Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
uther
He was always very proud of his routine. It was carefully constructed, honed through years of practice, different working hours, through night shifts back when he was but a lowly technician, sterile cubicles, cheap suits, and then, at long last, vast executive offices. In its current form, it leads him to rise at seven, wash, exercise, shave, then eat breakfast with the morning papers at eight thirty.
This morning is no different from any other. He idly brushes a few toast crumbs off an article in the Financial Times. He has no trouble focusing. No trouble at all. For this, too, is a skill he has honed over the years.
Don’t let them get to you. Don’t ever let them get to you. It is a message he will pass on to his son. Drum it into him.
-
He met her for the first time when she was just a baby, in the hospital, swaddled in a crisp white blanket. Ygraine had cooed over and coddled her, looking at him with those beseeching eyes of hers. She wanted one of her own.
-
Their very own child, who, when Uther finishes with his breakfast and walks out into the hallway, is sitting halfway up the stairs. He hears him before he sees him, a muffled sniffing sound. He’s crying. He wipes his eyes on the sleeve of his pyjamas as his father passes, but he cannot hide it. Uther wonders if he should say something, but - no. Later. Not now.
He crosses into the lounge and peers out the window. It is nine o’clock and the black van is pulling in to the driveway right on schedule.
She is upstairs, locked away firmly in her room. Except she is not a she any longer, he reminds himself (and obviously there will be more slips of the tongue now. He has never lost someone he was so close to this way).
Arthur scampers out of the way when the uniformed men arrive. Embarrassed to be seen in his pyjamas, and crying, at that. He flees up to the second floor landing and watches from above as they open the door.
But Uther turns away. He walks out of the house to discuss security with the head of the team, near the van. They will not need him inside, so there is no reason for him to be there. It’s logic. That is all.
He tries not to look as she is taken past him.
-
When Arthur was three, and Merlin was just barely a year old, Uther appeared on television for the first time. He’d been in his new position at the Institute for scarcely a month. Arthur thought later that he could remember watching it and feeling proud despite everything, but he might have been confusing it with something that happened later.
Merlin could not remember it at all. It was just as well.
But the evening of the day they take Morgana - take it - away, Uther sits in his study and replays his own words in his mind.
It is a waste of time to have these creatures crowding the institutions to no purpose. I believe that we could learn much from them were there no restrictions on study, and we could use that knowledge to aid the identification and capture of others who have been afflicted, the wolves in sheep’s clothing that lurk amongst the populace…
The details are hazy. He finds the video tape and watches it once, twice, listens to the thundering applause at the end of this speech. Glows with pride. His victory.
It is ludicrous that these animals are allowed to live after harming, sometimes killing innocent people. We put down dogs that bite. It would be injustice not to apply the same to a beast just because it has a human face.
But he can’t help but notice how weary he looks. It had only been twelve days. Less than a month before, he and Ygraine had been celebrating his promotion together.
He finds himself searching his own words for a loophole. The forms ordering the death of - the subject they acquired today lie on his desk, unsigned.
Monster or not, she it is a young monster. Out of control. And he has seen the preliminary results of the tests, to destroy it without any further study would be…
He loses the form in a pile of paperwork.
-
Arthur cries.
Arthur cries, and Uther scolds him for crying, because he is twelve years old now, and that is too old for crying. There’s no point crying over something that never existed to begin with.
Arthur is to help clear out Morgana’s room. He will destroy her possessions as if she had died of the plague.
It’s easier to think of her as dead.
He will deal with her corpse himself.
-
(He allows himself to wonder sometimes, at night, in the dark, what her father would have to say about this.)
-
She begs at first. Asks him to look at her. Calls him by name. Mentions her father, her mother, Arthur, how they’d hate him for this.
One day she mentions Ygraine. Ygraine wouldn’t want this, you have to stop…
That name sounds wrong on her lips. He twists a dial sharply to the right. She screams.
-
She stops begging not long after that.
Eventually she stops making sense altogether. Her hands clutch at empty air in the restraints as if reaching out, searching for some kind of contact, but no-one touches her without gloves, not any more.
---
merlin
He always knew that it was different, wrong, dirtynaughtybad, but it didn’t really hit him until one day, the last day of school, when he and Will were outside, walking along the curb like it was a tightrope, and a black, shiny van pulled up outside a house opposite the school, and he recognise the shrieking woman they dragged out, because she’s Natasha’s mum who made the costumes for the school play; she’d made him a pointy hat to play a wizard and they’d taken it away because it was dirtynaughtybad and he’d been a jester instead.
He doesn’t understand, but then Will says magic like it’s a rude word, like the words the older boys say that make everyone snort and giggle, and he realises that it’s not just different and wrong and dirtynaughtybad, that it means being taken away forever. Because Natasha’s mum is never coming back, not ever. And then suddenly the curb felt like it really was a tightrope, high and dizzying, wobbling beneath his feet, and he toppled off to the side, and he thought for a moment that he was going to fall and fall, for ever and ever, but then he hit the road, hard, and got dust all over his school trousers.
Natasha moved away.
He needed a new pair of trousers for next year anyway.
-
But then it hits him again when a girl he knew at school is taken away three years later, and again when the posters appear on every notice board he sees telling people the signs to look for, and again, and again, with every person who is taken, every story on the news.
But it doesn’t really sink in until he is standing naked and shivering in a tiny room in the Institute, and someone throws a bucket of icy-cold water all over him to make sure he’s clean, and the sharp, cold shock of it brings his sleepy, hungover, addled mind to its senses at last, and he finally understands what has happened.
You’d think that there would be screaming and crying and pleading, but all that comes out is a gasp.
But then they are scrubbing him all over with disinfectant and it stings when it gets in his eyes, and then, then he starts to fight back again.
---
lancelot
What we do.
He sits back in his chair, sighs, and rubs a hand over his face. He suspects that when Dr. Pendragon handed him the file, and smiled, and said it would be good for him, that he perhaps had an ulterior motive at work.
What we do. How we help you. How we are making the streets safer.
He eyes up the other files piled on his desk suspiciously. They are full of reports and case studies about electroshock and sensory deprivation and dissections. He wonders what would happen if he told them about any of that. He’d probably get sued.
He sits forward, taps his pen against the desk anxiously a few times, then slits back again.
“Fuck.”
-
“What we do,” he says after the introductions. “Is help you. We help every one of you. We are making the streets safer for you all.” He pauses to clear his throat. Four hundred tiny wide-eyed faces stare back at him.
“What we do makes it easier for dangerous -” What’s the word, the official word, the one that they are supposed to use “- afflicted beings to be caught, so they can’t help anyone else. One day we hope that we’ll be able to find them before they hurt anyone at all.” He breaks off to smile at them, then moves to his next cue card. “Um. Are there any questions so far?”
Silence. The teachers smile encouragingly. A few shy hands go up. He picks a nice, friendly-looking little girl in the front row.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, you in the front row?” he says.
“What do you do with them to make it safer?” Her voice is sickly sweet. Saccharine.
He swallows. “We study them,” he says. “And do tests. So we can find them faster next time.” Forces a smile. “Anyone else?” Nothing. The rest of the hands had wilted already. “Alright, then,” he said. Click. Next slide. “Now, I imagine most of you have read the posters we’ve been putting up, but just in case -”
-
He runs into his superior within minutes or arriving back (sits down at his desk, shoves his papers away, then gets up to get himself some coffee). Dr. Pendragon, standing in the hallway, flirting cheerfully with a pretty intern. Lancelot stops short and watches them for a moment. He’s not sure he dares interrupt. But then the girl giggles and hurries away, and Dr. Pendragon is coming towards him.
“Ah, Lancelot!” he says. “Back already? How was the presentation?”
“Fine, doctor,” says Lancelot. “Absolutely fine.”
“It better have been,” says Dr. Pendragon. “People have been getting so uneasy lately, can’t think why…”
Lancelot could think of a few reasons. But no, no, he should ignore them. None of them bothered anyone else, especially not Dr. Pendragon, who could casually flirt and banter while signing papers ordering that a subject be put to death at once as if they were nothing. As if it were okay.
“Me neither, doctor,” he says. He clears his throat. “Though to be honest, doctor, I wasn’t really sure what to - I mean, I just didn’t know how to put it all. To children.”
“I know, I know,” says Dr. Pendragon, “It was a tough assignment, but I really thought you could handle it.” He accepts a file from another intern, smiles at Lancelot, and walks away.
Lancelot smiles after him. He can’t help it.
Of course it’s okay.
---
guinevere
They are standing around a little bench with a memorial plaque on it, under a little tree, outside the chapel, when the car pulls up. It is big and black and shiny, and the moment it turns the corner Morgana flinches next to her.
“It’s alright,” murmurs Gwen, running a hand through Morgana’s hair, pulled back for the occasion. “He can’t do anything to you now.”
The door opens. A young skinny man in a dark suit gets out, looks around, then says something through the open door of the car.
Gwen does not think she has ever seen Uther Pendragon in person before.
He is every bit as intimidating as he is on television, on the radio, in Morgana’s ramblings, hell, even in his signature scrawled neatly across official documents back at the Institute. All tall and silver-grey and glaring.
She hears Will’s sharp indrawn breath, feels him tense up, standing next to her with one hand on the back of the bench.
“He has no right to be here,” he says softly.
“He’s Arthur’s father,” says Gwen.
Will just shakes his head. “He has no right to be here,” he repeats.
“Will,” hisses Hunith. “As much as I hate the man, he just lost his son, Will, and Lord knows I know how that feels. Don’t you dare talk to him like that, alright? Just be civil.”
Will doesn’t respond. Gwen thinks maybe he is shaking slightly. Is that rage? She wonders which of them it’s for. Arthur or Merlin.
She thinks that she hopes at least some of it was for Arthur, who she feels she had misjudged horribly. She thinks that it is only a matter of time before Will gives up on being civil.
Next to her, Morgana has her eyes tightly closed.
“Just ignore him, love,” Gwen says. “We’re here for Arthur.”
-
She remembers finding him. It is burned into her brain. She had tried to call him when she got home late from work (to tell him that Morgana seemed better for having seen him, and maybe he could come more often) and got no answer. She had tried again, and again, then gone to bed and tried calling him again the next morning over breakfast, heart pounding, palms sweating, telling herself that she was just being irrational like always, he was fine, probably just taken an early night -
Then she had gone round to his flat to check, found a spare key under the mat and let herself in when he didn’t answer, just in case, and found him slumped in the bedroom, blood dried into the carpet, hard and dark reddish-purple against the blue.
His eyes were still open. She had thrown up in the bathroom afterwards. Twice. Since then she’d hardly felt anything at all.
-
The service is actually quite nice, in a depressing, subdued sort of way. There are only a few people there. The public memorial service isn’t until next week.
She and Morgana, arranged so they couldn’t see Uther and his aides, at the back of the room. Hunith and Will. Lance and Owain and Gareth, who Arthur had worked with. Dr. Gaius. Some of Hunith’s friends. No-one there had been that close to him, she thinks. Not really.
She sits, crumpling the flimsy program in one sweaty hand, waiting for it to be over so she can leave and change out of the uncomfortable black dress and make sandwiches for Morgana.
But afterwards, over awkward drinks it all went to hell. Uther seems to be going to leave at first, and there is a collective sigh of relief, but then -
“No, stay,” says Hunith, “you have every right to be here.”
Will glares, downs the rest of his glass of wine. Morgana shifts uncomfortable beside Gwen, though thankfully remains quiet. She should take her outside, she thinks. It’s a nice day.
“If you don’t mind,” Uther Pendragon is saying to Hunith, “who exactly are you?”
What do you have to do with my son.
“I’m Hunith Emrys,” says Hunith.
“You and Arthur were… friends?”
She nods. “My son… died. In his facility.”
“He killed him, you mean,” says Will.
Hunith shoots daggers. But she doesn’t say a word. Will swallows the rest of his wine and gestures with the glass. “It’s all your fault, you know. Both of them.”
“Will -” says Gwen. They have to be polite. Arthur wouldn’t want them to argue at his funeral. Would he?
“How dare you,” seethes Uther Pendragon. “I -”
“Don’t you dare try to justify yourself,” says Will. “They’d both still be here if it wasn’t for you.”
“Will, don’t,” says Gwen. She can feel something building up inside of her. She thinks she may throw up.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Uther Pendragon.
“Like hell I do,” says Will. “It’s all your fault. You started it all off!”
“Will, please,” pleads Gwen, who is starting to Gwen breathless. He’d listen to Hunith, but she remains resolutely silent.
“You don’t understand,” Uther Pendragon is saying, “none of you do - this madness…”
“You have no right to be here,” Will says firmly, calmly, though he is visibly shaking.
“Now, Will,” says Lance. “He’s family, Will -”
“We’re more family than he is.”
Uther Pendragon shouts something back, but Gwen doesn’t hear it. The world is fuzzy. She can’t quite breathe. She can feel her shoulders heaving. The carpeted floor collides with her knees. She can here someone crying somewhere somehow. It might be her. She’s not sure.
As the fuzziness retreats, she hears her name over and over. Feels a pair of thin arms slip around her. It’s Morgana.
“Hush, love,” she said with surprising clarity.
-
Ten minutes later, she and Morgana sit on the grass outside and watch Uther’s shiny black car pull away.
“I just don’t understand why he did it,” says Gwen. “Arthur, I mean.” Morgana is silent. “Did you see it?” Morgana shakes her head.
“No,” she says, “but I dreamed about Merlin, once. Merlin and Arthur.”
“You never even met Merlin,” says Gwen.
“I knew it was him,” says Morgana. “They fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. Maybe that’s why he did it. There were pieces missing.”
Gwen finds herself strangely unsettled. She shivers despite the warm air. Most of what Morgana says is strange like that, she tells herself, and jumps back a stage in their conversation.
“It’s strange that you didn’t dream it,” she says.
“Maybe I’m dreaming it now,” says Morgana. She has pulled her hair down loose. It falls in waves across her shoulders.
“No, you aren’t,” says Gwen. “I’d know. I’m here and I’m thinking, and, well… I’m here.”
Morgana turns to look at her. “So?”
---
merlin and arthur
They lie side by side on soft, tingly grass, watching the lights in the sky go swirling by in silence.
“D’you think things could ever have been… different?” says one. The words hang in the air between them, like icicles, before melting away.
“I don’t know. I’d like to think so,” says the other.
“If you’d met me before it all happened, could we have been friends, d’you think?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I’d have liked you.”
“You didn’t like me anyway.”
“Yes. Well.”
Silence. The moon rises and falls a few times.
“Are we friends now?”
“I don’t know. Are we?”
“I’d like to think so.”
Above them, the swirling lights come together to form a whole.
---
william
He doesn’t watch Uther drive away, just wanders into the men’s toilets and paces a little, tries to decide what he should do.
He’s not as surprised as he should be when Hunith finds him there after ten minutes or so. She stands in the doorway, staring at him sadly.
“You can’t come in here,” he says. “It’s the gents.”
“There’s no-one around,” she says. “And everyone’s leaving. I thought maybe we could go back to the house. This place is so… soulless.”
Will doesn’t answer. He stares at himself in the mirror for a while. “Did you even like him?” he says eventually.
“Excuse me?” she says.
“Arthur,” says Will. “Did you even like him, or did you just feel sorry for him?”
Hunith is silent for a moment. Then she steps inside, lets the door swing closed behind her. “You said he was family, Will.”
“Just because someone’s family doesn’t mean you have to like them,” says Will. “Like my cousin Trevor. No-one likes him, but we put up with him every Christmas anyway, because… just because. I’d stand up for him too if I had too. Doesn’t matter how much shit he pulled.”
“That’s family for you, I suppose,” says Hunith, almost smiling.
“But did you like him?” says Will.
It takes her a while to answer. She steps forward and rests a hand on his shoulder. “He was a good person, Will,” she says. “He did some bad things, but he did a lot of good as well.”
“You sound like you’re talking to a journalist or something,” says Will. Because the journalists had come to their door, once they’d heard what had happened. He sighs and stares down into the sink. “He drank too much and he was moody and bloody arrogant. I wouldn’t’ve liked him even if he hadn’t -”
But he can’t quite bring himself to say the words again. He’s said it enough times already, but for some reason he can’t say it now. “Anyway. He’s dead now and I didn’t like him. Sometimes I think he deserved it.”
Hunith squeezes his shoulder, but doesn’t say anything. He can’t bring himself to look up, to look her in the eye.
“I’ll see you outside,” she says eventually.
The door swings shut behind her.
-
They don’t talk about the funeral much after that. Like it was something they all just had to do and now it’s over and the world seems like one big sigh of relief.
He goes back to university that autumn. Not the one he and Merlin had been at before. A different one. It’s not so good but it’s closer to home and the people are all new. A few of them know his name, act all awed and sympathetic, but for the most part he’s just one more fresher. No-one remembers the blokes behind the scenes. He likes it that way.
---
hunith
The day had come too soon.
Her son was halfway under his bed, legs waving out into the room, as if he were trying to hide. He looked so childlike that for a moment she could almost think that he was still a little boy, that she could keep him here for longer, here where he was safe. With her.
“It’s not under here,” he said, voice muffled by layers of wood and mattress. He squirmed a little more, then emerged clutching a whisk in one hand. “But I found this. Is it yours?” He frowned and held it out.
“Probably,” she said, taking it and wiping some of the dust off on her sleeve.
“It’s probably at the back of my wardrobe somewhere,” he said. “I should probably clear it out before I go anyway, d’you think?”
“If you dare,” she said. “It might be better just to seal it off and leave it, though.”
He laughed and sat down on his bed. The mattress dipped, sending the sheath of papers perched on the edge scattering across the floor.
“Oh, Christ!” he exclaimed, hurrying to pick them up.
She knelt down beside him. Accommodation, registration, matriculation - his future condensed into little boxes and colour-coded paper. Three tiny identical photos of his face in a little row. She set them down on top of the pile.
“You will be careful,” she said, “won’t you?”
“Of course,” he said. “I can look after myself, Mum. Don’t worry.”
“Of course I’ll worry,” she said. “I’m your mother. That’s my job. I always worry.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said.
“Just make sure you come home,” she said.
They had never talked about what would happen if he got caught. The knowledge just hung in the air between them. In her nightmares.
“I will,” he said. He straightened up the papers and set them back on the bed. “Promise.”
-
He left three days later, swept away on a train into the distance. She was struck with the knowledge that she might never see him again. If anyone so much as grew suspicious while he was away…
But he came home at Christmas, and again at Easter, and for long weeks over the summer, until she began to relax, to think that maybe he would really be alright, he could really keep it hidden forever.
-
Then one day, midway through his second year, she came home one day to a garbled, panicky phone message from his friend Will.
I’m sorry, he heard. Couldn’t stop - He broke off, shouted something unintelligible at someone else, away from the phone. I couldn’t stop it - Then he was drowned out by another voice and background noise. All she could make out before the message cut out with a beep was took him.
She set down the phone, went into the kitchen, and made herself a cup of tea. Told herself that she had misunderstood. That he was trying to tell her something else altogether.
Halfway into the cup, she dialled her son’s mobile number. It rang for a long time, then stopped. She tried again, with much the same effect. She finished her tea, washed up her dishes from breakfast, and tried once more.
It rang three times. Then a familiar voice answered.
“Hunith?”
“Will?” she said. “I got your message. What happened? Where’s Merlin?”
“I tried to stop it,” he said, sounding on the brink of tears. “I did. But I couldn’t -”
“Will, what happened?” she said. “Is Merlin alright?”
He was silent for a long time.
Then he told her.
“I didn’t know,” he said once he was done. “I didn’t know what he was. I’d have stopped him if I’d known, I swear. I was there, I could have stopped him, but I thought - I didn’t know.”
She didn’t answer.
“I don’t mind, though,” he said. “It’s Merlin, I know he’s not - it’s bullshit, isn’t it? It’s all bullshit.” He fell silent. “Are you alright?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said quietly. She wasn’t sure he heard.
“Don’t worry,” he said, with new certainty. “I’m going to get him back.”
The line went dead.
-
They came for her a few hours later.
At first, when the van drew up outside, she thought that she was to go the same way as her son and his father, guilty by association, but no. They were polite. Gentle. Almost sympathetic. They invited her into the van and drove for hour after hour, two men keeping up a light conversation in the front, and her in the back.
There were restraints in the back of the van. Straps and buckles, like a net, for holding people down. She wondered if he had been taken by the same van, driven for hours, bound and gagged and restrained. Her son.
Her fingers brushed the sharp metal of the nearest buckle, just as they drew up to the gates. They opened with a grating metallic sound. The van drove on, then slowed to a stop.
It was a squat brick building, with small windows covered by grey blinds. The two men helped her out of he van and through the doors. Inside, it smelled like a hospital. There were people hurrying back and forth, lab coats and files and papers and smiling faces everywhere.
A smiling young woman took her by the arm the moment she was inside and hurried her away.
“Mrs Emrys?” she said. “Dr. Pendragon is handling the case. You’re in good hands. He’s the very best.”
-
“Oh, it’s just a blood test,” said another doctor, after the meeting. “Don’t worry. I’ll send the sample to the lab, they’ll run a quick test, and depending on the results we might have to do a quick scan, but that’s not likely. I doubt you’d have agreed to come in if you’d had anything to hide, eh?” He smiled at her. She pointedly did not smile back. “You should be able to leave in an hour or so.”
“Thank you,” she said, “Doctor…?”
“Du Lac,” he said. “You can call me Lance, Mrs Emrys.”
“Of course,” she said. She held out her arm, one sleeve rolled up to the elbow neatly.
He took it by the wrist. “You might want to look away,” he said.
“I’m not squeamish,” she said.
The needle sank into her arm. She didn’t flinch.
“So, what did you think of Dr. Pendragon?” he said, as if it were the time to be making conversation.
“I think,” she said, “he’s a monster.”
He looked hurt. He pulled the needle from her arm and handed her a plaster. “Trust me,” he said, “there are much worse.”
-
A few weeks later, Will showed up on her doorstep one evening, bag slung over his shoulder, looking pale and under-slept.
“I’ve dropped out,” he said. “Or I’m going to, anyway. And I can’t - I can’t go home. I told my mum what happened, and she said, she said -” His voice cracked.
She opened the door to let him through. “You can stay here for a while,” she said. “I’ll make you some tea.”
---
gaius
The teapot touches the tabletop with a soft clink.
“Thank you,” says Gaius, accepting a cup. “It’s very kind of you.”
Hunith smiles sadly. “You’re always welcome,” she says.
“How’s Will?” he says.
“He’s very well,” she says. “He’s talking about going back to university.”
“That’s good,” says Gaius.
“And yourself?”
He takes a sip of his tea. “I’ve been better, I must admit.” He sets down the cup. “Mrs. Emrys, may I possibly ask you a question about your son?”
“That depends what you want to ask,” she says, but she motions for him to go on.
“Was he… was he a very forgiving person?” says Gaius.
She thinks for a moment, gaze drifting over to the window. “Yes,” she says eventually. “Yes, he was.” She turns back to him.
“It’s a good quality to have,” he says.
“Was that all you wanted to know?” she asks.
“More or less,” he says. He looks around the room, searching for something else to say. “You’ve repainted in here?”
-
It is irrational and unprofessional and utterly illogical, and after forty years he really should be better than this, but Arthur’s case sends shivers up his spine. Maybe it is just the knowledge of what he did.
You wouldn’t know it to look at him. He is a friendly, charismatic, good-looking young man, the kind of person one trusts easily. But then he would sit in Gaius’s office and talk.
It took a while, but once he got Arthur talking, he wouldn’t stop.
‘I didn’t kill any of them,’ he says. ‘I just signed the papers. The killing was different from the rest of it. It was separate. And then they burned the bodies after.’
Another session:
‘You wouldn’t believe the things people will say under - that sort of thing - the things they would offer you - they would offer you everything.”
Another.
‘Some of them were children - I remember this one girl, she couldn’t have been older than twelve -’
Another.
‘I remember this woman, she’d burned down a house in her sleep, and I -’
Yet another.
‘I remember what I did…’
‘I did it.’
Ghosts.
Gaius does not believe in ghosts, of course. But he has visited the facilities, walked those corridors, looked in the rooms where they would kill and maim and torture, and if there was any place that was haunted, that was it.
They were not killed. They were ‘disposed of’. ‘Terminated’. ‘Shelved’. There had been no burials, no memorials, just a paper trail that led to a number and a full stop. If there was anyone who would stay trapped and angry…
Arthur talks.
‘I saw him again today. He told me it hurt, when I killed him.’
He is frank. He never once tried to deny the reality of what he did. He never tried to hide it from Gaius.
‘I see him sometimes, just watching me. I think he’s keeping watch. I think he might be watching me all the time, even when I can’t see him. Is that crazy?”
He is quite adamant about his sanity, as if it is all he has left.
‘I saw him again today…’
‘He told me he would…’
Arthur talks.
‘I see him everywhere,’ he says. ‘All the time. He’s so angry, Gaius.’
“He’s not real, Arthur,” says Gaius. “It’s just a manifestation of the guilt,” says Gaius.
He tells himself that he believes it.
---
morgana
The news of Arthur’s death is a dull shock, it hurts.
It hurts as much as anything can hurt her anymore, because she the pain everything hurt so much for so long that her skin is now too thin thick, she is impenetrable;
And yet it hurts.
She did not see this, she sees everything now, her mind her mind opened up by the hurt, letting it all in, the dreams, the nightmares, until she can hardly tell one from the other, but it is getting better, and this is not a dream, not a nightmare, he’s dead and she didn’t see it.
My little brother is dead. He shot himself in the head.
But did it hurt, she wonders, did he feel the bullet before he died.
She is in her room. Gwen, lovely sweet-safe-soft Gwen is pulling back her hair, gently with a brush and a black stretchy band, washing and clean and nice-smelling,
Do you want to talk about it? Says lovely sweet-safe-soft Gwen.
The girl shakes her head.
Me neither, says safe-soft Gwen.
Silence, the breeze whispers against the window.
Uther will be there, says safe-soft-sweet Gwen, the name is like ice and broken glass shards in her mouth, like needles and sparks and sharp hot pain.
I don’t think anyone wants him there, but he sort of has to be there, says Her Lovely Gwen. He’s Arthur’s father, says she.
He was my father once, the girl says, or maybe she just thinks it.
Lovely sweet-safe-soft Gwen doesn’t answer, either way.
---
uther
They don’t tell him what has happened.
He finds out a few weeks later. He is midway through his morning routine - still maintained, despite everything - and he has just turned to the second of his newspapers. The headline chills him to the bone.
But no, it isn’t true, he tells himself. His son is not dead. His son has not committed suicide. His son is alive and well. This is a hoax, a lie, a sick, twisted publicity stunt. If he was really dead, they would have told him, those people he’d been spending time with.
It isn’t until a few days later, when a woman calls him and tells him, haltingly, that the funeral will be on Tuesday, that he accepts what has happened. He thanks her politely, hangs up the phone, then sinks to his knees and weeps, routine be damned.