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He loves him.
He hates him.
He wants him.
He wants him broken.
They tell him these are polar opposites on some long scale of human emotion, but it’s not so simple. Not that Mordred has ever felt simple, or human. No, they’re wrong—emotion is no flat, straight scale but a round circle. And when one feeling cuts him so intensely and the other bleeds just as thick and red, the pain blends together. Love. Hate. The exact same damn thing.
“I want to do unspeakable things to you,” he murmurs against Galahad’s soft mouth.
The golden knight smiles and Mordred feels his lips curve, and he wants to bite them until they bleed, feel the salt and iron dance on his tongue, let it burn.
“So do unspeakable things,” Galahad whispers. In this place, in this bed, the perfect knight is gone. Rot will only grow in rain, in shadows, if it’s not cleared away. Rain, shadows—their relationship lives in those darker places because the sun burns Mordred’s ice-pale skin and it hurts Mordred’s eyes to look at brightness and Mordred hates its damn warmth and Galahad is enough of the sun for the bastard knight anyway. He doesn’t know the sun well, not after growing up in Orkney. But the grey rain and the long night are his old companions, and Galahad and pleasure are a new, welcome face among them.
As for the rot, well, Galahad isn’t exactly trying to dust away the black mold that grows inside him, that has begun to ruin and corrupt him just from being around Mordred’s own cursed person. (Mordred likes that; that the rest of the world can have their perfect knight, the chosen one who claimed the Siege Perilous for his purity, and it is only him who sees the flawed boy underneath.) “I… I want you to.”
They’re almost monsters, the both of them. Of mirrored kind. Galahad is an angel and Mordred is some horned, hooved, despicable devil, but seraphim blood runs in the children of both Heaven and Hell. And when the rest of King Arthur’s court are truly just mortally human underneath it all… Mordred think that’s why he was drawn to the golden knight. It was no gentle string of fate, but the pull of heavy magnets of opposite poles, the unstoppable crash of sea against shore. Their love is no eye of the storm. It is the hurricane itself.
But Mordred is the son of his homeland; he is godless wind and rain and thunder incarnate and one day he will let it rage. Everything about him screams of destruction, even this love. He knows it’s all borrowed time, anyway; when, one day, Galahad will find whatever damn thing he was destined to find and die and go to Heaven where he belongs, and Mordred will snap to his anger and wage a prophesied war against his own father, and he’ll fall and go to Hell like he deserves. This thing between the two of them will run into the ground… but Mordred swears, that when it does, it will be him that comes out on top.
Mordred loves Galahad. He does. And that means he can be the only one to break him.
“I want you to hurt me,” the golden knight says, “and I want to hurt you.” In his dark eyes (they’re that bastard Lancelot’s eyes, and the only part of Galahad that Mordred truly, truly despises), the raw, lethal lust is nothing human. Gone is Galahad the Good, the Pure, the Virgin—this is Galahad as Mordred has turned him into with his poisonous love. Blood, blood, blood—the lion’s mouth already drips of it, and still Galahad wants more.
God , Mordred thinks, he’s the most beautiful man in this entire universe. He’s mine . Mine, mine, mine, mine . He belongs to Mordred, as all things will soon enough, and he is his to love, his to break. Touch him or torture him, Galahad will let him do anything.
Oh, love, Mordred almost wants to tell him. Don’t you know never to bare your heart to a wolf?
(Contrary to popular belief, you see, heartbeats are not a rhythm of constancy. They are a countdown, seconds ticking and tocking like clockwork to count the time we have left here. Mordred thinks never of his own heart—he has torn them from chests enough times before, and they are ugly, tiny, disgusting things. To imagine such a weak thing, keeping him alive... Such a pity, really, that Galahad has given him his. It is far too delicate in Mordred’s undeserving hands, and each day his fingers tighten around it. He’ll crush him, let him bleed broken and drip all over his fingers. Because the blood is what comes of the heart and the curse is in Mordred’s blood and that bloodline curse is going to take his life soon enough, not that Galahad knows.)
That’s the thing, isn’t it? Mordred thinks idly. Gods and men who court power think they will never fall. That their fire will burn forever. His damn father is enough of a example of that, as is Galahad’s, as is every other bullheaded, glory-chasing, idiotic, useless knight in Arthur’s court. But Mordred knows he’s going to die; he knows his time is marked, as it has been since the day he was conceived. It was a pity that he didn’t die the first time, when the ship broke apart on the rocks and drowned his brethren, his fellow children of May.
(If he did, you know, maybe their ghosts wouldn’t still haunt him. Maybe their voices wouldn’t urge him to kill his father, to shove his blade through the nape of his neck until it exits from his mouth and cuts out his tongue and renders him voiceless to apologize for what he had done. Because apologies don’t work like that, like a simple snap of the finger, not when they’re eighteen years too late and stained with the blood of innocents.)
The truth is that Mordred’s deepest desire in this life isn’t Galahad. It is to turn his father’s beloved kingdom to rubble and ashes and laugh above the carnage before he ends his own sorry life. He doesn’t aspire to live forever—where’s the fun in that, anyway?—but what he does will be immortal. His life is not what matters. His actions are.
And in that simple plan, Galahad isn’t allowed to factor in. He complicates things. He complicates Mordred. And Mordred loves that about him, that the golden knight still stubbornly thinks he deserves to be saved; and Mordred hates that about him, that the golden knight gives him hope for that salvation when God knows it’s all in vain.
The story was written long ago, and he can’t change his part even if he tried, even if he wanted to.
Galahad doesn’t know anything about what really screams inside Mordred’s head, though he senses he’s got demons of her own. (Of course he would, with goddamn Lancelot as a father.) But the golden knight, even if his eyes gleam with war in these secret shadows between the two of them… Galahad is naïve. He’s still never killed—kept pure, because of course he was, because Arthur cared more to spare the immortal soul of the son of his battle brother than for his own child’s. Galahad has warred, more than Mordred has, with all his quests and whatnot. But the blood across his blades was not that of dead men. Still, Galahad shows mercy, and this is why Arthur’s knights truly love him, when they shun Mordred for his bitter truths. ( Mercy. Mordred almost scoffs. There’s no such thing. All men will die eventually—the time is the only part that changes. It’s stupidity to think there’s honour in only delaying the inevitable.)
In this respect, once again they are opposites: Galahad, a sheep who has lain with wolves and thinks that that has made him one of the pack; and Mordred: the wolf in sheep’s clothing stitched so well the mindless creatures will never see him coming, until he tears them all to pieces.
Mordred is nothing like them. He is so, so much more.
Gods and men alike are trivial. But he? He smiles into Galahad’s jaw, as the other knight parts his lips in a quiet, breathless moan. What Mordred is going to do will mark this world for eternity.
“We’re dark stars, you and I,” he tells Galahad. “We burn with a brightness they will never see. But when stars collide, well.” He lets the golden knight’s lean body crush into his, drags his fingers up his arching back inch by inch, vertebra by perfect vertebra. God . Mordred wants to rip his spine out.
“When stars collide, love, they’ll become something even greater.” His hands slide up, wrap around Galahad’s throat, a gentle threat and a gesture of devotion at once. In this swollen moonlight, under silvered skin constellated with freckles, his veins pulse purple. Beautiful. Vulnerable.
If Mordred were a holy man as Galahad were, he thinks, he would worship God every night. But the only god he wants to worship in the midnight shadows is Galahad’s body.
Galahad’s laugh is a low, dark rumble he can feel vibrate. “You and I, Mordred. We’ll create the brightest damn star to ever be.”
See, that’s what you have understood wrong, Mordred thinks. He remembers something he had learned on some small quest his father had set him—Arthur likes giving quests, you see, but only to those he deemed worthy. (Mordred’s quests were usually a sorry excuse at hiding errands, and an even sorrier excuse just to get him out of his father’s hair.) Some hag witch who claimed she could see the future had told him, before he cut her head off for terrorizing a village with her wretched screams of plague all hours of the day and night. (Stupid woman. If she could truly see the future, she should have known to run.) But he remembers her last words because he liked the ring of them, liked the power they gave to him.
Stars didn’t make more stars, has had learned from her, when they collided. Stars became voids, eternally gaping black holes. And when Galahad was created to save them all, Mordred was created to destroy them. Mirrored, again (fate loves parallels, Mordred has also learned); but they had raw, godless, cruel destinies awaiting them both. A collision of light and dark, good and not, God and Devil, salvation and ruin…
And it isn’t just them, to be completely honest. No, the story began a long time ago, with dragons under a lake. Two. It’s always two. Matched pairs, reflections and opposites and one and the same, two parts of a whole. They are nothing without each other, but together, all they can do is break. Their fathers are the same: even if they try their best to hide all traces now, Mordred’s no idiot. He knows his father has bedded Lancelot before, as battle brothers, as battle lovers. And they still love each other, but they hate each other too, and why is that? Truly? Why is it, the fiercer the love burns, so the fire is poisoned with uglier things? It isn’t Guenevere, no—something soured between the two of them that would have done so regardless of the queen. Maybe it’s just that fate finds it entertaining, to ruin them all.
(But, you know, the funny thing is, that’s exactly what it does.)
And Mordred eagerly awaits the day they draw blood, and he couldn’t care less whichever one dies. (No, he reflects, that’s not true—he couldn’t care less if Arthur kills his old lover, but his father himself? His life is forfeit, and it is Mordred’s alone to take.)
Whether history looks at Lancelot and his father, or at Galahad and Mordred himself, when Camelot crumbles to its knees one day, the truth is the same. There will be a war. They will all die one day. They were pairs of polar opposite stars, and they would create a void to swallow the universe. Like nothing it had ever seen before.
Galahad is Mordred’s enemy, really. But he is also his true love. Mordred wants Galahad’s pleasure spilling from his hands. He wants his severed skull at his feet.
Stars, stars, stars—they are tragic creatures, indeed, but tonight, Mordred doesn’t want to think of destiny. Tonight, all he wants is to drink himself over the edge on his golden knight. Tonight, they will play some long-fated lovers. Tonight, they will be safe.
Tomorrow, or after, or one day soon enough, Mordred promises to himself, he will destroy Camelot, and everything Galahad had ever loved.