Winter of the White Wolf

Chapter 22 - Eclipse

Sam couldn't help but compare their silent, somber march through the Wakanda Design Group to something of a funeral procession. The glass and vibranium building was as active as any military base, with scientists, Doras, and staff everywhere he looked, each preoccupied with whatever afternoon tasks they were assigned to for the remainder of their workday.

Their own group opted to shuck off the need for small talk in preference to making their way to wherever Shuri was leading them as efficiently as possible. From what he could tell: it looked as though they were headed in the same direction of that lab from the night prior where they'd all been given a firsthand recap of Madripoor.

The building's interior had a very different feel in the daytime than at night, due in part to the fact that so much of it was lined with glass (or was it transparent vibranium?) that looked out onto the vibrant natural world outside. Seeing the manned and unmanned vessels maneuvering effortlessly outside reminded him about Bucky's comment about the wings earlier: that yes, he would absolutely love to stretch them out and see the view from way up there, where there was nothing between him and the sky itself.

But those were thoughts for another day. Right now he needed to ground himself to the present.

While there was no doubt from the immaculate labs and assorted scientific equipment (those that Sam could recognize, anyway) that this was a research facility, it was also dripping with an uncharacteristic amount of culture that he just wasn't used to seeing in places like this.

In his experience, the bases and labs he'd spent any time in were made to look intentionally sterile, because somewhere along the way, that'd been deemed to be tantamount to efficiency. You could visit the same base ten times over ten years and about the only decor that was liable to change were the safety diagrams on the walls, and if you were lucky, maybe the paint color'd been overhauled from silver to French grey, or maybe pewter if someone was feeling particularly daring on challenging the building codes.

But everywhere Sam looked around him had this amazing ability to blend the look of a professional lab with… with art. With culture and design. There were entire murals painted on walls and alcoves that wouldn't have been out-of-place beside street art in Baltimore, and yet they didn't stand out here: they belonged. It was a very specific cultural hit that made him feel a lot of things at once, seeing people so proud and unintimidated to put their heritage on display like it was just the status-quo.

For them, it probably was.

And that made him feel a certain way, and that led him to thinking about Isaiah Bradley and the starkly different life he'd led and the choices that'd been taken away from him, never to truly be able to be repaid.

Sam focused his attention back on the present, pulling his mind away from letting his mind linger too far from their current objective.

Bucky walked beside him, and though neither of them had spoken a word since Ayo'd suggested they should talk, the concern on his face was plain-as-day. Sam couldn't blame him, especially since he'd been given so little in the way of explanation, but at least he suspected they'd be getting to that shortly. It wasn't like there was footage worse than Madripoor for them to drum up.

"You good?" Sam inquired softly as they kept pace behind Ayo, Shuri, and Nomble while Yama trailed behind them.

Bucky glanced over to Sam with those troubled blue eyes of his, "Not really. I feel like my brain's going a thousand miles a minute here. I just keep thinking about worst-case scenarios."

Sam had a few guesses on what those might entail, but he didn't want to give the thoughts any more oxygen than absolutely necessary, "Whatever it is: We'll figure it out."

"I was kinda hoping I was past the point of having to figure more of this stuff out," Bucky admitted, frustration apparent in his voice.

Yeah, Sam could feel that one too. The man had already been through so much.

As they stepped through the next set of automated doors, Sam squeezed Bucky's shoulder in a quick show of camaraderie. Around them, the three Doras fanned out and the group came to a stop in the lab. Shuri immediately stepped over to attend to a nearby console while Yama and Nomble quietly spoke to some of the scientists and staff present in the room. By all appearances, they politely asked them to go on a break and step outside for a little while so Shuri could have the room. One of the perks of being a genius princess.

None of the staff put up any debate, but Sam could feel their eyes upon him, and particularly on Bucky. They might not have recognized Sam without the suit and shield, but it was clear they recognized Bucky, and were probably trying to sort out why he was here, or possibly: what'd happened to the arm, if they remembered him having it at all.

Once Shuri was satisfied with whatever logistics she was attending to, she turned back around wearing that very particular expression of hers that Sam still didn't feel he had the language to properly parse. There was something heavy under the surface there for sure, but he didn't feel like it was the bombshell Bucky was bracing for. He couldn't imagined any of them, Shuri included, would have been able to fake those smiles back at the museum if they had news that was truly dire.

That still didn't mean it was good news, granted.

He was certain it was definitely not good news.

Shuri made a temple out of her fingers and nodded her head to Sam in acknowledgement, but her words were for Bucky, "Before we get started, I think it's important for you to be aware that I'd like to discuss some topics that you may consider private, as they concern your time here in Wakanda as well as your continued recovery. You can do as much or as little with the information as you choose, and I will as ever respect your wishes on who is made aware of it, with the exception being my brother and our King."

Sam immediately caught the weight of the term "continued recovery" but it took him a moment to process the subtext of what she was saying.

Bucky caught on immediately. He anxiously rubbed his fingers together as he regarded Yama, Nomble, and Ayo. His voice was almost fragile as he pulled up the courage to speak, "They're fine. I trust them. They've seen it all and worse."

He looked to Sam next, and Sam could feel something heavy in his friend's expression. At first, he thought maybe Bucky was evaluating if he was comfortable sharing this vulnerable part of himself with him, but the longer Sam looked, the more he saw not apprehension, but that familiar, lingering shame and fear that followed Bucky about his past. It was the look of someone who knew they had skeletons in their closet that they'd gone to extremes to learn to lock away rather than address. "You don't have to stay if you don't want to," Bucky said candidly for not the first time that day. Because his default remained that he wanted to ensure that people around him were free to dodge away from anything remotely uncomfortable.

"Do you want me here?" Sam asked seriously, "Because if you want me here, this is where I want to be."

The gravity and resolve in that statement was too much truth for Bucky Barnes to debate. He responded by taking a gulp of air and managing a barely audible, "Yeah. I would." His eyes were so unsettled and frightened they were almost alien.

"Okay then I'm staying, Buck. So don't worry about me." He tilted his chin in Shuri's direction, acknowledging that the decision had been made. He was in on whatever this little club of theirs had to offer, skeletons included.

Shuri nodded, and Sam was pretty sure he saw the empathy of relief in her expression, "Okay. Let me try and offer a brief overview since these and related topics are fresher for some and many years-old for others."

She rolled her hand across a display that projected a 3D hologram of what Sam was rather certain was a scan of some of Bucky's old biometric data. The read-out displayed the outline of his head and upper-torso, including what looked like a torn-off version of his signature chrome arm. The view was semi-transparent, showing not only his skeleton, brain, and nervous system, but the strange ways in which his original prosthetic had been well... surgically grafted onto him. He'd never stopped to consider how the arm was attached, but the pale view he saw of screws tapped into bone and wires running into his nervous system was frankly: incredibly, terribly unsettling, not to mention downright painful to look at. That was not how prosthetics were supposed to look or be attached.

Sam remembered asking Steve once if the serum made him immune or dull to pain, and he'd actually laughed at the question, insisting that while it'd made him more durable and quicker to recover, when he got injured, it still hurt just as much as he remembered.

Seeing all the wires and metal in Bucky's old shoulder though... god. It was amazing he would have been able to focus on anything other than the constant, agonizing pain.

"Years ago, when you were dropped on our doorstep, we had very little to go on beyond the fact that you were reactive to various words and auditory responses that HYDRA spent years embedding. We quickly realized that their methods included tangential and supplementary stimuli responses, such as through the precise application of various frequencies and patterns of flashing lights, tactical responses, electrical stimulation, and so-on."

Sam felt his stomach shift as he took in Shuri's words and ran them through the basics, which appeared to include that HYDRA hadn't just put words of obedience in his friend's mind, but a… a lot more than that. He'd always assumed a torture and experimentation had likely been involved in equal measure, but it was one thing suspecting and another thing having someone lay it out in the open like that. The fact that Bucky wasn't saying anything to counter Shuri's statement was chilling. He couldn't imagine how-on-earth they'd even begun to work out what Bucky was responsive to without an instruction manual to go-by.

He didn't want to think through the details of how HYDRA went about breaking Bucky originally, no less what trial-and-error was needed for Shuri to sort out not only what'd been done to him, but how to hopefully un-do it.

"It took years of work, but slowly, steadily, we made progress to identify the rogue programming and find ways to navigate around it."

Bucky's expression turned hard, "Around it?" His attention shifted to Ayo, and confusion showed in his voice as he spoke to her, "You told me the Winter Soldier programming was removed. That I was free."

Ayo's face shifted and she glanced to Shuri, as if asking permission to speak. Shuri nodded, and Ayo addressed Bucky, her rhythmic voice soft and empathetic in a way Sam wasn't sure he'd ever heard from her, "You were, and you are free," she confirmed, "Nothing there has changed. We have no revelation that will force you back to that life."

Shuri's tone and expression were all compassion as she sought to clarify, "Ayo is correct, but the programming cannot ever truly be removed, not in the way you mean. We explained that to you. The best option we could manage with the least lasting damage was to make it benign by ensuring that none of the processes could be remotely activated."

Bucky's expression went unreadable as he processed her words.

Sam was feeling like he was starting to get lost at the nuance of some of the talk that was going around, and if he expected that he might be quizzed or expected to understand any of this, he wanted to ensure he wasn't left behind, "I'm trying to get caught up here," He held up a hand for the group so he could get their attention, "Bucky'd told me he was cured here in Wakanda. That the trigger words that used to work on him don't anymore. Is that not the case?" He heard concern rising in his own voice.

"There are no words that anyone can speak that will activate those embedded processes," Shuri confirmed, though Sam noted she didn't lead with a decided yes or no, which was… troubling. "The topic is an immensely nuanced one. Here, let me try to take a step further back."

She waved a hand and a series of five more readouts popped up in the air in front of her. She made a quick gesture with three fingers and the data displayed under them swapped to English before they came to life, cycling through a time capsule of about thirty seconds of captured data. Listed under each scan was a date and time the readings were taken, as well as various biometric data such as Bucky's heart rate, temperature, oxygen level, weight, and so on, as well as handwritten notes that included observations such as his mood, stress levels, and further information about if the readings were taken during or in relation to what was simply listed as an "event." These events were numbered in the double-digits, which… which was not a particularly settling thing.

While the figures were recognizable enough, it was easy to pick up on subtle differences between them. The most obvious differences ranged from the various states of Bucky's arm, or lack thereof, through the very different ways that various colors and patterns of light flickered through his brain and nervous system. Sam might not have specialized as a neurologist, but his years as a pararescue allowed him to at least grasp the basics of the medical chart in front of him. But even then: only barely. The three readouts that listed an "Active Event" were notably different from not only the other three readouts, but even from one-another. They each had all sorts of colored lights firing rapidly, but they were isolated in different areas, like the big finale of a firework performance.

"So there are a number of assumptions that you may inadvertently be making based on what you've seen and your life's experiences," Shuri observed, "We all do this, but it's important for us to break it down so we are speaking on the same plateau."

"There is an assumption to be made that HYDRA inserted a rogue personality, a sleeper agent inside of James, and that that personality was instructed to lay dormant until code words were spoken. The end result of such an endeavor would likely be a type of dissociative identity disorder, that colloquially may be known as multiple personalities. While some of what we saw, and I suspect you saw, verges on that appearance at first glance, it was insufficient to explain the complexities of what we saw in Jame's particular case."

"There were not simply two or more latent personalities and a switch that permitted one or the other to surface. Frankly: That was what I expected to find at first as well, and things may have been altogether simpler if that was the case, but that is neither here nor there."

Beside him, Sam could tell that Bucky was practically squirming. This couldn't be easy to listen to from the outside when you'd lived it, "I remember you saying something to that effect too. But it feels more like that. Felt like," he automatically corrected.

"How long's it been?" Sam heard himself ask before it'd even gotten past him to consider if this was the place or time for such a personal question.

The face Bucky made was… it was not a good face. It wasn't an expression that declared that Sam had overstepped or he was upset for being put on the spot. Rather: what made it so profoundly unsettling was it was apparent Bucky didn't know.

Apparently Ayo was to the rescue and didn't see the need to string the question out, "The last few failsafes we had to root out were not like the scripted trigger words Zemo used against James. They were insidious, evil things," her eyes glanced back to Bucky, with that same expression she had before, that one that said there was a lot of history between them and she was doing her best to step with compassion and grace as she spoke, "And in some cases, discovered in highly problematic orders. They rarely presented the same, and caused complications in their wake. The final one was perhaps, what? Three months before the Battle of Wakanda?"

The question was for Shuri, but Sam found himself staggered: It'd been only months since that for he, Bucky, and anyone else who'd been dusted. "But you… don't remember it," Sam half-stated, half-asked, trying to keep pace with the conversation.

Bucky flinched as he responded, "Our best guess is HYDRA had very specific data they were trying to capture when it came to things like missions. The other stuff… it was more…"

"-Reactive," Shuri offered, simply. Sam caught Yama nodding in agreement from beside her. "The whole point of the failsafes were to protect how their asset was being used and by who. This helped ensure that if he were captured, sensitive information couldn't be pulled without the required input codes."

Sam caught something of a shift in Bucky's expression, but it was Ayo that interjected, smoothly correcting Shuri, "The soldier, not the asset." Ayo's eyes went back to Bucky, and Sam became distinctly aware that this woman, this woman who had a god-given right to be cross for the various trespasses Bucky'd made in the last few months… that she was actively burying her own frustrations so she could be present and attentive for him.

It was good to see for sure, but he was also finding it readily apparent just how deep their history must go if Ayo felt the need to correct Princess Shuri, of all people, on behalf of Bucky's silent feelings.

"Of course," Shuri tipped her head in acknowledgement and steered the conversation back to the displays. "In time, we found that what James was experiencing was not a rogue personality in the form of a sleeper agent or fully-formed, multiple personalities. Our first clue was that we saw a great deal of variation as well as overlaps in the readouts, including during active events as well as in the time between them. Here, look."

She spread her fingers apart over one of the animated scans of Bucky's brain, which prompted the image to enlarge until the outline of the brain was easily two feet across, allowing for a detailed view of the cycle of colorful fireworks that trailed through his nervous system.

"Consider for a moment that the human mind does not exist in a static state. It's dynamic and alive, constantly evolving how it operates, much like an advanced computer. Artificial intelligence in its purest form is an assembly of data, and one could say that our very personality is formulated from a complex assortment of ever-changing memories, life experiences, as well as more nebulous learned muscle, nerve, and synapse-memory. The difference is that in Jame's case: the normal linear progression has been disrupted countless times by attempts from outside forces to reroute the natural process, subvert it with programmed reactions and causal training, as well as attempts to compartmentalize certain types of stored information so that they are only active when certain conditions are met. Much like how the instances and events that transpired during failsafe events, let alone their code words, aren't recorded and stored in a way that can be readily accessed after the fact. That's not to mention the wipes they put him through trying to reduce the emergence of the human element."

Bucky sighed, seeing fit to try to forcibly interject some levity in what was becoming a downright uncomfortable situation, "I'd almost forgotten how elegant you made this stuff sound."

Shuri's private smile was for him alone, "If we think of it like pure data and lines of code, it can be easier to speak about."

"Wait, wipes?" Sam heard himself say as he struggled to catch-up to the conversation, "They could do that?"

"Well, it was more like being fried from the inside out," Bucky admitted with far more ease than the man ought to have been able to, "Eventually things just... short out. Or your heart stops. And they have to restart you." He looked to Shuri, adding, "You know, if you think about it like a computer, you're right: It's marginally less awful. I'd never considered that was HYDRA's version of 'Just turn it off and back on again.'"

Sam wasn't sure how wide his eyes got at that. He'd never… he'd just never thought to ask. And the fact that Bucky dared to make a joke at his own expense about it, "Christ, man."

Bucky shrugged and chewed his lip, and Sam took a deep breath in and out before his partner clarified, "Don't worry about it. We didn't do any of that in Wakanda."

"We certainly didn't," Ayo saw fit to add.

Sam found his voice again, buried somewhere in the back of whatever pantry he stored topics like torture and people inflicting near-death experiences on people he cared about, "I still feel like I'm not quite following. If you're saying the Winter Soldier wasn't a separate personality, then…?" he began, though he wasn't even sure where he was going with the thought.

"Comparisons like that will be prone to experience bias because you innately draw similarities and differences to yourself," Shuri offered. "Instead, try to focus on something more morally neutral." She considered a second before holding up a finger, "Think of it more like your drone, Redwing, was it?"

Sam's attention perked at this. The two had discussed the history of drones and AI back at the museum, so the topic and her enthusiasm for it were still fresh in his mind.

She continued, "Consider the difference between your prior drone, as compared to your new ones. Then how they responded when they were first initiated, as compared to their responses after weeks and months of development."

"They're learning," Sam observed, feeling like he was beginning to grasp what the genius was getting at.

"Yes! Though he's still running the same core programming, the AI steadily adapts and evolves." She scaled the nearest display of Bucky's brain back down again so that it was poster-sized like the others. "And if you tracked it over time, you would see changes in how it thinks and behaves as well."

"In the same way, for all the periods where the Soldier was out of cryo, his mind continued to adapt and evolve as well. When those processes were called again, they could reference old pockets of code, like programmed obedience of the trigger words, but even that was done in addition to leveraging current information, and the years of life experiences that the Soldier had both before and during his time with HYDRA. They had to. Situational awareness was as important as adaptability. He needed to be able to respond to handlers as well as threats at a moment's notice. You can't program the mind to cover all possible contingencies: you have to allow it to adapt and make decisions. Some of them are so minor, we take them for granted: How to breathe, walk, swallow, and talk. Others are infinitely more complex. And what HYDRA was trying to do, it seems, was to create their own manner of thinking, living AI, that had free-thought, but only to a controlled point."

Sam considered her words, "So you're saying what we've seen, what we've always seen, are just… an-ever evolving blend that's pulling from different parts and experiences? Like…" he searched for a comparison he could more readily relate to, because the intricacies of coding and artificial intelligence certainly weren't it, "Like building with Legos?"

Shuri rolled the simile over in her mind's eye, "A bit primitive, but if you mean that each 'build' would contain different colored bricks in the shape of a human mind, then yes, something like that. And that in time, more bricks would be added to the initial pool of life experiences, stimulus and response, memories, and so on, and that the resulting assemblies would each form a subtly different, loose version of what one might call 'personality.' Using this comparison, the Winter Soldier programming was set up to repress very specific building blocks, keystone landmarks." She glanced to Bucky as if seeing how the comparison landed for him.

From beside Sam, Bucky offered only a halfhearted shrug in reply, as if portions of this topic were hardly new territory, and undoubtedly: All this focus on him was getting to be a bit much considering his normal preferences towards introversion and avoidance, "All I know is that that whatever way you want to cut it, HYDRA made it a point to find ways to leverage some bricks and intentionally exclude others, and that certain combinations were especially devoid of anything I'd consider 'choice' or 'free will.'"

"Wait, more than what I saw?" Asked Sam, because he very clearly thought what he'd seen firsthand was the Winter Soldier's standard operating procedure."

"Worse," Bucky admitted, "Or so I'm told. I don't remember a lot of the details."

"Some had intention and little else to speak of at all," confirmed Ayo.

The heavy silence that followed told Sam he was clearly missing the context of the reference.

Bucky caught the inquiry pooling on Sam's face, "Recovery wasn't… remotely a straight line. Some of the trigger words and fail-safes were…" he faded off as he searched for a suitable term.

"Dangerous, and dehumanizing setbacks," Ayo supplied.

Bucky cringed, shifting his weight to his other foot, "Yeah. That's one way to put it." His attention shifted to Ayo, "...I'm sorry you got the brunt of it."

Ayo shrugged easily, too easily, her expression returned to once again being tight and guarded, "I knew what I agreed to. It would not have been my place to shuck off the responsibility to someone else."

The silence continued to linger in the room, and for a moment, Sam looked to Shuri as if waiting for her to continue, but both she, Yama, and Nomble were apparently biding their time as Bucky and Ayo awkwardly regarded one another.

"...I know I've said it before, but thank you," Bucky's voice was small, but it conveyed more gravity than Sam thought he'd ever heard those two words project, "All of you quite literally saved my life, in some cases, nearly at the cost of your own. I may not remember all of it it, but-"

Ayo's focused brown eyes stayed steady on him, but there was a crack in her armor, and she swiftly cut him off with a voice that was tempered with a very particular type of no-nonsense compassion Sam still wasn't used-to hearing from her, "You are welcome. We only ever wanted to see you free and whole."

The two of them regarded each other for a long, respectful moment before Bucky turned his attention back to Shuri, obviously searching for the words he wanted to ask next. "But if you're saying the programming is benign, it follows that it's still there. And therefore the parts that are made up of him are still there, too?"

"It's hard to explain," Shuri confessed, "But try to think of it this way: Were I even to pretend I could look into your mind and selectively choose which parts to keep and which to shuck away, what would you have me do?"

"I mean… all those years. I don't need them. I don't want them," Bucky said without a moment's hesitation.

"But you see, we don't get to choose like that, Bucky. Much as I'm sure there is part of you that wishes you could go back to the person you were before the train, before Azzano, before the War, those experiences changed you. There's a delicate beauty in the concept of pure innocence, particularly when you were a victim for so long, but those years and those experiences have shaped who you are now. I wish that I had the skill to cherry-pick out the worst of those memories and give you peace and reprieve from them, but it's impossible to cleanly separate out parts you call the Winter Soldier from young Bucky Barnes to who you are now because they all share a great deal of common material."

"We've spoken of this at-length over the years, but HYDRA did what they could to repeatedly wipe and experiment on you. Even if I were willing, would you want more of the same? Even if you could: It would risk removing the core of who you were prior to that as well. And then what are you left with? You can't selectively erase only a portion of someone's memories like some blissfully simplified children's science fiction movie."

Shuri sighed, "I know it is easier to try to think of things in black and white. Of good and bad. Of viewing this as a tumor that is either present or cut free, but it's not that simple. You have come so far, and your future is finally your own."

"Then why did you call me back here? Why are you telling me this now?"

"Your training," Shuri said in a measured tone, "We weren't done, you know that. So much of your life has been fraught with periods that were a blend of many things: Of memories, of wants and needs, of questions of identity. You've done an incredible job of pushing forward through so very much adversity. But as you've done so, it became apparent that your mind was not healing as we'd hoped it might once HYDRA ceased its efforts to repeatedly wipe and repress what we'll call your baseline personality."

"Your mind's been able to heal and form new connections, but always struggled with the shadows of memories from various times in your life. When I was reviewing some of the last sets of data I captured from you, it made me concerned that there might be other trends we weren't initially seeing because the code words and similar were acting as a sort of soft event reset. I'm overly simplifying a number of complex, compounding issues, but there were still other trends I only picked up on in earnest as my work with artificial intelligence deepened after Vision, after the Decimation. As I learned more, it became evermore apparent that the further we got from one of your events, that data, memories, and experiences that weren't readily referenced might be evermore susceptible to inadvertently getting locked away like those behind the old failsafes."

Sam was following, generously, maybe twenty percent of that, but he understood enough: Shuri was worried Bucky could start losing his memory, or at least portions of it. That was, if he hadn't already. Damn.

Bucky's voice was pale, "...So you're saying you're worried that because of what HYDRA did to me, that my mind could be filing things away that I wouldn't want locked away?"

"I am," Shuri confirmed, face ever-compassionate as she spoke, "And that the further away we get from an event, the worse it could become. This is uncharted territory for all of us. There were early instances of memory loss I thought were outliers, fall-out from the damage that was done to you by their hands, but I think it's more complicated and less self-resolving than we'd hoped."

Shuri leaned down slightly to try to catch Bucky's eye, "I believe there is more we can do to help, but only if you want to. If you are content with how things are now, we never need to speak of this again. I only worry about the possibility of you losing access to more with time, and worse: Perhaps not even being aware it's happening."

Silence pervaded the lab, followed by a quiet, reserved version of Bucky's voice, "You told me I was free," he repeated to no one in particular, his voice hoarse as he let the statement envelop the lab.

The words and the raw emotion in them hit Sam hard, and he was certain he saw Ayo start to take a small step forward before she caught herself and she slipped back into that silent guardian pose of hers. Yama and Nomble watched quietly from nearby, though Yama's expression was far more troubled.

"You are free, James," Shuri insisted "There are no words anyone can say to force him back to that place… back to the obedience and the horrors. But much of your memories may be shaded behind nearby doors, and in theory, you can access them if that's what you want. I have no reason to believe they aren't still there."

"But how?" his friend's voice was hollow, confused.

"I don't know. Not exactly," Shuri admitted, "That is what we need to work together to find out. If you are willing. If that's what you want."

Bucky lowered his head as he numbly responded with a bitter laugh that made Sam's heart ache in shared sympathy, "What other choice do I have?"

Author's Remarks:

So there are a lot of takes on Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, and so on, and… but now we are just starting to dip a toe into a bit of my own.

I realize there is… a lot here, and it was a bit of a dance trying to write tech-speak for Shuri as well as to hopefully get across some initial concepts we're going to dive into that are a bit more in Sam's realm of understanding.

Separately, I think it's sort of beautiful and telling that not only did the Wakandans consent to continue helping Bucky EVEN AFTER knowing about Zemo, Madripoor, dodging calls, etc., but that Bucky trusts them right back (and of course Sam as well). Off-screen, Shuri would have spoken with them individually and asked who among them were interested in helping, since she wasn't about to force any of them against their will, especially with tensions as high as they were.

And each and every one of them said they would help however they could: including Ayo.

In any case, I hope all of you have a wonderful weekend. I still have a lot of overtime ahead of me, but it felt wonderful to finally step forward into this section of the greater story. As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts, and thank you again for all the kind words and encouragement!

Written to "Arcanine," by Ursine Vulpine, which I listened to on repeat for… many hours.