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She steps away from the room like a ghost.
She crosses the balcony door and the cold night air hits her in the face immediately. Her long hair is loose, so it gets on her face, but she doesn’t care, she doesn’t even make a move to get it off.
She stops when she encounters the railing. She grips her hands so tight that for a moment, you can see how her knuckles turn white. Her big brown eyes end in the landscape across the balcony.
Sakhra had been a battlefield for years, and now she was on her way to her old glory. No thanks to the oppressors, but to freedom fighters like the woman on the balcony.
Her body shook then, but you knew for a fact that it wasn’t because of the cold. She had endured worse colds throughout her thirty years of life, she was not going to get affected by some mere cold in the capital.
She watches in silence how the city succumbed to darkness. How is still weird to hear it is a normal city and not a battlefield. You knew that the woman on the balcony had thought that it all had been a dream, more than once. That it was still hard to believe that Urzikstan was finally free.
Thanks to her.
Thanks to women and men who didn’t stay put and decided to risk their lives to do something about the people who wanted to get their land from them.
She refused the leadership of her land several times, but she did accept to stay as one of the Generals. She regretted her decision as soon as she realized that it was a lot of paperwork, but you knew that she told herself about it every morning in front of the mirror, that she was doing it for her people, her land, Urzikstan.
After an eternity of standing still and looking at the city, she sits down in one of the armchairs on the balcony and gets a cigarette packet. She gets a lighter from the packet and her face lights up for a moment before the cigarette’s end burns.
Then is replaced by smoke and darkness again.
She inhales and exhales and the breeze takes it away like it tries to take her hair away.
You sigh from inside.
You have been watching her and you are aware that she knows you have been keeping an eye on her.
You can’t sleep without her in the bed after all and you are a light sleeper. Thanks to half a year in the ULF getting awake at random hours.
Is hard to sleep after all the shit you have seen and you know that is even harder for her, because she had lived in, and she had the scars to prove it.
Slowly you move your covers away and sit down on the edge of the bed. You grab the shirt hanging from the nearest chair and your feet make their way to the balcony door while the shirt makes its way over your head and then down your torso.
Once is on completely; you arrive at the door and look at her.
The smell of smoke and jasmine intertwines and is pushed into your nostrils thanks to the breeze. It makes you shiver because you aren’t as strong as the woman in front of you.
She was the stone; you were just there because she allowed you to be.
From all the people around her, she trusted you the most, enough to share a bed with you, to share a little of her mind in the middle of the chaos, to grace you with one of her smiles, to present you before Allah and claim you as hers in front of the rest of the world.
And you let her because you were the lucky one here.
She exhales another cloud of smoke that disappears in the breeze and the cold night before she turns her head in your direction.
For a moment her eyes are empty and hollow but is just for a moment.
“Did I wake you up?”
Her voice is rough and smooth at the same time. You think it has to do with the smoking or with her accent. It was still your favorite thing about her after her long dark hair.
“You know I can’t sleep without you”, you answer, leaning on the balcony door.
You can see a smirk on her face, but you both pretend is not there.
“Sorry”, she simply says, before she inhales the cigarette again.
“I forgave you before you put a foot on the floor”, you answer, trying not to sound like this will fuck your entire schedule and you will probably need more than three cups of coffee in the morning to be functional. “What I haven’t forgiven you for is this piece of shit in your mouth”.
You glare at the cigarette between her fingers while she exhales again.
“If I didn’t know you better I’d say you are jealous of a cigarette”.
“I’m not, habibti”, you said, stretching your hand to take the cigarette. “I married those lips, this cigarette is temporary”.
She doesn’t resist, which takes you by surprise for a moment before you turn away from her to turn it off in an ashtray inside.
You return to her half a second later.
You pass her at the entrance, sitting in the opposite armchair on the balcony.
It was cold.
She eyes you like she eyes her enemies.
You didn’t take it the wrong way, it meant she was paying attention to you now. And a little bit more far from dying of lung cancer. You sometimes wondered where the fuck she got that bad habit if it was the Russians, life, or Price.
You will probably ask and end up having an argument about politics and philosophy. And to be honest, you don’t want to have one of those now, not in the middle of the night when your primary goal is getting her back to bed.
Selfish you know, but you knew she wouldn’t be smoking if she wasn’t suffering about something again.
“You know, when I married you, we exchanged vows”, you started and you saw her roll her eyes a little, while her face was hidden behind her long hair, wiping her face like a veil.
“We did”, she said, still looking at you like you were the enemy. “And I have not broken mine”.
“I think you are lying”, she scoffed.
“Why do you think so?”
Her voice is defiant, and daring and you usually think it makes her powerful and unbeatable when she uses it with people who underestimate her, but when she is using it with you, you know it means trouble.
You think you don’t have anything to waste.
“You are hiding from me”, you answer, and you pause, for her to speak, to answer you back, but she doesn’t say anything, she simply looks at you from the other side of the balcony. “You are hiding your sorrows and fears from me, Farah and we promised we were going to share them”.
She lets go a breath slowly and you swear you can feel it, even if is technically impossible.
She doesn’t answer for a long time.
You just watch each other, with empty eyes and too much patience.
“Is not my intention to hide from you”, she finally says.
“I’m here for you, Farah”.
“I know”.
Silence.
“Why did you hide then?”
“I’m not hiding, I just –“, she stops mid-sentence and after holding her breath for a moment or two she lets it go.
She exhales and looks away.
You knew what was happening in that head of hers, but you needed to hear it and she needed to say it.
It was the only way to heal since she refused everybody’s else help.
“Habibti”, you plead.
It disarms her, as every other time you have used it with her. It was incredible how such a pet name could disarm her like a gun, could make her forget she had been a Commander, a Leader, a General.
It always reduces her to just Farah.
A woman.
Your woman.
Your love.
She moves her hair from her face, and you can see her clearly.
The bags under her eyes, the crystal eyes about to break in shards called tears, the pale skin, the slouched shoulders.
She was so far from the Farah you see every day, from the strong, chin-high woman that parades around commanding respect and receiving it from everyone because she was a hero, a liberator, a fighter.
The fighter.
You just were lucky she was yours, that she had allowed you to be in her shadow, to watch her back, to take care of her.
And you didn’t want to hurt her, you just wanted to help her, because she needed to talk about it with someone.
“I had a nightmare”.
And there it was.
The truth, the painful truth.
The truth she wanted to take with herself and smoke away like it wasn’t going to turn into a giant black rock in her lungs that would eventually choke her to death.
Talking with you was better than smoking, being honest was better than hiding away.
Stupid bad habit of thinking that she would be less of a leader if she admitted her fears.
“A nightmare about Hadir?”
She slowly nods.
You sighed.
She had them from time to time. Not just of Hadir, but also of the Russian invasion, of her father, her mother under the debris, the blood, and the gas.
She was especially afraid of the gas and more than once you woke up to her thinking she was choking again.
“He got what he deserved, Farah”.
“I know”, she looks at you, at your eyes, at your soul, “that doesn’t mean I can forgive him”.
You stay quiet looking at her for a while.
“You don’t need to forgive him”.
She sighs.
“He was your brother, yes, but he abused your trust, he betrayed you first, and he doesn’t deserve your forgiveness”.
She looks at her hands in her lap.
“He was my brother, I thought he was my family”.
“Family doesn’t betray you as he did”.
She lets go of a shaky breath.
You hate this Farah, this hopeless Farah, but at the same time you love her, because it meant that she felt, that she was human, that she was stronger than she let on.
“I’m your family now, just as Price, Laswell, Gaz, Nik”, she looks at you, she doesn’t cry physically but you think she is doing it internally. “You have me now; you’ll have me until I stop breathing”.
She gulps, looking at you.
“I don’t deserve you”, she says at the end, and you can’t stop a chuckle from escaping you.
“You are wrong, Farah, is you I don’t deserve. You chose me, and I still don’t understand why”.
“Probably because of this, because you care too much to see me destroy myself”.
You don’t have words for that, and she knows it.
You gulp, looking away.
You stay in silence for a long moment.
Then, suddenly, when you were looking at the city lost in thought, she stood up from the armchair.
You turned to look at her, to look at her stretched hand between the two of you.
“Let’s go inside, you are going to freeze here”.
Your eyes connect with her brown ones, and you can see that they are not hollow anymore. There is a pale spark in them, the spark that ignites them on a normal day.
“I know you’ll keep me warm”, and you put your hand in hers and she guides you inside.
She closes the balcony door behind you, but she stops just before she can get into bed.
You eye her, how her hair is a mess, and how she brushes it away for a moment.
“Will you hold me?”
The spark is still there, but the sad frown makes her look like a child, one of the many orphans of this land who either ended up dead or in her militia.
You have seen them; you have held them in their last moments.
“Come”, you simply say.
She is fast and resourceful like she has always been.
She is in your arms in a second, holding into you so tight you think you’ll break.
She smells of jasmines and smoke, she reminds you of the heaven only she can allow you to visit.
She doesn’t like to be called an angel, she doesn’t like when people call her ma’am with reverence like she was a queen, and she doesn’t like when people call her name and rank like she is some type of goddess of war.
But you do, you think she is an angel, a queen, a goddess of war, that she is the sole survivor of an idea, and the sole responsible for everything good that happens to you and this land.
You run your hands all over her, burring your face in her jasmine-infused hair.
You feel like the lucky mortal chosen by the goddess to be her warrior on Earth.
“I’m sorry”.
“Don’t apologize, is not your fault these monsters keep harassing you”.
“I just feel like I can’t fight them anymore”.
“Then let me help you. Let me fight them for you”.
She sighs and that’s when she finally breaks.
She breaks like a vase, and you hold her pieces together like you have been doing since you met her.
When you open your eyes, the room is bathed in light and your alarm is about to break your eardrums.
You turn it off and then you roll over on the bed that’s when you see it.
Her black hair against the morning light again.
Her caramel skin sparkling against the golden light.
And when she lazily opens her brown eyes to mumble something in Arabic you barely understand, all you can do is grin like the fool you are.
You’ll die for that view any day of your life.
Certainly, you are the lucky one here.