Lava: The Legend of the Volcanoes

F O U R T H E R U P T I ON: T H E H O U R S

                                                 "I X T L I,  Y O LL O T L I  Q U I T Q U I T I N E M I"
                                                           They begin to take on a face, a heart.
                                                                               - Aztec saying.

Popocatépetl saw her between masses and masses of people, almost as if his eyes were trained to see her. Standing with a plate of tacos, talking animatedly to their peers, as if she were one of them. The warrior tried to turn his full attention to his food, but his eyes kept looking for her.

"Popo, your taco's falling!"

"Eh?"

He barely had enough time to grab it before it crashed to the ground.

The drill for those reunions was to switch groups so that you talked to everyone, but most people ignored that rule and sat with their preferred groups. At the sides of the plaza were tables with plates of tortillas, meat and chile, and between taco and taco, Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl went nearer.

"How do you know how to prepare a taco?", he asked her, going for his fourth serving. "It's not pipiltzin food."

"Psh," she put a tortilla container back into a bag hanging from her shoulder, "The pipiltzin food is boring."

Popocatépetl leaned against the table, pausing before taking a bite.

"You brought the food?"

"Mine? Yeah, I couldn't take their food when I have my own," she shrugged.

The mass of people absorbed them again, and their meetings since that where scarce and casual. Each time they saw each other they threw words in jagged conversation before they were separated again.

"Tonight at eleven?"

"See you there!"

And so the hours went. Each day they met an hour earlier than the last day, until eleven became ten, ten became nine and nine became eight and so on till it couldn't. Soon, seeing the warrior and the princess together stopped being a novelty, and not even the overprotective chief had something to say against them.

That day the date was at four, and Iztaccíhuatl walked with all the freedom of the world to their meeting point when she heard a crunch behind her. Crunch, crunch.

She turned around. Nothing.

Shrugging, she kept walking and found Popocatépetl shooting arrows at a poor, innocent tree, and all her body raised in fiery awareness.

"Popo!" leaving her bag on the ground, she ran to him and hugged him. He left the bow and hugged her back, grinning.

"You do know that it's a half hour to four, do you?" he asked.

"And you counted it?"

"I wanted to see if you really were so eager to see me."

"You must have been more eager than me to come this early."

They started working a few minutes later. Popocatépetl tried to be the strict teacher, but he ended up laughing at a joke Iztaccíhuatl made and forbidding her from shooting in case the arrow deflected.

"You just keep on distracting, huh?", he said, pulling her to him by the waist and trying to appear angry.

He failed.

"I'm supposed to be the one who's learning, so you shouldn't give me a distraction," she went to smack her, and he caught her hand between his.

They heard a noise.

Both their heads snapped towards the noise, and the warrior started walking to it.

"You think there might be..."

He took a finger to his lips, asking her to be silent. He took out a tecpatl and cut off a few branches. Someone started running away.

Popocatépetl took off running in a zas.

Iztaccíhuatl took a tecpatl of her own and followed him into the woods.

Meanwhile, Popocatépetl smashed the intruder to the ground and pulled his head up from the half of hair that he had.

"What interest did you have there spying us?"

The princess stood next to him, panting a little but not as much as she would have done before. The intruder stayed quiet.

"Answer."

Iztaccíhuatl poked him with the tecpatl's tip to remark Popocatépetl's order, and the intruder raised his head. She swallowed her surprise.

"I wanted to see what you were doing," Citlatépetl said, looking her right to the eye. "Lately all you do is be with him."

"That doesn't allow you to spy," she snapped.

Popocatépetl's expression was of annoyance, and maybe more than a bit of possessiveness.

"Who is him?" he asked Iz. Then, to the intruder, with a glare, "And you're not anyone to stick your nose in what the princess does."

"He's only the son of a friend of my father's," she answered him. "His name is Citlatépetl."

"I am someone. Especially when it was all about fighting, you could have asked me of you were interested!"

Popocatépetl smashed Citlatépetl's face to the ground in a strange fit of anger. The intruder squirmed like a snake in his grasp and he showed-begrudgingly- a bit of mercy, releasing his head only.

"Why didn't you ask me to teach you?", the bastard asked between earth filled coughs.

Iztaccíhuatl shrugged, locking eyes with her warrior.
She hadn't been interested in fighting until she saw Popocatépetl.

I don't really know of tacos existed at that time, but also I don't really know what they ate so...
Earth and Popo's jealously,
-IAmACaticorn