Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The day King Arthur is found, the ward goes quiet and still. Every television, every mobile, every tablet is turned to the same livestream.

The entirety of Wales watches in ghostly silence. The hero, the legend, the myth himself lays among mist and water lilies on their myriads of screens.

Under the fish-bowl eye of god knows how many cameras, King Arthur rests in utter, eerie stillness in the bowels of a boat whose wood has long been overtaken by mosses and fallen leaves. Its walls inside are black and slick.

King Arthur’s corpse is spared the ruin of that slime and algae by a bridge of sorts made out of branches, that holds him securely above the boat’s bottom. Everyone knows that wood is branches because several have grown limbs of their own despite having no access to soil, and from those limbs has emerged a smattering of familiar ruffled hazel leaves.

The leaves hover over the fallen king. They shiver with the autumn wind out on the lake as the boat travels on and on at the same slow pace it has kept up for centuries.

Ygraine’s ward is full of sick people, hurt people, people drowning in pills and liquids, wrapped up tight in gauze and monitored within inches of their lives.

But in that moment, everyone forgets their aches and pains and woes.

Because all of Wales gets to witness the rise of Arthur.

King Arthur.

Their Arthur.

He is surrounded by archaeologists, professors, a full medical team, social workers, out-of-place MPs, police—his discovery by several environmentalists and the slow pace of his coracle gave the country the time it needed to amass a team of professional who’s entire careers have prepared them for this moment.

That is, the moment King Arthur opens his eyes.

No one, however, is prepared for King Arthur’s first breath in more than a thousand years to come as a horrible, gut-curdling gurgle.

On livestream, his lips rapidly fill with color as pink foam suddenly blooms in his mouth. He arches his spine against the branches beneath him in and convulses in desperation to get himself onto his side.

He is trying to clear the foam from his nose and mouth.

He can’t breathe.

Oh God, he can’t breathe.

The air of tranquility on the ward is crushed by an inescapable velvet curtain of helplessness as the medics and doctors on everyone’s screens leap into action. They shove aside counselors and government officers and academics and go crashing into the shallow water on all sides of the boat to get his majesty into the recovery position and start assessing his condition.

Somehow, they’re already too late.

Without even being there, Ygraine knows that King Arthur’s lungs are fucked. They may have been pierced. His heart, too. His organs must be failing.

It’s a betrayal so horrible that many on the ward begin weeping in anger.

The king was meant to come back healed. He was meant to have been spirited away to a magic, mysterious island for that express purpose.

And yet before them, under the eyes of man and God, the king has been awoken just to lay again on his deathbed.

His gloved fingers claw at his throat as paramedics and doctors argue loudly with academics who beg them not to cut his clothing.

Several EMTs don’t wait for that answer. They fumble furiously, still half in the water, with King Arthur’s clothing, stripping as much of it back as they can manage. He is covered in layers upon layers—first an enormous red cape that follows him wherever he moves like a moving bloodbath. Under that is a knee-length shirt of metal rings and then, when someone somehow manages to liberate him of that to (Arthur’s obvious, writhing relief) there is a brown tunic utterly ruined with bloodstains that blossom out from his right side.

The largest of the stains is long-dried, but a new one has begun to grow at the seam that Arthur begins grasping at.

The EMTs tear at the tunic to get eyes on the wound, only to discover that this is, somehow, still an outer tunic. Though thankfully, without the belt and the mail and the cape, that tunic is large and loose enough that the medical team is able to hike it up and access the thinner layer beneath that is all but pasted to a wound inches long in Arthur’s ribs.

The damage must have been catastrophic. Ygraine’s fingers tremble as the livestream picks up the tiny, desperate sounds Arthur makes as an oxygen mask is forced over his nose and mouth.

Relief floods her shoulders as the nurse on screen holds firm.

If Arthur can fight the medical team like this, he can breathe long enough for them to clear the foam, Ygraine tells herself.

She watches with everyone else on the ward as Arthur breathes in enough oxygen that he begins struggling in earnest. He shouts out, though the sound is muffled by the mask, and when everyone starts shushing him, he lashes out and tries to push himself up to the absolute panic of everyone trying desperately to stabilize him.

In the end, he is strapped, fighting with every breathless fiber of his being, onto a board and lifted out of his ceremonial coracle.

And in a moment of absolute fury, he strips an arm out of the stretcher’s restraints and slams his fist directly into the first thing that he can reach: an MP’s chin.

The whole ward explodes in cheering.

Ygraine sees little of Arthur for a year afterwards. People like him, she knows that much. 

He is more relatable than the present royal family, young and handsome, and endearingly fascinated by ordinary things. 

Much like how actors tumble into and out of people’s mouths in every day conversation, his majesty’s presence falls and surfaces for days and weeks at a time in Ygraine’s world.

Ygraine has almost forgotten about him entirely until she gets an alert from the hospital that they are about to admit a high profile patient through the back entrance. 

The security entourage speaks for itself. 

Ygraine keeps her head down and her eyes facing front. She’s heard about hospitals admitting royalty and foreign heads of state. She goes about her usual business, stubbornly refusing to look over her shoulder while taking blood pressure readings and administering medications.

Her patients crane their necks around her to see what they can of the guards and their precious cargo.

The girls at the nurses’ station reveal to Ygraine that it was Arthur who was brought in towards the end of her shift. 

He was found in a lake. The same one he came out of. 

Ygraine’s stomach cringes like she’s just swallowed ice. 

Poor baby, she thinks. Didn’t even make it a year before we ruined him.

She learns through the same network of whispers that Arthur has been living in a council flat and is monitored by social workers through weekly, sometimes bi-weekly check-ins. He travels for the rest of his time, going to summits and councils of men with fingers buried deep in oil drums.

He has become, over the last year, an outspoken environmental activist and, as a result, a target for the extremely wealthy. So he is well-liked, yes, but constantly surveilled by local and national governments for both his safety and the curiosity of a world who can’t get enough of the Once and Future King. 

And yet here he arrives to a hospital with lips and fingertips blue and stiff and rashes underneath his clothes where patches of skin have been rubbed raw.

Ygraine becomes aware that someone put in an order for an STI test shortly after she returns for her next shift.

She is not a new girl on this ward. The test, the rashes. The circles of social workers outside Arthur’s room.

People talk in hospitals and forget that nurses have eyes and ears of their own.

Despite 12 months of meetings and regular surveillance, Ygraine discovers that no one caught Arthur’s flatmate stepping into his room, rummaging through his few belongings, waiting for him to step out of the shower.

Sure, the workers noticed his reluctance to bathe after some time and apparently addressed it with several unflinching conversations about social norms and hygiene, which Arthur received with apparent shame.

He’d said he understood and subsequently began to accept more and more invitations to speak outside the country. He came home for only days at a time between international conferences and summits, often touching down just to repack a bag and climb on a new plane or a train or a boat headed the opposite direction from where he’d just come..

This last time was the longest stretch of time at home he’d had in months.

He’d only been in Wales for a week.

His flatmate must have been waiting for him.

In distress and with no place to go, nor anyone else to turn to, it shouldn’t be surprising he found his way back to that lake.

It was only by God’s grace that an old man saw him climb over a guardrail near the park’s carpark and thought to come back to the place to call emergency services ‘just in case’ something strange was afoot. 

Arthur’s STI panel comes back negative, but he remains in the hospital for some time to keep eyes on his condition post-drowning.

Pneumonia sets in despite every treatment meant to stop it. 

Ygraine lays her hands on him, her son, for the very first time because of that. 

It’s late that night.

She works the nightshift twice a week.

She usually works with people far sicker than Arthur, knocking, as they say, on death’s door or freshly emerged on its other side.

But Arthur’s nurses are short staffed and his lack of immunity to most modern disease puts him at particular risk for a quick downward spiral, so Ygraine tells the charge nurse that yes, she’ll check in on him between her usual flock of patients.

The first time she peeks past the curtains of his bed, he is sleeping with his head tumbled back against the mattress. There is no need to get closer to see that he is stable.

The second time, however, he is awake, though barely enough to notice Ygraine until she reaches across him to adjust the pulse oximeter on his curled-up fingers.

He’s smaller in person, probably from the lack of layers. His chin is square but his jaw is slim and his bare chest is ruined with scars from his first life-saving surgery. He looks up into Ygraine’s eyes as she pulls back.

His exhaustion from merely existing keeps him languid and speechless, and in that moment, Ygraine sees two people beneath her: first the king and then her mother. 

It’s the width of his mouth and the peak of his lips and the way shadows fall over his eyes. The blue of them is the same blue that Ygraine sees every morning in her own face in the mirror. 

Out of reflex and panic, she smiles. 

As a sort of taught reaction, Arthur weakly smiles back.

He looked like her mother only seconds ago, but the lopsided stretch of his lips transforms the apples of his cheeks and the line of his brow into those of another man Ygraine know better than she knows her own heart:

Her husband.

Ex-husband, technically. Well, not ex, but not husband and not not husband—it’s complicated.

Nearly as complicated as the stutter of Ygraine’s heart when Arthur sighs and lets his face go slack and turns away from her to rest his cheek on the mattress again.

His monitors beep soothingly around his head. 

Ygraine pulls away and leaves him to sleep. Her hands are still shaking out in the hall. 

For fifteen years, Ygraine fell asleep in the bed of a man nigh twice her size whose mission in life was to chase and steal balls from the arms of other giants. 

She left him two years ago to sleep in a bed that fits her own body and no one else’s.

When she told him she needed space, her sportsman gave it to her. A whole other flat, quiet and never imposed upon by his eagle-eyed brother or his mother. 

Tadd bought it for her outright and left the deed in her name on a piece of paper on the only piece of furniture in the whole place at that time. It was a wooden table, polished to a gloss finish and made from the purple-ish, reddish wood he knows she loves. 

Tadd sent her no messages for months after they split.

Ygraine resented him so much for doing all that he did, and she hated him even more for being able to follow her demand to be left alone to the letter. 

She knows she is not easy to love, but she still wanted him to fight for it. For her. For their life together. Some fucked up part of her brain has always reveled in the thought of being kept and treated and prized. 

It’s been two years, though, that she’s been coming home to her empty flat every day with Tadd’s most recent response to her most recent message to him at the top of her message history. 

Whatever he does, wherever he is, he always answers her texts.

She’s seen him do it on the sidelines of televised matches. His teammates and brother give him a hard time for it. They call him whipped and hopeless, but he shrugs them off and carries on typing. Even if it is just an ‘I’m sorry you had a bad day.’

Those little ‘I’m sorry you had a bad day’s are why he and Ygraine aren’t properly exes, despite the flat and the emptiness surrounding them both. 

Tadd’s middle name is Uther.

It’s archaic and fussy. His mum is like that. She named her eldest ‘Aurelius,’ and the lads’ father only intervened to give them ‘Thaddeus’ and ‘Constantine’ as their given names, as if he thought he was being helpful.  

No one calls Tadd ‘Uther’ and no one calls Rel ‘Constantine’ besides their mum when she’s really on one.

But even if someone did, it wouldn’t matter.

Tadd and his brother are unflappable. Indomitable, on the field and off it.

They are so close that they seem to be able to read each other’s minds.

So when, only days after Arthur’s arrival to the ward, Ygraine gets a text message from Rel asking her what the fuck his brother is thinking, she is surprised.

She tells him she doesn’t know what he is on about and to go bother Tadd if he really wants an answer, but Rel replies with a picture of several forms laid on the kitchen table in her and Tadd’s cottage. One is a letter responding to one Tadd must have written to Ygraine’s place of work. She recognizes the NHS logo immediately.  

Rel sends a clearer photo of the letter, this time held directly in front of his phone camera. 

It denies Tadd’s request for a paternity test. 

Ygraine’s heart stops beating before her eyes even reach the end of that sentence. 

The only child in her and Tadd’s life is his daughter from a previous relationship. She is beautiful, much like her mother, and cold too (also like her mother). Coming home from working during that mother’s custodially mandated visits always felt like entering a war zone in which everyone had to communicate through code and glances. 

Since Ygraine left her and Tadd’s cottage, however, Morgana has been spending more time than ever with Tadd, apparently comfortable only now that Ygraine is absent. 

With her throat closing and eyes blurring, Ygraine reads on and discovers that Tadd didn’t request the paternity test for him and Morgana. 

He requested it for him and Arthur. 

Arthur. King of Albion. 

It’s little wonder he was turned down. Ygraine almost finds it in herself to laugh about it.

Who in their right mind would wake up one morning and think to themselves, ‘I am the father of a sixth-century king?’

Tadd, apparently. 

Rel reports he’s not picking up when he calls him. He asks Ygraine to do it for him. He knows Tadd can’t refuse her and he’s genuinely worried, so she does. 

Wiping tears from her eyes with her thumb and forefinger, she stands in her sad little, grey little flat and waits as her call goes to voicemail. 

She breaks into pieces then and there. 

Tadd never puts anything before her, never, and of all people to suddenly fixate on, Arthur has no meaning or place in their lives. 

He is a lost lamb, yes. A sad, miserable man out of time. Ygraine feels for him, she does, but he is nothing to Tadd. 

Nothing. 

Hours later, Tadd finally messages her. 

“I’m sorry,” he writes. “I had to.” 

He knows then what Rel sent Ygraine’s way. He knows how deeply it has cut her.

”You’re out of your fucking mind,” she messages back. 

“I’m not,” he replies. 

“He’s an ex-dead king, Tadd.” 

“He is my son.” 

“Tell me who told you that,” she types furiously. “Tell me what demon possessed you to even think that could be a possibility.”

Tadd doesn’t reply for another hour. 

“He is my son,” he says again. 

Tadd never wanted to try for children. He told Ygraine he was waiting for the right time at the start of their relationship, and that right time never came. 

Nothing stuck to her womb, not even by accident. 

Ygraine thought it was a disappointment to him, but he swore that it wasn’t. He told her it was all in her head, that she was making herself upset over things he never said. 

He wasn’t wrong. But he isn’t right. 

“You do not have a son,” she types. 

”If you don’t believe me, just wait,” Tadd says. “You’ll see.” 

“What’s her name?” Ygraine demands. 

Tadd doesn’t answer. 

A week later, Tadd leaves a televised match after receiving a phone call. Ygraine watches every game he plays in. She has no love for rugby and never has. She watches for Tadd and Tadd alone. 

Rel follows him off the field, apparently trying to convince him to stay, but Tadd barrels on and vanishes shortly off the sidelines and out of sight. 

Ygraine picks at the fringe of her sofa pillows, then roots around her blanket blindly for her mobile. 

“Where are you going?” She texts him.

Tadd doesn’t reply. 

Hours later, Rel does. 

He says in alarm that Tadd went to Ygraine’s work and was let into Arthur’s room. 

The paternity test came back clear as day.

Against all odds and reason, he is the man’s father and as Arthur’s only living relative, he has the right to sit with him in that room for as long as visiting hours are open.

Ygraine doesn’t go to him that night. She is too angry to bear witness to some farcical happy reunion. She has no choice the next night. Her shift waits for no one.

And, of course, Arthur’s ward is short-staffed.

Tadd is sat in the chair by Arthur’s bedside watching him fight his way through every breath when Ygraine opens the bed’s curtains. His elbows press hard into his knees.

Ygraine brushes past him without a word to lift Arthur’s fallen head off the mattress. He flinches awake at her touch and gasps.

She shushes him and searches around for a mask. Arthur hates all things oxygen-mask relataed, so struggles with her, slurring words in his mother tongue.

“Stop,” she eventually orders him.

Arthur blinks at her in bleary confusion. He seems…afraid. He leans away from her into the mattress. His breath comes in soft rattles.

When Ygraine holds the mask out to him to put on himself, he shrinks back further and shakes his head.

“You’re not a child,” she tells him.

Arthur shakes his head again and turns away from her to try to cough. His ribs expand dramatically under his gown, flaring out like bony wings with each gasp of air.

He’s strong enough to cough now. That’s a good thing.

She goes to touch his back only to be shrugged immediately off. Arthur shivers and lets his body go slack against the mattress and the pillow under his arm.

Ygraine reaches to adjust his pulse oximeter, but he pulls his hand under the pillow and buries himself deeper into it for good measure.

She scoffs under her breath at his tantrum and turns to leave only to find herself facing Tadd.

His expression is cold.

“If you’re angry, take it out on me,” he says.

“I’m not angry, sir,” Ygraine says.

Tadd says nothing. His eyes say everything.

“Take it out on me,” he repeats.

“You don’t know him,” Ygraine hisses.

“I know him better than I know my own soul,” Tadd says darkly.

“That’s horseshite, and you know it.”

“I don’t expect you to understand.”

“But you expect me to stand back and watch you do this?”

“I expect nothing of you but civility.”

“Are you calling me unprofessional?”

“Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“Tad.”

Ygraine startles at the sound and finds herself offended on Tadd’s behalf that this stranger would address him so casually when she realizes that Arthur’s tone is half-warning, half-plea.

Tadd’s attention latches onto him. He speaks and not a word that leaves his mouth registers in Ygraine’s mind with meaning. But then Arthur replies.

He speaks in full, unintelligible sentences.

Tadd answers in much sharper tones.

“Please,” Arthur suddenly says. “Tired. Please.” He reaches behind him. Tadd takes his hand. He guides it over Arthur’s hip where it came from and bends it until it is wrapped again around Arthur’s pillow.

“Alright,” he says. “Sleep.”

Arthur closes his eyes as if commanded and sighs. Tadd leans forward and kisses his temple.

Tadd, Ygraine’s stoic rugby star. Tadd, her giant, her guardian and husband.

He only kisses her like that.

She is so taken aback that all she can do is stand by while Tadd rubs circles into Arthur’s shoulder blades, luring him quickly into deeper sleep.

He keeps up the motion even after Arthur’s hands have gone limp.

“Did you speak to him just now?” Ygraine asks. “In his language? Did you—”

“Yes,” Tadd says without turning around.

“No, you didn’t.”

“Whatever you want.”

“Who is he?” she demands.

Tadd’s hand comes to a gradual stop as he finally looks away from Arthur’s sleeping face.

Tadd sits across from Ygraine in an empty, recently cleaned, and soon to be filled patients’ room.

He says he has believed for some time now that he is Uther Pendragon, the king who ruled before Arthur took the throne in the sixth century.

He’s had this strange feeling ever since he was a teenager.

At first, it was an ever-present sense of doom, like he had been chosen by God to receive some sort of task or message. He can’t explain where it came from but over time, the doom intensified and took on colors and shapes in his mind. He began to experience stories so real they were practically memories of a different world, a different life, and a different Ygraine. 

They’ve haunted him since before he was drafted. 

He’s watched her, Ygraine, die in his mind thousands of times in the exact same way, bleeding out in a humid room filled with the stench of iron and birth.

Tadd only ever wanted to protect her from that fate. 

He knew somehow that she could never bear children. He knew her body wasn’t made for it, that she herself had not the mindset of a mother but that she would endure it out of love for him. 

But he felt he’d already used up her goodwill in his last life as Uther Pendragon, and in this one, he wanted her to live long and be free.

So he waited and watched her and made himself grateful, even when she told him she needed space away from where he could feel and see her.

But then Arthur returned, and he became more helpless than he’d ever been. He watched with the country as the baby he once held in his arms clawed at his chest for breath on a half-rotted boat and fought for his life against a centuries-old battle wound. 

He began obsessively tracking all news of Arthur; he searched every day for new photos and articles. When Arthur began traveling and speaking out independently at international conferences and summits, Tadd began hunting down livestreams and recordings; he spent untold amounts of money to get access to some of them. 

A professional athlete’s salary allowed him this opportunity and selfishly, he took it. 

The only thing he regrets is thinking that Arthur was big enough and brave enough walk through this new world on his own.

The day Arthur tried to kill himself, he felt something snap inside his chest.

Instantly, instinctually, he knew the situation was dire. He decided had to do something, so he told the NHS that he was Arthur’s father, and when they scoffed, he contacted the offices that look after Arthur’s affairs and made such a nightmare out of himself that someone somewhere deep within them finally cracked and said to give the man a blood test so that they could have him arrested for harassment. 

And here they are. 

The blood test was passed with flying colors.

Scientists are baffled. Historians, mind-blown. 

Tadd is a high profile public persona in and of himself. For him to be linked so clearly and undeniably now with Arthur spells a logistical disaster for many, many people.

Tadd doesn’t intend to allow any office to manage his son’s affairs any longer. He let them have their go at it and look where they are now.

His Arthur is not innocent per se, but apparently naturally disinclined to speak on sex and topics related.

He was taught early on to keep his hands to himself to prevent illegitimate heirs from cropping up while his friends ran wild through villages and taverns. Arthur followed that order to the letter and to the point that Tadd thought that he might still be a virgin at twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six years old.

He asked once.

Arthur never gave him a straight answer, which in itself, was an answer.

Had Tadd been there with him in that flat, had he been able to see Arthur’s personality changing from day to day, he would have known something was wrong.

He would have stepped in before Arthur worked himself to the brink of death in an attempt to put an end to his pain and confusion.

Tadd feels responsible for Arthur’s pneumonia even now.

He wants to take Arthur home with him to his and Ygraine’s cottage so he can look after him. He wants  to teach his boy what he needs to know to safely exist in this new world. 

“And then what?” Ygraine asks. 

“There is no ‘and then,’” Tadd says. 

“He moves out? He goes back in time? What happens after?” she asks.

“My love, there is no after. Arthur will stay with me.” 

“In our house?”

”You don’t have to be anything to him,” Tadd says. ”He never knew you in Camelot. He won’t notice any difference now.” 

“Tadd.” 

“Igs.” 

“You can’t take him. You don’t even know him.”

“I know him.”

“No, you know this delusion.”

“It’s not a delusion or a dream.”

“How can you know that?”

“I just do,” Tadd says.

He sounds like a priest speaking of God. He sounds like he’s sitting in a pew. The rims of Ygraine’s eyes feel drier every second she spends staring at him.

“Prove it,” she says.

She takes a blood test. Arthur writhes away the needle this time.

He’s upset for some reason the day his sample is taken. He’s been bringing up mucus all morning and hasn’t appreciated everyone’s cheering about that harbinger of healing.

He hides his arm until Tadd stands up from the room’s chair.

Instantly, Arthur becomes another person. He goes quiet and pliant. He refuses to meet Tadd’s eye until both vial and needle are on their way out of the room.

He says something in his old language softly.

“English,” Tadd chides.

Arthur’s fingers clench in the folds of his blankets.

He looks thin.

Ygraine’s blood is taken downstairs. She doesn’t want Arthur to see her bare arm. It’s too intimate.

It doesn’t matter what the result of the test is, she knows she doesn’t know him.

Her mum opens the envelope for her when it comes because she can’t bear to do it herself. Mum and Ector sit on the one side of the purple table in Ygraine’s grey little, sad little flat and read while she buries herself in her arms and dread on the other side.

Mum puts the letter down on the table.

No one speaks until Ygraine cannot stifle her sobs any longer.

She never asked for a son.

Arthur doesn’t know her and while he accepts Tadd as his father, his expression towards Ygraine is as it always has been: vacant.

Even when Tadd explains to him in the old language what the letters in front of him mean, he simply looks up at him as if asking ‘what do I do with this, Dad?’

Tadd encourages him to look at Ygraine. She tries to smile when he does, but Arthur looks at her only for a brief moment. His eyes go back to Tadd.

It shouldn’t hurt. They are strangers, and Ygraine hasn’t exactly been the most sympathetic nurse to him.

But somehow it still feels like a heavy landing on hard, dusty concrete.

He is her son.

He is her son.

This is her son who doesn’t know her. A millennium and more ago, she gave her life to birth him. She could not have sacrificed more. And yet there he goes, looking to Tadd and rubbing knuckles against his cheek and jaw.

It’s not fair that he has taken so much from her. Her life, her husband. And yet there he sits, flagrantly uninterested in even the slightest thing about her.

“Well,” Ygraine says. “I’ll leave you two to it.”

Tadd calls after her, but her shift is starting. She’s needed downstairs.

Word gets out among the nurses. It has a tendency to do that. The younger ones call Ygraine a cold bitch. They dream out loud about what they would do if they were the mother of a legend. The older ladies, mothers themselves, eye Ygraine with pity and suspicion in equal measures.

Women already tend to hate her as Tadd’s wife. It’s nothing Ygraine isn’t used to. She’s not here to make friends anyways. She’s here to work and by god, she can work.

She takes a new shift every time Tadd texts her.

After two weeks, Arthur is discharged into Tadd’s care. Ygraine waits until after he is meant to have left to go check that the room is clear.

It isn’t.

There’s been a delay in paperwork. Arthur is sitting in the chair by his former bed, leaning on the armrest with his phone balanced on his knee.

He’s wearing a long-sleeved hoodie two sizes too big. He notices her and sits back quickly as if ashamed to have been caught being bored.

“You’ve been discharged,” Ygraine informs him.

He glances her way.

“Paper late,” he says.

Ah.

“Shouldn’t be too much longer, then,” she says.

“Not your home, I go now,” Arthur says out of nowhere in a strange tone as if he is trying to reassure her.

Ygraine pauses in the process of checking the queue for the name of the next patient. She looks up and finds Arthur watching her.

“Where are you going then?” she asks.

“My place,” he says.

“Your place,” she repeats.

“Yes.”

“Your place with your flatmate?” she asks.

“Mm.” Arthur nods.

Ygraine puts down her clipboard and pen.

“Who cleared that?” she asks.

“Who?”

“Who cleared—who said that was okay?” she clarifies.

Arthur’s eyes flick around her face. He tries to smile.

He doesn’t understand what she’s asking.

“Stay there,” she orders him and leaves the room.

Arthur told the doctors that he didn’t want to be released into Tadd’s care while no one was around. He said he wanted to go home and someone, some godforsaken place thought, ‘yeah, alright, that sounds good,’ and his security team all also shrugged and said, ‘probably fine that.’

Ygraine has no patience for any of them. She calls Tadd in the hallway and tells him to get his arse to the hospital right now to pick up his son.

She’ll create as much fuss as she needs to until he gets here.

She hangs up first and goes back to Arthur’s room to find him about to receive discharge paperwork.

She snatches it out of the nurse’s hand and walks him right out the door. An impromptu meeting is held in a different doorway. The charge nurse takes the paperwork and reads it as Ygraine tells her to.

She looks up with a reckoning brewing in the shadow of her brow.

“I don’t think so,” she says.

When Ygraine returns to where Arthur is sitting, confused now, she kneels next to him.

“You need to stay a little longer,” she says.

Arthur frowns at her.

“Again,” he says. “Give paper.”

“You need to stay,” Ygraine says, slower this time.

“No,” Arthur says. “No more. Not to your home.” He pats his chest as if it’s a promise.

“Arthur, look at me. We can’t release you knowing you’re walking into an unsafe situation,” she says.

“Home.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” Ygraine says.

Arthur’s fingers search for those on his other hand to wrap around. Ygraine is familiar with the gesture now. He does it when his stomach hurts too much for him to eat. He does it when he doesn’t want to look at Tadd’s face when they talk.

He knows what is going to happen the second he walks back into that flat.

Ygraine takes ahold of his hands to stop their wringing.

“You’re going to my house,” she tells him. “It’s safe for you at my house. Your dad is coming to—Arthur. Arthur—”

He takes back his hands and glowers.

“I leave,” he says.

“No, you’re staying until Tadd gets here.”

“Is not his job,” Arthur snaps out of absolutely nowhere. “No one job. NO ONE. Okay? Okay? I am king. I am—I—” he lets out a half-grunt, half-growl of frustration and tries to move past her.

Ygraine catches ahold of his sleeve.

He tears it away and glares over his shoulder.

“My choice,” he warns. “Do not follow.”

Tadd is ten minutes too late.

To Ygraine’s surprise, Morgana is the one who tracks down Arthur’s flat. It takes her a few days, but when she’s got it, she tells the house at large that she’s leaving and she’s got three seats for anyone who wants to come with her.

She’s the first to start pounding on the council flat door and so is the first to be treated to the sneering face of a man with brown hair and a square jaw.

He says Arthur never came home.

This is a lie. The white hoodie from the hospital has been left draped over the back of the sofa.

Tadd calls Arthur’s mobile.

The flatmate changes his story then and explains that Arthur did come home, but only to drop off all his things. Then he went right back out.

“He does that,” he says. “He’s always coming and going, you know.”

Tadd stares this man in the face for long enough that he starts to have a whole second thought. Rel crosses his arms behind him to really drive home the danger he’s put himself in.

“Call him, then,” Tadd says. “Go on. You’ve got his number, don’t you?”

The flatmate clears his throat and swallows. He pulls back suddenly, scowling and calling Ygraine and Morgana bitches and cunts under his breath.

He leaves the doorway to approach a closed door down a short hallway.

The flat isn’t huge. There are dishes in the sink. A plastic milk jug has been left on the counter surrounded by crumbs and what looks to be sugar or protein powder.

The whole place smells sour.

Morgana sees the flatmate turn the knob of the bedroom door and takes that as her cue to fly off in his direction.

In hindsight, she was right to be suspicious. What kind of person just opens their flatmate’s door without knocking?

Arthur is not expecting Morgana.

He seems to be expecting no one at all, as he is laid across his impeccably made bed with his forehead pressed against the wall.

His room is immaculate and…empty. He stares in shock at Morgana for a beat, then scrambles up and flattens himself against the wall, arms up over his face.

Morgana’s arms drop at her sides.

She says his name with the same accent Tadd does. She says something else that compels Arthur to open his eyes.

Morgana approaches him, speaking softly until his arms fall entirely. Tears begin streaking down Morgana’s pale cheeks and suddenly, Arthur’s chest starts heaving. They fall into each other abruptly, clutching each other so close it must be painful. Arthur buries his face in Morgana’s neck and long, curling black hair. He weeps. Softly. Openly.

Tadd steps around Ygraine and takes the two of them into his arms.

Rel hangs back with Ygraine, both of them strangers to the centuries of grief shattering before them. Rel looks pointedly from the desk with its charging tablet to the lone navy knapsack hanging off the room’s plastic chair.

Arthur travels. Everyone knows he does. But there’s no sign of it anywhere in this place.

His hospital room was more inviting.

Ygraine’s throat aches.

Tadd and Morgana talk to Arthur for quite a long time. It takes them nearly half an hour to convince him that he doesn’t have to punish himself like this.

He didn’t do anything wrong.

Rel calls a cab for him and Ygraine to take back to her and Tadd’s cottage. He correctly thinks Arthur will be too overwhelmed to handle new people at the moment.

The cottage is more of a modern thing than a true Welsh cottage. It has all the comfortable kitsch of the little house Ygraine’s nan kept up north, but all the conveniences of a new home. There is a wide kitchen island, a backsplash made of old white and blue and red tiles, four bedrooms and two stories. In all her time as the wife of an athlete, Ygraine filled it with knick-knacks and god knows how many cushions.

Tadd offered to hire an interior designer once and only once. The last thing Ygraine wanted for twenty years was to leave work and come home to yet another sea of sterile white marble.

She fluffs pillows and lights candles and puts on a pot a coffee while she and Rel wait for the others to come.

Tadd messaged her an hour or so ago to say that Morgana made them stop so she could buy Arthur some clothing that doesn’t have some non-profit’s logo on it.

No one seems to have given much thought to the fact that he doesn’t have money of his own. Ygraine wonders who gave him that white hoodie at the hospital.

He wasn’t wearing it when he was brought in.

Rel, in a bout of uncharacteristic empathy, wonders what Arthur might be able to eat.

They realize as a unit that the cottage’s fridge contains four yogurts, takeaway leftovers, a bag of peppers, and a cabbage.

Rel googles the typical medieval diet while Ygraine makes a list. They hustle to the shops and come back with arms full of bags with hopefully non-offensive foodstuffs.

They miss the grand entrance of his royal highness into the cottage and their lives. Tadd is already making cups of tea when they arrive huffing and puffing to clutter up the kitchen counter.

He blinks slowly.

Morgana, on the sofa in the other room, rolls her eyes and shakes her head. Arthur is nowhere to be seen.

“Ran off, did he?” Rel asks as he starts haphazardly stuffing the fridge.

“Just went outside for a breath of fresh air,” Tadd says. “Why are you like this?”

“Like what?” Rel asks.

“You know what.”

“I’m exactly as I always am.”

Tadd stares at him flatly as he stirs the tea.

“You got something to say?” Rel demands.

Tadd hms and looks away.

“HEY. You sorry fuck, I’m talking to you.”

Tadd ignores him to deliver one of his mugs to Morgana. He pushes open the sliding glass door to the garden with his newly freed hand.

He closes it behind him.

“Your da’s dead to me,” Rel informs Morgana.

“I’ll make a note of it,” Morgana says.

“Is he alright?” Ygraine asks.

Morgana holds her mug to her lips without drinking.

“Arthur?” she asks. “Or Dad?”

“Both. Either,” Ygraine says.

“He thinks you hate him. Arthur, I mean. He doesn’t want to bother you more than he thinks he already has, so thought he’d make things easier on Dad by staying where he was.”

Right.

That doesn’t feel great.

“I don’t hate him,” Ygraine says.

“It’s okay if you do,” Morgana says. 

“I don’t hate him,” Ygraine says again in case she wasn’t clear enough the first time.

“Maybe not,” Morgana says. “But he’s spent his whole life wishing he could have known you, so.”

There is no end to that statement.

“Is that what he told you?” Ygraine asks.

“He didn’t have to,” Morgana says. “He’s going to stay out there until you go to sleep.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Ygraine says.

“Is it?” Morgana asks.

Sometimes, Ygraine wonders if Morgana can see the future.

Tadd tries to convince Arthur to come inside from the garden, but he remains well out of sight of even the glass doors. Ygraine can imagine him crouched in the clover out there along the back stone wall. Tadd brings in the mug he left with, still full but for a sip.

He pours it in the sink. Morgana and Rel have long since departed, Morgana to her bedroom for the night and Rel back to his and Tadd’s mum’s house to make sure the old bat hasn’t perished in the time he’s been away.

Ygraine remains at the kitchen table, soaking in the alien feeling of home.

“He thinks I hate him?” she asks while Tadd rinses out the sink.

“He’s tired,” Tadd says.

“Don’t lie to me.”

Tadd sighs.

“Igs,” he says.

“I don’t hate him,” she says.

“He’s just tired. Overwhelmed. It’s been a long day.”

“He was going to let that man go on abusing him because of me?”

Tadd finally turns around. His face is grave.

“So what if he was?” he asks.

It’s a challenge. Ygraine knows better to rise to that bait.

“Did you talk to him about that?” she asks. “Tell him no means no?”

“I told him it wasn’t his fault.”

That works, too.

“He doesn’t believe me,” Tadd admits. “Told me he thought they were just talking, and he didn’t want it to stop because he was lonely. Told me he thought that he’d let a few times slide, thinking it was the drink, until he noticed he was the only one drinking.”

“Jesus,” Ygraine swears.

“He says he started having these fits—feeling out of control. He didn’t go out to that water thinking to die, he went thinking it might be cold enough to slow his blood down, but while he was there, he started having a whole new fit and all he could think about was making it stop.”

“I’ll go,” Ygraine says.

“Then he says to me, ‘Dad, what’d I ever do to not deserve to die?’”

“Tadd.”

“He’s asleep already.”

“It’ll rain.”

“I’ll bring him in before it does.”

Ygraine’s fingers frame her long-cold coffee in its mug.

“I’m not meant to be his mum,” she says. “I don’t have it in me.”

“You don’t have to be his anything,” Tadd says. “I’m just asking you to stand with me in his corner. But if you can’t, that’s alright. We’re used to it being him and me.”

Her fingers tighten around the mug.

“I’ll try,” she eventually says.

Tadd looks up from where he’s slumped with the small of his back pressed into the counter by the kitchen sink.

Arthur sleeps in the garden the first night he ought to feel truly safe. It rains. Tadd goes out to bring him inside only to find that he’d already moved himself up against the wall of the house mostly out of the splatter zone of the worst of the rain coming off the roof.

He falls asleep again there hugging his legs to his chest with his cheek laid across his knees. He’s wearing that white hoodie from before, though it’s stained now from the clover and the grey roof water.

In the dark, he looks like a statue.

In the morning, Tadd wakes him up and brings him inside. He comes in wiping at his eyes and flexing his cold-swollen knuckles.

He doesn’t notice Ygraine in the kitchen as Tadd marches him upstairs for a shower. Once he’s situated, Tadd brings down the white hoodie and the rest of Arthur’s damp clothes to add to the hamper of washing to do.

“Does he have something to wear?” Ygraine asks.

“Barely,” Tadd says. He closes the hamper and accepts the coffee mug she holds out to him.

“What about all those suits to from those fancy meetings of his?” Ygraine points out.

“Rented,” Tadd says.

“Did the council even think to set him up with a bank account?”

“They did,” Tadd says. “But we didn’t have banks in Camelot. He doesn’t know how it all works.”

“How’s he been eating, then?”

“One of his social workers goes with him to take out some cash every couple of weeks. He buys what he can and rations it for long as he can manage.”

It’s all so bleak.

“They were doing their best,” Tadd sighs, voicing what the more charitable parts of Ygraine’s god-fearing soul were grinding between their teeth.

“What’re you going to do with him?” she asks.

“Today?”

“Mm.”

“He has meetings.”

“Meetings?”

“Four or five of them. Online. He brought his computer.”

“He just got out of hospital.”

Tadd sighs.

“He was taking them in the hospital, Igs,” he says.

“Outrageous.”

“Yes, well. I guess he gets it from you.”

Ygraine’s intestines light up with fury.

“I don’t—” she starts, but stops because no, he’s right.

Tadd hides his smirk with his mug. She slams hers down and points at him. He turns away sharply to admire the sink.

Arthur has four sets of clothes in total. Two soft cotton shirts and two with proper buttons and collars. He has one pair of athletic shorts, one pair of jeans in blue, one pair of jeans in black and a set of black dress slacks. He has four pairs of socks, four pairs of underwear, and four sets of shoes: a pair of trainers, a pair of boots, a set of oxfords and some plain black loafers.

He had more clothing in medieval times, but he didn’t have a washing machine and so seems to have assumed that everyone in this new world just keeps four pairs of everything around and their washer constantly going.

He fills his days with meetings with world leaders and coalitions and committees. He’s deep in the works of a mass demonstration involving no fewer than three hundred non-profits.

He works through his first full week at home. Ygraine sees him once per day, each time asleep with his head in his arms.

Arthur doesn’t talk to her.

He doesn’t talk to anyone, really, besides the people on his calls and Morgana when she comes over to badger him about what he’s working on.

Tadd leaves him be until he suddenly appears one day from the depths of the house and crosses the living room for the garden door. He shuts it abruptly behind him and vanishes from sight.

Seconds later, Tadd and Ygraine hear an explosion of coughing. The wracking kind.

Ygraine stands up from the table.

Arthur wretches in the garden. He sounds like he’s struggling to breathe. Tadd puts his hand on Ygraine’s and squeezes past her to go open the door.

He steps outside and closes it behind him.

Soon more coughing starts up. Morgana creeps down the stairs.

“He’s not eating,” she says. “Probably getting sick again.”

Ygraine hadn’t wanted to mention it to Tadd, but she’d also noticed how slowly the groceries were moving in the fridge.

“He says his stomach hurts all the time,” Morgana says.

“Probably because he’s not eating,” Ygraine says.

“What do you want him to do?” Morgana says.

Isn’t it obvious?

“Aren’t you a nurse?”

Ygraine stands and goes out into the garden. There, she sees that Arthur has vomited in the clover.

Morgana’s right. If Arthur wasn’t resting in the hospital and he’s not resting now, he’s just going to walk right into a second round of pneumonia.

“Both of you inside,” she orders. “And you, boy, in bed.”

There are medications on the end table of the bed Arthur has been using as a desk. None of them have been opened. Ygraine asks Arthur to show her how he takes them, and he demonstrates beautifully for her that the tops of the bottles are both childproof and ancient king-proof.

She opens the bottles.

It’s no wonder he’s been so listless. There are SSRIs among antibiotics and the steroid inhaler. Ygraine rattles through the cabinets upstairs in her and Tadd’s toilet until she finds the spare pill box she bought once for traveling and promptly forgot about.

The boxes will be easier for Arthur to open than the pill bottles. She doles out the meds. Four little white tablets rattle in each box. Obviously the inhaler can’t fit. Ygraine has to show Arthur how to depress the cannister on that one.

He takes the pills and the requisite puffs at her behest and spends the rest of the afternoon absolutely dead to the world on the edge of the backroom’s bed.

His laptop chirps with messages every minute and a half. Ygraine opens it after some time to try to turn off the sound. She doesn’t know Arthur’s password, though, so ends up scrounging up an ancient pair of headphones to plug into the audio-jack to silence it for the time being.

Tadd smiles at her when she throws herself upon the living room sofa with an agitated huff afterwards.

“Thanks, doc,” he says.

“I’m not his mum,” she says immediately.

“Wouldn’t dream of thinking it.”

“It’s irresponsible. They should have educated him before discharge.”

“Mm.”  

“Outright negligence. Imagine if the NHS killed a national icon on top of all that shit about that MP’s wife.” 

Tadd closes the fridge and appears at her side with an egg sandwich held out to her. She takes the offered bite and leans back to whinge some more around it.

Tadd chuckles.

“Thanks for looking after him,” he says. “I was wondering why he wasn’t acting like himself.”

“What is ‘himself?’” she demands.

Tadd shrugs.

“You’ll have to wait and see,” he says.

At the weekend, Ygraine decides that Arthur must have some sort of anxiety disorder. He does that squeezing, wringing thing with his hands when he’s not focused in on any particular task. She knows now that he is taking SSRIs, and though she knows that some SSRIs’ side effects include insomnia, she can’t quite tamp down her annoyance when she finds him working through the night.

They end up having an argument over it, and it is through that argument that Ygraine discovers she has vastly overestimated Arthur’s spoken English.

It is far, far worse than expected.

He can understand, more or less, what is said to him, and he seems to be able to read decently enough but he can’t make sentences of his own, and after several long silences through which Ygraine waits to let him to say his piece, he eventually just shakes his head and looks away from her entirely.

In the lamplight, his eyes shine around their rims.

His tears aren’t those of self-pity. They’re tears of rage.

Arthur cuts his losses by standing up and squeezing past Ygraine. He ignores her calling after him as he slips through the glass sliding doors to go out, once again, into the garden.

Full of spite, she situates herself on the sofa, fully intent to wait him out.

After two hours, she knows that he’s doing the exact same thing outside.

The brat.

Tadd comes downstairs around 5:30 to meet Rel for their daily run. He stops in the doorway of the living room. Ygraine glares at him over her shoulder.

“Right,” he says.

He changes tact and opens the garden door. He pauses out there too.

“Right,” she hears him say again through the door.

Presumably, Arthur is as angry still as Ygraine is.

“Inside,” Tadd says.

Arthur responds in a torrent of the Old Language.

“English,” Tadd says, then pauses and says, “Hey. Ah. Don’t. Art-bach, look at me. Come here. ARTHUR.”

Ygraine startles at the sudden volume of Tadd’s voice. He’s never been one to take a tone like that as long as she’s known him.

“What the hell is going on?” Morgana asks, suddenly appearing on the stairs.

“Your brother,” Ygraine says simply.

Morgana hurries past her to open the door to the garden.

“HEY,” she snaps. “Don’t fucking talk to him like that.”

The door slides shut behind her. Ygraine raises an eyebrow.

Just as it is unlike Tadd to shout, it is unlike Morgana to care about other people. Ygraine curls her fingers and checks her phone until Rel unlocks the front door with his key, apparently worried that Tadd didn’t meet him like usual.

He takes in the empty living room and the flurry of voices going on outside.

“Was there a meeting I wasn’t invited to?” he asks.

“Apparently,” Ygraine says.

“You’re pissy.”

“Fuck off, Rel.”

“What’s happened?”

“Arthur.”

“What’s he done now?”

“Not slept. Not even tried.”

Rel’s nose wrinkles when he frowns.

“All this fuss for that?” he says. “Jesus Christ.”

Ygraine doesn’t stop him from going out to join the fray. She’s not going to. She’s positive that her name is being dragged through mud out there, and she gets plenty of that at work, thanks.

Eventually, though, she hears Rel saying, “Alright, alright, everyone shut up. I’m senior king here, aren’t I?”

Ygraine snorts to herself.

“You ought to listen to your dad, Arthur,” Rel lectures outside. “After all he’s done for you, boy.”

“He doesn’t owe any of us anything, actually,” Morgana snaps.

“It’s not your turn yet, Missy. I’ll get to you when I get to you.”

“Don’t you ‘Missy’ me, you piece of—”

“Morgana.”

“Arthur is king, not either of you. If he wants to go, he’s allowed to go.”

“It’s not safe.”

“It’s never been safe, Uther.”

“Hey. That’s your father, girl.”

“Leave it.”

“I’m not leaving it, it’s basic respect.”

“I said leave it.”

Arthur interrupts in the old language.

“English,” Tadd says immediately.

Arthur suddenly appears again in the doorway. His expression is grave. He doesn’t even glance at Ygraine as he makes a beeline for the front door and starts putting his shoes on.

Morgana comes rushing in right after him, speaking rapidly in the old language, too. Arthur snaps at her. He throws down his shoe and starts going on what sounds to be a healthy tirade complete with multiple parts. He gestures at the two giant men coming back inside from the garden, then at Ygraine and finishes with some sort of declaration that pins Morgana in place while he goes back to collecting his keys and wallet.

He doesn’t waste a second more walking out the front door once he’s sorted.

“Arthur, no, it’s not like that,” Morgana says after him.

“Let him go,” Tadd says.

Morgana flings her hair over her shoulder to sneer at him.

“Just to cool off,” Tadd says. “Let him go.”

Morgana ignores him and zips her boots on. Out the door she, too, goes stomping.

Tadd sighs and shakes his head.

“Fuckin’ kids,” Rel says. “Dad would’ve beaten the snot out of us for lip like that.”

“Can you not?” Tadd suddenly snarls. “Can you just—I’m not trying to be Dad.”

“Well that’s your problem, then,” Rel says. “Where’s your fuckin’ authority?”

“Rel,” Tadd says. “I beat them enough last time.”

The room goes still.

“What?” Rel says.

“You heard me.”

“No. You wouldn’t.”

Tadd looks away.

“You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t,” Rel says.

“Obviously things were different,” Tadd says.

Rel stares for another long moment, then swears and rubs a hand over the bottom half of his face.

“Alright,” he says. “Alright, so. Yeah. Okay.”

“He’ll come back,” Tadd says. “He’s—” he sighs again. “He’s still used to it.”

“Fuck me, Tadd. Why the hell didn’t you say something?”

“I wanted things to be different.”

“Yeah, but, I mean. It’s a cycle, mate. Is he gonna take it out on some unsuspecting passerby?”

“No. Arthur’s not like that. He’s—”

Tadd puts a hand on the back of the sofa.

“He’s good despite me,” he says. “Despite everything I did.”

Rel glances from him to the door.

“You all have to set some ground rules,” he says. “That includes you, Igs.”

Yeah, sure. Ygraine hears him, but she’s still focused in on Tadd’s words there. Slowly, she stands from the sofa.

“You laid a hand on my son?” she asks Tadd directly.

“I thought you weren’t his mum,” Tadd says.

She doesn’t care about that. Her brain is trying to wrap itself around the very idea in front of her.

It feels the way an octopus trying to open a jar looks.

Arthur isn’t her child, but he is. Biologically, he is.

All those hundreds and thousand-odd years ago, he was some Ygraine’s child. He was born because some Ygraine loved him enough to die for him.

Ygraine knows in her heart that no version of herself would stand for a child of hers to fear the hand of his mother or father.

The memory of Arthur reaching for Tadd in the hospital rubs her clear the wrong way now. It takes a long time for even a beaten dog to stop wanting to please its master.

She needs to go.

“Igs. Igs, come on, leave it for now,” Rel says. “Everyone’s already upset.”

She throws on the first cardigan she can get her hands on and stuffs her keys into her pocket.

“Iggy—Ygraine. Come on, mate, tell her,” Rel pleads.

Ygraine meets Tadd’s eye dead on.

She knows that he knows that he’s crossed a line, that hiding this validates all those reasons she had to walk out that door in the first place.

Something wasn’t right and she couldn’t put her finger on it.

This isn’t it, but it’s closer than she’s ever been before.

“I’ll be back,” she says.

Arthur hasn’t gone far. He and Morgana have found a series of stones by the side of the road. Morgana must have convinced Arthur to stop and sit with her on them before he walked his way back to the edge of the city to catch a bus to his old flat.

Both he and Morgana look up as Ygraine approaches, wrapping herself tighter in her cardigan as she goes.

Arthur stands. Morgana moves to stand in front of him.

“You’ve done enough,” she says.

Ygraine ignores her to stare up into Arthur’s eyes.

“Where did he hit you?” she asks.

Arthur frowns.

“Hit?” he says.

“Your father,” Ygraine says. “Where did he hit you? Did he hit you here?” she taps on her face.

“Ygraine,” Morgana says tersely.

“Your backside? Where?”

Arthur murmurs to Morgana. She glances at him and narrows her eyes at Ygraine.

“What does it matter to you?” she asks.

“I know he’s never laid a hand on you since I’ve known you,” Ygraine tells her.

“This time, no. He didn’t,” Morgana says.

“But he did once? In the old times? He did, didn’t he?” Ygraine clarifies. “Both of you?”

Arthur murmurs again to Morgana. She tsks and turns back to translate for him. The two hold a brief back-and-forth before Morgana turns back to Ygraine.

“He doesn’t understand how this is relevant. He says he just can’t sleep.”

“Forget the sleeping,” Ygraine says. “It’s relevant because he’s my son, and you’re my step-daughter.”

“You were gone back then,” Morgana says. “It wouldn’t have mattered.”

“He is not like you or me or Tadd,” Ygraine tells her, pointing at Arthur. “He is still living the old times. So it matters. It matters to me. Ask him where.”

“I don’t have to ask him,” Morgana says lowly. “I was there.”

Right. Okay. Okay, then.

“Ask him if he’s scared of his dad,” Ygraine says.

Arthur, curious now, puts a hand on Morgana’s shoulder.

“Scare?” he asks.

“Scared of Father,” Ygraine says. “Are you scared of your father? Tadd—Uther. Are you afraid of Uther?”

She can tell Arthur understands. Still, he speaks to Morgana.

“He’s not afraid,” Morgana says.

“You’re not,” Ygraine says. “He is. Tell him I see it in his face. Tell him his great-grandfather beat his grandmother black and blue when she was a girl, and he’s wearing her eyes in his face.”

Morgana stares.

“You don’t even like us, Ygraine,” she says.

“I don’t know you,” Ygraine counters. “Either of you. You never let me get to know you, Morgan. And you—” she lets out a long breath. “I know I’m not the mother you wanted; I don’t remember you, Arthur. I never met you. There’s nothing I can say that will change that.”

Morgana swallows hard as she murmurs into Arthur’s ear. Ygraine knows that she doesn’t sugar coat a word of it, though, because Arthur’s eyes fill with tears and he lets out a tiny bark of laughter.

Morgana takes ahold of his arm in deep concern. He pulls away and clears his throat.

He says something to Morgana that makes her close her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers.

Arthur shakes his head and sniffs. He wipes away the tears with the back of his hand and somehow, from somewhere, finds a smile to wear.

“Still have you,” he tells Morgana.

“Yes,” Morgana says, taking both of his hands. “You’ll always have me.”

The siblings squeeze each other’s hands and Ygraine understands, in that moment, that this is them forgiving each other for awful deeds committed against each other.

“And you’ll have me,” Ygraine says. “Both of you. For whatever little that is worth.”

When they get home, it is raining. Tadd and Rel have left the house. Ygraine brushes raindrops out of her hair on her way to put the kettle on.

Arthur sits gingerly on the sofa.

This is new territory for him.

It’s a nice sofa, though; Ygraine hunted through department stores and pages upon pages of online offerings for it.

Tadd loathes all things oatmeal-colored, so while that was her first choice, ultimately, she ended up going with the burgundy. Arthur trails his fingers across it.

“Milk?” she asks.

He looks up.

“Milk?” he echoes.

“For your tea, dear.”

“Tea,” he says to himself.

Ygraine takes that to mean he doesn’t have a preference. Milk and sugar it is, then.

She brings him a white mug and gives Morgana her usual black one. Arthur thanks her. He holds the tea.

Ygraine exchanges a look with Morgana. Morgana taps Arthur’s knee and tells him in their old language to have a sip. He nods.

Ygraine purses her lips at his surprised expression.

He points at the mug.

“Tea?” he says.

“Surely someone has fed you tea,” Ygraine says. “Tadd made tea for you didn’t he?”

Arthur taps the side of the mug.

“I don’t think he thought to add things to it,” Morgana says.

Ah.

“He’s got a sweet-tooth.”

Ah.

“Me too,” Ygraine says. “It’s healing.”

“Healing,” Arthur mimics.

Ygraine fetches her own mug and joins Arthur on the couch. She holds out her hand. Arthur blinks at it until she makes a grabby gesture. He gives her the hand not holding the mug.

His hands are smaller than Tadd’s, and yet so rough on the palm that they could strip paint from walls.

“What on earth have you been doing?” she asks, turning the hand over.

Arthur looks from her to his hand back. He takes his hand back and sets his mug on the coffee table.

Arthur brings from his bedroom a sword only a foot or so shorter than he is tall. Its hilt is gold and etched and wrapped in leather bands. A long panel of the same metal stretches into the silver of the blade after the hilt ends; that too is engraved with symbols.

He sits and lays the sword across his lap. It is so long that it lays across Ygraine’s too.

She knows its name from the legends:

Excalibur.

Arthur gives it to her.

“Is this an answer?” she asks.

“Practice,” Arthur says.

“For what, love, the second coming?”

Morgana snorts.

“Dragon,” Arthur says.

Ygraine raises a skeptical eyebrow.

“Dragons,” she says.

“Soldiers. Kings. Horses who run,” Arthur says.

“Show her the bow, Arthur,” Morgana says.

Arthur lights up and pats lightly at Ygraine’s thigh. She takes the sword properly so he can stand up.

Arthur’s bow is, much like the sword, pretty much his size. How he got it into the house without Ygraine’s notice, she has no clue. It seems to have been to hell and back, though it is clear that Arthur takes good care of it. He demonstrates for her how to pull its string, which is all fine and well until she tries to do it.

It takes all her strength to move it barely a few inches.

She stares at him, gobsmacked, when he takes it back and demonstrates the proper form for her again.

He moves the string like it’s a particularly thick rubber band—like the exercise ones the physical therapists give to long-term patients in the hospital.

Ygraine accepts the bow when it is handed to her once more. The string isn’t any looser, but Arthur seems pleased at her attempts to yank on it regardless.

He offers the bow to Morgana who takes it and gets further into the draw than Ygraine, but only by a few inches before her arms start to shake.

“So that’s what you do in the garden,” Ygraine realizes.

“Garden,” Arthur agrees.

“No, he usually goes to a park,” Morgana corrects. “He’s been praying in the garden.”

Ygraine takes a moment to add ‘Catholic’ to her growing list of Arthur’s afflictions.

“I’ve got just the thing for this,” she says.

Tadd and Rel come in from the rain to find everyone scrubbing dead skin off their hands. Ygraine challenges them both to speak with an eyebrow. Tadd takes off his coat in silence.

Rel squints.

“Are we doing manicures?” he asks.

“Exfoliating,” Morgana says.

“Why?”

“Because Igs says its therapeutic.”

Ygraine lifts the second eyebrow so that it joins the first in asking Tadd what, precisely, he intends to do about it.

Tadd comes over and kisses the top of her head. This is satisfactory. She goes back to her scrub, though watches out of the corner of her eye as Tadd takes ahold of Arthur’s jaw and lifts his chin so that they make eye contact.

“Father,” Arthur acknowledges.

Tadd kisses his forehead. Arthur closes his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Tadd says. “You don’t have to speak English to me.”

Rel clasps at his face in the foyer in aggravation. Apparently this is the opposite of what the two of them discussed on their run. Ygraine swallows her giggles at his frustration.

Arthur, however, nuzzles his forehead against Tadd’s chin and lips. He says something in the old language.

“I know,” Tadd says.

Arthur goes on.

“I know, son. But life will be easier for you if you learn to accept that which you cannot change,” Tadd says. He says it again in the old language. Arthur watches him closely.

“Okay,” he finally says.

“Good lad.”

“Good lad.”

Tadd chuckles.

“We’ll work on it,” he says. “Don’t bolt.” He repeats that statement in the old language, too.

Ygraine can see what he’s trying to do. From now on, it seems, this will be the way.

“Bolt,” Arthur repeats. “Don’t bolt.”

“That’s right. Is that your bow?”

In all the excitement of exfoliation, it seems that they forgot to put away the weapons.

“Your bow,” Arthur says.

Ygraine pauses.

“It’s too big for you,” Tadd says.

“Your bow.”

“Art-bach, it’s too heavy,” Tadd sighs.

“He taught himself how to use it,” Morgana says.

“That’s my bow,” Rel interrupts.

Everyone stops what they’re doing.

“You remember?” Tadd says.

Rel seems taken aback himself.

“No,” he says quickly.

Morgana jumps up and points.

“Oooooh,” she says.

“Stop that,” Rel says.

“Ooooooh. He’s startin’ to do it. Dad, look at him.”

“Tadd, your child is speaking evil.”

Tadd ignores them as he always does. He takes in the handscrub and bowls scattered around.

“It’d be faster to just get the leather conditioner,” he tells Ygraine.

“This smells better. Where did you two go?” Ygraine asks.

“Around.”

“What’s your mum got to say, then?”

“Nothing helpful.”

Sounds about right.

“She wants to meet Arthur—your grandmother, Art-bach.”

Arthur doesn’t respond, he’s lost interest in everything again but the grit between his palms. Tadd rolls his eyes.

“Dunno about that,” Ygraine says.

“That was my feeling as well. Rel seems to think it’s a matter of honor.”

Ygraine glances back to the kitchen where Morgana has backed her uncle into a corner.

“How unlike him,” she notes.

She takes Arthur’s hands and holds them over the bowl she gave him so she can scoop water over them until they are clean. Mystified, he rubs his fresh palms together.

He shows them to Tadd in awe.

“I can’t ask you to forgive me,” Tadd says, barely glancing at the hands.

“I can see how much you love them,” Ygraine says.

Tadd strokes Arthur’s hair. Arthur pulls away immediately and tsks. He only wanted Tadd to admire his softened callouses. He reaches over to tug at Ygraine’s fingers instead. She allows him to put them in the bowl and bathe them the way she did for him.

It feels like some kind of ritual when he does it.

“I’ll be better,” Tadd says.

“They love you back,” Ygraine says. “It’s why they’ve stayed. We all have that in common.”

Her hands are clean now. She lets Arthur hold their palms together. His are still hard with wear and peeling blisters.

They must at least feel a little better to him. He stands with the bowl and takes it away, leaving Ygraine and Tadd alone.

“He looks like my mum,” Ygraine says.

“He looks like you,” Tadd says.

Maybe he does.

“We need to figure out what services he has,” Ygraine says.

“I’ll ring them,” Tadd says.

“And his meds. Diagnoses.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“Distract your mum. He needs time to settle in. I want him to feels safe here first.” 

“Does that mean you’ll stay?”

Well.

Ygraine can’t see a way around it for now.

Tadd drops her off for her next shift at the hospital. This is excruciating because there are other nurses in the carpark, and the second they see her in the passenger seat of Tadd’s shiny blue Kia, they start lingering around their own vehicles.

Watching.

Ygraine is in such a hurry to escape their notice that she doesn’t hear Tadd calling after her the first few times. He rolls the Kia slowly up next to her and rolls down the window.

“Arthur made you a lunch,” he says, holding a small bag through the gap.

“You don’t have to eat it, but I promised I’d give it to you.”

“Thanks. Drive safe,” she says.

“So,” Penelope says while Ygraine is furiously typing at the nurses’ station. “I heard Tadd dropped you off today. You two are back together then?”

The keys beneath her fingers clack so loudly, Ygraine is sure that the people down the hall can hear them. She checks her notes.

“Iggy,” Pen drawls. “We all know you love him.”

“I needed a break,” Ygraine says tersely.

“Uh-huh. Looks to me like you two had a baby.”

“He’s not my baby.”

“Everyone is dying to know what that’s like, you know. It’s not every day you find out you’re a real queen.”

“A real dead queen, yep,” Ygraine says.

The other nurses snort and chortle around her. Pen, never to be dissuaded, grins like a shark.

“I’m sure it’s a lot to get used to,” she says. “You never struck me as the Mummy-type.”

“I’m not.”

“Who’s not the mummy-type?” Doctor Dozie asks.

“Igs,” Marcy says.

“Are you pregnant?” Doctor Dozie asks in alarm.

“Oh? You haven’t heard?” Ygraine deadpans.

“Iggy’s King Arthur’s mum. Took a blood test and everything,” Pen says.

“I didn’t ask for this,” Ygraine reminds everyone.

“That’s not possible,” Doctor Dozie says.

Ygraine lays into her with a look. The nurses burst into fresh giggles.

“She took him in like a little baby bird,” Pen says. “She’s transforming before our eyes.”

“But it’s not possible,” Doctor Dozie says. “Arthur was born in the 500s.”

“I would love for you to tell that to lads who did my bloodwork,” Ygraine says. “And my husband. And his mum.”

She opens a new chart. Doctor Dozie stands behind her awkwardly.

“Can I see?” she eventually asks.

Ygraine wastes no time in taking out her mobile and bringing up the letter. She hands it over and goes back to her notes.

“God above,” Doctor Dozie says.

“Tadd must be so happy. He’s always wanted a son, I’ll bet,” Pen says.

“Tadd remembers being a medieval king,” Ygraine says. “He says he was just waiting for his son to come back to him. He brought all this upon us.”

“Can’t you just be happy, Igs?”

“If I ever walk in here smiling, call the police. I’ve been kidnapped.”

“Is he…stable?” Doctor Dozie asks. “I can’t imagine the trauma of coming back from the dead.”

Ygraine pauses to consider this.

“Remarkably stable,” she says. “But there’s a language barrier. And obviously he was expecting a different sort of mum.”

“One who cares?” Miriam asks.

Ygraine stiffens.

“I care,” she says.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Sorry.”

“It’s fine, Igs,” Pen says. “The lad’s gone to war. I’m sure he’ll cope just fine with your moody self once he gets used to you.”

“Hm.”

“I’m surprised about the language barrier,” Doctor Dozie interrupts. “He’s been well spoken every time I’ve heard him talk.”

“He mimics,” Ygraine says.

“Does he?”

“Constantly. Doesn’t really understand, though. And he made me lunch, god bless ‘im.”

“Lunch?” the nurses bustle.

“Can he do that?” Pen asks.

“No idea,” Ygraine says. “We’re about to find out.”

 The first half of Ygraine’s shift passes with only minor incident. For some reason, she has managed to get two patients who smoke and who are equally adamant about being able to do so while wheeling around oxygen tanks. So that is invigorating.

One of her younger lads is a fan of Tadd’s team and recognizes her from a gala that she attended years and years ago.

He asks if she can get him an autograph from Tadd or Rel or both.

She tells him that she can get him cranberry juice or orange.

Apart from the men, she has a lady refusing to believe she is pregnant in the first place and experiencing a high-risk one in the second and a younger lady who’s brother thought he’d wake her up with a cricket bat only to realize one second too late how bad of an idea that was.

It’s a calm shift, all things considered. Busy enough to keep Ygraine’s mind off the complicated situation at home, but not especially traumatizing.

When she finally makes it to a breakroom to have her supper, she finds herself surrounded, unfortunately, by the same busybodies from the carpark that afternoon.

She briefly considers eating outside but doesn’t want to be spotted or called upon by any of her wandering smokers, so is forced to sit and endure the scrutiny.

She opens the bag Tadd gave her.

Inside is an ensemble of things whimsical enough to make even the charge nurse cackle when she looks over.

Arthur has very thoughtfully started by giving Ygraine a kitchen knife from the block on the counter and no other utensils. She takes it out of the bag with extreme care and, more than that, wonder at how he got it inside without slicing open the bag’s lining.  

She then removes the whole tub of margarine from the fridge door from the top of her supper, along with one of the packets of crisps Arthur has seen her snacking on before.

He is fascinated with Hula Hoops. He gave her the salt and vinegar ones.

He put them in a second plastic bag along with a breakfast muffin from the pack on the counter.

For the requisite protein of the meal, Arthur has gifted her a pot of yogurt wrapped, for some reason, two times in aluminum foil along with two folded up pieces of sliced turkey which have been similarly packaged and tied to the yogurt’s top with butcher’s twine.

Concerned, apparently, about the safety of the meat and dairy on its journey to the hospital’s cafe, Arthur has also given her both a meat thermometer and the kitchen timer.

He must not have been able to figure out which was which.

The tiny dressing tub at the very bottom of the bag appears to be her dessert. It is full of peeled grapes.

“You know,” Pen says, “That’s like, 90% food.”

She is correct that it is food. It is also half the kitchen.

“Maybe this is what Arthur eats when you’re not looking,” Eliza from the maternity ward downstairs offers.

No, Ygraine is pretty sure that Arthur survives off half-slices of bread, pinches of watercress and the occasional bite of chicken. She’s not actually seen him sit down for a true meal. She doesn’t know how he thought to include the yogurt. Maybe he googled ‘what is a packed lunch’ and followed along until he was confident enough to add his own flair to it.

“I think it’s sweet,” Pen says.

Ygraine can’t argue with that.

She texts Tadd a picture of her supper and gets back an immediate ‘I was looking for that knife.’

She tells him to make a real supper and eat it at the table with the kids.

Oh god, she realizes, she’s calling them ‘the kids’ now. This is it. She’s sinking with no sign of land for miles.

Tadd reminds her that he’s working until 10pm.

He picks Ygraine up at midnight when her shift ends. This time, there are far fewer nosy neighbors in the carpark.

“What did people eat in medieval times?” Ygraine asks on the way home.

“Lots of pottage,” Tadd says. “Stews.”

“What did Arthur eat?”

“To be honest, I couldn’t say. I left it to Gaius to sort that out.”

“Gaius?”

“Our physician. We thought everything was medicine back then. Every meal had its purpose. He gave his prescription for our various ailments to the cook, and she did what she could with them.”

“Is Gaius here with us?” Ygraine asks.

Tadd considers it.

“I’ll find out,” he says.

Arthur isn’t home when they get in. He left that morning for a trip abroad. Ygraine is touched that he spent his precious few minutes before leaving making her a packed dinner.

It’s progress.

They are bonding.

She thinks he’s in Amsterdam at the moment. She messages him a thank you and receives no response back. It’s late. He’s probably sleeping.

Tadd brings in his kit and tells her to go take a shower. They can sleep in tomorrow, finally.

Tadd calls around through his contacts for most of the next day, on this hunt for this man called ‘Gaius.’ Ygraine still isn’t clear on their relationship. He calls Gaius a ‘physician’ but it honestly sounds like the man was a quack, doling out potions and antidotes and mashes of herbs according to whatever mood he was in that day.

She doesn’t dare speak that thought outloud, however. Not to Tadd anyways. To Rel, who reliably comes over around noon to show her his bruised legs, she has fewer qualms.

“Gaius?” he echoes.

“Ringing any bells? Old ones? New ones?” Ygraine asks.

“Not a one,” Rel says. “I feel like we had a physician growing up. Tanned sort of fellow. Beard.” He mimes stroking one near his belly. “He had an accent. Must’ve been Arabic or something.”

‘Gaius’ doesn’t sound much like an Arabic name.

“How do you remember these things?” she asks.

“I dunno,” Rel says. “Sort of comes in flashes and dreams. Wakes me right up, to be honest. You know I used to have a tattoo?”

“Did you?”

“All over here,” Rel says, gesturing to his shoulder. “A snake eating its tail.”

Hm.

“I should have it redone, I think.”

“Do you think there are others like us and Morgana?” she asks.

Rel takes a second to mull it over. He and Tadd spend so much time together that their thinking faces are practically reflections of each other.

People call them twins out on the field even though Rel is older by three years.

“There must be,” Rel says. “Morgana is young—of Art-bach’s generation. So there must be some of his friends milling about.”

Hm.

“Should we find them?” Ygraine asks.

“I think that’s Arthur’s dilemma, not ours,” Rel says.

Maybe it is.

Tadd comes up with a web of possible leads on his Gaius. He tells Ygraine that he needs to go meet with someone who was once her best friend.

Ygraine raises an eyebrow at the very suggestion.

It isn’t that she doesn’t have friends. People have always taken pity upon her and adopted her into their various social circles. In school they did it because she was pretty. Now they do it because she apparently ‘takes no shit’ and is ‘adorably the size of a mouse.’

She can deny neither accusation.

But for her to have a best friend?

Sounds fake.

“Her name is Nimueh,” Tadd says. “She was once a priestess.”

“Like Morgana?” Ygraine asks.

Tadd seems uncomfortable.

“Like Morgana,” he says.

“Why would I be friends with a priestess?” she asks.

“I don’t know, dear. You are the one who brought her into the relationship.”

“And I take it you brought Gaius?”

“I wouldn’t say they were mortal nemeses,” Tadd says.

This means they were mortal nemeses.

“Did she happen to wear a lot of purple?” Ygraine asks.

Tadd stops puttering around by the door.

“Do you remember?” he asks.

It’s not memory per se. Ygraine just has this impression that if she did have a best friend, they would be into purple. She herself has always been a pink sort of girl.

“Nimueh,” she says. “I don’t remember. It’s a lovely name.”

“Yes, well. She hates me. Can you come along?”

Why not? It’s not like Ygraine has anything better to do in her kid-less house this weekend.

Nimueh is a long, tall woman with the most interesting face Ygraine’s ever seen. To look upon her once is to want to look forever.

Her skin is like that of a doll. Her lipstick has been applied with care in a rusty-orange color and her hair tumbles in oiled tresses down her back. She stares into Tadd’s face like she wishes she was holding the handle of a knife under the café table between them.

“It’s a neutral question,” Tadd says diplomatically.

“Nothing is neutral,” Nimueh says.

“Nim.”

“Uther.”

“I’m not asking for me.”

“It’ll come back to you somehow, it always does,” Nimueh says. Her dark blue eyes flit briefly over to Ygraine. “Did you think bringing her along would persuade me?”

Surely, she is some sort of model or influencer. No one working a normal job could be this put together on a random Saturday morning.

“Igs came on her own,” Tadd lies.

“Igs?” Nimueh says with a sneer.

“That’s me,” Ygraine says. “You’re beautiful.”

Nimueh seems taken off guard.

“I’m just me,” she says.

“You’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen,” Ygraine tells her. “What do you do for work?”

Tadd looks slowly from her back to Nimueh who scowls at him right away.

“It won’t work, Uther,” she says.

“I am merely a father trying to look out for his son,” Tadd says.

“Arthur should have been allowed to die the moment Mordred’s blade touched his heart,” Nimueh says.

“He should have,” Tadd agrees.

“If you didn’t want to bear witness to his suffering, you should have changed your ways earlier.”

“Must you make this about me at every turn?”

“Yes,” Nimueh says simply.

“Fine. But I did not come here to open old wounds,” Tadd says. “I only want to know if Gaius is here as well.”

“I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to find Merlin.”

“Why on earth would I be trying to find Merlin?” Tadd asks.

Nimueh stares at him. She looks then to Ygraine.

“Is he serious?” she asks.

Ygraine shrugs. She hasn’t been paying much attention. Nimueh’s lips form a cupid’s bow and the way that the light hits her mouth and chin creates a halo around their edges.

“Uther, tell me you haven’t at least become curious in your old age,” Nimueh says.

“I am curious about plenty of things, including the whereabouts of my former physician.”

“You’ve heard the legends, haven’t you? Merlin is a sorcerer.”

“Yes, well. He was Gaius’s nephew. I can’t say I am surprised.”

“Jesus wept,” Nimueh says. “Emrys—Merlin—is the one Arthur should be seeking. He has been waiting for him since Arthur’s death at Camlann.”

“Alright, so Merlin will know where Gaius is?” Tadd says.

Nimueh folds her hands together and leans forward on the table.

“You’re serious,” she says.

Tadd shrugs.

“You’re actually serious.”

“I told you, I’m looking for—”

“Gaius. I hear you. I am trying, however, to extend you an olive branch, you stupid, thoughtless man. Find Merlin, not Gaius. Merlin is Arthur’s guide from here on.”

“Says who?”

“Everyone,” Nimueh says. “But most importantly, the magic that brought your son here from Avalon. It will not let him wander from this path until he has fulfilled his purpose. If he dies before then, there is no telling where his spirit will go, but I can promise you that it will not rest in peace.”

Ominous.

“And if Arthur has already found him?” Tadd asks.

“Then ask Arthur to ask Merlin to lead you to Gaius,” Nimueh says, sitting back in her seat and crossing one leg over the other. “It’ll be faster than having me track him down for you. You know his type. Unobtrusive. Ordinary. He thrives among poverty.”

The words fall like poison from her lips. Ygraine could only pray that her own words might one day come forth with such gravity.

Ygraine gives Nimueh her number before they depart and asks her to send along the brand of her lipstick if she is so inclined.

Tadd tells her not to hold her breath, but after only an hour or so, a link appears at the top of Ygraine’s messages.

Nimueh tells her not to message her again, which is a funny thing to say over text. Ygraine has no choice but to text back ‘Okay!” with a little smiley face.

Predictably, Nimueh replies with, “I said DON’T.”

It’s too easy.

“Oops, my bad!” Ygraine replies.

“STOP.”

“I’m trying to!”

“Just. Whatever. Nevermind. Whatever do what you will,” Nimueh types.

Ygraine sends her another smiley face. And a heart. And an emoji of a strawberry shortcake.

Arthur comes home the following Tuesday. His security team walks him all the way up to the doorstep. He fights his way through them and shoos them aggressively. They remain in the doorway until he has closed the doors and pulled the shades on the kitchen windows so they can’t see him through them.

He’s wearing a branded hoodie he didn’t have before his trip. It’s black.

He greets Ygraine in hoarse English and drops down to languish for a moment before even starting to pick at his shoelaces.

“Tired?” she asks.

“Mm.”

“There’s food on the hob.”

Arthur rustles around for a while. He comes up behind her to peer over her head.

“Nimueh,” he says.

Ygraine looks up at him. She raises her mobile.

“You know her?” she asks.

“She tries to kill Father,” Arthur says.

“She’s telling me she tried to kill you, too,” Ygraine says.

“Ehn,” Arthur says and wanders off.

He’s so unbothered. Ygraine respects it.

“Apparently, she and I were friends,” she says over the sounds of Arthur picking a mug out of the dish-drying wrack.

“Okay?” Arthur says.

“She said I promised her she’d be your godmother.”

“Promise her. Promise her? Nimueh?”

“Mmhm.”

“Merlin kills her.”

Ygraine’s fingers freeze over her phone screen. She pushes herself up and twists back to see over the back of the sofa. Arthur flicks the kettle on and tries to crack his neck.

“Merlin?” she says. “The wizard?”

Arthur huffs without turning around.

“Wizard,” he mocks.

“Isn’t he?”

Arthur scoffs.

“Wizard,” he says again. He offers her another word instead.

“Sure,” she says. “Your friend, though?”

“Friend?”

“Yes. Merlin is?”

“Merlin is friend.”

“He killed my friend?”

“Merlin kills lots of people,” Arthur tells her with unusual clarity. 

“But you’re still friends? Even though he’s killed a lot of people?” Ygraine asks.

“Mother, I kill lots of people,” Arthur says with a sigh.

Yes, but Ygraine has been overlooking that for the sake of her sanity.

“Why do you need all those men if you could just have Merlin?” she asks.

“Men? Knights?”

“No, darling. Your security team.”

“I see,” Arthur says, which is actually his way of signaling that he’s tired and overwhelmed and wants to stop talking.

Ygraine gets up and joins him in the kitchen. His hair is so long that it’s starting to brush his eyelashes.

“Can I see your phone?” she asks, holding up hers and pointing at it.

Arthur digs around in his pockets and hands his over.

His idea of privacy isn’t quite like everyone else’s Ygraine has learned. He’s given both Tadd and Morgana the passwords for all his devices and doesn’t seem particularly bothered about them tracking what websites he goes to.

There’s been no pornography to everyone’s surprise. There are far more concerning things to account for like how many times Arthur has googled the word ‘camel.’

He’s fascinated with them. He just goes onto google images and clicks through the photos. He’s looked at probably hundreds of pictures of camels at this point.

His phone’s contacts are equally transparent. He has what feels like an endless list of them. He’s marked the work ones with their organization names in brackets, but there are a few in there that give Ygraine pause.

For example: Guinevere❤️

She purses her lips and watches him pour the kettle.

Everyone else seems to have a last name. But not Guinevere. And then not a series of other names that start to appear.

Leon.

Gwaine.

Lancelot.

Merlin.

Merlin. Ygraine opens that conversation tab and finds probably a thousand messages between him and Arthur.

Arthur writes to him mostly in his old language. Though he uses familiar letters, the way he puts them together is incomprehensible.  

Merlin’s responses to these jumbles of letters come in a mix of languages. Some responses seem to be in the same language, others are recognizably Welsh (though the spelling for some of the words is bizarre), the rest are in English.

His most used reply is, “If you say so, my lord.”

It pops up almost every fifth message in both English and Welsh, and Arthur’s response to it every time is ‘Fine. What would YOU do?’

Merlin responds either with ‘nothing. Nothing at all’ or a brick of text that takes several scrolls to get through.

“You talk with Merlin a lot,” she says.

“Mm. Shows me how,” Arthur says.

“To text?” Ygraine asks.

“Mm.”

Fascinating. She scrolls upwards until she finds the date that Arthur tried to drown himself.

Before that, there are no messages. After that, there are hundreds.

“Don’t you EVER. EVER. Do that again.”

“You have no idea how worried I was.”

“All you had to FUCKING DO was call me you godforsaken brainless turnip faced bastard.”

“I don’t know why I even waste my time.”

“WHY DO I EVEN BOTHER.”

“I hate you.”

“Come live with me.”

“I HATE YOU.”

“I cleared a room. I don’t care about your flatmate, I’ll kill him my fucking self.”

“He sounds like the worst. I can fix that.”

“Okay, but I could take care of him for you.”

“Right so hear me out. What if I”

“Killed your.”

“hello hello hello answer me if you don’t answer me I’m tracking you down and bringing a match. I did it once I’ll do it again hello hello that’s a lie don’t ask me how many times I’ve done it”

“Arthur I am waiting.”

“When are they discharging you?”

“discharging is like when they let you go.”

“Just sign whatever they give you.”

“No with your name.”

“No they don’t have seals. Use your name.”

“Where the hell did he even come from???? No, I’m picking you up. Don’t go with him.”

“What did I LITERALLY just say?”

“My god you’re hopeless”

“Someone spare me. Someone spare us all.”

“Okay once you get there, wait until they’re all asleep and go outside. I’ll come get you.”

“My lord, you had one job.”

“I don’t care.”

“I can take care of her.”

“It is a solution actually.”

Ygraine can’t help but laugh the more she reads. Arthur stirs his newly brewed tea.

“Funny?” he asks.

“Merlin is funny,” she says.

“Sometime,” Arthur says. “Otherwise stupid.”

‘You fucking pumpkin,’ is Merlin’s most recent message. Evidently, he thinks Arthur is just as stupid.

“He’s a good friend,” Ygraine says, “He was going to come get you from the hospital?”

“Mm.”

“Why didn’t you go with him?”

“Father comes.”

And Arthur just couldn’t say no. Merlin knew how tense that reunion would be. He was trying to protect Arthur the whole time.

“Do you plan to go with him eventually?” Ygraine asks.

Arthur watches her as he drinks from his mug. Eventually, he sets the mug on the counter.

“Merlin is where I am to be,” he says.

“You’re meant to be together?” Ygraine translates.

“My heart, his heart, beat together,” Arthur says.

Aw.

“And what about Miss Guinevere then?” Ygraine asks.

Arthur’s face turns red in an instant.

“Nothing about Guinevere,” he says immediately.

“Oh? But I see right here, she was talking to you.”

Arthur snatches his phone back and stuffs it in his pocket.

“Don’t be embarrassed. It’s good that you found her.”

Arthur huffs and looks anywhere but her.

“Tired, he says. “Going bed.”

“I bet you are,” Ygraine says.

“Good night.”

“I won’t tell your father,” Ygraine says.

Arthur pauses and turns suspiciously back.

“If you invite Merlin round for tea,” she says.

“Mother. You—Merlin is not tea. Worst tea,” Arthur whispers urgently. “Him and Father like this” He bangs his knuckles together.

“So? He’s your friend, isn’t he? I’d like to meet him,” Ygraine says. “Invite him round.”

“Mother, be helpful.”

She can’t stop herself from shaking with laughter.

“I’ll protect you,” she says. “Go on off to bed.”