Story of the Sangrail #3: So dark, o love, my spirit without thee (chapter 1)
Title: So dark, o love, my spirit without thee (third story of the series)
Series: The story of the Sangrail ( READ THE PREVIOUS STORIES)
Writer: lucre_noin
Beta reader: osmandias (and all the thanks must go to her, because without her help I assure you that you woudn't be able to read this story in a decent English!)
Rating: PG
Pairings or characters: Mordred and Galahad, most and the pairing is Mordred/Galahad (but here they are Moray and Gale)
Warnings: m/m preslash and slash, illness, suicide, cancer, reincarnation
Plot: This is the third story of a longer series called The story of the Sangrail. Gale Morrison is not only an employee but also the famouse knight sir Galahad. After meeting with Moray, Gale starts discovering what happened centuries ago with the Grail and his own death.
01. Newport
England Gale Harrison was only ten years old when, in the school play, the teacher recruited him to enact the role of King Arthur.
It was fun. He was dressed as a knight in rags, he wore a crown of tin and he was zigzagging left and right with a sword of polystyrene. His parents were so proud of him that they watched the video tape for years after the play.
On his fourteenth birthday, his cousin Emma Summers, and Gale really couldnt bear her, gave him a book titled 'Morte d'Arthur'. Gale devoured it, metaphorically speaking. Watching again the old VHS of the play, Gale discovered that someone had given him the wrong role. He would never have been King Arthur.
This was the period when the dreams began. They kept him awake at night with images of women bleeding to death, horses, swords and creepy smiling angels. Gale used to wake up suddenly, crying or screaming and his mother ran to him to hug him, to reassure him.
"It's okay, do not fear, they are just dreams, they cannot hurt you."
"They've already done that," Gale use to whisper between the tears.
Months passed and the dreams became more vivid and made more sense. The castles and ladies from coloured cloths had the same consistency of the coarse red sofa in the living room. The flavour of the old sea was as real as the smell of breakfast in the other room. The gulls that he heard crying in Portsmouth when he visited his grandparents where the same gulls he had heard many years before. The knights began to become familiar; he knew their names as he knew those of his classmates. Arthur, Lancelot, Bors, Perceval, Mordred- all of them, very slowly, were returning to him.
His dreams clicked together, one after another, like a puzzle.
"You have a vivid imagination," said his teacher after an examination in an exercise of creative writing.
"It's not fantasy, teacher, Lancelot is really my father." The teacher laughed that day, but she stopped laughing when a friend of Gale came to tell her that his companion was telling everyone that he was Sir Galahad.
She tried to talk to Gale. She tried to convince him that dreaming was not always healthy, that he was Gale Harrison of Newbury.
A part of Gale understood her perfectly. He was Gale, but he knew he was also Galahad, and therefore he ignored the silly adults who did not understand him.
Mr. and Mrs. Harrison, however, did not ignore the cry of help of the teacher.
"Gale, dear, I think it is better to talk," Mrs. Harrison said softly, a small woman with a fragile look. She stroked the cheek of her child with her beautiful pianist's fingers and then took him on the sofa beside her.
"If this is about Mrs. Norton, I did not know that the cat would go in her garden."
"This is not about Mrs. Norton, Gale, nor the cat," said his father. He was patient and good but not inclined to subtlety. "It's about something that your teacher told us."
"What did she tell you?"
"Those things you said about being Sir Galahad," whispered his mother, and then she smiled.
"Gale, I know the story of King Arthur is very charming but-"
Gale stood up suddenly. "I am not a liar! It's all true!" Inwardly, he knew that the sad look of his mother would not lead to anything good, but he also knew that he could not lie. The next day Mrs. Harrion took him to the school psychologist.
The psychologist seemed to come out of an old Marvel comic, with a large square face, big and voluminous hair and a huge moustache.
His name was Sean and he smiled a lot.
He explained to Gale that some dreams could be very vivid, but they stayed dreams: not real. Gale tried to convince him in all innocence and trust that a thousand years before he was Galahad (and he was certain of it).
For years, the psychologist shook his head, on the brink of despair.
For Gale, the feelings of being experienced, of having another life, were so strong that they were hard to forget and avoid.
After Sean the psychologist, Annie the psychiatrist was the next person Gale saw.
Annie never smiled. When Gale came into her study, he should have realized that things had changed. It was a strange sensation. Annie was nearly fifty years old, she looked tired and she had gray hair. She was clearly overweight and Gale moved in his leather chair with anxiety, making it creak.
The woman had in her hands a copy of 'Morte d'Arthur'.
"Welcome, Gale. Sit, please."
"Yes, ma'am Bavers." Gale sat in the leather chair in front of the desk, watching with fascination Annie's plump fingers leafing through the book.
"You turned seventeen, yes?" asked the psychiatrist, looking sweet.
Gale nodded. He had turned seventeen a week before. New memories were reappearing in his dreams. The woman who had bled to death now had a name: Dindrane.
The Grail, the angel of the Grail, was terrible and knocked on the door of his memories every night. He had dreamt of Mordred, his kisses, and he had blushed.
He had strange reactions from his body, reactions that he preferred not to elaborate on and that he had always linked with girls and women.
He felt that there was almost nothing missing to reach the totality of his former life. The past memories scattered here and there, missing memories that would have allowed him to complete the picture.
But he could not say any of this to Annie.
"Do you like this book?" asked the woman.
"Yes, very much, Mrs. Bavers."
"It's a great novel," Annie nodded, "the end is sad though."
"Yes, it's sad."
"The king grabbed his spear and rushed forward, shouting: "Traitor, now is the day of your death!" Ser Mordred rushed to turn against him brandishing his sword, but the king is already sinking under the shield and spear made him escape from the body for more than an arm. And when the usurper understood that he could not escape death, he ran with all his force forward piercing up to handle the auction, then dropped the sword held with both hands on his father and joined him in one hand head piercing through the helmet and skull. Immediately after he fell to the ground dead." read Annie.
Gale turned pale. He trembled in his chair. Mordred had not been his friend, but he remembered thinking a lot about him before his death. Mordred was- odd, strange, complicated. Gale still could not understand a lot about him.
Mordred died in another life and he was here alone.
In that brief, subtle moment of epiphany, Gale knew that Mordred had always been right: he was an idiot, an imbecile who was always too trusting.
"Yes, very sad," nodded the psychiatrist, watching him intently. "Tell me, Gale, why do you want to take refuge in such a world?"
He swallowed, and for the first time, he lied. "I just wanted my parents to stop-" Stop what? He thought desperately, "-to annoy me with that stupid talk about my performance. Everyone told me I could be an actor, but I-" Gale gulped again, feeling that everything became smoother and fluent word after word, lie after lie. "I want to- I do not want to be an actor."
Gale's recovery was greeted in the house like a miracle.
Mr. and Mrs. Harrison gave the psychiatrist a basket of fruits (with her monthly fee, of course) but Gale was forced to visit Mrs. Annie Bavers for the rest of the year, until his eighteenth birthday. He was forced to lie, to joke in front of the nervous relief of his parents. But he knew that they loved him sincerely.
He once had had a mother, Elaine, who kept him closely tied; hoping he could become the change for all the other silly pagan knights, magically turning them into Christians. And Gale once had a father, Lancelot, who had abandoned him to run behind the skirts of a queen.
Now he had a mother and a father who lived with him, fed him, brought him to the movies, walked with him some Sundays and did not abandon him even when he claimed not to be Gale, their son, but another person from another time.
Gale knew that if they didn't believe him, nobody in the world could.
So he decided to put everything to rest. He ignored the memories, plunging headlong into his studies. He went to college and studied literature.
At nineteen, he fell in love with Lucy Howlett, one of his classmates. Lucy had red hair, her hands always smelling of mint and she had a lovely crooked tooth. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever met. It was with great irony that Gale, the morning after their first night together, wondered when he was Galahad, he had kept away from women. He must have been a fool and all for the Grail, to that terrible figure of an angel who had killed him and which still gave him chills.
The affair with Lucy only lasted one year.
After her, there was Jean Gray even though he probably never truly loved Jean. He graduated discreetly, not with the highest grades but not so low as to disappoint his parents.
It did not take long for Gale to find a job. Hired by Mr. Pawlins, a publisher of Portsmouth. Gale Harrison became an employee, the same as all the others. Neither a knight nor a hero.
He was kind, cheerful, sincere and helpful. His colleagues adored him and the female employees were infatuated by his big blue eyes and golden hair. But they remained infatuated, none of them tried to go any further with Gale. People seemed to understand that Gale was different. Gale did not notice what the others did because he was simply himself: he was Gale, the boy from Newport, and Galahad, the knight of Camelot. There was no contradiction in that.
Many years before, talking to the psychiatrist Annie Bavers, he had promised to forget Camelot, but the nostalgia has always been the sweetest of feelings and it was hard to resist.
So when, at twenty-four year old, he had begun to earn enough to take a holiday, he went to Glastonbury.
The beautiful Glastonbury. The city of the Grail, the place where everyone believed Arthur was buried, and he was dead.
Next chapter
Series: The story of the Sangrail ( READ THE PREVIOUS STORIES)
Writer: lucre_noin
Beta reader: osmandias (and all the thanks must go to her, because without her help I assure you that you woudn't be able to read this story in a decent English!)
Rating: PG
Pairings or characters: Mordred and Galahad, most and the pairing is Mordred/Galahad (but here they are Moray and Gale)
Warnings: m/m preslash and slash, illness, suicide, cancer, reincarnation
Plot: This is the third story of a longer series called The story of the Sangrail. Gale Morrison is not only an employee but also the famouse knight sir Galahad. After meeting with Moray, Gale starts discovering what happened centuries ago with the Grail and his own death.
01. Newport
England Gale Harrison was only ten years old when, in the school play, the teacher recruited him to enact the role of King Arthur.
It was fun. He was dressed as a knight in rags, he wore a crown of tin and he was zigzagging left and right with a sword of polystyrene. His parents were so proud of him that they watched the video tape for years after the play.
On his fourteenth birthday, his cousin Emma Summers, and Gale really couldnt bear her, gave him a book titled 'Morte d'Arthur'. Gale devoured it, metaphorically speaking. Watching again the old VHS of the play, Gale discovered that someone had given him the wrong role. He would never have been King Arthur.
This was the period when the dreams began. They kept him awake at night with images of women bleeding to death, horses, swords and creepy smiling angels. Gale used to wake up suddenly, crying or screaming and his mother ran to him to hug him, to reassure him.
"It's okay, do not fear, they are just dreams, they cannot hurt you."
"They've already done that," Gale use to whisper between the tears.
Months passed and the dreams became more vivid and made more sense. The castles and ladies from coloured cloths had the same consistency of the coarse red sofa in the living room. The flavour of the old sea was as real as the smell of breakfast in the other room. The gulls that he heard crying in Portsmouth when he visited his grandparents where the same gulls he had heard many years before. The knights began to become familiar; he knew their names as he knew those of his classmates. Arthur, Lancelot, Bors, Perceval, Mordred- all of them, very slowly, were returning to him.
His dreams clicked together, one after another, like a puzzle.
"You have a vivid imagination," said his teacher after an examination in an exercise of creative writing.
"It's not fantasy, teacher, Lancelot is really my father." The teacher laughed that day, but she stopped laughing when a friend of Gale came to tell her that his companion was telling everyone that he was Sir Galahad.
She tried to talk to Gale. She tried to convince him that dreaming was not always healthy, that he was Gale Harrison of Newbury.
A part of Gale understood her perfectly. He was Gale, but he knew he was also Galahad, and therefore he ignored the silly adults who did not understand him.
Mr. and Mrs. Harrison, however, did not ignore the cry of help of the teacher.
"Gale, dear, I think it is better to talk," Mrs. Harrison said softly, a small woman with a fragile look. She stroked the cheek of her child with her beautiful pianist's fingers and then took him on the sofa beside her.
"If this is about Mrs. Norton, I did not know that the cat would go in her garden."
"This is not about Mrs. Norton, Gale, nor the cat," said his father. He was patient and good but not inclined to subtlety. "It's about something that your teacher told us."
"What did she tell you?"
"Those things you said about being Sir Galahad," whispered his mother, and then she smiled.
"Gale, I know the story of King Arthur is very charming but-"
Gale stood up suddenly. "I am not a liar! It's all true!" Inwardly, he knew that the sad look of his mother would not lead to anything good, but he also knew that he could not lie. The next day Mrs. Harrion took him to the school psychologist.
The psychologist seemed to come out of an old Marvel comic, with a large square face, big and voluminous hair and a huge moustache.
His name was Sean and he smiled a lot.
He explained to Gale that some dreams could be very vivid, but they stayed dreams: not real. Gale tried to convince him in all innocence and trust that a thousand years before he was Galahad (and he was certain of it).
For years, the psychologist shook his head, on the brink of despair.
For Gale, the feelings of being experienced, of having another life, were so strong that they were hard to forget and avoid.
After Sean the psychologist, Annie the psychiatrist was the next person Gale saw.
Annie never smiled. When Gale came into her study, he should have realized that things had changed. It was a strange sensation. Annie was nearly fifty years old, she looked tired and she had gray hair. She was clearly overweight and Gale moved in his leather chair with anxiety, making it creak.
The woman had in her hands a copy of 'Morte d'Arthur'.
"Welcome, Gale. Sit, please."
"Yes, ma'am Bavers." Gale sat in the leather chair in front of the desk, watching with fascination Annie's plump fingers leafing through the book.
"You turned seventeen, yes?" asked the psychiatrist, looking sweet.
Gale nodded. He had turned seventeen a week before. New memories were reappearing in his dreams. The woman who had bled to death now had a name: Dindrane.
The Grail, the angel of the Grail, was terrible and knocked on the door of his memories every night. He had dreamt of Mordred, his kisses, and he had blushed.
He had strange reactions from his body, reactions that he preferred not to elaborate on and that he had always linked with girls and women.
He felt that there was almost nothing missing to reach the totality of his former life. The past memories scattered here and there, missing memories that would have allowed him to complete the picture.
But he could not say any of this to Annie.
"Do you like this book?" asked the woman.
"Yes, very much, Mrs. Bavers."
"It's a great novel," Annie nodded, "the end is sad though."
"Yes, it's sad."
"The king grabbed his spear and rushed forward, shouting: "Traitor, now is the day of your death!" Ser Mordred rushed to turn against him brandishing his sword, but the king is already sinking under the shield and spear made him escape from the body for more than an arm. And when the usurper understood that he could not escape death, he ran with all his force forward piercing up to handle the auction, then dropped the sword held with both hands on his father and joined him in one hand head piercing through the helmet and skull. Immediately after he fell to the ground dead." read Annie.
Gale turned pale. He trembled in his chair. Mordred had not been his friend, but he remembered thinking a lot about him before his death. Mordred was- odd, strange, complicated. Gale still could not understand a lot about him.
Mordred died in another life and he was here alone.
In that brief, subtle moment of epiphany, Gale knew that Mordred had always been right: he was an idiot, an imbecile who was always too trusting.
"Yes, very sad," nodded the psychiatrist, watching him intently. "Tell me, Gale, why do you want to take refuge in such a world?"
He swallowed, and for the first time, he lied. "I just wanted my parents to stop-" Stop what? He thought desperately, "-to annoy me with that stupid talk about my performance. Everyone told me I could be an actor, but I-" Gale gulped again, feeling that everything became smoother and fluent word after word, lie after lie. "I want to- I do not want to be an actor."
Gale's recovery was greeted in the house like a miracle.
Mr. and Mrs. Harrison gave the psychiatrist a basket of fruits (with her monthly fee, of course) but Gale was forced to visit Mrs. Annie Bavers for the rest of the year, until his eighteenth birthday. He was forced to lie, to joke in front of the nervous relief of his parents. But he knew that they loved him sincerely.
He once had had a mother, Elaine, who kept him closely tied; hoping he could become the change for all the other silly pagan knights, magically turning them into Christians. And Gale once had a father, Lancelot, who had abandoned him to run behind the skirts of a queen.
Now he had a mother and a father who lived with him, fed him, brought him to the movies, walked with him some Sundays and did not abandon him even when he claimed not to be Gale, their son, but another person from another time.
Gale knew that if they didn't believe him, nobody in the world could.
So he decided to put everything to rest. He ignored the memories, plunging headlong into his studies. He went to college and studied literature.
At nineteen, he fell in love with Lucy Howlett, one of his classmates. Lucy had red hair, her hands always smelling of mint and she had a lovely crooked tooth. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever met. It was with great irony that Gale, the morning after their first night together, wondered when he was Galahad, he had kept away from women. He must have been a fool and all for the Grail, to that terrible figure of an angel who had killed him and which still gave him chills.
The affair with Lucy only lasted one year.
After her, there was Jean Gray even though he probably never truly loved Jean. He graduated discreetly, not with the highest grades but not so low as to disappoint his parents.
It did not take long for Gale to find a job. Hired by Mr. Pawlins, a publisher of Portsmouth. Gale Harrison became an employee, the same as all the others. Neither a knight nor a hero.
He was kind, cheerful, sincere and helpful. His colleagues adored him and the female employees were infatuated by his big blue eyes and golden hair. But they remained infatuated, none of them tried to go any further with Gale. People seemed to understand that Gale was different. Gale did not notice what the others did because he was simply himself: he was Gale, the boy from Newport, and Galahad, the knight of Camelot. There was no contradiction in that.
Many years before, talking to the psychiatrist Annie Bavers, he had promised to forget Camelot, but the nostalgia has always been the sweetest of feelings and it was hard to resist.
So when, at twenty-four year old, he had begun to earn enough to take a holiday, he went to Glastonbury.
The beautiful Glastonbury. The city of the Grail, the place where everyone believed Arthur was buried, and he was dead.
Next chapter