The last time her father hugged her, it was when former King T'Chaka and T'Challa were on their way to Vienna. Shuri had been sitting in a lesson with her tutors, but eager for a reason to escape, caught her father before he boarded an airship. This was before Wakanda was open to the world, so he would be traveling to the nearest airport in Africa to take a plane ("How sad, imagine sitting in a cramped space for twelve hours!").

Shuri couldn't remember what her last words to her father were. She could guess, though — a whine about her classes, a request for more toys to tinker with, or a tease about his graying hair. Sometimes, she would reconstruct the memory in her head and yell at young Shuri that this was the last time she would ever see him, the ancestors didn't exist, and show him you love him so, so much, Bast-damnit.

All she actually remembered was that he hugged her while her brother promised to bring a report detailing how a Starbucks Frappuccino compared to Wakandan coffee.

He came back with a coffin, instead.

Shuri cringed at hugs after that. She preferred fist bumps and friendly jostles. Then her brother passed, and the only hugs she received were from the select few she kept in her heart: her mother, Nakia, members of the Dora Milaje, and Bucky.

So when Namor hugged her, so tight that his golden arm bands dug into her belly, the panther in her dozed off, trusting her to fall apart.

Shuri's hands moved to rest on his. For a long moment, the world around them stilled, only the flowing water of the room's lake reminding them of the march of time.

He lowered his chin to her neck. His breaths came out in long, drawn-out rumbles and warmed the left side of her face. She kept her eyes studiously trained in front of her on the bed that she'd been in moments ago, ready to leave this day behind.

"No response? Shall I be preparing for an elbow to the gut?" He teased, voice low.

There was no use denying she'd hoped for this. If only she could control how hot her cheeks felt, so she resorted to what she did best: wit.

"An obvious request by a masochist. I can put on the claws if you want."

"This is not for my wants. What does the Black Panther request of the Feathered Serpent?" He unclasped one of her hands, the one adorned with his mother's bracelet, and lifted it up to his face. His lips touched the underside of her wrist, just below where it met her palm. Her world titled on its axis.

"You want me to make requests when you've already made your conclusion?"

"You did not deny it."

She turned around in this little circle he kept her in, his mouth still hovering over her wrist, to see if she could read him like he read her without words. His water-swept hair glistened in the light. Both his eyebrows drew towards his nose, his face one of full attention and dark irises resting on her. She removed her hand from his as it twisted at an awkward angle.

And then replaced it with her other hand, weaving her fingers through his. One corner of his lips tilted upwards in a small smile of surprise. He spoke first.

"Have you drawn up your requests?"

She shook her head. "I'm okay now." She was. This was enough to satisfy her. This was all she wanted today, her frantic imagination going no further than this.

"Your state of mind is irrelevant to holding you."

"I thought you said this wasn't about your wants."

"My wants," he began, his lips returning to her skin. He spoke into her fingers, uncurling them as his lips moved around them. "are few. My needs, however, are many. So many that it would take the rest of your life to describe them all." His eyelashes lifted as he looked at her again. "I can do the speaking."

He pressed his lips into her wrist again, and the bracelet, and then pulled her hand higher and higher to access her arms. Then he flung her arm over his shoulders and left soft pecks on her upper arms, around her bare shoulders, the crook of her neck. "Beautiful," he muttered, "soft as water and firm as a panther."

All the while Shuri watched, spellbound, straining to remain still on the tilting floor. She'd fought in battle and leapt in circles around this man, but the panther was fast asleep, leaving her defenseless. His fingers left scorch marks on her skin wherever he tapped them, stopping only when his mouth reached her ears. His beard tickled her skin through her undercut.

"Talokanil women usually leave their hair long and pulled into intricate head pieces." His hand lifted her other arm over his shoulder, and she immediately clasped her hands behind his neck. "But it is easier to tangle in tight curls than loose hair."

"Have you?" She blurted. He pulled his head back to rest her forehead on hers. "Tangled, that is."

A chuckle. "There is no one alive to be jealous of."

Relief flooded over her, for some reason. "Oh," she said dumbly. And then she realized, with a start, that she wasn't satisfied. A laugh reverberated in his chest while she mumbled something under her breath.

"Speak up, woman."

Shuri had no problem saying a great many embarrassing things — clapping at her brother's ritual combat for the throne and complaining about her uncomfortable corset; or telling Okoye she named the new suit Midnight Angel, of all things. But she was careful to protect her heart. There was no room for vulnerability when she grew up near the throne and the threat of exploitation lingered over their heads, even in the isolation of Wakanda.

So why should this be any different?

She blinked up at him, the Feathered Serpent water-king, half air and half water, her hands unwinding from behind his neck and grasping at the beads at the base of his neck. The pads of her fingers touched his beard and she heard him repress a strangled gasp. Surely she'd touched his face before?

What she repeated must have come from her heart because no set of facts in her brain could have led to her next request. "I have a request. If you don't kiss me in five seconds, I will claw your ears off."

He kissed her in two.

A strangled moan escaped her mouth while one of her hands flattened against the angle of his jaw, the other crawling into his hair. It was so soft and slick, but not waxy despite how it often looked. She explored his face, his head, his ears and ear jewelry— they were adoringly pointy, she decided — and even though his hands returned to her back, she didn't need him to push her close because she did it herself. She threw the full weight of her body onto his, and he returned the favor by lifting a hand to her upper back and tilting her over. She felt a moment of falling — to the floor or into him, she wasn't sure and she wasn't sure that she cared — and then realized it was so he could angle his mouth better against hers. His other hand stablized her head. It was like fiddling with scraps of metal, welding them so they fit together better, but a flexible panther and the curves of a serpent had no need for her design.

He pulled away. She parted her lips, incredulous, but he returned at a different angle. His tongue dove into her mouth without coaxing. She bit at his lip; pressed into him as much as he did her, their kisses a sequence of pushes and pulls. Her hands left his hair and lowered to his back, tugging at this strings of jade and thick collar of gold. He groaned, nibbling her lower lip, swiping his tongue across her teeth, then into her mouth. Passing by the sun itself could not have consumed her whole like he did her.

Her lungs began to constrict. When a bundle of nerves near in her lower body warmed the base of her spine, her fingers left their ministrations at his back. They untangled their bodies simultaneously. She studiously kept her eyes trained on his, the straps of her nightgown falling off her shoulders and the material thoroughly wrinkled.

Namor straightened, running a hand through his hair. It was too daunting to look away.

If he was going to say anything, it was cut off by the entrance of a guard. Shuri wondered if doors should be her next invention.

He turned around and shifted to shield her and her unruly appearance. She averted her eyes, the sight of his bare back replaying the memory of her fingernails scraping against them mere moments ago.

The guard raised her palms, one to the floor and the other to the ceiling. Her eyes narrowed and flickered around the room before settling squarely on the floor.

"K'uk'ulkan, Tomas requires an update on tomorrow's ceremony."

He nodded and grabbed his staff, stiff and silent. She wondered if he felt as she did: thoroughly satisfied, but unable to speak.

Shuri couldn't sleep. There was no stress; only the feeling of her heart repeatedly slamming into her ribcage. It was suffocation, but of a good kind.

Juana was moved back into the water, this time permanently unless any health issues lingered. She moved her new arm around in circles, testing the joints of her fingers and poking at where organic flesh met vibranium.

"It feels so...natural," the Talokanil said, but she was looking at her mother. Iahui nodded stiffly, her hands clasped under Juana's good arm. They waded into the water, Shuri watching from afar.

"You wouldn't have needed it if that girl didn't almost kill you."

"Mother..." Juana craned a neck to meet Shuri's eyes. The Talokanil seemed almost apologetic but Shuri shook her head, pulling all her guilt forward to contort her face into one Juana could perceive as an apology.

"Thank you," Juana mouthed in return.

Then they were gone, and she was alone with the guards. They had changed shifts overnight, and she thanked Bast. Her mind needed to focus on the flower completely and couldn't afford anymore delays.

One of them stepped forward.

"K'uk'ulkan sends a summons."

Shuri looked up at the ceiling and dangling coils of light. "A summons or a request?"

The guard shrugged, as if there was no difference. She sighed, trying to quell the volley in her stomach. A small delay couldn't hurt.

It was her first time outside the lab in days. She was normally escorted straight from the end of the whirlpool and into the engineering dome but this time she waded closer to the palace behind the pair of guards. Namor was hovering near a side entrance, speaking in tones that exemplified benevolent authority with a group of Talokanil. They wore small headpieces, some none at all, but they differed than the usual appearances of civilians. The men wore formal cloaks in place of the regular topless state and the women's dresses looked not unlike her own Talokanil ones.

She shoved aside the stupid feeling in her stomach that had erupted since the guard mentioned his name with a surprising ease. He hadn't hovered around her in the week; a sudden request did not bode well.

He betrayed no feeling in his eyes, his mouth set in a half-smile as he greeted her formally as he did the others. The civilians swam away while Shuri treaded to a smooth stop.

"You swim with ease now." He remarked. In the lab, she preferred to place her feet on the floor as much as possible. Most of her equipment was welded to it, anyway, but still, two weeks of swimming up and down to the lab left her feeling like she could best an Olympic swimmer. "My cousin weds today."

She frowned, hoping he could see it through her helmet.

"Did something happen?"

"You asked me once to show you my culture. A wedding is not an infrequent event here, but the bride's father is a council member. It will be a large festivity."

Was he...inviting her to a family member's wedding?

As a date?

She coughed, and her oxygen tank sputtered. He squinted at her.

Talokanil didn't date. Not really. She turned the logical side of her brain up a notch and yelled at it for disappearing at the most inopportune times. "I need to get to work on the flower. I already lost a couple days with the explosion."

He didn't push. "As you wish."

Her forehead wrinkled. Maybe she hadn't egged him on in too long, or maybe he was treating her like another one of his subjects, but his offer was cordial. Kind, even.

"It might be nice to see one before I go." She relented. A strange emotion crossed his face but she continued unfazed, "But...the others don't like me very much. I don't know how appreciated crashing a wedding after causing your people trouble would be."

He grinned, baring his teeth. "Follow me."

She and her entourage followed him into the palace. This entrance, unlike the one Tozi took her through, led them into a narrow set of halls. The stretched in every direction and angle and she briefly felt she was at the middle of a latice structure. He zipped upwards through a hall — tunnel? — and then diagonally into another one that took them higher and to the right. Finally, they emerged into a room shaped like the inside of a pyramid, made entirely of red rock except one floor to ceiling window.

"I brought the sun to my people, and these rooms are the stars. They are all around the palace and allow us to overlook most parts of the city." Namor beckoned her to approach the window. She glanced down to see a criss-crossing set of paths winding into a district and set of domes she recognized as residential.

"Watch the areas of there," he gestured. "Talokan weddings are a series of many rituals. This is the first one. The procession and the bride's acceptance of a carved necklace is the first step in her acceptance as a wife."

She nodded. Wakandan weddings were similarly winded, boisterous affairs. "Who solemnizes it? A shaman?"

"Yes, and myself." He answered a few more of her questions as she watched a crowd begin to gather in district. When it grew to at least twenty Talokan, he took his leave.

Minutes after he was gone, one of her guards spoke. They never said anything except when they brought news or carried her requests so this made her jolt from her spot where she had pressed herself into the window.

"He favors you."

She made a face. "What gave you that idea?"

The two guards shifted, trading a knowing look, but said nothing more. She sighed.

"I'm the Princess of Talokan's protector. It does him well to treat me well, and I appreciate it."

A sort of doubt emerged from her words, but she refused to ruminate on it right now. The procession was starting.

Spirals of lace flowed from a cluster of Talokanil. When they moved closer to where she could identify faces from this angle, she realized they were emanating from the bride's back. The woman was beautiful, from the faint features Shuri could discern. She donned an enormous headpiece, from which cloth also flowed. Meters and meters of fabric trailed behind the bride as she and her entourage swam across a series of buildings and into narrow alleys between them. Crowds of the water people lined either side of her, leaving floating seaweed and other assortments of plants in her wake.

Eventually, the bride reached another cluster of Talokanil. Her dress by now flowed across the entire district. Near the edge of the cluster, Shuri spotted Namor, his distinctive golden brown skin and feathered crown easy to identify among the pallor of full-blooded Talokanil. His split red cape looked like the tongues of a serpent behind him.

Some minutes went by, and with the jostle of the crowd, the groom appeared. In one hand was a large spear, and in the other dangled a strings of glittering stone. One woman pulled the bride's headpiece off, revealing a bun twisted with intricate pearls, and the groom placed the necklace around her.

Then the dancing began. Namor didn't join, floating off to the side and away from the circular, graceful movements of his people swimming and spiraling upwards, then down into intricate concentric shapes. If there were gaps in the window, Shuri knew she would hear foreign chants and whooping and drums that only worked underwater. It reminded her of incense and drums at Okoye's wedding, her and W'Kabi chanting as they proceeded through the Golden City and then their parents wrapping them in blankets.

This went on for an hour. Content with what she had witnessed, she prepared to leave. It was a beautiful memory and was honored to have witnessed it.

Totl volunteered his blood and convinced two of his friends to have their fingers pricked too. With Juana and Namor's blood, that totaled five samples, enough for her to put together a rudimentary map of the blue flower's shape.

The core of Takolanil physiology was the same as humans. Most internal organ systems worked similarly, only that they were attuned to the use of water molecules as opposed to oxygen. Outward impacts of the flower were minimal in comparison. Interestingly, where humans needed water, they needed iodine, which explained their obsession with seaweed.

Namor's blood was unlike anything she had ever seen. His genes coded for a repetitive stream of telomeres, which she guessed slowed down his aging (she was no geneticist, but she'd watched some YouTube videos about it). Some of his genetic code mirrored the Talokanil exactly, and at others resembled neither water people nor human, even her blood with the herb's influence.

He was truly alone.

She wondered what that kind of isolation—being the sole composition of a species—did to someone. How many generations of Talokanil had he ruled over?

Namor met her in the catacombs again while she ate dinner. Without the constant chatter and flurry of activity over Juana, and lack of friendly guards, it was a welcome silence that he broke the surface of the water into.

"How does Namora age?" Was the first thing she said. He padded up and out of the lake, waiting for water to puddle around his feet before he joined her at her spot between the cabin and a series of misshapen rocks. "What's the average lifespan of Talokanil?"

"Is this a matter for scientists?"

"Yes," she gulped down her corn and kelp. She offered him some, but he waved it away citing an ample wedding feast.

"If it is in regards to the flower, I will oblige."

He turned to her like he had the moment he'd clasped his mother's bracelet around her wrist. Their knees, his bare and hers clothed, bumped.

"Namora is my aunt's daughter, born a decade after her mother took the flower. She and her siblings are the only ones to have lived as long as I have, though they have aged slowly while I stopped completely."

Shuri nodded slowly. If Namora were human, she'd pinpoint her age to be around forty. Namor looked to be in his early or mid thirties.

"And the others?"

"The typical age of passing onto the ancestors is one hundred, though some have lived to be well into their sixteenth or seventeenth decade." He looked at the lake, its edge a full pace away. "The shaman believes it to be my cousin's nearness to my blood that distills some of Chac's blessings from me to them."

She frowned. He noticed.

"You do not believe that to be an adequate explanation?"

She picked at her corn. "I analyzed your blood with my kimoyo beads. There's genes for aging, so it could've been something than ran in your family —"

"My mother did not give birth to a kind of coincidence," he grit out. "Does science explain the ancestors? As the Black Panther, you see them, do you not?"

Not recently, she hadn't. "I believe in it, and I've gone to the ancestral plane," she rebutted.

"And what did you see there?"

Her appetite disappeared as she crossed her arms. "Talokan and Wakanda are the same. We both have vibranium that sets us apart from the rest of the world and makes them the target of their ire. Maybe that makes us particularly susceptible to the ancestors, because both our people need protectors from the world. I don't know. But what's important is science helped me, and can help you restore the source of protection."

"Perhaps you are right. I did not yield for naught."

"Why did you yield?" Shuri knew she was provoking him now, but now that he had brought it up, nothing could stop the words from coming out of her mouth. In the weeks after the Battle, she'd often anticipated revenge: a fishman swimming into the flood that he'd turned the Capital City into. "You wanted to burn the world, you could have done so with Wakanda in it."

"There was a spear at my neck." Namor said. But she knew that he knew her understanding of him; he would die if it was necessary to protect Talokan. Unfortunately, she concluded keeping him alive was the only way to avoid eternal war.

Still. Maybe without Wakanda, Talokan would manage but would be too weakened. When he refused to elaborate, Shuri tried again.

"If you agreed to our protection of your secrets, then why are you considering exposing Talokan to the Americans?" The question visited her occasionally ever since he spoke of his deal with Wakanda. He straightened at this.

"If that is what is required to keep Wakanda's continued protection, and restore our flower, then it is a possibility. Wakanda chose their path in opening up the world for reasons that have yet to make sense but I will choose what is necessary for my people in the face of two ugly options."

Her temper flared. "Do you think the choice to open Wakanda was done on a whim with only you bearing the consequences? The African continent suffered for centuries because we isolated ourselves. My brother sought to fix our father's wrongs. And now, we suffer the patronizing condescension from people too insecure to confront the idea an African nation could be a super power whilst trying to make a grab for the very resources we exposed to help others."

Killmonger didn't appear. She pinched the bridge of her nose, willing her heart to calm.

Namor turned an unsettling gaze on her, words flowing out of his mouth in a bitter rush.

"Wakanda and Talokan are the same in vibranium, and I affirm we are more alike than surface-dwelling fools. The difference is that we were driven from our homes. Water was foreign to my mother and she died grieving for her land. Wakandans suffered no such displacement, regardless of the war that ravaged your ancestors." He stood up when a guard called for him, relaying an urgent message.

As he waded into the water, he parted with his last words.

"We carry no such noble misgivings of aiding others, Princess."

In her muddied mind of physical urges and fleeting glimpses of comfort, Shuri had forgotten that Namor could be cruel. She blinked at the ground he had sat on moments before, so deep in thought that she missed the first woosh! of air.

The hairs of her neck stood up in time, hands flying to her kimoyo beads in time for a second rush of air. Her eyes furtively scanned the catacombs. Her two guards were crumpled on the floor.

Shuri recognized the footsteps before she recognized the face. Nakia emerged from her old room, holding a weapon.

"Don't worry. This one is not lethal."