A/N

A scene from Gilgamesh's perspective. Slight angst & typical Gilgamesh arrogance.

Yearning

He watches her sleep that night, curled up contentedly by the crackling embers, the dusky moonlight catching on a stray strand of her long pale hair and turning it to liquid starlight. She sleeps perfectly still, her knees tucked almost to her chin, huddled close to his feet. He remembers watching her as she watched the flickering flames, her pale bronze eyes, as beautiful and serene and aloof as the dawning sky, dull, their spark gone. She did not speak for a long time, and sensing her need to be alone, he allowed the silence to continue, until at last she murmured something about being tired and plopped herself down by him and curled up next to him as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

He can feel her warmth now against his leg as he sits, one leg propped loosely up, his arm resting lightly on his knee, the heat from the fire stark against the bitter night chill at his back. The stone outcropping overhead is little more than a low shelf of jagged rock, doing little to shield him from the cold. He misses his bed back at the palace, the carved marble headboard and columns draped in crimson cloth and the finest white silk, the mattress stuffed with swan down and the sandalwood burning in the braziers. It seems impossible to him how Enkidu grew up in a cave just like this one, with only wild beasts for company. He is the king, after all, deserving only of the best, and she is the only one who has ever been able to stand before him, which in his eyes makes her no less deserving of the same. She should have grown up in a majestic palace, surrounded by wealth and tended to by servants, not in some pathetic hole in the ground that reeks of wolf stench.

At his side, he feels her stir and glances down, away from the flames. Enkidu curls up tighter, pressing her back against his leg as she moans softly in her sleep. Light shimmers on her cheek as a tear slips down her skin and vanishes into the dirt. He reaches down and brushes it carefully away, gently so as not to wake her. She is so beautiful when she is asleep, her eyes closed and her long pale lashes curving across the lightly tanned skin of her cheek, her long hair sprawled around her in a wild tangle of waves. He enjoys admiring her like this. When she is awake she always catches him watching her and either narrows her eyes at him until he stops or simply races away, bounding lightly over stones and scrub brush with her long hair streaming behind her, her face tilted into the wind.

She moans again, softly. The sound is so sad that he touches her shoulder. She wakes at his touch, her head darting up, her pale eyes wild for a moment before focusing on his face, her tense frame easing again. "Gilgamesh?" she whispers, and reaches up to touch the wet trails on her cheeks, her eyes widening. "Tears...?" she says, startled.

He leans back against the rock, bracing his arms lazily on his knees. "Were you dreaming?"

"Yes." She frowns, her brow crinkling. "At least, I think so. But why are there tears?"

"It must have been a sad dream," he says, watching her. Her gaze flickers. "Yes," she says softly. "Yes, I remember now. I was dreaming, but I could not hear the voices anymore. I was in the sky, and I could see the city, but I was alone. The animals would not come to me anymore." She draws her knees up to her chest and hugs them, resting her chin on her knees. "But it was not a dream," she whispers, no longer speaking to him. "I woke up, and I am still all alone." Another tear leaks out of her eyes and falls silently down her cheek. She sniffs and wipes it away with the heel of her hand, but another one follows. She buries her head in her knees and lets them flow, her shoulders trembling. He could hear the sobs she was trying to keep silent.

He waits until she has finished. It is almost dawn when she raises her head again, her eyes red and swollen, tangled strands of hair clinging to her damp cheeks. Her beauty is not lost in them. Indeed, there's something in her sudden frailty that draws him, that wakens an urge in him to go to her and claim her for his own, to wipe her tears away and run his fingers through that soft pale hair and caress her skin until she laughs again, to make her his, not as some human girl or temple prostitute, but as Enkidu, as the warrior and friend he sees.

"You are not alone," he says. "You live among humans now. They are foolish, and weak, but they are better than beasts. You alone stand by my side."

Isn't that enough? he wants to ask. Are not I enough?

Enkidu does not answer, just looks at the dying embers, her gaze dull. A final tear slips out of the corner of her eye and falls to the dusty ground.