Fire Inside; Merlin Modern AU

Dec 14, 2010 01:27

Title: Fire Inside
Authors: mydoctortennant
Pairings/Characters: Leon/Morgana, mentions of Gwen, Merlin and Arthur
Warnings: Not much; a couple of comments towards what Morgana has seen on her travels.
Disclaimer: Not real. Despite birthday wishes and night time prayers to Santa (all Hail Amy Pond!) Merlin still isn't mine!
Rating: PG13
Summary: It's not what Morgana is than Leon is attracted to; it's who she is on the inside.
Author Notes: Written for miki_hime1221. Set in a modern day era. This is my first time writing something that isn't Arthur/Gwen or Merlin/Morgana. I've never really written Leon all that much so hopefully I didn't murder him too much =S Also, I hardly write in the first person anymore, so I wanted to give it a go =]

My Merlin Prompt Table

I’ve watched her grow up.

I remember the day she came to Camelot. Ten years old and so full of anger, and fire and sadness. I used to see her sitting up in her window in the girls dorm. She always looked so sad but she never looked alone. One of the other girls, Gwen, was showing her around and seemed to be making good friends with her. But still I used to see her looking over the courtyard on my way to training.

Whenever Arthur was with me she’d turn away. She hated him.

I could understand why. He’s a year younger than her and could be incredibly annoying. He can be quite arrogant too, but he means well deep down. He was always pumping Gwen for information - often with a pink tinge on the top of his ears - trying to find out how she was.

It didn’t take long for Morgana to come out of her shell. Mostly that was to do with Gwen and the other girls in the dorm. They treated her like they would anybody else. Another of the boys, Merlin, was always treating her with little favours; ones she always accepted with a friendly smile but nothing more.

A lot of the time during school I didn’t have much to do with her. She was three years below me and often I wouldn’t run into her. It wasn’t until I started to see Arthur outside of school once we had both finished that I started to see her again.

And I saw her in a whole new light.

She was different. She was confident. She was beautiful.

She had grown into herself. Suddenly she had this intense personality that rivalled everything I had ever believed in. She was strong-willed, more than I ever remembered from the quiet girl I had first encountered. She wasn’t carefree but she never let anything she couldn’t handle take over her.

She has this fabulously quick mind that controls her satirically sarcastic mouth with incredibly witty retorts that take Arthur back down to the bottom peg. Then the second she turns to Gwen she is sweet, happy and a joker. It seemed that Gwen brought that quality out in everybody.

Morgana’s personality could change in a second. She was almost bipolar, it seemed.

One morning after the Pendragon family had hosted a house party, Morgana had walked into the kitchen in her skimpy pyjamas. The shorts could almost be called underwear rather than an actual item of clothing. The top was a thin material and was low cut with thin straps; the sort of top that rose up as she reached for the top shelf of the cupboard, searching for a glass. She hadn’t realised I was there. Or perhaps she had.

She filled the glass from the tap and left again as quickly as she had come.

The next day she was gone with all but a note on the kitchen counter telling Uther and Arthur that she had gone travelling and she didn’t know when she would return. That was Morgana through and through. Last minute plans and abrupt decisions that led her all over the world. She saw so much, she learnt so much, and it all influenced her character.

Parts of her were so full of anger and hatred but there are other pats of her that are so delicate. She doesn’t need wrapping in cotton wool but there is vulnerability in her that isn’t in anybody else. It comes from the things she’s seen about the world that we can only hope to imagine. We could only dream about the things she’d been through. She has so many stories to tell but only a third of them parted her lips.

The last time she disappeared she didn’t come back for a year. It was the longest she had ever gone away. We hadn’t expected her to come back by the end. Life had moved on without her in England. But when she came back I had to see her; even if it was for her to tell me where she’d been and where she was going next.

There was a ghost behind her eyes. The life in her wasn’t gone, but buried so deep.

“What did you see?” I asked her as she sat on the edge of her bed, her opened but still packed case at her feet. She shook her head, “Where did you go?” she shook her head again, “Morgana?”

“You can’t even begin to understand,” was all she said.

She invited me to sit beside her and I did so without hesitation. Here she was, the girl I had watched grow up into the most extraordinary woman, sat broken before me.

Later she told me. Everything she had seen. Everything she had witnessed. From the bitterness of war to the corruption of politics. She’d thought herself a traveller. A girl without a home. But she had seen it. She had seen true homelessness. She had seen loss.

Everything about her changed that year.

Yet still beneath the surface laid the true woman I had grown to love; wild and unpredictable and so full of so many experiences that shaped her past, present and her future.

♠ miki_hime1221, ♥ leon/morgana, ♦ merlin, ♣ prompt fic

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