Chapter 79
While Toni received regular updates from Shuri in the following days, mostly in the form of the young princess having calls with her children, she didn't hear from King T'Challa as much after the incident in South Korea.
She didn't blame him, not when he'd just learned something of potential concern to his kingdom. And even without it, he was a new king, attempting to navigate a new world as a leader instead of just the son of one. It would be overwhelming; she knew from her own experiences of trying to manage being the new CEO of Stark Industries while grieving for her mother. It would be a lot, but she had the utmost faith that he would figure it out. And unlike her, he had a mother left who loved him and would guide him to make the best choices for him and their country.
Unlike her who had Obie left to guide her.
She was grateful for that; he and Shuri deserved having someone in their lives who wanted the best for them and would fight for them to have that.
So it didn't really worry her that she didn't hear from the King.
But when Shuri didn't contact her family for a day, she knew something was wrong.
Even if she wasn't talking to the Princess directly, the teenager was always sending internet content to Peter and Harley, and they were always laughing over some "meme" or the other that they'd received.
It wasn't until she received a call first thing in the morning that she truly found out just what had been happening in Wakanda.
"Miss, there is a call for you," JARVIS said, as she sat up, "Princess Shuri is trying to reach you about what seems to be an urgent matter."
"Patch her through, J," she said, as she grabbed a robe and pulled out her StarkPad. She moved to the vanity in her room, as Shuri's face came across her screen.
The young princess looked haggard as she appeared to be in some sort of tent.
"Toni!" the girl said, sounding relieved.
"What happened?" she asked, immediately feeling worried over the teenager.
"That man," Shuri said, voice breaking. "The one who you and T'Challa were looking into. He came to Wakanda and challenged him to the throne. Said he was the son of our uncle, and that he had as much right as we did. He threw T'Challa off a cliff."
She took in a quick intake of breath, "Is he okay?"
"I don't know," Shuri said, tearfully. "We brought some of the Heart-Shaped Herb to give to M'Baku, hoping he'd challenge Killmonger. But it turns out the Border Tribe had found T'Challa. We gave it to him, but he hasn't woken up yet. What if he doesn't wake up? I can't lose him, Toni, I just lost my father, I can't lose my brother too."
She hiccupped.
"Hey," she told the girl gently, "You, Shuri, are one of the strongest people I know. One of the smartest too. You're going to make it through this, okay? I promise. We'll figure this out, together."
"I don't know if I can bring him down on my own," she said, "He wants to send Vibranium to the War Dogs around the world. Equip them with it and overtake the world as the next big superpower. And without T'Challa to challenge him, I don't know if we'll be able to stop it."
"You're forgetting one thing," she told the girl gently, "You are the daughter of T'Chaka. T'Challa and Killmonger aside, you have just as much right to the throne as they do. You can put a stop to this."
"I'm not strong enough," she said, shaking her head, "If T'Challa couldn't even defeat him, how can I?"
"Maybe so, but you're smarter than them both," she said, "If you can't defeat him physically then defeat him mentally. How can you stop the vibranium from being sent out?"
"If I were in my lab I could hack their ships," she said, slowly.
"Exactly," she said, encouragingly.
"I need to get back," she said, determinedly.
"No, Sister," a deep voice said, and Shuri's eyes widened. "We need to get back."
The girl launched herself at her brother, and she watched the view shake, given she was calling off her wrist beads.
"Toni," King T'Challa said.
"I'm glad to see you're up, Your Highness," she said, and the man winced.
"I think after everything that's happened you can definitely call me T'Challa," he said. "We need to get back. He cannot be allowed to launch those ships."
"Do you need any assistance?" she offered them, "I can put on the suit now and be in Wakanda in about three hours."
The young King shook his head, "I appreciate the offer to fight arm in arm with you. However if I take down the Usurper with outside help the people will never respect me as one of their own. This is a fight we need to win on our own, to secure the future of our country."
"I understand," she gave him a smile, "I wish you both all the best in this fight. You are both so strong, and I have no doubt in my mind that you will succeed in this."
"Thank you," Shuri said softly, and her brother wrapped an arm around her. She smiled up at him tentatively.
"With this one fighting by my side to help me, I have no doubt of that either," T'Challa said, smiling proudly at her. "She is the smartest mind our country has ever seen. I pity anyone who stands in her way."
"I'll tear them apart," she said solemnly. "Just watch them try and keep me away from my lab."
"We should get going," T'Challa said, "Thank you for all you have done for us, Toni. I hope on our next call I can give you pleasant news."
"Take care," she wished them both, as the call ended.
She wrapped her arms around herself as she headed out of the bedroom. Steve was most likely in the gym or on a run, so she headed towards the kitchen to get herself a cup of coffee.
Da Vinci knew she wasn't going to fall back asleep after that.
The call she got next was not from Princess Shuri, despite what she'd been expecting. While Steve had assured her that the young royals would be okay, she couldn't help but be on pins and needles, worried that the two were captured by the insurgents, or even worse, dead.
"Doctor Stark-Rogers?" a female voice said from the other end, and she glanced at the caller ID.
"Doctor Palmer," she said in surprise, "I can't say I was expecting to hear from you today."
"I'm sorry if the timing wasn't ideal," she said softly, "I understand you're a busy woman, with everything you do. However I wouldn't call if I didn't have to."
"Of course," she said, "What can I do for you, Doctor Palmer?"
"I was wondering if you've heard from Stephen? That is, Doctor Strange," she said, looking worried, "It's just that I haven't seen him since I went to his house in March and well, we had a falling out. I tried going over the other day, since no one's seem to heard from him in the last few months. And his house was completely empty. He didn't leave a note or anything, and I just, I don't know what happened to him. And his condition-"
She loved him.
That much Toni could tell from the despair in her voice. Even if the two had broken up a while back. She knew that look all too well.
"I know the two of you were working together a while back on a project, and I'm not even sure if you've heard from him after the accident. But I've tried everyone else and no one has heard from him in months! How can he just vanish like that, without a trace? It's not possible. Someone must know something."
"Are you sure he didn't move?" Toni asked her gently.
"No," she shook her heard fervently. "He owned his place, so he wasn't at risk of losing it. And I talked to the building manager, she said he still owned the unit. I thought he might have sold it; he was looking into all these experimental procedures, and well, he's running low on money. But as far as she knew it was under his name and he wasn't leasing it to anyone. So he should be there still."
"Did he go on a trip?" she asked, trying to exhaust all his options, "Maybe he was looking into cures. The two of you weren't speaking, so is it possible he went somewhere to try one of those procedures?"
"I suppose," she said, sounding lost, and she felt pity for the young doctor.
"Tell you what, Doctor Palmer," she told the woman, "Let me dig around for a bit. I can see if he took any flights in the last few months and if so, where he was headed. I'll also run an algorithm to scan CCTV footage worldwide and see if we get any hits."
"You would do that?" she breathed, sounding overwhelmed.
Well, it would be JARVIS running the searches. But the doctor didn't need to know that. She gave a nod to one of J's sensors, and the data from the search process appeared in front of her, as he scanned for the missing doctor.
"I can't say that working with him wasn't without grievances," she said, "He wasn't easy to get along with, but then again, neither am I. He is, however, a genius, who was instrumental in helping with the project I was working on with him. I'm not sure we would have been able to have done it without him. I can't promise that we'll be able to find anything; he's a smart man and if he avoided the cameras on purposes, chances are we may not be able to find anything on him. But I'll do my best."
"Thank you," she said, letting out a relieved breath, "You don't know how much it means that you're willing to help me like this. I was at my wits end, trying to find out what happened to him when I called you. I wasn't certain I'd find anything on my own, and that I'd have no idea what happened to him. Thank you, Doctor Stark-Rogers."
"Please, call me Toni," she told the woman kindly.
"Christine," Doctor Palmer said in return.
"I'll send you anything I may find," she said, as she knew the search could take some time.
"Thank you, again," Christine said.
She ended the call, as she continued to try working on an AI for Peter's suit. She wanted to work on it more with the boys, but she figured she could do some of the set up while she waited for news from Wakanda.
The search for Doctor Strange took a few hours before JARVIS summoned her attention.
"Miss?" JARVIS said, "I have some results for Doctor Strange's whereabouts."
"Oh?" she said, placing down her tablet.
"I found a flight booked to Kathmandu," JAVIS told her, "One way. I found record of him entering the city, and a small incident with some local boys. But after that, he seemingly disappeared. No record of him since that day, around the city, or leaving Nepal."
She frowned, "That can't be right."
Because it either meant one of two things.
That he'd died shortly after, and either his body wasn't found or was unidentified.
Or that he was avoiding detection.
Now what reason would the doctor have to avoid being seen on camera? Unless he was up to something illegal.
Which could explain why he'd gone to Nepal in the first place.
But it didn't explain why he'd been on camera before, because wouldn't he want to hide the fact he was going there?
Maybe he didn't know what he was getting involved with before then.
"Send Doctor Palmer what you found," she instructed, "And keep digging, J. Something seems off to me."
"As you wish, Miss," JARVIS said, and she frowned as she stared at the screen, unsure what to make of it.
She'd been in the lab for the better part of the next day, hoping to hear back from Shuri on how they were doing. Steve had brought her meals and urged her to come upstairs, to eat and get some rest as none of the stress could have been good for the baby. And while she did eat when he prompted her and sleep when he came to collect her, the worry in her mind continued to grow the longer that they did not hear back from either royal.
She placed her hand on her stomach lightly, as her satellites continued to circle over the country of Wakanda, and struggled to capture anything on their screens.
When suddenly, everything went dark. Her screens. Her lights. Everything.
And a blast of awful music came over her speakers. Something that was most certainly not the music she enjoyed listening to. Nothing classic rock or any other of the good stuff.
Something modern.
Was the tower under attack?
She frowned; JARVIS would have warned her if it was, wouldn't he?
"J?" she called out, but he didn't answer her. "FRIDAY? Are either of you there?"
She was met with only silence.
Well silence would have been better than the pop hell playing through her speakers.
Then, one by one, her suits all lit up, and she stared at them, as they began to move.
She reached for her tablet, ready to disarm them, but to her surprise, they were dancing.
And the moves were ones she knew all too well, since Abby had insisted on teaching Harley and Peter a few days before on how to whip and nae nae.
She'd had JARVIS record the entire event because she'd found it so endearing.
"Very funny," she sighed out loud as she watched the show play out in front of her. "Hacking my lab like that."
She knew she clearly wasn't going to get anything else done, so she watched her suits, followed by her poor bots who were trying very, very, hard to keep up, as they finished their performance for her. A smile filled her face, as she grabbed her StarkPhone, and headed to the elevator to head up to the common floors.
When she exited, she saw Peter and Harley giggling to themselves, as Ava helped guide Abby into getting her suits to do more tricks, even though they all knew she'd left the lab.
"Having fun?" she asked, as she raised her brow, and all of them burst into laughter at the sight of her.
"You should have seen your face!" Harley said, "When the music came on, I thought you were going to lecture the people you thought were attacking you about proper music and not this current garbage that all us young people insist on listening to."
"I feel like just for that, I need to properly educate you as to the virtues of proper music," she sniffed, as Peter groaned.
"Please not another lecture. I agree that their music is good but I really can't listen to another one of those lectures where you try and compare it to modern songs but then mess up their names," Peter said.
She let out a fake outraged gasp, "Et tu, Peter?" asked, placing her hand to her heart. "You can't do that to your mother in her old age. My poor heart can't take it."
"Darling, you have one of the strongest hearts I know," Steve said as he came up from behind her and wrapped his arms around her.
"Ew we wanted to get you out of the lab, but we didn't want this," Harley complained, as he launched himself on the couch.
"So all of this was an elaborate ruse to get me to leave?" she asked, pretending to be outraged.
"We're worried about Shuri and T'Challa too," Abby said to her, and Toni wrapped her arms around the young girl. "But we wanted to be with you."
She gave Steve a look, as she hadn't told the children what was happening due to the need to keep them sheltered from the events in Wakanda.
"We don't need you to hide what's happening from us," Peter told her gently. "It might not be the best, but we want to know. Shuri's our friend, and if something happens, we want to know."
She sighed, as she sat down on the couch, next to Harley, and Abby sat down beside her. Peter sat down next to the other boy.
"I don't know what's happening," she told them all. "But you're right. I shouldn't keep you in the dark about it. It won't help in the long run. I promise, the minute I find out anything, I'll let you guys know, okay? Because chances are, if the fight doesn't go the way they want it to, the Avengers may need to take action, so we need to be on alert."
"Will he hurt them?" Abby said, sounding scared.
"I don't know, Sweetheart," she said, as the girl leaned into them, "I hope not. But you know what? T'Challa is a powerful warrior who has been training his entire life. And Shuri is a smart kid. You know she is. If there's anyone who can bring down the bad guy, it would be the two of them, okay?"
"I've seen her designs for the potato gun," Harley said with a nod, "She took that design and completely revamped it. And that was for a potato gun. Imagine what she could come up with for weapons to keep their country safe that are actually supposed to cause damage. I'm definitely not underestimating her."
"Can we watch a movie?" Abby said, and Toni took the cue to change the subject.
"Sure, J, can you queue up Finding Dory?" she asked, and the three immediately clamoured up to watch.
"I'll make popcorn," Steve said, as he bent down to kiss her head.
She didn't say anything as the movie came on screen. She wanted nothing more than to be able to protect her children from the horrors of the world, but she knew that life didn't always work that way. And if something happened to Shuri or T'Challa, they'd learn the hard way how cruel life could be at times.
Still, that didn't mean she could try and keep them safe from some of the horrors. They were her children after all.
The sunset on the Kingdom of Wakanda, as T'Challa sat on the ground, exhausted from all the fighting, with Killmonger, his cousin, beside him.
Their country had been shaken since his arrival, and he knew such dissent didn't just spring up overnight. He had failed W'Kabi and the border tribe when he'd failed to bring Klaue home. He'd failed them as his father had failed them in not getting justice for all the lives the man had taken from them. He'd gone there with good intentions, but seeing Killmonger there, wearing his family's ring, it had taken the focus away from the mission all together.
He was a new leader, he wasn't without his faults, and his father had often said a good leader didn't just listen to what their people had to say, but heard them as well.
And he hadn't. He hadn't heard W'Kabi's need for justice. Like he hadn't heard Nakia's need to help others.
He would be better though. He would learn from his mistakes and use them to strengthen their kingdom.
"It's beautiful," Killmonger said, wincing in pain, as he struggled to sit up. N'Jadaka had said. Because that man there, despite all his hatred and his pain was T'Challa's family.
So he leaned down beside his cousin, and took in a deep breath as he made sure he wanted to say the next words that came out of his mouth.
"Perhaps it is not too late," T'Challa said, looking at him. "Maybe we can still heal you."
"Why? So you can just lock me up? Nah. Just bury me in the ocean, with my ancestors that jumped from the ships," he said, gasping for air, "Cause they knew death was better than bondage."
He moved to pull the knife from his chest, and T'Challa placed his hand on the man's, stopping him.
"You've been alone for so long, that you forget what it is family is for," T'Challa told him gently. "You're not wrong. You committed several crimes. "Against Wakanda, and the rest of the world. You committed an armed robbery that resulted in the death of several officers, and you murdered Ulysses Klaue, but that could be explained as justice, and I doubt very many would be saddened by his death. You tried to overthrow my kingdom, but you were well in your rights to challenge me. Bast knows while I don't like M'Baku, I still respect that he had the right to challenge me. And for all the fighting that nearly tore Wakanda apart, well, neither of us were technically king since the challenge had not come to an end. And it could be explained as in fighting at a time where the country was divided. You are not innocent, but you are not as guilty as you may think."
"So what?" N'Jadaka asked with a laugh, "You want to paint over my history with a whitewashed brush and pretend it didn't exist? I still murdered people. More than you could ever know."
"For the United States Government," T'Challa reminded him, "Mr Ross told us as much. You did horrible things, but as a soldier following orders. You are not the villain you want to paint yourself as."
"Why?" N'Jadaka said finally, "Why are you so insistent on pretending I'm not a horrible person. I know what I am. I see it every day. Why can you not see that as well? Just because you've had a sheltered life doesn't mean that there is good in everyone."
"You came here because you wanted to see where your father was from," T'Challa told him, "Where you were from. And even misguided, you wanted to help the world. Help the children who were at risk."
He took a deep breath, "My father did yours a great injustice. And I would be doing the same to you if I let you die here today. If I didn't at least try to help you. You're right, Wakanda has plenty of resources, and by keeping them close to our chest, we're doing the world a grave injustice as well. I'm seeing that more and more every day. So help me. Let's do this the right way. Let's help save the world, together."
"You talk a lot of pretty words," N'Jadaka said, as he hissed in pain. "So what, we pretend this didn't happen? We just ignore all the horrible things I've done?"
"I don't think we can do that," T'Challa said with a sigh, "You'll have to face justice for your actions at the museum. But for everything done here? If you truly wish to change. Truly wish to work with us, then I'm certain we can make it work. Please. We both lost our fathers. And I won't compare your pain to mine, but both were taken from us, unfairly, and unjustly. But I am not my father and you are not yours. Let's work together, to make the world a better place, like they should have."
"You really think you can fix this?" N'Jadaka said, looking down at his stomach.
"The sooner you learn that my sister is smarter than either of us, the easier of a time you'll have here," T'Challa said with a laugh. "She can heal you. But we won't take that choice from you. So what do you say, Cousin? Will you help us?"
N'Jadaka closed his eyes, and for a second, T'Challa feared he would say no. But instead, the man nodded in agreement.
"Okay," he let out a long breath. "Okay. Let's do this."
A/N: As much as I love Toni, I didn't want her to fight in the battle with the rest of the Wakandians. The fight was something they needed to do themselves, and aside from Everett Ross, there was no outside intervention. And well, saving Erik Killmonger was a nice plus.
