in remembrance of may
written for yuletide; originally posted at my AO3, reposting here for my own archiving purposes.
title in remembrance of may
rating probably pg-13
word count 2,306
pairings implied guinevere/lancelot, guinevere/arthur; lancelot/arthur
summary an episode during the knight of the cart (malory) in which lancelot becomes a woman.
written for whatimages
notes if you're unfamiliar with legend- directly proceeding this episode, lancelot had rescued guinevere from sir mellyagaunce. he had also broken into her bedroom to spend the knight with her, and in the process wounded his hand such that his blood was found in her bed. because of the blood, guinevere was accused of infidelity, and lancelot has sworn to defend her honor by battling sir mellyagaunce eight days from the beginning of this episode. thanks goes to cafune for telling me it was, in fact, okay to write genderbendt lancelot, everyforever for reassuring me that it wasn't a pile of shit, and vana-tuivana for the incredibly short-notice beta job. i owe you all. ♥
And so it befell upon Sir Lancelot that no peril dread: as he went with Sir Mellyagaunce he trod on a trap, and the board rolled, and there Sir Lancelot fell down more than ten fathom into a cave full of straw.
The first thing he notices when he comes to consciousness is that his head hurts. There is a distinct throbbing behind his right ear, and when he reaches up to touch it, his fingers come away sticky with half-clotted blood. He takes a deep breath; his face is pressed to the ground, cold, and straw tickles his cheek. He groans.
It isn't until he tries to stand that he realizes - his armour doesn't fit quite right. It's loose at the shoulder and tight across his chest and his chainmail hangs on his frame.
Lancelot gets to his feet and takes off his armour, piece by piece. He goes slowly, sets it all down neatly on the straw, and wishes he could see himself, somehow, because everything is wrong. He is soft where he was once hard and slender where he was once broad. He cups his hands to his breast and feels tender flesh, soft like that of a woman.
He curses and doesn't bother to keep it under his breath because nobody's around to hear him. Then he brings his hand back up to the wound on his head and winces.
And then, he thinks, there's nothing left to do but go back to sleep and pray that when he wakes, his body has righted itself.
By the end of the first day and night, his body is still the same - or not the same, but new, different, and not his own.
He cannot contain his anger, at the end of this first night. He yells until his voice is hoarse and he pounds the walls of the cave with his injured hand. He relishes the pain that sears through his flesh with every strike. He falls to his knees, but he doesn't allow himself to weep or wail, because he may be in this body but he is not - he cannot be a woman.
Lancelot sits and closes his eyes.
When he opens them, he sees daylight creeping in through the cracks of the boards. It glints off of his armour.
His armour.
The contest with Sir Mellyagaunce is seven days hence and Lancelot cannot fight. Since waking, he has only thought of the body he is trapped in. He has only been able to feel how strange and wrong it is, how he has curves where muscle should be, how he has to sit differently, and lie differently, and piss differently. How, for the first time in his knighthood, he doesn't trust himself to wield a sword. He looks again at his armour and thinks for the first time since falling of Guinevere, who is now without a champion.
Lancelot lets himself cry out, just once.
A woman (a proper woman, Lancelot thinks, with soft hands and long hair and a sweet voice, though not ever as sweet as Guinevere's) comes to him on the second day. He hides his body from her - he puts his armour on despite the ill fit and tries to hold himself as he used to, with his shoulders and back straight.
"I hit my head," he answers when she asks what's wrong.
She pushes his hair back from the wound and tends to him, cleans the dried blood away and provides for him food and drink, and when she is done, she asks Lancelot to lay with her.
"I can't," he says. It isn't any different from what he would have said before, because she is no Guinevere.
"Why not?" she asks. "Are you promised?"
"I am not," Lancelot tells her, because it isn't in him to lie. "But I do love another dearly."
"I will return with more food tomorrow, then," the lady says. She gathers her things and Lancelot bids her farewell.
When she's gone, he takes off his armour piece by piece and rolls his head around. His neck pops a few times on the right side. He looks down at himself, still in this unfamiliar body, and doesn't know what to do. His shoulders slump and his back hunches, trying to contain his new figure.
On the third day, Lancelot tells himself not to worry about Guinevere, because she will always have a champion. If not him, as he would prefer, she will have one of her guard, or the King.
Arthur's image springs to Lancelot's mind and Lancelot wonders, lying sprawled out on the cold ground, waiting for the lady to reappear, when he will see his king again. He wonders how Arthur will look at him, if it will be with pity. He wonders if Arthur will still see him as his most trusted knight, as the champion of his queen. If Arthur will still love him.
He can admit it now, he thinks, that he wants Arthur to look at him the way they both look at Guinevere.
When the lady returns on the fourth evening, Lancelot is practicing with his sword.
His palms are still calloused and rough and the heft of the sword in his hand is the only thing that has felt familiar and good since his fall. He swings the blade through the air a few times before sliding into basic footwork patterns. He handles the sword with two hands, not sure if he can support it with one, but after a while, he stops and takes his shield onto one arm and goes through his paces with just one hand on the hilt.
It isn't the same, of course. He has to hold his shield differently to allow for the curve of his bosom, and he can't reach across his body as conveniently anymore, but it's not different, either - the ache in his shoulders as he continues is a familiar burn, and the sweat gathering at his temples and brow is something he knows well.
"You have some skill," the lady says. Lancelot turns to face her, unarmoured save for the shield and sword.
"I am a Knight of the Table Round," he says.
"How did you come to be here, then?" she asks.
Lancelot sets down his sword and removes his shield from his arm. "I think," he says, "that I have been enchanted."
"How and by whom?" the lady asks.
"By whom, I don't know," Lancelot says. "But how-" and he can't bring himself to say it, because he doesn't even know how, so instead he reaches behind his head and pulls off his tunic, stands before her with the skin above his waist bare and his tunic gripped in one hand. He keeps his shoulders back and doesn't let himself hide. "This is how."
"This is not your body?" she asks.
"No," he says. "These are my hands and this is my sword and that is my armour; I can still fight and I am still myself, but this is not my body."
On the fifth day, the lady asks, "Is your new body why you will not lay with me?"
"No," Lancelot replies. "I will not because I do love another."
Lancelot's palms are rough against his skin. He runs his hands over his ribcage, lying alone on the straw-covered floor, and he can feel the callouses that rise where fingers meet palms. The wound on his hand from breaking the bars of Guinevere's window is still tender, but he likes that he can feel his heartbeat in his hand. He imagines that it is her heartbeat as well.
His right hand drifts lower, across the still-flat plane of his stomach, but he takes a minute to explore the new width of his hips, how his very bones seem to have shifted. He thinks of the curve of Guinevere's hips when he touches her like this, when he runs his hands over her body. He imagines himself to be her and dips his hand between his legs, sliding his rough fingers over sensitive skin.
He can feel the ghost of her hand on his wrist, directing him, and he moves his fingers against and inside himself as he had done to her. It feels good, better than he thought it could have, and he is beginning to sweat.
Unbidden, Lancelot thinks of Arthur. He wonders if Guinevere tells Arthur what she wants the same way she tells him. He wonders if Arthur would touch him the way he now touches himself, what his king would do if he could see him with his legs apart on the floor of the cave. He moves his hand faster and faster and imagines Arthur's hand is his, imagines Arthur's fingers inside of him, and he tilts his new hips up. His free hand moves to cup his bosom, and he thinks of Guinevere's skin, of his own hands against her, of Arthur's hands against her, and he comes, his toes curling and his back arching and both of their faces in his mind's eye.
"Can you send for someone to have my armour refitted?" Lancelot asks when the lady wonders if he needs anything. It is the sixth evening. "Can you find out how far I am from the field beside Westminster?"
"I can," she says. "But how will you fight?"
"As I have always fought," Lancelot says. "For the love of my king and the love of my queen and for the honour that binds me to them."
"How will you defeat Sir Mellyagaunce?" she asks.
"I am the most skilled knight of the Table Round, trusted to defend the queen's honour for that reason," Lancelot says.
"But you are not a man anymore," she says. "How can you still be a knight of the Table Round?"
"I am Lancelot du Lac," Lancelot tells her.
She watches him for a moment, searching his face. "I will see what I can do about your armour," she says at last.
"Can you send for King Arthur?" Lancelot asks.
When Lancelot wakes on the seventh morning, his king is there. Lancelot's chest feels tight as he looks at Arthur, standing in front of him in the straw-filled cave.
"Lancelot," Arthur says. His eyes move over Lancelot's body and Lancelot forces himself to keep his hands at his sides, doesn't let himself cross his arms over his chest. "What happened?"
"It was Sir Mellyagaunce," Lancelot says, "who trapped me here, but I don't know who is responsible for the enchantment."
"Enchantment?" Arthur asks. His voice is a quiet rumble.
"My body is no longer my own," Lancelot says, and he doesn't take off his tunic, but he reaches out for Arthur's wrist and brings the hand of his king to his breast. He can feel Arthur's pulse against his fingers, knows Arthur can feel his through his skin. "But I can still fight," he continues, and he reaches for Arthur's other hand, lines up their free palms so Arthur can feel his callouses, the strength of his skin. Arthur runs his fingers over the wound still visible on Lancelot's hand and the look in his eyes is unreadable.
"There was blood in her bed," he says, runs his fingers over Lancelot's wound again, and Lancelot knows that he's talking about Guinevere and he knows that Arthur has done what Sir Mellyagaunce could not and realized that the blood in Guinevere's bed was from his own hand.
"I will still fight for her," Lancelot says, "if you and she will still have me."
Arthur squeezes Lancelot's breast, over his heart, and leans forward, pressing a kiss first to Lancelot's forehead and then to his lips. "We will always have you," he says, and Lancelot lets himself sag against his king in relief.
The first thing he notices when he wakes on the eighth morning is that his hand doesn't hurt anymore. He clenches his fist and releases it and there is no throb of pain. He takes a deep breath and pulls himself to a sitting position.
He reaches for his sword, across his body, and his arm doesn't brush against anything.
Lancelot stands and runs the flats of his palms down his sides. Where he has begun to be accustomed to curves, there are straight lines of muscle leading to closed hips. His shoulders are broad once more, and his chest flat, and when he dresses himself in his armour, it fits as perfectly as it did the day it was made.
"I could not find anyone to refit your armour so quickly," the lady says when she appears, moments later.
"I need it not," Lancelot tells her. "I am myself again."
"You had said that you were always yourself," the lady says.
"I did," Lancelot says, "and I was. And now I have my own body back."
"And you go now to champion the queen?" the lady asks.
"I do," Lancelot says, "if, for a kiss, you will deliver me to a horse so I can ride to the field beside Westminster."
"For a kiss, I will do that," says the lady who had twice asked him to lay with her.
True to his word, Lancelot kisses her, and true to her word, she brings him out of the cave and gives him her horse.
"I cannot wear your token," Lancelot tells her when she offers it, "but I will remember what I owe you from this day." He turns from her and rides for Westminster.
And right as the heralds should cry: Laissez-les aller! right so came Sir Lancelot driving with all the might of his horse. And then king Arthur cried 'Wo!' and 'Abide!' […] Then was the queen sent for and set by the king in the great trust of her champion.
title in remembrance of may
rating probably pg-13
word count 2,306
pairings implied guinevere/lancelot, guinevere/arthur; lancelot/arthur
summary an episode during the knight of the cart (malory) in which lancelot becomes a woman.
written for whatimages
notes if you're unfamiliar with legend- directly proceeding this episode, lancelot had rescued guinevere from sir mellyagaunce. he had also broken into her bedroom to spend the knight with her, and in the process wounded his hand such that his blood was found in her bed. because of the blood, guinevere was accused of infidelity, and lancelot has sworn to defend her honor by battling sir mellyagaunce eight days from the beginning of this episode. thanks goes to cafune for telling me it was, in fact, okay to write genderbendt lancelot, everyforever for reassuring me that it wasn't a pile of shit, and vana-tuivana for the incredibly short-notice beta job. i owe you all. ♥
And so it befell upon Sir Lancelot that no peril dread: as he went with Sir Mellyagaunce he trod on a trap, and the board rolled, and there Sir Lancelot fell down more than ten fathom into a cave full of straw.
The first thing he notices when he comes to consciousness is that his head hurts. There is a distinct throbbing behind his right ear, and when he reaches up to touch it, his fingers come away sticky with half-clotted blood. He takes a deep breath; his face is pressed to the ground, cold, and straw tickles his cheek. He groans.
It isn't until he tries to stand that he realizes - his armour doesn't fit quite right. It's loose at the shoulder and tight across his chest and his chainmail hangs on his frame.
Lancelot gets to his feet and takes off his armour, piece by piece. He goes slowly, sets it all down neatly on the straw, and wishes he could see himself, somehow, because everything is wrong. He is soft where he was once hard and slender where he was once broad. He cups his hands to his breast and feels tender flesh, soft like that of a woman.
He curses and doesn't bother to keep it under his breath because nobody's around to hear him. Then he brings his hand back up to the wound on his head and winces.
And then, he thinks, there's nothing left to do but go back to sleep and pray that when he wakes, his body has righted itself.
By the end of the first day and night, his body is still the same - or not the same, but new, different, and not his own.
He cannot contain his anger, at the end of this first night. He yells until his voice is hoarse and he pounds the walls of the cave with his injured hand. He relishes the pain that sears through his flesh with every strike. He falls to his knees, but he doesn't allow himself to weep or wail, because he may be in this body but he is not - he cannot be a woman.
Lancelot sits and closes his eyes.
When he opens them, he sees daylight creeping in through the cracks of the boards. It glints off of his armour.
His armour.
The contest with Sir Mellyagaunce is seven days hence and Lancelot cannot fight. Since waking, he has only thought of the body he is trapped in. He has only been able to feel how strange and wrong it is, how he has curves where muscle should be, how he has to sit differently, and lie differently, and piss differently. How, for the first time in his knighthood, he doesn't trust himself to wield a sword. He looks again at his armour and thinks for the first time since falling of Guinevere, who is now without a champion.
Lancelot lets himself cry out, just once.
A woman (a proper woman, Lancelot thinks, with soft hands and long hair and a sweet voice, though not ever as sweet as Guinevere's) comes to him on the second day. He hides his body from her - he puts his armour on despite the ill fit and tries to hold himself as he used to, with his shoulders and back straight.
"I hit my head," he answers when she asks what's wrong.
She pushes his hair back from the wound and tends to him, cleans the dried blood away and provides for him food and drink, and when she is done, she asks Lancelot to lay with her.
"I can't," he says. It isn't any different from what he would have said before, because she is no Guinevere.
"Why not?" she asks. "Are you promised?"
"I am not," Lancelot tells her, because it isn't in him to lie. "But I do love another dearly."
"I will return with more food tomorrow, then," the lady says. She gathers her things and Lancelot bids her farewell.
When she's gone, he takes off his armour piece by piece and rolls his head around. His neck pops a few times on the right side. He looks down at himself, still in this unfamiliar body, and doesn't know what to do. His shoulders slump and his back hunches, trying to contain his new figure.
On the third day, Lancelot tells himself not to worry about Guinevere, because she will always have a champion. If not him, as he would prefer, she will have one of her guard, or the King.
Arthur's image springs to Lancelot's mind and Lancelot wonders, lying sprawled out on the cold ground, waiting for the lady to reappear, when he will see his king again. He wonders how Arthur will look at him, if it will be with pity. He wonders if Arthur will still see him as his most trusted knight, as the champion of his queen. If Arthur will still love him.
He can admit it now, he thinks, that he wants Arthur to look at him the way they both look at Guinevere.
When the lady returns on the fourth evening, Lancelot is practicing with his sword.
His palms are still calloused and rough and the heft of the sword in his hand is the only thing that has felt familiar and good since his fall. He swings the blade through the air a few times before sliding into basic footwork patterns. He handles the sword with two hands, not sure if he can support it with one, but after a while, he stops and takes his shield onto one arm and goes through his paces with just one hand on the hilt.
It isn't the same, of course. He has to hold his shield differently to allow for the curve of his bosom, and he can't reach across his body as conveniently anymore, but it's not different, either - the ache in his shoulders as he continues is a familiar burn, and the sweat gathering at his temples and brow is something he knows well.
"You have some skill," the lady says. Lancelot turns to face her, unarmoured save for the shield and sword.
"I am a Knight of the Table Round," he says.
"How did you come to be here, then?" she asks.
Lancelot sets down his sword and removes his shield from his arm. "I think," he says, "that I have been enchanted."
"How and by whom?" the lady asks.
"By whom, I don't know," Lancelot says. "But how-" and he can't bring himself to say it, because he doesn't even know how, so instead he reaches behind his head and pulls off his tunic, stands before her with the skin above his waist bare and his tunic gripped in one hand. He keeps his shoulders back and doesn't let himself hide. "This is how."
"This is not your body?" she asks.
"No," he says. "These are my hands and this is my sword and that is my armour; I can still fight and I am still myself, but this is not my body."
On the fifth day, the lady asks, "Is your new body why you will not lay with me?"
"No," Lancelot replies. "I will not because I do love another."
Lancelot's palms are rough against his skin. He runs his hands over his ribcage, lying alone on the straw-covered floor, and he can feel the callouses that rise where fingers meet palms. The wound on his hand from breaking the bars of Guinevere's window is still tender, but he likes that he can feel his heartbeat in his hand. He imagines that it is her heartbeat as well.
His right hand drifts lower, across the still-flat plane of his stomach, but he takes a minute to explore the new width of his hips, how his very bones seem to have shifted. He thinks of the curve of Guinevere's hips when he touches her like this, when he runs his hands over her body. He imagines himself to be her and dips his hand between his legs, sliding his rough fingers over sensitive skin.
He can feel the ghost of her hand on his wrist, directing him, and he moves his fingers against and inside himself as he had done to her. It feels good, better than he thought it could have, and he is beginning to sweat.
Unbidden, Lancelot thinks of Arthur. He wonders if Guinevere tells Arthur what she wants the same way she tells him. He wonders if Arthur would touch him the way he now touches himself, what his king would do if he could see him with his legs apart on the floor of the cave. He moves his hand faster and faster and imagines Arthur's hand is his, imagines Arthur's fingers inside of him, and he tilts his new hips up. His free hand moves to cup his bosom, and he thinks of Guinevere's skin, of his own hands against her, of Arthur's hands against her, and he comes, his toes curling and his back arching and both of their faces in his mind's eye.
"Can you send for someone to have my armour refitted?" Lancelot asks when the lady wonders if he needs anything. It is the sixth evening. "Can you find out how far I am from the field beside Westminster?"
"I can," she says. "But how will you fight?"
"As I have always fought," Lancelot says. "For the love of my king and the love of my queen and for the honour that binds me to them."
"How will you defeat Sir Mellyagaunce?" she asks.
"I am the most skilled knight of the Table Round, trusted to defend the queen's honour for that reason," Lancelot says.
"But you are not a man anymore," she says. "How can you still be a knight of the Table Round?"
"I am Lancelot du Lac," Lancelot tells her.
She watches him for a moment, searching his face. "I will see what I can do about your armour," she says at last.
"Can you send for King Arthur?" Lancelot asks.
When Lancelot wakes on the seventh morning, his king is there. Lancelot's chest feels tight as he looks at Arthur, standing in front of him in the straw-filled cave.
"Lancelot," Arthur says. His eyes move over Lancelot's body and Lancelot forces himself to keep his hands at his sides, doesn't let himself cross his arms over his chest. "What happened?"
"It was Sir Mellyagaunce," Lancelot says, "who trapped me here, but I don't know who is responsible for the enchantment."
"Enchantment?" Arthur asks. His voice is a quiet rumble.
"My body is no longer my own," Lancelot says, and he doesn't take off his tunic, but he reaches out for Arthur's wrist and brings the hand of his king to his breast. He can feel Arthur's pulse against his fingers, knows Arthur can feel his through his skin. "But I can still fight," he continues, and he reaches for Arthur's other hand, lines up their free palms so Arthur can feel his callouses, the strength of his skin. Arthur runs his fingers over the wound still visible on Lancelot's hand and the look in his eyes is unreadable.
"There was blood in her bed," he says, runs his fingers over Lancelot's wound again, and Lancelot knows that he's talking about Guinevere and he knows that Arthur has done what Sir Mellyagaunce could not and realized that the blood in Guinevere's bed was from his own hand.
"I will still fight for her," Lancelot says, "if you and she will still have me."
Arthur squeezes Lancelot's breast, over his heart, and leans forward, pressing a kiss first to Lancelot's forehead and then to his lips. "We will always have you," he says, and Lancelot lets himself sag against his king in relief.
The first thing he notices when he wakes on the eighth morning is that his hand doesn't hurt anymore. He clenches his fist and releases it and there is no throb of pain. He takes a deep breath and pulls himself to a sitting position.
He reaches for his sword, across his body, and his arm doesn't brush against anything.
Lancelot stands and runs the flats of his palms down his sides. Where he has begun to be accustomed to curves, there are straight lines of muscle leading to closed hips. His shoulders are broad once more, and his chest flat, and when he dresses himself in his armour, it fits as perfectly as it did the day it was made.
"I could not find anyone to refit your armour so quickly," the lady says when she appears, moments later.
"I need it not," Lancelot tells her. "I am myself again."
"You had said that you were always yourself," the lady says.
"I did," Lancelot says, "and I was. And now I have my own body back."
"And you go now to champion the queen?" the lady asks.
"I do," Lancelot says, "if, for a kiss, you will deliver me to a horse so I can ride to the field beside Westminster."
"For a kiss, I will do that," says the lady who had twice asked him to lay with her.
True to his word, Lancelot kisses her, and true to her word, she brings him out of the cave and gives him her horse.
"I cannot wear your token," Lancelot tells her when she offers it, "but I will remember what I owe you from this day." He turns from her and rides for Westminster.
And right as the heralds should cry: Laissez-les aller! right so came Sir Lancelot driving with all the might of his horse. And then king Arthur cried 'Wo!' and 'Abide!' […] Then was the queen sent for and set by the king in the great trust of her champion.