Once, Shuri thought her brother had died. She had followed that path away from hope and down into despair, feeling more like a child than she ever had.
And then, T'Challa came back. With the help of his people, he defied death. With the help of his family, he came back and saved not only Wakanda, but the entire world.
So it's understandable that now, she refuses to believe that all hope is lost. It's understandable how she turns her gaze away from the grieving heroes wandering a too-empty battlefield, and grabs Okoye's arm, and says, "Let's go."
Shuri understands that there's no need to give in to tragedy, and no point in waiting for miracles. Miracles are a thing you create.
Of course Shuri has a spaceship in a secret hangar under her lab. The world's been attacked by aliens too many times in her lifetime for her to not be prepared for such things.
"It can travel faster than light," she says, a prideful smile peeking out from the serious moment.
"Have you actually tested that capacity?" Okoye knows that the answer is no.
"So let's test it," says Shuri. "There's a first time for everything."
"But where are we going? What is your plan?"
"Find Thanos, take control of the Infinity Stones, undo what he did, and destroy the stones so that this can never happen again." It comes out of Shuri's mouth all in a rush, she's been repeating it in her head so many times.
"My Queen – "
"Not your queen."
Okoye is not as hopeful as Shuri, and has never been that optimistic. But she wants nothing more than to drive her spear through Thanos's brain, and if anyone's going to get her there it's Shuri, so she plays along.
"My princess," she says, "assuming that the rest of the list is possible, how do you suggest we find Thanos?"
Again, Shuri smirks.
"We find someone who already has."
Even before the Avengers brought the fight to Wakanda, the international news had been going on all day about Tony Stark's disappearance after confronting the alien ship. It doesn't take a genius – and Shuri is a genius – to make accurate assumptions about where Stark ended up in relation to the ship, and where that ship was going. Find Stark, and find Thanos – or at least someplace close to Thanos, with clues about how to find him.
And while Stark's latest Iron Man suit may use nanobots instead of vibranium, it operates on the same pattern as Shuri's latest Black Panther suit, and she most definitely noticed someone ripping off her blueprints, and she most definitely hacked him right back, adding a quiet little tracking device for good measure.
Thanos seemed almost proud of the fact that there was no life on his planet. It proved him right, or so he claimed – we might never know exactly what brought down the people of Titan, and whether killing half of its population would have prevented it. Thanos expects the universe to take his word for it.
There arguably still is no life on Titan, though two not-dead beings wander the halls of Thanos's castle. Tony Stark and Nebula do not so much live as they subsist.
They have failed. The universe is doomed, and everyone they care about is dead, and they each know deep in their soul, in the way that those who have suffered so much always know, that all that has gone wrong is entirely their fault.
Stark's wounds slowly heal, but imperfectly. He moves like a figure held together by glue. There's something wrong with Nebula, too – since she's been torn apart and shoved herself back together – she can't remember a time when living didn't hurt, but she thinks it didn't used to hurt this much.
But she won't let Stark near enough to analyze the machines that are more her body than flesh, let alone attempt to repair them. He doesn't try very hard to convince her otherwise. He understands her refusal. They are in pain, but neither feels the need to do anything about it. They must deserve this, after all. They certainly don't deserve the release of death.
At least, that's what the darkest part of their brains are telling them. Those parts have never been so loud. And so they wander Thanos's empty castle like the ghosts they half-wish they were, never really speaking to each other, but on some level aware that they (the genius billionaire playboy philanthropist in a metal suit, and the blue vengeance-driven abuse victim in a cyborg body she never consented to) are the same.
The ship that brought Stark to Titan is still crash-landed on the lawn.
And then one day another spaceship crash-lands into it.
The presence of a threat wakes something up in the ghosts, and without a word they go as one to confront it.
"Ready?" Tony says out of habit as they prepare for a battle they're both low-key hoping they will lose.
The door slowly opens. They take aim.
The African teenager takes a few stumbling steps down the ramp, making mental notes through her nausea about how there's got to be a way to achieve FTL space travel without it hurting like that, the alien armies never stumbled onto Earth, maybe she needs to upgrade the thrust stabilizers –
– and then her eyes lock onto Nebula, and Shuri freezes.
"Incredible," she whispers.
Stark recognizes the Princess of Wakanda – Steve wasn't the only one who kept an eye on T'Challa and his family after the whole mess in Russia.
So when Okoye leaps forward to defend her queen (her princess, her princess, Shuri refuses to think of herself as the queen, her brother will be back soon) from the alien, Shuri is able to focus on holding Okoye back, because Stark is doing the same to Nebula.
"What happened on Earth?" says Stark.
"What happened here?" says Shuri.
And so, in a manner all too rare these days, conversation wins out over violence, though Nebula and Okoye maintain a suspicious eye on each other. Everyone confirms to each other what they had already suspected: half of the universe is just plain gone. Thanos succeeded, and the situation is objectively hopeless.
"Not hopeless," says Shuri. "We can fix this."
"As much as I admire your teenage stubbornness – "
"There is no situation that can't be improved upon. Socially, technologically – we can always make an upgrade. We have to fix this, and we have to make sure that this can never happen again," she says, and despite her insistence to the contrary she never sounded more like a queen. Her insistence has caught even the cynical Nebula's attention.
There must be a way, Shuri theorizes aloud, to track the energy of the Infinity Stones, especially since they were all used at once like that. She has the data from her frantic analysis of the Mind Stone, and Tony has been considering these stones for quite some time. Surely, between the two of them, they can come up with something.
"It'll take time," says Tony.
"It doesn't matter how long it will take," says Shuri, "as long as it is done."
It does take time. But the idea is to undo what time (and mind and soul and power and space and reality) have wrought, so time they take. Shuri and Stark spend hours and days in front of computers cobbled-together from the wreckage of the ships around them. Okoye reminds them to eat, and keeps watch for attackers, and keeps watch on Nebula, whom she doesn't trust.
(She doesn't trust Stark, either, but he at least is a known threat.)
Nebula watches, too. She watches Okoye right back, unblinking. She watches the horizon behind the crashed ships. She watches Shuri as she types at the computer, and as she paces while excitedly talking through a new idea, and as she tells Stark to shut up with his doubts because they will figure it out, they will bring back everyone they've lost, they must, they will.
Nebula watches, and wonders what kind of childhood Shuri had, to create someone so different from her in every way.
There is a night where Stark is asleep with his head on the control panel of a slowly-buffering computer, and Okoye is checking the palace's defenses yet again, and Shuri finds herself with time to fill.
She goes to where Nebula sits in an enormous windowsill, staring up at the night sky. She walks loudly so as not to startle her, and looks outward as well.
(She hasn't taken much time to study the stars. In different circumstances, examining a night sky completely different from her own would be a primary fascination. But there's too much to do right now. She'll have to come back someday, when this is over, and everyone's alive again.)
"Tell me about your brother."
It's the first thing Nebula has said to her, and it surprises Shuri out of her train of thought. Of course she's mentioned T'Challa again and again in Nebula's earshot.
So Shuri tells her. She talks about her brother the King, and their childhood in Wakanda, and the battles they've fought together, and the jokes they've shared together. All the while, she speaks of him in the present tense, and Nebula tries to understand how she can do that.
Nebula is a good listener, and so Shuri keeps talking, about her parents, about the Wakandan Outreach Center, about Killmonger, about the Jabari. About the terrorist who killed her father.
"Did you kill him?" Nebula asks.
Shuri shakes her head.
"Didn't you want to?"
Shuri thinks about it. "Yes."
"Then why didn't you? He killed your father. He hurt you."
"Do you go around killing the people who hurt you?"
"Yes."
Several different things cross Shuri's mind, but in a moment of wisdom she says none of them, instead turning her gaze to the stars again.
"What do you do?" Nebula asks. "When you don't go around hurting the people who hurt you."
"I make things," says Shuri. "Thing that will keep anyone else from being hurt as I was."
(When her father died, she made a suit that would keep her brother from ever suffering the same fate – always on you, and able to absorb the energy of a bomb. She had presented it to him with a laughing tone of voice. She had never been more serious in her life to that point.)
Nebula makes a thoughtful sound. It turns into a groan of pain. Shuri's eyes dart up and down, taking in all that she'd previously only glanced at.
"Your cybernetic enhancements hurt you," she says. An observation, not a question.
"It's nothing," says Nebula.
I'm nothing, hears Shuri.
"It's incredible that you're alive at all," says Shuri. "The interplay between your organic and mechanical components must be fascinating."
Nebula snorts. "Fascinating" is not a word she'd ever use to describe herself.
"I could help," says Shuri. "I'm good with machines. With a little study, I could improve that interplay. I could ease your pain."
Nebula means to say no. But what comes out is, "Why?"
Shuri's brow furrows. "Do you need a reason?"
Nebula frowns. Of course she does, else she wouldn't have asked.
"We'll need you in the fight to come," Shuri says. "If you hurt less, you'll last longer."
Nebula's frown deepens.
"If you hurt less, you'll be able to think more clearly, and move more quickly, and Thanos will be at your mercy this time."
The frown goes away.
"May I ease your pain?" Shuri says, and Nebula nods.
Shuri is two for two on fixing broken white boys, but she's never tried to fix a broken blue girl before. The cybernetics that make up the majority of Nebula's body are unfamiliar to her, but understandable – much like the person they contain.
For all her confidence and optimism, Shuri doesn't think she can fix all that has been done to Nebula. A lot of it, Nebula will have to fix for herself, if it can be fixed.
But Shuri can ease her pain.
As the work to track the Infinity Stones continues, Shuri finds more quiet moments to work on Nebula's machinery. Sometimes they sit in silence while she does so. Other times, Nebula asks for more stories of Shuri's life on Earth.
And then one night, Shuri says, "Tell me about your sister."
And Nebula talks until her throat is hoarse, the sun is rising, and salty water is dripping down blue and brown cheeks alike.
Behind her, Shuri hears Tony waking up to grumble at the computer. She quickly wipes her face and sets her tools aside.
"Does that feel any better?" she says, making a general sort of gesture at Nebula's mechanical body.
Nebula reaches up to put her hand around Shuri's. Shuri holds very, very still.
"Yes," says Nebula, "it does."
Finally, a breakthrough. The tracker sends its signal out into the stars and returns with a set of coordinates. They know where the Infinity Stones are, which means they know where Thanos is.
Tony and Shuri are (arguing about) intelligently discussing the best way to go about repairing one or more of the crash-landed ships when the computer begins to play an incoming transmission.
For the first few seconds, everyone is tense – who is this that tracked their signal back to them so quickly? But the woman on the screen, though there is a sense of fierceness about her, is on a tiny ship, and surrounded by children.
"I am Brunnhilde of Asgard," she says, "last of the Valkyries. Do you mean us harm?"
Valkyrie has been eyeing Titan for a while, trying to determine if it is empty, or at least non-hostile. She has been doing all she can to keep the dozen Asgardian children on board this escape pod out of harm's way, even as five of them suddenly disappeared, even as they slowly ran out of food.
She longs to be in the thick of the fight, but her first duty is to the people of Asgard, which means keeping these children safe. The conflict of interest burns her.
But Stark knows Thor, and is able to convince her to trust them enough to land.
"We need your ship," he says when they're all face-to-face.
"Three conditions," says Valkyrie, blunt and to the point – she's too sober to beat around the bush. "One, I come with you. Two, I drive the ship. Three, two of you stay behind and swear on your life to protect these children."
"We could just overpower you and take your ship," says Tony.
"Try it, metal man."
"We accept your terms," says Shuri.
"When I said 'we accept your terms,' I didn't expect to be put on babysitting duty," Shuri mutters to Nebula later. But Okoye put her foot down about her (queen) princess going so far into harm's way, and Tony had expressed doubts about Nebula's physical fitness for a fight compared to him, and Nebula, to everyone's surprise, tersely agreed with both of them.
"These are the coordinates," says Tony.
Valkyrie smirks at him. "Forget it. I have a better plan."
"Why did you agree with Stark?" says Shuri. "I thought you'd jump at the chance to join the fight."
Nebula's eyes are on the Asgardian children milling about the palace's front yard, enjoying the opportunity to stretch their legs on this strange new world. She said she'd watch the children, and so watch them she will.
Shuri has to ask the question two more times before Nebula replies:
"I thought if I agreed to stay away from the battle, then you might, too."
"Why did you want me to stay behind?"
Nebula's eyes flicker towards Shuri. "Do you need a reason?"
"Please," Shuri snarks, "enlighten me."
"I don't want you to die."
Shuri opens her mouth, and closes it again when no retort comes out.
The Grandmaster doesn't care about the entire universe. He cares about the chaos caused by half the population of Sakaar suddenly disappearing, certainly, inasmuch as he is able to take advantage of that chaos and put himself on top again. Never let it be said that he doesn't have his priorities in order.
Valkyrie understands the Grandmaster's priorities. So when she, Stark, and Okoye march into his throne room, she cuts to the chase:
"Thanos murdered Loki."
Afterwards, no one would say what exactly the Grandmaster did. Okoye would say she did not see. Tony would admit that he saw, but change the subject. Valkyrie would just laugh.
But the Grandmaster is very old, and very powerful when he wants to be, and very, very attached to his favorite mischievous Asgardian.
And Thanos had enjoyed his last sunset.
Whispers from the farthest reaches of the universe claim that the Grandmaster forced Thanos to watch him undo all his deeds, back to the day he killed Loki.
(He isn't a hero. He has no intention of undoing everything Thanos has ever done. Again, he has his priorities. But he wants to hurt Thanos, and nothing hurts Thanos more than failure.)
Time does not turn back. Everyone remembers what happened. But the consequences suddenly are no longer there anymore – or, rather, they are suddenly there once again. On Earth, on Titan, and all across the universe, the dead awaken, and grief turns to shock turns to joy.
And maybe it's because Shuri and Nebula are sitting quietly together, watching the children and thinking about their siblings. Maybe it's because the Grandmaster knows more than he lets on, and has more of a heart than he lets on. Maybe it's because the Infinity Stones have some kind of a conscience.
But suddenly two people appear near the two girls on Titan, though they each died far across the universe from there.
Nebula is not the huggy type. She and Gamora just look at each other. But T'Challa can't get even a word out before Shuri knocks the air out of him with her embrace.
The Grandmaster lets Thanos's corpse fall away to the side, snapping his fingers for a few custodial workers to come dispose of it. He frowns at the large gauntlet in his hands, the Power Stone glowing in its socket, and tosses it over to Stark disinterestedly.
Loki pauses just long enough to place the Space Stone in the gauntlet and make some quippy comment about saying hello to his brother for him (Tony barely hears it) before walking off with the Grandmaster, hand in hand.
Tony stares at the Infinity Gauntlet, lying slack in his hands, Power and Space Stones glowing. For a moment, he considers putting it on.
It's Okoye who sets her hand on top of his, stopping his movement. "Eager to repeat history, colonizer?"
"Never," says Tony, silently praying to whatever god he doesn't believe in but might be listening that he is telling the truth.
Steve and Bucky are having a quiet moment together, for once – god knows they've earned it – when Steve's phone buzzes. It's a text from Tony Stark, just one word:
"Assemble."
The war council (it's not the best term for the gathering, but someone said it and it stuck) meets not long afterwards, but none who attended ever tell anyone where they met, and later no one will even admit to having been in the room. Some things you just don't tell the world, like where you took the most powerful object in the universe, and who specifically decided what to do with it.
But, based on what we know of the people who fought against the end of the world, and of what happened in the universe afterwards, we can assume most of what is said and done.
The Infinity Gauntlet lies on a table in the center of the room, the six stones placed in it (for lack of a better place to put them), conceivably within everyone's reach, though no one is reaching for it.
Rocket, for the sake of preserving his reputation, loudly wonders aloud how much the most powerful weapon in the universe might be worth, if he should hang onto it and sell it. Nobody pays him any mind. Those who care know he doesn't really mean it, not about the thing that made him go through losing Groot a second time.
Someone asks the obvious question: "What do we do with it?"
"Destroy it," someone replies.
"Can we?"
All eyes turn to the part of the room where Shuri and Wanda have made eye contact. Wanda is holding hands with a man who is on a journey to figure out who he is, now that the orange stone that once was a significant part of him is on a table a few feet away. He still likes the name Vision.
The answer is yes, they can. This time around, the girls have what they lacked before: time. Time enough to work slowly, to separate the part of Vision that could be used to destroy universes from the part that was a good person. Time enough to assess Wanda's powers, to replicate its effects, to determine the precise vibration frequency necessary to destroy each individual Infinity Stone.
With "can" on the table, the question turns to "should." It's not clear who takes what side; most switch sides many times throughout the debate, and still others are ambivalent. With that kind of power, they could do so much good. With that kind of power, they could cause so much harm. They could protect the universe. They could destroy the universe. They could, they should, they would.
"Can't things just go back to normal?!" Peter Parker finally shouts in frustration.
But what is normal? Who in that room has lived anything like what one imagines when they say "normal"?
"Normal is what we've been living through until now." Nebula's voice is low, but still manages to reach all the ears in the room. "Normal is what gave rise to Thanos."
"She's right," Gamora says. The sisters will always uplift each other's voices now. "Normal isn't good enough. We have to be better than normal."
"Yeah, but not everyone's gonna agree to be better. Not in this universe. There's always gonna be another asshole," says Star-Lord, who would know, given that he is one of those assholes. "And that asshole becomes another Thanos, and then we're back where we started. To be better than normal, you'd need a universe without any assholes."
"No." T'Challa looks thoughtful as he speaks. "What we need is a universe that will not support the next Thanos. A universe where everyone is too comfortable and cared for to listen when someone claims that there are not enough resources to go around."
"I am Groot," says Groot.
Rocket rolls his eyes. "All of a sudden the kid's an economist."
After some translation, and some more debate, and several calls for people to check their privilege, the multiple geniuses in the room confirm that Groot is correct: there are in fact enough resources to go around, on Earth certainly, and in the universe as a whole. The problem isn't scarcity, but distribution.
And now that there (for once!) currently isn't a megalomaniac sending armies across the universe, perhaps the heroes in this room – representatives of many countries and planets, dimensions and galaxies – can take the time they had to this point spent fending off those armies and devote it to a different kind of saving the world. The Wakandans have already begun this, with T'Challa's, Nakia's, and Shuri's work to share what their nation has with the world. It makes sense to expand that mission. Even those in the room who don't care about fixing poverty, who have never known a life where it seemed like there wasn't enough to go around, care about creating a universe where no Thanos will ever exist again. Everyone here, everyone in the universe, has reason to care about that, has suffered because of that.
It's exciting. Voices rise. Smiles spread across faces.
And then they all remember the Infinity Stones, and all grow quiet and stare at the gauntlet again.
"We don't support the bad guys," Tony Stark says, thinking of Ultron, thinking of super-soldier serums, thinking of terrorists holding weapons with the Stark Industries logo stamped across them. That is, after all, where it all started for him.
"We don't fund them," he continues. "We don't allow the means for them to cause harm to exist. Even if that means we can't use them, either."
He wonders if he had come to that conclusion sooner, would some or all of this have been averted. The phrase "better late than never" comes to mind, and he discards it.
Slowly, the room comes to an agreement about each of the stones, weighing their ability to cause harm more heavily than their ability to cause good.
It's easy to come to a conclusion about the Power Stone. All there know that power does nothing but corrupt. Shuri demonstrates her stone-destroying device with the Power Stone as her guinea pig, and it satisfyingly crumbles to dust.
All from Earth are quick to condemn the Space Stone as well. The Tesseract caused nothing but trouble here, and many in the room are occasionally glancing over their shoulder to see if Loki has had yet another change of heart and come back to claim it. Shuri hands Banner the device, and as he reduces the Space Stone to dust, he hears Hulk's relieved laughing deep inside his brain, and soon they are laughing together.
Dr. Strange steps forward then, taking responsibility for the Time Stone one last time, and deeming it prudent to destroy it sooner rather than later to avoid anyone using it to undo their progress. He's been unusually quiet this whole time, and stays that way as he destroys the stone. Tony wonders just how much of this moment Strange foresaw, when he used the Time Stone back on Thanos's world and concluded that the only way to win "the conflict to come" was to give it up. He doubts Strange will ever tell him.
There is tacit agreement in the room that the fate of the Mind Stone lies in Vision's hands. "I know firsthand the good that this object can create," he says, "and knowing that, I made my decision long ago, and I stand by it: no life – no potential new life – is worth the destruction of other life, both existing and potential." It's a fitting eulogy for the orange stone, turning to dust under the beam from Shuri's device.
There's some renewed discussion over the Reality Stone – this one of all of them could certainly be used to make a universe where everyone has enough and feels comfortable. But something feels off about it, and it's finally Natasha who puts that feeling into words: "One man's subjective version of reality overshadowed all the objective good in the universe. If we use it, who knows what our subjective reality would destroy? It's too risky. And like the tree said, we already have enough." So Vision passes her the device, and the Reality Stone is reduced to dust.
No one really understands the Soul Stone, with the exception of Gamora. While others mutter and shrug, she takes the device from Natasha. Nebula stands by her side, her glare daring anyone to try to stop her sister as she takes the thing that had the audacity to equate abuse with love and removes it from the universe.
The gauntlet itself, Thor slices in two with Stormbreaker, and Eitri's greatest creation destroys his greatest mistake.
"It is done," someone says.
"No," says Steve. "Now it begins."
Time passes normally, which is a relief for all involved. Sometime in between the planning and enacting of the New Avengers Initiative, the universe's heroes takes the time to celebrate now and again, though some have to scrounge deeply to find their own ability to relax. The anecdotes from these celebrations through the years would become legend: the ever-escalating prank wars, the things broken in friendly competitions of strength, the endless stories about who finally got over their angst and was caught kissing who…
One such party, because of how everyone's schedules aligned, consists of the group that converged on Titan when all hope might have been lost, the group that proved once and for all that intelligence and optimism, hope and love, will always, ALWAYS win.
Valkyrie drinks all the alcohol that was not specifically labeled "This bottle is not for Valkyrie," and the majority of the alcohol that did have that label as well.
Star-Lord (who tagged along with Gamora, who is always Nebula's plus-one) puts himself in charge of the music.
Shuri spends several hours (mocking him) attempting to re-educate Star-Lord's taste in music.
Tony is a good host for a while, but ends up wandering off to his lab – Pepper explains that he's working with genetically modified crops these days, just in case they do in fact run out of resources at some point, replicating results at least a dozen times before deeming anything safe enough to deliver to the public.
Okoye never stays long at such events anyway. Ostensibly, she only comes to serve as her princess's guard, but the Avengers Headquarters is the one place in the world almost as safe for her as Wakanda.
So when Gamora finally breaks up Shuri and Star-Lord's "music lesson," Shuri's eyes land on Nebula, sitting in a window and watching the night sky.
Shuri sits next to her.
"We're leaving soon," says Nebula.
"It's getting pretty late," Shuri agrees.
"I mean we're leaving Earth."
"Oh."
Of course they're leaving. The Guardians of the Galaxy are always on the move, hopping from world to world, keeping down whatever crime the universe's assholes are determined to cause and reporting back to the many divisions of the New Initiative about the needs they discover, for more food, more medical aid, more psychological support. The Guardians have become very good at recognizing PTSD when they see it, since they've begun to recognize it in themselves. Though they will likely always joke about their own trauma more than anything else.
They're doing important work out there, Nebula, her sister, and their found family. Shuri knows this. But she also knows that every time she realizes it will be a while before she sees Nebula again, it stings.
"It's a shame," Nebula says, interrupting Shuri's train of thought.
Shuri blinks. "Sorry?"
"Out there, no one knows how to ease my pain like you do."
It is so, so difficult to discern anything from Nebula's voice or facial expression. But Shuri is never too nervous to flirt.
"Well then," she says with a smirk, "you'll just have to come back. For regular check-ups."
"Or you could come with me."
Shuri opens her mouth, but whatever banter she has prepared disappears from her brain as Nebula's eyes lock with hers.
Damn it. At least T'Challa isn't here to see her freeze. Okoye has been good enough to keep her mouth shut so far.
"Or you could come with me," Nebula says again.
Shuri knows she won't go. Not this time, at least. There's still too much to do on Earth. She's still the head of Wakanda's science and information exchange. She can't just run to the spaceship she knows is parked outside and go map the stars with Nebula. She's sure that Nebula knows this, too.
But it's one of the nicest thoughts she's had in a long time.
So instead she says, "Okay," and they watch the stars as seen from Earth together until Pepper makes the rounds to send everyone ("Yes, you too, Tony!") to bed.