Merlin fic: Ultima Ratio Regum (10/16)
Jan. 13th, 2010 03:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficTitle: Ultima Ratio Regum
Fandom: Merlin BBS
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,860
Characters/Pairings: Merlin/Arthur, Gwen/Morgana, Morgana/Nimue, Lancelot/Gwen
Author's note:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
snarkydame betaed this. She's shiny! Assumes familiarity with season one.
Last Part: Chapter 9
Next: Chapter 11
Summary: As Merlin fights for his life, Morgana and Nimue take a meeting with their boss.
I blindly worked my way down the stairs, walking on the ends of the steps so they wouldn’t creak. My socks had fallen around my ankles and that annoyance kept looping in my head like a bad cassette. Finally, my feet hit concrete so cold it burned right through my shoes.
The basement stunk like hamburger left out in the sun too long, a cattle-car stink of misery and confinement. The only light came from a computer screen showing what looked like a medical read-out.
The light from it was a faint spotlight. I could see the tile floor of a public restroom, the kind that can be hosed down easily, then the stainless steel legs of a table. Not strange; I recalled it from the morgue. A gurney. Atop it, most fully bathed in the digital light, was the silhouetted profile of a woman. A plastic tube wormed its way down her throat; I could see its bulge disrupting her breathing.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to calm down. My music wasn’t helping, shrieking along like the rumble of some hellish engine. But I’d been able to redirect its current before, to feed it, and I gritted my teeth to do it again. Lucius – distant as a reverb. The light switch—I circled the room, feet squeaking on the wetted-then-dried tiles, until the music started to build. My fingers finding the switch was the crescendo. The lights came on, fluorescent, with a whiplash that made me wonder if the world was ending. The girl on the gurney was still alive, and the gurneys were designed to fold up like card tables. They lined the walls, victims in various states of decay strapped upright. Some of them stared at me. Some of them blinked.
Their mouths spread in soundless, never-ending screams. But their silent anguish cut into my music like a buzzsaw. I thought my eardrums would burst. There was only one solution to it, besides the drugs. I dug into my pocket and found my trusty iPod. With practiced ease I fitted the buds into my ears, then pressed play. If I concentrated on other music – radio, movie, street musician, anything – my own faded away. Oh, thank God, the scramble picked ABBA. “Elaine”. Sounds like music from a Sonic game.
And now that I could think, I dashed to the woman on the gurney. She looked healthy enough, aside from her paleness, so I figured maybe she could still be saved. Besides, two against one was better odds than one against Jason Voorhees. She was naked, with ugly sutures leaking pus across her abdomen. And there was a swath of skin missing from her inner thigh, replaced with a translucent bandage that let me see her atrophying muscle. When I leaned over her, she made a rattling sound deep in her throat like she hadn’t had anything to drink in years.
I worked at her bindings as well as I could with my fingers splinted. “Relax. I’m gonna get you out of here.” I finally freed one of her hands and gave it a squeeze.
She opened her mouth again, lips like scalpel cuts in her jaw. It opened and shut like scars reopening and healing. Words.
As I worked at the other wrist strap, my broken fingers dribbling pain at all the activity, I bent down to hear what she was trying to say. I couldn’t hear her past through the iPod, so I took one of the buds out of my ear.
Instantly, a roar exploded in my ear and reverberated, gong-like, as I held my head. It was right above me. I looked up and heard another, and another, and another, booming across the ceiling. Footsteps. Then the door creaked open.
I looked around for a hiding place. There was a grouping of water pipes in the corner, intertwined with the fat umbilical cord of an AC tube. I unthinkingly started to redo the girl’s restraints, but she froze me in my tracks with one beseeching look. I couldn’t stop seeing the welts where those straps had bit into her.
I heard a rhythmic thudding as something heavy was dragged down the stairs. As soon as Lucius reached the point where the U-shaped stairs doubled back on themselves, he’d see the light.
“Don’t move,” I told the girl, then I switched off the light. Using the light from my cell phone’s screen, I ran back to those water pipes. I caught a break. Whatever Lucius was dragging, it gave him trouble on the intermediate landing. I wrestled the AC tube out of the way, then jammed myself through the pipes. That was the plan, at least. Pipes can be damn close together.
Lucius and his cargo beat a tattoo down the steps. The door rapped against the wall and then I heard the fuzzy half-second of premonition that follows a light switch being thrown. I sucked in the gut and forced myself through. I hit the wall just as the lights snapped to buzzing attention.
I turned. In the stark light, Lucius’s eyes were darker than black. He looked older as well, his silvering hair bleached white by the bare lightbulb. Bits of his clothes were spotted with blood where he’d taken a bullet, but they might as well have been ketchup stains for all that they hindered him.
He shoved the girl’s gurney aside, not even noticing I’d partially freed her. He was too absorbed with what he’d dragged down the steps and into the room, leaving a trail of blood like dirty mop water. Arthur.
Lucius hummed as he pulled Arthur, one-handed, to a nest of chains on the opposite side of the basement from me. I forced myself deeper into the shadows. Lucius wrapped a chain up Arthur’s leg and into his belt. Arthur made a groggy noise, stirred until Lucius stomped on his face. The bastard grabbed the other end of the chain and pulled on it, lifting Arthur until he was suspended, upside-down, six feet up.
Lucius batted at Arthur like a cat with a string, spinning him around. “God, if He exists, is really on our side. I spend weeks baiting a trap for your friend, then you and Lancelot drop into my lap. I was content with just the Negro—“
“Her name is Gwen,” Arthur said as he spun to a stop.
“But now I have you two to strip for parts. Tell me, are you especially… endowed? No reason to let it go to waste.”
“They’ll be more of us. When Gaius realizes we all went missing after seeing you, the New Knights will put you in the ground and let you rot like you should’ve done forty years ago.”
Lucius pulled the gun from Arthur’s shoulder holster and tossed it away. “By then, I’ll be a god and you’ll be leftovers. It is the endgame, imposter. I didn’t lie about that. Pity you won’t live to see it.”
“I’ll outlive you.”
“Good line. But you can’t back it up.” Lucius picked up something from the surgical tray. It looked like a cross between an eyelash trimmer and an ice cream scoop. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you have very lovely eyes. What can you see with them?”
Arthur winked. It took me a moment to realize it was directed at me. “Enough.”
Lucius held open his own eyelids, as if about to put in some eye drops. “This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me.”
He worked the spoon of the device into his eye socket, jangling it like a toilet lever when the metal rode up against the bone. I gagged on a sudden foul taste in my mouth, but couldn’t stop watching. There was a bear-trap snap audible through the back of his head. I saw it at an angle as he started to tug.
It started in the tendons of his arm, rippled through his spidery fingers, then that horribly unblinking eye began to bulge. The bile in my throat rose higher. Arthur watched stoically, as if it didn’t concern him that the same thing was about to happen to him.
Lucius’s eyeball popped out with a sound I hate to remember. He gave the instrument’s handle one last squeeze and it closed. The snipped optic nerve dropped against his cheek, twitching with the blood it spewed. That was all I could take. I doubled over and vomited everything I’d ever eaten for the last five years.
Lucius spun like a bloodhound that’d just caught a scent, his empty eye socket gaping in eternal surprise. “Meat? That you?”
Maybe if I pressed hard enough against that cold concrete wall, I would break right through to Candyland.
“I can taste your fear now, meat. And your lunch. Lotta carbs. Me, I’m very particular about the parts I eat. You know there’s a disease you can get from eating the brain? Weight Watchers doesn’t tell you that!”
He was walking away from the light and toward me, his shrinking shadow pulling him to my hiding place. His feet squished into the pool of my vomit. Blood ran from where his teeth cut into his too-small mouth. “Before the main course, an appetizer. Oh, we are high-class. Hold out your hand; I wanna start with some finger foods.”
He reached between the pipes. This close, I could only see his hand by how it blotted out the light, and not even that when his head was blocking the light. But facing me head-on, he couldn’t get through. His shoulders caught on the pipes; his hand opened and closed in front of my face like a beating heart. I could see the blood under his fingernails.
“Give me the gun,” Arthur said, as calmly and deliberately as a man giving instructions to a small child.
“I’m a little busy at the moment!” I shouted. My words covered up the sound of the metal pipes groaning with the strain of containing Lucius. For that, I was irrationally grateful.
“Give me the gun,” Arthur repeated.
I heard a series of pops, like balloons being attacked by a pin, and realized it was Lucius’s joints as his fingers stretched to reach me, the nails cruelly curved. I felt the sharp points dig into my cheeks and the black holes of Lucius’s eyes were draining the color out of his face and my blood tickled as it ran down my jaw and his face was bluish-white, veins visibly pumping black blood through him, row upon row of teeth shining in his mouth, all the way down his throat, shining for me as he reeled me in with those fishhook nails.
“Gobble. Gobble.”
The blood was pounding so hard in my ears that I almost didn’t hear the report of the Colt. As if slapped upside the head, Lucius jerked forward with the noise of a pound of raw meat being slapped down on a counter. Blood ran from his mouth and eye socket. His arm fell; he slumped forward and was caught between the pipes. With his head down, I could see the smoking crater where the bullet had punched its way into his brain.
Behind him, Arthur still hung upside-down. All that had changed was that the girl on the gurney had crawled under him, and his gun was spewing blue smoke in his hand.
“Is it too late for me to quip ‘Eat that’ manfully?”
I nudged Lucius onto his back with my foot. “Not at all.”
I stood there, watching Lucius’s red halo grow. I turned off my iPod. My music came back strong and reassuring. I gulped in air for a few seconds.
“Merlin, I realize you’ve been through a lot, but I’d prefer not to spend another minute hanging here like a piñata!”
“Oh, sorry.” I tiptoed around Lucius and went to help Arthur down. “So, uh, is he gonna get up from that?”
“When I take the bullet out of his brain, sure. You wouldn’t think very good if you had a pierced frontal lobe, would you?” I nodded before realizing it was a rhetorical question.
Arthur touched down, got back up. Cracked his neck a few times before holstering his Colt.
“Hey, what’d you call me?” I asked belatedly.
Casually, Arthur knelt down to examine the girl. “Go check on Lance.”
I went upstairs. I think I got three-fourths of the way up the stairs before I crumpled like a gum wrapper, wrapping my hands over my stomach as I got like a dozen ulcers all at once. After a few moments of a full-on panic attack, I was able to pull myself up. My hands were still shaking, so I stuffed them in my pockets when I went to see Lance. I found him about where I’d left him, crushed in the window.
He took one look at me and rolled his eyes. “Is Arthur dead?”
“No.”
“C’est la vie. A hand?”
I helped him out of the window. He stood, cracking his neck, then popping a few other bones into place.
“Arthur’s downstairs, with Lucius. He put a bullet in his brain.”
“Show me.”
***
Lance gave Arthur a quick nod, then checked out the people lining the walls.
“What are their prospects?” Arthur asked.
“The girl’s a fighter. The others…” Lance ripped open the Glad bag covering one of the men. Something wet tumbled out. Several somethings. “Maybe if we’d gotten here a few months sooner…”
“Marten, get the girl upstairs,” Arthur ordered. He himself picked up what was left of Lucius. “Lance, make it quick.”
Lance’s knife was already in his hand, but he waited for Arthur’s word before he butterflied it out. “Right,” Lance said, flat as cola left open on a hot day.
“Wait, no, these people need hospitals, not… Kevorkian over there!”
“All a hospital could accomplish would be to prolong the pain,” Arthur said. “Let him end it. It’s who he is.”
Lance stiffened at Arthur’s words, but the blade didn’t waver. He was bringing it up to one’s throat when I saw him last. He was saying something before he cut.
“Rest now, spirit. The curtain falls. The tragedy is ended, the comedy begins…”
It would’ve been sweet, if it weren’t for the sudden gargle and abbreviated exhale that followed it.
***
Morgana took a hot shower. She strictly restrained herself to ten minutes, despite how tempting it was to stay under the stream. She looked at herself in the mirror, trying to imagine how Gwen would see her.
She dressed with a worn leather gun belt around her waist. Something wasn’t right. It lingered like an unclaimed kiss about her face.
Nimue brought her a coffee, knocking on the door as she walked in. “Are you decent?”
“I’d say I’m better than decent. Did you get through?”
Nimue gestured to the chair at the vanity. Morgana lowered her head, embarrassed, but then Nimue brushed a strand of wet hair from the side of Morgana’s face. “Come now. You have such pretty hair.”
Trying to hide her smile, Morgana sat down in front of the mirror. She tried not to indulge Nimue too much, but it was hard when Nimue was so charming and loving. And so different from Gwen.
Morgana sat down and let Nimue brush her hair, relaxing a little in the slight tingle of Nimue’s fingers on her scalp, the feel of magic weaving between them. Nimue could be so vain about her appearance, always wasting some magic to airbrush herself. Morgana had seen the definition of beauty change so many times that she couldn’t really care what she looked like, so long as she didn’t attract attention, but if Nimue wanted to pretty her up… Morgana owed her that much.
“So did you get through?”
“Who do you think you’re talking to?” Nimue set a cell phone down on the vanity. “He said he’d call back.”
“And you believed him?”
The phone rang. Nimue smugly began sorting Morgana’s hair into a braid.
Morgana picked up the phone. So many years, and now to hear his voice again. She’d gotten comfortable forgetting it. “Hello?”
“My dear Morgana. Nimue told me you were troubled.”
“Yes, my lord. You know I am your servant in all things. But you can also understand my discomfort at being neglected.”
“Neglected? I wasn’t aware you required my attention.”
“Not socially. I must know if you have any operations running without my knowledge.”
“I was also not aware that I needed your approval to conduct my business.”
“You know what I mean. Has Guinevere been taken?”
Mordred was quiet for a long moment. “Not by us. But whoever has her, did make an offer.”
“And you took it? Without notifying me?”
“I’m aware of your feelings on Guinevere. I thought it’d be best not to trouble you.”
“Trouble me?” Gritting her teeth, Morgana snatched her braid away from Nimue. “Your own signature is on the Treaty, and you are ripping it to shreds!”
“My dear, the treaty was never meant to last. It was meant to whet our appetites.”
Fandom: Merlin BBS
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,860
Characters/Pairings: Merlin/Arthur, Gwen/Morgana, Morgana/Nimue, Lancelot/Gwen
Author's note:
snarkydame betaed this. She's shiny! Assumes familiarity with season one.Last Part: Chapter 9
Next: Chapter 11
Summary: As Merlin fights for his life, Morgana and Nimue take a meeting with their boss.
I blindly worked my way down the stairs, walking on the ends of the steps so they wouldn’t creak. My socks had fallen around my ankles and that annoyance kept looping in my head like a bad cassette. Finally, my feet hit concrete so cold it burned right through my shoes.
The basement stunk like hamburger left out in the sun too long, a cattle-car stink of misery and confinement. The only light came from a computer screen showing what looked like a medical read-out.
The light from it was a faint spotlight. I could see the tile floor of a public restroom, the kind that can be hosed down easily, then the stainless steel legs of a table. Not strange; I recalled it from the morgue. A gurney. Atop it, most fully bathed in the digital light, was the silhouetted profile of a woman. A plastic tube wormed its way down her throat; I could see its bulge disrupting her breathing.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to calm down. My music wasn’t helping, shrieking along like the rumble of some hellish engine. But I’d been able to redirect its current before, to feed it, and I gritted my teeth to do it again. Lucius – distant as a reverb. The light switch—I circled the room, feet squeaking on the wetted-then-dried tiles, until the music started to build. My fingers finding the switch was the crescendo. The lights came on, fluorescent, with a whiplash that made me wonder if the world was ending. The girl on the gurney was still alive, and the gurneys were designed to fold up like card tables. They lined the walls, victims in various states of decay strapped upright. Some of them stared at me. Some of them blinked.
Their mouths spread in soundless, never-ending screams. But their silent anguish cut into my music like a buzzsaw. I thought my eardrums would burst. There was only one solution to it, besides the drugs. I dug into my pocket and found my trusty iPod. With practiced ease I fitted the buds into my ears, then pressed play. If I concentrated on other music – radio, movie, street musician, anything – my own faded away. Oh, thank God, the scramble picked ABBA. “Elaine”. Sounds like music from a Sonic game.
And now that I could think, I dashed to the woman on the gurney. She looked healthy enough, aside from her paleness, so I figured maybe she could still be saved. Besides, two against one was better odds than one against Jason Voorhees. She was naked, with ugly sutures leaking pus across her abdomen. And there was a swath of skin missing from her inner thigh, replaced with a translucent bandage that let me see her atrophying muscle. When I leaned over her, she made a rattling sound deep in her throat like she hadn’t had anything to drink in years.
I worked at her bindings as well as I could with my fingers splinted. “Relax. I’m gonna get you out of here.” I finally freed one of her hands and gave it a squeeze.
She opened her mouth again, lips like scalpel cuts in her jaw. It opened and shut like scars reopening and healing. Words.
As I worked at the other wrist strap, my broken fingers dribbling pain at all the activity, I bent down to hear what she was trying to say. I couldn’t hear her past through the iPod, so I took one of the buds out of my ear.
Instantly, a roar exploded in my ear and reverberated, gong-like, as I held my head. It was right above me. I looked up and heard another, and another, and another, booming across the ceiling. Footsteps. Then the door creaked open.
I looked around for a hiding place. There was a grouping of water pipes in the corner, intertwined with the fat umbilical cord of an AC tube. I unthinkingly started to redo the girl’s restraints, but she froze me in my tracks with one beseeching look. I couldn’t stop seeing the welts where those straps had bit into her.
I heard a rhythmic thudding as something heavy was dragged down the stairs. As soon as Lucius reached the point where the U-shaped stairs doubled back on themselves, he’d see the light.
“Don’t move,” I told the girl, then I switched off the light. Using the light from my cell phone’s screen, I ran back to those water pipes. I caught a break. Whatever Lucius was dragging, it gave him trouble on the intermediate landing. I wrestled the AC tube out of the way, then jammed myself through the pipes. That was the plan, at least. Pipes can be damn close together.
Lucius and his cargo beat a tattoo down the steps. The door rapped against the wall and then I heard the fuzzy half-second of premonition that follows a light switch being thrown. I sucked in the gut and forced myself through. I hit the wall just as the lights snapped to buzzing attention.
I turned. In the stark light, Lucius’s eyes were darker than black. He looked older as well, his silvering hair bleached white by the bare lightbulb. Bits of his clothes were spotted with blood where he’d taken a bullet, but they might as well have been ketchup stains for all that they hindered him.
He shoved the girl’s gurney aside, not even noticing I’d partially freed her. He was too absorbed with what he’d dragged down the steps and into the room, leaving a trail of blood like dirty mop water. Arthur.
Lucius hummed as he pulled Arthur, one-handed, to a nest of chains on the opposite side of the basement from me. I forced myself deeper into the shadows. Lucius wrapped a chain up Arthur’s leg and into his belt. Arthur made a groggy noise, stirred until Lucius stomped on his face. The bastard grabbed the other end of the chain and pulled on it, lifting Arthur until he was suspended, upside-down, six feet up.
Lucius batted at Arthur like a cat with a string, spinning him around. “God, if He exists, is really on our side. I spend weeks baiting a trap for your friend, then you and Lancelot drop into my lap. I was content with just the Negro—“
“Her name is Gwen,” Arthur said as he spun to a stop.
“But now I have you two to strip for parts. Tell me, are you especially… endowed? No reason to let it go to waste.”
“They’ll be more of us. When Gaius realizes we all went missing after seeing you, the New Knights will put you in the ground and let you rot like you should’ve done forty years ago.”
Lucius pulled the gun from Arthur’s shoulder holster and tossed it away. “By then, I’ll be a god and you’ll be leftovers. It is the endgame, imposter. I didn’t lie about that. Pity you won’t live to see it.”
“I’ll outlive you.”
“Good line. But you can’t back it up.” Lucius picked up something from the surgical tray. It looked like a cross between an eyelash trimmer and an ice cream scoop. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you have very lovely eyes. What can you see with them?”
Arthur winked. It took me a moment to realize it was directed at me. “Enough.”
Lucius held open his own eyelids, as if about to put in some eye drops. “This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me.”
He worked the spoon of the device into his eye socket, jangling it like a toilet lever when the metal rode up against the bone. I gagged on a sudden foul taste in my mouth, but couldn’t stop watching. There was a bear-trap snap audible through the back of his head. I saw it at an angle as he started to tug.
It started in the tendons of his arm, rippled through his spidery fingers, then that horribly unblinking eye began to bulge. The bile in my throat rose higher. Arthur watched stoically, as if it didn’t concern him that the same thing was about to happen to him.
Lucius’s eyeball popped out with a sound I hate to remember. He gave the instrument’s handle one last squeeze and it closed. The snipped optic nerve dropped against his cheek, twitching with the blood it spewed. That was all I could take. I doubled over and vomited everything I’d ever eaten for the last five years.
Lucius spun like a bloodhound that’d just caught a scent, his empty eye socket gaping in eternal surprise. “Meat? That you?”
Maybe if I pressed hard enough against that cold concrete wall, I would break right through to Candyland.
“I can taste your fear now, meat. And your lunch. Lotta carbs. Me, I’m very particular about the parts I eat. You know there’s a disease you can get from eating the brain? Weight Watchers doesn’t tell you that!”
He was walking away from the light and toward me, his shrinking shadow pulling him to my hiding place. His feet squished into the pool of my vomit. Blood ran from where his teeth cut into his too-small mouth. “Before the main course, an appetizer. Oh, we are high-class. Hold out your hand; I wanna start with some finger foods.”
He reached between the pipes. This close, I could only see his hand by how it blotted out the light, and not even that when his head was blocking the light. But facing me head-on, he couldn’t get through. His shoulders caught on the pipes; his hand opened and closed in front of my face like a beating heart. I could see the blood under his fingernails.
“Give me the gun,” Arthur said, as calmly and deliberately as a man giving instructions to a small child.
“I’m a little busy at the moment!” I shouted. My words covered up the sound of the metal pipes groaning with the strain of containing Lucius. For that, I was irrationally grateful.
“Give me the gun,” Arthur repeated.
I heard a series of pops, like balloons being attacked by a pin, and realized it was Lucius’s joints as his fingers stretched to reach me, the nails cruelly curved. I felt the sharp points dig into my cheeks and the black holes of Lucius’s eyes were draining the color out of his face and my blood tickled as it ran down my jaw and his face was bluish-white, veins visibly pumping black blood through him, row upon row of teeth shining in his mouth, all the way down his throat, shining for me as he reeled me in with those fishhook nails.
“Gobble. Gobble.”
The blood was pounding so hard in my ears that I almost didn’t hear the report of the Colt. As if slapped upside the head, Lucius jerked forward with the noise of a pound of raw meat being slapped down on a counter. Blood ran from his mouth and eye socket. His arm fell; he slumped forward and was caught between the pipes. With his head down, I could see the smoking crater where the bullet had punched its way into his brain.
Behind him, Arthur still hung upside-down. All that had changed was that the girl on the gurney had crawled under him, and his gun was spewing blue smoke in his hand.
“Is it too late for me to quip ‘Eat that’ manfully?”
I nudged Lucius onto his back with my foot. “Not at all.”
I stood there, watching Lucius’s red halo grow. I turned off my iPod. My music came back strong and reassuring. I gulped in air for a few seconds.
“Merlin, I realize you’ve been through a lot, but I’d prefer not to spend another minute hanging here like a piñata!”
“Oh, sorry.” I tiptoed around Lucius and went to help Arthur down. “So, uh, is he gonna get up from that?”
“When I take the bullet out of his brain, sure. You wouldn’t think very good if you had a pierced frontal lobe, would you?” I nodded before realizing it was a rhetorical question.
Arthur touched down, got back up. Cracked his neck a few times before holstering his Colt.
“Hey, what’d you call me?” I asked belatedly.
Casually, Arthur knelt down to examine the girl. “Go check on Lance.”
I went upstairs. I think I got three-fourths of the way up the stairs before I crumpled like a gum wrapper, wrapping my hands over my stomach as I got like a dozen ulcers all at once. After a few moments of a full-on panic attack, I was able to pull myself up. My hands were still shaking, so I stuffed them in my pockets when I went to see Lance. I found him about where I’d left him, crushed in the window.
He took one look at me and rolled his eyes. “Is Arthur dead?”
“No.”
“C’est la vie. A hand?”
I helped him out of the window. He stood, cracking his neck, then popping a few other bones into place.
“Arthur’s downstairs, with Lucius. He put a bullet in his brain.”
“Show me.”
***
Lance gave Arthur a quick nod, then checked out the people lining the walls.
“What are their prospects?” Arthur asked.
“The girl’s a fighter. The others…” Lance ripped open the Glad bag covering one of the men. Something wet tumbled out. Several somethings. “Maybe if we’d gotten here a few months sooner…”
“Marten, get the girl upstairs,” Arthur ordered. He himself picked up what was left of Lucius. “Lance, make it quick.”
Lance’s knife was already in his hand, but he waited for Arthur’s word before he butterflied it out. “Right,” Lance said, flat as cola left open on a hot day.
“Wait, no, these people need hospitals, not… Kevorkian over there!”
“All a hospital could accomplish would be to prolong the pain,” Arthur said. “Let him end it. It’s who he is.”
Lance stiffened at Arthur’s words, but the blade didn’t waver. He was bringing it up to one’s throat when I saw him last. He was saying something before he cut.
“Rest now, spirit. The curtain falls. The tragedy is ended, the comedy begins…”
It would’ve been sweet, if it weren’t for the sudden gargle and abbreviated exhale that followed it.
***
Morgana took a hot shower. She strictly restrained herself to ten minutes, despite how tempting it was to stay under the stream. She looked at herself in the mirror, trying to imagine how Gwen would see her.
She dressed with a worn leather gun belt around her waist. Something wasn’t right. It lingered like an unclaimed kiss about her face.
Nimue brought her a coffee, knocking on the door as she walked in. “Are you decent?”
“I’d say I’m better than decent. Did you get through?”
Nimue gestured to the chair at the vanity. Morgana lowered her head, embarrassed, but then Nimue brushed a strand of wet hair from the side of Morgana’s face. “Come now. You have such pretty hair.”
Trying to hide her smile, Morgana sat down in front of the mirror. She tried not to indulge Nimue too much, but it was hard when Nimue was so charming and loving. And so different from Gwen.
Morgana sat down and let Nimue brush her hair, relaxing a little in the slight tingle of Nimue’s fingers on her scalp, the feel of magic weaving between them. Nimue could be so vain about her appearance, always wasting some magic to airbrush herself. Morgana had seen the definition of beauty change so many times that she couldn’t really care what she looked like, so long as she didn’t attract attention, but if Nimue wanted to pretty her up… Morgana owed her that much.
“So did you get through?”
“Who do you think you’re talking to?” Nimue set a cell phone down on the vanity. “He said he’d call back.”
“And you believed him?”
The phone rang. Nimue smugly began sorting Morgana’s hair into a braid.
Morgana picked up the phone. So many years, and now to hear his voice again. She’d gotten comfortable forgetting it. “Hello?”
“My dear Morgana. Nimue told me you were troubled.”
“Yes, my lord. You know I am your servant in all things. But you can also understand my discomfort at being neglected.”
“Neglected? I wasn’t aware you required my attention.”
“Not socially. I must know if you have any operations running without my knowledge.”
“I was also not aware that I needed your approval to conduct my business.”
“You know what I mean. Has Guinevere been taken?”
Mordred was quiet for a long moment. “Not by us. But whoever has her, did make an offer.”
“And you took it? Without notifying me?”
“I’m aware of your feelings on Guinevere. I thought it’d be best not to trouble you.”
“Trouble me?” Gritting her teeth, Morgana snatched her braid away from Nimue. “Your own signature is on the Treaty, and you are ripping it to shreds!”
“My dear, the treaty was never meant to last. It was meant to whet our appetites.”
