Chapter Text
“You chucked over Juilliard for this?” Arthur glances at the crumpled leaflet laid before him on the polished desk. He flicks it away with a disdainful finger, as if it is an unsavoury bit of rubbish rather than an advertisement for a gig. The two, in his eyes, are very similar. Music really isn’t his forte. It all sounds pretty much like senseless noise to him, from Tchaikovsky straight down to Beyoncé. But even he can dance to Beyoncé, so perhaps it isn’t all useless cacophony. He likes a steady beat to run against in the mornings. But this band, Albion Revisited, doesn’t look like it’ll provide the requisite metronomic precision required to get his blood moving in the pre-dawn light. More like another derivative Ren-Faire reject, like so many so-called bands in this ridiculous hamlet. Anachronistic to the hilt.
Morgana slams a hand far more elegant than indicated by her choice in chipped black nail varnish over the bit of brightly coloured detritus, shoving it back toward her half-brother with a snarl of impatience she doesn’t bother concealing. “This is my band, Arthur, you twat, and it just happens to be my life, so a little bit more respect from you is in in order. After all, I’m doing you a massive favour, here. Or attempting to, if you’d just remove your giant, over-inflated head from your posterior long enough to realize it.”
Arthur raises an eyebrow. “A favour? How is you barging in here in the middle of a conference-call demanding I allow you and your group of degenerate flophouse flatmates to play in my club meant to be a favour to me? Explain this to me. Use words I might actually understand.”
Morgana bares her teeth in a an oddly captivating grimace meant to be a smile, somewhere down deep, and leans over the desk, hands planted squarely on the painstakingly varnished surface. Bloody hell. Arthur will have to get a lacky in as soon as she leaves with a bottle of Pledge and a soft rag. He pretends to ignore her complete lack of physical boundaries, examining his fresh [and tasteful] manicure in the hazy sunlight that washes over his workspace like a corona of personal power. He had his desk placed very carefully.
“Then I’ll speak very. Slowly. Shall I?” She takes a deep breath. “Your club? Rubbish. Boring. My band? Exciting. Has more buzz than you’ll know what to do with. This gig? Cancelled, due to closure of venue. Your club? Empty every Saturday night. Why? Because my band is playing elsewhere. Do you see where I’m going with this, half-brother?”
Arthur sighs. “The Rising Sun isn’t that sort of club. It’s not a venue, Morgana. We don’t do live music.”
“And you’re failing miserably. See the connection?”
Arthur simply smiles.
"This is Glastonbury, Arthur.” Morgana continues, standing up straight, folding her arms petulantly across her exposed cleavage. She really has started dressing down. She used to be a Chanel girl. Now she looks as though her signature pieces have been bought in a furtive, gritty transaction involving a debit card across a Topshop sales counter. The accountant indicated she hasn’t used her Platinum Card in months, even though it has no limit. Even though the money is hers to spend. Her pride has always been her downfall. Or her greatest asset. Arthur can never quite decide.
He sighs. “Your point being? Spit it out, Morgana. I don’t have all afternoon.”
She laughs, dimpling, the timbre of her voice like cut-crystal even when serving up a helping of her signature derision. “My point, dear near-sibling, is that the summer crowds mob this tiny hamlet, not for Muzak paired with exorbitantly-priced booze, as you seem to think. They come here for the spirit of Glastonbury, for the sound. They come here for the music, you imbecile, or have you never heard of Festival Season?”
Arthur stares. “This isn’t Festival Season.”
“No,” Morgana agrees. “Not yet. But it will be, in three months time. And if my band doesn’t have a respectable slot on the John Peel Stage at the very least, you are going to be one very sorry little executive. This gig?” Morgana stabs a tapered fingernail at the steadily declining scrap of bright yellow paper. “This gig is a strategic one for Albion Revisited. Some very high-profile label scouts are going to be there. Except there is no there. And don’t think I am not aware of the reasons for that, and who is and who is not responsible. And when I say who is responsible, Arthur Pendragon, I mean you! So you are going to make it up not only to me, but to my entire fucking genius band! Is that clear?”
Arthur does his best to remain impassive. He sighs, stretching nonchalantly in his chair, enjoying the pop and crackle of his joints. “How, exactly, did you know about my involvement in the closing of The Silver Arrow? Just out of professional curiosity. I kept that little victory rather hush-hush, even for me.”
“It doesn’t matter how I know,” Morgana curls her pretty upper lip. “Suffice it to say, I made it my business to know. Consequently, I know that you not only fucked the owner of The Silver Arrow, who happens to be a contact of mine, but you caused him to fuck me. Hard. And I don’t enjoy non-consensual sex, Arthur. Therefore, you owe me. Big. And as a way of repayment, this major favour I’m doing you and your crummy little wine-bar doesn’t even come close. I’ll be milking this for months, Arthur. And you know how I like to drain something right down to the bone.”
Arthur swallows. A bead of sweat springs out on the small of his back. Morgana has that predatory expression on her face that he knows only too well. What’s more, he respects it. Might even fear it a little bit. It tells him that there is no way he is getting out of this one, so he might as well lie back and think of England.
Morgana narrows her eyes into jewelled slits. She knows she has him just where she wants him. She can smell the stink of surrender on him as surely as a rabid dog smells fear.
“Right,” he says, rapidly recovering his poise. “Fine. I’ve thought about it, and you can have your precious little gig. But this is the only time, Morgana. I don’t want you and your scruffy little mates hanging about the place after Saturday night. This is a one night thing. Agreed?”
Morgana smiles, smug and satisfied as a cat licking feathers from her claws. “I’ll remember you said that, Arthur. Every single word. Mind you do the same.”
Arthur doesn’t watch her saunter out the door. He knows her victory-sashay only too well. It used to drive his adolescent mates completely mad, back in the day. Drove him a bit mad, too, before he discovered they were actually related. Her power over that part of him loves to reassert itself at the most inopportune moments.
“Pull yourself together, Pendragon,” he mutters, gritting his teeth. “She’s your fucking sister, for Christ’s sake. Or it least, the less-detestable half of her is.”
Goddamn Morgana. She isn’t satisfied til she leaves men trembling and inappropriately hard behind her in every room she exits. Nothing much has changed there. Arthur shifts uncomfortably in his chair. Waiting for the blood to rush back to his brain. So he can think about how royally whipped he is. Not to mention how catastrophically fucked.
Arthur has no intention on actually going to the gig. He simply wants to make certain that Morgana hasn’t vindictively trashed the place, or made plans to torch it after her bloody band exits stage left.
He would never admit it to anyone, least of all Morgana, but he feels the anxious overprotectiveness of a first-time parent towards his club. The Rising Sun is his own brainchild, the sole product of his independance. It has nothing to do with Camelot Industries, with his father’s future legacy. It’s something of his own, that he bought with his own cautiously hoarded earnings. Money his father didn’t throw at him the way he throws money at both of his children, all the while maintaining an elaborate expression of consummate, constipated disappointment. It was that particular display of facial-acrobatics that finally drove Morgana out of the mansion and straight across the Pond, but even Juilliard wasn’t far enough. Uthur approved of Juilliard. He was proud of the burgeoning talent of the latent violin virtuoso Morgana had become, seemingly overnight. Arthur himself knew that his half-sister had played for years, in secret. That she had payed for her own tutors, thinking Uther would never approve of a career-path so tenuous and frivolous.
It was her trump card.
It fell completely flat.
What she hadn’t banked on was that, however dazzling her cleverness and charm, however promising she was, no matter that she was the elder child by eighteen months, Morgana was a girl. She wasn’t the son, and therefore could never be the crown prince, the Pendragon heir. Therefore, for better or for worse, she had more leeway on her tether. A glittering career on the stage would simply be one more diamond-cluster adorning Uther’s tie-clip.
And so she had tossed it all away, gleefully. She’d taken up with a scruffy band of misfits. A literal one, as it turned out. A life on a very different sort of stage than their father had begun to covet for her, and more importantly, for himself. The Pendragon children were both trapped by their father, in one way or another. And in one way or another, they had each found an outlet.
Morgana has her band.
Arthur has his club.
His own secret, furtive little rebellion that as far as he is aware, Uther knows nothing about. Like Morgana, Arthur wants to two-finger-salute the old man: unlike Morgana, he wants to do it on the sly. He likes the feeling that he's getting away with something. Morgana likes the feeling that she isn’t. They are very different people, in the end, he and his half-sister.
Except now she's changing tactics, trampling all over Arthur’s private refuge with her tatty stripper-boots and her banged-up gig-gear. It isn’t enough to lead her own life. Her own disaster. She has to drag Arthur and his perfectly contained fantasy along with her. He loves playing proprietor. Now Morgana is about to spoil everything. Everything. Just like she always has from the moment she arrived, a ten-year-old orphan on their doorstep. The fact that she has only ever been a half-orphan, as well as a half-everything-else--half-friend, half-sister, half-completely-mad--changes nothing. Morgana is the bane of Arthur’s existence. He loves her, of course. Is crazy about her, and always has been. As is anyone who really knows her. Sod it, complete strangers are barmy about Morgana Pendragon in a requisitely terrified sort of way. But it doesn’t change the fact that Arthur would seriously consider strangling the life out of her if he thought he had any chance of getting away with it.
He had been banking on the fact that this new life of hers very well might save him the trouble. But now she has her noose around his neck as well. Arthur has to give the crazy bitch credit: he hadn’t anticipated that. He can feel the slipknot tightening as he parks his Jag, tossing the keys to his personal valet who’d been huddling against the brickwork, waiting in case Arthur deigned to show up. It's what he's paid to do. Arthur likes to pay people to do things. It's so much tidier than this business of favours given, favours owed. He doesn’t like red in his ledger. Morgana is a crimson tide soaking its pages. Messy. Impermeable. Acid-proof. He will never completely scrub her off. Deep down--very deep--he knows he doesn't want to. Morgana is a mess he loves to tidy up, and the task is never finished. It will finish only with her life or his.
Rounding the corner to the front entrance to The Rising Sun, Arthur is confronted by a sight he’s never seen before: a queue--more of a mob, really, truth be told, taking up the entire sidewalk beneath the subtle black awning depicting a stylized sun with emblazoned rays of light. Percival, the tallest man Arthur has ever seen, is arguing with several members of the crowd as Arthur elbows his way through to the velvet rope that has clearly been vandalized. Several raised voices overtake Perc’s unperturbed baritone. He stands with arms crossed implacably over his impressive pectorals, his massive biceps displayed to full effect. Arthur shoves down the tendril of envy that rises like a vindictive eel from the murky depths of his ego.
“What’s going on?” he asks the monolithic bouncer.
“Nothin’, boss. Just telling this lot it’s no use bribing or threatening me, they’re not getting in tonight.”
Arthur frowns, scanning the hopeful faces. “Why not? Are they barred, or something? They can’t all be barred--there’re several hundred people out here.”
“Nope. They ain’t barred.”
Arthur sighs impatiently. “Well, what, then?” he leans close. Percival leans down to accommodate the rather outrageous height difference. “We can’t exactly afford to be turning customers away, Perc. There’s a hell of a lot of red in my ledger. I want to know there’s a bloody good reason for this.”
“Club’s full,” Percival explains.
“What do you mean, full?”
He shrugs his massive shoulders. “Jam-packed to the bloody rafters, is what I’m gettin’ at, boss. I shove another body in there what ain’t yours, the fire brigade’ll be on our arses in a matter of minutes. Your call, of course. Just don’t blame me for the massive fine.”
Arthur stares. “You’re having me on.”
“Nope.”
“We have a two-thousand body capacity.”
“Yep.”
“We’ve never pulled in more than five hundred people at once.”
“I know.”
“The club’s practically empty most nights.”
“Not tonight, boss.”
“I don’t see why tonight should be any different,” Arthur grouses. “Just because we’ve got some ridiculous band on.” He turns to scan the disgruntled crowd, denied entrance to a drinking hole he doubts very much they’d be caught dead in normally, judging from the state of their chosen attire, which is anything but normal. They range in style from your average High Street hipster to more than a few gutter punks and a fair smattering of granola, Earth-Goddess types sporting white-kid dreadlocks and Birkenstocks. Arthur is nearly blinded by the reflection of several dozen pairs of thick-framed Buddy Holly specs.
Christ, he thinks. I’m the fall guy in an ironic music video I didn’t fucking agree to star in.
“Hey dude,” one of the crunchy granola types says in an American drawl slow as molasses, clapping Arthur on the arm. “There’s gotta be room for a few more. I’ve been dyin’ to catch this band, and we were told there’d be spare tickets at the door. What the fuck, man?”
“That was the old venue,” Percival explains patiently in a voice so saturated with boredom that Arthur is certain he’s repeating himself for the umpteenth time. “The Rising Sun’s smaller.”
“The Rising Sun’s more exclusive,” Arthur corrects him, shrugging the guy’s sweaty hand from his arm. “Next time, make sure to purchase your tickets well ahead of time to avoid disappointment.”
He lifts his hands and raises his voice over the dull roar of the rest of the mob. “I’m sorry to have to turn you away, people, but the club is packed, the tickets have all been sold. I’m going to need you to clear the area immediately, as there is no loitering outside of the venue. You’re violating fire codes as we speak, and I don’t want any of you fine folks to be hurt or get yourself into trouble with the police. Come back tomorrow night, mojitos are two-for-one, and no cover charge for the ladies.”
“What’s the band tomorrow?” one of the hipsters wearing a pair of jeans so skinny he casts no shadow on the pavement asks in a tone of voice that expresses very little interest in Arthur’s reply.
“There is no band tomorrow,” he explains, irritation creeping into his voice. “Or at any other time. This is a one night thing.”
The house music drowns out the groans and jeers as Arthur steps over the mangled velvet rope and through the front doors of his club. He puts on his most dazzling smile like a swift change in costume as he nods to the bartender and tries to ignore the sinking in his stomach and the gloating laughter in Morgana’s voice that he can hear already, echoing off of the back of his skull. Now who’s begging whom for a favour, near-brother dear? she cackles.
No one, he tells himself. Not on her life or mine.
The Rising Sun only ever looks this way in Arthur’s dreams. Packed to full capacity with people talking and laughing excitedly, the house music blaring just loudly enough to make everyone lean closer to one another, spilling drinks and buying more because the talk is making them so damned thirsty they require more and more lubrication. People so thick on the extremely costly floating dancefloor that hasn’t so much as been scuffed by an erant Jimmy Choo that they can barely swivel their hips let alone dance with any alacrity. Granted, it’s extremely unlikely than anyone in this particular demographic can afford a pair of Jimmy Choos, even if they had the sartorial good taste to want them. But if Arthur squints his eyes and allows the strobing lights to hit his corneas just right, he can imagine that all his dreams for the place have come true. That his club, against all odds, has made it. That it hadn’t taken Morgana’s grotty little tribe to fill a place that hasn’t seen a crowd this keen since the excesses of the 1980s, a decade into which Arthur had only barely been born.
He muscles his way through the crowd and up to the bar where he quickly catches the eye of Elena, the charming but klutzy barmaid who manages to spill every customer’s drink on their shirt-sleeves, but who Arthur can’t bear to fire. He has a soft spot for overgrown puppies, and Elena’s exactly that--a sweet mongrel pup in human form, down to the huge paws and loving disposition. Thank Christ she mixes a mean Snakebite and Black. It keeps the kids from the business college coming back night after night, their student loan money burning a hole in their Dockers.
Tearing herself away from a more-demanding-than-usual clientele, Elena sloshes a couple fingers of whiskey into a highball glass and shoves it Arthur’s way. He downs it in one and raises his finger for another. She pours with her usual ineptitude, sloppily doubling the last dosage. Arthur mouths a tolerant thank you and allows her to get back to the clamouring customers waving impatient ten-pound notes and demanding noxious pints of cider and lager. The fact that they’ll pull in any decent overhead tonight is down completely to sheer numbers. Not that Arthur can complain. Five thousand pints beats a hundred high-end cocktails, any way one looks at it.
He sucks back half of his drink as insurance against the jostling crowd, cradling what remains in his glass against his chest as he elbows his way toward the stage. It’s crawling with roadie-types who on closer inspection turn out to be members of the band, a fact that isn’t lost on the more rabid members of their fan-base, who lean against the stage with expressions bordering on the obsessive. Some of them even occasionally call out to various members of the band by name. Arthur stops to watch, fascinated despite himself.
“Gwaaaaaaine!” one extremely inebriated girl shrieks. “I want to have your fuckin’ baaaaabyyyyyy!”
An excessively good-looking bloke pops his head up from behind the half-assembled drumkit, grinning as he tosses back an elaborate mane of rich chestnut waves. He looks like an Ambercrombie model in his simple black beater and low-slung jeans, well-formed muscles rippling as he fiddles suggestively with the tuning rod on his snare. “Cheers, darlin’,” he replies in a thick Dublin accent, “But I’m really not much of a family man, know what I’m sayin’?”
Arthur pushes through the door to the backstage area as the drunken girl begins describing loudly and in graphic detail an alternate service she would be more than happy to render. The Irishman seems much more interested in her second suggestion, though by the time the gig is over, Arthur predicts she’ll need scraping off the dancefloor in no fit condition for any follow-through. He’ll have to have a word with one of the bouncers to keep an eye on her. He doesn’t know how rowdy the crowd is likely to get. It’s hard to get a read on their demographic, which is varied enough to become very unpredictable. He doesn’t want anyone getting hurt, too drunk to stumble out of the way of a crushing surge of fist-pumpers and slam-dancers. There are Festival casualties every year ending up in the A&E, or so he’s always read in the papers in the days following the annual tear-down. He has to be ready for anything, especially if it might turn litigious. Litigation causes the sort of unwanted attention he is desperate to avert. He doesn’t need Uther catching wind of his little enterprise.
Which is another reason he isn’t supposed to be here tonight.
He should really finish his drink and duck out the alleyway exit. He could call a taxi and pick up his car the next morning. Though Elena’s creative measuring practices make it very hard to keep track, Arthur estimates that he’s had three drinks at the very least. He’s feeling it a little bit, which is why he actually smiles when he catches sight of Morgana applying eyeliner in the cracked mirror at the dressing table in the doorless room where she’d clearly been getting ready for the show.
“These dressing rooms leave much to be desired, arsehole,” she informs him testily.
“That’s because this is a club, Morgana, not a venue. There isn’t meant to be any dressing going on back here. It’s just spare storage.”
“It’s a bloody bollocks storage area, too,” she grouses, flinging out a hand to gesture dramatically at the jumble of equipment cases and spare gear cluttering up what remains of the space.
Arthur shrugs, leaning his head back to rest against the doorframe. “You don’t like it, you know what to do.”
She rolls her eyes, leaning in to apply a streak of silver along each eyelid, smudging it as she goes until she looks like someone’s blackened both of her eyes for her, but in a sexy, heroin-chic sort of way. Her mouth is a cruel red pout, like a bitten cherry. She narrows her gimlet eyes at Arthur in the mirror and winks saucily at him when she catches him staring.
“You really are the limit, you know that, Morgana?” he says, and tosses back the remainder of his drink.
He is nearly bowled over the next moment by a much more conservatively dressed woman who begins unceremoniously whipping off her dress and exchanging it for another one similar in cut but much more spangly. Arthur catches an eyeful of smooth cafe-au-lait coloured midriff and a delightful jiggle of cleavage in a black push-up bra before a headful of glorious black ringlets pops up through the neck-hole.
“I know, I know, I know! Sorry! I’m sorry!” she exclaims, wrinkling her nose as she scurries over to join Morgana at the mirror. “I couldn’t get the last two people out the door tonight, and I was late locking up!”
Morgana raises an imperious eyebrow. “Are you a mousy librarian or a rock-goddess, Gwen?” she demands coldly, handing over the eyeliner. “It’s time to decide.”
“I’m a mousy librarian when it’s time to pay the electric,” Gwen replies practicably. “A rock-goddess? Well, never, really. That’s your department.”
Morgana snatches the stick of kohl impatiently away, tilting the other girl’s face more conveniently toward the unflattering overhead light. She executes a few terrifyingly vigorous slashes at her band-mate’s large whiskey-coloured eyes. “There. Look. Now who’s a rock-goddess?”
Gwen blinks several times, wiping away a few reflexive tears and then peers into the mirror. “Well, actually, still you, I’m afraid. But that’s much more convincing, isn’t it?”
Morgana sighs, plunging her remorselessly strong, slender fingers into the mass of curls and gives them a good mussing. “There. Now put on some lippy for fuck’s sake, we go on in ten.”
Arthur watches in a sort of intensely dreamy silence as the girls primp and gossip. Memories are being triggered deep inside of him, rising like long-drowned corpses. Pale limbs drift across the surface-tension of his mind. Now, Arthur, love--mind you don’t smear Mummy’s lipstick, she goes on in ten minutes. A waft of delicious perfume, the scent of face-powder and licorice liqueur. The damp pulse of a kiss on his temple leaving behind a sugar-frosted moue of colour. The jangle of silver bangles sliding against gold. Goodnight, poppet. Nanny will take you home now. Mummy will be there when you wake to tell you all about it...
Arthur shakes his head, stumbling back against the wall as several more people crowd into the makeshift dressing room. They take no notice of him whatsoever as his hands shake violently and his heart hammers like a kick-drum in his chest. He drops his glass with a dull thunk on the stained carpet and sucks in a few calming breaths. He squeezes his eyes shut and just focuses on their contextless conversation, willing it to anchor him back to the present like a thumb-tack pressed through the resistant thorax of a recently chloroformed specimen.
“Lance, that shirt is minging,” Morgana laughs, coughing theatrically, no doubt waving an elegant hand in front of her delicate patrician nose. “Unless you’ve a closet full of the same thing, you’ve worn it to the last three gigs at least. Don’t you ever change clothes?”
The faceless man inhales deeply. “Phew, yeah, I know. I’m sorry! I’m a bit behind on laundry.”
“Don’t look at me,” a sultry voice Arthur recognizes as belonging to Morgana’s other half-sibling [on her mother’s side, no relation to Arthur, thank Christ] Morgause, with whom she has an even more inappropriate relationship that the one she conducts with Arthur. “I don’t do laundry. I just buy new every week.”
“Which is fortunate for me,” Gwen quips jovially, “Because I do do laundry, and I can’t afford new clothes, so everything I have started out life as one of your cast-offs.”
“You can’t tell,” Morgause rasps admiringly as Arthur opens his eyes in time to see her fondling the hemline of Gwen’s dress. “This looks like a runway original.”
“It’s a Gwen original,” Lancelot purrs soppily as Gwen blushes, turning away to fiddle with her sleeve. “This hem is a bit wonky,” she demures apologetically, “But discoball-light is very forgiving.”
“And I always told Arthur the discoball was too cheesy, even for a club belonging to him, the Tasteless Wonder,” Morgan says dryly. “I stand corrected--apparently even unforgivable cheese has its uses. And wouldn’t The Tasteless Wonder have been a far more appropriate name for this pretentious shite-hole?”
Everyone has a laugh at Arthur’s expense. No one takes any notice of him at all. For the first time in his life, he finds he is grateful for the moment of invisibility, derision aside. He doesn’t have the presence of mind to wrestle up even a modicum of offended pride. The whiskey and the nostalgia are too busy holding him under.
“Anyone seen Himself?” Morgana asks. “He might be interested to know that we go on in five.”
“He’ll be here,” a now-familiar Irish brogue asserts as Gwaine struts into the room. Arthur’s momentary anonymity melts away as the brunette looks him up and down appraisingly. He smirks lasciviously. “Wow, for me? You shouldn’t have, gang. Flowers would’ve been fine--you’ve really outdone yerselves this year. I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be daft, Gwaine,” Morgana says sourly. “No one cares about your stupid birthday. This is just my evil half-brother, Arthur. You know, the one for whom we’re doing the favour by drumming up some business for this sad excuse of a venue.”
“I told you, Morgana,” Arthur grits out, coming back to life. “This isn’t a venue.”
“Well, sure, t’is tonight, handsome,” Gwaine says, clapping him on the back. “And thanks again, mate. We really owe ye one. We’d’ve been royally fecked if you hadn’t come through like this. It’s a bad time of year to be losing a gig, y'know? Festival season comin’ up, and what have ye.”
Arthur yelps as the man’s wandering hand grips him by the arse and gives it an appreciative squeeze. Morgana punches him soundly on the arm, and Gwaine emits his own yelp, backing away with his hands raised placatingly. “Sorry, Christ! I thought you said he was your brother. Not up for grabs, I’m guessin’?” His face falls. “So you sorry lot of arseholes really did forget me birthday?”
“Shut up about your stupid birthday!” Morgana growls. “No one gives a fuck!”
Gwaine struts sulkily over to the mirror, where he sucks in his cheeks and does something complicated with a brush that makes his features look even more streamlined and sculpted.
“Show me how you do that,” Gwen says, fascinated.
“Ye don’t need it, doll,” Gwaine proclaims, stroking her cheek. “Look at ye. Ye’re perfect, so ye are. Like a wee queen.”
Lance clears his throat, frowning, and Gwen blushes all the more, the only woman Arthur has ever seen look demure whilst gazing at herself in the mirror and sucking in her cheeks. The sort of girl who has no idea how gorgeous she is, especially not when standing flanked on either side by Morgana and Morgause. Arthur, for one, thinks she outshines them both in her lovely, less showy way. Like a buttercup among hothouse roses. She makes the haughty half-sisters look overblown. Spoiled by the way they’ve taken beauty too far in the wrong direction. Arthur smiles at her, considering whether he should ask Morgana for her number, despite the way Lance is hovering around her like an anxious stag trying to herd a doe with his less-impressive-than-he-hopes pair of antlers.
Arthur stands up straight, tightening his abs and squaring his shoulders. When he glances at the mirror to gauge the effect and to check out the state of his hair, he freezes.
A pair of blue eyes, unfathomable as the hearts of distant galaxies, pin his in place. The rest of the face is an angular blur: Arthur can’t seem to focus on anything but the startling shade of the irises. A dark shock of hair the style of which he doesn’t even notice is the only other feature that registers. He tries to blink, attempts to unglue his eyes from their resting point, but he is paralyzed, yet again, by an overwhelming sense, not of nostalgia this time--but something more. Something deeper. The most intense deja vu he has ever experienced in his life. For a moment, feels as if his entirely life leading up to this moment has been nothing but a slightly tedious dream. An artfully crafted distraction.
“I could take you apart,” Arthur says without thinking, without knowing what he is saying. He flushes furiously, but no one hears him, thank Christ. Except for the young man in the mirror, whose eyes widen slightly before relaxing again into guarded indifference. It hurts Arthur, in some obscure way. It hurts him to be so summarily dismissed by this complete stranger. His heart squeezes, constricting painfully. He’s never felt so wrong-footed.
“There you are, you bastard,” Morgana screeches, clearly relieved, with obvious though grudging fondness. It’s a tone of voice she’s never once used when speaking to Arthur. It’s very nearly tender, which is deeply, deeply unnerving. As if to underscore the strangeness of her response to the dark-haired enigma, Morgana flings herself into his arms, clearly relieved, and lays a giant, wet kiss on his cheek. He pats her tolerantly on the back before pushing her gently but firmly away.
Arthur feels a hot, dry lightning strike of emotion lick through him. He can’t quite identify it, and never, ever wants to. It makes him feel slightly nauseated, though that may well be the Jameson’s talking. This could all be the Jameson’s talking. Whiskey always makes him maudlin. It really shouldn’t be his drink of choice. He makes a mental note to switch over to cognac, vodka, sweet bloody vermouth--anything but whiskey. It chews on his stomach with tiny, angry teeth.
Arthur wrestles his gaze away from Morgana’s appalling display of affection. He rears back, stumbling past the stranger without accidentally grazing or looking directly at him, though he is left with an impression of height, of wiry strength and preternatural intensity. And an intrinsic awareness that seems to emanate from the lanky man like radio-waves. No one else notices Arthur leave. He shouldn’t even have been there. He’d meant to go home ages ago. He should have left when he still could.
He knows now that he can’t go yet. Somehow, everything has changed. Shifted in some frightening way he couldn’t have anticipated and can’t deconstruct.
Arthur has the sudden, overwhelming urge to get completely, ruinously, unforgivably, unapologetically shit-faced. He needs something--anything--that will rebury the ghosts rising up in him tonight. He feels their fingers on the back of his neck. It’s both soothing and completely fucking terrifying. I could take you apart with one blow. One blow...
Arthur leans against the nearest wall. He can’t stop shaking. He holds his hand up to the light and it trembles like a reed.
I could take you apart with less than that.