Power
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE—March 2039
Bucky stood with his head hanging over the coffin-like chamber, looking at Samantha's peaceful face frozen inches below the small, frosty window. He regretted his decision, yet he still could think of no other option. Shuri, completing the cryogenic program, kept watch over the silent soldier. She hadn't questioned him bursting into her lab with Sam unconscious in his arms. Bucky shrieked for Shuri to put Sam under, and he wouldn't accept any delay. The glow had spread over Sam's entire arm and crept towards her heart. He had been too terrified to let it continue; the simplest thing seemed to be putting Sam on ice.
Shuri did, however, have the wherewithal to accumulate as much information as she could from Sam's body while the princess flash-froze the teen. Shuri had tried, and failed, to explain what was happening to Sam, mainly because even the royal genius could not extrapolate everything from one minute of scans and sampling a rapidly changing body.
Hours later, with Bucky still standing above Sam's chamber, Shuri returned from raiding the girl's room for more answers, holding a brown, paper-wrapped package. "Barnes, what I am telling you is this is a mess. The Stark girl is a mess," she started, ignoring the flicker of his eyes when she didn't use Sam's name, "even if I could delay or cure the virus she just gave herself—"
"I gave it to her," Bucky corrected.
"—which I cannot at this moment…and you may have depressed a plunger, but Samantha Stark carried it with her into that wood."
"It was my choice," Bucky clarified, "she was already gone."
"If I undo that," Shuri continued, pointedly, "she will die from the incompatibility of her skin, which she was dying of anyway. Did you know she did that?"
Bucky made no reply, but when he finally looked up, his face was a mosaic of conflict. His jaw was tight, stoic; his eyes guilty and afraid; and his lips a full and unwavering frown. Shuri took no pleasure in explaining the grave prognosis.
"She would be dead if she—you—hadn't injected the Extremis virus. That's what this is. Her skin already starved her body." Shuri could not tell whether Bucky was listening. "But," she continued slowly, deliberately, "Samantha has not only dosed herself with two different viruses, neither of which has a cure currently, seeing as they are mutations of the original, but she has placed vibranium inextricably inside her largest body organ. If I take her out of this box," she spread her fingers across the window, breaking Bucky's stare, as if to smother Sam's face, "and remove the vibranium from her skin, which I don't know how to do yet, during that time she is unfrozen, Extremis will consume her whole body, change her DNA, and there is no going back. If I take her out and cure her body from the inside, which I don't know how to do yet, she will still die before I can make her own skin survivable. Beside all of that, I do not have the time or resources to bother with her one life while there are multiple threats to our kingdom and across the planet. We do not even know if the metal-man Doom is dead. King Namor is still searching the sea for him. I am sorry, my friend, but she stays here. We will have to deal with her when the rest is handled."
"When the hell was the last time we were without a threat?" Bucky's jaw tightened, holding back a sudden stab of fury. "You mean, after all the enemies that have popped up constantly for two decades are all 'handled,' you finally get around to possibly saving her?"
"Don't think I have forgotten about your arm. You are not in a position to demand anything of me, Barnes." Shuri walked around the chamber to place her slender form within a foot of the bulky soldier. "I spent a great deal of time helping you once before. You attacked me, spat at me, and cursed me. I know it was not you who did those things. It was a dark part of yourself that we saved you from, but," she looked directly into Bucky's eyes with an unwavering determination, "that girl did this to herself. This was her choice. I will not allow one arrogant, foolish, white girl to distract me from aiding my people. I am sick of it. She can wait until her father takes her home for all I care." Shuri walked over to one of her techs, adding, "take that chamber to the annex lab. Come, Captain Barnes."
Shuri walked over to a main board with a constellation of dots and lines, leaving Bucky standing over his greatest guilt in this decade thinking about all the other guilts from all his other decades. He tried to be a good man; he tried to right the past, but he always seemed to fail. Sam's compartment was unceremoniously removed from the lab, and Bucky joined Shuri at the projection, resigned as ever to being instructed on how he might gleam a sliver of redemption for his mistakes.
"What is this," Bucky mumbled, "Stark's route back?"
"This is our analysis of new threats, their origin, and movements that we know of," Shuri said flatly.
Bucky could see the faintest outline of the continents, but several of the dots fell outside of those anyway. It was a jumbled web. Dozens of threats, multiple origins, and half-verified, half-bullshit sightings and leads. He flicked through files in the corner with one finger. Some weren't even threats: Parker's newest recruits were classified as 'unknown agents' until fully vetted. Drug distributers and engineers, doctors, Victor Von Doom, Namor himself, general descriptions of actual monsters that had been sited terrorizing places from Morocco to Hong Kong.
"You see now why the Stark girl will have to wait." She took a deep breath before adding, "and I am convinced there is something big missing. I need to know what it is, Barnes, who it is." Shuri planted the small package in front of Bucky with a heavy thud. "She wiped all of her equipment. I found this in her room. I am not convinced she intended to be saved, James."
He didn't need to go to the annex to be haunted by Sam's face. Bucky could vividly see the snowy flecks on her dark lashes, a fringe of pure white lining her periwinkle lips, her hair a dark grey in the light of her temporary coffin. Was it temporary though? The way the terrain of enemies stood now, it could be a lifetime before someone could help her. Suppressing the thought of explaining to her father what he'd done, Bucky stopped by Sam's room before heading back to his hut. It was another all-nighter; dawn had broken two hours earlier. No wonder Shuri had been so short with him. He was surprised by how sparse and clinical the whole place had been made. What once was 98% laboratory and 2% laundry bin now lay in ruins. Almost everything had been quickly stripped and transferred to storage or the princess's own lab. Bucky sat himself down in the remaining chair, placing the package with Sam's all-caps handwriting prominently showing 'Barnes' facing him on the desk.
Bucky hadn't considered that it mattered, what Sam did to herself before, or if he knew about it. Why should the other things Sam Stark tinkered with matter to him? None of Tony's other tinkering did, and if anyone asked him, Tony answered with "evil genius shit, obviously." Bucky had been trained, incidentally, to not question the technology that created him, and he had to admit that the promise of being made more human was too tempting to start arguing now.
He remembered her admission of being her own patient. He should have known; he should have pressed her for more, maybe then he could be of some use. The way Sam had behaved…how did Bucky not see how desperate she was? She'd sat at that very desk and comforted him, promised him his own wildest dreams, all while she was dying, slowly, probably painfully. Starved, Shuri had said, Sam had starved right before him, fainted even, and Bucky had done nothing but talk about dancing and taking up farming and having lived decade after decade with friends and family. Those same people, they should have been Sam's family, too, but no one was here now.
Bucky picked up his gift. He sat, running his thumbs against the course paper. He took another long moment before running a finger under the corner of tape and ripping down.
A rusted burgundy box lay beneath with the label 'James Buchanan's Blended Scotch Whisky.' He covered his mouth and shut his eyes. Aged 18 years, indeed. Bucky ran his fingers back and forth over his stubble, noting yet another unfamiliar feeling to his left hand. More than any other moment in his long life, he felt utterly helpless, but his guilt remained constant, an ever-flowing river beneath the stone surface. I cannot be responsible for another Stark's death. The thought caught in his brain, rattling around, growing louder.
Bucky clutched the bottle in his hand, feeling his new flesh give way to glass. That simple sensation, gripping things with malleable pressure, was still so foreign. It was as disquieting as seeing the reflection of the Winter Soldier in a mirror: natural and terrifying all at once, half-memory and half-reality. The faces of Howard and Maria flashed before him as they had done countless times before, angled wide-eyed below him as their only granddaughter's face had been just yesterday. Tony truly would kill him, and again Bucky would agree with Tony. He deserved it. His debts could never be repaid. He could not win.
He had more in common with Sam than he'd ever noticed before, yet there was a defined yin and yang to their histories. Bucky Barnes could not get out of this life serving the Avengers, and Samantha Stark could not get in.
"Hey, buddy," Sam Wilson interrupted from the doorway, folding his arms across his chest as he cautiously watched Bucky. His dark eyes were sympathetic. He must have been curtailing his curiosity. It was unlike him to say so little, and without a wise-crack. The seated soldier would have bristled less if Falcon had called him 'Bucko' in this moment. "Let's get you something to eat."
They can describe space as lonely, vast, and cold all they want, but no one truly explains the maddening effects of spinning around in the equivalent of a tin can with nothing surrounding you for lightyears. Your brain is all you have, and the human brain is marvelously fallible. Everything about the human mind, and body, can be deceived in one way or another.
Just one more jump. He had to hold out for just one more, but still the memories bled into the joy that goal brought to him.
Tony could hear them now: Pepper and Sam. They were playing with these little colored blocks of different shapes. Tony sat down with them. Little Sam picked up a bright red cube, and at ten months old, chucked it at Tony's head, hitting his cheekbone with a corner.
Pepper held eighteen-month-old Sam against her hip, staring up at the gigantic bronze statue of Captain Marvel, the woman who saved the universe by snapping her fingers twice. She whispered into her child's ear, "I hope you never have to fight, sweetheart," then looked at Tony, stretching out one hand to his. "Promise me," she demanded.
Down in his headquarters' lab, one of Tony's latest adjustments to the suit caught fire while he worked late one night. Pepper rushed in, screaming about safety for the umpteenth time, the speech nearly drowned out by the roar of fire suppressant. Sam's second birthday was later that week. His adjustment was supposed to be a little surprise at the party, shaped and colorful fireworks that he could launch from his flight stabilizers, but he gave up on it when he saw how red Pep's face became trying to stop him from endangering a group of kids.
Tony graciously took teeter-tooter two-year-old Sam for the day while he scouted a new medical facility site with Happy near DC. He let her chase a butterfly around while assessing the terrain. Sam ended up with poison sumac over her hands and face. She cried for nearly two weeks.
Tony tripped right over her once.
He had to stop Sam from choking on a chicken finger.
He opened the fridge into her face, shut her finger in a drawer, forgot her in the tub.
All of this, and then he lost her mother…and then Sam almost got crushed by Hulk.
There was something Pepper said in jest over coffee one morning when the sumac was almost healed: "at this rate Tony, we'll have to protect Sam from you." Now, he couldn't even ballpark how many times that thought had repeated in his head and his heart over the past years. How could he not be ashamed to be her father? Pepper was the only thing that kept him remotely qualified for the job, and without her Sam deserved better.
And so he had provided better. The Avengers were the best people Tony had ever known; they could do the job better than him. In his mourning, in his distraction, he was no use to Sam.
Tony felt the familiar weightless flutter of his heart, as if gravity no longer held his insides down in one direction but crushed them from all sides. He'd had these pains since the wormhole over Stark Tower, and by now he was used to the feeling, able to shift his mind to jokes and movie quotes and sarcasm, but today was not the same.
He thought back to that horrible day on Titan, when Steven Strange hummed like a tuning fork to predict their futures. Fourteen million, six hundred and five. Tony might be one of the few people who could honestly fathom that quantity of information; he dealt entirely in terabytes and megatons and exponentials. Tony's global-thinking mind had not been prepared for a galactic shit show that day, however, so he asked Strange: "how many do we survive?"
The look Strange had given him, to this day, was indescribable, and more infuriating still were the Doctor's next words.
"Can you trust me, Stark?"
Beyond answering a question with another question, Tony met that guy the day before. Trust issues doesn't even begin to cover it, Dumbledore. What is the god damn plan?! If this was what he invested his faith in, Tony would punch Strange in the face right now and die…
Nope. He still wouldn't be happy. He had to see Sam first.
One last jump.
A/N: James Buchanan Whiskey is a real thing, and you can look it up. I described the packaging as best I could, but it's a fun factoid for ya. Anyone spot the difference in Infinity War canon and this universe? It's important... bwahahahahaha