Fic: Merlin; Until We Run Out of Road; PG-13
Title: Until We Run Out of Road
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Merlin
Pairings/Characters: Merlin/Will Friendship, Merlin, Will, Arthur
Warnings: Character death, swearing, abuse of music.
Disclaimer: Merlin does not belong to me, nor do the songs 'Come Together', 'Yellow Submarine', 'Highway to Hell', 'Back in Black', 'Don't Stop Me Now' or 'Bohemian Rhapsody'.
Author's Note: Written for prompt on comment_fic so unbeta'd. Merlin, author's choice, road trip AU. This is not a happy story. Sorry.
He’s got a pack of Red Bull in the glove compartment and what would pretty much surmount to a lifetimes supply of crisps and sweets on the back seat. He stopped using the map about half an hour ago, deciding that he didn’t want to know where he was going. So he’s pounding out music from the 70s and 80s on the CD player - the stuff his Mum tells him he’s too young to know - and he’s working on a system. Right, right, left, left, right, until he gets back on another motorway and then he’ll just hit the accelerator until he’s so far away from where he came from no one will know where it is.
They always said they were going to do this, take off one day and just drive. It’s not like they live in America, where the open road goes on forever, but if he keeps going, eventually he’ll meet a coast.
“Merlin,” the voice says from the passenger seat. He never puts anything there because it’s his spot. He glances over, and there’s no one there unless he imagines them. He’s not crazy. He’s not. But sometimes he hears Will’s voice in his head still, singing along to Meatloaf with over enthusiastic glee. “You’ve got to stop sometime… you’ll kill yourself if you drive all night.”
“You could take over,” he says to thin air before remembering that Will really, really can’t.
“I’m a figment of your sodding imagination, you muppet,” Will sounds amused, just like he used to sound, but Merlin knows that’s just him putting words into a ghost’s mouth. “Come off at the next service station.”
“No,” Merlin tells him stubbornly. He’s not far enough away yet, nowhere near far enough.
“Do you think you’ll ever get far enough away?”
Merlin’s phone vibrates in his pocket, and he ignores it. It’s his mother, again. It’s getting dark and she hasn’t seen him since he left the funeral, storming out of the room.
“She’s worried about you,” Will says, leaning over the seat to try and grab some sweets. “Dammit! You know the worst thing about not really existing?” he asks in exasperation, “you can’t bloody touch anything.” He sighs, shifting round in the seat. Merlin knows he’s not there, knows he’s not real, but he can see it anyway. The wrinkles of the Zeppelin T-shirt Will’s wearing, the one he spilt his first beer down. It’s so… real. “I’m worried about you too, you know.”
“You’re a figment of my imagination remember?” Will doesn’t say anything then, and the first bars of Highway to Hell blast out from the car speakers. It’s not even Merlin’s car, it’s his mother’s. He took it off the drive because his own was boxed in. She’s going to be mad as all hell when he gets back. Or maybe she’ll just look at him in that way, the way people keep doing. It’s half pity half patronising understanding and it drives him mad.
The street lights are starting to come on and the sign up ahead says ‘the North’ and that’s enough for him.
He keeps driving.
*
Seven am and Merlin finally succumbs, pulling over to a lay-by to get some sleep. Will’s telling him that he should turn around, but he’s saying it quietly, and looking frustrated.
“You should get some sleep too,” Merlin tells him.
“I don’t sleep,” Will replies.
“Oh… yeah,” Merlin mutters on the cusp of unconsciousness. For a moment there he had forgotten he was talking to a ghost.
*
He manages a couple of hours before Will wakes him up with a truly awful rendition of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. It’s off key and he doesn’t know the words, which is bizarre because Will always knew all the words to Beatles’ songs. His Dad had taught them to him when he was little, before he had died.
Merlin mentions this and Will turns to look at him as though he’s completely stupid.
“Of course I don’t know all the words,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world “You don’t know all the words. Which is sort of lame, you know. You should really work on that. I’m getting sick and tired of the chorus.”
Merlin pulls himself back into the driver’s seat, peering at himself in the rear-view mirror. There are pieces of broken crisp in his hair and he picks them out, almost absently putting one into his mouth. Prawn cocktail, he hates prawn cocktail, but it was always Will’s favourite.
“You’ve completely ruined that suit, you know,” Will comments as they pull back onto the road. “And to think you only bought it last week, and what happened to the tie, anyway? I liked it. It was very black.”
“Mum wouldn’t let me wear jeans,” Merlin muttered. It had been a sticking point.
“Pity… that would have been brilliant,” Will says idly, putting his feet up on the dashboard. “Imagine, everyone else in shirt and tie and you rocking out in jeans and t-shirt. I would have liked that.”
“Don’t talk about yourself in the past tense,” Merlin snaps, gritting his teeth together.
It’s two o’clock when Merlin pulls over again. He’s starving and crushed crisps and a half melted lump of wine gums aren’t helping much. There’s a coffee shop at the service station, something generic that’s trying to be hip and trendy and he grabs a sandwich there instead of going into the little Chef for something hot, if only to avoid the stares. He looks a mess, he knows.
He pays the cashier with cash and fills up on petrol, the same way. They can find you, he knows from TV, through card transactions. It sucks, but he’ll be moving on soon enough.
“You need to shave,” Will points out, “and get changed… there’re some clothes in the boot. And you look like a banker who just got fired.”
“Fuck off,” Merlin mutters. He’s not in the mood for a dead man to be criticising his appearance, but he grabs the clothes and a razor out of the boot anyway. He’d been planning this all week. He’d needed to get away, and at first it had been a thought, a fancy, but it had solidified. He’d snuck the stuff into the boot, got cash out of the bank, as much as he could. He just wanted to disappear.
He’s changing in the back of the car when he realises that he picked the wrong t-shirt out of the boot. It’s not his, not the blue one he’d shoved into the bag. It’s Will’s, the one he left at Merlin’s house three weeks ago, the one he’s wearing right now.
“Put it on,” Will says quietly from the front seat. Merlin jumps, he hadn’t know he was watching.
“Pervert,” he says half-heartedly, trying to ignore the subject. He could get out and go to the boot, get the other t-shirt.
“Believe me, Merlin. I’ve seen more of your body than I’ve ever wanted to,” Will tells him, sticking out his tongue. “Now put on the damn shirt - it’s just a piece of fabric.”
“It’s yours,” Merlin says.
“Difficult to own things when you’re dead,” Will tells him. “Stop being such a girl about it. It was mine, now it’s yours. Deal with it, wuss.”
“Not a wuss.”
“Scaredy-cat.”
“Shut up.”
“Put on the damn shirt.”
“No.”
“Put it on, or I will haunt you forever… I will plague your life and…”
“Shut up.”
“Put it on and I’ll shut up.”
“Will.”
“Put it on.” Will has that set to his face, the glare and set jaw that mean he’s not backing down any time soon.
“Fine,” Merlin struggles into it, his hands and elbows whacking the ceiling and almost putting one of them through the neck hole.
“For crying out loud, Merlin. It’s just a t-shirt… how you manage to take care of yourself, I’ll never know.” Will comments, and then it’s on. It’s too big for Merlin. Will was always broader across the chest, and it hangs baggy.
“It suits you,” Will says, and Merlin takes in a deep breath. It feels a little easier somehow. “It’s because you’re not wearing the shirt any more. I could never breathe properly in shirts.”
Merlin climbs into the driver’s seat again and pulls out onto the motorway. AC/DC is still playing, but it’s switched to Back in Black and Merlin sings along as Will attempts to play air guitar, his hands sometimes almost hitting Merlin in the face - but never quite.
*
They get off the motorway half an hour later. They’re both sick of the never ending identical scenery. Or perhaps it’s just Merlin and Will doesn’t have a mind of his own.
Merlin’s speeding, he knows he is. Will tells him to slow down, but there’s no one around and Merlin hasn’t felt this free in years. Until, of course, there is someone around and he screeches to a halt.
“Shit.” Merlin almost echoes the word himself, because there’s a man almost in the middle of the road looking about as fed up as Merlin feels. He’s got his thumb stuck up, but he’s wearing a suit that looks expensive. It’s the kind of suit that makes Merlin look at the back seat of his car guiltily.
“He’s probably a mass murderer,” Will comments, “leave him. Let some other poor mug pick him up.”
“Because mass murderers where suits like that.”
“That’s kind of the point, dimwit. Mass murderers can only be mass murderers because they look like everyone else. If they all had Hitler moustaches and carried bloody axes then they’d never be able to kill anyone.”
“I think you’re under estimating how easy it is to kill someone,” Merlin says, watching as the man in the suit approaches the door.
“Believe me, I, of all people, am not underestimating the fragility of the human existence,” Will says.
“That was almost profound,” are the only words Merlin can manage to squeeze out of his mouth, because any of the other ones don’t bear thinking about.
“So’s your face.”
“So’s your Mum.”
There’s a tap at the window and Merlin flicks the switch to wind it down, despite Will’s continued litany of ‘no, you moron, no.’
“Can I help you?” Merlin asks, feeling most conspicuous as the stranger takes in the state of him and the car.
“From the looks of things you can barely help yourself,” the man says, and Merlin immediately regrets thinking that he was hot a couple of seconds ago, because clearly he is a complete prick. He starts the car up again.
“Fine, then you can wait for the next person to come along,” Merlin says, ignoring Will’s list of insults from the passenger seat. “I hope that their car is up to standard.”
“Don’t be a moron. I’ve been standing here half the day already and you’re the first person to even stop. People with nice cars just don’t pick people up off the side of the road.”
“Let me guess,” Will says acidly, “someone kicked you out of their car for being too much of an arsehole.” The stranger ignores him, but then, he can’t see him.
“You know… I wonder why, if this is the thanks they get for it,” Merlin’s had almost enough of the man anyway, and he’s about to actually drive away when the passenger door opens and the man’s getting in.
“Wait…” Merlin doesn’t know how to say this, Will’s glaring at him and the man’s half crouched in the doorway.
“What?”
“You can’t…” he pauses, mouth open, trying to come up with a reason on the spur of them moment, “sit there,” he finishes lamely. There is no reason, no excuse, nothing that won’t have him visiting a therapist for the rest of his natural life.
“You expect me to sit in the back?”
“Yes,” Will says, crossing his arms across his chest. Merlin shoots him a look which, luckily, the guy misses.
“No…” Merlin hates himself in that moment more than at any time before. “of course not. I just thought I’d left a CD there… that’s all.”
“Oh… right,” The man slides in and suddenly Will’s in the back, with the sweet wrappers and crisp packets. “I’m Arthur, by the way.”
“Merlin,” he’s about to say ‘and this is Will,’ when the words stick in his throat. This isn’t Will, this is just his wishful thinking and possible insanity taking on form. “So Arthur,” he says, telling himself to concentrate on the real person for a moment, not the hallucination in the back seat, “where are you heading?”
“I don’t know,” Arthur sighs, “where are you going?”
“Forwards,” Merlin says after a moment. Arthur gives him a curious half smile out, which he only catches out of the corner of his eye.
*
Will’s singing Metallica at the top of his lungs, trying to drown out the Queen that Arthur seems to like. The blond hair of his passenger’s now messed up a little, and Arthur’s tie is unknotted, just draped around his neck. He’s tapping his fingers in time to Don’t stop me now, not belting it out like Will would have done. And he stops the movement whenever Merlin looks across.
So Merlin begins to sing along, competing with Will in the backseat for volume. There’s something about Arthur, sitting next to him with something clearly on his mind. He can’t quite put his finger on it, though, and he sort of wants to make the man smile again.
By the end of the song, he has Arthur singing along with the chorus, if a little half heartedly, and by the end of the CD they manage a fair rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody together. Will is sulking in the rearview mirror and keeps telling Merlin how he’s going to die horribly and Arthur will cut him up into little pieces and eat his brains. None of them has any idea where they are and Merlin’s phone ran out of battery two hours ago.
Finally, finally, Arthur smiles, almost reluctantly, and Merlin nearly brings himself to smile back.
*
“Who’s Will?” the question comes from nowhere and Merlin starts, turning round to Arthur.
“What?” he asks stupidly. Arthur hold up a CD.
“It says here: Will’s Road Trip Mix. Do not record over on pain of very painful death,” Arthur reads and Merlin feels the burning behind his eyes that he’s felt for over a week, the one that should precede tears but never ever does.
“He’s a friend.”
“Couldn’t he come?” Arthur asks, setting the CD back and pulling out a can of Red Bull from the diminishing supply in the glove box.. He looks relaxed, and Merlin wishes he could rewind time back to ten seconds before when he had felt the same… or ten days before when none of this would have made any sense to him.
“No.”
“Busy at work?”
“No…” Merlin draws in a breath, and shoots a glance at Will in the mirror. He’s shaking his head stubbornly, he doesn’t want Arthur to know. But sort of, in a way, Merlin does. He just wants to tell a complete stranger something that he couldn’t say to anyone else. “He’s dead.”
The silence in the car feels like it lasts for hours, but it’s only a millisecond.
“Shit,” Arthur says. There’s no patronisation in the word, no pity, nothing.
“I know,” Merlin agrees. Shit pretty much sums it up actually.
“When?” Arthur asks, not even a little hesitantly.
“Last Thursday,” Merlin tells him, “fell off a bridge…”
“Off a bridge?”
“He was drunk.”
“Shit.” Arthur looks at the back seat and then at Merlin, “and this is your way of coping?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Where are your family? Do they have any clue where you are?”
“I told my Mum I needed to go out,” Merlin explains. Arthur has no right to judge him, no right at all. Will’s being suspiciously quiet from where he’s sitting, but Merlin doesn’t dare look up in case he’s gone off in a fit of pique. “She’ll be fine, my Uncle Gaius is there.”
“And you think she’s okay when you’ve just disappeared… with a car. She probably thinks you’ve driven off a cliff or something.”
“You don’t know her. You don’t know me, and you didn’t know Will!” Merlin yells.
“I’m bloody glad I don’t know you if this is how you react to things,” Arthur growls, “running away isn’t going to solve anything. You can’t just up and leave any time you want.”
“You didn’t have to get in this car and you don’t have any right to comment on my life.”
“Then I’ll just shut up then, shall I?” Arthur asks.
“You do that!”
From the back seat, Will laughs. He sounds a little hysterical. Merlin thinks that being dead will probably do that to you.
*
‘Come together, right no-o-ow, over me…” Will’s crooning in the back. He always did love Abbey Road. His Dad’s favourite Album.
“My sister,” Arthur says, after twenty miles of not speaking.
“What about her?” Merlin asks, he wonders, idly, if Arthur’s only ever spoken with psychic people before, because these nonsequiturs are playing havoc with Merlin’s brain.
“She left…” Arthur says quietly, “two days ago. She just up and left. She screamed at my Dad that he couldn’t run her life any more and she walked out. She hasn’t called since.”
“Bugger,” Merlin manages.
“I had a fight with my Dad about it earlier. We were on our way back from a meeting,” Arthur tugs at his tie, and if Merlin didn’t think him incapable of the emotion, he’d suspect that the man feels guilty. “I yelled at him that she never would have left if he hadn’t made her, and he threw me out of the car.”
“What’s her name?” Merlin asks, for lack of anything better to say.
“Morgana.”
“I’m sure she’s fine.”
“Yeah…” Arthur sighs. It’s getting dark again. Merlin’s been driving for almost two days now. He doesn’t feel free any more, he doesn’t feel angry any more, he just feels tired, so tired. “I think she’s happy now… I hope she is. I wish she’d call.”
“You could call her,” Merlin suggests. Arthur’s lips tighten.
“She’s the one who left.”
“So you decided to run away too, huh?” Merlin asks. There isn’t an answer.
“One and one and one is three… Got to be good looking coz he’s so hard to see,” Will sings out of the window. “Come together right now over me.”
*
It’s five minutes past midnight when Merlin first sees the sea, and they pull up soon afterwards, walking towards the shore without even talking about it. Arthur’s hands are stuck in his pockets, and Merlin’s freezing without a jumper on, but he can’t help but feel that he’s got to see it, got to see that endless expanse of water and darkness.
When they reach the edge of the cliff he just wants to sit down and go to sleep.
There are lights out there, ships sailing through the night, and he watches the reflection of them in the water, bright waves appearing and disappearing.
“Did he… like the sea?” Arthur asks, suddenly sounding less than his arrogant self.
“No,” Merlin says, before Will can reply, “he hated it, got sea sick just looking at it.”
“Then why…?”
Merlin shrugs, dropping down to dangle his feet over the edge.
“It’s an end,” he says, “I don’t know. It was there in my head: just keep driving until you run out of grief or you run out of land.”
He turns to look at Will, who was standing by the car, but he’s not there any more. There’s just empty patches of darkness and shadow, and Arthur’s leg.
Something inside him seems to break.
“Fucking idiot,” Merlin mutters. “The bastard. What did he think he was doing? Dancing on a bridge wall over a fucking concrete road… The moron, what did he think was going to happen?”
“He was drunk.”
“Does that make it better or worse?”
“I don’t know,” Arthur says honestly. “I don’t think it matters either way, it just is.”
Merlin looks down at his t-shirt. ’It was mine, now it’s yours. I was alive, now I’m dead. Deal with it.’
There’s a tear rolling down his cheek. It’s the first one he’s had since Last Thursday, the words forever capitalised in his mind. Last Thursday, the day Will died. It was senseless and it was pointless, but it happened.
Arthur pats him awkwardly on the shoulder, and he’s suddenly aware that he’s in the middle of bloody nowhere, with a stranger and he’s crying his eyes out.
“Do you want to call your Mum?” Arthur asks, and Merlin nods.
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Merlin
Pairings/Characters: Merlin/Will Friendship, Merlin, Will, Arthur
Warnings: Character death, swearing, abuse of music.
Disclaimer: Merlin does not belong to me, nor do the songs 'Come Together', 'Yellow Submarine', 'Highway to Hell', 'Back in Black', 'Don't Stop Me Now' or 'Bohemian Rhapsody'.
Author's Note: Written for prompt on comment_fic so unbeta'd. Merlin, author's choice, road trip AU. This is not a happy story. Sorry.
He’s got a pack of Red Bull in the glove compartment and what would pretty much surmount to a lifetimes supply of crisps and sweets on the back seat. He stopped using the map about half an hour ago, deciding that he didn’t want to know where he was going. So he’s pounding out music from the 70s and 80s on the CD player - the stuff his Mum tells him he’s too young to know - and he’s working on a system. Right, right, left, left, right, until he gets back on another motorway and then he’ll just hit the accelerator until he’s so far away from where he came from no one will know where it is.
They always said they were going to do this, take off one day and just drive. It’s not like they live in America, where the open road goes on forever, but if he keeps going, eventually he’ll meet a coast.
“Merlin,” the voice says from the passenger seat. He never puts anything there because it’s his spot. He glances over, and there’s no one there unless he imagines them. He’s not crazy. He’s not. But sometimes he hears Will’s voice in his head still, singing along to Meatloaf with over enthusiastic glee. “You’ve got to stop sometime… you’ll kill yourself if you drive all night.”
“You could take over,” he says to thin air before remembering that Will really, really can’t.
“I’m a figment of your sodding imagination, you muppet,” Will sounds amused, just like he used to sound, but Merlin knows that’s just him putting words into a ghost’s mouth. “Come off at the next service station.”
“No,” Merlin tells him stubbornly. He’s not far enough away yet, nowhere near far enough.
“Do you think you’ll ever get far enough away?”
Merlin’s phone vibrates in his pocket, and he ignores it. It’s his mother, again. It’s getting dark and she hasn’t seen him since he left the funeral, storming out of the room.
“She’s worried about you,” Will says, leaning over the seat to try and grab some sweets. “Dammit! You know the worst thing about not really existing?” he asks in exasperation, “you can’t bloody touch anything.” He sighs, shifting round in the seat. Merlin knows he’s not there, knows he’s not real, but he can see it anyway. The wrinkles of the Zeppelin T-shirt Will’s wearing, the one he spilt his first beer down. It’s so… real. “I’m worried about you too, you know.”
“You’re a figment of my imagination remember?” Will doesn’t say anything then, and the first bars of Highway to Hell blast out from the car speakers. It’s not even Merlin’s car, it’s his mother’s. He took it off the drive because his own was boxed in. She’s going to be mad as all hell when he gets back. Or maybe she’ll just look at him in that way, the way people keep doing. It’s half pity half patronising understanding and it drives him mad.
The street lights are starting to come on and the sign up ahead says ‘the North’ and that’s enough for him.
He keeps driving.
*
Seven am and Merlin finally succumbs, pulling over to a lay-by to get some sleep. Will’s telling him that he should turn around, but he’s saying it quietly, and looking frustrated.
“You should get some sleep too,” Merlin tells him.
“I don’t sleep,” Will replies.
“Oh… yeah,” Merlin mutters on the cusp of unconsciousness. For a moment there he had forgotten he was talking to a ghost.
*
He manages a couple of hours before Will wakes him up with a truly awful rendition of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. It’s off key and he doesn’t know the words, which is bizarre because Will always knew all the words to Beatles’ songs. His Dad had taught them to him when he was little, before he had died.
Merlin mentions this and Will turns to look at him as though he’s completely stupid.
“Of course I don’t know all the words,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world “You don’t know all the words. Which is sort of lame, you know. You should really work on that. I’m getting sick and tired of the chorus.”
Merlin pulls himself back into the driver’s seat, peering at himself in the rear-view mirror. There are pieces of broken crisp in his hair and he picks them out, almost absently putting one into his mouth. Prawn cocktail, he hates prawn cocktail, but it was always Will’s favourite.
“You’ve completely ruined that suit, you know,” Will comments as they pull back onto the road. “And to think you only bought it last week, and what happened to the tie, anyway? I liked it. It was very black.”
“Mum wouldn’t let me wear jeans,” Merlin muttered. It had been a sticking point.
“Pity… that would have been brilliant,” Will says idly, putting his feet up on the dashboard. “Imagine, everyone else in shirt and tie and you rocking out in jeans and t-shirt. I would have liked that.”
“Don’t talk about yourself in the past tense,” Merlin snaps, gritting his teeth together.
It’s two o’clock when Merlin pulls over again. He’s starving and crushed crisps and a half melted lump of wine gums aren’t helping much. There’s a coffee shop at the service station, something generic that’s trying to be hip and trendy and he grabs a sandwich there instead of going into the little Chef for something hot, if only to avoid the stares. He looks a mess, he knows.
He pays the cashier with cash and fills up on petrol, the same way. They can find you, he knows from TV, through card transactions. It sucks, but he’ll be moving on soon enough.
“You need to shave,” Will points out, “and get changed… there’re some clothes in the boot. And you look like a banker who just got fired.”
“Fuck off,” Merlin mutters. He’s not in the mood for a dead man to be criticising his appearance, but he grabs the clothes and a razor out of the boot anyway. He’d been planning this all week. He’d needed to get away, and at first it had been a thought, a fancy, but it had solidified. He’d snuck the stuff into the boot, got cash out of the bank, as much as he could. He just wanted to disappear.
He’s changing in the back of the car when he realises that he picked the wrong t-shirt out of the boot. It’s not his, not the blue one he’d shoved into the bag. It’s Will’s, the one he left at Merlin’s house three weeks ago, the one he’s wearing right now.
“Put it on,” Will says quietly from the front seat. Merlin jumps, he hadn’t know he was watching.
“Pervert,” he says half-heartedly, trying to ignore the subject. He could get out and go to the boot, get the other t-shirt.
“Believe me, Merlin. I’ve seen more of your body than I’ve ever wanted to,” Will tells him, sticking out his tongue. “Now put on the damn shirt - it’s just a piece of fabric.”
“It’s yours,” Merlin says.
“Difficult to own things when you’re dead,” Will tells him. “Stop being such a girl about it. It was mine, now it’s yours. Deal with it, wuss.”
“Not a wuss.”
“Scaredy-cat.”
“Shut up.”
“Put on the damn shirt.”
“No.”
“Put it on, or I will haunt you forever… I will plague your life and…”
“Shut up.”
“Put it on and I’ll shut up.”
“Will.”
“Put it on.” Will has that set to his face, the glare and set jaw that mean he’s not backing down any time soon.
“Fine,” Merlin struggles into it, his hands and elbows whacking the ceiling and almost putting one of them through the neck hole.
“For crying out loud, Merlin. It’s just a t-shirt… how you manage to take care of yourself, I’ll never know.” Will comments, and then it’s on. It’s too big for Merlin. Will was always broader across the chest, and it hangs baggy.
“It suits you,” Will says, and Merlin takes in a deep breath. It feels a little easier somehow. “It’s because you’re not wearing the shirt any more. I could never breathe properly in shirts.”
Merlin climbs into the driver’s seat again and pulls out onto the motorway. AC/DC is still playing, but it’s switched to Back in Black and Merlin sings along as Will attempts to play air guitar, his hands sometimes almost hitting Merlin in the face - but never quite.
*
They get off the motorway half an hour later. They’re both sick of the never ending identical scenery. Or perhaps it’s just Merlin and Will doesn’t have a mind of his own.
Merlin’s speeding, he knows he is. Will tells him to slow down, but there’s no one around and Merlin hasn’t felt this free in years. Until, of course, there is someone around and he screeches to a halt.
“Shit.” Merlin almost echoes the word himself, because there’s a man almost in the middle of the road looking about as fed up as Merlin feels. He’s got his thumb stuck up, but he’s wearing a suit that looks expensive. It’s the kind of suit that makes Merlin look at the back seat of his car guiltily.
“He’s probably a mass murderer,” Will comments, “leave him. Let some other poor mug pick him up.”
“Because mass murderers where suits like that.”
“That’s kind of the point, dimwit. Mass murderers can only be mass murderers because they look like everyone else. If they all had Hitler moustaches and carried bloody axes then they’d never be able to kill anyone.”
“I think you’re under estimating how easy it is to kill someone,” Merlin says, watching as the man in the suit approaches the door.
“Believe me, I, of all people, am not underestimating the fragility of the human existence,” Will says.
“That was almost profound,” are the only words Merlin can manage to squeeze out of his mouth, because any of the other ones don’t bear thinking about.
“So’s your face.”
“So’s your Mum.”
There’s a tap at the window and Merlin flicks the switch to wind it down, despite Will’s continued litany of ‘no, you moron, no.’
“Can I help you?” Merlin asks, feeling most conspicuous as the stranger takes in the state of him and the car.
“From the looks of things you can barely help yourself,” the man says, and Merlin immediately regrets thinking that he was hot a couple of seconds ago, because clearly he is a complete prick. He starts the car up again.
“Fine, then you can wait for the next person to come along,” Merlin says, ignoring Will’s list of insults from the passenger seat. “I hope that their car is up to standard.”
“Don’t be a moron. I’ve been standing here half the day already and you’re the first person to even stop. People with nice cars just don’t pick people up off the side of the road.”
“Let me guess,” Will says acidly, “someone kicked you out of their car for being too much of an arsehole.” The stranger ignores him, but then, he can’t see him.
“You know… I wonder why, if this is the thanks they get for it,” Merlin’s had almost enough of the man anyway, and he’s about to actually drive away when the passenger door opens and the man’s getting in.
“Wait…” Merlin doesn’t know how to say this, Will’s glaring at him and the man’s half crouched in the doorway.
“What?”
“You can’t…” he pauses, mouth open, trying to come up with a reason on the spur of them moment, “sit there,” he finishes lamely. There is no reason, no excuse, nothing that won’t have him visiting a therapist for the rest of his natural life.
“You expect me to sit in the back?”
“Yes,” Will says, crossing his arms across his chest. Merlin shoots him a look which, luckily, the guy misses.
“No…” Merlin hates himself in that moment more than at any time before. “of course not. I just thought I’d left a CD there… that’s all.”
“Oh… right,” The man slides in and suddenly Will’s in the back, with the sweet wrappers and crisp packets. “I’m Arthur, by the way.”
“Merlin,” he’s about to say ‘and this is Will,’ when the words stick in his throat. This isn’t Will, this is just his wishful thinking and possible insanity taking on form. “So Arthur,” he says, telling himself to concentrate on the real person for a moment, not the hallucination in the back seat, “where are you heading?”
“I don’t know,” Arthur sighs, “where are you going?”
“Forwards,” Merlin says after a moment. Arthur gives him a curious half smile out, which he only catches out of the corner of his eye.
*
Will’s singing Metallica at the top of his lungs, trying to drown out the Queen that Arthur seems to like. The blond hair of his passenger’s now messed up a little, and Arthur’s tie is unknotted, just draped around his neck. He’s tapping his fingers in time to Don’t stop me now, not belting it out like Will would have done. And he stops the movement whenever Merlin looks across.
So Merlin begins to sing along, competing with Will in the backseat for volume. There’s something about Arthur, sitting next to him with something clearly on his mind. He can’t quite put his finger on it, though, and he sort of wants to make the man smile again.
By the end of the song, he has Arthur singing along with the chorus, if a little half heartedly, and by the end of the CD they manage a fair rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody together. Will is sulking in the rearview mirror and keeps telling Merlin how he’s going to die horribly and Arthur will cut him up into little pieces and eat his brains. None of them has any idea where they are and Merlin’s phone ran out of battery two hours ago.
Finally, finally, Arthur smiles, almost reluctantly, and Merlin nearly brings himself to smile back.
*
“Who’s Will?” the question comes from nowhere and Merlin starts, turning round to Arthur.
“What?” he asks stupidly. Arthur hold up a CD.
“It says here: Will’s Road Trip Mix. Do not record over on pain of very painful death,” Arthur reads and Merlin feels the burning behind his eyes that he’s felt for over a week, the one that should precede tears but never ever does.
“He’s a friend.”
“Couldn’t he come?” Arthur asks, setting the CD back and pulling out a can of Red Bull from the diminishing supply in the glove box.. He looks relaxed, and Merlin wishes he could rewind time back to ten seconds before when he had felt the same… or ten days before when none of this would have made any sense to him.
“No.”
“Busy at work?”
“No…” Merlin draws in a breath, and shoots a glance at Will in the mirror. He’s shaking his head stubbornly, he doesn’t want Arthur to know. But sort of, in a way, Merlin does. He just wants to tell a complete stranger something that he couldn’t say to anyone else. “He’s dead.”
The silence in the car feels like it lasts for hours, but it’s only a millisecond.
“Shit,” Arthur says. There’s no patronisation in the word, no pity, nothing.
“I know,” Merlin agrees. Shit pretty much sums it up actually.
“When?” Arthur asks, not even a little hesitantly.
“Last Thursday,” Merlin tells him, “fell off a bridge…”
“Off a bridge?”
“He was drunk.”
“Shit.” Arthur looks at the back seat and then at Merlin, “and this is your way of coping?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Where are your family? Do they have any clue where you are?”
“I told my Mum I needed to go out,” Merlin explains. Arthur has no right to judge him, no right at all. Will’s being suspiciously quiet from where he’s sitting, but Merlin doesn’t dare look up in case he’s gone off in a fit of pique. “She’ll be fine, my Uncle Gaius is there.”
“And you think she’s okay when you’ve just disappeared… with a car. She probably thinks you’ve driven off a cliff or something.”
“You don’t know her. You don’t know me, and you didn’t know Will!” Merlin yells.
“I’m bloody glad I don’t know you if this is how you react to things,” Arthur growls, “running away isn’t going to solve anything. You can’t just up and leave any time you want.”
“You didn’t have to get in this car and you don’t have any right to comment on my life.”
“Then I’ll just shut up then, shall I?” Arthur asks.
“You do that!”
From the back seat, Will laughs. He sounds a little hysterical. Merlin thinks that being dead will probably do that to you.
*
‘Come together, right no-o-ow, over me…” Will’s crooning in the back. He always did love Abbey Road. His Dad’s favourite Album.
“My sister,” Arthur says, after twenty miles of not speaking.
“What about her?” Merlin asks, he wonders, idly, if Arthur’s only ever spoken with psychic people before, because these nonsequiturs are playing havoc with Merlin’s brain.
“She left…” Arthur says quietly, “two days ago. She just up and left. She screamed at my Dad that he couldn’t run her life any more and she walked out. She hasn’t called since.”
“Bugger,” Merlin manages.
“I had a fight with my Dad about it earlier. We were on our way back from a meeting,” Arthur tugs at his tie, and if Merlin didn’t think him incapable of the emotion, he’d suspect that the man feels guilty. “I yelled at him that she never would have left if he hadn’t made her, and he threw me out of the car.”
“What’s her name?” Merlin asks, for lack of anything better to say.
“Morgana.”
“I’m sure she’s fine.”
“Yeah…” Arthur sighs. It’s getting dark again. Merlin’s been driving for almost two days now. He doesn’t feel free any more, he doesn’t feel angry any more, he just feels tired, so tired. “I think she’s happy now… I hope she is. I wish she’d call.”
“You could call her,” Merlin suggests. Arthur’s lips tighten.
“She’s the one who left.”
“So you decided to run away too, huh?” Merlin asks. There isn’t an answer.
“One and one and one is three… Got to be good looking coz he’s so hard to see,” Will sings out of the window. “Come together right now over me.”
*
It’s five minutes past midnight when Merlin first sees the sea, and they pull up soon afterwards, walking towards the shore without even talking about it. Arthur’s hands are stuck in his pockets, and Merlin’s freezing without a jumper on, but he can’t help but feel that he’s got to see it, got to see that endless expanse of water and darkness.
When they reach the edge of the cliff he just wants to sit down and go to sleep.
There are lights out there, ships sailing through the night, and he watches the reflection of them in the water, bright waves appearing and disappearing.
“Did he… like the sea?” Arthur asks, suddenly sounding less than his arrogant self.
“No,” Merlin says, before Will can reply, “he hated it, got sea sick just looking at it.”
“Then why…?”
Merlin shrugs, dropping down to dangle his feet over the edge.
“It’s an end,” he says, “I don’t know. It was there in my head: just keep driving until you run out of grief or you run out of land.”
He turns to look at Will, who was standing by the car, but he’s not there any more. There’s just empty patches of darkness and shadow, and Arthur’s leg.
Something inside him seems to break.
“Fucking idiot,” Merlin mutters. “The bastard. What did he think he was doing? Dancing on a bridge wall over a fucking concrete road… The moron, what did he think was going to happen?”
“He was drunk.”
“Does that make it better or worse?”
“I don’t know,” Arthur says honestly. “I don’t think it matters either way, it just is.”
Merlin looks down at his t-shirt. ’It was mine, now it’s yours. I was alive, now I’m dead. Deal with it.’
There’s a tear rolling down his cheek. It’s the first one he’s had since Last Thursday, the words forever capitalised in his mind. Last Thursday, the day Will died. It was senseless and it was pointless, but it happened.
Arthur pats him awkwardly on the shoulder, and he’s suddenly aware that he’s in the middle of bloody nowhere, with a stranger and he’s crying his eyes out.
“Do you want to call your Mum?” Arthur asks, and Merlin nods.