Eva's first impression of Wakanda was that it was hot. Stepping off the plane was like going into a sauna, and she was glad that she had frozen her knees off in JFK airport with her shorts, since jeans here would have surely surmounted into instant death. At customs a woman in a white suit approached her. "Miss Kresk?" she said in a heavy Wakandan accent, as Eva fumbled with her passport and rucksack.
"Uh, yes, ma'am. Hello."
"If you would like to follow me," said the woman, leading her away from the main part of the airport.
"Am I in trouble?" Eva asked nervously. It would be just like her to have done something wrong before even clearing security in a new country.
"No, Miss Kresk. King T'Challa has arranged transport for you. Through here, please."
"Ri-i-ight. And, um, what kind of transport is that?" she asked. "It's not a car, is it?"
"No, Miss Kresk. The home of Alvie Kennings is inaccessible by automobile."
"Well, that's okay, then."
"You will be travelling by helicopter."
"WHAT?!"
They walked out onto a helipad, upon which stood a glossy black helicopter with its dragonfly wings spinning faster than the human eye could perceive. Another woman took Eva's bag for her and held out a hand to pull her up into the machine before handing her a pair of headphones.
"The flight will take roughly an hour and a half, Miss Kresk," the second woman said through the radio, as the first climbed in behind her. A third was sat in the cockpit, fiddling with the controls.
"Right," Eva yelled back over the roar of the helicopter, "if you don't mind me asking - who the hell are you people?"
"We are the Dora Milaje, Miss Kresk. Personal security for King T'Challa."
This is so weird, Eva thought fervently. She knew her friend was now directly employed by the monarch in some laboratory deep in the African jungle, but experiencing it directly was completely insane. She didn't deserve to get a lift off of a king! She was a barista! A gardener! She lived in a crappy Manhattan apartment, for goodness' sake!
The helicopter took off abruptly, and Eva's fingers dug into the leather of the seat as they ascended. Risking a glance out of the window, she saw Wakanda's small capital city unfold beneath her, a web of gray in a sea of lush green, mountains rising and falling like sea waves. It was breathtaking, and also completely terrifying, so she shut her eyes again and tried not to fear-sweat as well as heat-sweat.
An eternity later, one of the Dora Milaje tapped her on the shoulder. "We have almost arrived, Miss Kresk," she said, and against her better judgement Eva peered downwards through the glass.
The green was endless now, unbroken by roads and rivers save for a single crashing waterfall that descended from a cliff in the distance. Clinging to the mountainside a white rock building sprawled, its massive windows glinting in the sunlight, but that wasn't what she was looking at. Oh, no, her eyes were immediately drawn to the colossal stone panther that rose from the treeline, maw drawn back in an eternal snarl like it was guarding the space-age building behind it.
"That's a bloody big cat, if you don't mind me saying," Eva commented, with all the poetry in her soul.
"Yes, Miss Kresk."
The helicopter began to descend onto the roof of the building, where two small figures were waiting. One of them was instantly recognisable by her jewel-bright clothes and her jumping up and down and waving, while the other was stood rather more demurely and, as they pulled closer, Eva felt as though she recognized him from somewhere. The helicopter landed with a judder, the engines died, and Eva yanked off her seatbelt and fell of onto the building on her hands and knees, clutching at the solid stone and never intending to leave it again.
"Eva!"
She stood up, only to be almost felled again by a hug from Alvie. "Hey, honey," she said in a voice still shaking from the fear of the chopper ride, "I missed you, too."
Alvie let her go and beamed. Wakanda had done her good, it seemed - her skin was sun-darkened to a richer brown color that suited her better, bringing out the gold in her eyes, and there was something else about her too... an aura of contentedness that she had lacked in New York.
"You've barely been in the country two hours!" Alvie exclaimed. "How are you already sunburnt?"
"I'm from Texas, I thought I would cope with heat," Eva replied, "clearly, I was wrong."
Alvie laughed, and kissed her on both cheeks. "Oh, before forget - Eva, this is T'Challa, King of Wakanda and Black Panther. T'Challa, this is Eva. She's a barista."
"Don't sell me short, Kennings," Eva muttered, dropping into an awkward curtsy. T'Challa, who looked nothing like a king in jeans and a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled up, smiled at her. He had a very nice smile and, indeed, a very nice face. Eva felt herself blushing, and hope the sunburn hid it.
"It is an honour to meet you at last, Miss Kresk," he said, "I have heard many things about you."
"Good things," Alvie chipped in, noticing the look Eva was giving her. "Complimentary things, I promise."
"Thank you your, ah, supreme majesty," she said, and he winced.
"Oh," said Alvie, "and he doesn't like airs and graces."
"I respect that completely, your holy magnificence," Eva said, and T'Challa smiled. "You got some nice rainforests here, if you don't mind me saying."
"I would be happy to show you them - that is, if Alvie does not mind," T'Challa added.
"I prefer nature from a distance," said Alvie, "but by all means, you two go and count trees or whatever it is people do outside without me. I'm sure it'll be very roman- OUCH!" she yelped, rubbing her arm where Eva had punched her.
"Thank you, O High Lord of All," Eva said, "I'll see you around."
"I shall leave you both to reacquaint, then," T'Challa said, bowing his head and waving a hand at the Dora Milaje. They followed him off of the rooftop, leaving the two Americans alone.
"So," said Alvie, "you break up with your boyfriend, an actual superhero, and the next thing ya do is start flirting with another superhero who also happens to be a king. I admire your ambition."
"Shut up," said Eva, "I am a gardener, y'know. I genuinely want to have a look at the rainforests."
"Sure ya do." Alvie grabbed her hand and hauled her away down into the building. "Admire the local wildlife in its natural habitat, and all that."
"I swear to God, Kennings, I will punch you again if you don't shut your mouth right now," Eva warned her. "You got that?"
"Loud and clear," Alvie grinned, pulling a security card on a lanyard out from under her dress and using it to scan them both in. "But how awesome is this place? The technology here is insane, they're two decades ahead of mainstream Western stuff. They keep sending me interns from the university, and they're so smart I feel genuinely threatened."
"What d'you actually do here, Al?" Eva asked.
"Lotsa stuff. Mostly I work on neuromechanics, translating brain activity into language commands, but whatever T'Challa needs I do my best to achieve. Experiments on the properties of vibranium, biotech, super-secret stuff I can't tell you about, non-binary based software... things like that."
"Super-secret stuff, huh?" Eva asked with interest. "What's that, then?"
"Telling you would defeat the point," Alvie said, now unlocking the door to a suite of rooms that could only be hers. There were clothes everywhere, nothing was where it should be, and yet you got the impression there was some kind of order to it all that only Alvie could understand. Eva drifted over to her bedside table, where there was a small pile of books, a Prince record and a couple of photos. One was unmistakeably of a young Alvie, no more than three or four years old sat on the hip of a large, elderly black woman with her hair in pigtails and a banana-wide smile on her face. Alvie, that was. Not the woman. There was another of Alvie and Eva, which made the gardener very happy, and one more of her friend and what she assumed was the infamous boyfriend, who Alvie said was currently "on a retreat somewhere nearby", and declined to explain further. They looked cute together, though. Not quite as cute as Eva and Alvie did in their own photograph, but not bad at all.
"How's New York?" Alvie asked her, picking up Eva's rucksack that had been left by the door and emptying it onto the sofa-bed. "And your Vision? You said a while back he was a bit... depressed."
Her Vision. She would have to tell him that. "It's all a bit... wobbly," she confessed. "I'm not really up at the HQ that much anymore. I think Vision prefers coming round mine, anyway. It's an escape."
"Are the Avengers even still a thing?"
"Your guess is as good as mine. I just hope nobody tries to take over the world in the foreseeable future," Eva said heavily, sitting down on the edge of Alvie's bed. "Stark's around more than ever, too. They're all bloody miserable. I hate it."
"Right," said Alvie, "because normally you're a proper ray of sunshine." She ducked the pillow Alvie threw at her head. "Can I show you my labs?"
"Sure," said Eva, "I'm sure they'll be fascinating."
Alvie missed the sarcasm completely.
The labs were massive and yet still seemed overfull, with fancy equipment and young, beautiful Wakandan scientists who talked quickly and cleverly and seemed to hang on Alvie's every word. She waved them away and escorted Eva into her own private lab, which had workshop tables and monitors lining the walls and a paperwork desk in the middle, near to what looked like a massive refrigerator crossed with a test tube.
"What's that?" Eva asked, pointing at it. It was made of glass, but it had frosted over so completely that she didn't have a hope of seeing inside.
"Super-secret stuff," Alvie said, knocking on the futurist construction and making it clang. "I'm monitoring it for a friend of T'Challa's."
"It's not gonna explode, is it?" Eva asked cautiously.
"Not unless you piss it off, no."
"Cool. What are the screens for?"
"The left wall connects to the servers I use for running algorithms. That one's research. This one's Athena stuff. The one at the table is for monitoring Bu – uh - super-secret stuff. This one's for funny cat videos. The ones up there are connected to all the surveillance footage in the building. I watch movies on that one over there."
After her brief tour of the labs, which involved many long words Eva did not know the meaning of anyway, Alvie took her into a communal kitchen-dining area which smelt strongly of spicy cooking. With her powers of deduction, Eva traced this back to the bubbling gumbo pot sat on the stove, and her stomach made an appreciative noise as Alvie stirred it.
"You seem happy here," Eva said, switching on the kettle to make herself a cup of tea.
"Thanks," said Alvie, "I'm actually okay. I'm safe here, and I can still work as Athena and as a scientist. T'Challa's good company, and the university thinks I'm important and gets me to do lectures there all the time. And I'm close by to my boyfriend, which is nice, even if I don't really see him much. You like okra, right?"
"Al, I like literally anything and everything you cook. Don't ask stupid questions like that."
"In that case," said Alvie, "we'll eat and then engage in friendshippy activities such as bitching about things and people neither of us like and watching crap films in silence for the rest of the day, and I'll let you go on your jungle date with the king and my employer tomorrow while I'm working."
"How about we bitch while talking over the top of crap films?" Eva suggested, and Alvie gave her a thumbs up as she added some kind of spice to the pot. "Also, it's not a date."
"You said that way too late for it to be true," Alvie said sagely, "if you haven't engaged in amorous activities by the time you catch your plane Sunday night, I shall be shocked and disappointed."
"I hate you," Eva mumbled.
"Je t'aime aussi, ma chérie."
Lying in bed (or sofa-bed) that night, after having silently given thanks for air-conditioning, Eva called Vision. "Wakanda's great," she told him, "Alvie's doing amazing over here."
"Send her my love," Vision replied, "how about you? Please, do not get heatstroke."
"I'm fine," she assured him, "that king dude's taking me out to see the jungle tomorrow. The flora here's meant to be unlike anywhere else, we learnt about it in college. Something about the natural minerals in vibranium mines caused mutations into completely unique species. How cool is that? I'm gonna try and get a cutting for my apartment back home, maybe something for the allotment on the roof, too. How's Rachel Carson?"
"As delightful as ever. You know you asked me to check your emails for you while you were away?"
"It's not a holiday unless you ignore all responsibilities, V."
"Yes, well - there is one from the New York City Parks and Recreation department. There has, apparently, been an area of Central Park left in a state of ruin ever since the Chitauri attack and -"
Eva sat up in bed. "Oh, my god," she said. "Hang on. Let me process this." She took a deep breath. "Okay, carry on. I'm calm."
"They would like you to be the chief architect in redesigning -"
"HOLY CRAP!" she screamed, and Alvie ran in from the next room with a baseball bat.
"Where's the fire?" she yelled, and Eva waved a hand.
"It's good! I'm good!" she said, getting up to jump up and down on the bed. "Vision says he loves you, by the way."
"Aw, I love him too. Not that I know him particularly well, but -"
"Alvie loves you too," Eva said into the phone.
"I heard. Congratulations, Eva."
"This," she said, bouncing up and down on the squishy mattress, "is the best thing that has ever happened to me. No - second best, after meeting you. No - third best, after meeting Alvie. I'm gonna design part of the most famous park in the world, V!" She dropped down onto her butt. "Oh, jeez. What if I do terrible, and I get exiled from New York forever, and I have to move to Cleveland where nobody knows me or my shame?"
"Whatever you do," Vision said, "I have no doubt it will be exceptional. Now get some rest, and on no account are you to think about this or any other form of work until you return to American soil."
"Yes, sir. Love you," she said.
"I love you, too."
She hung up, and conveyed the news to Alvie. "This is... amazing. This is way too good for me."
"Nothing is too good for you, Eva," Alvie said. "Not even the king of Wakanda."
"Let it go, dude. Let it go."
A/N since there isn't a Christmas chapter this year, enjoy Eva's adventures in Wakanda instead. I've had this saved in the notes on my phone for ages, so it's nice to finally release it into the wild. Also, everyone else in my flat has gone home since term finished yesterday, but for some reason I decided to stay for another TWO DAYS. This might be what severs the last tenuous link to my sanity. This afternoon I roasted sweet potato for lunch, dropped it on the floor when I took it out of the oven and screamed. I'm either losing it, or very emotionally invested in sweet potato. Possibly both.