Face To Face (Nanshe)
Things faded in and out, came to be and were forgotten. An ice pack. Curry. Water. Aspirin. All of it assailed him in dream-like waves, endless shifting things that he couldn't control. Much as the rest of his life, lately, had seemed some sort of dream he couldn't distinguish the real from the unreal. There was silence. A murmured word or two, and then nothing. And at last when he opened his eyes and the world seemed as he remembered it days upon days ago, she was there. Nanshe. She'd fought her way into his heart and taken over without so much as a whimper from him. All-unknowing Shamash had been content to think her odd, shy, too reserved for his company. And somehow she'd turned him into the creature he'd been before. In the ziggurat or elsewhere, when he loved man instead of fearing what man was capable of doing. No one could ever care for mankind like that dimwit Enki, no one could possibly be so whimsically fascinated by it like the ancient one. But Shamash had tried. He'd tried, and he'd gotten precisely nowhere. Nanshe had healed him of that cynicism before he knew it.
There was still work to be done, wasn't there?
There always would be.
How she looked at him, how she moved, Shamash knew. Bare beneath the covers. Her hands were damp from the cloth she'd just applied to his forehead. She knew, knew everything that he'd ruined and everything that he'd done in the past days. Blaming Tyr was not only dishonest but inaccurate. Shamash could have gone, could have departed the Norse god's company and returned to India. It wasn't necessary for him to stay. Only he didn't want to admit that it felt like her home here, not just his. That as proud as he was of what they'd made together something was missing, something he couldn't put his finger on. Life without Nanshe was unimaginable to him now. He couldn't leave, would never dream of it. And yet that feeling was still there, nagging somehow, as though the answer was close at hand. It didn't feel like home. It wasn't the desert, or the proud oasis of the Euphrates. There were too many things that he'd taken for granted that were missing here, too many things that would leave him unsatisfied. If he were honest with himself, it wasn't family that drove him away. It was his own discontentment.
He didn't know what to do.
"Your charity is boundless," Shamash croaked quietly. "If I were you, I'd have left him outside to sleep in the car."
Memory was a knife as surely as love or dreams. There were things he remembered well and things that faded with the passage of time. Minds could hold information for only so long, thoughts could be in place for only this short time. Shamash had never been a master of memories in the first place, but mixing pain and alcohol with that failing was bound to cause problems. When he'd faced her by the fountain he knew nothing of what he'd done, nothing of how he'd come to be there. Snippets only, fragments that were meaningless in the context of his life. Sleep and water had brought those memories to the forefront. Things that might have remained lost forever were suddenly there, in his mind, slashing at him much as his own actions did. The guilt he felt facing her was immeasurable. The guilt he felt when he faced those memories was even worse. She didn't know what he'd done, at least not all of it.
He had to tell her.
Dancers. Naked flesh. Police. Fighting, what seemed like endless fighting. The inability to remain sober was apparently a memorable trait of the Norse gods. Did Tyr feel any shame for his part in that debacle? Did he care that he'd had a hand in embarrassing Shamash? Hardly mattered. Tyr had given Shamash an answer to go with his shame. The truth didn't always come in the way that you wanted it, when you wanted it or even when you needed it. Shamash had thought it was a lesson he'd never forget. Too soon he'd forgotten, too soon he'd tossed aside the lesson he'd spent years teaching Inanna and Dumuzi. Shame was a powerful tool, a powerful motivator, and Shamash should have known that. Right then he didn't feel like doing anything but hiding in the ziggurat for another thousand years. Right then, even if the look in her eyes wasn't as fierce as it could have been, he didn't want to face it. He knew what he'd done. Nanshe was never fierce with him, never harsh or rash as he was. It was one of the things he loved most about her. Just then the mildness coupled with the anger was more cutting than the harshest word.