#gaphael

Gale can feel Raphael’s teeth grinding together. The lines of his lean body are tense, every muscle knitted up tight like his furrowed brow.

Guilt chews at Gale despite his protective anger. Exhaling through his nose, the mage presses a hand flat to Raphael’s ruined back and murmurs “how long do we have?”

“It varies,” Raphael drawls. “Depending on what my dear lord husband requires.”

Bile and rage crowd into Gale’s mouth. Raphael’s pale back is a mottled battlefield of new whiplash wounds, frayed flesh going purple at the edges of what will surely become a new grid of scars on his ruined body.

No - not ruined. He has not been ruined in any way that could matter. No one, not even the great devil Mephistopheles, would be the ruin of such a man.

“You need to go,” Raphael says, not for the first time. “Or we will both suffer when he finds you here. Especially as you are.”

“And how am I?”

There’s a brief silence.

“Furious,” Raphael murmurs, turning his head to the side to eye Gale in his periphery. “I can taste it. Like licorice and whiskey.”

Gale smiles a bit. He takes in the elegance of Raphael’s aquiline profile and reaches out when a tear cuts down the devil’s cheek. Slowly, the mage rises from where he sits on a stool behind Raphael - sat backwards on a simple chair so Gale can tend to his back - and moves to stand before him.

The sanctuary of Raphael’s bedchamber is a fickle one. He knows this. It is less a sanctuary and more a concubine’s cell; the bathchamber has become Gale’s domain, the place where he can put a barrier - magical and mental - between Raphael and the rest of the room.

“Dekarios,” Raphael starts warningly; “Gale,” the wizard murmurs as he crouches down and takes in the bloodied plain of Raphael’s chest. “I think we’re past the threshold of surnames and bullish masculinity to keep the tenderness at bay, Raphael. At least, I hope we are.”

Perhaps it’s not the best thing, the fact that Gale finds anger so very fetching on Raphael’s vulpine face. Ever hurtling towards imminent demise, Gale reaches up and cups Raphael’s clenching jaw. He thumbs over the five o’clock shadow there and Raphael’s fury ebbs away to reveal a horribly aching thing - an emotion Gale cannot rightly put a name to because it encapsulates too much.

It bleeds. That much he knows.

And then - Raphael’s eyes flash open and he stiffens, swaying back and away from Gale’s touch.

“You need to go,” the Devil says urgently. “Dekarios - Gale. Please.”

His voice fractures around the word. True fear radiates from Raphael like heat from a burning coal.

“Please,” Raphael utters wretchedly again, lurching forward to fist a hand in Gale’s tunic, “take this victory and run - you have to go. Please, Gale - go. I will be - I will endure.”

Gale’s heart thunders in his throat. When Raphael splays his hand over his chest, he covers it with his own and cups Raphael’s jaw with his other.

There is a moment - a Moment - wherein Gale Dekarios realizes that the world as he’s known it has been irrevocably changed. Raphael’s eyes drop to his lips and Gale’s gut tightens like it’s been wound around a steel bar.

For a Moment suspended far out of fear, they share a breath between them. Their lips do not touch - but it’s a very close thing. Raphael makes a sound as if he’s been struck, mouth parting as his body strains towards Gale’s, drawn by the magnetic force that exists like a living thing between them.

And then -

“Please,” Raphael croaks. “Go.”

He’s done it.

He’s made the devil beg.

It’s a sour, hollow victory. Just as Gale toes the line between utter stupidity and selfish ignorance, his eyes fly open and he sits bolt upright in his cot. In his tent, in their camp - leagues and realms and ruins away from where Raphael lingers in the maw of a beast he cannot outrun.

He moves through his morning in a stupor, the scent of musk and cherries and sulphuric ozone burning at the back of his tongue. It’s not until Astarion says “as long as Gale stays on his good side, that is,” that Gale blinks and forces himself to look up from his own wringing hands.

“What?”

“I was saying,” Astarion says, irate that he has to repeat himself, “that we can count the devil as an ally - so long as you remain useful to him.”

It’s as if someone’s gone and dropped a chunk of glacier into his belly.

That’s right, isn’t it? Astarion’s right.

Gale is useful. Raphael didn’t beg him to flee out of any want to keep him, the man surrounding the orb, safe. If it weren’t for the orb, Raphael wouldn’t give half a damn about him.

And yet -

And yet.

Gale has sympathy for the devil. That will never change.

But something… something has changed.