Archive of Our Own ^beta

T’Challa stumbled with the force of the explosion.

It wasn’t quite an explosion, more like a low rumbling in the palace, but it was centered directly on Shuri’s labs.

The Black Panther rolled his eyes as he jogged down the halls, three of the Dora falling in step behind him. There had been five false-alarms in the last week and he had a feeling that this would be yet another one, but there was no harm in being cautious.

The guards stepped in front of him when they reached the door, one taking hold of the handle and the others readying their spears in case action was needed.

T’Challa waved Nareema out of the way. She scrunched her nose up but didn’t verbally argue.

Banging and shouts came from the other side of the door. He steeled himself before nodding to the guards to open it, revealing…

Pink. Pink goop everywhere.

Zataniah stood in the center of the room, the semi-solid substance drenching her from head to toe and her eyes wide.

“Auntie Shuri did it!” She pointed to the left side of the room.

The teenager brought her head up from behind a screen with a disgruntled denial. She was also covered in the strange liquid.

T’Challa almost held a chuckle back, (almost) but the laughter of the Dora Milaje pushed him over the edge.

“Does anyone want to actually explain what happened before the Queen Mother hears about this mess?” He tried to school his face into a fatherly expression of seriousness, but knew he’d missed by a mile.

He turned and asked the guards to go find someone to help them clean this up, whatever it was.

Azari dropped down from somewhere above, landing on all-fours and standing straight in one smooth move.

T’Challa was surprised he didn’t slip, between the floor and himself being slicked in goop.

“She was working on a new chemistry experiment,” he said, pointing to his aunt and flicking pink beads across the open space. “And forgot to turn down the burner, causing it to overheat and explode, coating the whole room in Pepto-Bismol.”

Zataniah giggled at the joke and Shuri huffed playfully.

Electricity began to emanate from Azari’s eyes and fingertips, flowing up his arms and down his torso and legs. The pink goo evaporated in its wake, leaving his clothing and skin completely clean and as if the accident had never happened.

“That’s not fair,” Shuri complained.

The boy laughed and stuck his tongue out.

Sometimes it was hard to remember that those two were the same age, but as they began to bicker about whether or not mutant abilities were cheating using more slang than either Xhosa or English, it became painfully obvious.

One of the guards brought a stack of towels for the girls and a horde of lab technicians went about trying to un-stick everything.

T’Challa ignored the two teenagers as he helped the nine-year-old try and get the mess out of her hair. She was going to need a bath, of course, but this would at least help her get through the halls without dripping everywhere.

“Thank you, baba.”

“You’re welcome, little one.”

She held her hand out and a glob of the pink goop formed into a small giraffe, creating another into a rhino, and then finally one more into an elephant.

“I thought you could only do that with ink.”

Shuri’s head popped up, still covered in her towel.

“It worked?” She yanked it off and threw her hands up in the air at the sight of the small menagerie Zataniah continued to create from stray droplets. “It worked!”

T’Challa looked to his silently chuckling son for clarification as his sister continued to celebrate her success.

“Ink is fine if Zataniah’s just doing things around the house, like moving a box from one room to another.” He gestured to his sister, who was making the small animals wander around the feet of the technicians, one of which stepped on a pink lion but didn’t even dent the creature.

“But in a fight, ink won’t do much damage and she can lose her focus causing it to lose its shape.” He waved a hand around the room, still covered in gunk. “So Shuri tried to make her something that would act like vibranium and stay the way she made it, even if she got hurt.”

T’Challa looked around the lab and down at the little girl chasing a small herd of antelope across the floor.

“You may want to change the color,” he suggested to his sister. “The pink will stand out in a situation where subtlety is key.”

Shuri nodded and began giving orders on how to store the prototype properly.