[private] heaven help me for the way I am

[Gale]

Gale it's hard to keep a straight face when i just want to smile -- starlight crashing through the room, we'll lose our feathers Gale had thought nothing of the offer, but he enjoys the way that the pale lines of Mazikeen’s face shift as she smiles. He mirrors it without thought, complete with an assenting nod of his navy chin. Later, when the dark world is a little clearer and the drums that beat at the back of his skull slacken their pace.  Taking a slow inhale, Gale does his best muffle the distraction of his headache and focuses instead on the shuffling hooves and suddenly absent smile on Maizkeen’s face. Accustomed to committing faux pas, Gale is not surprised to see the signs of another, and at least his disappointment in himself for yet another overtakes the distraction of his pain. It was asking her to fight, he knows. That there were other reasons for a visit had crossed his mind, but this one had seemed the most straightforward, had required the least amount of assumptions on Gale’s part. Breach had said she’d come to see the islands, he remembers, and while he still suspects that had not been entirely true, there is no reason Mazikeen might not have done the same thing. He listens, navy ears flicked toward her, and at her accusation of pleasantness he even laughs. (It’s short lived, for it moves his head in a way that worsens the throbbing, but genuine). “Well, you weren’t what I expected either.” He admits. He had battled one of the undead, and then a creature comprised entirely of darkness; next to them Mazikeen was markedly different. More enjoyable, if he is honest, but he’s very sure that attempting to articulate that it felt best to kick her living flesh would ensure that a second battle between them began immediately. Instead, he doesn’t elaborate at all, and instead just finishes with a slow and appreciative nod as Mazikeen begins to speak of her unchanged abilities and desire to spar when he is ready. Gale should know better than to laugh, but he does anyway when she lists her triad of powers. His headache responds by spreading a little farther down his spine, and Gale exhales a long breath toward the dark sea just as she asks if she is the reason for his weariness. “I was sleeping, yes, but…” He trails off as something moves in the far away darkness. Or perhaps it’s only something he’d imagined. “I came across a…a thing, on the way home. It was too dark to see, or maybe it was” the dark? The wingless brindle clearly muses out loud, the story emerging just as he remembers it. “It ran at me and so I tried to take its sight and it, well… it did not like that.” A vast overstatement, Gale thinks, and barely remembers to not shake his head in confusion. “I made it away, obviously, being an immensely talented warrior…” (he glances under his white forelock at her for just a moment, hoping that she will smile again) “But my eyes are still a little sore, so I was resting them a bit.” @[Mazikeen]