Chapter Text
'You allowed this to happen.'
'I trusted you.'
'I wish I’d never met you.'
'You should be the one dying.'
He’d only ever heard Morgana say such things in his sleep, when he dreamed of his final moments with her on Telos. When he was awake he could never recall her having said anything remotely like that, even once, but when he was at his most vulnerable his subconscious tortured him in the way his conscious self felt he deserved, and in his dreams she said all sorts of accusatory things before dying dramatically as if on cue just to spite him.
He hated himself even more for his brain dishonouring Morgana’s memory in this way. He was there with her at the end. There were no accusations, no grand declarations of love, not even a complaint about her situation, only a broken woman in a broken home on a broken planet moaning in pain and unable to manage a single word, let alone a complete sentence. Hell, he wasn’t even sure if she was aware enough of her surroundings to know that he was the person holding her as she died, or that she was even being held at all.
When he was awake he remembered things about her (she was a civil engineer like her father), things she did (the cold showers she had when he was away he always found amusing), the way she smiled (lop-sided, always pulling slightly more to the right, and he could tell it was genuine by looking in her eyes), what her hair smelled like (bilaberries from that shampoo she liked), their last fight (over how much she spent on that jacket for his birthday on the final time he’d been home on shore leave)… but not her face.
The face he never got to see nearly often enough of was replaced in his mind by the dirty, burned appearance of a woman in so much pain she couldn’t even express it, and his mind couldn’t move past the version of her on that one day to see what she was she was like every day he knew her before that. He wanted to hold that in his head instead, but the unmarred face of Morgana was gone.
He hadn’t talked to anyone about it, but figured if he tried to analyse the dreams that everything ‘Morgana’ said to him was merely his own feelings on the matter being reflected back at him.
That he allowed Telos to burn, that he couldn’t be trusted to protect them because he was incapable of that in the face of the trust he’d misplaced in his mentor, that maybe she would have been better off if she’d lived a different life – had another son with another man and moved to another planet where she might still be alive if it weren’t for Carth… that he would give anything to have died in her place.
There had been no way for him to sacrifice his own life to save hers. Now all he had left was the possibility of dying to avenge her.