be a reminder of what he was and what he still is and why he needs to be put back under ice and he doesn't need that reinforced. He doesn't need Steve thinking about it, either. That's a sword of Damocles that can hang over him alone for a while.

With their more minor injuries healing and healed, he and Steve are in a bit of limbo right now, the quiet between what will come and what has gone before. Idleness is a little foreign to both of them -- "at least when we're at greater than room temperature" -- and their ability to wait out the fog over their futures is sometimes better than others. They aren't bored, Wakanda's endless novelty making that impossible, but they are occasionally restless. Which is how they find themselves the Laurel and Hardy of the south-facing gardens after a public humiliation via soccer ball. The kids around the palace quickly realize that the two of them are a couple of easy marks because enhanced reflexes can't cover for inexperience playing the game. Or save their dignity, since there's undoubtedly video.

They are not completely at rest, however, or isolated from what is going on outside Wakanda's borders. The world's governments are still focused on the Accords, mostly because of the fight at the airport. There's a push to revise them to make them more strict and clamp down even further on the Avengers' actions. There's also a push to void the Accords entirely because they were intended to reduce the chance of destruction and yet this was a sanctioned action and there won't be air service to Leipzig-Halle for weeks. There's a curious lack of interest in the individuals involved, not the Avengers staying or leaving, not himself for his role or lack thereof in the bombing, and not the unexpected supernumeraries.

"That's by intent," Steve tells him. "If they start talking about the two of us, they have to start talking about the others, including the Queens kid with the spider webs. Who is definitely not old enough to be doing this and is also just as definitely not on the official roster of badged Avengers. They don't want to have to unmask a kid to throw him in the Raft for violating the Accords -- or have to publicly ask why Tony pulled him into this in the first place. Easier and cleaner all around if they say that they're still working on what the Accords mean. It's probably going to be how Clint and Lang stay out of prison."

Steve is in contact with all of them; Shuri gave him a phone that can't be traced. (She offered one to Bucky, too, but he pointed out that he has nobody to call since Steve is usually in earshot.) Wilson is in South Carolina, apparently, laying low with cousins and getting fat on barbecued pork. At least that's what he told Steve. Wanda is in Prague being a tourist; both of them want to know where Steve is. He hates lying to them, but pretty much the only condition on Steve's residence in Wakanda is that he can't ever talk about Wakanda. So as far as Wilson and Wanda know, Steve and Bucky are somewhere warm where Tony can't find them.

"I think Sam thinks we're in Costa Rica," Steve says. "Tony doesn't speak understandable Spanish."

Costa Rica does not, to Bucky's knowledge, have rhinoceroses. Wakanda, on the other hand, raises them like horses, and that's only one of the animals he and Steve get to meet up close on their safari. It was a suggestion from Zuri, apparently, who thought that his king's guests might be getting a little cabin fever stuck in the palace compound day after day. They can't wander around in the streets -- there might be spies in Wakanda, T'Challa admits, and there are definitely people in the outside world who know the nation's true face. It's a risk that T'Challa is uncomfortable taking and Steve and Bucky are disinclined to press the issue. Steve can work off his excess energy fighting in melees with the Dora Milaje and Bucky is content in his absolute lack of wanderlust.

Which does not mean that he isn't slack-jawed with awe at his first face-to-face meeting with a giraffe.

The safari is a week traveling around Wakanda outside the bubble that hides the real capital. (The for-show capital that has all of the embassies is on the other side of the country. T'Challa visits it once a week, usually.) They have a guide, Bomani, who is not only there to help them find and interact with the animals, but also to guide them in the weird covert technology that gets used in Wakanda outside of the bubble. Their vehicle is a jeep that has a chassis that might be from the Fifties and hasn't been cleaned since the Eighties, but has an engine that looks like it's from space. Their tent could come from any camping store in the West, but it retracts into a marble that fits in your pocket.

"I finally feel like I'm not a time traveler and then I show up here," Steve sighs to him as they watch Bomani pull up a solid-light map from another marble so that they can find where the okapi are hanging out this time of year. But then he grins broadly. "Isn't it awesome?"

Bucky can only smile in return because yes, it is.

He didn't originally think they really needed time away, but maybe the did because outside of the palace, in the middle of the Wakandan bushland, is the first time he and Steve have gotten to be he-and-Steve pretty much since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. It's a chance for them to be Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers, hanging out because they can and because they want to. Not Sergeant Barnes and Captain Rogers, not the Winter Soldier and Captain America, not soldiers, not servants, not refugees from a justice that maybe isn't. They're not chasing each other anymore and they're not dragging each other into or out of danger's path. They don't have anyone to fight at all and it's here, in the middle of effing nowhere, that they get to realize that they can still carry on a conversation that's not about war. That their wildly different and yet really-kinda-not experiences apart have not changed them in ways that make them no longer complementary together. It's a relief, yeah, but it's also a joy to have that missing part of yourself not only found again, but also still fitting.

He initially thinks it's that this is the most human he's felt since the Helicarrier, but by the time they get back, he realizes that it's actually that this is the first time since the Helicarrier that feeling human hasn't hurt.

There is still the question of whether there will be more surgery on his arm, but just the thought of considering it doesn't make him tense up anymore.

Regardless of what he chooses to do, he still has to go sit for more scans of his stub as it is so that Shuri can design either the new arm compatible with what he has or the new base for an entirely new setup.

"Don't you have better things to do?" he asks her as she shoos away her assistants to work on him herself.

"What makes you think I am not already doing them?" she retorts. "This isn't very hard."

They spend a long time going over the scans. Shuri hates the HYDRA work that's left. "It's ugly and primitive and inefficient. They could have done so much better work, even with what they had. This part, over here? They had to replace it because they didn't choose a material that could stand up to daily use. It's an arm, not the fancy dishes!"

He doesn't tell her that he was HYDRA's version of the fancy dishes. They built the arm to survive cryo as much as to allow him to be as lethal as he was.

Shuri gives him a marble -- actual name being kimoyo bead -- to take with him. It has got his scans on it, all of them from the beginning, and some preliminary designs for what his new arm might look like, on whatever foundation it ends up being built on. She shows him how to use the bead, which is a lot like the one Bomani had for maps, but not enough that Bucky doesn't screw it up the first time he tries it.

"You are worse than a toddler," she chides, taking it from him and turning it off to reset it before handing it back. "I'm lucky you don't try to eat it."

He laughs at that -- his ribs are healed enough that it doesn't hurt -- and she smiles. "It's good to see you laugh, Sergeant Barnes."

"Bucky," he reminds her. She rolls her eyes.

A couple of men in white scrubs come running in, bead necklaces jangling with each step. They call to Shuri in Xhosa and all Bucky can make out is the word for "explosion" because his vocabulary is pretty much food and war right now. There is a brief, animated discussion as Shuri questions them (something is unstable, that much he's sure of; something else is porridge, which he's less sure of, but it could be slang) and she sends them on their way.

A few more things to go over and then it's Bucky's turn to go.

"If -- if -- you want to go through with this," Shuri says as he's almost at the door, "I have an idea for how to make it more comfortable for you."

He's pretty sure there's nothing that could make it more comfortable for him, but he appreciates the gesture and nods thanks.

Steve, sporting a large bruise on his left cheek up near his eye courtesy of a Dora weapon, is as fascinated by the kimoyo bead as Bucky is. They go over his shoulder scans like they once went over maps of Europe, poring over the details and forgetting that they were supposed to be eating while they do it. It feels weird to be so amazed by something that's been attached to him for so long, regardless of how it got attached in the first place, but he is. It's a technological marvel, better than any prosthetic other people can get, better than anything Tony Stark ever built for himself, and he never really gave it a second thought before Stark blew it off.

"It was just there," he tries to explain once he says as much to Steve. "It was a part of me. I didn't put much thought into how my real arm was put together, either."

Steve grins wryly. "I did. Not your arm, although I had a lot of questions about it once I saw it. But how I was put together. How I was changed."

"Well, you went into a tube a shrimp and came out a lobster. I'd wonder about that, too," Bucky points out reasonably. "Would have hoped you'd have come up with an answer after eighty years, but you were always slow."

Steve frowns at him.

The discussion about what to do about his arm takes place later, after Bucky needs Steve's help to tie his shoelaces. He wanders around in sandals most of the time because those he can put on and take off by himself, but they're getting a tour of the vibranium mine and his boots are a must. He and Steve have more or less worked out what he needs Steve's help with and how to go about it without making it more of a fuss than it needs to be. But it's still never not a reminder of why it's necessary and what can be done to make it not so.

"I think you should do it," Steve tells him, double-knotting the laces. "It's what you want. It's maybe what you need. I know why you think you shouldn't, but I think you can and that everyone is willing to help."

Bucky frowns at him because it's not that easy and Steve knows it's not that easy.

"The thing I hate most about what was done to you," Steve says as he stands up, "One of the things, because it's a really long list. But what I hate the absolute most is that it took away your faith in people. All you saw was the worst we can be and it made you forget the not-worst. You don't trust people not to hurt you and it never crosses your mind that someone might do more than the bare minimum to help you without there being something in it for them. And all of that was justified, but... This is your first chance to build your future, Buck. To decide how you're going to live and not just survive. But you're going to need more than the arm to do it. You're going to have to relearn how to expect more from people than the occasional scraps of kindness tossed your way by accident.

"Nobody here thinks fixing your arm is the same thing as helping swap out a tire like a good samaritan on the side of the road," he goes on. "They're not eager to get you an all-Wakandan arm just because they're so sure that their stuff is better and want to show it off. They want you to be happy and free and they understand the symbolism of not building a new arm on top of what HYDRA forced on you. And I'm not sure you see any of that for what it is."

Steve stops talking and Bucky looks back up at him instead of at the floor. He knows this is a necessary conversation, that Steve is right and he did not -- does not -- recognize the motivation of the Wakandan generosity for what it apparently is. But he also hates this conversation because it's been a constantly necessary conversation because he really is that fucked in the head and he doesn't like the part where that's pointed out. He also doesn't like the look on Steve's face when he gets fresh evidence that HYDRA broke more than Bucky's arm.

"I think this is a really good place to take a first leap of faith in people because they're going to catch you," Steve says once Bucky meets his gaze. And then he shrugs and gives Bucky a wry smile. "You've made crazier jumps for reasons not nearly as good."

"Parachuting into Italy in '43 doesn't count," Bucky says, standing up. He's being intentionally obtuse and Steve knows it. Steve also probably knows that Bucky doesn't have the words to say what he really wants to say -- or maybe the courage to say them if he did. "Jumping off of the Fulton Ferry to impress Mildred Crawford probably does, though."

Steve lights up, the way he does every time Bucky remembers something he didn't. "Oh, that definitely counts," he agrees. "You had to eat standing up for a week after that belting. And Mildred thought you were too young for her anyway."

Just in case Bucky thought the change of topic was successful, Steve pulls him into a one-armed hug as he passes by to get the cloth wrap he was given in lieu of a coat. Steve has one, too, and they were told to bring them because the mine is cold, but Bucky's has a loop and button on his so that he can work it one-handed and it dawns on him that this is maybe not a standard style but a custom alteration.

The mine doesn't look like anything out of a movie about the California Gold Rush, that's for certain. It looks more like Star Wars, with little and not-so-little craft flying around and robots moving the glowing vibranium here and there. It's fascinating and Bucky would be content to watch just this, but that's not what they've been brought here to see.

"Magnets," Shuri says very smugly as they watch a train go flying by -- literally flying by, with no tracks and no wheels and no screeching metal as it makes a sharp turn into a tunnel. "Thomas the Tank Engine wishes he could move like this."

Which is a reference that Bucky doesn't get, but Steve might because he chuckles.

They walk where the rails would be if they existed so that Shuri can show them up close the arms that open and close as trains approach.

"You're not going to stick to them like a bug on fly paper, are you?" Steve asks him as they stand next to an arm. "They didn't take all of the metal out of you."

Bucky just rolls his eyes; Steve is pleased enough by his joke for the both of them.

"Stand back," Shuri warns as she points to a light in the near distance that has changed from blue to orange. "There's plenty of clearance, but my brother would never forgive me if you got splattered."

They stand on the side as a train speeds past them and he can feel the magnetic forces like a hum in his bones, but not as any kind of physical pull. He drops down into a crouch to better see the undercarriage, the shimmery nothing where the wheels would be on this flying train. And then he falls on his ass because his balance is fine when he's standing up, but less so when he's not. Steve's hand is on his shoulder to steady him lest he fall toward the train, but he's pretty steady sitting down and so instead he pulls Steve down with him and Steve goes, smiling. So the two of them are sitting on the train bed like the world's most confused hobos. Which they maybe sort of are.

"You two are very strange," Shuri says as she looks down at them. The train has passed, but instead of getting up, Bucky gestures with a tilt of his head for her to sit down. She shakes her head no, but then Steve beckons with his hand and she makes a show of how ridiculous she thinks this is before she sits down on Bucky's left side.

"When we lived in New York," he tries to explain, "almost all of the subways in New York were still elevated. You'd hear the screeching of the brakes for blocks."

"Or when they had to make a turn," Steve adds, because he understands. "They were hot in the summer and cold in the winter and the wicker seats always had sharp bits sticking out. Our Moms and sisters ruined a lot of stockings on those."

The two of them end up giving Shuri a very peculiar history of the subway, light on the technical detail and heavy on the details that mattered, like the stink of the Joralemon Street tunnel and different styles of fare-beating and why sitting at the end of the car was best in winter but worst in summer. It's their way of trying to explain why this is so amazing to them, this one more thing Shuri takes for granted as old hat because she's a genius and because she's a product of Wakanda. It's also them pulling out more bits of their memories and wiping off the dust and finding them intact. Which Bucky thinks is important to Steve, too, because Steve hasn't really put enough effort into being Steve and not Captain America in this future they've found themselves in. The one that now contains flying trains.

If Shuri's bored, she hides it well, but Bucky doesn't think she is. She thinks the rest of the world is little better than cavemen and here the two of them are whatever came before even that, but while she is still quick to make fun of them, she also is a little fascinated by what they have to share. Wakanda is the bleeding edge of technology, but they are still a nation that tells the stories of their forefathers with great reverence and respect. The history of Wakanda could be squished into a kimoyo bead, but it's not; it's told with great ceremony at every opportunity. Shuri doesn't know enough about the world to appreciate how not common that is and how easy it is to manipulate events when you can take advantage of that ignorance. Instead, she expects him and Steve to have the stories of their people within them, too, and has both the good manners and the natural curiosity to offer to listen. Even if she can't quite get over that they grew up with black-and-white movies that had no sound but for the piano player down front.

Nonetheless, she ends their adventure with the gift of kimoyo bead bracelets, which everyone in Wakanda not them seems to wear. (Bucky's is looped on a cord for around his neck.) They are the smartphones of Wakanda, capable of everything from holographs to whatever else a computer or phone could do. She is extremely dubious that they'll be able to use them successfully, which was why she'd given Steve a phone, but T'Challa thinks it is time and so she is obeying. "Please do not chew on them."

After they get back to their apartment, they spend the rest of the evening futzing with the beads and more or less proving Shuri correct. Steve doesn't mention the arm again the rest of the night, not when he undoes Bucky's shoelaces and not when he loads up the toothbrush with toothpaste. Instead he mulls Shuri's suggestion of a drawing tablet to replace the notepad and pencils he's been carrying around everywhere for the last few weeks.

"I had one back in New York," he admits. "It was fun in some ways and really frustrating in others -- I don't like pressing too hard with the stylus because I'm afraid I'm going to break it, so my lines weren't always what I wanted them to be. And you have to plug them in to recharge and I have enough trouble remembering to charge my phone. But I do like the undo function more than an eraser."

Bucky accepts the toothbrush Steve is holding out to him. "How much of this is just you being a stubborn old fart who doesn't like that everyone thinks you're being a stubborn old fart?"

Steve is no more or less contrary now than then, but that just means that he's still a big fan of planting his flag because he's got one in his hand instead of because there's a good reason.

"Probably a little," Steve admits. "But it doesn't feel like it."

Two days later, Steve gets a message through Wilson that the Black Widow wants to talk. Wilson is very suspicious and Bucky doesn't blame him, not when the Widow was on the other side of the airport fight and Wilson's still hiding from the authorities. But Steve tells Wilson that he's pretty sure that the Widow's not interested in bringing any of them in. "She let us go, Sam," Steve tells him over the phone he's still using to talk to his friends because he doesn't want to accidentally give anything away with the kimoyo beads he's still not really good at using. "She held the Black Panther at gunpoint and let us go after Zemo. And then after we were gone, she convinced him why Bucky wasn't his father's murderer."

Bucky can't hear the other half of the conversation beyond the fact that Wilson's got his voice raised, but judging from Steve's responses, Wilson's not convinced that the Widow's ethics and morals are more than situational and their years of fighting together aren't necessarily evidence to the contrary.

Still, the end result is that Steve asks T'Challa if there's a way he can go meet the Widow in neutral territory. There is, of course, and T'Challa offers to send along some backup because he's not quite sure this is on the up-and-up, either. But Steve only ends up accepting the ride to Tetouan and some false papers to get him up to Seville on his own. Bucky doesn't offer to go along; they both know why it's a bad idea on many levels.

It's one of those levels that Bucky finally addresses while Steve is away. "I want to do the whole arm," he tells the medical staff at the next meeting. "But not right away. That's not the most important part of what HYDRA left inside of me that I need to get rid of."

Which turns the medical confab into a much different meeting, one with T'Challa. "I'm a timebomb," Bucky tells the king. "With what's still in my head, I'm a danger to everyone and myself. Putting a fancy new arm on me is also upgrading the Winter Soldier's weaponry and I don't want to do that -- and you shouldn't want to do that, either."

T'Challa is a glass-half-full kind of guy like Steve is, Bucky has come to understand. But he's also the ruler of a secret kingdom and he doesn't have Steve's history with him -- or Steve's desperate need to hold him close no matter the cost. T'Challa knows that the longer Bucky's wandering around, the greater the odds that someone recognizes him and reports it to someone who cares. Bucky is safer in Wakanda than anywhere else on Earth, but that's not the same thing as safe and T'Challa has first-hand experience with what happens if -- when -- he is found by the wrong people.

"Our best option should not be keeping you hobbled," T'Challa says, not disagreeing with his argument. "Your quality of life should be a consideration and not the last one. That is not why I invited you to Wakanda."

The obvious solution is also the most impossible solution: breaking HYDRA's mental conditioning.

Bucky has been aware that there's been a working group of psychiatrists and psychologists and neurologists and whoever else can contribute, all of them trying to come up with a way to clean his mind of HYDRA's sticky taint. He's only met with them twice, the first time to be introduced and to make sure that he was comfortable with them taking on his case and the second time to answer a list of questions carefully prepared to better focus their research. But they've otherwise left him alone, not seeing the point of either getting his hopes up or distressing him with ideas that can't be implemented. He assumes Shuri's been involved in some capacity, but she hasn't ever said anything to him and he hasn't asked.

Turns out she has been on the case since the beginning and there's been a very good reason she hasn't said anything about it.

"I've been reading up on the machines HYDRA used on you," she tells him while they sit on a ledge of the vibranium mountain. She's packed them a picnic, everything edible with one hand, and the leftover food sits between them. "It was very distressing to me and I am so very, very sorry for what they did to you."

Her distress is clear in her voice and Bucky reaches out over the picnic spread to touch her elbow and make her look up at him. "I thank you for the sympathy, but you have nothing to apologize for, so don't."

It takes her a minute to get her emotions back under control and Bucky gives her the time, looking out at the vista before them. Wakanda is beautiful from all angles.

"The group wants to find an approach that does not mimic the original methods," she finally goes on, eyes on the same horizon. "They -- we -- would like it to be more like deprogramming someone from a cult or a bad religion. There is a lot of research on that and here, in Africa, there is a lot of need for it. We have people who have a lot of experience doing that work and while it would be a very hard process for you, it would not feel like we were picking up where your torturers had left off.

"But after researching HYDRA's technology, I don't think such methods would work. I'm sure they would not. The machine they used to... "

"To wipe me," he finishes for her because she's struggling to find words that won't horrify them both and he's hard to horrify anymore, at least about that.

"From the behavior it elicited," she continues with a quick nod, an acknowledgment that she understands that he understands. "We assumed that it essentially partitioned your mind, like a hard drive. It was why you still had access to skills but had no memory of where you'd picked them up. But that's not what it did. There was no partitioning. There was -- is -- a virus. It corrupted everything and used the corrupted memories to build what they wanted. But the new construction wasn't completely stable because the brain is very complicated. So the machine that 'wiped' you wasn't about destruction or partition -- it was to optimize the corrupted data to rebuild what they wanted. That is why the triggers still work -- everything is still there."

It's his turn to take a minute to digest what she's telling him. And then to squash down the ache of sorrow because this was his only chance of staying out of cryo -- of having a life -- and he cannot drop that disappointment on a sixteen-year-old girl who would take it as a personal failure even though she shouldn't. "So I more or less have a cancer in my mind," he says. "You can't cure cancer by talking it out."

He doesn't think he did a very good job of hiding his feelings if Shuri's face is any indication.

"You can't cure cancer by talking it out," she agrees solemnly. But then she puts on her most serious expression. "But that is why we will investigate other methods. Curing cancer is messy and harmful and unpleasant, but in many cases it can be done. We will find a way to do it. I will find a way to do it."

He smiles then, because the alternative is to cry and if he does, she will, and the two of them will spend the rest of the afternoon sobbing on a mountaintop. "If anyone can, you will."

He maybe does a little bit of sobbing in his quarters because he had gotten so quickly acclimated to Wakanda being a place of magic that he allowed himself to hope everything would work out. To maybe even expect it a little and he's angry at himself for that because when in the last seventy-five years has anything gone perfectly for him? He knows he's grieving, but it feels like self-pity and so he washes his face and goes down to where the Dora Milaje train and asks if they don't mind a one-armed chew toy instead of their usual two-armed one who is currently in transit back from Spain.

He doesn't like to fight for fun and he doesn't take joy in his body's capacity the way Steve does. But it gets him out of his head for a while, forces him to concentrate on other things, and he feels better afterward. Lighter. And sore as hell, but he actually fared a helluva lot better than he thought he would.

Steve gets back two days later. He's been gone two weeks and looks a little lighter for it, too. He spent most of the time talking to the Widow about the state of things -- and about Bucky. "So you two are actually on a first-name basis," Steve prompts with curious delight. The Widow -- Natalia -- has clearly told him something, but not actually anything because Steve is asking him. (And he is choosing not to answer.) Steve also saw Wanda, first separately and then with Natalia, and she is faring well bumping around Europe pretending to be a student on a gap year adventure.

"Lang and Barton will be more or less fine," Steve reports. "The rest of us are not and that will include Natasha because General Ross knows that she let us go. She doesn't know if it was T'Challa who told him or Tony or whether it was done intentionally or not. I told her I didn't think T'Challa was that kind of man, but she said that I didn't think Tony was that kind of man, either, until he tried to kill you so I don't get a vote."

He's remarkably chipper for someone who's possibly going on the docket at the Hague, but he shrugs when Bucky points that out.

"The only laws I broke were stupid ones," he says and Bucky groans out loud at that. "What?"

"What?" Bucky repeats, shaking his head. "You know what."

Their good humor lasts precisely as long as it takes for Steve to ask how the medical consult about his arm went. Which is thankfully the next day because they are distracted by what Steve brought back with him from Europe. Steve has souvenirs from both Spain and Morocco and they are all ridiculous, including the candy that Bucky ends up eating because Steve can't read Arabic very well and the fig filling is not a happy surprise for him.

"They can't fix me," is how Bucky answers the question, which is not exactly what Steve is asking, but that's what's paramount in Bucky's mind.

The longer explanation is hard to get out and frustrating because Steve keeps interrupting to question whether Bucky heard things correctly.

"You don't always hear what is actually being said," Steve retorts after Bucky shouts at him for it. "You know that you do this!"

"Well, this time I'm not," Bucky assures.

Steve drops it, but he might have been humoring Bucky because he reacts like he's been shot when Shuri confirms it a few days later. Bucky takes Steve with him to the appointment Shuri set up to do some brain wave monitoring (or whatever it actually is, but that's how she explains it to him) and tells her it's okay to talk about whatever in front of him. It's what she has to say that's not okay and Steve can hear it straight from the source.

"They'll figure something out," Steve says once they're back in their apartment. He sounds like he believes it, but his face says that he knows how little that will help.

In a perverse sort of way, it's a comfort to have someone to be utterly miserable with. Steve wants him to have a life even more than he does on some days and, right now, the disappointment can crush them both together. They stick closer to each other than usual for the next few days, not talking about why. Bucky takes Steve up to the mountaintop where Shuri brought him and they sit and marvel at the view.

"Does it hurt to think about everything from before?"

Bucky looks over at Steve, honestly not sure what he's asking. "You mean literally or metaphorically?"

Steve puts down the sandwich he's been inhaling. "Literally. Shuri said that the Winter Soldier is built out of your memories that HYDRA infected. So me asking you to think about that stuff all of the time..."

Bucky smiles because Steve is genuinely worried about this and possibly has been since Tuesday, when they saw Shuri. "It doesn't hurt me physically, no. It's hard to think about the boy I was because I know who he grew up to be, but that's something else."

Steve nods, clearly relieved, and goes back to his sandwich. Their baseline with each other is calibrated to their not-insignificant sets of issues.

"I am, however, so very fucking pissed off that HYDRA took the only part of me that I thought they couldn't touch and ruined it, too," Bucky says after a few moments. He's never put the thoughts into words before, not even in his head; it's just been an inchoate rage simmering and he's been slow to recognize it because he's got so many reasons to be so furious. "I had twenty-six years of a pretty good life before HYDRA knew my name, twenty-seven before they took me over. That part should be sacrosanct, you know? HYDRA shouldn't be able to get their hands on my family, on my friends, on everything that was good in my world before I went to war. But they did and they've been using it against me ever since and I can't get rid of that without losing everything I've ever loved."

His voice breaks on the last word and so he shuts up. Steve puts down his sandwich and wipes his hands on his jeans and scootches over so that he can pull Bucky in to a hug and Bucky goes because now that he has the words to name this horrible thing, he's exhausted and feeling very fragile and very sad. He's outlived all of his masters -- Schmidt, Karpov, Lukin, Pierce -- but they have their claws in him so deeply that not even their deaths can free him. If HYDRA can't have him, no one can. Not even Steve and not even himself.

He's not exactly surprised when Steve announces a couple of days later that they are going on another little safari. Just the two of them -- and a lot of giraffes. They have a jeep and their tent-in-a-marble and the Border Tribe rangers who see them wave because if they're not exactly natives, they're at least familiarly strange. They've met W'Kabi at the palace and while they don't see him out here, his warriors are friendly and offer advice for where to set up camp and where to find the newest giraffe calves. It's not enough to distract him -- or Steve -- from what they now know, but he's willing to let Steve try his best for the both of them. All throughout Steve talks about their youth, about the ridiculous things they got up to and their families and how Steve's Ma always brought two pies to the Barnes's Thanksgiving -- the apple one with raisins that Bucky's dad loved beyond all else and then whatever else she'd wanted to make. He's trying to free Bucky's past from what binds it and Bucky loves him for it even as they both know it won't work.

The third time Bucky meets the brainwashing working group, Shuri is there and so is T'Challa and so is Steve. Which is all to the good because the discussion is one that could never take place without all of them there.

"I do not think that you appreciate the gravity of your proposal," T'Challa tells his sister, breaking the silence because nobody else would.

"I understand, Brother," Shuri insists and Bucky knows she can't even fathom how much she doesn't. "I don't make it lightly."

She wants to activate the Winter Soldier. She wants to see how the trigger process affects Bucky's brain and whether that brain functions differently with the Soldier in control. It would be the best way of accelerating the research into how to defeat his programming, she is sure. And all of them are actually sure it will, too. But there are three people in the room who know who and what the Winter Soldier really is and what's he's capable of and why how Bucky feels about reliving past trauma is the least problematic part of the proposal.

He knows that he has the deciding vote, that if he says he can't or he won't nobody will challenge him or think less of him for making the job harder than it already is. And he knows that Steve, sitting to his left, is very eager to hear those words from him. But Bucky hasn't said them yet and he's not sure he will. It will get them closer to maybe coming up with a cure and he's exactly that desperate for the hope that they might. And, the bleakly pragmatic part of him believes, if he's going to be in Wakanda in any state, walking around or in a cryo tube, then everyone needs to know what they might be dealing with. The Dora can gang up on him now and he'll go down, but they haven't gone up against the Soldier and if T'Challa can at least hold his own, nobody else in the palace has a prayer. One-armed or not.

But everyone else is far more concerned with his comfort than their own safety and he appreciates it, but it's not... helpful? Necessary? He's spent too long as a tool and a weapon to feel as strongly as they do about his own pain and he'd walk through Hell itself if it meant he could come through the other side with his head clear.

"I'll do it," he says and the room erupts and Bucky regrets that Steve is to his left because he can't reach out and keep him from flying out of his chair.

"No," Steve insists. Begs. "Bucky, no."

Bucky looks up at him because Steve doesn't realize he's looming and telling him not to is just going to make things worse. "Leap of faith, Steve," he says instead and he can see the words register. "This is much more than an arm. And you'll be there to catch me, right?"

Steve looks miserably at him and then sits down heavily, rubbing his hands over his face before returning Bucky's gaze. "Yeah, Buck," he sighs, defeated. "Always."

The decision takes a lot of the tension out of the room and allows Shuri to direct the discussion back toward what might be accomplished and how best to accomplish it. She's focused entirely on the science, on the monitoring and the testing and how what tech they have can be used and what will need to be created for the purpose. She's not thinking about containment or defensive perimeters or the possible authorization of lethal force; she waves these considerations aside under the tidy banner of "safety protocols" and her scientists and medical people go along without pause. But T'Challa does not. Bucky can see that he's following along, but he's also clearly thinking about other things and Bucky knows that those other things are the dangers of the Winter Soldier unchained.

Closer by, Steve is doodling on the tablet Shuri finally got him to accept. He's drawing ivy with flowers on it and Bucky knows from a thousand SSR briefings that this is Steve receiving orders he hates but will obey. At least it's not street scenes; a roasted chestnut cart or someone sitting on a stoop is a warning flag for insubordination because it means Steve has stopped listening entirely and is just killing time before he goes off to do something nobody wants him to do.

But today Steve just waits along with Bucky and T'Challa for the room to empty after the science part of the discussion is complete. Shuri looks like she might try to stay, too, but she has a silent conversation with her brother and instead bids them a good afternoon.

"I believe that I told you that you were not obligated to go along with my sister's ideas," T'Challa tells Bucky, a late smile spoiling the stern tone, when it is just the three of them.

It's too soon for anything like details and both Steve and T'Challa do him the favor of not second-guessing his choice, so they focus on the Soldier. T'Challa has a list of thoughtful questions and Bucky answers them completely, aware that most of them are questions Steve has undoubtedly wondered about but would never in a million years give voice to.

"I have zero ability to take control," Bucky says with a grimace. "I'm usually there, but not there enough."

"Like sitting in a sidecar?" Steve asks warily. This matters to him more than anything, Bucky knows, and for more than merely practical reasons. "Or like a ghost?"

He pauses a beat to try to come up with the words to describe the most awful hell anyone could ever conceive.

"Like I'm sitting in the back of a movie theater," he finally answers. "I can talk to who I see on the screen, but they won't hear me any more than the movie characters do. And sometimes I sleep through the feature because there's plenty of things the Soldier did that I don't remember seeing but I know happened."

He lied to Stark about remembering killing Howard and his wife. He watched the video knowing how it ended, but not the details. And the most perverse part of it all is that seeing the tape made the nightmares about it go away. Before, he'd have horrible dreams of slaughtering Howard (a young Howard, the one he bummed cigarettes off of, not the middle-aged man who died in the snow) in macabre ways and he'd wake up wanting to puke. But seeing the actual murders, seeing his own hands and his own dead eyes and how banal all of it actually was... He's broken-hearted that Howard recognized him, but he has nightmares about other crimes he doesn't remember now.

There is some disagreement between him and Steve about how easy or not it will be to take Bucky's body back from the Soldier. They agree it will be difficult, but Steve's faith in past methods implies that there is a method beyond the two of them beating each other half to death.

"It was easier the second time," Steve insists. "You came out of it on your own. You knew who you were."

Which is true in the sense that Bucky knew that there was a Bucky Barnes he was supposed to be, as opposed to the first time on the Helicarrier when it had all been a jumble and he'd only really understood that he was someone other than the Soldier and that Steve was important to whoever that was.

"I'm not sure how much of an anchor that is," he says, holding up his hand because Steve is about to protest. "This isn't a self-esteem issue. We know that the Soldier is build out of who I am, too. We might have gotten lucky last time that the coin came up Bucky Barnes and not the Winter Soldier."

"Perhaps not," T'Challa interrupts Steve's flustering. "From what I understand, the Winter Soldier is a... construct... that cannot stand forever on its own. You were tortured to keep the Soldier intact and you have not been subject to that torture for some time now. It could be that the response to the triggers is still strong, but the result grows weak."

Bucky cocks an eyebrow. "Did I seem that weak to you when I broke out of confinement?"

He knows T'Challa doesn't mean physically, but his question stands even from a psychological standpoint. He doesn't remember anything between Zemo finishing the trigger sequence and waking up with his arm pinned in a vise, but he knows what happened and he knows that he didn't recognize Natalia, he didn't recognize Steve, he just plowed through with his orders like always and it took Steve holding down a helicopter for there to be any kind of happy ending.

"How about we agree to keep hitting you in the head until you wake up you?" Steve asks and he's making a joke, but he might not be by the end. They really don't know how this will go; all they can do is prepare for the ways it can go badly.

T'Challa has somewhere else to be, but he tells them that he'll confer with Okoye. "We will find a way to do this without multiple concussions."

Neither he nor Steve want to be inside and so they go out to the Palace gardens.

"I'm glad you weren't you before," Steve says and it takes Bucky a second to parse the statement to refer to the revelation that there really hadn't been a Bucky Barnes before the Helicarrier, that the guy sitting in the movie theater hadn't had a name or a face or a body. "It doesn't make it better, but if you didn't know who you were, if you didn't know right from wrong... it's one tiny bit of pain you were spared."

"I did know right from wrong," Bucky corrects. "I just had it backward."

All he'd known of the world had been what HYDRA had told him; they'd filled him up from an empty vessel to believe he was on the side of the angels. He didn't spend seventy years watching a horror movie he couldn't stop; he spent it watching a noir thriller where the Winter Soldier was the protagonist, the anti-hero doing what was necessary for a greater good. It would be different now, he suspected, if he had any awareness. He'd start screaming and never stop.

When they get back to their apartment, they are greeted with a message on the tv screen that Shuri has queued up some movies she thinks they should see.

"This is going to be either awesome or a disaster," Steve muses as he looks over the list. Shuri's done this before, sometimes with music and sometimes with movies. Neither of them have any idea what a sixteen-year-old's taste would be in this day and age and place, but they're fairly sure that this isn't representative of it. It might, however, be representative of what a sixteen-year-old in this day and age thinks hundred-year-old people would like. "She's a good kid."

Because the timing is extraordinarily suspect on this gesture of goodwill.

Steve picks one at random because none of the titles are at all familiar to either of them. It turns out to be a screwball comedy from the 1970s that isn't too bad. Of course it starts with a newsreel (a clip from BBC World News) and then a cartoon (something called Pinky and the Brain) because Shuri is too clever for anyone's good.

Later on, Bucky's reading in bed when Steve shows up holding a pillow, a blanket, and his tablet.

"What are you doing?" Bucky asks as Steve approaches and drops his things on the side of the bed Bucky isn't completely using.

"What are the odds you sleep through the night?" Steve asks by way of reply. "What are the chances I do? Shove over."

Bucky wakes up twice, for the record. The first time, Steve is asleep and has managed to steal his blanket despite being wrapped in the one he brought. The second time, Steve is awake and presumably doodling on the tablet; he's on his side facing away, but there's a glow on the other side of his torso. He doesn't say anything or look up or over, but Bucky gets a very intentional kick to his shin in acknowledgement.

There is no fixed date for the experiment and Bucky thinks it's so that he doesn't have a countdown to freak out about. There are several plans being designed and improved and he's a part of some of them and intentionally excluded from others -- there is no possible advantage to him knowing details of all of the ways T'Challa and Okoye are preparing to take down the Winter Soldier. Steve is active in all of it, however, and it's stressing him out and Bucky suggests he take a break and go visit his ex-Avengers friends (as opposed to his Avengers ex-friends, who are still trying to get him arraigned). Which Steve takes badly and then realizes that that's sort of proof that Bucky's right.

"You're starting to look at this like you're planning my murder," he tells Steve when it seems like he is possibly willing to listen. "I can't function if I start to think about all of the ways this can go wrong or just plain fail. You can't, either, but that's all you're seeing."

Steve agrees to go away for a couple of weeks mostly because he thinks he's making things worse for Bucky, which he's not but this is what gets him on to the plane. "Get Natalia to buy your candy this time," Bucky tells him. "She'll read the labels."

It's a pretty rotten two weeks, to be honest, lonely and a little scary despite efforts to make it less so. Ramonda, the Queen Mother, teaches him to play a game that's not backgammon at all but kind of looks like it. Well, teaching him to play might be overstating it; she teaches him the rules and then trounces him repeatedly because it may look like backgammon but it requires thinking like chess. It takes her longer to dispatch him by the end, however, so they both consider it a win.

Steve returns with less of a furrow in his brow and a box of chocolates from somewhere in France, most of which Bucky ends up in possession of because Steve likes dark chocolate a lot less than he thinks he does.

Bucky can report that Shuri's designed a rig to monitor him that they are reasonably sure the Soldier can't destroy. Also that there has been a decision about where they're going to be doing this -- he has a name of a region, but that means nothing to him. Or to Steve, for that matter.

"But more importantly," he adds, "I've got sneakers I can do up by myself."

It was Ramonda who finally sent someone to buy a couple of pairs of sneakers with velcro closures, muttering that T'Challa would think the everpresent sandals were a choice and Shuri was undoubtedly trying to invent a new pair of shoes for him instead. She also had a few choice words for Bucky for not asking for shoes, which being the first bit of direct mothering he'd gotten since 1941 was a little startling, but not in a bad way. The story makes Steve laugh hard enough to wheeze.

There is no date so there is no countdown, but Bucky does start to count down as it seems ideas are getting more solid and plans more final. He's pretty sure they're close enough to pick a date and there might be one but they're not telling him.

"There isn't," Steve assures him. "Right now, Shuri is holding up the works because she wants to be there."

Which is such a bad idea that Steve doesn't need to elaborate on why. Instead, he tells her that T'Challa has tried both asking and ordering and neither is getting very far because Shuri can ignore both the king who sounds like her brother and the brother who sounds like her king.

"I've even had a go at it," he admits. "She's dug in pretty deep."

For better or for worse, Steve's ability to get people to do what he wants got a whole lot better after he became Captain America. Combine it with an utterly reasonable request and the failure is all the more remarkable.

"I guess it's my turn, then," Bucky says. Because the wait is making him uncomfortable, but there is no way in hell he's going through with this if Shuri's anywhere nearby. He might not have Steve's powers of persuasion, but he's got experience with three little sisters and a trump card he hopes he doesn't have to play.

Shuri at least suspects why he turns up in her lab the next day, but she's distracted by the sneakers. "You have finally come properly shod!" she exclaims, raising her arms in celebration. "I didn't want to be rude, but there is a strict no-toes-in-sight rule in this lab."

Bucky rolls his eyes and waggles his stump. "You ever try to do shoelaces with one hand?"

He can see her mentally trying to do just that.

"I would have designed something for you had you asked," she chides, reaching for a tablet. "What color do you want?"

He circles them around from racing stripes to why she needs to be as far away from the Winter Soldier as possible without too many digressions. It frustrates her and flusters her and she throws all of her logical-to-her reasons at him and some of them are objectively logical, but that's not enough.

He holds out his hand, asking for hers. It requires her to stop pacing and waving her arms, but mostly it bring her close enough to speak terrible words.

"There's a monster in me," he tells her and she stills. "And that monster knows that you are the smallest, you are the smartest, and you are the best-loved. You will be his target because you're how he gets free. But I'm going to be there too, watching my hand around your throat, hearing my voice promise to kill you. Please don't ask me to do that."

He has no idea what will happen once the Soldier's in charge. He might be aware of what's happening, he might not. The Soldier might be docile waiting for orders or he might think he's in captivity and try to break free to return to his masters. Bucky doesn't have to know how T'Challa and Okoye are planning to stop the Soldier or what Steve might be planning on his own because he absolutely is. All he has to know is that if Shuri is there, then she is the Soldier's key to whatever he wants -- her life for his freedom. And it will work.

They stay as they are for a long moment, him waiting for her response and her trying to formulate one. And trying not to cry, although she's losing that battle a little because she uses her free hand to wipe at her eyes and then sniffles. He lets her hand go so she can reach for the tissues, but instead she reaches for him and gives him a hug while she snuffles by his ear.

"I'm sorry," she half-whispers and he returns the hug because the first thing he learned with three little sisters is that tears happen and the second is that being magnanimous in victory is important for more reasons than that he's the eldest.

"Forgiven," he tells her. "But only if you don't get snot on my shirt."

Neither Steve nor T'Challa ask how he got Shuri to see reason, although they can probably guess. Instead, T'Challa asks him if he's ready and he says he's as ready as he'll ever be, which is not at all. Thankfully, a little while later Steve manages to pick a fight completely by accident, so he has no time to dwell.

It starts over something incredibly minor and unimportant, which is honestly not how most of their rows have started over the years and why it takes both of them by surprise. But then it segues into something very important.

"Absolutely not," Bucky tells Steve, who probably doesn't realize he's waving Bucky's red shawl around like a cape in front of a bull. "How the hell could you possibly think that was a good idea?"

They don't have the book Zemo used, the Winter Soldier's user manual, but Steve's got an eidetic memory and that's enough for the job. Except Steve somehow thinks that hearing the trigger words in his voice will be easier for Bucky to handle. If the two of them hadn't been arguing about stupid shit for the last half-hour, then Steve would have probably let this go without a problem. But they have and so Steve is now fully in Captain America Knows What's Best For You mode and Bucky has had zero time for that shit since 1943. So it takes another twenty minutes or so of insults and shouting before Bucky gets around to actually explaining why he doesn't want Steve doing what Steve wants to do.

"This whole process is so that they can purge HYDRA from everything that's good in my life, everything that's actually me and not what bad people filled me up with," he says too loudly. "Why the fuck do you think smearing yourself in their stink is going to be good for me?"

Which is a question Bucky feels he's been asking since the beginning, but maybe this is the phrasing that penetrates that thick Rogers skull because Steve stops talking.

"There is no way this is anything but awful," Bucky goes on in less of a shout. "You can't make it less awful. This plan of yours is going to make it more awful, for me and for you."

He is willing to go on, but Steve looks at him instead of at the floor and he can see the fear and so he stops and waits. Steve closes his eyes and exhales loudly, like he's purging his anger and maybe his stupid idea, and when he opens his eyes again, he gives Bucky a crooked smile.

"You can't turn shit into Ex-Lax," he offers and Bucky laughs because it's a peace offering.

"But you can turn Ex-Lax into shit," he responds, smiling because he hasn't even thought about Ex-Lax jokes since Before. "I hope Billy Sullivan, wherever he might be, has forgiven us."

The first -- and the only -- time they actually managed to pull off convincing someone that an Ex-Lax bar was real chocolate, Sarah Rogers dragged them by the ears to the Sullivans to apologize to Billy and then to the confessional in St. Anne's to apologize to God.

Steve rubs at his left ear in remembrance. "So many Pater Nosters. Father Reilly was probably a prune man."

It turns out that the trigger issue has already been resolved because Shuri and T'Challa and everyone else already knew that Steve issuing the commands was an awful idea and assumed he did, too.

"It will be one of our foreign agents with a fluency in Russian," T'Challa explains. "The voice will be run through filters so that it does not sound very human. This way, there won't be a voice or a timbre that will ever remind you of this experience."

Out of the corner of his eye, Bucky can see Steve fidget just enough that he figures Steve is recovering from being smacked in the face with just how bad his idea was.

"Unless Tony Stark comes up with more killer robots," Shuri pipes up brightly. "But even then, they probably will not speak with our accent."

They will do it tomorrow -- Bucky really doesn't want this hanging over him a minute more than he has to -- and he spends the evening restless and distracted. Steve does his best, including taking them down to the pitch where the palace kids can humiliate them at soccer, but the morning of, Bucky finds himself standing in his bedroom wondering whether to pack for a day or for a lifetime.

"A couple of extra pairs of shorts if you really want to be prepared," Steve says from the doorway. "But otherwise doing more than making your bed is probably being overly cautious."

Bucky's already made his bed and sorted his surprisingly-large cache of things he's acquired in Wakanda in case someone not Steve has to pack things up. He's also maybe written a death letter to Steve, although all it says is "IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT, ASSHOLE" in really big, crooked letters because writing and holding a piece of paper still is complicated with one arm.

As per agreement, Shuri is not there when they get to the site, which is a warehouse kind of building in the middle of absolutely nowhere on the plains -- he can't even see the nearest village from the sky before they land. But she has clearly been there because there is a giant toy Mjolnir made of foam with a tag on it that says "Steve -- no concussions, please!" in very childlike print. (Shuri's handwriting is awful in Wakandan, Bucky has been assured, but she has written in English maybe half a dozen times in her life and it shows.)

There is also children's programming playing on the monitors in the observation room, something that makes T'Challa sigh heavily and Okoye stifle a smile.

"Enough, Sister," T'Challa calls out because Shuri's not around physically, but she's certainly present from a distance. The screens go blank.

Bucky thinks he's doing okay right up until he's blindfolded to be taken down to where he's supposed to be. The blindfold is a good plan, not giving the Soldier any kind of sense of the space, but it's still the beginning of the end in a way that everything else has not been. The hands on his shoulders to guide him are gentle and belong to a pair of Dora, he doesn't know which, but it's Steve's quick kiss to his forehead that makes him tear up where nobody can see.

There's a hoverboard, because of course there is. It will keep him from being able to count steps or accurately register turns or even stairs and he makes a joke about it being a shame he can't see when he finally gets to fly, but his voice comes out weird and so he shuts up.

When the ride stops and he can see again, they are in a room that is padded and bare save for a narrow bed secured to the floor. He was asked whether he preferred sitting or lying down or standing, but being chained to a wall seemed too medieval and sitting would be too much like every other time, so lying down it is.

The people who help him into the monitoring harness and secure all of the million electrodes that make him look like a measles patient are unknown to him, nobody from the working group and nobody who's ever treated him at any point during his stay. Same for the ones who help him on to the bed and shackle him in place with vibranium cuffs. Nobody at any point speaks a word; it is all done with gestures and pointing. But Bucky can see how affected the attendants are even in their silence and it doesn't exactly make him feel any better, but any and all signs of compassion and humanity are pretty welcome right now.

The robotic voice that asks him if it is okay to proceed is not one he'll ever hear again after today, he's pretty sure. He just hopes he gets a chance to test the theory.

He hasn't been any kind of Catholic since spending seventy years in places God clearly didn't have the address to, but there are no atheists in foxholes and a quick prayer won't hurt here.

Longing

Rusted

Furnace

Daybreak

Panic surges and he can't help fight against the restraints. He agreed to this, he knows what is happening, and it doesn't matter. He's drowning in fear and he cries out, begs them to stop, pleads for his life. "Steve, please!"

But there is no answer. There will be no answer. They asked him what they should do if he asked them to stop in the middle and he told them to ignore him because he would never be able to go through with this if he wasn't forced into it. He regrets that choice with a profoundness more bitter than the bile in his throat.

Seventeen

Benign

It's a pull in the back of his mind, like a vacuum cleaner sucking up everything that's Bucky Barnes and leaving the Winter Soldier in his place.

Nine

Homecoming

One

His thoughts get foggy and hard to hold and he's falling. From a train, from a Helicarrier, from his life and he can see himself disappear into a cloud as the darkness comes.

Freight car.

The Soldier doesn't wake docile and ready to comply. He comes to life with the furious howl of a trapped animal while Bucky is in his movie seat shouting at the screen.

And it is him, he knows who he is and where he is, even if the answer is nowhere because he has no form, no body, nothing to use to claw his way free of this no-place that's holding him hostage in his own mind. He can't turn away from the screen, can't close eyes that don't exist, and so he watches as the Soldier struggles and then breaks free of the restraints because while the cuffs are vibranium, the table is not and there had to be structural compromises made in securing a one-armed man.

The door has no handle on the inside. The Soldier kicks at it until it creaks.

The first ones who come for him are Dora, masked and armed with staves. But the Soldier doesn't fight like Bucky -- they have the same moves and the same skills, but the Soldier is insensitive to pain and only fights to kill and this doesn't go like the sparring matches at the Palace.

In the end, he's brought down by a hail of sedative-tipped darts and Bucky has never felt more himself than in the moment he wonders whether they tried out the dosage on Steve or on one of W'Kabi's rhinos.

And then the world goes dark once more.

He wakes up on another bed, shackled more firmly and less comfortably. He's sore and maybe in actual pain, but his thoughts are still very sluggish and not quite solid enough to grasp beyond the fact that he's alone in his head and his body is his and that's all that could possibly matter right now. He opens his eyes and tries to turn his head to see his hand, but he's too well restrained and settles for trying to wiggle his fingers that he cannot see.

Soldier, present yourself!

It's a command that takes a second to penetrate, like everything does right now. And then he gets lost in his thoughts trying to remember if Zemo used that command on him where Steve saw it or if it's just a lucky guess. Once upon a time, it would have had the Soldier doing whatever was necessary to stand before his masters. But right now, when he hears it again, this time more firmly, Bucky Barnes gets to decide.

"No."

He's not sure if he answered in Russian or in English or even if he made enough noise to be heard at all. Everything's still very floaty and not-quite-there and he closes his eyes because the room's starting to spin.

When he opens his eyes again, he's somewhere else and he has no idea where. He's more alert, which makes the panic set in faster, and he's not tied down so he can sit up and look around and see that he's in a tent and Steve is sitting a few feet away, drawing with a pencil on paper.

"Lie back down," Steve says, putting down the pad. "You're swaying."

He doesn't want to -- he doesn't want to do anything anyone wants him to right now -- but then he nearly faceplants, so he does.

"We're a couple of klicks from the site," Steve tells him, shimmying over on his backside so that Bucky can see him. "You get to decide if you want to hang out here for a bit or go back to the palace or whatever else you might want to do. We just figured you didn't need to wake up there again."

"Okay." He's still woozy, but it doesn't feel like the outside world has to fight through a fog to get to him. He lifts his arm to see his hand because it hurts; it's wrapped in white gauze that covers his fingers up to the second knuckles.

"You're dented, not broken," Steve says. "You've got a couple of stitches up by your hairline and your left knee is probably going to be pretty sore, but everything else is cuts and bruises that'll heal in no time. Everyone else is going to be fine, too. Nothing permanent."

Which is not the same as "nothing serious" and Bucky frowns because he was 'there' for the fight, but Steve shakes his head. "Really. On the scale of damage you could have caused, it was pretty unimpressive."

It doesn't really make it okay, but he nods.

"How do you feel?" Steve asks, leaning over out of Bucky's view and then leaning back holding a water bottle and a straw and combining them before holding it out for him to drink. It requires him to sit up a little and he does so very slowly, Steve ready to catch him.

"Like I was in a really big fight," Bucky responds after he drinks, which gets Steve to roll his eyes at the evasion. "I don't know."

Which is the truth and not just because he hasn't had enough time to think about it. He walked into hell on his own doing, however much pushing he needed from behind, and he has come out the other side and he doesn't know what the trip has done to him.

Steve puts the water down. "Fair enough."

Sitting up fully is awkward because he can't lean on the one hand he's got and his abs are sore because he took a couple of blows to the torso and Steve pretty much winds up dragging up upright. It's a completely different kind of helpless than before and being manhandled doesn't make him flinch and he doesn't know if it's because he's okay or because it's Steve.

"There's food and a tablet if you want," Steve tells him when he's settled. "Basically, you get to make the call. I'm here to tell you what happened and what your options are and if you want me to go away, I will."

"No," he says a little too sharply. "Don't go."

He might be okay or almost-okay with some of it, maybe. But he's very not-okay with being alone right now. He had enough solitude in the back of his own mind while the Soldier ran riot with his body. He doesn't want to be anywhere in the same time zone as that awful abyss. He's not sure he even wants to go pee by himself right now.

"Okay," Steve says with a smile. "Good."

It takes another hour or so for the rest of the drugs to clear enough that he feels up to eating, which is again complicated by his wrapped-up hand and he realizes that he might not have a choice about not peeing by himself when the time comes.

But then Steve rummages around in his pack for what looks like a box of tissues but turns out to be a box of disposable mittens. "Hand condoms so you can eat and piss on your own," he reports, taking one out. "Adaku was more delicate about it, except she wanted to emphasize that different ones should be used for different purposes."

Adaku is the Dora Milaje's senior medic and she is a kind woman and has been a gentle and able healer for Bucky and Steve both, But she's pretty sure men are incapable of taking care of themselves if left unattended. Ayo has implied that T'Challa is at least part of the reason for this.

"I'm not sure a mitten's gonna do much for my fine motor skills," Bucky says as he holds up his hand for Steve to roll one on. It's not latex or the same material covering his stump, but it sort of feels halfway between and he's got more flexibility with it on than he thought he would. But it's still a mitten.

"I came prepared," Steve assures and hands him a dainty fork with an absurdly long padded handle.

Bucky's pretty sure he's sober as far as the drugs go, but he's still staring at the fork in his hand like it's an alien weapon. "What contingency plan was this part of?"

Steve laughs. "It's a barbecue fork, for a grill," he explains, reaching behind him for the Wakandan version of a dabba, a stacked set of colorful metal bowls held together in a carrier. "The Dora had it with them -- to cook with, not to fight with. They mess better than we ever did in the Army, that's for sure."

The bowls are opened to reveal grilled meats and vegetables and the cassava and plantain fufu balls that are great for mopping up anything on your plate. And flatbread, because of course Steve doesn't like fufu. Seeing the spread makes Bucky surprisingly emotional; it's all food Steve would eat save the fufu, but everything's been cut and shaped so that Bucky can eat it one-handed and he isn't sure if he's touched by the optimism or just still a little druggy.

Intentionally or not, Steve distracts him by tucking a napkin into his shirt collar like a baby bib.

"Really?" he sighs, taking it out of his collar and putting it in his lap.

Steve carries the conversation while they eat. It's about anything and nothing -- and nothing to do with what happened today beyond that he found a nature video series while fiddling around with his tablet and spent an embarrassing amount of time watching very pretty fish swim around. He was drawing some of the fish when Bucky woke up and reaches over to grab his pad to show him.

"That red and orange one looks like my uncle Walter," Bucky says and Steve turns the pad back toward himself, looks at the fish, and cracks up laughing.

"Oh god, it does," he sighs. "I think it's the eyes."

And then he takes a pencil and starts drawing eyeglasses on the fish. "Okay, yeah, it's definitely the eyes."

They finish the meal with fruit and Steve packs the detritus away and Bucky holds out his hand so Steve can take the mitten off. After it's off, Bucky takes a long look at the barely visible knuckles, red and raw from punches that connected.

"So what happened?" he asks in a quiet voice, not looking up from his hand. "Apart from no permanent damage to anyone I tried to kill."

"It wasn't--" and then Steve breaks off because they've had this conversation a few too many times. "They have a lot of data that they are sure will be useful. You're still being monitored and they're still collecting whatever it is they're collecting."

Bucky'd noticed the sensors still stuck to him earlier. He's unbothered by it, either as continued research or just to make sure he doesn't turn into the Soldier again. Obviously they trust him enough to leave him here with Steve, but this isn't the kind of situation that calls for faith without a more pragmatic backup plan.

"They're gonna want to talk to you about your end of things," Steve goes on, then pauses. "How much do you remember?"

Bucky frowns. "All of it, I think."

And he has no idea how he feels about that. He's pretty sure it's not better to be awake inside the Soldier, trapped screaming in a hell he can't escape from, than to sleep in ignorance. But it's harder to be awake outside not fully knowing what he's done.

Steve reaches out and puts his hand on Bucky's undamaged knee. He doesn't say it'll be okay, nobody can, but Bucky feels better nonetheless.

They can stay camping out as long as they want, pretty much, Steve explains. He's got his beads with him and they can call for a ride back to the palace whenever Bucky's ready to go.

"I'm in no hurry to get back," Steve says with a shrug when Bucky looks to him. "I don't have anything pressing on my calendar."

Bucky does and he's not quite ready to go back and do it, so he punts the decision to tomorrow. It's not that he doesn't want to have to talk about what was going on in his head -- he doesn't, but that was pretty much the entire point of this exercise, so he accepts it. It's going back to the palace, where he's successfully been only and purely Bucky Barnes for the last couple of months, with the shadow of the Winter Soldier following him. It's having to look at the faces of the healers and scientists, who've been nothing but kind and gentle with him, after they've seen the Soldier in action -- he doesn't want to see the fear in their eyes. He doesn't want to see the fear in Shuri's eyes now that she's met the monster he didn't want her to ever see.

Steve might've told him to just make his bed and call it good, but he himself packed a lot more than a change of underwear. He's brought the book Bucky's been working through -- a Xhosa primer intended for Wakandan kids just learning to read and write -- and loaded the accompanying audio track on to his own tablet so that Bucky can sing along with Bathandwa the Hippo as he learns the alphabet. Bucky accuses him of doing that entirely for his own amusement.

"I know you and Bathandwa are pretty tight," Steve says with a shrug that's an unrepentant denial. "You two do lovely duets together."

Steve has caught him singing along precisely once and Bucky knows that this is going to be something Steve will never let drop. Ever.

They end up making a soft mountain of pillows and blankets and watching Disney movies on a tablet. No Pixar, Steve says, because those always involve crying.

"And who sniffled their way through Dumbo?" Bucky points out. "And Bambi? You were worse than my sisters."

"There might be crying at Disney movies," Steve amends, conveniently skipping over the part where he sobbed more than Dottie, who cried over everything. "There is always crying at Pixar movies."

Bucky falls asleep to happy singing and wakes up to daylight and he's honestly shocked that he slept through the night. He doesn't remember dreaming, which can only be a good thing.

Steve is already up and digging through his pack for breakfast material, which is a serious downgrade over their last meal, but there's real coffee. Steve tells him to wait in the tent for a second and Bucky asks why and also where does Steve think he is possibly going to go but Steve just says wait.

"Okay, you can come out now," Steve calls.

Bucky can get up without assistance now, although his knee still hurts a lot, and he blinks stupidly at the bright morning sun. "Did you pull your pants up? Did you police your poop?"

"Keep it up and you don't get to ride," Steve warns and Bucky follows his voice around the side of the tent... where Steve is standing there with a hoverboard. Possibly the hoverboard, but Bucky never actually saw the one he rode yesterday.

"The ground is soft here and there's nobody to laugh at us falling off," Steve says, grinning madly. "Wanna take a go?"

Of course he does.

Steve has to drive because the controls require two hands, but Bucky is perfectly happy to ride shotgun because they are flying. He rides seated cross-legged on the board; just because Steve has two hands doesn't mean he can drive and there are more sudden accelerations and steep turns than would be good for a standing one-armed man with nothing to hold on to.

"Christ, this is worse than you in Dad's Chevy," Bucky grouses after he nearly gets bounced off the board again. But he's laughing and Steve's laughing and it's amazing on its own and ridiculous after what he's done and that's actually a perfect summary of his time in Wakanda.

"We should have watched Aladdin," Steve muses during a pause in the action. "Magic carpet ride and all."

Steve's a quick learner with the controls and the ride becomes smoother and faster and more daring because Steve is an adrenaline junkie. They swoop high and low, make tight turns around trees, and Bucky is giddy with it all. And then Steve slows them to a stop and tells Bucky to get up and drive.

"I'll handle the pitch control," Steve tells him. "You steer."

"'I'll handle the pitch control,'" Bucky repeats sourly as he stands up. "Says the guy who drove his plane into the North Sea."

Steve shrugs it off. "I was aiming for the North Sea. C'mon."

Bucky has to figure out how to maintain his own center of gravity while steering, so it's a whole order of magnitude harder than driving a car one-handed, but he's driven a bike with one hand (the other being occupied with a weapon, not missing in action) and it's manageable. Which is not to say that he doesn't make a hash of it the first few times and then start off slow enough that Steve gripes he drives like an old lady who can't see over the steering wheel. But while they don't repeat the air show stunts Steve was pulling at the end, they get going at a pretty good clip and it's fantastic.

He maybe crashes a little bit -- metaphorically -- when the plane comes to retrieve them and he has to remember why he's out here in the first place.

"We can stay longer if you want," Steve offers.

Bucky shakes his head no. Any longer would be avoidance and not recovery.

By the time they get back to Central Wakanda, he's almost eager to get the after-action report started and done with. It's just the medical people, not the engineers and, thankfully, not Shuri. It takes a few hours and a break for a snack, but while it is exhausting, it is not terrible because it's putting together a timeline by how he experienced things without making him relive it. Breaking down what happened to him almost as a mechanical exercise instead of as a trauma doesn't take away the pain, but it doesn't make it worse, either. Focusing on at what point in the trigger sequence he felt himself losing control and how without correlating it explicitly to when he was begging for mercy makes it possible to get through the whole thing without needing more than a couple of momentary breaks to compose himself.

He also gets to ask questions, even if they can't answer the one he wants most: how can they fix him? But they can tell him that they think that it’s very significant that he’s come out from under the Soldier’s control by himself the last two times. It makes it sound like he did something other than get knocked out, but they challenge him to prove that he did not.

“You know who you are now,” Gimbya tells him. “That is not nothing. That is a very significant something because you had to relearn your own identity after having it stolen and forcibly kept from you. But you did and you made it truly yours once again. That took tremendous effort, tremendous work, and you should not dismiss it as anything less.”

They also tell him that the brain scans and all of the data they collected absolutely shows a difference between him and the Soldier and that will, presumably be the key to undoing the conditioning that holds him prisoner. But nothing has been closely analyzed yet and they cautioned him not to expect immediate answers on that front. “It’s not a blood test.”

After the meeting breaks up, Gimbya suggests that the two of them take a walk. She leads him down to the underground farm, a field of hydroponics as far as the eye can see, all growing toward their artificial suns. He’s been here twice, both times with Ramonda, who explained to him that Wakanda’s capacity to feed its people far outstrips what would be plausible for the impoverished nation they allegedly are and so they must cultivate their bounty in secret. “Our commitment to keeping Wakanda’s secrets does not extend to starving our own people.”

Gimbya is a psychiatrist kind of healer -- Wakanda doesn’t really make the same kind of distinctions as he's used to, but Gimbya did go to medical school in America and her specialization was psychiatry. And so Bucky expects to be asked about his feelings, although he keeps waiting for the gardening similes that never come.

(“I brought you here for the privacy, not the visual aids,” she tells him with a laugh.)

She does ask him about his feelings, but not so directly. Instead she asks him about where and when he’s felt safe and gently guides him to include more than ‘before Pearl Harbor’ and ‘after coming to Wakanda’ and to come up with specifics. She talks to him about self-preservation, both literal and in the way most people mean it, and why he gives so much more credit to his capacity for the latter and not the former. And Steve, who is in the intersection of all of his roads.

She suggests that they meet again, which is not surprising, but not because she agrees that he’s so screwed up in the head that the psych appointments are well overdue.

“To the contrary,” she says firmly. “I believe that you are a lot less screwed up than you could be. Possibly than you should be for all of the unspeakable cruelties and violations you have experienced. But I also believe that you do not believe such. And I think that whatever Shuri comes up with, your recovery will be so much greater if you are better able to recognize your own strengths and use them toward that end.

“By the nature of what we are doing to remove the Winter Soldier programming from your mind, it is too easy to focus on where you are damaged. That is where the spotlight shines brightest right now. But you are more than your emotional trauma, Bucky Barnes, just as you are more than your missing arm. I would like to help you to see that more clearly.”

He goes back to the apartment, where Steve is now working on a piece that is a kind of a snapshot of their neighborhood growing up, except everyone is a fish. Uncle Walter's there with his eyeglasses and so is Sarah Rogers, in a nurse's cap and a familiar smile that somehow doesn't look at all weird on a delicate fish. Steve-the-fish is tiny and listing slightly and wearing that damned gray hat with the blue band that he wore at least a year past when it couldn't be reshaped anymore, purely out of spite.

"Why can't my fish have good hair?" Bucky demands. The fish looks like him, he supposes, but it's the curl of hair in his fishy face that gives the game away.

"Because that would be unfaithful to the historical record," Steve replies, not looking up from sketching a fish that has to be Mrs. Turnbull because it's spherical and in a pink housecoat with green flowers. "You liked the slicked-back look more than it liked you."

Bucky mutters rude things as he goes off to shower, then realizes he needs Steve's help either getting the wrapping off or a mitten on and comes back. At which point Steve tells him he's not helping anyone who calls him names.

They end up cutting the wrapping off because Bucky wants to see what it actually looks like. He doesn't think it should be more than some scraped-up knuckles and it's not, but the knuckles are pretty scraped up and the scabs aren't ready to go unprotected. He showers, then goes down to the clinic where Adaku quizzes him on his mitten use as she applies ointments and then a gauzy cotton glove and then a rubbery one. She directs him over to a machine that looks like a toaster oven and tells him to stick his hand in and hold it still. There's a flash and a buzz and he feels something tickle his fingers and then it's over. When he sees his hand again, the fingertips of the gloves have been neatly sliced off and the whole thing sealed and he is told to come back in two days.

By the time he returns to Adaku, he's feeling a little tender in more than just his hand and left knee. It's been a couple of days of erratic sleeping and weird dreams and a few incidences of of dissociation that have scared Steve as much as himself. He's been to see Gimbya, but there's only so much she can do -- psychologically, he's apparently doing what he's supposed to be doing, which is processing a traumatic event. They talk about how he is doing it, and she has some useful pointers there, but this is nature taking its course. "We gave you poison to drink; you are going to be feeling the effects even after they pump your stomach."

He does even out over the next week-plus; it probably would have been less time if he'd agreed to either Gimbya's or Adaku's suggestions that he take something to help him either relax or sleep. Both of them understand why he doesn't want to, but both of them also think that he's letting his fear overrule his common sense. So does Steve, but he's less polite about it.

There are updates from the working group and from Shuri, but they are the sort of updates to make sure he's not getting anxious about things as opposed to the kind of updates that pass on real information. He is going to be anxious about things no matter what -- either Shuri and her people can fix him or he goes back into cryo. But he's not looking at the clock constantly wondering when they'll have an answer. Possibly because he knows the answer is going to be the latter and he doesn't want to know that for certain because then he will have to prepare to give up his life, to put it on pause indefinitely for his own sake and everyone else's. And that thought is terrible and growing more so every day he spends in Wakanda as a free man.

He's out on the terrace reading on his tablet when he hears the doorbell. Steve is inside working on his fish art -- the Brooklyn aquarium population continues to grow -- and he can answer it. Presumably he does because it doesn't ring again, so Bucky goes back to reading Fashion on the Ration.

"Good evening, Sergeant Barnes."

Shuri is standing at the terrace doorway and Bucky freezes. He doesn't unfreeze until she waves shyly and then he jumps up because even if she weren't a princess, he has his manners.

"Hi," he says a little awkwardly to his own ears. "How are you?"

He hasn't seen her since the experiment. He has had cause to and has been invited to the lab, but he's gotten by with emails and voicemails and sending Steve as a courier. He's been a little afraid of how Shuri's going to look at him now that she's seen the Soldier.

Shuri is looking at him with an expression he can't read as she stays firmly rooted in the doorway, her hands balled into fists at her sides. "I came to apologize to you, sir."

Bucky shakes his head, confused. "For what?"

He's the one who should probably be doing the apologizing for avoiding her out of his own cowardice.

"For causing you so much pain," she says. "For not listening when everyone tried to tell me that what I was proposing was a terrible thing. For only seeing what could possibly be gained and not the awful cost. I was looking at the science and not at you and even when you warned me about what this would do to you, I did not listen well enough. I was arrogant."

The words come out in a flood and while she's not near tears, he can still hear how upset she is and it breaks his heart a little. He doesn't want her hurting for him, not for this.

"C'mere," he says, gesturing to the table where he and Steve usually have their meals. It has four chairs and he pulls two away from the table to face each other and then waits for her to sit in one before he follows suit. "I want you to listen closely: I am not mad at you at all," he says, leaning forward so that his elbow is on his knee. "You didn't bully me into this and I walked into that building knowing what I was doing and what kind of price I was going to pay to do it. I'm not going to tell you that I'm peachy keen because I'm not. But you didn't do this to me. Very bad people did and they enjoyed doing it, so don't think you've got anything in common with them.

"I could have said no when you asked and that would have been the end of it. But I didn't say no because I have so much faith in your smarts that I thought it was worth the risk, worth the pain, if the end result was that you could fix even a part of what's in my head. I still have that faith in you, so..." he trailed off with a shrug.

Shuri is still looking down at her hands in her lap, but then she lifts her head to meet his gaze. "Then why have you been avoiding me?"

He sighs heavily and pushes the stray wisps of hair out of his face. "Because I was scared," he admits, leaning back. "Because you are an amazing young lady who is kind and generous and who reminds me so much of my own little sisters it makes me dizzy sometimes. And because you have never been afraid of me, which is... I don't know many people who aren't afraid of me anymore. Who aren't worried about what I might do. But you never were, in no small part because you'd never heard of the Winter Soldier before I was accused of killing your father. And you'd never seen what the Soldier can do. But now you have."

Shuri absorbs all of this for a long moment and he waits. He thinks she's mature enough to understand at least some of what he's saying. Not all of it and for that he's honestly grateful because she should have that kind of innocence for as long as possible.

"I am afraid of the Winter Soldier," she says slowly. "He is terrifying and he is meant to be terrifying and I can understand why the world is scared of him. I am embarrassed that I thought it would be fine for me to be there with him. I would have made things much worse not only for myself, but especially for those who would be forced to defend me."

She raises her hands, palms up, over her lap. "But I am not afraid of Bucky Barnes. You wear ugly sandals and Bathandwa talks too fast for you to follow. You cannot figure out how to use your kimoyo beads. You are not scary, I am sorry."

The laughter comes out of him in a surprised bark. "Thanks, I think?"

"The Winter Soldier looks like you," she continues thoughtfully. "And I can appreciate how that similarity can make people uneasy. But if it is too early for that test to produce the results we are hoping for, then it has at least already produced one that can put us all at ease: it takes tremendous effort to awaken the Winter Soldier and you are not at all willing to help that effort. This will not happen by accident or because you are having a bad day or if someone hits you in the head. You must be tortured into giving up and, having seen that, I am not afraid of you because of it. I am afraid for you and that is quite different."

She looks at him with challenge in her eyes, daring him to contradict her.

He gives up with a smile. "Truce?" he offers, holding out his hand.

"Truce," she agrees, but then tries to do some kind of complicated fist-bump thing instead of a handshake and her sigh expresses her lack of fear of Bucky Barnes with supreme eloquence.

Right on cue, Steve turns up carrying a tray with a pitcher of juice and glasses on it. Followed by Ramonda, who came as a chaperone for her daughter but Bucky also suspects she wanted to make sure he and Shuri patched things up.

The conversation around the table is more business than idle chatter. Shuri has been waiting for the opportunity to tell him things and now that she has it, she grips it with both hands.

"I am confident that we will find a solution -- find a cure," she says and Bucky, already a little tenderized from earlier, tries not to react too strongly. "The way forward is manifestly obvious. The challenge will be to speed up the process -- my initial ideas for what to do would most likely be effective, but far too slow and there is a not-insignificant chance that the process would be too painful to endure."

Bucky is about to assure her that he's okay with suffering a little for such a gift, but both Ramonda and Steve give him complementing dirty looks and he sighs.

"I will not cause you more pain, Sergeant Barnes," Shuri tells him. "Not even for what you most desire. You have seen enough of it."

Ramonda takes advantage of the silence that follows to shift the topic to something less weighted. Which ends up being that damned fish art and requires both Steve and Bucky to elaborate on who everyone is and why they are depicted as they are. Steve ends up promising Shuri a fish portrait of the royal family, although he does not promise to render T'Challa as she suggests.

The next two weeks are low-key. Bucky spends a lot of time with Gimbya and Shuri and Steve prepares for another trip out into the world, this time not because he's stir-crazy but because he's aware that it's time he started leading the team that has pledged its allegiance to him. He's torn about it, caught between duty to Bucky and duty to his friends and the world, but the two of them manage to discuss it without it breaking into an argument and Steve heads off with a relatively clear conscience. And possibly a suggestion or two from T'Challa, who has a wide network of spies. Bucky's sincerely fine with it, which is how he managed to get Steve to agree to an open-ended ticket; Steve is not going to spend the rest of his days at his side in Wakanda and it's time the two of them started learning to live outside of each other's pocket.

Also, Steve really wants to punch things that deserve it and while the Dora give him a workout, it's just that. He needs the real thing in a way that Bucky maybe talks over with Gimbya.

But Steve isn't the only one who has to start making an effort to figure out his future. Bucky talks with Ramonda, T'Challa, and Zuri about what a life in Wakanda outside the palace would look like. He's still the world's most wanted criminal and will remain so even after Shuri purges the Soldier from his mind and that will always matter. T'Challa thinks that life outside the capital -- both the real one and the Potemkin village in the south -- would be the lowest-risk. Zuri agrees, adding that it would also be the most suitable place to rediscover his own peace. It would require accepting a rural lifestyle, but Bucky is not as opposed to the idea as they think he might be. As Steve most probably would be. He's city-born and doesn't know anything about farming or forestry or fishing or animal husbandry or whatever else goes on out past where the roads aren't paved, but he's also open to learning about it.

"I don't want to be a soldier anymore, let alone that Soldier," he tells Ramonda over another game of not-backgammon that he's losing badly. "I think I might be able to get used to learning how to grow things instead of killing them."

Toward that end, Bucky walks himself back into the crosshairs of the doctors who want to remove the rest of his HYDRA-arm because he still wants that, too. And he figures that if he can survive his adventure with the Winter Soldier, he can maybe be a little stronger to face the surgery to rid himself of the physical evidence of that alter ego, too. Also, farming with one hand is probably a helluva lot harder than trying to tie shoes.

The surgery can't be right away, not the least because Gimbya has enough pull to make sure he doesn't go off and do something like that while emotionally unprepared for the consequences. There's also the matter of finalizing a design for what will be installed. The arm itself can wait, but the parts that will cover his bone and touch his skin cannot and it turns out that the information that the doctors were working from is not quite right because Bucky was not quite right in what he was saying when he told them about it. He wasn't lying or even talking out of ignorance, but he was talking out of desperation and the truth requires a different approach than the one that had been on the table. He has sensation in a greater area than he told them and that apparently changes everything.

What doesn't change, to Bucky's everlasting gratitude, is his relationship with Shuri, who continues to be completely unimpressed with his rate of success in adopting Wakandan technology. "You might be a very good student in school," she tells him one afternoon while he's sitting for more tests, "but you are a very poor learner of the practical things in life."

She doesn't accept that to him kimoyo beads and vibranium-threaded fabrics are not among the practical -- they remain firmly in the fantastical.

He gets emails from Steve that are part travelogue and part mission report and part deep regret that he has to hide such a huge part of his life from the people who mean the most to him. "I hate that you're a secret," he writes. "You deserve better and so do they."

Wakanda is about halfway through the official mourning period for T'Chaka and, as it is explained to Bucky, halfway toward the first official challenge to T'Challa's rise to the throne. T'Challa is the king already and everything he has done since his father's death has been legitimate in the eyes of Wakanda's laws and traditions. But one of those traditions is to more or less offer up the crown to whoever can defeat him in combat and the time for that is now sooner than later. Ramonda doubts that there will be any legitimate challengers; T'Challa hasn't done anything to anger the other tribes and T'Chaka died with the goodwill of his people firmly in place. Shuri doesn't think it will come to anything, either, but she's also sure that if anyone puts up a candidate, her brother will end the battle quickly.

"They have a small idea of what my brother is like as king," she tells him. "But they have a very large idea of what he has been as Black Panther. He will defend his right to the throne as well as he has defended Wakanda."

Bucky's a little uncomfortable with being in Wakanda for that even before he receives a formal invitation to bear witness to the ceremony. He didn't kill T'Chaka and everyone knows he didn't, but he is still the reason they are having this ceremony and he doesn't want to be a distraction from what is really the first time T'Challa will be honored as king in his own right and not as his father's son.

"I would like you to be there," T'Challa tells him because of course Shuri ratted him out. "You are becoming part of Wakanda and this will be a very important day for our people. It is a rite that goes back to the very beginning of our nation and it will show you who we are more than anything else you've seen so far."

Of course then T'Challa ruins it all by assuring him with an almost perfectly straight face that someone will help him tie his shuka so that he can dress like a grown-up. Bucky's wardrobe is a mixture of western and African clothes; the latter are easier to get into and out of with one arm and much easier to acquire as his need for more outfits has grown. The folks in the palace have expressed their approval with his sartorial open-mindedness -- and more frequently their suggestions that he do something differently to make himself more presentable. Or, in the case of his attempt at a kamisa, to stop telling everyone he's married -- Steve professed hurt at the divorce announcement when Bucky came back home with the knot on the other side.

Ramonda promises to find something suitable for him to wear and assistance, if required, to wear it correctly.

"What's the official costume of the Wakandan court jester?" he asks her.

Steve sends him pictures of a fish building in Hyderabad -- an actual building built like a fish. "Sister Mary Perpetua?" is the caption of the one from the front and Bucky nearly chokes for laughing, then texts back that the good Sister is probably in heaven right now giving them both dirty looks.

He's in the Dora clinic getting more scans of his shoulder and torso in the golden sand machine when one of the little pages shows up and tells him that T'Challa would like to see him in the Council Room right away. He gets dressed -- it's a dashiki and trousers, even he can't mess it up -- and goes, wondering what it could be and then trying not to panic at the thought that something might have happened to Steve. T'Challa would have come to him, he tells himself, rather than sending someone to get him.

He's been in the Council Room before, but never when it's been in session. Never with T'Challa sitting on the throne like the king Bucky sometimes manages to forget that he is. The Council members greet him somberly and he wouldn't necessarily take it as ominous except that Ramonda is looking at him like she's just gotten bad news.

"Who came for me?" he asks because that's the actual likeliest answer to why he's here. If it were about Steve, about his arm, about his mind, about almost anything else that couldn't wait, there would not be an audience. There is only one matter of Wakandan national interest that involves him.

"Nobody yet," T'Challa tells him, gesturing for him to sit in the empty seat at the end of the semi-circle. "But we have received proof that your presence here is known to an enemy of Wakanda."

Bucky sits gracelessly, the wind knocked out of him by the reminder that he's still a weapon to be used, this time against those who've only ever shown him kindness.

On the far wall, a screen flickers to life and a face, a mugshot, appears.

"This is Ulysses Klaue," T'Challa begins. "He is--"

"I know who he is," Bucky interrupts. "He tried for years to buy me from HYDRA."

"Buy you?" Zuri asks warily.

He knows they know his history, so he skips that part. "Klaue's an arms dealer and he dealt a lot with HYDRA. He calls himself a connoisseur of weapons and I am a very rare weapon," he says sourly. "But I wasn't for sale. Not that that stopped him, but he never came up with an offer good enough to change anyone's mind."

He doesn't know if all of his memories of Klaue ogling him and pawing him like a show horse are all of the times it happened. He remembers being told not to react to the unwanted touches -- at least after the time he broke Klaue's wrist for caressing his metal arm. The Winter Soldier wasn't for sale, but he wasn't off-limits either, at least for those who had enough goods to offer that Pierce didn't care if they copped a feel.

"Klaue is a man of many crimes," T'Challa continues with a nod to Bucky. "He bears a grudge against our country and would like to see it destroyed. He has invaded our borders, killed our people, and stolen enough vibranium to be a danger for that alone."

But that's not the only reason why Klaue is a danger, not by far. HYDRA didn't keep him on retainer just for his ability to procure rifles by the thousand.

"And he's coming for me to get to you?" It's a half-question because he already knows half the answer.

T'Challa grimaces. "We don't know for certain what he is planning to do," he admits. "But unlike the vibranium he hordes, this is not something he will sit on."

It's not. This isn't a precious resource that can wait for the right deal. This is intelligence that has an expiration date -- it's only valuable until someone else has it, too.

"What do you want me to do?" Bucky asks. He's been comfortable these months in Wakanda, growing soft and at ease. He'll need to find a firing range because he hasn't touched a rifle or a pistol since he's been here, but most of the skills he'll need to go on the run again aren't perishable. HYDRA branded them into his bones as efficiently as everything else they did to him. An arm would be helpful but not absolutely necessary. Telling Steve will be necessary, but absolutely not helpful.

"Nothing right now," T'Challa says with an emphasis that maybe has more to do with whatever's showing on Bucky's face than the actual situation. "We wanted you to know right away so that if something does happen, if we have to hide you without giving you time to prepare or if there is, Bast forbid, a fight, you will understand what is going on."

Which sounds like he's not asking Bucky to clear out, not even thinking about it, and Bucky considers that very poor strategic planning unless he's to be used as bait and he says so.

"You are our guest Sergeant Barnes," T'Challa says with what might be annoyance. Or frustration. "You are among friends and that is not about convenience. And it is most certainly not to serve as bait to draw out our enemies. Captain Rogers is not the only one who would protect you from all that has been brought upon you. You are not here to fight our battles -- and if your battles come here, we shall fight them in your stead."

There's more, but most of it is it everyone making sure that Bucky isn't going home to pack and that he's not constantly looking over his shoulder. Which is probably going to happen no matter what he promises to do or not do.

He goes back to the clinic and finishes the scans, but then he asks them to take images in case he needs an arm before they can replace the infrastructure. Which, somewhat predictably, brings a sharply worded message from Shuri.

"Of course I know what's going on!" she chides him once he shows up in the lab. "You are being silly. That is what is going on. Now come, I want you to decide on what your shoulder on your proper new arm will look like."

Steve is not surprised when Bucky tells him because T'Challa's already brought him up to speed. "We've had our ears to the ground," he says when next they talk. "I really wish we'd dealt with him more permanently the last time."

He also wishes Bucky would let other people take care of him and they argue a bit about that. "The most efficient option is not always the best option," Steve sighs at him. "Stop thinking like the Winter Soldier and start thinking like Sergeant Barnes. You'd have blown a gasket if one of the boys had talked like you are now."

It's not the same thing and they go back and forth about that a little, too. But then they wind up talking about the movies Steve has seen because his team has wound up going once a week, wherever they happen to be. It's something Bucky had done during his years on the run -- nobody really looks for fugitives in movie theaters and it's a good way to pretend to be any kind of normal for a few hours -- and Steve thinks it's a good idea now that it's his turn to be a wanderer. "We get a lot less sick of each other's faces," Steve says wryly. "And it gives us something to talk about that isn't work or what we left behind."

Steve's team is very unimpressed that he seems to not trust them enough to tell them where Bucky is, not quite believing him that it's not his choice to withhold the information. Steve really hates the deception and he thinks it is messing with team dynamics a bit. Not in a way that's going to break things down later on, more that it's widening the tiny gap between Steve and the others that's a natural consequence of him being 'in charge.' He doesn't want to be in charge; he wants it to be an equal thing despite knowing full well that it doesn't work out like that, especially since he'd previously been their field commander. For someone who has proven to be such a peerless leader of men (and women), Steve still hasn't figured out how leadership actually works. It's kind of cute.

Three-plus weeks after the initial summons, Bucky finds out how Klaue knew he was here.

"Someone in the palace told him," T'Challa explains, as furious as Bucky remembers seeing him -- including back when he thought Bucky had killed his father. "We have a traitor."

It's taken this long to figure out how, but they have not yet figured out who. Or, rather, if the who they do know is a lone operator. But they do know why.

"There is a faction that objected to my invitation to you and Captain Rogers," T'Challa goes on. "They consider it to be a violation of the laws and traditions that have kept Wakanda's true nature from the world. By their thinking, I am the traitor for betraying my people."

Bucky shakes his head, not grasping the logic. "I get why they'd think you were in the wrong for bringing us here, but how do you get from there to selling me out to the man who can bring everything down on his own?"

Ramonda smiles placidly. "To force a challenge to the throne. The ceremony is the only time that a legitimate change can take place, anything else would create doubts. Until now, there has been no talk of contesting T'Challa's right to be king. But if something were to happen to threaten Wakanda's safety because of his actions, then there will be candidates. The Jabari might even get involved. M'Baku is not like his uncle."

Bucky's learned who the Jabari are by now and their self-imposed exclusion from Wakandan life. It's usually the reason they are the byword for something unlikely happening, but in this case, Ramonda's not speaking hyperbole.

There is nothing he can do about this, either -- T'Challa is still uninterested in using him as bait and if he tried to run, Steve would undoubtedly be sent to find him. He can answer any questions that the investigators have, but Okoye, who is stalking around the palace like an avenging angel, only has a few. Instead, he asks for more history books about Wakanda, especially the politics; he's read a couple, but they've been mostly about the country's glorious history of scientific progress and not the ugly bits of reality that even this paradise contains.

He also steps up his workouts with the Dora and asks W'Kabi about training with his warriors.

"You can come to visit the rhinos any time you want," W'Kabi tells him. "But I will not defy my king in this matter. You did not come to Wakanda to learn our ways of war. You came to learn our ways of peace and you cannot do that with a spear in your hand."

So he is left to return to what passes as his normal life in Wakanda as if nothing was wrong. It's easier some days than others, but it's never actually hard. Gimbya says that this is progress, to trust others not Steve with his safety, but he kind of suspects it's more that he's really used to not having a say in what he does and how he lives.

Shuri throws him a surprise birthday party -- surprise in that he's surprised Steve is there, not that he hadn't figured out that she was up to something because her genius doesn't extend to subterfuge. It's a lot of fun and there are a lot of people there, people he's come to know and spend time with, and there's cake. Which is not a Wakandan tradition at all, but there is a giant sheet cake with white buttercream frosting and a fondant Bathandwa because Steve is an asshole. It's the best birthday in decades, he tells everyone, and he means it. He's happy and it feels so unfamiliar to be so.

A month later, he's in hell and there's nothing novel about it.

They come for him in the hydroponics farm. He's there learning about the basics of planting vegetables and he's got tomato seeds in a little pouch around his neck that he can reach in to as he sows at the prescribed intervals. He doesn't have a chance because he doesn't recognize the danger; Aksil and Idder are part of the medical team that took care of him before and after the Winter Soldier experiment and they were at his birthday party and he greets them accordingly.

He never sees who fired the dart that hits him in the neck, but he can tell it's drugged immediately. Idder would know the dosage it took to bring the Soldier down and he looks on impassively as Bucky, already on his knees, melts bonelessly to the ground and the world goes black.

He wakes up strapped to a chair surrounded by men and women, some of whom he recognizes and most of whom he doesn't. He's still fuzzy-headed and cotton-mouthed, but that's not why he doesn't ask what's going on. He knows. There are two ways to burn T'Challa for his decision to bring foreigners in to Wakanda: get Klaue to do something from without and get him to something within. Klaue's had years to do something and hasn't, so that leaves him.

The chair he's more or less taped into isn't that unbreakable and while the tape binding him is threaded with vibranium, this won't hold the Soldier. Which it was never intended to do. But it might not even hold him if he can summon the focus to actually move his body to break free.

"It's a paralytic designed for you," Idder explains after Bucky tries and fails badly to so much flex his wrists. "One of the non-lethal responses should we have had trouble containing the Winter Soldier. It will keep you conscious, but you will feel like jelly."

"Fuck," Bucky mutters because there's no point in wasting energy on bravado that could be spent on keeping his chin off of his chest.

"I am sorry, Sergeant Barnes," Idder says and it sounds like he means it, too. "You are a good man and none of us are the least bit proud of making you suffer once more for something you did not do. But you do not belong here and we cannot let you stay. I know you would leave if given the chance, but that will not serve the necessary purpose of showing T'Challa the mistake he has made. He must be taught in a way he will understand. And so, what is it you like to say? You will be the object lesson instead of the good example."

They tell him he'll be programmed to kill everyone he sees and then turned loose in the marketplace; mass murder of innocents is a threat that will require a response that cannot factor in the royal family's private feelings. It will force T'Challa to agree to keep Wakanda's borders impermeable.

The group's so-far flawless planning hits its first bump when they realize that they have over-dosed him. He's floppy long after they thought he'd be ready to hear the trigger words -- considering what their plans are, hanging out with the Soldier until he's steady enough to massacre isn't an option -- and they have to wait. Hours, it turns out, because nobody knew how strong the drug was. Back when they were setting up the experiment, there was no way to accurately test its half-life without actually dosing him with it and so all they did was pick an amount well under what could conceivably be a lethal dose and halve it. It was never used, so nobody knew that a quarter-dose would have more than sufficed.

Bucky tries to hide his returning strength, but Idder and Aksil aren't the only ones who've taken care of him and studied his responses. He's not close to fighting form when they start -- they need him weak enough to stay put for the entire trigger -- but he's got enough to try to break free as he hears the words.

Longing

Rusted

It's a recording of the robotic voice from the experiment and he feels the terror constrict his throat.

Furnace

Daybreak

Seventeen

He screams as the pull in his mind grows stronger. Just a pure animal howl from the bottom of whatever soul he's got left.

Benign

Nine

He goes numb, control of his body lost to the Soldier as his vision grays out.

Homecoming

One

The last thing he hears is a scream that isn't his.

He wakes up with a full-body spasm and a gasp like he's drowning. He might have been. He might be.

"Rest, Sergeant Barnes, rest. You are safe," he hears. Hears but doesn't comprehend right away as he opens his eyes, pushes himself to sitting on a wobbly arm, and looks around in fear. He's hyperventilating and he can't make himself relax enough to get air. "Bucky!"

He turns toward his name and there is Ramonda, looking griefstricken.

Oh my God, what did I do? He can't speak the words, can't draw breath enough to get them out, but she knows what he is asking.

She leans forward in her seat and reaches out to him slowly, like she's not sure he won't bolt, and holds his face in her hands to try to still him. "You are safe," she repeats slowly. "They did not finish the trigger sequence. They did not complete the process. You did not become the Winter Soldier. You did not hurt anyone. Do you understand?"

It takes a moment for the words to penetrate. He nods inside the cradle of her hands and she smiles, but it doesn't reach her eyes.

"Good," she says, letting go of his face only to move from her chair to the side of his bed and take his hand in hers. "Breathe, unyana wam. Breathe. You can rest. You are safe. There are a dozen Dora outside this room who will let no one pass. No one will hurt you. No one will betray you again. I will personally kill anyone who tries."

She takes one hand from his and pats her hip, where a knife with a jeweled hilt sits, then brings it back up to his face so he looks at her. "You are safe," she repeats again.

His gasps turn to sobs because he knows that she can't promise him that. Nobody can anymore. She holds him while he weeps, rubbing his back and murmuring words that Bathandwa never taught him but he understands anyway because once upon a time Winnie Barnes spoke them, too.

He doesn't remember going to sleep, but clearly he did because he wakes up with his head on the pillow and Steve in the chair next to him, sketching on his tablet.

"I am not going to apologize because half a dozen people have already told me at least a dozen times that there was absolutely nothing I could have done," Steve says, setting the tablet down. "But for the record, I really want to because I still feel like I let you down."

Bucky holds his hand out to Steve, who clasps it tightly and holds on. They stay like that for he doesn't know how long because he falls back asleep. When he wakes up, Steve is still there, but he's wearing a different shirt.

"You feel like sticking around for a while?" Steve asks wryly.

Being awake is terrible. He doesn't remember his dreams, but he does remember what actually happened and that's so much worse. Still, he gets out of bed and notices for the first time that they are somewhere not their apartment.

"We're next to the royal apartments," Steve tells him. "T'Challa would have you sleeping in his place while he stood guard if anyone let him. But he was talked down into 'next door' and so there's a lot of security here."

There are Dora in the living room area, Bucky sees as he goes to the bathroom to clean himself up.

The next couple of days are exhausting on so many levels. He has to answer questions about what happened and he has to withstand the full force of both Shuri's and T'Challa's shame, which is just... it's more than he can really cope with at the moment. Gimbya, who assures him that she's been thoroughly vetted, spends hours with him and that's as draining as it is necessary. It's not that she's more aware of what this sort of intimate betrayal will do to him, it's that she's already in recovery mode and not trying to apologize for failing to protect him.

"You worked so hard to get where you were and it blew up in your face through no fault of your own," she tells him. "Of course it is devastating. The question is whether to muster the strength to try again. I believe not only that you should, but also that you can."

She tells him that his ability to trust others will be the hardest to rebuild and the most necessary. He tells her that he wants to but that it doesn't feel like that desire will be enough.

Steve barely leaves his side when he's not with Gimbya or Zuri, who offers him the comfort of a spirituality that relies on neither of their gods. Bucky is far more grateful than annoyed, although he's sometimes both. They don't always talk, they sometimes never talk, but just Steve's presence keeps the worst of the fear at bay.

He does wait for Steve to go off to get beaten up by the Dora before he tells Shuri that he wants her to build him a cryo chamber. This isn't the first or the third time he's asked her, but it's the first time that they both understand that it's a reasonable request.

"You already have an idea of how to fix me," he tells her. "I know you think it's too slow and too cumbersome, but... it'll be faster if I'm unconscious for the whole thing, right?"

He can't afford to wait for her to come up with a way to zap the Winter Soldier out of him like she once fixed his shoulder ligaments. Nobody can afford that risk anymore.

"I don't want it to be like this," she tells him angrily. Not angry at him, but furious at circumstance. "I want you to not have to suffer to be free."

So would he. But on the sliding scale of hells he's been in, cryo is arguably the least of them.

Steve blows up when he hears, but then he deflates like a Thanksgiving Parade float with a leak. "I have never come closer to wanting to kill people," he says plainly. "I have seen how many thousands of bastards use how many millions of innocents and I held it in. But now... How does HYDRA not earn the bottom of the barrel of those who have hurt you?"

Bucky wants to tell him that at this point it doesn't matter who hurts him, but it does. What happens to him now as Bucky is very different than what happened to him as the Soldier. Everything is more raw, more intense, because he knows that he can have expectations now for how to be treated as a person. They were never very high before he got to Wakanda, but that only makes the current disappointment worse.

T'Challa doesn't try to talk him out of the cryo tank. Instead, he comes to thank Bucky for giving him another chance. Bucky was prepared for it to be a charged conversation, but he was not prepared to face gratitude. They wind up talking about what they expected out of life and it becomes a conversation between two guys of roughly similar biological ages laughing about life with little sisters who think they know best and fathers they both wish they could emulate better than they have.

It takes Shuri ten days to come up with the schematics for a cryo chamber. She outright refuses to use anything from what HYDRA developed; she considers it crude and unnecessarily painful and it will not meet her specifications for working on his brain while he's under.

"There is not one part of this thing that could not have been better designed," she growls at the HYDRA schematics early on in her own design process. The HYDRA plans are turned into solid light constructs floating at eye level and Bucky can't tell which part is what save for the headrest. "It is not even a matter of what we have in Wakanda. Thomas Edison could have done a better job with what he had in his lab; they were just lazy and stupid. Very stupid. They aerosolized a sedative that denatures at sub-freezing temperatures! You were awake when they froze you because they..."

She stops and stalks off and growls at the other side of the room, then comes back. "Why are you not angry about this?" she asks him, both curious and frustrated. "Why are you not angry about any of this?"

He shrugs; Steve has asked him this more than a few times. "If I started, I'd never stop," he says. "I'm not not-angry. I'm furious a lot of the time. But it has to stay as background noise because the list is too long. It's not like I've forgiven or forgotten. But I have other things I want to do with my life now that it's mine and vengeance takes away from that."

Shuri considers the answer. "You are a good man, Sergeant Barnes. Better than these people deserve."

"Bucky," he reminds her for the umpteenth time rather than point out that he's really not.

Steve goes away for a few weeks -- reluctantly -- and then comes back sooner than expected, torn between his obligations but clearly having decided which comes first. Bucky might have overstated his readiness to be by himself again in order to get Steve to leave, so he tries to understate his relief at Steve's return. He's pretty sure Steve knows the truth both ways, even if he made a show of turning Steve's bedroom into a storage room in his absence.

There's a test run once the chamber is built, twenty-four hours. Bucky's not looking forward to it, but he also is. Life is very exhausting right now and he tells everyone that he's okay with a nap. Cryo is nothing like a nap, but he could use a break from life nonetheless. Gimbya comes very close to calling the test off because she can't condone flash-freezing as an acceptable method of dealing with depression. But, in the end, she lets him do it because his desire for a cure is still a very active part of his decision-making.

Shuri walks him and Steve and T'Challa and Ramonda and Gimbya through the procedure the day before. But it's not about showing off her genius, not this time. It's about showing all of the ways she and her assistants have tried to make this painless and safe. "It is not just for you," she tells Bucky. "It's for us, too."

The day of the test is the first day that the rainy season is living up to its billing, water coming down in buckets on the terrace as he and Steve watch from the doorway.

"Well, this isn't any kind of sign at all," Bucky says cheerfully. Steve glares at him and goes into the kitchenette.

There's no audience for the test, just Shuri and a couple of assistants and Steve. The chamber's set up in a small room with an observation window that looks into (or out from) Shuri's lab near where she works. There are going to be curtains, she tells him, because she wants to be able to keep an eye on him, but watching people sleep is creepy. "Especially frozen people."

Steve's hug is too tight and he loses control for half a heartbeat, a tiny gasp, before pulling away.

"Don't you dare finish the banana cake while I'm out," Bucky tells him rather than try to communicate in words what he feels. "I know how much is left."

His first thoughts upon waking, beyond 'That didn't hurt at all' and 'I'm really cold,' is that it actually felt like a nap. He feels refreshed, not slow and disoriented and unable to move or think at speed until the buckets of cold water hit him.

He's also got a Bathandwa song stuck in his head.

"Did you really?" he asks Shuri, who could not look less repentant if she tried.

"I needed to test that part, too!" she insists. "There is no point in doing this if all it is doing is putting you in a cupboard. Now I know that the passive reception is working."

She hasn't figured out yet how to strip the conditioning from his mind while he's under. She's close, but not there yet and she wants him to wait. Everyone wants him to wait, lest they be depriving him of a moment's worth of life in the sun.

"I'm not going to be missing out on the sunshine," he tells Steve and T'Challa and Shuri and Ramonda as they sit around the table in T'Challa's royal apartment. "I'm not in the sun now. All I've got is the shadow of what can happen to me. It's all I can see. I just... I want to be me. I want to be able to figure out who that is without the Winter Soldier hovering over my shoulder. I'm tired of not being able to trust myself because there's someone out there who wants HYDRA's favorite toy for whatever purpose. I'm tired of carrying that weight around. I'm tired of everyone else trying to carry it for me.

"I don't like that this has to happen, but I'm ready for it."

He really is. The first time he asked, it was out of fear. He was running away. Now, he's asking so he can run toward something better. This is the leap he's prepared to take, ready for the fall.

Steve doesn't leave his side for the last few days before he goes under; they sleep in the same bed at night and move in tandem during the day. Steve's more or less come to terms with what's going to happen, going from reluctant respect for Bucky's agency to being almost hopeful for what Shuri can accomplish while he's in cryo. It's a comfort, kind of, to at least know that Steve's not going to be spending the duration running around the world looking for people to beat up because he can't hurt those who've hurt him. T'Challa promises to keep him busy and out of too much trouble. Bucky tells him that nobody can make that promise.

Shuri's got one last surprise to pull the day before.

"Do you remember, long ago, that I told you that if you wanted to try the next surgery, I had an idea to make it less upsetting?" she asks when she visits him and Steve.

He does and says as much, leaving out the part that he thought she was being very kind and very naive.

"I was going to show you lectures from our universities," she goes on. "To keep your mind focused on other things than your pain."

She pauses and Bucky knows that smile, the one that T'Challa calls the scariest thing in Wakanda because it means his little sister has an idea. "Do you want to go to school while you are asleep?"

Next to Bucky, Steve starts laughing. Happy laughter. Bucky finds himself joining in because it's so ridiculous. It's also ridiculous because it's possible.

"I'm serious!" Shuri insists. "If I can earworm you with children's music, I can teach you engineering."

Steve's still snickering. "You should do it, Buck. It'll be the first time in history that sleeping through class is a requirement."

Which is how Bucky winds up spending a couple of hours picking out a curriculum from Shuri's lists. Steve's both very helpful and really not, suggesting Beginning Conversational English because he's Steve, but also finding an Intro to African Art course that sounds pretty cool. Bucky's choices are pragmatic -- learning Xhosa not taught by Bathandwa -- but also a little aspirational; he picks the introductory mechanics and calculus courses Shuri highlighted because it's been eighty years since Brooklyn College.

The day of turns out to be gorgeous and he spends as much time as he can outside before it's time to go in and change. There are tears, but none of them his. There is also a Bathandwa plushie doll in the chamber when he gets there that Shuri swears was not her doing. He chooses to embrace this neverending joke and cuddles the toy as he gets settled, but it won't fit in with him and he hands it off to Steve for safe keeping.

His last thoughts are that he should have made Shuri promise not to play any of her awful music.

He wakes up in a bed, feeling better than he ever remembers feeling. It takes him a good long minute to figure out where he is -- Wakanda, a room he doesn't recognize -- before he starts to wonder when.

It's a concern that maybe ratchets up to panic when Steve comes running in. He's got a beard and his hair is longer than it has ever been. Bucky stares at him, feeling completely unmoored. How many years was he in stasis?

"Welcome back, Sleepyhead," Steve says with a smile, sitting down on the edge of the bed as Bucky sits up. "How do you feel?"

Bucky reaches out to paw at the beard and Steve laughs and grabs his hand, holding it near his face.

"How long?" Bucky asks and it comes out a rasp. Steve tells him to hold on a second and gets up and leaves the room, coming back with a glass of water and a straw.

"Twenty-two weeks," Steve tells him as he sits down again, holding the cup and the straw in place so that Bucky can drink.

"You been in a cave the entire time?" Bucky asks once he's finished.

Steve cackles, delighted. "Missed you, too, buddy."