When he arrived at the castle, he just knew there was going to be fanfare. And some wretched supper where the courtiers would scrutinize every inch of him. At court, his father demanded perfection, and perfection was exhausting.

There wasn’t even a point to it, because no matter how hard he worked, he was always behind Arthur. He could best his second cousin at fencing, at archery, at dancing, it didn’t change the fact that his blood ran less royal. That even now, he was a spare to a spare. But there was no way to make his parents listen, and so he’d eventually stopped trying.

It was easier just to be elsewhere.

He’d left Camelot believing that if he remained, he’d only watch himself slip further down the line of succession. But the queen had died in childbirth, and Arthur had performed an unlikely miracle, and he’d read his father’s letters with a curious sense of detachment, feeling as though, so long as he wasn’t there to witness it, it was all happening in a different life.

Still, a small part of him wondered how different things might have been if he’d stayed. If he’d pulled the sword from the stone. But there was no use dwelling on alternate histories, because when it came to the past, there were so many things he wished he could change.

He put charcoal to paper, setting down the first lines of his sketch before the boy could move. He lost himself to his work, sipping absently at his wine as the rough portrait bloomed onto the page.

He missed Paris already. He’d been happy there, with his easel, and his apartment overlooking the Seine, and his French staff who didn’t know Camelot from Cameliard. There had been ballets, and balls, and music that had made him feel alive, nights spent weaving drunkenly through the gardens of the Chateau de Saint-Germain in the company of beautiful women, and stumbling into brothels with his sketchpad under arm.

While he wasn’t wholly immune to the prostitutes’ charms, he mostly paid the girls to let him sketch. There was a thrill in signing his name to a scandalous drawing, instead of a stuffy court document. It made signing his name to the letters he sent home detailing the comings and goings under the dauphin less distasteful.

His family were courtiers. Politicians. Cold, calculating men of power. They found others’ weaknesses and exploited them to their advantage. They gained information by any means necessary. Gawain didn’t want to be like that, but sometimes he wondered if he had a choice. Wasn’t it what his brother had done, saving himself while dooming Lance? Wasn’t that same ugliness coiled within himself, waiting to strike?