[private] I'll cross that line

[Gale]

Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you The look in her orange eyes doesn’t quite match the hard sarcasm of earlier, and as Gale traces the familiar lines of her white face with his roving eyes, he tries to find one furrow that might suggest she means something different than what she’d said. Gale, who before had rarely attempted to hide his emotions, is predictably rather inept at reading them in others. She’s definitely angry, he decides, using her muttering as an indicator. Angry, but not enough to lash out at him, though the way she slowly closes her eyes makes him wonder how near a retort had to the edge of her tongue. He knows that trick – closing his eyes to avoid looking at something to give him time to think – and he gives her time to do it. He is grateful too, and as his mind turns to new tactics to convince her to leave, his eyes wander. Mazikeen is somehow more lovely than he’d remembered. She seems more at ease in this shape than she ever had been before, and he recalls the way she had prowled (despite her best efforts) down the beach toward him. Gale stops thinking of tactics sometime after he admires the strong arch of her neck, and realizes it only when he feels her eyes on him once more. He blinks, startled, and take a step back, and then another just for good measure when she begins to speak. It had become difficult to breathe for a moment there, and it takes him some time to orient to the conversation. He hears the words well enough, even over the rapid pace of his heart. For one brief moment, he’d forgotten the Curse, forgotten the danger, forgotten everything. Mazikeen’s words are a bitter reminder, and he swallows hard. “You will take it back.” Gale’s voice is terse. He manages to steady his breathing, but it remains only slightly less rapid than his heart. Gale is trying to be careful with his words, but he’s talking too quickly to be sure that he succeeds, the words tumbling over themselves as he tries to say many things at once. “I don’t want you to keep it. I want you to go back to Hyaline, far away from me, where you are safe. Eyas will tell you when it is over, I’m sure she will.” He is trying his best to be convincing, though he has failed at this effort enough that he suspects that the Fates have intervened. He stills his head from its nodding emphasis on the fact that his sister will inform Mazikeen of his demise, and exhales in a long sigh. She’d accused him of making her live through one of her worst fears with his rejection. That still stings, made all the worse because he’d done it to save her pain. It occurs to Gale for the first time that perhaps if Mazikeen knew how he actually felt, she might better understand why he does not want to see her.  So he tries once more, one final time. “Seeing you reminds me of the future that I want but cannot have.” He admits, the soft shake of his navy head doing nothing to disguise the sadness in his brilliantly blue eyes. “I am already Cursed, Mazikeen. Please do not also make me suffer.” @[Mazikeen]