The White Wolves

Heartbreaking

Maya

The others faded as I became stronger, T'Challa would have to lose his fanciful vision that we would save anyone without making sacrifices, but he was as stubborn as a horse refusing to leap over a fence it saw as impossible. Bucky wouldn't listen to reason either, not because of a stubborn nature but because he had lost too much already, he couldn't let them have me, not when what happened to him was constantly at the front of his mind. I couldn't bring myself to try and persuade Shuri, it would be fruitless and I didn't want to see the glitter of hope in her eyes go out.

*

It had been two days since the first appearance of my wings, when the last straw was ripped from my hand. The wings were growing everyday and I could no longer lean back against the bed when it was in a sitting position, someone was bound to notice eventually. But that was only the second last straw, the last was when Jamir's heart stopped.

They brought him back to the realm of the living but that didn't help blank out the horror, if we didn't get them to Wakanda now, the children were going to die. Because of me. Because the stupid, cold blooded government with gall for blood wanted me. They wanted a bejeweled sword to wave at their enemies from across the battlefield. I could not let them die.

"T'Challa," I beckoned him over, Shuri was asleep, her head on my arm, exhausted by all the translations she had to do to keep Jamir calm once he came back round. "You have to take them and leave." Our only witness was the silent Okoye.

"Not this again Maya. We are not leaving you to become a soldier in the hands of these people," T'Challa insisted.

"But they will die if you don't, this morning it was different. This morning we thought they could last a week, but now I don't think they can last another day," I was pleading, my young eyes looked wise beyond my age and like I had already been through too much already. "Forever the realist, but I know, in our last meeting I suggested they let some of our party leave with the others and some stay to continue negotiations. They shot it down like a peasant in the air, saying that either we all left without you, or no one left." T'Challa was almost despairing himself now, this was breaking him emotionally more than Killmonger ever had.

"Then go, now, when Shuri is asleep, when she can't object," if he weren't a king then it would have been an order. Bucky to was asleep in his chair, T'Challa sat in Shuri's vacant chair. "Let us at least leave it until the morning, let them have a say."

"In the morning half of those children could be dead. Jamir could be dead. What if some of them never wake up?"

"We have to trust that they will and hope that those idiots see sense overnight."

"T'Challa, we have been waiting for them to see sense for a week. It's not going to happen," I didn't want them to go, not really, didn't want to be at the mercy of mad-men, but I couldn't sit by and watch the life leach out of them one by one.

The argument went on and on and I made no headway, but neither did T'challa, we just kept going in circles, endless and pointless. In the end we both gave in at the same time. I stayed up all night, paranoid that every mechanical beep would become elongated, that every heartbeat would be their last. Now, I feel that I got so close that night, so close to knowing what it would feel like to be a guardian angel, constantly fearing for someone to drop dead in front of your eyes.

*

As the sun tipped over the horizon, luck seemed to be on our side, no one had died. Shuri's eyes flickered open by my side, her previously emotionless face caused by the bliss of sleep was graced with a smile of pure joy at seeing me. I couldn't help but mirror it, my heart too infatuated to resist. Myself waking up before her wasn't unheard of so she didn't inquire about my open eyes. "Morning Feathers," Shuri said, she had been trying to find a nickname she liked and her method was to call me something different every time she would have normally called me Maya. This was actually one of the more sensible attempts, the least sensible being, "yeet" during a conversation about cricket back home. When she learnt I played, Okoye promised me that when we got to Wakanda she would show me how to throw a spear, she seemed to think I would be quite good. But that might never happen now.