What? Wait, no, Arthur isn't dead! (This is what I get for trying to be coy about the BIG REVEAL). Though my god, that would make a great fic -- you can write that one. Morgana, haunted by the ghost of Arthur for the rest of her life. It would be comic, but also bittersweet. She rules Albion and he stalks about and sulks and helps her and they wonder where the hell his body might be. And sometimes she wonders if she isn't haunted at all, or any more than anyone else is -- she just couldn't quite let Arthur go.

"Do you think," he says, quietly, sun glowing between the clouds overhead them, "do you think I'll stay here, when you die?"

"I'm not even thirty yet, Arthur. I'm not anywhere near dying yet."

He shrugs, turns a smile -- "You found a grey hair yesterday. And that Purple Knight almost took you, last week." His image sharpens, almost opaque, against the scenery. "With swordsmanship like yours, you may not live to see thirty."

"What, like you?" she says, and he shrugs again.

"At least I'll never go grey."

"Perhaps I could make you. With a spell -- maybe I could alter your image a bit. Make you more interesting. Hey, how d'you feel about going bald?"

"No. It can't happen," says Arthur. "Impossible."

"It might not be."

"Hmph."


"You could be all in my imagination, in which case--" she pauses, because perhaps that's going too far. She says, "Anyway, even if you're real, you might be alterable."

Arthur turns away so that she can't see his mouth, and has to acknowledge, more, that she only 'hears' the words in her head: "Am I just a figment of your mind, d'you think?"

"I'm not that masochistic," Morgana tells him.