#not only should gaheris be the one to do it but setting it up ahead of time is non negotiable sorry

[queer-ragnelle]

idk who needs to hear this but if you're writing an arthurian retelling and neglect gaheris...you are my enemy. either cut him entirely (like gillian bradshaw) or use him fully (like gerald morris) but under no circumstances are you allowed to dump his crimes onto agravaine and split. you're supposed to add depth, not shift the maximum two things he does narratively and leave him with nothing. gaheris did not put his whole pussy into his squire duties to be written off as the tagalong matricidal middle bro with zero personality traits to speak of. he's going on a high shelf until authors grasp this.

[missdulcerosea]

king and lionheart

taglist (please ask to be added or removed!): @mordredfuckingpendragon​ @gringolet​ @cukibola​ @kouvei-matarra​

warning(s): mild violence and gore.

i. 

It starts with Gareth. His older brothers have learned to adapt - they blend in in blues, greens and gray. Keep your heads down, listen to Mother’s every word, listen to your king. But Gareth is young and has yet to learn.

And he suffers for it.

Gawaine shields him. He is the sun of their family, setting every night so the moon can rise without struggle. But sometimes he is too late, and comes across Gareth curled up in a corner of the castle, fingers pressing at the faint bruises at his knuckles or hastily scrubbing away the blood so that no one knows that Mother didn’t like him crying too loudly or saying the wrong thing. They all know but they try and hide it - he is still learning how to fade like his brothers, even though he is red.

Gawaine sets too late. He finds Gareth too long after he should, when Gareth is clutching hold of his eye - it is the magic. Gareth said the wrong thing again and Mother didn’t like that, even though he insisted that he was getting along fine with her, that in fact he tired of her coddling him too close this time. Though he’s tied the bandages around where she hit him, they are tattered and clumsy and he can barely hold them in place. He cries, even as Gawaine runs over and throws his arms around him.

They don’t say a word, because they all know Gareth is the red that runs through. And they know that it won’t be the same after this.

“How - how - she said she loved me - that she - that she’d never hurt me - and - and-”

“It’s okay,” Gawaine says, letting Gareth crumble in his arms. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

He’s lying. They both know he is. But the lies are all they’ve got.

Gareth is the first of them. He burns brightest, he is the flame that must be extinguished. 

Gawaine knows that Camelot is crumbling away. It is but a gilded kingdom, and they are the walking corpses that populate it - decaying, decaying, decaying. If, perhaps, he’d arrived a little sooner maybe Gareth would at least get a bittersweet ending (they are all dying, so anything more than that is impossible), where Gawaine sees him off before he is gone, and he gets to hear the last words his second youngest brother - the one who he’d failed to keep completely safe - would ever say.

If he’d arrived sooner.

But when he arrives the flames are dying. Corpses are strewn around on the ground, and Gareth lies staring up with an empty eye at the sky. 

Again, he’s too late. The facade begins to crack (if it hadn’t begun already).

ii.

Mother warns them to stay far away from the woods unless they are hunting, but for Gaheris it looks like he doesn’t have to blend in. He fades the most, and thought Gawaine lets him know otherwise he lets himself go invisible. Though the words may leave him bloodied and wounded he keeps his lips sealed shut, like Mother told him. It is different when they are in the woods - he stands out, always racing ahead of his brothers, always the one who runs back saying he’d seen a unicorn there, he really had.

And Gawaine thinks about that a lot. Because if his brother fades away forever, how will he be able to know what goes on - what could be wrong? Though he keeps reaching for Gaheris’ hand, he only grasps at empty air.

“You had a nightmare, didn’t you?” 

Gaheris stares up at his brother. He swallows thickly. 

“You were tossing ‘n turning in your sleep - you weren’t saying a thing, but I could tell.”

“Well, I’m alright now.” Gareth speaks quickly. “Go back to sleep, I don’t want to keep you up-”

“You’re not alright.”

He’s lying through his teeth, even though he tries to frantically rub - no, scratch, because he will hurt himself if it means people don’t end up hurting him - away the tears that stain his face. His eyes are rimmed with dark circles and he shivers beneath the thin blanket in their tent. They’d found a wyrm guarding a tree of golden apple and though they’d managed to take it down it was only after they had several of the knights with them devoured by the flames it spat out.

“I’m staying with you. Gaheris, you have to tell me or Agravaine about these things. You’re hurting. I just want you and everyone else to be happy.”

Gaheris nods. He has nothing. He is the gray of their family - not even a color, because he does not want to be noticed. And again he’s lying, because he will fade farther away from them again till he’s just a phantasm, an afterimage.

Gawaine pulls Gaheris close. “I’ll stay with you till you stop having nightmares. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Gaheris does not go with Gareth, his twin. Gawaine finds him with an arrow poking out through his chest, gulping in one desperate breath after another. He’s dragged himself away from the mess of dust-tinted red on the ground, where he sits against a tree where the woods begin. He’s fading.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Gaheris mumbles. “You have to go. You have to go on.”

“Not without saying goodbye.”

He holds Gaheris’ hand till the warmth begins to fade. Another brother that’s left behind as an afterimage, another brother of his gone.

The part that makes him the most numb, Gawaine realizes, is that Gaheris still told him to leave him be, to let him fade. Even though it was the end.

iii.

They’re sent to Camelot once the truce is made official. They see the envelope sealed with a lump of red wax and are sent on a boat to Camelot. The water laps at the boat, the skies above are a dull gray. Gareth and Gaheris are still so very young, and though they have felt pain no one as young as them should feel they bounce around on the boat, waiting for the stars to poke through the sky and for the high towers of Camelot to appear on the horizon. Gawaine, too, thinks that now that Mother is sending them away they will be different. They will be heroes. They will be free.

Agravaine stays the same.

He squints past the setting sun. The wind presses his hair against his face and distorts his vision, but still he leans over the deck of the rocking boat to stare at home - by now it is but a dot far away on the horizon.

Gawaine is their sun. The other brothers are the planets, and Agravaine doesn’t want to fall out of alignment.

“What’s the matter?”

Agravaine lets out a hushed sigh. “I don’t know. There’s a part of me glad to be so far away from Mother. But at the same time some of the things she said and did - she said she loved us, and now that Father’s gone and this king of England who we barely know’s the only person we have left-”

“I understand.”

“You say that. But do you really understand?”

The gravitational pull shifts. Gawaine falters in his words. “Maybe I don’t.”

“Damn him. Or at least damn Uther for ruining our grandmother’s life and ruining our mother’s. She says she’s happy, especially with the new baby, but I don’t think she is. And at the same time I kind of want her to be unhappy because of the times she beat me, even if she was just angry and I was in trouble.”

“I don’t know what to do or say about any of that. Because for me it is different.”

“You don’t have to say anything. Just having you listen is enough.”

He’s seen Mother rub off on Agravaine. It is how he snaps at his brothers, the cold blue of his eyes (like ice - glittering but with no warmth or life to them), how he says that he can say things because he is angry or sad. But Agravaine is his brother, and Gawaine does not want him to go through the world like this. He will be his brother’s shield, even if his brother spits venom, because he knows that one day the ice will melt and the sun shall shine through.

Agravaine does not go gently. He reaches the end still spitting forth venom, determined to draw blood and infect Lancelot with all that he has been infected with.

And Gawaine goes with him, because Agravaine is one of the only brothers he has left - he tells Agravaine to get out now, better to live in exile than to be killed. There is no convincing Mordred of anything other than tearing the kingdom apart now, only letting Agravaine escapes. If it comes to the sun setting once and for all so that the moon can rise, then Gawaine will let that happen.

“Go.” Gawaine will have no regrets in saying this. He knows that much.

Agravaine stares back at him. “What do you-”

“Go!” Gawaine shouts. “I don’t want you gone. I already lost two brothers. I don’t want to have another one dead and gone, too.”

Lancelot lets him go, and turns to Gawaine. They both knew Agravaine would lose - he does not have what Lancelot and Gawaine do. Lancelot lets him go because then he will get to call him a coward, a snivelling, pathetic coward just like the rest of his brothers.

“I’ll fight you in my brother’s name. Because I know it’s all your fault. It’s all your fault they’re gone.”

iv. 

“Am I good enough?”

Mordred is very, very young. His hair is ash-white, from Mother’s meddling with magic and using him as a test subject. He stares up at Gawaine with drooping brown eyes - Arthur’s eyes, Gawaine knows, the eyes of Mordred’s father. A father who promises to be everything their mother was not. 

“At parrying your blows, I mean,” Mordred adds. “‘Cause I know I’m not as good as you-”

“Don’t say that.” Gawaine shakes his head. “You’ve still got a long way to go. You’ve got a lot to learn.”

“Thanks for teaching me.”

Gawaine smiles. “Of course. It’s what brothers do.”

While Agravaine is cold as ice, Mordred burns bright - if he is not careful, his flames will disintegrate all he comes close to. There’s no monster, just a boy Gawaine needs to keep his eye on. Like he has always done with the rest of the family. It is no different for his newest, youngest brother.

Mordred shatters.

He is wounded and bleeds, and decides to wound Camelot in return for all that he has been through. Gawaine thinks it isn’t right, for though Camelot may be gilded there are still remnants of the true gold glittering underneath. Mordred thinks he needs to break everything, and rebuild from the ashes.

Mordred of Orkney - Mordred Pendragon, whoever he is, a stranger - is not dead.

But with all that has been said and done, he might as well be.

[fireinmoonshot]

First Date.

Requested by Anon: Could you write Male!Reader x Eggsy first date fic where the reader is a young but established Kingsman agent who watches him through training and got so impressed with him, he asked Eggsy out? The date is cracky bc reader is so easily flustered and kinda awkward (also I’d like some overprotective Harry for humour but it’s up to you.) Pairing: Male!Reader x Eggsy Unwin. Fandom: Kingsman. Warnings: Drinking. Word Count: 1267.

As a Kingsman agent, you had pretty much accepted that you were never going to fall in love. You spent most of your time either in the tailor shop or Kingsman HQ, which meant you never had any time to actually try and find somebody. You expected that relationships would be hard.

You knew that anyone you dated would have to live with the fact that you couldn’t tell them the truth about your job. You loved being an agent more than anything, though you knew that you’d never be able to lie to someone you loved like that.

So, when Gary ‘Eggsy’ Unwin showed up at Kingsman HQ to start his training for the now open position of Agent Lancelot, you never really expected anything to grow from that. You admitted to yourself that yes, he was very attractive, and seemed to be a decent guy, but that was it.

Plus, you had your own candidate to help train, and you had no plans to start getting all close with someone else candidate when you had to be loyal to your own.

It was only when you saw the footage of him breaking the glass in the underwater task that you were really impressed with him. You, during your own training, had barely made it to the toilets in time to get a snorkel working, yet he’d picked up on the mirror right away. 

And then, again, when he landed right in the target after the skydiving task with Roxy. They’d opened way too late, but somehow they’d made it. You were slowly finding yourself much more attracted to him than you intended, but you really couldn’t help it. You’d been an agent for a few years now and you knew that something about Eggsy was different. He was better, smarter.

When your proposal for the position was sent home, you didn’t feel as guilty for liking him.

You hadn’t really spoken to Eggsy all that much. You’d told him to call you by your real name, but he liked to annoy you by referring to you as Gaheris, your codename. You found it quite amusing, however. You spoke during lunch breaks and sometimes as you passed in the hallways of HQ, but you’d never really had a proper conversation.

Which was why, you supposed, Eggsy was so surprised when you somehow got the guts to go up to him during a training day at Kingsman HQ and ask him out on a date. You set a time and a place and that was that. Everything was happening.

Harry Hart, better known around Kingsman as Galahad, cornered you on the afternoon of your date as you were finishing up on a mission report in your office. You looked up, eyebrows raised. “Galahad?”

He looked down at you. “I’ve heard that you’ve got plans tonight,” he began.

You nodded at him, sitting the pen you’d been using on the table. “I do, sir,” you confirmed.

Harry hummed and nodded. “A date with my proposal for Lancelot’s position, am I right?”

“You’re right, sir,” you nodded. “Is this a problem?”

Harry was your superior, you knew that, and you also knew that he was the one who proposed Eggsy for the new position. You hadn’t really thought he’d mind, though now you were wishing that you’d asked for his permission beforehand.

He nodded slowly before smiling softly and shaking his head. “No, Gaheris. You’re fine,” he assured you. “Just make sure that you don’t tire him out too much. He’s got a busy day ahead of him tomorrow. He is my proposal for Lancelot’s position, so I would very much like him back here tomorrow to continue his training in one piece. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Galahad. I can promise you he’ll be back tomorrow, unharmed,” you confirmed. Your heart was beating out of your chest with your nerves - you hadn’t realised just how important Eggsy was to him, though, when your proposal for Lancelot’s position was still here, you’d felt the same.

You picked up Eggsy from the outside of his apartment in London at precisely 7:00pm later that night. You’d organised a somewhat fancy dinner, and you, luckily, didn’t look too odd in your suit - considering Eggsy saw you mostly in this suit, it was normal for him.

As soon as Eggsy walked out of his apartment, you felt your heart swell in your chest. Your palms were sweaty with nerves and you were terrified that this would all go wrong. Eggsy thought you looked rather handsome, even though he’d always thought that. 

The two of you made your way to the restaurant in silence. Eggsy managed to make some small talk, but it was clear that you were nervous. You didn’t want to mess this up in any way, because you knew that if you did, and if Eggsy became Lancelot, work would be painful.

You took your seats at the table you’d booked and instantly picked up the menus, ordering whatever sounded good and trying to make a bit of small talk before you ate.

“So,” Eggsy began, taking a sip of his beer. “How long have you been an agent?”

“Uh, eight years,” you muttered, taking a gulp of your own beer - a gulp that was much too big. He almost asked Eggsy how long he’d been an agent, but then you realised he wasn’t and, instead, chuckled awkwardly.

Eggsy nodded. “That’s a bloody long time. I’d like t’ think I’ll get to that point one day.”

“I’m sure you will,” you assured him, knotting your hands together on the table in front of you. “You’re doing really well in your training. I, uh, I’ve been watching. I’m very impressed.”

Eggsy grinned at you. “Really? That’s nice, Y/N,” he mused.

Conversation died off for a few minutes and you could feel the awkwardness slipping into the moment. You hadn’t expected to be so lacking of things to say - you’d expected this date with Eggsy to go well, easy, even. But it was proving to be anything but.

When your food arrived, both of you gratefully started eating. 

Eggsy, to his credit, started talking half way through the meal. “Could I ask, Gaheris,” he began. “Why did you ask me out tonight? We haven’t really talked before.”

You paused, food half way to your mouth, and with an awkward chuckle, returned your fork to your plate. “Well, I, uh, I like you...” you muttered, your heart beating crazily in your chests and your palms sweating again. “You impressed me in the challenges. I just... I had to give it a go.”

Eggsy nodded and ate another fork full of his dinner. “Y’know,” he said, chewing his dinner and talking with his mouth full - something you knew that Harry would chastise. “I’ve actually had a pretty good time t’night.” 

“You have?” You furrowed your eyebrows and looked at him. 

He hummed. “Yeah, I have. Maybe next time we should go somewhere less formal, though. Y’know, like a pub or somethin’. It’s not like I don’t enjoy bein’ all fancy, cause I do. But I feel like it’d be easier to talk without the pressure of this place. You get me?”

“Next time...?” You muttered. You had thought that, after the awfulness of this date tonight, Eggsy would just leave and that would be that. You hadn’t even considered a second date.

“Yeah, next time,” Eggsy nodded, taking a sip of his beer. “We’re definitely going out again, Gaheris. There’s no way you can ask me out once and expect that to be it.”