Command • T'Challa

When It All Falls Apart: Grace's POV

 It scares me. I shiver a little as I watch an older man come over to Prince T'Challa- I assume he must be King T'Chaka, and say something to him. He seems proud of his son. Maybe he is a noble and kind king, maybe when he sees me in person, and sees how utterly terrified I am, maybe he'll have mercy on me.

 Actually, to be totally honest, I was kind of hoping to play the race card, but hey, I'm not entirely black, but I think that it doesn't matter if I'm white, black, or polka-dotted. All he cares about is that I'm an American- that alone divides me and makes me less-than. Having superpowers while the mighty king of Wakanda doesn't probably won't help the case either.   I sigh heavily, looking away from the king, his son, and out of one of the windows.

Minutes pass after what feels like hours to me. King T'Chaka gets up to speak, and I know he's speaking harshly, in english, but I'm not listening to what he is saying. I'm not listening to him, or to anyone else- even though what he is saying concerns me. It just doesn't seem to be important right now-

Something is wrong. It's not just the harshness in King T'Chaka's voice, or the murmuring among the superheroes and UN delegates- something is wrong.

I can feel it in the air, and it's choking me. I fight the urge to stand up, to stand up and get the hell out of there, and take Wanda and anyone else nearby with me. I look at Wanda, then Natasha, Tony, and Steve, then at King T'Chaka, who is pounding his fist on the podium. In my peripheral vision, I see Prince T'Challa's head snap around from me to his father. He lunges at him, I grab ahold of Wanda, and a millisecond later, the podium and the wall and half of the room blows up.

The king is thrown forward, obviously killed in the explosion, and many others around us are dead. I hold Wanda in a vice-like grip, my eyes wide. I knew it was coming- my senses told me so, and by the look on Wanda's face, she had felt it, too. Prince T'Challa's father was dead, and the prince was crawling to his father's broken body, cradling it, crying. Tony came to grab me, and Steve grabbed Wanda, trying to rush us out of there.

"We can't leave yet!" I said, shaking out of Tony's grip. "Some of these people need medical attention!"

"We are not medics, our job is to go out and catch the son of a bitch who did this- or sons of bitches. We gotta catch the bad guys, not play nurse."

I want to argue, looking over at the prince, who is laying his father's body to the side, tears streaming down his face. His eyes flash with dark rage- one that I recognize, like my own.

I remember the day my mother was killed, the day I came back to find her, but there's no time to go back into that now. If there's a later, if I'm not somehow blamed for this mess, I will try to comfort the prince and tell him of my own experience. Perhaps it will help him.

Now I'm running into action, off to do the very thing we'd been dragged to this damned European country not to do- go out and try to save the world. We had to find out who did this, and fast.

.........

Not too much later, after all of our rushing, it was all a ruse to get us to safety. We were locked down in some room. There was a bad guy to catch, but that only made things more complicated.

"No, no." Steve said, covering his face with his hand. "I wish it weren't true."

It turned out that, according to security footage, the person who had bombed the building was the Winter Soldier, the same guy who was ghost stories back in SHIELD/ HYDRA. I'd heard a lot of crazy stories about him, about the terrible things he'd done over the past seventy years, and I also knew that he was Captain Roger's old friend. He was once a man named James Buchanan Barnes, same age as Steve, his best friend since childhood. Now he was an assassin, a product of HYDRA, as much as I was, only so much worse. Nobody ever made me kill, not that I remember. Sometimes Tony suspects that I might have a past life within the agency that I don't know or remember- that I'm not as naive as I seem, but no one knows for sure, and most of the people who would tell are either dead or missing, and it's the missing ones who scare me.