Fic: Beltane (Pt 8 of 9)
Aug. 25th, 2009 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gnimaerdPairing: Arthur/Morgana; background Gwen/Merlin; hints of Morgana/Gwen and Merlin/Arthur
Rating: R
Summary: Set at some point during season 1, before 1x12; Taking part in the celebration of Beltane has unforseen consequences for the crown prince and the king's ward.
Notes: This chapter is smut-free but contains numerous references to *cough* smutty behaviour.
Part one is here.
Part two is here.
Part three is here.
Part four is here.
Part five is here.
Part six is here.
Part seven is here.
Chapter Eight:
Arthur spent most of the rest of the day in his chambers. He wanted very much to go hunting but knew that that would entail having Merlin come with him, and he didn’t want to open himself up to another argument on the subject of Morgana. He couldn’t wonder the castle because of the high likelihood that he would encounter the woman in question again – a prospect he didn’t relish – so he resigned himself to interminable boredom in the name of self-preservation.
Merlin brought him dinner and gave him another long, accusing look over the meal before Arthur dismissed him – but he didn’t finish the food. It felt unappetitising, all of a sudden. He stirred his soup rather moodily, then decided that he simply hadn’t worked up an appetite today.
There was a soft knock at his door, and he didn’t look up.
“Merlin, really, this is becoming tiresome.”
“What’s Merlin done?” Morgana put her head round the door, looking curious.
“Morgana,” Arthur stood up, abruptly, “I’m… sorry – I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Clearly.” Morgana sauntered into the room without waiting for invitation, pushing the door closed behind her.
She was dressed in blue, with the front part of her hair pulled back off her face but the rest of it tumbling freely down her back, looking very much her usual airily superior self. Arthur gripped the back of her chair, trying not to appear too suspicious.
“What do you want?”
Morgana considered him for a moment, eyebrows raised. Then she held out her hand.
“I want you to show me your left forearm.”
Arthur blinked, then laughed, nervously. “What? Why?”
“It’s a simple enough request,” Morgana pointed out.
Arthur sighed, but, grudgingly, pulled up his shirt sleeve to reveal the fresh bandage put on that morning, holding out the offending appendage for inspection. Morgana crossed the room, and clasped his wrist with both hands (they were cool, her fingers long and fine). Without asking permission, she calmly peeled up one end of the bandage and unwrapped the clean linen strips keeping the wound out of contact with the air, until she could properly see the deep, bloody gash beneath.
She glanced up, briefly. “You need stitches in this.”
“Yeah, well,” Arthur shrugged. He was well-aware of that, as it happened. He’d just been putting it off a little, hoping that, if he kept it properly wrapped, the wound might begin to seal itself off without the intervention of Gaius and a thick needle. “Is that all? I’m touched by your concern, Morgana, but you’re acting very oddly.”
Morgana was still gazing at the great rent in his flesh, her brow creased. “Go to see Gaius – have him stitch this up for you. You know how dangerous it is to leave a wound like this open.”
“Yes, thank you, mother,” Arthur resisted the temptation to roll his eyes.
Morgana abruptly dropped his arm. “How did you do it, Arthur?”
“This? How do you think I did it? I did spend most of the night, two nights ago, running through a forest.”
“Yes, but how specifically did you do it?” Morgana raised her eyebrows, “that’s a deep wound, Arthur – you must remember getting it.”
“The details are… fuzzy,” Arthur waved a hand, trying desperately to think of something to say that wasn’t ‘yes, I took an antler to my wrist whilst killing that damn stag – oh and there’s the bit where I took your virginity afterwards.’
Morgana gave him a long, sceptical look, unblinking. And whether it was the slight quirk of her head, or just a trick of the evening light pouring in from the window, Arthur would never know – but suddenly, she looked exactly as she had done when they were children, hiding beneath a table in the kitchens: she reaching up to fish two tiny honey cakes down from above them, cramming one whole into her mouth and pressing the other into his, giggling like an imp. Her light eyes bright with glee, her dark hair unruly, her mouth stretched around a smile too big for her face.
He’d loved her, back then – powerful as a fist to the stomach – the passionate, delighted, unerring devotion that little boys love with. She’d been so utterly fantastic when they were children – so full of rage and joy and sweetness, untamed and brilliant. Absolutely the opposite of everything little girls were meant to be – everything anyone was meant to be in Camelot.
Arthur didn’t know what had happened to that love – what had happened to her, really, to wind her back into this coy, poised, steely coquette of a woman. But what they had done at Beltane, he realised, had allowed loose everything she had worked so hard to refine, for an hour or two. She was still that girl, albeit it mature and quite clearly with the appetites of a fully-grown woman. His best friend was still in there – and suddenly he wanted her so keenly that he thought his heart might be about to break against his ribs.
He took a sharp, inward breath – but even as he opened his mouth, Morgana said it for him.
“It was you.”
She spoke so abruptly that Arthur’s mind went temporarily blank. “What?”
“You were the – ”
“Yes,” Arthur managed, brain stumbling back into gear before she could take his confession from him, “and you – you – we – ” his tongue was somehow not quite working in the way he wanted it to.
“You knew?” Morgana looked, however, as if she’d just been told she’d unwittingly slept with a syphilitic slug.
“No! Not – before,” Arthur waved a hand, “your mask – in the morning… your mask had come off and I saw…”
“Oh,” Morgana took a step back, “right.”
She promptly pulled out a chair from the table and sat down with an abruptness that suggested her knees wouldn’t have held her up much longer if she’d insisted on standing.
What followed was the single most excruciatingly awkward pause of Arthur’s entire life. The silence was so dense that the prince was half convinced that he could feel it physically pressing down on his shoulders.
He swallowed, hard – then tried to speak at precisely the same moment that Morgana did.
“I – ”
“Ah – ”
“Um – ”
“You first,” Arthur suggested, not quite meeting her gazing.
Morgana nodded, glancing away. She took a few steadying breaths. “Arthur we can never – ”
“I know.”
“I mean,” Morgana spread her hands, her tone earnest, “we can never – ”
“I know, Morgana,” Arthur insisted, “believe me, I was hardly planning on shouting this from the rooftops.”
Morgana had laid her hands on the table, and seemed to have found something interesting about her nails to contemplate. “Were you ever actually going to tell me that it had been you?”
“I…” Arthur felt a wretchedly helpless, ever so slightly defensive shrug accost him. “I was just… waiting for the right time…”
Morgana snorted, inelegantly.
“Hey,” now Arthur really was irritated, “why bother asking if you’re so sure I wasn’t going to bother telling you?”
“Sorry,” Morgana didn’t particularly look it.
Arthur sighed, heavily, his knuckles whitening on the back of his chair. “Merlin wanted me to tell you.”
“Merlin knew before I did?”
“Well I had to tell somebody – ”
“Yes, just apparently not me!”
Arthur caught, just for a moment, a look of genuine betrayal in Morgana’s eyes, dark and sharp as broken glass behind the rainy-day hue of her irises. He tried and failed to swallow down the guilt, rising like bile in the back of his throat.
“You weren’t even supposed to be there…” he muttered, sounding, even to his own ears, like a little boy who’d been caught stealing sweets from other children.
“Well I was,” Morgana snapped, “I was there, with you, and we both did something monumentally stupid now, didn’t we?”
“If that’s how you want to see it,” Arthur replied, coldly.
“How do you want to see it?” Morgana demanded, standing up, her expression daring him to suggest that it had meant anything more to him than it supposedly had done to her.
“I don’t know,” Arthur grimaced, “it was just… a coincidence – an accident – it just happened…”
“Oh, yes, that’s so much better,” Morgana rolled her eyes. She stepped away from the table and headed towards the door, pausing as she reached it to turn back round. “Can we just agree never, ever to speak of this again?”
“Sounds ideal,” Arthur replied, coldly.
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
Morgana left, slamming the door behind her.
***
Morgana made it half way back to her room before she began to sob.
The first, humiliating tears welled up and burned under her eyelids, even as she told herself she absolutely was not going to cry – and before she could get any further she was forced to bolt into an alcove behind a hanging tapestry and fell to her knees, burying her face into her hands and weeping bitterly.
This was, she insisted to herself, an entirely pathetic exercise in melodrama: Morgana had never in her life cried after a fight with Arthur (in fact, more often than not, she had reduced him to tears, at least when they were younger).
And he had not been nearly as cruel to her tonight as he had been during the course of some of their other arguments. In fact, what had just transpired really only just breeched ‘bickering’ territory compared to how they sometimes quarrelled.
She absolutely should not be this upset over something so stupid –
Except that it wasn’t stupid. Not really. Not when they were talking about something as meaningful as a religious union. It wasn’t just her maidenhood, after all – her virginity being something she had never placed much emotional value on, (for practical reasons it was important, yes; but it seemed silly to become emotionally invested in the fact that an opening in her body had never had a male appendage inside it before). No, that wasn’t what was currently eating at her so – bringing up great, inconveniently ugly sobs from her gut – what hurt was how sacred what had transpired had been.
She had been a part of something that night: something alive with power and blood and sex and death and the kind of brilliance that could only come from real magic: the kind you made with your body – with your love and hope and faith. Not any tiresome spell, or something out of a book or brewed in a cauldron or summoned from Avalon – just the natural energy that possessed too people united by passion.
However trivial Arthur clearly considered it, that act had meant something and now she couldn’t think of it without feeling stupid – dirty – and furious with that wretched arse of a prince.
How dare he take that from her? One glorious moment of utter peace and freedom and he’d made a mockery of it the moment he’d seen her face and decided to run rather than wake her and confess. He’d touched her – he’d – he’d – Gods, she didn’t want to think about what he’d done to her.
And he would have spent the rest of his life looking at her, knowing what they’d done, and quite happy with the fact that she was none-the-wiser.
Arrogant, prattish bastard.
And why couldn’t she stop sobbing?
It was really horribly womanly of her to be weeping behind a tapestry because a man had been moronic. She sniffed, frantically scrubbing at her eyes and trying to choke back her tears.
“Morgana?”
Oh for the love of – had Arthur actually followed her?
“Morgana, is that – ”
Morgana froze, sob stuck mid-gasp in her chest, scrambling to her feet and pressing herself to the wall behind the tapestry.
Arthur’s foot steps shifted first one way, and then the other down the corridor outside. It was empty, and the evening had drawn out into twilight, so the place was dim and quiet.
“Morgana, I know you’re here,” the prince insisted, after a moment. “I heard you – look, please – obviously we need to talk about this in terms other than those used by bickering children. Would you – Morgana come out, for heaven’s sake – you accuse me of acting childishly.”
That stung – but Morgana stayed stubbornly where she was. She’d done quite enough talking to him for one night (for the rest of the month, in fact – she’d gone longer without talking to him in the past).
“Morgana…” a sigh, heavy and cold. “Look – I’m sorry, alright? I’m sorry. If I’d known before – before it happened – I would never have done it – I mean – not that you’re not – I mean – you’re very lovely – very, very lovely and – and – quite… talented, in ways I would never before have conceived – um – but – oh, Christ…”
Morgana swallowed a small, wet smile. She waited a moment, to see if he was going to continue to flounder, before twitching aside the tapestry and peering out at him. “If that’s how you apologise, Arthur Pendragon, I’m glad I’ve only ever been exposed to your self-righteous refusals to ever admit any wrong-doing.”
“I do not – ” but Arthur stopped himself, abruptly, and managed a quick, wry smile, “alright, I don’t do this very often. Consider yourself honoured.”
“Oh, I feel blessed, truly,” Morgana retorted, folding her arms.
Arthur gave her a sidelong look. “Have you been crying?”
“No,” Morgana realised the stupidity of the lie before she could stop it escaping her lips. She could feel how wet her cheeks still were, even if, by some miracle, her eyes weren’t as puffy and red as that kind of crying fit ought, by rights, to make them.
She lifted her chin a little, daring him to question her and – wisely – Arthur didn’t.
“I am… sorry, Morgana,” he offered, after a moment, sounding more trite than she had ever heard him in her life before. “It was cowardly of me not to tell you what had happened. And it doesn’t befit a prince to behave so dishonourably.”
“No,” Morgana sniffed, “it doesn’t.” She looked him over, appraisingly, for a moment. “But thank you – even if I don’t think you really understand what you’re trying to be sorry for.”
“Well – explain it to me!” Arthur suggested, sounding ever so slightly peeved again. He didn’t offer up such heart-felt apologies regularly, after all.
Morgana drew a deep, shaky breath, glancing one way and then the other up and down the deserted, twilit corridor to make sure that they were truly alone, before stepping out into it properly and leaning against the wall, glancing at her feet. “I don’t care about… you had my virginity and – honestly, if we have to be frank, and given the subject matter I suppose we must be, I would far rather it was you than some ancient lord I’d been married off to. But… it was sacred, Arthur. We were sacred, for a moment – and… I don’t think you understand that. I don’t think you particularly care about that – you’ve never had any inclination towards the old religion. For once something I did had real meaning and power and I didn’t expect anyone else to understand except maybe, maybe the person I did it with – but that person was you.”
Arthur would have snapped something disparaging at that but managed to hold his tongue for a moment longer. It was, of course, deeply insulting to be assumed so dense as to have no grasp on the significance of the
But if Morgana was confessing belief in it then he was very glad that no one but he could hear it. That kind of talk got people’s heads cut off.
“You’re talking like a witch,” he pointed out, as evenly as he could.
Morgana shrugged. “If you say so.”
Her face was moon-pale in the gloom, her eyes glassy pools. Arthur remembered, for a moment, the thrum of heavy power in his chest as he’d lain with her – the energy; the sense of some grander drama at play in his own body and hers. And those thinly veiled prophecies Morgana sometimes had… the nightmares that plagued her… the way she looked sometimes…
He wondered, suddenly, who and what she would be had she been raised in a kingdom where magic was still legal.
“Does it scare you?” Morgana enquired, softly.
“No,” Arthur lied, “but it’ll get you into trouble.”
“Good job I don’t make a habit of arguing about such things in public often, then.”
Arthur glanced at her – the all too familiar dry smile; the eyelashes still a little dewy. “I understand, Morgana. You don’t have to believe me, but I understand.”
“Do you?” Morgana quirked her head, “really?”
Arthur shrugged, glancing uneasily away. “It meant something,” was all he said, “it meant… something.”
Morgana hesitated a moment, then nodded.
Another pause, soft and steady, as something in the air became slack about them – a breath released; a chest emptied.
“I should go back to my chambers,” Morgana told him, softly. “Gwen will be wondering where I am.”
Arthur nodded, “yes. Um – well – I could… accompany you, if you like…”
“I’m fine, Arthur,” Morgana promised, “I’ll be fine. Goodnight.”
She turned, and walked away.
_____________________________________________________
Part nine here.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 06:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 06:43 pm (UTC)Well done.
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Date: 2009-08-25 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 07:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 07:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 08:43 pm (UTC)Things have changed for them both now. There's a shared bond between them, one that I don't think either of them is fully ready to completely comprehend, but it's there.
Heh, Merlin is going to be so proud when he finds out that Arthur finally acted like a man and talked to Morgana. ;D
Wonderful chapter! :)
no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 09:10 pm (UTC)That whole bit with Arthur remembering Morgana was absolutely lovely.
– and suddenly he wanted her so keenly that he thought his heart might be about to break against his ribs.
*happy sigh* And the fight. So in character it hurt.
We were sacred, for a moment and He wondered, suddenly, who and what she would be had she been raised in a kingdom where magic was still legal.
Love these lines. Both are just filled with so many layer that tug at you.
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Date: 2009-08-25 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 10:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-26 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-26 07:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 04:08 am (UTC)Once again, spot on. *g* I loved that fight.