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It’s a cold winter morning when the guards report a solitary knight with no insignia to speak of riding up the conifer-lined path to the castle gates. Pearl and Bertilak are sitting at breakfast, a platter of fruit half-eaten before them.
(There are benefits to existing out of time.)
They exchange one look: Pearl, her eyebrows raised, a knowing smile on her lips; Bertilak, his head tilted in surprise and concession. Then Bertilak nods to the guard and they sit together and wait for their guest.
Gawain looks older, not in body or face but in the way he carries himself. The nervous clutch of his shoulders has relaxed to a calm, even stance, and his expression is friendly and confident. He has foregone armour for a tight green doublet, secured at the waist with a very familiar girdle.
For a long moment the hall sits in silence, respectfully waiting for their lord and lady to greet the newcomer. Then Gawain’s face splits in a bashful smile and he gives a wave to the assembled diners. “Hello, everyone. Good to see you again. Can I get breakfast?”
“So, let me get this straight,” says Pearl, later, late that night. “They liked the story?”
Gawain waves a hand from his position tucked in the window seat of their bedroom, his face cast in shadow from the flickering light of the candles. “Wildly popular. A massive success. I kept telling them I made a very shameful mistake and they-- I think they thought that only added drama.”
“It did add drama,” murmurs Bertilak, “and other things.”
“Well, I didn’t tell them about the other things, obviously. That might have been a bit too dramatic.” He pauses, rolls his head back against the window, shoots them a lazy grin. “How do other things sound to you two, by the way?”
“After a hard week’s travel on your part?” laughs Pearl. “Enthusiastic, aren’t we?”
Pivoting in the window seat so he can reach for his cup of wine, Gawain shrugs. “I’ve been trudging through bland forest for two weeks,” he says, “it’s been very boring. I could do with a little excitement, if it suits the two of you.”
“It suits me very well,” Bertilak says, and then shoots a glance at Pearl for confirmation. It’s something of a surprise, considering how reserved he had been the first time, but not an unwelcome one.
“Certainly.”
Gawain tosses back the last of his wine and then raises his cup in salutation. “To the reunion!”
They settle into a rhythm. It’s not every year, not quite-- well, it is for the first three or four winters, but then Gawain’s visits jump over seasons like rocks skipping on a lake. In the beginning he’s always different when they see him next: no longer shy, then no longer bashful, then no longer insecure, then no longer modest. But then the years stretch on into an even, uninterrupted mix of time and magic, always the same, never changing.
(More time than is entirely natural, perhaps-- Camelot is like that.)
And Gawain stops changing too.
“You seem so much more content nowadays,” says Pearl to Gawain, her hand idly tracing patterns on Bertilak’s arm. Bertilak opens his eyes, sleepy, and watches the pleased smile on his wife’s face as she regards their guest. In his opinion, she seems more content too, now that Morgan le Fay has finally let them be and gone to play games with the queen on her own time.
Gawain hums. In the late morning sunlight his hair looks dappled, his dark eyes glinting from under curls like lily-pads in a shaded pond. “Life’s good. I have family, I have friends. Plus, wealth and power and all those convenient earthly currencies.” He catches a glimpse of the eye-rolls that Bertilak and Pearl shoot each other, and chuckles. “I’m joking. I’m not much of anyone at court, just a friendly middleman.”
“You’re king of the Orkneys,” Pearl points out, amused but skeptical.
“All of King Arthur’s vassals are kings of somewhere,” says Gawain easily. “You think if I was really that important I would be able to take a month off every other year to visit old friends? These are the indulgences of being a happy nobody.”
“You seem so much more confident nowadays,” says Bertilak, leaning back in his chair and steepling his hands behind his head. This is the longest they have gone without seeing Gawain-- five years, but only because if anyone knows how to count time it’s those who exist outside of it. Gawain probably doesn’t know. Clocks tick wrong in Camelot. “Nothing like the shy young man who was so hesitant to kiss my wife.”
“I try never to be hesitant in kissing wives,” Gawain says, to laughter from both of them. “If a woman wants to be adulterous, that’s her prerogative. It’s the men who should watch themselves. They’re the ones who choose the marriages.”
Pearl lays her hand of cards down on the table so as to sling an arm around Bertilak. “I chose my marriage.”
“Yes, well-- the women who chose their husband tend to be less treacherously adulterous than the first initiator of a more flexible situation, yes?”
“Always the third party?” comments Pearl, curiously. “I never hear you talk about finding a wife yourself.”
Gawain’s smile drops. He tilts his head back, his eyes shuttered and all of a sudden very, very cold. “I don’t want to talk about my marriage.”
That night there is little more idle chatter, just a rotten discomfort that segues into a rotten comfort and wide-eyed insomnia. Gawain leaves the next morning without saying goodbye. It’s the first of the bad visits.
(They find out later that Ragnelle of Inglewood left him. At first they don’t understand why. Later they do.)
But for a while good visits speed by, blurring into one, and Gawain is warm and friendly-- and arrogant, yes, but arrogant in a charming and self-aware way. He stops pretending to be a nobody, and even if he had, the stories that get carried on the tongues of servants would have reached them eventually. Tales of dragons and far-off princesses and devils in cemeteries. Other names weave their way into the Hautdeserts’ consciousness, even though Gawain never talks in detail about his life in Camelot: Queen Guinevere, Yvain of Rheged, Guinloie of Granlande, and-- always with a tinge of fear-- Lancelot du Lac.
“Did you really kill the Devil?”
“ A devil,” says Gawain modestly, and then: “Yes. It was a haunted graveyard, actually, you would have very much enjoyed it. They wouldn’t let my horse into the city so I had to spend the night there. I met a nice lady named Joconde, and I killed a devil for her.”
“And the one about the dragon?”
He chuckles, reaches across the table and takes an apple slice from the ever-filled platter. “Which one? The one with the dragon, singular, or the one with the six dragons in the mountain?”
“You’re lying,” Pearl laughs, her eyes crinkling in doubt and humour. “There’s no way you’ve killed seven dragons.”
“My horse killed one. It was only six.”
“Six dragons!” cries Bertilak, raising his glass. “A toast to the six dragons, then. And a toast to our friendship.”
“Cheers,” says Gawain.
They sit on the roof together one time.
“You seem less content this visit,” Pearl observes, after even the breath-taking spread of the stars, cracking the sky in two and pouring out light, can’t patch up the awkward and dark silence of their evening. “Did something happen?”
For a long moment the two of them aren’t sure if Gawain will respond. His curls hang loosely over his face, obscuring his eyes. “My apologies.”
Pearl and Bertilak glance at each other. “You don’t have to apologize for anything,” Bertilak tries, reaching out a hand to lightly massage Gawain’s shoulder. “We’re just worried about you.”
“Oh, you needn’t be. I’m being dramatic.” With a wrenching movement that looks almost physically painful, Gawain straightens and bares his teeth in a manic grin. “I’m doing well! Getting things done. People too,” he adds with a leer, but it feels forced. “No, that didn’t land, did it?”
Now Pearl touches him as well, grabbing his hand in hers and peering at him. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t ask me that.” Gawain tugs his hand away, not unkindly, and points to the sky. “Look at the stars! Aren’t they beautiful? That’s-- I don’t know, the North Star, or something. It’s in the north. It’s a star. I’m really good at this.” He blinks at their unconvinced faces. “No? Not the stars? Kiss me, then, and for God’s sake don’t be gentle. You’re always so gentle . I’m bored of it. It’s been a long time since I was new to this.”
“Well, you don’t need to--” Bertilak starts, after a shocked silence. Then he stops, takes a deep breath. “Just tell us what’s wrong.”
“With me? Oh, plenty.” But his wide, frantic eyes narrow back into an expression of innocence, and he gives them a hesitant smile. “Come on, I’m just Gawain, just like always. You don’t need to look any closer.”
“You’re our friend,” says Pearl, “and we love you.” But the words are so very small compared to the star-stained night sky.
He leaves before dawn.
They never tell him to stop coming. They never even hope he will stop coming. All they hope is that he will go back to who he was when he was still changing, before this stationary figure of the Maiden’s Knight stepped onto its pedestal and fixed a laurel-crown on its head. Sometimes it seems that he has-- but the homely paint always cracks, sooner or later, and there’s cold steel underneath.
He never talks of death. Because they exist outside of it, they don’t realise for a long time that Gawain wades through it like water, drinking it in and smearing it over everything. Camelot stands. Camelot stands and stands and stands, and time isn’t right, and they’re still telling stories of the mild Sir Gawain.
And, eventually, he forgets to come visit.
The letter is short: hardly a letter at all, more of a note. It’s written in a scratched, chaotic hand that neither of them knows, and delivered by a wandering hermit with a sword that’s far too expensive for its owner. The hilt is red. Neither of them remembers what this means until long after the messenger is gone.
“So,” says Pearl, after they have both read it and read it and let it fall face-down on the table so they can’t read it anymore. “He’s truly dead. All those false alarms-- but this is real.”
“Mm.” Bertilak rubs at his eyes with the back of his hand. He’s always been the more idealistic of the two of them. “And Sir Lancelot thought to write to us. I suppose that’s his penance.”
“Gawain talked about us,” Pearl notes. “This is personalized. Sir Lancelot knows who we are.”
“And we barely knew who Sir Lancelot was.”
“Or Gawain,” says Pearl.
They burn the letter.