"We're ready for you."
Charlotte started at the sound of Shuri's voice in her earpiece. Without her focus, the energy current that she had extended into the medical wing warped and retreated back to her room, bringing back with it the solid, abrasive edge of the soldier's current. He was scared.
She stared up at the ceiling of her bedroom, admiring the billowy, lilac drapery that hung from the ceiling. Someone had left fresh lavender in a vase on the dark wooden nightstand. Plush furs and skins lay strewn about the floor the and a soft breeze from a balcony window stirred the silk curtains. Moroccan-style lanterns mounted on the bedroom walls lent a dim, golden light that helped to calm the frantic noise and energy within her mind. She took a deep breath, savoring the lavender one last time, and rolled herself off of the bed.
Charlotte arrived in the medical wing with no memory of how she got there. The room was filled with half a dozen people or so, most of them in stark white lab coats. Shuri was studying a massive digital readout and conversing with one of the medical team. Next to her was what looked like a slimmed-down version of an MRI machine, with a plastic, clear tunnel that encased the table and ended in a halo of machinery at the top end. The electromagnetic noise in her head was overwhelming. Machines hummed, bodies pulsed, pockets of slight gravitational changes tugged and pushed. Charlotte took another deep breath and made her way over to Shuri.
The princess quickly eyed her friend up and down. "How are you feeling?"
"Like I could blow up a microwave."
"Here," Shuri handed her friend a bracelet of Kimoyo beads. "I've expanded your biomechanical sensors to include detectors for your electromagnetic signature. This way, we'll be able to predict if you do."
Charlotte slipped them over her wrist as her eyes drifted over to the man lying in the machine.
"You've anesthetized him?"
"The trigger words have been used to manipulate emotionally traumatic events and memories in Barnes' life as a means of controlling his physical actions. To an extent, we will also be manipulating these memories. I wanted to spare him this if I could. He may still experience some nightmares, but this is a much better option than reliving them while awake."
Charlotte walked up to the plastic tunnel that encased the soldier. He was wearing black pants and a dull gray t-shirt. His right arm trailed 3 separate IV lines and she noticed his feet were bare. Most of his face was hidden by the semicircle of imaging equipment. Charlotte wondered if the only difference between the scene before her and Siberia was the lack of restraints. A wave of unease, almost nausea, made the skin along her jaw crawl.
"Do you know the words?" Shuri asked.
Charlotte nodded and pulled a small piece of paper from her pocket.
"Read each word aloud once. At the end of the sequence, I will help you to locate and recalibrate the neuropathways that have been corrupted by the winter soldier code." She gave Shuri one last unconvinced look. Her friend answered in a low voice, "Charlotte, we can't leave him like this."
Recognizing this truth, Charlotte took a slow, deep breath and exhaled the word,
"Zhelaniye."
The room suddenly seemed as wide as a canyon, deep and hollow and void of all sound, save for the single, echoing Russian word. Bucky remained motionless, his current muted and soft. Charlotte took another breath.
"Rzhavyy."
She felt his energy buckle before the monitor had a chance to sound its alert. Looking behind her, she saw Shuri adjust something on the holographic display. Once she seemed satisfied with its readings, she gave Charlotte a reassuring nod to continue.
"Semnadtsat."
More murmurs behind her as the science team stirred in reaction to what they were seeing on the screen. Charlotte didn't need to see it. She could feel it. The quickest flicker of his finger caught her eye.
"Rassvet."
Charlotte felt a warm growth in her chest, as though the sun were slowly burning its way through her sternum in an effort to reach the soldier's increasingly manic and spiraling current. One of the Wakandans walked up to the table and increased the flow of the anesthetic line.
"Pech."
As Charlotte watched the steady drip of the IV line, the back of her neck prickled as the heat in her chest grew uncomfortably hot. Instead of succumbing to the newest influx of an inhuman amount of anesthesia, his body went rigid. The next word fell from her lips in a taut whisper,
"Devyat."
She heard the plastic fabric rip as Bucky shot up from the table, heaving and gasping and drenched in sweat. With mindless speed, the soldier gripped the scientist's arm and the room erupted into panic. Charlotte backed herself against a wall, unable to look away from the scene unfolding before her. She saw the struggle playing out across Bucky's face as he held the whimpering scientist prisoner with a punishing grip. Bucky growled, dark and low, before throwing the man halfway across the room with a frustrated shout.
"Sistemnaya oshibka."
The gravelly tone was almost unrecognizable. The room suddenly quelled in an effort to hear the soldier's words. He sat motionless on the edge of the table, his hair damp with sweat and blank, dark eyes half-lidded as he fought hard against the anesthesia still coursing through his veins.
"Sistemnaya oshibka," he repeated.
"System error," Shuri translated. If she was as stunned as everyone else in the room, she did a good job of hiding it. Her gaze lingered on Bucky for a few seconds more before she finally turned to Charlotte.
"Are you ok?" she asked. Charlotte nodded. "Sergeant Barnes?"
He lifted his head and slid wordlessly from the table. With a tight stomach, Charlotte watched as he stumbled several feet until he reached the end of his IV tether. The sudden tug of needles in his arm ignited another outburst and Charlotte winced as he flung his arm, mercilessly ripping the catheters from his skin in a spray of blood. His balance dislodged, he fell heavily into the monitoring equipment and a glass screen exploded into a million glittering blue shards.
He remained sitting motionless on the floor, frowning at the ground as his sobriety returned to him. Charlotte cautiously approached and knelt beside him, the sound of crunching glass beneath her feet as loud as fireworks in the deathly quiet room.
"Bucky?"
He gave no indication that he heard her. She reached out and gently placed a hand on the back of his shoulder, inwardly praying for any reaction, even a violent one. His gaze remained fixed to something none of them could see.
"Shit," Shuri hissed under her breath. "He's catatonic." She turned to her team and instructed something in low, quiet Wakandan. Charlotte became vaguely aware of people moving about the room, but her gaze was fixed on the dry rivulets of blood on his arm. His wounds had already clotted.
"We'll take him down to my lab until he recovers," Shuri explained. As she said so, two of the scientists lifted Bucky to his feet and slowly escorted him from the room. Charlotte remained sitting a moment longer, mindlessly toying with a piece of glass until the medical wing was empty except for her and Shuri. Several, long moments of silence stretched between them.
"What a mess," Shuri breathed. Charlotte looked up at her friend, who surveyed the room with crossed arms and furrowed brows. "I don't understand. We ran this algorithm dozens of times and never had an outcome like this."
"Well," Charlotte stood and started to slowly wander the room, "he is a super soldier."
"Exactly. Which is why we were using a super soldier dose of sedatives for the procedure."
"Maybe there was some kind of built-in failsafe to prevent deprogramming?"
Shuri shook her head. "We've mapped and scanned his entire brain. If such a thing existed, it would've been replicated in our trial runs. What were you perceiving?"
"An electromagnetic nightmare."
Charlotte approached the IV pole on the ground and stopped, studying the damp puddles of spilled fluids. There was also a darker, rust color scattered about like confetti. A super soldier dose.
"Shuri, was this drug formula similar to what they might have used in Siberia?"
"Probably somewhat similar. I'm not sure what compounds they used."
Charlotte glanced around the room again, reimagining the scene just moments ago. Scientists is white coats studying an incapacitated figure on an operating table. The medical team glides oversized needles in and out of his forearms, translating notes on holographic screens. A series of Russian words…
Charlotte let out an unsteady breath. "Somewhat similar is all it took. Shuri, all we did was recreate Siberia."
"Which is why we anesthetized him; to remove any traumatic exposure."
"We sedated his brain activity," Charlotte explained. "That's all anesthesia is. But we are made up of so much more than our brains."
Shuri crossed her arms and Charlotte could tell her thoughts were already miles ahead of her own. "You're saying he overcame drug-induced unconsciousness due to severely traumatic physical memory? That his body actually recognized and rejected the pharmaceuticals we gave him?"
"Physical, emotional, and chemical memory. It would also explain why your algorithm never calculated this result; your digital construct didn't account for the rest of the organism."
"Listen to you, sounding like a true biologist," Shuri grinned, then pensively studied her friend in a way that made Charlotte feel akin to a lab rat. "Did you help him?"
"What?"
"This 'electromagnetic nightmare.' You knew he was in distress before we did. Did you help revive him somehow?"
Charlotte thought back to the burning sensation in her chest, realizing now that Shuri was probably right. Perhaps what she felt wasn't her energy field, but his trying to find a way to escape. "If I did, I didn't do it consciously."
Shuri nodded slowly. "We chose to perform his treatment this way because it was safest. For him, for the team, and for you."
Charlotte looked around at the shattered glass and raised an eyebrow. "Well that worked out well, didn't it?"
"Ok, smart-ass. But if he reacted this way to his treatment while unconscious, what makes you think that it could be better if he's awake?"
"I don't know if it'll be better," Charlotte said with a slight shrug. "I'm sure we'll still be testing his limits. But if we approach this differently, then maybe we have a chance at actually curing him."
"Whatever you're about to suggest, I can tell I won't like it."
She grinned and glanced out the window at the cascading falls on the other side of the ravine. "No injectables, no machines or monitoring. And no one else, to minimize any potential damage. Just me and him."
Shuri's steadfast confidence was gone and a rare darkness tinged her eyes. "That's dangerous. I didn't—"
Before she could open her mouth to say more, a metallic beep from her transmitter announced an incoming transmission.
"Shuri. Sergeant Barnes appears to have recovered from his cataonia, but he remains unstable. We're having difficulty confining him."
Shuri and Charlotte exchanged looks. The brunette took the lead, "And I guess we do this now."
Shuri's lips tightened as she mentally sped through any other possible solutions. Charlotte waited patiently, tensely. She absentmindedly reached for the scar behind her ear.
"Shuri?" the voice spoke again.
"Dammit," Shuri hissed under her breath and started to walk away at a brisk pace, motioning for Charlotte to follow. "Bring Barnes to the observation chamber now. We'll meet you there."
Charlotte struggled to keep up as Shuri's long strides gracefully carried her ahead. As they walked through the long hallways of the palace, Shuri instructed,
"We will be remotely monitoring you and Barnes at all times. Here," she plucked off one of her Kimoyo beads. "Keep this in your pocket. It creates a self-defense barrier should you need to use it. To activate it, throw it against the wall or the ground – any hard surface." Shuri turned a sharp corner and Charlotte skidded after her, trying to process the words that were spilling out at a speed only Shuri could manage. "With him conscious, you won't be able to complete an entire sequence, so we'll have to engage each trigger word individually and recalibrate them one by one. Deconstructing the neurologic pathways this way will be slower, but the process will basically be the same. You will probably have to repeat some words to elicit an isolated signal strong enough for recalibration."
As they approached the end of the hallway, Charlotte noted three of the scientists from the medical wing were standing attentively outside a pair of unassuming gray doors. As they neared, Charlotte had to blink away the electromagnetic pressure from those deceptively simple vibranium doors. Shuri briefly conversed with the scientists in Wakandan dialect, then hesitantly turned to her friend. Charlotte had never seen her look so worried before.
"Are you sure you want to do this? This isn't what I intended for you to do."
"My, how the tables have turned," Charlotte gave a weak grin. "An hour ago you were saying we can't leave him like this."
"An hour ago, I was in control."
Charlotte nodded. "I promise I want to do this. Now more than ever."
Shuri wrapped her long arms around Charlotte. "Be careful. I will help you if you need it."
She didn't remember the doors opening or passing through the threshold into the blank room. The chamber seemed to materialize around her, like the setting of a dream, and there was only silence and her and the lone soldier. She focused on the man standing on the opposite side of the room, staring blankly, dazedly at the wall in front of him. He never acknowledged her entry.
"Do you trust me?"
He didn't answer.
"Bucky, look at me." His eyes finally left the wall he had been staring at and met her gaze. "Do you trust me?"
A/N: I feel like I've just wrapped up the prettiest and most neatest Christmas package ever =D Also, bless the lot of you that still come here to read this story. It will get finished. I promise.