Morgana Wilshere could barely focus her vision as she stumbled across the doorway of her apartment. Scraps of blood and flesh clung to the black of her specially-designed battle suit, the one that clung tight to her body, providing her with a light layer of protection. Threaded beneath the black overlay was a deep red, obscuring the fact that she was bleeding from several minor wounds.

Her vision was singular and focused as she dropped her bag on the floor next to the door and stumbled her way towards her bedroom, blind to the figure lurking in the corner of her living room. It was stupid, oh so stupid, but she was running on almost 48 hours of no sleep and had lost more blood than she’d planned on.

She’d been running herself ragged for the past year, going out on any assignment that The Nine provided her with, doing anything she could to help keep the supernatural community within the region under control and within the constraints that allowed them to exist in the human world without creating a new crises every other day.

She contorted her arms to reach behind her and unzip the suit as she peeled it off, using her feet to slide it down her legs and shucking it off of her body as she bobbled side to side for a moment, her wooziness briefly taking over.

Every inch of her body ached, and Morgana fought back a yawn as she shuffled towards her bathroom and slammed the shower on, shoving the knob to scalding hot and waiting impatiently for it to heat. The soles of her feet ached as she stepped into the shower and let the scalding hot water pound against her skin, driving away the tension and sluicing blood and bits down her body to swirl in a pink whirlpool before sliding down the drain.

By the time she stepped out and wrapped a towel around herself, she could almost forget what today was. She could almost forget the exhaustion and the stress and the anxiety and the numbness that she tried to use to stifle it all. A brief glimpse of herself in the mirror as she walked past it towards her bedroom revealed her haggard face and the egregious black bags under her eyes. You could only run yourself so hard for so long, she supposed.

Morgana crossed the threshold back into her room, the hardwood floor cool beneath her feet as droplets of water fell off her nearly waist-length hair and slid down her pale skin.

“Morgana.”

She stood preternaturally still as the hairs along the back of her neck stood on edge and her fight instincts immediately kicked in. The closest weapon was the knife she had under her mattress, and there wouldn’t be enough time to reach it, judging by the distance of the location.

It took an embarrassing full fifteen seconds for it to register just who the voice belonged to. She’d almost dropped the towel clenched between her breasts and gone into a frenzied flurry of fighting before her brain registered the intruder as being none other than Trevor Glyndwr, the bane of her existence.

“What are you doing here?” She muttered as her shoulders set tight with tension. He stepped from the shadows of her room, the moonlight glinting off the chiseled profile of his jaw. His shaggy black hair fell in front of his ice blue eyes, and she focused for just a moment too long on the stubble along his chin. He hadn’t shaved in a day or two, and she couldn’t tell if that had been out of circumstance or intention. She shouldn’t care.

“You’re tired enough that you left your home unsecured, didn’t notice me in the living room, and didn’t notice me in your bedroom until I spoke.” The judgment in his voice was heavy.

He was always there on her worst days. Often as a contentious figure. Their relationship was fragile and more antagonistic than anything else, and that was what she needed from him. There were too many sympathetic figures in her life, people who liked at the girl who’d once been the Wilshere Wildling and saw only a sad and broken young woman. She never received sympathy from Trevor, never saw that look in his eyes that she saw in others - the one that said they were just a little too worried about breaking her.

“There was no way for you to know that before you entered,” she replied as she lazily dropped the towel and began pulling on clothes. The leggings and the loose tunic were plain black and nothing special, but they afforded her some kind of armor against Trevor and at this moment that was what she needed.

“You’ve been leaving a trail all over the city,” he said crisply, arrogance and irritation clear in every syllable.

Morgana felt her muscles lock as she froze, her back to him. She still hadn’t turned a light on and the darkness lended an eerie ambience to the entire conversation. She thought that she had escaped from under his thumb. She’d spent almost a year with him as her bodyguard during what had been the worst year of her life and they had clashed at every opportunity. Here she was finally staking out a sliver of life without him and without tragedy hanging over her head, and he had the nerve to harangue her about it. She knew he was involved with The Nine but goddammit, could he let her be for once.

She turned around to face him, leaning against her dresser, arms crossed in front of her chest. He knew what today was and he’d still chosen it to come and antagonize her. Her brows pushed together as they stood, silence hanging heavy in the air. His fingers twitched as if he were going to reach for her, and her eyes narrowed. This was… new for them.

“You need to leave,” she told him as she moved to skirt around him. His hand on her arm, gripping just slightly tighter than was necessary stopped her and she shot him the dirtiest look.

“You left your place unsecured, Morgana.”

“It wouldn’t have been an issue if you hadn’t broken in!”

“I wouldn’t have broken in if you weren’t running yourself ragged and doing stupid shit. You should know better than that by now.” His voice was quiet, but it lashed like a whip and she flinched visibly, mad at herself for showing even that.

“You’re not my caretaker anymore,” she whispered.

“God knows somebody needs to be,” he said with complete and utter exasperation. “You can’t be trusted to do it for yourself.”

Her chest rose and fell with heaving breaths as she fought the tears building behind her eyes. The look of panic on his face wasn’t lost to her as she fought them back and shoved past him, moving through the narrow hallway and into the shambling kitchen with peeling wallpaper and out-of-date appliances.

She pulled open the fridge, looked past the expired milk and shoved aside a block of cheese before giving up and pulling a granola bar from the cabinet. She bit into it with gusto, imagining that she was tearing a vein from his neck, and turned to face the overbearing behemoth who had of course followed her into the confined space.

“If I didn’t know you better I would be under the mistaken impression that you care about me,” she said quietly, her brow furrowed.

“Could you have defended yourself tonight against an intruder? Against somebody or something who came in with the intent to kill you?”

“The charm that you disabled on my door would have…”

“The charm that I disabled on your door was child’s play and anybody with the slightest familiarity with the base runes would have disabled it.”

She paused, her eyes narrowing. The Glyndwrs were an ancient mystic family, as ancient and much more mystic than the Wilshere’s. She thought back to the runes she’d etched and could mentally acknowledge how shoddy they’d been.

Morgana opened her mouth… and closed it quickly.

“At some point you need to acknowledge it instead of burying it.”

She dropped the granola bar on the counter, the peanut butter and oats turning to ash in her mouth. With a flip of her damp hair over her shoulder and an imperial turn, she flounced from the kitchen. This stupid shoddy place was too small to properly pace, but she gave it her best queenly effort, ending up in the cramped living room, before shifting direction and moving back to her bedroom. This time she flipped the light on and turned in a circle, almost a little lost.

She dragged her fingers through her hair, wishing that for once he would let her be on this day. The wounds were still too fresh, and all he ever did was poke and prod at them like she was some lab experiment, some animal to be toyed with.

Morgana felt him enter the room behind her, every inch of her body immediately becoming aware of his presence. She would bury the pain until it killed her. He had taught her that. The sympathetic looks from strangers who recognized her on the street had taught her that. If she could fake functioning long enough, maybe they would stop treating her like a fragile doll who would break with a harsh word or a mean look. Trevor was the only one who didn’t treat her that way and that somehow made everything so much worse.

His hand fell gently on her shoulder and she shivered before shrugging it off. If he was nice to her, she would break. Morgana swung around, confusion clear on her face as she peered up at him. Sometimes she forgot just how big he was, because he took up a room on the strength of his personality alone. But here they stood, only a foot or so apart, and she had to crane her neck a bit to make eye contact and at 5”9’, what was uncommon for her.

“You’re not the boss of me. You’re not my family. You’re not my caretaker. You’re not my lover. You don’t have authority over me and you need to stop treating me like a child.”

“I’m the only one who doesn’t,” he said, a haze of anger darkening the ethereal ice blue of his eyes. “Jill and your brothers will coddle you and treat you like a breakable little doll because they don’t know how to deal with your trauma and -”

“And you think you do?!” She spat, before she realized that she had acknowledged the fact that trauma was there.

They stood in silence for a moment as that realization struck both of them temporarily speechless. “You’re going to get yourself killed, Morgana,” he thundered, truly raising his voice for the first time this evening. Any other day she would have taken pleasure in the breaking of his composure, but there was something different amount it tonight.

“Maybe that’s what I want,” she screamed, giving voice to the darkness and the disregard for her own life that had been lurking below the surface of her psyche for close to two years now.

His eyes went wide with shock for a microsecond before they shuttered completely and he pulled her close to his chest, even as her feet dragged against the hardwood floor in protest.

“Why…” she whispered, before, softly, “don’t.” She shook her head and reached to push him away, to storm off again before he caught her up in his grip and pulled her to his chest. She took a moment to just breathe in the scent of him - fresh like the sea, rigid in his arms.

“It’s been two years, and if you keep burying it it’s going to kill you. You learned to keep it out of your eyes, but you’re not fooling anybody, Wildling.”

Yes she was. She was fooling everybody except for him.

“Trevor you need to leave. Right now.” Her voice smothered against him as she leaned her forehead against the muscled wall of his chest. She was about to break in his arms and there would be nothing worse for either of them.

His calloused hand rubbed against her back and her breath hitched as her shoulders went tight with tension.

He rested his chin against the crowd of her head and she could feel strands of crimson hair get caught in his stubble. This was the worst, just the absolute worst thing he had ever done to her. She needed anything from him but compassion.

“Break for me, Morgana. Break, or you’re going to get yourself killed.”

The unspoken lay between them - she wasn’t entirely sure that she didn’t want that.

“I hate you,” she whispered against him as her shoulders began to shake and tears fell from her eyes. She sobbed against his chest with a heart wrenching silence; sobbed with a silence that was learned. He picked her up, cradling her in his arms as if she weighed nothing more than a feather, and that was when she broke for real, the cascade of sobs wracking her body as he settled back against the quilted headboard of her bed, cradling her in his arms like a child as she cried like a broken creature.

The atmosphere in the post is tangible. Best pure writer on the site.

@grimmwald: ❤️❤️❤️

@morgana_wilshere: Besos, mi amor <3

Lemme put sometime aside to read

@shanana: :o

@grimmwald:Je t'aime ♥

An exquisite study on how to convey raw emotion. Magnificent.

I had to go back and read the first one to refresh my memory on Morgana but it was worth it. I enjoyed this.

@nordok: @hawkshade: Thank you both very much! Her brokenness is different from other characters of mine and I find that fun to play with.

@morgana_wilshere: You are very welcome. She is an interesting character. And she has the best bio-gif lol.

I don't even know/remember what Part 1 was about, but I hate that you're not with us regularly anymore.

@hawkshade: She's the most emotionally raw of my current stable, which is fun as hell to write. And thank you tumblr for the gif.

I miss y'all something fierce.

@morgana_wilshere: Then come back to me. v_v

@rosso: It’s being considered...

@morgana_wilshere: Is it really?

@rosso: 😈

@morgana_wilshere: