Chapter Text
Gawain was twenty-three when his father finally had enough. It had never been good, not anything any of his friends termed good, but it had been tolerable. He could tolerate it. He could survive.
Now he stood in the doorway of an overnight prison cell with the scotch clearing from his system a little too quickly and Lot’s words ringing in his ears. One night to shock him into straightening up a bit, that was all this was. But the jailer was laughing and the keys were clattering too loudly against their ring and there was a hand on his back shoving him forward.
“You’ll be out in the morning,” the jailer said as the cell door slammed shut. He didn’t look cruel, not really, he just looked like he was doing his job. Through the bars Gawain could see the tired lines of his eyes. “Have fun.”
He turned and headed back down the corridor. “Thanks for your hospitality!” Gawain called after him, cursing himself for not thinking of anything actually clever. It was not a situation for which he’d prepped intelligent quips. The jailer just gave him a half-hearted wave, sympathetic bastard, and for a split second Gawain wanted nothing more than for him to drop dead. There was nothing he hated like pity.
Swallowing down his shame, he stepped back from the door and turned to give the rest of the cell a dismayed look. It wasn’t terrible. There was a man sitting against the far wall, his head resting back and his eyes closed. The floor was clean, at least, and there weren’t— rats, or bees, or anything. Gawain wasn’t sure what was supposed to be in a prison cell. All in all, it could be worse. He slumped down against the wall by the door and tried to fall asleep.
He made it about thirty seconds before he got bored and opened his eyes again. Since there was nothing else to do, he gave the man on the other side of the cell a curious glance. Chin-length black hair framed a face at repose, untroubled, almost peaceful. It was a strange attitude to see in a jail. Stranger, then, his attire— a dark grey overcoat, black boots, gloves, all of it cheap but well-maintained. He didn’t look the sort of ruffian Gawain would expect to find in a cell in this part of the city.
Then the man opened his eyes and, before Gawain could look away, met his gaze. They both froze in identical discomfort before Gawain gave him a little wave and, because he was terrible, a cheeky grin. “How’s your evening?”
“Uh— fine.”
Not a conversationalist, more was the pity. It was going to be a long night. If only he was in here with someone interesting. Still, Gawain prided himself on getting anyone talking once he plied them enough with his own words. “Suppose we’re lucky to be in here, it started raining just as I was getting dragged in.”
The man grunted. “Yeah?”
“My socks are wet,” Gawain said mournfully, and cast him a look with eyes as wide as he could make them. It didn’t seem to do anything, so he dropped it almost immediately. “But I suppose one mustn’t complain. This is what I get for being drunk and disorderly. Fetching company, at least.”
That got the man to move, finally, a startled tilt of the head. “What? Me?”
“Mhm!” Gawain said cheerfully. Oh, he was still drunk. It was— metaphorically— a sobering realisation. But his mouth kept moving, because it always did. “You’ve got the— what’s it called— aestheticism.”
“I do?” He looked bewildered now. At least that was an emotion. Gawain had been beginning to think he didn’t have any.
“Oh, yes. Fine aesthetic you’ve got going on.” He gave a light wave of his hand. “Coat. Boots. Face.”
The man narrowed his eyes. “Face?”
“It’s friendly!”
This seemed to take him aback a bit. “Oh. Well. That’s alright, then.”
“Yeah? I’m Gawain. Gawain Orkney. Pleasure to be imprisoned with you.”
In the half-dark, the man watched him. It took a second for him to respond. “Lancelot.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Lancelot.” He was getting there. He was making headway. At least this mysterious Lancelot had finally started to respond in multisyllabic sentences. “What did you do to get tossed in here?”
He got a suspicious look in return for that, but when Gawain didn’t change his friendly expression, Lancelot said, “Roughed up a fellow.”
“Oh! Impressive.”
Lancelot shrugged. “It wasn’t my best.”
That got a real laugh out of Gawain, one he didn’t intend to give. “Clearly it was good enough to get you locked up.”
“Only for a night,” said Lancelot modestly. There was something in his expression vaguely reminiscent of humour, shrunk down to a microscopic level and painted on the corner of his lips. Barely a proper expression at all, but it was there.
“Well, I’d drink to that if I had— more scotch. Whoops! That’s why I’m here,” he confided. “It’s not as exciting.”
Lancelot regarded him for a moment. “They threw you in here for drinking? Your clothes look a little fine for that.”
“Oh, that’s why.” Gawain toyed with the idea of whether he should be private with his affairs, and then dismissed it on the basis that privacy was no fun and he was still tipsy. “My father— finally had enough. Any old excuse to teach me a lesson. Throw me in here with the nasty evil criminals. Uh, no offense meant.”
“None taken. It sounds like a compliment.”
Gawain wondered briefly if that was supposed to be flirting. Chances were not; this man didn’t look the type— not the type to flirt with him, but also not the type to flirt at all. Still, it was an invitation for further conversation of the intelligent sort, or rather it would be if Gawain felt particularly intelligent at the moment. His mind made a valiant attempt to wrangle him back from the cliff face of charmingly blunt questions and lost the battle to his tongue, which said, “Are you a nasty evil criminal, Lancelot?”
A solemn nod. Gawain couldn’t tell if there was any humour in it or not.
“I’m thinking about dropping out of the University and moving to France,” Gawain announced. There was no one listening who would care, he reasoned, and also he was still drunk and thus could use that to excuse the fact that he didn’t want to let the conversation with this stranger drop. “I want to be a resurrection man and sell to the medical schools there. I am not a criminal, however. What’s your opinion on this course of action, as an expert in the field?”
“You’re at the University?” said Lancelot, rather than entertain the question.
Gawain waved his hand modestly. “For now. But I’m thinking about dropping out. I want to move to France and—”
“—and steal dead bodies. I heard you.” He tilted his head as though considering it. “Bad idea. If you’re a student, don’t— be stupid. What are you studying?”
“I want to be a doctor.”
“You do?”
“Well, I like dissection,” said Gawain. He hadn’t intended to say it. That was what he got for drinking, he supposed. “And— anatomy, and such.”
Lancelot chuckled. In the low half-light, his eyes glinted from out of the shadowed outline of his face. “Hence the— the grave robbery. You know your way around a body.”
“Oh, I hope so,” said Gawain, grinning, “and I’m pretty good at surgery too.”
He’d expected a laugh in return, perhaps a leering comment about popularity with the ladies, but to his shock the man hunched his shoulders. It was too dark to see whether he was blushing but Gawain got the impression he was. “Sorry, that— that sounded lewd. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Oh. Well, my further apologies, then, because I did.” That didn’t procure a laugh. Digging himself further into the pit of awkwardness, Gawain said, “Not much of one for love?”
He expected a noncommittal answer, perhaps a return of the discomfited silence, but instead Lancelot cocked his head as though he was giving it serious thought. “Not so far,” he said at length. “Any advice for finding it?”
“Getting thrown in prison seems a good start,” said Gawain cheerfully. The intended sarcasm didn’t quite make it into his voice. “Lots of women to impress with your— your criminal ways. I’ve often heard that courtship involves roses, chocolates, and gruesome murder.”
Lancelot let out a burst of shocked breath, and he straightened slightly, but didn’t deny the accusation. “Is that your method, then? To have women falling at your feet?”
“Me? Oh, no, I’ve never given anyone roses and chocolates.” Modesty tapped him on the shoulder and reminded him he would look very amiable were he to employ it. “And I wouldn’t say women fall at my feet. More just— knock on my door for a pleasantly distracting evening.”
Again, Lancelot ducked his head, but this time a small laugh accompanied his presumed blush. “I suppose that’s what you get for only courting them with gruesome murder and leaving out the other bits.”
It wasn’t often that Gawain was at a loss for words. Even alcohol generally left him charmingly honest (or at least that was how he thought of himself) rather than stumped. Now he sat, twisting his mouth, thoughts flashing through his brain to do with the fact that he had accidentally given this strange intriguing man the impression that he was a murderer, which was not the case; furthermore, Lancelot looked like he thought that was a winsome and endearing attribute. “Uh,” said Gawain at length, “I’m too drunk to know how to respond to that. Let’s change the subject. What do you do for a living?”
“Oh,” he said vaguely, “jobs. Just odd jobs around the place.”
“Mhm?”
“You know, just jobs.”
Gawain squinted. “What kind of jobs?”
“Are you looking to hire me or arrest me?”
“You’re— you’re already in jail,” pointed out Gawain. Then, although he was only curious, he said, “Let’s go with hire.”
“Right.” Lancelot gave him a cursory nod. “What’s the job?”
“What jobs can you do?”
“Oh, many…” But now there was a glint of humour in Lancelot’s shadowed eyes, and a small mocking quirk to his lips. “Are you looking for tasks to be performed?”
Gawain gave up. “Yes,” he said, “yes, I’m looking for you to perform a task for me. Any task. I’ll pay you an exceedingly large amount of money to pick a task and perform it.”
“A bit like Russian roulette,” said Lancelot, sounding amused, “but with tasks of an unspecified nature. Is anyone listening?”
Peering over his shoulder, Gawain could just make out the outline of a door further down the hall. “I think the jailer’s in the other room. Why?”
“Who do you want killed?”
He said it mildly, curiously almost, with no change in inflection. Gawain was out of sorts enough that he leant his head back against the cold wall and gave it a proper think. How much would it cost, to hire a man he’d met in a jail cell to kill his father? He could always do it himself. Perhaps it was a waste of money. Then his mind caught up with his thoughts and waved its hands wildly to remind him that the biggest obstacle was that no son should kill his father. A second after that he remembered any murder at all was bad regardless of familial relationship. Finally, he decided he didn’t care. “Well, you know, I’ve always fantasized about killing my father. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that.” He shot Lancelot a lazy grin, too drunk to care about his own stupidity. “What’s it to be now I said that? I hire you or you rat me out to— to whoever you can?”
“No,” said Lancelot. He sounded embarrassed. “I was joking, anyway.”
“You weren’t!” said Gawain cheerfully.
There was a pause. Gawain pictured a coin flipping up in the air; heads, tails, heads, tails— it landed. “No, I wasn’t,” said Lancelot, and now he looked intrigued. He leaned forward. “What did you say your name was? I wasn’t listening because I thought you seemed annoying.”
“I am annoying,” Gawain promised earnestly. “It’s part of my charm. I’m Gawain.”
“Right. At risk of— sounding invasive— what did your father do?”
He was drunk. That’s what he thought to himself— he was allowed to do stupid things, because he was drunk.
(He wasn’t that drunk anymore.)
So, despite every logical impulse in him telling him it was a bad idea, he opened his mouth and began to talk.
He talked.
And talked.
And talked.
At some point, several hours into the future, he realised vaguely that they were on a topic of conversation entirely unrelated to where they had started, that Lancelot was talking too, his voice quiet but animated, and that moreover— and this was the most frightening thing— Gawain wouldn’t have stopped the conversation for the life of him. In fact, they kept talking until the sun glinted through the miniscule window on the far side of the hall and the sound of the door opening rang through the hallway.
Both of them stilled. The weak daylight trickled across the floor and across the hands of the jailer, who slid his key into the lock with a paltry wave. “Good morning, fellows. I hope I don’t see you in here again.”
“You won’t,” Gawain promised. His throat was hoarse, had been hoarse starting several hours before, but he hadn’t stopped talking. “Have a good day, sir.”
Then they were outside. It was an impossibly bright morning, tinged with dew; everything glinted and shone and no one was about on the streets save for a solitary flower vendor at the other end of the square, preparing her merchandise. Gawain took a deep breath, savouring the chill of the air in his lungs. “It’s one of those days,” he announced, “that I am very glad to be alive.”
Lancelot gave him a sly little smile. “That’s a good kind of day.”
Now was the time to bid each other goodbye, pointed out a neat polite part of Gawain’s brain. It had, all things considered, been a very pleasant jail stay, which was probably not what his father had intended. He was a medical student. He had no time to be cavorting around with ex-pickpockets with no whims or direction in life save a thrilling willingness to do practically any crime for money, even if he had spent all night talking with them, talking and talking and talking. Smiling, too.
“You know,” said Lancelot, still looking at him with that odd little expression, “we should get something to eat. I haven’t eaten for a long time.”
Gawain grinned, and made a decision. “You should come to my house,” he said, “I know how to fry eggs.”
That was how it started. By the end of the morning, shared over breakfast and coffee and delighted exhaustion, they had determined that Gawain should kill his father.
“You could hire me,” said Lancelot, waving a hand. He was sitting on a very fine brocade armchair in Gawain’s parlour, his boots propped up on the tea table with no regard for propriety. It was enchanting. “I mean, I wouldn’t say no. But—”
“But?”
“Why not do it yourself?”
Gawain blushed and took another sip of coffee to cover it. Something in him recognized the preposterousness of the situation. The rest of him was grinning in delight, exfoliating all his secrets for this stranger who, astoundingly, didn’t feel like a stranger, not after the night they had spent. “Ah— I actually— hm. I should have said this before. I’ve never killed anyone.”
“Oh? Why not?”
He gaped, half offended propriety and half laughter. “I— what— what do you mean, why not?”
“You’re a medical student,” Lancelot said, tearing a chunk off a crumpet and dipping it in his coffee. “And you told me yourself you like cutting people open.”
“I didn’t— say it like that,” said Gawain, flushing further. But he had said it. He had said a lot of things in the last twelve hours, things he had never said to anyone before. “Keep talking, though.”
“Well, he’s your terrible father.”
Gawain thought about it. This was true. “I don’t know how I’d do it. I don’t— have any experience, you know.”
He squirmed under Lancelot’s thoughtful gaze. “If you wanted,” said Lancelot slowly, “I could help you.”
All of Gawain’s breath left him in a burst. “You would?”
“You know the layout. I know how to get away with things.” He paused and gave a nod of his head to indicate he did realise they had met in jail. “Well, most of the time.”
“What would you want for it?”
“Hm?”
“How much?”
“Oh. Uhm. Nothing.” He looked bashful. “I’ve— you’re going to laugh.”
“I promise I won’t,” said Gawain softly.
“I’ve had a very good time talking to you. I don’t— talk to people, much. Especially people I don’t know. But I like talking to you.”
“Oh!” said Gawain. He was a cynical person by nature; the idea that Lancelot had been enjoying talking to him just as much as he himself had enjoyed it seemed too good to be true. There was some kind of an angle, he had told himself.
This wasn’t an angle.
“Oh?” said Lancelot tentatively, when Gawain didn’t say anything further. “I don’t mean to— to be— forward.”
“That’s not forward,” said Gawain vaguely, because he was too tired to stop himself. “Forward would be if you were kissing me. Whoops. Shouldn’t have said that.”
It had happened too quickly for his heart to drop. Still, the peal of surprised laughter he got in return jolted him into relief. “It’s fine,” said Lancelot. “I’m just— surprised.”
“Really?” said Gawain, leaning back in his chair. “I’ve been told I’m not discreet enough.”
“Well, I’m oblivious. But you— you had talked a lot about women.”
“Well, they’re a big part of my life. I love women. But, yes, I excised the bits about men.” Carefully, he studied Lancelot’s face. Perhaps, if he was optimistic, it looked slightly relieved.
But Lancelot just nodded. “Neat. Anyway— I would— if you wanted— well.”
Gawain should have felt something. Horror, perhaps; revulsion, definitely. He should have been unsettled by the offer. Instead he smiled. “Sounds like a plan,” he said. “Where do we start?”
They spent the rest of the day in conversation until, late in the evening, Lancelot announced regretfully that he had to leave. “I have to rendezvous with Guinevere tomorrow morning,” he said, “something about smuggling. I don’t know. But I’m very tired and should sleep.”
They were standing on Gawain’s front porch, or at least Lancelot was. The rain was drifting down again, dusting his hair and glowing slightly in the guttering light of the streetlamps. He gave Gawain a slip of a smile. “This was an adventure.”
“None more so than for me,” said Gawain, leaning on the doorframe. “I am troubled by the distinct thought that we are being very foolish, to make friends so quickly.”
“Maybe so,” said Lancelot, and he didn’t say anything else after that, just dipped his head, grinned, and was gone.