The White Wolves

Clarifying

Shuri
As my mind cleared, so did the body mass that so cruelly shrouded me from her. It was good news, Maya now conscious, must have been woken by the sirens and voices; her face was still holding its wallpaper of fear. My bother, still holding me in his arms, sensed my need and walked me closer to the blood stained bed. He gently set me down in the chair I despised and her eyes met mine, a deep brown pair to her golden hazel. Behind those eyes I saw joy, pain, memories, emotion and everything human, including love. Looking at her was like gazing into a deep pool of water on a windless day, like staring up at a sky dotted with more soft clouds than cumulonimbus. What I saw was too much for even my mind to comprehend for too long and so I was forced to look away.

For the first time since the injections, I noticed the other nine cots, soldiers lined up in barracks, containing the frail bodies of the children. They were weakening, our time was running out. Her time was running out. The time for talking was over.

"We have to get you lot out of here," expressed T'Challa as if he had a ticket for the same train of thought as I did. "We should have fought them when we had ten extra warriors instead of one and nine children," said Okoye her expression frustrated as Bucky reached over from his new place by her side and touched her on the shoulder causing her to turn her head from my face. She had been sitting upright since the doctors left and this didn't change as Bucky began to talk, "You're not ok, are you?" My love shook her head before picking up one of the scattered monopoly notes and a pen we had used to keep score in the connect four tournament... was all that joy really only the day before.

I had never seen her write and her handwriting now didn't fail to disappoint, even when leaning on her own left hand, it was swirling, connected and elegant. Very English, like tea but with more Maya. More beauty. After she formed a swirling capital C, she began on a smaller but as gracefully crafted A, followed swiftly by an M, E, R, A and finally culminated in a dramatic question mark. She angled the paper first to Bucky and then to myself, Camera? I nodded in recognition, she didn't want them to know. That must mean that it was something they could use... an assumption. I was getting as bad as her. After a moment's hesitation, I touched one of the beads on my wrist, setting a temporary endless loop on the cameras, ending the very second before I moved to touch the bead so as to be indetectable. Once the bead changed from black to a glowing blue, informing me of my success, I spoke, "It's looped."

There were several seconds of awkward anticipation before Maya spoke, I had not previously noted the tone of her voice but now I picked out every perfect detail. How it was not too high or low but distinctly feminine, with auras of kindness and comfort but underlying tones of fierce nature. All this I took in before the she finished the first word, " It would be easier to show you. Please don't let this change whatever your twisted view of me is into something darker." I could never see her as anything but what I love. She could never be dark in my eyes, for there she practically glows. Despite my indignation that she would think that anything could change how I felt, I needed to remain silent out of courtesy and because there would probably be more important items on the agenda to argue about later.

Maya closed her magnificent eyes, her back exposed by the now bloodstained hospital gown, its painfully cicadelic pattern so similar to bus seating that I pitied the wretch who thought they were a good idea. I couldn't see what the doctor meant by scaring, there was not a patch of her back, other than the normal moles and slight changes of pigment, that wasn't a flawless, sunkissed, unwrinkled cover of what lay beneath.

I could have blinked and missed it. It was like reading a passage of text from your favourite book and suddenly realising something new. It had always been there, you just hadn't quite clocked what it meant the first thousand times. My view of her back became obscured by a pair of downy feathered wings, no bigger than my hand, and certainly still growing as they could not get Maya off the ground if they tried. They protruded from the exact spots where Maya had complained about being the center of the pain and were a slightly lighter shade of bloodstain than the bedsheets telling me they were a vibrant and true white. The absence of colour rather than an extremely bleached yellow. They were Maya, I realised both physically as they had seemingly grow in, and metaphorically, as they were everything I loved about her. Beautiful and elegant yet strong and practical, a kaleidoscopic jeweled sword swinging at the side of a ruthless leader. The real question would be who that faceless leader was.

What if they knew? The UK would never give up the ultimate weapon in their air force, she would never be safe. There would be no cure for what had already occurred. She would have to live as a sword for the rest of her life. I reached out a tentative hand to stroke the wings, like a lost puppy in awe of the beauty of human kindness. I half expected Maya to flinch away from the contact, but instead she embraced it, relished it even, moving her new limbs slightly to shift off some of the dried and claggy blood.

Maya

I was a blunt dagger, untrained and all the more deadly for it. All I could picture was the horror on Shuri's face as the hand of a demon thrust me into her brothers side, the side of Wakanda. There would be no forging this rusted and blunt dagger into something beautiful, it would only disintegrate into the flames. I hated it. Hated this weaponizing of my body. The body I have had for 16 years that only know felt like it wasn't my own. They needed to know why, why this had happened to me and why there was still hope for the others, that they wouldn't be shaped into daggers yet.

And so I spoke, "They are not the mutation," I managed to choke out. This caused Bucky's brow to furrow but to my delight Shuri was too preoccupied with the wings to display any relevant emotion. "Then what is? They sure are not human," T'Challa asked, his shock fading to confusion at my words. I slowly lifted the sleeve of my right arm, just like the doctors had for everyone but me before the injections, to reveal a tattoo.

A tattoo of a pair of angelically stylized wings. In clear black ink.