filling in canon: sge oneshots

solider on, achilles

WARNINGS: MAJOR OTK spoilers, some mild gore, strong language 

Whoever's idea it was to send them all back to the School, Tedros hates them.

It would help if he could remember who it was, but he doesn't remember anything much around that particular few hours.

The virtue of having just died, he supposes.

"Want to come to my lessons with me?"

Agatha is leaning on his back, gentler than she usually would, but still digging her knobbly elbows into his spine. It's strangely grounding.

He shakes his head.

They've done this every morning since he was properly conscious; Agatha wakes up first, puts on something that is not her uniform, tips stones out of her boots, then asks him if he wants to come. He shakes his head no, she says alright, she kisses him goodbye, she goes to her lessons and doesn't pay attention, then comes back with food at dinner time, as well as something pilfered from Hansel's Haven. Tedros lies face-down on her bed and tries to nap. It never works.

He thinks the teachers are of the opinion he should go with her, which is why she keeps asking, but he refuses to. The idea of going down into the main school, facing the gawking first years and his solemn peers, makes him feel unwell.

At least there are no mirrors in Agatha's room. Apparently she broke them all in first year. That way, he doesn't have to look.

Still, he knows what it looks like. He isn't sure what he'd expected; a thin white line and lots of opportunities for black humour, probably.

That's not what he's got. His scar is not thin, or white, and it's barely a straight line. Instead, Tedros's entire neck is a mess of ugly black bruising and a puckered, scarlet seam which goes up in random places and down in others, a testament to the unhinged savagery with which Japeth had taken his fucking head off.

It still bleeds, if he irritates it enough, or weeps, which is decidedly more disgusting. Magic can only do so much, and it seems the magic inherent in Excalibur is not the most attentive of nurses. Brutally practical. He is alive, and he is the King, and therefore the bastard bit of metal considers its work done.

It is a sword, he supposes, not a hospital. But talking is mostly impossible, breathing is hard, and eating and drinking is similarly painful, as his oesophagus and windpipe take their sweet goddamn time fixing themselves. Merlin had done what he could before he returned to Camelot, but what he could turned out to be relatively little. It would fix itself, he said helplessly. Eventually. There was nothing he could do to speed it up.

Tedros wishes eventually would hurry the hell up.

Outside, he can hear excited chattering, the first years filing out onto the field below--

Then the grim squeal of swords being pulled out of leather scabbards.

It goes right through him, setting his teeth on edge and jerking him out of his half doze, pricking sweat on his temples and down his back. He bolts up and staggers for the window, slamming it shut so hard the glass rattles in the pane. But he can still hear it; the reverberating crash of swords blocking one another. Laughter.

The low swoosh of a blade falling through the air.

---

So Tedros barricades himself in the bathroom.

He sits in the tub, facing away from the mirror, and picks his nails. It's an old habit that his mother would have scolded him for, but his mother's dead.