Disclaimer: Monty Python's Holy Grail is the property of Messers Cleese, Idle, Jones, Palin, Gilliam and the late Mr Chapman. I own nothing.
Arthur's Plea
I hurried upstairs, too agitated to take my time and too exhausted mentally to run. He felt like the only thing I had left that was stable, easy, a remnant from some simpler time. Why had it been so long since I had gone to see him, since I had talked to him properly?
He had been there since before all of this; before Galahad with his secret and poor dead Robin, and Mordred and Morgan and Lancelot… oh God, Lancelot. Of all of them Lancelot, who I had eventually come to think of my favourite knight, how could he have done what he had done?
And Guinevere, the only woman I had ever truly loved. How could she have agreed to it, gone through with it?
And how could I have done what I've done? How could I have ordered my own wife, my own true love Guinevere burned, and having her so heavily guarded she had almost no hope of rescue? Thinking now, I'm so grateful to Lancelot, even after I banished him from Camelot forever, he had ridden back to save her. And I'm thanking him by going to war with him. War with Lancelot, the man who I loved as a brother. Gawain has lost his brothers to Lancelot, and I am to blame. But he doesn't blame me. He blames Lancelot. Lancelot killed them both, but I put them between him and Guinevere.
I've just killed my own son. How could such a callous bastard have come from me? Anyone else who fathered such a child, I would have told them to abandon him to his fate rather than infect the world with him, but I had given him chances, far too many chances. In the end, perhaps it could have all been his, but the boy could never wait, and could only think to force himself upon a shamed queen to usurp me while I was away.
Away fighting my last best friend.
She's gone now. I will never see her again, as I shouldn't. She deceived me and I almost had her killed. I can never see her again, however much I may still love her.
Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, brother of the witch-child of a murdered father and a conquered mother, cheated husband, wife-burner, son-killer. Is this how I will be remembered?
Not by him. He'll remember me as I was, won't he? When there was just me and him for a while, and I was noble and righteous with a lifetime of potential ahead of me. When I had no concern with adultery or murder, just faith in God and a name to make for myself. It was all so much easier back then. He is an aura of simplicity, a sense of ease, someone to be sure about.
I opened the door to his room. It had been so long since I entered. He was just lying there on the bed, reading something, I think, but I didn't look. He knew, I think, that I would come to him eventually. He turned to me, sitting up and offering himself, letting me know he was still there, he understood this time why I had left him so long, and he would still do anything for me.
I put my arms around him and realised I was weeping. I remembered all the times he had wept before me, asking only for my company and some acknowledgement that I still felt some affection for him, and now here was I, weeping at his bed and begging him silently to love me like he always had, and take my mind away from the monsters of now.
He returned my embrace, still accepting, still a rock to cling to in the storm, and I wanted to leave and travel with him alone again, no purpose this time, just no life and no connections, just the two of us and a coconut.
Sweet Patsy, keep me sane until death comes to rescue me.