Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Day 1

He has lived a long time. A decade is nothing. A breath, a blink, a turn of the current. Nothing—

(Ten years of nothing, nothing, nothing not even her scent on the ocean breeze)

—then suddenly the call of a long forgotten shell, and she is before him, at last.

Her hair sweeps below the swell of her backside, braids curtaining the sides of her face. It’s the only thing visually different about her - her eyes, her skin, her frame are untouched by the years, even to his supernatural eye. She is ever the same, as he is.

As he is.

When he flies out of the water, it’s her scent that grabs him by the ears and hauls him down, ten toes into the sand. It punches the sense from him. It’s her - cocoa and palm oil and something spicy on her breath - but it’s also him - salt and petrichor. Water in her veins, as it is in his.

As it is in his.

“I called you here because I need your help,” she says, and it is the Black Panther that speaks. The teeth of her suit glint at him like the lure of an angler fish.

He extends his hand - a lure of his own. Shuri examines it as one would examine an omen in tea leaves.

“Aren’t you going to ask what I need help with?”

The instinct to sing grips him.

I don’t need to. You are of water.
I know you. I feel you. I see you.
Jaguar sun, the underworld waits for you.
Come to the water and be as I am. As we are.

“Show me,” he says, and fends off a shiver when her palm slides against his. He has lived such a long time. It has felt infinitely longer without her.

Chapter Text

Day 2

His aging slowed to a crawl in adolescence; ten human years, and the rest as an ageless god.

It took time, much more time than his mother had on this earth, to perfect the balance his body needed of water and air and sun. It took longer to abandon his resentment of such a visceral connection to the surface.

Shuri will gain this balance much easier
— but she must learn from his mistake. She must throw off the burden of resenting a connection to him.

He tells her all this as they sit submerged on the floor of a hidden reef. Light dapples through the surface tension to pool in the place where gills would be if she were anything but his equal. Her dark eyes are full of questions, but she is far from mastering the art of speaking without pulling in air. He can hear how her lungs stutter, unused to being idle.

“Something to say, Black Panther?”

She gifts him her middle finger, using it to point up before breaking for the surface. Gasping for air is a habit she will let go of gradually, like so many other things, but for now he lets her catch the breath she doesn’t need.

He marvels at her left ear and how it points at the sun. The other is halved at the cartilage, laced with blackened scar tissue. His ankle inexplicably itches.

“So, that’s why these mutations have been hidden in my cells for the last ten years. Growing, like cancer.”

“Mutations hide inside every human. They only lack the circumstances to reveal themselves.”

“I doubt my DNA predisposed me to becoming a reptile.”

“You are hardly a reptile,” he says, and only just stops himself from reaching for the back of her neck to soothe. “In Talokan, snakes are allowed to fly and feel the sun, and jaguars are allowed to swim to the deepest depths of Xibalba.”

“Mm, and in Talokan what do you call a panther that sheds their skin?”

Mine.

“A goddess.”

Chapter Text

Day 3

The Black Panther has become a specimen to herself; a thing to be studied—

(She is something to be worshiped, not cut and prodded and made a spectacle of, even to just herself and her living computer. But he lost the right to say such things when he speared her open against a rock.)

She frames her mutilated ear as the result of violent curiosity - but Namor knows an act of despair when he sees it. She woke to find him tattooed into her cells and he cannot fault her for taking a blade to the evidence. He can only tell her the truth: that her senses will be compromised under the water. That the ocean is loud, and it will get worse the deeper she goes.

The computer agrees with him, from her wrist. Shuri ignores them both.

“So it will hurt,” she shrugs. “Pain and I are old friends.”

“You could suffer more than momentary pain.”

“But I won’t know the boundaries unless I push them, now will I?”

So they push, and when they break through a deeper barrier of pressure, she spins out into the current, beads flaring to life with purple light and mechanical warnings. He grabs and pulls her close, smashing her nose into his collar. Her suit emerges and she slices open his shoulder, screaming. He only holds tighter.

“Be still, itzia!”

With the strength of his wings Namor turns them horizontal and sets them into a slow spin inside the current. Shuri spasms against him, furious, shuddering, retracting her claws to tap at her beads.

Let me go, the computer says.

“You must calm—”

Everything is so loud.

I just got confused.

I’m fine now.

“When my senses betrayed me, my mother would hold me like this, until I learned to hear all but only listen to what matters.”

Pain blooms where her claws reemerge, his blood like ribbons in the water.

Don’t speak to me about mothers.

Ever again.

Chapter Text

Day 4

“You are being unreasonable,” he tells her, careful to try and keep the ache out of his expression. “I understand I offend you, but you came to me for help. Let me.”

“You don’t understand a goddamn thing,” she growls. “And you don’t have to touch me so much to help. It’s obvious to me how much you want to.”

Namor grows impatient. She is a temptation that knows no equal - but this is not that. It is a steady hand at your neck, your back, your elbow that is often the barrier between a child surviving the depths and being swallowed whole. It is cruel at worst, foolish at best to show herself a newborn to the water and demand he behave otherwise.

This is the ocean. This is Talokanil. The water itself binds them, molecule by molecule, so what is skin to skin?

She is the one that doesn’t understand.

“It is necessary. You must trust me.”

He reaches for her elbow and Shuri pushes him away with enough force to make them both stumble. Rage burns a path across her face - darkens her brow and licks at the corners of her lip until it curls up over her teeth. Her hands turn black with vibranium.

“I am barely healed from yesterday,” he laughs without humor. “You rail against my holding you but seem so eager to put your hands on me.”

“Touch me again and you’ll see exactly what these hands are eager to do.”

His impatience forms a mirror for her rage. Namor leans into the feeling, as she leans into a fighting stance. The water beckons at their backs, to no avail.

“I don’t want to fight you, Black Panther.”

“Why? Scared I’ll carve you up again? This isn’t Talokan and I’m not one of your subjects!”

“Correct,” he snarls, "You are my equal, so stop this childishness and act like it!”

Shuri is on him, quick and without sound. What a shame it is this that brings her closer.

Chapter Text

Day 5

She doesn’t call for him, so he tends to his murals and to himself. Memory of her fire keeps the chill of despair away—

(She is not indifferent. She is angry. Hateful. Unforgiving, still. All things he can take with his hands, feel, gather to his chest for warmth.)

Namora scowls at his wounds, barking like a mother sea lion. “You let that woman do what she pleases to you. Is she testing to see if you scar? Vile creature. I will count each one and pay her back one hundred times!”

“It is the nature of training,” he says, by way of explanation. “Sometimes instincts overpower sense of reason.”

Attuma looks on in concern, but he has always been too reverent to speak without prompt.

Namor doesn’t have it in him to explain that it is his pride that bleeds more than his skin - to say nothing of his heart. Shuri could steal one thousand feathers from his ankles and strike one thousand lines across his back. He would pay this tribute gladly, for her summons. Take any punishment.

Chaac forgive him, he will take anything from her.

Chapter Text

Day 6

Anxiety slips about him like chains, until her call finally comes.

“Truce?”

They are sunning on a rock, the serpent and the panther, when the day’s lesson is done. She: stretched and languid as a feline, her soft, exposed skin dewy with sweat, one brown foot flirting with the water. He: halfway to wretched, tracing the arch of that foot all the way up to her muscular thigh, over and over and over until he is dizzy.

“I have yielded to you once,” is his answer. “And our last fight was a, what is the phrase…a draw. A truce is unnecessary.”

Shuri closes her eyes and mutters something in Wakandan. A prayer for patience, maybe. A curse on his bloodline, more likely.

“There’s no need to call down Bast’s wrath.”

“I’m not cursing you,” she sighs. “If Bast listened you’d be dead already, my family would be here, and I wouldn’t be turning into the loch ness monster. I’m…trying to apologize.”

Namor leans back and closes his eyes, content to feel the summer heat unencumbered by wind or cloud or sea. Shuri’s gaze beats his brow hotter than the sun.

“Did you hear me, Namor?”

“I did.”

“…and do you accept?”

“No.”

Her foot stops in the water with a startled splash. She sounds something like the girl-princess he once knew when she demands,

“And why the hell not?”

“Because I don’t want an apology from you, Black Panther.”

I want your eyes, when they first saw Talokan.

He hears her moving her long limbs around to draw herself closer, in curiosity and outrage and maybe (maybe maybe maybe, his heart whines) something else.

“What, then? Bast, the fact that I am even saying sorry to the man who…I’m trying my hardest to keep peace here!”

Irritation spikes within Namor, hot and thorny. He opens his eyes to glare.

“I do not care to keep peace,” he hisses from behind clenched teeth. “I am here to help you make peace with what you have become. For that we must come together, not be apart.”

To his surprise, her response is mild. “I don't like you touching me so intimately. Not even my family embraced me so much.”

“What you consider intimate is the way of life in water. It cannot be helped.”

Shuri rolls her eyes and dips her feet back into the sea. Her fingers fist against the pale rock under them.

“You don’t have to enjoy it as much as you do,” she mumbles.

Namor, for the first time in centuries, feels something akin to shyness. “That…also cannot be helped.”

Chapter Text

Day 7

He should have known. Shuri could be nothing less than extraordinary. It’s prophetic in nature, her ability to exceed expectation. Written down in her DNA.

They swim deeper than before, and she is apt, even as she struggles. The pain sends her into his waiting arms which she no longer fights. She learns the language of the current. She keeps water from her lungs. Real progress is made.

Feeling bold and giddy with that progress, Shuri dares to venture farther, and Namor indulges her.

When they reach a depth where light struggles to hold its shape, something divine happens. A path of iridescent light — glowing like the worms in his beloved cenote — pushes through her skin from the place where gills won’t ever grow and branches out across her shoulders, down the sides of her ribs and across the slope of her hips, stopping and pooling in the hollow of her ankles in a persistant, magnetic blue.

Right before his eyes, the Black Panther blooms - like a blessed flower in the heart of Talokan.

Creatures of the deep approach her light; a school of chrome colored fish; a busshel of tiny, tiny seahorses; a large, undulating jellyfish with pink limbs; and a pair of eels, their yellow eyes uncommonly gentle. They, and more, all move their bodies along the lit path of her arms and circle her like a beacon.

Namor joins them, waving the creatures out of his way and grasping at her bare sides with gentle reverence. The light within her dims and then surges forward, warmth concentrating under his hands like a heart beat. If they were on land he’d fall to his knees.

Shuri’s smile is nervous, questioning. “Normal?” she manages to push out of her mouth; a timid vibration in the water.

“Ki'ichpanech,” he chokes.

Her brow furrows in confusion, and then concern. He wants badly to lie. Convince her, somehow, that her transformation requires she return to Talokan this instant. The words are on the tip of his tongue, but Shuri beats him to it.

“Talokan,” she demands. “Answers.”

He is all too eager to oblige.

Chapter Text

Day 8

The Talokanil are trusting by nature - more confident in their God’s judgment than fearful of the surface - so the maidservants and guards take to Shuri’s presence with the ease of before, as if no blood had ever been spilled in these caves.

It helps that Shuri is kind. She shows none of her ire for him in front of his people, and even Namora is struck into civility by her gracious suggestion that someone run ahead to Talokan with news of her visit.

“It’d be rude to just…show up,” she says, in passable Maaya t’aan, and sees his people’s esteem for her grow.

But her presence in his home still fills him with nervous energy, so in sharp contrast to their forced proximity in the water, Namor keeps his distance while Shuri mills about.

She lingers at his mural, fingers twitching.

“Is this supposed to be me?”

“Our great battle.”

“Why am I a cat?”

“…You are the Black Panther.”

She gives him an amused look, and it’s so unlike her usual scowls and forced politeness it makes his heart somersault. He cannot help but smile back.

“I’m surprised you didn’t also paint your great victory over Wakanda.”

Namor’s smile falters at the bitter note in her voice, but he doesn’t look away, even when her eyes shine dangerously.

“There was nothing great about that day,” he replies, solemn. “It is recorded elsewhere, as history to be learned from. Not imitated.”

Shuri blinks, a winding tension easing out of her shoulders and neck. She turns back to the mural and finally touches it, running her finger along the jade adornments of his likeness with renewed amusement.

“Isn’t this where you sleep?”

Namor doesn’t bother answering.

Chapter Text

Day 9

“Namor,” Shuri’s tone is low but sharp. A warning. “We are not in the water.”

“Be still, I have a theory and am merely testing it.”

He passes his hands along her ribs and earns a scowl. For a day and a half, he’s overseen Talokan’s brightest minds interacting with the Black Panther, and has nearly perished from the jealousy—

(Smiles as luminous as a constellation, back arching with delicate touches from their instruments, shared laughter in the water)—

“I’ve been here almost two days and I’m supposed to believe that you just now have some idea worth testing?”

“I’ve had many ideas. But you did not seem inclined to hear them.”

The suspicion in her expression wanes. He can almost always count on her curiosity to win him her attention. In truth, he does have a working theory - though it sits couched in a boyish fantasy.

“This gift is part of you the way my wings are part of me. You are controlling it.”

“That’s your big theory? We already tested for psychic reactivity, psychodynamic regulation, and acute stress. This isn’t something I am controlling with my thoughts, or a response to dangerous stimuli—”

“You misunderstand.”

Namor gently turns her so her back is facing him, and she faces the water in front of his home.

“There is a place beyond emotion and thought, Black Panther. I do not think to myself: fly, and then take flight. Nor do I always feel when I am in danger, until my wings tremble against me and I am forced to heed their warning.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“Instinct, itzia. Your tests have failed to factor in the fundamental nature of a predator. You cannot simulate a danger or pleasure that your instincts do not recognize. I will demonstrate.”

Namor kisses the top of her spine and Shuri grunts as if hit. A faint blue spikes and recedes in hypnotic motion around the base of her neck in response. The heat of it tingles his lips, and Namor realizes he has been stung. Were they in water, he has a feeling it would have actually hurt.

How much, exactly, would it take to hurt?

“Namor,” Shuri hisses. Another warning.

“You are not a hostage,” he reminds her. “You can move away.”

When she doesn’t, his heart upticks, wings shaking themselves out and shuddering. His instincts tell him to move away, but like prey in the light of a sea-devil, he moves forward anyway, dipping his head between her shoulder blades and licking a strip up her spine.

Shuri cries out - in pleasure or pain he cannot tell. A pulse of blue shimmers on the path of her nervous system like scales, and the sting finally reaches him, subtle but insistent, making him light headed.

Hazy with pain and passion deferred, he begins mouthing at the knobs of her spine, tasting the sweat on her shoulders with langor, scraping his teeth on her neck, panting.

“N-nam—Bast—fuck!”

The sounds she tries to hold back are wanton; Namor’s wings buzz in agitation, nearly lifting them both off the ground as his speech slurs in her ear,

“You see? Teeche' teech u Talokan. You have swallowed the sun. My Jaguar. You have swallowed my heart.”

Shuri pries herself from his hands with a whimper, and he falls like a drunk man. She dives into the water, her light going from dim to explosively vibrant to gone as she swims away — resembling a shooting star.

Chapter Text

Day 10

Her summons is a surprise, their meeting on the beach a simulacrum of the first.

Shuri is deceptively casual; she might as well be wearing the Black Panther mask for all the emotion she displays. She is not curious about the medicine swathed across his neck under cloth to soothe the imprint of her sting, nor does she ask about the elixirs he was forced to gulp down to cure the swelling of his throat and tongue.

She could kill him in the water. Still, he is pulled to her as if by string.

“More lessons today?”

“No. No more lessons.”

“…I see.”

“Thank you. For what you’ve taught me,” she says, and he hears the dismissal in it. She holds his gaze with something like pity, and his tongue suddenly feels swollen again.

“You truly think you’ve learned all that needs to be learned in 9 days?”

“I’ve learned enough, and so have you.”

“I disagree.”

Her lip curls in frustration. “You called me the sun. But if I’m the sun then you are the sea, right? So that means we can never meet. Do you understand? It’s enough, now, Namor.”

“Enough?” he echoes, not quite a question, pushing the offending word back to her, rejecting it like a child. “I don’t understand. Speak plainly.”

“You want me to spell it out? Fine. This can never be what you want. We can never be what you want!”

It isn’t her words, but her obvious belief in them that is worse than being struck. Namor swallows back a cry. “Never…is a very long time.”

Shuri folds her arms around herself and looks away. He traces the outline of her severed ear with his eyes.

“I’m returning to Wakanda, and our…circumstances have made it that you’ll always be near me, in one way or another. If I am the sun to you then…look at me all you want. Get warm. But that…what happened can never happen again.”

“What happened…by which you mean your very instincts responding to my touch.”

“My instinct is to hurt you, and I did.”

“Your instinct is fear. Not of me, but of how I make you feel—”

“Stop!” She swipes her hand through the air like a cat clawing down a bird. “You can twist it into what you like, believe what you want - but you will respect your limits, Namor, or I will keep finding new ways to remind you of them!”

Limits? He wants to growl. A god has no limits. But they both know it to be untrue. She has proven he does. She has burned him, maimed him, set him on his back at the point of her spear. Even now, he is all but on his knees, begging without begging. Please, let me keep touching you. Let me hold your light. And she denies him, like the goddess she has become, looking down her beautiful, regal nose to grace him with rejection.

She has defined his limits, and now she enforces them with the sharp, unfeeling cruelty he’d shown to her nation. To her mother.

She should have just killed me.

“Shuri,” he tries and grimaces at how his voice betrays him. “In itzia…”

“Black Panther to you,” she corrects, eyes cutting a spark against him like knives against grindstone. “Always Black Panther, to you.”

His throat feels clogged up with words. She goes on about seeing one another in the places where games of diplomacy must still be played. She forbids him to contact her otherwise.

And then, she is walking away from him, with quick sure steps in the sand. He thinks he might have heard her say see you around.

How casual she is in vomiting his heart up at his feet.

“Why must I pretend not to know you as I do now?”

His voice is strangled and rough with grief, the words hurled across the beach like a spear.

“Why must I let go of the smell of water in your blood, the taste of your skin? Why should I forget the sound of your pleasure? Why, when these things are already mine?”

Shuri doesn’t pause in her stride or turn. Her voice carries over her shoulder:

“Why doesn’t matter, as long as you know how.”