The heat radiating from the rooftop tiles was a familiar comfort, a drowsy warmth that soaked into the seat of his trousers. Aladdin stretched his legs out, leaning back on his hands and tipping his face to the swollen apricot of the setting sun. For the first time in a week, his stomach wasn't a hollow, aching drum. He’d managed a whole skewer of lamb from a distracted merchant, followed by a handful of figs that were actually sweet, not the woody, half-dry refuse that usually fell from the back of carts. Truly, life since freeing the Genie had become a string of small, astonishing luxuries.
He scraped a thumbnail under the nail of his index finger, dislodging a crescent of grime. A habit he couldn't break. The grit of the streets was a part of him, baked into the lines of his palms. No matter how many times he washed his hands in the palace fountains, the feeling of it remained. He supposed it was what kept him sharp. That, and a profound, professional hatred for the taste of stale dates. Some people thought hunger was the worst a body could feel, but they’d never had to live for three days on the sugary, cloying rot of fruit left too long in the sun. Hunger was clean. Stale dates were a betrayal.
A shadow fell over him, sharp and sudden, blotting out the sun. The air, thick with the smell of baked clay and roasting spices, went cold. Not the pleasant cool of evening, but a deep, cellar-damp chill that raised the hairs on his arms.
"Enjoying the fruits of your new station, street rat?"
The voice was a silken rasp, a sound he had prayed he would never hear again outside of a nightmare. Aladdin was on his feet in an instant, dropping into a defensive crouch. Jafar stood at the edge of the rooftop, not ten feet away. He looked just as he had in the palace: tall, gaunt, the ridiculously ornate robes and turban somehow adding to his menace rather than detracting from it. His cobra-head staff was clutched in one pale, long-fingered hand, the ruby eyes glinting with a malevolent light of their own.
"Jafar," Aladdin spat, his hand reflexively going to his belt for a knife that wasn't there. He was unarmed. Stupid. Complacent. "Thought you'd be polishing a lamp for the next ten thousand years."
Jafar took a slow step forward. He wasn't looking at Aladdin with the familiar contempt of a vizier for a thief. This was different. His gaze was unnervingly intent, analytical, like a physician diagnosing a disease.
"Circumstances change," Jafar said, his eyes narrowing. "But you... you have not. Still playing the hero. Still wrapping yourself in this fragile human skin." He took another step, the staff tapping softly on the rooftop. "Tell me, boy. Does the ache in your bones keep you awake at night?"
Aladdin flinched. How could he know? For months, it had been a quiet companion. A deep, thrumming ache in his femurs and spine, one that came and went with the phases of the moon. He'd dismissed it as the consequence of years spent sleeping on hard ground and jumping from high places. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Of course you don't," Jafar murmured, his lips curling into a semblance of a smile that held no warmth at all. It was the expression of a predator that had finally cornered its meal. "You've starved it for so long you've forgotten the nature of your own hunger. You reek of denial. It's a pathetic scent."
This was wrong. This wasn't about the Sultan, or Jasmine, or power. This was personal, and deeply, frighteningly strange. Aladdin backed away, his heels hitting the low parapet at the edge of the roof. The street was three stories down. A risky jump, but he'd made worse.
"Whatever game you're playing, Jafar, it's over. The Sultan trusts me. Jasmine—"
"The princess?" Jafar cut him off with a flick of his wrist. "A fleeting amusement. A pet. Is that what you wish to be? Someone's pet?" He was closer now, the chill emanating from him so intense it made Aladdin's teeth chatter. Jafar's dark eyes scanned him from head to toe. "I see the tremor in your hands. You think it's from fear. You think this exhaustion you feel is merely from your little adventures."
He knew. The bastard *knew*. The exhaustion was the worst part, a weariness so profound it felt as if his very marrow was tired.
"You have suffered for eighteen years, pretending to be a gnat when you were born a serpent," Jafar said, his voice dropping to a low, hypnotic whisper. "Fighting every instinct. Muting every impulse. For what? To be accepted by creatures whose lives are a flash of lightning in the span of our own?"
Aladdin's mind spun. *Our own?* "You're insane. You were a man, Jafar. A sorcerer."
Jafar let out a short, sharp laugh. It was a hateful sound. "I was a man in the same way a tiger is a house cat. I learned to wear the skin. Unlike you. You are trying to shed your own." He raised his staff, the cobra's head swaying gently. "This self-mutilation ends now. The line of Mehr-un-Nizar does not end in a gutter, starving itself to death for the approval of mayflies."
The name meant nothing. The rest of it was a cascade of ice down his spine. Aladdin shook his head, a frantic denial. "You're not making any sense."
"Then let me be painfully clear," Jafar said, his voice suddenly stripped of all its serpentine elegance, leaving only a raw, guttural command. "You will stop this foolishness. You will learn what you are. You have denied yourself for far too long, my son."
The word hit Aladdin harder than any physical blow. *Son*. It was a lie. It was a trick. It was the most absurd, poisonous thing he had ever heard. A laugh, wild and disbelieving, bubbled up in his chest. But before it could escape his lips, Jafar moved.
Aladdin didn't hesitate. He pivoted on his heel and vaulted over the parapet, launching himself into the open air. He'd done this a hundred times. He knew the awning that would break his fall, the washing line he could grab to swing to the next rooftop.
But the air thickened. The shadows below on the street stretched, became tangible and animate. They twisted up to meet him like black, grasping tentacles of smoke. They coiled around his ankles, his wrists, his waist, their touch shockingly solid and colder than ice. They didn't just hold him; they *pulled*. He was yanked to a dead stop in mid-air, dangling helplessly over the street as people below screamed and pointed.
Panic, blinding and absolute, seized him. He struggled, but the shadows were like bands of iron. He looked up and saw Jafar peering down at him from the roof's edge, his expression not of triumph, but of grim, paternal disappointment.
"All that energy," Jafar sighed, "wasted on such pointless defiance."
The cobra staff on the rooftop began to glow, its ruby eyes pulsing with a deep crimson light. A wave of profound lethargy washed over Aladdin. It wasn't sleepiness. It was an extinguishing. His muscles went slack. The fight drained out of him, leaving a hollow vessel. The shadows tightened, pulling him back up, up, over the parapet, and deposited him in a heap at Jafar's feet.
The last thing he saw before the darkness consumed him entirely was the toe of Jafar's pointed shoe, inches from his face, and the cold, absolute certainty in those dark eyes.
***
He awoke to silence and stone.
The air was still and frigid, carrying the scent of dust and something metallic, like old blood. He was lying on a thin but clean mattress on the floor of a large, circular room. The walls were smooth, dark stone, seamlessly fitted together. High above, the ceiling was a dome of the same rock. There were no windows. A single, heavy-looking wooden door, banded with iron, was the only break in the oppressive uniformity. Torches in black iron sconces provided a flickering, inadequate light.
Aladdin sat up, his head throbbing. The deep ache in his bones was back, sharper now, as if it had been woken from a slumber. He was still in his vest, trousers, and sash, but he was barefoot. He ran a hand over his face. He felt trapped. Not just imprisoned, but *contained*.
The sound of a heavy bolt being drawn echoed in the room. The door swung inward on silent hinges.
Jafar entered, carrying a simple earthenware bowl. He was no longer in his vizier's robes, but in a simple, dark tunic and trousers that made him look no less imposing. He placed the bowl on the stone floor, a few feet from Aladdin.
"You are an infant," Jafar said, his voice flat. "Barely two decades old. By the reckoning of our kind, you are not yet weaned. Yet you have been feeding yourself dirt and gravel."
Inside the bowl was a dark, viscous liquid, almost black, that steamed faintly in the cold air. It smelled of raw meat and hot spice and something else, something wild and unfamiliar that made the saliva pool in Aladdin's mouth even as his stomach churned in revulsion.
"I won't let you do this," Aladdin said, his voice a hoarse rasp. He shuffled backwards until his back hit the cold wall. "Whatever you think I am... you're wrong."
Jafar looked down at him, his expression unreadable. He withheld any explanation, any comfort. All he offered was the cold, hard fact of the situation. "You are weak. You are malnourished. This correction will be unpleasant at first. Your body has forgotten what it needs." He gestured to the bowl. "Eat."
He turned and left without another word, the heavy door thudding shut behind him. The sound of the bolt sliding home was a final, damning note.
Aladdin was alone again in the Torchlight. He stared at the bowl, at the dark, steaming liquid. The smell was drawing him in, playing on a primal hunger he had never known he possessed. The ache in his bones sharpened into a throbbing, insistent demand. He looked at his hands, at the faint tremor that had returned. He felt the cold stone beneath him, the impenetrable walls around him. He wasn't Aladdin, the hero of Agrabah, anymore. He was something else. A creature in a cage, with a bowl of food he didn't understand, and a hunger that was beginning to feel terrifyingly like his own.