Chapter Text
Where to beging?
With water?
Or with fire?
He has always felt cold. Darkness, emptiness, death. But above all, it is always the cold that summons him, even if he’s walking through flames.
Sometimes he can fear lighting bolts of fear striking at him in the middle of the night, when the blood of his punishments is still fresh running through his skin, leaving behind it strokes of red.
Blood seems to be the only constant factor of his life as the solid purpose of his path. That’s’ what they told him, what they made him believe. Still, now it’s his own blood the one that coagulates in his eyebrows, drying in the cold air and making even harder to keep his eyes open. But he has to, a primitive whisper inside him pushing him with the question: Who would command the horse, the kid?
His body is shivering, maybe because of the freezing landscape, or maybe because his body can’t take it any longer. Perhaps he has one of those infections some healers whisper in their tents, or for instance is the Devil who’s trying to nail his claws on his barely existing soul. That’s what Father Carden is praying for at this moment, he’s sure of it.
“Stop laying on me!” screams the little boy. “You’re heavy, you know. And smell horrible.”
A few answers cross his mind, but he’s too tired to pronounce them, or to even consider them. However, a tiny smirk shadows his lips for what it seems the first time in a while. He could have a worst death, that’s for sure.
Or that’s what he thought.
First it’s in his shoulder, then in his stomach. A growl crawls his throat, scaring the boy and the horse almost at the same time. He feels, but he’s not sure of what exactly is turning his guts into a storm of turmoil and despair and threatens to torn him apart.
He needs to dismount the horse; he need to feel the ground.
His wrecked body hits the ground, his breath knocked out of him when the pain of his wounds slashes through him. Lancelot heart starts to beat fast, stronger than before, and the air he breaths seems to not be enough for his lungs. It escapes him, and when he opens his mouth he can only savour the taste of water and blood.
And then, just as the tiny spark that’s created because of the friction of two rocks, an unusual heat blossoms in his chest for the first time in his life. Magic? Hasn’t the Hidden turned on him? Still, it feels different from anything he has ever felt, too powerful to be his own and too good to come from him.
Lancelot thinks he can hear the little boy screaming his name, but maybe because it still feels strange to answer by it, he feels like not responding to the call.
He grapes the muddy floor, mud escaping between his fingers as he tries to control his breathing and clear his thoughts. His body burn with an unknown force, as if it was telling him something, but he has repressed the magic and his connection with the land that he can’t barely read the meaning behind it. And it hurts so much.
Breathing hurts, almost as if he was drowning, but stones digging into his knees and hands remained him of the land that it’s watching him being torn apart.
“Lancelot!” The voice of the little kid pierces through his mind, painfully slow.
But he can’t let go, not yet when it seems as if he’s missing something.
Someone.
That whisper… He hasn’t heard anything in years, only the poisonous voice of Father.
Someone needs you.
“Who?” he asks.
In the lake.
He needs air. He can’t breathe.
Little hands shake him, the wound of his arm screaming for mercy. But Lancelot grabs that heat even stronger, some deep part almost forgotten inside him telling him to no let go. It burns him, trying to consume every piece that it’s left inside him, but he holds onto it. A little more. Just one breath. He has to do it.
Then, the burning explodes.
Air fills his lungs and he collapses on the ground, blue sky above him and a little boy shaking his body.
The whisper is still repeating the words, but now is a female voice the one that asks him to find her. Who would him to find them? No-one. In the lake, find me in the lake.
“We’re changing routes.” His voice really sounds as if he almost drowned.
“What?!” Squirrel screams. “They are searching for us!”
“We need to.”
“Why!”
“I don’t know.”
Hans on his knees, a pain that seems almost unbearable if not because of all the mercy Father Carden has put him through all those years. Nothing of that matters now, he has to keep going, and he will do it even if that takes away his last breath.
“Where’re you going?!”
“To the lake”, he whispers.
Mounting while hearing the boy’s curses and complains should be considerate another type of torture, but he obeys and helps him to keep straight and looking after that mysterious lake that keeps calling him.
At some point the little boy is the only thing that keeps him steady enough to continue this crazy pursuit, but despite the screams from him body to let it go, he keeps going; he keeps graving with strength that little spark inside him.
Time seems meaningless when Percival starts to hear the rush of water running.
“Lancelot!” he screams, trying to call him back.
And that who now responds to that name feels a rush he can only compare when he had to fight a large number or a dangerous mission as the Weeping Monk. The rush of adrenaline fuels him into taking the horse’s reins and get into full tracker mood. With his mind settled in a goal and that as his only focus, he manages to work properly, to forget the pain that Hell was inflicting him to see if he succumbs —as Father Carden had told him many times— and only seek for his objective. Even if he isn’t sure of that it’s anymore.
The lake, far from being a calm reflection, seems to empathise with the turmoil that the world is drowning right now. That doesn’t stop him, not even a heartbeat.
Once they approach even more the lake, the pull inside him is almost everything he can perceive and feel. That’s why he doesn’t question not even one of the movements that his body does following this instinct.
Trying to not show any of his pain, he dismounts the horse and ties it in a tree near the lake.
“Don’t dismount”, Lance orders the boy. He takes off his clock. “Here, get covered. If you feel someone or you see anything, go.”
“No.”
“Just… Do it.”
And it’s then, when he faces the lake, that something inside him takes the control. But nothing has to do as when Father Carden pulled him towards some scenarios or situations, when, at night, he doubted if those were his actions or the whispers he has been hearing for ages. This is different, he feels it. Rather than make him shiver, even when he enters the water, he feels a heat that keeps him going.
Time doesn’t exist anymore. The cold, freezing, waters starts to numb him, air begging to enter into his lungs. He has lost the sense of orientation and, at one moment under the water, he doesn’t know what’s up and what’s down.
His blood has tinted his surroundings, and some rational part of his brain screams him to leave, that he might have lost a lot of blood and he’s in no position to rest in order to make a full recovery. But that instinct is so strong inside him, that he cannot move.
Or he thinks that until he spots more blood. However, this times it’s the water the one that carries it.
And he knows it.
It doesn’t make sense.
But who cares.
With the last strength he can pull off, he starts swimming towards the rocks that seem to be the starting point from where the blood flows. It almost feels as if he’s fighting an invisible enemy, some kind of force that’s trying to stop him.
Nothing matter, not when he can start to see a person grabbing a rock with as if they life depends of it. He swims even harder, going against the tide, to find that the person is in fact, a beautiful young girl.
Lancelot can swear —and he never does it— that something in his world changes as the water stops freezing him and he can fully breathe for the first time since he can remember. No longer does his wounds matter, not when that girl that could light up the whole world is struggling to even breathe.
For what he can see, he has two important wounds, caused by arrows, but despite the nasty wound on her shoulder, the one in the abdomen region seems to be not that deep thanks to the leather corset. Even the arrow has disappeared while the one in her shoulder has been ripped. He has to take than one off before it gets infected.
Without caring for anything but her, Lancelot tries to grab her with the utmost delicacy and try to put her laying on his back while he swims back to the shore.
The boy, Percival, is there, against everything he has said to him.
He screams when he sees them.
“Nimue!”
Lancelot doesn’t have enough strength to ask for the name or recriminate the lack of respect this boy seems to have toward orders.
With the help of the boy they lay her on the grass and it only takes second for her to look better. Lancelot orders the boy —this time he follows the commands— to bring some kind of tissue so he can rip the broken arrow and help the fresh wound.
They do it, but she doesn’t react. Not immediately.
Little by little she seems to gain more of that strength that made Lancelot able to track her.
That’s when the fire inside him seems to burn out, and when all of his tiredness, exhaustion and pain come back. But just a little more. Being as careful as he can with the wounds, he starts to press her chest, praying to whoever is there to listen to make her come back. Frustration grows inside him when the girl doesn’t react.
“Please”, he begs, maybe for the first time in his life.
Then, in slow motion, her hands start to grip on the land, a deep connection inside her surfaces despite the water that tried to drown her. But it’s not only the power of the land, of the spirits of the woods, that returns the colour of her cheeks and makes her heartbeat grow faster. Another kind of energy settles deep in her chest, blossoming inside her with such strength that she is unable to stop the rush that propels her to one side to throw out all the water accumulated in her lungs.
Lancelot feels such a wave of relief that he falls to his knees, his body unable to keep his weight any longer. He can only watch her take deep breaths, just before Squirrel jumps into her arms. He can’t form a question, not when his sight starts to blur and breathing seems to drain him from all the energy that has kept him up for the last hours.