James Buchanan 'Bucky' Barnes (
nerves_of_ice) wrote2021-02-26 12:54 am
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[oom] see right through my walls
As T'Challa stares at the hologram in the palm of his hand, he can already feel the headache forming. "She what? No. Never mind. Bring her to me in the throne room, when she arrives. I will deal with her myself."
He clears the image, then taps the Kimoyo Bead again. "Nakia. I need you."
* * * * * * * * *
"You cannot be serious."
"I don't see why this is a problem. You brought Everett Ross here--"
"Ross was dying! And he was never allowed to know that the man he was seeking was here! Nakia, I have made a promise to protect him."
"She is not a threat. Not to him."
"I will be the judge of that."
Nakia throws up her hands. "Fine. You will see. I hope it does not bother you that I stay and watch?"
T'Challa smiles. "Of course not."
He clears the image, then taps the Kimoyo Bead again. "Nakia. I need you."
"You cannot be serious."
"I don't see why this is a problem. You brought Everett Ross here--"
"Ross was dying! And he was never allowed to know that the man he was seeking was here! Nakia, I have made a promise to protect him."
"She is not a threat. Not to him."
"I will be the judge of that."
Nakia throws up her hands. "Fine. You will see. I hope it does not bother you that I stay and watch?"
T'Challa smiles. "Of course not."
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First, her stomach plummets and twists and then fills up again with butterflies like she's back in tenth grade, and second, he looks so concerned that she wants to go stick her head into the lake so she'd at least have a good excuse for looking like shit.
Damn. "Hey," she says, and smiles even as metaphorical frost swirls from Nakia's skirts. She turns to her friend. "Thanks for walking me down," she says, and her tone is light but she fixes Nakia with an intent look. Whatever her own feelings, he doesn't actually deserve to be on the receiving end of whatever Nakia had planned to say.
They have a silent battle of wills for a moment, but Nakia finally shakes her head and steps in to give her a hug. "Remember what you are worth," she says low, into Sharon's ear, and then steps back to nod, coolly, to Bucky before sweeping back off across the grass.
Sharon watches her go, then scrubs at her face and wanders up to him, looking around with a crooked half-smile. "Where's your fan club?"
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He doesn't bother to look at them, though. All his attention is fixed on Sharon.
"Did something happen?"
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She's looking at him a little strangely. "Nothing happened. I just – didn't sleep very well – God, do I look that bad?"
She scrubs her hands over her face again like it might help. (The lake idea is sounding better and better, honestly.) "Awesome. Thanks."
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James. Darling. Natasha's voice whispers in his memory with an echo from years past, at a time when he'd screwed up so royally that he wasn't entirely sure if she was going to throw him out the window he'd just climbed in to apologize. How did you ever think that was a good idea? You idiot man.
"Okay, maybe I did mean that, but not like that," he tries, carefully, feeling a little like his words are quicksand sliding out from under his feet. "You just look so tired, and--"
He swallows, and tries again.
"When you didn't show up this morning, I was ... worried."
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Or maybe she should yell at him herself, but the thing is?
He's allowed to not...want her back. As much as she wants to say that he's not. "Nothing happened," she repeats. "No Task Force agents climbing in through the window, no shoot-outs, no fights. Just...couldn't sleep."
There's a beat of silence while she looks at him, and then away again. Not being able to sleep doesn't explain why she wasn't here earlier, but maybe he won't ask.
"I'm sorry I made you worry."
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"No, that's -- you didn't do anything wrong." Just because he'd expected her to show up doesn't mean she had to. She doesn't owe him anything. Anything at all. She's done so much more than he could ever expect by coming to Wakanda in the first place.
And now she won't even look at him. All his instincts are screaming at him that something's wrong, very wrong, disastrously wrong, but he can't for the life of him figure out what it is.
He sets his mind working at the problem with some desperation as he asks,
"Do you... um." He glances around, raking his hand through his hair. "I guess, um, there's not much to show you that you haven't already seen. Except the lake?"
The lake that is right there and impossible to miss seeing, he realizes, and closes his eyes briefly in an effort to keep from wincing.
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The big one that's about twenty feet away? That lake?
She huffs a breath of a laugh and shakes her head. "You know what? Yes. I would like to see the lake."
Maybe she could dive into it. Or push him into it. Either way it would at least break some of this tension. "Is there a spot around it you like?"
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He turns to walk on her left, gesturing toward the little footpath that leads through the grasses and toward the thicket of trees further along the shore. "It's this way."
She'd been fine when he'd left her and Shuri the night before. Whatever happened, it was between then and now... and based on the way Nakia had treated him, he's pretty sure he's to blame for it, whatever it is.
One way to find out.
Very quietly, he says,
"If I ask what I did, will you tell me?"
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Ever since Franche-Comté, even. She's always been honest with him, and that's a hell of a thing for an intelligence operative like her to do. And even if she wanted to lie, that pained look on his face from yesterday when she attempted a harmless white lie would stop her cold before she could even try.
She doesn't look at him, but she's all too conscious of how his right hand is so near her left, and how much this is beginning to feel like their conversation in Leipzig.
"Are you asking?"
After all, he might not want to know the answer.
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"Yes. I'm asking."
If he's responsible for the way she looks--
He's walked this pathway enough times that he doesn't need to watch his footing. It means he can look at her instead, searching her face.
"Sharon. What did I do?"
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But the words are hard, because the thing he did is not really the same as the thing that kept her up all night, although they're connected.
And try as she might, she's not sure she can explain how. "The ornament and my blanket," she says, after a long second. "You gave them to Nakia to put in my room, didn't you?"
Her stomach is just one hard knot, but she presses on, because she knows the answer to that question, and that wasn't – that wasn't it.
"You didn't want them in yours?"
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The faintest hint of confusion wisps through his tone.
"I thought you'd want something familiar. I thought -- I wanted you to -- I thought you'd find it a comfort to have them with you."
And he'd also thought he had no right to keep them; no right to take what she'd offered.
"I kept the other throw. The one you gave me before."
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He's not lying. She's sure that was part of it, but the rest –
"But that's not what it...felt like. Bucky –"
She can't help herself. She stops walking, and reaches for his hand to keep him from walking past her, so she can look up into his face.
He looks so confused. She has to try to make him understand. "It felt like you just wanted them away from you. Do you understand? Those things – they're me. Me and you. And you...didn't want them. Me."
Her smile holds no humor or laugh whatsoever. "You could have just said, 'Sharon, I don't feel that way about you, let's just be pals,' and – I mean, I wouldn't like it, but I would listen."
Probably.
Her heart is racing and she feels like she's just run a race, but she stays stock-still, watching him.
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-- and then she keeps going, and the realization hits him with the force of an explosion.
Bucky stares at her, mind reeling, as his hand tightens compulsively on hers, as understanding crashes in.
"No, I couldn't." He manages to force the words past his lips, even as a cold, distant, all-too-familiar part of him points out that he could let her believe this, that it would resolve the overall situation if he did.
Except that he can't. He can't. Not and be who he is. Who he wants to be.
"I couldn't have said that. Because it would be a lie."
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His hand is so tight in hers that she almost can't feel how hers is shaking. "So I wasn't wrong, before?"
She's staring up at him, trying to tamp down on this hope that keeps trying to claw its way along her ribs and through her chest. "That night in Leipzig, I thought – it seemed like –"
She sighs, closes her eyes, sets her jaw, and stubbornly tries again. "It seemed like you felt the same way I did. There was this – spark. Did you?"
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"You weren't wrong."
He makes himself keep his eyes on her, makes himself not look away.
I care about you, she'd said.
"I did care. I do."
But, threatens to leap from his tongue next, and he bites it back. That can wait. Undoing the pain and hurt he's caused her is more important. This is more important.
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...No. Not like a rock. Like an invisible Steve Rogers, tall and smiling and too perfect to be true.
And the most important person in Bucky's life.
I should never have shown you that photo, she thinks, a little sadly, and steels herself with a deep breath, lacing her fingers carefully through his.
"But?"
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"Steve's my best friend," Bucky says, and it's quiet, but oh, so clear. "He always has been. Always will be."
"When we were back in Brooklyn, before the war, before the serum, women would always look past him to me." He says it without bragging or evasion, as a simple matter of fact. Sharon knows his background already, knows what kind of man he used to be, before the war, before the Winter Soldier.
It's who he is now that's important.
"Neither of us were -- there was nothing serious, with any of them. But." He searches her face, hoping he can make her understand. "Steve - Sharon, if he cares about you like that, if he loves you -- how I feel doesn't matter. I can't do it. I can't be the one to break his heart. I can't."
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Yes. She remembers Aunt Peggy telling her about Bucky Barnes: handsome, charming, quick with a line. She's sure that before the serum, even with all his qualities, Steve was practically invisible next to his best friend.
It may have been seventy years ago, but it's as real now as it was back then to Bucky, she can tell. The pain in those smoke-blue eyes of his is crystal clear and real.
But. He said if.
"And if he doesn't?"
Her voice is just as quiet, but they may as well be standing here in their own universe by the lake. There's nothing to hear around them but the breeze in the grass and leaves and the soft ripple of water against reeds. She shakes her head. "You don't know that he feels that way. I don't want to break his heart, but I'm not willing to break mine on a guess."
Softly: "Or yours."
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She deserves the truth. All of it.
His next breath is ragged as he raises their joined hands between them. He keeps his eyes closed as he kisses the inside of her wrist, his lips warm against the delicate skin over her pulse and lingering for a moment before he lets go of her entirely and takes a small step back.
"I'm a broken man, Sharon." He opens his eyes again and looks back at her, hope smashed flat and buried like it was never there in the first place.
"I'm a worse bet now than I was that night in Leipzig. Before I tried to kill you."
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This is nothing like the sweet butterflies of Steve's kiss in Leipzig. This could burn everything down, and she'd be the one pouring gasoline on the flames as it did.
Her hand doesn't fall right away when he lets her go and steps back; it floats between them for a moment, then clenches into a stubborn fist. "If I wanted to play it safe, I would never have come to Franche-Comté or gone to Polygyros in the first place."
Be careful, Shuri had told her, but Shuri hadn't seen that burning hope in his eyes a second ago; Shuri isn't seeing how shuttered those same eyes are now. She tips her chin up, obstinate.
"I don't care if you're broken. Broken things can be fixed. And even if they never look the same – even if you don't look the same, even if you've got all those edges that don't quite line up right – you still deserve good things. You still deserve to be cared about. The only thing you don't have the right to do is tell me how to feel."
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"I know better than that, Sharon. I'm not telling you how to feel, or how not to feel. I know you won't back down from a fight."
He's standing very still, trying to keep his tone even, but he can't prevent the thin threads of desperation and despair that snake beneath his words. He doesn't even notice them.
"But this isn't what about I deserve. I almost killed you. I almost killed Natasha. Steve. I did kill a lot of others. Both in Berlin and before. That I was - I am - the Winter Soldier - it doesn't matter, not to me. I may not have been in control of myself, but it doesn't change what I did."
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She can't hear that agony in his voice and not try to mitigate it; she moves forward the same step he'd taken back, stubbornly holding his gaze. "Okay. Let's break this down. If it's not about what you think you deserve, then it's one of two things:
"One, you think maybe you'll try to kill me again. Or two, you want to punish yourself for all those sins HYDRA heaped on you, the things you did and can't change. Which is it?"
She advances on him slowly, like he's a wounded stray as likely to bite her from fear as listen to her voice. "I'm in no position to tell you or anyone not to feel guilty, and I know that even if I don't blame you, you blame yourself. I'm just – asking you to see it the way I do. Just for a second."
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He shakes his head, unable to speak, unable to explain as she pushes at him, forcing a choice in front of him, demanding he decide, demanding he--
The world around him starts to dim with white flashes at the edges of his vision as the voices begin to ring in his head, sound and memory overlapping, louder and faster and insistent.
Wipe him and start over.
I don't know if I'm worth all this, Steve.
Mission report.
Ready to comply.
Your mission --
You could at least recognize me.
Soldat?
You are innocent of my father's death. You were used. If you come to Wakanda, we will make it so you can never be used again.
I don't care. He killed my mom.
His hand clenches into a fist as his vision blurs and his eyes go black, bleak, unseeing, as his skin pales under the assault of the past, as everything darkens into an overwhelming scream.
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He doesn't respond. She's not sure he can respond, and a thrill of panic screams through her.
Shuri, I should get Shuri –
But she can't leave him standing here alone like this. She doesn't know what to do, so she does what she's trained to do: throws herself headfirst at the problem. She pushes forward like a wave and presses herself against him, ankles to shoulders, her arms around his neck, her hand careful at the back of his head, her cheek to his so she can speak low into his ear.
Her voice is soft but fierce. "You are James Buchanan Barnes. You're in Wakanda. You're safe. You're getting better. Nobody is going to make you do anything you don't want to do ever again. And I'm not leaving you."
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