[an TAH rez]
✬ sayyida ✬
▻ jyeshtha ♀ (x indira), aminah ♀ | nashira ♀ ◅
He wants to lash out because he has felt alone and like he had to hold up the weight of all their happinesses and he could not ask his grieving Mira to let go of her, their, pain over their firstborn daughter. He wants to lash out because he is panicking that the only thing that makes any of it tolerable is on the verge of leaving. He wants to lash out because he, in part, is bitter that she gets to grieve while he agonizes in silence and private to keep her from trying to take on the weight of his mourning too when she had seemed so fragile.
In some part, he does, then. He scolds, yells, because he doesn’t dare lay an angry touch on her beloved hide. It had been enough to mark her withers as he had, though his ears flatten just fine into that blood red mane. "Stop putting me on a pedestal." she finally snaps back, startling him enough that his neck snaps his posture backwards over his spine. He is confused, not sure how else he should treat the thing that made breathing worthwhile other than to cherish it. To safeguard it.
"I will not leave you." His ears prick, though, hearing the words he so desperately needed in a tone that made him wonder if she hated him for making her - for begging her. "I will not leave you," She pulls back from him for a moment before finding herself broadside and buffeting him as if picking a fight. "Until you come to your senses and send me away."
Her teeth make his skin burn, his stumble mainly due to his refusal at first to retaliate against her physical assault. "Never." He flattens his ears, although it makes him nauseous that that word might be as good as an anchor to drown her when he inevitably fails again. Her teeth come again and he does not dodge them, snorting only in defiance of the action that might - from anyone else - have earned a solid hind kick to the barrel. He still does not want to hurt her, to taint in him the single thing that remains to him of what he thought was nobility, of Good Husband.
Her tears, though, make his fog clear just a little - the intention in her gaze suddenly more understandable. The fight was back in her, the wild thing that she had been when they’d first found each other over the fresh new island earth that had once been Maslakhat’s. "But you will not ask me to make myself small again. EVER again." The demand in those words he would keep in his heart, the spine that she shows drawing up in him a bit more confidence in them, though it should probably not have done so.
"And you will stop waiting for me," she kicks out and the aim for his foreknees was enough to rip a surprised and challenging stallion-squeal, though he dodges any damage with ease - only to be caught by her teeth and to squeal again. This time with some force and intention in it himself. "Tell me what you need." In answer, he buffets her in return with his chest to her hip, likely the only real ‘hit’ he could stomach against a woman of his Household, much less his own First Wife. "Show me."
He grips at her withers with a snake-quick grab, though he does not lunge atop her like he might have in another season and only attempts to pull his single foreleg across her back. Her muzzle along his spine had been too reminiscent for him and though he is back on the earth in quick order - if she’d allowed the frustrated move at all - his body had only followed the natural order he had been denying since the beginning of their renewed time together.
To say he was not inwardly embarrassed by the clear show of the fact he was only a mortal man with a beautiful wife… well, he might never admit it aloud but his frustrated snorting and snapping of his tail was likely enough to inform a wife who had seen so much of him. His blood was up, his temper roused by the wrongness he felt in every fiber of their marriage save for the Love both had just reaffirmed despite the fighting nature of both their words. "We were so young… so sure we knew it all best… but we are not going to be young and pridefully stupid anymore." He says it because it is all that keeps him from seeking a snaked-low head and gathering her into the water of the oasis like they had done before in the lost times.
"I want this. You. I haven’t been able to think about anything else." He snorts, feeling a burn he’d felt the night he’d claimed her and they’d chosen one another without any bonds of requirement or duty. "I will not make you smaller than you are ever again--" but he flattens his ears with an idle flex of his own hind leg in mild resentment. "But do not tell me that I should ever look for another Mira ever again. If you are never to be made small, you must never act small either."
"If you want me to take wives, then they will be political wives and I will not be sent to them like some temple priest to teach lessons of Rutting." It had hurt him most, that. Being told to go and bed someone for something other than love would have been no different than to have obeyed his father and not freed himself to love at all. "Accept that my desire for you is not going to change - and has not lessened even a little." he is sore to remind her of his seconds-ago instinctual, compulsive, but ineffective half-mount attempt … but it was as tangible of a confession of desire as any words would offer.
He is quieter then, ears twisting opposite ways as he decides to say what he thinks or no, "Your defiance has always been so beautiful..."
OF SALEM’S EASTERN DUNES
▻ eleven years - arabian - mulberry gray with bloodmarks - 15.2 hh ◅