"No, no, honey, no!" She's quick to reach for him, to catch his face on her hands and press soothing kisses along his jaw. "I wanted to give you an out so if you had, you wouldn't feel like an asshole for bringing it up first."
He definitely wasn't panicking and super doesn't need to be comforted about it. "Ah, well, in that case, you needn't have worried. I'm not really the sort to change my mind about such things, definitely not overnight."
He flushes again, partly hidden by his beard, but it still creeps to his ears. Such casual but thorough affection has become foreign, and every time it appears, it is a surprise all over again. "Perhaps, but as you know, I've already been deemed the most high maintenance pet in all of Waterdeep." And of course, Tara would know.
Just when he thought it was safe to take a sip of his tea, she goes and says that, and he at least only manages to spit a little. "Well." Now he's really red. "Anyway."
She sighs again, endlessly delighted that she can scandalize him so easily, and takes a moment to gaze upon the lovely sight of his fierce blush. She tucks into the meal, in a sudden hurry to finish here so she can woo him with the most romantic of gifts for a wizard: academic texts.
"I love you," she says casually between chews, "in case you thought you dreamed that part."
"I rather thought I might have," he said between bites. "You might still
change your mind. You haven't known me terribly long, and this on the heels
of heartbreak?" Hadn't she been the one so suggest a rebound to him? Maybe
that's what he was, even if it wasn't intentional.
There's a clatter of her cutlery dropping and a sharp hiss of breath. She has an expression like he struck her, and would honestly prefer if he had.
She pushes back from the table and stands, looking toward the exit. She swallows thickly, tense all over and trembling with the effort of not walking out.
"Between us, I am not the one on the heels of heartbreak," she rasps, "so don't project that onto me.
He sees her look at the door, and fear cuts him like a cold blade. She'll leave again and never come back. His heart hammers like a trapped and desperate thing.
"Didn't you mention explosively shattering mirrors, scars, and shards of glass that still cut you when you think you've cleaned them all up?" Some part of him, smaller and younger, wants to take it back, turn back time by a few minutes, cry and beg for her not to go. The more predominant part puts up a wall by pretending everything is an academic debate you can win by being well spoken and citing sources. "I'm not the only one who worshiped, by your own admission, and that kind of devotion, cleaved from its altar, leaves wounds. We can debate the chronology and whether 'on the heels of' applies, but not the hurt left behind, surely?"
Her eyes flick to him. She can taste the beginning of vicious mockery on her tongue and swallows the acid down. Her throat feels like it might close up, might choke her from the inside out, to save her from saying too many things she will immediately regret.
"Excuse me for a moment."
She grimaces down at the table, shakes her head to clear her thoughts, and trails her hand across his shoulders on the way out of the room. She goes further in, to the study, and returns with a stack of thick leather-wrapped folios. She presses the documents to his chest -- her thesis on how the effect of being in love can influence individuals to abandon societal norms,her dissertation on loss of empathy as a survival mechanism in longterm traumatic situations, all her research and interview notes, her personal journals from her days in academia -- and sweeps away to take her meal on the balcony.
This is the gift for him. She hopes that as a wizard, as the kind of person he is, that he can understand the deeper meaning of opening all these old parts of herself.
For several moments he sits there frozen, his thoughts a school of fish -- plentiful, but when he tries to grasp one to focus on it, it wriggles away. Finally, he sets the folios aside, and begins to clean up lunch, putting away leftovers, moving dishes to the sink, wiping down cooking surfaces. It doesn't help keep his mind off of anything, actually, but at least he feels productive.
When there's nothing left to do, he returns to the pile of paper on the table, unsure what exactly it is, but somehow afraid to open it. When he opens the first one, he finds that instead of answering questions, it spawns a hundred more. He opens and reads the title and abstract of each, frowns, then gathers them up. These were his gift, weren't they? Were they meant to tell him more about her, about him, or about both of them?
Rather than examine his feelings, or hyperfocus on what he's done wrong, he gathers the folios up in his arms and proceeds upstairs. He stops by the study door, left open, but he can hear her out on the balcony, so he continues on to his bedroom. He settles in for long reading, arranging the pillows so that he can prop himself up comfortably. He grabs the paper and ink from the bedside table (of course he keeps some there -- what if he has a great idea in the middle of the night he needs to write down?) so he can take notes without marking up her copies.
Then he does the most Gale thing: he reads, he takes notes, he writes down his thoughts, he works on a theoretical timeline of Harley's life from bits and pieces she's told him, he lists questions he'd like to ask (many marked through). The day wears on. Tara arrives at some point, naps a little, chides him for, well, all of this, and then leaves. He wonders whether Tara scolded Harley too, but not enough to get up and go ask.
The day passes by, and Gale does not move, does not so much as get up once.
Edited 2025-05-12 02:08 (UTC)
wait no, take me back to the world where his head is stuck in a trashcan
The Harley in the pages, Harleen, may she rest in peace, was a competent academic who would have thrived with a little proper mentorship. Her education had been piecemeal with strange gaps, but her sheer determination to learn and do had fueled her toward brilliance.
The personal journals covered her time at Blackstaff. She had been accepted on a scholarship, which a temple had applied for on her behalf, and she had suspected it was less about providing her with a future than it was about getting her far away from Baldur's Gate. Harleen had also suspected that Blackstaff had chosen her either from a complete lack of other applicants or as the punchline to some grand joke. Nothing ever proved her right, but she may not have been entirely wrong either.
Not long after officially beginning courses, the casual cruelty of more blessed peers began to wear her patience thin. Books, spell components, uniform robes, scrolls and sundries... The scholarship did not stretch far enough to cover it all, and Harleen's reliance on secondhand, lower quality materials was a delicious target for the sort of ambitious apprentice treated everything like a dire competition. She had some measure of skill, more drive than many, but most wizards had a proper mentor or formal education before reaching this stage. She spent long nights trying to catch up and when she struggled even the slightest bit in class it was quickly added to the list of reasons why she didn't belong.
The rumors began flying, and they were merciless. She was a pretty thing and there was no end of speculation about how she earned that scholarship, what sort of extra credit she was willing to do to muster a passing grade. She was no blushing maiden and laughed it off, but her lack of shame was treated like damning evidence. A brief and unsatisfying dalliance with a prefect was cut off when he bragged to his friends how easy it had been, as if he hadn't been the one chasing at her heels, and a budding flirtation with a girl in her year abruptly ended with a cold shoulder when the stories became unavoidable. The final straw had been a professor offering a bit of mentorship during office hours, that quickly turned into an expectation of undue physical gratitude, and when she tried to report the conduct the only evidence they considered was her reputation. Harleen had dislocated his jaw, walked across the city to the bard college, and enrolled on her own merits that same afternoon.
She wrote less about herself after that, after she found peers and company and the right place to be, and most of her records became about other people. Her greatest skills, her natural genius inclinations, shined through best in her interviews. She could coax out stories no one thought they would ever tell a living soul as easily as tugging a loose string from a sweater, find subtle patterns and new angles with shocking grace. Harleen read people as easily as the prodigy Gale Dekarios had read the Weave in his golden youth. Not long after submitting her dissertation, she had received an offer to return to Baldur's Gate. There was a man there who may have been from the Feywild. Nobody was quite sure what he was or how he could do such strange things, and he was refusing to speak with anyone. But Harleen, fresh and ready and eager and so clever, she could get anyone to talk, and wouldn't she like to come home?
The pages after that are ripped from the spine. The end.
Harley, in the present, spends long miserable hours on the balcony. She frets and weeps and considers running back into the Underdark, but Gale has retreated to the bedroom and so she can't grab her pack without risking the very conversation she's avoiding. Tara offers brief comfort but refuses to help sneak out so much as a change of clothes so she can make an escape. She insists that Mister Dekarios would not drive her out of the city over one tantrum, and adds further insults by correctly guessing that if Harley did get dressed and leave that she might not come back. They were both being ridiculous children and Tara would not subject herself to this secondhand embarrassment any longer. They had until morning to behave reasonably or it was fireballs for both of them.
The sun is setting before Harley trods up to the bedroom with a dreadful feeling pitted in her stomach. She clears her throat, opens the door, and steps inside. Her eyes are red from crying, so much she had been sure she was all dried out, but she has to blink back the sting of fresh tears at the sight of him surrounded by her history.
"Um," she says eloquently as she presses her back against the door and slides all the way down to the floor, "I'm such an asshole."
Edited (The most inconsequential word swap that has nonetheless been bothering me for hours ) 2025-05-12 19:57 (UTC)
"Tara, we've already discussed this, and besides, I'm quite busy with--" Gale starts to say at the sound of the door opening, cutting himself short once he recognizes the sound of human footfalls. His head snaps up, wide eyed, and he doesn't immediately say anything. His eyes are also red, but from the looks of things on the bed, it may be at least in part from not blinking enough. All the folios she gave him are open, with scraps of paper shoved in between a number of pages, either notes or just to mark pages. There are other papers all over the bed, covered in Gale's handwriting. Some attempt had been made to shuffle them into piles, but he abandoned it along the way. There are a couple of books that Harley didn't give him also open on the bed, perhaps for him to cross reference.
"You're brilliant," he says matter of factly. It's not a flattering attempt to win back her favor, it's just a statement of fact m Reading what she wrote just made him even more certain than he was before. "Blackstaff was foolish to lose you. Despite being intellectuals, wizards are often fools." Present company included. "You've been crying... because of me." Apparently, he's going to keep making obvious statements. "So it seems more appropriate that I should have earned that particular title."
"Not because of you," she is quick to correct, with a grimace at the way the words come out thick with the threat of more weeping. Her head tips back against the door with a woeful thunk. "It all happened in my own head. I'm not-- I'm not well, Gale."
She squeezes her eyes closed and presses the heels of her palms against the lids, but fat tears escape anyway and roll down her cheeks. Every ounce of self control, and that is not much, goes to keeping her voice and breath even.
"Sometimes, sometimes it doesn't matter what someone says. What I hear is the worst possible version, because ... Because ghosts." She gestures uselessly at the air. Gods, she used to be able to explain herself. Used to be able to track the thread of her thoughts, but it's been nothing but tangles for years now.
"I love you." There, that's one thing she knows for certain. A good place to start. "I love that you woke up one day to a strange woman in your kitchen and made me tea. I love the way your hands move when you talk, and I love that you talk all the time. I love that you really, genuinely want to know the answer for every question you ask. I love the way you listen like I have important things to say. I love that you summoned a tressym as a lonely little boy and that she's still your best friend. I love that you remember little things I like. I love you, but I'm-- I might not know how to be loved."
"Harley..." he begins, but seems to decide against having this conversation while she is on the floor and he is on the bed. It would take considerable tidying before she could join him on the bed, so he'll just come to her.
It is embarrassingly difficult. His legs resist unfolding after hours frozen in one position. Once he's managed to stand up, wobble over with one foot well asleep, and sit down beside her as both knees pop, he's grimacing. Without reminders, he often doesn't remember to stand up and stretch, and Tara was in no mood for taking care of her high maintenance pet today.
"Please don't take this as a dismissal of your concerns, because I would never do so intentionally, but..." He frowns, rubs his earring between his index finger and thumb while he considers how he wants to say this. "I think... well, no one really knows how to do anything until they've been taught. And, as clever as you may be, that's one thing no one was ever kind enough to teach you. That's no fault of yours."
Gale reaches over to take her hand, fingers intertwined on her lap. There's ink on his skin, which will inevitably spread to hers. "You say it's in your head, that you hear the worst version of things. I would ask you to share that with me. I'm not the most... intuitive about such things, I know, but not for lack of effort. I want to understand, to stand beside you against your ghosts. If you need to yell or rage or cry, then you are welcome to do so. Just... Please don't leave."
She squeezes his hand and leans into him like she's drawn into his orbit. She worries her bottom lip between her teeth, and it takes a couple false starts before she can answer.
"A friend told me once that talking to me is like a knife fight. I didn't want to do that to you. I don't-- I only want to be good to you." Another thing she never really learned to do. Her thumb rubs over the ink stain, smudging it further. "I thought that, maybe, you would want me to leave. But I'm here. I stayed."
"I would rather risk the cuts than the echo of an empty room," he replies,
far more candid about his vulnerabilities than he would be with most. Then
again, most people aren't Harley. She doesn't feel like a knife fight to
him, but she does sometimes feel like a surgeon, excising old wounds that
never healed. "Thank you for staying."
"You don't have to keep apologizing. It's alright," Gale gently reassures. "We are both stumbling in the dark. There's no need to say sorry for tripping." He looks down at their linked hands with mirrored ink stains on both palms. "Will you tell me what you were worried about? What the worst version of what I said was?"
"Harley." He sounds so sad. Despite his gift for gab, he feels like the wrong person for this conversation, like none of his words could ever fix this. "You're not broken, and I never thought you were ruining anything. I rather expected that to be my part in it, to be honest." Through his whole life, he has never been the one to leave. Always, he is the one who messes it up, who is left standing as people he cares about walk away. For better or worse, one thing that defines Gale Dekarios is devotion, but his worship has always been one sided.
She grimaces at how sad he sounds over her and is even more determined to avoid looking up.
"Do you still want--" Wait, shit. Hells. She's done everything all mixed up and backwards. "What do you want? With me." She risks eye contact for a second before her gaze flicks away again. "About us."
"I want you to be safe and happy, but I'm not sure I'm capable of making that happen. I don't want to be one more person who inevitably lets you down." Now he's the one that won't look at her. "Even if I endeavor to get everything right, there's the very real possibility I won't survive all that long. What's the point in planting a garden in salted earth?"
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"Well, just remember that I did give you a chance, and you were fool enough to keep me anyway."
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"Ah, well," she sighs over his perfect hands before letting go, "I'm sure I can keep hold of your leash."
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"I love you," she says casually between chews, "in case you thought you dreamed that part."
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"I rather thought I might have," he said between bites. "You might still change your mind. You haven't known me terribly long, and this on the heels of heartbreak?" Hadn't she been the one so suggest a rebound to him? Maybe that's what he was, even if it wasn't intentional.
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She pushes back from the table and stands, looking toward the exit. She swallows thickly, tense all over and trembling with the effort of not walking out.
"Between us, I am not the one on the heels of heartbreak," she rasps, "so don't project that onto me.
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"Didn't you mention explosively shattering mirrors, scars, and shards of glass that still cut you when you think you've cleaned them all up?" Some part of him, smaller and younger, wants to take it back, turn back time by a few minutes, cry and beg for her not to go. The more predominant part puts up a wall by pretending everything is an academic debate you can win by being well spoken and citing sources. "I'm not the only one who worshiped, by your own admission, and that kind of devotion, cleaved from its altar, leaves wounds. We can debate the chronology and whether 'on the heels of' applies, but not the hurt left behind, surely?"
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"Excuse me for a moment."
She grimaces down at the table, shakes her head to clear her thoughts, and trails her hand across his shoulders on the way out of the room. She goes further in, to the study, and returns with a stack of thick leather-wrapped folios. She presses the documents to his chest -- her thesis on how the effect of being in love can influence individuals to abandon societal norms,her dissertation on loss of empathy as a survival mechanism in longterm traumatic situations, all her research and interview notes, her personal journals from her days in academia -- and sweeps away to take her meal on the balcony.
This is the gift for him. She hopes that as a wizard, as the kind of person he is, that he can understand the deeper meaning of opening all these old parts of herself.
These are love letters.
deletes multiverse, time for real tag
When there's nothing left to do, he returns to the pile of paper on the table, unsure what exactly it is, but somehow afraid to open it. When he opens the first one, he finds that instead of answering questions, it spawns a hundred more. He opens and reads the title and abstract of each, frowns, then gathers them up. These were his gift, weren't they? Were they meant to tell him more about her, about him, or about both of them?
Rather than examine his feelings, or hyperfocus on what he's done wrong, he gathers the folios up in his arms and proceeds upstairs. He stops by the study door, left open, but he can hear her out on the balcony, so he continues on to his bedroom. He settles in for long reading, arranging the pillows so that he can prop himself up comfortably. He grabs the paper and ink from the bedside table (of course he keeps some there -- what if he has a great idea in the middle of the night he needs to write down?) so he can take notes without marking up her copies.
Then he does the most Gale thing: he reads, he takes notes, he writes down his thoughts, he works on a theoretical timeline of Harley's life from bits and pieces she's told him, he lists questions he'd like to ask (many marked through). The day wears on. Tara arrives at some point, naps a little, chides him for, well, all of this, and then leaves. He wonders whether Tara scolded Harley too, but not enough to get up and go ask.
The day passes by, and Gale does not move, does not so much as get up once.
wait no, take me back to the world where his head is stuck in a trashcan
The personal journals covered her time at Blackstaff. She had been accepted on a scholarship, which a temple had applied for on her behalf, and she had suspected it was less about providing her with a future than it was about getting her far away from Baldur's Gate. Harleen had also suspected that Blackstaff had chosen her either from a complete lack of other applicants or as the punchline to some grand joke. Nothing ever proved her right, but she may not have been entirely wrong either.
Not long after officially beginning courses, the casual cruelty of more blessed peers began to wear her patience thin. Books, spell components, uniform robes, scrolls and sundries... The scholarship did not stretch far enough to cover it all, and Harleen's reliance on secondhand, lower quality materials was a delicious target for the sort of ambitious apprentice treated everything like a dire competition. She had some measure of skill, more drive than many, but most wizards had a proper mentor or formal education before reaching this stage. She spent long nights trying to catch up and when she struggled even the slightest bit in class it was quickly added to the list of reasons why she didn't belong.
The rumors began flying, and they were merciless. She was a pretty thing and there was no end of speculation about how she earned that scholarship, what sort of extra credit she was willing to do to muster a passing grade. She was no blushing maiden and laughed it off, but her lack of shame was treated like damning evidence. A brief and unsatisfying dalliance with a prefect was cut off when he bragged to his friends how easy it had been, as if he hadn't been the one chasing at her heels, and a budding flirtation with a girl in her year abruptly ended with a cold shoulder when the stories became unavoidable. The final straw had been a professor offering a bit of mentorship during office hours, that quickly turned into an expectation of undue physical gratitude, and when she tried to report the conduct the only evidence they considered was her reputation. Harleen had dislocated his jaw, walked across the city to the bard college, and enrolled on her own merits that same afternoon.
She wrote less about herself after that, after she found peers and company and the right place to be, and most of her records became about other people. Her greatest skills, her natural genius inclinations, shined through best in her interviews. She could coax out stories no one thought they would ever tell a living soul as easily as tugging a loose string from a sweater, find subtle patterns and new angles with shocking grace. Harleen read people as easily as the prodigy Gale Dekarios had read the Weave in his golden youth. Not long after submitting her dissertation, she had received an offer to return to Baldur's Gate. There was a man there who may have been from the Feywild. Nobody was quite sure what he was or how he could do such strange things, and he was refusing to speak with anyone. But Harleen, fresh and ready and eager and so clever, she could get anyone to talk, and wouldn't she like to come home?
The pages after that are ripped from the spine. The end.
Harley, in the present, spends long miserable hours on the balcony. She frets and weeps and considers running back into the Underdark, but Gale has retreated to the bedroom and so she can't grab her pack without risking the very conversation she's avoiding. Tara offers brief comfort but refuses to help sneak out so much as a change of clothes so she can make an escape. She insists that Mister Dekarios would not drive her out of the city over one tantrum, and adds further insults by correctly guessing that if Harley did get dressed and leave that she might not come back. They were both being ridiculous children and Tara would not subject herself to this secondhand embarrassment any longer. They had until morning to behave reasonably or it was fireballs for both of them.
The sun is setting before Harley trods up to the bedroom with a dreadful feeling pitted in her stomach. She clears her throat, opens the door, and steps inside. Her eyes are red from crying, so much she had been sure she was all dried out, but she has to blink back the sting of fresh tears at the sight of him surrounded by her history.
"Um," she says eloquently as she presses her back against the door and slides all the way down to the floor, "I'm such an asshole."
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"You're brilliant," he says matter of factly. It's not a flattering attempt to win back her favor, it's just a statement of fact m Reading what she wrote just made him even more certain than he was before. "Blackstaff was foolish to lose you. Despite being intellectuals, wizards are often fools." Present company included. "You've been crying... because of me." Apparently, he's going to keep making obvious statements. "So it seems more appropriate that I should have earned that particular title."
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She squeezes her eyes closed and presses the heels of her palms against the lids, but fat tears escape anyway and roll down her cheeks. Every ounce of self control, and that is not much, goes to keeping her voice and breath even.
"Sometimes, sometimes it doesn't matter what someone says. What I hear is the worst possible version, because
... Because ghosts." She gestures uselessly at the air. Gods, she used to be able to explain herself. Used to be able to track the thread of her thoughts, but it's been nothing but tangles for years now.
"I love you." There, that's one thing she knows for certain. A good place to start. "I love that you woke up one day to a strange woman in your kitchen and made me tea. I love the way your hands move when you talk, and I love that you talk all the time. I love that you really, genuinely want to know the answer for every question you ask. I love the way you listen like I have important things to say. I love that you summoned a tressym as a lonely little boy and that she's still your best friend. I love that you remember little things I like. I love you, but I'm-- I might not know how to be loved."
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It is embarrassingly difficult. His legs resist unfolding after hours frozen in one position. Once he's managed to stand up, wobble over with one foot well asleep, and sit down beside her as both knees pop, he's grimacing. Without reminders, he often doesn't remember to stand up and stretch, and Tara was in no mood for taking care of her high maintenance pet today.
"Please don't take this as a dismissal of your concerns, because I would never do so intentionally, but..." He frowns, rubs his earring between his index finger and thumb while he considers how he wants to say this. "I think... well, no one really knows how to do anything until they've been taught. And, as clever as you may be, that's one thing no one was ever kind enough to teach you. That's no fault of yours."
Gale reaches over to take her hand, fingers intertwined on her lap. There's ink on his skin, which will inevitably spread to hers. "You say it's in your head, that you hear the worst version of things. I would ask you to share that with me. I'm not the most... intuitive about such things, I know, but not for lack of effort. I want to understand, to stand beside you against your ghosts. If you need to yell or rage or cry, then you are welcome to do so. Just... Please don't leave."
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"A friend told me once that talking to me is like a knife fight. I didn't want to do that to you. I don't-- I only want to be good to you." Another thing she never really learned to do. Her thumb rubs over the ink stain, smudging it further. "I thought that, maybe, you would want me to leave. But I'm here. I stayed."
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"I would rather risk the cuts than the echo of an empty room," he replies, far more candid about his vulnerabilities than he would be with most. Then again, most people aren't Harley. She doesn't feel like a knife fight to him, but she does sometimes feel like a surgeon, excising old wounds that never healed. "Thank you for staying."
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"I'll try. Okay? I'm sorry. I'm really sorry."
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"That, um." She bites the inside of her cheek until she tastes blood. "That I was too broken to know my own feelings. To not ruin this."
So she immediately did that anyway.
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"Do you still want--" Wait, shit. Hells. She's done everything all mixed up and backwards. "What do you want? With me." She risks eye contact for a second before her gaze flicks away again. "About us."
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