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Everything falls apart at the 7th peace summit.
It’s only the 3rd Shuri has attended in person — because the rest of the world needs the Black Panther more than Wakanda, these days, and Haiti is where T’Challa is. Not complicated. Everyone seemed to understand, except him.
So here she sits, in the honored seat beside King M’Baku, a living symbol in her suit and white face paint.
Namor’s seat is empty. For all his faults, he is a god who prefers the company of his people. She catches sight of him milling between stalls, charming Wakandan merchants and carrying Talokanil children on his shoulders. He never flies at these things, she’s told, after seeing more than one Wakandan flinch at the sound of his wings. Shuri isn’t moved; it’s the least he could do.
He looks her way; a quick, furtive glance that makes her breathe harshly through her nose and look anywhere else.
-
Birnin Zana is alive with music. Blue and brown bodies move with ease beside each other, the stilted sound of translators filling in gaps of conversation. Surrounding a stall of smoking meats, a cluster of burly men lift their water masks to sample tender lamb. A Talokanil woman splashes a Wakandan child in the fountain in the square, earning a delighted squeal. Pearls and shells exchange hands like currency; gifts made to gleam and ripple as if still under water.
It’s more casual than Shuri remembers. M’Baku gave a short speech, and there was only one presentation on a stride in Talokanil breathing technology, given by Wakanda’s new and enthusiastic head of the science division. Aside from a dance performance scheduled in the evening, what was once a formal and strained summit looked more like the cultural festivals Shuri grew up attending with her family.
It’s beautiful, this thing she helped make possible. And it hurts so much to see.
“Black Panther.”
M’Baku has wandered off, no doubt lured by the smell of vegetable stew or the challenge of an arm wrestle, by the time Namor chooses to approach her. Dressed as plainly as he can manage in all his vanity, he smiles up at her elevated seat.
“Come down,” he requests. “See what your work has won you.”
“I can see just fine from here.”
“Do more than see, then. Walk. Dance. Play.”
His eyes are too playful, too human. It’s the first time they’ve occupied the same space in years and it feels like more than enough for a lifetime.
“I’m in this seat because I didn’t want my work to be undone by your fragile ego. Do you think you can make more demands of me?”
Irritation feathers his jaw. It’s almost as satisfying as drawing his blood.
“Demands? I am—”
“Acting as if I’m one of your subjects.”
“Treating you as an ally,” he corrects, sweeping his arm behind him. “Look. Isn’t this what you—we—wanted?”
It’s more, really. She gave up her vengeance for this fragile dream, and here it is, worthy of even T’Challa’s.
But there at its root is him. She could never have achieved this without his cooperation, without his faith in her, without his constant heavy gaze that made her feel like he was waiting for her to do something as disgusting as thank him.
“What I want…is to be left alone,” she replies. Namor’s mouth flattens.
“You have made that very clear these seven years. But you’ve hidden long enough. Come down, now.” He extends his hand, almost gentlemanly. “Join your people.”
Shuri almost hurls herself off her seat. But peace, no matter how dry the ink, wouldn’t survive her gouging out his eyes.
“Choosing my family isn’t hiding. I have precious little left, as you know.”
He doesn’t flinch at the reminder, but both his hands disappear behind his back.
“And what of the duty you owe to Wakanda, to Talokan? You punish them by separating yourself. Not me.”
“Save your paternalistic bullshit. Look.” She mimics his tone from before, gesturing broadly around. “Our people are happy. You are the only one standing here, upset that I won’t come down and play with you.”
A short lived rattle pierces the air, his wings shivering with agitation and then snapping closed again. Shuri studies the shadow falling across his face, wishing he would just turn around and go back to playing benevolent god, before a notion takes hold of her.
“Is that why you demanded I be here? You think this is about you?”
He lifts his chin. “Isn’t it?”
“Are you—” she chokes down a peal of laughter. “That’s ridiculous! I’m not avoiding you, Namor!”
“Then come down here.”
“Stop giving me orders!”
He sighs and rolls his eyes. Actually rolls them! Like she is the one making dramatic, unfounded accusations!
But she does come down, losing all her ground in favor of stabbing his shoulder with her pointer finger.
“I don’t answer to you. I don’t think of you, outside of the peace bought with your life. You don’t get to tell me how or where to grieve, and if you think I’d waste my energy on such pettiness then you’re deranged!”
Deranged isn’t the word for this man, who traps her hand against his shoulder and dips forward to kiss her open mouth. He is so quick, it barely makes a sound, but Shuri stumbles back regardless, nearly tripping on the stairs. Her whole body lights up with adrenaline, her suit responding to her distress by covering her face and ejecting her claws.
Namor, deceptively calm, taps his mouth as if it had acted on its own. He runs his tongue over his bottom lip, wings twitching, eyes tracking back and forth looking for witnesses.
“Shuri…,” he starts, and it’s already too much to hear him speak, to hear her name spoken so raggedly like she’d stolen his breath, when he was the one always taking what didn’t belong to him.
She stands. “Stay away from me. If you know what’s good for you...I swear, Namor…”
The shadow falls across him again, his jaw flexing. Laughter and music follow her, at odds with the ringing in her ears, as Shuri bounds away like a frightened animal.
-
The citadel stopped feeling like home a long time ago. But when the lab doors shut behind her, it's like an embrace.
She holes up there for the next day of the summit. The performances are broadcast on Wakanda’s live network, so she doesn’t miss much, and isn’t missed. After all, there is no one left in Wakanda who would come looking.
Black Panther, Griot chirrups late that afternoon. Ku’kul’kan is requesting entry.
Shit.
Her suit curls around her in a flash of purple, the auto feature a bit too trigger happy. She’ll have to make some modifications.
I’ve informed him you aren’t expecting visitors. Should I send him away?
If he made a scene, her sacrifices would become a footnote to their indiscretion. It was becoming apparent that that’s what he wanted—to cause some sort of chaos and make her look incompetent as Wakanda’s protector.
What a fucking child, Shuri thinks, touching her mouth without realizing it. “It’s fine. Let him in.”
The doors glide open and closed. His sandals are quiet against the smooth floor, and Shuri bites back a knee-jerk quip about his footwear in her lab.
Namor seems in awe of what he sees, and it occurs to her that it’s his first time inside Mount Bashenga. Another sacrifice at the altar of peace.
She clears her throat.
“You shouldn’t have come here. You’re technically in breach of the treaty.”
“Did you do this?”
He glances at her, then strides towards a colorfully painted wall.
“I didn’t know that you paint.”
“Did you hear me? You—”
“It’s beautiful. Strong.” He traces one thick, dark line curving through a bright landscape. “If a bit haphazard...”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“You opened the door.”
Shuri presses a thumb into the ache forming near her brow. Stiffly, she approaches and bats his hand away from her art. “To stop you from breaking in.”
“Breaking in?” A smile toys at the edges of his mouth as he smooths down his beard. “What could I possibly want that would be worth the trouble?”
“Exactly. So do us both a favor and leave.”
“Your King sent me,” he replies, moving past her to investigate the rest of the wall. “I’m afraid your seat was noticeably empty at the midday feast.”
So that’s how he got permission. She knows M’Baku is just as tired of Namor’s bullshit as she is, and tries to imagine what he actually said. (Drag her here yourself then, if you can, fishman.)
“I would like your word that you’ll be present for this evening,” Namor continues, feigning casual. “There will be a special tribute I do not think the Black Panther should miss.”
“That’s not up to you.”
“Aren’t you curious what it is?”
“I just want this weekend to be over so I can go home,” she mutters, and it’s too much like a confession.
Namor’s gaze warms with sympathy she never asked for. “No matter how far you go, this will always be your home, Princess.”
“Don’t…call me that.”
“Why not?”
“You know why.”
He shrugs, tracing his hand along another contour of paint. A bright splash of purple, put there when Wakanda did have a princess, and an entire royal family to match.
“People like us bear the burden of many names. We cannot deny one without denying all parts of ourselves.”
“People like us?”
“Gods,” he answers, and smiles. “Or, would you prefer I say guardians?”
Shuri doesn’t smile back, or take the bait, which seems to amuse him.
“It is fitting to call you guardian. Talokan wishes to acknowledge you as such, tonight, just as our ancestors once honored the Wáay Báalam—powerful Jaguar spirits who protected them on land.”
Meaning: her empty seat will actually matter. Bast damn this man.
“I…don’t know what to say to that.”
“Say you will come.”
His tone is fond, his confidence absolute. Shuri fights the urge to shuffle her feet.
“And if I don’t?”
“Then…I’m afraid you will have to inform my generals yourself. Namora spent weeks memorizing a very difficult prayer of Bast, and I would prefer not to be the bearer of disappointing news to the most skilled marksman in my army.”
They stare at one another, the vibranium mines creating familiar blue shadows between them, his smile tilted as if they’re sharing some inside joke. As if they ever could.
Everything about this conversation feels too close to a dance they’ve done before.
“No.” Shuri shakes her head, like waking herself from a dream of a memory. “No, I won’t play this game with you. Not again.”
His smile wavers. Good.
“Game,” he repeats, flatly.
“The one where you pretend to respect me.”
She might as well have cursed his mother with how he recoils. “I have never pretended.” His teeth clack on the last word, an inscrutable hurt flashing in his eyes.
“Two days we’ve been on the same continent. Two, and you’ve gone out of your way to provoke me, tried to humiliate me—”
“That was never my intention!”
“But it’s what you did!” She shrieks. “The kiss?”
He pauses at that, nostrils flared. “I did not plan it. The impulse…took hold of me.”
When his eyes drop to her mouth, Shuri twists it into a scowl.
“You’re a liar.”
That familiar shadow darkens his brow. “Shuri,” he warns, just shy of a bark, and her insides thrum like some discordant chord being struck.
“I have never lied to you, even when I should have. I beg you to try and imagine, for one moment, any motive besides harm for why that might be.”
She exhales slowly through her nose to keep her voice level.
“It’s time for you to leave, Namor.”
Paint cracks and chips off the wall in flecks of purple as he curls his fingers in.
“No.”
“No?”
He slithers toward her, head canting to the left, wings stirring a hollow echo around them. “You’ve made a ritual of avoiding inconvenient truths. But you cannot reject everything as easily as you rejected being Queen.”
“Fuck you. Griot, the door!”
The lab doors slide open as her claws slide out. Namor’s mouth parts, like he means to say something else, but all Shuri can see is his tongue move under his teeth, wetting his bottom lip. She forces her eyes away from his lips, only to find him staring at hers again.
Anticipation tightens her skin.
“Stop,” she hisses, heart in her throat. “Namor!”
Before she can think, his breath is wafting over her clenched jaw, lips and facial hair grazing her skin. How had she let him get so close, again?
How doesn’t matter, does it?
Gentler this time, like testing the give of her skin or more likely her patience, he presses his mouth to the corner of hers. Shuri trembles, puncturing his shoulders with a snarl. But she doesn’t push. Just stands there, breath up ticking with every way he brings them closer—nose in her cheek, hands enveloping her waist, powerful thigh pressing between her own—until it sounds like she’s gasping instead of breathing.
She thinks he will say something about the pain. He must. But he just coils around her, eventually coaxing her lips under his, and licks slow into her mouth.
Shit. Shit shit shit.
Some invisible string snaps. Shuri moans, sagging against him.
He washes over her, probing past the barrier of her teeth, sucking at the tender flesh of her tongue. Instead of the triumphant smile she expects, he sighs against her mouth like he is relieved, hands dipping to cup under her backside and lift. The sudden movement forces her to wrap around him, legs locking on instinct to keep her steady. But the angle separates their lips, and Shuri’s brain breaks onto the surface, floundering.
“Wait. Wait I—what are you—”
Namor breathes—shhhhhh—over her lips, his septum bar a cool lick against her flushed skin—shhhh, hush now—against her tongue, into her lungs, his hands anchored under her thighs.
“No—we…you have to put me down—”
Her back meets the wall, the whole of him pressing in between her legs. Shuri catches the mad glint in his eye, the desperation beneath his slow, serpentine movements, before he is kissing the ink beneath her ear, drawing her raging blood to the surface as if by siren call.
“Sto—op.” What is meant as a command comes out as a breathy whine, even as she grips his hair, unconsciously drawing him closer.
“You will give me this,” he whispers — a plea, disguised as decree. “I will not seek you out again. I swear it. Only now, today…a taste and I will learn to hunger in silence again.”
He claims her mouth like it's the first time, biting and desperate. She can taste the hunger on his tongue and feel it passing into her; a bitter fever starting in every place their bodies meet, everywhere he lays his ancient eyes.
Shuri wrenches her head back.
“S-set me down. Set me down! Just. Namor. Namor please.”
He does, but gives her no room to breathe, her front sliding against his as she descends. Their hearts are bumping against each other, and blood is staining his cloak in the shape of her fingers. The sight makes her feel insane.
“Princess…”
“I said don’t call me that,” she snaps. His honeyed gaze narrows, flashing hot as brown shrinks further beneath black.
“Why,” Namor draws out the word, low and sharp, like unsheathing a sword. “…does it make you so uncomfortable to be seen?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think I do, and it is you who is the liar.”
Sharply, Shuri pricks his neck with the tip of her claw, mouth parting in awe as he cranes his neck further, letting her carve a fine line over his jugular. Red barely bubbles to the surface, she is so precise, and yet it's this that makes him flinch.
The line dances as he swallows. Shuri imagines the metallic run of it under her tongue, the sound he might make if she bit down—and looks up to find him watching her with glittering eyes.
“Griot…t-turn off the lights and seal the doors. Don’t let anyone in.”
Her suit disappears, leaving her vulnerable to his touch in her dark, thin under-armor.
Again, she expects triumph from him. But under the dimming lights, his eyes shine with barely restrained greed, carving a path from her face to her exposed shoulders, to the pebbling of her breasts and lower, where her shorts cling to her thighs. His body follows the line of his gaze, hands brushing her skin as he falls to his knees.
“Only today,” she reminds him, managing not to stutter as he noses at her mons, seeking, always seeking.
“Only today,” he agrees, muffled by his own desire, and throws her leg over his shoulder.
-
The tribute is moving. They wear dotted face paint, and shark tooth necklaces that resemble her claws. Namora does a better than average job of speaking in Xhosa. To everyone’s surprise, Namor even sings with his generals in the closing act, looking a bit strange without his ceremonial cloak.
She’ll have to double back to find and incinerate it. But there is nothing she can do about the scratch along his throat that he doesn’t seem inclined to hide, or the way his song becomes an excuse to stare openly.
Unencumbered by a face mask, his voice is the current carrying theirs forward, a deep resonance one key from hypnotizing. Shuri is unsure where exactly to look; at his bobbing throat? At his eyes? He hasn’t taken them off of her yet, their depth partially hidden by lowered lashes.
Shuri recalls his lashes fluttering as he gasped beneath her, and shifts hard in her seat.
When the song is done, and the courtyard fills with applause, Namor smiles just for her, licking at the corner of his mouth like a sated beast. It ignites a shame so hot that she stands, clapping harder and louder than anyone else, just to feel the sting in her palms.
And something else. Something worse, claws at her back teeth.
Expectation.
-
For all her accusations, he is a man of his word.
The next day, Namor spares her polite glances and formal head nods.
He doesn’t find her even to say goodbye. No, that dignity and honor he gives to Attuma, who is fierce but kind and asks if he may call her Ek Báalam with the shyness of a schoolboy.
She smiles but says no. The summit is over, and there is no excuse to pretend she’s something she’s not.
-
Another comes. And another. And another.
Things go back to how they were. Only they are not at all how they were.
Now, she knows the taste of his sweat. The grain and drag of him inside her. How he sounds at the height of his pleasure, and why (why why it's always the why) he stared.
Now, she knows what it’s like to say his name without hesitation or venom or grief. And the terrifying thrill of her mind going completely blank, all of the world narrowed down to the heat of his mouth.
Now she knows. But ‘a taste’, he said, and apparently meant it.
Bast! He agreed so easily.
Too easily.
Ah.
So this is his game, then. Well, Shuri is very good at games. He may be more patient, but her long-standing resentment is a buoy in the unrelenting tide of her desire. She will not approach him again. And if he is smart, he won’t come looking for her either. They will both be better off for it.
-
The world still needs saving, which occasionally includes Talokan. They cross paths after a tip about the Americans outfitting their research vessels with cloaking technology—elementary stuff that saw its best days in 2012, and was only now being dug up to be a pain in her ass.
As far she could tell, they weren’t looking for vibranium, but testing the shields in the Atlantic for other purposes. Namor finds her hovering above the projected area, legs dangling out of her ship, finishing up the command codes for a remote tracker.
Or, rather, she finds him following said vessel with a gang of warriors at his back, like a school of sharks scenting blood.
They regard each other silently for a moment, water sliding into his eyes and down his nose. Shuri taps at her beads and tries not to remember the way his beard dripped when he emerged from between her thighs.
“We will take care of this,” he tells her, in lieu of a greeting.
“If you do, there’ll be another one here by the end of the week, and a suspicious, purple haired white woman following it with a team of soldiers.”
“Then we will take care of them too.”
The tip of his spear gleams where it bobs from the water. But he smiles that inside joke smile, and Shuri takes the bait.
She jumps into the water, swimming in a neat arch under the poorly hidden vessel to place her tracker on its belly. When she reemerges, they’re close enough to touch. If she leaned in, she could lick the water off the bridge of his nose.
“Leave it for now. I’ll keep track of it.”
Namor looks to the sky, where the vessel smudges and blurs the outline of a cloud, and nods. He is annoyed, but not with her. Strange, that she can tell the difference now.
“Shall I help you back into your ship, then?”
He doesn’t touch her, but extends his spear. Now Shuri is the one who is annoyed. She takes ahold and lets him airlift her back onto the ship, her suit already expelling excess water and suffusing with heat.
“Couldn’t you have thrown it from here? The tracker.” He asks. Shuri shrugs.
“Felt like a swim. Is that a problem?”
Namor’s voice gentles, probing around her provocation and straight at the scar tissue between them. “Will you return this year for the summit?”
“Only virtually,” she answers, more clipped than she intended. “Why would I go through the trouble of going in person?”
Their eyes catch and hold. Shuri is stuck on an inhale as he backs off of the ship, wings buzzing, that shadow falling and clearing rapidly over his brow.
He cants his head in a goodbye. “A shame.”
Exhaling brings the annoyance into her sinus. Shuri rubs at the blooming headache as the Talokanil disappear with their King, and it only occurs to her now what that look of his is.
“I will learn to hunger in silence again.”
But the quieter he is about his, the louder hers is becoming.
-
At the first sign of foul play, Shuri’s tracking device shorts out the American’s sad excuse for cloaking tech. Whatever secret project was burgeoning is put on ice with no one to blame, and the loud purple lady can curse Wakanda until her face gets purple too, for all Shuri cares.
Avenger business is just that. Villains come and go, but their evil-deeds stay strictly surface bound—or, sometimes, beyond it.
T’Challa grows, and it’s a joy to witness, to be a part of.
But even he notices how her walk has become a restless prowl, and how, more often than not, her eyes stray too long on the ocean.
She has no excuses to call upon him, or meet him in the wild anymore. None but one.
-
At the 12th peace summit, she can tell he is shocked to see her under his feathered helm.
Every day she wears pearls in her hair, and paints her eyes in stardust. Every dress is meticulously chosen to dip low at her back, and cut a window to her waist, where a set of vibranium beads bounce against her navel in the color of jade. On her right pointer finger, a nail ring in the shape of a claw.
He stares of course—enough to burn another opening into her slinky dresses. She looks back, once, and holds his eye long enough to make him swallow hard and look away, unconsciously brushing the long healed line of his throat where she’d left her superficial mark.
Yet, he never approaches. In fact, he finds all manner of excuses to be elsewhere.
Shuri has always been good at games of the mind. Better, when she cares to try. But by day three, she tires of this one.
-
The large Talokanil camp sits along the River Tribe border in shades of yellow and green and blue. Shuri had given plans for this pop-up village a year before the summit itself was set in motion; a pipe dream, back then, on top of the alliance that was already a pipe dream.
They’d come such a long way from the small retinue nervously agreeing to stay in the palace. No Dora held the line between the camp and the river tribe homes. No Talokanil guards stationed themselves outside tents.
And no one had to give Princess Shuri, the Black Panther, guardian of Wakanda and Talokan, permission to enter Ku’kul’kan’s dwelling.
“Namor…”
He turns, bare except for a pair of linen pants slung low on his hips. The Wakandan print stands out boldly against his skin—black and purple and gold—the artificial lights bathing him in cool blue.
“Princess,” he responds without thinking, then recovers. “Apologies, Black Panther…”
“So this is where you sleep at these things.”
He looks around like he is seeing the space for the first time.
“Yes…when I have need for sleep.”
Shuri slinks toward him, and then around him, their forearms brushing. His sharp exhale is gratifying, to say the least. “I’m glad to see my ideas still being put to use.” She runs her hands along the light fixtures, programmed to emit the same color frequency as would be necessary in a dim, underwater grotto. “Does it feel very much like home?”
“Not quite, but…you should not feel slighted. There is not much that can compare.”
Shuri leans back against the reinforced walls of the tent, nothing but his hammock between them. The night is unseasonably warm and there is sweat gathering on his shoulders.
Would he let her lick it off? Or fall to his knees again, at the first sign she is willing?
“It’s hard,” she croons, “…when you know the taste of something, and nothing else even comes close.”
There, the shadow emerges like a serpent from its den, and Namor’s hunger becomes a third presence in the room with them. She wonders if he can see hers too, like a deadly, nightborn creature panting over their heads.
Shuri bites her lip, her heart beating a crescendo when he rounds the hammock to close in on her.
Stupidly, her suit emerges. After all her efforts, it still can’t tell excitement from fear.
Namor stops, assessing her with a raised brow. “Do you intend to carve me up, again, Shuri?”
Bast damn. He’s never said her name like that. Or maybe he always had, and she just wasn’t ready to hear it.
“Only if you like that sort of thing.”
“I think it’s you that likes it.”
“Well. I think you like giving me what I want. Don’t you?”
He takes a step closer, digging his fingers into the upright post holding up one side of his hammock. The wood groans as cracks appear under his thumb, a bead of sweat trickling down his chest in a way that is obscene.
“Not as much as watching you want it.”
Shuri throws herself at him, catching his mouth before it closes.
It’s almost a punishment, this kiss. Too much teeth, her nails clawing at his cheek to keep him still.
Namor huffs a moan through his nose, softening under her inelegant touch. Her violence means nothing, it seems. There is no fight in him at all.
The kiss becomes filthy, his mouth abandoning hers to leave a wet, bruising trail up her jaw. He lifts her into a familiar position, cradling her backside, tangling her limbs around him. Unlike before, Shuri leans into the embrace, flexing her thighs and clutching at his hair. Namor hums in pleasure, skating one hand over her back and pressing her impossibly closer.
Delicious friction lights up her spine. “More,” she whimpers, rocking against him.
There is something reverent in the way he lays her in his hammock and climbs over her. That same beastly look in his eyes makes her shiver; she’d dreamed of it, lost all her senses thinking he would never look at her like that again.
“Don’t think you’ve won,” she hisses between their mouths meeting. “I’m not stupid.”
Namor grinds into her like a man possessed, groaning when she rakes her fingers into his hair. “The Princess has never been stupid.”
“I know you stayed away on purpose.”
“Mm…as I said I would.”
“I know you—ah!—you tried to trick me—”
“I did no such thing,” he sighs and sinks his teeth into the gentle swell of her breast, under an inconvenient layer of vibranium mesh. “Make this go away, please.”
She does, gasping when tongue finally meets skin.
“Snake,” she moans.
He kisses her silent, hand slithering between her thighs to pry her open.
-
When she is truly delirious, biting into his shoulder to keep from disturbing the night air of the camp, he mumbles something insane into her hair, something she won’t want to face in the morning because she knows it’s true.
I am a fool.
A taste could never be enough.