Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
Watching her as intently as he is, Gale does not miss the way she looks away from his Alliance insignia. Her insignia, he thinks, though he’s never said such a thing out loud. He’s not frequently asked - not in this world of magnificently colored creatures - but he’s always flared it to show the inverted V where blood had once stained his feathers and said it came from a fight he’d very nearly lost.
He wonders, sometimes, what might have happened if he had lost. Would the world still be shrouded in darkness? Would Mazikeen have been able to defeat Jamie and kept the Monsters at bay to stop the eclipse? This Mazikeen might have, he thinks as he admires the majestic shape of the Haast’s eagle, listening to her explanation.
Dragons are very old, Gale thinks, recalling the stone skeleton in Loess. Perhaps they have remained when the rest of these prehistoric creatures she speaks of live only in their descendents. What have dragons become, he finds himself thinking? Gale might have become lost in this line of thought for some time, and indeed he is quiet for some time and his blue gaze goes soft in a way that says he is thinking and not Seeing.
But then Mazikeen’s compliment interrupts him, and he looks back just in time to lock eyes with her as she tells him that he is getting good. He tilts his osprey’s head, which is less telling than a blush across an unfeathered face.
The memories he’d lost return to him, pulled back by the strong emotions, and the words he’d just spoken feel as though a stranger had said them. He scowls. Or he would have if he were a horse, and as an osprey just shuffles his feet which could mean a dozen things.
The tumultuous clash of emotions is immensely uncomfortable, and Gale draws in on himself, an expression familiar across all species. He needs to tell her.
But she doesn’t seem angry or sad or anything bad at all, and the thought of changing that, of sharing the news that he has begun to slowly lose his mind, seem suddenly insurmountable. Gale opens his mouth to tell her, and again closes it with a click. Odd behavior for a creature so chatty as Gale. The silent battle, the urge to lie and tell the truth, play out behind a blank expression, until he finally says something that satiates the darkness and his own need to be truthful:
“I miss you. I think about you all the time.” The darkness withdraws, and Gale seizes the chance to add three quick words just a moment behind it. “I’ve felt it.” The bird’s sharp eyes are inscrutable, and he soons breaks her gaze as he turns to face the lake.
By the time his blue eyes settle on the distant water, he has changed from an osprey to an ocelot, and the salmon in his feathers has become the central color of yellow rosettes on a summer sky blue body.
He’s showing off, and then he casually stretches his body forward and moves to a lower branch. It’s placed him just out of reach of Mazikeen’s sharp talons were she to lunge, and the way he looks up at her with wide blue feline eyes is with over-exaggerated innocence.
He lifts a paw to move again, but waits, his blue paw poised as he watches Mazikeen overhead for a reaction.
Sometime during their conversation, Erne had disappeared. Gale, absorbed entirely by the shifter overhead, doesn’t even notice.
@[Mazikeen]
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