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beatrice_otter) wrote2020-10-21 08:12 pm
beatrice_otter) wrote2020-10-21 08:12 pm
Entry tags:
Fic: the sand road we walk (the beauty and trauma remix)
Title: the sand road we walk (the beauty and trauma remix)
Remix of: the first lily opens its red mouth byseinmit
Author:beatrice_otter
Fandom: Black Panther
Pairing: Shuri
Betaed by:karios
Rating: Teen
Word count: 5004 words
Summary: Shuri wants to fix everything. Alas, some things don't work that way.
At AO3. On tumblr. On Pillowfort.
Wakanda was, objectively, the most beautiful place in the world.
Shuri knew this, because when she was thirteen she had made a computer algorithm to determine what places were the most beautiful.
It was an interesting challenge, but all it did was confirm what Shuri already knew—that Wakanda was the most beautiful place in the world—and so once the assignment was over she turned her focus to more interesting things.
It wasn't that she did not care about the aesthetic portions of design; if her work was so unbalanced she would never have been given the chance to lead the Wakanda Design Group. It was merely that there were others who were more interested, and once she was an independent designer instead of a student, the aesthetics could be delegated to them.
After Killmonger and the coup and her brother's decision to open up the country, she paid beauty even less thought. There was simply too much to do.
So the first few times she noticed her brother's pet broken white boy lost in contemplation of rather ordinary objects, she thought little of it. Wakanda was beautiful. Very little of it was designed for pure aesthetics, but nothing was designed without thought for aesthetics, unlike the colonizers who seemed to delight in ugliness in the guise of efficiency. Barnes had suffered greatly, and beauty was a balm to the soul. If beauty would help him, he was in the right place.
Then she got the call that her brother's pet White boy had been standing, for over an hour, entranced by a garbage can. To such a great degree that he did not hear people speaking to him.
There were no enemies in Wakanda, of course. (Not now, at any rate; there could not be another Killmonger, and the Border Tribe was firmly held in check.) It was safe. Barnes was safe. (Unless there was something wrong with his brain that she had failed to find?)
For a handful of seconds, her hands paused in the middle of the model she was working on. She was busy. The War Dogs in the field needed better security, now that people were actively looking for them, and repairing the maglev trains was the perfect opportunity to make upgrades but that could only be done if the upgrades were designed and tested in a reasonable amount of time. Last but not least, now that they didn't need to stealth their satellites, their whole communications and information network could be massively upgraded. Any reasonable person would agree that the best thing to do would be to send someone else, someone with medical training, someone who was not working on half a dozen time-sensitive projects vital to Wakandan national security.
Mother and T'Challa, however, were not always reasonable people. Barnes was a guest of the royal family; he was a guest, moreover, for whom she had responsibility. And while both T'Challa and her mother had said that she needed to learn to delegate, to turn some of her responsibilities over to others and trust them to do their jobs, she knew that this was not a job they would approve of her delegating.
So, with a sigh, she turned the model off and hoped that she would remember her train of thought once she came back to it.
Barnes had insisted on constant monitoring. Thando, his therapist, had said that the reassurance that the Hydra program could not be reactivated without someone noticing would be better for his soul than the privacy he would lose by it, so he wore a net of sensors in his hair.
Shuri pulled up his brain activity on her kimoyo beads. She was not a medical doctor, but the computer did a basic reading and said that it was not epilepsy or a stroke or any neurological condition requiring immediate assistance. Nor did it look like his programming had been activated. Shuri sent the scan on to Kisembo, Barnes' neurologist, just in case.
That done, she went to collect Barnes.
He did respond when she called his name, and although he was momentarily confused, he seemed to be fine otherwise.
He was visibly startled to see her. "How long have I been—"
"Long enough," Shuri said. This was not a case where further data would be helpful, and the healers had said it was important to keep him comfortable and as free from worry as possible. "But it's no big deal. Just, it's probably safer for you to nap with your eyes open at the palace." There were no enemies for him to fear, here, and nobody would deliberately hurt him; but what if he walked into traffic and got accidentally run over?
He could probably walk back by himself just fine, but what if it had been a seizure? What if it was some sort of precursor to a stroke or some other brain problem that she hadn't found? She held out her arm to him, as if he were an elderly War Dog visiting the capital, who hadn't quite reconciled himself to what age and lingering scars from his service had done to his mobility.
"What was that thing?" Barnes asked.
Shuri snickered a little. After all, it was a little funny, even if it was also worrisome. (One more thing on her list of concerns to be handled….) Barnes would appreciate the humor more than the worry. "A trash can."
Barnes laughed, too. "Okay. Well. You have stunning trash cans."
By the time they got back to the palace, the neurologist had reviewed the information and said that there was no immediate cause for concern, although they should do a more in-depth scan to be sure, and that tomorrow morning would be soon enough. So, despite her misgivings (Shuri did not like things she could not explain or fix), she shooed Barnes off to the palace's gardens. He would be safe enough there.
Checking his monitor when there was not a possible crisis would be too invasive to be polite, but Shuri double-checked that it was set to alert her if anything went wrong, and tweaked the settings so that the threshold for "wrong" would be a little lower.
Just in case.
Then she went back to her real work. Although she couldn't quite pick up the threads of what she had been working on before the interruption, she'd had a few more thoughts about how to improve the maglev …
The next day, they scanned Barnes' brain, and the whole team sat down and talked it over.
"Your brain is healing well," Kisembo said. "A great many new connections have been formed since the last scan."
"You say you were lost in memories?" Thando asked. "And these memories were stirred up in you by the color of the garbage can?"
Barnes nodded.
"Were these memories that you had conscious access to before yesterday?"
"I don't know," Barnes said. "Maybe?" He hesitated. "I … it's not like it was some great revelation or anything. Just a quiet moment I hadn't thought of in a long time. Whether or not I could have remembered it, if I'd been trying to, I don't know."
"The new pathways are consistent with what I would expect if you were building new associations between old memories," Kisembo said. "This is very good. HYDRA worked to keep such mental associations from forming, to keep you as ignorant as possible, and we had to disconnect several pathways ourselves to get rid of the triggers. That you are forming new pathways—or, perhaps, recovering old ones—is a very good sign."
"Would a device to help create these new pathways do any good?" Shuri asked. Technical assistance was, after all, her main contribution to the group. Besides indulging her brother's overdeveloped sense of honor and hospitality.
"No," Kisembo said. "The brain is delicate, and should not be altered without good cause. Even if Barnes wished to try, I would advise against it … and," he said, nodding to Barnes, "I do not believe he wishes it."
Shuri looked over at Barnes, and saw that he was even paler than usual. She was not used to judging White skin tones, but his color seemed slightly less pink than it should be. "Sorry," she said, chagrined. "I should have asked you for your opinion first."
"It's okay," he said.
There was not much to say after that, and none of it was interesting to Shuri; she cared that Barnes was healing, but biology and medicine were not very interesting to her. Too messy.
Thando lingered after the others left.
"Do you have something in particular you wanted to ask me?" Shuri asked, a trifle warily. He had the air of an elder wishing to dispense wisdom. She could sense that from kilometers away. "I can give you a few minutes, but today was going to be busy enough before we added the session with Barnes."
"I will try not to take up too much of your time," Thando said.
He studied her, and she felt her cheeks heat up. "Look, if this is about earlier, I know that Barnes has had more than enough people rummaging around in his head and I should have thought about that before asking about technological assistance with his problem, but technical assistance is my role on the team."
"It is part of your role," Thando said. "You are also his friend, and that is an important role indeed."
"He has other friends here," Shuri said. "And I have no doubt he will make more. He is a very sociable man, underneath everything. But while many people can be his friend, if we need to create another device to help his brain heal, I am the only one who can do it."
Thando raised his eyebrows. "Not the only one," he said judiciously, "although certainly the best. Princess, forgive me, you are not in my care, but I cannot help but observing that you take great comfort in … fixing things. Making them better. Finding solutions."
"Yes, of course," Shuri said with a laugh. "Who doesn't?"
"It is very satisfying," he said. "But not a pleasure I have often, in my profession, nor one I can afford to indulge."
"Your job is to fix people," Shuri said.
"No. It is not. My job is to give people the tools that they can, if they choose, use to help themselves grow and heal." He saw her skepticism, and raised a hand. "People are not machines, or tools, or computers. Change and growth and healing must come from within. I can support this, but I cannot force it. Both for ethical reasons, and because it would not work. Not really."
Bast, that would be so frustrating, Shuri thought. She could not even imagine it. "I am glad I don't have your job," she said.
"It is frustrating, at times," Thando admitted. "But it has also taught me a great deal of patience. And compassion. And a piece of wisdom that took many mistakes and much frustration to truly learn."
And here it was. "And what is that?" Shuri asked, letting her impatience show.
"That fixing things … is not always the goal," he said. "And if you rush too quickly to try it, you may do more harm than good. And reduce the possibility of future growth and healing."
"I see," Shuri said. "I will keep that in mind the next time we meet with Barnes to discuss his care."
"That would be helpful," he said. "But also, I think it is something that might be helpful to you in other times and places."
Shuri snorted. "You and I have very different callings."
"In some ways, yes."
"My whole job is to fix things!" Shuri said. "Or to make them good enough in the first place that they will never need to be fixed!"
"I doubt that any engineer can ever guarantee that," Thando said, thoughtfully. "And, in any case, your lab is not the only calling you have."
It is the only calling I want to have, Shuri thought rebelliously, though she did not say it for it was not really true. "Thank you for your advice, healer," she said sharply. "Is there anything else, or can I get back to work?"
He hesitated.
She rolled her eyes. "Out with it."
"I do not mean to pry, but … I trust that you are receiving support to help you heal from the recent Civil War?"
"Yes, of course, this is Wakanda and not some barbarian colonial state," Shuri said. "Although it was not much of a war—only a few hours of battle, all told—I have been through all the rites of cleansing and renewal, and received counsel from a priestess of Bast. It was useful, I feel much better, and now I am ready to get on with my life and there is a great deal of work to do. Is that all?"
He was still watching her thoughtfully, but he bowed and accepted the dismissal.
She was late to dinner, that night, and dropped into her seat with a muttered "Sorry, mother," her brain still churning over the problems she had been working on, although it was too tired to think properly.
"This is the third time you've been late for dinner this week," Mother noted. "It's not like you."
Shuri shrugged as she washed her hands in the basin. "I had a great deal to do, and the meeting with Barnes and his team interfered with my schedule."
"I was not aware there was a consultation," T'Challa said. "Is Barnes alright?"
Shuri paused. Should she have said anything? She was not used to medical confidentiality; much of her work (for example, on the Black Panther suits) was restricted to those who needed to know it, but her parents and brother had always been safe to talk to. "Yes," she said, "but if you want any details you will have to ask him about them."
"If your workload is too heavy, you should delegate more of it to others," Mother said, delicately forming her ugali into a disc and dipping it in the stew.
"I don't need to do that, Mother," Shuri scoffed, "and besides, I am the best designer in the lab. I have already given away all the things that are not vital to Wakanda, or else personal favorites of mine."
"And yet I see you are growing thinner, which is not what a girl your age should be doing," Mother said. "I only see you at dinner and formal meetings, unless I go to visit you in your lab, and then you have no time for your mother. Few jokes, only new designs. And I haven't heard your brother complain of a prank in far too long."
"Mother, the pranks at least we do not need to encourage," T'Challa said, sipping his pomegranate juice.
"If I thought she had stopped because she was growing up and gaining maturity, I would rejoice," Mother said. "But I do not think this is the case. You are pushing yourself too hard, my daughter."
"Wakanda is going through a very difficult time, and my work is important," Shuri said.
"It is." Mother inclined her head regally. "But you are not the only one who can do it."
"I can do it best and fastest," Shuri protested. It was true, she was a little tired, but she was young and strong and had deep reserves.
"You are the best, and you know it," T'Challa said. "But your team, they are also the best. And if none of them could match you individually, I think as a group they are more capable than you give them credit for."
"Shuri, your intelligence is a gift from Bast, you know that," Mother said. "But it is not your only gift, nor is the most important thing about you. Not to me, and not to Wakanda."
Shuri looked down at her plate and swallowed. "Thank you, Mother," she said, taking a drink of her own juice, not quite sure why those words made her heart feel tender and glad.
"And I think you ought to spend more time with Mother Noxolo," Mother said thoughtfully.
"Did Thando say something to you?" Shuri demanded, tenderness forgotten.
"Thando?" Mother asked.
"The therapist on Barnes' team," T'Challa supplied.
"Ah. To my knowledge, I have never spoken with him," she said, "but the fact that you think he might have concerns about you only proves that I am right." She took another piece of ugali and formed it into a ball.
"Yes, Mother." Shuri bowed her head and reached for some ugali of her own.
"Then it's settled," Mother said. "You'll reduce your workload, and with part of your new free time you will do whatever you wish outside of the labs, but you will spend at least some of it in the temple with Mother Noxolo."
Shuri sighed. There was no arguing with her mother when she was decided. "Yes, Mother."
That night, Shuri tossed and turned and tried to figure out what projects she could hand over fully or partially, and what if something slipped through the cracks, and what would happen if her people were not capable of the tasks, and what if she couldn't fall asleep tonight and at last she grabbed a pillow and used it to muffle a frustrated groan. (As a child, she had experimented on what sorts of noises and how loud they could be without having the Dora Milaje burst in to see if she was in danger.)
This was all very stupid. Shuri knew how to delegate, and her people were the best in the world, and if by chance something did go wrong they would fix it, and whether everything went perfectly or failed miserably, worrying about it in the middle of the night was absolutely useless and did nothing but raise the likelihood that she would make mistakes out of fatigue.
Unfortunately, as she had learned these last few months, knowing that did not make her more likely to fall asleep.
She slept more than she had expected to, but when she woke up her eyes still felt gritty. She could work, she could marshal her brain and focus, but Mother would be unhappy with her after their conversation last night. So instead of taking a few hours to transfer projects and wrap things up, she handed over several of her projects to the rest of the group and announced she was taking the rest of the day off.
But of course the problem with that was that if she was not working, there was nothing to stop her brain from returning to the same tired grooves it had worn all night. And watching media or playing games had stopped holding her attention very well since Baba died. She might as well go see Mother Noxolo. Shuri wasn't expecting anything from her, because she'd already done all the rites, but it would please Mother.
"Ah, Shuri, your mother told me you might be stopping by today!" Mother Noxolo said as Shuri entered the small private temple in the heart of the Palace. It was not the large one where the heart-shaped herb was grown, the Black Panther consecrated, and the Dora Milaje rites performed, but rather the smaller one reserved for the royal family. Shuri had learned all the rites a Princess was expected to lead here, before having to perform them under the public eye. Most recently, it was here she had undergone the purification rites after the battle.
"I was about to start the mid-morning prayers, if you would like to join me," Noxolo said with a smile.
Shuri dragged her attention back to the priestess. "I didn't mean to disturb you," she said. She didn't come to either temple often, so the daily rhythm of caring for the statue of the goddess and saying the prayers appropriate to each hour was not written into her heart the way it was into Mother's.
"It is no disturbance," Noxolo said. "This prayer is not reserved to the priesthood, and even if it were …" She shrugged.
Even if it were, Shuri was technically a priestess by virtue of being a member of the Royal Family. "Do I know this one well enough to participate?" Shuri wrinkled her nose.
"If you do not, then all the more reason to practice," Noxolo said.
This was one of the longer ones, a moving meditation, all repetitive chanting and precise movements. Shuri had participated in it before, although not often and not recently, and mainly she remembered it as an exercise in tedium. This time, she surprised herself by finding it relaxing. It required enough attention that her mind stopped chasing itself in circles, but it was not so complicated as to be difficult.
When they were done, Noxolo invited Shuri to join her for tea. "How have you been?" she asked, swirling hot water around the pot to warm it.
Shuri shrugged. "Well enough, I suppose."
"That is not the same as 'good,'" Noxolo observed.
"I've been busy," Shuri said. "Very busy. Lots of projects, lots of cleanup, lots of work to be done to move forward. And I haven't been sleeping well."
"Nightmares?"
"No, nothing like that. No trauma symptoms. Just … my brain goes very fast all the time, and usually I can turn it off when it is time to sleep, but not lately."
"That, too, can be a symptom of trauma," Noxolo observed.
"I do not think so," Shuri said uncomfortably. "Nothing very bad happened to me, considering all that could have; and I went through all the rites of healing and cleansing after a battle, and they were very helpful."
"They generally are, which is why we have always done them," Noxolo said. "But, Princess, the human mind and body and soul are not like machines. You cannot simply repair them and be done with it. Many things help. But there are no magic words to make everything better."
"I know that," Shuri said.
"In your head, yes," Noxolo said. "I am not so sure if you know it in your heart. And also, your father died, and then your brother was thought dead and you and your mother had to flee for your lives, and then you fought in a battle. It could have been much worse, yes; but it was still very bad. And the fact that others have suffered worse than you does not mean that you did not suffer. It is no shame to still be grieving, and wounded, by all that has happened."
"Perhaps not, but I don't have the time for it."
Noxolo snorted. "That is not a decision any of us get to make."
"So what do I do?" Shuri asked, frustrated.
Noxolo shrugged. "Rest. Give yourself time and permission to feel what you feel. Meditate. Care for yourself, and let others do so as well. Participate in the rites of healing and cleansing as many times as you need—the soul is not a machine, you know, where everything works the first time if you have done it correctly. Sometimes it takes time, and repetition, and comfort. Teach yourself how to see beauty again."
Her conversation with the priestess was not unpleasant; far from it. But neither did it tell Shuri anything she did not already know. It wasn't as if she thought the soul and the brain and the body were like machines that could simply be fixed, but she could not deny that if they were, things would be so much easier.
Of course, that was what the colonizers who had enslaved Barnes had thought, too, and she did not like having anything in common with them, even if she would use the knowledge for vastly different ends than they. In any case, that was not a thought which improved her mood any.
So she wandered the palace grumpily, half-heartedly trying to argue herself into going back to the lab. This was hardly restful, and if she wasn't going to be resting or enjoying herself, she might as well be getting something productive done. (And since when was her work merely something productive to occupy her time, instead of a joy to be looked forward to?)
Eventually she wandered into one of the smaller palace gardens and saw Barnes there, sitting cross-legged on the ground, staring at a vividly purple flower.
"Hello," she said in English.
He glanced up at her. "Princess," he said, scrambling to his feet.
She waved a hand at him. "You could have stayed where you were, I don't stand on ceremony."
"Good manners is good manners," Barnes said, but he did drop down to where he had been. Shuri joined him. "Do you know what it's called?" he asked.
"No," she said, "I never paid much attention to botany. The biological sciences in general are too messy for my tastes."
"It's gorgeous," he said. "You have a very pretty country."
"Of course we do!" Shuri said. "Once, when I was still under a tutor's guidance, I had to make a computer program to measure how beautiful different places in the world were, and of course Wakanda was the most beautiful of them all."
He gave her a skeptical look. "How would a computer measure beauty?"
"Beauty is such a subjective concept," she agreed. "Before I could even get started on the programming aspects, I had to develop a grand unified theory of what beauty was and how to judge it. Since the whole point was to be objective, it had to reflect universal principles of what forms and figures and levels of symmetry and color combinations were in general most pleasing to the human eye. That took a bit of research, because of course there are cultural variations. There was a slight bias towards Wakandan aesthetics, of course, but how could there not be?"
"After all, it was your project," Barnes said.
"Once I determined an objective—mostly objective—way to rate beauty, the rest of the project was, well, not simple, but more a matter of technical matters which are my specialty. Selecting databases of images and writing the code to scour and score them, deciding whether or not to take points for ugliness—"
"Did you?"
"Oh, yes. I weighted the scores for each location so that a gorgeous building surrounded by eyesores would not outscore a neighborhood where everything was attractive."
"Or gorgeous scenery a mile away from a strip mine," Barnes murmured, and she wondered what he was remembering.
"Or that!" Shuri agreed. "And I had to filter out multiple images of the same location, since humans tend to take a lot of pictures of pretty things and few pictures of ugly things. And also, I had to figure out a way to take the bias of the photographer into account, and looking back I should have spent more time on that part of it. Teaching the algorithm to accurately apply my scoring system was simple, once all of that was done."
"Simple," Barnes said wryly. "And Wakanda was the most beautiful place in the world?"
"Yes," Shuri said.
"I've seen … some very beautiful places," Barnes said. "But more ugly ones."
"Considering who was holding you prisoner, I am more surprised that you saw any beauty."
Barnes shrugged. "They could control where I went, what I did, what I said, what I remembered, even what I thought to a certain extent. But they couldn't control what I saw."
"Is that what you have been remembering, when you go off into your own head?" Shuri asked.
He looked down at his hands, folded in his lap. "Sometimes," he muttered. "But it's what I want to remember."
Shuri lowered her eyes, too. Barnes had suffered so much worse than she had, and until recently had had nobody to support him. She'd had a few very bad days, and she had all the support Wakanda could give. She shouldn't waste time feeling sorry for herself.
"Hey, are you okay?" Barnes asked. "I don't mean to be rude, but you're looking down."
She shrugged. "Eh. Not bad, considering everything that has happened recently."
"Princess, that isn't saying much."
"Perhaps not, but it is still true." Shuri sighed. "I just wish everything would go back to normal."
Barnes paused, before responding. "I don't," he said at last.
"Well, your normal was terrible," Shuri said. "My normal was … pretty good. I mean, some of the things which have happened are good; I am glad you are free and safe. And I think my brother is right, and the time for Wakanda to hide is past. But others …" she shook her head.
Barnes didn't respond, and the silence stretched out between them. Had she offended him somehow? Or was he lost inside his head? "Barnes?" she asked.
"I'm sorry for everything that's happened to you," he said at last. "To Wakanda. It's a good place, and you should still have time to be a kid. Not have the weight of the world on you."
"I am not a child!" she cried. "And besides, if one of us should be sorry about what happened to the other, surely you have the greater claim to sympathy."
"I don't think pain is something you can measure and add up, Princess," he said, shaking his head. "The horrors I've experienced don't trump the violence you've been through. They just … are. And you can wish all day long that it hadn't happened, but in the end it's not going to change anything."
"I know that," Shuri said with some frustration.
He looked at her skeptically, and she scoffed in return. "Very well, O wise elder," she said, "what should I be thinking about instead?"
He reached out and plucked one of the purple blossoms he had been admiring earlier, and gave it to her. "Remembering that even with all the terrible things that have happened, there is still beauty."
Remix of: the first lily opens its red mouth by
seinmit Author:
beatrice_otter Fandom: Black Panther
Pairing: Shuri
Betaed by:
karios Rating: Teen
Word count: 5004 words
Summary: Shuri wants to fix everything. Alas, some things don't work that way.
At AO3. On tumblr. On Pillowfort.
Wakanda was, objectively, the most beautiful place in the world.
Shuri knew this, because when she was thirteen she had made a computer algorithm to determine what places were the most beautiful.
It was an interesting challenge, but all it did was confirm what Shuri already knew—that Wakanda was the most beautiful place in the world—and so once the assignment was over she turned her focus to more interesting things.
It wasn't that she did not care about the aesthetic portions of design; if her work was so unbalanced she would never have been given the chance to lead the Wakanda Design Group. It was merely that there were others who were more interested, and once she was an independent designer instead of a student, the aesthetics could be delegated to them.
After Killmonger and the coup and her brother's decision to open up the country, she paid beauty even less thought. There was simply too much to do.
So the first few times she noticed her brother's pet broken white boy lost in contemplation of rather ordinary objects, she thought little of it. Wakanda was beautiful. Very little of it was designed for pure aesthetics, but nothing was designed without thought for aesthetics, unlike the colonizers who seemed to delight in ugliness in the guise of efficiency. Barnes had suffered greatly, and beauty was a balm to the soul. If beauty would help him, he was in the right place.
Then she got the call that her brother's pet White boy had been standing, for over an hour, entranced by a garbage can. To such a great degree that he did not hear people speaking to him.
There were no enemies in Wakanda, of course. (Not now, at any rate; there could not be another Killmonger, and the Border Tribe was firmly held in check.) It was safe. Barnes was safe. (Unless there was something wrong with his brain that she had failed to find?)
For a handful of seconds, her hands paused in the middle of the model she was working on. She was busy. The War Dogs in the field needed better security, now that people were actively looking for them, and repairing the maglev trains was the perfect opportunity to make upgrades but that could only be done if the upgrades were designed and tested in a reasonable amount of time. Last but not least, now that they didn't need to stealth their satellites, their whole communications and information network could be massively upgraded. Any reasonable person would agree that the best thing to do would be to send someone else, someone with medical training, someone who was not working on half a dozen time-sensitive projects vital to Wakandan national security.
Mother and T'Challa, however, were not always reasonable people. Barnes was a guest of the royal family; he was a guest, moreover, for whom she had responsibility. And while both T'Challa and her mother had said that she needed to learn to delegate, to turn some of her responsibilities over to others and trust them to do their jobs, she knew that this was not a job they would approve of her delegating.
So, with a sigh, she turned the model off and hoped that she would remember her train of thought once she came back to it.
Barnes had insisted on constant monitoring. Thando, his therapist, had said that the reassurance that the Hydra program could not be reactivated without someone noticing would be better for his soul than the privacy he would lose by it, so he wore a net of sensors in his hair.
Shuri pulled up his brain activity on her kimoyo beads. She was not a medical doctor, but the computer did a basic reading and said that it was not epilepsy or a stroke or any neurological condition requiring immediate assistance. Nor did it look like his programming had been activated. Shuri sent the scan on to Kisembo, Barnes' neurologist, just in case.
That done, she went to collect Barnes.
He did respond when she called his name, and although he was momentarily confused, he seemed to be fine otherwise.
He was visibly startled to see her. "How long have I been—"
"Long enough," Shuri said. This was not a case where further data would be helpful, and the healers had said it was important to keep him comfortable and as free from worry as possible. "But it's no big deal. Just, it's probably safer for you to nap with your eyes open at the palace." There were no enemies for him to fear, here, and nobody would deliberately hurt him; but what if he walked into traffic and got accidentally run over?
He could probably walk back by himself just fine, but what if it had been a seizure? What if it was some sort of precursor to a stroke or some other brain problem that she hadn't found? She held out her arm to him, as if he were an elderly War Dog visiting the capital, who hadn't quite reconciled himself to what age and lingering scars from his service had done to his mobility.
"What was that thing?" Barnes asked.
Shuri snickered a little. After all, it was a little funny, even if it was also worrisome. (One more thing on her list of concerns to be handled….) Barnes would appreciate the humor more than the worry. "A trash can."
Barnes laughed, too. "Okay. Well. You have stunning trash cans."
By the time they got back to the palace, the neurologist had reviewed the information and said that there was no immediate cause for concern, although they should do a more in-depth scan to be sure, and that tomorrow morning would be soon enough. So, despite her misgivings (Shuri did not like things she could not explain or fix), she shooed Barnes off to the palace's gardens. He would be safe enough there.
Checking his monitor when there was not a possible crisis would be too invasive to be polite, but Shuri double-checked that it was set to alert her if anything went wrong, and tweaked the settings so that the threshold for "wrong" would be a little lower.
Just in case.
Then she went back to her real work. Although she couldn't quite pick up the threads of what she had been working on before the interruption, she'd had a few more thoughts about how to improve the maglev …
The next day, they scanned Barnes' brain, and the whole team sat down and talked it over.
"Your brain is healing well," Kisembo said. "A great many new connections have been formed since the last scan."
"You say you were lost in memories?" Thando asked. "And these memories were stirred up in you by the color of the garbage can?"
Barnes nodded.
"Were these memories that you had conscious access to before yesterday?"
"I don't know," Barnes said. "Maybe?" He hesitated. "I … it's not like it was some great revelation or anything. Just a quiet moment I hadn't thought of in a long time. Whether or not I could have remembered it, if I'd been trying to, I don't know."
"The new pathways are consistent with what I would expect if you were building new associations between old memories," Kisembo said. "This is very good. HYDRA worked to keep such mental associations from forming, to keep you as ignorant as possible, and we had to disconnect several pathways ourselves to get rid of the triggers. That you are forming new pathways—or, perhaps, recovering old ones—is a very good sign."
"Would a device to help create these new pathways do any good?" Shuri asked. Technical assistance was, after all, her main contribution to the group. Besides indulging her brother's overdeveloped sense of honor and hospitality.
"No," Kisembo said. "The brain is delicate, and should not be altered without good cause. Even if Barnes wished to try, I would advise against it … and," he said, nodding to Barnes, "I do not believe he wishes it."
Shuri looked over at Barnes, and saw that he was even paler than usual. She was not used to judging White skin tones, but his color seemed slightly less pink than it should be. "Sorry," she said, chagrined. "I should have asked you for your opinion first."
"It's okay," he said.
There was not much to say after that, and none of it was interesting to Shuri; she cared that Barnes was healing, but biology and medicine were not very interesting to her. Too messy.
Thando lingered after the others left.
"Do you have something in particular you wanted to ask me?" Shuri asked, a trifle warily. He had the air of an elder wishing to dispense wisdom. She could sense that from kilometers away. "I can give you a few minutes, but today was going to be busy enough before we added the session with Barnes."
"I will try not to take up too much of your time," Thando said.
He studied her, and she felt her cheeks heat up. "Look, if this is about earlier, I know that Barnes has had more than enough people rummaging around in his head and I should have thought about that before asking about technological assistance with his problem, but technical assistance is my role on the team."
"It is part of your role," Thando said. "You are also his friend, and that is an important role indeed."
"He has other friends here," Shuri said. "And I have no doubt he will make more. He is a very sociable man, underneath everything. But while many people can be his friend, if we need to create another device to help his brain heal, I am the only one who can do it."
Thando raised his eyebrows. "Not the only one," he said judiciously, "although certainly the best. Princess, forgive me, you are not in my care, but I cannot help but observing that you take great comfort in … fixing things. Making them better. Finding solutions."
"Yes, of course," Shuri said with a laugh. "Who doesn't?"
"It is very satisfying," he said. "But not a pleasure I have often, in my profession, nor one I can afford to indulge."
"Your job is to fix people," Shuri said.
"No. It is not. My job is to give people the tools that they can, if they choose, use to help themselves grow and heal." He saw her skepticism, and raised a hand. "People are not machines, or tools, or computers. Change and growth and healing must come from within. I can support this, but I cannot force it. Both for ethical reasons, and because it would not work. Not really."
Bast, that would be so frustrating, Shuri thought. She could not even imagine it. "I am glad I don't have your job," she said.
"It is frustrating, at times," Thando admitted. "But it has also taught me a great deal of patience. And compassion. And a piece of wisdom that took many mistakes and much frustration to truly learn."
And here it was. "And what is that?" Shuri asked, letting her impatience show.
"That fixing things … is not always the goal," he said. "And if you rush too quickly to try it, you may do more harm than good. And reduce the possibility of future growth and healing."
"I see," Shuri said. "I will keep that in mind the next time we meet with Barnes to discuss his care."
"That would be helpful," he said. "But also, I think it is something that might be helpful to you in other times and places."
Shuri snorted. "You and I have very different callings."
"In some ways, yes."
"My whole job is to fix things!" Shuri said. "Or to make them good enough in the first place that they will never need to be fixed!"
"I doubt that any engineer can ever guarantee that," Thando said, thoughtfully. "And, in any case, your lab is not the only calling you have."
It is the only calling I want to have, Shuri thought rebelliously, though she did not say it for it was not really true. "Thank you for your advice, healer," she said sharply. "Is there anything else, or can I get back to work?"
He hesitated.
She rolled her eyes. "Out with it."
"I do not mean to pry, but … I trust that you are receiving support to help you heal from the recent Civil War?"
"Yes, of course, this is Wakanda and not some barbarian colonial state," Shuri said. "Although it was not much of a war—only a few hours of battle, all told—I have been through all the rites of cleansing and renewal, and received counsel from a priestess of Bast. It was useful, I feel much better, and now I am ready to get on with my life and there is a great deal of work to do. Is that all?"
He was still watching her thoughtfully, but he bowed and accepted the dismissal.
She was late to dinner, that night, and dropped into her seat with a muttered "Sorry, mother," her brain still churning over the problems she had been working on, although it was too tired to think properly.
"This is the third time you've been late for dinner this week," Mother noted. "It's not like you."
Shuri shrugged as she washed her hands in the basin. "I had a great deal to do, and the meeting with Barnes and his team interfered with my schedule."
"I was not aware there was a consultation," T'Challa said. "Is Barnes alright?"
Shuri paused. Should she have said anything? She was not used to medical confidentiality; much of her work (for example, on the Black Panther suits) was restricted to those who needed to know it, but her parents and brother had always been safe to talk to. "Yes," she said, "but if you want any details you will have to ask him about them."
"If your workload is too heavy, you should delegate more of it to others," Mother said, delicately forming her ugali into a disc and dipping it in the stew.
"I don't need to do that, Mother," Shuri scoffed, "and besides, I am the best designer in the lab. I have already given away all the things that are not vital to Wakanda, or else personal favorites of mine."
"And yet I see you are growing thinner, which is not what a girl your age should be doing," Mother said. "I only see you at dinner and formal meetings, unless I go to visit you in your lab, and then you have no time for your mother. Few jokes, only new designs. And I haven't heard your brother complain of a prank in far too long."
"Mother, the pranks at least we do not need to encourage," T'Challa said, sipping his pomegranate juice.
"If I thought she had stopped because she was growing up and gaining maturity, I would rejoice," Mother said. "But I do not think this is the case. You are pushing yourself too hard, my daughter."
"Wakanda is going through a very difficult time, and my work is important," Shuri said.
"It is." Mother inclined her head regally. "But you are not the only one who can do it."
"I can do it best and fastest," Shuri protested. It was true, she was a little tired, but she was young and strong and had deep reserves.
"You are the best, and you know it," T'Challa said. "But your team, they are also the best. And if none of them could match you individually, I think as a group they are more capable than you give them credit for."
"Shuri, your intelligence is a gift from Bast, you know that," Mother said. "But it is not your only gift, nor is the most important thing about you. Not to me, and not to Wakanda."
Shuri looked down at her plate and swallowed. "Thank you, Mother," she said, taking a drink of her own juice, not quite sure why those words made her heart feel tender and glad.
"And I think you ought to spend more time with Mother Noxolo," Mother said thoughtfully.
"Did Thando say something to you?" Shuri demanded, tenderness forgotten.
"Thando?" Mother asked.
"The therapist on Barnes' team," T'Challa supplied.
"Ah. To my knowledge, I have never spoken with him," she said, "but the fact that you think he might have concerns about you only proves that I am right." She took another piece of ugali and formed it into a ball.
"Yes, Mother." Shuri bowed her head and reached for some ugali of her own.
"Then it's settled," Mother said. "You'll reduce your workload, and with part of your new free time you will do whatever you wish outside of the labs, but you will spend at least some of it in the temple with Mother Noxolo."
Shuri sighed. There was no arguing with her mother when she was decided. "Yes, Mother."
That night, Shuri tossed and turned and tried to figure out what projects she could hand over fully or partially, and what if something slipped through the cracks, and what would happen if her people were not capable of the tasks, and what if she couldn't fall asleep tonight and at last she grabbed a pillow and used it to muffle a frustrated groan. (As a child, she had experimented on what sorts of noises and how loud they could be without having the Dora Milaje burst in to see if she was in danger.)
This was all very stupid. Shuri knew how to delegate, and her people were the best in the world, and if by chance something did go wrong they would fix it, and whether everything went perfectly or failed miserably, worrying about it in the middle of the night was absolutely useless and did nothing but raise the likelihood that she would make mistakes out of fatigue.
Unfortunately, as she had learned these last few months, knowing that did not make her more likely to fall asleep.
She slept more than she had expected to, but when she woke up her eyes still felt gritty. She could work, she could marshal her brain and focus, but Mother would be unhappy with her after their conversation last night. So instead of taking a few hours to transfer projects and wrap things up, she handed over several of her projects to the rest of the group and announced she was taking the rest of the day off.
But of course the problem with that was that if she was not working, there was nothing to stop her brain from returning to the same tired grooves it had worn all night. And watching media or playing games had stopped holding her attention very well since Baba died. She might as well go see Mother Noxolo. Shuri wasn't expecting anything from her, because she'd already done all the rites, but it would please Mother.
"Ah, Shuri, your mother told me you might be stopping by today!" Mother Noxolo said as Shuri entered the small private temple in the heart of the Palace. It was not the large one where the heart-shaped herb was grown, the Black Panther consecrated, and the Dora Milaje rites performed, but rather the smaller one reserved for the royal family. Shuri had learned all the rites a Princess was expected to lead here, before having to perform them under the public eye. Most recently, it was here she had undergone the purification rites after the battle.
"I was about to start the mid-morning prayers, if you would like to join me," Noxolo said with a smile.
Shuri dragged her attention back to the priestess. "I didn't mean to disturb you," she said. She didn't come to either temple often, so the daily rhythm of caring for the statue of the goddess and saying the prayers appropriate to each hour was not written into her heart the way it was into Mother's.
"It is no disturbance," Noxolo said. "This prayer is not reserved to the priesthood, and even if it were …" She shrugged.
Even if it were, Shuri was technically a priestess by virtue of being a member of the Royal Family. "Do I know this one well enough to participate?" Shuri wrinkled her nose.
"If you do not, then all the more reason to practice," Noxolo said.
This was one of the longer ones, a moving meditation, all repetitive chanting and precise movements. Shuri had participated in it before, although not often and not recently, and mainly she remembered it as an exercise in tedium. This time, she surprised herself by finding it relaxing. It required enough attention that her mind stopped chasing itself in circles, but it was not so complicated as to be difficult.
When they were done, Noxolo invited Shuri to join her for tea. "How have you been?" she asked, swirling hot water around the pot to warm it.
Shuri shrugged. "Well enough, I suppose."
"That is not the same as 'good,'" Noxolo observed.
"I've been busy," Shuri said. "Very busy. Lots of projects, lots of cleanup, lots of work to be done to move forward. And I haven't been sleeping well."
"Nightmares?"
"No, nothing like that. No trauma symptoms. Just … my brain goes very fast all the time, and usually I can turn it off when it is time to sleep, but not lately."
"That, too, can be a symptom of trauma," Noxolo observed.
"I do not think so," Shuri said uncomfortably. "Nothing very bad happened to me, considering all that could have; and I went through all the rites of healing and cleansing after a battle, and they were very helpful."
"They generally are, which is why we have always done them," Noxolo said. "But, Princess, the human mind and body and soul are not like machines. You cannot simply repair them and be done with it. Many things help. But there are no magic words to make everything better."
"I know that," Shuri said.
"In your head, yes," Noxolo said. "I am not so sure if you know it in your heart. And also, your father died, and then your brother was thought dead and you and your mother had to flee for your lives, and then you fought in a battle. It could have been much worse, yes; but it was still very bad. And the fact that others have suffered worse than you does not mean that you did not suffer. It is no shame to still be grieving, and wounded, by all that has happened."
"Perhaps not, but I don't have the time for it."
Noxolo snorted. "That is not a decision any of us get to make."
"So what do I do?" Shuri asked, frustrated.
Noxolo shrugged. "Rest. Give yourself time and permission to feel what you feel. Meditate. Care for yourself, and let others do so as well. Participate in the rites of healing and cleansing as many times as you need—the soul is not a machine, you know, where everything works the first time if you have done it correctly. Sometimes it takes time, and repetition, and comfort. Teach yourself how to see beauty again."
Her conversation with the priestess was not unpleasant; far from it. But neither did it tell Shuri anything she did not already know. It wasn't as if she thought the soul and the brain and the body were like machines that could simply be fixed, but she could not deny that if they were, things would be so much easier.
Of course, that was what the colonizers who had enslaved Barnes had thought, too, and she did not like having anything in common with them, even if she would use the knowledge for vastly different ends than they. In any case, that was not a thought which improved her mood any.
So she wandered the palace grumpily, half-heartedly trying to argue herself into going back to the lab. This was hardly restful, and if she wasn't going to be resting or enjoying herself, she might as well be getting something productive done. (And since when was her work merely something productive to occupy her time, instead of a joy to be looked forward to?)
Eventually she wandered into one of the smaller palace gardens and saw Barnes there, sitting cross-legged on the ground, staring at a vividly purple flower.
"Hello," she said in English.
He glanced up at her. "Princess," he said, scrambling to his feet.
She waved a hand at him. "You could have stayed where you were, I don't stand on ceremony."
"Good manners is good manners," Barnes said, but he did drop down to where he had been. Shuri joined him. "Do you know what it's called?" he asked.
"No," she said, "I never paid much attention to botany. The biological sciences in general are too messy for my tastes."
"It's gorgeous," he said. "You have a very pretty country."
"Of course we do!" Shuri said. "Once, when I was still under a tutor's guidance, I had to make a computer program to measure how beautiful different places in the world were, and of course Wakanda was the most beautiful of them all."
He gave her a skeptical look. "How would a computer measure beauty?"
"Beauty is such a subjective concept," she agreed. "Before I could even get started on the programming aspects, I had to develop a grand unified theory of what beauty was and how to judge it. Since the whole point was to be objective, it had to reflect universal principles of what forms and figures and levels of symmetry and color combinations were in general most pleasing to the human eye. That took a bit of research, because of course there are cultural variations. There was a slight bias towards Wakandan aesthetics, of course, but how could there not be?"
"After all, it was your project," Barnes said.
"Once I determined an objective—mostly objective—way to rate beauty, the rest of the project was, well, not simple, but more a matter of technical matters which are my specialty. Selecting databases of images and writing the code to scour and score them, deciding whether or not to take points for ugliness—"
"Did you?"
"Oh, yes. I weighted the scores for each location so that a gorgeous building surrounded by eyesores would not outscore a neighborhood where everything was attractive."
"Or gorgeous scenery a mile away from a strip mine," Barnes murmured, and she wondered what he was remembering.
"Or that!" Shuri agreed. "And I had to filter out multiple images of the same location, since humans tend to take a lot of pictures of pretty things and few pictures of ugly things. And also, I had to figure out a way to take the bias of the photographer into account, and looking back I should have spent more time on that part of it. Teaching the algorithm to accurately apply my scoring system was simple, once all of that was done."
"Simple," Barnes said wryly. "And Wakanda was the most beautiful place in the world?"
"Yes," Shuri said.
"I've seen … some very beautiful places," Barnes said. "But more ugly ones."
"Considering who was holding you prisoner, I am more surprised that you saw any beauty."
Barnes shrugged. "They could control where I went, what I did, what I said, what I remembered, even what I thought to a certain extent. But they couldn't control what I saw."
"Is that what you have been remembering, when you go off into your own head?" Shuri asked.
He looked down at his hands, folded in his lap. "Sometimes," he muttered. "But it's what I want to remember."
Shuri lowered her eyes, too. Barnes had suffered so much worse than she had, and until recently had had nobody to support him. She'd had a few very bad days, and she had all the support Wakanda could give. She shouldn't waste time feeling sorry for herself.
"Hey, are you okay?" Barnes asked. "I don't mean to be rude, but you're looking down."
She shrugged. "Eh. Not bad, considering everything that has happened recently."
"Princess, that isn't saying much."
"Perhaps not, but it is still true." Shuri sighed. "I just wish everything would go back to normal."
Barnes paused, before responding. "I don't," he said at last.
"Well, your normal was terrible," Shuri said. "My normal was … pretty good. I mean, some of the things which have happened are good; I am glad you are free and safe. And I think my brother is right, and the time for Wakanda to hide is past. But others …" she shook her head.
Barnes didn't respond, and the silence stretched out between them. Had she offended him somehow? Or was he lost inside his head? "Barnes?" she asked.
"I'm sorry for everything that's happened to you," he said at last. "To Wakanda. It's a good place, and you should still have time to be a kid. Not have the weight of the world on you."
"I am not a child!" she cried. "And besides, if one of us should be sorry about what happened to the other, surely you have the greater claim to sympathy."
"I don't think pain is something you can measure and add up, Princess," he said, shaking his head. "The horrors I've experienced don't trump the violence you've been through. They just … are. And you can wish all day long that it hadn't happened, but in the end it's not going to change anything."
"I know that," Shuri said with some frustration.
He looked at her skeptically, and she scoffed in return. "Very well, O wise elder," she said, "what should I be thinking about instead?"
He reached out and plucked one of the purple blossoms he had been admiring earlier, and gave it to her. "Remembering that even with all the terrible things that have happened, there is still beauty."