Arthurian Ficlets: A Series of Snapshots
Yes, this is a transparent bid for feedback. And a crossposting of comment_fic stuff again.
Title: A Series of Snapshots
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairing: Lancelot and Gawaine
Wordcount: Six snapshots, all <700 words
Summary: They were rivals, yes, but also one of the steadier friendships in Camelot. A series of snapshots in the lives of Arthur's champions.
Notes/Warnings: This is one of those annoying relationships that can be either read as an established romantic one of a nonsexual variety or a close friendship. I'm not actually certain they know which it is. Also? Concrit is more than welcome; these are characters I write outside of posted fanfiction.
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Scottish Mist
It never rained so much in France.
This was not what was truly irritating him, but Lancelot thought that it was a good start, regardless. An English rain was misty and unpredictable and occasionally punctuated by mere minutes of blinding sunlight, and if England was truly still under the control of the old gods Lancelot did not understand why they couldn't make up their minds about the weather.
Scottish mist and rain, on the other hand? That was just cold.
Gawaine did not mind, of course, but Gawaine welcomed fog and mist and solitude like an old friend. Lancelot supposed he must have gotten lost in it many times as a child, trying to find somewhere his brothers weren't. So even though Lancelot could not see more than five feet from him and the rain was starting to pick up from a drizzle to a downpour, the ease at which Gawaine picked his way along the pass suggested that they could keep going like this for some time.
Lancelot, on the other hand, wanted a roof over his head. Now. He never had liked moving in wet clothes, and the mist and rain had been seeping through his cloak all day.
Gawaine touched his arm gently and veered off the path. Lancelot followed, watching Gawaine's boots carefully for footholds. The grass and mud were even less reliable than the shale, after all.
It wasn't until he'd ducked under a stone that he realized Gawaine had been leading him out of the weather. The air was still clammy, and it was rather dark where the mist didn't reach, but there was nothing coming out of the sky to drip down under his collar.
"Wood's too damp to light, so it's dark," Gawaine said from the shadows. "But at least our boots won't be filling up here."
"Thank you," Lancelot mumbled, not sure what else to say.
Actually thanking him had the predictable effect of making Gawaine fidget and attempt to claim he'd done nothing worthy of it. "I don't like being out in the rain, either," he said, leaning against the back of the cave and sliding down to the floor.
Lancelot wrung as much damp out of his cloak as possible before stepping forward. "You seemed to be navigating it well enough to go on indefinitely."
Gawaine shrugged. "Mordred always liked the rain. I used to have to chase after him and bring him back in before he caught his death." He leaned his head back against the stone, staring at the rocky ceiling.
Lancelot stepped forward and sat beside him, wedging himself as close to Gawaine's warm body as he could. "Mmm," he mumbled, indicating he was listening if Gawaine wanted to tell a story. If not, he could try to doze off for a few hours while his friend enjoyed the sound of the rain.
Splash
Lancelot's experience with water was shaped by his acquaintance with the fae, and a childhood that included the Lady of the Lake. He knew still pools and mischievous water spirits who, in their friendlier moods would not have hesitated to pull him into the lake and show him interesting lairs and grottoes (even if they often were distracted and left him there to find his own way back). He could swim like a fish.
On the other hand, Gawaine's experience with water had been shaped by cold winters and the unforgiving North Sea. He knew meltwater streams that flooded late every spring and salty breakers that crashed against the rocky outcroppings. He knew water as powerful, unpredictable, and often treacherous.
He had also been caked with mud for entirely too long.
They were in some forgotten, Druidic corner of Whales. There was a waterfall, but the stream was slow-moving around it. Lancelot had already stripped to his skin and waded in, in an attempt to get the mud out of his hair and the road dirt from all the crevices in his skin. Gawaine was not entirely certain whether he wanted to get in.
It wasn't home, but it was spring, and the temperature on the bank was pleasantly cool, especially after the sun and dust on the road. The water was sure to be cold, and while Gawaine of all people had no fear of cold, he wasn't going to subject himself to it unnecessarily, either.
Lancelot surfaced, caught Gawaine's eye, and cocked his head slightly, asking what was taking him so long.
Gawaine rolled his eyes theatrically.
Lancelot grinned.
Gawaine sat down on the stony bank and stretched his legs out in front of him, waving a hand dismissively at his friend's smirk, but he resolved to keep an eye on Lancelot until he'd made up his mind. Washing his arms and face only had to involve full submersion if he let Lancelot pull him in.
Lancelot dipped below the greenish surface of the water again, and for a moment Gawaine watched his friend's pale body dart through the water until he disappeared in a shadowy patch closer to the falls.
Gawaine leaned back, relaxing a little in spite of himself. The sound of the falls was steady, and if he didn't think too much about it sounded like heavy rain on a solid roof, someplace he was comfortably out of it. Now if Lancelot would be content to play at fish on his own, Gawaine could lean back, watch the wind in the trees, and actually relax as he rarely did on the road.
He'd let a fox picking its way around the other side of the water distract him for a moment when Lancelot came barreling out of the water beside him, sending water droplets in all directions. Most of it, however, hit Gawaine, as had been intended.
The water wasn't as cold as he had assumed, but it was terribly unexpected, and Gawaine cringed backwards on reflex. "Ludd! What was that for?"
Lancelot gave him his most innocent and reasonable stare. "Someone might think I had thrown a stone at you," he said.
Gawaine rolled his eyes and gave into the inevitable, tugging his now-soaked shirt over his head and kicking his boots off as he did so. Linen might dry fairly quickly, but leather wouldn't.
And, even though he knew it would hardly faze Lancelot, he slapped his forearm into the water as hard as he could.
Lancelot grabbed the arm, blinking water out of his face, and tugged his already badly-balanced friend into the water.
Gawaine didn't want a mouthful, so he didn't swear, but it was a near miss. He found a hold on the pebbled ground instead and surfaced like the Leviathan, sending waves out from him in all directions, and wiped the hair out of his face.
To look into the face of Lancelot, grinning like a cat.
"Swim fast," Gawaine suggested, but he could feel the grin on his face as he said it.
Wool
It got so cold at Camelot that winter that even the lads from Orkney preferred to drink by the fire rather than play tricks on each other in the snow.
Enough of the lads from Orkney that the usual winter games were curtailed, anyway.
Lancelot had never quite understood the way Gawaine did or did not feel the cold. Put him near a body of water -- be it a lake in England or a Scottish loch -- and he would declare it obscenely cold and refuse to so much as get his toes wet. However, put him in the vicinity of a snow drift, and he would be insisting that it was not that bad and more people should come out and join him.
It was all quite baffling, and Lancelot had long since given up trying to puzzle out the logic of it.
However, on a day in which Gaheris was so near the hearth his sleeves might catch fire and Mordred had refused to even get out from under the covers, there was no way in any hell, pagan or Christian, that he was doing anything but settling down to listen to knights spin stories at each other over mulled wine.
Gawaine had gone out anyway, wading through the snow into town to see a carpenter about propping up a few of the creaking beams in the stables before the next big snow storm. He returned successfully shortly before sunset to kick Gaheris, who was sprawled in front of the fire like one of the dogs, until his brother rolled an acceptable distance away from the logs. Then he collapsed onto a bench beside Lancelot. "Any wine left?" he asked.
"You can get up and get it yourself," Lancelot said mildly.
Gawaine pulled a face at him, but he got up, found a mug and filled it from the pot. Then he returned to the seat beside Lancelot and shook some of the water out of his hair.
Lancelot shook his head. Gawaine was grinning like an imbecile, though his face and hands were pink from the cold and he smelled faintly of snowmelt and sweat. Plowing through those drifts had been work.
Gawaine, on the other hand, just raised the mug to his lips and glanced speculatively around. Gaheris was of course still sprawled on the floor and one of the dogs had come to join him. At some point, Gareth had convinced Mordred that he couldn't stay in bed all day, and the boy had complied reluctantly, although he still looked half asleep in his seat with his dark hair fantastically mussed. Lady Lynet was beating Agrivaine soundly at chess.
Gawaine turned back to Lancelot, sitting in the midst of his brothers, and smiled slightly. "Nice atmosphere to come home to," he said. "Who broke up the fight?"
"Fight?"
Gawaine raised a knowing eyebrow.
"Milady Morgan visited, looking for you."
"I'll see her later." But even as the dutiful nephew said it, the older brother was nodding, satisfied that the world had not titled off its axis in his absence.
"There is still snow by your collar." Lancelot reached out to flick it away, rubbing his fingers against the wool tunic and the warm skin of Gawaine's neck. His knuckle brushed against the freezing metal of his friend's ever-present torc, and Lancelot yanked back with a jolt.
Gawaine was just as fast, reaching up to seize Lancelot's hand and run a thumb over the knuckle, feeling for damage.
"Just a shock," Lancelot mumbled.
Gawaine nodded and let go. "Wool and metal do that," he pointed out, stretching his feet out and hitting Gaheris squarely in the ribs. "Especially when it's this bloody cold."
Of The Trail
"You are hopelessly lost," Lancelot said dryly. It was not a question.
Gawaine glanced back at the other knight and gave him a look of such innocent bafflement he was certain a brother would punch it on sight. Lancelot, on the other hand, simply rolled his eyes.
As his friend was having none of it, Gawaine allowed himself a grin before he started walking again. Lancelot huffed in irritation, but a moment later Gawaine could hear his bootsteps behind him.
The day was cool for summer and there was a good breeze drifting through the wood, and Gawaine was in no hurry to pick his way along the deer trail, stopping occasionally to take a look at any tracks he might have encountered. Not far away, two birds were chattering angrily at each other, and to Gawaine's mind whatever they were arguing about had to be more sensible than the diplomatic arguments he had spent the past two weeks listening to.
He clambered over a rather large fallen tree that ended the path and looked back again to see Lancelot had stopped and was watching him with a scowl and his arms crossed over his chest.
Gawaine shrugged.
Lancelot glanced up at the heavens, and it was so obviously a prayer for patience Gawaine wondered that he didn't cross himself.
He had just turned to keep walking when he heard a snap as Lancelot started over and put his weight on a twig that wouldn't hold him. There was a thud as he fell back to the ground.
"Merde!"
Gawaine looked back again, this time with a little more concern. "Blood?" he asked, as Lancelot dropped to the ground again, this time on his side of the log.
"Just you," Lancelot answered. "We shall go into the woods and find Lady Lynet's runaway brachet, shall we? The dog has gone back to its mistress, Gawaine, and you have no more of an idea where we are than I do."
Gawaine smiled. "West of the Cam, by no more than two miles."
Lancelot closed his eyes. "You wanted to get away from the diplomats."
The smile became a smirk. "Did it take you that long?"
"To realize you might get lost on purpose and not simply pretend to be lost? Yes. Even if we found the Cam now, we will miss supper, and Kay and the cook will throw twin fits with knights in the kitchens."
Gawaine slipped the wine skin off from where it hung on his belt and passed it to Lancelot. "I've two pastries and some cheese in here, too."
Lancelot uncorked the wine and muttered something vague in French. Gawaine caught a word he recognized as meaning "fool" and beamed.
"I want to see the castle before dark," Lancelot said.
Gawaine laughed and clapped his friend on the shoulder. That gave them a few hours yet to wander together.
Chapel Steps
Gawaine sat on the steps of the chapel with a chunk of wood, peeling long strips off of it with a knife. He wasn't entirely certain what he was going to whittle it into, yet, but if no inspiration hit, he was just going to keep peeling until it became a toothpick. He wanted his hands busy, just now.
Bootsteps came up behind him. Gawaine didn't look up.
The boots paused at his back, and Gawaine could feel eyes on his hands, and the few long strips of wood shavings at his feet.
The knife skipped against a particularly stubborn knot, stopping just short of Gawaine's thumbnail and leaving a long curl of wood in the middle of his work. He took it between two fingers, ripped it off, and started again.
The bootsteps came around Gawaine and down the first two steps, and then Lancelot sat down beside him with a sigh.
Gawaine glanced at him. There were more lines on his face than there had been that morning, and his shoulders slumped. As Gawaine watched, Lancelot raised a hand to rub at his temples. "Mon Deu," he mumbled.
Gawaine turned back to carving, pretending not to see how haggard his friend was.
The service that Gawaine hadn't been able to walk inside for was for Galahad.
He slide the knife around the knot, this time. Perhaps he would turn it into something. Or perhaps there would be nothing left but the knot when he was through.
Lancelot reached down and picked up a discarded curl, wrapping it round his finger, tighter and tighter until the pressure snapped the fiber. He glanced back at Gawaine, who flicked wood dust off his knife and tried to pretend he hadn't been watching with concern.
"It is over," Lancelot said quietly.
Gawaine bit his lip. Lancelot didn't need to say it, but Gawaine heard it anyway -- I never even knew the boy, and I bring him home to bury him.
Lancelot shook his head and dropped the snapped woodshavings.
Galahad wasn't the only one to come back a memory or a body. Gawaine had known almost all the names and gotten the majority of them roaring drunk at one time or another, and it was amazing how quiet Camelot was, knowing their number had gone down. Empty, quiet, forlorn.
Failed.
The only one who had achieved the stupid Quest had died as he did it.
Gawaine didn't know what to say.
"How did we get here?" Lancelot asked. "There was so much hope, not so long ago."
Gawaine put the knife down beside him and put his big hand on Lancelot's shoulder. He squeezed it once, then let it rest, hoping the warm weight of it would say everything he didn't know how to.
They sat on the steps of the chapel and waited for the bell to ring.
Sword to Sword
He does not really know how it has come to this.
He does not know how he came to betray Arthur, how Gareth came to die, how the Round Table lay split in two, with half its loyalty in Benoic and the other half in Camelot.
Oh, he knows the events. He remembers Mordred barging into the Queen's rooms, remembers the sight of Guenevere tied to the stake, her chestnut hair shining in the predawn light. He remembers events.
But he does not quite understand the whys of them, that they led here. That they led to two bloody swords, and to having to look into Gawaine's once-bright green eyes. To seeing echoed in those eyes all the evenings spent side by side as allies, friends, compatriots -- but also seeing the deaths of four brothers who were to Gawaine almost sons, and the betrayal of a friend.
And Gawaine has never known what to do with betrayal. He is angry and helpless, and wants it to be over even if it means kill or be killed.
Lancelot has a feeling Gawaine's preference is "be killed."
But someone has to win, and he's not so certain he's in favor of his own survival.
Title: A Series of Snapshots
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairing: Lancelot and Gawaine
Wordcount: Six snapshots, all <700 words
Summary: They were rivals, yes, but also one of the steadier friendships in Camelot. A series of snapshots in the lives of Arthur's champions.
Notes/Warnings: This is one of those annoying relationships that can be either read as an established romantic one of a nonsexual variety or a close friendship. I'm not actually certain they know which it is. Also? Concrit is more than welcome; these are characters I write outside of posted fanfiction.
__
Scottish Mist
It never rained so much in France.
This was not what was truly irritating him, but Lancelot thought that it was a good start, regardless. An English rain was misty and unpredictable and occasionally punctuated by mere minutes of blinding sunlight, and if England was truly still under the control of the old gods Lancelot did not understand why they couldn't make up their minds about the weather.
Scottish mist and rain, on the other hand? That was just cold.
Gawaine did not mind, of course, but Gawaine welcomed fog and mist and solitude like an old friend. Lancelot supposed he must have gotten lost in it many times as a child, trying to find somewhere his brothers weren't. So even though Lancelot could not see more than five feet from him and the rain was starting to pick up from a drizzle to a downpour, the ease at which Gawaine picked his way along the pass suggested that they could keep going like this for some time.
Lancelot, on the other hand, wanted a roof over his head. Now. He never had liked moving in wet clothes, and the mist and rain had been seeping through his cloak all day.
Gawaine touched his arm gently and veered off the path. Lancelot followed, watching Gawaine's boots carefully for footholds. The grass and mud were even less reliable than the shale, after all.
It wasn't until he'd ducked under a stone that he realized Gawaine had been leading him out of the weather. The air was still clammy, and it was rather dark where the mist didn't reach, but there was nothing coming out of the sky to drip down under his collar.
"Wood's too damp to light, so it's dark," Gawaine said from the shadows. "But at least our boots won't be filling up here."
"Thank you," Lancelot mumbled, not sure what else to say.
Actually thanking him had the predictable effect of making Gawaine fidget and attempt to claim he'd done nothing worthy of it. "I don't like being out in the rain, either," he said, leaning against the back of the cave and sliding down to the floor.
Lancelot wrung as much damp out of his cloak as possible before stepping forward. "You seemed to be navigating it well enough to go on indefinitely."
Gawaine shrugged. "Mordred always liked the rain. I used to have to chase after him and bring him back in before he caught his death." He leaned his head back against the stone, staring at the rocky ceiling.
Lancelot stepped forward and sat beside him, wedging himself as close to Gawaine's warm body as he could. "Mmm," he mumbled, indicating he was listening if Gawaine wanted to tell a story. If not, he could try to doze off for a few hours while his friend enjoyed the sound of the rain.
Splash
Lancelot's experience with water was shaped by his acquaintance with the fae, and a childhood that included the Lady of the Lake. He knew still pools and mischievous water spirits who, in their friendlier moods would not have hesitated to pull him into the lake and show him interesting lairs and grottoes (even if they often were distracted and left him there to find his own way back). He could swim like a fish.
On the other hand, Gawaine's experience with water had been shaped by cold winters and the unforgiving North Sea. He knew meltwater streams that flooded late every spring and salty breakers that crashed against the rocky outcroppings. He knew water as powerful, unpredictable, and often treacherous.
He had also been caked with mud for entirely too long.
They were in some forgotten, Druidic corner of Whales. There was a waterfall, but the stream was slow-moving around it. Lancelot had already stripped to his skin and waded in, in an attempt to get the mud out of his hair and the road dirt from all the crevices in his skin. Gawaine was not entirely certain whether he wanted to get in.
It wasn't home, but it was spring, and the temperature on the bank was pleasantly cool, especially after the sun and dust on the road. The water was sure to be cold, and while Gawaine of all people had no fear of cold, he wasn't going to subject himself to it unnecessarily, either.
Lancelot surfaced, caught Gawaine's eye, and cocked his head slightly, asking what was taking him so long.
Gawaine rolled his eyes theatrically.
Lancelot grinned.
Gawaine sat down on the stony bank and stretched his legs out in front of him, waving a hand dismissively at his friend's smirk, but he resolved to keep an eye on Lancelot until he'd made up his mind. Washing his arms and face only had to involve full submersion if he let Lancelot pull him in.
Lancelot dipped below the greenish surface of the water again, and for a moment Gawaine watched his friend's pale body dart through the water until he disappeared in a shadowy patch closer to the falls.
Gawaine leaned back, relaxing a little in spite of himself. The sound of the falls was steady, and if he didn't think too much about it sounded like heavy rain on a solid roof, someplace he was comfortably out of it. Now if Lancelot would be content to play at fish on his own, Gawaine could lean back, watch the wind in the trees, and actually relax as he rarely did on the road.
He'd let a fox picking its way around the other side of the water distract him for a moment when Lancelot came barreling out of the water beside him, sending water droplets in all directions. Most of it, however, hit Gawaine, as had been intended.
The water wasn't as cold as he had assumed, but it was terribly unexpected, and Gawaine cringed backwards on reflex. "Ludd! What was that for?"
Lancelot gave him his most innocent and reasonable stare. "Someone might think I had thrown a stone at you," he said.
Gawaine rolled his eyes and gave into the inevitable, tugging his now-soaked shirt over his head and kicking his boots off as he did so. Linen might dry fairly quickly, but leather wouldn't.
And, even though he knew it would hardly faze Lancelot, he slapped his forearm into the water as hard as he could.
Lancelot grabbed the arm, blinking water out of his face, and tugged his already badly-balanced friend into the water.
Gawaine didn't want a mouthful, so he didn't swear, but it was a near miss. He found a hold on the pebbled ground instead and surfaced like the Leviathan, sending waves out from him in all directions, and wiped the hair out of his face.
To look into the face of Lancelot, grinning like a cat.
"Swim fast," Gawaine suggested, but he could feel the grin on his face as he said it.
Wool
It got so cold at Camelot that winter that even the lads from Orkney preferred to drink by the fire rather than play tricks on each other in the snow.
Enough of the lads from Orkney that the usual winter games were curtailed, anyway.
Lancelot had never quite understood the way Gawaine did or did not feel the cold. Put him near a body of water -- be it a lake in England or a Scottish loch -- and he would declare it obscenely cold and refuse to so much as get his toes wet. However, put him in the vicinity of a snow drift, and he would be insisting that it was not that bad and more people should come out and join him.
It was all quite baffling, and Lancelot had long since given up trying to puzzle out the logic of it.
However, on a day in which Gaheris was so near the hearth his sleeves might catch fire and Mordred had refused to even get out from under the covers, there was no way in any hell, pagan or Christian, that he was doing anything but settling down to listen to knights spin stories at each other over mulled wine.
Gawaine had gone out anyway, wading through the snow into town to see a carpenter about propping up a few of the creaking beams in the stables before the next big snow storm. He returned successfully shortly before sunset to kick Gaheris, who was sprawled in front of the fire like one of the dogs, until his brother rolled an acceptable distance away from the logs. Then he collapsed onto a bench beside Lancelot. "Any wine left?" he asked.
"You can get up and get it yourself," Lancelot said mildly.
Gawaine pulled a face at him, but he got up, found a mug and filled it from the pot. Then he returned to the seat beside Lancelot and shook some of the water out of his hair.
Lancelot shook his head. Gawaine was grinning like an imbecile, though his face and hands were pink from the cold and he smelled faintly of snowmelt and sweat. Plowing through those drifts had been work.
Gawaine, on the other hand, just raised the mug to his lips and glanced speculatively around. Gaheris was of course still sprawled on the floor and one of the dogs had come to join him. At some point, Gareth had convinced Mordred that he couldn't stay in bed all day, and the boy had complied reluctantly, although he still looked half asleep in his seat with his dark hair fantastically mussed. Lady Lynet was beating Agrivaine soundly at chess.
Gawaine turned back to Lancelot, sitting in the midst of his brothers, and smiled slightly. "Nice atmosphere to come home to," he said. "Who broke up the fight?"
"Fight?"
Gawaine raised a knowing eyebrow.
"Milady Morgan visited, looking for you."
"I'll see her later." But even as the dutiful nephew said it, the older brother was nodding, satisfied that the world had not titled off its axis in his absence.
"There is still snow by your collar." Lancelot reached out to flick it away, rubbing his fingers against the wool tunic and the warm skin of Gawaine's neck. His knuckle brushed against the freezing metal of his friend's ever-present torc, and Lancelot yanked back with a jolt.
Gawaine was just as fast, reaching up to seize Lancelot's hand and run a thumb over the knuckle, feeling for damage.
"Just a shock," Lancelot mumbled.
Gawaine nodded and let go. "Wool and metal do that," he pointed out, stretching his feet out and hitting Gaheris squarely in the ribs. "Especially when it's this bloody cold."
Of The Trail
"You are hopelessly lost," Lancelot said dryly. It was not a question.
Gawaine glanced back at the other knight and gave him a look of such innocent bafflement he was certain a brother would punch it on sight. Lancelot, on the other hand, simply rolled his eyes.
As his friend was having none of it, Gawaine allowed himself a grin before he started walking again. Lancelot huffed in irritation, but a moment later Gawaine could hear his bootsteps behind him.
The day was cool for summer and there was a good breeze drifting through the wood, and Gawaine was in no hurry to pick his way along the deer trail, stopping occasionally to take a look at any tracks he might have encountered. Not far away, two birds were chattering angrily at each other, and to Gawaine's mind whatever they were arguing about had to be more sensible than the diplomatic arguments he had spent the past two weeks listening to.
He clambered over a rather large fallen tree that ended the path and looked back again to see Lancelot had stopped and was watching him with a scowl and his arms crossed over his chest.
Gawaine shrugged.
Lancelot glanced up at the heavens, and it was so obviously a prayer for patience Gawaine wondered that he didn't cross himself.
He had just turned to keep walking when he heard a snap as Lancelot started over and put his weight on a twig that wouldn't hold him. There was a thud as he fell back to the ground.
"Merde!"
Gawaine looked back again, this time with a little more concern. "Blood?" he asked, as Lancelot dropped to the ground again, this time on his side of the log.
"Just you," Lancelot answered. "We shall go into the woods and find Lady Lynet's runaway brachet, shall we? The dog has gone back to its mistress, Gawaine, and you have no more of an idea where we are than I do."
Gawaine smiled. "West of the Cam, by no more than two miles."
Lancelot closed his eyes. "You wanted to get away from the diplomats."
The smile became a smirk. "Did it take you that long?"
"To realize you might get lost on purpose and not simply pretend to be lost? Yes. Even if we found the Cam now, we will miss supper, and Kay and the cook will throw twin fits with knights in the kitchens."
Gawaine slipped the wine skin off from where it hung on his belt and passed it to Lancelot. "I've two pastries and some cheese in here, too."
Lancelot uncorked the wine and muttered something vague in French. Gawaine caught a word he recognized as meaning "fool" and beamed.
"I want to see the castle before dark," Lancelot said.
Gawaine laughed and clapped his friend on the shoulder. That gave them a few hours yet to wander together.
Chapel Steps
Gawaine sat on the steps of the chapel with a chunk of wood, peeling long strips off of it with a knife. He wasn't entirely certain what he was going to whittle it into, yet, but if no inspiration hit, he was just going to keep peeling until it became a toothpick. He wanted his hands busy, just now.
Bootsteps came up behind him. Gawaine didn't look up.
The boots paused at his back, and Gawaine could feel eyes on his hands, and the few long strips of wood shavings at his feet.
The knife skipped against a particularly stubborn knot, stopping just short of Gawaine's thumbnail and leaving a long curl of wood in the middle of his work. He took it between two fingers, ripped it off, and started again.
The bootsteps came around Gawaine and down the first two steps, and then Lancelot sat down beside him with a sigh.
Gawaine glanced at him. There were more lines on his face than there had been that morning, and his shoulders slumped. As Gawaine watched, Lancelot raised a hand to rub at his temples. "Mon Deu," he mumbled.
Gawaine turned back to carving, pretending not to see how haggard his friend was.
The service that Gawaine hadn't been able to walk inside for was for Galahad.
He slide the knife around the knot, this time. Perhaps he would turn it into something. Or perhaps there would be nothing left but the knot when he was through.
Lancelot reached down and picked up a discarded curl, wrapping it round his finger, tighter and tighter until the pressure snapped the fiber. He glanced back at Gawaine, who flicked wood dust off his knife and tried to pretend he hadn't been watching with concern.
"It is over," Lancelot said quietly.
Gawaine bit his lip. Lancelot didn't need to say it, but Gawaine heard it anyway -- I never even knew the boy, and I bring him home to bury him.
Lancelot shook his head and dropped the snapped woodshavings.
Galahad wasn't the only one to come back a memory or a body. Gawaine had known almost all the names and gotten the majority of them roaring drunk at one time or another, and it was amazing how quiet Camelot was, knowing their number had gone down. Empty, quiet, forlorn.
Failed.
The only one who had achieved the stupid Quest had died as he did it.
Gawaine didn't know what to say.
"How did we get here?" Lancelot asked. "There was so much hope, not so long ago."
Gawaine put the knife down beside him and put his big hand on Lancelot's shoulder. He squeezed it once, then let it rest, hoping the warm weight of it would say everything he didn't know how to.
They sat on the steps of the chapel and waited for the bell to ring.
Sword to Sword
He does not really know how it has come to this.
He does not know how he came to betray Arthur, how Gareth came to die, how the Round Table lay split in two, with half its loyalty in Benoic and the other half in Camelot.
Oh, he knows the events. He remembers Mordred barging into the Queen's rooms, remembers the sight of Guenevere tied to the stake, her chestnut hair shining in the predawn light. He remembers events.
But he does not quite understand the whys of them, that they led here. That they led to two bloody swords, and to having to look into Gawaine's once-bright green eyes. To seeing echoed in those eyes all the evenings spent side by side as allies, friends, compatriots -- but also seeing the deaths of four brothers who were to Gawaine almost sons, and the betrayal of a friend.
And Gawaine has never known what to do with betrayal. He is angry and helpless, and wants it to be over even if it means kill or be killed.
Lancelot has a feeling Gawaine's preference is "be killed."
But someone has to win, and he's not so certain he's in favor of his own survival.