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Fasting in Camelot is — strange. They give more indulgences here, allow far more exceptions, than Galahad is or has ever been used to. He supposes that’s what happens when you live at a court and not a convent, but nonetheless it is strange.
Galahad ignores the indulgences, fasts even more strictly than he did before he came to court. Eating nothing but bread and water and the Eucharist for forty days while training with a sword is perhaps not the best plan he’s ever had but once he starts it feels right, and they call him pious, holy, pure and all he can feel is the dizzying clarity. Like he’s floating just above himself, like if he starves his body he’ll be free of it, like there’s no room in him for any feeling but cold euphoria, like nothing can touch him, like maybe he can be clean.
When Lent is over he finds he doesn’t want to stop. Returning to living in a body feels wrong, too close too visceral too much; there is a feast on Easter and the noise of the hall and the sheer number of smells is — there isn’t anything in his stomach to be rid of but his body makes a very good effort.
It’s Mordred who finds him, kneeling on the ground in the gardens with a hand over his mouth and the bitter taste of bile on his tongue.
“Are you alright?” Galahad nods even though he isn’t sure. Mordred sits down next to him. “It’s a lot, isn’t it.”
He nods again. Cautiously uncovers his mouth. “It is indeed a lot.” There’s a long silence and he can’t tell whether it’s comfortable or not.
They say a lot of things about Mordred in Camelot, most of them bad. In the month and a half that Galahad has been at court he’s heard that Mordred is a witch’s son, that nobody’s ever seen him enter the confessional, that he’s the King’s bastard adopted by the Queen of Orkney as a favor to her brother, that he’ll sleep with anyone and everyone willing, that he fought a duel with his own brother (though nobody can seem to agree on which), that he goes half out of his wits with rage in combat.
But what Galahad has seen of him is this: that there are marks on his back from a knotted cord, and they increased in number and intensity when Lent began but his skin was hardly blank before. That he attends every Mass and never takes Communion. And that he kneels down beside Galahad on the cold ground while a feast goes on inside, and his voice is gentle, and he at least sounds like he understands.
--
That sets the pattern: when Camelot is too much too close too loud too many people too embodied too visceral too grounding, Galahad will slip away and find somewhere cold and quiet, and Mordred will follow him.
Today — as he sometimes but not often does — Galahad leaves before he has to, because Mordred looks like he’s halfway to falling apart. Finds a battlement that’s high-up enough that looking down at the ground gives him a sense of dizzy vertigo, and waits.
“Are you —” Mordred says behind him.
Galahad doesn’t make him finish the question they both know the answer to. “I’m alright. — You looked like you needed the excuse to leave.”
“Ah,” Mordred says. “Thoughtful of you.” Galahad can’t quite tell whether it’s sarcastic or not so he chooses to act as though it isn’t.
The wind is fast and drowns out all the other noise this high off the ground. Cold, although maybe that’s just that Galahad is almost always cold.
“You like high up places,” Mordred says, and Galahad might be imagining how carefully neutral he sounds. Alternatively, he might not be.
“It feels like fasting feels,” Galahad agrees. “High and cold and clear and sort of dizzy and not so close. I don’t know. I thought it might help, you looked like you were falling apart and it’s quiet here.”
“Mm.” Mordred leans forward. “— if I jumped, would you stop me?”
Galahad goes very, very still. “Would you want me to?”
Mordred laughs, sharp and unhappy; the wind catches the sound and pulls it away. “If I wanted you to stop me I just wouldn’t do it.”
“Then no, I wouldn’t,” careful, careful, “but please don’t?”
“I’m not going to.” Mordred makes a face that puts Galahad in mind of the stray cats that lived near the convent; there’s the sense that his tail would be lashing if he had one. “I don’t think it’d work if I did. Thank you, though.”
Galahad looks up so as not to look down. The sky is terribly, enormously blue, with only a single tiny wisp of cloud hanging in it as if to provide a sense of scale. “What do you mean, you don’t think it would work if you did?”
Mordred lets out a frustrated sound; in Galahad’s peripheral vision he gestures sharply at the empty air. “Nothing works. I survived a ship sinking when I was too young to hold my head up much less swim and I’ve tried to die every time I’ve seen combat and people keep trying to kill me and it doesn’t work and I’m not sure anything will until fate decides to let it.”
Goes half out of his wits with rage on the battlefield, Galahad had been told about Mordred. “Oh.”
“And now I suppose you’re going to tell me about how despair is a graver sin than whatever it is I want to die over —”
“I wasn’t.”
Another too-sharp unhappy laugh. “Good of you,” Mordred says, and somehow it doesn’t sound sarcastic at all.
--
The first of May falls on a fine, clear day. It is, objectively speaking, warm; there are celebrations of the spring outside, a maypole and crowns of flowers.
Mordred avoids all of them.
It takes Galahad nearly an hour to realize he has no idea where Mordred is, and another half hour to find him once he’s realized, but eventually he thinks to check a little-used storeroom where Mordred once brought him and finds —
“What,” Mordred snarls, and then, voice suddenly flat, “Oh. It’s you.”
“Yes, it’s me,” Galahad says, because he can’t think of anything else to say. Mordred is sitting crosslegged on the floor, a book open in front of him that it’s too dark for him to actually be reading, his thumbnail pressed into the flesh of his wrist. “Can I,” and he stops, unsure what it is he wants to ask permission for.
“Do what you want.” Mordred’s voice is still flat, his face blank.
Galahad sits down next to him for lack of any better ideas, closes the book and pushes it away; Mordred doesn’t respond, except to dig his fingernails deeper into his wrist.
There’s a long pause, in which Galahad waits for Mordred to say something and Mordred stares into middle distance and runs his thumbnail up and down his forearm, leaving red lines behind, before Galahad says “What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I’m just.” Another long silence. Mordred hasn’t stopped scratching at his arm. “Well. Nothing happened today, in any case.”
Galahad keeps waiting, doesn’t try to watch Mordred’s face, watches his hands instead.
“Which of the things people say about me have you heard?” Mordred finally asks.
“Um,” Galahad says. “That your mother’s a witch, that your father’s the King and Morgause adopted you as a favor —” Mordred laughs at that — “that you duelled one of your brothers but I know that one isn’t true, that you don’t make confession, that you’re a terror with a sword. Is this relevant?”
“A little bit.” His thumbnail splits skin; he hisses and lets go of his wrist, leans back against the wall and closes his eyes. His voice isn’t quite so flat but he doesn’t sound angry so much as very, very tired. “When I was a baby Merlin told my father I’d grow up to kill him and destroy his kingdom. So my father took all the children born in the North in the same May as I was and put them on a ship and sank it, and I survived because fate won’t let me die until I burn down Camelot but I’m the only one who did. And I can’t look at my father the Good King of Logres celebrating May Day like nothing ever happened any more than you can handle a feast at Easter and if you try to bring me outside to dance around a maypole I swear to God I will kill you.”
I wasn’t going to, Galahad thinks, I’ve never pulled you back into a crowd. What he says is “I’m sorry.”
“You had nothing to do with it.” Mordred’s voice has gone flat again.
“It still shouldn’t have happened.” Galahad reaches for Mordred’s hand. “And I’m sorry that it did.”
Mordred laughs, the unhappy sharp laugh that Galahad is growing to hate the sound of, but does take his hand. His skin is very, very warm. “It’s. Hard to blame him. It’s not like I haven’t spent the last eight years trying to succeed where he failed.”
“I didn’t say anything about blaming him.” He squeezes Mordred’s hand, shifts closer to his side. “Just that it shouldn’t have happened.”
“...I suppose that’s fair,” Mordred says, and tilts his head so it falls on Galahad’s shoulder, and Galahad puts his free arm around Mordred’s shoulders and pulls him closer and they stay there, in the small dark storeroom, until the May Day festivities are over and it’s late enough that they can return to one set of chambers or the other without having to look anyone in the eye.
--
Galahad prays for Mordred. He prays for Camelot to be kept safe and he prays to find the Grail and he prays for his mother’s health and he prays for peace and he prays for Mordred to be if not happy then at least content and if not content then at least not despairing.
If he were anyone else he might ask his father to pray for him. But Lancelot is profoundly uncomfortable with his very existence (and how not, when he fathered Galahad unwilling, Elaine certainly never said so in so many words but Galahad listens more closely than anyone thinks and he’s capable of reading between the lines) and is nearly family with the King, and so Galahad cannot.
“Saint Lancelot, pray for me,” he whispers instead in the dead of night, and trusts God to understand.
--
“What is it you want,” Mordred whispers across the pillow in the dead of night. “Not what you can have, but what you would choose, if you could have anything.”
“I don’t know,” Galahad whispers back; he’s never thought about it, not really, not in those terms. “I want to be — not person-shaped.”
Mordred makes a quiet sound that Galahad doesn’t know how to interpret, pushes his face into Galahad’s shoulder. Mordred’s heartbeat is jackrabbit-quick and heat pours off his skin, a sharp contrast against the cold of the air.
“I want to not have to live in a body,” Galahad continues. “I want to not have to pretend to be a person. I want to feel like I can ever be clean again. — Also I want you but I think that’s less interesting.”
Mordred shifts closer still, fitting himself into every one of the spaces Galahad leaves; on instinct Galahad wraps an arm around his waist. He’s probably too thin but Galahad is also probably too thin so maybe it balances out or maybe they’re just both killing themselves too slowly for anyone else to notice. “You know you can have me, right?”
“I can’t. The Grail.” Sometimes he wakes up from dreams of it and feels clean. Like maybe it’ll let him escape his own bones, let him live outside of his own skin.
Almost absentmindedly Mordred’s fingertips trace patterns on Galahad’s back, swirls and spirals and words he isn’t concentrating enough to make out. “Right. Of course. You have a destiny.” There’s something strange in his voice.
Galahad doesn’t kiss him, doesn’t even particularly want to; kisses are for contracts — of fealty, of marriage — and Galahad doesn’t know what the thing is that he has with Mordred but he doesn’t want it to be a contract. “It isn’t just mine.”
“Mm.”
“I mean it,” he insists. “I can save Camelot. I can save you, if I just manage to be good enough. And I’d rather save you than have you.”
They call it keeping watch, staying awake holding each other like they are now, or at least Mordred calls it that half-joking and Galahad agrees not joking at all. Galahad doesn’t know what the thing he has with Mordred is but he wouldn’t mind being the one who keeps Mordred safe, if that were all he was and all he had to be.
Mordred laughs at that. It isn’t a happy sound; it echoes harsh in the quiet room. “You can’t save me,” he says with perfect confidence. “No one can. That’s what destiny means. I’m going to break everything either of us has ever loved or wanted and if I thought anything I did could stop it I’d throw myself off the battlements tomorrow.”
Galahad doesn’t know what to say and isn’t sure there is anything that can be said, so instead of trying to put the words together he tightens his arm around Mordred’s too-thin waist and feels the thumpthumpthump of his too-quick heartbeat and rubs his thumb in circles over his too-hot skin.
“I love you,” Mordred tells him. He sounds like he’s about to cry. “I love you and I don’t want to break you.”
I’m already broken, Galahad thinks, or maybe There’s nothing here to break. He doesn’t say that. The world is cold and clear and Galahad isn’t sure anything can touch him let alone break him but Mordred is fever-hot and if anything can pierce that shield it would be him.
What he says is “I love you too,” and his hands are firm on Mordred’s back, his arms tight around Mordred’s body. “Get some sleep. I’ll keep watch.”