I dream sometimes.
I'm not so much of a fool that I would expect anyone to find this inconspicuous, or special. Everyone dreams. Gaius does, often. About what, I'm disinclined to try and find out. Sometimes, he grouches and squirms and complains about his bad back. Differentiating between Gaius when he is conscious, and when he is asleep, is hard at most times. Other times, very rarely, he dreams of the Purge. He's never told me this, but I know. I hate those nights, where I have to wake him from his night terrors after I hear his distress from my room. He never seems to recall those dreams, or never mentions them, at least. But the mornings after he looks more pale and tired, than usual. As if he had suffered through those twenty years all over again.
I remember, my mother, she dreamed all the time. She would talk in her sleep. Sometimes, she would mumble names under her breath, names that made no sense to me, except for my own. Nights like that made me feel guilty. Usually, she wouldn't say my name, but call it. She'd reach her hands forward into the dark, and I would sit by her and watch as tears rolled down her cheeks, and I was afraid to wake her, because she would remember the dream with me in it that had caused her pain, and she would no longer love me. Of course, I am ashamed that I thought this, now. But, to be fair, in the mind of a child, any terrible, impossible thing is suddenly made likely in the solitude and black of the night. It was best to wait until morning, to wake her. I'd always get up early, back then. Arthur complains that I always sleep in too late, nowadays. He's right, of course. But I hold true to the theory that my body's making up for what it never got when I was a boy.
I would always wake just short after dawn. No matter what day it was, no matter how unlikely, I always begged my mother to take me for breakfast by the creek. I didn't care if we ate three day old biscuits, or gruel. Any meal was magical if I could just spend a little while in a patch of damp grass by the water, with my mother. Any meal was a feast when I was apart from a village that shunned me, and I could pretend I was anywhere or anyone else. I could be a prince, watering his horses while on a dangerous quest. I could be part of a miraculous caravan, a trickster who could make rivulets of liquid spout from his fingers with a skilled slight of hand, or a masterful secret. Of course, I never told my mother about these imaginings. She always told me I was perfect the way I was. She always told me I was special. I believed her for the first ten years, but then upon entering my early manhood, began to resent the word "special". It no longer meant anything to me but sidelong glances, derisive sneers, and suspicious glares. It meant words like "bastard" and "filth", and doors being shut in my face.
I suppose this contributed to the fact that even my mother, the one person who despite all exhaustion and tribulation, never gave up on me, not once, I lost faith in. She was the one who loved me throughout it all. She was the one who survived through my magical tantrums, accidents triggered by emotional outbursts. She was the one who dealt with the burnt patches of hay and the chicken's inexplicable loss of his feathers.
And I still doubted her in the darkest times.
For a time, I was convinced that she and Will would leave me, that they would eventually hate me just as much as everyone else.
And for a time, I wouldn't have blamed them.
When I do dream, it isn't usually about those days. I dream about the here and now, mostly. I dream that I can't move, am forced to watch as Arthur is slain before my eyes and Camelot is turned to rubble. I dream about Freya, that she is still alive, and has returned to me. We live together in a home, with a garden that she tends. And we have a child. And I always wake up before I can watch them burn to ashes.
But sometimes, on those few blessed nights, I dream of the future. I dream of Albion, of Arthur's accepting smile as a crown is placed upon his head. I dream of applause, the people of Camelot cheering and praising, chanting my name against the wind. And everyone knows. And all is perfect.
Those are the nights when I wake up early once again, like I used to in the days of my innocence. I walk to the window and watch the first rays of dawn shine over the horizon, bathing the city and its people in the warm glow of new days, and new possibilities. Those are the times that I don't think of what little I had, but cherish how much I have.
For I have a home, and a destiny. And the sun will always rise again.
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