#bellecosebabe

The door to the agency finally clicks shut. Someone was here earlier, a woman, red-eyed and wound up. She screamed and cried until her voice went raw, the vases rattling, his bones shifting. Her face mottled red and she stormed out, a tissue balled in hand.

Verin is here now—was she sitting out in the waiting room?—and Sam wonders if he should close for the day. He could use some gin. 

She snaps, and it sounds desperate.

He knows that look about her. It's sharp like daggers, gnashing mad with the purpose of a wolf at hunt. He's made to feel a lamb, something small and bleating, and Gale can taste her bloodlust, her siren-song for murder... she's but a frantic lunacy. A blade unsheathed. He longs to near, the chirping of the crickets now lost behind him. Verin looms there menacing, a shadow so reviled, and even the stars past her tent seem horrified to kiss her; in the madness of her eyes, they hemorrhage blood-red.

In the reaches of his mind, he knows it prudent to turn and bolt. However, Gale, stalwart, is not a man of wisdom...rather, he steps inside, devoted, a man of heart.

"My place is by you," he says, determined. His brow furrows, and there is a steadfast line about his jaw. "If you believe me one to shrink at the threat of an insatiable hunger, some maligned compulsion, then I'm afraid you have misread me entirely. I will not leave you, and certainly not at your darkest moments."

❝ Don't you know? ❞ He looks up vaguely away from her, nodding to the direction of the security nearby on the exit side of the alley. Distracted, talking about how it was to look after inebriated college kids. ❝ Guess you don't ... ❞

Send ‘wax poetic’ for Gale to work some poetry; his muse is you: still accepting.

Verin, he thinks, show no mercy.

You, a knife-point, must not dare.

She'll sink blades into men, bleed hearts till they're empty, and she'll wear them, their hemorrhage, on her lips like rouge. She has done so already in innumerable measure, a rhapsody in agony and terrorized throes. Several hundreds she'd slaughtered. And something-thousands she'd maimed. So, add another, begs the inn-room, to your terrible ledger—a fallen wizard, your whetstone, to sharpen your edge.

Use your eyes that'd cleave me.

Or your daggered, clever tongue.

Remarkable. Are they sharing a candelit dinner? A glance at their surroundings suggests they're not. There are bodies at their feet, slaughter fragrant in the gnoll-clogged dungeon, and stained on her lips gleams a color too delicious... an erapturing ruby like her eyes so keen. Gale is smitten. Gale is stunned. And dispelling his thunder, ozone throbbing up his marrow, a half-sigh, near chuckle, half-leaves his throat.

Oh, Verin. "I believe you and I," he starts, "may have rather varying ideas on romantic concessions." Returning to her side, a far gnoll yips.

She is a goddess. Yes, yes, a bludgeoning and reckoning woman-storm. She hardly looks winded, chest swelled with an easy inhale, and the candles crackling in their wax baths beyond? They're shimmering, tittering, and crown her gold. Marvelous, he thinks. How breathlessly marvelous. She calmly nears him, blood creeping down her neck, and as it slips down her sternum, the wizard awes.

∗ 5o﹕ sender rests their forehead against receiver’s .

∗ 85﹕ sender grabs receiver roughly by the hair .

:))

𝟏𝟎𝟎 𝑵𝑶𝑵𝑽𝑬𝑹𝑩𝑨𝑳 𝑷𝑹𝑶𝑴𝑷𝑻𝑺: still accepting.

First, surprise. Then, heat.

Verin, viciously perfect, corrals him to a nearby wall. The brick nips along his spine, digs uncomfortable up his back, and the button of her trousers bites meanly at his hip. In other words, Gale deduces: everything's perfect.

She's hands that travel and a mouth that ravages. Her kiss claims his every breath, and she tastes of flames.

Heady, smoldering perhaps, Gale eagerly burns. There churns delight, oh so resplendently butterfly-winged, fluttering mad within his rioting heart. Heat lashes at his nerves, stokes want inside his marrow, and when she licks all animal at the sweep of his gums, something wounded, something ravenous delightfully stirs. How she stokes him, this creature... How she burns him alive! And when Verin tugs at his hair, his scalp singing with the pain, Gale, half-shuddering, lets loose a groan.

He pulls her toward his hip, the desperate press addicting.

She pulls back, smiles, and lets him breathe.

Gale, a soliloquy upon soliloquies: for every one word she spoke, he seemed to have hundreds, thousands; every rain drop in a torrential downpour, the storm that drives her to seek shelter in his tent. If she sought silence, she wouldn’t have come to him. If she sought silence from him, it’d be a cruelty to them both. She’d be neither the lighting or thunder that would dare to silence him. But he’s met with her silence, that quiet stare of hers from where she rests her head on his chest, as she continues, lightly tracing the valleys and lines of the palm of his hand before taking it into her own “And what word would that be? What single word could silence Gale of Waterdeep? And why in all of the nine hells would I dare to ever speak it.”