Prompt Shop Bop

"Answer 36" - Jiwe

from 36 Questions

"No one wants to let go"

No one wants to let go of the ones they love. Letting go of your first love is even harder. It may have been a relief to let go of Tenga, but that didn’t mean Jiwe wanted to. Some part of him would always love his ex-mate, and he couldn’t deny that it would be so much harder to go back to her now, especially when she made it so clear that that was what she wanted. However, Jiwe knew better. What was right wasn’t always what was easy; in fact, more often than not, it would be the harder of the options. To go back to Tenga now and become her mate once more would be easy, but it would not be healthy. It had hurt at the time, and maybe it wasn’t even true back then, but what she said when she broke things off back then was at least true now: they were different people than who they used to be. They may have fit together as a couple way back then, but looking at the white lioness now, staring into her blue eyes, Jiwe found himself facing a stranger. She was a mystery to him now, and, upon further reflection, he found that he didn’t even mind. He wasn’t hurt to learn that he no longer knew the lioness he once loved so dearly, more than the sun itself, and the fact that he didn’t care made him sadder than the realization that he no longer knew her ever would.

"You've gotta fight against your every instinct
"And that's hard to do"

At first, when Tenga broke things off with Jiwe, it felt like everything was falling apart. The world was turned upside down, despite the fact that, externally, nothing really changed. Tenga and Jiwe had not been spending much time with each other as it was, though not from lack of effort on Jiwe’s part, and so his day to day life was relatively undisturbed. However, that didn’t mean he didn’t have to change things. There were no more gifts or trinkets given to Tenga when he found something she might like or that made him think of her. He stopped trying to eat meals with her whenever she was on one of her rare excursions out of the nursery. He no longer kept his thoughts about her treatment of their children (and the obvious favoritism she harbored towards Sasa while Laani was neglected and looked down upon for her curse) to himself, instead calling her out on it when he had an opening, so long as it wasn’t an incredibly public setting that would embarrass her, as that was never the goal of those confrontations. All those things he’d learned to do to try and demonstrate his love for Tenga, even when they were seeing less and less of each other as she busied herself in the nursery, had to be forgotten. They’d become instinct for him, and they all had to be unlearned. He was constantly having to fight back against his instincts, and that was hard. It felt like every step he took to do so was a struggle, because, despite it not affecting his routine all that much, it felt like everything had been turned upside down and inside out. He hated it, hated how hard it was to cut that part of him out of his life, but it had to be done, no matter how difficult it was.

"No one wants to quit"

When Tenga first broke things off, Jiwe was devastated, in part because it felt like she had simply quit. She gave up on their relationship without making any effort to fix things, and that hurt him far more than anything else she could've done, beyond perhaps cheating on him (and even that might not have been as terrible in his eyes). In turn, it felt like he was quitting and giving up on everything they had together instead of making some effort to repair what had been broken and mend whatever tear had formed between them. When he turned and left her after she ended things between them, it took everything in him not to turn around and immediately go back to her to try and fix things. It hurt, to give it up without a fight, but he was too tired to try and keep his mate from quitting on him. To be honest, though he could never have admitted it at the time, it was somewhat of a relief. Things had been going downhill for a while between them, and though at that time he would have tried anything and everything to fix things, would have moved the heavens and the earth if it meant they would be happy together again, further reflection inward made Jiwe realize he was just as tired with how their relationship had been. He had been clinging to a spark that had died a long while ago, and, as sad as it was to come to grips with that realization, it was for the best. He didn't want to quit, and even if how things had ended wasn't technically quitting on his part, it still felt that way. However, it was going to be for the best.

"No one wants to admit to themselves
"What's actually true"

The hardest part of moving on was swallowing the bitter truth that was the fact that his feelings for Tenga were just as dead as her feelings apparently were for him. He didn't want to admit that the first lioness he had ever loved, the fragile girl who he had protected as she grew to become strong and proud of herself, was no longer his mate. On top of that, he was forced to confront the fact that that was for the best, and that he also didn't harbor the feelings for Tenga that he once did. That realization made him sick to his stomach, and Jiwe tried to deny it, but eventually, he had to admit the truth to himself: Tenga was right, and the two of them were not the same as they once had been. They may have been compatible before, but they weren't anymore.