With his feet in the stirrups, men and women in white coats talking over him, the Soldier waited. Like he always waited when he was in rooms like this. Like he always waited when they were talking about him. He waited for them to be done; waited to be told where to go and what to do next.
He didn't think he was listening to what they were saying. He never listened. Their modifications weren't supposed to matter to him, and so they didn't. What mattered was what they wanted him to do. Right now, they wanted him to be still, and quiet, and not listen until the next time they spoke to him directly.
He didn't think he was listening, but the next time they gave him a target, and a team to help him, he ran. He took out the team first, so they couldn't report his defection. He took the team leader's radio, too, used it to make mission reports until they started asking things like "Where are you?" and "Why didn't you make the rendezvous?" and "Is the Asset secure?"
The first time they asked that last one, he ditched the radio, along with the big armored car, nearly three hundred miles from his starting point.
It wasn't until the night after that that he was able to stop long enough to think. By then, he had to stop for long enough to sleep, and so he'd picked out a place underneath a highway overpass. He didn't sleep more than a few minutes at a time, though just lying there refreshed him the way it always did.
He was there for a few hours, and while he was there, he realized that he didn't know where he was going, but he needed to figure it out...and in order to do that, he needed to understand why.
And so, for the first time, he let himself think about what he'd heard, when he hadn't meant to be listening. This new thing they'd done to him, in the drive to have more like him. They'd taken samples from him, a long time ago. It must not have worked, because they'd decided to try this new thing, this thing that was dangerous to him...but that might get them a soldier just like him. A soldier they wouldn't need to wipe, a soldier they wouldn't need words from a book to control. If it worked once, they could do it again; if it worked, they'd keep him doing this until they had enough of them that they didn't need him anymore.
The Soldier's first instinct was to think that this was why he'd run. To keep himself from being made obsolete. Obsolete things were disposed of, so that newer and stronger things might take their place. It was the way of the world. But as soon as he thought it, he knew it was wrong. He hadn't run because he feared the thing growing inside him. He'd run because it didn't belong to them. It was his, and he wouldn't let them have it. Wouldn't (in a fleeting thought, one he wouldn't remember a minute later, or think about again for another few weeks) let them do to it what had been done to him.
Once he knew what he wanted, he had to think of where he could go, to keep safe from them. To keep it with him, where it belonged. In the end, he could only think of one place. Even then, he wasn't really sure. There was only one place they'd never sent him; only one place they'd never had an operative return from. Even if they found his trail and followed him there, they would never dare to try to take him. At least, they wouldn't have when he was alone. Not now, either, maybe.
Maybe, if he went there, the Soldier would disappear, too. But he found he wasn't afraid. There was only one thing he was afraid of, and he already knew he would never go back.
*
They caught him on the border, of course. The Soldier had expected them to. He'd planned for this. He'd left all his weapons behind, miles ago, knowing they wouldn't save him, suspecting there was only one thing that might give him a chance.
When they came for him, on the border of a little nothing country that had never been infiltrated by Hydra, he raised his hands in the air and said, "I'm here for sanctuary."
*
Apparently, they didn't do that kind of thing. Not for outsiders. Not ever.
Also apparently, the king's daughter had gotten wind of the Soldier's arm, and had pestered her father to let her poke it. And that was how--though the Soldier wouldn't know all the details about the pestering and the sighing and the giving in until later--he wound up in her lab about twenty hours after they'd locked him in a cell, with the Princess of Wakanda examining his arm with some sort of glowy thing, and about five guards watching him stonily from the door.
He noticed she was a lot younger than he was; he also noticed that she seemed as competent as anyone else who'd ever looked at him.
As soon as she was done grumbling about how primitive his arm was, he said, "There's more."
She perked up right away. Twenty minutes later, she said, "I don't know which is cruder: What they did to your arm, or what they did to your brain."
"Can you fix it?" the Soldier asked, without having known he meant to ask. He'd thought he was working up to the biggest thing from the smallest, so he could gauge her reaction to the lesser things before he got to the one that mattered.
"Your arm or your brain?"
"Either. Both."
"Both works for me. It'll take some time, though." She looked at him intensely for a moment--at his face, this time--and then said, in a tone the Soldier would only later recognize as kind, "I'd like to scan the rest of your body, like I just did with your brain. The people who did this to you might have done something else, too. I'd bet anything that there's a tracker in you somewhere. If they did, the signal is blocked here, but it won't be when you leave again."
The Soldier raised the sleeve of his other arm, let her see the pink scar in the flesh of his shoulder. It was from the gouge he'd made there, as soon as he'd taken care of the last member of his team. "There's no tracker."
"Okay. Well, is there anything else you want me to look at?"
The Soldier hesitated. He didn't know why; this was why he was here. "There's something."
"Like?"
Later, he wouldn't be sure how he'd managed to say it, even though he'd come here meaning to say it. He didn't realize until that moment just how closely he'd been holding this secret to himself. If no one else knew, no one else could try to take it away from him. If no one else knew, anyone who did know would be immediately recognizable as an enemy.
But if she didn't know, she couldn't help him.
Finally, he said, "I'm pregnant."
*
She never told him exactly what happened after he was escorted out of her lab that day. All he knew was that she said she'd take care of it, and made a call just as he was on his way out...and instead of being led back to his (not terrible, but not real comfortable, either) cell, he was taken to a much nicer room. Still wasn't allowed to leave it without an escort, but this time there was an end date: When the programming was out of his head, he'd be allowed to wander freely through the area of the palace between his room and Princess Shuri's lab, as long as she kept vouching for him.
It was a strange way to live. There was a lot of downtime. The Soldier was used to being frozen when there wasn't anything for him to be doing, and so at first he had no idea what to do with himself in-between visits to her lab. He ended up sleeping a lot, staring at the ceiling a lot, looking out the window and planning his escape if things went bad even more. At first, it didn't seem so bad. Then it started to nag at him.
It took almost a week after he started feeling bored for him to realize that's what was happening. It didn't last for too long, though, because he mentioned it to Shuri, and she gave him a tablet sort of thing. He'd seen others sort of like it before, but none as sleek or as fast as this one was. It could access anything he wanted to know, outside of Wakandan secrets. After that, he wasn't bored at all anymore; there was a lot to learn, a lot (though he didn't think of it that way until he'd had the tablet for a while) to catch up on.
A few weeks after she'd given him the tablet, she was finished with his brain. A couple weeks after that, she had a new arm for him, one that would require much less maintenance than the other one. Even if it wasn't more than a few pounds lighter than the other one, the Soldier found he carried it more easily.
A few weeks after that--right when he was beginning to show, a curving of his abdomen that had never been there before, and was dangerous and amazing all at the same time--he woke up in the middle of the night, and realized he remembered his own name, and where he was from, and why he'd been reading so much about everything that had happened in the world since the 1940s. He was halfway to Shuri's lab before he realized she wouldn't be there, not this late. So he went back to his room and waited until morning...and while he waited, he read about himself for the first time, letting the things that had been written about him fill in all the gaps that were still there.
A few hours later, he found her in his lab, and he told her, in a rush of words that seemed strange, coming out of himself; and she beamed at him, and offered him her hand, and said, "It's so good to meet you, Bucky."
*
From there, things happened fast. Mostly it was that Bucky got big fast. Too fast to feel as balanced as he had before; big so fast he started to feel like his body didn't belong to him anymore.
Not that it was a new feeling. He had it every morning now anyway, the first glimpse he got of his left hand; the more he'd remembered of his old life, the more his life as the Soldier had begun to feel like some strange dream.
Big as he'd gotten, it took a while for him to feel the baby move. Shuri had said it was probably to be expected, since his uterus was a little thicker and made of a firmer material than anyone else's. He didn't realize how much he hadn't been letting himself think about it until the day he got a good sharp kick right in the liver. After that, he felt the baby all the time. Never got a fluttery butterfly feeling, like something might be happening or might not be; for him it was always a kick, or a pretty good shove. It probably would have hurt, if he hadn't been what he was.
Everything changed, in those months. Bucky's relationship with his body, with who he'd been and who he was now...and between him and Princess Shuri.
At first, he'd only gone to her lab when he had a question or was worried about something, or when she asked him to come. But as the months went by, the security detail following him around had thinned out before being completely disbanded to go back to whatever they'd been doing before him, he started to go see her more often, even when nothing was really happening. Started to tell her things he'd remembered not only because she was still tracking his progress, but because he was curious about what she'd say about it...and, often, wanted to see if he could get her to laugh (usually, he could). Sometimes he didn't have anything new to tell her about, but he'd go to see her anyway, and she'd show him whatever she was working on that day. She had a lot more projects than just him; she had so many things on the go that it made his head spin sometimes.
He still didn't remember everything about the person he'd been before the Soldier, or even before the war...but he was pretty sure it would have taken exactly one of her projects to make him fall for her, back them.
Not that there was any chance of that happening now. He just thought about it, sometimes. What they would have thought of each other, back then.
*
Twice a week, Bucky's visits to Shuri's lab were business, not pleasure. Every time, he braced himself for the worst, based on all the things he'd read about that could go wrong, and all the extra things that could probably go wrong with him. Maybe something that was supposed to be on the inside would show up on the outside, this time. Maybe she'd find something wrong with its heart, its brain, its spine. Maybe she'd find that it had died, somewhere between trying to crack one of his ribs five minutes ago and now. Maybe...
"So far, so good," Shuri said, looking up from her screen and smiling at him.
It was the only thing that ever soothed the worry, and it did now, too. Bucky beamed back at her, the way he always did, so wide the corners of his mouth would hurt later. He'd learned a long time ago never to show a strong emotion, if he could help it...but he never could help it, when she'd given him such good news. He could never even help it when he was here with her for no reason.
What happened next was always the same. Shuri would put away her instruments. Then she'd say she had something she wanted to show him (if it wasn't for him) or run by him (if it was). Bucky was ready for all that, so accustomed to it and so distracted by his relief that he didn't realize something else was going to happen this time until it was already happening.
Instead of putting anything away, Shuri beamed back at him, and leaned toward him--and with her standing, and him sitting on the exam table, they were pretty close to the same height--and kissed him.
For a moment, Bucky frozen, or at least his mind did. When he realized what was happening, and that he should probably put a stop to it, it was a few seconds later, and she was much closer than she'd been when the kiss had started. She was standing between his thighs now, and his right arm was around her waist while his left hand held onto the edge of the table, and she was pressed against the swell of his belly, and...
Bucky broke the kiss and leaned back. He was breathing more heavily than he had since he'd come here. "Wait. Hold on a second."
"Why?"
"I don't think we--" Bucky began.
Shuri made a face. "Don't you dare tell me we shouldn't be doing this."
"We shouldn't."
"Because I'm your doctor or because I'm the princess?"
"I--"
"It had better not be because I'm sixteen."
"It's not that," Bucky said. He hadn't actually known that. "It's--I'm a--you could get hurt."
"I could, but I won't. You would never lay a finger on me." Shuri said it with the calm assurance of someone who had seen his brain, and knew the worst things he'd ever done, and how many of those things there were. She said it with the surety of someone who had a really good idea of what he'd do to make sure those things would never happen again, or anything like them. And she really did know all about it, because he'd started telling her about them before he really knew how bad they were; by the time he did know, there was nothing she didn't know about that wasn't either better or exactly the same as everything she already knew.
"I," Bucky said. "I need to think."
He really did. As much as he'd needed to since the time under a bridge overpass, when he'd needed to decide where to go, where they'd have the best chance.
"Okay," Shuri said. She stepped away from him, and pretended to be looking at something else. It would have been clear to someone much less paranoid than he was that she was still watching him out of the corner of her eye, but at least she was trying.
So, Bucky thought about it. He was honest with himself. Too much had happened for him not to be, ever, even when it hurt. So what he realized, almost as soon as he asked himself the question, was that he wasn't really worried about hurting her. Not like that, anyway. Her work was good, solid; there could be nothing left inside him, waiting to come out until she was even more vulnerable to him than every other time they were alone.
"I don't want things to get messed up between us," he said finally. He'd told her everything else, but no matter how hard he pushed the words to come out, this was the closest he was going to get to admit that he was more worried about getting hurt than doing the hurting, this time.
Shuri thought about this. Not as long as Bucky had, but long enough for him to be sure that she wasn't going to deny it out of reflex. "I don't think it will," she said. "We're really good together, you know?"
That was true. They were good together on a daily basis. If the baby, which usually waited to kick him until he was trying to get to to sleep, was the highlight of his nights, then seeing Shuri had been the highlight of his days for months. At first it had been about the things she was doing for him, but it had been more than that for a long time. And that kiss...
Bucky couldn't remember all that many other kisses, though he had enough of the rest of his past to have figured there had been quite a few. But however many there had been, he knew, somehow, that none of them had been this good, or this right. It wasn't because he was hungrier for touch than he'd known before, or at least it wasn't all about that; part of it, most of it had to be because it was Shuri. That was all. It was her.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. We are."
She came back over to him, then, and kissed him again. She telegraphed it really well this time, giving him all sorts of time to change his mind.
He didn't. This time, he wasn't surprised; this time, he let it happen. Knowing it was coming didn't make it any worse than it had been before. Maybe it even made it better. Soon they were necking, hotter and heavier than before. He was hard already, an ache and a desire that was new, and old, and for no one but her, now. She must have felt it, pressed up against him the way she was, but she didn't seem upset about it, didn't pull back. Instead, she reached under his shirt, splayed her hands out over his belly. Possessive. Like it wasn't just his, but hers, too.
Even a month or two ago, Bucky might've reacted badly to that. The person he'd been when he'd come here would have acted instantly, and lethally. Now, though...this was Shuri. She'd saved him from everything Hydra had done to him. She'd stood between him and a cell, between him and her father. Maybe even she still was. She'd done more than anyone else could have done to make sure his baby would be born healthy, and not be born before it should be.
Bucky would never have let anyone else set down this kind of claim here...but this was Shuri. He was already hers. He'd already chosen. Probably before he'd even realized it. And because he'd chosen that, he could decide to choose this, too.
And so he did, knowing they were safe in her hands, the both of them.