Work Text:
something in the way
(mm-hmm)
Something about his love will always be painful. It will always be bright and shrieking and painful. It will always taste like nuclear fusion and fission under her tongue, like generations dying and being reborn.
The thing about his love is that it is intense. It is single-minded. It is what makes his people bow down in fear and adoration, what makes them believe he is a god. It is certain, a fact of life to be as accepted as death.
His love is one that requires boundless energy and a heart strong enough to take it.
“I love you,” he says, and she hears the true meaning behind the words. She will be loved, regardless of whether or not she wants it. A fact of life, as accepted as death.
The details give it a softening that it does not deserve. Too much nuance and the story collapses.
She wonders what will happen when she dies. If she'll find peace. If Mama and Baba will scorn her or pull her close. She tells him so, illustrates her musings to him.
His face goes cold and he is bright. His brows form a furious shadow on his face. You will not die, he says. Certain, but even he cannot fight death. She tells him so. And he gives her a look, simultaneously condescending and loving. As though she is one of his people, offering a prayer for something he has already given them.
“I am God,” he says. “ I determine how it works. And so I will not have to.”
He pulls her closer. Her head is pillowed on his chest. He calls her his, and she believes him.
The sky is blue and grey. The grass is yellow. The water is red.
That is the scene that greets Shuri when she wakes up the day after their wedding.
He flies into the balcony, tugs her into him, uncaring of her horrified eyes.
An assassin, he tells her. A group of rebels, unhappy with his marriage to a surfacer.
“I killed them all,” he says, pressing a kiss to her neck. “All for you.”
And the blood is in the water, and on his hands, and his winged ankles. He is smearing it onto her nightgown.
Her hands are shaking. He notices it immediately- “Are you cold? Surely you are, in this nightgown, let us go inside,”- and it makes her feel a bit hysterical because he knows, knows that what he has done is wrong, knows everything from the growing of a seed to crafting a sun from scratch, but he doesn't care.
His body is warm, running hot as it always does. And so her back is cold when he lets go of her to rinse himself off. She glides to the couch, a step out of her body. Everything smells of rust.
He comes out, and she asks, “How many?”
His eyes soften, but maybe they don't. “Everyone who knew of the plot.”
“The blood is of dozens.”
“Dozens knew.” He says, as if it's so simple. “Not everybody sees you as I do.”
And when he gives his people that as an explanation, they will accept it as gospel, as she supposes it is. Words from the mouth of a god.
It bothers her, his flippancy. And then so does the thought of dozens of her husband's people, hating her so much that they support a plot to kill her.
“You should talk to them,” she says. Her tongue sticks to her teeth; the words are choked out.
“I will. If there is rot in the wood, all of it must be gouged out.”
It sounds too much like a threat, and that isn't what she meant by talking to them. But the sentence is heavy. She cannot get it out.
He takes her silence for fear. Presses a kiss to her lips, then her forehead.
“Don't worry. Anyone that seeks to cause you harm will feel the wrath of Talokan.” Another kiss, even more tender, in the center of her throat.
“Ashes in their mouths.” whispered into her skin.
The elders are in support.
“Very good,” L’Tawi says. His grey beard is quivering. “No one will presume to plot against the Black Panther again.”
M’Baku is silent. He taps his staff lightly on the floor. She doesn't know what he thinks of the killings. She thinks she might never know. He's been more pensive recently, playing with his cards pressed to his chest.
But then he pulls her aside, after the meeting.
“Did you see the bodies?”
Shuri’s brows furrow.
“No, why?”
She understands when he shows a picture of a Talokanil corpse, rotting blue-grey, bruised and battered and slashed and stabbed and-Bast- there are chunks ripped from their sides, as if mangled by some great beast.
She is scared and stressed and dazed when she questions Namor.
“It was necessary,” he says, mild as milk tea.
“It was inhumane! How could you-” she chokes on something that might be a sob.
“I understand that they knew, but-”
“But what? They would've seen you dead, do not afford them mercy-”
“Was death truly the only way? No trial! Only you as judge, jury and executioner?”
His face is cold, condescending. And simple.
“Yes.”
She sniffs. She cannot look like a child in front of him, sobbing and soft-hearted, but for Bast's sake-
“What did you even do? There- there were chunks ripped out of them! Bast, did you eat their flesh?”
“No.” And then he tilts his head, considering. “Did you want me to?’
For a second she thinks he's joking. Then she realises he's dead serious.
And isn't that a sight? Not too far-fetched. The blood is already on his hands, why not in his mouth?
She turns and leaves the room. Manages to make it to the bathroom of her lab before retching.
The day she finds out she's pregnant, she goes to her mother's grave.
It is all old and new. The white stone and the purple flowers.
She cannot look at it for too long. She feels like it might burn her eyelids.
Then, she tells Okoye.
“Hm.” Is all she says, leaning back in her chair.
There's a tapestry behind the table. It depicts a beach with grey skies and white sand.
“Are you…happy?” Okoye asks.
“I don't know.” She spares the details. They lend the situation a softness it doesn't have.
In the end, she doesn't tell him. He knows.
2 weeks after she talks to Okoye, she is floating in a riverbed, breathing in the scent of the water lilies. He surfaces near the bank and frowns. He looks almost cute when he does, and the thought makes her smile.
“What is that sound?”
In hindsight she shouldn't have been surprised. It's much too early for the child's heartbeat to be heard, but that's just another rule that doesn't apply to him.
He presses his ear to her abdomen. She breathes in, and out.