You Must Remember This

Chapter 38 - Swan song

Wakanda, August 11, 2016

Steve walked over the brightly lit bridge into Shuri's design lab, built within the heart of Mount Bashenga. He'd imagined finding something similar to the medical unit, with strict white lines, but Shuri had gone all out to make this place her own. 
A giant cylinder with a winding staircase stood in the middle of the room. A splendid design of rich, colorful African motives decorated the black outer walls of the two white cubicles in the middle of the cylinder. Some of the most intricate tech stuff Steve had ever seen was displayed in an arc around it. He immediately thought of Tony. Iron Man would be as giddy as a kid on the playground in a place like this. 
Shuri and Sam sat together, hunched over a table holding several tablets and computers near the window. Daylight streamed in from up above, down the shaft holding the nation's most precious substance. He suspected the close location to vibranium was the primary reason for Shuri and the Wakandan Design Group to have set up shop here. 

"Please tell me you got something," Steve said as he approached the duo. 

"Something and nothing," responded Sam, surly. "How'd it go with Nemesis?"

"She definitely knows Lucas well enough to get upset after I told her he was found dead at home."

"Wait, what? You told her Lucas died?"

"I had to get her to react to the photograph, and the best way to do that was to shock her." 

By the manner in which Sam pinched his lips, Steve could tell he didn't agree with this course of action and would've handled things differently and more empathically, but they had no time to treat Nemesis with kid gloves. She was far from one, despite looking so young. And he was far from the skinny, naïve boy he used to be. Too much had happened for him to still look at the world the way he had before the war.  

"What do you have?" asked Steve again. 

Shuri answered first. "Nemesis's DNA profile is one of the most complicated I have come across. I am still running the data, but I suspect she may be a human chimera. It is a genetic mutation that sometimes occurs when blood or marrow gets mixed in, for example, a transplant. I've found blood cells of both type A and O, but I cannot say how the mutation occurred. Yet. You would not know what you have, by any chance, would you, Captain? It would help me filter the results."

"Type A," he answered. "S.H.I.E.L.D. did a full analysis on me after they pulled me from the ice."

 "All right, so assuming we are correct in our identical twins' theory, Evelyn had the same type, so we are still left with the same questions as before. I will have to determine the O, which will not be easy. Over 37% of the world's population has that type."

"If anyone can figure this out, it's you, Shuri." Steve next turned to Sam. "What about you? What's the word on Lucas?"

"Not that much, though he's had some bad luck in his life," answered Sam. "Moved to LA in the Spring of '47, where he raised his son alone after his wife died of —"

"Whoa, back up. His son and wife? That's not possible."

"Why not?"

"Lucas is gay. Bucky remembered and told me before we found out he was still alive."

Sam furrowed a brow and then groaned in annoyance as he glanced at Shuri. "Looks like I owe you and Widow ten bucks." 

"Told you." She smirked triumphantly. "He was far more interested in speaking with you than me or Natasha."

"Guys, focus." Steve brought them back to order. "Sam, what about the wife and son?"

"Right, so the wife, Deborah Rider, died of TB a few months after giving birth. The pregnancy advanced and complicated the disease, but the baby was delivered safely and didn't have it. The kid then died when he was sixteen when he was visiting relatives in Brooklyn."