"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.
She believes him, which makes it better than any poem. She laughs, not at him but because she's too full of happiness to keep it all in.
"I know."
Her thighs squeeze his sides and she rolls both of them to the floor in a tangle of limbs. Her fingers lightly trail the contours of his face like he's too precious to hold tight.
"Gods, I wish--" She bites her lip on the useless filthy things she was about to say. "I love you too."
He lands with a soft oof, but then her hands are on him like he is something to be handled lightly. He laughs too, but it gives way to a tight frown that pushes all that softness out of his features. "I know," he says. Of course he knows what she was about to say. With her thighs still around him, how could either of them be thinking of anything else? "And I'm sorry." Not just that they can't make love, but about everything a life with him will be missing. He won't try to make the choice for her, but he can still apologize for what it entails.
She hums thoughtfully and presses soft, sweet kisses to his face like she can chase the tension away if she can just be gentle enough.
"There's more to intimacy than sex, and there's more to sex than orgasms." She does teasingly rock her hips against him there, because she can't entirely behave. "We can't do everything but I promise there is still so much I can do to make you feel good."
"Minx," he accuses. Gale lets his eyes drift closed and exhales a slow,
calming breath. His hands grip her hips tight, and it's hard to tell if
he's trying to keep her still or hold her close. "You do that every day.
You are the sun breaking through storm clouds, do you know that?"
When he opens his eyes again, they are adoring... and hungry. He shifts his
hips against hers just once, allowing himself this small indulgence. It's a
bad idea, but when has that actually stopped him? "That doesn't mean I
don't want to wear your thighs as a circlet and prove my oral prowess in
more than just pontificating."
A flush of excitement colors her cheeks and lights up her eyes. Her lips curve into an eager smile.
"Seems like I'm not the only minx in this relationship," she quips. She arches against him with a little wiggle. "Obviously I'm not gonna say no to such a delicious offer."
Technically, it's only potentially unsafe. There are a lot of variables he isn't sure about. Is it the physical stimulation the destabilizes the orb? Is it the strong emotions? Some combination of the two? Could he touch her without blowing them all into the astral plane? If touch is entirely off the table, what about mage hand? Intimacy isn't just sex, and sex isn't just climax, as she said, and ordinarily he would be eager to try to discover those lines. Experimentation is one of the most appealing bedroom endeavors.
The only thing stopping him is fear, and even though he's not willing to admit it, it's not just fear of destroying Waterdeep and everyone in it.
But he can't be content with nothing. "Will you show me your tattoos? All... of them?" He flushes a little, which is silly, because it's not like he hadn't just made a filthier suggestion. There's more to intimacy than sex, though. "And tell me about them? If you want to. I wouldn't impose if it's unpleasant. It's just..." He's been looking, glimpses here and there when fabric shifts to reveal the edge of mysterious ink. "I'm curious." His greatest virtue and his worst vice.
"I'm not safe," she counters. She has her own questions and theories about the specific limits of his condition, and salacious ideas on how they can map out those boundaries.
Some other day. Gale insists on an impending doom, but Harley is not so quick to give in to grim fates.
She untangles herself from him, sits back on her heels and pulls off her top. Tattoos stand in stark contrast against her pale skin, and for the first time he can see the ones below her collarbone and low across her stomach. The garment is tossed aside without a glance as she stands, turns away-- two more tattoos on her shoulder and lower back. She pushes her short pants off her hips and shimmies them down her thighs, stepping out of them and toward the bed.
She pauses with one knee on the mattress, actually noticing the pages scattered around for the first time. She looks back at him over her shoulder with a cheeky smile.
"Gale!" She has the same tone of perfomative scandal and giggly delight that she takes on whenever she finds a sexy magic book in his library. "Have you been annotating me?"
"It's different." It's always different when he's burying himself in noble suffering.
Harley discards her top with absolutely no hesitation, and that's a marvel on its own, though not nearly so much as what follows. He looks away on instinct, remembers that he doesn't have to, then turns his gaze back to her.
He laughs, because she can always get him to laugh no matter the circumstances. "Of course I had to take notes, how else would I remember everything I wanted to discuss? You laugh now, but you'll have to read through all of them later." He pushes himself up off the floor, his knees still protesting from spending so long in one position on the bed. "Besides, I didn't annotate you. But... I could?" Gale's eyes take on a mischievous glint. Her skin is covered in ink, after all, its own sort of story. Magic helps him clear everything from the bed except the pen and ink, which he's sure not to spill as he climbs onto his bed with her.
Harley reclines against his pillows like a queen in repose, arranging herself in the most enticing pose she can think of. She holds a beckoning hand toward him.
"Yes," she agrees easily, immediately. He can do anything he likes to her body and she'd thank him for it.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
"I'll try. Okay? I'm sorry. I'm really sorry."
no subject
no subject
"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.
no subject
no subject
"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."
no subject
no subject
"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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
"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."
no subject
"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."
no subject
no subject
"I'm here. I'm yours."
no subject
no subject
"I know."
Her thighs squeeze his sides and she rolls both of them to the floor in a tangle of limbs. Her fingers lightly trail the contours of his face like he's too precious to hold tight.
"Gods, I wish--" She bites her lip on the useless filthy things she was about to say. "I love you too."
no subject
no subject
"There's more to intimacy than sex, and there's more to sex than orgasms." She does teasingly rock her hips against him there, because she can't entirely behave. "We can't do everything but I promise there is still so much I can do to make you feel good."
no subject
"Minx," he accuses. Gale lets his eyes drift closed and exhales a slow, calming breath. His hands grip her hips tight, and it's hard to tell if he's trying to keep her still or hold her close. "You do that every day. You are the sun breaking through storm clouds, do you know that?"
When he opens his eyes again, they are adoring... and hungry. He shifts his hips against hers just once, allowing himself this small indulgence. It's a bad idea, but when has that actually stopped him? "That doesn't mean I don't want to wear your thighs as a circlet and prove my oral prowess in more than just pontificating."
no subject
"Seems like I'm not the only minx in this relationship," she quips. She arches against him with a little wiggle. "Obviously I'm not gonna say no to such a delicious offer."
no subject
Technically, it's only potentially unsafe. There are a lot of variables he isn't sure about. Is it the physical stimulation the destabilizes the orb? Is it the strong emotions? Some combination of the two? Could he touch her without blowing them all into the astral plane? If touch is entirely off the table, what about mage hand? Intimacy isn't just sex, and sex isn't just climax, as she said, and ordinarily he would be eager to try to discover those lines. Experimentation is one of the most appealing bedroom endeavors.
The only thing stopping him is fear, and even though he's not willing to admit it, it's not just fear of destroying Waterdeep and everyone in it.
But he can't be content with nothing. "Will you show me your tattoos? All... of them?" He flushes a little, which is silly, because it's not like he hadn't just made a filthier suggestion. There's more to intimacy than sex, though. "And tell me about them? If you want to. I wouldn't impose if it's unpleasant. It's just..." He's been looking, glimpses here and there when fabric shifts to reveal the edge of mysterious ink. "I'm curious." His greatest virtue and his worst vice.
no subject
Some other day. Gale insists on an impending doom, but Harley is not so quick to give in to grim fates.
She untangles herself from him, sits back on her heels and pulls off her top. Tattoos stand in stark contrast against her pale skin, and for the first time he can see the ones below her collarbone and low across her stomach. The garment is tossed aside without a glance as she stands, turns away-- two more tattoos on her shoulder and lower back. She pushes her short pants off her hips and shimmies them down her thighs, stepping out of them and toward the bed.
She pauses with one knee on the mattress, actually noticing the pages scattered around for the first time. She looks back at him over her shoulder with a cheeky smile.
"Gale!" She has the same tone of perfomative scandal and giggly delight that she takes on whenever she finds a sexy magic book in his library. "Have you been annotating me?"
no subject
Harley discards her top with absolutely no hesitation, and that's a marvel on its own, though not nearly so much as what follows. He looks away on instinct, remembers that he doesn't have to, then turns his gaze back to her.
He laughs, because she can always get him to laugh no matter the circumstances. "Of course I had to take notes, how else would I remember everything I wanted to discuss? You laugh now, but you'll have to read through all of them later." He pushes himself up off the floor, his knees still protesting from spending so long in one position on the bed. "Besides, I didn't annotate you. But... I could?" Gale's eyes take on a mischievous glint. Her skin is covered in ink, after all, its own sort of story. Magic helps him clear everything from the bed except the pen and ink, which he's sure not to spill as he climbs onto his bed with her.
no subject
"Yes," she agrees easily, immediately. He can do anything he likes to her body and she'd thank him for it.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)