"I Gave Nothing, but You Gave it All..."
Apr. 24th, 2007 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psalm_onethirtyoneThis song makes me cry. >_> I STILL HATE LANCE and it makes me cry anyway. Guh.
Agravain stays with them for a week.
He has much to tell, and he doesn't tell it well; he laughs over things that shouldn't be laughed at, and shoots them all looks that aren't trusting, as though they're enemies with whom he has an uneasy peace, instead of brothers. He has a girlfriend back where he lives--in Canada--who he's been with for five years, and he cheats on her every time Vivienne comes to visit him. He doesn't offer any reason for it. Gareth listens to him talk with a constant small frown, and bites his lip as though he's trying to understand.
Mordred listens more darkly, standing far away from him. Agravain has little business cards with his new name printed on them in neat, small block letters: Terrence Collins. It's not a name that fits at all. He's always had his memories, the way Mordred has, and he's always done his best to ignore them. "They wouldn't get me anywhere but a nuthouse," he says, looking significantly at Gareth, who colours and turns away.
When he was thirty Vivienne started coming to see him, laughing her heather-sweet laugh and trading him kisses for something--he still doesn't know what the something is. He shrugs and looks at them sharply, as if he's asking them whether they'll try to find out, whether they think he cares.
No one offers to answer him.
One night Gaheris wakes to the telephone ringing. It's two in the morning. He stumbles out of bed and downstairs, and answers while Clar shouts, with a sharp note to her voice, "Get it! Get it, get it! It's Mordred's!" from the living room. What's she doing still awake? he thinks blearily, and: why am I taking Mordred's call?
"Hello?"
A woman's voice comes shakily. "Is--Is Mike Wilkinson there?"
"He's probably asleep."
"No, he's not," Mordred says behind him, sleepily cranky. "Who the hell can sleep through Clar yelling? Who is it?"
"I'm sorry," she says. "I really--I really need to talk to him."
"Can I ask who's calling?"
"Can you tell him it's Roxy?"
"It's Roxy," he says to Mordred, putting his hand over the mouthpiece.
"Oh, shit. Give it." Now Mordred is wide awake. Gaheris hands him the telephone. "You okay? What's wrong? Why're you calling? It's two a.m., you know that, right?"
Gaheris watches him.
"Christ. Okay. Yeah, I'll be right there. Hang on, okay? I know you love doing stupid things, but tone it down for an hour, and I'll be there. Yeah. Yeah. It's okay. No, I'm fine, you didn't wake me up. I was reading. It's okay. Just hang on. You want me to switch to my cell phone?"
"Who's he talking to?"
Turning, he finds Agravain leaning in the doorway in his pyjamas, his dark hair tousled and sticking up everywhere, an unshaven shadow on his cheeks.
"I don't know."
"Okay. I'll be right there. Don't move." Mordred presses a button and tosses the phone to Gaheris. "I'm going out."
"With who?" Agravain drawls.
"Someone who looks a hell of a lot better than you do at two in the morning." He's already halfway up the stairs, and then down again in a minute half-dressed, pulling his shirt over his head and grabbing his jacket from the pile by the kitchen door. "I'll see you later."
"Wait-- can I come?"
He frowns at Gaheris.
"If he's coming, I am, too. I want to see this person who looks better than me."
Mordred gives them both nasty looks. "I really don't have time for this. I'm on my way to stop a potential crisis, okay, I don't need you two fighting over who gets to come along like a couple of five-year-olds. If you're coming, get in the car and shut up." And he goes.
They're paused for just a moment, and then Gaheris slips out after him and sits in the back of the car, watching him silently. Agravain takes the front passenger and tries to look as though he was asked along. The two of them start talking, Mordred clipped and brief, Agravain with an almost-hidden troubled note in his voice.
Gaheris looks out the window and thinks of something else.
~~~
"Honey! Come on, we're ready to go!" His mother stood by the door, laughing and rolling her eyes, trying to hurry him. "Come on, really."
He was too quiet a child by then, eleven years old and he wouldn't make friends, wouldn't be close to anyone but her, and for all that hardly told her anything. They'd gotten through ten all right somehow, but she thought this might be harder.
Certainly there'd been a turning point. Before ten he was happy. He laughed at things and he had a few good friends who sometimes came over to the apartment, although he was a little embarrassed because they all had houses, and plenty of not so close friends to play with. He'd seemed like any other child.
And then one day they sent him home from school in hysterics, and after that he'd closed up to her and to everyone. She wrote to Dr. T. Berry Brazelton once a week, and he even wrote her back sometimes, but his suggestions never helped. Something had happened to her son and she'd lost him, and she never managed to get him back. Not for lack of trying, she thought.
He came now, pulling on his jacket, looking up at her. His eyes were different, too, but God, she loved his eyes. Maybe they didn't tell her anything, but they still trusted her, they still expected her to guide him and answer him and give him honesty and safety.
"You ready?"
"Yeah," he said. "Sorry."
"Nothing to be sorry about." She kissed his forehead. "Let's go."
Outside the sunlight spotted them, coming through the D.C. cherries in glows of pink and golden. For a shy moment he seemed happy again, and her insides ached. Maybe this was how people felt when they had children who were in accidents and ended up alive but unable to recognise anything, or had terrible mental illnesses that couldn't be fixed. Maybe they thought they were going to break because their children, these beautiful things that had come from their own bodies and had the hope of the world inside them, were all but dead and yet somehow still alive, and they kept holding out because maybe, maybe one of the children would suddenly know what was going on, even for the briefest second, or smile at them, or know who they were. He was practically lost to her, told her nothing, gave her nothing, and then some day she'd be out with him somewhere and something would make him come alive for a split-second.
It was the most terrible and beautiful thing she could think of. Worse than if he really were dead, but with the chance--
She'd taken to letting him sleep with her at night. There was a feeling inside her that she couldn't get rid of, that something terrible might happen and she'd really lose him and that chance wouldn't be there any more, and if that were true she wanted him to be with her all the time, so she could have every moment. If it happened she'd never have lost time.
~~~
He finally looks away from the window, in time to catch Mordred saying, "She was unhappy, too. You never saw anything as fucked-up as that place after you broke down the door. After he went off to war I married her."
"Jesus Christ, was there anyone you weren't sleeping with?"
"Yeah. You." Mordred leans on the horn.
Gaheris is quiet, listening.
"I bet that took willpower."
"Oh, yeah. Every time we were in the same room I had to stand around looking gloomy so I wouldn't jump on you and snog you senseless."
"...That's disgusting."
"Congratulations. Now you know how I feel every time you open your mouth."
"Hostile, aren't we?"
"That wasn't the impression I was getting, no. In fact, I'm feeling so warmly towards you that when we get there I want you to take the car and drive somewhere--anywhere--and don't bother getting caught up in all this."
"Ha, ha."
"Is Gaheris sleeping?" Mordred cranes around to look. Agravain immediately snatches at the steering wheel.
"Are you insane?"
"Getting there. --Hey, you awake?"
Gaheris looks at him silently.
"You okay?" His voice takes on the same unexpected gentleness it did with the woman on the telephone.
"I'm fine."
"You sure?"
"Shut up about him and drive, you idiot!"
"Better drive," Gaheris says softly.
"Thank you. Listen to your nut brother. Hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, brain--well, there's no brain, so we'll have to forget that part."
"Some wit you're blessed with," Mordred says, turning front again.
"You'll have to forgive me if the prospect of imminent death makes me a little less clever."
"Nah, you're the same as usual, don't worry."
Half an hour later Mordred pulls up at an apartment building. It isn't the one Gaheris grew up in, and there aren't any cherry trees outside, but one apartment looks a lot like another and he feels a catch in his chest. It's the same old tightening that always comes with terrible memory or knowledge.
Mordred gets out of the car and then hesitates, looking at them both. Finally he motions for Gaheris to come, and gives Agravain a sarcastic, unwelcome look. Agravain gives him the finger and gets into the driver's seat. Then Mordred turns away to the building and presses a button at the door.
"Hey. It's me."
A buzzer sounds.
They go up. Mordred finds a door and taps it softly, and it's opened immediately.
Gaheris stills. It's the flight attendant from the plane. She looks even more washed-out than she did before, and her hair is knotty, her cheeks and eyes are red with crying, the frilly white silk nightdress she's wearing looks pathetic on her. When she sees Gaheris she tries to smile.
"Hi. Come in."
Mordred catches her in a gentle embrace the moment they're inside. "Hey."
The woman begins to cry. "I'm sorry."
"It's fine. It's okay. Let's make--coffee. Do you have coffee?"
She nods and points to a small kitchenette.
"Good girl. Come on."
Gaheris goes to the couch and sits, trying to be invisible. He doesn't know why he's so afraid, and he doesn't know who she is or why he's seen her before, and he doesn't understand. Mordred talked about having married her, but she isn't Cywyllog.
He hears them in the kitchenette, Mordred murmuring to her and her sniffling and answering back sometimes; the small bubble of the automatic kettle on the stove, and Mordred spooning insant coffee into cups while making disgusted noises at it. At last they come back to the room Gaheris is in and sit down around the table with the coffee; Mordred offers him a cup and he shakes his head. The woman wipes her eyes with the back of her hands. There's a photograph album open on her table, full of pictures of her and another man, young and bright-looking.
"So they just called to-day, huh?" Mordred asks softly.
"Yeah. I--I thought I was going to be okay."
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry I called so late."
"It's okay. Don't worry."
"You have work to-morrow?"
"I'll call off or something. It's not a problem. They can handle it."
"Thanks so much."
They seem to have forgotten about Gaheris. Mordred stands after a while and gets a brush out of her bedroom, and begins to brush her knotty blonde hair. There's something terrible here, something Gaheris can't understand, and it's too important for him to be jealous at Mordred's gentleness. There's no place for jealousy. More time passes, and she takes the photograph album on her knees and goes through it; Mordred helps her turn the pages, and answers her explanations-- "Here we are at Jersey beach. See--he got squished by a wave. He had seaweed in his hair." --with quiet words. Once he says,--
"Stupid bastard,"
and she starts to cry again, hiding her face in his shirt.
"I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I didn't think, I thought it was just--I wish he'd never signed up. I wish he was here. I wish he was here. I'm so scared." Her shoulders shake. "I don't know what I'm gonna do without him."
"I know."
"I'm so scared."
Gaheris watches Mordred's jaw tighten, his hands pass over her hair. "I know."
They all sit in silence, two of them with something to hold on to. After a long while, Gaheris falls asleep, only because he's so weary--
In the morning he's woken up by the sunlight on his face and Mordred shaking him. "Rise and shine."
"Huh?"
"Time to go. Roxy's going to be okay, and we're going home."
Gaheris shakes himself and rubs his face hard. He looks around for the woman--she's standing by the door and smiling at him shyly. "'Morning, Gaheris."
"Who are you?"
"Guenever," she says. "You remember?"
Of course he remembers. Of course he's always blamed her, blamed her with Lancelot for all of what happened, though he blamed Agravain more. She was at the root of it, she who couldn't tame her love. She couldn't for the sake of her husband, and couldn't for the sake of the King-- This woman and her smile like a watercolour with too much water, fragile with her sadness, she helped bring down a kingdom? He tries to look at her with anger, but there isn't any in him. Not for her.
"'Morning," he says.
"Remember to call if you need anything," Mordred says, fixing her with a look as he pulls on his leather jacket. "Anything. Okay?"
"I know. Thanks."
"Okay. See you."
"'Bye." She smiles at them, wiping at her eyes as they go out. "Take care. I'll call."
Gaheris catches her eye before the door closes, and whispers, "Sorry."
Guenever doesn't move, but he knows she accepts it.
~~~
Agravain isn't waiting for them, and Mordred sits down cross-legged on the sidewalk and leans back against one of the porch supports. "We'll wait."
"How long have you known her?" Gaheris frowns at him.
"About a year. She recognised you on the plane and got a friend to find our address. She called me a while back."
"You didn't tell me." He has to tense his head to keep from sounding petulant or reproachful.
"It wasn't your problem."
But this is why Mordred's been so closed off from him this year, isn't it? It means everything. It's an explanation and a question, it's a sudden understanding and only more confusion, and so many things to try to answer--
"When did you marry her?" he asks quietly.
"After the war started."
"Why?"
"Because we were both unhappy," Mordred says. This is where his face should close, where he should suddenly shutter himself and leave Gaheris without any understanding of what he feels, what his words mean to him, but he looks at Gaheris and stays clear, and Gaheris sees the hurt. It's so much. It's--something he never imagined. It's years and years of memories, years of unbelonging, of loving worthlessly, of fighting fate and losing constantly; of losing brothers, losing the people who anchored him by fitting in to what they were given to, despite everything that backed them and the blood they carried in them. When Agravain died--when Gareth died--when Gaheris died. He sees now the pieces that broke and were lost. He sees the last handhold to safety fall away as Gawain died, and Mordred was left entirely alone. With nothing. Without Gawain's gentle counsel to stop his anger, without Gareth's innocence to temper his too much knowledge. Mordred's voice is very steady, with the soft taste of bitterness in his words. "I didn't know what to do. I didn't love Cywyllog, Mother married us with an enchantment, and you were all dead, so I didn't have anyone to talk to; and she lost her husband and her lover. We were both alone. It wasn't actually a marriage, either, because we were both still married. We just decided that we could use something to hold on to."
"Oh," Gaheris says.
Mordred leans over and ruffles his hair very lightly. "Idiot."
"What happened now? Why did she--need you?"
"She's been with Lancelot for about ten, fifteen years now, and he enlisted for Iraq when the war started here," Mordred says, with a trace of bitterness still left from before. "Got blown up yesterday."
It sends a shock through Gaheris. A second death--what does that mean? Will Lancelot come back? And an entire person has passed them by, someone who showed so large in their old life, and he's come back into this one and gone as quickly as a candle blown out. Whuff. Lancelot was here--now he's dead. He makes a noise in his throat.
"Oh."
"I made some calls this morning and got her an appointment with a therapist, so hopefully that'll help. They do that these days. You get medical professionals for something they'd have told you to shut up about and get over a couple of hundred years ago."
"Not that anyone did," Gaheris murmurs.
"C'est la vie, brother."
And then Agravain pulls up in the middle of whatever answer Gaheris was giving, and they stand. Gaheris slips into the back seat again, while Mordred stands by the driver's window and taps on it until Agravain gets out and hands him the keys. They drive home in relative silence, with only a few questions, all of which Mordred answers shortly, telling little.
At the end of the week, Agravain goes, leaving a business card behind him. Clar takes it into the living room and no one ever sees it again.
Agravain stays with them for a week.
He has much to tell, and he doesn't tell it well; he laughs over things that shouldn't be laughed at, and shoots them all looks that aren't trusting, as though they're enemies with whom he has an uneasy peace, instead of brothers. He has a girlfriend back where he lives--in Canada--who he's been with for five years, and he cheats on her every time Vivienne comes to visit him. He doesn't offer any reason for it. Gareth listens to him talk with a constant small frown, and bites his lip as though he's trying to understand.
Mordred listens more darkly, standing far away from him. Agravain has little business cards with his new name printed on them in neat, small block letters: Terrence Collins. It's not a name that fits at all. He's always had his memories, the way Mordred has, and he's always done his best to ignore them. "They wouldn't get me anywhere but a nuthouse," he says, looking significantly at Gareth, who colours and turns away.
When he was thirty Vivienne started coming to see him, laughing her heather-sweet laugh and trading him kisses for something--he still doesn't know what the something is. He shrugs and looks at them sharply, as if he's asking them whether they'll try to find out, whether they think he cares.
No one offers to answer him.
One night Gaheris wakes to the telephone ringing. It's two in the morning. He stumbles out of bed and downstairs, and answers while Clar shouts, with a sharp note to her voice, "Get it! Get it, get it! It's Mordred's!" from the living room. What's she doing still awake? he thinks blearily, and: why am I taking Mordred's call?
"Hello?"
A woman's voice comes shakily. "Is--Is Mike Wilkinson there?"
"He's probably asleep."
"No, he's not," Mordred says behind him, sleepily cranky. "Who the hell can sleep through Clar yelling? Who is it?"
"I'm sorry," she says. "I really--I really need to talk to him."
"Can I ask who's calling?"
"Can you tell him it's Roxy?"
"It's Roxy," he says to Mordred, putting his hand over the mouthpiece.
"Oh, shit. Give it." Now Mordred is wide awake. Gaheris hands him the telephone. "You okay? What's wrong? Why're you calling? It's two a.m., you know that, right?"
Gaheris watches him.
"Christ. Okay. Yeah, I'll be right there. Hang on, okay? I know you love doing stupid things, but tone it down for an hour, and I'll be there. Yeah. Yeah. It's okay. No, I'm fine, you didn't wake me up. I was reading. It's okay. Just hang on. You want me to switch to my cell phone?"
"Who's he talking to?"
Turning, he finds Agravain leaning in the doorway in his pyjamas, his dark hair tousled and sticking up everywhere, an unshaven shadow on his cheeks.
"I don't know."
"Okay. I'll be right there. Don't move." Mordred presses a button and tosses the phone to Gaheris. "I'm going out."
"With who?" Agravain drawls.
"Someone who looks a hell of a lot better than you do at two in the morning." He's already halfway up the stairs, and then down again in a minute half-dressed, pulling his shirt over his head and grabbing his jacket from the pile by the kitchen door. "I'll see you later."
"Wait-- can I come?"
He frowns at Gaheris.
"If he's coming, I am, too. I want to see this person who looks better than me."
Mordred gives them both nasty looks. "I really don't have time for this. I'm on my way to stop a potential crisis, okay, I don't need you two fighting over who gets to come along like a couple of five-year-olds. If you're coming, get in the car and shut up." And he goes.
They're paused for just a moment, and then Gaheris slips out after him and sits in the back of the car, watching him silently. Agravain takes the front passenger and tries to look as though he was asked along. The two of them start talking, Mordred clipped and brief, Agravain with an almost-hidden troubled note in his voice.
Gaheris looks out the window and thinks of something else.
"Honey! Come on, we're ready to go!" His mother stood by the door, laughing and rolling her eyes, trying to hurry him. "Come on, really."
He was too quiet a child by then, eleven years old and he wouldn't make friends, wouldn't be close to anyone but her, and for all that hardly told her anything. They'd gotten through ten all right somehow, but she thought this might be harder.
Certainly there'd been a turning point. Before ten he was happy. He laughed at things and he had a few good friends who sometimes came over to the apartment, although he was a little embarrassed because they all had houses, and plenty of not so close friends to play with. He'd seemed like any other child.
And then one day they sent him home from school in hysterics, and after that he'd closed up to her and to everyone. She wrote to Dr. T. Berry Brazelton once a week, and he even wrote her back sometimes, but his suggestions never helped. Something had happened to her son and she'd lost him, and she never managed to get him back. Not for lack of trying, she thought.
He came now, pulling on his jacket, looking up at her. His eyes were different, too, but God, she loved his eyes. Maybe they didn't tell her anything, but they still trusted her, they still expected her to guide him and answer him and give him honesty and safety.
"You ready?"
"Yeah," he said. "Sorry."
"Nothing to be sorry about." She kissed his forehead. "Let's go."
Outside the sunlight spotted them, coming through the D.C. cherries in glows of pink and golden. For a shy moment he seemed happy again, and her insides ached. Maybe this was how people felt when they had children who were in accidents and ended up alive but unable to recognise anything, or had terrible mental illnesses that couldn't be fixed. Maybe they thought they were going to break because their children, these beautiful things that had come from their own bodies and had the hope of the world inside them, were all but dead and yet somehow still alive, and they kept holding out because maybe, maybe one of the children would suddenly know what was going on, even for the briefest second, or smile at them, or know who they were. He was practically lost to her, told her nothing, gave her nothing, and then some day she'd be out with him somewhere and something would make him come alive for a split-second.
It was the most terrible and beautiful thing she could think of. Worse than if he really were dead, but with the chance--
She'd taken to letting him sleep with her at night. There was a feeling inside her that she couldn't get rid of, that something terrible might happen and she'd really lose him and that chance wouldn't be there any more, and if that were true she wanted him to be with her all the time, so she could have every moment. If it happened she'd never have lost time.
He finally looks away from the window, in time to catch Mordred saying, "She was unhappy, too. You never saw anything as fucked-up as that place after you broke down the door. After he went off to war I married her."
"Jesus Christ, was there anyone you weren't sleeping with?"
"Yeah. You." Mordred leans on the horn.
Gaheris is quiet, listening.
"I bet that took willpower."
"Oh, yeah. Every time we were in the same room I had to stand around looking gloomy so I wouldn't jump on you and snog you senseless."
"...That's disgusting."
"Congratulations. Now you know how I feel every time you open your mouth."
"Hostile, aren't we?"
"That wasn't the impression I was getting, no. In fact, I'm feeling so warmly towards you that when we get there I want you to take the car and drive somewhere--anywhere--and don't bother getting caught up in all this."
"Ha, ha."
"Is Gaheris sleeping?" Mordred cranes around to look. Agravain immediately snatches at the steering wheel.
"Are you insane?"
"Getting there. --Hey, you awake?"
Gaheris looks at him silently.
"You okay?" His voice takes on the same unexpected gentleness it did with the woman on the telephone.
"I'm fine."
"You sure?"
"Shut up about him and drive, you idiot!"
"Better drive," Gaheris says softly.
"Thank you. Listen to your nut brother. Hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, brain--well, there's no brain, so we'll have to forget that part."
"Some wit you're blessed with," Mordred says, turning front again.
"You'll have to forgive me if the prospect of imminent death makes me a little less clever."
"Nah, you're the same as usual, don't worry."
Half an hour later Mordred pulls up at an apartment building. It isn't the one Gaheris grew up in, and there aren't any cherry trees outside, but one apartment looks a lot like another and he feels a catch in his chest. It's the same old tightening that always comes with terrible memory or knowledge.
Mordred gets out of the car and then hesitates, looking at them both. Finally he motions for Gaheris to come, and gives Agravain a sarcastic, unwelcome look. Agravain gives him the finger and gets into the driver's seat. Then Mordred turns away to the building and presses a button at the door.
"Hey. It's me."
A buzzer sounds.
They go up. Mordred finds a door and taps it softly, and it's opened immediately.
Gaheris stills. It's the flight attendant from the plane. She looks even more washed-out than she did before, and her hair is knotty, her cheeks and eyes are red with crying, the frilly white silk nightdress she's wearing looks pathetic on her. When she sees Gaheris she tries to smile.
"Hi. Come in."
Mordred catches her in a gentle embrace the moment they're inside. "Hey."
The woman begins to cry. "I'm sorry."
"It's fine. It's okay. Let's make--coffee. Do you have coffee?"
She nods and points to a small kitchenette.
"Good girl. Come on."
Gaheris goes to the couch and sits, trying to be invisible. He doesn't know why he's so afraid, and he doesn't know who she is or why he's seen her before, and he doesn't understand. Mordred talked about having married her, but she isn't Cywyllog.
He hears them in the kitchenette, Mordred murmuring to her and her sniffling and answering back sometimes; the small bubble of the automatic kettle on the stove, and Mordred spooning insant coffee into cups while making disgusted noises at it. At last they come back to the room Gaheris is in and sit down around the table with the coffee; Mordred offers him a cup and he shakes his head. The woman wipes her eyes with the back of her hands. There's a photograph album open on her table, full of pictures of her and another man, young and bright-looking.
"So they just called to-day, huh?" Mordred asks softly.
"Yeah. I--I thought I was going to be okay."
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry I called so late."
"It's okay. Don't worry."
"You have work to-morrow?"
"I'll call off or something. It's not a problem. They can handle it."
"Thanks so much."
They seem to have forgotten about Gaheris. Mordred stands after a while and gets a brush out of her bedroom, and begins to brush her knotty blonde hair. There's something terrible here, something Gaheris can't understand, and it's too important for him to be jealous at Mordred's gentleness. There's no place for jealousy. More time passes, and she takes the photograph album on her knees and goes through it; Mordred helps her turn the pages, and answers her explanations-- "Here we are at Jersey beach. See--he got squished by a wave. He had seaweed in his hair." --with quiet words. Once he says,--
"Stupid bastard,"
and she starts to cry again, hiding her face in his shirt.
"I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I didn't think, I thought it was just--I wish he'd never signed up. I wish he was here. I wish he was here. I'm so scared." Her shoulders shake. "I don't know what I'm gonna do without him."
"I know."
"I'm so scared."
Gaheris watches Mordred's jaw tighten, his hands pass over her hair. "I know."
They all sit in silence, two of them with something to hold on to. After a long while, Gaheris falls asleep, only because he's so weary--
In the morning he's woken up by the sunlight on his face and Mordred shaking him. "Rise and shine."
"Huh?"
"Time to go. Roxy's going to be okay, and we're going home."
Gaheris shakes himself and rubs his face hard. He looks around for the woman--she's standing by the door and smiling at him shyly. "'Morning, Gaheris."
"Who are you?"
"Guenever," she says. "You remember?"
Of course he remembers. Of course he's always blamed her, blamed her with Lancelot for all of what happened, though he blamed Agravain more. She was at the root of it, she who couldn't tame her love. She couldn't for the sake of her husband, and couldn't for the sake of the King-- This woman and her smile like a watercolour with too much water, fragile with her sadness, she helped bring down a kingdom? He tries to look at her with anger, but there isn't any in him. Not for her.
"'Morning," he says.
"Remember to call if you need anything," Mordred says, fixing her with a look as he pulls on his leather jacket. "Anything. Okay?"
"I know. Thanks."
"Okay. See you."
"'Bye." She smiles at them, wiping at her eyes as they go out. "Take care. I'll call."
Gaheris catches her eye before the door closes, and whispers, "Sorry."
Guenever doesn't move, but he knows she accepts it.
Agravain isn't waiting for them, and Mordred sits down cross-legged on the sidewalk and leans back against one of the porch supports. "We'll wait."
"How long have you known her?" Gaheris frowns at him.
"About a year. She recognised you on the plane and got a friend to find our address. She called me a while back."
"You didn't tell me." He has to tense his head to keep from sounding petulant or reproachful.
"It wasn't your problem."
But this is why Mordred's been so closed off from him this year, isn't it? It means everything. It's an explanation and a question, it's a sudden understanding and only more confusion, and so many things to try to answer--
"When did you marry her?" he asks quietly.
"After the war started."
"Why?"
"Because we were both unhappy," Mordred says. This is where his face should close, where he should suddenly shutter himself and leave Gaheris without any understanding of what he feels, what his words mean to him, but he looks at Gaheris and stays clear, and Gaheris sees the hurt. It's so much. It's--something he never imagined. It's years and years of memories, years of unbelonging, of loving worthlessly, of fighting fate and losing constantly; of losing brothers, losing the people who anchored him by fitting in to what they were given to, despite everything that backed them and the blood they carried in them. When Agravain died--when Gareth died--when Gaheris died. He sees now the pieces that broke and were lost. He sees the last handhold to safety fall away as Gawain died, and Mordred was left entirely alone. With nothing. Without Gawain's gentle counsel to stop his anger, without Gareth's innocence to temper his too much knowledge. Mordred's voice is very steady, with the soft taste of bitterness in his words. "I didn't know what to do. I didn't love Cywyllog, Mother married us with an enchantment, and you were all dead, so I didn't have anyone to talk to; and she lost her husband and her lover. We were both alone. It wasn't actually a marriage, either, because we were both still married. We just decided that we could use something to hold on to."
"Oh," Gaheris says.
Mordred leans over and ruffles his hair very lightly. "Idiot."
"What happened now? Why did she--need you?"
"She's been with Lancelot for about ten, fifteen years now, and he enlisted for Iraq when the war started here," Mordred says, with a trace of bitterness still left from before. "Got blown up yesterday."
It sends a shock through Gaheris. A second death--what does that mean? Will Lancelot come back? And an entire person has passed them by, someone who showed so large in their old life, and he's come back into this one and gone as quickly as a candle blown out. Whuff. Lancelot was here--now he's dead. He makes a noise in his throat.
"Oh."
"I made some calls this morning and got her an appointment with a therapist, so hopefully that'll help. They do that these days. You get medical professionals for something they'd have told you to shut up about and get over a couple of hundred years ago."
"Not that anyone did," Gaheris murmurs.
"C'est la vie, brother."
And then Agravain pulls up in the middle of whatever answer Gaheris was giving, and they stand. Gaheris slips into the back seat again, while Mordred stands by the driver's window and taps on it until Agravain gets out and hands him the keys. They drive home in relative silence, with only a few questions, all of which Mordred answers shortly, telling little.
At the end of the week, Agravain goes, leaving a business card behind him. Clar takes it into the living room and no one ever sees it again.
