Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Lancelot wandered the castle, his feet bare. His hands were wrapped in bandages. When he stretched his arms upward to the vaulted ceilings he could feel scar tissue stretching with him, tight and hot.

Moonlight streamed in through the windows, and he paused to turn his face to it, silent. Clouds moved too fast across the moon's face and he wondered for a moment that he couldn't feel the wind of their passing even through the keep's stone walls.

There was a screech of metal on metal from behind him, and he turned slower than he would have liked to find a figure facing him, bare steel in his hand, clothed only in shadow. His slimness was achingly familiar, his face dim and strange. Lancelot took a step back - not from cowardice but from curiosity, trying to draw the nameless opponent into the light.

His foe stepped forward after him, the moonlight silvering his hair and his highlighting luminous blue eyes. Lancelot barely had time to feel his heart stop at the expression on Gawain's face before his friend was lunging at him, slim blade pressed to Lancelot's breast.

And he realized he, too, had no clothes but shadow, his scarred chest fluttering with his heartbeat against the painful-bright tip of Gawain's sword. They circled one another, dancing between moonbeams. He wanted to talk - ask what it was that he'd done, to inspire the anger in Gawain's face, ask what he'd done for the sword in his breast - yes, in, because Gawain was sliding forward and forward and it was an aching, tearing pain and his lips would not move, his voice caught on the blade and pressed out his back in rivers of red.

He wakes up shaking and silent, his fists twisted in his sheets.

The next day, Merlin tells him what he has seen. He speaks with no passion, with sympathy and with no judgement, but it is a statement of face. You will. Lancelot falls back abed with his mind on fire.

This time Gawain's mouth was wide open and mocking, spilling out words of love that Lancelot has not yet said, yet they are in his own voice - things in his heart that he would lay open for Gawain's ears if such a thing could even be dreamed of. And yet he was dreaming of them - but twisted and wrong, his words bitter in his lover's mouth, more painful than the long, bright sword.

He wakes dark-faced and withdrawn, and nothing that his friend says now makes what his friend will say any softer.

In the third dream, he was in the throne room, the windows dark. Two new scars, puckered and angry, marred his chest where two nights before this he had died. He stared at the throne, emptied, at the two, at where the Lady Guenivere (his Queen, how...she was as unattainable as Gawain! And perhaps that...) and King Arthur should be, should always be for the rest of time, where they would be but for him.

And he turned, almost resigned, to meet eyes like blue fire. And Gawain pushed it in, in, in, pulled him up, up, up along the blade and pressed his soft lips close to Lancelot's ear. His voice is full of all the sorrow that's hidden by the mask of rage on his face, and he murmurs dark and low, "They were my brothers."