In just a few moments, with the growl of the mare before her ringing in her ears, Shenzi feels everything shift and settle within her, and in the moments following, when the barb mare’s throaty rumble joins in the vicious melody of the silver bay Queen, the unspoken question that had lingered in Shenzi’s mind since their first meeting only days ago in the Commons was answered. There was no leaving now. The ache in her heart takes her by surprise, but she embraces it instead of burying it as she so often did. “Never again,” she promises hastily, but her eyes darken with candor. Her ears pin, an outward expression of the empathy she feels for the mare who is little more than a stranger to her. Not for long, though – Shenzi would know the mare who has suffered as she has suffered.
They suffer still.
Shenzi stalks closer, the aggression in her body showing no signs of dissipating. But it is not directed at the mare, if anything, it is directed beyond her, in behalf of her. The barb mare trembles for a moment, so strongly do her emotions run through her, but with the words she snaps next, anger again radiating outwards and away from the figure at her side, she manages to temper herself, and finds a mooring in the presence of a mare – a lifeline onto which she latches, and unlike the tangled strand of silver-white mane that she catches between her teeth, only to gently tease with her lips before settling into place, the connection she feels with the mare is something she doesn’t intend to let go of.
Her golden brown eyes seek that smouldering gaze, and her lips curl into a brazen grin as Nyimara names herself, and to Shenzi, it feels like a gift, to be given something meaningful, something she yearned to possess, without her having to ask for it. The smile turns devilish, sharpening at the edges and she falls still beneath Nyimara’s touch, moving only to lift her head, the tilting of her velvet-dark jaw serving to expose the scars that laced her throat in a rare moment of vulnerability. “You know me already,” Shenzi murmurs huskily, her eyes half-closed so as to remain fixed upon the delicate lines of Nyimara’s face. “ ‘Fierce heart’. Fierce. This is what my name means. Savage upon your tongue, Nyimara,” her lips curl around the other mare’s name, “but in the language of my homeland, I am Shenzi.”
She follows Nyimara’s gaze as it dips to the filly sheltered between them, and the seal brown mare huffs a gentle breath of greeting as the girl reaches for her. “Warduna,” she acknowledges softly, and though her eyes linger on the perfect form of the foal (again, her heart agonises as it remembers what she has lost), as she continues speaking, she traces her russet muzzle up the line of Nyimara’s arched neck. “Fear not, I have it in me to be gentle too.”
But not right now, not when Nyimara’s words ignite a fire within her.
Again she seizes a lock of bright hair, though she is not nearly so gentle with it this time. But her teeth part after one short, sharp tug, and, careful not to jostle Warduna, she backs up a step or two, shifting her weight to bump Nyimara’s hip with her own. “I’m with you, Nyimara.” Another promise, this one heavy with things that for now remain unspoken, and layered with emotion. Shenzi levels a confident gaze at her newfound companion, the smile fading from her lips, even as in the depths of her eyes something darker and far more devious stirs. With a subtle signal in the form of a dip of her muzzle (eagerness in the flare of her nostrils), she waits for Nyimara to take the lead, not as one who held herself superior to the barb mare, but as an equal, whose back (whose vulnerabilities, whose daughter) Shenzi would fiercely defend.
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