Chapter Text
It takes Namor longer than it should to realize that he has miscalculated.
That he has made a mistake that will destroy him.
Perhaps it's when the Wakandan King rips out his feathers.
He can barely understand that it is his own throat that makes such an agonized yell.
Perhaps it is when a man with a silver arm slams Attuma into the ground and he does not get up. Perhaps it is when Namora starts shrieking when the Scarlet Witch throws her red magic across her eyes.
Perhaps it is when the world of the stars comes to the war between Talokan and Wakanda.
He is not sure.
All he sees is monsters, true, colonizers , conquestadors de las estrellas.
“Rejoice,” they call. And they call for a stone that holds the pillar of the universe. For the death of half of them.
Schicophants.
Powerful.
It reminds him, terrifyingly, of the priests who would slip into villages with words of peace and pox-filled blankets. It reminds him of the man who saw him attempt to bury his mother and called him a boy without love. Namor realizes, too late, what Shuri had begged of him in Talokan. She had wanted to help them all. Because this threat would reach everywhere.
And he had spat in her face at the suggestion.
Too late, Namor, aching, terrified looks to the Wakanda King.
“What will happen?!” he shrieks.
The King is stone in the wake of this War. He stands tall. Fire in his gaze, his face is bloody and steady.
“We fight, or half the universe dies.”
Namor is lost.
“The princess?”
T’Challa looks upward.
A single tear.
“My sister is in the stars, fighting this War on a different front.”
She was fighting in this?
Namor looks at the mass of bodies pilling upon the shields. He has made a fatal, horrible mistake.
But War marches on.