Author's Note: Please let me know if there's a detail in here that conflicts with the series; I don't always pay attention when watching television. I assume this potential character was never mentioned and I therefore made him up (OC presence is not predominant). 2K oneshot. Tense shift is intentional.
Trigger warning for blood.
"If you value your head, use it." – Gaius, Season 3, Episode 9
He was four years old, hair overgrown, a makeshift sword swinging idly from his belt as he ran through the hall. "Slow down, young sire," a green knight warned when the boy all but rammed into him. "You'll trip all the ladies!"
The knight handed the child a string of grapes despite himself. "Make it last," he joked. "We haven't got enough to go around."
"We've a feast!" Arthur shrieked, and quickly caught his father's eye. His father raised his gauntlet upward to his son, smiling with good nature. The prince nearly collapsed with delight.
He continued on his way for a bit, weaving around long tables and getting lost in the trains of the ladies' gowns. And he ate – bread, stews, fruit from he didn't know where. Meats of all kinds, all at once, and more wine than is fit for anyone so young. It was all-consuming and jovial, and he hadn't a care to question why.
Indeed, it was Morgana who brought his joy to a halt. She had looked puzzled all evening; surely, she had eaten and danced and stolen as much wine as the rest of the palace children, but when she found herself in a moment of solitude, she hobbled nervously over to a window and gazed down at the dark courtyard.
"Is something the matter?" Arthur asked her reluctantly, pursing his lips and heading over to her. He did not like her. Not a bit, to tell the truth – he was supposed to think she was beautiful, but they were really too immature to see the other as anything but annoying.
"I don't see why we're feasting," Morgana complained. "They've hardly cleaned the blood from the stump!"
"Why are you always yelling about everything? We're feasting because we're feasting," Arthur replied with a grin. He was the prince of a bright city, a land he knew not. His father was king, and their life was both stable and splendid, and so why shouldn't they feast? "Come and join our fun, Morgana," he pleaded impatiently, but when she did not budge, he ran off with a knight's son.
It wasn't until an hour or so later, when the wine and the play were closing his eyes and his toy sword was broken in half on the floor, that he began to see Morgana's question. He knew his father called for a night of good food and good counsel often, but there was usually a visitor to Camelot or a fantastic battle won. Today, Arthur had dressed himself hastily, scrambled outside with the knights, and stood tall by his father's side as a masked man hacked off the head of a supposed sorcerer.
He stumbled to the man who served the king – the man who, when Arthur was seven, would hang for magic – and tugged at his sleeve. "Sir, why are we feasting? Sir, what's the cause, the exact cause for the feast today?"
"Your father has ruled well today, my lad," the man said. "He struck down a sorcerer. He killed a man for the good of this kingdom." He brushed some crumbs off the prince's shirt and left to attend to a very intoxicated King Uther.
Arthur made an unrecognizable sound, his breath twisting its way out of his throat, suddenly feeling as thick as the blood of the sorcerer. The wine was all quite sour now, for a man was dead at the hands of their feast and he had scarcely seen the head fall. A knight had asked him something unimportant at the moment of impact – a task he later realized was done on purpose.
Next time, however, he resolved to look with sharper eyes.
He got his chance less than a year later, when a man was said to have poisoned a well with just the tip of his finger. It was just as well, for he was new to Camelot, a peasant the brother of another peasant. He had dark hair, dark skin, and light eyes focused on the horizon. Thus he was quite unlike the last poor soul, in that sense, for he kept a cool disposition while the king spoke of his wrongdoings. He did not beg or yelp when the sword was prepared; the only cries came from a small girl who bore slight physical resemblance to the prisoner. Despite the insistence from her father, who held her back by the dress, she wept aloud during the whole procession. Arthur looked down as Morgana ran to her.
"Please," he heard Morgana say calmly. "Let's go to the fields. Let's go, please, we must go to see the horses. We'll have fun in the stables. Let's go somewhere."
Morgana took the girl by the hand and quite dragged her away from the crowd, half of whom were focused on the pair rather than the man awaiting his fate on the stump. And Arthur watched with fear in his chest, for he was just as small as the unknown girl, and it could very well have been his friend or his father on the block were they not royalty. He closed his eyes in pity and opened them to a sorry sight.
It was as if the swinging of the sword was timed to match the fluttering of the prince's eyelids. How could the head fall so quickly, so cleanly, when blood spewed so sporadically from the lifeless body? How, truly, could that much blood be kept inside a person, running in rivers over and over until death released it? It did not matter that the sword was sharp and efficient, for it was the cruelest of executions the prince had ever witnessed.
For in truth, it was the last time Prince Arthur had leant a victim the grace of watching the execution. He had long ago reasoned that it made him no less of a man to avert his eyes from the blades or the ropes. His mind was a busy one, and he did not wish to lend it to his imagining his father or Morgana or Merlin at the hands of the executioner. Besides, they were noble, or at least protected, and it did him no good to be thankful for their lives. He was the son of the king, the man who had all but purged the land of magic. There was nothing to fear.
It still possessed him years later, after he had grown up with dozens of executions etched into his mind, after Morgana was gone from his care and worry. Years later, when he understood – after being told time after time – exactly why each was killed and the good it would bring to the land, he still woke from a visit to that balcony where his five year old self watched death firsthand.
He woke chilled, yet accustomed to this cold sweat. The dream visited him about three times a year and he was quite used to the shaking and uneasiness that would keep him up the rest of the night. It was not a nightmare. It was too calm, too realistic.
He had not reasoned that his shaking and gasping would wake Gwen, but his arms wrapped idly around her body caused her to tremor with him. She woke with a whimper, knowing it was not the right hour of the morning. "Arthur," she said groggily. "Are you alright?"
It came rushing back to him then: The heat of the sun, the gasp of the crowd, the young girl screaming and fighting as she was pulled off to the stables. He knew he was not dreaming. "It was you," he croaked, then louder, "It was you!"
The tiredness fell from her face as Gwen looked about their room. She sat up and hurriedly threw a pillow into the darkness, worried yet disoriented, and nearly screamed when she felt Arthur's hands on her face.
But he was not hurting her – he was muttering apologies to her, over and over again like a madman. Even half asleep, this was odd behavior. She assumed he had a nightmare, and so she wrapped her arms about his neck; nightmares were common for the both of them, but she never wished to discuss them.
"Gwen," he hissed, insistent to talk to her. "It was you, the day with the balcony – I mean the courtyard – Morgana was there…" he trailed off, his eyes blazing.
She wiped the sweat from his forehead and shushed him again. "It's alright," she cooed. "It was just a dream."
"No!" He startled her in his protest. "No, Gwen, I'm so sorry. That man – he was your friend. He was in your family, wasn't he?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said, trying her best to calm him as apprehension crept up in her. He couldn't possibly remember the day he had stood and watched as her father's brother fell from grace.
He swallowed, his throat thick with the memory of blood. "When we were children," he began, grasping her hands. "There was a man who was accused of poisoning a well with the touch of his –"
Her eyes widened and she let out a rather childish noise of fear. She'd always assumed that day to be unspoken between them, silently acknowledged, too fragile to bring up. She did not want apologies or repayments or even repentance – she wanted to leave it alone.
But he would not. While it helped her to drift back off after a bad dream, it helped him to stare at the ceiling, whispering the events of the dream and shaking softly. If she woke with him, he'd talk to her.
"I didn't know, how could I not have known, not have realized?" he rambled, panting, his hands fluttering all over. "I didn't do it. I didn't know you then. Not that that makes it any better."
Her eyes were fixed on a spot beyond his shoulder, her hands clenched on the sheets. "He was innocent," she said softly. "He had done no harm."
"I know," Arthur said, for one man in a thousand on the block had been guilty, one child in a hundred at the bottom of the well had shown a spark in their eye, and the ones who did meant nothing by it. He felt like an oppressor, a part of something he could not control; and whether that something was magic or its suppression, whether it was all good or evil in the end, he found that he could sometimes not understand it. "He was innocent."
They all were.
There was no way for him to truly know who was or was not a sorcerer, or if their intentions were malicious, but he swore to not sentence as many as his father had. He didn't know if his promise would hold out or what would befall Camelot, but they both knew that there were children running about the city who didn't need to see death. They could find other ways to amuse themselves, other ways to gather as a people, that did not involve the blood and screams that lent themselves to nightmares. If they had some powers of prevention, they would do all they could.
When he executes his first man, Gwen avoids him for a few days, trying to will herself to listen to the reasons. He was a threat to the kingdom, a potential enemy, with more power than any one of them could ever fathom – yes, she knew. But if so many others were innocent, it was almost illogical to assume that this man was not.
His face hardens with his second execution, his worn eyes trailing the blood. Inside him, a five year old boy screeches and flees. A prince yells at his father. A child and an old man fall asleep to the same dream, over and over again.
Outside, he has a people to rule and a land to govern. One death is not thousands, he tells himself. One man struck down is another day of glory for his kingdom.
He does what he can.