This is how we dance

I had so much.. song in my heart when I left the children and Scoot with Magda. I had put myself in a strange sort of position where I was mothering about a dozen children and finding it hard to find time to myself. Everywhere I went I was followed by small feet and shy giggles. I did not mind, it was fulfilling to be needed.

Skies was I happy.

Happy in that breathless, bright eyed kind of way. Oh sure I was.. lonely and lonely enough now to notice the empty place in my heart. Where my butterflies lived. It doesn't come all at once you know, the lonely. It comes in stages. At first, after loss.. you feel it intensely, you are consumed by the loss. It was like having part of my body removed. You are broken, shattered. Not everyone gets past that stage but I am Asria of the Tuchuk and I would not dishonor Trayu's memory, my children.. or those I called family by such a show of weakness. I am weak, let us be clear. I am a weak, soft, sometimes confused woman. But I can be weak and be strong, I walk that fine line. I know I can spiral down either side when I must and I know how to climb back up again. I am a Tuchuck woman. I am Tuchuk. I am woman. After that, things grow quieter, the screaming in your head becomes, slowly over time, little mewling kitten sounds. Always there but easier to ignore. I had Lei to care for, I worried about Astar, I followed Fonce to the first fires and then I had my son. I have dealt with my loss, felt it, swum in it, drank it up and made love to it. Loss. It was mine and now.. I have let it go.

Now I want to live.

In order to live though, live for me, live for my children and live for the Tribe.. I have to look deeply at myself and the path I am walking down. I spent a great deal of time thinking about things that have been said to me in my lifetime.

My mother laughing as I sang to her about how soap bubbles were born (they came out woman’s fingers, of course) My father telling me to stop dancing and come look at the wheel beads with a twinkle in his eye.

I recalled countless hours of sitting at my mothers knee, learning all the things women do, listening to my father explain again and again about the way we kept time, the way we marked it. But all I really recall are the things I thought about. Games I wanted to play, dresses I wanted to make, flowers I wanted to pick, things I wanted to paint and draw. I was unable to concentrate on my parent’s clan and I think my father knew it. We spoke once, briefly, when I was around 14, about clan. There had been talk of me spending time at all the different clan fires before any decisions were made.

But then my mother.. and the leather worker from the first wagons.. Everything changed and the plans were forgotten. I had to step in for my mother then and my father was growing ill. There was no more idle time for discussion of my future. Trayu was there with me then.. sneaking me away to kiss behind the wagons in the middle of the night. I was fourteen and so hopelessly in love. Trayu was a year keeper, my father was a year keeper. What else was there for me to do? I would join the year keepers.

But later.. I recalled other times, when I sung to Lei as a baby and Magda would listen to me tell her a story with her eyes closed so she could better 'see' my words. Trayu too would listen but.. he was less impressed. Sometimes I think my stories bothered him, looking back I think I know why. He had this ideal of us, a pair of Yearkeepers, like our parents and their parents.

Later still.. Fonce had grown angry with me when I admitted why I was a year keeper. Fonce's displeasure with me always stays with me. I incur it by accident and have yet to discover the secret of soothing it.. but I never let it go. I have been holding it in a tight little ball inside of me. Whenever our eyes meet I can feel it pulse. He may have completely forgotten the way he looked at me that day but I have not. it is another fine line I walk. Fonce has all these expectations of me, I think.. but won't tell me what they are because the biggest expectation of all is that I should already know. I am not permitted to falter.

My name is Asria and I am a tight rope walker mind reader in a pink tutu.

Sigh.

Telling him my identity was based on what someone else decided put another crack in my pedestal. How is this thing even still holding me up? How many times to do I have to hurt it before it crumbles and someone.. catches me?

or I fall and break my neck.

What was my point again? Right.. clan. I was all filled up with bubbly happy but I am always slow to share my happy bubbles, I am all too aware how much people like to burst them. I knew exactly who I needed to speak to first. I know he is not my guardian but.. he is. Go ahead and screw with my family if you have doubts. Fonce knows parts of me I think I hide, what everyone else sees as concrete he sees as a veil. He looks right at me, right though me. I think.

Anyway.

I ran to find him, spill my happy bubbles like soap all over his hands. Telling him would begin to clean up all the dirty blood between us. A small beginning but... even mountains can grow out of anthills.

He was pleased. Pleased enough that even in the midst of his personal mess, he smiled for me. He gave me a joke.. or a tease. He certainly gave me a blush.

"I wanted your approval, very much Fonce. It means everything to me. Thank you so much!" I kissed his cheek.

"You have it .. I see this as a good change for you and a mature change if you are realizing you have talent and desires beyond what Trayu held."

It was the first time he brought up Trayu that I did not look away, or look down or let go. It simply flowed from his lips to my ear and.. was. I kept my hand on his arm and did not hear Trayu in my head anymore. He told me Trayu would have wanted me to be happy, he just had not realized I needed to be asked.

"Skies your hard to crack Fonce."

"Depends on what you want .. Asria." His pause before my name, there are unspoken words inserted there. Woman of Trayu, Woman I will not smudge, Miss Madonna, Mother of children, Patron Saint of widows. All the things he puts before my name to keep me unattainable. To keep that space there. I want to eat that space, lick it up like ice cream until it is gone. I want to respect it. I want to understand it more before I deny it.

"What crack you are looking for?" He asked me, I saw a wary glimmer in his dark eyes. I could say the wrong thing and the ground would open up and swallow me. I know this because I often say the wrong thing and the ground eats me up. Fonce walks away with curled fists.

I am the muse of his anger.

As I always did and always will, I breathed deeply and said what I felt.. and risked his anger. I do not censor myself for the enjoyment of others. "The crack that I fit in. The one I can slip inside of while you are looking the other way and then you'll look back and I'll just be there and you will want me to stay there. That, little, crack."

The twitch of his lips was.. not unhappy.

"You must know that women attempt to get my attention all the time and touching my arm or kissing me on the cheek is not going to be much more intense than someone rubbing a wet pussy across my thigh."

I'm not making that up! He said that! And me.. a woman who has said worse things in the night, done wonderfully unladylike things under the cover of dark.. blushed. I squirmed. I stumbled over my tongue and the tips of my ears went red.

Fonce chuckled. I suppose my blushing response is like filler for the cracks in my pedestal. I take out a chunk and he steadily repairs it. Bastard. There was a tense, amused silence between us before I spoke again.

"What.. would get your attention Fonce? What would make you look at me like.. I am a woman?"
"I .. honestly ... am not sure Asria." No pause, no unspoken title to keep me away, I had taken another step. "I actually wish I knew the answer to that."

I bit harder into my lip, I tasted blood on the inside of my cheek. I had to tell him the one thing I would never do to get his attention, no matter how it sounded. I had to say it so he would never, ever, wonder. "I would never submit to you. I'm not judging anyone else for it.. but.. I won't do that, I couldn't."

The easy way he took that promise, and it was a promise, buoyed me. I knew it was the right thing for once. All women are different, what is right for one is not for another. I do not know if Fonce knows about my mother and I am too ashamed to tell him. But I will never submit to a man of my own free will.

We spoke briefly of .. mating and attention and I admitted to him something that might have surprised some people but I think it reassured Fonce. It soothed me, at any rate.

".. Yes. I want your attention. I want you to look at me as a woman you could like.. that way. But I am not.. saying I want to be your mate. You were right before, I do not know you well enough to think that.. far ahead. But I know when I am alone with you.. I want you to kiss me. I stand here talking and wondering what I would actually do if you just kissed me. I want you to wonder the same thing, Fonce. And..."

He cut me off with a smirky grin. "Well then .. submitting would be rather against the point unless you want to .. beg ... to kiss me."

Blush, my ears hurt they were so hot! I was offended at the implication of what he said but too tongue tied to protest it. I laughed instead, mostly at myself. "I forget what I was saying now!"

He laughed, how I have missed that sound. "You were about to go tell the Ubar you would like to switch clans."

I let go of my hands to swat at his arm. I wonder if I looked as.. shiny as I felt "You were about to say would go with me and hold my hand while l I told him."

He snorted, like a beast! But his eyes were happy! "Not a chance. Now scram and get it done and .. good luck I think this is a good idea"

Go be a big girl, little Asria. Show me that you can.

The world was spinning on the proper axis and I hope I gave Fonce a small reprieve from the demands made on him lately. I know I, too, make demands of him but this has all been very different. Not wrong, just different. I could not need him less because he had a drama to deal with. And I know Fonce just well enough that if I had not gone to him with this, right now, when I needed too.. he would have been irritated with me.

Thank the Skies I love riddles.