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The Way Night Falls, PG-13, King Arthur
The Way Night Falls
By Lokei
Universe: King Arthur (movieverse)
Rating: PG-13
Notes: inspired by that ‘stories I haven’t written’ meme, title by romanticalgirl, who wanted the rest of the story
= = = =
It took until he lost the first of his knights for Arthur to appreciate the sudden darkness of a late November afternoon. When he was growing up hearing the stories that Pelagius would tell of the gentle twilights that lingered over Rome, bathing the great monuments and temples in roseate glory, Arthur could not imagine anything more different from the way gloom could suddenly overtake one in the raw autumns of Britannia, and he vastly preferred the Rome of his imagination to the grey of his reality.
They lost Lamorak to a stupid error, letting him go with Tristan and Lucan beyond the wall on reconnaissance. Lamorak was a good fighter, but no scout; almost as noisy as Bors, and nearly as irrepressible. Lancelot had frowned when Arthur had named the scouting party, but said nothing. Arthur couldn’t be sure now, standing over the fresh grave, whether he was angry or not for Lancelot’s apparent faith in his command. Arthur was doubting it himself. Tristan and Lucan had nearly been lost, and Lamorak had suffered far too harsh a punishment for his unceasing chatter, coming home in the November half-light with a half-dozen arrows in his gut.
What kind of a commander was he? Was this the kind of care he took of his men?
The last shreds of light vanished from the cloud cover as if in answer and Arthur rolled his head slowly up to stare into the bruised and darkened sky.
“Arthur.”
The voice near his ear startled him and he flinched, but did not look around. In the space of that instant’s surprise his ear told him what his other senses had not: Lancelot stood close behind him, his slight frame still managing to provide a bit of protection from the rising wind. Arthur closed his eyes; the sting of the wind would be fierce, if he were looking into it, but he could not blame it for the moisture threatening to overflow.
“You made a reasonable judgment, Arthur.”
“Don’t placate me like a child, Lancelot. A man died because of my judgment today.”
“He died because of the Woads, not because of you.” Lancelot’s voice was fierce as the night breeze, and nearly as cold. “He needed the training and he needed the experience. Tristan and Lucan should have been able to keep rein on him, and none of us could have known the Woads were so close in such numbers.” Lancelot snorted softly. “That, after all, is the point of a scouting party.”
“You would have done better.”
“Better than Tristan? Unlikely. Better than Lamorak? Undoubtedly, but then I am not the one in need of training, so why send me?”
“No,” Arthur cast a look over his shoulder at his most difficult and yet most trusted knight. “You would have done better than I.”
Lancelot rolled his eyes. “Arthur, if I were in command we would none of us be sitting in a gray heap of uncomfortable stone waiting for blue-painted devils to poke us full of holes.” His lips twitched and his voice softened. “But then, we’d probably all be on the run from your Roman friends and we’d all end up dead instead of just poor idiotic Lamorak, so I doubt we’d do much better after all.”
“Doesn’t stop you wanting it, though, does it?” Arthur didn’t know why he felt compelled to push at all the possible sore points between them tonight, but the urge to needle was there, as if he could somehow make it all pour out and wash away.
“I want freedom, not the hunted life of a fugitive,” Lancelot snapped back. “I’d rather not give my life for Rome, but since no one asked me or Lamorak, we must take what we get and grieve when we can, mustn’t we?” He smacked a leather bound bottle up against Arthur’s chest and the other took it reflexively as Lancelot stomped further into the shadows of the trees to take a seat on a convenient stump, pulling at the stopper of a bottle of his own.
Arthur looked at the bottle in his hand in some surprise, and wandered over to sit beside Lancelot. He tried to ignore how grudgingly Lancelot made room. “You didn’t even like Lamorak. This is a fine bottle to spend in grieving over someone you couldn’t stand.”
Lancelot gave him a look and tossed the stopper somewhere behind him into the trees. “You don’t need to like your brother to grieve for him.”
Arthur frowned. “You two were from different tribes…” he trailed off as Lancelot’s look sharpened to genuine irritation.
“He was of the people of the sun and the grasslands, grew up with the same gods, fought with the same fury, was a stranger to these lands as much as I or any of the others. The differences between Sarmatians and their kin are little compared to the differences between Sarmatians and those bronze-plated buffoons down in the barracks.”
Arthur expected the bitterness against the Roman troops quartered in the same garrison, and he let it slide in deference to the day’s loss, but he was surprised by the sudden hurt which Lancelot’s words also inflicted.
“So the difference between you and Lamorak was not so great as the difference between you and me.”
Lancelot tipped his head to the side and considered Arthur from an angle, but it did not seem that Lancelot was drunk as yet, merely pensive.
“You are trying to ask if you’re too Roman to be my brother?”
Arthur flushed, grateful to the darkness which stole all color from the scene. “I suppose.”
The slighter man started to chuckle and Arthur growled his name in warning, but the knight waved away the signs of Arthur’s ire. “I cannot look at you as a brother, Arthur.”
That truly did hurt, and Arthur could not fool himself that it was the wine making it worse. “Why not?”
Lancelot clasped him on the near shoulder and leaned in confidentially. “Your god would disapprove of me even more if I did,” he replied, somewhat too cryptically for the late hour and the circumstances.
“It is the way of God to teach that all men should treat each other as brothers,” Arthur began, but Lancelot cut him off with a decided shake of his head.
“I do not want to treat you as my brother,” he said again, slowly this time as if that would make his statement make more sense. Arthur’s continued confusion surely showed upon his face because Lancelot shook his head once more and stood, holding out his hand to pull Arthur up as well. Arthur allowed Lancelot to position him so that he once again stood with his back to the biting wind, and Lancelot stood behind him, back to back this time.
“This, Arthur, how would you describe what I am doing?” Lancelot’s words carried easily over his shoulder and Arthur smiled.
“Protecting my back, just as we often do. Watching my weaker side, guarding my flank. How many ways do you need it described?”
Lancelot snorted and Arthur felt more than heard him shift position so that now Lancelot stood as he had beside the grave, facing Arthur but a few hands away. “And now?”
“Making a somewhat less than adequate shield against the weather, Lancelot. How is it that you and Bors can be cousins and yet be shaped so differently?”
“I believe the fault lies with our fathers,” Lancelot said diffidently, moving closer so that there was barely a space between them and his chilled cheek was a breath away from Arthur’s ear. “Better?”
“Yes.” Arthur could not be certain, but there seemed to be a weight to that question which he could not decipher. “So far all you have done I would do for a brother, Lancelot. Did you have a point or are we freezing out here to no purpose?”
The darker man stepped just that fraction closer and slid his arms around Arthur’s waist. Arthur frowned, then felt his mouth drop open comically as Lancelot pulled sharply, bringing them flush from waist to knee.
“As you can tell, I do have a point,” Lancelot purred, and Arthur squirmed a little, regretting it as soon as he moved. Lancelot’s point was fairly obvious indeed, and Arthur felt heat rise to his cheeks as the other chuckled in his ear.
“I…believe I take your meaning,” Arthur said, trying without success to free himself from Lancelot’s grip. Lancelot pulled him back again so that Arthur was leaning against the smaller man, feeling off balance and horribly aware of the warmth of leather against his back and wrapped around him with careful strength.
“Do you? And what would your priests say is my sin, Arthur?”
Arthur finally managed to break his knight’s hold and spun away, not meeting Lancelot’s eyes. “Your blood is too hot, Lancelot. Go find yourself a woman and have done.”
“A lesser sin, surely, but a sin nonetheless,” the other sneered. “And it will not solve my problem. When it comes to you I am never done.”
Startled, Arthur looked up almost without his own volition, and found that when his eyes met Lancelot’s, he could not look away. He opened his mouth, found no words there, closed it again, and sighed as his Sarmatian snorted in pained amusement at his own inexplicable vulnerability.
The sound broke his paralysis and he lifted an imperious hand. “Come here.”
Lancelot’s eyebrows rose. “If you’re going to hit me, Arthur, I’d prefer it if you walked over here.”
Arthur’s voice dropped. “Lancelot. Come. Here.”
Lancelot came. His face was obscured by the deeper shadows of the branches overhead until he was a mere hand’s-breadth away, but even in the faint moonlight coming over the horizon, his face was unreadable. Until he was so close Arthur still didn’t know what he was going to do. Vague ideas he had ignored came back in a headlong stampede, the force of their rush causing his fingers to tremble like the ground under a stallion’s hooves.
He reached up and put a hand on Lancelot’s face, gentling his flinch with a touch almost as skilled as Lancelot’s own.
“I’m never done with you, either.”
“Then I suppose you believe we’re both going to hell.”
Arthur lamented the bitterness in Lancelot’s tone, but knew they would never see eye-to-eye on the God in whom he placed his trust. And yet…
“Then,” he murmured, drawing Lancelot closer still, “I suppose I shall have very good company for the journey.”
By Lokei
Universe: King Arthur (movieverse)
Rating: PG-13
Notes: inspired by that ‘stories I haven’t written’ meme, title by romanticalgirl, who wanted the rest of the story
= = = =
It took until he lost the first of his knights for Arthur to appreciate the sudden darkness of a late November afternoon. When he was growing up hearing the stories that Pelagius would tell of the gentle twilights that lingered over Rome, bathing the great monuments and temples in roseate glory, Arthur could not imagine anything more different from the way gloom could suddenly overtake one in the raw autumns of Britannia, and he vastly preferred the Rome of his imagination to the grey of his reality.
They lost Lamorak to a stupid error, letting him go with Tristan and Lucan beyond the wall on reconnaissance. Lamorak was a good fighter, but no scout; almost as noisy as Bors, and nearly as irrepressible. Lancelot had frowned when Arthur had named the scouting party, but said nothing. Arthur couldn’t be sure now, standing over the fresh grave, whether he was angry or not for Lancelot’s apparent faith in his command. Arthur was doubting it himself. Tristan and Lucan had nearly been lost, and Lamorak had suffered far too harsh a punishment for his unceasing chatter, coming home in the November half-light with a half-dozen arrows in his gut.
What kind of a commander was he? Was this the kind of care he took of his men?
The last shreds of light vanished from the cloud cover as if in answer and Arthur rolled his head slowly up to stare into the bruised and darkened sky.
“Arthur.”
The voice near his ear startled him and he flinched, but did not look around. In the space of that instant’s surprise his ear told him what his other senses had not: Lancelot stood close behind him, his slight frame still managing to provide a bit of protection from the rising wind. Arthur closed his eyes; the sting of the wind would be fierce, if he were looking into it, but he could not blame it for the moisture threatening to overflow.
“You made a reasonable judgment, Arthur.”
“Don’t placate me like a child, Lancelot. A man died because of my judgment today.”
“He died because of the Woads, not because of you.” Lancelot’s voice was fierce as the night breeze, and nearly as cold. “He needed the training and he needed the experience. Tristan and Lucan should have been able to keep rein on him, and none of us could have known the Woads were so close in such numbers.” Lancelot snorted softly. “That, after all, is the point of a scouting party.”
“You would have done better.”
“Better than Tristan? Unlikely. Better than Lamorak? Undoubtedly, but then I am not the one in need of training, so why send me?”
“No,” Arthur cast a look over his shoulder at his most difficult and yet most trusted knight. “You would have done better than I.”
Lancelot rolled his eyes. “Arthur, if I were in command we would none of us be sitting in a gray heap of uncomfortable stone waiting for blue-painted devils to poke us full of holes.” His lips twitched and his voice softened. “But then, we’d probably all be on the run from your Roman friends and we’d all end up dead instead of just poor idiotic Lamorak, so I doubt we’d do much better after all.”
“Doesn’t stop you wanting it, though, does it?” Arthur didn’t know why he felt compelled to push at all the possible sore points between them tonight, but the urge to needle was there, as if he could somehow make it all pour out and wash away.
“I want freedom, not the hunted life of a fugitive,” Lancelot snapped back. “I’d rather not give my life for Rome, but since no one asked me or Lamorak, we must take what we get and grieve when we can, mustn’t we?” He smacked a leather bound bottle up against Arthur’s chest and the other took it reflexively as Lancelot stomped further into the shadows of the trees to take a seat on a convenient stump, pulling at the stopper of a bottle of his own.
Arthur looked at the bottle in his hand in some surprise, and wandered over to sit beside Lancelot. He tried to ignore how grudgingly Lancelot made room. “You didn’t even like Lamorak. This is a fine bottle to spend in grieving over someone you couldn’t stand.”
Lancelot gave him a look and tossed the stopper somewhere behind him into the trees. “You don’t need to like your brother to grieve for him.”
Arthur frowned. “You two were from different tribes…” he trailed off as Lancelot’s look sharpened to genuine irritation.
“He was of the people of the sun and the grasslands, grew up with the same gods, fought with the same fury, was a stranger to these lands as much as I or any of the others. The differences between Sarmatians and their kin are little compared to the differences between Sarmatians and those bronze-plated buffoons down in the barracks.”
Arthur expected the bitterness against the Roman troops quartered in the same garrison, and he let it slide in deference to the day’s loss, but he was surprised by the sudden hurt which Lancelot’s words also inflicted.
“So the difference between you and Lamorak was not so great as the difference between you and me.”
Lancelot tipped his head to the side and considered Arthur from an angle, but it did not seem that Lancelot was drunk as yet, merely pensive.
“You are trying to ask if you’re too Roman to be my brother?”
Arthur flushed, grateful to the darkness which stole all color from the scene. “I suppose.”
The slighter man started to chuckle and Arthur growled his name in warning, but the knight waved away the signs of Arthur’s ire. “I cannot look at you as a brother, Arthur.”
That truly did hurt, and Arthur could not fool himself that it was the wine making it worse. “Why not?”
Lancelot clasped him on the near shoulder and leaned in confidentially. “Your god would disapprove of me even more if I did,” he replied, somewhat too cryptically for the late hour and the circumstances.
“It is the way of God to teach that all men should treat each other as brothers,” Arthur began, but Lancelot cut him off with a decided shake of his head.
“I do not want to treat you as my brother,” he said again, slowly this time as if that would make his statement make more sense. Arthur’s continued confusion surely showed upon his face because Lancelot shook his head once more and stood, holding out his hand to pull Arthur up as well. Arthur allowed Lancelot to position him so that he once again stood with his back to the biting wind, and Lancelot stood behind him, back to back this time.
“This, Arthur, how would you describe what I am doing?” Lancelot’s words carried easily over his shoulder and Arthur smiled.
“Protecting my back, just as we often do. Watching my weaker side, guarding my flank. How many ways do you need it described?”
Lancelot snorted and Arthur felt more than heard him shift position so that now Lancelot stood as he had beside the grave, facing Arthur but a few hands away. “And now?”
“Making a somewhat less than adequate shield against the weather, Lancelot. How is it that you and Bors can be cousins and yet be shaped so differently?”
“I believe the fault lies with our fathers,” Lancelot said diffidently, moving closer so that there was barely a space between them and his chilled cheek was a breath away from Arthur’s ear. “Better?”
“Yes.” Arthur could not be certain, but there seemed to be a weight to that question which he could not decipher. “So far all you have done I would do for a brother, Lancelot. Did you have a point or are we freezing out here to no purpose?”
The darker man stepped just that fraction closer and slid his arms around Arthur’s waist. Arthur frowned, then felt his mouth drop open comically as Lancelot pulled sharply, bringing them flush from waist to knee.
“As you can tell, I do have a point,” Lancelot purred, and Arthur squirmed a little, regretting it as soon as he moved. Lancelot’s point was fairly obvious indeed, and Arthur felt heat rise to his cheeks as the other chuckled in his ear.
“I…believe I take your meaning,” Arthur said, trying without success to free himself from Lancelot’s grip. Lancelot pulled him back again so that Arthur was leaning against the smaller man, feeling off balance and horribly aware of the warmth of leather against his back and wrapped around him with careful strength.
“Do you? And what would your priests say is my sin, Arthur?”
Arthur finally managed to break his knight’s hold and spun away, not meeting Lancelot’s eyes. “Your blood is too hot, Lancelot. Go find yourself a woman and have done.”
“A lesser sin, surely, but a sin nonetheless,” the other sneered. “And it will not solve my problem. When it comes to you I am never done.”
Startled, Arthur looked up almost without his own volition, and found that when his eyes met Lancelot’s, he could not look away. He opened his mouth, found no words there, closed it again, and sighed as his Sarmatian snorted in pained amusement at his own inexplicable vulnerability.
The sound broke his paralysis and he lifted an imperious hand. “Come here.”
Lancelot’s eyebrows rose. “If you’re going to hit me, Arthur, I’d prefer it if you walked over here.”
Arthur’s voice dropped. “Lancelot. Come. Here.”
Lancelot came. His face was obscured by the deeper shadows of the branches overhead until he was a mere hand’s-breadth away, but even in the faint moonlight coming over the horizon, his face was unreadable. Until he was so close Arthur still didn’t know what he was going to do. Vague ideas he had ignored came back in a headlong stampede, the force of their rush causing his fingers to tremble like the ground under a stallion’s hooves.
He reached up and put a hand on Lancelot’s face, gentling his flinch with a touch almost as skilled as Lancelot’s own.
“I’m never done with you, either.”
“Then I suppose you believe we’re both going to hell.”
Arthur lamented the bitterness in Lancelot’s tone, but knew they would never see eye-to-eye on the God in whom he placed his trust. And yet…
“Then,” he murmured, drawing Lancelot closer still, “I suppose I shall have very good company for the journey.”