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psalm_onethirtyoneMordred POV and more Ragnelle.
Mordred is so happy here. Gaheris can't help noticing, and it makes him aching and angry--because doesn't Mordred have every right to happiness, and isn't it what he's wanted, to see him laugh like that all the time, as if nothing weighs on him; to see him talking freely and less bitterly every moment? But why wasn't Gaheris good enough? Why is Mordred never so happy with him? Despite everything Ragnelle's said he feels sick to his stomach and he's always sullen when Mordred tries to talk to him, until Mordred stops trying altogether.
Gareth tries to engage him, but he does his best to ignore Gareth, who doesn't know anything about anything.
He wants to be loved--how many times has he said this, over and over, always pointlessly? He spends all his time with Ragnelle, when Mordred isn't flirting with her or she with Gawain, and she soothes him a little with her soft, accented voice and her sense of humour and her wisdom that he understands and maybe never accepts. She tells him about the uncle he'll be once her baby is born, and how she hopes he manages it better in this life than the other.
"You were pathetic," she tells him, laughing. He can't keep himself from smiling then. "You visited, oh, maybe once a year. At best, once a year. You looked at my boys like you thought they were going to try to corrupt your daughter if you didn't keep an eye on them every moment."
"They probably would have."
"They were three."
"Boys start young."
"Yes," says Ragnelle, with something amused and distant in her eyes, "they do."
~~~
His mother always made him take his sister along when he went places. At first he resented it, but when he became older--old enough to understand what was in his memory--he stopped complaining. Jessie was nothing like Jennifer. Jennifer, his next-door-neighbour and best friend, his other sister, his once-upon-a-time sister, had flashing eyes and trouble explaining things; her parents were going to put in a special needs class until they realised that at thirteen she could get a perfect score on the SATs, and put her in a gifted intelligence class instead. Jessie was nothing like her, and it was a relief sometimes.
Besides, she wasn't anyone he knew.
Jessie was little and bouncy and eager (and blonde, the way everybody else in the family was, not like him, his hair was dark as Jessie's hands after she discovered black walnuts and stained herself with them). She tagged along the way an annoying little sister should, and asked dumb questions and always wanted him to share with her.
Most of the time he did. She could sit on the handlebars when he biked around town on weekends, baking under the hot sun. She'd put her hair into pigtails and she didn't look anything like him and Jennifer, dark-eyed and quiet and so alike that people asked if they were twins when they were out together.
His mother was sure they were dating, no matter how many times he explained she was just a friend.
"Just remember to make sure she wants it, too, if you decide to go all the way. Don't pressure her, okay?" his mother said.
"Mom," he yelled, banging out of the room while Jessie laughed and blushed and sang,--
"Mike and Jennifer, sitting in a tree-ee," and he could ignore her, because she was his little sister and little sisters always tried to be a pain. It was his mother who bothered him, because it was obvious--it should be obvious--that he was not in love with his sister, God, and then he'd have to remind himself that nobody knew Jennifer was his sister except Jennifer herself. Sometimes he'd feel funny, turn, and find her looking at him during class with burning in her eyes and she'd catch him afterwards to try and tell something and get lost in tangled words that she couldn't express.
"Got to find. Somebody," she'd say, halting, and angry because of it. "It's stupid. You weren't supposed to--not at Camlann. I brought you. I fixed you. I know I fixed you," and it was so weird to hear it coming from a teenage girl who looked like most teenage girls if you didn't look at her face too closely, stonewashed jeans and a tie-dye t-shirt, and her dark hair straightened (by her mother), and he'd say,--
"It doesn't matter, forget it. It doesn't matter now. Does it?" suddenly unsure, because she always knew better and she probably did now, but she just looked at him.
"Forget it," she said.
So it was a relief to take Jessie out somewhere, to the movies or to play mini-golf or whatever it was she'd decided she couldn't live without doing. Sometimes she said she did things because she wanted to be like the girls in her class (and it was stupid, because she was exactly like every other girl in her class). But it didn't matter, whatever she wanted he let her do.
To a point. Always to a point.
He'd been a cynical eight-year-old and now he was a cynical sixteen-year-old, and sometimes he looked at Jessie and he saw Gareth, innocent to a fault, indulged because of his sweetness, and then, in the end, betrayed and killed by someone he loved and trusted. Which showed you just how good love and trust were when they weren't for your family. He half-taught Jessie that. You can always come to your family, always come to me when you want something, he said, but be careful what you give to other people, what you tell.
And Jessie didn't understand.
He didn't understand, himself, not half the time. He was balancing two people, trying not to let them overlap too much, because if they did he didn't know what he'd be, and Jessie couldn't be allowed to know Mordred, and Jennifer didn't want to talk to Mike.
Sometimes he got dizzy with it, he couldn't figure out which one he was, and he ended up in a middle place where he was no one, and it was easy to see and breathe but there was so much darkness, and he was safe and without feeling but he was no one. And he had to be someone. One half of him was a pretty decent nineties teen. His family liked him, he helped out around the house, he was good-natured overall, and wanted to learn, and had a best friend and good ideas; and the other half of him was tired and old and had a deep darkness inside, bloody hands and terrible scars. Both parts wanted to be.
And he made it through high school and then through college, managed to handle himself no matter who he was, even when he didn't think he'd be able, and afterwards he and Jennifer bought the house in the Philly suburbs and he stopped calling her Jennifer. His mother called every weekend and always asked at least once a month when they were getting married or whether they planned on living in sin for the rest of their lives. He, having learned a little, sometimes laughed at her.
"Mom," he said, "we're not sleeping together."
"I believe that," his mother said. "When are you coming down? Jessie isn't talking about anything else. 'Oooh, I can't wait for Mike to come! Oooh, do you think he'll teach me to drive in his car? Oooh, maybe he'll take us all to the waterpark!'"
"Oh, Jesus."
Jessie was turning sixteen and wanted him to be there for her birthday, and he made long-suffering noises and said he'd leave by the end of the week. His parents had divorced when he was eighteen and his father had disappeared into the blue, leaving nothing to him except a habit of cursing and a certainty that people would stop him now when he went too far. Both those things, he said, were good to have.
His mother, always blunt and a little sarcastic, had become even more so, and Jessie sometimes got sad, but on the whole it didn't seem as though anything too terrible had happened because of either the divorce or the passing of years.
Jennifer--Clarissant--whoever the hell she was--didn't have much to do with his family, but she knew about them and she knew, or at least it seemed that way, what they meant to him. His family. A new family, a safer family, who did better by him than Morgause and Lot and Arthur, taught him something and at least loved him straightforwardly.
He managed. He liked his job and the way things were--not perfect, but good. And he thought they'd stay that way, he thought he'd have no problem living like this--but something was bothering Clar, and she started filling the house with cigarette smoke and unquiet magic until he thought he was going insane.
"What the hell is all this?" he asked.
"Don't be stupid. Stupid boys." Clar, who had stopped dressing like other people a long time ago, wiped her hands on her black jeans. "One of them needs us. I hear him."
"Who?"
"Your brother! Idiot!"
"All right, don't yell. Jesus Christ."
"Stupid," Clar muttered.
"Which one is it? Gawain?"
"No, the other one." She lit another cigarette and then used the electric-green lighter, which she'd bought at a gas station years and years ago (in some town she said was The Right Place), and which had never broken or died, to set fire to a small piece of gold-coloured paper. It looked like the foil wrapper on a thing of Rollos. He eyed it. "The little one, the lizard one."
"What?"
"Skitter!"
"Oh, for crying out loud."
The look Clar gave him would have made men unused to it drop dead, he suspected. "You know. The bloody one."
Something in him stirred, some feeling at the bottom of his stomach. He opened his mouth to say something smart-ass about Agravain, who none of them could stand, and was silent instead. Because she didn't mean Agravain, she meant Gaheris. Anxious Gaheris, who never fit in. The last time he'd ever talked to Gaheris they ended up shouting at each other about Agravain's and their mother's deaths, unaware of how loud they'd become until Gawain came and tried to calm them down and Gaheris turned and left the room so angry and afraid he was shaking. And the last time he'd ever seen Gaheris, it was in death, Gaheris bloody on the ground and broken, his body all but slashed to pieces and Gareth's beside him.
The something stirred in him again, threatening to make him sick. He'd thought he was past that. It was all past now.
"Yes," Clar said, with satisfaction. "You know."
"Christ almighty, did you do that?"
"No." Now she sounded disgusted with him and his idiocy. "You always knew. You hid it. Hurts you. You and him, you're--alike. Ish. Go away. I'm working."
And a week later--
It was a week that was filled with memories and left him Mordred almost every moment of the day, so that he called in sick twice to work because he couldn't get his head right. He knew at any moment he might lose himself in Old English and a bitterness so choking it filled his eyes and nose and mouth like the smoke from Clar's cigarettes.
A week later, she made animal-shaped macaroni and cheese and told him, as she sorted the noodles out by animal and put them on different sides of her plate, "I found him. New York. Next time you go you should look."
"When the hell am I going to New York?"
"Next month. Lecture."
"Thanks a lot."
And Clar just laughed at him in a way that made his stomach turn.
~~~
Ragnelle takes Gaheris and Gareth through the gardens, showing them all her trees--it's the beginning of December, and everything is sleeping, but still the trees are beautiful, and she shows them where the roses will be when they bloom, and brings them down to the lake. She shows them the greenhouses, too, the one Gaheris has already seen and two others, brimful of flowers. Gareth is as bored by flowers as by wind turbines, and he and Ragnelle end up sitting together at one end of the greenhouse telling each other things that make them both laugh while Gaheris loses himself in the vast, tangled gardens hidden behind glass walls.
~~~
He didn't want to go back.
He kept reminding himself--job, his mother, Jessie. There were things to go back for. He needed to go back. But it was hard to keep that part of himself on the surface, here with Gawain and Ragnelle. It was so much easier to be Mordred. Gawain had so much to show him and tell him, Gawain had somehow managed to balance his two selves--Gawain, King of Orkney, and George Styer, billionaire--without getting lost or seeming much troubled. Gawain could spend the whole day showing him all his ideas and inventions, the roof, the wind turbines, all that shit, and then spend the evening remembering their home and their childhood, the way they never parted while they were growing up.
Gawain remembered that he had taught Mordred to fight, squired him (as Gawain squired all the brothers, but that didn't matter), took him hunting, played with him, lectured him, stood up for him and knocked him down when he deserved it. He remembered that Mordred was jealous as hell when he married, that Mordred was certain he'd be forgotten, but he wasn't; Ragnelle invited his company and they still did things together, and they always talked.
He never really began to lose Gawain until he began to lose himself.
But that wasn't what mattered (and then he laughed at himself, with a hard twist in it, because it mattered, he just didn't want to think about it, and he knew that)--what mattered was that Gawain was both people, the then and now, and Gawain was happy.
And right now, right now he was there with him.
He wanted to stay for-ever in this bizarre idyll where they washed with Ecover dish soap and talked about old tourneys, where Ragnelle grew geraniums and spoke with a Southern accent, where Gawain was beloved (as he deserved to be, as he had always deserved to be) and drove expensive imported cars. He didn't want to leave.
But he was going to have to.
And he was somehow going to have to find out why Gaheris was so pissed off, and deal with that, and he was going to have to buy something for Clar, and his vacation didn't last all that long, and there really was no end to the things that were unresolved and unwell. He groaned aloud and Gawain looked up and asked what was wrong.
"Nothing," he said. "I'm trying to think what I'll placate Clar with."
"Does she like gadgets?"
"Nope!" Gareth said. It was dinner and he was sitting next to Gawain. His curly hair was even curlier in the humidity here. "That's Mordred. He's got all kinds of stuff."
"Really?" Gawain looked at him.
"Yeah."
"I'll have to show you the pH testers, then! There're these little ones that you hold in your hand, they're really convenient and kind of neat. They remind me of that sonic screwdriver thingy in the old Doctor Who."
"Christ, Gawain."
Gareth laughed. "We need to get something shiny for Clar. Like maybe--"
"Gold-plated hen's teeth," he said.
"Boxes or shells or something," Gareth said, looking at him reproachfully. "Or green glass bottles. Or those little packets of salt like you get at Wendy's. Stuff like that."
"Would she like one of my rings, you think?" Ragnelle asked.
"People keep sending her rings," Gawain said. "Sort of--love-gifts. From all these people she doesn't even know."
"How archaic."
Ragnelle looked at him and laughed, her eyes dancing--so alive, something always moving in them, like Clar's, but in a different way--enjoying the world. "Good sir, the world becomes archaic faced with two such as we are. Chivalry's knight and the Loathly Lady of Inglewood?"
"You just say that so we'll compliment you."
"Well, of course. A ring for your sister?"
"Sure," Gareth said, "I think she'd like that."
(Gaheris hadn't said a word yet.)
~~~
Gaheris hasn't stopped being cold inside. He can feel it all the time, even when he's a little happy, even with Ragnelle. The sooner they leave, the better, he thinks. The better.
And in a week they do, with promises to come back, and promises to be visited--
"You've got to come and meet Peredur," Mordred says cheerfully. "You and him, my God. An organic vegetable franchise in a minute, I bet you fifty bucks."
"It would be bad for small businesses," promptly. "We'll have to think of something else."
"God!"
But he's laughing.
Gaheris is glad and disheartened at the same time. He won't be so jealous, and Mordred won't be so happy. He isn't sure there's any way for both of them to be happy, really, and he doesn't want to think about it too hard, because he has a bad idea, a bad idea that he'll try for his own happiness over Mordred's, and he doesn't want to know that about himself.
Well, what good can you expect from a man who's killed his mother? He says it to himself viciously, more cruelly than Agravain would, trying to make himself flinch. Why should he be so worried about knowing he's selfish when he already knows he's a murderer? It's the lesser of two evils, isn't it? Be glad you don't want to kill him for loving Gawain more. The way you killed Mother for loving Lamorack more. Think of that.
It makes him shake inside, coldness and sickness together, and hate himself.
And before they go, Gawain kisses his cheek and smiles at him, says,--
"Go well, brother."
Ragnelle takes a little longer to say good-bye. She makes him come to the greenhouse one last time and talks with him for a long time about Mordred and Gawain and Gareth and Agravain, about all his brothers, and, for a flickering moment, about his mother. Everything they say is a secret.
("Gaheris," she says, sitting there on the side of a huge planter, with a strange purple flower threaded through her fingers, "they love you. They always have."
"That's not what Mother said."
"Then she lied. I never knew her--I ran away back to my forest after seven years and I wasn't there for you and I wasn't there for your brothers, and I let Gawain go to his death alone, and I haven't forgotten it for a day--but I was yours and your brothers' long enough to know you a little. They love you. They always loved you."
He looks down at her hands.
"Maybe," she says, "Agravain loved you a little less. But you know he's an idiot."
"Why did she tell me so if it wasn't true?"
"I don't know."
"She didn't do things for no reason."
"Then why do you think she didn't have something in mind when she told you that? She wanted something. It's who she was."
"I wanted her to love me."
"Oh, dearest." She puts her arms around him, purple flower and all, fingering his hair gently. "She wanted so many things, and she wouldn't give them up for kids. She didn't want to be someone's wife. She didn't want to do what your Clarissant did, and use her magic for her family and her people. It was hers. She didn't want to share it or herself. She couldn't love you. Maybe she even wanted to, a little, but she couldn't, because she put herself first."
"I don't even remember her. I just remember killing her. Damn it."
Ragnelle kisses his forehead. "Someday you'll remember more."
"Will I?"
She just smiles a little, sad and sweet and so beautiful. "I promise. I know you will. For now, just remember they love you. I promise that, too."
"Mordred too?"
"Mordred of course.")
Then she drives them to the airport in the sedan while Gawain takes the shiny red Roadster to work, and there she sees them off, again making them promise to come back.
"You'll be uncles in a year," she says. "You don't want to miss that."
Mordred is so happy here. Gaheris can't help noticing, and it makes him aching and angry--because doesn't Mordred have every right to happiness, and isn't it what he's wanted, to see him laugh like that all the time, as if nothing weighs on him; to see him talking freely and less bitterly every moment? But why wasn't Gaheris good enough? Why is Mordred never so happy with him? Despite everything Ragnelle's said he feels sick to his stomach and he's always sullen when Mordred tries to talk to him, until Mordred stops trying altogether.
Gareth tries to engage him, but he does his best to ignore Gareth, who doesn't know anything about anything.
He wants to be loved--how many times has he said this, over and over, always pointlessly? He spends all his time with Ragnelle, when Mordred isn't flirting with her or she with Gawain, and she soothes him a little with her soft, accented voice and her sense of humour and her wisdom that he understands and maybe never accepts. She tells him about the uncle he'll be once her baby is born, and how she hopes he manages it better in this life than the other.
"You were pathetic," she tells him, laughing. He can't keep himself from smiling then. "You visited, oh, maybe once a year. At best, once a year. You looked at my boys like you thought they were going to try to corrupt your daughter if you didn't keep an eye on them every moment."
"They probably would have."
"They were three."
"Boys start young."
"Yes," says Ragnelle, with something amused and distant in her eyes, "they do."
His mother always made him take his sister along when he went places. At first he resented it, but when he became older--old enough to understand what was in his memory--he stopped complaining. Jessie was nothing like Jennifer. Jennifer, his next-door-neighbour and best friend, his other sister, his once-upon-a-time sister, had flashing eyes and trouble explaining things; her parents were going to put in a special needs class until they realised that at thirteen she could get a perfect score on the SATs, and put her in a gifted intelligence class instead. Jessie was nothing like her, and it was a relief sometimes.
Besides, she wasn't anyone he knew.
Jessie was little and bouncy and eager (and blonde, the way everybody else in the family was, not like him, his hair was dark as Jessie's hands after she discovered black walnuts and stained herself with them). She tagged along the way an annoying little sister should, and asked dumb questions and always wanted him to share with her.
Most of the time he did. She could sit on the handlebars when he biked around town on weekends, baking under the hot sun. She'd put her hair into pigtails and she didn't look anything like him and Jennifer, dark-eyed and quiet and so alike that people asked if they were twins when they were out together.
His mother was sure they were dating, no matter how many times he explained she was just a friend.
"Just remember to make sure she wants it, too, if you decide to go all the way. Don't pressure her, okay?" his mother said.
"Mom," he yelled, banging out of the room while Jessie laughed and blushed and sang,--
"Mike and Jennifer, sitting in a tree-ee," and he could ignore her, because she was his little sister and little sisters always tried to be a pain. It was his mother who bothered him, because it was obvious--it should be obvious--that he was not in love with his sister, God, and then he'd have to remind himself that nobody knew Jennifer was his sister except Jennifer herself. Sometimes he'd feel funny, turn, and find her looking at him during class with burning in her eyes and she'd catch him afterwards to try and tell something and get lost in tangled words that she couldn't express.
"Got to find. Somebody," she'd say, halting, and angry because of it. "It's stupid. You weren't supposed to--not at Camlann. I brought you. I fixed you. I know I fixed you," and it was so weird to hear it coming from a teenage girl who looked like most teenage girls if you didn't look at her face too closely, stonewashed jeans and a tie-dye t-shirt, and her dark hair straightened (by her mother), and he'd say,--
"It doesn't matter, forget it. It doesn't matter now. Does it?" suddenly unsure, because she always knew better and she probably did now, but she just looked at him.
"Forget it," she said.
So it was a relief to take Jessie out somewhere, to the movies or to play mini-golf or whatever it was she'd decided she couldn't live without doing. Sometimes she said she did things because she wanted to be like the girls in her class (and it was stupid, because she was exactly like every other girl in her class). But it didn't matter, whatever she wanted he let her do.
To a point. Always to a point.
He'd been a cynical eight-year-old and now he was a cynical sixteen-year-old, and sometimes he looked at Jessie and he saw Gareth, innocent to a fault, indulged because of his sweetness, and then, in the end, betrayed and killed by someone he loved and trusted. Which showed you just how good love and trust were when they weren't for your family. He half-taught Jessie that. You can always come to your family, always come to me when you want something, he said, but be careful what you give to other people, what you tell.
And Jessie didn't understand.
He didn't understand, himself, not half the time. He was balancing two people, trying not to let them overlap too much, because if they did he didn't know what he'd be, and Jessie couldn't be allowed to know Mordred, and Jennifer didn't want to talk to Mike.
Sometimes he got dizzy with it, he couldn't figure out which one he was, and he ended up in a middle place where he was no one, and it was easy to see and breathe but there was so much darkness, and he was safe and without feeling but he was no one. And he had to be someone. One half of him was a pretty decent nineties teen. His family liked him, he helped out around the house, he was good-natured overall, and wanted to learn, and had a best friend and good ideas; and the other half of him was tired and old and had a deep darkness inside, bloody hands and terrible scars. Both parts wanted to be.
And he made it through high school and then through college, managed to handle himself no matter who he was, even when he didn't think he'd be able, and afterwards he and Jennifer bought the house in the Philly suburbs and he stopped calling her Jennifer. His mother called every weekend and always asked at least once a month when they were getting married or whether they planned on living in sin for the rest of their lives. He, having learned a little, sometimes laughed at her.
"Mom," he said, "we're not sleeping together."
"I believe that," his mother said. "When are you coming down? Jessie isn't talking about anything else. 'Oooh, I can't wait for Mike to come! Oooh, do you think he'll teach me to drive in his car? Oooh, maybe he'll take us all to the waterpark!'"
"Oh, Jesus."
Jessie was turning sixteen and wanted him to be there for her birthday, and he made long-suffering noises and said he'd leave by the end of the week. His parents had divorced when he was eighteen and his father had disappeared into the blue, leaving nothing to him except a habit of cursing and a certainty that people would stop him now when he went too far. Both those things, he said, were good to have.
His mother, always blunt and a little sarcastic, had become even more so, and Jessie sometimes got sad, but on the whole it didn't seem as though anything too terrible had happened because of either the divorce or the passing of years.
Jennifer--Clarissant--whoever the hell she was--didn't have much to do with his family, but she knew about them and she knew, or at least it seemed that way, what they meant to him. His family. A new family, a safer family, who did better by him than Morgause and Lot and Arthur, taught him something and at least loved him straightforwardly.
He managed. He liked his job and the way things were--not perfect, but good. And he thought they'd stay that way, he thought he'd have no problem living like this--but something was bothering Clar, and she started filling the house with cigarette smoke and unquiet magic until he thought he was going insane.
"What the hell is all this?" he asked.
"Don't be stupid. Stupid boys." Clar, who had stopped dressing like other people a long time ago, wiped her hands on her black jeans. "One of them needs us. I hear him."
"Who?"
"Your brother! Idiot!"
"All right, don't yell. Jesus Christ."
"Stupid," Clar muttered.
"Which one is it? Gawain?"
"No, the other one." She lit another cigarette and then used the electric-green lighter, which she'd bought at a gas station years and years ago (in some town she said was The Right Place), and which had never broken or died, to set fire to a small piece of gold-coloured paper. It looked like the foil wrapper on a thing of Rollos. He eyed it. "The little one, the lizard one."
"What?"
"Skitter!"
"Oh, for crying out loud."
The look Clar gave him would have made men unused to it drop dead, he suspected. "You know. The bloody one."
Something in him stirred, some feeling at the bottom of his stomach. He opened his mouth to say something smart-ass about Agravain, who none of them could stand, and was silent instead. Because she didn't mean Agravain, she meant Gaheris. Anxious Gaheris, who never fit in. The last time he'd ever talked to Gaheris they ended up shouting at each other about Agravain's and their mother's deaths, unaware of how loud they'd become until Gawain came and tried to calm them down and Gaheris turned and left the room so angry and afraid he was shaking. And the last time he'd ever seen Gaheris, it was in death, Gaheris bloody on the ground and broken, his body all but slashed to pieces and Gareth's beside him.
The something stirred in him again, threatening to make him sick. He'd thought he was past that. It was all past now.
"Yes," Clar said, with satisfaction. "You know."
"Christ almighty, did you do that?"
"No." Now she sounded disgusted with him and his idiocy. "You always knew. You hid it. Hurts you. You and him, you're--alike. Ish. Go away. I'm working."
And a week later--
It was a week that was filled with memories and left him Mordred almost every moment of the day, so that he called in sick twice to work because he couldn't get his head right. He knew at any moment he might lose himself in Old English and a bitterness so choking it filled his eyes and nose and mouth like the smoke from Clar's cigarettes.
A week later, she made animal-shaped macaroni and cheese and told him, as she sorted the noodles out by animal and put them on different sides of her plate, "I found him. New York. Next time you go you should look."
"When the hell am I going to New York?"
"Next month. Lecture."
"Thanks a lot."
And Clar just laughed at him in a way that made his stomach turn.
Ragnelle takes Gaheris and Gareth through the gardens, showing them all her trees--it's the beginning of December, and everything is sleeping, but still the trees are beautiful, and she shows them where the roses will be when they bloom, and brings them down to the lake. She shows them the greenhouses, too, the one Gaheris has already seen and two others, brimful of flowers. Gareth is as bored by flowers as by wind turbines, and he and Ragnelle end up sitting together at one end of the greenhouse telling each other things that make them both laugh while Gaheris loses himself in the vast, tangled gardens hidden behind glass walls.
He didn't want to go back.
He kept reminding himself--job, his mother, Jessie. There were things to go back for. He needed to go back. But it was hard to keep that part of himself on the surface, here with Gawain and Ragnelle. It was so much easier to be Mordred. Gawain had so much to show him and tell him, Gawain had somehow managed to balance his two selves--Gawain, King of Orkney, and George Styer, billionaire--without getting lost or seeming much troubled. Gawain could spend the whole day showing him all his ideas and inventions, the roof, the wind turbines, all that shit, and then spend the evening remembering their home and their childhood, the way they never parted while they were growing up.
Gawain remembered that he had taught Mordred to fight, squired him (as Gawain squired all the brothers, but that didn't matter), took him hunting, played with him, lectured him, stood up for him and knocked him down when he deserved it. He remembered that Mordred was jealous as hell when he married, that Mordred was certain he'd be forgotten, but he wasn't; Ragnelle invited his company and they still did things together, and they always talked.
He never really began to lose Gawain until he began to lose himself.
But that wasn't what mattered (and then he laughed at himself, with a hard twist in it, because it mattered, he just didn't want to think about it, and he knew that)--what mattered was that Gawain was both people, the then and now, and Gawain was happy.
And right now, right now he was there with him.
He wanted to stay for-ever in this bizarre idyll where they washed with Ecover dish soap and talked about old tourneys, where Ragnelle grew geraniums and spoke with a Southern accent, where Gawain was beloved (as he deserved to be, as he had always deserved to be) and drove expensive imported cars. He didn't want to leave.
But he was going to have to.
And he was somehow going to have to find out why Gaheris was so pissed off, and deal with that, and he was going to have to buy something for Clar, and his vacation didn't last all that long, and there really was no end to the things that were unresolved and unwell. He groaned aloud and Gawain looked up and asked what was wrong.
"Nothing," he said. "I'm trying to think what I'll placate Clar with."
"Does she like gadgets?"
"Nope!" Gareth said. It was dinner and he was sitting next to Gawain. His curly hair was even curlier in the humidity here. "That's Mordred. He's got all kinds of stuff."
"Really?" Gawain looked at him.
"Yeah."
"I'll have to show you the pH testers, then! There're these little ones that you hold in your hand, they're really convenient and kind of neat. They remind me of that sonic screwdriver thingy in the old Doctor Who."
"Christ, Gawain."
Gareth laughed. "We need to get something shiny for Clar. Like maybe--"
"Gold-plated hen's teeth," he said.
"Boxes or shells or something," Gareth said, looking at him reproachfully. "Or green glass bottles. Or those little packets of salt like you get at Wendy's. Stuff like that."
"Would she like one of my rings, you think?" Ragnelle asked.
"People keep sending her rings," Gawain said. "Sort of--love-gifts. From all these people she doesn't even know."
"How archaic."
Ragnelle looked at him and laughed, her eyes dancing--so alive, something always moving in them, like Clar's, but in a different way--enjoying the world. "Good sir, the world becomes archaic faced with two such as we are. Chivalry's knight and the Loathly Lady of Inglewood?"
"You just say that so we'll compliment you."
"Well, of course. A ring for your sister?"
"Sure," Gareth said, "I think she'd like that."
(Gaheris hadn't said a word yet.)
Gaheris hasn't stopped being cold inside. He can feel it all the time, even when he's a little happy, even with Ragnelle. The sooner they leave, the better, he thinks. The better.
And in a week they do, with promises to come back, and promises to be visited--
"You've got to come and meet Peredur," Mordred says cheerfully. "You and him, my God. An organic vegetable franchise in a minute, I bet you fifty bucks."
"It would be bad for small businesses," promptly. "We'll have to think of something else."
"God!"
But he's laughing.
Gaheris is glad and disheartened at the same time. He won't be so jealous, and Mordred won't be so happy. He isn't sure there's any way for both of them to be happy, really, and he doesn't want to think about it too hard, because he has a bad idea, a bad idea that he'll try for his own happiness over Mordred's, and he doesn't want to know that about himself.
Well, what good can you expect from a man who's killed his mother? He says it to himself viciously, more cruelly than Agravain would, trying to make himself flinch. Why should he be so worried about knowing he's selfish when he already knows he's a murderer? It's the lesser of two evils, isn't it? Be glad you don't want to kill him for loving Gawain more. The way you killed Mother for loving Lamorack more. Think of that.
It makes him shake inside, coldness and sickness together, and hate himself.
And before they go, Gawain kisses his cheek and smiles at him, says,--
"Go well, brother."
Ragnelle takes a little longer to say good-bye. She makes him come to the greenhouse one last time and talks with him for a long time about Mordred and Gawain and Gareth and Agravain, about all his brothers, and, for a flickering moment, about his mother. Everything they say is a secret.
("Gaheris," she says, sitting there on the side of a huge planter, with a strange purple flower threaded through her fingers, "they love you. They always have."
"That's not what Mother said."
"Then she lied. I never knew her--I ran away back to my forest after seven years and I wasn't there for you and I wasn't there for your brothers, and I let Gawain go to his death alone, and I haven't forgotten it for a day--but I was yours and your brothers' long enough to know you a little. They love you. They always loved you."
He looks down at her hands.
"Maybe," she says, "Agravain loved you a little less. But you know he's an idiot."
"Why did she tell me so if it wasn't true?"
"I don't know."
"She didn't do things for no reason."
"Then why do you think she didn't have something in mind when she told you that? She wanted something. It's who she was."
"I wanted her to love me."
"Oh, dearest." She puts her arms around him, purple flower and all, fingering his hair gently. "She wanted so many things, and she wouldn't give them up for kids. She didn't want to be someone's wife. She didn't want to do what your Clarissant did, and use her magic for her family and her people. It was hers. She didn't want to share it or herself. She couldn't love you. Maybe she even wanted to, a little, but she couldn't, because she put herself first."
"I don't even remember her. I just remember killing her. Damn it."
Ragnelle kisses his forehead. "Someday you'll remember more."
"Will I?"
She just smiles a little, sad and sweet and so beautiful. "I promise. I know you will. For now, just remember they love you. I promise that, too."
"Mordred too?"
"Mordred of course.")
Then she drives them to the airport in the sedan while Gawain takes the shiny red Roadster to work, and there she sees them off, again making them promise to come back.
"You'll be uncles in a year," she says. "You don't want to miss that."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-08 04:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-08 04:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-08 08:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2007-07-10 02:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-10 02:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-10 02:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-10 02:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-10 02:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-10 02:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-10 02:33 am (UTC)I always wonder what Clar and Ragnelle's interactions were like. Because I can't see Clar taking to Ragnelle as easily as the boys...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-10 02:35 am (UTC)I have no idea, really. In Catechism, at least, it's telling that Clar volunteered to stay home when Gareth was going.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-10 02:36 am (UTC)That was part of what made me think about it, actually. I could see Clar...distrusting Ragnelle.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-10 02:41 am (UTC)I don't know how Nanni does it. I should ask.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-27 01:45 pm (UTC)Mordred is fantastic here. I particularly love the way Modred thinks of his hair in relation to his non-sister. It really shows how he still feels tainted and stained and not really part of the world. I also loved how in the second italicized thing Gaharis is mentioned in paranthesis. It's a nice effect. Also, Ragnelle and Gawain are amazing and I love the detail about the rings. It fits in so perfectly!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-27 04:19 pm (UTC)Also: guh. Thank you. ^___^ Mordred really, I think, he also grounds himself with details. He notices things in the now-world as hard as he can because he needs to ground himself from the past world. Probably because otherwise he'll go craz(ier)y. And bweee, thank you! Ragnelle and Gawain are love.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-27 09:59 pm (UTC)Ooh, I noticed that, particularly with Mordred's choice of a career. It seems like he needs to know everything and the fact that he gets to repeat it endlessly must be appealing; it might remind him of what's "real" and what must be dealt with.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-27 10:33 pm (UTC)Yes! Reality needs to be concrete, because if it doesn't feel real he's going to lose it.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-27 10:46 pm (UTC)Eee, oh Mordred. Poor thing.
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Date: 2007-08-27 10:54 pm (UTC)They're all so on the edge.