[There are only awful things now. On a different day, a better day, he would've told her as much. With Dorian, in their private chambers and private moments, he brags of that monster Hermione has witnessed herself. He drives terrible pain into her friend and delights in it. He dreams of a world broken apart and scattered and he drinks in the blood of those foolish enough to offer it to him.

Hermione, however... he can only offer her a ring and a lance. As she reached for his hand, he reaches to close his fingers around that ghost of a promise she wears. Is it a memory? Is it a punishment? Why would she do it to herself? Maybe it's a weight she can't shrug off, either. The weight of a friend who wasn't. The weight of a wish spurned.

She's glad, she's glad and it makes him so mad that he really would choke her with that damn chain if half the Citadel wouldn't hunt down his head on a pike for it. It sounds like the truth and it's risky to believe in. She'll poison his wine, lace his bread with daggers, he swears that she will even as he hangs in her grip as a pitiful creature.]

I lived with a priest, once. He told me I would drown in sin and I laughed at him, because he could not see what I was wading in.

[Telling the truth is the worst sort of sin for Gilgamesh. It only ever gets him into trouble. His hand shifts, into her hair, and his face tilts, into her shoulder, to hide there.]

I can't live like you, Hermione. In that world of humans. In a world of sympathy and softness. It's a world only for you and yours.