@daisyscape : ✍️ + okay listen... najma viper / accepting.
“Did you get to see Jamil today?” Ruhee asks, and Najma laughs, nodding, scooping the tiny girl into her arms.
“There you are. I’ve been looking for you.” Ruhee gives a sheepish smile; she always seems to disappear around bedtime. “And I did! It was nice.” Her smile goes a little mischievous as she considers how she’d tormented him; that’s her job as little sister, though. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen him in person.”
“Luckyyyyy,” Ruhee replies, almost pouting. “We haven’t seen Kalim in aaaages.”
Najma shifts her against her hip. “It’s not that long ‘til his next break. Maybe your big brother come home this time.” She hopes so — she’d sooner die than let Jamil find out, but it had been hard, last break, to be without her brother when she’d expected him home. She can’t imagine it’s easier on Kalim’s brothers and sisters. “How about I text Kalim tomorrow and we try to arrange a video call, so you guys can all see him sometime this week?”
“Yaaay! That’d be so fun! You’re the best, Najma!”
“In exchange, you have to go to bed really quiet tonight, and not give anybody any trouble, okay?”
“Booooo,” Rugee whines back, and Najma laughs. “But okay! I’ll tell everyone, and we’ll be soooo good tonight.” Najma laughs again. They’re all good kids — the Al - Asim family is, in a lot of ways, made up of especially good people. They’re kind. Kalim is kind; she knows that. She grew up with her brother, serving the family like her family’s always done, and even if she wasn’t as close to Kalim as Jamil was, she’d never been all that far from him, either. Jamil had protected her from becoming anyone’s personal servant, and kept her as far from Kalim as possible, but they grew up together; there had been times, between the distance and her own quiet resentment, when Kalim felt as much like her older brother as Jamil did.
Those moments never lasted all that long, though. It only ever took a word from either of her parents — fearful in a way that she was too young to understand — or a thoughtless word from Kalim himself to remind her of what they were. She — her brother — all of them...at the end of the day, they weren’t family. They were servants, born into an impossible task, a role that none got to choose. Najma cares for the Al - Asims, she does, but as she tucks Ruhee into the large bed piled with other children ( not because there isn’t madol and space enough for each to have their own room, their own wing, but because the siblings simply love one another in a way that’s all - tactile ) she thinks of what she is. She is their servant. She is not their equal. She’s not their sister. At the end of the day, she’s not, really, even, allowed to be their friend.
And, every one of them, too sweet and too ignorant to see it.
She closes the door, she smiles, she stretches her arms above her head. She misses her brother. She misses Kalim, in between moments of splicing resentment she’s never been able to shake ( omah, omah, why can’t jamil play with me? / he has to entertain kalim, dear, you know that — ) but above all, she misses her brother. And she hopes he’s happy, with his friends. He’d seemed happy when they met, in his own way. He was away from Kalim, who Jamil ——
Who Jamil always said he loved. Who, Najma noticed, even if no one else does, Jamil resents.
She wonders how things are at school. She wonders if Kalim has figured it out yet, that no one can be his friend when they were born to serve him. She wonders how long until she’s all grown up, when she can leave this place, when she can be more girl than servant. She wonders that her parents never did, and wonders if it would be a betrayal to leave them.
Then, her head shakes. There’s no use dwelling on things like that, things that ache. Not when there’s still work to be done before it’s time for her, too, to go to sleep.
