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Nakia finds him on the cliffs.
Okoye had told him the moment she and Shuri landed. He’d stood back after their greeting, listening while Nakia and Shuri informed his mother and the council elders of their progress with the outreach center, and then had quietly slipped out of the room. T’Challa had known she’d known where he went.
T’Challa doesn’t turn when he hears her coming through the grass, but he closes his eyes when she rests her hands on his shoulders. He laces their fingers together. When he leans against her legs, he feels her kiss the top of his head. They don’t say anything.
The sun sets in front of them and everything is golden and red and pink and he feels so quiet and steady with her beside him.
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There are more things to talk about later in the soft darkness of evening. He tells her of W’Kabi and his sleeping anger, and she tells him of the letters she and Shuri received so often they began throwing them away unopened. Anger of his own curls around his lungs.
<<I know that look,>> she says. <<Do not do anything rash.>>
He kisses her palm. <<When have I ever?>>
Nakia laughs and says, “You do not want me to answer that.”
T’Challa brushes his lips over the back of her hand, pretending to consider this. She is right; he can think of many things from his childhood that would prove her point.
“Even so,” he starts, but she interrupts.
“I am not denying that it’s a problem. These are the things we are trying to change, remember? The good we are doing outweighs this. Shuri and I both agree.” Nakia tilts his chin up with two fingers. He kisses her knuckles, and she smiles slightly. “It is not even a contest.”
<<It is not.>>
She runs the fingers of her free hand over his face and outlines his features. It’s soothing; he closes his eyes again, content to let her memorize the feel of him. She brushes her thumb across his cheek.
T’Challa wants to kiss her. She is so much of everything here in this light while the winds curl around them both.
Nakia looks at his mouth and then meets his eyes and he wants to kiss her. She whispers, “T’Challa,” and he does.
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In the morning they walk hand in hand to the garden of the heart shaped herbs. He presses his palm to the walls in an apology that still hurts too much to say, and he hopes the earth hears and understands.
The council had talked about sending search parties to find another patch of the herbs. Privately, T’Challa isn’t sure they will ever find more, not in their lifetimes; the vibranium had taken millions of years to seep into the land and change the plants around them. Such change does not happen overnight.
He wants to hope there will come an Earth that will not make the Black Panther necessary. The letters Nakia and Shuri received do not make him confident that it will be soon, but he wants to hope. There isn’t any way to go forward without believing things will change.
Nakia takes both his hands and he hopes so much his chest aches.
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Shuri greets him with their handshake when he enters her lab. He listens as she talks about her Oakland students and interns, and when she tells him about the latest memes, he laughs.
“Nakia says you have done so well, sister,” he says. Shuri grins.
She says, “Nakia says you snore,” and she bends over laughing at the expression on this face.
“I cannot believe I missed you,” he tells her, and this only makes her laugh harder.
“Where would this country be without me.”
Shuri waits for a response, but he only crosses his arms and raises his eyebrows. She elbows him in the bicep.
“Fine,” he says. “Where would this country be?”
Shuri opens her mouth, then pauses. He watches in amusement as she does this several times.
“You don’t know, do you?”
“I forgot the joke,” she says sheepishly. “I blame my brother for taking too long to respond.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
There’s a moment in which T’Challa laughs at his sister and she mocks his laughter, which results in T’Challa crying because he’s laughing so hard.
“Close your mouth, you’re going to catch flies,” Shuri grumbles.
T’Challa wipes away his tears with his sleeves, trying to catch his breath. The truth is, regardless of all of this, he’s not sure where the country would be without Shuri. She has revolutionized so many things.
He says, <<Where do you think we will be, without the Black Panther?>>
Shuri makes a noise like surprise deep in her throat. T’Challa doesn’t look at her. <<What do you mean?>>
<<If there are no herbs, then there will be no Black Panther. The Black Panther has protected us for centuries.>> He takes off his father’s ring and spins it on her lab table. <<Without it, now that the world knows us for what we are, who do you think we will be?>>
His sister comes around the table and crosses her arms. He is not brave enough to look at the expression on her face; he hasn’t said it this baldly before. In the council meetings, no one has said it so plainly, opting instead to talk about keeping things the same instead of entertaining this possibility.
T’Challa needs to know the other possibilities. He needs to know what might happen to his people. He bows his head and waits for her to speak.
Shuri says, <<The Black Panther has never been just herbs. You know this as well as I do, brother.>> She pokes him until he looks at her, and he smiles a little.
<<I needed the reminder,>> he says softly. <<Thank you.>>
Shuri pokes him again and smiles. They spend the rest of the afternoon watching vine compilations as he thinks about what she’s said.
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The garden walls are still burned, and so are the plant beds. T’Challa feels the earth and imagines it in bloom once again.
Tomorrow he’ll ask for the earth to be nourished and fertilized. He will do what he must to enact his apology to this place, but the walls will stay the same. He will not cover up the history of this place.
When he tells this to Nakia in their bedroom, she frames his face with her hands and her fingers on his temples are cool as the river.
<<You do not think they will come back?>> she asks.
He tells her, <<I have to. It’s the only way I can wake up every morning, hoping like this.>>
Nakia considers him, and he touches her hair knots one by one. He likes counting them. She covers his hand with her own and moves his fingers to her face and to her shoulder where it meets her neck. He looks at her with a question.
“My shoulders hurt,” she says, and he laughs once and starts massaging her shoulders. She watches him. “Every morning I think of the way the world is and how much there is to do. Every minute after that for the rest of the day I tell myself I can change it, and I list what can be done.” She meets his eyes now, and adds, “It is the only way I can wake up, too.”
T’Challa says, <<It is easier now, waking up with you.>>
Nakia keeps his gaze. <<It’s easier for me, too,>> she says, and then she rises onto her tiptoes to kiss him.
This kiss leads to T’Challa walking her toward their bed and she sits before kneeling and kissing him into the pillows. She draws back, sitting on her heels, and T’Challa is breathless as he watches her pull off her shirt.
“Are you sure,” he says, and Nakia tosses her shirt across the room.
“Yes.” She tilts her head to the side. “Are you?”
T’Challa tells her, “With all my heart.”
He helps her take his shirt off and then her fingers are on his pants and he steps out of them easily. T’Challa goes for her pants too, and he catches her when she trips on the hem.
“You fell for me?”
Nakia puts her finger to his lips, trying and failing to hide a smile. “We knew this already, remember?”
“Did we?” T’Challa says this against her neck.
She says, “Yes,” and the word sounds as though it caught on something in her throat.
He pulls back from her neck slowly, uncertain. Nakia wipes tears from her cheeks and he reaches for her slow enough that she can track what he’s doing. He holds her to his chest, trailing his fingers up and down her back. She is shivering beneath his fingers.
T’Challa reaches for a loose blanket near the headboard and wraps it around them both. She rubs the edges of the blanket between her thumb and forefinger, but she no longer shivers.
<<Do you know when I fell for you?>> he asks. He traces a circle on her back with his forefinger, and she turns her face against his neck. Her nose is cold on his skin. <<We were fifteen. You wanted to go into the world, to help ease the suffering they showed us on our screens in school. You were arguing to be a War Dog at fifteen years old, Nakia. That memory is part of my hopes for our country as well as for us.>>
She whispers, <<We were children then. The world is so wide now.>>
<<And my love for you has grown with it.>> He touches every knot of her hair before continuing. <<I think it could reach the depths of the universe by now. I cannot wait—>> He kisses her temple, and she laces their fingers together. <<—I cannot wait to see where it goes from there.>>
<<I love you,>> she says.
They tickle his neck, these words. Something warm blooms in his chest.
He says, <<I love you too.>>
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A week later there are green sprouts curling up from soil in the lab. Shuri scrolls through her notes rapidly, sending the information shooting up toward the ceiling so fast T’Challa can’t follow it. Nakia shakes her head, massaging her temples, and he squeezes her hand sympathetically.
“We used vibranium-infused fertilizer on burned plants from the border,” Shuri tells them. It seems as though she has gone through yards and yards of data before finally coming to a stop amongst a section filled with graphs. Shuri points at Nakia and winks. “Nakia’s idea. These little ones are only centimeters high, but it has only been a week since we started.”
“We are hopeful we will be able to ease the herbs back to life,” Nakia says. She glances at T’Challa before studying the graphs again. “Vibranium changed the wild plants ages ago. We think it will help now, too.”
“Nakia says it might help now,” Shuri says. “Take credit, please, it’s a good idea. I would already have a tattoo of this if it were my idea.”
“Yes, if our mother would allow it,” T’Challa says, bumping his sister’s shoulder with his own. She rolls her eyes.
“Mother would not mind, you know this as well as I do.”
T’Challa does not respond to this. They both know Shuri would win this argument. Instead, he says, “Do you think—”
“We do,” Nakia says, and she plops a bucket filled with fertilizer onto the lab table. It seems to glow faintly.
He lifts the handle with a finger to mask the way his heart is beating so fast. Maybe he will not be the last Black Panther.
“Let’s go,” he says.
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The Black Panther has never been just herbs. T’Challa reminds himself of this as he shovels fertilizer onto the garden beds. The Black Panther is a history, an entire people’s legacy; just as the history of this place should not be ignored, this raw history his cousin burned into the ground and walls and air, the history of their people should not be ignored either.
T’Challa does not like not trusting the world, but he does not. Not with all his heart, not yet. The world’s history should not be ignored either.
But beside him Shuri and Nakia shovel too, and their hands ache from the handles too, and the world should not be ignored but this, the three of them here together with action between their teeth, this should be something he can hold in his hands.
It is easier waking up knowing there are people like Nakia and Shuri in the world. T’Challa promises himself to be worthy of working beside them. He is steady here with this shovel in his hands.
He wipes sweat off his forehead and Nakia says, “We’ve gotten everything.”
“I’ll keep monitoring,” Shuri says. She looks around and nods approvingly, already talking to herself about what to do next as she leaves.
T’Challa sits on the path and pulls his legs to his chest, feeling at once so young and so ancient. There is still so much to do.
Nakia sits beside him, taking his hand and rubbing out the tension in his muscles. They sit here until the sun sets, waiting as if the herbs will grow before their eyes.
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The herbs do not grow overnight, and they are not there the next day, or the day after, or after that. T’Challa and Nakia visit the garden every morning and evening to take recordings, and it is so difficult to keep hoping.
Three weeks later Shuri calls them down into her lab, her smile so wide Nakia says she could swallow the entire river whole. Shuri just sticks out her tongue and tells them to hurry.
“What is it?” T’Challa asks, hope fluttering under his ribcage.
Shuri just points to their most recent morning recording. There’s a spot of green beneath her finger.
T’Challa’s running to the garden before she finishes speaking. When he finds the bud, he drops to his knees and cries.
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Nakia finds him there moments later. Without speaking, he feels her kneel beside him, and she covers his hands with her own again. They cradle the plant as one.
<<I am more than just this herb,>> T’Challa whispers. Nakia leans against him and hums in response. <<The Black Panther is more than this.>>
<<You are everything,>> Nakia says against his shoulder.
<<This herb is a blessing and a curse, and we now know this firsthand.>> He slides his arm around her, lacing their fingers together.
Nakia stands and pulls him to his feet and he just looks at her, the warmth in his chest threatening to overflow and flood the rest of him. It is difficult not to feel light standing here with her hands in his.
<<One morning it will be neither,>> she whispers. <<We will turn it into hope instead.>>
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T’Challa feels her stir beside him and hopes he hadn’t woken her up by snoring. He rolls onto his side and squints, and then smiles when he finds her looking back at him with a forgotten smile curving her lips. The sunrise shines off her skin. He wants to kiss her where the sun does.
“You are so lovely in the morning,” she says, and yawns.
“Nakia,” he says. He is so content to be sleepy with her.
She says, “T’Challa.” He follows the dips and curves of her face with his fingertips. She leans into his touch.
The warmth in his chest seems to seep into the earth. He imagines it spreading to the heart shaped herbs to help them grow, and the idea of it makes him smile. The Black Panther has never been just herbs. He thinks, just maybe, part of the Black Panther lies next to him in this bed. He kisses her palm.
“Nakia, my heart, my love for you is new every morning,” he tells her, and she smiles golden in the light.
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