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And then she’d deanna had refused the elixir of life, and so inside him had snapped

Christ, it was always souls Souls, souls, souls And his great, big fucking lack thereof

He could have offered her a pretty lie--he’d fabricated several ser, defiance, and an age-old hurt had filled him with a wildness, a need he’d been unable to deny

To cram his reality down her throat To say, This is what I am, for Christ’s sake, is it so bloody awful?

See me See me!

And she’d seen hiazed at hiold eyes Those eyes that only the night before had been drea Those eyes that had made him feel every inch a man, more alive and at peace and at home than he’d ever felt in his entire existence

And that hen he’d finally understood

He’d been a fool with Morganna He’dthe saain, he would erase Gabrielle’s memory of his admission He would eliminate all those facts that she’d found so distasteful, wipe them cleanly from her mind

Then he would slip her the elixir of life And he would whisk her off and keep her blissfully occupied, keep her enchanted by whatever means necessary, for as many years as it took for her ione, she would no longer even feel those parts of herself thatto it She wouldn’t even know toas she possibly could turned out to be exactly one month, seven days, and fourteen hours

Gabby would have ain, she was undone by yet another diabolical iced cup of coffee to go

To her credit, she did briefly contereatly simplify her life Still, by the time she’d arrived at that conclusion, it was too late