summerdude | I Embrace My Inner Tarzan [open post]

There's a massive old oak about fifty yards west of Magnus's favorite clearing. It has thick, sturdy branches; he can climb nearly forty feet up it before he starts to worry about them holding his weight. There's a family of squirrels that lives nearby -- good squirrels, nothing like Ratatosk -- and Magnus likes to listen to them discuss their acorn deposits. Sometimes, when they're not looking, he'll grow and stash more acorns for them to discover; he's not sure how long the winters here get.

He's pretty sure it's cold outside, but it's not cold enough to affect him, and so he's still barefoot and in a t-shirt pretty much all the time.

Today, he's been scrounging in some of the out-buildings. There's a portable outdoor fireplace. While he doesn't feel the cold, he finds (contained) fires comforting, and it'll be nice to have some hot food, so he shoulders it and a makeshift grill surface, and lugs them to the base of his oak tree. Now he'll have an easier way of preparing the fish Mothwing sometimes leaves him than trying to summon the right amount of summer into them so that they cook and don't explode, at least.

He lights a modest fire, feeding it with fallen sticks. Then he shoves an apple, picked from another nearby tree, into his mouth and a book he'd pilfered from the library into the waistband of his pants, and climbs up an easy ten feet to his favorite branch. Things don't seem so bad, living out here.

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"No, it's fascinating," Magnus says. "'Turning to things of the spirit' sounds a lot like Ramadan, according to Sam. Only I don't think there's anything about Jesus in Ramadan. Just a lot of stuff about connecting to god and abstaining from... uh, most things." Food, sex, et cetera. He shrugs. "So this Advent fast. How long is it? Is it just during the day, or something else?"

He cuts himself off after the two questions.

Thank you. "When I told you about sin, I said some things were different for me. The Nativity Fast was a Black Fast once. I may only eat once a day, after Nones, and it should be bread, vegetables, and water. I may not have meat or wine or lacticinia." It has the air of recitation, as is often this case when he talks about this sort of thing. "But most people eat throughout the day and just keep the diet."

"Nones," Magnus repeats, trying to remember what he's read since he and Galahad first started talking about time. "That's... midafternoon? Late afternoon?" He's not sure what lacticinia means, but it sounds kind of like lactose, so it's probably milky.

"Three hours after the middle of the day." A flickering smile. "You have not forgotten the middle of the day?"

As soon as he says it his expression changes subtly. He teased Magnus. He has no idea how it happened and no idea how to make it happen again, but it felt new and good and-- something that he could do because he knows Magnus, because there's so much shared speech between them, things that have happened that only they know about. Because Magnus makes him feel at ease, and he thinks less about every word he says. It doesn't matter whether Magnus has noticed or not; Galahad is grateful to know it was possible.

Magnus laughs, delighted. He's noticed the teasing because he loves being teased. "Dude," he says.

He blushes, but he also smiles again, less briefly this time.

"I don't think I could ever fast," Magnus says, thoughtful. Not least because he an atheist, so there's probably no point. "When I was on the streets, especially before I met Amir's dad and he started giving me free falafel, it was hard to know when and where my next meal would come from. That was enough fleshly hunger for me for one lifetime."

He scoots over a little more, so that his side is pressed against Galahad's. "But when Samirah was fasting -- during Ramadan, after sunset, you always break your fast with dates. The food kind, not the double kind. And she and I would sit on the deck of the Big Banana -- our boat; Frey sent it to me and we called it that because it was bright yellow -- and look at the stars and the water and she'd share her dates with me. Because it's best to do that kind of thing in community." He glances sideways at Galahad. "I don't know what it's like for you and your kind of fasting, but if there's some kind of ritual you want to share with a friend who doesn't really get it, I'm your guy."

"Fasting should mean something," seriously. He remembers how it felt to begin letting his hands move and touch with Claudius, and he allows himself to take a little of Magnus' shirt between his fingers and thumb and rub the fabric. "If it doesn't mean anything to you, then you shouldn't do it. You don't need to."

Magnus glances down at the tug, and then relaxes against Galahad. "For sure, dude, I wouldn't want to appropriate or anything," he says. "I just mean -- if there's a non-fasting part of fasting where you want companionship and it doesn't matter that the only reason I'm there is because friendship, then I wanna do it."

The t-shirt fabric is thinner and springier than either his old linen and wool tunics or the soft sweaters and slacks he's been wearing; he likes the lightness of it, though he thinks he would be too cold to wear something like it. He feels the pressure of Magnus against his body, the heat that radiates out of him even when he isn't conjuring summer. Fasting has always been a solitary thing: in the nunnery he was often alone -- except at mealtimes, which were taken in silence, and at mass and prayers, when he sat by himself in the first pew and no one spoke to him except God -- and in Camelot he fasted more seriously than anyone else, even Percival.

He only remembers a handful of times when it ended in something like camaraderie: once when he drank too much wine too quickly at Easter and afterwards blushed and laughed at everything Percival said; once at Epiphany when he ate meat again and Percival had twelfth cake with fruit and found the broad bean in it. All his happy memories of breaking fast are like that: Percival is there.

Suddenly he feels so sad that it takes his breath away. He doesn't know whether he'll ever see Percival again. The person he was in Camelot feels as distant and unfamiliar to him as any other knight there -- impossible to read or sympathize with, a stone statue of a man with God's voice in his ear, someone who never questioned anything until Claudius asked him if he doubted his purpose -- but that person would have defined himself by Percival's friendship. He misses Percival's light, his chatter, his stories, his touch. He misses watching him catch fish and build fires, misses praying beside him, misses his Welsh accent and the way he knew about every natural thing. He misses everything.

He tries to imagine Magnus instead. He tries to imagine sitting by the water, looking at the stars, eating dates, the sweetness on his tongue.

"Thank you," he says at last.

"Yeah, 'course," Magnus says, blithely. He slings an arm around Galahad's shoulders and squeezes.

I Embrace My Inner Tarzan [open post]

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