The Protector: Hakan & Nisan

Chapter 11

She lay there on his chest for the longest time, not wanting to move, not wanting to let him go. Her body could never hate him, despite her best efforts.  She wanted him to stay inside of her forever.  But those were the thoughts and feelings that would be her undoing - again - so she made herself lift her head and look down at him. She was surprised to see tears sliding silently down his handsome face and her heart constricted painfully.

"Just kill me." It was the weakest of whispers. She had broken his spirit. What did it matter if she now broke his body, too?

And suddenly she hated her triumph. She loathed his defeat. Every instinct she had inexplicably ached to protect the Protector. "My soul, " she said quite tenderly. "You see now how I have suffered. Through and through. Except I can't seem to kill you as easily as you killed me." 

There were tears now in her eyes and he looked at her in surprise, in sudden understanding. This was the source of her pain. And now his. The cursed, unfathomable love between mortal enemies. One of them willing to give it all up for their love but not the other.

"Nisan," he said slowly, desperately, "That wasn't me." He tested his hand and could move it up an inch but no more. He actually had the instinct to touch her face, in something akin to empathy and love.

"But that was me," she said helplessly, slapping his hand back down, mistakenly thinking he would try to push her off even in his weakened state. "And you have his face," she said accusingly, grabbing that damned handsome face with one hand, squeezing hard and searching it's beautiful and familiar features. "His eyes.  You are connected to him through space and time. His DNA, his blood, runs through you." And she was angry once more. "His traitorous heart beats within you." The spell was broken and she dismounted him and straightened her clothes.

"That's what he called me, you know, his heart," she said almost casually but with a sneer. "'My soul,' I'd say foolishly. 'My heart,' he would say back. Until he shoved his precious dagger right through it." She reached down and grabbed said dagger off the floor, looking at its sharp, familiar tip and turning it over in her hand. She could still feel it, all these centuries later, the all-consuming pain of it.  The physical skewering was the least of it.  "I suppose I deserved it. I was so very pathetic."

"No," Hakan responded vehemently, desperately. Whether he was desperate not to die or desperate not to lose her, or both, he couldn't say for sure. "No, Nisan, you were brave."

She looked at him startled, frozen for a moment. Then she shook her head and seethed, "You won't trick me again. Not ever again, Protector."  She grabbed his face again, standing over him and studying him as past and present fused.  "Really you did me a favor. Who needs a heart when it can so easily be used as a weapon to break you?"  She had just brilliantly taught him that very lesson right here and now.

Thanks to the divine loop hole that brought an Immortal back to life with a sip of Protector's blood, she had been revived by the other Immortals a hundred years after the Original had put her down.  This time, thank God, she'd been reborn without love and compassion flowing through her body making her weak and pathetic.

Hakan moved his whole arm an inch then, gaining some strength and mobility. He tested a leg but it was still too heavy. He was desperate to move but for a different reason now than defending himself. He inexplicably wanted to comfort her, plead with her and perhaps pivot away from the deadly course that they were forevermore speeding down hand in hand. He wanted to change the present, the future, disrupt the pattern of Protector and Immortal loving and fighting till the death. "I'm not him, Nisan. I'm not the Original.  I'm a better man."

Again, she paused. Something ran through her head and then, resolutely, she leaned over and kissed him, flicking her tongue against his lips. "You may be different now but only because I broke you."