[private] just deliver me truth; gale

[breach]

for so long had my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary point

Gale does not ask further questions, and she is not certain whether she is relieved or frustrated by it. Whether she had hoped he would ask so that she could finally take off this weight and place it at someone else’s feet. That she could tell him about her childhood roaming. How she had met Yadigar and then his abusive father. How Ghaul had killed her to send a message to him—and how that had been merely the first of situations to plunge her straight into a drama that was not her own. How she’d never fought it.

How she loved the pack and what it represented, but that she resented her mother for dying.

How she wished it was Sochi leading it and not herself.

How she wished she was still a girl, adventuring and living with ease.

But he doesn’t ask and she chooses to feel relieved, shutting the door on her trauma once more. Instead she smiles, enjoying the way that he looked and the way she felt feminine and pretty for a moment. How she didn’t feel like the Alpha or the Queen or anything but Breach in that breath of time.

“A vacation?” she echoes, musing over the idea. She frowns as she looks out to the horizon, to the places where Tephra rises up against the sky. “I’m not sure I would even know where to start.” It feels like such a silly thing to admit—that she doesn’t even know how to relax anymore—and it leaves her feeling freshly vulnerable again, childish before him. She straightens again, as if she could brush away the illusion of her relative inexperience and instead focuses on the strange but handsome brindling of his coat.

“Tell me something of you, Gale,” she asks, desperate to turn the conversation back toward him.

though ritual pyre sending smoke to the sky as the building continues to burn
though rapt in the ruin, the pain in the grave, is lies you leave tied to the earth

@[Gale]