heart peach

---

As time worn on, Gala found her boundaries naturally eroding, with Bart. In simple ways, and in very natural ways, but in ways that would have scared her right out of her petti-skirted skin, not so long ago.

More than once, she'd caught him, having fallen asleep first while sitting beside her, with his nose buried in her hair. It had either been snoring or soft murmurs of unutterable love, or something like that, issuing from the once-pirate prince's mouth, and Gala had been so bewildered that she simply hadn't said anything, and never brought it up again.

Which didn't at all mean that she didn't think about it, quite often. The thought of Bart enjoying her company and presence aside, it had been so warm and cozy and comforting...

So eventually, Gala decided she'd try something.

She'd start by taking the ribbon out of her hair around mealtimes, or when it was time to go to sleep, and make a routine of that. Then, once she felt comfortable with the decision to let her hair down at all, she'd ask Bart if he might like to help her with it.

That was about as coy as Gala could manage, and Bart (she hoped) knew it. Sure, "helping Gala with her hair" was code for something, but it certainly wasn't code for anything more serious than "why don't you do what I've been doing, instead of me", which was already plenty, for both Gala and Bart.

The way Bart's face lit up at the mere mention, and the way he hastily attempted to calm his reaction, told Gala that for sure. Sometimes she thought he was even more nervous than she was!

Gingerly, gingerly, with two callused fingers, Bart tugged at the ribbon, then apprehended the source of the tie and made to unwork the knot, before catching himself.

"Wait, uh, Gala?"

Uh oh. There wasn't supposed to be...talking involved in this. Gala might have been the smartest cookie Nisan had ever known, at the very least on level with Margie and Maria each in their own unique ways, but verbal communication on top of physical contact was just one too many a layer of complexity.

But Gala blinked, pushed up her glasses with one shaking finger, perked up the apples of her cheeks (it was for her to feel, not for him to see), and replied, "Yes, Bart?"

"Can I, uh... Touch your scalp?"

She couldn't exactly say no. That is, she could! But why would she? No, there was only one way to square away this difficulty.

"Um...if you need to."

No way she'd sounded flippant, or derisive, or inconvenienced. No way! She wasn't capable of that...right? Gala furrowed her brow and thought very hard about convincing herself of that fact, that she'd not possibly inflected her tone any which way so as to make Bart think that she was annoyed with him.

So hard did Gala concentrate that she very nearly missed the flick of Bart's thumb against the nape of her neck. It was a point for her powers of fortitude, and a counterpoint for just what exactly she'd gotten herself into.

There was also the fact of, well, state of dress to consider. While this little huddle about the hair ribbon felt frightfully intimate, no shirts or pants were anywhere near the dreaded danger area of coming off. Still, Gala had removed her coat, leaving her back beneath it somewhat exposed.

It appeared she forgot about the heart shape on the rear bodice of her bodysuit at only the most inopportune of times. What were you thinking, Gala?! And Gala supposed she had been thinking that Bart would sort of...awkwardly arc his arms over her head in order to get at her hair, instead of moseying around behind her back.

Since she was sitting with her back to a tree, and it was dark on that side of her body, away from the fire, maybe he wouldn't notice, and then her hair would fall down and cover it.

Or maybe Bart would allow himself one longing, loving brush of his hand through the ends of Gala's hair, and he would discover the precious shape at once.

Such was to be Gala's luck. The Desert Orca had been exceedingly decorous with respect to thumbs and scalps and ribbons and napes, but even he couldn't help delighting in the wonder of it all.

"Gala," he nearly blurted out, "you have a heart on your back!"

Almost involuntarily, Gala scrunched inward, hugging her knees. "No," she insisted, "I have a heart in my chest, which is closer to my front."

Was it, really? Did it matter?

Bart's tone gentled. "Can I see it? Is that okay?"

Gala nearly thought she'd heard him stutter. Rubbing her thumbs into the places where her leggings molded to the depressions in her kneecaps, she fussed with her frown until it resembled something more like a querulous gasp.

"You really want to?"

(And with that gasp, a tone that even more surely did not tend off-put.)

He didn't move around to catch her gaze, instead lingering his chin somewhere close to her crown. "Gala, it's so cute. Everything about you is so..."

"Ridiculous?" Gala offered, petulantly and hating herself for it. Oh, how had this all gone so wrong? In some ways, of course, it was also going so very right, but she couldn't help it. Danger! Danger! Danger! Her mind and heart both reminded her with a fervor. She supressed a shiver-shudder that would have rippled through her back, too.

But Bart was having none of it.

"Beautiful. You're beautiful, Gala."

It was just a piece of clothing. Historical significance though clothing might often have had, you could only say something like that if you had such a deep attachment and fondness for and admiration of the person who was wearing it. Gala knew from experience. There certainly wasn't anything so special about a shirt with embroidery and a suspicious lack of buttons.

She'd opened herself up to this vulnerability. There was no backing down from it - except, again, that there almost certainly was, since Bart seemed willing to do whatever Gala asked, whether positive or prohibitive.

The correct next comment, from this point, was something about how she couldn't see Bart; how they weren't making eye contact. But that was a third layer! Oh, goodness gracious...

As demurely as she could, Gala swiveled her head to one side, looking plaintively over her shoulder and spying Bart's left boot, for her trouble. Since her flush at such a compliment had by now subsided, she felt close to being ready to face Bart. But only close.

"You can see it."

Drat. A squeak.

Taking Bart's assumption as axiom, even her squeaks were beautiful. Judging from the way that same thumb now traced over the heart-shaped gold-colored ridge of metal on her back, Gala had to believe it.

"I guess this has always been here, huh? Just hiding away..."

"Not always. Just..."

Well, in a manner of speaking, just since she'd met Bart, huh? And come aboard, and all. Around that time. Everything had changed around that time.

"I bet it's not really that special," Gala hastily amended. Her glasses needed pushing up again, but only once; successive attempts just put a minute crease in her fingertip. "I bet everyone has, um, has shapes on their backs. It's probably a fashion!"

To Gala's immense surprise, Bart snorted (his hand at her back remained all-adoring, though). "Not me."

"I guess we should get you some, then."

"No, no..."

Unbidden, Bart's boot disappeared, and then the whole of him appeared in Gala's frontal point of view. Of course, this meant that his hand was no longer at her back, but Gala shocked herself by taking the outstretched hand before her right in time.

"It's definitely not cute, what I've got on my back."

"B-but you're cute!"

Apparently, it was Gala's turn to blurt. Bart did blush, but the gravity into which he'd set the conversation won out.

"Wanna see, and test your hypothesis?"

Now Gala snorted. "It's not a hypothesis. You can't call it a hypothesis when you know it's true, that's unscientific."

"We're not scientists, Gala," Bart replied sagely - in an attempt at being sage, anyway. "Do you want to? You know, show you mine since you showed me yours."

"Bart!" But instead of yanking her hand back, Gala only squeezed tighter. "...okay. If you want to show me."

Bart nodded. "I do."

With the deep cut of his shirt, it didn't take many more buttons undone, hand-holding temporarily withdrawn, for Bart to be able to shrug it off over his broad shoulders. Gala gasped when she saw what lurked just beyond the generous open collar, backlit by the firelight.

Her instinct wasn't to touch the pale lacerations, though the thought did occur to her in an academic sort of way (that is, what would a given person do in a given situation such as this? probably touch them, right?) and then more less academic thoughts followed in short order.

In fact, Gala didn't say anything for a while. Bart didn't either.

Then: "Do you...want me to touch them?"

(What? "Would you like me to touch them?" sounded way too formal. And obviously they were way past formal.)

Bart chuckled, eyes downcast. Gala almost hated how cute she found that one bashful motion.

"I guess I do. I...didn't really think this through."

"I guess I didn't either, since...we're here."

After a brief near-incident with Gala's untamed hair and the smoldering campfire, they'd arranged themselves in an almost-inverse of the initial position, with Bart prone on the ground and Gala cross-legged to one side.

They were really doing this, weren't they?

"Oh, maybe these two," she traced them out, "make a heart shape. You were lying, Bart!"

"Gala, you're making that up."

"Maybe I am," Gala admitted.

Undeterred, Bart posed, "And you know what rhymes with heart?"

Gala couldn't even find it in herself to groan.

She could, however, find quite easily the back band of Bart's eyepatch to pull up just a few micro-fractions of a sharl and then let it snap smartly down against the back of his head.

"Ow!" cried Bart, subtly muffled by the makeshift pillow beneath his mouth. "Gala..."

Maybe it was a little mean-spirited. Maybe it was a little too on the nose. Maybe she should, and usually would, fly into a guilty haze.

But he had so much hair! Gala, meek-hearted soul though she was, couldn't possibly believe that he'd actually felt it.

They had plenty of other, nicer things to feel right now, anyway.