At the palace, Aladdin paced around the throne room, thinking. Jasmine had walked in on him after about ten minutes of him doing this. "What's wrong Aladdin?" She said after seeing her husband pace the room three more times. He was too deep in thought to hear his wife ask. "Aladdin."
He finally looked up, slightly startled, "Jasmine."
"What's wrong? You have been doing his since you've gotten back from the market place. Is everything alright?" She asked.
"Do you ever have this feeling that you could be doing more? Like you haven't done what you think you should be doing?" She nods, "That's what's bugging me, and by Allah, the feeling won't go away."
Jasmine looked at Aladdin and held his hands with her own, "Is this about your friends?"
"I don't know Jasmine, maybe. They have a little child with them, stealing like I did, like they do, she's living on her own. I feel like I could do something for her, give her a better life than I had. She isn't even that old from what I could tell." The prince said, "I offered her a place here at the palace, but she said she would only come if Omar, Kassim, and Babkak came with her. I don't think I could do that." He felt a bit of disappointment in himself saying that last part out loud, but knew he couldn't keep anything from his wife.
"Aladdin, just calm down, you can't help everyone, try to get her here without them and we will take it from there after that. If she's is a lot of distress, she can go back to them. How old is she?"
"No older than 10 I believe. She looks quite small, and too thin for her own good. Some people don't food down there Jazz, she's one of them. She steals to survive, but she shouldn't have to." Aladdin sighed a little and rubbed the back of his neck.
"I agree, now we should head to sleep, we can do something about it in the morning. Okay?" She held her husbands hands tightly, making him smile a little. The couple prepared for bed. The feeling never left Aladdin, even though his sleep, he felt so bad for the kid that he was trying to formulate a plan to get her to have a better life. He came up with three before falling asleep.
Back in the town of Agrabah, Kassim went to go see Sadah, just to check on her before she went to sleep. He found her in the crack of the building, just looking out. He sat down next to her, tapping her leg with his foot so she knew he was there. "Anything weird happen that you want to talk about?" He asked and stared out with her. She shook her head hesitantly, "No? I'll tell you something weird that I heard. So I heard a little while ago, that a certain little girl was invited to the palace, and she said not without her friends. I thought she might have been insane, but I understand why she said it."
"You do..?" She asked.
Kassim nodded, "Oh yeah. Her friends were the only family she had ever known, and she didn't want to leave them for anything. And I don't think you'd mind that I kept an eye on you just in case." He messed up her hair a little bit, making it more of a mess than it already was. "I also saw that you got something off of someone. Care to let me see?" Kassim asked. Sadah grabbed the chain from her pocket and showed it to him with a proud smile. He took it to look at it and smiled at the little child's small accomplishment. "It's pretty Sadah. Fit for a princess." He threw it over with her stuff in a corner of the room and turned back to the smiling girl. "Babkak and Omar are stressing out way too much about Aladdin. They don't know that he asked you to come to the palace, but I'm going to have to tell them."
"Please don't Kassim!" She begged. Sadah didn't want to other two to worry about it, because she didn't think she would go, even if Aladdin had said okay to the other three coming with her to the palace. "I don't want to go there again. They're going to lock me up until I die!" She exaggerated slightly.
Kassim chuckled, "No they won't, you just won't be allowed to go walking around that much."
"My point still stands!" She pouted and laid onto Kassim's side.
"I think one of us needs some sleep, and it's not me." He noticed her tired attitude. "Come on kiddo, let's put you to sleep."
"But I'm not tired Kassim." She pouted again. He ignored her and picked her up, then laid her on her bed, which was merely an old rug, a small pillow that she seemed to have made, and a little blanket. He put the blanket over her and sat down next to her.
"I'll make you a deal, I tell you a story, and you fall asleep for me. Got it?" He asked and she nodded. "Okay, so once, a couple of years ago, one of us got trapped in the dungeon of the palace because we took something of the princess's, which we didn't know at the time because she was disguising herself. So Babkak and I went to go rescue them. We thought it would be easy, but there were so many guards there that we could barely get past them all. We fought a couple of them and won easily. Actually it was pretty hard because we weren't experienced, and they were. But we were not intimidated, instead we ran to the dungeon, and found our friend. We helped him out of there, and ran back again. We were so scared of them, I don't think I've ever seen Babkak so scared in my life, and I've known him for a very long time. After we ran out of the palace, we ran straight into an alley way which was blocked by a wall, so we climbed up and waited for the guards to come and see that we had gotten away. We haven't been caught much since then." He said, at his last sentence, Sadah had fallen fast asleep. Kassim finished his story before walking back to where we were him, Omar and Babkak were staying.
"Boys, we have a bit of trouble."
To be continued...
