the fine line between love and hate

Black-rimmed ears flick and swivel as he listens to her speak the Debwani tongue. There is something strangely comforting about the forest-dwellers tongue; because it is familiar, it harkens back to the Plains. There were Dorobians, Korofi now here, speaking their mother tongue. But the Debwani language… it was still spoken only in the plains.

Until Ada spoke it, that is. And so he listened to her words and their meaning. He listened, and let them fall into his mind; but, for the moment, they were as lost as he was amid the sea of loss and grief that he had been avoiding for so long. And he had built his defenses, bolstered his sails, against this raging storm. But, still, there was little one can do against such melancholic ghosts.

He had no words, only his lips buried in Ada’s silken black mane, listening as she answered his question. She told him of her father, and her mother; both were deaths he had discovered and confirmed the Makutano had caused after he had sent her away. But he did not know of this ‘Jeshi,’ —and was surprised, for all the sensual attraction between the Elephant and the cheetah during their time in Dorobo, that she had not mentioned him before.

“I was pregnant when Mawindo beat me… I miscarried shortly after.”

The man stilled, breath dead in his lungs. “I miscarried.” His dark blue eyes flared open and glazed as emptiness filled his barrel. He had allowed Mawindo to take her; he had—he had caused this? The realization shook the foundations of the Elephant’s just pillars.

He had killed her child.

“No, Ada,” the deep, broken words were said on a quiet gasp of air as his head slung suddenly over her slender neck and withers. Holding onto her in apology, forgiveness, as well as grasping onto something to keep him there, and standing. Darkness swelled in his barrel, so much more damning and condemning than the demons of dead bodies he had brought with him.

He hadn’t killed his wife and child. He had buried them, mourned them, missed them—but he did not cause their deaths. But this child, Ada’s unborn foal— this one he had murdered. Or allowed to be murdered.

A quiet, deep groan pulled from his throat as he thighed his hold on the cheetah, painfully so, “Why didn’t you tell me?” His hissed question was laced with defeat, betrayal, fear, and pain.