We'll Meet Again...I Know When || Bucky Barnes x Reader

26 || Keep Calm and Carry On

T'Challa shows you all to where Vision will be kept in one of the safest and best hidden facilities within Wakanda. Even if his location is discovered here, this lab rests on a tall mountainside, so in theory at least, no massive spaceships will be able to land. They'll instead be forced to go miles out into some fields where your own army will be waiting, effectively putting a comfortable distance between enemy and friend (if all goes according to plan, that is).

"Shuri, this is (Y/n)," Although the overall mood of the room is rushed and laced with stress, Bucky seems to find a temporary distraction from it all as he drags you over to the Wakanda Princess seconds after she finishes talking with T'Challa. You've seen her before, of course, sometimes in the background of your shared video calls with Bucky, yet this is the first time you've officially gotten to speak directly to each other.

"Sooo, I take it you're the one I have to thank for going through the torture of teaching this old man how to FaceTime?"

"Unfortunately. It was a true test of patience if I've ever had one!" The young girl groans dramatically, but her mocked annoyance quickly melts away into a similar smile as your own, "Although I must say, that hell was preferable compared to listening to him mope about you all the time."

"Mope, eh?" You smirk, glancing at Bucky who grumbles.

"...I didn't 'mope'..."

Shuri takes no shame in embarrassing him, in fact she's eager to keep it up, "Yes, he moped aaall the time! Day in and day out, just wandering about my lab pouting about 'his (Y/n)' and how much he misses you. It was to the point that I couldn't get any work done! Finally, I got so tired of it that I gave him that tablet to talk to you with - just like turning on cartoons to distract a toddler!"

Bucky glares at Shuri, his cheeks a red hue, but you simply laugh while snuggling up to his arm, "Well, I suppose I can't judge. I was pretty mopey myself back then. I'm honored to be missed."

This makes him smile bashfully, however you don't miss the way his shy joy fades into a more dejected stare as soon as you look up with a teasing flutter of your eyelashes only for him to quickly dodge your gaze.

While he makes no attempt to move his arm away from you, that distant look on his face doesn't exactly make your actions feel welcomed, thus you're quick to step away, putting a safer space between the two of you. If it wasn't for a more dire situation being at hand and the fact that this room is filled with people, many of whom you either don't or barely know, you would've asked him what's on his mind, yet you end up storing the question in the back of your mind for later instead.

There, you nearly forget about it while trying to focus on Vision's neutron connections as Shuri scans them. In her opinion, while Tony and Bruce did well enough to make Vision functional given the whole 'Ultron time-crunch' they were racing against, in a moment like this where the stone needs to be fully removed, they did a pretty...shit job, to be nice. Even Shuri, with her seemingly endless intelligence, estimates that it'll take her quite a bit of time to get this task finished without accidentally causing any circuit failures.

"How long do you need?"

"As long as you can give me."

Sometimes it feels like the universe truly is against all of you. Seconds after Shuri's sentence, Okoye receives an alert that something has entered the atmosphere. You swear, you can hear a collective inhale as everyone already assumes what 'something' must be, however no one reacts too outwardly aside from that, in fact the whole room is rather calm as they move to the large windows overlooking a vast amount of land beyond the mountainside, eyes tilted towards the sky in preparation for an attack to rain down upon your heads.