nerves_of_ice | [oom] see right through my walls

"God. Yes. Please."

She makes a beeline for the coffee maker and impatiently waits for it to finish brewing, laughing a little at Shuri's comment.

"Vibranium for this, too? Really? Is there anything you don't use it for?"

"Well, I use it for this. The design is not finished yet."

Behind them, Bucky smothers a chuckle.

"And so the experiments begin," Sharon laughs, and picks up the mug as soon as the drip has stopped, then casts about for whatever version of cream and sugar might be nearby.

She'll drink it black, if she has to, but it's not her preference.

"Okay," she says, once the coffee is doctored to her taste and she's sipped at it in deep contentment. "What's next?"

"Next, we start the notebooks through the scanner, and then I can show you some of the things I am working on," Shuri tells them.

Bucky follows her over to a different machine and starts unpacking the backpack, passing the books over to her one at a time while Shuri loads them into what appears to be some kind of feeder basket. She presses a symbol and the first book slides forward into a glass-walled box, where a series of automated metal tongs opens the cover and starts flipping pages for light to scan. That done, he turns to watch as Shuri walks back toward Sharon with a smile.

"What would you like to hear about first?"

"God, where to start?"

She feels like a kid in a candy shop. This whole place is R&D, but unlike any Sharon's ever seen before. Shuri's experiments are housed like museum pieces: mounted on mannequins, behind glass, beautifully lit and artfully designed. Sharon walks across the lab to a long white table that holds a bowl of beads like the ones Shuri, T'Challa, and Nakia all wear on their wrists and several yards of richly dyed cloth interwoven with vibranium threads. She reaches out to finger the material, and frowns as the bright colors fade away entirely under her touch until she can see the table right through it, but not her own fingers.

She turns with an expression of total bewilderment. "Are you making an invisibility cloak?"

"Yes!" Shuri tells her, visibly pleased that Sharon has figured it out. Bucky leans back against a clear stretch of wall and watches in silence, quietly amused.

"We already use this technology in our ships. But there, we have much more metal and a stable frame to work with to generate the necessary energy fields for photorealistic visual deception. Doing the same with cloth is more difficult, but I think I have figured out a way based on some of the work I have done with my brother's Panther Habit."

Sharon drapes some of the cloth over her forearm and stares as it and her forearm both dissolve away like frost melting under sunlight. "That is so trippy."

Putting the cloth back, she huffs an impressed breath of a laugh. "I can think of a lot of ways that would be pretty useful."

And not just as a spy, either. The pranks someone could pull!

"Oh?" Shuri looks delighted. "Then you will have to help me test it! And these with it."

She picks up a set of flat circular discs from a table and tosses them at Sharon.

"How well can you climb?"

"Pretty well," she says, thinking of scaling the side of a building after two and half glasses of wine and smiling to herself. Six weeks on the run – and rebreaking those ribs – mean she's not quite up to her usual level of fitness, but she's willing to give anything a shot.

And she's healed, anyhow. She just gets a little stiff and sore.

She sets one of the discs on her right palm and watches as the material expands creeping around her metacarpals and knuckles until she's wearing what looks like a high-tech motorcycle glove. Prodding the palm, she peers at the series of tiny circles woven across the material. "That's cool."

Straightening, she goes to the table and leans her hand onto it, fingers splayed, and grins at the sensation. "What is this...?"

It's like she can feel all the micro-fractures and textures of the table and grip them just like a handhold on a climbing wall; but when she pulls her hand away again, it comes easily.

"Okay. That is awesome. I almost wish I were a cat burglar."

Edited 2021-03-01 14:43 (UTC)

"Do not let my brother hear you say that," Shuri warns, laughing. "He has strong opinions on such things, for reasons I think you can guess."

Her eyes are dancing.

"But I admit that is in part where I got the inspiration."

Bucky coughs into his hand, hiding a laugh of his own.

"Well, I am looking for new career opportunities," Sharon muses, but she's grinning as she strips the glove off her hand and watches it return to its previous shape.

Putting them back on the table, she narrows her eyes at another corner of the lab, where a series of mats form an open-center square around what looks like a few square feet of sand.

"What's this?"

"Try it and find out," encourages Shuri, who looks smugly pleased with herself.

Sharon steps onto a mat and almost steps right back off again as the sand shifts and rises in front of her, forming a faceless figure about her own size and weight that settles into a fight stance. "What!" she gasps, and Shuri laughs.

"Go on, throw something."

Sharon shakes her head, but obediently readies herself, then shifts her weight and turns her hip sharply over, delivering a shin-first mid kick to the figure's side –

Which the sand figure blocks with a quick lift of its left leg, stopping Sharon's shin with its own.

"I call it 'sand spar'!" Shuri calls, delighted. "You know, like 'sand bar.' But with sparring!"

"That's amazing," Sharon says, walking around the figure, and Shuri nods, pleased.

"And programmable," she says, touching one of her wrist beads. The sand shifts and flows, and after a second, Sharon is staring at T'Challa, all kitted out in his Black Panther costume.

She turns to Bucky. "I want one!"

Edited 2021-03-01 15:19 (UTC)

"Don't ask me," he says, visibly amused, but with something warm in his eyes. "It's her you have to convince."

Bucky looks at Shuri as he adds, "But if it makes a difference, she's a good fighter of a style you may not have seen as much of here. Could help you adapt your design."

He doesn't give any sign that talking about this causes him pain at the memory. Whether that's true or he's just hiding it is impossible to say.

"Please?" Sharon says to Shuri. "Please let me fight your sand people?"

Shuri, for her part, looks delighted at the idea. "The more fighting styles and types of opponent I can use, the better," she says. "Tell me a little about your techniques?"

That kicks off a few minutes of intent discussion of Sharon's martial arts background – mostly Belgian-style Muay Thai with a handful of grappling and other striking styles – and the limitations of the illusory sparring partner. Shuri shows Sharon how the sand dummy can be ratcheted up or down multiple scales representing difficulty and pliability, and flips through a few of the pre-programmed sparring partners to show off their different fighting styles.

One of them, a huge man dressed in white gorilla furs and holding a tall club, stares down at Sharon. She has to put her head almost all the way back to see his face. He's about three times her size.

"Yes," she says, decisively. "That guy. I want to fight that guy."

But before she can, a bead on Shuri's wrist chimes a gentle alarm, and Shuri shakes her head, smiling as the huge man drifts back down into a pile of sand. "Later."

She looks at Bucky. "Shall we give Captain Rogers a call?"

Edited 2021-03-01 15:41 (UTC)

"Please," he says, straightening from his spot against the wall. Shuri nods.

"This way," she tells Sharon, as Bucky moves to join them. It's apparent he already knows where they're going, as Shuri leads the way through the lab and down a side hallway to a small room. Unlike SHIELD or JTTF offices, this one is set up as a combination working-and-conversation space, similarly to the one in the garden chamber, with the addition of woven hangings on the walls and a table containing a high-tech communications station.

"We could not give him a set of Kimoyo Beads," Shuri tells Sharon as she activates the comm center. It projects a holographic video display of a phone screen in the air above it. "The security risk was too great."

Bucky interjects, "Steve doesn't want any clues leading back here. And no one was sure what would happen if any of the beads went missing somehow; can't compromise Wakandan systems."

Shuri nods. "But I refuse to limit anyone to staring at a tiny screen on a phone or box." She huffs out a breath and starts typing in a code from her wrist, which projects onto the comm center in preparation for the encrypted call.

Bucky turns to Sharon. "If you're okay with letting me tell him you're here first, go stand off-screen." He nods to the side. "Or if not, stay here by me."

"You can tell him first," she decides, and takes up a spot off to the side, clasping one hand around the other wrist like she's back at the JTTF, awaiting orders.

She's nervous, she realizes. Nervous to see him, to talk to him, to think about what Bucky is thinking and feeling as she does.

She schools her face into a neutral, expectant expression and waits for the call to start.

He nods and turns back to watch the display as it rings. Three times, then a fourth, before the communications center chimes softly and a two-dimensional holographic screen image of Steve Rogers appears above the table.

He's bearded, with longer hair than the last time Bucky saw him, and looks tired, but everything about him brightens when he sees who's on the other end of the call. "Princess Shuri. Bucky." Steve's smile is as brilliant as ever as he takes in their expressions and realizes this call probably doesn't include any kind of trouble. "Good to see you."

"You too, Captain Rogers." Shuri waves cheerfully at him and pats Bucky on the shoulder. "I will be in the lab if you need me, eh?"

"Thanks," Bucky tells her, and turns back to Steve as she leaves the room. "Your beard's getting long, old man."

Steve chuckles. "What, don't like the new look?"

"It's growing on me," Bucky promises. "Hey. Before we start catching up, I've got some good news for you."

He looks good. Tired, a little thinner than the last time she saw him, and that shaggy hair and thick beard – but it's Steve, and he looks good, all the more so for how happy he clearly is to see his best friend.

She hopes they've been able to spend time together. They went through so much just to get here.

She turns her attention to Bucky, taking in the relaxed set of his shoulders, the warmth in his face, the bone-deep happiness of just seeing Steve and proving to himself all over again that they're both alive, they both have each other again. He even teases Steve a little in a way that makes Sharon's mouth quirk: some echo of their long-lost Brooklyn boyhood or Howling Commando days, no doubt.

For her part, she's tense and trying not to be. She can't keep from replaying that moment on the roof in Leipzig over in her head, Bucky softly saying you didn't see your face when you looked at his picture.

Or earlier. When he talked about seeing them together when she made the gear drop.

Well, she can keep an eye on her own expression this time. And sure. She's happy to see Steve. Can't help but think a little wistfully, the way she always does, of what might have been.

But she made her choice and she's sticking with it.

"That's the best kind," Steve laughs. "What is it?"

"Sharon made it out of Germany," Bucky says, simply, and watches Steve's eyes go wide.

I haven't seen Steve since Leipzig, she'd said. He knows his best friend, knows how big his heart is; knows how he must have worried, even if he hadn't said anything about it.

"She's safe," he continues. "She's here."

"She's there?"

He manages a wry smile. "Yeah. Turns out she stuck a tracker in my boot when she brought all the gear."

Bucky turns to Sharon, and tips his head to the side to beckon her forward. The look in his eyes is steady and kind, the same as it was on a night almost two months ago.

You know what I've done. I'm a bad bet.

If she never saw that look in his eyes again, at least in regards to her and Steve Rogers, it would still be too soon. She meets it with something wry in her own, her fingers rubbing fretfully against each other, before she shakes back her hair and comes into view, smiling at Steve's hologram.

It's easy to smile at him, especially when he looks so happy to see her. "You guys aren't rid of me yet," she says, teasing, and he laughs.

"It's good to see you, Sharon. You got out okay?"

"I got out fine. No problems." She doesn't know if Steve is seeing them from the waist up or not, but she keeps her hands low as they twist together. Her own smile is warm. "It's good to see you too. Pretty sure that beard's not regulation, though."

He chuckles and strokes his chin a little self-consciously. "Well, neither am I, these days."

"You get used to that eventually, I hear," Bucky says, keeping his tone light, and chuckles when Steve gives him a look, a chuckle that's answered by Steve's own wry laugh of acknowledgement before he turns his attention back to Sharon.

Bucky thinks for a moment about leaving the two of them to talk alone, and decides against it. For one thing, he's not entirely sure that Sharon won't yank him back or say something in a headlong rush to stop him, and for another, he's not sure it wouldn't make Steve worry if he did.

They'll have time for calls of their own, just the two of them, now that they know how to find each other. Come to think of it --

"Sharon's thinking of sticking around here for a bit," he says, and can't miss the quick flash of relief that crosses Steve's expression. "Shuri's already angling to have her test stuff in the lab."

"Oh yeah?" Steve looks at Sharon. "What kind of stuff?"

"Classified stuff," she says, arch, and considers smacking herself in the forehead when Steve laughs. She's not trying to flirt, but it's easy to settle into a quick back-and-forth with him.

"Really?" he says in amused disbelief. "That's what you're going with?"

She smiles faintly. "Old habits."

"Well, whatever it is, I'm sure you'll be a huge help," he says, warm and sincere. He's always so kind. "You certainly helped us a lot."

Her shoulders loosen a little, and her expression turns softly wry. "I'm just glad everyone made it out in one piece."

A beat of silence, and she glances with exaggerated eyebrows at Bucky, her lips twitching towards a smile again. "Mostly, anyhow."

"Mostly," he says, his tone bone-dry, and Steve grimaces slightly before Bucky shakes his head at him. "Hey, she's not wrong."

A beat, while they trade a glance, and this time Bucky nods.

"I'm bringing her up to speed later. There's a lot to catch up on," he adds, quietly, and Steve nods. "Yeah, there is. Thanks."

His gaze turns back to Sharon. "And thank you. Again. I mean it - you helped us a lot. We wouldn't have made it without you."

"That's me," she says, a little wry. "Handy in a pinch."

Lightly: "Besides, it was only a matter of time before some fool Task Force member would try Sam's wings and fly into the side of a building, so I figure I was really doing them a favor, too."

Her fingers, out of sight, twist together. "How are you doing? You look okay, at least. No obvious holes, which is always good."

He chuckles. "Sam would never have let me hear the end of it."

Steve shakes his head, amused at some thought, then meets her eyes. "I'm good," he says, simply, seriously. "I'm okay. Avoiding holes. Working with Sam and Nat on the kind of stuff you two were up to in France and Greece."

He says it matter-of-factly, without any hint of upset or blame.

"Oh, good," she says, after a long pause where she really wants to just go whack her head against the wall for a few minutes. "You heard about that."

She shoots Bucky an amused, teasingly wry look, and shakes her head. Well, it's for the best: she hadn't wanted to lie to Steve and neither had he.

And it looks like the two of them have sorted some stuff out. That's good. "Sorry for the misdirection."

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