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He’s awake in an instant, the faintest rustle of fabric, no matter how light, enough of to shatter away any thin illusions of unconsciousness. His mind does not trust itself to rest, even still, too much inorganic sleep in his bones, too much anguish threaded through the tangles of his mind. He can’t trust himself, he can’t trust his surroundings, not even here.
Tear tracks are wet down Shuri's face though, and he’s sitting up straight in a heartbeat. He doesn’t like the bed as much as the ground, the softness too soft, too confusing, the hard solidity of dirt and earth is easier to process. She’s kneeling beside him.
Not broken, his mind has never lost its cold sharp way of assessing before feeling, though the powers of those observations are duller, these days. Not bleeding, no signs of a struggle, nothing out of place. Her breathing is strained, but she’s not having an attack. In the dimness, her eyes are wide, but aware. It doesn’t mean anything, not really, who knows that better than him? All it means is that nothing he knows how to react to is present, and his damage assessments give way beneath him. He’s stuck instead in momentary pause as he processes that even still, she is next to him, on her knees, tears running down her cheeks, and it is for him to do something .
“Prince-” He starts, but she’d commanded him sharply not to call her that anymore. “Shuri?”
“I - I am sorry. I only just.” She shakes her head, braids swinging around her, too hard, he wants to reach out, to still her, the clear deep lines of anguish that rise from her throat clenching through his own. “I saw him fall again, and for a moment I forgot it was not real, I -”
She takes a breath, shuddering, and he only watches her, silent, waiting.
“I cannot tell my brother that I see him dying in my dreams -” She exhales finally, her hand going up in the direction of her brain. “Again and again. Nor my mother, nor Nakia, who see the same, I am certain. It is easy during the day, when we are altogether and there is so much to do, but when I close my eyes.” For a moment she is younger than he remembers her being, fierce still, undoubtedly, but bearing a weight too much for her shoulders. A realization that, for the first time, she has been outmatched and outdone by the world. It’s a hauntingly familiar look.
“So I thought perhaps -”
His lip has turned up at one side, humorlessly, but, something in him reaches for her. “I knew a little bit about that?”
She’s got the wrong guy for that though, he doesn’t know what it’s like to watch, to hang helpless, left behind, as someone else plummets far out of your reach. Sure, he’d seen Steve fall from the helicarrier, one different lifetime ago, but he’d only known that he couldn’t allow it. That there was no choice but to follow behind him. That had been the breadth and depth of his capacities then, and he doesn’t think she would find that particularly helpful.
But the intensity of her curiosity, and beneath that, her hope, press into his awareness. She wouldn’t have come here if she wasn’t absolutely sure there was something he could do to help, and he owes her for so many different things, too many things, things he couldn’t even put into words, so he has to try to give back this, the first request she’s ever made of him.
“I know what it’s like to fall.” He murmurs finally, it catches on his tongue without his meaning, glances curious, seeping pain through him. Falling isn’t his most painful memory, not the bloodiest, nor the most humiliating, but it is, he supposes, the beginning.
His eyes dart away, but the move tastes of cowardice, and she would not approve, so he brings their gazes back together.
“I know.” Shuri’s fingertips graze just barely against his arm as she shifts towards him. “I saw all of the gory details, as they say.” The weight of her touch grows just a little as he winces reflexively, lips in another press of empty, almost smile for lack of a better reaction. “But I only just saw, like a black and white movie, no color. I wish to know how it felt, to fall. So that I can understand instead of fear.”
The words bubble out of him before he can stop them. “I don’t feel.”
At that, laughter peels, clear and easy, her voice losing for a moment its seriousness to the usual pure delight of her tone.
“Sergeant Barnes, you are not broken.” She moves her hand away to shake a finger in his face. “I fixed you, remember. You are only scared.” The smile falls away in slow increments, back to the serious armor she has donned this evening. “But so am I. That is why I have come to you. You know fear, greater, though different, from my own, and you bring yourself through it. Tell me how.”
“With the help of bossy, but genius, kind strangers who come to wake me up at all hours of the night.” He half grouses at her and her teeth glint in the darkness. “Princess.”
She swats him. “I told you to call me Shuri.”
“And I told you to call me Bucky.”
They both look at each other brows raised for a beat and then she grins, and he, tentatively, presses his lips into configurations they can’t quite embrace, tries something closer to a real smile.
It pleases her, he can see.
In the silence, he tries to remember the cold stinging against his face, the rush of wind, and ice, the roar of the train, and the weightlessness, the endless suspension of falling. Ironic, that his last moments of freedom had been almost like flying. Steve’s face the only image in his mind, crumpled and defeated. In the space of his plummet, infinite, and too short, he knows he’d reached for that.
But it plays to him almost like Shuri describes it, a scene from a movie from a life not his own, and that won’t do. It’s embedded in him though, somewhere in the cells of his being, in places he wouldn’t press into, not even for Steve, but pushes against now.
“I guess.” He works his lips open and closed a few times before sound comes out. “I guess I mostly just felt scared then too, not of falling.” His eyes flutter closed for a long breath, only one, inhale, exhale, open. “Though maybe if I knew then… but I thought I was gonna just be gone. So I was really only scared for Steve. Of leaving him alone, and what that stupid kid would do without me, because he thought he couldn’t save me.” And he’d been right, ultimately, about that, it crumples ache through his ribs, collapses his lungs momentarily. Old wounds unburied, the hurt is bright, in a dizzying way, but an odd kind of clarity accompanies it.
Outside of his mind, Shuri is nodding. “I could not save T’Challa either, perhaps that is the worst of it. In my dreams, I am frozen. In life, I was frozen. I froze and I did not try to save him, I did nothing.” The words are poisonous from her lips, filled for the first time with a sharp edge of anger turned inwards, of self defeating hate. Shuri is practical, and she’s adaptable, and he’s never once seen her approach any situation with less than complete serenity. He doesn’t want her to learn this, but he knows she already has. That’s why she’s come, to build the walls to stop the spread. He wouldn’t have recommended himself to help put them up, because he hadn’t at all, not until barely heartbeats ago, and had broken because of it, again and again. But she’s chosen him and it’s not his place to question that judgment .
“No.” He pushes himself to say, clumsily. The direction unclear, the thoughts tangled and heavy on his tongue. “That’s not-” She waits on his words, patient, riveted, and he tries again. “He did save me. I mean, not from the fall, or, you know, what came after, but in the end -” He shrugs his shoulders, grapples with emotions he can still barely name for coherency. “If I fell and I didn’t have him, if he hadn’t been here -” He raises his hand with the intent to bring it to his head, but it lands instead, on his heart without his permission. Her smile is low, despite the conversation, shrewd. “I would’ve just died that day, maybe not my body, but me, that wouldn’t have stuck around.”
His breath rattles, but he presses forward.
“T’Challa fell, and I fell, but falls don’t mean death.” He moves his hand away from himself, brings it in slow hesitating inches towards her cheek, thumb pressing at the edge of her jaw. “Not if you’ve got something to crawl yourself back for.
They freeze again, there. And he watches the words process through that machine brain of hers, trying to reconcile the narrative she’s inflicted upon herself and what he’s saying.
“The flower restored T’Challa’s life to him.” She murmurs finally the words phrased like fact, a reality she knows to be true, but her voice is thin - wavering. He’s pleased in this moment, to finally be able to turn that specific expression that’s been so often used on him, back around on someone else, that blend of amusement, brushed with incredulity that whispers keenly, You don’t honestly believe what you’re saying to me right now, do you?
She sticks her tongue out at him in response, but her eyes are fluid.
“And Hydra restored my life back to me, but they didn’t save me.”
“No.” Her voice is protective ice for a beat, and an odd surge of....something, happiness? Contentment? Worth? wakes through his cells at the sound. “They did not.”
“I can’t tell you what your brother felt, exactly, but I know that he loves you, and he fell knowing he’d left you behind, so he had to come back for you.” He pauses, the air around them seems to thin, something intensifying in the exchange between them. “So you brought him back. So you did everything . You and your mom and Nakia and your country, together. You did everything you could have done, and you loved him enough to bring him back to you.”
He doesn’t know where the words are coming from, doesn’t even sound like himself, but he knows they’re true. They were true for him, when he fell, when he woke, when he couldn’t even remember Steve’s name at all, and they’re true for Shuri now. He wonders, for a moment, if they’re true for Steve. If someone ever told him that he’d saved Bucky and nothing in the world but him could have done it. That it doesn’t matter if he let him fall, because he pulled him out after all, however long it took. Maybe, he considers, a little shakily, he ought to make sure that someone does. He presses away the thoughts for now though, because Steve isn’t here, is somewhere far, and he can’t think about that too long without something threatening to break in the carefully arranged spaces of his mind, so he turns himself back to the girl in front of him instead.
She’s so much more of a warrior than he’ll ever be, refuses to cry again though the tears are pooling in the corners of her eyes, a strong set to her jaw as she pulls herself together in increments. “I will try to tell myself this.” She announces after a fashion. “If I see him fall again in my sleep.” Determined, settled, certain, but he can see the hairline fractures of doubt already pressing in.
“I’ll tell you, if you want.” He offers without thinking, but finds that he means it very much as he plays the words back, wants to be able to do this, to give this, whatever it is. “Uh - whenever you need to hear it.” He gives himself over to the brush of sadness that ebbs and then flows away. “Sometimes it’s not...so convincing in the sound of your own voice and I don’t really sleep anyway, so -”
She’s gone from beneath the touch of his hand, but then all at once, curled up against his side, arms stretching around his chest in a side hug. He straightens out of habit, but lets himself fall to humanity, vertebrae but vertebrae relaxing into the sudden warmth at his side. He’s not metal anymore, he’s not broken, he is scared, but he’s trying. His arm comes across her shoulders, holds her, careful. She seems small against him, but he knows of the two of them, she’d best him in strength every time. In the fog of his mind, he remembers the squeals of his sisters in their small apartment, remembers the eager smiles on their faces when they looked for him. Shuri brings brightness of her own, and it settles beneath his skin.
“Thank you, Bucky .” She murmurs against him and he squeezes, light.
For once, he feels like he’s done it all right.