I began this story in the belief that Shuri was 24, the same age as Letitia Wright, and only later discovered that the character is supposed to be 16 (!). In order to align my head canon with the canon, I decided that a year in the ancient calendar of Wakanda consists of 18 months. Arbitrary, but necessary. So Shuri is 16 Wakanda years old, and 24 Everywhere-Else years old.

Prologue

White boys ... Shuri was fascinated by them and their strangeness, their exotic skin that glowed like the moon, their hair that slipped through the fingers like fine linen thread.

The first one was beautiful, undeniably so. Though older than her father's father, he wore the appearance of youth circling upward, as on a wheel, toward an intriguing maturity. He might in this respect have been a figure from a half-forgotten myth. She might have been healing a god, or a monster, or something in between. And so there was, at first, dread in her fascination. To make up for it, she acted with efficiency and maintained an outward air of detachment. Gods and monsters were confused by indifference. It diminished their power.

This one, the second one, perhaps twice Shuri's age, was on the downward trajectory of the wheel ... face marked and creased, hair greying, body relaxing toward agedness. And yet he possessed a beauty of his own that both intrigued her and excited a tenderness in her. And so she was tender as she treated him, consciously tender, letting the efficient scientist be subordinate to the curious inventor. For all invention begins with curiosity.

And what else is love, but the daydreaming heart's invention?