An hour in a half after somehow managing to help Bucky out of the vent- Steve, Clint, Sam, Scott, and Natasha were all hanging out in the dining room waiting on T'Challa- watching the man pace back and forth like an angry beast. God, seeing Bucky like this was literally like watching the man's sanity unravel.
And Steve knew, deep, deep down that whoever or whatever had been dumb enough to take Bucky's arm was going to be in serious trouble the next time it showed itself around the palace.
Even more so if Bucky managed to get his hands on it.
"So...what was it that happened again?" Natasha asked for like the tenth time, earning a slow, yet no less murderous look from Bucky as his pacing temporarily stopped for a moment. Just long enough for Nat to give him her most innocent smile even though everyone in the room knew that the woman was needling the- semi deranged former Hydra assassin, for her own amusement.
Steve gave her a look meant to shut her down, but she tended to ignore him when she was messing with someone purely for entertainment purposes.
She did tend to get bored after all. And unlike the rest of them, reading, sparring, pranking, and watching days upon days upon days of endless zombie movies didn't keep her half as distracted as it did the rest of them. It must be a male vs. female thing.
Steve knew he and the guys were never half as bored and restless as she was.
"Something attacked me!" Bucky practically shouted at her. "Do you see my fucking arm anywhere?! I don't! I'm pretty sure that whatever or whoever that was has taken it and left the frigging country by now!"
Clint rolled his eyes and pointed out, "Weren't you going to gnaw it off anyways?" Causing Nat to snort in amusement as Bucky all out snarled at the two.
It had only been half an hour since Steve and the others had helped Bucky get himself free of the vent, so there was no way anyone could make it through the countries customs in that amount of time. There was also no real purpose in stealing Bucky's arm and then leaving the country with it.
It wasn't that cutting edge as far as tech went.
And Steve had definitely seen better prosthetics in various parts of the world. So it wasn't as if Bucky's arm had a design or something that was worth smuggling out of the country.
"Calm yourself Sergeant Barnes," T'Challa said as he finally decided to join the rest of them before saying, "I can assure you that you're arm is safely still in the palace and probably will be for a while." Bucky wheeled on him like a rabid animal. He snapped and snarled like one too.
"Where?! Where is my arm?" Bucky demanded in an angry tone that nearly had Steve's hackles rising. Call him crazy but that was no way to talk to the man letting them live in his home.
"Bucky, calm down now."
"Fuck you Steve." The brunette growled in a loud rumbling tone as he eyed T'Challa.
"One moment and I will show you what I mean. As well as who has your arm- but you aren't allowed to go and retrieve it as of yet because I want you calm before you do. I'm not overly fond of blood being used to paint my walls." T'Challa said as he scrunched up his nose a little bit at the mere idea of blood being used to paint the various walls of his home a bright and vivid crimson red.
Ick.
Using the AI system that his sister had created and connected to the palace, T'Challa pulled up a video of the thing that had attacked Bucky. Everyone's eyes went to the image out of curiosity. Well except for Bucky, the man was so hostile and spitting mad that he was trying to glare the video into exploding or something.
Truly his temper was a terrible thing. But it didn't seem to be helping him any right now.
In the image they saw the kid, Shion climb out of a vent, elsewhere in the palace with Bucky's metal wrist in her mouth. She replaced the grate on the vent. Using her long-ish fingernails to re screw it back into place on the wall before standing up and then taking the arm out of her mouth and staggering a few feet away, before then walking up the side of the wall to the ceiling where she just stood there.
Somehow mysteriously suspended upside down for several minutes before dropping back to the floor.
Landing lightly on the balls of her feet, and then staggering off a little bit further down the hall before simply flopping over onto the floor and rolling herself underneath a table where they could barely make out the girl curling her body around Bucky's arm and simply sleeping.
Steve couldn't seem to do anything but stare. While almost everyone else in the room flat out gaped. Well, again, except Bucky. He was still trying to make the video explode or something.
"You've got to be kidding me," Clint finally said after several moments of silence. "Her? She did that? She dragged a two hundred and sixty pound super soldier off, screaming like a little girl-"
"Hey! I didn't scream like a little girl!"
"Yes you did. It was literally something that will haunt my nightmares," Scott said with a shudder before turning to Nat and saying in a pleading tone. "Hold me." Which earned him a nice, hard smack upside the head and a few choice words spat at him in Russian as he quickly moved to escape her before she could smack him again.
"Okay so the kid took Bucky's arm..." Steve said slowly, a slight frown marring his features as the video ended.
"That is not all she has done. I managed to speak in length to Stark about the girl and found out some very interesting things both about her, and the military she serves."
"Really? Like what?" Clint asked as he propped his chin on one of his palms.
"I will show you. But first let us eat something for dinner. I fear that what I will show you may put some of you off of your meal."
"Is it really that bad?" Steve asked in a worried tone as Bucky's angry glaring seemed to slowly lessen bit by bit.
"It is not good." T'Challa said as he sat down and looked over the various articles of food on the table with a slight scowl. In truth he wasn't all that hungry himself after watching the video that Stark had shown him, but he couldn't seem to recall the last time he ate something so...he would probably have to choke something down or risk making himself ill.
Steve said nothing as he re took his seat and waited for Bucky to finally sit down so that they could all eat something before T'Challa showed them what he had managed to dig up. Glancing curiously at the king, Steve noted that the man didn't seem all that interested in much of anything.
Food, conversation- nothing. If anything he appeared to be distracted.
It...worried him.
Dinner ended much faster than T'Challa had anticipated that it would. In truth the dinners that he usually ate with the rogue Avengers tended to last an hour or longer. So the fact that everyone had managed to eat something and were now sitting in their seats waiting on him to polish off what was left of his food was telling.
Especially given the time it took everyone to finish.
Thirty minutes. A new record.
Finally deciding that he had dragged things out enough, he pushed his plate away and then pulled up the video that he had downloaded from Stark on his touch pad and fixed it so that everyone could see it clearly and then started to play it.
Letting them see everything from beginning to end.
The kids, the chaos that happened during the attack, saving the civilians, and then there was the enemy. Those horrifically malicious beings that attacked without reason or rhyme. The battle that ensued.
Even...
He swallowed the lump that formed in his throat as he stared down the only real evidence of the girl's nature. The horrifyingly shocking truth brought on by experiencing an instantly fatal, gaping wound to the chest. That seemed to have destroyed her heart, part of her spine, and a good portion of her torso along with the rest.
The gaping wound squirting blood high up into the air as she fell to the ground, dead.
Looking away from the scene, he took a moment to let his gaze flicker from one person to another, taking in the horror mirrored in each of their expressions as the video continued.
Showing the girl slowly pushing herself to her feet, her eyes- changing from the color that they were before- to an almost sinister looking gold on black as a bone mask slowly formed on her face.
The continued battled between her and her enemies. And then finally the end showing the mask shattering as she sank to her knees in the middle of the broken streets where she tiredly spoke, "I will protect..." Before finally falling and staying down for good this time as several of her friends made their way over to her side and took up defensive positions around her unconscious form.
Once the video ended, T'Challa then switched it over to something a little bit less horrible and began playing one of the other video's that he managed to dig up with Stark's help.
It wasn't something centered around combat or death or even heroics. Which was probably why he seemed to gravitate towards it so much. There was simply something about the one he was now playing was only one of the ones that he had managed to find that struck a chord in him.
It was an video of the girl on a stage, dressed in a nice black pant's suit. Her long hair had been pulled back away form her face and carefully styled in a twist at the back of her head. Leaving her long bangs to hang down in and frame her face as she bowed to the audience and then turned to move over to the large piano that was sitting behind her and sat down and slowly began to play it.
She played her chosen piece of classical Beethoven beautifully. Almost as if she had been doing it for years. And she even managed to follow it up with a few other songs from, Chopin, Debussy, and Mozart.
And then at the end of her performance, once she had stepped off of the stage with a huge grin on her face. She was tackled to the floor with an indignant squawk by two small kids. Both of whom were girls if their hair and clothing was any indication at all.
The two kids were hyped. Having enjoyed the show so much that they were both talking at once as Shion merely laughed and patted them both on the head before whispering that she'd buy them both some burgers on the way home.
The two kids cheered and let her go long enough to start jumping around in excitement as a man in his early forties walked up and tried to hug the girl before being dealt with swiftly by an sharp elbow to the face before Shion collected the kids and started walking away.
