Patience (and Other Imaginary Things)
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
1. Secrets (and Other Lonely Things)
Arthur had never felt like a little boy, not really.
He liked sports just like the other boys in his neighborhood, rough housed with the best of them, and was such a picky eater that his parents often joked that he had tastes too rich for their peasant blood. His family was not particularly well off, but he always found himself asking for things that he felt that he was entitled to have. It made him feel guilty, from time to time, but it was an intrinsic feeling of wealth that he simply could not shake.
Aside from just the feeling that he was more than what he was, there were the dreams. He had a mother, and he loved her, but sometimes he dreamt of a time where she had died a long time ago. A life where he had never met her. When he slept, scenes came back to him from a world that he only saw in historical films. When he entered school, he learned facts about the history of Albion that he somehow already knew, because he rememberedit. From his dreams. They didn't feel like dreams.
He felt like a man. A strong man, with a life and with friends and respect. People looked up to him, once upon a time. He didn't feel like a young peasant who went to public school just outside of Camelot and sometimes had to punch in the face of an older kid who insulted his mother. He felt important.
Arthur had never felt like a little boy, because in his sleep there was an entire life for him, completely separate from play dates and schoolwork and chores. He drew pictures of himself in armor and played pretend on the playground with his friends, leading them into battle with sticks as swords and trashcan lids as makeshift shields. He usually ended up bruised, battered and with a half dozen bleeding abrasions, but it felt so right that he could never bring himself to care.
Many of the dreams left him gasping for air, or crying out, sitting up with a jolt at the horror of what had happened. There were wars, battles, tournaments, hunting trips, feast and adventures. Somehow he knew how to string a bow, hold a sword, ride a horse. He knew how to skin a rabbit, to set a rope trap for an enemy. He knew what it felt like to kill a man.
Yet in his life he had done not one of those things.
There was also another man, one whom he had never met and yet had known forever, whose face was familiar but unknown, yet too detailed to be a figment of his imagination. He knew the shade of his eyes, and the color they turned to when he cast magic, the curvature of his face and where his skin reddened when he cried.
And the man cried a lot, in his dreams. Arthur wondered why and if it was his fault. He somehow felt it was. But it gave him hope, even though it saddened him, because it meant the stories in his mind were true—because if it was truly all in his mind, he would have written it so that the pale boy never cried.
He told his mother about it, but it didn't worry her until he was twelve or so and she could no longer play it off as childish fantasy. The therapist didn't help, and after a while, Arthur stopped talking about it to anyone at all. How could he explain that he'd fought in wars? Lead a kingdom? Married a woman? That the castle students only visited on field trips had once been his home? Maybe he was crazy, for feeling and knowing and seeing the impossible things that he did.
Either way, it was really just easier to keep those dreams, that life, to himself.
He kept it close, quiet and hidden, and it felt like it was more real that way. That by speaking it out loud to anyone might degrade the honesty of his nightly visions. Because they were honest, as genuine as the dirt under his feet—it was as real as the life he lived now, as if he held hands with that world, an invisible but not imaginary friend that was only for him.
The boy with the dark hair, broad smile and the sometimes-gold eyes felt like the most wonderful secret anyone had ever had. He felt special to wield the knowledge of him, because he was the only one who could.
Even if he wasn't real, even if none of it was.
Short, I know, but I hope to continue it soon. The ending saddened and inspired me. Tell me what you think, please.