the family jewels

The first sign was the child's drawings.

As they crammed around the table in the squat dining room of the Avalon cottage, Agatha's eyes fell upon a scraggly line of parchment drawings, scrawled in splodgy ink, pinned on string across the wall.

They didn't look old, like relics of Guinevere's first child, now a young man. They looked new. Brand new.

She glanced at Tedros, but his gaze was pinned firmly on the table, far too distant to even have a prayer of noticing a detail like that. Small mercy, perhaps. But Agatha cast around, now, looking for...

For things like the slightly raised chair near the wall, meant for someone shorter, and the small, brightly coloured socks in the washing basket.

Heart slamming, Agatha looked across at Guinevere, praying she was somehow wrong. If she wasn't, this was going to be a disaster, even more so than currently– and as it was, anything too bad was currently being averted by how Lancelot had, mercifully, stayed outside with Merlin. No doubt at some point, Tedros was going to come to himself, and Agatha did not put it past him to try and pick a fight with Lancelot, which would probably end up being a disaster, given Lancelot was far broader than Tedros, a real knight, and not a teenager.

But this...

Agatha looked at Sophie and Hort, wondering if they'd noticed, but neither seemed to have done. Tedros still hadn't said anything. He'd not touched anything, either, and it had taken Agatha pulling his arm hard to get him to sit down at all. Agatha hadn't been sure how he was going to take the shock, but somehow she'd not expected him to shut down completely.

Guinevere had brought out some sort of stew, but Hort and Agatha were the only ones who had taken any; Sophie refused to eat anything so wholesome, and there simply wasn't a prayer for Tedros.

Still, Guinevere gave it a go; with unsteady hands, she took Tedros's untouched bowl from where she'd put it, and made the exact same sort of tremulous, unconvincing smile that Tedros did when he was uncomfortable.

"How much do you want, dear?"

Tedros didn't even look at her, and Guinevere anxiously dished up far too much. Agatha looked between them, dread growing. Tedros and his mother looked at least related; they shared the set of their eyes, and their nose shape, and the tendency to sweat when they were stressed, if the back of Guinevere's gown and the front of Tedros's shirt were any indication–

"Mum, what's going on?"

To Agatha's surprise, it was Sophie who seemed to realise fastest– her eyes widened, and she whipped around. Hort was slower. Tedros didn't turn at all, but Agatha had seen how hard he'd tensed.

She turned around in her chair.

Tedros and Guinevere looked decently alike, true.

But this girl...

Agatha's heart sank, so far and so fast that she felt briefly sick.

The girl on the stairs staring curiously at them could have been absolutely no one, but Guinevere's daughter. Same frizzy brown hair, same skin tone and mouth and build... the only thing was different was the dark eyes, probably inherited from–

Agatha physically winced. Lancelot.

Slowly, Tedros looked over his shoulder. Guinevere had frozen, staring in terror at Tedros, whose face was a complete mask–

Until it wasn't.

He whipped around and stood up abruptly, bashing his chair into the wall.

"Teddy–" began Guinevere–