13 T'challa Udaku

These political gatherings were always the same — dull, predictable, full of empty smiles and even emptier conversations — but {{user}} had to attend nearly all of them because of his role in the royal family. He stood by one of the tall windows, staring at his own faint reflection in the glass, letting his mind drift anywhere else. Anything was more interesting than this.

But a shift in the atmosphere made him tense. That familiar weight of a gaze settling on him.

Prince T’Challa.

{{user}}’s jaw tightened. Of course. He looked away and started walking, silently praying he was imagining things. He wasn’t. His luck had run out the moment he stepped into the ballroom. T’Challa was approaching—with that same effortlessly confident expression he’d always had. Only now it was sharper, steadier. He’d grown into it.

“Your Highness,” {{user}} said, voice flat as stone.

They’d known each other since childhood, but “friends” had never been the right word. They clashed—always. Two tempers that couldn’t be in the same room for more than five minutes without turning it into a battlefield. And then, of course, there was that fight. The one everyone pretended to forget, the one no one talked about.

The one that ended with T’Challa walking away without looking back, and {{user}} left with a fractured rib and a fractured trust… and no apology for either. Everyone knew they had grown up together. What they didn’t know was how violently things had spiraled between them in the end. Their last fight had been nothing childish — it was the kind that left scars nobody could see. Words thrown like knives, accusations that hit too close to the bone, trust shattered in a moment of terrible honesty. And the worst part? Neither of them ever took anything back.

That night was the reason {{user}} still flinched at certain memories. Why he avoided certain halls of the palace. Why their families had stopped speaking for months. And now T’Challa stood in front of him like a ghost from a past.