Charlotte closed her eyes. She didn't need to, but a dark world helped to eliminate the distraction of watching Bucky and added a clarity to her work. With her feet firmly planted on the floor, hands by her sides, she glided her current outwards until it reached his. She stayed there for a moment, letting their energies drift effortlessly together, like silken sails.

"Semnadtsat."

His current wavered and began to pull inward, disappearing into the deeper recesses of his conscious. She followed it, enveloping his mind gently, carefully, like a great cotton bedsheet falling slowly through the air. The edges of her own energy barrier cracked and fizzed as it brushed his electrical field.

"Semnadtsat."

She felt a surge as thousands of millions of hot, white lights raced along unseen channels in less than half a second. Frowning, she worked hard to tune out the sensation of his blood racing through his veins, the guarded tension in his muscles. His distressed current continued to retreat, haphazardly snapping and reconnecting as he faltered between his own conscious and another. Charlotte pushed forward steadily, letting his dwindling thread of energy guide her to the fragmented mechanism of his mind. Here, she found a twisted energy signal, straining to complete a journey along a channel that disappeared into a hollow abyss. Recollecting herself, Charlotte activated the signal once more.

"Semnadtsat."

The signal flared into an impossible color of light. She had no words for what she did next. It almost felt as if she summoned wind, alive and cold at the edge of a storm. She speared the electrical signal with her own energy. Oversaturated, it ruptured into nothing and was instantly replaced by another as the neurological forces desperately tried to connect. With timed precision, she sent out sharp pulses of electric current, eroding each signal and its pathway little by little.

A sharp pain suddenly shot through her neck. She steeled against it, biting down through the ache.

Not here. Not now.

She gently peeled the bandage off the side of her leg, unable to completely hide her disgust at the sticky, yellow residue that oozed between the skin and the cloth. She had treated burn wounds before, and most were easily healed with a mixture of grafting composites and enhanced molecular regeneration. But these wounds were different. These had been inflicted weeks ago.

And they were still burning.

Shuri tossed the old bandage aside, glanced up at the readout displayed on the hexagonal pixels of the screen, and grabbed a new strip of cloth. "It looks good. See? There's a whole new patch of healed skin here."

Charlotte reclined on an elevated gray table, barefoot and draped in a pair of Wakandan robes that were so thin they were almost transparent. It was the only material she could tolerate against her skin. A searing scar carved out a bald pattern on nearly half of her scalp, while the rest of her hair hung in miserable tatters. Burst blood vessels flooded the whites of her eye into a sea of startling red. Her right hand shook incessantly.

She looked halfheartedly down at her leg. "It hurts like hell."

"It should. The epidermal tissues in most of your leg are still actively burning, likely because there is less blood flow in the lower regions of the body, which means healing is a bit slower. I can give you something else for the pain."

"You can try." Shuri's face faltered ever so slightly as she gingerly wrapped the new bandage around her shin. Charlotte noticed. "I'm sorry, Shuri. I'm not ungrateful."

"I know. You're just difficult." She looked up at Charlotte, reassuring her with a wide grin. "I have an older brother. I can handle difficult."

Charlotte said nothing and watched as Shuri tenderly finished securing the bandage in place. When she was done, she presented her bracelet of Kimoyo beads and took a scan of her entire body. Looking back at the data displayed on the screen, Shuri resisted the urge to shake her head.

"Well, aside from an erratic heart rate, hypoxemia, a fever that should have already killed you, and involuntary muscle contractions, you're a perfectly healthy person."

Charlotte almost snorted. "So, what's the good news?"

"The good news is that all of these symptoms are actually better than they were before." She turned to face Charlotte and immediately froze. "Charlotte? What's wrong?"

Sitting upright on the table, Charlotte had her eyes shut hard, her right hand now tremoring wildly out of control. Before Shuri had time to cross over to her, the lights in the building hummed and flared a hot white. There was a harsh, searing crack and the pixelated display screen shattered into thousands of tinkling pieces. Shuri's wrist blistered in pain and the bracelet of Kimoyo beads exploded across the room, scattering like nothing more than marbles. The lights dimmed in unison. When the last shard fell from Shuri's braided hair, a gaping silence filled the room. It was broken by a sob.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," Charlotte started repeating over and over, her arms crossed in front of her and her head bowed. "I didn't mean to. I'm sorry."

Shuri frowned. "You…you did that?"

"I think so. I don't know."

"Have you done that before?" Charlotte, choking on words, only shook her head. "Are you hurt?"

A fresh torrent of tears spilled down her face. "I'm worried that it's never going to go away. This pain. It's everywhere. I don't want to live like this. What if it doesn't get better?"

Shuri's gaze found her friend's right arm. It was no longer shaking. She crossed over to where Charlotte was sitting, transparent glass shards crunching beneath each step. With long fingers, she grabbed Charlotte's cold, white hands in her own. When Charlotte raised her glassy eyes to Shuri's, the Wakandan princess said,

"I promise you I will not let you suffer. Clearly, we still have some variables to figure out, but you are making progress each day. I am determined to figure out why you were meant to survive all this, and I will do whatever it takes to spare you this pain. And if you lose your will to try…"

Her voice trailed off as her dark eyes searched Charlotte's face. She took in the sight of her charred scalp and her frayed hair, her one monstrous, blood-red eye. Was it a mistake? Was it a cosmic blunder that she survived, only to shrivel towards death? She couldn't bring herself to say it. It would be the ultimate defeat.

Charlotte's lips trembled and she nodded, sparing them both from admitting aloud what neither of them wanted to hear. Shuri gave her hands a hard squeeze in acknowledgement, then glanced around at the ruins of her monitor. She kicked a chipped Kimoyo bead away from her foot.

"But first," she said, half-smiling, "I'm going to need you to stop destroying my lab."

Charlotte opened her eyes. Empty, gray walls stared back at her. Panic grabbed her chest and she spun around until she saw him standing in front of the window, staring out into the dark veil of night.

"Bucky."

He sniffed, shook his head and looked down at his feet. "He used to bring books to the movie theater so he could sit on them and see over other people's heads. He was such a punk. Never took no for an answer."

Charlotte blinked. "You mean Capta—Steve?"

He nodded, a small grin on his face. "Did you know Captain America used to have asthma so bad, I had to carry him for part of a hiking trail on a school field trip?" Charlotte smiled, imagining a breathless Steve, wheezing and pink in the face as Bucky haphazardly slung him over his shoulder and trotted ahead to catch up with the group. "Or there was that one time I had to take him to the hospital because he caught a ball at a Yankees game, and it broke his wrist. Who would've thought? That dumb kid from Brooklyn as Captain America." A shadow crossed his face. "He was going to let me kill him. Why? What would that have proved?"

Charlotte's face wilted as she heard the hitch in his voice. "Nothing. Over the course of his life, he lost you twice. Maybe he figured it was better than to lose you a third time."

He glanced back at her with pink rimmed eyes, looking almost confused. Charlotte shrugged and offered the only anecdote she could think of, "Shuri made me read your files."

It worked. Bucky smirked. "You got that from a personnel report?"

"No." She grinned and turned away. "I got that from the way you described an asthmatic young man who needed booster seats."

A/N: This was a really hard chapter to write. Still not convinced it's completely done, but I'm too impatient to keep fiddling with it. Onward!