Rehoboam hated the heat. He hated the way he constantly smelled of sweat, and the way the horizon line was always smudged with heat waves. He hated the way the sand of the dunes got into everything, and the way that he was forced to continue to interact with the silver-maned witch if he needed to drink. He hated the Dunes, and Salem. He hated himself and what he had done here. He hated that he would have a child (if not children) in this world that would not even know him, who would think he abandoned them the same way that he had been abandoned.
His heart ached, and yet he hated relentlessly.
The sound of a familiar voice on the breeze seemed like a mirage at first. No one had stepped up to defend him until the last second in the Lagoon, and he doubted that there was anyone left in that swamp that would look upon him with anything but disgust. Azizi perhaps, but Rehoboam knew that would change if he found out what he'd done to... with Shenzi.
But the name came again, demanding that his eyes find the mirage before his mind would accept the reality of it being a hallucination. To his surprise, the young boy he'd looked after in the Lagoon appeared from out of the sands, his earnest face all screwed up with worry.
"Azizi?" He asked the wind incredulously, unable to believe that the boy would have followed him here from the Lagoon. Reh's gaze cut immediately away from him to search the Dunes for any sign of the witch, but snapped back to the boy quickly.
The sight of him brought such a confusing tangle of emotions to the surface - pride and gratitude, shame and fear - that he could do nothing but stare, his mouth slack as Azizi began to hastily speak. Heat flushed Rehoboam's cheeks as the boy brought up the past and Rehoboam's own mistakes, but he did not shy away from Azizi's sharp gaze.
Would it have been better? Rehoboam didn't know. Shenzi would not have gone back to the Lagoon, so there would have been no reason for her to hate him. And if she didn't hate him, they wouldn't have fought. And if they wouldn't have fought, Azizi might not have become a big brother.
But Reh also wouldn't have met Azizi. And Shenzi wouldn't have had her freedom -
true freedom - from both the Lagoon and Nyimara. But the fight between Shenzi and Azizi might never have happened at all, and Azizi's heart and ear might be intact. It was hard to say what was worse.
"I don't know," he said guardedly, shame making the words croak from his mouth.
"I-I can't change the past, Zi."
He shook his head, lips thinned out into a grimace as he considered it. The truth was, Shenzi had chosen
not to go with Nyimara that day on the Lagoon's shore, and had remained (presumably) on the Crossing even after being granted her freedom.
"But she's not here now," he continued with his thought,
"I don't know that she wants to be. Nyimara came for her once," he said, without thinking and immediately regretted it.
"But she chose not to go with her."
He well remembered the reason she hadn't gone with Nyimara then, and that reason was standing right in front of him with a pair of too-earnest eyes.
Shaking his head, Rehoboam tried to store away his own self-loathing and doubts to focus on the real situation at hand.
What was Azizi doing here, risking his life? Why had he come when it was safer for him to stay securely in the Lagoon, where Frey or Tyr might possibly be bothered to look over him?
"Come, let's get you out of sight before Nyimara sees you." His skin crawled with the possibility that Nyimara might try to imprison him too. It would be the sort of thing she would do too, if only because Azizi was of the Lagoon. She might not know he was Shenzi's son, but she'd imprison him all the same. Rehoboam gestured hastily toward the dunes on the northwestern side, near the canyons of the Badlands where the rockier terrain might be able to hide them for a little longer.
He didn't know what he'd do if he let Azizi - the boy who he'd felt responsible for for years now, the boy whose existence had softened Rehoboam's anti-child policy in the first place, and the boy who Shenzi risked it all for to save - get captured too.
"Does anyone else know you're here?"