Welcome to Gaia! ::

The ordained time for rest and quiet had been spent thus far as anything but, yet Mildred was still very satisfied with the way they'd used the day's waning hours. They existed together in a world where no one else did - no other knights, no Lancelot, no threat of a war she did not want to fight - and it made every second worthwhile and perfect.

It was well into twilight before she noticed the fading light, which would generally be fairly meaningless, another end to another day. This day, however, marked the first occasion upon which her 'new' glasses would allow her to actually see the stars once night fell. There was no need to lament the loss of the telescope any further, nor any need to regret their inability to share the stars. Now they could, without even requiring anything between them, which would have impeded their ability to be as close as they possibly could to one another.

That distance, small as it was, would be unforgivable.

As the last light of the sun disappeared from the horizon, and the stars emerged to continue where it left off, she pressed herself close to Robert and stared into the heavens with hushed awe. From where they lay on the lakeshore, the water lapped at her toes, but its persistent efforts to convince her to return were given no attention.

"I do not remember the constellations," she finally murmured, breaking her silence. "I cannot find them. I remember their existence, but no more."

She turned to him, partially wrapping herself around his body, and propped her head up against his shoulder.

"Do you think that we did this often?" Her lips were pressed into a contemplative frown. "If you were born for glory, and I was born to chart the heavens...no, I have faith that we made this work. Perhaps the journeys we have shared together here are but a fraction of the adventures we once had."

"I thought..."

This made no sense. It had been her impression that they shared the same memory upon the acquisition of their sacred weapons, and this impression had driven her to make so many assumptions about them. It had encouraged her to believe they were married - why had he so willingly accepted it?

"But...I remember you. I remember working. I remember that my father dictated a strict schedule of study, but...you were in it. There was time for you. I worked to complete it by dusk so I might see the stars to share them. I remember hiding beneath the window to listen as you spoke, and how excited you became when you finally saw me there. You wanted us to be wed! I remember finding the courage to answer you. I..."

...had no memory of what the answer was.

Oh no. Surely it had been yes? It had to be yes.

It had to.

"I am confident that you are the reason I agreed to become a knight," she mumbled, voice as lost as she felt. "I cannot fathom another reason, despite the countless times in which I have tried, even prior to that memory's return. It must have been you. I would never have come here. But in that memory I felt a true sense of belonging, and you were there, and you are here, and you have always been more suited to this than I, so I...it was a logical conclusion..."

Other potentials began to surface, which had once been so confidently stifled by her certainty. She squeezed his hand, and wondered if simply leaving his question unanswered would go unnoticed. Or maybe she'd left too many of his questions unanswered already.

"It does not displease me, I suppose." The ring on her finger caught and held her unyielding attention as she spoke. "I am fearful of our memories. I think that I no longer seek their return."

Listening to Robert's recounting of what he knew of their time together - or potentially of their time separated, as it were - felt a bit strange. It first rose from the realization that she could remember next to nothing about the man she'd referred to as her father, despite the fact that he'd existed. It was functionally the same as never having met him either, she supposed.

The second churning oddity came when he confessed that he thought she didn't want him, when she began to consider the possibility of this. Was that why she'd hidden? Had she not been shy, but overwhelmed with the persistence of something she did not want?

"Perhaps I was not," she agreed, soft and contemplative. "If this is true, I was searching in a perpetually fruitless manner. How could I have found my place in this world, when I sought to look beyond it? If I so rarely looked down from the window at you, if I looked up instead...I stood no chance."

She was pulled from her stormy thoughts as she felt his delighted movements, and she laughed as she tried to stay close to him in spite of them.

"You spoke then of taking me away from there. What if...I realized my errors, and allowed you to? If I abandoned it all to seek meaning alongside you? And we knelt together there, because we were already certain that we would each return to the other's side once more? Because we already knew that nothing else would suffice."

A giggle managed to escape the enthusiastic enactment of precisely how intertwined they were. Mildred playfully kicked her feet against the shore in mock protest, before settling against him once more.

"Yes, we have achieved it. I belong. We belong together, and that is enough." And it was, truly. This was everything she needed, everything she could say she required. "But...as you said: I want more. Think of what we can have, if we refuse to sacrifice for anyone but each other. If we put the vows we have made before the allegiances we are now under. If we--"

These were not new concepts. She'd insisted upon reverence to these things several times before now, but they held a new relevance, and realizing as much stole the air from her lungs. Her chest hurt, aching for as long as she failed to breathe, persisting even after.

"Must we go? Must we join them in battle?" The words were muffled, namely due to the fact that her face was buried against him. "I fear the singular intent is for us to all meet our demise there. I do not know why, but his choice of words was unnervingly suspect. We are being granted one last reprieve, but I want many more. Many more days of all sorts with you. I want a life with you. A lifetime."

She would have liked to believe him. It would have comforted her to accept his words with certainty, to truly think that Lancelot had just misspoken, or that he carried a pessimism that would be unfounded. She wanted this so badly that she resolved to set this concern aside - or try to - so what could easily have been their last night together would not be spent arguing semantics and definitions.

"I would have liked to seek another option," she sighed. Being frustrated that war and physical combat was the path that knights had chosen to take was a bit ridiculous, but she was anyway. "I would have liked to approach this with a greater comfort, so I might feel more confident about our safety. I would like to know that we will still have our lives, if that peace is achieved."

As his gaze turned towards her, they had already caught her attention; but when he spoke about their future, about children, she exhaled a light shudder of a breath and stared into his eyes. In hers, she gave him trust and curiosity, adoration and intrigue. In his, she sought some wordless promise that they would be all right. Some glimpse of a future he could not possibly know, some indication that they would have this.

She so painfully wanted it.

"Our children?" She tried to laugh, but it failed to hide her fractured voice. "Will we live on the countryside and make a life learning how to grow? Or in a new kingdom, perhaps, with a new tower for us both? Or will they travel with us, as we chart the uncharted world that will be left to us to discover?"

Twenty might have been a startling number to most sane or reasonable people, but Mildred was very obviously neither. She accepted their inevitability of twenty children, affirmed to herself that it that it was mathematically possible, and thought about them all venturing out into the world together.

"I will learn about the constellations once more, and we will use them to navigate," she added, closing her eyes as she tried to envision it. "We will all know them by name, and when we reach lands with stars not yet known, we will map the lines between them and name them after us. We will lay claim to this world and the world beyond, in this way."

This all sounded nice. Immortal through land and sea and sky.

"So, then..." Her trembling hands curled gently over her belly as the stars became blurry once more, obscured beneath the sting of tears. "What will we name the first?"

A snort broke through her tearful reverie, and she wiped what remained of it away from her eyes with the back of her hand.

"A boy, I think." She clutched at her stomach and felt another pang of worry. "I hope. He will have all of the strengths of both of us, and we will be proud that he bears our name."

When her memories returned implied an optimism that she didn't share; the King stole from her, and the King was dead. They were not coming back. But she could assign herself a favorite constellation, once she could properly recall them. This was simple enough, so she rose no complaint.

Instead, she stared at the star he indicated and scrunched up her nose in concentration. It was maddening to have information so close, and so far away all at once, and she struggled through every little detail she could remember, clawing past the surface.

"Sirius? Alpha...Canis?" That seemed right, even if she couldn't place why. "You would have me give birth to a dog-child?"

She laughed and gave him a playful shove as she teased him, and when she calmed again, she looked back up at the twinkling star.

"You are welcome in our family," she told it, gesturing for it to come and join them. "I speak only in jest. You will be accepted here. Do not fear the distance. We will be waiting for you, to show you where you belong."

In truth, scouring the single memory whose return had been granted to her for just one detail was an exhausting ordeal that she did not especially intend to replicate. Picturing everything as she remembered it, then pressing past the focus of that memory in hopes of seeking one fragment of information from the notes and documents that served as little more than a background, was worth neither the thought nor the energy. A successful experiment, certainly, but not sustainable. Only if they never found any of this data again, if she never encountered a method of re-learning it, would she reconsider picking clean the entire skeleton of that recollection of a small window in time. She sorely hoped that would not be the case, and only gave it further consideration long enough to appreciate his praise.

She smiled and gave half a bow in acceptance of it.

"If my books are gone," and they were hers, "and the Observatory Tower is inaccessible when we reclaim the castle, then I will accept that Camelot cannot offer this intellectual aid to me, and our first adventure can be as you describe. Should we locate the relevant texts upon our return, however, I would not mind a shift in prioritization to venture towards something you need to find."

This was only fair, of course. With these accompanying materials, she would have enough to begin to rebuild the structures that had once been so meticulously maintained within her mind, and he had only her. That seemed less than fair. Appealing, though, which was precisely how she knew it wasn't in the interest of keeping them equal.

"When Robert the Second is born, and we require time to gain the strength both for travel and the conception of his heavenly siblings..." Hiding a grin, she glanced sidelong at him to catch his reaction, if there was one. "Will you build a home for us, wherever we may be, until we are well and able to continue on our journey? So they will all grow to learn that home is where we are together, and so I may never forget it?"