Yes, yes, I'll get round to Little Bat soon… But this called out to me. Dedicated to my sleeping man!
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Morgana leant against the desk and simply watched. Breathing in, breathing out. Sleep looked so peaceful for him; she almost envied him that, before she remembered how hard he worked and how exhausted he must be.
She had guarded the boy, Mordred, as he slept; he was strong, but still as vulnerable as any other child. When she had left Camelot – when Merlin had betrayed her – she had thought that she was doomed to wander Albion alone for all time. Mordred had been her salvation, as she had been his. No man would ever touch Morgana's heart, save the one the boy would become. They were kin now, she and he.
Typing a short story up on her laptop, wondering if this one might just somehow be fit to print, she can't help but steal glances across at the young man's sleeping form. He is the first man she has loved since Camelot – and oh, how she has lived since then – and she sometimes wonders if he will be the last. What would you think of this, Merlin? Morgan Le Fay watching over a sleeping mortal? She knows, deep down, he would be happy for her. She doubts he intended her to lose her trust in mankind after he poisoned her. In five minutes, she should wake her man up – but he is tired, and there is time. She will give him a little longer in those pleasant dreams of his.
She stood in Arthur's chambers, hidden by the night, and watched him sleep. The handle of the knife she held, so cold until now, almost seemed to glow with heat as she continued to grip it. She stood there for an hour, but she could not kill her brother, though he had sent his men to kill her and had stolen everything from her; even her name was now that of a monster. She fled into the night, unable to return to Morgause, unable to remain in Camelot.
She is fiercely possessive of this man, who would not believe her if she told him that she had once been Le Fay. Now she went by other names, a new one every life, and often several to spare. She loves the foolish mortal, and wishes he would not work so hard; wishes he understood that his work wasn't everything. He could make magic with computers, and they were the future, and he was the future, and she saw him. All of that was good. But it was when he stopped, when she observed him like this… Then he was truly beautiful.
For the first time in fifteen hundred years, Morgana thought that maybe, just maybe, things might be perfect.