#joyuex

' 𝔏inger a moment longer here with me, lancelot. ' she seems almost timid in the way she asks. the ride had been hard, the forestry no denser than it had been at the start of their journey, some time ago. the body aches, despite the cushioning of a saddle most kingly. it would be some time, she'd imagine, before they came across another spring. turstin says as much. ' men are not meant to be astride a beast quite so. we can afford the respite, hm? '

@joyuex

Were Henry less furious, what Lancelot just said would have struck him harder. As it is, the man's but an ox on a good day and some unfathomable tempest on the unspeakably sour. And today, quite unfortunately, life has taken up a shovel, acting like a knacker as it burrows him a trench — and the way that this noble had worn at his patience? It's legendary. Indeed, it's the bloody work-in-progress of a messy tale.

duty is a cutout of a knight, a sword that swings both ways. & here is the swollen wound of it, the very sting of it, the feeling of bending back on itself until it makes a circle and a man stands in the middle of it and yet, duty remains, dilated & distended like a good muscle. perhaps obsession is yet another bodily function, here is the organ in which hunger lodges itself like a blade, here is the throbbing of it, the red, the steel under it. a knight will believe anything is his duty if he is hungry enough for something to fill the vacant spaces under the armor. chilvary is ceremonial and cannibalistic or carnivorous at best — everything else is sacrificed at the altar of it. whatever comes to the inhospitable land of the dying self is by the mouths of kings, through the word of god.

here is the hand that knows the shape of a sword, the weight of it. here is the body that falls to the ground, compliant and accommodating, an easy death despite the blood. the sounds of a corpse are swallowed by a silence larger than the death of a man that has no face nor name in this story. a final gasp, a final thud and then, he is out of the scene, behind the curtains of my body.

i look back at the other one, this @joyuex. ❛ i recognize but i do not know you ❜, he says. the irony is that a a knight will put a sword through the heart of another and then forget the face of death. & he continues: ❛ are you real or are you a spirit ? ❜ then again, duty, like armor, is not versatile nor flexible. it hangs around the neck, a lose weight that he grows used to, until he hangs by it. this one knows duty by the name of "love", which is another tragedy, but it helps him swallow the bitterness of his own sin. there is devotion and dedication interwoven with just enough self-pity that it hides his brutal appetites, the eagerness of the flesh, the need for violence from which he abstains with such shame most people would look past it. understand that i do not judge, but i stare back.

❛ . . . sir lancelot ? ❜ siegfried inquires, an unsure look upon his face. but there is also the unmistakable light of compassion within his eyes.

the sound of the toy horse’s clacking wheels pauses as galahad sets it aside, looking up into the knight’s face. he seems calmer now, they think, than when they last saw him. if anything, he is more like the man they first met in the inn’s yard, the one who’d knelt to their level and spoken to them in kind, measured words, and let them babble on about the innkeep’s children and the sweetbread at breakfast and the new hoop their uncle bought for them. 

then sir bors had rushed out the door, and everything had changed. it wasn’t his fault, of course ; they only caught the crestfallen look on his face before he replaced it with a genial ( if somewhat awkward ) smile, so fleeting they certainly would have missed it if they hadn’t spent the last few days trailing after him and watching his every move. then they’d gone back to their lodgings upstairs, and he’d sat galahad down on the edge of the bed and the stranger on the room’s only chair, and then leaned close to speak to him in a voice too hushed for galahad to overhear.

they’d never forget the look that came onto the knight’s face then. his eyes had gone wide and wild, and he’d stared at galahad like he had never seen anything like them before. 

❛ you were scared. ❜ they aren’t sure themselves whether they mean these words to be a statement or a question. perhaps they are waiting for him - this man who is a stranger and their father - to make that call himself. ❛ was it a bad day ? ❜

"No? Not dressed up enough for you? Should I truss it proper like them tales you hear up in them mighty castles?"

He's brazen. Looking at Lancelot with his keen and twinkly eyes, Henry would appear but perhaps a few summers older. At the very least, he isn't so utterly humorless as to border on those boundaries of some ill-natured youth. To that point, he looms quite wonderfully jovial, his words coasting jouncy with a softness to its edges that mirrored all a friend. He's there atop his Pebbles, his hideous, snuffling mare as the sun sinks low, and before them, a plenty fine village struts out in the distance. Already, they would hear the roar of young men and the sloshing of drink.

ough ough ough you no YOU!!! plotting with you feels like interlocking our magic rings to activate our incredible powers which has so far consisted of us discussing how they like to crawl all over each other to destress and professing their undying love morning noon and nightly. they are understanding each other wet eyeball to wet eyeball, toes interlocked with toes