Love, Faith and Family

Alternate Ending

Her feet were bare as she paced in front of her throne, the leather of any kind of shoes just making them hurt more as she couldn't keep still.

"Miriam, maybe you should sit down?" Gaius advised as he stood along with his queen in the throne room.

"He's right, Mira, you've been through a lot and -"

"I can't stop," Miriam interrupted Percival. "If I stop moving, I panic even more - I just - I just need to know if they're ok or not. It's the not knowing that's killing me."

Her blue silk dress seemed to shimmer as she walked in and out of the sunlight, fidgeting with her hands as she moved.

"Everyone else is accounted for?" she asked.

"Yes, Mira," Percival answered.

"And Gwaine? How is he?"

"Physically, he is fine, but he still seems to be taking his submission to Morgana's torture a little hard," Gaius answered.

"Queen Miriam!" Sir Leon exclaimed as he burst through the throne room doors, and her heart stopped completely as did her feet and her breathing grew heavy, the breaths she needed to survive too small to be inhaled through her nose.

"What is it?!" she asked worriedly, taking a few steps toward the knight.

"Aithusa was spotted in the skies to the south and the patrol that saw him swears to have seen riders on his back," Leon informed and Miriam went running from the room and through the corridors, the knights on her tail, more and more joining them as they thought something was wrong when they saw their queen moving with absolute urgency.

She stood in the midday sun at the bottom of the steps in the courtyard as she looked to the sky, spreading her arms out as the knights crowded on the stone steps behind her.

The queen spouted words in the dragon tongue and Leon and Percival were the first of the group to look to the sky anxiously.

Miriam fisted her sweaty hands into the skirts of her dress as they waited.

The patrol had returned home minutes before Aithusa, who was still a small dragon who was hopefully carrying the weight of two very alive grown men, which meant that he would indeed be a few minutes behind the patrol.

So, Miriam counted.

One minute.

One year.

Two minutes.

Two decades.

Three minutes.

Three centuries.

Four.

Miriam's love for the number four was born in that fourth minute. That fourth minute when the sun was blocked by a figure flying in the sky as it neared the citadel and Miriam sank to her knees.

Aithusa was so high in the sky that no one could make out if the patrol's words were true and the dragon did indeed carried riders.

The way Miriam's heart was being squeezed in her chest was akin to the feeling of the way one would clutch a pendant on a necklace. She refused to let it feel anything until she knew for sure, lest she grows hopeful only to be let down.

Applause sounded first from the guards on the parapets and the balconies on the higher levels of the castle and then from the knights on the steps and the people who had also gathered in the courtyard as tears began to slide down Miriam's face.

Aithusa's feet landed softly and with ease on the stone floor of the courtyard and Miriam pushed herself off the ground and into a sprint, feet not even feeling the burn of the sun-heated stone as she was picked up off the ground and squeezed into the biggest and most loving hug in all of history.