Genre: Slice of Life

Inspired by this:

At the sight of him, anyone would have thought the third prince fast asleep. He lay sprawled out on his plush bed, pointy golden shoes kicked off and lying forgotten in the corner, crown placed lopsidedly on the vanity. Deep maroon silks hung in half-strung curves from the ceiling, as if he had been too lazy to fully draw them.

He lingered in between consciousness and dreamland, eyes drooping, warmth from the sun seeping into his body. Light streamed through the transparent muslin curtains lining their balcony. Golden rays melted into the lines and ridges of his young face.

On the other side of the room, his wife was hunched in front of a large easel, paintbrush held limply between her fingers. Her hand danced uneasily on the soft oriental carpet that sunk obediently underneath her painted feet. As she tilted her head to the side, her maang tikka fell out of place.

A breeze blew through the curtains and made the chandelier swing back and forth with chiming jingles, casting pale reflections everywhere.

The glow of the sunset created uneven, fuzzy shadows on her painting, and her careful strokes were bled with the force of the wind. Frustrated, she opened her mouth, about to call upon her beloved to draw the curtains closed at once, but as she turned around, all her thoughts scattered like marbles on tile. 

He was beautiful. Enthralling in a sense that commanded every possible meaning of the word. 

There could be no accessory that deserved to adorn her lord other than the sun itself, and he wore its rich fabric gracefully, his chest rising and falling under its weight with ease. His eyes were almost closed, almost, but his fingers twitched slightly with wake.

Trapped under his charm, she stood up on unsteady feet, painting forgotten, and walked towards him, the sound of her anklets filling the mellow silence.

Urmila settled on the soft bedsheets, and smoothed down his hair with a gentle hand. 

As if recognizing her touch, his lashes fluttered in response, and he opened his eyes to regard her.

Her cotton skirt was embroidered with shining mirrors, so that she could dance and watch tiny crystals of light shift on the walls like he knew she liked to do. She wore an intricate crimson blouse with the most delicate flowers sewn into it with string spun from gold. 

Her maang tikka was slightly off-center, and if he had had any energy at all, he would have lifted his hand up to try to move it.

But he didn't, and her beauty couldn't have been marred by anything, forget a silly piece of jewelry, so he kept still.

Then, he met her gaze, chestnut eyes reaching hazel with a softness neither could have expected. "What happened?" he wondered, voice sagging with sleep and an unusual vulnerability.

Urmila hummed, shaking her head as she looked down at him, and watched him close his eyes with a content sigh at her touch, deciding not to tell him about the curtains or the sunlight, or the way the warm red of his dhoti made him look angelic.

If she had been any more selfless, she would have immortalized him in paints and inks right then and there, when the sun was still setting and his brows didn't furrow. But this moment, this man, belonged to her. 

Not the thin parchments of her sketchbook that would bleed the fine lines of his lashes, not the hues of the paints that would make his hair a shade darker, not the roughness of the canvas that would harm his soft frame, nor anything less worthy. His divinity was for only her eyes to behold.

Urmila didn't move to do anything, simply stroking his hair, before pulling her feet up on the bed as well, draping herself over the side of his body, and listening to his steady breaths. 

There would be much time to pull him up, feed him the dinner they forgot, tug off the heavy silver bracelets that he hadn't bothered to remove, and embrace him, tell him everything she ever wanted him to know. 

But that would be later, when the sun no longer remained behind to ornament his body, and his limbs no longer slumped with languor.

For now, it was just Urmila and her Nath.

A/N: Also Inspired by everything I expected Adipurush to be except for a VFX nightmare with bad costumes and terrible jewelry choices and fake backgrounds when India literally has the actual forests and castles where the Ramayan took place :)))))))

Some part of me wants this to be after vanvas, when she's just enjoying his presence after so long, but then again, I want it to be innocent and before vanvas. Which time period do you think fits better?

By the way, I wanted to thank the great Guruji Shivam for inspiring me to write this after publishing a Ramayan Romance chapter! Thank you very much, guruji.