In Noctem

Bucky woke up more abruptly than he hoped, nightmare still gnawing at his heels; guilt bubbled up as he hoped he didn't wake Nat.
"Hey." She says, his fear confirmed.
"Sorry."
"Stop that." She replies, stretching her arms above her head, sheet falling off of her.
He sat at the edge of bed, running his hand through his sweat flecked hair. The dream was...strange. Azzano and Siberia were painted alongside each othee in the same shade of black that he's too familiar with, but he remembered something strange inside of it. Something that looked like a map on the wall of Zola's lab, 6 colors appearing in different parts of it.
"James." Natasha says, her worry tinged voice sounding like it's coming from a mile away.
He turns to her, her blonde hair inadvertently making his vertigo spike for a brief moment as it still tries to settle, closing his eyes.
"[Come here.]" She replies softly.
He makes his way over to her, lying on her thigh as she moves her hand through his hair, kissing his forehead. And just like that, the room stops being a thousand different time zones, settling here, now; amidst her scent and fresh water, coming in from the vents.
"Weird dream." He says breaking the silence.
"What about?" She asks, her voice too calming.
"Zola's." He says, dipping back into sleep, the warmth of her on his skin. "Something on the wall.."

Just as they both had drifted, the phone rang, startling them.
Bucky reached for it first. "Yeah?" His brow furrowed for a moment, replaced by relief. "Be down."
"Who was it?" She asks, as Bucky now got up.
"Steve's back."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Steve was in the main lab, abridged next to Shuri's own personal.
Bucky took a good look at him, both out of force of habit or worry. He was without any major injuries, a seemingly fresh cut on his arm but other than that, relatively unscathed. He breathed a quiet sigh of relief. "Steve."
He looked up from the paper he was looking at, an odd familiarity leaking from it. Steve smiled, walking toward him.
They gave each other an embrace. "Good to see back in one piece." He patted Steve on the back. "Too stubborn to die yet."
"Obviously." He smirked, as he saw Nat coming down the stairs. "Glad you made it back."
"Would've stayed if I could, didn't want to tip the Hand into what you were looking at."
"So what is it?" Bucky said, walking toward the object, now in a sheer Wakandan wrapping used to accurately date and scan older documents. And as he walked up to it, his stomach felt as if it dropped a few stories.

It was the map from his memory.
The almost hexagonal map was a deep brown from age, though the colors on it remained vibrant.
Red, blue, yellow, green, purple and orange, flung across different sides of it and almost looked as if it was moving; a gold ribbon surrounded the outer sides, in between small, strange alien print he had never seen before. Like a mesh of Arabic and Hebrew. "James, what is i-" Natasha began to ask, before seeing it herself. "You found it."
Steve nodded almost grimly. "The Hand apparently couldn't decipher it."
"It's Asgardian." Bucky said, the words almost tumbling out of his mouth.
Nat and Steve looked at him simultaneously. "Buck, how do you know?"
And then it started coming back.

"...to up the dosage, Brody's coming to more often."
Footsteps.
"Looking at the map, Sergeant Barnes? As do I. It represents something the the Furher no longer believes in.. But Herr Schmidt, does." His vision swims as he sees Zola glance over at it. "(The Infinity Stones.)" He says in German, with an almost strange admiration.
He's in Siberia. "-using my project-"
"Which you willing gave over." Karpov says.
Zola coughs violently into a white hankerchief, spots of red now showing. Even sickly, he shoots a menacing look at Karpov, who's standing straight, knowing he's coming out of this winning.
"He would not be here without one of them. Without me." He puts emphasis on the last two words. "We are close. The Asgardians let more than we thought. There are things bigger than both you, and I. To think otherwise would be foolish."
"The way I see it, Mother Russia remains undefeated because we chose not put stock in fairy tales. Unlike you, and your Red Skull."
Zola cursed in German but his already small stature was made seemingly worse by whatever ailment he had.
He passed by Bucky, looking at him up and down. "Do not forget your makers, Soldier." Zola's gaze went to his arm for a few moments, before cluctching his suitcase and leaving.

It feels like a day has passed, but it's only been a handful of seconds, which already seems like he was far too deep in, judging by the look on their faces.
He blinked, taking longer breaths to shake off the memory. "Zola."
And he knew, Steve would immediately understand, his gaze darkening at the mention. "...He knew."
"He had this a replica back in the lab at Azzano. He came to Siberia years later and gave me Asgardian texts to learn. Karpov stopped it. ...Said they were fairy tales." Nat's look grew more worried as she tried to figure out the pieces.
"Can you read this?" Steve asked, turning it carefully toward him.
Bucky looked down at the paper, trying to make out anything. "Only a few words. ...Life." He pointed toward the red spot. "...Power.", at the purple, trying to make out anything. " 'Once joined, never parted.' ". His lips pursed slightly, something eerie in the sentence.
The feeling spread throughout the room, with Steve now looking more worried. "Did Zola say what they were called?"
"He called them infinity stones."

Shuri arrived in, looking a bit dishelved. "What is it, Captain Rogers?"
"I'm sorry to bother, your Highness."
She stopped in her tracks, taken by the paper. "...Is that..?"
"We need help translating the full dialogue. It's in Asgardian, the computers won't translate it." Steve no sooner finishing his sentence, she picked up a flat glass square, rapidly typing in combinations.
The computers made a soft whir, as it scanned itself again. "Asgardian is a different dialect of Latin scripture, if I can manipulate it to reconfigure against the text on Thor's ham- There."
An English version popped up above it, as Shuri enlarged it.

It was a map. The stones now had names: Space, Power, Mind, Reality, Time and Soul.
The stones names were followed by what appeared to be places: "Xandar", "Protean Galaxy" and "Knowhere", before their hearts stopped on the last three. "Earth".
Steve and Bucky glanced at each other, their theory true. They had discussed what might be possible, Vision, and some man named Strange who could turn back time; the Tesseract sent back to Asgard. But the name wasn't here.
"Someone's going after them." The sentence rang throughout the room, though it seemed Shuri was the one most paralyzed. The innocence in her face, suddenly showing against the mature grace she was endowed with.
"It's true." She whispered to the air.
"What is?" Nat asked.
Shuri looked around the room, as if conflicting whether or not to divulge it. "When I was a young girl, the elders would tell a story to the heirs, and heirs alone. Of a star, falling to the Earth, and landing here. Our ancestors monitored it, afraid to move it.
"After the first day, a field befitting Bast sprung around the hole where it was left. On the second, a waterfall formed in the caverns it created. It was called the Soul of our City."
"Wakanda. It's built on an uncharted portion of the Namib."
"No one has seen it since the 10th reign. That King came from a different tribe, and before he was usurped, it was said he took it from it's resting place and taken elsewhere."
"Where is T'Challa?"
Shuri became sterner, coming back to her own. "Away. Until then, I'm to tend to matters." She surveyed the map, cogs turning in her mind. "We must destroy this."
"Your highness-"
"If anyone was to find this, Wakanda would be decimated."
"Whoever is hunting them is coming, and they know where they are."
"How do you know this?"
"Because the place where we left one of them is no longer on here." Nat said. "We left it on Asgard and the name isn't on here. The war's already started, we need to prepare. You need to warn-"
"My people are already worried as it is. I cannot warn them on a theory."
"It's not a theory." Bucky said grimly, looking at the main map. The word on one of the stones vanished once more. Wherever Xandar was, it was gone, the name now mirroring the other. Simply reading "Protean Galaxy".
A moment of silence stretched into a week was interrupted by Shuri. "Do you know where the other two are?"
"Yes." Steve said, still looking at the now changed spot.
"Very well. You will bring them here."
"Your-"
"Wakanda is a fortress, Captain. Whomever is wielding these stones, has powers we cannot begin to predict. No one besides The throne, and those in this room even know of Wakanda's heart, I intend to keep it that way. We are not just fighting for Wakanda, Captain. We are fighting for the world. Let us show them the power of a soul." She turned to leave. "I will give you some of our best warriors to take with you on finding the other two. You will need help, Captain. Now is not the time to be modest. I must confer with the council." She sighed quietly, as she left. "And my King."