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The hut has changed since she’s been in it last.
Namor looks the same, at a glance. He is dressed plainly, in a rough brown tunic, a cord at his waist. Not for visitors. Not expecting visitors. Only the jade in his ears and his nose as adornment.
His face is neutral — carefully so. She has surprised him. She wipes her hands on her thighs, wets her lips. She has surprised herself, coming down here.
Now that Yatzil has been sent away, they have no guards against what they can say to each other. It is terrifying. She hasn’t been in his private quarters in over a decade. It is so small; there is nowhere she can look that doesn’t remind her, in some small way, of something else.
“You are not one to hesitate when you have something to say.” Namor breaks the silence first; his tone still cool, impersonal. He had a bag in hand; he sets it down by the door. Walking forward brings him closer to her. When he faces her again, she can see his eyes dissecting her breathing apparatus, taking it apart in his mind and reassembling it. “You knew you would find me here. There is no point in waiting any further.”
“She is a beautiful girl,” says Shuri, awkwardly. “She favors you.”
“She favors you, in my eyes,” he returns. “The resemblance is stronger underwater.”
Shuri thinks that there is something of Ramonda in Yatzil, especially around the forehead and eyes, but says nothing.
“Who do you look like?” She finds herself asking.
“My father,” answers Namor, without looking at her. “Or so I assume. I would have preferred to look like my mother. Or to see her in Yatzil. But none of this. Why did you intrude on my home?”
She hadn’t expected to get this far. ”You never formally revoked my access.”
”I had reason to believe you would never use it again.”
“That does not seem like you, to leave loose ends.”
Namor, infuriatingly, only shrugs. She is used to answers from him, even the most frustrating kind. Of course he is silent when she most needs to hear them.
“So, that is my daughter?”
Namor’s face twists into some ugly, contemptuous grimace. Shuri does not back away, even though her instincts scream at her to defend and shield.
”She is your daughter now?” He mocks. “I thought your child was dead. You were so noble in your grief. I did not know you were capable of such a deceit, until that moment.”
Shuri’s vision goes white at the corners, like it had when she first stood before him and demanded retribution.
”How would you know?” She snarls. “You were not there.”
And she hadn’t wanted him there, though perhaps it would have pushed her into a greater grief.
“And whose decision was that? I had a dying child, abandoned—“
She strikes him for his insolence, the crunch of bone under her fist satisfyingly loud. He stumbles back — it does not send him into the wall as it would anyone else. He touches his cheek gingerly; she rushes him, claws extended for another blow.
He retaliates with a fist to her side, knocking her off course.
They fight. It is unfortunate but inevitable; Namor is not one to take a blow without returning it. His returning grapple is hardly at his full strength, but enough that when he throws her, though Shuri skids across the stone and rights herself, breathing hard, she has to take a minute to recover.
Blood wells and trickles down Namor’s cheek; she tries not to wince and reminds herself that the last time she left such marks, they healed without a trace. The bruises under her armor will do the same, and they are a much smaller hurt than a spear through the gut.
“This is pointless,” she says.
”Obviously.” Namor’s voice is bone dry.
“I am not demanding to become her mother,” says Shuri. “I know it is too late for that. And I know I can’t do anything that can make up for what I did to you—”
“And what wrong, exactly, do you think that is?”
Shuri frowns, confused.
“I—for leaving Yatzil with you—“
Namor draws the back of his hand across his mouth. His eyes are wild, unfocused. “My house has seen children before. I have fostered many in my life. But I never expected to raise a child of my own blood. I did not think it was possible. Yatzil is a blessing.”
Shuri’s mouth is very dry. She swallows, and it doesn’t help.
“I know,” she chokes out. In the minutes between Nakia’s preparations, when she cupped her hands around Yatzil’s head in the basin while the newborn slept and breathed underwater, she’d marveled at her. Under her panic, the urgent need to fix things, she’d marveled at the child who should have been impossible.
“I don’t think you do,” he replies, softly as ever. “I discovered I sired a child of my own blood with the woman who is the only equal I’ve ever known. And, despite who she is, she was so cowardly she could not even tell me of this blessing herself, and so I understood that she felt it to be a curse.”
Annoyance sparks in Shuri, which is better than shame.
“If I had met you to explain, you would never have let me go home. And with things the way they were between our nations—”
“Could you have blamed me? That would have been right. All those months watching your stomach grow…” he shakes his head slowly. When he smiles it looks more like a grimace. “I could not even enjoy that knowledge.”
A flush of heat runs up Shuri’s chest, flaring across her cheeks and behind her eyes. She wants to ask what there would be to enjoy — what claim that he would have thought he had on her. She slipped it, in the end.
“You would have regretted it. There were more important moves to be made.”
“You talk as if I didn’t abide by your terms,” says Namor silkily. “As if you are not the one choosing to break them, right now.”
His face grows stern, and Shuri shivers. He leans close, his eyes intent. She’d forgotten what it was like, the full force of his attention. Unnerving and alluring, both.
“What do you want, now that you are here?”
“I want to meet her.”
Namor does not look surprised. But his face hardens, somehow, that she can understand how the likeness of him in the cave was sculpted.
“And then?”
“I just want to see what she’s like. You are her guardian—”
“I am her father,” says Namor curtly. “If it were my decision, you would leave and never return.”
Shuri is silent. She knew this was possible. She knows she has every right to contest him, and that she has given him every right to turn her down.
But then Namor sighs. He touches the cuts on his face, tracing from one end to the other. It makes Shuri’s stomach squirm; she looks away.
“However, Yatzil wishes to know you. She has proven she will take great risks to do so. Namora looks after her, but she wants you.”
“She does?”
”I would have thought that you, of anyone, would not underestimate the desire for a mother’s love.” His eyes slide away from her, perhaps to avoid her reaction (who’s the coward now, she thinks viciously), to the murals on the wall that were not there before — of a man showing a child to his people. “This choice is hers to make, not mine.”
Joy, muddied by trepidation, floods Shuri.
“You won’t have any terms?” she asks, warily.
“I will be present for this first meeting. If I feel that it is not good for Yatzil, I reserve my rights to end any dialogue between you.”
“Not good for her?”
“She is meeting her long-desired mother after many years. She will have questions. You were never one to mince your answers.”
Shuri flinches.
“I do not want to hurt her.” It’s the truth, but speaking the truth, it sounds insipid and thin between them.
“No, the situation is enough. You abandoned our daughter, and now choose to return to her.” There is real pain in his eyes. True anger. “I have done everything I could to protect her. But I cannot protect her from you. And…it is better, for her to know you.”
He does not say anything more, and Shuri cannot bring herself to speak. She looks down at her claws instead, still tipped red, and blanches.
“I don’t want—“
“Use the chambers you had when you first came here,” Namor cuts in, quickly. “We will bring you more appropriate clothing.”
Yes, it would not do to meet Yatzil in armor stained with her father’s blood. Perhaps it is a bad omen of things to come.
But Shuri does not believe in omens any more now than she did as a young girl. She left too much unsaid with Namor — it is not surprising they always resort to blows instead of words. No matter how well they argue with each other, it always comes back to the physical with him.
“Thank you,” she says. Namor’s shoulders jerk a little, like even that barest pleasantry has startled him. “When will Yatzil return?”
“When I tell Namora to bring her. How much time would you need?”
”Not too long.”
He inclines his head. Blood wells from the scratches on his face; he licks his thumb and wipes it away. It does not heal before her eyes, the way her body is already healing. She considers apologizing, as a gesture of good will, but says nothing. They exist somewhere beyond apologies and acts of breathless cruelty. They have changed each other’s lives too completely for that. No words can truly capture what they are to each other.
“I will send for her,” he says. “And then I will come for you.”
She nods.
”Thank you,” she repeats. “I always knew you would be a good father to her.”
He laughs, without humor. The scratches are no longer bleeding, but they still look a little raw when he turns away.
”I hope you are willing to be the mother she deserves,” he replies.
Shuri does not like for him to have the last word, but she is permitting herself to be identified. Like the day they signed the treaty, there are ways she has to think about how she behaves around him that she did not before.
“Follow me,” he says. He does not reach for her hand, just starts down the path deeper into the cave, the first chamber she ever saw.
She follows him, to wait for her daughter’s arrival.