Disclaimer: Don't own. Don't sue.
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He was staring again.
It's all he seemed to do these days.
Stare. At her.
He couldn't help it.
He'd tried to stop. He'd tried. But trying and succeeding were two different things, two completely different things.
Arthur had tried thinking about sour plums and trotters in soup whenever she walked past, but it did no good. She was too beautiful. She took his breath away - literally, because he stopped breathing whenever she was near, to slow his heart. He was sure she could hear it whenever she stood too close, which she often did, because they were friends. Or supposed to be. Or would have been, if he'd been able to get his thoughts in order.
There was only one way to protect his self-respect - abuse her. Which he did, wholeheartedly. It was hard, for a while, seeing her crestfallen and confused, but then it got fun, especially when she started joining in with quips and jibes about how he thought he was the best, and how he was 'such a bully'. He never did it in front of her, but that made him laugh.
She made him laugh.
The way she'd crinkle her nose when she smelled something pleasant, like the flowers he put outside her door one night, when he was tortured and stupid with love. It made him smile, fill to the very brim with a warm, gushing feeling. Then her eyes, wondrous and glimmering in that unbelievable blueness of theirs. They shot straight through him, got to the soul she said he must have left somewhere in the gutters.
She didn't know.
Didn't know anything.
He could have handled it if she'd only been beautiful. There were many beautiful girls in Camelot. Daughters of lords, daughters of bakers - it didn't matter. Prettiness was everywhere, wherever he wanted it. They'd never refused him. But there was more to it than that. More to her. She was clever. Compassionate. She had a capacity for kindness he didn't have. And she used it, with everyone. Everyone but him, that is.
He only has himself to blame, he supposed.
Whenever Arthur looked into that pale, beautiful face, he saw a lot that might have been, hidden somewhere in those eyes. Saw what she had. What she would have given.
To him.
Only to you, she'd seemed sometimes to say. At least her eyes had, in the early years.
She didn't look much now.
She thought he didn't want her.
How could he hate her? She was the light to his dark. She was kind where he was cruel. She was his friend. And she was there, on the other side of the room, with another man, laughing at something he said, something he couldn't hear over the noise and tumult of the feasting hall. She is beautiful in green, and when his eyes drift lower, her breasts are white under hot silk, the valley between them glowing with sweat.
She thought he didn't want her.
She didn't know, though.
Morgana didn't know anything.
--
Exeunt.