A/N: Here's a little ficlet about Tristan, because, seriously, he IS the shit. No pairing, no slash, just a little POV piece from an indeterminate character. All comments and suggestions are welcome. NO FLAMES. Enjoy!
Carrion
By: rondo
I like to watch him sometimes. He's easy to watch, like a bird in flight or a banner flapping bravely against the fog. There's nothing taxing about these things, they just are. There's nothing taxing about him, not the restrained, angry intensity in Arthur, not the brash crudeness in Bors, not the frustration, the bitterness in Galahad. He is in himself some other kind of entity altogether. I'm intrigued by it. There aren't many men who can slice another man in two with the almost frightening stillness that I see in him. He hews limbs from body, thrusts his long blade deep into flesh, causing more damage on the way out than in thanks to the just-curved tip, and all with the same quiet and reserve. It's the easiest thing in the world to observe, and at the same time it's chilling, unsettling to see such unapologetic carnage and be unaffected. Even after all the many lives I've taken myself, I still believe there should be something felt when a man is killed, instead of this mild interest, this casual regard, instead of this…nothing, as if he were merely throwing knives into a beam of wood instead of some man's exposed throat.
All the same, he's an enigma, one I'd like to understand a little better if not solve, perhaps though I shouldn't. A man is the way he is for a reason, his own reason, and it's no other man's place to try and divine that reason. I would never suspect him of being something other than what he claims to be (little though that is), but there are times when I look into his half-squinting eyes, and it may just be the light (little though that is either) that makes me notice it, though I notice it all the same. There is something in them that cannot be seen, but speaks of a wildness almost, something far and away from anything that might try and touch it. A part of me, a tiny part that perhaps is more primal instinct than anything else, is wary of that, not out of fear, not at all, but out of something more akin to wary respect, the kind a hunter might give to a prowling wolf. And then, he will shift, one of the many small movements that characterize him, and it will be gone, leaving me to wonder if it was just the rank smell of week-old death, and unacknowledged fear still simmering under layers of dirt and blood and Woad that made me see it in the first place.
I would never confide this to anyone, not even Arthur. I get the feeling sometimes that the only reason I'm seeing it is because he wants me to see it (which opens up a whole array of possibilities about why that might be that leave me going in circles for hours), and if he's going to entrust this fragment to me, however small and strange and maybe not real, it is not in me to betray my thoughts to anyone else. He's tossing scraps, and I can either take them and do with them what I wish or I can leave them for the carrion eaters who might be more interested in them than I. Do with them what you will, his eyes tell me, while his hands do their even, measured work with knife and unfortunate rodent, If you want to eat, if you want to see, you'll have to take what I'm ready to give you. I take them because I'm not about to get much else, but for all my thinking I'm still nothing but a knight, who would've been little more if not for the heavy burden of Roman double sided mercy, and I'm really in no position to string together all the scraps and make them into something easily understood.
And it's hard not to think that he might fall before I ever do.