Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
Someone bitey lives in the lake, someone who can be pacified with gifts. Gale is not entirely sure how serious Mazikeen is, but he decides that he’ll have to find this Sabal someday, and see how much of the warning is true. He is just wondering who else might live here, when the black margay speaks again.
Breach is dead, Mazikeen tells him.
Gale’s navy mouth pulls into a thin line, and then a frown, and he contemplates what she has said. He’d not known the woman especially well, but it seems it had been well enough to mourn her passing. He had admired the young Alpha, and often thought of what she had admitted to him in the shade of wooden figures.
He’d always thought of them as rather alike, Breach and Mazikeen, and he had not been surprised to learn they were close friends. The black cat’s sadness is heavy in the dark air between them, and Gale shifts his weight on his piney perch much as he wavers internally with indecision.
In the end, he does what feels the best, because there’s never really enough time to think through the endless possibilities. Leaping gracefully onto her branch, Gale tries to hug her as best as he can manage in this feline shape. Her small size elicits a sense of protectiveness that she wouldn’t appreciate, and Gale is amused at the thought of telling her.
He succeeds in not smiling, but doesn’t take his shape into account, and the contentment emerges as a low purr. At her half-hearted joke though, the laugh finally escapes, a low chuckle that rumbles just as deep in his throat.
“Of course you are.” He tells her, drawing away to stretch languorously on the branch, ending in a flick of his long tail. “That is part of why I find you so fascinating.”
There is something freeing in being bold and honest, and for the first time Gale thinks that perhaps not all aspects of the Curse are terrible.
@[Mazikeen]
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