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Sancho Panza remembers. It's not what he was well known for in the past, certainly not a quality his wife ever praised him for. The church verses always slipped in one ear and out the other. If you sent him to the market, you'd be lucky if he even made it home with half of the things he left for. But now, it's all there is to do. Travel. Remember. His old ass of a donkey the only constant as he moves from town to town. Wander. Remember again. But worse than remember: Sancho believes.
It's funny, how that works. Quijano. Quixote. When the absence of someone casts a much larger shadow than they ever did in life. How even in a brief time together, your body can bend to the shape of another. Each night he makes camp and leaves an extra seat near the fire. There's always an absence to his left in the blankets he forms into a bed. Is he destined to forever notice that shape? Would he even know what to do with himself if it was no longer there?
In the end, right as the moon emerges from the clouds, Sancho asks himself the same questions he does every night: why? Why did he believe him? Why is he believing still?
You can have as many thoughts as you'd like: whether they roll off the tongue into the mud is far more relevant. That at least, the Don was consistently proof of. The privilege of nobility is blind idealism. The only hope men like himself have is to attach themselves thoroughly to the first piece of tarnished gold they see, in hopes they will become silver just from proximity. Whether Sancho doubted his sire was irrelevant. Belief exists only in the physical. Each night he oiled rusted armor and brushed Rocinante's ragged pelt. Waited to see if his master would nod peacefully off to sleep under the stars or run him ragged with demands and chivalrous practicum for hours. When the dawn awoke, Sancho saddled their nag and donkey, and they continued onward to the next town in sight. You do it enough times, and the belief has nothing to do with you.
...It wasn't all like that. For every day it felt like hauling around a madman, there was a day in which his master lit stars in eyes, unexpectedly swept a strange-natured acquaintance off their feet. For every time they ended beat with sticks and dropped outside of city limits, there was free lodging some other time, stories cheered around campfires with fellow citizens-who-would-be-knights. For as often as Sancho thought of leaving, fiefdom be twice-damned, he caught himself wondering, in guilty swirls, what exactly his life would look like without this knight-errant.
Sancho knows himself well enough: he's not a learned man nor one ever destined to be one. Neither was his master. Madness. Wisdom. Insanity. All the same in the pulpit, all the same in the grave. But belief is difficult: harbor it too long and you might become a convert. His sire thought in wobbling lines: justice looked skewed, punishment magnified, freedom twisted. His Don believed in stray princesses, steadfast knights, wandering giants. He believed so hard it must have been what busted his brains out in the end. Sancho remembers holding his sire's hand at the end. Clammy, frail, cold. The man believed they'd meet again someday. Loathe as Sancho was to trust that, it lingered like a curse. Everywhere he goes, he sees his eyes, his hands, his horse, his grin, his anger, his injustice, his nobility. Belief is a ghost.
"I like him," he'd said, scrambling for similes and failing to find any remaining in his skull. Miss Aldonza had only raised an eyebrow. Better him than anyone else. Better her know later than now.
...Once. It was only once. They'd been sent to scare off a mighty monster as a fool's errand and actually discovered the herd of cattle scattered to the winds by a feral compatriot. Somehow his donkey made a run directly for the beast and as their saddlebag of supplies split in the collision, leaving them both prone and the bull in much worse shape than Sancho. They'd all had a laugh over it, and dragged the body to town and were given all of the drink their stomachs could hold at a local inn. His sire stood on a table and declared a toast to their great bovine kingdom, and Sancho smiled, despite himself and the bruises. In that moment, he forgot about the fief, forgot about the proper place of a squire. They retired upstairs and Sancho dropped to his knees, feeling his years creak through them as his eyes met Quijote's. They were drunk. They were happy. They were just lonely enough. Before him wasn't an old man or a madman, not just a master, before him was a knight. Before him was his Don. He closed his mouth around his sire and swallowed deep.
Afterwards, they never spoke of it again. Sancho assumed it went in one of the few places the nobility stores the things they're not allowed to have. They'd never speak of it, even in his last moments. It barely even mattered. Memories and the taste of salt sandwiched between time and humor and pain and laughter and tragicomedy. Stories you can only hold in your hands, not your mind. In the end, on his deathbed, he'd been Alonso. Would it have been better for him to have retained his chivalry, knowing his days were numbered? Was it kinder to let him make amends to his niece and family as the man he was? His master, no longer truly his master, apologized to Sancho for his cruelty and harm. The words curdle in his stomach even now.
From the sky, there is an outline of a man, cast in pale shadow as the sun rises. He tends to his fire and saddles his donkey and closes his eyes, briefly, so he forgets that the morning has already arrived. So why believe still? For Sancho, there's no other choice.