Antares
[an TAH rez]
✮ sayyida ✮
▻ jyeshtha ♀ (x indira), aminah ♀ ◅
He had always been weaker than the stories of him had exposed. He had always been very vulnerable behind the wall of his breeding and status. It made him only more vulnerable because this was HER, his soulmate, that was about to see him exposed and wounded. He was older, had been so unsuccessful as to feel less than a man as it was. How could she find him attractive after proving over and over he couldn’t help her - do anything for her. She gave him a child, he lost that child to the first danger they crossed.
The complexity of his scars of the mind branched so many times as he let her wash him with rubs of her nose and lips. He tells her of the worst because he wished to cleanse himself fully. She would only anger if he’d been too stubborn to share his ordeals with her and she discovered it later. He tries to soften the delivery here or there, the admissions taxing him as it was - and wanting her to be very sure he had not wanted a single one of them.
He was washed clean by the end of his words, his wife finally finding the words to begin to speak. "He probably ate through the Priesthoods grain in a day and devastated their fat plates." He mutters, at least decompressed enough to ask her permission to help bathe her too. She is lost in her thoughts and so he doesn’t ask a second time, only being cautious and gentle as he starts tending to her much cleaner body. A swish of water, a rub of his muzzle, kneading the water in and the wash out. She hasn’t said much about his time - but he feels as though there must have been as much trouble in her much stricter parent’s house.
"Do you think they will come back here?" he thinks at first she is asking about their respective parents’ men… but he chooses to adjust his thinking to the positive. Surely she meant their family, "It is the only place that they would know that we all could meet for sure… They have no homes or purpose beyond those here with the family they left behind." More water, fewer words once more. He wants to know her, to feel her soften against him, "What if there is nothing left of us in the Dunes?"
He thinks maybe this is her greatest fear, her loss of everyone now tickling her belief she was unworthy. "Sayyida, my love, then we go and put us back in it. We go and bring our Sadim back to her home. We go and build a place that if, or when, our daughter wishes to come back -- she has a place waiting for her." He tucks himself tightly against her, wrapping her up in him the way he had only dreamed they’d do again in the most vulnerable moments of the night. "I will negotiate a safe place where we can rest our family, grow together, and find peace and comfort."
He is only too sad that he would not be able to give her the one thing that she would have wanted from him. Their daughter. Aminah. It makes him hesitate in his closeness. His thought were a man’s thoughts far sooner than he had thought himself capable - but this wasn’t the place. It wasn’t the time. "I have missed you. What of your trip to your parents? When you stayed to visit with your mother, did they hurt you? I couldn’t imagine they would with the love of your people-- but I worried so much that they were attempting worse with you." Even now he exposes how he was raised to believe Maghrib was stringent and unforgiving, regardless that his own family were supposed to be the ‘lenient’ ones.
"I was aching to get back to you," his heart clenches, "but it had been so long and I wasn’t sure if they only let Aminah see me after they’d convinced you I was worthless and proved it by my continued capture." He shakes his head, obviously disbelieving those words as they even left his mouth. "And now I see you and I cannot help but want you to myself a while before we have to see my brothers. It is a silly, boyish thought… selfish and wrong… but I would not be terribly upset if they took their time coming home."
He leans his head across her back and sighs. "I want you to be the only thing within miles of me for the rest of this day..." He does not press against her, unsure of whether her story will be one she wanted to be touched for - but he does leave the balance of his lower jaw on her spine. "What happened when I was kept from you?"
OF THE LOST ISLANDS WILDS
▻ eleven years - arabian - mulberry gray with bloodmarks - 15.2 hh ◅