"People Are Just People Like You..."
Mar. 27th, 2007 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psalm_onethirtyoneIn other news!
This is Bedivere's chapter. :D
"Wales," Mordred says, cheerfully scathing, kicking a stone off the path and down into the stream below. Gaheris ignores him. It's only because the plane ride took too long, and they're both jetlagged. He at least got some sleep, but Mordred's been up the last twenty-four hours, and his eyes are brighter than they should be. "Hell of a place. I remember why I never came here."
"Peredur was telling me about it."
"When?"
"When I stayed with him. I couldn't sleep. We sat up and he told me about Wales, I told him about Orkney. He said he liked all the places he's ever been in. He said he always found some way to get used to them and feel right in them. I said I wasn't like that at all. Never comfortable in Orkney or anywhere else."
"You really told him everything." Mordred frowns slightly.
"He's easy to talk to. You were right--remember?"
"No, what?"
"You said you thought he was less a fool than everyone thought."
"Did I? Half-assed thing to say. I believe you." That flash of good humour Gaheris loves so much is suddenly shining through. He feels the strain of the need to keep it shining.
It's only the two of them, as Clar said it should be-- just the two of them, and here, alone, with nowhere for either of them to run away to, can't he solve something? He needs to know Mordred loves him. Perhaps he can make it so, if it isn't already. Perhaps he can make something right.
"Sure. If it's half-assed, you know you said it."
"Thanks," laughing.
"Absolutely."
He kicks another rock off the path. "I still can't believe we're in Wales, damn it."
"Funny. I've gotten used to doing anything Clar says."
"I thought she told you to shave that damn beard."
The rough stubble on Gaheris' chin hardly constitutes a beard, but he rubs it anyway, a little thoughtfully. He's only been growing it for the last few days. It's been two weeks since the day Clar told them to go, and a week since Mordred argued his way into a two week vacation--he complained to everyone that evening that since it was so hard to find a substitute for him he'd have to make it up teaching a summer class. "She told me that it was either shave or look like a fool, actually. So it was less a command and more a suggestion."
Mordred snorts.
Above the town they find a convenient flat rock and sit down for a little while. From the hotel they've driven an hour, and then walked another, around the wide blue lakes, as smooth and royally coloured as a king's robes. Somewhere below them there's someone they know. Clar's witch's tongue was full of half-answers and possibilities, but no names, no certainties.
A little while later and they're going down. Gaheris keeps tripping on the loose stones, and catching himself on Mordred's arm, or tree bits hanging over the path. It's as though there's an unsteady peace now between himself and everything around him, and he's filled with the notion that falling, and not getting hold of anything to stop himself, will leaving him falling for-ever.
The town is small, and it would be picturesque if it weren't so dirty. The houses are coated in whitewash that's coated in mud, and the thatched roofs are growing crippled ivy and plants. One has a cow grazing on it; it's sloped into the ground so she can wander up and eat her fill of the coarse grass. It seems so old, so like the years before and the centuries before that. As if nothing's ever changed. It's not a wonder someone came back here to live, or maybe lived here all along. It would be safe. Perhaps less frightening than the other world, with its hundreds of flashing high-speed connexion ideas. This feels like the old world. This could feel like home.
The strange tranquillity breaks abruptly.
"Damn you, I don't care what the hell y're excuse is! Don't y'dare call me her name again!" Shouting. A rough, angry voice.
A deeper one answers, and the rough voices comes out again, clear with fury. "Y'come home drunk every day, every night, y'expect me t'go on kissing you when y'get back, and y'call me her name! I don't care what y'remember!"
"Sounds like ours," Mordred remarks. "Poor bastard."
Gaheris rolls his eyes and slips past the cow house, rounding a corner and coming upon the argument. A tall, redheaded woman--she looks like the Scottish princesses he recalls in legends, long burnished hair down to her waist, except that it's tangled and tied back with rags, and her clothes aren't finery, they're well-worn jeans and a huge sweater, and it surprises him how thin she is, as if she'd been half-starved all her life, the way Gareth has been--is shouting, hers the rough voice.
"Mairghread indeed, y'damned--"
The man suddenly grasps her collar and pulls himself up, kissing her full on the mouth. He's taller than she is, looks stronger, for all his unsteadiness. She pushes at him, but he has her back against a wall, so that he's got something to lean on, and she doesn't escape until he lets her go; and then she hits him.
"Come on, tigress, what's that for?" in a slurred, Welsh accent.
"Y'know damned well. Damn you and y're Mairghread and everything y'remember!"
Gaheris looks to Mordred, but Mordred doesn't move, his bright eyes fixed on the woman. At that moment, watching his brother's face, Gaheris is aware of a sinking in his stomach. He clears his throat with a bit of difficulty.
"Bedwyr."
Both man and woman turn to look at them.
Bedwyr laughs, a peculiar light laugh. "Wondered when you two'd show up. That's Orkneys for you. They'll never leave you alone."
The redheaded woman looks defiantly at them. "Y're not taking him anywhere."
"The hell we'd want to, ma'am," Mordred says. The good humour is back, and sudden, and bright, and terrible.
"We had one a' you years back, and I didn't have it then and I ent now." Something in her is wilder than oceans or moors or battles. Something is stretched thin at the sight of them, and there's something in her she won't let go for anyone, not them, not any number of memories.
"Again, lady. We don't want the idiot."
"Laura doesn't want me and Mordred doesn't want me, so where am I going to go?" Bedwyr says. He breaks off in a ballad, only singing half the words, none of them with the right notes. "Look at me. They said I'm the wisest knight. Did you hear that? Bedivere, wisest of King Arthur's knights. What were they smoking, right? Best-laid of King Arthur's knights, they shoulda said."
The woman shoots Mordred one more vicious look, and then wraps her arm around Bedwyr's waist, steadying him. She holds him up, and he leans heavily against her, looking up at her.
"God, you're beautiful."
"Shut it." Her voice is still rough, but softer. "Y're so damn drunk. Come on t'bed."
"Any time, sweetheart."
She hits him again.
Gaheris wishes he weren't there. It can't be theirs to look at. He dares to cast a glance at Mordred, and immediately turns away. There it is again, all the strange delight he's wished for himself. Mordred has never seemed that amused or pleased by him. He's always wanted for it, longed to be so clever or brave or anything that could earn a reaction like that, approval out of Mordred. And Mordred only gives it to women he can't have, why the hell? Gaheris needs the approval. The woman doesn't care if she never sees Mordred again.
Gaheris needs to know he's as important, or as capable, or--just that Mordred is pleased to have him for a brother. Just that he's good enough because he's got something that captures Mordred's attention more than these useless family ties that often don't seem to mean anything.
"We should go," he says.
"Oh, I want to stay and laugh at his hangover."
"Get on," the woman says.
"Listen to Laura," Bedwyr slurs. "I always listen to Laura. Best way not to get into trouble. She's got more figured out than we do. Do we have anything figured out? I don't know, I don't know anything, and me the wisest. Lousy wisest. Laura's the wisest."
"She doesn't count unless she's one of us," Mordred says. "Are you one of us, lady?"
"And still thankin' the saints I ent."
"No," Bedwyr says. "She's my own, aren't you, heart? You're my own. Nothing to do with all that damned lot. Not an Orkney, not a Welshman--all Welshmen are thieves, didcha know that?--not Scottish, not British, not you. Never even saw a knight. Every night, never a knight. Except me. I'm the knight. She sleeps with me. She's my own." He tries to sing again.
Laura shakes her head angrily and puts her hand to his cheek. "Shhh. Y're not going to talk to them. Leave it be, c'mon now. Get you t'bed."
"Who came before?" Mordred asks.
"Kay!" He laughs uproariously. "Can you believe it? My own brother of a man! Weren't we all but joined at the hip?"
"I can't say I remember anything like that, but my memory's notoriously bad. Kay came and exhorted you to, what, return with him to his love-nest?"
"To get sober and come back to Ireland with him. And didn't my Laura tell him off?"
The woman flares. "Told him t'get back on his feet and act like a knight again. Hell with that, hell what he knows. Don't know a damned thing. Act like a knight again, he said, and be a proper man, and go off to damned Ireland and get a job and leave the whore, he said, and do right by Arthur."
"None of that sounds so bad."
"And if y'try t'touch him, I'll take off your head, I will. You lot just leave him be."
"What does he want?"
Bedwyr smiles lopsidedly. "Look at my stump." He shakes his arm at them, and suddenly Gaheris sees that it ends before the end, just as it used to. Bedwyr never told anyone what had happened to hurt him and take off his hand, and Gaheris doesn't know whether there is an answer. What's an answer? "Came with me here. I thought after I died that'd be the end of it, but wouldn't you know I'd be born without it? Guess I'm not meant to be put together, you think?" He laughs again. "See this place, yeah? Lived here all my life. So's she."
"I thought you said she wasn't Welsh."
"Said she wasn't a Welshman. Is she? Na, na." He uses the same gentle tongue sound Gaheris does, did, with Lynet. "Not a bit a Welshman."
Mordred laughs, too. "You damned Welsh and your damned tricks."
"Never trust a Welshman. Never trust."
Laura stands quietly now, her eyes still blazing but her lips silent, holding Bedwyr up with her arm around his waist, steadying him with her other at his side. Gaheris wonders what the hell is so enchanting about her, with her pinched face and her skinny arms and her angry eyes. Lynet was snapping and biting and seemed discontent, but she had a secret kind place beneath it, and she was solid enough to hold comfortably, she didn't stick out all hard angles. But Bedwyr looks at Laura and softens. At least he has a right to.
"This sweetheart of mine," he says, his voice thick, "she wants me to go back to th' house. Sleep it off. My Mairghread."
"Damn you!" she cries out, sharply, as if she'd been stung by an arrow. "Can't y'remember my damn name?"
Gaheris realises that she's almost crying, but keeping it back.
"I remember, I do. I do." Bedwyr seems to shake himself. "Laura. Born 'n raised here, yeah? Am I right? You sew things. And I don't do anything, I don't do anything. Do I?"
"Take your sword out in the fields sometimes," she reminds, suddenly gentle.
"I do that. I've got a sword," he says, turning to Mordred. "We have--a blacksmith. Here. And I get drunk, I do that. Every day?"
"Most every day," she says.
"But what did we come for?" Gaheris says. It's been pushing at him like water at a floodgates, begging to be let out. "What are we here for? If there's nothing--and you aren't coming, you're staying here with her--why are we here?"
"Hell if I know," Bedwyr says.
"'Cause y're learning we don't want you, that's what," Laura says sharply. "Don't y'see that? Y'want him back, I don't know what for, I don't know why y'keep coming 'round, because he ent one of you. I don't know what it's all about, but some of you got people now, maybe y'ent thought of that. He's got me, he doesn't need you. Leave him alone."
"Na, na, kitty, don't bite m' friend. He's an Orkney, he deserves it, but he doesn't mind hitting ladies. Wicked bastards, they're all like that."
Mordred starts. "Getting a little personal now, aren't we?"
"I ent a lady," she adds, giving Mordred a nasty look.
Gaheris looks at him, too. "Maybe we should go back to the hotel."
"What do you care?" Mordred says irritably. "You're so damned excited to find out whether there's a moral here. I see a moral. Don't get involved, or you'll never escape."
"We should go back."
"Y'should. Get on with you. I don't want y'here."
"And you, lady, you pipe down for just a minute, how about it? Bedwyr--"
"I don't care what you do," he says, putting his head on Laura's shoulder. "I'm ready to sleep it off. Head's all fuzzy. Do what she says."
"I'm sayin' y'should go, y'damned idiots, just leave us alone. He ent lying. I bite."
"Jesus Christ--"
"Get out! Leave us alone!"
Mordred steps forward, as if he'd strike her--Gaheris doesn't think, but he doesn't know, but he didn't know Mordred was that angry, why is everything always under the surface with Mordred, why always hidden--and suddenly Bedwyr changes. He pushes away from Laura and stands, still unsteady but different, alert, his eyes changed.
"Don't touch her, Mordred."
"I'm not going to." Mordred falls back a step. Bedwyr doesn't relax.
"Don't put a hand on her."
"I'm not," he says, as deadly serious.
Laura puts her hand on Bedwyr's shoulder. She's changed, too; she seems frightened, quietly frightened, as though she knows he's capable of doing hard things in his anger, and she wants to put things back the way they were before, when she was the angry one, and he was impotent in his drunkenness, when she was the guard for him and he leaning on her. "Stop," she says, almost a whisper. "Let be. He ent going to hurt me."
"I don't know if he knows that," Bedwyr says. "I'm being sure he does." His mouth twitches with a sideways kind of smile. "Know what we are?"
"What?" Mordred asks, his voice soft.
"Double suicide. Right in the ocean. What a way to meet, you think? Because it was killing me, I didn't remember anything except losing my wife. Laura--"
"Don't tell," she says.
"Met her right at the edge. I think it sounds like a movie." He directs the smile at her. "We go to Llangefni sometimes and see a movie. Sounds just like one. And I'm asking you to listen to her. If she tells you to go, get going."
Gaheris is aware that there are people around them now, people who've come out from the houses. He wonders why they didn't come sooner. Mordred makes a small bow, as if it were the old time again, and he's showing Bedwyr his respect. Then he turns and walks away, without waiting for Gaheris, without looking back. Gaheris turns helplessly to Bedwyr for a moment, and then follows him. Behind him he hears someone talking, asking questions. He doesn't listen. He just follows Mordred silently back to the hotel.
This is Bedivere's chapter. :D
"Wales," Mordred says, cheerfully scathing, kicking a stone off the path and down into the stream below. Gaheris ignores him. It's only because the plane ride took too long, and they're both jetlagged. He at least got some sleep, but Mordred's been up the last twenty-four hours, and his eyes are brighter than they should be. "Hell of a place. I remember why I never came here."
"Peredur was telling me about it."
"When?"
"When I stayed with him. I couldn't sleep. We sat up and he told me about Wales, I told him about Orkney. He said he liked all the places he's ever been in. He said he always found some way to get used to them and feel right in them. I said I wasn't like that at all. Never comfortable in Orkney or anywhere else."
"You really told him everything." Mordred frowns slightly.
"He's easy to talk to. You were right--remember?"
"No, what?"
"You said you thought he was less a fool than everyone thought."
"Did I? Half-assed thing to say. I believe you." That flash of good humour Gaheris loves so much is suddenly shining through. He feels the strain of the need to keep it shining.
It's only the two of them, as Clar said it should be-- just the two of them, and here, alone, with nowhere for either of them to run away to, can't he solve something? He needs to know Mordred loves him. Perhaps he can make it so, if it isn't already. Perhaps he can make something right.
"Sure. If it's half-assed, you know you said it."
"Thanks," laughing.
"Absolutely."
He kicks another rock off the path. "I still can't believe we're in Wales, damn it."
"Funny. I've gotten used to doing anything Clar says."
"I thought she told you to shave that damn beard."
The rough stubble on Gaheris' chin hardly constitutes a beard, but he rubs it anyway, a little thoughtfully. He's only been growing it for the last few days. It's been two weeks since the day Clar told them to go, and a week since Mordred argued his way into a two week vacation--he complained to everyone that evening that since it was so hard to find a substitute for him he'd have to make it up teaching a summer class. "She told me that it was either shave or look like a fool, actually. So it was less a command and more a suggestion."
Mordred snorts.
Above the town they find a convenient flat rock and sit down for a little while. From the hotel they've driven an hour, and then walked another, around the wide blue lakes, as smooth and royally coloured as a king's robes. Somewhere below them there's someone they know. Clar's witch's tongue was full of half-answers and possibilities, but no names, no certainties.
A little while later and they're going down. Gaheris keeps tripping on the loose stones, and catching himself on Mordred's arm, or tree bits hanging over the path. It's as though there's an unsteady peace now between himself and everything around him, and he's filled with the notion that falling, and not getting hold of anything to stop himself, will leaving him falling for-ever.
The town is small, and it would be picturesque if it weren't so dirty. The houses are coated in whitewash that's coated in mud, and the thatched roofs are growing crippled ivy and plants. One has a cow grazing on it; it's sloped into the ground so she can wander up and eat her fill of the coarse grass. It seems so old, so like the years before and the centuries before that. As if nothing's ever changed. It's not a wonder someone came back here to live, or maybe lived here all along. It would be safe. Perhaps less frightening than the other world, with its hundreds of flashing high-speed connexion ideas. This feels like the old world. This could feel like home.
The strange tranquillity breaks abruptly.
"Damn you, I don't care what the hell y're excuse is! Don't y'dare call me her name again!" Shouting. A rough, angry voice.
A deeper one answers, and the rough voices comes out again, clear with fury. "Y'come home drunk every day, every night, y'expect me t'go on kissing you when y'get back, and y'call me her name! I don't care what y'remember!"
"Sounds like ours," Mordred remarks. "Poor bastard."
Gaheris rolls his eyes and slips past the cow house, rounding a corner and coming upon the argument. A tall, redheaded woman--she looks like the Scottish princesses he recalls in legends, long burnished hair down to her waist, except that it's tangled and tied back with rags, and her clothes aren't finery, they're well-worn jeans and a huge sweater, and it surprises him how thin she is, as if she'd been half-starved all her life, the way Gareth has been--is shouting, hers the rough voice.
"Mairghread indeed, y'damned--"
The man suddenly grasps her collar and pulls himself up, kissing her full on the mouth. He's taller than she is, looks stronger, for all his unsteadiness. She pushes at him, but he has her back against a wall, so that he's got something to lean on, and she doesn't escape until he lets her go; and then she hits him.
"Come on, tigress, what's that for?" in a slurred, Welsh accent.
"Y'know damned well. Damn you and y're Mairghread and everything y'remember!"
Gaheris looks to Mordred, but Mordred doesn't move, his bright eyes fixed on the woman. At that moment, watching his brother's face, Gaheris is aware of a sinking in his stomach. He clears his throat with a bit of difficulty.
"Bedwyr."
Both man and woman turn to look at them.
Bedwyr laughs, a peculiar light laugh. "Wondered when you two'd show up. That's Orkneys for you. They'll never leave you alone."
The redheaded woman looks defiantly at them. "Y're not taking him anywhere."
"The hell we'd want to, ma'am," Mordred says. The good humour is back, and sudden, and bright, and terrible.
"We had one a' you years back, and I didn't have it then and I ent now." Something in her is wilder than oceans or moors or battles. Something is stretched thin at the sight of them, and there's something in her she won't let go for anyone, not them, not any number of memories.
"Again, lady. We don't want the idiot."
"Laura doesn't want me and Mordred doesn't want me, so where am I going to go?" Bedwyr says. He breaks off in a ballad, only singing half the words, none of them with the right notes. "Look at me. They said I'm the wisest knight. Did you hear that? Bedivere, wisest of King Arthur's knights. What were they smoking, right? Best-laid of King Arthur's knights, they shoulda said."
The woman shoots Mordred one more vicious look, and then wraps her arm around Bedwyr's waist, steadying him. She holds him up, and he leans heavily against her, looking up at her.
"God, you're beautiful."
"Shut it." Her voice is still rough, but softer. "Y're so damn drunk. Come on t'bed."
"Any time, sweetheart."
She hits him again.
Gaheris wishes he weren't there. It can't be theirs to look at. He dares to cast a glance at Mordred, and immediately turns away. There it is again, all the strange delight he's wished for himself. Mordred has never seemed that amused or pleased by him. He's always wanted for it, longed to be so clever or brave or anything that could earn a reaction like that, approval out of Mordred. And Mordred only gives it to women he can't have, why the hell? Gaheris needs the approval. The woman doesn't care if she never sees Mordred again.
Gaheris needs to know he's as important, or as capable, or--just that Mordred is pleased to have him for a brother. Just that he's good enough because he's got something that captures Mordred's attention more than these useless family ties that often don't seem to mean anything.
"We should go," he says.
"Oh, I want to stay and laugh at his hangover."
"Get on," the woman says.
"Listen to Laura," Bedwyr slurs. "I always listen to Laura. Best way not to get into trouble. She's got more figured out than we do. Do we have anything figured out? I don't know, I don't know anything, and me the wisest. Lousy wisest. Laura's the wisest."
"She doesn't count unless she's one of us," Mordred says. "Are you one of us, lady?"
"And still thankin' the saints I ent."
"No," Bedwyr says. "She's my own, aren't you, heart? You're my own. Nothing to do with all that damned lot. Not an Orkney, not a Welshman--all Welshmen are thieves, didcha know that?--not Scottish, not British, not you. Never even saw a knight. Every night, never a knight. Except me. I'm the knight. She sleeps with me. She's my own." He tries to sing again.
Laura shakes her head angrily and puts her hand to his cheek. "Shhh. Y're not going to talk to them. Leave it be, c'mon now. Get you t'bed."
"Who came before?" Mordred asks.
"Kay!" He laughs uproariously. "Can you believe it? My own brother of a man! Weren't we all but joined at the hip?"
"I can't say I remember anything like that, but my memory's notoriously bad. Kay came and exhorted you to, what, return with him to his love-nest?"
"To get sober and come back to Ireland with him. And didn't my Laura tell him off?"
The woman flares. "Told him t'get back on his feet and act like a knight again. Hell with that, hell what he knows. Don't know a damned thing. Act like a knight again, he said, and be a proper man, and go off to damned Ireland and get a job and leave the whore, he said, and do right by Arthur."
"None of that sounds so bad."
"And if y'try t'touch him, I'll take off your head, I will. You lot just leave him be."
"What does he want?"
Bedwyr smiles lopsidedly. "Look at my stump." He shakes his arm at them, and suddenly Gaheris sees that it ends before the end, just as it used to. Bedwyr never told anyone what had happened to hurt him and take off his hand, and Gaheris doesn't know whether there is an answer. What's an answer? "Came with me here. I thought after I died that'd be the end of it, but wouldn't you know I'd be born without it? Guess I'm not meant to be put together, you think?" He laughs again. "See this place, yeah? Lived here all my life. So's she."
"I thought you said she wasn't Welsh."
"Said she wasn't a Welshman. Is she? Na, na." He uses the same gentle tongue sound Gaheris does, did, with Lynet. "Not a bit a Welshman."
Mordred laughs, too. "You damned Welsh and your damned tricks."
"Never trust a Welshman. Never trust."
Laura stands quietly now, her eyes still blazing but her lips silent, holding Bedwyr up with her arm around his waist, steadying him with her other at his side. Gaheris wonders what the hell is so enchanting about her, with her pinched face and her skinny arms and her angry eyes. Lynet was snapping and biting and seemed discontent, but she had a secret kind place beneath it, and she was solid enough to hold comfortably, she didn't stick out all hard angles. But Bedwyr looks at Laura and softens. At least he has a right to.
"This sweetheart of mine," he says, his voice thick, "she wants me to go back to th' house. Sleep it off. My Mairghread."
"Damn you!" she cries out, sharply, as if she'd been stung by an arrow. "Can't y'remember my damn name?"
Gaheris realises that she's almost crying, but keeping it back.
"I remember, I do. I do." Bedwyr seems to shake himself. "Laura. Born 'n raised here, yeah? Am I right? You sew things. And I don't do anything, I don't do anything. Do I?"
"Take your sword out in the fields sometimes," she reminds, suddenly gentle.
"I do that. I've got a sword," he says, turning to Mordred. "We have--a blacksmith. Here. And I get drunk, I do that. Every day?"
"Most every day," she says.
"But what did we come for?" Gaheris says. It's been pushing at him like water at a floodgates, begging to be let out. "What are we here for? If there's nothing--and you aren't coming, you're staying here with her--why are we here?"
"Hell if I know," Bedwyr says.
"'Cause y're learning we don't want you, that's what," Laura says sharply. "Don't y'see that? Y'want him back, I don't know what for, I don't know why y'keep coming 'round, because he ent one of you. I don't know what it's all about, but some of you got people now, maybe y'ent thought of that. He's got me, he doesn't need you. Leave him alone."
"Na, na, kitty, don't bite m' friend. He's an Orkney, he deserves it, but he doesn't mind hitting ladies. Wicked bastards, they're all like that."
Mordred starts. "Getting a little personal now, aren't we?"
"I ent a lady," she adds, giving Mordred a nasty look.
Gaheris looks at him, too. "Maybe we should go back to the hotel."
"What do you care?" Mordred says irritably. "You're so damned excited to find out whether there's a moral here. I see a moral. Don't get involved, or you'll never escape."
"We should go back."
"Y'should. Get on with you. I don't want y'here."
"And you, lady, you pipe down for just a minute, how about it? Bedwyr--"
"I don't care what you do," he says, putting his head on Laura's shoulder. "I'm ready to sleep it off. Head's all fuzzy. Do what she says."
"I'm sayin' y'should go, y'damned idiots, just leave us alone. He ent lying. I bite."
"Jesus Christ--"
"Get out! Leave us alone!"
Mordred steps forward, as if he'd strike her--Gaheris doesn't think, but he doesn't know, but he didn't know Mordred was that angry, why is everything always under the surface with Mordred, why always hidden--and suddenly Bedwyr changes. He pushes away from Laura and stands, still unsteady but different, alert, his eyes changed.
"Don't touch her, Mordred."
"I'm not going to." Mordred falls back a step. Bedwyr doesn't relax.
"Don't put a hand on her."
"I'm not," he says, as deadly serious.
Laura puts her hand on Bedwyr's shoulder. She's changed, too; she seems frightened, quietly frightened, as though she knows he's capable of doing hard things in his anger, and she wants to put things back the way they were before, when she was the angry one, and he was impotent in his drunkenness, when she was the guard for him and he leaning on her. "Stop," she says, almost a whisper. "Let be. He ent going to hurt me."
"I don't know if he knows that," Bedwyr says. "I'm being sure he does." His mouth twitches with a sideways kind of smile. "Know what we are?"
"What?" Mordred asks, his voice soft.
"Double suicide. Right in the ocean. What a way to meet, you think? Because it was killing me, I didn't remember anything except losing my wife. Laura--"
"Don't tell," she says.
"Met her right at the edge. I think it sounds like a movie." He directs the smile at her. "We go to Llangefni sometimes and see a movie. Sounds just like one. And I'm asking you to listen to her. If she tells you to go, get going."
Gaheris is aware that there are people around them now, people who've come out from the houses. He wonders why they didn't come sooner. Mordred makes a small bow, as if it were the old time again, and he's showing Bedwyr his respect. Then he turns and walks away, without waiting for Gaheris, without looking back. Gaheris turns helplessly to Bedwyr for a moment, and then follows him. Behind him he hears someone talking, asking questions. He doesn't listen. He just follows Mordred silently back to the hotel.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-28 04:07 am (UTC)(also, eee, Kay. :D)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-28 04:10 am (UTC)(He'll come in eventually. XD And then grouch. a lot.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-28 04:13 am (UTC)(Yay. :D I have a very soft spot for poor Kay. I've my thoughts about him.)
--oh, also! I was reading this thing that says some people think that King Arthur didn't die, but was going to come back when England was in trouble blah blah blah, and some people think that Queen Elizabeth I was him, and some think Winston Churchill was, because they both helped England so much and both had red hair. And... I don't know what the point of that was. XD But I thought of you, though I bet you've already heard it.
...and then I found twenty dollars?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-28 04:17 am (UTC)(Awwwwwwww. Well, then. There must be Kay for Snowy, if for no other reason.)
...That's really awesome and kind of crazy, and no I had not already heard it. It makes me squee with the kind of crazy of it. Does that mean King Marmalade had red hair?
...NO FAIR.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-28 04:18 am (UTC)I guess so!
XD
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-28 04:21 am (UTC)Neeeeeeeat. ^___^ Also, King Marmalade is fun to say. Marmaladian Legend. Marmaladiana. ehee.
!!!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-28 04:23 am (UTC)Hee!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-28 04:25 am (UTC)...Sorry.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-28 04:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-28 04:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-28 04:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-28 04:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 03:06 pm (UTC)WAIT.
I've read this before.
Or am I just having the most ridiculous deja vu?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-29 09:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-30 03:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-30 03:55 am (UTC)