Faith In Your Future
Title: Faith In Your Future
Characters/Pairings: Gwen character piece (with dollops of future!Gwen/Arthur and Arthur/Morgana)
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,000
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Summary: Gwen muses on her past, her present, and her future. Post-episode 1.
Author's Note: I wrote this last year I think but never posted it on LJ. I've changed and added a bit since then so there's some small references to Season 2 (if you squint)
Arthur wakes next to brown skin and dark eyes. He blinks and it’s the pale serving girl again, who gives a nervous laugh and hastily leaves his chamber. She’ll be dismissed from Camelot within the week, Arthur makes sure of it; the other face cannot be banished so easily. It belongs to his tomorrow and someone else’s as well. Unsettled, he sends Morgana’s maid to fetch his foster-sibling for him. Dawn’s rosy fingers curl around the castle battlements, but Arthur forgoes his morning ride and Latin session to find her ladyship: Camelot may be his tomorrow, but Morgana is his today.
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The serving girl exits his room tired, ruffled but beaming with pride to have shared the bed of the future king. She affords a cleaning Gwen a superior glance as she hurriedly fixes her clothing, and Gwen wonders at her, wonders at her pride to have become one of Arthur’s many, tossed away and discarded after use. The girl will be gone from the castle within the fortnight, sacked on some false premise: Arthur doesn’t like to be reminded of his past. He lives in the now and sometimes, Gwen thinks, in the future, a glimpse of glittering tomorrows reflected in the golden strands of his hair.
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She is Morgana’s servant, not even worth a glance as she bows to serve him in the Great Hall. He briefly brushes her hand as she passes him a goblet, then their planets separate and she disappears into the village, and him into the royal apartments with a last, longing look at Morgana.
And so she watches him, not knowing that destiny bears the standard of a dragon and wears a crown in Camelot. “Who’d want to marry Arthur?” she’d said, and she really meant it. It was women like Morgana that were meant to be queen with their delicate features and royal bearing. Not someone like her, who watched silently in the shadows of Camelot’s great and became easily tongue-tied in the presence of others. Not Gwen the blacksmith’s daughter, devoid of beauty and nobility. Unreachable and undesired tomorrows that nevertheless invaded her dreams at night, regally charged through and painted promise across her pillow. Who’d want to marry Arthur?
So she returns to her work, scrubbing, cleaning, washing, and an unwanted image, forty years away, invades her mind of herself still wiping floors and repeating her mother’s deathbed words: I have so many regrets. Night falls quickly when the young are too busy trying to capture the stars to notice and their servants are trying to keep up. And she knows it will happen to her: a legacy of tidy rooms and colourful flowers, gone when the petals droop and a new generation sleeps in the bed of their ancestors. An unnoticed if not entirely un-mourned death, and a forgotten grave, overgrown and wild as the years drag on and the corridors of youth becoming crowded with giggling, rosy-cheeked boys with wrinkled skin and wheezing laughs. The thought saddens her more than anything and it is happening already: she cannot remember her mother’s face and cannot recognise her own; she snatches a glimpse of it occasionally in Morgana’s mirror and is always shocked to realise she has not the awkward body of a teenager but the figure of a woman grown. When, she wonders, when did this happen?
And it’s not as if she resents her position, dislikes the disregard she receives from all but Morgana, is bitter that within Camelot’s rigidly hierarchal, feudal society she is destined to never eat from the royal plates she cleans or wear the exquisite gowns she washes - ever the optimist, our Gwen, her father says with laughter - and is that pride? - in his eye. Indeed, she had already reached as high as she could: a blacksmith’s daughter being the chief attendant to the Lady Morgana. Had that dream not been unreachable once? But the prospect of reaching her life’s peak at such a young age was scarcely an encouraging one. When Morgana married, Gwen would be without a position, and would fill the rest of her days as the castle’s seamstress. It was at once both reassuring and depressing to know her future already.
“Oh Gwen, I wish I had half your faith in the future,” Morgana says, with that mischievous yet somehow, achingly sad expression she has sometimes. “You find constancy even in change.” Another one of those bewilderingly vague remarks she makes that Gwen can do nothing but offer a smile at, and a “my lady” in response, for how do you respond to Morgana’s mysterious musings and her disconcertingly accurate remarks that seem to see into some part of Gwen she had not known existed?
Gwen loves Morgana, yet she fears even now that she does not, cannot love all of her - she does not love the dark depths she can sometimes discern in her ladyship’s eyes after she wakes from her nightmares and, for a small moment, does not recognize Gwen and fights against her embrace. She does not love that unknown terror she sees in Morgana’s face when she has fallen into one of her strange trances. And she cannot love all of her, when Morgana refuses to reveal herself in her entirety. Gwen, who offers all of herself to everyone with a simple hello, knows that Morgana is hiding some part of herself that, for all her ease in seeing through others, Morgana cannot see yet, or simply refuses, in all her stubborn glory (or fear), to admit exists.
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The candles are replaced for the day, the floors cleaned, and she can almost see herself in the gleaming windows along the corridor for the royal apartments: She thinks, for a moment, she sees a small dark woman, not unlike herself, standing beside a familiar man whose blonde hair would put the sun to shade. But the momentary vision is interrupted by Arthur, snapping his fingers and demanding her go and fetch Morgana for him. She obeys and leaves, a crown of sunlight on her head as she finds the Queen-to-be.