Chapter Text
Erik opened his eyes to clean, sterile bright light. His chest ached, but not as much as it should. The blade of the spear had gone in under his ribs and pierced his heart - he’d felt it in every beat, shearing the muscle. Killed enough people that way to know it was a death blow; known what it meant pulling it out too. That he’d bleed to death in less than a minute. It would have been honest. He’d wanted it, with his only chance at making a difference falling through his fingers like this country’s red sand.
Couldn’t his arrogant cousin respect even a dying man’s last wish?
He knew where he was. Recognised the room, the designs on the walls, the medical bed he was lying on. Turning his head he could see glass scattering the floor, swept up in little piles. For all the damage done to this laboratory it was clearly still functioning. Buried in a mountain to better keep the secrets in. Hiding and hoarding truth and power, careless of any lives but their own.
He hadn’t been out for long.
Since eating that purple herb his ears had been sharper. When he concentrated the world opened up in a thousand sounds. Footsteps not far away. Breathing. If he got close enough, could he even hear a heartbeat? Would have been useful when he was out in the Middle East, although he’d never needed anything more that the weapon he’d made of his own body.
He could’a sent it out to his brothers and sisters along with the vibranium, but rising from a vision of his father with all the desperation of his anger he hadn’t given that a thought. It was the symbol of his uncaring cousins and so it was more important burned.
“I can tell you are awake,” said the voice of the footsteps his ears had been tracking. His other cousin. She wasn’t being wary - she’d come too close.
“Sure am kitten,” he said, rolling from the table to pounce… and fell spasming to the ground as energy crackled through him. Bands of pain coming from his wrists and neck.
“How stupid do you think I am?” Shuri asked him, crouching down so he could see her face, not just her ankles. “You are not going anywhere.”
Erik struggled to move his neck enough to look down at his arms sprawled in front of him. There were golden bands of vibranium around both wrists, glowing with lines of white energy. The fury of the righteous, never far away, leapt up in his chest like the stolen spirit of the panther. “Princess, you’re the worst memory of our shared ancestors. Kings putting their own kin in chains.”
“You are not a slave, Prince N’Jadaka. The cuffs are for when you choose to act like an animal rather than a civilised person.”
Erik bared his teeth. “Shows how much you respect me. If you think I’m not a person does that make it easier?”
Shuri shrugged. “Okay, that was harsh. You’re a person, just not a very nice one. Three days ago you tried to kill me, remember?”
“Nothing personal,” Erik said, struggling to make his muscles move. They were still frozen, locked up. “You were in my way.”
“You really do hate us, don’t you.” His cousin looked troubled, which gave him a sharp stab of satisfaction. “Is there anyone you care for? Anything you love, other than your ideals?”
Erik didn’t answer. Sometimes he wondered that himself. There had been, a long time ago. There had been friends growing up, then lovers, even comrades in his special ops teams. But if the cause had needed him to sacrifice them, any of them, he would have done it instantly. Hell, hadn’t he done just that a week ago?
“I would have let you die,” Shuri was saying. “My brother didn’t want to. You are… our guilty conscience. The product of the mistakes our father made. My brother and I want to do our best to make things right.”
“Twenty years too late for that cuz. No, centuries.”
“T'Challa can’t rewrite the history of the world, but we can change the world we live in now. With words, and science, and peace rather than at the point of a sword.”
“The white man only respects a sword,” Erik replied. His muscles were beginning to recover and he thought he would be able to move soon. “If words meant anything to them they wouldn’t have broken their own the thousand times they have.”
“So we will have our words in one hand, and a vibranium shield in the other,” Shuri suggested. “Still, why do you care? Do not tell me you are worrying about us?”
“Fuck you,” Erik spat back. “I’m worried about all of our people you can’t or won’t help because you care about your damn traditions more than you care about our goddamn suffering!” He lunged, hoping to trip Shuri up, but he was slower than he’d thought. She jumped lightly over his hand and skipped backwards.
“Words don’t work on you anyway,” she said. “Well I told T'Challa what he wanted wouldn’t be easy. We will just have to prove it to you when you see how we’re helping people.”
Erik managed to push himself onto his knees, then to his feet with the support of the medical table behind him. He leaned back against it, muscles still twitching with left-over energy. He realised he was naked aside from his boxers and the cuffs… and the weight of something over his collarbones and neck. He raised a hand to touch it. A collar. He had to grit his teeth together to keep from doing something rash.
“How long d’you think you can keep me like this exactly?” he asked.
Shuri shrugged. “You lost the challenge,” she said. “You yielded to death even if you didn’t die. That’s tradition, and so Wakanda will never accept you as king now. Where else do you have to go? Back to being a mercenary, a lost Dog of War? Or do you want to burn everything you see down around you just because you can’t have it?”
“It’s a nice idea.”
“Or how about you come and get to know your family a little better, hey? You caused a lot of pain and suffering, and you were going to do something terrible, but that doesn’t mean you didn't have about ten percent of a point. T'Challa is going to change things. Wakanda is going to change.”
The smash-and-grab takeover hadn’t worked. That avenue was closed to him. Didn’t mean the war was over though - far from it. Slow and subtle, Erik thought to himself. When the strike team fails, when the target gets away, that doesn’t mean give up. It means play it smarter next time. Infiltrate, wait, be patient, and strike when the time is right.
“Okay cuz,” he said. “Show me.”
----
The panther was hunting. Long grass rippled to either side of his face as he stalked his prey. The herd was ahead, the wind bearing the scent of warm beast towards him. Each footfall was silent against the earth. He stopped where the grass did, the open plain stretching ahead where the antelope grazed, lifting their heads from time to time to observe the world around them. Overhead the purple sky danced. Streamers of light made shapes without meaning.
The panther readied himself for the pounce. Yet before he could another sleek, dark shape came bursting from the grasses to his left streaking like an arrow towards the prey. The panther leapt forwards himself, snarling at the one stealing the kill.
Above the dead beast, the mottled hide of the golden jaguar rose. Yellow eyes met his own, and the other roared baring long fangs. The panther padded as close as he dared, risking attack, chuffing low in his throat. What to do about this one?
T'Challa opened his eyes from the dream before it came to any kind of conclusion. He sat up in his bed, the soft silk sheets falling away from him. The night was warm and dark, and he was alone.
“What are you trying to tell me Bast?” T'Challa asked, scrubbing a hand over his face. “N’Jadaka is a threat, I know this.” Perhaps it might have been better to give his cousin what he had asked for, but as those fierce eyes had closed for what could have been the last time T'Challa had found that he could not simply stand by and watch his kinsman die. His father had made the nightmare that had come for them because he had chosen to kill, and some vain hope had risen that perhaps in refusing to kill T'Challa could reverse that. Could undo it all.
Was it hubris? Ties of blood blinding him to the truth? Was it simply too late for N’Jadaka to be anything other than Killmonger?
T'Challa could not afford to believe so. His cousin had opened his eyes to everything Wakanda had ignored for so long. Remaining apart from the world when one could lift it up… that was a moral wrong near as bad as acting to destroy others in the first place. His people could no longer be so selfish as to only think of themselves. N’Jadaka had been right about that much. But meeting the world’s history of violence with violence even worse… with dreams of conquest, war and imperialism… that could not be the solution.
The ancient kings of the west had once had a legend about a great wheel of fate, which in turning lifted up the oppressed and laid their oppressors low… but the system itself did not change. The very idea that it might had been so alien it had not even entered their minds. Yet if in helping some others were made small then no good was put into the world, it was simply moved around. Wakanda would be better than that. Humanity deserved better than that.
The immensity of the task before him seemed so great as to break his back if he attempted to place it upon his shoulders. The kingship had seemed so once, and he had risen to the challenge of it. This would be no different. He had already managed to convince the council - or at least they were willing to let him try and to face the consequences as well. There was much to do and as yet he had only the outline of it. The details remained hazy and out of reach, but he was lifting up towards it, towards the rising sun of a new and better world.
And in his shadow walking in his footsteps, Prince N’Jadaka his cousin, skeptical and unconvinced.
T'Challa turned over in his bed, pulling the covers back over him. One problem at a time. If Bast had anything to tell him about N’Jadaka, She would have to send a clearer dream.
----
They’d placed him in expansive rooms in their palace, high up in one of the towers, but Erik was still a prisoner in all but name. The shackles at his wrists and throat were proving impossible to remove even with his now enhanced strength. He had been left alone for now, Shuri promising T'Challa would come to see him before long. When he’d tried the door after she left it hadn’t been locked, but outside was nothing but featureless corridors and guards. Erik had done a loop of this level, testing out the limits of the cage. The guards - Dora Milaje both - had followed him and said nothing. They hadn’t tried to stop him, but they hadn’t let him out of their sight either.
Without anything else to do, he’d returned to his room.
He wasn’t without things to keep him occupied. The view from the palace tower stretched down over the city to the river and the plains, and he could see people and traffic moving in the streets, herds of animals in the lands beyond. A screen was set into the wall which could be activated by voice or touch. Both the internet and the satellite channels of the world were at his fingertips, but he refused to drown his mind in distractions.
He’d been given the gift of more time. He had to use it to plan.
Wakanda wouldn’t follow him as easily a second time but there still had to be people out there who would believe in the cause. W’Kabi had fallen in behind him easily - so easily that Erik had been suspicious at first, before W’Kabi had thanked him from the bottom of his heart for Klaue’s death. Erik didn’t know how the fight between the Border Tribe and the Dora Milaje had finished but it was clear enough who’d won. W’Kabi might still be alive, but if so he must be a prisoner too. Didn’t mean he wasn’t a potential resource, just meant he couldn’t be counted on.
If Shuri had been telling the truth about T'Challa’s plans then it might undercut the support that Erik would have tried to call on, and pit them all against the traditionalists and isolationists of Wakanda. So stay patient. Wait. Align their warring sides together to fight for the common goal that was an internationally involved Wakanda, and strike once that first battle was out of the way.
Erik didn’t know yet what his cousin had planned, but it would not be enough. It never was. T'Challa was all talk without the willingness to take the radical action that was needed to change the world. Talking just ran around in circles wasting energy. He’d seen it all his life. Politicians making big pronouncements about ‘the inner city’, about ‘black on black violence’, about ‘third world countries’, about ‘international aid’. Boots on the ground? Just soldiers who sure weren’t there to help. Money in the hands of the people who needed it? Into the pockets of corrupt politicians.
Fine white words in one pale hand hid that the other one was always grasping after money and power at the expense of everything else. Even at the expense of other white people most times, not that many of them were willing to open their eyes and see it. Find the dark-skinned scapegoat to blame, turn the anger away from the powerful and back against the powerless. If people admitted the powerful were the cause of all their problems then they would have to face up to the fact that they’d let it happen, and that changing it might put themselves at risk.
Nah. Cowardice was easier, wasn’t it. Running away from the fact that you had to do bad to do good, because that was all the powerful out there would listen to. Words wouldn’t sway them. Money, yeah, that might. Try and take away the money they hoarded like their own blood? Threaten them with real violence? Yeah, then they would listen. After centuries of taking, believing they had every right to every scrap of it, taking it back however you had to was the only option.
Erik had fought in enough wars to know all this, on one side or the other. War against crime, war against drugs, war against foreign countries. War that wasn’t for a cause or for what was right but mostly for the Will of America which was the Will of the Whites, the crackers and colonisers and plutocrats.
Fuck em all.
Fuck T'Challa if he thought he could do business with people like that.
----
It would be the first time he had seen his cousin awake since their battle under the mountain. T'Challa stood outside the doors to N’Jadaka’s rooms and attempted to steel himself for the confrontation. He expected that his cousin would be angry, and that perhaps that they would come to blows once again. T'Challa wanted deeply to make up for the life N’Jadaka had been denied, but he was under no illusions that Erik would actually let him do so. He held much anger - which was justified - but the force of it pushed him into dangerous waters.
First N’Jadaka would need to forgive him for saving his life, and even that might be a step too far for him to take. In the light of that setting sun, watching the life bleed out of this man who was both kin and enemy, T'Challa had thought ‘If I can save the life of a friend even if he is a foreigner, how can I let my own cousin, my own blood, die here in front of me?’ He had gathered him up in his arms and run for Shuri’s laboratory.
He hadn’t been there when N’Jadaka woke up, or when he was brought here. Part of that had been court business, but some part of it had been his own fear. He could imagine this situation as no less than handling a bomb through thick gloves; slow progress and potentially fatal at the slightest slip. Did he even have the right to call his cousin by his birth name, his Wakandan name, or was that a secret and sacred thing to be kept in N’Jadaka’s heart alone?
Enough of his own thoughts. T'Challa took a deep breath and knocked sharply, before opening the door and stepping inside.
N’Jadaka was exercising in front of the window; push ups in nothing but loose trousers. It seemed effortless, no sweat beading his skin. That was the strength of the heart-shaped herb. T'Challa had considered feeding him the poison that washed it from one’s system while he was still unconscious, but it had not felt right. N’Jadaka had won the right to Bast’s gift fairly, even if he had then chosen to withhold it from others. He had not asked if that was the only garden. It wasn’t - merely the most sacred.
His cousin leapt smoothly to his feet as T'Challa entered, looking at him with a glare full of venom. “Come to gloat then cousin?” he asked.
T'Challa shook his head, and hesitated. How to say why he had chosen this path when even he himself still doubted. Instinct, rather than reason, was ruling him and it was not a state of affairs he was comfortable with. “I have come to make sure you are well,” he said.
Erik snorted. “Sure,” he said. “You mean y’all’s guilt is getting the better of you. It’s that patronising, useless kind of guilt that white folks are so good at.”
There was no place for pride here. “Yes,” T'Challa said, refusing to look away. “Wakanda has failed in its obligation to the world, one demanded by our shared humanity. And my family has failed in its obligation to you, my cousin. What would you have me do if not try to make amends?”
He saw N’Jadaka blink, taken aback for all of a moment before recovering. “I think I made that clear when I was sitting on the throne,” his cousin said. So far he had made no move to put on more clothes even though the climate settings on this floor had been adjusted for western sensibilities. He probably did not realise yet that the herb had also made him resistant to the cold.
“Washing away the sins of the world in blood will not make it clean,” T'Challa said. “When I speak of shared humanity I mean all of Africa’s children, even the ones that came back here as colonisers.”
With the careful eyes of the panther, T'Challa could see the way N’Jadaka tensed, muscles shifting under his skin and ticking in his jaw as he bit down on the urge to react to that the way he must badly want to; with violence. His cousin was not an unthinking killer though. He would not have survived to put all those scars on his body if he had been. His killing was calculated and controlled, always towards a purpose. Was that better or worse, T'Challa wondered, than simply being a vicious animal, shaped that way by the world?
“Our true brothers and sisters out there in the world are bad enough off to put up with that kinda paternalistic bullshit man, but you think the crackers are gonna thank you for it. Nah. Y’all’re uppity cuz, that’s how they’ll see it. Wakanda has the vibranium, sure, but they’ll pay in floods of dirt-poor blood and bodies to take it from you. The ones in power don’t care, and they sure don’t lead from the front like we do. You’ll kill the world anyway - you won’t get to choose.”
N’Jadaka painted a brutal picture with his words, one T'Challa could almost see before his eyes. But it was a violent, nihilistic, hopeless view of the world which he could not believe was all the world could be. Without hope, one lost all the impetus to strive.
“You seem to think I will hand over all our secrets to the world,” T'Challa said. “I know you think me foolish and misguided, but I hope you don’t believe I am so incautious as that.”
“Nothing I’ve seen so far has me thinking much of you,” N’Jadaka said, folding his arms over his chest. “But you’re gonna show me different, right cuz? Wow me with your great leadership, your great plan for the world. Gonna show me you can change things without it being at the point of a gun.”
“If you will let me do so.”
“Reckon I’m gonna watch you crash and burn,” N’Jadaka said with a snort. “Should be a good show though.”
It is something. Not quite a hand extended in forgiveness, but a cautious reason for optimism all the same. T'Challa smiled. “Come with me. We must let the council know that you are still alive, and then we must prepare for our visit to the United Nations.”
----
“M’baku,” T'Challa smiled, bearing teeth with a hint of the panther’s sharpness. “Thank you for coming.”
“I am cautious about what you are choosing to do,” M’baku replied. It made him ill at ease to stand here in the heart of Wakandan technology. Coming into the city had been uncomfortable enough - crossing that boundary between nature and so-called ‘civilisation’ for the first time. Ascending into the palace had been worse. This was the seat of Bast’s power - the outstretched hand of Hanuman could do little to protect him here. Not that he should require protecting. These people were not his enemies, not quite. History though had a way of impressing its weight upon the present.
“And that is why I welcome you,” T'Challa said. “I hope you will take a seat on the council of elders permanently.”
“For a long time the Jabari tribe have been separate from the rest of Wakanda,” M’baku said. “My people refused to bow to the Panther King ten thousand years ago, and no White Gorilla Chief has gone against that in the ages since. Is that what you are asking of me now, T'Challa?”
“I am not expecting you to bow the knee to me M’baku,” T'Challa replied. “I am not arrogant enough to think that simply because the Jabari helped me that you wish me to be your king, rather than just the king of Wakanda.” He must have read something in M’baku’s expression because he laughed softly. “Oh, I know,” he said. “Aren’t all kings arrogant? I am aware that is a risk and so I am trying not to be.”
“The council is made up of representatives from the tribes you govern,” M’baku pointed out. “You see the implications. Why then would you ask this of me?”
“I want you there to speak for the wishes of your people,” T'Challa said. “As a diplomat and an advisor, not as a subject. As the chief of one people to the chief of another. That is all and no more than that.”
M’baku considered this. He had known of T'Challa for a long time, even if he had known him personally for much less. He was an honest man, and his word could be trusted. If this was not the case, M’baku would not have aided him. He shrugged. “I will give it a try. After all, someone must make sure you do not put us too much at risk with these new policies of yours.”
“The safety of Wakanda is still my first priority,” T'Challa assured him. “Her culture included. Knowing the position of the Jabari on most of what you call our ‘over-reliance’ on technology I do not expect you to welcome the thought of making ourselves known to the outside world. However much as I will have people urging me onwards, I also wish to have the odd cautious voice to make sure I do not ignore the concerns of our people.”
“Clearly there is still work for me to do here,” M’baku said. “Although I imagine most of your council will also be cautious voices. When you say you will have people urging you on in your plan, who exactly do you mean?”
At this T'Challa looked away just for a moment. It was uncharacteristic of him, and made M’baku instantly wary.
“What have you done?”
“Something I have no doubt you will say is very foolish,” T'Challa said with a rueful grin. “I have saved a life. Come into the council chamber and see.”
“Hmmm,” was all that M’baku said as he followed him. The Dora Milaje at the doors pulled them open smoothly, baring the room beyond. At the head of the room, standing to one side of the royal throne, was indeed someone that he had believed was dead.
“S’up,” Erik Killmonger said, smirking.
“You are right T'Challa,” M’baku said. “You are a fool.”