"I can't," she tells him when he leans in for a kiss. She knew that it would be brief and chaste and honorable in every way, from a knight to his queen, that it would hold no passion or overwhelming spark. Someday, maybe it could. But not today.
He leans backward in his seat once more, and as the fire crackles in the background, giving her chamber a warm, glowing ambience, the lights in his eyes have not gone out. Disappointment doesn't show, only careful acceptance.
Gwen loves him for it.
"It's too soon," she says, head shaking and voice cracking. "Arthur's only been gone a year and a half. He is still my husband and my king. I cannot betray him in such a way."
"I would never ask you to," Leon holds her hand in his own. His are large and firm and warm around her smaller, trembling ones. "I loved Arthur, too."
"Someday," she tells him, rising to her feet, dismissing him from his duty of her bedside vigil that he had kept every night since Camlann and the news of the king's fall. Percival had stayed the first week, Gaius room for two weeks, and Merlin had stayed a single night before disappearing off somewhere into the world to seek his fortune. Leon, though – Leon had never left.
He rises to his feet as well, but immediately kneels and kisses her hand, beard rough and course. "I would wait a lifetime for you, my lady."
She believes him.
He doesn't ask, he never asks, but there's a look in his eyes, one that Gwen has learned to read as if it is a passage from her favorite book.
"I can't," she says, regret heavy as she lifts up a hand and lets it fall across his face, stroking his cheek. He closes his eyes as if the moment is precious to him. "I'm sorry."
"You have nothing to be sorry for, my lady," Leon says, because he will never stop calling her 'my lady', despite her insistence that she is just Gwen, just Gwen the servant girl, Gwen the childhood friend he caught frogs with, Gwen who has somehow become the single sovereign of a nation.
He's not like Arthur, Lancelot, Merlin, or Morgana – her past loves, loves all lost in that raging fire that consumes her loved ones – He's quieter. He calms her insides when they threaten to spill out. Arthur would always be her king, and no one would ever replace him, but Leon shapes and molds her into a queen.
"I do, though," she swallows down her feelings, her emotions, her overwhelming desire to lift up onto her toes and kiss him on the mouth. "You are so patient and loving. I don't deserve you."
Leon shakes his head in wonderment. "You deserve the world."
She does kiss him then, on the cheek, soft and light. "I love you, my knight."
"My lady…"
"I can," she tells him three years later when Arthur's name doesn't make her heart stutter and stop, only sigh with love and traces of longing, when memories of Lancelot's kisses have faded into a soft smile.
He blinks, surprised. "You can what?"
Gwen giggles like a child, hand on her mouth, smile wide and beaming and free like it hasn't been since Arthur left her that final time. "What do you think?"
"You…you…" he gaped for a moment as Gwen laughed, but it was blown out of her in a moment as Leon took a giant stride across the chamber to sweep her up into his arms. She felt her feet lift off the floor, and the part of her that thought this wasn't proper hardly existed as his mouth closed over hers, firm and pliant, soft and hard, beautiful and wonderful, and other endless conundrums as all thoughts melted away.
"My lady," he rumbles deep in his throat as he sets her down.
"My knight," she replies cheekily, and she has never felt more like a human being. She has always been a serving girl, a handmaiden, a wife, a queen – but she has never been free. Not like this.