#stormsire

⟨ ‎ @stormsire‎ ⟩ ‎ ‎ helena ‎ ‎is typing… ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ • • •

› Ororo M. ›

our great cat is king of many things.

he rules over an unconquered people with brilliance that is frequently relegated to the status of legend by those with no claim to comprehend its significance. he leads a people with the destiny of t heir existence secured not by accident, but by design over the course of many generations. he wields knowledge—of physics and biology and the subtle arithmetic of stars and blood. he stalks with the deadly efficiency of a hunter honed by ancestral ritual and discipline and memory. he leads dreamers and star-seekers and adventurers tracing the cosmos not to conquer but to comprehend.

all of this is true.

and yet—and yet, standing before her, none of it constitutes armor.

the moment is insignificant on its face. unceremonious. no drums. no council. no witnesses other than the earth itself. burkina faso extends around them, parched under africa's oppressive heat and alert, weighing the histories that do not shout their presence but merely exist. a land of beauty and violence that is still learning to exist as they snap fingers of neocolonialism from the soul of their land. a land t'challa knows well, since he has bled upon this continent in multiple ways.

and at this point, he is a boy trapped.

off guard, and naked as the day he was born.

the years lapped inward with a sort of uncounterable violence. the decades of governance, the war rooms and the labs, the crises averted and the compromises made—all contracted into the time span of a single breath. the crown does not dissipate, not one of vibranium. but it relaxed. the regal discipline does not break, not it entirely, for it flexes. and beneath it all, something else stirs.

the boy.

no, no, it is not the child who had stubbornly walked barefoot across the jungle, encountering nasty bites from the snakes that despised unwelcome entry into their territories. not the child who foolishly wrestled with panther cubs in the refuge of his domain, under the watch of a dozen palace guards. not the child who couldn't visit the marketplace without a nervous dora milaje attempting to passively persuade him to return behind royal walls, wanting her shift to be an easy one. what stood before hadari-yao now was the prince who had walked across africa with more questions than answers.

the same one who had learned about injustice not from private mentors, but from proximity. the one who had understood hunger by looking into people's faces. the one who had learned that freedom was not a theoretical construct, but a series of dangerous decisions made in the moment. the one who had met her, not as a goddess, or a symbol, or a force of nature, but a force that could not be reduced by mortal or divine.

astonishing.

the words lock in place where it should not be able to. warmth trickles down his dark cheeks before he can catch it in his head. champion of bast. master of equations that warp reality to suit his people's needs. a man who can take apart either a gun or a story conceived by anansi themselves.

undone.

maybe it is her voice. maybe it is the absence of demand in it. maybe it is the way she does not prepare for impact when she talks to him, as if she believes in the integrity of the space between them. or maybe it is the knowledge – mutual, tacit – of both of them bearing worlds on their shoulders, of both of them being familiar with just how often it is unnoticed.

his smile comes honest. ❝ you honor me. ❞ the words leave him before the king can polish them. they do not sound like the sovereign of wakanda.

they sound like the prince who once stood by her side through all the turmoil and thwarting the ambitions of racist parasites on their continent. the man who fought and ran and survived and came back different. learning all wrong about defeat through all the wrongs of attachment.

❝ your x-men are treating you well, lioness. ❞ a gift, given casually. a distraction, this time carefully planned. a means of acknowledging her strength without revealing what lies beneath his ribs: that a glimpse of her means finding a hurt he'd never bothered to interrogate. also, he didn't want her to catch his golden eyes eating her up.

time presses in, unrelenting as always. crises never pause for emotion's sake. the nation continues to boil. the nation continues to need him whole. thus, the poet inside his chest — dangerously alive and burning as the sun — is held in check. for now.

❝ i hope you do not find offense in my asking—but what brings you here? ❞ there is no accusation in his tone. only concern, tempered by respect. ❝ the last word i received spoke of a crisis among the mutant population in america. ❞ his voice lowers, slightly, his amber eyes searching her face. not for weakness, but for what remains unspoken. ❝ i am truly sorry, ororo. for what and who was lost. ❞

Well, and here come my Stormsire’s Cursebreakers. Yep another crazy name by Games Workshop. Sometimes I think that they can not possibly put much time into making these names up. 

Anyway these really cool looking minis were of course made by “Games Workshop” (https://www.games-workshop.com/). 

t'challa was a man prepared for everything.

he prepared himself to weather storms — in his country, in the motherland, in the world. he drafted contingencies for the most powerful of his allies and adversaries alike, from street-level threats to universal anomalies. he prepared for invasions. for betrayal. for multiversal compromises. he prepared for all of it.

however, the panther chieftan had not prepared himself for this.

for the way her voice quivered with delight when she spoke his name. for the placement of her hand in wonder on the area of the body that known most of his kisses and reverent touches. for the way joy could feel heavier than war and saving the cosmos.

the great cat stopped before her, the night air rustling the hem of his royal finery, violet city light reflecting softly across the stunned planes of his expression. for a moment — just a moment — he did not speak. his cat eyes of gold followed her hand. he fluttered his eyelashes, blinking once.

the tremor was there. the very human tremor.

and her words sank into his mind and his heart. as though the goddess bast herself had implanted them into the chest of her champion.

his breath left him, quiet and disbelieving.

he stepped forward then, closing the distance between them with a care that was akin to the sacred foundations they'd established from teenhood onward. his hand came up instinctively and landed on top of hers on her abdomen. the act anchored him.

there was joy beyond words. there was fear. and then there was the strongest instinct a cat possessed.

protectiveness.

t'challa was awed, pursing his lips together briefly

“ we are.. ” he started to say, but then the sentence failed to complete. unusual for king t'challa, for when the man spoke, he spoke with certainty. but these events were different from anything he had ever faced before. the constriction in his throat was from the overwhelming expansion of something too immense. t'challa imagined, in a fleeting moment of thought, that perhaps this was what his father had once felt. and his father before him.

“ a child, ” he finished softly. his fingers splayed out carefully over the area beneath her palm, as though he could already feel the promise of something new forming there. wakanda had her heirs before. but this was different.

this was not a phenomenon shaped by duty. this was love made flesh. it made so much sense, too.

it explained the subtle changes he had sensed; the change in her scent, the faint alteration in rhythm only heightened senses could detect. while still intoxicating, there had been something new woven into her being.

now he understood.

“ you carry our future, ” he whispered, his smile enhancing his dotting features. “ and i have never felt more honored. thank you. ” he planted a slow kiss on her forehead.

nothing held his imagination greater than the thought that now unfurled before him: holding ororo through every sunrise to come.

but then it dawned on him.