Abrafo looked up at the pregnant moon with slowly aging eyes. He wasn’t the spry young male he was before, and he knew it. The sadness that plagued him as a cub, that had vanished, was back again, but this time with reinforcements; worry.
What would happen to his cubs if they were to go out into the world, and find his mother? She would know them instantly, she was that crafty, and devise the best plan to slowly take the life from them. He couldn’t bear it. After that nightmare…
Abrafo shook his head. It would be alright. It had to be alright.
Safi padded through tall grasses to his father’s side. From his current distance, all he could see was a slumped dark form staring into the water, as Abrafo was prone to do when he needed to think. It wasn’t the first time Safi had seen the older lion like this, but it was the first he had seen the shivering.
That scared him. His father, the strongest male he knew, the pillar for their entire family was…shivering? What could have happened? Safi picked up his pace, and was quickly rubbing up against his father, a concerned look in his eyes. “What’s up, old man?”
“Just thinking.” Abrafo murmured in a lost, forlorn voice. He hung his head as if it were unbearably heavy under the circumstances. “I’ve seen a lot of things, Safi. Been a lot of places, done a lot of things. I’ve fought wild dogs, seen the fall of a pride, fallen to temptation, and somehow, I’m still around. Do you know why that is, Safi?”
He turned his large head around to stare at his son, bi-colored eyes bright with apprehension.
The pale leopon shifted on his paws, looking down at the water. What was he supposed to say? His father was obviously looking for some kind of cure-all answer to his worries, but who was he to give it to him? Why wasn’t he talking to mother? …Was it something she wasn’t supposed to know?
“Because of mom?” He ventured cautiously. “I mean, she’s been there from the beginning, right? At your side? She thought you were a Prince in that one pride when you were just a cub, and never left you alone after that.”
The father openly grinned at the son, the first attempt at such an act in several days. “Your right. I’ve made it out alive because of Nia, and now I don’t know if she’s going to be enough.” Just like that, his grin turned back into an obscene frown. The wrinkles on his forehead increased. “There is great danger in the rogue lands. We don’t have a pride to protect us anymore, and….” He shook his head. “I just…Damn it; I just can’t do it anymore.” He growled angrily, more bitter at himself than anything. “How could I let myself get like this? Safi, I was on top of the world for years, and now I’m so damned scared of a ******** dream that I can’t think straight.”
He slapped at the water with a vicious roar, scaring his son badly enough that the younger of the two jumped back. “How can she still control me like this!”
“She? Whose ‘she’?” Safi jumped back in front of Abrafo, pressing and goading the lion even as his body rumbled with anger. “Who did you dream about?” Was it a lover? That would be just like his self-righteous father to have a friggin’ lover under his mother’s nose.
“Tell me!” He demanded, standing toe to toe with the dark giant. His orchid eyes flashing brilliantly. “Tell me, at least, if no one else. If you go back there acting like you are now, mom will tear you apart in front of everyone. Save face, and tell me.”
“You really wanna know?” Abrafo hissed. He was reluctant to lay the burden that tempered him on the younger generation, but they needed to know as well. “I’ll tell you, then. I had a nightmare. Not a dream, a nightmare about…my mother. She abandoned me, and then had the audacity to attack your mother when she was pregnant herself. That female…is…just…” He growled through his teeth.
“She’s a demon, and yet she’s the only face I see when I go to sleep at night. I can’t get her out of my head! I should have killed her when I had the chance, but I….”
Safi took a deep breath, and bravely pushed his forehead against his father’s, locking eyes with the older male. For the first time in his life, he saw firsthand the untold horrors that plagued his father every night. The things he would never tell anyone about, and would never be able to let go of.
“She’s your mom.” He said simply with a sarcastic grin. “It doesn’t matter what she does, she’s still the one who nursed you when you had no one else, and carried you in her womb. Your brain has thousands of reasons to hate her, but your heart? It only has one.” He shook his head. “You hate her because she abandoned you. Left you for dead without a second thought, and that hurts. I can’t sympathize, but I’m tired of watching you go off like this is all on you.”
“It’s not,” Safi sighed after a long pause. “It’s just not, okay? You have a family now that loves and cares about you, whether you know that or not. Sons and daughters who idolize you. A mate whose world revolves around you. “
He stepped back to look at his father with a speculative gleam. “She’s going to come back sooner or later. If you isolate yourself, whose going to be there to help you when you need it most?”
And after that, the son left the father alone by the water’s edge with his thoughts. Abrafo could only shake his head with a laugh before following after his son, pondering to himself when his own children had become wiser than himself.
(WC: 1,010)
