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“Truth or dare, Jafar?”
Childish as the game might be, Jasmine was looking forward to it. She hadn’t planned on it, but a question was immediately forming in her mind.
Jafar thought for a second, tilting his head. His black ponytail fell to the side as he did.
“Truth.”
“What did you look like as a man?”
The words didn’t rush out of her mouth with the urgent curiosity Jasmine suddenly felt. She was poised, she was a princess, and she was talking to a hulking red figure standing over her in the privacy of her bedroom. In a word, she was feeling… comfortable.
What an odd disposition, all things considered.
“Interesting question,” he mused. “It’s been so long, I barely remember.”
“You could simply appear to me as you once were.”
Subtle? No. But there was no mistaking what she hoped for.
“I could,” he agreed with no follow up.
Jasmine should have decided not to push him to change his appearance, as that was clearly a touchy point. She was long past what she 'should' or 'should not' do however. If she had wanted to remain cautious, she should have put away the lamp as soon as she had realized it was hosting a genie. As careful as she'd been around him, her curiosity was getting the better of her.
What had Jafar been like, as a human, before he had become so powerful that changing the course of history had become as easy as a sneeze?
As soon as Jafar offered a dare rather than a truth in their little game, Jasmine knew what to ask.
"Show me as you were when you were human."
The red genie raised one of his dark eyebrows, his lips as immobile as if they were sculpted in stone. Reading his expressions had been difficult since the beginning. He had clearly trained to keep his features unperturbed as a Vizier when it had still been his position, but beyond this, his pupil-less yellow eyes were hard to read.
All of his face was sharp; cheekbones, teeth, ears and even the edge of his mouth when it was adorned with a smirk. It was hard to tell which of these abrupt angles were due to his nature as a genie, and which feature might once have been on his human face.
“So you insist on it a second time? You must be devoured by curiosity.”
Jasmine’s cheek did not heat up under his scrutiny, nor did she squirm. Had she not been such a guarded person however, she would have turned away from his piercing gaze, flustered.
“I am curious,” she admitted outright.
No sense in hiding what was in plain sight.
“I don’t imagine this physique,” she gestured at the thickness of his arms and his exposed pectorals, “was something a Grand Vizier would have bothered cultivating.”
Just imagining her father’s Grand Vizier, the aging, balding and short Omar exercising every day to reach such peak physique was ludicrous. It felt unkind to think of him in these terms, but the man was valued for his intellect and wisdom - which Jasmine knew he excelled in - not for his formidable muscles.
“Furthermore,” continued Jasmine, “I’ve now read and heard so much about ‘Jafar, the Grand Vizier of the Hamish court of Agrabah’. It feels unfair not to have a face to go with the name.”
Jafar stared at her wordlessly, arms crossed over his chest, and for the next few seconds, time seemed to stretch as a heavy silence hung between them.
The night was distractingly quiet too, no echoes of the usually bustling city to distract her from this charged anticipation. She glanced at the sky through the opened doors leading through her balcony. The moon hung there, as secretive as the genie was being.
When he finally sighed, sounding defeated, Jasmine felt all the tension leave her muscles as relief washed over her.
“Very well, Princess.”
Jasmine resisted the urge to correct him. She had told him many times to call her by her given name now. Something in the tone of his voice sounded… different, holding her back from interrupting him.
“If you so desire it, then I shall satisfy that which piques the curiosity of yours.”
Jasmine didn’t have the time to dwell on his curious turn of phrase.
Jafar rose up, floating just a bit higher than he had been, and spread his arms. A yellow cloud billowed over his form, emanating from his hands and obstructing her view. She could just about see his silhouette. Within moments, it stretched and distorted, his large body growing thinner, taller, more… Human.
Jasmine coughed, the smell of sulfur coming from the smoke seizing up her throat. She swatted the air in front of her mouth while her eyes watered a bit. She wondered if this was, in a way, some small manner in which Jafar was taking his revenge on her for pressing a matter he seemed less than inclined in divulging.
She was soon distracted from the thought as the smoke dissipated and she finally laid her eyes on Jafar’s human face.
There was a moment, so quick it couldn’t be perceived, where his features seemed familiar to her. Maybe she had seen his hooked nose on a servant she had passed by - one of his descendants perhaps? -, maybe she had dreamed of the dark shade of his eyes, maybe she had seen an illustration of him somewhere - yes, an illustration, in a book perhaps -
The hand of fate descended upon her, caressing her face like a mother closing a child’s eyes before sleep, and Jasmine forgot all about those thoughts.
He looked younger than she thought he would be.
“Would this be an attempt at complimenting me, Princess?”
Jasmine’s eyes widened as she realized she had said the words aloud.
“I- no, I just-” she stammered briefly, before finding her composure once more.
She cleared her throat and straightened her back - then cranked her neck to look the tall man in the eyes.
“No, I simply thought a man with such a long list of accomplishments would have been older,” she explained sincerely.
He had no need for flattery, just as Jasmine had no need to lie. She had imagined him old and grey - much like Grand Vizier Omar.
Jafar was far from looking like a young man. He would, at the least, have been in his late forties. His beard and thin mustache, looking just like the one he had sported as a genie, were jet black, and his eyes shone bright with intelligence and clarity. The creases on his face indicated he had lived much longer than Jasmine had, however. He might have been in his mid-fifties, then.
Still, this was a world away from the centuries old figure he truly was.
“Is the sight before you as you had hoped to see it?”
Jasmine observed his face carefully, comparing it to the one she had gotten to know ever since she had taken his lamp from under Aladdin’s nose.
No more pointy ears, nor canine too sharp nor glowing yellow eyes. His cheekbones remained remarkably sharp and she couldn’t have mistaken his self-assured expression for anyone else’s. It was still him, yet it was different. His face was longer, tanned by the sun, his tired eyes…
No, despite the bags underneath them, his eyes were just as piercing as they had been before.
Avoiding his stare, she took in his clothes as well, only now realizing how strange it was not to see all of his skin exposed. He was wearing black robes, a color she couldn’t imagine wearing under the unforgivable sun of Agrabah, with touches of red and gold sawn into the cloth. His headdress, covering forehead, ears and neck, was decorated by a red feather, which had long gone out of fashion for anyone but Sultans. Jafar was wearing a cape, something that gave her pause as she observed how his outfit gave him thick - no, stiff? - shoulders. Like tiny wings, or scales, protruding outward. The shape of this was unlike anything she’d ever seen… Except in history books.
“Is this an advisor’s garb from… ?” Jasmine trailed off, amazed by the revelation.
“That it should be,” nodded Jafar, patiently letting her oggle him up and down.
From someone who had seemed so reluctant to reveal his original appearance to her, he appeared as calm as a soft summer breeze.
This was when she finally noted how stilted and strange his speech had been. There was something in the inflection of his voice, in the timber of his vowels, in the turn of his phrases. Jasmine had heard something similar before, when poets had come to entertain her father’s court with texts from past centuries.
She stared at Jafar’s face some more. He hadn’t just changed his face, his body and his clothes. His whole demeanor had returned to what it had once been, four hundred years ago.
While it had been clear the previous night as they had looked at the stars and how the constellation had changed since he had last seen them, this still felt like a revelation.
The man Jafar had once been was from another time, so long ago it might have been a whole other world.
Jasmine checked that her jaw wasn’t hanging loose as the accumulation of all of these details was slowly overwhelming her, cleared her voice, and finally answered the question he had asked several minutes ago:
“It’s not that I didn’t want to see this, it’s just that I have to ask; were you truly that tall?”
There was a beat as Jafar took in her question, before a smile unlike any she had ever seen on him split his face, then a shrill laugh escaped his lips. It was as if she had asked the most ludicrous question one could ask.
“What? You’re really tall!” she protested.
His laughter was infectious. His voice wasn’t this high pitched when he was in his genie form. This made him feel more grounded, more… Real. It was nice.
“Yes, Jasmine,” he finally answered, his voice returning to its modern cadence, “I really was that tall.”