I'm sorry, but I think Gawain is too pretty a name to ruin by dropping a vowel.
-O-^-O
Victory.
Everywhere their enemies lay strewn on the rocky hillside, mustard yellow and silver dots on the brilliant green carpet.
He looked around at his men, heart swelling with relief and not a little pride. They had won, and sustained a bare minimum of casualties. Among the sea of scarlet which was seeping back to the camp from every side, he spotted familiar face after familiar face, each one bringing a new wave of gratitude and relief. They were all fine. Really fine.
Gawain was approaching with Perceval in toe, he grinned leisurely but, Arthur noted, there was a hint of desperate relief and quiet disbelief in his wide eyes, and when he spoke, there was a far off note of panic, a ghost of hysteria.
"Still alive then Princess?"
He knows then the man is counting up his comrades, just as he is. This wasn't just a little fray with one or two renegade bandits, this was a battle for Camelot. This was their battle for freedom. With one mocking remark, Gawain brings Arthur back to the vicious reality. For the first time he sees the bodies strewn on the ground, sees his men who entrust their life to him. He sees where he's failed them.
"Yeah," he replies, his eyes picking out the red of his men, glancing from a peaceful looking man with a wild black beard, to a blond man with a gaunt and weary face, to a boy, barely even a man. By all rights he shouldn't have been fighting at all.
"We did well."
They're following his gaze, he knows. He can feel the two men gazing with him at the boy.
"We had better head back to the camp."
They turned together and walked in silence towards the far off woods where they had made camp the day before. He hardly notices when Gawain falls back, lost in silent thought, prayer mixed with silent homage, mixed with numb relief. But then he hears the shout,
"Arthur?"
Quavering, tentative, the panic coming back to life.
He begins to turn around to look at the man, but he doesn't need to. By some silent force, Arthurs eyes are drawn to the same point as Gawains in passing as he turns.
It was not the figure that sparked the thought he was sure, because the chilling realisation hit him in exactly the same second his eyes focused on the limp form.
There was one who he had not counted amongst the living who trudged, stumbled, hobbled, limped past him.
Alone in the sea of red, green, yellow, silver, was a brown form, highlighted by flashes of blue and red.
The world freezes and falls in around him. The figure lays still, wind ruffling raven hair and ghosting through light fabric. In that moment, victory is withdrawn.
The boy is sprawled against the cold hillside, his body propped half upright by the ridge of silver rock jutting out between his shoulder-blades. His head is hanging backwards, suspended one or two feet off the grass, leaving his neck and the skin of the underside of his chin exposed to the vast grey sky. One arm is trapped between his body and the stone where the jagged lump of granite he is lying on meets another at a right angle, the other is flung out to the side, curled fingers smeared with dried blood. There is a steady drip-drip-drip as blood hits the rocks beneath him, spilling from the back of his head, but more worrying is the burghundy stain surrounding a small ragged hole in the fabric, barely any bigger than a button hole.
The silver blade was approximately an inch wide, a goose quills width thick at it's thickest point, and as long as the hand of a grown man. It was, in short, the perfect size to just slip between the forth and fifth ribs up from the bottom, round on the young man's right side, where the bones just begin to sweep upwards towards the heart. It would have taken a strong initial thrust to break through the cartilage and sinew, but once that barrier had been penetrated, with a nasty cracking noise no doubt, then the soft flesh beneath would be only to easy for the knife to perforate, breaching the man's lungs in a fraction of a second, guided by the bones on either side.
Too short.
Not long enough for any man to do more than turn, wide eyed to his assailant and stumble backwards, only stopping when a stone sends him tumbling backwards onto a rocky outcrop of sharp grey rocks.
His hands ghost over his ribcage, fluttering over the wound in shock, not feeling, never believing.
And then he breaks eye contact with the man, leering through a dull mousey beard, as he falls. His head is wrenched forward with a crack as it meets the cold stone and for just a second he loses himself. He looks down at the laceration, one trembling hand finally floats down to the small red tear and comes away sticky and warm. Then he feels it. Then the world seems to resume its constant pace. Hours, days, years, all come back into existence. Not that they held much use to him any more; The world of soldiers was never one he had belonged in, and it was one he surely wouldn't be in much longer.
There were men running, screaming, yelling incomprehensible commands. The world was moving again and he was being left behind.
As the darkness encircles him, taking first his fingers and toes, then pulsing through his limbs and up his body, in the moments between the death of the stabbing cold and the moment his consciousness slips away, he hears the last whisper of the wind, and it says "victory", so he steps into the unknown.