Chapter Text
The guards were staring at her, nary a word uttered. In Shuri's experience, it was when things were quiet that the most alarming developments tended to unravel.
Riri, for her part, munched on half of a mango, the pulp dribbling from her mouth. Her dark eyes flitted from the handmaid sharing food with her to the guards standing at the entrance of their glowworm room, all very foreign and blue-looking. Having had her fair share of experiences with bright-colored aliens and magic, Shuri remained unruffled, though walking through magic portals was somewhat less ominous than a damp, dim room hundreds of feet underground with only limestone-vibranium alloy rock formations keeping them abreast waves with the force of a thousand tons.
“What’s that?” Riri pointed to Shuri's wrist with sticky fingers.
Shuri looked at her bracelet. The newly christened one, tied gently around her wrist by the broad hands of the Feathered Serpent God, water-King and enemy of the surface-world. The shiver from his touch had lingered long after his fingers abandoned her skin, their knees almost touching, his gravitas belying his cruel invitation to burn the world. Together.
Riri mistook her shiver for one of fear.
“We ain’t never getting out of here. He really put a handcuff on you like some Persephone shit. I’m gonna die. We’re all gonna die. All because I wanted to show my dumbass professor—”
“No, nothing like that.”
She held up her hand to the light. It glistened and pulled her to trace a fingernail across the carvings. Some symbols were familiar but others were impossible to discern without Griot. From one angle, the bracelet could be mistaken for a kitschy souvenir from a museum or one of those flea markets in Oakland, but the quality of the twine—and was that vibranium shimmering through?—was unmistakable.
She tried not to think about the last time this piece of jewelry was looped around a wrist so reverently with promises.
“It’s a gift of gratitude. He took me to see the city.”
Riri scrutinized her carefully while the handmaid made a high-pitched noise, her eyes catching on Shuri's wrist and dipping into a slight bow. She was gone from the room before Riri could frown.
“O-okay. But tell me everything. Did he say we can leave? Is Wakanda coming to help?” Riri examined the bracelet with a scientist’s curiosity. “Aw, it’s pretty. If they have a jewelry store here, I want a souvenir too.”
“He wants to burn down the world and asked me to join him.”
Silence.
“Shit.”
Surface dwellers occupied his mind like most people of consequence did; their hearts branded as targets. The best a surface dweller could be was of no consequence to him, because to be important to Namor was to be killed next.
A young, slight thing she was, to be asking him to take her instead.
Iahui wrung her hands in front of his desk.
“K’uk’ulkan.”
He looked up from his slow mixing of pigments. If all played out the way he meticulously planned, there would be a mural of a king throned over land as well as sea by the end of the week. Blues and greens flecked his pot.
“What bothers you, my child?”
His handmaid scratched her ear, right below where her headpiece ended. Namor's eyes caught on the motion. He made an internal note to gift the Princess one as well—her manner of dressing that he’d seen both times indicated an aversion to excessive accessories, but a minimal feathered piece would curl wonderfully in her chiaroscuro black hair.
“She wears your mother’s bracelet.”
“A token of our gratitude.” He returned to watching green pigment darken into teal, then cerulean. “She accepted.”
“You have never offered it to anyone, one of our own or surface-dweller. You have only met her once.”
The Feathered Serpent God stood up and in two languid paces manueved around his desk to face her. Iahui was a young handmaid in her early 50s. Doubts were normal at these troubling times; she did not have the ferocity of Attuma or the hard-learned decisiveness of Namora. He could offer his children more patience now, another careful turn of the gear to ensure the pieces fell into place.
Brutality and gentleness reigned as dual forces in his one being. He thought of Chac and dry sand, of a coiling feathered serpent made to slither in water yet had wings and ears that pointed to the sky.
“Twice,” Namor corrected. Iahui's forehead was soft under his. “The shamans have seen that she will be the most powerful person on the surface. Talokan will never fear for their existence with Wakanda’s help.”
His handmaid closed her eyes. “She is only a Princess.”
“The Queen is too rigid in her ways and numbed by grief." What a curious pair the mother and daughter made. While her mother brandished a weapon at him, her daughter hesitated, at first entranced by the mystery and vibranium he posed. He recognized the genius (“These are Mesoamerican artifacts, 16th century,” she guessed so easily) burning in her depths. It was a flame that needed to be nurtured and directed to an outlet.
Skin shining like glass, dark eyes threatening to choke him, a gleam that rivaled the sun he brought to his people.
“Her mother is weary. The Princess, however, is ready to be tipped into a fight. Which way she falls will decide everything.”
By the time her body told her it was night time on the land above, there seemed to be no end to the gifts. Bowls of luscious fruit; soft blankets; a pair of white shawls, one embroidered in brown and another in gold; hair ornaments; and feathered quills. Not that there was anything to write on, but in a handful of conversations, Shuri had pieced together enough of Namor’s strategy.
She was absent Nakia's perceptive psychoanalysis skills or Queen Ramonda, who simply had an omniscient air about her, but she had endured enough buddy-cop shows with Aneka to know he was pushing and pulling. Acquiesce to her request to show her Talokan, praise her as the first surfacer to reach those depths, gift her his mother’s bracelet, and then not-so-subtly threaten her into joining his cause.
“Carrot and stick,” came Riri’s erudite assessment of the situation.
Shuri turned from where she sat amidst bowls of mango. Riri was already curled up in a hammock, suppressing a yawn.
“It’s this thing we learned in psychology class.” Another yawn.
“You’re an engineer?”
“Nah, no matter the degree program, they make you take required courses in different subjects. Usually they’re a waste of time but this one was useful.” Riri rolled over so her face was in full view, her braids tumbling over the thick ropes of the swaying hammock. “There’s two ways to get a rabbit to do what you want. Give it a carrot because it’ll do anything to get it. Or threaten it with a stick.”
She remembered similar metaphors in their language; her father often rebuked the tribal elders to not offer an antelope “too many leaves” or “send it running from a lion.”
“So I’m the rabbit?”
Shuri lowered a hand to pinch the soft shawls between two fingers. The one with gold was more intricate and resembled the one Namor wore earlier except that it had an undercurrent of purple to it. Either Talokanil were superb seamstresses, having made all these clothes in a matter of hours, or he had anticipated such a visit and prepared fitted dresses to adorn her with.
She really preferred the first option.
At least Riri wasn’t an afterthought. She tossed the shawl embroidered with brown, no less beautiful than hers if only a bit plainer, to the girl. Riri tucked herself into it despite muttering a set of curses as the late hour turned the damp cave cold.
Cold for surface-dwellers, at least. Namor and the other Talokanil seemed quite content roaming about with very little on.
“Yeah. Figure out what he wants.”
Shuri rubbed her forehead. “To burn the world with him.”
“No, that’s what he’s trying to get you to do; that’s the stick. Figure out what he wants.”
“And then what?”
“Stall enough and then hope you can hop your furry ass out.” Riri stretched her arms. “I'm gonna pass out. Let me know when the Wakandans are here to rescue us.”
If they hadn’t found them by now, that meant Talokan was admirably (and unfortunately) well-hidden and insulated enough to prevent her earring’s signal from penetrating the waters. She needed to buy time, fast. The ominous threat Namor had left her with curled at her gut.
What would King T’Challa do? Before disease took him, when he was still an earnest man optimistic that the world could not bring Wakanda down before it had the change to offer its best to humanity?
Only the most broken can be great leaders.
She was broken, but she was not a leader. She was not even a proper head of the Wakanda Design Group, having absconded much of her tinkering a year ago as though inventing burned her. Any inventor knew failure was a rule, not an exception. Yet, and yet..
Why did the ancestors give her these gifts, only to fail the one time she needed them to succeed?
She looked at Riri’s sleeping form. The girl's chest vacillated unevenly, her nerves coming to fore on shuddered breaths.
T'Challa couldn't save N'Jadaka, a boy from a lost tribe, but Bast-damn her if she couldn't save a girl from a lost tribe.
Shuri stood up, shimmied her dress to shake it of dust and crumbs, and approached a guard to mime a request for an audience with their king.
In the night, Namor was less sartorially incompetent, though his cloak barely reached his upper thighs. There was more flesh for her to look at than any reasonable person would want to look at in a such a situation.
Shuri exemplified the height of reason, of course, and stared.
“Princess,” he nodded.
This time, she was in his office first. She’d been escorted here and left to wait for what felt like half an hour. She didn’t care; her overactive mind provided plenty company, and it gave her an opportunity to look around the hut without his scrutiny. His desk that looked not unlike hers with an assortment of paints, quills, and parchment. In a corner, a lone hammock larger than the ones in their area of the cave hung with a pile of thick wool blankets atop it. There was also a neat pile of scrolls and books on a shelf against one wall, some in languages she recognized.
It was a modest lodging. Pity it was an adjective she could not use for its owner.
“Sorry to keep you waiting.” A flicker of something foreign flickered in his eyes but disappeared as quickly as it came. “I did not expect a visit at this hour.”
She swallowed. “And yourself? You were out too, unless this is not your home.”
“It is.” He settled into his chair at his desk. “I divide my team between the city and the outer caves, but I prefer to stay here.”
An interesting answer for a mutant who explained himself not hours ago as a boy without love for the surface world.
“Above air?”
He tilted his head, the beginning of an amused smirk tugging at the corners of his lips. “That is a very intrusive question.”
“You shared your life with me easily earlier.”
“Yes, but in return you shared with me some of yours.”
She loathed to remember. Finally, someone who spoke to her about grief and losing loved ones, only to capitalize on it for his own gain.
She felt awkward standing while he sat and didn’t know where to keep her hands. He nodded to his hammock and she raised an eyebrow, hoping it conveyed a distant but arch challenge instead of the alarm blooming in her gut.
“You don’t have another chair?”
“Princesses are short in supply in these parts. The hammock is comfortable, I assure you.”
Shuri much preferred herself to be a cat, but she all she could think was carrot and stick. Carrot and stick. Not one to be inimidated, howevdr, she clutched her dress from behind and plonked onto the hammock. Its soft sway comforted her marginally.
He perched his arms on his desk. His broad shoulders straightened to their fullest extent, until his ornaments shone brighter than the pulsating glowworm lights ouside. The strange thought of whether his nose ring ever bothered him while he swam or slept crossed her mind.
For a minute, she forgot what she had come for in the first place. And as an immortal with infinite time, he studied her. Carefully. She had encountered a variety of looks from people in her twenty some-odd years of living: there was the look of awe, usually after she said a word or two of science, and the Look of her mother, and the look of disdain from the council.
Namor was indiscernible. If there was a word for it, it was that he looked...hungry.
“Have you thought over my offer?”
She had. She extended her toes to halt the hammock's swing.
“That wasn’t an offer, it was a threat. You gave me two choices.”
“Wakanda is foolish to consider them equally. Wakanda cannot win against Talokan.” His eyes darkened. The stick.
“I am not Wakanda. Even if we were to make an alliance, it would not be binding. I am only the Princess. My mother is Queen and she will be looking for me as we speak. Let us leave, and we can discuss this properly, nation to nation. I can promise you that.”
He stood, slow in his motions, like he was wading through sludge. His nostrils flared around the jade and his necklace's pearls rattled as he approached, his hands clasped under his cloak. Shuri leapt to her feet, unwilling to concede even a few inches of height to him.
“Can you promise me that when you have just said you are not a sovereign?” He peered down his nose.
“I would be promising as Princess Shuri, daughter of Queen Ramonda. I would make this a condition for my release.”
He unclasped his arms and one hand grasped the place where the ropes of the hammock tied around a wooden post. His face flooded her senses. Her vision went fuzzy around the sides. She counted the lines in his frown and noticed the lack of white hairs in his beard.
“You barter with your life easily, Princess."
Carrot or stick?
Did it matter? Stall. All I need to do is stall.
Shuri lifted a finger to his chest, poking him on the side that was covered by his cloak. She had no doubt even the Black Panther would struggle to make him move, yet he shifted an imperceptible inch even before the pad of her finger made contact with the fabric. Years of staring down a microscope made her attuned to the small movements of molecules and vibranium atoms.
What does a god want from a princess of a vibranium nation?
Wakanda would find her soon. The problem was getting herself and Riri out with Talokan’s agreement or risk starting a war. Namor left her offer to stay in Riri's stead unanswered, but she remembered acutely his puzzlement, taken aback as though that was one calculation he never made.
She was good at calculations. Puzzles, card games, number games, the lot of them. She’d already figured out that escape was not an option—not with Riri and both their lives at risk in location that could be hundreds of miles from the nearest land mass. But five, six days was enough for War Dogs to scour every inch of the Earth, the Dora Milaje to demand answers from the Americans, and her lab’s scientists to work out how to track her. Hopefully Okoye had found the kimoyo beads she left on that highway.
She lowered her hand. “One week.”
“A Mayan week is—”
“Thirteen or twenty days.” She rather thought he looked impressed. After his unceremonious appearance in Wakanda's waters, while Okoye bartered with the council to extract Riri, she spent her time brushing up on Mesoamerican history. An underwater Mayan civilization had its differences, of course, but the jewelry Namor adorned that night was ample evidence enough that he, and by extension his people, were maintainers of tradition. “A Gregorian week for you to convince me that burning the world is the only way to solve this, and we will do it.”
“And if the Princess cannot see what I see?”
“You let me and the scientist leave unharmed, and we prepare to go to war.”
He let go of the wooden post, straightening with a small shake of his head. “A good offer, Princess, but not good enough. My people are at risk—”
What does a god want? What does Talokan need?
She interrupted the Feathered Serpent God for the second time that evening. “We would willingly share all the knowledge Wakanda has to offer. Your army and oceans might be stronger, but you haven’t seen an iota of what Wakanda has done.” What I have made. “Medicine, technology, security.”
His face started to soften. Contemplate. His square earrings twitched as he did.
“I’ve been told I’m very stubborn. Either you deal with an angry Princess, or we can be courteous and make my stay easier for the both of us. What’s a week when you have a chance to avoid wasting resources and time battling with Wakanda altogether? What's a week to a god?”
"My plan to protect Talokan was 'madness' hours ago."
"If you wish it wasn't, then show me." Shuri resisted the urge to close her eyes before she made her final play. “Convince me, and I will stay here. With you, and burn the world together.”
He looked at her like he was seeing her for the first time.
Maybe he’d expected an immediate yes in the catacombs, or even her horrified reaction, but there was no way, in all his centuries of wisdom and experience and arrogance, could he have anticipated this. And she counted on it. She didn’t draw a wild card; she was the wild card.
She canted her chin high. “I will see you tomorrow," she said in her best imitation of Okoye speaking to the rest of the Dora Milaje.
She ducked out of the little trap he made with his body and hammock and padded out of the hut. It was only when she was back to their room area that she released a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. The panic and adrenaline eventually subsided, giving way to an eager triumph. If only the council could see her now.
K’uk’ulkan. Whatever game you’re playing, I am better.
Namor finished the last stroke of the letter. It was a message to his advisors and Namora in the city below, shorter than it should have been but made note of the rapid change in decisions.
The Princess has agreed to stay.
The scientist was not to be killed, neither was Wakanda to be attacked for the time being.
And lastly, the Princess was draped in his jewels and crowned by his mother’s bracelet.
He slipped the letter into a cylinder of vibranium and red stone. Iahui took it carefully with both hands and left while he settled into his hammock, the smell of spices and an unfamiliar willow-bark like scent lingering in the air around it.
“Where were you?” Riri mumbled through her grogginess. Shuri rocked in another hammock nearby after having changed back into her tracksuit but cuddled under a warm shawl and wooly blanket.
“Go back to sleep.”
“What’d you do?”
She considered the question, and then the events of the whole day.
“The rabbit should be a panther, but a panther would leap faster before getting stuck in a situation like the rabbit.”
Riri coughed and rolled over. Seconds later only snoring was heard from her side of the room.
Shuri peered into the girl’s back. Bast had failed her once, but her own wits and immovable determination this time would get them out both alive.