[an TAH rez]
✬ sayyida ✬
▻ jyeshtha ♀ (x indira), aminah ♀ | nashira ♀ ◅
She is angry at him again. Over and over, it seemed, he missed the mark. He had thought it brutish to compete with her, to fight her when he felt in his bones that she is right. He takes the hits because it is wrong to hit your Wives. He comes off her back because she did not give him permission for something so obviously about consuming the power of a Husband-- and he perhaps see where she means he puts her on a pedestal…
Too little too late?
The words are all the weapon he has had, all that he has been able to utilize - it is what she had used against him, so he had rose to them with equal force. She demands from him, so he returns with his own. But wait… then why would he not return the physical accosting? What was so different in exchanging blows in words or bodies? Why did he feel it so much less brutal to be abrasive in speech and not physically? He knew first hand that the physical abuse could be so much less hurtful than the mental, emotional, verbal…
"What desire?" She is not Mira when she asks this, he realizes. She sheds the obedience inherent in the role and becomes only Wife, only Woman, and what woman wouldn’t grow angry when passion was stowed away in lieu of empty proclamations after having only that much for so long? "I have to fight for any scrap of it- and then you bury it immediately."
The dawning is embarrassing as it is clear on his face that he is struggling to become the man he HAD once been - where she had already become that same woman wild and free on the desert sands he’d met. She had broken that Mira facade in a way he struggled to shed his own Sheik one.
Again, it is because for so long the only thing he could use without drawing them into wars or fights - was words. He is more used to those now than living truly whole as himself. They’d made him fear it. They made him fear being a sexual being - and it had taken a toll on his marriage to this degree. Well, it had been her too - hiding away, lamenting so deeply the loss of their child that he felt ashamed to want her in the midst of it--
But even that was his hang up and a blockade their former world had tried to brick into place for them so that they might not enjoy the world beyond. He takes her words now, his eyes now as clear as the first night they’d met. The fog of trauma removed, he is ashamed of having let their trickery and brainwashing make him weaker than he was. "I do not want you to tell me, for Allah's sake Antares. I told you to show me. Do you not know how anymore? Do you not know how to love me?"
She was not wrong, the spark that had lit had scared him. It had been wrong for so long, it had been dangerous for so long, it had seemed infantile to cave to urges or devious or wrong -- but when had he said he would become a monk? When had he said that he would take the pulpit and preach instead of live? His nostrils flare wide, his ears flattening into his mane, his tail snapping, his eyes closing. He looks for that spark he had so quickly tried to douse, thinking of propriety and duty before need. He looks for the part of him that would be so offended by who he’d become now.
He finds him in his mind, angry, thrashing against bonds and chains that had been added by everyone all around him. Rigel with his words and laws and rules that he himself hadn’t followed properly - leading him to believe he’d failed to be the proper role model, Sayyida with her pulling away and jealousy and her own keenness to be the Mira of their homeland - leading him to believe he was too frivolous, too emotional, too much of a burden, too much of a failure. The priests who led him to fear the notion of sexual arousal - lest he take another in the heat of the moment and Sayyida be taken from him forever. The royal inheritance which told him that he might never be happy again, being so wild as to reject ancient traditions that had worked just fine.
The vision of who he was beneath all of that dignity, nobility, self-control, self-denial - it was hard to look at. Trauma, negative opinions, they all had convinced him not to be who he was in the end. Instead, for a moment, he thinks of what it had felt like to feel the spirit and fight trickling back into Sayyida again and he could almost hear the first chain snap and clatter to the floor. The thrashing of his inner self stopped, surprised that it’s eternal fight had not done what he had done in just moments of thinking about the wildness of his wife beneath the facade she had adopted.
The sheik and the exile stare at each other, curiosity in their eyes… and the exile in chains smiles a savage smile as he reminds the sheik of how it had felt that first evening when Sayyida had washed them, had waited and accepted them… two more chains clatter free of the wildman’s body. In the few breaths that it took to remind the Sheik he was also a hot-blooded arabian stallion, a whole eon had passed in his mind - until both images of himself had become one and the same man. Just Antares. Self-awareness instead of Self-denial.
His shoulder twitches, but then his head snakes low, his intent to drive her from the open spaces perhaps a lingering sensibility he’d not quite shaken - but there were others awake and he wanted his Wife for himself. This was his time, not for others to consume in sight or thought. He adds an accosting kick of his foreleg to insist, a shrill-to-bellow sound streaking from whistling nostrils to rumbling chest. He chases her into the foliage of their oasis and barely makes time for them to be properly behind palm fronds and tropical underbrush before he is raking teeth in to and fro succession up her spine and atop her again.
For once he feels less like a sinful creature for wanting this, for wanting her outside of season despite there being nothing that would come of it. For once it is just about having her, her having him, and the simple satisfaction of bodies rather than lineage. Who would care about what should come of the coupling? There were no priests here to scold them of wasting royal seed, of letting their baser natures rule. He does not begin kindly or patiently, but by the time he and she have begun to lather, he nickers low and softer. Almost relieved to tears in the same way she had been angered to them.
He does not want to lose their connection, though he knows that he is heavy and that the satisfaction is had. Still, when he lands on the bare oasis foliage beneath his feet, he keeps his neck across her, his teeth latched onto the mane above the mark he’d given her so very long ago now. His hind hoof stamps, the long withholding years not entirely gone from him after one tryst - and maybe never again if nothing else came to shame him for being who he - they, obviously - were.
"I did not think I did," he confesses in a voice made hoarse by their coupling, "remember how to love you." His body shudders, he tugs just a little harder on the low mane on her neck. "It has not been… right to… for so long..." Another tug, then he lets that lock go to massage his lips down her spine as his eyes drift to half-lidded. "I don’t want to be that again… afraid to touch you, that touching you was… wrong."
OF SALEM’S EASTERN DUNES
▻ eleven years - arabian - mulberry gray with bloodmarks - 15.2 hh ◅