Loretta of the Lamp

Truth Telling

[Akil's POV, sort of]

When she did slip, he caught her easily. He had felt the change in her weight as she drifted off, and reached one arm back tentatively to make sure she didn't fall. He pulled her arms back around him and took both her hands in one of his own to hold her steady. She didn't stir at all.

"She's tired," Bennou noted, when Akil finally caught up with them.

Akil nodded.

He didn't like talking much. It had been strange speaking again after so many years, and while he had adjusted to regular conversation with Loretta out of pure necessity, Bennou had never been one he'd been interested much in speaking with, and if he planned to speak with Hess again, it would only be because he was gratingly curious to know more about the assumptions she had been alluding to when she spoke of the relationship between him and Loretta and their situation. Besides, the relationship he had with Loretta was one based on a need for survival. If she fell off the camel at that very moment and got trampled, he couldn't guarantee he would survive it himself. He had felt the horrendous pain and sickness when they were separated too far from each other, and although he had tried to brush it off and downplay it to Loretta, the feeling of separation from her killed him inside. It made him furious to admit it, but he hated it when she left his sight because of how much he feared for her safety.

Somewhere along the way it had ceased to be about him. If something did happen to her, he wasn't sure at all how he would deal with it, and he couldn't say exactly why he felt the way he did.

The burn in his fingers as he held her slender hands was a strange comfort, reminding him that she existed and that this was all real. He was awake and alive inside the lamp, and it was because of her, because she had somehow followed him back into the lamp and broken the spell that had incarcerated him.

He looked up ahead and into the distance towards Misbah, the city was only visible because of the twisting tear in the sky, the eternal column of smoke which reached over it in a mass of dark clouds. This was where they were headed, to the place where he had been held captive for a thousand years. To make matters worse, they were headed right into the hands of the Djin King, the one Jinni in all of the Lamp who knew Akil, who had lived longer than he had and knew more than he did about existence and how the Lamp worked. If there really was a way Loretta could possibly escape and return to her own world, it was true that he would be the only one to know. Yet Akil felt uncomfortable about it. There was a deep, gripping fear in the heart of his being about approaching the Djin King.

Loretta stirred at his back, and he let go of her hands, expecting her to wake. She shifted and wrapped her hands against his chest instead, twisting her fists into his clothing and pressing against his bare skin. She was still asleep, but the feeling of her hands against his chest was awkwardly pleasing, and it annoyed him that after a thousand years of existence he was so affected by a small moment like this.

"Where are we?" came her voice, closer to his ear than he had expected her to be. He shuddered, shying away from her lips and the tickling sensation they left against his skin.

"About half an hour from where we were when you fell asleep," he said. It came out far more harsh on his tongue than it had sounded in his mind.

She pulled away and straightened herself instantly.

He thought he should probably apologise, but he didn't really know how he should do it, and it would seem out of place to apologise for behaviour that had been his mainstay since they had first met.

So he didn't, and Loretta didn't touch him or speak to him again until that evening when the camel finally set them down at their campsite.
She took his hand once to climb off the camel, and offered him a short, curt smile. Though he knew it was his fault, he didn't like that they were back to barely talking again. Bennou set the fire and then he disappeared just as he had the evening before. Hess decided it would be better to buy food from someone else rather than spend time cooking, given that Bennou was really the only sound cook among them.