[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 He feels the words somewhere in his chest, a blow not unlike the empathic attacks he has felt from his siblings. But Mazikeen has no such ability, he thinks, this is the real thing. Having regrown his heart, healed his punctured heart, and repaired his frozen heart, Gale had always scoffed a bit at the idea of heartbreak being an actual thing that people felt. Even now he’s not quite sure this is heartbreak, but it is definitely something in his heart, and Mazikeen had definitely been responsible. Is this what she’d felt back in Hyaline, he wonders, when he’d chosen to leave? This is a terrible feeling. Gale has always prided himself on his patience, thinking it second only to his ability to think his way out of any puzzle. Together they’d gotten him through every trouble thus far; there was nothing he could not outwait or outthink. He’d thought and waited himself out of a grave, for Beqanna’s sake; his patience is surely an endless well Yet when he reaches for it now, knowing it will make his infrequently practiced stoicism easier, he comes up nearly empty. Gale stills (not that he’d been especially mobile before) like one of his island’s wooden carvings, the instinctive freeze in the face of unexpected danger winning out for just a moment before he blinks it away. He doesn’t need it, not when he has anger to fall back on. That possibility wouldn’t have occurred to him if he’d taken a moment to pause. But it is hard to think when she scoffs at his admission. Hard to remind himself to tread carefully when he’s wounded in a part of himself he’d thought impervious. The anger simmers there, just below the surface, bright in his blue eyes as she begins her impassioned plea. Gale is grappling with the fact that he wants to shove Mazikeen away hard for her earlier words and also to hold her as closely to himself as possible and prove he’d meant it. He doesn’t quite hear what she says, but he doesn’t need to. He understands the gist of it: she’s still refusing to listen to him. She’s still sure she knows better, when she doesn’t really know anything at all. Gale reminds himself that her lack of knowledge is his own fault, and that stretches his remaining patience just long enough to let her finish speaking before he interjects. “Stop thinking about yourself, Mazikeen! This isn’t about you!” His eyes are narrowed, somewhere between frustration and bewilderment. “If you really wanted to help me, you’d just leave me alone. I don’t want to hurt you at all. That’s why I want you far away. I forget about the Curse when I think about you. I forget about everything else in the world. But I can’t forget, Mazikeen, I can’t forget because that might be when it happens.” When one of the Others, the voices of the Curse, might slip into him, and leave him nothing but a voice within his own head, his body puppetted by something dark. His anger is easily spent by his verbal outburst, but rather than relief he instead feels hollowed out and empty. He shakes his head, but that doesn’t help either, so he tries a deep breath. That’s a little better. When he speaks again, his voice is soft, and he does not meet her eyes. “So I will ask you one last time: please leave.” Another long breath, another sweep of the horizon, and then he fixes his blue eyes on hers and forces himself to see anything but the mare in front of him. @[Mazikeen]