Chapter Text
In the evening: T’Challa, again. Footsteps hushed as any clever-footed hunter of the night.
He has a book in his hand. Brown, thick, leather bound. A journal that used to be hidden in the secret compartments next to a Public Enemy poster, its pages bearing the secrets of another nation.
Erik deliberately keeps his face empty of recognition. He’s sitting at the pale wood table in the living area, a simple supper laid out in front of him of steaming chicken stew and fresh bread. A small bowl of cut fruit, a glass of water. Things he doesn’t need cutlery for. Erik hasn’t touched any of it yet.
T’Challa places the book on the table. “Aren’t you going to eat?” he says.
Erik shrugs. “Shoulda thought of that before you came in here and killed my appetite.”
T’Challa considers him. Erik considers him in return, trying to glean from the planes of T’Challa’s face if the palace cooks have already whispered to T’Challa of how the new king had refused the meal they’d made for him, visiting the kitchens in the middle of the night, instead, to rummage carefully through the well-stocked stores until he’d found snacks he could be sure were safe to eat.
“Can I?” T’Challa asks, gesturing to the food. “Unfortunately, my schedule didn’t leave me with much time to eat today.”
“Knock yourself out," Erik says.
Lightly, T'Challa perches himself against the table and the movement pushes his scent towards Erik – the same strange scent, unknowable scent, that had drifted from Erik’s father, that all Wakandans seem to carry, unique to this land. Erik can’t separate it into its various components. Figures maybe it’s the vibranium, its quiet presence threaded through the food they eat, their plants, their blood. If he took a stethoscope to them, he might even hear its metallic ringing echoing through their bodies like a buried song.
Soaking a small chunk of bread in the fragrant stew, T’Challa raises it to his mouth. He doesn’t make a show of chewing, but Erik understands what he’s doing.
“It would be counterproductive to save you,” T’Challa says, “if I was just going to poison you to death anyway.”
“No such thing as being too careful. You could say I’m not in an ideal situation right now.”
“Well, I certainly can’t argue against that.”
“Did you look through it?” Erik asks. He doesn’t bother with elaboration.
T’Challa dips another piece of bread, somehow manages to catch a slice of tender chicken without staining his fingers. “No. It isn’t mine to read.”
“I’m sensing a ‘but’.”
“But I caught a glimpse of the handwriting inside and I recognize it. I’ve seen his handwriting before in old notes and books.”
“He used to hide it,” Erik says. “Every time he caught me reading it, he’d say, ‘what did I tell you about going through my things?’ and then he’d smile and I’d know he wasn’t angry. He wasn’t ever angry. He wanted me to know about his home.”
“Your home, too. Despite everything, it still is.”
“It ain’t. I thought it could be. I thought it was. I know better now.” The Wakandans are different to everyone else and Erik, even with his father’s blood in his veins, is different to the Wakandans. There is no one else here like him. He’s anomalous. A species of his own in a country not his own, but that’s nothing new. It had been that way in America, too. “You here to just give me the book back and eat my food or you got some other business with me?”
T’Challa wipes his fingers clean on a nearby napkin that he scrunches up, holds in the loose curl of his fist. Solemnly, he says, “Tomorrow, we’ll be holding funerals. Among them, Zuri's. I thought you should know.”
“Why? I don’t give a shit. I told ‘em to get rid of his body and then I forgot all about Zuri.” The name still feels unusual on his tongue, when Erik had only known him as Uncle James.
“You felt strongly enough about him that you had to kill him.”
“I killed him ‘cause it was what he deserved," Erik corrects. "Eye for an eye. The Babylonians knew what was up.”
T’Challa makes a humorless sound. “A couple of weeks ago, I might have even agreed with that kind of philosophy.”
“You mean when yo pops got killed and you went crazy?” Erik’s mouth twists into a small, vicious sickle. It’s a gratifying little detail to know that they’ve both sought out revenge like it was blood in the water, all they could smell, inhale, the need for it clamoring in between the beat of their hearts. “You ain’t as perfect as you make yourself out to be.”
“But I never claimed to be perfect. What separates me from you is that I learn and I learn better.”
“Oh, that what you call it? I thought it was jus’ you having a lack of balls.”
“Is that why I am King and you are not, N’Jadaka?” T’Challa's voice is a smooth blade, each word cutting precise.
Erik’s smile falls. “I see where your sis gets it from.”
“You always seem to have a reply yourself, so perhaps it really is a family trait,” T’Challa says. “Was it your friends in the CIA who told you about Sergeant Barnes and Zemo?”
“Every organization’s got their gossips. I heard you made a friend of your own. That obnoxious little bastard, Ross.”
“It doesn’t hurt to have someone on the inside of such an...active foreign intelligence service.”
“You know the shit they done to Black people in America and on this continent? Me, I was pretending to be their friend. You seem to actually think they’re gonna be your friend.”
“I’m not assuming anything. I can’t afford to. We’re in uncharted territory now.”
“So what are you gonna do if it turns out he’s a double agent?”
“If it comes to that, I’ll handle it. You needn’t concern yourself.”
It’s another casual, galling reminder of the shift in power between them. Erik narrows his eyes. Asks, “Speaking of friends, where W’Kabi at? Shouldn’t he be right here in the Fort, too?”
“As is befitting a man who committed treason,” T’Challa says flatly. “You won’t be running into him, however. It’s better if your paths don’t cross.”
“My bad. Looks like I been a bad influence on him.”
“He made his choices. Ultimately, our own actions are the only things we can answer for and you should focus on yours. If you look on your tablet, you will find texts to help you understand our legal system. We have advisors—”
“I'm not interested,” Erik interrupts. “I ain’t going along with this charade y’all putting on of wanting to help me, so I'll speak for myself.”
"You’ll be expected to. You could say trials in Wakanda are closer to discussions than questionings.” T’Challa straightens himself, ready to leave, then he stops, eyes pausing on Erik’s father’s journal, something about it prodding him to add, “There is still another conversation we need to have, but I think I’ll spare you for tonight."
"Maybe you should spare me completely and let me get the fuck outta here."
"You can make your case for that next week,” T’Challa says dryly. “Let the guards know if you require anything – within reason.”
Erik waits 'til the glass door has hissed shut behind T’Challa to look back at the journal. Just look. He knows all its contents by heart. Time and time again, he’s ran his fingers over neat black and blue writing, felt the grooves lightly sunk into the paper from the precise press of his father’s pen, the weight of his most private thoughts.
Who are you, my son? You will ask this one day and know the answer:
N’Jadaka, son of N’Jobu.
The bread, when Erik finally reaches for it, is faintly warm, tearing easily under the pull of his fingers. He dips it into the stew, takes a bite. A sweet spiciness bursts through his mouth.
Steadily, he eats until everything is gone. Erik doesn’t waste food. He hasn’t since he was made an orphan, son of nobody.
+
It isn’t so easy to sleep on a bed these days.
He's slept too often on desert dunes and forest floors and the uncomfortable earth of too many countries that the softness of a bed troubles him. Makes him toss and turn. He remembers Linda peeking over the top of her laptop, frowning down at him where he’d been sprawled on the cold floor rather than beside her.
She’d shaken him awake from a bad dream once, her hand insistent on his arm, then her hand in his, crushed in a vice grip, her throat soft in the grasp of his other hand, the pulse fast and skittish against his thumb like a metronome out of control. A scared animal’s heart.
“Don’t fucking do that,” he’d hissed, letting go, knowing already that there’d be marks left behind. “I could kill you if you pull that kinda shit.”
“It’s OK,” she’d said. Eyes glossy. Smile quivering on her lips. “You won’t kill me. It’s OK.”
But Erik had. He’d cleanly put a bullet in her that had stopped her scared animal’s heart, left her body skewed on the ground, easy as that, and he'd walked away because hers wasn't the corpse he had any interest in. Now he’s here, staring at a bed that, even in a cell, is unfamiliar with its luxury. A luxury that’s his due. That he despises.
Erik turns away from it. There’s the table with the journal he can’t bring himself to touch. He turns away from that also.
Part of him still wants to believe the ancestral plane had simply been a hallucination induced by the Herb, but it had felt too real, the apartment a pale yellow like an old photograph, the book exactly where it always was, and his father – his father like Erik had always known him.
Always, except for how he’d said, “Look at what I’ve done.” Eyes large and sad. Regretful. He’d looked at Erik not with pride but as if he were a sad, regrettable thing, and all Erik had wanted to say was, This is for you. I did this for you. For you. All those terrible things in Kandahar and Tegucigalpa. In Diffa and Hell’s Kitchen and Baltimore. Mogadishu and Fallujah. In too many places on too many occasions and even in his father’s own home. For you.
Erik had abandoned him at the end. Abandoned both his father and mother. Picked the depths of the ocean instead of Djalia’s great veldt, got a prison cell in Wakanda instead, and he’s torn between laughing and breaking something because isn’t that some shit?
In the end, he’s forced into picking up the tablet. It activates with a press of his finger and pours out a deluge of information like a starter’s pack to Wakanda. All kinds of images, videos, and literature. Historical accounts and scientific findings, even access to news outlets, but carefully chosen, he suspects, so that he doesn’t know too much. Only knows as much as a Wakandan child.
Erik reads one report after another, sees himself branded a usurper and T’Challa, Shuri, Okoye, some River Tribe girl called Nakia all hailed as heroes. He learns of how the Jabari, led by a giant, a M'Baku, had rolled down from their mountain, spilling onto the flatlands at the last second with their chanting grunts and weapons of enhanced wood to overwhelm the Border Tribe, slotting into place the final piece of T’Challa’s victory.
Searching through older stories, Erik looks for the messy underbelly of pristine Wakanda. He doesn’t find it. Aside from periodic clashes with neighboring Niganda and fairly small inter-tribal disagreements, there’s virtually no mention of major violence, just a negligible crime rate and a basic street patrol force. Nothing like all the cops he’s seen in his life, the ones who'd hounded his steps, chasing an imagined threat in the hair on his head, the color of his skin. All the times he could’ve been just one wrong look, wrong word, away from a bullet to the brain.
Erik has to take a moment. Envy sits acrid at the back of his mouth. Translates into resentment in the rigid curl of his palms around the tablet’s vibranium edges.
With more force than necessary, he stabs his fingers at the texts T’Challa had mentioned, skimming through the rundown of Wakanda’s legal system, its particular focus on restoration and rehabilitation, punitive measures more often than not a last resort – exile in the mountains rather than execution. Smaller cases are handled by lower ranking judges and a number of representatives from each tribe, resolved within a morning’s work, but a case such as his would be the responsibility of a Chief Justice and include King and Council, likely carrying on throughout the day. A whole day being subjected to the judgment of those he’d rather burn to the ground.
Erik throws the tablet to a side, careless, knowing it won’t break. He lies down on the floor beside the bed. With his command, the windows turn opaque, the room plummeting into a darkness so complete, he could maybe reach out and touch the velvet fabric of it. Inhale its thickness and let it clot in his lungs and suffocate him.
He almost wishes it was true.
Staring into that nothingness, Erik slows and quietens his breathing down into something barely noticeable. The sound of a man comatose. A ghost haunting himself.
+
The singing begins at noon. It reaches them in the Fort, haunting snatches like messages from a far-flung, unearthly world.
Erik listens and carefully pieces together the fragmented lyrics. Iimbongi, he realizes. Praise poets extolling the virtues of the dead, singing of their lives.
Standing outside, as close to the edge of the barrier as he’s allowed, he sees through the trees plumes of fire, plumes of smoke, twined together into braids of black and orange-gold that graze their tips along the sky.
“How long they gonna sing for?” he asks his two new companions.
“Until the hour strikes midnight and the new day begins,” Heri replies. His armor is gone, as is Gheilani’s, as is every other guard’s. Exchanged for simple white outfits. Mourning clothes. “They’ll sing the longest for the great shaman as he was well-loved by the people.”
“That’s ‘cause they don’t know what he did. Do you guys?”
“We’ve been briefed,” Heri says, succinct.
“Then you know why I put him in the ground.”
“Did it accomplish anything?” asks Gheilani coolly, the same ice in his eyes.
Erik arches a brow. “You allowed to talk to me like that? Last I checked, I’m still royalty.”
“Amongst other things. Hence why you are in the Fort at all.”
“Y’all smart-mouthed fuckers." Erik scoffs, turning back to the distant smoke and fire and singing. "Figures that’s who I’d end up with.”
There’d always been a funeral to attend, but the only one he’d ever gone to had been his father’s, a quick, unremarkable affair with only old Mrs Harris and Reggie from school standing beside him. Uncle James had mysteriously disappeared; all the other folks his dad had known had suddenly disappeared, too. As his father, hidden in a plain, state-issued pine box, had been lowered into the ground, Mrs Harris’s frail hand had slipped down onto Erik’s shoulder, her weak voice croaking, “He’s gone to a better place now.” Heaven, she’d been referring to, but Erik had been thinking of the veldt, his father running free, Bast and Sekhmet watching over him.
He knows, now, the truth. That beautiful sky with its swirl of colors and that land with no end is out of his father’s reach. He’s a caged specter, trapped in the shoebox apartment they’d called home as if Bast and Sekhmet had judged him and found him wanting.
Mrs Harris hadn’t lasted for many months after that, the cancer attacking swift and relentless. Several years later brought news through the grapevine that Reggie had died from a crack overdose, and Erik hadn’t been surprised. He hadn’t been surprised at all.
He’d always assumed Uncle James had ended up in a grave of his own. Uncle James, who’d offered to help him with math even though Erik had never needed it. Uncle James, who’d bought Erik his favorite sneakers, talked basketball with him, been nothing but weird, familiar Uncle James -- but all along he’d been Zuri of Wakanda, vanishing back into her embrace until Erik had come along to put him into the long overdue grave Zuri belonged in.
“My father didn’t get no song, did he,” Erik says. “You think that was fair?”
“He should’ve received a proper burial,” Heri says. “He was also loved. We would’ve sung for him.”
And me? Erik considers asking. Would you have sung for me?
The thought doesn’t make it out of his mouth. He already knows the answer. Erik turns around, goes back inside, ignores the voices of the iimbongi following his steps, singing songs they never would sing for him.
+
It suits him just fine that he’s generally left to his own devices for the rest of the week and it fills him with an urge to rip the walls apart with his bare hands.
Erik understands patience, though. Was forced into learning it, became good at it. How to lay low, seem innocuous, disarmed.
He walks the grounds at every opportunity, Gheilani and Heri always at his back, and takes all his meals in his cell, away from scrutiny. He reads on his tablet and visits the Fort’s training facility, running through exercises that had stuck from Boot Camp. He watches the guards around him and ignores the prisoners and he never sees W’Kabi. Sleep comes to him in sporadic bursts that bring no rest.
The evening before Erik’s trial, T’Challa returns.
Erik suppresses the initial instinct to tell him to fuck off; in this country full of enemies, it’s his greatest enemy that seems the safest to be near for now.
“Hey, King,” he says, leaning against the entryway that connects the living area to the bedroom and watching T’Challa seat himself at the table Erik eats at, perfect posture like every chair is merely an extension of his throne. “How you been? You enjoy Zuri’s funeral?”
“You don’t waste time, do you, N’Jadaka?”
“I’ve waited years to say half this shit to you and I ain’t waiting no more. You brought this on yourself by keeping me alive."
“It appears so.” T’Challa adds nothing else, falling into a silence that has a contemplative slant to it. He glances outside at the soft purple dusk, the turn of his face hiding his expression. Erik goes to prompt him, when T’Challa says, carefully, somberly, “I thought of Zuri as a second father. I loved him as a second father. And in a handful of days, I lost my father and I lost Zuri. That must make you happy to know. It must seem – fair and then some, yes?”
“Yeah,” Erik says blithely. "Funny how the universe works, huh?" The vindictiveness sweeping through him is profuse and sweet, but it’s sour, too, ‘cause it doesn’t mean shit when he’s stuck here and his father’s stuck elsewhere.
“I don’t think it’s the universe that’s at fault here, just human folly.”
“Whatever you say, man, but hey, if you ever wanna work through your pain, do me a favor and don’t come to me.”
“I think it’s safe to say you’re the last person I’d come to,” T’Challa replies, turning back from the sky, and his face is smooth, empty of anything raw that might've been revealed just a few seconds ago. “I’m only here for that conversation I told you we still need to have. You should hear this from me first, before I have to share it tomorrow in front of everyone else.”
“Hear what?”
“The truth about what happened that night between your father, mine, and Zuri.”
There’s an abrupt swoop inside Erik like everything’s been upturned. He loses his nonchalance, steps closer to T’Challa before he can stop himself. “The truth? How am I s’posed to know whatever crap you’re about to feed me is the truth?”
“You don’t, but lies and omissions are what brought us here. I have no reason and certainly no desire to continue that on. Unfortunately, the only person who could still tell us anything of that night died at your hands.”
“He coulda been lying to protect your dad.”
“I don’t believe that he was.” T’Challa’s eyes turn unseeing, his gaze thrown back into the past, into a memory Erik wants to peek inside for himself. “You didn’t see Zuri when he confessed it all. His face. His tears. I don’t say this to convince you. I know how little anything I can say will assure you, but in the end, Zuri tried in his own way to make amends.”
“He should’ve tried harder and earlier.”
T’Challa’s gaze darts back into the moment, fixes itself hook-like on Erik. “He wasn’t the one who killed Uncle N’Jobu.”
“He didn’t think nothing about leaving me behind, though,” Erik spits back.
“His loyalty turned from virtue into vice, it’s true,” T’Challa agrees, and receiving an agreement at all makes Erik pause. “I imagine some new lessons have been learned here recently about loyalty.”
“Glad I could help,” Erik says blandly. “Just what I came to Wakanda for.”
“How much do you know of what your father had been planning back then? We made it public knowledge that Klaue had stolen vibranium from us and you brought his body, so that you could pretend you were delivering justice, but did you know about your father’s involvement with him? Did he know whose son you were?”
“He had no clue. If my dad was doing anything with him, it would’ve only been to use Klaue, same way I used him. He wouldn’t have been in league with that piece of shit for any other reason.”
“Whether he was using Klaue as a means to an end or not, it still means treason. I know you know that. He had blood on his hands.”
“Your sister said the same shit, calling my dad a traitor.” The recollection plucks at Erik’s nerves. “That’s why your pops killed mine?”
T’Challa shakes his head. “Zuri had been a War Dog assigned to watch your father. Pass on information. He informed my father that Uncle N’Jobu had been the one to help Klaue steal the vibranium, so my father went to retrieve it and bring Uncle N’Jobu back to Wakanda to stand trial. When Zuri revealed his true identity, Uncle N’Jobu, in anger and feeling betrayed, attempted to murder him. My father intervened.”
“What, the great Black Panther couldn’t take down a guy without killing him?”
“Perhaps he was reacting on instinct when your father drew his weapon, but I can only speculate. You came into my throne room and called me the son of a murderer. It seems you aren’t exempt yourself. The both of us have to face that our fathers hadn’t always been the moral, infallible men we thought they were.”
For long moments, Erik’s jaw refuses to open. He feels an anger that wipes clean all words and all thought except for one, a memory of his own: the long hours he’d spent clutching the empty house of his father’s body in his arms, bright red blood thickening beneath his fingers, darkening, sluggish treacle he could not hope to contain although he’d tried. The carpet had gotten stained. Erik doesn’t know who cleaned it. If it got cleaned at all.
“Nah,” he says. Drags it out of himself, a low, furious slice of sound. T’Challa is watching him closely with those eyes that have already seen too much of Erik and are learning still and Erik will deny them. “Nah, you think you and me are gonna connect over this? This ain’t some after-school special. You say that shit about your dad if you want, but you didn’t know mine. He was just trying to do good. That’s all. And he got killed for it.”
Grim and blunt, disappointed, T’Challa says, “He was a prince of Wakanda, who chose to sacrifice Wakandan lives even as he spoke about liberation.”
“Nobody said doing the right thing was gonna be easy,” Erik argues, moving closer so that T’Challa can see it, see all the disdain Erik holds for his pretty ideals, and T’Challa must see it, because he stands up to meet Erik with his own anger crystallized in the uncompromising set of his face. “The world ain’t so black and white,” Erik continues, “but I can see why a sheltered Wakandan would think it is, like a damn child.”
“Don’t talk down to me, N’Jadaka. You think because you’re comfortable with needless death that you’re somehow pragmatic. Whatever lies you’ve told yourself, I haven’t spent my entire life shut off in Wakanda. I’ve been out there for a number of years. I have, against orders, saved lives, while you, on orders, took life.”
“You had the luxury of choice. I had nothing else going for me, but I knew - I knew I was gon’ drag myself into this fucking country no matter what and I was gon’ fix things, the way my pops wanted to fix things, so that boys like me got choice.”
“I would’ve helped you,” T’Challa replies like he actually means it. “If you’d come here any other way, I would’ve helped you. I wanted to help you, but you insisted on the challenge.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Erik hisses. “I’m sick of lies.”
“I’m not lying,” T’Challa says firmly. He says, “I won’t lie like my father did. Like your father did. Like you did. I’ll always tell you the truth,” and there isn’t any artifice in him, and Erik thinks he hates that more.
+
He dreams that night.
He dreams of his father judged and found wanting, barred from the splendor of the ancestral plane.
He dreams of himself on the other side of the apartment door, unable to open it as his scars bleed without end. He is bleeding without end. They are killing him, his scars, the last remnants of the lives he’s taken, their ghosts in his skin judging him, finding him wanting, and enacting a revenge so perfect, Erik could never replicate it in life.