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Her grief comes and goes in waves—which, Shuri supposes, with a wry twist of her lips, is fitting.
Others had told her it would get easier with time, that someday—someday soon!—the pain from her mounting losses would simply melt away. That she would no longer feel burdened, weighed down by them.
On sunny days, she can almost forget what’s been taken from her. On sunny days, she can so easily picture her nephew’s grinning face, or Nakia’s soft smile. She can feel Riri’s hand clasping her own, or hear her mother’s warm voice washing over her like rich silk.
On dark, dreary days—on those days in which she can barely lift her head from her pillow—she sees only him. Not Ku’ku’lkán, not the god-king, but Namor. The boy without love—the one who’d killed the only family she had left and had threatened her home.
On those days, she rages at nothing: at the walls, at her mattress and pillows, at the ghosts that surround her.
On those days, she longs for Namor to present himself to her so that she can pound her fists against his chest, rake her claws across his face.
But the anger fades, eventually, leaving her a weakened, sobbing heap on her bed. Or slumped in the corner of her bare room, weeping quietly.
And then she picks herself up, dusts herself off, and starts moving forward again.
Before he returned to the sea, Namor had given her a gift. A braided bracelet to replace the one he’d wrapped around her wrist when she was his guest in Talokan.
She touches it now, traces a finger over the woven bracelet and the ripple of shells that line her wrist.
Grief traps you in the past. Vengeance imprisons you there. But hope—the hope that Namor’s gift represents to her—is her way forward. Shuri wraps her hand over the bracelet that’s wrapped around her wrist and allows herself to hold onto that promise of hope.