(House/Merlin) Half Sick of Shadows for ariadnes_string
Title: Half Sick of Shadows
Author: auctorial
Fandoms: House/Merlin
Characters Thirteen; Morgana
Pairings: Thirteen/Morgana
Rating: R
Wordcount: 2911
Spoilers: Through episode 7x01 of House, general spoilers for Merlin
Disclaimer: House and Merlin belong to their respective creators.
A/N: Title from The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Thank you so much to pie_is_good and rosepetal9 for being awesome and beta'ing this for me. All remaining errors are my own.
Summary: Thirteen goes to Rome and meets an unexpected visitor.
Once, if a beautiful girl sitting next to her in a bar asked if she believed in fate, Remy might have said yes.
But she's a doctor now, and though she's learned to lie well over the years, it no longer holds any intrigue for her. Lying is pointless, and nothing is going to change the fact that she's dying.
So she looks the girl in the eye and says no with exactly the right amount of bitterness. It almost ends there, except the girl's eyes go wide and Remy sees that familiar look of horror and pity she's grown accustomed to seeing on Taub's and Foreman's faces. Not on House's, though. And not on her dad's - because she can't bear to tell him. Let him have a few more years of peace before he realises he has to live through the nightmare of his wife's death all over again, part two.
"Well, go on," Remy says, because she's far too used to House at this point. It makes perfect sense that this girl can look at her and see all her secrets. "Now you're going to tell me how you know, right? Go through your Holmesian deduction."
"No," the girl says, almost wildly, a flush working up her fair cheeks. "I didn't mean, I - "
God, she is so young, so easily flustered. And yet ten times more lovely than the assured, self-possessed creature who first approached Remy and asked if she could buy her a drink.
"I just see - I just know things, sometimes," she says, and stares at Remy with wide dark eyes.
Remy thinks she should walk away. She's had enough with crazy people - she came to Rome to escape them. But the girl herself is a mystery, one that Remy finds hard to resist. She's always been drawn to the half-hidden, and she badly wants to know what it feels like to run her hands through the girl's long hair. So she leans in and says, "Did you know this?" and kisses her for the first time.
*
Her name is Morgana. Remy wonders if that's even her real name, or if she took that name when she started claiming she could see things that shouldn't be able to be seen. If she is telling the truth, and her parents cursed her with that name. All of this is transcendental, as Remy doesn't believe in magic or that words have power - not in that way.
Morgana is an exchange student from Ireland, and she has her own room in the top floor of an old, lonely woman's house. Remy takes Morgana to her own hotel room instead. They don't talk much after that. Morgana smoulders beneath Remy as they kiss, heat staining her cheeks and neck and the angles of her collarbone as they disappear down her shirt with red. Every bit of her that Remy touches seems soft and flawless. Surely that illusion can't last once she's divested of her clothes; everyone has scars.
And somehow, Morgana has seen hers.
Morgana's lips are soft and full, and she kisses like it's a privilege, not a right. Like if she makes a mistake, she'll have to stop. Like she'd be perfectly content to do this all night. Remy cups the back of her neck and deepens the kiss, letting her tongue wander messily around in Morgana's mouth. Morgana sighs, breathily, and arches up into Remy with a new sense of urgency.
Oh, Remy has missed this. There was no one after Eric, although there could have been; Remy has never had to put much effort into attracting a warm body into bed.
Attracting one she wanted to keep - that was another matter.
Morgana lies still and willing beneath her, and she smiles as she grazes the side of Morgana's long swan neck with her teeth, mapping each tendon with her tongue. Chase had asked, the day before she left. She found his honesty refreshing. She might have taken him up on his offer, but she knew now what a monumental mistake it was to date one of her coworkers, or even sleep with one. After all, Chase's last hospital fling ended up in marriage and then divorce. It was nothing she hadn't already guessed, but Eric filled in the blanks for her anyway, one weekend while they were lazing around in bed, enjoying the time off.
Not that weekend and time off meant anything to House. Part of the thrill was knowing that at any moment, House could call with a new case.
She misses them suddenly: Eric, House, the whole team. More than that, she misses home. Security. Knowing that she had somewhere she needed to be every day. Knowing that they relied on her because lives were at stake.
But there are a number of people who can take her place. Better people, who aren't obsessed with the pursuit of a fleeting mortality. Who don't wake up every day wondering if this is the day she has to stop working, if she can hold a lab sample without dropping it, if she'll remember the names never mind the symptoms of all of the diseases that come to her so easily now. If she'll even realise that's the day: if she won't just show up, babbling about things that make no sense and insisting she can do her job until they have to have hospital security escort her out.
Realistically, she knows that won't happen. That she'll quit her job when it's time. That once she reaches that stage, she'll already be locked up in her own private sick room, because at least becoming a doctor and earning a doctor's salary means she won't have to impose on her father's hospitality. At least she can give him that.
Morgana is still soft and gentle beneath her hands, but Remy doesn't want gentle. She's maybe rougher than she should be, when all she reads is eager submissiveness in the green-blue of Morgana's eyes, but a sudden pressing need to feel skin on skin grips her. She has her own shirt over her head in one moment, attacking Morgana's now-unbuttoned shirt in the next. Morgana whimpers and gasps, but her hands are just as desperate on the fly of Remy's jeans.
At last they're both stripped bare, and although Morgana was hesitant at first, she's growing to like this new, rough way of playing. Her touches become bolder and bolder, until she's grabbing generous handfuls of Remy's breasts and scraping her nails down Remy's back and tugging Remy's hair, not too hard, but just right, forcing Remy downwards, where she needs her the most.
That's when Remy loses herself, putting aside thought altogether and focusing on this: burying her nose in Morgana's warm cunt and tasting the musky, womanly scent of her, until Morgana's voice goes higher and louder, filling the hotel room up to its spacious ceilings and making Remy feel alive.
*
The next morning, Remy wakes to Morgana sprawled over more of the bed than seems possible, sleeping, and she doesn't feel the immediate urge to run away.
Not even when Morgana wakes up with curses spilling from her mouth, because she's already late for class, and she has to get back to her room first. She's splashed water on her face and thrown on her clothes in thirty seconds flat, but when she gets to the door, she lingers for a moment, turning halfway and shooting a questioning glance at Remy over her shoulder.
"You know where to find me," Remy says, her voice heavy with promise.
And so Morgana goes.
*
During the day, Remy wanders the streets of Rome, disappointed at how unfamiliar everything looks. It's only been five years since she was here last, an exchange student like Morgana, but college feels like a lifetime ago, and so does her proficiency in Italian. She used to be fluent; now she stumbles along with gestures to supplant her words and mangles verb conjugations horribly.
She can't decide whether she hates the feeling of being cast adrift, clearly a foreigner, or if she welcomes it. A little of both, she thinks, or why else would she travel? She needs the freedom to come and go as she wishes and break free of expectations, but she also needs something that pulls her home.
Maybe this is where she's meant to be, Remy thinks. Roaming the streets of a foreign city, kissing strangers in the night.
But she doesn't believe in fate. Of course. Because why is it her fate to die the same way she watched her mother die?
In the evenings, Remy meets up with Morgana at the bar, and depending on the mood, they stay and flirt awhile, or they make a break for Remy's hotel room, hot and heavy on each other's heels. But it's not until the thirteenth night that Morgana confesses, shyly, that she's never done this before.
"I mean, with a woman," Morgana says, blushing; Morgana seems to blush at everything, belying her cool seductress guise and betraying her age. Remy finds that more fascinating than anything else, this shy, vulnerable side of her that she tries so hard not to show. "I mean, not in this lifetime."
"How does that work?" Remy says, trying not to project rampant disbelief. Obviously, it doesn't work, as Morgana's lips twist into a sardonic curl. She's strangely appealing like this, like something half wild, begging to be tamed. Remy's almost willing to back off so she can push Morgana back down onto the soft mattress and kiss her into something more pliant and vulnerable, but instead she says, "How do you know you're not just crazy?"
Morgana looks at her with sparks in her eyes, and because Remy is watching closely, she sees first the hurt and then the anger that flash over Morgana's face, just before Morgana tries to retreat into herself, wary. But then something changes her mind, something that Remy betrayed, maybe - Remy can't read her own face the way she's learned to for others. "I don't, sometimes," Morgana says quietly, but her voice bell-sharp so Remy won't miss a word. "But when I try to fight it, when I try not to... it's worse. I think I was in an asylum, once. I don't remember anything about it, except the screaming. Someone was always screaming. Maybe it was me.
"Sometimes I don't remember, ever. Not until the next time. And sometimes, I don't have the magic. I don't have the dreams. It's different every time; what I know, when I know, what I can do. I've lived so many lives. And for the longest time, I kept thinking, you know, why me? Why not Merlin?
"And then I found him, last year. He looked exactly the same, just the way I remembered him. He's studying medicine at St George's - " Morgana laughs then, like she can't believe she's completed an impossible feat. "He told me he saw me, once, in the 1900s. And he was relieved that he wasn't the only one, but he was scared of what would happen, if we met. That bastard."
The really crazy part about all of this is that Remy almost believes her.
"Why was he scared?" she finds herself asking, wanting to know more of the story. Even though it's not true, can't possibly be. It's far more probable that two individuals deluded themselves into believing they shared a common history. Or even one.
Who is she to talk? Thinking she could be a good doctor when she can't even help herself.
*
The next night, Remy is thinking about not going down to the bar, until the seconds stretch to minutes and then to an hour, whereupon someone knocks on her door. It's Morgana, and Remy is surprised and not entirely pleased. "You're not at the bar," she says, but lets Morgana in.
"I got bored of waiting," Morgana says, "and I don't want to hear your bullshit excuse for dumping me after I told you all of that stuff."
"Maybe I don't have an excuse," Remy says coolly. "Maybe I'm just bored."
"I don't think so," Morgana says. "I think you're scared."
Remy steps in until she's inches away and kisses Morgana, hard, because how dare she come in and say these things to her. Morgana doesn't flinch, but she's tense and angry against Remy, a far cry from the hesitant girl two weeks ago. They wrestle in the sheets until they're all tangled up and tired and Morgana has Remy pinned to the bed.
But instead of finishing what Remy started, Morgana flops down beside Remy, one hand still burrowed in the loose fabric of Remy's shirt, and says, "I think you should tell me a story about yourself."
"I - " Remy says, taken aback. "They're not interesting, not like yours."
"I don't care. Tell me how you got here."
The smart-ass response is, of course, "On a plane," but the moment to say it passes, and Remy realises that's not what she wants to say after all. Instead, she tells Morgana how she looked up drug trials and printed out the information, how she bought her ticket to Rome. How she left both in her locker on purpose, so her coworkers could draw the appropriate conclusions. How, when she left, she threw out the information and kept the ticket.
None of that really makes sense unless she explains who her coworkers are, so she finds herself talking about House and Eric and Taub and Chase and Cameron and Kutner. No one ever talks about Kutner any more. No one wants to, but in this moment, Remy finds that she does.
She tells Morgana about her nickname, how she's never had a nickname before then. Her name is too short, and she never let anyone get too close to be familiar. The thing about her nickname is, she likes it. She knows House started calling her Thirteen to remind her that she's no one special. That she's just a number among many others.
But Thirteen is the doctor who made it, who won a spot on House's team.
She doesn't think she's a masochist, but the only real reason she can think of for going to med school, for becoming a doctor, was so she could learn in excruciating detail what might happen to her when she grew older, exactly how hopeless it might be. How not to trust doctors. She'd rather die than go through what they put some of their patients through.
If she weren't a doctor, didn't know the hard science, maybe she could pretend she believed in miracles the way her mother and father did.
Morgana listens to all of this with her legs crossed, her back regally straight, her eyes not looking away from Remy, even for a second. And when Remy stops, feeling like she just spilled her soul out onto the bedspread for anyone to see, Morgana squeezes her hand and says, "Thank you."
And when Remy curls up among the pillows, utterly exhausted, Morgana gently untangles Remy's windblown hair and tells her about her brother, Arthur, and her friend, Gwen, and her friend and enemy, Merlin. She tells Remy tales of Camelot, of the grey walls and stone towers and the streets bustling with people. Of the bright banners and the shining knights. Of the darkness and magic and fear, how someone you loved could be ripped away from you by an accusation, no matter how false. Of destiny, and fate, and how everything happened as it was supposed to be, no matter how tragic. But there were bright spots, as there always are: the simple pleasures of sunlight and warm blankets and a fast, sure-footed horse.
She is still talking and Remy is still listening when the morning light peeks over the horizon and sets the grey sky ablaze.
"You're the first person I've ever told," Morgana says. "I didn't think anyone would believe me."
Remy's lips curve into a smile against the soft pillow. "Does it matter?" she says.
Watching Morgana's face is like watching a second sunrise, the dawning moment of her realisation radiant.
"No," she says, and her laughter tumbles free as she leans on Remy, ducking her dark, pretty head against Remy's shoulder. "It really doesn't."
Not everything everyone believes is true.
And just because no one believes it doesn't mean it's not.
*
Remy stays in Rome for a month before she gets restless. Morgana realises this even before she does, so there's no surprise on either end when Remy books her ticket home.
All Morgana says is, "So you're going back?"
And Remy replies, "Maybe." She's not sure if she is going back, or if she's already planning another escape route.
"I'll miss you," Morgana says, swinging her legs against the bed and looking so achingly young in that moment, "but I didn't think this would last forever."
"No?" Remy says, remembering what she was like in college, clinging to anything and anybody like it was the end of the world if they left. In college, she only had two absolutes: forever and never.
"No," Morgana says, with a beautiful smile and a fierce glint in her eye. "I don't believe in forever." And after she wraps her arms around Remy and kisses her for the last time, she holds herself close and whispers in Remy's ear.
"The present is beautiful enough."
-END-
Prompt:
-Thirteen/Morgana
-Reincarnation.
Author: auctorial
Fandoms: House/Merlin
Characters Thirteen; Morgana
Pairings: Thirteen/Morgana
Rating: R
Wordcount: 2911
Spoilers: Through episode 7x01 of House, general spoilers for Merlin
Disclaimer: House and Merlin belong to their respective creators.
A/N: Title from The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Thank you so much to pie_is_good and rosepetal9 for being awesome and beta'ing this for me. All remaining errors are my own.
Summary: Thirteen goes to Rome and meets an unexpected visitor.
Once, if a beautiful girl sitting next to her in a bar asked if she believed in fate, Remy might have said yes.
But she's a doctor now, and though she's learned to lie well over the years, it no longer holds any intrigue for her. Lying is pointless, and nothing is going to change the fact that she's dying.
So she looks the girl in the eye and says no with exactly the right amount of bitterness. It almost ends there, except the girl's eyes go wide and Remy sees that familiar look of horror and pity she's grown accustomed to seeing on Taub's and Foreman's faces. Not on House's, though. And not on her dad's - because she can't bear to tell him. Let him have a few more years of peace before he realises he has to live through the nightmare of his wife's death all over again, part two.
"Well, go on," Remy says, because she's far too used to House at this point. It makes perfect sense that this girl can look at her and see all her secrets. "Now you're going to tell me how you know, right? Go through your Holmesian deduction."
"No," the girl says, almost wildly, a flush working up her fair cheeks. "I didn't mean, I - "
God, she is so young, so easily flustered. And yet ten times more lovely than the assured, self-possessed creature who first approached Remy and asked if she could buy her a drink.
"I just see - I just know things, sometimes," she says, and stares at Remy with wide dark eyes.
Remy thinks she should walk away. She's had enough with crazy people - she came to Rome to escape them. But the girl herself is a mystery, one that Remy finds hard to resist. She's always been drawn to the half-hidden, and she badly wants to know what it feels like to run her hands through the girl's long hair. So she leans in and says, "Did you know this?" and kisses her for the first time.
*
Her name is Morgana. Remy wonders if that's even her real name, or if she took that name when she started claiming she could see things that shouldn't be able to be seen. If she is telling the truth, and her parents cursed her with that name. All of this is transcendental, as Remy doesn't believe in magic or that words have power - not in that way.
Morgana is an exchange student from Ireland, and she has her own room in the top floor of an old, lonely woman's house. Remy takes Morgana to her own hotel room instead. They don't talk much after that. Morgana smoulders beneath Remy as they kiss, heat staining her cheeks and neck and the angles of her collarbone as they disappear down her shirt with red. Every bit of her that Remy touches seems soft and flawless. Surely that illusion can't last once she's divested of her clothes; everyone has scars.
And somehow, Morgana has seen hers.
Morgana's lips are soft and full, and she kisses like it's a privilege, not a right. Like if she makes a mistake, she'll have to stop. Like she'd be perfectly content to do this all night. Remy cups the back of her neck and deepens the kiss, letting her tongue wander messily around in Morgana's mouth. Morgana sighs, breathily, and arches up into Remy with a new sense of urgency.
Oh, Remy has missed this. There was no one after Eric, although there could have been; Remy has never had to put much effort into attracting a warm body into bed.
Attracting one she wanted to keep - that was another matter.
Morgana lies still and willing beneath her, and she smiles as she grazes the side of Morgana's long swan neck with her teeth, mapping each tendon with her tongue. Chase had asked, the day before she left. She found his honesty refreshing. She might have taken him up on his offer, but she knew now what a monumental mistake it was to date one of her coworkers, or even sleep with one. After all, Chase's last hospital fling ended up in marriage and then divorce. It was nothing she hadn't already guessed, but Eric filled in the blanks for her anyway, one weekend while they were lazing around in bed, enjoying the time off.
Not that weekend and time off meant anything to House. Part of the thrill was knowing that at any moment, House could call with a new case.
She misses them suddenly: Eric, House, the whole team. More than that, she misses home. Security. Knowing that she had somewhere she needed to be every day. Knowing that they relied on her because lives were at stake.
But there are a number of people who can take her place. Better people, who aren't obsessed with the pursuit of a fleeting mortality. Who don't wake up every day wondering if this is the day she has to stop working, if she can hold a lab sample without dropping it, if she'll remember the names never mind the symptoms of all of the diseases that come to her so easily now. If she'll even realise that's the day: if she won't just show up, babbling about things that make no sense and insisting she can do her job until they have to have hospital security escort her out.
Realistically, she knows that won't happen. That she'll quit her job when it's time. That once she reaches that stage, she'll already be locked up in her own private sick room, because at least becoming a doctor and earning a doctor's salary means she won't have to impose on her father's hospitality. At least she can give him that.
Morgana is still soft and gentle beneath her hands, but Remy doesn't want gentle. She's maybe rougher than she should be, when all she reads is eager submissiveness in the green-blue of Morgana's eyes, but a sudden pressing need to feel skin on skin grips her. She has her own shirt over her head in one moment, attacking Morgana's now-unbuttoned shirt in the next. Morgana whimpers and gasps, but her hands are just as desperate on the fly of Remy's jeans.
At last they're both stripped bare, and although Morgana was hesitant at first, she's growing to like this new, rough way of playing. Her touches become bolder and bolder, until she's grabbing generous handfuls of Remy's breasts and scraping her nails down Remy's back and tugging Remy's hair, not too hard, but just right, forcing Remy downwards, where she needs her the most.
That's when Remy loses herself, putting aside thought altogether and focusing on this: burying her nose in Morgana's warm cunt and tasting the musky, womanly scent of her, until Morgana's voice goes higher and louder, filling the hotel room up to its spacious ceilings and making Remy feel alive.
*
The next morning, Remy wakes to Morgana sprawled over more of the bed than seems possible, sleeping, and she doesn't feel the immediate urge to run away.
Not even when Morgana wakes up with curses spilling from her mouth, because she's already late for class, and she has to get back to her room first. She's splashed water on her face and thrown on her clothes in thirty seconds flat, but when she gets to the door, she lingers for a moment, turning halfway and shooting a questioning glance at Remy over her shoulder.
"You know where to find me," Remy says, her voice heavy with promise.
And so Morgana goes.
*
During the day, Remy wanders the streets of Rome, disappointed at how unfamiliar everything looks. It's only been five years since she was here last, an exchange student like Morgana, but college feels like a lifetime ago, and so does her proficiency in Italian. She used to be fluent; now she stumbles along with gestures to supplant her words and mangles verb conjugations horribly.
She can't decide whether she hates the feeling of being cast adrift, clearly a foreigner, or if she welcomes it. A little of both, she thinks, or why else would she travel? She needs the freedom to come and go as she wishes and break free of expectations, but she also needs something that pulls her home.
Maybe this is where she's meant to be, Remy thinks. Roaming the streets of a foreign city, kissing strangers in the night.
But she doesn't believe in fate. Of course. Because why is it her fate to die the same way she watched her mother die?
In the evenings, Remy meets up with Morgana at the bar, and depending on the mood, they stay and flirt awhile, or they make a break for Remy's hotel room, hot and heavy on each other's heels. But it's not until the thirteenth night that Morgana confesses, shyly, that she's never done this before.
"I mean, with a woman," Morgana says, blushing; Morgana seems to blush at everything, belying her cool seductress guise and betraying her age. Remy finds that more fascinating than anything else, this shy, vulnerable side of her that she tries so hard not to show. "I mean, not in this lifetime."
"How does that work?" Remy says, trying not to project rampant disbelief. Obviously, it doesn't work, as Morgana's lips twist into a sardonic curl. She's strangely appealing like this, like something half wild, begging to be tamed. Remy's almost willing to back off so she can push Morgana back down onto the soft mattress and kiss her into something more pliant and vulnerable, but instead she says, "How do you know you're not just crazy?"
Morgana looks at her with sparks in her eyes, and because Remy is watching closely, she sees first the hurt and then the anger that flash over Morgana's face, just before Morgana tries to retreat into herself, wary. But then something changes her mind, something that Remy betrayed, maybe - Remy can't read her own face the way she's learned to for others. "I don't, sometimes," Morgana says quietly, but her voice bell-sharp so Remy won't miss a word. "But when I try to fight it, when I try not to... it's worse. I think I was in an asylum, once. I don't remember anything about it, except the screaming. Someone was always screaming. Maybe it was me.
"Sometimes I don't remember, ever. Not until the next time. And sometimes, I don't have the magic. I don't have the dreams. It's different every time; what I know, when I know, what I can do. I've lived so many lives. And for the longest time, I kept thinking, you know, why me? Why not Merlin?
"And then I found him, last year. He looked exactly the same, just the way I remembered him. He's studying medicine at St George's - " Morgana laughs then, like she can't believe she's completed an impossible feat. "He told me he saw me, once, in the 1900s. And he was relieved that he wasn't the only one, but he was scared of what would happen, if we met. That bastard."
The really crazy part about all of this is that Remy almost believes her.
"Why was he scared?" she finds herself asking, wanting to know more of the story. Even though it's not true, can't possibly be. It's far more probable that two individuals deluded themselves into believing they shared a common history. Or even one.
Who is she to talk? Thinking she could be a good doctor when she can't even help herself.
*
The next night, Remy is thinking about not going down to the bar, until the seconds stretch to minutes and then to an hour, whereupon someone knocks on her door. It's Morgana, and Remy is surprised and not entirely pleased. "You're not at the bar," she says, but lets Morgana in.
"I got bored of waiting," Morgana says, "and I don't want to hear your bullshit excuse for dumping me after I told you all of that stuff."
"Maybe I don't have an excuse," Remy says coolly. "Maybe I'm just bored."
"I don't think so," Morgana says. "I think you're scared."
Remy steps in until she's inches away and kisses Morgana, hard, because how dare she come in and say these things to her. Morgana doesn't flinch, but she's tense and angry against Remy, a far cry from the hesitant girl two weeks ago. They wrestle in the sheets until they're all tangled up and tired and Morgana has Remy pinned to the bed.
But instead of finishing what Remy started, Morgana flops down beside Remy, one hand still burrowed in the loose fabric of Remy's shirt, and says, "I think you should tell me a story about yourself."
"I - " Remy says, taken aback. "They're not interesting, not like yours."
"I don't care. Tell me how you got here."
The smart-ass response is, of course, "On a plane," but the moment to say it passes, and Remy realises that's not what she wants to say after all. Instead, she tells Morgana how she looked up drug trials and printed out the information, how she bought her ticket to Rome. How she left both in her locker on purpose, so her coworkers could draw the appropriate conclusions. How, when she left, she threw out the information and kept the ticket.
None of that really makes sense unless she explains who her coworkers are, so she finds herself talking about House and Eric and Taub and Chase and Cameron and Kutner. No one ever talks about Kutner any more. No one wants to, but in this moment, Remy finds that she does.
She tells Morgana about her nickname, how she's never had a nickname before then. Her name is too short, and she never let anyone get too close to be familiar. The thing about her nickname is, she likes it. She knows House started calling her Thirteen to remind her that she's no one special. That she's just a number among many others.
But Thirteen is the doctor who made it, who won a spot on House's team.
She doesn't think she's a masochist, but the only real reason she can think of for going to med school, for becoming a doctor, was so she could learn in excruciating detail what might happen to her when she grew older, exactly how hopeless it might be. How not to trust doctors. She'd rather die than go through what they put some of their patients through.
If she weren't a doctor, didn't know the hard science, maybe she could pretend she believed in miracles the way her mother and father did.
Morgana listens to all of this with her legs crossed, her back regally straight, her eyes not looking away from Remy, even for a second. And when Remy stops, feeling like she just spilled her soul out onto the bedspread for anyone to see, Morgana squeezes her hand and says, "Thank you."
And when Remy curls up among the pillows, utterly exhausted, Morgana gently untangles Remy's windblown hair and tells her about her brother, Arthur, and her friend, Gwen, and her friend and enemy, Merlin. She tells Remy tales of Camelot, of the grey walls and stone towers and the streets bustling with people. Of the bright banners and the shining knights. Of the darkness and magic and fear, how someone you loved could be ripped away from you by an accusation, no matter how false. Of destiny, and fate, and how everything happened as it was supposed to be, no matter how tragic. But there were bright spots, as there always are: the simple pleasures of sunlight and warm blankets and a fast, sure-footed horse.
She is still talking and Remy is still listening when the morning light peeks over the horizon and sets the grey sky ablaze.
"You're the first person I've ever told," Morgana says. "I didn't think anyone would believe me."
Remy's lips curve into a smile against the soft pillow. "Does it matter?" she says.
Watching Morgana's face is like watching a second sunrise, the dawning moment of her realisation radiant.
"No," she says, and her laughter tumbles free as she leans on Remy, ducking her dark, pretty head against Remy's shoulder. "It really doesn't."
Not everything everyone believes is true.
And just because no one believes it doesn't mean it's not.
*
Remy stays in Rome for a month before she gets restless. Morgana realises this even before she does, so there's no surprise on either end when Remy books her ticket home.
All Morgana says is, "So you're going back?"
And Remy replies, "Maybe." She's not sure if she is going back, or if she's already planning another escape route.
"I'll miss you," Morgana says, swinging her legs against the bed and looking so achingly young in that moment, "but I didn't think this would last forever."
"No?" Remy says, remembering what she was like in college, clinging to anything and anybody like it was the end of the world if they left. In college, she only had two absolutes: forever and never.
"No," Morgana says, with a beautiful smile and a fierce glint in her eye. "I don't believe in forever." And after she wraps her arms around Remy and kisses her for the last time, she holds herself close and whispers in Remy's ear.
"The present is beautiful enough."
-END-
Prompt:
-Thirteen/Morgana
-Reincarnation.