Snippet Sunday

Snippet Sunday

Thank you @alpydk for tagging me!

Right now I'm trying to add my favourite Shakespeare's sonnet (what's the text about a bard without the Bard?). But I want to share with you a little fluff from the 4th chapter of "Twin Compasses". Gale and Laerie (Tav) sit by the fire at night.

‘I wish I had a bed in a tavern, a hot bath and a good story to lull me into meditating. But here I cannot even have a nice pillow,’ she stretched her neck and winced from pain. ‘I have to put my head on my backpack.’ ‘I always thought elves meditate like monks, in the sitting position. But I think I can help you a bit.’ Gale looked away and started waving his hands in a somatic component for a spell. ‘Pulvinar,’ he pronounced cleanly and evenly. In an instant a purple pillow with a pink hem appeared on his lap. When he looked up at Laerie, he saw admiration and wonder in her eyes. His heart swelled. ‘A little plush present for our fearless leader,’ he said with a flourish and held it out to the elf. ‘Thank you so much,’ she smiled, taking the present. Laerie hugged the pillow and put her chin on top of it. ‘You should teach me this spell.’

It's the first time I've been tagged, so sorry if I mix up something (or tag someone for the secon time). I'll tag @elspethdekarios and @hotnerdywizard (maybe you have something?).

My new graphics card has been delivered today! I will finally have access to most of my screenshots of Laerie (and Gale) and to game saves with her. I plan to record kisses <3

Behold ✨Gale Dekarios✨

A STRONG GALE here for everyone! I finally got access to my old screenshots and saves! Just for the record, I do not use mods right now, because I want to beat Honour mode and get the achievement.

Gale and Tav sleeping together, not sex but sharing a bedroll. Maybe is happens after they have sex or sometime after when their in Gale’s tent and fall asleep. I imagine is been a while or maybe not ever that Gale’s shared a bed with someone who isn’t Tara.

Ohhhh what a lovely image, dear anon! I imagine you're right--Gale's slept with other people before, but he's never (or very rarely) just slept with them in the non-euphemistic sense of the term. Given that, I hope this serves! (The poem Gale remembers is "Darkness" by Byron.)

Bring the day

Gale x gn!Tav

The Shadow-Cursed lands, Gale decided, sucked all life and joy from the marrow.

In the morning they woke to a darkness that didn't lift, that huddled like a heavy and suffocating weight over their feeble firelight. Gale, eating a breakfast leached of taste, recalled a line from an old poem-- Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day--and wondered halfheartedly if the poet had seen Reithwin for himself.

The curse followed them everywhere, pressing impatiently against the wards set around Last Light, the feebler protections of Shadowheart's mace and their torches. Gale walked silently behind Tav and Wyll, not quite seeing the path under his feet. Moonrise loomed ahead of him. No matter Tav's words, no matter how much of Gale wanted to believe them and take comfort in the night they'd spent together, the tower (his failure, his redemption) pulled at him inexorably. Despite Elminster's charm the Orb still ached, a curse within a curse.

At the end of that dark-muffled day, Gale slunk back to his tent, the thought of eating, or making anything to eat, beyond even his optimism, or Lae'zel's irritated observation that the body needed nourishment as the curse fed on the soul. Gale sank down onto his bedroll, thought about calling up a magelight to try to read, and gave up when the thought of raising his hand and speaking the spell, let alone concentrating on a book, proved too much. Instead, he settled as best he could against his pillow and stared at the dim ceiling of the tent.

He would have stared for hours until sleep claimed him, if not for a rustle at his tent flap, and Tav's unmistakable presence in the entryway. For a moment, the curse lightened fractionally.

"Hey," Tav said, smile bright in the darkness. "I came to see if you wanted something to eat after all."

"It's hard to want things in a place such as this." Tav was the exception--his desire, his appetite, the part of him that burned unceasing, might be banked under his exhaustion but it would never fail. Gale drank in that already-beloved form, thirsty for it.

"That's not what you said the other day," Tav said, almost laughing. Gale snorted and looked back up at the roof of the tent.

When he wasn't looking, Tav (as had happened so many times already) slid into his space, discarding shirt and shimmying awkwardly out of trousers until only a warm body clad in scraps of underthings remained to twine around his own.

"I... you'll have to forgive me, my love," Gale said, swallowing against the warmth of familiar, already much-beloved flesh against his. He wrapped an arm around sturdy shoulders, even if his next words would replace their closeness with distance. "I'm afraid I'm not up to much tonight, certainly not our... recent pyrotechnics."

Tav's breath huffed against his neck, not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh, and burrowed more closely against him. "I didn't come here for sex, Gale."

Gale craned his head, catching the edges of cheekbone, jaw gleaming eyes in the darkness. "You didn't?"

"No." This would be an understandable place for Tav to tease him, but instead Tav merely said, "I knew something was wrong when I didn't see the lights come on. You always read before bed."

"You noticed that?" Gale asked, numb with something like amazement.

Tav hummed. "And that you've managed to hide at least one bottle of good wine from Wyll and Shadowheart. And that you sneak the books you've already read or have copies of into Astarion's tent. And that you talk to yourself while you read, usually arguing with the author."

Gale couldn't quite name what blossomed in his chest, something bright and lovely and unaccountably brilliant in the shrouding night. When he spoke, he had to speak around a fullness that threatened to choke him. "All of that? Is there anything else?"

"So many things," Tav said. A gentle kiss landed at the base of his neck, Tav nuzzling aside his collar. "But as a very wise wizard once said, we'd be here until morning if I tried to list them all. You're an easy person to notice." Before Gale could say anything about not losing his touch, Tav added, "And an easier person to love."

Don't say those things. Gale tried to say that, at least, but the words wouldn't come. He could only lie where he was, Tav enfolding him in warmth and a stubborn tenderness, and swallow a truth he'd started to think wasn't the truth anymore.

"I'd say it'll be better tomorrow," Tav said, "but I think we both know that's a lie." At Gale's quiet laugh, Tav continued, "At least for tonight... let's sleep together. Just sleep."

"Anything you require of me," Gale said as gallantly as he could--not very gallantly, considering how small his voice was, how lost in confusion he felt himself.

"Not a requirement," Tav said with another sigh. Strong hands, careful fingers, gathered him closer, stroking fragments back into place. "At least, not for me. For you."

"I've never just slept with anyone before," Gale admitted. He'd never just slept with Mystra--what use have gods, have Chosen, for sleeping? With other mortals they'd shared space for a night (if Gale slept at all), not this strange, mostly-silent communion.

"Well," Tav said lightly, "there's a first time for everything."

"This is true," Gale said.

The night they'd spent together they'd slept twined around each other, too exhausted and sated to move. This felt different, intentional--and Tav didn't seem to expect anything, only the privilege of being with him. Gale was not used to thinking of that in the context of being taken care of--the privilege of learning from Gale of Waterdeep, yes; the privilege of holding Gale Dekarios while he tried to put himself back together, no.

"C'mon," Tav said, the command punctuated with a yawn and a tightening of arms around him. "Let's sleep."

"I'll see you in your dreams, love," Gale said, which got him a quiet laugh and a kiss on the cheek. "Rest well."

He let the magelights fade, leaving them in the curse-dark night and thesilence of a dead, cold land. And yet, Gale thought, he himself was more alight than before--alive, warm, sliding deeper into Tav's embrace, into sleep, into something close to peace.

i just want gale to have emotional safety to process all that’s happened to him and to grow and prosper. i love him so much 🥹

Dearest beloved anon, I want this so much for him too.

We can already see how much happier a human Gale is in the epilogue (whether or not he's partnered), how he's discovered he doesn't need to be More, Always More, or the great and respected Archmage-Chosen, or the elaborate, immaculate facade of Gale of Waterdeep (so immaculate an illusion he'd believed in it).

[CW: the following gets a little heavy. Suicidal ideation, lots of self-hatred, spiraling, that sort of thing]

I imagine, though, that processing--once it begins--is painful and harrowing. For a time he doesn't recognize the angry, bitter, fearful man who rears his head to snap at Tara, Morena, Tav, whenever they try to comfort him. He shouldn't need and doesn't want help, he wants to be furious, he wants to get the crown back somehow and ascend so he can be safe, so he can show everyone his power is his own, he wants to turn back time and be a Chosen again, sheltered under the patronage of his goddess, he wants to burn everything down like Karlach. His magic feels like it's rusting, withering, eaten away by the acid he thinks the Orb must surely have left inside him. Or, even worse, he realizes that Mystra lied to him: the Orb is inside him still, and in those harrowing moments he feels that hideous thing clawing at his heart and his throat, swelling inside him, and there's no time to get away, no time, he's going to die and so many innocents will pay the price for his hubris after all--

It's a cave he's dragged back to time and time again, just when he'd thought he'd escaped from it. He wonders, when he's trapped in that darkness, why the hell he'd listened to Tav, why the cruelty to convince him to keep living, why his own stupidity and selfishness for fighting to live when he was unworthy of it--or, in a heartbeat, why he'd so foolishly limited himself to Tav's mortality when he was worthy of so much more, when he could have struck down Mystra and Elminster, felled the Blackstaff Tower and Toril itself to show the planes themselves a fraction of what he's capable of. Here is your reward for your service to a god, he would have said, and presented Tav with the realms themselves like war trophies.

Other times he remembers himself as that little boy, heartbroken over the ruin of his neighbor's rosebush. He wants to tell that boy--and the headstrong teenager and the prideful young man that boy would grow into--to run fast and far. He pities that boy as he demonstrates such easy mastery of his art and basks in the praise and favor of his goddess. Don't you know what's happening to you? he asks his past self, watching the threads of Weave and fate and failure twine around him, and thinks with bitter despair that even if he had known, he wouldn't have listened. How much of that obstinancy had Mystra seen in him? Had she seen his future and guided him towards it with praise and gentle touches and promises of greatness, a sacrifice who had conveniently and naively presented itself to her? Had he condemned himself? Both?

He feels the world falling apart around him, tells himself maybe he helped save the world for other people after all, that his being here is some cosmic error, or worse, a cosmic joke. Do you want to live so badly, Gale Dekarios? Let's see how you like it. The disbelieving, condescending faces of his apprentices when he tells them not to follow his path--disbelieving, because he did it, didn't he? he's one of the Saviors of the Gate, in the full flourish of his power once more, famous (however much he tries not to be)--make him sick with a helpless fury and he leaves the classroom before he does something that will get him fired.

He takes leave from the Academy and locks himself in his tower. Tav, with a resigned sigh and threats to check up on him, goes to stay with Morena after Gale makes it explicitly clear he wants to be left alone. Sometimes Tav comes over and holds Gale while he weeps, or watches while he rages. If there's any comment on the empty pedestal where Mystra's statue stood, or the stone dust on the floor of the study, it's kept back behind worried lips. When all Gale can do is sit on his balcony and stare at the sea, Tav watches the tides with him. Tav brings him food Gale can only choke down because Tav orders him to, and only sleeps--or lies in bed--because Tav guides him there with gentle, inexorable hands, and lays him down and sits with him in the dark.

Slowly, slowly, the distance between those dark days stretches out until the darkness retreats to nightmares that leave Gale breathless or to odd moments when he has to pause and steady himself as if against a blow before continuing on. Tav moves back in and graciously accepts apologies Gale knows are pathetically insufficient to the debt. He tries to show Tav his gratitude every day, in home-cooked meals (Gale hadn't cooked properly in months), in gifts he knows Tav would love, in reading in bed every night, in meeting Tav for lunch once Gale starts teaching again. At last Tav wraps strong, beloved arms around him and tells him just being here, just being Gale, is enough, has always been.

"I hurt you so much," Gale whispers. "So many times over, for no better reason than that you were there to hurt."

"And if I'd been in your place?" Tav asks, gathering his tearstreaked face close, heedless of the warm wetness on skin and clothes. "If I'd been the one who hurt you?"

"You never would have done that," Gale protests.

Tav huffs. "Call it a thought experiment. What if?"

"You know I would never leave you." Gale thinks his heart might rip apart at the very thought. "You must know if you ever have need for me, for any reason, I would do anything in my power to help you. And more besides."

"Then that's your answer," Tav says. "Everything in my power. For you. And more besides."

And Gale, for the first time, believes it.