Shuri was in her lab when a sudden beep on the scanners alerted her to incoming aircrafts. Spinning her chair to look, she sucked in a sharp breath as one of them was immediately identified as her brother's single-seater jet that he had taken to Siberia, whereas the other was unmistakably a quinjet, like the kind the Avenger's had.
Abandoning her work, she dashed out of the lab and headed straight outside.
Both planes had already landed by the time she got there, with T'Challa stepping out of of his jet in his full Black Panther mantle and carrying his helmet under one arm. Their eyes met across the wide courtyard and she immediately broke into a run, heading straight for him. She skidded to a halt a meter or so away, abruptly remembering that her big brother was now king after their father's death.
She bowed.
"Don't you dare," T'Challa said simply, his voice full of emotion as he stepped forward and wrapped her in a tight hug.
Shuri hugged him back just as tightly - the past few days had been dreadful, with news of her father's death immediately followed by her brothers arrest and then his subsequent trip to Siberia in pursuit of his killer. "Baba," she said quietly into her brother's neck. "Did he …"
"It was very quick, he didn't suffer," T'Challa replied softly as he held her, the grief and guilt evident in his voice.
Shuri nodded her understanding, her head still tucked against his neck as she fought back tears.
Movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention - the door to the quinjet was opening and two men were descending. One of them was immediately recognisable as Captain America despite how battered and bruised he was and his lack of shield. The other man was dark haired and bearded, being supported by the Captain as he walked down the ramp; he looked to be in bad shape, streaked with blood and seemingly missing an arm - curiously, the stump of his arm seemed to be consisted of metal and burned wires.
"Psst, invaders," Shuri whispered to her brother, knowing full well that they would have had to be invited there by him to have got into Wakanda in the first place.
T'Challa glanced over his shoulder at the approaching men and squeezed Shuri's shoulder slightly as he released her. "Gentlemen, this is my sister, Princess Shuri," he introduced them. "Shuri, Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes."
Shuri blinked, immediately recognising the name of the second man as the Winter Soldier who had supposedly been behind the explosion at the UN building that had killed their father. "I'm guessing by the fact that he's here and not in chains that he didn't kill Baba?" she assumed, raising her eyebrows and knowing that her brother would likely have already enacted his vengeance if this was the case.
"No, he too was a victim in all of this," her brother said deeply, then nodded to the Sergeant's injured arm. "He needs your help."
"So you bought a broken white boy for me to fix? Sweet," she said with mild excitement, skipping slightly as she approached the man and looked at his arm without even thinking of asking for permission. The stump of his arm appeared to be some kind of titanium alloy, containing a hewn, burned mess of wires and broken plates; it would be a tricky fix, though this was exactly the kind of thing she needed to distract her from her grief. "Although, when I told you to bring me back a present from Vienna I thought you would bring chocolate - or beer, since you ended up in Germany too," she added to her brother, ignoring the way the blood-streaked Sergeant was blinking dazedly down at her while she poked at the plates.
"You're sixteen," T'Challa reminded her with a hint of brotherly disapproval - there was an ever so slightly forced nature to their banter, like both of them were trying too hard to be normal in the wake of their father's death.
She waved that comment away without replying and hummed interestedly as she continued to examine the stump of metal arm. "Who did this hack job?" she wanted to know with no small amount of disapproval.
"We were in a fight with Tony Stark," Captain Rogers explained wearily, the arm that he still around Sergeant Barnes seemingly the only thing keeping the other man upright.
"That would have been a unibeam blast from the primary repulsor of his suit then," Shuri said understandingly, this information helping her make sense of what had happened to the high-tech prosthetic. She jerked her head towards the palace. "Let's get him to my lab, I wanna get a look at the internal mechanics of this thing."
Sergeant Barnes took a shaky step forward and promptly nearly collapsed. He was kept upright only by Captain Rogers on one side and Shuri also slipping an arm around him herself for extra support. Barnes stunk of blood, sweat and metal, making her wrinkle her nose at the sudden proximity, but she thought it might be impolitic to point this out to an assassin; probably better to get his arm and injuries sorted out first before she started hinting about taking a shower. "Might wanna call the med team in too," she said to her brother, who nodded his agreement.
Several minutes later they were all assembled in her lab, with T'Challa having briefly excused himself to go and find their mother.
Captain Rogers was sat on a chair, meanwhile Sergeant Barnes was perched on her lab table, being looked over by a doctor and scanned by her machines at the same time. Neither of the men's injuries were life threatening and the Captain assured her that they would both heal quickly due to the super soldier serum they had been injected with.
Shuri examined the scans that were being taken of Sergeant Barnes's arm, not liking what she was seeing one bit. The metal plates of the prosthetic started at his chest, though it appeared that his shoulder and even several inches of arm were still underneath, with metal fused straight on to skin, bone and muscle. Old technology had been mixed with new, like someone painting over a wall with a new colour, meaning that some bits in the remaining metal arm were completely redundant.
Even more worryingly, there was the archaic remains of an old tracker, long since disabled, and two small vials positioned right at the heart of the prosthetic, poised to inject their contents straight into the tissue of his arm. One vial was already empty, whereas the other was still full of a liquid that she couldn't yet identify in her scans.
They would have to be removed as soon as possible, but that would involve invasive surgery.
Finished with the scans for now, she picked up a small tray of tools and came around the table to have another look at the arm itself, a pair of goggles perched on the top of her head above her braids. "Does it hurt?" she asked, hoping to provide some kind of relief for him before they could do the surgery he required.
"A little," Sergeant Barnes replied in a tense voice that implied it actually hurt rather a lot more than he was letting on, the first words he had spoken since his arrival. He seemed much more alert after having been looked over by the medic, even though he had refused painkillers. The medic had cleaned the blood from his face, revealing the cuts on his cheek and nose that had been the source of the blood. He'd also removed his shirt to give better access to his prosthetic, letting her see where the metal met skin in angry red ridges of scar tissue. "I think some of the wires are short circuiting."
That didn't surprise her - the arm moved independently from signals his body was still sending as if to move a real arm, but with the damage that had been done the exposed copper of the wires was brushing against the titanium of the casing, causing the shocks every time he so much as shifted.
"I'll do a patch job for now, seal off the wires to stop the short circuiting, then I'll take a closer look at these scans and come up with a proper solution for tomorrow," Shuri said, all business as she hooked her foot around a stool to sit down, her gaze focused on the metal stump once more so that she could decide where to start. "Am I doing you a whole new arm?" she wanted to know, glancing up at him.
"Uh -" Sergeant Barnes said, blinking at her in stupefaction.
"What am I saying, of course I am," she said to herself, growing excited just thinking about the challenge it presented and how it could be improved with vibranium. "That'll take a little longer for me to design though, but I promise it'll be worth it."
Sergeant Barnes shook his head slightly at her "Aren't you a little young for …" he seemed to think better of his words and trailed off.
Shuri raised her brows, well used to this kind of thing. "For what?" she asked pointedly, smiling at him in amusement as she picked up a pair of wire strippers from her tray and twirled them expertly in a way that was intended to be vaguely threatening.
Barnes opened his mouth but no words came out, which only added to her entertainment.
"If you like I can go and get an old, white haired doctor to come and take a look at it, but I guarantee he won't be good as me," Shuri continued in a purposefully sweet voice, grinning widely now. "For one thing, he'll definitely turn off my playlist and where's the fun in performing open surgery - slash - technical engineering without tunes?"
"I only meant that you seem very knowledgeable for your age," Barnes countered simply and Shuri decided to stop teasing him for now - the poor former-assassin struck her as the kind of person who seemed to find conversation hard at the best of times, let alone while missing an arm and dealing with a stump that was painfully short-circuiting.
"She is indeed," T'Challa said with a note of pride in his voice as he entered the lab, evidently having heard their conversation due to his superior hearing. "Shuri has been the leader of the Wakandan Design Group since she was twelve. She is the inventor behind much of our modern technology."
Shuri pointed the wire strippers at him from where she sat on her stool. "That reminds me, your panther habit needs an upgrade," she said absently, having been working on ideas for adaptations for days since seeing the readings from both the chase in Bucharest and the fight at the airfield, the data having been sent to her lab in real time as she'd watched the drama unfold.
"Why?" T'Challa said, sounding more than a little offended at this comment. "My design works fine."
She raised her eyebrows at him. "So fine that the Black Widow was able to incapacitate you with her widow bites," she pointed out deprecatingly, not appreciating his stubbornness - she had told him time and time again that just because something worked didn't mean it couldn't be improved.
Her brother looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded. "You make a valid point," he allowed.
"I've also had some ideas for energy absorption and redistribution, leave it with me," she said airily, waving her hand and mentally tabling that for later - right now she had a broken former-assassin to fix. She spun the wire strippers once more and popped her goggles down over her eyes. "Alright, buckle up, white boy," she said with no small amount of excitement, then set to work on his arm.
For the next half hour or so she was busy stripping down and sealing wires with electrical tape. Meanwhile T'Challa and Captain America explained what had happened to Sergeant Barnes, telling her about the trigger words that Hydra had encoded into him; Sergeant Barnes sat silently the whole time she worked on his arm, staring at the wall of her lab though she was certain he was listening to every word.
T'Challa wanted her to work with a Wakandan medical and psychological team to see if they could break Hydra's programming for good, using their technology to take scans of his brain and even sift through his memories to try and find a cure. "Are you up for the challenge?"
Shuri shrugged as she worked, not even raising her gaze. "I can reprogramme machines, why not a human brain?" she said, her eyes still fixed on the remnants of the arm.
Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes glanced at each other, the first movement the Sergeant had made since they had started talking about Hydra. "We appreciate it, your highness," Captain Rogers said politely, nodding his head respectfully at her.
"It's Shuri, Captain Coloniser," she corrected, finding far too much amusement in the way Roger's head jerked back slightly in offence at the moniker; she also caught the way her brother shook his head in exasperation and Sergeant Barnes's mouth twitched in amusement as well, like he was trying to suppress a smile. Shuri grinned unrepentantly at both men as she moved on to filing down the jagged metal plates of Barnes's arm, pleased that she had managed to coax such a response from the battered, damaged man on her lab table.
The filing down was the longest part of the process and T'Challa and Captain Rogers moved to a corner of her lab to look at the internal scans she had taken - her brother appeared to be explaining the findings to Rogers, detailing the surgery that Barnes would need.
Her work was interrupted when she heard a low rumbling sound and frowned down at the metal stump. "Was that something in your arm? she asked, lifting her goggles and tilting her head to look deeper into the mess of metal, trying to pinpoint which gear or mechanism the sound had come from.
What appeared to be another smile was tugging at the Sergeant's mouth. "My stomach," he admitted with some humour, a hint of his original Brooklyn accent breaking through.
"When was the last time you ate anything?" Shuri asked, her frown lingering in concern.
He blinked, seemingly thinking back. "A couple of days ago," he said, shaking his head slightly at the question.
Shuri sighed in exasperation and spun on her chair to tap briefly on a tablet screen. Really, it was no wonder he was weak and could barely walk - men were so foolish sometimes. Several minutes later one of the kitchen staff arrived with a tray of food and a glass of water. He set it down in front of Barnes. "You can eat while I work," she said, carrying on with filling down the edges; she didn't have much more left to do, she was nearly finished on the patch job.
He nodded his thanks and started to pick one handedly at his meal with the appetite of a hungry wolf; he yawned hugely once he had finished eating it.
Shuri grinned as she put down the file, more than a little amused at the image of this infamous, master assassin yawning and showing his teeth like one of the big cats out on the savannah on her lab table. "Get some rest, come back tomorrow morning and we'll take a closer look at it," she ordered, turning back to look at the scans she had taken of him on the big screens as she thought of a plan. "I'll have a better idea of what to do with the internal mechanics by then."
"I'll have you both shown to a room," T'Challa said graciously, having heard her finishing up and offering them hospitality; he waved a hand towards the door, indicating that they should follow him.
Captain Rogers clapped Sergeant Barnes on the shoulder and he dismounted from her lab table, wobbling slightly since his centre of balance would have shifted with the loss of his arm. He met Shuri's eyes and inclined his head respectfully at her. "Thank you, Princess," Barnes said, and then followed her brother out of her lab.
"Try not to get it wet when you shower!" she called after them, sincerely hoping that he would take that particular hint.
The following morning Bucky stood in front of the large screens in the Princess's lab. He was examining the scans that she had taken of his torso, with Steve standing just behind him doing the same thing. She was expertly explaining the surgery that she wanted to perform that very morning to remove an old tracker and a pair of vials that were poised to inject something into the remaining tissue of his arm, one of them already empty.
Princess Shuri asked him if he knew what was in them and he didn't reply, thinking back to the agonising pain and poison symptoms that had wracked his body and nearly killed him several hours after the helicarrier incident - he suspected it would have killed him were it not for the super soldier serum he'd been injected with.
A contingency that could be activated remotely, a way to disable the Soldier if he broke Hydra's containment.
T'Challa's sister further explained that he would be sedated for the procedure - he couldn't say he liked that idea, but she wanted to get started with her work right away and he didn't really see another option.
At Steve's nod of reassurance he removed his shirt and settled on the Princess's lab table once more. He suppressed a flinch when he was injected with the necessary sedative for the operation, but nevertheless allowed his eyes to drift closed as unconsciousness took him.
He awoke to acute pain in his left shoulder and the swift realisation that his right arm was restrained.
Not knowing where he was or what was going on, Bucky pulled his right arm free and immediately swung at the person looming over him. He sent them crashing into a wall and heard a screen shatter, but he was already moving off the table where he had been restrained.
He looked for a weapon, for exits, but was stopped by a vaguely familiar voice. "Stop, stop!" a young woman shouted at him, holding her surgically-gloved hands out on a placating manner. He paused and stared at her, poised in a crouch to attack as he tried to determine if she was a threat. "You're safe, you're safe, Sergeant Barnes, I promise," she said, clearly trying to calm him.
Staring at her, Bucky eventually recognised her as Princess Shuri of Wakanda, the young woman who was trying to help him.
He was in Wakanda, not a Hydra base, he realised … and he had just attacked someone.
He collapsed against the wall of the lab at this realisation, sinking down to the floor and leaving a trail of blood from where they had been operating on his shoulder, the source of the pain, against the brightly painted mural on the wall. He groaned and closed his eyes when he saw the surgeon he had thrown collapsed unmoving in a pile of glass, the remnants of a shattered screen. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he whispered, his head tilted back against the wall.
Bucky heard the crunch of slow footsteps on glass and knew that Princess Shuri was approaching him. He tensed, not wanting her to come any closer lest he hurt her, but nevertheless felt her kneel down in front of him. "Hey," she said softly, trying to coax a response from him. When he didn't reply, her voice held a clear bite of annoyance and she actually clicked her fingers at him twice. "Hey white boy, look at me," she ordered him.
He took a deep breath and opened his eyes, meeting her own concerned ones. "I'm sorry, I didn't know where I was," he tried to explain; it sounded like a feeble excuse, but this was not the first time he had woken up on an operating table in the middle of a procedure.
"I'm the one who's sorry, I must have miscalculated the dose," Shuri said, looking at him apologetically. "Captain Rogers said that dose had been enough to sedate him when he needed surgery after DC, I thought you'd be out for several more hours."
Bucky exhaled a breath - it made sense that his and Steve's physiology's would be different, they'd both been given different versions of the serum. More than that, he'd developed a tolerance for sedatives with the numerous procedures Hydra had done on him over the years. He should have told her that before the surgery, this mistake was on him.
It was at that moment that he heard footsteps running towards the lab and became aware of the alarm that was ringing all around them. Steve and T'Challa entered the lab at a run, immediately noting the destruction. "Shuri," T'Challa said to his sister, making to dash towards her, but she forestalled him by holding her index finger up without even looking back at him, indicating that he was to remain silent and where he was.
Bucky appreciated this - he was still feeling woozy from the medication and wasn't entirely sure he was in control. He didn't know if he could stop himself from attacking if people made sudden, violent moves around him.
"Can you stand?" she asked Bucky, ignoring her brother and keeping her voice calm and gentle. "I want to get you back on the table so we can finish."
"I don't want to hurt anyone," he said in a whisper, watching as T'Challa instead approached the surgeon laying in the glass and checked his pulse; he was relieved to see the man groan and raise his head, indicating that he hadn't done too much damage.
"And I don't want you bleeding all over my lab, that mural took hours," the young princess retorted. She got to her feet and slipped her hand under his right arm, trying and failing to haul him up. "Come on, time to get up, buttercup."
Steve stepped over to help as well, and together they got him sat back on the table. He exhaled a breath, clenching his jaw at the pain in his shoulder. He risked a glance down and them immediately wished he hadn't - they'd cut away more of the prosthetic to get at the tissue beneath, meaning that his shoulder was a mass of tissue, metal and wires.
Shuri approached him with another dose of the sedative but he shook his head sharply at her, ignoring the dizziness that followed the movement. She immediately put it down. "You can stay awake if you want, though I warn you this is gonna hurt like a bitch," she warned him bluntly.
"Shuri," her brother scolded from across the lab, apparently disapproving of her language.
She rolled her eyes at him. "Hurt a lot," she reiterated childishly, then turned to face her brother. "And actually, considering I'm going to be poking around in his internal muscles, I'd say my use of like a bitch was justified," she countered with the playful insolence that only siblings were capable of.
"I'll stay awake," Bucky said; Steve was behind him and he knew that his friend would not move throughout the operation.
Shuri nodded and picked up an unfamiliar tool. "We don't have that much left now," she reassured him as he tensed in preparation for the pain. "Tell me at any point if you want me to stop," she added quietly - he appreciated this, it was never an option when he had been Hydra's prisoner.
The next few minutes passed in acute pain, with Bucky clenching his jaw and breathing hard through his nose with his eyes tightly closed. At one point Shuri did something to his shoulder that made him jerk against his will and he reached out to grab Steve's arm. Opening his eyes, he gave Steve a pointed look, trying to silently communicate that he may need to restrain him lest he hurt the young Princess on reflex. Steve took the hint and wrapped his hand loosely around Bucky's wrist, only tightening his fingers when he jerked once again.
He was aware of T'Challa watching this carefully - he warily met the Black Panther's eyes and was surprised that he received a nod of approval.
Several more minutes of work that primarily seemed to be on the outer casing of his arm passed and Shuri stepped back. "All done," she pronounced, moving a machine over to him to take some more scans of her finished work.
"Thank you," he said quietly, nodding at the Princess. She smiled at him in turn and carried her tray of tools over to the other side of the lab; her brother joined her looking at the new scans she had taken and she appeared to be already talking to him about designs for a new arm.
Bucky took a breath and looked down - instead of the burned mess of wires and metal, the plates had been folded neatly into each other to create a smooth stump just below his shoulder. It still hurt fiercely deep in the muscle, but he knew that with his super soldier healing the pain would fade.
He rubbed his face with his right hand and looked around the damaged, bloodstained lab. "This can't go on, Steve," he said, his eyes fixed on the pile of shattered glass from the broken screen, the injured surgeon having been taken out of the room to receive treatment elsewhere.
"We'll find a way to fix you, Buck," Steve said with the unfailing certainty of one who believed what he was saying.
Bucky suppressed a grimace. They'd come to Wakanda on T'Challa's invitation because the young King thought he would be able to help him; he wondered how long that welcome would have lasted if it had been the Princess Shuri, not a surgeon, that he had thrown across the room, all because he couldn't trust his damn mind.
"I just wish …" he started to say, then cut himself off.
"What?" Steve asked quietly.
Bucky gave him a small, humourless smile as Princess Shuri came over and started fitting a simple, black cover over the metal stump of his arm. "I wish I was frozen again," he admitted, hating the way Steve seemed to suppress a flinch at the words. "When I was frozen I couldn't feel, couldn't remember, couldn't hurt anyone …"
"You know, we have cryo-chambers here," Princess Shuri put in blithely, having been shamelessly listening in on the conversation.
Both men looked at her - Steve sharply, Bucky with sudden hope.
She shrugged one narrow shoulder at them and added, "Just sayin'"
The following afternoon Bucky was once more perched on a lab table, this one in a medical centre. He'd spent the morning having numerous scans of his brain and body done, with Princess Shuri adamant that she needed them to create a digital rendering for her to break his programming, claiming that she was going to sift through his brain and memories. He was hooked up to an IV to give him extra fluids before the procedure, ready to be frozen again in the next few minutes.
He was sat opposite the cryo-chamber, forcing himself to make note of all the things that separate it from the ones Hydra used to calm him down - it was white, for one thing, sleeker and more refined, nothing like the hideous, black and metal contraption he had been forced into again and again.
Even though he knew it was the right thing to do, it was not looking forward to being back in the cold once more.
"You sure about this?" Steve asked as he approached, no doubt picking up on his tension.
"I can't trust my own mind," Bucky said, giving his friend a small, humourless smile - the surgeon he'd thrown yesterday had escaped with a fractured collarbone and several minor contusions, but he had no doubt that he wouldn't be the last person that he accidentally harmed if he didn't do this. "So until they find a way to get this stuff outta my head, I think going under is the best thing … for everybody."
He reached out with his remaining hand and grasped Steve by the forearm; his friend pulled him into a hug, clapping him on the back. "I'll be right here with you," Steve told him.
"I know, to the end of the line," Bucky said, grateful for his friends presence.
He knew they were ready for him to go under when T'Challa and Shuri approached. T'Challa was formally dressed in dark clothing and a brown jacket, whereas the Princess Shuri looked more like a typical teenager than a scientist, wearing shorts, a blue t-shirt and a necklace of shells. T'Challa extended his hand, Bucky clasped it gratefully. "Thank you for this," he said seriously.
T'Challa inclined his head, but did not reply.
"Shall we get this show on the road?" Princess Shuri asked, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet.
With one final look at Steve and T'Challa, Bucky followed her over the the cryo-chamber. There were several other medical technicians around, but Shuri was the one to tap on the keypad to initiate the startup sequence. The chamber opened with a hiss of air.
He stepped inside, putting his back to the rest and trying to ignore the white strap that would go across his chest, restraining him.
"You alright?" Shuri asked as she fastened the strap around his chest.
Bucky took a deep breath. "I know this is the right thing to do, but I hate it," he confessed to her, his body already clenching in anticipation of the cold.
Shuri was frowning at him. "I don't know what experiences you've had with cryo-sleep in the past, but here the process is near instantaneous," she told him comfortingly. "You won't even feel the cold."
He wasn't sure he believed her, despite her earnest tone.
"And when I wake up?" he asked. Waking up had always been the worst - hauled roughly from the chamber, freezing cold with weak muscles, delirious, nauseous, covered in sweat and dragged across the room to a chair where he would be wiped and prepped for a mission.
"You'll wake up in a bed, as if you've just had a long sleep," she told him with a small smile as she adjusted the strap so that it sat snugly against his chest, apparently sensing that he needed reassurance. "Warm, cosy and well rested, I personally guarantee it."
Bucky managed a small smile - if she was telling the truth then it didn't sound so bad. "That sounds much better than I'm used to," he admitted.
"I could even have your new arm ready and attached for you if you want," Princess Shuri offered brightly, evidently excited by the prospect of making it for him. "I've had some design ideas," she added as she tapped the keyboard once more, doing final preparations on the cryo-sequence. "What are your thoughts on hot pink?"
A mental image of himself with a bright, garish pink arm flashed through his brain and his mouth dropped open in horror - only to realise that the young woman was grinning unrepentantly up at him, clearly amused by the response she had got. He shook his head, grateful for her humour in this situation. "I do believe you're teasing me, Princess," he observed, a smile of his own pulling at his mouth.
Her smile softened to one that was less amused, and more kind. "How about vibranium then?" she countered, one hand still tapping away at the keyboard as she worked.
Bucky's lips parted in shock once more - vibranium was a rare metal, the rarest on earth, each gram costing thousands of dollars, if he remembered rightly. Steve's shield had been vibranium and that thing was a damned symbol of freedom and justice, the idea that they would use the same thing in his arm, which had been a weapon, a monstrosity, was staggering. "Vibranium is a valuable resource -" he started to argue, but was cut off by Shuri.
"One that we happen to have lots of," she pointed out, apparently unphased that the upgrade she was suggesting to his arm would cost millions, if not billions, of dollars. She noticed the deep creases in his brow and gave him another small smile "Probably best I let you have a say on the design, though, huh?" she said, apparently picking up on his discomfort with what she was offering. "I'm guessing you didn't have much input on the original."
"No, I didn't," he replied, forcing the memories of waking up on the operating table when they were first attaching it and strangling one of the doctors looming over him to the back of his mind. Noting that the Princess's hand was poised over the keyboard, ready to initiate the final sequence, he inclined his head at her. "Thank you, Princess … for everything," he said honestly - he'd had no reason or right to imagine he would be treated with such kindness here in Wakanda.
It made him feel … well, not quite human again, but close, perhaps.
"Are you ready?" she asked, her voice quiet and serious, even as her gaze was reassuringly kind.
Bucky nodded and she pressed a button on the keyboard.
The cryo-chamber whirred as the door started to close him in. "See you on the other side, Sarge," she said, smiling at him as it closed, blocking out all sound from the outside world.
Bucky was aware of Steve standing just to one side, watching the process intently. The cryo-chamber hissed and whirred once more. He exhaled a breath, closed his eyes and leant his head back against the headrest, feeling nothing but warmth and peace as darkness took him.
Hey ya'll, I know I haven't posted anything for AGES since finishing Stirring The Leaves, but I got eaten up by the real world of studying and then working as a primary school teacher; sadly my writing took a major fall by the wayside.
I'm trying to get back into it though and currently have a long LOTR fic and a slightly shorter Marvel one that I am tinkering with, but I've decided not to post anything until they are complete since I don't want to leave a story unfinished.
This particular plot bunny struck me after seeing Black Panther (seriously, go see it, it's amazing) and Shuri's comment about 'another broken white boy for me to fix' got me thinking about the Civil War end credits scene, and how she must have been the one to fix Bucky. Just want to reiterate that this is not intended as a pairing fic, but rather a caregiver/comfort/friendship story that sets the groundwork for the trust and friendship we see between the two in the Black Panther end credits scene.
This is intended as a one shot with no plans to extend it.
Leave a review, my lovelies :)