The Burning Rose

7 ~ LACQUER

And you don't wanna know me
I will just let you down,
You don't wanna know me now.

~Castles Crumbling (feat. Hayley Williams), Taylor Swift

Lacquer

The amber fluid swirled in the chalice as he stared at it. His mind felt hazy in the midst of the unending noise within.

Wrong - all the noises were wrong and needless and against the very essence of his existence. And it made him want to laugh.  

His lips curled up in a corner. How was he delusional enough to imagine that the noises could be quieted down by a drink that he does not even quite like? 

He scoffed at himself and got up from the marble table. The dices and laid out board on the other edge of it was probably the least enticing thing in the entire chamber. His eyes drifted to his second wife's sleeping form on the bed as he poured the drink down the granite basin in one corner of the room. 

His wife. But not the Empress. His jaw momentarily clenched and his heart stuttered. 

It was wrong of him to miss her so when he was with another, but who cared? He was pretty certain that any desirous male who had ever laid his eyes on her missed her so at similarly odd hours. 

But he wasn't simply another desirous male-

Or maybe he was. In front of her dark eyes and smoke-and-honey voice, he was. He had welcomed and justified polyandry for her sake. He had grown to like playing dice simply because sometimes she would gamble away a kiss during a quiet night and then look at him from beneath those dark lashes after he had tasted her lips like a man starving. 

He would gamble away his life in a heartbeat if it meant she would look at him that way again. 

She would not, and he wasn't delusional enough to believe otherwise. Especially not in the presence of his brothers. 

The mighty Vrikodara ready to lay down his very soul if it meant gaining that glance of unadulterated adoration from her. 

The wielder of the Gandeeva himself poured all of his razor-sharp focus unto her everytime they were in the same room.

Nakula's beauty seemed to scorch him every time he reached for her hand. 

Or maybe Sahadeva's quiet serenity was all she wanted. 

It was only that he couldn't find himself anywhere on that map. Or on the map of the conquest. It was all on his brothers. Bringing the world to their knees and then offering him crown jewels and more area on the map to call his. None of it felt his, though. 

Not even her. 

She was Arjuna's conquest by right, Bhima's by prowess-

"Husband?", Devika's soft, sleep-laden voice sliced through the pressing silence like the tip of his spear, and he forced himself to loosen his grip on the edge of the granite basin, "Would you not sleep?"

Such sweet, direct wording. His mind whirred - what would Draupadi have said? Nothing, really. She would not have slept till she was certain that he had. And if he had awoken in the middle of the night, she would've laced her fingers through his and searched his eyes with that dark, sleep-drunken gaze till he spoke of what was bothering him. Without a singular question. 

"Sleep eludes me tonight, darling.", he sighed, walking back to the table and picking up a set of bound documents. Written appeals from all across Aryavarta. Some were in languages he had never seen before, but they had translations attached to them. Varying handwritings and inks and one appeal varying so vastly from another that it was fascinating.