My AU version of the Winter Soldier (a.k.a. Ingcuka, The White Wolf)'s recovery in Wakanda, focused on two of my favorite MCU characters - Bucky Barnes and Shuri.
A slow-ish burn.
As much therapy for me as it is a way to pass the time.
I do research to the best of my ability (Wakanda itself and the real-life region it is supposedly in), but I fully expect I've gotten something wrong.
Thanks for reading. Please let me know what you think.
-MM
A Face Like Sunshine, Eyes Like Winter
01
By the time she was two, Shuri and her Baba had a secret ritual together.
At first, the busy king's way of bonding with his little ilanga as often as possible while he had a kingdom to run. As she grew, however, it became so much more than that.
Whenever the world's noise closed in on her, or she was frightened by her own overwhelming intellect, or got lost inside her constantly working mind, Baba would insist that they look into each other's eyes, shut out the world, and communicate their true feelings without words.
Shuri is close with her big brother and even closer with her mother, but no one could get through to her like her Baba when it came to her brilliant mind.
With his extra care, she learned to ground herself, back herself. By the time she was ten, she'd become totally unashamed of always being the youngest and smartest (and often wittiest) in the room. And all her life, whenever she was uncertain, all she had to do was look into Baba's eyes. There, she always found his heart (and the truth), waiting for her. Where the world saw a warrior, beloved king and respected diplomat, his ilanga Shuri only saw a father who loved his daughter more than his own life.
Saying goodbye to Baba's proud, loving eyes is perhaps the hardest thing Shuri's ever done.
Many nights, while T'Challa was away seeking vengeance for their father's murder, Shuri and Ramonda cried themselves to sleep holding each other. Unbeknownst to the Queen Mother, however, the Princess would often end up awake with her mind running in circles. With nowhere to direct her thoughts, she would sneak away to her lab.
She told OKoye she needed to distract herself by finishing the humanitarian work she started with Baba before all of this, but she hasn't even been thinking about it. Instead, Shuri started pouring over every known detail of the U.N. attack. Including everything S.H.I.E.L.D. released about The Winter Soldier. And every night since, her obsession has only grown.
At first it was out of anger with T'Challa for excluding her from his mission. But the more she uncovered, the more her insatiable curiosity took over, pulling her deeper into a well of American v. Soviet (really S.H.I.E.L.D. v. HYDRA) history, years of war, experimental weapons, and how it all fed into the impossibly high political stakes surrounding her father's death. Finally, she had found her purpose, working her way through sleepless nights, preparing for her brother's return.
Before he died, Baba would visit her at her lab on nights like tonight, keenly checking on her progress. He tried to disguise his paternal pride as a king's desire to make sure Wakanda would be represented well, but he could never fool her.
In the present, she wonders what he would think of what she's doing now, if he was alive to see.
If Baba was alive, you wouldn't be doing this...Shuri thinks wearily as she blinks away the tears threatening to overwhelm her vision.
The hologram of her father stares back at her; him but not him. His eyes cannot see her now. They cannot reassure her.
She has nowhere to ground herself except this work. Yawning and rubbing the fatigue from her eyes, Shuri sits up straight at her lab station. She observes the time as she stretches her arms stiffly, high above her head. Listening for the tiny cracking sounds as her joints find release. Once done, she reaches out in front of her, "grabbing" the truncated data scrolling across her holoscreen, and spreads it out wide with outstretched hands.
Eighty years of information on The Winter Soldier, formerly known as Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, orbits her like a solar system. Her latest (and, she suspects, biggest) challenge. A very, very broken white boy in need of fixing, according to T'Challa's last few messages.
Shuri, weighed down with weariness but buoyed by curiosity, takes one last look at her father's hologram before shutting it off.
Back to work. The assassin they call the Winter Soldier has something wrong with his brain.
It's a vault that needs unlocking. A puzzle missing most of its pieces. She has to find a way to get inside and undo HYDRA's damage. Can she? If she can, the scientific world will go apeshit.
One step at a time, genius...you don't even know what you're looking for yet...
Pausing to drink some ice cold water and trick her body into carrying on with a few bites of fruit and cheese, Shuri goes over what she does know for the hundredth time.
She knows of his involvement with Captain America against her brother in the civil war over the Accords her father had spearheaded. Thanks to this new development with Helmut Zemo, she now knows he was framed for her father's murder.
But he is still one of the deadliest men in the world. She knows of some of his most infamous assassinations as The Winter Soldier. Including the parents of one of her idols, Tony Stark.
Thanks to some easy digging, she now knows of his history with Captain America while part of The Howling Commandos in World War II. Twice, he'd been taken as a prisoner of war, experimented on, brainwashed, and over the last five decades, made to do terrible things.
The reality of who she's dealing with doesn't frighten Shuri. It makes her determined, as does any situation where she knows she'll be underestimated; doubted, even. Her father taught her her confidence, her fearlessness. It's the only way she can manage her grief, with a puzzle so big and seemingly daunting that it will take all her expertise; all her focus; to solve it.
You represent Wakanda, she heard her father's grave words in her mind. The world sees who Bast chose as her kindred through your gifts, my sweet ilanga. Show them who we are. Who you are.
Shuri's mind is made, she just needs to convince her brother that she's uniquely positioned to be the one person in the world a man like that can turn to for help.
He's broken. She will fix him. It will be up to him afterwards how he intends to redeem himself for what he's done. Maybe, in the end, he'll decide to help her brother and the Avengers right the wrongs HYDRA inflicted on the world, and by extension, her family. At the very least, she hopes she can make her father proud.
Shuri leans back again, stretching her spine as she swats at various bits of data until she finds a video clip from a Smithsonian-owned documentary on the Howling Commandos.
In it, the elite squad of nine were being followed around the Alps as they fought their way through HYDRA blockades to raid bases and free POWs.
The footage is old, grainy, void of color, silent. But fascinating.
She watches as Captain America and his men dig into a trench, hunkering down until enemy fire pauses long enough to give them an in. He gives a quick signal and they charge full on, taking down the last of some HYDRA base's sniper offense posts. She gets a good, long look at Barnes as he dives in to protect the documentarian from heavy gunfire.
The reel spins and skips, then settles. Now she's shown an encampment somewhere deep in the winter wilderness, where the Commandos are resting before they set out for the next HYDRA base outside Munich.
She's studied this a dozen times by now, but she always discovers new details with each viewing.
When they aren't fighting for their lives in a devastating war, they seem like just a bunch of young men living as if their present moment is all they have. Rogers and Barnes are very close, Shuri can tell. They stay near each other in the group; Barnes is usually alongside or no more than a few paces behind Rogers; they even mimic each other's mannerisms on occasion.
In this section of footage, the Commandos are trying to lure a small pack of wild wolves out of hiding. There is no trace of fear on a single soldier's face. More like...recognition. Connection.
Rogers does dutifully attempt to get them to reconsider (or so she guesses; without sound it's hard to tell), but Barnes seems almost entranced. She watches him kneel at the edge of the camp a few feet from the forest wall, sinking his knee down into the snow, his breath fogging in front of him as he cautiously reaches a hand out to the alpha wolf.
Riveted (as are his fellow Commandos), Shuri watches the intimidating beast take one very cautious step forward after another. The wolf stares at the soldier reaching out to it. Sniffs the air. Barnes remains stone still, despite the fact that he must be freezing, and waits until the beast's snout touches his fingertips. The wolf sniffs at him some more, snorts, steps back. Cautiously inches forward again. Licks his fingers. Lets Barnes pet him. Licks the underside of his chin.
The woman Shuri recognizes as Special Agent Carter happens upon the group just then. The animal darts off with his pack as Rogers instinctively moves to shield her with his body.
Shuri rewinds and then pauses the footage. Studies Barnes's face as close as she can through the corrosion of the old film, even digitized as it is. He looks just as shocked as she is that any of them were able to survive an encounter with a pack of wild German wolves unscathed. Let alone coming that close to the alpha. It is something of significance…it tells her something about him. Perhaps something she can use to get inside his head and decipher what she finds there.
She can't articulate to herself quite what that something is yet, but she trusts herself to figure it out. Baba would, anyway. That comforts her somewhat.
Shuri stares a bit more at the frozen image of the young soldier watching after the wolf he'd just connected with...and she stares a bit more...and a bit more...seeing an open book and yet a deeply opaque mystery, until her eyelids grow so heavy that before she knows it...she is sound asleep.
She's running through the dark.
She doesn't know how she got here; her heart racing; panic, fear, adrenaline coursing through her every cell. Her path is dark, narrow, jagged. She tries to focus, but the sharp edges of the walls keep snagging at her clothing, cutting at her skin as she stumbles and bumps against them.
There is light ahead. Shuri, in a haze of confusion and desperation, surges forward as fast as her slender legs can carry her toward that light. Her heart feels like it will burst from her chest; tears flood and sting her eyes...almost there.
There is something behind her. Something big, fast, and snarling. It feels as if the thing's jaws will clamp down onto one of her heels and drag her back into the darkness any moment if she cannot move faster.
The light gets brighter, closer, rising like a steeple...a doorway.
When she finally emerges, the beast chases her down, narrowly missing catching her; much closer than she thought, sending her into a frenzy of emotion. She can only see that she has come out of the Great Mound, where the fleet of Royal Talons are parked, and the atrium overlooking the sonic trains lies.
Maybe she can get to one of the jets. She dashes with the last of her adrenaline, but it's too late.
The shadow of the beast darkens her steps, having leapt into the air to take her down.
She trips and falls, unable to see through her panicked tears anymore, rolling with momentum she can't stop toward the mouth of the atrium.
There is a deafening snarl, and she crushes her eyes shut, unable to stand the sight of her fate - whether it be to perish from the fall through the Great Mound or the crushing blow of the beast's powerful jaws.
She dies by neither method.
Instead, as she dares to open her eyes again after rolling into one of the pillars at the lips of the atrium mouth, she sees that the beast is a great white wolf.
Her enormous pursuer leaps clean over her, crashing bodily into the advancing white leopard she hadn't seen coming from another part of the landing zone.
The wolf and the leopard clash violently - jaws, claws, snarling, roaring, dueling. They roll with each other, trying to claw or bite chunks from one another, the wolf clamping down hard on the leopard's gullet.
Shuri looks on in shock until their fight takes them out of her sights.
She lays on her back, panting hard, confused. Get up, find help, find anyone.
But there is no one when she finally manages to sit up. No living soul in sight.
Shuri is getting to her feet again when the wolf returns.
The enormous beast limps slightly, looking utterly exhausted from its fight, blood staining its white coat. Shuri is terrified, until the wolf turns its eyes directly up to hers. The wolf's eyes are large, deep, and the color of a winter sky. They are not the eyes of a feral creature. They are uncannily intelligent eyes. Emotional eyes. Eyes that seem to carry centuries of spacetime in their depths. She can't help feeling an overwhelming swell of empathy as she gazes into the beast's soul, her fear and panic disappearing.
The wolf is battle-scarred. This fight wasn't its first.
It advances weakly, cautiously, pausing just at her feet. It gets down onto its haunches. Bows its head.
Shuri reaches out her hand. The white wolf rubs its head against her palm, allowing her to pet it around its crown, behind its ears. It is so big that it almost dwarfs her, but she can feel its gentleness, its reverence for her, the more she explores and caresses its thick coat.
It was never chasing her, she understands now. It was urging her toward escape. It was protecting her.
"Enkosi, ingcuka," she whispers as the wolf lowers its head to its paws, closing its wintery eyes. "I thought you were going to eat me, but you turned out to be just the protector I needed, didn't you?"
The wolf opens its eyes and licks at her palm, and then answers, "My Princess…"
"My Princess? ..… Shuri."
Shuri is startled violently awake by OKoye's loud, urgent hiss. She is pulled from her dream, from the soft fur of the wolf's coat and the heat of his tongue on her skin like an infant pulled from the womb. The Dora General's firm hand gently puts pressure on her shoulder to shift her weight so she'll lift her face from the pillow of her arms.
"Ah! Bast!" A groggy princess jerks upright wobbly, squinting up at Okoye through bleary eyes. "What time is it? How long have I been…?"
"It's an hour past breakfast, which you should have been present for," OKoye steps back and lowers her head in salute before standing at attention again, unable (or unwilling) to hide the concern and impatience worrying her beautiful face. "The Queen Mother has been trying to reach you. She's worried. You've been working for almost thirty-eight hours, Princess."
Shuri blinks, gathers her wits, and looks around, avoiding OKoye's fiery gaze. Her lab team hasn't arrived for the morning shift yet. The holograms of her Winter Soldier research are all still floating about in the same inert state that she last remembered before passing out. She'd been up all night, of course she missed breakfast at the palace with Umama. Of course, OKoye would come looking when she discovered the princess missing from her rooms and unresponsive to kimoyo hail. She feels silly for forgetting all about her responsibilities to her family; her presence being missed - and needed - at the palace. Time means almost nothing when she's in her lab. She can easily wile away the hours without stopping for a week if they'd let her.
"I try not to force my will on you, Shuri," OKoye speaks again quietly, her voice a river tide of suppressed emotion. Shuri looks up at her, her older usisi as much as a guardian and advisor. "I know how much your work means to you. But this cannot go on. Princess, you must rest. This…" she gestures disdainfully with her spear at the holograms floating about, showing her war and chaos, colonizers and their immortal assassin, "this is no way for a child who is grieving the loss of her baba to carry on."
"I'm fine, Koye…just working. T'Challa needs my help. It's not like he gave me a lot of time to figure this out, you know?" Shuri murmurs tiredly, stroking her kimoyo beads to shut off all of the holograms at once. The frozen image of Barnes staring after the wolf is the last thing she sees before it blinks out of existence.
That must've been why she had that crazy dream. Watching and re-watching old war footage of nine beastly men from a different era over and over through the night. Maybe OKoye's right.
"But you are still grieving," the general insists firmly, her glistening eyes refusing to relent their hold on Shuri's attention. "Surely your brother understands that."
Shuri rubs her forehead and sighs. "Yes. But you don't understand."
She stands, approaching OKoye, trying to get through to her. She's exhausted, she's emotionally stretched, but she's in charge of her own mind. No one could really understand what it's like when she's fixated on something but her Baba.
"I must do this. Or I won't sleep. I won't be able to process. I won't be able to function if you don't let me work. Please. I need this."
OKoye is silent for a long while, raising her chin - on the verge of arguing fiercely, Shuri knows.
Shuri winces a bit, awaiting the onslaught, but OKoye manages to swallow down whatever speech she'd been preparing on the way over here. After what feels like forever, she relents, nodding shortly. When she speaks next, her voice is gentle, laden with a bit of weariness of her own.
"At least eat something, for Sekhmet's sake. The Queen Mother will skin you alive if she finds out you've been skipping more than just your breakfast, hm?"
She taps her spear twice on the black marble flooring and three Dora appear, arms laden with wrapped food they'd brought from the palace.
As soon as Shuri smells the akara and moi-moi, her stomach growls loudly (drawing a twitch of a smirk from Koye's lips). She forgets about everything but eating, practically stumbling toward the small buffet gratefully. There's also an assortment of fruit, plantains, eggs, coconut rice and a furnace of hot tea.
"Is that my favorite tea? Arrgh, I love you so much, Koye!" She pauses to hug OKoye tightly.
The general makes a face but accepts the affection. Relaxing only a little once Shuri lets her go, she taps for her Dora to return to their usual posts around the lab while the princess digs in. She carefully piles a plate with everything, sets it on her desk, and begins to fill her belly without pausing to breathe, she is so famished. OKoye looks on...soon unable to stop the thoughts from leaving her mouth as she watches (what she sees as) this practically starving child inhale her food with the kind of voracity that is unbecoming of a princess.
"The Queen Mother is very worried, Shuri."
Shuri sighs as she pours herself some tea, still chewing on a big helping of rice and plantains. "I know. But this work is important."
"Important to whom?" OKoye takes a step forward with indignance, gesturing with her spear to the world at large. "Your work in Lagos with your father - that was important. Your designs for your brother and the protection of our kingdom - those things are important. This colonizer's brain damage is not our concern."
Shuri crushes her eyes shut, feeling them sting from exhaustion. "T'Challa trusts me to help him make things right. End the cycle of violence and vengeance all of this has wrought. Baba's death could have been prevented if only someone had been able to end it a long time ago…"
She knows her logic isn't exactly sound, but she's been going for hours and she doesn't feel like arguing with the general anymore. She doesn't understand, and there may be nothing Shuri can say or do to make her. Perhaps, once her work is finished, perhaps the General will be able to see why her Princess is so determined that she will be the one to carry it out.
"And what about your duty to your country? To your mother?"
Shuri takes a deep breath, sets her teacup down, and turns to face her guardian Dora.
"General OKoye. I am a genius, a polymath, and one of the world's leading engineers. I have many duties. I can handle them all just fine. Umama will understand - just as Baba did, and T'Challa - just as I command you to, now."
This silences OKoye, finally. She stands up straight as an arrow, glaring down at Shuri's hands in her lap for a beat, before nodding and turning on her heel to leave the princess alone with her meal. "The Queen Mother expects you home before the sun sets. I'll have Naija stay to escort you."
She's angry, but she'll get over it. At least, Shuri hopes, in time.
She takes a moment to close her eyes and calm her mind. A few steady, focused breaths, and she feels a bit better. She finishes her meal, eating until she's full and energized, and sets back to work for as long as she has before has to return to the palace and face the music. She knows that her mother is only giving her this space because there will be a reckoning later on the matter of her insistence on working for days without checking in. OKoye is definitely right about that part.
Still, she is grateful for the extra time.
She doubles her efforts for the day, drawing out plans for the cryostasis chamber that she will have built overnight as an emergency priority. She's intent on doing much more, but she runs out of time. Before she leaves for the evening with the Dora, Naija, she admires her 3D-printed model of the chamber, a little scale model of the Winter Soldier set inside it.
Yes, this will be a challenge. Perhaps an emotional one, given that (as OKoye correctly assessed) she is still grieving. If there is one thing in this world of turmoil, war, heroes and villains that Shuri knows she can rely on, however, even if her emotions fail her, it's her mind. She will lead with that, and it won't steer her wrong. She's sure of it. She has to be.
But Bast.
The last thing in the world Princess Shuri expects is to walk into her lab the next day to meet the man whose ghost stories she's been living with for over a week...
...and find him to possess a pair of the most gentle, nakedly lost winter blue eyes she has ever seen.