Chapter Text
On occasion, the water level rose in the cell. For the most part Morgott paid it little mind – liquid always coated the floor in some capacity, and when the level changed it still rarely reached even halfway up his toes – but once in a blue moon the incoming tide would lap at his ankles, and he would shimmy up a wall until his horns rubbed the ceiling and cling with a death grip to the brickwork as the flood climbed higher.
He had nearly no light to see by at the brightest of times, and those never were the brightest of times. The water was black as tar and the distance and depth of it impossible to judge. The coursing rush of it thundered through the sewers, echoes overlapping to build upon each other into a storm, but what crept into his cell only ever gurgled quietly.
He couldn't know the quantity until after the floods had subsided, when he could climb back down the wall and find the border beneath which the stones grew damp. Any trinkets he had accumulated had gotten swept out and replaced anew with bones and shells and pebbles and splintered wood.
If he sometimes dreamed of slipping, of falling, of a pitch-dark abyss swallowing him as easily as a snake devouring a mouse... the difference between sleep and waking in an environment that didn't respond to his attempts to change it and which he couldn't leave from was an academic one.
The first time a flood coincided with Godfrey's schedule, the flood won out. Morgott had more immediate concerns and barely noticed the usual appointment passing by. When the waters drained, he dropped to the floor and curled up to sleep. The hours spent holding himself above the waterline had exhausted him.
He opened an eye to torchlight outside the door – Godfrey had stopped bringing light sources inside after he'd learned it reduced Morgott to a volatile, snarling wreck in the farthest corner of the room – and to Godfrey nudging him awake. Then he closed his eye and turned his back.
Godfrey sighed. “Morgott.”
If Morgott fell asleep, he wouldn't see Godfrey until the next visit. He didn't much care about the company, but it would be a long wait. He shoved himself to a sitting position. “What?”
Grime stained Godfrey's shirtfront and clumped together strands of his hair. Morgott's attention caught on the shapes in it – hand prints and footprints, startlingly familiar. They looked like his own. He reached out, and Godfrey's grip closed around his wrist and steered it away. Luckily, he had two hands; unluckily, so did his father. “Morgott, did you spend last night on the ceiling?”
“What left those?”
Godfrey paused. “You did, last time.”
Morgott frowned. Had he?
Godfrey stood, stooped to keep from hitting his head, and headed to the back wall. He ghosted his hand down the bricks until he met the highest point the water had reached. “And you don't know how to swim,” he murmured.
“How to what?”
“Like a... fish....” A what? “A method of moving through water. It's not important.”
“You don't say that unless it is,” said Morgott. Pointing out so consistent a tell didn't help him, but sometimes he was clever and wanted it acknowledged. It needn't be by Godfrey, but Godfrey was the only person he had.
Godfrey grunted, still examining the wall. He hadn't been listening.
He arrived irregularly for the next visit as well, far earlier than Morgott had anticipated, and he brought with him a bundle of clutter and an entire bunch of grapes. The latter kept Morgott distracted from digging through the former, though he still climbed onto Godfrey to watch him work.
Godfrey explained as he went – he was knocking holes into the bricks to embed nails in, attaching a metal board against the wall to give the end result more stability, sticking a wooden board perpendicularly into that one for Morgott to sit on in the future if he needed to. Morgott listened, expression still, his grip on Godfrey's shoulder digging deeper and deeper.
Godfrey had told him of the cursed blood he bore. He was a relic of a bygone age, unwanted and unbelonging. It was not his fault. But it was better if he was forgotten in this cell. Safer for him and for others. Besides, the world outside held little to interest him.
To which Morgott has asked why Godfrey didn't stay in the cell.
However, he had never asked why Godfrey came on a schedule that the man occasionally missed but never supplemented, and he'd never asked why the cell remained largely barren. He'd taken them for granted. But now Godfrey had challenged both laws of the world, and it raised the understanding that he could have at any point. That he had not done so came down to his own choice.
Morgott had never deluded himself into imagining that love existed in this relationship, but that realization stung, still. He knew the world outside didn't want him. He hadn't believed that Godfrey didn't, either.
He asked, “Why do this now?”
“Would you prefer I stop?”
“You could have done it before, at any time. But you didn't think about it until you tried to come and the water didn't allow you.”
“No,” Godfrey agreed. “I didn't realize what happens down here when it storms. Neither did you tell me.”
“I thought you knew,” Morgott hissed. “Don't you know everything?”
“Compared to you, yes.”
The last time Morgott had clubbed him with his tail, Godfrey had told him he'd cut it off if it happened again. The intensity of the urge this time shocked the breath from him, but he forced the violence down and settled for lashing it instead. “You don't tell me what happens where you go. I won't tell you what happens to me. That's fairness, is it not?”
“That's pettiness,” said Godfrey, unmoved. “It's beneath you. If you had come to me about the problem earlier – ”
“Would you have helped? How? How was I meant to know you can make a new floor? What else can you do? What else haven't you done? You don't think about me unless I'm in front of you or inconveniencing you. Why would I ask anything of you? I'm an obligation.”
Godfrey said nothing for a long moment. “Would you like it if I stopped coming?”
Morgott recoiled. “That's – I didn't say that.”
Another pause. “I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but you're right. You are an obligation. You're my son, as much as... well. I have a responsibility to you.” He knocked on the completed shelf. “Here I am, meeting it.”