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* I forgot to put this in the note last chapter. This is "Season 0" where I deal with all the immediate repercussions of killing the dragon before skipping ahead 20 years to the start of the series. I'm aiming for 13 chapters and its all outlined and half-written, so updates should be quick in coming.

* I couldn't quite convince myself the older generation's actions would pan out the same without the dragon. It's like the proverbial elephant in the room for these people, never acknowledge but they all know its chained up under Camelot. So this is what they would have done if there wasn't that consideration to take into account.

* This chapter and the next set everything up and then the changes start trickling in. It'll all be give-and-take, so don't worry: the start of Season 1 won't be too thrown off.

**/

0x02 - Strangers Under One Roof

In a darkened room lit only by the cracks in the wood between the planks of the door and the diminishing stump of a candle, Hunith wrapped a bundle of cloths around a tiny, squalling figure. With a pleased expression on her face, she smiled at the red-faced, panting woman lying on the cot beside her. "It's a boy."

The woman stretched out her arms and gingerly took the bundle of swaddling cloth, tentatively running a finger down the tiny face in front of her. "William," she crooned, "You're my William. Like your daddy."

From the shadows near the doorway, the man in question stepped forward, pressing a coin into Hunith's hand. With a quick word of thanks, the man walked over to put his hand on his wife's shoulder, standing comfortingly beside her. The woman glanced up at him, exchanging a long look of pure love with her husband, and together they directed that loving, proud look at their newborn son.

Hunith slipped quietly out the door, not wishing to intrude on such an intimate moment, a smile still playing across her face. The bright sunlight stung her eyes after the dark lighting of the birthing room, but after a moment her eyes adjusted and she straightened up her headscarf. The position of the sun told her the cow was likely lowing in displeasure, her stomach hung low with milk. With a brisk step Hunith made her way to the animal shelter, humming under her breath.

Hunith enjoyed the times when putting her meagre knowledge to use aided in the everyday scrapes that came with peasantry life. She was the best a small village like Ealdor could hope for, and what she made on the side helping the villagers with their lesser ills and injuries went a long way in supporting the single woman living alone. She loved the role of healer-woman she played for the village, and births were by far her favourite to help with.

As a little girl, Hunith had been the child who carried around her straw doll everywhere, spoonfeeding it at dinnertime and changing its imaginary nappies, telling off teasing boys not for what they were doing to her, but because they were upsetting her "baby". Even as she grew into her teen years, it had been her dearest dream to some day be like the mother from earlier herself. A baby sleeping in her arms, a vaguely featured yet kind-looking husband standing alongside her, maybe a few older children tugging on the hem of her dress asking eagerly to see their baby sibling's face... but as an unmarried woman of 25 she had long ago faced reality and admitted her chance of that kind of life was sinking with each passing year.

Hunith may not have received a conventional education, but she could read and write and knew more than a fair bit about herbs and the human body. It was a trait attractive for a healer, not a wife, and none of the village men her age had glanced at her after she received a letter from her brother and they discovered her literacy. Initially she'd been disappointed, but that had been nearly eight years ago now. She'd long ago made peace with the knowledge that few men wanted to marry a woman more knowledgeable than them, and found joys in her life that didn't involve a family of her own. Sometimes it got a little lonesome returning home to an empty cottage, but she had lots of friends - even if all of them were now married with children and seldom had the time for her anymore - and she managed well enough alone.

These days she contented herself with the sight of other women's children running around the village, and told herself that as the midwife she too had a role in bringing these little ones into the world. And if she doted a touch excessively on each of the village children, or privately frowned at their exasperated mothers and told herself she'd do a much better job if given a chance, well, who was to know?

But today was not a day to envy. It was a good day; she had helped bring a child into the world, and she could not envy the parents their joy when she was so full of her own. Despite being fetched from her cot when the moon was still hanging as a growing sliver of silver in the night sky and spending the next twelve hours in a stifling birthing room comforting a terrified first time mother and father, Hunith felt nothing today could dampen her good mood.

Then she saw a strange man lurking outside her lean-to shelter, and her good mood hissed away little a merry little fire doused with a bucket of water. His was wearing well-cut clothing that Hunith's peasant's eyes recognized as being bought from a tailor, not hand-spun. They were worn, not in the way that suggested age but in a way suggesting recent travel or work. Course dark hair framed his long face, the shadow of a beard creeping across the bottom as if he was used to shaving but recently was unable to. Something about the way he held himself reminded the lowborn woman of the local lord's son, from the little she had seen of him on his routine patrols, and there was something about him that spoke of power, though she couldn't name what made her think it. His dark eyes didn't seem to want to settle on anything, constantly flickering to and fro with a steely look in them. They noticed her almost immediately, settling on her with an intensity that was smouldering.

Alarm bells were ringing in her head; this was not just a peasant from a nearby village coming to her for a broken leg or colicky child. A knight perhaps, or the disgraced son of a lord was more likely considering his appearance was of someone who was well-to-do but recently hit some trouble. She had no idea what someone like that would want with her. Perhaps he was one of Cenred's tax-collectors, here to demand she pay him Cenred's ludicrously high rate plus whatever additional charge he intended to pocket. Or perhaps he was sent from Camelot, heaven knows her recent nightmares all featured men in red capes dragging her away. Or perhaps he had fallen in with the wrong crowd and was sent to... she didn't even know what. Demand she hand over money or he would rough her up?

Or perhaps he was a perfectly innocent man with perfectly innocent reasons to be lurking outside her door, staring at her with eyes that seemed to burn right through her to her very soul, revealing a woman who was much less self-assured than she'd like people to believe. She'd never find out if she just stood there being stared at.

Squaring her shoulders and self-consciously brushing down her skirts - dusty from hours of kneeling on the floor holding the young mother's hand - as best she could, Hunith walked straight up to the stranger with her head held high and a non-expression on her face to hide her nervousness.

"Is there anything I can help you with?"

The man shifted slightly on his feet, turning to better face her. His deep voice was gruff, as though he did not often speak and it had grown scratchy from disuse, "I'm waiting for a woman who I'm told lives here... Hunith?"

That last word was a question all on its own, not so much inquiring whether he had got the name right as it was asking her to supply more information. Trying to hide her growing alarm, Hunith asked as neutrally as she could. "Who's looking for her?"

"My name's Keith." The man said was a deliberate studiedness that Hunith had been hearing a lot in the last months. The spark of an idea was kindled in her mind by that too-familiar tone, so she was not as surprised as she would otherwise have been when he continued with, "I was sent here by Gaius. I was told she knows him."

Hunith's shoulders sagged in relief; Gaius had never sent anyone dangerous her way. At last letting her guard drop and trying to rekindle her ruined good mood, she smiled a bit shakily. "Well, you've found her. I'm Hunith." Bypassing the animal shelter and opening the door to her house, she said, "Why don't we go inside?"

The man followed after her without a word, shutting the door behind him. Hunith moved to lower the window shade, even though it was the only light source. Darkness enveloped them, only a little light trickling in from the crack under the door. She beckoned the man away from the window and door, glancing at each before saying in a voice that was as soft as she could make it and still be audible. "You say Gaius sent you. You came from Camelot, then?"

The man nodded. It was difficult to tell what his expression was in the dark, which did little to reassure her. Hunith pushed aside her doubts - of course he looked sketchy, they all did after being chased through the wild, just most of them had seemed a lot more helpless and thus easier to be relaxed around. It was easier to pity those who looked pitiful. They'd also all worn old hand-spun cloth, and seemed like people she could pass in a village like Ealdor without thinking anything remarkable about them. The stranger in front of her was not like that.

Even just standing in the dark of her one-room cottage, he drew the eye as though power was an invisible cloak on his shoulders. She wondered who he was before he had been forced to flee; he seemed as different to the terrified, wounded people who knocked on her door quivering as they whispered "Are you Hunith?" as the lord of this area was to a lowly peasant like her. Hunith did not have good experiences with people of power. She'd seldom seen them do any good for anyone lower than them, and even the good some of them did do was nothing she would have found remarkable had it been done by a lower born person.

Nonetheless, it was the physicians code to help all in need equally, regardless of ones feelings of the person in particular, and though Hunith was not herself a physician she had been raised by them. Offers of assistance were not meant to be limited by things like the possibility of catching the illness oneself, whether the person could rob one blind the moment one turned ones back on them, or whether one was a woman living alone and the person in need of assistance was a tall, powerful man who could easily overpower her if he was so inclined.

It is not good to doubt others intentions, she told herself firmly. If she turned away everyone who might somehow hurt her, she'd be condemning a lot of people to perfectly preventable suffering.

Hunith pressed on, choosing the same careful words she had learned to use with the foreign guests Gaius had sent her way in the last months after she had blundered her way through the first few encounters. "And you left in a hurry, I dare say?"

Again, the man nodded, giving her no further explanation. She hardly needed one, it was not as if he was the first. Besides his look of fallen nobility look, another reason as to why she had not immediately recognized him as one of Gaius's refugees struck her then; he had nothing with him, not even a small bag crammed in haste with the bare essentials. They had all had something, either what they could grab as they ran or what Gaius provided them when he sent them off. They had also all known her name, but he had had to ask.

She had a horrible feeling about this. She broke one of her personal policies towards Gaius's refugees and asked a question she normally never would. "Where are you headed to after this?"

The man sounded uncertain for the first time. "Gaius told me to come here. There was nothing after that in his note."

"Note?" she questioned in a high voice. All the others had spoken to Gaius in person. "May I see it?"

"I destroyed it after reading it."

Either he was making it all up, trying to catch her in a trap and drag her off to be beheaded for sheltering sorcerers, or else he was in straits much more desperate than the others she had fed and housed and sent on their way.

The ground beneath her feet felt more flimsy than it usually did. What was she to do? Could she trust him? She had to, didn't she? What kind of person would she be if she turned him away and this turned out to be his greatest hour of need? She wouldn't be able to live with herself, always wondering what had become of the man she turned her back on. Besides, he had mentioned Gaius. No one knew of Gaius's role in helping escaping sorcerers - surely the news of the execution of the Royal Physician of the kingdom Ealdor bordered would have reached her. He was more likely to be telling the truth than lying.

But he'd already spoken to her neighbours. How would they explain this away to them? How long would he be staying with her? How could she share her home indefinitely with someone she didn't know?

Doubts never helped anyone. She would just have to do it, and deal with everything as it came. She had a standard of personal integrity she was beholden unto herself to uphold, and doing less than everything she could to help someone in need was not an option.

She said staunchly, mustering up all the false bravado she had to use as the closest thing Ealdor had to a healer and the only woman in the village who could get away with bossing around the men, "While you're here, Keith is as good a name as any. What did you tell people when they asked why you were looking for me?"

"That I was bringing news of my friend's death to his next of kin."

Hunith distractedly fiddled with a stray lock of hair while she thought, as though that small action could chase away the uncertainty clenching her innards. "Your friend, he could be my... second cousin. And the reason you can't go back after delivering the message... because you lost your job. With my second cousin's death. Because... because he was your boss! Yeah! You worked for him as his assistant. Gathering herbs, delivering potions... stuff that an old physician can't get up to on his own. But you didn't pick up any employable skills while there, so..."

"...so I came here to try my luck in farming." The man finished seriously, sounding as though he were actually a mere out of luck former apprentice concluding his tale to his potential landlady. Relief coursed through Hunith at how quickly he caught on - the ones who couldn't lie to save their life were the worst.

"And I decided to take you in, being grateful for your kindness to my cousin." Hunith strode over to the window, throwing it open to let light stream in. Grabbing a pail, she headed for the shelter, calling louder than strictly necessary. "Of course, Keith, of course you can stay! How could I turn away someone who stayed with poor, dear old cousin Marcus up until he breathed his last? Please, make yourself comfortable. I must go milk the cow, but I shall be back as soon as possible."

Hunith had scarcely begun the milking when Old Ann next-door stepped out her house. Looking more surprised than she should at the sight of Hunith going about her daily chores, she hobbled towards her with a quickness that she didn't often display at her age. With a smile that attempted to look natural, she exclaimed in feigned warmth, "Hunith my dear! How good to see you! How are you this fine day?"

Schooling her face into casual pleasantry, Hunith replied, "I am fine, thanks for asking. How are you?"

"Oh, very well, thanks." Eyes gleaming like a magpie, she continued with feigned naturalness, "I thought I heard something just now - might have just been my imagination, ears aren't as good as they once were - something about a guest?"

"Oh," Hunith said in surprise, as if she hadn't shouted it for half the street to hear, "Oh you heard that, did you? Yes, that's right. My second cousin Marcus just past away - poor old man, ever since his wife died his health hasn't been what it used to be - so his assistant came to give me the news. Very sweet of him, don't you think? He went to inform Gaius - you remember him, of course - first and then journeyed here all the way from Camelot."

"How kind of him." Old Ann simpered. "It's so nice you're letting him stay for... I'm sorry, dear, how long did you say?"

"I have no idea. Without Marcus, he's lost his only livelihood. I can hardly turn him out, now can I?"

"Quite. Poor... oh, he's name must have slipped my mind."

"Keith."

"Oh yes, that's right. Handsome fellow, isn't he?" Old Ann said, apparently done pretending not to have been glued to her window the moment she caught the wiff of a gossip-worthy story loitering outside of her unmarried neighbour's home. "Around your age, I should think. It's good having a nice, strong man around."

With a satisfied air, she said, "If you'll excuse me dear, I think I'll go see how my daughter is getting along with the little ones." Old Ann shuffled down the street, and Hunith ducked her head to hide her satisfied smile. No doubt juicy rumours of Hunith's poor, kind, handsome guest - who was of excellent age to make a good match with poor unmarried Hunith - would be known by every wife in the village by the time Old Ann arrived back home. For once, pushy old matrons poking their noses in Hunith's non-existent love life would work in her favour, or rather in Keith's.

By the time the men came home from the fields, "Keith" was a new but accepted part of village life. It was one hurdle taken care of, and she counted it as a victory, even if it resulted in raised eyebrows and sly smirks from nearly all the people she knew.

It was lucky it was summer, or else Hunith would not have had enough blankets to share with her guest. As it was he was substituting a bag of chicken feed for a pillow. Although Hunith apologized and assured him she was spinning more bedding, he did not complain. In fact, the man said very little at all, even when "welcomed" by Old Ann next-door with a stew and barge of questions of which an uncomfortable amount concerned his love life. The only thing Hunith learned from his terse answers was that he was not, and had never been, married. Old Ann's eyes had gleamed at this news, and Hunith shuddered to think of the sly matchmaking schemes cooking behind those crow-like eyes.

He slipped into village life like a shadow, rising before dawn to work the fields like all of them did. With him working in the fields in her place, Hunith stayed at home spinning away to double the bedding, and they only saw each other when he came home for meals. Hunith had the strange feeling she was being cast in the role of housewife, to a stranger she was not even married to. Yet she could not grudge the reprieve - strange though it felt - and the chance to finally get to cleaning tasks she had left off for far too long. Usually they piled up while she worked the field or tended to the ill, until one of her neighbours overly casually volunteered to help her with her housekeeping. Though she was grateful for the help, it was embarrassing to have to accept.

The days went by since his arrival, but she and the man going by the name Keith had not properly spoken once. The hushed conversion of unsaid words when they first met was the closest they had come to talking, the rest of the time they only communicated when necessary. "Supper's ready" or "No, let me" or "Thank you" were the extent of their conversations, and even then it was Hunith doing the speaking. "Keith" hadn't said anything since Old Ann had barged in to pull monosyllabic answers from him.

It was safer this way, Hunith knew in her head, and it was a policy she had implemented with the others Gaius had sent her. The difference, she was finding out, was that while letting a stranger stay the night with no questions asked was fairly easy, letting one share her home indefinitely was not so.

It was strange to live so silently with someone else around, it was nothing at all like the easy companionship with her guardians that she remembered from the years before she lived alone. She suddenly missed having her home all to herself. Although it had been lonely sometimes, it was always there to welcome her after a hard day. These days her sanctuary of rest left her feeling on edge with the additional presence of someone she did not know what to make of. She itched to dispel the silence with chatter, the way she often did around patients that occasionally found their way into her home while recuperating. However, there was something dark in his eyes so that made the words die in her throat.

And that was the true problem of the matter: there was something dark about Keith, and had he not said he was sent by Gaius she would have even said there was a sense of danger about him. She had a hard time grasping just what it was, but the little things he did - slamming doors, glaring holes into the walls with his moody staring, stomping rather than walking, his terse one-word answers to all the questions the curious villagers asked him - all of it set her on edge. It wasn't that he had done anything to her - he hadn't - it was that she had no idea what he was thinking behind those dark eyes.

She could feel those eyes on her whenever her back was turned, though she had never caught him staring. As soon as she'd turn around she'd see he was looking in the opposite direct, but when she'd turn away she could feel his gaze on her once again. She told herself she was being hypocritical, as she was often sneaking glances at him too. After all, with the thick silence of matters of any real importance lying between them, she knew nothing about what type of person he was, only that he knew Gaius and even then she was just taking his word for it.

She tried telling herself that she was being unreasonable, that he had given her no reason to be wary of him. Except his eyes, which had a dark depth to them that reminded Hunith of a river her guardians and she had passed while traveling when she was a child. The water looked calm, flowing at a steady trickle, and the young Hunith had gone to play in it.

All had seemed well at first, the cool water flowing slowly around her felt refreshing on the hot summer's day. Hunith had waded in until the water came nearly to her shoulders, enjoying the weightless feel and splashing her hair so the sun did not beat so harshly against the top of her head. When suddenly, she spotted a water snake swimming not two arm spans in front of her. Filled with a childish fear, she scrambled backwards, screaming. The next moment happened so fast Hunith could only in retrospect suppose that in her haste to back away she had tripped against a rock and lost her footing, but at the time all she knew was one moment her head had been above the water, and the next she was under.

It felt as though hands were tugging on her feet, dragging her along, and Hunith tried to kick to the surface without knowing where the surface was. She'd instinctively shut her eyes, and opened them. Ignoring the painful sting of cold water in her sensitive eyes, she wildly twisted to try and find where she had come from. She thought she saw a light shining distortedly somewhere and - thinking it the sun reaching through the watery veil separating them - Hunith kicked towards it to no avail. It never drew any closer to her, as though she was fighting against chains dragging her down into the depths. A roar filled her ears, oddly musical. Her eight-year-old mind had hysterically though the river was singing to her, recalling tales she'd heard of sailors being lured to their deaths. The river was singing, singing a curse to stop her from going up, and each note drew her deeper and deeper. With her funeral dirge in her ears, she had been sure she would die, when she felt something close around her arm and drag her in one direction.

Her head broke the surface and she was pulled out and onto a bridge by a woman she had never met before. An abandoned water pitcher was rolling to the side, emptied of its recently fetched contents, where the woman said she'd dropped it upon seeing a child getting pulled along by the current. Hunith had gasped for air and cried, hugging the stranger in front of her in her distress as though she was her mother. The woman had been both comforting and chiding, telling Hunith she was very foolish to go in water she knew nothing about. That was the day Hunith learned a new word, the word to describe the force which had almost taken her life: undercurrent.

Sometimes when Hunith looked into her guest's eyes, she thought she saw an undercurrent lurking there. And when she did, Hunith lost whatever desire she had to discover what lay under the deceptively calm surface of "Keith".

In the end, it was Keith himself who broke the tacit silence of their living arrangement.

It was night time, long after she had blown out the last candle, but Hunith had been unable to sleep. She'd finally finished the new bedding and had put away her winter supplies, and it was beginning to dawn on her that she truly didn't know how long Keith would be staying with her. All the other people Gaius had sent her way had not stayed long. She had only asked where they were going the first time, and in return had garnered nothing but a suspicious rebuttal of why she wanted to know, but she imagined they had other friends or family to stay with, or perhaps some skill that did not paint them as targets in the war of magic that was sweeping far past Uther's border. Most of them had had some supplies, even if only a small bag with a few necessities thrown in.

But as she'd noted from the first day, Keith had no bag. He hadn't known her name either, had had to ask around and arose the attention of her nosy neighbours. He hadn't asked her for supplies, nor to let him stay the night. He had seemed just as lost about what to do as she had felt. And so she had opened her home to him, because he had come looking for it without even knowing her name, with no alternative available to him. She had known then that he would stay longer than her other guests and had thought she understood the indefinite nature of the time spent living together.

But it was only then, as she finished Keith's bedding and put away her winter blankets, that she wondered if it would become a permanent fixture of her house. If Keith would continue to sleep across the cottage from her. If every night she would lie there, as she was now, feeling him looking at her in the dark and the skin of her neck rising as she wondered why it was that he was always looking at her. It was then, in the dark and being watched, that Hunith could not help herself from thinking that she was like a naive lamb inviting a masked man into her home, and wondering what would she do if when the mask was lifted it was a wolf staring back at her.

Heart beating too fast and eyes shut too tightly, she was so fervently counting sheep (two thousand three hundred twenty-two, two thousand three hundred twenty-three...) that she almost missed that life changing whisper,

"Why are you doing this?"

It was more words than either of them had spoken to each other since their hushed introduction a week ago.

Abandoning her futile efforts to will the obliviousness of sleep onto herself, Hunith sat up and faced where she knew he slept. The windows were shut for the night, and all that surrounded them was blackness, but she had a sense that he was not just lying in his bed roll any longer, either. Staring out into the darkness, she asked,

"P-pardon?"

"You're risking your life to hide me." He said listlessly, as though it was a puzzle he had been turning over and over, trying to shove squares in round pegs, until he'd finally thrown up his hands and fallen to the floor, too tired to consider it any longer. "You're sharing everything you have with me, even though you don't even know my name. Not only that, I've seen the way your neighbours whisper about us. There's nothing in this for you. And I know you're uncomfortable around me - what woman living alone wouldn't be nervous about opening her home to a man she knows nothing of?"

The darkness hid her shame-faced blush. She had no idea her silent stranger was so perceptive. "It's not that I think you'll try anything - you've had more than enough opportunity to already, if you were that kind of man - it's just..."

"I know," bitterness dripping from his words like acid. Hunith had the feeling that he wasn't speaking of him and her when he said, "Oh believe me, I know that people can't always be trusted, no matter how honeyed their words."

"I'm sorry." She whispered, wishing her covers would swallow her whole. She'd take the uneasy silence over this mortifying exposure of all her ugly doubts. "You've done nothing to make me doubt you."

"Don't be. You can't trust people. I'm not blaming you, I just -" frustration crept into the man's voice. "I just don't understand why you're giving so much, for someone who for all you know could turn around and stab you in the back when you're least expecting it."

She swallowed, her throat clogging and eyes stinging. She had known, of course, that life had not been kind to this man. He was one of Gaius's refugees, after all. She had even suspected that he had lost far more than the others who found their way to her door, that the darkness in his eyes that frightened her had its foundations in unjust cruelty inflicted by a tyrants hands. But it hurt, to hear anyone question an act of kindness as though it was unfathomable that someone would hold out a helping hand.

He needed to hear her answer, to understand that there was goodness in people as well as the bad which had brought his suffering to him. And perhaps she needed to tell someone about all she had been holding inside since the Purge began, before the secret feelings she kept from her village friends ate away at her. "I don't know. I just... It just... It isn't right. I've visited Gaius in Camelot before, meeting his friends. Alice, the Muirdens, Julian... they were nice people, or at least when I met them they were. I've never given much thought to magic - whether it's right or wrong - but if Gaius and his friends are good, how can it corrupt?"

Voice heavy in her throat, the memory of a tear stained letter shone white in her mind against the surrounding darkness. "And then Gaius wrote about... about Gregor and Jaden... I couldn't light a fire for weeks. So I wrote him back, saying I wanted to help. And two weeks later, a young man knocked on my door at night. He was holding a little girl - I think she was his daughter or little sister, but him wouldn't tell me - and he had a bandage wrapped all down his right arm. He handed me a letter from Gaius, asking if I would look after them while they recovered and send them on their way with provisions. They left after just a couple of days. More people came after them. I couldn't turn them away. I... I live right on the border. These people... they run and run to escape from Camelot, then cross the border and realize that crossing it hasn't solved all their problems at all. Most of them were wounded, none of them had everything they needed, most looked half-starved... If not me, then who?"

"But they never stayed." It was a question as much as an observation, asking words that one stranger could not ask another, not now after all this time of living separate lives under the same roof. Why are you letting me?

Hunith could not reply, because she could not articulate it, even to herself. Instead, she said, "No." A myriad of faces swam in her memory. All with the eyes of the hunted, all with expressions of exhausted grief, like they were so tired they could not even muster up the energy to mourn as they needed to. In her heart she prayed to all the gods she'd ever heard of that the people those faces belonged to were still safe.

They didn't say another word to each other that night, falling into silence once more. It was a different kind of silence though. If the silence between them before had been a wall, then their short conversation had torn it down, leaving just him and her, laying across the room from each other.

It wasn't that she truly knew him any better. She still didn't even know what his name was. Sitting in the dark, thinking, Hunith could only conclude it was that he was more real to her now they had spoken. He had a past which she knew nothing about and was surely filled with horrifying things to make him so jaded towards the goodness in humanity, but it was a real tangible past instead of terrible imaginings her mind inflicted on her. He had his own doubts and worries just like her, and just like she didn't know what to make of him so he didn't know what to make of her.

They had been forced into this situation and though they both could have walked away, neither of them did - he because he was desperate, she because her conscience wouldn't allow her to. But perhaps, she wondered lying back down again, it was more than that. Both of them had been alone until they were thrown together by circumstance. Maybe, just maybe, they had both secretly wanted to not be alone anymore. After all, she hadn't supplied him and sent him away even though it meant risking her life for someone who made her feel uncomfortable. And he had asked her why, in the end, instead of leaving because he didn't understand why she was helping him.

He was a braver person than she because he had faced his uncertainties while she hid from hers.

So where did that leave them? They were still strangers living under one roof. Had anything truly changed between them?

The answer to that came when Hunith blinked open her eyes in the morning, and realized she'd fallen asleep without having to count a single sheep.

/**

*Before anyone gets upset with me going "25 is still young!", that's a modern perspective. In the middle ages life was "nasty, brutish, and short" and the average life expectancy for peasants was about 30 because of disease, starvation, and war. Disney Princess age (16ish) was considered an optimal time to get married because you never knew what the future would bring.

* I know Morgana and Gwen were in their twenties, but that's city life versus country life. They didn't face starvation, the citadel (supposedly) protected them from the effects of war, and their proximity to the best physician in the land gave them better odds in the disease department. The possibility of premature death wasn't on their minds (occasionally being put in moments of danger is different than just living with the constant threat of death), so they weren't in a hurry to settle down.

**/