Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
Gale can feel Mazikeen’s snarl through his skin, where the pressure of her claws press against his chest. He can’t draw back from her snapping teeth, and he’s grateful she hadn’t bitten him.
This terrible reaction to his comment about her sense of humor is very unexpected.
He is still not entirely sure why she is shouting at him, but he knows that the breath is being pushed from his lungs as she accentuates her yelling, so he tries his hardest to listen, to understand.
She yells at him about losing her shifting and about the fears that he had assured her were unfounded. They are rehashing the past? But why is she yelling?
He knows he had hurt her but still winces at the aggressive verbal reminder, an injury that his healing cannot even begin to touch. But then she says something that isn’t true and Gale, who has been paying close attention to the truth of late, falls still.
He had been struggling before, shifting this way and that between the weight of her body, trying to find an escape. A creature without his healing might not have tried so long, for the thick blue skin of his brindle lionskin is no match for the rough stone of the mountainside.
She shoves away from him, and Gale exhales a bewildered: “Maze?” She stalks away, but not far; had she heard him? The glowing cat settles a short distance away from him but won’t meet his eyes, and Gale is awarded a brief moment of respite, a moment to think.
He frantically recalls what Maze had said, the way her ears had pulled back against her head and she’d snarled at him about love and...breaking her heart.
Oh.
Oh, so that’s what he’d done.
“It was a joke, Mazikeen.” He says, “A very very bad joke.” His tone is penitent, but he doesn’t shy away from her ferocious orange-eyed attention. He knows what it is like to face down the warrior in battle, and once more he finds a strange comparison between these two things.
With uncharacteristic boldness, he moves closer. Not snarling like Mazikeen, just closer. His face is still, but with the look of vague curiosity that Gale will never be able to entirely school away. And then he moves closer still, because even if she rips out his throat, Gale would simply grow a new one and continue.
He wants to be near her, because despite what his poor choice in words has conveyed this early morning, everything he had said to her before he’d left was true. He loves her. She is the most glorious, fascinating, wonderful thing he has ever set his eyes on - and he has Seen so much. But he has hurt her, and he will hurt her again, even as he loves her. This is what she'd agreed to only days before and already it is crumbling around them.
Gale isn't sure where the courage comes from to speak, but it comes: “My date.” He says, enunciating the words as though she might not hear them across the small space he’s put between them. “I do want you to be. I was just...just trying to be funny. And failed.” He pauses the briefest moment, adds: “Obviously.”
@[Mazikeen]
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