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Most nights, after her evening prayer to Kelemvor, Keighley finds sleep the way a stone sinks into a riverbed. Tumultuous thoughts slow just long enough for her to close her eyes and allow her problems to transform into misty figures she doesn't remember by morning. Tonight the river is frozen. She skitters across it until she's fidgeting and barely scratching on the azure canvas illuminated from the inside by a dimmed lantern.
"Come for another hug?" Gale's low-lidded gaze contrasts the curious and welcoming smirk.
"Did I wake you? I saw the light."
He pushes the canvas farther aside and there's a Gale-sized impression in the bundle of blankets garnished with an open faced book.
"Up late reading, I'm afraid. The habit hasn't left me despite being leagues from home. I would be lying, though, to say I wasn't beginning to doze."
She should leave him be.
"Would you like to sit with me for a bit?"
"I don't want to intrude."
"Hardly intruding when you've an open invitation."
The lines by his eyes are soft and far too patient.
"I can't sleep. I don't know why I decided to make it your problem."
She scrubs a hand down her face and steps back in the direction of her tent. The warm breadth of his palm slides into its dedicated slot in the middle of her back to halt her retreat.
"If you are a problem," he whispers and gathers her close to himself and the tent entrance, "then you're the only one I'm happy to have."
Once she's effectively trapped by the fluttering blue walls, Gale adjusts the blankets and lone pillow farther from a precariously stacked pile of books. Keighley stands back, listless, as he expands his private space to accommodate her. He looks pleased with the results and her chest aches with why this situation is familiar.
"Do you have siblings, Gale?"
"No, why?"
She slips her sandals off, thoughts of escape having never existed, and mirrors him as he crawls to the side he's claimed.
"You just look very at-home with what you're doing right now."
"Comforting you?"
She smiles because she has started to believe he may enjoy doing just that.
"Sure, but I meant making room in your bed to do so."
The confused scrunch of his brow encourages her to elaborate.
"I used to do the same thing for my brother. My sister was so small she could crawl into bed with me without me even knowing but my brother was closer to my age. I would have to make room where there wasn't much."
"Ah, well, I understand. I used to run to my mother's room. I must've been nearly twelve when I grew out of it."
She wonders when her brother would have grown out of it. If her sister would have ever.
"What used to keep you up?"
Gale purses his lips and his cheek dimples above his scruff. "Oh, I guess everything for a while there. I'd hear an owl screech too close to my window or hear tavern goers stumble their way home and be up and at her door."
Keighley rubs the blanket between her thumb and index finger. They'd bought bedding for everyone at the Emerald Grove, identical sets, yet she swears this is softer than the one she left cooling on her own bedroll.
"Did everything stop being scary when you were twelve?"
He chuckles. "No, miraculously not. I'd actually summoned Tara and when she slept in my room that first night I… didn't feel afraid once."
Keighley pulls her leg closer, resting her cheek on the round of her knee, and studies him. "She stopped the feeling altogether. I wonder which I did for them," her hushed musing is more for herself.
"What do you mean?"
"If I made my siblings feel comforted or protected. I wonder if I was the salve or the shield."
Gale's brown eyes wash over her face and then the line of her silhouette where their legs nearly touch. Trying to decide which role she'd be better at, probably. But his gaze drifts to the lantern humming with a contained light spell.
"I'll agree there's nuance but, boiled down, they're both a feeling of being safe."
The word seems to echo. Is that why her feet walked her straight to his metaphorical door? She knew he would see her agitated state and open his arms like he has every time before.
"What are their names? Your siblings."
"Finley. Fin and Maeve."
"Pretty," he hums. "Did you ever read to them?"
Oh, she'd tried. "They didn't like it. They'd ask too many questions and forget they were supposed to be going to sleep. We usually talked until they nodded off or I'd hum lullabies."
The teasing toothy grin comes and goes before he can make some smart remark. Gale's brow wrinkles in irritation. "For the life of me, I can't think of a single lullaby!"
Her bark of a laugh is swallowed by the acoustics of the canvas walls.
"Good! You're not trying to put me to sleep. I'm going back to my tent once you get my mind off… everything."
Gale's cheek inflates with a small stream of breath leaving the corner of his mouth. "Everything? You may be spending your night here, with a tall order like that. All the things? I'm not sure I even possess a book about the inverse. A book on nothing would just be a new journal."
Keighley snorts and shoves his shoulder. When he rocks himself upright their outer thighs press together.
"You know what I mean." She wags her finger at her head as she scans the titles of nearby books. "The tadpole is up there dislodging my thoughts, making it hard to sleep."
She slips a book from its pile and hands it to Gale. "Here, this might inspire nothingness."
He takes the book and taps her head with the cover. "I'm not sure that's how our brains or the illithid tadpole works and, I'll have you know, My Battered Tankard Filled is an evocative thoughtpiece." Gale shifts down in their nest until his shoulders are flat against the bedroll, his chin tucked into his chest, with the book propped up on his abdomen."But, I'll indulge you."
"Is that how you read in bed?"
"Every night. Maximum comfort."
And now she knows why he's always complaining about his back.
Gale starts to read and she stays upright.
For what it's worth, the book isn't boring. But when she shared that her siblings didn't find reading to be soothing it hadn't applied to her. It doesn't help that his voice is smooth and warm, lilting in its familiarity with this author's musings. So she stays sitting with her body curled around her knees with the side of her hip pressed to his shoulder.
"Do you want to see the illustrations?"
Keighley jolts. Were her eyes shut? Gale's open gaze as he points to a sketch of people dancing doesn't let on that she'd done more than blink. She shifts, sinks to her side and rests on her elbow to see the details. Her mind must've finally wandered a few sentences back but she knows where they are.
Gale starts up again and even being this much closer she can hear a difference in his voice. Or maybe it's tactile since the it's from the way his chest rumbles when he speaks.
She has to follow along while he reads because her mind starts to drift to things like why she needs to stay awake. How friends can misinterpret a desire to be close like this. Her thoughts flit to why their expectations would be lofty in her eyes. She's never experienced the love described in all the books she's read. She's loved friends and family but never anything that's stirred her up the way romance is supposed to.
Which is why she can't sleep here. She can't sleep here because she'll never love this romantic, goddess-seducing, man the way he needs to be loved. Do goddesses sleep? Maybe he's only ever slept beside friends and family. She's filling his tressym's role as his protector while he's away from home.
These thoughts spiral as her body relaxes, her head nodding along with her justification for why falling asleep beside Gale is fine. When she reaches the desired conclusion, supported by an argument she won't remember in the morning, finding sleep is like nestling into a riverbed.
"There comes a time in the dance of a man and maid when truths must be told. Wise folk see to it that such times come early and often. Most of us leave such uncomfortable moments until far too late, when words are apt to burn or worse."
What truths has he to tell her, he wonders.
Gale watched her fight sleep from the moment she sat down. Weary as she seemed outside, in the dancing light of his tent he could see the dark circles under her eyes that were normally hidden by makeup.
So skittish over needing something so freely given.
Gale gently closes the book and sets it aside. He'll have to figure out which stack she pulled it from tomorrow.
He'd witnessed her jagged descent into sleep from the corner of his eye. Too afraid to yank her back into wakefulness for a second time since he'd gotten her on a clear path to the pillow. Alas, she rolled forward when she finally succumbed and now his right shoulder is forfeit.
His bright idea to keep himself awake had worked but Mystra help him if he has to stay in this position much longer. Relaxing his neck does nothing to relieve the ache that's built up since the flat edge of the pillow barely meets the back of his head.
How light of a sleeper is she? That first night in camp he woke her by stoking a crackling log on the fire but she said her sister Maeve could move around in her bed unnoticed.
Gods, if he wakes her this will have been for naught.
Gale lifts his back at a glacial pace, arches his neck, and stuffs the pillow beneath it with his free hand.
Keighley doesn't stir. It's some kind of grace that he can do this right. He can take care of someone in the way that they need. He is needed to give away something that costs him nothing. Weeks ago she'd never heard of him. Even now, she only knows what he's told her and that doesn't even include his last name!
Yet, somehow, she finds some kind of peace in his blank pages. She seeks him out for comfort, not knowing the written history, only caring for the glue and binding forced to contain it. The vessel burdened with carrying the evidence that it is worthwhile. Gone unopened, a priceless tome might as well be an old and abused journal.
Still, she's here, snoring a hairsbreadth away from what's frequently considered their party's biggest problem on any given day. Gale dispels the light and darkness merely hovers around them.
He's done exceedingly thorough reporting on the orb so it did not go unnoticed when it shifted from a sucking void-like black to stagnant violet. He'd been taking notes on the way it recently began glowing in certain spots when he heard Keighley pacing a trail outside his tent.
Then the orb changed again. The unnatural pulsing flash immobilized him in terror until he realized: he wasn't in any pain. He was still on the material plane. Keighley was scratching on his tent so quietly he would have missed it had he not been holding his breath. He buried his worry in favor of seeing to her.
Now, peeking out from under his collar and Keighley's short curls, he can see the flecks that hinted at light before were shining. Less like luminescent fish beneath water, like he'd described an hour ago, and more like lamplight on waves.
He watches the light flicker on strands of nebulous curls until it dims or his eyes finally shut. He isn't sure which because when he opens his eyes again he's turned onto his side. His chest and the channel-like veins etched into his neck and face are casting shadows on the canvas with beams of sky blue.
Keighley's curled herself around him, her arm beneath his own and anchoring him to her with his tunic's collar in her fist. It's not the position he would have chosen as the person doing the comforting but she came to him even in sleep. If holding him allowed her much needed rest, who was he to deny her.
The shadows leap and his eye catches on a ripple where the wind presses in on the tent's opening. He assumes (hopes) it's wind. They either made camp near a tunnel that leads to the surface or the Underdark has a way of breathing. Both are concerning for a number of reasons.
Come to think of it, did he not recast his wards? Hells, the first time he's taken care of someone and he can't even remember to share the one comfort he's given himself in this dangerous setting.
Gale shifts enough to free his elbow from beneath his head and whispers his nightly abjuration spells. While his movements are small and precise enough to keep her from rousing, it's when he settles his arm back over hers that she moves.
She squeezes him. She flexes her arm and the fist at his sagging neckline presses against his chest.
"Gale?"
The light flashes brighter in paired bursts.
If he pretends to be asleep maybe she'll think the light is what woke her. She'll get up any moment now and go back to her tent like she said she wanted to when her thoughts were quieted.
She's still, though. Relaxed around his back and their feet touching under the blankets. Not fused together but loosely woven. Intimate nonetheless. Minutes pass and he thinks she may have fallen back to sleep until her index finger unspools from her fist and moves over his collarbone.
Her barely-there touch chases the orb's rhythmic radiance with its shadow. She does it again, back and forth. Sky blue beams shimmer as they fight against the darkness. Gale is an invisible audience to the shadow puppet show starring the gentlest touch he's ever known and the sparkling beacon of his greatest failure.
Keighley's finger slows after a while and her metronomic movements have him relaxed and barely hanging on to the thread of consciousness.
Until she moves her hand.
She releases his tunic and her fingertips brush the base of his throat. His breath stutters out as her palm swallows nearly all the light.
Coiled around him as she is it would be hard to miss the way her body stiffens. Now, when her hand is flattened to his chest, is when she'll pry herself away just like she does during their hugs. Too soon for his liking but they weren't for him. Tonight wasn't for him. If it felt indulgent at any point then it was because he derives some measure of joy from meeting her needs. That mutually beneficial relationship is why he can stand to let her go when she pulls. Joy has been so absent from his life. With so little time on the clock he'll meet his grave priestess wherever she's at. If she needs a best friend, a brother, a teammate, or a lover it doesn't matter. Whatever she calls him will be the title he bears in the final chapter of his life.
"Pretty heartbeat. S'just bright." Keighley only relaxes her hand. Her palm lifts, barely cupping the orb, showing him how the light escapes.
Is that his heartbeat?
Damn. He would've figured it out eventually but she'd noticed after playing around with it for a fraction of the time he'd observed it tonight. Can she feel it beating? Surely not, she only just flattened her hand.
She fidgets, her hand begins to inch away, light spills onto the walls and—
She doesn't know how long he's been awake. She thinks she startled him with her touch.
Her retreating hand slips under his and he fills the spaces between her fingers with his own.
"You're okay. It is bright."
She allows him to move her to the perfect spot where she eclipses the orb. When his hand loosens to pull away his heart must forget to beat or maybe it slows to a near stall, because she stops him. She holds on so his palm sandwiches her own against the beautiful but invasive light.
He won't be hypnotized by the orb again tonight. No, tonight, he's allowed warm shadows and to count breathy snores like sheep until sleep takes him. If she decides this is the only time she needs to reign in his dazzling mistake with him then that's fine. It was a joy to hold her. A joy to be held by her.
When Keighley wakes she doesn't bother opening her eyes. Sight is her only sense absent of Gale.
One of his thighs is pinning her own while her other leg is draped over his lower back. He must've flipped to his stomach in the night and she dreamt being a turtle's shell into reality. With one hand twisted in the back of his tunic and the other clasped together with his, she really left herself no way out. His infrequent snores mock her with the knowledge that she could've gotten away with sneaking out if she didn't need Volo and an ice pick to separate them right now. Then there's the faint hint of breakfast in the air but it's secondary to Gale's hair which smells like ritual incense.
Suppose that would leave taste. While she can't taste anything, her mouth is dry. Which means she slept deeply enough to have either drooled or snored throughout the night. Not sure which is more embarrassing she focuses on feigning sleep and planning for possible branches of the oncoming conversation.
Then something clatters outside and Gale flinches. Every point of contact tenses beneath her like he's winding to tuck and roll out of here. Never mind she's clung to his back like the wrap shirt he dons every morning, he may try to flee with her still weighing him down.
Karlach hisses a creative string of curses and the tension snaps like a tightrope. Gale softens and buries a snort into his pillow. Keighley smothers her laugh against his back.
They valiantly fight off the fit of giggles but Karlach threatens to spit in their food and either that comment or Keighley's witch's cackle has Gale battling for breath. His hiccuping laugh has her bouncing against his back and she rolls away out of concern for his immediate health.
Their peals of laughter trickle down until the only evidence that it even happened is wiped away from her eyes. When she turns to see how Gale's fared he's wearing a childlike smile. They're two kids, sharing a pillow in the shadows, laughing when they shouldn't. Reveling in the innocent joy of harmlessly conspiring with a person you love.
"Good morning. Did you sleep well?"
She really does love him. It's not the romantic kind that's eluded her all her life. It's not familial since there's no underlying responsibility. Best friend still seems like the most accurate word but… it doesn't encompass enough of the warmth she feels for him. She loves him uniquely.
"Good morning. I did, thank you for asking." She wants their smiles to match. To instill in him the same feeling he has in her. She wants to keep him safe. Comfortable.
"You know, after last night, I think I can finally diagnose the cause of your back aches. Reading with your neck at a right angle followed by belly sleeping cannot be good for you."
She's not sure why he rolls his eyes then thwacks her with the pillow. But it sure felt like it was done out of love.
He'd done well. Keighley looks well-rested as she leads their band through the Underdark. When they return to camp and she hugs him goodnight he's grateful it feels longer than usual.
He doesn't expect her to come scratch at his tent a bell later with a book in hand asking to read beside him. Promising to go back to her own tent once she's tired. She's engrossed in her book when he allows himself to peek up from his own. He thumbs through a few pages until he finds what he wants.
"Oh, this book has illustrations? Huh…"
"Can I see?" She's already closed her book, not even marking the page, as she scoots closer to him on the bedroll.
She's asleep on his shoulder before Gale can even finish the chapter. He manages to get them both onto the pillow without waking her.
It becomes a code. Some nights she hugs him goodnight, and that's it, but once everyone else has gone to bed, it becomes more common for her to ask if she can read beside him. As far as he can tell, she's not concerned with the others knowing where she spends the night, since she's not sneaking out before anyone else wakes. She pretends to care about what she's reading and whenever he can come up with an excuse to have her look at his book she rustles up to his side and is snoring within minutes.
The evening after they fought off a handful of Minotaur, Gale has the harrowing realization that despite not feeling the depth at first, looking at Keighley asleep and reaching out to him sets him firmly right as he sees how far he's fallen for her. It didn't start the way it had with Mystra.
He ruminates on this when he uses filaments of the weave to create her likeness days later. When Keighley comes over and he shows her the Weave. When he sees the image her mind creates, where they fall against one another with her hands on his face, lips locked in a heated kiss. She retreats, embarrassed and says she's just finished a novel that's been passed around camp.
It feels like there's more he could do for her while he still walks this plane.
He elects to wait for her. To withhold his feelings until she's ready. He can keep this truth to himself until she's ready to hear it because if he can't keep himself alive, then she will, topped up on magical artifacts she's squirreled away just for him.
He's pleased with his decision and his self-restraint even as she curls around him like armor in his bedroll. He reminds himself this is how she wants him.
Tomorrow, they'll be taking the elevator in the Grymforge up to the Shadow-Cursed Lands and who knows what horrors await. He'll need his rest if he's going to be a reliable support to his sunny priestess in yet another place with no light.