Old Friends, New Faces || Malik & Zahara
The smile is the first familiar sight all night. It’s out of place, a relic of a past time, and Malik isn’t sure what to do with it. His face remains blank, passive, because it’s muscle memory and easier than reacting. Part of him wants to scoop her in a fierce hug and cling to her. Zahara was one of the only stable fixtures in his mixed, rough past. She represents something more than the gossip, and it’s lighter than Mal has been in a long, long time.
But it isn’t on the larger scale of things. Mal can’t forget what he’s heard, what he’s seen and who he has lost. While Malik doesn’t have magic himself, Galin Stone taught him the art of meditation, control and what patience looks like on other people. When common folk could not brave the journey to Treefall, whether for lack of fighting finesse or the fear of the Church, Malik would travel, train and disappear into the night. Those people, the ones who Malik spent hours in the downtrodden slums of the city mentoring, are the very people Zahara hunted, tracked and killed.
Perhaps he is partially to blame. Mal disappeared when the Thief Lord took an interest in him, leaving his childhood friends and fun behind. He trained for nearly half a decade without stepping foot in the city, sending money and letters to his mother under a pseudonym of a far cousin. He wasn’t there to help Zahara become a better person like he should have been. Malik had been selfish, and he knows it.
"I don’t have old friends, love," Mal answers as he sheathes his daggers. He does not feel guilt. Whatever he missed, it is now gone, and Mal has never been one to revel in the past. Her admission of the Old Gods says something, but he doesn’t have the time to figure everything out at the moment. He looks at the table in front of him and grabs one of the first reed pen he can find. He scribbles down an address, a meeting place deep in the slums of the city. If she’s willing to meet him there, at the requested time, it’ll say something.
For now, he takes a running leap, crotches in the windowsill just long enough to to turn to look at her. Their eyes meet for a second and Malik just can’t over how foreign they look. He drops down, fingers hanging onto the ledge as he braces his arms for the next catch. He free falls, eyes open and hands ready to catch onto the next ledge. Within fifteen seconds he’s lost in the night, running home along rooftops with old memories tucked away.
Zahara feels her heart drop a little at his admittance to 'not having any old friends'. She had hoped for at least a little banter, but as much as she feels she should be hurt the look in Malik's eyes is one she knows well, every time she looks in the looking glass. They have changed much in the last years, and she ices off that part of her heart. There's not much left of her without frost surrounding it so when she sees the emotions in his eyes close off, his thinking done, it doesn't feel any worse than anything else she's had to do in the last few years.
Zahara doesn't play with what ifs.
She sees him turn to write something, leaving it on her desk. She could do many things, challenge him, ask him to stay. Stick her axe in his back while it is to her, which is what she should do if she were smart, but she has a gut feeling and those are the only ones she lets through anymore. Her heart lies to her, but her intuition rarely does. Which is why he gets out the window without starting a fight, though to be fair at this stage she's legitimately not sure which one of them would win.
Before he jumps, she turns in her chair, catching his eye. For the first time in a long time she's not sure what emotion she reads there. She thinks it might be sadness, or regret, but locked behind a wall similar to her own. She doesn't bother worrying for his safety despite the fact that her apartments are in a tower on the sixth and seventh floor of the palace. He's the one that taught her to climb trees, and walls that seem to have no handholds, in the first place. Something that has come to use multiple times in her present life.
She gets up after she is sure he's gone, closing the reed shutter of the window tightly, and walking to her desk. She puts the book down on her shelf as she passes it, uninterested for the moment. What he's written has far more value to her than some lost and nearly dead knowladge at the current moment.
Zahara reads the note, walking over to her fireplace, burned to coals for the evening, and lightly watches the parchment as it catches fire, and she kneels, making sure every trace of written parchment is burned to ash before she stands back up and looks at the window her friend jumped out of.
Malik was right. People like them didn't have 'old friends'.
Zahara smiles and turns to put out the candles in her reading room for the night, as she hears the crowd returning from church. At least the Gods gifted her with memory for all things written, it certainly made hiding from the church easier. Pondering how exactly she would plan her trip into the slums without it being questioned, she went to see what the commotion out in her hallway was all about. It sounded more frantic than the simple returning of the nobility from church.
