(OOC: minor dialogue edits near the end. it sounded a little too good to be true, lol, the original lines.)

"I don't know,"

Confusion he saw, and frustration and weariness, too - but no sudden flare of anger burning up her eyes, no hate; his mind stumbled onto what some poet had said about the wrath of a woman scorned. Forget scorn, he wasn't sure what he'd do just to keep her from looking at him like that.

He was still holding on, but had the glass tether shattered without his knowing it?

"I don't know what I'm doing, Kabir, how can I?...I've never had to sort my feelings about someone who I have no choice but to be with, someone I don't even think has actual feelings towards me."

"Neith - " he made to say, but she stopped him with a soft plea, a raised hand. And a touch, lingering somewhere over where they said the heart was supposed to be. And then - then, why wouldn't she stop looking at him like that, all lost and forlorn?

Neither have I.

"Don't, please, let me finish,"

He wasn't sure where his heart was supposed to be, but he estimated right then it was somewhere between his collarbone and his throat, every beat pounding no less harder for its change in position.

"I don't know how to go about this the right way. I don't know whether I should sit down and talk to you all proper about my family or my uprbringing or even my thoughts on the crisis between the muggle world and ours, or whether I should try and get to know you where it actually matters."

The words were slow in falling from her lips, hesitant almost, but how did she know, how could she have known those were the exact same words he would have offered her? Wordless, his clasp on her hand loosened anew, and he held on with a lingering touch on the inner wrist, gaze downturned at those exquisitely framed hands.

What was it a redhead had told him, aeons ago? That he didn't have eyes for pretty faces as much he had eyes for pretty hands.

"I thought that if I kissed you, if I felt you, that is...Then I would know at least if there could be anything here. Between us."

When he looked up, her eyes were locked on his, wearier than perhaps a thousand sleepless nights could make a person weary, and that whisper - the lifeline hadn't shattered yet, but it was cracking under the strain, and the cracks were spreading fast.

"But there is," he added quietly. "There is..."

"I thought there had been, I didn't know it wasn't enough."

She turned away, and he heard something crash inside his head. Had the glass shattered, then?

It took another moment to realise he was only hearing his own heartbeat, resonating with the dull roar of Thor's celestial hammer.

"Listen to me," he said, his own voice a pleading whisper now, reaching to touch her chin with a finger's edge, gently lifting it up that she was facing him again, "I'd give my life away to have that again, but it's still a kiss. A kiss can be -" he hesitated, trying to find the words," - it can be a lot of things - body heat, chemistry, need," he shook his head, slowly, his hand reaching up to cradle the side of her face in a silent gesture, a plea to hear him out, "We're still children to decide our fates by a kiss."

A pause, while something in his head that spoke with his voice called him a pathetic liar and a terrible fool.

"Hush," he said, before she might word a protest, quite sure if she said anything right now, with her eyes piercing into his like now, he'd be rendered mute, "There's so much we don't know, not yet. And I, for one would - "

Another pause, while he inhaled, and almost lost the words he'd so carefully prepared; but he managed to continue, his lips quirking up slightly in a wistful semblance of a smile, "I would rather know Anjali first."

Pulling away an inch, if that, he let his finger trace a line around the curve of her cheek, as helpless now as he had been when he'd inhaled of her scent not very long ago.

"Would you let me?"