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Despite yourself, you always think, when you see men drowning, when a ship springs a leak and sinks in the hungry waters, that they might just swim away. Yes, the mass of the vessel will create some suction vortex. Or whatever it is, exactly, that the gravity of shifting, sweeping waters create, when given a sacrifice of wood and wire to consume. Yes, they are difficult to pull away from, but… It is weakness, you would think still, that someone might not be able to swim free of the dragging currents, because surely those currents are not so strong.
But they are, and to think you might somehow extricate yourself from the whirlpool and wreck is the true stupidity. Even if you are only racing back to save another from the water, certain in your ability to free yourself and another, it isn’t like the water cares. It’s stronger than you. It’ll take you all the same.
So Galahad is an idiot, for swimming back to Mordred. For trying to rescue him from the dark and vicious waters of his own mind. He’s going to drown, too—Mordred will sink him and Galahad knows he won’t be able to escape, but…
He knows he is the only one who can reach him. He desperately wants to be the one to save him. Is that so foolish?
Love is foolishness, he supposes. At least, that’s what Mordred always says.
✯✯✯
They’re children, when they first meet. Elaine brings Galahad to meet his father in the High King’s court at Camelot, and he spends half the time clutching her skirts as she walks about. He finds himself often shoved in front of the queen (back, then Galahad hadn’t understood Guenevere’s jealousy as he so awfully does now), but to no real purpose—his father still, always, pays him and his mother little to no mind. It would have been better to remain at home. At least the distance gives Lancelot an excuse to never speak to his son.
So Galahad spends a miserable month at Camelot, hiding from the boorish knights who jeer at his mother behind her back, hiding from the queen whose beautiful face only contorts in disgust whenever she looks upon him, hiding from his bed and the visions that come in the night, hiding from his father above it all. Though no more than Lancelot hides from him. Galahad spends that time in the chapel praying like the good Christian that Elaine wants him to be, but his prayers are bitter. On good days, he asks God to make Lancelot love him. On other days, he asks Him to send his father tumbling from his horse and to break his faithless neck. And when the shame of what he prays for bars him from entering the holy place, he seeks refuge elsewhere. It is this hiding that teaches him the lost, abandoned, unseen, forgotten spaces in Camelot (Galahad finds solace in that which is kindred to he), and it is perched behind some musty old statue that he first sees the boy who would later claim his heart.
(Back then, before the Siege Perilous, before the knights fell down at his feet for some goddamn miracle they all believed he could perform for them, he was invisible. But Mordred saw him. He always saw him.)
Galahad knows who Gawaine is, knows Gaheris, knows Agravaine, even knows Gareth; he’s heard enough of their feats whispered around the castle, caught glimpses of their wild red hair slipping from helmets after tournament victories, hair that gleams like rust and blood in candlelight. Gawaine is one of his father’s best friends. That doesn’t mean Galahad fears the knight any less.
And today… Galahad knows today is the arrival of their mother, Morgause, queen of godless northern winds and isles and the sister of King Arthur himself. And despite his fears, he is intrigued. So he hides in the High King’s throne room to catch just a glimpse of the fearsome woman.
He hadn’t known she had a fifth son.
Mordred looks to be near the same age as he, perhaps two or so years older, but that is where the similarities end. The other boy doesn’t cower behind his mother. The other boy isn’t frail and thin and weak, but stands tall, proud, with the limber strength of a wildcat. The other boy is different from his brothers, too; he takes after his mother with that head of hair so black it looks blue, skin so pale he looks like a ghost, but his grey eyes glimmer bright with light and life and anger. The other boy doesn’t bend to the High King’s feet, but looks at him head on, juts his chin and glares. Some might have called him insolent for it. But to Galahad, at least then, it looked like courage.
(It is only years later that Galahad recognizes the similarity between the king and the boy, the shared features of a father and his son. It is only years later that Mordred tells him the truth.)
Mordred looks behind the king and his eyes narrow as they cross the statue that shields Galahad from the sight of the king, and Galahad realizes that the other boy sees him. He sees him, without even looking, and that’s something more than his own father, his own mother, the entire damn court have done—
Mordred smirks at him. In the days that followed and the friendship that sprung up after that and then the more that grew from that… it was the smirk, Galahad knows. That’s when he knew he too had begun to drown.
✯✯✯
The nights have gotten longer as the winter sets in, and the sky is changing, becoming colder, greyer, heavier. There’s restlessness on the biting northern wind. The castle is frigid when the sun leaves it behind at the close of the day, but Galahad is kept warm by the body wrapped around his own under the covers.
“You’re kicking me,” he tells Mordred, who only responds by burrowing his dark head deeper into the crook of Galahad’s neck, mumbling something incoherent and rough. His thick hair scratches Galahad’s chin, but the other knight is still softer here than he allows himself to be anywhere else. They love the night, the both of them—she is their last sanctuary. When the women are asleep and they do not titter like robins when Mordred’s gaze accidentally rests on Galahad too long; when the knights do not laugh at Galahad’s refusal to spar with the dark knight; when Guenevere doesn’t stare at them both with fire and ice in her eyes, the son of one lover, the son of the other, and neither by her own womb.
Well, these days, Galahad couldn’t care less about the queen’s jealousies. He has Mordred by his side now, and they guard each other in King Arthur’s adder-pit court.
“You smell like smoke,” Mordred murmurs, and his grip around Galahad’s waist tightens as he draws their hips closer, tangles their legs together, slow and warm. But despite the gentle touch of the other knight, Galahad stiffens. His words are strange: he hasn’t been around any flames today, so where could the—
“Mordred,” he asks softly, “have you been dreaming about fire again?”
The knight’s eyes shoot wide as he hears Galahad’s words—and quick as that, he sits up arrow-straight in the bed and jerks away from Galahad like his touch is poison. “ I didn’t —” he starts, and breaks off as he takes in the rumpled blankets, the stone room, the worry surely painted across Galahad’s face. His bare chest is ashen grey (the night paints his skin as dark as his eyes, and sometimes it scares Galahad because of how corpselike he appears, how he becomes some spectre he does not know) but he’s got that damn ring on that chain around his neck that he never takes off, the one that Galahad never asks about. He fiddles with it now, runs the ring up and down the chain with a shiiik, shiiik that grates at Galahad’s ears. But Mordred’s got a faraway, haunted look in eyes that dances with the shadow of a nightmare, so Galahad says nothing at all.
“Shit,” Mordred spits at last. “You weren’t supposed to—”
“Know about your desire to burn your father’s kingdom to the ground, yes,” Galahad finishes for him. (They’ve been sharing a bed long enough and the dark knight talks in his sleep, and Galahad has awoken to all too many whispers of kill the bastards, burn them all, leave nothing to find but the ashes to not comprehend what haunts Mordred’s nights.)
(It’s a bit of madness, Galahad wonders, that he doesn’t fear the knight for it.)
“Don’t call him that.” Mordred’s eyes are hard, and he rubs the ring against the chain faster, and his voice is colder than the winds outside. It grieves Galahad, really, more than anything—makes him sad because the Devil is the one who sits on Mordred’s shoulder and counsels him. The dark knight hates his father, but he doesn’t need one, really; Galahad knows that better than anyone. When it comes to sons, Lancelot is as much of a cruel bastard as Arthur is, even if Galahad hates to admit it as much as he hates his own father. But Galahad and Mordred have got each other, and they’ll outshine the men who sired them someday, and their names will be the ones to endure the wear and tear of tides and time, and their true Father is the Lord in Heaven and he will watch over them, even if their own damn fathers won’t.
“I don’t care,” he tells the dark knight, and he’s surprised to find nothing but truth in his own voice. “I’ve got my nightmares and you’ve got yours, and if you spare me your destiny, of course I’ll spare you mine.”
“That’s not smart.”
Galahad forces himself to shrug in nonchalance. “Love transcends logic.”
“Oh,” Mordred says, smirking, “you’re too good for me.”
(But he sits still atop the bed in the delicate perch of a cat, ready to run at the first sign of danger; still stares at Galahad with unreadable hooded eyes that make Galahad’s stomach curl in on itself; still runs that goddamn chain with that shiiik, shiiik that sounds like the claws of Lucifer himself scratching at the iron gates of Hell—)
“You could be good, too,” Galahad bursts out, just to cover the infernal sound. “If you tried.”
Most certainly not the answer Mordred had been expecting, then. The other knight’s eyebrows raise. In this light, with his unnatural stillness, they are the only part of his face that appear even slightly alive. “Could I? If I tried?” He laughs, then, a horrible cynical sound that Galahad grits his teeth tight at, “I’d have to want to be good, to bother trying.”
The dark waters have taken him and hold him in their roiling currents, tossing his head one way and the other until he no longer sees the difference between surface and abyss. Mordred will swim down deeper, then, to where the reflections of the sky shine against sharp, toothlike rocks, unaware the depth will only crush more breath from his lungs. There is power in the water, and he is always drawn to power, but… without air, it is death.
Galahad will drag him kicking and biting back to the light, even if he himself drowns in the process. “God will guide you,” he says, and his conviction is firm.
Mordred shifts, and the bed creaks. “He’s your god, not mine. If he had wanted to guide me, he should have started a long, long, time ago.”
That, at least, is no lie. The Devil had only managed to worm his way into the other knight’s mind because he was not raised to know God, because he was forsaken for his cursed birth, because his father himself had condemned him to die and thus split apart his soul for evil things to seep in as mortar. But Galahad is favoured by God, that he knows. Surely the Lord, in His immortal and just wisdom, will come to see, as his chosen one has, that Mordred still deserves deliverance.
“You’re going to burn him, then?” Galahad asks, even though he does not want to hear the answer.
They are silent, for a while—Mordred has even ceased the worrying of his ring on the chain—and the silence is as heavy as the weight of water at the bottom of the sea.
“I don’t know,” he says finally, in a smaller voice than Galahad is comfortable with hearing. “I don’t like fire. But one day, he’s going to die, and I hope to whatever gods are out there that it’s at my hand.” Then his voice picks up volume and steadiness, and when the knight looks straight into Galahad’s eyes, no shield, no lies… all that shines there in the dim light is the intensity of a fanatic.
(Is this what Galahad himself looks like, when he speaks of the Grail in his dreams?)
“They’ll all have to die,” Mordred tells him. “This place is corrupt and overrun with liars and thieves and whorers and murderers. The only thing keeping the castle upright is the fear they have for their king. Take him out of the picture, and the hypocrisy eating at the very bricks will finally break them down, and this place will crumble. And I’ll rebuild it from the rubble for those of us who actually deserve it: the forgotten, the forsaken.”
Now the waters are filling both their chests—Mordred has sunk deeper than Galahad had thought, and he fights harder against salvation than Galahad had thought, and the sea currents are stronger and colder than Galahad had thought, and are they going to drown, then? Is the moment coming, when the world as they know it will end? Has it already begun?
“You’re no visionary, Mordred,” Galahad tells his lover. “You’re just plain insane.”
“They’re the same thing, are they not?” the knight counters. “When the time comes, I’ll leave Lancelot to you. He’s your vengeance to take, not mine.”
(The worst part is—God help him—that he is tempted by that promise.)
The water is not water but poison, then, and being with the drowning man… the venom is seeping into his own mind, now. Devil’s work. Galahad mentally crosses himself. The words come out sharper than he intends them to, laced with fear—not even of Mordred, but of himself. “What happens if I side with him, then? If I stand against you?”
But Mordred only sighs, the exhaustion in the sound reminding Galahad how late it is and how little sleep they’ve gotten recently, between the two of them and their nightmares. The knight scratches his collarbone where a wicked scar from a sparring match is still healing. (Galahad doesn’t need to ask, to know it is the work of a certain king’s legendary blade.) Mercifully, he pulls back the covers and lies down again, stretching a careful arm towards Galahad. He lets him draw him close again and burrows deeper into the bed, into Mordred’s hard chest, as the knight says softly, “Then I suppose we’ll be enemies.”
“I won’t fear you,” Galahad says into the hollow where Mordred’s shoulder meets his collarbone, and his breath brushes the mending skin of Excalibur’s cut. “If it comes to it, I will kill you to protect this kingdom.”
(And even though it aches, it stings, it burns his heart to think, the same way he knows Christ’s Holy Grail is his alone to find, he knows he tells Mordred the truth.)
“Would you?” Mordred muses. “Or rather, could you?”
Somehow, Galahad’s fingers find the ring on the other knight’s chain, and he closes his fist around it, pulling tight. It will carve a thin line into Mordred’s neck, a mark to reprimand him his sins, a mark of Galahad’s determination to bring his lover back to God. He pulls, even as the ring bites into his palm, and says, “The Lord will lend me strength.”
Mordred kisses him, and it tastes of the Avalon apples they had eaten after dinner and blood from winter-dry cracked lips and dust and hurt and bitterness. But a kiss is a kiss, and Galahad leans into the other knight’s mouth, and wishes he no longer had to breathe so he might never need to break away.
This, he supposes, is drowning, just the same.
Once upon a time, in the beginning of things, Galahad had thought this sin. it was something Elaine had drilled into his head as a child—kisses were for lovers and lovers were for marriage and boys were for girls and not other boys and where did he think it was going to get him, to anger the Lord by rebelling against His commandments? Galahad was chosen, Galahad was special, Galahad would not get himself saddled with a wife he hated, simply because a night of bad choices and even worse wine got him stuck with a son, and it’s Lancelot again, always about Lancelot. Galahad, grown into a man, is as strong as he is and twice as handsome, but Elaine will be damned if she lets her son become anything like his father.
And so he went and threw his destiny in her face, in the face of the Lord himself, when he fell in love with the Devil.
When they break apart, gasping for breath, mouths sore, jaws aching, Galahad asks Mordred, “We’re sort of dysfunctional, aren’t we?”
The knight only grins, sort of savage, sort of sad, and surges forward again. “We’re more than dysfunctional, love,” he murmurs against Galahad’s lips. “But I think, for now, it will have to do.”
Their hearts beat together in what is almost the same rhythm as the sea. But not quite.
(Because the tide’s song will never end as a heartbeat must.)
✯✯✯
It’s raining, the day Galahad leaves Camelot forever. It’s raining, and he’s thankful for it, because the tears sliding down his face are indistinguishable from those of the sky as Mordred helps him up onto his horse.
The dark knight is quiet, for once, without a word to say. Not that they were ever good at words, between the two of them—Mordred keeps a tight hold on his feelings, even alone with him, and Galahad doesn’t understand his own feelings well enough to voice them anyhow. But even if Mordred did choose to speak his heart, Galahad knows there is nothing he could say to keep him from his quest.
Galahad’s destiny is not the black-haired boy, but a cup of gold in a faraway land. And he hates himself for it, but, when the day is done, that truth is all that tethers him to this world. He saw it, last night—they all did, and so today a hundred knights depart seeking glory, seeking God. It’s fruitless, Galahad wants to tell them. Because he has seen it in his dreams every other night since he was old enough to remember them. From before he was born, he was the one chosen for it, by it. The Grail was his alone to claim.
(It’s not like any of the other knights understand the cost, anyway. Galahad is the only one who knows that those who seek the Grail will never return.)
“Don’t,” is all Mordred can say.
“I have to,” Galahad tells him back.
Mordred shakes his head. “There are so many things you have to do, love, but this goddamn quest isn’t one of them. You don’t have to leave me. You’re choosing to.”
But it’s no choice at all, Galahad wants to scream. He didn’t choose his destiny, God knows if he had been given the ink and the quill at the dawn of time he would have written them both a happy ending but this story is a tragedy for every last one of them and a happy ending has no real value because what sort of lesson does it teach anyway? If we all get to live out what we want? And not what we all deserve, deserve, deserve—
“I’m choosing,” Galahad whispers instead, “to save you.”
Mordred’s eyes are wet and his hair clings to his scalp the way his clothes cling to his muscled body, and Galahad wonders how much worse his nightmares have gotten since he started sleeping in his own bed again. His beautiful grey eyes are ringed in hues of blue and purple, the same delicate bloom as the bruises that paint his skin. Scabs decorate the back of his knuckles, and Galahad wants to lift the dark knight’s hands to his lips and kiss them, soothe the pain, tell him it’s alright—
(But it isn’t, and it has never been, and Mordred hates liars, and Galahad’s touch burns him if he pushes too far.)
“Save me?” he snarls. “Or save yourself?”
He doesn’t understand Galahad’s quest. He still thinks he will return one day. He doesn’t know that Galahad is fated to die at the too-young age of two-and-twenty, two thousand miles from home. (Galahad isn’t afraid. He’s seen it countless times before, playing in his head like a tapestry woven in reverse, enough weaving and unraveling he no longer fears his own mortality.) God will treat him well, but even if He didn’t, it’s not about him, anyway. His death is what will save the Grail. His death is what will save his lover. His death will break Mordred. And it will force Mordred to heal, to swim and find his way back to the surface.
This is what has to be.
“I have to leave you,” Galahad says. “I’m just sorry it has to be like this.”
And then Mordred falls to his knees in the mud, and the rain dances across his upturned face, and his eyes are clenched shut, and he sobs out, “Please, Galahad. If you have to, just—” The call of a hunting horn in the distance drowns out his anguished voice, and all Galahad hears is a soft child’s plea of “Come back home to me.”
“I will,” Galahad promises, even though he won’t, and even though he was never going to, and even though Mordred hates liars, and even though his grief burns like cinders under his skin. “I will always come back to you.”
Galahad’s last sight of the dark knight, as his horse carries him up and over the moors away from a somber Camelot, is one that makes his heart ache. Mordred is still and crumpled and utterly lost, and he refuses to get up from the mud, even as it spreads across the knees of his soaked tunic like brackish wine, even as the rain pours, pours, pours.
(It isn't drowning, but the rain and mud and cold will ruin you all the same.)
Galahad is going to save him if it is the last thing he does.