Two Eyes Cenote Burrowing

She woke from those arcadian hours, when the palace was silent and there was none to catch her with sympathy in the hallways. The medicine woman slept. Eset crept past her, every muscle in her waist tightening as they clicked again into place.

She understood she’d be marked an alien from her kind; a shade amid mothers’ fruitful gleam. There was no use for women with sterile wombs. She imagined their insular stares. She wasn’t ready for that.

She wasn’t ready for him.

A black shadow by the water. She hesitates.

Seeing him fractures what had been dammed. But she cannot look without shame; without seeing the prominent snout and scar that stood out unmistakably in reflections of the cenote water. Once traced with her lips, now swollen by her peoples’ violence.

She steps out from the dark into his same pool of light, trying to remember the trick of control that had been her’s.

“You're here,” she breathes, an emotive inhale and then a frown following wordlessly. Because @Akavir should have gone. He needed to be.

Her words draw him from his reverie—her steps so light prior he hadn’t truly heard her. It was a strange feeling to be so caught off-guard, though it seemed to be something she excelled at when it came to him.

A frown mars her features and he shifts, paws pushing himself to draw from laying to a sit, his eyes sweeping over her in unvoiced concern. He couldn’t tell what she thought of him here—Eset remained unreadable to him—and he found himself giving a light exhale. “I haven’t gotten my permission slip to leave signed just yet,” he noted, aiming for light humor in a tone that was just above a rumbling whisper.

But there was a lingering pause, and then an admission: “I also wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Physically, perhaps. Emotionally, even more so.

Would she have told him if she had born their children?

“It is not the creek,” her lips give a curl, for his sake. She is not the same woman with whom he’d shared a time in the valley. A more controlled, affixed figure, who could not meet his gaze. She settles for the water near their feet and softly lowers into a silent seat beside him.

An arboreal scent incites affection, memories of their wild cadence. The wound; his face; she longs to soothe it, but her hand stills. He is a stranger she knew intimately, and not at all. He should have never been her’s. She should have let him alone, before he'd become entangled in affairs that would needlessly complicate his life. But it was not too late to extract the creek wolf from the schemes of her desert. He was owed that.

“Back in the valley, I saw something in you that I recognized. Hurt.” Eset’s eyes came as high as his chest, following the edge of one shoulder before turning away.

“These are hallowed walls for my people. These walls will hurt you, Akavir.” As they already had. With a breath, her eyes trail up to his chin, teeth clenching to cease tears before they can evolve. “It is not your duty as a lover to remain and accept this acrimony.”

She thought of them, then. The imagined child who was as much his as they had been her’s. And how every last evidence of them had been wiped away into nothing. Her body's failure. She cannot tell him how she'd dreamt they had his smile, and his eyes.

“I am sorry,” she breaks, a voice scarcely raised over the trilling cenotes.

It was not lost on him the way she barely looked at him—the curl of a grimace on her features. While there were likely a myriad of things probably running through her mind, he could not help but wonder if regret was at the forefront—regret for meeting him. Regret for their interlude…

His eyes caress over her as she settles—not touching him—refusing to. Only when she speaks does she look in his direction, but not to him—not truly.

She is a wall of fortitude—wilting, perhaps—but for how and why, he could not say… “Were you hurt, too, Eset?” His voice is quiet—she seeks to avoid him, but his eyes move to capture hers—wishing nothing more than to pull her back into his orbit. To settle her against him—to take away the hurts of not only the past days, but what he was starting to believe came from the very hallowed walls she spoke of.

“I don’t plan to remain, Eset,” he offered—the honesty of that statement lingering. He wouldn’t stay here—he couldn’t. Not only for those that needed him within the creek and valley, but he could not sing within a gilded cage. Not even for an assumed worthy ruler, like Toula. “You… You don’t have to either, if you don’t want. You can come… to the creek… Or anywhere, if that’s not what you want…”

He trailed off—his throat dry. He shifted his weight, ears falling back to his skull as she apologized, and he found himself frowning—that she ever felt the need to… “Why, Eset? You did nothing wrong.”

He would not accept her attempts at apathy, with a shift he weds their eyes and Eset startles, daunted by the intensity of his luminance; a dried sandbed ill prepared for his rush of rain.

“Yes,” pours abruptly from her mouth, “but it is Pharaoh who has given me refuge. I cannot leave her.” She would not. The coy was her hebsut; her ushabti; eternal servant.

It did not stop Eset’s mind from striding down an indulgent path where she did return with the creekwolf to his lush valley, hidden from the Gods beneath autumn boughs. Out from the ceiling of stone and into a limitless vault of wild starlight. And perhaps, in this dream, she would awaken to kisses, and join in hunts, and learn the untested limits of her own body.

“You are the only person who has ever asked me that,” she realizes, stricken, eyes shuttering for the span of a shaking breath as if in a dream.

And here is how the coy had repaid him. Less than wolf; less than woman; a girl with faulty genetics that would only foul a man’s cubs. She did have reasons to apologize- she had failed him so utterly. “I knew what I was doing with you. I did it anyways.”

The amber gaze glossed again, beneath them the image of his strong face held. “I am grateful you came when you did. You have a good heart, Akavir.”

Now she dared to look up in full. Her lips sought his own. She’d have placed them there had she been able to reach. Instead, it is his chest Eset grazes with her mouth. Beneath her kiss she feels all the life that drummed through him, so insistent, so strong, as she rests against his heart.

And in the gentlest voice she confesses, “I had wanted them to be like you.”

It took no time for her to shut down the invitation—her loyalty and love for Toula something Senmut had told him of. Words played at the tip of his tongue—to ask her to consider it a time—that they could travel to Akashingo and speak to Toula… or she could do so alone.

After all, Toula had told him before that none were held here against their will—though in his own predicament, he could have argued such. But prisoners were not slaves.

The rejection of it stung, but he had expected as such—strangers, spare for a handful of nights she had clearly meant to be only as such. The idea that she would go with him—the idea they could learn more of one another—they could…

She spoke of his heart—more words to perhaps ease the dismissal of his offer, and he released a sigh, though it was broken with a kiss—lingering to his chest, and he dips his muzzle down, grazing his nose along the top of her crown.

It is the whisper of words that draw his eyes closed. “They would have been perfect if they had been like you,” he returns, his own voice quiet—emotional. A loss he hadn’t even been able to process until now… ripped away before he had even know the existence.

But for Eset… He would try to draw her closer into his arms—gently, knowing that a hug would only act as a bandaid for the moment.

That Akavir might feel anything other than an abiding relief had not occurred to her. She’d long ago accepted that this was the part she played, that during the day she would pour wine and scrub floors and at night she belonged to soldiers or visiting nobility or kings. She had taken so many to bed, none who had kissed her without the intent to stave off the pains of a truer love, or looked into her muted eyes and dreamed they weren’t some regal hue. But in this moment the tension she feels in him seems distant from this notion, and as he whispers tears come to wet her cheeks.

He shifts, opening a space in his arms like the one she hadn’t known she had until it was empty. She moves to be held by him, unguarded, looking up into the face tinged by grief which brought to it a thoughtful, deepening grace. She felt safe there.

“I do not regret you,” breathing, Eset searches his eyes. The hebsut can smell him, hyacinth and egyptian oils used on his fur. Beneath it, the scent of the creek faded.

‘I do not regret you.’ She looks up at him—the murmur of her words luring the hint of a smirk upon his lips. He pulls her closer, his muzzle dipping down to trace a cheek—a kiss. A stolen moment where this could be their life—he could whisk her away from this nightmare, take her to the creek… They could be—

—but he had his answer. What good was it to dwell? Instead, he would listen to the steady rhythm of her heartbeat, hoping one day, it would mend itself once more, and the pain he had inflicted on her would desist. “That’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me,” he purred, a whisper to her ear as he nuzzled against the base of it—trying to coax at least a softer smile from the woman before him.

“Is it?” Uneasiness is in the splaying of her ears, the ghost of a smile that would last only for mere seconds upon her lips. She was certain Akavir meant to tempt her laugh, but entwined in his limbs she thinks how there had only ever been sex– how she did not rightly know for herself what she considered romantic.

She wanted to kiss him deeper, and so she did, setting her paws on his arms to align their lips. She wanted to lead him to her room and be held by him longer there, to ask him to stay–

She knew also how he would be subjected to the judgment of her people. To the jodai's wrath, felt as a thickening in the back of her throat. Akavir’s handsome face is somber and still there is a knowingness in his eyes that make her feel seen and not just looked at.

"Thank you," she says in a voice almost too gentle, "for being here with me. You didn't have to. Another man wouldn't have."

He would have responded to that initial question—an attempt to be comical in the lackluster ways of his romantic endeavors and failures if only to see that flit of a smile once more. But he did not—could not—when her lips sought him—draining his thoughts and rendering him speechless.

What he did manage was a rumbling growl—deepening the kiss—another stolen moment, for it was only these that she offered, he was learning—and finding himself rather smitten with the taste of her—the smell of her—having her in his arms.

Ah, it was fun to dream. Was that not what the allure of Akashingo and it’s sister palace offered?

When she pulled away, he felt himself grow dumb for a moment—eyes peering down at her as she spoke. Soon, then, a light frown pulled at his features—the way he wished to show her what the world and a life could be, if she only pulled herself from these chains. “Then the men you know aren’t worth your thoughts or your heart.”

She sighs deeply against his mouth, eyes lifting to graze his glowing look. It is not true, with words she will want to protest, but it is only her body that moves now, coaxed in response. Her mind wants to erase this desolate sentiment, mutely praying that she might not remember when the deepening of his growls sends a vibration through them both.

She presses to his chest with a growing imprint and brazenly slow undulations. The sharp tensing of teeth test the fine skin on his neck, lightly, and then more demanding, feeding every impossible desire to the fury of a pulverized point.

Let them exist now, then let him be free of her; of this place.