Chapter Text
London, 1992.
Everyone looks at him. He does not move a muscle.
Gale Dekarios does not feel brave.
He is a quiet man, a man with fewer friends than vices, a man who enjoys his solitude and his books and his sadness. His hair is brown. His favourite colour is purple. He has two piercings and a face tattoo he can't remember asking for.
He is sitting on a hard plastic chair, and everyone is looking at him. Twelve pairs of eyes—thirteen, if his own in the mirror across the hall are to be counted—arranged in a circle, looking with expectation and dimly-shroud interest. Gale can't move, can't breathe, can't look at any of them directly.
The psychiatrist at the rehabilitation centre had called him brave. She had said that what he’d been through would have been enough to kill someone. Yet here he is, alive. With plenty of therapy and group meetings and medication ahead of him, yes, but alive.
“There is no judgement here.”
That's Halsin, the meeting leader, quoting directly from a poster in the hallway. Across the circle, he has one big leg crossed over the other at the ankle, a cardboard coffee cup dangling between his fingers. He utterly dwarfs it.
Gale’s throat is so dry it pricks at his eyes. He shakes his head once, sure that if he opens his mouth he would burst into awful, ugly tears.
He thinks of his students. Once upon a time, he could give five lectures in a day without batting an eyelid.
Oh, how the mighty fall.
The rest of the meeting is painstaking, but Halsin doesn't ask him to speak again. Gale stares at the small cup in Halsin’s big hands and lets the conversation run off him like water. He thinks of Tara and his fireplace and his books, and eventually it's time to leave.
He makes quick work of his coat and satchel; he’d worn the same suit he used to wear for meetings with the Dean, and everyone else’s hoodies and jeans are making him feel quite exposed.
Halsin hovers like he wants to approach—such a large creature cannot quite master subtlety—but Gale walks straight past him and out of the door.
At some point, it had started to rain. Gale turns his collar up against the wind and stares at his shoes. Oxfords. Brown. Polished this morning. Muddy, now, because the rain has picked up to something catastrophic.
Gale used to hate nothing more than London in the wintertime, when the Christmas lights come down and the first breath of spring hangs in the air. Now, he finds it strangely comforting. Grey February is a great time to be miserable, and nobody on the tube cares if he smiles or not.
A bus soars past, straight through a puddle from a backed-up drain, splashes icy water all up his left side and seizes all of the air from his chest.
His coat is ruined. His hair stinks. His shoes need another polish.
And, worst of all, he is so cold.
He crosses his arms around himself. The cold is nothing to be afraid of. The underground isn't far. His teeth chatter until it hurts.
In his periphery, the soft glow of lamplight calls.
The coffee shop is inset into the bottom floor of a grandiose building. Nothing much to write home about; these types of shops have been popping up all over London since the early eighties, but it looks warm and dry and inviting. The sign swinging in the wind matches the logo of the cup he had stared at for the entirety of the meeting. The Grove. The entire window is outlined with plastic ivy, the frame painted a dark forest green.
Gale takes a breath—icy, painful—and ducks inside.
He is immediately hit with three senses; warmth, so warm that sweat suddenly beads at the back of his neck; smell, heady coffee and sweet cake; sight, a man leaning over the counter on his elbows, head cocked ever so.
He thinks of Tara.
“Hello, darling. What’s your poison?”
“Uh—”
Gale stops. The man is tall, waifish, blonde, a white shirt rolled up to his elbows. There is a streak of coffee on his right sleeve.
“I hope you don’t take offence,” he's saying, “but you look positively wretched. Caffeine?”
Gale’s heart skips; he isn't sure if… he doesn't…
“No," he says.
The man just chuckles—deep and decadent, like the smell in the air.
“Alright, what about chocolate?”
“Chocolate,” Gale repeats. “Yes. Please. That would be—yes.”
“Delightful. Take a seat, dear, I’ll come to you.”
Gale swallows, nods. He realises absently that his scarf is dripping onto the floor, so he unloops it from his neck and tucks it over the back of a bar stool against the front window. His coat is next—thankfully it's taken the brunt of the splash, so his suit underneath is dry besides the cuffs of his sleeves.
Someone appears at his elbow. He starts, and the tall barista just grins back at him.
Long, delicate fingers around a pale yellow mug. Whipped cream piled high atop the drink, and marshmallows.
Gale can't remember the last time he had marshmallows.
“Thank you,” he says, choked, still recovering from the embarrassment of jumping like a frightened animal.
“Anytime,” the barista replies. He eyes Gale’s coat, “Would you like me to put that over the radiator? It seems you got quite the tsunami.”
Gale thinks of the warmth of the shop and how cold he’d been. He watches the barista’s long fingers—pianist hands, he thinks absently—trace towards the collar of his coat on the seat.
“That would be great,” he says, “thank you.”
The barista plucks up his coat and tucks it over his arm, “Of course. Give me a wink if you need anything.”
With that, he's off, and Gale is alone.
He eats a marshmallow first and spends a long time poking at the mountain of whipped cream while watching people walk by. Everyone is so busy, so caught up in their own everything that they can't possibly care about him in the window, sipping a—divine, truly—hot chocolate and observing this small portion of their day. He wonders if any of them are coming or going from the same community centre as him, if any of them had ever stared at their hands and wondered what exactly they were going to do with the rest of their life, now that they had it back.
It's only when he's on the underground that he realises he hasn't paid for the drink.
The conditions of his release from rehab are simple: weekly hour-long phone calls with his therapist, living with at least one other person for the first six months after release, and mandatory Narcotics Anonymous sessions at the community centre every other day.
This means he has plenty of opportunities to go back and pay for that hot chocolate.
Two weeks later, he steps through the doors again.
The girl behind the counter is young and sullen. Her dark hair falls over her eyes as she scowls down at the till. Gale takes step back towards the door; he will just have to live with being a criminal.
“Ah, there he is, my rainwater prince.”
And there's the blonde barista again, emerging from a staff-only door with an armful of clean coffee cups.
“Hello, I just came to apologise. I realised I—”
“Left your coat?” He passes the dishes off onto the young girl, whose scowl only deepens. “I was wondering when you would be back for it. I actually considered taking it for myself but it isn’t exactly my style. I’m not sure why you’re apologising for that though, other than for nearly jeopardising my reputation with your lousy taste in coats, of course.”
“The drink,” Gale says, “I didn’t pay.”
The barista throws his head back with that delightful laugh. “Oh, sweetness. It was a gift, no payment needed! You looked, quite frankly, absolutely miserable, so it was the least I could do.”
Gale gawks. A gift. He doesn't even know this man.
“I—thank you,” he says, reaching for his wallet, “that’s very kind, but I really would hate for you to think me ill-mannered, so if you’d just let me pay…”
The barista curls a hand around the card reader.
“Ah-ah. The most ill-mannered thing would be to reject a gift, don’t you think?”
He narrows his eyes—dark brown, so rich they are almost red—and Gale has the sudden feeling of being in a standoff.
“I—”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No.”
Gale scowls. “Alright then. Can I have the same as last time?”
The barista grins. “Absolutely. Will you be gracing us with your presence for longer or would you like to take it out?”
Shit. His meeting. According to his watch, it started five minutes ago.
“Shit. Actually—forget about it. I’ll—thank you.”
He turns on his heel out of the door, leaving the shop in his wake.
The next time he visits, Gale gives himself far more time and promises that he is absolutely going to retrieve his coat. It's his favourite.
“Cinderella!”
That's the barista, looking up over the coffee machine. He seems genuinely happy to see him, or at least a little amused. It's only been two days since his last visit; he really wants that coat back.
“It’s Gale, by the way. So you can stop calling me…” He waves his hands around.
“I will still be calling you…” he mocks the gesture. “But it’s Astarion, at your service. Are you actually going to buy anything today, or will I have to chase you halfway to Soho this time?”
“Hot chocolate. Please.”
Astarion smiles. “Coming right up.”
Thus begins Gale’s new routine. Every other day, like clockwork, he leaves his mother’s house an hour before his meeting and goes to get his hot chocolate. Astarion seems to always be working on these days, and they fall into a sort of camaraderie. If the definition of camaraderie is Astarion making him a hot chocolate and making quips about his hair, his beard, the stunted way he speaks, anything else he can get his hands on, and Gale feeling mightily awkward and also grateful to have somebody to speak to. They don't share any personal information other than their names. Gale knows that Astarion has white hair and likes to dress to impress despite the shop’s casual dress code, and Astarion knows that Gale likes hot chocolate and always has an appointment at midday.
It's nice, pleasant, Halsin would probably say “exactly what Gale needs”, although he still hasn't so much as opened his mouth in a meeting.