A/N: This story is a sequel/companion to LovesAngst's "Just Keep Looking." This is technically a way it COULD end, but the story never even suggests that this would be the ending. Most of the characters mentioned aren't even in the story. I just thought that it warranted a POV from the "enemy." So you probably won't get this unless you've read that story… though it shouldn't be TOO hard to figure out. I suggest it. It doesn't take long, and is a very good story even if the ending made me really angry at Gwaine and Arthur.
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He was fourteen then, big for his age, with knotted brown hair.
The thing about being fourteen—one is never really sure if he or she is an adult or a child. He wasn't completely sure. He would have liked to be an adult, he thought. Adults had it good. They had more freedom. More choices.
More responsibility, pointed out the part of his mind that was really attached to the idea of remaining a child.
When his parents needed something done, they treated him like an adult. But when they wanted to tell him what to do, they treated him like a child. At least it felt that way. So he didn't really know if he was an adult or a child.
It never occurred to him that maybe others weren't quite sure either.
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The next door neighbor was a girl that his parents told him to stay away from.
She wasn't sick, like his younger sibling thought. She wasn't just too wild, like he had thought until recently. She was just on the wrong side of the law.
His parents never told him that. He had to figure it out on his own, but it wasn't too hard. Coming home all the time carrying food she couldn't have hunted or riches she couldn't have earned (especially when her parents, sickly things, couldn't work, and her siblings, lazy things, wouldn't work) made it rather obvious to him.
She was eighteen then, hair like a rat's nest or a broom, clothes always dirty, an unappealing gray. In that, she looked a little like him. But she was small for her age.
She and her rough-and-tough two big brothers would leave sometimes and come home richer, and they would feed those sick parents and lazy little critters that she was so attached to – her siblings, that is. She wasn't attached to the rats, though she had plenty.
He watched, fourteen years old, while his parents taught him not to sink as low as she had.
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One day she came back alone. She had a medicine pack in her one hand, some dead, hunted rabbits in the other, and tears running down her face. In her yard, she fell to her knees.
A sibling came out to meet her, her mother came out to ask what happened.
He was standing in the yard, watching.
The mother's voice hitched. "Drew? Chester?"
He saw the girl look up with flushed cheeks and say, "Don't worry, Ma. I got the one that did it. One of the two, anyway." She cursed and spat on the ground.
He wondered to himself in horror what the other man had felt like. Set upon by bandits, companion dead to a little woman in a gray skirt…
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The first time he ever saw a knight.
After that, he hated knights.
This knight could be seen from a distance, his fine horse and armor almost gleaming. "Cor!" he'd said to himself in a tone of wonder, catching sight of the cape. "What's a knight of Camelot doing around here?"
He was watching from the window.
She was standing in her yard, and when she saw the knight, she panicked. Something like knowing settled upon her, and she nearly ran to her door. She called to her siblings – the only stinking critters she ever cared about, including her own parents with their sickly ways – and sent them out into the forest.
"Pick something," she said. "Be gone at least an hour."
They had gone. She had stayed, twisting her little, bony hands in her dirty white shirt and staring at the approaching knight.
It was a funny thing, how the fourteen year old boy had always thought of knights so generally. If he'd been asked to describe them, he'd have said big. Fine spoken. Gentlemanly. Noble.
This knight had a handsome face. He was big enough. He wore fine armor. His hair was brown and cleaner than the plates the boy ate off of. It swopped down into his face in a funny style—he kept flipping it away.
The knight slid down off his horse.
He looked the girl in front of him up and down.
Flipped his hair, opened his mouth. One word. "Gwaine," he said. And then he drew his sword and stuck it right into her chest.
She choked.
He drew his sword out so quickly that several little drops of blood flew out and hit his cheek, but the knight didn't flinch. And the boy could've sworn he heard him say, "Don't worry, Merlin. I got the one that did it."
All this while the boy watched from a window with his mouth open.
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Gwaine – the knight – came back, and he brought friends.
They rode in, cloaks bright, looking as pretty as you please, and slaughtered everyone.
Well, not everyone.
They had faces like stone, as frozen as the fourteen-year-old's feet when it got very cold. The dead girl's house was the first to be descended upon. Gwaine personally led the charge into it, and with a few spoken words that the boy couldn't catch, he killed those sickly parents and the older siblings.
He left the smaller siblings screaming, crying, clutching onto each other, but he did leave the little critters alive.
Small mercies, and all that.
The boy's parents were terrified, but the whole thing was so quick, they didn't have time to flee. Some of the neighbors, scared by the knights, tried to run. Their grown up bodies littered the ground.
The one with the brown hair – Gwaine, he remembered, Gwaine – burst into the boy's house.
His little sister was rolled into a ball on the floor, screaming bloody murder. His parents were screaming, too, but they did it standing up, holding small things like frying pans for defense.
The boy stood in front of his sister and wished for a weapon. He was only fourteen, not trained, but that was okay. He didn't need training to whack in a panic.
In just a few minutes, the longest of the boy's life, Gwaine killed his parents. They lay together on the ground, blood pooling on the floor around them. His mother's head wasn't connected to her shoulders.
Then Gwaine looked at him, and he stood up straighter in front of his sister. Much good that would do. But it was brave. And noble. (Like a knight? taunted a snickering voice in his head that couldn't be his.)
Gwaine looked at him, his head tilted to the side, blood lust momentarily gone from his eyes.
"Adults only," he mumbled to himself.
He stared at the boy.
The boy stared at him.
Fourteen. Well, he'd wondered if he was an adult or not.
Turned out, the knight wasn't quite sure either.
But apparently fourteen was a child after all, because the knight just turned and left him with his screaming sister.
The boy looked at his dead parents, tears beginning to roll. A child? No, not anymore.
Two dozen adults were killed that day. No children. And the fourteen-year-old adults of the village were the ones who felt like maybe they had cheated death.
Not one of them knew exactly what it was they had done to warrant an attack where the attackers were nobility and they didn't even steal anything.
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He was twenty-four then, always a bit big, with knotted brown hair.
And he was rolling the title Sir about in his head.
He found he hated it. Sir, after all, was a prefix for the men that killed his village. His parents. And now it was a prefix for him.
Sir David, that's my name.
It's horrible, but temporary.
He was a knight of Camelot, actually. A knight for the great King Arthur. (No one noticed the slight mockery he put on the word great.) He was alongside the greatest knights of all time. Knights like Percival, Lancelot, Elyan…
…Gwaine…
It had been a busy ten years since he last saw that great Sir Gwaine. Ten years of training. Then going to Camelot. Fighting for Camelot. Telling a story about how horrible men with swords slaughtered his family and his neighbors, and he, a survivor, learned swordplay to fight for what was right and thereby avenge them where all men could become knights.
It was a familiar story in Camelot. Sir David was welcomed with open arms, trained, then knighted.
And a few days after he was knighted, Sir Gwaine offered the newby a chance to go to the tavern with him. "Drink away troubles, meet some women… eh? You in?"
Sir David had agreed.
He met Sir Gwaine after training. They walked towards the tavern, taking a backstreet.
And then, in a move that Sir David had practiced for ten years, the once-fourteen-year-old drew his sword and, before Gwaine could speak, thrust it into his chest.
After he pulled it out and Gwaine was dead at his feet with his unseeing eyes wide open, Sir David tore off his red cloak and used it to wipe the blood from his sword. He'd always hated knights.
"Don't worry, Mother and Father," he said to himself with a small grin. "I got the one that did it."
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An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
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