SPOILERS FOR INFINITY WAR. IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT, DO NOT READ.

There was a shattering behind her, but she did not turn.

She tried, but jerked herself away. Her guard would take care of it. She was Dora Millaje. She would.

For now, there was work to do.

She focused on the screen in front of her, and pinched together each connection, rapidly, yet carefully.

Her brother's words returned to her. You might want to pick up the pace.

I'm trying, Brother, she thought, trying to distract herself from the obvious crashing sounds behind her.

And the death cry, filled with pain, from her guard.

One last connection. And then...

It was over. Or was it? It would have to do. She had made all of them. Or at least as many connections as possible.

Whether she had succeeded or not didn't matter. She was out of time. The world was out of time.

How much time will you need?

As much as you can give me, she had answered.

He had given her all he could.

Now she had to return the favor.

She snatched up her weapons and fired.

A hit. A punch. The sound of a firearm.

Before she knew it, her patient and her attacker were smashing through the window, down to the forest floor.

She lay prostrate on the floor, breathing heavily. Was she bleeding? Was she dead? She did not know. Black edged her vision.

She had given all she could. Her brother had given all he could.

She hoped it was enough.

A foolish mistake, for a foolish girl, to hope. To hope that with a universe at stake, a mere teen could stop it. Could work fast enough.

Could help her brother, could help Wakanda.

It had not been enough.

It would never have been enough.

She had woken up in her own lab, and ignored her own wounds, stumbling out to the battlefield.

A quarter of each army was gone. A quarter of each was disappearing.

Simply becoming nothing but ash, blown away on a phantom wind.

T'Challa.

She began to run, not caring whether she, too, would become dust.

Her brother. Where was her brother?

"T'Challa!" she screamed. "T'CHALLA!"

Okoye is on the ground, stumbling backwards. Her foe is gone. Ash on the wind. What has happened?

T'Challa rounds a bush and she instinctively relaxes. Her king is here, her king is alive. The Black Panther bends over. "Get up. This is no place to die."

And then he turns to dust and is gone. Like her foe.

Okoye sits there stunned, wondering if she was hallucinating.

But her foe had been so, so real. She had not imagined her foe disappearing.

But her king...

Then she gets up, looks around, confused. Silent, yet the music of war beats loud in her ears.

The aftermath of a battle. The aftermath of a loss.

There is no one to fight, no enemies, no allies.

And no king.

Silent, burning tears begin to flow.

Okoye found her first.

The leader of the Dora Millaje, her brother's most trusted advisor, their friend, was stunned.

Stunned.

There were tears running down Okoye's cheeks, and despite herself, she felt tears running down her own, too.

"T'Challa. Where is T'Challa?" Tears blurred her vision.

It would be one thing for her brother to be killed in battle, an honorable death, but for him to face a death like this...

She would not imagine it.

A simple shake of the head was all Okoye had to do before Princess Shuri of Wakanda, sixteen-year-old genius, was reduced to a sobbing mess.

"No. No. Where is T'Challa, I need to find T'Challa!"

Okoye said nothing, only kept her from sinking deeper into the mud as she cried.

She'd lost her brother once, and the ancestors had given him a second chance.

There would be no second chances now. For any of them.

They were beyond help.

Okay yes, I know Shuri is MIA and that the last thing we saw of her was her lying in the ground in her lab but let me believe she's alive, the girl is smarter than Tony Stark and Bruce Banner combined for heck's sake. She's a genius and she needs to live and she needs to come up with one of her genius solutions to fix this.

This is all based on true events. Shuri continuing to work while a fight goes on behind her is true, Vision and that guy breaking a window is true, Shuri blacking out during the fight is true (we see her lying on her side blasted away) and the entire Okoye scene, complete with T'Challa's last words, is true. Only after "silent, burning tears begin to flow" does the fic deviate from canon.

(I'm pissed, his last words are "this is no place to die" like he cares because he doesn't want Okoye to just sit there and bleed to death and then Marvel makes him die in that exact place! If Shuri and T'Challa and Nakia and Okoye don't return I will sue someone. Wakanda forever.)