Six days until Western superpowers converged on her nation and Shuri moved like a woman blossoming in the soil of tentative hope.
Namor watched her sleep, protecting her from the spirits that roamed until her breathing deepened into one of heavy sleep, and then hours later observed her saunter into the ancestors' room, a silver and white tulip shell poking out of her hair, beads of jade strung across her shoulders and a small smile on her face. He strode to meet her before she could take her place at his side to lift a hand to her cheek.
Rebellion lingered in her eyes. His ears convulsed at the hitch of her breath and clenched jaw. A panther's first instinct was to pounce as a fearless and solitary animal. They also purred and curled up to sleep when content, so when the smallest of whines left Shuri's lips at him hovering over her, close but not quite falling into her just yet, he smiled the way his mother used to at him.
"Is this also your mother's?" She breathed, lifting a hand to her hair. "I was worried it'd break in the watersuit."
He caught her wrist midway, his eyes cascading over the shell. It was a small one—he was familiar with her people's culture of intricate hairdos using braids and pearls in contrast to Talokan's preference for the weight of large, towering feathers. Yet he preferred this: to see her face fully unshadowed by unnecessary luxuries, only bathed in the golden glow of the room in front of the gods.
"No. It was a shell of my own choosing." He had found it buried deep in the sand some odd years ago when watching a sunrise on the summer solstice. "Would you prefer it to be hers?"
"Not if it reminds you of sad times."
"On the contrary, Shuri," he used her name with purpose: her throat would bob and her pupils would expand to the size of her irises, "very little makes a god sad these days."
This was how it should have gone the first time—after she traded her life for that cursed scientist, before her mother tricked him and he was forced to break her heart.
The very hands grasping at him moments earlier shoved him away. She breathed heavily, noncommittally ensured the shell was still in place. Her blistered hand was tucked into her skirts. He wanted to check every expanse of her skin. How many wounds did she carry after he speared her? Did any of them compare to the pain he wrought on her?
A solitary finger stroked over her knuckles. Her hand unfurled like a blooming ych-kaan flower. Only faded bumps remained on her palms.
Her eyes squeezed shut and he saw the walls around her heart lift again.
"Can we make the prayers quick today? I have much to work on, as I'm sure you do."
He barked, rather than chanted, his hymns that morning.
"The machine exploded?" Darcy held up a bowl of mashed shrimp, an offering from Shuri's own breakfast. She sat criss-crossed on the grotto's floor, making faces at the food but dipping her hands in it anyway. "Neat."
"It melted, actually." Shuri lifted her hand to show her. "I reprogrammed the circuits but I can't find the right materials down here."
The two brainstormed as much as was possible in mere minutes. Darcy took the quill and parchment Shuri borrowed (read: stole) from Namor's office and drew rough outlines with squiggly lines masquerading as legible. Then Shuri offered her a Kimoyo bead, and Darcy wasted a solid minute rolling it over in her hands like a child on Coronation Day.
"Quickly," she directed the American's attention to a screen with a picture of her first attempt at a Vision-finder. An American keyboard flickered beneath it. "Also, if you have ideas for how to get a 3D printer to work under water, that would be great. But this is a higher priority right now."
Darcy clicked her tongue. "What's that in your hair?" She lifted a stray finger at her, eyes trained on the screen in a picturesque model of focus, but Shuri knew the woman well enough now to hear the eager curiosity in her voice.
"Oh, a gift." She responded absently, thinking about how pleasantly surprised she was at the look. She enjoyed her undercut, but missed the long braids she and Nakia often played with. Wearing the shell made her feel less belligerent and almost...ladylike, as much as she hated the term and everything associated with it. Hating tradition didn't mean not appreciating the more aesthetic sides of it. "The women here decorate their hair with shells."
Darcy hummed. "Did you know a seashell is—"
"—an animal exoskeleton."
The two made eye contact and laughed. Darcy resumed typing, a smirk growing on her face. "They're still romantic. Would you say you're one of them now, the 'people here'?"
She thought warmly of Atzi, Totl, Zuma, Juana, and all of the others.
"I'm a friend."
"No romantic prospects?"
She coughed. The woman pretending to be oblivious continued.
"Though, I don't know how their genetics work, so sex and procreating might be incompatible, but still, some of the guards were kinda hot. Once you're in academia it's hard to find cute single dudes but there was this one dorky agent—"
A guard interrupted them before Shuri could pull out her panther claws. They were dormant for too long.
Namor joined her for lunch. Shuri had intended for it to be a short affair, the one dependable routine as the days whittled down to her last week here: return from the lab, pull off her helmet, gulp down a couple helpings of corn and fish, and jump into the whirlpool after giving her stomach a few minutes to digest. Another healing session with a Kimoyo bead faded the blisters on her hand into barely noticeable and painless bumps so the morning was spent repurposing the melted metals. While her watersuit took less than half an hour to repair, separating the wires and vibranium from the lump of metal proved an arduous task and the dawdling further delayed her start of Vision-finder 2.0. Her fingers itched to return.
The water-king evidently did not have enough on his hands or his job was simply to wait while she ran around in circles. Yet, for as sacred as it was to him and the Talokanil, he seldom mentioned the flower at all. The idea he had his guards report to him the updates crossed her mind but they wouldn't have understood the mechanics of what exactly she was doing.
Nakia's words echoed in her mind again: that subtle seed doubt that once planted, lingering in her mind ever since. So a calm and gentle Namor that should have been welcome set her nerves on edge. Still, she shot him a playful look.
"Do you not have adoring subjects to serve?"
"Do you not count yourself among them?" He countered as he waved for the guards to leave ("I don't need them if I'm with you," she remembered. The words sounded more than an admission of practicality, in hindsight). He set down his staff and joined her, lounging atop a rock while she leaned against a stalagmite next to him.
She monitored him and his, ironically, presence on her body, despite the fire he set on her nerves and brain like he demanded every facet of her attention and nothing less.
"An adoring subject, no. A subject to serve, absolutely."
He patted her hair, his fingers catching in the springy coils. She swatted them away, confirmed that the shell was still in place, and resumed dutifully to eating her corn without spilling it everywhere. Where had her princess manners gone? Some weeks in a cave and suddenly she was slobbering everywhere.
It was just him, she decided. Her limbs didn't work right when he was around. They did as they pleased, digging her fingers into his back and touching him and letting his mouth —
She munched into a fresh strip of seaweed; there was only little variety by way of water snacks and her displeasure at seaweed was only outdone by her hatred of kelp.
"If not adoring, do explain the look that graces your face when I touch you."
Shuri spun to look at him, eyes narrowed and hand hovering in the air. "Excuse me—"
Namor placed a hand under the crook of her elbow and lifted her onto him, her frame engulfed by his build as his hands settled in the dips above her hips. Her back collided with his front, his damp beard resting on her head and a thumb swiping over her lips.
She stiffened.
His slow, even breathing eventually loosened her muscles, lulling her into folding her body against him. There was something about the curve of his arms, at once a muscular curvature ruthless in battle yet embodied the grace of a nimble, feathered serpent, that cradled her body as though it was fragile. She was far from fragile; her claws could rip any Jabari warrior in half or send an average Asgardian warrior scuttling back into space. But her strength was precisely to protect the still-healing crevice of her chest, regrowing the heart she'd buried months ago.
The lake shimmered with the scattered reflected lights of the catacombs. There was a moving stillness. Each sway of a wave matched the inhale and exhale of the man holding her. He shifted so she could wrap her arms around her legs, pulling them up onto his lap and moving her head to rest against his chest. The gold and jade necklaces tickled her cheeks. Darcy's stray comment about physical compatibility echoed in her head.
"Your hand?"
"Completely healed."
He reached for the shell in her hair. "If you wear this in your suit, it will break."
She toyed with one of the embellishments of his neckpiece, food entirely forgotten. "Then you can gift me another one."
His hand curled around her shoulder, fingers weaving through one of the holes in her tracksuit. The touch of his fingers on her bare skin sent a shudder through her.
"You asked for no more clothes but this is unbecoming of a Princess."
"It's uncomfortable wearing a dress in the watersuit and no one sees it anyway."
He lowered his nose into her hair. She had taken to washing it with a bowl of water steeped overnight with the fragrant vines and flowers of her room.
"I am someone."
She bit her tongue. "It's not the same."
"How so?"
Those two words penetrated her skull with the force of a maglev training carrying vibranium. It was the flare of a blowtorch again, or a climbing wave turning into a tidal wave, and as the wave reached its peak, she climbed off his lap, his lingering caresses trailing after her. Her mind had been entirely her own since Killmonger taunted her for her want for this mutant, so now she had no one to blame but herself.
"Will our Princess be ready?"
It was at times like this that W'Kabi's solemn presence was sorely missed. Okoye turned to look at the King Regent, the gorilla man and bald-head hater.
"That is not even a question, my King."
Next to her, Nakia huffed for the umpteenth time.
Despite their adamant, confident faces, the women had not rested for days. The members of the King's council turned their gazes to the city's skyline, praying to Bast for their Princess to be safe. She had to be ready. She restored the heart-shaped herb; not finding the synthezoid was out of the question.
Or this would be the first fire to set the globe ablaze.
Shuri spent the day in deep thought, her hands moving in practiced movements to fuse wires together and rebuild a circuit board. The vortex of her insides were an entirely different matter. She felt Namor with every movement: when her fingertips grazed a corner of the sequencing machine, in her breaths warmed by the stuffy helmet, and his gaze in her Kimoyo beads.
How, she muttered to herself, how is he different from others? Not as a physical being, but to her. What did he offer that no one else in Wakanda could?
A lot, actually, her heart seemed to think.
She spent the first few hours that afternoon pointlessly fiddling after completing a circuit board. Another engineer sent word that Totl was sick, and remembering his frequent coughs from the day before and the spreading illness, she decided that half a day of delay wouldn't hurt. She sent one guard with equipment needed to draw his blood—Totl was familiar with the procedure now—and three hours later, was developing a rudimentary form of a vaccine that could slow down the spread of the illness.
For Talokan, she told herself.
Before dinner, Atzi entered after having shoved off half a dozen engineers indignant at her intrusion. She waved jovially to some of the men who finally relented at her dazzling smile and allowed her entry. The dutiful guards groaned and hovered outside the entrance as Atzi tumbled inside. Happy to be distracted, she threw her arms around the girl, spinning upwards in excited circles until they drifted against the sloped ceiling.
"Ma'ach in túukulkech, I miss you! How fares our favorite land-dweller?"
She pulled away, wrinkling her nose. "Land-dweller sounds like a pejorative. How are you? How's Juana?"
Atzi shifted her headpiece and threw out her arms to still her spinning. "I met her yesterday. Her condition is improving, and she was even showing off her improved aim. Captain Tozi estimates she can return to work in a couple weeks."
"I'm glad."
"You should come see her."
She hesitated. Even if Juana seemed to be at peace, ruffling her family's feathers (literally and figuratively) as though the past was a merely small mistake would be presumptuous. She told Atzi her concerns but the Talokanil shook her head.
"They don't hate you. You saved her life."
"After putting her at risk in the first place."
The prospect of a fellow passionate and woman engineer joining her had made her lose sight of the consequences of technology. Shuri knew it was was not completely her fault, for many accidents were simply that, but the utter ease with which it could have been avoided...prevented Juana from teetering on he brink of death, was a guilt she would live with for a long time.
"People make their own choices. She knew enough about science and unknown tinkering that part of her anticipated the consequences. Do you not feel the same when you work?" Atzi gestured to Shuri's hand. "I signed up for the guard way before we...our people battled, and even as an isolated kingdom we face so many threats, natural and man-made. If death were to greet me during my duties, I would greet it back knowing I chose it."
A lone tear pooled in the corner of her eye. She wasn't thinking any longer about Juana, but the entire string of names she repeated every night and woke up with it branded on her tongue.
"When did you become so wise, Atzi?"
The Talokanil grabbed her leg and swung her downwards. Mindful of her strength, Shuri kicked back playfully, taking care to avoid the delicate instruments below. "And how'd you know about my hand?"
"So, about that..." A mischievous gleam rose to Atzi's eyes. She clasped her hands together, a blush sweeping over her cheeks. Shuri swallowed, her gut sinking in anticipation. "There has been some, how can I say, interesting rumors reaching my ears in these last few days."
She returned to the floor, bouncing towards a row of tiny vials that contained test rounds of the vaccine. "Hyperactive rumor mills are another one of many cultural universals, and everything reaches your ears."
"Hmm." She felt Atzi drift behind her, peering over her shoulder curiously. "I heard K'uk'ulkan spends his mornings with you."
"We meditate together."
Praying with others wasn't an activity she grew up with; communal praises to Bast and holy festivals aside, Shuri preferred to square herself away in the humdrum of laboratory work or catching an extra hour of sleep instead of waking for prayers. Joining the water-king, on the other hand, was initially out of curiosity. In those precious moments, he was alone and in deep thought; more amiable to her requests, willing to answer questions, and chanting with an undercurrent of gentleness in his expression before it hardened when speaking of the day's work ahead.
As far as she knew, only she had been granted the honor of joining him, so Atzi's curiosity was not unwarranted. The Talokanil giggled. "You speak to the ancestors?"
She had an answer prepared for that too. "My time here has shown me I need more of a spiritual balance."
"Mhm. I suppose him dismissing Tayanna and Eztli during mealtimes is part of that?"
She lifted a vial with a fluid motion and added buffer to stabilize its pH levels. "We need to discuss sensitive political matters."
"Maria told Tayanna who told me that she escorted you to watch Tomas' wedding on K'uk'ulkan's orders."
"Cultural exchange is beneficial to an alliance."
"Paula said he left your chambers late into the evening twice. One time she walked in and it seemed like you were arguing—"
She spun around. "We didn't argue that night!"
Atzi's jaw dropped as she wheezed, the action acting as thrust and sending her propelling a pace backwards. A giddy laugh echoed in the lab.
"So he was there! It is true!"
"It's his room, technically."
"Correct, but—" Atzi's mousy face scrunched up and phased through a plethora of emotions before landing on unadulterated horror. "Does that imply—are you saying—he observed—" Her words dissolved into choking squeaks as Shuri slammed a fist into the counter.
"Yes, but we didn't do anything."
The choking noises came to an abrupt stop. Distant coughs from her guards echoed from the outside. There was no possibility of a pin dropping in an underwater city to indicate the sort of silence that followed not just through her lab, but the entire dome, but she did drop a vial. It floated up and spun in front of her face almost mockingly while Atzi sucked in a sharp breath. The changing current of water pulled the vial, and Shuri's face along with it, who stretched out a numb hand to curl gloved fingers around it.
Atzi dropped her voice to a whisper. "Are you planning to stay here?"
She stuffed the vial back into the makeshift rack, heart stuck in her throat. "I'm sorry, Atzi, but I'm really busy," she shoved the rack at her without meeting her eyes.
The Talokanil flinched. "But—"
"Take this to Tozi. Tell her it's a substance that can slow down the illness but test it on a volunteer first. If there's no reaction in the next six hours, it should's safe for everyone who hasn't gotten ill yet to take."
"I would love to but right now we're busy finalizing our formation—"
She gently escorted her out of the room and waited for the guards to rejoin her before slamming the door shut. She curled up on her knees and let the water spiral for her. She allowed herself ten minutes to breathe, the air of the oxygen tank smelling muskier than ever, before returning to the Vision-finder.
"Five days," she imagined Nakia whisper.
The next morning, Shuri did not greet him in the ancestor's room, sending a guard to notify him and request to join her when he finished his morning prayers. He had robbed her of sleep entirely, occupied her every toss and turn in a way he had no right to. He had moved from her dreams to reality, and that shift made all of this—whatever this was, what she let go out of control—a dark reality she'd cocooned a bubble of warmth in.
Atzi's innocent words had punctured it. Shuri, as the Princess of Wakanda, was not here to stay. The idea was preposterous.
The talokanil unwittingly reminded her that she was here for a very specific purpose she intended to see to fruition by all means necessary. Thus, she sat in his chair in the office this morning, wearing a tracksuit and shell tucked into one pocket. From this angle, she couldn't see the mural of her forcing Namor's hand to yield or the painting directly behind her illustrating his blessed birth. The familiar sound of someone breaking through water and even footsteps emerged into the bane of her existence, the emblem of her wants. He almost stalked by the office completely and straight into his room, stopping only when he spotted her.
"Shuri." He greeted, taking her in. "You did not join me today. Did you sleep well?"
Look at him, acting like they were participants in the same routine, asking after her like a—
"Thank you for asking. I was busied with worry about my people."
He nodded approvingly. "The head of my guards informed me you provided an invention to aid our people."
"It doesn't kill, I assure you." She lifted her eyes to meet his, but the joke fell flat. The confusion on his face almost made her relent.
"I offer my people's gratitude."
She clenched and unclenched her jaw. "While I'm happy to help, these detours detract from the sole reason I am here. Why don't you ask about the flower?"
He strode forward, setting his staff against the table. "Am I to waste my time with such trivialities?"
"Every day of delay is a delay in perfecting your sacred flower," she grit out. "Am I to believe you're not as concerned with the outcome as an agreement like this requires?" Circles, her brain was reminding her, you always go in circles with this man. Hot and cold. Land and water.
Even in the dim lights, she spotted the moment when her words took effect and the amber of his eyes morphed into inky pools.
"What are you implying, Princess?"
Back to Princess, now? She rubbed her eyes. There was no anger in her words, only the numbness of one exhausted from mental exertion.
"I want to know if you're lying to me."
"I do not lie to my allies," he said coldly, appalled at the accusation. "Does Wakanda do me the same honor? Do you, when you begged me to trust you not two days ago?"
The papers and bead that she carried everywhere weighed down her pocket. "I don't beg. And I have not lied to you." Her need for the American scientist's help in both projects was not a lie, and the idea of outright lying to him in a dishonorable, underhanded tactic made her sick to her core.
She was not her brother, but her sympathy could not extend that far.
His lips curled. "When you first called me to you, you omitted that Wakanda was also under attack."
"Omitting is not the same thing as lying."
He waited for her to continue, tilting his head imperceptibly in acceptance of her reasoning. She took a shaky breath, Nakia's warnings now ringing in her head.
"I have...omitted other things to you. Recent developments. Can you believe me when I say it's for Wakanda?"
He leaned over the table, eyes glittering dangerously. She mirrored his movement, unwilling to fall to his commanding presence and attempts to daunt her. "Do those omittances compromise my people?"
She shut her eyes and shook her head.
"Answer me with words, woman."
"No. It's for their safety as well." Her eyes flew open to his face hovering inches away from her. "You didn't answer my question about the flower."
"Do not tell me it is difficult for you to believe that I trust your skills enough to be assured you will complete the task ahead of you. You know more than others what failure entails."
She clenched her jaw. "But you're omitting something, as I am?"
He smiled a predatory smile, brutish and dark. "As you are."
Fair. "Alright. I will trust you." The words had their intended effect; he exhaled audibly. "Then you will return me to Wakanda, and this will be over."
I'm not staying here. You and I are nothing except allies by necessity.
A lie.
"I see."
He advanced forward, his lips reaching her ears, and her heart continuing its thumping that hadn't seized since Atzi said those cursed words. He left a feather-light press on the skin below her black earring before pulling himself back, his body a coiled serpent poised to attack. "However, remember that I omit far less to myself than you do, Princess."
He uncurled his fingers under her jaw, and beyond any sense of control, a small whine left her parted lips.
He dived.
The first time, he kissed her after those beautiful syllables of his name fell from her lips in a string of pearls. The second, she'd demanded of him of it like he was a servant at her beck and call and kisses were an offer he had always available. This time, they met in the middle, as she sat on his seat, in his place as she should.
He parted her lips immediately, familiar enough with its shape but not familiar enough. Her nimble fingers moved to rest against his chest, his neck plate, then threaded through his beard, his jade earrings, his pointy ears.
He panted and shifted when she bit his lip, the table an enemy hindering him from fully engulfing her. It was a spit at the sacred, to do this here in front of the histories of his people, but he could imagine nothing more sacred than pulling her out of that damned suit and —
The very hands grasping at him stilled.
"What do you mean?" she whispered, but he was gone.
Midday found Shuri thoroughly ensconced in her lab, hacking at metals and reorienting Vision's brain scab for a third time so she could make something at least presentable for Darcy to evaluate. The woman's haphazard scribbles proved useful; her knowledge of basic witch magic helped her adjust the frequency to one that would recognize its lingering effects on White Vision. Part of the problem was that he was multi-faceted, composed of an amalgamation of vibranium, other metals, residues of the Mind Stone, and Chaos magic. One could not simply track him like a Wakandan princess did a slice of lamb.
Lamb. Bast, when this was all over, would she ban seafood for the rest of her life.
Her makeshift underwater welding tool melded two vibranium metals together. A stray spark jolted her right arm and sent her elbow into her hip. A small crunch dragged her from her calculations. She pressed her hands over her watersuit, realizing the shell was still in her pocket. Her fingers felt a jagged edge rather than smooth curves through her watersuit and she left the welding tool floating as she took a break to mourn the damaged gift.
Then it came to her, all at once—epiphanies that should have be earned after a life-changing, ocean-parting event, at the brink of war or threat of imminent death. But the tidal wave inside that crested yesterday began to drop, its edge curling over itself as it began to fall over her like this: in the unwieldy glow of a vibranium sun, thousands of feet underground in a hidden city after breaking a delicate shell offered to her in an omission.
First, that he watched her sleep, adorned her in the gifts of his people, and yielded to her over and over and over again.
Second, that she accepted those gifts, sought his arms, and let him hold her over and over and over again.
She staggered backwards, vision dotting with red. Dark eyes and pink lips and comfort and praying to the ancestors together in matching clothes and comfort—blasted comfort—and warmth and she'd forgotten everything, why she was here, too busy with the how of it all.
Third. You fell for the man who killed auntie. Gotta say, cuz, thought the world was cruel to me.