Work Text:
Inside the helm is always quiet.
Outside is different, different every time. A town cheering together. Jeers and curses. The groans of dying men. Children playing past the lists. Horns. Tower bells ringing midday. Saracens at prayer. Goshawks and squires.
Today is different. Those who chose to watch are few, and silent. The rain is loud as it drums his back and splashes thick against the fresh mud beneath him. Crows are shrieking beneath the pennant boards and a mason's man is heaving the last of his day's work up the wall. The world is loud today in the way a man's own breath is loud to his ears.
He allows himself an early glance across the lists, and is surprised by what he sees. This span of ground has been his world for the better part of a century. He knows the oak rail better than he knows his own bed. Every target he's ever laid a lance to, since he was old enough to hold a stick and tilt at rings, is framed in mind as clear as the stands and sky today. The step and angle of each mount, the height and breadth of each shield. The man he finds before him now defies experience. Bent low, slumped as if the titan's ponderous load were laid fresh across his back, that man is already on the ground. Already in the mud, broken and bleeding and choking on spit. The sight is wrong in his eyes: that man, sitting that way. Impossible. He bows his head downwards, away, and pulls on his helm.
He settles in the saddle, brings his eyes up, and once more the world is quiet. No matter where or why, who for or against, this quiet is always the same. This is the same quiet he finds when he returns to the green pine glades of his youth, far and away across the sea. The same quiet that greets him when he tilts his head back and the sun answers dappled and bright from so high above. The very same quiet he remembers from the green fields of Cornwall and the empty sands of Pontus and the dry reaches of Moorish lands too old for him to name. This is the sound of the whole world beneath him, the sound of laughter at midnight, the sound of a woman loved.
He touches heels to horse, rolls his knees forwards, sets his shield against his shoulder. Release.
Divinity.
There is little now for him to think of in the lists, beyond watching and waiting. He rides as his mount suggests and aims by consult of his lance. Beyond these things he is done doing. He has been doing for the full measure of a lifetime, and now he is complete. Some men wish for this, that they might have had the strength or the will to train as he has trained. They are wrong to think it. He hasn't trained. He has lived and breathed and dreamed. For one thing, for these thirty paces. He has burned and cried and bled and done all the lance ever asked of him. Now they ride hand in hand, the one leading the other.
So thirty paces becomes twenty-five and twenty. Fifteen and ten before he sees her, clambering out of the stands and onto the strip of meadow beside the lists. The courtiers are baffled, milling at the edge of the stand behind her and trying lure her back to shelter. She doesn't acknowledge them, won't turn away even to force them away. She's older now, old, but even in the grey half-light her eyes have the same wild power they always did. Her hair lost its fire ten years ago and her dress is soaked with mud and rain, but her neck is still unbowed and she holds her head just as high.
She is as beautiful now as she was at a score and four, when she sat the throne and knights of a hundred nations pledged themselves to her name.
He sees her looking between them, eyes blazing at the wrongness of it all, darting from him to the man across the rail to the center of the lists where their collision approaches. He can see the terrible sorrow written across her brows and the raging fury still burning in the twist of her lips. He catches her eyes narrow in the way they do when she finds something she knows to be true, when she finds herself fighting for the world to be simple and right. He has time to hope that she will stay silent. Time enough to turn away and believe that the clopping of hooves and the thrum of steel on steel will be loud enough to drown her out. He knows what he hears will break him, that it would be better in a thousand ways not to know.
She whispers, with anger and longing and desolate hope and not a hair of regret, and inside his helm her voice is as clear as the word of god.
"Lancelot"