you don’t get it. you don’t get it. i will always think about how shuri all but ran to the ancestral plane, despite not believing in it. how, despite her misgivings, it was a chance to see her mother or brother again;
and i will always think about how she met killmonger instead: someone she deemed an enemy and a threat to those she loved and stood for; always separate and far away, always just a warning—look, this is the wrong path. you should never take it.
and how killmonger convinced her that they were the same. you chose me, princess.
i will always think about shuri after, waking up in that cold metal slab under sterile fluorescent lighting, now hollow in a way no one else will ever be able to comprehend;
how, as she stood up, her loss finally seemed real to her, because even in a place where her wishes to see her family could have been granted, they weren’t. they didn’t come. to her, they chose not to, and so a man like killmonger guided her into her first breaths as the Black Panther instead.
i will always think about how broken by grief she sounded, and angry, and most of all, above all, so utterly alone:
“I saw no one Nakia! I SAW NO ONE! Why did they not show up? Why did they abandon me?”