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Shuri…Shuri…
“Shuri!”
She stirs and blinks awake only to see…herself. An image shrouded in haze, like a lightly frosted mirror, eyes dark and penetrating under a curtain of beaded braids.
“Hi,” the image says. “And before you ask, no you aren’t dreaming. Not technically, anyway.”
Shuri’s tongue feels thick in her mouth, her mind fuzzy. She feels as if she’s lying down, but she can’t see around or past directly in front of her to check. Everything is smoky and gray except for the strange woman staring at her out of a diamond shaped exposure in the wall of fog. The last thing she remembers is the big blue man putting a mask on her and—
“Riri! Where—”
“She’s safe, don’t worry.”
“How would you know? Who are you? Where am I?”
“You’re on your way to Talokan. Attuma gave you a mild sedative, which will wear off in a few hours.”
“Attuma?”
“The big blue man.”
Shuri stares. She’s seen all sorts of deep fake technology — photostatic widow’s veils that folded like tissue paper, Asgardian cloaking ‘magic’, war dog disguises perfected by her own hand, and so on. But this is next level even for her, and yet…why would someone create a reflection that looks like her but 10 years — or 5 very hard years — from now?
The woman puckers her lips, something between caution and amusement warring on her face.“You can just ask, you know,” she says.
“Ask what?”
“I can practically hear your brain trying to work around the most obvious answer to what is happening. Yes, I’m you, Shuri. From the future,” she shrugs when Shuri makes a face. “Sometimes things are really that straightforward.”
“But—what—how? The amount of energy it must be taking for you to rip into space-time like this! What are you using to stabilize it? Is there—“
“I’d love to share notes, mini-me, but we don’t have the time. Besides…how is never as important as why.”
Shuri frowns, immediately suspicious of a version of herself unwilling to talk shop. “How do I know this isn’t some sort of trick? Namor could be using technology I’m unfamiliar with.”
“Your greatest fear is that the ancestral plane is real and in the end you'll be kept from your family as punishment for your disbelief,” the woman recites in clipped, concise notes that stab at Shuri’s eyes. It’s embarrassing how quickly the tears rise, but she wills them away, breath shuddering.
“That…was uncalled for.”
“But you believe me now.”
“I have to assume you’re time-traveling to try and save our brother.”
“Not this time,” her tight-lipped smile wobbles with emotion. Shuri is gratified to see it. “I’m trying to save Namor—”
“The genocidal hummingbird?”
“—and countless others—you must be quiet now, and listen to me carefully.” Future Shuri clicks her tongue. “No interruptions, eh?”
Shuri nods, more curious than offended. The older woman begins — and she is so careful, so deliberate in how she tells her tale. The way she removes details is surgical, but there is so much she gives that Shuri can’t imagine what else there could be to hold back.
Her future is violent. She makes him yield, a tentative peace bought in heat and blood and sand that lasted years, but it was not without consequences. Slowly, the god-king tipped into an unexplainable madness which drove him to break the treaty and attack. Their countries warred for a long, unending year until his cousin and heir reached out to put a stop to the bloodshed.
“Namora was like his child,” she continues. “She and Attuma both were at his side in the worst of it. They saw that he was…no longer himself, that he was suffering, but they couldn’t raise a hand to their father. So I did it.”
“Did you ever find out what happened to him?”
“I happened to him.” Future Shuri taps her temple. Her hair beads clack. “Lesions formed on his brain in the places he went without oxygen for too long. I burned him alive, and his mind kept right on burning long after he’d healed.”
Shuri’s stomach churns. She tries to imagine burning someone alive and shakes the image from her mind, shuddering.
“Before he died, he…confessed that it was all for me. He’d gone to war with us simply to get my attention. Better to feel your claws then never feel your touch at all, he said. I was so furious, so disgusted, but then he kissed me and I felt…I knew…”
“Oh, Bast…you loved him too!”
“I didn’t know,” she exhales. “He’d painted me all over his walls and I still had his mother’s bracelet…but I couldn’t have known, after everything.”
There is a pause, where Shuri lets these hypothetical tragedies settle somewhere safe in her mind, and her future self collects her emotions behind wet eyes and a careful smile.
“Now, with you, maybe it can be different.”
“He’s not in love with me,” Shuri argues, a little too quickly. For some reason the image of him on that sandy riverbank comes to mind; how his eyes shifted to hers with a small, secret smile.
“Not yet, but it won’t be long.”
A cringe. “We’ve met exactly once. How can someone fall in love that fast? Impossible.”
“He’s a mutant. Until a few days ago, you thought he was impossible.”
“Fair point.”
“At any rate, love is different for everyone. For us,” she gestures between the two of them, “It comes in stages. Waves. For him, it is more like lightning. Immediate, all-consuming, painful in its intensity. At least, that’s what Namora said.”
Shuri feels second-hand guilt like a hand around her throat. “That sounds like torture.”
“For your Namor, it won’t be. Because you will love him back.”
“It doesn’t feel like I have a choice in this. What if…what if I want someone else? Bucky, Riri, I’ve even caught a few of my scientists staring! I’m not short on admirers.”
Future Shuri laughs. It’s almost offensive how loud and long she laughs. “You can do whatever you want. My message is a warning, not a prophecy. Once I am gone, how will I even know what you decide to do with this information? Our timelines diverge from here.”
“Then why…?”
“I needed…” She pauses, taking a deep breath. “I needed to at least try. Try to create a future without so much bloodshed, a future where my…where people I care about are still alive. A future where Ch’ah, who loves his people without restraint, who loved me without restraint despite the irreparable harm we did to each other…gets some of that love back.”
Ch’ah. Shuri files that away in her mind, along with the soft, careful way she pronounced it.
“I…I don’t think I said it but I’m really sorry, um, Shuri. For everything you’ve been through. For everyone you’ve lost.”
“Ah, yeah. Well. Thanks. I’m sure I’ll have a nice cry once I allow myself to process what’s happened. What…could have been. But I’ll be alright.” She smiles, weary but eyes focused, the expression of someone who’s on the brighter side of despair. “I’m not alone, and have someone else in my heart now.”
“Oh?”
“I helped him heal once upon a time, and now he’s returning the favor.”
Shuri flushes, remembering bluer than blue eyes staring up at her like she’d hung the sun. “Do…do you mean Buc—"
“Ah ah ah,” Future Shuri tuts, a playful, knowing look in her eye. “You’re meant to have a different path, mini-me. Focus.”
“I knew he liked me. I knew it,” Shuri whispers, unable to stifle her giddy smile.
Future Shuri rolls her eyes, lips twitching. “Focus,” she repeats. “I still have things to tell you.”
“Right. Different path. 500 year old merman.”
“Who will soon fall madly in love with you.”
“You say that, but I don’t feel—”
“You will,” future Shuri grins. “That part is a prophecy. No matter what you do, at this point in our story you will feel something for him. Waves, remember? You’re both curious and attracted to each other—”
Shuri grumbles, “I mean I have eyes—”
“—and once you see what he’s done for his people, your heart will follow.” Her eyes close in memory, expression pained, voice cracking like a woman crying.
“When you see Talokan, Shuri, you will feel it deep in your heart. I promise. And so will he.”
She’s right. About all of it.
Talokan fills her with a light she didn’t think was possible for her anymore — not after T’Challa. And Namor…
After a meal and check-in with Riri, he brings her to sit by a glimmering pool near his hut. The blue glow that seemed eerie at first is a soothing compliment to the lapping sounds of the water. Her eyes, now trained to take in the differences in hue, admire the violet colored stalagmites and the sky blue shade they cast on Namor’s handsome face. His eyes are on her too, soft and assessing like a caress. Who knew eyes could do that?
Mother is sending someone after you, her future self warned. So when you feel it, don’t hesitate. Tell him.
Feel what?
Love.
Tell him you love him, and you’ll save his life.
“I love it,” she admits. Namor inclines his head in question.
“Your nation, your people. I already love them.” She doesn’t know why her words are coming out so hushed and breathless. The setting just seems to call for it, and she’s palm-sweating nervous.
“That is encouraging to hear, Princess,” he replies, diplomatic. “My people were eager to show off for their first-ever visitor.”
The man is unreadable. Shuri feels everything she was told she would — tingles, flutters, the desire for him to take her hand and show her the deepest parts of the ocean — so he must be feeling it too. If only she could tell. Trying to flirt with Bucky had been so much easier than this!
She fidgets with her sleeves, looks askance, and back again. Namor’s ears twitch as she sighs out — practically purrs, “Please, will you promise to take me there again someday?”
And then she sees it. Namor glitches.
His body turns a fraction towards her and stops, the jerky move punctuated by a sharp exhale. His hands flex in a mimicry of something before he folds them. Dark eyes crawl down to her mouth and then snap back up to her eyeline just as quickly. His smile looks strained.
“I and Talokan would be honored to have you again. Hopefully, as a formal ally,” he says. Another diplomatic answer, but there is noticeable gravel in his voice, and it sends a thrill of confidence through Shuri.
“You swear?”
“I do not need to. My word is enough.”
“Ah, right. The word of a god.”
“Correct,” his lips twitch into a smirk. Shuri smiles and boldly bumps his shoulder, lingering close to his ear.
“But I do not believe in gods,” she mock whispers. “I’d much rather have the word of a man — brilliant enough to build a sun under the ocean, and kind enough to let a foreign Princess watch it rise.”
When she pulls back, he looks murderous.
No, that’s not right. Reframe, in context. He looks…hungry. Shuri’s heart gallops like a zebra in the crosshairs of a lion.
Wrong again. He’s no lion. He’s a flying serpent — a veritable goddamn dragon, Bast in her baobab tree!
“Then tell me, Princess,” the dragon croons, openly examining the curve of her neck. His next meal. “What can this man say to prove his sincerity?”
“A promise doesn’t have to be words, does it?”
Namor’s eyebrows jump to his hairline. His pupils dilate so fast they seem to explode. “No. It does not. What did you have in mind?”
Said mind, renowned the world over for its brilliance, goes blank. Right. The thing about seducing someone (if she can even call this seduction) is that it’s supposed to go somewhere. But how does one transition to… that?
Could have really used some advice about this part of the plan, future me!
Feeling incredibly out of her depth, Shuri lifts her hand, pinky extended. “On the surface, we have something called a pinky swear.”
His silence feels like a confirmation that she is the stupidest person above and below land, her technology be damned. She goes so far as to lift his hand and hook her pinky into his. “So. Um. How it works is you link pinkies like this, and…um—"
“Shuri,” he presses their hands together, slotting their fingers. “I know what a pinky swear is.”
“You do?”
“No.”
He grasps the back of her neck and wrenches her forward, swallowing her very unsexy squeak.
Oh.
His mouth is hot. He kisses like she imagines a snake kills; slow, deliberate, tongue coiling into her mouth to ply her own from its shy rest behind her teeth.
Oh oh oh.
His hands and arms are unreasonably warm too, snaking around her waist and cradling the back of her head with unearned familiarity. Distantly, in the part of her brain that’s still working, she wonders why his body seems to double as a heat source.
His core temperature must always be blistering. Does it have something to do with his mutation? Or did he evolve over the years to survive in the sub-zero temperatures of the sea? Maybe—and then he is pulling her into his lap and the only biology she’s concerned about is her own.
Her mother’s voice cracks like a whip in her ear.
Shuri Udaku! You are Princess of the most powerful nation on earth! You will not be impregnated by a merman in an underground cave!
Shuri can’t argue. Getting knocked up out of wedlock would absolutely, probably, put them back on the fast track to that bloody, violent future.
“Ah, um, Ku’kul’kan,” she pants, managing to get her mouth free. “W-what are you doing?”
He scrapes his teeth along her jaw, and then her neck, yanking down the high collar of her Talokanil outfit.
“Sealing my promise,” he rasps. “As a man.”
He bites down hard on her neck. The skin breaks — and so, it seems, does Shuri’s resolve.
She meant it about not getting pregnant in a cave, but Namor seemed content to simply have his hands and mouth on her — for a lot longer and in a lot more places than she originally planned to let him.
“This…is not what I planned,” he admits.
Shuri snorts, “I was just thinking the same thing.”
They are lying in his hammock, half-dressed and euphoric, Namor pressed against her back. He drops his nose into her neck, gently blowing on the small, half-moon puncture near her collarbone. She squirms.
“That stings!”
“I forget how fragile you surface dwellers are. I won’t bite so hard next time.”
Next time. Next time. Next time.
“I can heal it with my beads,” Shuri squeaks as he licks a stripe over the wound, soothing the sting. “It won’t leave a scar.”
His arm tightens around her midsection. “Don’t.”
“Don’t?”
“Heal it. It is proof of my promise.”
Shuri turns in his arms. He’s completely serious; she can see it in the set of his jaw that he’s ready to argue his case. But there’s no need. She’s already too fond of giving him what he wants.
“It’ll be hard to explain this to my mother.”
His grin is wolfish. “Then simply refuse to see her. Stay, as you promised.”
Shuri stiffens. Her mind goes into hyperdrive, and she forces herself not to react, to swallow the dread rapidly replacing any ease or comfort she feels in his arms. He still notices, of course he does, but he looks unsurprised.
“I’ve upset you.”
“Y-you can’t expect me to never see my mother again, my people—”
“I did not say that.”
“But you’re implying—”
“I am Ku’kul’kan,” he asserts mildly. “I do not need to imply anything. If that is what I wanted, Shuri, I would have said so.”
“You said refuse to see her and…stay.”
“Refuse to see her until you have had a chance to heal this naturally.” He taps the brand on her neck. “And stay until your heart is prepared to leave the scientist to her fate.”
Shuri recoils, pushing back to get as much distance as one can get when in a hammock. He lets her get a breath away and then holds her firm. She huffs,
“So what was all that a-about it’s proof of my promise and…and…are we really back to discussing killing an innocent child?”
“You have offered yourself in her place without truly knowing what that means, Princess. Eventually you must return.”
He doesn’t sound angry or sad, just resigned. He was expecting this, she realizes. He asked her to stay while fully expecting her to say no.
Something about that makes Shuri’s heart ache.
“I’ve never liked people telling me what I must or must not do,” she quips. Namor sighs in a fond way that reminds her of T’Challa. She’s finding that many things about him remind her of her brother, a strange feeling to have about a man when lying next to him half naked.
The path her future self missed out on is unfolding, right here and now in front of her eyes; she sees it in his unguarded stare, feels it in his gentle tap of a foreign rhythm on the ridges of her spine. But if she isn’t careful, this man who holds her like something precious will disappear, and she’ll be left to negotiate with a King — or worse, a vengeful God with no love for the surface.
Ch’ah, Future Shuri had called him.
Resolved, Shuri tilts her head up and kisses the underside of his jaw. Then his chin. Then the corner of his frowning mouth. He watches her from under his lashes.
“Tell me your name,” she demands. “The name your mother gave you.”
“Why?” He squeezes her hip, hand ghosting down her bare thigh. “You moan Ku'kul'kan beautifully.”
Shuri blushes, but sees the deflection for what it is. “Do you really want me to stay here in Talokan, with you?”
He is silent for a long moment, and then, very quietly, he speaks into her hairline. “Very much.”
“Then I will,” she replies, just as quiet, and feels rather than hears his sharp intake of breath. The admission shocks her too, and her limbs fill with a nervous giddiness that forces her to sit up. He is staring at her with an expression she can’t name.
No turning back now.
“But let’s be clear: I’m not becoming one of your subjects,” she pokes his bare chest and focuses on it, suddenly unable to meet his eyes. “We’ll exist as equals. I know who you are to your people. In front of them you will always be Ku’kul’kan. But when we’re in private, I would like to call you by your name…which is?”
He grabs her hand and brings it to his mouth.
“My mother called me Ch’ah,” he speaks into her palm. “Ch’ah,” a kiss there. “Toh,” a kiss on her wrist. “Almehen,” a kiss on her knuckles.
He says it differently than her older self did, more sharp and sure on the vowels. Shuri tests out the foreign cadence. “Ch’ah, Ch’ah, Ch’ah. Ch’ah Toh Almehen. Am I saying it right?”
“Perfect,” he murmurs, thumb pressing into the corner of her mouth with intention. He looks hungry again, and the air becomes thick with it.
“Marry me. I will give you a throne if you carry my children.”
Shuri smacks him in the shoulder. “Shut up.”
“I will drape you in jade and pearls. You will know nothing but pleasure.”
“Seriously, shut up,” she whines, covering her hot face with both hands. She warned me he’d be this way, but his intensity is still overwhelming, even with a warning label.
Namor grins like a feral little boy. Underneath that gorgeous head of hair are plans to roast her heart and gobble it up whole, she knows it.
“Marry me.”
“Ch’ah Toh,” she huffs. “That’s—It’s not—we should go on a date or…court or something—”
“I believe we’ve already gone beyond the proper bounds of courtship Princess—“
“—but we can’t without coming to some sort of peaceful resolution first!”
“Hm,” he sighs, closing his eyes. “You mean the scientist.”
“You still intend to kill her—”
“Which would be a very inauspicious beginning to an engagement, I agree.”
Shuri hits him again and he traps her wrist, cracking one eye open. “Ow,” he deadpans.
“Don’t joke. We’re talking about someone’s life.”
“We’re talking about many lives. The lives of my people, which I have spent centuries protecting. The lives of our future babies.”
Namor brings her hand back to his mouth for another kiss. She pinches his lips together. “Would you be serious for a second?”
“Mm always sherious,” he mumbles through her fingers. She mashes his cheeks in frustration and lets go. “But you are saying many, many things except what I want most to hear.”
Her heart flutters.
When you feel it, tell him.
Tell him you love him.
“I’ve already told you I will stay. I want to stay. But I won’t compromise on Riri’s life.”
Or anyone else’s!
Namor sits up, pulling Shuri by the elbows to sit between his legs. The hammock sways and their noses bump as he presses them forehead to forehead. He looks suddenly weary, all playfulness gone, though his tone is not unkind.
“I am very old, Shuri. I cannot be made to see your point of view in one evening, if at all. My desire to please you will not overshadow my duty to my people. It cannot. Do you understand?”
Shuri’s vision of the future frays, begins to fall away as her hackles rise. “I have never once asked you to put me before your people! How dare—”
He quiets her with a kiss, quick but thorough. “Peace, chan báalam. It is not an accusation.”
“How can there be peace when you are essentially telling me that you’ll never change your mind?”
“I am telling you that change is hard, and you must be patient,” he corrects, then shakes his head, muttering in frustration. “I despise this language. Toop wa'al ba'ax taak in wa'alik xma' biilankiltej maaya t'aano'.”
“I can be patient! I am the picture of patience!”
“Then marry me, itzia.”
“Why do you keep—I cannot just stand by while you indiscriminately kill anyone you deem a threat! There are better ways to protect our nations, better ways to rule, and it begins with innocent people like Riri—why are you smiling? What?”
“Already you speak like a Queen. As King, I would be expected to listen.”
“As…oh,” Shuri blinks. “Oh!”
I am very old. He wasn’t just speaking about himself. Whatever private thing was happening between them would never hold up in the public forum of Talokan, not even if he suddenly decided to become a tyrant. She wasn’t too savvy about ancient Mayan social politics, but the Talokanil had never seen their god negotiate with anyone, let alone change his mind, and to do so for the ideals of a foreign Princess would without doubt undermine their sense of who they are — who he is, unless…
“You need me to be Queen. They’ll only listen if I’m Queen.”
Namor squeezes her sides, pleased. She blows out a puff of air. “I…yes. Ok. That, well, that would make sense.”
“As my bride, I would be expected to honor your wishes and give you preference. As the mother of my heirs, you would become a goddess to them. An equal, as you say.”
There he goes again with the talk of babies. She tries not to feel too offended by the blatant measuring of her worth by her womb. It’s not so different from the rhetoric of Wakanda’s ancient council members, and he has already admitted that change is hard in Talokan.
But she can’t help calling him on it because ouch.
“Am I only your equal if I’m popping out your Legolas looking kids? No offense but that sucks.”
Namor looks slightly confused by her language but makes a valiant attempt to answer. “Becoming Queen Mother would raise your status to equal mine, yes. We are a superstitious people. It’s believed only a goddess can carry the child of a god.”
“Hmph. Never mind that I am the most brilliant mind on the surface, no it is my ovaries that are the prize.”
“My love, if a willing womb were all I required, Talokan would have known many Queens over the years. No one has ever come after my mother, or before you.”
Shuri’s very impressive synapses misfire to the repeat of his voice saying my love my love my love my love—
When you feel it, tell him.
“Is it wrong to want for many things at once, Princess?”
He presses her back into the blankets until he is stretched out above her, nuzzling her neck. “A Queen to satisfy the alliance, a goddess to satisfy my people…and a wife to satisfy.”
Bast save Wakanda I’m going to get pregnant in an underground cave.
“I can do that,” Shuri clears her throat, feeling suddenly hot and shy and a bit dumb about it all. “For our nations.”
“For our nations,” he agrees, lips traveling down her collarbone, her breastbone, her ribs, leaving a trail of sweet shivers. “Marry me?”
I love you
“Ok…but you should know I do not like fish. You will have to bring me real meat.”
She can feel his smirk against her hip. “I think I can manage that.”
I love you
I love you
I love you
“And I will need proper hair care, I cannot wear those severe top knots your people do or my edges will disappear.”
Her thighs tremble under his hands, clenching at the feel of his beard scraping there. “Continue,” he husks into her skin. “I am taking notes.”
“And my mother hates you, she will not make this easy. And…”
“Hmm?”
“…I love you.”
Namor looks up, eyes wide and round with surprise, and he looks so young — a boy crowned king, a child burying his mother, Ch’ah.
“I…” His throat bobs, his voice cracks.
Shuri reaches down to cup his cheek. “I love you, Ch’ah Toh.”
With a soft, desperate whine, he moves up her body clumsily, almost frantic, to pepper her face with feather light kisses and words she can’t understand.
“Teech ts'o'ok in yáakunek tak u súutukil ku tin wilech. A wojel wáaj ba'ax a meentik? Ba'ax je'el in meentik, in chan báalam? Wáaj bix páajchaj a wa'alik ti' teen je'elo'?”
He cradles her head with trembling hands, kisses her so soundly she swears she sees the future. His tears wet her cheeks.
“Yaan in yáakunaj teech ma'alob. Ma'atech a biin. P'áatech waye'. P'áat a utia'al mantats', my Shuri. Stay. Say you will stay with me?”
“Yes,” she promises, and does.
Somewhere, in a different time, an older, battle-worn version of Shuri leans back into her lover's arms. He kisses the top of her head, vibranium thumb idly rubbing at the old, scarred-over wound in her side.
“D’ya think it worked?”
“Yeah. I think it did,” Shuri answers, allowing herself to hope. “I really do.”