Author: ILoveThesePeople

Word Count: 725

Genre: Angst/Tragedy

Pairings: Gen.

Warnings: Depression, implied insanity.

Summary: Insanity a growing disease, death and madness nothing more than a welcoming breeze for the upcoming destiny creeping in through the edges of your fantasies.

A/N: So I'm working on two fics (One's a one-shot and the other a multi chapter) and they're kinda tearing me apart. This was my way of letting out all the stress from trying to get the other two stories to corporate. Was this how things were pre-series? I doubt it, but who knows. I hope you all enjoy this anyway and leave some feedback.

Arthur feels as though he's in suspension, dangling mid-air with no sight of freedom. It pulls at him, makes him light headed and dizzy, brings him to his knees in the stilted silence of his chambers. He wonders at times, when the only noise to be heard is the ringing in his ears, if this is what insanity feels like. If the constant doubt, the small whispers of destiny that are ever present, if the glimpses of a fair-haired queen are all omens to his breaking point. Then Morgana looks at him as if he were a foreign object in an unknown world, his father's stares ingrained with ignorance and cruel apathy, and he no longer has to wonder. But sanity has always been an abstract idea in Camelot, a word devised to separate and label even more precisely than before. This fact does not comfort, but the small restoration of his pride is more than he previously hoped for.

Morgana keeps a journal, leather bound and finely made, hidden inside her vanity. Precise, neat words devoid of emotion fill the ivory pages, an entry being made with each passing morning. It is a startling contrast to the chaos of emotions she has become and she finds that that is her saving grace. She guards it as if it were a precious jewel, and in some ways it is. She knows, even now, that the secrecy of the journal is the only thing saving her from the executioners block. Feels it in her very bones that, should a passing servant come across it, she wouldn't last long. So at nights she memorizes the pages filled with guarded dreams, filled with parallel words that have yet to come and timelines that may never be. She reads of the raven haired boy who saves them all, of the golden king and loving queen, of the loyal first knight who falls in the end, and tries to ignore how her own story is nothing but a gaping hole inside the journal.

Her mother's death was not a burden, not a grievance to forever be mourned. She passed before Guinevere had the chance to reach her first winter and left behind only a single golden dress and the family name of Pellinor. Her father's presence warms the servants' courters and her lady, The Lady Morgana, fills any female roll needed in a family life. But at night, with bruised dignity and calloused hands, she would fiddle with her mother's dress and wonder at the life within Camelot. For it was a majesty, a beacon of greatness that other kingdoms strove towards. Yet its cruelty was unparalleled in all of Albion and sometimes she wondered if it was worth it. Wondered if every day spent in this kingdom was worth it when, surely, the only way for this kingdom was flames. She could see it sometimes; see the flames in the back of her mind. They danced in and out of her conscious and left her searching the castle walls for an escape. Any would do, truthfully.

It was a constant pressure, building slowly inside his bloodstream until he was left unsure of his very being. How can he be human when the will to move the heavens was at his fingertips? How could humanity reside in him when his mother's gentle words and Will's teasing jokes induced nothing but resentment? Because they couldn't understand, could never understand the suspicious gazes from people you were raised with, the withdrawal of power unknown to any other peasant boy, the need to be set apart from a lineup of others because he could be. Yet, sometimes, he can feel the executioners axe pressing against his neck, the shackles and chains that accompanied bounty hunters seemingly cold and solid on his wrists and all he needs is normalcy. The normalcy of calluses that came with harvesting, the weariness of work that seemed to sweep through Ealador. And at the end of these days he was left with the gaping knowledge that it would never come, than an unknown father had left him with unwanted powers and whispering voices that spoke of power and peace, spoke lies. For how could power and peace lie together in this world, where the Earth itself cries out for the loss of the Old Religion?