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?"
Her head snaps up and she stares at him for a long, long moment. Trying to swallow knives.
"Would you rather guarantee that we're both miserable and alone than try to make anything nicer together? Maybe you succumb to the orb. Maybe I take a bad fall. Maybe we both die together in our sleep because of a house fire. Nobody is ever promised a future."
He wilts just a little under that gaze, and he knows she's too observant not to have noticed. "That's different. Those are mere possibilities."
"I obviously don't want us to be miserable." He just can't see any way being with him doesn't end in misery. With a weary sigh, he lets his head fall back against the door. "If we had met in school, what do you think that would have been like?"
It's not different, but she can pocket that particular fight for later.
"I think..." She hesitates before letting herself cuddle up to his side. "I think even if we had met then, and we got along, you would've dropped me for a goddess. So that's not a happier story."
She reaches up and smooths the divot between his brows with her thumb.
"You don't need to have the answers right now, but... Do you-- Are you happier when I'm here? Do you want me to stay in your life? This isn't an ultimatum, but I-- I don't know if it's okay for me to keep sleeping under your roof if we aren't on the same page." Certainly not in the same bed.
He frowns, because she's not wrong. Where Mystra was involved, he tended to be blind to all else. "If I'm being honest, I'm not sure you wouldn't have hated me anyway, as arrogant and shitty as I was." A word she had used to describe him once before, but he had been so much worse then, an ascending star who had never made any serious mistakes. Absorbing a malicious Netherese orb and becoming a god's UnChosen had been a uniquely humbling experience.
When she reaches for his face only to smooth the tension between his eyebrows, he huffs out a laugh. "See, that's the trouble, I always need to have all of the answers right now. But," he says, pausing so he can angle towards her, look at her when he continues, "I was an abandoned house before you appeared. Shuddered, haunted, and in disrepair. Then you appeared, turned on the lights, cleared the cobwebs, shored the foundation... I'm happier, but that seems a paltry description for all that you do for me." He leans in to kiss her between the eyebrows, the same spot she had smoothed on his face.
He startles a little puff of laughter out of her when he describes his younger self as shitty, which might be part of why he keeps doing it. Her face goes soft and full of love as he just ... does poetry at her out of nowhere. He leans in for a kiss and she tips her face toward him, which leaves her caught on the back foot when his lips press against her forehead quite chastely.
Well. Anyway.
"I want--" She stops herself, her mouth in a little twist of a smile, and looks away. "No, I won't tell you yet, because I don't want you to decide you want something just because it's what I said."
"Say that..." She clears her throat and looks back at his sweet face. "Say there was no orb, no time limit. Let yourself be selfish. How would this--" and she squeezes his hand that makes it clear that by this she means us-- "go, if you got to have everything you want the way you want it?"
"I wouldn't make a decision just because it's what you said you wanted," he counters. It's not a lie because he believes he's telling the truth, even though he's wrong.
"If things were different, if there were no orb..." Gale allows himself a self indulgent moment to ponder it, to daydream the possibility. At no point in his wishful thinking does it occur to him that she might not be here, that he would want Harley anywhere but by his side. "I wouldn't be spending all my time researching ways to survive, and I wouldn't be sending you out to steal magical items for me from gods know where. We'd curl up by the fire and read. We'd go have picnics on the beach and I would teach you to swim. I’d have taken the time to do things properly. To actually court you. To say... all of this better. There would be a great deal more pomp and poetry when I told you that I loved you." He squeezes her hand, just a hair too tight to be comfortable, so afraid that she will leave. "But I do. Love you, I mean. Even if everything else has gone wrong, know that you are the one thing that has gone right."
Harley's eyes drift closed as she imagines the life he describes, and she can feel the prickling threat of tears behind her lids. She takes a steadying breath, blinks away the tears, and squeezes his hand back just as fiercely.
"I want to make a home in you." She lifts their joined hands to her chest where her heart beats rabbit-fast. Her other hand cups his face, her thumb tracing the angle of his jaw. "If you want me, then please keep me. Please."
"You will always have a home here. I promise." He tilts himself closer, until their foreheads are touching. "If you want me, then please don't leave me. Please don't leave me alone."
Harley slides onto his lap, wraps her arms around his shoulders, and kisses him with all the heat and fervor of the night before but without the taste of liquor in her mouth. She kisses him until her body screams for air, until her lungs are burning and she has to gasp for breath.
Harley always has an elegance to the way she moves, and Gale marvels at it when she swings her legs over his in one smooth motion. But then, all thoughts evaporate in the heat of that kiss. Caution would be wise, but that has never been one of his virtues. He surges in to meet her, a wave crashing upon her shore. His hands land on her hips just to pull her closer, and just for one moment, the orb is forgotten. "I love you," he says and surely what it lacks in poetry it makes up for in enthusiasm.
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no subject
"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?"
no subject
"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."
no subject
"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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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."
no subject
"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."
no subject
"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."
no subject
"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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"Would you rather guarantee that we're both miserable and alone than try to make anything nicer together? Maybe you succumb to the orb. Maybe I take a bad fall. Maybe we both die together in our sleep because of a house fire. Nobody is ever promised a future."
no subject
"I obviously don't want us to be miserable." He just can't see any way being with him doesn't end in misery. With a weary sigh, he lets his head fall back against the door. "If we had met in school, what do you think that would have been like?"
no subject
"I think..." She hesitates before letting herself cuddle up to his side. "I think even if we had met then, and we got along, you would've dropped me for a goddess. So that's not a happier story."
She reaches up and smooths the divot between his brows with her thumb.
"You don't need to have the answers right now, but... Do you-- Are you happier when I'm here? Do you want me to stay in your life? This isn't an ultimatum, but I-- I don't know if it's okay for me to keep sleeping under your roof if we aren't on the same page." Certainly not in the same bed.
no subject
When she reaches for his face only to smooth the tension between his eyebrows, he huffs out a laugh. "See, that's the trouble, I always need to have all of the answers right now. But," he says, pausing so he can angle towards her, look at her when he continues, "I was an abandoned house before you appeared. Shuddered, haunted, and in disrepair. Then you appeared, turned on the lights, cleared the cobwebs, shored the foundation... I'm happier, but that seems a paltry description for all that you do for me." He leans in to kiss her between the eyebrows, the same spot she had smoothed on his face.
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Well. Anyway.
"I want--" She stops herself, her mouth in a little twist of a smile, and looks away. "No, I won't tell you yet, because I don't want you to decide you want something just because it's what I said."
"Say that..." She clears her throat and looks back at his sweet face. "Say there was no orb, no time limit. Let yourself be selfish. How would this--" and she squeezes his hand that makes it clear that by this she means us-- "go, if you got to have everything you want the way you want it?"
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"If things were different, if there were no orb..." Gale allows himself a self indulgent moment to ponder it, to daydream the possibility. At no point in his wishful thinking does it occur to him that she might not be here, that he would want Harley anywhere but by his side. "I wouldn't be spending all my time researching ways to survive, and I wouldn't be sending you out to steal magical items for me from gods know where. We'd curl up by the fire and read. We'd go have picnics on the beach and I would teach you to swim. I’d have taken the time to do things properly. To actually court you. To say... all of this better. There would be a great deal more pomp and poetry when I told you that I loved you." He squeezes her hand, just a hair too tight to be comfortable, so afraid that she will leave. "But I do. Love you, I mean. Even if everything else has gone wrong, know that you are the one thing that has gone right."
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"I want to make a home in you." She lifts their joined hands to her chest where her heart beats rabbit-fast. Her other hand cups his face, her thumb tracing the angle of his jaw. "If you want me, then please keep me. Please."
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"I'm here. I'm yours."
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