Chapter Text
It’s dark outside. The lights in their apartment turn everything the pale yellow of an old photograph.
The TV’s on, but Erik’s not paying attention. He slowly scuffs the tips of his sneakers against the wooden floor. He’s got a question tonight, so, tentatively, he says, “Baba…”
“What is it, N’Jadaka?” A distracted reply. His father’s at the window again, looking out for something only he knows.
“In Wakanda,” Erik begins, and now his father turns towards him, like Erik’s said the magic word, “what happens to someone after they die?”
“Why are you asking such a thing?”
Erik shrugs. “I just hope something good happens to them. Just ‘cause it feels like...every day people are dying.”
His father’s eyes are large and sad. “Unfortunately, it does.” He leaves the window and sits next to Erik, pulling him into a strong, one-armed embrace, and Erik smells his father’s strange scent, his unknowable scent, again.
“Bast and Sekhmet,” his father says, “they wait for the dead. They take them by the hand and let them run through Djalia, the ancestral plane. The sky is a swirl of beautiful colors. The land has no end.”
“And nothing can hurt them anymore?” Erik asks. It’s the most important question.
“No, my son.” His father’s hand, gentle over Erik’s hair. “They are as free as the wind. They’re free forever.”
+
Erik dies under the light of his first Wakandan sunset and there is no Bast or Sekhmet or the eternal freedom of Djalia.
Erik dies, and then he’s alive, opening his eyes, blinking up into clean, white light, bleary thoughts resolving soon enough into, For fuck’s sake.
There’s no pain when he sits up. None of the Herb’s strength, either, just a strange, lingering hollowness. The ordinary husk of his ordinary human body. Erik checks his bare chest, finds the skin the same it had been before T’Challa had driven a blade into him.
His father’s ring is still sitting on his right forefinger, Kimoyo band also there on his left wrist, the functions drastically limited to the Prime Bead monitoring his health. Erik pulls, but the beads remain fixed in place like they’ve been soldered to his skin and he’d have to cut into himself to remove them.
The floor is cold under his feet as he walks around, the air the sterile sort typically found in a hospital room. There’s nothing that would make for a good weapon. Only one entrance—a metal door that he’s not sure would open for him—and windows in the ceiling too high for him to reach. From somewhere beyond the walls comes a regular muted thump, steady as any 808 he’s ever heard.
Erik’s alone, except for the rage he’s always known, an old friend heaving hot in his blood, creaking and brittle in his knuckles as he fists them tight. T’Challa, he thinks. T’Challa’s done this to him.
Mere seconds later, as if somehow alerted by Erik’s thoughts, the door hisses open and T’Challa steps through.
No red and gold shadows trail behind him. He’s an immaculate, regal picture, elegant clothes neatly pressed, embroidery at the collar, the edges of the sleeves, a culture in those sleekly curving patterns that Erik had been unable to touch for so long. T’Challa stops at just at the right distance from Erik, hands held casually behind his back and expression stone-like, giving away nothing. The teeth of the Panther necklace are perfectly cut, gleaming slivers around his neck, bright in the sunshine pouring in through the skylights.
Erik already misses the solid weight of his own necklace. He tenses, conscious that he lacks the armor T’Challa has, that he’s got too many target areas on display, and prepares himself for if things get physical, already seeking out the points of T’Challa’s body that he could strike. It’s instinctive, now, to be ready to kill. To see another body and immediately work out how to destroy it.
They watch each other in silence, except that any silence between them is also something with a life of its own, a simmering charge and vibration moving through it like the ticking of an explosive perpetually primed for detonation.
“How are you feeling?” T’Challa asks eventually.
Erik stares. An incredulous laugh scrapes its way out of his throat. “Seriously? That’s what you’re gonna start with?”
“You’re not in any pain, then. Good. I presume you have questions.”
“You presume, huh?”
“And that you’re angry.”
“Astute fucking observations. What the hell is this? Why am I still alive.”
“I’m angry, too,” T’Challa continues as if Erik hadn’t replied. “I’m angry that you tried to destroy the sacred gift that Bast gave us. That you killed one of our beloved Doras. That you tried to kill my sister. That you told W’Kabi to kill me and that he listened and, in doing so, started a civil conflict. These are just some of the things I’m angry about.”
“You should talk to someone about all that,” Erik says indifferently. He eyes the door behind T’Challa. “No dogs with you today?”
“They served you for a time, short as it was. You should them show more respect.”
“You’re right. I should be more accurate. They all women, so I should really be calling those traitors bi—"
“Don’t,” T’Challa says, quick, sharp, “finish that sentence and ruin the second chance I’m giving you before we’ve even started. The Dora Milaje acted as they should have. It was you who grew too arrogant and threw the same challenge that brought you to power. You only have yourself to blame, N’Jadaka.”
He says Erik’s name easily, like he’s said it his whole life. Erik wants to rip it out of his mouth. He imagines all the two-hundred and sixty bones that make up the human body and he snaps each one in his hands ‘til T’Challa is a broken, mismatched jumble of ivory at his feet.
“I never asked for no second chance,” he snaps back, “but you must want your pound of flesh that bad. Either that or you some kind of pussy about to forgive a man who tried to kill you and yours.”
“Forgive you?” T’Challa’s brow creases. He seems like the one on verge of laughing now. “This isn’t forgiveness. You’re still a long way away from earning that. It isn’t about wanting my pound of flesh, either.”
“I told you—”
“I remember what you told me.”
“So you don’t care about the choice I made?”
“Do you think you’re above penance? You speak of choice. Did you ever give those you killed a choice? Did you honor their final requests?”
“I did what I had to do,” Erik says. To go as far as you can, to give everything of yourself for one precious dream – it’s nothing T’Challa could understand.
“And I’m doing what I have to do. You laid a hand on Wakanda, so you will face Wakandan justice.”
T’Challa stands there, august and untouchable, full of some kind of fresh clarity and purpose, and Erik understands that this isn’t the T’Challa he’d met. The T’Challa he’d known for a handful of moments, who’d ignored any killing blows he could’ve laid at Warrior Falls and whose wounded body Erik had thrown to drown in the turbulent waters below. This is someone else, a new configuration of the man Erik thought he’d already figured out how to defeat.
“I should just beat the shit outta you again.”
“You tried that already and you lost. I’m not interested in going around in circles with you.”
“So, what, I’m s’posed to rot in one of your prisons now? You think I’m just gon’ play by your rules?”
“Truthfully? No,” T’Challa says. “But we ought to at least try. There’s still so much of Wakanda you don’t know. You’ll find our method of justice isn’t entirely what you think it is.”
Erik sneers. “Such a noble man, easing your own conscience like that.”
“I know it’s difficult for you to believe I’d want to do anything but make you suffer.”
“You don’t know shit about me, man.”
Only Erik knows what T’Challa knows. What T’Challa’s seen. The world took everything away from me! Everything I ever loved! His voice too young. Like a hurt child’s. Tears almost springing up to his eyes. Then he’d pulled it all out of sight, found his anger again, let its chaos fill him back up, even though he’d been aware in the back of his mind that the damage had already been done.
If T’Challa’s recalling the same thing, he doesn’t let it show. His Kimoyo band chirps out some notification. “It’s only been a day since our fight in the mines,” he says. “There is still much to do, so your trial will be held next week. I can’t stay any longer, but Shuri will be here soon to look you over. I’m sure I don’t need to warn you to not lay a hand on her.”
“I’m making no promises,” Erik says with snide flippancy, just to see T’Challa’s face go steely and cold. “You more of a clown than I thought. A trial ain’t gonna end in my favor. You should’ve just let me die and saved us both the time.”
“That would’ve saved time, yes,” T’Challa agrees. “We’ll talk again later, cousin.” He walks away but not without one final, thoughtful pause at the door, saying over his shoulder, “We’re going to give you something more than imprisonment. I hope one day you’ll be able to see that.”
Erik imagines snapping bones with his hands again. His fingers curl into nothing except for his own skin, leaving behind nail-marks that hurt only himself.
+
Shuri is five foot five inches of thinly concealed animosity.
Unlike T’Challa, she hasn’t come alone. Her guards stand behind her, four blank-faced men in purple and gold. They have spears in hand, sickles at the waist, and eyes that stare unwaveringly at Erik. One guard carries the same kind of handcuffs Erik had worn into the council chamber only two days ago.
Absently, he wonders if their presence is more down to T’Challa than Shuri herself. If their reaction time would be fast enough to stop Erik from reaching for their precious princess. She’s got all the look of a fragile bird, too slight, easily breakable, like all it would take is one firm press of his hand.
Shuri plucks at the holos detailing his vitals without saying much at all, lips pressed together as if she’s holding back with effort. Erik remembers her fallen on the ground, the defiance in her face, the spite. Her certainty as she’d said, you’ll never be a true king, and the anger that had crackled through him at the words.
Her pointed silence makes him want to prod. He lets his gaze sit on her ‘til he’s sure she can feel its unrelenting weight.
“You really gonna give me the silent treatment, Princess? You always have so much to say.”
Shuri’s eyes narrow, but she stays focused on a vivid diagram depicting the anatomy of Erik’s chest where it had been a shredded puzzle of torn flesh under her brother’s hand. It’s not the first time Erik’s seen the inside of his body, but x-ray scans of himself had felt strangely removed, flat, wraithlike shapes that could’ve belonged to anyone.
Shuri’s holos are solid. Tangible. He could touch the place where vibranium had slid in expertly between his ribs, close enough to almost nick the apex of his heart. He could go in even deeper, beyond fine rivers of blood and delicate filaments of tissue, and press a fingertip right into his cells, the microstructure that constituted him.
“I died,” Erik says. His voice sounds hollow to his own ears. “I know I did. I felt it.”
Now Shuri looks at him. At last, the cage of her tensed jaw loosens. “Yes,” she says. “You were dead by the time T’Challa carried you in.”
Dying had been a cold journey, his breath a stumbling thing catching and catching in his tight throat—and T’Challa had been so warm against him even through the suit, holding him steady, mouth shaping words that had gone curiously silent, the darkness of his eyes and the glow of the sunset shimmering along his irises all Erik could see.
“You brought me back. Only, what, sixteen years old? And you can pull off something like that. Pretty impressive. But I’m surprised you even in here right now after how I was about to end you back there. How’d he convince you to help me?”
“I’m not going to run away from you like a frightened little mouse, Killmonger. As for my brother, he is the best man I’ve ever known. He has a way of making you want to be as good as him.”
“Can’t say he’s got the same effect on me.”
“No, that would be asking too much.”
“What’d it take to fix me up?”
“Nanomachines, of course,” Shuri says, as if it’s nothing, and Erik supposes it is nothing here in Wakanda, where genius is commonplace and achieving the impossible routine.
He’s had fellow soldiers bleed out under his hands, seen families laughing one moment, then dead on the ground the next, life reduced to nothing but just a wet smear, blood that would sink into the earth and live there forever. He’s seen it on deployments. Seen it Stateside. Seen it more often than not. More skill like Shuri’s, more tech like Shuri’s, and he wouldn’t have to.
“Of course,” Erik drawls with mocking emphasis. “Think you might wanna export some of those nanomachines to stop our people dying needlessly out there?”
“I thought the only thing you wanted to export was murder.”
“Now you just being mean, making assumptions like that about me. Ain’t we family?”
Shuri grimaces. Her eyes linger over his scars, her condemnation obvious.
“Wanna fix those, too?”
“In Wakanda, scars are kept out of honor. There is no honor in any of yours.”
The same anger she’d sparked in him last time scalds Erik again. “Don’t talk to me about honor, little girl,” he hisses. “You ain’t got no right to judge me.”
Shuri pulls back instinctively, but it’s not fear in her face, only the same enmity that’s rushing fast through Erik’s veins. “So you are still blaming us for our father’s mistakes. What about your own father’s mistakes?”
“What you know about my daddy?” he demands, leaving the bed he’d been perched on, stepping forward, intent on snatching up Shuri’s bird-bone fragility because he’s right and all it would take is just one press, just one—
A blue beam aims at his head, shooting out from Shuri’s Kimoyo band. Her other arm is aloft in the air, a gesture to pacify her guards whose spears are leveled at Erik’s face.
“Did you really think I would step in here unarmed?” she says.
Erik pauses in the crosshairs of whatever weapon Shuri’s modified into her beads. “You’re gonna kill me so soon after saving me? Your bro cool with that?”
“He would understand.”
For all Erik knows, Shuri is right. He feels the temptation anyway to push on, make Shuri kill him, learn for herself what it’s like to be a kin-slayer like her pops, and he forces himself to restrain the impulse. “What do you know about my father?” Erik asks again.
“I know he was a traitor.”
“Zuri tell you that? Or your brother? You know what? Maybe you oughta stay quiet, after all.”
“Oh, don’t worry, we’re finished here. I’m more than happy to kick you out now.” The blue beam remains centered on him even as Shuri points to two of the men beside her. “Unfortunately for them, Gheilani and Heri here drew the short straw and now they have to be your new guards.”
Erik glances over the men in question, vaguely recognizes having seen them in the Palace, Gheilani with his reddish curls and sober, narrow features and Heri with scars on his left cheek, arms as thick as Erik’s.
“You mean they’re my babysitters.”
“Semantics. Wherever you go, they go.”
“And where exactly am I going?”
“Fort Hahn, where you’ll stay until your trial is over.”
“Right. We still pretendin’ anything I got to say is worth a damn.”
“The trial isn’t just about you,” Shuri retorts. “It’s also for the people you hurt. They deserve justice.”
Justice, Erik’s learned, doesn’t come in any court of law. It’s something you have to bring into existence yourself. With your hands, your fists. A gun and a spray of bullets. A blade to the throat of a king. Any way you can.
“You mean they want my head on a vibranium platter ‘cause I don’t see what else could be justice for them.”
“If that was what they wanted, could you really blame them? Isn’t that why you wanted to kill my brother? You said it was for your father.”
“I’m a simple man. I call it like it is.”
Shuri lowers her hand and presses at a bead that switches off the beam. She smiles, nothing warm in it. “Then why so scared? Never had to face the consequences of your actions before?”
“I’m not scared of shit, least of all you guys,” Erik says and smiles back, nothing warm in his, either. It turns out they have the same smile.
+
As a child, he’d dreamed of Wakanda’s lush fields and vast savannahs. Its tumbling waterfalls like uproarious children, crashing down and surging on towards the remote, pure white home of the Jabari. Shining vibranium structures both tall and humble settled happily under a sky that ran on and on, endlessly blue, untroubled by clouds.
He’d closed his eyes and seen crowded, secretive jungles, thickly scented and alive with the scurrying of hidden creatures, and stalking silently through the trees like an imperceptible shadow: the Black Panther. The warrior-king. Bast’s own champion.
Even if the rest of the world turned to dust, Wakanda would somehow remain. Wakanda would be forever.
But that had all just been a compound created by his mind, born from the amalgamation of his father’s stories and Erik’s own imagination.
The real Wakanda, Erik still hasn’t seen much of. Something in him had been reluctant. Resistant. Defiant. It wasn’t the beauty he’d wanted to see. He’d wanted only what he needed. Wakanda’s weapons and secrets. The twin mantles of King and Panther.
As Gheilani and Heri take him to the Fort, Erik continues to refuse that beauty. He keeps his eyes forward. His gaze only strays when they arrive at an immense clearing. Before Erik can ask, Gheilani murmurs into his Kimoyo beads, and then the space before them ripples before splitting apart like a door, unveiling the modestly-sized complex where all of Wakanda’s convicts live as if in a hermetically sealed honeycomb. Once they’ve stepped through, the barrier melts back into sky and tree. Erik waits, but not even the slightest disturbance is left behind in the air to belie its presence.
Fort Hahn looks less like any kind of prison Erik had thought existed and more like a sleek townhouse with its curved walls, convex windows, sand-colored cladding. Behind glass doors, the cells are like small apartments. Simple, clean, functional. A living area adjoined with a bedroom. A bedroom connected to a bathroom. A tablet on one of the tables and a wardrobe populated with gray tunics and trousers and basic sandals.
For a long moment, Erik stands in the centre of the last type of place he’s ever wanted to be and swallows down on the bitterness, the indignation, churning and churning in him.
Force of habit gets him moving again, compelling him to memorize the layout of the rooms. He attempts a subtle scan for hidden devices, but cuts it fairly short. If the Wakandans don’t want him to find anything, he won’t. There could be a mic in the clothes given to him. He could have one tucked against his shoulder and he would never know.
Returning to the glass door, he raises his hand, displaying his Kimoyo band to his guards. “What’s the deal with this? Why can’t I take it off?”
Gheilani explains, “It informs us of your whereabouts at all times, Your Highness. A precautionary measure we take with everyone held at the Fort.”
“So what you’re saying is I’m gonna have to get creative to get this thing off me.”
“I wouldn’t advise any such creativity.”
“Will it do something nasty if I don’t behave? I seen that brand y’all put on Klaue.”
“Klaue was an outsider thief who would have bled this nation dry if given the chance,” says Heri. “You are Wakandan and also the King’s own cousin. No undue harm will come to you.”
“'Undue.'” Erik laughs. “You realize that ain’t so reassuring, right? ‘Specially when you got me locked up in this box here.”
“You’re welcome to walk around the grounds outside. Unless the circumstances demand it, we don’t require inmates to remain inside for the entirety of the day.”
“That’s not what I meant and you damn well know it.”
Still, Erik goes, ignoring the footsteps following him and the diligent eyes of the patrolling perimeter guards.
It’s midday at most, the heat deep enough that it would’ve made him sweat if not for the temperature-sensitive tech subtly incorporated into Wakandan clothing, keeping a soothing coolness tucked among the fibers. The copses of emerald trees surrounding the Fort are within view, deceptively close, reachable if not for the barrier.
It’s quiet.
Erik’s life has been governed by sound. The quick snick of a knife on an Oakland street, tires of getaway cars squealing. Children yelling as they played ball. Erratic patterns of roadside bombs and fire-fights that lasted hours into the night. But he’s also known shades of quiet, the uneasy kind he’d gotten used to on missions deep in hostile territory, where a fine layer of tension had rumbled beneath the wind, and the calamitous kind that pervaded an apartment empty except for a body on the floor, panther claws in the chest.
Now he’s standing in a tranquil silence that only makes him feel restless, trapped, all too aware that he’s burned all his bridges and there’s nowhere else for him to exist but in the ruins of the life he’d thought had ended on that sunset-drenched cliff-top.