A.N. : Read First!
This chapter is the detailed stories Emrys told Arthur. So it's kind of an inline prequel to Arthur's reactions of the story...
I didn't want to break pace of previous chapter, and wanted a good cliffhanger, so here are the stories seperately. The next chapter will follow up after On the Lake.
This chapter is necessary to plot! Please read it, otherwise conversations later will not make sense. The King Arthur stuff is heavily cliffnoted since I assume you have seen the show, the rest is in detail.
Pictured above is a photo I took myself of Waverly Hills on the side that faces down the hill. In this particular part, while I did lots of research will have historical "liberties" on parts I may not be able to research (such as when their PA system was installed, life for "mobile" patients).
Lot of dialogue this chap, so be prepared!
Anyhow~ Enjoy the chap!
Love, DbI
....
"King Arthur was a wonderful leader, he won the love of his people and was the first king to stop the persecution of druids. He was married to a wonderful woman who was headstrong and kind... just like him--" Emrys laughed softly at that, fondly.
"Druids? Like magic?" Arthur asked.
"Yeah, that's what the legend says," Emrys sighed. "To be quite honest, my memory of King Arthur consists of a lot of name-calling and him being a royal prat."
"Are you sure he was the annoying one?" Arthur grinned, watching Emrys with amusement.
"Seeing as he constantly had to be saved from himself, yes." Emrys whispered sagely. "He still died though... when it really mattered, I couldn't save him."
"But it wasn't you," Arthur reassured, putting his hand on the boy's shoulder. "It's not your fault."
"I wonder..." Emrys whispered, voice soft, his fingers beginning to twitch in Wade's fur. "The strongest memory of that time is his death. He begged me to stay with him as he died," his lip quivered. "He begged me to hold him... It's still very fresh in my mind, like it happened yesterday. Even my senses remember it perfectly."
"Don't you remember happy things?" Arthur asked, confused how Emrys could feel it so vividly.
"I don't remember vividly. It was a long time ago, after all. But, I do remember sensations I relate to him... if that makes sense. You know, like exasperation, amusement, warmth, admiration, things like that. I thought the sun would rise and set with him, I know that for sure."
"We should be prepared to stay the night," Arthur interrupted suddenly. "This won't be letting up anytime soon. I'll start dinner."
Emrys smiled, rolling his eyes as he watched Arthur unwrap from his behemoth of a dog. Arthur cooed at his dog as he unraveled himself, promising to come back soon. This sight greatly unseen by Arthur's friends, this moment with his walls down, was enough to put a warmth in Emrys's chest.
"You planned on staying the night, didn't you? You knew it would rain." Emrys crossed his arms in mock defiance, leaning his head back on the couch as he watched Arthur take a frozen pizza and a few waters from the fridge, presetting the oven. "How sly of you."
"Well, it opened you up to me, didn't it?" Arthur smiled, his expression soft. "I hoped for the rain, but it wasn't a plan exactly. I noticed on my phone while I went to pay for petrol it would rain so I prepared. We are in Britain, we are known for heaps of rain, after all."
"I'm sure I would have confessed these memories eventually," Emrys admitted. "With or without your insistence."
Arthur put the pizza in the oven, returning to his place on the couch beside Emrys who was watching the rain outside the window.
Suddenly, Arthur had the urge to tousle his hair, to wrap his arms around the boy's shoulders, to snuggle his face in his neck. The odd complusion caused him to choke on a mouthful of air.
As he coughed it out, he handed Emrys his water who spun around to visually check on him. He, for a moment, saw a visceral fear in Emrys's eyes. He breathed in, then out, regaining his breath before scooting next to Emrys thigh-to-thigh.
"Tell me more. What about the next one you remember?" Arthur asked, wanting to move on but morbidly curious to know more.
Emrys breathed sharply, "Are you sure? This one is, uhm, different... we were different. It might be better if you didn't know."
"What do you mean?" Arthur asked, "Different how?"
"I don't know how to put it delicately," Emrys blushed, touching his palm to his face and looking away.
"Just spit it out." Arthur grumbled, irritated by the cloak-and-dagger routine by which this entire conversation had seemed to follow. Why constantly question when Arthur was being open-minded enough to listen to all of this anyway?
"We, well he and I, were... in love. We were, uh, together, in a way." Emrys buried his face in the dog's fur, unable to meet Arthur's gaze.
"Oh." Arthur blushed, himself.
Emrys regained his composure and raised his head, looking out the window instead of meeting Arthur's eyes. Frankly, some of the stories were hard enough to think about, let alone recount them to the reincarnated subject of such memories.
"Artie was a TB patient at a hospital in America, one of the finest at the time, in fact. I remember nearly everything of him, since it was much more recent... While I don't have any memories of looking at calendars, I'm sure it was in the late 1910s.
"Our meeting was an accident, I had been working as a doctor in the hospital. With our limited knowledge we were trying to save people, but it was a futile task back then, you know. The only cure practices were rest, fresh air, sunlight, and balanced diets back then, seems obtuse to us with what we know now but doctors were doing the best they could with the knowledge they had. Survival rate was roughly 3% and it was difficult.
"Knowing the patients were torn from their homes, their families, to be quarantined away in this sanitorium on a hill with a quite-certain death sentence... Quarantine was an adamant part of this, in hopes the disease would not spread. Sometimes, children would be torn from their mother's arms and locked in the back of the horse-drawn carriages, which served as ambulances in those days.
"Children had their own ward with those children who had sick parents too poor or isolated from family to get care any other way... I'm sorry, I'm getting off-topic."
Emrys took a deep breath, covering his eyes as his head lolled as though he were staring at the ceiling. Arthur listened intently, silently. They interrupted for a while, to eat the cooked pizza, then continued where they left off.
"Well... Artie arrived a somber but calm young man, he was afraid but felt he had lived well enough in his 28 years. He found out his diagnosis quickly, volunteering to come to Waverly Hills with the small hope he could be cured. He contracted the disease from staying in a room previously held by an infected person, the innkeeper too dull or uncaring to do anything about the diseased bed and sheets. In fact, the room letter told him, herself, that the room was held by a consumptive merely days before. Next day, he took his precautions and made his way to the sanitarium.
"Artie was in an individual room, since he was still in early stages and still had mobility. The rooms were small, but the coughing fits the patients suffered were enough to cause significant levels of pain. Even early on, when he transferred in, his complexion was healthy and though he had fits that caused his throat to be sore and hoarse he was in good spirits. He liked helping to care for the children early on.
"He never had siblings for long, they died in adolescence for various reasons, so he liked to play with them and treated them like family-- learned their names, made them small gifts out of things around. It took a few months for me to even run into him the first time. It was a big hospital, after all. I was a British transplant, the only one in the hospital except Artie, and I had gone to check on a certain child per request of their parent who wrote a letter to me asking for updates.
"He was consoling the child I was looking for, oddly enough. The boy, 8 or so, was the youngest member of his family, and the only one to contract TB... for the health of his family he had to be quarantined away from them. He adjusted well enough, but he had trouble finding comfort in the nurses when he was in pain. Artie was wiping blood from the boy's hand that he had coughed up, which always caused him to cry. It was frightening, I imagine, for a child so young to try to grasp they would likely never see their family again and eventually just die.
"Anyway, Artie was smiling at him, talking in conspiratory whispers as though he were a child himself hiding a secret." Emrys couldn't supress a smile as he talked about it. "I interrupted, letting the boy know his parents dearly wished to recieve a letter from him. Invigorated by the conversation, he readily agreed and walked off to his room. I introduced myself as a doctor of the facility, and Artie just smiled and made a joke about how it made sense now that I wore a white coat in such a place."
Arthur, enraptured in the story, gave a nod of encouragement and Emrys went on.
"He seemed to place me as familiar immediately, patting my shoulder in greeting. He insisted that, as a fellow Brit, I be in charge of his care. I was of course, glad to do so. I knew it was him immediately, the man I knew as King Arthur, reborn as another. He, somehow, looked exactly the same... perhaps a little more tanned from the years spent in American sunshine, and more at peace with himself but I suppose some find calm in the face of death.
"His coughing was the most consistent, though not bad at first. The coughing did leave him with throat and chest pain, at times he stated it felt hard to breathe. He did so well at the beginning, he even helped us roll the beds out to the balcony walkways so that bedridden patients got healthy doses of sunlight and fresh air.
"The spring was kind, with bouts of rain but not humid, patients found it pleasant for the most part. Artie spent his free time in the lounge, reading, or spent time with the sick children who were seperated from the well children.
"You know... You can live for years with tuberculosis. It can take up to three years to take someone's life completely. When it begins to get bad, you lose weight, you lose the desire to eat, you can barely move from severe fatigue, you sweat bullets although you feel as though you're freezing...
"The memories of living corpses, skin almost transluctent and stretched like hide on a drum. Muscle mass diminishes, even your hands lose their supple appearance. It was only in the last year that Artie was that bad off. The fatigue had their comings and goings, as did the fevers, but once he began to lose weight it was a matter of time until he wasted away.
"I'm getting ahead of myself," Emrys cleared this throat, taking a sip of his drink that had been left mostly forgotten in front of him. The dog snored quietly from his spot on the floor nearby. Arthur watched Emrys with his total attention, head leaned sideways on his hand.
"Artie approached me one day, out the blue, and asked me to go into town and buy a few records. He wanted to host a party, of all things. I did as he asked, came back with a few. He gathered everyone who was mobile to the lounge and played records over the PA system for those who were bedridden. One of the nurses recognized one of the records and begged me to play it, I told her to go ahead. I was surprised to find it a waltz. She wasn't surprised of course, she asked me to dance. Being a doctor and all, I was better with my hands than my feet," Emrys let a small smile slip again.
Arthur was finding these smiles so be so warm, and yet they set him on edge though he wasn't sure why.
"Artie, he cut in. I was backing up from her, offering him her hand, when he clarified he wanted to dance with me, not her. She was shocked, but went off to dance with another doctor. I was shocked too, as you can imagine, the times being what they were... But I think it was the environment, the cloud of death that hung over everyone made those little things matter so much less. So, we danced... He had the grace of a king, I had seen him dance so many times with Gwen I never thought how it felt in her shoes.
"That moment could have been when I fell for him... But there were so many moments, so many times my heart skipped a beat throughout the time spent with him, it could have been any of them or all of them. The song ended, he bowed to me and in that moment I saw the king, the man I served for years, not the boy dying of TB. I bowed back awkwardly, then shuffled off to make myself scarce.
"I saw him in passing for a month or so, talking only when we happened to bump into each other. We didn't talk much, frankly. I think the dance had scared us both off, it felt weird, intimate, even. He stopped me one day when I was loitering in the stairwell, and he asked me questions, arbitrary things, but after a while was satisfied and went off on his own.
"It was a week or so after that, I was taking lunch break in the stairwell, and while on an outing to the courtyard with a few other patients, picked me a bouquet of tiny wildflowers. They were varied in size and shape, but it was obvious he tried to arrange them somehow before giving them to me. He gave them to me gently, wrapping my hand around them, and asked me if I liked them... I just... collapsed into tears.
"The memories of the man who died on the battlefield were overwhelming, I had clenched the flowers to my chest. Artie knelt down, met my eyes, and asked me if I thought of someone other than him as I cried. Obviously, it felt like a trick question, so my brain told me it ws high time to cry harder. When I calmed down, I told him I liked the flowers. He smiled and assured me there would be "more in my future", but of course all that ended when he got sicker. He lived over 2 years at the hospital before he did... Things obviously progressed from the flowers but, it is uncomfortable enough recounting all this."
"Fair enough," Arthur murmured, letting the story sink in. The part of him that wanted to doubt the story saw too much of himself in these men, hadn't he picked wild flowers for Eve once only for her to turn them down? Arthur admitted, Emrys did seem like the type to appreciate such gestures.
....
"You said there were three, doesn't that mean there's one more?" Arthur asked after a minute or two of silence.
"Ah, him. Honestly, there's not much to say, really." Emrys sighed, any sign of happiness from the events of the previous story gone from his expression. "Art, he was a painter, a wonderful one at that. In the year 1940, on his 30th birthday, he recieved a letter that he was to be inlisted in just a few days to fight in what we would come to know as World War II, he... well, he hung himself from the rafters of his art studio.
"I found out in the newspaper about his death, had his college picture and everything... They auctioned off his things, his paintings, even his diary. His paintings, a lot were landscapes, old England you know. No cities, just rolling hills and quiet meadows. The other half... They were portraits, realistic portraits that looked so vivid, so much like me. I bought the diary for a few dozen pounds and ran.
"His diary was filled with anguish, just constantly repeating this desire to 'fill the empty part of himself'. I don't have clear memories of the words, but he mentioned the paintings that looked like me were of his 'soulmate from a previous self'. I'm sure most of the paintings were destroyed, they weren't of much meaning to others like it was for him... Anyway, he was the last, until I met you. You're the fourth."
"I was quiet and listened to your stories. The sun has set since you started. I have a lot of questions, but one seems to bother me the most."
"Go ahead," Emrys insisted.
"Why do you refer to your past life in the first person?"
"Because it was all one life, as long as I remember it." Emrys smiled, the mirth not reaching his eyes, "You never remember, not fully, Art was the only one who did... and look what happened."
"Were you in love with Art too?"
Emrys sputtered, his entire face turning red, "Yes, I didn't know him like I did Artie, or King of the Round Table, but they were the same person. Different circumstances, but they had the same mind, same heart, they even looked the same."
"What about me?" Arthur asked, eyes glassing over from fatigue. "What am I to you?"
"You are a debt I must repay," Emrys said with a thickened voice, weighed with emotion. "I couldn't save you, any of those times... I would rather end things, then, if I am to be doomed to watch you die again and again and again. I can't do it anymore! I can't, Arthur!"
"Then don't." Arthur got a strange look on his face, a strong gaze that Emrys found to be very unsettling. "Don't let me out of your sight."
....
A.N.
My GOD. A triple chapter. Love me, my dear readers/kouhais bc there was an insane level of research in here. lol