Thank heaven...

[bluflamingo]

for the weekend, not that it's going to be any less busy than the week. Why, oh why, did I agree to do two full-time jobs, in two different towns, for a week? I must have been out of my mind!

So... despite the best efforts of hotmail to swallow this story whole and never release it, we have overcome, and here it is. Two days before the challenge deadline even... if only I could get everything else done that early as well, I'd be sorted :)

Rating: R
Feedback: Gratefully received, even if it’s bad. Especially if it’s bad.
Disclaimer: Still laying claim to Kay, even though he’s dead, and to Ygrain, who isn’t but only gets three lines. The others are nothing to do with me though.
Summary: Everything changes, and people always leave (A/L).
A/N: Thanks to lady_morgana, my ever-wonderful beta-reader. Part of the Muse Switch - write a story set 5 years pre-movie, focussing on Arthur and Lancelot; some references to 'The Truth', but can be read without.



Closer to the End

They’d never really marked the passing of time, beyond the turn of cold, damp summers to colder, damper winters. They knew, of course, how long they’d been in Britain, how long till they could return home, but somehow, over the years, it had become easier to mark the passing of knights and friends and brothers, rather than days and months and years.

And yet, they’d always counted those as well, at night when sleep didn’t come, or in the tavern, when drink came too freely. And on the day the papers came, they marked it consciously, with something like shock.

They’d been the last contingent to be taken from Sarmatia, or at least the last to be sent to Britain, and so they’d always been the youngest of the knights on the Wall, separate, in their way, from those who’d been there when they’d arrived.

The papers came with the secretary of a bishop who was travelling in the southern half of Britain and chose not to make the journey. His arrival caused as much excitement - more - than a visit from a Roman senator.

The knights gathered at the Round Table, all that was left of the many who had once sat there. Every empty seat had been left empty, occupied only by memories, and sometimes Lancelot thought he could see the fallen knights still sitting there, if he looked slantwise at the seats, or when he was so tired he couldn’t focus properly on anything but Arthur.

Around the table, drinks were poured, and the bishop’s secretary rose. The knights, the older knights, shifted, their faces bright with anticipation.

The secretary cleared his throat. ‘’Rome thanks you for your service to her Empire,’ he said, and Lancelot fought down the urge to laugh at the way he made it sound as though they’d had a choice. ‘Your value to her will not be forgotten. With these papers, you are granted free passage across the Empire.’

He turned and handed the box solemnly to Arthur. ‘Knights.’ Arthur’s voice rose slightly at the end of the word, as it always did when addressing them, as though he were asking their permission for whatever order he was about to give them. ‘Your freedom is granted.’

It was the announcement the older knights had waited fifteen years to hear. It should have warranted a cheer, or at least some expression of happiness, relief, excitement. Instead, it got twenty-five silently raised goblets, silently and solemnly drunk from. Everyone knew what this meant, both for those who would be leaving, and those who were staying behind.

Lancelot, lowering his goblet, felt someone’s eyes upon him, and turned to see Arthur gazing steadily at him. When their eyes met, Arthur smiled slightly, and raised his goblet a fraction to Lancelot, who smiled back, mildly confused. Since the message of the papers’ imminent arrival had arrived, Arthur had withdrawn as completely from the knights as it was possible to do around what was, truth be told, quite a small fort. Aside from practice drills and the occasional, increasingly infrequent, charge against the Woads, he’d left them to their own devices, and seemed not to have noticed how little those who were leaving now mixed with those who were staying.

It wasn’t, Lancelot thought, watching Arthur hand the scrolls to the other knights, that they weren’t glad on behalf of their older comrades, or that they begrudged them their freedom after fifteen years. It was just that their freedom was a sharp reminder of what the rest of them didn’t have, and had to wait another five years for.

Which was, Lancelot told himself firmly, no excuse for moping. After all, five years were better than five years, and they were five years to avoid wondering what on earth would happen to Arthur when the rest of them went home.

*

It took two days for the last of the fourteen newly freed knights to make his way out of the fort, and on to his new life. There was much talk, naturally, of where they would go, what they’d do when they got there and who they’d do it with, but when it came to it, the knights left in small groups, twos and threes, with vague plans to head back to Sarmatia, but little intent to go much beyond the coast of Britain. After so long, they were reluctant to leave and even more reluctant to give up the friendships they had forged with the other knights.

Arthur wondered if any of them would return, or if he’d ever hear of them again. The messenger service could be notoriously unreliable, letters often arriving months or even years after they were sent, and anyway, it was difficult to send letters to people with no fixed abode.

Face it, he reprimanded himself, they’ve gone on to new lives and they’d as soon forget about the old ones. And they had their freedom, the living embodiment of the good that could be done. Proof, for those as needed it, that Rome kept her promises.

The fort seemed empty without them. Arthur acknowledged the thought as ridiculous even as he thought it - they were only fourteen in a well-populated fort, their absence couldn’t really make that much difference.

And yet, the remaining knights seemed to feel it as well, actually seemed, when Arthur stepped into the tavern, to be accentuating it. Normally, they’d spread themselves across several tables, moving from one to another as they fell in and out of conversations, attracting women and visitors and those Romans who didn’t think Sarmatians were one step up from slaves. Tonight, they’d gathered around a single table in the darkest corner of the place, drinking and conversing in subdued tones, with nary a woman between them. Even Vanora and her ever present children were giving the knights a wide berth.

For a long moment, Arthur remained in the shadow of the arch-way, watching his knights. Was it really possible that they were all that was left of the Knights of the Round Table? He’d had such hopes, such dream and visions of the new world they would bring to this far-flung corner of the Roman Empire, of freedom and equality and an end to the kind of senseless brutality they saw every day.

He held onto the dreams, and the occasional, fleeting moments when he saw evidence that they were a little closer to being achieved. He truly believed that the knights were beginning to see it as well, and beginning to hold faith with the ideas of free-will that Arthur had spent so long explaining and justifying and promoting.

How many of them would see the kind of freedom they craved?

The thought assaulted Arthur from nowhere and refused to let go. Of so many, eleven remained. How many of them would set off for Sarmatia in five years’ time?

Or Rome, added an insistent voice inside Arthur’s head. He’d made his decision long ago to return to the city that felt more like home than Britain ever could, or would, despite the occasional suggestion that he might take up some position of power in Britain. There was little point in trying to explain that he’d only turned down previous offers of a return posting to Rome because he could not abandon his knights. To a man, they did not trust easily, especially Romans, a legacy of the two years before they’d come under his command, years none of them spoke of, not even Lancelot, who was rarely silent on any subject.

So Arthur would not leave them for Rome… it was just that, sometimes, he wondered if he’d ever see it again, or if he’d end up like his father and so many of his knights, a mound of earth with a sword sticking out of it, in their little cemetery. A fitting end, but not yet.

Arthur sought out Lancelot amongst the others. Head bent over his drink, he looked uncharacteristically grim. Would he stay in Britain once his service was over, Arthur wondered. Though Lancelot complained often and loud about the British weather, food, land, inhabitants and whatever else came to mind, he didn’t show the same longing for Sarmatia that the others did. Lancelot, Arthur thought, understood best of all of them the concept of free-will, for it was freedom and not home that he longed for.

Though not enough to come to Rome and see it first hand, despite Arthur’s not infrequent offers.

‘Arthur.’ Gawain, choosing that moment to look up, called him over. ‘Will you join us?’

Normally, lately, Arthur would have declined politely, citing work or strategising or plain exhaustion. It had been difficult, once news of the imminence of the papers had come through, to sit with the knights and watch as half of them drifted away while the others began to look older and more care-worn.

Yet now there were five years remaining on their terms, and could he really spend five years hiding from them in an attempt to avoid watching them grow up and old, and more worn with responsibility and loss, and trying not to think of how things would change if - when - any of them were to die?

‘Arthur?’ Gawain asked again. Arthur looked around the table, his gaze finally settling, once more, on Lancelot, whose expression bore the same frown of confusion it had in the fortress hall. That finally swayed him, and he nodded assent

A cup of wine was produced, and a space created at the end of once bench, and the knights fell back into the conversation his arrival had obviously interrupted.

‘There’s no-one left there.’ Ygrain shrugged. ‘Why would I want to go back?’

Galahad looked up at him from under his ever more unruly mop of curls, and Arthur vowed to drag him to the barber the next day, no matter how much complaining he had to suffer in the process. ‘Why would you want to stay here?’

Ygrain shrugged again. ‘Didn’t say I wanted to. Maybe I’ll go to Rome, see what this Empire we’ve been fighting for is really like.’ Laughter, then Ygrain became serious again. ‘I just don’t see why you’re all so eager to go back to a country that’s nothing like it used to be and has probably forgotten about us anyway.’

‘How would you know?’ Galahad sneered. ‘You haven’t been near it in ten years.’

Arthur let the conversation flow over him - he’d heard enough arguments about home to last him a lifetime, and probably through a good chunk of the afterlife as well, usually started by Galahad. It was enough to make him seriously regret allowing Galahad, two years ago, to join the escort for a governor and his family going home, even though one of their own escort had been killed and there’d been no-one else to take over. They’d only passed through the very edge of Sarmatia, but a stroke of luck had seen Galahad’s younger brother passing through at the same time, and Galahad rarely let the others forget that he, alone of all of them, had seen Sarmatia and his family since leaving.

It wasn’t long after his return that Arthur had dictated that only Roman legionnaires would be allowed to act as escorts beyond Britain’s borders.

As so often happened when he had nothing else to occupy him - and frequently even when he did - Arthur found his gaze draw to Lancelot, at the other end of the table and hence too far away for Arthur to hear whatever he was saying to Bors.

He tried to recall the last time he’d spoken to Lancelot about anything other than battle tactics or drill schedules and found he couldn’t. It wasn’t so long ago that Lancelot would come to his room every evening and persuade him away from his books to walk the Wall and talk of everything and nothing. Had Lancelot stopped coming or had Arthur stopped being persuaded? If Arthur was honest with himself - which he generally tried to be - he knew he’d stopped letting Lancelot persuade him, and eventually even Lancelot, who could be incredibly tenacious when he wanted to be, had stopped coming.

The bigger question, of course, was why Arthur had stopped letting Lancelot persuade him. As much as they disagreed on… well, everything, really… Lancelot was intelligent and a good friend, and conversation with him was never dull, nor did it descend into a trading of views without listening to each other. They would always come at the debate with new arguments the next time, building on what the other had said before.

So if it wasn’t the company - and yet in a way it was. Or, to be precise, it was the way Lancelot had of standing just a little too close, of holding Arthur’s gaze just a little too long, that made Arthur wonder things, lately, that he wasn’t sure he wanted to wonder, about Lancelot and about himself. And about the two of them together. It was easier by far to stay in his room, staring down at words he no longer saw in books he’d already read, and though Arthur had never been one for taking the easy road, his usual route of actually finding a solution seemed on this occasion to have suffered something of a landslide.

Arthur shook himself, aware that he must be providing sorry company indeed and looked round the table.

Lancelot was gone.

*

It was dark up in the cemetery, dark and quiet, even with the flames flickering on the graves. And, most importantly, it was away from Arthur’s penetrating stare, the one that made him feel he was being examined closely for something vital.

The one that Arthur had started turning on him just at the moment he least wanted it to be.

Everything was changing, Lancelot thought, folding himself cross-legged at Kay’s grave. He’d learnt long ago that nothing stayed the same forever, and that people would always leave, even those you clung to, hard. It was just… why did everything have to change so damn fast?

As though it wasn’t enough that Vanora was pregnant with her ninth child, that Tristan and Galahad had finally, after ten years, started being civil to each other, that Ygrain had found a girl and Dagonet had lost his. As though it wasn’t enough that fourteen of the Knights of the Round Table had been granted their freedom and ridden off to enjoy it and now they were it, the very last of Arthur’s Sarmatian Knights.

Was it really necessary for the world to throw Arthur at him as well?

Or rather, take Arthur away, or so it seemed, just as he realised how much he didn’t want that to happen.

Not that he expected the world to be fair - that was hard when he woke up every morning and remembered that he was only where he was because of some ancient pact. It was at times like this, though, that Lancelot really wished for someone to ask advice from. Someone who’d actually be able to make a decent suggestion, and who wouldn’t fall about laughing for twenty minutes first.

Which didn’t actually leave anyone for Lancelot to ask.

And so there he was, sitting in the cemetery, talking to a dead man.

‘I hope you realise how stupid I feel,’ he told Kay. ‘And you’d better not be laughing.’ Not that he really believed his old friend could hear him, and if he could, he wouldn’t hear any better through Lancelot addressing himself to his grave. It was more that Lancelot had run out of other options. ‘What do I say to convince him he can trust me? Or to undo whatever I’ve done to make him not trust me in the first place. You were always telling me you were older and wiser, you could send me a bit of advice.’

No response but a twitching in the grass behind him, and Lancelot was on his feet, cursing his thoughtlessness at leaving his swords in the garrison, and shoving down the little bit of him that said he’d asked for help and Kay had come to give it. ‘Who goes there?’

Silence, then movement again, and the dark-on-dark shadow resolved itself into Arthur. Lancelot abandoned cursing his lack of swords in favour of cursing himself for babbling about the man without checking first to see if he was nearby. Arthur, after all, had something of a tendency to haunt the cemetery.

‘You went missing,’ Arthur said, moving closer. ‘I wanted to be sure you were all right.’

No need to ask how Arthur had known where he’d be. They always knew. Better to ask why he stored up things like that and channelled them into dreams that threw him awake at unpleasant hours in the morning, gasping and sweating from something very different from the nightmares that charmingly did the same.

‘I am well. You can go back to the others.’

And it’s that, he added scathingly and silently, that makes him not want to be around you.

‘They can survive without me.’ Arthur’s smile flickered in the torchlight. ‘What are you doing up here?’

It was tempting, for a moment, to lie, but with Arthur there’d never been any point to that. ‘You heard what I came up here for.’

Something flickered in Arthur’s face, and Lancelot realised just how close they were. ‘You think I don’t trust you?’ Arthur asked softly.

Lancelot felt his face flush at his own words. ‘You - ‘ he started, and that was all it took for the words to stream out, pride be damned. ‘You don’t talk to me, you don’t come near me. You treat me like all the other commanders do, like a soldier to be disposed of, not a friend. You make excuses not to spend time with us, any of us. What are we supposed to think?’

It was strangely cathartic, finally being able to say it all to Arthur. Cathartic and incredibly frightening, as the silence grew longer and he began to think it might be better to just leave.

Except that, before he’d got any further than thinking about it, Arthur was speaking, and leaving seemed like a terrible idea. ‘I trust you, Lancelot, with everything I have, with my life. I never imagined you could think otherwise.’

‘So why- ‘ Lancelot cut himself off. He sounded like a girl, and a desperate, love-struck one at that.

‘Why don’t I go with you in the evenings?’ Arthur asked. One day, Lancelot was going to have to work out exactly how that man always knew what he was thinking. ‘I don’t go because… because I wonder at what might happen if I do.’

It was the same feeling, Lancelot thought distantly, as seeing Kay with an arrow through his throat. He’d passed out then, which, while an attractive prospect in many ways, didn’t seem entirely appropriate to the situation.

‘And do you wonder,’ he heard himself asking, without knowing where the words were coming from, ‘in a good or a bad way?’

‘Lancelot.’ It was the same faintly rebuking tone Arthur used over Lancelot’s more insistent dismissals of his faith, and reminded Lancelot that giving Arthur straight out choices was rarely wise. ‘As your commanding officer…’

‘What about as my friend?’ Lancelot interrupted, ignoring the queasy feeling in his stomach that said he should stop now before it got too late. ‘You said you were that as well.’

‘As your friend,’ Arthur started, and Lancelot kissed him.

And kept kissing him, eyes tightly closed, hands firmly gripping his shoulders, trying not to transmit his desperate hope and please, any god that’s passing by, let him get over his shock and kiss back because I can’t fuck this up and I can’t leave them all, not yet, please…

It took him a fraction too long to recognise that there were hands tangled in his hair and that they were pulling him closer, not pushing him away.

And of course, Arthur being Arthur, that fraction of a pause made him stop and pull away. Lancelot drew in a breath, told his hands firmly to stop shaking and looked at Arthur. Whose face could have rivalled the Wall for stoicism. ‘Was that what you were wondering about?’

Arthur nodded silently.

‘So at least now you don’t have to wonder.’ Lancelot took another deep breath and caught a fleeting hint of Arthur’s scent under the biting cold and the burning wood. ‘Would you do it again? And don’t you dare say you regret it.’

‘Lancelot. I’m your commander. And your friend. I can’t be seen to favour you over the others. This -‘ he gestured between the two of them, still less than a foot apart, ‘- this is against everything the church teaches.’

Too many arguments in that little speech, so Lancelot caught onto the last one, pushing himself a few paces away from Arthur. ‘You and your church! Do you ever consider that it might not actually be right about everything? That there might be exceptions?’ He whirled back to face Arthur, who hadn’t moved.

‘This is my faith, Lancelot. I keep it in the same way you keep yours.’

Except Lancelot’s faith had been beaten out of him on the long journey from Sarmatia to Britain and now resided in the man in front of him, who, it turned out, was more interested in being a martyr than a man. ‘You kissed me,’ he pointed out. He refused to get drawn into another argument about religion.

‘I -.’ Arthur twitched, as though he’d started to move and changed his mind before Lancelot could tell what direction it would have been in. ‘I was - I didn’t think.’

That was no kind of answer. ‘You wanted it,’ Lancelot said firmly. ‘You want me, and that’s why you hide away.’ He had no idea where that had come from - maybe Kay had been hanging around listening after all - but he knew as he said it that it was right.

‘Lancelot, I… this isn’t… ‘ Arthur was actually stuttering. It made him seem years younger, and suddenly Lancelot found it hard to be angry, and much easier to be sad. Maybe he could be patient. For a while.

‘I’ll still be here, when you change your mind. Just don’t wait too long.’ And, leaving that as his exit line, he turned sharply and strode out of the cemetery and back to the tavern, where he could only hope that the other knights wouldn’t ask too many questions.

Not that he got very far, alerted to someone’s presence by a not-quite-silent footfall behind him for the second time in one night. He started to turn and ask, ‘who -‘ and then he was being pressed back against a conveniently nearby tree, and his words were swallowed by Arthur’s mouth and tongue and - Arthur.

‘Don’t argue,’ Arthur hissed. ‘And don’t gloat.’

Not having the breath - or the desire - to do either, Lancelot settled for nodding agreement and pressing himself against Arthur.

And then there were hands in his hair and his clothes, and Arthur’s skin beneath his, warm against the cold night air; hard where he’d come to expect softness, and the rasp of scars against sensitive skin, cold air in places it shouldn’t have been, eased away by warm hands and caresses and kisses; kisses that he could lose himself in, and gasping breaths and awkward angles, bodies pressed together and half-formed names moaned into the dark, and a sudden rush and crash, like a collision of swords in the practice ring, except this sent him tilting forwards, hoping, knowing, that Arthur would catch him.

Gradually, the world swam back into Lancelot’s awareness, and he decided that, all things considered, it wasn’t that bad a world to be in, with Arthur’s face pressed against his neck, mumbling words that felt like kisses, and his own hands tight around Arthur. He thought that if he could have this for the next five years, maybe servitude would not be so bad.

Arthur shifted, pulling away from him, and Lancelot reflexively tightened his hold on him. ‘Don’t leave,’ he whispered.

Arthur tilted his head so Lancelot could see his expression, a mix of concern and happiness and something that Lancelot thought for a wild moment might eventually grow into love.

‘I’ll never leave you,’ Arthur promised, and Lancelot held onto him and didn’t think about the knights riding away, and the papers that would be coming their way in five years’ time.

Nothing stayed the same, and people always left, but he’d cling to whatever he could get for as long as he could.