i wrote this several months ago, like half a year ago, and only just now got around to fixing all that was wrong with it. that said, i probably didn't fix all that was wrong with it, and i hope i have scraped it into passable shape.
i hope you enjoy, and let me know what you think!
rated for description of injuries and aftermath of torture
It wasn't supposed to end like this.
Let it be known of course that in terms of endings, Rubio never held any illusions that he was guaranteed a happy one. That was a conversation he'd had years ago, when he'd first thrown his sword in with the Resistance. Percival had held him by the shoulders so tight it almost hurt and outlined exactly what he was risking if he went through with this. It was always perfectly, soberly clear that he had a very good chance of not making it out of this alive. There had been some comfort to be found in knowing his probable death would at least serve a righteous end, even if it came at the cost of his own. Even if it was an end he wouldn't live to see.
This, though. This was never part of the plan. Of course the possibility of capture had been raised. The Crown knew of their movement, had for years, and it had been a decision of strategy, allowing them to remain aware but convinced it was a minor, fringe group, rather than going deeper underground. An enemy aware but underestimating you was preferable to one who didn't know of you at all. It had made sense when he'd heard it. Most things did, when Bedivere said them. A logical jump led from there to the possibility of the King deciding they were a threat to be taken seriously, and deciding to gather a little information from whoever they could get their hands on.
The day of the failed assassination, when he turns away from the others, away from the ledge beyond which lay a chance at safety, and charges directly at the soldiers behind them, Rubio expects his story to end. He shoves down the burning in his side, the pounding pulse in his skull, and decides that this is as good a place as any to die. There are voices behind him, his name hollered in a handful of tones, some more familiar than others, but he pushes on. Moments later, a clash of steel and a brand new rush of pain later, and it's all over. He's dead.
Except that he isn't. Death would at that point have been a kinder end. The only thing left to his credit by the time they're done with him is that night falls before he's broken, by the time sleep deprivation and a relentless onslaught of the worst agony he's ever experienced breaks him and he tells them what they want to know. After Vortigern has swept out with a smirk and the steel at his neck is the only thing holding him upright, they leave. Rubio is expecting a killing blow to follow the swish of a cape out the door, expecting to be discarded like the used up, wrecked carcass he feels like.
It would only be what he's earned. The gravity of what he's done hits him square in the chest as they have him there alone in a cell with the sound of his own blood dripping onto an already damp floor and the echoes of what they've done ricocheting around every screaming nerve ending. He knows it then, when his mind quiets enough from the white-hot static of torture, that he's condemned the movement, sentenced his compatriots to die like he will, as soon as someone has half a mind to come back and finish what they started.
Horror seizes Rubio's lungs like the barbed tips of a dozen arrows, sending his already ragged breathing into a disjointed rhythm of choking gasps. It's a hysterical, airless facsimile of sobbing, a wretched grief-stricken sound that overtakes everything else. It's unclear, by the time unconsciousness takes him, if he passes out due to starving his own body of oxygen, or if the severity of his injuries have finally caught up to him.
Once again, Rubio does not die. He swims through a murky fog into awareness and immediately wishes he were still out. There is a cacophony in the distance, the sounds of fighting somewhere near enough to be audible but far enough that it is only a featureless roar. For a time he hangs there, crumpled half on the floor, held semi-upright by the restraints no one thought to remove, trying to catch his breath. Individual wounds have long since lost their distinction, melting instead into one mass of pain assaulting him from all angles.
An indeterminate amount of time passes until the door of his cell slams open. Hands grasp at his neck and Rubio flinches back hard. The hands do not tighten however, do not squeeze what's left of the life out of him, and instead withdraw, taking the collar with them. Soon he is left slumped over on the floor entirely under his own recognizance, some unknown, indistinguishable figure standing over him.
Abruptly, the figure starts to shout, words accompanied by waving of arms.
"Run! They've taken the castle, they're going to kill the King, now's your chance! Run, you stupid bastard, get up and run!"
His unknown liberator proceeds to take their own advice, a flurry of movement out of the cell and down the hall. Offbeat footsteps echo against one another as everyone left alive down there flees.
For Rubio's part in the mass exodus from the prisons, it is less of a wild, relieved dash, and more of a slow, weary shuffle.
They're going to kill the King, he remembers and cracked, bruised lips tug up into an almost smile. So some of them made it, then. Rubio's betrayal hadn't damned them all. Enough of the Resistance remained to take the castle and challenge Vortigern. Arthur remained. The Born King remained. The future remained.
Of course with the thought of a possible triumph comes another possibility, one not quite so relieving to consider. The facts and possibilities churn in Rubio's mind as he crouches on the cold, damp floor, heavy breaths pushing a ribcage spider-webbed with cracks into painful expansion. There are, from here, he realizes, head pounding in time with his pulse, only two options left to him.
Option one, Vortigern wins and the Blacklegs catch him. He'll be killed on the spot. He serves no more use to them.
Option two, Arthur wins. Arthur wins and his own side finds him, if he is permitted still to claim a side. There will be something of a discussion over what to do with him, and seeing as they've surely connected the dots on who revealed their location, the verdict drawn will be execution.
Though at this point Rubio himself would argue on the side that he deserves it, he does not want to die. The thought pushes him up off the floor, out the door of the cell, beginning the seemingly insurmountable journey down the corridor. He doesn't want to die, but neither can he stay. Because even more than he doesn't want to die, Rubio does not want to look his people in the eye, see their faces when they know what he's done, the way in which he failed them. He can remember the day years ago when he'd stood in front of them, Bedivere and Bill, while Percival presented him, then a squire of fifteen, to the Resistance leadership. His mouth pulls further into the faint imitation smile, the split in his lower lip widening and leaking a trail of fresh, hot blood down his chin. The memory is a good one.
It had been an argument at first, when he'd found out what Percival was doing when he kept disappearing, demanded to be read in, to join the fight. Percival had called him a naive kid, said he could die, said it would be treason, and Rubio had held his chin aloft with the arrogance of all young people with sea-deep reserves of anger and nowhere to aim them in, and asked why, if Percival clearly didn't trust him, had the knight taken him on as a squire in the first place?
So Percival brought him before the head of the snake itself, and before he knew it, Rubio was acting at the right hand of the Resistance. He had been involved every step of the way, and if, on the off chance they all made it through, he can't stomach the idea of standing before those three men and bearing their condemnation.
It had been hard to shake the thought that there were doubts about his presence at all. Some hot-headed kid from some nowhere town, vouched for by Percival - who was still himself viewed as a hot-headed kid by a non-negligible number of the older contingent, the ones who remembered Uther Pendragon as more than a motivating campfire story, despite his own position high in the ranks. The desire to prove himself had always been strong, right up to the moment it all went so horribly wrong, when he'd felt Percival's eyes on him, and told Arthur, yeah, I can make it.
He couldn't have.
He didn't.
The thought of Percival, of how proud he'd been and how ashamed he'd be now, it's enough to arrest Rubio's steps, nearly tripping over his own suddenly stilled feet. He presses his temple to the rough wall and tries to breathe through the lance in his chest, because that's all he'd wanted. All he'd wanted was to make Percival proud, make Bedivere and Bill proud.
And now, Rubio faces the possibility of execution at the hands of the men who trained him, and it is an untenable thought. So instead he chooses the only other path left available to him and picks the option only made considerable when laid in comparison to the alternatives.
He's going to run. He's going to gather his strength, fumble his way out - hopefully into the kitchen or storerooms and regain some of his drained strength -and then take off into the forest. He'll run as long and fast as he can, and he won't come back. He'll never have a home again, never see anyone he loves again, and it hurts. Even just the thought hurts worse than the lashes across his body, the broken ends of bone grating together, the reverberations of a half-dozen fists, none of what's been done to Rubio's body can hold a weak, flickering candle to the way his heart is shredding itself in his battered chest.
It feels like hell and it feels like justice at the same time. Banishing himself is, at this point, the least he deserves for the dozens of deaths surely on his shoulders, when a coward's desire to to preserve his own life prevents Rubio from just owning up, waiting for the dust to settle and turning himself in.
Plan firmly in place, he continues on down the dark dungeon hallway, braced heavily against the wall, aiming hopefully in the direction of an exit. Even if he could locate the source of the battle, he's sure to be completely useless in a fight right now, no help to his people should he be able to find them, should his help even be welcome. Fate seems to have other plans in mind, however, given he doesn't even make it past the abandoned guard's station at the mouth of the corridor of cells.
Not a foot from the first stair, his left leg collapses, knee crying out in protest as it collides with flagstone, and Rubio's vision whites out. He's thrown his hands out in an attempt to catch himself, but without accurate depth perception, his head spinning and sight useless, it hadn't worked, and he goes down, hard. Shaking arms brace throbbing palms against the floor, and he tries to stand, to shove himself upright, voice in his head screaming to get up, get up, you pathetic coward . It doesn't work, hands sliding out from under him, head cracking off the ground. The last, desperate reserves of adrenaline left in him seem to have petered out, leaving Rubio to lay collapsed at the bottom of a staircase, no hope of making it up.
For the third time in recent memory, he loses his grip on consciousness, and in a last fleeting moment of thought, a desperate grief rattles around in Rubio's bloodied head.
It wasn't supposed to end like this.
The battle ends. The King dies in an imitation last stand of glory and when things calm and settle, the Born King is at last where he was always fated to be. The last dregs of the guard fall either to surrender or death, and the castle is left in an eerie, sick quiet.
Nobody talks about the clean-up. There is a time left before rebuilding can begin, and not even funeral pyres can be lit before the bodies are collected, the dead counted and named.
Rubio lies in the basement as the echoes of steel-on-steel stop ringing, life ebbing slowly away while the castle is searched, scoured for bodies and survivors. It's a chance encounter that sends someone his way, a freed political prisoner grabbing the nearest member of the Resistance, alerting them to the potential that someone may still be left down there. Rubio is too far lost to the world to hear heavy footfalls coming down the stairs, feel the person who's arrived to officially clear the cells trip right over his sprawled legs. A curse is followed by a beat of stunned silence when the man looks down, recognizes the crumbled body that he had nearly fallen over.
Rubio doesn't hear Percival first gasp then shout his name. He doesn't feel the shaking fingers jabbing into the side of his bruised, chafed neck, the gust of an exhale at the improbable discovery of a pulse. He doesn't feel it either when Percival's hands lift him carefully upright to slump against the knight's chest. Rubio's forehead bumps forward against the hollow of Percival's neck, a rough palm catching the back of his head to hold him there. He doesn't feel Percival's lungs expand with the breath necessary to bellow out the words he doesn't hear, screaming for help.
They carry him upstairs, clean him of blood and dirt, bandage endless wounds, and Rubio knows none of it.
Some word swarmed across the castle, a summons passed from person to person, and all requested parties have made their way to what presumably was once guest chambers outfitted for visiting dignitaries. Arthur hasn't seen Percival stop moving. The man has been pacing constantly, hands shaking at his sides or raking at his hair, rubbing over his coppery beard. Not once has he stilled, and quite honestly it's beginning to give Arthur a headache. (Maybe the headache is due to the recent battle, complete with a couple good knocks to the head, but really, who's to say.)
Forcing himself to stop watching Percival bounce around the room like an aimless ball of errant energy, Arthur takes stock of the rest of the hodge-podge collection of people gathered in the room with the bed containing the unconscious person they've come to discuss. Bedivere is leaning against a wall, expression unreadable and eyes fixed on the young man they thought they'd lost for good. Across the room, just inside the door, lingers Wet Stick. Contrary to Bedivere, his expression is clear and uncomplicated. He doesn't like this, any of it, and he's not the least bit shy about who knows that. George stands next to Bill on the other side of the doorway and neither of them seem to quite know what to make of the situation. Bringing their motley crew to a close is the Mage, sitting on the floor beside the head of the bed.
In all honesty, all rationale and reasonableness, it doesn't make a lick of sense to have convened this specific collection of people to address the problem Arthur now finds himself facing. Though he quite genuinely has no idea who else he could conceivably call upon. The leadership of the Resistance together with the Slum King's rabble court, they are the closest thing Arthur presently has to advisors.
What they don't tell you when you kill your tyrant uncle and assume your rightful throne is exactly how long it takes to scrape a cabinet together, and it is certainly longer than the not-even-a-calendar-day for which he has held the throne.
"I thought the boy died. That's what I was told." Surprisingly, it is George who breaks the silence, George who is the only one of them who has not, present circumstances notwithstanding, actually met Rubio before, only heard a somber story of how they'd bought enough time to reach him.
"So did we," says Wet Stick with something akin to a sneer. "Turns out he was here, spilling our secrets to Vortigern."
"Have you not looked at him?" Percival stops pacing to whirl around and snap the words out, angry and frightened. "He didn't spill anything, they tore it out of him. And I don't seem to remember you losing all that much when they found the caves. Those were my people in those trees, my friends who died under Blackleg swords. Our secrets, like shit."
The bickering continues, back and forth between two parties with equally heightened tempers, equal justification by which to be upset about the matter at hand. It's the Mage Arthur's attention is drawn to, however, as she rises to her feet, casually walks between the arguing men like they are nothing more than an annoyance.
It's moments like this that Arthur finds himself somberly awed by her. The Mage could very well kill all of them and come out the other side without so much as a scratch.
"Is this really the place to have this conversation?" A tilt of her narrow chin indicates the form on the bed, the person indeed being discussed. "In front of him?"
"He can't hear us," George puts in, raising an eyebrow at her. "He's not woken since we got here."
"We do not understand what the mind can process when the body has been laid low," she counters, and there's a certain edge to her tone when she speaks, the one she uses to remind those around her that hands and swords are all well and good but the world does not end with things that can be seen and hit. "The choice of what to do about him belongs to the King, it is his jurisdiction to decide the penalty for treason, but we ought at least to do Rubio the kindness of not discussing his execution in front of him."
With those words having been introduced into the conversation at hand, the temperature of the room tangibly chills by several degrees. Treason. Execution. A debate of riled tempers and flaring emotions sobers and stills, all attention redirecting to Arthur. He breathes in slowly, releases the breath with a rush of air that is almost a sigh, and waves a hand in the direction of the door.
"Let's take this outside."
Emerging from the room to stand in a wide stone hallway produces clear divisions between the group gathered there, an even split right down the middle. On one side stands Arthur, flanked by Wet Stick and George, while facing them is Bedivere, with Percival and the Mage at his back. Nobody has exactly noted that Bill has not left the room, remaining with the as yet still dead to the world Rubio.
Still those words hang over Arthur's shoulders, heavy stones tied about his neck and pulling him down.
Treason. Execution.
It's with a jolt that Arthur realizes that's what's expected of him. That not only does he wield the power to sentence Rubio to die, there is at least something of an assumption that this is what he will do. He knows it's what Vortigern would have done. He also knows that hadn't in the slightest been what Wet Stick was suggesting. It wasn't something Arthur himself had been considering. Sure he has experience in leadership, in people calling him "boss", but kicking asses that needed kicking, collecting what's due, safeguarding what's his, that is leagues away from the power and responsibility he wields now, and he fears that perhaps more even than he had feared Excalibur, when the blade had first rested in his hands, wild and uncontrollable.
Unfortunately, as he mulls this over, Bedivere seems to have taken the opportunity to completely misinterpret his quiet as genuine consideration of having a young man executed for the choice of having confessed information they'd likely have obtained somehow regardless to save his life, to make the pain stop.
"Rubio is a good lad," Bedivere says seriously. His tone is neither pleading nor angry. He speaks in the rational, even voice of a strategist attempting to talk someone down off a ledge, and it churns Arthur's stomach. "He was Percival's squire when he was brought to me, a spitfire of a boy, and he has grown, is growing into a fine man. What he did… I'm not saying I excuse it. I'm not saying it's all done and forgotten. But he shouldn't die for it."
"When I said something should be done, I'm not saying kill him," Wet Stick says, and Percival's hand is on the hilt of his sword before the sentence is hardly half over, prompting a deviation from the originally planned end to shoot an irritated look in his direction and reiterate, "Calm down, I said I'm not saying kill him."
"Nobody said anything about killing him, alright?" Finally having had enough of listening to other people debate a choice he hadn't even thought of making, Arthur breaks in on the conversation. The relief in Percival's face stings to look at, so he looks away, towards Bedivere. "He was willing to die to give us time to get away. Back in Londinium."
"He's been willing to die for our cause since the day I met him," Bedivere says, and Arthur is once more struck by the disorienting feeling that there's a lot he's missed here.
It's oppressively strange to think that, while he was living his ordinary life in his adopted hometown, training with George, managing the brothel, walking under endless days' worth of skies with Wet Stick and Back Lack, there had been a group of people plotting his ascension to the throne. There had been squires, hardly more than children, ready to die in his name.
A long pause hangs over the hallway, and Bedivere spends it studying his newfound, not yet so much as crowned King. He must find something because he speaks again.
"I know we do not truly know each other, yet," he says, and his eyes have gone sad, shadowed, as if he is looking at Arthur and seeing a small towheaded child, remembering a different age, a different king standing here instead. "I know that we've fought and bled together, but we've only just met, and he isn't one of yours."
Arthur is the king now, which makes them all to some measure his, his to guide and to guard, but he gets the feeling that isn't exactly what Bedivere meant.
"He isn't yours," Bedivere repeats. "But he is mine. He is ours, and I am only asking that you, my King, consider the decision you would make if he was yours."
There is a loud silence, a gaping maw of empty air where Back Lack should be standing next to Wet Stick, and Lucy is a shadow Arthur sees around every corner. So much has been lost in such a short time, and it's nigh impossible to bear. When Arthur had stood by that lake, sword in hand, about to throw it away, he had remembered the way Rubio had looked, glancing back at them before taking off back down the alley. He had felt regret, something that felt like the sprouted seedling of grief, when he'd thought Rubio had died for them. For him.
Looking around, Arthur notes that even Wet Stick's expression of riled up fire has morphed into something that, if not agreement, could at least be called understanding. It's there in that hallway that Arthur makes what he supposes is the first actual decision of his reign.
"Vortigern is dead," he says. "He shouldn't be able to keep doing damage to us. He's taken enough, hurt enough. His power to hurt should die with him."
Bedivere stares with an inscrutable expression for a long moment before he nods.
If asked to explain why he had stayed behind when the others had heeded the Mage's advice and left the room to continue their rather grim discussion outside, Bill would not likely be able to articulate a coherent answer. Luckily enough for him, no one is likely to ask, and even if they did, the reputation he has cultivated is such that an incoherent dismissal of an answer would be entirely in line with expectation. He props himself against the wall closest to the bed, folds his arms tightly over his narrow chest, and contemplates the room's only other occupant.
Rubio is still out cold, and Bill hopes the Mage was wrong, and he remains blissfully unaware of that conversation. Bill himself has extensive personal experience with his execution being debated to his face, and it's not an enjoyable pastime. Especially coming from those alongside whom you had learned and lived and fought.
Try as he might, Bill cannot, in anticipation of watching Rubio die, talk himself into believing the boy deserves it. An Irish child raised against his will under an English crown, a life on the run from one thing or another until his patron saint, Lady Luck, landed him in Uther's court, Bill knows a thing or two about difficult choices. He knows about what enemy blades can do to the tethers you've built to the rest of the world, knows what kind of price you can be forced to pay to save your own life when you know damn well no help is coming and none would reach you in time even if it was.
It's been five years Bill has known Rubio now. Five years since Percival's squire tailed him to the cave, and the kid's cheeky insistence that he'd only been trying to follow orders ("You told me to curry the horse then took off riding the horse, what was I supposed to do?") instantly endearing him to Bill. Five years, and now Bill will get to watch him die.
Looking inside himself, Bill can find it in his capacity neither to comfort the boy nor to walk outside and offer argument to his defense. His words on the subject of what punishment any crime deserved, whether indeed a crime occurred at all, he can't imagine it would hold all that much weight with a man he'd first met on a night he'd chosen the wrong hiding place from a warrant for his own neck. As for should he wake up now, should Bill find himself attempting to console a condemned compatriot, a condemned young friend, well… Such things had never been in his wheelhouse. He wasn't called Goosefat Bill because he'd built a habit of sticking around hard situations. Escaping, however…
Still watching Rubio, motionless on the bed, Bill muses that you can't execute somebody you can't find, and should Bill decide to make him disappear, no one would surely ever see him again. It's not a great revelation, not a calm-shattering decision, merely an acceptance of realities, an acknowledgement of a leopard whose spots have not changed since childhood. If people didn't want him to take advantage of an opportunity and slip away, alone or accompanied, well, they shouldn't let him find one to begin with.
This conclusion is one reached round about the same moment Bill starts to pick up signs Rubio is choosing now to return to consciousness. The climb back to the land of the living does not appear to be an easy one, and Bill observes with a silent, cringing sympathy.
The first thing that changes is his breathing. What had before been slow, shallow inhales begin to quicken, hitching and growing irregular. Rubio's bruised face twitches, closed eyes scrunching even tighter shut. A soft, barely audible whine rises from a throat already screamed hoarse, and Bill feels thoroughly out of his depth.
Bedivere would know what to do, how to handle this. Percival would know. Hell, even Arthur himself, who Bill has seen with those people of his, with Blue Boy, would be better equipped to be the sole other person present when someone very badly hurt makes the slow, agonizing return to awareness.
In what is a mercy to him and could frankly go either was as far as Rubio is concerned, that is when the group outside chooses to reenter.
Having spotted Rubio's eyes, now open, Bedivere heads straight to the side of the bed, while Percival whips abruptly in the opposite direction, his back to both his leader and his subordinate. By now it would seem Rubio is awake enough to start remembering how he'd landed in the situation he's in now, the reality facing him. It's not a reality that lends itself to calm, and as seconds pass, he grows more and more agitated.
What happens next… doesn't help.
Completely ignoring Bill, Arthur stalks directly over to a spot next to the bed. He stands with arms crossed and a thundercloud expression on his face.
"I know we don't know each other at all," he says, addressing the room at large to the obvious exclusion of Wet Stick and George, "but you people seem to have misjudged me rather spectacularly. Me, who you've sworn your damned allegiance to? You'd have done that for somebody you'd thought would have him killed after that?" His hand hovers in the air, a finger pointing to the figure on the bed. "Enough people have died. Nobody else dies today. Not today, not tomorrow, not the day after, not if I have anything to say about it, and I've been told I'm the King now."
Bedivere, where he stands with one steadying palm laid over Rubio's forehead, exchanges a look with Bill, who shrugs. There's a coarseness to Arthur that is hard to adjust to in a man you've long thought of as your king, rough edges scratched into him by a life far from the castle he was born in. It has been hard, at times, to look at him and see the Born King, see Uther's son. Now, though…
Righteousness is not a guarantee in a ruler, justice and honor, compassion not inherent beneath a crown. Now though, listening to their dear friend's grown son lambast them for presuming him capable of executing someone under these circumstances, it is impossible not to see Uther in him. He's there in the set of Arthur's broad shoulders, and in the anger flashing in eyes neither Bedivere nor Bill can help but see Igraine. He wears his mother's compassion beneath his father's honor, and they know then that he will be a good king.
The good king, however, isn't done. He rounds on Rubio, who still doesn't seem to quite understand what's going on, shifting head and pained sounds under Bedivere's hand.
"As for you," Arthur says, and Bedivere feels Rubio's body stiffen, the muscles in his neck seizing as he braces himself. "Rubio, your sentence is bed rest and some soup if you think you can manage it. I'll send the first healer I can find."
With that, Arthur stalks out of the room, followed swiftly by Wet Stick and George. The remains of the Resistance stand around awkwardly unil a sound from Rubio reminds them why they're there to begin with. Bedivere talks to him in his most commanding voice, trying to break through a thick haze of pain and guilt, injuries and fear, to make him understand the decision rendered. Bill and the Mage do what they're both best at, standing back out of the way and observing, looking for a moment that should call either for them to aid or slip away.
Percival stands back as well, but for rather different and less clear motivations than the distance kept by Bill and the Mage. He faces a wall beside a window, looking away from the events carrying on behind him. Since his re-entry he has looked at Rubio once, one glance sending him whipping away. He stands still as a man frozen, one fist knocked to the wall and left there, knuckles jammed hard into cold rock. His other hand hangs at his side, clenched tight, fingers blanching bloodless every time some low cry or hoarse word comes comes from the bed.
Still Bedivere's attempts to calm Rubio are unsuccessful. If anything, he's only growing more worked up, and there's a very real fear that he'll hurt himself if he doesn't relax soon. Finally, Bedivere looks up, saying quietly, "Percival."
A flinch jolts through Percival's shoulders, but he neither turns around nor verbally responds.
"Percival," Bedivere repeats. "You need to talk to him. I'm not getting through, but he'll hear you."
When Percival turns to face them, his face is drawn and pale, but he nonetheless follows instructions. He steps up beside the bed as Bedivere steps away, one hand lightly laying over Rubio's shuddering chest, other coming to his jaw, stilling the erratic movements of his head. He begins to talk softly, and for the same reason it was Percival Bedivere called over to calm Rubio, Bill tunes out what he says. He focuses instead on his leader, whose attention is still forward,. Bedivere speaks without looking to the side, voice soft and nostalgic.
"Once you have trained a squire," he says, eyes far away, watching Percival with Rubio, "that boy will forever be your squire, no matter how grown he is."
Deciding not to point out that 'grown' is a debatable adjective when applied to Rubio, who had been knighted for approximately five minutes when things really went to hell, Bill instead goes for his second thought.
"I know," he says, eyebrow arched. The familiar path of teasing Bedivere is infinitely more comfortable a context in which to place himself than contemplation of the fact that it's working, that Rubio seems to finally be calming, so Bill grabs hard onto it. "I've seen the way you look at Percy sometimes, like he's still sixteen and stupid reckless."
Before Percival had been knighted, it had been a favorite pastime of Bill's to watch him drive Bedivere up the walls. Many a conversation had been spent snickering over Bedivere's doubts that Percival would ever develop the common sense to survive to twenty. And just look at him now, having trained a squire himself, stood beside his mentor at the helm of a revolution.
A successful revolution, and it's that thought that sends Bill's head back, thunking lightly against the wall. Now Bedivere does look away towards him with a question in his expression.
"We did it, Bedivere," Bill says in a quiet, tired voice, incredulousness gnawing at the edges, seeping into his vowels. "Vortigern is dead. Finally."
"Vortigern is dead," Bedivere repeats back to him.
He doesn't add on the names of everyone else who lies dead with him. Not the members of the Resistance Bedivere will soon send a party to collect, to arrange the pyres of. Not Catia, who he never saw grow up, but remembers as a sweet little girl, chasing around the castle with her cousin. Not Igraine, who bore an understated wisdom he has oft regretted being unable to call upon when the way forward seemed dark and uncertain.
Not Uther, Bedivere's dear friend, the man he had grown and trained with, fought beside, would have died for without a second thought. Twenty-odd years it's been, and still the thought of him aches, a knot of scarred over tissue within lies nerve endings as raw as the day the wound was dealt.
Arthur's words return to him then, that voice so like his father's had once been.
Nobody else dies today.
Calling Percival over has worked. Rubio is asleep finally, not unconscious but truly sleeping, looking at some kind of peace for the first time throughout this ordeal. Percival's head is tipped back, eyes closed, and he looks exhausted. They probably all do. It's been an exhausting couple of days.
It's been an exhausting series of years. But it's over now.
You hear that, Uther? Bedivere thinks, looking over out the window. We did it. Your boy did it. It's over.
It's over, but the aftermath has just started. Building a reign from the ground up is hard work. Arthur loses track of how many funeral pyres burn before his eyes, how many grief torn families whose hands he clasps in his, hoping it does some good at all.
Rubio recovers, his body healing faster than his spirit, and the day he willingly looks Arthur in the eye of his own accord is a triumph.
Through all of it, though, there's something Arthur can't quite shake. Something Bedivere said, which sticks in his mind every time he catches sight of Rubio limping down the hall with Percival at his shoulder, encounters the Mage in the courtyard, sees Bedivere or Bill watching him with two different kinds of unreadable expressions.
He isn't yours, Bedivere had said to him of Rubio. But he is mine.
Consider the decision you would make if he was yours.
Bedivere had been asking that day for Arthur to look at his family and render judgement as he would were it Arthur's own family, laying there in that bed.
If his betrayal by the rest of his crew had taught Arthur anything, it is that family is a precious, priceless thing. These people he'd only just met had, as Bedivere pointed out, fought and bled with him, and what should that make them, then?
These thoughts, of family and loyalty, mine and yours, ours, percolate in the back of his mind. It's a sensation almost like a phantom itch, the urge to do something, something important, something he is supposed to do, but not yet knowing what that something is. It's a frequent distraction in coming days, and Arthur often finds himself in that great main hall, the venue in which he had received the viking envoy, looking around and trying to puzzle it out.
It's early morning when the answer occurs to him, and he turns to Maggie, one of the first advisors he appointed when the dust began to settle.
"Where can I find some local craftsmen?" he asks. She looks back at him, no glint of understanding in her eyes. Arthur rests his hand against the hilt of Excalibur, leans against a pillar, and elaborates. "I need to get the materials to build a table."