[an TAH rez]
✬ sayyida ✬
▻ jyeshtha ♀ (x indira), aminah ♀ | nashira ♀ ◅
He feels bereft, alone, for the first time since his incarceration by his own family. He feels back in that cell. He tells her he is devoted, that he will do nothing to risk her, but still she balks, stepping back from him in a way he could not reach for. It is not a physical movement but he can feel, see, sense it nonetheless. He uses her cruel words back at her and she shrinks further into herself again, hiding away while he stood there and wailed from his heart for her to embrace him.
"I did not ask you for fairness when we bound our souls and wed, Sayyida. I did not ask you for anything except for love that I had fled my homeland hoping to obtain in freedom." He looks at her again, eyes opened like windows into the wounds he’d hidden from her trying to let her focus on her own. "I saw your jealousy of me and while I felt the sting of failing you every time I saw Jyeshtha, I reveled in it. I craved it. I thought it showed me a mirror of my own jealousy for you." He is positively twisted up in knots and it shows in the emotions on his face. "I do not see Eness beating herself for keeping my brother to herself. I do not see Atair languishing for a lack of more wives. I see Rigel in agony over every little flittering heart that he has ever passed by. I see Aldebarans neverending whimsy passing him by many women that might suit him wonderfully."
He lets her speak and she at LEAST repeats that she does not wish to leave, that perhaps he is not abandoned for sure yet. "I don't know what else to do. You need someone stronger than me - they all do. I... I have not led anyone in a long time, Antares. I don't even know how to be a Wife to you in the way that you deserve. You are not happy, and I do not know how to fix it...Is it so strange for me to think that perhaps I am not the answer? That you deserve... more? That Nashira, deserves more? I have spent all of her life comparing her to a sister she has never met - might never-- meet. It is fair to neither of you."
"THEN LOVE ME, DAMN IT ALL TO SET!" He positively erupts, "LOVE ME SO HARD THAT THERE ISN’T ANY REASON TO WONDER WHY I AM SO HAPPY WITHOUT ALL THAT FOOLISH MUCK." He is loud, but his entire being is begging. "STOP WAILING ABOUT HOW UNFAIR MY LIFE IS AND START LOVING ME SO MUCH THAT MY FAILURES FEEL LESS SUFFOCATING EVERY TIME I FIND THAT ATUM HASN’T BEEN GRACIOUS ENOUGH TO TAKE ME." He had never spoken about the fragile nature of his life, it feels like sacrilege to admit it, but how else would it heal if he never opened the wound to the light?
"Love me. Just love me. Love me and let me love you - stop using yourself as just another blade in my heart waiting to be twisted. If it is so terrible that I not have the fifty wives of our fathers, then love me like you did back when we were all we needed. Back when I felt I had obtained the whole world by simply obtaining your agreement to marry me…." His voice drops low, agonized, aching with a feeling of loss and yet also of yearning. "I miss the days I was so spoiled that my wife joined me to bathe in my oasis… that I could come to you and talk of anything and hear your thoughts… that we could simply stand on our sands and see our family and believe we could live here and thrive."
"Nashira deserves her parents to show her that she was born of love. Nashira deserves our watchful eyes and guiding nips so that she learns her own mind without hurting herself too deeply. Nashira should look at us and see what love is meant to be between a Husband and Wife. That wanting the love of your spouse is natural and not evil as we were taught. Nashira deserves her mother and father to heal in spite of their own learned habit of bloodying themselves for every loss they face.."
"Mira does not mean what it meant at home. Some silent stoic woman to epitomize a proper lady. Mira here means Mother. Loving your people, caring for your people… just as you do, thinking about them instead of love first. You are the better ruler-- but I will be selfish. I will cling to you until my dying breath. I will give the Sadim to a son of my brother instead of taking another woman, if Nashira is not suited." He shakes his head again, backing up because he is losing steam and spine.
"You are my only answer. How do we fix this but to fix ourselves and become the proper whole that we were supposed to be before catastrophe struck and sent us spiraling. Love me. Choose me. Remember that the more you pull away, the less whole I become. How can I love anything that loses me the other half of my soul? How do I value anything that costs me you? How do I care for anyone when the one I want most in my life would rather send me to the beds of whatever woman has enough ambition to destroy the rest of what is left of me?"
"When does my punishment end? When do I get back the love that gave my breath any meaning? When do I cease to feel like the rock sinking my only love into the deep?" He feels selfish speaking so much of himself - but it is her that has made this about him. "If this is all about me, my deserving of things, then I deserve my Soul to be full and whole and my Heart to be as strong as the desert mountains. If this is about suring up my power - then I deserve my Mira to stop pulling away from me and pretending that gives me strength. If this is about my joy - then I deserve my First Wife, my Only Wife, to truly love me and support me. If this is really about giving me the strength to be what I have been titled, then shouldn’t you be running TO me and not AWAY??"
OF SALEM’S EASTERN DUNES
▻ eleven years - arabian - mulberry gray with bloodmarks - 15.2 hh ◅