Gold Rings ⚜️ Bucky Barnes X Reader

1: Wake Up, Sleepyhead

A warm, glowing light.

The mechanical whirr of a sliding door.

The tingle of a young girl's voice.

For some reason, coming out of cryo felt much better this time. Much... Warmer. It felt like he was waking up in heaven.

When Bucky opened his eyes, he saw Shuri looking back at him. Her eyes pooled with concern, but the smile on her face confirmed his suspicions.

Something good was about to happen.

Bucky had been lightly secured in the cryo chamber using grey straps. After they were undone, Shuri held out her hand to guide Bucky's first steps into a new world. It took a second for his body to "wake up", but he was able to stumble out of the chamber with relative ease.

"How long was I in?"

"A little over a year," Shuri responded, tapping a few buttons on her tablet. It looked like she was taking notes, most likely about Barnes' condition.

A young nurse was taking Bucky's pulse from his forearm. An older man - roughly in his 50s - was tinkering with the titanium hunk of metal that stood in place of Bucky's old arm. It felt like they were studying him like a lab rat, but he tried to ignore it.

"That doesn't sound like long. Do you guys have the arm design complete?"

Shuri pointed her stylus at the 50-year-old man. "That is why he is here. We have the design complete and it is in construction. However, we are having some... Complications with how to attach the arm to your body."

With a smile, she pressed her stylus against the temple of her skull. "That's why we're going to fix this first, then add the arm."

"Actually, I was meaning to ask about that," Bucky continued. "When I went under, it sounded like rewiring an entire brain was impossible. How did you figure out a cure so fast?"

Shuri's eyes quickly darted back down to her tablet, intensely focusing on the screen.

"Here, I have a few things to debrief you on," she stated matter-of-factly, turning the tablet to face him.

"You didn't answer my quest--"

He was cut off by a screen of information. It showed clips of Steve, Natasha, and Sam in action acting as an undercover team. There were photos of Clint and Scott with their families, but they had small black boxes strapped around their necks. There was a clip of Tony Stark talking to the U.S. Senate about some superweapon. Freakiest of all was seeing Spider-Twerp patching together a boat that was cut in half.

Beside the familiar faces flashed news articles about the happenings of the last year, video clips of world leaders and the UN. There were also a swarm of new faces, most notably a man throwing golden sparks.

One face was missing.

"WoahWoahWoah, what is going on?"

Shuri turned the screen back to herself. "Oh! Sorry, wrong slide." She quickly swiped her finger against the screen, going to a new page before turning it back to Bucky. It showed a diagram of his new arm.

"Wait a minute, what's going on with the Avengers? Where's Bowman?"

Shuri bit her lip. "It's... Well, a lot happens in a year. There is much to discuss--"

"Bowman wasn't on that screen. What happened to her?"

Shuri sighed. Realizing Bucky wasn't going to discuss the arm design until he knew his friends were okay, she took the tablet back.

Shuri looked down at her tablet, opening an app that looked like a social media messaging app. After opening a conversation with a random user, she typed a message. As she typed it, it was automatically encrypted using stars for the characters she typed. Once she clicked 'send', a new interface opened showing a series of classified files.

Shuri clicked on a folder. Inside was a long list of files under different mission titles. Clicking on one, Shuri flicked through some of the classified documents. She pulled up a photo before turning the tablet to Bucky.

It was Bowman, but she looked almost like a completely different person. It had been a year since she had cut her hair short to impersonate Zemo during the Raft Raid, so now her hair hung just past her chin.

She was standing behind a wooden fence with a small baby goat cradled in her arms. Mud coated every nook and cranny: it was in the roots of her hair, under her nails, and even wiped across her face.

But one thing stood out to Bucky: her smile. It was one of those little windows into the person underneath her Hydra-given name. She looked... Happy. Genuinely happy.

Maybe Bucky could feel that way too.

"She wanted to go dark. No one knows she exists, and she wanted it to stay that way. It was best for her mission."

"Mission?" Bucky questioned. "I thought she wasn't doing any missions."

"Well, maybe 'mission' isn't the right word..." Shuri retorted.

"Then what is she doing? Why'd she stay dark?"

Shuri turned to Bucky, concern dripping from her gaze.

"You."