Charlotte breathed in deeply, savoring the scent of cool, wind-blown water and sunshine. Her olive-green canvas pants were rolled above her knees and she had shed her plaid buttoned shirt, revealing a plain black camisole underneath. Her hair, now partially drenched from the waterfall, swayed freely as she hopped from rock to rock.

"I bet you fifteen dollars that you fall and bust your ass," Shuri half-shouted from the grassy embankment. She was sitting cross-legged on a blanket and still chewing the last of her lunch as she watched her friend navigate the protruding stones in the stream. Two crescent-shaped cliff faces rose above them, water seeping down the thick, cascading foliage in smaller streams while the black rock walls in the center were hidden behind thick curtains of falling white water. Save for the pools at the base of the waterfalls, the ensuing river was relatively shallow, and the vibrant gray-green waters churned quickly as they continued to flow down the valley.

"I bet you twenty dollars that I fall and bust my ass!" Charlotte shouted back, laughing. She gingerly leaped to another rock before stepping down into the water and hobbling her way to shore, wincing as her soft feet found sharp stones on the riverbed. She picked her way back to where Shuri was sitting and laid down on the blanket, face-up, eyes closed hard against the African sun.

"I can't believe you have all of this around you and you never come up here."

Shuri shrugged. "I'm busy. Especially now that I have to head up the technology and information exchange. There is so much updating to be done in the rest of the world. I still can't believe you all are still using laptops." Charlotte snorted. "Besides, there's no one else who has time to come with me, either. What I can't believe is how many times I've invited you back and you never visit."

"I'm busy."

"Doing what? Blowing up microwaves?"

"That only happened once."

Shuri shook her head. "So primitive."

Charlotte defiantly held a single finger up in the air. "One. Microwave. I told you, they're usually professional speaking engagements. Energy researchers, medical universities, government engineering programs. They all have questions and I try to answer them and explain to them what I…feel."

"Have you figured it out?"

"Not really. It's like trying to describe what wetness feels like to someone who's never known water," Charlotte said, turning over onto her belly. "It's a whole other spectrum of senses."

"And they pay you for that?" Charlotte nodded. "You're such a scam artist."

"What? How?"

"Getting paid to talk about something you don't even understand. That would be like Elvis lecturing about the properties of matter. It's ridiculous. At the very least, it's fraud."

"Oh, what, like you have it all figured out?"

"Better than you do!"

"Fine, then you can do all the lecturing and I'll just sit there and be the trick pony. Oh, wait — you're too busy rescuing the world from laptops."

Shuri grabbed a handful of grass and tossed it at her friend. "I wouldn't want to take away your income. Then you'd have to come live with me, Bast forbid." Charlotte laughed and picked the green blades out of her hair. "How have you been doing physically?"

"Some days I—" was all Charlotte managed to say before two children clad in orange and red robes came running up the hill towards them, laughing. She sat up as they rushed to Shuri, breathless and white, wide smiles breaking across their faces.

"We won! We won!" The young boy shouted back in the direction they had come from, using a long stick to tout his success. The girl giggled and had her arm hooked around Shuri's neck. Charlotte looked back and saw a man approaching them, unhurriedly. He was missing his left arm.

"You won?" he exclaimed with a relaxed grin that suggested it wasn't much of a contest. "You're way too fast for me. I must be getting old."

Charlotte stood, noting how he stood nearly a full head taller than her, and offered her right hand. Still seated on the blanket, Shuri made introductions wile the children twirled around her,

"Sergeant Barnes, this is my good friend Charlotte Dawson."

He took her hand and shook it firmly. "Bucky."

It seemed like Charlotte had been preparing for days to meet him; she knew his name, his aliases, his history, his condition. But something still struck her about the man standing before her. He wore black pants and a white undershirt that was covered by a large, dark shawl carefully wrapped around his neck and left shoulder. His beard was a little thicker, his hair a little longer and part of it was loosely pulled back in a tie, leaving a few strands draped around his face. His bare arm was finely sculpted and behind his firm grip she could sense a well-controlled strength. Dark lashes shaded those intensely clear blue eyes.

She hoped she hadn't been staring too long before replying, "It's nice to finally meet you."

"White wolf!" the young boy said as he skipped up to Bucky. "White wolf, now you must come swim with us in the waterfalls! I can show you how to find fish!"

"There is lots of fish," the girl reiterated coyly, still clinging to Shuri.

"White wolf?" Charlotte shot a brief glance at Bucky, who shrugged. She grinned at the boy. "Where is my cool nickname?"

The boy twirled his stick and tapped it on the ground a few times, thinking hard. "I don't know," he admitted sheepishly.

"If you are going to fish, you need fishing spears and poles," Shuri said. "Why don't you go make some and let us know when you are finished?" The children ran off, the older boy shouting to his younger companion in an African dialect as they disappeared amongst the greenery and boulders. "Sit," Shuri motioned for Charlotte and Bucky to make themselves comfortable. "I hope you didn't mind me sending the children for you. They are very fond of you."

Bucky shook his head as he lowered himself to the blanket. "Not at all."

Charlotte grabbed at a small, silver cup. "Would you like something to drink after your footrace?"

"No thanks. Running for third place isn't exactly thirsty work."

Charlotte smiled and reached for her discarded shirt before sitting. Shuri noticed how Bucky's eyes were tracing the winding scar from her neck to her bare shoulder before she slipped back into her plaid shirt.

"Charlotte is going to help us with your recovery," Shuri started to explain. "But not before she has a chance to wine and dine you, first."

Bucky's eyebrows perked as Charlotte blushed into a furious red shade. The Wakandan princess laughed shamelessly.

"Shuri!" Charlotte hissed. "That's not true. Has she told you anything?"

"She said she found a way to get this junk out of my head and that she wanted me to meet you first."

"Because it's a bit complicated," she returned, still shooting daggers at her friend, who looked very pleased with herself.

"It's always complicated," Bucky said softly, earning back Charlotte's full attention. He looked tired. "I'm assuming you already know my story. What's yours?"

Those crystalline eyes that had seen more than she ever would witness were an almost intolerable spotlight. She lingered on his face a moment longer before looking out at the waterfalls.

"I have extra senses. We call it electromagnetism, but it's more than that. It's light, it's magnetism, it's a sense of animation in the earth, the air. Everything is infiltrated by it, living or otherwise. Technology, soil, us. It feels like…I don't know, and you probably don't care. But everything is composed of currents that constantly combine and interact and fluctuate. I can feel them and sometimes manipulate them."

"Manipulate them? How?"

Charlotte grinned and shook her head. "I don't really know. Bend them, augment them, eradicate them. It's not a very exact science."

"But it is," Shuri interjected. "She can detect energy signatures at great distances, and she can also identify microscopic ones within close proximity. Which means she constantly perceives an entire range of feedback from various sources and how they influence each other. The accuracy is in detecting energy correlations, not control."

Bucky's eyebrows raised. "Sounds overwhelming."

"It was," Charlotte admitted. "Things have gotten much better in the past few years."

"So how did you get these senses?"

"Well," Charlotte plucked a piece of grass and twirled it between her fingers. "I was helping my mom in the garden one afternoon when a storm started to move in. She headed inside as soon as she heard thunder and I stayed out to watch the colors in the clouds – they were beautifully gray and green and black-blue. Anyways…as far as we know, I am the only person to ever survive a direct lightning strike."

She motioned to the top of her head. "It blew apart part of my skull, traveled down my right side and exited my foot. My heart stopped beating on and off for days. When I finally came to, the world seemed a much more…intense place."

"I can relate," Bucky said, a small grin in place. "And that's not something I've said to many people." Charlotte lighted at his humor. "But I thought lightning was supposed to be hotter than the sun."

"It is," Shuri chimed in again, a little too eager to explain. "So, either Charlotte survived being struck by something that is almost 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun, or…" she paused and Charlotte half-expected her to start her own drum roll. "She somehow managed to interact with an upper-atmospheric phenomenon composed of electrically charged luminous plasma."

Charlotte exchanged skeptical looks with Bucky. "Did you catch that?" Bucky only smiled.

"We'll never know what really happened because the technology wasn't around to document it," Shuri said pointedly, alluding to their previous conversation, "but it's a possibility. This kind of upper-atmospheric lightning has relatively colder properties and lasts for only a fraction of the time of regular lightning. It would explain why she didn't combust upon impact."

"Thanks, Shuri."

Her friend lifted a cup towards her as a toast. "Either way my friend, you shouldn't be alive. So, cheers."

Charlotte smiled at Shuri and tried to ignore the feeling of Bucky's gaze lingering on her.

"And this is good news for you, Bucky," Shuri grinned, "because she is going to help us to reroute the neurological pathways of your mind and deprogram your soldier coding."

He nodded. "I'm in."

"But Bucky," Charlotte could hear the pleading note in her own voice. "This isn't without risk. It's all very experimental and I know Shuri is doing her best to make it as safe as possible, but I can't do this in good conscience without knowing that you are ok with this. I don't know if you're going to just have a headache or if you'll hallucinate or—"

"Or turn into a fried egg." Bucky frowned at Shuri's comment. "Those were her words."

Charlotte gave Bucky a helpless look. "I didn't mean—"

"The worst thing I've ever seen her do is blow up a microwave."

"So, you're saying there's a small chance I might blow up into a fried egg?" Bucky smirked, somewhat enjoying the exasperated look on Charlotte's face.

"No—Shuri doesn't—I meant…" Charlotte spluttered. "The microwave was years ago. Things are a lot more stable now than they were back then. I'm not saying there even will be any side effects. There may be none! But the point is I don't know what's going to happen and I would feel more comfortable about this whole process if you acknowledge that."

A strained silence fell over the group. His half-hearted grin from a moment ago was gone and those unblinking blue eyes stared straight at Charlotte.

"What's the worst that could happen?" he asked. "You kill me? You erase my memory again? Because I can tell you right now, I can think of worse things."

His words almost made her sick as her heart tumbled inside out within her chest. Her fingers floated back up to the scar on the side of her neck.

"I'm afraid of hurting you," she finally admitted. "Of causing pain."

Any reaction she expected from the former soldier was sealed behind a steel, emotionless wall. "I know that fear. I live with it every day."

"White wolf! White wolf! Now we can go fishing!"

She looked over her shoulder to see the children running towards them again, this time with their little fists full of cleanly shaven poles and green, twisted rope furnished from plant leaves.

"Charlotte." She looked back at Bucky and flinched when she felt him place his warm hand over hers. "If this has any chance of working at all, it's worth it."

He let go of her hand as the children swarmed the group of adults. The girl handed out individual fishing rods to each of them, ensuring that Bucky received his first, while the boy whispered intently into Shuri's ear. Without warning, she burst into laughter.

"You have a nickname," Shuri giggled at Charlotte. "It is a very good one."

"Isibhamu," the boy said, fiddling with the edges of his robe.

Delighted, the girl chimed in, "Isibhamu!"

"Isibhamu," Charlotte tried the African word out on her tongue. "What does it mean?"

"It means lightning bug."

Charlotte heard Bucky chuckle beside her and decided it was her favorite sound she had heard all day.

A/N: That was fun ^_^