Gela has a fork halfway to her mouth when somebody takes the seat opposite and in lifting her head to say hello, pauses. In a way, she has been waiting for this to happen ever since they returned from Dirthamen, shaken, sore and with each other's secrets, but even anticipation can't stop her heart from racing now.
"Good evening." She won't bother with her fake tone. After a momentary wobble, the fork completes its journey.
He doesn't know a thing... He knows what he saw, but it would have felt unbelievable to him, presented as messily and half-formed as it was at the time. And now, with his memories back, he remembers Gela has no magic.
There is no uncertainty in his regard of her across the table. In the confusion of memory fragments in the oppressive void of knowing absolutely nothing else, it had been a war between doubt and restraint and fear and mistrust, given more to transparency on a day he'd forgotten not to be opaque.
Here, this is a little more like the guards' office, the candlelight, the focus set on her that isn't intending to flay back muscle and nerve for the answers they're disguising, but has an edge nevertheless. Studying.
"I wanted to continue our conversation from the temple, now that we've the benefit of context."
She won't go so far as to pretend she's surprised to hear he wants this. Honestly, Gela isn't sure how she's supposed to react. She is tense and nervous, and there's a lead weight in her stomach that makes continuing to eat her dinner very hard. Nobody has ever been this close to figuring this out about her.
A year, she's been here. She was doing so well.
She puts her fork down.
"Okay."
May as well make him work for it until the very end. "I'm assuming you have questions."
With no lead weight in his stomach, Marcus pulls apart the half-piece of bread he'd dropped onto his plate. The needle-point of his attention dipping down to ensure he doesn't make a mess when he uses the stew to soften the cracked crust. A couple of rings glint in nearby lantern light, a fancy looking signet stamped with, perhaps, initials, and another of cheap silver and black stone.
They click against the tankard as he goes to pick that up too.
"Can you explain to me the memory of yours I saw?"
Gela's thinking of it too... she doesn't have very solid memories of those years in the forest, only odd flashes and scents or feelings that invade her dreams. Sometimes she can feel dirt underneath paws she doesn't have any more, the phantom-limb sensation of being four-legged or having a tail, a bedraggled coat and long snout.
Like a memory, of being in the woods, and hunting. Like an animal would.
She's been quiet for a little bit too long. Words jump into her mouth so she says them with no regard for if they sound at all truthful, clawing for a way out. "It's a dream that I have, messere, whenever I'm too tired. That's all. It used to scare me awake on the road."
It's vivid, for him. It still sticks in his mind, as easily summoned as something that belongs to him. Familiar, in its way. He remembers, also, a forest in another world, the cracking of fine rabbit bones between strong jaws and the spilling of hot blood, and this other thing could be so much like those memories except for how that copper-tasting residue caught between fangs had, he had known (she had known), belonged to a person.
And it didn't feel like a dream. He drinks from his ale as he allows her explanation to fill the space between them. Measuring it.
"I know dreams," after a moment, setting down the tankard. "Mages who have endured the education of the south are well-versed in their make." A subtle shake of his head, a concrete certainty to it. "It wasn't that, what I recalled. It was a real thing. Again," is a prompt, for her to re-address the question.
Gela has to take her hand off the table and hide it in her lap so he won't see it begin to shiver. It's slipping away from her, spiraling out of control. She can't think of a good enough explanation and even if she could she has a feeling he wouldn't accept it, or worse, that he would acquiesce but stealth around behind her back anyway, nosing for clues, reading into things. Telling other people about it, asking if they'd heard anything strange about her, from her, and she can barely stand the thought of that.
Again, then.
"I'm a shape-shifter," she says suddenly, sitting upright. "Like Jude is, or the man who used to live here, the one who turned into birds and dogs.
Here, Marcus doesn't immediately speak again. A silence settles, but it's of a sort of receptive kind, an invitation to speak more to the topic rather than a cynical front.
She's too wound up to notice if she's getting through or not, and it's worse when he says nothing. His silence, is it judgemental? Or disbelieving?
She adds, "I don't like to use such power, if I can help it. I'd rather not, actually, I — nobody knows, about this."
He was the first to have met her. He will remember that she said nothing of the sort back then, so Gela likes to think this adds a sense of credibility.
He doesn't leave off his dinner. It could be calculated, some attempt to put her at ease or to throw off any external impression of a serious conversation being held in the dining hall, or some opposite thing, designed to unsettle. Or he was getting dinner and saw her and decided there is nothing like the present. Either way—
A few bites down, a hand back to his tankard. "I see no reason for you to declare yourself to the company," he says. Apparently, her claim has been accepted as fact. She is a mage. He has his biases. "And I have no desire to endanger you by asking it."
He tips the tankard slightly, a gesture. "But I'll need a measure of assurance from you. After dinner, will you come by my office so that we can speak frankly?"
Gela doesn't seem to understand that he's accepted her lie. She watches him eat his dinner in silence; it feels like she's sitting both there and across the room at the same time. Anxiety crawls the length of her spine, marching like ants. She swallows and blinks.
"Okay." Her voice is faint. She can't wrap her head around the magnitude of what she's just told him and what it will mean, for her. Gela doesn't dare start to wonder what Marcus will think when he inevitably discovers the truth.
There is time to take it back—
And say what in its place? That she is a shape-shifter but not by choice, and she's putting the Gallows and its residents in danger by staying? He'll ask to her leave, or he'll lock her up and Gela doesn't want either of those things to happen. She should but she likes it here. She likes this little life.
She says, hushed, "You're the only person I've told," as if in explanation of herself, the sudden pallor in her cheeks. When she said nobody, she meant nobody.
He remembers, rather distinctly, her startles at minor magical effect, having dismissed it, or even used it as confirmation that the woman who had turned up in the pouring rain at the gate was no apostate or runaway Circle mage. It isn't a thing that niggles at him now. Plenty of mages fear their own ability, the abilities of others. He only thinks of it, as she says that.
Marcus nods once at that. "Because you had to," he says. "Because I saw something you wouldn't have shared. Something like that could well happen again, with someone else."
A Templar, maybe, or any non-mage at all who can't mind their business. Studies her, noting the paleness to her skin, the hush in her voice.
But yes, he's right when she thinks on it. It could happen again, and with somebody who doesn't seek her out first for confirmation. The next person could go straight to a division head with the information or confront her in public.
She feels airless for a moment, her throat working.
"Stay," Marcus suggests. "Work. Eat your food," is more short-term, granted, a tip of his head that seems to acknowledge he's likely spoilt her appetite, and is nearly apologetic for it. "I would have you consider speaking to more folk than only me, but it can wait. And I can make suggestions."
Until he has time to properly assess the risk. Or she chooses, in the interim between sitting here in the dining hall and meeting him in his office, whether she wishes to vanish across the waters. He would prefer she did not, but it would be a decently deniable means of a problem solved on its own.
"Is there something you would know of me?" A slight raise of an eyebrow. "For the sake of fairness."
Gela forgot that she had food. When her attention finally goes to it she pushes the bowl sideways with her fingertips; she doesn't want it any more. She presumes he wants her to try to talk with other people who are mages and hide it, or don't hide it as the case may be. Lying, to all of those people... Her stomach turns over.
She won't run though. Gela doesn't know if she could begin to make herself do that, she feels inexorably tied to Riftwatch and her business.
A slow nod. She asks to have him speak to her, and then she doesn't have to talk back or think of good words through her churning brain. "What Circle did you come here from?"
Something in her choice of question is faintly amusing, but it's hard to read in his expression, given towards subtle microexpression, a reflexive restraint. It is not so intimate a memory as the one he gleaned from her, but he will answer regardless. "Starkhaven Circle," he says. "As is Tsenka, if you know her. I was taken there when I was young, nine or so." Although she has been put off her food, he continues with his own, now disassembling the second bit of bread on his plate. "And kept there for fourteen years.
"And then I came here," and he gestures, a little, with the bread piece, "to the Gallows, while it was still a Circle itself. The Starkhaven one had suffered a fire, so we were all relocated until it was rebuilt. We returned once it was, and then burned it down again. The rebellion. No Circles, after that."
Ever again, in his tone, but he scarcely need press that point.
"I know her," Gela echoes quietly, thinking. Thinking, of the golden College of Magi visible from the Cumberland markets, knowing from a young age that she wasn't supposed to go in there, or even near, and wondering what went on inside anyway. There was a lot of gossip about it; she speculated darkly with her friends when she was young. Marcus went to a Circle when he was nine. He was there for fourteen years.
A pang of sympathy draws her brows together momentarily.
"You've come a long way."
And he doesn't want to go back, ever. That much is obvious, and that's a feeling that Gela understands very well.
Sympathy is not the intention so much as—, well, but it's not a bad sign that it's evoked; he nods to her comment, accepting it.
But there's utility in sharing. A sense of even-handedness, as he'd said. A sense of dismantling preconception, and maybe just giving her a moment out of the focus of the conversation, as pale as she'd gone. He takes a bite of food, again, more pragmatic than polite in table manners.
"Perhaps a few days before I was taken to the Circle," Marcus says. "There was an accident by the fireplace, just some minor thing that went unnoticed. But I didn't keep that secret very well. I didn't wish to be alone with it."
Gela looks startled. She can't think of an appropriate lie so she tells him what is true, which is, "When I was twenty-eight." That's when it happened, but that number is very, very far away from nine.
But perhaps it's not uncommon? She doesn't offer an anecdote to go along with it.
Uncommon enough that there is a flicker of surprise across features that trend impassive. If it's impossible, Marcus doesn't raise objection, absorbing this next question instead.
Studies her, as if truly thinking about it in the moment, then says, "I don't wish to," as he scrapes a fork around his plate and then lays it down. "But the memory I took from you indicated that you aren't in complete possession of your abilities." And so, her having come into them at the late age of twenty-eight might make some sense, for better or for worse.
"I require assurance you aren't anymore a danger to yourself and those around you," as he collects up his things. The table creaks as he uses it to lever himself to his feet. "My office, when you're done eating."
Oh no. She sees that flicker of surprise and feels as if she is briefly plummeting downward as she waits for him to condemn her—
But he doesn't. At least not knowingly. The thing he says about her not being in control of her abilities is certainly a blow whether he knows it or not. Gela watches him scrape his fork around the plate and feels airless, holds herself perfectly still. It's so difficult to be in this conversation. She feels exhausted actually, like she needs to go and lay down. Being told to come to his office is truly the final straw for what little calm she has left.
Her voice accidentally skips when she answers. "Oh– okay. Okay."
She doesn't dare to look at the plate she'd pushed away from herself earlier, still half-full. She's not going to eat it but she'll definitely sit here and pretend to until he's left the room, so she hastens to take up her utensil again and holds it loosely, looking lost.
He can see the way that chills her. No regret forms in his expression, just a last evaluating look, as if it to try to separate panic from guilt, or whatever other thing that has her voice skip, has her hold herself so still.
"It'll be alright," Marcus tells her, an altered echo, and no less true now than it was a moment ago. It isn't nothing, no, but it isn't everything.
And he'll leave her be. In his office, up in the central tower, there is some paperwork he needs seeing to while he waits. There is the faint expectation that she might run, now, and affording her the opportunity had seemed like the correct maneuver, but then, perhaps there'd been a better way to inspire some trust. That he comes up short on how he might have done so doesn't dismiss the thought.
It's hard to reconcile with a mage who mightn't trust their own kind. But then, an apostate, one who never knew herself to be one for a substantial portion of her life—
Well, that's different.
She will find his door unlatched and cracked open, lamp light within tinged with cigarette smoke.
When he's left the hall, Gela doesn't immediately move. She sits there with her dinner cooling, congealing. She thinks.
There are a few options:
She could leave right now. Part of her thinks Marcus might have left her a gap between conversations for this purpose; he was there when she arrived unexpectedly in the dark, and must imagine her leaving in the same way. It wouldn't take long to pack. She's acquired things by staying here, but Gela remembers how to travel light. The only problem with this plan is that she doesn't want to go.
She could tell Marcus the truth in his office. She doesn't want to do that either, maybe even less than leaving. Somehow it feels too late to be considering it.
What Gela really wants to do is ask somebody for advice on how to get out of this, but she's told nobody of it. And she can't start now, there's no time... It feels like she sits at the table for ever, head in her hands, hating having fallen into this. Hating how attached she's become to this little life because now she can't bear to leave it.
When she arrives at his office she looks much the same as she did before, pale and resigned to her fate. No running, no hiding away, no asking for help... No casting magic either, so he'd better not ask her to do it. It's not that Marcus looks or acts at all like her mother, more that visiting him like this reminds Gela of her: a narrow room and chair, warm smoke and lamp-light, the sense of having done something wrong.
She finds she can't say anything to herald her arrival. She appears inside, without much noise.
Good, is all he thinks when the door cracks open wider and Gela quietly steps into the room. He might have thought the same had it turned out she'd run off, but with less satisfaction, some amount of regret.
A nod is followed with, "Latch the door," and setting about ordering the pages in front of him so he can se them aside without losing his place. The cigarette he has burning is wedged between his knuckles, held with practiced ease not to get ash everywhere as he does so. There's a chair opposite his side of the desk, slightly angled aside. A second desk is on the other side of the office, but seems somewhat unused.
It smells of smoke and fainter still of dog, in here, but clean, orderly. When Marcus sets aside his work, he doesn't then go to retrieve a fresh piece of paper and quill, just shifts his ashtray to a more convenient spot.
A gesture to a brass case on the desk silently asks: would she like one?
Gela does so, with the sinking feeling that she is locking herself in. Remembering that, technically, if anything does go wrong in this moment, she has locked him in here with her, doesn't help much. She feels shivery, no braver than before despite the break she took before walking herself up here.
"... No thank you," to the offer of a cigarette, as she slinks into the chair opposite his desk, curling into it, one leg tucked underneath of her body. She puts her hands delicately on the edges of it.
There is a lot of work on his desk. She cranes her head to look at it, curious, and then suddenly he takes it and sets it out of her line of sight. She retracts herself, embarrassed, glancing at her hands and nails.
One of the problems is that, "I don't know why you're doing this for me."
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"Good evening." She won't bother with her fake tone. After a momentary wobble, the fork completes its journey.
He doesn't know a thing... He knows what he saw, but it would have felt unbelievable to him, presented as messily and half-formed as it was at the time. And now, with his memories back, he remembers Gela has no magic.
She says, calm as anything, "How's your leg?"
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There is no uncertainty in his regard of her across the table. In the confusion of memory fragments in the oppressive void of knowing absolutely nothing else, it had been a war between doubt and restraint and fear and mistrust, given more to transparency on a day he'd forgotten not to be opaque.
Here, this is a little more like the guards' office, the candlelight, the focus set on her that isn't intending to flay back muscle and nerve for the answers they're disguising, but has an edge nevertheless. Studying.
"I wanted to continue our conversation from the temple, now that we've the benefit of context."
More context, anyway.
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A year, she's been here. She was doing so well.
She puts her fork down.
"Okay."
May as well make him work for it until the very end. "I'm assuming you have questions."
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With no lead weight in his stomach, Marcus pulls apart the half-piece of bread he'd dropped onto his plate. The needle-point of his attention dipping down to ensure he doesn't make a mess when he uses the stew to soften the cracked crust. A couple of rings glint in nearby lantern light, a fancy looking signet stamped with, perhaps, initials, and another of cheap silver and black stone.
They click against the tankard as he goes to pick that up too.
"Can you explain to me the memory of yours I saw?"
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Like a memory, of being in the woods, and hunting. Like an animal would.
She's been quiet for a little bit too long. Words jump into her mouth so she says them with no regard for if they sound at all truthful, clawing for a way out. "It's a dream that I have, messere, whenever I'm too tired. That's all. It used to scare me awake on the road."
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And it didn't feel like a dream. He drinks from his ale as he allows her explanation to fill the space between them. Measuring it.
"I know dreams," after a moment, setting down the tankard. "Mages who have endured the education of the south are well-versed in their make." A subtle shake of his head, a concrete certainty to it. "It wasn't that, what I recalled. It was a real thing. Again," is a prompt, for her to re-address the question.
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Again, then.
"I'm a shape-shifter," she says suddenly, sitting upright. "Like Jude is, or the man who used to live here, the one who turned into birds and dogs.
I'm the same."
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As he had suspected, then.
Here, Marcus doesn't immediately speak again. A silence settles, but it's of a sort of receptive kind, an invitation to speak more to the topic rather than a cynical front.
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She adds, "I don't like to use such power, if I can help it. I'd rather not, actually, I — nobody knows, about this."
He was the first to have met her. He will remember that she said nothing of the sort back then, so Gela likes to think this adds a sense of credibility.
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A few bites down, a hand back to his tankard. "I see no reason for you to declare yourself to the company," he says. Apparently, her claim has been accepted as fact. She is a mage. He has his biases. "And I have no desire to endanger you by asking it."
He tips the tankard slightly, a gesture. "But I'll need a measure of assurance from you. After dinner, will you come by my office so that we can speak frankly?"
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"Okay." Her voice is faint. She can't wrap her head around the magnitude of what she's just told him and what it will mean, for her. Gela doesn't dare start to wonder what Marcus will think when he inevitably discovers the truth.
There is time to take it back—
And say what in its place? That she is a shape-shifter but not by choice, and she's putting the Gallows and its residents in danger by staying? He'll ask to her leave, or he'll lock her up and Gela doesn't want either of those things to happen. She should but she likes it here. She likes this little life.
She says, hushed, "You're the only person I've told," as if in explanation of herself, the sudden pallor in her cheeks. When she said nobody, she meant nobody.
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Marcus nods once at that. "Because you had to," he says. "Because I saw something you wouldn't have shared. Something like that could well happen again, with someone else."
A Templar, maybe, or any non-mage at all who can't mind their business. Studies her, noting the paleness to her skin, the hush in her voice.
"It's alright," he offers.
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But yes, he's right when she thinks on it. It could happen again, and with somebody who doesn't seek her out first for confirmation. The next person could go straight to a division head with the information or confront her in public.
She feels airless for a moment, her throat working.
"What do I do?"
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"Stay," Marcus suggests. "Work. Eat your food," is more short-term, granted, a tip of his head that seems to acknowledge he's likely spoilt her appetite, and is nearly apologetic for it. "I would have you consider speaking to more folk than only me, but it can wait. And I can make suggestions."
Until he has time to properly assess the risk. Or she chooses, in the interim between sitting here in the dining hall and meeting him in his office, whether she wishes to vanish across the waters. He would prefer she did not, but it would be a decently deniable means of a problem solved on its own.
"Is there something you would know of me?" A slight raise of an eyebrow. "For the sake of fairness."
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She won't run though. Gela doesn't know if she could begin to make herself do that, she feels inexorably tied to Riftwatch and her business.
A slow nod. She asks to have him speak to her, and then she doesn't have to talk back or think of good words through her churning brain. "What Circle did you come here from?"
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Something in her choice of question is faintly amusing, but it's hard to read in his expression, given towards subtle microexpression, a reflexive restraint. It is not so intimate a memory as the one he gleaned from her, but he will answer regardless. "Starkhaven Circle," he says. "As is Tsenka, if you know her. I was taken there when I was young, nine or so." Although she has been put off her food, he continues with his own, now disassembling the second bit of bread on his plate. "And kept there for fourteen years.
"And then I came here," and he gestures, a little, with the bread piece, "to the Gallows, while it was still a Circle itself. The Starkhaven one had suffered a fire, so we were all relocated until it was rebuilt. We returned once it was, and then burned it down again. The rebellion. No Circles, after that."
Ever again, in his tone, but he scarcely need press that point.
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A pang of sympathy draws her brows together momentarily.
"You've come a long way."
And he doesn't want to go back, ever. That much is obvious, and that's a feeling that Gela understands very well.
"When did you know you could do it?"
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But there's utility in sharing. A sense of even-handedness, as he'd said. A sense of dismantling preconception, and maybe just giving her a moment out of the focus of the conversation, as pale as she'd gone. He takes a bite of food, again, more pragmatic than polite in table manners.
"Perhaps a few days before I was taken to the Circle," Marcus says. "There was an accident by the fireplace, just some minor thing that went unnoticed. But I didn't keep that secret very well. I didn't wish to be alone with it."
He nods to her, across the table. "You?"
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Gela looks startled. She can't think of an appropriate lie so she tells him what is true, which is, "When I was twenty-eight." That's when it happened, but that number is very, very far away from nine.
But perhaps it's not uncommon? She doesn't offer an anecdote to go along with it.
"You won't tell anyone of this. Will you?"
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Studies her, as if truly thinking about it in the moment, then says, "I don't wish to," as he scrapes a fork around his plate and then lays it down. "But the memory I took from you indicated that you aren't in complete possession of your abilities." And so, her having come into them at the late age of twenty-eight might make some sense, for better or for worse.
"I require assurance you aren't anymore a danger to yourself and those around you," as he collects up his things. The table creaks as he uses it to lever himself to his feet. "My office, when you're done eating."
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But he doesn't. At least not knowingly. The thing he says about her not being in control of her abilities is certainly a blow whether he knows it or not. Gela watches him scrape his fork around the plate and feels airless, holds herself perfectly still. It's so difficult to be in this conversation. She feels exhausted actually, like she needs to go and lay down. Being told to come to his office is truly the final straw for what little calm she has left.
Her voice accidentally skips when she answers. "Oh– okay. Okay."
She doesn't dare to look at the plate she'd pushed away from herself earlier, still half-full. She's not going to eat it but she'll definitely sit here and pretend to until he's left the room, so she hastens to take up her utensil again and holds it loosely, looking lost.
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"It'll be alright," Marcus tells her, an altered echo, and no less true now than it was a moment ago. It isn't nothing, no, but it isn't everything.
And he'll leave her be. In his office, up in the central tower, there is some paperwork he needs seeing to while he waits. There is the faint expectation that she might run, now, and affording her the opportunity had seemed like the correct maneuver, but then, perhaps there'd been a better way to inspire some trust. That he comes up short on how he might have done so doesn't dismiss the thought.
It's hard to reconcile with a mage who mightn't trust their own kind. But then, an apostate, one who never knew herself to be one for a substantial portion of her life—
Well, that's different.
She will find his door unlatched and cracked open, lamp light within tinged with cigarette smoke.
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There are a few options:
She could leave right now. Part of her thinks Marcus might have left her a gap between conversations for this purpose; he was there when she arrived unexpectedly in the dark, and must imagine her leaving in the same way. It wouldn't take long to pack. She's acquired things by staying here, but Gela remembers how to travel light. The only problem with this plan is that she doesn't want to go.
She could tell Marcus the truth in his office. She doesn't want to do that either, maybe even less than leaving. Somehow it feels too late to be considering it.
What Gela really wants to do is ask somebody for advice on how to get out of this, but she's told nobody of it. And she can't start now, there's no time... It feels like she sits at the table for ever, head in her hands, hating having fallen into this. Hating how attached she's become to this little life because now she can't bear to leave it.
When she arrives at his office she looks much the same as she did before, pale and resigned to her fate. No running, no hiding away, no asking for help... No casting magic either, so he'd better not ask her to do it. It's not that Marcus looks or acts at all like her mother, more that visiting him like this reminds Gela of her: a narrow room and chair, warm smoke and lamp-light, the sense of having done something wrong.
She finds she can't say anything to herald her arrival. She appears inside, without much noise.
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A nod is followed with, "Latch the door," and setting about ordering the pages in front of him so he can se them aside without losing his place. The cigarette he has burning is wedged between his knuckles, held with practiced ease not to get ash everywhere as he does so. There's a chair opposite his side of the desk, slightly angled aside. A second desk is on the other side of the office, but seems somewhat unused.
It smells of smoke and fainter still of dog, in here, but clean, orderly. When Marcus sets aside his work, he doesn't then go to retrieve a fresh piece of paper and quill, just shifts his ashtray to a more convenient spot.
A gesture to a brass case on the desk silently asks: would she like one?
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"... No thank you," to the offer of a cigarette, as she slinks into the chair opposite his desk, curling into it, one leg tucked underneath of her body. She puts her hands delicately on the edges of it.
There is a lot of work on his desk. She cranes her head to look at it, curious, and then suddenly he takes it and sets it out of her line of sight. She retracts herself, embarrassed, glancing at her hands and nails.
One of the problems is that, "I don't know why you're doing this for me."
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