Shuri usually told Bucky what she was doing, the whole time she was doing it. She'd done it when she fixed his head. She'd done it when she'd fixed his arm. She'd done it every other time she'd ever examined him in this room. This time, though, she'd been getting forehead lines at her screen for the last few minutes without saying a single word to tell him what they were looking at.
It was enough to make it clear to Bucky how much he preferred the other way, so that finally he had to ask, "What do you think, doc? Am I gonna make it?"
"...I think maybe we should have used a condom after all," Shuri said.
That wasn't what Bucky had expected to hear. Not even close. It took him a second to understand what she was saying, but when he did, the chill started in his right hand--the same chill he'd felt when he'd left Steve on the riverbank and run, knowing for sure they would be after him; the one he'd felt time after time, whenever he'd remembered another person he'd killed as the Soldier. The one he'd felt before he'd come here, the one that had meant he had to come here, before he hurt or killed anyone else.
"What do I have?" Bucky asked, and remembered the day she'd come to him, and told him what she wanted. He'd known it was probably a bad idea, but it had been the only thing she'd ever asked from him for herself...and when it came right down to it, he'd wanted her, too. She was beautiful, and she had saved him...and she was maybe the only person he could have believed when she'd told him he wouldn't hurt her. Bucky'd gone along with it, he'd believed it, and now he was going to find out just how badly he'd fucked everything up this time. "Is it catching?"
"Uh, no. You're pregnant."
"...Wait, you are?" When he'd asked about it, she'd said Wakandan birth control had a 100% success rate. That, and her knowing he didn't have anything, due to being his doctor and all, and having run a zillion tests off one tiny tube of his blood, was why they hadn't used a...
"No, you. They changed you. I didn't know to look for anything like this before, or I would have seen it."
"Oh," Bucky said. His mouth was dry, the hairs on his arm standing up. There was an acrid taste at the back of his throat, different from the one that had sent him running to the toilet a couple times every morning for the past couple weeks, and eventually sent him here.
He'd wondered if Hydra had done anything else to his head; he hadn't thought to wonder if they'd done anything to him that was even less expected. And now it turned out they'd done something to him he'd never thought to worry about. They'd never been able to make another one of him any of the other ways they'd tried, so they must have decided to have him grow another one for them. They'd decided to make him do this, one more violation on top of the rest.
"It'll be all right," Shuri said. "We can terminate, no problem. If that's what you want to do."
For a second, Bucky almost said yes. But a second was all it took for it to twist inside his head. For it to stop being something they had done to him, and start being something they'd tried to do to someone else. The feeling rising inside his chest was one he hadn't felt anytime recently; it was something he maybe hadn't felt since long before the fall, when Steve had been a little guy, and Bucky had had sisters.
It had been a really long time since he'd had anyone to take care of, and even longer since it had been as safe for him to do that as it would be here with her, and so what he ended up saying was, "Nah. I think I'll keep it."