— warning: this chapter includes a teensy bit of
mature content but it's pretty pg or
pg-13. still, read with caution and
don't say i didn't warn you.
p.s. if you want the NSFW stuff,
go down to the next chapter! it's
a carbon copy of this, just with
more detail.

THE JET LANDED swiftly, the green of Wakanda's landscape shaking me from my empty mind space. I hadn't thought of much of anything ever since we boarded. Well, that was a minor lie. After I noticed that the rain had stopped its assault on my tired body, I had nothing to distract me from seeing my parents fall to their death, over and over and over again.

"They...they're dead," Cade had mumbled as we flew over the ocean, on our way to Africa. "I can't believe they're dead." He had done little more than hover by my side for the entire trip, refusing to leave me alone. Between my clingy brother and my man-of-few-words boyfriend, I hardly had time to think by myself.

But, nonetheless, my parents' death wrestled their way into my head, demanding that I watch the scene long enough to make me feel bad, to make me feel guilty, to make me feel anything. Because that was the problem. I wasn't feeling.

There was a dark-skinned man there on the ground to greet us, his dark purple robes indicating his status. Though I didn't like to pay very close attention to international politics, this man's face was one I remembered. T'Challa, King of Wakanda, had come to welcome us to his country.

As we were ushered off of the aircraft and into the warm air of the African country, I tried to make my mind go empty, losing every thought in my head. And it worked, as it would for the next few hours. I was blissfully oblivious to the fact that I had just seen my parents killed, left to rot at the bottom of a chasm in the deep underground of a corrupt, rogue organization built on the history of Hydra.

"Welcome, Captain," the king said smoothly, holding out a hand to shake Steve's. I was only a little surprised that the latter wasn't as disgruntled at the use of his former title as he usually was around the rest of us, but I supposed it was because a king was using it. Everyone knew that arguing with a king was a bad way to go, historically speaking. T'Challa sweeped his eyes over the band of misfits standing before him as his all-female guard. "I hope everyone has come back safely."

Steve nodded deeply, smiling softly. "We're a little shaken up, but it's nothing a few drinks and a visit with your sister can't fix." He cast his gaze to me, still supporting my distraught brother and mute boyfriend. With one look at the three of us, by far the most damaged luggage on the jet, his smile dropped, melancholy clouding over his eyes.

Flicking his head, the king gave a silent order to the woman standing next to him, clad in golden rings and red cloth. Then he dropped his eyes to mine, his tall stature hanging over me. "Welcome to Wakanda," he greeted as his adviser retreated behind him to the vast architectural masterpiece which I assumed was their palace. "I see we are in the blessed company of the White Wolf again," he added with a warm smile. His accent was thick, the words sounded strange rolling off his tongue.

I glanced at the dark-haired man slumped beside me, his lips still forming Steve's name, alternating with mine. He squeezes his eyes shut, only opening them when I dig through my grief to brush my hand with his. The skin-to-skin contact seemingly awakes him from his trance. He stares at me before shifting his head to the Wakandan king.

"He's..." I struggle to describe his condition. "Not good," I finished.

But the king didn't seem put off by the sight of him. "Shuri will tend to him. He'll be better in no time."

That just sounded like empty promises that doctors gave people with stage five cancer, but I fought to keep myself from rolling my eyes in the presence of a king. Instead, I nodded and gritted my teeth.

Behind him, his red-and-old clad adviser was returning with someone by her side. As they approached, I could make out the young girl who trailed behind her elder, though carrying herself with the authority of royalty. The resemblance to the king became clearer as she came to stand beside him, and I realized that I was looking at Wakanda's next in line, Princess Shuri.

Her dark skin practically glowed in the African sunlight, reflecting off the silver strands that she'd woven into her hair, braided and swirled into a coil on the top of her head. Her facade of professionalism quickly faded as her eyes scanned over the disheveled group in front of her. As she eyed up Bucky, her eyes widened and her smile was bright enough to momentarily shield my mind from the violent images of my parents falling to their deaths.

"Ubhuti!" She exclaimed at the sight of him, the delight evident on her face.

When he didn't answer with anything more than an empty stare, her face fell. "Oh," she said, "I see."

The king cleared his throat to address us. "Shuri will take you to her infirmary and make sure everything is in order. Then you can rest for as long as you need." He nodded at Steve, who had a look of concern on his face. "I have been in contact with Agent Wretton per your request, and he'll arrive in Wakanda in the next few days."

My heart lifted at the thought of seeing the CIA agent again. After all this shit, I hadn't been able to talk much before being whisked away on the jet to get here. It would be nice to see him, the unexpected friend that I've gotten out of all of this.

Shuri began to walk backwards, aiming for the palace. Using her hand, she beckoned us with an earnest, "Come on, the sooner you let me poke and prod, the sooner you can sleep until sundown."

Oh, that sounds nice.

We followed her through the open palace, twisting down stairs to the main floor of her labs. I let Bucky be tugged away from me, but by the look on his face, he required someone to be with him. Seeing the exhaustion on my face, Steve took the chance to be close to his best friend, laying a hand on his shoulder. I knew he wanted to do so much more.

It was easy to fall into a trance, being pulled around by Shuri and her assistants, forgetting where and who I was for a few hours. I didn't even feel it when they gave me antibiotics through injections.

Everyone else was okay, including me, but Cara had come away with a bullet wound, entering and exiting her shoulder in one fell swoop. "It's just a scratch," she shrugged to explain away the blood on her shirt, but the action made her yelp in pain, so Shuri—who was considerably younger than all of us—convinced her to lay back and let her vibranium-infused technology to its magic.

On behalf of the king, we'd all been given our own rooms in the palace, lined up like an American hotel room. I'd almost cried when I saw a bed, having slept in the corner of Cerberus' cell for weeks without anything to cushion me from the cold, hard concrete.

My mind flashed with bloody images of our escape route, momentarily giving me the urge to vomit. But I shook my head firmly, forcing myself to sink into the bed and sleep, forgetting about the world until I felt like waking up.

The first night, I slept for fourteen hours. After a week, I'd finally come round to establishing a more normal sleeping schedule. I kept myself busy during the days, talking to the others and checking up on Bucky, who'd had to stay overnight in Shuri's lab in order to speed up his recovery process.

"He's going to be fine," the genius princess reassured me, "it's worked before, and it'll work again." She looked down at his sleeping body, a sedative given to him to concentrate the recovery on his brain. "He's strong," she remarked with a certain glow in her eyes that gave me a sliver of a clue to the relationship they'd built when he was here. Even if he wasn't conscious for most of it.

I nodded. "I know." And when that week was over, I longed to see him look at me the way he'd always looked at me, but I knew not to get my hopes up.

Bucky was sitting up and talking to Shuri when I went into the lab that day to see him. "Thank you," he was saying, lifting his right, flesh hand to hold hers. "I don't know when this is going to end."

Shuri smiled, pulling him in for a hug, which seemed to surprise him. "I hope it already did," she whispered. "But you'll always have a room here, ubhuti."

I made my presence known by clearing my throat. "What does that word mean?" I asked gently.

The princess smiled. "It means 'brother,'" she admitted. "He likes it."

One glance at Bucky gave me pause, as I saw his cheeks go pink in embarrassment. "Shuri," he warned lightly, though there was no threat in it.

Shuri shook her head with a chuckle. "Come on, it's time you and Elda spend some time together. She's been in here every day since you came." She tugged him off the bed in the center of her lab, ushering him to walk to me, but he stayed where he was.

That was the first thing that squeezed my heart.

"Actually," he said softly, as if he didn't want me to hear, "can I just have my own room?"

The surprise was clear on Shuri's face. "What? I thought—"

"Well, you thought wrong," he interrupted, his words firm. Not cutting, not quite, but sharp enough to hurt. "My own room, please."

"Um...what?" I spoke up, my throat dry. "Bucky, I—"

His eyes were dark, but not in anger or dangerous cruelty. They were a sad sort of darkness. "I need my own room. I just..." For a moment, it seemed like he was regressing back to his previous state of uncertainty. But then he looked up at Shuri and nodded his head decidedly. "I need my own space. At least for a night or two."

I wanted to get mad at him for dropping a bombshell like this on me (what did I do wrong? Did he hate me now? Does he not love me anymore?) but it was impossible. I just needed one thing, and that was to understand him. He'd been out of my reach for so long, and the first chance I got to talk to him...it passed me by.

Shuri could clearly sense the tension in the room judging by her uncomfortable grimace. She clasped her hands together and inhaled deeply. "Uh, how about this? I'm just gonna set you up with two conjoining rooms. You know, like in America! How about that?" She added with a tense expression, trying to see how we would react.

Bucky shrugged. "Fine."

Well, at least he wasn't disgusted by the idea. That was something.

But when he refused to talk as we retreated to our rooms, not taking his eyes off the ground in front of him, that was the thing that crushed my heart in an iron fist and threatened to turn me to dust, a shattered pane of glass.

We simply closed the doors to our rooms with no words to each other. The click of the door closing felt like a bullet in the gut.

For the next several hours, watching the sun go down and night approach, I paced around my room, trying to muster the courage to burst into Bucky's room and make a declaration of my love, something so smooth and perfectly said like something I would see in one of his favorite rom-coms.

"What the fuck?" I asked myself, eyeing the door that connected our rooms. "What the fuck?"

Was I not enough for him anymore? Was this the end of us? It didn't matter so much that he didn't want to share a room, but why didn't he want to talk?

After what felt like weeks, I finally ignored the timid voice in my head and marched to the connecting door, twisting the handle and bursting into the dark room with a firm, "We need to talk, Bucky."

He froze. I took in his haggard appearance, having not changed out of his white shirt given to him by Shuri in the labs. His hand was on the door that led out to the balcony, but by the terror in his face, he wasn't just going out on the ledge to admire the starry Wakandan sky.

"Where the fuck do you think you're going?" I asked bluntly, shock on my face. When he didn't answer, I felt the sudden rush of tears as I stumbled over my next words. "Tell me you aren't..."

Bucky shook his head. "I'm not going to kill myself," he reassured me softly. Looking down, he added, "You made me not want to."

I took a step into the room, around the bed, and edged closer to him. "Then where? Buck, we're in this together. You can tell me anything."

He shook his head. "But we shouldn't have to be." Sucking in a deep sigh, he ran a hand through his mussed up hair. "This is why I didn't want to say goodbye."

"Goodbye?" My jaw slackened. "Bucky—"

"I ruined your life," he said in a rush of clarity and confidence. "I ruined your life, and you know that. If it weren't for me, you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't have been captured by Cerberus, and none of this shit would have involved you." He sighed. "Your parents would probably still be alive if it weren't for me."

I waved a dismissive hand, ignoring the pang of guilt at the mention of them. "Do you really believe you ruined my life? That you broke me?" I shook my head. "Bucky, you made me." He tried to intervene again, but I cut him off. "I am here because I chose to be. I wanted to help you. That was my choice, and you can't take that away from me."

"But—"

By then, I was standing right in front of him, my hand hovering over his fist that was still clenched on the knob of the door to the balcony. "We found each other, Buck. Let me ask you this: do you remember what you told me after you were taken? What you wrote me?"

It took him a few seconds of concentrated thought before he nodded slowly. "I told you about my past. Everything about Hydra."

I nodded. "And what else?"

"I told you I loved you."

Oh, those words sound so beautiful rolling off his lips. "True or false," I prompted, "I love you."

He paused. "True."

I let my hand brush his, relaxing the muscles that held a strong grip around the doorknob. He let go of it and let me hold his hand, the metal arm still dangling at his side. "Do you love me?" I asked softly, staring into the eyes of the man that had occupied my every thought for the better part of two years now, the man that became my safe haven, the man that called me his salvation.

My stomach fluttered when he answered, "I do," in a low, husky tone. Even in the moonlight, it was impossible to miss the way he looked at me. He was showing a part of himself that I hadn't seen in months, the side of him that was not a product of Hydra, or Cerberus, or even Steve. This was a product of my making, the man that looked down at me with the utmost love in his eyes.

A shaky sigh left my lips, causing him to dart his eyes down to them. "What I would give to hear you say that every day," I whispered, my other hand trailing up his chest.

For a second, his eyes clouded with concern. "But what about—"

I shook my head. "We'll figure it out. There's nothing we can't figure out together. Or with the help of Shuri, or Wretton, or Steve, or anybody else. We'll be okay, Buck. Just...don't leave me." I pressed my face into his chest, breathing in the scent that was undoubtedly him. "I need you," I hummed, my voice muffled by his clothes.

His right hand came up to cradle my head in his palm, lifting my face from his chest to look up at him once more. Blue eyes were the perfect picture of confusion as he whispered, "What in the hell do you need me for?"

"Now, Buck," I teased him breathlessly with a ghost of a smile, "that's too long of a list for tonight." I couldn't help but stare at his lips, their plump pinkness becoming too irresistible for me to look away. "Buck?"

"Mm?" He hummed, tracing the lines of my face with his fingertips.

I swallowed roughly with the realization of our roles being reversed. "Can I...can I kiss you?"

There was a glimmer of the old Bucky, the Bucky Barnes that I had fallen in love with, when he glanced at me with wide eyes. Without a word, he slowly dipped his head closer to mine, closing the distance between us with slower movement than molasses in January.

I had to keep myself from crashing my lips against his in case he would recoil, but I have to admit, it was hard. But then again, when he finally brushed his lips with mine, it was worth the wait. I practically melted in his careful embrace, reaching for his left metal arm that I could already tell he was embarrassed about.

He stiffened as I first made contact with his metal fingers, but then his lips relaxed against mine again when I intertwined our fingers together, flesh and metal joining together. His right hand held my hair away from my face as he kissed me, the movement coming back to him like a forgotten memory that was never really lost.

"You," I breathed, pulling away reluctantly, "you're okay?"

In an instant, his eyes filled with shadows. "I...I think so." He nodded gently. "Now that you've come back to me..." he trailed off, using his thumb to trace my red, glistening lips. I couldn't ignore the pulse that came alive in my core, causing my cheeks to blush. "I think I'll be okay, Elda."

My eyelids fluttered closed as I heard him whisper my name in the darkness. "Say it again," I requested, twisting my hands around his neck and pulling him down to kiss me again. In between each word was a slow, gentle kiss. "Say—it—again."

"Elda," he whispered over and over again. I did the same with his name as I stumbled backwards, aiming for the middle of the room where the thought of him leaving wouldn't cross our minds for a long time.

"Bucky," I hummed, relishing the resounding groan that left his lips each time I said it. "Bucky, I love you."

The only things that could see us that night were the moon and the stars, jealous of the love that radiated between us. An old love rekindled, a new love reborn, all in the space of breathless moans and promises whispered in the dead of night by bodies moving as one.

||

okay, shuri called bucky 'brother' because they're totally adopted siblings now and no one can tell me anything else.

oh-em-gee. it's like, the second-to-last chapter. only one left! this chapter was clean, and the next part is a carbon copy of this one except with the NSFW warning in the title. chapter 28 will be coming soon, though!

ahh thanks so much for reading! i hope you enjoyed! also, happy 2020! uhhh was hoping to have this finished before the new year but uhhh when does laura ever meet her writing goals? never.

january 4, 2020