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Her hard-won alliance shudders in its second year.
His movements are limited without her. She is safe: without her strength and Wakanda’s backing, Talokan has less chance of succeeding in a global war so he cannot act outright. Instead, he will push until the pieces are in place, then act.
Namor pushes, hard.
It starts with news of sinking ships in the Gulf of Mexico. Coastlines begin to flood. A smattering of villages in central Mexico are found burnt to the ground. The world attributes it to the merely inevitable incremental climate changes while some internet-savvy conspiracy theorists dredge up old tales about the Bermuda triangle and aliens (in a post-Thanos world, this was in all honesty a possibility). The Earth continues to spin without sparing too much thought into these unconnected, varied incidents.
Then they become more frequent. Ten percent of all oil tankers don’t make it across the Atlantic in one piece. The Aral sea, the world’s arguably worst ecological disaster, erupts with water again. The Nile river rises and decades-old trash is regurgitated to land.
Wakanda knows the how. Shuri, dare she say it, knows the why too. They have no proof. Even if their War Dogs return with the necessary evidence, divulging it to the world breaks their promise of protection and gives Namor the requisite pretext to continue his war.
No, this is an issue Wakanda must resolve alone. Shuri and M’Baku argue heatedly for a month followed by two weeks of frigid silence.
M’Baku wants to negotiate with him. She knows Namor is committed to a fault.
He will not be stopped. He has to die, and only she can kill him.
-
They need to find his weaknesses, and to do that they must make him lose control. Gone are the days when battle was a matter of technological ingenuity. Her sonic beams failed to defeat N’Jadaka and her oxygen air fryer, although it weakened Namor, only did so much.
He is engaging in a prolonged battle to stretch her limbs until they snap. He has had hundreds of years to prepare. It is now a war of mental fortitude.
She scowls to herself. A shaman probably gave him a premonition of some sort.
She goes to Riri. Though Okoye and Nakia are her older sisters and Aneka is the energetic best friend and Ayo the taciturn, loyal guard, she thinks Riri, the girl who started this all with her charming naiveté, should be the one to brainstorm with her.
Riri is a species of her own. She is blunt and uncouth. Efficient. They figure there are two ways to rattle him.
The obvious one is to go fully turncoat. In offering him the help he desperately wanted, she could witness his plans firsthand and traitorously undermine them. But, not only would Namor sooner believe his cousin liked to prance across the surface world in her free time, Shuri doesn’t want to come close to the possibility of hastening his war, nor does she trust herself to reign her claws in. She had come so tantalizingly close to vengeance. She knows she is capable of turning her anger into fuel for fire.
The other option is…yes. That’s her first mistake.
-
Shuri leaves her Kimoyo beads in the passenger seat of a rental car tucked behind a grove of trees. She dresses simply and the only pieces of jewelry on her are the panther necklace and his mother’s bracelet.
“You have to stop.”
She picked this location to remind him who yielded to who. She told Nakia she was on a day trip to follow a lead on a new mission M’Baku assigned her. The former spy probably found a discrepancy in the lie, either in her fresh cornrows and touched-up foundation—Fenty 440—in some convoluted detective show-like analysis.
Drawn out of the water by the call of the conch shell, Namor greets her with an empty smile. The beach is warm. They remain too close to the water for him to dry out.
“Stop what, Princess?”
“The attacks.”
“If you wished to discuss this you would have convened your council.”
She doesn’t attend any council meeting he does.
“Yes,” she admits. She is here to find a way to kill him without eternal war. “I don’t know how Talokanil do it but I don’t care for traditions. I have a proposal for you.”
Bewildered is an expression she has seen on him before. Does he expect her to sink to one knee? Bah, colonizer traditions.
“I am proposing to you," she amends.
The setting sun casts deep yellows and oranges over his ochre skin. She has appraised him before, first as a sovereign kidnapping a scientist, second in pursuing him as a dragonfly does a morsel of meat, and lastly in blown-up images in her lab to find a way to defeat him.
Her eyes rake over him now and account for the things that make him beautiful. One of his wings is more knotty than the other. Her throat constricts in pain.
“The Princess desires me.” His eyes glitter.
“I am not a Princess anymore.”
He rubs the back of his neck. “Allow me to process the not very subtle demand that I take a wife. Your council has needled me about the matter twice.”
Did they now? Good, it lends her credence.
“Who better than the Black Panther?”
“A Black Panther who is not queen.”
She almost crosses her arms before deciding better of it. Nakia has taught her many of her negotiation techniques over the month; crossing arms was a sign of discomfort and an attempt to put up a barrier from another. She would have to get close, so close to a point she estimates no one else has gone, to stop him.
“I spared you. I don’t want war.”
His face turns dangerous and his voice is deceptively soft. “The brute of a false king is better suited to diplomacy than you. ‘Wed me or we betray you’ is a threat I will not take lightly.”
She scoffs. “Your version of diplomacy is finding a young scientist and concluding she needed to die.”
“Yet you both remained safe in my care and an assassin left my child to die.”
Yes. The terrible part was Shuri, with all the copious love her mother raised her with, still has the space to feel sorry. She momentarily forgets her nefarious plans to marinate in the weight of wrongful deaths.
“I tried to save her. I’m sorry.” She sends him a sharp look. “I tried. I’m still trying, so I swear by your ego—”
The waves crash behind him. “Ego?”
“—for there’s nothing larger than it—that Wakanda is honorable and has never intended to break our promise. The purest show of that is to tie myself to you—” you to me, “—because these attacks have made us feel as though you may betray us.”
The rehearsed words take him aback. “Choose your words wisely. I have no reason to care what the surface world thinks when I defend Talokan. And yes, every single one of those attacks was warranted. Oil spills sicken my people. Dams violently redirecting water destroyed one of my cities. The villages were dealing in human trafficking and captured a Talokanil child roaming for play.”
Oh. He thinks her concern is what the world will think of Wakanda, which is partially true. She was rather mostly motivated by the base concern of innocents dying for crimes they didn't commit.
She doesn’t falter. “I can offer you other ways to deal with those problems. Technology to clean the water, barriers like ours that can better hide Talokan from the world. Wakanda’s outreach efforts can expand to policy advocacy. And,” her fingers clench at this, “my power. I conduct missions for the good of Wakanda.”
And Talokan too is the unspoken overture.
He considers her. “What then after you die?”
“Wakanda’s marital vows extend to the ancestral plane. I can haunt you from there if you would like.”
“The spirit of a disbeliever grants me little comfort.”
“Strange that anything can comfort you at all.”
When he smiles, his teeth are so white they seem blue. “When you are my wife, you will learn that a great many things can.”
She feels hysterical.
-
“M’Baku.”
“When for Hanuman’s sake will you use my title?”
Shuri is sitting on his throne in his home. Her legs dangle over one armrest. This throne room goes unused now that there is a new Jabari chief who built a council room deeper in the mountain. This room juts out of a jagged cliff and is unsurprisingly very cold. All she sees in every direction is the looming dreary landscape of Jabariland.
“Did you become king for title?”
He pounds his knobkerrie into the ground. “Did you not once beg me in this room to challenge your cousin and take his throne?”
She hums to herself. That was her mother, technically. M’Baku doesn’t care for technicalities.
“I’m here to tell you that you will not be sent to an early grave. Namor will cooperate.”
M'Baku is not nearly as surprised as he should be. “Glory to Hanuman. The Black Panther heeded my advice.”
“Whatever problems he runs to, our warriors will be at his disposal to resolve it so he doesn’t murder unnecessarily.”
He settles onto the closest chair and swipes his knobkerrie at her feet. He misses. “Unnecessary is an interesting word, one that your brother would not have chosen.”
“My brother killed people too.” Aliens, technically, but again. M’Baku.
“Tell me what you did so I can tell the council and make it look like it was my idea and that I am King. Which I am. Put your feet on the floor.”
“This keeps the floor clean. Bast, who designed this room? Are you running out of reasons to wear fur?”
He places a hand to still her swinging ankles. “If you have time to worry about traditional architecture I will assign you another mission. Speak.”
“Namor and I will wed next week. It promises the benefit of our ability to closely monitor him in return for aid I wish to give others anyway.”
M’Baku’s expression sours. His grip on her legs becomes a gentle touch. She swings her feet to the floor, knowing she owes no loyalty to Namor just yet but disliking the comforts of male flesh all the same, even from one who fulfills the role of her brother.
“The fishman agreed to be babysat?”
Her lips curl into a small smile. “He is like a child, if you think about it.”
“I don’t think about him if I can avoid it.” M’Baku stands. “What happened to you? Are you not satisfied with your work?”
She looks up at him curiously. From this angle, his enormous chest plate covers half his chin. “Protecting is part of my work.”
“You should have been a young woman enjoying the fruits of her discoveries and sharing a wealth of knowledge with the world.” He looks apologetic. “I have failed.”
“Not from you, M’Baku. You said it yourself that I am not a child. So I will take responsibility for the choices I have made, and the consequences of choices my loved ones made. It is only right.” She stands up and her mask solidifies over her face and neck. “You can tell the council. The Angels and the Dora will hear it from me.”
-
What happened is quite easy to list as a set of principles:
To defeat him, she must know his weaknesses.
To know his weaknesses, she must know him.
No one knows a man better than his wife.
Conclusion: she marries him on the third anniversary of T’Challa’s death. It gives her an excuse to wear the color of mourning.
-
Aneka doesn’t understand and ceases speaking to her. Okoye turns into a watchful hawk as though it is legal for her to go and marry another delusional monarch in his mid-five hundreds.
-
Namor, strangely, doesn’t demand she live with him. He is curt with her people and keeps his diplomatic visits short.
From the outside, there is nothing of complaint if one were to ignore the issue of how exactly the couple was brought together. He is an absentee husband boasting treasurers far and wide. What more did a former Princess want?
She’s not a Princess. She’s a protector who will do what no one else can.
She worries Nakia was right: Shuri, your emotions are more openly telegraphed than your punches. He will know whatever it is that you’re up to before you do.
Her last statement was falsifiable. Disproving it is as easy as one example: namely, she proposed to him and it was the last thing he expected. Unlike Namora, who watches her with a sister’s presumptuous scorn. Something like, I knew you were after our K’uk’ulkan. I heard your plea for him to keep you instead. Ha!
Nothing is further from the truth. His every movement makes her stomach curdle. She holds back a vomit at their first council as a couple as she is required to attend them now.
Princess Shuri, daughter of Ramonda, last member of the Golden Tribe, the Black Panther blessed by Bast, wife and queen consort of K’uk’ulkan, the Feathered Serpent God… M’Baku likes uttering it in full. After he adjourns today's council, during which Shuri agrees to build a water suit to monitor Talokan’s barriers and determine why abandoned coal deposits still make it into the city, she waits for her—husband?—to corner her.
He doesn’t.
He gives her a formal nod, kisses her on the cheek, and strides away, a billowing cloak in his wake. His sandals echo on the repolished floors—Shuri’s condition to rejoin council was contingent on meeting in a new throne room. If she were to see him stand where her drowned mother laid, she was guaranteed to send him to his ancestors without thought for eternal war.
Her right cheek burns for the rest of the evening.
-
Three months into their sham of a marriage, Shuri sends her husband a message through her his preferred means. M’Baku has a conch shell to request meetings with him and she was given many as part of the bride price along with copious amounts of jade and an assortment of Maya textiles.
“I wish to see you,” she tries. Hopefully it's vague enough that he comes out of curiosity alone.
When he doesn’t fly out of the river, she places a pathetic version of a vibranium sensor in the ocean.
He’s lounging on Okoye’s Baobab hand-carved stool when she returns from a visit to the market. She doesn’t bother asking him how he knew where she was staying for the week.
He stares at her, sensor in hand. “This mess masquerading as technology is more primitive than conquistador guns.” It is the perfect thing to say to a wife one hasn't seen in weeks nor spoken with privately since before their marriage.
She ignores him and opens Okoye’s fridge. The walk left her parched.
He ignores her ignoring him. “I only came to remind you to keep your technological feats from poisoning the ocean.”
“All this way? One would think you actually wanted to see your wife.” Her tone is biting.
Sensor abandoned, he stands up, wiping his damp hands on his soft shawl, and places a finger under her chin to lift her face. The fridge door swings into her back. Unwilling to damage more furniture than necessary in Okoye’s house, she lets it push her into him.
She stares into his eyes and counts the specks of black in them. She loses count at seventeen.
“Are you finished?” he asks tenderly.
Nothing about him should be tender. She reminds herself in a mantra: all that lurks beneath beautiful skin is evil. A gravitas he thinks is just but is an excuse for madness.
She presses a thumb into his cheek. She imagines a hole cleanly pierced through it, the back of his mouth, all the way into his cerebellum and out the base of his neck. “You look tired. Tell me what comforts you.”
“So you can do the opposite,” he deadpans.
She leans forward and he finishes the kiss. Her mouth is unfamiliar with kissing bearded men, least of all a fully-grown one. The hairs bristle against her bottom lip.
It takes a shifting of angle for his mouth to fully slot over hers. Embers are permanently sealed between her ribs and they glow hot.
Her hands go to his necklaces and yank. He grunts in approval, the flat of his tongue leaving a wet band over her lips. She parts her mouth and suddenly his hands are over her shoulders and behind her neck and in her hair. Her hands scrabble over his absurdly thick forearms. He tastes nothing like betrayal and blood. He tastes of a rich tapestry of chocolates tossed in sea salt.
She makes a rounded sound, not quite a squeal, in a plume of pleasure. That very sound summons Okoye, master of efficiency and timing, early from her errands. They part; Shuri’s hands slide down his arms and they watch the warrior set down her bags, toss the sensor into a laundry bin, and finally enter the kitchen.
Namor says nothing. Okoye nudges the fridge door closed, her eyes carefully averted from the pair.
The warrior extends a polite offer for dinner. He thanks her equally insincerely and leaves the way he came, that is through the balcony, and Shuri cooks dinner while Okoye looks upon her in apathy.
“I can help you find your own house,” says Okoye.
“No, thank you, actually.” She recognizes the distinct scent of marine plants and a shark tooth sitting next to a potted zebra plant. “I prefer the zoo of yours.”
-
She calls him a month later. This time there is no spite behind it. He comes, summoned by conch shell. He is an unwanted pest in her lab.
A curious and intelligent one. Still a pest.
His ears twitch at the techno music as his eyes take in the variety of equipment around her. He asks incisive questions that she begrudgingly admits are smarter than council elders and make her almost want to show him her vibranium stabilizers. Griot’s announcement of the time reminds her that they are both busy people and she is not some foolish assistant currying favor.
It took three days to fix the damage from his flood to her lab, she recalls. He notices her hardening demeanor.
“You wished to see me?” He prompts.
Shuri waves her hand. “My water suit is complete. I will take it for a test run but I am merciful and don’t wish to leave you a widow at—a young age. So accompany me in the river.”
“Any one of my advisors can help you with that.”
“They have good reason to abandon me.”
“No.” He shakes his head and slinks closer. At some point, her lab was emptied of everyone. She wills for an intern to return, having forgotten their beads or some other item. “No harm will come to Shuri of Wakanda in my dominion.”
There is a low edge to his statement.
She shrugs and moves for the suit, unclipping it from the stand. “Alright. If you’re busy, send whoever you wish.”
She backs into his chest. Something wet touches her ear. It’s his tongue, swiping into all the curves and curling below her earlobe and into the dip of her neck. She stiffens.
He hums. She feels the vibration start in his chest before the sound vocalizes. “You wished to see me.”
“What?” is her very intelligent response.
It’s followed by a high-pitched squeak when a large hand grasps the mesh fabric at her chest. His hand is too big to swallow one breast alone. The tips of his fingers reach past her cleavage.
Her gigantic brain searches fruitlessly for a pattern. It sputters when he applies pressure and she realizes that she, half-delirious, makes a noise that suspiciously resembles a moan.
Delirium? Delirium. Fervor.
He thinks she called him to—
She lifts her foot and slams it into his ankle. He hisses and rewards her with a bite in her neck. She’ll heal it later after she ensures she’s built a contraption that will allow her to sink to Talokan’s depths of her own volition.
He's left abandoned in her lab.
-
Riri’s advice is deceitfully simple: “Fuck him until he loses it.”
-
One of Wakanda’s outreach centers is raided. They were blindsided: the War Dogs reported tension in Oakland, but the evidence was purposefully placed in a ploy to keep others relatively unguarded. While she and most of the Dora honed in on California, two Wakandan scientists in Cambodia were kidnapped and a four-centimeter block of vibranium is unaccounted for.
Without warning, Namor is part of the entourage greeting their return. The doctors check her and the Dora for injuries. Ayo debriefs M’Baku amidst the elders muttering loud curses.
Shuri hobbles off the ramp of the Royal Talon Flyer. Namor grasps her wrist and yanks her out of the bustling crowd.
His pupils are blown. “Where did they take the vibranium?
“Confidential information. I can’t tell you that.”
Her upper lip is split. He places a thumb on it to stop the blood from spilling. “In our vows you promised your protection. I don’t see the Black Panther where she needs to be. If you do not go, and you refuse to tell me, then I will understand it as a betrayal of our agreement.”
She latches onto his finger, sucking the digit deeper into her mouth. The heat distracts her from the stinging. His eyes narrow such that his irises swallow the whites. He looks beastly, crazed, and thoroughly in control.
Before anyone can find them and mistake the scene for what it might become, she pulls off her Kimoyo beads and tosses them to him. His skin leaves a salty cacao taste in her mouth.
“I’ll send you a new set later.”
“Will you call me?”
Her foot stops midair. She sets it down slowly. “Use your half a millenium’s worth of intellect to figure out how to use them.”
-
Another raid kills two scientists and an intern. The intern was nineteen.
She’s lying on the floor of the cold building, the impact of the blast having dislodged a shard under her years-old stab wound. Griot transmits Okoye and Aneka’s furious shouts. Another explosion rattles the ground and she knows they are too close to losing.
Her fingers tap out a seldom used contact pattern. She sends coordinates with a message.
No killing.
The crushing cries of a boy hopeful for a mechanical engineering fellowship clatter in her ears.
Except the one in green. He killed a child.
Within an hour, the Americans are bound by ropes on the floor of their aircraft. A Kimoyo bead stabilizes her reopened stab wound. Namor tightens his grip around the second-in-command of the paramilitary group that has spent the past year posing as university professors seeking collaboration with Wakanda.
Their underhanded tactics makes her doubly enraged.
“Why didn’t you kill him?” she hisses. Aneka’s grip on her leg tightens.
“He transgressed your nation.” Namor evaluates her curiously. “His life is yours to take.”
Aneka speaks carefully. “Black Panther, the Dora will take care of him.”
She is not sure what ‘take care’ here means. And she finds herself unable to care.
Her husband waits, no blood on him or his spear. Behind him tower Attuma and Namora. They are efficient and clean.
She gives him a single nod. The head of the child-killer rolls in the time she turns her gaze back to the ceiling.
-
M’Baku bans her from the next mission for having called the fishman. “Yes, you may have been almost dying, but let’s not give them a reason to destroy São Paulo because civilians spotted your feathered husband.”
She tries not to laugh. The King’s logic is sound, however, and she pours her efforts into gaining approval for last resort calls upon Talokan. The elders are eager for the change as it is finally something tangible out of this arrangement to help Wakanda. They will fall to their knees seeking her thanks only in the end, she thinks bitterly.
Like her marriage, the arrangement quickly becomes longer than anticipated. Despite detailed instructions to call Talokan only if all else fails, she calls him for any mission that is close to the sea.
He is fast to heed.
In Johannesberg, he eliminates the militia before dawn breaks and they can even infiltrate the center. Colombo wakes to soldiers drowned at sea, all of whom had previously escaped civilian murder charges. Shuri intervenes and steals Namor’s spear every time because he’s less liable to kill on first impact with hands alone. Wakanda expands their prison for the first time in two decades to make space for all the arraigned prisoners.
He convinces her to look the other way when he lays down a god’s final judgment. That vermin killed Afghans for sport. This woman solicited minors for labor trafficking. She teaches him how to use Griot effectively and it’s too late to revoke his access to the Wakanda’s intelligence network—another fact she hides from M’Baku.
Part of her hopes that if she cannot stop him from burning the world, maybe he can expand his bubble of protection. It’s an outlet that serves her bloodlust too.
But the world is not black and white and she knows this well on their seventh mission. He does not.
Her choice of action: “We will send her team back to America.”
His objection: “They will die. They were intent to find vibranium laying around. They left your outreach workers for dead.”
“We stopped them, didn’t we? No one died. And they’re young soldiers.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “There’s no point in discussing this with you. Aneka, take us to Wakanda.”
Namor’s stare suggests he is about to abandon all Talokan weaponry in favor of a blowtorch to avenge the back she set on fire. “No. We will discuss this now as allies.”
The headache intensifies. “It can wait.”
“As husband and wife, then.”
Her misfortune of a husband balances on the damaged roof. She leaps onto a construction beam for privacy from the others. For a husband who was absent for most of the year, he invokes their union more than she ever has.
He sneers when her mask fizzles away. “I do not need your permission to put down dogs. Releasing them jeopardizes Talokan and it risks Wakanda.”
“While they had plans to infiltrate, they surrendered. They did nothing that warrants execution—”
A serpent’s hiss. “They could have.”
“And I could have killed you, and you could have killed the scientist.”
It is hard to read him in the dead of the night. “Such childish ways will not protect your people.”
Violent cramps shoot up her arms. “Oh, yes. Let us all be hanged for the crimes we could have done. Mercy, I guess is only for the monster who actually did,” she finishes in a tone that is below a shriek.
His face is unreadable. “We are both monsters waiting for the right moment to reveal who we are.”
The mask returns and with it a sharp sting. Pressure builds in her sinus. “Do you know what tomorrow is? Ask Griot to pull up the mortal surface world calendar. Tomorrow marks three years since the day I found out you are a monster. Burn incense and criminal towns and whatever else that it is you do to celebrate. I don’t care.”
-
A bundle of matches rest on her bedside table the next morning. She places padlocks on her balcony doors and flushes the matches down the toilet.
Unfortunately for her, Wakanda’s pipes are fitted with an automatic sifting system that will send them straight to the woodworker’s guild instead of littering the ocean.
-
For a sick moment, she almost thought she understood him.
-
Something is wrong with his sun. The message comes via Attuma instead of a kimoyo ping, scaring Border Tribe guards at an ungodly hour, who then send a message to M’Baku when she doesn’t respond because she's asleep.
She’s asleep on the couch she once promised her mother was only a temporary fixture in her lab. How easy it is for the temporary to become permanent.
She doesn’t need to know Mayan or ask Griot to recognize that Attuma is distraught. The beefy warrior's presence tugs both the threads of sympathy and curiosity in her and she departs the next day after a tedious meeting with M’Baku.
It is her first visit past an air cave after her wedding (the wedding had taken place in a cenote, one she was in for all of two hours before leaving). Okoye accompanies her and is only allowed into the cave, unable to go further anyway without a water suit. The former general insists on waiting as Shuri dives to follow Attuma to his God-king.
The skin under Namor’s eyes are dark. He looks devastated. Someone scooped out his eyeballs and returned them gaunt. Bile sticks to her throat. It leaves her feeling acidic and angry that something is able to damage him to a degree she only dreams of.
“Shuri.” His greeting is firm and soft.
The waning sun shudders. An unsaid question lingers.
The idea of leaving the sun to die out crosses her mind. He could be left looking like this for the rest of eternity.
Her eyes follow his line of sight. “Vibranium is not indestructible. It could be something in the water or the natural progression of being worn away. I can use fiber optic cables and redesign the lattice structure to optimize for brightness…”
In less than six hours Talokan’s sun shines brighter than his people have ever seen it. Namora manages to simmer her glare into a two lip twitches of thanks. Okoye itches to leave, grimacing every time Attuma says something to her.
A curious flash of color, and this alone, stops her from leaving without a word. She doesn’t wait for Namor's permission to enter the hut. He is hers now, so what is his is hers.
She stops in front of the largest mural yet. It is new. The paint is glossier than the others and its edges clean. Whoever the artist is, they painted with great care the Feathered Serpent God and the Black Panther locked in battle, the Black Panther defeating him just so.
“Why are you painted as human and me an animal?” When I am more human than you?
He watches her with the same unreadable look from the month prior.
“Attuma tells me you came straight here.” Before she can correct him, he tilts his forehead down. She panics, thinking he’s about to touch his forehead to hers. He doesn’t. It’s an incline of thanks.
“I’m not a child who abandons promises,” she asserts.
“I should not have called you that.” He sounds sorry.
Floored, she realizes, “You can apologize.”
The snap of a necklace, the click of his belt. He drops his jewelry into a woven basket. His cape comes next, and finally the loincloth. He turns with nothing on him except the scrap of clothing called shorts.
”When there is something to apologize for.”
She’s on him within a blink. The basket is overturned and his jewelry scatters across the floor. A rolling earring hits her thigh.
Her fingers tremble around his neck. A gentle pulse flows beneath her hands. Should she cut it off, his body will only expedite direct absorption from the air. She knows this. She’s raked through his files about his genes and bones and organs over a dozen times. She’s memorized the sinewy ropes of his arms.
She knows he can still feel pain.
Tightening her hand is rewarded with a wince and roll of thunder in his chest. Her legs are splayed across his chest and she’s drunk with rage.
He pries her fingers from his throat one by one. His eyes travel over her body. “I don’t ask for your forgiveness. Why should I? It will only force you to make a choice between being a good daughter and being a good wife. This is my mercy on you, my wife.”
To that, she says nothing. Only when she’s back in Wakanda does she dive into Okoye’s arms and cry.
-
During his monthly council visit, she drags him around the city. She forces him to see what needed to be rebuilt in the aftermath of his damage. He ignores every barb and praises the city’s beauty with such sincerity it rankles her disgust.
She shows him the new garden of the heart-shaped herb, a small patch of soil that sits where Wakanda performs the first of mourning rites.
Her father. Her brother. Mother.
Recognition blooms in him. “I made you into the Black Panther.” He kneels to graze a petal. The other hand tightens around her wrist. It forms a continuous connection between the bracelet and the herb it helped create.
“I restored the mantle of the Black Panther. You can thank your mother.” She waits with bated breath.
His response brings a strained relief that ugly hope says she can live with. “Yes, I do.”
The final stop is her room. If the Dora escorts who leave them alone think it is odd, she waves it away. He is her husband, one she cannot browbeat into submission. She will need to be patient. She will be patient.
“Let’s be clear. You will never talk about my mother again unless it’s to grovel in apology.”
“Yes.” He agrees. If he is disgusted at the prospect of groveling, he doesn't show it. Hope, the finicky thing that it is, remains in her. She doesn’t want to think about what she’ll do if he’s lying. It’s too terrible.
“And I will not bring her up to you until you do.”
“Yes.”
“Alright. Kiss me.”
At first his mouth is cold and she knees his groin out of surprise. He pulls back, moves his thumbs in circles on her temples, and returns with the force of a sun. The pressure he holds her jaw open with would have broken the skull of other mortals. It’s not—painful. He pries her mouth open with his tongue and explores the ridges of her teeth. When he retracts, she follows him into his mouth with her own tongue. She waits, assessing, for their clatter of teeth to become warm like the many times she morbidly imagined in the early, and probably healthiest, days of their marriage when they never spoke.
He groans.
She pulls away. “Do you need to breathe?”
He looks affronted. He loosens his grip so she can fall onto the bed. He stands in the space her parted legs make. “Whatever foolish boy in need of breath that has touched you, remove every comparison from your memory.”
She palms a Kimoyo bead to dim the lights. “There were none.” It's a lie. She has kissed before, but no further.
A ripple of crazed elation breaks onto his face. It’s quickly schooled into amusement. He removes her socks and shoes, her skirt and the mesh overlay with it, and lifts a leg over his shoulder.
“You stayed away from me on purpose,” she accuses. “To make me wanting.”
“You have always been wanton, my wife.”
She wants this more than she has wanted anything else. Her body screams for his touch. His finger burns. Flesh chars wherever he places the pad of his fingers. She feels like she’s burning from the inside when the embers in her chest hum to life. For minutes, only her breathing and a sound akin to a paintbrush plunging into a paint meet her ears. The look on him is fevered and she is irrevocably ensnared. She oscillates between looking at his glittering eyes and throwing her head back to evaluate the ceiling of the only room she has ever called hers. It is debauched to have him in here, touching her in the place where she once imagined sneaking a lover in past her parents. This feels like a parody and in the absence of anything else—warmth, affection, love—the desire for his body giving her gales of relief reaches a crescendo.
Her breaths come in shallow bubbles of pleasure. He replaces his fingers with his mouth, then his mouth with him, and she wants everything from him. Everything with him.
-
Any good inventor circles back to their work and ensures it is fitted with the best updates.
When she finds a free day after weeks of droll meetings, she volunteers to visit a university in Oaxaca with Okoye. She makes trips like this in M’Baku’s stead; obviously he cannot lecture about the virtues of scientific progress, and she still has her status as a member of the Golden Tribe to use in furthering her brother’s cause in educational outreach. Nakia serves as advisor on health services and relief work but in an unofficial capacity, busy of course with the most important task of all.
At the end of a series of diplomatic gatherings and guest lectures, Okoye and Shuri hike the rugged terrain to dig their toes into sandy beaches, and then she mentions her detour.
“I need to check in on their sun.”
Okoye tilts her head quizzically. “Of course.”
“Their barriers as well. Wakanda’s borders have improved and we should share that with them.”
“Have you mistaken me for one of your nerdy, overworked lab techs?”
Shuri removes her water suit and a conch shell from her bag. “I’m being clear so no one thinks I have been kidnapped again.” The joke falls flat.
Okoye rubs her forehead. “I will be with Nakia in Haiti. I will return here if you don’t return within five days.”
There are few things she fears almost as much as world destruction and one is Okoye with a new spear. She’s surprised Attuma dares to walk upon the land Okoye does but perhaps those are issues of warriors.
Once Okoye is out of hearing range, Shuri whispers into the shell.
“I wish to see you.”
Namor emerges in full regalia. His lips don’t twitch in a smirk and there is not a sign of arrogance on him. Good. She would have tossed him into the water and left.
He holds out his arm, seeming to understand that there is a permanent shift she is willing to concede between them. She knows this in their lengthy trip to Talokan; in his detailed instructions on how to locate the city; which currents to unlock; introducing the guards at the first barrier, and the second and the third; the stories his people whisper about the explosion of anemones below and the wonderful uses of coral.
Amusement breaks onto his face at her resolute urge to conduct her science. It’s only a pretext if she thinks of the after; for now, she is truly concerned with his sun’s health. Her follow-up measures take less than an hour.
“I seem to have pulled you from your duties.” She eyes the hovering group of Talokanil over his shoulder. He turns and says something in Mayan, takes her hand, and tunnels back to his hut.
She stares too long at the mural this time. There is nothing different in it. Like an accident in the distance, it’s just impossible to look at. He mistakes her horror for entrancement and he is already unfastening her shorts when she breaks from her reverie and turns.
“You can try suffocating me again,” he offers at her expression.
She fixes her gaze at a spot above his shoulder. If she looks at him he will smell her lust and her pride can’t survive that.
“Tempting. A scientist knows not to waste time with impossibilities.”
He scrapes his knuckles under her top. It comes off in a fluid motion. “What we have between us, some would call impossible.” He kisses the insides of her wrists, the space between her breasts, the scar on her abdomen.
“Do you?” she asks.
He turns to see what’s captured her attention. It’s the addition of a bed. His expression turns decidedly devious. His chest radiates heat hotter than the improved sun.
She hates him more than she ever has. There's also guilt that she hates him for what he makes her body feel more than for the lives he’s robbed. He spins her into the bed and crawls over her. “Yes. It is impossible. You are here with me and I have you unable to stay away. Do I make you feel good, in aatan? My wife?”
His arms flex to keep him hanging above her. She tugs him forward, beyond a point anyone else has. Who else but on her can he lose control and apply his full weight—it’s a favor, she reasons. He learns quickly the gift she's given him; he presses her deep into the mattress, draws out her breaths with a painter’s patience, and hums in tandem with her squeaks and half-finished wails. One, two fingers twist inside her.
Her own dig into his neck. The knot between her thighs tighten and her folds ache for relief. He kisses her everywhere and she learns the feel of his grainy beard against her neck, breasts, and pelvis.
She tugs. His fingers leave her. “With your mouth,” she sighs through a dizzying fog.
“In exchange for a gift from yours.”
Does he mean for her to taste him? Now it’s an image she will live with. She banishes it as one would a page in a medical textbook.
He places a finger over mouth so she can taste what he will. “Cha’ah Toh Alemhen is the name my mother gave me.”
It’s not the name his enemies use or the title his worshippers revered.
Her breathing resumes in strangled bursts. Her fingers hook into his shoulders to keep his mouth hovering over her clit. “I won’t choose.”
“No. This choice you must make.” He flits his tongue over her. She moans. “I can wait.”
She leaves knotted threads where her nails pierce into the woven bedspread. Her back arches off the mattress, coming so hard a painful headache radiates into her sinuses. Her heels burrow into his back as he positions himself over her, the thin sheen of sweat over his skin distracting her from the subsequent burn.
Like before, his initial thrusts are shallow until her body adjusts, and then he rocks into her. She feels impossibly full and he continues deeper. There is nowhere else for him to go. She begins to sob. This is better than piercing his neck and watching him bleed dry, it’s better than every fight, and she needs him to stop only when he's made up for every burned bridge, which is never.
Every time he snaps up into her, he ties a new knot in her belly. It twists and begs for release.
-
"I will visit my brother's old flame after this."
Namor is busy, but he speaks as though he is busier than he really is. He eats dinner with her tonight despite his lamentation at all the kingly responsibilities piling up on his desk. "Okay."
She fiddles with the collar of her button up pajamas. She should have bought new ones, sexy ones even. "In five days."
His eyebrows rise to his hairline. He continues eating, prying a pitaya in half with his bare hands. She's distracted by the movement, remembering other things he did with those hands, until he prompts her to speak.
"Do your people not need you?"
"Not for five days. Unless there's another Thanos-level threat."
"And you wish to stay here."
She observes the curios around them. The paints on his shelves, rolls and rolls of parchment, books with cracked pages, porcelain dishes, stone masks, an assortment of shells...so much to learn.
She returns her eyes to his dubious ones. So much to learn. "Yes." Belatedly, she remembers her mother's manners. "If it is not a burden." She knows it's not. There's a bed and a new wardrobe, and a basket of soaps with curiously feminine scents.
He swipes a tongue over his bottom lip to catch the rivulets of juice from the fruit. "As it pleases you. You are safe here."
-
Since she became Black Panther she has had two holidays. One to visit Nakia and unbeknownst to her at the time, Touissaint; and another to partake in Ayo and Aneka’s wedding festivities. None were for herself.
For five days in Talokan, she dares return to remnants of her girlhood. She tinkers in his scientists’ lab simply because she can and develops four new ways to transport large amounts of vibranium underwater. She also ponders over the more nefarious uses of technology.
“I need a blood sample," she declares.
He looks up from his work. “You won’t benefit from mine. Ask Namora. A Talokanil sample will give you the best picture of the plant’s effects on their bodies.”
The only kink Shuri will admit on the threat of death is that his brain—on the very rare, infinitesimal occasion that exists only in quantum physics—makes her head feel funny. It makes her want to—fuck him. After he learned this interesting factoid, what follows daily is him dangling a bit of tantalizing information about a rare marine animal, or something, and then placing his tongue into whatever opening she offers him.
Today, she corrects him. “It’s not to learn about the Talokanil. I want to learn about you.”
His eyebrow twitches. He asks what need she has for his blood, and she says he's a scientific relic all while shoving him into the lake. He, in his mature, water-soaked existence, rubs his brow, unclasps his bracers and lets them fall into the lake, and approaches her slowly, all pretense abandoned.
“I give you plenty of my seed. Analyze that in your lab.”
He’s right, which is a fact she treats as impartially as possible. She refuses to let her thighs quiver.
“I know you’re trying to send me to Xibalba,” he says when three of his wet fingers are, er, occupied.
When have I ever not? She writhes. She supposes the Black Panther powers prevent the saltwater from doing more damage on her than inducing a frenzied arousal.
“That’s a—” a breathy moan escapes her, “ridiculous conclusion. Why would I make you yield only to kill you?”
“Indeed.” He hauls her to his mouth. He is soft with her—too soft. If she lets slip control a tiny bit, she imagines another world with a loving husband and her a happy wife with some children going on family vacations to visit their grandmother.
In her dreams her husband is a blank silhouette. Maybe it’s Bucky. Or, she thinks to be hilarious, even M’Baku.
She comes with a cry.
She curls against his back every night. Two mornings she wakes first, his heavy arm flung across her chest, and she pretends to sleep until he wakes too. Others, she wakes to an empty bed and Namora sharpening her spear outside. Learning Mayan moves into her top ten list of things to do. Griot doesn't catch all the little idioms and turns of phrases. She would like to know if there is a murder plot afoot.
-
The noises she makes are sloven and better reserved for unspeakable dreams, ones she will look back on with a distant embarrassment. It's a steep price to pay for a new discovery: she relishes his sounds.
She’s finally made him need to breathe. Over the days, his fucking becomes frantic around the edges. He starts to come in half-shudders and low-pitched sharp pleas. He drawls her name openly in bed and in front of his people. He holds her hand underwater and places it around his forearm when they amble through the network of caves during casual explorations. She indulges every aspect of it; competent conversational partners are hard to come by. When Namor speaks about Talokan, he is an endless reservoir of knowledge.
On the day before she is due to leave, he’s gone. She tallies his absence in mild disdain and sets off to continue exploring.
With Griots subpar translation capabilities and without Namor to answer her questions, she is forced to mostly observe. Namor's given her wide breadth to roam alone and she uses it to scope for pressure points. During her walk, Talokanil wave and speak to her, not unkindly.
The return to his hut is through a route of winding tunnels she quickly memorized. He is already inside.
His right hand is slick with blood. Strands of his hair are torched; he shrugs wet ash from his sole item of battle wear (she thinks he should call them shame shorts). He wears no armor to show that he has no need for it—that even bogged with decoration he is a fearsome monster.
“What did you do?”
He meets her eyes. She never sees regret in them. “Why, my wife, is your ire always for me?”
“Always? It is the only thing you will have of mine completely and there’s plenty of it.” That’s not quite true—she’s mad at the elders for letting N’Jadaka become king and burn the garden of the heart-shaped herb, she’s mad at Aneka for not bothering to ask why she’s doing this, mad at the world’s greed. There are plenty of things deserving of her ire, really, and it is a good thing she has an endless bounty of it.
He leans his spear against a gap in the murals. Above the tip is a logogram she recognizes to mean jaguar.
“You dishonor me by lying to yourself about who I am. If making me the instigator in every scenario in your head helps you return to me, there’s nothing to say to that.” He swipes a hand meaninglessly through the air. “I am tired.”
“No,” she objects.
“No?”
She takes one step, then another, and backs him into the hammock. It’s gone unused since they have their bed. It dips under his weight. He strokes her cheek with a bloodied finger.
The question is acidic to ask because she fears he may be right. “Alright. Who did this to you?”
“The Americans were testing underwater bombs,” he answers simply.
She stares.
“So you bombed their port.”
He tilts his head in a way that says yes, wife, your wit has devolved to stating the obvious.
She clambers onto his lap and nips at his jaw. “Take me with you next time.”
“Ah, an amateur’s mistake to give you the opportunity to redirect those bombs to a better target.”
She will have to do something about that. She needs time to make him trust her, and time to find a way to kill him that won’t send his people into eternal war.
Later, though. She grinds her hips against his.
“A bomb can’t kill you.” Only I can.
His hand lifts to her ass and he squeezes. He looks like he’s about to laugh. “I am flattered at the thought you have put into this. It is not your deepest desire, though.”
She bristles at his brazen commentary. “Bast, that confidence could power four Wakandan windmills.” She bucks her hips and forces his clean hand into her shorts. His forefinger finds her in a smooth motion.
His fingers twist into a circular motion. Her head falls on his shoulder. “I know everything about you. Your blood; your bones; your punches. You became the Black Panther because of me. It is the highest compliment a mortal can pay a god.”
Her head is hot and dizzy. Her mouth goes dry. Through the haze, she manages to eek, “Is that your blood?”
She reads an affirmative in his increasingly frenzied pace as though he will come as she does. She turns her face and pops the tip of his finger into her mouth. His blood tastes saltier than her own.
He comes prematurely.
During the middle of the night, she finds the lab manufacturing high-energy water grenades and quietly mourns the temporary setback of technology as she shreds the design plans into confetti.
-
The end of her trip is different this time. He rewards her voluntary visit with the curse of his company all the way to Haiti. She lets herself hold his hand because he swims faster than her water suit can keep up with—at least, until she masters hydromechanics—and when they arrive to see a little boy shuffling on the shores, she doesn’t have it in her to shrug him away.
It’s a terrible thing to break someone’s innocence. She grasps Namor’s hand tighter as they ascend to the beach.
Toussaint stands tall between Nakia and Okoye. He’s almost ten years old and has grown like a spindly Baobab tree. His head is too big for his neck. The proportions will even out after puberty.
“Auntie.” He greets. His voice is thinner than his father’s, more playful. Shuri pulls him to her chest. “Have you become so busy that you’ve forgotten your only nephew?”
Nakia doesn’t look alarmed. She must have decided that sharing this information with Namor was to their benefit or some other complicated spy maneuver.
Shuri elbows Toussaint in the shoulder while she still can before he becomes a tower of a man. “Ask your mother to let you visit.”
The boy's eyes widen. He has misunderstood her because he turns to Namor, who appraises him in a calculating look. Her husband is shrewd. She attributes his stiffening demeanor and level gaze to a king meeting the future king of a worthy nation in a display she has never seen with M’Baku.
“Uncle.” Toussaint holds out a hand. Nakia and Okoye inhale sharply. “May I visit your nation?”
At first, Namor’s eyes flicker to the boy’s small hand. One corner of his lips curl, then the other, and Shuri knows she will later name with remarkable precision all the muscles that loosen into a genuine smile and the warmth that rises to his eyes.
He settles on one knee and clasps Toussaint’s hand. With naked curiosity the boy observes the strange accouterments around the god-king’s neck and the jade in his nose.
“You are welcome wherever your aunt is, little cub.”
Shuri looks away. Hundreds of thousands of children.
He never lets her forget that he is capable of so much love. He refuses to let her disregard him as a beast.
That’s where it starts, she thinks.
-
He scoffs. “The assassin cannot come. I swear by Akna’s and Patli’s blood that their murderer will not roam my nation.”
She wants to point out that their council welcomed him to Wakanda despite killing her sovereign. She can’t: it's the proverbial bed she made herself and now she's lying in it. News of destroyed grenade designs have already reached his ears (it’s really not her fault they have not dispensed paper for cloud storage), and he can’t accuse her definitively the way Wakanda can’t place blame on Talokan. It’s a series of dizzying deadlocks that Nakia tracks for her.
The costs of her concessions will eat her alive one day.
“Okoye.”
“He will have both of us with him. There is not a single Talokanil who will harm the heir to an allied nation.”
“He barely knows you and you can’t stay with him at all times. I also have my work. If you want an innocent child to wander without his mother, at least allow Okoye to accompany him.”
It’s the closest she can invoke the fracture in their relationship. He wavers and she knows he knows it.
-
Okoye knows more Mayan than Shuri.
Shuri takes a swig of mezcal. They watch Toussaint struggle to tread in the lake. Namor patiently shows him how to swing his arms wide and tighten his core muscles. She inwardly cheers her own nephew to succeed before Namor realizes anything of her brother’s blood is doomed to eternal dork-hood.
“You and Attuma are friends? Were you under threat?”
This is Shuri's second visit to Talokan within a month. They hand-waved away Toussaint’s presence in the name of strengthening their alliance but the boy just seems eager to have an indestructible uncle. She should introduce him to M’Baku or Bucky before her nephew makes a mentor out of her husband.
“The brute threatened to break into my house and destroy my midnight angel armor.” Okoye lolled her head towards her. “I helped him.”
“Okoye!”
“Hah, I joke.” Okoye swirls around her drinking bowl and switches to Xhosa. “They’re not so bad. If their king were not...”
In lieu of finishing the sentence, they both take another sip. Tomorrow, Shuri and Namor will take them to the city.
Okoye extends her legs and dangles her feet in the water. “Attuma has gripes with Griot. Some of the idioms don’t translate properly. I tried to call him an imbecile and he tells me it translated as staff, and now he thinks I think of his genitals in my spare time.”
She snickers. “The opposite. The etymological root of imbecile is weak, as in 'without a supporting staff'. You’ve castrated the man.”
“Good.” Okoye finishes her bowl of mezcal. The older Wakandan women Shuri loves are beautiful and shapely in a way she is not.
“What’s husband in Mayan?”
The warrior is too quick to answer. “Íichan.”
-
Toussaint screams the entire way to Talokan. He balks in frustration when his suit won’t let him hit the pitz ball as easily as the other children, laughs when it flies into Shuri, and collects a sample of snacks to try after they return to the upper caves. Okoye is a stern warrior the entire time, a small smile breaking through only when they are spat out of the current.
No amount of vivid retellings from Shuri can prepare anyone for the sight. Cameras don’t work here. It’s a feast for the senses she will never tire of.
Every time she has visited, she chose one element to focus on. Her questions are so plentiful it would bore even the Dean of Wakanda University, so she decides that since this temporary arrangement may last longer than initially anticipated, she may as well take her time gleaning what she can.
In her first visit after their marriage, it was the sun. How did he mold the vibranium? How did he transport it here? How did it emit light?
During her second, she learned about their fiber-optic cables and rudimentary information collection networks and involuntarily, about bombs.
Now, finding her knowledge of sociology is below par, she makes a mental notepad dedicated to Namor's interactions. A mother with a baby swaddled in seaweed asks him to bless them. The baby grips Namor’s pinky finger. He runs his fingers through the baby's tuft of hair.
The younger children hide behind their parents, trembling in awe. He always swims lower so that his face is level with theirs. Each one is left smiling. The older children think him charming. One swings from his outstretched arm as he explains the rules of pitz to Toussaint. Another tries to sneak a bit of kelp under his ankle bracers and he pretends to not notice until its halfway in.
The adults revere him. They think him perfect. She cuts the trip short.
-
She researches.
His genes are perfect too.
-
On the fourth anniversary of her brother’s death, she sits alone in the grove. The heart-shaped herbs glow with a pulsating gleam.
She hears a rush of air and damp flesh meeting flesh. “Who sent you?” She hasn’t used her Kimoyo beads to speak to him in over a month.
He’s shrugging hair out of his eyes. “It is one year since we wed.”
What is she supposed to say to that? She shrugs. “You’re right.”
“Must you send me off as though I have no desire to be around you?”
“I said nothing of your presence.”
He sticks his spear into a patch of grass and settles next to her. “No one else came with you.”
“I asked to be left alone.”
“Hm, the beads allow me to see your location at any time.”
Bast. “I’ll turn it off.”
“There are other ways to say you wish to be at my side in person.”
Fuck you, she could say, but a disbeliever still respects the grove and the science that made the herb possible. It feels blasphemous to curse at even him, here.
The silence drags on. A mosquito hovers above her right ear. He swipes it in his hand and crushes it.
“It was innocent,” she remarks, just because she can.
“It was bothering in aatan.”
“You’re bothering me too.”
He looks at the sky. “Your brother was a good king.”
The hiss that leaves her is inhuman. “You implied that he was foolish to open Wakanda to the world.”
He leans back on his palms. Wistful, is what she labels him at this moment. “That was a foolish thing to do. He still did it out of love for his people.” Head unmoving, his irises expand and contract. They flicker to her. “I regret that his loss caused you so much suffering.”
It is unfair that the weather is warm and perfect for celebration. The skies won’t mourn with her but he will.
-
Inevitably, she calls him on missions again. This time, only the larger ones where a risk of death is high enough that it justifies lethal self-defense. Her defense is him.
“I can do the killing where your goodness won’t let you,” is his more honest assessment. He does not call it cowardice. It would be beneath a god to think cowardice spared him.
All she can respond with is, “As long as you acknowledge what is good.”
After all, monsters could still recognize they were monsters, right? The worst of them are those that don’t recognize they are one at all.
-
For her birthday, she visits Riri. Their shared love for inventing is enough for a life-long bond but Riri’s unrestrained humor is the spice rub on Border lamb. She also doesn’t have very many friends her age.
They relax in Riri’s garage lab, which has had more money poured into it in recent years. There's even a juicing machine.
“You got this backwards. I’m supposed to be doing something for you for your birthday.” Riri’s voice is muffled behind the welding mask. She has undergraduate assistants now running the computers.
“I missed the Cubs game.”
“And you just had to come during finals.”
“No one forced you to do a masters program.”
“Was Wakanda gonna give me that fellowship? Nuh uh. I don’t want your hus—boyfriend wringing my neck.”
Without Wakandan technology, Riri’s recreation of the ironheart suit functions at 60% optimal speed. Sneaking vibranium to her was a one way ticket to a M’Baku-Namor alliance over Shuri's grave, so she brought Riri the next best thing: her brain. Building without vibranium is a challenge she enjoys.
When Riri’s suit is ready to fly, Shuri allows herself to smile freely. They keel over in laughter thinking about their haphazard escape from the feds, visit the Museum of Fine Arts and estimate how many things are stolen, take Riri’s car for a joyride around downtown where Shuri learns that driving a car is not nearly as cool nor easy as a motorcycle. In fact, Shuri is ridiculously horrible at it and nearly sends them hurtling into the ocean.
There’s no hint of that long ago struggle on the highway. During the day, the bridge disappears into a beautiful skyline. People rush to their next to-do item. Life goes on.
“Is having a husband at this age weird in America?” In Wakanda it varied greatly. Those closer to the throne tended to settle early.
Riri cups her hands and breathes into them. The morning chill is frigid this time of year. “What was that?”
“Boyfriend.”
“That? Oh. Nah, a lot of my friends in their mid twenties are hitched. I didn’t think you’d want people knowing you were married. Politics and all that shit. You’re famous in the STEM department.”
Riri’s developed a sense of discretion only a kidnapping and sacrifice can impose. Shuri is thankful for it.
“You got anyone?” she asks.
“Nah. The people I’m around are idiots and I’m too busy.” Riri joins her at the railing, her face looking ill. The blue-grey water below is murky. “Is…he there?”
Shuri makes a noncommittal noise. “He’d sooner barbecue himself than step a foot here voluntarily.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“Not your fault.”
“No, I mean—it was my idea.” Riri squints. “Please tell me he’s doing you good.”
She’s not sure if that means sexually or otherwise. “He’s my husband,” is a response that explains nothing. It’s the first time she’s called him that out loud.
-
They’re in a hotel near an outreach center in Mali. It was not life-threatening.
She just needed someone to die.
This time, it was a rapist who kidnapped two of their female scientists. The scientists lived, so it was not a life for a life, but the only fitting punishment for stealing girlhood was death. She thinks this while she impales his mouth with her tongue.
The rest of her suit dissolves to reveal a plain set of shorts and bra. He snaps the straps from her shoulders and flicks a tongue over a pebbled nipple. He tweaks the other with his fingers. Hot flashes of arousal rend her in half. Absently she reactivates her suit only over her hands. Her claws sink into the flesh of his back and tug him closer, a fish on a fish hook reeled to its capturer.
His lips return to her face with hasty fury. They place hot brands across her cheeks and sweep up lingering sweat from the fight. One leg hooks around his waist. The Black Panther has caught the fishman in her jaw.
“In Íichan,” she moans offhandedly into his mouth. Threads of saliva dip between his lips and hers as he parts them in surprise. His eyes are aglow with a leer.
“In aatan."
“Make me the mother you robbed me of." In the drowsy midst of lust, she doesn't think this qualifies as a violation of their agreement.
The feeling that cascades over her in seeing his features soften is similar to euphoria of a new discovery. It is the beginning of an addiction.
She is doomed.
He pinches her chin between his thumb and forefinger. His thumb presses into one corner of her mouth. “When I made you queen, you rejected it. Now you wish me to make you a mother?”
Her answer is petulant but in her defense her breasts are bruised and she’s throbbing. All over. “You rejected my offer to keep me instead.”
“And you would have borne my child?”
It's not a question she wants to hear again. She releases her claws to drag them across his back. “Bast. Fuck. Move.”
“Don’t be vulgar,” he admonishes, and proceeds to be impossibly vulgar. He presses a hard kiss to her mouth and releases her with a pop. They fall onto the cheap, half-broken bed that creaks under their combined weights. He flips her around and slides in from behind, coils an arm around her waist and pulls her against him. They come with her head falling back on his shoulder, out of breath.
-
“How many do you want?”
Shuri shrugs. She knows her nonchalance turns him into a deranged bee for honey.
“My wife?” He prompts in a low voice.
She leans against the notch that holds up the hammock and remembers her and T’Challa escaping to the gardens in the middle of their lessons. She was already past his level of mathematics and chemistry at the time but he wiped the floor with her in all matters philosophy and history. Geography too, since he kept a map in his room with all the places Nakia traveled to circled in blue.
So, she counts: two for her and T’Challa. Then there was N’Jadaka, the cousin who should have been but never was because of more homicidal tendencies in the family, and at least one nonexistent cousin from her mom’s side due to her uncle’s early death in a tragic accident (also a quality that seemed to run in the family).
Once the idea is formulated in her head, she knows, like a blueprint with dazzling possibilities for inventions she won’t be satiated with until project completion, that she’ll work herself haggard for perfection.
She files away the blueprint for a loving family disguised as world-saving and sees his face come into view. He waits for an answer at the foot of their hammock.
“More than one,” she says finally.
He makes a strange noise. His shorts have gone taut and he swallows. “One is enough to take Talokan’s throne. Nephew will take Wakanda’s.”
“You love children.” Children are his weakness and now they are hers too.
He makes a sweeping gesture to their home, the caves, to Talokan. “I already have plenty of them.”
She bites her lip. “Not with me.”
“Are you hastening your nephew’s death?”
She could slap him for that one. He hovers over her body, hands splayed on either side of the swaying hammock.
“Well. My family’s track record considered,” and then she stops because they have an agreement and she doesn’t want to end whatever macabre parody of flirting this is.
He frowns. “Let anyone think ill of him. I will burn their ilk.”
She kisses him for that. Pleased, he lifts her from the hammock and she finally conceives her first child against his favorite mural.
-
She gives birth in Wakanda. Izel is most beloved to most of her people. They do not know that a heir through King T’Challa awaits them in Haiti so to them she is the sole continuation of the royal bloodline.
Most. Zuri’s successor refuses to bless her. "Her lineage is polluted," he says. "Izel is the joining of a murderer and his victim."
When Namor’s face turns murderous, it is Aneka, having remained loyal and who’s pain Shuri lives with everyday, who meets her eyes. Aneka understands now.
M’Baku orders the shaman to leave. He takes Izel from Shuri and lifts her up against his oafish shoulders.
“This is a daughter of Wakanda. I bless her myself. From whence shall objection be raised to Izel, daughter of Shuri, the Black Panther? Hanuman will not have it. I will not have it.”
The council remains unused to M’Baku’s god but Shuri thinks she sees a small smile on Zawavari’s face. Namor, perennial lover of traditions, agreed to Wakandan birth rituals but found dealing with the Wakandan oligarchical-like system arguing over minutiae (easy for him to say, his word alone is law in Talokan) drab.
Namor reaches for their daughter. “King M’Baku. I must leave before this becomes a waste of time larger than it already is.”
M’Baku tuts. “Not yet. I must finish the ritual. All of you may go, the Black Panther can stay. There is none stronger than she.”
“I offer my gratitude.” There’s a respectful undercurrent in Namor’s voice that was absent before. After he tickles Izel into sneezing, he leaves with Attuma.
The Jabari rhythmic chants are animalistic. M’Baku breathes heavily by the end of it. He palms Izel’s head and drags his hand gently over her face and tiny body.
Shuri speaks. “My daughter will not be a bartering tool.”
M’Baku wears the face of an all-wise, all-knowing king. She sounds ridiculous, she knows. Embers sit inside her, waiting to be relit. She’s deep in hiding behind the many walls her own hands erected but that does not mean she has lost sight.
“The Queen made an admirable choice to save you the way she did. It is what made her a great and noble Queen. You, Black Panther, can only be what we need. Every personal choice has become political. That includes your child. If it keeps the fishman in line, we will invoke her.” M’Baku tries to re-swaddle the baby to still her frantic movements.
Izel paws at M’Baku’s beard. A chunky foot slips out of the blanket and a wing begins to flap. He catches her by the ankle before she can fly to sit atop his head. She giggles, presumably finding being dangled upside down at the solid age of three months incredibly amusing.
“That is all good and well, M’Baku. Are children identical to a sack of potatoes in Jabariland?”
“The Jabari can read—and listen carefully, you may need time to understand this—the records you sent show that she can breathe underwater too. What is to stop her from overpowering her father one day?”
His endless supply of cuddles and aquatic toys.
Telling M'Baku that will make her cognitive dissonance around her mercurial husband seem more real, so it is easier to admit, “He is mine to deal with.”
Izel’s wings flutter wildly. The King tosses her into the air. “I am glad she has your nose. It makes it easier to admit she is cute." Of course she's cute, she's mine. "Will you raise her vegetarian?”
“My diet’s half raw fish.”
“Bah. Replace the infernal hunting grounds with carrots.”
Over the months, she has complained to anyone who will hear it about the lack of nutritional variety under the sea. Namor considered her ideas for expanding their gardens for less than two seconds; he himself was content on a diet of shark meat and drinking from her mouth.
She watches M’Baku fruitlessly chase Izel into the kitchens. The doctors warned that clipping her wings could stunt physical development.
-
As though to make up for her year’s lack of involvement, Aneka agrees to watch Izel whenever they are in Wakanda. Aneka can fly with her suit, making her more qualified than most nannies.
Attuma adores his king’s daughter. He is poised to be Shuri’s escort to and from Wakanda, an unspoken arrangement she insists on abandoning. The brute pretends not to understand the bits of Mayan she has learned and growls at Griot’s translations, so she resigns to pillory her husband.
Namor sits in his hut with two low-level advisors. Izel rests in the crook of his elbow, nuzzling his chest and small fists clutching at his collar. Her wings never flutter around him. The dastardly naughty child is proof that Shuri of Wakanda embraces sacrifices. Spoiled girlhood is gone.
He excuses himself from the meeting. They convene in the newly built room for Izel. They have also discussed making a separate room for when Shuri visits, because the fact that they sleep—and do more—in the place he hosts his people is a tad too shameless for her tastes.
“All of Talokan knows how I take care of you. It’s not a crime to be ashamed of.”
He has been so good to her since she gave birth. His ripostes have less bite. He agrees with M’Baku a full forty-six percent of the time. Izel has also slowed his frequency of extraneous trips to the surface world…and hers, too.
Now, Namor observes her knowingly. He has improved at reading her nonverbal cues. It should scare her but she’s relieved at not having to force her mouth to keep up with her brain around him.
He slides his chin over Izel’s forehead. “Must you leave now? Your body is still in recovery.”
“Repeat that phrase and understand you insinuate that the Black Panther has been made weak by what women since the beginning of time have done.” She hopes he’s thinking of his mother. He gives no indication he does.
“Leave Izel with me. It will be easier for you.”
Their daughter will never know a softer father and it sickens her. She fights the primal part of her that is pleased.
“I can handle it. Okoye and Aneka will take turns watching her. It’s just a short mission with two War Dogs.”
“The Angels and the Dora Milaje have their own to protect,” he says, waving a hand.
What she hears is: Izel is more Talokanil than Wakandan.
There is a sorrow in seeing her life shaped by motherhood. She adores parts of it. Her life is bursting to the seams with things to enjoy. But her stays in Wakanda have become less frequent and shorter. Only her lab ties her physically to Wakanda and that, too, Talokan has begun to build a lab for her.
She knows it’s out of kindness. She cannot help but feel that Talokan has been made her home by others and Wakanda is now a place to visit as a temporary abode.
The corners of his eyes droop in her hurt silence.
“You don’t trust me with her," he muses.
“I don’t trust you at all," responds Shuri. “Stop it. We married for the sake of our peoples. Don’t forget for a single moment why.”
“I haven’t. If my wife doesn’t want for my care, so be it.”
“Your care? Shackling me is your care?”
“Tying you to me. Your words, Shuri. I have never stopped you from putting your people first," he says with the start of a sneer and leaves. Izel leaps to her mother.
-
Izel performs the flight equivalent of a waddle, which is to say, hover a meter from the ground and knock over every bit of spare decor in Okoye’s house. Shuri develops a vibranium rubber coat to spray movable items with and magnetic stickers to hold potted plants and fine vases in place.
Over her kimoyo beads, Nakia’s holographic face shimmers. “Does she walk?”
With a glazed look in her eyes, Shuri turns the bead to follow Izel’s mischief. Currently, the child wrestles with a large rhino tusk.
Nakia gasps quietly. “Should I be more worried for potential injury to her or the decor?”
Okoye sighs from her place on the floor in front of the dinner spread. Ayo, Aneka, and a younger Dora speak amongst themselves.
“The child of a snake and a cat. Bast herself anticipated an airborne feline.” Okoye’s shifty eyes bore into Shuri. “Izel. Meaning ‘only one’ and ‘unique’.”
“She will have an entire ancestral plane’s worth of an ego,” Aneka interjects.
“Does it come from her father or mother?” asks Okoye.
Shuri waves bye to Nakia and turns off her beads. “I am glad Okoye is a Midnight Angel. Her round head stopped fitting through the Dora neck-rings.”
“Psh, your wit has slowed. I will not fault you for the deeply exhausting journey of motherhood.”
Aneka swivels to fully enter their conversation. It is a sign she is about to say something extremely perturbing. “Deeply is what landed her here at all.”
Okoye rubs her forehead while Shuri adamantly continues martyring chunks of potato swimming in smoked pepper sauce. Izel growls at her latest enemy: a wooden facsimile of Mount Bashenga near the refrigerator where her parents first kissed.
Watching Izel, Okoye must be thinking the same because she says, “Aneka. You know they desecrated my kitchen.”
Shuri inadvertently launches a potato chunk at the floor. “It was one kiss.”
“His kisses must be very fine for everything else to be overlooked,” responds Okoye.
“He’s my husband. I do what wives do.”
Aneka shoves her shoulder. “Him repeatedly, I am sure.”
“Enough,” announces Ayo. Of the group, she is the least warm with Izel, not for want of company. Her duty as general precedes everything else. She sets the baby down on the floor. Her bracelets prove interesting enough for Izel to gnaw on. “The Dora Milaje has conveyed to King M’Baku their appreciation for the Feathered Serpent’s aid.” Her dark eyes flicker to Shuri. “The risks are high but he is efficient. Especially after he was…taught to leave a fainter trace.”
Aneka tosses a kola nut into her mouth. “Our own Hulk. In Mali him and Namora left only three teenagers for us to fight.”
“Bring him on our next trip, yes? He can save me a trip to the physical therapist,” Okoye stretches out her legs. Her green painted toenails remind Shuri of sea cress.
Their latest objective is to find an old associate of Ulysses Klaue. Though the man was dead, there was evidence that there was another buyer of Klaue's stolen vibranium.
She doesn’t understand all this. Okoye, joking like Namor was an insufferable brother-in-law. Aneka, who was supposed to remain openly angry for her, teasing her for dalliances as though he were a good-looking simpleton boyfriend. Ayo finding him useful.
The only use to Wakanda is if he is dead. Her breathing quickens. The potatoes bear the brunt of her deadly thoughts and are turned into mush.
“He won’t.”
Okoye notices her change of expression. “Hm?”
“No, he won’t help,” she repeats, louder. She won’t take anything from him anymore. “We don't need him. All he does is bring chaos."
The others smoothly change the topic of conversation while she simmers quietly, envying the potatoes for their easy existence, and leaves her dinner untouched. After everything is cleaned up and the group retires to the patio, Okoye pulls her into the kitchen and sets a heavy hand on her shoulder.
“Panther. Speak."
"I would rather not. Where are the potatoes? I am suddenly hungry."
Okoye looks to be two barbs away from jostling her. "Is it so terrible to enjoy the, I won't say happiness but ease, that he offers you? You punish yourself enough for the two of you."
“But the oh-very-wise council—”
“Am I aging? You, worrying over the traditional ways of elders?”
Right. “I will go to the Border Tribe right now and tell M’Kathu his representative replacement in training all but told me to enjoy a blissfully married life.”
“I said ease. He clearly offers you something no one else can." Okoye is someone of a shaman tonight. "Perhaps purpose? Having a family can be fulfilling."
My purpose is to eradicate him. She deigns to agree with the warrior.
"Purpose, yes." And because she’ll never lose her rebellious streak, adds, “I have a child. It took months of bedding, none of which occurred within these very fine blessed walls."
A vein next to Okoye’s ear tenses and she waves her away. Seeing an opportunity, Aneka intercepts Shuri next. It has been a slow journey to repair their friendship.
Perhaps Aneka needed time because only she knows how this will end. The Midnight Angel clutches her arm tightly. Shuri has never heard her speak more seriously.
“Sister, when you call on me, I will be ready.”
It is the resolve she needs.
-
Two months later, she is sitting on his lap. He holds her differently than he does Izel. Obvious size differences aside and the fact Shuri doesn’t fly nor try to eat his cheek (only bite into it), he holds her loosely and does his important work of scratching symbols into parchment. They’re letters to other cities of Talokan, detailed messages that cannot be sent through shellphones.
“How does the ink not dissolve?”
Namor's jade nose ring is a coolant against her heating skin. “I developed it myself. It’s a mixture of squid ink and crushed mollusk glands. When used on this paper it is hard to wash away.”
Smart. She presses a soft kiss to his mouth.
He pulls back. Is he confused at her initiating? She has done everything first, really; proposed marriage, called him to her, proposed a child.
Hm. It seemed his narcissism was of her own making.
He places a knuckle on her lip. “In aatan.”
“In íichan.”
“Has the argument left you?”
“No. Izel will come with me wherever I go. I can protect her.”
“Who will protect you?”
“Misogynist.”
“I only mean that you stretch yourself thin…allow me into your dependencies.” He seems hesitant and drops his quill. She scoots closer and places a hand over the open expanse of his chest, coaxing. “Allow me into your heart.”
“My rage is always yours. If you need someone to skin you alive I am here for you.”
He quirks a brow. “I would have to be naked first.”
She fiddles with a pearl necklace. Her eyelids droop. “That’s never been a problem for you, Cha’ah Toh.”
He doesn’t drag her to the hammock or slam his mouth over hers. He closes his eyes and brings her knuckles to his lips one by one. Her lungs empty, air and words all, and it is the most intimate thing she has ever witnessed. Feeling quesy, she follows his methodical appraisals of the mole near her elbow, the lines of her tattoo, the nails she keeps short.
He tucks her head under his chin. Her eyes catch on his extended leg exposed by a slit in his cloak. His wings are uneven. The ankle she injured is marginally swollen.
“After all these years?”
He bends his legs to hide his feet beneath the chair. “It will fully heal in time.”
“Too small," she realizes. “Don’t look at me like that, I meant your wings. To lift a human off the ground they should span at least seven meters. And the energy needed to maintain that? Massive.”
He grins. His fingers remain loosely resting between hers. “Everything about me is massive.”
“Colossal.”
“Enormous.”
“Positively brobdingnagian," she assures. “Will you give me a blood sample now? I can heal you.”
He rests his forehead on hers. It’s a yes.
-
Genes are different from blood. Blood can be poisoned.
-
“Do you—regret not killing me?” He asks these types of questions when he is half inside her. She preens at the fact he must resort to lowly tactics to open her up. When he is in her physically, what jump is it to metaphorically get under her skin?
She is on top of him. They’re on the couch in her lab; it’s four in the afternoon and he has no business being here. He’s started visiting without a discernible pattern (to aggravate her, she knows) and takes the time to explain that Izel is with Namora learning how to shuck oysters.
“I—ah—will regret it if you don’t move. Do you soliloquy every lover?”
“You count yourself among them?”
She rolls her eyes. Shifts once, twice, and gives a little bounce. A soft burst of lust fogs her mind for a moment. “Mm, I would think sleeping with you for…ah, there, yes…non-procreative reasons is self-explanatory.”
“It could be—practice.”
“For?”
He flips her over. Bast, she hopes the security locks are on and the camera feeds are off.
“‘More than one.’” He has a photographic memory too, because Bast has a sick sense of humor.
-
The years stuck in a slow-moving plot have split her into two. The embers are quieting. She visits her mother’s grave often to invigorate them.
-
After their second child is born, Namor’s razing of cities reduce to thrice a year. M’Baku claps her on the back and thanks her for saving the world by giving the menace children to zip after. It sounds like a terribly written novel plot.
“He already has thousands. Tens of thousands,” she protests. “I haven’t counted.”
“Good grief, woman. Look at him when he watches them. Everything that comes from you is his weakness.” M’Baku has taken to a new vegetable: the modest squash. It is a wonderful reprieve from sushi. She indulges it.
“Problem is they are also my children and I love them. I would destroy my lab before letting harm come to them.”
M’Baku eyes her carefully. “I was not only speaking of crab cake and shrimp boy.”
-
She is more occupied the further Wakanda moves from the year they opened up to the world. Papers on the uses of vibranium begin to be published, spearheaded by her and the first group of fellows at Wakanda University. They serve to show the world how careful they have always been with their blessings. Some accuse them of virtue-signaling—what makes Wakanda more deserving of vibranium?—but academia remains mostly a purer endeavour. Professors and researchers write to her asking about various ways to extract bullets that minimize nervous system damage (she pulls out Ross’ records for this one). A Japanese architecture firm asks for input on their maglev trains. She sends two techs to a relief organization working to clean up oil spills as a belated wedding gift to Namor.
She finds meaning in all of these things. She learns to grow around her grief instead of past it.
Nakia is fully forgiven the day Toussaint turns fourteen.
He is at the age where he no longer listens to his mother without question, lies about what games he plays on the computer, and tries to steal his mother’s beads to learn more about how they work. If he were not the future king, Shuri thinks he could take over as the head of the Wakandan Design Group.
Characteristic of the Wakandan impulse to make a celebration out of everything, his birthday celebrations last three days. Shuri is there for all of it although he is with his Haitian friends for most of it. It is on the second day when some of the other Dora join. M’Baku and the Dora were told about Toussaint before her marriage; the King had promptly sent a chocolate cake presumably in thanks that he can abdicate one day.
Toussaint hugs his favorite auntie. He mumbles thank you to his Mama and brightens at Okoye’s explanation of how to render a leg useless with one swipe of a spear.
“He wants to go to Wakanda.” Nakia sets down a large rusted ladle sacrificed in making a large pot of soup joumou. From the number of vegetables in it one would think M’Baku himself was making an appearance.
“It’s not what T’Challa would have wanted.” Shuri agrees with the logic.
Her own childhood was beautiful. For Toussaint, to grow close to the throne without family was a worse alternative to what Nakia built here, and T’Challa knew better than any of them what growing up to be king was like and the pressure placed on a young boy.
“He knows that. It is not the same but I fear…in him a similar anger that N’Jadaka had. Without my father, our culture, rituals, traditions—of which you are not fond of—and all of this.” Nakia motions to the Dora playing with him the yard. “I bring what I can. It might not be enough anymore.”
Shuri eyes her carefully. This is new. In her life, Nakia has been unsolicited advice-giver, not advice-seeker, least of all from a lanky tech-savvy girl who runs her mouth.
The new part of her that belongs to her children corrects her. Woman. Mother of two. How old was Queen Ramonda when she gave birth to Shuri? She doesn’t remember. Her mother was timeless.
“You are more than enough. If it helps, bring him to Wakanda for a visit," says Shuri after some deliberation.
“He will want to stay. And if I reappear suddenly, the elders might suspect something.”
“With his face that looks exactly like his father’s and his Wakandan name that is also his father’s? Nooo one will suspect a thing. Maybe I will pass him off as my husband’s.”
Nakia nudges her out of the kitchen. As though the mention summoned him, Namor stands at the entrance to the yard. They eyes meet through the rowdy Dora ganging up on Toussaint and his trusty water gun.
He carries L’Tawi under his cloak. L’Tawi takes after T’Chaka in demeanor, a sagely look to his eyes and a delightful lack of wings. His skin color is Namor’s and he has a chin completely foreign to both of them. From Namor’s nameless father, maybe. She hasn’t asked. Izel’s hand is tied to one of his feet by a springy coil covered in cotton.
Thank Bast Nakia’s home is right on the shore so no one can see the mess of a group they make. Toussaint, blessedly, thinks his cousins are the most normal people in the world. The only rule he must follow is that anything related to Wakanda or Talokan in name is to be hidden from his friends. The alienation of secrecy must make him yearn for his homeland too.
“Can she play?” The boy reaches Namor’s shoulder now. The god-king considers the prospect of handing an airborne toddler a water gun. He eventually shrugs and hands Toussaint the strap and they make their way inside. The rules are that without Namor or Aneka, inside flight time only.
Okoye nods to Namor formally and follows Toussaint. Aneka stalks after them. Shuri is left to—converse with him?
“Nephew invited me," her husband starts.
“He doesn’t have kimoyo beads.”
“His mother does and he is terribly outnumbered.”
Shuri frowns and collapses onto a folding chair. “He loves us. He can confide in any one of us and he knows that.”
“Even Namora gave me trouble.”
She snorts.
Amused, he joins her on a chair across from her. L’Tawi snores. “She was always obedient but constantly sought ways to be reckless. I had to give her instructions very carefully or she would find loopholes.” His expression goes fond. “I tell her to secure dinner; she steals my whale and rides it into what you call the Pacific ocean and returns two days later with a school of minnow in time for that day’s meal. I tell her to clean the palace of weeds and she dismisses half her team as rotten kelp.”
“Eh, hasn’t changed one bit.”
It’s impossible that he didn’t hear her snipe. He continues, engrossed in memories. “Every child is different, but they all wish to be heard. Some things cannot be shared with just anyone.” He lifts a finger to L’Tawi’s agape mouth to close it. The babe latches on immediately and begins to suckle. “Namora didn’t want to confide in me about her first kiss or her moon cycles.”
Huh. Underwater menstruation is now an odd piece of information that will now niggle at her until she solves it. She forces herself to focus.
“That could be because she’s your cousin.”
“Perhaps. It could also be there was no woman of my stature to confide in.” His smiles are freely given to her nowadays. “A nonexistent problem now.”
Growing horror. “No.”
“Yes.”
“If you make Namora, or any of the Talokanil, call me Mama, I will rip your wings off and throw them in a blender and feed the sludge to the pigeons.”
“Bird cannibalism is morbid even for you.”
“You’re a serpent, not a bird.”
“Did your blood analysis tell you that?”
She bites her tongue and draws blood.
He chuckles. The skin around his eyes crinkle. “Our children are half Talokan’s. What will you have them call you?”
She crosses her legs. He is ridiculous.
“I speak to them in Xhosa, but both Mama or Na’ are fine.” Her Mayan has improved. She can understand when the Talokanil attendants call her pretty or her children playful.
He shifts and pulls his cloak to shield L’Tawi from the afternoon rays. His voice lowers to a whisper as he speaks conspiratorially to a child who can’t yet understand him and nuzzles his cheek.
“I am someone of many names, but to you, yuum.” Father.
The mien he wears while he plays with L’Tawi is the same when speaking about his cousin. She knows it. She saw it everyday in her Mama and Baba when they looked at her and her brother.
Destroying her lab for her children are mighty steps from burning the world, but they are still steps. She suppresses a flinch. At that moment, she understands her mother’s desperation to rip the ocean apart.
And more horrifically: she understands Namor.
-
In their fourth year of marriage, she pleads. The blueprint falls out of the file cabinet in her brain, having been rattled with every thrust of his body into hers.
“One more,” she breathes. It turns into a whine, then whimper.
She craves it. Many have fought him. Others slept with him. But how many can boast they carried his seed to term?
In all honesty, she has no need to tell him. Birth control is up to her. Plastic is his devil. Next to the unshakable facts of He will burn the surface world so long as he lives and The ancestral plane is a rip-off is He would sooner wear coloniser leather than a condom. She has had greater success in developing a working relationship with Namora than in having him wear anything that is not purely Wakandan, and even then there are standards.
Point being, he is picky, latex is too close to plastic (Wakandan or not), and he curses any artificial obstacle between him and her, thus this entire situation in which she is duly in control.
Control. Bast. The way he mouths the pulse on her neck might make her internally combust altogether.
“Do you want more shackles?” He breathes. Her blood turns hot and thrums painfully. “You’re going to give me another child, in aatan? You want to carry mine so desperately. Ask me again, nicely.”
“Cha’ah Toh, king of every swimming pool, father of whimsical daughter and sage son—”
He puts a hand over her mouth. His cock twitches inside her. “I didn’t ask for a soliloquy.”
She bites. He lifts his hand, assesses the damage and seems to determine it is inadequate as he resumes with double the vigor. This hammock has snapped twice. She hates sleeping in it but loves how it flows around her body when he is in her, pulling her in further and further and him with her.
-
In her dreams, the silhouette has tapered ears.
-
“I lost the baby.” She doesn’t cry. Her body and chest are excavated.
Klaue’s friend had barely a gram of vibranium from a raid years ago but the energy it afforded turned a primitive gun to a lethal cannon. Her entire right side burns. The curse of competency is knowing the physical hole in her belly can heal but it will not bring back what it held minutes ago.
She should have told him, should have let him in.
Bucky shouts from somewhere outside, preceding a stampede of footsteps. She doesn’t know who called Namor and how he arrived so quickly.
“Look at me. The aircraft is coming. Can you stand?”
Her mouth tries to shape words and it evaporates into the fire in her veins. Familiar hands jostle her body onto her uninjured side. There is nothing to vomit. Damaged sensory neurons means the pain should abate soon into numbness. Her suits nanite particles struggle to patch the massive tear.
A cool relief cuts through the pain and spreads across her body. Not fully damaged, then, if she can feel it. Her vision goes bleary. Another pulse of relief. Namor pushes the last of his Kimoyo beads into the wound and soon her legs stop shaking.
He scoops her into his arms.
She clings to him and allows him to see her weakness as he bloodies his hands with her.
“I was—five weeks—alliance—”
He rolls his forehead across hers. “I don’t have a need for heirs. Everything you give me is a gift. What we have is a family, my wife.” The tears that fall from his eyes are indistinguishable from the rain.
Attuma takes on Namor’s Wakanda-related responsibilities and Namora watches over Talokan. He sits by her bed everyday until she recovers.
-
She adds new lines to her mental schematic.
To defeat him, she must know his weaknesses.
To know his weaknesses, she must know him.
No one knows a man better than his wife.
And: it was hard to know him without understanding him.
And by understanding him, she began to love him.
Bast.
-
“One more.”
He coughs on his drink. She smiles into hers.
She says this at a gala in Oakland, the site of their first Wakandan Outreach Center, while watching a lithe Gambian woman seated on the other side of her husband trying to rub his shoulders. The woman is the Research Head in this location. Former Head. The whole point of announcing her marriage to "the mysterious handsome fellow from Yucatán" was so they could pre-empt possible attacks together, not for him to be chummy with others.
Namor has worn surface clothes before but his outfit today is particularly stunning. Instead of a shawl or cloak, he is dressed in a white suit. His blazer has a single button. A garish teal copilli fans the left side of his head, sitting atop masterfully ruffled hair. Shuri’s designs of custom shoes for him were passed onto one of the many lab techs who turn out variations at a startling speed. Today, his shoes are squid ink-black over lacquer-like blue streaks.
She hasn’t seen him in a month, when he left to catch up on the work her recovery delayed. Her nipples harden from…serotonin, the desire hormone; dopamine, the pleasure hormone; oxytocin, the attachment hormone…
Ayo, who sits between her and M’Baku, slides a plate of banana fritters towards her.
“Take as many as you please.” The Dora General assesses her with a warrior’s intuition. “You are too thin for a breastfeeding mother.”
Shuri turns her eyes to pin them on the animated guest lecturer. In her periphery, she observes Namor try to dab his mouth politely while speaking to his new lady friend, Talokan’s recalcitrant rules for engaging with surface dwellers conveniently absent. He misses and the serviette hits his nose.
She times her next comment with his lift of a fork. “Hmm, yes. As many as I please.”
He doesn’t fall for it. She hates him.
He accosts her in the airship after the afterparty that she insisted on staying at for as long as possible because of Riri. She is a breastfeeding mother, however, and Riri is not, so she sits in the airship having forgotten most of the night in a daze altogether.
L’Tawi, just over eighteen months old, mouths at her right nipple. She winces when a tooth presses into her wrong. Aneka, having adopted two of her own very fussy children, coos and gives advice on readjusting the angle. The strength of a Black Panther who can become pregnant means that her body cycles through a variety of shapes quickly and she must relearn it every few months.
When the ramp shakes, announcing their final occupant, her son hiccups and starts wailing. Aneka gathers him into her arms. The Midnight Angel has not exchanged more than three words with Namor and hates to break her record silence, so she and Ayo barricade themselves in the cockpit with L’Tawi. M’Baku has to remain for a U.N. conference so it is just them two as passengers.
“Husband.”
“Wife.”
“You look angry.”
“I am wowed by your observant eye.” Namor proves himself a calm god in control of his faculties. She tests this by buttoning up the top of her dress only enough to cover her nipple. A lingering drop of milk turns the white fabric translucent.
His lips thin. “Shuri. My wife. I desire as many as you do and more but never at the cost of your life.”
She examines her white-painted nails. They grew longer during her bedrest and she hopes to keep it that way until Black Panther duties resume. “I was asking for more fritters. They were delicious. Talokan’s chefs could learn from surface world creativity and I am sure King M’Baku will lend you his chefs for training.”
“First, you abhor bananas. Second, you may be the strongest mortal woman with a body of vibranium—”
“I am.”
“But this many in such a short time and post-injury is asking to be kept from Black Panther duties.”
Now why did she let him in? He’s worse than Okoye. She tells him as much.
He stares in a way that makes her cheeks heat and her heart slam against her rib cage. “Is this a political maneuver? Has Wakanda made demands from you for more cubs?”
She bites the inside of her cheek and narrows her eyes. The door from the cockpit slides open at the same time.
“I thought you liked—” her tongue wrestles in the short pause to decide on his turn of phrase, “—taking root in me.”
Ayo promptly pivots on her foot. The door closes.
Namor bristles. If he were an actual serpent, he would be hissing. “Is this the time for foreplay?”
“You meet a pretty woman and you forget your wife?”
He blinks. She hears his ego inflate and lets go of hope of ever recovering from this.
When his face darkens, he starts to prowl.
Her back is firm against the wall. There’s no space to retreat; she stands up, shakes life into her legs, and moves a few paces towards the cockpit. A panther knows when to escape and regroup.
“In aatan, Shuri of Wakanda.” His voice turns silky. “In how many ways do you want to tie yourself to me? Do you still doubt I am yours?” He begins to circle her. She mirrors the movement, her lungs quivering and stomach knotting. He thumbs the sole button on his suit. “I have wondered many nights what woman would condemn herself, possibly forever, to me for a girl she barely knew. What woman would come to me two years silent after a well-earned defeat to force me to wed her—”
“There was no force, in íichan, though I understand the fantasies that appeal to you.”
The air between them electrifies, which is a silly pronouncement because she knows how electricity works.
“—but the Black Panther is very difficult to ignore and impossible to fall victim to. And this woman, you see, brings me to grieve with her, and then asks me to kiss her in her childhood home—”
“If you have a point, please make it before I am bored to tears.”
They continue their circle. She tenses her hand, claw-like. He rolls his neck. The button comes undone. His chest is as beautiful as the first day she laid eyes on him. One day, she will look his age, and the next older.
“—and pleads with me with the firmness of the queen she should be, to enter her over and over, to give her more.”
In the very purposeful pause in his words, she acknowledges that she’s wet—a clinical observation.
He grins. It’s a smile that doesn’t crinkle the corners of his lips, and his teeth look like they are ready to chomp on her. “I have my answer.”
She should do something before she starts panting. She bends over to unclasp a heel strap, grateful that Okoye succeeded in making her adopt some modicum of tradition, fully prepared to turn it into a weapon.
She straightens, one dangerous heel in hand. “What, Bast tell, is your point?”
He hums while shrugging off his blazer and unclasping the copilli from his ear. It falls to a floor in a show she hasn't seen before; he is always careful with his possessions. It is an infuriatingly attractive display of a serpent shedding its skin to toy with its prey.
“I think, that I have been made out to be a worshiper.”
“You…have lost your mind.” Very good, Shuri. Genius hey-ho brain.
She makes the mistake of blinking and then he is closer to her than propriety with her Dora sisters just paces away should allow. They are already airborne. Maybe her panther suit can handle a tumble from two thousand meters. Maybe the ancestors will decide to summon her to the plane right this moment.
“Ah, I also think,” he lifts her chin, “it is good practice to be honest with oneself.” Her heart races. Can he hear her thoughts now? What was in the wine? If she screams, Aneka and Ayo will appear with a spear at his throat. Except, L’Tawi will wake, and that sounds like an acceptable excuse.
He nips her ear and whispers, “This is all you. Did you think you could tolerate fucking anyone but me?”
Her heel drops.
-
"Not the dress, not the dress—"
He palms the dip in her hips. "I'll have a new one made—"
"I can't sit three more hours on this flight naked—"
"Really, aatan, you can."
"Would your people follow you into battle if they saw you naked? Aneka and Ayo..." Her words turn into mewls. She bites the back of her hand to keep whatever else inside was threatening to leave.
His mouth has rendered her confused. His people followed him in shorts. They obeyed him without question.
He spins her into where the emergency first aid kids are. She could probably find a small pair of scissors and stab him. I can do that with my claws. Bast, where are her brain cells?
"For the slight of thinking I can do more with surface woman than tolerate them," he proclaims and licks a long stripe from shoulder blade to shoulder blade, "for the compliment of your jealously," her thong hits the floor, "for your devoted pursual of a god," he yanks the sleeves down further to give him space to bite into, “No mortal is good enough for my Princess.”
Under his forceful grip, her hands are placed on the shelf in front of her, on either side of a glass case holding medicines. She is sure Aneka and Ayo know what is going on. If not from the zipping of his pants, then the lack of fighting noises. Bast damn sleek non-disruptive Wakandan engines. Her buttons are threatening to pop and the fear of having to deboard with nothing on, or her suit which would cause unnecessary panic, keeps her from moving her arms and tearing the already taut fabric.
She whines. ”Not a Princess—still a surface mortal—"
"A queen. However it would happen, you were meant to be a queen," he spits and there is a rubbing movement that precludes him splitting her in two.
-
Aneka and Ayo engage in nonsense conversation meant to fill the silence that Shuri blankly watching her husband, who is missing the outfit her team so carefully put together, wading back into the ocean leaves. When the last of the ripples settle, Aneka hands L'Tawi to Ayo. They wait for the pair to fade into the distance before Shuri speaks.
“The Dora should mandate guidance for him to depart directly for Talokan via underwater current apparatuses from foreign non-combative events.”
“We will also institute a restriction on white clothes for you. It is the color of funerals even if you match.” Aneka starts to walk in the direction of her home.
“I sometimes wear white in my lab,” calls Shuri.
“Perhaps he should not visit your lab either. Are you going to kill him?” Aneka asks over her shoulder. “I lost my uncle in that flood.”
“I am going to kill him,” Shuri promises. The part of her devoted to her children shakes in doubt.
Aneka nods. “One or two more children should do it.”
Her mind doesn’t waver. She will take from him as she pleases.
-
He is stagnant and unchanging. How does that mesh with the softness melting him day by day?
Izel begins to speak in full sentences. L’Tawi runs. And she tries to forget in order to make this all real.
-
“Are you sure he is of my seed?”
He’s joking. It’s a poor joke, as if she lets in just anyone.
Their third, Kaax, is a pure replica of T’Challa in his youth. For that reason alone, she forgives his butterfly ankle wings and appoints him to Toussaint’s mentorship when the king-to-be is of age. Nakia agrees.
The years have not made Nakia and Namor cordial. In fact, they are glacial. Toussaint’s eyes have only seen K’uk’ulkan, the king married to his auntie who takes him whale riding. All he hears from Nakia is Namor who drowned his grandmother.
Shuri makes a system. After a bit of finagling and a promise to rip apart a coal mine with him, her husband agrees for only one more person to know his name.
Toussaint loves his uncle Cha’ah Toh when he’s in Talokan. He even makes Attuma go gooey with rancorous shark-like howls. When home in Haiti, he repeatedly curses the Feathered Serpent God until his mother forgets he spent the weekend shark hunting.
Shuri makes no such distinctions. Sometimes, she spars with Namor, stopping only when she wins. He makes her a better fighter; she cannot fly like he does, but she can leap and pounce. She improves his spear when he rejects her offer to make him a necklace similar to hers with retractable armor, some things are simply too sacred for him, and proceeds to thwack him in place of ripping his wings out.
When anniversaries of her mother’s death come around, she lights matches and forces K’uk’ulkan to his knees and lets him stop praying into her only when his mouth runs dry. She remains unconvinced by many of Talokan's rituals, but finds a type of solace in them. She'll be in the ancestral realm, someday.
Sometimes, she sits with Cha'ah Toh and they simply continue in silence, him writing or painting, her reading. When they do speak, he tells her about his childhood, and because she cannot talk much about hers without falling into the taboo, she tells him about her trips abroad with her brother: going to Oakland thinking he was taking her to Coachella, grabbing a Starbucks after a U.N. conference, helping him chase thugs in South Korea. She tells him about graduating university at thirteen even though he has little concept of what a university is, her favorite lab techs and the shenanigans they get up to in their spare time, and the alien invasion where she was in charge of trying to remove a magic rock from a robot. Rarely, but it happens, she makes love to Cha’ah Toh. He is slow and gentle in assembling her broken pieces together that she meets him with delirious fervor. She languishes in the aftermath, trying to keep her mouth shut in a last defense from a secret threatening to escape after he says,
“I love you, my wife.”
She trembles and resolves to never make love again. Except she does, over and over.
No one told her that making love can be violent, too.
-
Shuri has gone living underwater two weeks without seeking him out physically. It is a record. It doesn’t mean she is any less attracted to him; it is that her heart has widened to enjoy all that he is.
They sit on a whale, her in her watersuit cradling Kaax, Namor holding L’Tawi, and Izel clutching onto his neck. His whale takes them to the chilling waters at the tip of South America. They watch from a distance Chilean fisherman hook fresh-water crab onto their hooks.
“Will they do that to me?” Izel cries. Namor is red. Shuri shushes her in Xhosa.
“No. King M’Baku calls you that because you are as quick as a crab.”
Her first-born points a chubby finger at the crab. “But uncle crab is not moving.”
Namor is quick to lead them towards Mikurajima. They stop periodically in small Talokan towns, villages really. The Talokanil host them in their homes and kneel to Namor. They leave their children with them while Namor accompanies her to the surface every night to replenish her oxygen. Sometimes, she wants to be left alone and he obliges seventy percent of the time.
The dark skies, unhindered by pollution, are beautiful. She thinks of her mother and sends a plethora of apologies for spurning their limited time together. Her only relief is that the last thing her mother heard from her, in a playful act during impending war, was to say love you, bye.
In Mikurajima, Izel sits herself and L'Tawi upon a dolphin and maneuvers it in circles. The little girl wears the grin of a mouse who has come upon a great wheel of cheese.
“What are you thinking?” Namor rubs his face against Shuri’s. He moisturizes his beard with her honey lotion so it is a pleasant sensation.
She grins wryly. “She reminds me of when American law enforcement chased me into the Atlantic. I ran ahead of Okoye and took a motorcycle down Harvard Bridge.”
Izel has had much practice on dolphins from her beloved Namora; L’Tawi, the only one without wings, shouts and struggles to hang on. Kaax, barely a year old, is loud in his attempts for attention. Namor swings him onto his back as he looks at her, curious, and she explains. He’s laughing by the end of it.
“Your water bombs almost killed me,” she mutters.
“I will declare war on them.”
“Mama.” Kaax declares with finality at Namor.
Shuri grouses. “Poor mistake. Your Baba is not nearly is pretty as your Mama.”
“He knows who is better of the two.”
“Oh, you self-obsessed plonker.” The latest evolution in her colorful vocabulary has come from Riri's British sitcom recommendations. They’re fun to watch while she punches someone’s eye out during counter-raids. In recent months, the Avengers have called her for help too.
Namor steals a kiss from her lips when the dolphin is the furthest in its circumambulation. “I only mean you, but I am glad you think I am pretty.”
“Pity me. I committed an American felony in evading the cops, all for this.” She motions to all of him.
“Such grand sacrifices come to me, in aatan.”
Their conversation teeters close to the edges of taboo. The moment sours.
It is hard to avoid altogether; so much of who she is, is tied to the pivotal years after returning from the snap and before making him yield. So much of what brought them together hinges on the most tragic events of her life. As they grow closer, a balloon between them inflates. It sputters. It will pop soon.
For now, she ignores it. She thinks not of satisfying the embers in her chest but the pleasure of a growing family that she asks the monster she loves for one more.
-
“More. More, Cha’aaaah, more. Yes.”
“More what?” He slowly pulls out and thrusts in. “More of this? I can give you as much as you want in aatan. Look at me and tell me.”
She grabs his fingers so hard his bones grind and places them over her clit. “One more.” She lifts her hips. “One more.”
She sits up, alive from consuming all of him. “One more.”
-
“That’s the problem then.”
Shuri ponders this. “I don’t think I would…tolerate him if he was anything but this.” Tolerate is a sad word, the only word she can say out loud. It does not begin to grasp at the depth of the oceans her chest is able to hold.
Nakia lifts a slender eyebrow. “Perhaps you can ask the wedding officiant for returns.”
Convinced by Toussaint’s increasing distant behavior, Nakia and her son are visiting Wakanda. She is a recognizable face so Shuri has volunteered to take him around, passing him off as a prodigious intern-in-training from Kenya.
Now at the start of her thirties, Shuri has grown old enough to know to take advantage of the love offered to her. In the dead of the night, when the ladies convene in a training room under the palace, she confesses in the hopes the action itself makes the problem sound ridiculous and easy to do away with.
“You do have a fondness, eh,” Okoye exchanges a knowing look with Nakia, “for carrying his children.”
She protests this with a Jabari-like fist pound into the table they sit at. A crack spirals from where her pinky finger made contact. “I’m an orphan and an only child now. What if I just wanted a large family?”
“And he’s your only option?” Aneka has a point. She’s with a woman.
“You never mentioned marriage or children once.” Okoye adds. “When the other children at primary school played house, you scared them away from you by singing the digits of Pi. I told your brother I was worried you would pass to the ancestors with your lab listed on your marriage certificate.”
She rolls her eyes. “Ah, that’s foolishness. Remember Sergeant Barnes?”
Ayo frowns at his name. There was some scuffle some years back that she hasn’t gotten over.
“So,” Aneka pulls a bottle of Wakandan mead out of an underground cooler. “Who is ready for tonight? I have invited the palace attendants and the Dora to join.”
Shuri looks away sheepishly and places a hand on her barely swollen belly. Ayo twitches, which is the equivalent of an eye roll.
-
“Crab cake. Shrimp boy. Mollusk. And..” M'Baku regards the new bundle in her arms decisively, “Lobster roll. I am running out of seafood. Shall I neuter him?”
Izel starts crying. Okoye ushers her out of the Jabari throne room, and Attuma follows with the boys thrown over his shoulders like—get this—sacks of potatoes, as M’Baku’s face goes ashen.
“Has the fish father poisoned his school against me?”
“No. He speaks of you a total of absolutely never times.”
She should be resting in the palace. The Black Panther’s accelerated healing reduces post-partum thrombosis risks to three weeks. Two weeks in, she decided she was sick of daily check ups and reduced lab hours. Her children also think mummy dearest is their favorite parent only when she is busy and Namor is on a worldwide hunt to eliminate all of Klaue’s remaining networks (an idea he proposed that not a single Border Tribe member was opposed to), so she itches to leave and deposit her water loving children near their pet manatee.
Regardless, Okoye insisted they all be blessed even by Hanuman. Namor sided with her. It’s a fight she doesn’t pick.
Shuri coughs. “Your names are off, by the way. L’Tawi is growing at a rate that will make him the tallest of the four. We can only wish to staple Kaax’s mouth shut.”
“Your daughter’s is apt.”
“One for three is not a boast-worthy statistic.”
“Two of four.” He points to the red blankets gifted by the Merchant tribe for the newest addition to her family. “He is idle.”
Shuri readjusts the blankets to reveal a winged ankle. M’Baku looks to be one pointy ear away from falling to his knees in tears.
“He might not fly.” It gives her no comfort. “The other one is deformed. I was careful…probability gives data, but what chance it falls on ultimately can’t be predicted.”
The King swipes her dangling feet away. It’s a years-old routine they have established. “You have become very wise.”
“I have four children now.”
“As do I.”
She lurches so far out of her seat that her panther instincts alone save Wasar from an unintended roll (hah!) across Jabari floors. “Eh?”
M’Baku rubs his brow sagely. “I thought you knew of this. I threatened to feed the white man to them, remember?”
“We thought that to be a poor attempt at a joke. You know, breaking the tension. He looked to pee his pants.”
“My wife passed with the young one’s birth," his eyes glisten. "Her sister helps raise them.”
Shuri is mildly offended—surely the shared burden of leading Wakanda meant exchanging insider secrets. “Well. I am floored. Look at me, the council knows my personal life enough to sell fodder for a five season net drama."
“Ah, ah, self flattery. Interesting choice of habit to pick up from your husband.”
She looks at the ceiling. It's made of smooth polished wood, and the gorilla faces carved into it watch her. “Heh. Be thankful I did not propose to marry you.”
“It would have failed. I cannot kiss the mouth of a meat-eater.”
“That your first concern is that and not the inability to stop the world’s biggest threat worries me.”
“Hm. Why not? The strongest mortal alive—and the feline.”
“Eh, the suit would not fit you. It can’t be made with furs.” She plops Wasar in his hands. “Do your blessing business or whatever. If you want to dangle a semi-immortal child, pick Kaax.”
She hits a wall as she rounds the exit. It is Attuma, and he watches her as a shark does a crustacean. His hands clench imperceptibly.
He lifts his hands and opens his palms at her. She does the same.
-
Attuma departs directly for Talokan. Nakia wishes to see her new nephew first. Before the aircraft reaches Nakia’s beachfront house, Shuri pulls Okoye aside.
“How much English did you teach him?”
“Attuma? A sizeable amount. We can discuss the best materials to sharpen our spears with in either language. Why?”
She senses an impending catastrophe. She forces herself to focus on Toussaint, taller than her now, Nakia who looks eager to return to permanently return to Wakanda in a few years, and all of the joy around her.
-
Namor drums his fingers on his table.
When he sits there, he is always writing, painting, carving, sharpening, or something else productive, but always is easy to disprove. It takes one example to disprove an affirmative statement, and her example is this: his choice of activity is to pour his eyes over her slowly. It is not productive. The children were left outside with Attuma, Namora, and the attendant—only one, Namor and her both never want their children to grow up stuffy—and she only has her bags to unpack. He watches her send a message to Nakia thanking her, Okoye to confirm her arrival. He blinks a total of two times in time she takes to declutter the wardrobe and change into a comfortable dress.
Is it better to watch a serpent assess its attack and wait with baited breath, or preserve the element of surprise by willingly closing the gap?
She made a god hers and lived. Fearless Shuri of Wakanda closes the drawer of the wardrobe with more force than necessary. It makes him blink a third time. "Which is it?"
He is taking a moment to re-strategize in light of her audacity, she knows.
She continues, hoping her voice remains flat and devoid of emotion. "Which one demands your ire? Jealously or betrayal?"
She turns in time to find him rolling a quill over his knuckles. If he wasn't so, him, he would make a fantastic War Dog trainer.
When he speaks, his voice is inhuman. "Have your fantasies of every Wakandan man, even, and I will make you forget them. The brute is a king to our children but not to you. As for betrayal, I have long known you see me as your enemy."
"Well. Then it is a waste to say that it was a joke that does not cross languages, like how I can't understand your socializing with Attuma. M'Baku is much older. He is my brother. Bast, I should not have to tell you this."
He stands from the table. "I am old. None of this surprises me," sure, okay, "No, panther, none of this demands my ire. It is a waste of my time and yours to convince an unshakeable woman when she has willingly blinded herself."
"To what?" Her challenge is a plunge into the verbial abyss. No, he should tell her—what does he think of her? Who does he think she is?
"When given my first set of options, you chose Namor before my other names without hesitation. You made me your enemy," he starts to take a step towards her. She is faster. She meets him across the table. "...thinking you could delay the inevitable. I will admit that you fought admirably and I was ensnared sooner than I expected, but you, in aatan, are a monster who doesn't know it. Every breadth of you craves me. Every one of those—nerve cells wants all of this. I am tired of waiting and seeing you punish yourself for a little greed."
"I—" Don't, is a lie. Can't admits everything he can never know. It is too much mercy he doesn't deserve. "No. No, you are wrong. Five hundred years and you never took a wife or had children? You met me and became selfish. You tell yourself this is for Talokan and sweep away your actions as nobility. Maybe they are noble. Maybe your love for Talokan and our family is true. You're not a boy without love. But your capability for love is tarnished because it is a twisted love. How can love be so violent? How can you say you love me when your love took my mother?"
The table cracks.
The last syllable has destroyed him.
She will not regret crossing the line that she herself drew, because why is who she is have to be so merciful?
She is done.
“K’uk’ulkan!”
Namora’s shriek makes their heads snap to the entrance of their hut simultaneously. The warrior is shaking.
They rush to the lake that shuttles all Talokanil between the city and their god-king. Izel and L’Tawi are old enough to know something is wrong. Their attendant yanks them from the lake and covers their eyes.
"I—sorry," the attendant says in slurred Mayan, Griot translating every other word, "was—taking—to the gardens—and he—" It is routine. Their children visit the gardens on a weekly basis.
Kaax thinks it is a game and wails in competition with Namora. Then, Namor roars in a loss of control that scares them all, Attuma most.
Wasar’s chest is unmoving.
Namor is faster than Shuri but she has had years more practice with her beads. Griot bursts to life listing numbers and percentages. Her husband yells something in Mayan; Namora dives jerkily into the lake, Attuma races into one of the tunnels, and Shuri has no cognizance of what her muscles begin to do. They act in reflex.
A bead is placed between his lips. Clothes are torn. Her husband begins chest compressions, his cloak dragging on the ground around the baby. He loses control, again, and she knows he didn’t break anything because babies are more soft cartilage than bone; her ancestors cannot be that cruel; and Wasar must live and breathe to see the love she is capable of now.
Water seeps from his lips. Wasar's eyes open. They are her mother’s eyes: dark, angular, clear, full of depth.
Namor chokes out a cry. Shuri falls onto her haunches and breathes with her baby, their baby, willing the air from her lungs to move into his.
-
Their youngest cannot breathe under water.
Shuri is flummoxed; she has bathed him before and there was no sign of ailment the entire journey from Haiti to Talokan. Her other children were born able to pull oxygen from water. With Izel, she ran a genetic analysis and confirmed it before the child even left her womb. By L’Tawi's time, she was hesitant, but after a bath Namor took him to the river and tried one second, five second, twenty second tests in increments. By the time Kaax arrived, it was rote expectation.
They got careless. They put their past first and future second.
The doctors are unsure what happened. Shuri nearly shouts at them to leave before Nakia places a stern arm on her that she swats away with a little too much strength.
“Panther! Get ahold of yourself. The others need you.”
Shuri stops.
“Your mother was elegant and she was not beyond losing control.” Nakia’s knowing gaze intensifies. “Your face just now. It looked as hers did when she came to me.”
“What do I do?” Wasar is on ventilation. His tiny chest moves only with the help of a machine twice his size. “Tell me Nakia, daughter of Yaa.”
Nakia hugs her tight. Shuri apologizes on the way to her lab.
-
“His genome is not like the others.” Shuri reads from her screens. “It is imperfect. We should have done a further analysis when we saw the abnormal wing growth. His gills and bloodwork are fine. The problem is that his lungs are chimeric: he has some cells that are fully human, and others that are Talokanil and can only transfer oxygen through water. His ability to breathe under water comes in sporadic, short, and random bursts. His lungs are atrophying.”
To all of this, Namor utters: “No.”
She is too tired for this. She is thirty, an orphan, an auntie, a wife, and a mother and she has no patience for—
“Genetics cannot be imperfect. Our children are never imperfect, there is no such thing.”
She raises a challenging eyebrow, voice rolling low with anger. “Surface or air?”
He hesitates. Then his countenance turns firm.
“Surface or air, Wasar is my son.” He places his forehead on hers. “Our son.”
In the widening rift between them, the balloon expands and begins to ripple.
-
He has hope. He watches their children bob in the river and returns ask how far along she is in her work. He calls upon and consults with Chaac, then proposes helping make a tiny ship for the little one since the baby cannot operate his own suit.
“Cha’ah Toh. I just want him breathing on his own again.” Her eyes are swollen. Her toes ache from standing.
He sends his advisor to bring food and places his hands on her back to massage her muscles. After he finishes, he reads over neatly collected notes on his new beads and makes cold comments about everyone’s competency but hers while forcing her to rest on the couch.
“Bring him to Talokan.” He says finally. “The methods here are ineffective. This says his lungs should be at seventy percent capacity by now but cells have not repaired themselves at all.”
She shakes her head. “Your healers have already tried what they know. He needs the support of mechanical ventilation and Talokan cannot support the electricity and equipment required.”
“Yet it is not working.”
It’s not a slight against her efforts; she knows it and still feels the need to defend herself. “In Wakanda, one rarely becomes so sick that they need these machines because my beads catch their diseases early. That makes the doctors less prepared to deal with issues like this. I have read about stem cell treatments in America—“
"And their violent science?"
"We are dealing with the unknown," she snaps. "You and I have made four permutations of the completely new, and forgive me. I didn't have time to invent vibranium-led regenerative medicine."
“I am not a child for you to be speaking like this to me.”
“Why are you so—“
A tear rolls down her cheek. Another, and another. She did not cry those times in the grove with him. She did not cry when her right side was blown through and with it a living bundle of cells. He has seen her cry exactly once before and she meant to keep it that way.
He folds her into him. “Shh, he will live.” He kisses her, hard, until the salt of her tears is indistinguishable from the taste of him.
-
America has possible bases for treatment where Wakanda does not because while the Wakandan Design Group boasted forty strong, its head was former Princess, Black Panther, protector and wife and mother, was too fucking busy to enjoy herself with such trivialities.
That is what she tells the council. She also tells them to off themselves when they question why she can’t teach Wakanda’s doctors to do it here.
She's normally not so rude, only playful and sarcastic, though surely she can be forgiven considering she is a mother.
“Okay,” M’Baku starts plainly, “the bus principle. If the a bus ran over the Black Panther and she were to die—“
“She cannot die from that,” Namor intones. Shuri beams at him.
“—how much would be in jeopardy? Too much, yes. That means that too much responsibility and knowledge sits on one head. That is careless. Who let her bleed dry?” M'Baku questions no one in particular.
Namor taps his foot once. “Good king. This should have been asked years ago.”
“Ah, and what of the man who made her tiny body carry four in seven years?”
Indignant, Shuri and Namor speak at once.
“I can punch through steel.”
“She acts of her own pleasure.”
Zawavari tilts her head and voices her input, “It is good, my king. The Golden Tribe lives on with many.”
M’Baku frowns. He dismisses the rest of the council, to their chagrin, and stands. He is taller and broader than Namor but the years have worn on him. Gray flecks in his beard, wrinkles on his forehead and around his eyes, a weariness held at bay in waiting for Toussaint.
The King is quiet in his observation. She knows when he understands that she is a mother even before the Black Panther because he sucks air through his teeth.
“Panther, travel and do what you need to. You do not need prior approval. My condition is that you take one of the Dora with you.” M’Baku turns to Namor. “Can you extend your stay here? There are some issues that would be best you are debriefed on.”
Her husband swivels the beads at his wrist. “Then what was the use of this infernal voice?”
“Debrief in person. Wakanda may need to call on your muscles.”
Shuri grows serious. Namor’s interest is piqued.
-
Back in the lab, he stares, voice hoarse. “Wakanda did not ask you to give your womb to me.”
“No. Who taught you English? Quit speaking of my body parts like that.”
He gets a faraway glint to his eyes. “You alone wished for them. Your nephew sufficed.”
“Yes, I thought you knew. Now move. I have to review this medical journal before I go—”
He spins her around and presses her into the lab table, hands clamping the stainless steel on her side of her waist. His hands clamp on her hips and he thrusts against her backside in a gentle roll.
”You wanted this. You are greedy," he says, half to himself.
She tries to turn and see what in Bast's name is he talking about, and then she remembers their quarrel and resists the urge to roll her eyes. "Insecure."
"Minx."
"Flirt."
"My love."
She stills. He moves her braids—her hair is as long as it used to be during her brother's reign as king—to rest over one shoulder and places his lips at the nape of her neck. He rolls his hips again. It has been three months since Wasar became ill and she has work to do, needs every part of her focused. But it's like her lab has turned traitorous and preserved them in a little island of her own. Her body demands she wants this until her mind follows, but she owes it to principle and pride to at least say, "Wasar."
“I know,” he says softly. The syllables tickle her neck.
“What if he doesn’t make it?”
“He will.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. I do know why—because he is the son of the the Black Panther and Feathered Serpent God. Now,” he thrusts again at a higher angle. It pushes her onto her toes. “What is one more?”
He squeezes her breasts. She pumps twice a day and they are still sore and swollen. She knows these are hormones too, ones that affect him, but he has always seemed taken with her chest big or small. She bites the inside of her cheek through a breathy moan, her hands splayed on the table in front of her. There's the Journal of Respiratory Medicine; some papers from Switzerland; a brochure from Mayo Clinic.
“Now?” she moans.
“Now.”
“It’s—dangerous.”
“That was not a problem for you before.”
"It was for you."
He bites her shoulder. “I also did not know then you genuinely ached to be so…full of me.”
Her attempt to elbow him is rendered feeble by the coil of desire shooting up her spine. “Six months. We need to focus.”
“We can practice from now.”
She bucks her hips. Closes her eyes when he bunches her dress at her waist and shucks off her underwear. “It’s not you, to clarify. It’s your kin.”
He sounds exasperated while toying with his belt. The gold digs into the swell of her ass. “My cock or what comes of it. It is the same.”
She should listen to M’Baku’s offer to castrate him. Lots of shoulds over the years. None she carried out.
He slides inside. Embraces her from behind and murmurs into her ear in his native tongue, sweet, filthy things.
“Come for me, in aatan.” He instructs.
-
Everything falls apart when America arrives at their borders with threat of war.
She receives the news on her way out of a meeting with Dr. Bruce Banner where he's currently living in America's East Coast. He has seven PhDs and one of them is in biomedical engineering, and though his expertise is in gamma radiation, she hopes the PhD in biochemistry offers some insight into stem cell therapy for super powered beings.
When her beads ping and the Dora guarding her sends her to the airship, she calls Dr. Banner and warns he’s coming with her right now.
“To Wakanda?” He’s big, wears glasses, and is very hulky.
“No, to Kansas.”
The news comes in pieces during the four hour flight. While she, the Dora, and War Dogs were chasing disparate groups around the globe and protecting their centers for years, a growing team behind the scenes set their eyes on the prize: Wakanda itself. The tip came from Ross, who apologizes fruitlessly and claims he was blindsided too.
As she rushes to her son’s side, Namor rushes out. He is not shaking with rage. His face is calm; he smiles a wrinkle-less smile. His eyes are flat.
She knows the look. It is the look of someone whose hopes aren’t crushed because they never had them in the first place.
“Namor.” She stops him firmly. The Dora are already protecting their borders. Her techs are fully powering the force fields. Dr. Banner hovers awkwardly behind her. “Talokan, Wakanda, and our children.”
He gives her no verbal response. He kisses Wasar on the forehead, sends out an order into his beads the way she taught him and he eagerly learned, and leaps into the sky.
-
“We can use your husband’s stem cells.” Dr. Banner rifles through the printed copies of her work. She hasn’t given him a set of beads; she has some standards. “It’s extremely risky. The literature supports stem cell therapy efficacy for treating pulmonary fibrosis. I helped the team at Mayo Clinic work with a few patients. We take a sample of his stem cells, differentiate them into alveolar epithelial cells to promote lung structural repair.”
“And?”
He falters. “It’s possible.”
That’s enough for her. “Why his cells?”
“It doesn’t have to be, but since your son already has some cells with—uh—liquid breathing capacity, we can increase our chances for success.”
“Water or air doesn’t matter to me.” If Wasar were to turn out to only live under water, that is where she would be. Mama. Please help me.
“Also,” Dr. Banner rubs his arm. He’s the epitome of an older scientist; awkward and somewhat out of place, mighty green-ness aside. “How strong is your husband exactly?”
She tells him about M’Baku’s hulk comment. He guffaws and continues his work. Outside in the distance, the battle continues.
She stands to join them. “He will agree. Ask my assistants for whatever you need to prepare.”
He lifts a hand in farewell and mumbles to himself.
“Dr. Banner.”
The hulking man pauses.
“Hypothetically, could one create cells unable to absorb oxygen at all?”
“Not hypothetical. There are a number of medical conditions where blood cells are unable to pick up oxygen. No hemoglobin, misshaped cells, sickle cell anemia…” He fades into his work.
“Thank you, Dr. Banner.”
-
“You’re needed in the lab.”
“In aatan.” He throws a helicopter into the trees. She winces. “Your people need you in the fight.”
“And so I am here. Wasar needs you. I sent the details to your beads. A bone marrow biopsy is painful but with your healing speed it will be quick.”
"You trust this science?"
Another aircraft takes flight over them and he sends a spear through it. She suppresses the urge to wring her hands together or, imagine in their place, his neck. "We have no other choice."
“My wife, I will go, but do not think I am a dog to send around as you please. Your enemy are the people here, at your door, driven by ugly greed—”
She doesn’t care if she assumes again. He has never had hesitation cost him before. “Have your battle. Right now, I’m not thinking about what the world might think of Wakanda or international tribunals. I’m thinking about the only surface world Wasar might roam if he cannot breathe with you. So, in íichan, I am not ordering you, I am telling you what you should already know.”
His expression is sad. He is disappointed in her. “When, in aatan, have I never put my children first?”
They hover more dangerously than ever to unspeakable in their relationship. He leaves and the balloon pops in his wake.
-
Death is not the end. She knows this now. She has stopped blaming herself for failure long ago, because some possibilities, even when there are chances of success, are not in her control.
Wasar is buried next to his grandmother.
Namor floods half of Florida.
-
He returns late. She has spent the day grinding her teeth and sending every last aircraft full of supplies, food, and medicine to America. She flew one ship herself, her beads turned off, letting the cold bite into her face in penance. She bore the looks of her people that said you enabled him. You were supposed to reign him in. It was your job to stop him. Where were you when you should have been protecting?
“I was burying my son.”
Many countries would not do it for Wakanda, she knows. But many countries spared them no attention when Thanos turned half the world into ash for five years.
There is goodness in the world. He will rob them all of the choice to choose it.
He pulls her flush against him in the dark. Their hammock sways with the shift.
“In aatan.”
“In íichan.”
“I will keep us safe. I will do what must be done.” He kisses her on the temple. She lets him.
She wakes up before he does and stands in front of the vanity. She is too empty for theatrics but she knows what happened.
She got careless.
I am the monster needed to kill him.
-
The world is looking for the how of it but Wakanda funnels their efforts in relief aid. The Avengers, the Midnight Angels, the Dora, they all convene. She does and sends all that she can. Wakanda has been flooded before. She is familiar with the protocol.
The Angels and Dora are quiet around her. Again, how many will live with secrets for her sake?
Aneka comes to her again. “When it is time, call on me.”
She breaks. Confesses. “What if it is time and I can’t?”
The Angel lifts her chin. The ground is sludge. Bodies are still being found two weeks later, emaciated and unrecognizable. The air reeks of flesh and mold. No children hurt, of course, never children.
“You can. You must. Think of this and your mother,” she lifts a finger to her chest, “and it will keep the light aflame.”
-
“Do you regret it?” She asks one day over dinner in Talokan. Their children play outside. Izel is the most cognizant of a missing brother; L'Tawi has become quieter if possible, and Kaax doesn't understand why everyone around him has dimmed in playfulness.
Her husband sinks his teeth into one half of a mango. He washes it down with chocolate. There is no compatibility there but he forces it to work.
“I regret that it had to be done, and I regret the pain it has caused.” He thinks she's referring to the colonizers.
“Was it worth it?”
He watches her. Licks the chocolate from the rim of his cup while he does so. “I…do not know yet. They will not bother Wakanda for a long time.”
His edges can soften but his core cannot change. All she will ever get from him for drowning her mother is regret. Never an apology. Never a plea for forgiveness. There is only so much she can concede without splintering herself.
How will she tell their children? Who would be worse in their eyes: the monster of a father or the woman who loved one?
It should have been harder, she thinks, to make the decision that she does. It settles a different kind of ache.
“Alright.”
He is surprised. She forgot how much she loves to see his little jolts, head tilts in bewilderment, curiosity flitting across his face.
She dabs her mouth and stands. Holds out her hand. “It’s been over six months. One more.”
He slips his fingers into her hand. They are not too slender and not too bulky. They click into the spaces between hers perfectly.
“In aatan. This is not like you. Your people are upset with me and call for a trial.”
“Your life is only mine to take,” she interrupts. “Why do they not understand that? If I, the one you have harmed most in this entire world, can have mercy on you, then who can challenge me?”
In their hammock, he kisses her carefully and leaves delicate marks all over her. “No one,” he affirms, placing a kiss on her forehead, “No one.”
When they are done, he tells her:
“I saw my mother on the beach that day. When you put the spear to my neck, she came. For five hundred years I could never reach her. She came to tell me to accept your hand and has never returned since.”
She traces circles into his shoulder. “Our mothers are our weaknesses.”
The words are carelessly chosen. She has already broken the agreement that tied together their fantasy.
“They are strengths, not weaknesses. It is not weak to have something to protect.”
She draws out a long breath. “What else, Cha’ah Toh of Talokan, is your strength?”
His wandering gaze stops and falls to her. “If after all this time you still do not know, you jeopardize your long-held title of genius, my wife, Black Panther, Princess Shuri of Wakanda.”
The air rushes out of her.
-
She gave him everything for this. It’s worth it. It has to be.
-
At the end of it all, when their youngest is of age, and Izel is training to lead Talokan; L’Tawi becomes Shuri’s studious acolyte; Kaax is Toussaint’s advisor; when Wakanda becomes home again and America temporarily leaves them alone because of all their aid; when she knows she might love him more than anything else in the world by the end of the decade and her love would doom the surface world, she takes no chances.
Aneka sneaks her one of her first Midnight Angel daggers. It's covered with a substance that will inject rapidly multiplying cells with the inability to pick up oxygen throughout a bloodstream.
He visits her in Wakanda’s citadel as usual, as she resides here during the start of fellowships she oversees. His lips curl into a smile as they always do around her. She embraces him as she always does. The dagger sits in a secret compartment in her headboard.
“In íichan.”
“In aatan.”
“The difference between me and you,” she sighs as they cuddle after she makes love to him, “is I found the right moment to reveal who I am.”
Shuri, don’t. Don’t bury your heart again. The warning is in her mother’s voice.
“I love you, Namor.”
He smiles as the dagger stops his heart, the words I’m sorry etched on his tongue.