Chapter 2
In his long existence, Chaac finally experiences calm. Not momentary peace, not a blip of enjoyment, but true calm. His last job overextended so long that he thinks at one point Chaac was synonymous with K’uk’ulkan. Now, he is just Chaac, partaking in the gatherings of colleagues without crushing worry. Hun Hunahpu could not boast such a feat; the maize god has yet to find his warring children. His daughter, Xquic, guardian of Xibalba and the waning moon, sends him a formal wave.
"There is a kitten curled around your axe,” Hun intones. The guests turn to Chaac, watch him lift it into the air and the small feline dangling from its haft. He sighs, they return to their feast, and with a crack of lightening he is back in his corner of Xibalba.
“How many times must I tell you I despise your form of travel?“ The panther's mouth is not open. The silky voice echoes from every expanse of rock.
He settles onto his favorite chair next to a barrel of corn. “Is it your charge again? Is it your job to overlook every marital dispute? Have you no other job, busy protector?”
“Hush, you brute.”
Axe forgotten, the panther pounces onto his lap. The metamorphosis of the feline into a languid stretch of human-like limbs is no longer unnerving. Bast’s smarmy grin is as commonplace as vats of Xtabentún in recent mortal years.
“Explain why your litter—”
“I do not litter,” she harps, using his arm as a perch. “Now tell me why your charge, sorry, former not-charge, has proven a fondness for angering eight-months pregnant women. Centuries worth of knowledge, tens of thousands of children raised, and he doesn’t know not to utter anything that can be perceived as patronizing. She is the Black Panther! She has my own powers! She will never be so weak to fall to an infection from a prick of coral.”
He doesn’t know what to say. Unlike him, K’uk’ulkan is not hot-headed. The Talokan King is of a colder fury with sun flares that break from his control when the moon eclipses him.
She claws at his hands. “See, how easy it is for a Mayan god to be soft as a puddle, weep rain over a woman? But Aj K’uk’ulkan is above chasing his wife and promising all seven seas to see her smile. He seeded her with flying children, the beginning of a dynasty hitherto uncharted, reaps the consequences, and won't even explain himself?”
He decides not remind her it was her who woke him with her ideas. Bast is, for good reason, not the god of marriage.
“Your Black Panther does not need softness. If she did, then why did you turn a tail to her brother?”
“I have told you before that your infernal armor reduces you into a a sack of meat, my friend.” She licks her lips. “Think. She is to be great. My first female charge, Black Panther to the strongest nation. How can one make greatness without trial? When her heart desperately called for a man of old, of the sea, it was the beginning of what can only be called fate.”
“Ah, yet you were spiteful of her spurning of you, and you thought to punish her by mating her to a god who's honorable rage drowned her mother.” He winces, thinking about K'uk'ulkan's fervor to drown his beloved with everything she ever wants except space.
Yes, Chaac knows women. He wasn't born yesterday.
Bast swipes a pail full of Xtabentún from him. "Now wait while I go comfort my charge.”
He thinks her refusal to admit Queen Shuri of Wakanda is among her favorites is worse than his refusal to fortify Xibalba enough to prevent unwanted guests.
Shuri sits with Okoye at the riverside. Despite her adamant insistence that she enjoys the isolation and attempts to stay long-term in Jabariland, her mother’s tribe and husband’s home eventually calls to her. She could not rid herself of the need; the river flows in her blood through her womb. Only bleeding herself dry would rid him of his venom.
“Must you be so morbid?” The bushes across the river emit a voice.
Shuri nudges Okoye a tad too harshly. The woman wheezes.
“My Queen?” The former Dora General, now Midnight Angel to Wakanda's skies, watches her carefully. Okoye has not left Shuri's side since she waddled out of their river, her pregnant belly distended and eyes embarrassingly weepy. Namor sent his finest warriors to escort her when it was clear she didn't want to see his face, again proving that he doesn't know what she wants.
She wants to be alone. She wants to breathe pristine air.
A pair of feline eyes flash. Claws.
Shuri grabs Okoye's hand. “Do you see—”
The Voice speaks again. “She cannot see. I appear to those I choose. I can hear your heartbeat. Use it to speak. Wakanda will not do with fear of losing another queen to illness.”
She looks to Okoye, whose bald head and tattoo gleams in the merigold wane of sunlight. The sky reminds her of corn, and corn reminds her of the Mayan god of maize, and gods remind her of—
"Bast," she says aloud. She doesn't trust her heart to speak when her tongue will do just fine. "I'm alright, Okoye. I will stay here some time longer."
The warrior is hesitant to leave but retreats into Aneka's riverside home, one eye hovering on her through a window.
Satisfied, the panther slowly crawls out of the bushes. Even with her sharpened senses, Shuri can see nothing but a dark silhouette and two glowing canary-yellow almond-shaped eyes.
"What ails you, child?" The voice is inhuman and fierce.
Her mind feels mushy. “It’s the pregnancy. If you are Bast, then you must know intimately that it is your fault.”
“What is the point of that renown wit and clockwork brain I granted you if your endless curiosity ends at what you think do not understand? You have the capacity to understand yet you choose not to."
“You didn’t grant me anything. I worked for it! I built myself up! I am Queen. I almost lost myself to vengeance until my mother helped.” Her voice cracks. She feels twelve again, sobbing into her mother’s dress, unable to understand the elders around her. "You didn't come to me when I needed you! I begged you." Then, more quietly, "I believed in you."
“In another world, I would not have chosen this path for anyone, but I am not the decreer." Bast sounds…sad? "I am a god. I cannot grant or take life. Your brother's death was fixed, and my help would have done nothing except delay the inevitable. I grant gifts and bless different paths, but I cannot foresee them all. Like Thor. Like your beloved."
"My belo—" She would have stood up but her babe decides its a good time of day to start practicing his father's flight patterns in her womb. "I am not for your molding and whims! This is my life. Do you know the pain you put me through? Was it simply a game of bingo, or spin-the-wheel, choose your horror story?”
”You,” Bast says tersely, “picked him yourself.” Yes. It is a reminder that haunted her for weeks when she realized.
"What did I do wrong?"
Was it disobeying her mother and sneaking out to the gardens to scavenge for lost items? Hitting T'Challa whenever he wanted to her to share her book? Throwing up on her father's shoes after a flight to Cape Verde?
Sacrificing some of her people in her plight for vengeance?
She thinks all of this and knows Bast can hear it.
"Only a god could restore to you what a god took," is Bast’s cryptic, inane response. She resists the urge to put a fist in her mouth and scream.
"I don't want a god. I want my brother."
"That god-king," Bast starts, resigned, "needs you as much as you need him. Had you truly hated him and thought him a—what does the American girl call him, a fish cake?—you would not return to him, again and again, knowing his ear is the only one that understands the centuries' worth depth of your sorrow, his bed the only one that lulls you into dreamless sleep, his heart the only love that satisfies you, his honor the only one capable of protecting you and your children. Dare I say, adding his powers to my line of charges will be quite something. Zeus himself will cower in awe."
Protection. That's all they ever blab about.
"Why?" she snaps. "I thought you'd be more traditional about that. A winged panther? Hah!"
"And I thought you would allow yourself to be happy without guilt. Who shall deny the Black Panther her right?"
"Ixchel will be of age soon to ask me about uncles and grandmas. What do I tell her, hmm? That her father made choices that stole away her grandmother?"
Bast's tail straightens. "Let him deal with that. But your mother tells me, while she loves her first grandchild, she is happy to have more through you that take after her.”
She cries. It is ugly and snotty and relieving. The panther remains paces away because it is untouchable and not comforting. Oddly, it makes her miss her serpentine, larger-than-life husband who covers every inch of her when she wants to hide from the world.
"I don't want to kill him," she confesses as though Bast herself doesn't know that. Genius Queen of Wakanda. "But he and everyone is suffocating me." Okoye, as she watches now, probably thinks her a moment away from hallucinating and is preparing to take her to the hospital. She is sick of it.
"Tell them what you need as the Queen you are and allow them to worry over you as people who love you should."
She sniffs. “Do you do returns?”
But Bast is already gone.
"You need to speak with your charge." Bast purses her lips. "I may...have been hasty."
Oh, Chaac knows this one. "A marriage is one of equals." He nods gravely. "He will not worship her, nor she him. They are—" He stops, unknowing how to continue that one.
"The sun and the moon, one in need of the company of the other, and the other in need of the light of the one," she finishes for him. When he tilts his head, she chitters. "A sun is so large and is seen from everywhere in the stars above. It has no equal. But it is a lonely star, with no company like the moon has. The moon cannot be alit of its own accord; it needs the sun to shine, for its beauty to be enjoyed."
"You ruined it with your tedious explanation." He picks up his largest axe, tightens his fingers around its haft. "I will be back soon."
She lets a tongue scrape over her sharp teeth. "Her every finger and toe.”
"Every finger and toe,” he repeats. "Watch my prized possessions."
She rolls his eyes. "No one has tried to steal anything from you since Ra."
Namor pens a letter to his generals in the south. He cannot leave Ixchel alone with Namora or she will learn a set of nasty curses in Mayan, so he works with Attuma through the written word. There are more whales than usual in his waters, the licentious mammals that they are, and they need to be fed. But there's a corn shortage due to a hurricane, one he has half the mind to wrestle into control, but he dismisses the thought as the surface-world predicts landfall on the state of Florida and he can do with less Disney in the world.
He misses his wife's Disney references. He doesn't understand them, but they accompany mirth in her eyes.
The sound of a conch shell summons him. It is different than other times. He feels something sparking has been shot up his spine. He leaves Ixchel with stern instructions to a deceitfully serious Namora, sheds his cloak, and departs immediately on his favorite orca, breaking the surface as lightening strikes again.
"Chaac!" he calls. Talokan's god replies with a roll of thunder. The orca squeals when peals of rain batter them into water. "I beseech you. God of rain and thunder."
"And I answer." Chaac's axe splits the sky again. His voice is louder than thunder. The points of Namor's ears curl under its weight. "So. You and your wife are struggling."
Namor pauses. There are a multitude of things to ask Chaac: about his suspended war on the world, ways to protect Talokan for good, whether using anemone is truly the best way to make paint. Whether his mother is in Xibalba. No, he knows she is in Xibalba. His belief is unshakeable but he is curious why she has ever appeared to him once and that only when he yielded.
There are more important things right now.
"Yes." He tilts his shin up to the skies since his ears can't. "I am struggling. She thinks I treat her like a child but she has not seen the threats I have. What the world can do to her if they hear she is with me and has given me children."
There's a pause in the heavy wind. It comes back twofold. His hair falls into his eyes.
"Have you...tried telling her this?" Chaac booms.
"Yes." He showed her his murals and spoke to her at length about the surface-world's crimes and heinous nature.
"In a way she can understand?"
He thinks of her robot in her beads, ones she made for him as well, and flashy screens and Western terminology she thinks he doesn't know but feigns ignorance just so she feels like she has taught him something, just as he teaches her. His moment of hesitation is enough for Chaac to vault another axe of sharp light through the sky.
"Go, K'uk'ulkan. She waits for you."
He comes out of the water bathed in the glow of the sunrise. Okoye is long gone, safely in her home with W'Kabi, and in her place is Ayo. Ayo understood what Shuri needed when she told her, "I will call my husband, and I want to be alone with him, but you can stay up. I will call you if anything happens," and she thinks it's a crime no one has told her until now that bearing one's heart out loud can be met with reactions other than trampling.
"You cannot wrestle a coral reef," is the first thing she says when he is a pace away and she stands in greeting. She refuses to speak to him when he is far because, despite his ability to hear her whisper across a lake, he is her husband and she will treat him as she would have treated a fully human one, a iota of normalcy to reflect her umama and ubaba's marriage when nothing about her own is normal.
He looks at her as though she has mumbled blasphemy in his temple. "I am a god of the seas. The fishes and the plants are in my care."
"Yes, yes, you speak to animals." A fact of her own making, she admits. "But must you threaten when one makes the mistake of harming me?" She pours so much fury into her face, wishing him to avert his gaze. He doesn't.
His face is stone. "It hurt you."
"You hurt me, and I lived. I am strong."
"I know."
Her lip trembles. Her toes curl into the muddy grass, a remnant of the sudden toll of rain the world experienced that night. "It makes me feel you don't trust me with myself. As if I'll disappear forever if you don't slink your body into all my crevices."
"I will do that, yes." He takes a step closer, his wings shuttering to a stop. "But I trust you. I have not a single partner in this world except you. What I cannot trust is the world with your care, Shuri."
Damnit. Smooth-talking, snake-tongued, inducer of hormone-ridden libido.
"I...can understand. I will understand," she amends. "The problem is I can't keep going like this if it means being stuck. I want space."
He presses a hand to the nape of her neck and rests his forehead on hers. Closes his eyes to prepare for a shock of pain like a child squirming in a chair before a blood sample is taken.
"Space," he repeats, agrees. "Next question: do you want to be left alone?"
No, not now, not ever. She needs her people like they do a Queen. She loves her family. Space is not the same as isolation.
"No."
"The voids your mother and brother leave, I cannot replace, but I will give you so much family, so many to surround you, that their absence will be easier to bear."
She should call Ayo before she starts panting.
"How is it that two of the most brilliant minds on that globe are unable to do something as simple as speaking?"
Chaac shrugs. "You gave her your gifts. My K'uk'ulkan weaves letters and poems for his people. He simply did not know how to approach her, but it can be excused out of ignorance. She is the first surfacer to have visited Talokan. Even his occasional roaming of the surface would not have given him the training needed to love his human mate."
Bast does not glare. She is deep in thought.
"K'uk'ulkan is smarter than your charge," he tries. That makes her startle and pounce to her feet.
"Of a brutish skill yes, in sheer talent, no."
"You like her."
Her answer comes in the form of a shrill laugh. "'Gods do not attach themselves.'"
He rolls his eyes and holds up his pail of Xtabentún from his last remaining reserve, her having sent them all to Ra, the Egyptian sun god, in his short absence.
"Bast?"
"Chaac."
"Please, do not respond to summons of mating rituals ever again."
“Even if you do one?”
He tries to remain still. She laughs. It is half a snarl and half smug.
Fin.