TM #157: What is your worst quality as a significant other?
With particular acknowledgments to cywyllog -- who does not, properly speaking, appear in this story, but who is an inspiration nonetheless.
She was pretty, I think, not beautiful. She had wonderful dark hair, I remember that, but her face is lost to me. By now I'm not certain even of her name; and that, maybe, says all there is to say. There's no reliable record, after all, no strong tradition; she meant even less to history than she did to me.
What remains is the sheen of that beautiful hair in the firelight; and the voice.
"Why? Why are you doing this?"
"Because I must. Because nothing else is left."
"There's no good in it, never was--"
"--Because I owe it to my brothers, damn you. Let me be."
"Your brothers are dead," she says, only that. Words heavy with the weight of anger, and thrown with force, knocking breath out of him for a moment.
"That fact had not escaped me, lady."
"You owe something to the living! You're needed here, now--"
"Don't look to me! Never look to me!"
She turns away as though flinching. But he is Gawain's right hand, has never truly wanted to be more. Severed, he feels nothing.
So I left my wife in anger, for the last time. Now I've forgotten her name, because no one else remembers it; no one wrote it in bright letters as they did Guinevere's -- or Gawain's. Or mine. I can't see the echo of her face looking out of the mirror to this day. I have only her words, spoken in bitterness; and that, I think, was justified.
Mordred
Arthurian legend
257 words
She was pretty, I think, not beautiful. She had wonderful dark hair, I remember that, but her face is lost to me. By now I'm not certain even of her name; and that, maybe, says all there is to say. There's no reliable record, after all, no strong tradition; she meant even less to history than she did to me.
What remains is the sheen of that beautiful hair in the firelight; and the voice.
"Why? Why are you doing this?"
"Because I must. Because nothing else is left."
"There's no good in it, never was--"
"--Because I owe it to my brothers, damn you. Let me be."
"Your brothers are dead," she says, only that. Words heavy with the weight of anger, and thrown with force, knocking breath out of him for a moment.
"That fact had not escaped me, lady."
"You owe something to the living! You're needed here, now--"
"Don't look to me! Never look to me!"
She turns away as though flinching. But he is Gawain's right hand, has never truly wanted to be more. Severed, he feels nothing.
So I left my wife in anger, for the last time. Now I've forgotten her name, because no one else remembers it; no one wrote it in bright letters as they did Guinevere's -- or Gawain's. Or mine. I can't see the echo of her face looking out of the mirror to this day. I have only her words, spoken in bitterness; and that, I think, was justified.
Mordred
Arthurian legend
257 words