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She has been looking at the waves for a while now.
Like she is waiting…for something that will never come.
She rubs her arms when the cold breeze blows, but she doesn’t make any move to stand up.
The ground feels like it's swallowing her, but she doesn’t want to move.
Her eyes move from the water to the stars then.
Is a nice view, and somehow gives her hope.
She sighs.
Why is she here?
She doesn’t know.
She doesn’t know anything at this rate.
The past few weeks have been…more than confusing.
She has lost everything and gained so much more.
Sometimes it all feels like a damn dream, a nightmare, but then someone calls her Queen, and she sobers up.
She chuckles at herself sarcastically.
She is Queen now, till Toussaint can take his rightful place. That wasn’t meant to happen yet…here she was, looking at the water like it had all her answers.
If anything, the water destroyed her life but whenever she needed to escape, she ended up here.
She was still trying to understand why.
She groans while she closes her eyes.
She is so tired of everything…of losing, of loneliness, of carrying too much on her shoulders and acting like is okay.
She misses her mother, and her brother, she misses how things were before a purple alien decided to blip up everything.
She missed her old self, that funny, annoying, confident little girl that laughed at tradition.
She sighs again, opening her eyes to contemplate the river one last time before returning to the city before Okoye could make a fuss and ruin her night with her excessive worries.
But then, she finds a familiar figure at the riverbank, and she is not as surprised or as scared as she should be.
He stays still for a few seconds until she stands up from the ground.
Slowly (and very dramatically) he approaches, till there is still a reasonable gap between them.
She has seen him in the night before, but for some reason, this time feels different. Her mother is not here and there is no fire to reflect in his bronze skin.
There is only the moon and the stars and the cold breeze that suddenly doesn’t feel that cold.
There is only the two of them, with soil in between.
They stare at each other for a few seconds.
“I have been looking for you”, he says, breaking the silence.
His honeyed voice takes her aback for a second as if she had forgotten how he sounds. She thinks that is impossible since his words have been echoing in her mind since the last time they saw each other (since they tried to kill each other).
“Why?”, she answers, trying to sound confident, like a Queen. She fails.
He doesn’t answer right away, if anything, is like he is thinking it through.
Still without an answer, he moves forward a little bit more, but not closer enough like they had been in his study back in Talokan.
He looks at the ground and then at her again. She tries to guess what he is thinking but is useless.
“I have been asking myself that question too”, he says with a chuckle, like the fact is ironic to him.
She frowns.
What was wrong with him?
What was wrong with her?
What was wrong with the whole world?
When did it become so…miserable, lonely, and awfully sad?
“What do you want, Namor?”
He makes a surprised noise, but his eyes don’t reflect it.
“Well, at the start I wanted to go for a swim because Namora has been silently protesting everything I do and is very annoying, but then, when I was swimming, I realized that the ocean is too quiet and lonely”.
She crosses her arms over her chest at the same time he moves and starts going in circles around her. Like a priest adoring a god, like a predator caging his prey.
“So, I thought of visiting the surface, because, even if I will very much like to see all of you burning, I enjoy sometimes how noisy you are”, she chuckles sarcastically, “But then, somehow”, he explains, and she can feel how he slows down behind her and how his tone changes gradually, “I ended up here, looking for someone who clearly doesn’t want to see me, yet she was very close to the water”.
“Is not like every place with water is yours”.
“Well, technically –“, she rolls her eyes and turns her body a little to face him.
She must stop because she then finds herself almost nose-to-nose with him.
He appears taken aback too and for a few seconds, they stare at each other quite confused.
There is something in his eyes. Something she has seen only once, and she was too disgusted to pay attention to.
“Technically what?”
“I don’t know, my queen”.
“You suddenly don’t know?”
He sighs, like he is annoyed or tired or both, and…for some reason, it amuses her how human, how real, how familiar he appears.
He stays quiet for a second or two, looking at everything around except her. After a second or two, he looks at her again, and this time, his eyes are different, more honest, softer.
“Since we are both here, do you care to simply stay?”
“Stay?”
“Yes, just – “, he moves one of his hands in the general direction like he totally doesn’t have a clue about what to say. “Can we sit and do nothing but enjoy each other’s silence?”
His words are more confident this time and she actually surprises herself thinking about it.
If she returned to the city, it was for her to sleep and be miserable with nightmares and then Okoye’s overprotectiveness that will absolutely drive her mad.
The idea of staying here with him sounded…sounded nice somehow.
She didn’t understand how, after everything they have been through, but somehow…it sounded...peaceful.
“Alright. But just for a while”, she says, and he nods.
They turn and they sit in raw Wakandan soil.
The ground doesn’t feel like it's swallowing her anymore, if anything, it feels steadier.
And so they enjoy each others silence, until the sun starts ticking the horizon with its first rays of light.
The ground doesn't feel like it's swallowing her anymore, it feels steadier and she has the slight suspicion that it has to do with him and his presence.
And of course, he totally knows it. (He knows because when he is about to leave, he smiles at her and, like the first time they met, she freezes like an antelope in the headlights).