Council and Confessions
A week passed.
Slowly. Cruelly. Bathed in never ending tension and embarrassment. Regrets and apologies bounced through the air unspoken, leaving both men unable to meet eyes. The other soldiers observed the tension with quiet concern, doing nothing but watching Gawain and Galahad's sudden rift with the same sort of confusion they'd reserve for Dagonet attending battle in a skirt and hoop. Night followed day. Spring followed winter. Gawain and Galahad followed each other. Some things just were.
Arthur lead his soldiers through the baking farmland, allowing them to been seem at the many small villages that lay in the country surrounding the fort. Their flesh and blood presence dispelled any rumor that Sir Arthur and his knights were no more than legend.
Each town brought its own mix of terror and respect, hate and adoration. Some of the villagers had once called themselves Woads. Now burdened with the citizenship of Rome and civilization, they greeted their indentured protectors with slurs and angry shouts. Gawain, usually outraged by such signs of insolence, remained quiet in his saddle through the worst of it, only looking up when the occasional jeer was loud enough to startle.
His sudden indifference was not lost on the men. Lancelot and Bors jeered him, asking if his lady love had found passion in the arms of a better lover, say, a sheep, cow, or other barnyard animal. Gawain barely responded, and eventually they lost interest. Dagonet asked the nature of his gloom, and received only a short, snapped suggestion to leave him be. The blonde knight was content to remain forlorn. But another in the group was not about to let the soldier slip from his duties.
"Will you tell me what's happened between you?" Arthur asked softly, appearing beside Gawain silently. He looked up and frowned at his leader, casting an eye about for Lancelot. It seemed that for once the young man had abandoned Arthur's side. A glance behind revealed that he'd fallen to the rear of the party and was glaring angrily at Arthur's back.
"Call off your shadow, did you?" Gawain asked, indicating Lancelot's distance. Arthur did not follow his gaze.
"Perhaps" Arthur conceded, looking at the road ahead, "Did you?" He did not have to point out Galahad to know of who he spoke.
Gawain could not stop his eyes as they went to the lonesome figure that the boy presented at the lead of the party. He rode beside Tristan, serving as the scout's unneeded second man. Tristan was a vanguard unto himself.
He'd ridden there since the day after Gawain's...dream. There were few ways that boy could have distanced himself more while riding in a small company along the same trail. But he'd cast his message clear enough. Stay away, stay back, I want no part in your sordid pleasures.
Gawain tore his eyes away and let his sight settle upon the pommel of his saddle. He'd been studying that oft of late.
"What does it matter? It's none of your concern" Gawain mumbled, refusing to look at the man beside him.
Arthur's eyes flashed sharply and the thin lips pressed closer together. "It is if it effects your fighting. You'd be a liar if you told me this hasn't. I've never seen you so lazy in all your years"
Gawain did not respond verbally. He tried to act as if his commander's words had not harmed him. Arthur's criticisms were never overly harsh, but so infrequent that the words had way of striking through the breast bone. Arthur was not a man to exaggerate his praise or reprimands.
For a long while they road in silence. Gawain quietly nursed the wound Arthur's words had left and, even if it was not conscious, sat straighter and taller in his saddle, keeping a closer watch to the roadside forests.
Arthur did not become impatient. The stoic man rarely let such destructive emotions touch him. Yet when he became convinced that Gawain would not speak again without provocation, he shifted in his saddle and spoke.
"You dream of him dying, don't you?"
Gawain's reaction was immediate. His shoulders tightened, eyes shot open, and tongue nervously escaped to lick dry, chapped lips. He coughed, realized that it was an obvious display of stress, tried to stop, and only succeeded in making an inhuman choking noise in the back of his throat.
Arthur only observed him tiredly.
After several failed attempts, he managed to force his tongue and lips to coordinate and create understandable speech.
"Dream of... dream of who?"
Arthur sighed, growing frustrated with the tortured man Gawain presented. It was pathetic. Here was a man that had killed hundreds upon the battlefield, acting coy as a virgin maid.
"Do not think me stupid" Arthur warned, letting irritation creep into his voice, "I know you've entertained men in your bedroom"
Again, Gawain was left speechless. His eyes fluttered as he remembered dozens of stable boys, bards, traveling merchants...any man that had been willing. He'd been careful dammit! Discreet! No one should have known. He'd taken them all to bed, lead them to the pathetic little cell where his worn cot lay. He'd undress them, kiss them, and blow out the lights, letting whatever man that lay beneath him become another in the moonlight.
"How did you know..." Gawain asked desperately, looking up for the first time from his saddle pommel. Such a direct statement was hard to deny.
Arthur looked at him for a long moment before turning away, "That you fancy men or that you love Galahad?"
Gawain closed his eyes against the fear and shame that suddenly filled him. He'd known that Arthur knew his secret nearly from the man's first words, but hearing it put so bluntly brought his predicament to a new plane of reality.
When Gawain again refused to respond, Arthur continued unhindered, "I care not what you do in bed, Gawain. All I've ever cared for is the lives of my men. Seeing as whatever happened between you may jeopardize that, all I can say is that I want it remedied. Immediately"
"There's nothing I can do" Gawain said hollowly, again slouching in his saddle, "I've ruined it." He closed his eyes and tugged at his clumped blonde hair, "For god's sake, the boy hates me"
"He does not hate you" Arthur said flippantly, as if such s statement was so idiotic it was beyond rebuke. "He may not understand you, but he doesn't hate you"
Gawain lifted his head hesitantly to meet the other's man's eyes. He wanted to believe. He wasn't sure if he could.
Arthur broke the stare with a quick look back to the man that was still storming behind them, well out of earshot. For a moment, Gawain was tempted to ask how well Lancelot understood Arthur, if they shared blankets even on warm nights. But the moment passed and he knew that the questions were nothing but prying.
"Fix it" Arthur instructed, turning his horse around, his voice stern once more, "I don't care how, but as long as you're like this, the both of you are worthless soldiers"
Galahad rode the week in tortured solitude, refusing to travel with the bulk of the men behind him. Instead he chose the strange non-company that Tristan provided. In the sluggish week, the older tattooed man said no more than ten words to the man beside him. He may grunt a warning at a ditch in the road several hundred feet ahead, or whistle to his hawk that circled high above the knights, but other than that, the wont to speak did not take him.
To Galahad, this came as a mixed blessing. Tristan's silence provided that the young man was not questioned incessantly about his sudden separation from the man whose side he rarely left. However, the gnawing empty hours provided time for him to relive the night's secret events over and over again. What worried him more than Gawain's actions and whispered confessions was the disgust he failed to feel at the memory. Should he not be appalled? Horrified?
And stranger still, though he'd been newly awake and shocked beyond reason during those fleeting moments, he recalled with stinging clarity the specifics of the stolen kiss. How Gawain's long thick hair had trailed across his cheek when he leaned in. The scrape of his beard against his own. The wet hint of a tongue against his closed lips. The clawing, shameful need to give in and let Gawain...
He coughed, and gripped his reins with sudden ferocity. The sudden, sharp pain of his nails against his palms was nearly enough to drive the thoughts away as if they'd never been. The lingering whisp of something trailed across his memory, taunting like some alleyway whore, and Galahad was nearly too weak to resist it.
"Have you grown sick with something, Galahad?" The young man looked up with a start, surprised that Tristan had spoken. It was the longest sentence he'd heard from the man in days.
Frowning, Galahad answered warily, "Erm, no...I feel fine" When the scout did not speak again, curiosity got the better of the young knight, "Why do you ask?"
Tristan rolled his head to look at him. Though the rest of his face was dark and shadowed, marred by scars, tattoos, and greasy locks of hair, the man's eyes were sharp and shining. He lazily arched his eyebrows at Galahad.
"You've been coughing quite a lot of late. Ought get that examined." A ghost of what may have been a grin stole across his face, "Wouldn't want you to fall ill"
Galahad swallowed nervously, suddenly knowing why it was people feared gypsies. They knew what they shouldn't, said what they please, went as they fancied...and Tristan, for all his leather and blades, had the eyes of the Traveling people.
"Right you are" he muttered eventually, for the first time tempted to forsake the man's company for the men behind him.
The quiet summer afternoon enveloped them for a time. The warm, not yet hot, morning breezes favored their trail briefly, carrying the muted sounds of the forest that flanked their path. A few sparrows chirped from treetop perches, fluttering away before the horses' footfalls and creak of well worn leather armor. There were vague rustles among the roadside bushes, yet since Tristan gave no sign of alarm, Galahad took them for harmless animals.
And even that calm could not dull Galahad's ragged nerves. Again and again his thoughts turned to Gawain. If it was not their kiss his mind lingered on, his thoughts turned to the nature of the emotion that lived and flourished in his chest like a separate entity. It must be some other being, he thought, letting his eyes slip closed. Nothing else could explain the palpable flutter and lurch that the thing gave at Gawain's look and touch.
It had only worsened with the kiss. A fleeting, consuming heat had raced through him, and left him hollow at its lost. And while that confused emptiness skittered across his mind like some ill-observed phantom, there was another loss that pained him more deeply. He had not spoken to Gawain for days. He had not ridden with him, laughed with him...kept warm with him.
Galahad winced as he remembered the night that followed Gawain's...attempt. It had rained again, cold and hard. Deliberately, he'd set up his blankets alone, welcoming the cold in place of Gawain's warmth. He had tried to avoid the other's eyes as he did so, feeling foolishly guilty. He'd failed. In a single glance, cursed with guilty clarity, he'd seen the pain and despair in Gawain's face, and was cut deeper than any blade could dream to reach. Gawain had turned away quickly, trying to hide his slain attempt at reconciliation. He'd carried his blankets loosely as he walked away, unknowingly letting them drag in the bubbling muck of the campsite. Rejection had rolled off him in waves. The warmth in Galahad's chest had shuddered, as if struck a heavy blow, and rapidly cooled into ice that still lingered.
Fighting to return to the present, Galahad sighed and looked skyward. Tristan's hawk still soared above them, looking majestic and free. Such sweet illusions...
Tristan noticed and followed Galahad's gaze, smiling at the boy's bitter expression. He was a portrait of innocence spoiled. The boy's face was still young, miraculously free of the deep lines and dull eyes that lifetime soldiers wore with pride. The wide eyes he'd come to them with would never go dull. Instead, they'd sharpened into spear points which he angrily threw at the trials before him. Time had only hewed his self-hate and injustice. Arthur was his mentor, the knights his friends, but the boy made no attempt to hide his intentions after his service ended. Tristan wondered if he'd even considered parting with Gawain. There were bonds and changes that followed men from the battlefield. No amount of miles would stop that.
"It's not a life easily lived" Tristan said suddenly, obviously startling Galahad for the second time that morning. He trained his eyes on a hillcrest several miles in the distance and spoke quietly, knowing that his words were ones the young man had no desire to hear. "We could go into battle on the morrow and not return...t'were I you, I'd take any comfort offered. There's no chance for regret in lives such as ours"
Galahad turned to stare at the now distracted man beside him. Tristan was thoughtfully observing his hawk as it pin wheeled through the sky. Slack jawed, the young man could only blink at the scout for several moments, wondering if he knew as much as he acted he did, and thanking the gods that the man fought with the knights, not against them. Such a man could make or break a war.
"What is it that you think you know of me?" Galahad demanded sharply, letting fear fueled anger creep into his voice.
Tristan did not look at him, but kept his eyes locked skyward. "More than you'd like to know, boy"
There was such a certain, deliberate tone to his voice that Galahad was not only convinced, he was frightened. Reining his horse without another word, he let the strange old scout gain several feet on him. When he nudged his horse to a walk several seconds later, he did not realize how adrift he was among the men. Separated from the majority of his brothers behind him, and again from the solitary man before him, he was alone on the crowded stretch of highway.
He rode sullenly, eyes locked to a frame of sight bordered by his horse's ears, seeing and not bothering to comprehend. An anguished look flashed across his face and he wished with all his being that Gawain had never touched him.
Yet to his horror and instant disclaim, the something within his chest gurgled and warmed at the memory. Do you? Asked some loathsome part of his psyche, Do you truly?
AN: Warm a young gail's 'eart. Review.