Kauravya's palace, Nagaloka, Thirty years ago

Uloopi sighed and tucked the loose curl which had fallen over his face, behind his ear. 

She could feel the energy of the powerful concoction which she had taken a few hours before swirl slowly at the pit of her stomach. It was a sickening feeling and she wished she had never gone through with it, at all. 

But rarely do pragmatism and expectations go hand in hand. 

The area over the right side of his neck was inflamed and the garish bruise of red and blue had spread a little like a spider's web beneath the skin. 

Uloopi felt tears spring to her eyes. 

'You Idiot! What were you thinking!', she reprimanded herself harshly in her mind. 

She bent down over him from where she had been holding herself upright on an elbow, over the silken cushions and laved over the neat wound left by her own fangs. The coagulants and antidote from her venom would soothe the area somewhat. 

Arjun winced and bared his throat, giving her a little more access, his fingers fisting the bedspread tightly as her fork like tongue licked over the poisonous spider web of scars emanating from the incision. 

She threw a smooth leg over his wiry one and hefted her naked body half over his and continued her ministrations. 

He moaned lowly and Uloopi couldn't be certain whether it was in pleasure, relief or pain. 

Maybe it was a little bit of all three. But the way his handsome features were twisted making his earthy brown skin, a tad washed out, the princess of the Nagas was afraid it was the latter. 

"Sorry. If mortals could have ingested it directly then I wouldn't have....well bit you. Does it hurt too greatly?", she asked, her typically proud voice soft in remorse. The curly haired prince, grinned at her, his prussian eyes flashing open, hiding the strain on those chiselled features immediately in a suavely practised move. 

"Tickles, more like", he rasped mirthfully. 

Uloopi shook her head and decided to avoid mentioning the red dents he had left on her back and sides and the chip of crystal he had broken off from the headboard of their bed. She had to let him have the masculine idiosyncrasy of appearing tough as nails in every situation.

"So... did it work?", he asked subdued. 

Uloopi touched her stomach and tried hard to sense the wisp of a new lifeform that will get created in a few months. Her mother was a very powerful sorceress and one of the few remaining pureblood Nagas, directly descended from Lord Vishnu's seat - Sheshanaga's lineage. 

Her potions were the most potent concoctions, hailed by almost every Naga tribe. 

"Yes. I can..feel him."

"Well then. Your position as the queen of the Nagas is cemented", there was a hint of bitterness in his tone and she couldn't fault him for it. She did kind of emotionally blackmail him into the marriage. 

The issue of Draupadi had been a long drawn out argument but she had managed to wear him down. The concept of being unable to protect a damsel, even from themselves, was perhaps too morally ignominious for the Chandravanshis or maybe the third Pandava wasn't as unattracted to her as he was showing himself to be. 

Uloopi hadn't really cared at that moment. 

She had always been too used to getting her own way. 

Consent had always been a shady business back in her realm. Immortals, apparently had separate rules than the humans. Mortals have caged themselves in too many societal chains. 

"I will lie with you, only if you marry me", Arjun had declared stiffly and Kauravya, her father had looked a tad impressed. 

She honestly, hadn't known how to feel. 

"I want you", she had told him, bold and unrepentant as she had always been and seen the Kuru prince flush like a tomato instantly. It had been a rather beautiful shade over the swarthy complexion of his taught muscles, mottled and patchy over his chiselled face. 

"You are very forward, princess", he had mumbled embarrassed. 

"Is it considered offensive back in your realm?", she had asked saucily only for him to splutter in a completely undignified manner, much to her eternal amusement. 

"You have made very powerful enemies, Prince Arjun. If Takshaka decides to retaliate, will Indraprastha's common folk be able to take the collateral damage? By this marriage, we can, not only bridge the hateful ravine between the Nagas and the humans but also, your King will gain a valuable and powerful ally. Think about it", her father had reiterated, well aware of his daughter's desires. 

"And what will you get out of it?", he had asked shrewdly. 

"An heir. A son. My brothers and the other Naga chieftains are circling around the throne as the day of the next accession draws closer. My previous husband was killed by Garuda and I was held incapable of handling the chiefdom. With an heir, I will be queen regent", she had retorted, the fire of stinging humiliation and ambition burning bright on her beautiful face. 

He had looked pensive but the sudden light in his eyes had assured the serpent princess that her plan had worked. The offer was too lucrative to refuse and the strategist and diplomat in Arjun had been tempted. 

"A marriage for convenience, you say?", he had asked reluctantly and her jade eyes had lit up. 

"Don't worry prince. I am not going to start belting out ballads of my love to you", Uloopi had grinned salaciously, flipping her long curly tresses behind her back and had thoroughly enjoyed the split second of alarm in Arjun's cyan gaze. 

The man was too innocent for his own good. 

And maybe that had softened her somewhere inside. 

The sheer naivete in the supposed archer supreme had been a refreshing change from the usual haughty behaviour of her crores of admirers. 

She remembered him sitting nervously at the edge of the bed, this night itself. 

Looking like a mouse in a lion's trap. 

Usually, the Naga princess would have immensely enjoyed the shift in the power dynamics but something in his expression had stopped her from spitting a sarcastic jape. 

She had touched his cheek and felt his skin jump underneath her hand. 

Arjun had seemed torn between leaning into her hand like an affection starved child and leaping away from it like her mere touch had burnt him. The slightly fearful bafflement in his eyes had struck a chord in her heart. 

"I expected the one who has charmed the mystical fireborn of Panchala to have a bit more suaveness than this", she had teased him lightly, carding her fingers through his thick curls, the satiny texture of the freshly washed hair making pleasure shiver through her. 

Arjun had very surprisingly looked away. 

Then it had struck her. 

"Oh.. you.. you haven't ever... You haven't ever done this before, have you?", she had whispered more as a statement than a question. 

The empress had been fated to marry all five, as the rumours went and according to the condition suggested by Vyasa, they each were to have an year with her. 

Arjun was exiled during the first year itself. 

Draupadi had started her married life with Yudhishtira. 

"Don't mock me!", he had snarled at her then, flinching back like a wounded stag. She had felt a massive lurch in her heart. She had misread the situation from the start. 

Arjun hadn't been revulsed by her, nor had he been smarting from having to give in to the demands of the Nagas.

He was just afraid. 

Uloopi hadn't seen how her eyes had softened then and her approach became infinitely softer. She had plopped beside him and curled her arms around one of his long sinewy ones and leant her head against his shoulder. 

Then she had started narrating one of her childhood anecdotes. An incredibly embarrassing one. Though initially bewildered at the abrupt change in her mood and topic of conversation, Arjun had fallen into the flow, easily enough. 

Then they had spent the first few hours, exchanging the most hilariously inglorious incidents of their respective infancy and adolescence, drowning in spurts of barking laughter. 

Then without a warning, Uloopi had kissed his cheek, stopping him mid flow. She had followed it up by slowly exploring the sharp ridges and gentle slopes of his face with her lips, till he was so engrossed into anticipating her next move that he had hardly noticed when she had climbed over him, hands tucked into his wild curls. 

"I won't hurt you. I promise", she had whispered against his heated skin and felt him shudder in response. 

He had pecked her once shyly and stopped. His curiously anxious eyes had searched for approval or discontent on her face and a fierce bout of protectiveness had surged like an uncharacteristic yet untameable magma inside her. 

She had captured his lips and then they had been lost. 

He had been endearingly clumsy and inexperienced but Uloopi had been satiated like never before. She hadn't know what it was that her life had been missing before meeting the enigmatic prince of Indraprastha. 

The Naga princess had been determined to please her new husband. 

He had not wanted her but she had made sure that he would at least remember the one night, he had spent with her, fondly. 

She had dived into him with all the fathomless passion hoarded by a young woman widowed too early, a princess twisted by circumstance and her vicious family members into a cold hard shell. 

Her lips and hands mapping every inch of his skin, bringing Arjun to such great heights of pleasure that his body had been left trembling and quaking long after they had come down from their respective spasmodic highs of abandoned ecstasy. 

But then she had had to do the dirty deed. Inject into her husband the poison from her own fangs, which will enable them to conceive a child. 

The future of the throne of the Kauravya Nagas. 

"I feel like a breeding stallion", Arjun had mumbled despondently before baring his neck hesitantly. 

"At least it is better than being a trussed up turkey for our troops. They were so disappointed at the news. They had all been salivating since we decided to kidnap you", she answered mischievously.

Her husband had looked at her alarmed again and she had burst into giggles against his neck. 

Truly, he was too sweet to be that dangerous warrior as rumoured. 

She had kissed the spot on his neck before sinking her fangs into it, holding down his sudden involuntary buckling while Arjun gritted his teeth and snapped his eyes shut tight, riding out the waves of burning agony flowing through his veins with a ridiculously easy poise. 

Uloopi had never hated herself more than at that moment. 

"Yes. Once I give birth. I will be reinstated as the queen and my father will abdicate", Uloopi muttered mutely, drawing circles on his chest with a finger. 

Arjun sighed and turned his head aside. 

A sudden surge of unwarranted panic built up in the Naga princess's heart then and she wrapped herself around her husband tightly. 

"You.. you wouldn't forget about me, right?", she asked uncharacteristically tremulously. 

Arjun turned to look at her then but couldn't gauge her expression as she had hidden her face beneath his chin, breathing in the heady fragrance of his skin and their love making swirling around, locked in the ashy residue of her venom. 

His arm circled her waist and held warmly. 

"I don't think anyone can forget you, my venom spitting, kidnapper extraordinaire, fiendishly manipulative snake queen", he chortled in a gentle tease. Uloopi felt her cheeks heat up and she mumbled illegibly into his skin, a strange bout of shyness enveloping her for the first time. 

They lay there awake and breathing softly, the watery darkness of Nagaloka peppered by the silvery moonlight which had been magically recreated by illusions was rippling around their chambers like a comforting blanket. 

Then Uloopi spoke again, her voice suffused with an odd gratefulness. 

"You have done me a great favour Arjun, prince of the Kurus and I want to give you a boon. Henceforth, no creature of the waters will ever be able to harm a single hair on your head and you will breathe underwater as easily as it is, but air."

Her words chimed and Arjun looked down at her, a little befuddled and a little awestruck at the same time. 

His prussian eyes met her verdant ones and then like a bolt of lightening clearing an overcast sky, Uloopi realised the root cause of all the confused mesh of emotions wracking her. 

She has fallen in love. 

With a man who was never hers to love. 

-----------------------------

At the battlefield of Manipura, at present time

Uloopi will never be able to quite describe the sequence of events which happened at that precise moment. 

It would always get muddled in her mind, as if she was looking up at the world through a haze of fog and mist, hearing the sounds from the watery depths of her home. 

But she remembered the events leading up to it very vividly. 

She had materialised in the battlefield, still hidden under a cloak of invisibility during the thick of the duel. She had seen father and son shoot arrow after arrow at each other.

One's marked to only touch and pass and the other's marked to kill. 

She had winced and felt her insides shrivelling up with every wound drawn across, both her husband's and her son's bodies. 

For a moment, when they had almost been indistinguishable, only the bright edges of their blades visible, Uloopi had felt like she was being pressed between two impregnable walls, pushing into each other with a violent force, their only purpose to crush her into a pulp. 

Then it had been all over in a flash. 

Arjun's sword broken clean from the middle and Babruvahan had been halfway across the field, snatching Senapati Akshay's bow. 

Witnessing the Ramabana again was like a vicious kick to the gut and the queen of the serpents had almost buckled onto the floor at the mere sight. 

Lord Rama's weapon had nearly blinded everyone with its sheer brilliance. 

Her throat had dried up completely, sweat beading her perineal cool skin, even the ever bubbling poison in her blood seemed to get evaporated at the vicinity of such power. She had had to throw a hand to shield her eyes, still trying to strain and catch Arjun's gaze somehow. 

It had to work. 

Please, it had to work.

It bloody had to work. 

She hadn't known what she would do if Arjun had ended up countering the Ramabana. All her meticulously laid plans would have been ruined. 

Please don't work. Please don't work. Please don't work. 

But she had known better. 

She knew her husband like the back of her palm. Separated through decades as they have been, incomplete snatches of covert meetings like drops of inconsequential rain over deserts doing nothing to quench her thirst. 

But anyone who knew Arjun would know his bond with the Dark Lord. 

Arjun would die but not counter Krishna or even a snatch of the latter's immense yet very recognizable power. 

And as expected, Uloopi had seen with wide eyes as the mighty Gandhiva had slipped from the Gandhivadhari's hands and fell on the ground with a deplorable thud. 

She had sensed her brother in law, the unconquerable Bheemsen drag the guards who had put him in chains right along with him, a testament to his incredible elephantine strength, in a mad scramble to reach Arjun. 

She had seen the Ramabana leave Babru's bow and had seen Arjun throw open his folded hands in gesture of complete acceptance. 

Acceptance of his end. 

With a grace only he could have managed to conjure. 

Handsome and beatific and invincible in all his flowing curly haired, glowing dark skinned, thunderous prussian eyed, silvery ivory clad glory. 

Their eyes had met then for a split second and the light of realisation had dawned on his cerulean gaze. 

He had smiled at her. 

And she had drawn blood from her palms, nails digging into it desperately, lips curled into her own fangs, her body pulsating with the need to leap in front of that damned weapon if only she could save the man she had plotted to kill. 

And for a moment, she had thought time had slowed down incredibly, cruelly eager to make her see every minute action of the horrifying sequence which followed next. 

Uloopi had raised an arm as if to catch him and had seen the divyastra which had incinerated the ferocious Ravana on spot, plunge into her husband's chest with a sickening, twisting, dazzling vigour. 

His athletic frame had been thrown back almost in an arc almost swanlike. Golden lightening had rippled through his entire body emanating from his chest, like a hauntingly beautiful symphony and the multitude of vibrant colours which burst from the Ramabana transformed into a pure white. 

Uloopi had tasted blood in her own throat at that moment, like the astra had ripped into her as well. The sweltering scathing burning heat, turning her bones into ash. 

It was through years of rigorous practise that she could summon enough of her strength to fabricate massive shields with her magic. 

Because she knew of the sheer scale of destruction that the after effect of the Ramabana could cause. Arjun's body had been said to have been made from the same essence of Devendra's vajra and his lifetime of ascetic merit may have absorbed most of the power from it.

Yet Raghunandana's divine weapon had enough strength left to vaporise them all.

The entire battlefield. 

Blood dripped from her nose as she and the shields were bodily pushed back by a humongous centrifugal force which radiated with such a murderous frenzy that it sent massive shockwaves of tectonic proportions, through the Earth beneath them. 

Every single man was thrown off their feet almost at the same time and the animals stumbled and fell over, shrieking piercingly in panic. Chariots toppled and flagstaffs were broken and blown away. Many of the soldiers in the front lines yelled in agony as their armours melted into their very skin due to the immense heat. 

Uloopi gnashed her teeth against the gigantic force and somehow managed to stay upright even as she saw with a side-eye, Babru flying back against Akshay, who in turned toppled away into the soldiers behind, making them all collapse together in an undignified heap. 

The Naga queen had focused much of her power directly to the magic shielding the young King of Manipur and the rest had gone into protecting her other family as well. But she could not see either of Bheema's mammoth frame or Vrishketu's lithesome one, from amidst the pure chaos of limbs and weapons at each side. 

The air cleared off slowly and Uloopi found her shields crackling away into nothingness while the last of her strength vanished into the mist.

Her knees wobbled. 

She coughed and hacked and cleared the dust from her eyes and smeared the blood still steadily flowing down her nose and the corner of her mouth with a shaky hand and stared in front. 

Arjun was lying sprawled on the ground, long limbs asunder like a marionette with its strings cut. 

Still as a corpse. 

Uloopi buckled and fell to her knees gracelessly, then heaved her wreaked frame, lifted her heavy and torn skirts and sprinted like a deranged creature towards the supine archer, stumbling like a new born colt and slipping inelegantly against the blood in the ground. 

She reached him within moments but it may have been an eternity for how far it had felt. 

Her blurred vision was curtained with blood and tears and dust and ash as she kneeled down beside him, slowly this time. Her hands quavered and the ringing in her ears had deafened her to any of the surrounding sounds. 

She didn't see his face. 

She couldn't. 

But she knew. She could feel it. Deep inside herself. Like someone had torn half her soul and flown away with it while she remained panting and grappling in a futile chase. 

Her plan has worked. 

Her husband was dead. 

She killed him. 

She killed him.

She killed him.

Arjun...

The scream tore out of her heart like maggots crawling forth a crumbling ancient structure. Her ribcage probably caved in itself from the resulting mayhem. But it dried up at her throat, before she could spit it out. 

The world had tilted at an axis. And it will never be straight again. Not as long as her mortal body remains undecayed. 

She couldn't breathe. 

She couldn't breathe.

She couldn't breathe. 

Arjun...

Uloopi found herself collapsing in a fluid move, head spinning out of control, a distant merging of yells and shouts and then her forehead smacked painfully against his silver clad shin and her arms gripped his leg like it was the only thing holding her together. 

Too cold, too cold, too cold. 

The Earth hadn't stopped shaking, or maybe it was just her. 

"Swami, forgive me..", she implored.

"I curse you, son of Pandu and Kunti, spawn of Indra! I curse you to burn in Yama's thousand hells of fiery misery for the rest of eternity. Your soul will know no peace, you will never get to meet the ones you have lost in this accursed war. That will be justice done!"

"My Lord, forgive me..", she begged. 

'I will kill him Iravan! I will kill that bastard for what he did to you! Even if it ends up with my life too. I will fucking kill him!'

"Oh my Lord, forgive me..", she grovelled and cried silently. 

"They won't be able to stop it, just hurt themselves more, thinking about it. Leave it be. For all our sanities wife, leave it be."

"Forgive me..", her words misted into a pained moan. 

'I will not let you suffer through a fate you don't deserve, my prince. Even if it makes me commit unfathomable sins myself.'

Her teeth chattered uncontrollably and she felt something unfathomably deep, snap inside her. Her words coagulated into thick sobs and she dug her fingers into his ice cold skin, through the fabric of his dhoti, as if she could pull his soul back in somehow. 

But it was in vain. 

Arjun was dead. 

Her husband. 

Gone. 

How was she breathing still?

To be continued.

A/N:- Umm.. more tissues? *pulls out a few more boxes*