Fic: Thunderbird Diaries (Merlin, Gwen/Morgana, R)
Title: Thunderbird Diaries
Author: emei
Film Prompt: Thelma & Louise
Pairing: Gwen/Morgana (with sides of Gwen/Mordred, Gwen/Lancelot and Merlin/Arthur pre-slash if you squint.)
Rating: R
Word Count: 3550 words
Warnings: Violence, harsh language, attempted non-con.
Summary: Gwen and Morgana take flight across the country. Police officer Emrys and FBI agent Pendragon follow their trail.
Notes: Written for round 2 of reel_merlin. Many thanks to significantowl, zeldaophelia and tempestsarekind for reading and helpful suggestions along the way. Mordred here is inspired more by T H White’s version than the BBC’s, and a few lines are borrowed almost directly from the film. Finally, all comments are very appreciated.
“So how did you get Mordred to let you go? I’m still surprised,” Morgana says over a glass in the rundown roadside bar that is their first stop. Gwen insisted: she was going to have fun this weekend and she wanted a drink, now. Morgana’s Thunderbird is safely parked outside, filled to bursting with bags because Gwen hasn’t been travelling in far too long and apparently forgot how to pack. She brought anything she could think of, and everything she happened to spot while packing.
“I didn’t tell him. I called him at work, see, and he told me he wouldn’t be home for dinner and I should stop being such a bother, and so on, and didn’t let me get a word in sideways. I wrote him a note.”
“Oh, Gwen, he’ll be furious with you,” Morgana says, her tone admiring.
The man coming up to them looks shady, Morgana thinks, overly self-confident, the bragging sort. “The name’s Valiant,” he says, “Val to my friends. Can I buy you lovely ladies a drink?”
He does buy them drinks, and though Morgana is in half a mind to turn the glass upside-down on his head, she doesn’t. Under the onslaught of his (quite sappy) compliments, Morgana is distant and cold. She’d like to tell him to bugger off but Gwen laps his comments up like a dried-out plant would water, and she smiles so brightly that Morgana hasn’t the heart to interrupt.
When Gwen’s in the bathroom and Val has gone off to somewhere else, the waitress comes over to Morgana. She’s a middle-aged woman with an open face, kind blue eyes and a warm smile. Morgana supposes that she’s got a tongue sharper than most people’s as well, if she’s fending for herself here.
“Keep an eye on your friend there, darling,” she says. “Val’s not someone you want to leave her alone with. You see it, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Morgana replies, “thank you.”
Someone bellows from across the room: “Hunith! A beer!” and the waitress smiles at her and goes.
Gwen is taking surprisingly long. She might’ve had a bit too much to drink, but not enough to collapse in the toilets, Morgana thinks. Val isn’t back either. Morgana picks Gwen’s bag up from her chair and goes to look.
---
“I don’t know why she took the gun,” grumbles Mordred. “She doesn’t know how to use it, only keeps it as some weird memory thing ‘cause it was her dad’s. Went half-mad on me when I borrowed it to try it out.”
“Did she? I couldn’t imagine why,” says Merlin dryly and is a little surprised at his instant, vehement dislike of this quite good-looking man.
Mordred fingers his necklace (a tacky golden chain) nervously and keeps stealing glances at Merlin’s police badge, like he hopes that it’ll be gone by the next time he looks so he won’t have to care. “Under suspicion for homicide? My Gwen? That woman wouldn’t hurt a fly. Doesn’t have enough backbone for it, I’ll tell you.”
“I would like to believe you,” Merlin says, noting that Gwen seems to have brought half her wardrobe with her.
---
Val has his hands all over Gwen who’s pressed against his car, dragging hard at her clothes and she’s struggling, blood dripping from the corner of her mouth. Morgana is holding Gwen’s purse, and her father’s gun is in it, and then it isn’t any longer, because she’s pressing it to Val’s temple, hard.
He raises his hands, slightly trembling.
“We were just having some fun,” he says.
“Were you?” says Morgana. “Let her go.”
He lifts himself off Gwen, leans on the hood on the car. Gwen slides down and takes a few steps away on shaky legs, towards Morgana’s Thunderbird. Her dress is ripped. Morgana follows her.
Without the cold gun at his temple, Val gets his cocky self-confidence back. His trousers are half-open, and he calls angrily: “You fucking lying whores! You were begging for it.” He pauses, catches his breath, and continues, harshly: “I wish I had raped her.”
And Morgana turns and pulls the trigger, turns and pulls the trigger, shoots this man, thinks later that she was shooting not at the man but at his words, his actions. She pulls the trigger because she had no trigger to pull, before, fires at masculinity, wants to shoot all men like this one, but the bullet hits Val square in the chest and it is him and only him that jerks and falls back over the hood of his car, then slides down on the dirt of the parking lot, dying.
“You killed him.” Gwen’s voice is a flat, frail thing.
“I did. I killed him. I did.”
Then: “Fuck. Gwen. Get in the car. Now!”
---
Hunith sits in the back of Merlin’s police car, her feet firmly planted on the ground outside.
“Those girls weren’t the type to kill anyone, Merlin. Believe me.”
“But several people saw them leaving together with him. And this man is dead. Who do you think did it?”
“Val got what was coming to him. I can imagine several angry husbands… Or his wife. In fact, I hope it was his wife who shot him.”
“Hunith!” says Merlin, scandalised.
She looks like she can’t decide if she wants to take the words back or say something even worse. Instead she repeats: “They weren’t the type, those girls. Too much good in them.”
“I think so too,” Merlin replies. “But I need proof.”
---
The Thunderbird speeds along the road, the last lights of civilisation flittering past quickly outside the windows. Morgana drives like a car thief, her back ramrod straight and her grip on the steering wheel white-knuckled. They don’t talk. Gwen watches the streetlights streaking past, their movement hypnotic, watches the meeting cars grow from pinpoints of light in the distance to blinding flashes up close, until they’ve disappeared behind them. Eventually there’s no more meeting cars, it’s just the two of them, silent, in this surreal new world - the humming of the Thunderbird’s motor, the black asphalt stretching out under the car lights, the night mutely black around them. Mile after mile of night in front of them.
---
Morgana doesn’t want to give the hitchhiking kid a ride (because Gwen smiles at him like she smiles at the first sun in spring).
“We don’t need witnesses, Gwen,” she says. “I think he seems shady. Too goody-two-shoes to be hitchhiking out here. Something feels off.”
Gwen’s smile falters.
Morgana picks the hitchhiking kid up because Gwen smiles at him like she smiles at the first sun in spring.
---
His name is Lancelot and he says that he’s a philosophy student heading home for the holidays. Gwen twists around in her seat to see and listen to him, where he sits in the back. Morgana stops the car and tells her to climb back before she stupidly breaks her neck. She knows that her voice is rougher than usual, harsher than necessary. The boy - Lancelot - keeps giving her puzzled looks. Morgana does not like it.
---
“I’m Arthur Pendragon, from the FBI,” the guy who’s somehow found his way into Merlin’s office presents himself.
“Oh? And you’re here because?”
Merlin does not like having people barging into his office. Especially not high-ranking people who burst in like they own the place and think they’ve got a right to push their noses in anywhere because they’ve got a pretty title.
“You’re officer Merlin Emrys, correct?”
Merlin nods.
“Your suspects have crossed the state border. The investigation is a federal matter by now.”
---
They’ve barely got enough money for two more days. Gwen empties her purse, stares at the contents, thinks about Mordred’s new car and his bank account. She finds another ten dollars hidden in the creases in the bottom of the purse and hands them to Morgana, fingertips brushing over her palm.
Morgana calls Uther, her emotionally distant and filthily rich stepfather, from a phone booth at the side of the road to ask for a loan.
“If you’d like to tell me why you suddenly want to touch my money, please feel free,” he says.
“You don’t need to know, and I doubt you really want to.” Morgana tips her head back against the glass wall and closes her eyes to say: “I need you now”.
Uther is completely silent for a moment. Then he says: “Tell me where to send the money.”
Morgana gives him the name of a motel they’ll be able to get to tomorrow.
---
Merlin clings to his investigation with beak and claws. Finally, he’s allowed to keep at it, but has to co-operate with the FBI agent Pendragon.
With all the documentation of the case spread over a table, Merlin motions to the photos of the two women.
“To the right is Gwen Smith. We’re keeping a watch on her husband. And this…”
“Morgana Le Fay,” Arthur cuts in.
“You know her?” says Merlin, surprised.
Arthur doesn’t reply, only keeps staring grimly at the photograph like it’s a riddle he needs to solve right now. Merlin found it in a drawer in Gwen’s and Mordred’s home. Morgana is standing in a garden, saluting the photographer with a bottle of beer and an ironic smile. Her hair blows freely over her shoulder, and the first time Merlin saw the picture he thought that she was breathtakingly beautiful in quite an offhanded way. Now he looks at her eyes and thinks about tragedy.
“Well, anyway, we haven’t managed to get hold of any relative of hers,” Merlin says, tearing his gaze away from Arthur’s face.
“Try Uther Pendragon,” Arthur says and is gone from the room.
---
In the morning, Gwen comes down from the motel room where Morgana eventually left her alone with Lancelot, with twinkling eyes and smile a mile wide. There’s a content languidness to her movements that first fills Morgana with a flash of joy and want, and then gives way for a gnawing in her gut. Gwen slides into the seat opposite Morgana in the breakfast room.
“I get it now,” she says. “Why people do it, and why they go on about it so. Oh.” She laughs. Morgana watches her with a sinking feeling.
“Do what?”
“Have sex, of course!”
Morgana has no right to be jealous. She’s had some mindblowingly good sex herself, quite recently. And she has no claim on Gwen. None at all.
She feels like a moth, and Gwen’s smile is a flame, and she’s hurtling through the air towards it, to surely burn.
Then another, urgent thought: “Gwen. Where’s the money?”
“On the table in our room, why?” She steals a piece of toast off Morgana’s plate and sets to chewing happily, crumbs falling all over.
“And where’s Lance?”
“Still sleeping when I left.”
“Fuck, Gwen. Fucking fuck.”
---
Lancelot goes straight to the police with the money.
“You stole their money?” Merlin asks, voice quivering dangerously.
“Yes. I think they’re good people, essentially, the both of them. If they go on, they’ll just make everything worse for themselves. And I knew that they can’t make their getaway without that money.”
Arthur enters the interrogation room, tense with anger. “I’ve got the tape,” he bites out and hands it to Merlin, who puts it on.
They watch as Gwen robs a roadside store, gun loaded and sure in her hands. She does it with words borrowed from old films, the kind that Lancelot loves too much, where the heroes are rash, wild outlaws who finally ride off into the sun.
Gwen has an odd half-smile on her lips, an air of playful young girl, but Merlin senses a steely determination underneath, a desperation in the way she runs out the door and out of the picture.
Merlin switches the tape off. The whirring of the air conditioner is the only sound in the small room. Lancelot collapses on a chair, looking stricken.
“You might as well have signed their sentence yourself,” Arthur tells him.
---
“Drive!” Gwen yells as she almost falls into the car seat and slams the door shut with the hand that isn’t gripping her bag overflowing with dollar notes. “Go, go, go!”
Morgana stomps down on the accelerator and the car screeches out on the road. She’s breathing loudly and stealing small glances at Gwen every few seconds.
“It’s odd, it’s like I have a knack for these things, I’m beginning to think,” says Gwen, smile broad.
“I believe you do,” Morgana answers, still looking at her like Gwen somehow turned into another person entirely while Morgana turned her back. Her hands on the steering wheel are white.
Later, when Morgana’s fingers are starting to return to their usual colour, Gwen says: “I lost our getaway money. I had to fix it, somehow.”
Morgana smiles at her, slowly. It’s the first time Gwen’s seen her smile for real, since… Well, in days.
“No turning back now, my Gwen. Not any more. You and me and the road.”
---
Uther Pendragon is a name Merlin recognises, and not only because the FBI-agent who’s meddling in his case happens to share the odd family name. It takes him a while to figure out why, and when he does he feels stupid and very, very thankful that he didn’t act on Arthur’s suggestion right away. Uther Pendragon is a name that gets mentioned when something’s blown up incredibly bad and heads are about to be bitten off, when new federal policies are discussed, and when someone’s referencing the Powers That Be in general.
While he’s searching for the phone number of this frighteningly important Pendragon, Merlin ponders the fact that Arthur really seems very young for an apparently high-ranking agent. He’s starting to work up a deep irritation over the blatant nepotism - no wonder the whole system of justice doesn’t work better when all you need to do is be some big name’s fucking son - when Arthur steps into his office looking like he got punched in the gut and Merlin’s line of thought gets cut off and forgotten.
---
The policeman who tried to stop them lies locked in the trunk of his car, crying, as the Thunderbird accelerates across the desert. The forward-movement is wild, at breakneck speed. Gwen yelps as Morgana cuts a curve, starts laughing until she’s got salt tears running down her cheeks and needs to take great gulps of air. She can’t classify this feeling as happiness or fear or sorrow. It is a hell of a lot of emotion, is all.
“We’ve gone crazy, haven’t we?” she says to Morgana once she can speak again.
“Mad, mad, mad,” singsongs Morgana. Half-a-beat later she continues. “The world is crazy. We’re only starting to catch up.”
Gwen laughs again. Morgana sounds deadly serious and so is Gwen, actually, but the world is mad and they are mad and there is nothing left to do but laugh, and be wild, and free.
---
Arthur has two pieces of news. One: Uther Pendragon had been the one to lend Morgana the exact amount of money Lancelot later turned in to the police. He had nothing else to contribute except confirming the address of the motel Lancelot’s already given them, and observing that Morgana seemed to have crossed the line into being completely unpredictable.
And two: A policeman has been discovered locked in the trunk of his car, which had been shot at enough times to turn it into a wreck. The guy was scared out of his wits but had still left a very clear testimonial describing the two women he’d stopped because they were driving a wanted car.
“We have good enough information on their whereabouts by now. I’m flying there tonight. This has to come to an end,” Arthur says.
---
They’ve long given up trying to brush the desert sand away. It falls like a dry glittering rain from Gwen’s hair and over her skin as Morgana combs it out with her fingers in the night before they fall asleep, side-by-side and half on top of each other in the backseat. Gwen closes her eyes, looking blissful. Morgana gently blows the sand out of her eyelashes.
---
Through the windows of the helicopter the car is clearly visible, a small green box moving quickly along the desert road. Merlin can see the small army of police cars further off, trying to catch up but not succeeding. Arthur snaps commands into his radio, directing the men on the ground. Merlin listens, watches and realises -
“You’re herding them towards the canyon!”
The look Arthur turns on him heavily implies that Merlin is a moron. “Yes. Because that is the only place where they’ll be forced to stop.”
“But -” and then Arthur snaps and reminds him that the only reason Merlin is here is because he’d said he could stay out of the way and quiet. Merlin claps his mouth shut. He still doesn’t feel good about this. Those two women have crossed so many lines no one had thought they would. What is there to say that the edge of the Grand Canyon won’t be just another limit for them to go over, just as carelessly?
---
There are police cars thundering closer from all directions behind them, threatening to catch up even though Morgana’s forcing her car as fast as it will go. She turns sharply off the road, hoping the policemen will hesitate before they ruin their cars on the bumpy desert sand, but they don’t. She notices that the cars to the right keep giving her more space while those to the left keep closing it, and she knows, oh, she knows, that they’re luring her on a different path than she would’ve chosen herself, but there really isn’t much she can do about it.
The ground seems to change colour in front of them, to become less uneven. It isn’t until Gwen screams that Morgana realises that they’re heading to a deep ravine, that the place where she thought the ground changed colour is in fact where it plunges into a deep chasm. She stamps down on the brake and the car screeches to a halt a scant few meters before the free fall.
A helicopter touches down some fifty meters back. Gwen turns around and sees that all the police cars have stopped in line with it, and men are getting out, forming ranks. Bullet-proof vests, uniforms, guns pointed towards them - it’s a emotionless army of nondescript faces waiting to swallow them.
“I suppose this is where it ends, then,” Morgana says.
---
Arthur arranges his men, all guns pointing toward the lonely car out there, and Merlin can’t take it anymore.
“Let me at least try to talk to them!”
Arthur looks pained but acquiesces, holding one hand up to keep the men at bay while Merlin walks forward, ignoring the mumblings rising in the lines about that damned suicidal type fucking things up.
---
Gwen looks from the black mass behind them, where one lonely figure is moving forward, to Morgana, to the canyon opening up the world in front of them.
“Let’s not get caught,” she says.
Morgana jerks and looks at her with wonder.
“Do you really mean…?”
“Yes.”
Morgana lets go of the steering wheel to pull Gwen to her, crashes their mouths together in a fierce kiss, all lips and teeth and tongue, desert sand and salt at the corners. Gwen surges up to meet her, holding on to Morgana’s upper arms with a bruising grip. This kiss should have happened years ago, though it happens now and maybe it’s enough. They are at a space at the end of their time where all their timelines converge and years and years of longing and desperation and love and half-finished realisations all merge into this kiss. Morgana almost drowns in the moment. They are each other’s now. They have always been.
Gwen moves away, still holding Morgana’s gaze.
“Gwen,” Morgana says with love dancing over her tongue.
Gwen takes her hand in a grip that’s hard enough to press their bones together.
“Go.”
Morgana presses down hard on the accelerator and the Thunderbird gains speed.
---
The moment he hears the sound of the motor Merlin runs, as fast as he ever has. It is pointless, but he runs as the car with the two women disappears from the safe ground. He runs for the sake of two women with playful smiles and something like desperation or tragedy in their eyes. Merlin is breathing raggedly. He thinks - they escaped. They ran until they had no escape and then made themselves one anyway. The world seems to slow down to this moment: the cloud of red sand glittering in the sun at the brink of the canyon.
---
They go sailing over the edge, and Gwen’s hand is warm and strong in Morgana’s. The air is crystal-clear blue, heady against the red of the canyon and the desert. Their grip is strong and it’s over and it will never be over, they will never be caught. Gwen laughs and Morgana laughs, wildly free, like birds.
---
FIN
Author: emei
Film Prompt: Thelma & Louise
Pairing: Gwen/Morgana (with sides of Gwen/Mordred, Gwen/Lancelot and Merlin/Arthur pre-slash if you squint.)
Rating: R
Word Count: 3550 words
Warnings: Violence, harsh language, attempted non-con.
Summary: Gwen and Morgana take flight across the country. Police officer Emrys and FBI agent Pendragon follow their trail.
Notes: Written for round 2 of reel_merlin. Many thanks to significantowl, zeldaophelia and tempestsarekind for reading and helpful suggestions along the way. Mordred here is inspired more by T H White’s version than the BBC’s, and a few lines are borrowed almost directly from the film. Finally, all comments are very appreciated.
“So how did you get Mordred to let you go? I’m still surprised,” Morgana says over a glass in the rundown roadside bar that is their first stop. Gwen insisted: she was going to have fun this weekend and she wanted a drink, now. Morgana’s Thunderbird is safely parked outside, filled to bursting with bags because Gwen hasn’t been travelling in far too long and apparently forgot how to pack. She brought anything she could think of, and everything she happened to spot while packing.
“I didn’t tell him. I called him at work, see, and he told me he wouldn’t be home for dinner and I should stop being such a bother, and so on, and didn’t let me get a word in sideways. I wrote him a note.”
“Oh, Gwen, he’ll be furious with you,” Morgana says, her tone admiring.
The man coming up to them looks shady, Morgana thinks, overly self-confident, the bragging sort. “The name’s Valiant,” he says, “Val to my friends. Can I buy you lovely ladies a drink?”
He does buy them drinks, and though Morgana is in half a mind to turn the glass upside-down on his head, she doesn’t. Under the onslaught of his (quite sappy) compliments, Morgana is distant and cold. She’d like to tell him to bugger off but Gwen laps his comments up like a dried-out plant would water, and she smiles so brightly that Morgana hasn’t the heart to interrupt.
When Gwen’s in the bathroom and Val has gone off to somewhere else, the waitress comes over to Morgana. She’s a middle-aged woman with an open face, kind blue eyes and a warm smile. Morgana supposes that she’s got a tongue sharper than most people’s as well, if she’s fending for herself here.
“Keep an eye on your friend there, darling,” she says. “Val’s not someone you want to leave her alone with. You see it, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Morgana replies, “thank you.”
Someone bellows from across the room: “Hunith! A beer!” and the waitress smiles at her and goes.
Gwen is taking surprisingly long. She might’ve had a bit too much to drink, but not enough to collapse in the toilets, Morgana thinks. Val isn’t back either. Morgana picks Gwen’s bag up from her chair and goes to look.
---
“I don’t know why she took the gun,” grumbles Mordred. “She doesn’t know how to use it, only keeps it as some weird memory thing ‘cause it was her dad’s. Went half-mad on me when I borrowed it to try it out.”
“Did she? I couldn’t imagine why,” says Merlin dryly and is a little surprised at his instant, vehement dislike of this quite good-looking man.
Mordred fingers his necklace (a tacky golden chain) nervously and keeps stealing glances at Merlin’s police badge, like he hopes that it’ll be gone by the next time he looks so he won’t have to care. “Under suspicion for homicide? My Gwen? That woman wouldn’t hurt a fly. Doesn’t have enough backbone for it, I’ll tell you.”
“I would like to believe you,” Merlin says, noting that Gwen seems to have brought half her wardrobe with her.
---
Val has his hands all over Gwen who’s pressed against his car, dragging hard at her clothes and she’s struggling, blood dripping from the corner of her mouth. Morgana is holding Gwen’s purse, and her father’s gun is in it, and then it isn’t any longer, because she’s pressing it to Val’s temple, hard.
He raises his hands, slightly trembling.
“We were just having some fun,” he says.
“Were you?” says Morgana. “Let her go.”
He lifts himself off Gwen, leans on the hood on the car. Gwen slides down and takes a few steps away on shaky legs, towards Morgana’s Thunderbird. Her dress is ripped. Morgana follows her.
Without the cold gun at his temple, Val gets his cocky self-confidence back. His trousers are half-open, and he calls angrily: “You fucking lying whores! You were begging for it.” He pauses, catches his breath, and continues, harshly: “I wish I had raped her.”
And Morgana turns and pulls the trigger, turns and pulls the trigger, shoots this man, thinks later that she was shooting not at the man but at his words, his actions. She pulls the trigger because she had no trigger to pull, before, fires at masculinity, wants to shoot all men like this one, but the bullet hits Val square in the chest and it is him and only him that jerks and falls back over the hood of his car, then slides down on the dirt of the parking lot, dying.
“You killed him.” Gwen’s voice is a flat, frail thing.
“I did. I killed him. I did.”
Then: “Fuck. Gwen. Get in the car. Now!”
---
Hunith sits in the back of Merlin’s police car, her feet firmly planted on the ground outside.
“Those girls weren’t the type to kill anyone, Merlin. Believe me.”
“But several people saw them leaving together with him. And this man is dead. Who do you think did it?”
“Val got what was coming to him. I can imagine several angry husbands… Or his wife. In fact, I hope it was his wife who shot him.”
“Hunith!” says Merlin, scandalised.
She looks like she can’t decide if she wants to take the words back or say something even worse. Instead she repeats: “They weren’t the type, those girls. Too much good in them.”
“I think so too,” Merlin replies. “But I need proof.”
---
The Thunderbird speeds along the road, the last lights of civilisation flittering past quickly outside the windows. Morgana drives like a car thief, her back ramrod straight and her grip on the steering wheel white-knuckled. They don’t talk. Gwen watches the streetlights streaking past, their movement hypnotic, watches the meeting cars grow from pinpoints of light in the distance to blinding flashes up close, until they’ve disappeared behind them. Eventually there’s no more meeting cars, it’s just the two of them, silent, in this surreal new world - the humming of the Thunderbird’s motor, the black asphalt stretching out under the car lights, the night mutely black around them. Mile after mile of night in front of them.
---
Morgana doesn’t want to give the hitchhiking kid a ride (because Gwen smiles at him like she smiles at the first sun in spring).
“We don’t need witnesses, Gwen,” she says. “I think he seems shady. Too goody-two-shoes to be hitchhiking out here. Something feels off.”
Gwen’s smile falters.
Morgana picks the hitchhiking kid up because Gwen smiles at him like she smiles at the first sun in spring.
---
His name is Lancelot and he says that he’s a philosophy student heading home for the holidays. Gwen twists around in her seat to see and listen to him, where he sits in the back. Morgana stops the car and tells her to climb back before she stupidly breaks her neck. She knows that her voice is rougher than usual, harsher than necessary. The boy - Lancelot - keeps giving her puzzled looks. Morgana does not like it.
---
“I’m Arthur Pendragon, from the FBI,” the guy who’s somehow found his way into Merlin’s office presents himself.
“Oh? And you’re here because?”
Merlin does not like having people barging into his office. Especially not high-ranking people who burst in like they own the place and think they’ve got a right to push their noses in anywhere because they’ve got a pretty title.
“You’re officer Merlin Emrys, correct?”
Merlin nods.
“Your suspects have crossed the state border. The investigation is a federal matter by now.”
---
They’ve barely got enough money for two more days. Gwen empties her purse, stares at the contents, thinks about Mordred’s new car and his bank account. She finds another ten dollars hidden in the creases in the bottom of the purse and hands them to Morgana, fingertips brushing over her palm.
Morgana calls Uther, her emotionally distant and filthily rich stepfather, from a phone booth at the side of the road to ask for a loan.
“If you’d like to tell me why you suddenly want to touch my money, please feel free,” he says.
“You don’t need to know, and I doubt you really want to.” Morgana tips her head back against the glass wall and closes her eyes to say: “I need you now”.
Uther is completely silent for a moment. Then he says: “Tell me where to send the money.”
Morgana gives him the name of a motel they’ll be able to get to tomorrow.
---
Merlin clings to his investigation with beak and claws. Finally, he’s allowed to keep at it, but has to co-operate with the FBI agent Pendragon.
With all the documentation of the case spread over a table, Merlin motions to the photos of the two women.
“To the right is Gwen Smith. We’re keeping a watch on her husband. And this…”
“Morgana Le Fay,” Arthur cuts in.
“You know her?” says Merlin, surprised.
Arthur doesn’t reply, only keeps staring grimly at the photograph like it’s a riddle he needs to solve right now. Merlin found it in a drawer in Gwen’s and Mordred’s home. Morgana is standing in a garden, saluting the photographer with a bottle of beer and an ironic smile. Her hair blows freely over her shoulder, and the first time Merlin saw the picture he thought that she was breathtakingly beautiful in quite an offhanded way. Now he looks at her eyes and thinks about tragedy.
“Well, anyway, we haven’t managed to get hold of any relative of hers,” Merlin says, tearing his gaze away from Arthur’s face.
“Try Uther Pendragon,” Arthur says and is gone from the room.
---
In the morning, Gwen comes down from the motel room where Morgana eventually left her alone with Lancelot, with twinkling eyes and smile a mile wide. There’s a content languidness to her movements that first fills Morgana with a flash of joy and want, and then gives way for a gnawing in her gut. Gwen slides into the seat opposite Morgana in the breakfast room.
“I get it now,” she says. “Why people do it, and why they go on about it so. Oh.” She laughs. Morgana watches her with a sinking feeling.
“Do what?”
“Have sex, of course!”
Morgana has no right to be jealous. She’s had some mindblowingly good sex herself, quite recently. And she has no claim on Gwen. None at all.
She feels like a moth, and Gwen’s smile is a flame, and she’s hurtling through the air towards it, to surely burn.
Then another, urgent thought: “Gwen. Where’s the money?”
“On the table in our room, why?” She steals a piece of toast off Morgana’s plate and sets to chewing happily, crumbs falling all over.
“And where’s Lance?”
“Still sleeping when I left.”
“Fuck, Gwen. Fucking fuck.”
---
Lancelot goes straight to the police with the money.
“You stole their money?” Merlin asks, voice quivering dangerously.
“Yes. I think they’re good people, essentially, the both of them. If they go on, they’ll just make everything worse for themselves. And I knew that they can’t make their getaway without that money.”
Arthur enters the interrogation room, tense with anger. “I’ve got the tape,” he bites out and hands it to Merlin, who puts it on.
They watch as Gwen robs a roadside store, gun loaded and sure in her hands. She does it with words borrowed from old films, the kind that Lancelot loves too much, where the heroes are rash, wild outlaws who finally ride off into the sun.
Gwen has an odd half-smile on her lips, an air of playful young girl, but Merlin senses a steely determination underneath, a desperation in the way she runs out the door and out of the picture.
Merlin switches the tape off. The whirring of the air conditioner is the only sound in the small room. Lancelot collapses on a chair, looking stricken.
“You might as well have signed their sentence yourself,” Arthur tells him.
---
“Drive!” Gwen yells as she almost falls into the car seat and slams the door shut with the hand that isn’t gripping her bag overflowing with dollar notes. “Go, go, go!”
Morgana stomps down on the accelerator and the car screeches out on the road. She’s breathing loudly and stealing small glances at Gwen every few seconds.
“It’s odd, it’s like I have a knack for these things, I’m beginning to think,” says Gwen, smile broad.
“I believe you do,” Morgana answers, still looking at her like Gwen somehow turned into another person entirely while Morgana turned her back. Her hands on the steering wheel are white.
Later, when Morgana’s fingers are starting to return to their usual colour, Gwen says: “I lost our getaway money. I had to fix it, somehow.”
Morgana smiles at her, slowly. It’s the first time Gwen’s seen her smile for real, since… Well, in days.
“No turning back now, my Gwen. Not any more. You and me and the road.”
---
Uther Pendragon is a name Merlin recognises, and not only because the FBI-agent who’s meddling in his case happens to share the odd family name. It takes him a while to figure out why, and when he does he feels stupid and very, very thankful that he didn’t act on Arthur’s suggestion right away. Uther Pendragon is a name that gets mentioned when something’s blown up incredibly bad and heads are about to be bitten off, when new federal policies are discussed, and when someone’s referencing the Powers That Be in general.
While he’s searching for the phone number of this frighteningly important Pendragon, Merlin ponders the fact that Arthur really seems very young for an apparently high-ranking agent. He’s starting to work up a deep irritation over the blatant nepotism - no wonder the whole system of justice doesn’t work better when all you need to do is be some big name’s fucking son - when Arthur steps into his office looking like he got punched in the gut and Merlin’s line of thought gets cut off and forgotten.
---
The policeman who tried to stop them lies locked in the trunk of his car, crying, as the Thunderbird accelerates across the desert. The forward-movement is wild, at breakneck speed. Gwen yelps as Morgana cuts a curve, starts laughing until she’s got salt tears running down her cheeks and needs to take great gulps of air. She can’t classify this feeling as happiness or fear or sorrow. It is a hell of a lot of emotion, is all.
“We’ve gone crazy, haven’t we?” she says to Morgana once she can speak again.
“Mad, mad, mad,” singsongs Morgana. Half-a-beat later she continues. “The world is crazy. We’re only starting to catch up.”
Gwen laughs again. Morgana sounds deadly serious and so is Gwen, actually, but the world is mad and they are mad and there is nothing left to do but laugh, and be wild, and free.
---
Arthur has two pieces of news. One: Uther Pendragon had been the one to lend Morgana the exact amount of money Lancelot later turned in to the police. He had nothing else to contribute except confirming the address of the motel Lancelot’s already given them, and observing that Morgana seemed to have crossed the line into being completely unpredictable.
And two: A policeman has been discovered locked in the trunk of his car, which had been shot at enough times to turn it into a wreck. The guy was scared out of his wits but had still left a very clear testimonial describing the two women he’d stopped because they were driving a wanted car.
“We have good enough information on their whereabouts by now. I’m flying there tonight. This has to come to an end,” Arthur says.
---
They’ve long given up trying to brush the desert sand away. It falls like a dry glittering rain from Gwen’s hair and over her skin as Morgana combs it out with her fingers in the night before they fall asleep, side-by-side and half on top of each other in the backseat. Gwen closes her eyes, looking blissful. Morgana gently blows the sand out of her eyelashes.
---
Through the windows of the helicopter the car is clearly visible, a small green box moving quickly along the desert road. Merlin can see the small army of police cars further off, trying to catch up but not succeeding. Arthur snaps commands into his radio, directing the men on the ground. Merlin listens, watches and realises -
“You’re herding them towards the canyon!”
The look Arthur turns on him heavily implies that Merlin is a moron. “Yes. Because that is the only place where they’ll be forced to stop.”
“But -” and then Arthur snaps and reminds him that the only reason Merlin is here is because he’d said he could stay out of the way and quiet. Merlin claps his mouth shut. He still doesn’t feel good about this. Those two women have crossed so many lines no one had thought they would. What is there to say that the edge of the Grand Canyon won’t be just another limit for them to go over, just as carelessly?
---
There are police cars thundering closer from all directions behind them, threatening to catch up even though Morgana’s forcing her car as fast as it will go. She turns sharply off the road, hoping the policemen will hesitate before they ruin their cars on the bumpy desert sand, but they don’t. She notices that the cars to the right keep giving her more space while those to the left keep closing it, and she knows, oh, she knows, that they’re luring her on a different path than she would’ve chosen herself, but there really isn’t much she can do about it.
The ground seems to change colour in front of them, to become less uneven. It isn’t until Gwen screams that Morgana realises that they’re heading to a deep ravine, that the place where she thought the ground changed colour is in fact where it plunges into a deep chasm. She stamps down on the brake and the car screeches to a halt a scant few meters before the free fall.
A helicopter touches down some fifty meters back. Gwen turns around and sees that all the police cars have stopped in line with it, and men are getting out, forming ranks. Bullet-proof vests, uniforms, guns pointed towards them - it’s a emotionless army of nondescript faces waiting to swallow them.
“I suppose this is where it ends, then,” Morgana says.
---
Arthur arranges his men, all guns pointing toward the lonely car out there, and Merlin can’t take it anymore.
“Let me at least try to talk to them!”
Arthur looks pained but acquiesces, holding one hand up to keep the men at bay while Merlin walks forward, ignoring the mumblings rising in the lines about that damned suicidal type fucking things up.
---
Gwen looks from the black mass behind them, where one lonely figure is moving forward, to Morgana, to the canyon opening up the world in front of them.
“Let’s not get caught,” she says.
Morgana jerks and looks at her with wonder.
“Do you really mean…?”
“Yes.”
Morgana lets go of the steering wheel to pull Gwen to her, crashes their mouths together in a fierce kiss, all lips and teeth and tongue, desert sand and salt at the corners. Gwen surges up to meet her, holding on to Morgana’s upper arms with a bruising grip. This kiss should have happened years ago, though it happens now and maybe it’s enough. They are at a space at the end of their time where all their timelines converge and years and years of longing and desperation and love and half-finished realisations all merge into this kiss. Morgana almost drowns in the moment. They are each other’s now. They have always been.
Gwen moves away, still holding Morgana’s gaze.
“Gwen,” Morgana says with love dancing over her tongue.
Gwen takes her hand in a grip that’s hard enough to press their bones together.
“Go.”
Morgana presses down hard on the accelerator and the Thunderbird gains speed.
---
The moment he hears the sound of the motor Merlin runs, as fast as he ever has. It is pointless, but he runs as the car with the two women disappears from the safe ground. He runs for the sake of two women with playful smiles and something like desperation or tragedy in their eyes. Merlin is breathing raggedly. He thinks - they escaped. They ran until they had no escape and then made themselves one anyway. The world seems to slow down to this moment: the cloud of red sand glittering in the sun at the brink of the canyon.
---
They go sailing over the edge, and Gwen’s hand is warm and strong in Morgana’s. The air is crystal-clear blue, heady against the red of the canyon and the desert. Their grip is strong and it’s over and it will never be over, they will never be caught. Gwen laughs and Morgana laughs, wildly free, like birds.
---
FIN